you take her, sir?” he asked.
“There are orchards a mile or two west of here?”
“Aye, McGinniss’s apples. Famous cider.”
“She’s a graceful jumper.”
“Isn’t she, though, sir?”
Lenox looked up at the high trees that fringed the gardens of the great house and circled the lake, all of them beginning to shift from green into orange and red. He could smell a fire. “I took an apple.” He pulled it from his pocket. “The temptation was very great.”
“You’re not likely to be the last,” said the groom, straight-faced.
Lenox smiled, handing the reins over. “Perhaps I’ll go confess to the magistrate.”
“See you again tomorrow, sir?”
“I hope you shall. If I’ve time I’d like to ride again.”
He went inside, rabid with hunger; according to his pocket-watch it was still shy of eight in the morning. He heaped a shaky pile of marmalade onto a piece of toast from the toast rack and champed it, pouring himself coffee from a silver pot as he chewed. There was always the freshest milk at Everley, and just as he was thinking it was his favorite part of visiting, he remembered the riding, and the clear air, and the happiness of the tumbling dogs about his feet, and, though an ardent Londoner, found himself thinking: Is there any reason we should not live in the country?
Just as he was committing a violent attack on a second piece of toast Miss Taylor walked in. She was the last person in creation before whom one wanted to appear at any disadvantage, and hurriedly he brushed the crumbs from his lips.
“Good morning,” he said. “I trust you’re quite well?”
“Yes, thank you,” she said.
“Will you join me for a bite?”
“Thank you, I will.” She went to the sideboard and took a plate, nodding her thanks to the attendant behind the chafing dishes, and started to spoon decorous quantities of egg and kedgeree onto it. She paused when she reached the kippers, and turned. “Sophia is with Lady Jane,” she said.
“I had surmised as much, but I thank you.”
The governess permitted herself a softening kind of smile. “I didn’t like you to worry.”
“Most considerate.”
She arrived at the table and sat down, Lenox standing to help her into her chair. “You take coffee, Mr. Lenox?”
“In the mornings, exclusively. I learned that aboard a ship. I used to take tea at every hour of the day, but nothing cuts the salt out of the air like a bracing cup of coffee.”
“For my part I find tea too mild before noon.”
“Will you allow me to pour you a cup of this coffee, then?”
“Oh, thank you.”
Again she smiled and Lenox apprehended, with a sense of surprise, that he liked this young woman, her grave, quiet manner, her seriousness. She had arrived with a fearful reputation for seriousness — the rudiments of Hebrew, competent to teach dancing without a master — and had cowed him for some while, but in the past weeks she had slipped, unnoticed, into his affections. “Are you quite comfortable?” he asked.
“I am,” she said, “and I feel singularly fortunate to walk Sophia in these beautiful gardens.”
“D’you know, when we were children, my brother and I used to dig up the flowers, simply to annoy the gardener. He threw a trowel at Edmund once, with my hand to God I swear it. Nearly took his head off.”
“It was too kind a punishment for the two of you, if the gardens were anything like this,” she said.
Lenox laughed. “My uncle still might toss me in a cell, if he found out. Have you had a chance to speak to him about the flowers? I can promise you an uninterrupted monologue of three or four hours if you would like one.”
“I haven’t spoken to him, no,” she said.
Governesses were often in a precarious position, Lenox understood, lying as they did somewhere between the staff and the masters, but now he perceived for the first time that Miss Taylor, whom he and Jane had striven to make feel welcome in Hampden Lane, might nevertheless feel that prejudice. “I hope you feel free to meet anyone here on — on equal terms,” he said, haltingly and in truth without much tact.
“Yes,” she said.
“I mean to say—” but he knew well enough now to stop himself. “I don’t think I ever heard where you were from in the first place?”
“My family lived in Berkshire, just outside the village of Crowthorne.”
“I passed through it once.”
“It was a lovely place to grow up,” she said. Then, perhaps sensing the question he hadn’t asked, she added, “My mother and father died a year apart, when I was thirteen.”
“I’m so very sorry.”
“My father was a gentleman,” she said, her voice rather rushed, “and I was raised as a gentleman’s daughter, but unbeknownst to us he had financial difficulties — some peculiarities in a business dealing — and it left me with something under sixty pounds a year. With the help, I may say the begrudging help, of an uncle, my father’s brother, I went to Miss Crandle’s school, where I helped teach the younger children to earn my keep.”
“How difficult it must have been.”
“No!” Her cheeks were suffused with a red color. She took a sip of coffee to steady herself. “No, I was very happy there, indeed.”
“And you learned much,” said Lenox, smiling at her.
“Exactly so. No, I have been fortunate, very fortunate, and now I do what I love best and look after children.”
“To happy endings,” he said, and raised his cup.
She smiled and raised hers. “To happy endings.”
Sixty pounds a year! What enormous strength this young woman must have had, to be left with such a pittance upon which she might live and to fashion out of it, through industry, through her natural gifts, the career she had! It filled Lenox with admiration, and, rather more obscurely, with guilt. The story also made him wonder whether it was primarily shyness and not severity that had held her tongue — though he remembered, too, being sharply checked by her when he did something incorrectly about his daughter.
They passed the rest of the breakfast in friendly conversation. Just as they were leaving the room, Dallington arrived; he bowed to Lenox, stiffly, and to the governess with slightly more ease. Seeing him, a shadow of worry passed across Lenox’s mind. He wondered if he had been too hard on the lad, too astringent, and he wondered if it was in part because he didn’t want to cede any of his claim to the case.
“May I have another cup of coffee with you, Dallington?” he asked.
“Certainly.”
“Miss Taylor, please tell Lady Jane I’ll cut along to see her and Sophia shortly, if you wouldn’t mind?”
When Dallington had piled a plate high with food — his appetite was a good sign, Lenox thought — he came to the table. “First allow me to say—”
“No, drop it, leave it. Listen, though — there’s a Frenchman called Fontaine, whom I met a few days ago …” Lenox elaborated for Dallington now upon the scant facts the lad had heard about the murder, telling him about the vandalisms, the two horses Carmody had seen, the note in Weston’s ticket pocket, all of it. “But I can’t shake this man Fontaine from my mind. Why did he beat his wife on an arbitrary Tuesday morning? Why did he have enough money in his pocket to run riot over half of Bath?”
“You think it’s connected,” said Dallington, ignoring his food.
“I don’t know. But as I concentrate on the murder, if you could—”
The young man stood up. “I’ll go now.”
“No, no. Finish eating first. You need the strength. You still look pale.”
“Well, just after breakfast, then.”
During that meal Lenox, a man with a forgiving heart, forgave Dallington. But the juxtaposition of his self- indulgence, a young man who had been given everything, with the austere self-discipline, the breadth of spirit, that he discerned in the young governess, would linger in his mind through the days and weeks that followed. No
