not be in danger under my care.”
“I trust Oates not to do me any harm,” said Wells, his voice cold, “and should take it as a great kindness to be permitted to stay in town, near my family. Bath is a city I do not know.”
Lenox and Archer, then, went to inspect the shop and Wells’s house more closely, and Frederick — still holding strong, despite his age, though slightly wan — sat down with the merchant’s wife to tell her what had happened. How she told her son and daughter was her own decision, he said.
With that duty discharged he said that he thought he might go back to Everley. “You’ve solved it, Charles, thank you.”
“It never feels quite as triumphant as it ought, does it?” asked Lenox.
The old squire looked at him with a half-smile. “No, it doesn’t,” he said. “D’you know what’s funny, I feel worse knowing than I did not knowing, though I’m glad the danger has passed.”
“You’ve been doing too much. You need rest.”
“Yes, it will be a relief to return to my books, my flowers. I think I shall take my tea alone today, if it won’t bother you and Jane.”
“Never.”
Wells’s house and his shop were both barren of further clues as to his villainy; from all appearances he was what he claimed to be, a prosperous seller of grain and corn. Only his ledgers — his real ones, which showed a certain recent slackness of business — offered any hint to the contrary. That and the monolithic machine in the basement.
Dallington returned at 4:00 that afternoon, arriving at the police headquarters with Hutchinson and a meek- looking Jack Randall, the man Frederick had fined only a few days before for passing bad coin.
“He’ll talk,” said Dallington grimly. “It took two hours to chase him down to an apple orchard and another two to get him to say a word. None of the words he said after that were very pleasant, but he’s as scared of prison as anyone I’ve ever met.”
Randall’s hooded eyes went up when he saw Oates. “Couldn’t come arrest me yourself?”
“I was busy arresting Mr. Wells,” said Oates. “Coiners, in Plumbley. You should be ashamed, Mr. Randall.”
“I don’t want to go to prison,” he said.
“I’ll help you if I can,” said Oates. “I’ve known you long enough, and your family, but you must be honest with us about Wells.”
Randall, looking slightly more confident, took a seat opposite Lenox, who had returned from inspecting Wells’s house and shop to speak to Archer. The constable from Bath was on the verge of leaving, but, looking at the clock, must have decided to stay until the 4:49 train.
He would have been just as well going; Randall’s tale was useful but unexciting. Once every two weeks he was to take fifteen pounds’ worth of coins and, through trades and small purchases, return with a minimum of ten pounds for Wells. Any of the false coins he had left over he could keep for himself. That was how he had been caught: His entire payment was in false coins, and naturally he wanted to spend them.
“Did you ever come up short of the ten pounds?” asked Lenox, more out of curiosity than anything.
“No, no. Usually cleared a pound or two for myself, and then I got to spend the other three — musicals, the best seats, ladies …”
“Where’d you usually go?”
“Mr. Wells made sure I went to different places — Bath, Salisbury, twice London, each time with thirty pounds…”
“That’s a great deal of money to spend in one day in London.”
“I was there three days. I found coffee shops worked well, put down a pound coin and pick up nineteen shillings and sixpence. Problem is you have to drink a great deal of coffee, then.”
“Public houses?”
“They’re suspicious of a coin there,” said Randall. “As I learned.”
“Did it never attract notice when you left Plumbley?”
The farmhand shrugged. “I work day shifts when I like.”
Lenox wondered how many such emissaries Wells had sent out into unsuspecting England, how much the man had enriched himself. “Do you know of anyone who did the same?” he asked.
“None such.”
“Fontaine?”
“That Frenchie?” said Randall, with the sort of dim-witted confidence that made it seem unlikely he was lying or concealing anything.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
There was a distinguished and (locally) famous lady in Plumbley, who had lived there for many, many years, named Emily Jasper. She had been married when the century was still young to a barrister in Taunton, widowed at thirty, childless, and, betaken herself back to the village of her youth, where her sister and her sister’s husband and her sister’s seven children became the primary concern of her days. As she was much richer than they were she could take a pretty active hand in their lives, given certain inconsistently timed contributions to their budget, and the children had been schooled at her expense, while her brother-in-law, a painter of great talent and little enterprise, had been made to show the world his work, in London. Though it had brought him a small measure of fame he did not thank her for the headache it gave him — which was a gratifying state of affairs to Mrs. Jasper, because it made her both correct and inconvenient. She still wore black crepe.
Now ninety years old, she lived in the finest house on what villagers called the Hill. With her lived a niece named Lucy, who was certainly past thirty-five and had never married — but who, rather surprisingly, had a sweet and lovely temperament, a great deal of patience, in fact, true love for her aunt, and a talent at the piano that Lenox remembered vividly. The result of that schooling, perhaps.
It was Emily Jasper who was to be the guest of honor at the dinner party that evening — the trumped-up dinner party Lady Jane had devised. When Lenox arrived home, just after seeing Archer onto the train back to Bath, he recalled for the first time that day that the house had committed itself to such an event. He groaned.
“It’s hardly an auspicious time for it,” he said, “just when we—”
Lady Jane, away from her desk for once, came and kissed him on the cheek, one earring in, the other held between her middle finger and her thumb. “I heard, the maid told me! Congratulations, Charles. That evil Wells, would you believe it?”
“This dinner—”
“Does my hair look passable?”
“Lovely. But I say—”
“Dr. Eastwood will be here. And we have Mr. Marsham coming, too, of course.”
This was the vicar. “Nash had better lock the wine cupboard.”
“Charles!” she said, not at all scandalized. “Anyhow Miss Taylor is dressing. She even asked me what I thought of a gray dress, which I consider a positive sign, given that I usually skulk around her in fear.”
“Oh, she’s not so bad,” said Lenox. “Did you approve the gray?”
Lady Jane smiled. “I recommended something more vividly colored, if she had it. Charles, could you see her with young John?”
“Enough of that, please. Where is Kirk? I need my shirt pressed.”
They prepared for the party together, in the comfortable rhythm of a couple that by now had done so together many times. Lenox told her about Wells and the coining machine.
“Your uncle must be relieved.”
“He is primarily exhausted, I think. His strength is not what it once was.”
Jane stopped what she was doing. “Perhaps it’s not a bad idea, him moving into the village. A smaller house.”
“How can you say that?” he asked. “It would be such a loss — for the village, for you, for me, for Sophia. Not
