to have Freddie in Everley?”
“You did not say that it would be a loss for him.”
“Of course it would be!” he said, his voice rising with anger.
“You have the luxury of coming here when you like. He must manage a great estate all on his own, year- round. I can understand why he might want to leave that responsibility to his nephew.”
Now Lenox became positively vexed and she, usually so good-natured, said a word or two back to him — and the result was that when they finally went downstairs to the guests, they were thoroughly fallen out with each other. It happened rarely enough, though they had been married several years now. Still, Lenox remembered with a sort of resigned dread, this sort of argument often lasted a day or two when it finally arrived.
Dallington, despite his exertions of the day, seemed fresh; by contrast Frederick looked squinty and out of all sorts, and when he was addressed responded only with a few short words, occasionally even with silence. He needed a good night’s sleep, thought Lenox, and then perhaps a day or two of quiet recreation in his small study, with his books, his manuscript, his telescope, his evening wine. His routine.
For her part, Miss Taylor had dressed up very finely indeed. When she came into the drawing room the three men stood and bowed, all, to one degree or another, dazzled by the transformation that had come to her face simply from loosening her rather severe plaits of hair. She looked pretty now, less ascetic, softer. Her dress was a vibrant blue color, and cut slightly lower than they might have been used to in Somerset, though it would have been modest for London. She smiled graciously when Dallington offered her a glass of champagne.
The conversation at dinner was not, it must be observed in the hopes of maintaining the strictest honesty, very sparkling. Still, Lenox was genuinely glad to see Lucy — he had known her in other years — and sat next to her, laughing softly with her throughout dinner about the people in town that he had met and re-met in the past few days: Carmody, Fripp, the women on the church steps. Mr. Marsham told Dr. Eastwood a few hoary anecdotes from his days at Clare and Emily Jasper was content to be kept company by Lady Jane, being something of a snob. This left Dallington and the governess to talk, with occasional, now more spirited interjections from Freddie, who had recovered something of his color with a glass of wine.
Inevitably conversation turned general, however, when Wells’s name arose. Dr. Eastwood said, his face grave, that he thought it was a very bad thing for Plumbley, whose name now would be bandied around the county, possibly even the country. “Such associations tend to linger,” he said.
“I am an old woman,” said Emily Jasper — a statement that it would have been impossible to contradict —“but I cannot see why he was not apprehended sooner.”
“He was concealing his activities, Aunt Emily,” said Lucy, voice gentle. “I think it was very clever of Mr. Oates, Mr. Ponsonby, and Mr. Lenox to catch him.”
“Hm! I like that. Did he think of us at all?”
“I doubt it, ma’am,” said Dr. Eastwood, and Lucy laughed.
By the time dessert was being served Lenox had to stifle a yawn every thirty seconds or thereabouts. Coffee perked him up, however, and when the men withdrew to smoke, he was alert enough to pull Dr. Eastwood to the side.
Lenox glanced over at Dallington, Marsham, and Frederick, who were discussing cigars, though the young detective, with his usual keenness of perception, plainly had an ear bent toward this conversation. “Did you receive the parcel I sent you this morning?”
“I did. I didn’t mention it before supper because you’ve caught—”
“I’m still very much curious.”
“Unfortunately I cannot say what the powder is. I have a friend in Liverpool, from my days at St. Bart’s, who might be able to help. I can tell you it is nothing in the ordinary way, not flour, not sugar, not arrowroot. I did one or two basic catalytic reactions to determine that much.”
“Could it be poison?”
“Yes, I suppose it could. Would you like me to send it to Liverpool?”
“Thank you, no, I have a friend in London who is already looking into it.”
“Please tell me what he finds.”
“I shall, of course,” said Lenox.
The men and women reassembled soon therafter and heard Lucy play, ate walnuts and apples from a silver tray, and drank port. At eleven, finally — too early for some, including the indomitable Emily Jasper, too late for others, including Lenox, whose entire determination it took to keep his eyes open — the party broke up.
It had been another surpassingly long day, and Lenox felt he might sleep without any trouble until the same time the next evening. He gave word that he didn’t need to be awakened at any particular hour.
Soon he and his wife were alone in their room again, and he could let himself give way to exhaustion. He loosened his tie and slumped into a soft armchair by their window.
Throughout the evening Jane had been affectionate with him, but now, alone again, she was silent, undoing her hair and removing her jewelry.
He granted her the right to silence, not doubting that he had been too harsh in his speech before supper.
At least he spoke, trying to make her smile by teasing her. “I would not call it your most successful party.” She didn’t respond, and so after another moment he added, “But did you see Dallington speak to Miss Taylor?”
Here was bait she could not help taking, though she knew it was offered for precisely that reason. “They were barely apart for the last hour of the evening,” she said. “So there, Charles Lenox.”
“Freddie was on the couch with them, dear.”
“Mark my words, it will be the making of him, to marry that young woman. She has a great spirit.”
“There we agree.”
They were quiet again for five or ten minutes after this, Lenox at his desk very casually looking over his speech, Lady Jane finishing a letter to her brother, in Sussex, that she intended to send in the morning. Yet their interchange had left them feeling more inclined to softness with each other, and when Lenox apologized she circled his neck with her arms and said that she, too, was sorry — and so they made it up.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
You hear of the calm that comes before the storm,” said Frederick Ponsonby two mornings later, “but I find I much prefer the calm that comes afterward.”
“Alas, the storm usually causes enough damage to make the aftermath unhappy,” said Lenox.
“Yes, you’re right of course — poor Weston.”
They were sipping coffee at a small wrought-iron table on the veranda outside the library. It was the warmest day since Lenox had arrived in Plumbley, brilliant with golden sunlight, though it was still before eight o’clock in the morning. Off a quarter mile into the gardens they could see Lady Jane, Sophia, and Miss Taylor walking, the dogs barking them to order when they slowed.
The men did not wear their customary clothes — Ponsonby his quiet gray flannel and subdued cravats or Lenox his more metropolitan dark suits and ties — but instead were dressed identically in whites, ironed white pants, white sweaters, and snub-nosed white caps. The day was ideal for cricket.
“It seems somehow more and less tragic at once, that he has no close family,” said Lenox.
“There is Oates.”
“Yes, there is Oates. Who knows what condition he is in, however,” said Lenox.
The constable had been drinking heavily in the King’s Arms the past few nights, according to the gossip that had worked its way up from the servants’ quarters. True to his word, however, Wells, in the Plumbley jail, remained unharmed. Oates and a series of reliable townsmen took shifts watching the prisoner, always in pairs.
“Oates will have himself dried out by the time of the funeral,” said Frederick.
This was to be the next afternoon. “I hope so, certainly.”
In fact the murder seemed already as if it had happened a long time before. The past few days had been wonderfully peaceable, the kind Lenox had looked for when he decided to visit his cousin. Freddie had retired to his study for the whole period, other than meal times, and looked better for it, while Jane, in between stretches at her
