desk, was helping to plan the refreshments they would have at the cricket. For his part Lenox rode out upon horseback at nine in the morning and at three in the afternoon, and otherwise worked with steady application at his speech, which was all but drafted now. He was proud of it. As he had written to his brother in a letter that morning:
I imagined that what I needed to focus on the writing of the speech was time away from London, in the country. In fact what I needed was this case — the matter of the coining you have no doubt read about in the papers — to free my mind from the task at hand. It has worked beautifully. My hope is that this speech shall shame the other side into doing something for the poor — something more. It is past time.
The case had, as Lenox learned almost immediately, made the London papers. In general he preferred to keep his name away from the investigations in which he participated, retaining, as he did, some sensitivity to the sneers of those members of his caste who believed his work was beneath his station — it was this that drove him to privacy, and not, as he would have preferred in himself, modesty.
Nevertheless it was sometimes impossible to keep his name out of things. There had been a raft of telegrams congratulating him on his role in the case’s solution, including one from his friend Inspector Thomas Jenkins at Scotland Yard, who was chasing a criminal in the gin bars of Brussels (and drinking a fair bit of the stuff himself in the process, from the sound of it) but took time to write; another from the head of the Royal Mint; and several from colleagues in Parliament, all of whom managed a joking reference to his speech. No doubt they thought he had been neglecting his duties. On that count, however, his conscience was entirely clear. The speech was in excellent fettle.
A team of men from Scotland Yard was, even now, dissecting the great coining machine that Wells had stored in his cellar. Apparently it was of an uncommon type, producing the kind of fraudulent coins that tended to pop up in the western part of England, which led them to believe that a great deal of coining was centered in Bath — peculiar, given that town’s affluent reputation. There was a fresh excitement and endeavor to their efforts: here was a new lead, a chance at halting the production of hundreds of thousands of pounds of illegal money. They were mildly grateful to Lenox; he had solved the murder, and discovered the coining only incidentally, and for these men, who had something of the air of obsessives, the latter was a more serious crime.
The only loose end the case had left, as far as Lenox could discern, was Musgrave’s behavior. There had been no report of him in Bath, which meant that he must have switched roads in the miles of road between that city and Plumbley, but why had he left? Why had his new wife been so decidedly homebound since their wedding? Lenox hoped McConnell might provide the glimmer of an answer, if he could identify the powder that had been marked as Mrs. Musgrave’s “sugar.” The doctor had written in a telegram that he hoped to have some idea in a day or two, not longer.
As they sat on the veranda the men did not discuss any of this, however. They talked instead of the cricket, and then of old matches they had played in, many years before, when Lenox was a schoolboy permitted to stand in the field for the last few overs, never to bat. By the time he reached the age of sixteen he was the Royal Oak’s second to last batsman (both men always played for that side, for reasons lost to history), desperate to overcome the invincible King’s Arms side. The KA, as they were called, had then boasted a blacksmith named Millington — dead now, kicked by a horse he was shoeing — who had seemed like Hercules himself, back in the fifties. It wasn’t until Lenox was past twenty-two that he saw Millington go out for less than a half-century.
“Have you played at all recently?” said Lenox.
“Not for five years. In honor of your return, however, I may let them stick me at the end of the queue to bat. I expect the game will have been called for dark well before then. Hopefully, that is.”
Lenox smiled. “Have you got the same bat?”
“Oh, yes, though she’s a bit yellow now.” Freddie’s bat was made of an old Everley willow tree that had been struck dead by lightning. He had made it himself, many years into the distant past.
“I’d have brought mine,” said Lenox, “though it was only store bought.”
“Fripp will have you sorted.”
Lady Jane was wandering in their general direction now, and waved at them, her soft smile visible even from a few hundred yards.
Lenox felt a flash of love for her. He stood and started toward her, to say they ought to leave soon.
Indeed by half-eight they were at the cricket pitch, an enormous expanse of closely shorn meadow just beyond Musgrave’s house on Church Lane. (Dallington had been spared, there being enough players for both teams, and was left behind at Everley.) It was an absolute carnival already when they arrived, though the match wouldn’t begin for another half an hour; there were men in their whites striding everywhere, calling out hearty taunts in each other’s direction, and women congregated around a white pavilion, cloth-topped and erected the week before. Jane went in that direction, greeting Mrs. Richards, the wife of the local butcher, as an old friend and enquiring as to the state of the tea, which was being brewed in frantically large quantities, by quite what method nobody could entirely agree — tea being a substance that provoked sharp and definite opinions in nearly every person present. Off in the distance four men shifted a sunscreen, white and as tall as a two-story building, so that the batsmen of the morning hours should be able to see.
Nominally the captain of the Royal Oak side was a man named Symes, who owned the public house. He was an ill-natured fat person, generous, and above all desperately and misguidedly in love with new technology. His most recent acquisition — which he rode with quiet dignity around Plumbley, despite near universal derision — was a penny-farthing. This was a kind of bicycle with an enormous front wheel and a small back one, in proportion roughly the same as a penny and a farthing sitting side by side upon a table.
Symes had an ugly cut on his forehead.
“The high-wheeler?” said Frederick sympathetically. “Well, well. You can only improve at it.”
Symes scowled. “It is very difficult to mount, Mr. Ponsonby, but once the position upon the front wheel is ascended, is achieved, it is a marvelous — I assure you a very marvelment of — well, yes. I don’t like to hear a word against the machine, myself. That is my own prejudice I grant you.”
Even Symes, who ran a pretty rigorously decorous public house, could not commandeer Fripp: here the fruit- and-vegetable man was absolutely and entirely in his element. He walked off the boundaries, double-checking them, with the captain of the King’s Arms, Millington Junior, the town’s new blacksmith, whom Lenox had never seen — the dead spit of his father, though perhaps even larger in the arms. Fripp, wiry and brown as a nut, looked miniature next to his opposite number, but he exuded a kind of calm authority that made the mismatch seem, obscurely, to lie in favor of the Royal Oak; even the tea debate subsided when he went round the pavilion to check that all was in order for the midday break.
After that errand was complete he returned to his team and spotted Lenox. “Charles,” he said, with a tight smile.
“Mr. Fripp. Are you—”
Just then the umpires arrived, gentlemen imported at some expense from Taunton, and the cricket ground went silent, somber. Fripp and Millington hurried toward them. The Royal Oak side said good-bye to their wives and their children and assembled at their benches, many of the men nodding deferentially — perhaps uncomfortably — at the two aristocrats in their midst.
“Are we taking anyone’s places?” asked Lenox of his cousin, swinging a bat to loosen his shoulders.
Frederick said, “No, Tolbert took a bad leg, Walcott inherited a piece of land in Devon, and someone else — oh, yes, Crockington is in London, for who-knows-why. I wouldn’t have played myself, if we didn’t need a final batsman. Fripp made me swear up and down or I should be in my gardens, now.” He nodded toward the costermonger, who was arguing vehemently about the state of the wicket. “I hope nothing is riding on my innings, either,” Freddie said. “Fripp looks liable to give someone a hiding.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
The Royal Oak won the coin toss — Lenox wondered in passing whether it was truly one of her Majesty’s ha’pennies that the umpire flung into the air — and Fripp, in consultation with Symes and a beefy farmer named
