A Death in the Small Hours

home.”

When he entered the drawing room Lenox smiled kindly at the governess. She was more self-possessed than Lady Jane, but he didn’t know what words had passed between them, and there was a certain color in her cheeks that might have indicated high emotion. Then again it was a cool day.

“I’m so sorry it has taken me this long to come and see you, Miss Taylor,” he said.

She rose. “I received this letter from your cousin yesterday, Mr. Lenox—”

“I don’t need to read it, only to offer my congratulations.”

“I would feel happier if you read it, since I live under your auspices, currently.”

To oblige her he took the note. It was written very formally and rather beautifully, too. Since I first walked with you in the west gardens a fortnight ago, Frederick began, I have entertained the liveliest affection for you — indeed I might call it love, if I did not fear it would be a trespass against your goodwill. I write now to ask whether you might reciprocate my emotions. It went on to describe his situation in detail, what she might expect as an allowance, the society of Plumbley, his general aversion to London (though he agreed that he might take a house in town for “a week or two in the season, should we be wed, preferably the shorter duration”), and ended by describing all that he found congenial in her character, and restating his admiration of her.

“I think it is a very fine letter,” said Lenox, “and again, can only offer you my congratulations. We shall be sorry to lose your services, of course, but it will be a delight for Sophia to know you as an aunt.”

“Do you think him a good man?” asked the governess, waving away his politeness.

“I know of none better.” Lenox hesitated for a moment. “For some time I thought John Dallington might have been courting you, however.”

She smiled. “John? He’s only half a boy, you know. About Freddie — you do not think I would be making a mistake? I believe I love him,” she said, and for the first time he heard the tone of petition in her voice.

It was because of this tone that he saw what he had not before. What she sought was not his congratulations, but something else, something she could not find elsewhere: a father’s advice.

With a sense of tenderness, mingled with pity, he gestured for her to sit down. “Let us take it point by point,” he said, and semi-conciously his voice lowered a half-step. “First let us discuss his social position, then, and after that we can move on to his finances, and then we ought to review his—”

“Oh, yes, thank you,” she said, sitting back, and her face was flooded with relief.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

That was a very cold winter in London. In the House of Commons one could see one’s breath, and for Lenox, in his new position, the hours and days and weeks were taken up with work, with long, exhausting meetings, too often unproductive, and — just as often — with coaxing recalcitrant liberal members to vote as the leaders of the party wished. These conferences were almost always made under a social pretext, and he grew wholly tired of the sight of his club on Pall Mall, which had once been a refuge to him.

Still, each morning he permitted himself a half hour with Sophia. She was growing rapidly, it seemed to both him and Jane, and she could sit unsupported now, even recognized voices from other rooms; her taste in toys, meanwhile, had become positively sophisticated, though she had a regrettable fondness for the loud rattle, painted a lethal shade of mauve, that her uncle Edmund had given her.

Miss Taylor was still living there, because in all truth she had nowhere else to which she might remove herself, unless it be lodgings, and all concerned, especially Frederick, considered this too dreary a prospect. It helped to have her in the house: From afar, Jane was planning the wedding at Everley.

It was not her only project.

Late one evening, while Lenox struggled to keep his eyes open over a report on sheep farming in Northumberland, she came to his study. “Hello, dear,” he said, standing. “I thought you had gone to sleep.”

“Not by a long shot,” she said. She was holding something behind her back. “Are you busy with your reading, Charles?”

“I would pay ten pounds to the person who gave me an excuse to stop,” he said, smiling and stifling a yawn, stretching his arms out.

“Do you remember when I was so secretive at Everley? You stopped asking — which I take kindly, you know.” She smiled at him softly. “Pressure never does, with this kind of thing.”

“Of course,” he said — but in truth he had forgotten all about it, once they were out of Somerset and he had less occasion to notice her habits.

Shyly she handed him a book. “Here it is.”

He furrowed his brow and took a loose sheaf of papers from her, perhaps twenty pages of them. “The Adventure of the Lucy,” he said. There was a picture of a small gray mouse below the title, wearing a morning jacket and looking out to sea through a telescope from the taffrail of a ship. “Is it a story?” he asked, smiling with the dawning realization that it was.

“It’s nothing much,” she said and stood up, then began to fix the cushions on his sofa. “I thought I might show you — one or two other people — for Sophia, you understand, after my great tour of the children’s books left me desirous of something different.”

“Who did the drawings, Jane?”

“Oh, Molly.”

That was Edmund’s wife, who was talented with watercolors. She made compact drawings, full of detail, often rather wistful; he should have recognized them straight away. “Come sit by me as I read it,” he said. “Please.”

She laughed skeptically — would have snorted, had her upbringing been different — and said, “I couldn’t. But read it if you like.”

So he did, awake now, with a glass of whisky in hand.

Once there was a mouse named Bancroft, and you will be surprised to learn that though he was only a mouse, and at that rather a small mouse, with a kind intelligent little face, he commanded one of the finest ships to sail the seven seas. She was called the Lucy, and in all respects she was like any other ship of England — ask your father, who has probably been on one and bumped his head on the low ceiling, and he will tell you all about it — with one notable exception: There were to be no shipboard cats. It would be much more difficult to find the lost Lady Sophia, after all, if the mice of the Lucy were at all hours listening for the footsteps of an enemy.

After only these few words Lenox was charmed, and as he read on his enchantment increased. The book told the tale of this troop of mice, and in many of its particulars — its gentler particulars — it mirrored the voyage he had made, not quite a year before, to Egypt. There were differences, needless to say. The mice successfully captured a pirate ship (full of cats) and landed on an island with a solitary human being living upon it, tired of London and committed to living there until he had grown a beard all the way to his feet. Their true mission — the recapture of a mouse girl named Sophia, who had been put on the wrong ship in Portsmouth — they fulfilled on the second to last page. On the last page they all had Christmas together, in Portsmouth again.

The book was funny, slightly magical, more contemplative and less madcap than many children’s books — certainly less moralizing, too. He felt proud of her. There was no question that it was a book that could find a public. Its pages went by before you realized you were reading at all.

Yet for some reason that he could not quite explain, reading the book and looking at its drawings filled him with a bittersweet sorrow, almost too heavy to bear. It felt as if it belonged to the past, perhaps that was it — the book had a lightness of tone and spirit that their lives had once had, too, but now, in this cold winter, had lost.

So often as one looked back on life one saw a multiplicity of choices, reduced, not quite at random, to one. There were so many houses he might have taken in London; so many women he might have fallen into marriage with; so many cases he might have taken. Rarely was there a clear path, with two choices.

Here was one, however, that he had made. Reading about the Lucy reminded him that what he loved — travel, adventure, detection — he had now traded for a different kind of work.