An Old Betrayal: A Charles Lenox Mystery (Charles Lenox Mysteries) (30 page)

“And showed her the letter?” asked Jenkins.

Dallington laughed. “I did show her the letter, and she couldn’t have been off quickly enough. Then I offered her money.”

“That did it?”

“Not exactly. It made her pause, and at last she declined. She said she couldn’t stand to lose the business of the lodge. As she was driving away, though, she said that everyone in town knew about the old man—old man Godwin—and that I only had to ask about the note.”

“The note,” said Lenox, furrowing his brow.

“I didn’t understand either. Nor did Hughes. I had lunch in the village and made a few friends at the public house, and none of them could make sense of it. At last I had the idea to seek out the local constable.”

“First thing you should have done,” said Jenkins, with professional satisfaction.

“He was about eighteen, sadly, a poor young pup, and didn’t know anything about the Godwins—or the note—but he gave me the name of the old constable, who had retired to Allington, one town over, and opened up a public house. The Godwin Arms, it was called, if you can credit that. It was there, you’ll be elated to hear, Jenkins, that the letters of introduction you and Shackleton wrote finally came in handy.”

“What did he say?”

“The old constable was a reedy fellow with big eyes, Jonathan Blaine. Always felt he was watching me too closely—an uneasy sort, you know. Kept his cards close to the vest, but sharp. Once he had examined the watermark on Shackleton’s notepaper and looked at the seals with a magnifying glass, he poured me a pint of mild and told me about Henrietta and Archibald Godwin’s father, Winthrop.

“Apparently Winthrop was a bit of a devil. He was litigious—suits against about thirty different people across Farnborough and Hampshire, from what I could gather—and it was widely known that he used his wife and children cruelly. His wife died not long after giving birth to Archibald. She fell down a flight of stairs.”

Lenox recalled the words in Hughes’s letter:
a vicious old fellow, according to my own pater. He was always in and out of court.
“He pushed her, you think?”

“It’s difficult to say—bad people’s wives take tumbles, too. It seemed enough to me that everyone in the village blamed him for her mishap. Anyhow, as I say, he was always at law, but the local cases, Blaine said, were only minor pleasures for him. His chief quarrel was with the government. He wanted to reclaim the lands of his ancestors.”

Jenkins bit his pipe thoughtfully. “You think Archibald was acting out his father’s wishes, then, for revenge?”

“The story’s not over,” said Dallington. He paused and took a long sip of water; he looked tired and energized at once. “Three years ago last Tuesday, Winthrop Godwin killed himself.”

Lenox raised his eyebrows. “Did he, though.”

“Blaine was still the town’s constable then. The household made the initial report of the death to him, and he went out to Raburn Lodge. Soon enough the Hampshire police took over, but not before Blaine saw Archibald and Henrietta’s father hanging from the rafters of the great dining hall. It was the central room of the house.”

“Is this where the note enters into the story?” asked Lenox.

Dallington nodded. “I’m coming to it. According to Blaine, Winthrop Godwin had received a letter from the courts the day he hanged himself. His final request for the restoration of the Godwin lands had been denied.

“Apparently his death was a matter of no great sorrow to the people round about Farnborough, for he was in suit with half of his neighbors and threatening the other half—he sued Peter Hughes because Hughes refused to repair a fence on his own property, Lenox—but there was a great deal of concern for Archibald and Henrietta Godwin.”

“They were well liked?” asked Jenkins.

“Neither was well known in the town or the county. Archibald had just returned from Oxford and Tonbridge, so in all he must have been away eight years or so at the time of his father’s death. Henrietta kept house for her father, but she didn’t have much of an acquaintance. It was widely expected that after their initial period of mourning, the two would take their place in local society—dine with the bishop; hire more staff, for of course their fortune was known to the last farthing, as it always is in such places; join in the Hunt.”

“The Beagles.”

“Yes, precisely. The Beagles are lords of all they survey in the Clinkard Meon Valley; it was astonishing. At any rate—they did none of that. On the contrary, they dismissed all of the staff except for the three I mentioned, they stopped ordering from local shops, they refused all invitations. They built up the hedges around the house.”

“There is something eerie in them, these two,” Lenox said. “I have seen it before. There was a case in Lower Danforth some years ago. There were two sisters, twelve and thirteen. Their mother was dead. Their father was a terror, beating them, berating the household, losing servants every fortnight. The two sisters grew strangely close. They had their own language, their own gestures. They wouldn’t speak to anyone except for each other. The walls of the room they shared were covered with an odd kind of cuneiform writing, you might call it. I’ve never wanted to leave a place as badly.”

Jenkins nodded. “I remember the case. The Thompsons.”

Dallington looked puzzled. “What was the crime?”

“They had killed their father,” said Lenox, “and after that every servant in the house. We found the housekeeper facedown in the coal scuttle. Old Thompson’s valet was in the bathtub with his throat slit. As for the father, he was dressed in his Sunday suit, sitting at the head of the table, where they had been eating for a week before anyone suspected that things had gone amiss. He had been stabbed dozens of times—before and after death.”

Dallington shivered. “Charming story, Lenox. You ought to tell it at parties.”

The older detective smiled. “Apologies.”

“No, it’s relevant. I don’t think they had their own language, these two, but they were uncommonly close. They were sometimes seen walking arm in arm upon the moor, as lovers might, according to the landlord at the Godwin Arms.”

“Do you think they killed their father?” asked Jenkins.

Dallington shook his head. “No. If anything, I think they were hoping to avenge him. Clearly there is some madness in the blood of that family. I would be curious to hear about Godwin at school, at Oxford. He already told us that he didn’t have friends. He must have been an odd soul.”

“You think they were attempting to avenge their father simply because of the timing of his suicide?” asked Lenox.

“No,” said Dallington and smiled faintly. “There we come to the note. It was found in Winthrop Godwin’s chest pocket. It was signed ‘VR,’ and Blaine said they interrogated a fellow named Victor Robertson, with whom Winthrop had quarreled, at length. Of course, I saw something else immediately, though I didn’t tell Blaine as much.”

“What?” asked Jenkins.

“Victoria Regina,” said Lenox. “Queen Victoria. What did she write, John?”

Dallington took a sip of water. “She used the royal ‘we,’” he told them. “The note said, “We forgive; we cannot forget.’”

As Lenox walked home along Regent Street he passed a wandering onion man, who wore a crimson bowtie, muttonchop whiskers, and a long strand of braided onions around his neck, and chanted, in a singsong voice, “Here’s your rope, to hang the Pope, and a penn’orth of cheese to choke him.” Lenox smiled and, reminded of supper and of Disraeli’s aversion, walked more quickly. There was much left to do that day.

None of it for him, however. When he arrived home and offered to throw himself into work, both Lady Jane and Kirk (the latter almost angrily) told him that he was underfoot and needed to absent himself from the sitting rooms and the dining room at all costs. There were men garlanding the walls with flowers, others moving furniture to Jane’s specifications, and servants lining up silver tureens along the old marble hunting table in the hall. With humble haste Lenox made his way upstairs.

For half an hour he sat at the escritoire in the third-floor guest room—he sometimes liked to work in parts of the house he visited less often, a new view refreshing his mind, permitting him to work longer—reading blue books and parliamentary memorandums. Then, almost with the force of revelation, he realized he didn’t need to know about American railroads any longer. He was leaving politics.

With a feeling of liberation he strolled about the upper corridors of the house. They were empty; the whole energy of the staff was concentrated downstairs. After a moment he realized that he had directed his footsteps, unthinkingly, toward the nursery. He knocked at the door.

Miss Emanuel was reading to Sophia, a book given to her a few months before by Toto. Lenox couldn’t stand the book. It was about a horse that got lost. The horse, even by the low standards of his species, was incalculably stupid, capable of confusing a lamppost for his master or meandering onto an ocean liner at random. Lenox understood that this was meant to be funny, and it was, indeed, the kind of humor that went straight to Sophia’s simple heart, but it irritated him. As Miss Emanuel went on reading, he determined to ignore the horse and thought instead about the Godwins.

There were questions that only they could answer, at this stage. Dallington’s story had satisfied both Lenox and Jenkins as to the motivation of the brother and sister, a long cathectic hatred of Queen Victoria, bred into the bone by their ancestors and their father, and flourishing, perhaps, without the soft guidance of a mother. Still: How had they discovered Grace Ammons’s history? Why had Godwin killed the homeless man, beyond the convenience of pinning it to Wintering?

Killing Wintering was more understandable—trouble and dissent among criminals was common in Lenox’s line of work—but he still would have liked to know the details. Unfortunately neither of the Godwins seemed likely to offer them. It was unclear how much Henrietta knew at all, for that matter.

Sophia’s book had finished (“Again!” she cried, to Lenox’s distress), and he had begun to speak to her nurse about the possibility of a walk in the spring sunshine, when there was a knock on the door of the nursery.

It was Kirk; he couldn’t say, “There you are, you fool,” to Lenox in an exasperated tone, but his face approximated the effect of those words. What a mood he was in! “A visitor, in your study, sir.”

“Probably the horse,” said Lenox to Sophia, who giggled. He turned to Kirk. “Who is it?”

“A Mr. LeMaire, sir.”

LeMaire was seated on one of Lenox’s red armchairs, reading from a small volume in French. When Lenox came into his study the French detective put the book into the breast pocket of his coat and stood, smiling and bowing slightly. “I hope you will excuse the intrusion, Mr. Lenox.”

“Not at all. Can I get you a drink?”

“Have you a brandy?”

“Of course.” Lenox went to the small lacquered table where he kept his spirits in crystal decanters and poured the drink for LeMaire. He took a small quantity of whisky and a large one of soda for himself, and the two men touched glasses. “Please, sit,” said Lenox.

“I have a piece of information that I think you wish to know,” said LeMaire, his voice no less accented outside of his office.

“About the Godwin case?”

“Ah! No,” said the Frenchman sadly. “There I think you need more help, but I cannot offer. It is about your other line of work. Your Parliament.”

Lenox gave him a quizzical look. “A piece of information?”

“In these battles there is a great element of gossip—and of course gossip is my trade, Mr. Lenox.”

Lenox suppressed a sigh, covering it with a sip from his glass. It would be about Graham—that Graham was embezzling money. He had yet to tell anyone other than Jane and Graham that he was leaving Parliament. His brother would be devastated, he feared. “How kind of you to come to me.”

“I will not insult your intelligence by pretending you are unaware of the rumors concerning your secretary, Mr. Graham,” said LeMaire. He set his glass down, and in his face Lenox saw, again, a sharp, darting intelligence. This was a formidable fellow. “What I have learned is their origin.”

Here was a surprise. “Their origin? Have you really?”

“It was Mr. Disraeli.”

There was a long pause. Lenox sat in silence, his gaze level upon the visitor. At last he said, “How did you hear that?”

“The day after you visited me, I heard your name at the house of one of my clients—a friend, now, I would venture to say. He sits in the House of Lords. A newer earldom. He sits on Mr. Disraeli’s side of the benches. When I inquired about the trouble you were facing, he informed me of your secretary’s predicament. I took it upon myself to discover the truth.”

“May I ask why you so decided?”

LeMaire shrugged in that Gallic fashion that seems to contain all meanings and none at once, a shrug that acknowledges the absurdity, the inevitability, the comic disloyalty, of the world. “I was sorry not to help you—and I think it is more than coincidence, Mr. Lenox, to hear your name again so quickly. Your career in London is, before which I advance here to the city myself, an inspiration. The Mad Jack case appeared in the French papers the week I entered the Sûreté. A private detective, beating the police! Not in a memoir, like Vidocq, but in the newspaper, the proper newspaper.”

“How did you discover that it was Disraeli?” Lenox asked.

LeMaire smiled. “The Frenchmen in this city must stick together.”

Lenox was in no mood for evasion, however, or charm. “Can you be more precise?”

“The French consul here is in the confidence of many men in your government. I asked him to make inquiries. Apparently Mr. Disraeli called Mr. Graham ‘the most inconvenient man in Parliament,’ at a small meeting of leaders of this party, his party, and stated his determination to be rid of the trouble.”

This surprised Lenox at first—but immediately he heard the ring of truth in it. That very morning Graham had come to him with a way to kill the naval bill, a small procedural step they might take. Lenox had passed it on in a memorandum to Edmund. “I see.”