An Old Betrayal: A Charles Lenox Mystery (Charles Lenox Mysteries) (32 page)

They came to trial, therefore, upon weaker charges than Lenox would have liked. Archibald Godwin was charged with the offense of high treason, which had been defined by the Treason Act of 1351—he had “compassed or imagined” the death of the Queen. (To plot the death of the monarch’s spouse, eldest son, or chief heir was the only other time this charge could be leveled.) Treason was exceedingly hard to prove, even under the law that had been updated in 1848. Lenox would have preferred—as would have Jenkins—a plain old charge of murder. The crown also charged Godwin with attempted murder and a host of smaller offenses, all the way down to breaking and entering. His barrister made it clear that he would contest them vigorously.

Henrietta Godwin’s crimes were more vexing still to punish. What had she done? Had a mad brother? Carried a key that anyone might have placed in her purse? She had never been anywhere near Buckingham Palace. It wasn’t illegal to carry a small pistol, though it was unusual. Nothing at Raburn Lodge implicated her in her brother’s plans. Out of desperation the prosecutor charged her, too, with high treason. Jenkins wasn’t hopeful.

The first day of the trial was, as it could not help but be, in such circumstances, a circus, with crowded galleries, milling press outside the doors, and an unusually large contingent of guards and officers on behalf of the Queen. (The Queen herself was visiting Wales.) Parliament had risen for the summer, and Lenox was free to attend the trial; he and Dallington sat several rows behind the defendants. Lenox appreciated the company, which was by no means a foregone matter—for Polly Buchanan was there also, not on the face of it as an interested party, merely as a spectator, for her guise as Miss Strickland remained intact. At the recesses Dallington would excuse himself and speak to her when he could.

“She has a sharper eye for legal matters than I do,” he said once when he returned.

“Oh?”

“She told me what the word ‘malice’ means for the first time. It can be expressed or implied, do you know.”

“How interesting.”

Dallington missed the sarcasm in Lenox’s voice. “Yes, isn’t it! And then there’s
mens rea
. She has a great deal of material on that, yards of the stuff.”

Soon Lenox himself had the opportunity to know her better, too—for as the days passed, the ranks of the hot, dusty courtroom grew thinner, as fewer and fewer of the press and the public found themselves able to tolerate the lengthy disquisitions and inactions of a courtroom trial. Eventually the three—Polly, Dallington, Lenox—began to sit along the same particular bench each morning. Throughout the day messengers would come in with notes for Polly, which she would answer directly or fold into a pocket. Presumably they were to do with her detective agency. Though these notes represented a direct competition to his own business, Dallington thought them very funny.

By the second week of the trial the Godwins still had yet to speak, and there were only a few dozen consistent attendants at the court.

One of them was an old, stooped, white-haired man in a clerical collar, extremely thin. His vestments were of thick black cloth, but he always sat, motionless, in the very first row of the courtroom, never leaving his seat even during a recess. “Who do you think he is?” whispered Polly to them one morning before the proceedings began.

“Father Time,” said Dallington. “No, I’m not sure. Lenox?”

Lenox smiled sadly. “I’ve wondered myself for some days. I think if we introduced ourselves we might find that he is Wintering’s father.”

Dallington and Polly, both struck by the idea, in unison turned their heads to look at the man again. Then Polly stood up. “I’m going to speak to him,” she said.

Before either man could respond she was walking toward the front row. “She’s an unorthodox young woman,” said Lenox.

“Yes, it’s wonderful,” said Dallington, his eyes following her. “Yesterday she told me women should be allowed to vote. Who knows, perhaps she’s right.”

“It won’t happen in our lifetimes,” said Lenox.

Polly had sat now beside the old man and was speaking with him, a hand upon his forearm. At one point she looked back toward them and nodded almost imperceptibly: Yes, it was Wintering. Lenox considered the curate’s back, his small church near Stoke, his white hair. What pain fatherhood could bring! Families were so strange—the Godwins, with their gnarled sense of duty to one another, or the Winterings, a thousand winters upon the same land and now brought to this, their last heir dead, his father alone in a London courtroom.

Upon her return, Polly said, “He has agreed to have lunch with us.” Then she added, whispering, “I think he is very poor, however. He is staying at a hostelry the Church of England owns in Camden and walks to the court each morning.”

He was a funny old soul, exceedingly gentle, with a pleasure in anything mildly funny. Forty years before he himself had been to Wadham, and he and Lenox reminisced about Oxford together. When the subject turned to the trial, however, he was, while polite, almost wholly silent—impenetrable. Soon, uncomfortable, they directed the conversation elsewhere.

Most days thereafter they took him to lunch, always at the Oxford and Cambridge Club, so that no bill would appear; they told the elder Wintering that Scotland Yard paid for these entertainments, an explanation he seemed to accept.

What brought him to court each day? They wondered to each other. Even after Polly befriended him, Wintering sat alone in the front row. Was it forgiveness? Dallington speculated. Curiosity? Lenox, the only father in the group of three, thought he understood: It was, no matter how unhappy a situation, the curate’s final chance of closeness to his son.

Somehow the old man’s presence lent a moral force to the trial that it might not otherwise have had, if it were just about the attempt upon the life of the Queen. After all, she was alive, and Leonard Wintering had involved himself in the matter, taken his own risks. It was on the curate’s behalf, more and more, that Lenox felt himself hoping that the Godwins be found guilty.

On the day when the verdicts came in, the courtroom again filled to capacity. The judge very quickly handed down his first ruling: Henrietta Godwin was innocent, and free to go.

There was a murmuring at this. It was expected, but still newsworthy. She had almost certainly been intending to murder the Queen, after all. The judge added that he could not reasonably preclude Miss Godwin from remaining in London, but that he advised close police observation of her comings and goings until such time as she returned to Hampshire.

Finally, at this, she stood and spoke. “I will return to Hampshire this afternoon, my lord,” she said. “With my brother, if God is good.”

God was not good—not by the lights of Hetty Godwin—for the next news that the judge delivered was of Archibald Godwin’s guilt.

This, too, had seemed the most likely outcome. He had offered no plausible defense for his presence in the Queen’s bedchamber, or for firing a gun at her. It was the sentencing that interested the pushing multitude of newspaper writers at the doors of the courtroom. The judge sighed and then spoke.

“The court views crimes such as Mr. Godwin’s in a very, very grave light—yet we find, regrettably, that there is little precedent for harsh sentencing in cases such as this one. Mr. Rhodes, in ’58, received just five years in prison. The majority of Her Majesty’s would-be assassins have begged off of their charges on the plea of mental illness.

“We considered placing you into prison, Mr. Godwin, for a term of ten years.” Henrietta Godwin made a terrified, involuntary little cry at this. “But that won’t do—you are too well situated, too financially secure, for prison to be an uncomfortable experience. Sadly, in this country money can buy comfort even for those guilty of very heinous crimes. Nor can we transport you to Australia, as we might have chosen to do in older—some would say better—days.

“Fortunately, because the target of your attempted murder was no less a personage than Her Majesty, the Queen, we have other options, rooted in deeper, less usual law. Therefore the crown elects to mulct, from you, the house of your ancestors, Raburn Lodge, along with all of its associated lands, which will henceforth be the property of the Queen, to dispose of as she pleases. In consideration of her safety you will also be imprisoned for a term of no less than ten years—no matter how comfortable such an interment may prove. That is my ruling. Consider it final.”

The judge—face impassive, as if he were unaware of the sensation his speech had caused in the courtroom, the rising voices—smacked his gavel and stood to walk away.

Polly’s hand found Dallington’s forearm, and she gripped it tight, shocked; Lenox kept his eyes fixed on Archibald Godwin, whose face had gone white as a ghost. There was a moment of strange silence, and then Henrietta Godwin, weeping and screaming, threw herself toward her brother. The bailiff of the court separated them as gently as he could and led Archie Godwin away, and Henrietta chased through the doors after them, stricken with grief.

That October, Lenox, sitting upon one of the back benches in Parliament one evening, raised his hand and caught the Speaker’s eye. It was the first time this autumn that he had risen to speak—once a daily occurrence—and the Speaker looked surprised. Nevertheless he called on Lenox.

“The Honourable Member for Stirrington.”

“Thank you, Mr. Speaker,” said Lenox. Not long before, Disraeli had finished speaking, and Lenox looked down and across the green benches at him. “I rise to thank the Prime Minister, Mr. Speaker. He has expatiated for us at some length upon the dimensions of the proposed Factory Act, and has my full agreement upon its virtues. No ten-year-old child should work upon a factory floor. No woman should risk dismissal because she will not work an eighteen-hour day. These are facts that seem self-evident to me, and I am sorry that there are those within my party who would disagree.”

From the front benches, Gladstone looked up. Edmund was at his side, and near them ranged most of the shadow cabinet.

“In two months’ time I will leave this chamber,” said Lenox. There was an audible reaction to this. Lenox, hands behind his back, waited patiently for the voices that rose to quiet again. “I am pleased that before my departure I will be able to vote for one of the Prime Minister’s bills, for the second time this year. I would encourage every Member seated in this chamber to do the same.”

There were calls of “Hear him!” from the other side. Lenox’s neighbors seemed disinclined to take the advice; they wanted stronger measures, but Aristotle had it right, that politics was the art of the possible.

“The Prime Minister does not have an easy job. He must please his friends, his family, the members of his party. Everyone has a quiet word for his ear. When he speaks, he speaks for England, at least so long as he is in office. His actions are England’s actions. I am sincere when I offer him my congratulations for this act he wishes to pass.”

There was an expectant silence in the room, a stray cough. Lenox paused, and then went on. “My own party’s leader, Mr. Gladstone, has been unimpeachably kind and honest with me, and as I leave I offer him my thanks—but I do not want to omit my thanks for Mr. Disraeli, either, though he has been my opposition. He sees, as I do, that he speaks for England. That is how we know that he does not gossip, would never deceive, would never slander a good name, whether it belong to a vagrant, or Queen Victoria herself, or any random person in this body—my secretary, for instance, anyone at all.” Here Lenox paused again and stared directly at Disraeli. There were titters in the House, as men explained the reference to each other in whispers. “Like all Prime Ministers his speech is his character, and his chief glory. He would never therefore utter a word that was to the detriment of his post’s integrity. He has my thanks. As I leave I only ask that all of you, after my departure, seek to rise as high as the standard of honesty and decency that Mr. Disraeli has set—or, if you conceive it possible, even higher.”

This time there were a few outright laughs; Lenox tried to keep the smile off of his face.

He went on for some time longer then, discussing his impressions of Parliament, his fond memories of the place, his particular friends James Hilary and Lord Cabot, his brother, his father. It was his final speech; in all he spoke for twelve minutes. When he was finished, the men all around him crowded in to shake his hand. He saw Edmund smile up from the front bench. Disraeli, his usually imperturbable face darkened, took the caesura in the proceedings to depart the chamber, his stride angry.

After declining many offers of a drink—he had two months still, after all, to lounge around the Members’ Bar—Lenox fetched his valise from his office and then went toward the building’s exit, deciding that he would walk home along the river.

“Wait!” called a voice as he left the building.

He turned and saw his brother, hurriedly putting on a cloak. “Edmund, there you are!”

“Will you not stay for the rest of the evening?”

“Jane is having a supper of some kind. Your wife is coming, as I recall.”

Edmund, who had reached his younger brother now, smiled wanly. “That’s right, I remember. Well, at any rate I can walk you back as far as Hampden Lane.” He clapped a hand to Charles’s shoulder and chuckled. “Had to stick it to Disraeli, did you? Between the two of us I thought it very funny.”

“I don’t think it will give him a second’s pause.”

“There you’re wrong. Any man can stand to be disliked—no man can stand to be a joke.”

It was a lovely evening, a last warmth of summer in the air. In the late evening pink they could see the dizzyingly high riggings of the ships, casting a shifting black lattice against the sky. Amazing to think that forty thousand ships came through London along the Thames every year, five or six thousand docked there at any given moment—bound for India, Africa, the Americas, everywhere—and the river so slender that in places a child could throw a rock across to the other side. Really, it was remarkable. Lenox said as much to his older brother.