The cases were always heard in order of ascending seriousness, and there was little doubt of the guilt of the man who came in now, from Oates’s testimony, a French laborer named Fontaine, very large and very strong. He had beaten his common-law wife badly one morning, apparently unprovoked by drink, which was unusual, and then gone to Bath by coach, where he passed a night spending money very freely before the police hauled him in. Dr. Eastwood — who along with the squire and a few others was one of the great men of Plumbley — came in and testified to the woman’s wounds. Fontaine himself was silent but stared unerringly, some might say threateningly, at the magistrate, even when other people addressed him.
“Where did you come by this money?” asked Frederick.
Fontaine was silent, his face expressionless. Even when Rodgers tried to bully him into speaking the Frenchman remained that way, perhaps secure in the knowledge that the law could not compel him to speak, and finally Frederick sentenced the man to thirty days in jail without the option of a fine, for the violent mistreatment of his common-law wife. He would be tried in Bath for his crimes there. When he had gone out, Lenox asked Frederick if this was about the usual run of cases he saw.
“Lighter than usual, perhaps,” his relative said.
“Exceeding light,” said Rodgers with great firmness.
“But this next one is a bit novel. Call him in, then, would you, bailiff?”
A very handsome, dark-eyed young man came in, willowy and with flowing dark hair. He wore a bottle-green blazer made of velvet.
“The lady in question is here?” asked Frederick of Rodgers.
“Arrived half an hour ago, Your Worship.” Then he added, “In a curricle, too.” This was a very quick, superior sort of conveyance, two horses for one or two passengers.
“Bring her in, please.”
“Very good.” Rodgers leaned out into the hall, made a beckoning motion, and then announced, as a beautiful young woman came in with a footman for company, “Miss Louisa Pershing.”
“Miss Pershing,” said the magistrate, rising. “May I introduce myself, and my cousin. My name is Frederick Ponsonby and this is Charles Lenox. May I ask you to sit, here, yes, just near me, and give me an account of this little matter?”
Miss Pershing was only too happy — it was dreadful what a dishonest man could achieve. The trust of a young person — society today — and so Miss Pershing, who looked perhaps better in repose than in conversation, nattering as she did, eventually produced her tale. One morning she had been walking in the flood meadow near her father’s property with her small dog, a toy fox terrier, when a brutish man, passing by, had simply picked up the dog and stormed away. Miss Pershing’s grief was evident and real as she recalled this, and Lenox, who loved his own dogs, felt a pang of sympathy for her.
Two mornings afterward a handsome young man — and here she pointed to the accused — had come to her house, saying that he had heard of her misfortune and, admiring her from afar for so long, taken it upon himself to find the dog. He had achieved this, and now it would only take three pounds to recover the animal. If he had had three pounds, of course, even his final three pounds on the earth, it would have been his pleasure, his signal honor …
It was a familiar old story. In the end the handsome fellow and his brutish partner extracted eighteen pounds from the young woman.
The man himself only spoke once. “We returned the dog!” he cried, when Miss Pershing had broken into fresh tears. “It was a service well rendered!”
Here Oates stepped in. “Sixth dog they’ve caught ’em taking, here and around. It’s a pretty living, too.”
“Set him to gardening,” Rodgers muttered, unsolicited.
The young man looked heartbroken at this suggestion. Frederick, with a thank-you to Miss Pershing, said that he had better wait until the Petty Session to sentence the man, the matter lying as it did somewhere between blackmail, extortion, and dog-theft. (For many years this last had been the most serious of those crimes, when rich men’s dogs could cost as much as workhorses.) With that decision he thanked Oates, Weston, and Rodgers, and adjourned the court, looking relieved to be done.
For his part, Lenox’s mind kept returning to the strong, silent Frenchman, to what secret precisely he might have been keeping, and to why he had so much money to spread around Bath.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
That afternoon Lenox walked into town to see the grain merchant, Wells. The shop, not far from Fripp’s, was a big, shiny affair, with a bright coat of hunter green paint on it and in the windows an enormous iron scale with counterweights for measuring large quantities of grain, seed, and flour.
Nobody was inside at the moment, however, except for a man behind the counter.
“Mr. Wells?” said Lenox.
“I am. Who’s asking?”
“My name is Charles Lenox, sir.” He shook hands. “I’m staying with my cousin at Everley, at the moment.”
Wells’s manner shifted just slightly toward the deferential. “Oh?”
“I’m also trying to help him — and Mr. Oates and Mr. Weston — discover who’s been vandalizing the town. Including your shop, I understand. Your window was broken?”
“We’d string the lout up by his thumbs, if I had my way, who did this,” said Wells.
“What happened?”
“It’s a short enough story. Old Fripp, down the road, had his window broken, and along about six or seven days later they did mine. Same kind of rock, same picture wrapped around it.”
“Do you have the picture?”
“I gave it to Oates.”
Lenox looked around. “Your shop seems to thrive.”
“Thank you, sir. It’s not been easy.”
“Does Captain Musgrave shop here?”
Wells was a purposeful-looking man. He had a dark mustache and was dressed in a black apron with a bow tie. He betrayed no real emotion at Musgrave’s name. “Not any longer.”
“He did once, then?”
“He doesn’t have much in the way of livestock or farmland,” said Wells, “but he stopped his cook buying her flour and corn here.” The word corn, here in Somerset, referred to any kind of grain — oats, barley, wheat.
“And the clock that was stolen from you — who knew it was here?”
“Anyone who’d been in the shop the last fifteen years, I suppose. That’s all, if you want to round them up.”
Lenox looked at him levelly. “Thank you.” He had noticed that in a small back corner of the store, next to a padlocked door, there was a narrow band of lighter, newer floorboards, mismatched with the timeworn ones they lay alongside. “And this is your expansion?”
“Yes. We can keep more stock with the new shelves there,” he said. “It’s been a good year for business.”
“Would you mind if I examined the place they took the clock from?” said Lenox.
Wells gestured toward a shelf over the door, now empty. “Be my guest. Do you want to stand on a stool?”
“If you wouldn’t mind.”
As Wells brought a stool over, Lenox asked, “Did the thieves come in after the rock, through the window?”
“They reached through it and unlocked the door. Left it standing wide open.”
Lenox ascended the stool. “How did they get the clock down? Was this stool standing here?”
Wells nodded. “The same one.”
“It’s very rickety — I wouldn’t like it if you let go at the moment. Makes me think there were two of them. Was it heavy, the clock?”
“Yes. Why?”
“It would require a man taller than I am or stronger to fetch down a heavy object from this position. You have a high-ceilinged place here, and I don’t doubt most men would have dropped the clock, including you. It would have been difficult for one man to take it away very quickly.”