“But the vandals?”
Lenox shook his head. “No doubt Musgrave had partners still in Bath. And the black dog upon the church door — perhaps it was a signal that they needed to see him, to consult with him. Or a threat?” At this Lenox smiled, despite his anger with himself.
“What is it?” asked Dallington.
“Only that for all their seeming hysteria, the people of Plumbley are proved quite correct in the end. Musgrave was an evil presence, and that black dog of his, Cincinnatus, corresponded to the black dog painted upon the church door.”
“A stopped clock is right twice a day.”
Lenox read the telegram again. “We must hope that Musgrave peaches on his friends in Bath.”
“Funny that Wells should have been so afraid to name Musgrave even after he had left.”
“No, I saw the shading of a terrible temper in the captain. Perhaps Wells did too, that day when they argued on the Plumbley green. When McConnell suggested that Mrs. Musgrave was with child I dismissed her husband from my mind as a suspect, but I ought to have done better. It is well that I’m out of the business, John.”
“I cannot agree.” Dallington lit his cigar, now tidily cut. “Do you think the wife was involved?”
“Time will tell.”
This they would never know, in fact, for Plumbley took her in, her and her new daughter as well, and cloaked her in its silent care. Cousins, friends, enemies, all of them together provided her with a small set of rooms, with food, with friendship, and above all with silence. She had undergone a dreadful pregnancy, indeed seemed half a ghost and would never speak of Musgrave’s treatment of her, or indeed of his affiliation with Wells. The village’s propensity for judgment stilled itself and withered away in this case, replaced with generosity. She was, after all, a broken woman. Some time later, when Lenox very gently broached the subject to Fripp, the fruit-and-vegetable seller said, “It is all in the past — and better to let it lie there.” In this sentence he summed up Plumbley’s attitude toward Cat Scales, as had been Cat Musgrave.
All of that was in the months to come. As Dallington and Lenox sat in the study at Hampden Lane, chewing over the case anew, Musgrave was being taken to a prison in Bath.
In the next week many different people attempted to make him speak, but he would not; in the end they could only charge him with possession of fraudulent monies, a great deal of it, to be sure, but never enough to put him in jail for a very long term. His solicitors said there was no proof whatsoever that Musgrave knew the money was fake at all.
At the trial, in which both Dallington and Lenox testified, he received a sentence of two years. Yet it might be just as well to round off the tale here, and say that, despite the assiduous scrutiny of police in both Bath and London, upon his release Musgrave did nothing illegal, until one day, three or four months after his release, he took a train bound for Manchester, a very small valise in hand. He never came out at any of the stations along the voyage, and, as a final trick, didn’t alight at Manchester either — in fact seemed to vanish straight into thin air. The police were confident he would appear in London, but in this they were wrong. Nobody caught sight of him again.
As for Wells, there was only ever one incident that proved him still alive.
His wife and his son had gone down in the world upon his departure, sold off their carriage, sold off their weekday china. Still, by dint of hard work in the shop they did manage to keep their large house, and to retain one of their horses. It helped that Mrs. Wells was a very pretty woman — blond, plump, and flirtatious, and the men of Taunton and Bath liked to deal with her. Slowly the shop, still called Wells and Son, grew to be successful.
At last, when she had saved enough capital, she and her sisters began a small sideline in selling scents. This was a talent they had cultivated since girlhood, and though at first only a small, dim shelf in the shop was devoted to their perfumes, after they received the patronage of Emily Jasper and several of her friends in Bath, this part of the business began to grow — until at last there was no more grain merchant at all upon the town green, and Mrs. Wells’s small, crystal bottles of lavender and primrose adorned the bureaus even of Mayfair.
Only she was no longer called Mrs. Wells — her name now, after a small ceremony presided over by the groom’s master, was Mrs. Chalmers.
In a village as small as Plumbley no wedding is ever wholly surprising. This one came near it, however. Mrs. Wells had gone to visit the groom when he was recuperating and their friendship had, in the course of several slow years, grown into love. Her marriage having been dissolved by a court, on grounds of desertion, she was free to wed the man her husband had nearly killed.
Around the time of the wedding, and not long after the conversion of the shop to its new business, was when Wells popped his head out. A postcard arrived at the house one day that said, without any additional comment, FOR SHAME, MY FATHER’S SHOP.
It was tracked to a sailor in Kilkenny, who said he had been asked to post it by a man in Paris — but there the tracks ran cold. Lenox, for his part, never looked back on the case with much fondness or satisfaction, because the two men who bore perhaps the most responsibility for its crimes were somewhere out upon the face of the earth, settled and, if not contented, at any rate still free. While Weston and Oates were both cold in the churchyard of St. Stephen’s.
If it bothered him overmuch, however, he consoled himself with two thoughts: first, that Chalmers was alive and well, still at the stables of Everley, and freshly married to, of all people born to womanhood, irony of ironies, Mrs. Wells; and second, that his Uncle Freddie might yet live to a ripe old age.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Is your uncle quite well?” Dallington asked Lenox, still smoking his small cigar on that autumn day in Hampden Lane.
“Yes — in fact, he shall be here Monday, if you would like to dine with us.”
“Oh, happily. Perhaps he will have more news from Archer.”
After another fifteen minutes Dallington took his leave, eyeing the flowers as he went.
Almost immediately there was a knock at the door — another Parliamentary visitor for Lenox, who greeted him with a very convincing false cheer that, even as he acted it out, sent a chill down his spine.
At last I have truly become a politician, he realized. Yet he wanted desperately to change the laws of his country, and if this was the way to do it, so it should go, he thought. He took the man into his study, gave him a glass of sherry, and straight away began to cajole and bargain him around to supporting the new poor laws he had proposed.
That Saturday and Sunday passed as the days before them had, in great avalanches of parliamentary chatter. Graham for his part slept not more than three or four hours a night, while Lenox was constantly between his desk at home and his offices in Whitehall, rarely eating more than a piece of cheese between two breads.
“People speak ill of the Earl of Sandwich but I am grateful to him,” he said to his brother when they passed each other in Bellamy’s one day.
Therefore he had nearly forgotten that Frederick was arriving on that Monday. Fortunately it was a bank holiday, and the Commons wouldn’t sit until the next evening. There were still meetings to attend, but by five o’clock he was home.
Jane was in her small rose-colored drawing room, writing at her desk, as Sophia slept in the bassinet next to her; the last lines of yellow light crossed the floor at a diagonal. When they had been simply friends it had been this room Lenox found the most comforting and homey of all the ones he knew, and still it offered him some evanescent pleasure — a woman’s touch in the small framed mezzotints, in the particular draw of the lace curtains, in the ornate cedar coffee table.