Two new ones struck him. The first was that a small hand-drawn map of Markethouse had been tucked into one of the books. “Was the town hall on it?” asked Lenox.
Edmund nodded. “Not only that, but Potbelly Lane, which is not quite at the very center of town.”
“Where is the map now? I should like to see it.”
“With Clavering.”
“I’ll look at it tomorrow, then,” said Lenox, frowning to himself.
The other detail was that along with the stolen food there was a slab of butter and several sprigs of herb — mint, marjoram, and rosemary were the ones Edmund had identified — which again suggested both a longer inhabitation, and a certain sophistication, of a piece with the novels and the bed.
As the footmen cleared the soup and brought out plates of steak, smothered with roasted potatoes, McConnell said, “Still, I would prefer dining here,” and the brothers laughed.
“There’s one thing that puzzles me more than the others,” Lenox said. “I understand all the food, our horses, the blankets, even the books. But I don’t understand the dog.”
“Nor do I,” said Edmund.
“Perhaps it was a watchdog,” Lenox said. “But then, it never barked at us. And it was surely the thought of the moment to have it act as a decoy, rather than a premeditated idea.”
They discussed the dog for some time then, sipping the claret Waller had opened for them to follow the Tokay, the disappearance of the last evening light in the windows making the candlelit family dining room of Lenox’s youth close, intimate, friendly. He asked if Edmund could get hold of a decent scenting dog, and he said he could, down at the Allenby farm, their excellent brindle pointer. Lenox suggested they put his skills to the test the next morning.
When McConnell left at a quarter to eight in the dogcart, both Edmund and Charles stood in the doorway, waving good-bye to him and asking him to pass their love to Toto and Georgianna.
After he was out of sight, they turned back inside and immediately started discussing the case again, even before they had reached the brandy.
It was good to see Edmund animated; and for that reason, Lenox said, when perhaps he might have kept it to himself, for it was a slender thought, “Gray beard, you know. Well dressed. Does it sound like anyone to you?”
“The Duke of Epping.”
Lenox shook his head. “No, I’m being serious.”
“Well, who?”
“To me it sounds rather like Arthur Hadley.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Lenox had a favorite piece of public wit from his many years of life in London. It had appeared at the north end of Westminster Abbey, which had one of the only walls in the entire city that was not covered in handbills — those familiar bright papers pasted up all over, advertisements for steamships, patent medicines, exhibitions, notices of public auction, whole magazines laid out to read page by page.
The men who posted these handbills were a familiar sight. All of them wore similar fantastically garish fustian jackets, with cavernous pockets to hold their bills, their pots of paste, their long collapsible sticks with rollers at the end.
The abbey was exempt from their energies only because of a large, forbidding placard that read BILL STICKERS WILL BE PROSECUTED in bold lettering. One day, passing nearby, Lenox had noticed an acquaintance — a usually somber fellow, a naval officer named Wilson — standing at the wall, grinning. Lenox had greeted him and asked what was so entertaining, and Wilson had pointed at the wall, where, underneath the placard, some anonymous genius had written Bill Stickers is innocent! Lenox had stared at this for a moment and then burst into laughter, and every time he saw Wilson now they smiled before they spoke, remembering the joke.
The next morning, Lenox woke up smiling, with this joke in his mind. He had been trying to remember all of his favorite ones for Edmund — most of which would elicit a groan from his brother, but a smile, too.
This one was good, and Lenox went downstairs thinking about how he would phrase it for maximum effect. But when he came into the breakfast room, he found that his brother was gone.
“Out on a walk again?” he said to Waller, who was carefully laying strips of kippered herring on a tray.
“Yes, sir, out on a walk.”
Lenox cursed. He didn’t know why this sudden uncontrollable passion for morning walks had arisen in his brother, and they had agreed the night before that they would make an early start to interview Miss Harville, Stevens’s secretary, before visiting Clavering to check on his progress. As soon as the morning frost burned off, he also wanted to take the pointer out and look for Sandy, Mickelson’s dog.
For twenty minutes he felt modestly irritated, as he ate and read the newspaper, and then in the next twenty minutes he began to grow more seriously vexed. This was a murder investigation, not a boys’ adventure. By the time he had waited an hour and ten minutes, he was full of utterly righteous indignation.
Edmund came in with red cheeks. “Hullo,” he said.
“Did you leave the dog in the stables?” asked Lenox.
Edmund was reading a letter and looked up from it only after a beat, distracted. “The dog?”
“The Allenby pointer — the one I asked you to borrow.”
“Oh, dash it, I forgot. I’ll have Rutherford send someone.”
“Just a leisurely walk, then?” asked Lenox.
“Why, what’s wrong?” said Edmund.
He was pouring himself a cup of tea, as if they had all the time in the world, and Lenox said coldly, “It’s nearly half past nine.”
Edmund glanced up at the clock on the wall. It was actually about ten past the hour, but he didn’t mention it — a piece of discretion that only annoyed Lenox further, in his current mood. “I’m sorry,” Edmund said. “Give me a few minutes, and I’ll be with you.”
“Where in creation do you keep going every morning?”
Edmund frowned and was silent for a moment, as if contemplating how to answer. Then he said, “Do you recall that one of my tenants, Martha Coxe, came to the house on the evening you arrived?”
“Vaguely.”
“Apparently Molly was teaching three of the women in the Coxe household to read, the mother and the two daughters. I have undertaken to continue the lessons.”
In a different mood, Lenox would have answered differently — but he was put out, and he made a scoffing noise. “Is that right?”
“Yes,” said Edmund.
“And you imagine that to be a good use of the time of a person engaged upon a piece of detective work — not to mention a Member of the Parliament of Great Britain.”
“I do. Why should it not be?”
“Teaching a parcel of women how to read? Your time is more valuable than that, Edmund, and if yours is not, mine certainly is.”
Edmund reddened. “And what was Molly’s time, may I ask you, valueless?”
“Of course not, don’t twist—”
“Valueless, simply because she did not sit in the greatest assemblage of fools in the history of the British Empire? Am I to consider yet another blue book on coal mining in preference to teaching these women, and leave them halfway through the alphabet? Do you call that honorable? Parliament!”
“Then there’s the case.”
“The case! It can wait half an hour.”
“That is not an assessment you are qualified to make. But more than that, how can you be so obtuse? You have a dozen duties more pressing than — you have the estate, that on its own, you know, is enough!”
“The estate,” said Edmund flatly.
“Your time—”
Suddenly Lenox saw that Edmund was close to vibrating with fury. He realized, a moment too late, that he wasn’t even angry at his brother anymore. He tried to go on, but Edmund said, in a very distant voice, “I shall conduct my personal affairs as I see fit, Charles. I do not recall telling you that it was unwise to go into trade, though neither of us has to stretch far to imagine how our mother would have felt to learn that you had.”