“Edmund—”
“I shall teach the horses to read if it pleases me. I invite you to disengage yourself from any interest in how I choose to spend my time immediately.”
“Edmund, I—”
“Please feel free to carry on the investigation without me. Good morning.”
He left. When he had gone, Lenox sat back in his chair, thoroughly dissatisfied with his behavior, Edmund’s too, and conscious as well of that word, “trade,” still alive in the room. For another ten minutes he sat and picked at the toast on his plate, dipping it in jam and eating it absentmindedly.
When he got up, he thought he might go and apologize. He stood there, indecisively. He noticed the letter Edmund had been reading when he had come in, the one that had distracted him. It was on the piano, atop its torn envelope. Lenox read it.
12 Sept. 76
Midshipman’s berth, The Lucy
Gibraltar
36.1° N, 5.3° W
Father and mother,
Writing in absolute haste, as did not expect to put into Gibraltar, but weather muddy and ugly and woke to find leeshore rather closer than comfortable — so cut against the wind and pulled into harbor, and now just time to dash this off before we lie to and tack out of harbor again. The good news is that we ought to be in Plymouth in a month, perhaps even less. That means my birthday at home! Hopes they will give us a week. If I can I mean to bring Cresswell with me — so hide the gin. (Am only joking, do not hide it please.) Mother, if you fancy you could draw Cresswell, he’s a great peacock. I do long to be on a horse again. Life aboard ship is splendid however. We passed old McEwan in Gib and he said to say hello to Uncle Charles and would he be so kind as to give him a character, because he is contemplating entering Parliament in Uncle Charles’s old spot (which was a joke). Will James come home at Christmas? What odds the four of us can spend it together? Love to all of you and mind you bring the dogs in on cold nights, that stable is fearfully drafty, whatever Rutherford says.
Your loving son,
Teddy
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Lenox went to the town hall alone. He could see from the activity in the corridors that business had resumed, albeit uneasily. In the small room opposite Stevens’s larger office, where his clerks sat, he found Miss Harville, the mayor’s secretary.
She was a quiet young woman with dark hair and narrow dark eyes, aged fifteen or sixteen, very, very young for the job. When Lenox mentioned this, she merely nodded.
He had expected her to be highly emotional, but in fact she was quite poised, and had spent the morning helping Stringfellow, the deputy mayor, catch up on the duties that would fall to him, at least for the time being. Perhaps forever. Lenox asked if there was much to do. A great deal, she said — particularly with the budget meeting approaching. It was the village’s most significant public debate of the year.
“Do you know who attacked Mr. Stevens, Miss Harville?” he asked.
Her eyes widened. “No, sir,” she said.
“It wasn’t you.”
“Of course not, sir.”
“In that case, it must have been disturbing to find the body.”
She nodded solemnly. “Yes. It was.”
He asked how she had come to work for Stevens, and she replied that she had been a student at the grammar, where she had shown a flair for mathematics. When she had left school — not intending to work, for her father was an assistant foreman at the factory, and fairly comfortably off — Stevens, searching for an assistant, had found her through the recommendation of her schoolmaster. He had first tested her skill, and then offered her the job.
“Have you enjoyed it?”
“Yes,” she said, but dutifully.
Lenox pressed her. “Are you sure?”
“It’s a pleasure to have my own money. I do feel quite ready to be married, and in a home of my own. But there are … there are not many young men in Markethouse, I suppose, and then, after a fashion, I am married to my work.”
Lenox frowned. As with Elizabeth Watson and Claire Adams, there was something reserved in her reaction to the attack upon Stevens.
“Stevens was not married?” he asked.
“Oh, no,” she said, as if the idea were outlandish, but added nothing else.
“Tell me about discovering the body.”
“I arrived here early yesterday morning, just past seven o’clock, because Mr. Stevens asked me to come in early and run over figures for the budget. We both checked them for safety, though his own calculations were never wrong. I knocked on the door of his office, and there was no answer.”
“Were you surprised?”
“Yes. He normally had his office door open.”
“What did you do?”
“I knocked again and waited for a response. When there wasn’t any, I assumed he had been detained at home. I went and fixed him a glass of sherry with an egg in it, which he always liked to take when he arrived at work and just when he left.”
Again that sherry. Lenox remembered Stevens ordering the same concoction at the Horns on Market Day. But could Stevens, of all people, have been the one to have broken into Hadley’s house? To have stolen the sherry?
It seemed impossible both because of the mayor’s character and because he had been the one so eager to put a stop to the thefts. It was Stevens, after all, who had told him that books from the library had gone missing — the titles that matched the books in the gamekeeper’s cottage.
“And then?” asked Lenox.
“I went into his office without knocking, thinking I would leave the glass on his desk. It was then that I found him.”
“Had you seen anyone in the corridors of the building? Anyone leaving as you came in?”
“No, sir,” she said.
“As far as you knew, you were the only person in the building.”
“Yes, sir.”
Lenox paused. “Did you disturb anything in the room?”
“No, sir.”
“What did you do?”
“I called for help straightaway.”
Lenox shook his head. “No, you didn’t.”
The secretary flushed. “Excuse me?”
Lenox nodded toward her shoes. “There were faint footprints in the carpeting that match the size of your shoe — in blood, you understand. They lead to the window. One set is much deeper there. I think you must have stood at the window for a while, more than a few moments. Perhaps you even drank the sherry! I shouldn’t blame you. At any rate, I know that nobody was admitted to the room again after you went for help.”
“Well, perhaps I did stand at the window. I was very shocked.”
Lenox inclined his head. “Did you drink the sherry?”
She was still red. “A sip, to steady my nerves.”
Very calmly, Lenox said, “What sort of man was Stevens?”
“A man much like any other.”
He noticed the word “sir” had dropped out of her answers. “You liked him?”
“He was not a warm person. But he did … he selected me,” she said.
“And who do you think attacked him?”
There was a long pause, and then, at last, she said, “I haven’t the slightest idea. And I really must pick up my work again.”
Lenox’s brain was running rapidly through everything this young woman had said. He tried to focus, to remember her face and tone of voice so he could mull them later at his leisure. “Does the name Arthur Hadley mean anything to you?” he asked.