“I don’t want to puncture your amour propre,” Edmund replied, “but that’s true of my house, too.”
Lenox smiled. “I wonder whether she went, that’s all.”
“Will Jane wire to tell you?”
“Hm. Only in the event of a nonappearance, I would wager. We shall see.”
Toby ran along ahead of them, nose importantly to the ground, tail high in the air. They were again walking the perimeter of the village, on the logic that Stevens’s attacker, if it was the same person who had been in the gamekeeper’s cottage, must have needed a new place to stay until at least Tuesday, the day of the assault.
After a mile or so, they spotted another horse, and as it came closer, Lenox saw that atop it was George Atherton, one of Edmund’s closest friends here. Atherton hailed them from a few hundred yards and rode their way, pulling his horse up short from its canter when he reached them, a trim, healthy animal, black all over but for its white socks. Toby smelled its legs and then dismissed it from his mind, coming to take a piece of dried duck from Edmund, then sitting and waiting at his command.
“I call this lucky — I was just riding over to see you, Ed!” said Atherton. He was a large, extremely good-natured fellow, country through and through, bluff, with an easy laugh and his blond hair held back in a clip, in the fashion of the last century. His chief passion in life was farming. He had chaffed Lenox since they were boys, and as a result Lenox had never been as fond of him as Edmund was. “Is that Cigar? What’s all this I hear about you selling him to the glue factory for a shilling a pound?”
Edmund shook his head. “He was stolen. You remember Charles, obviously?”
“Of course! How d’you do, Charles? Still scared of roosters?”
“Not for thirty-five years or so. Are you still wet from falling in Sturton Pond?”
Atherton bellowed with laughter at that, and then called Charles a good’un. After that he asked what they were doing, and when he learned they were scenting, offered to come along.
Lenox was irritated when his brother agreed — it would slow them down — but as time passed, and Atherton chatted away without a care, Lenox realized that Edmund was smiling. More than that, it emerged, from one or two stray comments, that Atherton had been a regular visitor at Lenox House whenever Edmund had been here, and learning that, Lenox felt himself warm to the man. He even put in his joke about Bill Stickers being innocent — and was rewarded with another of Atherton’s infectious guffaws.
It was when they were three-quarters of the way around the village that Toby picked up a scent. They were near a rutted cart path, and all at once all the muscles in the dog’s body came alive. His pace increased, and he quivered and whined, his nose so close to the ground that he bumped it every few inches. Lenox offered him the flannel again to be sure, and Toby barked impatiently and increased his pace.
To Lenox’s surprise, the dog led them not out into the countryside but toward the village of Markethouse itself.
Soon there was an air of great suspense among the three men, urgency. They were silent — even Atherton, unless you counted one occasion when he muttered that he’d never seen a dog so full of hell and pepper — and watched Toby intently as they followed him.
Presently they came to the head of Bell Street. “Shall we leave our horses here?” asked Edmund.
“Fool me once,” said Lenox.
So they rode in a crowd, almost as wide across as the street.
Toby, on the scent, was possessed — he would break into sprints now and then, and never faltered, turning right onto Markham Lane, left onto Pilling Street, left again onto Abbot Street. The few people about looked at them oddly, including half a dozen women from their windows. This was a quiet, working part of Markethouse, extremely tidy and well kept. In Abbot Street a chicken waddled indignantly beyond Toby’s path, though the dog ignored it completely.
“What the devil is he after?” said Atherton.
“He’s going to take us clear out of town again,” said Edmund.
Indeed, the houses were thinning; they had trailed through some of the densest parts of Markethouse, but now they were in sight of open fields once more.
Then, at the foot of Clifton Street, which actually ran straight from the market to the countryside, Toby became frantic. Lenox had tied a piece of rope to his collar several minutes before, and the dog strained and pulled at it, barking.
And finally it became clear where he was pointed — toward a little cottage at the very end of Clifton Street, set some ways off from the rest of the houses, surrounded by a stone wall. As Lenox could see from the height of his horse, a thick, rich tangle of climbing plants rose up the walls of the dwelling.
Toby leapt and fought at the wall, barking furiously. Lenox saw Atherton and Edmund exchange a grave look.
“What is it?” said Lenox. “Who lives here?”
It was Atherton who answered, in a low voice. “Mad Calloway.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Edmund and Atherton watched Lenox, awaiting a signal. For his part he was feeling irresolute; he kept glancing from the dog to the door of the little cottage and back.
Then he glanced into the garden. He thought of the mint, the marjoram, and the rosemary in the rudimentary little kitchen inside Snow’s gamekeeper’s lodge, next to the butter.
“Look,” he said to Edmund after a moment, voice quiet, gesturing toward the garden. “Loosestrife growing there on the south wall, just by the second window.”
Edmund raised his eyebrows in response, a look that said he understood the implications of that loosestrife. Neither mint nor marjoram nor rosemary nor loosestrife was very uncommon; on the other hand, there likely weren’t many gardens in Markethouse or its environs that contained all four.
Lenox recalled watching Mad Calloway walking around the Saturday market with his little stringed-up bundles of herb and flower.
In the twenty or thirty seconds all of this took, Toby remained frenzied, jumping with his front paws against the wall, turning around at them beseechingly every few seconds.
At last, Lenox stepped down from his horse. “Atherton, will you hold the dog? My horse, too, if you don’t mind.”
“Certainly,” said the farmer.
“Thank you,” Lenox said distractedly.
He was trying as hard as he could to recall what he could of Mad Calloway. It was very little. Calloway was the next thing to a hermit — disappearing for long stretches at a time into his little cottage, emerging every other market day usually, friendless, unfriendly indeed, and by all accounts truly mad. Lenox had never heard him speak a word.
On the other hand, he hadn’t heard of him being violent.
And yet — a full gray beard, that was what the man who had sold their horses to Tattersall’s had had, and that was what Calloway had. It was also common to see him ranging across town with a pipe clenched in his teeth, and Lenox hadn’t forgotten the tobacco ash that had been piled next to the door of the gamekeeper’s cottage, as if someone had been standing there for a long while, refilling a pipe as he waited.
A woman or a child, McConnell had said. But mightn’t an old, stooped man strike a similarly weak blow?
He was close enough to Atherton and Edmund that he could say to them, in a low voice, “Do Calloway and Stevens have anything to do with each other?”
Both men shook their heads. “Calloway has nothing to do with anyone,” said Atherton.
“What about Calloway and Hadley?” Lenox asked.
Again, both men said that they knew of no relationship between Calloway and any man in the village, and Atherton said that would be doubly true of a relative newcomer there, such as Arthur Hadley. “On the other hand,” he added, “Hadley and Stevens know each other well.”