Now they were both gone. How was it possible? It was amazing how real the dead could seem, as if they might walk in from the next room. Where had they gone? When would they come back? Why shouldn’t they sit at this table again, each smoking, Charles’s father in his red evening jacket, Paxton in his heavy brown cardigan, pondering their respective strategies? It was so strange. When his father had died, a great comfort had gone out of life, and being back here made him see that, and made him pity James and Teddy for losing their mother. To have Jane was an enormous consolation, but a parent — while one’s parents were alive, if they were decent parents, one was always at least in some small part of one’s self protected from life, from fear, from reality.
Lenox thought of Molly, and then of the line, the greatest line written by an Englishman between Chaucer and Shakespeare: O death, thou comest when I least expected thee.
He made his way through cup after cup of tea, sitting there in silence, staring into the countryside. It grew dimmer and then dark. The hours passed.
When at last he stood up, it wasn’t with a snap of recognition, or a revelation — but he had it. He was suddenly extremely tired.
He went downstairs, where his brother, Toto, and Jane were in the long drawing room, chatting amiably. “Charles!” said Jane. “How are you?”
“Oh, fine, thank you,” he said, smiling. “Edmund, do you think you might send word asking Mickelson if we could borrow his dog for the day?”
“Sandy? She’s not a scenting dog.”
“Yes, Sandy, if you wouldn’t mind. Unless Stevens steps to it, I suspect it’s that dog who will tell us the truth at last.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Lenox spent the whole next morning with Sophia. It was still just warm enough that they could comfortably clomp around the dewy fields in their boots, kicking up puddles. They visited the horses in the stables and had a walk around the pond — terrifying several hapless ducks as they went — before settling in to a long spell of picking themselves apples from the trees on the west side of the house. They threw the bad ones at a stump nearby, which was satisfying.
He had refused at breakfast to tell Edmund his suspicions, just as he had refused the night before. “I’m probably wrong,” he said.
“Is it Calloway?” asked Edmund. “Just tell me if it’s Calloway. I’m the one who told you about the mint and marjoram, after all.”
“That’s very true,” said Lenox, “but I don’t want to say anything. Just be patient a little while longer.”
“You’re a bore,” said Lady Jane. “And if you know who did it, oughtn’t you be out putting them in jail? The public’s safety is in danger.”
“The public will survive another day,” said Lenox.
After lunch, when Sophia went up to the nursery to have her afternoon nap, he did go into town. Edmund was busy catching up on a great deal of the estate’s business — what he had returned to Markethouse to do in the first place — so Lenox went alone. He took possession of Sandy, Mickelson’s spaniel, from his owner, and went to see Clavering in the jail.
The constable continued to look besieged. “Mad Calloway still won’t say a word more,” he told Lenox, “and I would swear that he’s laughing at us — daring us to hang him.”
They were standing on the porch of the Bell and Horns, which blazed with the welcoming light of several fireplaces from its small windows. “I think I may be able to settle his hash,” Lenox said, “with the help of the dog.”
“Are you sporting with me, Mr. Lenox?”
“You have my solemn word that I am not. But listen — will you get Claire Adams and Elizabeth Watson for me, a little bit later on, and Miss Harville, too?”
“Arrest them? Claire Adams has an alibi, for one.”
“No — not arrest them. But I would like to speak with all of them this evening.”
They fleshed out the details of the plan, and then Lenox walked with the spaniel down to Dr. Stallings’s house. There he learned that Stevens had relapsed into something that looked like a coma.
“Will he die soon?”
“I would have said he would be likely to die yesterday,” said Stallings, “and then he woke up briefly — and now — well, I cannot say. Nobody could say. It is all contingent.”
“I wish he might wake up,” said Lenox, shaking his head. “It would be enormously helpful.”
Stallings frowned. “No doubt of some personal consequence to Mr. Stevens himself, too.”
“Yes. Of course — of course.”
He made his way home with Sandy, tipping his cap at the window of the barbershop, where old Mr. Widaman was apparently still shaving people — though his hand couldn’t have gotten steadier since Lenox had been a boy, when he had already seemed of a very advanced age. In the window of the shop there was a card that said, in bold letters:
PURE GREASE OF A LARGE FINE BEAR!
Which meant that old canard had migrated from London out at least to the Home Counties. Ten to one it was plain old cooking grease. It was considered an extremely sophisticated thing to have in your hair, bear grease, but bears were not so very common, whereas grease was. From time to time one saw an actual bear in the window of a barbershop in the West End, with the promise that this was the bear to be killed for its grease later that week. Lenox was convinced that there was only one bear, who moved from shop to shop and would live to a fine old age — not unlike Lady Jane’s theory that there were fifty fruitcakes in the whole of England, and everyone kept passing them around to each other, year after year, at Christmastime.
At home, he found his wife writing letters in the quiet, light-filled front drawing room. Toto had retired; she always rested after her midday meal.
“Tell me about the party, then,” he said, as she sealed an envelope.
He was in an armchair next to the delicate walnut desk where she was sitting, and she smiled. “I wish you had been there — it was very fun. Though I’m afraid the sherbet was not all I could have wished. Toto agreed, she called it lackluster.”
“Shakespeare invented that word, you know.”
Lady Jane nodded. “He was pretty bright. Anyhow, it wasn’t very cheerful to serve lackluster sherbet to three royals — but on the other hand the soup was the most delicious soup I ever had, and everyone did get along famously. And then, of course, sherbet is not very important when you consider the children of the hospital. So I say, forget about the sherbet, life is too short.”
Lenox laughed, and asked another question about the party, and soon they were rattling along in conversation, trading names, their acquaintances — and more importantly their opinions of their acquaintances — so familiar to them that the conversation would barely have been comprehensible to an outsider. After a few minutes they turned to Sophia, and whether her nose was a little runny, whether she had outgrown a certain wooden toy, all the minor subjects that make having a child together so fascinating. Having already loved each other, Charles and Jane, he had nevertheless found, to his surprise, that by becoming parents, they had reached a different level of affinity he hadn’t expected, a whole unexplored variety of friendship and attachment.
After some time had passed, Jane said that she thought she had better prepare herself for the ball now. A woman would be coming from the village shortly to sew her and Toto into their dresses, and there was her hair to be done, too.
“The seamstress was Molly’s particular friend, I believe,” said Lady Jane. “Edmund recommended her very strongly.”