When the dance was done, Lenox asked Edmund if he wanted to come away for a bit, and his brother, comprehending, said of course, immediately. Together they found Adelaide Snow and her cousin Helena and asked them, cheerfully, if they might be willing to spare a moment of their time.
As they walked through the hallway toward the small sitting room where Clavering, Bunce, and Sandy were waiting, Lenox felt something about this deception — guilt, perhaps, or self-regret, especially with Adelaide Snow talking brightly just at his side about how great the fun of the evening had been so far.
They came to Houghton’s little sitting room, and there were four people in it now, arrayed along two dark blue couches: Clavering and Bunce on one, and on the other, faces irritable, as if they quite rightly wondered why they had been compelled to be here, two sisters, Elizabeth Watson and Claire Adams.
Clavering and Bunce rose as Edmund, Charles, and Adelaide and Helena Snow entered. Claire Adams and Elizabeth Watson remained seated — and their faces remained impassive. Lenox glanced at Helena and Adelaide. Their faces, too, were blank. There was perhaps a red color in Adelaide’s cheeks.
He drew the door closed behind him softly, waited a beat to see if anybody would say anything, and then, reluctantly, asked Clavering, “In the closet?”
The constable nodded. “Yes.”
Adelaide, looking flummoxed, said, “Why have you brought us here, may I ask?”
Lenox went to the closet in the back corner of the room. There was a happy whine behind it, and a scratch of paws on the other side of the door — and when he opened it, Sandy, the springer spaniel, burst out of it.
The dog bolted directly for Helena Snow, Adelaide’s quiet older cousin. He was hysterical with happiness — yelping, jumping for her with his front paws up, trying desperately to kiss her hands and her face. And despite what she must have known her position to be, she smiled, half-smiled, and murmured, “Good boy. Good boy.”
“Miss Snow,” said Lenox, “or Mrs. Watson — Miss Adams — would you like to come clean with us now?”
Elizabeth Watson shook her head, a look of total stupidity on her face. “About what?” she said.
“Yes, about what?” asked Adelaide Snow.
“I’m curious, too,” said Edmund.
Lenox inclined his head toward Helena. “This is the person who attacked the mayor of Markethouse, I fear,” he said.
“My cousin?” asked Adelaide, her demeanor stubborn but, to Lenox at least, transparent.
“Not your cousin, no. Your father was an orphan, was he not? My brother told me so, anyhow. If that’s true you shouldn’t have made her a Snow, when you invented her — you should have made her one of your mother’s relations.”
Clavering, his small round eyes squinched up in confusion, said, “Who is she, then?”
Lenox inclined his head toward the young woman, whom the dog was still happily circling and pawing. “Unless I am mistaken, this young person is Mr. Calloway’s daughter, Liza.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
There was a moment’s pause, and then the young woman burst out, “Well! I am! What of it!”
“Liza, no!” cried Claire Adams.
The young woman tried to hold herself steady, but after a moment she began to weep and fell back into the sofa behind her, hiding her face in the arm. Adelaide — her own face full of sympathy and grief, as if they really were cousins — sat down, too, and put her arm around Liza Calloway’s shoulder.
Adelaide glanced up at Lenox with a look of reproach in her eyes, and he felt it fully. He had needed some proof. The dog’s reaction had given it to him. Nevertheless, it was cruel to send any person into such collapse.
“At such a lovely ball, too, shame,” murmured Elizabeth Watson, as if privy to his thoughts.
It was absurd on its face, if Liza Calloway was guilty of violent assault upon the mayor, and yet there was a kind of county justice in it, too. The feeling of the room — even Clavering and Bunce, even his brother — was against him, not wrongly.
In his boyhood, one of the least reputable streets in Mayfair had been a few blocks down from the family house in London. It was a shabby, paint-chipped little lane, with a cheesemonger, an unsavory pub, and a number of scroungy fourth-rate lodging houses — oh, and at number 10, for it was the street called Downing, the residence of the Prime Minister of Great Britain.
To Lenox, raised in the rigid divisions of country society, by which two neighboring landowners might not enter each other’s houses for forty years because of slightly uneven ancestries, it was enthralling to see how London pushed every kind of person together into cheek-by-jowl life. Gladstone and the boot boy at the pub next door had the same right to the pavement. Downing Street had become more refined since the 1840s — in fact, partly at Gladstone’s insistence — but you could still find anyone out upon it at any hour, a merchant, a duke, a vagrant, drunks, priests, bricklayers, paviers, basket-men, a greengrocer, the Prime Minister, a cabman or chimneysweep. A detective. The Queen.
Here, however — well, he had played a London trick on Liza Calloway. The fact was that he bore one of the well-known surnames of Sussex, and now he stood in the sitting room of his brother-in-law, who bore another of those great last names. All of the advantage in the room was his, therefore, and in Markethouse that meant that he had a greater duty to the others than they did to him. Elizabeth Watson was a charwoman, Claire Adams a housemaid, Adelaide Snow the daughter of an orphan, and Liza Calloway was a thready pulse away from being a murderess. He had forgotten — something, noblesse oblige, perhaps, you could call it.
“I am sorry to have tricked you, Miss Calloway. I needed to see if the dog would identify you.”
Calloway’s daughter ignored these words and went on weeping. Edmund handed her his handkerchief. “Would you like a glass of champagne?” he asked. “Or something to eat?”
“Yes, sort her something to eat,” said Elizabeth Watson commandingly. Now she, too, had risen and come to the sofa. “She’ll feel better.”
It took a minute or two for a footman to return with a glass of champagne and a wooden board of cheese, apple, ham, and bread. By this time, Liza Calloway had wiped her tears. She drank a sip of the champagne and nibbled at a small hunk of bread, holding what remained in the fingertips of her two hands and staring at it, as if willing herself not to cry again. And then she did start crying again. Her aunt and Adelaide Snow embraced her.
“Can you explain to us what’s happened, Charles?” asked Edmund.
“Miss Calloway, would you like to explain?”
“Mrs. Evans,” she said. “My husband’s name was Evans — may he rest in peace. He contracted cholera and died last year.”
“Mrs. Evans,” said Lenox gently. ‘Would you care to explain how you’ve come to return to Markethouse?”
She was silent, though at least she was no longer crying. After a moment, Lenox nodded and began to explain.
“Mr. Calloway may not be a murderer,” he said, “but his confession was the most important clue we had about the case. Why? Well, from all we’ve heard, he has no strong personal ties remaining in Markethouse. He may live here, but his allegiances are dissolved. His wife’s family — the wife whom by all accounts he loved passionately—”
“He did,” said the daughter of that marriage.