An Old Betrayal: A Charles Lenox Mystery (Charles Lenox Mysteries) (29 page)

On his way out of the building at eight o’clock he saw Willard Fremantle. “Season’s on, eh, Lenox?” said the Marquess’s son, jovial at the prospect of a weekend. “Are you going to Lord Rash’s party tonight?”

“Oh, yes, very likely,” said Lenox, smiling and donning his gloves.

They progressed through the large doors out toward Abingdon Street, returning the nods of the porters. “He wants his son to marry a woman—a young woman—named Fisker, whose father built a railroad to somewhere called Salt Lake City. Imagine! She’ll be there.”

“You must admit it’s an evocative name,” said Lenox. “A lake of salt.”

“It sounds like one of the torments in Dante to me. Lakes are meant to have freshwater.”

“Here is my carriage. I’ll see you at Rash’s, or if not there, one of a dozen other places, I don’t doubt.”

Fremantle’s farewell was prophetic; this was the first weekend of the season, and Lenox had no case or parliamentary responsibilities, while Jane was extremely busy. As such he became her emissary and representative at a whole multitude of parties across London. It was a pleasant task—punch, catching up with friends one hadn’t seen in some time, the crisp comeliness of young men and women dancing in their starched new clothes. Young love added an exhilaration to the air, so promiscuous and free-floating that even the dowagers seated upon the divans felt it, and knew themselves momentarily more youthful, freshened by the freshness around them. Then there was always the excellent music.

So Friday and Saturday passed, and Sunday, when the hour of churchgoing had come and gone, women began to make Sunday calls upon each other to discuss the week, the engagements, while men trickled back into their clubs on Pall Mall, where, though they pretended to disdain the season, the conversations were all the same as the womens’.

Finally, on Monday morning, Dallington returned.

He came directly to Hampden Lane from Charing Cross Station, tired, his collar wilting (it was a warm day), and his suit smudged with dirt. Altogether he looked a bit beneath his Plimsoll line. “I didn’t realize how long I was going to stay in Hampshire,” he said, preempting Lenox’s question, “but it was worth it.”

“The Godwins?”

“I know the whole history of the family—a strange one, too. Shall we call on Jenkins? I don’t doubt he would like to hear it.”

“Yes, though I’m all curiousness to hear your story.”

They went to Scotland Yard and found Jenkins in his office. A flash of hope came into his eye when Dallington said he had returned with a story, for it had been a difficult weekend spent trying to coax a word out of Hetty and Archibald. “In all honesty I’m on the verge of giving the job up. We have Archie dead to rights, of course, at least on breaking into the palace, but Henrietta we cannot find anything to charge with. Leaving her hotel with a bag full of suspicious items?”

“Owning an illegally acquired key to the palace?” suggested Lenox.

“She says it was slipped under her door, and she kept it in case it had some purpose, not knowing what it was. Or rather her barrister says that. For of course she’s as talkative as a corpse.”

“I’ll tell you what I know,” said Dallington. “I’m not sure if any of it will matter in a court of law—but it made an impression on me that I won’t forget.”

They all sat down; Jenkins began to pack his pipe, with the dreamy, practiced air of a man who finds a separate and nearly equal pleasure in the small preliminary physical handiwork that prepares the real pleasure—the drinker uncorking his bottle, the horseman tightening his stirrups. “If you solve the case, Lord John, the Queen will make you a duke,” he said and smiled to himself, carefully sliding a shred of stray tobacco back into place.

“I’d rather not be if it’s all the same to her,” said Dallington.

“Tell us what happened,” said Lenox.

“To begin with, your friend Hughes was an absolute brick. He apparently got your telegram, because he met me at the station when my train arrived and insisted that I stay with him. That castle is falling half to pieces—but by God, it’s beautiful, and I must say, they make their little corner of it very snug. He asked me to come again for the shooting.”

“He’s a wonderful shot,” said Lenox. “Always was.”

“He was also very concerned about Godwin—said that you hadn’t let on in your first letter how seriously the man had gotten himself into trouble, for of course now the newspaper stories have landed in Hampshire, and nobody in those parts is talking of anything else. The steward at Raburn Lodge has had to let the dogs loose, apparently.”

“I didn’t know when I wrote to him how grim Godwin’s plans were,” said Lenox.

“No, quite.”

Jenkins lit his pipe; the smell of fire and tobacco made the room feel closer, a small lamplit vessel afloat in the great unending gray of the day’s weather. It would rain before long, Lenox suspected. Bad news for the party. “Was he able to help you?”

“Not directly, but he put me in touch with a chap named Fox—and that was the first link in the chain. I should go back a little way, however, and describe it all chronologically. That way I won’t get my story confused.

“After Hughes installed me in their guest bedroom, I borrowed a horse from him and together we rode up to Raburn Lodge. Lovely place—a manor house, very square-fronted, redbrick with white windows, and four chimneys coming right up out of the center of the house in a row. I suppose you would call it Queen Anne style. Ersatz Wren. If you’ve seen Winslow Hall, in Buckinghamshire, you’ll recognize the type.

“It’s not on very much land, however—and that comes into the story. We rode nearly up to the front door. It can’t be on more than five or six acres, all fenced in with a very high hedge for privacy, but Hughes took me to a place where I could take a look at it. Rather eerie, I can tell you.

“Next I went to see this fellow Fox, Gerald Fox. He was gamekeeper for two decades to Godwin’s father, though I immediately had the sense that his memories of the time weren’t fond, exactly. The elder Godwin liked to shoot, and therefore he was courteous with Fox, but they didn’t have a friendship. Fox was willing to speak to me but didn’t know much about the living family, the brother and sister. He said Archie had been raised to shoot but had given it up the moment his father died.”

“Until last week, the knave,” said Jenkins.

“Fox did offer me one interesting piece of information. He said that it was known in town—and had been widely discussed since the news appeared about the attempt on the Queen’s life—that the Godwins had always had a quarrel with the monarchy.”

“Republicans?” asked Lenox.

“Fox didn’t know. He was, however, able to introduce me to someone who did, a man named Harry Forrest. He’s the town’s historian—a rather abrasive fellow, meek wife, few friends, but damned useful in the end. He asked if I could ride up to Raburn, and so I borrowed a horse from Hughes again, and we went to the same spot where Hughes had taken me.

“Well, I admit that I thought it was pretty poor sport—I was tired and it was getting dark—but then Forrest told me something interesting. Behind Raburn Lodge is a great deal of rolling countryside, rather picturesque. At first I thought it was farmland, but he said that it simply lies there, fallow. Then he pointed to a church spire, about the farthest thing one could see on the horizon, really no more than a speck. ‘D’you see that?’ he asked, and I must have sounded irritated when I said that yes, I did, because he smirked and said he wasn’t giving me the architectural tour of Hampshire—that until 1715, everything that reached as far as that church had been Godwin land. It fairly took my breath away. They must have been the largest landowners in the county, I said, and he answered that they were second, after the Duke of Bolton. Nearly a hundred thousand acres in all.”

Jenkins frowned. “What happened?”

Lenox knew—that date, 1715. “George the First,” he said. “Are the Godwins Catholic?”

“You’re quicker than I am, Charles,” said Dallington.

“No. Only older.”

Walking into Buckingham Palace, one was supposed to feel the great immovable silver weight of the Queen’s power, extending as far backward and forward into time as anyone could imagine.

In truth, of course, the rule of England had always changed with the caprice of the wind on a spring afternoon. In 1714, Queen Anne had died. The first fifty-six men and women in line for the throne, every stripe of princeling and princess, earl and duke, were all of them, every single one, Catholic. By the 1701 Act of Settlement, they were therefore ineligible to assume the crown.

The fifty-seventh fellow in line was a Protestant; he was a mild German fellow with the unspectacular title of Elector of Hanover. He ruled over a small piece of northern Germany—and then added to that, when his distant cousin Anne died, the whole immense Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, trailing behind it every variety of colony and principality across the globe.

When he took the throne, he barely spoke English.

This was King George the First. Queen Victoria’s great-great-grandfather. In truth all three men sitting in the office were probably more purely English than their own Queen was, by the common understanding of the word—though of course even Englishness wasn’t permanent. If one was willing to venture back to 1066, they were likely all French. Or even if one came of a family that predated the Domesday Book, that family was likely Viking, unless somewhere in their veins lingered a drop of druid blood; and even then, even if one’s family predated the Viking incursions, it had almost certainly come to these shores with one of two loose Germanic confederations: the Angles or the Saxons.

So that, like Victoria, they were all German in the end.

Jenkins knew this in faint outlines. Lenox and Dallington, of the aristocracy and educated at schools where the history of the ruling class mattered, knew every wrinkled piece of the history, and recalled it in alternation. “The Godwins were Jacobites, then?” asked Lenox.

Dallington shook his head. “Yes, and worse. They were assassins.”

Jenkins lifted his eyebrows. “The papers will like that.”

“Forrest had spent the days before I arrived in the archives. The town knew the Godwins had lost their land, but the reason had been successfully hidden away. Godwin’s own great-great-grandfather had organized a ring of aristocrats who plotted to murder George the First, and use the subsequent confusion to place James Stuart on the throne.”

“Treason,” said Lenox. Stuart was Anne’s half brother, a Catholic. He’d had, briefly, wide support, but then George the First had emerged as a competent, gentle king, not power-mad in the slightest—happy, in fact, to let Walpole, his Prime Minister, rule the country. It was the beginning of the long relinquishment of power that had led to Parliament, and not the palace, ruling England. “He was foiled, obviously.”

“Betrayed by another member of his circle, who had gone along with the plan only to gather evidence.” Dallington grinned. “You won’t believe who it is.”

“Who?”

“A fellow named Arthur Hughes. Your friend’s great-great-grandfather. As thanks he was awarded Leck Castle and its environs. The King escheated Godwin’s lands, and they’ve lain fallow, untenanted, ever since.”

Jenkins looked back and forth between Lenox and Dallington, both of whom were now smiling, Lenox half in disbelief. “Did you tell Hughes?”

“He knew the history of the castle. He didn’t know that it was a Godwin who had been the chief conspirator. According to Forrest, there were a great many Godwins in London and the Home Counties who were deeply apologetic, and very rich, and arranged to have the matter hushed up—and even to keep Raburn Lodge.”

“How did Forrest discover that?”

“The document of forfeiture—of the Godwin lands. He went back in the files and found it for me, and it described the reasons. Apparently it never went farther than that. I had it copied out. It’s here with me.”

Jenkins shook his head. “It’s quite a tale, but I cannot see what any of it has to do with Leonard Wintering, or the Graves Hotel, or Henrietta Godwin. Surely they cannot have simply held a family grudge all this time?”

Dallington shook his head. “That’s the next part of the story.”

After Dallington had spoken with Fox and Forrest he had returned to Leck Castle, eaten supper with Peter and Frances Hughes—they had a very good chef, unusual in a household with only three servants, because Frances loved food—and gone to sleep while there was still light in the sky, exhausted. The next morning he went to Raburn Lodge.

Before he had left for Hampshire, Dallington had acquired, jointly from Jenkins and Shackleton, a letter that introduced him as their representative and begged the cooperation of witnesses.

It induced no special awe among the people of Raburn Lodge, unfortunately.

“What happened?” asked Lenox.

“An old stooped white-haired fellow answered the door, looked at the letter, and then spat at my feet and told me to be on my way.”

“What did you do then?”

“He had dogs on the leash, so I took his advice. I didn’t leave altogether, though. I spent the morning watching the house. I had a little eyeglass and looked in the windows. Curtains were drawn over most of them, but I could see three people at one time or another moving about the place, as if they expected Hetty and Archie Godwin back imminently—the old butler, an equally old housemaid, and a footman who must have been brushing up near a hundred.”

“Family retainers,” said Jenkins.

“Yes, and loyal I thought, unlikely to tell me anything. Then I had a stroke of luck. Just before noon, when I thought perhaps I would leave, a woman rode up to the house in a beaten-up dogcart, tied off her horses, and walked around to the servants’ quarters. She knocked on the door, and it opened, and then closed again, and she waited outside for some time. When the door opened again it was the footman. He gave her the laundry.”

“Excellent,” said Jenkins, smiling.

“How old was she?” asked Lenox.

“About fifty. Robust, though. Needless to say, I stopped her as she came back out to the road.”