An Old Betrayal: A Charles Lenox Mystery (Charles Lenox Mysteries) (31 page)

“I asked my friend why he did not try to discredit you, instead. According to Mr. Disraeli, it wouldn’t have been gentlemanly.” LeMaire smiled. “I thought my own country a rigid place, but class—it is the English disease, truly.”

They sat for a moment or two, the Englishman indignant and unhappy, the Frenchman quiet—permitting Lenox time to absorb the news. At last, Lenox said, “I must thank you very much for the information, unwelcome though it is.”

“I have a favor to request, in return.”

“Oh?” Lenox’s guard went up.

“I am in a battle with Mr. Audley. Your friend Lord John Dallington is off to the side—his own kind of detective; it is Audley with whom I am concerned. He is your countryman.”

“He’s a Scot.”

“He is close enough to being your countryman. I know your influence within the Scotland Yard, among the detectives, with Lord Dallington.”

“Lord John,” corrected Lenox, absentmindedly.

“I would like a fair opinion from you if ever my name arises, sir.” LeMaire stood and passed a card across. “This is my friend. He will verify the information for you, if you like—he has names, sources. I must beg you to be very discreet if you call upon him. You may be certain that he speaks the truth, or you may follow your own line of inquiry. Regardless you will arrive at Mr. Disraeli. Good day, Mr. Lenox.”

Each evening at six o’clock a chap named Mr. Bernard Rider came down Hampden Lane, always in the same colorful attire: blue trousers, yellow waistcoat (“veskit” by his pronunciation), checkered shirt, and pink coat, with a long, slender pipe clenched in his back teeth. An old but sturdy horse pulled his cart. The housemaids of some of Lenox’s neighbors, hoping for a few flirtatious words, looked forward all day to his visits, making sure to finish their chores by five to the hour so they could lounge upon the top steps of the servants’ entrances. Rider stopped at each house, collecting the kitchen leavings, flirting along the way. When his cart was full he sold the leavings—what people called the “wash”—to a mill outside of London, which turned them into food for pigs. Such was the origin of the word “hogwash.”

Just after Rider passed down the street that evening, a pair of carriages followed, both far more distinguished, one with vermilion trim, the other with a driver in full evening dress, both with tall footmen standing on the doors and horses glossy, brisk, and superior, trotting as if they had chosen to. The first guests were here.

It was axiomatic to say that parties such as this one passed in a blur, but in fact as people began to come up into the house, shrugging off their spring jackets and cloaks, jewels sparkling, full of compliments and greetings for their hostess, Lenox found that he had time to enjoy the company of each person he met, each sip of champagne he took with them. It was the season, and there was a great deal to discuss, news to exchange. The pink and yellow drawing rooms both immediately began to fill. Their especial friends arrived early and prepared to loft onto their shoulders the greatest social encumbrance; McConnell cornered Edward Twinkleton, by common consent the most boring man in London, and positively insisted upon hearing every detail of his most recent speech in Parliament.

Just after seven o’clock the Prime Minister arrived. Lenox was at the door to greet him personally. “It is a very great honor to welcome you, Mr. Disraeli,” he said.

“Eh? No, the pleasure’s mine, the pleasure’s mine. Lovely evening, isn’t it, too. And I hear Princess Helena means to come.”

“She informed us that we would be so honored, sir.”

“Is that your brother? Take me to him, if you would—I’d like a quick word.”

Soon the party, as parties do, took on its own vitality, its own parameters, quite out of the control of its nominal commanders. After guiding Disraeli to Edmund, Lenox returned to greet the next guest, and the next, and the next. After about an hour the noise in the house was roughly that of a medieval battlefield.

Finally he stepped away from the door and found a glass of champagne in the drawing room; he stopped there for a moment and looked around, the familiar paintings and surfaces enlivened by all the fresh eyes he saw glancing at them with subtle assessment.

In the corner of the room Toto and McConnell were speaking to Dallington, and for a moment Lenox shifted his watchfulness to them, trying to analyze what he saw. He hadn’t spoken to Thomas. Jane had visited Toto that very morning, though, and reported that she seemed happier—and less inclined to confidence in her older cousin, quick to dismiss the subject of Polly Buchanan, as if her weeks of unhappiness had all been a simple miscalculation on her own part.

They looked happy, to be sure, but there had been so many moments in the past years when the two of them had seemed to achieve a lasting happiness, not least when their daughter, Georgianna, had been born. He studied them—and suddenly his skepticism vanished, and he did feel that something had changed in them, in their animated faces. It was a sensation, nothing logical. In the past he had seen goodwill and love between them, but never an ease of togetherness such as this, a sense of quiet accord, of quiet warmth. There were the beginnings of lines at Toto’s eyes—she was past thirty now, though he would always think of her as so young—and Thomas’s hair was more gray than dark. Yet in the happiness of their eyes he saw a renewal of youth. It was love.

He realized, with gratitude, what his own face must look like as he stood beside Lady Jane.

Dallington must have seen Lenox staring, for he begged out of the conversation with the McConnells and came over. “Do you have a moment to speak?” he asked. “I know it’s not an ideal time.”

Lenox looked at his pocket watch. “There are twenty minutes until dinner. Why?”

“I was busy today. I learned something new. It will only take a moment to tell you—but I would rather do it in your study. I could smoke a cigarette there, too.”

“Yes, I’ll follow you,” said Lenox.

The study was dim, and a great deal of superfluous furniture had been shoved without ceremony into its various corners. Dallington sat upon the arm of a sofa that belonged more properly to the yellow drawing room and lit a match against the sole of his shoe, then touched it to the end of the cigarette in his mouth. “I saw Miss Buchanan today. She’s been as busy as we have.”

“What has she found?”

“She’s quite ingenious, Lenox—she has lessons to teach me. It’s a thoroughly modern outfit she’s building. The moment a case comes in, she has a team of people, specialists in different tasks. One of them is a financial investigator. His only work is to look into the money. How many times have you and I tried to parse a bank record or a receipt without success?”

It was true. “Innovative.”

“Yes, that’s the word for it. Anyhow, she discovered something about the Godwin family that seems significant to me. It’s about their mother.”

“Paget, was she called?”

“Yes. Apparently Winthrop Godwin lost nearly all of his fortune by going to law. He was especially unfortunate in a suit he brought against his father’s land agent. For the last years of his life, he was living on the interest of the money his wife had left behind—a substantial fortune.”

“Did that money come to Archibald and Henrietta?”

“There’s the rub. When she died, Abigail Paget—Abigail Godwin—hadn’t predicted that her husband would squander his fortune, and she had left the money to the heirs of her heirs, in effect her grandchildren, in equal distribution. According to Miss Buchanan’s financial expert, this was because the Godwin money and the Godwin land was entailed upon the male heirs.”

Suddenly Lenox understood. “Shall I guess what else he discovered?” he said.

Dallington smiled. “Please.”

“That by the terms of the will, all the money in trust was to be released to Henrietta upon Archibald’s death, should he die without children.”

“Close enough. The exact provision was that if her own children should live ‘beyond childbearing age,’ defined as forty-five in a woman and seventy in a man, the money should come to them outright.”

“How old is Henrietta Godwin?”

“She turned forty-six last year,” said Dallington. “Archie, of course, has thirty-eight years to go until he turns seventy. Imagine that, a child at seventy! His mother had a higher opinion of his virility than I do, I must say.”

Lenox shook his head. “Funny, how even in these crimes with the noblest purpose—revenge, regicide—there is so often an element of money.”

“Polly—Miss Buchanan—also agreed with us, that the murder was a convenient snare with which Godwin could entrap Wintering. It served more than one purpose.”

“We still don’t know what happened between Wintering and Godwin. Perhaps we never shall, quite.”

Dallington pointed at the carriage clock on Lenox’s desk, whose face was visible in the moonlight. “We had better go back.”

“Yes. I want to see this Miss Buchanan—she seems an interesting young woman.”

“Ever so interesting,” said Dallington, then must have realized the ardor in his voice, because he laughed and said hurriedly, “and likely to take away all of my own business.”

They emerged from the study just in time to see Kirk come to the doorway where the drawing rooms and the front hall met; there he rang the bell for supper.

Lady Jane, rather daringly, had decided not to proceed to the dining room in the usual way—couple by couple, in order of seniority, down to the very juniorest and most negligible souls in the room—but to lead the way out herself and invite all to follow. This she did, with Dallington’s mother by her side.

Word had apparently spread that this unorthodoxy (soon to be fashion, no doubt) was to be practiced, and in pairs and threes the men and the women, their faces half-scornful but also rather excited, began to follow. In the middle of the pack, evidently believing it to be a great lark, was Disraeli, accompanied, unsurprisingly, by two of the most beautiful women in the room, Jemima Faringdon and the Queen’s cousin Lady Louise Dietz.

Some habits die hard; the last pair out of the room were Grace Ammons and George Ivory, late replacements for a couple that had canceled, suggested as guests by Lenox to Lady Jane. Lenox bowed to Miss Ammons as she passed, and shook hands with George Ivory, a tall, straight-backed, very handsome fellow, with wavy blond hair and gentle green eyes. His manners were beautiful, simple, and appropriate. Grace herself said thank you, too, though in an extremely formal voice.

There were several small round tables in the dining room. Disraeli and Princess Helena—who had just arrived, taking all the breath out of the room, lovely in a sapphire green gown—were at Lenox and Lady Jane’s own table, along with the Duchess of Marchmain, Toto, McConnell, and a few others. As Lenox sat, he recalled Disraeli’s friendly manner in Parliament a few weeks earlier, as together they passed the Dwellings Act without respect for their different party affiliations. What a sly fox! Yet there was a strange modicum of pride in the whole saga—pride in Graham his friend, pride in having ascended high enough to irritate a Prime Minister.

Lady Jane had felt no such pride; as they were dressing for supper, earlier that evening, he had told her about LeMaire’s visit.

“Disraeli did that?” she asked, shocked.

“Apparently. I took fifteen minutes to call upon John Baltimore afterward, and he nodded his confirmation, though he didn’t speak it out loud.”

She had gone white with anger. “What an infamous thing to do.”

“Such is political life. We cannot treat him differently tonight.”

“No. Of course not.”

Nevertheless, Jane, unlike the Godwins, would have her revenge. As they sat down in the dining room, Disraeli busy with Lady Dietz’s whispering inquiries, she was in the kitchen. Footmen poured wine; the other tables stole glances of Princess Helena.

At last she came out, at the head of a long line of servants bearing dishes. She walked to the Prime Minister and, putting a hand on his shoulder, said, “I know you are a gourmand, Mr. Disraeli. This first dish is our chef’s special favorite, and mine, too. You must tell us how you like it.”

“Delighted, of course,” said Disraeli, smiling—a smile that vanished when he saw, placed in front of him, a large plate, heaped uncommonly high with stewed onions.

The spring passed into the summer then, the gentle pitch of the days and the particular pleasantness of the weather making it one of the finest seasons anyone could recall. In April there were a dozen engagements a day announced in the
Times.
By June half of the couples were newly married already.

In July the Godwins went to trial.

Neither had spoken more than a few words in the intervening months, and though they hadn’t seen each other neither believed for a moment, as Jenkins would pretend, that the other had betrayed them. Their bond was the stuff of newspaper natter; reporters had finally followed Dallington’s footsteps across the west toward Hampshire and discovered at least some of what he had, as well as paying local men and women for stories about the Godwins, which, as time passed, grew more outlandish in dimension.

A small amount of real information did trickle in. Jenkins went up with a warrant to investigate Raburn Lodge and found Archibald Godwin’s personal study suspiciously empty of papers and correspondence. Desperate, he brought in a team of constables who combed the house over—which they did with success. A locked wardrobe in the nursery proved to be, in fact, a concealed work desk, and it was evident that Godwin had used this place to plot his crimes. Among other things there were dossiers on several dozen members of the staff of Buckingham Palace: the footman who was having an affair, the cook who had stolen a chest of silver plate from his last employer and then concealed the fact, various points of pressure on the personal lives of people close to the Queen.

There was no file on Grace Ammons, unfortunately. Had he taken it with him, believing her to be the easiest member of the palace staff to compromise? Nor was there any link that Scotland Yard could find to Leonard Wintering. In the end it was impossible to charge Archibald Godwin with Wintering’s murder, with the blackmail of Grace Ammons (for which she was grateful, in fact), or even, realistically, with the murder of Joseph Thayer, the vagrant. True, he had been in Godwin’s room at the Graves; true, Arthur Whitstable would testify that he had seen Thayer in the company of Wintering and Godwin; true, Thayer was wearing a suit Godwin had ordered from Ede and Ravenscroft. None of this evidence was more than circumstantial.