According to O’Brian, Mrs. Berry was the granddaughter of a modest farmer who had risen to the position of lieutenant in a Rhode Island regiment during the American Revolution, when he had been captured and held for two years in Canada. In the spacious front room of her house, there was a portrait of him and his wife above the fireplace. Between them was the framed, tattered “stars and stripes” that the wife had sewn into his uniform coat for warmth, and which her husband had used as a blanket for the whole of his internment.
This front room was where Mrs. Berry sat by a small stove and supervised the complex inner workings of her busy house. She had inherited her ancestors’ discipline: Her establishment was in shining, beautiful condition, far cleaner than the cozy but dusty Union Club. Its wooden floors were polished, its windows clear.
Yet in spite of this aggressive cleanliness there was something comfortable about the place as well—every single object well loved and very well worn, from the butter dish in the breakfast room to the coal scuttle in the hall.
Mrs. Berry herself was a tall, bony woman in her sixties, with a severe but not unkind face. She welcomed Lenox in practicalities: who to call for fresh water, when he could expect tea, nothing beside the point.
In his fatigue, he was very grateful for this—and not forty minutes after leaving the Cliff Walk, he was sitting on the sweetest little balcony the village in Newport could conceivably have offered, he thought, with an immense view open in front of him of the sea, sun dipping down toward it, spreading golden light over a widening wedge of gray water. Along the coast, the vast houses perched upon the cliff, each of them large enough to contain dozens of secrets, hundreds.
He had two spacious rooms to himself. Their furnishings were spare compared to the thick curtains and heavy wooden furniture of the last English inn he had seen, in Plymouth, but comfortable—and on the shelves, most thoughtfully, a whole variety of intriguing books, novels, compendia of local history, poems, epics. Mrs. Berry must be a reader.
There were boxes filled with pink and white flowers on the rail of the balcony. Sitting on the table was a teapot, and resting near it a collection of small plates and dishes, which held scones, strawberry jam, sandwiches with cucumbers, and a very decent sort of savory cracker he had never tried before, and which he supposed must be local, with hard white cheddar cheese sliced at its side. Like all Englishmen he had snobbish feelings about cheddar cheese, but it had to be owned that this was a very credible version. Even his chair, with soft cushions on its seat and back, was eminently comfortable.
As he sat, shaking off the attentiveness of a day spent in the company of strangers, receding into himself, he experienced a certain evening melancholy. He would have liked to have Jane alongside him, or his brother, or Graham. Even to be in his study alone.
But he set these feelings aside and let his mind float upon the cool breeze, let his eyes soften. There was a red, white, and blue knitted blanket over the arm of a matching chair, and he laid it unevenly over himself, settling back then, holding his warm teacup in both hands …
When he awoke, the sun was all but gone. Only twenty or thirty minutes could have passed, but it had nonetheless been a deep, restorative rest, the kind of nap to put away a strenuous day.
He let his eyes fall gently closed again and lived for a while in the soft space between sleep and wakefulness. When at last he reopened them, it was in time to see a sunset of sublime purity, pink and gold beneath the immense soft clouds, the great houses underneath lost for a moment to nature. He watched it in silence, interrupted only occasionally by a muffled shout or conversation from some nearby street, until the sky was slate gray, all color gone.
He rose at last and stretched himself. “O’Brian!” he called.
After a moment the lad appeared. “Yes, Mr. Lenox?” he said.
“Would you be willing to do me a favor?”
“Of course, sir.”
He fished an unfamiliar dollar note and some coins from his jacket pocket. “What I would like is if you could go back to the tavern where you were waiting for me—or any tavern you choose, really.”
“Very good, sir.”
“You may say you are here as my servant. That should excite some interest. Buy yourself supper, stand a round if you like. Then, if you can do it naturally, find out what the locals think about Miss Allingham’s death.”
“Very good, sir.”
He was extremely young. “Do you think you can do that?”
O’Brian scorned the question. “Of course, sir.”
“You are comfortable in a tavern?”
“A day hasn’t passed since I turned nine that I wasn’t in one, sir.”
“No pressing them, please—they’ll get suspicious of an outsider asking questions, even you—but if in the normal course of things … but then, I’m giving you a lesson you don’t need, if you have been inside taverns since you were nine.”
“No, sir. Yes, sir,” said O’Brian.
“Thank you, Mr. O’Brian.”
The eager young fellow sloped off, and Lenox sat down at the desk. That might rustle a few answers out of the people who knew Newport from a different angle than your Schermerhorns and Blaines and Wellings.
He thought of the flask sitting where he had placed it in the little iron safe beneath the bed, then reflected for a moment on Schermerhorn. One of your bantamweight despots, Lenox decided, king of his cottage, and no doubt of some segment of Madison Avenue, too; but Lenox had almost as little doubt that the fellow’s son was guilty of a murder, and no amount of localized power could change that fact.
Having just left, O’Brian returned, heralded by the stamping sound of him taking two stairs in a swinging rhythm.
“Before I go, sir, Mrs. Berry instructed me to tell you that there’s a lady waiting upon you in the lower salon.”
“A lady? Who?”
“I did not ask, sir.”
“I see. Please tell Mrs. Berry I shall be down directly.”
“Yes, sir,” said O’Brian, and went.
When he went downstairs, Lenox found Mrs. Berry sewing a quilt by her comfortable stove, from which she could survey the door of the large parlor and the foot of the stairs. She directed him to the visitors’ salon. He thanked her and walked the few paces to this small room overlooking the street.
Sitting there, reading a copy of Blackwood’s, was a woman with her back turned to the door.
“Good evening,” Lenox said.
The woman turned. He recognized her, but there was a frozen moment in which he couldn’t place her, couldn’t even identify what period of his life she came from.
She, however, broke into a smile of unfeigned joy at seeing him. “Charles,” she said. “How long it’s been. Yet how little you’ve changed!”
“Why—Lady Cormorant!” Lenox said, flushing with real happiness. “It has been many years since I saw you last!”
“Dreadfully many,” she said, though still smiling. “Impolitely many. Yet when I heard you were here I came without delay.”
“I’m so very pleased you did,” he said. It was the pure truth. He took the hand she offered, bowing slightly. “You must let me offer you a cup of tea—a glass of wine, or sherry. Or anything that can be fetched. What would you like?”
“I would very happily accept a glass of wine.”
“Of course.”
He busied himself in finding the boy who helped Mrs. Berry, ordering a half bottle of sherry and a half bottle of hock and something to eat—anything, he responded rather wildly, when the timid lad, covered in pimples, asked what he meant. His mind was altogether elsewhere.
Kitty Ashbrook! How very strange. Once, long before, she had been the human of all those hundreds of millions on the planet with whom he was sure he would spend the rest of his days.
He returned to the front parlor, stoking the fire to brighten the room before he sat so they would be comfortable, then asked her rather inadequately how she had been.
She must be nearing fifty, he supposed, since he was, but she looked a decade or more younger. She still had the same glossy chestnut hair, elegant small shoulders, and large bright eyes, good-natured, warm, and intelligent, that she had at twenty. Indeed, there was still something youthful in her movements, the conscious grace left over from once having been the most beautiful young woman in every room she entered. Her small, pretty features had not grown pinched; instead, the lines around her mouth and eyes were, in that unmistakable way all faces take on the general disposition of their owners, kind ones, reassuring ones. Her gentle, lived-in face. It reminded Lenox a little of Edmund.
“I cannot tell you how pleased I am to see you, Lady Cormorant,” said Lenox.
“You may call me Lady Cormorant, of course, but I am only a dowager, you know. Lord Cormorant died of a fever in Calcutta ten or so years ago.”
“I had not heard. I’m very sorry.”
She inclined her head to thank him, but added, “My second husband is an American.”
“Your second husband! My sincere congratulations.”
She blushed, and he felt his heart jump out to hers. “It has not been so long, in fact,” she said.
“He must be a very good man.”
“He is. His name is Thomas Hunter. I certainly hope you shall meet him while you are here. But Charles, how came you to be in Newport! I have seen your name in the papers over the years, and now, within hours of Miss Allingham’s death, you appear. It seems like magic.”
“Far from it, alas,” said Lenox. “Shall we have a drink, and I can tell you what has brought me to America? I hope you are in no great rush?”
She smiled. “For you, none at all.”
The wine arrived, and first they discussed the circumstances that had brought him to Newport, then those that had brought her, and then they brushed up on mutual acquaintances, some of whom neither had thought of for many a long year.
Lenox was, unaccustomedly, grateful for his glass of wine—for being with Kitty once more was an odd feeling. He could see why he had loved her. The emotions were not the same at all now, his feelings toward her ones of goodwill, of pleasure in her company. Nevertheless, recalling those old emotions affected him. If he tried, he knew he could bring to mind every detail of the two passionate months when he had been sure that Kitty Ashbrook held his future in her hands.
He had been—what, twenty-five at the time? Around the period of the death of a young American on a train, as it happened. His first case involving the death of an American.
At the time, Lady Jane had been married, and Lenox had been under increasing pressure to make a family for himself. He had ignored this with some success, at least until he met Kitty; her quick ways, her silvery laugh, had fast won his heart.
But in the end she had chosen the dreary, arrogant Cormorant—had chosen a title, which, as Lenox could see with the benefit of hindsight, was what nearly every woman would have done, perhaps ought to have done, in such a perilous world for women.
Lord, though, how it had stung at the time.
The years fell away; they drank their wine and shared in the food the boy had brought. If Lady Jane could have looked into her husband’s heart, she would have found nothing at all there to trouble her—but it was also the most at ease, the happiest, Lenox had been since arriving in America, a genuinely welcome surprise.
“But I am quite out,” she said at last. “I had come here to invite you to a tea tomorrow—a champagne tea.”
“A champagne tea! I will come if I possibly can. Where is it to be?”
“My husband’s first cousin lives in one of the cottages, Greystone. We generally spend the first part of our summer season there before moving on to Cape Cod, where it is quieter. Everything grows rather repetitive in between here, as we discovered a few summers ago, and Mr. Hunter likes to work.”
“May I ask, Mrs. Hunter, do you not miss England?”
“I do! Yet I think I should miss Newport, were I there. For I do like it. And then, I return once in a while and stay with my brother and his wife in Derbyshire. It’s very peaceful there. Our mother lives with them. She and I write daily—though it is not the same.”
“I remember her very fondly. Anyhow, forgive me, it was an impertinent question,” Lenox said.
She smiled. “There can be no such thing from an old friend,” she said. “Can I count on you to come, then? All of Newport will be there, if that is an enticement—there are people who would cut you to ribbons for this invitation.”
“Are there?”
“Partly because Mrs. Astor may stop in, and while there have been parties here for a month, her ball, of course, is the one that will officially start the Newport season and end New York’s—and there is still a day or two left in which one might receive an invitation, though I have given up hope for myself.”
“Given up altogether?”
“Mostly. I like Lina, but it has become a rather cutthroat place these days, Newport, and I have lost my taste for that game.”
He hesitated. “I wonder if it would be bad form to ask you about that. You see, as it happens, you are the person I most need at the moment—someone who understands the town, and whom I can trust.”
She glanced at the clock. “I am due to supper at eight o’clock. Until then I am at your disposal,” she said. “What would you like to know?”