“I think I know the person he’s left with,” said Lenox.
“With?” said Schermerhorn, lowering the glass for the first time. The boat was beating up—well-handled, you had to give Willie Schermerhorn that.
“He’s a good sailor.”
“The best.”
Lenox doubted that, but sympathized with the father who would make such a claim. “Mm.”
“Who is he with?” Schermerhorn asked urgently.
Lenox did not wish to be the person under questioning here, for practical reasons. “Perhaps if we are to stand sentry over his departure,” he said, “you could ask one of your servants to fetch me a coat.”
“Very well, who is it? Please!” Schermerhorn said. At the same time he was signaling, and two people were there almost before his hand was down. “Fetch wet-weather things for Mr. Lenox, please—my hat as well.”
“Thank you,” said Lenox.
The thanks had been for the two men who were already beating a hasty path back toward Cove Court, but it was Schermerhorn who told Lenox he was welcome.
He studied the ship again for a moment, and then, as if admitting to himself that he could not be out there upon the waves with it, turned, lowering the glass, and said, “Please, Mr. Lenox, tell me the plain truth. Did my son kill Lily Allingham?”
“Until a few moments ago, I was almost sure that he had.”
“And now?” said Schermerhorn.
Lenox paused, and then very slightly turned his head. “I do not believe so, no.”
The relief in Schermerhorn’s face—in his whole body—was so profound that for a moment he looked as if he were going to slump to his knees. “Ah! I knew it. I knew he couldn’t have.”
The confidence of these words was belied by the reaction, but neither man mentioned it. “Can you tell me what happened at the yacht club?” Lenox asked.
Schermerhorn looked baffled by the question. “The yacht club? With Willie, you mean? It was—not nothing, but it was—” He shook his head. “One of the servants at the club struck another one for being insolent. Willie intervened. The result was not ideal. The senior servant was injured in the altercation. He ultimately left Newport.”
“Your son intervened in defense of the servant who had been struck?”
“Yes.”
“Of what race were these men?” asked Lenox curiously.
“Both were Negroes. Why?”
At that moment the cavalry returned—umbrellas, chairs, jackets—and Lenox and Schermerhorn waited almost a minute in silence while all of it was unfolded, offered, and so forth, before they were alone once more.
They were still standing, but now beneath the cover of four large white umbrellas, a space big enough that they could have had a small luncheon party here if they were inclined.
“I would be grateful if you would look at something for me,” said Lenox.
“Look at something?”
“In your study this morning, I noticed your family’s coat of arms again. Very handsome. It was on your stationery, too.”
“Thank you, though I fail to see the relevance.”
“There was a phrase on it—and two flowers.”
“Yes. Tulips, two. One standing tall in Holland, the other in America.”
As Schermerhorn was repeating this family saw, Lenox was taking a box from his pocket. He opened it, and even in the gray light of that stormy day, the diamonds on the necklace glittered.
He turned it carefully in his hand so the inscription would be visible. “Is that a tulip?” Lenox asked.
Schermerhorn studied the necklace. Something almost gentle came into his voice. “Yes, it is,” he said.
“The MM,” Lenox said, “stands for—”
“Maryanne Morris.”
Lenox glanced up from the necklace to the small man, with his stiff posture and carefully debonair salt-and-pepper hair. “The name is familiar to you?”
Schermerhorn didn’t reply. Instead, he stepped out from the cover of the umbrellas and went to the very edge of the Cliff Walk, where he held the telescope up to his eye. He remained there for a long while, long enough that Lenox finally put the necklace away, sat down, and dried himself off with one of the stack of towels that had appeared on a table—all of them warm and dry, thanks to some ingenious servant’s careful work.
The rain beat steadily down on William Stuyvesant Schermerhorn the Fourth long after the little ship had escaped the visibility of the naked eye; at last, apparently, it sailed even beyond the powerful reach of the telescope, for Schermerhorn lowered it, and for some time stared at the part of the sea where his son had been.
“So,” he said, as he walked slowly back and took one of the towels for himself. “My son is to marry a housemaid, raised in a fishing shack.”
But there was little anger in his voice. He was too relieved that Willie was not a murderer. “It would appear so,” said Lenox.
For the first time in a while, Schermerhorn met the detective’s eye. Some of his self-possession was returning. He already seemed slightly put out to have exposed his feelings to Lenox so unguardedly. “Will you be so kind as to tell me what you know?”
Lenox had closed the soft brown case in which the necklace was resting, but was still holding it in his right hand. It was small enough to fit snugly there.
“Would you have been happy if your son had married Lily Allingham?” asked Lenox. “You only have one son, one heir, I know.”
“Yes, I would have been delighted. She’s from a good family—they would not have had to worry about money—and she would have been an ornament to Cove Court, of course, a young woman as beautiful as that. But I have always told Willie that he must marry as he chooses—within reason.”
“I take it that your caveat precluded Miss Morris.”
Schermerhorn replied, curtly, “Yes.”
Lenox nodded. “It’s the same in my country, of course. A bad marriage can have ramifications for years—generations, if it’s unlucky enough.”
Schermerhorn leapt at the olive branch. “Yes! Oh, I tried to tell him, I tried, but one’s children…”
He had trailed off, and Lenox had to nudge him. “Yes?”
“Eh? Oh.” Schermerhorn took out a flat gold case and lit a small Cuban cigar. “It all happened two years ago. Centuries ago, in the life of the young, with their balls and parties. Miss Morris was a maid at one of ours. Willie, I will say, did not merely try to—he courted the young woman.”
“I see.”
“Finally she assented to his proposals. He came to me and said he loved her and planned to marry her. I forbid it, of course.” Schermerhorn looked troubled for a moment. He tinkered with a gold cigar cutter. “Clark went up to see her, arrange about her father’s medical care.”
“And Willie?”
“Willie spent the rest of that summer with his cousins in Madaket.”
“Evidently the affection did not die.”
“He said at the time that he would obey my wishes. But he also said that his heart would never change. I attributed it to—oh, youth, I suppose. I encouraged him when he told me about the Allingham girl. I might have had some cavil before Willie’s episode with Miss Morris, but Lily Allingham was a life raft as far as I was concerned.”
An ornament for Cove Court. Lenox about had the measure of the father. He was cautiously impressed that the son had greater scope of mind, if worse manners. Lenox had noticed something strange about Willie Schermerhorn at their very first meeting: real, credible grief for Lily Allingham, but along with it a strange, occluded sense of triumph, perhaps resolve. Now he believed it to have been the clarity that sometimes comes to those adjacent to tragedy. Willie Schermerhorn had heard of Lily Allingham’s death and with a new viewpoint on the crucial matters of life had cast his future immediately and irretrievably with the woman he loved. Maryanne Morris. All of his actions bespoke that priority.
And Lenox knew what certainly must have happened. Lily Allingham had gone out at the intermission of the ball and sat with Maryanne Morris for half an hour. No doubt she had coaxed the whole story out of the maid—heard, Lenox would guess, that Willie Schermerhorn and she were in contact still.
Then she had gone inside and broken off her engagement to Willie during the evening’s twelfth and thirteenth dances. Their engagement to be engaged. This would explain her mood, her distractedness.
It could also have explained her death—but Lenox did not believe that Willie Schermerhorn killed Lily Allingham. He didn’t think he would have been stupid enough to do it at Cove Court, or hurt enough over the rejection either, not when his heart clearly belonged to another woman.
“What did Clark report back of Miss Morris two years ago?”
“She would take no money,” said Schermerhorn. He had the good grace to sound uneasy. “He returned a second time and pressed her, but she would not move. Something was done for the father, as I said.”
It was not Lenox’s place to ask what Schermerhorn would do now, though the answer was clear enough. His son was too precious to him to lose. The second tulip; the heir to all those coats of arms and stories about when Manhattan was still forested.
Lenox told him, briefly, what his own conception of Willie Schermerhorn’s and Maryanne Morris’s past few days had been. There was her delayed return, to give them time to go, as well as, most significantly, the absolute bareness of her room. No young girl alive could keep only a bundle of her brother’s letters for company at night.
It had of course been Willie who had broken into her lodgings and removed all the traces of their connection—whatever letters, trifles, and presents she had from him still. Apparently he had not known the hiding place of the necklace.
“A cleverer man than I would have seen the flower and thought of the tulip immediately. But it took me until this morning, entering your study again and seeing the coat of arms, to connect the two.”
Schermerhorn listened carefully. The rain was quieting when at last he said, “I underestimated you.” There was a long pause. “Why did Willie do that, though?”
“I have been wondering. I assume it was to protect Miss Morris’s honor. He knows he is the suspect in a murder, and must have known what her family would think if she disappeared, and in her room her sister or her landlady had found all of your son’s declarations of affection. They would assume he had seduced her.”
“He’ll sail down to Key West and marry her there,” murmured Schermerhorn, already adjusting to the new facts of his life. “But wait—if not Willie, thank God, who killed Miss Allingham?”
Lenox shook his head. “I don’t know.”