“Two of the three?” Lenox said.
“It appears so, sir,” said Hollis. “Mr. Tiptree died in Liverpool.”
“Good God,” Lenox said. Then suddenly he said to Graham, “What time is it?”
Graham checked his watch. “Ten past five.”
Lenox thought for a moment. “Would you mind going to the Salted Herring and making a note of who comes in? Particularly anyone who seems to be looking for Mr. Hollis, obviously.”
Graham nodded, stood up, picked up a guttered candle, and said to Mrs. Thompson, “May I?”
“May you what?”
Taking this as assent, Graham disheveled his hair and rubbed a few just faintly perceptible streaks of black tallow into his cheeks, mucking up his face imperceptibly but tellingly.
He removed his jacket. Lenox took it for him. Despite the subtlety of the changes, he was transformed. Lenox knew that an accent—a growling Oxfordshire intonation that he could adopt at will—would prove no trouble. Graham could blend in anywhere. He bowed toward the room and left.
“Quick work,” Hollis said.
Lenox turned toward him angrily. “Did you not consider that one of your attackers might see your ad?”
“Excuse me?”
“Now it is Graham who must do the dangerous work of identifying whatever species of villain comes through that public house.”
Hollis looked surprised, and then his face darkened. “You’re both free to leave.”
“In fact we are not.”
“I cannot see anyone detaining you.”
“Our remit keeps us here. But my apologies,” said Lenox tersely. He was furious on behalf of his friend, but cognizant that he must coax what information he could out of Hollis. “You were saying—did you say that Gilman’s secretary is dead?”
“Yes. He fell between the gangway and the dock at our disembarkation in Liverpool. He was accompanying Congressman Gilman’s luggage. Neither of us was with him. We were traveling in three different classes and had agreed to meet at the hotel. They fished Mr. Tiptree out of the water with a gaff, but his head was badly wounded, and after several days of fever he died in the hospital. Gilman wrote to his wife from Liverpool to inform her of the news.”
“His name was Abram Tiptree?” Lenox said, writing it down in a small notebook he had pulled from his pocket. A present from his mother.
“Yes.”
Lenox looked up. “Why did you and Gilman separate on your way to London?”
Hollis frowned and thought.
The pause gave Lenox a chance to study him. He had a strong jawline and a good profile. He was missing a tooth near the back of the left side of his mouth. The shade of his skin was closer to tan than to ebony. The bandage around his head looked passably fresh but inadequate.
Lenox had never met a black American before. There were few people of African descent in Great Britain; those there were had a difficult time. Every second talk at the scientific academies seemed to Lenox to be an attempt to prove their intellectual inferiority—this was the word that had gained currency in London—and outside of places with a heavy naval population, such as the port cities of Liverpool and Cardiff, they were extremely noticeable, drawing stares, jeers, impertinences.
There was, however, a small but healthy black population in Canning Town, not from where they sat. A minor case had taken Lenox there two years before, and in the course of it he had met a man named Richard Bartlett, of such clear and remarkable intelligence that those scientific proofs had sat uneasily in Lenox’s mind since. (The world was a mysterious place, and nearly everyone in it knew rather less than they thought. Such were Lenox’s feelings.) Bartlett had been of no use, as it happened, in that particular case—but Lenox had kept his name and address, in the event that he ever found himself in Canning Town again.
The only eccentricity he had been able to discern in Bartlett was that he drank between forty and fifty cups of tea a day. But you could say the same of the Earl of Ascot, if you substituted sherry for tea.
All of these reflections passed very quickly, in the moment or two that Hollis pondered how to tell his tale.
“Would you like the full story, or the abbreviated one?” he asked the detective.
“It would be best if I could return to Scotland Yard quickly.”
Hollis nodded. “Very well. Then suffice it to say that Mr. Gilman was an evangelist for the cause of abolition, while I am the willing exhibit and witness of slavery’s evils. I was once enslaved, and there are enough otherwise well-meaning people who are amazed that I can dress in a suit of clothes and speak in complete sentences that sometimes it entices them to support our work.
“Gilman—I still cannot believe he is dead!—stayed in the north of England after Tiptree’s death in order to meet with textile factory owners there. It is they who demand the cotton that keeps slavery alive. Having heard that northern attitudes in England were less enlightened than in the south, Gilman and I decided that I should come here in advance to meet with the anti-slavery societies and help organize our march.”
“Where are you staying?”
“At a hotel close to Embassy Row. The Greensleeves. It is expensive, but has no policies of discrimination. Mr. Gilman had a room reserved next to mine.”
“Mr. Gilman was due to arrive Tuesday?”
That was the night of the body on the 449. “Yes. I went to sleep Tuesday expecting to see him in the morning. When I didn’t, I assumed he had been held back by either work or a missed train in the north. By the afternoon, however, when the fourth train from Manchester had arrived, and I met it on the platform to find that again he was not aboard it, I wired there. His hosts there assured me that he had left on time. It was then that I started to worry. I did not imagine for a moment that he was dead.”
“Did you see news of the murder?” Lenox asked.
“No. I would have with my supper yesterday evening, perhaps, for I usually read a paper in the evening. But as I was returning to my hotel, walking down an alleyway, a man came toward me from the other direction, his face and appearance in all respects ordinary. Gray hair, a gray mustache, of average height and build. When we were close to each other, he dealt a tremendous clout to the side of my head. His hand must have held some sort of blackjack—so I think in retrospect, at least. It gave me the wound you see bandaged over on my head.”
“And he what, ran off after that?”
“No. At that moment—by pure chance—a group of young men turned the corner. It was fortunate timing. The man who had attacked me was preparing to strike again, and it was not a busy alley. The young men didn’t rush to my help, but one of them did call out. My assaulter turned, saw them, and fled.”
“Did you go to the police?”
“I did not. I assumed it was a racial attack.”
“Even given Gilman’s absence and Tiptree’s death.”
“It hadn’t occurred to me until I met you that Gilman might be dead, or Tiptree’s death part of any larger plot.”
“No, of course not.”
“Now I am ready to take the first ship back to Boston.”
Lenox glanced at his notebook. “After the attack you came to Mrs. Thompson’s.”
“Yes. Mrs. Thompson, whose mother and father worked hand-in-glove with William Wilberforce himself, was kind enough to take me in.” Lenox nodded politely toward Mrs. Thompson. “I needed a doctor. I also wanted to consult with her about Gilman. We decided to place the ad against which you appear so dead set—and yet which brought you here.”
He had Lenox on that score. “I see.”
Mrs. Thompson added, “Dr. Harrison said he wasn’t to be left alone following a head wound. I insisted he stay here.”
“Mrs. Thompson placed the ad for me and tended me all day,” said Josiah Hollis. “At four o’clock, I went to the public house. There, you and I met. Fifteen minutes later, I learned that Eli Gilman was dead. And now you are apprised of my present circumstances, which are as great a puzzle to me as they are to you.”
Lenox contemplated this tale in silence for an instant. What he really wished to know was if Hollis’s attacker was the same person who had cleared the papers and tobacco out of Master Willikens’s cart. From the description it might well be.
He glanced at his watch. Half past five. With any luck, Mayne would still be in the office.
But he didn’t like the look of Hollis’s wound.
“Will you come to Scotland Yard with me, after we see a friend of mine who is a physician? There is nowhere you would be safer.”
“It’s as good a plan as any, I suppose.”
Lenox produced a card. “Mrs. Thompson, here is my information.”
Outside, Lenox whistled down a cab, which turned sharply off Three Colt Street. He asked Mrs. Thompson if she would find Graham at the Salted Herring and tell him—surreptitiously—that they could meet at home. She said she would, and the Briton and the American rode off west together under the sinking sun.