The two men devised a plan. Cobb had been preparing to go to Liverpool that day. They decided that he would carry on, while Lenox reopened his investigation into the case here.
First, though, Lenox returned home, for in his haste to catch Cobb he had left several letters and invitations unanswered to which he wished to reply. Besides, he wasn’t dressed warmly enough. He took the omnibus again. It was one of the more and more common kind painted a bright cherry red. When he had first moved to London, just several years before, they had been of different colors depending on their destination, a rainbow of vehicles trailing their way through the city. He rather missed that.
After a brisk twenty-minute ride, he walked the short distance from Grosvenor Square to Hampden Lane. About to duck into his house, he noticed that there was a soft light flickering in the front room next door and turned his steps there, almost without thinking, to see Lady Jane.
No matter how much she insisted otherwise, he knew she had been in low spirits. It had not truly abated even over Christmas, though she had put on a creditable simulation of seasonal gaiety.
He knocked on the door. Kirk, her butler, a large young fellow with a round face and the look of an all-county ale drinker, escorted him inside.
“Charles!” Jane was in her light blue morning room, writing letters on a small rosewood secretary. She had on a white dress, with a gray ribbon drawing it in around her rib cage. “I wish you the happiest of new years.”
He bowed. “And you. Am I interrupting?”
“I hope so. It’s a letter to my father, and I never know what to tell him, because the only news he really wants to hear about is who’s won the snooker at the Carlton Club. And they still won’t have me as a member.”
“You would be the first woman.”
“Someone must be. Anyhow, what are you doing? Nothing, I suppose? Not a single thief caught yet today?”
“It’s still morning. Although I have been busy, since you mention it.”
She stood up and crossed the room to a rose-colored sofa, inviting him to sit.
“Tell me all about it, please,” she said. “Put my mind to some use other than wondering about the weather in the Aral Sea, or wherever on earth James finds himself this morning.”
So he described Cobb’s visit the night before. Lady Jane expressed surprise at Lenox’s reconsideration of the case, which she had followed in the newspapers as everyone else had. She remarked that the assassination had in fact had the opposite effect than presumably the assassins had hoped: It had reignited the debate about whether Great Britain ought to pass a resolution of the kind that Gilman had come in part to propose to lawmakers, or even ought to break off trade with America.
They talked about this some while—before Lenox said that he wished he knew more about Bell, the murderer. “He’s a mystery to me.”
“Yet one sees so much about him.”
“It may seem so, but it’s always the same few facts. That he was dishonorably discharged from the American navy, that he moved here—to avoid prosecution, they say, though that is speculation—and that he fell into crime.”
“And Lady Elaine.”
“Yes, and that.”
This was a relatively new personage in the whole saga. Lady Elaine (no known last name) had been Winfield Bell’s consort—probably, in common law, his wife. She was a lifelong resident of the east side. The name was an affectation. She was, nonetheless, at least somewhat grand; she managed the tenement where the prostitutes under the “protection” of Bell’s gang lived.
They had been well known as a couple for at least three years. Not well liked, however. Even in Whitechapel, where very few people were inclined to speak about each other to the police, plenty had been willing to describe the general rottenness of Winfield Bell and his Lady Elaine.
Dunn had interviewed Lady Elaine at length and concluded that she knew nothing of interest. Now, though, Lenox mentally added her to his list of witnesses to revisit.
The question, as he told Jane, was how Bell had leapt from his low-grade fever of criminality to the full raving illness of savage and calculated murder.
“The influence of the White Horse?” she suggested, naming the tavern that had quickly become infamous.
“Perhaps,” said Lenox. “Perhaps. By the way—I had nearly forgotten myself, but I received another visitor yesterday evening, too.”
“Who was that?”
“I hoped you might be able to tell me. He wouldn’t give his name. He only came, stood in my entranceway, and instructed me to stay away from—can you guess? Kitty Ashbrook.”
Lenox said this lightly, but Lady Jane’s eyes widened. She was cradling a cup of tea in her hands. She took a sip, and as he observed her, sitting in the gentle slanting yellow light of the late morning, he felt grateful that he had a friend like this—that her eyes widened, that she was as concerned as he, or more.
She quizzed him for an exact physical description.
“A coat of arms,” she said finally, a puzzled look on her face. “Was Graham sure?”
“I think so. He’s not often wrong.”
“No, he’s not.” She set her tea down on the small flute-edged end table next to her. “But I don’t know who would behave that way over her.”
“Who are her suitors?” he asked.
“You would know as well as I.”
“I did not recognize him, certainly.”
Lady Jane frowned. She was unaccustomed to aught but victory in the social battles she waged. “We must find out who he was. I shall call on her mother this afternoon.”
“I like her, Mrs. Ashbrook,” said Lenox.
Lady Jane nodded. “Yes, I do, too. She is hard done by, yet uncomplaining. To lose a husband at her age, too late for more children, yet early in life, and two years of mourning to endure—that is no easy thing.”
“I have not had the courage to ask how Catherine’s father died.”
“Catherine! You are on intimate terms.”
Lenox blushed. “Perhaps that’s true.”
“Are you in love with her?”
He didn’t answer right away but turned and looked through the window, eyes narrowed in thought. “I can’t be sure. What does love feel like?”
She smiled tenderly. “It doesn’t feel like that question.”
“Then perhaps I am not.”
“I would not encourage you to marry without love, you know, Charles. But do you feel—are you capable of love, just at this moment in your life I mean, do you think?”
He looked back into her eyes. It was the nearest they had ever come to discussing the fact that he had once declared his love for her—and the additional unspoken fact, nevertheless known to both of them, that on that occasion he had felt no doubt at all.
“I think I am,” he said. He thought of his joy at getting Kitty’s letter over Christmas, with the lock of her hair. It sat in a small gold box on his desk now. “Yes, I think if I knew she loved me—if I felt safe in her love—mine would come forth readily.”
“Have you declared yourself?”
“No. Indeed, she has committed herself more than I have, I think—unless I am mistaken.”
“How could you be mistaken?”
He told her about the letter, though not about the lock of hair. He meant to keep that to himself—always—in case they married.
Lady Jane said it sounded as if Charles were very much in Kitty’s heart.
“I hope so. As much as I would hate to prove you and my mother right at one time.”
“What do you feel when you think of her?”
He thought of her: her kind eyes, long hair, and slender shoulders, her bright even teeth, her smile. And his heart skipped as he realized, yes, she was a person he knew, whether she was forthcoming of herself or not, he knew and understood her—and loved her.
“I think I do love her.”
Lady Jane reached over and squeezed his hand, then let it go. “Good. Do you know, they never spent much time in London before this. I think your visitor must be some country acquaintance of theirs, sure that he has first claim on her. But if you love her and she loves you, you shall have her. I promise you that.”
He laughed. “What a veritable Athena you are, Jane, intervening in the affairs of us mortals. Thank you. I should prefer to know who he was before I see her again on Thursday. Not that I would ask her—but for myself, I would like to know.”