Elizabeth.
It was like this in novels, the desperate chase. Only he hadn’t known that it would feel like the worst thing in the world.
Elizabeth lived in Mayfair, and Lenox would have given everything he had, down to his last farthing, his last scrap of clothing, his own life, to be able to cinch the whole of London up for just a brief moment and step, take a single step, to wherever she might be.
There were carriages flying to three addresses at that moment, one (with Exeter, Field, and two constables) to Cairn’s, one (with Mayne) to the Yard to muster up constables to search both for Lenox’s friend and for the murderer, and one (his own) to Elizabeth’s house.
There was also a whistle relay from one constable to the next, which would indicate—seven longs, two shorts, three longs, one short, in this case—whose beat had trouble afoot. But there would be innumerable houses and people on that beat, and no way faster than Lenox’s carriage of conveying who exactly, which house exactly, was in trouble.
Lenox had heard his first tales of crime during his schooldays. Back then they were as far from his own experiences as Earth was from Neptune. He came by the stories, which captured him from the start, at the costermonger’s. Every Tuesday, the butcher (who could read, which made him a learned fellow by the Markethouse standards of 1837) would sit in front of the costermonger’s huge slatted bins of apples and pears and read aloud from the new penny blood. (Why Tuesday? He couldn’t recall.) The butcher’s fee was a cup of strong tea, which he said helped soothe his reading voice. He would also usually take an apple on his way out, taking triumphant leave of his little crowd of twelve or fourteen, who remained behind discussing whatever they had just heard in a state of chilled credulity.
A costard was what had once, long before, been the name of an apple, after all—still was in some parts—and so it seemed a fair salary from the costermonger.
But Lenox had known in his heart, even then, that he was hearing something only tangentially related to real life.
Whereas now, thirteen years later, nothing could have been so dull, so awful—or so lifelike.
Lord, he hadn’t known how sheer physical space—the streets outside his carriage, the crossings, the horses, the people—could seem an enemy, the relentless seconds passing by.
“Can you go any faster?” he shouted up to the cabdriver through the open window. “Knock people out of the way. I don’t care. I’ll double your fare—double it again—if we get there with haste.”
The cabman grunted. “Right.”
There was a grievously minute increase in their pace.
He forced himself to think about Cairn. He pulled out his soft leather notebook. He jotted a few words very nearly at random, trying not to look out the window; it was too close to torture.
He wrote down the name, Cairn. Then he crossed a letter out.
Cain.
What a strange mind he found himself in battle against. Clearly those letters to the Challenger had been a disguise—the “perfect crime” business was perfect to pin to Jonathan Pond, the quirky, quiet, friendless, “literary” clerk, as easy for a detective’s imagination to sketch in as you could please.
And yet it was funny, Lenox sensed even more strongly Cairn’s own personality in the letter. They would discover his motive for murdering Eliza Corcoran, but this second play on a name (ponderous, Cairn) made Lenox feel sure that in part the letters were true—that he did want to commit the perfect murder.
What had set him off after decades of scrupulous work? He must have been very bright to ascend to his position at Corcoran and Sons; the letters seemed to Lenox to contain some distillation of all that effort, a will to be seen, to be admired. He was a man who felt underappreciated. He had drawn and erased those straight lines himself.
If the first victim was Eliza Corcoran … perhaps the motivation was love? Money? She was her father’s heir, after all.
But then who was this adventurer, Mr. Leckie, then? How did he come into it?
It was all so extremely confusing, and he was trying to be calm, and if she were harmed, if she were harmed …
“Hurry, hurry,” he muttered, looking through the window.
They crossed the bridge. He thought about hopping out here and running. It would have taken him eighteen minutes, probably, perhaps twenty. But he knew that the carriage, glacially slow as it might seem, would take only seven or eight.
He forced himself to look at his notepad.
It was the second body that remained puzzling. He read over his notes twice, three times.
1) Why so many flowers?
2) Why the shilling?
3) The shoes
4) Leckie? Corcoran? Gretna Green?
5) Why the door, rather than another trunk?
6) Cairn/Johanssen at the scene.
He studied this until he thought he would go cross-eyed.
But then, suddenly, in one of those strange moments of London traffic, the way before them cleared, and the horse pulling the cab broke out into a brisk trot, its driver, conscious of his imminent payday, whipping the beast along.
At the end of Elizabeth’s block, Lenox leapt from the carriage. He threw a pound note at the driver—infinities beyond the fare—and took tearing up the street.
He arrived at her door and banged it as hard as he could, terrified of what he would find.
Their young butler, portly and dignified, answered the door. He knew Lenox well, and greeted him without any apparent surprise. “Hello, sir.”
“Is she here? Lady Elizabeth?”
“No, sir. Her Ladyship is out upon a social call, and will be through lunch.”
“Where? Has anyone been here?”
The butler looked puzzled. “Been here, sir?”
Lenox could have wept. “Yes, been here! Been by! Asked where she was!”
“There was a telegram for her, sir. I directed the messenger on to the duchess’s, being as it is so cl—”
But Lenox was already flying down the steps three at a time.
The duchess’s house was two blocks over. He had never run harder. Somewhere in a far, far part of his mind, he knew that his fate hung in the balance during this run. It would last a minute or so; it would be the last minute in which he didn’t know whether Elizabeth, the woman he loved, would be the third woman in the water. If she died: no, it was impossible to think about.
But impossible not to imagine, too, as he ran up the crowded pavement along Bond Street, attracting looks from everyone he passed, skipping nimbly among them.
Whether she died or lived, he would never marry. That he knew. If she died—a lifelong grief, a life only of atonement to her. He didn’t know (he turned the corner to the duchess’s) whether that would mean giving up detection, or dedicating himself to it completely.
And then, as he came within forty paces of the duchess’s wide, amiable town house, two things happened.
The first was that he suddenly knew—his brain working behind his back—who Cairn’s second victim was. His list had told him.
The second was that he knew—knew—that Elizabeth was dead.
He stopped at the door. There was a great welling in his chest, which would be there forever now. He thought of his father—how much his father loved Elizabeth, how disappointed he would be in Charles—and thought of her, herself, her soft brown hair, her slim waist, her long fingers, and felt filled with a despair unlike any he had ever known.
He would murder Cairn.
He took the steps two at a time and banged this door now.
A housekeeper answered. “Yes, sir?” she said.
“Is she—here?” he gasped.
“Her Grace, sir?”
“No, no. Lady Elizabeth.”
And then,
a miracle,
there she was. Herself.
She emerged into the hallway with a look of curiosity in her eyes. “Charles?” she said.
He was still breathing heavily, and could barely get the words out. “Elizabeth. Good Christ.”
She looked alarmed. “Charles, what is it?”
“Go inside, go inside.” He shoved his way in, closing the door behind him. “Go.”
“Charles, what’s happened?” she asked. But he was in such a state—bewildered, relieved—that all he could do was stare at her. He took her hands tightly in his own. “Charles, that hurts.”
“I thought you might be—might be harmed,” he said.
“Harmed?”
And then he laughed, giddily, released from himself. Well; none of it mattered now. She was safe. And inadvertently, before he knew it, he called her the name that she had used throughout their childhood together. “Jane,” he said. “My goodness. You’re safe.”
He expected a rebuke, but he didn’t care. In Lord James Gray’s family, their pride in their royal ancestor was such that the name Elizabeth was sacred, and when they had learned that it was Jane’s middle name, that had been her betrothed’s one request, that she might adopt it.
But instead of reprimanding him, she smiled, faintly worried but with her sense of humor there, present as it almost always was—a part of why he loved her.
“Lady Jane, you mean,” she said, and switched their hands so that hers were holding his. “Not Jane anymore, Charles, but Lady Jane, if you will not call me Lady Elizabeth.”