As the carriage passed through the Temple Bar, toward Chancery Lane, Lenox said to Leigh, “Would you describe the entire chain of events that has led you here, please? Straight through from the beginning when you arrived in England.”
“Not just the attacks?” asked Leigh.
Lenox nodded. “No, the whole thing.”
“Perhaps we should wait three minutes then, and see if Dallington wants to hear,” said Polly. “It would give us another brain on the problem.”
“Yes, that’s a notion. If it’s all right with you, Gerald?”
He nodded. “Of course.”
Dallington was not present, however, and according to the people in the office had yet to appear that day. Evidently his business in Parliament was taking longer than might have been expected—or else he had gone out to investigate it immediately.
The offices of Lenox, Dallington, and Strickland, London’s first—and premier, they hoped, though competition was growing intense—detective agency, were centered around a large, sunny room. Its slanted clerks’ desks found a pleasing reflection in the large windows of the ceiling, which slanted upward itself. The room was murmuring with activity, though everyone turned to acknowledge the arrival of Lenox and Polly. The clerks and detectives politely ignored Leigh and McConnell, being accustomed to uneasy strangers—though one or two inclined their heads toward the doctor.
There were several smaller rooms ranged around the central one, including the private offices of the partners and a larger meeting room, which overlooked Chancery Lane.
It was into this large meeting room that Lenox led his old friend, with Polly and McConnell following them. “Can I offer you something to eat?” he asked. “Or tea, coffee?”
“I’d take a tea,” said McConnell.
“I never want to see coffee again after spending the night at Mr. Covington’s shop,” said Leigh. “But I too would take a cup of tea very gladly. What a cold day it is! There have been times in my life when I have forgotten that such weather is even possible, and got as brown as a nut.”
“I envy you them.”
They sat down at the polished table in the meeting room. Lenox had a notebook and there were inkpots at the center of the table; taking a nib, he wrote three names at the top of the first sheet: “Townsend,” “Brewster,” “Earl of Ashe.” Soon tea arrived, and Leigh poured himself a cup, smelled it, and then took a small sip, sighing with contentment.
“The one thing I have well and truly yearned for in England. It can be scarce abroad. I’ve often thought about a cup of Harrow tea.”
At school, nearly everything had been shabby, from the gloppy food to the cold and dirty baths. This was a part of the ethic of asceticism there. (If you could get through January at Harrow, the thinking went, you could send your troops over an enemy hill, endure a scorching day in India, make decisions of state.) But there had been one golden exception: tea. As if in acknowledgment that the absence of absolutely all creature comforts would have been too much for boys to bear, there had always been large steaming kettles of brown-golden tea at strategic locations around the schoolhouses, with cream and lump sugar (which could be stolen for candy) nearby.
Lenox smiled and took a sip of his own tea. “Not bad, is it.”
“Now,” said Leigh, “if I might ask: Isn’t this the one place we ought to have avoided, since they have your card from the hotel? They seem certain to come here.”
Lenox shook his head. “I hope they do. We have a former constable at the door at all times, as you saw, and with a blow on his whistle another half dozen would come. Then we would have caught them fairly easily, these people hounding you. But either way we shall find them. Go on, though, if you would, tell us what has happened. I am deeply curious, as you can imagine.”
Leigh nodded and looked up at the ceiling for an instant, organizing his thoughts, then began his tale.
He was living in France presently, he said. For many years he had traveled, collecting samples and identifying species, but more recently his interest had turned to smaller animals, the very smallest in fact, which he described with a term Lenox did not know, “microbes.” (“A new word,” he explained to McConnell, who expressed curiosity, “from the Greek mikros, small, bios, life. Adjective ‘microbial.’ You see, Charles, I really ought to have been paying attention at school after all. I’ve had to get my Greek secondhand for all these years, and I’m still a poor fist for all that.”) They could only be seen under powerful magnification.
Three weeks earlier he had received a letter from a London solicitor named Ernest Middleton. Its contents had been an utter surprise: he was named as the heir to a substantial fortune. Middleton requested that Leigh come to London, in order to expedite the process of probate.
Leigh had been loath to leave his research, and wrote back to ask, first, of whose generosity he was the recipient, and second, whether the business could be conducted by correspondence.
Middleton had replied that he was not at liberty to provide an answer to the first question, and that the answer to the second question was no. He had offered a variety of dates when Leigh might come to London; if he found himself embarrassed, funds could be provided from the estate for his travel.
Aside from Leigh’s voice, the only noise in the room was of two pens scratching, but now Polly laid hers down. “Have you heard of this Middleton?” she asked Lenox.
He nodded. “Yes. The firm is Middleton and Beaumont. Very solid reputation on estates, I believe. Beaumont was in the news some time ago because he wrote Lord Castleton’s will—left it all to his gamekeeper. The will held up. Their offices aren’t far from here.”
Polly nodded. “That makes sense if they’re often in and out of the courts.”
Leigh had replied to Middleton with his thanks and named a date, the earliest one the solicitor had offered in fact, just after the year ticked over to 1877. The French were fond of New Year’s celebrations. He would miss less at work by leaving then and returning before they had quite recovered from their binges.
“Is your French good?” Lenox asked, as an aside, curious.
“Quite good, yes. I was on a French corvette for three months once, off the coast of Africa. Abominable food they had, too. And it meant that I said a few words I shouldn’t have in mixed company, at first—didn’t know any better, you see.”
Leigh had arrived in London, then, three days earlier, on the first of the year. It had been more than a decade since he spent any time in London greater than was necessitated by a transfer of trains. He had been to Cornwall several times in that period to visit his mother, and then, finally, to bury her, two years before.
In advance of this trip, he had decided that while he didn’t wish to address the Royal Society, he would take advantage of his time in London to meet several colleagues with whom he had exchanged theories by correspondence over the years. He had written ahead to make plans for a dinner.
“I have no doubt your address would be respectfully received,” McConnell said, sounding wistful.
“Oh!” Leigh’s eyes widened. “Well—perhaps.”
“But on the other hand, many of the liveliest scientific conversations occur at just this type of informal dinner, as I’m sure you know.”
“That was my hope,” said Leigh.
After making the crossing he had gone straight to the Collingwood Hotel, where the administrators of the Royal Society had positively insisted he stay, he said, on the provision that he offer them at least a few casual remarks on his work after supper.
“And did anything strange happen on that first day?” asked Lenox.
“Nothing at all. I slept for half the afternoon, and then I went to my club for supper. I ran into Churchill on Pall Mall, incidentally. Hasn’t changed a bit.”
This was an old schoolmate of theirs from Harrow. Lenox smiled. “No, he hasn’t. I see him now and again.”
“He had his son with him, Winston he said the boy’s name was, four years old and greeted me very handsomely. Looks like a bulldog. Randolph said he certainly means to send the boy to Harrow. Fat round-faced little fellow, very jolly-looking in a navy coat two sizes too big. I said he’d be better off at the local grammar school, and Randolph said I had always hated Harrow, but that didn’t mean we all had. I conceded that it was a fair point. After all, you didn’t hate it.”
“Indeed, I liked it.”
Leigh laughed. “They tell me it takes all sorts to make a world.”
The following morning, Leigh said, he had gone to see Middleton at his offices. There he had signed several papers.
The sum in question was much larger than he had expected: twenty-five thousand pounds.
This number sent a little wave around the room. Lenox whistled. Leigh hadn’t mentioned this figure in the carriage, and after he did, now Lenox, McConnell, and Polly all paused, obviously commencing the rapid calculations that were native to their class, in which every girl of nine could estimate a fortune to a farthing. At five percent that would be a thousand pounds a year, a very, very handsome living. Even in the safest of investments, the consols at three percent, it would be enough to live extremely well on, keeping horses, dining out, all that sort of thing.
“Were you not shocked?” asked Polly.
Leigh frowned, considering the question. “I suppose I was surprised, yes. I don’t often think about money unless I don’t have any.”
“And have you any?” asked Lenox, in as light a voice as he could.
Leigh smiled. “A fair question. When I was much younger I invented a small wooden box in order to catch birds without killing them. I’m not an inventor. It was only that I needed one like it and couldn’t find anything—and it might have ended there, except that my mother very wisely insisted that I apply for a patent. That’s brought me in a few hundred pounds a year, every year, sometimes a bit less but never nothing. I’ve been able to live off that when I needed to, indeed much less than that often, since I have been abroad so much. They victual you pretty well aboard a navy ship, if you dine with the officers. And it allowed me to provide for her while she was alive.”
McConnell looked curious. “Which trap is it?”
“It’s called the step-spring.”
The doctor laughed incredulously. “My friend Exum swears by it, absolutely swears by it! You invented the step-spring? My goodness, will wonders never cease. What I find, however—”
And here for a moment the conversation devolved into a technical discussion of the merits of various scientific collection methods. McConnell’s own passion was the marine life of the North Atlantic, and Leigh, though he had evidently moved on to these microbes, spoke warmly of his own experiences collecting and identifying flora and fauna there.
Lenox and Polly waited patiently, until at last Polly interjected. “And you had no idea whatsoever who might have given you this incredible sum of money? I find that astonishing.”
“Ah. Well. I had a previous experience of anonymous benefaction, you see, as Charles knows.” Lenox nodded an affirmation of this. “And Mr. Middleton—who was all friendliness in person, after his rather formal correspondence—gave me a letter which offered, I thought, a clue. Only two words at the end, really. But there you are.”
Leigh pulled a folded piece of paper from his breast pocket and passed it to Lenox, who skimmed it and felt a thrill. “Shall I read it aloud? With your permission, Leigh. Yes? Very well.”
It was undated, from a typewriter with the letter s weaker than the rest, he noted from force of habit.
Mr. Leigh,
I have followed your career with admiration, and wish we had had greater opportunity to spend time together. My hope is that this money will allow you to realize your farther-reaching scientific ambitions.
Sincerely,
A friend