On his way from the office Lenox picked up McConnell in his carriage, for Jane was traveling together with McConnell’s own wife, Toto, and their daughter, Georgiana.
The physician was waiting outside of his house, bundled tightly in a cloak and carrying a parcel. “What is that?” Lenox asked.
“The fossilized excrement of an African elephant. I need to post it to a colleague in Manchester when we arrive at the station. I think I shall just have time.”
“What an exciting life you lead, Thomas.”
“Ha, ha.”
“I’m not sure how I can thank you adequately for blessing my carriage with such an exciting delivery.”
“It’s very well sealed. There is no odor—practically no odor.”
Lenox hadn’t seen McConnell since Leigh bolted for France, and it was this that they discussed as the carriage rolled through the West End and toward the train station. According to McConnell, Lenox’s old friend had been philosophical about his position at supper, only to wake up having reversed himself.
“It was all I could do to make him stay for breakfast,” said McConnell. “But how glad I am that I did! I owe you a profound thanks for introducing me to him. The Englishman who works with Pasteur.”
The name rang a faint bell. “Pasteur,” Lenox repeated. “Remind me who he is?”
“Louis Pasteur?” McConnell said. “No, I suppose his name has not penetrated into the wider world. A very great man. There can be no doubt of that. According to Leigh too he has a mania for his work. Which is significant, as Leigh pointed out, because many of the geniuses in our field are idle to the bone.”
“In my field, too,” said Lenox.
McConnell looked curious. “Oh?”
“The most brilliant criminal mind I ever encountered belonged to a fellow named Partridge, who never shifted from the corner seat of a pub in Clapham. As far as I know he slept there. Certainly he delivered his orders from there. Jenkins and I spent hundreds of hours trying to catch him out in his schemes, mostly extortion, but we never did. In fact the only thing that stopped him was his own weight. He had a heart attack and died at his table.”
“Pasteur is the very opposite case from the sound of it—scarcely sleeps or eats. And he has been rewarded. It wouldn’t surprise me if he saves a million lives a year between now and the end of the century.”
Lenox gave McConnell a look of astonishment. “A million!”
“Yes. Vaccination. He’s not a doctor, you know, and people kicked up very hard about that. But on the other hand I have seen the studies myself. It all comes down to this theory of germs.”
“Germs,” Lenox said. “Those tiny invisible particles? Was that not disproven?”
“You could not be more wrong,” McConnell said. “They’re not invisible, and Leigh is the one among all of us who has done the most to discover their properties. Even Pasteur acknowledges that, and he is not renowned as a generous collaborator.”
They had come within a few turns of Charing Cross, and Lenox asked how Leigh had been enticed to return to London in a week’s time. According to McConnell, among the possessions Anixter had recovered from the Collingwood Hotel had been the calling cards of the two joint presidents of the Royal Society, Lord Baird and Mr. Alexander Rowan, begging half an hour of Leigh’s time.
McConnell had persuaded Leigh to call on them at the Society in the half hour before his train for Dover departed. The doctor had gone along with him, and Rowan, he said (Baird had been away) could not have been more courteous, or more ardently committed to arranging Leigh’s speech. This was flattering, given Rowan’s own fame—he was only thirty-two, and his rise within the scientific community of England had been meteoric, paper after brilliant paper, a chair at Cambridge younger than anyone before him, but also, to go with it, a personable temperament, a handsome face, a fine fortune.
The entreaties of even someone so distinguished might not have tempted Leigh on their own, but he had also been offered, in exchange for his lecture, the foundation of a scholarship in his name for a Cornish boy of the board schools to either of the universities. Leigh’s pick. A graceful touch by Rowan, and the one that had won Leigh over in the end.
“Is that usual?”
“On the contrary, very unusual. But then, so is a scientist who has no interest in addressing the Royal Society.”
“I’m not happy about the idea,” said Lenox. “Will he be safe?”
“I cannot say that. But at least I know he will never be alone. Already every man of scientific interests in London has canceled his plans for that week, hoping to be invited to the supper afterward. I myself feel fortunate that Leigh arranged my tickets. Men are coming from Oxford, Cambridge of course, even Edinburgh.”
For Gerald Leigh! Lenox shook his head.
He couldn’t help but feel surprised. When they had been boys at Harrow, in between their investigations into the MB, they had sometimes talked about the future. What had they envisioned for themselves? Lenox would later find that he had one burst of unconventionality in him—the impulse to become a detective—but at the time he had not credited himself even so far as that, imagining that he would go to university, marry, and then enter politics. His dreams then had all been about travel.
Leigh, on the other hand, had been a fidgety dreamer. One hour he would see himself making for America, the next he fancied becoming a farmer in Cornwall and studying the behavior of bees.
How had he come to be so highly reckoned? From McConnell’s descriptions, perhaps by following that very restive instinct—the high seas, birds, then flora, then microbes, at each stage pursuing whatever interested him most, regardless of how many years he had dedicated to the last project. Perhaps that was one definition of genius: a willingness to surrender to obsession.
At Charing Cross, McConnell posted his parcel. When he was done, the two men went to platform 8 to wait for the train. The porter informed them that the first-class carriage would be the last car, so they walked down toward it, three abreast, the porter with his luggage cart, to wait. They were rigid in the extreme, the carriages of a British train: It was known that men who had made vast fortunes still almost always traveled in second class. Sometimes one had to acknowledge that theirs was a strange country.
“On Leigh, then—what progress have you made?” McConnell asked him, as they waited.
Lenox shook his head doubtfully. “It’s difficult to say. On the murder of Middleton we are nowhere at all. But I believe we may be on the track of the fellow who left Leigh the legacy. I have a suspect. And we certainly know the men who attacked him.”
A bright pair of lamplights appeared far down the darkness of the track’s curve. “There they are,” McConnell said, leaning forward.
Lenox’s heart rose. “Yes.”
The train slowly wended its way into the station, labored chuffs coming from its stovepipe—and then all at once the platform was furious with activity, and there they were! The two wives, the two daughters.
Lenox bent down and Sophia flew into his arms in a fashion that would, alas, be considered unladylike when another twelve months or so had passed, but which he could still enjoy now. She squeezed him tightly around the neck and he buried his scratchy face in her thick, curly hair, feeling the wholeness of a parent reunited with a child. Lifting Sophia to his side, he greeted Jane with a smile and a kiss, then made a cheerful greeting to McConnell’s own arrivals. Governesses descended, servants, luggage. Somehow they sorted themselves out. Sophia had urgent news to convey, which was that there had been Scotch eggs on the train.
“Were they good?” he asked.
“They were better than cook’s.”
“That wouldn’t be nice to tell her.”
“It would be nice to have the train eggs all the time though, Father,” she said passionately.
“Life is not all train eggs.”
She seemed to accept the justice of this—or perhaps was just tired—because she laid her head on his shoulder, and fell silent.
When they were back at Hampden Lane it felt, all at once, like home again; he was watching Jane nervously, but she seemed herself, and they chatted late into the evening after Sophia had gone to sleep, describing the last few days to each other, eating a late supper prepared by their mediocre cook. They were in the drawing room, where all of Jane’s touches came alive with her presence—the little portrait of her by Molly, Edmund’s wife, the small porcelain birds in flight along the mantel, even the intricate white-and-wintergreen wallpaper.
Before he retired for the night he went into his study and jotted down a few notes. The next day he would find Townsend’s son and he would go to the Blue Peter, dangerous though it might be, and see Anderson and Singh.
He wanted it all resolved before Leigh returned to London.
When he finally went up to their bedchamber, he started telling Jane about something Sophia had said. She didn’t reply immediately, and he looked more closely toward where she sat, in front of her tall oval mirror, and realized, with a shock, that she was crying.
He went over to her and put a hand on her shoulder. “What’s the matter, my dear?” he said.
“Nothing.”
She had been upset over Christmas. They had fallen out. With a sinking feeling he saw that it wasn’t over; and he still understood no better why. “Jane.”
She shook her head. “It’s nothing.”
It was so rare for her to be anything other than the most composed person in a room—his sweet, kind, acute wife, whose emotions generally ran highest for other people. “I wish you would tell me at last.”
She looked up at him in the mirror. “I don’t want to, because you’ll think less of me.”
“You have my word that I won’t.”
She hesitated, and then looked down at the silver brush in her hand. “No, Charles. It’s fine. A good night’s sleep at home will set me right.”