Kirk brought a bottle of champagne up from the cellar, and Lenox raised a toast to their friends, who were quite obviously dumbstruck with happiness. Toto had been to her physician that morning for confirmation.
“Part of me does hope it’s a boy,” Toto said, her hand falling unconsciously to her stomach. “We’ve got George after all and we’re not the Elizabeth Bennets.”
“You’re very far from the Elizabeth Bennets,” Lady Jane said.
“My enemy Duckworth is on her seventh child already, and won’t ever stop talking about it.”
“To be fair I’m not sure I would either, if I had seven children,” said Lenox.
“Two should at least quiet her down to a murmur, I hope.”
Lenox glanced at Jane.
There were facts in life; there were things you couldn’t help; it had mathematics in it. Jane was forty-three. Not quite too old to have another child, but not either young enough to have faith that she could do so without difficulty—and their particular era, Lenox had thought once or twice, was such a cruelly fertile one, families of ten and twelve and twenty, pouring into all the crevices of enormous houses. Never had a capital city been richer or more rudely healthy. To have one child could seem faintly feeble.
And how lovely it would have been to watch Sophia meet a baby brother, a baby sister.
He was suddenly struck by a long-forgotten memory of Lady Jane, perhaps because it dated to the same period of time that Leigh’s sudden reappearance in his life had dredged up in his mind.
Even as a child, Lady Jane Houghton, she had been self-possessed, with an affect of slight irony. Most children would laugh at anything whatsoever—but not she, five years younger than him then as now, even when such a gap had seemed perfectly enormous.
Home from Harrow once, he had seen her at a country ball. Perhaps it had even been her first—too young by a few years for London society, but allowed to dance in Sussex, as long as it was with a cousin or close friend.
She had come up behind him in the hall as he was leaving, just before supper, and at her call he had stopped, bowing slightly and greeting her. She was slender, with brown hair that fell in long pretty curls. “We didn’t have a chance to speak,” she said.
“Yes! I’m sorry for that. How are you?”
She had smiled and said not very badly. “And they say you will go to Oxford, as your brother has done?”
“I hope so,” Lenox replied.
“Will you give me tea if I come there?”
“Any time.”
“I’ll hold you to that, Master Charles,” she had said. “I know my father wouldn’t mind, as it’s you—and I’ll die if I have to spend another winter here in the country. He’ll let me go when I turn fifteen, I think, with Mother.”
“Are you so bored?”
“Yes. How I wish they would let us go off to school, as you do! Or failing that, I don’t see why we can’t go to London and live there.”
“Your father is important in the county,” Lenox pointed out.
“I suppose.” A maid had come in then, looking for Jane. “I think I ought to go. Good luck at Oxford!”
“And good luck leaving Houghton. You look very lovely this evening.”
She had blushed and thanked him, and Lenox had realized, with true amazement, that she had perhaps some romantic admiration for him—that perhaps, as in a novel, he was her faraway ideal, a slightly older chap, away at Harrow.
He had forgotten that for all these years. He would have to ask her if she remembered.
They gave McConnell and Toto lunch. Just as they were drinking their small glasses of sweet wine afterward, Sophia emerged from the nursery, bleary-eyed and tender following her nap, to say hello. When Lenox went off into the afternoon again it was with a feeling of warmth for all that he did have.
Leigh had spent the morning at the Royal College of Surgeons, delivering an informal lecture on his experiments on certain victims of alkali poisoning a decade before, near the Strait of Magellan; with him for protection were Cohen and a constable of Frost’s. Lenox met them at around two o’clock. There had been nothing peculiar about their day, fortunately.
“Have you seen Anderson?” Lenox asked Cohen when they had a private moment.
“No. No large red-haired fellows at all, sir.”
“Singh?”
“One Indian gentleman—a valet here, it would seem, brought back from the East by a scientist who trained him as an assistant. He’s widely known, however. Not Singh.”
“Good. Keep your eyes open. And after the talk tonight—”
“A hotel I’ve never heard of, neighborhood randomly chosen. Yes, sir.”
Lenox nodded. “Good.”
Having checked in on his friend, Lenox hailed a cab and directed it to Scotland Yard, where he met Frost.
They walked together along an inner corridor, returning from the front courtyard to Frost’s office. “Has Townsend consented to speak to us?”
“Yes—with his attorney present.”
“I suppose we could do worse. Are we going there now?”
“I thought we might.”
Townsend was waiting for them in a holding cell, the remains of a desultory lunch on a tray nearby—half a bottle of wine the only thing that looked to have been consumed entirely. With him was a small, ferret-faced sharp in a cheap suit, one of the jobbing attorneys who lurked around the courts, none of them stupid. He introduced himself as Chisholm.
“You understand that your presence here is a courtesy?” Frost asked him.
“I suppose so, sir,” said Chisholm. “Then again I could tell my client to hold his tongue and we could wait you out.”
Frost gave him a hard look. “And we could come and have a look at your other clients, and instruct the bailiff not to let Mr. Townsend order such luxurious foodstuffs—if you want to play that game.”
Chisholm shrugged, as if it was a matter of very little consequence to him, and then with a calculated degree of insolence began to pick at his teeth. Frost looked black with anger, but Lenox, sensing the futility of playing an attorney’s game with an attorney, said, “We are concerned solely with the death of Mr. Ernest Middleton of the Temple Bar. It occurred on the fourth of January. Does your client have any knowledge of it?”
“None,” said Chisholm.
“You may answer yourself, Mr. Townsend, if you have nothing to hide,” said Lenox.
Townsend glanced at his attorney and then said, echoing him, “None.”
“The name is unfamiliar to you?”
“Yes.”
“You were never in the offices of Beaumont and Middleton in Maltravers Street?”
“Never.”
“Mr. Middleton was not your father’s solicitor?”
For the first time Townsend looked thrown. “My father?”
“Did he not execute your father’s estate?”
“My father’s estate! What in heaven are you on about?”
Lenox looked at him narrowly. “Let us retreat farther back. Did your father die in 1876, sir?”
“He did, but I cannot see what that has to do with the price of tea in China.”
“You were not a beneficiary of his will?”
Chisholm held up a hand. “Salt, don’t answer that. What is this line of inquiry about, gentlemen? We have told you that Mr. Townsend had nothing to do with the death of Mr. Middleton. They were not acquainted.”
“And we are suggesting that they were,” said Frost.
“I can help you there, then. I wasn’t. He was not my father’s attorney,” said Townsend.
“Who was?” Lenox asked.
“He had three. Two in Cornwall and one in London, Mr. Josiah Dekker. He’s a fool, but he’s not dead. At least as far as I know.”
Lenox felt a creeping uneasiness. He thought back to the stairwell at 34 Abbot Street, when Townsend had run from them. No doubt he had run at the sight of a police constable for dishonest reasons. But he had also stopped at Middleton’s name, genuinely surprised at the cause of their chase.
Fells, he thought grimly.
“What were the terms of your father’s will?” Lenox asked.
“Not your concern,” said Chisholm, slicking his very thoroughly greased hair, which Lenox hoped never to see again, down his temples.
“Mr. Townsend, you may exonerate yourself if you tell us the answer honestly.”
Townsend paused, then, with a gambler’s air of feeling content to throw his freedom on a toss of the dice, said, “Well, why not. There were a few small bequests, and the balance came to me—in trust, worse luck, since it means that I can only spend the interest. Fortunately I’ve dissolved the businesses, so the interest is still a tidy income.”
“Our investigation indicated that you and your father were not speaking.”
“It’s true that we weren’t on close terms, but I never doubted for a second that he would leave it all to me. He was proud of the Townsend name.”
A misplaced pride, on the evidence of father and son, Lenox thought. Leigh had grown up without his own father because of this man’s—and now the son was engaged in some malevolent practice or other, whether he was involved in this business or not. “Are you certain that he might not have left a separate amount, through Middleton, unknown to you?”
Townsend shook his head. “No. Impossible.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because all of it was in the businesses, bar a few hundred pounds of ready money. Dekker’s bookkeepers went into very great detail determining just how much they were worth, and every penny was accounted for by the end. And except for a few thousand pounds it’s mine, thanks be to God.”