Time stopped; then it resumed.
The bullet had flown wildly wide of Leigh, splintering a wall.
All three men were equally taken aback. The gun had been directed straight at Leigh’s sternum, and Lenox couldn’t believe the luck of it, the sheer improbable impossible luck.
Rowan’s reaction was to stare down at the firearm. It was obvious what he was thinking: Perhaps Middleton had had its sights adjusted oddly?
Lenox rose, almost involuntarily, and Rowan, coming to himself, said, “Sit, I warn you!” and cocked the pistol. “I shan’t miss again!”
“Rowan, for heaven’s sake, remember yourself,” said Lenox. He obeyed, though, sitting, hands hovering above his shoulders. “Why on earth should you want to go to prison?”
“I don’t.”
“Then why kill us?”
Lenox was only talking. His heart was fluttering as furiously as a leaf snagged on a rock in a stream. He glanced over at Leigh. Rowan stared at both of them. “I should have thought it was obvious. I am an ambitious sort.”
Lenox, evenly, said, “Ambitious.”
“Yes.”
“But my heavens, you are preeminent in your field, Rowan. The president—the president!—of the Royal Society!”
“Ah,” said Rowan ruefully—and now that he had collected himself, he was utterly steady, in gesture, in tone, in every aspect of his person besides the gun in his hand, the courtesy of the drawing room lingering in his movements. “But that job requires only that you be tactful, brilliant, agreeable, fair-minded, gentle in manner, firm in decision, friendly, and intelligent.”
“My God! And is there anything else?”
“Yes,” said Rowan shortly. “Genius.”
There it was, Lenox thought—had time to think, even in the pressure of the moment. Two scientists. One a genius, and one not.
Rowan lifted the pistol with a straighter arm, aiming now just left of the center of Leigh’s chest, to accommodate for the swerve of the last shot. “Bartram!” shouted Lenox.
He had only been trying to buy them a moment, but Rowan glanced over at him, for the first time a real irritation flaring into his aristocratic features. “Bartram! What has that little toad been telling you?”
“Well.” Lenox appeared to be contemplating the question, but really he was calculating. If Rowan fired again, Lenox gave himself a fifty-fifty chance of survival; he would vault at the man in the moment, praying to overpower him before he could fire again. His slackness of reaction in chasing Townsend blazed up vexingly in the back of his thoughts. Older now. “He says that there has been fraud committed against Leigh.”
“Fraud?”
Lenox glanced over at Leigh.
And in his old friend’s face he saw—something strange.
It was not mirth, not delight. But confidence. Suddenly, as sometimes he was wont to do in pressured situations, Lenox flashed upon a distant and irrelevant memory: Leigh’s devil-may-care confrontation of Tennant, the Harrow hats stacked upon his head, defiance in his eyes.
Leigh spoke. “I suspect that Mr. Rowan has decided to claim my work. I submitted several papers to the Society late last year, the first I have chosen to publish on the microbe.”
“And your work involves the microbe,” said Lenox to Rowan. “Gerald trumped you, I take it?”
A bitter, half-mad laugh escaped Rowan. “Trumped. That is a word.”
“I fear our Mr. Rowan is not a scientist of original thought,” said Leigh, sounding genuinely sorry. “The first thing in his singularly blessed life that has not been his to pluck down ready-made from the branch.”
Both Lenox and Rowan stared at him, Rowan’s face darkening, and Lenox, desperately, trying to tell Leigh not to antagonize their murderous adversary.
But it was too late.
“More fool you,” said Rowan.
He lifted the gun, and fired it once more, both Leigh and Lenox rising in concert from their chairs in the millisecond that it was clear he was going to act again.
There was an odd explosive sound, quite unlike a gunshot. Lenox, in the confusion of the moment, saw only a bright red burst of light, immediately gone, and then Rowan recoiled, dropping the gun, falling to the ground with an agonized cry.
“Quick!” said Leigh. “The gun!”
Lenox was ahead of this piece of advice, already having covered the ground to Rowan. He picked up the gun and pointed it. “Don’t move.”
“Don’t fire it!” Leigh said.
But as they caught their breath, it became clear that Rowan was no longer a threat. He was writhing on the ground, clutching his arm underneath him, moaning incoherently.
“What on earth has happened?” said Lenox.
“I did it in the cab Rowan forced me into,” said Leigh. He was heaving breath, like a ship bailing water. “A little wad of paper from my day’s program, jammed in the flintlock. I had a second, less than a second, when he was standing up out of the fly—but I slotted it in there as perfectly as you could wish. I saw it slip in. I’ve never been happier.”
“How—how?” said Lenox, unequal to the articulation of his many questions.
Rowan, beneath them, was whimpering pitifully. Leigh, still breathing hard, shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe the luck of it himself. “It’s one of the first things you learn on board a ship, for some reason,” he said. “Thank God it was an old-fashioned pistol.”
“And that was why the first shot went wide,” said Lenox. “Of course.”
“Yes.”
And why Leigh had borne on his face that strange look of confidence. “You’ve saved us, old friend.”
“I knew if he shot once it would be wide; twice and it would explode, in all probability. I didn’t want to risk being wrong, however, and charge him.”
They were both looking down at Rowan, who had gone quite pale. “I think we had better bandage him, and get him care,” said Lenox.
They stooped down to do this. Rowan’s hand was a disaster: huge chunks of it missing or stripped away, blood everywhere. He had sustained a wound in his stomach, too. He tried feebly to push them away.
They wrapped a dishcloth hanging from a nearby laboratory table around the wound as tightly as they could, and then Lenox stepped to a nearby window, opened it, and called out for a constable in his loudest voice. “Police! Police needed!” he called.
Below him he could see the man who had driven Leigh and Rowan here, still dutifully holding Lenox’s horse, bless his heart.
For a second the full exertion of the last half hour rose up in him all at once and he laughed, and then realized he was shaking, too. Shock.
Cohen would arrive soon—must. Behind him, Leigh was sitting back on his haunches against the wall, gazing at Rowan, who had fallen into exhausted silence. On the table there was a typewriter, and Lenox, for want of anything better to do, typed the word “assessment” on it, having to hunt for each letter. The exercise gave him the confirmation he had been looking for: This was the typewriter with the weak s that had been the source of the original letter written to Leigh concerning his fictitious bequest.
“Who is this Bartram?” asked Leigh.
Lenox shook his head, recriminating with himself. “I should have told you. He wanted to speak to you about what he believed to be some kind of theft of your ideas.”
“How could he have known?” asked Leigh, frowning. “I myself never would have suspected Rowan—never, in a million years. A more generous fellow had rarely come across my path, I would have said until fifty minutes ago.”
“I cannot say. We must find him, clearly.”
“Or ask Rowan.”
Lenox looked down at their foe. “He will be up before the Queen’s Bench. I don’t know how forthcoming he will be.”
“No.”
“Meanwhile we are left with a question.”
“What is that?”
Lenox found himself laughing again, though more tiredly this time, the shock of the situation wearing off. His muscles were still tremulous. “The same one we have been asking for thirty-odd years. Who was the MB?”