The three of them had a quiet but happy supper at Hampden Lane, all filled with delight to be alive, Lenox and Leigh replaying the scene in the laboratory over and over, correcting each other, filling in each other’s memories, Lady Jane a rapt audience of one. There was a cassoulet to eat, and a fine joint served with a mellow French wine, and for dessert, best of all, one benefit of this cold time in the year, a lovely ice cream, flavored with chocolate and with mint from the gardens at Lenox House. It was a day to appreciate how nice a small thing such as this one could be.
As they were sipping coffee, two visitors came by. Both were close friends of Jane’s: the Duchess of Marchmain, who was Dallington’s mother, and Matilda Duckworth. The hour was an unusual one for a visit, but they both wanted to be sure that Jane was still alive.
“We are, yes,” Jane said, “little thanks to my husband.”
“Some thanks, if I might be permitted to correct you,” Leigh put in. “Though mostly it was my ingenious little wad of paper. I wish I could have taken it back in the aftermath of our encounter. I would have treasured it like the grail, whatever old crumpled state it was in—kept it under glass, and made a totem of it.”
This enigmatic statement required, of course, a retelling of the afternoon’s events, which horrified their guests but had now been told over so many times that there was almost room for something like amusement in Lenox’s and Leigh’s voices as they described it.
“I know Mr. Rowan’s cousin,” said Matilda Duckworth. “She is a very sweet girl. I think he’s meant to be very rich, Mr. Rowan—more than averagely rich.”
Matilda, recently orphaned, was more than averagely poor, and as such judged these matters keenly. “Is he?” asked Lenox curiously.
“From what Effie says, yes. All the parts of London that the Duke of Westminster doesn’t own are Rowan’s father’s—Bethnal Green, Bacon Street, Chilton Street, Liverpool Street, the East End.”
Lenox glanced at Leigh, who took a second longer but then slowly realized the import of these words. Chilton Street. Was it possible that Rowan was a very landlord to the Farthings?
Who held the gambling debt of Mr. Ernest Middleton. That would close the circle cleanly.
Their visitors had hoped to entice Lady Jane to come to a musical evening they were attending—but she declined, pleading fatigue, and though it wasn’t yet nine o’clock when they had gone, all three of the remaining party agreed that they were very tired, at the end of this very long day. Lenox, for his part, felt as if his body was all at once loaded down with wet sand; he could scarcely wish Leigh a civil good night, and as he went upstairs he heard the blessed sound of Kirk extinguishing the candles of the forward hall. The surest sign of a day’s ending.
He slept through the early sunlight of the morning, waking only when two deliverymen in the street outside began to argue. He let his eyes open slowly. A bright day, luxuriously little to do, the prospect of a good breakfast ahead of him.
He went and enjoyed this, divvying up the newspaper with Leigh—Lady Jane, more enterprising than either of them, was already out visiting—and reading it in pleasant silence, broken only occasionally by a passing comment.
“Nothing of Rowan in a single paper,” said Lenox.
“How would word have spread?”
“There are informants at the jailhouse, always interested in a boldfaced name. But I wonder if Rowan was able to spend more than the tip was worth to keep the papers silent.”
Leigh frowned. “He cannot hope to emerge from this with his reputation intact, can he? Though I suppose it is only our word against his.”
The idea troubled Lenox, too. He had been on the end of that pistol, as well. “We must go and see Mr. Joseph Bartram.”
Lenox still had the amateur scientist’s calling card. It listed an address in Holborn, not far from his own offices in Chancery Lane. They set out fairly soon after breakfast.
They found Bartram in his office. He answered the door himself. “Mr. Leigh!” he said. “This is a signal honor. I enjoyed your speech immensely. And Mr. Lenox—how do you do?”
“I’m pleased to meet you again,” said Lenox.
They followed Bartram into a cozy little room, with a fire blazing, a bookshelf lined with specimens and little framed drawings and silver instruments, and a strong smell of tobacco. There was a very old beagle on the rug in front of the fire, who looked at them and then yawned. “You are fortunate to catch me. In general I only spend the hours of ten to twelve here, to receive visitors, before dining at the Royal Society and passing my afternoons there.”
“You are much involved with the Society, I take it?” Leigh asked.
“It is my passion. I told you I was semiretired, Mr. Lenox—nine-tenths retired would be more honest.”
“What is your field, sir?” asked Leigh.
They conversed for a few moments, Lenox catching most of it, he thought. Bartram seemed more given to the organizational work of science, classification, organization, than to original research, but Leigh responded to his descriptions of these projects with real warmth, and they were soon discussing minor technical points that threatened to venture beyond Lenox’s ken.
At a very brief pause, he said, “But if you could resume this conversation later—Mr. Bartram, we are very eager to know about your suspicions.”
Bartram, a thorough but not a rapid thinker, blinked through his half-moon spectacles. “My suspicions? Oh! Ah! My suspicions! Yes, Mr. Lenox—I am glad you have brought Mr. Leigh—I would have forgot—my suspicions, yes.”
“You have heard that Mr. Rowan was arrested last night?”
That caught Bartram’s attention more quickly. He looked astonished, and then quickly accepting, and then, to Lenox’s surprise, heartbroken. “Rowan, was it?” he muttered. “Our president. How very, very sad for the Society—what a stain. But not unexpected, I suppose—no, not unexpected at all, if I think about it.”
“Come, Mr. Bartram,” said Leigh, “let us in on your thoughts.”
“Oh? Ah! Yes.” Bartram sighed again, and settled back into his armchair by the fire, putting a hand down to scratch his dog behind the ear. Lenox and Leigh, waiting on a sofa opposite, attended him closely. “The situation arose three months ago, perhaps a little longer. It had to do with the periodical library at the Society.”
“Pray go on.”
“The library is the clearinghouse for all the papers received as submissions to the Society’s journal. They are registered, noted down by our librarian with author, name, and précis, and then left in orderly stacks, where they may be consulted by any fellow of the Royal Society. Recommendations—primarily endorsements—may be left with the librarian. A small committee, which I took a turn serving upon in the year seventy, decides in consultation with the editor which pieces will be published. It is a very profound honor, as Mr. Leigh knows.
“Many fellows go months and years without setting foot in the periodical library, of course. Probably fewer than two dozen take an active interest in the outstanding submissions. Of these, I think I may say that I am exceptionally active. One of my great pleasures in life is to survey the new submissions—to see what discoveries have flowered in our country, recently. I am there every weekday afternoon; I am intimate with the periodical library’s contents.”
The old man stopped and removed his glasses, rubbing them against his sleeve. “Has this to do with Leigh’s papers, then?” asked Lenox.
Bartram nodded. “We received three papers by Mr. Leigh at the end of September. A treasure trove, given that he has not published with the Society before! May I ask why you decided to, now?”
Leigh shrugged. “I had been invited several times that year by the Society—both to speak, and to write. I think finally I decided it would be well enough to do it.”
“I see. As it happened, I nearly missed your papers. There were three of them, and only because I happened to be present when the mail arrived, one day, did I see your return address on the envelope, and, as it was opened, the three separate papers. The next day, they were gone.”
“Gone!”
Bartram nodded. “Yes. It was the librarian’s clerk who opened them for his master—a boy of fifteen, without any scientific knowledge—and between his opening them, in front of me, and leaving them on the librarian’s desk, and the librarian’s return the next morning, they had disappeared.”
“How very strange.”
“And yet not so strange as this: two days later, one of the papers reappeared, and was duly entered in the ledger. In fact it formed the bulk of your recent speech, Mr. Leigh. Your initial discoveries, but not your farther-reaching ones.”
Suddenly Lenox saw a partial answer to a question that had been bothering him: Why Rowan was so keen for Leigh to speak.
Leigh, too, looked as if something was dawning on him. “Two weeks ago, when I was last here, Mr. Rowan warned me not to reveal the contents of the remaining two papers I had submitted, though he assured me that they would be published.”
Bartram leaned forward. “Did he! They are not shelved in the library—have not been passed to the committee.”
Leigh shook his head slowly. “I took his advice. He said there might be unscrupulous Continental scientists present. That didn’t bother me—any man may turn his hand to my work, if he pleases—but as it happened, I hadn’t time to address them fully in my speech, anyway. The first paper was more than enough to begin with.”
Lenox nodded. “I suppose he was content for you to have credit for that one.”
“It was a breakthrough—but it is the third paper, on the growth of microorganisms, that I think may have reverberations across Europe. Rowan asked me to return and speak about it in two months, upon publication.”
“By which time you would have been dead, had his plan succeeded,” said Lenox, “and he would be the author whose name was appended to them. So that is how he meant to steal your work. Piecemeal, convincingly.”
Bartram looked as if he had been thrown into deep waters. “Dead!” he cried. “What is that?”
Leigh grimaced and then explained, to the old gentleman, the nature of Rowan’s misdeeds. Bartram, in his turn, described his own search for the missing papers. He had never spoken to Rowan directly about them; the librarian, meanwhile, had become convinced that there was only ever one paper, which had been briefly mislaid. But Bartram had stubbornly maintained what he had seen, leading to his secretive request for a moment of Leigh’s time at the Royal Society’s supper two nights before.
It was around noon when the two old Harrovians found themselves at last taking their leave, having consumed a pot of tea and a plate of gingersnaps, and Leigh having promised to dine with Bartram later that week.
As they walked out into the street, Leigh said to Lenox, “Well, there. We have an answer of how Rowan planned to do it.” Then putting on his gloves, he added, “You know, that man is the glory of my field.”
“Joseph Bartram?”
“Utterly disinterested—utterly fair-minded—committed, generous, honest. He has, I would venture, the precise quantity of brilliance that Rowan does, a modest quantity, that is, more than a layman but not of a sort destined to achieve greatness—and yet how well one turned his abilities to use for our greater good, how productively, and how evilly the other! Men are strange, Lenox.”
“Yes, they are.”
“I cannot understand it.”
“Because you are gifted,” said Lenox. “You have that fortune.”
Leigh shook his head. “I suppose so.”
“You would hate my work, if you are so easily dispirited by the depths of behavior to which our species can descend.”