Several hours later, Edmund and Charles Lenox were ensconced in the Boscawen Arms, gazing out of its mullioned windows at the passing traffic. Each had a pint pot of bitter, and there was a carving board of bread and cheese between them, into which each made the occasional foray. A thoroughly contented hour of life’s passage, Lenox thought. There was a 6:29 train back to London—the second-to-last of the evening—and they intended to catch it, in a little more than forty minutes.
“It only took you thirty years to solve your first case,” said Edmund.
Lenox smiled. “Twenty-nine and a half.”
“Better still! You should double your bonus for the year. That’s fast work.”
“You’re very witty.”
Edmund smiled. “No, no. I do think you did it well.”
“And now the question. Shall I tell him?”
Wilkins had been very candid with the brothers, for the simple reason, he said, that Mrs. Leigh was dead now. She had insisted upon secrecy from her son while she was alive about the source of his school fees; but there was no need to prolong the secret now that she was gone, Wilkins thought.
“Why did she want it kept from Gerald to begin with?” Lenox had asked Wilkins, in his little office with its view over the back garden.
Wilkins had leaned back, thinking over the question. He was the picture of a small-town solicitor: reliable, comfortable, a friend as surely as a professional. “Because he wouldn’t have wanted her to do what she did.”
“What she did?”
Wilkins frowned. “I handled the estate of Gerald’s father. Struck down in the prime of his life, now—just when he was setting out, certainly younger than both of you gentlemen, and therefore not having had a chance to accumulate much in the way of savings. There was no fortune there. He left them in a position that they might just squeak by—the cottage outright, and fifty or sixty pounds a year.”
“Townsend never gave them money?”
“Townsend? No. No, no. What on earth gave you that idea? The squire’s wife, Mrs. Williston, gave Mrs. Leigh things here and there, when they could be disguised as other than charity—cloth for a dress, you know, or a pair of pullets from the farm. Not Townsend, however. No.”
“And yet Leigh went to Harrow.”
Wilkins nodded, his fingers steepled. “She was set upon it, Mrs. Regina Leigh. It was her obsession. She was in grief herself, I believe, though she was not a communicative person—not at all like her husband.
“But you see, she had loved him very, very much, and Harrow had been vital to his upbringing, to his sense of the world, and I believe she wanted to offer Gerald the same opportunity. I advised her against it, frankly. The fees were more than their entire remaining annual income.”
“How did she pay them, then?” Lenox asked curiously. “Her family?”
Wilkins shook his head. “It is an impoverished earldom, you know, besides which there was a falling-out between the two branches. No, what she did was to invent this canard of an anonymous benefactor—with my reluctant consent—and then, while Gerald was away, she earned the money herself.”
“How?”
Wilkins sighed. “Whatever her uncle was, she was the granddaughter of an earl, Mrs. Leigh, and very proud. But she had to have the money, and so she did two things. The first was to take in boarders.”
“Leigh always said their house was small.”
“Yes, two bedrooms. She let each of them during school term, and slept in the kitchen.”
“Brought low indeed,” Lenox murmured.
“And the second thing?” asked Edmund.
“She began to take in piecework, sewing at night, and during the day she began to teach lessons. Whatever came to hand—etiquette, piano, French, German, drawing, for of course she had all the accomplishments of her class, and she was happy to teach anything. The Ashe name means a great deal in these parts, and she priced herself reasonably, which meant that all the townswomen could send their daughters to her. A bragging right. That was how she scraped the money together for Harrow.”
“And you transmitted the fees.”
“I did. I would have helped, except—well, as a solicitor, once you begin to take pity on your clients, all of them need money, don’t they? Or a great many. The best you can do is give it to the local societies, or the church, and help where help is needed direly. A public school—I respected her decision, and helped her arrange to send Gerald there. Not for long, as it happened.”
“What about holidays?” asked Lenox, still stuck on Regina Leigh.
“The lodgers’ terms always ended the day before he came home, and she taught no lessons while he was in Cornwall.”
“I see.”
“It was only a period of two years, though they were brutally hard ones for her. After that, indeed, I believe he was able to send money back to her.”
Lenox nodded. “That’s true.”
“She once referred to a bird trap, I think,” said Wilkins, trying to remember. “I may have that wrong.”
Lenox had felt a sudden stinging at the corners of his eyes then, quite unexpectedly. Why? Perhaps because Leigh had said, so often, how dull his mother was, how far less interesting than his father. Perhaps because she was gone. For his friend. For his own mother. Or perhaps it was universal: He looked over to his brother, who admittedly had had a very soft heart since Molly’s death, and saw that his face was screwed up tightly and seriously, which had meant since he was five years old that he was determined not to betray his own emotions.
“Thank you for solving our puzzle,” Lenox had said.
“Do you see Leigh?”
“Oh, yes.”
“I hope he will return to these parts soon. He came for his mother’s funeral, of course, and to settle her estate—but he still has many friends here, you know!”
Lenox nodded and said that he would give Leigh that message—conscious, however, that his friend was not likely to return to Cornwall, now that it had relinquished its one claim on him.
Charles and Edmund had taken their leave of Wilkins after this, thanking him again and complimenting his garden on their way, and wandered out into the street, a little aimless.
“What shall we do now?” Edmund had asked.
“We could have a look around Truro.”
“Yes, that should be a thrilling eight minutes.”
Lenox laughed. “Come along. Let’s walk south and see what we may find.”
As it happened Truro was a very pretty small city, with two rivers flowing through it, and many winding streets full of charm and character, teashops, a row of competing greengrocers, in the public square a half-indoor pantomime theater whose troupe was currently delighting a gang of small children. It was more like an English village overgrown than like a city—and they passed a diverting hour walking it, each of them picking up a few small souvenirs, Lenox, for Sophia and Jane, a pair of matching silver spoons with the city’s name and motto engraved on the handles.
After some time they had found themselves—a little chilly, with the fall of the sun—seeking out the warm table by the fire at the Boscawen Arms where they now sat.
When Lenox ought to have known, he told his brother, was when that mysterious Greek dictionary appeared after Leigh had lost it during half term. Who else but his mother could have known? A master, perhaps; a friend—but not Townsend, nor his uncle. Poor detective work.
“You must go easy on yourself,” said Edmund. “You were inexperienced.”
“Rum, isn’t it, to be thinking back to clues from our days at school.”
“Indeed.”
Lenox felt a certain lonely dejection, as they walked slowly through the darkened evening toward the train station. He couldn’t say exactly why. But the compartment they secured in the first-class carriage was cozy and warm, and each of them bought a cup of tea from the lady passing down the aisle, and soon they were warmly ensconced in the conversation they had been conducting for all these years, and which never, even in periods of remission, ceased, and Lenox felt better. Just past St. Austell, Edmund fell asleep, and Charles, taking advantage of the moment, began to sketch out with a nib of charcoal a long letter to Leigh. When this first draft was done he began to make a list of clients he ought to check in on the next morning, by wire or by letter; one thought led to another, and soon he was jotting down ideas for how they might improve, for example, the efficiency of their monthly check-ins at the soap factory in Birmingham.