They left. Lady Jane was closeted with Adelaide Snow, Liza Calloway, and Elizabeth Watson and Claire Adams for the better part of an hour. Halfway through she came out and told Lenox to go and find Toto for her, which he did. Clavering and Bunce were in the kitchen, eating and drinking; the two brothers sat in the hall outside the room, on a wooden bench beneath a comically bad portrait of the seventh King Henry, waiting. Off to their left was the ceaseless roar of the ball, and behind them the close little room, from which a raised voice would occasionally emerge.
They passed the time first by playing five-across noughts and crosses (Edmund won five games out of fourteen; they drew six; Lenox won three) and then by attempting to throw playing cards into an empty wastebasket across the hallway. Lenox had a blue deck, Edmund a red one, and after each had thrown all of his cards they would go and count up how many of each color was in the basket. They were more or less even, Edmund perhaps edging his younger brother more often than not. His sideways flick of the wrist achieved less glamorous results than Lenox’s tomahawk motion—but was more reliable.
He didn’t ask about the case until they had been sitting there for forty-five minutes or so. And then all he said was, “Stevens, then—from the sound of it he was a kind of—of vicious exploiter of young women, you believe.”
Lenox nodded. “That’s my guess.”
“How do you know?”
Lenox sighed. “A feeling, I suppose. He hired this long series of young girls as his secretaries, and the list Pointilleux found showed that almost half of them left immediately. Including Miss Adelaide Snow, for example. Do you remember her saying that she hoped Miss Harville enjoyed the job—and then adding, ‘I gave her fair warning that she might not’? And don’t forget Miss Ainsworth, the young girl Clavering told us disappeared to London after only a few weeks of working for Stevens.”
Edmund shook his head, disgust on his face. “It wasn’t because it was less expensive to hire women, then, or because he believed them to be more intelligent than men.”
“I doubt saving the village fifteen pounds a year was his first priority, in a budget of so many thousands. Though perhaps it added to his pleasure.”
“And Miss Calloway—or Mrs. Evans, I suppose we should call her—”
It was then that Lady Jane opened the door. Her face was sad, full of concern. “You may come in again, if you like,” she said. “I think we can have a reasonable conversation. I’ve assured them that you’re not trying to hound them onto the gallows. I hope I’m right.”
“Don’t be absurd,” said Edmund.
They followed her into the little room, where the four women were sitting as they had been. Toto, perched on a small armchair next to the fire, her arm resting on a card table, had tears on her face, and the spaniel, which was still lying between Liza Calloway’s feet, looked up as they entered, thumped his tail once, sniffed the air, and then laid his head between his paws again, his eyes quickly closing.
“Charles,” said Lady Jane, “tell us exactly what you know, please, and then we can have a conversation.”
Lenox and Edmund were still standing. “What I know?” said Charles. “Very little, really. The timing is suggestive.”
“Timing?” said Miss Calloway—Mrs. Evans—looking up at him. Her own face was now dry.
“Your father began to withdraw from society approximately ten years ago, a little while after your mother’s death, and more exactly after your departure. To Norfolk, from all we learned—but I wonder if that’s true. It seems to me that perhaps his grief was at losing you without an explanation. Did you think that he knew about Stevens’s treatment of you, and leave without telling him why?”
He saw that his supposition had gone home. “Well. Go on,” she said.
“Perhaps it was your own grief at the death of your husband that drove you back here, seeking revenge on Stevens. You had nothing else to lose, after all. I take it that you don’t have children?”
“We were not so blessed.”
Lenox didn’t need to look at Lady Jane to know that he was correct—that she knew the whole truth. “The drawing on the wall, of a schoolgirl,” he said. “Was it some kind of message to Stevens?”
Suddenly Toto stood up. “This is all very well,” she said angrily, “but what are we going to do? This young woman cannot go to prison—not after what she has endured. I’ll put her on a train myself, and you can try to stop me, Charles Lenox.”
Lenox shrugged. “I have no legal standing here,” he said. “Clavering is downstairs. I think you could do worse than to place your trust in me.”
Calloway’s daughter looked him in the eye for a long moment and then nodded, inhaled to brace herself, and began to talk.
The mayor had come into her life on the day she first made that drawing. Or a version, anyhow—that particular schoolgirl had been smiling. She had been nine years old. Stevens had seen her drawing as her father socialized on the steps of the Bell and Horns and praised her for it, asked, even, if he might have it.
After that, he had always been very friendly to her and to her father, and when he had seen her he had nearly always mentioned the drawing. (“Still drawing, my dear?” “Well enough supplied with charcoal, I hope?” That kind of thing.) Finally, five years later, he had offered her a position as a secretary. She had been unusually young for the position, just fourteen, but as he had told Calloway, he’d had his eye on her for a long time.
Lenox had known Stevens as an acquaintance for many years, and even the euphemistic description of what he had done to his young secretary seemed … well, impossible. Dull, number-bound, impersonal old Stevens, his name the only interesting thing about him, a market mayor in a market town.
And yet there was Adelaide Snow’s face: confirming every detail. Lenox hoped that her short term as Stevens’s secretary meant that she had been strong-willed enough to resist his assaults.
I gave her fair warning that she might not.
“I was in a savage grief after William died,” Mrs. Evans said. “You were correct about that. I had a little money, and no connections at all in the world. His family were mostly dead, my own was a father I believed had betrayed me. I decided that I could at least—at least right one of the wrongs of my life, I suppose.”
“You poisoned the sherry,” Lenox said.
She nodded. “I did. The sherry, well, he enjoyed it, of course. And he always offered me a glass—after. As if I were an adult then.”
“The scoundrel,” said Toto.
“I chalked that drawing on his steps, first, though,” said Calloway’s daughter. “I wanted Stevens to know that I was back—to go in, pour a drink to calm himself, and then know, as he was choking on the floor, dying, who had done it to him.”
“How did you find out that it was the wrong house?”
“I went straight to my father after it was done, to spite him. I was exhilarated. I was planning to leave that night, return to London.”
“Did you never live in Bombay, then?” asked Edmund suddenly.
“We did, yes, for several happy years.”
“I’m sorry—go on.”
“When I saw my father, my heart broke,” she said. Next to her, Adelaide Snow gave her arm a little extra squeeze. “He looked a thousand years old to me. And then, his garden. He had always liked plants, but now, I could tell right away, it was all he had. His garden—all these years taking care of something, if you see what I mean, after my mother and I had both left him. I think I would have forgiven him then and there, regardless of the past. But it emerged that he hadn’t even known about Stevens. Foolish child that I was, and missing my mother, too, I had assumed he was as evil as the world. I’d been wrong. And to think—he never met William!”
She burst into tears, and it was some while before she could resume. “Take your time,” Lenox said.
“No, it’s better to get it out,” she replied, collecting herself. “Well, it wasn’t until a long time had passed that I even told him about the sherry I poisoned. He put the pieces together and realized that I had gone to the wrong house.
“In a panic I went back. I stared at the house for a long time. For all I knew the wrong man was on the floor inside, dead—but then, the lights were off, which made me hopeful that this poor Hadley person was still alive. He might not have been a sherry drinker. Fortunately for me, he wasn’t.
“The next morning, with my father’s help, I lured Mr. Hadley out of town and then took the sherry and destroyed the bottle. After that, it was a matter of planning anew how to kill Stevens.”
“Your father didn’t attempt to dissuade you?” asked Lenox.
“If anything, he was readier than I to do it.” She gazed toward the low blue fire. “I suppose if two people are mad together, they can talk each other into thinking anything makes sense.”
Lenox looked at Claire Adams. “You gave her the key to the town hall?” he asked.
“I did, yes,” said the maid stoutly. “I would do it again.”
“My father suggested that I visit Aunt Claire and explain—ask for her help. He was quite right.”
“We’ve known what Stevens was for a while,” said Claire Adams.
“Sarah Ainsworth,” muttered Elizabeth Watson.
“It’s simply a coincidence that your aunt was working in Hadley’s house, then?” asked Edmund.
“It’s a small village,” Lady Jane said.
Lenox turned to Adelaide Snow. “Miss Snow,” he said, “tell me, how did you come to be involved in all of this?”
“I found Liza in our gamekeeper’s cottage.”
“And then?”
“I asked her instantly whether she was the person who had tried to kill Stevens. She said she wasn’t. I said that was too bad, because if she had been I would have shaken her hand—that I had worked for him briefly, and thought he was the devil. I only wish I’d had the courage to tell my father about him. After that we became friends. I vowed I would help her.”
The Watsons, Calloway, Adelaide Snow—a village was like that, Lenox supposed, with justice elusive for a long time, and then everyone agreeing on it all at once, and converging to help bring it about.
He was about to speak again when there was a knock on the door. It was Houghton’s butler, Lane. Behind him was Pointilleux. Lenox had sent word that he would be here and told him to come to the ball if he’d finished his work.
The young Frenchman bowed to all of the ladies in the room and then said to Lenox, with some urgency, “Two things.”
“Yes?”
“First, this. I find it in his ledger.”
He passed Lenox the folded paper he had been carrying. It was the drawing—the schoolgirl, preserved all these years, its crease so deep that a gentle tug would have ripped it in two. In the bottom corner, in childish scrawl, a signature: Liza Calloway.
“Well found,” said Lenox. “What was the second thing?”
“The victim, Stevens—he is dead.”