Now, just past three on the afternoon of that busy day, he and Graham sat at the table with the broken spectacles, discussing their potential courses of action.
“Do you think we really have a month, then, sir?” Graham asked Lenox ruminatively.
“I rather do. He has been fairly loyal to his word thus far.” Lenox tilted his head, thinking. “He seems to be of a precise set of mind, in the way that madmen occasionally are.”
“Fanatical.”
“Yes.”
Lenox stood up from the breakfast table and stretched, a little tired, then wandered toward the other end of the room, where the fireplace, bookshelves either side of it, was burning low. He poked at it; the great pastime of anyone who has ever wished to be lost in thought.
He was often alone in this room. The liquor stand was nearby. Loose correspondence, too little organized, but which he had ordered the servants not to touch, sat upon a coffee table. Above the mantel there was a cup he had won many distant years before in school—third place in his form’s boxing contest—along with a rough-woven bag of shag tobacco, a book turned facedown, and a small oil of Lenox House. It was by a Frenchman. Two figures walked along the far end of the old home’s pond, Lenox’s grandfather and his grandfather’s brother, inseparable young companions sixty years before when it was painted. Both very old men now.
There were a pair of very comfortable red armchairs in front of the fireplace; he sank down into one of them.
A month was a dangerous amount of time.
“I say,” Lenox observed suddenly, “the rug is gone. The rug in front of the hearth.”
Graham, who every fifteen days or so let slip a small joke at his employer’s expense, said, “I hope you are not overtaxing your powers of detection at just the moment you may need them most, sir.”
“Mrs. Huggins,” Lenox muttered bitterly. He liked the rug. When you pushed your feet through it, the bristles stayed up stiff and lighter colored, until you smoothed them back down into their natural state of dark blue. It helped a chap cogitate. “The perfect crime, though, Graham. Think on that one.”
“Sir?”
“The crime—as an end in itself. With no motive but itself. With no reason for existing but itself, the pleasure of its own symmetry and design. There’s an evil thing. Murder for money or love or power is also evil, of course, but murder for itself belongs to some different class of person. I don’t like it.”
Graham, who had risen and was leaning, though somehow his leaning conveyed respectfulness, perhaps in the way his hands were clasped behind his back, or in the attentive tilt of his head, against the wall, absorbed this reflection. “No, sir.”
The idea of the perfect crime was familiar to anyone who, like Lenox, was a student of sensational fiction. It had been especially popular in the rags this last decade, Lenox had noted; he wondered whether their murderer was a reader of the penny bloods, which gave you eight pages a week for a penny, an ongoing story contained in their sheets. (The more modern term, slowly coming into use, was “penny dreadful,” but to Lenox, who had started reading them at the age of twelve, they would always be the bloods.) Even sober, middle-class novels had begun to engage with the idea of murder. Dickens himself was at work on a mystery, people murmured.
Lenox’s brother had said something about this very subject a few weeks before. “They don’t hang in public anymore.”
“So?”
Edmund had shrugged. They’d been in the dining room at Parliament, where his brother was a backbencher, and content to remain such all his life, looking in on the occasional vote when he was really needed. (He had already avowed to anyone who listened that he would never hold office in the cabinet. On the other hand, he knew a great deal about the husbandry of pigs. He took his role as heir seriously—or perhaps it came to him naturally, the way the city felt more and more as though it was coming to Charles naturally.)
“It’s different than it was thirty years ago,” Edmund had said, running a fork through his boiled cabbage, the terraces by the river crowded with other MPs. “Men walking home across Hyde Park from the countinghouse, tipping their hats to each other, don’t want to see a gallows being dismantled.”
“No more Rotten Row.”
“Right. England’s bloody days are past. She’s an empire now, to be managed.”
Lenox let that pass, though he knew, always a better student than his brother, that empires could be bloody enough. He smiled. “So then, murder moves into the drawing room.”
Edmund laughed. “Yes. It’s a capital way to fall asleep, a murder mystery. I like Bulwer-Lytton myself. Decent tales, those.”
“Decent murder tales,” Lenox grumbled.
In the stories that circulated through Britain about the so-called perfect crime, the criminal was nearly always from the Continent—an evil, mustache-twirling aristocrat, a Bluebeard.
Not a clerk, not that he remembered.
Lenox and Graham talked through the specifics of the case for some time—the shilling in the woman’s hand, the flowers, the obscuring, almost mocking thickness of the white makeup upon her face, the spectacles, the dryness of the plank upon which she was laid, the trunk on Walnut Island, and of course the letters, which now numbered two. They read these over again carefully, studying them for details.
“How will you proceed, sir?” Graham asked at last.
“Walnut Island. There’s a warehouse in Ealing where the evidence of unsolved crimes is kept. Tomorrow morning I intend to go there. You’ll come?”
“Only too happy, sir, if I’m not required here.”
Lenox waved a dismissive hand. “I would like to go back to Bankside, too.”
“I thought it was the first murder you were fixed upon solving, sir,” said Graham.
“It is. But they cannot stop me from thinking about the second one. Or walking a public part of the riverside. Everyone in London will be doing the same when the papers come out.”
“True, sir.”
“Why the Challenger?” Lenox asked in a voice soft enough that it was clear he was talking three-quarters to himself. “And these two women: Where in London do you come across two wellborn women to murder, who will not be missed?”
For Mayne had been very clear: every report of a woman’s disappearance in this city since the start of the year had been tracked down and resolved, for better or worse.
Graham, silent, shook his head. The air was cool; below them, in the park, the little flowers of spring moved imperceptibly in the afternoon breeze. There were clouds passing across the heavens. The authority and high-spiritedness of the noonday sun was dissipating; a moment to feel things, to ask of oneself what it all meant, the white loveliness of the sky an answer and an evasion at once, sufficient, never enough.
It was at this sort of time that Lenox’s thoughts always turned to Elizabeth.
“I’ve kept you from your duties,” Lenox said at last, after they had both stayed in silent reflection for some time. “And you no doubt need some time after your day—exhausting, I know, I know. Apologies.”
“Not at all, sir.”
“Could you ask Clara or Mrs. Huggins to ship in some more tea for me, before you retire? I want to sit here and gather my thoughts before I dine out.”
“Of course, sir.”
When he was alone, Lenox made a few fruitless lists, tore them up, scattered their remains in the fire. He leaned back and traced his fingertips along the spine of a random book on the side table next to his chair. The material was cloth, and it felt like trying to run his hand over the case: the very slight changes in texture, the very slight rises and dips, barely perceptible. Murder was a dramatic, violent act; the chase after the murderer was a matter of nuance and feel.
With that thought in mind, he took the paper notebook back up and started to write random words, connecting them with lines.
The shilling. The spectacles. Walnut Island. The Thames. Field. Mayne. Bankside. The tide. Nathaniel Butler. Death. Women. Brown hair. Strangulation.
Mrs. Huggins appeared with one of her trays.
“Ah, Mrs. Huggins,” he said, “thank you.”
“By all means, Mr. Lenox.”
“Do you know when I can expect my rug back?”
“By tomorrow.”
“Will it still bristle up in that pleasing way, or will it be softer?”
“Sir?”
He smiled. “Never mind. Thank you, Mrs. Huggins.” (In a moment of levity early in their relationship, he had once called her “Madame de La Huggins,” and her responding frown, though unaccompanied by reproach, had been so deep that it threatened to permanently contort her face.) “What is Graham doing?”
“Polishing silver, sir.”
Lenox winced. “Do tell him to take a break, would you?”
“If you wish, sir.”
“Thank you.”
“Of course, sir,” she said, and withdrew.
Lenox liked his tea smoky, and he took a deep draft, feeling it warm his chest. He ate quickly and happily.
His eyes began to feel lazy and soft; the fire flickered; and before long, with a mostly empty teacup cradled in two hands in his lap, he had nodded off to sleep.
He was woken by a bell. In the quick lurch from sleep, he felt momentarily confused, glanced down at his list, imagined that it was Mayne—didn’t know what to think—but then remembered that of course it must be his mother, and stood up, happy at the prospect of her arrival.