As in most country houses, the dogcart at Lenox House was in perhaps eight times greater use than the carriage. But the carriage was here: now painted a glossy maroon, Lenox arms on the door, easing down slightly earthward on whichever side it was stepped into. Four black horses, groomed and beautiful, ridden out every morning by Hitchens and his stableboy two by two, were ready to pull it.
Lenox and Graham went together to pick up Sir Riley Callum, the consulting surgeon Courtenay had recommended. He stepped from the train, and Lenox’s first thought was that in looks there was virtually nothing more you could have asked of him: his white-haired head might have been the model for a marble bust, and he stood marvelously erect, a man with delicate papery skin and keen gray eyes that seemed to survey and anatomize the world with bloodless precision.
They might as well have taken the dogcart for him, though. He was closeted with Lenox’s father for about ninety minutes, spoke briefly with Lenox’s two parents, politely but firmly declined Lenox’s company on the return trip to the train station, and left.
Lenox was in the ballroom, vast and empty, sitting with his legs up in a window and staring at the clean-shorn hedges of the formal gardens, when his mother came down. “Nothing to be done, he says.”
Lenox stood up. “That’s all he said?”
“He concurred with the opinion of the other doctors your father has seen.” She bit her lip. Her arms were crossed. “No surgical options.”
“None?” said Lenox, stunned.
“He offered some palliative advice. Though your father won’t stop smoking his pipe, of course.”
“No,” Lenox said in an indistinct voice. More plausible that the sun should stop rising in the east. He looked up at his mother. “Shall I cancel Dr. McConnell?”
“Hadn’t you better? Your father will see him, but there doesn’t seem much point.”
He didn’t, though. Something in his mother at the moment she said that—well, he had never known her bright, lively face so drained of life. He decided he would keep the appointment.
What a mystery one’s parents were! Lenox would have said that his mother was by far the better equipped for this kind of loss—she was so universally beloved by her friends, so interested in life, so alive herself—and yet he saw now that in fact he had been exactly wrong. His father would have borne the loss of his mother. He would have been shattered, but he also didn’t have quite so strong a sense that his life was important. Perhaps it came of being the steward of a title and of land. If it had been she who received this diagnosis, Sir Edward would have known that his loss was only personal and, however inwardly bereft, carried on.
But for Emma Lenox, all of life was personal. The way she teased, her easy gift for being in a room—all these warm traits would be adrift on cold waters without her husband, Lenox saw for the first time.
The next morning, Graham and Lenox sat in the carriage again. They were, as usual, discussing the crimes in London. The first thing they did was stop into the telegraph office—very new—to see if anything had arrived from Mrs. Huggins, who was under strict orders to forward anything from Scotland Yard, regardless of expense.
Nothing there, however.
As they waited on a bench near the small train station, with its pink shutters pulled back so that the newsagent and the small tea shop looked appealingly open, inviting, Lenox said, “I’ve been thinking about the letters.”
Indeed, he had read them over and over, until he had made copies because he was afraid he would rub the newsprint too much to read.
“Have you, sir?”
“Is he really trying to commit perfect crimes, do you think?”
Lenox’s valet was never one to reply before thinking, and he sat for some time, pondering the question. For his part, Lenox valued these silences, which often allowed questions he had to resonate in his own mind.
“Why do you ask, sir?” said Graham at last.
“Because!” Lenox burst out. “Think about every article you and I have clipped in the last seven months. What did they all have in common?”
“Sir?”
“None of them was a perfect crime! No—they were all driven by money or anger. Every single one.”
“And yet he has written these letters, sir.”
“Come at it from another angle. Why has he killed women? They are infinitely scarcer—men pass in and out of London all the time, men are passed stupefied by drink in every corner of the city. Slit a man’s neck and walk away. That is the perfect crime.”
“On the other hand, that very fact suggests an obsessiveness, sir. He has chosen two women of similar health and appearance.”
A loose conflagration of birds burst from a tree nearby, in ragged unison. “True,” said Lenox. “But what about these lurid flowers, the Thames ‘Ophelia,’ showy, literary, guaranteed to attract the press’s attention. Sheer misdirection. He has already done it once: the HMS Gallant.”
Graham, who looked less convinced, said, “Perhaps, sir. You think there is some base motive involved here, then, and all of this is—window dressing, sir, I suppose you would call it.”
Lenox reflected on the question. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “What’s funny is that you are right about the two women. I retain in my mind the same image of the murderer I had after the first letter.
“Perhaps both things are true—that he is the arrogant, misused person of the letters, and also that he is acting out of some other motive. Because the letters are too convincing. They are too well in character to be false, to be truly false.”
Just then a whistle sounded, and around a curve of poplar trees the train appeared, chuffing black smoke. The few souls on the station’s platform stepped forward, as people waiting for trains always do a moment or two early.
Lenox stood up. He had the certainty in his breast that they were getting closer and closer—from Sussex!—than the police were in London.
It was odd. Almost for the first time since Oxford, he believed that perhaps this was what he was meant to do, after all. Some combination of reasoning, psychological insight, and curiosity (some combination of qualities that he couldn’t even name, strictly) made him fit for this work, and perhaps for no other.
Youth is dramatic, his mother would have replied to that. He smiled faintly to himself, though visibly enough that Graham looked at him, at a slant.
Only four people stepped off the train at Markethouse. It was clear which one of them was the doctor from London—for one thing, he stepped from the first-class carriage, while the rest bundled out of third, and for another, he wore a high white collar and a cravat and carried a leather medical bag, while the rest immediately set about offering proof to any interested party that they were in an advanced state of inebriation.
“Dr. McConnell?” said Lenox, going forward with his hand outstretched. “Thank you for making the journey. I’m Charles Lenox.”
“Delighted to meet you,” said the doctor, extending his own hand and smiling. “A very pleasant journey, too, all in all.”
“Here’s the carriage to shoot us along. Can my valet take your bag?”
“This? No, it barely weighs a thing.”
Lenox’s first impression of Thomas McConnell was that he liked him enormously. It was hard not to. He was tall and extremely handsome, with strong features and hair that he wore in a fringe below his collar. His eyes sparkled with intelligence and interest, and he emanated goodwill, amiability, a readiness to be pleased. For a doctor to retain his decency seemed nearly impossible—death, paraded before you every moment, in all its dull spangled variety. Yet here was a person who had, one felt.
His accent was fairly English now, slipping home to Scotland here and there for certain words. On the way to Lenox House (Graham sat on the box with the driver, rather than inside the carriage), he listened attentively as Lenox described the little he knew of his father’s case. He also accepted the report of Sir Riley Callum, which had arrived that morning by mail.
The doctor read this carefully. The trip was a short one, and they were turning past Carter at the gatehouse when McConnell closed the report. “Does your father seem to be in good spirits?” he asked, his face serious and attentive.
“I think so.”
“Mm.” The doctor tapped his door where his hand lay, thinking. Then he turned to Lenox. “In any case, I will spend some time with him.”
“You do not think of cutting today, then,” said Lenox, his heart sinking. He had hoped that McConnell would dismiss Callum’s report as pessimistic.
“It is almost always impossible to say without seeing the patient,” Dr. McConnell said gently.
They drew down the avenue; the clouds above were black, ominous, and as they went inside, the first drops of a heavy rain began to fall on the marble steps leading into Lenox House.