For the next three days, Lenox barely stirred out of his flat. He read the papers as soon as they arrived, and he and Graham caught up on several missed days of clipping; otherwise, the young detective spent most of his time sitting on the floor of his study, cross-legged, burning matches and dropping them into a glass.
He knew he ought to shake off this malaise, but found he couldn’t.
More than once he thanked goodness for the two kittens they had kept out of the enormous litter Mrs. Huggins had rescued from whatever obscure alley in the East End. He didn’t know where the rest were—he had drawn the line at two—though he had granted the housekeeper permission to keep them in the house until she had found them homes.
Lady Hamilton was taking one; it would be a kitchen cat, Mrs. Huggins reported with gravity and pride. Her harrowing fierceness had returned, and her attention to detail had been redoubled, as if to compensate for the humiliation of being caught using Lenox’s flat as an ad hoc cat sanctuary, but fortunately her demands that he attend to detail had subsided, somewhat, in her distraction over the animals.
The cats they had kept were lovely little creatures, one black and white, the other an even sea-sky gray. The former was called Scout, the latter James.
Lenox had taken no part in the naming. “Cats didn’t even have names where I grew up,” he told Mrs. Huggins.
“They’re more intelligent than dogs, sir.”
“That is patently false.”
She glanced at Graham, who wisely kept his silence. “The late Mr. Huggins said that the average cat was twice as smart as the average dog.” She paused, then added, by way of concession, “But the smartest dogs are very smart, I will grant you.”
“Mr. Huggins was fond of cats?” Lenox asked.
She almost smiled. “Passionately fond, sir. He grew up with them.”
Lenox softened. “Well, name them whatever you like—only I shan’t abide by the names, that’s all. They’ll be ‘cat’ to me, that’s it.”
“Just as you please, sir.”
He immediately showed himself a liar—and in his three days sitting on his study floor spent most of his time calling out their names, enticing them with bits of string, watching them turn their stumbles into lithe rolls. They had alert little eyes, exploring paws. Their minds were so transparent at moments; such a secret at others. It was a pleasure to watch. A welcome distraction, too. They ate splendidly—Mrs. Huggins planned out their diets as carefully as if they were dignitaries visiting from an adversarial country.
In these three days, the evidence against Pond accumulated. It was Exeter who discovered in a second survey of the young clerk’s flat a key that eventually proved to fit the trunk marked HMS GALLANT, G957.
After that, Lenox removed himself from the investigation of Pond. Instead, he sat in his study, striking matches, trying to piece together on his own the elements of a case that still felt unresolved to him, trying to join them together. But perhaps all cases felt this way, and he was only inexperienced. He could have used a mentor to tell him. That was the disadvantage of a profession one invented as one went along.
On the third day, he had a visitor. It was Edmund. There had been others (Hugh had been by twice, Lucia once; Elizabeth was in Paris, where her husband was on leave) but none so welcome.
He watched Lenox wave out a match, then said, “You’re going to burn the whole building down.”
“Ha, that’s where you’re wrong. They’re those safety matches.”
“Are they! Let me have a go.”
For their entire lives, every soul in England had used lucifer matches, which struck with any friction—a great virtue and a great vice, since they could be carried loose and struck against a boot, a wall, anything really, in cold or in wet. That was convenient; until one caught fire in your jacket pocket, when it became very extremely inconvenient.
But now some ingenious person had invented the safety match, which came in a small box made of card and needed to be struck specifically against that box to be lit. The innovation had swept certain parts of society—the navy, which considered fire even more diabolical than France, outlawed lucifer matches immediately—and there was already a noticeable decline in the number of London house fires. And singed hair, more trivially, but not unpleasantly for people who had hair.
Soon Edmund (a devotee of the lucifer match, as befit his country preferences) was on the floor next to Lenox, legs stretched out in front of him and crossed, lighting matches himself.
“We’ll have to send someone out for more,” said Charles.
“I am willing to incur that risk,” Edmund said, striking two at once and gazing at them with childlike joy.
“How were Mother and Father?”
Ed looked up. “Eh? Oh, fine. Actually, I stopped by to warn you. Father is coming to London this evening.”
Lenox looked up from the match. “Is he? Why? Parliament?”
“No, he doesn’t give a fig about Parliament. He’s coming to see you.”
“Why?”
Edmund shrugged. “That’s all he told me.”
Lenox pondered this in silence for some time. “What did you do, the two of you?”
“We rode every inch of the property together. I must say, it’s very large.”
“You were always clever.”
Edmund grinned. “Shut up. Anyhow, I learned a great deal. I was taking notes the entire time—not that he told me to, but I couldn’t keep up otherwise, and wouldn’t you know it, at just the right moment, he happened to have a notebook and a piece of charcoal in his bag. A plum coincidence.”
Lenox smiled. That was their father all over. “So what did you learn?”
“The name of every tree, every rock. He told me the stories of each tenant, going back to his boyhood. He took me right up to the line where Robinson’s property begins and showed me the stone wall there—and told me about our great-great-great-grandfather building it himself, with the help of hired laborers. 1688, he said, and showed me a little scratching by some fellow called Jacob, who just decided to leave his name and the year there. That was a queer feeling, I can tell you. You could imagine his hand doing it. Probably nobody has spoken his name in a hundred and fifty years.”
Lenox realized in that moment that his older brother was very young. He had never really thought of him like that before; or had, but not really, not truly. “You’ll do a very, very good job, Ed,” he said.
“I’ll try anyhow.”
“You will.”
In a low voice, Edmund said, “He didn’t mention—well, it, you know. Not at all. Except once. He said that we had to take care of Mother. And I said of course we would. And he said, no, I didn’t understand—we had to take care of her. I didn’t quite understand.”
Charles hesitated, and then nodded. “There’s time.”
Edmund nodded, too. “Yes. Molly and I talked about it.” He sighed. “Anyway, tell me about this case, would you? Even out in the country, there’s nothing else anyone will talk of. And they all know you’re involved, somehow.”
They sat for a while. Edmund moved on from playing with the matches to playing with the kittens (a fair little encapsulation in twenty minutes of Lenox’s previous three days) and they talked about the strange case. Charles described watching Pond die, and found that relating the story took away a little bit of its power over his imagination; he had been gazing into those eyes more often than he liked.
“My goodness,” said Edmund.
“Worse things happen at sea.”
“Not all that much worse,” said Edmund.
“Yes, you have a point. I always wondered what they meant by that.”
“People getting flogged and drowning and eaten by sharks, probably.”
“That does sound worse,” Lenox said. “Being eaten by a shark sounds just about as unlucky a go as you can have.”
“I should add the shark people to my prayers at night.”
“Who’ll they replace?”
Edmund frowned. Both brothers had a strict one-in-one-out policy on their evening prayers, dating to the age of nine and six, when they had wanted to get through them as quickly as possible—it wasn’t very Christian, their mother said, but Edmund and Charles had maintained over the years that it kept each conscious of the people for whom he was grateful or of whom he was particularly solicitous.
“Terrance acted as if I were an intruder all weekend. I think he really thought I might steal the silver. Two months’ probation from my prayers wouldn’t hurt him.”
After Edmund had gone, Charles spent the rest of the afternoon dreading his father’s arrival. He was sure it would be—what, some kind of plea? To find a more serious career. To keep his name out of the papers.
He thought with a kind of sickness in his stomach about their cousin Lord Billingsley’s words at Lady Hamilton’s ball.
To distract himself, he spent his time organizing his notes from the Pond case, including the clippings he had made from it. The petechiae still bothered him; the shoes; he wanted to know more, more. Something was still bothering him.
At six o’clock the bell rang. Graham answered, and ushered his father in. Lenox had dressed himself—his father, as always in London, was the last word in correct attire. He had often said to his sons that while in London, he was also every single person in Markethouse, the ones he represented in Parliament; that was his duty. He dressed quite to his era, the perfectly tied cravat, the silk hat, the cane.
“Hullo, Father,” said Lenox.
“There you are, Charles. Listen, are you free?”
“Free? For the evening?”
“For five days.”
“For five days.”
Edward Lenox took a folded sheet of paper from his inner breast pocket. “I’ll tell you a secret. In my heart of hearts, I’ve always wanted to see Russia.”
He smiled, and Charles felt about nine again, the immense, oceanic contentment one found in one’s father’s smile, one’s father’s love.
“Russia!” said Charles, his voice high pitched even to his own ears. “You mean, to travel there?”
“Only if you can spare the time.”
“Spare the—I can of course spare the time, of course, Father.”
“Good. I’ve booked us to leave by the ten o’clock train from Waterloo this evening. You’ll be back by Saturday next, as if you’d never been gone.” He looked down at his feet. “No doubt someone will be able to watch these cats.”