“I lost a pound almost instantly,” Clarkson said. He motioned for his plate to be taken away. “One of the usual deceptions they play—a flashy smart-mouth fellow renting a room that isn’t his to rent, disappeared when you return with your things. I may tell you that I wept bitterly over that pound. I had never regretted the loss of a sum of money so much, nor have I since.
“Finally I found a room in a respectable coaching inn. It was ten shillings for six months. A single room. It included breakfast and tea. The landlady, Mrs. Cooley, was one of the dearest people ever to draw breath. The old Chequers, it’s gone now, but then everyone in London knew it, had an arcade, and my room let out straight onto a balcony. There were many days when breakfast and tea were all I had to eat, for I was very stringent with myself, but Mrs. Cooley seemed to have a sixth sense when too much time had passed, and would slip me the remains of an eel pie, or a rind of cheese.”
“A generous person.”
Clarkson nodded. “Surpassingly. At any rate. That was one and a half pounds gone. I hired a suit for five shillings, and some shirts and trousers for another two. Those were mine for a year, with a one-shilling deposit. Then there was the basic expense of keeping alive. No matter how prudent I attempted to be, the pennies would make their way out of my purse. They kept only two hundred forty to the pound in those days, then as now.
“I wore out my shoes at the engineering firms in town—thruppence, that was, having them resoled, in case you thought I was using a figure of speech—but nobody wanted to hire me. There was one place above all that I longed to work, under a Mr. Carroll Cary. His reputation was the highest, both for the quality of his work and the fairness of his terms to his apprentices.
“Needless to say, he was also the most difficult to gain an apprenticeship under. I aimed my sights much lower—cheap engineering firms. I would have worked anywhere. I had several very close calls, moments when I was nearly hired. I regretted their loss almost as much as I regretted that pound.”
Clarkson settled back into his chair as a beefsteak with potatoes came before him. He had a glass of wine, and he swirled it, thinking. Lenox could have stopped him here, but he was curious about the story that had started Clarkson’s troubles—his benign troubles—and whether he had found employment under Mr. Carroll Cary.
“Finally I had only eighteen shillings left. I was a month away from the end of my rent, and whatever Mrs. Cooley’s generosity, it would not have extended to free board. Understandably! We all have to make our way in this world, gentlemen.
“It was almost the New Year,” he went on, “and I don’t mind saying that it was hard, very hard, to see the families together, smell the gooses roasting … and then, suddenly, I had an idea. I trembled at the very thought of it. I knew I couldn’t do it. And at the same moment, I knew I must.
“Old Cary had a granddaughter of whom he was very fond. It was well known—even I, who had no job and had been in London for only five months, knew it. She would play under his desk at work, he took her to the theater—doted upon her.
“I took fourteen of my eighteen shillings to a shop and bought the best materials I could. Solid, gleaming brass. Coils, springs, screws. Then I spent the next nine days in my room, barely leaving. It was freezing—I had no money for coal or firewood—and I worked in my gloves.
“At the end, what I had made fit in the palm of my hand.
“It was a small brass frog. When you turned its lever, it jumped over its own head. It had—oh, I would say seventy pieces or so. When I finished it, I knew I had constructed a masterpiece.
“I left it at Cary’s office with a note: ‘A gift for your granddaughter on the occasion of Christmas, as well as a sample of my work. If I am not hired soon, I shall return to my father’s farm—but I will not regret having made this frog for her. Many happy returns of the season.’ And with it, my name and address.”
“You got the job,” Lenox said.
Clarkson sat back, gazing happily into the past, ignoring his food. “I got the job. Mind you, it wasn’t easy—not at all. The wages were fair, but not high, and the hours were endless, nineteen hours a day, sometimes seven days a week. Usually seven days a week, I daresay. Then again, we knew what hard work was, back then.”
“And all from only five pounds,” Lenox said.
There was a just perceptible roll to Graham’s eye, and Lenox had to stifle a smile. “Well, yes,” said Clarkson. “Why?”
“Have you told your friends this remarkable story of your origins before?” asked Lenox.
“One or two of them, perhaps,” Clarkson said.
One or two of them a day for the past ten years, perhaps. That was the truth.
What Lenox had discovered in Dulwich was that Clarkson’s two sets of friends—on the one hand the fishermen of Dulwich, on the other the diners and oenophiles of London—had begun to worry about the old widower since his retirement.
He was old, rich, alone, and in each of these traits had begun to show some genuine eccentricity. Several had asked him independently to serve upon some charitable board or other and been met with a surprisingly violent rebuke that such things were all swindles. He was growing stingier and stingier, too, disputing small bills with friends who had considerably less money than he did.
On the other hand, he had the habit, especially in his cups, of retelling again and again the story of his first tenuous months in London.
“We thought perhaps we would give him a gentle push,” one of the gentlemen upon the banks at Dulwich had told Lenox—Joshua King. “A chance to look into his own conscience. We thought it might alarm him just a bit. But then perhaps he needed to be alarmed! None of us need a farthing from him. At our age, though, one of the joys of life is passing down what one has earned. Clarkson has been cutting himself off more and more. Why, he fell out with us here over a lost lure just last week—demanded his penny from me. I didn’t have it on me. He left in a fury.”
“Evidently he didn’t understand the message,” Lenox said.
King, the former military man, had looked at him smoothly. “I suppose that you find it in your hands to deliver, in that case.”
The conspiracy extended to four or five friends (there was some overlap in the groups) and one insider—though here Lenox refused to press. He was no informer.
At the conclusion of Clarkson’s tale, Lenox had sat for a moment, and then said, “I think that perhaps the story of your five pounds has made as strong an impression upon your friends as it has upon me, Mr. Clarkson.”
Instantly the engineer looked suspicious. “How’s that, then?”
“What I have gathered in my researches is that these—acts of mischief, you might deem them, belong to one of your friends. He wonders if you are perhaps becoming too stingy, too close, in your retirement, and hopes that you will remember how much five pounds once did for you, and what it could do for others.”
Clarkson had risen out of his chair before this statement was done. He was crimson with fury. “Who!” he cried. “Was it Dinkins, that interfering fool?”
“I do not know that name.”
“Then who!”
Lenox shook his head very slightly. “That is not my place to say.”
“Not your place to say! You took my money!”
Lenox took the two ten-pound notes from the inner pocket of his jacket. He held them up. “I am handing one of these to Mr. Graham, who did most of the work on the case, and whom I would not deprive on account of my own scruples. The other I shall leave here. Please take it in the spirit as your friend’s own emoluments. A man of your means and lack of encumbrances could do an immense amount of good with it.”
Clarkson was furious—still standing, one hand balled. “You’re in league with them,” he said.
“I am not.”
“Is it King? Lewis? Wassner?”
“Good day, Mr. Clarkson,” Lenox said quietly. “There won’t be any further envelopes. You may return to Dulwich at your leisure.”
As they departed, Clarkson continued to call names after them—insults, too, and Lenox suspected that his client (his final client, perhaps!) would remember him as a bounder.
It couldn’t be helped.
Was this what a long, unmarried life meant? He wondered; but the feeling had returned to him throughout the day, recurring again and again more strongly: Elizabeth would only ever be his friend; from this day forward, he would think of her only in those terms; and he would not marry.
It was very easy to make vows at twenty-three, he knew. Still, he intended to keep this one.
As they returned home from Clarkson’s, each with the Challenger underarm, Lenox and Graham discussed their busy day. Lenox was due to have supper out. They passed an old man wearing a Waterloo medal, the first battle for which all participants received a medal of commemoration. His was no doubt still earning him glasses of ale—perhaps too many of them, judging by the broken veins spreading out from his nose onto his cheeks—and it was impossible not to notice that he lifted one leg as if it were heavier than the other, and to wonder about the noble acts of that ancient day; or if a donkey had run over it two weeks before; and to feel guilty for wondering.
He returned home to find Hugh waiting for him, drinking black tea and reading a newspaper, tie elegantly loosened. “Hullo, old fellow,” he said. “Heavens, you’ve been busy.”
“Why are you looking at me as if I had leprosy?” Lenox asked suspiciously.
Hugh grimaced. “It’s the newspaper.” He tossed a copy of the Daily Star onto the coffee table.
Lenox took in the headline as a whole before its words individuated themselves: SON OF SIR EDWARD LENOX LET OPHELIA MURDERER SLIP AWAY, then the subhead, INSPECTOR EXETER HAD COLLARED SUSPICIOUS SWEDE BEFORE INTERFERENCE.
“Interesting,” murmured Lenox.
“They’re fools. Still I thought I would bring it by—best to hear it from a friend.”
Lenox stared at it for a moment and then laughed. “Well! Do you fancy a drink before we go to Lady Wilkes’s? I’m going to have a Scotch.”
Hugh looked as if there might be a catch coming, but then, hands in pockets, simply shrugged. “Go on, then, whisky and soda as usual.” He sighed. “This and the princess returning to Paris in a fortnight—barely aware I’m alive. What a world, Charles. Lacrimae rerum, and all that. Not so much soda—yes—top it up with brandy—I suppose we’re young yet, we may as well play out the string.”