He drew the duke’s undivided attention with this comment. Indeed, there was a hunger in his look, an avidity—he had traveled many years alone with this secret.
“An idea.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“No man who has seen the clue has yet solved it. Perhaps you may be the one to do so. Nothing would relieve me more.”
Lenox removed the ancient letter from his breast pocket and returned it to the duke. “Perhaps the first thing you could do is to tell me something about your great-grandfather. In particular I am confused as to the order of succession. He was the thirteenth duke, yet you are the fifteenth.”
Dorset nodded. “It is a sad story. My grandfather, Clarence, to whom this letter was addressed, died of scarlet fever at the age of just thirty-one. His wife died at the same time. And in fact the author of the letter—my great-grandfather—followed them quickly to the grave. Of grief, I have sometimes fancied, for he was only sixty-three. He had no other children and was a widower.”
“But he had a grandson.”
“Yes, my own father. He was only three months old at the time his parents contracted the fever, but was quarantined. Needless to say, he survived.”
“An orphan.”
“He was raised well loved and well tended by his mother’s parents at Stowe Lodge and lived to a healthy old age himself, long enough even to become close with Corfe and Violet. They often went to stay with him at Dorset Castle. We only lost him four years ago. I think that very good of God, after his own parents died so young.”
Lenox did some quick math and calculated that the duke’s father must have been seventy-seven or seventy-eight. This explained why there had been four sons but only three dukes within the family in the past seventy years.
“I see.”
“When my father turned eighteen, our family solicitor gave him this letter, along with several important family possessions of traditional value, in a sealed box.”
“But he never heard the story of the portrait firsthand.”
Dorset shook his head regretfully. “No. He was scarcely a year old when he was passed into the care of his grandparents. It would have saved us an immense amount of trouble.”
“So when your great-grandfather refers to himself and his son knowing the secret that he will not spell out…”
“A secret lost to history.”
Lenox nodded. “And your father? What happened when he eventually received the letter?”
“He was eighteen. He was at Gonville and Caius then.” This was one of the colleges of Cambridge. “Shakespeare became a deep interest of his, as it has of mine. You see our position: If we make the portrait public, given that it contains a clue—”
“Yes. If the riddle were public, any unscrupulous gold hunter in Christendom might find the play, and hold it hostage for whatever sum they chose.”
They were standing about five feet apart, and Dorset nodded. “Exactly. I take it as a sacred trust that this should not happen.”
Lenox wanted to return to the clue, momentarily. First, he said, “Your great-grandfather’s papers of research—have they been preserved?”
The duke nodded. “Yes. My father spent much time organizing and examining them. I have done the same when I had respite from my public duties.”
“And what do they reveal?”
“There is no clue either to the origin of the portrait or the specific play that was found. He was too canny to commit either to print, I suppose. As to the play, there are rumors, of course.”
Lenox knew these from the reading Duncan Jones had given him. The legends of lost Shakespeare plays were ten-a-penny—to begin with, those that had very definitely been performed by Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, but of which no text existed. (For instance, Love’s Labors Won—a sequel to Love’s Labors Lost.) Others were only rumors. The tradition had it that there was a play about Queen Elizabeth herself, as well as a variety of plays with tantalizing names: Cardenio, Double Falsehood, Fair Em, Lancelot, Lord Cromwell. Men spent their lives in dusty bookshops and forgotten libraries hoping to unearth one of them. Thus far none had succeeded.
Lenox nodded. “And so now we come to the poem.”
The duke smiled. “Yes, the poem. A trifle that I have spent many years of my life contemplating. A rhyme scheme of AABB, one of the simplest possible. Iambic tetrameter. Seven syllables, eight, seven, eight.”
“Forty miles from Charing Cross,” Lenox said.
“Forty miles from Charing Cross,” the duke said, and nodded.
“I take it that you or your forebears have followed the instructions.”
The Duke nodded again. “Yes. With a very considerable margin of error built in.”
“What do you mean?”
“In 1822, my father used a compass to draw a forty-mile radius around Charing Cross. Then he spent a month traveling the terrain by horse himself, allowing two miles on either side—anything thirty-eight to forty-two miles from Charing Cross.”
“He did not forget the apple’s toss, then,” said Lenox.
The duke shook his head. “Believe me, we have not.”
“And what did he find?”
“There were around fifty fields that matched the description in the poem. He took his steward, Crawford, under his advisement, for he was a methodical man, and together they made a search, though my father never told him for what.”
“What did they do?”
“First, they looked for markers. Wherever there was anything resembling a marker, they dug—my father spending very freely on local laborers and on the men to whom the land belonged, explaining that he was chasing an old Dorset cross, not especially valuable in itself but of great worth to our family.”
“I wonder that they believed that.”
“Perhaps they did not,” said the duke.
There was a knock on the door, and then it opened, which, since the duke had not answered, was rather surprising—until Lenox remembered they were in a prison.
It was a middle-aged maid in a coarse dress, bearing a tea tray. Behind her was the bailiff, holding the keys. “Mr. Ward sent tea through, from the Port of Whitby downstairs.”
“Ah, good of him, thank you,” said the duke. The maid came in and set the tea tray with its small sandwiches and scones down on a table. “That reminds me that I have not asked you to sit, Mr. Lenox. Will you join me? It is not quite White’s.”
The young detective smiled. “It is more interesting.”
By the time they were alone again, the door shut behind them, each had a cup of tea. The wind whistled through the stone turrets.
“To return to my story: They found nothing, my father and his steward. Nothing at all. My father once told me that he had not once ever felt even close.”
“Was he bitter about it?”
“Oh, no. But he was certainly determined that I should continue to look.”
Lenox nodded. “And the painting itself? Have you had it inspected?”
Dorset nodded. “Numerous times. Inside, outside, backside, frontside, framed, out of frame, the frame itself.”
“And?”
“No clue about the play has come from it. It is obviously of the right age—various experts have attested to that. They have also noted that its sitter—”
“Is Catholic,” said Lenox.
Dorset smiled faintly. “Well done. Yes. That is why the picture was hidden in John Shakespeare’s house.”
In his Latin dictionary, Lenox had looked up the phrase Nomen Mariae, BV. “In the name of Mary, Blessed Virgin,” he said.
“Yes. The lily in the painting is her emblem. They are Catholic references that anyone of Shakespeare’s own time would have known instantly.”
Lenox nodded. He put down his teacup. “Very good, Your Grace.”
The duke looked alarmed. “Are you leaving?”
“I have a solid idea of what we’re working from now,” said Lenox. “But I still must find that picture.”
“Why? You know about the play.”
Lenox was tempted to elaborate—but nothing good could come of talking before he fully knew what he was saying. “Your Grace,” he said, “I wonder still whether your initial call upon my services began with an error.”
“How is that?”
“Does it not strike you as implausible,” said Lenox, “that someone would know of the existence of this portrait and then steal the wrong picture?”
Dorset frowned. “I assumed they sent a thief, who bungled the job.”
Lenox tilted his head. “It is possible. Anyhow, I am very eager to learn more about your valet, and I am stubbornly still hopeful that finding the portrait will help us. If you excuse me, I promise to send you word of my progress this evening.”