It was a matter of numbers. Lenox had never been much of a fist at maths, but it would have looked something like 3 + x + y, the equation he had in his mind.
He had taken on faith the duke’s word that only three people knew about the painting of Shakespeare: in fact it was three plus the number those three people had told, and the number those people had told. 3 + x + y: It might equal 3 + 0 + 0, to be sure, as the duke was confident, but it might just as easily be 3 + 2 + 9, or 3 + 1 + 600. Who knew?
Or perhaps—and this was what he really suspected—the original number was not three at all. Perhaps it was four.
When he arrived at the duke’s rooms this time, everything had a markedly different feel. There were numerous men in the hallways outside, and several inside as well, all of them solemn, and all of them very busy. Lord Aston’s work.
The duke saw Lenox and dismissed them with a quick word; they looked at Lenox resentfully but left. The bailiff closed the door behind them.
“My apologies, Mr. Lenox,” said the duke. “Solicitors, and men from the House of Lords, and the Palace, and all that.”
And all that. “Of course, Your Grace.”
They sat near the window again. The day wouldn’t give in—still dark, still intermittently wet, and gusting with wind. They could see the ships rocking on the Thames, the taut flags on Tower Bridge.
“I have been contemplating the poem,” said Dorset.
“I have been contemplating the missing picture,” said Lenox.
“Yes, of course. Naturally. Where is it now?”
“In my house, Your Grace, safe under lock and key. I can have it sent back to you any time you choose.”
“Where was it?” the duke asked curiously, as if it were a matter of academic significance to him, not germane to his primary interests.
Lenox took a deep breath. Here was where he felt his youth; he couldn’t fluff this opportunity. “It was nailed to the underside of the bed of your son, Lord Vere.”
The duke looked at him, taken aback. “Corfe? His bed?”
“Yes, sir.”
The part of Lenox that had wondered whether the duke himself might be concealing something more gave way. No. His face now was unmasked and raw, his bafflement real.
“How strange that Craig would place it there. What can explain it?” said the duke.
Lenox held steady. “You mentioned to me, once, your gratitude that your own father lived to a good age, long enough to grow close to his grandchildren.”
Corfe had said the same that morning: Christmases with the old duke. “Yes,” said Dorset. “Why? Speak plain, Lenox.”
“Very well, Your Grace. It is this way.
“When your great-grandfather’s portrait was stolen, the windows in your study were open and it was locked. That led us to believe that it was a thief from outside who took the painting. I believe now that that was misdirection. It would have been nearly impossible to gain access from outside the house. Which means that the thief came from inside the house.”
“Yes—Craig.”
“The key was his, certainly. Was he loyal to Lord Vere?”
The duke put together what Lenox’s questions implied. “Are you accusing my son of something?” he asked. “You had better be very sure of your facts if you are.”
And so Lenox explained the facts as succinctly and linearly and impassively as he could to the duke, who sat opposite him, intimidatingly silent:
first, that he believed that Corfe had been feigning his fever; he had rejected doctor’s visits more than once without any rational explanation, according to separate, equally exasperated accounts from Dorset and from Lady Violet;
second, that he believed Corfe had done so in the hope that he might be alone in the house, but had been thwarted when his parents had delayed their visit to the country to look after him;
third, that he had decided to attempt the theft of the portrait anyway;
fourth, that he was doing so because—and here was the crucial step in the chain of speculation—his grandfather, with whom he had been so close as a child, had told him the whole truth about the Shakespeare, old men being famously careless with their confidences, reckoners, totters-up of debt, and above all, among dukes, in love with their eldest grandsons;
fifth, that Craig had been Lord Vere’s accomplice in all matters, first offering him the key to the study, then, apparently, going to fetch the second portrait, the Shakespeare, too;
and sixth, that his motive in this must be one of two things—either, Lenox said, a maniacal interest in Shakespeare, which he could not disclose to his father without betraying his grandfather’s trust, or (and privately Lenox thought this much more likely) a matter of money.
The duke took each point as a blow, wincing slightly as Lenox spoke. When the detective was done, he stood and walked away across the cell.
When he turned back, something defiant remained in his face. “Corfe has all the money he could ever need—his allowance would put the full income of most households on your street to shame,” he said, with, to Lenox, a remarkable lack of delicacy.
“No doubt that is true.”
“Moreover, he and I are close. If it was the portrait of Shakespeare he wanted, he would have told me. You are wrong, Lenox. I don’t doubt your good faith, but you are wrong. It must be Craig.”
“Perhaps. There is one point I find telling.”
“Well?”
“That Lord Vere was back on his feet the moment you were taken away. Fever gone.”
The duke hesitated. “Fevers come and go.”
“Then look at Craig, Your Grace. Is there anyone on earth for whom he would have betrayed you other than Corfe? Listen to me—I have been delirious with fever, as I imagine you have been. To me it seems implausible that even the deepest fever sleep could remain undisturbed by a painting being hammered to the underside of one’s bed.”
The duke looked at him for a long moment and then slumped back. “It’s not possible,” he muttered. He looked out through the window, thinking. “Did you know the last person executed here was a woman?”
Lenox had not. He did not especially want to know it now. “No, Your Grace.”
“In 1780. Gordon Riots.”
“Oh, right, yes.”
“Gordon himself, of course, went free.”
Another Etonian, Lenox almost muttered, thinking of Lancelot, who was probably leading a riot somewhere right now, and Corfe, too.
Lord Gordon had been a Protestant who stirred up a mob of sixty thousand or so because some very elementary rights had been restored to English Catholics. A fool. His timing could not have been worse: directly after the American revolution, and as the French one was simmering. The Gordon Riots had become a byword for brutality now; Lenox could recall his own father’s anger at the stories of violence in London that year.
“I remember now,” said Lenox. “The three traitors.”
Dorset nodded. “They give you a ghastly kind of introduction when you come here. Or at least they did to me. Wellington was here, which I thought civilized in him. The first thing he mentioned was that there were a hundred and twenty-two executions here between 1388 and 1780. This poor woman apparently being the last.”
“Mm.”
The duke got up and strode around. Lenox noticed that he had the paper with the poem on it clutched tightly in one hand. “Ninety-three beheaded. Ninety-three! Twelve hanged. Three shot. Two burned at the stake. Eleven hanged, drawn, and quartered.
“And one, he told me, with a relish that I didn’t quite like, who had his stomach cut open and his entrails thrown into a fire. After that they castrated him and threw him into the fire. Which must have been a mercy, all things told.”
“Good Lord.”
The duke nodded grimly. “Yes, quite.”
“Well, they’re not going to execute you, Your Grace.”
Dorset waved an irritated hand. “I know that, of course.” Still, he looked as if it weren’t the worst of the options he faced at the present moment.