Lenox measured his words. “My friend Cabot tells me that he thinks a hundred years hence all executions will have ceased. In his opinion we will be viewed as barbarians for having had them at all.”
“By 1953. Lord Cabot?”
“Indeed, your Grace.”
“A sound man, if a liberal.” The duke wandered around his capacious cell. Outside, the hushed chattering of the black-cloaked men continued, just audible. But the duke was not concerned with them at the moment. “If we follow your theory,” he said suddenly, “why was Craig unscrewing the portrait of Shakespeare?”
There was a gleam of hope in his eye—but Lenox had anticipated this question. “I think Lord Vere believed he needed it. The second stanza of the poem.”
The duke read it over. “Well?”
“The third line: It would have been easy to mistake it, behind the name my portrait gloss, as an indication that there was another clue about the lost play behind Shakespeare’s own portrait.”
“Oh, I see,” said the duke, pacing again. “Yes, that is possible, I suppose.”
Then he muttered something to himself that sounded like “Kent.” Lenox wondered: Was everything Shakespearean in the end? Because he looked like Lear now, certainly, this hopelessly rich and privileged gentleman in his cell.
“Your Grace?”
“Kent, I said. Everybody knows Kent, don’t they—apples, cherries, hops, and women.”
Lenox smiled politely. It was a famous line of Dickens’s. “Not much else.”
“No. It must be a small churchyard.”
“Yes,” said Lenox.
The duke seemed to have accepted the detective’s theory whole cloth now. He read the poem again.
But then, all at once, he shook his head violently. “It still doesn’t make sense. I told you—Corfe has an allowance that a prince would find generous. He is not a gambler—nor is there a woman I know of—and in either case, there is no financial situation from which I would be unable to extract him. We could afford ten ruinations over. He is my heir.”
Lenox nodded. “Perhaps he is embarrassed.”
“No. He would never risk this embarrassment rather than coming to me. I told him when he was five that there was nothing I could not get him out of.”
Perhaps that was the problem, Lenox reflected. “Then it must be that he is interested in Shakespeare.”
The duke shook his head. “I know my son. He doesn’t care a whit about William Shakespeare.”
That was curious. “Might he have been Craig’s accomplice, then?” he suggested.
The duke rejected that idea, too, though. “After all these years?”
“Perhaps he just learned of it.”
“If Craig wanted money, there were a million things he could have stolen without my even noticing. He has a key to the jewel room at Dorset Castle, for pity’s sake. Anyway, I trust him—trusted him—implicitly.”
“And Shakespeare?”
“If there has ever been a person less interested in Shakespeare in all of Great Britain than Corfe, it was Alexander Craig. The only thing I ever knew him to read was the army gazette.”
“I see.”
And indeed Lenox was troubled by this assessment of the duke’s household, by its head. His mind turned the facts over but could not quite make them add up. Something was missing.
Someone, too. The maid, Maggie McNeal.
The duke sighed. “Will you wait to dig until I am free? We may share the credit,” he said. “It is just that it should be so, given that you have sleuthed out the poem.”
Lenox was shocked at this offer. He admitted as much. “You surprise me, Your Grace.”
The duke gave him a tired glance, but his voice was strong, unbowed. “Then we are both experiencing a day filled with surprise,” he said drily.
“If you wish, Your Grace. Of course. I had planned to sit down with an atlas myself later today and begin investigating the churchyards of Kent. But I will naturally not dig without you.”
Unless you are imprisoned for life, he thought to himself.
“Find out everything you can. Just keep going. As for Corfe—and Craig—all of that, leave in my hands.”
“I have one request,” Lenox said.
“Not money?”
“No,” said Lenox coldly. “It is that if we should search for the play together, I may be allowed a friend to come along.”
The 15th Duke of Dorset looked at him for a long while. This had been his own secret for many years. But he nodded. “As you please,” he said.
Lenox returned to Hampden Lane not sure how to feel. What had he solved? Who had he helped? He ate lunch, a consoling cream of tomato soup, slices of cheese with hard biscuit, and a glass of ginger ale, the meal he asked for when he wanted sleep but before he knew he wanted sleep.
He napped once more before the low warm fire in the grate, this time with a novel on his chest. He dreamed that he was a child again.
When he woke this time, he could tell that it was midafternoon. There was a glimmer of yellow light in the branches of the trees, the sun at last showing itself. He heard a knock at the front door and realized it was this that had woken him.
The knock had apparently attracted Lancelot, too, because Lenox heard a noise like a large suitcase falling from a cliff on the stairs.
Lancelot and Lady Jane appeared in his study at once, her hand protectively on his head. She held a newspaper. Evidently it had been her at the door. “Hello, Charles,” she said.
He stood up. “Hello. What are you reading?”
“The afternoon Times. I have missed the Dunmow Flitch again,” she said.
“What is the Dunmow Flitch?” he asked, still blinking his way out of sleep.
She had walked over to the fire and was prodding it, paper in one hand. “Charles, really?” she said chidingly, looking up at him.
“Am I supposed to know?”
“The winners this year were a Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Cheese. Though numerous couples received the side of bacon, obviously.”
“Jane, if you value my sanity, explain what you are talking about, or leave.” He glanced over at his cousin, who was rooting through his desk. “Preferably with Lancelot.”
She smiled and rose. “Every Whit Monday in Essex they award a handsome side of bacon to any couple that presents themselves and swears on a Bible that they have not broken their marriage vows or quarreled for at least the space of a year and a day. The Times has a full column on it.”
“That is one of the silliest things I ever heard,” said Lenox. He sat back down and suddenly realized that for the first time in days he was in a fair mood.
“Charles! Where is your sense of romance!”
“Anyhow it is not closely associated with slabs of dead pig.”
“Think how easily James and I should win. We scarcely see each other three months a year, and I cannot recall quarreling with him during those. Poor Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Cheese would stand no chance against us.”
“What did they do to win?”
“They wrote a poem. Would you like to hear it?”
“Less than anything.”
“Oh Mrs. Cheese, it begins, who brights when I awaken—”
“Jane, I beg of you.”
“Celebrate our love with me, and with this side of bacon.”
“What meter is that?”
“It’s only fifty lines—shall I go on?”
“No.”
“Almost all of it is bacon themed.”
Lenox glared at her. “Leave me alone, I beg of you.”
“Lancelot, come tell your cousin about the zoo. I know from my long friendship with him that he’ll want to hear every last detail you can offer about the health of Obaysch the hippopotamus.”