Early the next morning—before six—his carriage was winding its way south. He was on his way to Bedlam after all. He couldn’t abide seeing the duke ensconced again at Dorset House, master of all he surveyed; not yet, anyhow. There was more to be done about Alexander Craig’s death, but he would not be doing it today.
He slept for some of the drive. The journey was quicker than usual because of the time, forty minutes perhaps. As it passed he read the papers by the light of the rising sun. Nobody challenged the narrative that it had been an unfortunate accident. A few made hay of the history of the Tower—the Princes, the nine-day Queen, Anne Boleyn—but that was it.
This was the power of being a duke, he supposed, folding the papers as they came to the gate of the asylum.
When he checked in at Bedlam, Dr. Hansel greeted him with mild surprise. “You are here.” The old doctor smiled. They were in a small inner courtyard dominated by an ancient oak tree, putatively the preserve of the doctor since it lay just beside his office—but even here they could hear strange moans and screeches. “What brings you?”
“I wanted to ask in person about Belmont.”
Hansel nodded. “Never a patient who attracted my notice. I had a look at his papers after you wired.”
There were a thousand patients or more here. “What was his situation?”
“Committed for madness three years ago—delusions of grandeur, believed he was all sorts of people, the Empress of Austria, Beau Brummel, Alexander the Great.”
Lenox asked if he could see the papers. “He approached me last week.”
“What did he say?”
“That he was held here under false pretenses.”
“I see.” Hansel frowned. “You can examine his papers, yes. Strange timing. His sister wrote and asked that he be transferred to Edinburgh on the Monday after you left.”
“Giving what reason?”
“She had recently married and moved there from London, wished him close.”
“Is that sort of move unusual?”
“No, not in the least. In fact I didn’t even hear of it—not a decision that would reach my desk. She sent the fees to have him go by post, though, which is rather luxurious.”
It also meant two large bailiffs, Lenox imagined. Hansel signaled to a young assistant—brave lad, to work at Bedlam—and asked him to fetch the papers, spelling the name Belmont twice.
“Thank you,” Lenox said.
“Of course. Tell me, do you have reason to believe him?”
“I don’t know, in truth. But I didn’t like how it felt not to come.”
“I understand. But you must excuse me—I have patients to see, even early on a weekend.”
“Of course,” said Lenox.
He sat down in the courtyard. No matter what went on here, the birds in the trees sang their morning songs. He pulled the little fortune-telling book of Shakespeare quotations from his pocket—he felt he was getting the hang of the bard, a bit—and opened it at random.
The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power.
—Julius Caesar
Ten minutes or so later, the boy returned. “Here you are, sir.”
“Thank you very much. Say, by chance do you keep the annual naval gazette here? I can’t imagine you do.”
“Oh, yes. We have quite an extensive library, sir. Would you like to see it?”
“Who uses it?”
“The inmates.”
Lenox felt a trickle of panic at the idea of being in a room with them—but he nodded. “If you don’t mind, thank you.”
The boy led him to a desk with a green banker’s lamp. Lenox glanced around nervously, but everyone there seemed absorbed in scholarship. He could imagine what some of them must have done to come to arrive at this station in life, yet all were calm now.
Belmont’s file was a disappointment. The fellow had been here for two years. His health was good. He had never caused trouble. There were regular additional monies allotted to him for small luxuries: tobacco, newspapers, and so forth.
Lenox flipped through the pages twice but noticed nothing else.
Then he turned to the long row of annual gazettes to which Hansel’s assistant had guided him, bound in blue leather, with gold lettering on their spines. He tried the one from two years before. There was no mention of a Captain Irvington in the index—the name Belmont had said was actually his own. He tried the year before and after. Nothing.
But then he did find something. In the gazette for 1849, this short entry from November:
Captain T. Irvington, Hants, formerly HMS Bella, Livia, Aurelie, lost in solo hunting expedition from HMS Victoria near Storm Bay, Van Diemen’s Land, Australia.
Search fruitless; numerous inlets along “Tasmania,” as locals call it; small parties gave up after several days; funeral services held at sea; Lt. Pilon breveted to Captain for remainder of voyage by Rear Adm. Weber.
Lenox felt a rush of excitement. He looked through the previous years’ gazettes methodically and found no mention of an Irvington except in the year 1842, when he had received his first captaincy aboard the Aurelie.
Was it possible that Irvington had been whisked away, his disappearance covered with this tale, and then pressed into his imprisonment here in England?
He turned back to Belmont’s file. Something was bothering him.
Only after studying it carefully did he suddenly realize what it was: His visitor log for the past two years, despite his having this sister so eager to bring him with her to Edinburgh, was entirely empty.
He got up and went to the offices to send a few wires, one to a friend in the naval office, another to the asylum in Edinburgh, and a third to the sister there, return post paid, asking if Belmont had arrived safely.
He felt sure he was onto something. What had Belmont said? Never to let a member of the royal family fall in love with your wife. It seemed ridiculous to imagine an officer of the navy being interned here under a false name simply by royal fiat, but in the same thought he remembered the headline that had greeted him in the paper the night before, and all those clerks and solicitors in their efficient swarm around the duke in the Tower.
It was past nine o’clock by the time Lenox left, and he was hungry. They stopped at a coaching inn in Penge called the Sycamore, which his driver said was good—and though it was relatively quiet, he was right. They sat at a small knotted table together and fell ravenously upon eggs on toast, a piping hot Welsh rarebit, sausages, and strong dark tea, with a measure of whisky for the driver, to aid, he said, his concentration upon the roads.
“That works, does it?” said Lenox, ingenuously.
“Works a treat, sir—works a treat.”
It was the first meal they had ever shared, but then there was something democratic about a coaching inn. It was different from a regular public house. A coaching inn was much larger, for a start, and generally located along a main road, since horses could be stabled there. All of them had private dining rooms and sleeping quarters for travelers; unlike a pub, a coaching inn never closed.
Some of the best memories of his childhood were of a coaching inn. When they were young, his and Edmund’s father had taken them up to town by himself once a year for the start of Parliament, so they could sit among the spectators.
There had been something delightful about traveling without their mother, love her though they dearly did. It was more of an adventure with their father. He didn’t have any particular rules, for one thing.
They had always stopped at the same inn halfway, the Admiral Nelson. It was a wonderful, uproarious place, full of the scent of beer and coffee and horses. Class vanished. Men of every stripe—he had never seen a woman there—traded stories, those coming from London, those headed there, over tankards of ale and the latest newspapers.
Most of all Charles remembered the food: His father, generally ascetic, had let the boys have whatever they wished.
Edmund’s taste tended to mutton, but for Lenox the best sight was the huge black pot, trembling when there were footsteps nearby, that always hung over the fire, full of a delicious stew. It came in a tremendous bowl—what had seemed tremendous at the time, anyway—with hunks of bread and a pitcher of freshly chilled milk.
Edmund and Charles watched how their father handled himself, as they ate and their horses were watered and fed; he was civil to all, familiar with few, a figure, whether because of his clothes or because someone had whispered his name, of instant significance and respect.
He could so easily recall that awe.
Once he had told them—Lenox had never forgotten—about England’s two most famous coaching inns, just a few hundred yards apart on the same road in Buckinghamshire.
Their father, eyes twinkling, said, “They are famous for their tall tales. Have been for centuries now. Nobody goes there expecting the truth—only for a good rattling yarn. And do you know what they’re called?”
“What?” Charles and Edmund had said simultaneously.
He smiled. “The Cock and the Bull, lads,” he had said. “That is why you shouldn’t let anyone at school tell you a cock-and-bull story.”
Lenox and his driver finished their breakfast and by ten had returned to Hampden Lane. Lenox had fallen deeply asleep again, full and tired, but apparently the driver was right—the whisky had kept him alert.
He woke up thinking of the dozens of words that he had been scrawling in his notebook before he fell asleep, trying to force his hand to generate what his mind could not: Corfe, money, Craig, 20, Shakespeare, Vere, terrace, a loose association. He read over them again as the carriage stood patiently in front of his house.
Something was still wrong. But what? The page wouldn’t give it up to him, even after twenty minutes. At last he sighed and went inside.