When he left Dorset House, Lenox saw a young man in a summer suit lounging by the front steps, a foot propped back against the railing. One of Corfe’s friends, from the look of him. Lenox touched his hat and went on his way, mind back on Captain Irvington, lost at sea.
“Sir,” the fellow said when Lenox had gone about ten paces.
He turned back and, after a moment of what felt like an intense dislodgement from his own senses, realized that it was Bonden, of all people. “Bonden!” he said.
“How do you do?”
“Fairly well. You—you surprised me.”
Bonden fell into step with him. They continued in the direction Lenox had been going. “I read this morning that your duke had returned. I wanted to see if his painting had followed him.”
“It did.”
“Yes, I saw. The matter is concluded, then?”
“It is.”
“To your satisfaction?”
That was a more difficult question. “I don’t know that I would say that.”
“Mm.”
Bonden raised his cigar again, and Lenox thought that perhaps it was this prop that allowed his astonishing concealment (for the younger man had looked the older straight in the face when he touched his hat, and Lenox would have sworn him to be no more than thirty or so). That, and the suit of clothes, and a fresh-shaven cheek.
“You spent all morning here, then?” Lenox asked.
“I often find that it pays to be careless with my time. In this instance I was curious.” They turned into the park (Lenox, at least, was walking automatically toward his home), and Bonden went on. “I observe that it was the butler who died. Not the duke, or one of the duke’s children.”
“Yes.”
“They used to sing a shanty at sea. There was always some tuneful soul who passed the third watch in song, quiet, you know, since it was after midnight, but keeping those on watch awake.” Bonden tossed his cigar into the cobblestones of the street, then sang, in a quiet and surprisingly mellifluous voice, “Same the world over, ain’t it a shame—the rich what gets the pleasure, the poor what gets the blame … That’s the part I remember, anyway.”
So, then, Bonden had sniffed out what Lenox had taken until today to piece together: that Craig’s death had not been accidental.
“True too often, I fear,” said Lenox.
“I wonder if you would give me an hour of your time? Not more.”
They were on one of the pathways in Green Park, and before answering Lenox nodded to a gentleman he knew, Sir Thomas Clapton, and wished him a good day. Clapton was walking toward Parliament, where he was greatly concerned with foreign affairs, cane under his arm. The year before he had written a long report on currency reform that nobody had read, and with whose ideas nearly every reasonable person in England vehemently disagreed; naturally he was knighted in the next honors list, and now considered in all the papers as a wide-ranging authority.
Passing Clapton suddenly made Lenox rue every one of his decisions. Each single one. Clapton was only six years his elder! He was not very remarkably smart, not even amiable. He would be in the next cabinet.
Meanwhile, Lenox was bound for God knew where with an old sailor who wouldn’t tell him anything straight, and the career he had chosen as a detective had already cut off, permanently, his path to Parliament, the other vague dream of his youth.
Without showing any of this feeling—he hoped—he turned to Bonden. “Lead the way,” he said.
They boarded an omnibus bound east. They passed the trip in silence, until at last Bonden signaled, when they were in Eastcheap Street, that they should disembark.
It was an insalubrious, swarming stretch of London, families stacked too close together, pawnbrokers next to rag shops, prostitutes out in plain sight even at this early hour. Unaccompanied children ran to and fro.
They turned off Eastcheap and into Pudding Lane. This was the heart of where the Great Fire had raged in 1666, and all the buildings were of the last hundred years or so, some of them tilting oddly, jury-rigged, no doubt unsafe.
The fire had incinerated thirteen thousand buildings, Lenox knew—all slums, skirting up only toward the edge of Mayfair.
“Do you know how many people died in the fire, out of curiosity?” Bonden asked.
“I do, as a matter of fact,” said Lenox. “Six.”
“Ha! Yes, that’s what they say up Parliament way. More like six hundred, they’ll tell you here. The bodies weren’t found, that’s all.”
Lenox was about to answer that he doubted that when they stopped. Bonden acted out his usual small performance—leaning against a building, producing his tobacco, acting busy—and Lenox followed his example.
They were opposite a small yard, mostly in disuse. In it was a lone woman. She looked up at them, without recognition, for a beat—large, faded eyes, strong cheekbones, hair in a bonnet. Then she turned back to the yard, where a small row of lettuce plants grew; she was plucking paltry leaves from them, brushing away dirt. She put what she had retrieved in her apron and then went with a small pail of water to some kind of bare-limbed tree that Lenox could have told her from this distance would never flower or fruit again.
“That is Mrs. Lila Wallace, relict of the late Alec Wallace, a carthorse driver. Two children. He was murdered seven months ago.”
“Why?”
“Nobody knows.”
“Money? A bar fight?”
“Not money, not a bar fight. He was shot in his own rooms.”
Lenox crossed his arms. “Does she need money?”
“No, she manages.”
“What point are you making, then, Mr. Bonden?”
“None at all, Mr. Lenox. I had it in mind to offer you a trade.”
“What sort of trade?”
“I will teach you what I know if you help me find out who killed her husband. It is a matter of some interest to me. She is my cousin.”
“She didn’t recognize you.”
“Nor did you.”
Lenox looked across the way again. “Yes, true. But why don’t you solve the case?”
“I don’t have your gift.”
“You!”
Bonden nodded, pipe now in his mouth, in place of the West End cigar. “I can find things; I can watch. But you can ask questions—and your name, your face, your manner, gain you admission where I could well be denied.”
“This is a genuine offer?”
“It is. You know how to be active. I can teach you how to be … perhaps not passive, but certainly quiet. There is a great deal of power in quietness, Mr. Lenox. And not only quietness of voice but of body, of posture.”
“I see.”
“And together perhaps we may give my cousin some peace.”
At that moment something overcame Lenox. The lesson was there, whether Bonden intended it or otherwise: that crime happened indiscriminately, or if with discrimination, then with discrimination against the poor. He must redouble his efforts. No more dukes for a while; the Yard could help him or it could not.
But there was the potential all around him to do something useful in the world, just what his father had always emphasized, and Bonden had articulated something that Lenox had known but never conceded to himself, or even considered especially.
It was that he had a gift for this. What was he thinking? He wouldn’t have traded places with Sir Thomas Clapton.
“You have a bargain,” Lenox said. “Thank you for taking me on as a pupil. I am full of effort, even if I am a slow fist sometimes.”
Bonden nodded. “Good.”
“You will have to wait two days to begin, however. Perhaps three.” He didn’t like to say that Lady Jane’s garden party was to take place in two mornings. “I must go to Kent to see to a few remaining pieces of business.”
They shook hands—and it was left to Lenox, as Bonden strode off, to determine how to return, handkerchief across his nose, to his own part of London. In any event he had his next case. He was already wondering if he and Graham had clipped anything from the newspapers about Mr. Alec Wallace, or whether the Yard had made any headway on the matter at all.