Some hours later, at twilight, Lenox stood in the doorway of a very different sort of room than the beautiful little study by the Thames. He paused, surveying the grizzled inhabitants along their low-slung deal benches, their pint pots of ale in hand, their amiable conversations gathering into a low indistinct rumble, until a pair of heavy sailors pushed through the door and past him, carrying him partway inside.
This was a pub in Cannon Street called the Dovecote, and he was in search of a fellow named Bonden.
The sinewy, angular old landlord walked out from behind the bar to one of the pub’s tables, holding four pewter jugs in each hand, foam rocking tautly atop each of them, then placed them on the table with a thud, spilling nary a drop. He returned with the table’s empty tankards and laid them in a pan of sudsy water. When he was done, he looked at Lenox, who asked whether Thaddeus Bonden was there.
“Tad Bonden? I can check.”
Lenox nodded. “Thank you.”
The Dovecote sat squatly near London Bridge, where, being close to two dockyards, it served primarily a naval clientele. A naval clientele, at that, drawn from before the mast, the hammock rather than the officer class, rough, rough-tongued, easy with their money, generous to those they liked, violent to those they didn’t.
Presumably those characteristics were also possessed by Bonden, and Lenox was on his guard.
“How’d you hear of him?” the proprietor asked eventually.
A stool at the bar had been vacated. “Could I have a pint of bitter, please,” said Lenox, taking it.
The old server briefly smiled. “Lock-jawed, then,” he said. “Fair enough.”
As he spoke he was already turning toward the tap with a jug in hand, as automatically as if he were only a large piece in some large mechanical contraption designed to serve beer and gin to men.
“Your bitter.” The old man looked at him levelly for a moment. “Well, Bonden, he’s here, or he ain’t, if you catch my meaning. You’ll know which in five minutes. Find a table if you like.”
Lenox followed these instructions and watched the barman disappear from sight, then return without looking at him. He waited nine minutes, and when that much time had elapsed, he stood, lifted his hat to the proprietor, who nodded back without a change in countenance, and left.
He was a bit disappointed, a bit relieved. Bonden would have been a risk.
It was a long westward trek back across town to Mayfair, but Lenox walked it, the six-odd miles. He had a good deal to consider.
London was a very different place at this hour. The business of the day was done, and everyone but the few lone souls upon the streets had returned home from the diligent, hectic, forgetful city. Yet the late pale violet light made the houses—whose quality improved just perceptibly from street to street over the course of his walk to his own neighborhood—look so sad, cold and alone, the world an arcing, skybound, unknowable place. Those who remained outside were thrown back, with every shop shuttered, every street hawker headed to their hearths, upon little but their own thoughts.
Lenox didn’t quite mind that melancholy feeling; and he needed the thoughts. The Romans, in their phrasemaking way, had hit upon it: Solvitur ambulando, all problems are solved by walking. In the times when Lenox had been most puzzled during his short career, it was often a long walk that had suddenly galvanized his mind.
And the duke’s problem was a significant puzzle, both in itself and because it belonged to the Duke of Dorset.
The walk took him a little more than ninety minutes. His own tall, handsome home came into view when he turned off Grosvenor Square and onto Hampden Lane.
“Graham?” he called when he had reached it and unlocked the front door. “Graham, are you there?”
Nobody answered, but he heard a footstep on the stair. Then he felt a sharp crack on his face, as sudden as a bee sting. He lurched backward.
“Ha!” cried a triumphant young voice.
“You fiend!” Lenox shouted. He had been the victim of this same peashooter four times thus far. “Lancelot! Come here! I’m going to thrash you, I swear on your life!”
But this was apparently insufficient enticement; Lenox’s young cousin was already thumping up to his lair on the third floor.
It was hard to conceive of a person belonging less to his name, this Lancelot being, down to his deepest essence, an instrument of mischief. Lenox loved—truly loved—his cousin Eustacia, Lancelot’s mother, who had married a fine country-souled man named Stovall and led a loving, charitable, and blameless life in the far west reaches of Cornwall, near the sea.
But Lancelot made it difficult to remember that. He was a child of twelve, with continually dirty knees, brown-blond hair that spiked in every direction regardless of the ministrations it received, and a face that looked mostly innocent, but from time to time flashed a deep cunning. It was just the week before that they had celebrated his twelfth birthday, Lancelot gorging himself that day on chocolate torte in a way that would have made a French courtesan blush.
“Lancelot!” Lenox shouted up the stairs.
But the only response was silence. After these attacks the boy liked to hole up in his room, which was tactically intelligent, given that, alas, it locked from the inside. According to Graham, he had turned it—the best guest room!—into a midden of discarded clothes and lurid illustrated magazines about the bloodiest subjects imaginable, werewolves, vampires, unrepentant murderers. (Lenox had swiped a few of the last. He had research to conduct.)
Lenox shook his head and hung up his hat, rubbing the welt on his cheek and scanning the floor for the projectile.
He found it. A pebble! That was hardly sporting. Really, now. As he examined it there was a far quieter footstep on the stair, and Lenox looked up to see the house’s butler, Graham, a compact, sandy-haired man of roughly his own age.
“Good evening, sir. I heard a noise.”
“Did you! What hearing you must have!” said Lenox bitterly. He shook his head, removing his jacket. “What does the law say about killing your cousin?”
“It’s illegal, sir.”
“Still!”
“I believe so, sir.”
“And they call this a civilization.”
Graham held forth a patched, smoky tweed housecoat, into which Lenox deposited himself, arm by arm. “Your supper is in your study, sir,” Graham said.
“Oh. Thank you. Would you care to sit with me while I dine?”
Graham tilted his head. “With pleasure, sir. The Dorset case?”
“Yes. It’s a good one.”
Graham would not smile, indeed would not inquire further than he already had, but Lenox had known him for eight years, and from a very minor compression of the valet’s lips could tell that he was extremely glad to hear it—that they had a case—for from the starting gun they had been strange, friendly partners in this business.
Passing, in the long hallways from which his study branched to the right, the table that bore his silver card-stand, Lenox saw that several people had left their calling cards while he was away that afternoon.
One of them was Sir Richard Mayne, the head of Scotland Yard.
“Mayne didn’t come here himself?” he said to Graham.
“No, sir. The card was left on his behalf by a constable.”
“Did he have a message?”
“He said that Sir Richard would appreciate a call when you have spare time. There is no rush.”
This was mere politeness. Lenox needed the goodwill of Scotland Yard, and he would go to Mayne in the morning. He was in a position that required him to treat his few allies respectfully.
Lenox’s career as a detective had been, thus far, a mixed success. The first obstacle to overcome had been the lack of work, but he had chipped steadily away at that. There were long stretches when he had nothing to do, not a case in sight, sometimes until he was very near indeed to the brink of despair. He satisfied himself during such periods with carefully designed courses of study—on poison, firearms, fraud, every criminal subject—but they never felt a substitute for a real case.
Still, something always arrived at last, as it had now. Harder to manage, and harder to bear, was the ridicule visited upon him by members of his own class.
In truth he understood their attitude. Had he been to Harrow and Oxford for this absurd shamming police work? Had he been raised to the manners of the aristocracy, ridden horses with royalty, been invited to the balls of the great metropolis and England’s immortal country houses, been flattered by the mothers of young women who knew he had money and position, had he been Charles Lenox, only to throw it away?
No, it was agreed, by all but his close friends. Perhaps even some of them secretly agreed.
And on his other flank there was the ridicule of the police. They considered him a mere enthusiast, an amateur; a nuisance.
This was despite the two notable successes of his three-year tenure in London. The first was the case of the Thames Ophelia; the second, the bizarre matter of the businessman in Maida Vale who had gone into a top-drawer butcher’s shop, come out with a pound of mutton wrapped in wax paper for his family, and upon reaching the outdoors again immediately taken a pistol from his pocket and shot himself.
Lenox alone could claim credit for solving that one.
He wondered why Mayne wanted to see him. It might well be about the duke.
There was a knock on the front door. Lenox turned, curious, having come about twenty feet into the house. He felt a sharp hunger—he could smell the cook’s fragrant leek-and-potato soup, and it had been a long six miles—and hoped the caller would make no very determined demand upon his time.
Graham answered the door, spoke a few words, then closed it gently. “It is a gentleman named Mr. Bonden, sir. He asks if you’ll meet him in the street.”
Lenox felt a prickle across the back of his hairline. He had been followed home.