Lenox was up at the stroke of six o’clock the next morning. By quarter past, he was seated at the desk in his study, carefully reading through the papers, a pair of scissors at hand so that he could clip any article he thought relevant to his encompassing study of criminal activity in London.
It had taken him some time to be happy in this house; his rooms from the year he had first moved to London held a dear place in his heart, with their expansive view of Green Park. It was when he had made this large rectangular study comfortable that he had at last felt really at home. Now he couldn’t imagine a better place to work. His books were arranged as he liked, history on one side of the room, fiction on the other. At the far end of the long chamber there was a fireplace surrounded by comfortable chairs; here, closer to the windows, was his desk, topped in red leather. From his chair he could turn and ponder the passersby a few feet below on Hampden Lane.
These morning hours were his most serious time of work. One of the reasons he had hoped to have Bonden’s help was to add to his own education, to which he was ardently committed. He wouldn’t have minded being a person who could find anything.
Mrs. Huggins came in. “Good morning, sir. Do you have enough tea?”
The housekeeper was a widow of approximately fifty-five, attractive and severe, with dark hair going gray in streaks—who kept house for him more exactingly than perhaps he would quite have preferred.
Lenox looked at the monumental teapot on the corner of his desk, which could have accommodated the needs of a party of eight, then at his own very small teacup.
“For now I think I’ll be able to get on, Mrs. Huggins,” he said, looking up at her earnestly. “Thank you.”
“Mr. Graham is preparing your eggs, sir, and your toast is in the brazier.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Huggins.”
“If you had time to peruse a few matters of household—”
“Unfortunately it is a very busy morning, Mrs. Huggins. Could we put off the perusing until tomorrow?”
She knew very well what that meant—that he would try to put it off to the day of revelation, if he could. “Very well, sir.”
He tried a slight smile. “Be sure to give me two or three reports before the food comes, though. I would like to be apprised of absolutely all this information as it becomes available.”
Some days she was receptive to a joke; some days not. Today: not. “I thought you would like to know, sir,” she said stiffly.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I would. I’m very hungry.” Then, pressing his luck, he said, “I also much need to take something along with me to Jane’s for breakfast—to Lady Jane’s—but it slipped my mind to buy flowers, or what have you, yesterday. Do we have anything sitting around?”
“Sitting around, sir!” said Mrs. Huggins.
“Well, I mean, a savory cake, or something of that sort.”
She looked at him almost sadly. He knew in these moments that he seemed to her an irredeemable specimen representing the lost ways of a whole generation. “A cake, sir.”
“Or something. I did say, ‘or something,’ Mrs. Huggins.”
“I could make a tulip cake in a pinch, sir.”
“Might you? I would be extremely grateful.”
“In that case Mr. Graham will have to be the one to bring you up your eggs and toast, though, sir! And see to it if you need any more tea!”
Graham could have done this blindfolded and backward. He had been Lenox’s scout at Balliol for three years—even now was the person Lenox liked to make his soft-boiled eggs, a duty Mrs. Huggins had only conceded after the bitterest protest—but Lenox just said, “Thank you, Mrs. Huggins. You are a brick.”
“I suppose such emergencies are part of being in service, Mr. Lenox,” she said.
Before long Graham brought the eggs and toast, and Lenox tucked into them with a hearty appetite. The valet sat down in the chair opposite, with his own cup of tea and his own stack of newspapers, and was soon as absorbed as Lenox. This was their daily ritual—or their friendly competition, you might say. Each was put out if the other found a significant clipping that he had missed.
“These are cracking good eggs,” said Lenox after a long period of silence, looking up.
“Thank you, sir.”
Lenox laughed. “Eh? Cracking? Did you pick up on that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Cracking.”
“Almost painfully humorous, sir,” said Graham, nodding.
Lenox frowned. “You need to get about more, Graham.”
“It may well be so, sir.”
Lenox glanced up at the clock on his mantel. It was close to eight o’clock. The rays of the sun were just beginning to fall more insistently across the room’s dark carpet. “What time is the breakfast, remind me?” he said.
“Nine o’clock.”
Lenox sat back. “I have just enough time to run out and call on Mayne. But I doubt he’ll be in the office before eight thirty, and then I shall have to turn around. It’s a nuisance.”
“Indeed, sir,” said Graham, though this time his sympathy was sincere.
Instead of leaving, Lenox took out his notepad. He flipped to the page where he had written the duke’s description of the missing painting.
“The painting was thirty inches high by twenty-two inches across,” Lenox said, reading. “Or at least the frame was, because he swore it was the same size as the other seven, and he had asked Theodore Ward, my old school friend, to measure one of those.”
“Do you have any suspicions of Ward, sir?” asked Graham.
Lenox didn’t look up from his notes. “No, none,” he murmured. On the wall there was a portrait of Lenox’s mother’s uncle, an earl himself, sitting grumpily in a chair. Lenox had always liked it. He looked over at it. “Would you say roughly that size, Graham?”
“To a first approximation, sir, certainly.”
“Not easy to conceal.” He looked up at Graham from his notepad. “Whereas the Shakespeare couldn’t have been more than fifteen inches high and twelve across. Scarcely much larger than a sheet of paper.”
“Interesting, sir.”
“The background was Dorset House, in the country—trees and that sort of thing, the duke said, a pillar. You know how those old portraits look.”
Graham nodded. “Yes, sir.”
Lenox frowned at his notes. “What is a jerkin?”
“A sort of sleeveless jacket, sir.”
“Sounds asinine. Well, he’s in a red jerkin and silver pants, this fellow, if you can credit that. Next to him is his favorite dog, a setter with long ears.”
Graham nodded. “Anything else, sir?”
“It is signed by the artist very legibly, a person named Quincy Quinn. Oh, and the duke is smiling in it. That shall be a clue, if the jerkin doesn’t give it away.” Lenox flipped his notebook closed. “It sounds a picture of so little consequence. And yet someone went to the trouble of hiking up the side of that building, prying open a locked window, and stealing it. That is peculiar.”
“You saw evidence the window was pried open, sir?”
Lenox shook his head. “No. But Dorset and his valet both swear that it was locked the night before. And it would have been far easier to break into the window than into the house, and then into the study, which itself has two locks.”
“It only occurs to me, sir,” said Graham, “that perhaps we are all overreaching. Perhaps it was merely one of the servants.”
“I specifically asked about that possibility. Nearly the entire staff had gone to Dorset Castle ahead of the duke and duchess. Those that were left—the duchess’s maid, the butler, the duke’s valet, the cook—are employees of long standing.”
“None with a grudge, sir?”
Lenox tilted his head philosophically. “It is always possible. But the duke told me specifically that he pays well over market rates. That includes Ward. Why steal a painting worth less than that difference and risk the sack?”
“True, sir.”
“That is what I keep wondering—why that painting? It’s too large, too personal, not valuable enough…” He glanced at his watch. “But we can resume this discussion in a bit.”
He stood up and straightened out. He didn’t really mind at all going to Jane’s, though it did well to pretend; his heart, the stubborn old animal, beat a little faster at the thought of seeing her. The irony was that she planned breakfasts like this one partly to help him find a wife. It would be best to leave the city soon, he thought. Behind him on the wall was a map tacked to corkboard and covered with ink: the places he intended to travel.
“Graham,” he called, when the tie was done. The valet appeared. “Is Lancelot awake?”
“Not yet, sir.”
“You’ll see him into Mr. Templeton’s hands at nine?”
This was the pimple-covered young curate in charge of showing three young Etonians on their break the sights of London.
“Yes, sir,” said Graham.
Before he left his study, Lenox went over to one of his bookshelves on the right side of the room and scanned it for about ninety seconds before finding the small, very soft brown leather book he was looking for. He opened it wholly at random and read a line:
I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow my own teaching.
—The Merchant of Venice
He frowned, considering this, then slipped the buttery-soft little book into his front pocket.
On the front hall table was the tulip spice cake, an object of perfect beauty, of course, still warm, wrapped in parchment paper, reposing regally upon a deep-blue plate.
“It’s a capital cake, Mrs. Huggins!” he called out loudly. “Thank you! Good-bye!”