A Stranger in Mayfair Page 10

  A few moments later they were sitting with her in the tearoom next door. Lenox went to the counter and bought cakes and coffee, as well as a scone and jam for Mrs. Clarke’s breakfast.

  She was a striking woman, nearly fifty but still slender and well dressed. Her hair was black and her face very alive, at once shrewd and playful—though now these characteristics were only half visible under an outer layer of grief. Her wide mouth was pinched with anxiety.

  “Thank you,” she said when Lenox returned with the food. Her accent was less distinct than the average housemaid’s—perhaps through conscious effort. “Mr. Dallington has been telling me about your credentials as an investigator. Extremely impressive.”

  “He plays a decent hand of cards, too,” said Dallington with a grin.

  She smiled faintly. “I’m sure.”

  “Is your hotel comfortable?” asked Lenox.

  “Thank you, yes.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss. By all accounts your son was a fine young man.”

  “A good boxer as well,” said Dallington encouragingly.

  “His letters were full of boxing, I do know that. Which makes it seem so unfair that he didn’t get a chance to fight back.” She brought her handkerchief to her mouth, her eyes suddenly stricken.

  “Did he like his work, too?” asked Lenox.

  “Yes, he seemed to.”

  “He must have mentioned the people he worked with—Miss Rogers, Mr. Collingwood?”

  “Only Mr. Collingwood.”

  “In a negative light?”

  “Not always. I sometimes thought they seemed quite friendly, though Freddie did mention that the butler could be strict with the staff. He wouldn’t have liked that.” She nibbled at her slice of lemon cake.

  “What were his plans?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Did he hope to continue on as a footman?”

  “He spoke of university, in fact. The new place, not Oxford or Cambridge.”

  For many centuries these had been the only two universities in England, but now others were springing up. “University College, do you mean? Here in London?”

  “Yes, exactly. He said they offered a good education without all the snobbery. But just for the moment he was earning a decent wage and saving his money, I think. We never spoke about his plans, to be quite honest. I was always pleased for him to do whatever he liked. I only know he thought about university because we live in Cambridge, and when he visited me he said that he could never go anywhere like that—pointing at the university, you understand.”

  “I didn’t realize you lived in Cambridge.”

  “Yes, these several years, and before I worked in London as well. It’s where I grew up. My father was a gardener at Peterhouse.”

  “Did you come to work for the Starlings because you met them in Cambridge, then?” asked Lenox.

  She looked at him curiously. “Why would you think that? I came to work for the Starlings because they needed a housemaid and the hiring agency sent me there—you see, I had come to London because I wanted to see a bit of the world. I left when I inherited money from my uncle George and opened my pub. The Dove.”

  “Did Frederick like the Starlings?”

  “He never mentioned it. I imagine he did since he stayed so long.”

  “Did you like working there?”

  She shrugged. “I liked the girls on the alley—oh, yes, the one where Freddie died,” she said in response to Lenox’s surprised look. “We lived our whole life in that alley, the ten or fifteen of us. There was a great deal of gossip and chat. It pleased me to think of him there, running out for small errands and meeting people.”

  “A community,” Lenox murmured.

  “Yes, precisely.”

  Lenox made a mental note to interview other people “on the alley”—not just the footmen who had been friends with the dead lad.

  “Did he ever wear a ring, that you recall?” asked Dallington.

  “No,” said his mother. “What sort of ring?”

  “A signet ring? With a picture on the front, gold?”

  “No.” She shook her head firmly. “Certainly not.”

  “In your experience did he often have much money? When he came to visit you on his holidays, for instance?”

  “Oh, dear, no—he saved his money, I think.”

  “Did he dress differently after he moved to London? In a nicer suit, for instance?”

  “Not at all. He had his old suits mended and wore them until they were threadbare. He always offered me money, though. Not that I needed it—the Dove does quite well—but still, the offer.” She took a sip of tea, and a slight smile came over her face. “You can’t imagine how wonderful he was to me. Mr. Clarke is dead, you see, and when Freddie came to visit he was so thoughtful—so considerate. What a nice boy he was.”

  “There, there,” said Lenox. She had tears in her eyes.

  “He did all the chores a man usually does in the pub, when he was home. Fixed squeaky doors and creaking chairs, carried the kegs, rousted the patrons who had too much drink and were acting loud. It was a treat for me, not to be on my own.” Now she was really crying. “And he’s gone forever.”

  Because of his work Lenox had seen so many grieving people in the last two decades that he was, to his shame, in some degree immune to their suffering. It was no different with Mrs. Clarke; he sympathized with her, but the rawness of her emotions—he could now feel detached from it. Inwardly he vowed to discover who had killed Freddie, if only to make amends for this own private callousness.

  “Are you leaving town, Mrs. Clarke?”

  She shook her head decisively. “Certainly not. Mr. Rathbone, who sold the Pig and Whistle some years ago, has come out of retirement to run the Dove while I’m away. I mean to stay here until I find out the truth.”

  “Can I ask—who do you think killed your son?”

  Her tears started afresh. “I don’t know!” she said. “I wish I did.”

  “Do you recall anything else he said about life at the Starlings’, anything unusual? Anything about Mr. Collingwood?”

  She thought for a moment, one delicate hand touching her pale chin. “He said that Collingwood was secretive, I remember. Freddie said, ‘I don’t have any friends in the house, only on the alley. Collingwood is far too secretive.’”

  Freddie had his own secrets, thought Lenox, his mind on the money. “Did you ever send him money, by any chance?” It was a long shot.

  She frowned. “No, not after his first month or so there, when I made sure he had enough. I didn’t want him to go, you see.”

  “Oh?”

  “He could have taken over the pub for me. Even if he had only wanted to live in London, he needn’t have been a footman. He could have taken lodgings and applied to be a tutor—he was excellent in books, you know—or any number of things. But he insisted on London, and on being a footman—and in fact on being a footman for the Starlings.”

  “Why the Starlings?”

  She shook her head. “He heard me talk about my days there, I suppose. He said he wanted a few years in London, and then he would decide what he should really do with his life. Do you have children, Mr. Lenox?”

  “I don’t.”

  “They’re mysterious creatures. You do your best with them, but in the end it’s not up to you how they live.”

  Lenox took a sip of coffee, wondering to himself what could have made Freddie so adamantly desire to be a footman, a difficult job, and more specifically a footman at the Starlings’, when other options were available to him…and how did his job in Mayfair connect with the large sums of money he had been receiving under the door of the servants’ quarters?

  Chapter Nineteen

  Lenox had eaten little as he spoke with Mrs. Clarke, absorbed by her answers, and so at twelve thirty that afternoon he fell ravenously upon the lunch Kirk brought to his desk in the house on Hampden Lane. There was a roasted chicken, a fluffy hillock of mashed potatoes, and a beautifully ch
arred tomato cut in quarters, along with half a bottle of dreadful claret that he nevertheless managed to get through most of. As he ate he let both Parliament and Frederick Clarke fall away from his mind and read a novel by Miss Gaskell about a small town somewhere in the Home Counties. When he was finished eating he moved to his armchair, reading on and smoking quite contentedly.

  Only at two o’clock or so did he turn his attention to the tottering stack of blue books that Graham had put on his desk the night before. Their name was wonderfully evocative to Lenox (its origin was the rich blue velvet medieval parliamentary records were bound in), reminding him of harried politicians, deep matters of state, and hushed late-night discussions of strategy. As it happened, one in ten of the books—reports on every imaginable topic that affected Great Britain—was as interesting and urgent as he had imagined. The other nine would be dreadfully dull, reports from distant nations of the empire, coal statistics, a study of the increasingly serious accumulation of horse manure in Manchester.

  Still, he was duty bound to read them all, or at any rate to skim them. He picked one up, spent half an hour in study, and then tossed it aside. Another. Another. Soon it was four o’clock and he knew far more than he had ever cared to about the state of Newcastle’s police force and the shortage of English beef after the previous year’s serious outbreak of a new illness called—and he had to double-check the name—“hoof and mouth” disease.

  With four books absorbed, in their outlines if not in their details, he turned to a fifth. It drew him in almost like a novel—with the best novels he was at first still extremely aware that he was reading, but gradually the act of reading itself disappeared, and even turning the pages didn’t remind him that there were two worlds, inside and outside of the book’s covers. This blue book, though much more dense than a good novel, had for him that same imperative feeling.

  He finished it in an hour flat, and when he was done he clutched it in one hand and, without a word to anyone in the house, made for the door and hailed a taxi.

  He was after James Hilary. Although Hilary was nearly a decade younger than Lenox, he was one of the most influential men in Parliament, an urbane, learned, and fluent gentleman with a private fortune and a secure seat in Liverpool. He was irreplaceable within the party, connecting as he did the back bench and the front bench, the various offices of government to one another. If anyone would understand, it was Hilary.

  As Lenox had expected he found the man—a charming, well-dressed, slightly sharp-faced sort of person—in his favored club, the Athenaeum. He was reading by a window in the great hall.

  “There you are—may we speak?”

  “Lenox, my dear chap, you look beside yourself. Is everything all right? Jane? I’ve scarcely said ten words to you since your wedding all those months ago.”

  “Oh, quite well, quite well. It’s this.” He thrust the blue book he had been reading into the air.

  Hilary narrowed his eyes, trying to catch the title of the report on the side of the book. “What is it?”

  “Can we find a private room?”

  “By all means.” He folded his paper. “I’m so pleased that you’ve hit the ground running. Your man, Graham, has been all over the House, too. Excellent.”

  They retired to a small chamber nearby and sat at a six-sided card table, where in a few hours four or five debauched gentleman would sit until dawn, playing whist for stakes rather higher than they could afford and drinking great drafts of champagne. Lenox hated the scene: the jollity, sometimes real but often forced; the insincere banter as each man privately, worriedly totted up what he had won or lost; the casual IOUs passed from rather poor men to very rich ones, both knowing that payment would be difficult but pretending it was all the same. The room set his teeth on edge. Still, he knew what he wanted to say.

  “It’s cholera,” said Lenox.

  “Oh, that? Is that what you’re so worked up about, Charles? My dear chap, Bazalgette has solved—”

  “He hasn’t!”

  Perhaps taken aback by the fierceness of Lenox’s tone, Hilary began to look more serious. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s about the poor. They’re still in danger—as anyone who read this report could tell you.”

  Cholera had been for much of Victoria’s reign the chief social anxiety of London, England, and indeed the world. In England there had been epidemics in 1831, 1848, 1854, and just last year, in 1866. In the previous decade alone more than ten thousand people had died of the disease.

  It had only recently become widely acknowledged that it was a waterborne plague, and the so-called Great Stink of several years ago had galvanized into action the politicians and municipal leaders of London. Joseph Bazalgette, a well-respected engineer working with the Metropolitan Commission for Sewers and its successor, the Board of Works, had designed a new sewage system for London that would make the water of the Thames safe to drink again, and after his plan had been published and executed a couple of years before, towns and cities across the country had begun to copy it. The reformers had won.

  But there was a problem. Most of London was connected to the new sewage system, but the part of the city that had suffered the most deaths, East London, where the poorest people lived—it had not. This fact, with its implications, was what had so shocked Lenox. He had assumed before then, not paying very great attention to the matter, that all was solved. It wasn’t. In fact a fresh epidemic was just beginning to show signs of emerging in East London. One of the primary causes of cholera—overfull cemeteries—was still prevalent there, and the water supply was horribly compromised.

  Lenox explained all this to Hilary. “It’s all right for the nibs, living around here, and for the middle class, but these people, James! You wouldn’t believe the statistics! Italy has lost a hundred thousand people this year, maybe more. Russia the same. Everywhere in Europe. People couldn’t abide the smell—the smell!—and so we have a new sewage system, but there’s no interest in the death of people in our own city! It’s the most shocking thing I’ve heard since I was elected!”

  Hilary shifted uncomfortably in his high-backed wooden chair. “It’s grave indeed, Charles, but I’m afraid we have more pressing concerns at the moment. This reform bill, for one, and of course the colonies—”

  Lenox interrupted him. “Surely we have time to handle all of these things at once. As a start we should buy some of these private water companies, which care for nothing but profit, and turn them into municipal concerns.”

  “That would require a great deal of money.”

  “These are precisely the people we’re supposed to represent. What if this were happening in a small town? Would we help them?” He threw up his hands in disgust. “Any evil can go hiding in London. It’s always been the way, hasn’t it?”

  “Charles, you’re new to Parliament. You must understand that we hold human life in the balance every day, and make judgments about how to help people based on our best sense. It’s not pleasant, but it’s our work. When you’ve been in Parliament a year you’ll comprehend—”

  “I’ll deliver a speech. I don’t care who listens to it—I don’t especially care who wants to help me, Conservative or our side.”

  “A speech!” said Hilary with amused incredulity. “I should think it would be some months before you deliver a speech.”

  Lenox realized that he was in the reverse of his usual position: He was the petitioner, like so many grieving people who had come to solicit his services with varying success. It was a helpless, unpleasant feeling.

  He decided to try a different tack. “I know I must seem callow to you, Hilary, but you’ve known me for many years. I’m not a hasty-minded person. I’ve read dozens of blue books, and of them all this was the one that affected me. Will you read it? Will you speak to people?”

  Lenox was holding the book halfway out, and Hilary took it gingerly. “I’ll read it.”

  Lenox stood up. “Thank you. Meanwhile I’ll speak to a few of the Members I kn
ow. This is a worthy cause, you’ll see.”

  “Well—I’m quite sure. But Charles, don’t speak to too many people—let this move slowly.”

  The detective nodded, though he had no intention of adhering to the advice. He ran out of the Athenaeum with a dozen ideas swirling through his mind—to talk to this person, to write that one, to ask that gentleman to dinner and another gentleman’s wife who could speak to Jane. Underlying these plans was the thrilling notion, barely formed in all the hustle of the last hour, that he had found the purpose and motivation in his new career that had seemed so elusive only the day before.

  Chapter Twenty

  Though he now had a dozen things to do, he decided it was important to stop in for a visit at the McConnells’.

  Jane was still spending nearly all of her time there. He didn’t wonder at her devotion—he knew better perhaps than anyone else in the world the strength of her friendship—but did ask himself whether it took a toll on her. She would be happy for Toto, that was a given. But would she be sorry for herself?

  She had been a very young widow. It was the one subject they never discussed, the sudden death of her first husband just a year into their marriage. Lenox tried to think back to Jane as she was then, at a time when he could be friendly but dispassionate in his analysis of her character. He remembered that she had been a very happy bride, and a very brave widow. What had she planned for herself, in the idle moments during the weeks before that first wedding? How many children? What names had she bestowed upon them?

  It made his chest feel hollow, his lower stomach roiled. It was awful.

  Still, he managed to put on a cheerful face for Thomas and spent half an hour closeted with him, drinking a dram of whisky with the new father, who paced back and forth, an unshakable grin upon his face. It was the happiest, quite literally the happiest, that Lenox had ever seen him.