The Vanishing Man Page 14

  Evidently it was her boardinghouse. She was impressed enough by Lenox’s clothing and accent to allow him a word, and he said he had come to ask whether Miss Maggie McNeal was present.

  She wasn’t, the woman said.

  “When was she last here?” asked Lenox, curiously.

  “Never.”

  “Never?”

  “It’s not a name I’ve ever heard. And I know all my girls.”

  Lenox asked her a series of questions then. Had there been any recent turnover in the rooms? Had anyone disappeared? Gone off without paying the rent? She might have gone by any name, Lenox said.

  The woman shook her head authoritatively. No. Not for several months; it was the best establishment of its kind in London for day-maids—he could believe that—and if she wanted she could fill every bed again twice over. Nobody had left since at least January, and she had seen, herself, every one of the place’s girls, twenty-four of them in twelve rooms, no later than that morning, for she fed them breakfast at 5:00 A.M.

  She would swear it on any Bible, or Pilgrim’s Progress if he preferred—or a jar of jam, she didn’t care.

  He thanked her and said that none of that would be necessary, then walked off, hands in pockets, eyes ahead of him—for now it was really nighttime—confused, very confused.

  Walking through this neighborhood, it paid to keep one’s eyes open. Lenox must have cut a strange figure—dressed in subdued, expensive clothes, with his tall hat and a gold watch chain that he tucked away as he came back onto Garnet Street—and he stayed alert as he turned up Milk Lane. He passed a yard where two men in their shirtsleeves were splitting the chunks of an immense tree into first logs and then kindling, which would be sold up toward Lenox’s end of town.

  No doubt they had overpaid the country laborer who shipped the tree into London. So it went—the vast, dimly visible economy of this capital, as complex and inextricable as the vascular system of a man, crisscrossing itself a thousand times.

  He caught the omnibus at the corner, kept to himself in one corner until it reached the Strand, then hopped out and took a cab the rest of the way.

  When he pulled up to his own house on Hampden Lane, Lady Jane’s door opened and she came out. “There you are!”

  “Did I do something wrong?”

  “What on earth has that duke done?” she asked.

  Lenox shook his head. He lived in several overlapping versions of this city; one had to do with crime, and he sometimes forgot that word of that London could be sent back, by the passenger pigeons of society, to this one, his own.

  “Shot someone.”

  “My goodness, so it’s true.” She sighed. “The papers are being very cautious, libel. So he’s shot someone! Will he go to prison?”

  She was leaning against the railing of her own house. He paid the driver and walked toward her. The lime tree that grew between their houses was in full leaf now, casting a dancing shadow under the gaslight.

  “I would be shocked,” Lenox said.

  “Hm.” She wore a white dress with eyelets at the neckline, and looked like summer to him. “Yes, the Lords will hush it up. They always do.”

  “How is your reading of Marx and Engels going?”

  She laughed gaily. “I am not converted yet.”

  Lenox noticed that she was holding a letter and said, “What news?”

  “Oh!” She folded it and tucked it into the pocket of her dress. “It is sad news, in fact—well, sad, but happy. James and his company have been dispatched to India for six months. He only has time to stop home in London for a single evening before he goes.”

  “I’m awfully sorry to hear that,” said Lenox. She had been anticipating a long visit. “It’s wicked luck.”

  She smiled. “No, on the contrary, he says that he hopes to be home by Christmas, and what’s better still, that he will have six months in London then—for he has just been promoted.”

  “I say, that’s something.”

  “Yes—there’s nothing I like better than Christmas, you know.” She touched her stomach, not consciously, Lenox thought. “The best thing about having a child will be Christmas morning, I sometimes think.”

  “Your child will be lucky in its mother and father.”

  “We’ll see, I suppose—he’ll be a spoiler, James, dear one that he is, especially if it’s a girl, and I think I shall have to be the harsh and exacting disciplinarian. Girls get such a bad hand in this world that they need toughening up from the start.”

  “Feel free to practice on Lancelot.”

  She laughed. “By the way, would you like to come to supper in two nights? There will be twelve of us. I have been counting on you. Effie will be there.”

  “Will she? Then I must accept, I suppose.”

  “Good. Until then, if not before, in that case. Keep the duke from shooting anyone else in the meanwhile.”

  He felt particularly alone walking into his study; particularly unmarried. He reached into his pocket and opened the book at random.

  The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne, burn’d on the water.

  —Antony and Cleopatra

  What on earth was that supposed to mean? He closed the book in disgust, sick of Shakespeare. Nevertheless, he spent the rest of the evening painstakingly making notes for himself about every element of the case, from Maggie McNeal to John Shakespeare. Graham was out, which meant that he was still investigating Alexander Arnold Craig. Finally, Lenox poured himself a glass of red wine, took down his old Latin dictionary from school, and rang for dinner to be brought up to him whenever was convenient.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  It was raining again the next morning, a thin drizzle that was still steady enough to leave the pavement darker and absolve the city of the previous day’s accumulated dust, to the delight of maids everywhere. With the streets hushed, one could hear the songbirds of London very clearly, Lenox noticed as he read the papers.

  At eight o’clock, Ward appeared in the duke’s carriage to pick him up.

  He was alone. “Hello,” he said. “Ready?”

  “Is anyone else visiting the duke?” Lenox asked.

  “Lady Violet plans to take him lunch.”

  “And the duchess?”

  Ward screwed his mouth to one side and raised his eyebrows. But all he said was that he didn’t know Her Grace’s plans. Lenox nodded—he understood the implication. She must be a cold sort, he thought.

  Ward neatened a few papers he was holding as the carriage started away. “I must say, he has been very decent to me. He wrote and released me from my position. He has offered me my pick of spots in the Lords or the Commons to go to. Says his friends will of course honor their debts to him.”

  “That was honorable,” said Lenox.

  “I declined. I will stick here for now, anyway. Though the papers are getting uglier hour by hour.”

  Lenox nodded. He had read the articles that morning, which were still just skirting the word “murderer.” “Ward—about Craig. Will you answer me something? Who was he close to?”

  Ward frowned. “Close to? I’m really not quite sure. The duke. He got on well with Lord Vere, I think—Corfe, His Grace’s son.”

  “Below stairs, though, I mean.”

  Ward shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Fair enough,” said Lenox.

  They rode through the steady rainfall. They started chatting about nothing much—bygone cricket matches and housemasters, old friends—which was rather a relief, as it happened.

  That lasted until they turned onto Tower Bridge.

  Then both of them fell silent, staring at the hulking dark Tower of London itself, sitting heavily on its foundation across the Thames.

  A strange chill ran through Lenox. They could see its two enormous concentric defensive walls, and rising above these, the White Tower, the center of the compound, a square building with the flag of the St. George’s cross flying at each of its corners.

  “There’s the
Traitors’ Gate,” said Ward quietly, pointing.

  Lenox looked at the waterline of the Thames and saw it—a huge arched medieval gate cut into the very stonework of one wall and plunging directly into the water. This was where barges transported the worst prisoners into the Tower. Anne Boleyn had gone through the Traitors’ Gate.

  “The Duke of Wellington is still the constable, you know,” Lenox murmured.

  Wellington, the immortal hero of Waterloo, commanded every motion in the tower unless the monarch was present. To be constable was a position of huge prestige. “Yes,” said Ward.

  “I would bet you that he came to see Dorset in.”

  “Wellington? He’s eighty-one!”

  Lenox nodded. “Yes. But we are wading into very old customs here. The forms must never be broken—the ravens leaving and all that. A Duke of Dorset must be received as a Duke of Dorset. We might as easily be in 1550 as 1850 once we cross this bridge.”

  There were always at least six ravens in the Tower of London; terrifying huge black birds with strangely human eyes. If there were ever fewer—every child knew—the Crown would fall, and with it England.

  Lenox and Ward, both twenty-six, were still just within fingertips’ reach of that old schoolboy awe of Albion, Henry the Eighth, Sir Walter Raleigh, Oliver Cromwell. Poor Prince Edward and poor Prince Richard with their curling blond locks. Guy Fawkes had been tortured here. Such a great number of the country’s most deeply etched mythologies had emerged from within these formidable walls.

  They circled halfway around the castle once they had crossed the river, to a postern gate where two tall soldiers in bright red uniform stood sentry. Ward told them they were there to see the duke, and once the yeoman guards had been informed the two old Harrovians were ushered into the austere palace where much of England’s long history since 1066 had, in one murderous way or another, taken place.

  “Deep breath, old fellow,” said Lenox.

  “Deep breath yourself,” said the short, solid Ward, shoving his taller friend over on the path.

  Lenox laughed.

  They climbed dim, circling stone stairs, each one worn down in the middle from centuries of use.

  “Here you are,” the guard said, and opened a wooden door.

  The suite of rooms in which they found the Duke of Dorset could not have been more eligible, except that it locked from the outside. Its stone walls were damp, true, and there were bars over the window, old, strong, thin black ones crosshatching a sweeping view of the Thames and the city. But the Savoy could not have imagined finer niceties. There was a bowl of cut flowers, a handsome desk, a pen and inkstand, books, a plush settee, every comfort. Lady Violet had arranged it all very quickly, no doubt—or who knew, the Duke of Wellington himself.

  Dorset rose, a pouch of tobacco in hand. “Good morning, gentlemen.”

  Mysteriously, he looked better to Lenox’s eye than he had two days before. Perhaps it was that he had shaved, or perhaps it was that he had made some internal decision that this was an ordeal he would conquer through attitude. His soft crimson tie was knotted impeccably. A great deal could be got out of an aristocrat in a jam, Lenox knew. It was their lone teaching (Lord knew they couldn’t muster much maths) from the cradle, stiffness of spine. It did lend them a certain glory at moments of embattlement.

  Ward handed the duke the papers he was carrying. “Here you are, Your Grace,” he said.

  “Thank you, thank you.” He looked around the room, papers in hand. “Not so bad, is it? They tell me Thomas Cromwell had these rooms.”

  “Indeed, Your Grace?” said Ward.

  Dorset smiled at Lenox, bringing him into the conversation as naturally as any host could have. “I am not sure that is as reassuring as they believe it to be when they tell you. Anyway, perhaps while you are here you may solve the mystery of the Princes in the Tower, Mr. Lenox.”

  Lenox laughed politely. “It may be so, Your Grace.”

  “Has the press put their oar in yet?” the duke asked.

  “Not that we have seen,” said Ward.

  “The jailers will bring me the papers. A shilling goes quite a way here.”

  “That reminds me—Lady Violet sends some ready money, in notes and coin, Your Grace, and also a kidney pie for your supper. That has gone straight to the kitchens.”

  Ward handed over a leather billfold. “Give my thanks to my daughter, if you would,” said Dorset. “She is a sound one.”

  “With pleasure, Your Grace.”

  Lenox again noticed the strange absence of the duchess from these proceedings, this conversation.

  “I wonder if you would leave me and Lenox for a moment, Ward?” said the duke. “They will make you comfortable. A cup of tea, perhaps.”

  The secretary seemed relieved. “Yes, of course.”

  As Ward left, the duke walked to one of the small windows and stared through it, hands clasped behind his back. There was no glass in them, only bars; Lenox could feel the cold gusting of the rainy wind.

  Dorset was silent for some time, even after Ward had gone. Finally, he turned back to his visitor. “I had never imagined that I would kill a man,” he said. “Much less someone I respected so highly as Mr. Craig. He was a person of the utmost character. I am grieved, I find—fiercely grieved.”

  “I am told that he died painlessly, Your Grace.”

  Dorset, hands still behind his back, said, “My emotions are complicated by the fact that he was attempting to steal from me, I fear.”

  “Could you describe the events of the morning to me, Your Grace?”

  The duke shook his head and shrugged, as if he were wonderstruck himself. “It was so extremely quick.”

  “Anything you remember.”

  “I had fallen asleep in the armchair. The one I moved to the closet at the east end of my study. I woke because of a noise. I stepped out and saw a figure with a paraffin lamp set on the desk beside him, unscrewing the portrait of—well, you know what portrait it is. He seemed to charge at me. It was a confused moment. I fired my pistol. I hit him square in the chest, of course.”

  Lenox nodded. “Seemed to charge you? Was he on the other side of the desk?”

  “He came around the desk. He was holding a screwdriver. I couldn’t make him out—I wouldn’t have shot had I seen it was Craig, that’s sure.”

  “You thought it was merely another intruder.”

  “Yes. I went over and looked at his face by the light of his own paraffin lamp, and when I saw that it was Craig I was shocked to my bones.”

  “You sent for the police.”

  “For a doctor, and the police, immediately. But he was clearly dying.” A muscle flickered in Dorset’s jaw. “I shall never forget it.”

  Lenox paused. Then he said, “I have read your great-grandfather’s letter, Your Grace, if you wish to discuss the portrait. And I have read the poem; and I have an idea.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  He drew the duke’s undivided attention with this comment. Indeed, there was a hunger in his look, an avidity—he had traveled many years alone with this secret.

  “An idea.”

  “Yes, Your Grace.”

  “No man who has seen the clue has yet solved it. Perhaps you may be the one to do so. Nothing would relieve me more.”

  Lenox removed the ancient letter from his breast pocket and returned it to the duke. “Perhaps the first thing you could do is to tell me something about your great-grandfather. In particular I am confused as to the order of succession. He was the thirteenth duke, yet you are the fifteenth.”

  Dorset nodded. “It is a sad story. My grandfather, Clarence, to whom this letter was addressed, died of scarlet fever at the age of just thirty-one. His wife died at the same time. And in fact the author of the letter—my great-grandfather—followed them quickly to the grave. Of grief, I have sometimes fancied, for he was only sixty-three. He had no other children and was a widower.”

  “But he had a grandson.”

  “Yes,
my own father. He was only three months old at the time his parents contracted the fever, but was quarantined. Needless to say, he survived.”

  “An orphan.”

  “He was raised well loved and well tended by his mother’s parents at Stowe Lodge and lived to a healthy old age himself, long enough even to become close with Corfe and Violet. They often went to stay with him at Dorset Castle. We only lost him four years ago. I think that very good of God, after his own parents died so young.”

  Lenox did some quick math and calculated that the duke’s father must have been seventy-seven or seventy-eight. This explained why there had been four sons but only three dukes within the family in the past seventy years.

  “I see.”

  “When my father turned eighteen, our family solicitor gave him this letter, along with several important family possessions of traditional value, in a sealed box.”

  “But he never heard the story of the portrait firsthand.”

  Dorset shook his head regretfully. “No. He was scarcely a year old when he was passed into the care of his grandparents. It would have saved us an immense amount of trouble.”

  “So when your great-grandfather refers to himself and his son knowing the secret that he will not spell out…”

  “A secret lost to history.”

  Lenox nodded. “And your father? What happened when he eventually received the letter?”

  “He was eighteen. He was at Gonville and Caius then.” This was one of the colleges of Cambridge. “Shakespeare became a deep interest of his, as it has of mine. You see our position: If we make the portrait public, given that it contains a clue—”

  “Yes. If the riddle were public, any unscrupulous gold hunter in Christendom might find the play, and hold it hostage for whatever sum they chose.”

  They were standing about five feet apart, and Dorset nodded. “Exactly. I take it as a sacred trust that this should not happen.”