The Inheritance Read online

  Their relationship was all that Lenox could wish for either of them—except that they had no relationship, properly speaking, beyond work and an amiable, easy camaraderie, a complete comfort with each other, which nevertheless never strayed from within certain rigid bounds.

  Yet he knew that Dallington felt very, very strongly for Polly! And had since they first encountered her as Miss Strickland, the anonymous detective who had been a step ahead of them all the time in the case of Godwin, and his attempt upon the life of Queen Victoria. The plain truth was that he loved her. Every gesture betrayed it, every look, as vigilant as he was not to let them.

  Why then did he not ask for her hand?

  Lady Jane, who was close friends with Dallington’s mother, had strong opinions on this question: She felt that the young lord, for all his blitheness of demeanor, had perhaps been wounded by the animus that London society had developed toward him during his years of debauchery, and feared either Polly’s rejection, because of it, or else feared burdening her with his reputation.

  And while there was no doubt that she, too, had a deep affinity with Dallington, Polly was in no wise short of admirers—and a girl could not wait forever, as every aged aunt from Oxford Street to the Strand would have been pleased to inform her.

  A very small part of Lenox was relieved that their romance had progressed no further, because the agency had never run more smoothly than it did in its current iteration, the three of them equal friends.

  And yet.

  When Polly had finished her tea and Dallington had donned his greatcoat, the three of them descended the stairs (“If I have any visitors tell them I’m in Peru, Mrs. Lucas,” their host called out cheerfully, not bothering to listen for the reply) and stepped into the carriage, Polly and Anixter on one of the benches, the two gentlemen facing them from the other.

  “We’ll drop you at the Commons, Dallington,” said Polly, “but then, Lenox, where shall you and I begin?”

  “The Collingwood again, I think.”

  She nodded. “Very well. And we’ll all meet in Chancery Lane at two o’clock this afternoon—or at least, I shall be there, Dallington, if Lenox is still out upon the trail. We must show our faces, I think. And assign work.”

  There were several detectives, all formerly of the Yard, who worked for the agency. The bulk of their business was commercial: acting more swiftly and with greater energy than the police could on behalf of various businesses when they had internal troubles, just as they did for Parliament.

  Dallington debarked with a wave at the Commons, and then they turned back toward the Collingwood, Rackham driving them in as straight a line as he could manage, through the snow—the now dirtied snow, life, as was its habit, having resumed.

  “Off to the Collingwood, then,” said Polly. “Before we get there, can you remind me again how you know Mr. Leigh?”

  “I—”

  There was a pause as he considered how to answer that question.

  In the very brief duration of that pause, Lenox felt himself transported into the past. It felt almost physical, as if he had been thrust backward in time, to the first real conversation he had ever had with his friend.

  “It’s a very involved story,” he said, finally.

  That conversation had taken place thirty years before, along the country road that separated Harrow School from the high street of the village of Harrow.

  Lenox, sixteen then, had been strolling along that road alone in the mid-afternoon; a hot mid-afternoon, because it was only just September, and the weather still more August-like, the trees so heavy with their late-summer leaves that the wind could barely shift them.

  There had been in those days a rough-hewn wooden fence running along this empty road. Lenox had spotted a figure sitting upon it, hunched and wretched-looking.

  As he drew closer, he had seen it was Gerald Leigh.

  “Ahoy,” he said, which for some lost reason had become the customary greeting of all the boys in school.

  Leigh looked up. “Oh.”

  Not a customary greeting, by contrast. There was a very awkward silence, as it became perfectly clear that Leigh had been crying, and then it became clear that Lenox knew, and then it became clear that Leigh knew that Lenox knew. “Good summer?” Lenox asked.

  “Yes. Fine.”

  “Mine, too.”

  “How rippingly splendid,” said Leigh.

  Lenox’s spirits, that day, had in fact been very high. Not many boys were back at Harrow from his year. (He had come up early with Edmund, who was head of his house.) There was no prospect of work for a week or so still, only games, riding, and perhaps a bit of fishing.

  Lenox had almost walked on. But something in Leigh’s posture—his hands stuffed into his pockets, his face grim with the determination not to cry any further in front of a schoolmate—held him back. “Would you like to go into town?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Look here, there’s no point being proud. We’ve all been snotty once, or crying.”

  “Thanks, no.”

  The truth was there really was no excuse to be crying. They were fifth formers now. But Lenox, young and carefree, had been in such a decent mood that he had tried again. “I think I’ve a parcel in the mails from my aunt. There’s bound to be some gingerbread in it.”

  Chocolate, too; but that he was not going to share with a person he barely knew. “I’m fine,” said Leigh.

  “Be stubborn, then, go on.”

  Leigh had colored—his unhappy tendency—and said, “Don’t think I’m not appreciative that you’re being friendly. It’s just that you’d rather feel rotten alone, wouldn’t you?”

  “But why feel rotten? Come along to town and forget about it.”

  Leigh looked conflicted, but after a beat, said, “Well—all right. I’ve nothing else to do.”

  “Good chap.”

  Leigh hopped down from the fence and ambled alongside Lenox. “Cheers.”

  “Although you do have something to do, if it’s anything like last year. You ought to be studying.”

  “I’m never going to study any of that rot again if I can help it.”

  They walked along in silence for a few moments, Leigh occasionally grabbing moodily at the high grasses at the side of the road. He really did ought to have been studying, Lenox had reflected. At Harrow a bad paper received a “skew,” which was a black mark, and a truly terrible paper a “rip,” which involved the beak literally ripping the paper in half and returning it to the pupil. A skew was shameful enough—Lenox had gotten two in his first year—but a rip was an event of such embarrassment that his own father still winced at the word, when Edmund spoke it. Leigh was nearly always skewed; and had been ripped at least weekly the year before.

  This was none of Lenox’s business, however, and soon enough they came to the post office.

  If it had been any other time of year, Lenox probably would have shared his gingerbread at this point and bade Leigh good-bye. But none of his own friends would return for another day or two, he knew from their letters, and Edmund, though he would have helped him if anything was wrong, in the normal course of a day at school wouldn’t even deign to look at his younger brother.

  And so Lenox suggested that they take the long way back around, by way of passing the day.

  Leigh had agreed. This roundabout route took them across some pretty countryside, past a dairy farm and then a lord’s meadow with a small, idyllic pond in it.

  To Lenox’s surprise he found that Leigh was not such an appalling companion for a walk. Once he started talking his temper improved, and he surprised Lenox by mentioning with great care the names and properties of one or two plants they passed. In fact he seemed to know quite a lot in that field, for all that he was a dunce—he told Lenox the name of a bird, and then, when they came near a huge oak tree, stooped to feel its roots, saying that he thought it was sick.

  “You’re talking rubbish,” Lenox said, bending down.

  “I’m no
t,” said Leigh hotly.

  “How do you know, then?”

  “You can see whiteness under the bark of the roots.” He pointed. “It’ll be a while, but that’s the end of that.”

  Lenox looked up at the massive tree. “Hm.”

  “Nothing to be done.”

  They stopped when they reached the edge of the pond. They had been discussing some of the boys in the upper forms, the bullies, with satisfying mutual expressions of loathing. Lenox, hot, had taken off his jacket and tossed it to the ground. Leigh picked up a flat stone and hurled it sullenly toward the water.

  “No, no,” said Lenox, who found a similar stone and threw it at a low parallel to the pond’s surface, then watched with gratification as it skipped seven, eight, nine times, before jagging the water and disappearing.

  They skipped stones for ten minutes before Leigh got the hang of it. “Ah!” he called triumphantly after a decent shot.

  No older brother, Lenox reckoned. “What were you so weepy about back there?” he ventured to ask.

  “Oh, mind your own business,” said Leigh.

  “Fine.”

  They started slowly around the pond, still some ways off from school. Only after they had been strolling in silence for a few minutes did Leigh say, in a burst of confidence, “I hate being here again.”

  “I’m happy to be back. The summer was a million years long, I thought.”

  “You would be happy,” said Leigh, bitterly.

  “You’ll never make a friend if you’re so down at the mouth all the time.”

  Leigh shook his head furiously, as if he knew it just as well as Lenox did. There was another long period of silence.

  And then, suddenly, as if he couldn’t help himself, he began to pour out the whole story in a great torrent.

  They walked slowly. He told Lenox about his father, about his mother’s insistence that he come to Harrow, about his odd anonymous patron (whom they would come to call in their investigations that fall the MB, short for “Mysterious Benefactor”), his misery at being forced to sit in the Harrow classrooms, surrounded by boys who hated him and teachers who were indifferent.

  Lenox was as selfish as most sixteen-year-olds, but he had mostly been a good sort even then, and after a while the boys had taken up places opposite each other, sitting against two trees at the edge of the school meadow, and sat there for a long time, discussing Leigh’s misfortunes.

  It helped that they were interesting—and Leigh, silent amid his schoolmates for a whole year, was furiously talkative, in a way that he had never been and Lenox would never know him to be again. Indeed, they sat for so long that they only realized they had to be back at school when the first bell for supper rang. “Damn it,” said Leigh.

  Lenox leaped up, tugging his jacket on. “We can make it.”

  “No chance.”

  “You have to get your chin up. Come on. It’ll mean sprinting it, but I certainly don’t intend to be caned on my second day back.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Lenox recounted none of this history in response to Polly’s question. All he said was that he and Leigh had been friends at school together—but that Leigh had spent the ensuing years abroad.

  Polly tilted her head thoughtfully, as the carriage juddered along. “I don’t wish to be indelicate,” she said, “but your friend wouldn’t be the first gentleman in London to be enticed into spending the night away from his hotel room.”

  Anixter frowned pointedly, which Lenox thought was a little bit rich given that he had called at every port from here to Bombay with Her Majesty’s Navy, an association not remarkable for its high morals ashore.

  “Yes, but I think he would have written that he couldn’t come, after the alarmed tone of his first letter,” Lenox said. “That’s what worries me. He is not an inconsiderate person.”

  Polly nodded. “A fair point.” She thought for a moment, then added, “My own father was at Eton.”

  “I’m amazed he stayed out of prison long enough to have a daughter.”

  “Ha, ha.” She drew her arms around herself. “I don’t envy your poor Mr. Leigh a night out, either. It’s colder than a witch’s heart.”

  “They say it warms up during a snow and gets colder afterward.”

  “That sounds like balderdash.”

  Whether it was true or not, the cold told in the streets of the capital: As Lenox stepped down from the carriage he had a long view of the street, tapering into the distance, and saw that the chimneypots were smoking furiously from each house along the way. He hoped Jane and Sophia weren’t so very cold. He knew from his childhood that certain rooms in a country house could never be coaxed into real warmth, no matter the number of fires lit in their hearths.

  “Why are we here, then?” Polly murmured to Lenox as they entered the hushed entryway of the lobby.

  “I want to find out who paid for Leigh’s room.”

  “Paid for it?”

  “He wouldn’t have stayed here of his own choice. At least I don’t think he would. He would have found someplace simple, and preferably closer to a park.”

  “Perhaps he’s changed.”

  Lenox smiled. “No. He hasn’t changed.”

  There was a short line at the clerk’s desk, and as they took their place in it, Polly said, “He’s a natural philosopher, you said?”

  Lenox shrugged. “Yes. Or a ‘scientist,’ as McConnell keeps insisting the more up-to-date term is. A generalist of some sort anyhow. We had lunch together—oh, ten years ago, I suppose, and my impression then was that he was some sort of a jobbing scientist, taking whatever work he could find, acting as shipboard apothecary. He had gone on a great many sea voyages, jumping aboard ships wherever they happened to be going. Rather romantic.”

  “Not successful, then. In spite of being at Harrow.”

  “He was expelled from Harrow and never went up to university at all—no, not traditionally successful. But happy, I hope. His coat was in tatters when we dined, as if mice had been at its edges. He was very sunburned, too. If I recall he had just been in Brazil.”

  “And you’ve no idea what’s drawn him back to London now?”

  The answer to that was complicated, given Leigh’s note. Lenox was spared from offering it when the clerk greeted them, inviting them forward.

  Lenox was about to speak when he realized something: His letter was gone. Leigh had apparently claimed it within the last hour. And yet the key was still there, on its hook.

  “Is Mr. Leigh in?” he asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “He was just by?”

  “Sir?”

  “I see the card I left for him earlier is gone.”

  “Ah! No, sir, his secretary was here.”

  “His secretary.”

  “Yes, a red-haired young man. He took Mr. Leigh’s letters.”

  “Did this person say where Mr. Leigh was waiting for his letters?”

  The clerk looked blank. “No, sir.”

  “I see.”

  “Can I take another message for you?”

  Lenox glanced at Polly. She shook her head. The same thought had occurred to them both: that this secretary, this supposed secretary, might be the very person Leigh feared. For his part Lenox felt that his friend was unlikely in the extreme to employ a secretary.

  And so Lenox declined the clerk’s offer. He then asked under whose auspices Leigh was staying at the Collingwood—who was paying for the room—and the clerk immediately grew suspicious and then silent, which would have been Lenox’s reaction, too.

  He looked happy when Lenox and Polly turned and left.

  “Where now?” asked Polly.

  “I’m going to find him,” said Lenox grimly. “But first I suppose we had better go back to my house to be sure he hasn’t popped up there, or had my letter from this ‘secretary’ and replied to it. Unless you would prefer me to drop you in Chancery Lane.”

  “No. I’m curious now.”

  In fact there was a guest wai
ting at Hampden Lane, but it wasn’t Gerald Leigh. It was Thomas McConnell, one of Lenox’s closest friends.

  He had a telegram himself. “Jane and Toto are still in the country,” he said, holding it up. “I stopped by to see if you thought we ought to go down and retrieve them. Hello, Polly.”

  “Hello, McConnell. We were hoping that Lenox here had received a letter. Kirk?”

  The butler, hovering nearby, stepped forward and said that no letter had arrived.

  “Were you working overnight, Thomas?” Lenox asked.

  McConnell looked at him inquiringly. “How did you know?”

  “Iodine on your right cuff. A tired face. Your collar crimped in a neat line, where your stethoscope loops it.”

  “Ah! Yes, so. As it happens I was there overnight. It was a hard one as well with this weather,” said McConnell. “New patients.”

  McConnell was a physician. A Scotsman, he had come to London riding a crest of academic success—papers published, a brilliant future foretold—and immediately become one of the most respected practitioners in Harley Street. Then he had made an extremely illustrious marriage, which nearly ruined him.

  His wife was one of Lady Jane’s cousins and also one of her closest friends, a sprightly and feckless young person named Victoria Phillips, though everyone, from dukes down to the gossip columnists of the penny papers, called her Toto. When she had defied her family and married McConnell—who was well but not nobly born—they had insisted that he sell his practice before the marriage take place. The idleness that this decision let him in for, combined with the tempestuousness of both his own character and his new wife’s, had made for several dark years, full of long periods of estrangement and, in his case, drink.

  Two things had pulled him back from the edge: the daughter he and Toto had had, and, more recently, his return to work, at the Great Ormond Street Hospital, where indigent children received treatment without any charge. It was here that he had evidently been working through the previous night.

  The three of them had moved into Lenox’s nearby study, where McConnell perched on the arm of a chair, and Polly took a seat behind the detective’s desk and studied the small swinging silver clock there, its gears visible through glass.