The Vanishing Man Read online

  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!”

  CHAPTER NINE

  The garden behind Lady Jane’s house was unusually wild compared to most of those on Hampden Lane, with vines that climbed the fences and a small sunlit knoll encircled by a few towering oak trees, shifting in the breeze.

  There was a table on the flagstones outside with four places set, three occupied. Lady Jane waved to Lenox. “There you are! What a cake,” she said, taking the plate from his hands. “How neatly it’s iced.”

  “Well, of course,” said Lenox with pride.

  “Pass my compliments to Mrs. Huggins.”

  “I will not!” said Lenox indignantly.

  She laughed. “You know the duchess, Charles.” This was the Duchess of Marchmain, an older cousin of Jane’s aged around forty-three or forty-four, very pretty, all that was amiable and kind. She gave Lenox her hand. “And this is my dear friend Miss Euphemia Somers, from Mrs. Clark’s. She has just returned from a year in America with her parents.”

  “I’m charmed to meet you, Miss Somers,” said Lenox, bowing.

  She inclined her head. “And you, Mr. Lenox. My friends call me Effie.”

  If Effie Somers had been at Mrs. Clark’s with Lady Jane—a girls’ school where Lenox’s friend had spent a year perfecting her French and painting sailboats—she was probably around twenty-two. She gave an impression of great ease and good nature. She was not unusually beautiful, but her smile was, and so was her hair, a dark chestnut blond that she wore in plaits, so notably beautiful, in fact, that one might have fallen in love with her for this single trait.

  Lenox sat, and the duchess said, “I hear you have been calling upon Dorset.”

  Lenox peered curiously at her, smiling. “Where on earth did you hear that?”

  “Not from me,” Jane said.

  “A little chickadee saw you going into the house, I suppose.”

  It would be easier to find privacy in a jammed lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean than in London. “He was an acquaintance of my father’s,” Lenox said.

  Her husband was a very different kind of duke than Dorset, his title only two generations old and won on the battlefield. But there was a great deal of money in it. “I like him.”

  “He pinches cheeks,” said Effie Somers.

  “Does he!” said Lenox, surprised.

  She smiled. “He did when I was eighteen, at any rate.”

  “Come clean, Charles,” said Lady Jane, “why were you with him?”

  “It really was a social call,” he said, and took a covering bite of teacake.

  “Just don’t go hunting with him,” said the duchess.

  Jane laughed shortly.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  They glanced at each other. Miss Somers looked at them inquiringly, evidently in the dark, too. “I suppose he kept it quiet,” said the duchess.

  “Kept what quiet?” asked Lenox.

  Lady Jane, who had before her a small, neatly drawn diagram of the seating arrangements for her garden party, nominally their reason for being there, looked down at it. “Shall we discuss seating?”

  “Come now!” said Lenox.

  “Even dukes deserve privacy.”

  Lenox might have let it rest there, except that Miss Somers, to whom he became instantly indebted, said, “But there are only two of us. I’ll keep the secret.”

  “So shall I,” Lenox put in right away.

  Lady Jane sighed. “Fine. It was about five years ago. It was terribly sad, really. A group were hunting grouse in Dorset, the duke, General Pendleton, and their two sons, and the duke accidentally shot Pendleton’s son. Pure bad chance.”

  “And he died?”

  “He lived for a month,” said the duchess, her cup of tea poised in her hand. “It was awful for Georgia Pendleton—awful. They have no other sons.”

  “Was t
here an inquest?” asked Effie Somers.

  “Yes, with no fault found. Everyone present, including the groom, agreed that it was no more than an unfortunate accident.”

  Lenox reflected on this. “Pendleton commanded a brigade at Waterloo,” he said. “He was made a knight for it.”

  “Your facts are out of date,” the duchess said, “for the Queen made him a baron in the list last year. He doesn’t come down from the country often, or you would have heard.”

  “He has no son to leave the title to,” said Lady Jane.

  “He has a nephew, at least,” said the duchess, “with whom he has become closer. His younger brother’s son.”

  Lenox took another bite of his teacake, which had a satisfying cracked-cinnamon sugar crust. He followed it with a sip of tea and looked up into the pure blue sky, thinking of his father and his brother for a passing moment.

  “Was there bad blood between Pendleton and the duke?”

  “They are not so close as they once were, of course,” said the duchess. “But no, the general accepted the situation, ultimately. Of course the duke himself was heartbroken.”

  Lenox pictured the still, impassive face of the thin and finely dressed aristocrat.

  “What a terribly sad story,” said Jane’s friend.

  “Yes. I don’t know why we brought up something so morbid!” replied Lady Jane, then with a businesslike tone went on, “Leave it aside—this seating plan. Here is where you are essential, Charles. I need to know everyone who has rejected everyone’s proposals among your Oxford friends. It’s vital. All the secrets, now, please.”

  “Why do you care?” he asked curiously.

  Lady Jane looked at him for a moment with guilty happiness. “There is a chance the Queen may come. I’d like it to be perfect.”

  “You’d better cut those branches back, then,” said Lenox, nodding upward. “It would be bad news if one fell on her.”

  “Leave the garden to me.” Then, with sudden alarm, she said, “Lancelot will be gone in three weeks’ time, won’t he?”

  “Yes, thank heavens.”

  “That’s good news. It’s one thing for him to target you with the peashooter, another Prince Albert.”

  “I’m offended at that,” said Lenox.

  “Who is Lancelot?” Effie Somers said.

  “Don’t ask,” he and Jane replied simultaneously, and all three laughed, and the conversation turned decisively away from the Duke of Dorset.

  Still, the story of the hunting accident stayed in his mind. And the name: Pendleton.

  When they had finished eating breakfast, Lenox went inside to help Lady Jane fetch the cut flowers she was considering for the tables. He said to her, in the back conservatory, “You’re about a quarter as clever as you think.”

  She stopped, surprised. “At least half, I would have said. But how so?”

  “As if I knew more than you about who has proposed to whom! I can’t even remember who’s engaged.”

  “We have different friends,” she said.

  He shook his head and smiled. “I’m not going to marry Miss Somers.”

  Lady Jane paused, looking at him, then said, “But don’t you like her? She was the dearest person I knew at Miss Clark’s. Always the most popular—but never took sides, even against the worst of the girls. And her father, being a diplomat, has dragged her all over the world these last three years, meaning she’s never been thrown in the way of a decent fellow.”

  “Well, she may be at your party. Say, look at this,” he said, and pulled the small leather book from his study out of his breast pocket. “You’ll like it.”

  She took it. “Selected Quotations of William Shakespeare. Why do you have it?”

  “I just came across it. My father gave it to me when I went to Harrow. It was once his own.”

  She smiled, flipping through the pages. “There are stars by some of the lines.”

  “Those are his.”

  She read one and laughed, studying it. She was one of the people close to Charles who had known his father well.

  Eventually she handed the little book back. “I’m very glad you have it.”

  “So am I.”

  Lady Jane looked him in the eye. “Don’t you like her, Charles? Effie?”

  He did, in fact; he liked her more with every passage of the conversation. She didn’t have quite so sharp an edge as Lady Jane or the duchess, but there was something lovely about her—the effortlessness of her laugh, the ingenuousness of her wit, her clear intelligence.

  He was about to say so, but there was a knock at the door. There were no servants immediately at hand, and he went to answer it himself. He saw, to his surprise, that outside was Theodore Ward.

  “Hello, Theo,” he said.

  Lady Jane came up behind Lenox. “Hello, Mr. Ward.”

  The young secretary looked utterly changed. His hair was a dark upright shock, his collar loose and his face red. He only just managed to bow. “My Lady.” Then he turned back to Lenox. “Charles. Thank goodness.”

  “What’s the matter?” asked Lenox.

  “The duke has been kidnapped.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Lenox opened the door wide. “Kidnapped! What?”

  Ward shook his head. “I don’t know much. I have a cab waiting. Will you come?”

  “Of course. Instantly.”

  Soon Lenox and Ward were down the stairs and into the waiting hansom. Ward gave the address of a busy corner near Pall Mall, the quarter of Mayfair that housed the private clubs and wine and gun and clothing shops that the city’s bluest-blooded inhabitants frequented.

  Theo had only heard the barest details of the incident. He knew the duke had been stepping from his carriage outside the august Carlton Club, which was the luxurious and exclusive game preserve of the conservative party. It was apparently where Dorset went nearly every morning, meaning the kidnappers might well have lain in wait for him there.

  “Two large men in cloaks, collars turned up, shoved him into a different carriage that pulled right up alongside the duke’s.”

  “Cloaks?” said Lenox, interrupting.

  “Yes, why?”

  He turned away and looked at the passing street. “Out of season,” he murmured. “Go on.”

  “This second carriage had sped up the street before the doorman of the Carlton could even get down the steps,” Ward said, though he had blown his police whistle instantly. There had been a large crowd upon the steps of the Carlton who watched the commotion.

  “Where were you?” Lenox asked.

  “Dorset House.”

  “Did any of them provide a good description of either the men or the carriage?” asked Lenox.

  Theo shook his head unhappily. “You have heard all I know. I came to fetch you immediately. The duchess is at the scene of the crime, accompanied by her cousin Sir Japheth Miles. His Lordship, the duke’s son, Corfe, would naturally have gone, but his health has worsened today. He has not left his room—delirious with fever from what I understand.”

  “Bad timing.”

  “It never rains but it pours,” said Ward, resorting, in his plain unintellectual but not unintelligent way, to the closest cliché at hand.

  “Chin up,” Lenox said, resorting to his, for Ward looked bereft. “The duke is too important to stay kidnapped. Nothing could be more certain than that.”

  And indeed, when they pulled up to the Carlton there were no fewer than half a dozen police wagons present. The street was blocked off in both directions. They stepped down from the cab and walked the last hundred yards to reach the scene.

  The first people Lenox saw there were Sir Richard Mayne, head of the Yard, and one of his chief inspectors, Warren Sinex. Sinex was a tall, hard, dangerous fellow, shrewd but given to flights of temper. Mayne, by contrast, was a gentleman to his fingernails, equable and hood-eyed, careful.

  “Lenox,” Mayne said, surprised. “What brings you here?”

  “I have been consulting with the duk
e in the last few days. His personal secretary, Mr. Ward, fetched me.”

  Mayne’s eyes went to Ward. “You are Theodore Ward? Very well, you two, come through the gauntlet if you wish.”

  Journalists were ringed around the carriage, which had the Dorset family’s intricate arms in raised gold leaf on each of its four doors. Inside it, Mayne showed them, were two plush blue velvet benches facing each other.

  One of them there bore a large dark stain.

  “Blood?” Lenox said to Mayne.

  “We think so,” said Sir Richard. He turned to find the journalists pressing behind him and barked, “Clear out! Clear out! Constables, yes, you two, do a better job of keeping these men back or you’ll be looking for another line of work. I mean that sincerely.”

  The constables didn’t need a second telling, and with rough shoves pushed the protesting members of the press backward.

  Lenox took the chance to lean in and feel the cushion. His fingers came away a rusty red. There was no doubt of it: blood.

  He looked at Ward. “Not a great amount. That is some comfort at least,” said Lenox.

  Mayne and Sinex returned their attention to the carriage, Sinex hanging about half a foot behind his superior, glowering at Lenox, whom he strongly disliked.

  “What happened?” Lenox asked Sir Richard.

  Mayne offered an account similar to Ward’s, filigreed with a few more details. The carriage into which the duke had been forced had four horses—in other words, was unusually fast, might easily be halfway to Scotland by now—and both men had looked “English,” to the doorman.

  “‘No Indian or Negro buggers, begging your pardon, Sir Richard,’ he told me,” Mayne said. “I quote him directly, you understand.”

  “Did he notice anything about their clothes?”

  “Not beyond the cloaks. But there’s this,” said Mayne. He took a notecard from his pocket and passed it over to Lenox and Ward.

  Prepare ten thousand pounds in ready notes and ten thousand pounds in gold bullion. Await further instruction.

  Lenox read it twice and turned to Ward. “I take it the duke can raise this kind of money?”

  Ward, who had been pale throughout the encounter, at last had a use to which to put his nervous energy. He nodded. “Without even troubling his bankers, I should think,” he said. “He owns—well, Dorset. You know that as well as I do.”