Contents

Begin Reading

Excerpt: A Burial at sea

“Poor chap, Lenox murmured, walking up toward the scene of the crime. The still body sprawled along the cobblestones below him was cast over with the jaundice of evening lamplight. “You don’t know what his name was, do you?”

“Phil Jigg, according to one woman. I asked something like eight people about him.”

“Did she say anything else?”

The young bobby shook his head. “That was all, and she rushed off right quick.”

“It looks like strangulation.” Lenox pointed out the ring of deep scarlet around the man’s neck. “His head is at that slightly unnatural angle, too. Was there anything in his pockets?”

“Probably, Mr. Lenox, but of course the beggars and the boys would have given it the thrice-over and taken anything worthwhile. I only arrived here half an hour ago. Nothing was left.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Not even the buttons of his waistcoat.”

Lenox looked down and saw the man’s bare feet. “How about where he lived?”

“I wouldn’t guess Pall Mall, begging your pardon, sir.”

Lenox looked around the street, a long, deathly quiet one that by day would gradually become a carnival of pickpockets, jugglers, badger baiters, ball-and-cup shills, prostitutes, and street urchins who could turn a magic trick or do a few flips between the hansom cabs. It was famous, Great St. Andrew’s Street, though not one of the British Empire’s prouder adornments.

“I’ll look the matter over,” said Lenox, a soft sigh behind his words. “If you’re sure you can’t find the time.”

The young policeman nodded dolefully. “If Inspector Exeter knew I was even here I’d be in trouble. Peacekeeping, he often says, not crime solving.”

“I’ve seen exceptions to that rule,” Lenox said dryly.

The bobby didn’t respond, except to say, “Will you be needing a look at the body, then?”

“Could you keep it in the morgue for a day or two, just in case?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Very well. Thanks for calling me out, Jameson.”

Lenox walked back to his carriage, took a brief glance around, stepped inside, and told the driver to go to Regent Square. The driver, Lenox knew, was only too glad to trade Great St. Andrew’s for the square, and a six-hour-old corpse for the companionship of the other drivers who would be waiting outside at the Duke of Marchmain’s dinner party.

Looking out of the window as the carriage bumped along, Lenox cast back his mind. It must have been 1862 that he had his last case here, a murder then, too. So it had been three years. The place doesn’t look different at all, he thought, and gave a quiet sigh of despair. Only his closest friends could have seen the glint of interest in his eye, and known the excitement he felt that he was working once again.

* * *

The next morning was sunny and bright, a first intimation that spring was close. It had been a remorselessly cold and windswept April, and the first few days of May little better. As Lenox wandered through the churchyard of St. Giles in the Fields he undid a button on his overcoat, then another. It was a ten-minute walk from there, past Two Brewers Yard and Monmouth Street, down Great White Lion’s, that brought him to the Seven Dials, the small circle at the heart of this rather poor area. Extending out from the circle were seven thin streets crowded with noisy vendors and high, shabby buildings full of underfed children and overworked mothers. One of the seven was Great St. Andrew’s, and Lenox turned down it with a wary check of his billfold. The pickpockets worked toward the middle of the day, when the streets were thick with slumming gentleman and foreigners who didn’t know better, but it was always best to be safe.

He knew one woman on Great St. Andrew’s, Martha Morris. She had a hot corn stand in front of the rag-and-bone shop twenty doors or so down the street. It was her husband who had been murdered three years before, though she hadn’t been sorry to see him go. Abraham Morris had been a drinker and a gambler, the kind who hit his wife and took the money she had made, and it was only reluctantly that Martha cooperated with the detective. When he solved the case (a well-connected man named James Dewey had killed Morris when he threatened to expose Dewey’s habit of going to prostitutes), she hadn’t even been moderately glad, in fact not even all that interested. Still, in the end they had reached a position of mutual respect, if a grudging one on her side.

So Lenox sought her out first. Sure enough, there she was at her stand, selling the buttered ears of corn for fourpence each. Lenox asked for one and paid before she recognized him. As he took his first bite (and it was good, smoky and salty, the kind of food they would never have let him have as a boy), she looked at him through narrowed eyes and said, “Don’t I know you?”

“You do, Mrs. Morris,” he said. “Charles Lenox.”

She looked him in the eyes. “Are you bearing any news for me, Mr. Lenox?”

“Oh no,” he said. “Nothing like that.” He waved a reassuring hand.

“Do you always get greeted as if you were the Grim Reaper?” she asked, expertly rolling the corn with a pair of blackened tongs.

“More often than I’d like, I’m afraid. No, in fact I was coming to ask you for a favor. I was wondering if you knew a man named Philip Jigg.” He consulted his notepad. “That’s right, Philip Jigg.”

The guarded look her face had worn when she recognized him returned. “I expected that there’d be a price for your ‘elp, if you can call it that,” she said. “Big gentleman like you coming down among us.”

Lenox was stung. “No, I don’t expect you to say anything you don’t want to. Or anything at all, for that matter. I only came here because I know you.”

She wasn’t mollified. “I knew Philly Jigg, all right. But I don’t want trouble, so I’ll be asking you to go on your way. And ‘ere’s your fourpence. No charity needed ‘ere, I’ll tell you.”

“I won’t take that fourpence, because I enjoyed the corn.” He tossed the cob into a barrel by the stand. “But I will move on, if that’s what you like.”

“I reckon it is,” she said.

“Was he a bad man?” Lenox asked, almost as an afterthought. “Was he like your husband?”

“Gentler than that, bless his soul.” She said it almost involuntarily.

“Could you at least point out someone who knew him well?” Lenox said, trying hard to keep his voice nonchalant.

“The Plug brothers p’raps. Down by the arena. That’s all I reckon I’ll say.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Morris.”

She waved her tongs urgently, and he walked briskly away, aware that to be seen talking to him was a kind of danger, that in the Dials the unusual was always a kind of danger. There was no need to ask where the arena was—Lenox remembered vividly Abraham Morris’s body slumped against the wall in the alley behind it. It was a place where a sixpence bought a quart of ale and a show of ratting or bear-baiting, famous in Parliament as the example reform-minded MPs would always draw on as a sign of London’s moral degradation. As Lenox approached he could see the thicket of performers, beggars, and street urchins trying to make a penny or two. Many of them would use those pennies in the arena, in fact, betting and drinking.

“Plug brothers?” he asked a boy of six or seven, handing over two halfpenny coins.

“Just there.”

Lenox walked to the storefront the lad had pointed out. It had grimy windows filled with rather garish suits of clothing and a more staid rack of hats. Red stencil lettering above the door read PLUG BROTHERS, and a signboard out on the sidewalk advertised all sorts of products, ranging from the banal (“hats”) to the bizarre (“ratty pockets”). Lenox went in and found two identical men, each about forty-five, each with trim black hair, and each with an enormous stomach and about nine chins. These, evidently, were the Plugs, and in Lenox’s opinion were the last word on what a Mr. Plug ought to look like. Both of them stood up when he came in, though the effort left them panting slightly as they spoke.

“Hello, sir,” said one of them. “Timothy Plug. This is my brother, Thomas.”

“How do you do,” Lenox said.

“Can we help you today, sir? In the market for anything particular?”

“What are ratty pockets, if I might inquire?”

Thomas Plug frowned. “A gentleman square-rigged like you, I should say, could go without them.”

“Square-rigged?”

“Respectably dressed, sir.”

“But what are they? Just curiosity, you know.”

Timothy Plug took this one. “Pants with extra large pockets running along the sides, for rat catchers to fill with feed, net, water bottle, in short, the entire apparatus of the rat catcher.”

Thomas Plug nodded to indicate that he thought this a satisfactory answer.

Lenox took the least offensive item in his purview off of the shelf—a pink lace handkerchief that looked to be about eight feet across—and paid half a shilling for it. As the Plugs went about wrapping it, no small job, Lenox asked a question. “I say, I wonder whether you two knew Phil Jigg?”

Both brothers froze. “Who might be asking?” one of them inquired after a moment.

“Charles Lenox. I’m looking into his death.”

Thomas Plug went nervously to the door and looked at the street. “You understand,” he said, looking back over his shoulder at Lenox, “that we don’t know who killed him. It could have been anybody.”

“Of course,” Lenox said. There was always the danger that someone powerful, one of the minor monarchs of the Dials, had wanted Phil Jigg dead.

“But,” Plug went on, “Jiggs was our friend, you know. We’d like to see some justice done.”

“All too rare around here,” Timothy chipped in.

Lenox nodded. “Can you tell me anything about him?”

Thomas sighed. “He was a nice chap. Never afraid to stand a pint at the pub, but not a drunk or a boaster. Generous, I mean. Bought his clothes here to support us.”

“What did he do?”

“Ah—now he had ratty pockets. He was a rat catcher, wasn’t he. About four times a month the arena has a dog-and-rat show, and Jiggs always used to supply about half the rats. He would wander all over the Dials until he had caught about eighty or ninety of the little fellers.”

Timothy added, “And in between shows, if he ran a bit shy he was a pea-and-thimble man, like.”

“Pea-and-thimble?”

“You know, Mr. Lenox, sir, the fellow with three cups and a pea.”

“Ah.”

Timothy’s pink face quivered. “Poor Jiggs, I’ll say that much.”

“Do you know anybody who didn’t like him, if I may ask?”

“No, ‘course not. I’m dashed if he wasn’t one of the most popular chappies in these parts, Mr. Lenox.”

“Who were his other friends, Mr. Plug?”

Both brothers thought for a moment. “We were the closest to him,” Thomas said at last. “Some of the lads at the Queen’s Arms knew him but weren’t friends, like.”

“Where did he live?”

“Ah—a sad story there, you know,” said Thomas. Timothy nodded. “A right sad story, Mr. Lenox. Three weeks ago a slang cove—a showman, you know, one of these fellows outside the arena offering magic tricks and the like—well, one of these fellows stuck a knife to Jiggs’s throat and made him turn over a whole week’s rat-catching money. Disappeared after that, I can tell you. Jiggs near died of it. Then, next go-round, believe it or don’t, it happened again! A fine wirer, though, no knife involved.”

“Fine wirer?”

“Only the best of the pickpockets receive that precise appellation,” Timothy said knowledgeably, shaking his great pink head up and down.

“What happened to Phil Jigg, then?”

“He was run out of his house. Had to go stay around back of the church. Not a bad deal, though they force you to listen to them sermons, you know.”

“Which church?”

“Rev Tilton’s, it’s called St. Martin’s. Only a few hundred paces in that direction.”

Thomas Plug said thoughtfully, “The lads there might know better than we what his habits have been.”

Lenox nodded. “No idea, then, what happened to him? Enemies, I mean to say, or perhaps somebody whose turf Phil Jigg trespassed on?”

“Phil paid up promptly out of the pea-and-thimble money, I can tell you that,” said Timothy. “And he was valuable to them at the arena. No, I reckon it was something else. Can’t say what, though.”

A short while later Lenox went back out into the street, which was much busier now. He had asked a few more questions, none of which yielded much. Jigg was from the county of Norfolk originally; orphaned early, without knowing whether his parents were alive or dead; raised in an orphanage; didn’t have a wife, a child, or indeed any family of any sort; no, not at all the type to gamble or go into debt; no, never involved in anything criminal. Still, the Plugs had been helpful. Lenox had learned enough to begin looking more deeply into the case.

It was about eleven, and Lenox thought his next step might be to visit St. Martin’s, where Phil Jigg had been staying since he was kicked out of his residence. Perhaps the other habituals there could give him fresher information. He stopped on the way and peered inside the arena, though there was nothing to see and he was rewarded only with a hundred different invitations to play a card game, a hundred different forms of begging. One of them caught his eye in particular, a little girl of ten or so with what appeared to be an awful wound on her leg. Though Lenox knew it was only a piece of meat strapped there, in some way that almost made him sadder. He gave the girl some coins and moved off down the street, thinking he would do an awful lot more good in Parliament than out here searching futilely for facts about a man who seemed almost eerily anonymous even to his closest friends.

St. Martin’s was nicer than the neighborhood it served, a wide, airy, whitewashed church surrounded by dim, narrow buildings. It had a spartan altar and a modest sort of organ in the rear of the nave, as well as some rather pretty scenes from the life of Christ in stained glass. Behind it, according to the Plug brothers, was the long room that transient men either paid threepence or did chores to sleep in, with a large central fire that ran day and night, summer and winter, and cots along its walls. And behind that were the St. Martin’s orphans.

The Reverend Tilton was a tall, thin man with a shock of white hair. He met Lenox in a small but immaculate office behind a door by the chapel. A page (perhaps one of the orphans) had taken Lenox’s card in.

“Phil Jigg?” he said without preliminaries.

“That’s right,” said Lenox. “Did you know him well?”

“I only made Mr. Jigg’s acquaintance when he first began to frequent our refectory here.”

“How long ago was that?”

“I first saw him perhaps ten weeks ago, and then more regularly for the past month.”

“Not before that?”

“He did not attend our services here, no, Mr. Lenox. I have time for little else than the work of the church.”

“Of course, Reverend Tilton, I understand. If I may ask another question—what was Mr. Jigg like?”

“To me he had only just become one of the thirty or so regular inhabitants of the church, so I couldn’t say specifically, Mr. Lenox. I know that he didn’t fall into any sort of trouble while he was staying here, and I know that he was what’s called a ratter, but beyond that not much.”

“Did he pay or work for his bed?”

“Both at different times. His means were variable, like many people of this neighborhood.”

“He never had any trouble with the other inmates?”

“Not at all, no. I make a point of finding out who has.”

“Did you ever have any conversation with Mr. Jigg?”

“Not really, no. He mentioned that he was an orphan, too, lost his parents when he was two to a fire, and complimented our work here.”

“With the orphanage?”

“Yes. London’s a sight more difficult than Norwich, but we get by. Food, clothes, shelter. The three priorities in my life. In the boys’ lives.”

“That was all you and Mr. Jigg talked about?” Lenox asked.

“We may have traded a word or two about his chores for the day, and I certainly might have quoted a passage or two from the scriptures to him.”

None of it was very promising, and neither was Lenox’s conversation with the men staying in the long room behind the church, many of whom were doing chores. Only one man, John Mason, said anything interesting, and that was that he knew Philip Jigg to be a troublemaker.

“I’m surprised to hear that,” Lenox said. “From what I’ve heard he seems to have been a man who kept his own counsel, Mr. Mason.”

“You’d’a been surprised.”

“Can you give me any example of what you mean?”

“Chap didn’t know ‘is business, and chaps like that don’t come to no good,” was all Mason could offer, even when Lenox prodded him for more.

Lenox left St. Martin’s puzzled. The next step, he thought as he walked back toward the circle at the heart of the Seven Dials, was to talk to the other ratters and the men in the arena. After a bite of lunch, perhaps. Coming up to the circle he saw an inoffensive-looking pub called the John o’Groats. It was just by Martha Morris, who studiously ignored Lenox’s glance as she turned her corn. Lenox turned into the pub with a sigh—always grim to lose another source, to alienate another acquaintance. It would only be worth it if he could find the murderer.

At the pub, Lenox sat by a dim transom near the fire, which was roaring despite the improved weather. He ordered half a pint of mild and a slice of steak-and-kidney pie from a young woman of perhaps fifteen, then looked over the notes he had taken from the Plug brothers as he waited for his food. Just as it came, though, Lenox saw a young boy and a man come into the pub, the boy point him out, and a few small coins change hands. The boy scampered out of the pub, and apprehension rose in the detective’s chest as he saw that the man coming toward him was John Mason.

“Ain’t a bobby, is you?” he asked.

“No, I’m not. Can I help you?”

Mason sneered. “Maybe. Though’ I’d just repeat myself—a chap what don’t know ‘is business don’t come to much good.” As he said it he pulled his hand outward from his pocket, and with a flash of panic Lenox saw the dull black sheen of a pistol in the man’s hand.

“All right,” Lenox managed to mutter.

Mason stormed off, and Lenox pushed away the steaming pie, suddenly finding that the cliche was true: He didn’t have an appetite any longer.

* * *

That evening Jameson, the bobby who had found Phil Jigg’s body, stopped by Lenox’s house to check on the day’s progress. Lenox told him the little he had learned from the Plug brothers and Reverend Tilton, as well as what had happened with John Mason in the pub.

“We can always bring him in, sir,” said Jameson. “No point in carrying on if you might get hurt.”

“What I wonder is whether the man was threatening me to protect himself or to protect somebody else.”

“Himself, I’d reckon.”

“But why? Why draw attention to himself? It wasn’t as if he were my primary suspect. Or any kind of suspect, for that matter.”

“Don’t know that he’d think it through like that, sir.” He pushed his black hair away from his eyes. An awfully young man, Lenox thought wearily. “If you ask me, he’s the chap.”

“You may be right. But what about proof? Motive? Witnesses?”

“Nobody will stand witness against Mason.”

“No?”

“He’s reckoned quite dangerous, and he’s been known to work for Black Sammy.”

Even Lenox had heard of Black Sammy, the man who ran prostitution, thief-taking, and gambling along most of Great St. Andrew’s. He was known for his violence. His presence cast a shadow over the case now that he was involved, even at one remove.

“He might be the man—Black Sammy, I mean,” said Lenox.

“Might be.”

“Will you come out with me tomorrow morning?

“You mean to go back to the Dials then, sir?”

“I do.”

“I suppose I could come along. Oh—and by the way, I had a friend at the morgue take a quick glance over Phil Jigg’s body.”

“Did you?”

“He confirmed what you said, strangulation, though he found a few bruises on the body as well.”

“Not all that much help, unfortunately.”

“No.” Jameson frowned at his notepad. “A couple of other small notes—Jigg had one tattoo, on the back of his neck. An old one, apparently, reading ST. He was a heavy smoker, though that’s not surprising. Oh—and he had lots of small scars up and down his legs.”

“That’s odd.”

“I thought so, too.”

Lenox looked into the fire in his library, his chin resting on his hand. “Well,” he said, “the only thing for it is another look around the Dials. Can’t be helped, I’m afraid.”

* * *

The next morning Lenox went back to see the Plug brothers. Jameson stood outside the shop while Lenox went in. He thought he would ask about Mason.

When he did, though, all of the cheerfulness vanished from the brothers’ faces, their attitude toward Lenox completely altered, and they rushed him back out onto the street without a word. For good measure they locked the door behind him and put up their CLOSED sign, turned out the gas lamps inside the shop, and clattered heavily up the back stairs, which must have led to their residence. All of it happened in only a few seconds; it left Lenox in a daze.

The entire morning passed like that. They asked on Monmouth Street, in the arena, among the street urchins, and nobody would answer any questions about Mason or Black Sammy. Finally, nearing noon, as they walked dejectedly back to the beginning of Great St. Andrew’s, they heard a whisper from the shadows say, “Come over here!” Following it (guardedly), they found a woman beckoning them down a slip of an alleyway. It was Martha Morris.

“Why, Mrs. Morris!” said Lenox.

“Listen ‘ere—I’ll only say this because Phil Jigg was a decent chap. The question is: Why was a man like John Mason, plenty of scratch, staying at St. Martin’s?” Before Jameson or Lenox could answer, she had gone back out into the street and picked up her tongs. Prodding the bobby, Lenox motioned toward the other end of the alley, where they wouldn’t give her away.

“What was that about?” Jameson asked.

“An old friend.”

“What do you think, sir?”

“She’s right. Back to the church, I say, and see if we can hunt down Reverend Tilton, or at least the man who rents out the beds, and ask for an explanation.”

As they walked back down toward the church, Lenox had to admit that it was a relief to see Jameson’s cosh and pistol in his belt. He didn’t relish the prospect of another meeting with Mason.

At the church the page who had helped Lenox before appeared again.

“Can you take us to see Reverend Tilton, my lad?” said Jameson. “Or the man who runs the refectory?”

“Aye, sir, they’ll both be back in the low courtyard with the orphans. Morning chores.”

The courtyard was a small one with a frail tree at its center, obviously dying from lack of sunlight. It was a dark place. A door at the back marked out the orphanage; a door at the front, the long room where Phil Jigg had taken to sleeping. Reverend Tilton was pacing among the orphans, watching as they swept the courtyard, wiped down the walls, copied out sheet music, mended socks and blankets—did all the chores they were evidently asked to. Lenox felt his heart sink again. They were all frightfully thin, the poor lads, and wearing patched-up clothes. And he noticed that they all had unusually shaggy hair, long enough to touch their shoulders.

“Shall we talk to Reverend Tilton, then, Mr. Lenox?” asked Jameson.

It was then that it came to Lenox, in a flash of revelation. Could it be that—was it even conceivable? Was the coincidence too great? One way to find out.

“Reverend Tilton,” he said, walking toward the man, “do you mind if I ask you what your first name is?”

Tilton turned around. “Ah, Mr. Lenox. How do you do?”

“Well enough, thanks.”

“Silas—Silas is my first name. But may I wait until the end of chores to meet with you?”

“Certainly,” said Lenox. He turned to Jameson and said in a low voice, “Arrest that man if I give you the signal, will you?”

“What—Tilton?” said Jameson, confusion all over his face.

“Trust me.”

Lenox went over to one of the boys sweeping the courtyard. “Hello,” he said.

“How do you do, sir,” the small boy said.

“I’m Charles.”

“My name is George, sir.”

“Could I ask you a favor? Could I see the back of your neck?”

George shrugged in a puzzled way, and before he could resist Lenox had swept up his hair and taken a look. Tilton shouted and began to run toward them.

“Jameson!”

Jameson subdued Tilton despite the startled looks of everyone else in the courtyard—and with some skepticism in his eyes, too.

“Well, Mr. Lenox?” he asked. “What’s happened?”

Lenox looked at Tilton. His thinness no longer looked ascetic or godly, but angry and cruel; his wild white hair suddenly sinister, rather than eccentric. Gently Lenox turned George around so that Jameson could see the back of his neck. And there, tattooed freshly on the skin, were two clear letters—ST.

* * *

“The ST for Silas Tilton, of course,” Lenox said, lighting a small cigar at the same table at John o’Groats. Jameson sat across from him. It was about two hours later, and Tilton, refusing to speak, was down at Scotland Yard. They had found a piano string with traces of blood on it in his office, though, after a long search, and the curate (innocent of any knowledge of the deed) had confirmed that his superior was out at the time of the murder.

“I understood that—though little else, I have to confess. How did you know? And why on earth would Tilton have wanted to kill Jigg?”

“I can only answer your second question with an educated guess, I’m sorry to say. As for your first question—the orphans’ shaggy hair was the slightly out-of-key note in the picture that made plain the other ones. There was Tilton mentioning Norwich, first of all.”

“Norwich, sir?”

“I may not have told you—he said something inadvertent about the place, about it being different than London, I think.”

“I’m still not quite sure why that matters, Mr. Lenox.”

Lenox took a sip of his ale before he answered. “Jigg was from Norfolk, according to the Plug brothers. Well, Jameson, you walk these streets every day. How often do you find one person here who wasn’t born in one of the Dials, much less two on the same street, both living in the same church, from the same county?”

“Hardly conclusive, if you’ll excuse me saying so, sir.”

“Not at all. But it lent credence to the second point that returned to me in the courtyard. You’ll remember me telling you, I hope, that according to the Plugs Jigg entered the orphanage in Norfolk at two, not certain whether his parents were dead or had abandoned him. But Tilton—I’ll leave the ‘Reverend’ out if it’s all the same—said that Jigg had lost his parents in a fire. Clearly Philip Jigg was much closer to his longtime friends the Plug brothers than to a clergyman he had only met a few times, rather by the way. How did Tilton have such specific information?”

“I see what you’re getting at. Dashed clever, Mr. Lenox.”

“Luck and intuition more than anything else, I’m afraid. It just flashed upon me in the courtyard that there was too much coincidence in the thing—two people from Norwich, an orphan and an orphan-master, and then that small, nagging detail about the fire—all I know is that it felt like deeper water than it had first seemed. And when the lads’ hair was so out of the ordinary … well, as I say, it triggered that rare certainty you’ll come across someday that there’s ominous work afoot.”

“I don’t understand the tattoos—why so great a risk for so little reward?”

“I’m afraid that there I have to fall back on pure speculation. I’d say that it was the most significant way in which Tilton cowed the lads, made them wholly his. Pure folly, you’re right. But then I think part of him was utterly mad.”

“Motive, then? For Jigg, I mean,” said Jameson, a mouthful of steak and peas slightly muffling his words.

Lenox thought back to the painful skinniness of the boys in the courtyard and the browbeaten look in their eyes after Tilton had gone off. It pained him. “I suspect,” he said, “that Tilton was running the orphanage for a profit. Not uncommon. Parliament gives money to the church, the church squeezes every last halfpenny out of it by working the boys, feeding them next to nothing, making them earn money—think of that music the one lad was copying out, must have been at sixpence a page, I’d say—and a man like Tilton can suddenly afford a new silk hat or a box at the theater.”

Jameson looked at Lenox pensively. “I’ll have them send someone around this evening to make a full accounting, sir.”

“The curate seemed a nice enough chap—hadn’t anything to do with the orphanage, only the refectory, you’ll remember, and I suppose he’ll give them a good meal this evening. A first step, at any rate.”

The troubled look didn’t leave Jameson’s face. “All the same.”

“Yes, absolutely, do,” Lenox said.

“I’m still not sure how that links Tilton and Jigg, though, Mr. Lenox.”

“Oh—well, I suppose that Jigg threatened to go the police when he first stayed at the refectory and saw the orphans in Tilton’s care.”

“But why would Jigg notice? Or care?”

“That’s simple enough. I imagine you’ll find that Jigg grew up in Tilton’s orphanage up in Norfolk.”

* * *

As Lenox’s carriage rattled toward the Devonshire Club (he was due for a drink with his friends Lord Cabot and Thomas McConnell), he thought over the case again. Simple enough, in its way, if unexpected. As he had told Jameson, Martha Morris’s question had also helped him in that moment of clarity: Why would John Mason have stayed at St. Martin’s? In all probability, exactly for the purpose of meeting and threatening Lenox or Jameson or whoever had come around to investigate the case. No doubt Tilton had been in business with Black Sammy and asked for a hand in the matter. A sordid business, Lenox thought to himself …

Through his window he watched the moonlight, dappled over the lampposts and high white houses of Park Lane, sparkling in the spring drizzle that had begun to fall. His happiness wasn’t complete, perhaps. He knew that he had helped in some small way, of course, and for that he was glad. But at the bottom of that gladness was the memory of the young girl begging with her fake wound, the young, fearful boys who didn’t stand all that much better a chance without Tilton than with him—and the awful knowledge that in the end he hadn’t really helped at all, and that perhaps he would never be able to. Still, he had done some small good that day. The orphans would have better lives, perhaps, and Silas Tilton go to the gallows. It was enough.

Also by Charles Finch

A Stranger in Mayfair

The Fleet Street Murders

The September Society

A Beautiful Blue Death

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this story are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

AN EAST END MURDER. Copyright (c) 2010 by Charles Finch. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.minotuarbooks.com

ISBN: 978-1-4299-0866-5

Read on for a preview of the next exciting installment of the Charlie Lenox series

BURIAL AT SEA

On Sale November 2011 from Minotaur Books

Chapter One

He gazed out at the sunfall from an open second-floor window, breathing deeply of the cool salt air, and felt it was the first calm moment he had known in days. Between the outfitting, the packing, the political conversations with his brother, and a succession of formal meals that had served as shipboard introductions to the officers of the Lucy, his week in Plymouth had been a daze of action and information.

Now, though, Charles Lenox could be still for a moment. As he looked out over the maze of thin streets that crossed the short path to the harbor, and then over the gray, calm water itself—smudged brown with half-a-dozen large ships and any number of small craft—he bent forward slightly over the hip-high window rail, hands in pockets. He was past forty now, forty-two, and his frame, always thin and strong, had started to fill out some at the waist. His trim brown hair, however, was still untouched by gray. On his face was a slight, careworn smile, matched by his tired, happy, and curious hazel eyes. He had been for much of his life a detective, more lately a member of Parliament for the district of Stirrington, and now for the first time, he would be something else: something very like a diplomat.

Or even a spy.

It had begun two months before, in early March. Lenox had been at home on Hampden Lane. This was the small street just off Grosvenor Square, lined with pleasant houses and innocuous shops—a bookseller, a tobacconist—where he had lived nearly his whole adult life. For much of that time his best friend had lived next door to him, a widow named Lady Jane Grey whose family was also from Sussex: they had grown up riding together, fidgeting through church together: together. Just three years before, to his own confused and happy surprise, Lenox had realized how very much he loved her. It had taken some time to gather the courage to ask her to marry him. But he had. Now, in the winter of 1873, they were just getting used to the upside-down tumble their lives had taken. Their houses, side by side as they were, had been rebuilt to connect, and now they lived within a sprawling mishmash of rooms that somehow represented perfectly their joined-up lives. They were a couple.

Lenox had been in his study that evening in March, making notes for a speech he hoped to give the following day in the House of Commons about India. There was a gentle snow outside the high windows near his desk, and the gaslights cast a dim and romantic light over the white, freshened streets.

There was a knock at the door.

Lenox put down his pen and flexed his sore hand, opening and closing it, as he waited for their butler, Kirk, to show the guest in.

“Sir Edmund Lenox,” Kirk announced, and to his delight Charles saw his older brother’s cheerful and ruddy face pop around the doorway.

“Ed!” he said, and stood. They clasped hands. “Come, sit by the fire—you must be nigh on frozen. Well, it’s been two weeks nearly, hasn’t it? You’re in the country too often for my taste, I tell you that frankly.”

Edmund smiled widely in his customary manner, but up close he looked exhausted. “In fact I wasn’t at the house, so you can’t lay that charge against me,” he said. The house being the one they had grown up in together, Lenox House.

“No? But you said you were going to see Molly and the—”

The baronet waved a hand. “Security reasons, they say, but whatever it is we were at Lord Axmouth’s place in Kent, five of us, holed up with the admiralty, the chaps from the army, a rotating cast of ministers…with Gladstone.”

The prime minister. Charles furrowed his brow. “What can it have been about?”

In person Edmund Lenox looked very much like his younger brother, but he was perhaps less shrewd in the eyes, more open-faced. He served in Parliament out of a sense, not of ambition, but of duty, inherited from their father, and indeed preferred the country to London. Perhaps as a result he had a countryish air. He seemed heartier than his brother Charles.

This innocent, candid mien, however, concealed a more intelligent mind than one might immediately have suspected. It had been to Lenox’s great shock when he first learned, five or six years before, that Edmund wasn’t the stolid backbencher he had always appeared to be, but in fact a leading member of his party who had declined important posts again and again, preferring to work behind the scenes.

Now he surprised Charles again.

“You know something of my purview?” Edmund said.

“Something.” Lenox himself was still a backbencher, but could say without undue immodesty that he was a rising man; long hours of work had seen to that. “You advise the ministers, consult with the prime minister on occasion, find votes—that sort of thing.”

Edmund smiled again, an unhappy smile this time. “First of all, let me say that I come to ask a favor. I hope you’ll agree to do it.”

“With all my heart.”

“Not so quickly, for love’s sake, Charles.”

“Well?”

Edmund sighed and stood up from the armchair, staring for a moment at the low, crackling glow in the hearth. “Might I have a drink?” he asked.

“The usual?” Lenox stood and walked over to a small, square, lacquered table crowded with crystal decanters. He poured them each a glass of Scotch whisky. “Here you are.”

“There are other parts of my job, that I haven’t mentioned to you before,” said Edmund after a sip. “A role I play that you might call more—more secret.”

Lenox understood instantly, and felt well inside him some mixture of excitement, tension, surprise, and even a slight hurt that he hadn’t heard of this before. “Intelligence?” he said gravely.

“Yes.”

“What branch?”

Edmund considered the question. “You might call me an overseer, of sorts.”

“All of it, then.”

“Since the new prime minister came in, yes. I report to him. These weeks we have been—”

“You might have told me,” said Charles, his tone one of forced jocularity.

With comprehension in his eyes Edmund said, “I would have, believe me—I would have come to you first were I permitted to speak of it.”

“And why can you now? This favor?”

“Yes.”

“Well?”

“It’s France,” said Edmund. “We’re worried about France.”

“That doesn’t make sense. Everything has been cordial, hasn’t it? Uneasily so, I suppose, but—”

Edmund sat down. “Charles,” he said with a hard look, “will you go to Egypt for us?”

Taken aback, Charles returned his brother’s stare. “Why—I suppose I could,” he said at last. “If you needed me to.”

So that spark had burst into this conflagration; Lenox would set sail twelve hours from now aboard the Lucy, a corvette bound for the Suez.

A cool breeze fluttered the thin white curtains on either side of him. He felt his nerves shake slightly, his stomach tighten, as he contemplated the idea of leaving, of all his fresh responsibility. This Plymouth house—a cream-colored old Georgian in a row, let by the week or month to officers and their families—had in just two weeks come to feel almost like home, and he realized with a feeling of surprise that he would be sorry to leave it, even though he had looked forward to nothing else for two months but his voyage. Then he understood that it wasn’t the house he would miss, but the home that his wife had made of it.

He heard the door open downstairs.

“Charles?” a voice rang from the bottom of the stairs. It was Lady Jane.

Before he answered he hesitated for a brief moment and looked out again at Plymouth Harbor, under its falling golden sun, savoring the idea, every boy’s dream, of being out at sea.

“Up here!” he cried then. “Let me give you a hand.”

But she was clambering up the stairs. “Nonsense! I’m already halfway there.”

She came in, pink-faced, dark-haired, smallish, pretty in a rather plain way, dressed all in blue and gray—and holding her belly, which, though her dress hid it, had begun to round out.

For after hesitation and dispute, something wonderful had happened to them, that daily miracle of the world that nevertheless always manages to catch us off guard, no matter our planning, no matter our dreams, no matter our circumstances: she was pregnant.

Chapter Two

The next morning was bright, and now the harbor shifted and glittered brilliantly. Anchored some way out, close enough that one could see men moving aboard her but far enough that their faces were indistinct, lay the Lucy, bobbing up and down.

She had come into dry dock some six weeks before, after a two-year tour in distant waters, and had since then been refitted: her old and tattered sails, mended so often they were three-quarters patch, replaced with snow-white new ones, the dented copper below her waterline smoothed and reinforced, her old bolts refitted, her formerly bare engine room again coaled. She looked young once more.

Lucy had come off the same dockyards as Her Majesty’s ship Challenger in the same year, 1858, and both were corvettes, ships designed not for firing power, like a frigate, or quick jaunts out, like a brig, but for speed and maneuverability. She carried three masts; from stem to stern she measured about two hundred feet; as for men, she held roughly two hundred and twenty bluejackets—common seamen—and twenty-five or so more, from the rank of midshipman to captain, who belonged to the officer ranks. The Challenger, which was well known because of its long scientific mission to Australia and the surrounding seas, was quicker than the Lucy, but the Lucy was thought to be more agile and better in a fight.

In her means of propulsion she embodied perfectly the uncertain present state of the navy’s technology. She was not steam-powered but rather steam-assisted, which is to say that she used the power of coal to leave and enter harbor and during battle, but the rest of the time moved under sail, not all that differently than her forebears in the Napoleonic Wars sixty years earlier might have. Using coal added several knots to the Lucy‘s speed, but it was a problematic fuel source: coaling stations were few and far between and the burners were thin-walled and had to be spared too much taxation lest they falter in an important situation. (New, thicker burners were being manufactured now, but even in her Plymouth refitting the Lucy didn’t receive one of them.)

Lenox had learned all of this information three nights before from the captain, Jacob Martin, a stern, youngish fellow, perhaps thirty-five, extremely religious, prematurely gray but physically very strong. Edmund said that he was much respected within the admiralty and destined for great things, perhaps even the command of a large warship within the next few months. Martin politely did his duty by welcoming Lenox to the ship and describing her outlines to him, but all the same didn’t quite seem to relish the prospect of a civilian passenger.

“Still,” he had said, “we must try to prove our worth now, the navy. It’s not like it was in my grandfather’s day. He was an admiral, Mr. Lenox, raised his flag at Trafalgar. Those chaps were heroes to the common Englishman. Now we must stretch ourselves in every new direction—diplomacy, science, trade—so that you mathematical fellows in Parliament will continue to see the use of us. Peacetime, you see.”

“Surely peace is the most desirable state of affairs for an officer of the navy?”

“Oh, yes!” said Martin, but in a slightly wistful tone, as if he weren’t entirely in agreement but couldn’t tactfully say as much.

They were in a private room at a public house near the water, where many officers regularly took supper. It was called the Yardarm. “I realize there must be fewer men afloat than during war,” said Lenox, trying to be sympathetic.

Martin nodded vehemently. “Yes, too many of my peers are on shore, eking out a life on half-pay. Dozens of children, all of them. Meanwhile the French have started to outpace us.”

“Our navy is much larger,” said Lenox. He spoke with authority—he had read the world’s driest blue book (or parliamentary report) on the subject.

“To be sure, but their ships are sound and fast and big, Mr. Lenox.” Martin swirled his wine in his glass, looking into it. “They were ahead of us on coal. Our Warrior was based on her Gloire. Who knows what they’re doing now. Meanwhile we’re all at sixes and sevens.”

“The navy?”

“It’s a period of transition.”

“Coal and steam, you mean, Captain? I know.”

“Do you?”

“I thought so, at any rate. Please enlighten me.”

“It’s not as it was,” said Martin. “We must now train our men to sail a full-rigged vessel, as we always have, and at the same time to coal a ship to fourteen knots under steam even as we fire a broadside. Because she’s built for speed the Lucy is very light in guns, of course—only twenty-one four-pounders, which would scarcely trouble a serious ship—but still, to be worried at once about sail, steam, and shooting is no easy task for a captain or a crew. And the Lord forbid you find yourself without coal.” He laughed bitterly and drank off the last of his wine.

“I understand the depots are few and far between.”

“You might say that. I think it’s more likely we’ll see three mermaids between here and Egypt than three proper depots where we can take our fill.”

Lenox tried good cheer. “Still, to be at sea! It’s old hat for you, but for me I confess it’s a thrill.”

Martin smiled. “I apologize for sounding so negative, Mr. Lenox. I’ve been afloat since I was twelve, and I wouldn’t be anywhere else for money. But a captain’s job is a difficult one. When I’m on the water all of my problems are soluble, you see, but on land I can think over them and fret and worry myself half to oblivion. Before we leave, for instance, I must meet with the admiralty to discuss the prospects of my lieutenants. I’m bound to break one of their hearts. Well, but let us speak of other things. You’ll have a child soon, as I hear it? Might we drink to your wife’s health?”

“Oh, yes,” said Lenox fervently, and signaled to the waiter at the door for another bottle.

If supper at the Yardarm had been morose in patches, due to Martin’s heavyhearted fears over the future of his service, Lenox’s visit to the wardroom of the Lucy had been entirely different.

It was in the wardroom where the rest of the officers took their meals. They were a far more rollicking, jovial set of men than their captain, and they had insisted Lenox actually visit the ship by way of introduction.

In the wardroom itself—a low-slung, long chamber at the stern of the ship with a row of very handsome curved windows, where lanterns swung gently from their moorings in the roof, casting a flickering light over the wineglasses and silver—Lenox met a bewildering array of men. All were seated at a single long table that ran fore-to-aft through the entire room. There were the ship’s five lieutenants, each of whom hoped one day to take on the responsibilities that Martin bemoaned; two marines, dressed in lobster-red, a captain and lieutenant, who commanded a squadron of twenty fighting men in the ship, and were thus part of the navy and not quite part of it at all; and finally the civil officers, each with a different responsibility, from the surgeon to the chaplain to the purser. Each of the fifteen or so people present sat in a dark mahogany chair, upholstered in navy blue, and as Lenox had learned from the rather rough quarterdeckman who had fetched him from shore, none could speak out of rank until the Queen was toasted.

When at last this happened the fierce decorum of the first glasses of wine fell off and people began to converse companionably. Lenox had already forgotten half the names he had heard, but to his pleasure he discovered that the person seated to his left, a second lieutenant called Halifax, was an agreeable sort.

“How long have you been with the Lucy?” Lenox asked him.

“About five months,” said Halifax. He was a plump fellow with a face slick and red from the warmth and wine. He seemed somehow gentle, though—not the card-playing, hard-drinking type Lenox might have expected. His voice was soft and melodious and his face was more than anything a kind one.

“What brought you on board?”

“Captain Martin’s previous second lieutenant had been lost at sea just before, and I met the ship at Port Mahon to replace him.”

“Poor chap.”

A troubled look passed over Halifax’s face, and his eyes ran along the faces at the table. “Yes. Unfortunately the navy can be unkind. Not all men get their wishes—not all lieutenants are made captain, for instance, however much they may feel they deserve it. Or take my case: nobody likes getting work at another man’s expense, of course, but I admit that I’m happy for the time at sea. Shore is dull, don’t you find?”

“I don’t,” said Lenox, “but then I’ve nothing to compare it to.”

“Very true. Do you fish, at least?”

“When I was a boy I did. Not since then.”

“I’ve a spare rod—you must come with me to the quarter-deck some time.” Halifax smiled to himself, his eyes fixed somewhere in the middle distance. “Watching your line bob along the water as the sun goes down and the ship is quiet—a mild wind, leaning over the rail, cool breeze, perhaps a cigar—it’s the only way to live, Mr. Lenox.”

“What do you catch?”

“It depends where you are. My last ship, the Defiant, was broken up, but I sailed with her to the northern waters with Captain Robertson. There you found char, sculpins, cods, gunnels. Any number of things. We raked over a fair few hundred jellyfish. Have you ever seen one?”

“I haven’t, except in pictures.”

“They’re enormous, several feet long. Harmless, though their sting hurts like the dickens. Rather beautiful. Translucent.”

“And on our way to Egypt what will you find?”

A delighted look came into Halifax’s face. “The Mediterranean is a treat, from all I hear, enormous tuna fish, bream, mullet, marlins, swordfish. A velvet-belly shark, if we’re very lucky.”

“I must strike off my plans to go for a swim.”

“Nonsense—most refreshing thing in the world! If you’re sincerely afraid of sharks the captain will put a net out alongside of the ship, which you may swim in. Oh, but wait—a toast.”

The white-haired chaplain was rising, wildly inebriated, and when he had (not without difficulty) attained a standing position, proclaimed in a loud voice, “To a woman’s leg, sirs! Nothing could be finer in the world! And to my wife Edwina!”

There was a raucous cheer at this, and as anyone might have predicted who witnessed that moment, the wardroom’s supper went on very late into the night.

Chapter Three

“Eat this,” said Lady Jane, and thrust out an orange at him.

“For the fiftieth time, dear heart, I’m not likely to come down with scurvy.”

They were walking down to the docks now. Behind them were two sailors from the Lucy, carrying Lenox’s effects: a large steamer trunk and two smaller bags. Lenox himself carried a small leather case full of documents that he thought it best to keep in his possession at all times. They were from his brother.

“Indulge me, won’t you?”

With a not unhappy sigh he took the piece of fruit she held out and began to peel it with his thumb. “I make this the sixteenth orange I’ve eaten in the last fortnight, and I’m not even counting the lemons you sneak onto every piece of fish I put in my mouth or those lime-flavored sherbets you plied me with at the admiral’s supper. I’m heartily sick of citrus fruits, you know. If I do get scurvy that will be the reason.”

“I would prefer you to return with all of your teeth, Charles. You can’t blame me for that.”

“I knew I was marrying a noblewoman. Such discrimination!”

She laughed. “I’ve packed a few more oranges in your trunk—eat them, will you?”

He pretended to think. “I’ll make you a deal. I promise to choke down any and all oranges you give me if you promise in return to stay off your feet after I leave.”

“Oh, I shall,” she said. “Shake my hand—there, the deal is finished. I’m ahead of you anyhow—I told Toto I would let her read to me in the afternoons while I stayed in my bed.”

“Dr. Chavasse’s book?”

“I threw that away. Advice to a Mother on the Management of Her Children, indeed—that man knew no more about real mothering than Kirk does, or a bear in the woods. It’s more a book to frighten women than help them.”

“But he’s a doctor, Jane, and—”

“And what sort of name is Pye Henry Chavasse, too? I don’t trust a person who can’t have an honest name. Just call yourself Henry if your parents were foolish enough to burden you with ‘Pye,’ I say.”

“I’m not sure anyone related by blood to a man called Galahad Albion Lancelot Houghton can cast such aspersions.”

“He has the humility to go by Uncle Albert, doesn’t he? Pye Henry—for shame. At any rate I don’t need a book to tell me about what our child will be like. I have friends, oh, and cousins, all sorts of people who have been through it before.”

“That’s true enough.”

They turned into a small street that led straight down to the water. It was swarmed with bluejackets in the last minutes of their shore leave, some wildly drunk, others buying shipboard provisions at the general store, and still others kissing women who might equally be sweethearts from home or prostitutes working out of the coaching houses. As he was taking it all in he felt Jane clutch his arm.

“Stop a moment, will you?” she said softly.

He stopped and turned to look at her. “What’s wrong?”

There were tears standing unfallen in her gray eyes. “Must you go?” she said. Her bantering tone had vanished.

His heart fell. “I promised that I would.”

“I wish you hadn’t.”

She put her face to his chest and started to cry. Embarrassed, the two sailors carrying Lenox’s trunk and bags both studied a bill of goods in the window of the grocer’s they had stopped by, though Lenox knew for a fact that the smaller one, LeMoyne, couldn’t read.

“We’ll meet you by the water,” he said to the men, and shepherded Jane into a tea shop next door. “Call it twenty minutes.”

He knew there to be a private room in the back, and as they entered he handed over half a crown to the landlady that they might take it. She obliged them by leaving them alone.

It was a small room, with Toby jugs—old clay mugs from Staffordshire, brown salt glazed and molded into human figures—lining a shelf on one wall. They sat opposite each other in the low wooden chairs.

“What’s happened to make you change your mind?” he asked Jane gently, taking her hand in his.

She wiped her eyes and tried to calm herself. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I know you have to go. It’s only—it’s only—” She burst into fresh tears.

“Darling,” he said.

“I know I’m foolish!”

“You’re not. Shall I stay with you? We can go back to London this evening if you prefer.”

“No! No, you must go. I know it’s important, oh, in every sort of way. And I know you want to go! But it will be hard to be alone for two months, and just when I’m with child.”

The landlady came in now, carrying a tray laden with tea cakes, biscuits, sandwiches, mugs, a milk jug, a sugar pot, and a teakettle. She avoided looking at them as she transferred the tray’s contents to their small table with rapid precision. “And take your time,” she said before she hurried out.

When they had discovered Jane was pregnant, a week or so after Lenox had committed to this trip for his brother, both had been immensely happy. Strangely it wasn’t the chattering, social sort of happiness their marriage had been: both found in the next days that more than anything they would prefer to sit on the sofa together, not even talking much, perhaps reading, eating now and then, holding hands. It was a joy both of them preferred to experience almost silently, perhaps because it was so overwhelming.

When it occurred to Lenox that leaving would mean missing two months of that joy, he had immediately decided that he wouldn’t do it. In fact it had been she who convinced him he still must, after he told her the reason Edmund had asked. Since then she had always been staunchly in favor of the voyage. This was the first hint to Lenox that she felt otherwise.

Sitting at the table, looking despondent, not touching the steaming cup of tea in front of her, Jane said, “This is silly—we’ll be late. We should go.”

“I’d rather sit here,” he answered. “Will you eat something?”

“No.”

“I should, then.”

He picked up a sandwich with butter and tomato on it, no crusts, and took a bite. He found that he was hungry—the orange was still in his jacket pocket, half peeled—and when he had finished the sandwich he took a tea cake too and started to butter it.

Through her tears she smiled. “You can always eat, can’t you?”

He stopped chewing his cake in the middle of a bite and, with a look of surprised innocence, said, “Me?”

“You, Charles Lenox. I remember you as a seven-year-old, stuffing your face with slices of cold cottage pie when you thought nobody was looking, on hunt days.”

They laughed. Tenderly, he put his hand to her stomach. “I’ll be back soon, you know.”

“I worry you won’t come back at all. What do you know about a ship, Charles?”

“Ever so much now. How many sails it has, what it’s made of, who all the officers are, what the midshipmen do, where one sleeps and eats…”

“I don’t mean that. I mean you’re liable to fall off and vanish into the ocean because you thought you could lean on the railing…” She trailed off and gave him a miserable look.

“You can’t think how careful I’ll be, Jane,” he said, and again grasped her hand.

“I’ll worry myself sick, is all I know.”

“I’ll write to you.”

She rolled her eyes. “That will do me no good—you’ll beat your letters home, I’m sure.”

“It’s not a far sail, and the weather is calm. Captain Martin has a great deal of experience. She’s a good ship.”

“Oh, I know all that! Am I not allowed to be irrational once in a while?”

“You are, to be sure you are.”

To his sorrow their conversation progressed this way and ended inconclusively, as he promised again and again to be safe and avowed his disappointment at missing two months of her company, and as she said again and again that well, it was all right, even though plainly it wasn’t.

Just as they absolutely had to leave, however, she reached up for his cheek and gave him a swift kiss. “It’s only because I love you, Charles,” she whispered.

“And I you.”

They went out and walked the final street that slanted sharply down to the docks, which were loud with bickering voices and smelled of heat, fish, salt, wood, and rope.

He took some mild solace in thinking of the letter he had left behind on her pillow in London: it was a very good sort of letter, long and full of thoughts and declarations of love and speculation about what their child would be like and ideas for what they might do when he returned to London. She would be comforted by that at least. He hoped.

They found the sailors with Lenox’s effects, and then Lady Jane pointed off to the right.

“Look, there they are—your brother and Teddy. The poor boy looks green with fear.” She looked up at him. “I still find it difficult to believe you and your nephew will be novices aboard the same ship, don’t you?”

Chapter Four

This was indeed the case. Lenox had discovered it during the course of his fateful conversation with Edmund two months before. On that snowy evening the older brother had offered the younger an explanation of his request.

“We’ve had a disaster, Charles. That’s why I’ve been in these meetings with the prime minister.”

“What happened?”

Edmund sighed and rubbed his eyes, weary from long days and worry. He took a deep sup of whisky. “What do you know of our intelligence systems?”

“Very little. What they say in the papers, perhaps a bit more.”

“Our officers are all across Europe, of course, Charles,” said Edmund, “and despite this peace—this tenuous peace—many of them are still concentrated in and around France. The prospect of another war is very real, you should know.

“Eight days ago an Englishman named Harold Rucks, resident in Marseille, was found dead in a bedroom above a brothel near the docks. He had been stabbed in the heart, and the woman who worked from that room—a new recruit to her work, you’ll note—was nowhere to be found.”

“I take it he was one of your men?” said Charles.

“Yes. In Marseille he was considered a simple expatriate drunk, but that was merely the facade he had adopted. He was quite a competent man, if violent-tempered. At first we considered the possibility that he had died in an argument over something personal—money, let’s say, or indeed what he was paying for—but the next day another Englishman died, this time in Nimes. His name was Arthur Archer. He was garroted in an alleyway. Nasty death.”

“I see.”

“You can guess what happened then. Three more men, two in Paris, one in Nice. All dead. Five of ours.”

“How were their identities discovered?”

Edmund sighed and stroked his cheek pensively, looking for all the world like a farmer anxious over crops. But these were higher stakes.

“A list went missing from our ministry. Eight names on it. The three who weren’t killed were fortunate: two were back in England, one who just managed to get out of Paris with his life, though he left all of his possessions behind. He was fired upon as he got into the ferry.”

“The French mean business.”

“You can see that the peace is…a complex one,” said Edmund with a wry smile. He took another sip of his drink. “What’s fortunate is that none of them were tortured for information. There’s some evidence that Archer was to be kidnapped, but struggled enough that they simply killed him. The same may be true of one of our men in Paris, Franklin King.”

“Does this mean that someone in our government is working for the French?”

“I fear it does. We’re looking into it, you may rely on that.”

“Treason.”

“Yes. We haven’t found the man yet, but we will, and in the meantime all of our activities—our intelligence activities—have been suspended.” Edmund looked uneasy then. “Well. Except for one.”

“Egypt.”

The brothers sat in silence for a moment. Charles, for his part, was knocked backwards, though through some ancient childhood wish to seem strong to his older brother, he acted calm. But he had had no idea that such arcane and troubling matters fell within his brother’s bailiwick. Edmund had been a good member of the party, but devoted his time (as far as anyone knew at least) to broader public issues like voting or the colonies.

Worse still, he saw that it was taking a toll on Edmund, who looked tired and dogged with wary.

As if sensing Charles’s thoughts, Edmund said, “I didn’t ask for the responsibility, but I couldn’t decline it, could I?”

“No. Of course not.”

“You see the problem.”

“Well, tell me,” said Charles.

“We don’t know how much information the French have. Is it everything, every name? Are they sticking to this list of eight men to make it seem that they know less than they do? Or do they really know nothing beyond those eight names?”

“We need to find out what they have, then.”

Edmund rolled his eyes. “They need ice water in hell, too, but I doubt they get much of it.”

“Tell me about Egypt.”

“In our disarray we’ve accepted that we must sacrifice certain knowledge we had hoped to acquire about the French’s munitions, their navy, so forth and so on. Rucks was particularly well placed to study their navy, being in a port city, but so be it. Still, there’s one thing we must know.”

“Yes?”

“Whether the French mean to strike at us preemptively. To start another war.”

“They wouldn’t. It wouldn’t be in their interests, would it?” said Charles.

As Edmund pondered how to answer this question the fire shifted, a log breaking in half. Both men stood up and started to fiddle with it, one with the poker and the other with a sort of long iron claw that could pick up bits of wood.

“We’ve still the finest navy that has ever gone afloat,” Edmund said at last, “but the margin is shrinking, I can tell you frankly, and on land they may be just as strong as we are. The colonies have spread us a bit thin. If they have any ambitions of greater power…let’s say it’s not impossible.”

“I see.”

“Making matters worse, of course, is that we still don’t know quite where we are with this government. Napoleon the Third has been gone for three years now—and for that matter died in January—and this third republic is unpredictable. We can never be sure whose voice matters there. We had thought these boule-versements might cease, but the deaths of our men…this is where we need you to step in.”

“How?”

“We have a man in place in the French Ministry of War, working directly under Cissey, their secretaire d’etat de la guerre. This fellow is very high up, very clever, but rather poor. Despite the death of the empire it’s mostly the aristocrats who work in their government as I understand.”

“How unfamiliar,” said Lenox.

Edmund laughed. “Well, quite so. Not all that different from here, I suppose. This chap is no aristocrat. He’s clever, though, and he’s a mercenary. For money he’ll tell us all we need to know about the new government’s intentions.”

“How much?”

Edmund quoted a figure that made Charles whistle. “It’s not ideal. A man you have to pay is much less reliable than a man who burns with patriotic fervor, but so be it.”

“How do you know he’s not acting under orders, Ed? Playing a double game?”

“We have other informants, men who would know if that were the case. But they’re not at so high a level as this gentleman.”

Charles sat down again and for a moment brooded over all this. “You’re in disarray, then,” he said at last, “and need someone the French couldn’t possibly have on any…any list of names?”

“Precisely. We need someone who can go to Egypt in a public guise.”

“Why Egypt?”

“We don’t dare send anyone to France, because of course they’ll be on guard at such a tense, decisive moment. But this French gentleman, the one who can pass us information, has business he may plausibly conduct in Suez.”

Charles saw all now. “And you thought you would send me to the canal as a member of Parliament—but in fact to meet this gentleman?”

Edmund nodded, and then, with a look of eagerness that made his younger brother nearly smile, said, “What do you think?”

“I’ll do it, of course.”

“Excellent. What a relief that is.”

This puzzled Charles. “Why?”

“Well—because we need someone we trust.”

“There are other men in Parliament who would do it, I imagine.”

“But we don’t want a man without any special loyalty to Gladstone and the current government to have this information—this power over the leadership of the party, you see. You’re my brother, and it’s our luck that on top of that you’re a clever and discreet member.”

“Thank you, then.”

A brief pause. “There one thing I’ve omitted, however.”

Lenox had felt it coming. “Oh?”

“We would ask that you go on the Lucy. Does the name ring a bell?”

“Vaguely.”

Edmund looked uncomfortable now. “It will be Teddy’s first ship, you see.”

Indignation filled Lenox.

Teddy was his—very beloved—nephew, Edmund’s second son, who had been groomed, like many of his mother’s clan, which had seemingly a hundred admirals lurking in its family tree, to enter the navy at a young age. He had recently turned fourteen, and was just now ready to become a midshipman.

“So there’s no special task,” said Charles. “You don’t need me. You simply want a babysitter.”

“No, no!” Edmund, to his credit, looked horribly unhappy. “I feared you would take it this way.”

“I don’t mind, of course. I’ll do it. But I wish you had been honest.”

“Charles, no! I view this as nothing more than a lucky coincidence. Your primary job will be to meet our French contact in Egypt, and make some sort of trumped-up speech we give you as cover for that job.”

“Oh, is that to be my ‘primary’ job?” Charles said, hearing the bitterness in his own voice.

“Listen, Charles—if this doesn’t convince you nothing will. It wasn’t I who brought your name up. Gladstone did.”

This gave Lenox pause. “The prime minister? Asked for me?”

“Yes. And he had no idea that Teddy would be on our next ship to Egypt, either.” Edmund looked hopefully up at Charles, who was pacing toward the snow-covered window. “He likes you. And to be certain, it helped that you were my brother—someone we could trust. But he wouldn’t send an incompetent for loyalty’s sake.”

“Hmm.”

“Charles, listen to reason. England needs you. This may be the most important thing you do, you know.”

“A lucky coincidence?”

“I swear,” said Edmund.

“Well, I would have done it either way,” Charles said ruminatively. Then, pouring two more glasses of whisky, he added, “By name, the prime minister asked for me?”

Also by Charles Finch

A Beautiful Blue Death

The September Society

The Fleet Street Murders

A Stranger in Mayfair

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

A BURIAL AT SEA. Copyright (c) 2011 by Charles Finch. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

ISBN: 978-1-4299-0866-5

Table of Contents

Title Page

Contents

Begin Reading

Also by Charles Finch

Copyright

Excerpt: A Burial at sea