On top of that, he said, the journalists had dismissed his accounts without listening as closely as he would have liked. Lenox wasn’t disheartened by that—he could have told the young man that London journalists had little use for politeness—and in fact he was positively encouraged to hear that three of the nine men had said they intended to stop by the offices that afternoon or that evening to hear more, though it meant staying late.
At four o’clock Nicholson arrived. He looked absolutely dead on his feet, but he had brought them a report from the Asiatic Limited Corporation. Apparently one of the members of the company’s board had pressured the Yard into releasing the Gunner the day before, complaining of the delay and the loss of profits as the ship bobbed idly on the Thames.
“Nobody bothered to inform me the blasted ship was going, though,” said Nicholson resentfully. “Anyway, I’ve brought you their full company files on the Gunner, at least. I have a copy for myself, too. I mean to look over it later. I need to go back to the Yard just now and see what’s come of all these interviews.”
“And at some point you need to sleep.”
“In 1877, fingers crossed,” said Nicholson, and a shadow of a smile appeared on his face. “It’s been made clear to me that my advancement depends upon the resolution of all this. People are angry, you know. Very angry.”
“They ought to be pleased that we found the club.”
“Well, they’re not.”
When Nicholson had gone, taking with thanks a few biscuits from the plate they pushed on him, Lenox took up the file he had left from Asiatic Limited. Dallington came and looked over his shoulder. There were many long pages in tight handwriting detailing the ship’s voyages, accounts, diagrams and drawings of her, lists of past mates.
Lenox sighed. “Shall we divide it up and go through it?”
“I bet we find Francis’s name.”
“And another false address for him, no doubt.”
For half an hour they sat in silence, reading; then, with a cry of delight, Dallington said he’d found something.
It was an overhead illustration of the ship’s hold, dated 1874, on a large piece of paper, the size of a decent map, folded over twice to fit into the file. As Lenox came around the table to look, Dallington planted his finger next to a name. It was the space on the plan for aft hold 119, with Lord Wakefield written in tidy cursive letters.
“Look,” said Dallington, “he had hold 118, too. Did we look in that one?”
“I think we did,” said Lenox.
Together they went around the holds in a circle, reading them aloud together, most of the names unfamiliar, Donoghue Spirits, Jones, India Hemp Corporation, King, Davies, Taylor, Berry’s Herb and Pharmaceutical, Smith, Warrington, Fielding, Brown, but then a few familiar, Dyer, Wakefield, one marked First Lt. and even one that said Helmer. The chap from the docks. That gave Lenox pause. It might be worth speaking to him again.
And then, when they had nearly circled back around to Wakefield’s holds again, they came across a name that stopped them both. And not Francis’s.
Earl Calder.
They looked at each other. “Just one hold,” said Lenox.
“Very close to Wakefield’s.”
“Yet for all the world he acted as if he couldn’t distance himself from his father quickly enough. It was as if the name were poison to him. It can’t be a coincidence.”
“No,” said Lenox quietly, thinking.
“Shall we go see him?”
Suddenly it struck Lenox anew how strange it was that Calder had stayed in Portland Place for the past few evenings. He said as much to Dallington and then added, “After all, his father was murdered, an inspector of the Yard killed on the pavement out front, the butler attacked upstairs. The place is bedlam.”
Dallington had stood up and was pacing the room, thinking. “Yes. Either he’s a fool, a very cool fellow—or he knows he’s not in danger. Let’s go to Portland Place, I say.”
“What should we ask him when we get there?”
“What in the devil he’s doing leasing a hold on a ship that brought captive women into his country’s capital, while he was supposed to be sitting tripos at Cambridge and worrying about whether the Field of the Cloth of Gold was in 1200 or 1300.”
“It was in 1520.”
“Nobody likes a swot, Lenox.”
Lenox smiled. They were both standing now, energized by the possibility that they’d come upon something new. Then something occurred to him to dampen his enthusiasm. “I suppose we owe it to Nicholson to wait,” he said. “It sounds as if he’s already on thin ice.”
“They can’t hold him responsible for us.”
“They can, unfortunately. As you pointed out, he’s paying us.”
Dallington frowned. “True.”
Lenox looked down at the files on the table. “Perhaps we should get through as much of this material as we can, and go see Calder—or Lord Wakefield, I suppose he is now—tomorrow. With Nicholson. At least we can look for Calder’s name again.”
They sent Nicholson a note at the Yard telling him what they had found, and mentioned that they were going to investigate the Asiatic’s files very carefully, if it would spare him doing the same. They dedicated the next hours, then, to doing just that, Pointilleux joining them after he had finished a bit of filing on Polly’s behalf.
At half past six they sent out for a pot of oysters and three pints of ale, and when the barmaid came to fetch back the tankards and the pot, Dallington ordered three more from her. They didn’t find Calder’s name again, though Wakefield’s did appear several times. Just before eight o’clock one of the newspapermen came around, a fox-faced reporter for the Evening Sentinel, and listened to their story. Between that interruption and the density of the documents Nicholson had dropped off, it was ten o’clock in the evening before the three men finally left—dispirited, but promising each other that they would see about Calder the next day.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Seven years before, in 1869, the august medical school in Edinburgh had admitted women for the first time. There had been anonymous threats of violence against these women, and no lesser figures than the Queen and William Gladstone had plotted together to see if they could keep the Queen’s own sex from joining the medical profession, but the next fall these prospective students came to the college nevertheless to enroll. A gathering of hundreds of people met them at the gates, heckling and booing, waving signs in protest. This crowd threw rubbish at the women, old eggs, rotten fruit. At moments it had seemed likely to cross the line that divided a protest from a riot.
Afterward there were fines handed down by the courts. A pound each, a heavy penalty, for disturbing the peace—from the women, not from the protesters.
Since Sophia had been born, Lenox sometimes thought of those women, of the injustice of that fine. He harbored little doubt that women were weaker than men, being more prone to the vicissitudes of emotion—though sometimes, watching Lady Jane out of the corner of his eye, even this assumption seemed slightly doubtful—but despite this conviction, having a daughter had made him reconsider the idea of them working. There were women’s colleges at the universities now, after all. Why shouldn’t she attend one of those? He knew for a fact that his daughter was more intelligent than a boy nearby on Hampden Lane of the same age, Alfred O’Connell, who seemed to pass most of his time sucking on his fist. Sometimes Lenox even wondered: Should he be able to vote in an election, for instance, and his own daughter not?
It was because of Sophia, he thought, or obliquely perhaps even because of those young women in Edinburgh, that he had a sneaking sense of sympathy for Polly’s probable departure from their firm. From the first time they met he had admired her intelligence and her ambition. It was hardly surprising someone else should have noticed those qualities. Still, it was very surprising, outlandish even, to consider a woman being offered the control of such a large enterprise, and at such a young age. Polly was twenty-six now—the age Sophia would be in a quarter century, that far-fetched-sounding year, 1900. He wondered what the world would look like to her then. Perhaps her physician would be a woman.