Free A Beautiful Blue Death by Charles Finch Page B

smiled. “Of course not,” he said.
    “Oh, I know you did, you fibber. Was it too terrible?”
    “I’ll only admit I was cross with the city when I came home, but it passed within a moment and I no longer have any idea of moving to the American prairie.”
    “Thank goodness. We should have seen much less of each other.”
    “Not a fashionable enough neighborhood, my lady?”
    “Not by half,” she said, and they both laughed.
    The tea came a moment later, and Jane, as she always did, served it.
    “Two pieces of toast?” she asked.
    “How about four?”
    “Four!”
    “Yes.”
    “A bear couldn’t eat four pieces of toast!”
    “A bear who had walked through London all day, and stepped in a puddle, and been betrayed by a cabdriver, very well might eat four pieces of toast.”
    She laughed and handed him his tea and his toast and began to talk about a ball that her friend the Duchess Marchmain was giving next month. They fell into a conversation about old friends, and soon he realized, with a pang of gratitude, and love, that though she had rushed here to speak about the murder, she had seen his weariness and sacrificed her own anxiety to put his mind at rest.
    He let her talk a little while longer about the Duchess and her sons—who were known to be as vain as women—and whom they might marry. But when the conversation turned, he told her that he had spent all day on the case.
    He recounted what he had done: about bella indigo, about his breakfast with Barnard, and about Graham, who was out working on a few basic leads Lenox hoped would reveal something he suspected. And last he told her that he had discovered something else, something potentially important, but had been sworn to secrecy over it at lunch.
    It wasn’t much of a bounty to give her, but she seemed comforted, by the time he stopped talking, and said only that she hoped she would be able to do something herself.
    “I’ll get to the bottom of it,” Lenox said.
    “I know you will.” Her face betrayed a moment of worry, but then she took a last sip of tea and began to put on her gloves again. She stood up to leave and they said goodbye, agreeing that they would have tea again the next day, just to check in.
    After she left, Lenox thought about what he knew so far. It had been slightly less than a day, and he had learned a great deal: that Prue Smith had definitely been murdered; by what instrument; the clues at the scene of the murder; the probable originsof the poison; the definite motive of the mint’s gold; the restricted group among whom the murderer might reside.
    But all the same he felt as if he knew nothing. Who were George Barnard’s houseguests other than Claude, the young man he had met? Had any of them discovered the gold? How had the murderer’s path crossed the housemaid’s; had they had some relationship? Was he dismissing too quickly the possibility that a friend or a lover had done it because he was focused on the cost and obscurity of the poison and the presence in the house of the mint’s money?
    Many murders, he knew, are solved within twenty-four hours. The rest, from his experience, were never solved or took weeks. But at least, he thought with grim satisfaction, he was ahead of Exeter, who was still twisting his whiskers and thinking the girl had destroyed herself while his underlings stroked his ego.
    There were too many pieces to the puzzle, if anything. The factors that usually determine a murderer’s identity had been thrown into doubt immediately.
    He pondered the case for half an hour—and then remembered something that Jeremiah Jones had said, thought curiously about it for a moment, and decided he would wait until Graham had come home to think about Prue Smith again. He searched through the books on his desk, found his old copy of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, and opened it in the middle.
    He read quite contentedly until eight, when he had to dress for supper with his friend Lord Cabot, who shared with him a