Free The Fleet Street Murders by Charles Finch Page B

lived. An actor named Crummles who comes through sometimes and does a decent show. There are more, though I can’t think of them.”
    “I’m honored to be in such company,” Lenox said with mock formality.
    Smith laughed. “You’ll find her a strange woman, no doubt. Still, she’s sharp enough in her way, I can promise you.”
    They arrived at her well-maintained house, which was white with two tidy gables, and the maid let them in, then guided them down a front hall and into a sitting room that seemed purposely designed as a kind of permanent salon for guests. There were small clusters of chairs and couches spread throughout the room, each centered around a sizable tea table; all of these bore tea rings and hot water stains, bespeaking long hours of intimate conversation. On the walls were a few portraits in black and white of what might be deemed “Olde Stirrington,” sentimentalized pictures of rural lanes and young couples in bygone churchyards. The largest of these pictures was of a blacksmith shop from some impossibly halcyon time, with a brawny man at the hammer and tongs and awed small children watching him, as a row of ducks passed in the foreground. All of it made Mrs. Reeve’s vision of the world very clear.
    As for the woman herself: She sat on the largest of the sofas, perhaps because it was the only one that fit her, wearing a regal maroon gown the size of a ship’s sail and reading Dickens’s latest novel, Our Mutual Friend .
    “How do you like it?” asked Lenox before they had been introduced.
    “Have you read it, Mr. Lenox?” she asked in a low-pitched voice, one with more charm and power in it than he had expected.
    “I have indeed.”
    “It’s very black, I think—but funny, too.”
    “They say he’s sick.”
    “Mr. Dickens? I hope he lives forever, as long he can always write.”
    Lenox laughed. “I’m Charles Lenox,” he said. “Although you already know that.”
    “Alice Reeve. Sally, fetch some tea, will you?”
    “I’m awfully pleased to meet you, Mrs. Reeve.”
    “And I’m glad you came to see me. I suppose you must view me rather as a local monument—yes, I see you, Sandy Smith, please sit down—a monument, along the lines of a church or a museum, to be respectfully and duly visited?”
    “On the contrary, I’ve heard the best conversation in town is to be found in this room.”
    “In town, yes.” She arched her eyebrows appraisingly. “Not quite London, though.”
    “I grew up in the country, in fact.”
    “Oh, yes—but in some vast house.”
    “Well—big enough.”
    “We’re sharper in these small towns than you might expect.”
    “After meeting your fellow townsmen, I’ve little doubt of your sharpness here in Stirrington.”
    “We don’t appreciate interlopers or arrivistes, either. Still, I bear no love for Robert Roodle.”
    “No?”
    “My nephew worked at the brewery before it left. A young lad with a family. He looked for six months before he found work again—and at a mill, terrible work at a lower wage.”
    “I’m sorry to hear it.”
    “Well, we need jobs, no doubt of that. The men here may care about this beer tax, but the women know better.”
    “I’m relieved to hear you say that—I thought beer might be the local god from the way some people talk,” said Lenox.
    At this Sandy Smith looked terrified, but after a moment of silence Mrs. Reeve gave her first real laugh, warm and long. Lenox liked her, in fact. A strange woman. She had gained some of the outward symbols of the gentry by virtue of her small fortune and intellect but retained the sense of a workingman’s wife, he saw. She corrected her maid when she brought out the largest teapot.
    “Wasteful, Sally,” she said as she poured. “Well, and what can I do for you, Mr. Lenox?”
    “Ma’am?”
    “Sandy?”
    “We would appreciate your support.”
    Lenox hastened to say, “Although before we can ask for that, I thought I’d meet you.”
    “Well—let us see,” she