An Extravagant Death by Charles Finch

Author:Charles Finch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Lenox must have been one of the only guests to leave the tea at Greystone by foot, for he had the pretty, cypress-lined Bellevue Avenue to himself when he departed. Indeed few people seemed to walk here, a town of carriages.

He made his way in the direction of the small western side of Newport. It was modest, but pleasant, housing a variety of shanties, shacks, and lean-tos, some with energetic vegetable gardens and chicken coops, others with that indefinable air of want that means poverty in every nation.

As he went, only one question occupied his thoughts. Did he think Lawrence Vanderbilt was a murderer?

This was what Lenox contemplated as he wound his way up through the streets by the wharf, keeping his bearings by the night’s young moon. It was a far cry from Greystone. The smells were strong and various, hearty stews slowly cooking over fires, water running across dirt and stone, and above all the sea, sometimes fresh and clean and sometimes fishy and brackish, depending upon the wind.

Almost every house had some collection of fishing poles and baskets crowded together near their front doors. He nodded at the men gathered in the alleyways, who stood in what he had come to think of as a peculiarly American way: one hand in the pocket of their rough linen trousers, the other with a cigarette; an intimate posture. A few women were outside, too, most engaged in some task—pumping water, hanging clothes to dry, lighting lamps.

It had cooled considerably, and he was glad to stop in at the Paul Revere, which was warm and comfortable, with flickering lamps in its windows and the smell of pipe smoke. He took a table and ate a resplendent meal: roast duck seasoned with onions and carrots, and piled in snug around it baked beans, apple preserves, common crackers, and on the side a slice of cold pumpkin pie.

He leafed through a copy of an old Harper’s as he ate, mostly full of inside jokes about American politics that he couldn’t quite understand, though some he did. The tone was democratic, humorous. His attention was eventually drawn away from it by the pumpkin pie, since it was his first encounter with this comestible, and a very pleasant one. When, thoroughly satisfied, he finished, the saloon keeper came to take his plate and brought him a glass of plum brandy—“on the house, for the British detective.”

By the time Lenox left the tavern it must have been close to ten o’clock. The temperature had dipped further still, a taut sea breeze putting some red into the cheeks of passersby. It was nice to see Mrs. Berry’s house hove into view, broad and white, with its trim garden. He was tired. He went in, greeted the girl who sat up in the front parlor by night, and asked her to send O’Brian up from the servants’ quarters with coffee.

But before he could ascend the staircase himself, a figure emerged from the visitor’s parlor. It was Teddy Blaine.

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