The Woman in the Water (Charles Lenox Mysteries) by Charles Finch

Author:Charles Finch [Finch, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2018-02-19T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

As in most country houses, the dogcart at Lenox House was in perhaps eight times greater use than the carriage. But the carriage was here: now painted a glossy maroon, Lenox arms on the door, easing down slightly earthward on whichever side it was stepped into. Four black horses, groomed and beautiful, ridden out every morning by Hitchens and his stableboy two by two, were ready to pull it.

Lenox and Graham went together to pick up Sir Riley Callum, the consulting surgeon Courtenay had recommended. He stepped from the train, and Lenox’s first thought was that in looks there was virtually nothing more you could have asked of him: his white-haired head might have been the model for a marble bust, and he stood marvelously erect, a man with delicate papery skin and keen gray eyes that seemed to survey and anatomize the world with bloodless precision.

They might as well have taken the dogcart for him, though. He was closeted with Lenox’s father for about ninety minutes, spoke briefly with Lenox’s two parents, politely but firmly declined Lenox’s company on the return trip to the train station, and left.

Lenox was in the ballroom, vast and empty, sitting with his legs up in a window and staring at the clean-shorn hedges of the formal gardens, when his mother came down. “Nothing to be done, he says.”

Lenox stood up. “That’s all he said?”

“He concurred with the opinion of the other doctors your father has seen.” She bit her lip. Her arms were crossed. “No surgical options.”

“None?” said Lenox, stunned.

“He offered some palliative advice. Though your father won’t stop smoking his pipe, of course.”

“No,” Lenox said in an indistinct voice. More plausible that the sun should stop rising in the east. He looked up at his mother. “Shall I cancel Dr. McConnell?”

“Hadn’t you better? Your father will see him, but there doesn’t seem much point.”

He didn’t, though. Something in his mother at the moment she said that—well, he had never known her bright, lively face so drained of life. He decided he would keep the appointment.

What a mystery one’s parents were! Lenox would have said that his mother was by far the better equipped for this kind of loss—she was so universally beloved by her friends, so interested in life, so alive herself—and yet he saw now that in fact he had been exactly wrong. His father would have borne the loss of his mother. He would have been shattered, but he also didn’t have quite so strong a sense that his life was important. Perhaps it came of being the steward of a title and of land. If it had been she who received this diagnosis, Sir Edward would have known that his loss was only personal and, however inwardly bereft, carried on.

But for Emma Lenox, all of life was personal. The way she teased, her easy gift for being in a room—all these warm traits would be adrift on cold waters without her husband, Lenox saw for the first time.

The next morning, Graham and Lenox sat in the carriage again.

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