Home by Nightfall by Charles Finch

zealous group. If Hadley was a known figure in that particular field, he might well have attracted the wrong sort of attention.
    Lenox nodded, understandingly. “That’s excellent,” he said. “But I would consider removing them to a bank, as I said, or failing that precaution I would at least consider buying a safe. I am far from persuaded that the crimes of which you have been a victim are at their end.”

 
    CHAPTER FOURTEEN
    The next day was Saturday: market day, which might as well have counted as two days of the week here. In the morning, Lenox rode again, his muscles loosening slowly as he went, for he was sore as the devil from the previous two mornings’ rides. It was gray and wet still, though bracingly open. He wished Jane and Sophia were here to take the air. He might miss any number of things about London—his office, his friends, his clubs, the noise, the light—but he didn’t miss the soupy fog that rolled through the streets this time of year, troubling every pair of lungs in the street.
    When he returned to Lenox House, Edmund was again gone, though it was scarcely eight o’clock. “Where is he now?” Lenox asked Waller.
    â€œOut upon a walk as he was yesterday morning, sir. He gave me to understand that he does not expect to return for a period of one to two hours.”
    Lenox was vexed; he wanted to get to the market early, before it grew too busy, and interview the stall-holders who had been the victims of the thefts Clavering had described. After lingering over breakfast, checking the window every other minute for Edmund’s return, he decided he would go on his own. He asked Waller to tell his brother to meet him in town.
    To save time, he borrowed an old dray horse from the stables, Matilda, a gentle, lolloping beast, fifteen years old and still just about faster than a man on foot. She carried him to the square, nuzzled him when he patted her mane, and gracefully accepted an apple from his pocket. He found a boy in the square—a local, who spent market day hanging around the central square to do odd jobs—and gave him a penny to take her back to Lenox House.
    â€œDon’t hire her out to your friends for rides on the way, either, or I shall hear about it,” said Lenox. “There’s another halfpenny if you find me within the hour with the news that she is home.”
    With that finished, he stood at the top of the square, gazing down at the gentle slope. Dozens of stalls were crammed higgledy-piggledy into it, the noise and smell already impressive.
    â€œLo there, oysters?” called a fellow passing him, with a yoke around his neck and a tray hanging from it full of cracked oysters. A pepper box and a salt cellar hung from his belt.
    â€œLater, perhaps, thank you,” said Lenox.
    There were other wandering vendors of this type, selling ale in flagons, coffee in tin pots, apples, flowers, long braided strings of turnips and onions. A teenaged boy had rock sugar for a farthing. A bargain: As Lenox knew from his boyhood, with careful husbandry a medium-sized piece of rock sugar could be made to last through a full market day.
    Then there were the stalls. Cockerels, more substantial varieties of fruit and vegetable, trout (from Edmund’s and Houghton’s waters, almost certainly), fat pheasants, white sugar in twisted brown wax paper. What an infinity of things to buy! Down the west lane were the patent medicine sellers—all fraudulent, McConnell had assured Lenox, and most of the medicines simply alcohol, though many in the lower classes all across England swore by their effects with sacral fervor—and down the east lane were stalls selling jewelry, muslin, bombazine, perfume, soapstone carvings, slippers, sponges, cloaks, squares of glass, penknives, anything you could imagine. Out in front of these stands, knife-cleaners and tin-menders sat on low stools, the tools of their trade close at hand. Down