Home by Nightfall by Charles Finch Page A

near the fountain, a barber was warming water over a small covered fire to give his shaves and cuts.
    â€œMr. Lenox?” said a voice.
    Lenox turned. “Constable Clavering, how do you do?”
    Clavering looked overrun of his capacities, but he nodded bravely. “Hoping for uneventful, sir,” he said. “Uneventful would be ideal.”
    â€œI wonder—could you point me in the direction of the sellers who were stolen from, the last two weekends?”
    They spent the next hour going from stall to stall, Clavering walking with the assurance of a man who knew precisely where every stray potato in this marketplace had fallen.
    None of the vendors could explain the thefts. Lenox asked them to describe any customers who had stood out, but the crowd was too various and bustling to allow for such recollection—yes, there were regulars at each stall, and among the irregulars most of the faces at least were familiar. That still left two or three in every ten who were strangers, or whom the vendors had only seen once or twice.
    The most audacious of the thefts had been the half wheelbarrow of carrots. “Gone,” the fellow who had missed them said to Lenox, his astonishment undiminished by time. “Gone! Simple as that. Talked to a customer for a moment or two, turned back to the barrow I’d been unloading, and it was gone.”
    â€œYou didn’t see anyone lurking about?”
    â€œThere are always boys in and around the market. But we’ve never had a problem—always deal very severely with anyone caught stealing, several months in jail from the magistrate, ’cause we all know Markethouse needs the market, don’t we?”
    Clavering nodded emphatically at that.
    It made Lenox think, this. The two sets of crimes were very different. On the one hand, there was the simple theft of necessities—food, blankets. On the other, there was the rather uncanny victimization of Arthur Hadley, including the telegram, the chalk drawing, and the sherry.
    Were these crimes necessarily related? he wondered.
    He spent the next half hour moving around the market. He saw a great many people he knew. There was Mrs. Nabors, who had been the housekeeper at Lenox House some years before, but had been fired when she’d been found selling the house’s food from the back door; apparently she had continued in that business, for she had a stand full of meat pies and gave Lenox a very dirty look as he passed it. He saw Mad Calloway again, wandering with his herbs, simples, dandelion greens, mushrooms, and nettles, stopping occasionally to accept a coin for a bunch of them. And he spotted Mrs. Watson’s older boy, in full health apparently, sprinting up an alleyway with a group of children around his age.
    He found Edmund near the Bell and Horns at a little before eleven o’clock. He was with the mayor of Markethouse—a slender, staid-looking man whose name was, for some reason that had gone into the ground with his parents, Stevens Stevens. It was really the only notable thing about him.
    â€œHello, Mr. Stevens,” said Lenox.
    â€œHello, Mr. Lenox. Wet day, isn’t it?”
    â€œClearing, I would have said.”
    The mayor looked up doubtfully. Lenox had known him for forty years, since he was a swottish, pedantic boy at the village school, and more or less the same look of circumspection had been on his face the whole time. He had never in that time evinced any vivacity except a complete, joyful absorption in numbers. Markethouse—a market town, after all—liked that, and his rather stooped figure, permanently hunched forward from a lifetime of peering over his glasses at balance sheets, inspired a fond confidence. He’d run unopposed several times in a row now.
    â€œI don’t know—it could be more rain,” he said. “I find these Saturdays exhausting, though of course necessary, too. Louisa, could you run inside and fetch me a