Chapter 14
Chapter
Fourteen
A Gentleman of No Consequence
The Argosy stood on the west side of St. James’s Street, four doors up from a bootmaker and a comfortable distance below White’s, which was precisely where it wished to stand. It was a club for men who had risen far enough to want a good address and not far enough to be asked anywhere better.
Sir Basil Crane had belonged to it. Under its roof, a month past, Cosmos had struck him in a private room he had believed to be private.
And somewhere in its books, if Whitfield’s figures told the truth, stood the name of Walter Marsh, a member of two years’ standing whose subscription was paid with washed money.
I had never before had occasion to enter the place. That afternoon I had three.
The porter knew me before I had gained the top step. Porters always do; recognition is the whole of their trade.
“Your Grace.”
“Good afternoon. I should like a word with Mr. Morris, if he can be spared.”
Finch had furnished the steward’s name, along with the observation that a man who had kept the doors of gentlemen’s clubs for thirty years knew more of the members than their confessors did, and charged less for absolution.
The porter did not ask my business. A duke’s business is presumed sufficient.
He showed me into the hall and murmured something to a page.
Within two minutes Morris himself appeared—a spare, upright man of fifty or thereabouts, in the black coat of his office, with the composed face of a servant who had spent his life watching gentlemen misbehave and being paid to forget it.
He bowed. “Your Grace. How may I be of service?”
“I wonder whether you might give me a quarter of an hour. Somewhere quiet.”
“Of course.”
He led me to a small reading room overlooking the street. It stood empty at that hour save for an elderly gentleman asleep behind The Times, his breathing keeping slow time with the clock on the mantel. Morris glanced at him, judged him no obstacle, and drew the door half closed.
I came immediately to the point. “A matter of business has been put before me. A commercial guarantee, in which a certain gentleman’s name stands surety. Before anything proceeds, I prefer to take my own soundings of the man. I am given to understand he is a member here. Mr. Walter Marsh.”
Nothing crossed the steward’s face, which told me only that he was good at his work. “Mr. Marsh. Yes, Your Grace. He was put up—let me think—two years ago this spring.”
Two years. The figure sat exactly where Whitfield had placed it. There is a small, cold satisfaction in watching a stranger corroborate a ledger.
“A regular attendee?”
“Tolerably regular. Two or three days in the week, as a rule.”
“And what manner of gentleman is he?”
Morris considered the question with the care of a man weighing loyalty against truth and finding, for once, that they did not conflict. “A quiet one, Your Grace.”
“How so?”
“He keeps very much to himself. He arrives, reads the newspapers, takes luncheon on occasion, and leaves. Sometimes a frame of billiards, if the room is empty.”
“That’s rather odd.”
“He does not play against other members. He knocks the balls about alone.”
A man who came to a club—the one institution in England built for the company of other men—and arranged to be alone in it. “No close companions, then?”
“None that I would call intimate.”
“In two years?”
“No, Your Grace.”
“A man who joins a club generally forms acquaintances. It is half the purpose of the subscription.”
“So one would suppose.” Morris permitted himself the smallest pause. “Mr. Marsh appears to have joined for the other half.”
The newspapers, the luncheons, the quiet rooms. A place to be, without being anything. I moved to the window and looked down at the street, where the afternoon traffic of St. James’s went about its business—clerks and carriages and two young bloods arguing over a horse.
“Does he play cards?”
“No, Your Grace.”
“Never?”
“I have never once seen him at a table.”
“Does he drink?”
“A single glass of claret with luncheon. He leaves half of it.”
“Does he owe money in the house? To the wine committee, the kitchen, the servants?”
“His account is settled quarterly, to the day.”
“Political opinions?”
The ghost of a smile touched the steward’s mouth. “He avoids them with admirable consistency.”
I turned from the window. On paper—and Marsh existed chiefly on paper—here was the least remarkable member of the least remarkable club in London.
No vices, no debts, no friends, no opinions.
In thirty years of government I had learned to distrust every man who presented no surface at all.
Honest men are inconvenient. They have tempers, or debts, or views on the Corn Laws. Only a constructed man has none.
“Did he receive visitors?”
“Visitors, Your Grace?”
“Gentlemen calling at the club and asking for him.”
Morris’s weight shifted, no more than an inch, from one foot to the other. In another man it would have meant nothing. In a servant of his discipline it was the equivalent of a shout.
“Not many,” he said.
“But some.”
“Yes.”
“Do you recall who?”
“Most of them I could not put a name to. Gentlemen of business, by their look. They never stayed long.” He stopped there, and the stop had an edge to it. There was more, and he was deciding what to do with it.
I waited. Silence is the cheapest instrument of inquiry and the least often used.
“There was one,” Morris said at last, “whose name I knew.”
“Go on.”
“Sir Basil Crane.”
The name dropped into the quiet room and lay there between us.
The old gentleman behind The Times slept on.
I kept my face in order, which cost me something, because for five days I had labored to hold two investigations apart—the murder at Kew on one hand, the ghost on the river on the other, two inquiries that must never once be seen to touch.
And a club steward had just laid them in each other’s arms.
“Sir Basil,” I said, “was a member here himself, I believe.”
“He was, Your Grace.” Morris’s voice lowered by a degree, the tone reserved in every servants’ hall for the recently and scandalously dead. “You will understand the committee has been most anxious that the club’s name not be drawn into the matter of his death. Most anxious.”
“I understand entirely. Nothing you tell me will travel.” It was a promise I intended to keep in the letter if not the spirit. “You say Sir Basil called upon Mr. Marsh. Were they friends?”
“I could not honestly say they were, Your Grace.”
“What were they, then?”
Morris took his time. “It always seemed to me that Sir Basil sought out Mr. Marsh, and never the reverse. Mr. Marsh would be in the library, or at his coffee, and Sir Basil would come in from the street, ask the hall porter whether Mr. Marsh was in the house, and go straight up to him.”
“And then?”
“They would remove to one of the small rooms and speak privately. A few minutes, sometimes. Half an hour at the outside.”
“Were the conversations heated? Raised voices, quarrels?”
“Never once.”
“Did they appear friendly?”
Another pause, longer than the others. “I have kept club rooms for thirty years, Your Grace. One learns to read a table the way other men read a newspaper.”
“I am relying upon it.”
“Mr. Marsh was never pleased to see him.”
“Displeased how? Afraid?”
“I could not swear to afraid.”
“Reluctant, then.”
Morris nodded slowly. “That is nearer it. Whenever Sir Basil sat down with him, Mr. Marsh had the look of a man waiting for the interview to be over. And when it was over, Sir Basil left the club directly. He never stayed for a hand of cards afterward, though the tables were his usual habit. He came for Mr. Marsh, and having had him, he went.”
I let the picture assemble itself. Crane, the hanger-on, the man of debts and deep play, presenting himself again and again at another man’s elbow.
Marsh, the cipher, enduring it. Two readings offered themselves, and they pointed in opposite directions.
Either Crane had held something over Marsh and come to collect—or Marsh was no cipher at all, and Crane had come to render account and receive instruction, and had been despised for coming in daylight.
The steward’s evidence fit both. Evidence of that kind is the most dangerous sort; it flatters whichever theory a man brought into the room with him.
“When did Sir Basil last call upon him?”
Morris reckoned. “A week ago, or very near it. The Tuesday, I believe.”
Two days before Crane was found at Kew with another man’s pistol beside him.
“And Mr. Marsh? When was he last in the house?”
“That same afternoon, Your Grace.” The steward’s brow gathered as the arithmetic performed itself behind his eyes, and he did not much care for the sum. “I have not seen him since.”
Nor, I refrained from observing, would anyone see Sir Basil Crane again.
“One thing more, Morris, and I am done. Describe Mr. Marsh to me. I may have passed the man a dozen times without knowing it.”
“Describe him.” Morris repeated the word.
Plainly no one had ever asked him for such a thing.
“A gentleman of middle years, Your Grace. Middling height. Neither stout nor spare. Brown hair, going gray at the sides. Clean-shaven. He dresses well, but not so well that you would remark it.” He stopped, plainly dissatisfied with his own inventory.
“I should know him the moment he came through that door. But I find I could not paint him for a stranger, and I have just proved it.”
“You have described him exactly,” I said. “That is what troubles me.”
A man of middle years and middling height, of no vices and no acquaintance, who belonged to a club in order to be alone in it. A man assembled, feature by feature, to be forgotten.
I thanked Morris, pressed a sovereign into his hand, and asked for his discretion.
The coin was not payment for his silence—that would have insulted a man who had served the Argosy faithfully for three decades.
It was simply an acknowledgment of his time.
His discretion rested where it always had: in thirty years of loyal service and the committee's horror of scandal.
On the steps, the heat of the street rose to meet me.
A hansom cab stood waiting. What the visit had bought me could be reckoned to the shilling.
What it might cost was harder arithmetic.
Half of what London knew about itself traveled below stairs.
If the quiet Mr. Marsh had ears at the Argosy, then by nightfall he would know a duke had come asking his name.
Let him know. A ghost who learns he is being hunted makes his first mistake soon after.
“Grosvenor Square,” I told the driver.
Finch had claimed Marsh for his own. He would have to hear, before the day was out, that the two inquiries he was sworn to keep apart had met without permission—in a reading room in St. James’s, over a dead man’s visits and a member the club steward could not describe.