A Stranger in Mayfair - Charles Finch [90]
“What circumstances?” asked Lenox.
Fowler smiled a bittersweet smile and took a puff on his cigar. “We’re very different men, you and I,” he said. “It’s all very well for you to take the high ground on a subject like money, knowing full well that in the normal run of life it would never come up between us. But do you know what my father did?”
“What?”
“He was a pure collector.” Lenox grimaced unintentionally, and Fowler laughed. “Not so nice, is it? No, it wasn’t then.”
Lenox knew of pure collectors; they had formed part of his reading on cholera. They were men—very poor men—who scavenged for dog and human waste, which they then sold to farms. It took extremely long workdays in extremely unpleasant places to make a living at it.
“I don’t understand the connection of that to Ludo Starling,” said Lenox.
“No; you wouldn’t. While I was using tea leaves four times to get all the flavor of them, living in a house that smelled of—well, why mince words? It smelled of shit! Yes, you can make all the unpleasant faces you want, but while I was living there you were in your father’s house, looked after by nannies, eating off of silver, learning about what your old ancestors did at, at Agincourt…no, we’re very different, you and I.”
Lenox felt on uncertain ground now. This was a tender spot for him. Money was the great unexamined area of his conscience, in a way. “But you took bribery, Grayson, and you have a job now. You’re not a pure collector. That was your father.”
The look on Fowler’s face was contemptuous. “You know about it, do you? Did you know that I have nine brothers and sisters, and that of us all I’m the only one with a decent job? That I’ve given them nearly every cent I earned to keep them in food and clothes, to try to educate their children, and that four of them have died anyway, of that blasted cholera? You have a brother, I know. Can you imagine burying him, Mr. Lenox?”
“No.”
“I have my house, Mr. Lenox—a modest enough affair, but it took me ten years to buy it. Beyond that, nothing except my next wage packet from the Yard…and last year I found out that I’m getting too old to stay on here.”
“What?”
“There’ll be my pension, but that’s only enough for tea and toast. So yes, I’ve taken a few pounds here and there. Always in cases when I thought I knew better than the law. Can you judge me for it?”
The answer was that he couldn’t. No. It was possible of course that Fowler was spinning a story for him, playing for sympathy, but something final and confessional in the man’s air convinced Lenox it was all true.
“Well, but what about Collingwood?” asked Lenox with a struggle.
“He would have been free next week.”
“Why next week?”
But Fowler was in his own world. He stood up and looked through the window, which was flung with a few raindrops. “Do you know when I joined the Yard?” he said. “It was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
“When?”
“1829. I was one of the first peelers. Fifteen years of age, but I looked eighteen. Thirty-eight years ago, it was.”
Lenox nearly gasped. In 1829 Sir Robert Peel—one of the great politicians of the last century, famed for the greatest maiden speech ever given in Parliament—had founded the modern police force. He started with a thousand constables, the peelers. Over time they had taken as a nickname not his last but his first name: They were bobbies. To have been among the first rank was an honor, and Fowler was surely one of the few dozen who remained alive.
“I never knew that,” said Lenox and could hear the awe in his own voice.
Proudly, Fowler nodded. “I always drink to Sir Bobby,” he said and nodded toward a dusty pencil portrait of Peel as a young man that Lenox had missed before. “I met him four