Page 53 of The Trick of the Treasure
“Well, I am a carpenter—if you’re looking for one?”
“Not just at the moment,” Solomon said. “It is Mr. Samuels in particular we would like to speak to.”
Clarke did not ask why. But then, he wouldn’t, if Samuels was a stranger to him. “I’m afraid I can’t help you.”
“You have the complexion of a seafaring man,” Constance said with a smile. Her hair and her bonnet were straight and respectable once more. “That must be the source of the confusion.”
“I do work outdoors often. Just back from a long job in Berkshire, building an elaborate summer house for someone with more imagination than sense.”
“We’re sorry to interrupt you,” Solomon said. “It was Miss Lloyd who told me you lived here.” It wasn’tpreciselya lie.
“Miss Lloyd? But she knows my name is not Samuels.” He smiled, not without amusement, even fondness. “She can be very forgetful and vague, bless her.”
“Then she visits you often?”
“Oh, not me. My sister. We grew up on the Lloyds’ country estate and she still looks in on Hetty, especially when I’m away from home. My sister does not keep terribly well.”
Which did rather explain Miss Lloyd’s charity claim. It seemed they had solved one minor mystery by finding the wrong carpenter.
*
Returning to theoffice for luncheon, Constance was not surprised to discover Janey entertaining Lenny Knox as they munched through a plate of sandwiches.
“Well met, Lenny,” Solomon greeted him. “You’re just the man we were looking for.”
“I am?” Lenny had sprung up from the stool in Janey’s cubbyhole. “I just dropped in to see if you had any work for me. Miss Janey thought I could help her…”
“Oh yes, of course,” Solomon said. He picked up the plate, offered it to Constance, then took two sandwiches himself. “First, though, we want your professional opinion about a wooden chest in Mayfair.”
Janey glared daggers at Solomon, who didn’t even notice. Constance kicked her foot in warning, and she sniffed.
Lenny had once been a bit of a firebrand radical, organizing resistance to unlivable wages and unreasonable rents for tiny spaces in dangerous buildings. Because of the latter, he had recently lost his wife and child. Because of the former, he hadlost his job. He was in the process of beginning again on his own, both in his trade and his life, but it would take time for the fire to return. Constance, who liked him, didn’t doubt that it would, but Janey was hoping for too much, too quickly, and Constance didn’t want her hurt.
Right now, it was his skills as a carpenter she and Solomon needed, Accordingly, after luncheon, they whisked him off to the Lloyds’ residence, where they asked for Mr. Lloyd.
“Is this the culprit?” Lloyd asked eagerly as he strode into the small reception room where Garrick had left them. He looked Lenny up and down contemptuously.
Lenny, in his workingman’s clothes with the lines of suffering on his face, gazed back without shame or much interest.
“No,” Solomon said. “This is Mr. Knox, an excellent carpenter of our acquaintance. Knox, Mr. Lloyd.”
Of course, Lloyd ignored the introduction. Lenny nodded curtly, as though to an equal, though Lloyd didn’t even notice.
Solomon continued. “We want his opinion of the chest in your strong room.”
Lloyd’s face was blank. “Why?”
“To give us a clue as to who built it. The chances of any man on your expedition just happening to possess a chest exactly like the one you dug up are not high. Someone must have made a copy deliberately, and it might be helpful to know whether or not that copyist was an amateur or a tradesman.”
Lloyd turned away. “Wait here,” he said. “Garrick will fetch you.”
Obviously, Lenny was not to be granted the privilege of seeing how to open the strong room door. Constance exchanged glances with Solomon.
At least they were not kept waiting for long before Garrick, clearly resenting the mundane task, summoned them to followhim upstairs, where Lloyd awaited them by the open strong room door. The ring of keys weighed down his coat pocket.
Constance stood back and Lenny walked into the strong room, ignoring everything but the chest. He examined every plank minutely, from inside and out. Then he heaved it on to its side and inspected the bottom. He poked around the joins and rubbed at the heads of few nails, even prying one up with a tool in his pocket to inspect it more closely before reinserting it and knocking it back in.
He half turned to look up at the others. “Looks like a craftsman’s work to me, except the wood don’t match. None of it. It was made from scraps of different trees and different ages. One bitherelooks to me like new wood, just dirtied up a bit to match the rest of it. I’d saythispiece andthesetwo had spent a long time in seawater—part of a ship or a boat, maybe.Thatnail is new, just with its head dirtied. The rest seem to be old nails dug out of somewhere else and reused, rusted or not.”
