The September Society (12 page)

I
t was late in the afternoon, perhaps four o’clock, and Lenox was in the Bodleian Library’s Upper Reading Room, leaning back in his chair and rubbing his tired eyes with his knuckles. He had been there for two hours and received very little recompense for his assiduousness, but had hopes that the next hour would bring greater success.

The Bodleian above anything else made Oxford what it was to the university’s alumni. If there were diverse college allegiances, club allegiances, and sporting allegiances that fractured Oxford, what unified the undergraduates was the Bod, lying in all of its beauty at the center of life in the city. There was something incommunicably grand about it, something difficult to understand unless you had spent your evenings there or walked past it on the way to celebrate the boat race, a magic that came from ignoring it a thousand times a day and then noticing its overwhelming beauty when you came out of a tiny alley and it caught you unexpectedly. A library—it didn’t sound like much, but it was what made Oxford itself. The greatest library in the world.

At the heart of it was the Old Schools Quad, a hushed
cobblestone square. Its high carved walls gave it the feeling of a tower. Along the walls were the low, dark doors where the original schools had been, each bearing a Latin description of what was taught inside—philosophy became
Schola Moralis Philosophiae
, music became
Schola Musicae
–in high black and gold lettering above the doorways. Painted on the doors in blue was Oxford’s motto,
Dominus Illuminatio Mea
, the Lord is my light. Walking past students in their black gowns and white ties that afternoon, treading the quiet stone steps worn away by time and traffic, the beautiful, intricately worked stone walls reaching up on high toward a statue of James the First, the famous dreaming spires reaching heavenward—confronted with all of it, Lenox had been lost for words, lost even for thoughts.

He looked up at the graceful stained glass window of Duke Humfrey’s Library, which housed the most extensive collection of rare books in the world; he looked in through the broad doors of the Divinity School, the oldest surviving university building in the world, its famously intricate Gothic vaulted stone ceiling serenely accepting the worship of a few scattered sightseers; he looked through the narrow walkway that led out to Oxford’s most famous building, the circular library called the Radcliffe Camera; and as his eyes traveled over these familiar sights his main feeling was that he had come home. These buildings, the Clarendon, Sheldonian, Bodleian, these were the first home that belonged solely to him, to his adult self. Now, in the twilight of early fall, he felt almost breathless in the face of all the memories they held, all the promise spent, all the students like him who had turned out one way or another, whatever their first dreams had been when they arrived.

The appearance of the librarian jerked him out of his reverie.

“Doing all right, Mr. Lenox?”

“Quite well, thanks, Mr. Folsom. What are those?” he asked, nodding toward the papers in the other man’s hands.

“Ah—a few more we found on the September Society.”

“I’m awfully obliged.”

“Oh, and here’s a note that came up for you from one of the pages at Jesus College.”

The note, to Lenox’s surprise, was from a woman named Rosie Little, asking him to come visit her the next morning at Jesus—the place, he noted, where Payson had been to the dance on Saturday evening. He wrote back to her saying that he would come, and then turned to the papers.

Lenox had ascertained a few bare facts about this Society that kept popping up, but only a very few, and the work was slow going. He was trawling through old newspapers that the library had cross-referenced and through the books of club and society histories, as well as the histories of eastern military action by the British Empire. In this hodgepodge of sources he had found nine references to the September Society, three of them entirely incidental, five ancillary, and one that was more intriguing. The three incidental mentions all came in the middle of long lists of organizations, groups with a representative at a conference, for example, or groups that had all donated to a single cause.

Of the five ancillary mentions, two were interesting to Lenox. The first reported that select members of the September Society had been received by Queen Victoria. It was in a copy of the
Times
about ten years old. The second was about the same event, but was slightly more specific and had appeared about a week later in the
Spectator
. Its chief usefulness to Lenox was that it gave the number of members of the Society (roughly thirty, awfully small) and a more detailed account of the club’s formation by a group of officers who had served together in eastern India and all received high military decorations.

This added information to the most interesting of the sources, a book called
A History of the Pall Mall
, about ten years old, which had an appendix entitled “Club and Society Profiles.” The entry on the September Society was instructive.

This gave Lenox three names to research and a building to focus on. He also knew that someone in his web of friends would belong to the Biblius, an elite and prideful sort of club which accepted members regardless of background who had exceptionally fine collections of incunabula. Lady Jane would know it. Her family had a famous library of early books.

Swallowing the thought of his old friend, Lenox picked up
the papers that Mr. Folsom had just brought. On top of the pile was an unpublished collection called
Seals, Crests, and Coats of Arms of Some British Organizations, Being an Attempt to Classify Their Genealogies and Histories
. It was by somebody named H. Probisher Protherham whom Lenox thanked his lucky stars he didn’t know. A man who could write a treatise on crests was a man capable of anything, was Lenox’s feeling. Give him open rein at a dinner party and there was no level of tediousness he might not achieve.

He languidly flipped to the S section of the papers and perked up a bit when he saw that the seal of the September Society had been included. It was a rather ornate thing. Below it H. Probisher Protherham had written:

Lenox sat back in his chair, thinking. Could it be? He read it over again and then copied the entire entry down in his notebook, also marking down the shelf number and the book’s title and author. He glanced through the index to make sure there was only one reference to the September Society and then read the description over one more time for good measure.

So, he thought. Another cat.

H
ow do you do, Mr. Kelly?”

“Quite well, thank you, Mr. Lenox, but as I said before, please call me Red.”

“That’s right, the students call you that, don’t they?”

“They do, sir, though not because of this.” With a laugh, the head porter tugged at his shock of black hair. “Because I’m Irish, you see.”

“I remember we used to give our head porter a bit of chaff in my day, too. Sign of affection, I expect.”

“I hope so, sir. Was there anything I could help you with?”

“As a matter of fact there is, Red. I was hoping to talk to you about the day Bill Dabney and George Payson disappeared.”

“I can’t, sir, not after poor Payson’s body showed up in the middle of Christ Church Meadow. Dreadful, dreadful blow, that.”

“In that case I have a note here from Inspector Goodson asking you to answer my questions.”

Kelly looked over the note Lenox had handed him and then nodded. “Fair enough,” he said, “though I don’t reckon I’ll be much help.”

“Why is that?”

“I didn’t see much of Master Payson that day, sir.”

“But you saw his mother.”

“Aye, at a little before midday.”

“Were you accustomed to seeing her?”

“Certainly, sir.”

“She visited quite often, then?”

“Aye, sir.”

“And did you see the meeting between George Payson and his mother out here in the Front Quad, by any chance?”

“Can’t say I did, sir, no.”

“When was the last time you saw George Payson?”

“I did see him when he came out, sir, after he saw his mother and promised to meet her.”

“Ah!”

“He didn’t look at me, though. And that was the last time.”

“He followed his mother out?”

“She went out down Ship Street, sir, and then he went out five minutes later.”

Ship Street (once known as Lincoln College Lane) and Turl Street formed a tiny cross at the center of Oxford, and a great deal of colleges were clustered around them. At the end of Ship was the Saxon Tower, the oldest structure in Oxford, which dated to 1040.

“Did you see Bill Dabney that day, Mr. Kelly? Red?”

“I didn’t, sir. I had seen him the night before.”

“What was he doing?”

“Going to the dance at Jesus College.”

“Did George Payson go to the same dance?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

Lenox thought of the dance card he had found in Payson’s room. “How about Payson’s scout?”

“He didn’t go to the dance, no, sir.”

Lenox laughed. “Very good. I meant—did you see the scout that day?”

“I see him every day, sir.” The head porter seemed to be growing impatient.

“Could I meet him?”

“He’s not here, sir.”

“That’s odd.”

“Not really, sir, begging your pardon. It’s his day off.”

“Do you know whether the police have spoken to him?”

“They haven’t to my knowledge, Mr. Lenox.”

Lenox puzzled over this. Suddenly the dance card seemed like another clue for his list. The strange thing about the card was that only one side of the correspondence appeared on it—the porter’s response. Had Payson sent his request down on a different piece of paper? But why would he have done that?

“Have you heard of the September Society, Mr. Kelly?”

“No, sir.”

“I believe you were in the military, however?”

“Yes, we were, all of us porters. The Royal Pioneer Corps.”

“Did you see the battlefield?”

“No, sir, thankfully not. Though mind, I would have done my bit when the time came.”

“Of course … what can you tell me about Bill Dabney?”

The head porter shook his head apologetically. “We have an awful lot of students, sir, and the only ones I know well are our third-years. Master Dabney was only another face in the long procession. Friendly enough, good pals with Masters Payson and Stamp—I fear that’s about the extent of my knowledge of him, sir.”

“Did he get much post?”

“Post? I couldn’t say, sir.”

“And Payson?”

“Oh—now that you mention it, he’d been getting more recently.”

“Do you have any memory of it?”

“One queer thing comes back, sir, now that you say it. He had been getting letters, properly stamped, Queen’s head on ’em, and then throwing ’em away unopened.”

“Why did you notice that?”

“I didn’t, sir—Mr. Fallows, another of our porters here, he noticed it, Mr. Lenox.”

“Can you remember when?”

“Certainly, sir. About a week ago, I reckon—and finally Mr. Fallows went and took the letter out of the wastepaper basket to open it, and he found it to be empty!”

“Puzzling, that.”

“It is, quite.”

“Anything on the letter except the stamp and address? Any markings?”

“Nothing, sir. No return of address.”

A signal? How long had Payson known that he was in danger?

“You don’t have any mail for George Payson left, do you?”

“None, sir, nor for Master Dabney. Checked straight away, I did.”

“Which other porters were on duty the day Dabney and Payson vanished?”

“I was, sir, both days, Fallows on evenings, and with me in the daytime was a chap named Phelps.”

“You’re alone now?”

“No, Phelps is out checking the staircases and the student rooms. A new system since the unfortunate incident.”

“Ah. Well, thank you, Mr. Kelly. I appreciate it.”

Lenox left Lincoln and walked the short distance across Turl Street to Jesus College, another of the small to medium-sized colleges along this central artery, not quite as grand as some but beautiful in their own right. Jesus was known for having a large Welsh population (a Welshman had founded it,
though officially Elizabeth I held the title of Founder) and for its frequent contributions to the ’varsity athletic clubs. The college also famously owned a huge silver punch bowl from which the Tsar of Russia, the Duke of Wellington, the King of Prussia, and the Prince Regent had formally drunk to signify their defeat of Napoleon in 1814. But Lenox’s favorite thing about it was the daffodils that appeared in full bloom on (the Welsh) St. David’s Day, the first of March, to signify the beginning of spring. He remembered fondly seeing the daffodils and feeling his heart rise as another cold winter vanished behind him.