The September Society (2 page)

He was a lean man with a friendly face—even in the morning’s preoccupation—hazel eyes, and a short brown beard. His carriage was upright, and as he paced he clasped his
hands behind his back. It gave him a pensive air, the kind he had during the most difficult moments of his cases. But there was no case at hand this morning.

All of this pacing and worrying and sitting and standing took place in a handsome white house on Hampden Lane, just off Grosvenor Square. Fifteen paces down the front hall and to the right was this large library, a rectangular, high-ceilinged room with a desk near the door, a fireplace and chairs at the end of the room, a row of tall windows along the front wall, and books everywhere else. It was where he spent the great majority of his time at home, both anxious and happy alike. He pondered his cases there, and on wet, foggy days like this one, he pondered the world—or the part of it that Hampden Lane occupied—through his trickling windowpanes.

At ten he rang for coffee and at a quarter past he rang to have it taken away, cold and untouched. Graham, his butler, looked concerned but said nothing as he came to and fro. By eleven, however, he could no longer prevent himself from intervening, and presented himself unbidden in the dark oak doorway of the room.

At that moment Lenox had just taken up residence at his desk, where he was looking across the street at the bookshop.

“May I get you anything else, sir?” Graham said.

“No, no,” said Lenox distractedly, still peering through the rain-touched window.

“If I may venture to say so, sir, you seem anxious.”

In many of the aristocratic Mayfair households surrounding Hampden Lane, such a statement would have seemed like the highest impertinence. Lenox and Graham had a long and complex history, though, and in the end were friends more than master and man. While Graham, a sandy-haired man with perfectly arranged clothes and a strong, utterly honest face, always spoke and behaved respectfully, he never hesitated to disagree
with Lenox, often helped the detective in his work, and even, on rare occasions, spoke with the frankness he just had.

“Eh?” said Lenox, at last looking up. “Oh, no, Graham—no, thank you, I’m quite all right.”

“Will you take your lunch here in the library, sir?”

“No,” said Lenox. “Thanks, I’m having lunch in the City, actually. I shall be glad to get on the other side of these four walls.”

“Indeed, sir,” said Graham. He paused before adding, “I am in the hall if you require anything.”

“Thank you,” said Lenox.

Graham withdrew then, and Lenox sighed. Well! he thought to himself. If Graham had noticed, it had gone too far. He would have to stop worrying and go to lunch with his brother. Standing with a decisive air, Lenox patted the pockets of his jacket and went through the double doors of the library out into the hallway.

“Graham, will you call out the carriage, please? I think I’ll leave now.”

“Of course, sir.”

“I’ll be waiting at Chaffanbrass’s while they rub down the horses.”

“Yes, sir,” Graham said as he began to walk downstairs. “It shouldn’t be longer than a quarter of an hour.”

In the front hall, Lenox took his overcoat down from its peg and pulled his umbrella out of its stand. Then he took a breath, ducked outside into the rain, and crossed the street, dodging several hansom cabs and a landau with no inconsiderable agility to get to the bookshop. He pulled open the door and saw the proprietor.

“Mr. Chaffanbrass,” he said with a smile. “How do you do?”

“Mr. Lenox!” said Mr. Chaffanbrass, beaming at him from behind a small counter. “Happy anniversary!”

“Oh?”

“The fire!”

“Ah, of course.”

As it happened, that very day, September 2, was the two hundredth anniversary of the Great Fire of 1666; what had started as a minor conflagration at the Pudding Lane bakery of Thomas Farriner, baker to Charles II, eventually consumed four-fifths of central London. By some miracle only a handful of people had died—the traditional count was reckoned at eight—but thirteen thousand buildings and nearly a hundred churches had vanished. Of the eighty thousand residents of the city, seventy thousand were left homeless. In a year that was already being heralded in some parts as the apocalypse because it contained the Number of the Beast, 666, few needed persuading in the first heady hours after the three-day blaze that the world was at an end.

“And yet,” said Lenox, “my grandfather always said the fire did our city two great services.”

“What do you mean?”

“For one thing, it allowed Wren to build his fifty churches, as well as St. Paul’s Cathedral. The fire is the reason we live in such a beautiful city, Mr. Chaffanbrass.”

“And the second reason?”

“Do you know how many people died of the plague in 1665?”

“How many?”

“About sixty-five thousand, and that despite two-thirds of Londoners leaving the city. The fire killed so many rats and fleas, leveled so many derelict buildings, that in the end it probably saved tens of thousands of lives.”

Ruminatively, Mr. Chaffanbrass said, “Perhaps it’s received a bad press, then.”

“Perhaps,” Lenox agreed. “Still, it would be better all around if it didn’t happen again. Incidentally, has my copy of
Pickwick
come in yet?”

“It hasn’t yet, I very much fear.”

“Can’t be helped,” said Lenox.

“It will prove worth the wait, though! The finest red leather, with gold inlay!”

“And all the words inside?”

“Every last one!”

Ancient, homey, and comfortable, Calum’s was one of the best bookshops around, small and a little dark with rows of crammed bookshelves along the walls. Mr. Chaffanbrass’s squat counter stood in the middle of the room, just next to a freestanding oven that usually had a kettle on and a comfortable chair beside it. The owner himself was a very small, cheerful man, with red cheeks, tidy white hair, and a large belly. He wore perfectly round spectacles and a tweed suit, and the majority of his life was spent behind the counter and next to the warmth of the oven, reading. There was always a turned-down book on the arm of his chair.

“Anything else new?” asked Lenox.

“Nothing you haven’t seen, no. Wait, though!” As Mr. Chaffanbrass skittered to the back of the store, Lenox looked idly through the books on the counter. Presently the gentleman came back with a small volume in his hand.

“What do you make of that, Mr. Lenox?” he said. “A new translation.”

Lenox looked at the flyleaf. It was a thin, pebbled brown copy of
The Praise of Folly
by Erasmus, with an accompanying essay by one of the dons at Cambridge.

“Why not. May I take it?”

“Yes, of course. A poor bookseller I’d be if I said no,” said Mr. Chaffanbrass, placing his hands on his stomach and chortling.

“Thanks. I’ll be off, then.”

“Wrapped?”

“No,” said Lenox. “I need something to read straight away.”

“As you please,” said Mr. Chaffanbrass, taking a short stub of pencil from his breast pocket, opening a ledger, and making a small tick. “On your bill, then?”

“Graham will be around on the fifteenth.”

“No doubt of it. I set my calendar by him!”

He said this with satisfaction and then shook Lenox’s hand with great vigor, getting redder and redder and smiling furiously. After this brief ceremony he sat down again with a sigh and took his book up, groping with his other hand for a piece of toast on the stovetop. He would burn himself sooner or later. As far as Lenox could tell, the bookseller’s diet consisted of dozens of pieces of toast a day, each followed by a cup of milky coffee. Not the regimen recommended by the best physicians, perhaps, but it suited him.

On the street again, wet smoke clouded the air. The drizzle continued. It had been a beautiful late summer until then, but perhaps they were in for a wet September, he thought. It would be too bad. He looked back across the street toward his brightly lit house and saw his carriage waiting, the horses occasionally stamping their feet and the driver huddled underneath a thick black coat to keep the rain off, with only a pipe protruding out of the coat’s hood, its ember occasionally brightening to orange. Lenox dodged another cab and stepped into the carriage, and with a word to the driver he was on his way to meet his brother.

And while he was looking forward to lunch—and while he took pleasure in examining his new book—he could not rid himself of the question he had been asking himself for weeks, as well as that entire morning: How on God’s green earth was he supposed to ask one of his oldest friends, Lady Jane Grey, to be his wife?

T
he sun rose mild the next morning, a rich, burnished gold that flooded the back of Parliament and the stone houses along the Thames, a light with pink at its edges. The air was cool, but warming. Along the windswept boulevards that ran by the river, lonely men on anonymous errands hurried past. On the currents, watermen poled their skiffs down each bank, collecting rubbish or ferrying supplies out to small ships. A single long barge, covered with coal, proceeded regally down the center of the river, demanding a wide berth. And under the shadow of Big Ben, on the river’s western edge, Lenox gave a great final stroke of his oars, ran aground on the gravelly bank, and bent over his knees, panting.

Two or three mornings a week—providing he didn’t have a case—he brought his single scull out to the river by Hammersmith and had a long pull back to his neighborhood, Mayfair, which stood behind Parliament. The person who liked this least was the driver of his carriage, who had to fit the scull to the roof and then wait for Lenox’s slow return to fetch it again. But to Lenox himself it was a singular pleasure. He loved to row in the morning, his body warming itself with the world.

It was an old habit. At his school, Harrow, one of the beaks from his house, Druries (where Lord Byron had been, not to mention Lord Palmerston, who had died only a year before), had noticed Lenox’s height and asked him to come row for the house team. After that he had rowed at Oxford, in the Balliol college eight (he had never been big enough to row for the Blues) and upon graduation had made himself a present of a single scull. It was battered and old-fashioned now, but he still loved it. The exercise kept him trim, and simply to be on the river was a great privilege.

Lenox took a last gulp of air and stepped out of the vessel. His driver was waiting with a cup of cold tea and a cloak—and when he had placed the latter on Lenox’s shoulders, hoisted the scull over his head and moved slowly toward the carriage. Lenox sipped the tea gratefully, thirsty, and called out, “I’ll walk home,” to the driver. Then he climbed the stairs from the riverbank to the street, every muscle in his legs crying out for mercy, and with an exhausted happiness filling his body started on the short trot home.

It was a little past seven in the morning, and Lady Jane was coming to have breakfast at eight. When he reached home, Lenox hurriedly bathed and dressed, checked to see what Ellie, the cook, was preparing, and with a quarter of an hour till his friend’s arrival sat down to look over the morning post. There wasn’t much in it, beyond a letter about Hadrian’s Rome from one of his Italian correspondents, who wrote half in English and half in Latin, and who disagreed vociferously with Lenox about the social breadth of slavery. Lenox read the letter with some amusement and then tucked it into the book he had bought the day before to remind himself to respond to it. There was also the card of a man named John Best, whom Lenox had never heard of.

“John Best?” he said to Graham.

“A young man, sir. He was here late yesterday evening.”

“Don’t know him.”

Soon there was a tap at the door, and Lenox knew that Lady Jane had come. His heart fluttered a little, and he had that hollow, happy feeling of unspoken love. Checking his tie, he stood and made his way toward the hall, where Graham would be taking her things.

“Hullo!” he cried out cheerfully upon seeing her.

She turned from Graham, with whom she had been speaking. “Oh, Charles, hello! I’m delighted to see you.”

“Likewise, of course. Have you been well?”

She was taking off her gloves, then removing her scarf, then handing over her jacket. “Yes, quite well. But I haven’t seen you in ages, Charles.”

“It’s true,” he said. “I’m forced to blame you.”

Indeed, it was true. Though their usual routine brought them together every day, or near it, in the past few weeks she had been less available to him than at any time he could remember in the last fifteen years, and just when he most yearned for her presence. He hadn’t yet broached the most mysterious point of all: that he had seen her carriage emerge from the low, poor tenements of the Seven Dials one afternoon the week before.

“Come, it’s only been a few days.”

“Yes, but neighbors who are friends ought to see each other every day.”

She laughed. “You feel firmly about that?”

He frowned, pleasantly. “I do.”

“Then I shall make more of an effort.” She met him halfway down the hall and gave him a light kiss on the cheek. “I apologize, Charles.”

Lady Jane Grey had been a young widow, her husband, the heroic and much loved Lord Deere, having died in battle only a few months after their marriage. She was from one of the oldest families in Sussex—older, in fact, than Lenox’s—and
the two of them had grown up neighbors, belonging to the two leading families of their tucked-away cove of countryside. She was a pretty and lovable but perhaps not a beautiful woman, with wide, intelligent, peaceful eyes and a smiling mouth that ran pink and red depending on the weather. She rarely dressed inside the fashion, yet always managed to look fashionable, and while there were those in London society who condemned her curling, unostentatious hair as dull, there were others who thought it her best asset. Lenox, of course, stood with this latter group.

In any case, her greatest charm wasn’t in her looks. It was in her character. Her mind was wide-ranging but never pretentious, and a loving sense of humor always lay beneath her speech. She sat at the apex of society in London, and in Sussex when she visited her brother, the Earl of Houghton, at home, but she wore the power that came with her friendships and connections lightly. Rarely was she mercurial in her affections. She had happy friendships awaiting her wherever she went.