The September Society (22 page)

“Yes,” said Lenox.

“To give you this would be to break a hard and fast rule, you know. You have no claim to that file.”

“I understand.”

Arlington turned back to him. “But your brother could legally request it.” Lenox was silent. “My rule of thumb here has been total honesty. I’ve been guided entirely by the rules that bind me. I can’t change that now. But I’ll send the file to my friend Edmund Lenox this afternoon.” He put the file back in his top drawer, and with a firm nod the subject was closed. “Now, have I heard correctly that Toto wants to name the child
Malory?”

W
hen Lenox returned to Hampden Lane he found Dallington, carnation firmly established in his buttonhole, his feet up near the fire in Lenox’s favorite armchair, evidently feeling quite at home. He was smoking a cigarette and reading
Punch
with a small grin on his face.

“Entertaining?” said Lenox.

Dallington turned to him. “Oh—your maid put me in here. Hope that’s all right. Yes, it is, rather,” he added, gesturing toward the magazine. “What’s that parcel you’ve got?”

There was a rectangular package under Lenox’s arm, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. “Oh,” he said vaguely, “just something.”

“Your powers of description would put Wordsworth to shame.” The small grin had grown wider by now. “At any rate, I didn’t come here to josh you.”

“Didn’t you?” Lenox sat down opposite his pupil. “What a lovely surprise.”

“I wanted to ask about the servant who got shot.”

“Oh—yes, it worked out as fortunately as it could have.”

“I’m glad of that.”

“The wound wasn’t serious at all.”

“I saw the bobbies outside. They looked at me as if I might be returning to the scene of the crime when I sidled up here. By the way, you got my note about Theophilus Butler?”

“I did—and about the 12th Suffolk 2nd, thanks. Both a big help. In fact, I’m glad you’re here. I wanted to talk about another assignment.”

Dallington’s eyebrows arched inquisitively. “At your service, of course. Everything’s gone well enough so far, give or take.”

“This task might be a bit more delicate—closer to the heart of the case.”

“May I ask what it is?”

“Do you remember I told you about Lysander?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I think perhaps he murdered George Payson.”

“What!”

“Yes. At any rate, I think he met with Payson before Payson disappeared. Who knows what they talked about.”

“Why? What would his motive have been?”

Lenox laid out the trail of clues connecting the younger George Payson, his father, and the September Society. “So you see, you’ve asked the precise question Goodson and I have been asking ourselves … motive.”

“What can I do?”

“You can put together as accurate a record as possible—you really can’t be too meticulous—of this last week of Lysander’s life. We know, or at least I think I know, that he was in Oxford this weekend, and we know that he and I met two days ago. The rest will need to be sketched in.”

“Any advice?”

“Only that it would be much better that you fail miserably than that you succeed and at the same time tip Lysander off.”

Dallington nodded, his face grave, transformed since only
a moment ago. Lenox recognized a flicker of that fire of curiosity and—well, anger that he felt in himself when he worked on cases like this.

“I understand.”

“I hope you do. Please don’t speak to his servants, or anything like that. Hard evidence, his name in the club register—you don’t belong to the Army and Navy, of course? No, well, you’ll know somebody who does. Ask the conductors on the Oxford train, speak to the man who sits on the bench in Green Park all day and watches that row of houses Wilson and Lysander live in—you know they live two doors away from each other?”

“Yes, of course. What man, though? In Green Park?”

“I was speaking figuratively. I mean—be imaginative.”

Dallington nodded again, though less certainly. “Yes, I see what you mean. I’ll do my level best at any rate.”

“Lovely. Oh—and look Lysander up in
Who’s Who
for a bit of background information. Do you have it? Because it’s somewhere on these shelves …” Lenox peered around the bookcases.

“Father has it, I’ll ask him.”

“All right. And remember—caution. The case’s demands have to be more important than anybody’s ego, yours or mine. It’s no use trapping him dead in a lie if he’s already on a train to Moscow by the time you have.”

“Thanks, Charles. Your trust means the world to me.”

Dallington took up his copy of
Punch
as he said this, and suddenly Lenox saw the young lord for what he was: a boy. Not five years out of school, and already the misery of his parents, a notorious failure. His bantering manners and air of worldliness—not to say weariness—somehow masked a truer part of him. A part that had already come to the surface in flashes during his brief working relationship with Lenox. Whether it would stay there was another matter entirely.

Dallington left, and Lenox was alone. He sorted through his post, discarded most of it, and then picked up his parcel and went toward the door. He was going over to Jane’s house.

Kirk greeted him with his usual measure of corpulent politeness, then said, “I am sorry to say that her Ladyship is not at home just now.”

“Oh, I know. I was hoping to see Annie, actually.”

Kirk raised his eyebrows almost imperceptibly. “Yes, sir,” he said.

“If it’s not an inconvenient time for her, that is.”

“No, sir, I’m sure it’s not.”

“She has recovered some, then?”

“Very well, sir, yes.”

“If she’s retired—”

“No, sir, she is situated in the second upper drawing room.”

Kirk led Lenox up a long flight of stairs to a wide, rather drab room, prettily furnished, on the second floor. Lady Jane lived primarily in two places: her morning room, a small, beautifully light square where she wrote letters and took her breakfast, and the drawing room Lenox knew so well. This room was new to him. Annie was perched on a long chaise by the window, facing away from the door, her arm in a sling. She didn’t appear to be doing anything particular and tried to crane her neck to see who had entered. Kirk bowed and left the two of them alone—commenting quietly to himself, no doubt, on the impropriety of the situation.

She was a plump woman, rosy-cheeked, maternal in bearing, with the strong arms and sloped back that a lifetime of labor bestowed on so many women of her class. She wore a cheery bonnet and a long, plain gray dress.

“How do you do, Annie? I’m Charles Lenox.” She made the best curtsy she could from her compromised position, and Lenox sat in a chair that had been left close by. “I recognize you, of course, but I’m not certain we’ve met properly.”

Awkwardly, he took her outstretched hand. Then he handed her the parcel Dallington had asked about, saying, “Oh, this is for you, incidentally—just to pass the time.”

She opened it deliberately and cooed over its contents: a few penny dreadfuls, several women’s magazines Lenox had sent Mary to fetch, an ivory-handled comb, and a wax-paper-wrapped bundle of chocolates he had bought himself.

“Why, thank you, Mr. Lenox. How kind of you!”

“Oh, no—we’ve all been ill,” he said, smiling. “The hours do drag on. I remember receiving just such a parcel from my mother when I was at school. It made all the difference.”

“As this shall, too, sir, I’m quite sure.”

“Really I wanted to come apologize, however, Annie.”

“Oh, Mr. Lenox,” she said skeptically, “please don’t think about it.”

“Really; none of this would have happened if it weren’t for me. I’m sorry. If I can ever do you a good turn, simply say the word, won’t you? I do wish it had happened to me rather than you.”

“Don’t mention that, sir. As my lady pointed out, you had no more control over this madman than I did. And to be honest”—her voice fell to a whisper—“it hasn’t been all that bad, having a vacation. Mind, I’m not saying I’d do it again, but it hasn’t been all
that
bad.”

Lenox laughed. “Still—for all that, I am sorry.”

As he walked down the stairs a few minutes later, he was glad it was over. It had been an awkward transaction. He wished that he might have expressed himself more eloquently—impressed upon her more urgently how sorry he was that he had endangered her. Even how fearful he was that he had endangered Lady Jane.

Of course, though, that was impossible. Their stations were too far apart. He went home and answered one of the letters he had received. Mary came in to ask him whether he
would have his lunch in or out, and he decided that he would try to drop in on his brother, Edmund, and perhaps get the file Arlington had sent over. No, he told her, he would eat out. He gave her the letter to post and, asking for his carriage, said he would be reading until it was ready to take him to the Houses of Parliament.

T
he Parliament of the United Kingdom was by no means a perfect body, but it was getting better—had gotten better, in fact, in Lenox’s lifetime. He could remember the infamous borough of Old Sarum, which in 1831 had elected two Members, and in doing so overcome the notable handicap of having only eleven residents. But the Reform Act of 1832 had finally abolished Old Sarum and places like it. (The town of Dunwich, in Suffolk, for example, had also elected two MPs in 1831 despite literally not existing, an impressive feat; while it technically had about two dozen voters, the town itself had long been claimed by the waters of the local river.) Now, only thirty years after the reforms, which had been unimaginable to his grandparents’ generation, more and more people had suffrage, landowners could only vote once, and the Earl of Lonsdale no longer had the right to name nine Members completely on his own. In all it allowed the House of Commons to become more forceful in its dealings with the House of Lords—allowed the people, in other words, to be more assertive with the noblemen. Taken together, the years of that
era had added up to a gradual reclamation of rights that was on par with the Magna Carta.

As he looked up at the famous long facade of the Palace of Westminster (its formal name) just above the rolling Thames, he thought for the hundredth time that the highest service an Englishman could do was to work in this building, to serve here with honesty and compassion and patriotism. At Balliol his friends had called him “the Debater” because of his tendency to make long and ardent speeches about civil reform and imperial restraint. His friends and family had all assumed he would find himself within these doors before too long. Yet here he was, nearly forty, and no closer than he had been twenty years past. It was a deep, mostly healed-over wound. He was reconciled to his profession, loved his profession. Still, just as his heart rose every time he caught a glimpse of Big Ben, it fell when he had to sign in as a guest at the door.

Lenox found his older brother in the anteroom just by the actual chamber of the House of Commons sitting with two or three other Members, heads huddled together, quite obviously speaking about something of importance to the party. He held back in the doorway and waited for their conversation to end. The House was down, of course, until the evening, and there was quiet in most of the building. He felt slightly out of place. After only a few seconds Edmund looked up and saw him, flashed him a smile, and made his excuses to his compatriots.

“Charles,” he said, “I’m very glad to see you.”

Lenox’s brother looked very much like him, tall, with a good head of brown hair and sparkling, curious eyes, but while the younger brother was slender, the elder was ruddy and heavyset from years of country life.

“How are you, Edmund?”

They shook hands. “Not bad, not bad.”

“You look a bit knocked about.”

“Do I? Late nights in here, I expect. I miss the country. But how’s this business in Oxford going?”

“Are you having lunch with anybody?”

“I am, yes—but come along, won’t you? Only a few chaps from the Board of Trade, the War Office, all our party. Russell. You’ll know one or two of them.”

“Wouldn’t it disrupt your work?”

“No, not at all. Purely social.”

They had paused in the hallways that connected the street, just by the Thames, to the beehive of rooms around the House. “I shall, then, thanks,” said Lenox, and they moved inward once again toward the famous Parliamentary restaurant called Bellamy’s.

Edmund’s group was at a large table to the rear of the room, far from the prying eyes of the entrance. By the table there were two large windows overlooking the swift, gray river, but nobody looked out that way. Edmund introduced Lenox to the people he didn’t know—his friend James Hilary was there and greeted him warmly—but had read of in the papers. There was the promising young MP Jonathan Brick, a great orator and defender of the poor from Warwickshire, with a melodious South Midlands accent, and also Lord Russell, whom Lenox knew slightly and who had only just served a year as Prime Minister. Russell had stepped down after trying to introduce a reform bill which his own party had opposed—scandalously, in Lenox’s view. An angry mob in Hyde Park that July had agreed.

At the luncheon there were also several backbenchers, men Lenox knew and recognized, men useful to the party in small, unglamorous, and utterly practical ways. Peter Anthony, a soap manufacturer from Birmingham, was one, and so was Donald Longstaffe, a man with no aspirations other than to belong to good clubs, Parliament being one of them. His talent was for gossip, a currency always redeemable in politics.

The Liberal Party missed its founder, Viscount Palmerston, who had died just the year before. Besides being politically gifted and uncannily savvy, Lord Palmerston had been a figure around whom Liberals could unite: Having begun as a Tory, he had decided upon the necessity of a new path and forged it himself. As an orator nobody in either party had surpassed him. Lenox would never forget Palmerston’s bold stance in favor of the revolutions that swept the Continent in 1848, support that lent legitimacy to the rebellious armies in Italy, France, and Hungary. It was a noble belief in the idea of constitutional liberties that had driven him. Yes, they missed Palmerston. The party missed its talisman.