A Stranger in Mayfair

Chapter Nineteen

Lenox had eaten little as he spoke with Mrs. Clarke, absorbed by her answers, and so at twelve thirty that afternoon he fell ravenously upon the lunch Kirk brought to his desk in the house on Hampden Lane. There was a roasted chicken, a fluffy hillock of mashed potatoes, and a beautifully charred tomato cut in quarters, along with half a bottle of dreadful claret that he nevertheless managed to get through most of. As he ate he let both Parliament and Frederick Clarke fall away from his mind and read a novel by Miss Gaskell about a small town somewhere in the Home Counties. When he was finished eating he moved to his armchair, reading on and smoking quite contentedly.

Only at two o’clock or so did he turn his attention to the tottering stack of blue books that Graham had put on his desk the night before. Their name was wonderfully evocative to Lenox (its origin was the rich blue velvet medieval parliamentary records were bound in), reminding him of harried politicians, deep matters of state, and hushed late-night discussions of strategy. As it happened, one in ten of the books-reports on every imaginable topic that affected Great Britain-was as interesting and urgent as he had imagined. The other nine would be dreadfully dull, reports from distant nations of the empire, coal statistics, a study of the increasingly serious accumulation of horse manure in Manchester.

Still, he was duty bound to read them all, or at any rate to skim them. He picked one up, spent half an hour in study, and then tossed it aside. Another. Another. Soon it was four o’clock and he knew far more than he had ever cared to about the state of Newcastle’s police force and the shortage of English beef after the previous year’s serious outbreak of a new illness called-and he had to double-check the name-“hoof and mouth” disease.

With four books absorbed, in their outlines if not in their details, he turned to a fifth. It drew him in almost like a novel-with the best novels he was at first still extremely aware that he was reading, but gradually the act of reading itself disappeared, and even turning the pages didn’t remind him that there were two worlds, inside and outside of the book’s covers. This blue book, though much more dense than a good novel, had for him that same imperative feeling.

He finished it in an hour flat, and when he was done he clutched it in one hand and, without a word to anyone in the house, made for the door and hailed a taxi.

He was after James Hilary. Although Hilary was nearly a decade younger than Lenox, he was one of the most influential men in Parliament, an urbane, learned, and fluent gentleman with a private fortune and a secure seat in Liverpool. He was irreplaceable within the party, connecting as he did the back bench and the front bench, the various offices of government to one another. If anyone would understand, it was Hilary.

As Lenox had expected he found the man-a charming, well-dressed, slightly sharp-faced sort of person-in his favored club, the Athenaeum. He was reading by a window in the great hall.

“There you are-may we speak?”

“Lenox, my dear chap, you look beside yourself. Is everything all right? Jane? I’ve scarcely said ten words to you since your wedding all those months ago.”

“Oh, quite well, quite well. It’s this.” He thrust the blue book he had been reading into the air.

Hilary narrowed his eyes, trying to catch the title of the report on the side of the book. “What is it?”

“Can we find a private room?”

“By all means.” He folded his paper. “I’m so pleased that you’ve hit the ground running. Your man, Graham, has been all over the House, too. Excellent.”

They retired to a small chamber nearby and sat at a six-sided card table, where in a few hours four or five debauched gentleman would sit until dawn, playing whist for stakes rather higher than they could afford and drinking great drafts of champagne. Lenox hated the scene: the jollity, sometimes real but often forced; the insincere banter as each man privately, worriedly totted up what he had won or lost; the casual IOUs passed from rather poor men to very rich ones, both knowing that payment would be difficult but pretending it was all the same. The room set his teeth on edge. Still, he knew what he wanted to say.

“It’s cholera,” said Lenox.

“Oh, that? Is that what you’re so worked up about, Charles? My dear chap, Bazalgette has solved-”

“He hasn’t!”

Perhaps taken aback by the fierceness of Lenox’s tone, Hilary began to look more serious. “What do you mean?”

“It’s about the poor. They’re still in danger-as anyone who read this report could tell you.”

Cholera had been for much of Victoria’s reign the chief social anxiety of London, England, and indeed the world. In England there had been epidemics in 1831, 1848, 1854, and just last year, in 1866. In the previous decade alone more than ten thousand people had died of the disease.

It had only recently become widely acknowledged that it was a waterborne plague, and the so-called Great Stink of several years ago had galvanized into action the politicians and municipal leaders of London. Joseph Bazalgette, a well-respected engineer working with the Metropolitan Commission for Sewers and its successor, the Board of Works, had designed a new sewage system for London that would make the water of the Thames safe to drink again, and after his plan had been published and executed a couple of years before, towns and cities across the country had begun to copy it. The reformers had won.

But there was a problem. Most of London was connected to the new sewage system, but the part of the city that had suffered the most deaths, East London, where the poorest people lived-it had not. This fact, with its implications, was what had so shocked Lenox. He had assumed before then, not paying very great attention to the matter, that all was solved. It wasn’t. In fact a fresh epidemic was just beginning to show signs of emerging in East London. One of the primary causes of cholera-overfull cemeteries-was still prevalent there, and the water supply was horribly compromised.

Lenox explained all this to Hilary. “It’s all right for the nibs, living around here, and for the middle class, but these people, James! You wouldn’t believe the statistics! Italy has lost a hundred thousand people this year, maybe more. Russia the same. Everywhere in Europe. People couldn’t abide the smell-the smell!-and so we have a new sewage system, but there’s no interest in the death of people in our own city! It’s the most shocking thing I’ve heard since I was elected!”

Hilary shifted uncomfortably in his high-backed wooden chair. “It’s grave indeed, Charles, but I’m afraid we have more pressing concerns at the moment. This reform bill, for one, and of course the colonies-”

Lenox interrupted him. “Surely we have time to handle all of these things at once. As a start we should buy some of these private water companies, which care for nothing but profit, and turn them into municipal concerns.”

“That would require a great deal of money.”

“These are precisely the people we’re supposed to represent. What if this were happening in a small town? Would we help them?” He threw up his hands in disgust. “Any evil can go hiding in London. It’s always been the way, hasn’t it?”

“Charles, you’re new to Parliament. You must understand that we hold human life in the balance every day, and make judgments about how to help people based on our best sense. It’s not pleasant, but it’s our work. When you’ve been in Parliament a year you’ll comprehend-”

“I’ll deliver a speech. I don’t care who listens to it-I don’t especially care who wants to help me, Conservative or our side.”

“A speech!” said Hilary with amused incredulity. “I should think it would be some months before you deliver a speech.”

Lenox realized that he was in the reverse of his usual position: He was the petitioner, like so many grieving people who had come to solicit his services with varying success. It was a helpless, unpleasant feeling.

He decided to try a different tack. “I know I must seem callow to you, Hilary, but you’ve known me for many years. I’m not a hasty-minded person. I’ve read dozens of blue books, and of them all this was the one that affected me. Will you read it? Will you speak to people?”

Lenox was holding the book halfway out, and Hilary took it gingerly. “I’ll read it.”

Lenox stood up. “Thank you. Meanwhile I’ll speak to a few of the Members I know. This is a worthy cause, you’ll see.”

“Well-I’m quite sure. But Charles, don’t speak to too many people-let this move slowly.”

The detective nodded, though he had no intention of adhering to the advice. He ran out of the Athenaeum with a dozen ideas swirling through his mind-to talk to this person, to write that one, to ask that gentleman to dinner and another gentleman’s wife who could speak to Jane. Underlying these plans was the thrilling notion, barely formed in all the hustle of the last hour, that he had found the purpose and motivation in his new career that had seemed so elusive only the day before.