A Stranger in Mayfair

Chapter Thirty-Six

A whole cloud of associations and small incidents had sent forth this lightning bolt. They were separately inconclusive but together powerful. Foremost in Lenox’s mind was the ring.

It was exactly the kind of ring that Lenox’s father had given Edmund long ago, when he turned twenty-one. Each ring had an element of its family’s crest embossed on it-a griffin for the Starlings, and for the Lenoxes a lion. Each was meant to be worn on the smallest finger of the left hand, but rarely came out of a locked case. Engraved inside Lenox’s father’s ring had been his initials, and now there were Edmund’s opposite it; inside Starling’s old ring were LS and FC, for Ludovic Starling and Frederick Clarke. Father and son.

That wasn’t all, though; something ineffable in Mrs. Clarke’s tone told Lenox he was right. Pacing for some time along the length of his library, the din of the party for background noise, he at last stood still and then threw himself onto the sofa. What had it been? A sense of betrayal, perhaps, or anger at Ludo. She didn’t suspect Ludo-he was an old love-but she blamed him.

And she had called him Ludovic! She had quickly checked herself, but she had unmistakably mentioned him by his first name.

Then, in the dark workings of his mind, he remembered another fact. She had come from Cambridge, and Ludo had once lived in Cambridge-at Downing, where Alfred was a student now. They were roughly the same age, Mrs. Clarke and Ludo Starling, and she-she was still quite striking. Not beautiful or soft or even very feminine, like Elizabeth Starling, but a woman with whom a gentleman of a certain kind could undoubtedly fall in love.

She still had no husband, Clarke being perhaps a fiction invented as she went off and had the child on her own somewhere private, with Ludo’s money. What had she done? Sent her fictional husband off with the army and had him fictionally killed?

Lenox smacked his head-Ludo’s money. “Of course,” he muttered.

There hadn’t been any uncle’s inheritance. What kind of London housemaid had an uncle rich enough to see her retire upon his death? She had bought her pub with Starling money, and raised Clarke with Starling money, too. It all made so much sense.

Dallington was due to come to the party but hadn’t arrived yet when Lenox retreated to his library. Now he went down the hallway, back toward the lively noise, to see if he could find his apprentice.

“There you are,” said Lady Jane, face smiling but voice steely. “Where have you been?”

“I’m sorry-truly I’m sorry. I lost track of time. Is Dallington here?”

“You’re not leaving, are you? You can’t, Charles.”

“No-no, I shan’t. There he is. I see him. His mother is wiping something from his chin and he’s pushing her hand away-look.”

His mind racing with possibilities, Lenox went over and coughed softly behind Dallington’s back.

“Oh! There you are,” said the young man. Dressed as discriminatingly as ever, a fragrant white carnation pinned in his buttonhole, he turned to face Lenox and smiled. “It’s the worst party I ever went to, if I can be candid.”

Lenox forgot the case for a moment and frowned. “Oh?”

“Too many people I want to speak to, and I can’t imagine it will run into breakfast; I’ll be sorely disappointed when I leave that I didn’t get to speak to this one or that. There’s an art to parties-there must be boring people, too, so we don’t feel too regretful when we leave.”

Lenox laughed. “A finely paid compliment. Listen, though-about the case.”

Dallington’s eyes narrowed with interest. “Yes? Shall we go somewhere quieter?”

“We can’t, sadly-Jane-well, we can’t. But I’ve figured something strange, I think. Freddie Clarke was Ludo Starling’s natural son.”

“He was a bastard!” whispered Dallington, deeply moved. The look of astonishment on his face was gratifying. “How on earth do you reckon that?”

Lenox told Dallington quickly how this epiphany had come about. “I don’t swear by it,” he said last of all, “but I feel in my mind that it must be right. It would explain so much.”

Dallington, lost in thought, had stopped listening, but now he looked up. “I say-at the boxing club, do you remember what Willard North said?”

“Which part?”

“About-”

Lady Jane cut in then. “Charles, the Chancellor of the Exchequer is here. It’s just what I hoped for. I invited Mary to have lunch with me next week, and mentioned specially to her that I was having a Tuesday that would be very political in character, and that she should come-and bring her husband.”

The Conservative party was in at the moment-Lenox hoped not for long-and that meant that the chancellor standing in his doorway was Benjamin Disraeli. He was a tall, severe, intelligent-looking gentleman, with deep-set eyes that seemed almost predatory. He had risen to become the first or second man in his party (the Earl of Derby, though Prime Minister, was considered less brilliant in political circles) despite the considerable disadvantage of having been born Jewish. Some considered him an opportunist-his wife, Mary, was the widow of Wyndham Lewis and a very rich woman-but Lenox suspected the attribution of avarice was due perhaps in part to his ancestors’ religion.

More importantly to Lenox, he was the only man in Parliament who had balanced politics with a second career. Throughout the past decades, if less so of late, he had published a series of celebrated novels. This dual purpose made Lenox feel an affinity for the man despite their different parties; both of them had to balance two lives, two worlds.

Beyond all that, it was a tremendous thing to have him in the house. It meant that Lenox was a serious participant in the grand game of London politics, someone on the move. Disraeli wasn’t any longer a very sociable fellow; his visit here would be on people’s lips the next morning.

“That’s a thing to celebrate,” Lenox said. “With your skills of persuasion you should be in Parliament yourself, Jane.”

She smiled and walked back toward the chancellor’s wife.

Lenox made to follow her but stopped and said, “Quickly, Dallington-before I go-in a few words, say what you meant to say about the boxing club.”

“Only that I remembered something else. Do you recall that North said Clarke was always hinting that he had a rich father? ‘Drinks on father,’ or something like that? It fits with your theory.”

“I’d forgotten-you’re quite right. We’ll piece the rest together in a moment, but I must go speak to Disraeli.”

“Wait-the butcher-Paul-where do they fit into any of this?”

“I don’t know yet,” said Lenox, turning away.

As he crossed the room he crossed, too, between his professions and tried to shed the details of the case from his whirling mind. It was hard. Ludo Starling had a great deal to hide, evidently. What besides a natural son?

In Charles’s absence Edmund had greeted the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the man who might be reasonably called the second man in government and the man who ultimately would control the funds for any project Lenox ever hoped to pursue to completion.

That wasn’t the subject this evening, though, nor even politics. “How do you do, Mr. Disraeli?” said Lenox.

“Fairly; fairly. I could do with fresh air. London feels stifling.”

“You ought to come hunting at Lenox House,” said Sir Edmund. “We can find you a pony, and as for fresh air-well, we won’t bill you for it.”

“You’ll see my brother’s truer self there,” added Lenox, smiling. “His talents are wasted in the House, I realize when we hunt together.”

“His talents are not wasted in the House-he has been a positive inconvenience-but I see it was meant to be humorous. Edmund, thank you kindly. I might well accept your offer if my secretary deems it possible. As for you, Mr. Lenox, may I say welcome to the House?”

“Have you any advice? What mistakes did you make upon your arrival?”

He let out a barking, humorless laugh. “Mistakes? In that day it wasn’t within a young Member’s purview to make mistakes. He voted with his party unfailingly, never agitated on behalf of a particular issue, and waited to mature into his position.”

Lenox felt like a chided schoolboy. “I see.”

“Still, you’ll do well if you’re at all like your brother,” he said. “By the way, Mr. Lenox, is that punch I see? I would quite like a glass of punch-yes, I think I’ll have one. No, no need to fetch it for me. Please, stay here and speak to your guests.”

Lenox watched him for the rest of the night, occasionally returning to him to say another courteous word or two, and by the end of the evening the old man’s demeanor had softened. Still, he smiled only once: when Toto came in, accepting congratulations from everyone and chattering as rapidly as an auctioneer. For all his seriousness Disraeli was known as a man who loved a pretty young lady.

Many hours later, when the last guests had gone and the tables in the sitting room were empty, with only a low pond of punch left at the bottom of the bowl, Lenox, Edmund, and Dallington were sitting in Lenox’s library, smoking cigars.

Edmund and Lenox talked of the chancellor first, and the very great honor of his visit, and then all three spoke appreciatively of Lady Jane’s turn at the piano.

“I wonder what Ludo Starling is doing at the moment,” said Dallington at a lapse in their talk. “I’d pay a shilling or two to read his mind, the devilish sod.”

“Why?” asked Edmund. “It was the son, wasn’t it?” Seeing his brother’s smile, he said, “Am I behind the times? I always am in these things.”

“Yes-or a bit, anyway. We think that the footman, Freddie Clarke, may have been Ludo Starling’s natural child.”

Edmund blew out a low whistle, shocked. “Who told you?”

“Nobody,” said Charles and recapitulated the series of small facts that had led him to the idea.

Dallington chimed in when he was done. “Something else. Do you remember how he hovered around the hallway when we looked at Clarke’s room? Guilty, I thought at the time-as if he couldn’t come in, for whatever reason.”

“Then, too, his reaction to the ring was singularly strange,” said Lenox.

“How?” asked Edmund.

“He didn’t recognize it at first. If he had, I would have believed more readily that Freddie Clarke stole it, although the act of his engraving his own initials on it would still have been a mystery to me. I think perhaps Ludo gave it to Clarke’s mother many years ago.”

“Just the sort of foolish gesture Ludo Starling would make to a maid,” added Edmund.

“It may even have been that they were in love. At any rate, I don’t think he had seen it for some time.”

“Freddie Clarke was proud of it,” said Dallington thoughtfully. “It was polished, well engraved, kept in a safe spot.”

“The one memento he had of his father,” said Edmund.

They talked it over for a while longer, but soon enough their cigars had burned down to stubs, and both Edmund and Dallington left, taking a taxi together away from Hampden Lane. After he had seen them off, Lenox went upstairs to have the real postmortem for the party, with Jane.