An Old Betrayal

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Lenox spoke several times at the Commons that evening, Graham close at hand, ready to dart down the aisle with relevant statistics, scrawled quickly on a scrap of paper. He left just after eleven, tired but pleased — one of those evenings when he felt his own party, and its principles, had inched forward across the battlefield slightly. There was nothing urgent to wake him in the morning, either. He would sleep late, and perhaps give over some of his day to his daughter.

In Hampden Lane, late that evening, he found Lady Jane sitting in the drawing room with Toto, both of them talking in low voices. Jane rose and gave him a kiss on the cheek.

“I come bearing very important news,” said Lenox. “Benjamin Disraeli does not like — cannot abide — cooked onions, in any hot dish whatsoever.”

“Where did you hear that?” asked Toto. “I call it nonsense. They add such a savor.”

“It’s good to know, if it’s true,” said Lady Jane.

“The Queen’s social secretary provided me with that information, Mrs. McConnell,” said Lenox with dignified superiority, then, coming out of this pose, smiled lightly at her. “And how are you?”

“Miserable — but who cares, why were you with Mrs. Engel?”

“Yes, Charles, what took you to the palace?” asked Jane.

He had gone to the sideboard and now was fixing a weak whisky and soda — in truth he did not think he could remain upright for very long if he had a strong one. When he was finished, he carried it to the armchair near them. “The case that John Dallington and I are working on.”

He told them about his day in broad outlines: the paintings at Buckingham Palace, the East Gallery, Mrs. Engel’s desk. Toto looked as if she welcomed the distraction, but Lady Jane seemed unhappy. “Hadn’t you better leave it all to Inspector Jenkins? A murder!”

“That used to be my profession.”

“Then you married, and had a child.”

“If there’s any danger I will dodge behind Dallington. He’s nearly in a coffin already, poor fellow, he’s so ill.”

“You won’t, and you oughtn’t to make such jokes.”

“It’s been another very long day. What were you speaking about when I came in?”

Toto sighed and waved a hand. “Thomas.”

Nothing had changed, apparently. McConnell was puzzled by his wife’s coldness but did not inquire, and in the meanwhile he seemed, otherwise, still unusually happy, absent from the house every day, looking in on George in the evenings but not, as he once had, in each hour of the day.

Gently, Lenox said, “And has he been in Hyde Park?”

“No. Evidently he and Polly Buchanan have tired of making a spectacle of themselves. Perhaps they found somewhere more private.”

“Toto,” said Lady Jane reproachfully.

“I’m sorry — you’re right,” said the younger woman and leaned on the sofa toward Jane, taking her hand. “But it is cruel upon me, I swear it is.”

As Lenox was readying himself for bed he saw a telegram from Jenkins, which had been left upon his bedside table.

So. Confirmation.

Usually when he had a case like this one, Lenox’s thoughts as he lay in bed were occupied with its specifics — but now, exhausted, he fell immediately into the black null of near-consciousness and then, after only a few moments, into a profound sleep, which carried him through to morning.

Miss Emanuel was away the next day — she had a day off each week of her choice, and the first half of each of Saturday and Sunday as well — which meant that it was Charles and Jane’s turn to look after Sophia.

They took the child into the dining room, where she crawled around the floor, inspecting the robed legs of the furniture, while they flipped through the newspapers and ate eggs with toast. Bright sun streamed through the windows. Once in a while Lenox would rise to refill his coffee cup at the sideboard, preferring as he did to take a quarter or a third of a cup at once, so that he could have it hot, and on these short voyages he would stop and greet his daughter. By the time the footmen had cleared the food, Sophia was involved in an intense examination of an old piece of tartan ribbon she had found under the sideboard. Lenox sighed: How much pleasanter it seemed just at the moment to sit here and let the lingering hours pass slowly by than to run back and forth across London, but he knew his brain would begin to itch after the solution before too long.

The papers were full of Archibald Godwin. The Times headline read FARMER MURDERED IN KENSINGTON, which seemed inaccurate, while the Evening Star of the night before — a paper that members of Lenox’s class usually called, with derisive smiles, the Heevening Star — declared GRAVES HOTEL LIVES UP TO NAME. The most accurate story was in the Telegraph. It relayed the essentials, and Lenox, reading between the lines, suspected that Inspector Jenkins, solicitous of the good opinion of the press, might have fed the story to the reporter. Well — he did have to look out for his own advancement, and there was a place at the top to be had.

Lenox looked at the police report in each paper, searching specifically for the crimes that had occurred in Kensington. Aside from the murder, they all reported a grocer’s robbed at knifepoint, a horse stolen when a hansom cab driver stopped for a cup of tea, a homeless man who had gone missing (he always thought such notices paradoxical, and yet they kept appearing), and an active pickpocket along the Gloucester Road. Nothing easily linked to their suspect, though it might be worth speaking to the driver of the hansom cab.

When all that remained on the long table was a single coffee cup, Lady Jane’s, Lenox picked up Sophia and set her on his lap. “Are you tired?” he asked his wife. “You were up earlier than I was.”

“A bit.” She paused, looking out at the fine day. “I do worry about Toto.”

“She is hale enough.”

“Last night she mentioned divorce, for the first time.”

Lenox raised his eyebrows. This was somber news indeed; there were only two hundred divorces a year in England, often fewer. All of them were among couples of Toto’s own rank, the very rich, who could afford the moral disgrace — and, in extreme circumstances, tolerate its public nature. The same papers now jumbled in an untidy pile on a chair would report, with breathless excitement, every detail of the case. Very often the woman suffered more than the man in the opinion of the public. Lady Violet Lesslock had moved to Baden after her divorce, because of the press’s intrusions a broken woman — though it was known among her friends that her husband had used her violently, cruelly, and had been entirely in the wrong.

“She cannot be serious,” said Lenox.

“You know her. She is impulsive and stubborn. A difficult blend.”

“Her father would never permit it.” This was a small, kindly man, who doted on his daughter but had never in his life become accustomed to any variety of contradiction. “He would sooner see them both move to India.”

“I pray it doesn’t come to that.” She reached her hand across the table to his. “Could you speak to Thomas? More directly this time?”

“I could not — I’m sorry, Jane, but I could not. It would be a terrible affront to his self-respect. Certainly I should not forgive him if the situations were reversed and he came to speak to me.”

She sighed. “I know.”

It was half past nine now. Lenox went into his library. In the night Graham had neatened his desk and left for him a sheath of documents to sign. Lenox was a Junior Lord of the Treasury now — nothing to do with money at all, as it happened, but a position within the hierarchy of the party — and a great many papers passed under his hand. There was also a new blue book to read about the tax on breweries, a subject of particular interest to Lenox’s constituency, up north in Durham. (It was unnecessary — some would even argue undesirable — for Members of Parliament to have a geographical link to the districts for which they stood. Lenox himself had never set foot in Stirrington before he traveled there as a candidate.) He signed the papers and then took the book to a comfortable armchair, recessed between two bookcases in the wall, its arms a comfortable height, with glasses and a decanter of water on the small hexagonal side table next to it. For some time he read.

Thomas McConnell had made a morganatic union for himself, one in which his rank and wealth could not match his wife’s, and he had never since seemed entirely happy. The terrible moment had come early: when Toto’s family had pushed him, with kindly intended pressure, to sell his practice, medicine skirting too close to physical labor for their liking.

Was it entirely surprising, then, that he had sought happiness elsewhere?

If he had, if he had, Lenox reminded himself internally, gazing out at the spring day. The bookseller across the street was doing a brisk trade.

Yes, of course it was surprising, because in recent years McConnell had been so delighted by his daughter, Georgianna. It had seemed enough.

Divorce: such a far-fetched notion that it was almost impossible for Lenox to grant the possibility of it in his own mind. Still, Toto dug her claws into ideas and wrestled them until they died or she forgot she held them; she was the daughter of wealth, and of almost limitless parental love. It was a dangerous combination — one that imperiled even Sophia, perhaps, though he and Jane tried not to indulge her.

He sighed and looked away from the window, back toward his book, unsettled in his mind.