An Old Betrayal

CHAPTER TWO

A stroll up and across Green Park took Lenox to Half Moon Street, where Dallington lived. The address was a fashionable one, popular especially among the young and idle rich, lying as it did close by both their clubs and Hyde Park, where they might ride their horses in the morning. Dallington lived toward the Curzon Street end, almost precisely halfway between Parliament and Lenox’s own house in Hampden Lane, which was situated in the leafy, more sedate precincts of Grosvenor Square.

John Dallington, the youngest son of a very kindly duke and duchess, must have been twenty-seven or — eight by now — but he was fixed in many London minds as a disreputable cad of twenty, who had been sent down from Cambridge in sordid circumstances, then spent the subsequent years making the acquaintance of every gin hall and debauched aristocrat in Mayfair.

This image might have been just once, but by now it was unfair. Lenox knew as much firsthand. Several years before, Dallington had, to the older man’s very great astonishment, expressed an interest in detective work, and though the lad was still prone, in times of boredom, to relapse, visiting with friends from that less seemly era of his life, by and large he had settled into adulthood. His apprenticeship to Lenox had been profitable to both men. Indeed, through his own intelligence and industry he had now succeeded Lenox as the premier private detective in the city — or at the very least trailing just behind one or two other men who followed the same calling.

Dallington inhabited a chalk-colored building of four floors, taking the large second story for himself. At the front door now was the neighborhood’s postman, in his familiar uniform, the scarlet tunic and high black hat. Dallington’s landlady — a redoubtable and highly proper personage in her twenty-fifth month of mourning for her husband, only a little black crepe around her shoulders — answered the door and took the post, then saw Lenox farther down the steps.

“Mr. Lenox?” she said, as the postman touched his hat and retreated.

“How do you do, Mrs. Lucas?” Lenox asked, climbing the steps.

“Are you here to see Lord John, sir?”

“If I might.”

“Perhaps you can convince him to take his toast and water.”

“Has he been ill?” Toast and water was the food considered most suitable for convalescents, at least for those who belonged to the generation of Lenox, of Mrs. Lucas, of Twinkleton — boiling water poured over burnt toast, and mashed into something like gruel. Personally Lenox had never found it palatable.

This made sense of the note, at any rate, which had contained a postscript apologizing that the young lord couldn’t come to him.

“You shall see for yourself,” she said, turning and leading him into the dim hallway.

“Not contagious, is he?”

“Only his mood, sir.”

“I see.”

She lifted a candle from the table in the front hall and led him up the stairs. A boy was sweeping them but made way.

“Mr. Lenox, here to see you,” called the landlady when they reached Dallington’s door, tapping it chidingly with her nails.

“Push him in!” called out the young lord. “Unless he doesn’t like to get consumption.”

“Ignore him,” she whispered. “Good evening, Mr. Lenox.”

“Good evening, Mrs. Lucas.”

By contrast to the shadowy stairwell, Dallington’s rooms were a riot of light, candles and lamps everywhere. Such was his preference. Because of that the air was always tolerably warm there, especially now, in the spring. The sitting room one entered from the hall was pleasant and comfortable, with dog-eared books in piles upon the mantel and one of the sofas, watercolors of Scotland upon the wall, and a cottage piano in the corner.

“How do you do, Dallington?” asked Lenox, smiling.

The young man lay upon a divan, surrounded by discarded newspapers and letters stuffed back into their envelopes. He wore — the privilege of the ill — comfortable clothes, a soft jacket of blue merino and gray woolen trousers, with scarlet slippers on his feet. “Oh, not very badly.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Now—”

“Though if I die I would like you to have my collection of neckties.”

“They’re too colorful for me. It might be that an especially garish meat-pie seller would agree to take possession of the quieter ones.”

Dallington laughed. “In truth it’s only a head cold, but I must keep Lucas on her toes, or she’s liable to come it pretty high. Toast and water, indeed.”

His appearance made a lie of this deprecation, however. Despite his years of drink he was usually healthy-looking, face unlined, hair sleek and black. At the moment, by contrast, his skin was pallid, his eyes red, his person disheveled, and on top of that he had a nearly continuous cough, though he managed mostly to stifle it in a handkerchief. It seemed no wonder that he didn’t feel equal to venturing out upon a case.

“I can’t stay long,” Lenox said.

“Of course, and thank you for coming — I thought perhaps you might not be able to get away from the Commons at all. It’s only that I’m due out to meet a client at eight in the morning, and finally decided two hours ago that I don’t think I can go.”

“You couldn’t reschedule?”

“That’s the damnable bit, I—” Here Dallington broke into a fit of coughing, before finally going on in a hoarse voice. “I have no way of reaching the person who sent the note. An enigmatic missive, too. You can pick it out from the birdcage, if you like, the red envelope.”

This brass birdcage, absent of avian life, was where Dallington kept his professional correspondence. It hung near the window. Lenox went to it and found the letter Dallington meant, tucked between two bars. It was undated.

“Well, what do you make of that?” Dallington asked. “It is unsigned, of course, which tells us that he desires anonymity.”

“Yes.”

“Moreover, he cannot know me very well, to address me as Mr. Dallington. I don’t stand upon much titled formality but I generally receive it anyhow.”

“What else?”

Dallington shrugged. “I cannot see much farther into it.”

“There are one or two telling details,” said Lenox. “Here, for instance, where he says he’ll wait for thirty-five minutes.”

“Why is that odd?”

“Such a specific length of time? Given that he proposes meeting at a train station, it suggests, to me, that he will catch a train shortly after 8:35. Do you have a Bradshaw?”

“On the shelf there,” said Dallington.

Lenox pulled the railway guide down and browsed through it, frowning, until he found the listings for Charing Cross. “There is an 8:38 for Canterbury. The following train doesn’t leave until 8:49. I think we may presume that your correspondent is traveling to Kent.”

“Bravo,” said Dallington. “Is there anything else?”

“Yes,” said Lenox. He paused, trying to define his reaction in his own mind before he told it to Dallington; for the letter had unsettled him.

“Well?”

“It is something in the tone. I don’t know that I can identify it precisely.” He gestured toward the page. “Its despairing scorn for the police, for instance. His carefully generic description of himself.”

“He is being cautious, you mean?”

Lenox shook his head. “More than that. This phrase, ‘God willing,’ and then this rather desperate final line. All of it together makes me believe that the man who wrote this letter is living in a state of mortal fear.”