An Old Betrayal

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

As the day went by, Lenox’s mind returned again and again to his interview that morning with Grace Ammons, in the discreet beauty of the East Gallery. After she had told the long tale of her past, she had taken a few moments to compose herself and had then invited Lenox to ask any further questions he had.

The first he had asked was whether her blackmailer had ever offered her a way to reach him, an address, a club.

“Never,” she had said.

“Did he say how he found you?” She shook her head. “Did you see him at either of the parties he attended?”

“I looked, but didn’t see him.”

After that Lenox had asked her, at least partially out of professional curiosity, to recount her experiences with Miss Strickland’s agency. The young secretary had been forthright on the subject: She had hired Miss Strickland as soon as she believed Dallington to be untrustworthy, and since then her agency’s protection and work had been sterling.

“Did you meet with Miss Strickland herself?”

“Of course.”

It would be an actress, someone hired for the women clients and a few of the gentlemen. “What progress has she made?”

Grace Ammons had shrugged. “I’m not sure.”

“She is not in touch?”

“On the contrary, she is available twenty-four hours a day, and her people are always nearby. She also lent me a small pistol with which to protect myself.”

“What does she charge you?”

Grace Ammons had lifted her eyebrows at this — it was a forward question to hear from a gentleman. “A pound a day, and then expenses.”

“It’s a great deal.”

“She could treble that amount and I would happily pay it.” The young lady had paused and then gone on. “I was always very careful with my money in France, after that week when I was abandoned. I husbanded it. George does not know the extent of the fortune I mean to bring him.”

Though their talk already seemed long ago after the work of the day, it lingered in his mind. He was curious about Miss Strickland, and certainly very curious about the man who had tormented Grace Ammons and impersonated Archibald Godwin.

As the sun fell that evening, ten hours after the conversation, Lenox remained in his office in Parliament, and at half past eight he went down to the Members’ Bar, leaving word with one of the porters at the gate that if any visitors should arrive — he was thinking of Skaggs — he should immediately be fetched back. Opening the door of the bar he sighed, wondering what Miss Strickland was making of the case, wherever and whoever she was. He was impatient for new information.

The bar was teeming with gentlemen, many of them taking a break from the evening session. (On Friday these were always sparsely attended, the benches not a quarter full.) Some of them hailed Lenox. He paused and shook hands but didn’t stop for long. He had a specific target in mind: Willard Fremantle, the least discreet man in London.

Fremantle was the third son of a Northumberland marquess, most recent in a very ancient line. Willard’s older brothers had both stayed close to home, but Willard, brighter and more restless, had strayed in the direction of the stock market, losing disastrous sums of money until his father, tired of underwriting these losses, found him a seat in Parliament to occupy his time.

There are gossips the world values and gossips the world despises. Willard, sadly for himself, fell into this latter category, and one felt that he could almost sense it; instead of driving him to reticence, it seemed to induce in him an even greater volubility, as if in desperate defiance of other men’s opinion. Certainly it had been many years since anyone told him a secret. While his amiability assured that he had many friendly acquaintances in the House, one or two of whom could be counted upon to stop for a drink with him on any given night, he had no true friends. He was a plump, rapidly graying gentleman, unmarried.

Lenox found him near the end of the bar, drinking a shandy and perusing the court circular in the Times. “Anything interesting?” asked Lenox.

“Parties at the palace the next three nights, then a night for the Queen to rest, then the whole retinue makes for Balmoral.”

“So early in the season?”

“Only for a week, however.”

Lenox nodded. Unsurprisingly, the one way to quiet Fremantle was to make a direct inquiry of him. Then he would tap his nose, implying that he had a great deal of knowledge on that particular subject but couldn’t possibly share it. Lenox started elsewhere, therefore. “Did you hear that Millwood’s secretary resigned?” he asked. “Passed on if he might obtain Ursula Millwood’s hand in marriage, no less!”

This was the stalest piece of tattle in London, and Fremantle treated it with appropriate disdain. “I hear she’s said she’ll run off if her papa doesn’t consent.”

Lenox smiled. “Count us lucky to have our chaps — Graham and Mollinger.” Mollinger was an old Fremantle retainer, the gamekeeper’s grandnephew. Like Graham, he was one of the very few parliamentary secretaries not to come from the ranks of the aristocracy. Rumor said that Willard had to draw his allowance from Mollinger. “Not above themselves.”

Willard pursed his lips doubtfully. “Not Mollinger.”

“Eh?” said Lenox.

“Well, your chap, Graham…” He trailed off as if no more needed to be said.

“What about him? Excellent fellow.”

“The business with the trade unions.”

“Oh, that,” said Lenox scornfully. “What’ve you heard? I’ll guarantee you I know more, and that it’s wrong.”

“Wrong!” said Fremantle and laughed heartily to himself, taking a sip of his shandy. “When he’s been seen accepting cash from Whirral and Peligo? And others before them?”

“Who else?” asked Lenox.

Fremantle paused — perhaps he heard the urgency in his interlocutor’s voice. “Well, if it’s all false it can make no matter.”

“Of course.” Lenox took his watch from its pocket and looked at it, then said, sighing, “I suppose I’d better go into the chamber?”

“I wouldn’t advise it, my dear chap. Twinkleton had just begun to expatiate on the state of the glue industry when I left five minutes ago. He won’t rest until the whole country is covered in a thin layer of glue, you know.”

Lenox smiled; in spite of it all he rather liked Fremantle. Perhaps he would ask Jane if they could have him to their supper — but then he remembered Disraeli and the onions (now famous in his mind) and thought that perhaps he had better reserve Fremantle for a less important evening. “I say, thank you. That was a near miss. Well, good evening, Fremantle.”

Willard beckoned in Lenox close and said, “Before you go, a word. They do say that Cross has heard your secretary’s name in a meeting — yes, Cross, and even Gladstone. I think you had better be shot of him, you know.”

Lenox felt a faint dread, but he masked it, smiling knowingly at Fremantle as he made his farewells.

That was the slur, then: that in the negotiations over the Public Health Act, Graham had extorted the two great union leaders, Whirral and Peligo, for the support of his master, Lenox. It was a grave charge, and, Lenox knew, false.

So why hadn’t Lenox himself been implicated in this corruption? Why was Graham’s name the one on every tongue? Certainly Edmund would have told him, and perhaps even John Baltimore or Willard Fremantle — as well as a dozen other friends he could name, who would have come to speak to him the moment they heard any slander against him, and not his secretary.

Graham did have the power of scheduling. He could place a petitioner in a room with some of the most powerful men in the country, earning that ability in the last twelve months, when he had begun to arrange many of the meetings those in the upper hierarchy of the party took, coordinating his efforts with their secretaries. The charge was that Graham was selling access — and since Graham was not of the same class as most of the men in these hallways, it was easy to believe in his avarice.

Lenox knew he would have to take steps quickly to repudiate these whispered accusations. Already, he feared, it might be too late.

His heart heavy and mind preoccupied, he wandered almost inadvertently into the Commons — and there, indeed, was Twinkleton, upon his feet, a tranquilizing dullness in his voice.

Fortunately, a messenger came to fetch Lenox from the benches almost immediately. He had a visitor.

He walked to the small, comfortable room where visitors to the Members could wait. It was paneled in rosewood, with a green carpet, and always had a cozy fire running in every season, a tray of tea and sandwiches, and all the current papers and journals. The room was empty save for a lad in uniform waiting to deliver a telegram, and in the meanwhile eating his fill of biscuits, dunked in a cup of tea.

Skaggs must have gone upstairs; Lenox turned and then heard, behind him, “Just a moment of your time, Mr. Lenox.” He turned back, and the delivery boy, shorn of his cap and kerchief, had become a middle-aged man — Skaggs himself. “Weren’t you curious about my report?”

“Skaggs, you devil.”

“Apologies, sir. Thought you might like to see the costume I wore when I approached most of the gents on your list.”

“I had no conception of your dramatic talents,” said Lenox, smiling. “Well done. Shall we go up to my office?”