An Old Betrayal

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

Dallington was gone all weekend. Lenox stopped into Half Moon Street on Saturday morning and Sunday afternoon, but according to Mrs. Lucas her tenant still hadn’t returned. He hadn’t telegrammed for Lenox or Jenkins either, which was rather surprising.

Hopefully he would be back by Monday evening. Aside from Lenox’s pure curiosity, the grand dinner they were throwing for the opening of the season was then, and Dallington was scheduled to come. Lady Jane had been in a whirl from noon to night, barely managing to dart out in the evenings to the parties, where she had a quick sherbet and a quicker glance at the dresses before leaving again. It was the most significant dinner they had yet thrown; and at the last minute, not two days before they would all sit down to dine, Princess Helena, one of Queen Victoria’s daughters, had sent word that she meant to come after all.

Royalty would add a tremble of glamor to the supper, of course — some people could barely look away when Princess Helena, or Princess Louise, was in the room, or even Prince Leopold, their unfortunate-looking brother — and for that, Jane was happy. However, it meant altering half of her carefully laid plans. The seating would have to change, the order of the toasts. Still: to have the Prime Minister and the Princess in Hampden Lane on one night! It felt like a zenith, a juncture in their lives.

Certainly it was a political zenith, a fact whose irony wasn’t lost on Lenox. Returning home in the early evening Friday, he had thought that perhaps he might delay the news of his decision about Parliament until after the party, but when he saw Jane he realized he didn’t want to keep a secret.

They were in the small study off of their bedroom, with its wide windows looking over their small back garden. Lenox was removing his cufflinks. “My dear, I have some news that will surprise you — not make you miserable, I hope, for you must believe I’m not miserable about it.”

“What is it?” she asked, face concerned.

“I’m leaving Parliament.”

She looked at him for a moment and then, smiling, said, “Thank goodness for that.”

“The news doesn’t upset you?”

“I think it’s the best thing I’ve heard all day. Though I did get a joke from Duch, how did it go? Never mind, though, come, sit, tell me what made you decide that.”

They discussed the decision for a few minutes, though Lenox spoke mostly in broad terms. (“Oh! I’ve got it!” she said, interjecting at one point. “When is the moon heaviest?” “When?” “When it’s full,” she said and waited, expectantly, for his laughter. He rolled his eyes.) For her part she was glad that all of his late nights and taxing afternoons would come to an end.

Graham had been less complaisant, earlier in the day, when he heard the decision; his face had grown wary, and almost immediately he had said, “Now is the time to push on, if anything, sir. In fact, I was going to speak with you later in the week — it is time you had a more professionally experienced secretary, as you rise up in the party. That will make the work seem less daunting.”

“We’ll leave at the same time,” Lenox said.

Graham was silent for a moment. “I wonder if you have heard my name recently in connection with Mr. Whirral or Mr. Peligo’s, sir?”

Lenox refused to place Graham under any kind of moral obligation. “Certainly, inasmuch as I have met with them, and you told me when the meetings were, and wrote my questions down for them. Not otherwise. Why?”

“No reason,” said Graham.

Their cagey conversation went on for another few minutes. “What will become of Frabbs?” asked Graham. “Or Markson, for that matter? He has been doing well, young as he is.”

“Frabbs can go work for Edmund. Markson will have a reference. I mean to serve out my last eight months, anyhow. I will go up and see Brick to tell him face-to-face — meet with the people of Stirrington, too — next week. I wish you’d come with me.”

“You had better still take the meeting with Coleridge,” said Graham. “In case you change your mind.”

Lenox shook his head. “I’ve heard he’s intolerably dry. It’s precisely the sort of luncheon I shan’t miss after I’m gone.”

There were things he would miss, as his own sudden decision gradually bore in upon him. The cut and thrust of the Commons’s debates, for instance, those evenings when suddenly the somnolent chamber burst into fire with a new idea or an angry speech. He would miss the lazy comfort of the quieter sessions, too, the oak-and-leather smell of the benches there, the discreet tactical evacuations to the Members’ Bar for a glass of claret. It was everything in between — the meetings, the luncheons, the patient auditing of every man’s pet idea — that he would enjoy leaving behind.

After Graham left the office, Lenox returned to work. He felt rather giddy with his own impulsiveness, and as a means of subduing himself set to reading the dry blue books and constituent letters and newspaper editorials that he had set to the side, scrupulously making sure that he gave them the same attention he would have the day before, and the day before that. Eight months was a long time; it was many votes.

On his way out of the building at eight o’clock he saw Willard Fremantle. “Season’s on, eh, Lenox?” said the Marquess’s son, jovial at the prospect of a weekend. “Are you going to Lord Rash’s party tonight?”

“Oh, yes, very likely,” said Lenox, smiling and donning his gloves.

They progressed through the large doors out toward Abingdon Street, returning the nods of the porters. “He wants his son to marry a woman — a young woman — named Fisker, whose father built a railroad to somewhere called Salt Lake City. Imagine! She’ll be there.”

“You must admit it’s an evocative name,” said Lenox. “A lake of salt.”

“It sounds like one of the torments in Dante to me. Lakes are meant to have freshwater.”

“Here is my carriage. I’ll see you at Rash’s, or if not there, one of a dozen other places, I don’t doubt.”

Fremantle’s farewell was prophetic; this was the first weekend of the season, and Lenox had no case or parliamentary responsibilities, while Jane was extremely busy. As such he became her emissary and representative at a whole multitude of parties across London. It was a pleasant task — punch, catching up with friends one hadn’t seen in some time, the crisp comeliness of young men and women dancing in their starched new clothes. Young love added an exhilaration to the air, so promiscuous and free-floating that even the dowagers seated upon the divans felt it, and knew themselves momentarily more youthful, freshened by the freshness around them. Then there was always the excellent music.

So Friday and Saturday passed, and Sunday, when the hour of churchgoing had come and gone, women began to make Sunday calls upon each other to discuss the week, the engagements, while men trickled back into their clubs on Pall Mall, where, though they pretended to disdain the season, the conversations were all the same as the womens’.

Finally, on Monday morning, Dallington returned.

He came directly to Hampden Lane from Charing Cross Station, tired, his collar wilting (it was a warm day), and his suit smudged with dirt. Altogether he looked a bit beneath his Plimsoll line. “I didn’t realize how long I was going to stay in Hampshire,” he said, preempting Lenox’s question, “but it was worth it.”

“The Godwins?”

“I know the whole history of the family — a strange one, too. Shall we call on Jenkins? I don’t doubt he would like to hear it.”

“Yes, though I’m all curiousness to hear your story.”

They went to Scotland Yard and found Jenkins in his office. A flash of hope came into his eye when Dallington said he had returned with a story, for it had been a difficult weekend spent trying to coax a word out of Hetty and Archibald. “In all honesty I’m on the verge of giving the job up. We have Archie dead to rights, of course, at least on breaking into the palace, but Henrietta we cannot find anything to charge with. Leaving her hotel with a bag full of suspicious items?”

“Owning an illegally acquired key to the palace?” suggested Lenox.

“She says it was slipped under her door, and she kept it in case it had some purpose, not knowing what it was. Or rather her barrister says that. For of course she’s as talkative as a corpse.”

“I’ll tell you what I know,” said Dallington. “I’m not sure if any of it will matter in a court of law — but it made an impression on me that I won’t forget.”