Home by Nightfall

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

There was a thick fog the next morning, the kind you could find only in London; Lenox thought of Esther Summerson in Bleak House, arriving in the city and asking whether there hadn’t been some enormous fire. It was somewhat wistfully that he told Jane over his soft-boiled egg about all the fresh air he had inhaled, riding upon the heaths of Sussex.

When he had finished his breakfast, he checked his watch. He was due to have coffee with his friend Graham at ten o’clock, at the latter’s invitation, and had fifty minutes until then: just enough time to take Sophia to her favorite place in London. He stole her away — wrapped in about thirty layers of wool — from the nanny, and they walked toward Green Park.

“Where are we going, Papa?” she asked.

“Where do you think?”

She looked ahead, frowning with thought. “George’s,” she said at last.

That was her friend Georgianna, who was older than Sophia, five — the daughter of Thomas and Toto McConnell. “No,” he said. “Guess again.”

“I can’t guess.”

He pointed ahead. “What does that green thing look like?” he asked.

“The park.”

“And what’s there?”

Her eyes widened. “The circus?” she said, scarcely daring to hope.

“Yes, the circus.”

She whooped happily (and not very demurely) and dropped her piece of gingerbread, but was in such ripping spirits that she didn’t care.

A few minutes later they came to Green Park — and here he was, the fellow in the red-and-white striped shirt, with the straw hat, standing over a tiny little proscenium made of cheap wood. It was nothing to the grandeur of the Cadogan, but Sophia wouldn’t have traded.

“THE CIRCUS,” she bellowed as she broke into a run, and Lenox, laughing, had to shush her, catching up with her and holding her hand.

He passed over a shilling, and she sat upon a tiny stool. The owner of the circus drew back the curtain, and a small crowd gathered — watching for free, or at any rate on Lenox’s coin, though the hat would be passed around when it was over.

Sophia was rapt, her hands clutched together in anticipation. Soon it began: Two small bright yellow canaries (for it was the canary circus) in military jackets hopped out onto the stage, chirping. Their owner placed a miniature cannon between them, and instantly they went to work with their beaks, first dropping a small ball in the muzzle, then running back to the breach and lighting it with a tiny match. After a moment of breathless expectancy, the ball popped six or eight inches forward, and everyone applauded.

The circus continued, the canaries walking along a tightrope, dancing with each other formally, and, for a finale, playing an inexact but fairly convincing game of billiards.

As they walked back toward Hampden Lane, Sophia described the entire thing to Lenox in minute detail, as if he hadn’t been there, becoming so absorbed in the telling that occasionally at some important moment (“and then the other bird hopped on one feet”) she stopped and stood stock-still to concentrate, staring into the distance. Her father listened very carefully.

After he restored her to her nanny, he took the short drive to Parliament, where Graham met him at the Members’ Entrance, which of course it had been Lenox’s prerogative to enter himself until the previous year. He looked tired, a compact, sandy-haired man about Lenox’s own age. He shook his former employer’s hand warmly, though.

“What’s it now?” asked Lenox.

“Ventilation,” said Graham shortly.

Lenox sighed and shook his head in sympathy. His own experience within these grand, honey-colored walls had taught him that “ventilation” was a word that politicians could use to exact almost any cruelty upon the poor, such was the fear of disease spreading by “bad air.” Buildings might be leveled, tenants evicted, children parted from their parents — all of that and more had been done under Lenox’s gaze in the name of ventilation, though in actuality that word was most often merely a fig leaf for the moneyed interest that wanted a certain building torn down, and a different one put up …

Meanwhile, nobody had any interest in the ventilation of some of the tenements he and Graham had seen in their tours around the slums of Clare Market, where dozens of abandoned boys and girls lived side by side, each renting a few feet of space at night, few in anything more than underclothes, all far too many dozens of hours from their last real meal.

Graham had entered Parliament the year before, after having spent two decades as Lenox’s butler, or more accurately as his butler, assistant in detection, confidant, and friend — an astonishing rise, but one for which his intelligence and strategic nous made him signally qualified. In the last few months, he had made the tenements of East London his primary concern, despite representing a district in Oxfordshire, the county from which he hailed; in British politics, Members in the Commons were often only tenuously affiliated with their constituencies, a very different system than say the American one, where one had to be resident in a state to represent it in Congress.

“What now?” Lenox asked.

They had walked through a long hallway and come into the comfortable paneled quiet of the Members’ Bar. A few men nodded toward them, and a fellow named Baltimore came and shook Lenox’s hand warmly.

“Your brother has been kind enough to support my Tenement Act,” Graham said when they were seated, “but I fear it may not pass. We haven’t the northern vote.”

“Too many factory barons?”

“That’s precisely it.”

Lenox smiled. “I don’t miss those headaches. But what can you give the Tories for their support? What do you have to trade?”

“That’s the trouble — nothing. I have already voted on their side three times this year. I cannot do it again.”

“You’re a man of your word. Promise them you’ll vote with them next session.”

“They do not count on me still being here. You know that they’re running a strong candidate against me, Armitage.”

“Yes,” said Lenox. “Edmund told me.”

Graham waved to a passing waiter and asked him for coffee — and in that transient gesture Lenox perceived that his friend was finally comfortable here, finally felt as if he belonged. “Even if I am forced out, I hope I will pass this bill before I go,” he said. “It would be worth the defeat.”

“Then promise them the world,” said Lenox. “And either give it to them next session, or apologize that you cannot.”

Graham brightened slightly. “Yes. Perhaps that’s right.”

They fell quickly back into their old, familiar ways. There was still just a hint of deference in Graham’s speech — a silent “sir” at the end of his sentences — but it didn’t prevent them from having a lively exchange, about Muller, about Hadley, about Graham’s long evenings in the House, leavened with gossip about Disraeli and Victoria and the next vote.

When their coffee was cold, Graham seemed to hesitate. “What is it?” Lenox asked.

Graham leaned forward in his armchair and said, “I wonder if you would give me your advice upon a personal matter.”

“You needn’t even ask.”

Graham looked troubled for a moment — paused — and then said, “The truth is that I am contemplating the estate of marriage.”

Lenox smiled. “This is wonderful news. You contemplate it not conceptually, I take it, but as regards a specific young person?”

Graham nodded. “Miss Abigail Winston. I believe you know her. She lives in Hampden Lane.”

“The housekeeper at Dawkins’s house?” Lenox knew her by sight, a pretty, amiable woman of around thirty-five, with a beautiful smile. “I think it’s a wonderful idea.”

“I am concerned that my current position … that perhaps it is less suitable, on either side, than it might have been once.”

“Perhaps you ought to quit and come be my valet again.”

Graham smiled. “Do you think so?”

Lenox leaned forward now, too. “Since you have asked my advice, I won’t pretend that I don’t have any,” he said. “If you feel that this marriage would make you happy, I think you ought to declare as much to Miss Winston without waiting another minute. Life is long, but it’s short, too, you know. I would do it this afternoon.”

A wave of relief swept over Graham’s generally imperturbable face. “Do you think so?” he asked.

“I’ll be there with the silver fish-slice myself, if you’ll have me.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” Graham said, looking into the distance, and not as if it were ventilation on his mind. “I don’t doubt that you’re right.”

Their conversation continued for some time. Eventually Graham saw him off, and at a little before eleven Lenox arrived at the office in Chancery Lane, where Dallington and Polly were waiting for him.

“You’re late,” said Dallington, who was at the door in his overcoat.

“I’m sorry,” said Lenox.

“Well, it’s usually me who’s late, anyhow. We ought to go, though. Polly wants to take Anixter and speak to the people at Muller’s hotel. You and I are marked for the Cadogan Theater. Did you see the papers last night, by the way?”

Lenox handed his valise to a clerk, and they turned back for the door of the office. “Yes, I did.”

Dallington grinned. “We’d better damn well solve it. Oh, I say, before we go — you had a telegram this morning. No, two telegrams.”

“Who from?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Let me fetch them, then, just another minute if you don’t mind.”

They were sitting on his desk. Both were from Edmund. Lenox frowned, wondering what they could be.

He had his answer soon enough, and as he read them he felt a chill run through him. That morning there had been an attack in the village of his youth — in Edmund’s constituency — in gentle old Markethouse.