The Empire of Night

10

At twilight Stockman fed the throngs. By then upwards of five hundred people had been drifting around and lolling around or gathered around listening to the salon orchestra and, in the adjacent tent, to a dialect comic, after watching jugglers and a magician. A two-ring music hall. At the call to high tea they’d all queued into the lug’s tent and emerged with substantial enough food on paper plates to make a working-class last meal of the day, which they took to the chairs or the picnic blankets or to the grass or the stone fence. I suspected the area east of the house, before the library, was now populated. I counted on my mother drawing them away when the time came.

As for the house guests — Isabel Cobb and Joseph W. Hunter included — we were gathered and brought to the courtyard and we took our high tea alfresco at temporary tables covered in linen behind a barricade of half a dozen Gray Suits. Pickled salmon and soused mackerel and sliced beef. Boiled eggs and cucumber sandwiches and radishes. Scones and marmalade and sponge cake.

Al and Isabel were side by side at the head of the table nearest the house. I was down the way, at a separate table, surrounded by a London banker, an Edinburgh banker, a Zurich banker, and their wives, who had much to say to each other, not knowing what to make of an American journalist. Which was fine with me. As the daylight waned I waited for a chance to have a few moments with the subject of my story.

I forced the issue as the dozen guests were in the midst of their sponge cake. I knew my mother would not be taking sponge cake. Particularly before performing. I rose, notebook drawn, and I crept toward her table. She was listening to one of the three Brits I’d passed in the Great Hall. He was bloviating about the French trying to run the show on the Western Front. She listened with her elbow on the table, her chin on her fist, declining to play the absolute lady, even in her role as Stockman’s hostess. She knew her business. Stockman must have liked her this way. Stockman was also focused on the man, and I crept some more, letting my notebook show in my hand.

I drew near enough and she was bored enough that the movement drew her eyes. I stopped. She turned to Stockman and leaned to him and whispered a few words, in the midst of which he glanced my way. He nodded assent to her — making a pucker-mouthed, veiled-eye show of how of course it was all right — and she rose and came to me.

“Mr. Hunter,” she said.

“Madam Cobb,” I said.

“I’m sorry to have neglected you this evening,” she said. “You could use some impressions for your story.”

“Just a few,” I said. “Before you perform tonight.”

We said all this in our best stage whisper. Stockman heard it, though he was looking at the still-rambling speaker.

Isabel took me by the arm and guided me away, out of earshot of both the tables and the line of Gray Suits. We turned our bodies, however, toward Stockman. Nothing to hide.

I would take notes during every word she spoke. Scribble.

I said, “I have a pretty good hunch where to look in the house.”

“He’s nervous about something,” she said. “He and his cohorts.”

“About us?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t think so. He doesn’t try to hide it. The demeanor of it.”

“The public?”

“He talks offhandedly about them. No. The public’s been here before. This he doesn’t talk about. Not around me.”

“Be that as it may. .” I began.

“Do what you have to do,” she said.

She was right about my gist. “. . Tonight is likely my only chance,” I finished.

“Where?”

“The tower.”

“Doesn’t surprise me.”

“You see it?”

“Only the staircase,” she said. “I didn’t climb it, but I had a chance to look up and down.”

“A guard?”

“Not that I saw. I think our man’s comfortable in the house.”

“Keep the show going tonight for as long as you can,” I said.

“You know me when I sing,” she said. “Keep applauding, I’ll keep encoring.”

“Keep encoring even if they don’t applaud,” I said.

She did a stagey spine stiffening. “You just do your job. I’ll do mine,” she said.