The September Society

CHAPTER ONE

The only question left, he felt, was how to handle the matter-how it was to be done. Not if, for he had made his mind up entirely. Nor when; the moment would arise on its own.

But how?

Charles Lenox, noted amateur detective and scion of an ancient Sussex family, spent most of the morning of September 2, 1866, wandering around his study and pondering his few, daunting options. Normally imperturbable, he seemed during these long hours like a restless man. To begin he would sit heavily in one of the two armchairs by the low fire; then he would lean forward to tap the tobacco ash from his pipe into the embers; then he would stand up and walk across the room to shuffle the letters on his desk, or switch one book with another in the shelves along the wall, or straighten a picture that was to some imperceptible degree tilted; then he would return to his armchair, fill his pipe, and begin the entire dance again.

He was a lean man with a friendly face-even in the morning’s preoccupation-hazel eyes, and a short brown beard. His carriage was upright, and as he paced he clasped his hands behind his back. It gave him a pensive air, the kind he had during the most difficult moments of his cases. But there was no case at hand this morning.

All of this pacing and worrying and sitting and standing took place in a handsome white house on Hampden Lane, just off Grosvenor Square. Fifteen paces down the front hall and to the right was this large library, a rectangular, high-ceilinged room with a desk near the door, a fireplace and chairs at the end of the room, a row of tall windows along the front wall, and books everywhere else. It was where he spent the great majority of his time at home, both anxious and happy alike. He pondered his cases there, and on wet, foggy days like this one, he pondered the world-or the part of it that Hampden Lane occupied-through his trickling windowpanes.

At ten he rang for coffee and at a quarter past he rang to have it taken away, cold and untouched. Graham, his butler, looked concerned but said nothing as he came to and fro. By eleven, however, he could no longer prevent himself from intervening, and presented himself unbidden in the dark oak doorway of the room.

At that moment Lenox had just taken up residence at his desk, where he was looking across the street at the bookshop.

“May I get you anything else, sir?” Graham said.

“No, no,” said Lenox distractedly, still peering through the rain-touched window.

“If I may venture to say so, sir, you seem anxious.”

In many of the aristocratic Mayfair households surrounding Hampden Lane, such a statement would have seemed like the highest impertinence. Lenox and Graham had a long and complex history, though, and in the end were friends more than master and man. While Graham, a sandy-haired man with perfectly arranged clothes and a strong, utterly honest face, always spoke and behaved respectfully, he never hesitated to disagree with Lenox, often helped the detective in his work, and even, on rare occasions, spoke with the frankness he just had.

“Eh?” said Lenox, at last looking up. “Oh, no, Graham-no, thank you, I’m quite all right.”

“Will you take your lunch here in the library, sir?”

“No,” said Lenox. “Thanks, I’m having lunch in the City, actually. I shall be glad to get on the other side of these four walls.”

“Indeed, sir,” said Graham. He paused before adding, “I am in the hall if you require anything.”

“Thank you,” said Lenox.

Graham withdrew then, and Lenox sighed. Well! he thought to himself. If Graham had noticed, it had gone too far. He would have to stop worrying and go to lunch with his brother. Standing with a decisive air, Lenox patted the pockets of his jacket and went through the double doors of the library out into the hallway.

“Graham, will you call out the carriage, please? I think I’ll leave now.”

“Of course, sir.”

“I’ll be waiting at Chaffanbrass’s while they rub down the horses.”

“Yes, sir,” Graham said as he began to walk downstairs. “It shouldn’t be longer than a quarter of an hour.”

In the front hall, Lenox took his overcoat down from its peg and pulled his umbrella out of its stand. Then he took a breath, ducked outside into the rain, and crossed the street, dodging several hansom cabs and a landau with no inconsiderable agility to get to the bookshop. He pulled open the door and saw the proprietor.

“Mr. Chaffanbrass,” he said with a smile. “How do you do?”

“Mr. Lenox!” said Mr. Chaffanbrass, beaming at him from behind a small counter. “Happy anniversary!”

“Oh?”

“The fire!”

“Ah, of course.”

As it happened, that very day, September 2, was the two hundredth anniversary of the Great Fire of 1666; what had started as a minor conflagration at the Pudding Lane bakery of Thomas Farriner, baker to Charles II, eventually consumed four-fifths of central London. By some miracle only a handful of people had died-the traditional count was reckoned at eight-but thirteen thousand buildings and nearly a hundred churches had vanished. Of the eighty thousand residents of the city, seventy thousand were left homeless. In a year that was already being heralded in some parts as the apocalypse because it contained the Number of the Beast, 666, few needed persuading in the first heady hours after the three-day blaze that the world was at an end.

“And yet,” said Lenox, “my grandfather always said the fire did our city two great services.”

“What do you mean?”

“For one thing, it allowed Wren to build his fifty churches, as well as St. Paul’s Cathedral. The fire is the reason we live in such a beautiful city, Mr. Chaffanbrass.”

“And the second reason?”

“Do you know how many people died of the plague in 1665?”

“How many?”

“About sixty-five thousand, and that despite two-thirds of Londoners leaving the city. The fire killed so many rats and fleas, leveled so many derelict buildings, that in the end it probably saved tens of thousands of lives.”

Ruminatively, Mr. Chaffanbrass said, “Perhaps it’s received a bad press, then.”

“Perhaps,” Lenox agreed. “Still, it would be better all around if it didn’t happen again. Incidentally, has my copy of Pickwick come in yet?”

“It hasn’t yet, I very much fear.”

“Can’t be helped,” said Lenox.

“It will prove worth the wait, though! The finest red leather, with gold inlay!”

“And all the words inside?”

“Every last one!”

Ancient, homey, and comfortable, Calum’s was one of the best bookshops around, small and a little dark with rows of crammed bookshelves along the walls. Mr. Chaffanbrass’s squat counter stood in the middle of the room, just next to a freestanding oven that usually had a kettle on and a comfortable chair beside it. The owner himself was a very small, cheerful man, with red cheeks, tidy white hair, and a large belly. He wore perfectly round spectacles and a tweed suit, and the majority of his life was spent behind the counter and next to the warmth of the oven, reading. There was always a turned-down book on the arm of his chair.

“Anything else new?” asked Lenox.

“Nothing you haven’t seen, no. Wait, though!” As Mr. Chaffanbrass skittered to the back of the store, Lenox looked idly through the books on the counter. Presently the gentleman came back with a small volume in his hand.

“What do you make of that, Mr. Lenox?” he said. “A new translation.”

Lenox looked at the flyleaf. It was a thin, pebbled brown copy of The Praise of Folly by Erasmus, with an accompanying essay by one of the dons at Cambridge.

“Why not. May I take it?”

“Yes, of course. A poor bookseller I’d be if I said no,” said Mr. Chaffanbrass, placing his hands on his stomach and chortling.

“Thanks. I’ll be off, then.”

“Wrapped?”

“No,” said Lenox. “I need something to read straight away.”

“As you please,” said Mr. Chaffanbrass, taking a short stub of pencil from his breast pocket, opening a ledger, and making a small tick. “On your bill, then?”

“Graham will be around on the fifteenth.”

“No doubt of it. I set my calendar by him!”

He said this with satisfaction and then shook Lenox’s hand with great vigor, getting redder and redder and smiling furiously. After this brief ceremony he sat down again with a sigh and took his book up, groping with his other hand for a piece of toast on the stovetop. He would burn himself sooner or later. As far as Lenox could tell, the bookseller’s diet consisted of dozens of pieces of toast a day, each followed by a cup of milky coffee. Not the regimen recommended by the best physicians, perhaps, but it suited him.

On the street again, wet smoke clouded the air. The drizzle continued. It had been a beautiful late summer until then, but perhaps they were in for a wet September, he thought. It would be too bad. He looked back across the street toward his brightly lit house and saw his carriage waiting, the horses occasionally stamping their feet and the driver huddled underneath a thick black coat to keep the rain off, with only a pipe protruding out of the coat’s hood, its ember occasionally brightening to orange. Lenox dodged another cab and stepped into the carriage, and with a word to the driver he was on his way to meet his brother.

And while he was looking forward to lunch-and while he took pleasure in examining his new book-he could not rid himself of the question he had been asking himself for weeks, as well as that entire morning: How on God’s green earth was he supposed to ask one of his oldest friends, Lady Jane Grey, to be his wife?