The September Society

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

T he Parliament of the United Kingdom was by no means a perfect body, but it was getting better-had gotten better, in fact, in Lenox’s lifetime. He could remember the infamous borough of Old Sarum, which in 1831 had elected two Members, and in doing so overcome the notable handicap of having only eleven residents. But the Reform Act of 1832 had finally abolished Old Sarum and places like it. (The town of Dunwich, in Suffolk, for example, had also elected two MPs in 1831 despite literally not existing, an impressive feat; while it technically had about two dozen voters, the town itself had long been claimed by the waters of the local river.) Now, only thirty years after the reforms, which had been unimaginable to his grandparents’ generation, more and more people had suffrage, landowners could only vote once, and the Earl of Lonsdale no longer had the right to name nine Members completely on his own. In all it allowed the House of Commons to become more forceful in its dealings with the House of Lords-allowed the people, in other words, to be more assertive with the noblemen. Taken together, the years of that era had added up to a gradual reclamation of rights that was on par with the Magna Carta.

As he looked up at the famous long facade of the Palace of Westminster (its formal name) just above the rolling Thames, he thought for the hundredth time that the highest service an Englishman could do was to work in this building, to serve here with honesty and compassion and patriotism. At Balliol his friends had called him “the Debater” because of his tendency to make long and ardent speeches about civil reform and imperial restraint. His friends and family had all assumed he would find himself within these doors before too long. Yet here he was, nearly forty, and no closer than he had been twenty years past. It was a deep, mostly healed-over wound. He was reconciled to his profession, loved his profession. Still, just as his heart rose every time he caught a glimpse of Big Ben, it fell when he had to sign in as a guest at the door.

Lenox found his older brother in the anteroom just by the actual chamber of the House of Commons sitting with two or three other Members, heads huddled together, quite obviously speaking about something of importance to the party. He held back in the doorway and waited for their conversation to end. The House was down, of course, until the evening, and there was quiet in most of the building. He felt slightly out of place. After only a few seconds Edmund looked up and saw him, flashed him a smile, and made his excuses to his compatriots.

“Charles,” he said, “I’m very glad to see you.”

Lenox’s brother looked very much like him, tall, with a good head of brown hair and sparkling, curious eyes, but while the younger brother was slender, the elder was ruddy and heavyset from years of country life.

“How are you, Edmund?”

They shook hands. “Not bad, not bad.”

“You look a bit knocked about.”

“Do I? Late nights in here, I expect. I miss the country. But how’s this business in Oxford going?”

“Are you having lunch with anybody?”

“I am, yes-but come along, won’t you? Only a few chaps from the Board of Trade, the War Office, all our party. Russell. You’ll know one or two of them.”

“Wouldn’t it disrupt your work?”

“No, not at all. Purely social.”

They had paused in the hallways that connected the street, just by the Thames, to the beehive of rooms around the House. “I shall, then, thanks,” said Lenox, and they moved inward once again toward the famous Parliamentary restaurant called Bellamy’s.

Edmund’s group was at a large table to the rear of the room, far from the prying eyes of the entrance. By the table there were two large windows overlooking the swift, gray river, but nobody looked out that way. Edmund introduced Lenox to the people he didn’t know-his friend James Hilary was there and greeted him warmly-but had read of in the papers. There was the promising young MP Jonathan Brick, a great orator and defender of the poor from Warwickshire, with a melodious South Midlands accent, and also Lord Russell, whom Lenox knew slightly and who had only just served a year as Prime Minister. Russell had stepped down after trying to introduce a reform bill which his own party had opposed-scandalously, in Lenox’s view. An angry mob in Hyde Park that July had agreed.

At the luncheon there were also several backbenchers, men Lenox knew and recognized, men useful to the party in small, unglamorous, and utterly practical ways. Peter Anthony, a soap manufacturer from Birmingham, was one, and so was Donald Longstaffe, a man with no aspirations other than to belong to good clubs, Parliament being one of them. His talent was for gossip, a currency always redeemable in politics.

The Liberal Party missed its founder, Viscount Palmerston, who had died just the year before. Besides being politically gifted and uncannily savvy, Lord Palmerston had been a figure around whom Liberals could unite: Having begun as a Tory, he had decided upon the necessity of a new path and forged it himself. As an orator nobody in either party had surpassed him. Lenox would never forget Palmerston’s bold stance in favor of the revolutions that swept the Continent in 1848, support that lent legitimacy to the rebellious armies in Italy, France, and Hungary. It was a noble belief in the idea of constitutional liberties that had driven him. Yes, they missed Palmerston. The party missed its talisman.

In the meanwhile the Conservative Party had its own still-living leader. The current Prime Minister, the Earl of Derby, was serving his third (nonconsecutive) term, and all agreed that the Liberals had to find somebody quickly who might match him both in rhetoric and vision. Brick was one candidate; Hilary another, at any rate in time; and William Ewart Gladstone, though rather puritanical for some tastes, was a third, though he wasn’t present at the luncheon.

“What are we all speaking about?” Edmund asked.

Out of deference they all waited for Russell’s answer. None forthcoming, Brick said, “Oh, all the usual catastrophes. Derby’s evil plans. Gladstone’s speech yesterday evening.”

Hilary said, “Derby may mean to steal our reform bill-yours, I should say, Lord Russell. He wants to greatly increase the franchise, anyway, reading between the lines of his speech of last week.”

Edmund nodded. “Yes, that seems to be so.”

The attention the table granted Edmund was not deferential, as with Lord Russell; but it was somehow individualized, specific, respectful. The entire table took up Hilary’s point, debating it back and forth. Once, Russell said, “Well, if he does it, good for him,” and everyone nodded vigorously and then disagreed. Lenox chimed in once or twice energetically, and when he did Brick looked at him rather appraisingly. Between them they finished three bottles of claret, which went a long way toward the establishment of good feeling at the table, and by the time they stood up they all seemed to agree about something not quite spelled out but nonetheless significant. All in all it left Lenox confused, but at the same time with the feeling that the language was one of subtexts, which it would be easy to pick up.

“What did you make of that?” Edmund asked, clapping his brother on the shoulder as they walked down the long corridor toward Edmund’s office.

“Was anything accomplished, exactly?”

“Oh, Lord, no! We simply wanted to begin talking about this reform bill we’re expecting next year. Needed to find out what Russell thought.”

“He seemed unruffled.”

“That was the right form on his part.”

A man, dark, short, and striding quickly, approached them. Edmund said hello to him.

“Oh-yes, hello, Lenox. I can’t speak at the moment-something-something quite important. Forgive me.”

“Not at all,” said Edmund, and the man walked on.

“Who was that?” Lenox asked.

“Daniel Maran.”

“What! That’s a strange coincidence, to lay eyes on him.”

“Not that strange, of course-he haunts this little building. I must see him at least once a day. Why are you so surprised?”

“He may figure into this case of mine.”

“How so?”

Lenox quickly told Edmund what the September Society was, about Wilson, Butler, Lysander, and the shooting accident at Maran’s property that killed Wilson. He also mentioned that he had come by in part to see the file Arlington had sent over, and reminded his brother about James Payson.

Edmund’s brow furrowed. “That’s quite strange, you know, about Maran.”

“Oh? Why?”

“I could swear-yes, I feel certain that only the other day he was closeted with that man Lysander when I wanted to see him.”

“What do you mean?” said Lenox keenly.

“I popped into his office to ask him a question or two-I was with James Hilary, actually-and he said he couldn’t meet, and then introduced us to Lysander in a rather hurried way.”

“When was this, Edmund?”

“Oh, last… was it last Thursday? Yes, I think so.”

“Why have you been dealing with Maran?”

“Oh, just a small task they’ve asked me to do-nothing important, mind you. A few matters of ordnance. Some strange spending there, it would appear-though nothing that can’t be sorted out. But listen, Charles, what about Lysander?”

Lenox’s mind was racing, and he answered his brother’s questions distractedly. When at length they reached Edmund’s small, cluttered office, he sat down and jotted a few notes. Then he took the file on James Payson, which Edmund had found on his desk. It was thin and looked inconsequential. Lenox scrambled backward in his memory for some further recollection of James Payson in his early days of marriage but couldn’t remember any. He opened the folder expecting disappointment but still half hoping for a breakthrough. After a bit of boilerplate, the report of the 2nd Battalion’s medical staff read: Already there are rumors in the camp about Captain Payson’s final hours, some of them quite outlandish… it is the consensus of this panel that these rumors should be encouraged while a deeper investigation of the circumstances of Captain Payson’s death is undertaken, for it seems to us certain that, first, the subject was not injured by the enemy, and, second, that he may well have been the victim of foul play, intended to simulate suicide… whether or not this turns out to be the case, the death is not one which redounds to the credit of the 12th Regiment or the 2nd Battalion, and we believe that precautions should be taken against the revelation of the true facts of the incident in order to maintain morale… please see our initial findings below…

Following this introduction the report went on for some time, describing in great detail Payson’s wound and how it might have been sustained. Lenox scanned this quickly and flipped to the second page of the report, an addendum from the same pen, which read: After further investigation we must conclude that our original report’s conjecture about Captain Payson’s death was incorrect, and that in fact he was a suicide… it may be seen that the angle of the shot, while unusual, was not impossible… in re the question posed about the scars on his face and chest, an animal had obviously been at the remains between Payson’s death and the discovery of the corpse, not surprising given the emaciated state of the domestic animals in this region… the scent of aniseed around the body points to canines… added to the peculiarity of Payson having wandered off alone, quite out of his usual routine, we are forced to believe that he killed himself with aforethought…

Lenox read over the report a second time; his brother was sitting at his narrow window, tapping the ash of his pipe outside as cold air blew into the room. Nevertheless Lenox flushed as he read on, slowly realizing how this twenty-year-old description of James Payson’s suicide corresponded with McConnell’s report on the suicide of Peter Wilson. Was it possible that these two men, drawn from the same small circle of a battalion’s officers, had died in the same fashion, under the same cloud of uncertainty, coincidentally? No, of course it wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t.

Above all it was eerie that James and George Payson’s deaths were so similar: both bodies found in public fields, their bodies mauled, their lives over at the age of twenty.

“This damned Society,” Lenox muttered. “Look here, Edmund, I don’t suppose I can take this folder with me?”

They had both seen that Arlington had marked it NOT TO BE REMOVED