The September Society

CHAPTER EIGHT

O n some unrecorded day in the 1090s, perhaps a little earlier, perhaps a little later-the Battle of Hastings still in memory, at any rate, and the Domesday Book not more than a decade old-an anonymous cleric and one or two students gathered by appointment in a small room (was it at an inn? in a church?), and the University of Oxford was born. Soon students from the University of Paris staged a minor revolt and joined those unremembered pioneers, and Oxford began to flourish. It was the first university in England and one of the few in Europe; before a century had passed it was the greatest institution of higher learning in the world. It had an astonishing number of books, for one thing-hundreds. Thanks to these books and the men who taught from them, generations of clergymen began to share, in their far-flung parishes, an Oxford education, an Oxford way of thinking and teaching. Thus was created a world of ideas, a world of the mind, which collapsed the difference between Devon and Yorkshire, which for the first time aligned the beliefs of the people all over England-and indeed, Europe.

Then on some equally uncertain day in the 1200s, one of the constituent colleges of Oxford began, perhaps Merton College, perhaps University College, probably at first just a house where students could rent a room and have a meal; and then slowly, as the years washed over them, the colleges consolidated, joined by other colleges, until sometime in the 1400s when Oxford truly began to look and feel like Oxford.

There was something that age bestowed, Lenox thought. A depth and richness to the afternoon light in the windows; a kind of holiness even in the buildings that weren’t religious. When you became a student at Oxford you realized both your own mortality, in the flow of this near-millennium of students, and also the small particle of immortality that attaches to you when you begin to belong to an immortal place.

Lenox strode across the cobblestones of the forecourt of Balliol College, the site of his undergraduate days, gazing at the high windows he had once known so well. There was a smile upon his face, that mostly happy but slightly sad smile people have when they go back to a place they have loved. This had been a place of wonder for him, cut loose as he was from childhood and the halls of Lenox House, with new friends and new studies. Even the few streets of central Oxford had seemed huge to him, lined with a bewildering number of shops stretching the quarter mile from St. Giles to St. Aldate’s, from St. John’s College to Christ Church.

He was older now and felt it. Nearly forty. Unmarried still. Caught up with some of his dreams, fallen behind in others. He had thought since he was a boy that he would enter Parliament, and it had never happened. He had wanted a son. That was what he had found: The things one assumed would happen sometimes never did. It was a lesson his undergraduate self wouldn’t have understood.

For an hour or so Lenox sat in the Balliol courtyard and thought about the case; one result of this brown study was the increased seriousness he now saw that it merited. The distracted manner in which George Payson had greeted his mother the morning before had tended rather to mitigate the case’s depth than add to it; Lenox remembered that all students had private lives that they guarded from all but their friends, and thought that if he had seen his mother even an hour early in his day he also would have been distracted. Too close a rub against his independence. With the step back, now Lenox saw that the strange, almost intentional dishevelment of Payson’s room, along with the presence of the white cat, which since he had seen it in the flesh had grown more eerie than comical, could hardly be anything but grave.

As he stood up and left, he was more puzzled-but had a better grasp, too, of what he was puzzled about.

Although now he had to shift into a different mood.

Being a detective requires many skills, and just then he was an actor, attempting a kind of genial frivolity: He was leaning up against the gilt steel front gate of Lincoln, where he had just come from Balliol, and pretending that he was George Payson’s carefree visiting uncle. He swung his cane and hummed a tune, looked around curiously, and all the while waited for the right person to come out of the gate-a student who wouldn’t mind a few prying questions. As he waited he read the Times.

The stories in the paper were comfortably familiar. There was a long article condemning the new speed limits that had been introduced that summer, of two miles per hour in towns and four miles per hour in the countryside. An infringement on people’s daily lives, the editor argued. There was an update on the search for John Surratt, who had fled to Canada and then across the Atlantic after being implicated in Abraham Lincoln’s death. (Like many other Englishmen, Lenox had a deep admiration of the president and had closely followed the American Civil War. He thanked God it was over.

The death counts listed in the papers alone could throw him into a horrible mood for days.) The Austro-Prussian War was just over as well, making it a good year for lovers of peace. Then there were the reports of the first months of marriage of Princess Helena, Victoria’s third daughter, who had been wed that summer to… Lenox peered at the paper to sound out the name for himself… to Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg. Gracious. And most thrilling to Lenox, who had his age’s deep love of the new and revolutionary, the Atlantic Cable was nearly complete. As he understood it-and he would be the first to admit that he didn’t quite-the cable would allow people to telegraph between Europe and America! What would my grandfather have said, thought Lenox? Brave new world…

All the while he had his eye on the slow trickle of students coming in and out of the college. He passed the first one up, a tall, censorious-looking fellow in glasses. The second wouldn’t do either, a terrified first-year from the looks of him. The third shot out of the gate as fast as he could and didn’t give Lenox a chance to approach. The fourth student, though, evidently a temperate second-year, judging from the flower in his buttonhole, looked hale and likely. Lenox threw out a studied word, relishing his role.

“Oh-I say there, would you mind stopping a moment? I’m Charles Payson-awfully sorry to trouble you.” He shook hands with the student, who looked bewildered but nodded politely, as if strange men introduced themselves to him at random moments throughout every day.

“I thought I might bother you. You see, my nephew is here in Lincoln-George Payson-and I thought I’d pop in on him while I was passing through Oxford, you know, but I can’t track him down.”

“Ah,” said the young man, who had brightened at Payson’s name.

“You couldn’t tell me the name of a friend of his, could you? It’d be a favor.”

“I shouldn’t want to give out information that might… well, I don’t know what it might do.”

“No, quite understandable,” said Lenox. He looked up at the sky. “You know, I was at Lincoln too. Great place, isn’t it?” He sounded even to himself like a bluff clubman up from London, the role he had decided he would play. “Games and youth, I mean. Full of promise. Well, please, be on your way. Sorry again to stop you.”

The young man said, “Oh-I suppose it can’t hurt. His uncle, you say? Father’s brother, I guess?”

Lenox nodded.

“Well, they’re a real trio-Payson, Bill Dabney, and Tom Stamp. Dabney and Stamp live in three rooms toward the front of the Grove Quad-by Deep Hall, you may remember, through that old stone stairway.”

Lenox hadn’t the faintest idea of where the place was in Lincoln, but nodded cheerfully. “Beautiful there, ain’t it?” he said, inwardly thinking that perhaps he should have been on the stage. He had already formulated a military history for himself if the conversation somehow wound its way there.

“It is. Good luck finding Payson. Nice chap, your nephew.”

“Cheers,” said Lenox and shook the boy’s hand.

Lenox walked into the college whistling a low tune and contemplating which story he would tell the porter to gain entrance to the college. Luckily, however, the porter’s head was turned toward a student requesting his mail, and Lenox was able to walk into the Front Quad without any trouble. The Grove Quad-a piece of luck-was marked clearly, through the back corridors of the front square, and he followed it with the young second-year’s instructions in mind.

In the Grove Quad there was bright green ivy on the walls and covering even the doors, but he found the right one without too much difficulty and walked up the stairwell. He knocked on the first door he saw. The bleary-eyed student who opened it appeared to have come straight from bed.

“Dabney and Stamp?” Lenox asked.

“Next floor up and to the left,” said the young man and unceremoniously closed the door.

Climbing the stairs, Lenox found the spot easily enough. The door was ajar. He knocked, and a fair-haired young man came forward. The room behind him was a bit of a mess, and from the look of the desk where he had been studying, it was work, not sleep, that made this one bleary-eyed. Still, he seemed pleasant.

“Bill Dabney?” Lenox asked.

“No, I’m Tom Stamp,” he said. “May I ask who you are?”

“Charles Lenox.” They shook hands. “I’m here because I was hoping to have a word with you and your roommate about George Payson.”

“Are you a relation? Something of that sort?”

“No, I’m a detective.”

Tom Stamp blanched. “A detective. Has George gone missing?”

“Why do you ask?” said Lenox sharply.

“Because I haven’t seen Bill or George, either of them, for days. I’m getting pretty damn worried.”

“Have you contacted the police?”

“Not yet.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I have collections-exams, you know-tomorrow morning, and I hadn’t really thought about the lads until a few hours ago. I thought I’d run over to the dean’s office in a little while if they weren’t back.”

“Did you see anything out of the ordinary in Dabney’s room? Any signs that he had left in a rush or even of a struggle?”

“Nothing like that, no. Hang on a sec, though-I did find this.” He motioned for Lenox to follow him into the room and then found a book and took a slip of paper out of it, which he handed over. “Make anything of it?” he said.

Lenox narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. The artifact with which Tom Stamp had presented him seemed to confirm the conclusions he had reached after thinking the case over at Balliol. It was a plain card inscribed with the words THE SEPTEMBER SOCIETY.