excellent but not much given to innovation.
He smiled. “Sandwiches will be fine.”
“I’ll go out for luncheon, then, if you don’t mind. Duch invited me to come around. We’re planning the Christmas ball.” Lady Jane, rather more than Lenox, was one of the arbiters of Mayfair society, much sought after.
“I shan’t see you for supper, either.”
“Dallington?”
“Yes. But we’ll put Sophie into bed together?”
She smiled, then stood on her toes to kiss his cheek. “Of course. Good-bye, my dear.”
He stopped her with a hand on the arm, and leaned down to give her a kiss in return. “Until this evening,” he said, his heart full of happiness, as so often it was these days.
After she had gone downstairs to arrange his lunch with the butler and the cook, Lenox remained in the hall, where he opened his letter. It was from his uncle Frederick, a relation of Lenox’s late mother.
Dear Charles,
Please consider this a formal invitation to come down for a week or two, with Jane of course and the new Lenox; I very much want to meet her. The garden is in fine shape, and then, Fripp is very anxious to have you for the cricket, which takes place Saturday week. I haven’t seen you in more than a year, you know.
Yours with affection &c,
Frederick Ponsonby
Postscript: To sweeten the pot, shall I mention that in town, recently, there have been a series of strange vandalisms? The police cannot make head or tail of them and so everyone is in great stir. Perhaps you might lend a hand.
Lenox smiled. He was fond of his uncle, an eccentric man, retiring and very devoted to his small, ancient country house, which lay just by a village. Since the age of four or five Lenox had gone there once a year, usually for a fortnight, though it was true that the stretches between visits had gotten longer more recently, as life had grown busier. Still, there was no way he could leave London just at this moment, with so many political matters hanging in the balance. He tucked the note into his jacket pocket and turned back to his study.
Ah, but he had forgotten: Sophie! With soft steps he bounded up the stairs, past a maid carrying a coal scuttle, and toward the nursery.
The child’s nursemaid, Miss Taylor, sat in a chair in the hall outside it, reading. She was a brilliant young woman, accomplished in drawing and French — both useless to the infant at the moment, but fine endowments nevertheless — who had a reputation as the most capable nursemaid in London. She cared for a new child every year or so, always infants. Jane had acquired this marvel for them, at great expense, to Lenox’s derision — yet he had to admit that she was wonderful with Sophie, with a gentle comprehension and tolerance for even the child’s worst moods. Despite her relative callowness — she was perhaps two and thirty, though her complexion retained to an unusual degree the bloom of youth — Miss Taylor was an imperious figure; they both lived in frank terror of offending her. Still, she was used to Lenox’s frequent interruptions and indulged them with less severity now than she had at first.
“Only for a moment, please,” she whispered.
“Of course,” he said.
He went into the room and crossed the soft carpet as quietly as he could. He leaned over the child’s crib and with a great upsurge of love and joy looked down upon her. Such a miracle! Her serenely sleeping face, rather pink and sweaty at the moment, her haphazard blond curls, her little balled-up fists, her skin as smooth and pure as still water when you touched it, as he did now, with the back of his fingers.
It was joy beyond anything he had ever known.
CHAPTER TWO
The light rain of the afternoon had thickened into a torrent by the evening. It emptied the streets of London, and even up close the streetlamps, paced fifty feet apart along the pavement, were no more than shrouded yellow smudges against the darkness, while the buildings of Pall Mall loomed above like great, lightless cliffs. As for the driver of Lenox’s carriage, he and his horses alike were soaked to the bone — though upon closer inspection one could in the dimness around the driver’s face perceive a small dot of orange, growing faint and then brightening every so often: his inextinguishable cigar.
He didn’t remove it to call down. “Here we are, sir.”
“Thank you kindly,” Lenox answered and climbed out of the carriage.
It was a short, wet walk into his destination, Brooks’s, one of the gentlemen’s clubs along Pall Mall. Lenox was not a member here, preferring the less erratic and more civilized air of the Athenaeum or the Reform nearby. Certainly the average member of Brooks’s was quite highly born — royalty were upon its rolls — but they were also almost uniformly wild men, who gambled at cards for days and nights on ends, jousted with cues across the snooker table, and placed with each other the oddest sorts of bets in the infamous club book. This lay open on a marble plinth in the warm, comfortably carpeted entry hall where Lenox stood now; the entry that caught his eye read:
Mr. Berkeley pays five guineas to Lord Erskine, to receive five hundred should he successfully entice an unclothed woman of good birth into a hot air balloon, which must then attain no less a height than one thousand feet.
“Oh, dear,” said Lenox to himself.
“There you are!”
Lenox turned and saw his companion for the evening, Lord John Dallington, coming down the club’s grand staircase. He was a handsome, compact man of perhaps twenty-seven or twenty-eight, wearing a black velvet blazer with a carnation affixed to its buttonhole.
“Hello, John,” Lenox said.
“Have you been peeking into the club book?”
“No — or rather—”
“Good. There’s a bet I have with Ollie Pendleton which I don’t think you ought to know about — all on the up and up, I swear. It’s to do with stealing a certain horse from a certain stable. Damned impudence to call a lock unbreakable — sheer hubris — but never mind, it’s neither here nor there. Come along, let’s go up, I’ve reserved us the small room by the library. The wine is open.”
Lenox smiled. “Cork it again, then — I have too much work to feel mutton-headed in the morning, these days. Not to mention a daughter.”
“How is she, then? Happy, healthy? And Lady Jane?”
“They’re flourishing, thank you.”
“I’m glad you’ve been able to get away, nevertheless. I’ve got a tricky one this week.”
Lenox felt a quickening of anticipation. “Oh?”
“It’s a poisoning in Belsize Park.”
“Have I read about it?”
Dallington, climbing a step ahead of him, shook his head. “It hasn’t made the papers yet, because the chap who was poisoned is hanging on to life like a limpet. He’s comatose, unfortunately, which means he’s roughly as communicative as one too, ha, ha.”
Lenox and Dallington sat down to supper once a week when both were in town, always at Brooks’s. It was a strange and unexpected relationship. For many years Lenox had heard of the younger man only distantly, the disappointing youngest son of one of Lady Jane’s closest friends. Dallington had been sent down from Cambridge under a cloud of angry rumor, and after that had proceeded to investigate every alehouse, gambling pit, and gin
