attitude would have been sharper.
Lenox felt cruelly disappointed. The odds had lengthened against them again. He and Symes had both done badly, very badly. The next batsmen worked hard, getting out for twenty-six and thirty-one, but that great number, two seventy-seven, seemed far away still. They had barely cleared two hundred runs, and it was getting on toward dark.
Soon the eighth batsman had gone up, and despite a couple of booming sixes, been retired relatively quickly. Lenox, somewhat recovered, looked at his uncle, who was deep in conversation with the curate, fifteen paces off.
“Freddie!” he called out.
“Oh, dear,” said the squire, after he had turned and assessed the situation. “I suppose I had better go up, Mr. Lanchester.”
The team cheered him, dutifully, but there was a feeling of defeat along the bench. Frederick walked toward the box, plump and unhurried, waved a friendly hand at Millington, stood, waiting for the ball — and when it came immediately and with great authority cracked it wide and right, for two fast runs.
This drew a murmur of surprise in the crowd, and from opposite ends of their bench, Fripp and Lenox caught each other’s eyes and smiled; they knew, or at least had suspected, for age’s ravages are unpredictable, something that the others didn’t, that perhaps only a few of the older men and women in the crowds could recall.
It was this: that Freddie with a bat in his hand was a man reborn. He grew taller, surer. Lenox had to admit that his swing was slightly different — now the squire had a way of curving the arc of his bat around his paunch that was unlike his old batting style, but it was just as graceful, just as effective. He smacked ball after ball for a run, two runs, a run, rarely hitting one for four or six but never, ever looking in danger of getting out, either.
In fact, once he had swung a second time, proving that his first attempt was not a fluke, the outcome of the match never seemed in doubt. The men of the King’s Arms tried to gee each other up, shouting encouragement, telling the bowler that it was an easy one, but even to them it was as plain as day: Freddie wasn’t going to make an out anytime soon. Twenty minutes later, the light still not quite faded, his face red but grinning, he stroked a calm single, and had posted the forty-four runs—“the famous forty-four,” as Fripp and his friends at the pub would come to call them — that the Royal Oak needed to win.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
When do you imagine we shall return to London?” asked Lady Jane, late that evening.
“It has been on my mind, too,” said Lenox. “The speech is a week from today and I still need Graham to read it, as useful as the notes you gave me were.”
He was exhausted. The celebrations at the Royal Oak — attendance mandatory, Fripp insisted — would go on all night, but for he and Freddie an hour there, after a long day in the sun, had been enough to drive them home, amid good-spirited jesting about their lack of vigor. Freddie, of course, had been the real hero of the hour. The men of the King’s Arms had lined up to shake his hand after the match. The blacksmith had offered him a pint at a time of his choosing, which Freddie, whose loyalty to the Oak was strong only in matters of cricket, generously suggested that they might take at the KA. There had been more tea, more sandwiches, after that, in the pavilion. Only Lady Jane remembered Lenox’s failure, squeezing his arm and smiling when she saw him.
“For my part, I could stay a while longer,” she said. “Sophia rather enjoys it.”
“I’ll send a telegram to my brother in the morning and ask when he thinks I should return. It needs at least three or four days of preparation, the speech. I shall have to run it by one or two of the ministers.”
“Must you?”
“Can’t be avoided,” he said.
“Mm,” she said. She was sewing something or other.
He was sitting by the window, warm in his quilted red evening jacket, smoking and gazing out at Everley’s gardens under the moonlight. His eyes felt pleasantly heavy, his skin pleasantly warm. Parliament seemed a very long way off; though metropolitan to his bones, he understood at least to some degree why his brother always felt vexed at being in the city, away from Sussex and Lenox House.
“Perhaps a few more nights,” he said. “They cannot positively expect me before the Monday. And then I am curious to see Wells one last time.”
“And the funeral tomorrow.”
“Yes,” said Lenox.
In the morning he was dreadfully stiff in his arms and legs from his few exertions, and realized that it was a piece of luck that he had been caught out so quickly. He dressed himself gingerly.
The funeral was at St. Stephen’s, which was jammed with townspeople. Frederick had a pew, but he had given it over to Weston’s closest cousins, so that they might be near the front. All of the Somerset superstitions were in place: the clocks had been stopped at two o’clock, as close as possible to the time when Weston had died as they could guess; there were boxwood wreaths and candles lining the walls of the church; and along the pews were laid funeral cakes, wrapped in butcher’s paper and sealed with black wax.
As they were finding their seats, Lenox said to Lady Jane, “Did you know they consider it bad luck, in Plumbley, to wear anything new to a funeral? Hats in particular. Funny.”
“Of course, in Sussex they think that everything means you’re about to die — an owl in the daytime, the smell of roses when there aren’t roses nearby, the wrong fold in clean linen.”
He smiled. “I had forgotten one or two of those.”
The vicar Marsham gave young Weston an admirable eulogy, and it was Oates who stood by the door afterward, dressed in black and with a black armband, shaking the hands of people who left — walking out, in fact, to the very green where Weston had met his murderer. At the graveyard just by the church door was an open rectangle of earth, tidily excavated.
As the casket came out of the church (feet forward, always) it began gently to rain. There was a murmur of happiness among the guests at that: For it was thought to mean that Weston was in heaven, as promising an omen as rain on a wedding day.
When the funeral was over Lenox shook Oates’s hand, met Weston’s aunts and cousins, and then, with Frederick, Dallington, and Jane — Sophia and Miss Taylor having stayed at home, of course — said good-bye and returned to Everley.
That afternoon he sat in the great library, poring over his speech, slicing apart certain paragraphs to see where they were soft, tightening, tightening. After a few hours he stood up, suddenly sick of seeing these particular words in this particular order. It was a sure sign that he needed a fresh set of eyes.
The teatime post brought two letters to divert him.
The first was from Edmund, and had anticipated his telegram of that morning. It filled him in on the news from London, and added that Lenox had better come back Sunday evening or Monday morning, both to meet with the cabinet ministers who would like to check that the speech gave no ammunition to the other side, and — though it was unfortunate — to be seen in London. A retreat was one thing, invisibility another.
Still, that gave them three nights more in Everley. At tea he mentioned as much to Frederick, who had spent the past hours showing the governess his flowers between spells of rain. Both of them were full of chatter about what they had seen — apparently there was a budding yew tree they both found especially fine — but Frederick was brought up short by Lenox’s news.
“I had hoped you might stay longer,” he said.
“We shall return soon.”
“I’ve no doubt of it,” said the squire stoutly. “Come any time.”
His expression troubled Lenox.
After they took their tea Lenox motioned to Dallington. “Come through to the library. I’ve a letter from Thomas, you can hear the news if you don’t mind watching me read.”
“With pleasure. Did I mention, by the way, that I had word from Bath just before tea?”
They were walking along a dim corridor now, oak-walled and lined with paintings. “No. What’s happened?”
