Empire

would probably not steal a red-hot stove. When Simon had heard this, he demanded an apology. The congressman complied, with the words “Believe me, I did not say that you would not steal a red-hot stove.”

Hay’s career had seemed at an end when he moved into the Romanesque fortress opposite the White House. But then, as the political dice were again cast and Ohio, yet again, was about to produce a president, the obvious candidate was the state’s governor, one William McKinley, known as the Major-pronounced Maj-ah. A Civil War veteran and longtime member of the House of Representatives, the Major had sworn eternal loyalty to the tariff, the creed of the higher Republicans, and so gained the attention and loyalty of the party’s leaders, the merchant princes. For them, McKinley was immaculate. He was poor-hence, honest; eloquent but without ideas-hence, not dangerous; devoted to I his wife, an epileptic who always sat next to him at table so that when she went into convulsions, he could tactfully throw a napkin over her head and continue his conversation as though nothing had happened; when the convulsions ceased, he would remove the napkin and she would continue her dinner. Although Mrs. McKinley was not entirely an asset as a potential first lady, the fact that she was an “invalid” (and he deeply devoted to her) counted for a great deal in the republic’s numerous sentimental quarters.

Unfortunately, McKinley went bankrupt at the start of the campaign. Out of friendship, he had signed his name to a note, which the friend in question could not redeem, to the amount of $140,000. The McKinley campaign was about to end before it started, giving the election to the so-called boy-orator of the Platte, that fire-breathing populist and enemy of the rich, William Jennings Bryan. As blood would obscure the moon for a generation if Bryan should prevail, McKinley’s campaign manager, a wealthy grocer named Mark Hanna, appealed to a number of other wealthy men, among them Hay, to pay off the note and save the moon from a sanguinary fate. The Major was grateful. Hay, who had been passed over for high diplomatic office by an earlier president because “there was just no politics in appointing him,” now found himself in high favor with the latest Ohio management across the road.

The Major appointed Hay ambassador to the Court of St. James’s; and Hay had arrived in London the year before, accompanied by Henry Adams, whose father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had each held the same post. The ambassadorial party had been met at Southampton by Henry James, who was never seen anywhere near the world of politics or near-politics or even plain celebrity. But there he most loyally was at the customs house, crushed by the international press. After observing Hay’s dexterous handling of the thorny flower of the British press, James had whispered to Hay, in a voice audible to more than a few, “What impression does it make on your mind to have those insects creeping about and saying things to you?”

“I do not know this man,” Hay said with mock severity, getting into his carriage.

“Anyway,” Del had told Caroline, summing up, “the firm of Hay and Adams prospered from the day they moved into their joint house.”

But Caroline had been conscious of an omission. “Weren’t there, to begin with, two couples who were friends?”

“Yes. My father and mother. And Mr. and Mrs. Adams.”

“What became of Mrs. Adams?”

“She died before they could move into the house. She was small and plain. That’s all I remember. People say she was brilliant, even witty, for a woman. She took photographs, and developed them herself. She was very talented. Her name was Marian, but everyone called her Clover.”

“How did she die?”

Del had looked at her, as if uncertain whether or not she was to be trusted-but trusted with what? Caroline had wondered. Surely he knew nothing that others did not know. “She killed herself. She drank some sort of chemical that you use to develop pictures. Mr. Adams found her on the floor. It was a painful death.”

“Why did she do it?” Caroline had asked, but there had been no answer.

As the lunch party began to drift toward the dining room, with its southern exposure of quantities of Kentish Weald, Mrs. Cameron hurried toward John Hay. “He’s come! He says you invited him…”

“Who?” asked Hay.

“Mr. Austin. Our neighbor. Your admirer.”

“Oh, God,” murmured Hay. “He thinks I’m a poet, too.”

“But so triumphantly you were-” began James.

“Tell Mr. Austin there’s been a mistake…”

But there was no telling Mr. Beech, who was now declaiming, “The Poet Laureate of All England and Mrs. Alfred Austin!”

“What joy!” Hay exclaimed so that all could hear and relish. Then he hurried to greet what many believed was the dullest poet in all England.

Caroline sat at table between Del and Henry James. The dining room was easily the most agreeable of the old house’s state apartments, and here Mrs. Cameron presided efficiently over children, young adults, statesmen and- now-a dim poet, wreathed in courtly laurel. “Mr. Austin is under the impression that our friend Hay is the American poet laureate,” said James, doing justice to a quantity of turbot in fresh cream. Across the table a very small Curzon girl sniffled next to a nanny who had apparently invoked an unfair prohibition.

“Father keeps telling Mr. Austin that he hasn’t written a line since…”

Like the low rumbling note of an organ the voice of Henry James began, through a last mouthful of turbot, to intone:

“And I think that saving a little child,

And fetching him to his own,

Is a derned sight better business

Than loafing around The Throne.”

At the quatrain’s end, half the table applauded: Mr. James’s voice was unusually sonorous and compelling.

“I always find that part the most moving,” said the Laureate, “if not theologically tactful.”

“I hate it,” said Hay, who looked most embarrassed.

“I am sure that Dante must have felt the same whenever the Inferno was quoted.” Adams was most amused.

“What on earth is it?” Caroline whispered to Del, but Henry James’s ear was sharp.

“ ‘Little Breeches,’ ” he boomed, “the poignant narrative-nay, epic-of a four-year-old boy saved from the wreckage of some sort of rustic conveyance that was drawn, most perilously, as it proved, by horses, the sort of conveyance, ill-defined, I fear, and of vague utility, what one might term…”

“A wagon?” Caroline contributed.

“Precisely.” James was enjoying himself. The first of several roast fowls had now appeared, further brightening his mood. “The small boy-hardly more than what Adams would call an infant, except to Adams an infant is any unmarried maiden who might be his niece, and this child-Little Breeches,” again the name vibrated in the air and Caroline could see Hay cringe, and even Del cleared his throat, preparatory to drowning out James’s inexorable voice, “-apparently, this small untended rustic person fell from the moving conveyance and was saved by a rustic hero, who deliberately sacrificed his own life for this pair of, as it were, small trousers, or, rather, its contents, and for this noble act, despite a terrestrial life of some untidiness-even sin-he was translated to Paradise.”

“The churches still complain about Father’s poem.” Del was more than ready to change the subject.

“But it sold, as a pamphlet, in the untold millions,” said James, dislodging with a forefinger a morsel of chicken from between his two front teeth. “Like the later and, perhaps, more profound ‘Jim Bludso,’ your father’s most celebrated ballad, the hero of which gave his life to save those of his passengers aboard a-this time nautical-conveyance, the Prairie Belle. Mr. Hay’s fascination with the hazards of American travel was very much the spirit of the seventies. In any event, this steam-propelled barque explodes, if memory serves, in some wild American river, enabling the paragon to give his life for innumerable little breeches, not to mention other garments, including maidenly costumes, all the passengers in short, thus ensuring himself a direct passage to Paradise on the democratic ground-highest of all grounds-that ‘Christ ain’t going to be too hard on a man who died for men.’ ” But this time James dropped his voice dramatically and no one but Caroline heard. To her left, Del was talking to Abigail Adams, one of Henry’s actual nieces, a large plain girl, recently broken out of a