occasional splash of red.
This was also a time when the symbolism of flowers was in great vogue, and all the young girls carried bouquets with private meanings. Violets meant modesty, and the girls with violets tended to look rather pinched and censorious; ivy meant fidelity, and the girls with ivy looked very happy; forget-me-nots meant truest love, and these girls looked the happiest. They all had pocket dictionaries of these meanings, and when two lovers had different dictionaries, flowers were often thrown tearfully into some poor man’s chest, to be followed by explanation and reconciliation.
For the fun of it, Lenox had once asked Toto what his favorite flowers meant, and she had very excitedly scanned her book. “Snowdrops,” she had said. “Hope, or consolation.”
Dinner was served.
Lenox, like all Harrovians since time immemorial, had been forced to read
Barnard had not elected to serve such exotic fare, but his banquet was no less complete. There were to be a dozen courses, and in due time they arrived: warm onion soup, bubbling with cheese; delicate strips of hare with cranberry sauce; roasted chicken and a blood gravy; plain English mutton under a blanket of peas and onions; a broiled beefsteak in pastry; a light salad of pears and walnuts; sliced apples dipped in chocolate; a towering white cake decorated with whipped cream; a plate of thinly sliced cheese; a bowl of chestnuts and walnuts; and, last, coffee—all accompanied by what Lenox had to acknowledge was a remarkably good selection of wines, from champagne to German summer wine to dark claret to a light Bordeaux. It was the sort of supper that people would talk about for quite a long time—just as Barnard intended.
Lenox sat with a group of men and women he knew, though McConnell was far to his left and Lady Jane far to his right—two seats to the left of Barnard himself, in fact. Lenox spoke for most of the night with James Hilary, a young politician barely out of his twenties, and Lord Cabot, his old friend, who was too busy eating to be truly coherent but who uttered, from time to time, some authoritative word on whatever subject was at hand.
Hilary was a good sort. He was one of the people who had been working with the Royal Academy to ban certain poisons, and while Lenox couldn’t get anything from him on that subject he spoke very fluently about Parliament.
“I expect our side will be in the ascendancy for some time, Mr. Lenox,” he said, during the fifth course.
“Do you now?” asked Lenox. “Why?”
“As fewer boroughs become rotten, and the number of people who vote their conscience increases, we must by necessity grow. We are the party of the public. It was more difficult to be so when the public had trouble voting for us, because Lord So-and-so of So-and-so decreed otherwise. No offense, Lord Cabot.”
“None taken,” Lord Cabot said.
“You may be right,” said Lenox.
“I was speaking with Eustace Bramwell before dinner—a most ardent conservative, belongs to my club—and even he acknowledged it.”
“You belong to the Jumpers?”
“Yes, indeed, Mr. Lenox. But how would you know the Jumpers?”
Lenox laughed. “Do you mean because I’m so old? I still hear of things, now and then. How well do you know young Bramwell?”
Hilary had laughed too, good-naturedly. “Not well. He and his cousin Claude are rather friends, sometimes thick as thieves, and they belong to the half of the club I don’t know much about. Just as in Parliament, however, I expect my half of the club will eventually outlast.”
Lord Cabot here made one of his rare comments. “Damn silly club, if you’ll excuse me saying, Hilary. Don’t see why you can’t come to the Travelers more. Your father does.”
“We’ve got good food and good fellows at the Jumpers,” said Hilary. “But I do come to the Travelers, now and then. I’ve got a constituency to work for, though. And to be honest, I feel a bit rubbish that my five hundred miles were only to Germany, when both of you pop round to Jupiter every few years.”
He laughed again, and so did Lenox and Cabot, and the conversation, intertwined with the food and the wine, floated along.
All through this chatter, however, Lenox kept his eye on the residents of the Barnard house. Sir Edmund had been invited only to the ball, not to the dinner—it was thought likely that he would decline the invitation altogether based on his neglect of prior invitations—and Lenox couldn’t very well pull McConnell away from his seat, so he was forced to observe the men he suspected on his own, and increasingly his attention was devoted to Soames, down at Barnard’s end of the table.
Soames, unfortunately, was quite flushed and appeared to be drinking too much and eating too little. His dinner jacket was ill-fitting, or perhaps had merely been hastily donned, for he was usually a well-dressed man. His discomfort seemed to be palpable, and he only spoke intermittently, Lenox noticed, without truly entering any of the conversations around him.
It had taken two hours—and an effort akin to rowing ten miles—to go through all the courses, but at last people put their forks aside, took their final sips of water and wine, and began to light their cigarettes and wander into the maze of drawing rooms that surrounded the ballroom. Only then could Lenox pull Mc-Connell aside and say to him, “Keep an eye on Potts and Duff if you can, Duff especially,” before the two men joined Lady Jane and Toto, who were waiting intently to begin dancing.
Just as the band began to play, however, Barnard himself approached Lady Jane and to their quiet amusement asked her to have the opening dance with him. She could not but agree and Lenox was left to the side, where he smoked a cigarette and watched his friends dancing and, with slightly more focus, also watched Soames walking unsteadily around the room.
Chapter 32
Supper had lasted until nine, and the ball had commenced an hour later. It was now eleven, and the chatter on the couches and the clack of shoes on the dance floor were growing steadily louder, as the flow of guests into the party reached its crest. Sir Edmund had come, looking not altogether disheveled, and Lenox had set him the task of watching the two nephews, Eustace and Claude.
Lenox had originally intended to watch Claude himself, but he had begun to feel more strongly by the moment that the murderer was Soames. Thus he devoted his entire attention to his prime suspect. He must have murdered Prue Smith, Lenox thought, because she had tripped over him while he was angling after the gold—and while she couldn’t know what it was, he would have been on edge and more likely to overreact. In particular because this would be his first time, really, as a criminal. How had he cadged an invitation to stay with Barnard?
Soames was dancing with a succession of women, but he had grown redder and drunker and visibly less in control of himself, and after a last waltz he had sought rest at one side of the ballroom and taken a glass of champagne to cool himself.
Lady Jane and Lenox stood on the other side of the ballroom. They had just finished a dance together.
“What was that business with Barnard?” Lenox asked, with an eye on Soames.
“Strange, wasn’t it?”
“There are probably worse things than dancing with Barnard, but at the moment I can’t think of them.”
“Don’t be mean,” Lady Jane said. “I suppose he needed a woman and saw that I met that description, in some modest way.”
“You look lovely.”
“Thank you, Charles.”
“Have you danced with Edmund?”
“Of course! Not half so much twirling as you frightened me with, although he stepped on my foot once. I think he was trying to spy on somebody.”
