to murder someone. As a steward he would be practically invisible! As himself, he goes to the cloakroom saying he is not feeling well. Once in there he changes into a steward’s jacket, then returns to the pantry, collects a tray and brandy into which he puts the laudanum, serves it to Sir Arthur, saying it is a gift from someone. Then he says that Mr. Hathaway has been taken unwell in the cloakroom and has rung for assistance, so he establishes that Hathaway was in the cloakroom all the time.” Her voice was rising with excitement. “He goes out, changes back into himself, then further to establish that, he leaves directly from the cloakroom. He calls the attendant and has him fetch a hansom and assist him out into it. He has established his own whereabouts, with witnesses, and become invisible long enough to give Sir Arthur a fatal dose of laudanum, virtually unseen. Uncle Eustace, you are brilliant! You have solved it!”
“Thank you.” Eustace blushed scarlet with pleasure and satisfaction. “Thank you, my dear.” For once he was even oblivious of the giggles and words of a group of ladies in an open landau. Then the brilliance of his smile faded a little. “But why? Why should Mr. Hathaway, an eminent official of the Colonial Office, wish to poison Sir Arthur Desmond, an erstwhile eminent official of the Foreign Office?”
“Oh-” She caught her breath. “That is regrettably easy. By a process of deduction, he must be the executioner of the Inner Circle….”
Eustace’s expression froze. “The what? What on earth are you talking about, my dear lady?”
Her face changed. The victory fled out of it, leaving only anger and a terrible sense of loss. It alarmed him to see the fierceness of the emotion in her.
“The executioner of the Inner Circle,” she repeated. “At least one of them. He was detailed to kill Sir Arthur, because-”
“What absolute nonsense!” He was appalled. “The Inner Circle, whose name you should not even know, is a group of gentlemen dedicated to the good of the community, the protection of the values of honor and wise and beneficent rule, and the well-being of everyone.”
“Balderdash!” she retorted vehemently. “The junior new recruits are told that, and no doubt sincerely believe it. You do, Micah Drummond did, until he learned otherwise. But the inner core of it is to gain power and to use it to preserve their own interests.”
“My dear Charlotte …” He attempted to interrupt, but she overrode him.
“Sir Arthur was speaking out against them before he died.”
“But what did he know?” Eustace protested. “Only what he may have imagined.”
“He was a member!”
“Was he? Er …” Eustace was confounded, a worm of doubt creeping into his mind.
“Yes. He found out about their intentions to use the Cecil Rhodes settlement of Africa to gain immense wealth for their own members, and he tried to make it public, but no one would listen to the little he could prove. And before he could say any more, they killed him. That’s what they do to members who betray their covenants. Don’t you know that?”
With a sudden sickening return of memory, Eustace thought of the covenants he had been obliged to make, the oaths of loyalty he had taken. At the time he had thought them rather fun, a great adventure, something like the vigil of Sir Galahad before receiving his spurs, the weaving of good and evil that belongs to high romance, the ordeals of those who dare the great adventures. But what if they had meant them truly? What if they really did mean that the Circle was to come before mother or father, wife or brother or child? What if he had pledged away the right to choose on pain of his life?
She must have seen the fear in his eyes. Suddenly there was gentleness, almost pity, mixed with her anger. Neither of them was even aware of the world around them, the pedestrians who passed within a yard of them on the pavement, or the carriages in the street.
“They count on your secrecy to protect them,” she said more softly. “They count on your not breaking your promises, even when you gave them without being aware what they would lead to, or that you might compromise yourself, and betray what you most believe in, your own honor, in their keeping.” Her expression hardened into contempt and the anger returned. “And of course they also count on fear….”
“Well, I’m not afraid!” he said furiously, turning back towards the steps up into the club. He was too angry to be frightened. They had taken him for a fool, and even worse than that, they had betrayed his belief in them. They had pretended to espouse all the things in which he most dearly believed, honor and openness, candor, high-minded courage, valor to defend the weak, the true spirit of leadership which was the Englishman’s heritage. They had shown him an Arthurian vision, made him believe something of himself, and then they had perverted it into a thing that was soiled, dangerous and ugly. It was an insupportable outrage, and he would not be party to it!
He strode up the steps, hardly aware of Charlotte behind him, swung the doors open and made his way across the foyer without a word to the doorman. He pushed his way through the drawing room doors and accosted the first steward he saw.
“Where is Mr. Hathaway? I know he is here today, so don’t prevaricate with me. Where is he?”
“S-sir, I–I think …”
“Don’t trifle with me, my good man,” Eustace said between his teeth. “Tell me where he is!”
The steward looked at Eustace’s gimlet eyes and rapidly purpling cheeks and decided discretion was definitely the better part of valor.
“In the blue room, sir.”
“Thank you,” Eustace acknowledged him, turning on his heel to march back into the foyer. Only then did he remember he was not sure which way the blue room was. “The blue room?” he demanded of a steward who appeared at the pantry door with a tray held up above his head in one hand.
“To your right, sir,” the steward answered with surprise.
“Good.” Eustace reached the door in half a dozen steps and threw it open. The blue room might once have lived up to its name, but now it was faded to a genteel gray, the heavy curtains blue only in the folds away from the sunlight which streamed in from four long, high windows looking onto the street. Through the decades the brilliance had bleached out of the carpet also, leaving it pink and gray and a green so soft as to be almost no color at all. Portraits of distinguished members from the past decorated the walls in discreet tones of sepia and umber, many of them from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In some the whiteness of a powdered wig was the only distinguishable feature.
Eustace had not been in here before. It was a room reserved for senior members, one of which he only aspired to be.
Hathaway was sitting in a large leather armchair reading the
Eustace was too enraged even to consider the impropriety of what he was doing. Greater decencies had been blasphemed against. No one was going to be permitted to hide behind the conventions of a gentleman’s club. He stopped in front of Hathaway’s chair, put his hands on the
Every head in the room looked up at the noise. A whiskered general snorted with offense. A banker cleared his throat ostentatiously. A member of the House of Lords (who actually attended now and then) put down his glass in amazement. A bishop dropped his cigar.
Hathaway looked up at Eustace with considerable surprise.
“I am making a citizen’s arrest,” Eustace announced grimly.
“I say, old chap …” the banker began.
“Somebody robbed you, old boy?” the bishop asked mildly. “Pickpocket, what? Cutpurse?”
“Bit high-handed, taking a fellow’s newspaper,” the earl said, regarding Eustace with disfavor.
Hathaway was perfectly composed. He sat quite still in the chair, ignoring the wreck of his paper.
“What is it that has disturbed you so much, my dear fellow?” he said very slowly. At another time Eustace might not have noticed the hard, unflinching quality of his eyes, but all his senses were sharpened by his outrage. Now he felt almost as if Hathaway might offer him physical violence, and he was poised, ready to react, even to welcome it.
“Yes I have been robbed,” he said fiercely. “Of trust, of … of …” He did not know how to express the feeling he had of having been used, insulted, then suddenly it came to him in a rush of words fraught with pain. “I have been robbed of my belief in my fellows, of those I admired and honored, even aspired to be like! That’s what you’ve taken. You’ve destroyed it, betrayed it.”
“My dear fellow!” the banker protested, rising to his feet. “You are overemotional. Sit down and calm
