Ah, how it hurt! The walk home after his conversation with the maid was one of the purest desolation. Never, not in the most cheerless depths of adolescence, had he felt this strange kind of living grief.
He tortured himself, of course, with images of how he had danced with Kitty, conversed with her—of that sublime moment when they had held hands and so nearly kissed.
In the days that followed he walked by her house in a state of alternating panic and self-pity and nausea, debating whether to speak to her.
In the event he returned just once more, that Thursday. He had planned to stay but briefly, yet he found that he couldn’t pull himself away from the woman to whom his heart belonged. He simply stared at her much of the time, quite unable to sustain a conversation.
Rather than condoling with him, she seemed more distant than usual. Lenox spent all weekend debating whether to propose—a great fell action, sure to sweep her off her feet he thought—and then debating with himself how to do it, and then going back to whether to do it again, walking the streets, barely eating, seeing no one, no doubt wild-looking, his footsteps taking him unintentionally by Eaton Square.
At last he resolved that he would say his piece. He would ask her—he could not live without asking her.
But the engagement between Miss Ashbrook and Lord Cormorant was announced in the papers on the very next Monday morning.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
One day in 1686, a coffeehouse in London, popular with sea captains and ship’s outfitters seeking the latest maritime news, offered a small insurance policy for a voyage. Eventually, after numerous steps along the way, it became the most significant insurer of slave ships in the world. It kept the name of its coffeehouse days, however: Lloyd’s of London.
There was thus a peculiar aptness to the fact that it was Lloyd’s that had insured a Plymouth clipper ship called the Melodia that sank in the Atlantic that March after an explosion in the engine room, with all passengers aboard. One of these was Wilton Sheridan.
His departure had been the result of some compromise whose lineaments Lenox could only hazily discern—family connections, careful inquiries at court, a promise never to return to London. The American embassy was furious that he had been permitted to leave without a trial. Yet England was England.
It meant that only Samuel Jonas remained to answer for the deaths of Abram Tiptree, Eli Gilman, and Winfield Bell. After a bit of wriggling, the papers were satisfied: a single focus for their righteous anger. As for Lenox, he was unsure where the blame began and ended.
He was also preoccupied. The last weeks of February had been difficult. As he never had before, he woke up in the middle of the night from strange dreams—once one in which he and Kitty were married and living on a tropical island, often one in which he owed a man in an unfamiliar city money, and was looking everywhere to find him, but could not.
After these confused dreams he would stand by his window and stare into the night, his mind groping after something it couldn’t articulate, as if by speaking the right word he might retrieve the promise of those blissful weeks when he had been in love.
“I wish you could have met him,” he told Lady Jane one day.
The sun was just peeking through the clouds, and they were sitting in her parlor, having coffee and chocolate late in the morning.
“Lord Cormorant? I’ve no need to.”
“He was as dense as a fig pudding.”
“One of your own favorite desserts.”
“I just don’t understand how she could have chosen him.”
Lady Jane had been a sympathetic listener to Lenox, whose complaints he knew were unmanly, wrong, the laments of a fellow with no pluck—but couldn’t help.
She had rarely spoken to him directly about Kitty Ashbrook, however. Now she did.
“It’s my fault,” she said.
“Of course it’s not.”
“I encouraged you.” She looked grave. “Yet I confess I understand her position.”
“Do you? I wish you would enlighten me.”
She rose from the sofa where she was seated and went to the window, which framed her prettily, in her soft pink dress, a few wisps of her upswept brown hair falling across the nape of her neck.
“She will be called Lady Cormorant for the rest of her life,” Jane said thoughtfully. “Her place in society is permanently secure.”
“And mine is not?”
“You well know that it is. Yet for a woman … you have never understood this, Charles We get but one chance. I’ve no doubt she’ll regret you all her life—what you were to her. Yet she will know as well that she had one chance and made the safe decision.”
“Safe! A life of enduring that—”
“Anything at all might happen to you between now and the age of fifty, Charles. You might become fat, or eccentric—more eccentric than you already are for being a detective—or prove cruel.”
“A grim forecast.”
“When Cormorant is fifty all of that may have happened to him, too. But his eldest son will still be a lord. She will be the mother of lords and ladies.”
“She has not made a decision that guarantees her happiness. Is happiness not the safe decision?”
Lady Jane looked at him as schoolteachers sometimes had, in the distant past, as if the gap in their knowledge were so wide that it was vaguely wondrous.
“Not for a woman,” she said.
“She would not have starved with me.”
“You might have been shot. Even as you were courting her, in fact, your life was under threat.”
“She didn’t know that.”
“Of course she did. Do you think that the happenings at the Carlton Club are a secret? That your actions are a secret?”
Lenox had, in fact. It was curious to learn that they were not. “I did.”
“No. On the contrary, you are one of the most fascinating subjects of the drawing rooms of our London—a dashing adventurer, a bumbling fool. Half the men who cut you are probably jealous of you.”
Some part of him glowed, knowing this. He had never even thought of it. But he kept that secret. “Cormorant, though.”
“She chose the option with the least risk of unhappiness, and the least chance of real happiness. You ought to pity her the slenderness of those options before you judge her.”
“I do not judge her,” said Lenox.
“In your heart I think you may.”
He looked at the gold box on his desk. “Yes, perhaps. But Jane, over Christmas she sent me a letter, a … and in return I loved her. I believe I may still.”
“Can you still not understand that she may have loved you in return, Charles? She was not untrue to you—only to herself. And she will know that more fully than you ever could.”
It took several days, but this conversation brought some reconciliation to his memories of Kitty Ashbrook. As the first signs of spring appeared, he was renewed; rather than barricading himself in his study, he started to venture out to social events again.
But without the same faith. It had been a consequential passage of time, this. When it began he had believed in love, and he had believed that people were basically decent. Now, a survivor of lost love and an auditor of some of the most terrible stories of slavery he had heard, he was sure of neither.
It must have told in his manner, for more than one person commented that he seemed more reserved now, and his mother, when she visited, observed in a stray moment that she thought he seemed to have passed into adulthood.
Then adulthood could keep itself, he thought. But he had not said it.
On the other hand, he felt a dawning faith in his abilities as a detective. He was more mature because of this time, more methodically careful. He had always been careful—but in bursts, just as long as it was exciting to be careful. It had changed him to overhear his own death discussed. He had missed too much in this case—hadn’t interviewed Lady Elaine, just to give one example, or considered the incongruity of the missing label
s in Gilman’s clothes and the white horse.
Meeting Cobb had changed him, too, in this regard. Observing the American’s work at close hand, Lenox had decided it was time for new habits. He dined out less. He spent more time reading, more time learning London’s geography and history by heart, more time studying old crimes for echoes between seemingly disparate cases. Most happily, for Lenox, his warm exchange of letters with Cobb continued—transformed, now, into a series of gentle sparring matches over how to investigate a murder, where to start and whom to suspect. It was a subject whose study was shamefully lacking.
After brooding about it for a long time, he spoke at last with his mother about her wish that he leave his career. It turned out to be one of those long misunderstandings resolved in a few seconds: She had never doubted his abilities, she said, only feared for his safety. Was that not a mother’s prerogative? Duty, in fact? He understood when she explained it—and after taking it so hard! What a fool. Still, this conversation, also, made him vow to himself to take his career as seriously as he could. If his mother must suffer worry on his behalf, let it be for a cause to which he had not given himself in part but in full.
It was as if the world noticed. He had never been busier than he became that March, cases flying at him so quickly that he had to turn several down.
On the other hand, Sir Richard Mayne was finished with him. Cordial, still, certainly—and perhaps a friend to call on in an hour of real need. But otherwise their relationship was severed. Lenox had elected to stay outside of the Yard, and the meet rejoinder to this was for the Yard to respond in kind.
Lenox tried to make up for it by befriending more constables and keeping his ear to the ground. He discovered the power of pure listening, attentive listening. Nearly everyone on earth wanted to talk about themselves, he began to perceive. Even—perhaps especially—criminals.
Yet it was not any of these subtle alterations that truly marked the end of the period of Lenox’s life that he might have called youth. The event that did that was much a starker one. Afterward, he would have traded all he had to return to the time before it.
It came on a day in March of the kind that almost made one believe summer might come again. A few hardy green shoots had emerged from the ground. The air was clear and pure, as gentle as it could be in the smoky city.
Lenox was returning from Parliament. He had dined with his brother there, and now was ambling slowly up Hampden Lane.
Initially, from a distance, he thought the group of men he saw in a doorway was at his door. Had something happened to Jonas? Only after advancing another twenty feet or so did he make out that in fact they were at Lady Jane’s house, not his.
His first reaction was to wonder if Deere had returned early, and for a moment he saw, as if in a Gainsborough portrait, Deere and Lady Jane, with the two dogs that the gamekeeper at his ancestral home was keeping careful watch over. He would be so delighted to have them—never a man that loved a dog near his side more than Lord Deere.
It was only when he was fifteen or so feet away that Lenox saw he had misread the situation.
There were four men in military uniform on Jane’s step. One, who stood forward of the others, had white hair, a white mustache, and three stripes on his shoulder. He was a general.
Another—very handsome—was Catlett, whose place Deere had taken in India.
Lenox realized that his friend must have been wounded there. Perhaps even quite badly. He started moving more quickly. Only when he had come close enough to see Lady Jane’s face, unmoving, utterly white, yet her expression one of a self-control so rigid that to lose it must mean an equally powerful frenzy, did he realize that Lord Deere was not wounded but dead.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
The Bishop of Kent was speaking—and, like all Bishops of Kent, expected his audience to be rapt and respectful. “Do you know St. Augustine, young man?”
But he had chosen an unfortunate interlocutor to whom to impart this information: Lenox’s young cousin Lancelot, who was probably the worst-behaved boy currently serving time at Eton College.
“No, thank goodness,” said Lancelot. “Why, where does he live?”
Bishops were made of pretty rugged self-regard, and this one, before whom powerful men of religion cowered, carried on without noticing the reply. “St. Augustine began to convert England to the true religion, Christ’s religion, in the year 597 after his birth.”
“What, St. Augustine’s!” said Lancelot in amazement.
“No!” said the bishop, looking down with annoyance for the first time. “Christ’s! How could St. Augustine have converted people nearly six hundred years after his own death?”
“He’s a saint, Father, they can do all sorts of things— You mustn’t—”
“Don’t call me Father.”
“Oh, sorry.”
The bishop was not to be put off. “Do you know where St. Augustine chose to start his mission?”
The boy frowned. “Oxford, probably. The answer is almost always Oxford.”
“Canterbury.”
“Oh.” Lancelot received this contradiction with complete indifference. “I say, is there a saint who did live for six hundred years?”
“No.”
“One of them ought to try.”
Now, for the first time, Lancelot had the bishop’s undivided attention. “What on earth do you mean, try?”
“Bit lazy, if you ask me, to live for seventy years. If you’re a saint, I mean, you ought to stick around and do your bit.”
“I can assure you that St. Augustine ‘did his bit.’”
“It sounds as if he wandered about Canterbury telling people about Christ from time to time. The curate at school does that.”
“You are wholly incorrect. The very pilgrims in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are on their mission in tribute to him.”
“Well, fine, that’s topping of them. Very decent. I’d have chosen Brighton. But fair play.”
Lenox looked at Lady Jane, who was watching the conversation alongside him. “This is the worst party you have ever thrown,” he said.
Though she did not laugh, she did smile. “It was short notice,” she said, and moved away without waiting for a reply.
For two weeks she had seen almost no one, except, strangely, for Lady Molly Lenox, Edmund’s wife and Charles’s sister-in-law. That included Lenox himself; he had not seen her until today.
He had written her a long letter, more than ten pages, describing his affection and his many memories of Deere, and entrusted it to Molly. If he had to guess, it probably lay upstairs on a bureau, unopened.
Now it was the day of the funeral, and Lady Jane’s strength was worse to him than any display of emotion could have been.
She wore all black, the attire known, rather unpardonably, as widow’s weeds. To Lenox the phrase had always conjured images of a lady emerging from a lake, covered in grasses—until at Oxford he had learned the Old English word waed, or garment, and the long tradition of wearing black upon the death of a loved one.
Everything was black here. The servants wore black suits, with black armbands. The bishop’s robe was black, Lancelot’s suit. There was black crêpe over the door knocker.
For a year and a day, Lady Jane would wear black. She could socialize after that period was over, if she wished, and add dark, subtle colors to her dress—lilac, lavender. Her mourning would only truly be finished after two years.
Or never. Lenox knew his friend, and as he watched her move among her guests, paying special care to Deere’s young, bewildered brother—suddenly an earl and in a way an orphan for a second time—everything in her actions graceful and easy, dispelling the awkwardness other people felt in consoling her, he saw the abyssal depths of her pain; knew by instinct that she was relying on nothing at all but muscle memory, like a great Athenian runner in the last mile of a race, out of oxygen, far past the last stages of conscious action, legs moving only because that was what legs did. No part of her was alive today
; not while her husband lay in a grave.
Lenox had no idea whether this would ever change. He had spent hours discussing it with Edmund. They agreed that the best thing he could do was to be the most reliable friend she had—to cultivate amnesia about the past, to be quiet when she needed quiet, talkative when she needed talk, present when she needed company, absent when she needed solitude.
As the afternoon wore on, there were tears all over the room, many of them shed by men who were not accustomed to crying. But it was such a devastating loss, a man so young, his life before him, loved by all, happy in his young marriage—gone because a bullet fired during a meaningless skirmish happened to strike him directly in the chest.
Lenox did not want to be among the last people there. He was sure that it would put too much pressure on Lady Jane if he were; they knew each other too well for the dishonesty this kind of day required, upon which it gently rested.
“Lady Jane,” he said, at just past three o’clock, “I think I had better take Lancelot back before he brings out his peashooter. He didn’t like the bishop.”
She smiled. “Just feed him a cream tea. Boys are very easy.”
“I am always next door, you know—and frequently bored, and almost never asleep.”
“I know, Charles,” she said. “Thank you for being such a good friend to James. He loved you.”
“He was the best of men.”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s true.”
In the weeks that followed, Lady Jane did something strange; she arrogated to her use (as was her absolute right, in the circumstances) all of the people who usually surrounded Lenox.
First it was Mrs. Huggins, who went over one afternoon to fix tea because Lady Jane’s maid was ill, and ended up with a bedroom at that house; then it was Graham, who took on the duties of a second butler. Lady Molly remained a constant visitor, soon along with Edmund. Only Charles was not invited.
The Last Passenger - A Prequel Page 25