A Death in the Small Hours clm-6

by Charles Finch

  Lenox lingered in the hallway reading Cornhill after Eastwood had gone to Frederick’s study, waiting for the doctor to come out. As he was waiting the third and fourth visitors arrived. The bell rang and Lenox, being nearby, went to the door, but found that Nash had hurried, indeed rather pushed, beyond him, giving a soft exasperated sigh at Lenox’s infringement upon his rightful terrain.

  Nash stepped backward to admit the visitors. “Mr.—”

  He needn’t have said a word, though, for Lenox could have spotted the two gentlemen from a Somerset mile off. “Edmund! And Graham! What on earth are you two doing here!”

  Edmund laughed, taking off his hat, handing over his cane and cloak to the butler. “The cavalry has arrived, Charles. We cannot have you getting knocked on the head and missing out on your speech and going into pistol fights with bit fakers. It won’t do. And Graham has been pining to see the text you’ve drafted; he won’t stop complaining.”

  One look at Graham’s silent, smiling face showed that there was some truth in this. Lenox shook his hand, thrilled to see his old butler, now his political secretary — indeed one of the savviest political secretaries in the Commons, despite the handicap of his birth, as most such jobs went to recent graduates of the great public schools, sometimes even one of the two universities.

  “It’s true,” he said, “I am desperate to see it, after the prime minister himself stopped me in the halls yesterday to ask about your progress.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  It is the commonest observation in the world that a week can sometimes pass in an hour and an hour in a week, but it is true. Lenox’s final days at Everley had been idyllic — long rides out on Sadie, afternoon tea in the great drawing room, walks in the garden with Sophie and Jane — and had passed in such a flash that now, sitting in a small anteroom outside the House of Commons, he felt practically dazed.

  From the chamber there was a steady hum of human voices, each, because it belonged to a member of Parliament, more than usually accustomed to attention.

  “Are they preparing for a great failure, do you think?” asked Lenox, and then laughed rather weakly.

  Graham was the only other person in the dim room. Frabbs, their carrot-haired clerk, was at the door, prepared to reject entrance by anyone other than the prime minister himself. Or, if he were to stretch a point, the Queen. “I’ve no doubt they’re speaking of their suppers and their women,” said Graham.

  “You are right of course.”

  They were on two blue leather sofas, with a mahogany table between them. There was a plate of biscuits and a bottle of claret there. Both were untouched as yet. Bottlesworth — that noble expert on comestibles who had advised Lenox to have two pints of porter and a passel of sandwiches before his speech — would have been distressed.

  Lenox shuffled through the papers in his hand, looking at them and seeing nothing. He was all nerves; Lady Jane was in the visitors’ gallery, McConnell too, and the press box, he had seen, was jammed. The prime minister had sent him a very civil communication, congratulating him on the tone of the speech and inviting him to dine together afterward.

  “We shall see about that, if it goes badly,” muttered Lenox.

  “Sir?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  The door opened. Lenox assumed it was Frabbs and didn’t turn, but then noticed with some consternation that a man in a snuff-colored suit of clothes had entered the room, and said, in a hoarse voice, “I have come to give my best wishes for your speech.”

  Lord preserve me from well-wishers, thought Charles, and why has Frabbs—but as he turned, artificial smile on his face to accept the compliment, he saw that it was his brother. Of course! Edmund had a cold in his head and shouldn’t have been here at all, were it not for the occasion.

  “Why, thank you, Ed.” Charles’s face was flushed with true pleasure as he spoke these words.

  “I am prepared to hear a thumper.”

  “Lower your expectations, for the love of all that’s good.”

  Edmund smiled. “Graham, I wish you joy of your achievement today, too.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Will it be a third or a fourth, Charles?”

  “Anyhow not a second.”

  In the brothers’ experience there were four kinds of speeches delivered in the House of Commons, and this shorthand, long since developed, helped them communicate to each other — in the lobby of the House, for instance — whether it was necessary to go and sit upon the benches for a speech, or whether it could be tolerably missed.

  Of the four types, two were good and two were bad. The first was a sympathetically bad speech, often full of painstaking research, mumbling, and indecisively argued points (for true intelligence welcomes dissent, unlike a good political speech); the second was an unsympathetically bad speech, full of bluster and steadily increasing passion without much bottom; the third was a powerful speech, with conviction and right on its side, also full of bluster and steadily increasing passion; but the fourth, the cynosure of parliamentary addresses, crowned all of these. It had circumspection, careful argument, passion, rhythm, suasion, wit, poignancy, ease, command, all stitched together seamlessly.

  Lenox had aimed to make his speech a fourth. Time would tell.

  Very little time, in fact. “A glass of wine, sir?” asked Graham.

  “I think not, thank you.”

  “It would be wise to take something, Charles,” said Edmund.

  “I have spoken before the House, you know. Some thirty times.”

  Graham shook his head. “You cannot know how hungry you are, sir. You will rise and feel weak in the knees.”

  It was rare that Graham was insistent upon anything other than Lenox’s schedule, and so the member took a half-cup of wine and a biscuit, albeit with great churlishness. Immediately he felt better and more solid. “A full House?” he asked his brother.

  Edmund smiled. “Tolerably full.”

  “You ought to go in.”

  The older brother looked at his pocket-watch, their father’s. “Yes, you’re right. Two or three minutes is all that’s in it. I say, good luck, Charles. Graham, mind that he doesn’t bolt for the channel.”

  Graham and Lenox both laughed; then, as Edmund left to take his seat and Frabbs went out to check the composition of the house for them, they were alone.

  For many, many years, since Lenox was an undergraduate at Balliol, they had lived almost changelessly together, the same house, the same daily pursuits, Graham often helping Lenox with his cases — the same rhythm of life. Then all had changed. Lenox had married, been elected to Parliament, had a child, cobbled his house together with Jane’s into a rambling new hybrid. Most radically of all he had asked Graham, and not a lad fresh from Charterhouse or Downing, to act as his political secretary. It had been a change that demanded Graham endure the slights of those above him in station and work harder than he ever had before. Now, more thanks to his efforts than any other single man’s, Lenox was opening Parliament. It was a friendship that Lenox reflected upon only very occasionally — perhaps because whenever he did he felt some strange emotion, which with greater deliberation he might have identified as true brotherly love. One might have used the word loyal about Graham, did it not imply one-sidedness: In their friendship the loyalty was mutual and equal in weight.

  As they sat here that association filled the silence. At last, Lenox said, “You know, Graham—” He halted.

  “Sir?”

  “Oh, nothing. Only that I feel better for having had the wine and the biscuit.”

  “I’m glad to hear it, sir.” He checked his own watch. “And now perhaps you should go into the chamber. Don’t forget to bow to the Speaker and pay your respects to the opposition leader, before you shake the prime minister’s hand.”

  The two men shook hands. Graham would watch from the sliver of the cracked secretaries’ door, and be waiting there when it was all finished.

  The benches of the chamber were jammed
, and the doorways, through which members were still streaming, a positive fire hazard. Lenox paid his proper obeisances and then took a spot along the first bench. All of it was rather a blur. He had imagined there would be a great passage of time in which he might steel himself to the task, when in fact it happened in no time at all that he was called to speak. He stood up, legs watery, and addressed the chamber.

  “Mr. Speaker, Prime Minister, good evening, and thank you,” he said. “It is my humble honor to address the House of Commons at this opening, and my hope is that my words will incline you not toward partisan rancor but toward national pride; not toward meanness but toward generosity; not toward argument but toward reconciliation and progress. It ought only be such when we remember that we represent, together, the greatest nation the world has yet known.

  “Indeed, we congregate here at the very center of the civilized world. I would ask you to set aside the next half of an hour to peer into the homes of those who still live as if in the last century, those who live solid, honest, British lives, but are afforded too little protection from the vicissitudes of fortune by their government. I would ask you to consider the poor.”

  It was a good speech, Lenox realized as he read on, but not a great one. It moved too much perhaps in the direction of fervor — the subject was too close to his heart. There was a passage about a family in Somerset who had to choose between medicine and food that was the God’s honest truth, but might, he feared, have come across as nearly Dickensian.

  But then why not? Dickens’s greatest gifts had been humor and a conscience, two virtues that belonged in a political speech. As he spoke on about the Somerset family, about the shoeless children walking down frosted dirt paths, about the father who had one hot meal in a week, about the terror of the workhouse, Lenox felt his conviction rising.

  He was aided by the men around him. On both sides, the right, the left, there were murmurs of assent. This was not the House of Lords, that ivoried domicile of the rich and remote. Among the men on the benches were brewers, stockbrokers, even publicans. They understood poverty. Most had seen it.

  He remembered to take a sip of water after some time and realized his hand was trembling. It gave him confidence, strangely.

  Just when the speech might have become the first kind, a mumbling recitation of facts, he saw his brother, and his voice strengthened. He offered a series of proposals and saw the nods around the chamber.

  His conclusion was perhaps fanciful. He had been talking for well on thirty-five minutes, and his heart fell when he came to the last page. Was it a mistake to mention the coining, to have a little joke? In Everley it had seemed a clever idea, but here it seemed self-important. It had made the papers, yes, but …

  He needn’t have worried. “If only we could all turn coiners, the problems would be solved,” he said, voice unsteady, and was instantly gratified to receive an enormous laugh. Even the Speaker, propriety personified, smiled.

  He wouldn’t remember finishing, only thanking the house and returning to his seat in silence. Ten or fifteen seconds passed before he realized that it was not silence at all, but wave after wave of applause.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  He’s gone,” Lenox called back down the hallway at Hampden Lane.

  His brother emerged from the Ugly Room, a drafty, dark parlor toward the rear of the house, in which Jane and Lenox never set foot because they stored in it all of their least favorite pieces of furniture, all of their most unfortunate works of art, objects they could not in all scrupulousness throw away — usually because they were the treasured bequest of some relative — but with which they had no desire to live daily life.

  Edmund had been hiding from a particularly tedious liberal minister who would have wanted an hour’s good conversation about India. He was only the latest in a long line of people who had come to congratulate Lenox on his speech.

  “Was that tea coming in soon, Charles?”

  “I forgot to ring for it. I’ll do so now.”

  “It’s rather cold.”

  “Well, you see the fire,” said Charles, somewhat irritably. “Presumably you have not forgotten how to turn over a spade full of coal.”

  Edmund smiled. “Tired of your meetings?”

  Lenox was at his desk, signing a stack of cards Graham had prepared to send to his constituents in Stirrington. “I am giving strong consideration to the idea of life as a hermit. On the one hand it would be irksome to grow a beard to my ankles; on the other I should never have to go to Lord Furze’s for supper tonight, unless Lady Furze’s taste has changed dramatically.”

  Edmund put more coal on the fire, and ordered the tea himself while his brother worked on. These tasks accomplished he settled into an armchair with an out-of-date copy of Punch.

  After a while Lenox looked up from his work and out through the tall window. It had gotten colder, it was true. The fall had sharpened and deepened, the leaves upon the trees shading from the red and orange brilliance of their dying into the crackled brown of their deaths. The sunlight was paler now.

  Though he had received the garlands of a victor after his speech there was some vague dissatisfaction in his heart. Perhaps it was that for all of this congratulation there seemed to be little real will to implement his ideas, and he knew, with an exhausted familiarity, that to pass anything through the House of Commons would mean months of persuasion and wrangling — that a single speech, though it had seemed so important, could not trim the sails of the ship of state.

  He consoled himself — and his brother and Graham had consoled him — by remembering that he had placed the issue of poverty directly before his colleagues now. The papers had reported it so favorably, for the most part, that perhaps it would shame them into action. Even then there was the House of Lords to deal with, however; he had always found it fitting that just three people, shouting across each other, each a king upon his own remote plot of land, could make a quorum there. Maddening.

  Presently the tea arrived. “Much better,” said Edmund as they moved to Lenox’s couches, nearer the fire. Between this and the tea the book-lined walls immediately seemed more welcoming, the thick blue carpet warmer.

  A footman followed the tea tray in with the post. Amid the shuffle of letters Lenox found one postmarked from Everley, with the Ponsonby crest upon the seal. “A letter from Freddie,” he said, slitting it open.

  Lenox read in silence for a moment, while Edmund drank his grateful tea. “A pro forma thank-you, I imagine?” asked the older brother.

  “No.” Charles leaned across and handed the letter over. “See what you think of that.”

  Edmund read the letter.

  September 23, 1874

  Everley

  Plumbley, Som.

  Dear Charles,

  First I must congratulate you on your speech, which we have just had details of this morning in the Bath papers. As you know Fripp and I are committed Tories, but both of us thought many of your points inarguable — as for those that break along party lines, neither of us doubts your good faith. Fripp did add that he hoped the next time you visited you worried less about farmers’ shoes and more about covering your wicket, but I put him down straight away.

  Everley is quiet since you left — Plumbley, too — and has reminded me why I feel, as you know, unequal to the ongoing task of her maintenance. In September I planted a line of spruce saplings along the west portico, against the better judgment of Rodgers — and now they have all but one of them died, which I view as final and irrefragable evidence that I have entered my senescence. It is a period I think better spent in a cottage in the village, a spacious and light-filled cottage, none of your dank rabbit holes, but a cottage nevertheless, and I therefore propose to come up to London on Monday next to see Wendell and discuss the transfer of ownership with him. There are three or six or even eight months of work left for me to do before I am satisfied that I have truly done my all by this house I have loved so much, and then it shall be his. I hope I may come to
see you upon my arrival, however, as there are one or two subjects I should like to discuss before I see him.

  Funny how quickly one grew accustomed to Jane, Sophia, and Miss Taylor! The house feels empty indeed. Return at any time the four of you please; and indeed if you do you shall have the best of Plumbley’s hospitality, being rather more of a grandee than they realized when they had you in their grip.

  Ever,

  Frederick Ponsonby

  “Well?” said Charles.

  Edmund shrugged. “If he feels himself unequal to the work—”

  “Does it not sadden you? To think of — well, of mother, I suppose? It is very like the end of an era.”

  “Eras go on ending,” said Edmund gently. “It is the sign of a small—”

  “A small mind to deplore change, yes,” said Lenox crossly. “We had the same father, you know.”

  Edmund smiled at his brother, whose brooding eyes were turned toward the fire. “My primary thought on the matter—”

  The world would have to wait for Sir Edmund Lenox’s primary thought on the matter, however, because just then they heard the front door open. “Who could that be?” wondered Charles.

  “Will it not be Jane?” Edmund asked.

  Lenox said he thought not, that she was out visiting for the afternoon, that it was more probably Graham or someone unexpected, but within fifteen seconds the door of the study had made a liar of him. Lady Jane came in, surrounded by shopping bags, her bright smile and kind eyes alighting on each brother in turn.

  “You wouldn’t believe the weather — porpoises in Piccadilly — I saw Meredith Hance and thought her nose might fall off it was so red. That’s terrible to say, Edmund I’m sorry. Oh, but Sophie! She must see her uncle! Miss Taylor! They are just in the hall.”

  “Was she quite warm?” said Charles.

  “It is hard to remember whether she wore seventy-eight layers of wool or seventy-nine, but at any rate, yes, I imagine she was.”

  The governess, the red in her cheeks making her look rather prettier than usual, came in with Sophia, and then, the other three adults descending upon the child at once, made her safely to the sofa and sat sipping a very welcome cup of tea.