A Stranger in Mayfair

by Charles Finch

“And our guide when we went up there!”

  “It was a wonderful trip,” he said, leaning on the rail, “but I’m glad we’re going home. I’m ready to be married in London now.”

  She laughed her clear, low laugh and said, “I am, too.”

  He hadn’t been quite joking. He stole a glance at Jane, and his heart filled with happiness. For years he had thought himself a happy man—indeed had been happy and fortunate in his friendships, his work, his interests, his family—but now he understood that in that entire time something vital had been missing. It was she. This was a new kind of happiness. It wasn’t only the mawkish love of penny fiction, though that was there. It was also a feeling of deep security in the universe, which derived from the knowledge of an equal soul and spirit going through life together with you. From time to time he thought his heart would break, it made him so glad, and felt so precarious, so new, so unsure.

  A mild, wispy rain started to fall when they were nearly across the water. Jane went inside, but Lenox said he thought he might stay out and look.

  And he was lucky to have done so. At certain times in our lives we all feel grateful for one outworn idea or another, and now was one of those times for Lenox: As the fog cleared he saw much closer and bigger than he had expected the vast, pristine white face of the cliffs of Dover come into view. It made him feel he was home. Just like Jane did.

  Chapter Two

  It was fortunate that the man who had designed and built the ten houses along Hampden Lane in 1788 had built them to the same scale, albeit in different configurations. Lenox’s and Lady Jane’s houses both had twelve-foot-deep basements where the staff could work and live, eight-step front stairs that led to broad front doors (his was red, hers white), four floors of rooms, and a narrow back garden. It meant they fit together.

  Still, to join them had taken a great deal of ingenuity on the part of a young builder named, aptly enough, Stackhouse. On the first floor he had knocked down the wall between their two dining rooms, creating a single long hall, which could now entertain fifty people or so. More importantly, it had left intact the two most important rooms in the house: Lady Jane’s sitting room, a rose colored square where she entertained her friends and took her tea, and Lenox’s study, a long, lived-in chamber full of overstuffed armchairs, with books lining every surface and a desk piled under hundreds of papers and trinkets. Its high windows looked over the street, and on the opposite end its fireplace was where Lenox sat with his friends.

  Upstairs there was a large new bedroom for them, and on the third floor two small parlors became a very nice billiard room for Lenox. In the basement the builders only made a slim hallway between the houses, firstly so as not to tamper with the foundation and secondly because the couple didn’t need as much space down there. They were reducing their staff. They only required one coachman now, two footmen, one cook (Lenox’s, Ellie, was foul-mouthed but talented), and one bootboy. Lady Jane’s cook gave notice, explaining that it was excellent timing, since she and her husband had always hoped to open a pub and now had the money. Still, it would leave four people out of work. Fortunately Lady Jane’s brother always needed servants, and those who wanted to move from London to the country received their new billets happily. Three of them took this offer, and the fourth, a bright young lad who had been Lenox’s coachman, took two months’ pay and set out for South Africa to make his fortune, with a letter of introduction from his now former employer.

  All of this still left one enormous problem: the butlers. Both Lenox and Lady Jane had long-serving butlers who seemed half part of the family. In fact it was unusual for a woman to have a butler rather than a housekeeper, but Jane had insisted on it when she first came to London, and now Kirk, an extremely fat, extremely dignified Yorkshireman, had been with her for nearly twenty years. More seriously, there was Graham. For all of Lenox’s adult life, Graham had been his butler, and more importantly his confidant and companion. They had met when Lenox was a student and Graham a scout at Balliol College; special circumstances had bound them there, and when Lenox left for London he had taken Graham with him. He had fetched Lenox his morning coffee, yes, but Graham had also helped him in a dozen of his cases, campaigned for him in Stirrington, and traveled with him across Europe and to Russia. Now all that might change.

  So when Lenox returned to London, he went over the new house with an awed, pleased eye—it was just as he had imagined it being—but with the consciousness as well that he had to confront the problem of Graham. The next morning he had a rather radical idea.

  He rang the bell, and soon Graham appeared with a breakfast tray laden with eggs, ham, kippers, and toast, a pot of fragrant black coffee to the side. He was a compact, sandy-haired, and intelligent-looking man.

  “Good morning, Graham.”

  “Good morning, sir. May I welcome you back less formally to London?” The previous night the servants had lined the hall and curtsied and bowed in turn to the newlyweds, then presented them with the wedding present of a silver teapot.

  “Thanks. That’s awfully kind of you—it’s a wonderful pot. Graham, would you sit down and keep me company for a moment? You don’t mind if I eat, do you? Fetch yourself a cup to have some of this coffee if you like.”

  Graham shook his head at the offer but sat down in the armchair across from Lenox, an act that would have drawn gasps from many of Lenox’s acquaintances for its familiarity. They made idle chat about Switzerland as Lenox gulped down coffee and eggs, until at last, sated, he pushed his plate away and sat happily back, patting the crimson dressing gown over his stomach.

  “How long have we known each other, Graham?” asked Lenox.

  “Twenty-one years, sir.”

  “Is it really that long? Yes, I suppose I was eighteen. It scarcely seems credible. Twenty-one years. We’ve grown middle-aged together, haven’t we?”

  “Indeed, sir.”

  “I just got married, Graham.”

  The butler, who had been at the wedding, allowed himself the ghost of a smile. “I heard something of it, sir.”

  “Did you never consider it?”

  “Once, sir, but the lady’s affections were otherwise engaged.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it.”

  “It was many years ago, sir, when we still lived in Oxford.”

  “Have you been happy in your employment?”

  “Yes, sir.” Graham was an understated man, but he said this emphatically. “Both in my daily duties and in the less usual ones you have asked me to perform, Mr. Lenox.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. You don’t fancy a change of work?”

  “No, sir. Not in the slightest.”

  “You mustn’t look so stony-faced, Graham. I’m not firing you—not by a long shot. Remind me, what papers do you read?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What newspapers do you read?”

  “The house subscribes to—”

  “No, Graham, not the house—you.”

  “Below stairs we take the Times and the Manchester Guardian, sir. In my spare hours I usually read both.”

  “Does anyone else read them downstairs?”

  Graham looked discomfited. “Well—no, sir.”

  “You know as much about politics as I do, or very nearly,” murmured Lenox, more to himself than his companion.

  “Sir?”

  “May I shock you, Graham?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I want you to come work for me.”

  The butler very nearly laughed. “Sir?”

  Lenox sighed, stood up, and began pacing the study. “I’ve been troubled during all my time on the Continent about the business of a secretary. I interviewed eight candidates, all young men just up from Cambridge or Oxford, all of them of excellent family and eager to be personal secretary to a gentleman in Parliament. The trouble was that I felt that each one of them was sizing me up to decide when he could have my seat. They were all too ambitious, Graham. Or perhaps that’s not it—perhaps it’s simply that
I didn’t know them, and I didn’t want to risk getting to know them as they worked for me.”

  “You cannot be suggesting, sir—”

  “You read more than half the men sitting in Parliament, Graham. More importantly, I trust you.” Lenox walked up to the study’s row of high windows, his slippers softly padding the thick rug. He stared into the bright, summery street for a few moments. “I want you to come be my secretary.”

  Graham stood up too now, quite clearly agitated. “If I may speak freely, sir—”

  “Yes?”

  “It is an utterly impossible request. As gratified as I am at your consideration, Mr. Lenox, I am in no way suited to such a role—a role that belongs to someone—someone from the great universities, someone with far more education than I possess, and…if I may speak frankly, sir, someone of your own class.”

  “I’m not trying to change the world. I simply want someone I can trust.”

  Graham swallowed. “As a solution to a simple staffing problem, sir, I must say I find it exceedingly inelegant.”

  Lenox waved an irritated hand. “No, no. I want both you and Kirk to be happy, of course, but it’s more than that. For one thing, you’ve been overqualified by your natural merits for years. More to the point—more selfishly—I’m new at this. I need help.”

  At last Graham was silent. Finally, he said, “I’m honored, sir.”

  “Will you do it?”

  “I cannot say, sir. May I have time to consider the proposal?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Would I still live here?”

  “If you liked, yes. You shall always have lodging while I draw breath, as you well know.”

  “And if I say no, sir? What will become of me then?”

  Grumpily, Lenox said, “Well, we’d keep both of you, of course—and we’d hire five more butlers, just to make sure we had one in every room.”

  Now Graham did laugh. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Before you get above your old station, would you mind helping me with this painting?”

  It was the one from the Salon, the blurry one. The two men pried its crate open, took its wrappings off, and then walked it down to the dining hall. There they hung it, tilting it imperceptibly back and forth until it was just level.

  “May I ask who painted it?” Graham asked.

  “A chap named Monet,” said Lenox. “Rhymes with bonnet, I think. I never heard of him myself. Funny, the picture looked better over in Paris.”

  “Such is often the case with these flashy Continental objects, sir,” said Graham with evident disapproval.

  As they got the picture hung just right, there was a knock at the door. Through the troubling weeks that followed, Lenox sometimes wished he and Graham had ignored that knock and the ominous events it portended.

  Chapter Three

  The gentleman’s name was Ludovic Starling. Lenox had known him for a decade. Nevertheless it was a surprise to find him at the door, for there was little acquaintance between the two men.

  Ludo was through and through a son of Wiltshire, with a family that had sat obstinately on the same plot of land there since the Restoration, when one of Ludo’s progenitors had remained covertly loyal to the King. This man, Cheshire Starling, a blacksmith, had received six hundred prime acres in thanks for printing twelve copies of a single handbill that denounced (with dazzlingly poor syntax) Oliver Cromwell and his people. With a grant of three hundred pounds Cheshire had erected a tidy L-shaped hall, and the generations that had succeeded him in it had been filled with dull, pasty, and, despite their fanciful surname, heavy-footed men. The Starling women had just as little enterprise, and in all the family had been content to remain just as they were, year after year and decade after decade. Century after century. No Starling was ever too dismal a failure or too great a success, and the little parcel of family money never dipped or rose too high in value. The cousins were all looked after. They were a comfortable, pointless clan.

  Until Ludovic, that is. About Lenox’s age, he had gone up to university as a willowy, handsome, ambitious lad of seventeen. From there he had moved to London and by the age of thirty had through his marriage attained a seat in Parliament; his father-in-law was a Scottish lord with land in Kintyre and a district in pocket. Since then Ludo had been a reliable backbencher and more recently had assumed a prominent position in his party’s hierarchy. He had also gained weight and was now a red-faced, sturdy, and social creature, who loved to drink and play cards. A year before he had inherited Starling Hall—an only child—but hadn’t visited it since his father’s funeral. All this Lenox knew by the way, just as well as he knew a thousand other short biographies of his London acquaintanceship.

  “Why, Ludo, what can I do for you?” asked Lenox, who had come down the hall and watched Graham open the door.

  “There you are, Charles. I’m sorry to pop up unannounced like this.”

  Graham left, and Lenox shepherded Ludo into the study to sit. “You’re very welcome, of course. How is Elizabeth?”

  “Quite well, thanks. A bit unsure of what to do with herself, with Alfred at Cambridge and Paul following him in the fall. They’re both here for the summer holidays at the moment, at least.”

  “Following in their father’s footsteps at Downing, I take it?

  Here, come into my study. Have you come about Parliament? I’m to meet with a group of gentlemen this afternoon to discuss our position in the colonies. I expressed an interest on the subject, and James Hilary was kind enough to include me.”

  Ludo shook his head. “No, not that at all. Congratulations, by the way.”

  “Thanks.”

  “In fact I’ve come for another reason. A lad in my house has been killed.”

  “My God!”

  “Not in my house,” Ludo hastened to add. He was restless, anxious. In Lenox’s study he stood up and paced back and forth. “A lad of my house, I should have said. In fact his actual demise took place in an alley just behind us, off of South Audley.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Not anyone I knew well—a young man named Clarke, Frederick Clarke, who worked for me. He was only nineteen.”

  “How was he killed?”

  “Bludgeoned to death. There was no weapon at the scene apparently.”

  “The Yard is in?”

  “Oh yes—it happened last night. Two constables are there now, keeping people clear of the area. I came to see you because—well, because I know you’ve worked as a detective in the past. Kept your cases very quiet, too.”

  “This young man, Frederick Clarke, worked for you?”

  “Yes, as a footman. His mother, Marie, was our housekeeper briefly, about fifteen years ago. Almost as soon as she came into our service she inherited something from her family and moved back to her hometown to open a pub. Apparently her son wanted to come to London, and she wrote asking if we might take him on, so of course we said yes.”

  “Decent of you.”

  “Elizabeth has a long memory for these things—you know how kind she is. He’s been with us for four years now, but I spend so much time at the House and at the Turf”—this was his club, whose membership consisted largely of sportsmen and cardplayers—“that I don’t know all the faces.”

  Four years! thought Lenox. It seemed impossible to live under the same roof as a person for so long without knowing him through and through. “You didn’t know him, or you didn’t know him well?”

  “Didn’t know him well, I should have said. Of course I knew his face and exchanged a few words with him here and there. But Eliza is very upset, and I promised her that I would ask for your help. She’s the reason I’m here, in fact. Although we were both relieved when we remembered you had just gotten back into town.”

  “Oh?”

  Ludo’s face flushed, and his tone became confidential. “In truth I wouldn’t mind it quietly handled, and I know I can count on your discretion. Quite between you and me, there has been some talk of a title.”


  “A title for you?” asked Lenox, surprised. A title usually capped a career. Ludo was still young, or at least middle-aged.

  “I’ve been a guest at the palace quite often recently, and play whist with one of the royals almost every night. I won’t say his name. But apparently my service in Parliament has been observed and may be commended.”

  “I congratulate you.”

  “It would please me immensely, I don’t mind saying. It always rather rankled in our family that the old King didn’t hand us something in that line. God bless him,” he added as an afterthought.

  This was puzzlingly intimate, thought Lenox, and then asked, “Why must it be quiet? Surely there’s no implication that you killed the boy?”

  “I? Never!” Ludo laughed. “Besides having no reason on earth to do it, I was sat firmly at the card table for ten hours last night, with Frank Derbyshire and a whole host of others.”

  “Of course. I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s only that the slightest breath of scandal or infelicity can shake this sort of thing. It’s all so fragile, you know.”

  “The title?”

  “Yes, exactly. Also, as I say, Eliza is quite upset—most upset—and asked me to come.”

  Lenox was puzzled by Ludo’s behavior. Did he care about this lad, Frederick Clarke? Why not let the Yard handle it? And why was he bursting with all this information about his prospects for an elevation to the House of Lords? It seemed in awfully poor taste. Then it occurred to Lenox that perhaps Ludo couldn’t share any of this potential good fortune with his friends, or even his family, lest it fall through and make him look like a liar or a fool. It might be that he needed an audience, someone who would listen with appropriate gravity to the news but who would keep it to himself. Yes, Lenox decided, it was because the man had run over the tantalizing facts so often in his mind and needed to blurt them out to stay sane. Had been bursting with the news. Strange indeed, though, to deliver it as he simultaneously delivered news of a murder.

  He was terribly restless. “Here, sit,” said Lenox. At last Ludo settled into the armchair Graham had only recently occupied, opposite Lenox and in front of the cold hearth.