A Stranger in Mayfair

by Charles Finch

  Lenox ran into Percy Field one morning in the halls of Parliament, and Field stopped him to say thank you again for the invitation to Lady Jane’s Tuesday.

  “You’re all over the papers,” he said after they had exchanged “thank you” and “you’re welcome.” “Elizabeth Starling?”

  “Poor Ludo—I wonder whether he’ll return to the House, or if he’s finished.”

  “He’s back at Starling Hall, isn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  He was there with Frederick Clarke’s mother. Before he had left he had come to Hampden Lane, some three days after his wife’s arrest, to apologize for the past weeks. As they sat in front of the fireplace, lit because the first frost of the autumn had been in the gardens and parks of the city that morning, Lenox studied the other man. His face was pained and older than before. He had taken the glass of claret Lenox offered but, in a way that was very unlike himself, didn’t touch it.

  “Do you ever feel you’ve wasted your life?” he asked, an exceedingly, even inappropriately intimate question, but of course Lenox was prepared to make allowances for him.

  “I daresay everyone feels that way once in a while.”

  Ludo smiled. “No—I see you don’t know what I mean.”

  “Perhaps not.”

  “I’m taking Alfred to Starling Hall. Paul is there.”

  “How are they?”

  “Alfred is bewildered—between you and me, he’s rather a bewildered kind of soul—and Paul is angry. I think it will do them both good to get to Cambridge. They go next week.”

  “Have you seen Elizabeth?”

  “No,” he said shortly, “but Collingwood was in the house this morning. I poured my heart out to him.” He laughed. “I don’t think he forgave me. I wouldn’t either.”

  “I can’t imagine he would, no.”

  “There are no criminal charges to be laid against me.” Ludo paused. “Tell me, will you turn Fowler in?”

  “He and I have our own agreement.”

  “I wonder whether you would forgive me, Lenox.”

  “Certainly.”

  “Don’t be hasty. She might have killed you, you know, on the street outside of our house. D’you know, I feel now as if it was all a dream—a bizarre dream.”

  “She was a strong-willed woman.”

  “That’s like saying London is a biggish village,” responded Ludo, with a flash of his old bantering ways.

  “Could I ask you a question, Ludo? Was Derbyshire supposed to vouch for you? Is that why you didn’t sign in?”

  Ludo sighed. “Yes,” he said. “That’s right. If I had signed in, when I arrived it would have showed I wasn’t at the club during the time Freddie was murdered. I was home, in fact.”

  Lenox nodded. “I woke up in the middle of the night and thought of it. After Elizabeth murdered Freddie, you went to the club to create an alibi for yourself. You must have tried to make people think you had already been there for many hours.”

  “Yes. I lost money to Derbyshire so he would remember I was there, and said as often as I could that I had been there most of the day. I hoped they all would misremember how long I had been there, and in the end I said to Derbyshire point-blank: ‘Do you know how long I’ve been here? Ten hours. Time slips away, doesn’t it?’ It didn’t do me any good, apparently.”

  There was a long pause. Both men’s eyes turned away from each other, Ludo’s to the fire, Lenox’s outside to the street, where men with upturned collars trotted by, trying to get indoors as fast as possible.

  “Could I ask you another question?” asked Lenox at length.

  “Oh? What’s that?” asked Ludo, startled from a reverie. “Of course.”

  “The title—was that only important to Elizabeth? That Alfred should inherit? Or that there should be a title at all?”

  “You’re a mind reader, I sometimes think. It was the subject that was just in my head.” He settled back in his chair, a pensive look on his face. “You’ve heard of old Cheshire Starling, I assume?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “You’ve no idea what it’s like to have as your first landed ancestor a common man—a blacksmith, no less. We could have owned three-quarters of Wiltshire and none of the families there would have cared about us. Oh, there were the merchants. To be sure we were above them, or the new generations. We had some status. We built churches.

  “But a blacksmith! My father brooded about it every day of his life. When I did something wrong I was the son of a whore and a smith to him. When we were snubbed by the Duke of Argyllshire it was ‘Back to the hammer and tongs.’ It was the worst terror to be taken out to the smithy and beaten by the blacksmith there.”

  Lenox didn’t speak; Ludo, lost in reminiscence, didn’t seem to mind.

  “Elizabeth made it worse. Her father was a lord, yes, but only an Irish lord…I think we—what is it called when two people live inside the same dream together, Lenox?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There must be a word for it.” He waved a dismissive hand and stood up. “It’s all history now, anyway. I’m taking Marie, too, with me. To the Hall. Marie Clarke. Perhaps she’ll forgive me one day.”

  “I hope so.”

  Ludo gathered his cloak and hat. “There are second chances in life, after all. Aren’t there?”

  It had indeed been in the papers, and inevitably Lenox’s name had, too. Elizabeth Starling likely wouldn’t hang, but she would certainly be in prison for the rest of her life. Lenox had debated in his own mind whether to go visit her, and seek out more explanation, but in the end he decided that there wasn’t anything else. He knew what there was to know.

  Although there was a sour postscript from Percy Field, in the hallway.

  “Tell me,” Lenox said, “was Ludo close to receiving a title? In the New Year’s Honors?”

  Titles were in the hands of the Queen, of course, but more and more often she received recommendations from Field’s superior, the Prime Minister. Field would almost certainly have seen the list.

  He snorted. “Mr. Lenox, have you heard of a man of Ludovic Starling’s age and position becoming a baron out of the blue? It was the purest fantasy. He agitated, to be sure, for it, but even to be knighted! Why—it was impossible.”

  “If you’ll allow me to ask something rude, Mr. Field: Are you only saying so now, because of what happened last week?”

  Field laughed. “I would tell you the truth if it were so, Mr. Lenox. You’re a man who can keep his lips sealed. It was a fantasy, nothing more and nothing less.”

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  That was a heavy-hearted fall for Charles Lenox. As September passed into October and October into November, he felt weighed down by both the needless misery of the case and the slight, constant disappointment of Parliament not being the paradise he had wished it. This he came to terms with slowly, but surely; it was his duty. He referred two cases that came his way to Dallington, who solved the first and botched the second terribly. They were no longer daily companions, but they had taken to dining together two or three times a week. What they did during these meals was go over old cases, teasing through the clues, Lenox pushing his apprentice gently in the right direction, teaching him to think like a detective. Gradually Lenox discovered that they were the best parts of his week, these dinners—a visit to his old life. Still, when the third case came in early December, he turned it toward Dallington and, after the entreating visitor had gone, turned back to a new blue book.

  It was around this time that he realized there had been a third unhappiness, too. His marriage. He and Lady Jane were best friends as ever, and they had a dozen different parties and balls they might have attended each week.

  Yet he found he wanted something different. Each time he was with Toto, Thomas, and George, his heart ached with envy.

  This blue period finally lifted one day in the first week of December. They had been at the McConnells’ that night for supper, and the McConnells were returning the
visit the next day, to trim Lady Jane and Lenox’s Christmas tree. As they were riding home in the carriage, Lenox sensed that Lady Jane had come close to bringing up the subject of a child. At the last moment, however, she didn’t.

  He was in Parliament the next morning, meeting with a committee. There was no session in the evening, and he returned to their double-house on Hampden Lane hungry for lunch.

  Instead of Kirk it was Jane herself who met him at the door.

  “Will you guess where I’ve been this morning?” she asked.

  “Where?” he said, giving her a kiss on her soft, pink cheek.

  “Only to Kent!”

  He hung up his cloak. “Have you really? Whatever for?”

  “It was an hour each way—not far, really—but I found you a present.”

  “In Kent? Thank you, darling. You’re lovely. May I open it after lunch? I’m famished.”

  He was headed toward his study, about to open the door, and she said, “You’re going to open it this second.”

  He frowned, puzzled, until he twisted the door.

  Two puppies, neither of them bigger than a loaf of bread, came bounding out of the room in a state of profound excitement.

  One was dark, midnight black, and the other was a pure white gold. They were retrievers. Both of them had floppy ears and thick coats, and they tumbled over each other into Lenox’s ankles, barking in happy voices at his arrival.

  With an enormous smile on his face he bent down to them. “What are they?” he said.

  “I would have thought a child could identify them as dogs—puppies.”

  “I mean—well, why?”

  Then Lady Jane did something touching to him; she came and knelt by him, letting the puppies jump into her lap, and put an arm through his. “I’m not ready—not quite yet,” she said. “Can we wait one more year?”

  He looked at her, and love, love greater than himself, filled his heart. “Of course,” he said.

  “I thought perhaps we could practice on them.”

  “A capital notion, that. What shall we call them?”

  “I want to call the black one Bear. She looks like a bear to me.”

  “And the white one?”

  She laughed. “Well—he reminds me of a rabbit.”

  Lenox smiled. “Bear and Rabbit. It’s settled.”

  As if they understood, Bear and Rabbit started to bark again, then chased each other around Lenox, first in one direction and then the other, occasionally felled by their new legs or stopping for a judicious sniff of shoe or rug. He loved them already.

  It was later that afternoon that his blue period truly ended. He was sorting through old mail (and had just found Clara Woodward’s wedding invitation) when Graham, who stayed long hours in Whitehall, came home unaccustomedly early. He drew up short when he saw Bear and Rabbit, remembered they weren’t his responsibility, and then made an urgent petition for an immediate conference with Lenox.

  “Whatever is it?”

  Graham, usually so reserved, was flushed with enthusiasm. “It’s your speech, sir. They want you to give your maiden speech.”

  “What?”

  “The party leaders. They’d like you to speak in two days’ time. During the afternoon session, sir, when all the press will be there! In time for the evening papers.”

  “A speech? In two days? Not now, Bear!” he said to the little black retriever, who was pawing at his shoe.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Suddenly every nerve in Lenox’s body began to tingle, and he felt his brain begin to race. And in the same moment he realized: This was the thrill he had wanted all along.

  The next fifty hours was a period of ceaseless activity. Lenox, closeted in his study, skipped the blue books that accumulated on his desk and instead wrote feverishly. Graham would come into the room every half hour or so and take away a much crossed and scratched and corrected piece of paper, consult with Lenox about his intentions for this part of the speech, and then take it to Frabbs, who was stationed in the dining room, to make a fair copy for further revision.

  (Frabbs was delighted. He had a grand table to himself and plenty of time to draw, and the dogs were constantly whining at his heel for him to get on the floor and roll about with them—which, it should be said, he very conscientiously did only after he had copied out a page and locked the door.)

  The other presence in the house was Edmund. Though he was a necessity to his party, he resisted every appeal and skipped two straight days of Parliament in order to sit with his brother, converse when Charles felt he was stuck, and mull over ideas with him. They decided together, after a long conversation, that he shouldn’t mention cholera—that he should save it. There would be time to come back to it. They took their meals together, down to the chocolate and brandy they each had at two in the morning the day before the speech.

  The day.

  It arrived far, far sooner than Lenox would have liked. He had committed his speech, which would take twenty minutes or thereabouts, to memory, and as he and Edmund walked down Whitehall he muttered the difficult bits of it to himself over and over, occasionally checking his notes—so that he looked very much like an aristocratic madman, roaming the streets of Mayfair with his minder.

  “Have you any advice?” he asked Edmund as they came to the Members’ Entrance.

  “I’ve given you nothing but advice for these last two days, Charles. I should have thought you had far too much of it from me.”

  “No, no—that was for the speech itself. I mean any advice about delivering the stupid thing.”

  “Ah—I see. You remember my maiden speech?”

  “Oh, yes. I was in the spectators’ gallery.”

  “I had this counsel from a sage old head, Wilson Randolph—been dead for fifteen years—and it worked well enough for me. He said that ten minutes before my speech I should have a glass of wine and a crust of bread to fortify me.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Edmund laughed. “After that, I’m afraid you’re on your own.”

  The chamber seemed ten times more imposing than it ever had before, ten times more crowded, its range of faces ten times more judgmental, the Speaker of the House ten times more momentous, the gallery of reporters and spectators ten times more eager for a failure.

  His heart in his stomach, Lenox sat through half a dozen parries back and forth, hearing not a word of them, going over in his head each line of his speech. There was the astute slash at the other party’s policies on India, the witticism about the daily papers, the stirring (he hoped) final argument about colonial obligation. When it was ten to four he sneaked out of a side door, where Graham was waiting with a glass of wine and a piece of brown bread.

  “Good luck, sir,” said Graham, who looked as if he were bursting with pride.

  “Thank you—the credit is yours. Unless I make a mess of it, of course, in which case you may blame me.”

  Lenox laughed, Graham frowned, and soon he had drunk off the wine and eaten the bread. He slipped back into the House.

  A speech was concluding, and after it was done Lenox raised his leaden arm, his heart beating rapidly, as he knew he must.

  “The Right Honorable Gentleman from Stirrington!” cried the Speaker.

  Lenox rose, his legs insensate. For strength he chanced a look at his brother.

  Edmund returned the gaze. He was a man with a pure, tender heart—less doubtful than his brother’s, more open—and as Charles rose to speak, he felt conflicted. He knew that the excitement of the past two days was what his brother really loved, what he thrived on, and he was happy. In another part of his heart, however, he worried that Charles would never again be a detective—that he would live in this less happy profession he had found out of a sense of duty, occasionally excited as he was now but more often dispirited.

  And Edmund worried about Charles and Jane.

  Lenox himself, who knew perhaps a bit better, shifted his gaze from Edmund to Jane herself. She was in the spectators’ gall
ery, a gray dress on, the knuckles of her fists white with tension. She gave him a small smile, and to his surprise he realized that it calmed him.

  From her he looked out into the chamber, and with a clear, confident voice, began to speak.

  Also by Charles Finch

  A Beautiful Blue Death

  The September Society

  The Fleet Street Murders

  Acknowledgments

  In the course of writing this series of books I have thanked my friends and family so comprehensively and doggedly that they must be exhausted. So I’ll give them a break, except to mention the keen eyes and ongoing support of Charlie Spicer, Kate Lee, Yaniv Soha, Sarah Melnyk, Andy Martin, and Kaitlyn Flynn. The rest of you know who you are and how deep my gratitude is.

  Oh, and thanks to Lucy!

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A STRANGER IN MAYFAIR. Copyright © 2010 by Charles Finch. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  ISBN: 978-0-312-62506-1