“You know, I’m not sure you should, Charles. I hate to say so. Is it quite important?”
Lenox waved his hand. “Oh, I understand, of course—look here, would you mind if McConnell came in and had a look at it?”
“Not at all—as long as he does so before the end of the day.”
“Then I’ll fetch him right now. I won’t come back myself, Edmund—thanks awfully for lunch, and I’ll see you as soon as this business is resolved, all right?”
“Yes, all right. You can’t explain?”
“I wish I could,” said Lenox, taking his coat and heading for the door.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
As he stepped out of his carriage by McConnell’s house, Lenox heard a piano and a clear, melodious voice accompanying it.
It was Toto, playing and singing. Her spirit was captured in music, often: evanescent, chatty, generous, warm. He almost hesitated as he knocked at the door, loath as he was to cut her off. Then again, Arlington’s file would only be with Edmund for the rest of the day.
“Charles!” she said. “You see how frivolously we pass the time.”
“Good for the baby, to hear such sweet sounds. Where is Jane?”
Toto looked cross. “Where is she ever! As secretive as the sphinx, and always in and out. I should chain her to this piano. But how’s your case?”
Lenox looked to McConnell. “In fact, I came here about it. Do you think you could go to my brother’s office and look over a file he has there?”
Toto looked unhappy at the request, but McConnell nodded. “Of course. What’s it all about?”
Briefly Lenox explained what he thought was the similarity between Wilson’s death and Payson’s. “I’m not sure, however, and I could use your opinion.”
“I’ll go straight away.”
“Thanks very much. I have to be off as well—let me give you a ride.”
“Perfect.”
In the carriage, Lenox said, “Thanks for your letter to Arlington, by the way. He thought it best to send the file through official channels, rather than handing it over. Sensible enough I suppose.”
“Don’t mention it. How did you find him?”
“I liked him. He seems to be straightforward about things. He says exactly what he means.”
As he dropped McConnell by Westminster Abbey a moment later, Lenox said, “Do you want to come around to see me afterward?”
“Yes—it shouldn’t be above half an hour, if the file’s as short as you say.”
“I’ll be waiting for you, then.”
At home Lenox sorted through his post and found that there was a report from Graham about Hatch’s movements in the last day or two. It read:
Mr. Lenox—
Per your request, I have closely followed the movements of Professor John Hatch since your departure. Unfortunately he has done nothing untoward; his routine seems to be very set, a limited range of motion including his rooms at Lincoln, his laboratory, and the lecture hall. I shall continue to observe him but have little hope of a breakthrough. Unless I receive instructions to the contrary I will return to London tomorrow.
It would be best for Graham to return, certainly. Lenox sighed. If Lysander and the September Society were responsible for killing George Payson, why? What did Hatch know that he wasn’t revealing? And where on earth was Bill Dabney?
There was also a note from Inspector Goodson. It was very brief but made Lenox more hopeful than anything had in days.
Have found a small campsite just by the meadow, due 100 yards south in a thick grove of trees. Sign of habitation some days old. Remnants: some food, a bright red lock of hair, and a thick, straight line of ash. Thought the latter two might interest you. Please report any findings, as we have lost Canterbury and no sign of Dabney. Goodson.
Before he had time to think about this, there was a knock on the door, and he knew it must be McConnell.
The doctor was drenched. He came in smiling ruefully. “Don’t suppose I could have a cup of that?” he said, gesturing toward the tea tray. “Something hot would go down well.” He took the towel that Mary had just arrived with and managed to make himself slightly drier.
“Come over by the fire,” Lenox said. “Only milk, right?”
“Right.”
They sat opposite each other in the brown armchairs by the fire, Lenox quickly removing a small stack of books he had left on the one he never sat in.
“Was I right, then? About the report?”
“Yes,” said McConnell, removing his flask and taking a slug with a wince, “you were absolutely right. There’s no question about it. Unless James Payson and Peter Wilson’s regimental training encompassed a uniform lesson on the proper way to commit suicide, they were both murdered.”
Though he had known it was coming, Lenox’s composure lurched a bit. “Murdered?”
“That’s as clear as I can see it. I wanted to come over here first, but then I’m going to go see the coroner who worked on Wilson’s case and ask his opinion.”
“I wish you wouldn’t, just yet.”
“Why?”
“In a day or two it won’t matter—next week, say—but at the moment I don’t want him calling in Daniel Maran and the rest of this damned Society for testimony about that weekend, asking them about George Payson.”
McConnell nodded. “Yes, all right. By God, it’s pretty grim all around.”
“Yes. Pretty grim.”
“Have you heard anything from Oxford?”
“They found the place where Payson and Dabney were hiding out behind Christ Church Meadow.” Lenox handed his friend Goodson’s note. “Everything seems conclusive enough, and at the same time completely baffling. Why would this Society care after twenty years that old James Payson’s son was sitting around studying modern history in some innocuous college? And it has to be Payson, doesn’t it? He was the one killed; he’s the one with the link to this group; Lysander was in Oxford. And yet, and yet …”
“It’ll come clean soon, I’ve no doubt,” McConnell said consolingly, giving the note back.
“I suppose you’re right. Jane’s doing well, incidentally?” said Lenox.
“It would put anyone’s back up to have their maid shot, but she’s doing remarkably well, yes.”
They spoke for another few moments, but as soon as he had drunk his last drop of tea, McConnell stood up and said he had to go. Lenox could see his eagerness to return to his pregnant wife, and envied him it.
“Sorry to have taken you away from home, but the file couldn’t leave Edmund’s …”
“Oh, not at all, I was glad to get a look at it. One of the queerest means of murder I’ve ever heard of. By the way, what do you make of that missing sheet? In the file on Payson?”
“Missing sheet?”
McConnell had been halfway out the door, but he turned back fully to Lenox now. “You must have seen that there was a third sheet in Payson’s file. In the War Office’s file.”
“I confess I didn’t.”
“Yes—in all that useless information on the bottom of the first page it said 1/3, the second said 2/3 … I suppose I got used to looking there when I practiced medicine.”
“Unforgivable on my part.” Lenox shook his head. “What do you think it was?”
“Could have been anything—a meaningless addendum, the solution to the whole problem. I don’t know. But if it were meaningless, why would it be gone?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
That evening at eight forty-five, Lenox put on a swallowtail coat and white evening tie, his SPQR cufflinks, a black waistcoat, and last of all his black patent leather shoes, buffed by the shoe-and-lace boy who came by once a week. Boats were steaming toward the New World, merchants were taking stock in Yorkshire, and railroads were being built one spike at a time so that Lenox could stand at his mirror in the city at the center of the world, preparing himself for the evening. But for better or worse, none of that was on his mind.
He straightened his tie
with one last nudge of his knuckle, turned, and went downstairs. His carriage was waiting on the curb, but he didn’t hurry to it as he usually did; he looked over a neat stack of papers on his desk once more, put them into a brown leather case, donned his heavy overcoat, and only then went outside, with Mary wishing him well. It was a special evening.
The SPQRs met once every two months, sometimes less and never more often, in a large room, windowed on two sides, at Boodle’s. Of all his clubs—and by now Lenox belonged to some seven or eight—Boodle’s was the most prestigious, and the one he visited least. Lenox’s ancestor the late eighteenth-century Prime Minister the Marquess of Landsdowne had founded it. People there tended to be somewhat staid, a departure from the club’s earlier days when Beau Brummell had made his last bet there before fleeing to France and the Duke of Wellington had taken his evening meals there with a choice friend or two, guaranteed for once of no adoration. It was placed well, at 28 St. James’s Street, and even clubmen passed it with a reverentially silent step, contemplating their slim chance of entrance; the days were long gone when the club was whimsical and un-self-important enough to be named, as it had been, for a beloved waiter.
“Mr. Lenox,” said Timothy Quails, an institution himself, in the doorway of the club. He held the door open.
“Thanks, Quilts.” Somehow that name had stuck to the doorman. “Am I first?”
“Last, sir, save one.”
He emphasized the word “one” strangely, and Lenox knew whom he meant. He mounted the back staircase two steps at a time and entered the SPQRs’ usual room with a smile at the five men seated at the round table in the corner.
“No sign of our seventh yet, according to Quilts?”
The other five men stood up and crowded around him, smiling and offering their hands in turn. Some of them he only saw at these meetings and some he saw every day, or nearly every day. All of them were his close, close friends; after nine years, he could have gone to any of them with any problem and been assured of their confidence and sympathy. The club was seven for precisely that reason. They were Lenox; young James Hilary, the MP, whom Lenox had proposed, and whose third meeting it was; Sir John Beacham, an engineer and student of Brunel’s who was only slightly older than Hilary, and considered in his profession to be immensely promising; Thomas Weft, who was kind, poor, shy, and brilliant, but had only a sinecure at the Naval Office, procured for him by an SPQR, to show for it; Lord Hallam, the terrifying, imperious inventor and scientist who had introduced McConnell to the Royal Society; and, sixth, Francis Charles Hastings Russell, Liberal Member of Parliament for Bedfordshire, founder of the SPQRs, and agricultural theorist, who would become the 9th Duke of Bedford when his father died.
Then there was the seventh member of the club, who came in about ten minutes later while the other six men sat at the table talking. He was Edward, the Prince of Wales and heir apparent to his mother’s crown. Though he had come late to scholarship—for the SPQRs’ common interest was Roman history—at Christ Church he had been keen, and he and Francis Russell had been friends. That he knew the least of the seven was no obstacle; doors opened at the sight of him that would have been closed shut to the battering of money and even position, usual position. He was candid, friendly, and yet slightly remote. Theirs was his only intellectual pursuit. The rest of the time, married though he was to Princess Alexandra, he was with women and friends, living the life of a playboy.
“Marius,” said the future duke, and was first to shake the prince’s hands.
There were a few hard and fast rules of the SPQR, and one was that names didn’t matter. Weft and the prince could shake hands, for those few hours, as equals, Aurelius and Marius. Lenox was called Julius, and when the prince came to him the royal lips moved slightly: “Well, Julius, how goes it in Oxford?”
“Well enough,” said Lenox, momentarily dumbstruck.
“I wish you all luck there. This is still England …”
The meeting opened with a ceremonial glass of Roman honeyed wine, which the chef at Boodle’s prepared a week in advance. Russell said the traditional opening words.
“Gentlemen, welcome again to this tiny club of ours. Tonight we honor the long dead, for the happiness and instruction they bring to our short lives. Drink with me once, and be my friend forever.”
For supper there was soup, fish, steak, and finally Boodle’s orange fool, made of sponge cake, orange, lemon, heavy cream, and sugar; it tasted delicious with a glass of champagne. Talk over supper was general and avoided their common interest, which was reserved for the postprandial hour. They talked about politics, horses, friends, hunting, cricket, books, their lives. Over dessert everybody was responsible for a paragraph of praise and celebration of the person to his left. Lenox spoke of Beacham, the engineer, with fond and witty brevity, and in turn had to listen to Weft’s encomium.
The great hour, though, was the brandy hour. When it arrived they all felt slightly more solemn, unbuttoned their cuffs, gave great sighs of contented fullness, and sipped their drinks to the accompaniment of a lecture. At this meeting it was Weft’s turn, and the young scholar gave a lively account of gossip’s role in the second Catiline conspiracy (he was a great lover of Cicero, Weft). The speech met with thundering applause and a lively round of questions. Even the prince asked a question—rare for him—on a minor point of Senate history and was congratulated on its aptness. Lenox challenged Weft’s translation of a line of Sallust and gained the small concession from the room at large, though Weft stuck with his original reading. Hallam brought forth an exceedingly rare Roman coin he had acquired at auction and, as a first order of business, made a present of it to the SPQRs, which was greeted with many toasts and great excitement.
(“A silver didrachm of Claudius,” said Hallam authoritatively. He was reckoned to know of such things. “You can all see the uneven cut, as well as Claudius standing in his four-horse chariot. From A.D. 46, would be my guess. One of the rarest early coins.”
“But where shall it be housed?” Hilary asked.
“If the palace will do, I can arrange for its presentation and safekeeping,” said the prince with a noble turn of his head. “It shall come to every meeting.”
Nobody would say otherwise, though Hallam looked slightly crestfallen, and indeed there was much excited talk about a possible SPQR collection—and then a long argument about whether Cambridge or Oxford was a better ultimate location for the hypothetical archive.)
Then there was a motion from Russell to cap the total number of members at any one time at eight, except in the case when a legacy of the seven original members present, or more specifically a son or grandson, had a sufficient interest and knowledge of Roman history to gain admittance to the group.
Now, this was a controversy. A faction comprised of Lenox, Hilary, and Beacham suggested that the number be higher—twelve, say—though with no obligation to reach the cap, because there might well be two deserving candidates to come forth in the future. Russell pointed out that compatibility was as serious an issue as knowledge, and that the group would begin to grow too generic if it got much larger, without the bonds of friendship that they all enjoyed. The prince, Hallam, and Weft all said that they could see both sides of the argument, with Weft leaning toward Russell’s side, Hallam the other way, and the prince refusing to commit. This was all very vexing to Russell, who had expected to sail through the vote unanimously. Eventually, though, he agreed to compromise on the number nine. Everyone conceded that finding three eligible candidates in their lifetimes was unlikely, and so nine became the number. Weft added that they didn’t even have an eligible candidate on the horizon and expressed his doubt that the issue would become problematic anytime soon. Still, it had been a pleasing argument and given them all time for another glass of brandy, and so none of them regretted it.
Lenox gave the closing remarks. These were different each time, and responsibility for them rotated among the men. In general they were meant to pledge the renewal of every
man’s friendship with every other. He removed a sheet of paper from the thin brown folder he had brought, and read.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “we come here every two months to celebrate the ancient culture which all of us love. And if I may say so, they are six of the happiest nights of the year for me. I read something of the old texts every day—Virgil, Polybius, Tacitus, Ovid—and I may say that they are common in my life. But it is uncommon to meet with a small group of other people so sympathetic and friendly, so lively and intelligent. It is uncommon that we all feel at ease with each other, in our short interactions together. It is uncommon that we have this felicity in our lives. As Marcus Aurelius pointed out, we are only passing creatures—but happy and fortunate ones. Please raise your glasses with me that these passing hours of our lifetime are so blessed with good spirit and friendship.”
The applause bespoke recognition, somber, affirmative, and genuine. They raised their glasses, their room visible as a small square of light in the late darkness of the city.
CHAPTER FORTY
Who was Major Peter Wilson, late of the 12th Suffolk W 2nd, cofounder of the September Society, and recently deceased?
The next morning was rainy, too, and after rising late (and slightly foggy-headed), Lenox in his slippers and robe had taken himself to his old thinking post by the fire. Sipping his cup of tea, he pondered Wilson’s strange and superficially senseless death. Wilson must have had a good pension, had certainly had a distinguished career, and enjoyed—theoretically—a group of close friends. The more Lenox thought over the idea of suicide, the more improbable it seemed.
When he finished his breakfast, Lenox donned a blue morning coat and set out to walk the short distance to Park Lane. He had decided to pay another visit to the September Society’s (and Biblius Club’s) talkative doorman.
The rain was thin and driving, bitter, and the buildings along St. James’s Park looked gray and dull, lifeless even where they were dimly lit. A rolling fog had appeared, too. It became denser as Lenox came nearer the Thames, until the streets were almost impenetrable beyond a few feet. When he reached Carlton Gardens and the stout building that housed the two clubs, he found a different, older doorman present.
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