The Fleet Street Murders (25 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

N

ow it was a month later.

Early February, and while the days were short and gray, and while those who tramped through London’s streets longed for home, there was a happy glow to Lenox’s life. His hours were taken up with warm fires, long books, slow suppers, his brother, and Lady Jane. He went out very little, and even when he did never commented to a soul about the downfall of George Barnard, choosing instead to focus on clearing up all of Barnard’s myriad crimes by tracing them diligently through the cunning and subtle ways in which the man had pushed Winston Carruthers’s work. The newspaper report of a fracas in some neighborhood, for instance, might dovetail nicely with a robbery several days later in the same area. It was the kind of deep research Lenox had loved since Oxford.

This morning, however, he was more pleasantly disposed, sitting in his library with Toto.

She had insisted on coming to him, although he had had his misgivings. “I need to get out of that poky house,” she said, conveniently forgetting about its ten bedrooms, and so she sat now in his library, bent daintily over a small notebook she had been keeping about Jane and Lenox’s honeymoon, her effervescent laugh ringing more and more often through the room.

It emerged from their tête-à-tête that Toto was a furious negotiator on Jane’s behalf and loved every moment of research and discussion about the honeymoon. She and Lenox complemented each other well. Every time he started to talk about local cash crops or cave art she would roll her eyes and return as soon as she could to the waterfall they had to visit, the dressmaker who was meant to be so clever.

“What do you think of Ireland?” Lenox asked.

Toto made a face. “All those potatoes,” she said. “Ugh.”

“It’s meant to be beautiful, Toto. All that green! And the beautiful Irish babies!” Lenox halted.

“It’s all right, Charles,” she said.

“No—it’s—that was awfully tactless of me.”

“Charles, it’s all right!” He saw that she was smiling shyly.

“Toto?”

“What?” she said innocently. Under his gaze, however, she soon broke down. Quietly she admitted, “We’re having a baby.”

A great weight lifted from Lenox’s spirit. “I’m so happy,” he said.

“We’re being awfully silent about it,” she said, but then, breaking into a grin, went on, “I am, too, though! How happy I am!”

“Is Thomas?”

“Yes, very, very happy, and the doctors say”—here she ran into the strictures of her age and couldn’t say quite what she wanted—“they say how healthy I am, and indeed I feel it! But Charles, you mustn’t tell anybody. I’ve barely said a word about it, except to Jane and Duch.” Duch was the Duchess of Marchmain, Toto and Jane’s great friend. “Thomas will tell you in due time.”

Rather sadly, Lenox remembered what her mien had been when she was first with child and bursting with baby names and nursery ideas.

They sat closeted for another half hour, talking about the honeymoon—Toto liked the idea of Greece—until McConnell came to fetch her, smiling broadly at Lenox, his face less troubled than usual, and walking his wife very carefully out of the house and down to their carriage.

After they had gone Lenox stood just inside the door, thinking about life, about its passing strangeness. He went back to his library to read a tract about the Catiline conspiracy.

Not half an hour later there was a knock at the front door, and he laid the pamphlet down.

Graham appeared. “You have two guests, sir,” he said.

“Bring them in.”

A moment later the butler reappeared, with James Hilary and—to Lenox’s astonishment—Edward Crook in tow.

“Crook!” he exclaimed, rising to his feet. “I’m honored to have you here. Graham, fetch something to eat, would you, and drink? How do you do, Hilary? But Crook! I scarcely expected to see you accept my invitation to London so soon—which is not to say I’m not pleased that you have!”

“It isn’t a visit of pleasure, in fact, Mr. Lenox,” said Crook. Lenox noticed the small gleam of a smile in the corner of his mouth.

“How do you mean?” asked Lenox.

Hilary and Crook glanced at each other, and it was the London man who spoke. “Late yesterday evening Mr. Crook called on me. I must confess I was as astonished as you appear to be to see him, but he told me some interesting information.”

“I couldn’t let go of that election,” said Crook. “It seemed so unjust, after you and I had both worked so hard.”

“Mr. Crook went back over the rolls of the vote—”

“As any person in Stirrington could, by law,” Crook interjected rather pompously.

“He noticed that about a thousand more people had voted in the by-election than had ever voted before. Not that surprising, given that Stoke regularly ran unopposed—but certainly surprising, given that the number comprised about 95 percent of Stirrington’s population.”

“The number of people in town has been decreasing, and it seemed altogether suspicious that 95 percent of them would vote,” said Crook.

Lenox scarcely dared to hope but said, “What does all this mean?”

Again his two visitors glanced at each other, and again it was Hilary who spoke. “As it happened, Mr. Crook recognized some six hundred names—”

“More than that.”

“Excuse me—more than six hundred names that
should not have been on the voter rolls
.”

“You see, Mr. Lenox, all six hundred of these voters were—are—dead!”

Hilary smiled. “Can you guess for whom they voted, by any chance?”

Lenox flushed. “Not—”

“That’s right. Roodle.”

“The devil,” said the detective softly.

“Mr. Crook instantly lodged a complaint—”

“Instantly. Didn’t want to get your hopes up, but I had to.”

Hilary paused. “In any event, the complaint is pending, but we had a private talk with Roodle, who means to step down and—”

“We did it!” cried Crook. “You’re to be the Member for Stirrington!”

Hilary gave the large barman a wry look, then turned back to Lenox and said, “Welcome to the House, Charles. I can’t think of a fitter man to enter it.”

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

T

wo weeks later it was the momentous afternoon when Lenox was to take his seat in Parliament. He was in his library, and occasionally the smack of a hammer sounded above; they were joining his house to Lady Jane’s in anticipation of a marriage three months hence. The muted sound pleased him every time he heard it—the symbol of the thing, the jointure, made him happy.

The library he stood in was transformed by the letters and telegrams that lay on every surface, jammed in books, and stacked unread on the floor, all of which offered advice and some congratulations as well. He was dressed very nattily, he thought. His brother had ventured down to the kitchen to scrounge himself a cup of tea (something not strictly done in the best society, and which would no doubt send the staff into an anxious bout of indignation, but which the Lenox boys had done all their lives), and Lady Jane was standing with Lenox, adjusting his attire, giving him proud, happy little smiles, and generally bustling about in her useful way.

“Now, before you go I have a present for you,” she said.

Lenox smiled. “You needn’t have,” he said.

“Ah, but it was such fun! Here, look.”

It was a flat, square parcel, plainly a book, wrapped in patterned paper and tied with a blue ribbon Lenox recognized as usually belonging to her hair.

“What can it be?” he asked, slowly unwrapping it.

He saw that it was a smallish book, not longer than a hundred pages, bound in very supple brown Morocco leather. There was no title on it, only
CHARLES LENOX
embossed in gold in the lower right corner of the cover, and he flicked it open with his brow furrowed, slightly puzzled, though the smile remained on his lips.

“It’s your father’s speeches,” said Lady Jane softly. “I had them bound.”

Suddenly he recognized what she had done.

For years Edmund and Charles’s father’s speeches from the House of Commons had been floating around in loose manuscripts. Each brother had a copy, Lenox House had one, and a few of the political clubs did, too. He had been a respected orator, if never among the chief of his party; the certainty of his seat and the lineage of his family ensured him that respect despite what were considered his eccentricities—a startling advocacy for the poor and the foreign, an indifference to British military pride, and a confidence unmatched by his peers in the power of the vote, which now seemed ahead of its time.

Lenox flipped through the thick cream-colored pages very gingerly now, each one a treasure. He turned to the front and saw the beautifully laid out title page, and opposite it a tintype likeness of his father’s wonderful, kind, wise face.

He wanted to describe everything he felt to Lady Jane—he wanted to compliment the type, the effort, the secrecy, the speed with which she had had it made—but he found there was a lump in his throat, and to his shame tears stood in his eyes. He tried not to think of how much he missed his father, how much he missed always having someone to reassure him that the world would be all right—the desolation of his absence—

Jane, who always understood everything, kissed him on the cheek and held him for a moment longer than she usually did, and then made a great show of clearing a pile of telegrams off his desk.

“Are you going to give a speech?” she asked gaily.

He gave a choked laugh. “Of course not,” he said. “Not for ages.”

“My cousin Davey gave one on his very first day!”

This was the present Earl of St. Pancras, who was, unlike Lenox’s father, genuinely eccentric. “In the Lords, I remember. It was about how he didn’t like strawberry jam.”

“Be nice, Charles! It was a speech about fruit importation, which I admit devolved into something of a tirade.” She couldn’t help but laugh. “Still, you could talk about something more important.”

“Than jam? Impossible. We mustn’t set the bar too high, Jane.”

So they bantered until he was quite himself again and was ready to leave. Edmund emerged from downstairs gulping a cup of tea.

“Look what Jane has made, Ed,” Charles said, holding up the book.

“What is it? Oh, Fa’s speeches? Yes, it’s marvelous.”

“I used Edmund’s version of them to have it made,” Jane explained. “I have a dozen copies.”

“We sent one to the British Library,” said Edmund, “and the library at Parliament. Come along, come along, we mustn’t be late.”

Clutching his book in one hand, Lenox rode silently through the streets of London while Jane and Edmund talked. He was watching all of the people and places he saw with new eyes and with a profound sense of the burden of looking after his fellow men, a profound sense of the gravity of his new work.

The Members’ entrance to the House was through a beautiful arched corridor, which led into an open courtyard and then into the chambers of governance. Never had the golden buildings of Parliament and Big Ben looked so momentous to Lenox, so majestic, as they did now against the backdrop of the river.

The Members themselves were a different matter. The courtyard was crowded by a series of glum, combative-looking gentlemen in black cloaks and very proper top hats. Small groups were deep in discussion, and only a few people looked up to say hello to Edmund, Lenox, and Jane as they came through the arch.

“We must leave you here, Jane,” said Lenox, “but shall I come to visit you afterward?”

“I wouldn’t forgive you if you didn’t!”

“Oh—ah—I—I see a man,” said Edmund. “Meet me by the door, Charles. Good-bye, Jane!”

Edmund went off commending himself on the extreme cunning of the maneuver (and it was perhaps for the best that he didn’t notice their indulgent smiles trailing behind him) and stood off in a corner, waiting.

It was a beautiful courtyard, Edmund always thought. The light was falling through the high, old windows, the vivid lavender of winter evening, and he thought with contentment of going back to the country the next morning to see Molly and his boys. There was nothing he liked better than being married, and as he stole a glance at his brother and his old friend, Lady Jane, his heart filled with joy for them, and he pondered the vagaries of the world, which for all of its fault lines and difficulties could offer so much happiness sometimes, and often—as for his brother, who had so long lived as a bachelor, had so long struggled with the prejudice against his profession—often when you weren’t even looking for it at all.