The Hidden City, page 3
part #12 of Charles Lenox Series
As the brougham from the station started on to Hampden Lane, where he lived, Lenox felt the day’s uneasiness dissolve. If he was not quite master of himself, right now, he knew that the house would be full of people willing to take up the slack.
Lady Jane was there to greet them at the front door. Lenox had wired her that there were to be two girls, not just one, and Jane, with impeccable nonchalance, took Sari in just as she did Lenox’s cousin, leading the pair upstairs and depositing them into adjoining guest rooms at the top of the house’s west stairs, just as if she had been expecting them both all along. In fact Lenox knew that a different room had been prepared for Angela.
Lady Jane Lenox was a woman of exactly her husband’s age, plain but pretty, with light brown curling hair. Her gray eyes were calm, quizzical. In person she was serene, self-assured, and often funny, qualities born aloft by deep reserves of decency and discretion. She was the daughter of an earl and the sister of another, and of the couple, it was she who belonged to fashionable London; his profession was too eccentric, for one thing, while her closest friendships reached into the highest spheres of British life.
While she showed them to their rooms, Lenox retreated, tired, to the drawing room, idly thumbing through his book. (“Pause there, Morocco,” he read, with a flash of schoolboy recognition.) At last, an hour later, the two girls emerged, chatting more freely with Lady Jane, freshly scrubbed, wearing their threadbare best.
“You must come to the nursery before you do anything else and meet the girls—our girls, your young cousins,” Lady Jane said.
They found Clara and Sophia in their schoolroom. Their lessons for the day were apparently over, for they were busy arranging their dolls and animals in rows along the room’s front bench.
“Girls, listen and be obedient,” said Lady Jane, as they entered. “This is your cousin Angela whom we told you about and her particular friend Sari—and you must meet them and curtsy, and be extremely polite, for they are special visitors, who will stay here at home with us for quite a while, perhaps even forever. Do you understand?”
Both girls turned and stood. “She has brown skin,” said Clara, the younger of the two, staring at Sari. She was not quite four.
“You have forgotten to curtsy,” said Lady Jane.
“It’s true, though, I do,” said Sari, with such sweetness that both Sophia and Clara moved toward her a step or two, gravitationally—and Lenox sensed it would be she, not Angela, that they favored.
“I hope your voyage went well,” said Sophia, who was five years older than Clara and a little more civilized. “Do you like England thus far?”
“It is very cold,” said Sari, but smiling, without any tone of complaint. “I was enchanted by the meadows and pastures we passed. Just like in the books! What are your dolls doing? How I loved my dolls when I was little.”
“They are in school, minding their lessons,” Sophia answered.
“Just like you,” said Sari.
“Yes,” said Clara—smiling shyly, highly gratified.
“Marjorie is in trouble,” said Sophia. “She didn’t know two plus two.”
All of them turned to look at a cloth horse that stood with its face ignominiously angled into a corner.
“I hope she can get out soon,” said Angela—the first comment she had ventured.
Sophia and Clara looked at her a little crossly, as if they hadn’t expected her to take the part of the disgraced Marjorie so soon into the acquaintance; their schoolchildren were subjected to the strictest discipline if they answered questions incorrectly, Lenox knew. He wasn’t sure where they had formed this impression of the strictness of other schools—their own governess was so tenderhearted that she had burst into tears once when Sophia called her a muttonhead.
“She can only come out tomorrow,” said Clara.
CHAPTER FIVE
The first meeting between the children and the new guests went well on the whole; and supper better still. There was white wine with the soup course, and after dessert and cheese, a dusty bottle of Tokay, which Kirk poured into tiny crystal glasses. Lenox doubted the wisdom of strong drink for the girls still not yet a night’s sleep past their long voyage, but Jane had called for the bottle herself, and after a glass both grew flushed, convivial, and happy in spirits, indeed happier than at any time since they landed.
They talked broadly of their upbringing, which at least in its early years sounded as if it had been a typical one for English children in the colonies, with visits among the other British expatriates and a regular schoolmistress. The two had been educated side by side.
“My father was partial to cheddar,” Angela observed as she nibbled at a last piece of the cheese. It was the first time she had volunteered any information about Jasper. “It was fearfully hard to get hold of. It is so very strange to be here. It is as if everything the English at home imitated about life were real now—the real England.”
The clock struck ten, and soon the girls’ mood shifted from giddy to tired. Sari managed to get off a last wry comment about the ship (“We would have given quite a lot for biscuits like these rounding Africa!”) before at last the immense fatigue of the trip showed in the girls’ faces.
“Come now,” said Lady Jane. “I will take you to your rooms.”
A maid was dispatched to put lemon water at their bedsides; and as the girls went upstairs, Lenox heard them laughing and laughing about something. He felt a softening of the tension around his mouth at that. Such a happy noise was welcome in his heart.
The question of Sari—of whether it was possible that she could be introduced into society with Angela, of how people would greet the idea of a young Indian girl living on equal footing in Lenox’s house—remained to be solved. But there was a young Indian lad at Oxford now, after all, and another standing for Parliament. Besides, no one who had seen the two girls together for a moment could contemplate separating them.
At breakfast the next morning, Charles’s older brother Edmund came to meet the new visitors. “Hello, hello,” he said, entering the breakfast room hard on the heels of the footman who announced him. “But where are they?”
“Still sleeping,” said Lady Jane, giving Edmund a kiss on the cheek.
“Ah, I see. Look, breakfast! Lord, I was up half the night starving away.”
Edmund went to the sideboard and scooped some eggs onto a plate. He was half an inch taller than Charles and wore a sober black suit to his younger brother’s gray one, but otherwise they looked very alike.
It was no surprise at all that he had been up late. After thirty years of refusing advancement within his party, holding firm to his status as a backbencher, he had at last accepted Gladstone’s entreaties that he take a cabinet-level position.
His reward had been unstinting labor since, and to Charles, who had known him from birth, the strain and exhaustion in his brother’s face was obvious.
More subtle but equally present was a new eagerness there. Edmund’s wife, Molly, had died suddenly a few years before—there had rarely been a happier couple when she was alive—and this was the first time since her death that he seemed to his younger brother to have found any distraction from the loss.
“How is Parliament, Your Lordship?” Charles said.
“Stop that,” said Edmund irritably, sitting down and placing his gloves by his plate. A maid poured him a cup of tea. “It is rotten, as you well know. How are you, Jane?”
“Very well, thank you. In fact Charles and I were just discussing Angela’s welcome supper on Saturday.”
“Ah, yes,” said Edmund, nodding to show he understood the importance of the subject. “I should like to hear. But tell me—what do you make of these two girls?”
“I like them a great deal,” said Charles.
“It must have thrown you to find two of them.”
“Oh yes. And Angela is—well, very quiet. Fortunately the friend talks.”
“Did she tell you anything of their circumstances in Bombay?”
“Only a little,” said Lady Jane. “Apparently Jasper had a small house up in the foothills, which had deteriorated a great deal in recent years.”
The brothers glanced at each other. “Poor Jazz,” said Edmund.
“Angela and Sari thought of staying there after he died, but the local English wouldn’t hear of it. Busybodies. They told me last night that there were some very lean years. I’m afraid your cousin was unhappy toward the end.”
“I supposed as much,” Charles said.
“He was down to two servants by the time of his death, which Sari implied to me was nearly inconceivable for an Englishman there. A cook and a housekeeper. Angela and Sari themselves did all the shopping and the cleaning, and looked after themselves. They sent the laundry out, but besides that had to be quite self-sufficient. The local officers’ society provided a governess when they were younger, apparently, but she stopped coming when Angela was fourteen, and she refused to teach Sari at all.”
“It sounds rather bleak,” said Edmund. “Tell me, who is coming to dine on Saturday?”
This they discussed for some ten minutes, as Charles sipped his coffee, Edmund his tea. There were to be thirty guests, and it was vital to balance the number of men and women. A dozen old necessary relatives would have to be leavened by some jolly younger guests, Lady Jane told them. It was she who understood society better than either of the brothers—better indeed than any woman in London, it was sometimes said.
The conversation moved easily until the subject of Charles’s close friend Thomas McConnell came up. It was Jane who mentioned it. “I had thought to invite him and Toto, of course. But they are going to be in the country.”
“Strange,” said Lenox.
McConnell was a doctor, a gallant Scotsman, and Toto the daughter of a duchess; both were quite social, and it was odd that they should leave London during the season.
Edmund had gotten a guarded look on his face. Charles, who knew his brother, said, “What is it, Ed?”
Edmund set down his fork. “I don’t know if you’ve heard the rumors. But I may as well tell you, since people are talking. They say Thomas has begun drinking again.”
Jane whitened, and Lenox knew he must have shown his reaction, too. Besides being one of his closest friends, McConnell had helped him on more cases than he could count. It had been years now since he had touched alcohol—ever since he had begun practicing medicine full time again, a good seven or eight years. Lenox had thought the problem was in the past forever.
“Perhaps it is only a rumor,” said Lady Jane.
“I had it from Tallulah Carleton, who is no idle whisperer.”
Lenox’s heart fell. “Oh no.”
At that moment, the door cracked shyly open, and the two arrivals from India appeared. They wore morning dresses, these, too, patched, faded. Jane would have to take them dress shopping.
“Angela and Sari,” said Edmund, rising, his face beaming. He bowed deeply. “I am Sir Edmund Lenox, your cousin. How very happy I am to see you. Welcome to England.”
Both girls curtsied, and Angela said, “How do you do, Cousin?”
“You must know how sorry I am about your father—the salt of the earth, Jasper. And I hope you will swear to me that though you may stay here, I shall have an equal share in your company as Charles. I have never been able to bear him getting the better of me. Jasper would have told you that. But please, I am sure you are far too hungry for speeches. Here is the dish of scrambled eggs before me—would either of you care for some?”
CHAPTER SIX
At ten o’clock, a pleasant breakfast behind them and Edmund having departed for Parliament, Lenox felt confident enough in the girls’ comfort to make a trip out into the city, leaving them in the care of Lady Jane. He stepped into his carriage, which was waiting for him out in the brisk, clear morning, and some twenty minutes after leaving Hampden Lane arrived in front of a pretty yellow row house with blue trim and flowers in the windows at 12 Conduit Street.
This was the address Mrs. Huggins had given in her letter. Already standing there, tidy in a heather-gray suit and dark gloves, was a compact, sandy-haired gentleman.
“Graham!”
“Good morning.”
Graham was perhaps Lenox’s most intimate friend, and the two of them had agreed by wire upon this rendezvous quite early that morning. Graham was famously always one of the first members into Parliament; as for Lenox, he had been unable to sleep, and so their communication had fired back and forth before the sun was up.
“How are you?” Lenox said, as he came down from his carriage.
“Well enough,” said Graham. As ever when he spoke to Lenox, an implicit sir lay just beyond his words. “How are you?”
Friends—it was true that Lenox and Graham were friends, but the word did not quite encompass their standing with each other. For many years, indeed since Oxford, Graham had been Lenox’s personal servant, or valet—yet this was not all of it either, and indeed perhaps there was hardly a word to describe all that Graham had done in Lenox’s employment.
As a person he was quiet and thoughtful, invariably respectful, but with a quick and original mind. It had made him useful in ways a valet would never usually be.
This had first shown itself in the ways he helped Lenox in his detective work. But it was not until Lenox had entered politics that they had discovered Graham’s real vocation—for in politics he was a born tactician, with a workingman’s understanding of the issues, yet also, from living beside Lenox, an aristocrat’s understanding of how they were resolved in the great rooms by the Thames.
His acuity had made it inevitable that he become Lenox’s chief political secretary—a job that would traditionally have fallen to a promising young Oxbridge graduate. Later, against longer odds still, he had dared to run for Parliament himself and won. Once he was in his seat, he was, despite his birth, so obviously useful to his side, so obviously an impediment to the other, that it forced all men to greet him on his own terms.
There had been years when Lenox and Graham scarcely left each other’s company except to sleep. But days and weeks and even months passed these days between their meetings. Such was the price of a friend’s success.
Still, they looked a pair in front of Mrs. Huggins’s building, together scrutinizing its arched vestibule, large enough to shelter two or three people from rain, four from a storm. It led through a glass-fronted door up a dim stairwell.
“Shall we go in?” said Graham.
Lenox stood still, gazing critically at the vestibule. “Someone slept here last night.”
Graham glanced at it again. “Slept here?”
Lenox pointed to a small grouping of black semicircular smudges on the wall at foot level. “Look. These are fresh.” He glanced up and down the street. “Whoever it was put out his cigar and relit it twelve or thirteen times in the night. No one could remain so long unobserved in the day. And it rained yesterday, so these must be from overnight.”
Graham shook his head, studying the marks. “Just so. I am out of practice.”
Lenox shrugged. “I may be wrong. Come, let’s find out from Mrs. Huggins what this is all about.”
They went up the stairs where the murder had taken place, according to the letter—nothing very remarkable here, at least that Lenox could see in the shadowy light—and knocked on one of the two doors there. The other led up to a rooftop by a rickety-looking continuation of the wooden stairwell.
Seeing it, Lenox immediately reckoned that there was a nine-tenths chance the death was closer to misadventure than murder.
It would be good to see Mrs. Huggins nonetheless.
She answered her own door. She looked the same as ever, perhaps a little older but in truth not much to Lenox’s eye, a short woman with fine bones, white hair pulled back, and intelligent eyes. She wore a simple day dress and an intricate white lace bonnet, in the old fashion of the 1830s.
“Hello, Mr. Lenox,” she said, a genuine smile brightening her rather severe features. “And hello to you, too, Mr. Graham! I had wondered now and then if I should ever lay eyes upon either of you again in this lifetime. Well, come in, come in! A pretty year or two has passed, hasn’t it, since you incorrigible paper gatherers were young men?”
“Indeed it has, Mrs. Huggins,” said Lenox, returning her smile and taking her outstretched hand.
She led them into a clean and spacious pair of rooms. In the main one was a small fire burning in the grate, with a rocking chair next to it and a pot of tea warming over the coals. Lenox could see a partially knitted garment on the arm of the chair. The second room overlooked the street. A black cat prowled the windowsills, only briefly turning to look at them.
