Chapter Forty-Eight
The next day Lenox resumed his place in the House of Commons. He was determined to make a go of it; the brief spark of excitement that the cholera problem had given him was fresh in his mind still, and he realized that to last in Parliament you had to be one of two sorts of people. You could be the dogged, workaday type (there had been plenty of Prime Ministers and Chancellors of the Exchequer who belonged to this category, and it was by no means lesser), and spend long hours in study and work. Or you could be the sort who felt strongly the inciting passion of ideas, and work to bend other men to your will.
He had no chance of being the first kind. It wasn’t in his makeup. But he could be the second kind, he hoped.
In the meanwhile it was Graham who filled the first role. As the days passed after the case had concluded and Lenox spent more and more time in his office, he found out that Graham had inexhaustible reserves of energy to devote even to the minutest issues. He was a wonderful taskmaster to Frabbs, both cajoling him into better work and teaching him how the work was to be done.
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.