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.