The two men finished their drinks, stood up, and left, just far apart enough that it was clear they were going separate ways. Lenox and Cobb had to wait for an agonizing few seconds as Graham sat, prolonging his ruse, before returning to them.
“Well?” said Lenox eagerly when he had returned.
Graham took his seat again, and said, in a low voice, “Forsythe Witt couldn’t make this meeting. It was Jonas who reported that. Sheridan was quite put out. They are meeting at six at the Carlton Club instead. Sheridan objected to the plan but eventually agreed.”
The two detectives absorbed this information. “Can we get into the Carlton Club?” asked Cobb.
“I can, at least,” said Lenox. “I have to think of a friend who won’t ask questions. Let me think for a moment.”
He had an equal number of friends on each side of the House of Commons, Lenox, tilting perhaps toward his brother’s party (and his father’s, and his own) in proportion. Most of the conservatives were school friends. He searched his mind for one who wouldn’t care about letting him in as a guest without wanting to know why. It was notorious for its privacy, the Carlton; the chances of getting Cobb in were slim, and Graham probably none.
Lenox glanced at his watch: 4:55. It would need to be someone close at hand, too, worse luck.
Forsythe Witt. Wilton Sheridan. And Samuel Jonas. One liberal, two conservatives. All three Members of Parliament. Roughly of the same age. Sheridan the only aristocrat among them, however.
Why were they meeting? What did they know?
“I can’t think of the right person,” he said, not quite listening to himself, for his mind was working.
“Perhaps Sir Richard?” Winston Cobb said.
In fact, Mayne was a member of the Carlton, but it was impossible to explain to Cobb why exactly the commissioner would have felt honor-bound never to use it in his work.
“There is also His Grace the Duke of Dorset,” said Graham. “I think he would do it for you.”
“Graham!” Lenox cried. “That’s it!”
“A duke?” said Cobb. “My understanding is that they’re—not indebted to many people, I suppose.”
But Lenox was already standing up, for this one happened to be, as the visit to Hawkes’s had again shown. The young detective had inadvertently learned many of Dorset’s most important secrets in a case not long before, and that same case had produced a grudging sense on Dorset’s part that Lenox, so socially inferior to him as to be beneath his notice in general terms, had the right to call upon his goodwill should he wish.
There was a line of hansoms just outside the pub. They stepped into one, having agreed to go together to Dorset House, with its beautiful views of the Thames, its masterpieces of art and craft and furniture, and its air of sorrowful majesty.
They had been in the cab for five minutes, the rain still very heavy, the sound outside thunderous, when Lenox said, slowly, “I think I understand what’s happened.”
“What?” asked Cobb, who had been sharpening a small knife he apparently kept in his belt.
Lenox didn’t speak for fully half a minute after that. Indeed, his eyes might have fallen closed. But at last he said, “Tell me where I go wrong. I’m not sure yet. Will you?”
Graham nodded; Cobb, too.
“Wilton Sheridan, Samuel Jonas, and Forsythe Witt. Three men who are roughly of an age, all of whom were in Jamaica at an overlapping period of their lives.”
“Correct.”
“An aristocrat, and two men who set out to become rich and did it.”
“Correct.”
“And those two both returned to England within the last five years and immediately expended some of that wealth to become Members of Parliament.”
“Yes.”
“It doesn’t run cheap, a seat in Parliament.”
“So far we know all of this,” Cobb said, though not impatiently.
“My next thought, then, is how unlikely a friendship it is.”
“Why?”
“Sheridan is a man of the turf who was in Jamaica once, twenty years ago, by his account. Horses are all he cares about. The others are men of business. From that I think: What did they have that he wanted?”
“Have, sir?” said Graham.
“Samuel Jonas had land and money. He was a successful merchant.”
“As was Forsythe Witt,” said Cobb.
“Not quite!” Lenox had warmed to his theory as he began to explain it; he was all but sure, and a slow excitement started to suffuse him. “If you notice from his biography in Who’s Who, he started with less than Jonas, Witt. He began as a bookkeeper and moved around Jamaica in search of work.”
“Yes.”
“What he did have was a shipping company. He had boats.”
“And what did Sheridan have that needed to be moved in boats? Sugar?”
Lenox shook his head slightly, then looked at Cobb and Graham, seated on the bench opposite him. “Slaves.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
The card room of the Carlton Club justified the invention of the word “sumptuous”—and even perhaps the invention of the word “sumptuosity”—and probably, in all good faith, the return of sumptuary laws, which for centuries, until around the time of Queen Elizabeth, had placed a tax on furs and types of cloth that only the very rich could afford.
The room’s chairs were of a mind-boggling plushness, the woods of table and bench darkened with age, the grandfather clock, with its heavy gleaming pendulum, a construction of ancient magnificence and intricacy.
Cobb had no doubt seen comfort, but there was no mistaking the way he took everything in subtly as they sat there, he, Graham, and Lenox—a citizen of a republic visiting a monarchy.
It was the three men’s good fortune that the duke had been indignant at Lenox’s suggestion that he might not be able to get all of them into the club.
“My father was one of the founders of the Carlton,” he’d said.
“So I recall, Your Grace,” Lenox had replied.
And indeed he did now remember that Dorset had his own tables at White’s and the Carlton, never to be used by any other patron, no matter how busy the dining room might be.
“I myself paid for a portrait of him to be installed there recently. Next to Charles Fox.” This was a Whig hero. “Goodness me. My second footman would receive a welcome at the Carlton. Certainly you and your friends shall.”
He had ushered them in as if the club existed to serve his whims, then left them in the card room and gone to smoke on the next floor up (and perhaps complain about the world, to some friend who would commiserate about their equally unfavorable fortunes while sipping forty-year-old port). A discreet waiter—discreet almost to the extent that Lenox would have believed he was deaf and blind, if they hadn’t spoken—brought them whiskies with soda.
From here they had a view of the grand staircase, but not such a direct view that they could not conceal themselves. Lenox, in particular, knew he would stand out to Wilt Sheridan, whom he had seen in every ballroom in London over the course of the last four or five years. He kept his back to the door.
It was ten to six. He felt a drumming anticipation in his pulse. They were close to an answer.
And after all the winding oddities of this case, it was a modest piece of cross-stitch that had told Lenox the story.
Jonas Hall. That was what the cross-stitched picture in Jonas’s apartments had said, beneath a picture of a house. But as he had walked the apartment again in his mind—he had an excellent visual memory, Lenox—the house had looked … strange. Why?
It was snow white, with large columns and a balcony overhanging a porch. There were willow and magnolia trees. There was a well to the side.
It was, he had realized, an American house. There were English mansions in the Palladian manner, but only in America had this very specific style become popular—and more specifically still, only in the South, where the heat turned the shade of the front porch from a comfort into a neces
sity. Jonas Hall didn’t sit in Kent or Shropshire or even South Africa, Jamaica, or Australia. Lenox would bet anything on that. It was in America.
Cobb had agreed, when Lenox described the house. And that completed Lenox’s theory. It was roughly this: that some twenty years before, with slavery about to end even in England’s colonies, a young Wilton Sheridan had faced losing the value of five hundred slaves. Instead of selling them at a catastrophic discount, or manumitting them, he and a pair of other Englishmen in Jamaica had devised a plan.
Forsythe Witt, a tyro in the already risky business of shipping, would smuggle the five hundred men, women, and children, despite the laws explicitly forbidding such transportation, to the shores of the United States of America. And if they were successfully delivered, Samuel Jonas, who must have either had American connections or made enough money to buy a plantation there, would take ownership of them at Jonas Hall.
The profits—of what? the sugar the slaves harvested? the tobacco? or simply of selling the bodies one by one?—would be split three ways.
It had been Graham who pointed out one of the most telling details of all.
“Both men ran for Parliament immediately, too,” he had said in the carriage on the way to the Duke of Dorset’s.
“I don’t follow,” Cobb had replied.
“Members of Parliament have certain immunities, sir,” said Graham.
“Like the ones of the Savoy?” Cobb asked.
Exactly like that, Lenox thought. “Yes, though greater in extent, Mr. Cobb,” Graham said. “Particularly in civil matters. The full details of their immunity are quite arcane, but extensive, I believe.”
“It explains why Jonas would seek a seat and never vote.”
It was a plan of such calculated malignancy that Lenox almost hoped he was wrong. Sheridan had always struck him as superficial but inoffensive; Lenox didn’t know the other two men, but the idea of their plotting led to uncomfortable ideas indeed—about what exactly was happening, under the Queen’s name, in the empire upon which the sun never set.
Now here they sat, waiting to see why the three men had needed to meet so urgently.
Wilton Sheridan arrived first.
“Sheridan, sir,” Graham murmured. He had the best view of the hall.
“Where’s he going?”
“The bar, I think.”
The bar wasn’t quite within sight of the card room, but it was just around a baluster, past what the club called Cads’ Corner. This was a private alcove between the bar and the card room, with a few comfortable armchairs and an array of papers, more private than either the bar or any of the public rooms. With any luck the three men would meet there.
“Nervy business,” muttered Cobb.
Lenox nodded. “Very.”
He didn’t bother to explain that for him—at least in his mind—it was particularly so because he was in the Carlton Club. If he made a scene here, if he were embarrassed, or thrown out, the great ten thousand would know it before the evening was over. Letters would fly to every corner of the isles, to the great country houses and the little cottages, to sisters and brothers, to first and second and third cousins, to nieces, aunts, friends. Charles Lenox had created a scene in the Carlton Club—tried to arrest a member, if you would believe it—on the very premises … the pinnacle of embarrassment … no, nobody had been able to convince him to leave that foolishness behind.
He didn’t mind for himself. At least, he tried to convince himself of this, half-truth though it might have been. But he actually did mind on behalf of his brother, who must see so many of these people in Parliament, and on behalf of his mother.
And perhaps most painfully of all, though he was gone, Lenox minded on behalf of his father.
It occurred to him that they should have fetched a constable. He said so to Cobb and Graham.
“It’s not too late,” said Cobb.
A set of footsteps proved him wrong. It was Samuel Jonas, gut overhanging his tight breeches, hair only moderately less wild than it had been at the Savoy. Lenox watched him in a mirror and saw, now, a redness on his skin—not the kind earned temporarily by exertion but the kind that came from years under a hotter sun than England boasted.
Leaning to catch sight of them in the mirror, he saw Jonas and Sheridan shake hands. Neither looked very happy to see the other, however.
Six o’clock came, and the heavy sound of the grandfather clock nearly bolted Lenox out of his seat. The chimes passed, and all five now waited on Forsythe Witt: the successful merchant shipper, returned triumphantly to a seat in Parliament.
Why were the three men meeting? Surely it would be better not to. They must have had something vital to discuss. But what?
Then they heard something—perhaps the answer, Lenox thought—coming up the great staircase.
Lenox repositioned himself very slightly so that he had a better view of the mirror. Graham—opposite him, facing the open doorway—had a book open and an air of nonchalance. (He, needless to say, was the most correctly dressed of the three men for the room.) Cobb had gotten up and was riffling carelessly through a pile of old copies of Punch.
Lenox’s plan, if they overheard nothing of value, was to follow Jonas out of the club. “Won’t that be conspicuous?” Cobb had asked.
“I don’t think it will, if we’re careful. The Carlton will be busy at that time of evening.”
“Why him?”
“The open door. He’s a mess of nerves right now. He’s obviously set in his ways, here seven days a week. I say we confront him with the theory and take him to Sir Richard before he knows what’s happening.”
“Kidnap him!”
“Not quite that,” Lenox had said, smiling. “But not too far off.”
Decent planning. But no planning had prepared him for the nerves that accompanied the arrival of Forsythe Witt. This gentleman came up the stairs, dressed impeccably, shoes buffed, neatly shorn salt-and-pepper hair and the beginnings of a similar beard on his chin.
“Hullo, Jonas. Sheridan,” he said.
“Hullo, Witt,” Jonas replied.
Witt turned to the barman. “A brandy, please.”
Lenox was staring at him, mouth open, caution gone.
For Witt was a very different person now than he had been the last time Lenox saw him. Then, he had been standing atop the roof of the White Horse Tavern, having just witnessed the death of Winfield Bell. This was Forsythe Witt—but it was also Bert Smith.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
“Graham,” said Lenox, in a low voice. “That’s Bert Smith, for God’s sake. Could you please—”
But Graham was, as often, several steps ahead of him. “A constable,” he said. “We shall be in a carriage outside. I have Sir Richard’s card.”
When Witt had received his brandy, the three men took to Cads’ Corner—and thus out of sight—with their drinks.
Cobb gave Lenox a pointed look and walked slowly over to the bar. Lenox lost Cobb in the mirror—he had edged as close as he could to the three Members of Parliament—and so he was in the agonizing position of being separated by a wall from a murderer, perhaps three murderers, without being able to hear a word they said.
He tried standing near the doorway, but it was no use. The club was just settling into its busiest presupper hour, and the noise from each bar and from the entryway downstairs grew louder minute by minute
Then he noticed something. In one wall of the room, paneled and painted so as to be nearly invisible, was a servant’s door. Was this how their drinks had arrived? It might well have been—he had been too excited to pay attention, and he made a note, somewhere in the back part of his brain, that the next time he was in a situation of high stakes he would be scrupulously watchful.
He went through the door. It led into a plain white hallway. This itself had two doors at one end and a staircase at the other, and he went to the first door and had almost pressed it open when suddenly, very clearly, he heard Wilt Sheridan’s distinctive racecourse d
rawl.
“… at some bookstore tomorrow.”
Lenox stood by the door, barely daring to breathe. “Let him get back to America.”
That was another voice. Sheridan answered by saying, “He seems to like it pretty well here, I suppose! And if Gilman knew, he knows.”
“We can’t know who Gilman told. Would you trust a slave? He would have told someone.”
“We have a great deal riding on the hope that Gilman told nobody at all about Jonas Hall, so that he could blackmail us. Impertinent bugger.”
That exchange had been between Sheridan and Jonas, Lenox suspected. And its subject must of course have been Josiah Hollis.
A new voice came in. “I tell you absolutely that we have to get the Lenox brother, too.”
Lenox almost gasped—but didn’t.
“You must drop that idea,” said Sheridan.
This suggestion made Sheridan seem, at least for the brief interval that followed this reply, slightly less rotten in Lenox’s eyes than he had been five minutes before. He was only human.
“Sooner or later I shall see him. It’s absolutely inevitable. Collins said he was in the coffeehouse, jabbering about me. Or about—Smith. If I see him just once at Parliament, the whole game is up.”
Collins! The coffeehouse owner! He had betrayed them. That was bitter—yet Lenox ought to have known that his allegiance would be to the tavern across the street, not to the police. It was a bitter failure, an amateur’s mistake, and he remonstrated with himself even as he went on listening.
Jonas spoke next. “Then don’t go into Parliament.”
“I want to.”
“It would draw too much attention to the Gilman matter if Charles Lenox died. Right now it’s all solved and tidied away. We’ve gotten away with it, for heaven’s sake, Witt.”
“I’m telling you, I shall see him—sooner or later—and it will all be over. I cannot quit London for the rest of my life.”
There was a pause, as the implication, Lenox guessed, became uncomfortably clear to the other two men: If Witt went down, so did they all.
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