“That goes without saying.”
“My apologies. Yes. Good day, gentlemen.”
The whole lobby watched him leave, that figure of greatness, and step into his gilt carriage. Charles, for his part, preferred the more modest company in which the duke had left him.
“Why are you here?” he asked Edmund.
“Lunch with the American ambassador, Streeter. Very civil fellow, you know. Lovely daughters.”
“Surely you can’t be trying to marry me off, too.”
They had spent much of the weekend fending off Lenox’s mother’s suggestions, abetted by Lady Jane, of whom he ought to marry.
“No, no,” said Edmund.
They turned into the card room off the lobby and ordered two cups of coffee. When it arrived, Lenox reached into his pocket. He had his little book. He finally felt, for the first time in his life, having glanced into it forty or fifty times in the past week, that he was starting to understand something about why people loved Shakespeare. He had flapped down a tiny corner above one quotation that very morning, struck at how it described his feelings for the person who had given him the book: This earth that bears thee dead bears not alive so stout a gentleman.
He showed the little volume to Edmund. “Did Father give you one of these when you went to school?”
Edmund looked at the title page and smiled. “No. He gave me Hesiod’s Days. Great lot of rot about farming. Did he write in it?”
Lenox showed him the front page. “No.”
Edmund looked at him queerly. “Charles, you must remember that Father always wrote at the back of the books he gave. It was a quirk.”
“I don’t remember that at all. Why?”
“He said it would be rude to speak before the author.” Edmund smiled. “Excuse me for a moment, would you? I need a quick word with Chalmers there about the Irish bill, damn him. Only a moment.”
Lenox watched him go, frowning—the Irish bill wouldn’t come up this session—until he realized, dolt that he was, that his brother had been exercising tact, leaving him alone to look and see if his father had written in the book.
He flicked through the pages slowly.
And there, at the back, was his father’s infinitely familiar handwriting, so disposable while he was alive but now so precious-seeming.
Charles,
It took me a long while to love Shakespeare. In school I preferred Donne. For a long time my main knowledge about Shakespeare was that his name was an anagram for I am a weakish speller, a trick which occasionally impressed my schoolmates, and which now that you are going to school may impress yours.
But eventually I did love Shakespeare, for his wisdom, his wit, and above all for his clear-seeing love of his fellow man. I hope you, too, will have the pleasure of this discovery, whether it is now or much later in your life. Please know that whenever that time comes, if it does, I will be with you here, in the pages of this book, both now and then.
the proudest of all fathers, yours,
Thomas Lenox
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
The next day, the time had finally come for Lancelot to depart.
“Well, it’s flown by, hasn’t it!” said Mrs. Huggins at breakfast, as she poured cream over Lancelot’s porridge.
The lad was kicking steadily away at the legs of the dining table. “No,” said Lenox.
“Oh, come now, Mr. Lenox!”
Lancelot, looking serious, said, “Do you think they’ll believe me at school if I say I fought a duel in France with Spate?”
This was the huge brute he had argued with in the park; France where duels were still legal. “No,” said Lenox.
“And you mustn’t lie, of course,” said Mrs. Huggins.
“Right, of course,” said Lancelot, without, seemingly, any sense of irony. He looked at his cousin. “What if I just say I challenged him to a duel?”
“No,” said Lenox, who was quite pleased that his lines were so easy.
“The story is interesting enough on its own,” said Mrs. Huggins pacifyingly.
“Interesting!” Lenox said. “Mrs. Huggins, are you endorsing that kind of common low-down scrabble-hearted run-amok fistfight! You!”
The housekeeper went pink. “No!” she said. “Not at all!”
“It is a good story,” said Lancelot, looking pleased. “He must weigh twenty stone.”
“Yes, a regular David and Goliath story,” said Lenox, “if they had both been imbeciles.”
At around eleven o’clock, Edmund and Lady Jane came to say good-bye. (Graham, as usual the most intelligent of them all, had cleared off after a firm handshake before breakfast. No risk for him of getting caught in a last peashooter crossfire.) Lancelot was upstairs with Mrs. Huggins, shoving things into his trunk. Lenox’s mother—who loved train stations dearly and irrationally—had gone to pick Eustacia up at Charing Cross. It had taken Charles some restraint not to mention the apple’s toss.
He was entertaining Lady Jane and Edmund with the story of his misguided attempt to save Belmont; a comical story now, though for several days it had plagued him. But error could always lead to growth—and even as he and Edmund and Lady Jane laughed, he resolved that he would do better, in the future, at looking through appearances to the nuance that any plain-told story inevitably missed.
“Ed,” said Charles, “did you know they give away a side of bacon to a couple in Essex every year that can prove they haven’t quarreled in thirteen months?”
“Yes, I read the Times,” said Edmund.
Lady Jane laughed. “Stout fellow.”
“I bet you didn’t know that they roll a tremendous wheel of cheese down a hill in Gloucester every year and the first person to catch it gets to keep it.”
“Who told you that?” said Charles.
“Fotheringay-Phipps.”
“A known liar.”
Edmund shook his head gravely. “No, he had it on absolute eyeball account from his brother Waller, who’s as honest as the day is long.”
Charles acknowledged that Waller was a good source. “You should try to get it next year.”
“I don’t like cheese that much.”
“What a thing to say,” Lady Jane replied. “In my own house.”
“This is my house,” said Charles.
“In as good as my own house,” she said, scowling at him and picking up the cane he used to knock on her wall.
“I don’t! I prefer potatoes,” said Edmund.
“Nobody’s making you choose, you dunderhead,” said Lady Jane. “In fact there is a reasonable argument to be made that cheese and potatoes are best together.”
“I like plain buttered potatoes,” said Charles, for one had to draw one’s lines.
“I only said a reasonable argument.”
The front door opened, and all three got up. Lenox’s cousin Eustacia, a pretty, lively person, very small, with endless tea table conversation and endless goodwill toward the world, gave him a tight squeeze.
“You must tell me,” she said, gripping him by his shoulders and looking up at him. “Has he been a bother?”
“My housekeeper isn’t even willing to let him leave,” said Charles.
She squeezed. “Good. I worry that he can be a bit high spirited.”
“A bit, perhaps, at times,” said Charles thoughtfully. “But I think he’s turned out splendidly. You’ve done such good work with him.”
“So he didn’t bring his peashooter?”
“Well … he did bring it.”
“Oh, Lancelot,” she muttered. “Well, thank you anyway, Charles. He needed this.”
At that moment there was a noise on the stairwell, and Lenox flinched, fully expecting to be shot one last time.
But his young cousin was looking almost bashful, if anything. He accepted a long hug from his mother, then said very polite good-byes to his cousin Edmund and to Lady Jane, each of whom tipped him. (Lenox could have told them the money would be spent on mischief, but what was the point?) Finally
Mrs. Huggins enclosed him in a tight embrace, which he wriggled out of.
To Lenox’s astonishment, he saw that she had tears in her eyes. “Please visit again sometime very soon, Master Lancelot,” she said.
The boy looked at Lenox, whom he had been studiously ignoring until then. “Is that … do you think so, too, cousin Charles?”
Lenox realized that it was a sincere question. “Why, of course,” he said. “You are welcome in any home I have, as long as I have one, Lancelot.”
“I am?” he said, as if looking for a catch.
“Of course you are. When you are expelled from school I hope you will come directly here.” All of them laughed, even Eustacia—except Lancelot, who, without warning, got his cousin into a tight squash around the midsection, burying his head in Lenox’s waistcoat. “Well, well,” said Lenox, taken aback. “You know, you are family.”
Lancelot let go and, refusing to look his cousin in the eyes, went outside with Lenox’s own mother and waited for Eustacia—who said her own quick good-byes, for they were due on a train to Eton soon—and departed without another word.
Lenox stared after their carriage in a sort of shock. What strange creatures children were!
“That was very sweet, after all,” said Lady Jane.
“Yes,” he said, “it was.”
He felt a vibration of happiness inside, something in between hope, sorrow, and life. He realized that he had accidentally done something good, having Lancelot here.
He watched the carriage all the way to the corner, where it disappeared into the great smoky city. Finally he turned back inside and checked his watch. “Blast,” he said. “I’ll be late. I’m going to the East End.”
“You can give me a ride partway,” said Lady Jane. “I’m having my tea with Duch. But open my present first.”
She had brought it earlier, and it stood by the door, about the size of a footstool. “I will, thank you, though I don’t know the occasion.”
He unwrapped the parcel and saw, after a moment’s confusion, what it was: a gleaming brass and satinwood barometer, fit for an admiral’s cabin, with a delicate pendulum and beautiful workings.
“Jane!” he said, astonished.
She smiled at him. “For putting up with Lancelot. You can thank me in all the boring detail later—tell me how it works. For now I’ll pop next door and get my things, then we can go. Let’s meet soon, Edmund. There’s much to discuss about Molly’s party.”
After she had left, Edmund said, “Why are you going?”
“I’m meeting Bonden and Graham. A case down there, a murder.”
“Cor! What a life, Charles.”
Lenox smiled at his brother, a radiant smile. “And yet here you are, in Parliament, titled, with Molly and two lovely sons. That is what I call a life.”
“We’ll swap for a day sometime. I have to go listen to them drone on in the Commons all afternoon.”
“You have a deal. Good-bye till then.”
Edmund watched as Charles walked outside to his cab. The baronet remained in the doorway, waving good-bye.
His secret, as he stood there, was that there had been no lunch with an American diplomat the day before; he had gone in case his younger brother were subject to another one of the duke’s attacks.
Edmund watched Lenox and Lady Jane leave in the carriage. After a little time had passed, he buttoned his own jacket, a little more deliberately, and shut the door behind him after calling out his good-bye to Mrs. Huggins. He stood on the house’s steps for some time, gazing out at the distant spires, the square countinghouses in the middle distance, the smoke rising from a hundred buildings into the clear summer sky, and wondered to which hidden, mysterious, thrilling corner, in the great city spread before him now like a world of marvels, his brother’s new case would take him.
Also by Charles Finch
The Last Enchantments
The Charles Lenox Series
A Beautiful Blue Death
The September Society
The Fleet Street Murders
A Stranger in Mayfair
A Burial at Sea
A Death in the Small Hours
An Old Betrayal
The Laws of Murder
Home by Nightfall
The Inheritance
The Woman in the Water
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charles Finch is the USA Today bestselling author of the Charles Lenox mysteries, including The Woman in the Water (February 2018). His first contemporary novel, The Last Enchantments, is also available from St. Martin’s Press. Finch received the 2017 Nona Balakian Citation Award, for excellence in reviewing, from the National Book Critics Circle. His essays and criticism have appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Washington Post, and elsewhere. He lives in Los Angeles. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Also by Charles Finch
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE VANISHING MAN. Copyright © 2019 by Charles Finch. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.minotaurbooks.com
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-31136-8 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-31138-2 (ebook)
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First Edition: February 2019
eISBN 9781250311382
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