An Old Betrayal: A Charles Lenox Mystery (Charles Lenox Mysteries)

by Charles Finch

  It was clear from the moment they arrived, however, that Soyer’s food hall was still a model of efficiency. Lenox had now made several of these trips, and the signs of mismanagement had become instantly distinguishable to him: dirt, neglected duties, men lazing about on the job. None of those signs were here. The kitchen was housed in a long room, with a massive marble countertop at one end where eager young men offered a steadily flowing line of ragged-looking individuals and families both soup and bread. Some twelve hundred people ate here each day, according to the letter Lenox had received inviting him onto the board. On Christmas that number was closer to twenty-two thousand. Because it was cheap and made for a hearty meal, Soyer’s kitchen mostly served soup; the men who frequented the place had started calling it the “soup kitchen,” and that concept, of a hall serving soup to the impoverished, had spread all across creation, to the Americas, northwest to Ireland, and southeast to the continent.

  This was a testament to the genius and vision of Soyer himself, who had now been dead for nearly twenty years. A Frenchman, he had come to England as the chef of the Reform Club, which instantly became famous for the quality of its food. It was the famine in Ireland that drew his roving attention (for he was also an inventor and an artist) to charitable work, eventually leading to this establishment in Spitalfields. Lenox had already decided when they entered the room that he would join the kitchen’s board of directors, and now, watching the men, women, and children take their food, he wondered at what life must have been like thirty years before, when there was no such resource. He gave credit to his age: Since William the Fourth had died and Victoria took the crown, somehow it had been decided, in the faint aggregate consciousness, that it was unacceptable to permit an Englishman to die of simple starvation, that it was unacceptable not to extend a hand down in aid. The changes were individually imperceptible, and together enormous. Who could say how many tens of thousands of lives this kitchen alone had rescued?

  Not all charities were so admirable, unfortunately. The next one they visited was the Osgood Children’s Home, not far away from Soyer’s; it was a disaster.

  The home was in Petticoat Market Lane, which might have been the most colorful street in London. All along it was a line of stalls selling clothes and cloth, in every possible color, quiet and garish alike; no doubt Lady Jane had bought dresses whose material originated in this street. Eel sellers and baked-potato men wandered among the crowds, offering their food, and little children, scampering between the stalls, stole what they could.

  Near the end of the street was Osgood’s. A nervous young woman greeted them at the door (“It would be ever so much better if you wrote to Mr. Osgood for an appointment,” she kept saying) and only reluctantly escorted them to meet her master. Osgood was a type Lenox recognized at once, bluff, venal, arrogant, charmless, and full of the self-regard of a man who thinks he has made his place in the world on his own. Very possibly Osgood had—but by no savory means. The house was filthy, and the children that Lenox saw were all working, picking apart old rope. He only managed to see this much because he opened a door at random as Osgood hustled them along on a tour of the building.

  When they returned to Osgood’s office, Lenox was preparing to give the man a measure of his mind. “Sir, I—”

  Here Graham stepped in. “Mr. Lenox is honored at your invitation,” he said, “but wonders if it comes with any emolument, to ease the financial burden of his travel here, for instance, or the lost hours he would spend on behalf of the home’s cause. Perhaps I could return tomorrow to discuss it with you alone? Mr. Lenox’s time is, you understand, very valuable.”

  Relief flooded into Osgood’s face. “Of course, of course,” he said. “Any time … I shall be in any time … I shall—please, come along and we may speak. It is always a pleasure to speak with a gentleman who has a business head.”

  Graham, all graciousness, thanked their host and promised to return the next day. Lenox touched his cap and followed Osgood’s secretary out of the door.

  When they had returned to the carriage, Graham said, in a low voice, “I thought it would be intelligent not to forewarn Mr. Osgood of any potential investigation you saw fit to initiate. I sensed that you might be near to expressing your anger with him, sir.”

  “You were absolutely right.”

  Yet this method of their extrication—the unsubtle hint that a bribe would certify Lenox’s good opinion of the home—hewed uncomfortably close to the slanders against Graham. Was it possible that just such a situation had led to the misunderstanding? Lenox nearly spoke the question out loud—but didn’t, found he couldn’t. His faith in Graham remained unshaken, and yet his disdain for the rumors about Graham had somewhat diminished.

  The next two organizations they visited met with Lenox and Graham’s approval, though the second, a library for the Jewish schools, would demand a great deal of time; if possible, Lenox intended to fob the job off upon some junior Member.

  “Are we finished?” he asked Graham as they left.

  “Two more, sir.”

  Lenox looked at his watch. It was nearly half past one. “I can do one of them.”

  Graham chose for them, directing the driver to Great Ormond Street. There was a hospital for children there, the first of its kind in Britain, and though it had started with only ten beds, in ’52, it had been successful. One of its earliest supporters had been Charles Dickens.

  “Stopping there has the virtue of bringing us back toward the west end of town,” Graham said. He was looking down at a page of notes in his tidy handwriting. “Aside from that, it is the least disinterested of our stops, sir.”

  “Oh?”

  “In fact, they did not inquire after your availability—rather the opposite; I inquired whether there might be a seat on their board for you. It may mean financial outlay, even a personal donation from you.”

  “To what end?” asked Lenox, curious.

  “If the rumors are to be believed, Queen Victoria intends to take an interest in the hospital. Better to be on the train before it stops for the multitudes, I think, sir.”

  It was the kind of minor, vital action that Graham had mastered. Lenox smiled. “Excellent.”

  The hospital, housed in a tall red building that curved around a corner, was a model of what such an establishment ought to be. The wards were clean and white, with the sharp disinfecting smell of soap strong on the air, and behind it occasionally a whiff of baked marmalade pie, which must have been the dessert the children received for lunch. Windows were open to circulate the air, but the beds looked warm. In tidy crates near the door were picture books and toys.

  All of the patients here were between the ages of two and thirteen, with very occasionally someone who had been long in convalescence staying to the age of fourteen. Lenox’s tour began with the infants; a nurse, after giving him a mask for his mouth, led him to each crib, where she described the child’s illness and the steps that the hospital was taking. A remarkable variety of medical men, including dozens from the Royal Society of Medicine and the Society of Apothecaries, gave freely of their time. There were six staff doctors who rotated in and out of the hospital daily.

  “Here is our newest one now,” said the nurse as they turned a corner. “Perhaps we can follow him for a few minutes in his rounds.”

  There, to Lenox’s astonishment, stood Thomas McConnell.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  “She is only suffering from thrush at the moment, the poor mite,” said McConnell.

  They were beside the bed of a small girl, who was in the throes of what looked like a terrible fever. Lenox and Graham stood a few respectful strides back from the bed. It was the fifth patient they had visited with McConnell.

  “Are you sure?” asked the nurse.

  “Quite sure. We must give her a bolus of laudanum.” With great tenderness, McConnell tilted back the child’s head, its face swollen and red, and tipped a liquid taken from his coat pocket between her chapped, cracked lips. She cou
ghed it down without leaving her state of febrile semiconsciousness. The doctor patted her hand and, as they walked away, murmured to Lenox, “I very much fear that she will not live out the month.”

  “You said it was only thrush.”

  “Yes, but a growth in her belly is what has made her susceptible to infection. No surgeon will touch it, if I’m not wrong. Still, we may hope.”

  Thus far Lenox and McConnell had not exchanged any words beyond a polite greeting, but now, as the nurse pointed out the artworks along the wall to Graham, Lenox said in a quiet voice, “Thomas, why didn’t you tell me you were working here?”

  McConnell consulted his pocket watch. It had been a present from Toto and was beribboned with rubies and emeralds, a garish, rather beautiful thing. “I’m free in twenty minutes,” he said, “and I’m ravenous. Will you sit with me to my luncheon?”

  “We passed a chophouse on Rugby Street when we came here.”

  “Mr. Porter’s house? I know it intimately. Yes, let’s meet there. Call it half an hour.”

  They shook hands, and Lenox saw with his own eyes, for the first time, what Toto had been telling them: McConnell really did look happier than perhaps he ever had before, his eyes light and free of burdens. Was it work? Was it love?

  Lenox spent the next half hour introducing himself to the staff at the hospital. With every corridor he traversed and every person he met he grew more impressed—with the people in particular, for all of them bore the same brisk, efficient, no-nonsense variety of good cheer, which in Lenox’s experience approached much more nearly to sainthood than the breed of self-regarding softheartedness that one found in Mayfair. Better to clean one patient’s bedding than to pour vague pity upon a thousand homeless urchins.

  He made an appointment to return and meet the director of the hospital and then, telling Graham he had agreed to meet McConnell, made for Rugby Street.

  Mr. Porter’s was a rude chophouse, with sawdust on the floor and a matronly woman hustling tall pewter jugs of ale here and there. Lenox took a table near the door. Evidently many of the physicians from the Royal College nearby took their sustenance here; the walls were covered in scrawled prescriptions, some now decades old, some belonging to doctors who had become famous on Harley Street. “Advised: one night in the Rugby: four glasses sherry: four glasses ale: four glasses port: sleep till noon,” read a sheet near Lenox’s right arm, upon the prescription paper of a man who was now the royal family’s own surgeon. Perhaps that was why it was the only prescription in a frame.

  McConnell came into the room not long after Lenox had sat down. “There you are,” he said. “I hope I am not late. Yes, I’ll sit, there we are. Are you hungry? They do a capital game pie, with half-burnt mashed potatoes over it. That’s what I mean to have.”

  Lenox had already ordered coffee, which arrived as McConnell was sitting. He peered into the pot. “There are white bits floating in it,” he said unhappily.

  “Eggshells—it takes the bitterness away. Old doctor’s trick, you know. Could I have a cup of that?”

  “You can have all of it.”

  “No, come, you must try it. There, half a cup each.”

  Lenox took a sip and was compelled to admit the efficacy of the eggshells. “Not bad.”

  They ordered, and for a while McConnell spoke about the patients Lenox had seen, giving him more detail on each one—a small boy with a teratoma, an older girl with the hundred-day cough, and a newborn, seemingly in perfect health, whose breathing was strained. “We shall pull him through, however,” said the doctor. “I’m sure of that.”

  “Then I am, too.”

  McConnell paused now. “Tell me,” he said, “did you come to the hospital because you knew I would be there?”

  “No. Did you not observe the surprise in my face?”

  “I thought I did,” McConnell murmured. “I had kept it quiet. Still, it was a jolt seeing you there.”

  “You have a taken a job of work, then, Thomas?”

  “You don’t need to say it that way,” said McConnell irritably, “as if you were Toto’s father, the old bugger, and I had decided to shift vocations and become a chimney sweep late in life.”

  In that sentence was encapsulated the change in Lenox’s friend—a new self-confidence, a new indifference to the opinion of others. “You seem happy.”

  “I have never been happier in all my life. I have been at the hospital for six weeks, and it has passed like six hours.”

  “But Toto doesn’t know,” said Lenox.

  A defiant look came into McConnell’s eyes. “I asked her if I should take the job—Dr. West was my professor, many years ago—and she pitched a fit, if you must know. Fortunately I am not tied to her apron strings.”

  “She thinks you’re having an affair with Polly Buchanan,” said Lenox. He had decided upon directness. “In fact, half of London thinks as much.”

  McConnell’s eyes widened in surprise, and then he burst into a long and rolling laugh. After a few moments, catching sight of his friend’s stern face, he laughed harder still. “Oh, dear,” he said, wiping his eyes.

  “I cannot see what is so funny,” said Lenox, vexed.

  “Only the idea—but I suppose that is why Toto has been so cold? What a relief!” McConnell emitted a final sigh of laughter and then, realizing perhaps that he had conveyed too much information about his marriage in that spontaneous exclamation, hurried along his next words. “No, no, Charles, I have no amorous affection for Miss Buchanan. I look forward to telling Toto as much this evening. I suppose I had better tell her about the hospital, too—yes, I will, and she can take it just as she pleases, for I don’t mean to stop.”

  “You are friends, you and Polly Buchanan? She is a great rake.”

  “Just a minor friendship—no, I would not even call us friends, though I cannot dislike her. Still, I must keep my word, and not tell you why she and I have met in Hyde Park. For I assume our meetings there have given rise to these rumors.”

  “Yes.”

  “Trust me, Charles, in the fullness of time I shall explain it all to you. Polly Buchanan! You must admit that it’s amusing.”

  Lenox, who conceived himself bound to admit no such thing, merely frowned. Their food arrived, and McConnell dropped into it ravenously, ordering a pint of ale to accompany it. For many years he had been too heavy a drinker, but even to Lenox, now, his thirst seemed healthy.

  What happiness he saw in his friend’s face! In spite of his misgivings, Lenox felt a growing warmth of corresponding happiness, and blended into it an overpowering degree of relief. Toto would understand about the hospital. She was not a cruel-minded woman, not at all. The only shame was that it had taken so long for him to return to medicine.

  Thomas had the same feeling, describing, as they ate, the sense of waste, of talent squandered, that the decade since his marriage seemed to represent.

  “I don’t blame Toto in the slightest. It was my own fault,” he said, “and when her mind is at ease over Polly Buchanan, how much happier she shall be, knowing that I am happy. Do you not think so, Charles?”

  It was an unusually intimate question, and an unusually intimate conversation, but something about the hominess of the food and the sawdust on the floor and the rising drunken voices toward the back of the room made it seem appropriate. They were friends of very long standing, after all. So Lenox replied that yes, he did imagine that Toto would be happier. “Perhaps your only error has been secrecy, Thomas,” he said.

  “One is bred to it.”

  “That is true.” Lenox took a sip of coffee, sitting back from his half-eaten luncheon. He checked his watch. It was nearly three. “I must go soon. Tell me first, though, what I am to say to Jane?”

  “You must tell her what you please,” said McConnell lightly. “You speak as if it all must be such very heavy weather.”

  “I don’t think you can understand how Toto has suffered, Thomas, and as a consequence how much Jane and I have suffered on her behalf. Yo
ur happiness has blinded you. If I still seem somber, that is the reason—not because I am not pleased that you have come to work at the hospital, which has already earned my full-hearted esteem. I give you joy of your new venture. Only you must recall the old ventures, too.”

  McConnell hesitated for a moment, thinking, and then nodded. “Yes.”

  “I hope you are not offended that I am candid.”

  “Never in life. I think you are right, Charles. I have been selfish—but it may be that I was overdue some selfishness, and now I can accord myself the proper prescription of it again. All those years I spent in a lab, such a wan imitation of life! You’ve no idea what it is to lose yourself for so long.”

  Lenox briefly alighted upon the feeling of avid anticipation he had of the meeting at four, then thought of the thousands of hours he had spent at his office in the Commons. “No,” he said, “I don’t.”

  “It is like coming back to the red-blooded rush of living, after being a ghost. I am certain that Toto will understand—Polly Buchanan, indeed.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Lord John Dallington was unmistakably in better health. Lenox watched him stride down a wide central passage at Scotland Yard just after four o’clock. “Jenkins will be another moment,” Lenox told his young associate.

  “Is he bringing a constable with him, I hope?” asked Dallington.

  “Two.”

  “Who are these four gentlemen we mean to visit, then? Old college mates of Godwin’s?”

  Lenox read out the names that Skaggs had given him. “Mark Troughton. Albert Walworth. Jeremiah Smith. St. John Walker.”

  “They sound a dreary lot.”

  “Let us hope they are dreary enough not to fire a pistol upon us, at any rate.”

  “True, I should hate to die just when I no longer feel like ten-day-old soup.” Then, cheered by a thought, he said, “But perhaps they’ll hit the constables!”