“Yes.”
She went in, and Lenox followed her—but while the impulse of her body, he saw, was to move toward the bed, Dallington’s mother was in the way, and so she merely stood, upright and silent, watching.
In the hall again, some time later, she asked, “Will he live?”
“I think so.”
She gave him a searching stare. “And it was Labrenz.”
Lenox nodded. “I think so.”
“Then John was right.” She looked away. “It came too easily, I see now, all the information we received—the misinformation—about the cabinet ministers’ private room.”
Lenox nodded. “And the foolish complaints about Dallington’s presence. Their side, again.”
Polly looked as if she could hate herself. She took a moment, piecing through the information she had. Then she looked up and said, “I must ask if you will go and organize the office.”
Lenox frowned. “But—”
“I know he is your old friend. But only one of us is going to marry him when he wakes up.”
He nodded. “I’ll go now,” he said. “Please tell his family I’ll be by again this evening.”
Time never passes, until it does. There was the slow, agonizing night, during which Dallington had another seizure, one that this time almost finished his life. A cot was brought into the infirmary; McConnell slept there. The next morning went. A few small swallows of water were imposed upon the patient, and one of broth. An afternoon then; and another night, more stable.
Lenox, true to his word, made the office his business: with two of them gone there was a great deal to be delegated that had never been delegated before, and Pointilleux became an indispensable ally, assuming more responsibility than ever he had theretofore.
And yet Lenox was back at Parliament whenever he could be. His brother came up regularly, bringing food and wine to those assembled outside of the small room.
It was on the fourth day that McConnell felt just enough confidence in Dallington’s condition—it had been two days since his body last seized, his fever had declined slightly, his broken bones were expertly set, and his body was already regenerating the skin around his wounds—to move him. He was taken to his parents’ house. It was more awkward for Polly to go there; and yet she did. It didn’t fall to her to keep vigil at his bedside, but she was the one who brought in flowers, who brought flasks of beef tea to McConnell and his satellites, who made herself indispensable. Lenox had never seen a person so determined.
Meanwhile Dallington’s final encounter continued to obsess the governmental officials Lenox saw more and more of. Labrenz was not in the capital, that anyone could determine, and gone with him were papers of significance.
“And yet,” said Barkley, who checked in daily to see if Dallington had awoken, “many fewer than would have been taken otherwise—only one of the drawers forced open, and the rest still locked. Your friend did well.”
Had done well; and also did well, his fever improving further, his color also, and something ineffable releasing itself in his body, a tension that had been held there from the first moments Lenox saw him, as if only now had he truly fallen into a deep rest.
“I think the worst is past,” McConnell said on the fifth day, in a subdued voice, standing in a dim hallway. “But I feel I ought to warn you, so that you may inform the duke and duchess, that now it is all up to chance. He may wake up ten minutes from now. But it is also possible that he will die in the morning, or that he will be in this coma a year, a decade. His entire life.”
“What seems most likely?”
“I cannot say, sincerely.”
McConnell looked crestfallen, and Lenox put a hand on his shoulder. “You have been a hero. Thank you.”
“Give it a week, and see how that word ‘hero’ becomes revised.” McConnell sighed. “He is the finest of fellows, Dallington. And he is so amiable in his manners that I’m not sure who ever remembers to tell him so.”
CHAPTER FORTY
McConnell gave Lenox this word of warning at a moment when Dallington’s many friends were heartened by his apparent progress. Ten minutes had seemed a more likely horizon for his wakening than ten days, certainly.
And yet the tenth day came and went, and Dallington had not awoken. McConnell passed the case to a specialist in such matters—concern having shifted now to deterioration of the muscle, nourishment of the body, rather than sheer survival.
The attendees at the young lord’s bedside were loyal but more intermittent. All except two: Polly, and his mother, both constantly near him.
All manner of rumor crossed the city. The chief among these was that Dallington had been in a duel. It was shocking how few people knew, even now, that he was a detective. Most assumed that he had been drunk when he found his way into mischief.
Ten days, then eleven, then twelve, an aching inversion of time, since each day brought them not nearer to hope, even if it must inexorably mean they were closer to his waking, but farther from it. Lenox began to notice an alarming loss of weight in the young lord. His cheeks were thin, his shanks withering.
During this time, Lenox found that he took great comfort in the presence of his old friend Leigh. It had been his expectation that after Rowan was arrested, Leigh would breathe a sigh of relief and return to Paris. That return had been delayed by Dallington’s misfortune—Leigh’s own experience as a surgeon had been valuable, another voice—but in fact, even after a week, he seemed to have no interest in leaving London.
He quickly became a beloved and consoling presence at Hampden Lane. He had endless patience for Sophia’s games; with Jane he would happily discuss books, people, ideas; and he and Charles barely needed to speak, though often they did, suppers lingering far past the warmth of the dishes that constituted them. It would be impossible to imagine a less intrusive guest, though he did keep odd hours, departing, sometimes, at midnight, and returning after dawn, sleeping very early one morning and very late the next.
“What are you occupying yourself with out in the city?” Lenox asked finally.
It was a late January day about a fortnight after Dallington’s fall. Leigh was putting his scarf on in the front hallway, preparing to leave the house. “Eh? Oh—well, it’s stuck in my head, you know. The Rowan business.”
Lenox smiled wanly. “I can imagine, yes.”
“Well, I’m having a whack at it, if you must know.”
He would reveal no more than that.
Two weeks from the day after Dallington’s accident, the patient suddenly took a turn for the worse.
That was the doctor’s drab and unilluminating phrase, which Polly had repeated, but it didn’t prepare Lenox for the reality when he visited him in the afternoon. McConnell was back, having been entreated by the Duchess of Marchmain to return and supervise. When he saw Lenox, he gave a slight shake of his head.
“What is it?” asked Lenox, when they finally had a moment alone together.
“The fever is back. I think there may be an infection internally.”
“An infection.”
“Yes.” McConnell looked pale. “I must warn you that this kind of disease is wont to move very, very quickly at such a stage.”
“What do you mean?” McConnell didn’t reply. “Should he go to the hospital?”
“No. Not just now.”
“Come now.”
“Charles, you must listen. I think he will go.”
Death took place at home, of course, a universal fact across all classes. You didn’t go to the hospital unless you expected to get better. Certainly you didn’t go there to die.
McConnell went back into the patient’s sickroom, and Lenox went to wait.
He would never forget sitting alone in the duke’s grand music room that afternoon. There had been a hundred evenings of amusement and celebration here. Now it was as desolate as an empty ocean, the light going iron gray as the sun faded, the carefully situated picture frames and sofas and silver bowls each reproached by their
own frivolity. It was intensely sad. In Lenox’s mind was the business of the next day. The terrible black-edged paper would have to be bought; the terrible black-edged envelopes; the terrible black wax, to seal the news in forever; the length of black velvet, fetched by a servant from some blessedly forgotten box below stairs, and affixed once more to the door knocker, to muffle its sound. All of the things that meant: A person is gone.
It was four o’clock when Polly came. Lenox, wishing to spare her the implications of McConnell’s prognosis, tried to begin their conversation lightly. “Cold out?”
She flicked on a gas lamp, quite at home. “Yes, very.”
“Where is Anixter?”
“Outside. He doesn’t mind the cold, you know. But what about this—we have had news about Rowan, from Inspector Frost.”
“Oh?”
“They have been trying to connect him to Middleton, and they have found a barman who remembers the two of them meeting at the Collingwood more than once. He knew Rowan well, and happened to know Middleton’s face because he had once worked at a different hotel closer to the chancery courts.”
“Arrogant of Rowan to meet Middleton where he was known.”
Polly tilted her head philosophically. “Perhaps. I doubt he thought it would end in murder.”
“True.”
“If only the Farthings would talk. But I think it would take a miracle.”
Lenox hesitated, and then said, “Polly, when you told me that he had taken a turn for the worse—it’s the very much worse.”
“What? What do you mean?”
She had become so intimate a colleague of Lenox’s that it was strange to see her, in that instant, for the pale, slender, beautiful young widow she was, making her way through life more or less alone. Her pragmatism, too, somehow diminished both her vulnerability and her femininity, in one’s eyes—a necessity, in all probability. Lenox thought of when she had first come to their attention as Miss Strickland: her mischievous attempt to hire McConnell as a criminal investigator, her ingenious employment of a charcoal portraitist. A formidable person, Polly Buchanan.
Just at that moment McConnell came into the room.
Lenox knew instantly that something had changed. “What is it?” he asked.
“He is awake.”
Polly half rose, her cheeks going red. “Awake! That is the most welcome news.”
“Awake, but feverish. He is speaking almost exclusively about Mr. Labrenz.”
They had confided that name in McConnell. “But this must be good news!” said Lenox.
McConnell nodded cautiously, but his face was flushed with color. “Yes. Yes, I think it is. It’s possible that it was merely a fever he caught, in his weakened state, rather than an infection. He may be improving.”
Polly looked at Lenox, realizing what he had been about to say. “May we see him?”
“At the moment—no. But I thought you would like to know.”
They stayed long into the night. Lady Jane came over at eight o’clock, bringing them supper, then closeting herself with her old friend, the duchess, for a long, long time. There was no change in his condition; when at last they left, it was in an odd mood of optimistic anxiety. Their hopes had been relocated so many times they’d forgotten where they left them last.
The next morning was cool, steely, mundane, with a light sharp rain falling across the gray buildings. Lenox and Polly both had a tremendous amount of work to do in the office, and they had agreed that they would meet at Dallington’s early to check on him before they went to Chancery Lane together.
She looked nervous. “It has been at least six or seven hours since I saw you,” she said. Lenox noticed she was wearing a soft gray and pink frock coat over a dress, different than what she usually had on at the office. “How goes it?”
“I am ready for it to be springtime,” said Lenox.
The person who came out to see them was the duchess herself. “There you are,” she said. “Would you like to see John?”
“Is he well enough?” asked Lenox.
But the question had answered itself—his mother’s face was a portrait of relief.
“He’s in the finest fettle,” she said. “I can barely believe it. So well that McConnell left at half two to get some rest—said that he wanted to catch up with the patient’s, ha! The duke is asleep too, no less.”
“I’m so very happy to hear it,” said Lenox.
Polly didn’t even speak; only nodded her fervent agreement. “He is very hoarse and very thirsty—not yet hungry,” said the duchess. “Some headache, which as I understand it is to be expected. Weak. But alert, very alert. Indeed the first thing he insisted on doing was writing out an account of what happened.”
“Did he?”
“Yes—after what seemed incredible labor. I have just given it to Mr. Barkley.”
Suddenly Polly couldn’t hold herself back anymore. “May we go in?” she said. “He is not asleep?”
“No! Go in—I have to send a wire. The nursemaid is there, should he show any signs of disturbance. But the doctors are happy. For once.”
Lenox barely knew what to expect. The room was unlit, the patient reclining upon the bed, his gaze turned toward the window, which was running with streaks of rain.
He turned his head and saw them enter. His face was ineffably different. Was it older? Was it more careworn? Or was this only a passing change?
“Hello,” he croaked softly.
Polly, heedless of anything else, ran to the bed. “There you are,” she said.
Dallington smiled, with a ghost of his old humor on his face. “Nowhere else.”
She took his hand in hers and bent her head low toward his, by all appearances unconscious of Lenox’s presence in the room. “You must marry me, you know. Will you?”
He looked at her for a long moment, with infinite exhaustion in his eyes, and then said, without any happiness, Lenox thought, and in a voice still hoarse, “Yes.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Throughout the entire spring of that year, Lenox drove himself very hard. He worked from morning to noon and noon to night, all Saturdays and most Sundays, over meals, after the house on Hampden Lane had gone to sleep—he gave himself to the business of the agency, compensating for Dallington’s absence by redoubling his efforts.
A great deal of this involved the tedious but crucial work of reading through reports about various minor incidents at the businesses that kept Lenox, Dallington, and Strickland on retainer, to identify patterns that might foreshadow a larger crime, in particular a financial one. He found he had a gift for this kind of close, connecting work. Though that didn’t mean he was fond of it.
Whenever he looked up, the agency had hired someone new—a medical specialist, a translator (so immediately useful that Polly was already thinking of adding a second), a new clerk or page. Suddenly, here was that elusive thing, success. They had never made more money.
And yet, as Lenox woke one late March Thursday, he discovered that he had no appetite for the day’s work. He couldn’t recall the last time he had investigated a case on his own, unless it was Leigh’s.
This was a temporary state of affairs—they were looking for someone to do precisely his job, and indeed had offered Frost the position, though the inspector had declined—but it had worn on him.
And when he stepped outside to see what the weather was like, and saw the small, soft buds on the trees, saw the gentle yellow sun rising in the morning sky, and felt a mild warm breeze such as they hadn’t experienced since the autumn before, he decided that he would take the day off. An hour later he was on his way to a place he hadn’t been in a long time: Harrow School.
An interesting fact that Harrow illustrated was how much a distance of ten miles had changed in England in the last few centuries. The school’s founder had left the overwhelming majority of his fortune to the maintenance of a highway that length, between London and the little village where he began the school. It seemed like nothing now
, an hour’s carriage ride, but in those early modern days it had been rather a long journey. His foresight had guaranteed that London’s great families weren’t sending their sons down a dank road, crossed with fallen trees and lined with thieves. As much as anything, this was the fact that had allowed Harrow to become so prestigious.
At about eleven o’clock, Lenox found himself passing up London Road, approaching the school grounds. Alongside the right hand of the carriage was an idyllic grove which Leigh, particularly, had loved, investigating the little tidepools and undergrowths between its close-ranged trees.
Lenox remembered a brilliant fall afternoon that the two of them had passed there, with huge banks of orange and pink clouds gliding through the sky, a smoky smell in the air. They’d gone out riding—Edmund, in one of his moments of decency, had let them have seconds on a pair of horses he and his friend St. Cross had hired for the weekend in order to ride into London, their rightful perquisite as monitors.
“Bring them back to the owner and you can have them for a few hours first,” Edmund said. “He’s just a quarter mile down from the school gate—Denham, the farmer there.”
“Thanks, Ed,” Charles had said.
“Oh, don’t mention it. I shall be forced to murder you in your sleep if you lose them, incidentally. Probably by smothering you with a pillow. Understood?”
“Understood.”
In truth Lenox probably would have selected Gray or Almondsley-West to go riding with him, except that there was a house cricket match that day, which he was missing because he had had a badly sprained wrist. He had therefore invited Leigh. He remembered it particularly well because Leigh had talked about his family, which he rarely did. They were very poor—shockingly so, by Harrow standards, and still more shocking that Leigh should admit it. Most of the boys of lesser fortune bluffed their way through conversations about money.
Leigh, though he didn’t mention it much, told Lenox without any special ceremony that he and his mother now used their tea leaves three or four times. “We had a fearful row this summer about whether a fourth time was too much.”
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