Was he in Amsterdam?
Lenox realized with some relief that yes, he must be in Amsterdam again, for the room in which he finally opened his eyes was a quiet comfortable brown one, with hunter green curtains pulled close over two vertical slits of late evening darkness. Yes, Amsterdam. When had he come here though?
The next time he woke he realized it wasn’t Amsterdam but Haarlem, its neighbor. He could tell. The good old dark wood, the slightly damp air. The northern country. The lowlands. He was looking forward to seeing the canals again, the men in their odd hats. He liked the paintings very much. But why had he come here? And now it was midday, too—but he was in bed. That was wrong. He struggled up and felt a blinding heat, and then heard a voice saying something, and felt a blessed coolness on his forehead. Then he was asleep again.
It was when he woke up the next time that he remembered for the first time that he was, of course, in America. There was candlelight playing on the walls and two people were hovering above him. One of them smelled like mothballs. That was all he had time to register before there was a sharp needle in his arm, and then relief coursing through his wracked body …
Until at last, on the sixth day, the fever broke, and he opened his eyes in the very early morning to see a figure slumbering in the armchair next to his bed.
It took him a long moment to realize who it was. He had assumed it would be O’Brian, possibly Wyatt. But he was wrong.
“Graham?” Lenox said hoarsely. “Can that be you?”
But his voice was so out of use—so soft—that the chair didn’t hear, and before he could try again, Lenox fell back to sleep.
At last, at around four o’clock that afternoon, he woke up to a living world. There was a nurse changing a pitcher of water, and two doctors standing and talking in subdued tones next to his bed. The light was watery and clear, rather beautiful—New York light.
“Ah! The patient awakens!” said one doctor, smiling. “How do you feel, Mr. Lenox?”
Lenox was still, even in his deteriorated state, detective enough to know from the man’s tone that the news was good, that he was going to survive. Without answering, but with some inner spring of relief loosed by the revelation that he would not leave Jane a widow, not leave his daughters fatherless, he fell asleep again.
It was that evening at around seven o’clock that he woke up and felt real clarity for the first time. He almost thought he must have imagined Graham, but there he was, sitting at the bedside.
“Graham?” said Lenox.
Graham drew a little closer in. “It’s very good to see you up, sir,” he said.
“Theodore Blaine—”
“Yes. It’s all over. It’s done.”
Lenox’s whole body relaxed. If Graham said it was over, it was over. If he said it was done, it was done. So.
Lenox and Graham had known each other for thirty years now. Lenox found himself brought to the brink of tears by thinking that his friend had come all the way across the Atlantic. It must be the wound—he chastised himself, and let his head roll away from Graham, the effort of holding it up exhausting, so that if tears had appeared in his eyes no one should be able to see them. Ridiculous, after all; the knife wound costing him his sanity.
Graham was a compact, sandy-haired person, who for many years had been Lenox’s valet. Latterly he had gone into politics and shot through into the firmament of that profession’s stars in Britain, making himself as indispensable to the nation as he once had been to Lenox.
Lenox fell asleep again. When he woke, it was in a panic. “Theodore Blaine?” He pushed himself up onto an elbow. The pain in his side went hot with flames. “Teddy Blaine? You must—”
Graham was still there, and patiently talked Lenox out of his confusion. When the detective had taken a ginger sip of water and lain back, Graham told him the story in a quiet voice.
“There was a chap named Clark listening at the door the entire time. He has given the police a full account of every word the two of you exchanged.”
“Clark,” said Lenox, momentarily unequal to this information. “James Clark?”
“And of course, there was the telegram.”
The telegram. He had forgotten. But he could bring it into his mind as clearly as if he had just opened it, which he thought must be some kind of good sign, the telegram he had received that night from Willie Schermerhorn, sent in at Bay Head, New Jersey, by the Western Union lines:
Was younger Blaine who told Lily about Maryanne STOP But he has done me a favor STOP Tell father letter coming STOP Mind made up STOP Cannot deny love STOP WS
Blaine had made numerous small errors, but only this telegram and the ring tied him definitively to the murder. Lenox was pondering this when he realized he had closed his eyes and was again nearing sleep.
But there was so much to say—to know, to ask. He adjusted himself so that his side would hurt a little less, but as soon as that was done, rather than pursuing the conversation further, he fell asleep once more.
It was fifteen days after Mrs. Astor’s ball when Lenox first rose to his feet again.
The knife wound had penetrated his torso just beneath the last rib on his right-hand side, tearing into his liver and his gallbladder according to the best of the doctors, a phlegmatic young professor at the college of medicine in Philadelphia.
“You are fortunate the knife did not touch the peritoneum,” he had told Lenox, when the detective was at last fit enough to sit up and understand, “or indeed the stomach.”
“Am I?”
“I suppose you must be the judge of that. We would not be having this discussion if it had.”
In truth, Lenox probably rose from his bed too early—but Lady Jane had arrived the evening before with Sophia and Clara, and he couldn’t bear to let them see him unable to move, even if it was only a few creaky steps he managed. Sophia was old enough to be worried, and Lenox realized, with a sad fall in his heart, that she was creating a permanent memory, that she would never forget their sea voyage to see her injured father.
He tried to make up for it by good cheer now.
“Did it hurt?” she asked him.
He was in a smoking jacket near the window. Graham had helped him dress, for the first time in a dozen years. They were in a small, sweet white house on Washington Square, with daffodils growing wild in the little yard in front of it.
“I suppose it must have!” he said. “I can’t quite remember.”
“Can I see it?”
He opened his jacket to show her the padding of bandages beneath his shirt. “It’s all freshly dressed up now—like a doll, you see.”
She nodded, though she looked confused. Later that day she and her governess began making bandages for her own dolls; not white, like Lenox’s, as Sophia herself pointed out seriously, but blue, because that was the only material Miss Huntington had. Lenox said he thought it would do just as well.
It was Graham who had arrived from England first, of course, and in the last six days, preceding Jane’s arrival, they had spent more time together than at any point in the last decade. It was amazing how rapidly they fell back into their old bachelor routines though: at seven (once Lenox was conscious again) Graham would come in with newspapers and a wax paper bag of savory pastries from the baker on Washington Square while O’Brian made tea. Then they would sit in the second-story bedroom with the papers, occasionally commenting to each other on stories, breaking to delve deeper into a subject, while gradually birdsong, light, and the scent of Washington Square’s high birch trees filled the quiet room on the second floor.
“Take me through it one more time,” Lenox said almost every morning.
Then the sometime butler would tell Lenox the story of his survival again.
It had indeed been Clark who broke into the study and saved Lenox’s life—Clark, whom Lenox had suspected, along with his master and various others (even Rose Bennett!) as he made his speculations, before his focus had resolved itself onto Teddy Blaine.
He wrote to thank the Union veteran. He had also asked why Clark was at the ball. There had been a brief response from Schermerhorn’s man, apologizing that he had not entered the room sooner—he had been listening carefully, he replied, and neither Blaine nor Lenox’s voice had led him to believe they were close to any kind of physical violence until the last possible moment.
This was true, of course; Lenox specifically remembered not acknowledging the gun.
He had been at the ball, Clark said, because a young woman had been murdered on his master’s property; he had followed Blaine and Lenox to eavesdrop on them. In his reply to Clark, Lenox acknowledged the force of the first point and said that he could hardly blame Clark for the second.
He had been almost dead when Clark entered. According to Graham (who had pieced together the story), it had taken Clark no effort at all to disarm Blaine, and indeed the ball—Lenox had seen the papers!—had suffered no interruption.
Still, only quick action by Clark and Caroline Astor had saved Lenox’s life. They had sent for doctors, who had dressed the wound, and then suggested that for his own sake Lenox be taken to a hospital in New York.
The Astors’ best horses had driven him, unconscious, into the city, where a team of surgeons had sewn him up before daybreak. Almost immediately he had broken out in infection—the long period of his confused impressions during brief bouts of wakefulness that he was in Holland. Doctors had been called in from Cambridge, New Haven, and Philadelphia, according to Graham—before Graham’s arrival, it had been Mrs. Astor and O’Brian supervising affairs, an unlikely twosome.
All of them had agreed that the infection was too intense to survive. On the fifth night, one of the nurses, a young woman named Lucinda Carraight, had poured alcohol onto the bandages after the doctor had left. She only admitted it after Lenox began to improve: her uncle’s trick, she said, never known to fail. Whether it was this old superstition or luck, he began to get well.
His recovery was of course welcome, but it was agonizingly slow. He was usually at his best after breakfast. Two strong young men would (humiliatingly) carry him in a fireman’s lift downstairs and place him in a wicker wheelchair, after which Graham would perambulate him, tolerating Lenox’s irritable complaints about the unevenness of the pavement, the brightness of the sun, the loudness of the infernal birds, around Washington Square.
Following these outings, Lenox slept most mornings. He was in fair shape for lunch, generally, but beyond that his energy was nil.
He wanted to be on his feet—to figure out where Teddy Blaine had vanished, curse him. But it was too soon. He had never been so humbled before his own body. The effort to lift anything with his right arm was excruciating, and even to shift in his bed, or swallow food, was sometimes enough to cause him to close his eyes and breathe evenly, in an attempt to stave off the pain.
It was Caroline Astor who had wired Lady Jane on the night of Blaine’s attack. She had warned that the doctors were not sure whether Lenox would survive. Jane had spread the word to one or two people, as she eventually told him when they were alone, Sophia and Clara asleep upstairs. She had arranged to sail the next afternoon but one with the girls.
Yet even by then, she said, Graham had already been aboard the fastest ship bound for America, the mail packet, having left behind only a letter on his desk at Parliament, which wasn’t discovered by his panicked aides, who were suddenly forced to cancel dozens of meetings and speeches, until he was already part of the way across the Atlantic.