Five days later, a lurch awoke Lenox from a dream. For an instant he couldn’t place where he was, until another sharp roll reminded him: in his snug cabin aboard HMS Selene, bound for New York harbor.
He lay there with his eyes still closed for a moment, then blinked them open and glanced over at the small shining brass barometer his friend Thomas McConnell had given him before he left London. The needle was dropping. Wet weather. Lenox checked his pocket watch by the light of dawn and saw that it was just past four in the morning. It was an hour when things aboard the ship for the past three nights had been quiet, but at the moment he could hear the concerted effort of numerous men above him.
Still, he could tell, through some intuition, that the hands were about ship to make it safe, not because it was in real danger. Sinking back into his small groove of bedding, he went over the events of the last week in his mind, contemplating them—and wondering, for the hundredth time, whether he had chosen this path wisely.
Not long after Disraeli had departed Hampden Lane on that evening of his visit, Lenox and Lady Jane had sat down to supper. Since he had first mentioned the notion of going to America there had been some distance between them, which was unusual. But at supper she had been full of questions about the Prime Minister’s visit, listening carefully to Lenox’s minute description of it. When the second course came—a fine roasted pheasant in a sauce of mushrooms, wine, and walnuts, with green peas surrounding it on the salver, like green hillocks around a village—she spoke her mind.
“You must ask for more.”
“More? More what?”
“More!” The word lingered, and it was only then that he realized her opinion of the idea had changed. “The trip to America, made under the seal, the knighthood—but what more do you want? It is a rare state of affairs to have a Prime Minister desperate to answer your wishes. You must seize it.”
“That only applies if I go.”
“Oh!” she said, taking a slotted spoonful of peas. “As for that—of course you must go.”
“But you cannot expect me to go?”
“Yes, Charles,” she said, glancing up at him as if she had never said otherwise. “You have my blessing. It was ill-natured of me not to give it from the start.”
“But the girls, Jane, and you, of course—and the agency.”
“We shall keep.” She reached across the table and touched his hand. In the changing shadowed golden light of the candles, arrayed down the spine of the table, she had looked lovely. “And you will regret it if you don’t go see America. I cannot have that on my conscience.”
Lenox was about to protest when he realized it was true. He had already been regretting it. He paused for a long moment, hands resting, with knife and fork in them, on the table, then said, “It would be infernally selfish of me.”
She shook her head. “You have stayed close to London for a long time. Now you have this chance. Will there be another like it? Not likely. And then, if you go it shall give us all a chance to miss you.
“While to decline the chance might poison your heart against us—me, Sophia, Clara.”
“Never,” he said.
“Not seriously, I know, Charles, but I should be very sorry if even a small part of you came to resent us.” She took a sip of the cold white wine she liked with most foods and looked at him. “That means the only question remaining is what you shall ask for in exchange for going.”
In the days that ensued, even as he made plans to follow her counsel, he was caught between a longing to believe what she said and guilt about it. His thoughts kept returning to little Clara. What if something happened to him? Of course he was just as likely to fall victim to an unexpected fate in this teeming city; it was superstition to think of travel as the more dangerous option. Wasn’t it?
But in a deeper part of himself, which corresponded, obscurely, to the sound of wind flooding itself over the water outside, to the creak of the rigging above, he knew that it had been a balm to his soul to embark on this journey.
Selene was a frigate, a good sailor, which moved under a combination of steam and sail. Lenox was her sole civilian passenger; the rest, aside from her crew, were marines. They were bound for New York, where they would provision the ship, then on to San Francisco, before voyaging toward their final destination, Hong Kong, where they would serve eighteen months in a convoy of guard ships.
Because of the length of this prospective trip, Lenox barely existed to the men of the Selene. He would be gone from their lives for good after eight days, and some eight hundred that would pass before they saw England again. The exception to this polite indifference was the captain, a decent chap named Christopher Heller with whom Lenox dined each evening. Yet of course the captain was much occupied in the sailing of his ship, and so the detective had long hours to himself, which he passed either on deck or reading happily in his cabin, with its elegant sweep of starboard windows.
He got up now (carefully—the ceiling of the cabin was perilously low) and went over to these windows.
All was froth and darkness outside, creamy waves rising just visibly out of a black-gray sea. Lenox put on a tarpaulin jacket and stepped into the galley before moving cautiously up the steps to the deck. He poked his head out—he dreaded being in the way, since, being too high ranking to be told to move, he could so easily disrupt the ship’s management unintentionally—and only when he saw that it was clear went up to the quarterdeck.
The ship’s third lieutenant, a cheerful, open-faced, rather stout young person in a sealskin slicker, greeted him. “Morning, sir! Salty, ain’t it?”
Lenox, who had just been smashed by a hard spray breaking over the side of the ship and was staggering in a roughly westward direction, holding his hat down, managed to say, “Hullo, Winterson. Yes. A bit.”
“If you look to starboard, you’ll see something that might interest you, sir.”
Once, a decade before, Lenox had spent many happy weeks—enough to know which side starboard was, anyhow—aboard the Lucy, as it sailed for Egypt. He moved in what he hoped was a credibly seamanlike way to the starboard side of the quarterdeck, and when he arrived he was glad he had—for next to the ship was a pod of dolphins, breaching in beautifully asynchronous motion out of the water.
“Dolphins!” cried Lenox.
“Ain’t they?” said the lieutenant, shouting over the noise of the rain and wind. “They normally fetch up more toward Scotland and the north—but this time of year, with the cold, you do see ’em.”
Winterson returned to his business after a moment of respectful silence for their aquatic convoy, but for a long, long time, as the sky grew slowly lighter, Lenox stood at the gunwale, staring, rapt, into the water below. There were perhaps ten or twelve of the creatures. They were surprisingly long and slender, sleek, muscular, their coloring a beautiful pearlescent gray on top, paler beneath.
Though their motion seemed effortless, they were going at a blinding speed. The ship must have been hauling ten knots. But the dolphins showed no sign of leaving her.
“Do they often do this?” asked Lenox at last, when Winterson had circled back toward his side of the quarterdeck on some errand.
“Oh, yes, sir,” said the lieutenant, stopping.
“How very beautiful,” he murmured.
Lenox had passed a busy few days before leaving England. On the first he had dedicated twelve exhausting hours to setting down his testimony for the trial of the three corrupt detectives—anticipating every conceivable defense he could and striking it down preemptively, caging them as tightly as possible into their crimes. It had been a matter of intense concentration, sunup to sundown and beyond, motionless at his desk, rewriting over and over.
Only when he had completed this task to his satisfaction (and thanked the heavens that he was not a writer by profession) had he send a note to Disraeli, accepting his offer.
He requested a variety of things, which he and Lady Jane had devised over the course of the previous evening. Some were outlandish; for instance, he said straight out that he wished Disraeli’s direct assurance, in writing, that he should himself be able to bestow that knighthood which had been offered him. He asked for a budget far in excess of what he should need, and he withheld the right to determine his own itinerary and pace completely—without the slightest interference.
And, he’d said finally, he wanted the Wallace file from the Yard. Every word of it. He would send a clerk from his agency to copy it, along with someone of authority from Disraeli’s office so that it could not be interfered with before it came to him.
He’d sent this letter off to the Carlton Club, knowing it would find its way from that Tory game preserve to the Prime Minister more quickly than through even Parliament or 10 Downing Street.
He and Lady Jane had dined with McConnell and Toto that night, much of the talk taken up with America—and with what they could expect Disraeli’s response to be. None of them were prepared for its brevity, however, when it came back only a little over an hour after Kirk had dispatched it: Done. Beaconsfield.
The ensuing days had been a whirlwind of preparation, goodbyes, and then the travel to Plymouth, with its mazy cobblestone streets, romantic to walk through with Lady Jane beneath the lamplight, the sense of separation before them, their hands clasped a little more tightly—and finally his departure.
And now, in what felt like ten minutes since he had been in his own home, he stood watching the dolphins, a feeling of awe and momentousness in his spirit. This was why he had come. Let no one say that even at his age, he could not see the world afresh again.
The storm intensified and all at once the dolphins disappeared. That was how they always departed, the lieutenant told Lenox in his clipped naval drawl, “very sudden-like.” Three bells rang then; and Lenox, watching the water where they had been with no less satisfaction than when he had been watching the creatures themselves, realized he was soaked to the bone, and decided to go down to his little cabin, ask for some coffee, eggs, and bacon from the galley, and set about untangling the mystery of who had murdered Harold Wallace.