That absurd goddaughter. After he had gotten home and sat up for a while—so late that he was fairly sure even Graham had gone to bed before him, a rare occurrence indeed—that phrase came back to Lenox.
It had been Fry who’d said it. And the queen did indeed have a black goddaughter. Her absurdity was a matter of opinion; Lenox had yet to meet a person whose unalterable existence was absurd to them, and he would have to guess that Sara Forbes Bonetta—that was her name, he remembered clearly now from the articles about her, his memory prompted—did not consider her own existence absurd.
And Fry’s own existence was the very reverse of absurd to him, of course. As was Wilt Sheridan’s: more intimately concerned a thousand times over with the health and lineage of his horses than with that of his father’s slaves in Jamaica. With his waxed mustaches, for that matter—Sheridan.
The absurd goddaughter had once been a princess in a tribe in Africa. Another tribe had captured and enslaved her when she was five, killing her parents. They had prepared her for human sacrifice. So the story went, at least. Then some Briton in that area had rescued her from this fate and made a present of her to the Queen. (A present! Like a mangosteen, or a porcelain place setting.) She must have been ten or eleven now, and if there was callousness in the young naval officer who had made her a present, at least the girl had lived.
Lenox wondered if perhaps it was in the favoritism shown this small girl, who lived at court with the full perquisites implied thereby, that Eleazer Gilman’s hopes had resided. He must ask Hollis.
Lenox was warm in his chill study. Wrapped in a smoking jacket, he had his feet propped up against the ledge of his window. The snow had stopped. Now there was only the eerie emptiness of Hampden Lane beneath cloudless moonlight; ahead, the whispering late hours, his own in which to think.
After a long time he turned back to his desk, where he had laid out the documents Stevenage had given him. They detailed the activities of the Patriots Abroad (the less respectable of the two groups, or at least the less affluent) and the Knights of America in England (whose rolls included self-exiled merchants of the American middle class).
Not a very knightish place, America. Wasn’t the premise of the whole project that they no longer had knights? Still, an American had received a lordship from the Queen the year before, by special dispensation, and the time it took to travel between the countries by ship shortened annually. During the revolutionary period the crossing had taken anywhere between six weeks and sixteen, depending on the season and the weather. (That had acted tremendously to the colonials’ advantage.) Now it rarely lasted longer than two. Perhaps one day the countries would be reunited. He tried to imagine as far forward as he could: 1950, say, a time of instantaneous travel, and America and Britain a single nation once more …
He stopped woolgathering and settled in to read carefully over Stevenage’s useful summaries.
The Patriots met in some configuration nearly every night in the White Horse Tavern, near Whitechapel. The Knights congregated in a tonier establishment, a restaurant without an official name but generally called the Stilton, where they had a private room and a tun of wine reserved for the second Monday of each month.
He scanned the names of the members of each group. There were some two dozen Patriots, roughly the same of the Knights. No crossover, nor did any name jump out at him except the unusual ones—a fellow who evidently went through his days encumbered with the name Christmas Byrd, for example. (In a crossword you would have put goose.)
With a sigh, he began the toilsome labor of cross-matching these names to the ones he and Graham had gathered from the newspapers over the years. He found no matches in the first ten or so names. Then he must have—he supposed—fallen asleep, for when he woke, it was with a confused start. His soft desk chair protested ferociously at the way his body shifted, squeaking beneath him and clattering against the desk.
After a moment the door opened. “All well, sir?” said Graham—still dressed, of course, bother him.
Lenox rose, rubbing his eyes, and smiled. “I thought I had stolen a march on you. But perhaps we both ought to get to bed.”
“It’s rather late, yes, sir.”
His eye fell on the paper he had been studying. “These are the names of men who may have threatened Gilman.” He sighed. “I feel no tremendous confidence that any of them are involved. But the rope is running out of our hands.”
The case should be his, he could tell that now; he had enough information that he ought to be able to pick up the scent again, find the sham conductor who had slipped through his fingers, the gray-haired man who had attacked Hollis and sent Willikens off after buying out his newspapers and tobacco.
He had the clues. Only he didn’t know where they went.
“I have been researching Mr. Gilman further, sir.”
Lenox rubbed his eyes. “Have you? What did you find?”
“There isn’t a great deal of other information, sir. All of the articles from the papers on file at the British Library were about the declaration of censure he hopes Parliament will pass against America.”
Lenox nodded, thinking. “I saw his outline of the idea in his journal. He was a determined chap, anyhow.”
After a brief further exchange, Lenox climbed upstairs to bed, falling asleep quickly and dreaming confused dreams in which Kitty Ashbrook appeared, and then Deere, all of it taking place in a house he could not name somewhere far from his own—a place with a bad feeling in it, in America, perhaps, or India. It was threatening snow, someone told him, someone just behind him and to his left. He saw his father, and then Edmund.
He woke in the darkest part of the night, overheated in body and mind.
He went to the window, pulled the curtains apart, and opened the latch slightly. The cool air was an instant relief.
But a feeling bedeviled him from the dream, which it took him five minutes of total silence, standing before the window, to name: loneliness.
There were a few flurries in the air again. At some length Lenox saw a figure pass beneath him on Hampden Lane. It was a tall man in decent clothes, certainly not at first glance the type to seem as if he would be out at—Lenox glanced at the clock—three o’clock in the morning. Perhaps something was preying on his mind, too.
It sent Lenox’s thought to that evening at Paddington. The carriage; the horror of the strong young body torn open and slumped over. The stationmaster. Hemstock. The labels. And that blasted false conductor, fooling them all and making away as cleanly as you please on—
And in that instant, just as the man walking below slipped beyond view, Lenox’s instincts came alive. Quickly he drew the window shut, locked it, then took the stairs to his study as quietly as he could manage, a candle in hand.
He went over to his desk and looked at Stevenage’s report on the Patriots Abroad.
There it was: the White Horse Tavern.
Could it be a coincidence? He turned over his own notes, taken from his meeting in Mayne’s office. He found what he was searching for. The porter at the Great Western had reported seeing a solitary man with dark hair leaving on “a bright white horse.” He had been clear on that, Dunn said.
Those were not so very common. Uncommon in London, actually.
Lenox gripped the paper, reading the names again. He wanted badly for this theory to be true, which was a warning to be cautious about believing it to be true.
But it was a coincidence—and in the past five years, he had grown to dearly love coincidences. Or what seemed to be coincidences. They were the coin of his realm. For where he found a coincidence, six times out of ten it was no such thing at all but rather an odd sort of magnetism between two facts, such that the two magnets only had to be drawn closer and closer until they snapped together, seemingly at random—as if by coincidence.
The white horse, the White Horse Tavern. It struck him as very definitely possible that the way the murderer had departed had been a purposeful statement—of whatever dim ideas they had about racial purity (a white horse) and their own trumped up notions of symbolism.
He sat back, thinking about the Americans, trying to collect himself. He had always wanted to visit America, Lenox. He imagined it as a strange hybrid beast: a place that in some ways—fashion, importance, money—was still a colony subordinated to England, but in others a vast empire that seemed, between its promise of land and opportunity, certain to surpass this country. A strange place, in other words. In New York, he had heard, some of the houses were very nearly as fine as a home in London. But travel not far at all, less than a day, and you could be alone for twenty miles in every direction.
Standing at the desk, Lenox felt alone for twenty miles in every direction himself—far from the evening before and the dawn to come, far from the person he loved, wherever she might have set her head to rest in this great world, the person he hoped would bear his children, and whom he might still not even have met.
Far from himself in a way, in that queer hour; for it had stung when that chap from Oxford cut him. It still hurt that any fool with a coal baron’s half-foot in the upper class could look past him because he had chosen this odd profession—which he could scarcely wait to pursue, in his current state of excitement, when the next morning arrived.