Gentlemen’s clubs were well and good. Officers’ messes, coffeehouses, restaurants, and tearooms, too, all had their place. But sometimes one wanted nothing more than a spell in a good pub.
Lenox, Graham, and Cobb had spent an hour trawling through the Savoy without luck. About halfway through the journey it had started to rain—a cold, driving rain, the kind that made you long to be indoors with a cup of something strong and an engrossing novel. At last they had taken refuge in a public house called the Duke of Lancaster, a winding burrow of a place with several rooms and two enormous fireplaces.
They sat at a table in the shadow of one of these six-foot hearths. The barmaid came round, and the three all ordered hot spiced cider with rum. Meanwhile Lenox shivered, with that horrid feeling of being cold and hot at the same time in wet clothes. Someone—perhaps his brother?—had once told him that a turkey without its feathers was hideous, clammy, pale, pimpled, trembling at the slightest touch. Those same physical symptoms were present when someone quit drinking or tobacco or opium suddenly—went, as the saying had it, cold turkey. Well, so he felt now.
“They must have met in someone’s lodgings,” Cobb said.
“It may also be that Sav stood for something else,” said Lenox.
“Mr. Graham, would the Savoy have been your first guess?”
“Without a doubt, sir,” and though Lenox was not sure whether honesty or loyalty played a greater role in this reply, he was grateful for it.
Their ciders came, hot and delicious. Cobb had a bacon sandwich; Lenox, a paper sleeve of chipped potatoes, warm, crispy, salty and filling. As for Graham, he had a slice of steak pie with his cider. The rain lashed the windows, fierce and relentless, the gray sky dimming even faster than usual. Lenox tried to remember the shortest day of the winter and failed. He hoped they were past it. December, wasn’t it? Or was that wishful thinking? Still, it was a companionable little meal.
As Cobb and Graham talked, Lenox’s mind turned to Kitty Ashbrook, and he thought of the contrast between this afternoon—welcome as it was—and her warm, inviting sitting room, the feeling of her light hands in his.
And then, in the midst of his idle thought, as the three of them sipped their cider, two men entered the Duke of Lancaster: Samuel Jonas, whom Lenox recognized faintly, but surely, and with him, as if by way of confirmation, Wilt Sheridan, blithe Wilt Sheridan, with his mustaches waxed carefully to the tips and not a hair out of place.
Lenox nudged Graham and Cobb. “It’s them.”
None spoke further—all three recognizing that they were placed, as if some divinity had set them there on purpose, in the perfect half-concealed spot to observe what the two men did.
Jonas waddled to the bar. He sat down heavily, his thinning hair tossed up in wild torrents by the weather. He looked miserable. A day away from the comforts of the Carlton.
They couldn’t hear the two men. “Graham?” said Lenox. “They know me.”
Without further prompting, Graham took, with his usual knack, the most natural path in the world toward a spot at the bar just by the two men.
Lenox could see that Jonas had ordered a double brandy, Sheridan a glass of hot red wine. Their talk was very brief. Graham, next to them, ordered and sipped a pint of ale, studying—or at least appearing to study—a folded journal that he had drawn from his jacket pocket.
The two men finished their drinks, stood up, and left, just far apart enough that it was clear they were going separate ways. Lenox and Cobb had to wait for an agonizing few seconds as Graham sat, prolonging his ruse, before returning to them.
“Well?” said Lenox eagerly when he had returned.
Graham took his seat again, and said, in a low voice, “Forsythe Witt couldn’t make this meeting. It was Jonas who reported that. Sheridan was quite put out. They are meeting at six at the Carlton Club instead. Sheridan objected to the plan but eventually agreed.”
The two detectives absorbed this information. “Can we get into the Carlton Club?” asked Cobb.
“I can, at least,” said Lenox. “I have to think of a friend who won’t ask questions. Let me think for a moment.”
He had an equal number of friends on each side of the House of Commons, Lenox, tilting perhaps toward his brother’s party (and his father’s, and his own) in proportion. Most of the conservatives were school friends. He searched his mind for one who wouldn’t care about letting him in as a guest without wanting to know why. It was notorious for its privacy, the Carlton; the chances of getting Cobb in were slim, and Graham probably none.
Lenox glanced at his watch: 4:55. It would need to be someone close at hand, too, worse luck.
Forsythe Witt. Wilton Sheridan. And Samuel Jonas. One liberal, two conservatives. All three Members of Parliament. Roughly of the same age. Sheridan the only aristocrat among them, however.
Why were they meeting? What did they know?
“I can’t think of the right person,” he said, not quite listening to himself, for his mind was working.
“Perhaps Sir Richard?” Winston Cobb said.
In fact, Mayne was a member of the Carlton, but it was impossible to explain to Cobb why exactly the commissioner would have felt honor-bound never to use it in his work.
“There is also His Grace the Duke of Dorset,” said Graham. “I think he would do it for you.”
“Graham!” Lenox cried. “That’s it!”
“A duke?” said Cobb. “My understanding is that they’re—not indebted to many people, I suppose.”
But Lenox was already standing up, for this one happened to be, as the visit to Hawkes’s had again shown. The young detective had inadvertently learned many of Dorset’s most important secrets in a case not long before, and that same case had produced a grudging sense on Dorset’s part that Lenox, so socially inferior to him as to be beneath his notice in general terms, had the right to call upon his goodwill should he wish.
There was a line of hansoms just outside the pub. They stepped into one, having agreed to go together to Dorset House, with its beautiful views of the Thames, its masterpieces of art and craft and furniture, and its air of sorrowful majesty.
They had been in the cab for five minutes, the rain still very heavy, the sound outside thunderous, when Lenox said, slowly, “I think I understand what’s happened.”
“What?” asked Cobb, who had been sharpening a small knife he apparently kept in his belt.
Lenox didn’t speak for fully half a minute after that. Indeed, his eyes might have fallen closed. But at last he said, “Tell me where I go wrong. I’m not sure yet. Will you?”
Graham nodded; Cobb, too.
“Wilton Sheridan, Samuel Jonas, and Forsythe Witt. Three men who are roughly of an age, all of whom were in Jamaica at an overlapping period of their lives.”
“Correct.”
“An aristocrat, and two men who set out to become rich and did it.”
“Correct.”
“And those two both returned to England within the last five years and immediately expended some of that wealth to become Members of Parliament.”
“Yes.”
“It doesn’t run cheap, a seat in Parliament.”
“So far we know all of this,” Cobb said, though not impatiently.
“My next thought, then, is how unlikely a friendship it is.”
“Why?”
“Sheridan is a man of the turf who was in Jamaica once, twenty years ago, by his account. Horses are all he cares about. The others are men of business. From that I think: What did they have that he wanted?”
“Have, sir?” said Graham.
“Samuel Jonas had land and money. He was a successful merchant.”
“As was Forsythe Witt,” said Cobb.
“Not quite!” Lenox had warmed to his theory as he began to explain it; he was all but sure, and a slow excitement started to suffuse him. “If you notice from his biography in Who’s Who, he started with less than Jonas, Witt. He began as a bookkeeper and moved around Jamaica in search of work.”
“Yes.”
“What he did have was a shipping company. He had boats.”
“And what did Sheridan have that needed to be moved in boats? Sugar?”
Lenox shook his head slightly, then looked at Cobb and Graham, seated on the bench opposite him. “Slaves.”