How would London remember the months that followed the dawn of 1856?
In Fleet Street it was a time of giddy joy: three Members of Parliament arrested for murder! And from each side of the aisle, meaning that no accusation of political bias could be leveled! The column inches filled themselves. Sketches appeared in all the papers, of every party involved in this spectacular plot.
Yet Lenox observed that as January and then February vanished, the tale took on a strange, confused aspect, which at times he scarcely recognized—casting Sheridan as the witless aristocratic dupe of a scheme hatched by Jonas and Witt, and later more definitely just Witt, so that by the start of February there was merely a general sense that Sheridan had been part of “some mess or other in Jamaica.” The other two were more harshly judged by public opinion, yet it was nonetheless for the most part still Winfield Bell who was blamed for the murders of Norman Haase, Abram Tiptree, and Eleazer Gilman.
Forsythe Witt would no doubt remember the start of 1856 as the time of first his capture and then his escape. One evening, apparently not trusting that his testimony was enough, he disappeared from Newgate Prison. Nobody knew how. There was one sighting of him, on a light cruiser to Newfoundland—but the news of it took so long to return to London that Lenox’s best guess was that Witt had already found a soft landing place by the time the search for him began. Perhaps even a way back into the slave trade.
Sheridan and Jonas had neither Witt’s cunning nor his enterprise. Lenox had ample time to observe them both.
Jonas was a pathetic, self-aggrandizing, blubbering specimen, a monster of some kind or another. The sentimental cross-stitch of Jonas Hall might have been his crest. He would speak in the most maudlin terms about his fatherly love of the slaves at Jonas Hall, for hours if you let him, then change the subject immediately at the mention of the cruelty of their position. Changing it, in general, to his second-favorite subject, which was the injustices he had suffered in the past few months: cut off from the Carlton Club, from his happy rooms, never having raised a hand to anyone, he would say, never having even laid eyes on Eleazer Gilman. Always afraid of Witt, only obeying Witt. All this despite the fact that he existed in a state of fair comfort, importing greasy plates of chicken, greedily reading the tabloids, even paying his hairdresser to come in and arrange his delicate strange pillow of hair, his vanity undimmed by the loss of his status.
Yet it was Sheridan who struck Lenox closest to home. Sheridan was bitter, furious, skittish, delusional. His hair had grayed, his face developed deeper lines. But he was nevertheless home to Lenox—as familiar as the scent of tobacco in a gentleman’s club. Their lives had been so roughly similar, if one took the view of the great spectrum of humanity, that there was a discomfiting sense that Sheridan’s guilt implicated him. At moments Lenox felt he himself ought to stand trial in Sheridan’s place.
Absurd, of course. Still, Lenox became desperate to know what his life had rendered him blind to—it was what had made him a detective, perhaps—while Sheridan would do anything to preserve his own myopias.
Cobb would remember the second month of 1856 as the time of his passage back to Washington, case successfully resolved. He took with him four jars of jam from Lenox House and posted his first letter to Lenox from his ship’s brief stop in Boston, a long analysis, more than five pages close-written on both sides, of every element of the case.
Lenox studied these pages again and again, scribbling notes to himself, pulling old newspaper clippings for comparison, correcting details of geography, before beginning his own long reply. He hoped (and better yet, knew) that the letter was, as Cobb had signed it, the beginning of what I hope shall be a long and mutually fruitful correspondence.
Jane would remember that January and February for the long, empty weeks, Lenox thought, without Deere; Graham perhaps for the resumption of his daily routine, though it was difficult even for someone as close to him as Lenox to say whether such a return was welcome or regrettable, his demeanor remained so even. Edmund? For long days of work, probably, and a few happy hours at home in the country. Slowly, invisibly, but emphatically, he was becoming their father. This struck his younger brother as both enviable and slightly smothering, and he thought that providence had chosen the order of their birth correctly, for few men were happier than Sir Edmund Lenox.
And what about Charles Lenox himself? How was he to remember this time?
On the second Tuesday of January he was at Kitty Ashbrook’s salon—Mrs. Ashbrook’s, properly speaking—when the man who had paid him such an abrupt visit entered the room.
“Lord Cormorant!” Kitty had said in surprise, and Lenox noticed that she seemed sincerely startled. “We did not expect your return so quickly.”
“I shortened my voyage to see you,” said Cormorant.
He was a large, confident, fairly handsome gentleman with small eyes, aged perhaps forty or forty-five, and certainly, by how he carried himself, unaccustomed to contradiction.
“Please allow me to introduce you to Mr. Charles Lenox,” Kitty said.
“We have met,” Cormorant said shortly, and inclined his head.
“Indeed,” said Lenox.
It was of course impossible that Miss Ashbrook should show any favor to Lord Cormorant, and for much of that morning and the Thursday that succeeded it, he sat glowering in the corner as Lenox and Kitty talked, their usual lively banter.
She was halting only on the subject of this new wooer. “How do you know Cormorant?” Lenox asked when they had a moment to themselves. “I’m not sure I recognize the title.”
“It is quite new,” she said, and glanced away. “His father was the first. He was a director of the East India Company. But he studied at Gonville and Caius before that, I believe. The father.”
“Ah.”
This reference to Cambridge was the first moment, Lenox would later reflect, when he should have known that in the end he would lose his battle. It betrayed Kitty’s anxiety that Cormorant came out of trade. His father having gone to Cambridge, before amassing his vast fortune, seemed to vouchsafe that it was not quite so.
It took Lenox a very, very long time to realize that Kitty’s heart was not his. When the realization did come, it crushed him.
It was a cold morning in the middle of February, with flurries melting as soon as they hit the pavement, the sky a steely white. He had spent a happy breakfast hour poring over a new letter from Cobb, sipping tea and eating eggs as Mrs. Huggins’s cats chased each other around his study—immune, apparently, to pieces of toast occasionally striking them in the back, or the irritated commands of their house’s owner that they be gone.
When he arrived at Kitty’s, it was to find Cormorant in conversation with the maid of the house, Virginia. “It had better be two dozen of the shortbread,” he said, and passed her a note, before glancing at Lenox—they had never mentioned their sole encounter previous to these at Eaton Square—and passing into the sitting room.
It was only this trivial moment of intimacy that led Lenox to see how profoundly he had misunderstood the roles he and Cormorant played here.
He had missed it all, he saw in a flash: the whole drama, played out day by day, and he not the hero but the antagonist. He inquired discreetly of Virginia whether his lordship came often—and was told, with a knowing look that near broke his heart, oh, yes, every day almost, including the Sabbath itself, when he walked Mrs. Ashbrook to the early service; and weren’t they all expecting an announcement pretty soon!
It was the maid’s ease in telling him this that showed Lenox more finally than anything else that all was settled. He must be, he thought … not a joke, perhaps, but no one to take very seriously. The also-ran.
Yet he’d thought he and Kitty had been as close as ever. Certainly they had spoken with as much rushing enthusiasm as they always had in prior days of books, of travel, of the prosaic tales in the news. Every night, as he fell asleep, Lenox had thought of her face and how dear and unique it was to him, how particularly beautiful in its animation. It became the center of his world for a while—the one thing to which his heart answered, not books, not friends, nothing but Kitty Ashbrook’s face.
And yet it was Cormorant she would marry.
With Cormorant she exchanged stilted niceties about, for instance, his wine cellar, a subject very close to his heart; or his money, another. Not directly—his money washed itself clean, conversationally, through hobbies, ponies, broughams, a gun collection, a new sailing yacht, a thousand acres in Scotland, each of them a way, like the very good red laid down by his father in ’23 and now worth too much to part with, to mention his wealth without mentioning it.
Lenox hadn’t a need in the world. He could afford most anything, and if he couldn’t—well, he didn’t want a sailing yacht, or a case of red wine worth the same as a sailing yacht.
Yet he discovered what he did need, after all. More than he had conceived even in his innermost soul, he needed love. His mother had been correct. She had sensed that he was or soon would be lonely—and even if her means of remedying that inevitability was inelegant, it had been correct. He wondered—though far off from the problem, dully—if that meant she was also right that he should not be a detective. A thought that had shadowed the whole case, though now lapsed in significance amidst the fog of this rejection.
Ah, how it hurt! The walk home after his conversation with the maid was one of the purest desolation. Never, not in the most cheerless depths of adolescence, had he felt this strange kind of living grief.
He tortured himself, of course, with images of how he had danced with Kitty, conversed with her—of that sublime moment when they had held hands and so nearly kissed.
In the days that followed he walked by her house in a state of alternating panic and self-pity and nausea, debating whether to speak to her.
In the event he returned just once more, that Thursday. He had planned to stay but briefly, yet he found that he couldn’t pull himself away from the woman to whom his heart belonged. He simply stared at her much of the time, quite unable to sustain a conversation.
Rather than condoling with him, she seemed more distant than usual. Lenox spent all weekend debating whether to propose—a great fell action, sure to sweep her off her feet he thought—and then debating with himself how to do it, and then going back to whether to do it again, walking the streets, barely eating, seeing no one, no doubt wild-looking, his footsteps taking him unintentionally by Eaton Square.
At last he resolved that he would say his piece. He would ask her—he could not live without asking her.
But the engagement between Miss Ashbrook and Lord Cormorant was announced in the papers on the very next Monday morning.