Eleven hours later, Lenox was, as one old Irish friend from school would have called it, heavy drunk.
He had one hand on the wall of an alley. He was somewhere in West London; he knew that much. The culprit was wine, which in his heart of hearts he had never actually believed could get him properly drunk, only tipsy. As it happened, he had disproved that hypothesis this evening. He was barely upright, and only a small animal part of him was still conscious, willing the other nine-tenths of his carcass to carry on.
“Oy! Guv! Ride home!”
At the end of the alley, there was a hansom cab. It must have been just out of the stable for the morning—its horse’s coat was glossy, and Lenox, had he been slightly more alert, would have noticed that its driver’s jacket was brushed, too.
With almost indescribable gratitude, he nodded, lurched toward the cab, and heaved himself inside, mumbling his address.
Fifteen minutes later, he woke up with a jolt outside his own familiar home. Thank goodness for that. The driver could have made for the ends of the earth, and Lenox wouldn’t have woken up to stop him. He somehow managed to pay, stumbled out, and went upstairs.
He fell asleep on the chaise in his room.
At ten the next morning he was washed, shaved, and sitting with the papers.
“Oh hell,” he said to no one in particular—Graham had gone to the kitchen—when he picked up the sixth newspaper of the stack he was examining.
“Sir?”
Lenox glanced up and reddened. It was Mrs. Huggins, carrying a coffeepot. He hadn’t heard her enter and wouldn’t have sworn in front of her (shouldn’t have sworn at all, really). “Oh, nothing, Mrs. Huggins. Apologies.”
“Can I bring you anything else, sir?”
“Oh no, not as long as Graham will be by before too long.”
“Only a moment, sir, I believe.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Huggins,” Lenox said humbly.
In fact, he didn’t feel all that awful—only wretched, wretched down to the bottom of his soul. Physically he would survive: he was young, and he had slept for a little more than five hours, besides which he vaguely remembered that before he had collapsed onto the divan in his room, Graham had been coaxing him into drinking water, brick that he was.
Now, having had coffee and toast, he felt nearly human, and at that moment Graham came—as tidily dressed as ever—with a plate of bacon and eggs. Lenox had been truly drunk just four or five times in his life, and knew from those experiences that he would benefit from eating as much as possible the next morning. In the years to come, of course, he would look back with a sense of tragic hilarity at the youth who had believed these were the elements of a full recovery from a drunken night—but for now, while he was twenty-three, they were.
“Thanks very much,” he said to Graham. He held the newspaper out. “Did you see this?”
He did feel fearfully low in his emotions. He had been too drunk; now this newspaper; and above all, like the thrumming of a heartbeat in his ears, the fact of his father’s illness, news that right now, in a sitting room a few streets over, his mother would be gently relaying to Edmund.
Graham took the paper. “Ah. Yes, sir, I did.”
The paper was the Daily Star. “Why on earth have they included an illustration of me? No other paper has even mentioned me! And it’s—”
Lenox came up short. He had seen the answer to his own question before he was finished asking it. “Sir?” Graham said quizzically.
“It’s the favorite of the police. That’s what I was going to say.”
Graham raised his eyebrows. “Ah.”
“Exeter’s revenge, I hazard. He knows my position in society will be—well, who cares. Compromised. But who cares?” Lenox shoveled a forkful of scrambled eggs into his mouth. “None of that matters. Listen here, are you ready for a trip to Ealing?”
“Yes, sir. Are you, sir?”
“Yes, I am,” said Lenox indignantly. He wasn’t, still foggy, still tired, but that was his own fault, and he wouldn’t take it out on the victim of Walnut Island. “Get my suit ready, if you would.”
“It’s on the back of your door, sir.”
It was a long ride to Ealing. Plenty of time to lament every bump in the road, as it jolted his tender head, and plenty of time to think.
Lenox believed himself to be a very honest person; and yet he supposed that he must not be. Because he knew that there were some men and women who couldn’t have lived with themselves, keeping the news about their father a secret from Edmund.
Edmund himself, in fact, was this sort of person. So was their father. It would never have occurred to either of them—and in some self-punishing part of his soul, still full of anger at itself for his wasted night and sickly morning, Lenox realized this made them better than he was—to hesitate for a moment. They would have come to him without waiting.
Lenox and his mother were different, however. Not dishonest; “practical” would have been the generous word, “slippery” the ungenerous one. “Deceitful” the cruel one. But the deceit had been practiced from love.
After they discussed his father’s condition, the night before, his mother had sighed. “The question before me now,” she had said, “is how I am to tell Edmund.”
“Just as you told me,” Lenox had replied.
She had sighed, then smiled wanly. “He is receiving different news than you are, Charles,” she said. “He is also receiving news about himself.”
Lenox had felt just an instant of irritation. When you were the younger brother, you were always the younger brother; whether you minded or not; on days you forgot and days you remembered; always.
At moments of late-night introspection, he wondered if it was what had driven him into his current profession.
“Yes,” he’d said.
His mother had exhaled, steadying herself. “A wife takes a vow to obey, you know. That seemed immensely serious to me when your father and I married. It does still.”
“But?”
“But he would never have told you. There’s no vow for a mother, either. And maybe that’s because there’s no—there are no words, Charles, to express the promise a mother makes to herself and her children when they are born. You can just about make up a contract between a man and woman, just. But a mother and a child—”
As she pulled up short here, deep in thought, her fingers on her chin, her eyes on the floor. She was going to have to tell Edmund, her firstborn, that he was going to assume his title, his responsibilities, his land, all far, far sooner than he had expected, too soon.
“Perhaps you should leave it until the morning,” Lenox had said.
She looked up at him. “I had thought of it.”
Lenox nodded. “You and he and Molly.”
“He would want you there.”
“I’m sure, but it’s better the three of you.”
“Could you manage dinner, though?”
He had managed dinner. The one thing that public school indisputably taught you was how to put a brave and cheerful face on things. (No doubt this was useful in battle.) As soon as he could do so without being noticeable, however, Lenox had made his excuses and gone off to a party with his friend Hugh, who was pleasant company on occasions like this because he was always so forlornly in love—it was a French princess at the moment—that one never felt very scrutinized.
There Lenox had gotten so roaring drunk (on wine!) and he could recall, in the cab to Ealing, that he had made a fool of himself. He had remained in close conversation in a way he never would have dreamed to do sober with Cynthia Stark, whose husband was infamously indifferent to her behavior—being, it was said, in love with his groomsman, which left Cynthia at ends too loose for her own good, her own reputation.
Wincing, he realized that he might even have discussed Elizabeth with her.
Worse still, at the next party Hugh had taken him to, near Jermyn Street, Lenox had been absolutely cut by Lord Markham, who would one day be the Duke of Rotherham, though at Harrow Lenox wouldn’t have deigned to let Markham carry his cricket bat.
It might have been this slight that triggered his final plunge into drink.
“Did you see that?” he had asked Hugh indignantly.
Markham had very politely said hello to Hugh. “That’s a bad family,” Lenox’s friend had said. “He’s going to have to marry an American. The father is a gambler and the mother is addicted to laudanum, takes it in strength enough to kill horses, they say. They cut down all the timber on the property. He only wants someone to feel superior to, that’s all.”
“Glad I was here, then,” Lenox had replied bitterly, and then—another point of shame—throwing off his friend’s attempt at comfort, he had joined a party of the drunkest people, who were leading a weaving charge toward some twopenny wine bar where it was as likely as not one of them would get his throat cut.
Now, in the new day, the carriage toward Ealing rattled on, and more and more of the night came back to Lenox. He felt sickened by himself; and he pictured, somewhere behind them a few miles, Edmund suffering the news that Charles had known for a full night, standing up, and insisting that they must go see Charles immediately. Let me do it, his mother would say—slippery, like her younger son. Soon enough, they would all know. And it would change nothing at all. His father—his father, his only father!—would still have just six months left to live.