The English custom of driving on the left side of the road had practical origins.
It had started in medieval days, when genuine knights had traveled the high way between villages. A knight kept his sword to his right as he rode, in order to have his strong hand toward the middle of the road in the event that he should cross paths with thieves or other highwaymen. To ride down the right side of the road would have meant fighting with a weaker left hand closer to the middle of the road; a possibly fatal disadvantage.
In America, that newer country, they drove on the right—and this decision, too, had a logic, for there, with the huge teams of horses required to move across the vast land, it was necessary to drive with a very long whip. By riding on the right, the drovers could keep it to the outside of the road, so that if they passed another team they would never cross whips or inadvertently strike a fellow driver.
At the Royal Society that evening, Leigh stood in front of an overflowing and rapt audience and began his lecture with this cryptic little piece of trivia.
Soon he had opened out into a larger discussion that explained it, however. First he gave them a subtle and humorous delineation of all the manifold ways in which scientific process was necessarily different from country to country—just like driving!—and then he delved into how it was different specifically, in all the innumerable places he had been during his travels. Finally, losing Lenox but evidently winning over the rest of the room, he had gone deep indeed into his own investigations into the microbe.
At the very end of the speech, he returned to America and England. “As a going concern they will surpass us in the next century, I have no doubt, the Americans,” he concluded, “but in science our tradition cannot be bettered. I am proud to join its history this evening, even if I am only a far-flung particle in the greater body.”
In the period of questions that followed there were a great many detailed interrogations into the nature of the microbe and the research of Pasteur. One questioner did return to Leigh’s final line: impossible to imagine a capital more powerful than London, he said angrily, a nation whose interests were so intricately tied to those of a hundred million souls across the globe—why, in shipping alone—
Leigh listened patiently, and then replied. “Yes, I have heard about whether or not the sun sets on our empire—that it doesn’t—but I do think it will be the States that matters more in 1976 than Britain.”
“But, sir—”
Leigh plowed ahead. “That is for two reasons. The first is that they have the common schools, which we have been foolish in the extreme not to build. I myself see four or five of my old schoolmates here this evening”—there was a brief smile at Lenox as he said this—“and understand that nobody could be better educated than our landholding class. But as long as we do not educate our lower orders, the Darwin of 1976 is bound to be from a farming family in, say, Missouri.
“And then, the second reason. They have land. Which is a thing that every time I return home here to England I observe that they have laid down no more of—and which is more or less infinite there. I have seen the birds across the plain, and as they thundered past you would have thought it was nighttime, though it was noon, so many I thought they would never end, so wide that I couldn’t see the edge of the flock. It is a large, large place, gentlemen.”
There were a few more questions, but Lenox’s thoughts stayed on this striking image, and when Leigh had finished, though there was applause, the mood in the room seemed to have stayed there too, something slightly melancholy and queer in it, as claret was passed out on trays in this room at what they had all believed twenty minutes before was the center of the universe.
At the supper afterward, Leigh sat, by his own request, with Lenox and Lady Jane—women were welcome at the Society, an enlightenment most such establishments had not yet achieved—at one of eight small tables under a beautiful ceiling tiled with a black-and-gold map of the heavens. Rowan, the wiry president of the Society who had been so desperately eager to bring about this evening, was also with them, beaming and accepting congratulations.
At regular intervals gentlemen would stop by to meet Leigh and leave a card with him. The first was a bald-headed gentleman named Parkes, a metallurgist who had discovered, Leigh said, a very promising and pliable new industrial material. (“He’s had the abominable taste to name it Parkesine,” Leigh added, after Parkes had gone, “though I am pleased to say that people are not using the name. Rowan tells me they generally call it ‘plastic’ instead.”) Close on his heels was Prince Alfred, one of the Society’s three Royal Fellows, a dashing thin fellow in a blue coat with dark moustaches and a twinkling smile—the Queen’s son.
They all rose as he approached the table. “America, then!” he said, but laughed. “I shall have to tell Mother.”
“No country could exceed hers during her lifetime or yours, Your Highness,” said Rowan, bowing.
“Indeed not. And I must take issue—for we are acquiring new land almost continually. It simply happens to be in other countries.”
Leigh smiled and nodded. “Very true, Your Highness.”
“As for the microbes—damned interesting.” The prince looked around at the seven other people at the table (he was seated, by his request according to Rowan, with a certain group he favored from the Jockey Club) and his eyes alighted on Lady Jane, to whom he inclined his head. They had met several times, though it was clear he could place only her face. “How is our Miss Phillips?” he asked.
Apparently he did remember that Jane was somehow associated with Toto, who in distant days had been a part of his set. “Exceedingly happy, Your Highness,” said Jane. “A very proud mother.”
“Please give her my best, would you? Is it a girl or a boy?”
“A girl, Your Highness.”
Nearly six, too. “I shall send round a rattle. That’s what’s done, isn’t it, Rowan?”
“Or a cup, as the case may be, Your Majesty.”
“Nonsense. It must be a rattle.” Prince Alfred, standing there with his gloves in his hands, beamed at them, a creature without anxieties. “Congratulations, Mr. Leigh! I thought your speech very interesting—for all that you have rejected our generosities.”
After the prince had gone, the little table buzzed with happiness, even the least impressionable among them there rather excited at this visitation from the vaults of heaven. Lenox turned to Leigh. “Their generosities?” he murmured.
“Oh, they tried to knight me.”
“And you declined? Shouldn’t you like to be a knight?”
“No.”
Lenox smiled.
It was truly rare for a married couple to be seated to supper together, and Lenox and Lady Jane took the chance to have a long conversation with Leigh. It was hard not to feel a little proud, watching him so guarded with every other member of the party, and so open and happy with them—so immediately prepared to make a friend of Lenox’s wife, finding delight in her company without any hesitation or prompting, though even his great ally Rowan could not elicit any very strong reaction from him in other moments of conversation, and the palace itself should be denied.
Baked mullets came out to the tables; rissoles, and roast fowl, and macaroni with parmesan cheese, and sea-kale; for dessert there was a laudably enormous charlotte russe placed at the center of each table, with vanilla hard sauce trickling down its sides. Every table made its way through wine and wine and more wine. It was a merry evening, and that before the toasting had even begun.
“What was Charles like in school?” Jane asked Leigh as they ate dessert. “I know my own memories of him, but I am curious to hear yours.”
“I have never met anyone who grew up in the country and knew less about plants.”
“That’s not fair,” Lenox said. “If you’ll recall I taught you how to whistle with a blade of grass during field day.”
Leigh flashed a smile. “I had forgotten that. Yes, it’s true.”
“He was a scoundrel, then,” said Lady Jane.
“Oh, no. On the contrary, even then he was a personage of the utmost respectability. I seem to recall him reading adventure stories at an impossible pace—and doing very well at Greek, less well at Latin. Better than I did in either. Refused to sport with the beaks. I disliked his older brother.”
Lady Jane looked amazed. “Edmund!”
“Yes—but I was a truculent specimen in those days.”
“And Edmund was rather high-handed,” Lenox said. “He was chased and dunked in the fountain at Christ Church during his first week at Oxford. It taught him a world of humility.”
“By whom?” asked Leigh.
“A gang from Winchester.”
“Miserable sods.”
Lady Jane laughed. “Were you dunked, Charles?”
Lenox laughed. “I wasn’t hobnob enough to be considered. We had a lovely time as undergraduates, though. And meanwhile Leigh was sailing across the world.”
“And that, was that a lovely time itself?” asked Lady Jane of Leigh.
“I cannot imagine a better one, my lady,” he said, sitting back with his thumb in the watch pocket of his jacket, and smiling as he reflected upon it. “The splendid open water, birds and fish to study, good fellows everywhere around you, just enough in the way of excitement from a storm and a cannonball. I only rue that I am too old now to be a surgeon’s assistant. Sometimes I am tempted to go out under a false name and sail without any responsibilities at all, preparing tinctures for some drunken old sawbones on a ship bound for the Horn.”
“You would grow restless.”
“Never. If anything I have grown restless in Paris. With that money, you know, I had it in mind to hire a ship and go to India, to stop wherever I wished, to hug the coasts. I am almost done with the microbe.”
“Just as you are uncovering its secrets!” interjected Rowan, who had been eavesdropping.
“Others will do the rest.”
There was a footstep behind Leigh’s chair. He turned, expecting, Lenox could see from the polite set of his face, another set of congratulations. But it was Cohen.
“A letter, Mr. Leigh,” he said, “left with the porter.”
Leigh opened the letter, frowned, and passed it to Lenox. “What do you make of that?”
Mr. Leigh, I hope you will meet me in the upper courtyard at a moment of convenience. What you hear there will be to your benefit. Please come alone.