Even before the coin had struck the ground, Lenox felt a coldness grip his heart. For a moment he and Frost both stood and stared at the coin where it had landed, and then Frost stooped down and picked it up, rising with a shake of his head. “Too far,” he said immediately.
Lenox’s thoughts were with Sophia and Lady Jane. “I have to go and tell my wife,” he said. “Don’t leave Leigh for anything. I’ll be back shortly.”
Frost grabbed his arm. “It would be unwise to go off alone after such a message, Lenox. Wait, would you?”
“No, I can’t.”
He made it home, looking over his shoulder the whole way for a trap but finding none, and discovered Lady Jane in her drawing room, writing letters. She looked up at him curiously when he entered. “Home already?”
“Where is Sophia?” he asked.
“Upstairs in the nursery. Why?”
Just at that moment there was a merry cry, with what he could never have mistaken for anything but his daughter’s joy in it. “Thank goodness.”
“Why, Charles?” said Jane again.
He told her. She had been thrown out of her daily schedule by some threat to Lenox more than once, but now that they had a child she grew angry at these intrusions of his work into their life. With justification.
“Will this never end?” she asked, standing up.
“My idea is that you should go to Toto’s for the night,” he said. “That will be no hardship. Sophia will like to sleep in George’s nursery. And there are already men going directly to the Farthings’ chief to arrest him, including the superintendent, if I have my way—I wrote him, through Frost, and used Edmund’s name.”
“Charles.”
“Nothing will come of it all. You have my solemn word.”
He felt sick, though, as he kissed Sophia’s cheeks ten minutes later. “I shall be over to see you this evening, love,” he said.
When they were gone, he was alone again. He stood for a moment—away from the windows, he noticed, fearful of bullets—and let his thoughts run.
Why had they targeted him now? First Middleton had been sent this message of the solitary farthing; then an amateur detective. Was it because Frost was too powerful a figure, embedded within the official body of Scotland Yard, to menace?
But then—why send such a message at all? Why not strike, if you intended to strike? It was this question that puzzled him most, and had before that day, too.
Sophia and Jane, at least, would be safe at McConnell’s heavily fortified house on Grosvenor Square, a place that would offer protection both in numbers and in concrete physical ways that not many other private houses could.
He left by the back gate, coat up around his ears, eyes darting left and right. There was a threat in every face he passed; at the corner he felt a heavy hand on his shoulder, and turned, violently.
Only Pargiter, the newsman. He looked surprised. “All well, Mr. Lenox?”
“Oh—fine, yes.”
“I thought you might want the afternoon papers.”
“Later, Pargiter, later. Thank you.”
It was only when he was sunk low within the anonymity of a London taxi a few minutes later that he felt safe again. He directed it back to the Royal Society.
Frost greeted him in the marble rotunda. “Family safe?” he asked.
“Safe,” Lenox confirmed.
“You’ll be happy to know we’ve been busy here. There is a large group going to the Blue Peter. At least twelve men, including, I believe, Superintendent Gilbert.”
“Good.”
“Yes, I think so. There are fifteen of these gangs—any one of them that we really turned our attention to could be gone in a week, and they know it. The trouble is another would pop up. But it would be worth it to keep you and Leigh safe. As I said, it’s gone too far. Let them kill each other—but not us.”
“Thank you, Frost.”
The inspector nodded seriously. “Don’t mention it. I’ve instructed one of my men to return here as soon as possible with a report on the arrest—they may begin coughing up what they know immediately, the scoundrels.”
Lenox puffed out his cheeks, very modestly reassured. “Thank you,” he said again. He had fewer friends at the Yard than he once had. His dear friend Jenkins was gone. But here was a new one. “That’s decent of you.”
“Not at all.”
To Lenox’s amazement, lunch was still, after this interruption, somehow a going concern, the gentlemen in the room having loosened their ties, poured out brandies for themselves, and lit cigars, and the room whirring with amiable clubroom chatter. (One word rose above the noise again and again, eliciting a laugh almost every time. In the American state of North Carolina forty or fifty years before, Rowan had told them over lunch, some particularly fatuous politician had made a speech, immediately derided as unctuous and full of airy sophistry; it was delivered in the county of those parts called Buncombe, and almost immediately, in that mysterious way of slang, that name had become a byword for just such nonsense—soon making the transition from its proper form to the more generic “bunkum,” or, as the men of the Royal Society had taken to shortening it in their appropriation of the word, to indicate friendly disagreement during a postprandial conversation, “bunk.”
“I think they’re bunk,” Frost muttered at last, watching them.)
Leigh was in deep conversation with a slim red-haired young man, very earnest and it would appear very engaging, too.
“Nothing off?” Lenox asked Frost.
“Nothing.”
They were standing on the periphery of the room, watching the luncheon. Lenox hadn’t taken more than a small glass of wine—he wanted a clear head—and Frost’s eyes didn’t leave Leigh. Nor did Cohen’s; he stood close to the room’s other entrance.
Lenox’s old friend eventually noticed them, however, and beckoned his young red-haired friend to come and meet them. “Lenox, Frost—this is Mr. William Shandy. A man after my own heart: untrained.”
“How do you do?” said Mr. William Shandy, untrained.
Lenox and Frost introduced themselves. “An amateur, then?” asked Lenox, civilly, despite the anxiety that still gripped him. “What is your field?”
“I propagate ferns, sir.”
Instead of saying “how infinitely dull,” Lenox nodded politely, and inquired about the ferns; yes, they were easy to grow; no, they had few predators in England; yes, there were interesting facts about their inherited traits.
“This is the glory of England, this kind of thing,” Leigh said, beaming. Lenox hadn’t seen him so happy that day. “You must remember that Darwin studied medicine and divinity, nothing else. He became a natural philosopher simply by attempting natural philosophy over and over! Which is how we shall launch an aeroplane into the heavens, one day, I imagine, no matter how many of us have to fall down first.”
“You cannot believe that rot,” said Lenox. “Mr. Shandy, do you?”
Shandy looked both scandalized that Lenox had spoken to Leigh in such a way, and uncomfortable that the discussion had moved on from ferns. “I cannot say, sir. I really cannot say.”
Leigh was immediately approached by another fellow of the Society, who drew him into a conversation about the microbe (Lenox hoped never to hear the word again) and had soon induced one or two other men to join their colloquy. The word “bunk” came along, and Lenox wondered how much longer he would have to endure the interminable gathering.
Frost pulled a flask from his breast pocket. “You look as if you could do with a sup, after the last few hours.”
Lenox took the flask, a much dented and tarnished old pewter object, inscribed with lettering too darkened to read, and said, “If you absolutely insist.”
The liquid inside was fiery—every time he visited a workingman’s pub, he had to admit his tastes had grown genteel in the years since university—but its results were as gratifying as the finest Jura malt could have provided, filling him with a warm calm.
He asked what it was, and Frost said, “A London mash.”
“Not for the faint of heart.”
“Ha! No.”
“Your flask has been through the wars.”
Frost looked down at it in his hand. “Oh, yes, quite literally. It was my grandfather’s. He had it in Crimea—he wore it over his heart, trusting that it might stop a bullet. Instead he got shot in the upper leg, like a common poacher, he always says. He mostly sits with the leg up in Lambeth now, where he has one of those new stores you’ve probably heard of. A nice little business, paid for by his pension.”
“New stores?”
“Have you not been? You serve yourself. The shopkeeper does nothing but sit behind the cash register like a grandee.” Frost sighed and capped the flask. “Someday I’ll do it myself. I only hope I don’t have to get shot in the leg for the pleasure. Granddad gave me the flask when I joined the Yard—said perhaps it would catch a bullet for me, even if it hadn’t for him.”
“Not today, I pray,” said Lenox.
“No—not today, I quite agree.”