Lenox’s desk at the offices in Chancery Lane was guaranteed to be a demoralizing vision, and he approached the offices with some gloominess. But it was necessary. Leigh had taken the carriage onward, going to see Frost and provide a more complete accounting of their adventures the day before.
As Lenox entered the sunny main office, he observed immediately that there was a hushed nervousness in the air. A moment later, as muffled but obviously angry voices rose from behind Polly’s door, he understood why.
He said a few mild hellos as he walked through the little neighborhoods of the room, wondering whether he ought to go to his own office and leave well enough alone. But curiosity—or concern, if he were more generous with himself—turned his steps at the last moment to join his colleagues.
He knocked on the door, got a very curt invitation to enter, and found himself with Polly and Dallington. Both of them were standing, both, plainly, upset.
He realized that he had a card he had not played—already Rowan’s villainy was settled news for him, but he hadn’t been to the office again, and they would have had no way of learning of what had passed. “Leigh was shot at yesterday,” he said. “I was about a foot from him. Very close quarters, too!”
The anger dropped out of both of his friends’—his partners’—faces right away, and each began at the same time to express their concern and anxiety. “But what happened?” asked Dallington, speaking for both of them.
“We have caught the fellow who killed Middleton, and wanted to kill Leigh, I think,” said Lenox. “It was Mr. Alexander Rowan. The president of the Royal Society.”
A dozen questions ensued from this declaration, simultaneously again, and by the time Lenox had begun to answer them, detailing the events of the previous afternoon, all three were sitting, Polly in her usual high-backed chair before the large windows of her office, looking out at the smoky chimneys, across from her Dallington and Lenox.
It took some twenty minutes or so to unspool the tale. “Can you make it stick to him?” asked Polly at last.
Lenox shook his head. “We shall see. I fear it may be difficult. It is our word against his.”
“There are two of you, at least. Both reputable.”
“Yes, true.” Then he said, turning a cigar from Polly’s desk over in his fingers, hoping they were pacified, “And may I ask how things have been here?”
Immediately an angry guardedness returned to Polly’s face. For Dallington’s part, when Lenox glanced at him, there was only a resigned look. He was the one who answered. “We have had a letter from Lord Sumlin.”
“Who is that?” said Lenox.
“I can’t believe we have found someone Debrett’s knows and you do not!” said Dallington. “A Member of the House of Lords. Dear, dear. What will Lady Jane say?”
“Well? Who is he?”
“He’s a lord.”
“I had grappled my way that far into the matter, complex though it might be.”
“And he is not often in London, living mostly on the Continent—but when he is, I suppose, he doesn’t like to have his private use of the back halls impeded. He has written an angry note to Cheesewright because I very gently inquired who he was and why he was visiting the cabinet’s private office—the one at the end of our corridor with the broken window, you know.”
“I see.”
Polly held up the letter. “Direct rudeness,” she said. “That is a quotation.”
“What an old maid,” said Dallington dismissively.
She looked dangerously angry. “You are threatening to leave us two thousand pounds short a year—and our most prestigious standing client. I would beg you not to treat it so lightly.”
Lenox frowned. “Can Lord Sumlin’s word carry very much weight with Cheesewright, if he is not often present at Parliament?”
Dallington and Polly exchanged a glance. The former tilted his head, then admitted, “Cheesewright is getting rather itchy. Finished business, he says.”
“And you disagree.”
“It isn’t finished business. We still don’t know exactly what happened—and right at the heart of the Commons!” Dallington said. “Fifteen feet from the chamber in which you yourself sat for several years!”
Polly looked close to standing again. “We have had this out already for an hour, Charles—the better part of ninety minutes—and I cannot abide the answer Lord John deigns to give me. He is not a free agent. Let us put the issue to a vote. I say that he gives the inquiry up and returns to work. Neither of you has earned a penny for the agency in the last week.”
She reddened, perhaps realizing her infelicity so close to Lenox’s brush with death, but said nothing more. Dallington sat there looking neutral. He was never prone to confrontation—and Lenox saw, in his face, almost wholly concealed, a pain, which must have originated from it being Polly who was so angry with him.
But all he said was that he wished to continue.
Lenox weighed his thoughts, and then said, “I think Polly must be right, John. It is not that I do not admire your tenacity—but that I think if Mr. Cheesewright is satisfied, we must be, too. If Lord Sumlin can make matters tenuous for us, imagine what some greater figure, a cabinet minister, could do?”
Dallington looked between them, and then stood up. “I am going to continue for a night, anyway,” he said in a mollifying tone, his face etched with irenic apology. “Something is amiss. It has all come too easily, and been too fine, and now they are pushing us away? No. I am not settled in my mind about it.”
“John—”
Dallington shook his head, soft in manner but resolute. “They may fire me—or of course you may—but I must follow through on the matter, I fear, for my own conscience.”
“When did you develop a conscience?” said Polly.
There was a horrid silence.
The blow, coming from her, had struck too deep—all three of them saw that instantly. “Excuse me,” said Dallington, and picked up his hat and cloak from beside his chair.
Polly and Lenox looked at each other, regret already in her eyes, and then Lenox, after a beat, stood up to follow Dallington. But only long enough to see him ducking out of the office and down the flight of stairs into Chancery Lane.
They did not see him again that day. Lenox—as he had expected—had an interestingly unsteady mountain range of papers along his desk, and three of their inspectors needed urgent help, one of them necessitating a meeting at a local pub with a man named Randolph, who for two pounds and an open bar tab running through midnight sold them the name of an embezzler. (He would vouchsafe the name only to “that Member of Parlyment what works with you.”)
As a gesture of conciliation, Lenox, before he left, sent over to the Houses a basket containing a few bites to eat and a bottle of Médoc; if Dallington meant to keep his vigil, he might as well be provisioned.
When he returned home he found that Leigh and Lady Jane were playing cards, laughing over something. Both looked so full of happiness to see him that his heart, hardened by the afternoon’s work, immediately softened, and he settled down with a sigh into a third chair, asked Kirk to bring him something to eat—anything, it needn’t be hot—and then took up a hand of cards himself.
“The news of my day is that I am to be brought suit against,” said Leigh. “By Rowan.”
“What!” said Lenox. “Rowan?”
“Yes. I have been stealing his work for years, it emerges.”
“That is nerve, I must say. Can anyone believe it?”
Leigh shrugged. “I hope not. The scientific trail does not bear him out, and he could not re-create my results were Isaac Newton himself to come and garland his brow for the achievement—but any man may say any word he likes, in a court of law, and test the credulity of his fellow citizens.”
“You seem awfully calm.”
Leigh looked mystified. “I? Oh—well, I know it to be false.”
He had always been a fellow out of the ordinary way, Lenox thought, and with a shake of his head laid down a knave atop his wife’s four.
The next morning was genuinely warm, chasing the last banks of snow down a foot before ten, watching them vanish, in full retreat, into the watery, bright streets by noon. It made the city more cheerful.
And yet not the office at Chancery Lane: Polly was in a fearsome temper, querying old expenses to their benefit, shouting at Anixter, while Lenox snapped at one of the clerks that he needed half an hour, an hour, without intrusion. The mood was sour. Dallington was often gone—but then, he was often there, too. He was more than a talisman, but his good cheer, his idle words, his neat appearance, Lenox realized, were essential to the happy workings of the agency. When at lunchtime he left to go see Frost and Leigh, he felt their absence himself.