Prostitution was not illegal in London. One could be arrested for it, to be sure—but only on some auxiliary charge. “Annoying passersby,” for instance, or “public drunkenness.” It was one of the stranger facts of their judgmental age, which in most matters of morality condescended dreadfully toward England’s prior eras—the highwayman lawlessness of Queen Elizabeth’s time, the libertinism of the Restoration, the debauchery of the Regent’s reign.
Lenox thought of this very Victorian paradox as he saw, from his carriage window, the night’s women ranged along the periphery of Green Park. It was awfully cold, and they were huddled around barrels of fire. It filled his spirit, already heartsick over fear for Dallington, with something like a mortal sorrow. Like the majority of his friends, and in fact many of his more sincerely Christian friends too, he could never fault these women for their choice of work—money was scarce and allocated unfairly, gin and bodies were cheap and allocated without much partiality at all—and yet he might wish such a different life for them than this. Was the law the answer? Gladstone had gone into the alleys to preach to them; Dickens had founded a house where they might retire, these women; and yet here they were, along Green Park, waiting out the hours of the night.
What a vale of tears the world could seem at the wrong hour, in the wrong place, and particularly when you had heard the wrong news.
In the instant after Lenox had absorbed Kirk’s information he had been out of bed. “Get the horses up, please.”
“I gave the order immediately, sir.”
“Thank you. Was there a note?”
“No, sir. The messenger came only with word. Lord John is in the Parliament’s infirmary.”
“Very good.”
“Can I offer any assistance, sir?”
“Send for McConnell. Go round yourself if you must.”
Kirk nodded. “Immediately, sir.”
Lenox was dressed in under a minute, downstairs in four long strides. Kirk, waiting in the front hall, handed him his coat, gloves, and hat. Through the narrow band of window by the door, Lenox saw Rackham perched unmoving atop his box, the little orange glow of his cigar occasionally intensifying and then fading.
“Wish him luck, Kirk.”
“I will, sir. Give His Lordship our very best—all of us, sir. The finest gentleman.”
The finest gentleman! That was not Dallington’s reputation, of course; London was quick to name a person, and devilishly slow to unname him.
The cab moved quickly through the silent streets. Down Whitehall, the enormous gray buildings stood alone, without sentry. Always a strange experience to see nature’s light in a city—a reminder that humans, for all they had built, were not automatic, were not essential, were not indispensable.
There was a low lantern slung above the visitors’ gate of Parliament. Lenox stepped down from the carriage and knocked on the door.
A night porter was there. “Who is that?” he asked.
“Charles Lenox. You must remember me from my own days here, Drinkwater.”
“Of course I do, sir, of course. A differing context is all, sir. Of course I do. If you are here for Lord John Dallington, he is in the infirmary.”
“Have you seen him?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How is he?”
“I cannot say, sir. Not being in the medical line myself at all.”
And yet Drinkwater’s face had answered the question. They walked quickly through the back corridors. “Who found him?”
“The other night porter, sir, Wilson.”
“Where?”
“Directly beneath the south gate. There was a crash.”
Lenox thought of this: just beneath the knee-high crenellations that made Parliament appear so beautiful from the opposite side of the river. His stomach turned over at the thought of it. He had been on that roof. Could one survive a fall from such a height?
The infirmary was one of Parliament’s little peculiarities. It was in a room canted just so over the river, and was provided for emergencies like this one, rather than for lengthy care—though Lenox had heard of it being used most often when a Member was dead drunk, or, in the more generous parlance given out to the press, “tired and emotional.” He could picture it from his first tour of the building, small, with a single cot and a medicine stand in the corner. He hadn’t been back since.
He tracked Drinkwater’s squat, hurried gait through various slender hallways, up two stairwells, down the reverse of a small hidden corridor. “Who is with him?” he asked.
“The physician we have on call from Harley Street, Melman, and his assistant. Along with Mr. Cheesewright, of course.”
“And what has Melman said?”
“Nothing to me, sir.”
They came to the door. Drinkwater tapped gently upon it, and pushed it open.
Inside there was the low light of a single candle, flaming back at itself from the window, growing large and small in its own shadows against the wall as it quivered. Three men were standing toward one side of the room, Cheesewright among them.
Lenox looked at Dallington and gasped.
He had been expecting a calmly comatose patient—but here was carnage, devastation.
Dallington’s left leg was elevated. The pants were ripped back to reveal a huge, open wound, and the sickening white gleam within it of bone. The arms were folded over his chest, hands enrobed in bandages, one of the elbows horrifically out of joint.
And his face, his poor face—a mass of red and black, the hair shorn away in huge uneven swaths, cuts crossing it.
The doctor was in shirtsleeves. He looked at Lenox. “Family member?”
“Yes,” said Lenox.
“Virtually,” said Cheesewright.
“Will he live?” asked Lenox.
Melman looked him directly in the eye. He was a large, ruddy man, with huge hands. “I don’t think so.”
Lenox felt his heart cave in. “No?”
The doctor shook his head. “The damage to his internal organs is severe. There is blood in them. He has not regained consciousness—is concussed, certainly—no. He will not survive this fall. We will attempt to keep him alive. We have sewn him and patched him where we could. But I do not think he will live to see the dawn.”
Lenox looked at the window. Already there was some paling in the sky.
He went and sat on the small stool by the bed. His inclination was to reach out and touch Dallington’s brow—how young he looked!—but he reached for his hand. “I’m here with you, John,” he murmured. “Just so you know.”
There were perhaps two or three minutes of silence. Finally, the doctor said, “There is fever, sir. We must apply the cold compresses.”
Lenox nodded and stood. He and Cheesewright stepped into the hall. “What happened?” asked Lenox.
“I don’t know. There was this note at his station, however.”
Lenox saw an envelope with his own name on it—again. Polly’s was next to it. He grabbed the envelope and ripped it open. Inside, in a desperately quick hand, was a line from Dallington.
Nothing to do with lovers. It’s Labrenz. Giving chase.
Lenox stifled a gasp. Labrenz was a Prussian spy, wanted throughout England. He’d been thought dead for nearly a year now.
They would never have even imagined a connection between him and the broken window. But now, his mind racing, Lenox wondered what the truth of the business in Parliament had been. Was the story of the lovers’ quarrel a red herring, designed to lead them off the scent of the real reason Labrenz was there—something to do, presumably, with affairs of state, after all?
It had come too easily, that information about the affair, even Polly had acknowledged that, the chattering servants revealing without any hesitation what had supposedly gone on between Lord Beverley and Mr. Winslow, all of it secondhand, their sources perhaps not in on any particular lie, but only too happy to gossip it forward. He, Polly, and Cheesewright had all been too credulous. Only Dallington had felt that something was off. And meanwhile, a spy had been lurking around Parliament, the true cause behind that broken window.
Which meant—he realized—that it was eminently possible that Dallington had been pushed.
As he was reckoning with this information there was a footfall in the hallway behind him. Wilson, the other porter, appeared, leading McConnell.
“Lenox!” cried the doctor. He was carrying his leather bag. “For Christ’s sake, what’s happened? Kirk came to my door.”
“It’s Dallington,” said Lenox. “He fell from a great height. The physician—a man named Melman—says he won’t live two hours.”
McConnell pushed forward without hesitation. “What utter nonsense. Melman is a fool. Let me see him.”