As it happened, Dallington was in excellent fettle. When Lenox’s carriage slowed before the building in Half Moon Street in which he had his rooms, the young lord leaned from his window and called out a hello. He was dressed, his jet black hair smoothed down, and a small white flower in his buttonhole to match the city’s glistening shell of snow.
“What do you two scoundrels need now? Bail money again?” he called.
“LORD JOHN!” cried an anguished voice from within—his landlady, an extremely proper widow.
“Apologies, Mrs. Lucas! Apologies! Come up, Lenox and Polly, come up.”
He met them at the top of the stairs and ushered them into his rooms with a smile. There was breakfast on his table, the newspapers spread out among the plates. Polly accepted a second cup of tea. “You’re reading the papers,” she said.
“Well spotted.”
She rolled her eyes. “I only meant—you saw the story.”
“Yes. ‘Vandals.’ Not so dramatic a culprit, but it’s a slow day for news, I suppose.”
“There were one or two intriguing details, were there not?” asked Lenox, who had looked at the papers on the way over. “That it was so close to the main chamber of the Commons, for instance. We came to see if you would talk to Jacob Cheesewright for us.”
Dallington nodded. “I thought you might have. But wouldn’t he prefer to see you?”
Because Lenox had been a Member, Cheesewright was extremely deferential toward him, even more so than toward Dallington. If the Yard was being difficult—territorial—it was Lenox who stood the better chance of putting the agency on the inside of the investigation.
He explained, briefly, about Leigh, Dallington’s face becoming more solemn as he attended to the details. When Lenox had finished, the young lord stood up and said he was ready to go to the Commons immediately.
“Thank you,” said Polly. “I would do it myself, but—”
“Oh, I understand, of course,” said Dallington, and in his polite reply there was almost even a bow, a ghost of a bow in the angle of his head.
This was their usual interaction: teasing, until there was any point of consideration that they might pay to each other, at which time it became entirely respectful.
Their relationship was all that Lenox could wish for either of them—except that they had no relationship, properly speaking, beyond work and an amiable, easy camaraderie, a complete comfort with each other, which nevertheless never strayed from within certain rigid bounds.
Yet he knew that Dallington felt very, very strongly for Polly! And had since they first encountered her as Miss Strickland, the anonymous detective who had been a step ahead of them all the time in the case of Godwin, and his attempt upon the life of Queen Victoria. The plain truth was that he loved her. Every gesture betrayed it, every look, as vigilant as he was not to let them.
Why then did he not ask for her hand?
Lady Jane, who was close friends with Dallington’s mother, had strong opinions on this question: She felt that the young lord, for all his blitheness of demeanor, had perhaps been wounded by the animus that London society had developed toward him during his years of debauchery, and feared either Polly’s rejection, because of it, or else feared burdening her with his reputation.
And while there was no doubt that she, too, had a deep affinity with Dallington, Polly was in no wise short of admirers—and a girl could not wait forever, as every aged aunt from Oxford Street to the Strand would have been pleased to inform her.
A very small part of Lenox was relieved that their romance had progressed no further, because the agency had never run more smoothly than it did in its current iteration, the three of them equal friends.
And yet.
When Polly had finished her tea and Dallington had donned his greatcoat, the three of them descended the stairs (“If I have any visitors tell them I’m in Peru, Mrs. Lucas,” their host called out cheerfully, not bothering to listen for the reply) and stepped into the carriage, Polly and Anixter on one of the benches, the two gentlemen facing them from the other.
“We’ll drop you at the Commons, Dallington,” said Polly, “but then, Lenox, where shall you and I begin?”
“The Collingwood again, I think.”
She nodded. “Very well. And we’ll all meet in Chancery Lane at two o’clock this afternoon—or at least, I shall be there, Dallington, if Lenox is still out upon the trail. We must show our faces, I think. And assign work.”
There were several detectives, all formerly of the Yard, who worked for the agency. The bulk of their business was commercial: acting more swiftly and with greater energy than the police could on behalf of various businesses when they had internal troubles, just as they did for Parliament.
Dallington debarked with a wave at the Commons, and then they turned back toward the Collingwood, Rackham driving them in as straight a line as he could manage, through the snow—the now dirtied snow, life, as was its habit, having resumed.
“Off to the Collingwood, then,” said Polly. “Before we get there, can you remind me again how you know Mr. Leigh?”
“I—”
There was a pause as he considered how to answer that question.
In the very brief duration of that pause, Lenox felt himself transported into the past. It felt almost physical, as if he had been thrust backward in time, to the first real conversation he had ever had with his friend.
“It’s a very involved story,” he said, finally.
That conversation had taken place thirty years before, along the country road that separated Harrow School from the high street of the village of Harrow.
Lenox, sixteen then, had been strolling along that road alone in the mid-afternoon; a hot mid-afternoon, because it was only just September, and the weather still more August-like, the trees so heavy with their late-summer leaves that the wind could barely shift them.
There had been in those days a rough-hewn wooden fence running along this empty road. Lenox had spotted a figure sitting upon it, hunched and wretched-looking.
As he drew closer, he had seen it was Gerald Leigh.
“Ahoy,” he said, which for some lost reason had become the customary greeting of all the boys in school.
Leigh looked up. “Oh.”
Not a customary greeting, by contrast. There was a very awkward silence, as it became perfectly clear that Leigh had been crying, and then it became clear that Lenox knew, and then it became clear that Leigh knew that Lenox knew. “Good summer?” Lenox asked.
“Yes. Fine.”
“Mine, too.”
“How rippingly splendid,” said Leigh.
Lenox’s spirits, that day, had in fact been very high. Not many boys were back at Harrow from his year. (He had come up early with Edmund, who was head of his house.) There was no prospect of work for a week or so still, only games, riding, and perhaps a bit of fishing.
Lenox had almost walked on. But something in Leigh’s posture—his hands stuffed into his pockets, his face grim with the determination not to cry any further in front of a schoolmate—held him back. “Would you like to go into town?”
“Not at all.”
“Look here, there’s no point being proud. We’ve all been snotty once, or crying.”
“Thanks, no.”
The truth was there really was no excuse to be crying. They were fifth formers now. But Lenox, young and carefree, had been in such a decent mood that he had tried again. “I think I’ve a parcel in the mails from my aunt. There’s bound to be some gingerbread in it.”
Chocolate, too; but that he was not going to share with a person he barely knew. “I’m fine,” said Leigh.
“Be stubborn, then, go on.”
Leigh had colored—his unhappy tendency—and said, “Don’t think I’m not appreciative that you’re being friendly. It’s just that you’d rather feel rotten alone, wouldn’t you?”
“But why feel rotten? Come along to town and forget about it.”
Leigh looked conflicted, but after a beat, said, “Well—all right. I’ve nothing else to do.”
“Good chap.”
Leigh hopped down from the fence and ambled alongside Lenox. “Cheers.”
“Although you do have something to do, if it’s anything like last year. You ought to be studying.”
“I’m never going to study any of that rot again if I can help it.”
They walked along in silence for a few moments, Leigh occasionally grabbing moodily at the high grasses at the side of the road. He really did ought to have been studying, Lenox had reflected. At Harrow a bad paper received a “skew,” which was a black mark, and a truly terrible paper a “rip,” which involved the beak literally ripping the paper in half and returning it to the pupil. A skew was shameful enough—Lenox had gotten two in his first year—but a rip was an event of such embarrassment that his own father still winced at the word, when Edmund spoke it. Leigh was nearly always skewed; and had been ripped at least weekly the year before.
This was none of Lenox’s business, however, and soon enough they came to the post office.
If it had been any other time of year, Lenox probably would have shared his gingerbread at this point and bade Leigh good-bye. But none of his own friends would return for another day or two, he knew from their letters, and Edmund, though he would have helped him if anything was wrong, in the normal course of a day at school wouldn’t even deign to look at his younger brother.
And so Lenox suggested that they take the long way back around, by way of passing the day.
Leigh had agreed. This roundabout route took them across some pretty countryside, past a dairy farm and then a lord’s meadow with a small, idyllic pond in it.
To Lenox’s surprise he found that Leigh was not such an appalling companion for a walk. Once he started talking his temper improved, and he surprised Lenox by mentioning with great care the names and properties of one or two plants they passed. In fact he seemed to know quite a lot in that field, for all that he was a dunce—he told Lenox the name of a bird, and then, when they came near a huge oak tree, stooped to feel its roots, saying that he thought it was sick.
“You’re talking rubbish,” Lenox said, bending down.
“I’m not,” said Leigh hotly.
“How do you know, then?”
“You can see whiteness under the bark of the roots.” He pointed. “It’ll be a while, but that’s the end of that.”
Lenox looked up at the massive tree. “Hm.”
“Nothing to be done.”
They stopped when they reached the edge of the pond. They had been discussing some of the boys in the upper forms, the bullies, with satisfying mutual expressions of loathing. Lenox, hot, had taken off his jacket and tossed it to the ground. Leigh picked up a flat stone and hurled it sullenly toward the water.
“No, no,” said Lenox, who found a similar stone and threw it at a low parallel to the pond’s surface, then watched with gratification as it skipped seven, eight, nine times, before jagging the water and disappearing.
They skipped stones for ten minutes before Leigh got the hang of it. “Ah!” he called triumphantly after a decent shot.
No older brother, Lenox reckoned. “What were you so weepy about back there?” he ventured to ask.
“Oh, mind your own business,” said Leigh.
“Fine.”
They started slowly around the pond, still some ways off from school. Only after they had been strolling in silence for a few minutes did Leigh say, in a burst of confidence, “I hate being here again.”
“I’m happy to be back. The summer was a million years long, I thought.”
“You would be happy,” said Leigh, bitterly.
“You’ll never make a friend if you’re so down at the mouth all the time.”
Leigh shook his head furiously, as if he knew it just as well as Lenox did. There was another long period of silence.
And then, suddenly, as if he couldn’t help himself, he began to pour out the whole story in a great torrent.
They walked slowly. He told Lenox about his father, about his mother’s insistence that he come to Harrow, about his odd anonymous patron (whom they would come to call in their investigations that fall the MB, short for “Mysterious Benefactor”), his misery at being forced to sit in the Harrow classrooms, surrounded by boys who hated him and teachers who were indifferent.
Lenox was as selfish as most sixteen-year-olds, but he had mostly been a good sort even then, and after a while the boys had taken up places opposite each other, sitting against two trees at the edge of the school meadow, and sat there for a long time, discussing Leigh’s misfortunes.
It helped that they were interesting—and Leigh, silent amid his schoolmates for a whole year, was furiously talkative, in a way that he had never been and Lenox would never know him to be again. Indeed, they sat for so long that they only realized they had to be back at school when the first bell for supper rang. “Damn it,” said Leigh.
Lenox leaped up, tugging his jacket on. “We can make it.”
“No chance.”
“You have to get your chin up. Come on. It’ll mean sprinting it, but I certainly don’t intend to be caned on my second day back.”