McConnell gave Lenox this word of warning at a moment when Dallington’s many friends were heartened by his apparent progress. Ten minutes had seemed a more likely horizon for his wakening than ten days, certainly.
And yet the tenth day came and went, and Dallington had not awoken. McConnell passed the case to a specialist in such matters—concern having shifted now to deterioration of the muscle, nourishment of the body, rather than sheer survival.
The attendees at the young lord’s bedside were loyal but more intermittent. All except two: Polly, and his mother, both constantly near him.
All manner of rumor crossed the city. The chief among these was that Dallington had been in a duel. It was shocking how few people knew, even now, that he was a detective. Most assumed that he had been drunk when he found his way into mischief.
Ten days, then eleven, then twelve, an aching inversion of time, since each day brought them not nearer to hope, even if it must inexorably mean they were closer to his waking, but farther from it. Lenox began to notice an alarming loss of weight in the young lord. His cheeks were thin, his shanks withering.
During this time, Lenox found that he took great comfort in the presence of his old friend Leigh. It had been his expectation that after Rowan was arrested, Leigh would breathe a sigh of relief and return to Paris. That return had been delayed by Dallington’s misfortune—Leigh’s own experience as a surgeon had been valuable, another voice—but in fact, even after a week, he seemed to have no interest in leaving London.
He quickly became a beloved and consoling presence at Hampden Lane. He had endless patience for Sophia’s games; with Jane he would happily discuss books, people, ideas; and he and Charles barely needed to speak, though often they did, suppers lingering far past the warmth of the dishes that constituted them. It would be impossible to imagine a less intrusive guest, though he did keep odd hours, departing, sometimes, at midnight, and returning after dawn, sleeping very early one morning and very late the next.
“What are you occupying yourself with out in the city?” Lenox asked finally.
It was a late January day about a fortnight after Dallington’s fall. Leigh was putting his scarf on in the front hallway, preparing to leave the house. “Eh? Oh—well, it’s stuck in my head, you know. The Rowan business.”
Lenox smiled wanly. “I can imagine, yes.”
“Well, I’m having a whack at it, if you must know.”
He would reveal no more than that.
Two weeks from the day after Dallington’s accident, the patient suddenly took a turn for the worse.
That was the doctor’s drab and unilluminating phrase, which Polly had repeated, but it didn’t prepare Lenox for the reality when he visited him in the afternoon. McConnell was back, having been entreated by the Duchess of Marchmain to return and supervise. When he saw Lenox, he gave a slight shake of his head.
“What is it?” asked Lenox, when they finally had a moment alone together.
“The fever is back. I think there may be an infection internally.”
“An infection.”
“Yes.” McConnell looked pale. “I must warn you that this kind of disease is wont to move very, very quickly at such a stage.”
“What do you mean?” McConnell didn’t reply. “Should he go to the hospital?”
“No. Not just now.”
“Come now.”
“Charles, you must listen. I think he will go.”
Death took place at home, of course, a universal fact across all classes. You didn’t go to the hospital unless you expected to get better. Certainly you didn’t go there to die.
McConnell went back into the patient’s sickroom, and Lenox went to wait.
He would never forget sitting alone in the duke’s grand music room that afternoon. There had been a hundred evenings of amusement and celebration here. Now it was as desolate as an empty ocean, the light going iron gray as the sun faded, the carefully situated picture frames and sofas and silver bowls each reproached by their own frivolity. It was intensely sad. In Lenox’s mind was the business of the next day. The terrible black-edged paper would have to be bought; the terrible black-edged envelopes; the terrible black wax, to seal the news in forever; the length of black velvet, fetched by a servant from some blessedly forgotten box below stairs, and affixed once more to the door knocker, to muffle its sound. All of the things that meant: A person is gone.
It was four o’clock when Polly came. Lenox, wishing to spare her the implications of McConnell’s prognosis, tried to begin their conversation lightly. “Cold out?”
She flicked on a gas lamp, quite at home. “Yes, very.”
“Where is Anixter?”
“Outside. He doesn’t mind the cold, you know. But what about this—we have had news about Rowan, from Inspector Frost.”
“Oh?”
“They have been trying to connect him to Middleton, and they have found a barman who remembers the two of them meeting at the Collingwood more than once. He knew Rowan well, and happened to know Middleton’s face because he had once worked at a different hotel closer to the chancery courts.”
“Arrogant of Rowan to meet Middleton where he was known.”
Polly tilted her head philosophically. “Perhaps. I doubt he thought it would end in murder.”
“True.”
“If only the Farthings would talk. But I think it would take a miracle.”
Lenox hesitated, and then said, “Polly, when you told me that he had taken a turn for the worse—it’s the very much worse.”
“What? What do you mean?”
She had become so intimate a colleague of Lenox’s that it was strange to see her, in that instant, for the pale, slender, beautiful young widow she was, making her way through life more or less alone. Her pragmatism, too, somehow diminished both her vulnerability and her femininity, in one’s eyes—a necessity, in all probability. Lenox thought of when she had first come to their attention as Miss Strickland: her mischievous attempt to hire McConnell as a criminal investigator, her ingenious employment of a charcoal portraitist. A formidable person, Polly Buchanan.
Just at that moment McConnell came into the room.
Lenox knew instantly that something had changed. “What is it?” he asked.
“He is awake.”
Polly half rose, her cheeks going red. “Awake! That is the most welcome news.”
“Awake, but feverish. He is speaking almost exclusively about Mr. Labrenz.”
They had confided that name in McConnell. “But this must be good news!” said Lenox.
McConnell nodded cautiously, but his face was flushed with color. “Yes. Yes, I think it is. It’s possible that it was merely a fever he caught, in his weakened state, rather than an infection. He may be improving.”
Polly looked at Lenox, realizing what he had been about to say. “May we see him?”
“At the moment—no. But I thought you would like to know.”
They stayed long into the night. Lady Jane came over at eight o’clock, bringing them supper, then closeting herself with her old friend, the duchess, for a long, long time. There was no change in his condition; when at last they left, it was in an odd mood of optimistic anxiety. Their hopes had been relocated so many times they’d forgotten where they left them last.
The next morning was cool, steely, mundane, with a light sharp rain falling across the gray buildings. Lenox and Polly both had a tremendous amount of work to do in the office, and they had agreed that they would meet at Dallington’s early to check on him before they went to Chancery Lane together.
She looked nervous. “It has been at least six or seven hours since I saw you,” she said. Lenox noticed she was wearing a soft gray and pink frock coat over a dress, different than what she usually had on at the office. “How goes it?”
“I am ready for it to be springtime,” said Lenox.
The person who came out to see them was the duchess herself. “There you are,” she said. “Would you like to see John?”
“Is he well enough?” asked Lenox.
But the question had answered itself—his mother’s face was a portrait of relief.
“He’s in the finest fettle,” she said. “I can barely believe it. So well that McConnell left at half two to get some rest—said that he wanted to catch up with the patient’s, ha! The duke is asleep too, no less.”
“I’m so very happy to hear it,” said Lenox.
Polly didn’t even speak; only nodded her fervent agreement. “He is very hoarse and very thirsty—not yet hungry,” said the duchess. “Some headache, which as I understand it is to be expected. Weak. But alert, very alert. Indeed the first thing he insisted on doing was writing out an account of what happened.”
“Did he?”
“Yes—after what seemed incredible labor. I have just given it to Mr. Barkley.”
Suddenly Polly couldn’t hold herself back anymore. “May we go in?” she said. “He is not asleep?”
“No! Go in—I have to send a wire. The nursemaid is there, should he show any signs of disturbance. But the doctors are happy. For once.”
Lenox barely knew what to expect. The room was unlit, the patient reclining upon the bed, his gaze turned toward the window, which was running with streaks of rain.
He turned his head and saw them enter. His face was ineffably different. Was it older? Was it more careworn? Or was this only a passing change?
“Hello,” he croaked softly.
Polly, heedless of anything else, ran to the bed. “There you are,” she said.
Dallington smiled, with a ghost of his old humor on his face. “Nowhere else.”
She took his hand in hers and bent her head low toward his, by all appearances unconscious of Lenox’s presence in the room. “You must marry me, you know. Will you?”
He looked at her for a long moment, with infinite exhaustion in his eyes, and then said, without any happiness, Lenox thought, and in a voice still hoarse, “Yes.”