On the June morning of Dallington’s wedding to Polly, it rained steadily and torrentially, the light washed out of the sky, the people washed out of the streets.
“Fearful good luck,” said Lenox.
Dallington, who looked sick, nodded. “Is it very full out there?”
“Tolerably full.”
“I say, thank you again for standing up next to me.”
“Well, I need the exercise.”
Dallington managed a smile. They were standing in a tiny attending room at Marchmain House. Anything that was good of London society had found its way into the adjoining chamber, with its enormous windows. Lenox, peering into it a moment before, had seen Lady Jane, sitting with Toto and the duchess, the three of them speaking animatedly, Toto’s hands upon her rounding stomach; McConnell and Edmund nearby, talking; and even Anixter, who for the first time in his adult life didn’t seem to be wearing a peacoat; and who certainly wasn’t speaking to anyone.
It was just passing six minutes before eleven o’clock now. Upstairs, Polly was no doubt busy with her final preparations. She was due to come before them in five and a half minutes, her first step down the stairwell, toward marriage. Lenox had no idea how he would make the time go.
And he felt sorry, sorry for his friend, who winced as they stood, the leg still painful, sorry for Polly, who had so few people here on her behalf—so few friends, Lenox had realized, and none of her first husband’s family. A marriage day ought to be happier than this one was.
Still, a minute did pass, and then another minute. “Four minutes now,” said Lenox.
Dallington, whose face was nine or so inches from the enormous grandfather clock, said, “How very useful a notification.”
“Well!”
Another minute—and then, suddenly, there was a loud murmur in the room. “What is it?” Dallington asked, alarmed.
Lenox cracked the door, and saw, to his astonishment, striding up the aisle, Polly. She looked lovely, her pale face made angular by the hair swept in a corona away from it, her simple rose-colored dress brightened by the bundle of yellow tulips she held.
She was headed for them.
At the very last moment Lenox stepped back from the door, making way for her to come in. The noise in the room outside was a clamor, now.
“Polly,” said Dallington, more surprised than Lenox. “What—”
“Do you want to marry me?” she said.
“What?”
Her voice was steady, but there were tears in her eyes. “Do you want to marry me?”
“Of everything, it is what I want the most.”
“Then why? Why have you treated me so coldly, John? I have made allowances, but I cannot marry you if—if—”
She was weeping. “Shall I leave?” Lenox asked.
He turned to the door and saw that the duchess was standing outside of it. He made a signal not to come in. Meanwhile, behind him, Dallington said, “I do not deserve to marry you.”
“Deserve?”
“The night I fell, I had been taking laudanum, Polly. That is the truth.”
More of Dallington’s relatives had appeared at the door now—little so dangerous as people who wish you well—and Lenox, though desperate to leave, found that he had become the bulwark between his friends and their potential intruders.
“Listen,” said Polly behind him. “Is that all? Is that really all that has been making you unhappy? Do you promise?”
“Yes. You deserve more than—more than a crippled, intoxicated liar.”
And there, in the word “crippled,” Lenox glimpsed the deepest truth of his friend’s sorrows.
So had Polly. There was a sound which, though Lenox’s eyes were turned studiously away, could never be mistaken for anything but a series of kisses upon a face. “You are the best person I know,” Polly said, “and I love you better than anyone in the world, and you could be a million times more crippled and a million times more intoxicated and I would feel that way still.”
“Would you?” said Dallington.
She kissed him again. “Charles,” she said. Her face was shining with happiness when he turned to look. She was squeezing her betrothed’s hand. “Would you mind clearing the way so that you and Dallington can go and stand by the priest? I’ll walk from here—it’s no matter—I would walk from a much less convenient place to marry you, John—go, go, we only have thirty seconds.”
Dallington looked at Lenox, took a deep breath, and smiled. “Ready, then,” he said, and started through the door.
It was many hours later when Lenox and Lady Jane returned home in their carriage. A good lunch was in them; and many happy memories, stored away now, of their friends’ wedding.
Seated between them, curling her fingers through her doll’s hair, was Sophia, who had stood near Polly with a basket of flowers, eaten too much soup, had a tantrum, and fallen asleep in her chair. Not one of her finest performances.
Lady Jane seemed sleepy, too. She had been awake late with the duchess, finalizing the layout of the room, the menu of the wedding luncheon. “I hope they are happy,” she said.
“If he is as happy as I am he will have done well.”
She smiled. “And she.”
“Look,” said Lenox. “Who is that on our front steps? With a hammer?”
It was a workman—but it was also Saturday, and they had hired no workman. Lenox’s mind flew to the dangerous possibilities of this, immediately, but then Leigh came out of the house.
He was still wearing a black suit, having been a guest at the wedding. He gave the workman a note, and waved him down the steps, then waved Lenox and Lady Jane and Sophia up the steps. He looked pleased with himself. “Hello! Hello, hello! How are you?”
“Who was that?” said Lady Jane.
“Aha. Come in, and you shall see. Kirk already knows—I think he might quit, however.”
“You said you had to get back to Cornwall,” Lenox said, as they came to the front door.
“And so I do. But I had a present to deliver to you first.”
He led them very ceremonially down the front hall, and then stopped, with great pomp, just before the door to the study. Lenox looked around, but he saw nothing. “What is it?”
Leigh frowned. “Look, would you.”
He pointed to the wall. There was a small black tab there, not more than half an inch long. It was new. “What is that?” said Lenox.
“I don’t want that on my wall, Gerald!” said Lady Jane. “It looks very—very something.”
“You couldn’t even see it at first!” he said. “Anyhow, just give it a turn, would you? Or perhaps Sophia—perhaps you would like to do it. Yes, I think it ought to be you who turns it.”
She looked up at her father for permission, and when he nodded walked over and pushed the little switch.
All at once, throughout the lower floor of the house, there was the most astonishing light—somehow brilliant and a soft yellow at once, flooding every corner of the hallway, casting itself evenly across every object, as if the sun had been divided into trillionth pieces and divvied out, this amount to their own house.
Sophia gasped softly. “What is it?” she said.
Lenox too had his mouth hanging open. Lady Jane half turned, speechless.
Leigh looked gratified. “My friend Swann has finally perfected his invention,” he said. “One day you will be able to tell your grandchildren that yours was one of the first twenty private homes in London to use electric light.”
“Electric light,” Sophia repeated, wonderingly.
“Is it safe?” said Lady Jane, though Lenox could see that she was, already, enchanted.
“Safe? Pish posh, safe. That fellow you saw on the steps is installing it in Victoria Station—the Royal Albert Hall has it already—the Times has put it into their machine rooms. Even Buckingham Palace. But there are very, very few private homes, as yet. We had to run a wire from four streets over. Your brother helped with the permissions for that, Charles.”
Lenox had read about the idea of electric light, but to see it in person was something else. It had already been, for him, a cathartic day; his dear friends married, and better still happy, happy. He felt something like a lump in his throat. “It’s like magic, isn’t it?”
Leigh smiled. “No, it’s not magic, the future—it’s science.”
He was leaving that afternoon for Cornwall, and while Lenox and Lady Jane prevailed upon him to remain for another day, two days, a week, he insisted that he had to leave. (“I am overdue, and more importantly, when will I ever make a more spectacular exit?”) Accustomed now to the idea of Rowan’s money being his own, he had hired a carriage to transport him with his two trunks to Truro, where he had rented a cottage along the very same oceanfront cliffsides that he and his father had once explored. It would travel overnight. After a last cup of tea, he took his leave—promising Sophia, the most heartbroken of those he left behind, that he would be back soon.
And as his carriage pulled away, Leigh looked back up the steps toward the little family there and felt something funny and happy and a little sad. There they stood, father, mother, child, waving at him and smiling. It was how it ought to be—how it ought to have been for him when he was a boy. At least, he thought, as the carriage pulled beyond their good-byes, there was one truly happy family, here in this small corner of London. Already he looked forward to returning to see them again.