In the house where Lenox had grown up, there was a full-length portrait of his mother. Its painter, Thomas Lawrence, had been old and grand—near the end of his life—and she had been very young. He had captured that youth, her pale face flushed with excitement, full of the future, lips parted in a slight smile. She was standing in the private study of a country house, a clean-hedged landscape visible through a window behind her, one hand resting lightly on a desk, the other holding the place in a small book, her figure slender in a brilliant lapis lazuli–colored dress.
She came into Lenox’s rooms now, nearly thirty years later, and her face was aged, but in its expression identical: tender, lively, curious, warm, haughty, loving. Still always full of the future.
“There you are, Mother, hullo.”
She kissed him and held his face between her hands. “You’ve been asleep, haven’t you?”
“No!” he said indignantly.
“I must be losing my touch then.” She kissed him one more time. “Is any of that tea left? I’m chilled to the bone.”
“Have you been to the Savoy?”
“No, I came straight here and sent my bags there. The train was late.”
Lenox glanced up at the clock—past five. “That’s a nuisance.”
“It always is.”
“You haven’t seen Wallace?”
“Wallace? Oh! No, not yet.” She had poured herself the tea, deemed it (Lenox could read her gestures as well as his own mind) too cold, and had now turned her hand to tidying the tray so that it could be taken away—returned with hot water, hopefully. “Tomorrow, I suppose. You’ll give me a ride to Edmund’s? If so, we have an hour or so to ourselves.”
“Of course.”
She looked at him with a mother’s eyes, and he felt her engulfing love with an unexpected sensation of gratitude. “How lovely it is to see you, Charles.”
“You as well.”
“Go on, then,” she said, leaning forward. “I can see you have news. What is it?”
He laughed. She had always been slightly uncanny. “I do have a case.”
He spun his tale. She was one of those people who bored easily, and whom you therefore wanted to entertain—even Lenox felt that, though he knew he couldn’t bore her. Of all the women she met in society, she was easily the best read and usually the smartest, but she had rejected any specific channel of energy, and there was a sense of idleness in her, idleness alongside brilliance. Perhaps it was that she was one of those people who are poetic without the forced-flower unhappiness that makes for a poet—she loved nature, she felt deeply, but she never seemed to expect anything in return from that love or those feelings, as a writer would. She took violently against people; grew sick of places very quickly; treated her husband high-handedly. Virtually everyone with whom she was acquainted was in a state of continual exasperation with her, and also loved her very much.
Universally, in Lenox’s experience, they wished to know what she thought of them.
For Lenox’s part—his father was a figure he revered, and upon whose opinion he counted. But his mother was his best friend upon the earth.
It was rather the reverse in Edmund’s case. Interesting how such things fell out.
They spent thirty minutes in intense conversation about Lenox’s morning by the riverbank. It was interrupted only when the housekeeper came to take away the tea. Apparently Lenox’s mother had let herself in (she had a key), because Mrs. Huggins startled at the sight of her and curtsied low.
“How are you, Mrs. Huggins?” said Lady Emma, smiling.
“Very well, ma’am, I am pleased to say.”
“Would it be a terrible bother to ask for hot water?”
“I can prepare a new pot of tea instantly, of course, ma’am—if that will do, Mr. Lenox?” she said abruptly, remembering that he was in fact her employer.
“I think we can stretch to a new pot for my mother, Mrs. Huggins.”
“Straightaway, sir,” the housekeeper said, betraying none of the longing that no doubt lingered in her bosom to ask for news of Lady Hamilton as she left the room.
“Make sure it’s the cheap stuff!” Lenox called after her.
She pretended not to hear. “Charles,” said his mother chidingly. “How has she been, anyhow?”
“She is the scourge of my existence.”
His mother smiled once more. “Good. A young man of your age and means in this city needs his existence scourged once an hour. You’re not gambling, are you?”
He gave her a very severe and skeptical glance. This was her greatest fear, and one of the few points on which she was truly naïve. Perhaps that was because it was the great theme of so many cheap novels, an art form to which she was susceptible: vast fortunes gambled away in a single night, the red-rimmed eyes of a tragic young fellow stumbling out of a club at dawn worth nothing more than the expensive clothes on his back.
For some reason, she never suspected it of Edmund for a minute, though he was the one who in fact did enjoy a hand of whist at his club now and again. But then, Edmund had money that would never be his, in that peculiar paradoxical British first-son way—that is, he would inherit the baronetcy and Lenox House with the entrusted funds those meant. Whereas Charles, though it was less, had his own money outright, his to lose on the fall of a pair of dice if he wished.
“Still no gambling,” he said. “I’m too busy with opium.”
“Charles.”
“And duels, of course. I may take it up at any moment, though. Your vigilance is wise.”
“Charles.”
“Truly I don’t gamble, Mother.”
“Well—mind you don’t start.”
“I’ll wager you five pounds this minute that I haven’t started by Michaelmas.”
“Very droll,” she said. “How is Jane?”
“She’s well, I think.”
“Is that all you know? You must stick together up here, you children who move to London from the country.”
“It’s not as if we’re in the South China Sea. She has her own friends.”
She smiled at him fondly. “To me you’re still each about nine years old.”
Impulsively, he said, “What do you think ‘wondrous affable’ means? Not what it means, the words, but what—it’s a strange thing to call someone, isn’t it?”
“Not someone valiant as a lion.”
He frowned. “Say that again?”
“It’s from Shakespeare, my dear.”
“Oh.”
“Nearly everything is.”
He waved a glum hand. “I know it, I know it. That or the Bible or Bunyan.”
“You should have paid attention in school.” She stood, saying, quite directly, “I’m going to snoop until the tea comes.”
They went on discussing the two women who had died upon—or beside—the Thames. For her part, Lady Emma couldn’t have cared less that Lenox had elected to become a detective, and anyone who had cared, in her presence, would have met a lion, wondrous unaffable.
She studied the map of Russia that he had open on a card table, asking what certain ink lines on it meant, put a gloved finger to the sill of the window and came away without any dust for her effort—spied, in short, as good as her word.
The two of them had always been like this. During the two-year window after Edmund had gone to Harrow but before Lenox had, they had been closest friends; she had learned the texts and the maths his tutor set him, they had taken long walks around the grounds as his father worked on important Parliamentary matters, often dining alone together afterwards. That was unusual; but she was unusual. They often read together—Charles, adventure stories still at the time, his mother, most often, Jane Austen.
Sometimes they would talk incessantly, sometimes not at all. It didn’t signify either way.
“Do you really mean to travel, Charles?” she asked. “Russia?”
“Not anytime in the next forty minutes.”
“I’m being quite serious,” she said, and her face was serious. “Those were the two things you said when you came down from Balliol—that you meant to travel, and you meant to be a detective. You have become a detective.”
“Well, yes,” he said guardedly. “I do mean to travel. Why?”
“When?”
“I don’t know to any great certainty. At the moment, I really am caught up in my work, you know.”
“I do know, my dear, I do know.” She came and touched his cheek again. “Good Lord, how young you are.”
She had always had an uncommon physical intimacy with her sons—in an age of decorum, she ruffled their hair, drew them into hugs well past their boyhood, rested a head on their shoulders: her sons. Once it had embarrassed Charles a little (there was a horrifying memory of a kiss on the cheek at Harrow in front of dozens of boys from his house, which could still make him blush), but he valued it, too, her touch.
“Twenty-three now.”
“I’m so awfully proud of you.”
“Are you? I haven’t done anything.”
“I’m proud of the man you’ve become, I suppose I mean.”
In the far distances of his mind, a single alarm bell pealed. “Is something wrong?”
She smiled slightly and enigmatically, perhaps at his intuition, inherited from her, and sat. “You know, you’re stronger than Edmund, Charles.”
“Me? I am?”
“Yes.”
And suddenly in that moment he realized that he did know this to be true, though he hadn’t known he knew it. His brother was an innocent, in many ways. He belonged to the country, as their father did; Charles belonged to the city, as their mother did. His brother was larger, but Charles, slender, could bend like a reed without breaking.
“Why do you say so?”
“I worry it will hurt him terribly—it will hurt you both terribly—but—ah, well, Charles, your father. He’s ill.”
“Ill?”
“There is a growth in his chest.”
“His chest,” Lenox said dumbly.
She nodded, her face grave and sorrowful. “Dr. Rivers has given him six months to live.”
“So you don’t have a meeting with Wallace at all,” he said, still not quite thinking logically.
“No.”
He hesitated. “This can’t be.”
He knew perfectly well that it could, but—it couldn’t. She let a moment pass, then said, “It may be less. Either way, Dr. Rivers says he’ll be gone before the year is out, I fear, Charles. My poor boy.” She reached for his hands and clasped them in hers. Though her voice remained steady, there were tears spilling from her eyes. “I’m so sorry to have to tell you.”