Charles’s brother, Edmund, who would one (hopefully distant) day be Sir Edmund Lenox, 11th Baronet of Markethouse, was his only sibling. They greeted each other with an affectionate handshake at the door of a comfortable paneled room. Beside Edmund was his young wife, Molly (Emily in more formal settings), who was pretty and countryish, not most at home in London.
“Happiest of birthdays, my dear fellow,” Edmund said.
“Well, thank you.”
“I remember when I was twenty-three.”
“I would be worried if you couldn’t remember three years ago.”
“Halcyon days,” said Edmund with mock rue.
Molly kissed him, laughing. “Happy birthday, Charles.”
He kissed her back. “Thank you, my dear sister.”
The two brothers looked similar, but Edmund was fuller in the shoulders than Charles, who was more naturally willowy, of good height but always reckoned taller than he was because of his slenderness.
They had grown up in the Sussex countryside—and those were, in truth, halcyon days; each of them a horse for his tenth birthday, swimming in the pond next to Lenox House during summers, long-standing family traditions at Christmas, two happy parents, on to Harrow (one of the nation’s pair of great public schools) at thirteen, and then, like toppling dominoes, to the University of Oxford.
Lenox was at an age when his childhood felt at once very near and very far. So much had intervened between that tenth birthday and this twenty-third one, as if the former had happened either that morning or a hundred years ago. (His horse at Lenox House, Cinder, was fourteen now. Imagine that!)
In this room, coming across to greet him one by one with hearty handshakes as they noticed him, were representatives from the various phases of his life. Their amiable fat-jowled older cousin Homer Lenox was sipping a glass of warm negus by the fire, speaking to their aunt Martha, whom they had both loathed as children and now both rather liked. Lenox’s particular friend from Harrow, Hugh Smith, strode over. There were Oxford friends, too, a part of Lenox’s little set in London here. A happy small gathering, whose constituents, one would have said, bespoke a celebrant of exceptional good fortune. And the Lord knew it was true his life had been fluid, untroubled by larger worries, essentially without difficulties. He was deeply conscious of it.
Except that now he had made this queer decision to become a consulting detective.
Lenox knew, though he was determined to ignore the fact, that during these first seven months in London, he had become a joke. To think of it too much would have pained him, however. And among these twelve or so people, at any rate, he was yet loved.
Soon they were all seated, and he found himself next to Elizabeth. They had said a brief hello earlier, but now she turned to him with a face ready to be pleased, fingers running idly along a silver necklace she often wore.
“Well—tell me, Charles,” she said, “are you going to see Obaysch?”
He gave her a look of consternation. “Not you, too.”
She looked at him with reproach. “Don’t be a curmudgeon.”
“I?”
“Yes, you!”
He smiled. She was a pale-cheeked young woman of nineteen, in a blue dress, with lively dark eyes and white, even teeth. They were very close friends, perhaps even what you would call best friends.
She had been married for just more than three months now. In love, days into her first London season.
“I take it you’ve been, then?” he asked.
“Of course. He was quite a sight, the dear. Still just a baby.”
Unconsciously she touched the spot where a gray ribbon encircled her dress; she must, Lenox thought, his reflex for observation never switched wholly off, have thought every day since her marriage of the quickening that would mean she was with child.
“From what I hear, he wallows a great deal.”
“There are people of whom I could say the same,” she said, looking at him dryly, and turned slightly away to take a spoonful of soup.
Lenox laughed. He picked up his own spoon. “I am never entirely certain how personal your comments are.”
“Good,” she said.
Their conversation was the same one happening all over the city, because at the London Zoo, just then, was the greatest commotion the metropolis had witnessed in many years, perhaps even since the Queen had introduced the city to Prince Albert. This Obaysch was what these natural philosophers had chosen to call, with straight faces apparently, a hippopotamus: the first in Europe since the time of the Romans, the first in England itself—well, ever, inasmuch as any learned person at the Royal Academy was able to discern. Ten thousand people (an enormous number, perhaps twenty times the average) were visiting the zoo each day to lay eyes on the creature.
He was a plump potato-shaped fellow, at least according to the illustrations Lenox had seen in the papers and the descriptions that even very exalted members of the aristocracy, who wouldn’t deign to look at certain foreign royals but had visited the hippopotamus with breathless excitement, had provided him.
“What tricks does he do?” Lenox asked Elizabeth.
“Tricks!”
“Yes, tricks.”
She looked appalled. “I don’t know if you have fully grasped the dignity of this animal.”
“Haven’t I?”
She gave him a disappointed shake of her head. “Tricks, indeed.”
Great ceremony had preceded the hippopotamus, which had traveled up the Nile with an entire herd of cattle to provide it milk, a troop led with pride by Sir Charles Augustus Murray, Her Majesty’s consul to Egypt, who had enjoyed his triumph for less than a fortnight before finding his august reputation permanently sullied by the new nickname “Hippopotamus Murray.” (No matter how admiringly he was addressed in this fashion, it seemed doubtful to Lenox that Murray could feel quite content with it, after such a long and distinguished nonhippopotamus-based career.) Now there were vendors selling little hippopotami figurines outside the zoo. The rulers on the Continent were sick with envy. Children played nothing but hippo in the streets.
The next step was to find Obaysch a mate, and the energies of many stout Englishmen in Egypt were no doubt being squandered on that project as Charles and Elizabeth ate their soup. (Even now Lenox always thought of his mother’s nursery-era lesson in manners when there was soup at table: “Like ships upon the sea, I push my spoon away from me.”)
“Anyhow,” Elizabeth went on, “when I’m in the country there will be few enough spectacles. I ought to enjoy those in London while I can.”
She was moving to her new husband’s estate in the autumn, when his military regiment returned to England, to take up her rightful position as the wife of the heir to an earldom; second or third lady of the county.
That meant there were good works in her future, visits to the vicarage. Some glamour, too, to be sure—but as their friend Nellie had put it, country glamour. Because of her personal qualities, she deserved, in Lenox’s estimation, both high position and high excitement. She would have only the former in her life beginning that autumn.
“You’ll return often, I hope, however,” said Lenox lightly, though his heart fluttered. He had never proposed. He felt a familiar dull pain at his lack of courage; he had missed his chance. Sometimes, late in the small hours of the night, he wondered if he had missed his only chance. “Your friends here will miss you.”
She pushed back against the insinuation of his question slightly—at least in her posture, in her voice, a certain formality entering them, though never anything like unfriendliness. “Oh yes, I imagine, when James finds it necessary.” She leaned forward slightly to address the young gentleman on Lenox’s left; a third. “Hugh, have you seen the hippopotamus?”
Hugh gave them a scornful look. “Have I seen the hippopotamus. Haven’t I seen the fellow six times?”
“Six!”
“I consider him more of a brother than a friend.”
“Disgraceful,” said Lenox.
“You’re outnumbered,” said Elizabeth. “This is a table that looks favorably upon Obaysch. Hugh and I won’t hear a word against him.”
Across from them, deep in conversation with Eleanor Arden, another of their set, was Lenox’s aunt. He appealed to her as a last resort. “Aunt Martha,” he said, and the table fell silent as she looked up. “Tell me that you, at least, haven’t condescended to visit the London Zoo in the past two weeks. The old ways must still mean something.”
She hesitated—a gray-haired and portly older woman, resplendent in a spangled dress of gold and red—and then said, “I must admit that I paused there yesterday.” Everyone at the table burst into kind laughter. She gave the room a generalized look of indignation. “One likes to keep abreast, you know, even at my age.”
When the soup had been cleared and there was a lull in the conversation, even the hippopotamus parts of it, Edmund stood up. He lifted his glass.
“What about a toast?” he said.
“Yes, yes,” said one or two people, and lifted their glasses too.
“Charles moved to London in the fall, as you all know,” said Edmund. “So far he has not been imprisoned, lost money in a three-shell game on the Strand, or eloped to the Continent with a dancer.”
There was more laughter, and Lenox called out, “Give me six weeks.”
“He has also,” Edmund said with stout, awkwardly footed pride, “begun his very significant work as a detective—very significant work, very.”
“Hear, hear,” said Hugh.
“I am proud of him for it, and I think we ought to have a double toast to him for it. Join me, please. Two cheers for Charles.”
As they cheered, Lenox felt himself blush, a little hollowness of embarrassment in his throat and chest. He would have preferred no reference to his work. But he accepted the toast—said thank you—all here loved him—the moment passed—and soon the conversation again became general.
It was beneath the station of all those present here to have a profession, unless it be politics, arms, or God. It had been many generations since the families of any of them had done work with their hands, season upon season, year upon year, century upon century.
A gentleman scientist, fine, or in an eccentric case an explorer, a collector, an equerry, a horse breeder.
But even the most eccentric of these would never have dreamed of taking work as a detective. England’s caste system was too inflexible to allow for it. It was this fact that had poisoned Lenox’s seven months here. Only unto illness, not death, and mostly for his poor parents; but still, still.
Making it worse was how desperately little headway he had made. He was laughed off in Scotland Yard (he had tried repeatedly to make allies there) and laughed off in a different kind of way at the parties—where he was still welcome, but more often than before because of his brother, or because of Elizabeth, Eleanor, Hugh, his friends. In the fullness of these seven months, he had had two cases, precisely. And this despite charging no fee! He had solved both: one a pitiably simple matter of a missing fiancé (he had an extant family in Bournemouth, unfortunately for the young woman who had entreated Lenox to find him so that she could marry him), and one an embezzler at a midsized firm in the city.
Both cases had been referred to him by friends. Neither had led to more work.
At the end of the breakfast, some two hours later, a great deal of it spent reminiscing over old village cricket matches with his cousin Homer, he found himself momentarily in a quiet corner of the room with Elizabeth, who was donning her overcoat.
She was due at a luncheon—straight from one meal to another, she said, and sheepishly added that when she was fat, she would have to feign an illness to avoid going out—and Lenox, putting his own cloak on, took the opportunity to ask how she had been, which parties she would be going to—
But suddenly, realizing that they were by the grace of chance briefly isolated from everyone else, he said, anxiously, “Listen here, do you think I’m a fool? About the detective business. Answer me honestly, Elizabeth—be brutal. Nobody else will. Nobody whose opinion I care for.”
She gave the question a look of real surprise, and then shook her head, concern in her eyes. “Never, never, never,” she said. She touched his cheek. “I think you are valiant as a lion, Charles. And wondrous affable.”
Before he had a chance to reply, she had turned away to say her other goodbyes. For his part, he did not move for at least ten, fifteen seconds; he could still feel her hand on his cheek.