At a shade before six o’clock on Thursday morning—feeling fit as a fiddle, Lady Hamilton’s ball a distant memory—Lenox stood by the river and watched its gray waters reconstitute themselves over and over, rise, fall, sweep, crest, wave, dip, splash.
It could be argued that the Thames hadn’t changed in seven thousand years. Or—that it changed at every second, and in every decade, and in every century, while remaining eternally itself. The millions of boats that had passed down it, just think! Yet here it was, dark, flat, as stark as a god. They said a body a day was fished from its waters. They said every Londoner drank thirteen cups out of it one way or another between dawn and dusk, in wine, in beer, as water itself. King John had signed the Magna Carta on one of its islands. Millions of generations of fish plucked from it. A city rising, falling, rising around it. And none of it changing the river even slightly; not really.
How separate humans were from nature, thought Lenox.
He was standing on Bankside. In fact, he was at precisely the point where the second “perfect” had been discovered. (That was the awful nickname the press had settled on for the two victims, and for their murderer, simply “The London Murderer.” No doubt that gratified him, its exclusivity: The.)
He could see four bridges. One was Westminster Bridge, which touched Parliament, and a memory came to him unbidden of his father taking him and Edmund to the House of Commons when they were, oh, perhaps five and eight.
“Do you know why the bridge is green?” he’d asked them as they pulled across it.
“Why, Papa?” Edmund had said—it was for him, this trip, though Charles had suspected of himself, even then, that he might like to go into that grand building every day and decide what the nation should think.
“It matches the color of the benches in the Commons exactly,” his father had said with a soft smile. “Vanity, isn’t it? But pleasant.”
Now, eighteen years later, Lenox turned around, away from the river and its bridges, and examined the thin shingle behind him.
Facing the Thames here was a row of warehouses, interspersed with thinner countinghouses, almost all of them to do with the great shipping concerns around them—rather as, on the water itself, small fry lived in the wake of the whalers, outfitters, accountants, the kind.
Lenox’s scull was tied onto one of the posts scattered at intervals along the river. He was red and sweating, deep in thought: the spectacles, the door. He looked down at the small pebbles mixed into the sand.
At last, he took out his notebook and scanned the buildings in front of him one by one. The address was Bankside, as simple as that—here, numbers 30 through 114, roughly.
He stared for a long, long time—perhaps twenty minutes—without anyone passing by, and finally, with a sigh and a feeling of significance, a certainty that this was the day, he got back into his scull.
The vital thing was to hear back from Wilton’s, the trunkmakers, Lenox thought. The earliest they might conceivably write was nine o’clock, so naturally he started to look for their wire at around eight fifteen.
It kept on not arriving. He would have settled for a note from one of the constabularies, the identity of one of the perfects. Nor did that arrive, however.
Instead Lenox and Graham spent the morning catching up on their newspapers. (Crime went on occurring around London, which seemed rather unfair.) There was one note: Mayne reported that Sinex was irate that Lenox had gone to Ealing against direct orders, and demanding that Lenox be fired summarily.
Moreover, he had still yet to pick up his pay. He would do that in person today, Mayne said; or Mayne would follow Sinex’s advice.
Lenox crumpled this message and hurled it across the room to the fireplace, though it fell just short. On the side table nearby were the two ten-pound notes of Rupert Clarkson, like a couple of shreds from the tattered flag of his dignity.
He sat in silence for a long time, then burst out at a charwoman who was passing through the front hall. “Where on earth is Mrs. Huggins?” he called to her.
She looked absolutely terrified, and Lenox felt instantly guilty. “I can’t say, m’Lord.”
Lenox was not a lord. “If you see her”—this was hardly likely, given that she was leaving—“tell her to come here immediately. Graham, do you know where she is?”
Graham first nodded in courtly fashion to the charwoman, who had been standing rooted to her spot, and now hustled away. “She was here this morning, sir.”
“Was she? How splendid for her. Nevertheless, please inform her that I intend to stop her pay if she is not present during working hours.”
“The house has never looked finer, sir.”
Lenox looked around, and saw to his intense irritation that this was indeed true. There were beautiful vases of hydrangeas on every surface; every dustless surface. It was just like Mrs. Huggins to be most superlative in her work as she was shirking it. “It looks fine,” he said shortly.
“Shall I send the wire?” Graham asked.
It was on the table, waiting—a wire to Wilton’s, asking for their progress. “Not till eleven o’clock.”
They waited, and at eleven on the dot, Graham went out to send it. Meanwhile Lenox went to collect his pay. His name was in bright red on a white board by the pay window, as if he’d committed some crime; the man behind the counter laughed nastily at him.
“Not many’s too good for their pay,” he said.
Evidently Lenox was—known, here, too. “Nor am I.”
“Here you are, then.”
“It comes in coins?”
“‘It comes in coins,’” he replied in falsetto.
Lenox gave the coins to every beggar who asked for them along his path home, indiscriminately. Then he almost traced his step to ask for them back, because he hated the arrogance of the gesture. But of course, it was too late. Half the coins were no doubt spent already.
He wished he could cast himself back to that morning on Bankside, when it had all seemed so clear.
Wilton’s had responded. Graham handed over the telegram when Lenox entered. Lenox read it. “Damn them.”
“Sir?”
He passed across the wire, which read, with infuriating economy given that it was postpaid,
Assembling STOP Regards STOP
“No indication of when it might arrive,” Lenox said.
“Would you care to tell me your theory, sir?”
“No, because I don’t want to be wrong,” said Lenox bluntly.
Graham nodded. “I understand, sir.”
The day was saved, unexpectedly, at a little before noon. There was a ring at the door; it was Elizabeth.
At seeing her, Lenox felt, first, a sudden consciousness of shame at how he had behaved Tuesday night, though he could see no clear reason for it, and second, the release of the nervous tension in his limbs, the toll of that morning of waiting.
“Hello, Charles,” she said. “I was just out calling and I thought I would make you give me lunch.”
“I’m a terrible cook.”
She smiled. “Come now.”
As they ate their lunch, which was quite good in the end—salmon with lemon and asparagus, a baked cauliflower with cheese, a silver dish of peas with a lump of butter melting over them—the two of them discussed Lady Hamilton’s, their friends, Hugh’s doomed love, Lucia’s likely one.
Afterwards, a cup of coffee in her hands, Elizabeth wandered the study. She stopped in front of a map of Russia. “Tell me,” she said, “do you really mean to go?”
“Indeed I do, my lady.”
“It snows more or less continuously, no?”
“Sometimes less, and sometimes discontinuously.” He smiled. “Summer is not an English invention.”
She traced her finger along a route that Lenox had drawn on the map. It took him by train from St. Petersburg to Moscow, with stops marked by small blue circles along the way. “What are these?”
“Monasteries. You can walk from one to the next.”
“You shall become very spiritually enlightened one of these days.”
Lenox shook his head. “May it arrive soon.”
For the first time, she looked at him directly in the eye. “I owe you an apology.”
“Do you? I can’t imagine you do.”
“I do; and you know why. I was very censorious at the ball—and your behavior was none of my business at all.”
He stared back at her.
By the time he had realized that she was not merely his closest friend (her youth had been an obstruction to that realization, a fatal one), she had accepted a proposal. This was the closest either had come to speaking a word about their emotions since then.
“As my closest friend,” Lenox said, “you are forgiven. In fact, you could move to a Russian monastery, and I would visit you there.”
She smiled. “The country won’t seem so far then.”
There was a ring at the door.
Lenox’s heart leapt. Graham came tearing in, if it was possible one could tear into a room in a manner befitting the gravity of a butler. “The telegram, sir.”
Lenox opened it.
It was very long, a list of all sales the company had made in London within the last five years, though because Wilton’s were based in Manchester, it wasn’t so prohibitively long that it was impossible to scan. At the top: they had sold 1,900 trunks to a muslin importer in Lambeth; 1,750 to a dry goods company in Greenwich—the list went on, down to ten trunks entrusted to the Oxford and Cambridge Club.
For shipping food, Lenox would wager.
And then he saw it. “Here!” he cried. “Graham, order a cab. We have to go to Bankside. Elizabeth, goodbye—I’m sorry—I shall see you this evening, I hope—at Clarissa’s—but I must go.”
“Go, go,” she said, “go.”