The express train to England’s northeastern coast took four hours. Lenox’s father had booked them sleepers across a slender red-carpeted aisle from each other, and he cheerfully and immediately turned in with an old copy of Gibbon, whose work he reread more or less continually. The fourth of his set’s nine volumes, for their particular trip.
Charles, in his own small chamber, sat up at the little chair and table, legs and arms crossed. He watched the landscape pass. He was conscious of wanting to remember this very clearly. Villages whose names he would never know or speak, and a broad black sky, sparkling with stars.
At the start of the voyage, the steward gave him a very good supper—a cutlet of steak, mashed potatoes, crushed peas, a half bottle of hock, and then coffee, followed by a pipe. He read about Russia as he ate. (Graham had somehow packed all his books about the country, all his maps, into the neat little suitcase he had made up for Lenox a few hours before. The trip he had been planning was to have lasted roughly fifteen months. But five days would do.)
The hours passed. Finally, in the very last moments of the train journey, he took out a pen. He had been contemplating the letter the whole way, but nevertheless as he began to compose it, his heart raced, his hand trembled.
Dear Elizabeth,
I love you. I know that nothing can come of this fact—of course. I would do anything before suggesting you leave England. I understand my position. But I don’t want to die without telling you, and they say any of us can die at any moment, though it scarcely seems possible, does it.
I won’t mention it again. You have my word upon that. I had to do so once, however. Anyhow, please believe my sincerity when I say that you receive this letter with the very dear and constant love of,
Charles Lenox
Before he could second-guess himself, he jammed it into an envelope; handed it to the steward with a penny and a sixpence tip, asking him to post it as soon as he could; and before he knew what had happened, they were off the train, in a carriage, and on a boat.
And so Elizabeth would know.
The boat took them to Stockholm first. As dawn broke, Charles and his father shared a strong flask of tea—Lenox House tea, of course, packed specially for them by Crump—and watched penguins frolic among the rocks. Or were they great auks? After a flying stop at Stockholm to drop off cargo, not more than an hour, the ship proceeded on to Tallinn.
It was lovely to feel the air on deck, even as it grew more chill with each nautical mile they traveled. They were wayfaring in great comfort (a Member of Parliament and his son, after all), and Sir Edward spent much of the late morning in a small swinging chair that had been arranged near the bow of the boat for him, sometimes reading, more often watching the water furl behind the boat, large birds darting down to fetch a meal out of its wake, in such deep thought—or perhaps in such pure absence of his thought—that Charles was content merely to observe him from his own chair, a little ways off.
They had two Finnish porters who brought them a lunch of soft-boiled eggs, black bread with salted butter, tiny buttered potatoes, and salted fish. Lenox’s father had brought a bottle of champagne, which they divided. During their luncheon, eaten upon an overturned crate, the father peppered his son with questions about Russia. Charles was hesitant at first, but eventually, after some coaxing, he began to describe in exuberant detail their destination, its immensely different culture, its people, the landmarks of St. Petersburg.
“My goodness,” his father said, smiling, “you know a great deal. But you were always a very complete child.”
“Complete?” said Charles.
The porters took away the leftover food, openly eating it themselves as they went, and then brought them a hard kind of biscuit for dessert. It wasn’t bad if you dipped it in the wine.
Edward Lenox lit his pipe and leaned back against the dull blue metal siding of the ship. “I remember that before you had your first horse, you learned the name of every horse that had ever won our little race in Markethouse, back to, oh, 1770 at least. Your own horse was the descendant of several of them, it turned out.”
Lenox smiled. “Yes, that’s right. So was Edmund’s.”
“Yes. Before your time there was a farmer, Julian, who bred the fastest horses in our part of the country. That was when I was a child. He was quite mad for horses—let his farm go to seed in his passion for them. Anyhow, I think several of them must have been his. Died childless, though, and they sold off his horses, whatever nieces and nephews he must have had. Robinson bought the land.”
This reminded Lenox of Edmund’s tour of the grounds of Lenox House over the last week, and he said, “Our neighbor.”
“Eh? Oh! Yes. A good neighbor, too, he’s been over the years, Robinson. I hope I’ve been the same to him.”
It was twenty-six hours after their departure—nearly to the minute—that their swift little mailboat pulled in to the docks of St. Petersburg.
It felt as if it had been faster still. Lenox’s father, who had been changing below deck into a suit and a fur-lined overcoat, came on deck, took in the sight of the city, and whistled.
“Gracious me,” he said. His pipe was in his hand. Before them was an absolutely enormous dull-golden dome, which seemed even larger because of the busy stone bridge that passed underneath their view of it, peopled with miniature figures. “Keep your wits about you.”
The ship’s captain, a Finn with excellent English and Russian, personally arranged for them to hire a private carriage that would take them to the British consulate. There they were greeted very warmly, and offered small dishes of caviar and salted nuts, along with wine, by a minor diplomat, Aspern. He asked if they weren’t very tired.
Charles looked at his father, who said that on the contrary, they would like nothing more than a little bit of the city—and some advice on where to stay. Well, then; they must go to the ballet. They could have the ambassador’s box. He was out of town, fishing. As for where to stay, that was the least conceivable trouble. He would arrange it all himself.
“It’s very kind of you,” said Charles’s father.
“Not in the slightest, sir. We are honored to have a Member of Parliament in the consulate.”
They were off.
The next three days passed in a lovely flash, like one of those vivid countryside strokes of lightning that stays illuminated an unnaturally long while, more than a second, a second and a half, which feels an eternity even though it’s still gone before you’ve begun to see it.
The hours were very full. They were met at the palace by Nicholas I, who had the most outlandish mustache Lenox had ever personally seen. (Its ends began at his lip and curled roughly up to eye level.) He was severe but gracious in his greeting. There was a spectacular ball, of the kind that Lenox had never imagined, much less seen. The least jewel there would have been the talk of Lady Hamilton’s. They had a sense of magnificence, certainly, the Russians. It was borne on the backs of uncountable serfs, and in England you could find many people who would tell you that one day that bill would come due. Nevertheless, like the pyramids or an egret in flight, it was something to behold—something one would never forget.
But Lenox valued these moments less than the wanderings he made with his father through the city. In many respects—being the capital—it was like London. There were clerks and officials everywhere one looked. The guide the consulate had provided them, a very eager young Russian, took them through gardens full of enormous quilts of spring flowers; pointed out old women bundled under their wares, exotic creatures in the new, modern Russia; guided them through unmarked doors where they found small restaurants serving wonderfully fragrant stews.
Lenox’s father had his usual durability, and he was in a superlative mood. Never would you have guessed he was living under a death sentence. Everything delighted him. The little Russian coins, their guide’s interminable lectures, the ball. He didn’t drink any vodka, and did decry the lack of beer. On the other hand, there was nowhere like Russia for champagne—the aristocracy spoke to each other exclusively in French, and thought nothing of putting away a dozen bottles of Jacquesson in a single sitting.
On their last evening, they were wandering through the Winter Palace. “I’ve never seen anything like it, I admit,” Edward Lenox said.
Charles nodded. It faced the river, this building, constructed by Catherine the Great. Its beautiful, symmetrical frontage was a wintergreen color he had never seen in England—and ever so long, endless. “Do you think it’s three times as long as Parliament, I wonder,” he said.
“Yes, and a third as democratic,” said Lenox’s father stoutly. Then he smiled at his patriotism. “I never imagined I would see it in person. I must thank you for that, Charles. The etchings don’t do it justice, do they?”
“No,” said Lenox.
They decided to have supper in their suite of rooms at their hotel; their ship left at midnight. It was a merry meal. Charles didn’t mention his father’s health, but he did allow himself to ask a few questions about his boyhood, his father’s own parents, and he found that Sir Edward, so often taciturn, was in an expansive mood. The wine, perhaps—it was a rich yellowish Hungarian wine—inclined him to reminisce.
There was a great deal awaiting Lenox in London: Elizabeth, who had never been gone from his mind; and Graham, whom Lenox had asked to take an initial look into Rupert Clarkson’s little problem, their actual paying client.
But he found himself wishing this trip would last forever.
It didn’t, of course. Soon enough they were in Tallinn; soon enough they were in Stockholm; soon enough they were approaching the English shore; soon enough Lenox would be not twenty-three, but seventy-three, and his father would have been gone for fifty years—and as he watched the older man in his little swing chair, reading Gibbon and smoking his pipe with great absorption, he felt overwhelmed with tenderness and sorrow, with loss, a desire to hold each moment.
As they were boarding the train, his father said, “Well, I wouldn’t trade that.”
“Nor would I.”
It was a sleeper again—late in the English evening—and for the first time, Edward Lenox looked tired, old. It was only natural, probably. After summoning up something from inside, he said, “You were right about traveling, weren’t you! Let no man say that I am immune to changing my mind, even at my old age. But—”
Charles looked at him curiously. “Yes?”
“I hope you will entertain the idea of other careers.”
“Ah, that. I suppose I will.”
“You’re only twenty-three,” his father said. He sighed. Lenox felt his heart sink horribly. “All right—I’d better sleep, I think. I’ll see you at Waterloo.”
They both slept heavily, waking up to a hurried cup of coffee and biscuit as they pulled in to the station. They parted there with an amicable handshake, Sir Edward changing trains to return to Sussex, Charles promising to come down to the country within the next week. It seemed too abrupt, too informal. He was tired and irritated in the hansom ride back to his flat. Already the trip was like a dream—with the peculiar estranged beauty of a dream, to be sure, but also with the pastness of a dream, the vanishedness of it.
Except that then, as he climbed the stairs, he found a little folded piece of paper in the pocket of his jacket.
Inside it there was a pound note, which was what his father had always given him when he left for school. He must have written it while his son was asleep, and placed it in his pocket as they were parting.
Charles,
What I would have said, had I not been quite so tired and so pompous, is that there is no conceivable life you could lead of which I wouldn’t be proud—because you are yourself—and also, that you should be sure to swallow a little bismuth—very heavy food in Russia, very heavy—but then again, how glad I am we went. Until I see you next, know me to be both in this life, and in whatever life comes next,
Your loving father,
EL.