Lenox put on his favorite suit, a light gray twill which was appropriate enough on a late May evening. He felt pure terror, standing in the mirror and tying his tie. It wouldn’t do to get there at six o’clock; it also would be impossible to get there later than 6:05.
At 6:04 he stood on the steps of a wide terraced house, bright with lamplight inside, which made the evening, pink and still not close to dark, feel unnaturally still, almost lonely.
He knocked on the door and was brought in. The Duchess of Marchmain greeted him. “Charles! How welcome you are. Elizabeth said she had mentioned that you ought to come—having been all over Russia, and catching murderers, and generally becoming infamous.”
He smiled. “You’re sure I’m not troubling you?”
“Quite the reverse. There’s a mountain of cabbage salad that only you can make a dent in.”
“I say, what an enticement.”
She laughed and led him inside. She was a woman of thirty-three, cheeks highly colored, pretty and very cheerful and affectionate, friend to several of Lenox’s closest friends, though they had never been more than acquaintances.
It was a newer dukedom—but a dukedom nonetheless, and the front hall was very grand, with a Van Dyck portrait of Charles II over a table dominated by a huge bowl of brilliant purple and white flowers.
Just as Lenox was about to ask the duchess how she had been, there was the clatter of a door, and a little boy came sprinting across the black-and-white checkerboard tiles, running hell-for-leather. He wore a suit jacket, a tie, short pants, and brown shoes with white socks. He had very knobbly knees, much bruised and cut.
With a swift, effortlessly athletic motion—she was a mother to four—the duchess caught him in a strong arm.
Suddenly a harassed-looking governess emerged from the same door, breathing heavily. “I’m very sorry, Your Grace.”
The duchess was scowling at her son. “John Dallington, what were you doing? Can’t you see we have guests? Say hello to Mr. Lenox.”
The little boy, bright faced, probably about four, looked at Lenox directly and said, “No, thank you.”
“John,” said his mother threateningly, and the little boy, sensing he had gone too far, said a sullen hello to Lenox.
“Pleasure to make your acquaintance,” Lenox said, smiling.
“What was he running for, Susan?”
“He stole a tin of biscuits, Your Grace.”
It took only a quick search to find and confiscate this contraband, and within less than a minute, the prisoner was being led upstairs toward bed, badly out of countenance.
“Never have children,” the duchess told Charles as she took him into her sitting room, where she entertained most evenings.
“I see no immediate prospect of it.”
She smiled. “Oh, you’ll be caught soon enough.”
Lenox followed her into the room, expecting a small gathering. To his surprise, only Elizabeth was there, sitting upon a pink sofa, a book in her hand. She looked up and laid the book down in her lap. “Oh, hello, Lenox! I had hoped you would come by. We are desperate to hear about this murder.”
“Wait,” said the duchess. “Don’t start. I’m going to run into the kitchen and tell them to bring in more food—and I want to say goodnight to poor Lord John. He had been hatching plans to steal those biscuits for days.”
“You’re a soft touch,” Lenox said.
“I am, it’s true. The duke should be home any moment, too—at any rate, wait five minutes, and then you will sing for your—well, for your cabbage salad, because really it is priced to go—absolutely mad amount to have made—”
And the duchess left them alone, Elizabeth laughing.
When Lenox turned back to her, however, her face had changed entirely.
She was sitting straight upright, and staring at him intensely. They were alone.
He felt his heart begin to go faster. “Elizabeth—”
“Listen to me,” she said in a quick voice, “for we may only have a moment. By every law of marriage to which I swore, I ought to send your letter directly to James. That is the truth.”
“But—”
“I don’t plan to do so. He would tell me never to see you again, and he would be quite right. But I care for you as a friend, Charles.”
This was all said so quickly that Lenox barely had time to absorb it. “I—”
“We shall of course not be alone together again. Not now. I am happy to meet you, whether it be at dinner, or a ball. But we cannot be alone together anymore. We cannot even be in a group as small as three or four.”
In his worst imaginings, it had not been quite this bad. “Very well,” he said.
“I love my husband,” she said.
“I know—I knew that when I wrote.”
She looked at him searchingly, and then, with an air of release, leaned back into the soft cushions of the sofa. “I cannot begin to imagine what you were thinking.”
“No,” he said. “I apologize.”
“I have imagined something of your feelings, but our friendship—I cannot conceive what your motivation was, except to hurt me.”
“Never that,” he said miserably.
“Then what?”
Now he leaned forward on the sofa. “I think you are being very hard, Elizabeth,” he said quietly. “I am—I am beyond sorry, if there were a word stronger than the word ‘sorry,’ I would speak it, you know I would. But I think you are being very hard.”
“Hard!”
“Well—yes,” he said.
She sat up again, too, and looked at him, eye to eye. “Hard, you say! Think for a moment in your simple life what it means to be a woman, Charles.”
“I know that, it’s only—”
“No—stop, and please, think of it for a moment. Use your brain. You would have to murder a man to suffer the same damage to your reputation that would occur to mine if I were to kiss one.”
He paused. “I know that.”
Her voice had fallen to a low hiss. “A single whisper of a romance between us, and my name would be gone forever. It is also all I have. Nothing is my own. When I married, every penny that was ever mine passed to James. And I made that bargain willingly! I love him. But do not speak to me of hardness—please, don’t, when my life will be so irredeemably worse without your friendship, and when I am bound for the great empty countryside in five months, and when—when—”
He saw that she was near crying, and with his whole being he wanted to reach out and take her hand. Instead he leaned even farther forward and said, in an insistent voice, “You are right, and I am wrong. That is all there is to it. I have been hideously thoughtless. I hope you will forgive me.”
“I forgive you, you fool,” she said.
In that moment, he could almost have sworn that she loved him.
She stood up and went to the sideboard, where for fifteen or twenty seconds she busied herself with something. Then she turned back. Her face was a mask. “Lucia Chatham has been talking about you virtually without stopping, you know.”
“Has she?”
“She’s very beautiful.”
“Indeed she is,” Lenox said. He had never been unhappier. “Indeed she is.”