It was a long train ride south to Sussex. Everything in the countryside was the surprised fluttering green of spring. The trees, the little sprays of random pink in huge meadows, made Lenox’s heart ache in a way he couldn’t quite fathom, something to do with home, something to do with his father.
At Markethouse, he sent Graham ahead with his luggage on a cart. He wanted to walk to Lenox House by himself. First he passed through the small town, with its two churches, greengrocer’s, village square, the public houses (one bright and jaunty, the other low and lurking, each about as reputable as the other once you got inside).
As he passed down Whitcomb Lane, someone a distance away called out “Welcome back, Master Duck!” which was a village nickname that he had been given after a cricket match when he went out for a duck (the term in cricket parlance for making zero runs), to his very great humiliation.
He rolled his eyes, touched his hat—he suspected who it was, an older opponent from that day named Arnold, a blacksmith—and thought of Elizabeth, who had honeymooned in part in Italy, telling him that their word for nickname was “injury.” True more often than you’d like.
“I was out for forty the next match, and we won handily!” he shouted back.
There was a guffaw by way of reply.
By this time, he was at the edge of the town, Markethouse. It took him trekking across a half mile of rough countryside to get to the handsome black gates of Lenox House. The shadows were now long, the sunlight a heavy gold. In the gatehouse was old Carter, who had retired into this position at twenty after sustaining a bad wound in the army, and had sat here with a stone flask of hot tea and a newspaper (hopefully he changed it out occasionally) for the approximately fifty years since.
“Father nearby?” Lenox said after greeting him.
“Shooting on the small lawn, sir,” Carter, wiry, sharp eyed, known as the village’s best poacher, said immediately.
“Shooting, is it? Well, did my things come?”
“They did, sir, right quick.”
There was a long avenue from the front gate to Lenox House itself. The dirt road was lined with symmetrical rows of lime trees, which his grandfather had planted years before. A pretty walk. He heard the crack of a gun, then twenty yards later heard it again, and smiled to himself.
The house itself was a small but picturesque one, mirrored prettily now in the pond that sat in front of it, two long wings in the shape of an L. The great lawn lay to the west side of the house, and led to the formal gardens. But it was to the small lawn, chapel side of the house, that he made his way.
“Hullo!” he yelled out well before he turned the corner, just to be safe. “Don’t shoot!”
“Come round unless you’re a clay pigeon!” the call came back.
He found his father sitting in a small wooden chair, with a leather seat that sank low. It looked designed to fold. He’d never seen his father shoot from a chair.
He stood up, smiling. “You’ve come back to Sussex, have you?” he said.
“Yes, sir,” said Lenox, going forward and grasping his father’s outstretched hand.
Nearby was Terrance, an old servant of around 150 years old, with heavy jowls and the gloomiest face in Christendom. He was dressed in a checkered jacket so threadbare that it looked as if it would dissolve in sunlight. Its pockets were bulging. He stood at the trap, holding a clay pigeon that he had just pulled from one of them. “Welcome back, Master Charles,” he said.
“Thank you, Terrance. The air is considerably fresher here, I’ll say.”
“Perhaps it’ll keep you out of the papers, too.”
Lenox scowled at the old servant, who said pretty much what he pleased these days. His father smiled. “Your mother will be happy you’ve decided to visit.”
“Yes, just a quick one,” said Lenox, forcing a smile of his own.
“Care for a shot?”
“Eh? Oh—go on.”
There was about twenty minutes of light left, and they traded rounds of shots. This was his father’s best gun. On his first attempt, Lenox missed twice. (“I’ll have to fetch ’em, of course,” Terrance muttered in a voice he either did or did not believe to be under his breath, but which regardless could have halted traffic in the Strand.) But then he got the measure of the light and the surroundings, and fired off several good shots, culminating in a double.
“Very fine shooting,” his father said, and Terrance grunted, which in his case was roughly equivalent to a notarized letter of praise from the Queen.
His father took the gun back with a “thankee”—in certain mannerisms, he was still very, very old-fashioned, plucked from 1740-odd—and sat in his chair. He split every pigeon cleanly in half, sighed with happiness after the tenth, and broke the shotgun over his arm as he stood up.
He turned to Charles. “Now, that’s a lovely evening. Son back at home, clay taught its lesson, and Terrance has something to complain about because you missed those two.”
Lenox’s father was named Edward. He was a half inch shorter than either of his sons, and he always seemed to walk back in his shoes, as if he were assessing the world carefully. He had gray hair, a gray mustache, and very shrewd, watchful hazel eyes, which Lenox had inherited, though in other respects he more resembled his mother.
Sir Edward had spent his career in Parliament. Twice he had declined positions in the cabinet. This had always gnawed at Charles, though not at Edmund. There were eight hundred baronets in England, and five hundred peers; several hundred members of Parliament; but only twelve in a cabinet. Lenox, churlish though he knew it was, had sometimes felt among people of his class (at Harrow, especially) that he was always just shy of the mark: second son; not in the peerage, though for the most part he could not have given a fig for that, because the Lenoxes had been on their land twice as long as most of those newish Elizabethan earls; his father never prime minister or anything so exalted as that.
A disgraceful way to feel. Nevertheless, real.
Edmund, though, who had a slower metabolism and had been raised from the instant of his birth in the knowledge that he would inherit, said he thought that his father, first, always kept his primary loyalty in the countryside, not Thames-side, and second, preferred the flexibility of being in every significant meeting of his party without being bound to a single duty within it—the treasury, say, or the war department.
Lenox could understand the wisdom of this. But there were moments when he wondered if his father could have been more, done more, gone higher.
None of that was to imply that his father was in any way a diminished figure in his eyes. On the contrary, Lenox knew instinctively that his own father was more right, more substantial, more significant, than any of the dukes’ sons he knew could ever say their own were. Indeed, Sir Edward was like a royal to his sons—more important than the Queen, in some indefinable way—and it was commonly said in town that he was the best baronet the family had produced.
He was sixty-one now. As they walked toward the house’s side door, Lenox glanced surreptitiously, but could detect no real change in the older man’s physical appearance.
“The newspaper, then,” he said mildly as they reached the mudroom.
Charles had been dreading the revival of that question. “Yes, sir. I didn’t know you took the Daily Star in Sussex now.”
His father tilted his head. “News will always reach you if it’s bad,” he said. “It’s the kind people are most eager to give.”
They went to the large double sink and both washed their hands. “It’s not all bad to be invited in to consult,” Charles said.
His father looked up very quickly. “No! No, not at all. I didn’t mean objectively bad news, you know. Any man can turn any piece of information to his pleasure. The devil can cite Scripture, and all that. One of the curses of each of us being a person, you know.” He shook out his hands, drops flying from them in the golden light. “I’m going to change for supper. I expect your mother will want to see you, though. She’ll be in her study.”
Charles nodded, dried his hands, then walked through the entrance hall, up a short flight of stairs, and into the study.
His mother had a small, beautiful room on the second floor of the house, full of her personality, with a small desk whose fine intricacy had fascinated Charles endlessly when he played underneath it as a boy; the wallpaper was a pale lilac, and there was always a clean scent here that didn’t exist in the rest of the house, too light to be perfume, never absent.
“You’re here!” she said with an enormous smile when he knocked on the open door.
He came in and returned her embrace. “Susceptible to cats,” he said.
“You got my wire!”
“I did. You might have been clearer! I wasn’t sure if it was from you or if the French government had sent an encoded message to the wrong fellow.”
“And yet I’ll bet you four pounds she was susceptible. Wasn’t she?”
He frowned. “Have you taken up gambling? I hate to see that vice in someone your age.”
She hit his arm in frustration. “Was she?”
Lenox smiled and said that yes, his mother had been right, or at any rate right enough to buy him ten minutes of freedom, though the Lord alone could know what the consequences would be. Some hissing, scratching creature, no doubt. It was almost too great a cliché—a widow who liked cats.
Here his mother interjected, though, that it wasn’t like that at all. According to Lady Hamilton, Mrs. Huggins had grown up solely with dogs. It was her husband who had loved cats.
That was moderately interesting, and Mrs. Huggins took them through ten minutes of conversation. His mother rang the bell and asked for a whisky and soda for her son, and a Chartreuse for herself. “The curate and his wife are coming to supper this evening, and Jane’s father,” she said. “Nothing very out of the ordinary. By the way, you looked lovely in the paper! They captured you beautifully, I thought. I’ve half a mind to write the draftsman and buy the portrait.”
“When are they arriving?”
“Not for half an hour.”
“Oh? Listen, then. I have two doctors coming down on Thursday and Friday.”
She frowned. “Yes, you wired.”
“They’re the two best men in London. One a consultant, the second a surgeon. I did a great deal of looking into it.”
She shook her head. “Well—may you live in interesting times, they say the Chinese tell each other. For now I shall just be happy to have you back here. I can’t tell you how happy. Go get changed for dinner, you look like you came from a long day of cleaning chimneys.”