There was a table at White’s that belonged exclusively to the duke, one of just three members accorded the honor, and was otherwise kept empty. The headwaiter led them to it—the center of the most important room at the most exclusive club in the British Empire.
By leading him here, the duke had discharged a certain duty; Lenox was a gentleman who could be respectably met in the highest echelon of London society, up to Buckingham Palace. There would be new invitations on his hall table when he returned home that afternoon, some so brazen as to be given again after an earlier withdrawal, he reflected as they looked at the menus.
They ate salmon, pheasant, mashed potatoes, and long beans, with the house popovers, light and eggy, serving as sauce-pushers, per tradition. Lenox was a member at White’s, and when the check came with coffee and brandy, he offered to sign it. But the duke gave him a look somewhere between contempt and amusement, and just waved it away, unsigned.
They had spoken so far only of neutral matters. The duke reminisced about Lenox’s father in kind terms, and they spoke at some length about how Edmund was managing his new responsibilities.
“Please tell him that he is welcome to call on me if he should need any advice,” Dorset said, sipping his coffee black.
“It is very kind of you, Your Grace.”
“Meanwhile I wonder if you would join me in nominating Ward for membership here. It is perhaps slightly above his station, but he has been loyal to me, and he is well educated and very sound.”
Lenox looked down at the petit fours. “Of course,” he said.
It was remarkable how rapidly the duke had returned, unstained, to his previous sphere of social activity. That night, he mentioned in passing, he would be dining with the Queen, and the next week he planned to do some stag shooting at his friend Lord Mountjoy’s estate.
Lenox thought of General Pendleton.
“Tell me,” Lenox said at last, “only because I am inveterately curious. Will you seek the play?”
The duke’s expression flattened. When he spoke, it seemed to pain him; he did not even say his daughter’s name, merely, “She has married one of my cotters.”
“I know,” said Lenox.
This was an ancient race of farm laborers, many of their families on the small parcels of land just as long as the dukes and earls who rented to them had been on theirs. Their dwellings, over time, had taken their names—cottages.
“You went to Harrow and Oxford. Your father was a traditionalist. You must have some comprehension of my position. Imagine your own position, but magnified a thousand times.”
It was exhausting, this arrogance. He was only a man, the fellow across the table, with his lined face, his smooth gray hair, his gold ring, his cup of coffee. One day the last person who had ever loved him would die, just as was true for everyone within these convivial walls. What lay beyond this earth they none of them knew—but nobody could believe there would be dukes there.
Or perhaps they could. “I can see the difficulty, Your Grace,” said Lenox. “But it is Shakespeare.”
“Yes, Shakespeare,” said the duke, turning his eyes to the windows. “William Shakespeare. I think it is time for that portrait to be stored in the vault at Dorset Castle, and perhaps in three or four generations someone will take it out, and read my letter. But not till then.”
So Campion would not be coming back to England! Could that be? Lenox felt a shiver of rage—but knew he might just as profitably yell at the crashing shore as at the Duke of Dorset.
To his credit, the duke, before they left, invited him to play a few games of billiards, doubles. The message was clear: that it was a social luncheon, this one, a friendship. He was loud in his proclamations of affection for Lenox, free in his teasing, before half a dozen men who would each tell another half a dozen about it. 6+x+y.
They went to the cloakroom together and fetched their hats at a little past two o’clock. Emerging into the lobby, Lenox saw his brother.
“Edmund!”
“Oh, hello, Charles.” He bowed to the duke. “Edmund Lenox, Your Grace.”
The duke inclined his head in response. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance. I have been telling your brother that you ought to call upon me if you need any advice about that small estate of yours.”
Only someone who had known Edmund exceedingly well over the course of many years would have discerned the anger in his voice when he said, “I will be sure to do so at the first possible chance, Your Grace. Thank you.”
“Well!” The duke slapped his gloves against his palm. “I will bid you both good day.”
“Good day, Your Grace,” said Charles, with the peculiar consciousness that they were passing out of each other’s lives. “I will write Ward’s letter this evening.”
“Capital.” The duke looked briefly troubled. “And you will be … discreet.”
“That goes without saying.”
“My apologies. Yes. Good day, gentlemen.”
The whole lobby watched him leave, that figure of greatness, and step into his gilt carriage. Charles, for his part, preferred the more modest company in which the duke had left him.
“Why are you here?” he asked Edmund.
“Lunch with the American ambassador, Streeter. Very civil fellow, you know. Lovely daughters.”
“Surely you can’t be trying to marry me off, too.”
They had spent much of the weekend fending off Lenox’s mother’s suggestions, abetted by Lady Jane, of whom he ought to marry.
“No, no,” said Edmund.
They turned into the card room off the lobby and ordered two cups of coffee. When it arrived, Lenox reached into his pocket. He had his little book. He finally felt, for the first time in his life, having glanced into it forty or fifty times in the past week, that he was starting to understand something about why people loved Shakespeare. He had flapped down a tiny corner above one quotation that very morning, struck at how it described his feelings for the person who had given him the book: This earth that bears thee dead bears not alive so stout a gentleman.
He showed the little volume to Edmund. “Did Father give you one of these when you went to school?”
Edmund looked at the title page and smiled. “No. He gave me Hesiod’s Days. Great lot of rot about farming. Did he write in it?”
Lenox showed him the front page. “No.”
Edmund looked at him queerly. “Charles, you must remember that Father always wrote at the back of the books he gave. It was a quirk.”
“I don’t remember that at all. Why?”
“He said it would be rude to speak before the author.” Edmund smiled. “Excuse me for a moment, would you? I need a quick word with Chalmers there about the Irish bill, damn him. Only a moment.”
Lenox watched him go, frowning—the Irish bill wouldn’t come up this session—until he realized, dolt that he was, that his brother had been exercising tact, leaving him alone to look and see if his father had written in the book.
He flicked through the pages slowly.
And there, at the back, was his father’s infinitely familiar handwriting, so disposable while he was alive but now so precious-seeming.
Charles,
It took me a long while to love Shakespeare. In school I preferred Donne. For a long time my main knowledge about Shakespeare was that his name was an anagram for I am a weakish speller, a trick which occasionally impressed my schoolmates, and which now that you are going to school may impress yours.
But eventually I did love Shakespeare, for his wisdom, his wit, and above all for his clear-seeing love of his fellow man. I hope you, too, will have the pleasure of this discovery, whether it is now or much later in your life. Please know that whenever that time comes, if it does, I will be with you here, in the pages of this book, both now and then.
the proudest of all fathers, yours,
Thomas Lenox