The garden behind Lady Jane’s house was unusually wild compared to most of those on Hampden Lane, with vines that climbed the fences and a small sunlit knoll encircled by a few towering oak trees, shifting in the breeze.
There was a table on the flagstones outside with four places set, three occupied. Lady Jane waved to Lenox. “There you are! What a cake,” she said, taking the plate from his hands. “How neatly it’s iced.”
“Well, of course,” said Lenox with pride.
“Pass my compliments to Mrs. Huggins.”
“I will not!” said Lenox indignantly.
She laughed. “You know the duchess, Charles.” This was the Duchess of Marchmain, an older cousin of Jane’s aged around forty-three or forty-four, very pretty, all that was amiable and kind. She gave Lenox her hand. “And this is my dear friend Miss Euphemia Somers, from Mrs. Clark’s. She has just returned from a year in America with her parents.”
“I’m charmed to meet you, Miss Somers,” said Lenox, bowing.
She inclined her head. “And you, Mr. Lenox. My friends call me Effie.”
If Effie Somers had been at Mrs. Clark’s with Lady Jane—a girls’ school where Lenox’s friend had spent a year perfecting her French and painting sailboats—she was probably around twenty-two. She gave an impression of great ease and good nature. She was not unusually beautiful, but her smile was, and so was her hair, a dark chestnut blond that she wore in plaits, so notably beautiful, in fact, that one might have fallen in love with her for this single trait.
Lenox sat, and the duchess said, “I hear you have been calling upon Dorset.”
Lenox peered curiously at her, smiling. “Where on earth did you hear that?”
“Not from me,” Jane said.
“A little chickadee saw you going into the house, I suppose.”
It would be easier to find privacy in a jammed lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean than in London. “He was an acquaintance of my father’s,” Lenox said.
Her husband was a very different kind of duke than Dorset, his title only two generations old and won on the battlefield. But there was a great deal of money in it. “I like him.”
“He pinches cheeks,” said Effie Somers.
“Does he!” said Lenox, surprised.
She smiled. “He did when I was eighteen, at any rate.”
“Come clean, Charles,” said Lady Jane, “why were you with him?”
“It really was a social call,” he said, and took a covering bite of teacake.
“Just don’t go hunting with him,” said the duchess.
Jane laughed shortly.
“Why not?” he asked.
They glanced at each other. Miss Somers looked at them inquiringly, evidently in the dark, too. “I suppose he kept it quiet,” said the duchess.
“Kept what quiet?” asked Lenox.
Lady Jane, who had before her a small, neatly drawn diagram of the seating arrangements for her garden party, nominally their reason for being there, looked down at it. “Shall we discuss seating?”
“Come now!” said Lenox.
“Even dukes deserve privacy.”
Lenox might have let it rest there, except that Miss Somers, to whom he became instantly indebted, said, “But there are only two of us. I’ll keep the secret.”
“So shall I,” Lenox put in right away.
Lady Jane sighed. “Fine. It was about five years ago. It was terribly sad, really. A group were hunting grouse in Dorset, the duke, General Pendleton, and their two sons, and the duke accidentally shot Pendleton’s son. Pure bad chance.”
“And he died?”
“He lived for a month,” said the duchess, her cup of tea poised in her hand. “It was awful for Georgia Pendleton—awful. They have no other sons.”
“Was there an inquest?” asked Effie Somers.
“Yes, with no fault found. Everyone present, including the groom, agreed that it was no more than an unfortunate accident.”
Lenox reflected on this. “Pendleton commanded a brigade at Waterloo,” he said. “He was made a knight for it.”
“Your facts are out of date,” the duchess said, “for the Queen made him a baron in the list last year. He doesn’t come down from the country often, or you would have heard.”
“He has no son to leave the title to,” said Lady Jane.
“He has a nephew, at least,” said the duchess, “with whom he has become closer. His younger brother’s son.”
Lenox took another bite of his teacake, which had a satisfying cracked-cinnamon sugar crust. He followed it with a sip of tea and looked up into the pure blue sky, thinking of his father and his brother for a passing moment.
“Was there bad blood between Pendleton and the duke?”
“They are not so close as they once were, of course,” said the duchess. “But no, the general accepted the situation, ultimately. Of course the duke himself was heartbroken.”
Lenox pictured the still, impassive face of the thin and finely dressed aristocrat.
“What a terribly sad story,” said Jane’s friend.
“Yes. I don’t know why we brought up something so morbid!” replied Lady Jane, then with a businesslike tone went on, “Leave it aside—this seating plan. Here is where you are essential, Charles. I need to know everyone who has rejected everyone’s proposals among your Oxford friends. It’s vital. All the secrets, now, please.”
“Why do you care?” he asked curiously.
Lady Jane looked at him for a moment with guilty happiness. “There is a chance the Queen may come. I’d like it to be perfect.”
“You’d better cut those branches back, then,” said Lenox, nodding upward. “It would be bad news if one fell on her.”
“Leave the garden to me.” Then, with sudden alarm, she said, “Lancelot will be gone in three weeks’ time, won’t he?”
“Yes, thank heavens.”
“That’s good news. It’s one thing for him to target you with the peashooter, another Prince Albert.”
“I’m offended at that,” said Lenox.
“Who is Lancelot?” Effie Somers said.
“Don’t ask,” he and Jane replied simultaneously, and all three laughed, and the conversation turned decisively away from the Duke of Dorset.
Still, the story of the hunting accident stayed in his mind. And the name: Pendleton.
When they had finished eating breakfast, Lenox went inside to help Lady Jane fetch the cut flowers she was considering for the tables. He said to her, in the back conservatory, “You’re about a quarter as clever as you think.”
She stopped, surprised. “At least half, I would have said. But how so?”
“As if I knew more than you about who has proposed to whom! I can’t even remember who’s engaged.”
“We have different friends,” she said.
He shook his head and smiled. “I’m not going to marry Miss Somers.”
Lady Jane paused, looking at him, then said, “But don’t you like her? She was the dearest person I knew at Miss Clark’s. Always the most popular—but never took sides, even against the worst of the girls. And her father, being a diplomat, has dragged her all over the world these last three years, meaning she’s never been thrown in the way of a decent fellow.”
“Well, she may be at your party. Say, look at this,” he said, and pulled the small leather book from his study out of his breast pocket. “You’ll like it.”
She took it. “Selected Quotations of William Shakespeare. Why do you have it?”
“I just came across it. My father gave it to me when I went to Harrow. It was once his own.”
She smiled, flipping through the pages. “There are stars by some of the lines.”
“Those are his.”
She read one and laughed, studying it. She was one of the people close to Charles who had known his father well.
Eventually she handed the little book back. “I’m very glad you have it.”
“So am I.”
Lady Jane looked him in the eye. “Don’t you like her, Charles? Effie?”
He did, in fact; he liked her more with every passage of the conversation. She didn’t have quite so sharp an edge as Lady Jane or the duchess, but there was something lovely about her—the effortlessness of her laugh, the ingenuousness of her wit, her clear intelligence.
He was about to say so, but there was a knock at the door. There were no servants immediately at hand, and he went to answer it himself. He saw, to his surprise, that outside was Theodore Ward.
“Hello, Theo,” he said.
Lady Jane came up behind Lenox. “Hello, Mr. Ward.”
The young secretary looked utterly changed. His hair was a dark upright shock, his collar loose and his face red. He only just managed to bow. “My Lady.” Then he turned back to Lenox. “Charles. Thank goodness.”
“What’s the matter?” asked Lenox.
“The duke has been kidnapped.”