‘I don’t understand why you were so determined that Charles and I should accompany you,’ Jack grumbled to Alan on the following morning when they entered Clanton’s gymnasium. ‘You know that I don’t share your enthusiasm for the noble art, and nor, I gather, does Charles.’
‘A good experience for you both,’ Alan told him lightly. ‘Wouldn’t do for you to enjoy yourself all the time. Bad for you. To my certain knowledge Charles has never visited such a place before. No need for either of you to feel that you have to take any pleasure in visiting a gym. Just savour a new experience.’
‘So noted,’ said Charles sardonically, looking around the big room and making for some chairs which were strategically placed to have the best view of the ring set up in its centre.
Jack joined him, amused to see Alan stroll up and begin to try to charm a burly Yankee who had immediately made it plain that he hated all the English, and English aristocrats most of all. He gave a great guffaw when Alan informed him that he had come for a light workout in the ring.
‘Nothing punishing,’ Alan said. ‘I’m too old for that, and I don’t want my face marked. Wouldn’t do. I’m merely trying to keep my weight down.’
Jack and Charles, amused, watched the way in which Clanton’s face and manner changed when Alan stripped off and performed in the ring. Despite his size and his age there was little spare fat on him and, although he knew that time had robbed him of much of his speed and power, he was still as light on his feet and as tricky as ever.
Clanton had warned his bruiser not to damage the gentleman but, watching them, he had to admit, if grudgingly, that a few years ago the large Englishman must have been a formidable opponent.
After the session was over Alan sat on the stool in the corner of the ring, panting heavily as he towelled off: the sweat was running down his body.
‘Enjoyed yourself?’ queried Clanton with a grin.
Alan dropped the towel from his face and gasped an answer.
‘Yes, but good God, I’m winded. I’m an old man these days.’
His trunk was scarlet where the boy who had been his opponent had caught him. He flexed his hand and sucked at his knuckles, aching though he had been using gloves in practice.
‘I can’t do this too often now, nor do it properly. I can’t afford to spoil my gentlemanly looks.’
He offered Clanton his wolfish grin, having grasped that he had dispelled the man’s original antagonism after he had revealed how remarkable a performer he had once been.
‘Ruthless devil, aren’t you?’ said Clanton, who had known his man the moment he had seen him in action and, being a hard man himself, recognised another when he saw one.
‘Yes,’ said Alan. ‘It runs in the family.’ He jerked his thumb at the watching Jack who sat, a picture of easy amiability, beside the silent Charles.
‘Does he want a go, a real go?’ asked Clanton eagerly.
‘Not I,’ said Jack. ‘I stick at riding and the foils. Soaking up that sort of punishment isn’t my idea of fun.’
‘And poking about with long-bladed table-knives isn’t mine,’ said Alan. He used one of his repertoire of comic faces after rising and saying, ‘I shall be stiff for the rest of the day.’
‘Come again,’ invited Clanton before Alan strode off to dress. ‘You were good once. Pity to go to seed too much.’
Alan shook his head. ‘Thank you, but no. I’m too old and too busy—but you’ve a nice set-up here.’
Improbably that afternoon, since Jack had never expected to end up in such grand company, Alan took them both to the Hill. They walked through the Capitol for the first time, admiring the murals, even if they did represent the surrender of British troops under Burgoyne during the American Revolution.
Later Alan presented them to Gideon Welles, President Lincoln’s Secretary to the Navy, whom Alan had already met, and a group of his associates who gazed suspiciously at the three Britishers—as they supposed them all to be.
Watching his brother, cold and inscrutable beneath his false veneer of an idle English gentleman who was drawling his incomprehension of the strange new world in which he found himself, Jack found it difficult to associate him with the grinning bruiser of the morning. He had not known Alan very well before he had settled in England, and now he found himself wondering which of the many masks his brother wore was that of the true man.
Senator Hope arrived in the middle of the discussion, his handsome old face alight with pleasure at the sight of the brothers and Charles. Like the others, though, he was putting pressure on Alan, trying to influence him in favour of the North. There was no doubt that Lincoln’s government was suspicious of the British whom they thought, with some justification, favoured the South. They were trying to impress on Alan during these semi-formal conversations that they were worried that English ship-builders might give an advantage to the Southern rebels. The names of Lairds and Liverpool popped in and out of the conversation.
Alan’s deceitful manner enabled him to give little away. He had introduced Jack as his brother who was knowledgeable about shipping and was by way of being a marine engineer and architect, too. He had been involved in the building of Sydney’s first dry-dock at Balmain while still young, Alan said, and like Charles he was interested in the development of iron-clad ships, both for civilian use and for war.
‘Thank you, Mr Dilhorne,’ Welles said. ‘We would now like to question your associate, Mr Charles Stanton—more properly Viscount Stanton, we understand—and your brother also.’
Someone had been doing their homework, thought Jack, preparing to be quizzed.
‘Mr Stanton, please,’ said Charles in reply to a question about his experience. ‘I have been working with Cowper Coles, the British naval officer and designer, and one of my recent tasks was to assist him to design and build the first semi-iron-clad warship for the British Navy. Fortunately, or unfortunately,’ he added, ‘we have not had the opportunity to use it in action.’
This brought a few laughs, but one fierce-looking frontier type, who obviously held all Britishers in contempt, and was a little annoyed to find them let loose on the Hill, said contemptuously, ‘We have as yet no iron-clads in these United States. I consider their possibilities in war to be greatly overrated.’
After that discussion grew brisk. A little clerk took notes and Jack was at pains to suggest that he was an amateur in such matters compared with Charles. He spoke of his wish to meet John Ericsson, the Swedish designer and ship-builder who lived in New York, and it was evident that many present had heard of him.
A naval officer, covered in gold braid, came in and joined in the discussion which grew rapidly into an argument. He, too, was contemptuous of Charles’s quiet assertion that iron-clads would alter naval battle tactics. The talk grew so lively that Jack could not help thinking how much Marietta would have enjoyed it. The traditionalist naval officer grew verbally violent in pressing his belief that iron-clads would never be capable of fighting effective battles on the high seas.
‘But it will come,’ said Charles firmly, Jack nodding at his side, ‘and soon. For if war breaks out here I am prepared to wager that iron ships will fight it out, somewhere, somehow.’
‘So you say,’ said the naval officer, tempting Jack to put his oar in to support Charles, but Charles did not need his support: beneath his quiet exterior he was a most determined young man. Hammer and tongs they went at it, and the frock-coated politicians stroked their chins and listened. Charles had the advantage of knowing at first hand what the European navies were doing and Jack listened carefully to him.
In the middle of all this a tall, dry-looking man came in and took Welles to one side, to speak to him at length. After his departure, Welles returned to the table, put up a hand for silence and said, ‘Our discussion comes apropos, gentlemen. I have further news from Fort Sumter. The would-be rebels expect us to evacuate it—nay, they have demanded that we do so—but we are standing firm. It cannot hold for ever, and if they fire on us, the fort will fall—and the Union with it.’
The little group fell silent, and for the first time Jack felt the hand of war heavy on them all. Sumter had dominated conversations for days, and it was a matter of agreement that, if it were attacked, war was inevitable.
Welles turned to Alan, who had been listening to the discussion with great attention.
‘You see our concern plain, suh.’ He had a turn of speech common to many American politicians, orotund and formal. ‘And when you return and report back to your masters, why, you will do so from the horse’s mouth.’
‘Always remembering that my role is an unofficial one,’ said Alan. ‘But I have heard what you have to say and will so note when I reach home.’
Jack saw Charles give a subtle smile when his brother said this. Shortly afterwards the meeting broke up, but it was agreed that all present would dine at Willard’s that night. Jack knew that Alan would come under fire again, but this did not seem to trouble him.
Walking down Capitol Hill, Alan suddenly laughed out loud and said to Jack and Charles, ‘Men are the same the world over; never forget that, and you cannot go wrong. Having dealt with Chartists and Rothschilds and now with these horse-trading Yankees, I find the same patterns hold good. They will try to get me to drink heavily tonight in the hope that I might commit myself—and they will try to ply the two of you with drink as well. I shall drink bumper for bumper, smile and smile, and give nothing away until it pays me to—and you must do the same. We shall all have thick heads in the morning.’
He stopped, and stretched himself, his arms held high, so that passers-by smiled indulgently at the big man. For his part, Jack grew ever more convinced that he shared with Alan and Thomas and their dead father a zest for life and conflict which added spice to their days and gave form and meaning to that which without it would be empty and void…
Jack called on the Hopes on his way home. He had much to tell them and, besides, he wanted to see Marietta again. Instead, he found Sophie installed in the parlour, drinking tea with Aunt Percival. They both welcomed him warmly.
Sophie said, ‘What a pity, Marietta has just gone upstairs to copy some notes for the Senator. Never mind, I’m sure that we can entertain you. Will you be going to the Van Horns’ Ball tomorrow evening? I shall be sure to look after you if you are.’
‘Yes, we are all invited. It seems that we have become one of the curiosities of Washington—or perhaps it might be more truthful to say that Charles and Alan have. They are the ones who are the old English gentlemen, not me.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Sophie vigorously. ‘I’m sure that you’re wrong there. You are so much more like we Americans than Charles and Alan and are therefore more welcome.’
Jack made a suitably modest reply. Aunt Percival excused herself for a moment, and Sophie took the opportunity to lean forward and say, ‘Now we may speak at ease. I never seem to say anything of which Aunt Percival approves when we are together. Of course, she thinks Marietta is the pink of perfection, but we cannot all be serious all the time, can we?’
‘No, indeed,’ said Jack, although he was thinking that one of Sophie’s problems might be that she could never be serious at any time. One could forgive her, though. She was such a sweet young thing in her pretty pink-and-white toilette with a small posy of artificial rosebuds at her throat and a pale blue sash around her tiny waist. Age would perhaps mature her: after all, she was not yet twenty.
They were not to be left alone long, though. Aunt Percival reappeared with Marietta in her train. The look Sophie threw her would have slain a tiger at six paces. It was really too bad of the silly old woman to drag Marietta downstairs when she had had Jack to herself for once.
Inevitably the nature of the tea party took quite a different turn with Plain Jane there. Marietta wanted to know how Jack and the rest had fared on Capitol Hill, and insisted on hearing all the details. She tried to bring Sophie into the conversation, but to no avail.
‘I am sick of hearing about the war,’ she complained. ‘It’s all anyone wishes to talk about these days. Why can’t they wait until it starts? If it does, that is. Nothing could be more horrid.’
What could her hearers say to her that would not distress her the more?
Jack said, ‘Not everything takes second place to the coming war, Sophie, although it is not surprising that everyone is obsessed by it. You must allow me to escort you, Miss Marietta and Miss Percival to the theatre before we leave, and we can forget war and its pains while we are there. I hear that Edwin Booth’s acting is so remarkable that he would put his London rivals to shame were he to visit England.’
He could see at once that this was not at all what Sophie wanted to hear. An evening at the theatre which included Marietta would be no fun at all. Why did he wish to drag her along?
‘It is too bad,’ she complained. ‘Just when I came to Washington, too. None of my cousins had to compete with a war.’
‘On the other hand,’ Jack said with a smile, ‘it’s most likely that if it were not for the coming war then Alan, Charles and I would never have visited the States.’
‘There is that,’ she admitted. ‘But you will not be staying in Washington long, I understand. Do you have to leave so soon?’
‘Not so soon as Alan and Charles, but soon enough, I fear. All the more reason, then, for us to enjoy ourselves now.’
‘You could come with us to the Wades’ soirée this evening, perhaps,’ she said eagerly. ‘They would be sure to welcome you.’
‘Alas, we are all invited tonight to a great official jamboree in my brother’s honour at Willard’s. It would be tactless if I were not to attend, seeing that they made such a point of inviting us all, so I fear that I must decline your kind offer.’
‘Oh, your duty again,’ said Sophie glumly. ‘Do you always do it?’
‘Not always, I must admit—but on this occasion I have to. One does not insult one’s hosts—particularly when Mr Welles has promised to write me a letter of recommendation to Mr John Ericsson in New York.’
‘Oh, how splendid,’ exclaimed Marietta. ‘We don’t want to lose you, but you cannot snub Mr Welles after being given such a remarkable opportunity.’
‘No, indeed,’ agreed Jack. ‘I shall be sure to return to Washington when my time with him is over—but you must understand, Miss Sophie, that I cannot give you a firm date for that.’
‘The war, again, I suppose,’ moaned Sophie. ‘But we shall expect to see you before you leave the States.’
‘That is one promise, above all others, which I shall keep,’ he told them gravely. ‘Meantime, I suggest that we all meet tomorrow morning to go for the ride which we have been promising ourselves since we first met.’
Excited agreement followed from Sophie, with the proviso that she be allowed to accompany them in the carriage.
‘I do not like horses, nor do they like me,’ she declared. Marietta’s pleasure was muted but was none the less sincere.
Later, while changing into his evening togs before visiting Willard’s, it was Marietta’s smile of pleasure for him when he had bowed his farewells which he recalled, not Sophie’s.
Alan had been correct in saying that they would all have thick heads in the morning. The dinner had been informal and had included not only most of the men on the afternoon’s committee but also outsiders like the British newspaper reporter Russell. He was the war correspondent of The Times, already famous—some said infamous—for his frank and fearless reporting of the Crimean War, which had enraged the British Government of the time.
He joined them in the hard drinking at the bar after the dinner was over. He knew Alan, and his big, bearded face shone with pleasure when he shook hands with him. He smiled knowledgeably at the dead men littering the table.
He had one of the backwoods Congressmen with him: a big red-faced fellow who stared hard at Alan’s urbane splendour and said nastily, ‘Sparring at Clanton’s gym this morning, were you—for so he told me—doing your diplomatic nonsense at the Hill this afternoon and drinking here tonight? What a busy old English gentleman you are! What other talents do old English gentlemen possess?’
He had been drinking hard and his tone was insulting.
Alan looked quizzically at him. ‘As many as youngish Yankee gentlemen like yourself, I suppose.’
‘If you weren’t an old man, Dilhorne, I’d test your talents in the ring myself.’
‘Not so old as all that, and if you wish to do so do not let my years deter you, Mr Whatever-your-name-is.’
‘Macdonald, Dilhorne. My ancestors were kings in Scotland when yours were Saxon peasants.’
‘Oh, do not dignify me, or yourself,’ drawled Alan, who was beginning to feel the effects of heavy drinking, although no one would have guessed it. ‘My father was a transported felon—your ancestors were doubtless Viking pirates, so there’s not a pin to choose between us. Your ancestors narrowly missed the block and mine the noose.’
He leaned forward and grasped Macdonald by the wrist.
‘Come, sir, what shall it be, arm-wrestling or the ring? I am ready for either. Not for honour, I dare swear, for if the truth were known, neither of us possesses any. When we are done, Mr Russell may well sell this story to The Times, and share the profits between us.’
Jack watched Alan and then caught Charles’s eye on him. Charles had drunk little, and Jack not much more. Charles’s expression was curious: it was one of gleeful anticipation. Jack thought that there was more to this than met the eye. He knew that it was Alan’s last semi-official appointment before he left for home.
A frontiersman Senator who was barely conscious leaned forward and clapped Alan on the back. ‘Beat him at the arm-wrestling, suh, and I’ll take you on next. Lose, and you must guarantee to back the North when you reach home.’
‘And if I win, what do I get?’ grinned Alan. ‘No, don’t tell me, it might be an incentive for me to lose.’
‘So noted,’ Charles murmured under his breath so that Jack could scarcely hear him.
‘Life was never like this in the House of Commons,’ whispered Alan to Russell when Macdonald, his face eager, pulled out one of the tables and sat down on one side of it, waiting for Alan to join him on the other.
Frantic betting had already begun. The more sober and senior of the party, both so far as alcohol and status were concerned, looked disapprovingly on. One man said to Alan, ‘Do not humour him,’ but Alan shook his head.
‘Dare I believe that you are actually agreeing to take part in this frontiersman’s contest?’ queried Russell of Alan, more amused than amazed.
‘Dare I not?’ returned Alan. ‘I must strive for the honour of old England, or be shamed.’
He turned to Charles. ‘You will so note, Mr Stanton.’
‘So noted,’ repeated Charles, adding, ‘Return from the contest like the old Spartan, waving your shield in triumph or being carried home on it dead.’
Jack privately thought that Macdonald had no chance of winning. He was soft and fat and Jack had seen his brother’s strength and power in the ring that morning. If the man had been talking to Clanton, he was a fool to challenge Alan.
He was right. Alan rapidly forced Macdonald’s arm down on to the table twice in succession, and no sooner had he done so than others were clamouring to have a go at him.
The frontiersman who had challenged him on the Hill that afternoon, and who was now wearing a coonskin cap, pushed the defeated Macdonald away and sat down opposite to Alan, grinning at him.
‘If you win, Englishman,’ he said, ‘I promise you a free ride at Bella Dahlgren’s house with her best girl.’
The more Puritan among the watchers closed their eyes at this, but the rest were cheering, and Russell knew that, despite what Alan had said earlier, this was one despatch which he would never write or send home, when Alan slowly defeated his new opponent after several straining minutes.
Well, it was plain that this was still a frontier society, for all its marble columns and stern Republican admonitions, thought Jack. It was not so long since Senator Charles Sumner had been brutally thrashed, without warning, in the sacred precincts of the Capitol itself, by a supposedly gentlemanly assailant.
‘Enough,’ proclaimed Alan as others strove to get at him. ‘I have urgent duties to fulfil in the morning.’
A hand plucked at Jack’s arm. ‘Are you your brother’s equal, me lad?’ A bearded face grinned at him.
Jack shook his head and refused the offered challenge. He had never seen the man before, and the room was alive with shouts and cheers and the frontiersman was demanding that Bella Dahlgren’s should be the destination of them all.
Alan picked up a bottle and began to pour spirits into his glass. ‘Bourbon for me tonight,’ he announced, drinking it down. His hearers were not to know that he rarely drank.
He saw Jack smiling at him. ‘Little brother,’ he told him, ‘you may have my ticket to Bella Dahlgren’s tonight. I’m too far gone.’ He never patronised whorehouses, but that was another thing that he wasn’t revealing.
By now the frontiersman, clutching his bottle, was on the floor, and cared little whether Alan was at Bella’s or in bed at the Envoy’s residence. The evening was not yet over, though, and before Jack and Charles manoeuvred Alan through the door he had treated them to his farewell oration, which brought the house down. Some of the spectators swore drunkenly that the cheering could be heard on the Hill.
Far gone though they both were, since even Charles had been compelled to drink to save the honour of England, Alan’s two companions walked him home between them. Russell, staggering in their rear, was carrying Alan’s stove-pipe hat and drunkenly declaiming that, ‘The best despatches never get written—and he might have had the goodness to offer me his ride at Bella’s!’
For the next few days the story of the night at Willard’s and its ending ran round Washington. Those Yankees who had not been there were at first disbelieving, then amused and finally admiring, even though the joke was on them once all of the facts—some of them much embellished in the telling—came out.
‘For it seemed,’ said one witness to it, ‘that this MP, this envoy, this fool of a Britisher, was as stiff and starched and pompous as only an aristocrat could be, with his Haw Haw speech and his formality, so that all that was left for a true Yankee was to despise him. He apparently had a friend and patron back home who was a cousin of the Queen, and by some means which baffled everyone who met him—for the man was such an effete ass for all his size—he had built up a business empire back home.
‘His other patrons, the Rothschilds, must have lost their wits for once to have anything to do with this fellow who had made every politician and every committee he had encountered privately fume with rage and indignation as he danced them about so politely, asking idiotic questions and making heavy weather of their attempts to answer him.
‘Oh, yes, he was very polite, and great on protocol, too…’ and the speaker usually ran out of breath at this point and needed a few moments to recover himself before continuing with his remarkable tale.
‘He spent his time expressing blank incomprehension when confronted by any form of good American speech which differed from his own and consequently needed to have everything carefully explained to him several times so that discussions with him went round and round…
‘Well, on his last official day in these United States a number of Senators, Congressmen and their aides had banded together to take him to Willard’s and get him royally, nay, Republicanly, drunk for his pains and in the doing gouge out of the fool what concessions to the Northern cause they could.
‘While they were doing this and he was obliging them by saying yes to everything—even in those places where he ought rightly to have been saying no—that low-life ass, Macdonald, popped up and insulted him. Before you could say Haw Haw twice, my fine English gentleman accepted his foolish challenge and set about laying everyone low at arm-wrestling, no less—and offering to take them all on in the ring into the bargain. And that was no joke, either, as Clanton later testified, and a good thing no one took up his offer.
‘To cap it all, at the end of the evening…’ and the speaker was usually near exhaustion by now, between amusement and indignation ‘…at the end of the evening, when he had drunk most of the party under the table, and he was sitting there, still conscious, but only just, Macdonald rose and proposed a toast to him. Everyone shouted “Speech! Speech!” so he got up—no one knew how—and gave them the sort of grin a Plains Indian gives you just before he takes your scalp.
‘After that, he favoured them with a wickedly accurate impersonation of Mr Lincoln and half the politicians he had met, being particularly good when imitating the frontiersman, who by now was lying unconscious in the corner and who was bitter the next day about having missed this part of the fun.
‘So much for his not being able to understand what everyone had been saying to him! At the end he had reverted to his normal voice—if he has one, that is—which was quite unlike that of the man whose plummy tones had bamboozled Washington for the past three weeks. “Finally, fellow legislators and honest Americans,” he said, “This imitation of an aristocrat invites you all to a similar evening in London where I promise to wine and dine you as royally as you have feasted me tonight. I also promise to gouge as many concessions out of you as you have tried to wrench from me. What old English gentleman could say more? Mr Stanton, you will so note.”
‘Mad, drunken cheering followed. “Come back and settle here—you’re wasted in the old country,” Macdonald bawled at him. Half the company could have killed him for tricking them and the other half wanted to hire him so that he could do his tricks for them.’
This was what Russell did not send back to London and The Times. After Jack and Charles had struggled Alan into his bed, Jack asked, ‘What did all that mean? What were you “so noting” all evening, for God’s sake?’
‘Oh, that’s your brother’s shorthand, a parody of a businessman ordering a clerk to take notes, only he means you to be aware that he’s about to do something wicked and you’re not to show surprise and give him away.’
‘He’s our father’s worst,’ said Jack, shaking his head, ‘and I don’t envy him his head tomorrow morning, and I don’t much fancy mine, either. Did you see their faces at the end—particularly when he took off the coonskin-hatted gentleman?’
‘Yes, and whatever will the British Envoy make of it?’ Charles grinned. ‘He’s driven him and all his officials mad, too. The Envoy couldn’t imagine why they’d sent out such an ass. Now he knows why. Alan has given nothing away and he’s promised them nothing while learning as much as he could of what they didn’t want him to know!
‘What’s more, he’s signed off in such a fashion that they’re aware that they’ve been fooled, and that we can be as hard as they are—and so he’s ensured mutual respect. “It’s a frontier society,” he told me on the boat over, “and I’m giving a great deal of thought to how to deal with it. The diplomacy of the European monarchic states will be of no use in Washington, that’s for sure.”
‘In the end he played them at their own game—and that they understand. I think that only Senator Hope had an inkling of what lay behind all the flimflam. Beneath all the charm he’s a hard man, and no mistake.’
Jack nodded. He’d seen little of his brother since he’d become a man himself, but he was shrewd enough to know that what Charles had told him was true. He wondered whether he possessed his share of the Dilhornes’ cunning and decided ruefully that he did.
The three of them woke up the next morning with the thickest of thick heads—Alan’s being the worst. None the less, they all honoured their promise to ride with Marietta after breakfast.
Alan groaned at the mere idea. ‘I don’t recover from these sessions so quickly as I used to. You young things—’ and he gestured at Jack and Charles ‘—have the advantage of me now.’
Jack thought that Marietta looked superb in her bottle-green riding habit and her saucy little black hat with its high crown and silver buckle on its scarlet band. Its severity suited her and she controlled her mount as though she had been born in the saddle.
He and Charles galloped off with her, leaving Alan to trot gently beside Sophie’s carriage. He was gallantry itself, talking nonsense to her to divert her attention from the other three, particularly when, later on, they dismounted and walked their horses along, talking animatedly. She was pleasant enough to him, but the sight of Jack, Charles and Marietta together served only to increase her dislike for Marietta.
‘My father has asked me to invite you all to a dinner party on Saturday evening,’ Marietta was telling them. ‘He understands that Jack’s brother will be leaving for England soon and that Charles will be journeying South. Unfortunately, Sophie will not be able to be present. She is off tomorrow to stay for a short time with another of our cousins who has a summer home on the outskirts of the city.’
Not unfortunate at all, was Charles’s inward response, while Jack, who had once seen Sophie as a pretty girl well worth cultivating, was only too happy that it was she who would be absent, and not Marietta, who fascinated him more every time he met her. Both he and Charles expressed their pleasure at the invitation since they had come to respect the Senator, not only for the pleasure of his company, but for his shrewdness, both in the political and the social sense.
Alan, watching Sophie’s expression while she was jealously staring after the other three, was thoughtful when the party was reunited and they all rode back together. Part of him was thinking of his journey home to Eleanor and his children by way of New York and ‘the steep Atlantic stream’, as an old poet had it, and the other part was preoccupied by Jack’s relationship with the two Hope cousins and its possible consequences.