Of course, though, it was difficult to take much pleasure in the attendance when set off forward and to the left, in the specially wide pews where the local lord must have taken his place on Sundays, was Jenkins’s family: Madeleine; two small boys; a baby girl in a white lace dress and matching bonnet, blessedly unaware, for now, of what she had lost.

After the service was over, the people in the church made their way outside and stood on the steps again. The traditional funeral procession began. First a long series of empty carriages passed down the avenue outside, each, including Lenox’s own, sent by its owner as a mark of respect; after the carriages a line of five deaf-mutes dressed in black and red carried long wands, men who hired themselves out for funerals such as this one every day of the week; then the casket itself came, borne by a dozen pallbearers. Lenox looked among their faces and saw several men who worked at Scotland Yard.

Last was another carriage. Accompanied by a few ancient relatives, Madeleine Jenkins and her children stepped into it. They would follow the convoy to a cemetery nearby for the interment.

As she went, the bells of the church began to ring, thirty-nine times in this case, one for each year of Jenkins’s life, and then nine solemn strikes of the largest one, the tenor, to send the departed man on his way to his God.

The crowd on the steps watched silently until the final carriage was out of sight, and then breathed a collective exhalation, which could hardly be helped from bearing a slight air of relief. That was over, at any rate. By ones and twos most of the men and women began to get into a line of waiting cabs. There would be ham and bread and ale at Jenkins’s house now—a few hours to celebrate the man, with quiet stories and jokes, after these somber hours of grief at his death.

Lenox and Dallington decided it would be quicker to walk. The house—Treeshadow, Lenox recalled—wasn’t far, and it was a lovely spring day. They’d lost Nicholson, who was of course among dozens of his own daily colleagues on an occasion such as this one.

Dallington lit a cigarette. “You won’t find a more Christian fellow than me, but I can’t stand a funeral.”

“Really? I find it comforting.”

“I don’t mind the hymns. I just don’t think anyone should be allowed to talk. It always seems like so much hocus-pocus.”

“Hax pax max deus adimax,” said Lenox, and smiled.

“What on earth are you trying to say?”

“That’s where the word ‘hocus-pocus’ comes from. It’s a nonsense phrase that traveling magicians used to say to impress people as they did their tricks. Sounded enough like Latin, I suppose. I know it because my brother used to say it to me when I was four or five and we were arguing. It always scared the devil out of me. As he knew.”

“Edmund did that? I can’t imagine it.”

“Small boys are dirty fighters. Tell me, though, how are Polly’s cases coming along? You were able to help her?”

“There’s still a great deal more to do this evening,” said Dallington, though he didn’t look as if the prospect of the late night’s work gave him as much displeasure as it might have in other circumstances. “But I tell you, she’s a marvel. LeMaire’s a fool to leave. If Polly has anything to do with it we’ll be minting money by New Year’s. Every one of these cases came to her by a reference from a previous customer, and I think every one of the people she’s helping now will refer her to a dozen more.”

“What are the cases, specifically?” asked Lenox.

As they strolled on in the soft sunlight they discussed these—many of them small domestic matters, worth a pound or two to the firm, but in aggregate, they agreed, creating something more valuable: a reputation. There was the woman in Kensington whose post kept disappearing after it was delivered, the lost dog in Holborn, the Oxford Street tearoom whose owners suspected their cashier was stealing from them—but dearly hoped she wasn’t, because she was their beloved daughter. Small or large, Polly handled all of these matters with intense dedication, Dallington said.

They neared Treeshadow after a little while, identifiable from a distance by the great bustle outside of it. When they arrived at the house Dallington discarded his cigarette.

Lenox stopped him with a hand. “John, before we go in—I only mean to stay for twenty minutes, and then I should be off. You must stay longer for both of us, if you don’t mind, and then you ought to return to Chancery Lane to help Polly.”

“Where are you going?”

“Those nuns are going to tell us what they know once and for all. Preferably this very day.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

If an alert Londoner had been asked to pinpoint the precise geographical center of his city’s aristocratic society, in that month of that year of that century of English life, after a little hesitation he might have pointed to a slender street in the West End, only six houses long and none of them impressively large. It was called Cleveland Row.

Drop a fellow in this ostensibly unremarkable little corridor, and he was guaranteed to be within a minute’s walk of a title, of a fortune, of a beauty—and sometimes of all three united within a single body. At its east end the street opened onto the corner of St. James’s Street and Pall Mall, which were lined with the cavernous and sumptuous gentlemen’s clubs of London; at its west end it let onto the pathways of Green Park, which offered a direct approach, not three minutes’ walk, to Buckingham Palace. The Row backed onto Clarence House, where the Prince of Wales lived, and the Queen’s own chapel next to that; it looked forward to the Earl of Spencer’s chalk-colored mansion, where the great pageant of London society held its weekly gatherings.

Cleveland Row was Lenox’s destination, as he drove away from Jenkins’s house half an hour later in a cab. (His own carriage was still in the funeral procession, now heading to the cemetery.) There were few places he felt more at home. It was a ten-minute walk from Hampden Lane, where he and Jane lived, it was half a block from several clubs to which he belonged, including his favorite, the Athenaeum, and he’d visited Spencer House only the week before.

He had the cab stop at a sprightly brick residence with bright green shutters. He paid, stepped down, and rang at the bell. The house’s windows were glimmering with light, and after only a moment a butler answered.

“Charles Lenox, to see Father Hepworth,” said the visitor. “Here is my card. Is he receiving?”

“Please come in, sir,” said the butler. He gestured toward a small brittle chair upholstered in red velvet. “If you would care to sit while I ascertain whether Father Hepworth is occupied.”

Lenox waited in the small entrance hall, occasionally peering down the red-carpeted hallway the butler had followed upstairs. Even this little room was dense with beautiful objects: a convex mirror in a burnished brass frame, a stone urn carved with cherubim (and stuffed unceremoniously with umbrellas), small paintings of religious scenes in gilt frames.

After a few moments there was a footstep on the staircase, and when Lenox half-rose, he saw that it was not the butler again but Hepworth himself. “Lenox!” he said. “What an unexpected pleasure! Come up, won’t you? I was just about to have tea.”

“I’m pleased I caught you,” said Lenox.

“On the contrary, the pleasure is mine. Come along, this way.”

The upstairs room into which Hepworth led Lenox was decorated in much the same style as the entrance hall, though the objects here were grander in scale, including a row of magnificently ostentatious reliquaries along one wall, all of them bejeweled, some of them carved, some of them painted. One of Holbein’s portraits of Sir Thomas More (a great hero to Catholics, of course—he had died rather than grant Henry the Eighth permission to divorce) hung near the fireplace.