“Overplaying his hand there,” murmured Dallington.

“Inspector Jenkins warned that Mr. Lenox might find the transition from Parliament to the world of crime difficult, in particular. ‘If he offers them no more than his name, Mr. Lenox will likely be more of a burden than an aid to his new colleagues.’ As he may have been to his old ones, a parliamentary reporter for the Telegraph, James Wilde, confirms: ‘He was scored off by Disraeli, and had to leave with his tail between his legs.’”

The Telegraph was a conservative paper, and its owner, Lord Monomark, a fierce partisan and a great enemy of Charles’s allies in Parliament, so that was scarcely surprising. The comment from Jenkins was more surprising—indeed, carried a sharp personal sting.

Dallington shook his head. “He’ll regret saying that, if I know Thomas Jenkins. He’ll come round and apologize, and we’ll have a cup of tea.”

“I suppose it’s possible,” said Lenox.

Polly seemed upset—not hurt, but angry. “Why would the Yard be so dead set against us? Hasn’t Lenox above all proven that he can help them, in the last months? Haven’t all three of us—all four of us—helped them in the past?”

Just then the fourth in their quartet came in the door, beaming, apparently unaware that anything was amiss. This was LeMaire, a Frenchman with an open, warm face, rather betrayed by the impatient intelligence of his eyes. He held his gloves in one hand and slapped them against his palm happily. “My friends!” he said. “Are we ready to open our doors?”

CHAPTER THREE

The next month was harder than any of them had expected. On the day of their grand debut none of the newspaper writers had been very interested in their brass nameplate, in the vivacious young Miss Strickland, or even in Lenox’s quietly hoarded triumphs—the release of Anson told against those. The burst of positive publicity with which they had hoped to inaugurate the firm never materialized. Though for a while their names popped up in the newspapers, the slant was nearly always negative. Then they stopped receiving mention altogether; except, unfortunately, in the penny press, which adopted a gleeful gloating tone, celebrating the release of Anson in particular, one of their own, an East Ender.

Business, perhaps as a result, arrived much more slowly than they had hoped it would. Indeed, it arrived much more slowly than they could have imagined it might, even in their most pessimistic prognostications.

Despite this difficulty, for seven weeks the new office operated in a state of determined good cheer and hard work.

Then, finally, the stress told.

It was a sullen late-February morning, the sky a black-gray, as if night had never quite been persuaded to depart for day, a lingering suitor glowering after its lost prize; a freezing rain told a dull pattering tale upon the windows and the roofs, long minute after long minute, long hour after long hour. The four principals were at their customary Monday meeting, held each week to discuss new business. The head clerk, a bright young soul called Mr. Fletcher, took minutes.

“Any new business?” asked Dallington. He was tapping his small cigar against the table restlessly. In truth he wasn’t suited to the administrative elements of the operation and spent less time in Chancery Lane than any of the others, impatient when he had to pass more than an hour or two in the office.

“Two new cases,” said Polly, and described them. One was blackmail, one embezzlement.

Dallington also had a new case; LeMaire, two. The Frenchman was the leading detective within the expatriate community, among the diplomats and the foreign traders, French and German and Scandinavian. He spoke several languages, which helped. He was also popular among the fools of the English gentry, who believed only a Frenchman could make a detective, the Vidocq touch.

“And Mr. Lenox?” said Fletcher the clerk, in his springy Dorset accent.

“Nothing new,” said Lenox, as evenly as he could.

“What a surprise,” LeMaire murmured.

All five of them looked up, and Dallington started out of his chair, white-faced with anger. “What did you say?”

LeMaire looked as surprised as any of them, immediately abashed by this hint of dissatisfaction, and after a beat he stood and with great formality said, “You have my sincerest apologies for my unthinking utterance, sir,” he said, “and I will be happy to place them in writing. I spoke without thinking.”

“It’s quite all right,” said Lenox.

Dallington was nearly shaking. Polly, with a heavy sigh, interjected before he could speak. “Don’t be foolish, please, fellows. I know that none of us would willingly insult another. It’s an early morning. Sit down and we’ll talk about billings.”

The meeting resumed.

Lenox could scarcely pay attention, however, he felt so bitterly, miserably unhappy. For all four of them knew the truth: He had not brought a single case into the firm since its inception. The other three had seen their business decline, but not disappear; Polly had a reputation among the middle class and respectable lower middle class as an affordable, intelligent counsel, and still drew clients from her advertisements as Miss Strickland, which the firm had left in the papers as they had always appeared, altering only the address. Dallington had the faith of the members of his class—as Lenox once had. LeMaire’s base of clients had eroded the least.

As for Lenox: nothing. All of the referrals he and Dallington had expected to receive from the Yard had evaporated, vanished. Even Nicholson would do no more than smile his friendly smile, and tell them that the Yard was ahead of its business at the moment, in need of no help at all. This when it was known that the coroner had a stack of corpses higher than he could ever hope to handle, each of them an unsolved death, the metropolis spared from their smell only by the glacial temperature of the season.

Meanwhile Lenox’s parliamentary contacts had proved equally useless, even if they were friendlier, and whatever reputation he’d once had in London was gone, or had been distilled into Dallington’s.

How hard they had been, these seven weeks that led up to LeMaire’s comment! In a way it was a relief to have the grievance in the open. Every morning Lenox had come into the office at eight, and every evening departed at six. How the hours passed between he was hard-pressed to recall, except that there was a mechanical smile upon his face the whole time, and in his words a constant false tone of optimism. He had spent some of this period organizing his old case files and amassing new profiles of the criminals of London. He had also updated his archive of sensational literature, clipping notes on crime from newspapers that came to him from all across the world. Once or twice he had been able to add a valuable perspective on a colleague’s case, but Polly was independent, LeMaire jealous of his own work, and Dallington (who was most solicitous of his help) so rarely in the office.

All of this would have been tolerable to him were they not splitting their meager profits, and their increasing expenses, four ways.

The next Monday LeMaire was scrupulously polite when Lenox reported that he had no new cases, and the same the Monday following. But as March passed, the attitude within the office in Chancery Lane grew discernably less friendly. Soon LeMaire was stiffly polite, no more. Polly, though she was by nature a generous, warm-spirited person, and never changed in this respect to Lenox, did begin to seem downtrodden, as if she doubted that their new venture, which had begun so promisingly, had been wise. She had some small portion left over from her marriage, but she was very definitely in the business, as Lenox could not claim to be, for money, and by that measure the choice had been a bad one.