As for Dallington—it was not conceivable that Lenox could have had a stauncher ally than Dallington. At every meeting the young lord came in and swore to the heavens that Lenox had solved his cases for him, guaranteed the payment from their clients through his brilliance, single-handedly saved him from the embarrassment of an unsolved matter.

These were lies, and each week Lenox expected his friend’s eyes to fall slightly, his support to falter in its vehemence, if not in its content. It never happened. An outsider would have sworn from Dallington’s testimony in the meetings that only Lenox’s grim determination and hard work kept the firm together.

The subject rarely arose between them. “Shall I put more money into the books myself?” Lenox asked in a moment of weakness one evening.

“Absolutely not,” said Dallington shortly. “These others don’t see how rich you’re going to make us all.”

Lenox had been so affected by this blind stubborn friendship that he had turned away, unable to respond.

Finally, after ten weeks, Lenox told Lady Jane about his troubles. Afterward he wished he had done it sooner.

It was over breakfast. Lenox’s wife was the daughter of an earl and the sister of another, and therefore somewhat higher born than her husband, though they had been raised in and out of each other’s houses, ancient friends. For many years they had lived side by side in London, each the other’s closest confidant; then finally, with what seemed to them both in retrospect unforgivable slowness, they had realized how much they were in love. She was a pretty but plain woman, her dark hair in loose curls, more simply attired than the brocaded and upholstered women of her social sphere tended to be—a blue dress, a gray ribbon at the waist, that was her preference. Motherhood had rather softened her acute, forgiving eyes. Certainly it had added lines near their edges, lines Lenox loved for the thousand smiles they recalled to him: a life together, their love deepening as the unmarked days drew forward into each other.

Generally as they ate breakfast Lenox and Lady Jane read the newspapers, exchanging stories from them now and then when something struck one of them. That morning, as he stared at a plate of cooling eggs and kippers, Lenox couldn’t bring himself to read. Right away she noticed.

“Are you all right, Charles?”

He looked up at her from his hands and smiled. “It’s harder than I expected, the new firm.”

She frowned. “How do you mean?”

“I haven’t helped, you know. I’m the worst of the four of us.”

She sat forward on her chair, engaged immediately, concerned. “At your work? That’s impossible.”

“Nobody has come in to hire me.” It was hard for him even to say these words, or to look at his wife as he did. The truth was that he had never failed at anything in this way. “LeMaire is unhappy about it.”

She crossed the table and came to his side, her hands taking up his own, her face consumed by sympathy. “I have wondered why you seemed unhappy. I had worried—worried that you missed Parliament.”

“No, no,” said Lenox. “Not that.”

“You must give it time, Charles.”

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Yet he felt better for telling her. He had long since forfeited that adolescent urge to seem perfect to other people, to show no outward flaw in himself—but it was hard to admit that he had tried his best at something and been unsuccessful, even to Jane, perhaps especially to Jane. Her own life was effortless, or so it seemed: She was one of the leading arbiters of London society, the writer of a small, mildly successful book for children that had been much treasured and feted by her friends, a mother of impeccable judgment. In the last months this perfection had worn on him, but when he saw her face now, he knew he had been wrong to keep his unhappiness to himself.

Or so he thought. That afternoon a client came in for Lenox, a young servant with a sister he wished traced into the colonies; and not much later another, the president of a society for the preservation of cats who was persuaded that her offices were being surveilled. Lenox thought of declining both cases, but he didn’t have the heart to inform Jane that he had seen through her act of charity. Besides, each problem was real enough, by whatever obscure back channels she had located it, and by whatever means she had persuaded these clients to come to Lenox—and in truth, though it was likely his own money they brought him, the firm could use it. Neither matter took more than a day, and each brought in a few guineas. He thought the pity that they represented might kill him.

CHAPTER FOUR

One evening at the beginning of that April, Lenox and his friend Thomas McConnell, a physician at the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, sat in Lenox’s study in Hampden Lane. They usually passed one or two evenings a week in each other’s company, either at their houses or in one of the clubs on Pall Mall, drinking, smoking, and talking. McConnell was a tall, rangy Scotsman, rather weather-beaten but still handsome.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” said Lenox at a lull in the conversation, “what do you think of a teaspoon of brandy for a child as its milk teeth are coming in, to help it sleep?”

“Is Sophia sleeping badly?” asked McConnell.

Lenox’s daughter was two. “She is, the poor soul.”

“You only need to freeze a ring of milk for her to suck on. That will numb her gums. As for brandy, I’m amazed at you, Charles!”

“Our own nurses did it for us, Jane’s and mine—as they did for you, I don’t doubt.”

McConnell smiled. “Yes, but they lived in a dark age of physic.”

“Dark, perhaps, but effective.”

“Well, I cannot recommend alcohol for a child, I cannot, though I have seen chimney sweeps of eight and nine drink half-pints of gin to start the day. If you had studied the necrotic tissue of the liver of the average vagrant’s cadaver as I have, you would hesitate to drink brandy yourself, a full-grown man.”

“I consider it one of the achievements of my life that I have never studied the necrotic tissue of the liver of the average vagrant’s cadaver.”

“Has the child been keeping you up at night?”

“We hear her. Sometimes Jane goes to see her, though most often it falls to Mrs. Adamson.” This was Sophia’s nurse. “To be perfectly honest, it may be she that needs the brandy more than any of us, but she’s a member of one of these temperance churches.”

“They’re doing wonderful things in the slums, some of them,” said McConnell.

“I don’t doubt it. Hers is called St. Luke’s, as she’s told me often enough.”

“That’s one of the ones I mean. Perhaps I ought to speak to her. She may have come across some case suitable for the hospital, and not realized there was any place to send them.” Great Ormond Street took children to the age of thirteen, at no fee—all of them gravely ill. McConnell had only started working there recently, and Lenox had never known him happier. “In fact, is she here now?”

Lenox was about to suggest that they call for the nurse when a sixth sense, the kind that one develops after many years of inhabiting the same rooms, living within the same beams and bricks, told him that there was someone at the front door. Even as the thought came to him the bell sounded.

A moment later Kirk appeared. “Inspector Nicholson is in the hall, sir.”

Lenox frowned and looked at McConnell, who raised his eyebrows. The doctor knew the Yard’s generalized intolerance of the new agency. “You’d better tell him I’m not here,” said Lenox.

“Yes, sir.” Kirk hesitated. “Though I fear, sir, that he may have seen the light on in your study from the street. He might doubt my word.”

“He will have to live with that doubt.”

“Very good, sir,” said Kirk, and withdrew.