“That would please me inordinately. For one thing, we’re going to have a dance, for the county people, you know, and it would dispel the rumors that you yourself are part of a criminal gang if you were to attend.”

“Is that what they say?”

“The news gets very garbled on its way south, you know. And I may put it about that we’re disappointed in how it all ended for you, of course.” Edmund smiled, a spark in his eyes. “Anyhow—business? That’s why you’re in the building?”

“Yes. It’s been an interesting day.”

Not long before, Lenox had read an article in Blackwood’s that mentioned that the word “abracadabra” originally meant “I create what I speak” in the Hebrew language, a magician’s word that had migrated into English. This piece of trivia had been running through his mind all day, because so much of what he had done was to create money out of nothing—out of mere speech.

He had taken eighteen short meetings that day, he told Edmund, with eighteen friends and allies from his days in Parliament. (Twenty had been scheduled, but two Members had been detained elsewhere.) What all eighteen had in common was that they were men of business, and to each of them Lenox had proposed the same idea: that their firm pay an annual fee to retain the services of Lenox, Dallington, and Strickland on a permanent basis.

The blunt reaction of the second man he had seen, a steel manufacturer named Jordan Lee who had a great rotund belly and a thick mustache, had been typical. “Why on earth would I need to hire a detective agency?”

Lenox had been prepared for the question. “You’re familiar with the Holderness case?” he asked.

Lee grimaced. “Of course, the poor bastards.”

The year before, a quiet senior manager at Holderness had stayed ten minutes after work one evening, opened the company safe, and walked away with nearly four thousand pounds in European certificates of stock. It emerged that he had also been embezzling from the company for years. The two brothers in command of the firm, Andrew and Joseph Holderness, were living in sharply reduced personal circumstances as they attempted to pay off their debts and set the business back on its feet.

“A stitch in time, you know, Lee,” said Lenox. “We have a dedicated accountant who will do a quarterly examination of your books for fraud, detectives to do thorough investigations into any person you wish to hire—and of course in the case of any actual crime, theft, or violence, we’ll be on the spot immediately.”

Lenox saw Lee thinking. It was a good offer in general, he thought—though the accountant was, as yet, pure fiction—but the word that had most intrigued him was one thrown in with careful carelessness, “violence.” It was what the industrialists like Lee had most to fear.

“How much are you asking for the service?” he asked.

“Six hundred pounds per annum. We’ll keep a record of what we do for you, and charge more or return some of that at the end of the year based on our charges. Our own records are scrupulous, of course. I would be happy to show you a sample.”

For a moment the question hung in the balance—but then, perhaps because of his long acquaintance with Lenox, perhaps because six hundred pounds was a substantial but not a shocking sum, Lee nodded and put his hand out. “I think it’s a clever idea, now you explain it. We’ve been losing a mint simply from scrapped steel that’s gone missing. Your people could start there.”

Not all of Lenox’s meetings were so successful, of course. Eight of the men declined outright, two had, rather vexingly, already hired LeMaire to do the same job, and three others said they would think it over, in a hard genial tone that made it clear they wouldn’t.

In a way it had been a painful day for Lenox, who was so used to his own pride, so long accustomed to the luxury of financial independence, still adherent to old standards of what a gentleman ought to do. He had been inculcated with a disdain for business, for trade. These men, in fact, were those who looked up to him, to his life with his aristocratic wife, and in some of their faces he saw a subtle sense of reversal, perhaps even reprisal. That had been difficult.

And yet in another way it had been thrilling. Business was a kind of game, and for the first time he saw why men like Monomark chose to play it.

Better still, after he had finished his drink with Edmund, he could return to the offices with his news: that he had found five new clients that day, who would pay a total of seven hundred and fifty pounds into their accounts that very week, their first quarterly payments.

“Three thousand pounds for the year, then?” said Dallington uncertainly.

Polly repeated the words, too, but her voice was entirely free of uncertainty. She was beaming, with a look of pure relief and joy on her face, like a gambler who’s put his last shilling on a long shot and seen it run first through the gate. “Three thousand pounds!” she said. “Are you sure? It’s a fortune!”

Lenox smiled. “I’m sure.”

“Not that I doubt your word—only seven hundred and fifty pounds is already twice as much as every farthing we’ve brought in till now put together, Charles! My God, I could kiss you!”

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

The next month was one of frantic activity at Chancery Lane, all three of them putting in many long, grueling days of labor, so that the first weeks of May passed in a haze of early mornings and late nights. It was Polly who took the situation in hand, hiring, the day after Lenox’s meetings, an accountant, a new clerk, and a new detective named Atkinson. He was a fifty-year-old man who had recently retired from the Yard in search of a better salary, tall and solid with salt-and-pepper hair. He would be the person who went to the firms for a monthly checkup and interacted directly with the managers.

“They’ll prefer that type of fellow,” she said confidently after Atkinson had left his interview. “You and Dallington are too refined—and of course I’m a woman, which would never do.”

Atkinson was an immediate success, as was the new clerk, King. On the other hand, the accountant arrived at the offices in a state of impressive inebriation on his third morning, and they fired him on the spot, replacing him later that afternoon with a meek chap named Tomkins, who turned out to be splendidly intelligent. In his very first week he found a clerical error that saved Jordan Lee, the steel magnate, nearly seventy pounds.

At the same time, for some half-mysterious reason, the business coming in for Lenox, Dallington, and Polly increased. Small cases, mostly, many to do with minor sums of money, though some genuinely enigmatic ones were mixed in as well. Lenox spent three sleepless days helping a butcher in Hampstead recover a kidnapped child, who turned out, in the end, to have been taken by a local woman who imagined that the butcher had scorned her.

Lenox described the influx of cases to Lady Jane one evening, as they sat out upon the small stone terrace that overlooked the back garden at Hampden Lane, the pleasant call of birds in the air, a light breeze making it cooler than it had been for most of the week. Between them was Sophia. She sat on a small wooden horse and rocked back and forth, murmuring some very important words to herself, lost, as so often, in a private and apparently vivid world. It was one of Lenox’s favorite things about his daughter—the intensity and liveliness of her interior life. What on earth was she saying to the horse?

“Why do you think more cases have come in recently?” Lady Jane asked.

“I’m not certain,” he said. “Perhaps the establishment of LeMaire’s firm has raised awareness that such a thing as a detective agency exists—and that means ours, too. A rising tide, and all that. Or I suppose it may be that after the murders, our names appeared in the papers often enough to be noticed.”