A Stranger in Mayfair (22 page)

He had just rushed home from Parliament and changed. The immemorial practice of the House was to convene in mid afternoon and go late into the night; on the face of it an impractical schedule, until one remembered that there was a great deal of work done in the morning and early afternoon to prepare for the later assembly. In fact the morning work was perhaps more important, and now that they were just finished debating the Queen’s Speech the House would be only lightly populated for the rest of the evening.

“I wanted to remind you before I retire, sir, to pay special attention to Percy Field, the Prime Minister’s personal secretary.”

“Surely you’ll be coming?” said Lenox. “You’re invited, you know.”

Suddenly there was a pained look on Graham’s face, and Lenox realized that to be a guest where just weeks before he had been a butler would be too awkward, too abrupt—even too painful. “I fear not, sir. At any rate, your attention, or perhaps Lady Lenox’s, would be far more significant than mine.”

There was a ring at the bell, and Graham bowed very slightly, a habit of his former profession that still hadn’t left him, and withdrew.

“Who the hell wants to be first?” muttered Lenox to nobody in particular, setting down his punch to greet whoever it was. He heard Lady Jane’s quick footsteps on the stairs and smiled, imagining her sentiments—similar to his own—on early arrivals to a party.

Presently Kirk came down the hallway with someone who was in fact a welcome guest: Edmund.

“Oh, hurrah,” said Lady Jane. “I worried it was someone I would have to speak to. I’ll be down again shortly.”

“I call that a greeting!” Edmund laughed, and as she went out he said, “Well—if I’m not somebody one must speak to, I’ll sit in the corner and have my punch alone.”

“Thank goodness you’ve come—I don’t want to talk to the Archbishop of Winchester. How are Molly and the boys?”

“Molly sends me letters from the country—from the house—that I don’t mind telling you make me weep with frustration to be in this city all the time. I haven’t been on a horse in two weeks, Charles. Two weeks!”

They had both grown up in Lenox House, Edmund’s seat now, as the baronet, and Charles spent most of his holidays there. “Any word on the Ruxton farm? Is the son taking it over?”

“No, he’s selling out to open a chemist’s shop in town. It’s a relief—both of them, father and son, have been devilish. Rest in peace,” Edmund added obscurely.

The farms on the land were a source of income for Edmund—Charles had been left money outright, through their mother—and he had to deal frequently with discontented tenants. “What will you do with the land?”

“Southey, on the next parcel of land over, wants to expand. I’ll give him a fair rent to take the Ruxton land—about ten acres, I think—because he doesn’t need the house on them. A hellish little house, you remember.”

“Oh, yes. Mother used to go sit and teach the Ruxton children how to read, though she never got any thanks for it.”

Edmund snorted. “Well, hopefully the son can read well enough, or his new shop will poison half the people we know.”

“What about the boys?”

A glow came into Edmund’s face. “Teddy is owed a lashing for having candy at church, but I shan’t give it to him. Church is boring enough as a child without candy—oh, the door!”

Soon the party was crowded with incoming guests, Lady Jane greeting them, Kirk taking whole double armfuls of shawls and coats here and there, the punch bowl quickly shallowing down. There were small groups forming around the archbishop and around an extremely amusing man named Griggs, a clubman and a wastrel who nonetheless was held to be the most enjoyable conversationalist in London. Edmund and Lenox, deep in their own conversation, broke off when two very important Members came in from the House, looking extremely gratified to redeem their first invitations; this was always an exclusive event, not generally overpolitical in its composition.

Percy Field came in, Lenox noticed, tall, thin, and austere, and soon experienced the same gratification. For a while, fifteen seconds or so, he stood uncomfortably in the doorway. Just as Lenox was going to greet him, however, the Duchess of Marchmain beat him to it. In truth she was more of a cohost than Charles was at these events.

“Can I find you a drink?” she said to Field, as he was stammering out an introduction.

He was both pleased and nonplussed by this sudden intimacy with nobility (“Why—Duchess—no—I couldn’t—ah—yes—punch would be lovely”) and his stern visage, with its rather pompous chin, flushed with the excitement of met expectations. Lenox smiled.

Edmund came over, mouth full. “This is quite nice, actually. Have you tried the crab?”

“Not yet. Generally I wait until the party’s over to eat—there’s so much food left Jane has it for days.”

“By the way, that case—Ludo Starling. Is it true the butler did it?”

“Keep it quiet, but I don’t think so.” Lenox lowered his voice to a whisper. “In fact there’s some suspicion that it was Ludo’s son Paul, though I’m not convinced of that either.”

Edmund’s eyes grew wide. “His son! Never!”

Charles nodded. “We’ll see—at any rate it wasn’t the butler. Be grateful you only have to fret about candy in church.”

Edmund shook his head. “I don’t envy the boy anyway, having Starling for a father—he loves cards and drinking, and no chance of much attention when you compete with those.”

Lenox froze. Something had slotted into place in his brain, but he couldn’t quite see what it was.

“Charles?”

“Just a minute—I need—excuse me.” With a look of deep distraction Lenox left his brother, then left the sitting room altogether, with its gay hum of conversation, and ran into his silent study.

There was rain tapping on the windows, and for ten minutes Lenox stood in front of them, gazing at the wet, shining stones of Hampden Lane and thinking.

Edmund’s comment about Ludo Starling’s faults as a father had raised some possibility in his mind.

Suddenly he remembered what Mrs. Clarke had said that morning.

He needed someone. A real father would have protected him. That’s what he needed—he should have had a real father. Ludovic—Mr. Starling—he could have been that, when I entrusted my poor Freddie with him.

Just as that thought jumped into his brain, another one followed on its heels: the ring. The Starling ring, with
LS
and
FC
engraved inside of it.

A real father would have protected him
.

Ludo Starling was Frederick Clarke’s father.

Chapter Thirty-Six

A whole cloud of associations and small incidents had sent forth this lightning bolt. They were separately inconclusive but together powerful. Foremost in Lenox’s mind was the ring.

It was exactly the kind of ring that Lenox’s father had given Edmund long ago, when he turned twenty-one. Each ring had an element of its family’s crest embossed on it—a griffin for the Starlings, and for the Lenoxes a lion. Each was meant to be worn on the smallest finger of the left hand, but rarely came out of a locked case. Engraved inside Lenox’s father’s ring had been his initials, and now there were Edmund’s opposite it; inside Starling’s old ring were
LS
and
FC
, for Ludovic Starling and Frederick Clarke. Father and son.

That wasn’t all, though; something ineffable in Mrs. Clarke’s tone told Lenox he was right. Pacing for some time along the length of his library, the din of the party for background noise, he at last stood still and then threw himself onto the sofa. What had it been? A sense of betrayal, perhaps, or anger at Ludo. She didn’t
suspect
Ludo—he was an old love—but she blamed him.

And she had called him Ludovic! She had quickly checked herself, but she had unmistakably mentioned him by his first name.

Then, in the dark workings of his mind, he remembered another fact. She had come from Cambridge, and Ludo had once lived in Cambridge—at Downing, where Alfred was a student now. They were roughly the same age, Mrs. Clarke and Ludo Starling, and she—she was still quite striking. Not beautiful or soft or even very feminine, like Elizabeth Starling, but a woman with whom a gentleman of a certain kind could undoubtedly fall in love.

She still had no husband, Clarke being perhaps a fiction invented as she went off and had the child on her own somewhere private, with Ludo’s money. What had she done? Sent her fictional husband off with the army and had him fictionally killed?

Lenox smacked his head—Ludo’s money. “Of course,” he muttered.

There hadn’t been any uncle’s inheritance. What kind of London housemaid had an uncle rich enough to see her retire upon his death? She had bought her pub with Starling money, and raised Clarke with Starling money, too. It all made so much sense.

Dallington was due to come to the party but hadn’t arrived yet when Lenox retreated to his library. Now he went down the hallway, back toward the lively noise, to see if he could find his apprentice.

“There you are,” said Lady Jane, face smiling but voice steely. “Where have you been?”

“I’m sorry—truly I’m sorry. I lost track of time. Is Dallington here?”

“You’re not leaving, are you? You can’t, Charles.”

“No—no, I shan’t. There he is. I see him. His mother is wiping something from his chin and he’s pushing her hand away—look.”

His mind racing with possibilities, Lenox went over and coughed softly behind Dallington’s back.

“Oh! There you are,” said the young man. Dressed as discriminatingly as ever, a fragrant white carnation pinned in his buttonhole, he turned to face Lenox and smiled. “It’s the worst party I ever went to, if I can be candid.”

Lenox forgot the case for a moment and frowned. “Oh?”

“Too many people I want to speak to, and I can’t imagine it will run into breakfast; I’ll be sorely disappointed when I leave that I didn’t get to speak to this one or that. There’s an art to parties—there must be boring people, too, so we don’t feel too regretful when we leave.”

Lenox laughed. “A finely paid compliment. Listen, though—about the case.”

Dallington’s eyes narrowed with interest. “Yes? Shall we go somewhere quieter?”

“We can’t, sadly—Jane—well, we can’t. But I’ve figured something strange, I think. Freddie Clarke was Ludo Starling’s natural son.”

“He was a bastard!” whispered Dallington, deeply moved. The look of astonishment on his face was gratifying. “How on earth do you reckon that?”

Lenox told Dallington quickly how this epiphany had come about. “I don’t swear by it,” he said last of all, “but I feel in my mind that it must be right. It would explain so much.”

Dallington, lost in thought, had stopped listening, but now he looked up. “I say—at the boxing club, do you remember what Willard North said?”

“Which part?”

“About—”

Lady Jane cut in then. “Charles, the Chancellor of the Exchequer is here. It’s just what I hoped for. I invited Mary to have lunch with me next week, and mentioned specially to her that I was having a Tuesday that would be very political in character, and that she should come—and bring her husband.”

The Conservative party was in at the moment—Lenox hoped not for long—and that meant that the chancellor standing in his doorway was Benjamin Disraeli. He was a tall, severe, intelligent-looking gentleman, with deep-set eyes that seemed almost predatory. He had risen to become the first or second man in his party (the Earl of Derby, though Prime Minister, was considered less brilliant in political circles) despite the considerable disadvantage of having been born Jewish. Some considered him an opportunist—his wife, Mary, was the widow of Wyndham Lewis and a very rich woman—but Lenox suspected the attribution of avarice was due perhaps in part to his ancestors’ religion.

More importantly to Lenox, he was the only man in Parliament who had balanced politics with a second career. Throughout the past decades, if less so of late, he had published a series of celebrated novels. This dual purpose made Lenox feel an affinity for the man despite their different parties; both of them had to balance two lives, two worlds.

Beyond all that, it was a tremendous thing to have him in the house. It meant that Lenox was a serious participant in the grand game of London politics, someone on the move. Disraeli wasn’t any longer a very sociable fellow; his visit here would be on people’s lips the next morning.

“That’s a thing to celebrate,” Lenox said. “With your skills of persuasion you should be in Parliament yourself, Jane.”

She smiled and walked back toward the chancellor’s wife.

Lenox made to follow her but stopped and said, “Quickly, Dallington—before I go—in a few words, say what you meant to say about the boxing club.”

“Only that I remembered something else. Do you recall that North said Clarke was always hinting that he had a rich father? ‘Drinks on father,’ or something like that? It fits with your theory.”

“I’d forgotten—you’re quite right. We’ll piece the rest together in a moment, but I must go speak to Disraeli.”

“Wait—the butcher—Paul—where do they fit into any of this?”

“I don’t know yet,” said Lenox, turning away.

As he crossed the room he crossed, too, between his professions and tried to shed the details of the case from his whirling mind. It was hard. Ludo Starling had a great deal to hide, evidently. What besides a natural son?

In Charles’s absence Edmund had greeted the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the man who might be reasonably called the second man in government and the man who ultimately would control the funds for any project Lenox ever hoped to pursue to completion.

That wasn’t the subject this evening, though, nor even politics. “How do you do, Mr. Disraeli?” said Lenox.

“Fairly; fairly. I could do with fresh air. London feels stifling.”

“You ought to come hunting at Lenox House,” said Sir Edmund. “We can find you a pony, and as for fresh air—well, we won’t bill you for it.”

“You’ll see my brother’s truer self there,” added Lenox, smiling. “His talents are wasted in the House, I realize when we hunt together.”

“His talents are not wasted in the House—he has been a positive inconvenience—but I see it was meant to be humorous. Edmund, thank you kindly. I might well accept your offer if my secretary deems it possible. As for you, Mr. Lenox, may I say welcome to the House?”