A Beautiful Blue Death (22 page)

“Let’s take this up to the lab, eh, Charles?” said McConnell, shaking the glass jar.

“Certainly.”

They spoke as they went up the stairs. It was a narrow back staircase, with cartoons from
Punch
on the walls.

“What do you know about the Pacific Trust?” Lenox asked.

“I don’t pay any attention to it.”

“Neither do I.”

“I keep our fortune beneath the floorboards.”

Lenox laughed. “Of course.”

“But I know that something happened recently.”

“My brother said so, too.”

“I couldn’t say if it was for good or bad, only that it happened.”

“It’s probably not an issue, anyway.”

They had reached the library; Lenox looked up at the familiar railing that encircled the room, fifteen feet up, and the second level of books behind it.

McConnell walked to the tables with his lab equipment. A strong smell of charcoal lingered in the air, and he said, by way of explanation, “An experiment, you know.”

“Successful?”

“Hard to say. The kit I gave you worked, did it?”

“Yes. In fact, I need another.”

McConnell nodded. He unscrewed the top of the glass jar, took a pair of tweezers, and pulled the cotton out. Then he transferred it to a waiting beaker, which he shut with a rubber stopper. He stepped back and paused.

“Let’s see,” he said.

There was a huge cabinet above the desk, perhaps thirty feet long, which Lenox had never seen opened, but McConnell opened it now, swinging out door after door after door. Inside were long rows of bottles, the majority of them marked only by a number, arranged neatly. They must have numbered in the thousands. McConnell looked for a moment and then began to walk to and fro, searching for bottles, pulling one down now and then from the other end of the room until an idea brought him back. It was exhausting to watch. By the end he had a small mountain of bottles sitting on the empty table.

He turned and grinned at Lenox. “May as well be thorough,” he said.

“Good lord, where did you get all these?”

“There’s a bit less under the floorboards because of them. But when one is passionate.”

“I understand entirely.”

“I’ve even got a bit of
bella indigo,
just a bit, although it’s two years old. Only good now for plants.”

“I know your love for botany.”

McConnell grinned again. “Well, well. Each of us has an eccentricity. Look at you, when you don’t have a case, wandering around and trying to spot Hadrian.” He pointed at the sample Lenox had given him. “Two days—or perhaps less.”

“Thank you.”

McConnell ordered the bottles to his satisfaction, and the two men walked toward the door and downstairs by the same back staircase, ducking whenever they heard women’s voices echo through the house.

T
he next evening, a Sunday, at just past six, Lady Jane and Lenox were standing in the middle of his living room while helped him affix his buttons properly, smooth down his dinner jacket, and complete all of those offices which a bachelor can occasionally find irksome but which are improved inestimably by a female hand.

Lady Jane herself was already in a plain light-blue dress that was tight around her waist and curved out like a bell below, with a black scarf tied around her neck and white kid gloves to her elbows. She always said that some beauty was offset best by complex and bright material, but that what small parcel of beauty she had was only overshadowed by it; as a consequence she dressed with as few frills as she possibly could and still be à la mode. She looked beautiful.

“We live at an odd time,” Lenox said, submitting to have his collar fixed.

“No odder than any other, surely, darling?” said Lady Jane distractedly.

“Much odder.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“For one thing, you and Barnard going to botanical gardens together.” Lenox shook his head.

She laughed. “Only one botanical garden. But what do you really mean?”

“Look at us! This ball will be the last word in everything conservative and correct, I don’t doubt, and all the unmarried girls will dance with innocent hearts, well chaperoned, and the young men by and large will behave politely and everything will be staid and proper and right, you know—much more staid and proper and right than anything was a century ago—or during the time of the great monarchs—or ever.”

“Is that so odd, Charles?” said Lady Jane.

“It is! For us to have such conservative values, values that would have constrained our most revered ancestors in their behavior?”

“I suppose.”

“But then,” said Lenox, warming to the subject, “at the same time! At the same time, the last fifty years have been revolutionary!”

“What do you mean?”

“Think, my dear, about all the reform. Parliament has granted unprecedented rights to the lower classes, unprecedented—things that would never have been dreamed of: property rights, voting rights—”

“I’m for that, though,” said Lady Jane.

“So am I, of course. But how odd a juxtaposition—”

“Finished! Go look in the glass, dear heart.”

Lenox went over to the mirror in the corner of his library and saw that she had done a very good job: his buttons were fixed, his tie was neat, and his collar was straight.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Don’t think of it. Only, you must save me a dance.”

“Must I?”

“Oh, Charles, you horrid man. Look. For all of what you’ve
been saying, you aren’t even staid and right and proper enough to assent to a lady’s request. We fall behind the age of chivalry in that area, I suppose.”

He laughed. “Of course I shall dance with you.”

She looked at him crossly. “I withdraw the offer. Edmund will do, instead.”

“Very well, but he’s used to those country dances, you know. Much more active. No doubt he’ll twirl you around, things like that.”

“Don’t be a beast, Charles.”

He laughed again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re right. May I have the first dance?” He bowed and then proffered his hand.

“You may,” she said, and curtsied, which sent both of them into gales of laughter. It seemed like yesterday that they were children, peering through the slats of the staircase at their fathers’ dances and then pretending to dance themselves, barefoot on the rugs in a dark hallway.

It was nearly six by the time they were prepared to leave and the dinner before the ball began at seven, so they sat down on Lenox’s sofa and passed the remaining minutes chatting amiably until the half-hour struck and then hurried through the cold air—Graham behind them, holding an umbrella over them to block the few flurries in the air—and into the carriage.

Now there were only a few dozen houses in London that were equipped to host a ball and of those four or five were supreme: the McConnells’, the Duke of Westminster’s, Lady Rother-mere’s, and George Barnard’s. Each house had one or two balls a year, though Toto sometimes threw three, if only, she said, to clear Thomas’s sporting equipment out of the room, for he used their ballroom as a sort of indoor playing field for everything short of polo.

But people granted that Barnard’s house was unique in one way: He could seat two hundred at table and then afterward comfortably admit several hundred more to his own vast ballroom,
which sat in the center of the first floor—above, among many other areas, Prue Smith’s bedroom. It was three hundred feet across, with light-colored wood floors. The walls were full of gold columns and huge paintings, and the ceiling was painted with the transit of Venus.

The ball would follow the usual form. Several weeks before, the women guests had received a white card, listing the dances on one side and with blank slots on the other, to fill in a partner’s name for each dance. It would be mostly quadrilles and waltzes, but while most balls had a four-person orchestra, people expected Barnard to have about a dozen musicians.

The dinner before the ball was a peculiarity, for some people sought the tickets eagerly while others cared for them not at all; at any rate, there was no consensus on their value though to be sure the lack of any invitation at all, to dinner
or
dancing, would have been devastating.

To the dinner were invited the circle of which Barnard would have liked to consider himself a member: Lenox and Lady Jane’s circle, whose de facto leaders were the Duchess Marchmain, Jane herself, and Toto, representing the three generations in descending order.

Barnard was a peculiar case. Great politicians were of course invited everywhere, but it was not clear whether he was of the first rank of politicians. Men of tremendous wealth were occasionally invited, though Barnard was unwilling to class himself with that group. But he was connected, by threads more numerous than strong, to enough of the correct people that he was sure to be invited many places and was sure to have his own invitations accepted. That is, to put it more briefly, some combination of money, birth, and power were united in him that was impossible to classify and was neither enough to disbar him from the first tier of society nor to include him fully in it—for whatever one takes that first tier to be worth.

Of one thing there was no doubt, however, and that was that fashionable London would appear tonight en masse, and when Lenox’s carriage pulled into Clarges Street he saw that it was but one of three dozen, making the street quite impassible and in some respect exhilarating, full of the excitement preceding a large well-organized party.

After some deft work by the driver and a gradual movement of the carriages, Lenox and Lady Jane were able to step onto the unfurled red carpet that led to the front door of Barnard’s house and, with just a few moments to spare, make the dinner table on time.

The people were of great interest and variety: the men belonged to the upper echelons of art, politics, science, and scholarship and the women were all either beautiful or matriarchal, with very few exceptions. The men wore dinner jackets and shining shoes and the women wore beautiful dresses, usually in gray or blue, with an occasional splash of red.

This was also a time when the symbolism of flowers was in great vogue, and all the young girls carried bouquets with private meanings. Violets meant modesty, and the girls with violets tended to look rather pinched and censorious; ivy meant fidelity, and the girls with ivy looked very happy; forget-me-nots meant truest love, and these girls looked the happiest. They all had pocket dictionaries of these meanings, and when two lovers had different dictionaries, flowers were often thrown tearfully into some poor man’s chest, to be followed by explanation and reconciliation.

For the fun of it, Lenox had once asked Toto what his favorite flowers meant, and she had very excitedly scanned her book. “Snowdrops,” she had said. “Hope, or consolation.”

Dinner was served.

Lenox, like all Harrovians since time immemorial, had been forced to read
Satyricon
in his day, and he remembered well the
delicacies at Trimalchio’s feast: the dormice dipped in honey, the roasted boar with pastry sucklings at its breast, the hollow side of meat which, when carved, released live birds into the air.

Barnard had not elected to serve such exotic fare, but his banquet was no less complete. There were to be a dozen courses, and in due time they arrived: warm onion soup, bubbling with cheese; delicate strips of hare with cranberry sauce; roasted chicken and a blood gravy; plain English mutton under a blanket of peas and onions; a broiled beefsteak in pastry; a light salad of pears and walnuts; sliced apples dipped in chocolate; a towering white cake decorated with whipped cream; a plate of thinly sliced cheese; a bowl of chestnuts and walnuts; and, last, coffee—all accompanied by what Lenox had to acknowledge was a remarkably good selection of wines, from champagne to German summer wine to dark claret to a light Bordeaux. It was the sort of supper that people would talk about for quite a long time—just as Barnard intended.

Lenox sat with a group of men and women he knew, though McConnell was far to his left and Lady Jane far to his right—two seats to the left of Barnard himself, in fact. Lenox spoke for most of the night with James Hilary, a young politician barely out of his twenties, and Lord Cabot, his old friend, who was too busy eating to be truly coherent but who uttered, from time to time, some authoritative word on whatever subject was at hand.

Hilary was a good sort. He was one of the people who had been working with the Royal Academy to ban certain poisons, and while Lenox couldn’t get anything from him on that subject he spoke very fluently about Parliament.

“I expect our side will be in the ascendancy for some time, Mr. Lenox,” he said, during the fifth course.

“Do you now?” asked Lenox. “Why?”

“As fewer boroughs become rotten, and the number of people who vote their conscience increases, we must by necessity grow. We are the party of the public. It was more difficult to be so
when the public had trouble voting for us, because Lord So-and-so of So-and-so decreed otherwise. No offense, Lord Cabot.”

“None taken,” Lord Cabot said.

“You may be right,” said Lenox.

“I was speaking with Eustace Bramwell before dinner—a most ardent conservative, belongs to my club—and even he acknowledged it.”

“You belong to the Jumpers?”

“Yes, indeed, Mr. Lenox. But how would you know the Jumpers?”

Lenox laughed. “Do you mean because I’m so old? I still hear of things, now and then. How well do you know young Bramwell?”

Hilary had laughed too, good-naturedly. “Not well. He and his cousin Claude are rather friends, sometimes thick as thieves, and they belong to the half of the club I don’t know much about. Just as in Parliament, however, I expect my half of the club will eventually outlast.”

Lord Cabot here made one of his rare comments. “Damn silly club, if you’ll excuse me saying, Hilary. Don’t see why you can’t come to the Travelers more. Your father does.”

“We’ve got good food and good fellows at the Jumpers,” said Hilary. “But I do come to the Travelers, now and then. I’ve got a constituency to work for, though. And to be honest, I feel a bit rubbish that my five hundred miles were only to Germany, when both of you pop round to Jupiter every few years.”