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“I was looking for you,” said Stuart to Lizzy, who approached the house from the direction of the river.

He wanted to apologize to her. It was her first visit to their future home and he’d been barely adequate in his role as her host and husband-to-be. The effect of dinner had lasted the whole evening—and well into the night—and it had been all he could do to pretend to listen to Marsden and Mr. Bessler’s conversation and nod at seemingly appropriate points.

“I took a long walk,” answered his fiancée, not sounding at all as if she’d noticed his distraction. She turned around and looked back at the wide avenue leading down to the wrought-iron river gate and the formal gardens that flanked the passage on either side. “Fairleigh Park is beautiful.”

“Can you see yourself spending time here?”

“Very easily. I love it already.”

“I’m glad,” he said. “I know you wanted a much greater place for yourself.”

“Oh, no. Please, Stuart, you must not go on reminding me of my girlish arrogance. I’m thoroughly ashamed to have been so vain.”

He smiled at her. “You were not vain, but ambitious. I understand a thing or two about ambition.”

“Sir?” someone called him from behind.

He turned around. It was the housekeeper. “Yes, Mrs. Boyce?”

Mrs. Boyce handed him a brown envelope. “Sir, the maids found this. I thought I should bring it to your attention.”

The envelope had
To be buried with me
written across it. The script was elaborate, formal. Bertie’s, from the days when they’d written each other almost every day, before Bertie’s handwriting transitioned to a loose, loopy cursive during his later years at Harrow.

“Where did the maids find it?”

“In Mr. Bertram’s sketch collection,” said Mrs. Boyce. The housekeeper had asked him what she ought to do with Bertie’s extensive collection of sketches and he’d told her to put everything away. “I had them put tissue paper between the sketches. And they came across it in one of the earlier portfolios. Shall I have it placed in the casket?”

The envelope was light and unsealed—presumably when Bertie had been alive, no one ever went nosing in his sketches but himself. Stuart emptied the content of the envelope into his palm.

Photographs, two of them. The first was a family portrait of Bertie and his parents. Bertie would have been about five or six, small, blond, standing next to his mother, his hand in hers.

The second was a photograph of two young boys. One was Bertie. It took Stuart a moment to realize that the other was himself. They sat on a stone bench, two stiff, serious faces—one must hold oneself entirely still, or the photograph would be blurred.

Then he saw it, their clasped hands on the bench. For some reason, the sight stunned him. He quickly slid the photographs back into the envelope.

To be buried with me.

He gave it back. “Yes, you may have it placed in the casket.”

Dearest Georgette,

 

I wonder why I never asked you this before, but do you remember that hushed-up scandal about Mr. Marsden, the late Lord Wyden’s second-youngest son? At the time you said—you horrible tease, you—that you knew the truth from eavesdropping on your mother’s conversation with the distraught Lady Wyden, but that your mother caught you and made you swear not to say anything to anyone.

And remember that you told me that you’d let me in on the secret after Lord and Lady Wyden had both passed on? They have, and I want to know what happened. Don’t make me wait too long.

Kisses to the twins,

Love,
Lizzy

“I’m sorry, sir. Did you say Manchester South or Manchester South West?” asked Marsden.

“South West,” Stuart answered.

This was the second time Marsden had asked Stuart to repeat something. But Stuart was little better. He kept losing his train of thought and once had to ask Marsden to recite back a paragraph so he’d know what he’d said.

“While I am sympathetic to your anxieties with regard to your constituents’ strong feelings toward the Irish Home Rule bill,” continued Stuart, “allow me to point out that these same constituents voted you into office knowing full well that electoral success for the Liberals would return as Prime Minister Mr. William Ewart Gladstone, who has made it abundantly clear during his years in opposition that Irish Home Rule is a matter of moral imperative, that he stands fast by his commitment to the Irish and will reintroduce the bill in the upcoming parliamentary session.”

He paused, waiting to see if Marsden would need any further clarification. But Marsden only looked up expectantly.

“With the support of the electorate, and with Mr. Gladstone’s skills and persuasion, it is fully expected that the bill will pass in both Houses. I understand, having been a young MP myself, that you would not wish to be left out of this historic vote. Furthermore, I believe you would not wish to bypass the opportunity for an early and speedy passage of certain private bills near and dear to your heart.”

“Corporate charter?” asked Marsden, his pen scratching furiously.

“Railroad,” said Stuart.

Now that the threats had been laid, Stuart engaged in two paragraphs of cordiality. It was the last letter for the morning. Marsden closed his notebook and rose. “I’ll have these ready for you tomorrow, sir.”

“Thank you,” said Stuart.

They were ahead of schedule; it would be another five minutes before the carriage pulled up in front of the manor to take Stuart to the funeral.

“I’ve been meaning to ask, sir, do you think it wise for Mr. Gladstone to push for Irish Home Rule again? It cost him the government last time,” said Marsden.

“It very well could this time also,” said Stuart, shuffling through a pile of letters Prior had brought in a quarter hour ago. Privately, he wasn’t quite as confident of the bill’s passage as he projected in his letters to hesitant backbenchers. The Conservatives still held the House of Lords. The Liberals had only a forty-seat majority in the House of Commons. And the courage to do the right thing was a rare quality in any politician.

“Yet you have thrown your support behind him,” said Marsden.

“The Irish grow restless. But they are still willing to work with us. Do we really wish to procrastinate until the day they decide to take up arms?”

“Haven’t they already taken up arms, in a way?”

“If you speak of the bombings in the eighties, those were the action of an overwhelming minority. I would prefer that we act before the sentiment for violence finds favor with a greater part of the population,” said Stuart.

He was a pragmatic man who saw the best course of action as the one that did the least damage over time. Set that time horizon far enough and the best course of action from a pragmatic point of view matched well with the right thing to do on principle. It was one of the reasons that Mr. Gladstone had come to value him: His levelheaded approach to governing complemented the Grand Old Man’s passionate moral commitment.

“Let’s hope our MPs see it as you do.”

“They will,” said Stuart. There was nothing he could do about the outcome in the House of Lords, but he did not intend to fail in his role in the lower house. That vote he would deliver to Mr. Gladstone if he had to browbeat, bludgeon, and blackmail every last Liberal MP into line.

“I might have some useful information on a few MPs, sir,” said Marsden.

“Excellent,” said Stuart. Any intelligence Marsden supplied was certain to be something no MP would ever want publicly known. “We might yet make a backstabbing, blackhearted tactician out of you.”

Despite a letter of character from the mayor of Paris himself, Stuart had been reluctant to take on as his secretary an aristocratic young man who’d spent five years in Paris, rubbing shoulders with writers and artists—and anarchists, for all Stuart knew. Will Marsden, however, had turned out to be an extremely pleasant surprise. He was exactly as the mayor had said: competent, meticulous, and unfailingly reliable.

“I understand from the servants that you are to be married, sir,” said Marsden.

“The servants are always the first to know everything,” answered Stuart. Though in this instance the servants’ excessive knowledge was entirely his doing—after he’d informed Madame Durant, he’d gone ahead and told his own valet, with the understanding that it was not news that the latter needed to keep to himself. “Yes, Miss Bessler has accepted my suit.”

“Congratulations, sir.”

Marsden did not sound overly enthusiastic. Stuart wondered whether he reciprocated Lizzy’s antagonism in some way.

“Thank you,” he said. “The wedding will take place mid-January—much too soon really, but I want it done before Parliament opens. It is rather an unfair burden to place on Miss Bessler’s shoulders alone, so I have pledged your assistance in the matter. I trust you will prove as invaluable to Miss Bessler as you are to me?”

Marsden lifted the cover of his notebook halfway. He didn’t look at Stuart. “Are you certain that I would be able to do justice to your wedding, sir? I’ve no experience in the staging of weddings.”

“I understand that as part of your duties at the
mairie
you undertook social events of a similar scale and brought them off successfully. You’ll do fine.”

Marsden let the notebook cover drop. He tapped his pen twice against it. “Thank you for your confidence, sir. I shall strive to make it a most worthy event.”

Stuart arrived at the church ahead of everyone else. The vicar, a kindly man, asked him if he wished to spend a private moment with Bertie. It was a sincere, if routine, offer for a minute of seclusion with the dearly departed. Yet Stuart found himself paralyzed, as if he’d been thrust before a monumental decision.

“Yes, thank you,” he said, because it was expected of him.

Bertie’s casket rested on a catafalque at the end of the nave, before a wall of wreaths. It was a beautiful casket, the best mahogany money could buy. As Stuart approached, his reflection walked toward him in the glossy varnish, his face distorted by the curve and angle of the coffin.

A large spray of white lilies adorned the top of the casket. Stuart ran his finger along a cool green stem.