What could they mean? He still favored the thought that there was some kind of fraudulence at play, but then why would he have anything delivered under the servants’ door? Wasn’t that a dead giveaway?
There was good news, however. The case might be perplexing, and domestic bliss elusive, but professional happiness was close at hand.
In his short time as Lenox’s political secretary, Graham had already proved a marvel. It had only been a few days, but he had filled each of them with furious activity, rarely sleeping longer than a few hours, the commitment he had always shown as a servant transferred to this new work. Aside from organizing the new office to within an inch of its life, he had gone over Lenox’s appointment book, deciphered which meetings were most important, and canceled the rest, something that would save the grateful Lenox several hours a day.
What was most impressive, though, was his quickly growing acquaintance. It took men years to know the various faces of Parliament, but Graham was a quick pupil. This was an unspoken but important fact of life in the House of Commons, and Lenox hadn’t known anything about it. Now, however, they walked the halls and various men Lenox had never laid eyes on nodded at them both. “The Marquess of Aldington’s secretary,” Graham would say, or “Hector Prime’s chief counselor.” Graham’s principal gift in detective work had always been infiltration-making friends in a pub or a kitchen-and he put that gift to use here now in these more exalted corridors.
The apotheosis of this talent in its political form came that morning. Graham was waiting at the Members’ Entrance, as he did every day now, when Lenox arrived.
“Good morning, sir,” he said. “In ten minutes you must sit down with the Board of Agriculture. After that-”
Here Graham broke off and nodded his head at an enormously tall, thin young man with a giant forehead. “How do you do?” he said.
“Excellently, Mr. Graham, I thank you.”
After the man had walked on, Lenox said in a low voice, “My God, that was Percy Field.”
“Yes, sir.”
“How on earth do you know him?”
Percy Field was the Prime Minister’s own assistant, a famously accomplished and imperious lad from Magdalene College, prodigiously intelligent, whom the PM himself had declared more important to Great Britain’s welfare than all but ten or twenty people. Field had little patience for most Members, let alone their secretaries.
“He snubbed me, until I took the liberty of inviting him to one of your Tuesdays, sir. I spoke to Lady Lenox in advance of the offer, and she readily consented. Mr. Field’s attitude was cold when I first approached him, but he quickly warmed.”
This was disingenuous; they were Lady Jane’s Tuesdays, as they had been for fifteen years, a gathering of London’s elite-say twenty or so people-in her drawing room. Even for Field an invitation would be a great coup.
“Well done, Graham. Extremely well done.”
They went inside, up to the cramped office, and began the day’s work. For the rest of the morning Lenox dutifully attended his meetings and read his blue books. The entire time, though, his mind was on the murder. As such it wasn’t quite a surprise when he heard himself saying to Graham, “Send my regrets to the one o’clock meeting, please. I’m going round to fetch Dallington. I have to go to Frederick Clarke’s funeral.”
Chapter Twelve
What was the proper form for a servant’s funeral? In general one attended, but then in general the deceased was old and respectable. What if there was the strong prospect of a title, which only scandal could preclude?
The moment Lenox laid eyes on Ludo Starling it was clear the man had been mulling over these questions all morning. In the event Ludo and his wife were present, but Tiberius and the Starling boys weren’t. Jack Collingwood, Jenny Rogers, and Betsy Mints sat in the second row. Alone in the first row was a large, thin woman, perhaps fifty years old but still well-looking, horsey and countryish. She wore a straw mourning bonnet, black, with a deep black crepe ribbon, a soft black gown, and a dark veil. When she turned back Lenox saw that she was rather plain-faced, but somehow still attractive.
“That must be the boy’s mother,” he whispered to Dallington as they took their seats several rows back. “The place of honor.”
“Don’t you feel a bit dodgy here?” asked the young lord. “We didn’t know him.”
Lenox nodded gravely. “Even so, we owe him our best, and this is a singular opportunity to see who he knew and what he was like.”
The funeral took place in a small, appealing Mayfair church, St. George’s, which Lenox knew the Starling family had generously endowed over the years. It was a distinguished building with tall white columns in front, steep stairs to the front door, and a high bell tower overhead, part of the Fifty Churches Act that Parliament had passed in the early eighteenth century at the behest of Queen Anne, to keep up with London’s expansion in population. A pious woman, Anne had wanted to ensure that all of her subjects were close to a church. In the end the project fell well short of its target-a dozen churches or so had gone up-but they had left their mark. The great architect Nicholas Hawksmoor had built many of them, and even the ones he didn’t build (like this) were in his style. They were called Queen Anne’s Churches now-all much of a piece, beautiful, high, very white, and somewhat severe. Given Ludo’s newfound affinity for discretion, it was surprising to find the service held in a firmly aristocratic church.
The most striking occurrence at the funeral happened just before the service began. With the church already full, six footmen in identical livery marched somberly down the center aisle and took an empty pew. They made for an arresting picture.
“I’d like to speak to them,” said Dallington.
“Perhaps they were his real friends. It wouldn’t surprise me. He couldn’t have been proper friends with either of the women in his house or Collingwood, his superior among the staff.”
“True, and he lived along that row of houses. All the footmen would have been in the alley constantly.”
“Precisely.”
The service was a modest one, without music save for Bach’s St. Matthew Passion at the recession. Funerals in London tended to be grandiose (at one last year, Lenox had seen a procession of mutes and jugglers before the coffin), but this was a plain old English service-rather touching in its simplicity.
One rather strange absence was that of Inspector Grayson Fowler of Scotland Yard. Perhaps the feeling of propriety that had nettled Dallington kept him away, but Lenox doubted it. Fowler was a particular type-old, grizzled, disagreeable to most people, and extremely sharp-witted. He was well past fifty years of age, and in his many years on the force had been one of the few people at the Yard of whom Lenox had entirely approved. In turn he had always liked Lenox, who had talked over cases with him many a time, interpreting clues and prodding theories to find their soft spots. Lenox decided that he would visit Scotland Yard that night, despite the curt note he had received when he tried to contact Fowler before. Perhaps it had been a bad day.
As they stood on the steps of the church after the funeral, nobody seemed quite sure what to do. A reception would have been appropriate, but Ludo hadn’t mentioned one, and the boy’s mother was from out of town-and an old family servant! It was shabby of Ludo, actually, and thus it made Lenox doubly glad when one of the six footmen did something gallant. He was a red-haired, freckled, very young-looking man.
To the group he said, “Since we appear to be at loose ends, may my friends and I invite you all to the second floor of the Bricklayers’ Arms? It’s one street down, and Freddie often enjoyed a pint there. Mrs. Clarke, may I take your arm?”
“Oh-yes,” stammered Ludo. “Here, I insist upon buying a round.” He fumbled through his pockets and came up with a note, which the footman had the good manners to accept.