It was summer, but for some reason the Channel was extremely foggy, and as they stood on deck a wet, gray wind swirled around them.
“It seems like a dream, doesn’t it?” said Lady Jane. “I feel as if we left yesterday. But think of all those beautiful Swiss villages, Charles! Think of that hundred-foot waterfall!”
“We ate in that restaurant on the mountainside.”
“And our guide when we went up there!”
“It was a wonderful trip,” he said, leaning on the rail, “but I’m glad we’re going home. I’m ready to be married in London now.”
She laughed her clear, low laugh and said, “I am, too.”
He hadn’t been quite joking. He stole a glance at Jane, and his heart filled with happiness. For years he had thought himself a happy man-indeed had been happy and fortunate in his friendships, his work, his interests, his family-but now he understood that in that entire time something vital had been missing. It was she. This was a new kind of happiness. It wasn’t only the mawkish love of penny fiction, though that was there. It was also a feeling of deep security in the universe, which derived from the knowledge of an equal soul and spirit going through life together with you. From time to time he thought his heart would break, it made him so glad, and felt so precarious, so new, so unsure.
A mild, wispy rain started to fall when they were nearly across the water. Jane went inside, but Lenox said he thought he might stay out and look.
And he was lucky to have done so. At certain times in our lives we all feel grateful for one outworn idea or another, and now was one of those times for Lenox: As the fog cleared he saw much closer and bigger than he had expected the vast, pristine white face of the cliffs of Dover come into view. It made him feel he was home. Just like Jane did.
Chapter Two
It was fortunate that the man who had designed and built the ten houses along Hampden Lane in 1788 had built them to the same scale, albeit in different configurations. Lenox’s and Lady Jane’s houses both had twelve-foot-deep basements where the staff could work and live, eight-step front stairs that led to broad front doors (his was red, hers white), four floors of rooms, and a narrow back garden. It meant they fit together.
Still, to join them had taken a great deal of ingenuity on the part of a young builder named, aptly enough, Stackhouse. On the first floor he had knocked down the wall between their two dining rooms, creating a single long hall, which could now entertain fifty people or so. More importantly, it had left intact the two most important rooms in the house: Lady Jane’s sitting room, a rose colored square where she entertained her friends and took her tea, and Lenox’s study, a long, lived-in chamber full of overstuffed armchairs, with books lining every surface and a desk piled under hundreds of papers and trinkets. Its high windows looked over the street, and on the opposite end its fireplace was where Lenox sat with his friends.
Upstairs there was a large new bedroom for them, and on the third floor two small parlors became a very nice billiard room for Lenox. In the basement the builders only made a slim hallway between the houses, firstly so as not to tamper with the foundation and secondly because the couple didn’t need as much space down there. They were reducing their staff. They only required one coachman now, two footmen, one cook (Lenox’s, Ellie, was foul-mouthed but talented), and one bootboy. Lady Jane’s cook gave notice, explaining that it was excellent timing, since she and her husband had always hoped to open a pub and now had the money. Still, it would leave four people out of work. Fortunately Lady Jane’s brother always needed servants, and those who wanted to move from London to the country received their new billets happily. Three of them took this offer, and the fourth, a bright young lad who had been Lenox’s coachman, took two months’ pay and set out for South Africa to make his fortune, with a letter of introduction from his now former employer.
All of this still left one enormous problem: the butlers. Both Lenox and Lady Jane had long-serving butlers who seemed half part of the family. In fact it was unusual for a woman to have a butler rather than a housekeeper, but Jane had insisted on it when she first came to London, and now Kirk, an extremely fat, extremely dignified Yorkshireman, had been with her for nearly twenty years. More seriously, there was Graham. For all of Lenox’s adult life, Graham had been his butler, and more importantly his confidant and companion. They had met when Lenox was a student and Graham a scout at Balliol College; special circumstances had bound them there, and when Lenox left for London he had taken Graham with him. He had fetched Lenox his morning coffee, yes, but Graham had also helped him in a dozen of his cases, campaigned for him in Stirrington, and traveled with him across Europe and to Russia. Now all that might change.
So when Lenox returned to London, he went over the new house with an awed, pleased eye-it was just as he had imagined it being-but with the consciousness as well that he had to confront the problem of Graham. The next morning he had a rather radical idea.
He rang the bell, and soon Graham appeared with a breakfast tray laden with eggs, ham, kippers, and toast, a pot of fragrant black coffee to the side. He was a compact, sandy-haired, and intelligent-looking man.
“Good morning, Graham.”
“Good morning, sir. May I welcome you back less formally to London?” The previous night the servants had lined the hall and curtsied and bowed in turn to the newlyweds, then presented them with the wedding present of a silver teapot.
“Thanks. That’s awfully kind of you-it’s a wonderful pot. Graham, would you sit down and keep me company for a moment? You don’t mind if I eat, do you? Fetch yourself a cup to have some of this coffee if you like.”
Graham shook his head at the offer but sat down in the armchair across from Lenox, an act that would have drawn gasps from many of Lenox’s acquaintances for its familiarity. They made idle chat about Switzerland as Lenox gulped down coffee and eggs, until at last, sated, he pushed his plate away and sat happily back, patting the crimson dressing gown over his stomach.
“How long have we known each other, Graham?” asked Lenox.
“Twenty-one years, sir.”
“Is it really that long? Yes, I suppose I was eighteen. It scarcely seems credible. Twenty-one years. We’ve grown middle-aged together, haven’t we?”
“Indeed, sir.”
“I just got married, Graham.”
The butler, who had been at the wedding, allowed himself the ghost of a smile. “I heard something of it, sir.”
“Did you never consider it?”
“Once, sir, but the lady’s affections were otherwise engaged.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
“It was many years ago, sir, when we still lived in Oxford.”
“Have you been happy in your employment?”
“Yes, sir.” Graham was an understated man, but he said this emphatically. “Both in my daily duties and in the less usual ones you have asked me to perform, Mr. Lenox.”
“I’m glad to hear it. You don’t fancy a change of work?”
“No, sir. Not in the slightest.”
“You mustn’t look so stony-faced, Graham. I’m not firing you-not by a long shot. Remind me, what papers do you read?”
“Excuse me?”
“What newspapers do you read?”
“The house subscribes to-”
“No, Graham, not the house- you.”
“Below stairs we take the Times and the Manchester Guardian, sir. In my spare hours I usually read both.”
“Does anyone else read them downstairs?”
Graham looked discomfited. “Well-no, sir.”
“You know as much about politics as I do, or very nearly,” murmured Lenox, more to himself than his companion.
“Sir?”
“May I shock you, Graham?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I want you to come work for me.”