Lenox laughed. “Still-for all that, I am sorry.”
As he walked down the stairs a few minutes later, he was glad it was over. It had been an awkward transaction. He wished that he might have expressed himself more eloquently-impressed upon her more urgently how sorry he was that he had endangered her. Even how fearful he was that he had endangered Lady Jane.
Of course, though, that was impossible. Their stations were too far apart. He went home and answered one of the letters he had received. Mary came in to ask him whether he would have his lunch in or out, and he decided that he would try to drop in on his brother, Edmund, and perhaps get the file Arlington had sent over. No, he told her, he would eat out. He gave her the letter to post and, asking for his carriage, said he would be reading until it was ready to take him to the Houses of Parliament.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
T he Parliament of the United Kingdom was by no means a perfect body, but it was getting better-had gotten better, in fact, in Lenox’s lifetime. He could remember the infamous borough of Old Sarum, which in 1831 had elected two Members, and in doing so overcome the notable handicap of having only eleven residents. But the Reform Act of 1832 had finally abolished Old Sarum and places like it. (The town of Dunwich, in Suffolk, for example, had also elected two MPs in 1831 despite literally not existing, an impressive feat; while it technically had about two dozen voters, the town itself had long been claimed by the waters of the local river.) Now, only thirty years after the reforms, which had been unimaginable to his grandparents’ generation, more and more people had suffrage, landowners could only vote once, and the Earl of Lonsdale no longer had the right to name nine Members completely on his own. In all it allowed the House of Commons to become more forceful in its dealings with the House of Lords-allowed the people, in other words, to be more assertive with the noblemen. Taken together, the years of that era had added up to a gradual reclamation of rights that was on par with the Magna Carta.
As he looked up at the famous long facade of the Palace of Westminster (its formal name) just above the rolling Thames, he thought for the hundredth time that the highest service an Englishman could do was to work in this building, to serve here with honesty and compassion and patriotism. At Balliol his friends had called him “the Debater” because of his tendency to make long and ardent speeches about civil reform and imperial restraint. His friends and family had all assumed he would find himself within these doors before too long. Yet here he was, nearly forty, and no closer than he had been twenty years past. It was a deep, mostly healed-over wound. He was reconciled to his profession, loved his profession. Still, just as his heart rose every time he caught a glimpse of Big Ben, it fell when he had to sign in as a guest at the door.
Lenox found his older brother in the anteroom just by the actual chamber of the House of Commons sitting with two or three other Members, heads huddled together, quite obviously speaking about something of importance to the party. He held back in the doorway and waited for their conversation to end. The House was down, of course, until the evening, and there was quiet in most of the building. He felt slightly out of place. After only a few seconds Edmund looked up and saw him, flashed him a smile, and made his excuses to his compatriots.
“Charles,” he said, “I’m very glad to see you.”
Lenox’s brother looked very much like him, tall, with a good head of brown hair and sparkling, curious eyes, but while the younger brother was slender, the elder was ruddy and heavyset from years of country life.
“How are you, Edmund?”
They shook hands. “Not bad, not bad.”
“You look a bit knocked about.”
“Do I? Late nights in here, I expect. I miss the country. But how’s this business in Oxford going?”
“Are you having lunch with anybody?”
“I am, yes-but come along, won’t you? Only a few chaps from the Board of Trade, the War Office, all our party. Russell. You’ll know one or two of them.”
“Wouldn’t it disrupt your work?”
“No, not at all. Purely social.”
They had paused in the hallways that connected the street, just by the Thames, to the beehive of rooms around the House. “I shall, then, thanks,” said Lenox, and they moved inward once again toward the famous Parliamentary restaurant called Bellamy’s.
Edmund’s group was at a large table to the rear of the room, far from the prying eyes of the entrance. By the table there were two large windows overlooking the swift, gray river, but nobody looked out that way. Edmund introduced Lenox to the people he didn’t know-his friend James Hilary was there and greeted him warmly-but had read of in the papers. There was the promising young MP Jonathan Brick, a great orator and defender of the poor from Warwickshire, with a melodious South Midlands accent, and also Lord Russell, whom Lenox knew slightly and who had only just served a year as Prime Minister. Russell had stepped down after trying to introduce a reform bill which his own party had opposed-scandalously, in Lenox’s view. An angry mob in Hyde Park that July had agreed.
At the luncheon there were also several backbenchers, men Lenox knew and recognized, men useful to the party in small, unglamorous, and utterly practical ways. Peter Anthony, a soap manufacturer from Birmingham, was one, and so was Donald Longstaffe, a man with no aspirations other than to belong to good clubs, Parliament being one of them. His talent was for gossip, a currency always redeemable in politics.
The Liberal Party missed its founder, Viscount Palmerston, who had died just the year before. Besides being politically gifted and uncannily savvy, Lord Palmerston had been a figure around whom Liberals could unite: Having begun as a Tory, he had decided upon the necessity of a new path and forged it himself. As an orator nobody in either party had surpassed him. Lenox would never forget Palmerston’s bold stance in favor of the revolutions that swept the Continent in 1848, support that lent legitimacy to the rebellious armies in Italy, France, and Hungary. It was a noble belief in the idea of constitutional liberties that had driven him. Yes, they missed Palmerston. The party missed its talisman.
In the meanwhile the Conservative Party had its own still-living leader. The current Prime Minister, the Earl of Derby, was serving his third (nonconsecutive) term, and all agreed that the Liberals had to find somebody quickly who might match him both in rhetoric and vision. Brick was one candidate; Hilary another, at any rate in time; and William Ewart Gladstone, though rather puritanical for some tastes, was a third, though he wasn’t present at the luncheon.
“What are we all speaking about?” Edmund asked.
Out of deference they all waited for Russell’s answer. None forthcoming, Brick said, “Oh, all the usual catastrophes. Derby’s evil plans. Gladstone’s speech yesterday evening.”
Hilary said, “Derby may mean to steal our reform bill-yours, I should say, Lord Russell. He wants to greatly increase the franchise, anyway, reading between the lines of his speech of last week.”
Edmund nodded. “Yes, that seems to be so.”
The attention the table granted Edmund was not deferential, as with Lord Russell; but it was somehow individualized, specific, respectful. The entire table took up Hilary’s point, debating it back and forth. Once, Russell said, “Well, if he does it, good for him,” and everyone nodded vigorously and then disagreed. Lenox chimed in once or twice energetically, and when he did Brick looked at him rather appraisingly. Between them they finished three bottles of claret, which went a long way toward the establishment of good feeling at the table, and by the time they stood up they all seemed to agree about something not quite spelled out but nonetheless significant. All in all it left Lenox confused, but at the same time with the feeling that the language was one of subtexts, which it would be easy to pick up.