“On the third floor. I’ll lead, if you’ll stick by my side, Jenkins. I doubt you’ll have any cause to use your shackles, but it’s not impossible. George, come up beside me, won’t you? You’ve met Canterbury before, I believe.”
There were two doors on the third floor. Lenox led the way to the right and knocked.
“Hullo?” There was no response. “Hullo? Canterbury? We’ve a large group here. George is here.”
There was a shuffling in the room.
“I’m going to come in,” said Lenox. “We don’t mean you any harm, I promise.”
Lenox turned the doorknob, and they all crowded around him to see inside. It was a large, drafty, out-of-sorts room with a bed, a desk, and a chair as its only adornments. A man- dark hair, average height, a military bearing, with a scar on his neck-sat in the chair. He was holding a revolver.
“Stand back!” he said. “Who-why, is that Charles Lenox?”
“It is.”
“And Edmund? Good Lord! No wonder you found me here. My old haunt. Who have you brought, though?” The gun, which he had let fall to his lap, rose again.
“Please, please-the Society are all in police custody.”
A great burden seemed to lift from Canterbury’s face. He exhaled. “Thank God,” he said. “It’s over.”
“Not yet.” Lenox turned around. “George, come here, won’t you?”
Payson came to the front. “Hullo, Mr. Canterbury,” he said.
“No, george,” said lenox softly. “I’d Like to introduce you to your father.”
CHAPTER FIFTY
Lenox and Edmund’s own father had been a good man, one who took care of his land, ruled judiciously over local disputes, served in Parliament for fifty years, and loved his wife and his two sons. When Lenox was young he had admired in his father the high seriousness of purpose, the goal of service to Queen and country, that had defined his public life. Now he wasn’t sure that he didn’t admire something else more: his father’s good spirits, his cheerfulness, his ability to make things seem better. What had once almost seemed frivolous to Lenox, when he was young and serious himself, had now come to seem heroic, a putting of others before one’s self. It was strange to him that his perception of his father went on changing even after the old man’s death.
Greeted with his own father, Payson showed the shock in his face. “How do you do?” he said feebly.
The father rose. “I didn’t know whether or not to tell you, George,” he said. “I had to make amends here first.”
It was Dallington who said, “Perhaps we should withdraw.”
So he, McConnell, Lenox, Edmund, and Jenkins went into the hallway for about ten minutes and studiously ignored the muffled voices through the door. At the end of that time the younger Payson came out, tears on his face, and invited them to come back into the room.
“How did you know?” he asked Lenox straight away.
“I had assumed for a long while that Geoffrey Canterbury was a man named John Lysander, a member of the September Society.”
“Lysander!” spat out the elder Payson.
“It never quite added up. Why would he have been helping you? But there was the description to go on, and in particular the scar. Which I assume you’ll tell us about, George? Why the two of you had identical scars? When Lady Annabelle came to me it was the first thing I remembered about you. To have forgotten it so promptly was shameful on my part, though in my defense I believed you to be dead… and then while you and I were hiding at that meeting, Payson, we heard Butler mention ’an old friend unexpectedly returned.’ It was then that I remembered the scar, and combining that fact with the pocket watch… it simply seemed inevitable once I started to think about it.”
“Hardly inevitable, I should have said.”
“But why this sudden interest in the son of a long-dead man? They must have hoped to draw your father out by threatening you, killing you, whatever they planned to do. At any rate, I remembered that your father had once haunted this famous Eastcheap establishment, and guessed that if he were to lie low it would be here.”
“Famous for it,” said Edmund. “He was here night and day.”
“Voluntarily then, involuntarily now,” added James Payson. “This is the only place in London that I know inside and out, besides the Beefsteak Club.” He laughed. “And that might have been conspicuous.”
“I couldn’t remember the address or the name, but Edmund did, and so here we are.”
“And all extremely anxious to discover the origin of this entire horrible matter,” said Jenkins.
The elder Payson sighed and lifted his eyes to the half-ring of men standing around him. His hand was in his son’s.
Then he spoke. “It’s a simple enough story,” he said. “Or rather, two simple enough stories, one old, one new, the two of them intertwined. Any Englishman who has left this island for the wider empire can tell you that terrible things are done in the name of the Queen, bless her. A little less than twenty years ago, just after you were born, George, and just between the Anglo-Sikh wars, I took part in one of those atrocities.
“My battalion and I were monitoring an area along the Sutlej Frontier in Punjab, and if I never lay eyes on it again it will be too soon. There were about thirty thousand troops there-it was our most important strategic position in India, you see, geographically, politically, and culturally-and we always got by far the best of the few little local skirmishes. We had won the first Anglo-Sikh war handily, and though the locals resented us we ruled with a firm hand. As a result, I and the other officers led an idle life there. Each of us had a small house and four or five native servants, and there was always a card game or a drink to be had in the officers’ mess. Despite the heat, which none of us liked, it wasn’t a bad kip.
“I was still pretty wild then, I’m afraid-Edmund and Charles remember me from Oxford-and my best friend in all of India was another like me, a man named Juniper. He wasn’t in the army, though. He was an orphan, all alone in the world, with a few hundred pounds he had inherited, and when he came of age he set out for Lahore to make his fortune. The two of us drank together, hunted together, and even lived in the same house for some time together. They called us the twins, because there was some slight resemblance between us and because we were so inseparable.
“As you can gather, it wasn’t too bad a life. I had a close friend, all the gin I wanted, some shooting, and a game of cards most evenings. But then one day I did something foolish.
“I was chappy enough with John Lysander at the time, and one evening the two of us and an official of the East India Company attached to our battalion-a lad named Simon Halloran, as green as he could be-decided to venture into the strictly Punjabi part of Lahore. An adventure, we figured. Well, at the first teahouse we stopped into we were kidnapped by (you’ll scarcely credit this) a group of about ten boys, all of them armed to the teeth. They blindfolded us and led us out into the countryside. I’ve always had a keen enough sense of direction, and though they tried to turn us around and confuse us I knew which way we were going. Mark that-it comes back in a moment.
“Well, it was a hairy enough situation. The head of the village these boys belonged to searched us all over and eventually decided to send a message to the Queen by killing one of us. As you can no doubt guess, it was Halloran-nonmilitary, I suppose. He cut Halloran’s throat right in front of our eyes, and for good measure gave Lysander and myself identical cuts, to mark us out as dangerous to his fellow tribesmen.”
Payson’s hand went to his throat.
“It raised a terrible ruckus back at camp, as goes without saying, and as I knew where this village was we received permission to go capture this headman who had decided to kill Halloran. Well, we did go back, and-well, the less we say of it, the better.” His eyes looked ghostly as he said this. “We’re not allowed to take back anything in this life, and we did what we did, you see.