She sighed, tears standing in her eyes. “Then he came along with this absurd proposal of marriage, apparently persuaded of some affection between us that never existed. And of course I said no.”
“Of course.”
“But oh, Charles, no-don’t you see-if he had been perfect, if he had been-”
Lenox, with a strange mixture of courage and happiness roiling in his heart, interrupted her, to say, “You know, for years I’ve been expecting somebody to come along and marry you. I knew it would be a duke or the Prime Minister or a bishop or somebody. I always look out my window and expect him to be strolling along to your house.” He laughed. “And I would have accepted it with good grace, I hope. I knew you deserved the world. But for every moment that I’ve known you, Jane, for the entire time I’ve looked out through the window, I’ve loved you, too. Ardently, and without any anticipation of return. But while I have the courage to say it I must: You are the wisest person I know, and the most beautiful woman I know. And I love you from the bottom of my heart, and-and I want you to be my wife.”
Different tears wet her eyes now, and a luminous smile was on her face.
“Will you?” he asked.
“Oh, of course, Charles,” she said. “Of course I will.”
She put her small hand on his shoulder and lifted her face to him, and they kissed.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
The next few days were the happiest of Lenox’s life.
He and Jane took long walks along the river, the sun arching high above, watery, warm, bright, leaves scattering at their feet, as they spoke: spoke again with the same ease and intimacy they always had, but in a way so sweetened by love, so strengthened by the acknowledgment of love, that it seemed the smallest word carried the entire freight of their emotions. They told a few friends, and together had several small dinner parties to announce their engagement. (The happiness of a dinner party! He could scarcely believe how becoming part of a couple changed the pleasures of that ritual.) Toto and McConnell, Dallington and the Duchess of Marchmain, Cabot and Hilary, these old friends were constantly in and out of their houses, half as if they were already married. Lenox had a long conversation with Graham, a roundabout, reassuring conversation that ended with the two men pulling out a map and planning in great detail their tour of Morocco.
So the days passed, the weeks passed, each moment within them a small perfect crystal of happiness, undaunted by what might come next-the happiness of those living entirely in the present.
A month later, it was truly autumn. Along their little slip of London, leaves were falling at any breeze and the glow of fireplaces shone in every window, while above the high houses birds fell and rose on the cooler drifts of air. There was that note of melancholy in the air that comes briefly when at last summer is really over-when there will be no more exotically warm days interspersed among the colder ones-when finally people pull their collars up against the wind and children submit to heavy sweaters. A pink-cheeked, nightfall time of year, when the light was always diminishing.
The “Oxford and India Scandal,” as one paper had taken to calling the Payson case, had for some weeks been the talk of London. At dinner parties people had discussed the strange reappearance of the fearful James Payson and decried his decision to retreat to Scotland with his son; rumors that he was much changed, mellow even, were instantly dismissed. People’s hearts lifted when they spoke of Lady Annabelle and fell when the conversation turned to young Bill Dabney, whom the press had cast as the heroic figure in the story, the loyal and unquestioning young Englishman who had laid down his life for friendship. In England there is always a nostalgia for Oxford and Cambridge, almost especially among people who never went there, and so it was Dabney who captured people’s hearts. At the funeral, which Lenox and Lady Jane attended, it had been hard to witness his parents’ deep and silent midcountry sorrow.
There was one certain memorial for him. The multitude of gems, gold pieces, semiprecious stones, and silver dishes that had lain in the dusty walls of the September Society, and above all the great sapphire that had lain with them, had reverted to the East India Company. Under the strength of popular demand, they had sold the sapphire in an instantly famous auction (to participate required a letter from one’s bankers attesting to savings of at least a hundred thousand pounds sterling) to an obscure German count, and donated the proceeds of the sale to Lincoln College, where among other things a seat in classics would be founded in Bill Dabney’s name. His father had written the bequest: “To be given to lads of great spirit and loyalty, who possess both the gift of friendship and the dignity of greatness.”
Meanwhile the villains of the September Society had long turned against each other, and eventually the greatest offenders were brought to trial. Maran had resigned instantly from Parliament, and the full implications of his corruption were only slowly coming to light. His malfeasance had been at once of a unique and utterly mundane kind: One moment he would be diverting sums to obscure military manufacturers that turned out to be hastily assembled fronts of fellow September Society members, who kicked back to Maran; the next he would be doing something as simple as finding a sinecure in government for the underqualified nephew or cousin of a fellow veteran. These various stratagems to defraud Her Majesty had only begun to be parsed, and it was clear that at least an indirect accomplishment of Lenox’s and Goodson’s had been to save the country a great deal of money and scandal. In fact, the discovery had put back into broad public favor Lord Russell’s reform bill, which called for among other things greater transparency in government spending-and which Lenox had only recently been discussing in that lunch in Parliament with Russell himself.
Lenox had received a note of congratulations from the Prince of Wales and gone to see His Highness, but turned down the majority of other invitations in favor of nights in with Jane, Toto, and Thomas, the occasional drink with James Hilary or Lord Cabot, and his books-and one celebratory cup of champagne with a newly engaged couple: George Payson and Rosie Little. She had flown to London against her father’s wishes when she learned that he was alive and, with more courage than Lenox had suspected of her, laid the truth before Payson. In turn he had confessed that when he had flirted with her at the dances, his intentions had been more serious than she realized. Despite the ire of their parents (Lady Annabelle’s moderated by her overwhelming happiness), they were as happy as any people in the world, and determined to be happy their whole lives long. Rosie, for one, viewed Lenox as her closest friend, and it appeared that soon enough he would be godfather to two new children.
And so the case passed from one stage of notoriety to a lower one; and so it passed out of the common conversations of the day, and things were returned to normal.
There had been one black moment: a letter of congratulations from George Barnard, the powerful, rich government official, onetime courter of Lady Jane, and, Lenox knew for certain, criminal mastermind. There was still work to do there-but he was too happy, for those few days, to contemplate it just yet.
On an afternoon just after the height of the scandal’s celebrity, Lenox and Lady Jane were in his library, having lunch. She was telling a story animatedly and laughing when there was a knock at the door outside. Graham, restored to his front hallway at last, answered it. A moment later he appeared with three visitors in tow.
“Sir Edmund Lenox, Mr. Hilary, Mr. Brick,” he said, leading them in.
“Thanks,” said Lenox and rose to shake their hands. “How do you do, Mr. Brick? I don’t believe we’ve met since we had lunch in Parliament. James, Edmund, how are you? All three of you know Jane, of course.”