A Stranger in Mayfair - Charles Finch [12]
“You didn’t tell me anything of the sort.”
“And why have you come into the alley?”
“To see if Constable Johnson needs anything to drink or eat. Constable?”
“No, ma’am,” said the bobby, touching a knuckle to his forehead.
“Well, come round if you do. Mr. Lenox, would you like a cup of tea?”
“I fear I already find myself late for an important meeting, thank you. Ludo, shall I be in touch?”
“Oh—yes, of course.”
“Constable, your whistle?”
Reminded, Johnson whistled for help, and Lenox, doffing his hat, bade everyone good-bye.
As he walked down Curzon Street onto Half Moon Street (his meeting was in Whitehall, and he intended to cut through Green Park to get there) Lenox pondered Ludo Starling’s bizarre behavior. For starters there was his strange, agitated manner throughout their encounter. More significantly, why on earth had he claimed that his wife wanted Lenox on the case so badly when it was plain she had no idea he was in town?
But he put this out of his mind, ready for a different kind of challenge. He was going toward the Cabinet Office, a glorious old building erected on the site of the old Palace of Whitehall, where the Kings and Queens of England had lived until 1698, when they moved to St. James’s Palace on Pall Mall. It now housed hundreds of government workers, but inside, strangely enough, you could still see what remained of Henry the Eighth’s old tennis courts.
The meeting lasted several hours and was of intense interest to Lenox. He took copious notes (in fact he felt embarrassed to be without his personal secretary—all the rest of the dozen men in the room had bright young lads straight from Charterhouse and Cambridge seated just behind them) but never once spoke. At the break for tea he dispatched short notes to Dallington and McConnell, asking them to come by his house later, but otherwise his mind was wholly focused on his work for Parliament. They talked first about Hong Kong, which had been seized some thirty years before, then a sleepy town, now an expanding city; then they discussed the potential purchase from the ruler of Egypt of part of a great canal; and at last they talked at great length about the recent consolidation of several disparate provinces into what was now called (Lenox still had trouble taking the name seriously) the Dominion of Canada. Victorialand had been perhaps too jingoistic a suggestion, but how infinitely preferable it would have been, Lenox thought, had they named it Anglia, as he had heard was proposed at the time.
Exhausted and pleased, he left the room six hours after he had first entered it, feeling firstly that he had a new understanding of the British colonial position (to think that in the last fifty years the empire had added two hundred million souls and five million square miles to its purview! What astonishing numbers, which none of the dustmen and bankers in the street thought about for more than a passing moment!) and secondly that he had a new collegiality with the men who ran the Colonial Office. Lenox had no intention of becoming a backbencher. He would wait his turn, to be sure, and could be patient—but what effort could win him in power and influence, it would.
It was understandable, therefore, that Frederick Clarke and Ludo Starling were far from his mind as he arrived in Hampden Lane. But no sooner had he turned the door handle than he remembered that McConnell and Dallington would likely be there. Supper with Jane would have to wait half an hour.
In fact it was only the younger of the two men who was there; Jane, according to Graham, was still out, but Lenox found John Dallington sitting in one of the comfortable armchairs in the study, feet propped up on the rail of the fireplace, a thin cigar in hand, and a huge smile on his face. This last because he was reading Punch.
“Mr. Punch’s Book of Birthdays,” Dallington said in response to Lenox’s querying look. “But please!” He stood up. “Let me welcome you back from your honeymoon! It