A Stranger in Mayfair - Charles Finch [24]
“What’s the matter?” Dread struck his heart. “Is it Toto?”
“No. It’s you.”
“What have I done?”
“Are you aware of the time?”
“Roughly.” He pulled his pocket watch from his waistcoat. “Fourteen minutes past midnight,” he said.
“I came home at nine o’clock, and Kirk hadn’t the slightest idea where you were, except to say that John Dallington had dragged you off.”
“I don’t understand what’s wrong, Jane.”
“Why didn’t you tell me where you would be? Or leave a note! The most threadbare consideration would have satisfied. Instead I have had to worry for three hours, needlessly.”
“Three hours scarcely seems enough to go into such a panic over,” he said. “I’d have thought you understood the nature of my profession.”
This raised her ire. “I understand it well enough. You are under the constant threat of getting shot or stabbed or who knows what, while I wait at home and—what, politely wait to hear news of your death?”
“You’re being absurd,” he said in what he instantly knew, and regretted, to be a haughty fashion.
“Absurd?” Suddenly her anger had turned into tears. “To worry about you—that’s absurd? Is this what marriage is meant to be like?”
As she started to cry in earnest, his resentment washed away and was replaced with regret. “I’m terribly sorry, Jane. For so many years I could come and go as I pleased, and now—”
“I don’t have any interest in that. We’re married now. Do you understand that?”
He tried to take her hand, but she pulled it away. He sat down. “I hope I do.”
“I don’t know.”
“Really, I am sorry,” he said. Still she wouldn’t look at him. He sighed. “We never argued once during our honeymoon, did we?”
“Our honeymoon was lovely, Charles, but it wasn’t real life. This is real life. And it’s not fair on either of us to have you gallivanting around London, putting yourself in danger, over some obscure murder.”
“Obscure murder? If our friendship had taught you nothing else, I hoped it had taught you that there is no such thing.”
“It’s past midnight!”
“When I’m in the House I won’t be home till much later than this on occasion.”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
“It’s your job.”
“Being a detective is my job, Jane.”
Lady Jane’s voice rose. “Not any longer!”
“As long as I live!”
“You’re in Parliament, Charles!”
“So that’s worth staying out late for? Are you ashamed to be married to a detective?”
She looked as if he had slapped her: suddenly still, suddenly silent. Without a further word she swept out of the room and ran up the stairs.
“Damn,” he said to the empty room.
He sat down, and as the anger burned out of him and he returned to his right mind he felt a deep anguish. Not only had they not fought on their honeymoon, they hadn’t fought in twenty years, that he could remember. There had been cross words, but never a true battle.
He worried that he had ruined their friendship, the best thing in his life, by telling her he loved her. “My heart is ever at your service,” Shakespeare had written, and it was the line Lenox always thought of when Jane came to mind. Might it be that he would have served her better by staying silent?
He went to bed disconsolate, and slept very little.
The next morning she was gone before he woke, though it was barely half past seven. He breakfasted alone, reading the papers as he munched on eggs and ham and gulped down two cups of coffee. The Emperor of Japan had married, according to the Times. A chap named Meiji, of all things, and his wife was called Shoken. She was three years older than her new husband, which had apparently been the greatest obstacle to their nuptials. Suddenly the problems of the house on Hampden Street seemed a little smaller. He smiled slightly as he finished the article. It would be all right.
Walking down to Whitehall before nine o’clock, he knew his mind ought to be on the meetings of the day, the blue books he had to read, lunch with his party leaders at Bellamy’s.
Instead he was focused entirely on Frederick Clarke’s anonymous money drop-offs.
What could they mean? He still favored the thought that there was some kind of fraudulence