A Stranger in Mayfair - Charles Finch [40]
Chapter Nineteen
Lenox had eaten little as he spoke with Mrs. Clarke, absorbed by her answers, and so at twelve thirty that afternoon he fell ravenously upon the lunch Kirk brought to his desk in the house on Hampden Lane. There was a roasted chicken, a fluffy hillock of mashed potatoes, and a beautifully charred tomato cut in quarters, along with half a bottle of dreadful claret that he nevertheless managed to get through most of. As he ate he let both Parliament and Frederick Clarke fall away from his mind and read a novel by Miss Gaskell about a small town somewhere in the Home Counties. When he was finished eating he moved to his armchair, reading on and smoking quite contentedly.
Only at two o’clock or so did he turn his attention to the tottering stack of blue books that Graham had put on his desk the night before. Their name was wonderfully evocative to Lenox (its origin was the rich blue velvet medieval parliamentary records were bound in), reminding him of harried politicians, deep matters of state, and hushed late-night discussions of strategy. As it happened, one in ten of the books—reports on every imaginable topic that affected Great Britain—was as interesting and urgent as he had imagined. The other nine would be dreadfully dull, reports from distant nations of the empire, coal statistics, a study of the increasingly serious accumulation of horse manure in Manchester.
Still, he was duty bound to read them all, or at any rate to skim them. He picked one up, spent half an hour in study, and then tossed it aside. Another. Another. Soon it was four o’clock and he knew far more than he had ever cared to about the state of Newcastle’s police force and the shortage of English beef after the previous year’s serious outbreak of a new illness called—and he had to double-check the name—“hoof and mouth” disease.
With four books absorbed, in their outlines if not in their details, he turned to a fifth. It drew him in almost like a novel—with the best novels he was at first still extremely aware that he was reading, but gradually the act of reading itself disappeared, and even turning the pages didn’t remind him that there were two worlds, inside and outside of the book’s covers. This blue book, though much more dense than a good novel, had for him that same imperative feeling.
He finished it in an hour flat, and when he was done he clutched it in one hand and, without a word to anyone in the house, made for the door and hailed a taxi.
He was after James Hilary. Although Hilary was nearly a decade younger than Lenox, he was one of the most influential men in Parliament, an urbane, learned, and fluent gentleman with a private fortune and a secure seat in Liverpool. He was irreplaceable within the party, connecting as he did the back bench and the front bench, the various offices of government to one another. If anyone would understand, it was Hilary.
As Lenox had expected he found the man—a charming, well-dressed, slightly sharp-faced sort of person—in his favored club, the Athenaeum. He was reading by a window in the great hall.
“There you are—may we speak?”
“Lenox, my dear chap, you look beside yourself. Is everything all right? Jane? I’ve scarcely said ten words to you since your wedding all those months ago.”
“Oh, quite well, quite well. It’s this.” He thrust the blue book he had been reading into the air.
Hilary narrowed his eyes, trying to catch the title of the report on the side of the book. “What is it?”
“Can we find a private room?”
“By all means.” He folded his paper. “I’m so pleased that you’ve hit the ground running. Your man, Graham, has been all over the House, too. Excellent.”
They retired to a small chamber nearby and sat at a six-sided card table, where in a few hours four or five debauched gentleman would sit until dawn, playing whist for stakes rather higher than they could afford and drinking great drafts of champagne. Lenox hated the scene: the jollity, sometimes real but often forced; the