Lord Foxbridge Butts In (2 page)

“The bath is ready, my lord,” Pond returned after a brief absence, “The rest of the luggage is coming up in the service lift.  I will have our clothes laid out in time for luncheon.”

“Thank you, Pond,” I said, passing him as he rushed back out.  The bathroom was steamy and fragrant with my own special-blend bath salts, gorgeously scented with herbs and flowers by the ancient still-room maid at Foxbridge Castle.  Sliding out of my travel-stained clothes and leaving them in an untidy pile by the door, I stepped over to the looking-glass to see if I needed to touch up my shave.

I suppose now is a good time to tell you something about my appearance, rather than leaving you suspended with nothing but your own imagination to tell you what I saw in the glass.

My face was extraordinarily pretty in those days, an exquisite oval with delicate features and a blooming skin, big round chestnut-colour eyes that made me look frightfully innocent, and a sensuous scarlet mouth that made me look anything but; my hair was a bit more red than brown, naturally curling but rigorously brushed down to a more dignified ripple; my figure was long and slender, perfect for the fashion of the day, but well-knit from cricket and tennis and riding to give my limbs that sculptural delineation so appreciated by the Greeks.

I was widely considered the greatest beauty of my year at Eton, and was rated nearly as high at Oxford (though angelic prettiness is less valued at that age, when the criteria of masculine beauty shift from Ganymede to Adonis).  But though I enjoyed my beauty, I didn’t put much stock in it: being pretty, rather than handsome, is a short-lived distinction — my father had been a beauty in youth, too, like one of those pretty little Dresden figurines that old ladies collect; but by the time he was forty, he was a pinch-faced grotesque with a bulging forehead and a scrawny neck.

I never pretended that the favourable attention my looks brought me was mine for life, and certainly not due to the value of my character; and that I would certainly have to
develop
a character before the bloom was off the rose, if I wanted to remain lovable.  I had to hope that the well-stocked catalogue of amorous exploits I intended to collect while I was still pretty would be sufficiently character-building.

And of course I did
not
need a shave.  It still took me a week to grow enough whisker for the barber to
see
, much less shave.  I was very impatient with this recalcitrance on the part of my beard, as it made me look years younger than I really was.  People sometimes even addressed me as “sonny,” perhaps the most galling thing a twenty-one-year-old Oxford graduate can be called.

When I emerged from the bath, scrubbing my head with a towel as I came, I nearly collided with Pond standing in the middle of the room with my underclothes held out like a sacred offering.  I was still new to the business of being valeted — at home, there’d been a footman who laid out my evening clothes and helped me do my ties, and the fagging system at school taught me both sides of dressing a gentleman; but I’d been managing on my own for the last three years, and having a whole person in my life whose sole and sacred responsibility was to dress me took some adjustment.  At any rate, finding a man in one’s bedroom holding one’s knickers can be something of a jar if you’re not used to it.

“You can lay those down, Pond,” I said when I recovered myself, draping the towel around my waist (it felt unexpectedly awkward to be naked in front of a man in a black suit), “I’m not quite dry yet.”

“Very good, my lord,” he replied, laying the garments reverently on the bed.  This gentleman’s-gentleman Pond was so at odds with the raunchy and colorful Reggie I knew from the Lionheart pub; having known him first socially made it slightly difficult to see him professionally.  I wanted to elbow him in the ribs and tell him to ‘come off it, love.’

But if Reggie Pond felt in any way awkward about this change in our relationship, handling my drawers and addressing me as ‘my lord’ instead of ‘Foxy’ (my school nickname, I’m afraid; and though not in any way imaginative, with my red-brown hair and my title, it seems to have permanently stuck), it did not show in his impassive face and far-away eyes.

In a very few moments, and with very little assistance from me, I was attired in my best slate-gray suit with a mauve silk tie and matching handkerchief in my top pocket (a coded signal in those days), gray kid spats on my feet and gray kid gloves in my hand; I thought myself quite the snappy dresser — not quite so snappy as to appear
effete
, nor so careful of my appearance that I would be considered vain, but I definitely qualified as a dandy.  With plenty of money to throw around at my tailor’s and haberdasher’s, an excellent eye for detail, and a good valet, I would make quite a sartorial splash in London that Season.

I thought of lunching at the Hyacinth, and even stopped and examined the menu as I passed the public dining room, but I really wanted to have my first lunch as a full-time Londoner at Brooks’s, just across the street, where my father put me up for membership the year before — not from the kindness of his heart, of course, but because the Earls of Vere had
always
belonged to Brooks’s, ever since its founding.  Fortunately, Pater did not expect me to lunch
with
him; he in fact was seldom seen at Brooks’s during the Season, much preferring to lunch at Westminster and dine at St. Stephen’s when Parliament was sitting.

Prepared for a solitary meal in the august dining room, reveling alone in the airy Georgian grandeur of that most venerable club, I was delighted to instead run into a good friend from Oxford, Bunny Vavasor.

I never knew how the moniker ‘Bunny’ had come to be applied, as we’d gone to different schools, and he made a dire secret of it.  The Hon. Frederick Vavasor, son and heir to the sixth Baron Reedham, was nothing
like
a rabbit — he was so much more bovine than leporine: a big beefy chap, handsome but not dazzling, gazing placidly at the world through trusting brown eyes and moving with the plodding nonchalance of a contented Guernsey; he was sweet and lazy, not stupid so much as he was blithely uninterested in anything that did not relate directly to his own comforts and pleasures. 

“Well, Foxy Saint-Clair, as I live and breathe!” Bunny strode slowly across the lofty central hall with this hand out.

“Bunny!  How’s the lad?” I took his hand in a hearty shake, refraining just in time from kissing him on both cheeks, as we would have done in another sort of place.  Bunny and I had been members of the same dining club at Magdalen, which I had joined for no other reason than that I was fatally in love with its president, and hoped that getting drunk with him might lead to other possibilities.  Bunny was in love with the same man, who sadly held his liquor with remarkable dignity, and we ended up fast friends after discovering our shared tastes.

“Coming along nicely, thanks,” he said, moving to my side and gesturing to another young man who’d been standing behind him, “I want you to meet my old school chum, Sir Oliver Paget.  Sebastian Saint-Clair, Viscount Foxbridge.”

Sir Oliver Paget, Bart., was an extremely good-looking chap, with waving honey-gold hair and darting amber eyes softened by extremely long lashes, the clear-cut profile of a Roman statue with an athletic figure to match.  Within the next few minutes, as we went in to lunch together and settled ourselves at a table, I learned that ‘Twister’ (we were on a school-name basis before the soup was gone) had been a prefect at Harrow, where Bunny had fagged for him; he’d gone on to Cambridge and earned a degree in physical sciences, along with various fellowships and scholarships.  Bunny plainly worshiped him, and also intimated through arcane gestures and veiled references that Twister was ‘one of our sort,’ which substantially increased my interest in this Old Harrovian.

“You’ll
never
guess what Twister does, Foxy,” Bunny leaned over confidentially when we’d reached the cheese and fruit stage of our meal.

“Does?” I wondered.  People one meets in Brooks’s don’t
do
things, they
have
things.  But then, Twister wasn’t a member of Brooks’s, he was there as Bunny’s guest.

“For work, I mean,” Bunny prompted, “Try and guess.”

“I couldn’t possibly,” I admitted after a moment’s consideration.  Twister looked the sort of fellow who could do absolutely anything he set his mind to: he might be a politician or an engineer, a hairdresser or a cook for all I could tell.

“He’s a
rozzer
!” Bunny hissed gleefully, “A bluebottle, a busy, a
copper
! Could you just
die
?”

“I
could
,” I admitted, admiringly, envisioning this golden Apollo in a snappy blue uniform.

“I’m not exactly a constable on the beat, Bunny,” Twister reproved his friend gently, reaching into his pocket to pull out a calling-card, “I’m with the Metropolitan Police.”

“Golly! That
is
impressive,” I found myself even more interested in Twister as I perused his card, ‘Sergeant Oliver Paget’ (no Sir or Bart.) above a telephone number and office designation at New Scotland Yard on the Victoria Embankment; admiration was quickly developing into something more — at least a good schoolboy crush, perhaps the seed of a grand passion.

“Not really,” he shrugged off the compliment, “I’m just a chief-inspector’s dogsbody.  But it
is
a good occupation with a future, it’s interesting and keeps me busy.”

“Well, it’s certainly more than I could do,” I insisted.

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Twister gave me a look that I couldn’t quite identify, somewhere between a smoulder and a twinkle, “I’ve heard about you, you know.  I was in Oxford on a case two years ago when you helped catch that don who was burgling the students’ rooms.”

“How mortifying! I’m
known to the police
, Bunny!” I joked.  Twister wasn’t the only one anxious to shrug off admiration.  The chivalric code forbids crowing over one’s own accomplishments — one has to hire bards for that.

“You might consider the Yard as a career, yourself, Foxy,” Twister persisted.

“Pater
would
kick at that, wouldn’t he?” I laughed, but the idea had caught hold of my imagination, presenting tantalizing possibilities but also sobering impossibilities, “I don’t think one
can
be a peer and a policeman at the same time.  If my father didn’t murder me, the Press would roast me alive.”

“Besides,” Bunny put in, “Foxy’s career is already taped out for him.  He’ll be a big cheese in Parliament one day.”

“Bunny, don’t remind me,” I shivered with revulsion.  It isn’t actually
compulsory
that I take my seat in the Lords, fewer and fewer peers were doing it every day; but though I was intent on shirking responsibility for as long as I could, I also intended to toe the line when my time came.  The Earls of Vere have always been involved in the highest spheres of government, and I couldn’t shrug off three centuries of tradition out of sheer laziness.

“Perhaps that’s better,” Twister looked at me appraisingly, thoughtfully, “You could do something important in politics.  You could be a Great Reformer.”

“Lords never reform anything, we’ve too vested an interest in things staying the same.”

“You could be the first,” Twister insisted, fixing me with an earnest gaze.

“We’re getting
far
too serious, gentlemen,” Bunny pronounced as gravely as a physician shaking his head over a hopeless case as he rose from the table, “I suggest we adjourn to the bar and treat the malady with a few cocktails before we become altogether
elderly
.”

We reverted to our jolly schoolboy mood as soon as we moved to the bar, where we got a bit squiffy on repeat orders of a newly-invented cocktail, the recipe for which Bunny had learned from a fellow at the latest Soho nightclub and taught to Brooks’s barman.  I don’t recall the name of the mixture, but it contained several different kinds of alcohol and tasted oddly like pink-sugar humbugs.

When we reached the point where we’d either have to stop drinking or go somewhere less august to get properly soaked, Bunny elected to give it up, thinking he’d better run upstairs and sleep it off before dressing for dinner (he was staying at Brooks’s until his new flat in Albemarle Street would be ready).  I offered to escort Twister home, and he and I came downstairs together, where I asked the porter to get us a cab.

“You don’t have a car?” Twister looked at me with surprise when the porter scurried outside.

“Not yet,” I responded, “And I may just stick to cabs after all.  So much less bother.”

“Then why are you offering to take me home?  I could’ve called a cab on my own.”

“I think you know why,” I answered, lowering my eyes and then peeking up at him through my lashes, one of my most potent come-hither glances.

“Look, Foxy,” Twister laid his hand on my shoulder in a thoroughly avuncular manner, which was as close to the effect of a cold shower as could be managed in a public place, “You’re a very attractive boy, but I’m a policeman.  Even if I wasn’t queer, I’d have to be incredibly careful about my associates.  I don’t know you well enough yet to invite you to my rooms.”