The September Society (32 page)

“Well?”

“Lawrence and I have brought it—here you are, sir. Among a great lot of treasure hidden in the wall.”

Here the constable, who had probably never seen more than twenty pounds put together in his life, pulled from his pocket a large, sparkling, pristine sapphire, of the darkest blue.

They had all heard James Payson refer to the stone; nevertheless, there was a sharp intake of breath across the room.

It was McConnell who spoke at last. “Not my area,” he said softly, “and I wouldn’t claim any special knowledge—but—but do you think I could hold it, for a moment, Constable? Thank you, thank you.” He accepted it on his handkerchief. “My God, my God! It’s four times the size of the Star of Bombay! Look at this rock! Insoluble, infusible, and above all perfectly faceted! My God!”

The whole room watched the doctor.

“There are only four truly precious stones,” he went on. “Emeralds, diamonds, and rubies—which are only red sapphires—and then these … it would be impossible to put a price on it! I don’t think the headman of that village scavenged this, Mr. Payson … this must have come down through the generations. Look how perfectly it’s cut! Why, there aren’t a dozen people on this planet who can afford this, and only a handful more governments! Well, thank you for letting me see it,” he said, handing the sapphire to Jenkins. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

Everybody in the room took turns examining it until finally Jenkins and the two constables bore it to a waiting brougham with a holy air. (“And you brought it to the heart of Eastcheap, you fathead?” said Jenkins.) Then the group sorted themselves out and arranged their departure.

What a strange matter it had been! Full of mistaken identity and misplaced trust. Even at this early stage Lenox could admit to himself that it had been one of his poorer efforts—
marked by minor successes and major lapses. He couldn’t blame himself entirely, though. He had been in love.

In the end it was Dallington who took him back to Hampden Lane. McConnell had freshly dressed his bandages and given him several packets of the pain solution, along with a promise to come by early the next morning, but he had been anxious to go home and check on Toto. They had finally settled on a name that both of them liked: Bella McConnell. It was a beautiful name, Lenox agreed—beautiful enough even to justify all the arguments that came before it.

In the carriage Dallington spoke quietly. “Will you make it through the night, then? Your wound, I mean.”

“Oh, yes, I should say so. For which you deserve a great deal of the credit.”

“I was pretty dashing, wasn’t I?” said the young man with the first sign of his old grin. “Still, I’m sorry to have made it as close as it was.”

As he climbed the stairs of his house, Lenox felt sore, relieved, and exhausted—but on the fringe of those feelings was a sort of affection as well. In this short, fraught time he had come to be truly fond of Dallington.

Graham still hadn’t come home, and so in the front hallway it was Mary who exclaimed over his wound and took his overcoat. A cheerful constable named Addington was there as well and promised to stay the night. Lenox thanked him, asked Mary to find him some food, and then turned up the hallway toward the prospect of a nice smoke and some time alone in his library. It would be paradise, he thought.

But a different kind of paradise awaited him there. When Mary opened the doors Lenox saw that Lady Jane was sitting on the sofa, not even pretending to read.

“Oh, Charles!” she said, rising and rushing to his side. “Come sit next to me. Are you comfortable? Is it true what Addington says, you’ve been shot? Charles, how could you?”

Here she burst into unrestrained tears, which fell down her pale cheeks in little rivers. She clasped his hand tightly in hers. All the awkwardness of their last meeting was forgotten, and their old ease returned.

Laughing a little, Lenox said, “I’m awfully sorry. But it’s not even bleeding any longer, look!”

She laughed, too, in a hiccupping way, her spent nerves spilling over, and dried her eyes with Lenox’s handkerchief. In her plain pink dress and blue shawl, her hair falling in curls behind her ears, her large eyes bright and wet, she had never looked more beautiful to her friend. He wasn’t sure what he saw precisely—simply some light that began in her and radiated out, which made her golden and lovely. Which made her Jane.

“What was it that happened, Charles?” she said.

“I was foolish enough to hide behind some curtains, and a bullet grazed me just here, between my left arm and my side. McConnell says it won’t hurt for more than two or three days, though. More important, did you hear about little Bella?”

She laughed again, and finally her eyes were dry. Still, though, she hadn’t let go of his hand. “I like it, don’t you?”

“I think it’s a perfect name,” he agreed.

“Toto’s so happy, too.”

“And McConnell couldn’t wait to find his way home this evening.”

Then, suddenly, the conversation stopped. They were still looking into each other’s eyes, but for the first time in their long friendship neither of them could say anything. At last Lenox said, “Michael Pierce, the man I met at your house, he was—”

“He asked me to marry him, Charles.”

Lenox managed to say, “He seemed like a decent fellow when we met, though it wasn’t for long. I would—”

“I said no, of course.”

Their hands were still together, their eyes still met.

“Where have you been, Jane? What have you been doing, these past weeks? I feel as if my best friend were a ghost. What were you doing in the Seven Dials?” Preemptively, he added, “I saw you there accidentally, I promise.”

“Of course I believe you, Charles. Of course.” Hesitantly, gingerly, she went on. “As I told you, Michael is my brother’s friend.”

“Yes,” he said, his heart racing.

“It’s simple enough. He was at Eton with my brother, and they became friends on the rugby pitch—but Michael was always wild, never a very good student. After his classmates went to university, he came to London and became a dilettante, a wastrel. He drank in low and high company alike. He even”—she shuddered—“he behaved badly. Until one night outside a public house in the Seven Dials, when a man named Peter Puddle tried to rob him at knifepoint. Michael was carrying a loaded blackjack and dealt him a blow to the head and—and killed him, Charles.”

There was utter silence in the room.

“Michael’s uncle, Lord Holdernesse, and my brother were the only two men who knew the secret. Lord Holdernesse arranged his transit to the colonies, and paid Peter Puddle’s wife and children a weekly remittance and bought them a small house in the Dials. When he died, my brother began to pay the remittance and took me into his confidence; and for years now, three years I suppose, I’ve visited them one morning each week.

“At first they were sullenly respectful toward me—then friendlier—and finally a real friendship has sprung up between us. But then Michael returned, last month.”

It was all so clear now, Lenox thought.

“He was rich, and wanted to make amends; and since he returned I’ve been visiting them not in my spare morning hours
but nearly every day, trying to broker some kind of peace—to give Michael, whom my brother loves, some sort of redemption.”

“You needn’t say another word,” Lenox answered, “and if I’ve been rude enough and unkind enough to question you, or make you feel accountable to me—I’m so sorry.”

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.

T
he 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.