Free A Stranger in Mayfair by Charles Finch Page 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 at play, but then why would he have anything delivered under the servants’ door? Wasn’t that a dead giveaway?
    There was good news, however. The case might be perplexing, and domestic bliss elusive, but professional happiness was close at hand.
    In his short time as Lenox’s political secretary, Graham had already proved a marvel. It had only been a few days, but he had filled each of them with furious activity, rarely sleeping longer than a few hours, the commitment he had always shown as a servant transferred to this new work. Aside from organizing the new office to within an inch of its life, he had gone over Lenox’s appointment book, deciphered which meetings were most important, and canceled the rest, something that would save the grateful Lenox several hours a day.
    What was most impressive, though, was his quickly growing acquaintance. It took men years to know the various faces of Parliament, but Graham was a quick pupil. This was an unspoken but important fact of life in the House of Commons, and Lenox hadn’t known anything about it. Now, however, they walked the halls and various men Lenox had never laid eyes on nodded at them both. “The Marquess of Aldington’s secretary,” Graham would say, or “Hector Prime’s chief counselor.” Graham’s principal gift in detective work had always been infiltration—making friends in a pub or a kitchen—and he put that gift to use here now in these more exalted corridors.
    The apotheosis of this talent in its political form came that morning. Graham was waiting at the Members’ Entrance, as he did every day now, when Lenox arrived.
    “Good morning, sir,” he said. “In ten minutes you must sit down with the Board of Agriculture. After that—”
    Here Graham broke off and nodded his head at an enormously tall, thin young man with a giant forehead. “How do you do?” he said.
    “Excellently, Mr. Graham, I thank you.”
    After the man had walked on, Lenox said in a low voice, “My God, that was Percy Field.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “How on earth do you know him?”
    Percy Field was the Prime Minister’s own assistant, a famously accomplished and imperious lad from Magdalene College, prodigiously intelligent, whom the PM himself had declared more important to Great Britain’s welfare than all but ten or twenty people. Field had little patience for most Members, let alone their secretaries.
    “He snubbed me, until I took the liberty of inviting him to one of your Tuesdays, sir. I spoke to Lady Lenox in