A Beautiful Blue Death by Charles Finch

sportsman’s interest in politics, and a few friends, at their club, the Travelers. He had put on his dinner jacket and combed his hair when, just as he was nearly ready to leave, he heard the servants’ door open and close and knew from the buzz of voices that Graham was home.
    He went down to the hallway and at the same time heard footsteps on the stairs below, and a moment later his butler came in, looking worse for the day’s wear, much as Lenox him-selfmust have looked when he had come home that evening—cold and unhappy.
    “Graham!” he said.
    “Sir.”
    “Lovely day out, isn’t it?”
    “No, sir, if I may contradict you.”
    Lenox laughed. “Why are you up here, anyway?”
    “I thought you might want to discuss the matter we spoke about yesterday evening right away, sir.”
    “No, no,” said Lenox, “go to your room, have a fire, change your clothes, and doze off. If only to please me. And have some tea.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “We can talk later this evening or tomorrow morning.”
    “Very well, sir. Good evening.”
    Graham began to walk back down the stairs tiredly. Lenox stood and listened, heard a door shut beneath, and turned to the housekeeper.
    “Will you take him the tea yourself?”
    “Oh, yes, sir,” she said.
    “It’s my fault he had to go out at all.”
    “I will indeed, sir.”
    “Excellent.” He turned and began to walk toward the front door but stopped and turned around. Then he paused and didn’t say anything.
    After a moment, the housekeeper said, “Sir?”
    “Mary,” he said, “will you also take one of those little chocolate cakes I like so well, when you take him his tea? He might enjoy that.”
    “Of course, sir.”
    “That’ll do,” he said to himself, and opened the front door to leave.

Chapter 12
    M ost of the gentlemen’s clubs of London were on Pall Mall and St. James’s Street, near Hampden Lane, and Lenox belonged to several of them. Every group of people had a club—the Gresham for merchants, the Hogarth for artists, the Army and Navy, called Rag and Famish by its members, for veterans—but Lenox’s clubs were of a higher caste, being clubs dedicated not to a pursuit, by and large, but to the aristocracy.
    They mostly resembled one another, being wide white town-houses, usually in the Italianate style, and four or five stories high. Each of them served a different mood or clique.
    For instance, he had first joined the Athenæum Club, on Pall Mall, and still spent several evenings a month there. It had the best club library in England and excellent food, and most of his friends from school and university belonged there.
    He also went to the Savile Club, which was less politics and more art and science, to the Devonshire Club, which was for members of a liberal bent, and to the Eton and Harrow, on Pall Mall East, for graduates of those two public schools. He belonged to the Oriental Club and the Marlborough Club, the latter of which was considered perhaps the most prestigious inLondon. And then there was the Oxford and Cambridge Club, at 71 Pall Mall, which was shortly to play a role in the case.
    They were almost all in limestone buildings, and they were all very comfortable inside, particularly the Athenæum and the Devonshire. They all had central halls, where ceremonies and large dinners were held, and where you checked for your friends in thick chairs next to warm fireplaces. Beyond the large halls were a series of smaller rooms for smaller groups: billiard rooms, card rooms, grand old libraries where members dozed off with The Times on their laps, chess rooms, tearooms, and, of course, places to eat.
    The reason these clubs flourished, Lenox felt, was that this was an age of unusually rigid separation between men and women. He and Lady Jane ignored that separation, but most men spoke very little with women except at parties, and were most comfortable playing a hand of cards or smoking a cigar with their friends, a kind of solidarity encouraged in