A Beautiful Blue Death by Charles Finch Page A

grammar school, public school, and university, all of which excluded women.
    Lenox also belonged to the Travelers Club, on St. James’s Street, and there, in the long lounge that evening, the last two members by the fire were Lord Cabot and Charles Lenox—both of whom, it could be presumed, had at least once traveled 500 miles in a straight line from the center of London, which was the very minimum requirement of that club. Lenox wished he had gone farther than Russia—he wished he had gone to the Cape of Good Hope, like Stanley Foster, another member—but he enjoyed the club’s company nonetheless. Its members were the most interesting and idiosyncratic of the aristocratic class, from every field and every pursuit, with an emphasis on scholarship. Lenox’s father had helped found it, because his own clubs were too full of bores; everybody in the Travelers was an expert on something—ancient Welsh agriculture or Persian illuminated manuscripts or Shakespeare’s problem comedies, or imperial Rome, like Lenox—even those with other careers. The buildingitself was an old stone one, comfortable inside, with a sizable library and a good dining room. Lenox often went there to read at night and perhaps run into a friend who also loved to travel.
    But now they were in the lounge, which was a long hall with a painted ceiling and heavy armchairs. Each man had a drink in his hand, and Cabot held the poker and constantly shifted the dying embers in the hearth. He was a fat man with white hair, tidily dressed, and with a quick smile.
    The fire was warm, but outside the sounds of a blizzard shuffled against the windows, the fiercer wind that rises when the streets are abandoned at night, the swirls of wet snow against the ground, and the boots of the last men out hurrying along the pavement toward home.
    They were talking about the Commons, as they always did when they had supper. Their other friends had melted away by now.
    “Your brother,” said Lord Cabot. “There’s an example.”
    “Of what?”
    “A man with no more idea of leadership than of becoming a chimney sweep! Great fella, you know, and votes well, when he comes to town, but my question is, Who, when he sits in his seat, tells him what to do? Leadership!”
    “You may underestimate my brother. He surprised me today.”
    “But you do see my point, Lenox!”
    “You think we have no man the equal of Disraeli on the liberal side.”
    The political situation of the moment was complex. Disraeli had initiated tremendous social reform, but he was a Conservative, and the Liberals were trying to find a match for him. Lord Russell was the Prime Minister and a Liberal, but by common consent he was no Disraeli.
    “I should say not.”
    “Gladstone?”
    “Perhaps in time, my young friend,” Cabot said. “But Disraeli—”
    “He will go down in history as a liberal.”
    Both men laughed.
    “And here we are again. It always signals the time to sip our last sips, when we reach this subject.”
    Cabot smiled happily and set the poker against the hearth. Both men rose and began to walk across the great hall. Lenox corrected himself; they were not the last members present. An old white-haired man slept on a chair in the corner, his drink still in his hand. The stewards would leave him alone all night, if he slept. Particularly in a blizzard.
    “A ride?” said Lenox.
    “No, thank you, dear friend, my carriage should be along any moment.”
    Soon both men were on their way home, having promised each other to have supper again soon. Lenox, stepping into his carriage, sighed and leaned back in his seat. Nearly midnight, he thought, looking at his watch. The streets had a ghostly feel. Who walks among us, he asked himself, with a young maid’s death on their hands?
    When he reached Hampden Lane, he saw that Graham was still awake; the light in the hallway shone through the front windows. He climbed the steps, opened the door, and saw his butler reading over a set of