“I’m sorry to hear that, sir,” said Graham.

“It’s beastly cold outside.”

“It is, sir.”

Lenox looked more and more glum. “Can’t be helped, I expect,” he said.

“No, sir.”

Lenox sighed. “Will you get my things, then?”

“Of course, sir,” said Graham. “Does this mean that you don’t wish to reply-”

“No, no, no. That’s why I’m going over.”

“Very good, sir.”

As the butler left, Lenox stood up and walked over to the window behind his desk. He had been looking forward to a night in by the fire, but he was being foolish, he thought. It was only a house away. He should put his boots on-they were tossed under his desk, next to an open copy of Much, Ado -and get ready to go. They would be just about dry, he hoped. And in truth he looked forward to seeing her.

Lady Jane Grey was a childless widow of just past thirty, who lived in the next house over. She was one of his closest friends in the world. This had been the case ever since they were children in Sussex. Sir Edmund, Charles’s older brother, had once been in love with Lady Jane, but that was when they were all much younger, when Charles was just out of Harrow and on his way to Oxford.

Lenox and Lady Jane were neighbors on Hampden Lane, living next to each other in a row of gray stone houses on a little slip of an alley just off of St. James’s Park in the neighborhood of May-fair. As it had been for some time, Mayfair was the most prestigious address in London-and yet he had decided to live there because it was so near St. James’s, where Lenox had gone with his father when he was a child.

The park was surrounded by palaces: Buckingham Palace to the left, St. James’s Palace to the right, and Westminster Palace, more commonly known as Parliament, straight ahead. Like so many parks in London it had begun life as a place for Henry VIII to shoot deer, but Charles II, whom Lenox had always been fond of as a schoolboy, had opened it to the public and had often fed the ducks there himself, where he could talk with his subjects.