“Do you have any idea of how she died?”

“Poison, I think. That’s what the housemaid here says. It was she who heard the news.”

“Murder?”

“Or suicide. I don’t know.”

“How appalling!”

“It’s too much to ask-”

“Never.”

“I was hoping-”

“Of course,” he said.

He looked outside. He would have to begin right away. The snow was falling even harder, and it was almost dark, but he turned back to her, smiled cheerfully, and said, “I’d better go over while the trail is fresh.”

She smiled through her tears, and said, “Oh, Charles, it’s too good of you. Especially on a day when it’s so cold.”

He sat with her a few minutes longer, making small talk, trying to comfort her, and then asked Kirk for his hat. Lady Jane walked him to the door and waved goodbye as he stepped into a hansom cab and directed the driver to Bond Street.

George Barnard would dislike this, thought Lenox as he rode along. He was a man of immense personal pride, which extended equally to his finest paintings and his lowest pots and pans. A death by poison in his house would offend both his own impervious sense of order and his certainty that most of the world ran by his clock.

He was a politician-once a Member of Parliament, though more recently he had been appointed to a variety of more permanent government roles. He and Lenox were friends, or, more accurately, acquaintances who came into frequent contact. Lenox had too little personal ambition to be counted among Barnard’s truest friends. And had begun with too much money.

Barnard, by contrast, had grown up in impoverished middle-class gentility, somewhere slightly south of Manchester-a far cry from Whitehall. How he had made his money was considered a great mystery, and London society was constantly speculating about it. Some said he had made his first fortune playing on the Exchange, or even as a merchant, but if either was true he had long since thrown it off. He had arrived in London as a conservative MP but had quickly left elective government for unelected posts.