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the intermission, when Muller was already back out playing. But then where could he be?”
    Lenox pondered the question as the cab moved across Grosvenor Square, in the direction of his brother’s house. Parsons had told the truth—there was nothing new in the midday paper, though there was a great deal of specious theorizing. When he stepped down from his cab he had learned no fresh information. Alas. Well, here he was: his brother. He took a deep breath, bracing himself.
    Sir Edmund Lenox was two years older than Charles, and they had passed their childhoods as close as two brothers could be, first at their family home, Lenox House, in Sussex, then together at Harrow School, in London, and finally two years apart at Oxford. Their paths had diverged slightly after that. Edmund favored the country, Charles the city, and when their father died, and Edmund inherited both the baronetcy and the house, he had married and settled there. Then, however, around his thirtieth birthday, he had won the parliamentary seat of Markethouse, the village nearby, and since then he had divided his time more or less equally between London and the country. That had pleased his younger brother; for the past fifteen years, he’d been able to see a great deal of Edmund, between the time he was up for Parliament and the two weeks that they all spent at Lenox House over Christmas, by custom.
    Edmund’s house in the city was the same one Lenox’s family had lived in during the season since the early part of the century, a bright, airy, wide-windowed, white-walled town house on a Mayfair side street.
    Now, however, it was darkened—a black cloth wrapped around the door knocker, an unlit candle in the front window, black crepe lining the flower boxes, which ought at least to have had mums in them, at this time of year.
    Lenox, a lump in his throat, reached up to the cab’s seat and paid the driver, who accepted the money with a finger to his hat and then whipped his two horses onward to their next fare.
    The younger brother stood on the pavement for a moment, looking up. His brother’s dear, beloved wife, Molly, was dead, aged only forty, and though Edmund had kept his demeanor even, in the five weeks since it had happened, anyone who knew him even slightly saw how impenetrable, how implacable his grief was. He had become a ghost of himself, and Lenox had realized to his horror that it wasn’t impossible to imagine that Edmund might follow, soon, behind his wife.

 
    CHAPTER THREE
    They walked together to White’s. This was Edmund’s favorite club, where they got a quiet table near the window. Was the waiter unusually solicitous, or was it merely good service? Lenox saw his brother calculating the chances on either side of the question while they ordered their luncheon.
    â€œWell then,” said Edmund. “Muller. You must have some idea?”
    â€œNone at all!” said Lenox cheerfully.
    There was a very faint flicker of interest in Edmund’s face. “No?” he said. “Not even a conjecture?”
    â€œDo you have one? I should be very happy to take it and pass it off as my own, in particular should it prove correct.”
    â€œI? No, I have not followed it very closely,” murmured Edmund.
    Lenox would have greatly preferred it if his brother had been experiencing a more dramatic and tragic grief—if he drank too much wine, or refused all food, or stormed about the turf near Lenox House at midnight. Instead, he was passably social, drinking a little wine, eating a few bites of food. He was simply not altogether there. In the soft, luminous whiteness of midmorning, sunlight falling in slants through the windows, it looked as if he were already half departed from the world.
    How quickly it had happened! Molly had been a plump, pretty woman, with red cheeks and dark hair, of excellent but not especially illustrious stock. Edmund had met her at a Sussex dance. Then and