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later she had been countryish, quick to laugh, happy to chatter, even a bit silly at times—very different from Lenox’s own sharp, cosmopolitan wife, Lady Jane Grey, though the two had grown close across the years, being married as they were to a pair of brothers. She had been the type of person who enlivened a room, Molly, and since Edmund himself was rather quiet, a reflective soul, they had been a wonderful match. And she had been a woman of parts, too, fine at the pianoforte, and a really quite superb draftsman, who had left behind her hundreds of small, endearing, utterly accurate drawings of the people and places she had loved.
    Her death had been fast—shockingly fast. A mild headache on a Tuesday; a fever on the Wednesday; better on the Thursday and planning out her social calendar; very weak indeed on the Friday but optimistic she would see the illness out before the weekend; then, on Saturday morning, badly feverish, and by the afternoon, unconscious, the best doctors from three counties called to her bedside. On Sunday, dead.
    One of Lenox’s closest friends in the world was a physician named Thomas McConnell, a Scotsman who had often helped him in his criminal investigations.
    â€œWhat killed her?” Lenox had asked after the funeral. “It would be nice to know.”
    They had been walking down the lovely avenue, lined on either side with lime trees, which led toward Lenox House. McConnell, a rangy fellow, given perhaps too much to drink at moments in his life but a surpassingly excellent doctor, had shaken his head sadly. “I cannot say, exactly. A fever.”
    â€œBut you have spoken to Lincoln, Hoare?”
    It had been a lovely day, one of those true summer days of September in Sussex, still, bright, mild, a few clouds in the brilliant blue sky. “There are moments when I congratulate myself on belonging to an age of sophistication, Charles—none of the slime-draughts and silver bark and bloodletting of last century, all remedies that killed more than they saved. We know infinitely more than our grandfathers did. And yet something like this—delirium … a fever … chills? We are no closer to understanding precisely what killed her than the Romans would have been. Go back farther, if you like—the ancient Egpytians.”
    â€œPoor Molly,” Lenox had said.
    â€œPoor Edmund,” McConnell had replied, shaking his head. “The dead are at least beyond whatever harm this world can do them.”
    McConnell worked at Great Ormond Street Hospital, which served severely ill children, regardless of whether they could pay—a charity that was one of the great credits to the empire, or so Lenox thought. McConnell had seen children die. “Yes,” Lenox had said. “I’m sure you’re right.”
    As he and his brother ate lunch now, talking with simulated engagement about political matters, Lenox tried to think of what he could do to help. The five weeks since that day with McConnell might have been five seconds for his brother. Edmund’s face, his mood, were no different, his shock still total.
    What made it so difficult was his brother’s essential sweetness. London and his career as a detective had together sharpened Lenox into hawkishness, observance, and cynicism, not all the way perhaps, but far enough that there was little enough that could catch him off guard. Edmund, however, had never been altered, not from boyhood. Even as he maneuvered in Parliament—for he had reached a high position there—it was not through cunning but through his good nature, the ease with which people loved him, that he attained each success. He was intelligent, to be sure, but he had held on through the long years to his country openness.
    Part of the credit for that was in all likelihood due to Molly, Lenox realized now.
    â€œI’m down to the house in two days’ time,” Edmund said, as the waiter took away