Honor's Kingdom (22 page)

“You bullied that boy. Young Pomeroy. To find out all you could about the legation’s involvement with the Reverend Mr. Campbell?”

“
Is
there an ‘involvement,’ Major Jones?”

“Your curiosity seems to—”

“Ah! ‘Curiosity!’ Another word that never fails to interest me. Curiosity, Major Jones, is a quality I find admirable under almost every circumstance. Curiosity leads us onward to knowledge. And knowledge . . . knowledge is the engine of progress,
whether in the realms of industry, in the far fields of science, or in politics. Why, I believe a man in my position would fail in his duty, were he to decline the least chance to learn something new. Something,” he said, with that masking smile upon him again, “that might prove unexpectedly advantageous.”

“You preyed upon the boy’s weakness!”

His smile was like the light on a field of bracken, when the weather is changeable and the clouds run. The moment I thought him in shadow, sunlight returned. But one thing was markedly different from our first encounter. He did not twitter. Not once. It made me think that matters had grown serious.

“Upon his weakness? My dear Major Jones! Weakness may be an explanation, but it is never an excuse. Weak men should not seek position, if they cannot withstand the strong. I think that is an accepted argument of our times.” He stirred in his chair. “But I’ve been unspeakably neglectful. May I offer you a glass of sherry?”

Then he paused. For a sliver of a second after he had finished speaking, his mouth hung open. He looked just to the side of me and said, “But I forget myself. You abstain.”

Twas clear that his slight forgetfulness annoyed him. And stranger still I found it that a man who had dinner and guests waiting would help himself to a sherry, as Mr. Disraeli did before my eyes. I do not think it is “done,” as such folk say.

“I want the letters,” I told him.

Before he turned to face me again, he said, “I find myself at a disadvantage yet again. What letters, Major Jones?”

I knew it in my bones, see. Pomeroy might funk a conclusion staring him in the face, but I would not. Disraeli had the letters the failed young man had written to his wife. That is how he knew enough to break him.

“Mr. Reginald Pomeroy’s letters. To his wife.”

He lowered his glass of sherry and constructed an amazed face.

“You must explain.”

But I was learning his tricks of language, see.

“The letters from which you learned enough to make him sick with fear. Enough to make him dance and jump for you like a dog. The letters—”

“But my dear Major Jones . . . even if a gentleman came into the possession of such letters, which seems unlikely, he could hardly fail to—”

“Mr. Disraeli, I am not afraid to call things as they are. You have blackmailed that boy.”

He sat down again, and neatly placed his sherry glass on a table topped with marble. “Is
that
what you Americans call it? When a fellow seeks to assist a young man who has strayed? When a gentleman . . . attempts to spare a threatened youth the gravest embarrassment? When a man of position tries, selflessly, to improve the performance in office of one of Her Majesty’s officials? Is that called ‘blackmail’ in the United States, sir?”

“I will have the letters,” I told him, “before I go.”

He shook his head. Delicately, as a fine, high gentleman will. “Let us explore the dimensions of theoretical possibility, Major Jones. I will play Faraday and put a supposition to you. Now, if the first party possessed such letters, and party the second desired to come into their possession—perhaps for dubious reasons of their own, although that does not figure in our supposition—what might the second party offer party the first in exchange?” His smiled catted higher. “In what I believe the Yankee terms a ‘swap’?”

I do not like games. Not games of cards, nor games with words. And I am not skilled in such matters.

Twas then I blundered.

“It seems to me,” I said, “that the first fellow would be lucky not to be known publicly as a thief. Who stole a lady’s letters while she was lying ill, and who used them against the loving husband who had written them to her. Such a fellow should be glad to save his reputation.”

Mr. Disraeli made a steeple of his fingertips, feigning deep thought. Then he said, “But, Major Jones, I fail to recall any mention of thievery in our proposition. It was my unspoken
assumption that the first party, far from annoying a lady and her property, had come by the letters in question in his customary role as a good angel. Rescuing them from less scrupulous hands, and keeping them safe and intact. But now we have begun to speak of motives, which are never as clear as they seem.” He took a decidedly slow sip of sherry. “As for your suggested reward, the preservation of party the first’s good reputation, I should rather expect that reputation to be enhanced, should the affair come to light. When it emerged that he had attempted, at some risk, to effect the best of deeds and preserve a lady’s honor. Or, at least, the illusion thereof.”

Now, I was in a muddle. I do not like to talk around things, or over and under them, but to say plainly what must be said.

“What are you suggesting, sir?” I asked, in a voice too near demanding for good manners. I have little polish, see, and Christian honesty will not do in society.

He rose, slowly, like a cobra from its basket. “Why, I don’t believe I’ve ‘suggested’ a single thing. We have been speaking theoretically, nothing more. Even idly, one might say.” He glided behind a desk and opened one of its drawers. “Yet . . . it happens, Major Jones,” he said, bringing out a stack of letters tied up with a blue ribbon, “that there is a measure of reality to my proposition. I found myself enabled to defend the Pomeroy boy’s interests and—at no small cost—I did what a gentleman ought.”

He held the stack of letters out toward me.

I took them. And, sick with the vanity of my imagined cleverness, I pretended to count the stack I had been given. Though it was a fib of sorts, for I was merely guessing, I said, “The rest of them, too, sir. This is not all of them.”

It seemed to me that such a one as Mr. Disraeli would not give all at once, at the first asking.

Obediently, he made a show of rooting through the drawer. And he produced another, smaller collection, bound up in a red ribbon.

“How good of you to remind me,” he said.

I got myself up to my feet. “Thank you, sir. You have done the right thing, see.”

“Oh, but must you rush off?”

I failed to anticipate him. “You . . . but you have dinner guests, I believe? Don’t you—”

He waved such cares away with a jovial gesture and sat back down. “Mrs. Disraeli provides more than adequate compensation for my absence. No, Major Jones, now that you have ‘bagged your game,’ you must let me profit from your experience.”

I sat me down again, with a feeling grown uneasy.

“Really, Major Jones! I have underestimated you frightfully! You must forgive me, I beg you.” He leaned forward in that slight way of his. “I’m unspeakably relieved to know that those letters are in trustworthy hands at last. They’ve been a terrible burden to me. But . . .” He underscored the question with a tightening of his eyebrows. “ . . . why do you think it is that Reggie Pomeroy’s wife sold those letters in the first place? What benefit could she possibly have expected that might outweigh the risk to her worried husband? How much money do you think she asked?”

“Such a suggestion,” I replied, “is abominable, sir.”

“Ah,” Mr. Disraeli said happily, “that is one point upon which your views and mine coincide. I have often found the truth abominable. Insistent, as well.”

“She would not . . . no lady could have done such a thing!”

“But there we disagree, Major Jones. I have always found the fairer sex remarkably capable. Have you, by the way, ever
met
Mrs. Pomeroy? Young Reginald’s wife? In whom you have taken so great an interest?”

“I have not, sir, but—”

“Another word that has changed the course of nations! Indeed, a sometimes deadly word, infernal: ‘But.’ You have not met her, then? What a terrible pity.”

“I believe she is ill and incommoded. And . . . if she did sell . . .
if . . .
perhaps . . . her health . . . perhaps she was in need . . .”

“I must plead ignorance,” Mr. Disraeli said, as he emptied the final drop from his glass of sherry. “I had no idea Mrs. Pomeroy was in poor health.”

“She has been terribly ill, sir. A child was lost.”

At that, his smile grew unmistakably genuine. And cruel. “We do not speak, I take it, of young Pomeroy himself?”

“Sir . . .” Oh, there was a dreadful twisting at the bottom of my stomach, and not only from an abundance of Spanish oranges. “ . . . if you please . . . the lady has a secret she must protect.”

“What lady doesn’t?”

“You must be mistaken . . .”

Mr. Disraeli assumed the expression of a benevolent elder, bent on imparting knowledge to a boy. “Major Jones, I have, at certain times in the past, occupied myself with the composition of novels, an endeavor evocative of the political field in that a man must condition himself to the keenest observation of manners and character. And it has never failed to be an inspiration to me how a young man, captivated by his passion for a particular woman, will believe whatever she may see fit to tell him, no matter its absurdity. Such young men demonstrate a magnificent faith in the veracity of the beloved, one that routinely strains credulity. But, then, I never have understood faith in any of its profounder forms. I take life as I find it, you see. And I cannot say I feel any the poorer for my deficiency.”

“You expect me to believe that Mr. Pomeroy’s wife betrayed him? And sold the letters he wrote to her? Knowing the danger in which her husband might find himself? And jeopardizing all their private matters?”

“Major Jones, I don’t ‘expect’ you to believe anything. That is your affair entirely. I merely offer friendly observations.”

“Friendly, is it?”

“You do seem to have some difficulty in sorting your friends from your enemies. Indeed, I’ve been holding out the hand of friendship to you with uninterrupted consistency. But you display a certain reluctance to embrace my offer.”

What might I have said?

With a regretful wave of his head, Mr. Disraeli continued, “I recognized your value from the first, Major Jones. And let us be frank: Isn’t mutual value the basis of all friendships? Although we like to paint them in finer colors? Haven’t I entrusted you with those letters?” He pointed to the missives in my hand. “Would I entrust so delicate a matter to a man I did not believe I could trust without reservation? How
do
you Americans define friendship, if I may ask?”

I thought of Mick Tyrone, and of Jimmy Molloy. But let that bide.

Mr. Disraeli rose again, with a brief tut-tutting. He was the quietest man afoot that ever I did know this side of the Khyber. Save perhaps an American-Indian fellow, Broke Stick, who had crept through Mississippi—but that is another story. Mr. Disraeli seemed to glide across the carpet, and you heard naught but the hiss of his gleaming leather pumps.

“I believe,” my host resumed, “there is another American expression, to the effect that ‘seeing is believing.’ I suppose I shall have to offer further proof of my consideration toward you, Major Jones. Just as you were so kind in your suggestion that my reputation wanted preservation from the public’s misapprehensions. Indeed, circumstances have afforded me the ability to offer an identical service to you.”

I did not know what on earth he meant. But I did not think I would like it.

“You are, sir,” he continued, “a man of remarkable and varied accomplishments. I’m told you even served in the ranks, in India?”

“I did, sir,” I said cautiously. “In a John Company regiment.”

“And you served quite handsomely, I’m given to understand. Almost heroically, one might say?”

“That is not for me to judge.”

“No,” he said, in a thoughtful voice. “No, indeed not. Finally, it has been suggested—by a well-intentioned gentleman in the Indian Records Office—that you suffered a certain misfortune.
As things were sorting themselves out in the wake of the Mutiny. The result of which was a medical declaration to the effect that you were no longer fit for duty. ‘Mad of a fever,’ I believe the examining officer put it.” He had come quite close to me, until he almost hovered over my chair. “I must say, you don’t look the least bit mad to me. Sitting there so pleasantly in a Morocco armchair. In mufti for the evening, but currently serving as an officer in the military arm of the United States.”

“I am not mad,” I said slowly. “Nor was I then.” Although the truth is that I did not know what my condition might have been properly called. I only know the day arrived when I found myself helpless. I could not kill another unarmed man, which had become our vengeful occupation. I do not pretend to virtue in that regard. Twas only that I found myself unable. And I never had thought to raise my hand in the sin of war thereafter. America it was that called me back to service. Sweet America, and the sight of those helpless boys drilling.

“I was never mad,” I concluded.

“Ah,” Mr. Disraeli said, backing away as if to fetch more sherry. “I do find that a considerable relief! I will take you at your word and we shall declare the charge of madness an odious calumny. Really, it’s an enormous relief! I had supposed myself in a dilemma, you see, but now there’s no question of a madman let loose upon us.
With
the imprimatur of the Government of the United States. We need not fear embarrassment—or danger—on that count.” He paused before the decanter, but did not touch it. Twas as if he were acting upon a stage. “And so I find my concerns reduced to one: If you are not and were not ‘mad,’ and I am myself confident of your sanity, Major Jones, then the sole liability we face is a charge of desertion.”

He smiled and leaned his coat-tails against the front of his desk. “Might it not embarrass Mr. Adams, and your government—and, not least, yourself, sir—if someone of a malevolent nature were to misconstrue your actions? Imagining that you had perpetrated a hoax to avoid fulfilling your term of service? That you had made a wicked charade of madness out of cowardice
in the face of the enemy?” He shuddered for my benefit. “With the best will in the world, I could hardly defend anyone against such a charge. Consider how your odyssey might appear to unfriendly eyes: Five years ago, you were a sergeant in an Indian regiment, who suddenly refused to do his duty. Who was deemed ‘mad of a fever,’ perhaps in lieu of hanging. Think of it, sir: Such a man returns to England, supposedly an invalid, only to leave, within months, for America. It might look like a case of flight, Major Jones. And now, astonishingly, our innocent returns to Britain’s shores commissioned as a field officer in a foreign army. One whose interests are not entirely coincident with those of Her Majesty.”