The Last Passenger - A Prequel by Charles Finch

Author:Charles Finch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

That absurd goddaughter. After he had gotten home and sat up for a while—so late that he was fairly sure even Graham had gone to bed before him, a rare occurrence indeed—that phrase came back to Lenox.

It had been Fry who’d said it. And the queen did indeed have a black goddaughter. Her absurdity was a matter of opinion; Lenox had yet to meet a person whose unalterable existence was absurd to them, and he would have to guess that Sara Forbes Bonetta—that was her name, he remembered clearly now from the articles about her, his memory prompted—did not consider her own existence absurd.

And Fry’s own existence was the very reverse of absurd to him, of course. As was Wilt Sheridan’s: more intimately concerned a thousand times over with the health and lineage of his horses than with that of his father’s slaves in Jamaica. With his waxed mustaches, for that matter—Sheridan.

The absurd goddaughter had once been a princess in a tribe in Africa. Another tribe had captured and enslaved her when she was five, killing her parents. They had prepared her for human sacrifice. So the story went, at least. Then some Briton in that area had rescued her from this fate and made a present of her to the Queen. (A present! Like a mangosteen, or a porcelain place setting.) She must have been ten or eleven now, and if there was callousness in the young naval officer who had made her a present, at least the girl had lived.

Lenox wondered if perhaps it was in the favoritism shown this small girl, who lived at court with the full perquisites implied thereby, that Eleazer Gilman’s hopes had resided. He must ask Hollis.

Lenox was warm in his chill study. Wrapped in a smoking jacket, he had his feet propped up against the ledge of his window. The snow had stopped. Now there was only the eerie emptiness of Hampden Lane beneath cloudless moonlight; ahead, the whispering late hours, his own in which to think.

After a long time he turned back to his desk, where he had laid out the documents Stevenage had given him. They detailed the activities of the Patriots Abroad (the less respectable of the two groups, or at least the less affluent) and the Knights of America in England (whose rolls included self-exiled merchants of the American middle class).

Not a very knightish place, America. Wasn’t the premise of the whole project that they no longer had knights? Still, an American had received a lordship from the Queen the year before, by special dispensation, and the time it took to travel between the countries by ship shortened annually. During the revolutionary period the crossing had taken anywhere between six weeks and sixteen, depending on the season and the weather. (That had acted tremendously to the colonials’ advantage.) Now it rarely lasted longer than two. Perhaps one day the countries would be reunited. He tried to imagine as far forward as he could: 1950, say, a time

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