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the bow window and dispassionately studied Blair Stromwell, a senior member of Parliament and the Chairman of Justice. “Do you know Jonathon Clarring?”
    “What?” The senior man glanced up from The Globe. Gray smoke spiraled up from the brown stub of his cigar. “Don’t you?”
    Jack knew his reputation. Jack knew the desires of his wife.
    She wanted a divorce. A moral obligation, she had claimed.
    Jack lifted the crystal snifter—cupped between his fingers like a woman’s breast—and drained body-warmed brandy.
    The alcohol burned all the way down to his testicles.
    He set the snifter down onto solid oak. The thud of crystal impacting wood—the sound of other glasses, of other MPs drinking and breathing politics—reverberated throughout St. Stephen’s Club. Beside his empty snifter, amber winked in the bottom of a crystal decanter.
    Every night when he is home alone with me, he drinks himself into a state of unconsciousness slammed through him.
    “Why should I know Jonathon Clarring?” Slowly Jack raised his lashes and met the senior MP’s waiting gaze. “I examined his wife, not him.”
    “Best damn stockbroker in London. The man’s made me a bloody fortune.” The Chairman of Justice punctuated his endorsement with a fresh billow of smoke. “See him. Tell him I sent you.”
    Jack had not before realized how thoroughly he disliked cigars.
    Pushing back the heavy leather wing chair—wood skidding across wood—he stood. “I leave such things to my man of business.”
    “Lodoun.” A frail hand weighted down his shoulder. “Pity you lost today. Mothers suing their sons. And winning! Dreadful, just dreadful. Take comfort in the knowledge you were in the right.”
    Bitter irony welled up inside Jack.
    Slowly he turned, motion dislodging the hand that held him. “Was I, Father?”
    Jack addressed the Father of the House.
    The most senior member of Parliament—a man of seventy-five years who chaired the Select Committee of Privileges—was older than Jack’s own father. Unlike his own father, the most senior member of Parliament knew the cost of ambition.
    Empathy glinted in the senior MP’s eyes. Or perhaps it was the flickering light that gave the illusion of empathy. “Did Stromwell here tell you that your name came up today in meeting?”
    While Jack was in court, destroying an innocent woman.
    The Chairman of Justice’s gaze stabbed his back, sharp and appraising. His voice carried over the suffocating din of masculine conjectures: “I mentioned to Father what a splendid Lord of Appeal in Ordinary you’d make.”
    A Lord of Appeal in Ordinary sat in the House of Lords and adjudged the legal cases brought before it. Were Jack to be so appointed, he would for his lifetime be awarded the rank of Baron.
    Such an appointment would be the pinnacle of his career. But no appointment came without a price.
    Jack had learned that as attorney general. But he was attorney general no more.
    “I didn’t realize the appointment was available,” Jack said neutrally.
    “It isn’t . . . yet.” Reaching out a liver-spotted hand, Father squeezed Jack’s forearm; there was strength yet in the aging fingers. “But it will be.”
    All it would cost was more silence, more compromises, more lonely nights.
    A chorus of “. . . Shame you lost . . .” greeted Jack at each table he passed.
    Each man suspected the truth, but no one dared voice it: Shame you lost to a man you cuckolded.
    Jack collected his coat, hat and umbrella from the cloak clerk. A bowing, black-and-white uniformed man opened the door.
    With distant irony Jack reflected that membership to St. Stephen’s Club—a club that pandered to conservative Parliament members—cost more than the annual wages of the doorman whose liberty they were sworn to protect.
    One second Jack stepped off the concrete stoop; the next second the bowed man who held open the door stood at the curb hailing a cab.
    Jack was drunk. But the alcohol had not obliterated