Lonny Gad Childebert

Childebert, Ceolmund,and Boothman Esquire -LPB- London - Pax Britannica

Lonny Gad Childebert was born to a respectable solicitor in Islington and raised with the neat certainties of hymnals and household order. A scholarship to Cambridge and the long rooms of the Inner Temple honed his mind into a precise, implacable instrument; by 1905 he held chambers near Lincoln's Inn and argued with a crispness that earned him clients and the deference of judges. He kept his pew at St. Mary's and his subscription at the Conservative Club, voted with a stout, predictable hand, and took his duty to crown and altar as seriously as any oath sworn at the Bar. To the world he was the model of loyalism and propriety: a steady face in the lobby, a lettered name on a brass plate, an uncle who read the lessons at Christmas. Yet the rigid respectability which granted him station was also, quietly, a cage.

Beneath his habiliments of respectability Lonny carried a shame that belonged to the city's secret map. Born with affections that the law and the pulpit called sin, he sought what solace he could in furtive meetings and public liaisons that promised anonymity and risk in equal measure. The Labouchère law cast a long shadow over his counsel table—he who argued for justice dared not trust justice to his own inclinations—and the constant possibility of exposure made him cautious to the point of cruelty, both to himself and to those who loved him. He was a man of contradictions: devout in prayer, eager in party politics, brilliant before juries and yet habitually mortified by his own desires. Friends praised his steadiness; adversaries envied his calm; and Lonny, after a day in court and a sermon in which he prayed for forgiveness, would tidy his waistcoat and step into the London dusk, resolved once more to keep both his conscience and his secret intact.