The Gilded Scarab (5 page)

So, I took a metaphorical deep breath, bit the end off a cigarillo and stuck it between my teeth, shouldered my kit bags, and headed toward the edge of the landing field to find an autohansom to take me into the center of Londinium.

It was as well I liked adventure. It appeared I was facing one.

Chapter 4

F
OR
ALL
their arrogance, Minor Houses have little political power of their own. Their power comes from the alliances they make and from servile bowing and scraping to their betters. They’re the jackals slinking around the kill, waiting for the lions to finish the better cuts of meat before rushing in to scavenge what’s left.

Stravaigor is one of several Minor Houses allied to Convocation House Cartomancer, assuring the Cartomancer of a constant supply of lower-level officials to staff the government departments for which he’s responsible. The senior appointments were reserved for his own sons and brothers, of course. The Cartomancer has oversight of the Imperium’s foreign policy. Slipstreaming in this diplomatic wake for the last few generations, the heads of my House—very successful jackals indeed—have accumulated a substantial fortune in the East India Company. At the time of my return to Londinium, the House was heavily involved in developing the Far Eastern markets.

I don’t like the Houses. Quite simply, if I’m going to grovel and scrape and bow, I’ll do it on my own account. Not for a House of cousins and half cousins who care as much for me as I do for them. Sadly, despite my indifference, I had to sit through a progress report on the House’s fortunes regaled to me by my father’s cousin.

Now widowed, Cousin Agnes was housekeeper/manager at the hostel maintained in Russell Square for those of House Stravaigor’s members who couldn’t afford, or didn’t want, the expense of maintaining houses in town. I went straight to the hostel the day of my arrival and secured a room without difficulty. Thankfully, the rent was nominal, possibly because the room, on the second floor back, overlooked a narrow yard much beloved by the local cats. But while the house was as starched and upright as Agnes, with the same air of impregnable corseted solidity, the rooms were clean and comfortable. I was lucky to get the one Agnes offered. As I’d told Beckett, I was not considered a House member in good standing, and I had half anticipated being turned away.

Cousin Agnes was a deep-voiced, deep-bosomed woman with a hard eye and a harder heart. I had been designated the wastrel of the family at the age of twenty when I refused to take holy orders, and my service to the Imperium gave her no reason to change her opinion. Her greeting had been an effusive “Well, well. If it isn’t Rafe Lancaster. Have they cashiered you at last?”

I had powerful memories of Cousin Agnes. Not so much of her looks or voice or mannerisms, but her smell. She wafted about Bloomsbury in the same odor of peppermints and mothballs that had pervaded our family home near Salisbury whenever she had chosen to darken its doors. One inhalation of breath when I walked into the Russell Square house and I was taken back to childhood.

Still, common politeness demanded I ignore the scorn and plant a dutiful kiss on her cheek. It tasted of rose powder. “Medical discharge, ma’am. I was injured in the defense of the Imperium. I deem it an honor, of course.”

She sniffed. “I hope your return presages a change of heart on your part, and an acknowledgment of your duty to the House?”

“I shouldn’t put a great deal of money on that prospect, Cousin Agnes, were I you. I wouldn’t want to disappoint you.”

“I see you haven’t changed one iota. So unlike your brother.” She sounded wistful. “Dear Peter! Now he is such a hardworking and useful member of society! A loyal member of the House and always working in its best interests. He’s an example to us all.”

I’d barely given Peter a thought for years. He’s five years my elder, and he’s so far enmeshed in House business he’s invisible. We have nothing in common, and emulating him doesn’t stand high on my list of ambitions. Agnes was fond of Peter and fond of comparing us, to my detriment. I didn’t care. He was welcome to her and her peppermints and mothballs.

“Peter? I haven’t seen him for what? Six or seven years now. Seven. We last met at Papa’s funeral and that was 1892. Where is old Peter these days? Calcutta? Bangkok?”

I was sorry I asked. I suffered through a recitation of Peter’s accomplishments over the last seven years and how in each new posting he proved what a credit he was to the House. Said with a sniff and the look that reminded me I was the opposite. Apparently Peter was currently in Shanghai, building a fortune in silk, ivory, and opium. God help the poor Chinese. They would need all their reputed inscrutability to deal with Peter Lancaster.

“Good for him” was all I said, swallowing a yawn and making sure Cousin Agnes saw me do it.

When I was a child, she’d had a habit of sneering by flaring her nostrils and twisting her mouth up at one side. It was more pronounced now that her skin was laced with fine wrinkles. It wasn’t a flattering look for her. “Very well, Rafe. I can see it’s of little use appealing to your moral conscience about your duty to the House—”

“None at all, Cousin.”

“Then your rent is ten shillings a week with laundry included. No meals provided other than breakfast, which we serve in the parlor between nine and ten. The staff remove the dishes precisely when the clock strikes ten. Visitors by prior arrangement and gentlemen only. If you come in late, do so without disturbing anyone.” She took the first week’s rent with the sort of snappy wrist action a card player might envy, and with evident reluctance, handed over a set of house keys. “Since you have deigned to return, you might wish to consider approaching the Stravaigor. He may have advice to offer on your future. Once you have apologized and he has forgiven your offenses, of course.”

“I’ll consider doing just that,” I lied, and made my escape. I left the two kit bags for the housemaid to unpack, although I took out my service pistol in its wooden box and hid it under the bed before wandering out into the cold of a raw November day to explore a metropolis I hadn’t seen since my father’s death.

The day was still heavy with the threat of snow, and the wind was piercing. Thank heavens I still had my military greatcoat, made from thick, warm wool. I’d cursed it in Lucknow and the Cape, but with the hem coming well below the tops of my boots, it was thick enough and long enough to keep out the worst of the biting winds. I’d had to remove the insignia, of course, and replace the braid with a less ostentatious frogging—at least, Hugh Peters had, since he was a dab hand with a needle and I most certainly wasn’t. I pushed my hands into the pockets and slithered and slid on the icy pavements, working my way down Montague Street and the side of the Britannic Museum and turning into Great Russell Street to stand regarding the grand museum entrance from the gate.

Another childhood place, the museum. My governess, when I was small, and the tutors at Eton later, used to take me there so I could savor the full experience of our glorious Imperial history. It’s a huge building, a hollowed out square with two entire floors of things my educators felt I needed to know about. I can remember staring at fragments of pots and broken statuary until I was sure my brain had atrophied. I wasn’t yet quite desperate enough to kill time repeating the experience. That day might come, of course, but I had a more pressing need right then. Cousin Agnes had not so much as offered me a cup of tea, and at that moment I was looking for refreshment to recruit the inner man, all the better to fuel the internal debate on my future.

The narrow streets at right angles to the museum run down to Hart Street and New Oxford Street in the south. I turned into Museum Street. The day was so dark and the snow clouds so lowering, the photon globes were lit at the top of their tall lampposts, casting a dim light in little pools with shadows between. The Museum Tavern stood on the corner with Great Russell street, doors wide, and a welcome breath of warm, beery air wafting out onto the pavement. A shame it was so early in the day. I wasn’t yet in such a case that I needed to indulge in spirituous liquors before midmorning. But I paused by the door, took in a deep breath tasting of hops and yeast, and looked the street over.

The shops here were mostly small and dark and full of mysterious objects gathered from tombs all over the Imperium. It has to say something about the national psyche that the British can chart their expansion across the globe by mapping it against organized grave robbing.

An antiquarian coin dealer adjoined the public house, and beyond that stood an apothecary’s shop. It had an old doorway, I remembered, with lintel and door posts a riot of carved flora and fauna: lions, and monkeys, snakes and birds. It had fascinated me when I was a child. It had many-paned windows, too, showing off a display of bulbous jars full of red and green liquid, like molten rubies and emeralds, and piles of little pills to treat a nervous stomach or a distempered liver. A week of Cousin Agnes and I’d need those.

The street had been pedestrianized since my last visit to Londinium, with autocars of all kinds restricted to Great Russell Street to the north and New Oxford Street to the south. It was a long terrace on each side, unbroken until the street was crossed by Little Russell Street about halfway down its length. The style was all severe classical lines in stone and stucco to echo the formal design of the museum itself. Once very fashionable, now the area wore an air of slightly faded grandeur.

If the street generally was a little shabby, the Pearse Coffeehouse was particularly so. It stood opposite the apothecary, sandwiched between a pastry shop and a bookstore, its façade dulled with soot and grime from Londinium’s dirty air. It needed a coat of paint, and the windows would benefit from soap and water.

All the more surprising, then, to see a House guard exit from it, blocking the doorway.

There was no mistaking the look and the livery. Definitely someone in the service of a major House. Why on earth was a House guard frequenting such a dilapidated-looking coffeehouse? Which House…? Damn. Too late. I caught only a glimpse of the silvery-gray insignia embroidered on the left shoulder of the guard’s jacket before the man closed his plain military-style coat over it. I hadn’t been quick enough to make it out. I had no idea which House or how prestigious it was. Still, I halted beside the side door of the Tavern. Better to stay out of the way. Bad enough if it were a guard on his own, calling in for coffee. Worse if he were guarding a House member, however unlikely to find one in such a place.

Far better to keep out of the way of the Houses. They were nothing but trouble.

The guard flipped down a shaded visor from his cap, covering his eyes. He cast a glance up and down the street before moving out of the doorway. He stopped abruptly, staring diagonally across to the Tavern. I’d caught his attention somehow, despite trying to look inconspicuous and discreet. Not that the Lancasters as a race are noted for discretion, but I did my best. The guard swung his harquebus into position, and from a bare forty feet away, I heard the whine as he pushed a charge into the breech. The tube of luminiferous aether lying along the long barrel glowed a bright yellow shot through with scarlet phlogiston sparks.

Hell.

House guards are always too damn quick off the mark and notoriously suspicious. Seeing me there in what had obviously been a military greatcoat was enough to get this one on edge. It didn’t matter that I had no ill intent toward the House member in the coffeehouse, even if I knew who it was. The guard had too light a finger on the trigger, and if I moved a step, all the innocence in the world wouldn’t stop him firing. At this range he couldn’t miss, and it’s a sad day when a man has to hope the guard had his harquebus set for a neural disruptor pulse. A few minutes of pain and paralysis were infinitely preferable to being hit by phlogiston particles—human candles were a commodity best left to the Ancient Romans.

So I squared back my shoulders and lifted both arms to chest level, turning my empty hands palm up.

Harmless. No threat. Don’t care about your House. Couldn’t give a damn about it, actually. No threat.

For a moment, we stared at each other, until the guard nodded. For all that, the man kept the harquebus at the ready and took a step backward, blocking the doorway completely. His lips moved, although I couldn’t make out what he was saying. He might have been speaking to his master, or…. No. He’d been talking into a Marconi communicator. The lights outside the coffeehouse glinted on the earpiece as he turned his head.

He had called up reinforcements. An autophaeton, defying the anti-traffic laws, turned into the bottom of Museum Street from New Oxford Street at speed. Typical arrogance, that. The Houses always bent and twisted the laws to suit them. The phaeton, armor plated and with the driver a mere shape behind the shielded glass of the cabin, halted outside the coffeehouse with such sharpness it bobbed on the high-perch suspensors holding the body above the huge wheels. It blocked my view, and I caught only a glimpse of whoever was in the guard’s charge as they scrambled into the phaeton. Well, I caught a glimpse of a pair of boots. An instant later and the phaeton was moving again, lurching off with a burst of vapor and the stink of burning tar. It turned left into Great Russell Street and headed for Tottenham Court Road. The harquebus was probably trained on me until the autophaeton was out of sight.