“As you please,” Lash replied easily. “It was my error in not inviting Professor Fell to join the bidding, and so I take full responsibility. But let us not be hasty in our judgments, as we must take the long view on this matter.”

“A long dim view, sir!” Montague snapped, unwilling to empty his cup of anger.

“He lost at cards last night,” said Lash to Matthew in a tone of confidentiality. “That does tend to annoy someone who thinks he’s a better bluffer than he is. Ah, here’s your escort now!”

The Owl had entered the room. He was accompanied by a square-shouldered man of medium height, stocky with a thick bull neck. Bogen wore a dark blue cloak over a gray suit. Beneath a gray tricorn was a face hewn from a slab of granite and then squeezed under pressure. Matthew thought Bogen’s formidable nose could be mistaken as a third elbow and his chunk of chin an extra six-knuckled fist. A pair of pig-like eyes stared from the holes in the work of stone and fixed upon Matthew, whose heart rose into his throat at the same time his knees sagged as if struck from behind. This man was a beast.

“All is ready,” said the Owl.

“Get him that coat Devane wore,” Lash said. “Find him a hat, we don’t want him catching his death. Then search him again before you put him in the coach. Good journey to you, Matthew. Now run along.” He waved an indifferent hand and returned to the consumption of the breakfast feast.

Matthew cast another glance at Elizabeth. She kept her gaze averted. Now he felt his heart sink. If his plan was to work at all—and to call it a plan was to call Cardinal Black the most handsome of angels—he needed her help. Of course it all might go to hell in the first minute, so there was that possibility, and then what?

He dreaded to think.

Bogen took hold of Matthew’s upper arm. “Move,” he said, in a voice like the sound of the chisel that had shaped his face.

Shit, Matthew thought.

“Hurry back!” piped Merda’s childlike voice as Matthew was marched out of the dining room with Bogen on one side and the Owl on the other. They passed the central staircase and entered the foyer where the coats and hats were still hanging and, as Matthew noted while the Owl gave the polar bear coat a good going-over, the weapons were still piled up in the basket atop the table. Then the Owl frisked Matthew again, he was made to shrug into the coat, the bruise-colored tricorn of Baron Brux was smashed down upon his head, the front door was opened and the pre-dawn cold hit him in the face like a freezing sledgehammer, and once more he was marched along between the two men to where his coach awaited at the gate.