“Oh, agreed!” the lady said. “I understand completely!”

“Somehow,” said Julian with his most charming smile, “I knew you would.”

Rain was still beating down, yet Benson still drove the horses hard. Lord Turlentort opened the window shutters to peer into the storm, then he snapped them tight again. Winter’s light had turned gloomy. The lord reached into his coat, brought out a gold tinderbox, went about striking a flint and sparking the cotton and then he touched flame to the two oil lamps, which spread what Matthew considered a nice, comfortable and warming glow.

They had not gone much further when Lord Turlentort put his hand over his wife’s and she seemed to settle against him. Cautiously, he said to the villain, “I must ask … since we are fellow travellers and are here in these confines … with time on our hands … do you have any further … um … episodes you might relate?”

“Oh, yes,” Julian said. He again offered up the smooth smile. “Prepare to be amazed.”

Two

London Calling

Eight

It was a dark and stormy night. Truly it was. But with a difference, for the late-night lanterns of London taverns cut the dark, sending yellow beams out into the streets like lifelines to guide their patrons in from the storm, which had arrived over the city not as a howling horror but as a softer sigh of falling snow. Matthew mused that the snowfall—heavier within the last hour, and now blowing up flurries that swept through and nearly obscured those same tavern lights—was soon to completely cover the broken bricks and rude cobbles of the low city as well as the grand mansions and manicured parks of the high. All would be joined in white, in this town of many tones of gray.

Matthew and Julian trudged through the swirl, the former following the latter by several strides for it was clear Julian had another destination in mind in addition to the four taverns they’d already visited. The cold bit at Matthew’s cheeks and nose, the snow beginning to dash him in the face with flakes that felt edged with ice. When a wagon or a coach passed, the sounds of the wheels and the horses’ hooves were so muffled as to be nearly inaudible, and even the cries of a madman on a corner ahead were simply echoes within echoes, the snow imposing a quiet upon the most raucous of furies.

What part of the city they were in, Matthew had no clue. After Benson had let the exhausted couple of Lord and Lady Turlentort stagger from the coach in front of the majestic Mayfair Arms Inn and unloaded their baggage for the handlers to carry, he had agreed to take Matthew and Julian a mile or so further to the southeast, under Julian’s direction to a locale called Pepperpot Alley. There Julian paid Benson and his shooter, Hedges, the other gold guineas and the coach—its driver and shooter ready for two days of solid sleep—trundled off, leaving its previous passengers staring through the flurries at what Matthew saw was indeed a narrow alley with red lanterns showing in the windows of several questionable establishments and a sign that announced this was the entrance to Howe’s Cavern.