The guard said nothing. The hard blue eyes in the mask’s holes stared impassively at his questioner.

“We’re to be guests at Lord Somerset’s. Isn’t this his house?”

Still the guard did not speak. But there was a response: a gloved hand moved a fold of his coat aside to show a holster and a pistol’s grip.

“Oh!” said Julian, feigning both surprise and offense. “Pardon me again, we must have the wrong address! Come along, Samuel.” He gave a tug at Matthew’s sleeve and started walking back toward the Hermes carriage further up the road. Before he followed, Matthew cast another look at the mansion and saw at its highest roof a large crescent-shaped attic window lit by a lamp. On the other side of the glass a ship’s spoked wheel stood on a pedestal presumably mounted to the floor.

The admiral’s house, he thought. Bravo, Julian!

Then he turned away, the back of his neck bristling with the stare that the armed guard aimed at him.

Ten

“Hold on a minute,” said Julian as they reached their hackney. “What have we here?”

Matthew turned to look. Another carriage was coming around the park, the horses’ hooves making muffled thudding noises in the snow.

“You find who you’re after?” Hermes’ driver asked from his bench seat.

“Not yet,” Julian answered, his eyes narrowed as he watched the new carriage approach, “but the night is still young.”

“Gettin’ toward midnight is what I’m thinkin’,” the driver said. “If that’s what you mean by young. And I’m too old to be out here shiverin’ the rest of me life away!”

“Just a bit longer, if you please.” Julian and Matthew saw the new carriage slowing down, and then its driver reined the horse to a stop in front of the gate. “A busy place tonight,” said Julian. “I wonder what goes on in there.”

Two men emerged from the hackney. They appeared at first to be dressed as clowns from a circus. One wore an enormous white polar bear of a coat, a white muffler around the lower part of his face, and had on a bright red tricorn with a half-dozen feathers of various dyed hues sticking up from its golden band. The other man, taller and thinner than the first, wore a long coat of some kind of dark gray leather—sealskin? Matthew wondered—with a yellow cord as a sash around the waist, and perched atop his ridiculous pile of a curly white wig was a tricorn as purple as a new bruise. Matthew caught just a quick glimpse of his face, which seemed to be painted ghastly white with crimson arcs above the eyes to serve as brows.

“The carnival has come to town,” Julian said with a smirk. “Let’s see what these two do.”

The two in question approached the guard. The man in the polar bear coat reached into a pocket, withdrew something and showed the guard, who nodded and opened the gate. The strange pair then proceeded to walk nearly in lockstep up the drive and up the steps to the door, where Sir Polar Bear used the knocker. After a moment the door opened and that same uniformed man looked out. Both of the new arrivals came to rigid attention and sharply clicked their bootheels together.