“Prussian,” said Julian. “Have to be, with those military flagpoles up their tails.”

Prussian, Matthew thought with a feeling in his gut like a twinge of rising bile. The one Prussian he had ever known—and one too many—was the deadly swordsman Count Anton Mannerheim Dahlgren, who at the moment should be bones in the belly of whatever Atlantic ocean shark had managed to digest the bastard.

At the door the uniformed man was speaking. Sir Polar Bear nodded, and then he and Clown Face came back down the stairs in their stately marching order as the mansion’s door was shut and apparently the business finished. They came back through the gate, which was also closed behind them by the impassive guard. An instruction was given from Sir Polar Bear to the driver of their hackney, the two climbed back in, closed the cab’s door, and the carriage started off, passing Matthew and Julian, their own shivering driver and the steam-snorting Hermes.

“More intrigue!” Julian called up. “Now follow that carriage!”

“Intrigue or not, my ass is an iceberg!” the driver complained, but he unlocked the carriage’s brake as Matthew climbed up beside him again and Julian took his place within the hackney. With a whipstrike into the air Hermes started off, and this time the carriage ahead was easy to trail at least for a distance because they seemed to be the only two vehicles out and about in this vaunted area of London estates.

Back they travelled into the busier boulevards and thoroughfares of the city. It seemed to Matthew that the Christmas season had made London more of a beehive than ever, even at the midnight hour. Hackneys came out from all directions, veered off this way and that, but Matthew kept his focus squarely on the one carrying the two—Prussian?—clowns.

In another ten minutes they were stopping back where Benson had halted the coach to let the Turlentorts out: in front of the red-carpeted steps underneath a red awning that protected the entrance to the Mayfair Arms Inn, which was a huge elegant brownstone building that made New York town’s finest Dock House Inn look like a near relation to The Octopus Garden. The edifice boasted four floors and had a castle-like turret up at each of its corners along with a forest of chimneys, all of which seemed to be spouting smoke into the snowfall. The two objects of current attention were disembarking from their carriage, the hackney’s door being opened for them by a red-liveried footman wearing a ten-ton white wig and with white stockings up to his knobby knees.

As Hermes’ driver pulled their carriage up behind the one ahead, Matthew saw Sir Polar Bear, who had in his grip a small brown satchel, gesturing for aid to unpack the bags laced up beneath canvas on the luggage platform at the rear of the hack. In turn the footman blew into a whistle that brought a pair of other similarly-clad attendants running. Sir Polar Bear paid the driver with glittering silver and then he and Clown Face marched up the steps and into the Mayfair Arms while the footman strode ahead to open all closed doors as if the strange guests had no arms of their own.