A brief look of amusement flitted across Fergus’s saturnine features.

“Non,” he said. “But let me tell you. This Beauchamp has tried to speak with me several times, offering assorted things—but chiefly, offering me the truth—or what he says is the truth—about my parents.”

Roger glanced at him.

“Even an orphan must have had parents at one time,” Fergus said, lifting one shoulder in a shrug. “I have never known anything about mine, and I take leave to doubt that Monsieur Beauchamp does, either.”

“But if that’s the case, why pretend he does?”

“I don’t know, but I suppose we’re about to find out.” Fergus sounded grimly resigned to the prospect. He squared his shoulders, preparing to go on, but Roger’s hand hadn’t left his sleeve.

“Why?” Roger said quietly. “Why talk to him at all?”

The Adam’s apple bobbed in Fergus’s lean throat as he swallowed, but he met Roger’s eyes straight on.

“If I must lose my livelihood here, if I can no longer be a printer—then I must find a new place, or a new way to support my family, to protect them,” he said simply. “It may be that Monsieur Beauchamp will show me such a way.”

THE MYSTERIOUS MONSIEUR Beauchamp’s address was a grand house on Hasell Street, and Fergus’s knock upon the door was answered by a butler whose livery probably cost more than Bonnie the printing press. This worthy gave no sign of wondering why two vagabonds should have appeared on his master’s doorstep, but upon hearing Fergus’s name, bowed low and ushered them inside.

It was a hot day outside, and the thick velvet drapes at the windows were drawn to keep as much heat out as possible. They kept out all daylight as well, and the parlor into which they were shown was so dark that the single lamp on a table near the window glowed like a pearl inside an oyster.

Roger thought it was rather like being inside an oyster himself: surrounded by a slick, oppressive moistness, the constant touch of mucus on the skin. Granted, the room in which they had been shut was not as searing as the glaring cobblestones outside, but it wasn’t a hell of a lot cooler, either.

“Like being poached, instead of fried,” he whispered to Fergus, mopping his face with the lace-trimmed handkerchief he’d forgotten to exchange for a workman’s bandanna. Fergus blinked at him in momentary confusion, but before Roger could explain, the door opened and Percival Beauchamp walked in, smiling.

Roger didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but this chap wasn’t it. Beauchamp wasn’t French, for one thing. When he greeted them—with great courtesy—accepted Fergus’s introduction of Roger, and thanked them effusively for coming, his voice was that of an educated Englishman—but not one educated at Eton or Harrow. Roger thought that the traces of an underlying accent came from somewhere near the edges of the Thames—Southwark, or maybe Lambeth? He was dressed in the height of Paris style—or at least Roger assumed that must be what it was, with six-inch cuffs, a yellow silk waistcoat embroidered with swallows, and a lot of lace. He wore his own hair, though, dark and very curly, casually tied back with a plum-colored silk ribbon.