He was incorrigible. Sensing the imminent return of her customary urge to poke Quesnel Lefoux in the eye, Rue decided to make good her escape. She gave the man an insultingly brief curtsy before lifting her damp skirts high and saying, “I bid you good evening, Chief Engineer Lefoux. We leave in three days, with the aether current. Do tender my regards to your mother and beg my leave of the countess? I should be getting on.”

Quesnel bowed, taking the hint for once. “Lady Prudence. I look forward to our next meeting.”

Rue sniffed. “So do I, as long as it’s a good deal less soggy.”

CHAPTER THREE

RUE’S PROBLEM WITH REDHEADS

Professor Percival Tunstell moved out of his mother’s hive in Wimbledon and accepted a post as Oxford don the moment he came into his majority. After being summarily dismissed from Oxford for his radical theories on the transcendental sprout-shaped nature of the aetherosphere, he rented a decrepit bedsit behind the British Museum, off Rustle Square. “The better to facilitate my studies,” he explained to his aggrieved mother.

Nor would he tolerate vampire guards. Primrose, his dearly beloved and barely countenanced twin, might secretly enjoy the status conferred by a persistent supernatural escort but Percy spent the lion’s share of his days cooped up in his library researching the breeding habits of sand fleas. He did not require a vampire nanny. Nor, for that matter, did the fleas. After the third of his mother’s minions returned to the Wimbledon Hive with slashes from a wooden letter opener, Baroness Tunstell stopped sending them. Percival Tunstell was nothing if not a great fan of learning. If that education involved sharp pointy sticks, he applied himself just as diligently as to other forms of research and with far more uncomfortable results to those around him. In the end, Queen Ivy gave up mothering her son, and Percy stopped poking her vampires with letter openers.

Rue knocked loudly on the door to his apartments.

Nothing.

She knocked again.

She waited.

She knocked a third time.

Eventually, Percival Tunstell himself answered. The gentleman was wearing a smoking jacket and tweed trousers and carrying a heavy Latin tome. He glanced up at Rue, his skin pale as any vampire’s, spectacles perched at the tip of his nose. Percy, it must be acknowledged, was quite good-looking for a bluestocking ginger fellow, but terribly peaky about it.

“Oh. It’s you.”

“Where’s your footman?”

“Dismissed him, kept interrupting my reading.”

“With something sensible like food, I suspect. May I come in?”

“At least you don’t have my ghastly sister with you.”

Rue took that as permission to enter.

Percy resumed reading his book, walking slowly down the hallway away from her.

Rue followed. “You’ll be happy to know she’s doing well.”

“Who is?”

“Your sister.”

“Oh, is she? How unfortunate. It would do her some good to be in ill health for once.”