The Gilded Scarab (26 page)

He flushed scarlet. His fair skin, although bronzed from his months in Aegypt, couldn’t hide anything.

Rosens returned, brandishing my pistol. “I found this too. It’s charged and everything.”

Dammit! The man must have rifled through every drawer in the desk.

“That’s my service revolver,” I said, cold as I could make it.

“Fully charged?” sneered Hawkins.

I sneered right back at him. “Not of use otherwise.”

“Enough.” Winter took the sealed envelope from Rosens. “Hold on to it until we’ve gone, Rosens.” He glanced at the letter and the untouched seal, and looked at me. “I’d like to read this here, if I may, before you eject me from the premises.”

“Be my guest.” I turned my back on him and returned to the counter. I needed more coffee, and one of Will’s cakes would fuel my ire nicely. Since I wouldn’t have any customers until Winter left, I might as well enjoy the unexpected moment of leisure. I sat down in my favorite seat before the fire and enjoyed my cake. It was one of Will’s more elaborate creations, a fairy cake bedecked with vanilla icing and a marzipan strawberry oozing with strawberry sauce. I hoped Winter would see how much I enjoyed it, because his guard would have to shoot me before I’d offer one to him. He didn’t deserve the hospitality.

It tasted oddly flat, as it happens. I didn’t think it was a failure on Will’s part. It was probably a failure on mine.

Rosens spoke softly to Hawkins and made to leave the way he came in. I wasn’t having that. I pointed to the main door, and with a sheepish glance at me and a shrug from Hawkins, Rosens went out into the street for the few feet it took to get to the side door. The bastard took my pistol with him. Winter, intent on reading, didn’t appear to notice. I went back to my coffee and fire-staring.

Winter finished his letter and sat for a moment with it in his hand. Hawkins said something quietly to him, and he shook his head. “Everything is as Lancaster and Rosens said. He’s apologized for not telling me earlier, but things came to a head while we were in Aegypt. Selling to Lancaster was his best option, he says.” Winter looked pained, frowning, and his mouth turned down. “Why didn’t he tell me he was getting into difficulties? He must have known I’d help.”

I looked over at him. “He struck me as a proud man,” I said, and then wished I’d kept my mouth shut. I hadn’t intended to have any more conversation with Winter.

“I know. But it’s my responsibility. He should have told me.”

“Your responsibility? How do you make it your responsibility?”

Winter lifted one shoulder in a slight shrug. “How is it not? He’s one of our House allies. Of course I’m responsible for his welfare.”

I don’t mind admitting I stared. In my experience, no House member looked beyond his own House when it came to accepting obligations, and even then, only reluctantly shouldered the responsibilities entailed. Winter appeared genuinely concerned.

But all I said was “He wasn’t, to my certain knowledge, a great advocate for the Houses.”

For the first time, I got one of the little smiles I’d seen at Margrethe’s. It had lost its appeal. Instead it grated on the raw patches, and I took a hasty mouthful of coffee to cover the fact.

“Oh, I know that,” Winter said. “It doesn’t matter. Not to me. What does matter is very simple. I’m Gallowglass, he’s the Jongleur. We’re friends.”

I know my jaw dropped. I felt it. Mr. Pearse was the Jongleur?

The Jongleur?

Good. God.

But the old man hated the Houses! If he were the Jongleur, why was he running a coffeehouse and why had he been so poor? All the Houses were rich, and those attached to Gallowglass were very rich.

I didn’t get the opportunity to pursue it. Winter got to his feet.

“I had better go. If I’m to get down to Eastbourne today to see all is well with him, I need to start immediately.” He folded the letter and pushed it into a pocket. He hesitated. “I’m sorry about what happened here. I was taken by surprise. When I saw the outside, saw the changes, I was terrified something had happened to Mr. Pearse. But it wasn’t well done of me.”

I shrugged and sipped my coffee. “No. It wasn’t.”

Winter hesitated a little longer. “He talks about you in his letter. In very flattering terms.”

I nodded.

“I’m sorry, Rafe.”

“Oh, so am I.” I spoke on a long sigh. I didn’t get up, and I didn’t offer my hand. I stared into the fire while Winter headed for the door, Hawkins grumbling in his wake. I waited until the door opened, then turned my head to look at him. “Oh, Edward?”

He stopped. Turned to face me.

I managed a smile that felt thin and raw from my side of it. I don’t know what it looked like to him. “Welcome home, by the way. I’ve been looking forward to saying that.”

Good Lord, but the man could flush scarlet. Well, let him. He deserved it.

I waited for a moment or two after the door closed before getting to my feet. At the door I caught a glimpse of Winter and his guard walking toward the museum. Winter had his head down, and Hawkins appeared to be talking rapidly, if his gesticulating hands were any indication.

“Mmmmph
.”

I turned the sign to “Open” and went back to work. For the first time since I acquired the coffeehouse, I was oddly dissatisfied with my new life.

Damn.

I
T
HAD
been a long day. For once I hadn’t enjoyed my customers. I was short with Will when he came in to find out what all the fuss was about after I closed up for the evening. Luckily for him, he brought bottles of Bass from the public house.

“I heard you were closed down earlier,” he said. “Invaded by one of the Houses.”

“Did you know Gallowglass came here?” I demanded.

Wisely he offered me another glass of beer in propitiation. “Well, yes. But he’s been coming here for so long no one thinks about it much.”

“No. Including not thinking about warning me.” I drank down the pint in a single go. “Although, actually, I knew Ned Winter came here, and I knew he was the Gallowglass First Heir. I just wasn’t expecting him to be—” I stopped abruptly. I could hardly tell Will that I wasn’t expecting Ned Winter to be Edward Fairfax. I couldn’t tell him about Margrethe’s, and I could never mention Daniel. And the thought of Winter, Daniel, and I making some sort of unholy triangle made me choke, but I waved a hand at Will’s look of inquiry. “Nothing. I was taken by surprise when he came in, and that guard of his is a public menace. I don’t like having a harquebus pushed into my face. The sooner we get rid of Houses the better.”

The customer from New Zealand had said the Houses didn’t have much sway there. Perhaps I should have emigrated. And if New Zealand hadn’t been all sheep farms and I didn’t still abhor sheep, I would have.

Will laughed, said that Mr. Pearse and I were dangerous revolutionaries, and then took himself off to Covent Garden to collect Mrs. Somers from the stage door. I locked up and went to bed, feeling very much aggrieved and ill-used. I kicked at Rosens and Matthew’s door as I went, all the better to relieve my feelings on the matter. I went through my nightly ablutions, put on my nightshirt, and climbed into my enormous four-poster bed, and I
seethed.

I could put aside the extraordinary discovery that Mr. Pearse was, in fact, one of the very class he affected to despise. It was something I would have to take up with him when I next wrote, but I could forgive the little sin of omission on his part since he had so obviously cut all his ties with his House. For the Jongleur to keep a coffeehouse and barely make enough out of it to keep body and soul yoked together, and for him not to go running back to his House demanding his old position and all the riches and power associated with it… well, that suggested the old man was sincere in eschewing the Houses and everything they signified. His abdication had been genuine. I wondered why, of course I did, and I wondered if the reason lay buried in the sands of the Soudan in an unmarked grave. But that wasn’t the real thing to chew over as I tossed and turned on my pillow.

I found it harder to ignore, much less forgive, Edward Fairfax’s perfidy. Winter. Not Fairfax but Winter. I had to stop thinking about him as Edward and start thinking about him as Ned Winter. Edward Fairfax didn’t exist.

And yet….

And yet it was no consolation at all to know he didn’t owe me anything. He didn’t owe me an explanation. He didn’t owe me an apology. Well, perhaps for his suspicions and the aggression of his guard that morning, but not because he didn’t tell me he was Gallowglass First Heir. No man in his position and still in possession of his right mind would use his real name at even the highest-class molly house in the metropolis. No one would care much about Rafe Lancaster at Margrethe’s, but Gallowglass? The scandal would be too much even for him to ride out. So, he didn’t owe me that, or a night at opera or the music hall, or another night in the wide luxurious bed in Margrethe’s. He didn’t owe me anything at all.

It was a very great relief to sit up and land a few hard punches into my pillows. A very great relief.

And it was utterly infuriating that as I was drifting off at last, too tired to think and feel any longer, something scrabbled and skittered on my wooden floors, just on the edge of hearing and just enough of an annoyance to wake me up again. A mouse, perhaps. Or black beetles. If I’d had a shoe handy, I’d have shied it at them.

I spent most of the night staring up at the canopy of my four-poster, listening to the tiny skitterings and with my eyes burning and watering. From exhaustion and insomnia, no doubt.

Damn.

Well… damn.

Chapter 17

I
HAD
made my opinion clear, so it was no surprise Ned Winter didn’t appear the next day. Shame. I had stoked up a fine head of indignation ready to greet his appearance, but Convocation House types are sneaky. He didn’t come to the coffeehouse to allow me to vent. There is nothing more enervating than outrage that has nothing to spend itself on, nowhere to go. I was in lackluster spirits by the time I stopped looking up every time the strap-bell on the door jangled when someone pushed it open, and a moment’s savagery with a sheepish Rosens when he returned my pistol wasn’t enough to relieve my feelings. Winter had obviously taken heed and would stay away. Good. That was that. There was nothing more to concern myself about regarding him.

Which was, of course, a very good outcome.

The whole day was lackluster. I was listless and a little run-down, probably because of the disturbed night thanks to whatever it had been scurrying around my bedroom floor. I had to make a real effort to sparkle at the customers and charm them into going back to their hotels to tell everyone about the best coffee in Londinium and where to find it. It was too much of an effort to be mad at Rosens and Matthews, and I avoided them as much as possible. They, at least, had enough sense to stay out of my way.

Overall, it was a slow sort of day, and I ended it thinking that perhaps I was sickening for something. I went to bed early with a glass of scotch for company, to ensure if there were some sort of infection, I killed it before it had the chance to take hold. In fact, to be certain, and purely for medicinal purposes, I had a second glass. It worked a treat. If there were skitterings that night, I didn’t hear them.

The next day wasn’t much better. It dragged and dallied and lollygagged until I found that every few minutes I was taking out my watch and touching the little spring holding the wing cases over the dial. It was always a surprise that the hands had moved on a mere few minutes each time. It felt more like hours.

It looked as if I had seen the end of House Gallowglass. Good. I closed up the coffeehouse, walked down to New Oxford Street to the Somerton Chop House for a beefsteak and some company, and went off to bed at midnight, satisfied I’d seen the last of him.

Except, the very next day, Ned Winter came back.

I was squatting behind the counter at the time, searching through the tins of coffee for the new variety of mocha I had blended with chocolate. I heard the bell, called out “I’ll be with you in a moment!” as cheerily as I could manage, closed my hand around the right storage tin, and came up triumphant, to find myself face-to-face with Edw—Ned Winter.

Well, trust the Convocation Houses to acknowledge no authority but their own! I hoped my expression was suitably forbidding.

He looked a little sheepish. He ducked his head, didn’t quite meet my eyes, and shifted his weight from foot to foot. “Good morning, Rafe.”

I made that noncommittal “Mmmmph” sound again, the one I was perfecting for use against House intrusions, and looked past him to check that Hawkins didn’t have a blunderbuss trained on me today.

“May I stay, and may we talk?”

I shrugged. “I was thinking about making the ban permanent.”

“Without hearing me out?”

I am too fair-minded for my own good. A lifetime of being judged and found wanting made me reluctant to inflict the same indignity on others. I thought about it and nodded. Reluctantly. “Go ahead.”