“Something like that.”
Julia could not trust herself to meet his eyes. Instead, she glanced at the ornate ormolu clock on the fireplace mantel. “Let’s be done with it, then, sir,” she ground out. “Send me a serving maid and the clothes you promised and give me twenty minutes more.”
It was the only way. To become the hunter and not the hunted.
She wrenched her eyes back to the window. Not for the first time, she was aware of an acute need to watch him, to study his face, the gray eyes that gave nothing away, his preternatural calm. This lackey of Faron’s required her unadulterated attention.
He was her link to Montagu Faron, her escort to his underworld.
Chapter 3
“He sleeps at last.
“The man known only as Sebastian nodded. He was long and angular, with a high, domed forehead and narrow shoulders. “This episode was not as acute as a fortnight ago,” he said more to himself than anyone else in the room.
They both knew to what he referred. A detritus of broken glass and crockery crunched underfoot, the aroma of a spilled astringent pinching their nostrils. As for the rest, little enough damage had been done. Two rectangular tables lined the room, topped by rows of microscopes, most of which were double-barrelled. Each instrument had a lamp by its side, the beam adjusted so as to illuminate a prepared specimen. Minute and beautiful shells, dredged up from a sea bottom of unfathomable depths, glistened like jewels in their scientific settings. Glass cases were mounted on the walls, from floor to ceiling, replete with intricately constructed creatures, some vegetable, some animal, some dyed with carmine to better display their transparent bodies.
“It was not such a struggle this time,” said Giles Lowther, the larger of the two men. He crossed his arms over his barrel chest. His booted foot nudged a broken beaker aside. Subduing Montagu Faron was never an easy task, a sobering reminder that twenty years earlier one of the world’s finest minds had been destroyed. Whether there were lingering outward injuries was difficult to determine, as Faron was never without his leather mask, shielding the world from the facial tremors that overtook him with unexpected ferocity. For decades, no one had seen his face.
Sebastian grimaced, for a moment looking away from the chaos inside to the ordered park outside, which had been designed by one of Louis XIV’s esteemed landscapers. “I shall have the laboratory set to rights in no time,” he said, making a swift accounting of the disarray with an abrupt glance. “Difficult to understand, this mania. He was perfectly lucid just this morning.” They both knew that the voices in Montagu Faron’s head clamored for his attention, the crashing of cymbals destroying the former orderly music of his mind. In the past, primitive societies would have said the voices came from God or the Devil, but as acolytes of a great man of science and reason, they both knew differently.
“Perhaps it was the daguerreotype in the library. An all too potent reminder,” said Lowther.
“Since this business began, he has been most savagely beset by his demons.” Sebastian lowered his head to examine a flake of coal on the floor, laboriously filed down with sandpaper until it had become as thin and transparent as a sheet of notepaper. He straightened, putting a bony hand at the base of his spine. “You saw to it that Strathmore received the proper directives?”
Lowther nodded. “To the letter.”
Sebastian leaned his hip on the table at his side. He flicked a glance over a small dish at his elbow displaying a frog, its foot spread out and pinned to show the circulation of its blood. He pursed his lips in contemplation of the amphibian. “I fear this is simply the beginning. Faron will never be satisfied. He is manifesting all the signs of morbid obsession, I’m afraid.”
“And we’re to do his bidding, as always. Although I don’t quite understand Strathmore’s involvement.”
Sebastian continued addressing the moribund frog in its distressed state. “You and I both. What I do know is that Faron has been following Strathmore’s progress these years past with feverish intensity. As we both realize, that intensity is prompted by envy, curiosity and, quite possibly, a desire to punish.”
Alexander Francis Strathmore was known as England’s preeminent adventurer and explorer, conversant in at least nine eastern languages, discoverer of Lake Tanganyika in Africa, chronicler of exotic mountain ranges and rushing rivers, a man with a reputation for being both fearless and relentless in his quest for knowledge.
Everything that Montagu Faron had been and was no longer.
Lowther exhaled sharply. “I begin to understand. However, why would Strathmore allow himself to become involved in these desperate machinations? The man has everything he could possibly desire.”
Sebastian flicked a finger over the frog dismissively. “You believe so, do you, Lowther? Then you have not learned as much as I from Faron.” He added abruptly, “Think on it. Clearly Faron has something that Strathmore covets.”
Lowther held up his arms to indicate the room and its contents. “You are suggesting something of a scientific nature?” he asked.
“Whatever else?” Faron was wealthy beyond belief, damned by a family fortune that gave him unrivaled power and had led him down the darkest of paths. Sebastian leaned away from the table with its scientific offerings that many believed blasphemed the work of God. “What we have here is a Faustian dilemma,” he continued, “wherein a man will sell his soul to the very devil to gain the knowledge he craves.”
“What knowledge are you suggesting?”
“I’m suggesting that Strathmore knows Faron has the original Ptolemy maps.”
“I have yet to set eyes on Ptolemy’s Geography,” said Lowther, refering to the ancient Greek astronomer and author of an eight volume treatise on physics, mathematics, optics, and geography. Ptolemy was renowned for having created a world map one hundred and fifty years after the birth of Christ, but it was believed that none of his maps had survived.
Sebastian knew otherwise. “The volume exists, believe me, including the world map.” Scholars in the fifteenth century had recreated Ptolemy’s map using the instructions in his work which explained how to project a sphere onto a flat piece of paper using a system of gridlines. “And it is not a replication but the original,” he emphasized.
“The original? How is that possible and how did Faron come by it?”
“Who knows? But we can be certain Strathmore wants it. He wants it enough to do anything to get it. From what Faron has told me, Ptolemy compiled his geography of Africa based on the writings of Marinus of Tyre who recorded the Greek trader Diogenes’s travels over land from Tanzania. In it he described two great lakes and a snowy range of mountains from which the Nile, purportedly, draws its source. He also made the first recorded rendering of the Mountains of the Moon.”
His heavy brow furrowed, Lowther said, “Understandably irresistible to a man like Strathmore. But the question remains—why has Faron taken such an interest in Strathmore, baiting him with promises of the map?”
“He has his reasons. He always does,” said Sebastian, who had first heard of Faron while studying at the Sorbonne in Paris. “And he requires someone without scruples who will conclude this situation with the Woolcotts.”
“A further mystery—this Woolcott situation. Why a man with the vision of Faron occupies himself with such seemingly petty concerns, stemming from some perceived injustice perpetrated years ago—although it is said that his injuries stem from—”
Sebastian interrupted. “As I said earlier, Faron does nothing without purpose.” Lowther was English and could not begin to understand the complex mind of his