THIS WAS IT, the final test of his resolve. Edgar Marmon, Adventurer, and currently known as Sir Edgar Marmington, counted to ten to calm his queasy stomach as he stood just outside the tavern at the bottom end of Bond Street. He was getting too old for this, and knew that, if he hesitated, he would be in danger of losing his nerve.
But, as he was also in no monetary position to turn tail and run, and too aged to contemplate employing the sweat of his brow in an honest day’s work—probably because he’d never used the words “work” and “honest” in the same thought—he screwed himself up to the sticking point and soldiered on.
Once inside, his gaze roamed the place, seeking into the darkest corners, on the lookout for anyone who might see through his disguise of now snowy-white hair, a bushy white mustache, and the cane he used to support his limp, a leftover of his valiant service against the French, years earlier.
If one could count tagging after the army valiant as, for the most part, he had hidden himself in the rear during the day and left his visits to the battlefields to the dark of night, when he scavenged for any bits of loot he could find and carry away. If, not to make too fine a point on it, one could even call it a limp, as Sir Edgar, just to be sure he’d keep favoring the correct leg, placed a few pebbles in his left boot each morning, to remind him.
Sir Edgar selected the perfect small table in the corner, and carefully sat down in the chair that positioned his back to the wall. He ordered a bottle and two glasses, and announced very clearly to the disinterested barmaid that he was waiting for his good friend, the Viscount Claypole, to join him.
He’d wait a good long time for that, too, as Sir Edgar had made it his business to send the viscount a missive in the middle of the night, telling him he needs must hie himself home at once, as his father, the earl, was on his deathbed. As Claypole was located nearly thirty miles above Leicester, and the viscount was looking hard at finally inheriting his earldom, Sir Edgar was not disappointed in the man’s alacrity in obeying the summons, and waved him on his way from an alley as the viscount’s coach set north at first light.
Two or three days to Claypole. More, if this fog had drifted to the countryside. A few days’ rest as the viscount asked his father, repeatedly, “Are you quite sure you’re not dying?” A few days for the return trip.
And, by then, nobody would remember that Sir Edgar had even mentioned the man’s name.
“Oh dear, oh dear, where can he be?” Sir Edgar said several times over the next hour, as he consulted his pocket watch, as he looked anxiously toward the door to the street, sighed.
He only needed one. Two could be a problem, and three were definitely too many. More than one meant enough for a conversation, some shared contemplation, even an opening for a modicum of sense to overtake boundless greed. No, just one, that’s all.
He was considering if he should give it up as a bad job, and head for another tavern where the gentlemen of the ton thought it wonderful to rub elbows with the hoi polloi, select another target, when his last “oh, dear” finally caught the attention of the well-dressed, and fairly well into his cups gentleman at the next table.
“A problem, sir?” the man asked. Then, without waiting for an invitation, he picked up his glass and his bottle and joined Sir Edgar. “You’re waiting for someone, right? So am I, but I’ve got the feeling old Winfield is still probably hiding his head under the covers. We drank fairly deep last night, and the man doesn’t have the liver he should.” He stuck out his hand. “John Hatcher.”
Yes, Sir Edgar knew that. John Hatcher. No title, but a family that went back to the Great Fire (and may even have started it, if all his ancestors were as inept as this particular member of the Hatcher clan). Money that went back ever farther than that conflagration. Brains that had got misplaced somewhere along the way.
Oh, yes, Sir Edgar knew all about John Hatcher.
“It is a pleasure, sir,” Sir Edgar said, allowing his thin, trim hand to be half crushed in the bearlike grip of the much larger man. “Sir Edgar Marmington. I’m new to the city, never been here before, but my old school chum, Claypole, promised to…um…show me the sights. Can’t imagine where he is.”
“Claypole? Bit of a dry stick, that, don’t you think? I mean, maybe you wouldn’t know, not if you haven’t seen him since your school days, but he’s dull as…as a clay pole. Har! Har! That was a good one, eh? No, friend, you don’t want him. Claypole’s idea of seeing the sights would be a tour of all the churches, Lord help you. You’re better for him gone.”
Sir Edgar smiled, all attention. “Really? Not that I’m the hey-go-mad sort myself, understand. Sadly bookish, actually. But we’ve been corresponding, the viscount and myself, and he’d seemed so interested in my work…my travels through the ancient lands, my discovery of that old tome that told all about…”
Now Sir Edgar sighed. “I had so wanted to tell him in person that I’m wonderfully close now…at the very brink of discovery. He’s been so generous, subsidizing me monetarily in my research all these twenty years or more, you understand, for the greater end, the final reward. All I need are a few more things to complete my duplication of the monks’ experiments, the alchemist’s notes, and he’d promised—but, no, this is of no interest to you.”
“Probably not,” Hatcher said, tossing back the contents of his glass, and then pouring himself another measure of wine even while calling for a full bottle. “Don’t think I ever read a book, God’s truth. Pride m’self on that. Monks, you said? And what the devil’s an alchemist?”
Sir Edgar sat back, looked around the room nervously, then leaned in close, to whisper to John Hatcher….
“WHAT’S THIS MESS?” Olive Norbert whispered to Daphne Clifford in her booming voice (which is to say, she was probably heard in Tothill Fields, by little old ladies with brass ear trumpets), as she employed her fork to poke suspiciously at something on her plate. “It don’t look right. Looks sick.”
“More than sick, Mrs. Norbert,” Fanny said, winking at Emma. “It’s dead. And, as it’s escargot—that would be a snail, Mrs. Norbert—a snail, minus its shell, it demned well better would be dead, or I’ll be marching into the kitchens myself to ask why not. Oh, and because you’re looking as if you don’t believe me, please allow me to state this very firmly—it’s food.”
“Not on my plate, it ain’t,” Olive Norbert declared, pushing the serving of genuine French snails away from her with the tip of her fork. “Slimy things, leaving trails up the wall in the damp. Here now, you. Cart this mess off,” she commanded to Riley, doing duty at the table this evening.
“Bring me some meat, boy. Bloody red with juice. And a pudding. Go on, hop to it! I’m paying down good money for snails? In a pig’s eye, I am. Oh, and some ham, while you’re about it. It’s meat I want, and meat I will get or know the reason why.”
As Mrs. Norbert was twice Riley’s size (width-wise), and a paying guest, Riley hopped to, ready to serve, although it grated on him something awful, it really did. Mrs. Norbert was a pudding herself, a short, fat prawn with tiny, mean green eyes glinting out of a lumpy face, and with piss-yellow hair that frizzed here, curled there, but didn’t quite cover the shine of skin on the top of the behemoth’s head. She was no better than him. Maybe a whole lot worse.
“And it’s not me wanting you to try to cudgel that ugly brainbox of yours to think up a reason why, no, ma’am, it’s not,” Riley muttered under his breath as he turned to walk away.
Emma heard him, however, and kept her head down, to hide her smile. Mrs. Norbert might be crude, bordering on obnoxious most times, but she also had a point. When pinching the purse strings tight, the first thing to be sacrificed was meat. There had been many a meatless evening in the Clifford household until the next quarter’s allowance arrived from her father’s small estate.
“Um, Riley?” Daphne called timidly.