The Gilded Scarab (22 page)

“I’m sorry, Daniel.” I held out the scarab for him to take, but he shook his head.

“So am I.” He closed my fingers over the watch and pressed them. “Keep it. Please. I’ll no doubt see you here and there, around town.”

“Yes. Probably.”

He nodded. “I’d better go….” He turned abruptly and left without looking back.

Oh dear Lord.

At least the worst was over. And that was most emphatically that.

I turned the watch over in my hand. It really was a very desirable thing. When I opened the wing case by pressing the spring at the bottom, it was 4:00 p.m. Time for tea.

So I ate my sandwiches. And Daniel’s.

O
NE
EVENING
in late February, I left the coffeehouse after a day spent refining my technique on the coffee blenders and the espresso steamer, and learning to set up an extraordinary collection of glass spheres, alembics, tubes, and valves with its own cold-fusion furnace—known in the trade as a slow-drip filter machine, designed to create the finest coffee overnight from grounds and cold water. Judging the pressure and setting the furnace to feed through a constant rate of steam took practice and patience. But mastering it meant the first brew was ready for the moment we opened each morning, and I didn’t have to get to the brewing furnaces at the crack of dawn. I could stay in bed longer in the mornings. I grew to love that machine.

It had been an unusually foggy and murky day. Londinium tends to get its worst smogs in the late autumn, when the smokes and steams from its myriad chimneys warming the air around the metropolis meet the cold fronts moving in from the Arctic or Siberia. It was unusual to get a real pea-souper earlier in the year. But most unseasonably, premature stirrings of spring had warmed the air in time to meet a very seasonable Siberian frost. Coupled with the wind veering around to the south and bringing with it particulate red dust scooped up,
The
Times
reported, from storms over the Sahara, the result was a pea-souper the like of which I hadn’t seen in years. The unholy combination of smoke from the metropolis’s chimneys meeting fog and dust meant I could barely see across the street by teatime. And as darkness closed in, the gloom deepened.

The air was thick to breathe. I’m lucky I don’t have chest troubles. For people like Mr. Abrams, the apothecary, who wheezed like a leaky bellows on a good day, such weather was a torment and a curse. I could taste the dust as I turned up my coat collar and walked south. The Somerton Chop House around the corner from Museum Street’s junction with New Oxford Street and Hart Street had become a regular haunt when all I wanted was a filling meal. Haute cuisine it was not, but hearty, hot meals it could supply in abundance.

Once I turned into New Oxford Street, the traffic didn’t help improve the quality of the air. Autocars, phaetons, and the odd steam-landau crawled along in the fog, traveling slowly because not even the best driver could see more than a few yards in all that murk. An auto-omnibus crept past me, heading into town toward Oxford Circus. Its passengers were mere dark shadows behind the clear aluminum windows. The bus ground to a halt a few yards in front of me, wheezing like a wounded leviathan, steam escaping from every welded joint and puffing out of its tailpipes, turning the air thick and brown. Which did not improve the air one iota. It already tasted of tar and smoke. Now the tang of burned vulcanite lingered on the tongue.

It was a relief to turn into Somerton’s and close out the night. The owner knew me, knew my preferences, and found me a booth near the fire. He brought fresh bread rolls, the evening newspaper, a pint of Fuller’s Best Entire, and culinary advice.

“Best avoid the liver and onions, sir. The missus is a godsend in many ways, but she don’t understand offal. Not the way offal should be understood, if you follow me. The beef, sir? Very good choice, and it won’t be but a moment. What that woman can do with a sirloin of top beef defies description, sir.”

It certainly defied mine. I came to the conclusion that the gray of the day, the dense, foggy air, had pervaded its qualities into the beef. I was halfway through chewing this remarkable dish, which surely came from a very elderly cow, and was reading the evening paper’s grave warnings that the air was deadly to the old and frail, when a shadow fell over me. A man had stepped between me and the light.

He smiled when I looked up to remonstrate. “Captain Lancaster, I believe?”

I had absolutely no idea who he was. In his early fifties perhaps, balding, well dressed in the sober dark clothes of the businessman, he had a rubicund face with a jolly-looking red nose and bright blue eyes. But his lips were thin, and his mouth looked forced when he curved it up, little lines at the corners showing the strain. There was a slight twang to his voice, something in the vowels that suggested he might not be a native of these shores. An American, perhaps? I’d never seen him before.

I nodded. “Yes.”

“Excellent! I hoped to find you tonight.” He held out his hand. “The name is Stone, sir. Josiah Stone. I’ve been hoping for a word.”

I took his hand as briefly as etiquette demanded, and glanced at the card he gave me. A lawyer, at an address in Chambers in Lincoln’s Inn. I glanced at the adamantine-trap of a mouth. Typical lawyer’s mouth that, shut against anything spontaneous and natural, trained not to let anything out of it that might give away a point to an opponent. And to this kind of man, I suspected, every other living being was a potential opponent.

Still, I kept my tone light and airy, untroubled. “I do hope you’re here to tell me something to my advantage? If you can bring me one of the reclusive, eccentric species of aged great uncle who has left me an unexpected fortune, it would be very welcome.”

He tried for another smile, with less success than the first. “Ah. No. I’m afraid not. Although, I do have a proposition for you.”

“I thought so. Shame. There’s a dearth of nabobs on my side of the family, more’s the pity.” I slid his card into my pocket and nodded to the chair opposite mine. “Take a seat, Mr. Stone. Tell me all about it.”

“Thank you.” He took the seat and signaled to the landlord to bring him a glass of port—a mistake, as he would find out. There was a reason I restricted myself to beer. “I have been given to understand, Captain, you have recently purchased a coffeehouse very close by here. In Museum Street.”

Well. Well. Well.

“And who was it gave you to understand this, Mr. Stone?”

Another steel-box smile and a deprecating wave of the hand. “Let us say, a regular coffee drinker. My information, though, is correct?”

“Mmn. Yes. Yes, it is.”

“Then that is good news.” He paused while the landlord deposited a glass of port in front of him. I watched to see the small moue of distaste he’d make when he tasted it, to see what shape that slit of a mouth would form. But the man sipped at his port without outward signs of distress. Interesting.

He put down the glass and, since it had to be obvious I wasn’t going to say anything, he resumed. “I represent a group of people with an interest, shall we say, in coffee. They would very much have liked to buy the lease of Pearse’s coffeehouse, but were not granted the opportunity. My understanding is the House Gallowglass agent who oversees the House’s property investments in this area proved… difficult. Not amenable to an offer.”

“I expect he operates within strict House guidelines.”

“I expect he does.”

“Mmmmph. And your clients are?”

“Wishful of confidentiality at this stage, Captain, as I’m sure you will understand.”

Why did that not surprise me? I inclined my head and gestured to him to continue.

“Well now, this is our offer. We were prevented from making this a direct acquisition, but my clients are still very interested in obtaining this particular site. But, of course, we’re aware that Gallowglass would balk at a change of ownership now. So what we propose is that we will give you the purchase price of the coffeehouse, which I believe was some seven thousand guineas, plus a further five thousand as a sort of premium. You will retain nominal ownership, in order not to alert the agent to our takeover, but my clients will fit out and run the coffeehouse on their own principles, and you will, in fact, sign over your legal rights in the coffeehouse to my clients in a quitclaim deed that shall remain in my possession on their behalf.”

Five thousand guineas? They were offering me
five thousand guineas
to pretend to own the coffeehouse? What in tarnation was this all about?

Sometimes my mouth speaks before I have had the opportunity to think about what it is I intend to say. I didn’t hesitate before replying. “I don’t think I will.”

Stone blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

Well, there was no backtracking now, but I always did resent taking orders. That attitude made service life interesting and, perhaps, accounted for Abercrombie’s joy at my retirement. “I’m aware that investment in property can be lucrative, but to make that level of profit on a building I’ve owned a mere week… well, where’s the catch, Mr. Stone? The coffeehouse isn’t worth that much.”

Stone’s mouth thinned down so far his lips almost disappeared. “This particular site is very important to my clients, Captain Lancaster. Indeed, I might say their corporate strategy for the last five or six years has been to build a presence in the industry to be in a position to buy Pearse’s when it became available, as inevitably it would one day given the advanced age of the current—that is, the last proprietor. It is an important part of their business strategy to establish a presence near the museum. They are willing to pay you a reasonable price to achieve that.”

Did the man think I was born yesterday? The price was anything but reasonable. There was something havey-cavey going on. No sane businessman would pay so heavily over the odds for a shabby old coffeehouse. Any sane businessman would demand a large discount for the shabbiness, not pay a premium for it. And they’d been planning to buy Pearse’s for the last five years? Whatever was going on was not just havey-cavey. It was
desperately
havey-cavey. There was absolutely no way I was getting involved.

Besides, I didn’t like the cut of Josiah Stone’s jib.

So I smiled. “You know, I don’t like the idea of not having any sort of control over what a business does, yet be considered the legal owner of it with all the responsibilities and liabilities that entails. So while I am appreciative of your diligence in tracking me down to make the offer, I must decline it. I bought the coffeehouse for a reason, and that was not to sell it within the week.”

“It is a very generous offer. Very generous.”

“It is. But not one I am interested in.” I gave him my best smile and a dismissal. “My compliments, Mr. Stone.”

He looked thoughtful. “Mmn. Rather an unexpected response, Captain. We had been given to understand you would be amenable to an offer that would allow you a more gentlemanly career than shop proprietor.”

“If it’s the same person giving you these gifts of misunderstanding, Stone, then they don’t know me very well.”

His mouth was hard shut now, and his eyes narrowed. After a moment he nodded and unsealed the trap to speak. “Very well, Captain, I will convey your reply to my clients. They will be disappointed, of course. Perhaps we will speak of it again, sometime.”

I don’t react well to threats, subtle or overt. So I closed down the charm, since it was wasted on him anyway, reached for my sword stick, and stared the man out.

He grimaced. Nodded again. Drank up his port and grimaced again. “I’ll say good night, Captain. Thank you for listening. Until we meet again.”

I said nothing. I watched him go out the door and disappear into the murk outside.

After a moment, I went back to my beef and beer, and when I walked home that night, I carried my sword stick in my hand, the blade naked and ready.

I took no chances. Whatever that was all about, I wanted no part of it.

I
SAID
nothing to Mr. Pearse about my encounter with Josiah Stone except to ask if he had ever met the gentleman and, when he said the name meant nothing, I passed it off as a minor encounter of no significance. But I went the next day to South Audley Street. My family had bought its guns from Purdey’s since the firm had opened eighty years before. Iconoclast as I am when it came to the family’s traditions, there are some I wouldn’t dream of breaking, and that is one of them. Purdey’s are the best gunsmiths in the country.

I took my pistol with me, out from under the bed where I’d been keeping it, and handed it over to be cleaned and serviced in their workshops. Athol Purdey was in the shop that day. I left the pistol in his expert hands, agreeing to pick it up the following week, and allowed him to sell me a tiny cold-fusion hideaway gun I could secrete into a pocket. The gun was flat, unnoticeable, and allowed both for a neural-disruptor discharge or a lethal phlogiston laser burst. The sword stick was all very well as a defense, but its usefulness depended on an adversary opting for a close-quarters attack. With the hideaway gun, I was prepared for any eventuality.

Purdey patted the hideaway gun with affection as he handed it over. “They don’t carry a huge charge, these little guns. That pistol of yours could drop a charging bull elephant. This one doesn’t have quite that power, but still, it’s a useful little piece.”

Bloomsbury didn’t have a lot of bull elephants. The little gun would drop a man, if need be, and that was all that concerned me.

Chapter 15