The Gilded Scarab (10 page)

A week or so after my arrival, Phryne sidled up to me with a plate laden with bacon and eggs. “There’s kidneys today, sir, too, if you’d like. And here’s your coffee, sir. And
The
Times
.”

I declined the kidneys, on the basis that the early hour and offal were mutually exclusive. The coffee was execrable, but hot. I drank a mouthful and picked up my knife and fork, propping
The
Times
up against the coffee pot. Phryne hovered nearby, pleating her apron with her fingers. I glanced at her over the top of the newspaper and cocked an eyebrow at her, enquiringly.

“If you please, Captain Lancaster, sir, but will you be out all day today?”

I was out every day for hours at a time. She must have noticed I made myself scarce. “Most of it, I’m sure, Phryne. I won’t be back until supper, most likely. Why?”

“Madam wants me to turn out your room thoroughly today, sir.” Phryne looked a touch shamefaced. She glanced sidelong at Agnes. “It hasn’t had anything but a lick and promise since you took it, sir. Madam does like to keep the house clean, you see, but I didn’t want to disturb you.”

The room was spotless already. At least, it was more than clean enough for me. But when I followed Phryne’s glance and saw Agnes’s magisterial frown, I couldn’t really allow the poor girl to get into trouble. No doubt Agnes had made a tour of inspection and found a speck of dust somewhere. “I’ll be out by eleven, Phryne, and you may have most of the day to do whatever a ‘turn out’ needs. I won’t return until about six, I expect.”

“Oh thank you, sir. Thank you!” Phryne reddened to the roots of her hair. “I’ll get your boots cleaned today, sir, and do up the rest of your clothes, if you please, sir. Thank you!” She squirmed, although I couldn’t tell whether from gratitude or agitation, and dropped an ungainly curtsey. She scurried out to the back regions of the house.

It appeared I had committed myself to a long wander around the metropolis. Since a gentleman never forswore his given word, shortly before eleven I closed the front door behind me and walked down to New Oxford Street. I had no destination in view, but after studying the timetables tacked onto a wooden omnibus shelter, I took a steam tram out to the exotic east beyond the City, to the Bow Back Rivers. My intention was to walk back and take in as much of that side of the metropolis as I could.

I hasten to say this was not a walk I would attempt after dark, but in broad daylight I was safe enough, even wandering through the poorer quarters of Bow, Mile End, and Whitechapel. I was in no hurry, either, despite the biting cold November weather. My military greatcoat was thick, my boots kept my feet warm, and with hat, gloves, and scarf, I was snug enough. I could afford to dawdle.

I stayed on the major roads. They were well-populated with pedestrians, almost all of them of the working class and poorly dressed, and a steady stream of traffic flowed into and out of the City of Londinium. Some of the roads were wide avenues, with tall houses, and must have been commodious once. No longer. Even these main thoroughfares were thick with filth of all kinds, and a glimpse down a side road revealed the sort of stew and rookery that would defy even Dickens’s pen.

Street urchins—“children” was too genteel a word—were everywhere. They ran and shrieked and laughed, playing amongst the piles of barrels outside a public house or dodging in and out between the wagons drawn up at the side of the road. They fell and tumbled like so many little jesters, bouncing back up again as if they were made from vulcanized rubber and were equally as indestructible. One or two bumped up against me, as if by accident, but my pocket book was secure in an inside pocket. I quite enjoyed the chagrined looks they gave me as they jumped out of reach. Cutpurses began their careers early in Londinium, it seemed.

Good God, how big, busy, and dirty Londinium was! How it contrived to be the capital of the world was beyond me.

I courted death every time I stepped off a curb at a junction; there were so many autowagons on the streets, all of them traveling at no less than thirty miles an hour and belching out tarry smoke and steam to rival that puffed out by every chimney. And there were a lot of chimneys. By the time I reached the Royal Londinium Hospital at Whitechapel, I could barely see its great bulk across the street for the smoky, steamy air. I turned up my collar and pressed on to the City itself.

The City streets were crowded with men, women, and children busily going about their business, a restless mass of people coming and going, street hawkers selling everything from fresh fruit to silk handkerchiefs, a boy on every corner shouting out the day’s news. This was perhaps the better part of living in Londinium—there was always some amusement. Even here in the City, the monument to commerce and fortune hunting, people congregated in shops and small theaters, libraries, booksellers, clubs and taverns, squares, and parks. There was always something going on or somewhere to go or someone to supply whatever it was a man might fancy—the metropolis in microcosm.

The trouble was, what I really fancied wasn’t so easily available, although they crossed the metropolis every hour or so.

I had reached the Tower when a brisk breeze came down from the north, bringing a greater threat of snow but blowing the smokes and steams south beyond the river to bother the poorer districts of Bermondsey and Southwark. I stood in the public gardens on the corner of Little Tower Hill and stared up into the sky. There. Right there, coming down from Friary Park in the north rather than the newer, but smaller, aerodrome out at the west of the metropolis past Osterley Manor—a Britannic Aero Carrier ship. It was an unexciting, if properly aerodynamic, shape, a metal cigarillo enameled a deep, rich burgundy and striped with the thin silver lines of pipes and chimneys snaking around the main body of the aeroship to vent above its broad curved back.

It wasn’t my fast little aerofighter, but still, it was beautiful, speeding over the chimney tops with its emissarium chuffing out fat, round little clouds of steam and smoke against a gray sky.

I shouldn’t have stopped to watch it, really. It didn’t help. The skies weren’t mine any longer, and I didn’t know if they ever would be again. The aeroship jabbed at that sore spot in me as it went.

My eyes stung and burned. Damn. It must be the wind reaching chill fingers under my spectacles to make my eyes water. Or dust perhaps. Damn.

I put my head down and tramped on toward the Monument, endeavoring to put it all behind me. The skies were closed to me. I could do nothing about it. Far better I gave some consideration instead to what I was to do with my life.

I
MADE
several expeditions to the outlying parts of Londinium over the next few weeks, exploring a city that, I realized, I didn’t know as well as I’d thought. There was more to the world’s greatest metropolis than the broad streets of the center and the West End. It was as good a way as any of spending my time.

I got into the habit of going daily to the Pearse Coffeehouse after breakfast, and often returned there later in the day. The place was warm and dry and offered a refuge from the coldest November on record, with the added advantage of no Agnes to natter and glare at me all day long. Not to mention the best coffee I had ever tasted. Wonderful coffee, and the owner made no objection to me appearing with a paper bag full of some dainty confection from the pastry shop next door and making my luncheon there.

Customers were rare beasts. Whenever I walked into the warm shop and breathed in the richly scented air, ten to one but there’d only be me and the owner. After a decent interval in which the eponymous Mr. Pearse declared his indifference to commercial imperatives by pretending not to see my arrival, he would consent to put down his newspaper and give me a cup of coffee. I would then retire to a deep armchair set in front of a fire that was not in the least self-conscious about roaring in the grate, and warm my toes.

Few people came in during the hour or two I sat there each day sipping my coffee, smoking string-thin cigarillos, and searching my own copy of
The Times
for a likely business opportunity. Despite its proximity to the museum and the number of tourists—many of them colonials from as far afield as New York or San Francisco or Australasia, who came to wonder at the exhibits and pay homage to the motherland—the coffeehouse was seldom busy. People would glance through the windows, wrinkle their noses at the shabby interior, and continue on their way to one of the larger restaurants nearby, or to the local public houses that served remarkably good ale and very fine Dutch gin, or one of the other coffeehouses in the district. A chain of them, Philtre Coffee, was spreading its tentacles across Londinium, and one had recently opened up on Tottenham Court Road. I tried it one day, only to regret the highly priced dishwater it served instead of decent coffee. The West End coffee stalls, where the proprietors carried hours-old coffee about in tin cans on a yoke across their shoulders, served a better brew. It had been a relief to return to Mr. Pearse’s dilapidated but comfortable establishment.

“Is it always this quiet?” I asked on my fourth or fifth visit, when I went back to the counter for a second cup.

Mr. Pearse looked at me over the top of
The Times
and remarked that he didn’t want one of those modern places with a shifting clientele of visitors who had better have stayed at home rather than gallivanting all over the face of the globe. He preferred to keep a small and select customer base.

Perhaps he thought I was completely unobservant? So I had gathered. I gave him one of the patented Lancaster smiles of extreme charm, the one that acknowledges but does not engage further, and I retired to my seat before the fire. The old man looked at me once or twice, frowning, before returning his attention to the newspaper. Occasionally he put down
The
Times
to don a pair of gray gloves before feeding the furnaces of his coffee machines with nuggets of coal and solid phlogiston and tapping on a dial to check the steam pressure.

I didn’t need Mr. Pearse to tell me he didn’t do very much to attract trade. He might draw a regular customer’s attention to a new blend, although “Here, try this” was all he attempted in the way of advertising. He provided comfortable seating and most certainly served superlatively good coffee, but there was little probability of him holding a poetry reading or inviting a local glee club to use the coffeehouse for an evening of singing and stories, or anything community-minded that might draw in trade. Mr. Pearse didn’t hold with any of that, any more than he apparently held with fresh paint.

I didn’t care, really. I liked the place as it was.

I had been going to the coffeehouse daily for three weeks, and a chill November had given way to an even colder December, before Mr. Pearse acknowledged me with more than a grunt. But one day he pushed a cup over the counter toward me and said, “This is a full roast at four hundred and eighty degrees. It should taste quite sweet, with a lot more body than my old blend. More balanced in acidity, especially, and a little more complex. What do you think?”

Why in heaven’s name was the old man speaking in tongues?

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

Mr. Pearse smiled. “Taste it.”

The coffee was very good, and I could say so sincerely. It had a pleasing depth to it as it rolled in the mouth.

Mr. Pearse laughed and nodded. He held out his hand. “Howard Pearse, at your service.”

I shook hands. “Captain Rafe Lancaster at yours, sir.”

The old man grimaced, for some reason. “You aren’t on active service, I take it?”

“Invalided out.” I touched my spectacles, still the temporary ones Beckett had given me. I really should get around to making that appointment with the specialist Beckett had written to. Putting it off was pointless. At least the words were easier to say.

Invalided out. Washed up. Defunct. Useless. Worthl—

“South Africa?”

I nodded. Mr. Pearse patted my arm and gave me a full cup of the new blend. In gratitude for the old man’s quiet restraint, I tapped
The Times
, which Mr. Pearse had turned to the sporting pages where the newspapermen discussed the prospects for the Christmas Hurdles race at Kempton Park on Boxing Day. “I don’t trust Black Monk’s form at the moment. I think he’ll be too winded by the eighteenth jump to finish well, and he fades earlier than he should. My money’s on Gamecock. He’s feisty, and if this frost holds, it’ll be perfect going for him. He’s a devil for hard ground. Bill Daniels is slated to ride him, I believe. The man’s a genius in the saddle.”

Mr. Pearse blinked. “Do you think so? I rather hoped Tommy Skelton will repeat his win of last year. He has Black Monk well in hand.”

Wonderful! A fellow enthusiast for the turf. We had an entertaining ten minutes’ discussion about the nags, and after that, I was one of the elect. I was given my own large porcelain cup, which was kept behind the counter and brought out by Mr. Pearse with great ceremony as soon as the old man saw me step through the doorway.

I had arrived, it seemed.

Gradually I was introduced to the other regular customers. One was a far more august and important man than I would have ever expected to see in a small threadbare coffeehouse. Sir Tane Stafford is Princeps of House Scrivener, the Scrivener, head of the one formally neutral House that stays out of politicking. He must be the only princeps who doesn’t have a phalanx of guards with him everywhere he goes. It defeats me where House Scrivener stands in the hierarchy, but there is no denying the Scrivener is an important man; his likeness appears in
The
Times
often enough to prove it. He’s definitely above the Minor Houses, but his isn’t a Convocation House, either. He sits with them, though, and provides the Secretariat to the Convocation meetings. He attends Buckingham Palace Privy Council meetings at the behest of the Queen (God bless her). He spends his days in the Parliament House. But for all that, he is formally allied with no other House.