The Great Game (Royal Sorceress) (15 page)

There had been no female members until Gwen had inherited Master Thomas’s membership – and she had a quiet suspicion that it had only been Lord Mycroft’s intervention that had allowed her to
keep
the membership. The average member of the club came to the Diogenes to get
away
from the wife and children, according to Master Thomas; they didn’t even permit female
servants
within the club’s walls. Even so, Gwen didn’t visit very often. The club’s atmosphere only appealed to a certain type of man.

She jumped out of the carriage and walked up to the doorman, who recognised her at once. The Diogenes had no membership cards; the only way in was through the main door, forcing everyone to pass under the doorman’s gaze. He knew everyone who was allowed into the club and would have denied entry to anyone else, unless they were accompanied by a club member. The doorman nodded to her and stepped aside. Gwen nodded back and stepped into the club.

Absolute silence fell as soon as the door swung closed behind her. Talking was forbidden within the club, except in a handful of isolated and heavily sound-proofed rooms. Members who spoke out loud – or even ate too loudly - could be fined or, as a last resort, evicted from the club permanently. Very few former members were ever allowed to reapply.

The receptionist looked up at her as she approached, one eyebrow lifted questioningly. Gwen picked up the book of members and tapped Lord Mycroft’s name; the receptionist turned and pointed to a diagram on the wall, indicating that Lord Mycroft was in one of the private dining rooms. Gwen smiled at him, nodded in acknowledgement and headed for the stairs. At least she wouldn’t have to face him in one of the larger rooms, where the slightest sound could bring the guards.

She glanced into the first floor as she walked up the stairs. A handful of chairs were scattered around, with men sitting in them reading the newspapers or a handful of heavy books. Most of them were smoking heavily, the stench making Gwen’s nose twitch unpleasantly. Healers had proved that smoking Tobacco was bad for human lungs, but they hadn’t managed to discourage very many smokers from continuing to smoke. Gwen hadn’t even
tried
to ban magicians from smoking.

The third floor was divided into a handful of rooms, ensuring absolute privacy for the diners and their guests. Gwen smiled as a steward intercepted her before she could reach Lord Mycroft’s room. She held up her card, which he read quickly, blinking in surprise. Between her suit and the darkened corridor, her femininity had simply passed unnoticed. He must be new, Gwen decided, as he took the card down the corridor. If Lord Mycroft refused to see her, the stewards would evict her with as much force as necessary. The club took very good care of its members.

He returned a moment later and beckoned her forward, past a long series of closed doors, to one door that had been left on the latch. Gwen opened it and stepped inside, spotting Lord Mycroft on the other side of a large table. He was splitting his attention between a dinner of roast beef and a small pile of paperwork from the office.

“Lady Gwen,” he said, as the door clicked closed behind her. The door was locked; only the right key could open it from the outside. “Would you care for something to eat? Or drink? They do a very good roast beef here, with excellent potatoes...”

Gwen sat down facing him and picked up the menu. Recently, there had been a fashion for Turkish food sweeping London – a reaction to Turkey’s recent defeat of a French-backed revolution in Greece – but the Diogenes paid no lip service to such brief fads. The menu was typically English, with only a handful of dishes that came from outside the British Isles. For most of the club’s members, she knew, the haggis would be exotic enough.

“A beef sandwich, I think,” she said, marking it on a sheet of paper and dropping it down the tube to the kitchen. They’d send the meal up through the dumbwaiter, minimising contact between the staff and the club members. “What was Sir Travis doing for you?”

Lord Mycroft didn’t object to her interrupting his dinner. “Diplomacy,” he said, simply. “As a Sensitive, he was very capable of seeing what the other side actually
wanted
in negotiations.”

Gwen nodded. Diplomats always started out with exaggerated demands and then allowed their counterparts to whittle them down, until they arrived at a compromise both sides could live with. It probably hadn’t been easy for Sir Travis, she reflected; the British Empire held the whip hand in India and had no intention of allowing any mere prince to claim even a local victory. On the other hand, if she believed everything Sir Charles had written in his dispatches, a recognition or honour from King George was enough to convince some princes to allow the British to oversee the affairs of their kingdoms.

“My brother was one of the people who saw him before he died,” Gwen said, tartly. “Did you know that he was involved in the affair?”

“It was a possibility,” Lord Mycroft said, blandly. “He
was
certainly meant to have seen Sir Travis on the night he died.”

Gwen glowered at him, not bothering to hide her irritation. “And you didn’t think to tell me about
that
little detail?”

Lord Mycroft lifted one elegant eyebrow. “It may interest you to know,” he said, “that there are some matters
outside
the purview of the Royal Sorceress. Those include secret diplomatic talks that could cause no end of problems if they became public too early. And yes” – he pointed a finger at her – “they include the work of said Sorceress’s brother.”

“You have ordered me to find the killer of Sir Travis Mortimer,” Gwen snapped. “The list of suspects includes my own brother. How is that
not
important to me?”

Mycroft sighed. “Because I needed you to view the evidence blind,” he said. “And because, like the rest of us, you are expected to put personal feelings aside and serve your country.”

He cut another piece of beef and chewed it, thoughtfully. “What have you found out?”

Gwen put her thoughts in order and outlined everything she’d discovered, starting with Polly’s innocence and ending with the missing papers. Lord Mycroft studied the ones she’d brought with her carefully, clearly recognising that some were missing. It was hard to read his face, but Gwen could tell that he was very concerned. The missing papers were clearly important.

“You had to break into the safe,” he said, when she’d finished. “Could another magician have done the same trick?”

“Only if he were a Master,” Gwen said. She’d given the matter some thought while the carriage had been rattling towards Whitehall. “Even Merlin couldn’t have cooperated closely enough to open the safe without destroying the papers inside.”

“But that leaves us with another puzzle,” Lord Mycroft pointed out. “Either we have another Master Magician running around London or Sir Travis opened the safe himself. Could he have been Charmed into opening the safe?”

Gwen hesitated. “I wouldn’t have thought so,” she said, finally. “The more... unnatural a particular act is, the harder it is to use Charm to force someone to do it without them realising what’s happening. Even if the Charmer were powerful enough to overcome resistance, there should still be some signs of a struggle on his face.”

Mycroft frowned. “Even with someone as powerful as Lord Blackburn?”

“There should still have been some trace of a struggle,” Gwen said, remembering how Lord Blackburn had taught her how to resist Charm. It would be nice to find the traitor in London and arrest him, but it was unlikely that the Turks would ever send him back. “And if there were a Charmer massively more powerful than Lord Blackburn, he’d be running the world by now.”

“There are all sorts of suggestions about the new Sultan,” Lord Mycroft commented. “But people have been very charismatic for centuries before magic came into the world.”

There was a chime from the dumbwaiter. Gwen stood up and walked over to the hatch, opening it to reveal a large sandwich crammed with beef, vegetables and horseradish. Her mother would have been offended at such fare, but Gwen found it hard to care, not when using magic often left her feeling half-starved. She picked up the plate, carried it back to the table and sat down to eat. It tasted extremely good.

“But there is a simpler explanation,” Lord Mycroft said. “Sir Travis took the papers out of his safe and had them on his desk when he was murdered. The killer then took them with him when he left.”

Gwen scowled. Why hadn’t
she
thought of that?

“But that raises another puzzle,” Lord Mycroft added. “Your brother wouldn’t
need
to steal the papers, Ambassador Talleyrand should never have been allowed to
see
the papers and Howell wouldn’t have risked murdering anyone. And yet, the papers are worthless – unless one happens to have the key to unlocking the code. And to do that, you’d have to know what the papers were in advance.”

He frowned. “Unless, of course, the killer just took the papers relating to specific dates and times,” he concluded. “
That
would make a certain kind of sense.”

Gwen nodded. “Who is Howell?”

“Almost certainly uninvolved, although his presence in this affair is worrying,” Lord Mycroft said. “You should leave him out of your calculations.”

Gwen kept her opinion of
that
to herself, but silently resolved to investigate Howell as soon as possible.

Mycroft cleared his throat as he pushed his plates to one side. “You may have realised that there is more to this case than I have told you,” he said. “I would go so far as to say that it is of national importance. It is vitally important that we find the murderer and establish just what happened to those papers before it is too late.”

“You said it might lead to war,” Gwen said. “How likely is that?”

“The French were blamed for the undead epidemic in London during the Swing,” Lord Mycroft reminded her, dryly. “Right now, there are questions being asked in Parliament as to why the new government hasn’t declared war on France. The Duke of India is hard-pressed to explain, if only because he cannot command Parliament as easily as he can command his army. And the Honourable Members are hearing from their constituents. The general public loathes France right now. If there were a handful of defections in the Commons, the Prime Minister’s position would be fundamentally weakened and we would go to war.

“And then there’s the proposal from Governor Arnold in Philadelphia,” he added. “Our American subjects want to invade Northern Mexico, if only to liberate the white settlers who fled there after the end of the rebellion. And several in the Admiralty support them, Lady Gwen. Do you understand why?”

Gwen shook her head. The Army worked closely with American Militiamen, even if there was still a lingering sense of distrust after the attempted rebellion, but the Navy had much less to do with America apart from escorting slavers across the Atlantic. Admittedly, there were several squadrons based in America, or the West Indies, that might have developed close ties to Americans...

“The French and Spanish hold Panama,” Lord Mycroft explained. “Some bright spark at the Admiralty has realised that a canal, dug through the country, would make it much easier to redeploy Royal Navy squadrons to the Far East, should we ever have need to intervene in China or Japan. And we really should consider the latter. The Japanese are far too like us for comfort. If they get organised as a nation, we could be in some trouble.”

Gwen struggled to remember geography lessons that had never quite gelled in her mind. “They’re just a small set of islands,” she pointed out, finally. “How much trouble can they cause us?”

“
We’re
a small set of islands,” Lord Mycroft countered. “And yet we rule a quarter of the globe. The French can never focus completely on us because they have to control Europe – given time, the Prussians might turn into a serious threat to their control. The Russians have too many internal problems to deploy all of their strength against an outsider, at least as long as Russia itself is not invaded. The Turks have too many problems controlling the territory they hold.”

He smiled, but it didn’t quite touch his eyes. “What would happen if those factors no longer applied?

“My... predecessors were horrified at the mere
prospect
of France joining the American Revolutionaries in their war, particularly when they realised just how badly Lord Bute had mishandled our relations with Prussia and the rest of the German states. If the Americans had kept the war going, I have no doubt that the French would have joined them – and the results would have been disastrous. We had alienated Prussia too badly to count on them to support us.”

Gwen looked down at her hands, remembering the fighting in London at the end of the Swing.

“If we did go to war,” she said, “could we win?”

“We would win at sea, if not easily,” Lord Mycroft said. He shook his head in wry amusement. “One has to admire French persistence. They’ve been beaten successively in naval wars and yet they keep rebuilding their navy. Right now, we have reports that suggest that they too are experimenting with steam-powered vessels, which could be a major problem in future. But we could isolate the different parts of the French Empire and pick off the smaller colonies.

“Beating the French in Mexico, on the other hand...”

His face twisted into an odd scowl. “It would be difficult,” he admitted. “Ever since the French and Spanish united their Crowns, they’ve actually been working on developing Mexico into a proper power base. They’ve even managed to make progress towards giving the locals a stake in maintaining the
status quo
. And Mexico couldn’t simply be isolated and left to starve. We’d have to invade.”

“Or they might invade us,” Gwen said.

Mycroft nodded. “The Americans think that they can win quickly,” he said. “I’m not so sure. No one has fought a major war with modern weapons since 1802. And the French may well have some unfair advantages. There are plenty of Mexicans in New Orleans – and the French who used to live in Quebec.”

He shook his head. “I would prefer to avoid such a war, if possible,” he concluded. “Sir Travis was working on a project that might convince the French not to push too hard. But his death may have scuppered that plan.”