by Liz Carlyle
“What sort of people belonged?”
Anisha lifted one delicate shoulder. “Men of science, I believe—or at least the science of their day,” she explained. “Alchemy, astrology, natural philosophy. They also studied the great Greek and Druidic mysteries, and had some connection, perhaps, to Masonry.”
“Druids?” Grace was still staring at the lettering. “Didn’t they sacrifice people?”
Lady Anisha snatched up the needlework. “Ah, here is Begley with the tray!” she said. “Begley, set it here, then be so good as to fetch us another cup.”
“I shall get it.” Grace moved as if to rise.
“No.” Anisha’s hand forestalled her. “Stay. I wish to talk to you. Tell me how my children go on. Are they hopelessly recalcitrant?”
Grace gave her view that the boys were bright but resisted structure. When that went over well enough, she told the tale about the baking soda.
Anisha’s lips pursed. “Imps!” she said. “They did not get it from me. Like Adrian, I was a good, solemn child.”
That raised a question Grace wished to ask, for Lord Ruthveyn had deposited her in such haste, she knew next to nothing of the boys’ history. Still, she hesitated. The extra cup came, and she watched Anisha pour.
“Is that an Indian tea?” she asked.
Anisha set the pot down. “Just Chinese from Oxford Street,” she said. “Parts of India have begun to grow tea as an export crop, but rarely to drink. Occasionally it is boiled strong and spiced—chai masala, we call it—but you would not sleep for a week, I daresay, were you to drink it. By the way, did you meet Dr. von Althausen?”
“No,” she said, taking the cup Anisha passed.
“He is a scientist of sorts at the St. James Society.” Anisha shuddered. “A mad scientist, like in that frightful novel.”
“What is the St. James Society, anyway?” asked Grace. “I know it isn’t quite like a gentleman’s club.”
“Oh, mostly just a group of adventurers and mercenaries, to be honest.” Anisha gave a sheepish smile. “Men who have a natural curiosity about the world—like von Althausen and the tea.”
“The tea?”
“He was a friend of my father’s,” Anisha went on. “Now he and my brother have hy—hybreed—what is the word?”
“Hybridized?” Grace suggested.
“Yes, that—von Althausen went to India and made some special teas for Adrian to grow, but I know nothing of them. Still, Lucan says they are going to make us rich—that is to say, richer. But there—! In England, I am told, one never talks of money.”
Faintly, Grace smiled. “Not unless one has some to talk about,” she said. “Otherwise, everyone would rather pretend it’s too vulgar.”
Lady Anisha laughed her delightful laugh again, and it was as if the wall between them shattered. “Adrian said you were half-English,” she said, “but you sound like a practical Scot to me. Many of the Company men are, you know—like my father.”
Grace was surprised. “I hardly know enough of names to tell the difference,” she confessed. “But I did have a Scottish ancestor somewhere in the family tree—strangely, though, on my French side.”
“I do not know much of France,” said Anisha. “Is it lovely?”
Grace smiled. “I’ve seen little of it myself,” she confessed. “I grew up in North Africa. My father was a soldier.”
Anisha’s gaze fell to the teacup she now balanced on her knee. “Ah, like my husband.”
Grace seized the moment. “Might I ask, Lady Anisha, how long Tom and Teddy have been without their father?”
She looked up and sighed. “All their lives.”
“I beg your pardon,” said Grace softly. “I must have misunderstood.”
“Oh, I am not long widowed, but my husband was never home,” Anisha went on. “John was a captain in the Bengal Horse Artillery. He was cut down at Sobraon.”
“Against the Sikhs in the Punjab?” Grace murmured. “That was a controversial war, was it not?”
Lady Anisha shrugged. “Not to the East India Company.”
“Well, I am sorry for your loss, Lady Anisha,” said Grace. “I am sure it has been hard, too, on your children.”
She smiled wanly. “They do run a bit wild,” she conceded, “but I believe they are not quite so bad as Raju believes.”
“Raju?”
“Yes, another name!” Lady Anisha laughed. “Adrian is his Christian name. But in his youth, we called him by his pet name, Raju.”
“Raju,” Grace echoed, trying to mimic Lady Anisha. “What does it mean?”
“Pampered little prince, more or less,” said Anisha on another laugh.
“And was he?”
Lady Anisha rolled her eyes. “Oh, yes! My mother doted on him.”
“Your parents—was it a love match?” Grace immediately felt her face turn red. “I’m sorry. I beg your pardon. I ought not have asked such a thing.”
“It is perfectly all right,” she replied. “No, it was a political marriage. My grandfather actually was a prince, or something like it, in the Rajputana. But such mixed marriages are frowned upon nowadays—and unnecessary, too, for there are a great many Englishwomen in India now.”
“Oh,” said Grace softly. “I hope it was a happy union.”
Again, Lady Anisha shrugged. “It was not, I think, the marriage either would have chosen. But my mother was a great beauty, and my father very rich. There were worse lives to be lived, I daresay. My father’s second marriage—to Lucan’s mother, Pamela—ah, now that was a love match.”
They continued on for a time, talking of Lady Anisha’s childhood in India. If the comparison between her mother and her stepmother left her bitter, one could not discern it from her manner. Indeed, she was at all times gracious, with an elegance few highborn Englishwomen could have mimicked.
Still, life in London could not have been all roses for her, Grace conceded. The old tabbies of the ton—like Aunt Abigail—would have been hard-pressed to acknowledge Lady Anisha Stafford as “one of us.”
Grace could certainly sympathize. She had come to England with every intention of making a new life and allowing her grief to heal. But she had found instead another tragedy; one that was still to play out, and, if Ruthveyn were to be believed, fraught with danger. Worse, she was beginning to fear she was falling a little in love with her rescuer, and that would never do.
Yes, some days she wished, quite desperately, to flee England altogether.
Milo, apparently, understood.
“Help, help!” said the bird. “Let-me-out, let-me-out!”
CHAPTER 8
The Damning Evidence
Cheroot in hand, Lord Ruthveyn descended the old stone staircase into the cellars, his path weakly lit by the hissing flame of a wall sconce. This was a journey made a score of times each day by the Society’s members and staff, for it was in these dark, dungeonlike rooms that Belkadi stored bin upon bin of Europe’s finest wines, and Dr. von Althausen kept his laboratories.
There were other rooms farther along the vaulted stone passageway, tucked beneath the houses that were connected like rabbit warrens to make up the headquarters of the F.A.C. but those chambers were used rarely, and mostly for ceremonial occasions, or for prayer and meditation. Ruthveyn entered the first room on the right, a long space lit by high, grated windows that ran beneath the ground-floor balconet.
Seated at the worktable, Lord Bessett was rolling down his sleeve, his face drawn, his eyes shadowed beneath with dark circles. Beside him, von Althausen was bent over his electricity generator with one of his silvery tools, making some sort of adjustment.
“Any luck?” asked Ruthveyn, sliding into one of the empty chairs.
Lord Bessett winced and shook his head. “I’m no good at it,” he said, casting a rueful glance at the doctor. “After two weeks, the visions cannot be electrically produced.”
“Patience, patience, my friend.” Von Althausen glanced up from his machine, then scowled at R
uthveyn’s cheroot. “Ruthveyn, would you blow us all to Kingdom Come?” he barked. “Not all of us are bent on suicide.”
“What?” Ruthveyn lifted his hand, the cheroot dangling. “It’s merely smoldering.”
“This is a laboratory, um Gottes willen!” snapped the doctor. “Put it out!”
Bessett turned his bleary gaze on Ruthveyn. “I love when he curses you. No one else dares.”
Ruthveyn lifted one eyebrow and stabbed out his cheroot. “Was he cursing?” said the marquess blandly. “You look accursed already, my friend.”
“Rough night.” Bessett secured his cuff, then stood to draw on his jacket. “You know what it’s like, old chap.”
“The brain! The brain!” von Althausen muttered, throwing an old Holland cloth over his contraption. “It’s all in the brain! It is nothing but electricity. It must be. Galvani proved as much.”
“But Bessett is not a dead frog,” Ruthveyn calmly pointed out. “You cannot teach his brain to control itself if you—”
“Do I tell you how to do your job, Ruthveyn?” Von Althausen turned around, glaring. “Do I?”
“I do not have a job,” he said blithely.
“You are a Guardian,” snapped the doctor, stooping down to look for something, “and one of the Vateis. Those are solemn duties—”
“Yes, but not jobs,” Ruthveyn interjected. “I am a retired diplomat, you will recall.”
“You’re a retired spy, if you ask me,” Bessett countered, flinging himself back into his chair. “But Her Majesty can call you what she wishes, of course.” He turned to the doctor. “Dieter, have you a bottle down here?”
“Yes, of course.” The doctor’s voice came from a set of tool bins beneath the table. “In the cupboard.”
It was scarcely four in the afternoon, but Ruthveyn took pity. “Sit, old chap, before you collapse,” he said. “I’ll fetch it.”
Ruthveyn rose to rummage through the cluttered cupboard until he found a dusty bottle of armagnac, and three almost clean glasses. No servants were allowed in this room to tidy up, for the laboratory was filled with things both dangerous and private, a few of which even Ruthveyn did not comprehend.
There was all manner of optical equipment: microscopes, lenses, and in one corner on a wooden frame, one of those newfangled photographic cameras. There was an assortment of glass flasks, and cups—all handblown to von Althausen’s specifications—as well as calipers and other assorted measuring devices, and piles of thick, leather-bound tomes on subjects from alchemy to zoology that had been pulled from the main library’s shelves and carried down into the doctor’s lair, never to be seen above-stairs again.
Ruthveyn gave it all a passing glance, then returned to the battered wooden table, watching his younger friend from the corner of one eye as he poured. Geoff had been Lord Bessett but a short while, and the mantle of the earldom did not lie easy on his shoulders. The reasons, Ruthveyn knew, were complicated, but primary amongst them was the fact that Geoff had never expected to inherit.
Unlike Ruthveyn, who had been brought up expecting his father’s title and duties to fall to him, Geoff had not. Not until his much-older half brother had died suddenly. The grief had merely added to Geoff’s already challenging life. Even before his inheritance, the young man had made quite a name—and a fortune—for himself as a partner in MacGregor & Company, his stepfather’s firm. In addition to his many metaphysical gifts, the old boy was one hell of an architect and artist.
Ruthveyn finished pouring and pushed the glasses round as von Althausen finally settled into one of the chairs. “To the Fraternitas Aureae Crucis,” Ruthveyn said, lifting his glass with a twisted smile.
“Auf uns!” the doctor replied.
They drank in companionable silence for a time, Ruthveyn surreptitiously studying the shadows beneath Geoff’s eyes. Despite their occasional clash, he was fond of the young man. Though he had known of Geoff’s existence within the Fraternitas, they had met quite by chance in North Africa, where Geoff had been engaged in overseeing a construction project for the French colonial government.
Toward the end of his assignment, Ruthveyn and Lazonby had come upon Geoff a little worse for wear in the parlor of a Moroccan brothel, his pockets being picked by a pair of dubious-looking Frenchmen.
It was a bit reminiscent, in fact, of Ruthveyn’s first meeting with Lazonby—though on that occasion, they had both been something worse than glassy-eyed. They had also been naked—and stretched out on a pair of red silk banquettes, a smoldering four-hosed hookah on the floor between them, and two willing lovelies curled round it like cats, all of them lethargic and sated in the aftermath of what could only be described as an orgy—in more ways than one. Then, at some point in the evening’s finale, Ruthveyn had looked across the roiling haze at his new partner in debauchery as the sergeant rolled over to find his shirt.
And there it was.
The unmistakable mark on his flesh. The mark of the Guardian.
Geoff’s voice cut through the reverie. “We’ve been asked to take an acolyte,” he said to no one in particular. “From Tuscany.”
Ruthveyn looked up from his drink with a frown. “Under what circumstances?”
“The lad has been brought along by one of the Advocati,” said Geoff. “Signor Vittorio. But now the doctors tell him he is dying.”
Ruthveyn cast a glance at von Althausen. “The doctors are forever saying that,” he remarked, “and it’s very rarely true.”
“This is a cancer,” Geoff countered, “and these are uncertain times in Tuscany.”
“Ja, there is much clamor for war against Austria,” said von Althausen. “And talk of deposing Grand Duke Leopold.”
“Precisely,” said Geoff. “Vittorio thought it best the lad come here.”
“Does he have the Gift himself? Is that Vittorio’s concern?”
Geoff winced. “There is potential, I gather—enough to worry Vittorio that the boy might be ill used—but he is not, I collect, a strong Vates.”
Ruthveyn did not like idea. Too often, he knew, very young men were like Lazonby in his youth, not quite ready to commit themselves to the Fraternitas. Or like himself, tormented and angry. Few came to this life as Geoff had done, resigned to his fate and already under the tutelage of his grandmother, a powerful Scottish seer. To give oneself wholly to the life of a Guardian was an almost monastic conversion, and sometimes the first real acceptance of one’s fate. Better never to come to it at all, Ruthveyn believed, than to come but half-committed.
But von Althausen and Geoff were still staring at him. “We need a majority vote,” said Geoff quietly. “I have three, including Alexander. Lazonby and Manders are away. Will you use one of your vetoes?”
Ruthveyn considered it. There were but twelve vetoes allotted a Founder in his lifetime. It was what they had all agreed upon setting up the St. James Society. They had been fortunate in recruiting some of the Fraternitas’s most senior Savants—learned, well-honed men like von Althausen—and their priests, or Preosts, like the Reverend Mr. Sutherland, to aid in their objectives. But the voting, and the responsibility of it, was left to the Founders.
“Has the lad been initiated?” he demanded. “Is he marked?”
“I cannot say,” said Geoff. “But he can travel here in a few months’ time with all the proper documentation from Vittorio.”
“Belkadi won’t like it,” Ruthveyn warned. “He dislikes Italians.”
“Belkadi dislikes half of humanity, including you,” said Geoff evenly. “Besides, he isn’t a Founder.”
“And Italians hate London,” Ruthveyn went on. “It’s cold, it’s damp, and the air is foul. Did anyone tell the lad?”
Von Althausen grunted. “Who pissed in your porridge this morning, Ruthveyn?” he muttered. “You’d be well advised to take him. Who knows when one of you might be needed elsewhere? Already Lazonby is stuck in Scotland, and Manders is tending his political fires.”
The doctor was right. And Vittori
o was an honorable man who had been doing yeoman’s duty for the Fraternitas long before Ruthveyn’s birth. This was more about his strange, black mood, he acknowledged, than an acolyte.
“What is his birth date?” he asked.
“The fourteenth of April,” said Geoff.
Ruthveyn shoved his empty glass away. “Very well,” he said. “But send word to Lazonby.”
“Consider it done.” Geoff drained his brandy and moved as if to rise.
At the last instant, Ruthveyn caught Geoff’s arm. “I’m in a foul mood today. I should be horsewhipped, no doubt.”
Geoff’s smile was wan. “Well, I would call you out for being an ass, but I haven’t had above three hours’ sleep in an age.”
It was a torment he and Geoff shared—one that Lazonby never felt. He slept like a baby and snored after a drunk like one of those monstrous locomotives. Ruthveyn jerked his head toward the ceiling. “I have the cure for sleeplessness upstairs.”
Geoff’s expression went blank. “I am afraid I had to leave that habit back in Morocco, old chap.”
Ruthveyn shrugged one shoulder. “It’s hardly opium.”
“Opium. Charas. It all rots the brain, Ruthveyn.”
“Perhaps,” Ruthveyn said quietly, “but a man must survive.”
Von Althausen set his brandy down. “Once again, my boy, they are mind-altering chemicals,” he said, casting a warning glance at Ruthveyn. “They are to be used only ceremonially—and only then if they elicit information rather than quell it—which has never been the case for you. You would be well advised to give them up.”
“What, and merely drink myself into a stupor like half the gentlemen in London?” Ruthveyn jerked from his chair. “I see little difference.”
“Suit yourself,” replied the doctor. “But oftentimes ’tis better to deal with your devils firsthand.”
“Spoken like a man who doesn’t have any,” Ruthveyn complained.
But the truth was, he was beginning to fear his friends might be right. For the first time in a long while, Ruthveyn wondered if the discomfort he was staving off wasn’t more than sleeplessness and visions.