Still, Augustus did find it ever so funny that his next stop didn’t take him all that far away, once he was done with Clayborne and all that folderol. Worse, he was taking a marked step up the social ladder, in order to step down it rather precipitously.
The noontime had come and gone, but Augustus had instructed Mary, his Scots housekeeper, to fix a larger breakfast than normal this morning, knowing he would be out and busy for much of the day. He would sup at some later point, but for now was satiated.
He had approached the formidable abode with a spring in his step, entering through a gate that had no doubt marked his arrival, then up the long sidewalk to a wide covered porch and an imposing wooden door banded with bronze in an antique fashion, though the fabrication itself was rather recent.
The need to ensorcel said door as part of a wider upgrading of the establishment itself, due to the inhabitants. Augustus rather approved of the effort and the results.
He swung the heavy bronze knocker and waited with patient indulgence for the portal to swing inward to reveal an older woman. He nodded and she stepped back with a disapproving smile as she gestured him in.
But then, Eloise disapproved of most things. At least where an esotericist such as himself was involved. Old Cant Anglican, and all that. Church at least twice a week. Occasionally four times, were her imagined sins exceptional.
“Would the library suffice?” she asked dryly, taking his derby and walking stick.
“That would be exceptional, madame,” he nodded. “I would make a few inquiries of Lady Claudette, were she available, having been in the vicinity when the need struck. However, I am also equally at home being disappointed and needing to merely leave a calling card for later.”
Eloise frowned at him with an implied eyeroll, but she also bowed slightly.
“I shall inquire.”
And he was alone.
The Duke of Montmorcy was a dabbler in similar fields to Augustus, though only an interested amateur at best. Still, he had a considerable fortune owing to both ancient land ownership and cunning investments by his sires in a variety of industrial engagements up north, such that he was likely in the top ten wealthiest men in England today.
His library downstairs was more an entertaining space than a working repository of tomes. Thing in here were pretty, rather than practical.
Augustus made his way to the bar and fixed himself a bit of soda water with some bitters, mostly to clear his mouth of the taste of a sooty summer day in London’s heat. From there, he took to a chair and made himself comfortable. Someone had been through and left a morning paper.
Augustus was not an investor, in any sense of the word, but he did maintain certain funds, mostly by listening to Digby’s excellent advice. Most intently, he checked various things to see which of his many occasional clients might be facing ruin or windfalls.
As an acquisitions agent, he was as mercenary as the next man, but it stood him well to understand how the vagaries of the market might affect his missions.
Hopefully, the crass Egyptology phase that had taken the world by storm would be over soon, and he could finagle a few trips to the Chinese interior or Tibetan plateau again for the entertainment. And profit.
A shadow at the door caused Augustus to look up, then spring to his feet when he recognized the homeowner himself. George Herbert Faulkner, Duke of Montmorcy.
He was a tall man with an average build, possessed of dark hair fading both in color and volume. Fabulously wealthy and maintaining it in an uncertain future.
“Sir.” Augustus nodded as the man strode close and shook his hand.
“Be welcome, Derlyth,” Montmorcy said. “I gather you came to rouse my rabblerouser, but I thought I might entertain you for a bit myself as she rushes about to make herself presentable.”
Augustus sat and watched the man fizz some whiskey then take the comfortable chair on the end of the open space, where he traditionally held court on those nights when Augustus was along as a peer in realms esoteric, rather than class or wealth.
Not that many of the men in the room were truly Augustus’s peer on such nights, but Montmorcy had at least gotten his hands dirty in the field as a much younger man. Thus had Derlyth come to know him, circling round a group of such men that had come to be clients in more recent times.
They settled and Augustus studied the duke.
Fifty-three. Extremely well educated for his class and his era. And a man of his fists when it had been necessary.
In the era before the Great War, when Victoria and Edward had still held the world in their cultural thrall.
“I gather that the palace finally blackmailed you into the harness?” Montmorcy began, with a nod and wink kind of approach that suggested just how deep this man must have been involved.
Someone had, after all, overruled Clayborne’s objections. That sounded like it probably came from the top. Not King George, but one of his advisers who knew enough to be dangerous. A boon friend of Montmorcy, perhaps. Or at least someone who ran in the same circles and belonged to the same clubs.
“Blackmail is such an ugly term,” Augustus replied defensively. “However, they were able to make a most compelling case as for my continued involvement.”
“Anarchists rarely make the world better, once they move beyond their neighborhood,” Montmorcy nodded sagely.
Augustus bit back his first response. He really didn’t have a great deal with sympathy for most royals or aristocrats, if only because few of them had ever gone out and done things like Lord Faulkner had, as he had been known in those days.
Dirty hands. Bloody ones, occasionally. A man at the front of the battle instead of the rear, when fell and inimical manifestations made a nuisance of themselves.
One of the few Augustus respected.
“And you would tend to be correct, sir,” Augustus allowed. “At the neighborhood level, they frequently make things better, merely because they refuse to be bound by the limitations of petty men with forms to be filled out in triplicate in order to effect changes. Things happen now, instead of perhaps never.”
“Lachance is a much greater threat,” Montmorcy agreed.
“He is,” Augustus noted. “I have actually come to see if the ever-dangerous Lady Claudette might be induced to assist.”
“Assist in what, Derlyth?” the woman herself asked from the door.
Augustus sprang to his feet again. It was automatic, really.
Then he saw what she’d done and turned a sour eye on the duke, who had the decency to shrug helplessly.
As Lady Claudette had reminded all of them more than once, the man hadn’t been born who could give that woman orders. Not even her father.
Whatever sacrificial lamb husband Augustus and Montmorcy eventually found for her would have to understand that. And keep his mouth shut.
Trousers. A suit, even. Worse, cut in the Italian style like Augustus preferred, with two vents on the hips rather than one in the center. Dark brown linen, from the sheen, so light enough for the weather but not as likely to show off stains.
Augustus understood that the French woman Chanel had started a revolution less than a generation ago, but he was also perhaps old enough and a bit set in his ways to be surprised at a woman dressed like a man, especially when she was not otherwise giving off masculine impressions.
He’d known a few who achieved androgyneity in their time.
Lady Claudette was entirely woman. Petite, at barely five foot one and hardly more than seven stone soaking wet. Reddish-blond hair occasionally called strawberry and cut rather pageboy short. Saphirrically-blue eyes. Mind like a freshly-honed razor.
Like her father, she made her way to the bar and fixed herself something. Augustus gathered up the scattered shards of his coherence and sat again, noting the wry smile on Montmorcy’s face before it disappeared.
Quickly, the woman joined them, a peer today, watching them like an underfed hawk.
“Journalism,” Augustus said simply. “I need to find a man, without said man coming to understand that I seek him.”
“What kind of man?” Lady Claudette replied.
While she was the youngest daughter of Montmorcy, Claudette Faulkner was also a rather well-known journalist in certain circles. Worse, lately she had taken to transforming some of his and Digby’s adventures and such into thinly-veiled fictions and them selling to various magazines. For money. Reasonable money, at that, though nothing compared to her allowances or eventual inheritance.
Still, she was at least as well educated as the duke. And smarter. Possibly tougher, if only in that she had her gender to overcome to achieve things handed to the man on a silver platter.
And she did.
“An assassin,” Augustus said simply, listening for her gasp while watching Montmorcy’s barely-visible shrug.
Obviously, the man had left her out of these maneuvers. Had he known that Augustus would make a beeline here from meeting with the government?
Quite possibly. Lady Claudette frequently formed the third side of the dangerous triangle of hunters with him and Digby, though they were all peers without any romantic interests.
Lady Claudette was literally a generation younger than him at twenty-five, and the daughter of a duke. Digby might have made a good match, but he was a private man at the best of times, and Montmorcy seemed to hold his common background against him, in spite of all the awards and accolades the government had seen fit to award the man over the last fifteen years.
He would be Sir Gordon on some future honors list. Rightfully so.
“Assassin?” she pressed.
Augustus turned away from her father, and began explaining to her about Jean-Marie Lachance, and everything that man entailed.