Augustus had led the Captain by certain back alleys and lesser avenues that were probably unsafe for most folks. Even locals who knew these confines. Between his own rage and Digby’s size, Augustus had no worries that some fool would seek to ambush them here.
A wiser man would send an entire army, while remaining aloof someplace he might hope would protect him from Augustus’s wrath. Like Tibet or Samarkand. Someplace that might give him enough of a head start to flee, once Augustus and Digby were on his trail.
Not that he could ever escape.
But the fools had all retired. Perhaps they had smelled the danger on the air, like small forest creatures, as none were to be seen.
They arrived at the back of Digby’s hotel and ascended via something of a servant’s entrance, where his own scowl was sufficient that a maid working late pressed her back flat against a wall to allow him to pass.
Augustus took that as a cue and paused.
“My apologies, madame,” he said in French before continuing, working to fulminate a bit less as they ascended the stairs and rapped on Lady Claudette’s door. She opened it almost immediately, dressed for the field in mannish attire.
At least she had taken his hints and found a tailor that would work with her to give the woman’s current androgyneity a greater freedom of movement with cut and stitch.
They entered. Digby closed the door. Lady Claudette moved to the bed. Augustus paced.
It was to be that sort of an evening, it seemed.
“Perrin is not what he seems,” Augustus began, framing things quickly because neither of his cohorts had the power to see the truth of what had gone on in that room. “He appears to be a mask worn by another, and claims that Marie-Rose sent him. I had thoughts as to how such a thing could be done, ruminated upon while making this most recent trek, but I would need to consult a few sages and at least one other library besides my own to confirm how it could be done, let alone undertaking it myself.”
“A mask?” Lady Claudette volleyed back at him.
“An illusion, but one that was not being actively maintained, as most esoteric practitioners such as myself would have done it,” Augustus nodded.
“Ah,” she nodded. “I wondered, since you had previous stolen a mask. But our vocabulary is somewhat constrained.”
Augustus felt the entire room shiver once as Lady Claudette’s words rang home. Then he considered the ancient saw about forests and trees.
He snapped his fingers.
“Of course,” he muttered.
“Derlyth?” Digby asked.
“A mask,” Augustus turned to the man. “A literal mask. An item such as this ring I occasionally wear, but one dedicated specifically to cloaking a figure. Not in shadows or invisibility, but in the guise of another. A fully developed character, as if from a book.”
“A sallow faced chap?” Digby asked, harking back to earlier descriptions Augustus had supplied. “Down on his luck. Poor to the intent of a threadbare jacket and worn pants? A disguise meant to cause you to overlook him as a threat?”
“Exactly so, Captain,” Augustus nodded. “Perrin doesn’t exist, I’ll wager.”
“Who was under that mask, then?” Lady Claudette drew him back around with her incisive brilliance. “Or rather, would this be your Marie-Rose, pretending to be a man of little threat and means, in order to entrap you into a confession?”
Augustus considered it. The French authorities were hopeless when it came to the esoteric arts. And other things. A decade ago, the Germans had come so close to winning, not because of their supposed, vaunted Teutonic might, but because there were days the French government couldn’t arrange an orgy in a brothel, as that one American woman had explained it to Augustus.
That left the underworld. A range of thieves, whores, vagabonds, and charlatans. Augustus’s sort of folk, most days, as at least they were honest about it.
“She might be,” Augustus mused.
“Then will your little pet demon have a problem tracking her?” Digby asked.
Lady Claudette let a single, perfect, arched eyebrow speak multitudes. She really was exceptional at that.
“I conjured a thing perhaps an order of magnitude more dangerous than is my usual wont,” Augustus informed her. “Bid it track Perrin. And it should, because he will have left a trace, even after that mask comes off. I shan’t know who until the creature returns with a report, but I think we might profitably assume that Marie-Rose awaits at the center of the web. And she is more than she seems as well.”
“Indeed, she is,” Lady Claudette spoke up.
Augustus turned to the woman, then thought wiser and moved to the chair as she rose.
“Based on your thoughts, I asked London to delve some into Mlle. Guérin,” Lady Claudette continued. “They confirm the death of her father in 1921, during pro-monarchist riots in Paris. However, they also suggested hints that the man might have been a cat burglar at one time, though he seems to have retired from the business roughly fifteen years ago, and the British government was never able find sufficient evidence to charge the man with any crime.”
“Fifteen years ago, Marie-Rose would have been seventeen,” Augustus mused. “How old would the father have been?”
“Jean-Paul Guérin was born in Paris in 1873,” she said, reciting details from a memory Augustus occasionally wondered might be eidetic in nature. “Widower with one daughter, born in 1893. After 1913, he seems to have taken a job in a factory, for all intents being a model citizen during the war.”
“And unable to have been a roving burglar?” Digby confirmed.
“Correct,” Lady Claudette nodded. “That stability led the file on him to be closed after the war, as the crimes that he might have previous been accused of seemed to continue, on both sides of the war, during the fighting itself.”
“But if he had a daughter who had followed her father into the family business…?” Digby mused.
“My same thought, Captain,” Augustus agreed. “Now, let us extend our logic a shade. Suppose that Jean-Paul was in possession of a cloak that would allow him to appear as someone else? Someone with a sallow complexion, easily overlooked and underestimated. And suppose that at age forty, roughly, he decides that he has become too widely suspected of certain crimes, so he retires, at once providing himself an alibi against future activities, while allowing said daughter to work under the cover of misdirection.”
“Is she Jean-Marie Lachance?” Digby asked. “Were they both?”
Augustus turned to Lady Claudette.
“When did Lachance’s crime spree supposedly begin, according to spies, whores, and liars?” he asked, referring, of course, to various HM’s various governments over the last thirty years.
“Whitehall suspects that he got serious in 1894,” she said. “Thus, a young man with a young daughter.”
“Who may have found or created the thing I encountered tonight that left me so confused,” Augustus nodded. “Then passed it on to a beloved daughter when he retired.”
“And Jean-Paul’s death triggers a rage?” Digby asked.
But then, Captain Digby bore his own grief with stoic calm, most of the time, having lost Gladya to a fever while he was away in the fields of France during the War, not to remarry afterwards.
“It is a working theory that holds much water,” Lady Claudette stepped in. “The Kaiser is exiled. The Czar fallen. The Austro-Hungarian Empire broken down into smaller component parts. France has rebuffed the Bourbons several times, as well as the Bonapartists, intent on retaining their republic. Britain is really the last great power dominated by a strong aristocracy, with kings and princes ebbing as folks demand greater rights. Even there, Britain has moved power to the Commons for the most part, down from the Lords.”
“But a woman possessed of rage and ability can still strike deadly blows,” Augustus noted. “And that, my friends, is what drew us to France in the first place. When I penetrated her defenses, I noted a small stepping circle. Not much more than a portal, unlinked to anything as far as I could tell without actually opening it. But if she had the skills of a dream thief, it is all Marie-Rose might need.”
“Can we draw her out of her lair?” Digby asked. “Or do we risk a confrontation there, where she might manage to escape?”
“She might manage to flee, Captain,” Augustus corrected the giant. “She will not escape. Lady Claudette, gather your coat and your camera, not that it will be of much use to see the esoteric matters at play, but evidence of other things might be necessary.”
“Are we about to confront her?” Lady Claudette pressed.
“I might have frightened her sufficient that she runs,” Augustus replied. “Such was my intent with Perrin, not connecting the dots directly to Marie-Rose Guérin in my urgency. We will head that direction immediately, and hope to catch her before she can depart, pending news from my esoteric associate.”