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official-looking person about his losses. To his relief, they were not nearly so great as he had feared. He and Kestrel went outside, and Kestrel sent a link-boy to fetch a hackney carriage.
    A light rain was falling, and the April night was chill. Exhaustion swept over Hugh. He shrank inside his coat and turned up the collar.
    “If you’re going to be ill,” said Kestrel, not ungently, “you’d best have it over before you get into the hack. Drivers can be devilish unpleasant about those things.”
    “I think I’ll be all right. I’m not used to having this much to drink.”
    “That possibility had occurred to me.”
    “I’m supposed to be celebrating. I’m getting married in less than two months.”
    Kestrel looked at him more closely. Hugh stared down at the pavement, prodding it with his toe.
    The hackney drove up. Kestrel tossed a coin to the link-boy, who caught it deftly with one hand. Hugh got into the carriage, then let down the side-glass and poked out his head. “Mr. Kestrel, I—”
    Julian saw a display of gratitude coming, and ducked it hastily.
    “Good night, Mr. Fontclair,” he said, and stepped back to let the hackney drive away.
    “A bit blue-deviled, that ’un looked/* said the link-boy, jerking his head after Hugh’s carriage.
    “More than a bit, I should say,” Julian agreed. Who is he going to marry, he wondered, and why did he make that lugubrious face at the prospect? He’s young to be getting married. For God’s sake, he’s young to be let out without a nurse.
    He gave his head a shake, to clear away Hugh Fontclair and his concerns. You ought to have been a parson, he mocked at himself, so you could go about wrapping people’s throats in flannel and poking your nose into their affairs. He shrugged, and went back inside the gambling house.
    *
    Julian Kestrel lived in a first-floor flat in Clarges Street. The ceilings were high, and the windows large. The walls were painted ivory. The mahogany furniture was handsome but not too plentiful; Julian hated clutter. Here and there were keepsakes he had picked up on his travels: a Venetian glass decanter, a Moorish prayer rug, a marble head of a Roman goddess, an oil painting of the Tuscan hills. Crossed rapiers hung over the mantelpiece; they looked ornamental, but close inspection revealed they had seen a good deal of use. A small bust of Mozart occupied a place of honour by the pianoforte. Under the piano was a canterbury full of well-worn sheets of music.
    It was about one o’clock in the afternoon, and Julian was finishing breakfast. He generally stopped for breakfast about halfway through the elaborate process of dressing. At this stage, he was wearing a white shirt with a high embroidered collar, thin-striped grey Cossack trousers, and a dressing gown of bottle-green silk brocade. A coffeepot and a cup and saucer were all that remained of his meal. Every so often his manservant, who was brushing his coat and waistcoat, came over and refilled the cup, first feeling the coffeepot to be sure it was still hot.
    Julian was sorting through the morning’s post. As usual, it consisted mostly of invitations and bills. He glanced swiftly over the invitations, culling out those he would accept. But one letter gave him pause. He sat back in his chair and read it again, more slowly.
    “Dipper,” he said, “what would you do if a fellow you’d only met once, and hardly knew from Adam, suddenly wrote and asked you to be best man at his wedding?”
    The servant looked up from his work. He was small and lithe, about twenty years old, with a round face and quick-moving, supple fingers. His hair and eyes were the colour of a mud puddle—an almost iridescent brown. “Sounds like a rum go, sir.”
    “Rather. But everything about this wedding is a little rum. Of course, it’s no great novelty for a man of Hugh Fontclair’s birth to barter his name for a fortune. But the Fontclairs are an old Norman family, and proud as Lucifer. The on-dit