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all present by bequeathing Heart’s Ease cottage and the entirety of its contents to her dear nephew, Ambrose Congreve, instead of to her sole issue, her son, Henry Bulling. A stupefied silence descended upon the lawyer’s office. Henry Bulling, the assumed heir and a minor diplomat by trade, sat for some few moments in goggle-eyed shock, taking quick, shallow breaths. He shot Congreve a look that spoke volumes, all of which would have made for unpleasant reading, and then rose somewhat unsteadily on shaky pins and made for the door.
    The solicitor, a Mr. Reading, coughed into his fist once or twice and shuffled documents atop his large desk. There was a lavatory down the corridor and the door could be heard to slam loudly several seconds later. There was a muffled gargling noise, a retching actually, and the lawyer quickly resumed his reading. All ears were turned in his direction. There was a calico cat, Reading continued, apparently not well, which would be solely entrusted to Mrs. Bulling’s son, Henry. The cat, Felicity, and the princely sum of one thousand pounds.
    This current incident was just the latest in a long chain of disappointments for Henry. Ambrose had known him since birth. He was a boy who’d seemed positively doomed from the very beginning.
    Augusta’s only son was plainly one of life’s born unfortunates. A lackluster hank of orange hair lay atop his pate. He had not been blessed with the strong jawline and prominent chin that most Bulling men were known for leading with. He’d struggled in various public schools and been sent packing down from Cambridge for debauchery. Which is what they called in those days being discovered in a coat closet with a don’s wife in a compromising (and difficult to achieve) position.
    Born to Augusta in Bruges, by one of her husbands, a no-account count, a Belgian noble of some kind, Henry was a notorious layabout as a young man. It had gotten so bad that, at one point, Ambrose simply gave up on finding the boy a job he could hold for more than a month. Ambrose took to referring to his wastrel cousin as the “Belgian Loafer” after a shoe of that name. Actually, Ambrose thought the nickname did the eponymous shoe a disservice. The comfortable handmade shoes (a favorite of Congreve’s) were very stylish and wore quite well. Henry fit neither description.
    Migrating to Paris, Henry had spent a few years dabbling at the Sorbonne, and he had dabbled in the arts, too. Setting up his easel on the quay beside the storied and moody Seine, he had produced a series of dramatically large canvases that were, to Ambrose’s practiced artist’s eye, scenes of mindless violence.
    In the eighties, Henry Bulling lost a good portion of his mother’s money in the Lloyd’s debacle. Penniless, tail twixt the hindmost, he returned to his mother’s cottage in Hampstead Heath and moved into the small flat above the gardener’s shed. Later, he moved to an apparently rather unsavory place in town. He remained nonetheless an effete snob, in his cousin Ambrose’s opinion. His character was not enhanced by the faux French accent. Nor by the hundred-dollar pink Charvet shirts from Paris he could ill afford on the clerk’s salary he earned at the French embassy in Knightsbridge.
    His role there was not an exalted one—he worked in transportation and trade relations—but he was in a small way useful to queen and country.
    Henry Bulling was a spy. He earned the odd extra shilling or two keeping an eye on things at the French delegation, reporting on a regular basis to the Yard. Since Ambrose was Henry’s first cousin, it fell to him to listen to the weekly gossip and examine the purloined copies of generally useless documents Bulling had secreted in his briefcase before leaving for lunch. It was Ambrose’s habit to meet his cousin on various random but prearranged benches throughout St. James’ Park. It wasn’t sly and sophisticated tradecraft, but it worked well