The Gilded Scarab Read Online Free PDF Page B

dawn and quite a contrast to the Cape. The ground was white with rime frost and the sky heavy and dark with the threat of snow.
    I had spent most of my leaves at Le Touquet or Cannes, and it was seven years since I had last set foot on my native soil. I wasn’t quite thirty years old. I had no career, a fortune no man would call large and absolutely no idea what I was going to do with my life.
    So, I took a metaphorical deep breath, bit the end off a cigarillo and stuck it between my teeth, shouldered my kit bags, and headed toward the edge of the landing field to find an autohansom to take me into the center of Londinium.
    It was as well I liked adventure. It appeared I was facing one.

Chapter 4

    F OR ALL their arrogance, Minor Houses have little political power of their own. Their power comes from the alliances they make and from servile bowing and scraping to their betters. They’re the jackals slinking around the kill, waiting for the lions to finish the better cuts of meat before rushing in to scavenge what’s left.
    Stravaigor is one of several Minor Houses allied to Convocation House Cartomancer, assuring the Cartomancer of a constant supply of lower-level officials to staff the government departments for which he’s responsible. The senior appointments were reserved for his own sons and brothers, of course. The Cartomancer has oversight of the Imperium’s foreign policy. Slipstreaming in this diplomatic wake for the last few generations, the heads of my House—very successful jackals indeed—have accumulated a substantial fortune in the East India Company. At the time of my return to Londinium, the House was heavily involved in developing the Far Eastern markets.
    I don’t like the Houses. Quite simply, if I’m going to grovel and scrape and bow, I’ll do it on my own account. Not for a House of cousins and half cousins who care as much for me as I do for them. Sadly, despite my indifference, I had to sit through a progress report on the House’s fortunes regaled to me by my father’s cousin.
    Now widowed, Cousin Agnes was housekeeper/manager at the hostel maintained in Russell Square for those of House Stravaigor’s members who couldn’t afford, or didn’t want, the expense of maintaining houses in town. I went straight to the hostel the day of my arrival and secured a room without difficulty. Thankfully, the rent was nominal, possibly because the room, on the second floor back, overlooked a narrow yard much beloved by the local cats. But while the house was as starched and upright as Agnes, with the same air of impregnable corseted solidity, the rooms were clean and comfortable. I was lucky to get the one Agnes offered. As I’d told Beckett, I was not considered a House member in good standing, and I had half anticipated being turned away.
    Cousin Agnes was a deep-voiced, deep-bosomed woman with a hard eye and a harder heart. I had been designated the wastrel of the family at the age of twenty when I refused to take holy orders, and my service to the Imperium gave her no reason to change her opinion. Her greeting had been an effusive “Well, well. If it isn’t Rafe Lancaster. Have they cashiered you at last?”
    I had powerful memories of Cousin Agnes. Not so much of her looks or voice or mannerisms, but her smell. She wafted about Bloomsbury in the same odor of peppermints and mothballs that had pervaded our family home near Salisbury whenever she had chosen to darken its doors. One inhalation of breath when I walked into the Russell Square house and I was taken back to childhood.
    Still, common politeness demanded I ignore the scorn and plant a dutiful kiss on her cheek. It tasted of rose powder. “Medical discharge, ma’am. I was injured in the defense of the Imperium. I deem it an honor, of course.”
    She sniffed. “I hope your return presages a change of heart on your part, and an acknowledgment of your duty to the House?”
    “I shouldn’t put a great deal of money on that prospect,