“Sir,” gravely intoned Color Sergeant Major, “how is the shoulder?”

Richard shrugged the offended joint, which had no arm to wield, and felt the pain, the pain that did remain, an old wound now on a young man, to remind him of his limits. Meeting the eyes of the conscience that towered a head above him and a universe of patience beyond his ken, Richard flashed his impatient Barrett eyes and shrugged again, feeling the pain, saying nothing.

“Understood, Sir, the soul overcomes. That Welsh butcher did as a fine a job tidying that wing up as any Royal Navy surgeon.”

Richard grinned proudly, “What a mob we had, best action by a disciplinary platoon ever recorded. I hope that one of them at least has refrained from incarceration.”

Nodding, the Sergeant flashed eyes to the side where Lafono hung like a monkey from the rails of the thundering horseless coach, “A likely crew, good in a scrap, daft in the brain, and loyal as you like. O’Neal and Plimpton must guard the kit in the godforsaken brick of a pit whence we descend. I shall keep the door. It pains me, but this savage Irish squib would be your guard. I have not the sense for conspiracy and he for theography. I am, Sir, suspicious of this bit.”

Richard asked, “Despite or because of Queen Gloria’s writ?”

“Both, Sir, both. The height an order falls from determines its risk to the agent.”

The coach rumbled south down the wide boulevard, its twin bullseye lanterns mounted shining from spring mounted cressets on either side of the coachman to illuminate the cobblestone road ahead. Looking east and west, seeing slower single horse carriages with traditional lanterns on either side, provided Richard with a context in his mind’s eye.

“Sergeant, my birthday, as you know is exactly a month a way, it being September 25th today. The natural world has just begun to sleep and at this time the unnatural world opens to us. I am thrilled, I admit, to be invited to join in conclave the fellows that were the peers of my lost scions.”

“I like it not, in some public house, in this den of thieves and liars, ruffians and connivers?” grossed the Sergeant.

The lanterns on the various porches of the gentry lit the way down over the hill below the Loch, reminding him in repose, that his ancestors, his bold bloodsmen, looked down upon him from heaven—and that his lost father perhaps awaited rescue at Richard’s willful hand.

“Theography, Sergeant is the art of the secret wide open. These mindful men do not lurk in secret rooms, but hold forth in public houses where the eyes of evil are upon them—and can be seen. For evil never rests, My Man. In the Pub, we may spot their agents, as we speak in cipher as Homer and Hesiod and our bold Teraldus once did. We are the eagles of light coming to confer among the coiled serpents of the dark—like this very conveyance, piercing the night with right.”

The narrow blue eyes of his towering nanny, so tall even seated, slid to meet his in agreement, though from the sigh in his high-buttoned chest and the sad slide of his eyes, evinced the mourning of Mum Barrett back at Dark House, “You are The Barrett placed above Baltimore as agent against plots and revolts by tradition, yet called away in such haste, that I sense the hand of the Russian, that agents from Oregon and California have by clipper ship infested this city.”

“A hundred percent!” agreed Richard. “But, the Theographical Society, meeting here instead of London, I smell an expedition! Surely Russian agents will thwart us…”

That thought thrilled him the more. Richard became lost in reverie as the carriage bobbed along, the engine chugging behind them, visions of him crossing sword blades with some bear-like Russian thug swirling in his mind…

A few gentlemen, seated in wicker chairs in top hats, enjoyed pipes, wine glasses held by a negro boy, bottle and towel by a colored footman, each lord attended by a Hindoo footman, looked at Richard as he saluted them, O’Neal slowing so that Richard could hob a nob with his peers.. These men looked hard and disapproving of his smoking carriage, stood, motioned for their Hindoo man-servants to face the chairs about, and sat back down with their backs to the road.

Onward, downward, and into the closer yet cozy brick habitations of the middling class they rolled, O’Neal often giving out warning to children as he worked the levers, clutch and brake, keeping the progress slow as children yet played in the early autumn twilight, saying “Good evening,” to men seated under porch lanterns to enjoy an after dinner cigar and Scotch.

“That was pleasant enough—backbone of the empire, right there, Sergeant.”

Down the fourth hill of cobblestone road O’Neal guided them, into a more congested warren of three story brick homes with flat roofs, with brats running about unsupervised, men smoking cigarettes and drinking beer as they sat in tiny yards weary from the factory work that so obviously stained their big hard hands. One of them waived to O’Neal, “Good job ye ‘ave, mate—keep polishin’ that seat; beats all hell out O’ foundry toil!”

“The shipyard sucketh too, ye lucky thrift!” sounded another tired voice.

“That might be your Imperial spine there, Sir, what builds Her thews?”

“You are right—and there is nothing I can do but this,” and on impulse Richard stepped out on the running board, raising his hat in his right hand in salute to these worn-out working sorts, holding on to the roof rail with… and thank God for Lafono, who, seeing Richard’s shoulder raise in memory of an arm to hang from as he saluted the working men, grabbed his master with his own right arm and held him there.

‘You fool,’ he thought, but even as he excoriated himself for a memory of an arm nearly ending this expedition, he declared, “Hands of the Queen you are!”

To which one rougher sort quipped, “To see ‘er on the stamp, I’d as soon put hands to her lady favor,” and this was punctuated by the sound of a flower pot being hurled from the porch by a woman presumed to care…

That ruckus thankfully veiled the second portion of his embarrassment, as Lafono shoved him back into the arms of the Sergeant and hissed, “Boss, eyes ahead down the way—we headed through Crooks Warren.”

In a mere five minutes the same downward winding street, cobbled with enough bricks to make the Great Pyramid of Giza, saw them chugging through a close packed rpw of lower servants houses, brick shacks in fact, without porches and with a front door set to swing inward so landlords and police could more easily break it down, besides the fact that such a door if swung outward would nick a carriage wheel in the street. The children here played on the low roof tops, some tykes bombarding them with pebbles. Slaternly women peered from open windows from the backs of couches. Ragged youths stalked the street and gutters with surly countenances, some holding bricks, stick or palming a glint of steel. The sidewalks were the habitation of the men of this rough class, with broken noses, rude shoes to the bare feet of the youths, and clothes of a better sort then the working men up the hill. These men leaned upon light post and house front drinking from tin cups, every fifth one manning a rum cask.

“Stop!” shouted some maniac.

“Sir,” quizzed the Sergeant as Richard stepped out of the carriage, on to the rail, handing his hat to Lafono, and, as O’Neal brought her to a stop and Blackie stayed hidden from sight, Richard declared, looking at the street sign that proclaimed, Exeter and Calvert, “Exeter men, I seek a second footman, to man the far runner, a lightweight man handy with fists, cards and dice and can smell a dastard caper. I am Richard Dark Hall Barrett, and I pay in gold guineas and a daily drought of supernaculum.”

Among the men drinking was a tall, broken nosed, cannonball-shouldered affray of knuckles, with long black hair. He stalked forward and grinned, “I be busy with feud at the instant, Yer Pugnaciousness. But me son, Tyler, he needs for adventure en ya’ll seem set for the shit.”

Lafono and this man knew each other by a glance, with Richard’s footman declaring, “Nat Pope, Boss, coul’ narry lay a glove on ‘is mug.”

Nat grinned wider and took Richard’s hand, which he might have broken and shook, “Yer footman ‘ere is about worn out—my boy ‘ill make a fine replacement.”

Lafono laughed, knowingly and also shook the big hand, a hand that squeezed, and tested, pulled and pushed, and finally let go, “Dis Potato Negro ‘as got a scarp or two in ‘im. But a Barrett should be served by a right English Native.”

Nat Pope’s voice then boomed, “Tyler Pope, footman fer Sir Barrett, mount the left runner and learn from this runt mic thug—Exeter for the Barretts!”

The youth that sprang too was tall, lithe and wiry, like a faerie prince from fable.

So a dozen, then a score, and finally a hundred and more rough voices chanted, “Exeter for the Barretts!” as the prince of this gutter nation was sent off by its king.

Richard boarded with a bit more swagger than he had—ever, even at Mogadishu—and a second footman leaped to the far side of the Barrett c… ‘It should be a car, not a carriage, for it abbreviates passage—the Barrett car!’

The lurid lights of the Crook Warrens gave way to the crumbling brick and clapboard dens of the Negroes, overgrown with man-high weeds swaying in the post-summer breeze, presented naught but silence and the whites of fearful eyes, as an obvious and haughty agent of their lesser destinies rumbled like a lion on by.

“Well done, Sir.” intoned the now serene voice of the Color Sergeant Major.