Not long after his American adventure Luis had married. His bride was a young woman who had once been a singer in the variety halls, and had flirted briefly but intensely with the Great Elusivo. ‘Elusivo no more!’ Hackett had joked, when acting as best man at the wedding. ‘Now she’s got you pinned down at last!’
The couple settled in a decent town house in Richmond, and raised a daughter who they christened Elspeth – ‘Ella’ to her father, in a nod to Luis’s own ‘elusive’ past that was a secret even from his wife. Later came a son, Robert. As the children grew Luis kept an eye on them both, but to his relief neither showed signs of being a Waltzer, with none of the joys and complications such a condition might bring. The family lived modestly, quietly and respectably.
Luis noted the death of Prince Albert in 1861 – well, how could he not? The news dominated the nation. The Queen disappeared into mourning black, and all traces of the somewhat pretty if suspicious young woman Luis had once glimpsed in the vaults of Windsor Castle were extinguished. Luis did wonder how the passing of Albert, the great champion of the Knights of Discorporea, would affect their work. But truth be told, once he reached his own fortieth birthday in 1863, Luis heard little of whatever exploits the Knights were getting up to. His own increasing age made him that much less useful as an agent, of course. And Oswald Hackett had always had a secretive streak.
By the turn of the next decade – and while the British watched aghast as a newly unified Germany under its ferocious Chancellor Bismarck tore into France, advancing even to Paris – Luis’s contact with the Knights had dwindled to the occasional, almost nostalgic, letter or visit.
So it was a surprise when Hackett called one day in the spring of 1871 and asked him to go to Berlin. He and Burdon were to make separate trips, he said, with instructions to visit particular locations, including government buildings and royal residences.
Luis was reluctant, but he was wary of angering Oswald Hackett. So he complied. He fulfilled his own mission without incident or alarm.
And it was a still greater surprise, a few weeks later, when he, Hackett and Fraser Burdon were all summoned once more to Windsor.
24
LUIS STAYED OVERNIGHT in a hotel on the Strand.
Restless, anxious, he was up before the dawn, long before his appointment with Hackett and Burdon. He made his way down to the river, where in the grey light the mudlarks dug for wood and coins and bits of coal: children and old women, up to their knees in cold river-bed ooze. And he saw the sewer hunters emerging from their tunnels with their hoes and poles, coated in filth, splitting whatever grimy haul they had retrieved from the muck. Even in the city streets there was activity at this hour, the bone grubbers sifting garbage for anything they could eat or wear or sell on. All these people were striving to be up before the competition, as if the city was a vast midden infested by human insects, just as Hackett had once said, rooting and sifting and consuming the slightest morsel they found.
By eight Luis had made his way to Charing Cross, where the others were waiting by the brougham that would take them to Windsor.
This time the three of them, all older – Oswald Hackett was in his late fifties now – were met only by the man they knew as Mr Radcliffe, with a few hefty flunkeys at hand.
This encounter took place with the four of them standing somewhat uneasily in a drawing room that Luis suspected was one of the castle’s lesser chambers, deep in the bowels of the Conqueror’s tower, but whose carpet alone had probably cost more than all his own holdings combined, and whose walls were adorned with black crape, in the funereal style Victoria had maintained since the death of the Consort. Just the four of them, save for ‘servants’ in suits who stood by the walls and doorways, looking to Luis’s eye like nothing so much as Coldstream Guards playing at being butlers, and he imagined he wasn’t far wrong.
Radcliffe too had aged, of course; he must be nearly sixty now, with a greying at the temples, a slight stoop to the posture. But his attention remained blade-like, his stare skewering. ‘So, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘Once again we meet. No Prince this time, sadly.’
Burdon snorted. ‘But maybe you’ll have the Widow of Windsor serve us tea, what?’
Hackett glared at him.
Radcliffe’s smile was the kind that did not extend above the line of his thin moustache. His advancing age had not mellowed him, evidently. ‘You know why you are here – or I imagine you have guessed. You were all asked to go into the new Germany, and the heart of Berlin in particular. Now here you are with your reports. Would you care to accompany me to the archive? You’ll recall it from your previous visit. The staircase down is just along the hall from here …’
Hackett would have followed, but Burdon grabbed his arm. Burdon said, ‘Not this time, thanks. Gettin’ a bit sensitive to being confined, in my old age.’