Hunter stood by Door, looking back and forth down the platform. The Marquis had told them where to wait, and had slipped away. From somewhere, Richard heard a baby begin to cry. The Marquis slipped out of an exit-only door, and walked toward them. He was chewing on a piece of candy.
“Having fun?” asked Richard. A train was coming toward them, its approach heralded by a gust of warm wind.
“Just taking care of business,” said the Marquis. He consulted the piece of paper, and his watch. He pointed to a place on the platform. “This should be the Earl’s Court train. Stand behind me here, you three.” Then, as the Underground train—a rather boring-looking, normal train, Richard was disappointed to observe—rumbled and rattled its way into the station, the Marquis leaned across Richard, and said to Door, “My lady? There is something that perhaps I should have mentioned earlier.”
She turned her odd-colored eyes on him. “Yes?”
“Well,” he said, “the Earl might not be entirely pleased to see me.”
The train slowed down and stopped. The carriage that had pulled up in front of Richard was quite empty: its lights were turned off; it was bleak and empty and dark. From time to time Richard had noticed carriages like this one, locked and shadowy, on Tube trains, and had wondered what purpose they served. The other doors on the train hissed open, and passengers got on and got off. The doors of the darkened carriage remained closed. The Marquis drummed on the door with his fist, an intricate rhythmic rap. Nothing happened. Richard was just wondering if the train would now pull out without them on it, when the door of the dark carriage was pushed open from the inside. It opened about six inches, and an elderly, bespectacled face peered out at them.
“Who knocks?” he said.
Through the opening, Richard could see flames burning, and people, and smoke inside the car. Through the glass in the doors, however, he still saw a dark and empty carriage. “The Lady Door,” said the Marquis, smoothly, “and her companions.”
The door slid open all the way, and they were in Earl’s Court.
* * *
There was straw scattered on the floor, over a layer of rushes. There was an open log fire, sputtering and blazing in a large fireplace. There were a few chickens, strutting and pecking on the floor. There were seats with hand-embroidered cushions on them, and there were tapestries covering the windows and the doors.
Richard stumbled forward as the train lurched out of the station. He reached out, grabbed hold of the nearest person, and regained his balance. The nearest person happened to be a short, gray, elderly man-at-arms, who would have looked, Richard decided, exactly like a recently retired government employee, were it not for the tin hat, the surcoat, the rather clumsily knitted chain mail, and the spear; instead he looked like a recently retired government employee who had, somewhat against his will, been dragooned into his local amateur dramatic society, where he had been forced to play a man-at-arms.
The little gray man blinked shortsightedly at Richard, as Richard grabbed him, and then he said, lugubriously, “Sorry about that.”
“My fault,” said Richard.
“I know,” said the man.
An enormous Irish wolfhound padded down the aisle, and stopped beside a lute player, who sat on the floor picking at a gladsome melody in a desultory fashion. The wolfhound glared at Richard, snorted with disdain, then lay down and went to sleep. At the far end of the carriage an elderly falconer, with a hooded falcon on his wrist, was exchanging pleasantries with a small knot of damozels of a certain age. Some passengers obviously stared at the four travelers; others, just as obviously, ignored them. It was, Richard realized, as if someone had taken a small medieval court and put it, as best they could, in one carriage of an Underground train.
A herald raised his bugle to his lips and played a tuneless blast, as an immense, elderly man, in a huge fur-lined dressing gown and carpet slippers, staggered through the connecting door to the next compartment, his arm resting on the shoulder of a jester in shabby motley. The old man was larger than life in every way: he wore an eye patch over his left eye, which had the effect of making him look slightly helpless and unbalanced, like a one-eyed hawk. There were fragments of food in his red-gray beard, and what appeared to be pajama pants were visible at the bottom of his shabby fur gown.
That, thought Richard, correctly, must be the Earl.
The Earl’s jester, an elderly man with a pinched, humorless mouth and a painted face, looked like he had fled from a life as an all-round entertainer near the bottom of the bill in the Victorian music halls a hundred years before. He led the Earl to a throne-like carved wooden seat, in which, a trifle unsteadily, the Earl sat down. The wolfhound got up, padded down the length of the carriage, and settled itself at the Earl’s slippered feet.
Earl’s Court, thought Richard. Of course. And then he began to wonder whether there was a Baron in Barons Court tube station, or a Raven in Ravenscourt, or . . .
The little old man-at-arms coughed asthmatically, and said, “Right then, you lot. State your business.” Door stepped forward. She held her head up high, suddenly seeming taller and more at ease than Richard had previously seen her, and she said, “We seek an audience with His Grace the Earl.”
The Earl called down the carriage. “What did the little girl say, Halvard?” he asked. Richard wondered if he were deaf.
Halvard, the elderly man-at-arms, shuffled around, and cupped his hand to his mouth. “They seek an audience, Your Grace,” he shouted, over the rattle of the train.
The Earl pushed aside his thick
