Chapter 2
“Get out of my way, blue bottle.” Lord Garrett Embrey brushed the irritating old butler aside and marched along the strip of tan carpet flanked by varnished oak panels. Too many nautical oil paintings adorned the corridor walls. Grosvenor House was as self-righteously appointed as its committee members, and he’d long grown tired of this superciliousness.
“May I take your hat and coat, My Lord?” The pesky servant wearing a shiny blue waistcoat scurried after him.
Embrey stopped outside the new conference room door, inhaled the strong smell of lacquer and then shrugged his damp top coat off while the man held it for him. He handed his top hat behind him and waited until the blue bottle’s shoes squeaked away out of earshot. This moment to gather himself before the interrogation was the most crucial time of the evening, he knew. He plucked his father’s bronze pocketwatch inscribed with the Embrey coat-of-arms from his waistcoat-the timepiece was pretty much the only item belonging to the old man he still used-and raised an eyebrow.
Seven-twenty-five. He was deliciously late.
Oh, let them slither a while longer.
The 1801 Thomas Luny painting, Battle of the Nile, caught his eye. Thrilling and majestic, it echoed the nautical reminiscences his father had shared with him by the fireside after many a dinner. As far back as he could recall, Garrett had loved imagining them perched together in the crow’s nest of a grand ship of the line, sharing a spyglass in the run-up to a fierce engagement. How often he’d pictured his older self as the spitting image of Marquess Embrey, a much-admired figure in London society. Alas, how little he resembled his father these days! In his teens, everyone had remarked on the likeness. Now at twenty-five, Garrett was a little over six feet tall, broad- shouldered, strikingly blond, and he had his mother’s sharply defined, heart-shaped face that many had called handsome. But it was in his father’s name that he must contend with the Special Committee on War Crimes this evening.
Eighteen months after they had wrongfully convicted and executed Marquess Embrey for treachery against the Crown, the vipers still wanted more blood. Now they were after him, the last surviving member of one of the oldest aristocratic families in England. He tempered his urge to punch a hole through the glass by loosening his shoulders as he would on the playing fields of Oxford. He straightened his white bow tie and winged collar. During this meeting, his rage would have to remain subcutaneous, for his enemies were circling, and he must not be baited.
Very well-have at it, vipers.
He flung the door open and a score of gazes tried to strip him bare. Two long mahogany tables formed a V in the middle of a vast maroon carpet. The low ceiling, the centric lighting and the broad dimensions of the room had been designed to intimidate, to set visitors immediately ill-at-ease.
The game was afoot.
As he had during his Oxford days, Embrey fed off the challenge. He’d sparred with Sir Horace Holly himself on the debating floor, and the old adventurer had personally lauded his composure. It would take more than legal double-talk to ruffle him. He breezed to his chair held out for him by a gaunt, monocled clerk, bowed to the vipers slithering to their places, and sat.
“Lord Embrey, might we enquire as to the reason for your tardiness? I recall this is not the first time.” The hawkish, crookbacked chairman, the Rt. Hon. Lorne Wallingford, a member of the Whig cabinet, didn’t look up from the documents arrayed in front of him.
“You may enquire, yes.”
“I see. And may we now also proceed, if Your Lordship deigns to stand accused?”
Hateful old Quasimodo. “Pray proceed, sir, if you have the gall to accuse face-to-face.”
“Very well. Let us begin,” Crookback said, to much rustling of paper around the tables. “On March seventh last year, your father, the Marquess of Embrey, and your uncle, Lord Fitzwalter, were executed after being found guilty of treason against the Crown. Their crimes were perpetrated in the Benguela region of Angola, West Africa, and those actions led to a vicious assault by our enemies on the construction of our second Leviacrum tower-an assault which, I must remind you, cost the lives of hundreds of British servicemen and women. Lord Embrey, you have been summoned by this committee to answer the charge of aiding that assault by means of direct correspondence with your father and uncle, assisting in the redeployment of British regiments from Benguela, and by contacting elements of the rebel Coalition forces personally. ”
Embrey shot out of his seat at that last remark. “ What? Since when? What is this? I demand an explanation.” Hushed chatter throughout the assembly suggested this was a pre-emptive gambit, something Wallingford and his cronies had cooked up in private. In other words, a hatchet job. Remembering his promise to keep his composure was the only thing stopping him from chinning the old bastard, crookbacked or not.
“I have before me signed documents proving your collusion, sir. No further explanation is needed. Professors Talbot and Vaughn-Britton, two noted forensic document examiners, are willing to testify under oath that it is indeed your signature. They are waiting in the next room. I will summon them in due course, but first I would like to read the documents aloud to this committee so that it might better gauge the gravity of your complicity in these events.”
Embrey thrust an adamant finger at the chairman. “You dare spit one more word of fiction. I’m warning you.”
Forged letters? Handwriting experts? Throwing an insane charge of treason at him? It was so eerily reminiscent of Father’s and Uncle Ralph’s travesty of a trial at the Old Bailey that he shuddered. His knuckles and fingertips gripping the table’s edge turned white. He lifted them and watched his moist fingerprints fade to darkness. Would his family name, his great and noble lineage, be next? He stepped to one side. An atavistic call to flight rang through him from head to toe-it urged him to take the quickest possible exit.
“Lord Embrey, the sooner you take your seat and cooperate, the sooner you will have your opportunity to rebut these charges. Bear in mind, sir, that this is only a preliminary hearing and no official criminal indictments have entered the judiciary. Our job is merely to ascertain the veracity of these documents…and your own evidence, of course.” Crookback leaned across to confer with his colleague, a much taller, fat man with a double chin.
How did these sons of bitches get away with stunts like this? Embrey stepped farther from his chair.
“Lord Embrey,” Double Chin said, “I must remind you that until these hearings are satisfactorily resolved, you must not leave London.”
“Who put you up to this? The Leviacrum Council?”
“I beg your pardon!”
“You’ll rot in hell for this. Mark my words, you unconscionable bastards.” Embrey thumped the table with a livid fist. So much for composure.
Crookback whispered something to the monocled clerk, who rushed for the door Embrey had entered through. This couldn’t end well. Two police constables guarded the front of Grosvenor House, and Wallingford was clearly after apprehending him here and now. Those forged letters were as good as arrest warrants.
The urge to flee stiffened his considerable frame. But through one door waited the police, and through the other…learned forensic stooges ready to tighten the noose and sell their souls to the hot place.
“Might I at least see these letters first?” He stalked behind the line of swivelling snakes and toward the brain of this political Hydra-old Crookback himself. “For all I know, you mistook my signature for my father’s.” Those words choked him but he carried on.
Wallingford kept a defiant expression, adjusted his pince-nez as Embrey approached. “Nonsense. They have been thoroughly-”
Embrey barged him sideways off his chair. The old crookback squealed and hit the carpet with a thud. Protestations erupted all around the “V” but Embrey kept his composure when it mattered, just as he’d promised. He stuffed the folder containing the forged letters inside his waistcoat, and bolted for the clerk’s chair which stood beneath one of the arched windows.
