“I wonder,” said Lord Darcy, “is there somebody already in that booth? Or is she waiting for the person who sent her the note?”

“Let’s just stroll back and see,” said Lord Ashley.

“Good, but don’t get too close. I don’t want either of them to see our faces.”

“We could watch the dart game,” said Lord Ashley, “that might be interesting.”

“Yes, let’s,” said Lord Darcy. They walked slowly back to the far end of the bar.

There was someone in the booth, seated directly across from Tia Einzig. It was obviously a man, but the hood of the cloak completely concealed his face, and he kept his head bent low over the table.

Lord Darcy said: “Let’s move over to that table. I want to see if I can hear their conversation. But move carefully. Keep your face concealed without being obvious about it.”

The nearest table was further toward the front of the room than the booth that the two men were watching. They could no longer see the hooded man at all. His back was to them now and he kept his voice low, so that, while it was audible, it was not intelligible. Tia, however, was facing them, and, as Mary de Cumberland had told Lord Darcy the previous evening, the girl’s voice had abnormal carrying power, even when she did not speak loudly.

For several seconds all they could hear was the low mutter of the man’s voice, then Tia said, “If you didn’t want him dead, why did you kill him?” Her expression was hard and cold, with an undertone of anger.

More muttering, then Tia again: “You discovered that Zed, the much-feared head of Imperial Naval Intelligence in Europe, was actually Master Sir James Zwinge, and you mean to sit there and tell me that King Casimir’s Secret Service didn’t want him dead.”

A couple of angry words from the hooded man.

“I’ll talk any way I please,” said Tia. “You keep a civil tongue in your head.”

She said nothing more for nearly a minute, as she listened to the hooded man with that unchanging stony expression of cold anger on her beautiful face. Then an icy smile came across her lips.

“No, I will not,” she said. “I won’t ask him. Not for you, not for Poland, not for King Casimir’s whole damned army!”

A short phrase from the hooded man. Tia’s cold smile widened just a trifle. “No, damn you, not for him either. And do you know why? Because I know now that you lied to me! Because I know now that he’s safe from the torture chambers of the Polish Secret Service!”

The hooded man said something more. “Signing his death warrant?” She laughed sharply, without humor. “Oh no. You’ve harassed me long enough. You’ve tried to force me to betray a country that has been good to me, and a man who loves me. I’ve lived in constant fear and terror because of you, but no longer. Oh, I’m going to sign a death warrant all right — yours! I’m going to blow this whole plot sky high. I’m going to tell the Imperial authorities everything I know, and I hope they hang you, you vicious, miserable little…”

She stopped suddenly and blinked. “What?” She blinked again.

Lord Darcy, watching Tia’s face covertly from beneath his hood, saw her expression change. Where before it had been stony, now it became wooden. The cold expression became no expression at all.

The Commander suddenly reached over and grabbed Darcy’s wrist.

“Watch it!” he whispered harshly. “They’re going to leave by the back door!”

Lord Darcy smiled inwardly. Lord Bontriomphe had mentioned that Ashley had occasional flashes of precognition, and here was an example of it. Such flashes came to an untrained Talent in moments of personal stress.

As Ashley had predicted, Tia rose to her feet, as did the hooded man, his back still toward the watchers. The hooded man did not turn. Tia did, and the two of them walked directly out the back door, only a few feet away.

Darcy and the Commander were on their feet, heading toward the back door. Then Lord Darcy stopped, his hand on the doorknob.

“What are you waiting for?” Ashley asked.

“I want them to get far enough ahead so that they won’t notice the light when I open this door.”

“But we’ll lose them in this fog!”

“Not with those high heels of hers. You can hear them ten yards away.”

He eased the door open a trifle. “Hear that? They’re moving away toward our right. What street is this?”

“This would be Old Barnegat Road,” said Lord Ashley.

“All right, let’s go.” Lord Darcy swung open the door and the two men stepped out into the billowing fog. The steady clicking of Tia’s heels was still clearly audible.

“Let’s close up the distance,” Lord Darcy said as they walked steadily through the shrouded darkness. “If we walk quietly, they won’t notice our footsteps over the sound of hers.”

The two men said nothing for several minutes as they followed the beacon of sound that came from Tia’s heels. Then, in a low voice, Lord Ashley said, “You know, I didn’t understand much of that conversation back at the pub but I guess I should be thankful I could understand any of it at all.”

“Why?” asked Lord Darcy.

“I had rather assumed it would be in Polish. We know the Einzig girl speaks Polish and the note indicates that the man does, too.”

“Quite the contrary,” said Lord Darcy. “The note indicates that the man has a slight acquaintance with the Polish tongue, but hardly enough to carry on a lengthy conversation in it. The Poles differentiate between a ‘hound’ and a ‘dog’ just as we do. Yet in translating ‘Hound and Hare’ into Polish, he used the Polish word for ‘dog,’ which no one who was conversant with the language would have done. And that tells us a great deal more about the man we are following.”

“In what way, my lord?”

“That he is vain, pretentious, and has an overdeveloped sense of the melodramatic. He could quite as easily have written the note in Anglo-French, yet he did not. Why?”

“Perhaps because he felt that it would not be understood by anyone else who happened to see it.”

“Precisely; and you have fallen into the same error he did. Only a man who is unfamiliar with a language thinks of it as a kind of secret writing. Do you think of Anglo-French as a cryptic language with which to conceal your thoughts from others?”

“Hardly,” said Lord Ashley with a smile.

“But even so,” Lord Darcy said softly, “only a vain, pretentious man would attempt to show off his patently poor knowledge of a language to a person whose native tongue it is.”

At a corner ahead of them, the sound of Tia’s heels turned again to the right. “Where are we now?” Lord Darcy asked.

“If I haven’t lost my bearings, we just passed Great Harlow House; that means they turned on Thames Street, heading roughly south.”

Lord Darcy wished, not for the first time, that he knew more about the geography of London. “Have you any idea where they’re going?” he asked.

“Well, if we keep on this way,” said Lord Ashley, “we’ll pass St. Martin’s Church and end up smack in the middle of Westminster Palace.”

“Don’t tell me they’re going to see the King,” said Lord Darcy. “I really don’t believe I could swallow that.”

“Wait, they’re turning left.”

“Where would that be?”

“Somerset Bridge,” Lord Ashley said. “They’re crossing the river. We’d better drop back a little. There are lights on the bridge.”

“I think not,” said Lord Darcy. “We’ll take our chances.”

“How much longer are they going to keep walking?” Lord Ashley muttered. “Are they out on a pleasant evening stroll to Croydon or something?”

The lights on the bridge did not hamper them in any way. They were widely spaced, and the fog was so dense, especially here over the Thames, that someone standing directly under a gas lamp could not be seen from fifteen feet away. They kept walking at a steady pace.

Suddenly the clicking stopped, somewhere near the middle of the bridge. Automatically the two men also stopped. Then they heard a single sentence, muffled but clearly intelligible: “Now climb up on the balustrade.”