“Lofthouse,” Mr Grigsby said without looking up from his desk.
Wren didn’t slow his stride, much less stop to hear him.
Mr Grigsby continued on regardless. “I believe the penny post has arrived. If it wouldn’t trouble you overmuch, would you be so kind as to go down and—oh, thank you,” he said, glancing up at last to find Wren halfway through the open door, latch in hand.
A tight smile twitched at the corners of Wren’s mouth—the old man deserved better, but it was the best Wren could manage on a Monday—as he slipped out of the office and pulled the door shut behind him.
Yet even as Wren stepped into the hall, he heard the thud of boot-heels on floorboards, and as he peered over the railing down the steep and narrow staircase into the foyer below, he beheld a curious figure.
The figure stood tall enough that it had to duck under the doorframe to enter the foyer. Any other hint as to its shape remained hidden under an immense black cloak. The hood cast the face into deep shadow—assuming there existed a face at all beneath it. Wren began to doubt it as he watched the figure ascend the stair, looking as if it glided up the steps as smoothly as one might glide down the banister, and yet accompanied by the sound of heavy foot-falls beneath the cloak’s sepulchral folds. The cloak’s hem trailed behind the figure, flowing upwards like a waterfall in reverse, its dusty and tattered edges resembling black-and-grey feathers.
Wren, whose ceaseless prayers for escape from the tedium had never been answered before, stared in frank disbelief and quite forgot he was expected to do anything else until the figure had reached the upper landing and loomed over him like a gnarled oak.
Before Wren could address the astonishing shadow directly, a pair of hands gloved in black leather emerged from beneath the cloak and threw back its pointed hood to reveal an equally-pointed black hat with a long grey-and-black-striped feather adorning its black band.
The face beneath this hat proved no less bizarre. Wren beheld a black Venetian mask, its leather tooled in a feathered pattern, with a long, pointed nose like a beak. A ragged black scarf, so full of holes that it seemed halfway between fishing net and lace, swathed the stranger from throat to nose. Beneath the mask, two dark eyes smouldered like coals. The scent of wood-smoke—not just of a wood stove or a hearth, but that of a raging bonfire—hung in the hall.
The stranger could not be the queerest sight in all of London, but by Wren’s estimation he was the queerest sight in Staple Inn. Certainly the queerest figure to ever grace the chambers of Mr Ephraim Grigsby, Esq., and clerk.
Still, on the off chance that the stranger was not in fact a wormwood-tonic induced hallucination, Wren felt he probably ought to say something.
“Your name, sir?” Wren asked, covering his confusion with his blandest professional tone.
The smouldering eyes beneath the mask flew wide.
Impatience drove out the last of Wren’s wonder. “Your face, at least. You’re quite in out of the fog, and you needn’t fear its chill any longer.”
The stranger’s hunched shoulders relaxed, and the gloved hands came up again, this time to untie the mask, pull down the scarf, and sweep the hat from the head in a brisk bow.
Wren kept his own hair unfashionably long, with the tips of the longest strands brushing his collar, but he felt positively well-trimmed when compared against the unknown gentleman. Night-black locks shot through with starlight-silver spilled over the stranger’s shoulders as he bent forward despite the leather cord tying them at the nape of his neck, just visible where the hood had fallen back.
As the stranger rose from his bow, Wren beheld his face at last. The stranger appeared not many years older than Wren himself. His dark eyes and high cheekbones would strike even the most discerning taste as handsome. His nose proved almost as long and pointed as the mask’s beak, paired with the swarthy complexion and full lips worthy of an ancient Roman emperor or a modern gondolier. His sweeping black brows lent a stormy intrigue to his countenance. A raw red line with white pinched edges carved down his left cheek—a wound which had just begun to scar—proved his only flaw.
Wren realized not only was he staring at the stranger, but his own mouth had fallen open in the meantime. His teeth clicked together as he shut his jaw.
“Good morning, sir!”
Wren turned to find Mr Grigsby had wandered to the door and now looked over the stranger with an expression equal parts astonished and intrigued.
“Do forgive Lofthouse,” Mr Grigsby continued. “I’m afraid I work him rather too hard, and he hasn’t much patience left for conversation. But to the purpose—what may we do to assist you?”
The stranger looked almost as astonished to see Mr Grigsby. His black eyes swept from his bald pate to his knock-knees, then flicked over to Wren once more. With hesitation, the stranger asked, “Is this your master?”
“After a fashion,” Wren admitted. It took him a half-second too long to do so, for to hear the stranger speak quite unsettled him. The stranger’s voice rumbled forth from deep within his chest, low and looming, reverberating in Wren’s ears.
The stranger returned his attention to Mr Grigsby. “Then forgive me, my lord, for it seems my purpose lies not with you, but with your squire.”
Mr Grigsby appeared not in the least perturbed by this, which Wren put down to his being inured to sour dispositions and rude speech after suffering Wren’s indifferent service for too many years. On the contrary—he laughed. “Squire! My, how fanciful! Very well, then, he is at your service. Only pray don’t keep him over-long. Indispensable, he is, my good sir—indispensable!”
And, with the least-subtle wink Wren had ever seen, Mr Grigsby whisked himself away back into the office and shut the door behind him, leaving Wren alone in the hall with the stranger once more.
If nothing else, Wren supposed he could take Mr Grigsby’s direct address of the stranger as proof that the stranger was not, in fact, a hallucination. Still, the possibility of a hoax remained. And while Wren might fail as a clerk in many respects, he’d be damned before he’d allow Mr Grigsby to become as much a laughing-stock as Mrs Tottenham.
The stranger furrowed his formidable brow at the closed office door, then looked down at Wren. “If you are not your master’s squire, then you must be his page. Unless—is your master not a Knight Templar?”
“He most certainly is not,” Wren replied, bristling. “He is a lawyer, sir.”
“Then what are you?”
