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Gideon?”
    â€œPerfect,” said Gideon, excusing himself and following Mrs. Cadwallader out of the dining room, as Bent began to hammer the keys.
    Gideon found Mrs. Cadwallader in the study, amid all the trophies from the adventures of Dr. John Reed and Captain Trigger, who wrote up his international exploits in deathless prose for the penny bloods. The claw from the Exeter Werewolf, Lord Dexter’s Top Hat, Markus Mesmer’s Hypnowheel, the electric eyes of the Viennese Wardog … they were all there in glass cabinets, labeled and resting on velvet cushions. The housekeeper was standing before a portrait of Captain Trigger and Dr. Reed above the mantelpiece, her back to Gideon. He softly closed the door and walked over to her.
    â€œYou miss them, don’t you?”
    â€œOh, terribly, Mr. Smith,” she said tremulously, without turning around. “Do you know, before I came to work for them I would never have believed two men could be so in love. But their attachment was stronger than that of any married couple I have ever met.”
    â€œThe memorial to them will open in Hyde Park on the first anniversary of their deaths, I believe.”
    Mrs. Cadwallader turned at last, tears in her eyes. “It’s been a month now, Mr. Smith, but I still cry every day. Can it really be true, that Dr. Reed had gone bad?”
    Gideon sighed. “I don’t know, Mrs. Cadwallader. I never knew him before. But he had been trapped in that pyramid for a year. The loneliness he must have felt … only those horrible frog-faced mummies for company … who knows what that does to a man’s mind?”
    â€œBut to come home with such … such vengeance in his heart! He was going to turn that brass dragon on Buckingham Palace! Kill Queen Victoria! If he had succeeded…”
    â€œHe didn’t,” said Gideon. “Lucian stopped him. I watched them fall from the dragon, Mrs. Cadwallader. They held each other all the way down. I truly believe that John had come back to Lucian at that moment.”
    She nodded, wiping away her tears with the corner of her apron. “It was how Captain Trigger would have wanted to go. He had become such a shadow of himself in that year that Dr. Reed was missing, Mr. Smith. If you hadn’t come here, if you hadn’t stopped Dr. Reed … I don’t know what that would have done to Captain Trigger, if he had just watched from afar as Dr. Reed exacted such a mad revenge. It would have broken him. At least he died a whole man.”
    â€œHe died a hero, Mrs. Cadwallader.”
    She smiled and cocked her head to one side. “And look at you, Mr. Smith. You were just a boy when you came knocking on this door. Now you’re a man. The Hero of the Empire, no less.”
    It was Gideon’s turn to smile. “It was only a month ago.”
    But much had changed in a month. From fisherman to … well, as Mrs. Cadwallader said. He had been appointed as the Hero of the Empire by Queen Victoria herself, to fill the gap left in the public consciousness by the death of Captain Trigger. He had been sent to Sandhurst for intensive training in firearms and hand-to-hand combat for an exhausting two-week period before being dispatched to rescue Professor Rubicon and Charles Darwin from that lost island in the Pacific. But already he was hungry for more. Hungry to pursue the turncoat Louis Cockayne and the purloined brass dragon Apep to America, hungry to rescue Maria from whatever fate to which Cockayne had delivered the beautiful automaton with a human brain.
    As if reading his mind, Mrs. Cadwallader laid a hand on his forearm. “You will find Miss Maria, Mr. Smith. I am sure of it. Never was a thing more meant to be.”
    Gideon protested weakly, but his thoughts had been consumed by nothing else since the aerial battle over Hyde Park. The intervening month, as filled with activity as it had been, had done nothing to