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wrapping, he wound twine about the paper. “Nip this for me with the shears.” She did as he asked. “Now put your finger here.” He executed a perfect knot. “You’ll be posting our parcel to Paris. Poste restante. Do you know what that means?”
    “It means the parcel is held for the addressee.”
    Mick nodded, took a stick of scarlet sealing-wax from one trouser-pocket, his repeating match from the other. The match struck on the first try. “Yes, held there in Paris for us, safe as houses.” The wax darkened and slid in the oily flame. Scarlet droplets spattered the green knot, the brown paper. He tossed the shears and the roll of twine back into the portmanteau, pocketed the wax and the match, withdrew his reservoir-pen, and began to address the parcel.
    “But what is it, Mick? How can you know its value if you’ve no idea what it does?”
    “Now I didn’t say that, did I? I’ve my ideas, don’t I? Dandy Mick always has his ideas. I’d enough of an idea to take the original up to Manchester with me, on the General’s business. I’d enough of an idea to pump the canniest clackers for their latest compression techniques, and enough of the General’s capital to commission the result on Napoleon-gauge cellulose!”
    It might have been Greek, for all it meant to her.

    A knock came. An evil-looking servant boy, cropheaded and snuffling, wheeled in a trolley and cleared the plates. He made a botch of it, lingering as if expecting a gratuity, but Mick ignored him, and stared coolly into space, now and then grinning to himself like a cat.
    The boy left with a sneer. At length there came the rap of a cane against the door. A second of Mick’s friends had arrived.
    This was a heavyset man of quite astonishing ugliness, pop-eyed and blue-jowled, his squat sloping forehead fringed in an oiled parody of the elegant spit-curls the Prime Minister favored. The stranger wore new and well-cut evening dress, with cloak, cane, and top-hat, a fancy pearl in his cravat and a gold Masonic ring on one finger. His face and neck were deeply sunburnt.
    Mick rose at once from his chair, shook the ringed hand, offered a seat.
    “You keep late hours, Mr. Radley,” the stranger said.
    “We do what we can to accommodate your special needs, Professor Rudwick.”
    The ugly gentleman settled in his chair with a sharp wooden squeak. His bulging eyes shot Sybil a speculative look then, and for one heart-leaping moment she feared the worst, that it had all been a gull and she was about to become part of some dreadful transaction between them.
    But Rudwick looked away, to Mick. “I won’t conceal from you, sir, my eagerness to resume my activities in Texas.” He pursed his lips. He had small, grayish, pebble-like teeth in a great slash of a mouth. “This business of playing the London social lion is a deuced bore.”
    “President Houston will grant you an audience tomorrow at two, if that’s agreeable.”
    Rudwick grunted. “Perfectly.”
    Mick nodded. “The fame of your Texian discovery seems to grow by the day, sir. I understand that Lord Babbage himself has taken an interest.”
    “We have worked together at the Institute at Cambridge,” Rudwick admitted, unable to hide a smirk of satisfaction. “The theory of pneumo-dynamics . . .”
    “As it happens,” Mick remarked, “I find myself in possession of a clacking sequence that may amuse His Lordship.”
    Rudwick seemed nettled by this news. “Amuse him, sir? Lord Babbage is a most . . . irascible man.”
    “Lady Ada was kind enough to favor me in my initial efforts . . . ”
    “Favor you?” said Rudwick, with a sudden ugly laugh. “Is it some gambling-system, then? It had best be, if you hope to catch her eye.”
    “Not at all,” Mick said shortly.
    “Her Ladyship chooses odd friends,” Rudwick opined, with a long sullen look at Mick. “Do you know a man named Collins, a so-called oddsmaker?”
    “Haven’t had the pleasure,” Mick said.
    “The fellow’s on