Debrett's

anymore; the whole thing was so corrupt that one could practically rent a

peerage for a fortnight these days. A bloody fishmonger could print up cards

and

call himself Lord Wanking Bumkisser or whatever; even the House of Lords was

full of the worst sort of people nowadays. The only way that one could judge

anymore was by the way a fellow carried himself, by his manner and his sense

of

style, and if it turned out later that he was descended from a long line of

tradesmen, then one could always harrumph and raise one's eyebrows and say,

"How

shocking!" and hope that one's own pedigree was not too closely scrutinized.

Carfax, by all reports, was quite the real thing, and if he wasn't, well,

then

he should have been, which amounted to the same thing, more or less. He was

fabulously wealthy and old-school to the core, despite having grown up in

India

or Thailand or wherever, some damned wog country, but for all that, he knew a

thing or two the locals didn't. Yes, indeed, I'll bet he does, thought

Andrew,

living like some bloody maharaja in Kafiristan or wherever the hell it was he

came from. Handsome, young, elegant, and charming, Carfax was the epitome of

what the empire had stood for in the old days, and he was said to give

fantastic

parties.

Andrew had all this on the best authority. He'd heard it from one of his new

clients, a young chap named Joseph Lymon who'd come into a kingly inheritance

from an uncle in Los Angeles or something; it didn't really matter because he

was a splendid fellow who was well on his way to turning his apparently

considerable inheritance into a staggering fortune. He completely disregarded

all of Andrew's best advice and insisted on picking his own stocks, which

subsequently performed amazingly. In short order, knowing a good thing when

he

saw one, Andrew had hitched his star to Lymon's, buying when he bought and

selling when he sold, and invariably Andrew prospered. Andrew had cultivated

a

friendship with Lymon, sponsoring him into his club and introducing him to

all

the right people, and one night Lymon had confessed that he actually received

his stock-market tips from a friend of his named Lord Carfax.

This news had electrified Andrew, as he had been hearing fascinating things

about the young Lord Nigel Carfax ever since he had arrived in London from

Sumatra, or wherever it was he came from. No one really seemed to know,

though

everyone agreed that it was some far-off, exotic place in the Far East. Or

was

it the Middle East? No matter, the point was that everyone had heard of him,

yet

it seemed that few people had actually met him, though some people claimed

having been to his parties at his elegant Georgian town house in Charles

Street,

or at his .newly reconstructed medieval castle on the outskirts of London.

And

stories of these exclusive parties grew more and more fantastic with each

telling. Reportedly they were not parries quite so much as orgies, but orgies

of

a highly refined nature, admitting only the best sort of people and providing