In which Rothewell meets the Grim Reaper

October was a vile month, Baron Rothewell thought as he peered through the spatter trickling down his carriage window. John Keats had been either a poetic liar or a romantic fool. In dreary Marylebone, autumn was no season of soft mist and mellow fruitfulness. It was the season of gloom and decay. Skeletal branches clattered in the squares, and leaves which should have been skirling colorfully about instead plastered the streets and hitched up against the wrought-iron fences in sodden brown heaps. London -- what little of it had ever lived -- was in the midst of dying.

As his carriage wheels swished relentlessly through the water and worse, Rothewell drew on the stub of a cheroot and stared almost unseeingly at the pavement beyond. At this time of day, it was empty save for the occasional clerk or servant hastening past with a black umbrella clutched grimly in hand. The baron saw no one whom he knew. But then, he knew almost no one.

At the corner of Cavendish Square and Harley Street, he hammered upon the roof of his traveling coach with the brass knob of his walking stick, and ordered his driver to halt. The brace of footmen posted to the rear of the carriage hastened round to drop the steps. Rothewell was notoriously impatient.

He descended, the folds of his dark cloak furling elegantly about him as he spun round to look up at his coachman. "Return to Berkeley Square." In the drizzle, his command sounded rather like the low rumble of thunder. "I shall walk home when my business here is done."

No one bothered to counsel him against walking in the damp. Nor did they dare ask what brought him all the way from the Docklands to the less familiar lanes of Ma