He stood just near the club’s steps, his back to me along the foggy English night, and it was not until I’d passed him and began my ascent of the many steps that I’d heard his voice. The voice I knew, in all my years of living upon the Earth, that I would never forget. Even then I had known this. It was the slippery way of his tongue, or perhaps it was the coolness of which his words passed across the air and slid its way into my ears as though they were only meant for me.

Indeed, there were quite a lot of stand-abouts lingering around the club’s entrance, loitering along the sidewalk, but it was this man that had noticed me, it was this man that had ceased his rather droll conversation (he’d later told me)with a fellow gentlemen of older years, and stepped around him to block my path toward my goal of fun.

Though I had not known it, then, what I had considered fun would soon take a rather disturbing turn.

“My Lady,” he said simply, staring down at me with a pride I had seen in many of those with title, “what in God’s name are you doing?”

I must have looked the fool merely blinking upon him, I realize now, and if the blood could rush to these cold cheeks they would. For in truth, I had never seen such an interesting man before; all of the men I had met in my years at Court were quite simply boring. But this man had a spark in his dark eyes, I’d figured he had to have seen death, I even thought him to be an officer of the law for one brief moment, but the flicker of coldness in his eyes at that precise instant had quickly destroyed that foolish thought.