Chapter 455: The Random Door

Madam Marie's revenge was swiftly realized.

In Whitehall, Sir Archie's greatest pride in life was that, over his many years in politics, he had never signed a single document he was unwilling to take responsibility for.

That morning, he put on his top hat and tucked his black umbrella under his arm.

The window frames in the second-floor conference room were drafty, but every maintenance request was pushed to the following year.

So he brought his umbrella to every meeting; wedging the tip into the gap in the window cut down the draft.

Checking his watch, he pushed open his office door.

A blast of hot air hit his face, leaving Sir Archie stunned on the threshold.

The marble beneath his feet was hot enough to bake the polish right off his shoes.

The four walls were covered in blue-and-white tiles, and seven or eight men sat on a long bench to his left.

These men wore absolutely nothing but bath towels.

"...Sir Archie?"

The man sitting nearest the back squinted through the steam.

Sir Archie recognized the face.

Just last month, this gentleman had submitted a petition regarding leather transport, which Sir Archie had shelved on the grounds that the time was not yet ripe.

"Good afternoon," Sir Archie heard himself say.

"To think you bathe here too."

The gentleman pulled his towel tighter around his shoulders, his tone enthusiastic.

"You should have said something. The sauna is emptiest on Tuesdays."

Embarrassed, Sir Archie turned around and twisted the doorknob.

The door opened to reveal a storage room for bath towels.

He closed the door and opened it again. It was still a storage room.

Wearing his top hat and clutching his black umbrella, Sir Archie repeatedly opened and closed the door inside a fifty-degree Celsius sauna.

The gentleman behind him spoke up. "You have to go through the front lobby to leave."

The front lobby of the high-end bathhouse was carpeted in red, and an elderly woman sat behind the front desk.

She looked up to find a gentleman in a full suit and leather shoes stepping out of the sauna. His pomade had completely melted, and his face was covered in sweat.

"Sir, please show your cloakroom tag."

"I don't have a cloakroom tag."

"A lost tag requires a fee of sixpence."

"Madam, I never checked any clothes in the first place."

"Sir, our establishment has been open for over a decade."

The woman flipped a page in her ledger and tapped her pen against a grid.

"People who don't check their clothes never come out from the inside."

Sir Archie dug out sixpence. He pushed open the glass doors and found a man standing at the bottom of the steps, a camera hanging around his neck.

This was a photographer for the Imperial Capital Pictorial, staking out the street for a feature titled "Wartime Public Health," though he hadn't managed to snap a single usable photo yet.

The magnesium flash flared. Sir Archie's top hat was still sitting squarely on his head.

The photographer later swore in the darkroom.

In the bottom right corner of the negative, squatting on the steps, was a golden-eyed black cat that had appeared out of nowhere, ruining the entire lower edge of the composition.

Fischer rushed into the study room clutching the evening paper.

"Williams!"

He slapped the newspaper down on the table, rattling Richard's bottle of ink.

"Look at this."

Richard glanced down.

On the second page was a large photograph of a formally dressed gentleman standing at the entrance of a bathhouse, an expression of utter astonishment on his face.

"What's so funny about this?"

"Read the caption underneath."

The caption consisted of a single line: "Sir Archie emerged from a high-end public bathhouse at eleven o'clock today."

Sir Archie stated to this paper that he originally intended to go to a second-floor conference room.

"Maybe he took a wrong turn?"

Fischer slapped the table.

"It's only thirty steps from his office to the second-floor conference room! Going to that bathhouse means crossing half the Imperial Capital!"

Catherine walked in from the corridor just then, her coat draped over her shoulders.

She glanced at the newspaper, opened her notebook, wrote a line, and held it up.

"This is the fourth one already."

Fischer's laughter caught in his throat. "The fourth what?"

Catherine flipped a page.

"This morning, a deputy minister headed to his office, but ended up walking into a relief shelter over in Whitechapel."

This incident with the deputy minister was the most widely circulated of them all.

He had pushed open his door to find a steaming cauldron right in front of him, with two lines of people stretching from the pot all the way out of the shelter.

Someone shoved a tin bowl into his hands.

"Sir, please go to the back of the line."

"I'm not here to—"

"To the back!"

He stood in line for nearly forty minutes.

Halfway through, he tried to explain who he was to the person in front of him, but the man didn't even turn his head.

"Last week we had a guy claiming to be the Archbishop of Canterbury. He drank two large bowls that day."

The deputy minister ended up drinking a bowl as well.

He told a reporter from the Morning Post that the soup contained barley, radishes, and a hint of salted meat, and that it tasted better than he had expected.

On Wednesday night, a gentleman from the Censorship Bureau opened his door and walked straight into the wings of a theater stage.

A pantomime was being performed on stage.

He took two steps forward before realizing he was on the stage, looking up to face a densely packed audience in the dark.

Up in the third-floor gallery, a theater critic took the lead and started clapping.

The censorship official stood frozen for a moment before reflexively taking off his top hat and bowing to the audience.

The entire theater erupted in applause.

The next day's theater review read like this:

"The gentleman in the morning coat during the middle of the second act, who remained completely silent and left immediately after bowing, was the sharpest stroke of the entire play."

"This paper hopes to continue seeing this character in future performances."

The official wrote a letter to the critic explaining that he was not an actor in the play.

The critic published this letter in the very same column, making the dramatic effect even stronger.

By Friday, there were countless incidents of this nature.

Montagu shared his uncle's take with Richard in the dining hall.

"Yesterday afternoon, they sent someone to open every single door on the second floor, one by one."

"And the result?"

The blond young man set down his fork.

"The result was that they opened them a hundred times, and a hundred times they just led to the corridor."

"What if someone else opened them?"

"They switched through several people, and it was still just the corridor."

Montagu tapped the tip of his knife against the edge of his plate.

"But if those specific gentlemen go and push them..."

Richard looked down and cut his beef.

Today's cut was softer than last time, which meant the cold storage inventory had reached the bottom of the barrel.

Montagu suddenly spoke again.

"My uncle says the most important subject to study in Whitehall these days is figuring out exactly what you've done over the past few years that you shouldn't have."

At the newsstand, Richard bought a complete set of the past few days' newspapers and flipped through them one by one.

Over a dozen gentlemen had ended up in places they shouldn't have been. Among them, three had taken early retirement, and two had resigned.

One man had his photo published three times. The third time, the caption in the paper consisted of a single sentence: "Why is it him again?"

Richard finished flipping through the last paper and stacked them back into a neat pile.

That deputy minister had signed off on welfare cuts last year; that gentleman from the Censorship Bureau had canceled several plays over the past two years...

Every single one of them had been sent to the exact place they needed to see for themselves.

Richard had actually seen this particular portal trick before.

Just a week ago, he had stepped out of the inner street of Flower Moon Street, the dead leaf Matthew had given him still cold in his palm.

Richard walked to the main intersection and was just about to raise his hand to hail a carriage.

"Don't be in such a rush to leave."

Matthew strolled out of what was supposed to be a dead-end alley, both hands stuffed in his pockets.

"Mr. Carrick."

"Call me Matthew."

Matthew looked up.

"I saw what happened to Donner's hands. The tailor shop at number two was half burned down. That old man has been sewing clothes for half his life."

"Do you know what the people who smashed those shops are doing right now?"

"Eating at home," Matthew answered his own question.

"Tomorrow morning they'll go to work as usual, and at noon they'll be bragging at the factory gates about how tough they were."

"In the future, when their grandsons ask, they'll say that back in the day, grandpa did something great for the country."

"Teacher prefers to keep her hands clean. She considers it too dirty to deal with hundreds of fools pushed out as pawns."

"So you..."

"So I suppose I'd want to vent some anger," Matthew said.

He said it very calmly, the expression on his face turning cold.

"Teacher called me, so I came. Honestly, I don't really feel anything about it; I just felt I ought to come over."

Matthew laughed, his sun-reddened face relaxing, but to Richard, it somehow felt a bit fake.

"Tell you what, let's do something fun together."

There was no tone of consultation in those words.

"...Fun?"

"Yeah." Matthew looked as if it were only natural.

"Those hundreds of people walked down this street back then, and every one of them felt they were walking a particularly righteous and honorable path."

A police whistle sounded from down the street: two long blasts, one short.

Matthew jutted his chin in that direction.

"Since the police won't handle it, the two of us might as well step in."

"What do you want me to do?"

"I don't know either."

Richard looked up.

"Really, I don't know." Matthew spoke with utter frankness.

"Teacher didn't give me any instructions, and I haven't figured it out either."

"How about this? I'll drop you right in front of those people, and you can do whatever you want."

"It's fine if you don't do anything, either. When the time comes, just let me know, and I'll send you straight to the entrance of your school dormitory."

He stuck out his index finger and wagged it in front of Richard.

"Though, I'm guessing you probably won't."