Cole Mercer arrived at Lord Fairfax's townhouse three days after receiving the summons, slipping through the servants' entrance at a quarter past midnight like a shadow that had learned to use doors.
He was not what most people expected when they heard the words "retired scout." The popular imagination conjured images of lean, hawk-eyed men in weathered leather, moving with the fluid grace of forest predators. Cole Mercer was none of those things. He was stocky, average in height, with a face so unremarkable that witnesses routinely disagreed about basic details like the color of his eyes or the shape of his nose. His hair, a nondescript brown going grey at the temples, could have belonged to any of ten thousand men in the capital. His clothes were deliberately ordinary ...neither too fine nor too shabby, the kind of garments that a moderately successful merchant or mid-ranking clerk might wear on a day when nothing important was happening.
