Unnatural Issue by Mercedes Lackey

himself; he’d been a steady daytime presence for as long as Peter had been a member, and Peter suspected that his father had been in place when Peter’s father first joined the club. With a respectful nod, Cedric held open the door for him; Peter gave him a little two-fingered salute and a half smile.
    The paneled entryway gave out into the main Club Room, and it was here that the atmosphere of stodginess was most apparent. No hand had changed the interior in decades. The wallpaper remained the same—something Japonesque that Whistler, had he ever seen it, would surely have approved of. The furniture remained the same—prickly horsehair settees and spindly-limbed little chairs in the Visitor’s Dining Room (until recently, the only place in which females were permitted to set foot) and overstuffed leather monstrosities everywhere else. Though gas fires had replaced the coal-burning fireplaces in the Members’ rooms, the Club Room stubbornly retained its cheerful grate and firedogs, its carved mantle, and its coal and wood. Even the carpets were the same, brought back from Turkey by some globe-trotting member when Victoria was merely a princess. The menu in the Member’s Dining Room had not changed in decades either. And anyone looking into the Club Room and the Member’s Lounge could be pardoned if he got the impression that the old gentlemen in their dark suits drowsing behind their newspapers had been installed there as part and parcel of the furnishings.
    In fact, as Lord Peter Almsley was well aware, all this was a façade. Most of the members seldom set foot in the public areas of the Club except to dine. And those old gentlemen drowsing away were nothing more than camouflage for what really went on in the Exeter Club.
    The club was the home of Lord Alderscroft—the actual home, since he had long since given up his London residence, and his country estate was managed in absentia by the “tenants” who ran the school for very extraordinary little girls and boys that was quartered there. These days Alderscroft never went there except for the occasional hunt and hunt ball, and now and again, when the heat in London became unbearable.
    But this was his true home, the headquarters, as it were, of most of the most powerful Elemental Masters in Britain. And Lord Alderscroft was the Head of one of the oldest and most powerful White Lodges of Elemental Masters in all of the Empire.
    Of course, that’s partly because trying to organize Masters is like trying to herd sheep with a cat, Peter thought to himself, wryly. It’s probably only tradition that keeps our lot muddling along as well as we do.
    He had passed rapidly through the public rooms and into the Dining Room today; the Old Lion had summoned him for a consultation, and he badly wanted a bite to eat before he braved the old fellow in his den. He had hoped for a quiet table to himself, but as soon as his beaky nose cleared the door of the room, he found himself hailed by a group that had uncharacteristically gotten the servants to shove several small tables together to form one long one.
    “Peter, old man!” said Nigel Harcourt, making an imperious gesture in his direction. “Come join us, we were just mentioning you.” As ever, Nigel was impeccably clad in the work of a tailor so exclusive that even half the Royal Enclosure couldn’t get fittings with him. Then again, Nigel was so perfect a specimen of British Manhood that he made the ideal body upon which to drape such an exquisite suit. And besides that, Nigel was the one who had discovered the man.
    “Oh, I very much doubt that,” he replied, genially, putting a good face on it. “Really, old fellow, I’m just down from the family barn. I’ve been quite out of touch, and I don’t know what I could possibly add to any sort of earnest conversation.” But he joined them anyway. It was partly out of politeness and partly out of curiosity. Curiosity was an Almsley byword. The family arms, after all,