Summary
In a metropolis that seems to breathe through brass doorknockers and gas-lamp sighs, a penniless gadabout with a monocle for a conscience stumbles into the employ of a ducal household as a footman—only to discover that the stables conceal a hansom cab more talkative than its horse. While the widowed Duchess of Wexleigh stages operettas in her drawing-room to silence the ghosts of three dead husbands, her debutante niece—equal parts orchid and stick of dynamite—plots escape from corsets and contracts. Enter our anti-hero, a former street caricaturist who has sketched every sin in the borough: he is promoted from polishing silver to steering the Duchess’s prized hansom through moonlit errands that include collecting blackmail letters, returning drunk poets to their wives, and ferrying a mysterious child swaddled in headlines about a vanished banker. Each night the cab’s wheels retraces the same cobblestones, yet the city mutates—lanterns flicker Morse code, statues rotate on plinths, and the butler’s reflection begins to lag three seconds behind his gestures. When the niece vanishes mid-waltz, the footman-turned-coachman must decode the city’s palimpsest: every fare he drives has ridden before, wearing a different face. The hansom itself, lacquered with nautical charts instead of varnish, becomes both chariot and confessional, until a final dash across the fogged Thames reveals that the ultimate passenger is his own unremembered past, ticketed for an alibi he never gave.
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