This had to be a joke.

Diagon's just round the back, the man behind the bar had said, and Albion Picquery had taken him at his word. The American now felt like quite the fool for doing so, stood as he was in front of a decidedly sturdy wall.

It had taken him more than a year to relent, to take his father up on the Englishman's offer to come to London. Part of Alby felt bad for 'abandoining' his sister for the summer months, but it had been Hettie's idea, her request to summer in Boston with a friend from school. She had not even known of his father's offer, but had managed to remove herself as his one true excuse.

So he had agreed.

Nerves, though, had prompted him to change his booked passage, to come a couple of days earlier than scheduled. On Saturday afternoon, he would report to the Goshawk residence, the bastard prodigal son finally come to see his father's world. In the interim, a buffer, time to adjust to the strange surroundings of a new country before faced with the strange situation of being in his father's home. Perhaps if he had waited to travel to Diagon Alley with his father, he would not currently be stood here like an idiot.

"Open... sesame?" he tried lamely the magic words from Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves in One Thousand and One Nights, a book his mother had read to him as a child. Alby did not expect this to work. While mundane objects in New York were often magical entryways in disguise, they typically required a more nuanced approach—and the American was not altogether certain that this was that in the first place.