He replies to say he'd be delighted.

He finds Michael and Theodore and Aaron (and Fredrick, separately) and walks them through the logic, through the evidence-such-as-it-is, through the problems - "Elio's not doing it, I would have noticed, but I still don't like anything about this -"

       "You don't have to go," Fredrick says.

"I'm not hard to find, and not hard to draw out of hiding even if I saw fit to hide. I can't hide my whole family. Elio isn't behind this. He could be compromised, he could be in trouble, he could be impersonated, but he didn't do this, I'd have noticed."

      "You're betting your life on that."

"Staying in Britain and ignoring the nations collapsing around us wouldn't have been safer."

He tells Minor and Miranda.

"You could offer to meet him literally anywhere other than Portugal."

"Sure. Whoever's behind this can move, you know."

"But you don't have to give them infinite setup time and their choice of nonportable minions -"

"I don't want to invite them here. I suppose I can be unavoidably detained in France a while longer."

"It's still dicey as hell but slightly less."

"I can also not show up and stay home but I do think that if I do that, whoever's behind this comes here."

Shiver.

He tells Elio he's unavoidably detained in France. He buys Felix Felicis off Karen's father. 

He gets a discount!

Elio can meet him in France.

Oh good. He's staying with a friend of a friend. 

He takes the Felix. It does not give him an impulsive urge to flee to Britain at once, which probably means that fleeing to Britain is not the luckiest thing he could do.

So he shows up to the meeting.

Elio is there, and so is an assistant of some kind Timothy hasn't seen before, taking notes. Elio mutters sympathetically about the mess that is France and his similar-to-Timothy Portugal concerns and would Timothy mind cracking the window a bit, stuffy in here -

Elio continues to not be behind this. He pulls out his wand and opens the window -

An Imperius Curse hits him wordlessly in the back.

- he flicks it off before having the chance to consider whether it's really in his interests to do that. 

Silent check for other people in the room -

Nope, just Elio and the assistant. There is a soft "hsst" and a retry from the latter.

Yeah he'd already pieced that together.

He turns to face her. He probably can't win a duel with both of them even on luck drugs. "You don't need that," he says. "I want Britain and it really doesn't look like you do."

"Mm?" says Elio.

The assistant has already put her wand away before he's finished turning around and is back to looking mousy.

One can accomplish miracles if they're Imperiused into working every waking minute on a problem, from the best angle, no biases or distractions or desires creeping in. It's clever. If she'd left France and Sweden alone he is not even sure he'd condemn her for it. 

(She can't have many people like that. He hasn't managed the curse at all but it's not supposed to be possible to manage more than a few. Mostly genuine recruits of Elio's, then.)

"My concern is for the stability of Britain," he says to Elio. "We are not inclined towards intervention, not unless troubles cross the channel. But it's lucky the disaster in Sweden did not take any of our citizens, because we haven't signed off on nonintervention and are, if I'm honest, itching for an excuse to go poke France while they're in pieces -"

(He puts hints together from Sweden, from the reading-between-the-lines or reading-between-the-graves there. She didn't want the Statute repealed, she wanted coordinated international opposition to the use of magic dismantled.)

"I have no Britain-specific interests," says Elio pleasantly.

(Even now, when there's no secret - it's not paranoia, this whole operation is strikingly low on paranoia for the scope of its ambition - he thinks she just dislikes her own voice, dislikes having to put thoughts into words, prefers the ease of pushing the shape of them into someone else's mind and having the words come out warm and charming and well-chosen -)

(- the Portuguese royal family went to Brazil and mostly died there -)

(- her interests aren't even this side of the ocean -)

"I'm glad to hear it. I'll head back and soothe ruffled feathers and keep us out of foreign entanglements." 

"I'm so glad to discover we are not at cross purposes," smiles Elio guilelessly.

(She is planning to kill Timothy as soon as he leaves, though.)

He knows better than to get cues from Elio. He looks at her flatly.  "Just gets you several dozen of my people chasing down the leads I left them and furiously angry with you." Sigh. "Did you need me for something in Brazil or was I just getting too inquisitive?"

"The sort of person who says things like 'several dozen of my people' is always nice to have," Elio says.

"I can get 'Brazil' just from some attention to detail but I'm not going to be able to divine what you'd like me to be doing."