by F. G. Cottam
He reached across their table for her hand and squeezed it. ‘Let’s just not overthink it, Juliet, and see where this takes us. The world could end tomorrow.’
As if on cue, her phone rang then, and she recognized the Home Secretary’s number. Godspeed, he’d said to her.
‘Any progress to report?’
Edmund Fleury’s baronial pile had been destroyed by fire in the late Victorian period. His hunting lodge on the edge of Dartmoor was no more now than an ancient set of foundations. The house in London had been one of the spectacular early casualties of the London Blitz in the autumn of 1940. These facts had set Juliet thinking about where precious family items might have been stored after the Blitz.
She said, ‘There’s a location where the Almanac might have resided for at least some of its history. If so, it may have been stolen from there. If we can isolate the time of the theft, we can maybe identify the thief and we’ll be getting somewhere.’
‘Where is this place?’
‘It’s a castle in France, thirty miles north of Amiens. I google-earthed it and then looked up its history half an hour ago. It’s intact and until late in World War Two it was still occupied by the descendants of our boy’s wife.
‘Fleury’s journal suggests they were a cultured family, seigneurial, in the best sense. Probably why they survived the Revolution and the revolutionary Terror. They would have had an extensive library, and that library would have been scrupulously catalogued. You need to get someone with some smarts over there, sir. They need to go through that catalogue, fastidiously.’
At the other end of the line, sounding more stressed than he ever had to her before, he said, ‘Anything else?’
‘Send someone with linguistic and possibly code-breaking skills. The Almanac would have been clandestine library stock. Its presence would have been noted, rather than flaunted.’
‘Romeo?’
‘Not him. I need him here.’
The Home Secretary said, ‘Heard about London?’
‘I’ve been a bit preoccupied, sir.’
‘Hurricane raging there as we speak. The coup de grâce for a great metropolis, I fear. And I’ll get someone from Manchester to that chateau.’
‘Castle. Why Manchester?’
‘That’s the capital now, Juliet. And my name is David Anderson.’
‘I know that, sir.’
‘It’s just that “sir” seems absurdly formal, in the circumstances. Please call me David, in future. If any of us has a future.’
‘Goodbye, David.’
‘Good luck, Juliet. And say hello from me to Romeo.’
‘I will.’
‘And keep me up to speed.’
Godspeed.
‘I will.’ She ended the call, put her phone on the table.
Paul said, ‘You really think that’s a lead?’
Juliet shrugged. She said, ‘Beggars and choosers. Fleury’s last descendant perished in 1944. The castle became derelict until the end of the conflict. There’s a window for looting and I’d imagine looting occurred. Could have been a soldier. I don’t know enough about the specifics of the fighting in France to know whether German, American or French.’
‘Could equally have been a light-fingered civilian.’
‘Or a member of his household staff. Or a Resistance fighter. Or a similar scenario in the Great War, except that the vicomte was still living then. Or the Franco-Prussian War. Or the Almanac might never have been there at all. Slim pickings, but it’s all I had to offer him.’
‘There’s plenty more to learn.’
‘And we’ll get back to it in a few minutes. But he wanted a progress report. That’s what I gave him. A hurricane is raging in London, Paul, apparently.’
‘London’s like a boxer taking too many punches, except without a merciful referee to intervene and end the punishment.’
‘It strikes me as a bit more biblical than that. It’s like a contagion. It’s spreading all over the world.’
Except that it wasn’t, not quite. They had just eaten a delicious meal served them politely in idyllic surroundings. Oxford was effortlessly sustaining its movie-set perfection. It was comforting in a way that Juliet thought mythological. Like believing in a fairy tale.
The charming and well-educated man in front of her wasn’t out of a fairy tale. He wasn’t the handsome prince. The crisis condensed matters, she thought, forcing you into a kind of blunt honesty. It was more than just the cultural and semantic contrast between an English woman and a German man. In these circumstances, you talked about your emotions in a sort of shorthand.
She thought that they were responding to the crisis in the same way that people responded to war. And that was what the crisis really amounted to, wasn’t it? Their world, its fabric, its values, its people were living – and dying – under a sustained assault. On a scale that was epic.
Her phone rang again after they’d left the pub and were walking back to the Bodleian, refreshed, if still subdued. The Home Secretary again.
‘The storm in London is abating, thank God,’ he said. ‘It’s weakening.’
‘That’s something, David,’ Juliet said.
‘It’s raining, now.’
‘Strongly enough for another flood?’
‘Not strongly, Juliet. Oddly.’
‘How so?’
‘This rain is very fine. It’s also saline. We’ve had it analysed. Thought it might be a chemical attack, so we quickly got samples to a laboratory.’
‘Is it hazardous?’
‘Benign. But still odd.’
‘You’re speaking in riddles, David.’
The Home Secretary cleared his throat. He said, ‘In London, out of a clear blue sky, it’s raining tears.’
She ended the call.
‘Who was that?’
‘David Anderson again. In London, the sky is weeping.’
Paul remained silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘The city grieving for itself.’ And Juliet knew that the words should have sounded absurd. But they didn’t, to her, not remotely.
THIRTY-THREE
Dawn’s intense new study of the spell book, as the wind outside her four walls weakened and then subsided completely, had brought no ready solution to the problem of the side effects or repercussions of using it. But a passage she hadn’t come across before did give her great cause for excitement.
It contained the precise instructions for bringing a new life into the world. Not to give birth to your own progeny, but to fashion something corporeal from nothing. From the void, to use the words used in Latin in the book. It was a complex ritual requiring some recitation, a bit of physical choreography and even a few props. But Dawn was sure that with a bit of ingenuity and a few pounds of Grandpa’s cash stash, she could gather those together. She wouldn’t do it until she had either done her Special Study Group tests or received official confirmation that they had been postponed, which seemed even more likely after the latest disruptive weather event.
She’d phoned the school a couple of times but had got no answer other than a voice recording that seemed frustratingly vague. They weren’t saying so outright, but teacher absenteeism seemed to have made reopening impractical. Dawn understood the reasons for this. Some of the teachers who commuted to Crouch End from Finsbury Park, or Camden Town or Islington, might now be without habitable homes. Whilst everyone wanted a good Ofsted report, no one wanted to sleep in the gutter.
Either way, whatever happened, Dawn knew she would do it eventually because, once she knew it was possible, it became in her determined mind an ambition that just had to be achieved.
In the meantime, some domestic anomalies were occurring entirely without her intervention. The first of these was that the terrapins, after being the empty shells of her grandpa’s spontaneous snack, were now active again in the fetid green water of the fish tank, busy once more feasting off one another in that industrious Darwinian manner they had.
Dawn didn’t mind this. She thought that
they might nip if she went too close to the tank, but there was plenty of space in her roomy kitchen and she could easily avoid doing that. She thought there was actually a symbolic element to their return. She thought it meant that her grandpa had lost the crab-fight she’d seen only the start of downstairs. Given his age, he hadn’t really been the favourite, even against a one-armed Pete. But it slightly worried her that feasting on Grandpa after, or even during the win might have made Pete even stronger.
Then there was the man on the lawn. Dawn looked out of the kitchen window at the back lawn, where rain that was somehow pale and whimsical was falling to the soundtrack of the roiling terrapins, and there he was again.
He came, and he went, this man. He was blurred or smudged, as though portrayed in the sepia tones of an early photograph. He had thick blond hair he wore to shoulder length in a blunt cut. He wore a garment that was black and ankle length, generously buttoned like a priest’s cassock, except that he wore it cinched at the waist by a thick brown leather belt.
Because he didn’t move, because he faded in and out of view, Dawn knew that he wasn’t real. The man staring at her house from the lawn was what was termed an apparition.
Dawn wondered whether this apparition was the consequence of too much revision. Maybe she was working her brain too hard. But he wasn’t Thomas Malthus, who’d been known to his chums as Robert. She’d seen a photograph of him. He’d worn the clothing of a later period and his hair had been styled in a far more conservative manner.
The other, far likelier possibility was that the apparition was from the time of the spell book’s compilation. Use of the spell book had stirred the apparition into its weird half existence. Not even half, Dawn thought; fractional, actually. That theory neatly explained the period dress and frightful hairdo. And those heavy leather boots that had no laces.
Dawn didn’t want the apparition to become any more solid than it was, thank you very much. The man didn’t look like much fun. No one would confuse him with a party animal. He had a cruel face with a stern expression. A thin, twisted mouth, a permanent frown, intense eyes. And his fists were clenched in what looked to Dawn like an attitude of barely controlled fury.
Was he becoming more solid? If so, then only incrementally. If she concentrated hard, Dawn could still see the brickwork at the back of the garden through his torso. So he was still pretty insubstantial. And he did come and go. He wasn’t there all the time.
The other weirdness in the house concerned the mirrors. Except for those fronting the bathroom cabinets, these were all old-fashioned. They dated from the time long before Grandma had died. That had happened so long ago that Dawn didn’t even remember her. She’d probably bought them in the middle of the previous century. There was a mirror in every room, all wall-hung, all depending from chains time had blackened.
The mirrors weren’t really, strictly speaking, mirrors any more. They were still glass, insofar as Dawn could tell. But they were pictures now. They were paintings. They were all portraits.
There were two women. One was dowdy and sorrowful looking. The other was drop-dead gorgeous and wearing a lot of bling. There was a man with a white beard and white hair who looked to Dawn like someone attending a fancy dress as Gandalf. There was the garden apparition man with his terrible hair and a third man who looked cruel enough to be the apparition’s brother.
The portraits were definitely to do with the spell book, Dawn knew. And if she lingered for any length of time in the rooms where they hung, she got the distinct feeling that their subjects were watching her.
This made her feel more self-conscious than uncomfortable because she sensed that the scrutiny was curious rather than hostile. Except possibly on the part of the apparition man. Both on the lawn and on the wall, the apparition man seemed permanently pissed off. Like someone had played a trick on him in life and he’d fallen for it, big time.
The mirror situation was tolerable because it hadn’t occurred in either bathroom and there was no mirror in the kitchen, where Dawn mostly hung out. And she only had a hand-held one in her bedroom, which when used still did a proper job of reflecting her face.
Dawn sat at the kitchen table and mused on the creation of life. She didn’t think Thomas Malthus would at all approve. It was deliberately increasing the population by unnatural means. But increasing it with precisely what?
Dawn went and fetched her sketch pad and pencils and began to draw a series of imaginary creatures. Some were hybrids of existing creatures. Some were arachnoid. A couple were dragon-like. She believed she had a good imagination, but she knew it had its limitations. The spell book, by contrast, seemed to know no limitations at all.
Eventually she got bored with sketching and turned the TV on and flicked through to the Pete channel using the remote. And what she saw made her gasp.
Her brother had grown rather substantially. The cellar had a high ceiling, but in its gloomy confinement he could barely stand upright. His head had further distorted, concave at the temples, his one eye shifted cyclops-like almost to the centre of his face, his mouth huge and bristling with those sharp, feral teeth. But the real surprise was that his missing left arm was no longer entirely missing. It was growing back in the manner seen in some species. Just not humans. Of her grandfather, nothing seemed to remain.
About an hour after the wind had died down, there was a knock at the door. Dawn briefly considered not answering it. But then she decided to take the bull by the horns, grasp the nettle, face the music, whatever.
She opened the door to a man in a black suit and a black fedora hat, wearing a clerical dog collar. She thought it was probably Father Gould, of whom her brother, before his death, had spoken both respectfully and fondly.
In the face of the priest, Dawn felt her first pang of guilt about her brother’s murder. Her second surprise of the day after Pete’s reptilian arm.
He shook hands with her, quite formally. He introduced himself. He said, ‘Is Peter at home? Your grandfather?’
‘They’re in Ireland on a fishing trip,’ Dawn said. ‘You can get there by ferry, though there are no planes. Grandpa took Pete as a treat, because there’s no school.’
The priest had taken off his hat. Now he put it back on. ‘I’m sorry to have troubled you,’ he said.
‘No trouble, Father. Would you like to come in for some tea?’
She’d seat him in the study. No eccentric mirrors in there. None in the loo, if he needed to use it. Nothing odd for him to see on the lawn, as there might be out of the kitchen window. No orgy of terrapin cannibalism for him to witness. If Pete kicked off, she’d tell him what she’d told Handy Andy Baxter, that it was remedial work next door. You wouldn’t place the noise accurately from the study.
‘I know you’re not a believer, Dawn.’
‘But I’m curious,’ she said. ‘I’d like to have a theological discussion with you. I want to know something about your beliefs concerning the human soul.’
THIRTY-FOUR
October 10, 1528
His Royal Majesty the king thinks progress slow. Impatience is a regal characteristic, I think. The monarch is used to saying ‘Make it so’ to his privy councillors and having policy put into play, not at some far remove in time, but at once. He is headstrong anyway in temperament. He has the will to getting his own way which befits his status.
I believe that Gunter Keller has already assembled his collaborators in this dark enterprise. But he is secretive by instinct as well as of necessity. He is a naturally conspiratorial man. He is distrustful, and he is cautious. His meddling with the fabric of the world could, as its consequence, see him chained to a stake atop a lit pyre and he is understandably fearful of that fate. Therefore he is vague and ambiguous and non-committal in his correspondence with me. He resorts to opacity, and prevaricates where I seek straight answers and clarity.
But he is also a vain and arrogant man assured of his powers and he consequently has a boastful way about him. In his confidence he tells me that he
has assembled the dubious talents required to deliver what I have already spent a king’s ransom commissioning from him. He does not sound indebted. He sounds self-satisfied.
I know this because last week we had our first encounter face to face. Obliged by circumstance to meet him eventually, I would have liked to have met him at his laboratory, about which I confess to having a good deal of curiosity. But that would have been too dangerous. Englishmen of reputation are routinely followed by agents of the state when they travel abroad. These spies are immensely skilled at concealment. The safest course is simply to assume that you are being watched and to do nothing that might compromise.
Keller’s calling has made of him a man who cannot settle at a single address for long. Inevitably, he begins after a while to evoke suspicion. He is of necessity an inveterate traveller, almost nomadic, shifting between cities and even between countries with a nonchalance bordering on indifference as to his own whereabouts. This suited me. I did not want the stigma of association with the man. And so I suggested we meet at sea, and he readily agreed to this proposal.
I chartered a ship and hired its crew and ordered the captain to sail across the English Sea and anchor a mile off Calais, where my signal to the waiting Keller that I had arrived for our rendezvous was three lanterns hoist into the rigging and lit one by one.
After darkness had fallen he rowed himself out to us across a choppy sea in an open boat which he tethered to our stern. And he climbed the rope ladder to our deck, a powerfully built man of around six foot in height, his face marked by a permanent sneer and small craters across his cheeks and brow carved there by the smallpox suffered, I supposed, either as a child or in his youth.
Even without knowledge of his dubious calling I would not readily have taken to the man.
Some men are entitled to a high opinion of themselves. King Henry is such an individual. There is no more formidable man-at-arms than the monarch either on foot in the practice pit or mounted on his saddle in the tiltyard. He is a skilled musician, adept at the keyboard and sweet-voiced. He is a gifted linguist and can hold forth eloquently on most subjects.
