All I could manage in reply was a single “Oh?” distractedly delivered as I was grappling at the time with an especially elusive strip of duck.
“This new job of yours. Yesterday, when you woke me, you were gabbling, you weren’t making sense. Like you were high or something.”
“Oh,” I said again. “Sorry.”
“You’ve changed. Tell me the truth, Henry. Have you got yourself into something dangerous?”
“I’ve been given a promotion.”
“There’s more to it than that.”
Suddenly lacking the heart to go on, I balanced the chopsticks on my bowl and pushed it toward the center of the table. “Yes, there’s more. But I can’t tell you.”
“Why on earth not?”
“Because I don’t want to put you in danger.”
Abbey rolled her eyes and signaled to the waitress. “Fine. Let’s just get the bill.”
I’ve never considered myself especially perceptive about women but even I could see that she was upset.
“I’m not sure where you and me are heading,” Abbey said. “But I’m telling you now that nothing’s ever going to happen unless we’re absolutely honest with one another.”
“I wish I could tell you,” I said. “I really do.”
She looked at me skeptically.
“I’m serious,” I protested. “It’d be suicide.”
“Suicide?”
“Professional suicide,” I said quickly.
The waitress drifted up to the table. “Everything OK?”
“Great,” said Abbey vaguely. “Thanks.”
“What about you?” The waitress sneered down at my half-finished bowl. “Something wrong?”
I mustered a weedy smile. “Not at all. It was lovely. I’m just full, that’s all.”
The waitress shrugged and turned back to Abbey. “Haven’t seen you for a while.”
My landlady looked embarrassed. “I’ve been busy.”
“Yeah. I can see that.” This must have been meant as a reference to me, as when she said it, the girl glanced dismissively over in my direction. “I’ll tell you something for nothing.” She leant conspiratorially close. “I prefer the other one.”
“Just get the bill,” Abbey snapped, and the waitress, chafing at the sudden gear-crunch in tone, scurried away in the direction of the till.
“You’ve been here before?” I asked.
Abbey couldn’t quite meet my eye. “Loads. It’s just round the corner from work.”
“What did that waitress mean? That she preferred the other one?”
“Haven’t the foggiest.” Embarrassed, Abbey began to gabble: “Anyway, I’m sorry about earlier. Didn’t want to come on too strong.”
“You didn’t.”
“It’s just that I’m excited about what’s happening between us and I don’t want to jeopardize it. I’ll have to learn to trust you. Just promise me one thing.”
“I’ll try.”
“What you do… It’s legal?”
“Completely,” I said, although in point of fact the legal status of the Directorate had never occurred to me. That place and its people seemed to exist in some insulating bubble of their own, a carapace of the fantastic which kept them utterly divorced from the real world.
The bill arrived and I was adamant that it should be my treat, claiming that I’d just had a pay raise. This was perfectly true. My first, very generous wage from the Directorate had appeared unheralded in my bank statement the previous day. Abbey was initially determined that we should share the expense but she quickly caved in.
We sat waiting for the waitress to return.
“If you won’t talk to me about it,” she said, “if you won’t let me help you, at least find someone who can.”
I laughed. To my ears it sounded alien, bitter and harsh. How long, I wondered, had my laughter sounded like that? “The only man who can help me is in a coma,” I said.
Her patience was beginning to fray. “There must be someone.”
The waitress came back and I was distracted by settling up.
“P’raps there is someone,” I said once we were on our feet and heading for the door. “Someone who can help.”
“Well, then. Make the call.” Abbey’s mobile trilled to announce the arrival of a new message. She glanced at it. “I have to go. We’ve got a big meeting this afternoon. Bound to be boring but I’d better be there. Take care of yourself, Henry.” She kissed me passionlessly on the cheek, turned and left the restaurant.
I idled on my own for a moment, picked up a mint on my way out and mooched onto the street just in time to see her vanish around the corner. For a second, I felt a compulsion to run after her, throw myself upon her mercy and tell her everything. Instead, I just stood there like an idiot and watched her disappear.
Once she was out of sight, I reached for my wallet and prized free a small square of card. There was a number printed on it and as I typed the digits into my mobile I felt what little lunch I’d managed to consume lurch back up.
When I spoke I had to raise my voice to be heard above the clamor of the city.
“Miss Morning?” I said. “It’s Henry Lamb. The answer is yes.”
In Ruskin Park, not five minutes’ walk from where my granddad lay in hopeless oblivion, the ducks were famished. In the short time that we were there, they managed to devour an entire loaf of wholemeal between them.
Miss Morning looked as prim and fastidious as ever in a pair of tiny black gloves and a powder-blue hat, impeccably poised even as she stooped to scatter gobbets of bread. A couple of adventurous pigeons flew down to pilfer what they could but the old lady shooed them fiercely away.
“Here,” she said, passing me a slice. “Make sure he gets some.”
I did as I was told and tossed the bread into the path of a particularly sluggish goose who was dawdling dozily by the banks of the pond.
“Why did you call me?” she asked, once the last of the crumbs had been shaken from the bag and the waterfowl, sensing that we had nothing left for them, had waddled away in search of more promising giants.
“The Prefects…,” I said heavily.
“So you’ve met them?” she asked, her expression of wrinkled benignity shifting into something calculating and shrewd. “We should walk. Since we’re almost certainly being tracked the least we can do is make our conversation difficult for the bastards to hear.”
I gazed around at the gray, deserted park, with its stark trees, its balding grass and unpromising patches of scabby earth. “How could anyone be listening to us here?”
“Eyes in the sky. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the Directorate is just three men and a filing cabinet. You’ve only seen the tip of their operation.” She paused for breath. “But what was it you wanted to know?”
“Hawker and Boon… What are they? I mean, what the hell are they?”
Miss Morning flinched and for an instant I glimpsed the old steel in her, the skein of ruthlessness which must have made her fit for service in the Directorate. “They are the Domino Men, Mr. Lamb.”
“The Domino Men? Steerforth used that phrase.”
“All history is a game to them and all human lives their pieces. Their weapons are our selfishness, our greed and our cupidity. With infinite patience, over days and weeks and years, they set us up into long unknowing rows until at last, with the merest flick of their wrists, they send us toppling down, one after the other, and clap their hands at the fun of it. They were there at Maiwand, Sebastopol and Balaclava, at Kabul, Rourke’s Drift and Waterloo. And all the time — and this I can promise you, Mr. Lamb — as men died around them in the thousands, those creatures were laughing. They were doubled up at the sheer hilarity of it all.”
“That doesn’t really answer my question,” I said, unable, perhaps, to hide my frustration. “Who exactly are these people? What do they want?”
Miss Morning fixed her eyes on mine. “They’re mercenaries. Their services are for hire to anyo
ne who cares to pay. At this particular moment in time they also happen to be the key to ending the war. With your grandfather gone, they’re the only ones who know the whereabouts of Estella.”
“And that’s another thing,” I said, on a roll now. “Who on earth is this woman? Why’s she so important? Dedlock won’t tell me.”
A grim smile on the old lady’s lips. “Mr. Dedlock has always relished his secrets. He hoards them as a miser keeps banknotes under his mattress.”
“Please…”
“Very well.” The old woman cleared her throat. “Estella was one of us.”
“You mean she worked for the Directorate?”
“She was the best agent we’d ever had. Passionate, elegant, deadly. Beautiful death in a trench coat. But she’s been lost to us for many years.”
“Granddad knew where she was. That’s what everyone keeps telling me.”
Miss Morning nodded. “It was he who hid her from us.”
“What? Why?”
“Because he wanted to keep her safe. Because some things were more important to him even than the war.”
I sensed that Miss Morning was growing impatient and perhaps I shouldn’t have pushed her any further, but I had to know. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”
The old woman spoke softly so as not to be heard by those satellites which she imagined to have turned their lidless gaze upon us, but I could tell that, if she felt that she was able, she would have screamed her answer at me. “I think he loved her,” she said. “Loved her with a burning devotion that most of the time you only ever read about in poetry.”
I thought of my grandma, whose sullen face I knew only from old photographs and a few half-remembered family stories, and wondered, not for the first time, if I’d actually known Granddad at all. Another betrayal, I suppose. A defection of the heart.
“The hospital is nearby,” said Miss Morning. “I think I should like to see him now.”
It took us a quarter of an hour to get there. Miss Morning, fatigued from our walk in the park, suddenly seemed much older than before and I wondered how much of her usual appearance was simply a facade shored up by will power and tenacity. I led her to the Machen Ward, and when she saw the old bastard laid out like he was waiting for the undertaker, she staggered into my arms as though she was winded. I found us some chairs, we sat beside him and she took his hand in hers.
The scene reminded me of another time when I’d been in the hospital. Years ago, as a child, when I’d been ill and had those operations, I’d been in Granddad’s place and he’d been in mine watching fondly from a distance as Mum grabbed my hand and squeezed it tight.
Miss Morning gazed at my grandfather, her face blank and unreadable. “You foolish old man,” she murmured. She inclined her head toward me but did not lift her eyes from the bed. “Will you see the Prefects again?”
“Tonight. I don’t seem to have been given a choice.”
“Watch your step, Henry. The Domino Men are without morality or compunction. Stop your ears against their lies and their wicked distortions of the truth. Give away nothing of yourself. But keep asking your questions. Be relentless. They will almost certainly offer you a deal but the price they ask is never one you can afford.” She put my granddad’s arm, followed by its forlornly trailing plastic tube, back on his chest. “As I think he discovered in the end.”
I realized she was crying.
At my most haplessly maladroit, faced with raw emotion, I placed a hand on her shoulder and cast around for the platitudes which people usually say at times like these. “Please,” I murmured. “He wouldn’t want you to cry.”
“I’m not crying for him,” she said as the tears poured unchecked down her cheeks. “I’m crying for you.” She sniffled, dabbed at the corners of her eyes. “I’m crying because of what’s going to happen to you.”
Enough feckless rambling from Henry Lamb. By the by, we should point out that most of the material in the Chinese restaurant is a fiction — the wretched girl simply wished to get rid of an undesirable suitor and was trying to find a means of letting the sap down gently. Trust poor Henry to be so hopelessly enraptured by the yielding outline of her figure that he failed to see until it was far too late that the young lady never cared a damn for him at all.
Exhausted from the alarums and excursions of the previous night, the Prince of Wales had retired early to bed. Like the idiot Lamb, after his first encounter with Dedlock, he had tried his best to dismiss the episode as a lucid dream or a particularly unfunny practical joke, only for an incident at luncheon to smack the reality of the situation back to the forefront of his attention with distressing force. His mother had replied to his request for information in the shape of a small white square of card, a quarter of which was taken up with a gilt stamp of the royal crest and a listing of her every rank and title. Underneath, written in wavery, doddering capitals, were the following four words:
STREATER IS THE FUTURE
It was a perplexed and weary Arthur Windsor, then, who, shortly after nine o’clock, swaddled in Silverman-ironed pajamas and clutching his anthology of Rider Haggard, said good night to the muscle-bound servant who stood guard outside his room, folded himself into bed and snuggled up to a pillow.
He fully expected to be sleeping alone. Laetitia had let it be known via Silverman that she wished to spend the night in her private quarters — an increasingly regular occurrence which seemed to Arthur symptomatic of the ebbing away of her desire.
A chapter and a half from the end of She, the prince folded down the corner of the page, placed the book on the cabinet by his bed, switched off the light and, minutes later, fell asleep.
When he opened his eyes again, he was aware that there was someone in the room with him and that it had been her entrance which had woken him. It was not quite pitch black and there was light enough to glimpse a familiar silhouette.
“Laetitia?” he said, suddenly hopeful and aroused. “Did you change your mind?”
As the figure moved closer, he heard the silken music of her most flagrantly erotic nightgown, smelt the barest hint of that perfume which she had worn in the earliest days of their courtship, and closed his eyes in delicious anticipation of what was to follow, praying for her smooth tongue on his face, for her soft hands to rove southwards down his body.
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
“Darling?” he whispered. “Its’ been too long. Don’t tease me.”
Still nothing. Even the scent of her had vanished.
Arthur sat upright, clicked on the lamp by his bed, threw off the bedsheets, got to his feet, wrapped himself in his capacious dressing gown and opened the door.
The guard was waiting. “Evening, sir.”
The prince blinked, frantically fishing for a name. “Tom, isn’t it?”
“That’s correct, sir, yes.”
“Have you let anyone into my room tonight, Tom?”
The man seemed affronted by the suggestion. “Course not, sir.”
“You haven’t let my wife in, by any chance?”
“It was my understanding that the Princess of Wales was spending the night… elsewhere, sir.”
Was that a smirk? Was this man laughing at him? Good God, how widely was it known that his wife no longer wanted him?”
“That’s true,” the prince said stiffly. “But you’ll let me know, won’t’ you, Tom? If anyone calls for me.”
“Naturally, sir.”
Arthur was on the verge of beating a retreat back inside and was giving serious thought to polishing off the last chapter and a half of She when he heard Laetitia’s laugh.
“Did you hear that, Tom?”
“Hear what, sir?”
The prince did not reply but walked dazedly away, down the corridor, toward the source of the noise. Hearing it again, the pure, uncomplicated sound of Laetitia’s laughter, he found himself fighting back tears, for he had not heard his wife laugh so naturally as this since long before they were married. He r
eached the end of the corridor but still there was no sign of her.
For an awful moment, he wondered if he might have imagined it, but — no — there it was again, and he began to follow, down other passageway, up a staircase, through a dining room, a drawing room, through corridor after endless corridor, past numerous members of his personal staff who stopped short at the sight of him, pressed themselves into walls and cast their eyes toward the carpet, centuries of tradition having inoculated them against the asking of uncomfortable questions. Arthur moved past them all, too proud to ask for help, stumbling onwards in his dressing gown and slippers, further and further into the labyrinth.
By the standards of the family of Windsor, Clarence House is not especially large nor particularly ancient — certainly, it was nothing like so vast and distinguished as the properties he would eventually inherit upon his ascension to the throne, but as he wandered abroad that night it seemed to him that the house grew bigger than before, that it swelled and budded into marvelous new shapes. Spurred on by the laughter of his wife, he wandered through rooms which he had no recollection of ever having seen before — a hothouse filled with plants of astonishing hues, an immense library stocked with books written in impossible languages, a place which appeared as a strange museum, stuffed with trophy heads of terrible beasts and ancient armor designed for creatures less than human.
At last, he passed into a hall of mirrors, each of which twisted his dressing-gowned form into something gangling and bizarre. Then he saw her, at the end of the hall, waiting on the threshold by the doorway, her favorite nightgown pulled down to reveal a generous swathe of cleavage, slick with sweat. She was smiling, panting, waiting for him to come to her.
“Laetitia!”
“When the prince looked again she was gone and the door stood slightly ajar. Shaky and aching with excitement, Arthur dashed on in pursuit.
Inside, Mr. Streater was waiting. Barefoot, crouched on the floor, he was caught in the act of pressing a syringe filled with pinkish liquid into a vein somewhere near the region of his big toe.
“Chief!” Streater’s face was suffused with jollity, as though he had just bumped into an old acquaintance at the bar. “You’re a bit early.” He depressed the plunger.
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