The Great Game: The Bookman Histories, Book 3

by Lavie Tidhar

Thinking of rumours, stories, like nightmares that fade when you wake.

  Two words. Something to scare children by.

  The Bookman.

  TWENTY-ONE

  "Hush!" said the Bookman.

  Fogg said, "What?"

  "Were you followed?"

  Fogg, laughing: "By whom?"

  Lucy pressed against the shelves. The gun would be useless, here, against that… that thing.

  "I smell… human."

  "Stop being so melodramatic."

  "Report!" the Bookman barked. Fogg said, speaking calmly, "Mycroft won't let me near. He is running his own operation. He never trusted me."

  "What do you know of this death in Bangkok? This Alice?"

  "An old agent. Retired. To tell you the truth she had gone off the field long ago."

  "Then what was she doing dead in Siam?" the Bookman roared.

  "Working for Mycroft."

  "On what?"

  "The Babbage case."

  "Babbage…" There was a snort, and a sound as of jaws, locking and biting. "I should have killed him when I had the chance."

  "Recruited him, you mean."

  The Bookman laughed. It was a horrid sound, and Lucy suddenly realised that it was quite insane. She had to get out…

  "What killed her?"

  "A Bookman," Fogg said, and there was a terrible silence.

  She couldn't stomach it any more. The silence lengthened, unnatural there in the Unnatural History Room.

  Why wasn't the Bookman answering Fogg?

  A slithering sound, so close… She froze, her heart beating fast.

  "I sssssmell you…" a voice whispered. It was a cold voice, it made her shiver. "I know you're there…"

  She waited, wanting to bolt, to run–

  There was the sound of a crash from above and someone cursed and light came in and there were footsteps–

  "Is anyone down there?"

  A museum guard. He came down the stairs, shining a lamp around. It cast a pool of light amidst the shadows, and the faces of ancient lizards stared at her, from coins and tapestries and ancient clay tablets.

  Was there another exit? She edged away, softly, softly. "Who's there?"

  By the wall!

  A small opening, an air vent. As quietly as she could she pulled the grille. It came off in her hands.

  "It is I, Fogg."

  "Oh, apologies, sir! You didn't half startle me!"

  "Private business, James. But your diligence is duly noted."

  A hiss in the dark, amused or angry she didn't know. "What was that, sir?"

  "Just the wind, James. Just the wind."

  She placed the grille on the floor and pushed through the opening, head first.

  The hissing sound seemed to grow closer.

  "Very well, sir." The young guard sounded nervous. "I shall leave you, then."

  "You do that, James. You know it's not safe, down here."

  "Sir?"

  "Just a joke, James. Merely a joke."

  The hissing, coming closer – a slithering sound–

  She pushed through and found herself in a small crawlspace–

  The sound like jaws, snapping shut, behind her. She almost screamed.

  "What was that?"

  "Relax, James," Fogg said, with a laugh.

  "Strange things in this museum, sir," the guard said. "Strange happenings, and sounds at night. I don't mind telling you it makes some of us nervous."

  "Maybe you have a ghost down here," Fogg said, and laughed again, the sound like a gunshot. Lucy scrambled to get away. The space led up, she saw. A drop chute of some sort. She needed things to hold on to.

  A hiss behind her, a faint whisper, "I can smell you…"

  "What was that?"

  "Nothing!" Fogg said, losing his calm for the first time. "Rats," he said. "Go away, James, I have work to do."

  "Sir. Yes, sir."

  She felt something – the walls weren't even, she could grab hold–

  She pulled herself up. Heard movement behind her but didn't dare turn to look. Pulling herself again, and finding the next protrusion out of rock or wood, and hauling herself up, one step by laborious step–

  The sounds faded behind her, and then she was outside, emerging out of a drop chute a floor up, and it was quiet–

  "What are you doing here, miss?"

  The light hit her and she jumped, but it was only James, the guard, and she could have hugged him.

  "This is a restricted area! My God, you gave me a fright!"

  "Dr Fisher sent me," Lucy said, thinking quickly. "To fetch something from the, ah, warehouse."

  "How did you get in here? Do you have a pass?"

  "Wait," Lucy said. "Look, it's–"

  She was close enough to the man now and she hated to do it but didn't have a choice.

  "What–?"

  Then he gurgled and she caught him as he fell, gently, and laid him on the cold stone floor. Then she ran.

  It began to rain as she walked back to her lodgings. Her mind was awhirl with unanswered questions. Fogg, the mole in the Bureau. The Bookman – she had always thought it to be a person, or an organisation of people, all using a common name, a moniker. But the horror she had seen below the Lizardine Museum was no sort of human, it was an alien creature, not even alive – some sort of intelligent machine?

  What had Mycroft told her? He had warned her, his words cryptic then. We are on the cusp of war. Ancient artefacts are awakening…

  Could the thing called the Bookman be one of them?

  And yet the Bookman had been active for years – for decades. Disguising explosives, cunningly, in books – that had been his method. There had been the Martian probe case in eighty-eight, but since then nothing – as though the Bookman had disappeared, retired or died…

  She had to talk to Mycroft. Had to warn him…

  But Mycroft wouldn't see her. He was locked away at the Diogenes Club; he was seeing no one; he was absent from the Bureau; all lines of communication were down. Even Berlyne, when she had cornered him at last, refused to hear her out.

  "You do your role," he told her, staring at her despondently from wet, red-rimmed eyes. Earlier when she had tried to talk to him he kept interrupting her, telling her about his flu. "Leave the fat man be. And stay the hell away from Fogg."

  Did Mycroft know?

  There was no sign of Harker. The fat man was gone, to all intents and purposes, and Fogg was running the Bureau.

  She needed information, Lucy thought. She needed a line into the past.

  And so, two days later, on a day when the sky was grey and a cold, chill wind blew through the streets, she boarded a train, and went, not to St Mary Mead, where the retirees of the service were rumoured to be housed, but to the place called Satis House, hoping that she could get the woman there to talk to her.

  The train had stopped for five minutes at the station and Lucy was the only passenger to disembark. The small village of Satisby-the-Sea was really nothing more than a high street, several shops, a pub, a tea room, a one-storey hotel that appeared to be permanently closed, a post office and the train station.

  Dominating the view was the house. It perched over a cliff above the little village, a vast, crumbling edifice, its broken windows open to the wild wind of the sea. A lonely, snaking path led up to the house. Lucy had cream tea at the tea room, and chatted pleasantly with the proprietress, up to the point when the woman found out her objective. "You are going to see her?" she said.

  "Why, is she not there any more?" Lucy said.

  "Oh, she's there all right," the proprietress said. "If you'll excuse me–"

  And she disappeared into the kitchen and did not come back.

  Curiouser and curiouser, thought Lucy. She left money on the counter, seeing as the woman had disappeared. Then she went outside and began the long, cold walk up the hill.

  The wind was cold; gulls screeched high above, diving over the dark waves. The air was filled with brine and tar,
sea smells mixed, faintly, with gunpowder.

  Gunpowder?

  A shot rang out. Beside the trail Lucy was following, a branch exploded away from a tree, almost hitting her. She stopped, stood still.

  A voice through a bullhorn, the speaker unseen. "Who the hell are you?"

  Lucy carefully raised her arms. "Westenra!" she called out.

  "What? Speak up!"

  "Westenra," Lucy yelled. "It's me, damn it, Havisham!"

  "Oh." The voice sounded mildly disappointed. "Well, move along, then, girl. Come on up."

  "It's what I'm trying to do," Lucy muttered. She lowered her arms and continued up the path to the house.

  No wonder the woman in the tea room disapproved.

  She made it up there. Overgrown weeds, an apple tree with fruit around it, a sweet-and-sour smell of fermentation. A wrought-metal fence, the garden beyond. A stout oak door that stood in marked contrast to the rest of the house. Peeling paint, broken windows, a general air of disuse and disrepair.

  "Havisham? Where the hell are you?"

  A small, energetic figure appeared, as though from thin air.

  The bushes, Lucy thought, and couldn't hide the ghost of a smile. Havisham's tradecraft was well known, even though that was not what she was primarily famed for. In their circles, at any rate…

  "Lucy? Is that you?"

  "It's me."

  The other woman came and peered at her for a long moment. It was hard to tell her age. Fifty? Sixty? One of the old guard at the Bureau… She wore a man's hunting outfit, carried a gun with her, easily – she was used to it. "Come here," Miss Havisham said. They hugged. "It's been a long time," Lucy said.

  "Too long," Miss Havisham agreed, sadly, it seemed to Lucy. She released her. "What brings you to Satis House? I didn't think you even knew where it is."

  "I just looked at the map," Lucy said, "until I found the middle of nowhere."

  Miss Havisham laughed. "Come on in," she said. "Tea?"

  "Yes, please," Lucy said, with feeling.

  The inside of the house was a surprise.

  The outside, Lucy saw, had been carefully cultivated.

  The inside…

  The front room was a map of debris but, as Miss Havisham led her farther in, the house changed. The room they went into had carefully maintained windows overlooking the cliffs, at such an angle that they could not be seen from land. A fire was burning in the fireplace and the room was tastefully and expensively decorated. Rugs on the floor that must have come from the Ottoman Empire, sturdy bookshelves everywhere, books spilling out. The room was sunny, the furniture used and well maintained; the whole place had an air of comfortable domesticity to it.

  "They think of me as the crazy old lady who lives in the ruined mansion," Miss Havisham said cheerfully. "Which helps. And there are enough alarms outside to warn me of anyone approaching. You never know, in our line of work."

  "Quite," Lucy agreed. She watched Miss Havisham place a kettle over the fire and busy herself making tea. "How long has it been?" she asked.

  She could feel Miss Havisham tense. "Who can remember," she said, quietly.

  The post-eighty-eight fall-out.

  The reason she was there.

  But first, the tea.

  They sat and sipped their drink and watched the sea outside the windows. Miss Havisham is to be handled delicately, she remembered the fat man saying, once. Agents are replaceable, but archivists like her only come once in a lifetime.

  "How is Mycroft?" Miss Havisham said, as though reading her mind.

  "Oh, very well," Lucy said, carefully. "He sends his regards."

  "Good old Mycroft," Miss Havisham said. "What happened wasn't his fault. It was before your time, though, wasn't it, Westenra?"

  "Yes. Mycroft…" She hesitated, picking her words carefully. "He sent me for a chat. We need… Some old material has recently come up. Routine. He thought you might be able to help."

  "You know I could," Miss Havisham said. "The question is, should I?"

  But Lucy knew Miss Havisham, the way she knew herself. For they were all operatives, all playing the Great Game. And once you played, you were never out. Only death put you out of the Great Game. What had someone said, long ago? She had heard the words from one of her instructors in the secret compound at Ham Common… When everyone is dead the Great Game is finished. Not before.

  And so she waited, and sipped her tea, and didn't speak. And at last, the way she knew she would, Miss Havisham said, almost reluctantly it seemed, and yet unable not to say it, "What, exactly, has come up, Westenra?"

  And still Lucy prevaricated; still she waited; until Miss Havisham, perhaps recognising in herself the need to speak, to delve into the past, to play, once more, the game, said, with the ghost of a smile and a sharp, yet almost fond, tone, "Well, Westenra?" Then Lucy began to speak; and even then she idled, she went around the subject; she took her own time.

  "Sonnets from the Portuguese," she said, and waited, and watched Miss Havisham, whose head rose, and she looked out of the window with a far-distant look in her eyes.

  "Elizabeth Barrett Browning…" she said. "Yes…"

  Lucy waited, patient.

  "A small, innocent volume of verse…" Miss Havisham said. Her voice had acquired a dreamy, sing-song attribute. "Oh, yes… it was to be placed with great ceremony on board the Martian probe. The ceremony took place in Richmond Park. It was dusk; Moriarty was there, he was Prime Minister at the time, yes, wasn't he, love? And the Prince Consort was there, and that old rascal Harry Flashman. All of London society, it seemed, had turned out for the event. Irene Adler, too, though she was but an inspector in those days. And the boy, of course… he came, too, but too late to save her."

  Lucy waited, her heart beating faster. She was not supposed to know these things, she knew. But Miss Havisham was beyond rules and restrictions, now, and recollection for her was an act of living, like drawing breath or drinking water. Once started, she would not stop.

  "We had watched the boy, hadn't we, love?" Miss Havisham murmured. Who was she talking to? Lucy wondered, recalling, somewhat uneasily, the rumours at the Bureau. Havisham and Mycroft, they had whispered.

  "We watched him, ever so carefully. He was a handsome boy. Orphan. Less a name than a title. And he had a girl, he was in love. Her name, too, was Lucy. Did you know that?"

  Lucy hadn't. But Miss Havisham was not stopping to check her reaction. She was speaking through Lucy, speaking to the fat man who had left her here, in this crumbling mansion, in Satis.

  "A marine biologist. She worked with the whales in the Thames… Did you know they had followed Les Lézards here, on their voyage from Caliban's Island? We had wondered at the connection between them. Could the royal lizards somehow communicate with the whales? Were they their eyes and ears in the ocean? We could never prove anything… Some knowledge was beyond even us."

  "Tell me about Lucy," Lucy said, patient, probing. "Tell me about the Sonnets."

  "It was dusk and, before the spectators, the airship loomed. It was to carry the probe away with it, at the end of the ceremony. All the way to Caliban's Island, there to be launched into space. A big, dignified ceremony and the girl, Lucy, there to place, into the probe, ceremoniously, two objects. An Edison record filled with whale song… and that slim volume of poetry, Sonnets from the Portuguese."

  Miss Havisham fell silent. Motes of dust danced in the sunlight coming through the window. "Books…" she said, so softly Lucy almost didn't hear her. "They had always been his choice. His little folly, we called it. The Bookman."

  "The Bookman," Lucy said.

  "Yes. For as the girl came to place the objects into the open belly of the probe, there was a terrible explosion. She died, instantly. The probe was destroyed. Unbeknown to us, it had been a dummy. The real probe was already on the island, prepared to launch…"

  "You said there was a boy," Lucy said. She felt shaken. The explosion had been public knowledge, naturally – it would have been im
possible to keep it quiet – but Miss Havisham spoke of it as if she had lived through it, though always one step removed.

  "Orphan, yes. He tried to save her. Couldn't, of course. Which launched the whole sad affair."

  "Tell me."

  "Oh, it was one of Mycroft's less successful affairs," Miss Havisham said, with a small smile. "The boy was obviously being manipulated. His father was a Vespuccian, you know. And his mother, as we found out too late, could have been queen, if we still had human royalty."