“I don’t know. I’ve had rather a shock too.”
“You saw what you saw. You know that our work is real, and important.”
“I don’t know what I saw.”
“Of course you do! You have a rare talent. Atwood showed me your poetry.”
“Oh. He did?”
“I don’t intend to flatter you. What interests us is that your report of the heavens resembles, in certain respects, our own observations. In dreams, or in religious ecstasies, one may stumble into the very states of perception that we are attempting to observe and control through a process of rigorous experimentation. We need such talents.”
“Who are you, Moina?”
“I do not like to waste my time. Will you be our ninth, or not?”
Josephine found that she rather liked the woman’s manner. She was rude, but she was frank. It was preferable, at least, to Atwood’s coy secretiveness.
If she said no, what would Jupiter do? She could hardly kidnap her and force her to take part in their rituals. If she said no, she need not fear things from the stars, or menacing black-eyed men at the window, or mirrors.
And Arthur—she shuddered at the thought of the danger Arthur might be in, all unknowing.
“What happened to the—the manifestation?”
“Manifestation?”
“You know what I mean, Moina.”
“It’s safely locked away.”
“Is it hurt? May I see it again?”
Moina walked in silence for a while.
“Once upon a time,” she said, “when I was as young as you are now, I had a notion that I might make a career for myself in astronomy. My family, you may imagine, disapproved quite strongly—and yet I applied myself diligently to the study of mathematics, and to the mastery of Kirchhoff’s theorem and Kepler’s laws and Herschel’s hypotheses. I did indeed succeed, through certain work in mathematics, in attracting the patronage of some learned long-bearded astronomers. Perhaps I should have been grateful. But I was not. I was impatient. I am a terribly impatient person, Josephine, as perhaps you can see. I had no time for fiddling about with telescopes, or waiting twenty years for a comet to pass, or growing old. I still do not. I believe that there is a better way to seize the heavens, that a revolution in thought is possible—indeed, inevitable.”
“You and Lord Atwood—”
“The very first time you joined us, we achieved something we had never achieved before—never dreamed of. In forty-four experiments, our travel has been merely psychic; a matter of the perceptions. That night we worked something quite different. A conjuration. I know no better word for it. A tulpa, Atwood calls it…”
Moina stopped and looked into Josephine’s eyes, as if she were searching for something behind them. “Was our circle incomplete, Miss Bradman, until we found you?”
“I simply don’t remember, Moina. I don’t remember what happened that night before we woke, to see that, that extraordinary thing—”
Moina sighed. “I cannot have will-you or won’t-you, I cannot have nerves and weeping and girlishness. We meet tomorrow night. The hour cannot be postponed. You see that our enemies nip our heels. Will you join us?”
“Why are you here, and not Atwood, Moina?”
“He dithers. He has a soft spot for you, Miss Bradman.”
“Then the experiment is dangerous.”
“Of course. What worthwhile enterprise isn’t?”
Josephine didn’t know quite what to say to that.
It was a pleasant afternoon, the streets were crowded, the shops bright and full of inviting and curious things. They paused to admire the window of a glass-maker’s shop. Glass soldiers mustered beneath electric-light; a profusion of brightly-coloured bubbles and stems and spheres of glass hung overhead.
A boy ran up and tried to hand Josephine an advertisement for a photographer’s studio. Jupiter tweaked his ear and sent him running.
“Does Mr Gracewell do what you ask him, Moina?”
“He’s Atwood’s creature. But I have influence.”
“Then these are my terms. I will join you; God help me. But only for tomorrow night. And afterwards, in return, Mr Gracewell will let Arthur go—with a fair sum for his trouble; I have a figure in mind—and then you and Gracewell and Atwood and all the rest of you will never trouble either of us again.”
Chapter Thirteen
The boat to Gravesend bobbed and lurched in busy Thames traffic, belching smoke and soot. On the bench beside Arthur, two old women ate an endless succession of noxious sandwiches from a hamper; while on the other side a youngish father argued with his three sons, who were not looking forward to their holiday by the sea and intended, by God, that everyone should know all the reasons why not. In other words, all the usual irritations of travel. But the fact was that, after a couple of months as a variable in Gracewell’s Engine, Arthur found that he had a wonderful immunity to everyday irritations. The city slid by under a bright summer sky, church spires gleaming. The boat emptied and filled again. It passed into the cool shadow of a great industrial steamer, a towering metal behemoth making its way east. Arthur half-dozed, and woke at Gravesend.
He stopped in at St. Andrew’s Hotel on the High Street, and arranged for a room for the night. After all that water he was in no mood for fish, which was the hotel’s specialty, but they made him a very decent lunch of chops and stewed apples. Then, with his stomach settled and some strength in him, he set off on the next stage of his mission, which was rather a hike out into the country. A policeman at the pier gave him directions.
He wore his suit of good walking clothes. He set a brisk pace; away from the river and out of the wetlands, past little villages and mossy graveyards. Country lanes and hedgerows. A summer’s day and butterflies. Up and over a stile, and across a wheat-field. A muddy path through the woods. Stopping at a farmhouse for directions. All those other touches of homeliness and civilization, without which (in Arthur’s opinion) no landscape could be said to be truly beautiful. Crows. Sheep. Gnats. Sunburn. Getting lost and stepping in who-knows-what. Et cetera.
* * *
In the late afternoon he came to a house half-way up the side of Rudder Hill, on the outskirts of a village so tiny and so unkempt that it seemed almost accidental. Looking back along the path, he could see for miles through clear skies, all the way to the river and the smoke and the tiny toy houses of London.
The house was made of grey stone, grown over with ivy and moss; the roof was thatched and uneven. Ramshackle wooden sheds sprouted from it. In the garden a rusty red pump stood in the tall grass, garlanded with weeds and violet flowers.
He knocked on the door, to which a sprig of something had been nailed.
The man who opened the door was something of a giant. He was half a head taller than Arthur, who was by no means small; the outstretched arm that held the door was muscular, and also spattered with black mud. He wore wading boots and an apron. He had a square face, under a head of black hair as flat as a cap. His eyes, under heavy brows, were strikingly dark, and oddly inexpressive. He said nothing.
Behind him a voice called out, “Who?”
Arthur peered around the man in the door and into the gloom of the cottage. It was cluttered beyond belief. It resembled a tool-shed.
The big man stepped aside. Behind him stood a witch.
That was Arthur’s first thought: witch. She was ancient, and tiny, and bent; she wore shabby black, and her hair was white and wild. She was sharp-nosed, sharp-eyed, yellow-toothed. She had the look of something left behind from a bygone century.
Arthur said, “Mrs Archer?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Who’s asking?”
“I have a message from Mr Gracewell, for Mrs Archer, on Rudder Hill.”
Arthur offered her Gracewell’s envelope—a thick packet of papers, which had been folded uncomfortably inside his coat.
Mrs Archer nodded. The big man took the packet, tore it open, and handed the papers inside to her. They were covere
d in dots and dashes and other symbols of Gracewell’s Engine. Arthur didn’t know what exactly they meant.
“Hmm-hmm,” she said. A bent finger traced the lines. “Hmm-hmm. Where’s Dimmick?”
“Dimmick?”
“Dimmick. You know. Your master’s usual dogsbody.”
Arthur didn’t like dogsbody.
“Mr Dimmick’s unwell. My name’s Shaw.”
“Ha! Dimmick’s not the type to be unwell, like a fainting maiden! Tell me, where’s he gone to? What’s he about? What’s he up to?”
“There was a fire, Mrs Archer—he was injured in it. I’m here in his place, I suppose.”
“I know. I know about the fire! Not that your master had the decency to tell us. Not even a letter or a pigeon. A fire that stopped Mr Dimmick—there’s a thing! Well, off with you. Go on.”
“Now, wait,” Arthur said, putting his foot in the door. “They said I was to wait for your answer to whatever that is.”
The big fellow scowled, and closed the door regardless. It seemed to Arthur that he would’ve quite happily broken Arthur’s foot clean off if he hadn’t moved it.
A moment later the door opened again.
“Sit,” Mrs Archer said. “Over there by the fire. Have some tea.”
An iron kettle hung over a smouldering fire. Arthur sat on a rickety stool beside it, and the big fellow offered him a cup of tea, which tasted of the river.
The big fellow stared at Arthur, but rebuffed every attempt at conversation. After a while Arthur began to wonder if he was in fact staring, or if his eyes were merely open, while his attention was elsewhere, or nowhere at all. There was something very odd about the man, something that went beyond mere rudeness. Arthur wondered if he was half-blind, or in some way not quite right in the head.
The room smelled of tea, and straw, and dirt, and old age; and beneath that something less wholesome—rat, perhaps, something bitter and pungent. The corners were cluttered with tools, rustic brass nonsense, and dead rabbits. Tied-together twigs hung by string from the ceiling. A rat crawled out from behind a heap of rubbish, and nosed around the edge of the fire. Nobody but Arthur seemed to mind.
Archer sat at a table by the window and read Gracewell’s papers, tracing the lines of dashes and dots with her gnarled finger. She made notations of her own in a leather-bound journal.
“He thinks I’m old-fashioned,” she said.
“Hmm?” Arthur had been drowsing a little in the heat.
“Your master. Thinks I’m old-fashioned. Won’t come out here himself. Scared, I reckon. How’s he going to do all the things he wants to do if he’s scared of a little moonlight?”
“I don’t know about that. What is it you do for Mr Gracewell, madam?”
She gave him a long flat look. “We all do our part,” she said. Then she went back to her work.
Arthur felt ready to hit the next person who presented him with a mystery, or uttered a Delphic word in his presence.
The big fellow was still scowling.
“Your friend and I don’t seem to hit it off very well, Mrs Archer.”
“That’s my son,” she said. “My big beautiful boy.”
The big fellow continued to scowl.
Evening crept up on them. The window darkened, and insects buzzed and chirped outside. Archer didn’t believe in dinner, it seemed. She looked like she might live on tea, but Arthur didn’t see how the big fellow managed it.
Arthur closed his eyes and summoned in his mind the menu of the St. Andrew’s Hotel.
“Put your feet up, why don’t you, while I work!”
He opened his eyes.
He’d been asleep for a moment. Not long.
“Those are Mr Gracewell’s calculations,” he said.
“Yes.”
“From his Engine. Or plans—plans for the next Engine.”
“I reckon. Could be.”
“What in the world could you know about analytical engines, Mrs Archer?”
If she was determined to be rude, Arthur didn’t see why he shouldn’t respond in kind.
“Nothing,” she said. “Not one thing. Not a jot or a tittle. Not a speck. But I know the stars.”
She smiled.
She stood. “Come on, then.”
“What? Where?”
“Up.” She pointed out the window. “Up Rudder Hill.” She pronounced it rodor.
She handed Arthur Gracewell’s pages of calculations, now rather dirty and crumpled, and her own papers, which were covered in numbers and geometry. She went to a corner of the room and bent over. Rummaging in the clutter, she produced a large and expensive-looking telescope, an equally fine sextant, something very old-fashioned and etched with symbols—an astrolabe, perhaps—and some other implements Arthur couldn’t begin to name … the sort of things you might imagine Copernicus hunching over, or Magellan navigating by, or Stanley carrying down the Nile.
“Good God! What is all this, Mrs Archer? Do you have a Gatling gun, too?”
“Ha!” She began to shove the implements into sacks, from which long brass legs and odd sharp points stuck out. In amongst the brass and copper there were things made of sticks and twigs and bone. “Come on, then.”
“What’s up the hill?”
“Your job is to carry,” she said, “and keep an eye out.”
“What about him?” Arthur said, nodding sideways at the big fellow.
“He keeps the house. That’s his job. You come with me.”
She took down her cape and walking-stick from a hook by the door. “Quick now.”
Outside it was a summer night, clear and starry and windless. Archer walked around to the back of her house, where a gate in a tumbledown fence opened onto a path up into the woods.
She set a good pace, despite the dark and the steepness of the path. Arthur clanked behind, sacks over his shoulder, grumbling as telescopes overbalanced him and tripods caught on branches.
“An eye out for what?” he said.
“Dimmick wouldn’t have had to ask that.”
“I’m not Dimmick, am I?”
“Could be all kinds. They have all kinds of ways.”
He slapped at tormenting insects. Archer appeared immune to them. His stomach rumbled.
“Who does?”
“The other lot. Ah! I remember what happened to Lord Atwood—the old one, little Martin’s father. Now, he was someone who respected the old ways of doing things.” She made a throat-cutting gesture. “Not that I know what happened to him. Not that I’ll spread gossip. But it was bad blood. There were rumours. And now there’s Gracewell’s Engine, and all the rest of it. Well, how could they stand for that? How could they, after what he did? Be fair. There’ll be war, and it’ll get worse. And poor old bloody me in the middle. Stayed out of it all these long years—out here, let others fight—let the young fight each other. Survived that way. But I couldn’t say no, could I, not in the end? Greed. It’s greed that gets us all, young man.”
Arthur stumbled and dropped a large ornate bronze implement.
“Don’t drop that!”
“Sorr—”
“Well. Well! So now Atwood and Gracewell have got me working for them, and the other lot won’t forgive that, will they? What’ll they do next, I wonder? It was them who did that Storm, you know. Their work. You know why they did it?”
“Did what?”
“The storm?”
“No one can make storms, Mrs Archer.”
She looked disgusted.
“If they could, though, I’d say their motive was to flood Mr Gracewell’s first Engine.”
“No! No! No! They did it, young man, they did it, they called that bloody thing up, damn and blast ’em! Bloody London know-it-alls! They did it for the sake of buggering about with my bloody stars!”
She started on up the hill again, shaking her head. The trees thinned out, so that Arthur thought he could see the top of the hill—though hills were tricky things, and there was usually one more peak beyond the one
you could see. For a little while he had been able to make out a square structure on the horizon against the starry sky.
He kept a wary eye out for assailants, but it seemed they were alone.
“Mrs Archer—”
“Shh. Thinking. Said too much already, haven’t I? Not right, asking all those questions of an old woman. Not right.”
That was all she said until they stepped out of the woods and onto the crown of Rudder Hill.
A tower stood on the top of the hill. It was plain and windowless, circular, and made of brick. Arthur guessed it was about sixty feet tall. It had a conical top, out of which stuck an enormous telescope.
It was an extraordinarily impressive structure. At a quick glance, Arthur believed that the telescope was the equal of that of the Royal Observatory. He could not imagine what it was doing out in the woods, in the apparent possession of Mrs Archer. It looked quite new—no more than a few years old. It must have been staggeringly expensive.
The night sky above was so clear that Arthur could recognise no constellations, because it was all one field of a million stars, all of equal brightness. The Milky Way looked like something you could walk on. Arthur guessed it was midnight, or thereabouts.
Archer took one of the implements, a thing like an astrolabe on a tripod, and she set it up beside the tower. She crouched down and stared into a pinhole, and sighted the thing up at the stars. She grunted, and called for her papers. She made notes.
Arthur said nothing. The fact of the matter was that the sight of that telescope had unnerved him.
After a while she unlocked the tower’s door and went inside. Stairs spiralled up into the dark. She hiked her skirts and hurried on ahead. The stairs looked steep, and the implements were terribly unwieldy and heavy, so Arthur left half of them behind, planning to make another trip. He was glad of it. With each turn of the stairs he felt heavier and heavier, and shorter of breath. He soon lost sight of Archer, who climbed without apparent effort.
The Revolutions Page 13
