He had a long bath. Afterwards, he caught sight of himself in the mirror, a short, stout middle-aged man with curly black hair and an unruly beard. It seemed he had more lines around his eyes than he remembered, but that must have been the electric light.
Years and years ago, before Max was born, a particularly stubborn and stupid group of bandits had chanced upon Blandings and decided they wanted what was inside. The estate was very heavily defended back then, and the initial assault had been beaten back, but the bandits, like bandits everywhere, were too dim to take the hint and go away. They laid siege to the place, which was hardly a problem because Blandings could have existed independent of the outside world for almost a year if need be. But it had been a severe irritation, so Betty’s father – Mr Richard, everyone called him – got word out and a number of farmers had got their people together and marched up here and helped to sort things out. Max’s father had been among them, and when Max was little, he delighted in telling the story of The Battle of Blandings, much to Max’s mother’s annoyance.
The other farmers had drifted off down the years, preoccupied with their own troubles, but the Taylors and the Coghlans had remained close, had done each other favour after favour until no one really remembered who owed whom what and it didn’t really matter anyway.
Rose, for some reason, didn’t like them. She put up with Max’s periodic trips to Blandings, was perfectly polite about the Coghlans, but she’d grown so annoyed by Max’s insistence that the children call Betty ‘Auntie Betty’ that they’d had sharp words about it, and in the end, as he usually did, Max backed down in favour of a quiet life and being able to get on with stuff without being argued at.
Dinner, cooked by Andrew, was pork chops and potatoes and salad. On the other side of the estate were six big greenhouses, patiently constructed, pane by pane, from windows taken from neighbouring towns and villages. The Coghlans always ate well.
Afterwards, Andrew brought in coffee and brandy – both worth their weight in gold, if gold had actually been worth anything any more. He sat down and looked at Max and said, “So, mother says you have a problem.”
“I’m not sure if it’s a problem or not,” Max said, and he told them what he had seen. The burning buildings, the boats, the strange distant serenity of it all. “Don’t know what it was,” he finished. “Could have been anything.”
“But you don’t think so,” said Andrew.
Max shook his head.
“Could you make out what kind of boats they were?” Betty asked.
“Sorry?”
“Were they canoes? Rowing boats?”
Max thought about it. “They were almost as wide as the lane they were going down, sort of rectangular. I couldn’t see how many people were on them; quite a few, and quite a lot of gear.”
Betty and Andrew exchanged glances. “Things are starting to change,” she said. “I’ve been hearing some strange things about Oxford.”
Max nodded. “I’ve heard that too.”
Betty shook her head. “There’s been a takeover, some people from the Cotswolds.”
Max raised an eyebrow.
“Yes, I know,” she said. “I don’t have a clear idea what’s going on yet, but I wonder if whatever you saw in the Vale isn’t something to do with it.”
Max sipped his brandy.
“The days when people lived in tiny little communities are coming to an end,” said Betty. “It made sense back in the early days when times were hard and things were scarce, but people are more secure now, they’re banding together. There’s a big bunch of people down in the West Country, a couple of other large communities, here and there, that we’ve heard about.”
“Isn’t that a good thing?”
“Depends,” Andrew said. “For people like you, the other farmsteads, maybe not.”
Max thought of the faraway burning buildings. The boats moving along the flooded lane. He took a breath and said, “We need better weapons, Bets.”
“You can’t fight them, Max,” she said kindly.
“I will if they try to take what’s mine.”
“There’s too many of them,” she told him.
“Suppose they come here,” he said. “Suppose they take over the ferry and the toll and they hear about all your stuff and they want it.”
Betty got up and started to collect the dinner plates.
“Well then,” he said.
“They could try,” Andrew suggested.
“I’m not going to give you guns,” she said. “Not yet, anyway. Not until we know what’s happening in Oxford. That could just be rumours. What you saw could just have been bandits.”
“But you think it’s something else.”
“We don’t know,” Andrew said. “The boats sound purpose-built, shallow-draught for moving over flooded country. Not hard to build, but why would you, unless you had a use in mind for them?”
“It’s not as if there hasn’t been flooding down there before,” Betty said. “You and I both know people with boats.”
“We should be organising now,” said Max. “Us, the Lyalls, the Carters, everyone else. We should be ready.”
“You should be forewarned,” she said briskly, stacking the plates in the middle of the table. “Nothing wrong with that. If the time comes, I’ll help you, but I’m not going to hand guns out like sweeties, Max. That only causes trouble.”
“I can always go somewhere else.”
She picked up the plates, stood there looking at him. “Oh, Max,” she said sadly. “Sure, there’s old Robert Mason over to Wycombe. He’s got lots of guns and he’ll sell them to you without a moment’s thought. Perry Allen in Sonning – I’ll write you a list, if you like. Lots of people have got guns and they don’t care who buys them. That’s how wars start.”
He stood and followed her into the kitchen. “From what you say, a war’s coming anyway.”
“We don’t know that,” she said, putting the plates in the sink. “From what I hear about the people down West, that’s working all right.” She turned and looked at him. “Let me ask around, Max, okay? I know some folk in Witney and Chipping Norton. I haven’t spoken to them in a while, but they’ll know what’s going on. If they say things are getting bad, we can have this conversation again. Okay?”
Max didn’t say anything.
“Meanwhile,” she went on, “you do us a day’s work tomorrow to pay for your keep, and you go home, and you talk to the locals. Let them know that maybe something’s coming, maybe it isn’t.”
He thought about it. “When will you know?”
“Well, that is what my father used to call an imponderable.” She rinsed her hands under the tap, dried them with a threadbare tea towel. “I’ll send Andrew when I have some news for you. Okay? In the meantime, don’t panic, and do not buy guns from old man Mason because they’ll probably blow up in your face.”
He grunted.
She stepped forward and hugged him. “Cheer up, Max,” she said. “We live in interesting times. That’s always fun.”
“You’ve got an odd idea of fun, Betty.”
She laughed and clapped him on the shoulders. “Go to bed, Max. You’ve got a hard day’s work ahead of you tomorrow.”
LATER, BETTY WENT back to the study and sat for a while reading, but her heart wasn’t in it and she laid her book aside and looked into the fire. The wind had got up outside and it was booming in the chimneys the way it had when she’d been little. Back then, it had frightened her and her father had had to sit with her at night until she fell asleep. These days, there were other scary things, and now there was no one to sit with her.
There was a knock on the door and Andrew looked into the study. “Okay?” he asked.
She smiled at him, still amazed after all these years by how much he looked like his father. “Interesting times.”
“What are we going to do?”
“Well, we’re not going to panic, that’s the first thing we’re going to do.” She thought about it. “W
e need some help.” She saw the look on his face as he realised what she meant. “Don’t be like that.”
“I don’t like dealing with them,” he told her. “Every time we do, we wind up owing them a favour.”
“That’s the way the world works,” she said amiably. “We owe them a favour, they owe us a favour. It all averages out, in the end.”
“What are they going to do, anyway? Send us a battleship?”
“They may not want to help at all; they have their own stuff to worry about. I’ll get in touch tomorrow and see what they say, and then we can make plans. Or not.”
“You’re just going to send Max back to the Parish and tell everyone to sit tight and not do anything?”
Betty thought about some of the things she’d been hearing about the situation further north, things even she had trouble believing. She was glad she hadn’t mentioned them to Max; it wouldn’t have made matters any better.
“The weather’s going to break in a month or so,” she said. “The monsoons will be here, then it’ll be winter. Nobody’s going to try anything until the spring. What Max saw is just reconnaissance, people looking for a foothold. There will be time to prepare.”
“I hope you’re right. I really do.” Andrew had heard the same rumours she had.
“When have I ever been wrong?” She saw the look on his face and smiled. “All right. In the meantime, let Max have that spare water purifier and any odds and ends of farm tools he takes his fancy to. And don’t work him too hard tomorrow. He looks tired.”
Chapter Two
OFF IN THE distance, a pair of waterspouts twirled up from the surface of the Sound and touched the low clouds. Chrissie leaned on the railing and watched them skein about each other, their tips lost in boiling spray.
“Not funny,” Adam said.
She sighed. “No, it isn’t,” she said. “But there’s no one else.”
He put his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders deeper into his parka. He’d only got back from Wales the day before, but there was no point making a big thing about it.
She said, “What do you know about Thanet?”
He shrugged. “It’s in Kent. I think.”
Chrissie pushed away from the railing, turned, and began to walk along the seafront. Adam walked beside her. A respectful distance ahead and behind, her minders walked along too. It had been a long time since Guz had seen a political assassination, but you could never be too sure.
“We’ve heard some unpleasant stories about what’s going on out there, but that’s about it,” she said. “So we decided to have a proper look.”
He thought about that. “Who did you send?”
“Eleanor Christie; you don’t know her, but she’s good, very capable.”
“And she hasn’t been in touch.”
“She’s missed all her contacts for the past month. She could have had an accident, but we need to know.” She glanced at him, a stout, red-haired woman in her early thirties. “I wouldn’t ask unless I had to.”
Adam nodded. “Yeah, I know.”
“We’ll run you up the coast to Worthing, but you’ll have to walk the rest of the way. I don’t want to risk dropping you on the beach at Margate. Try to find out what’s happened, and if you can, either retrieve her gear or destroy it.”
He nodded again.
They walked for a while in silence, turned away from the seafront and headed through Hoe Park. “How was Wales, by the way?” she asked.
It was easy, on the neat rainswept streets of Guz, to forget that the rest of the country was not like this. A Sister – one of the small ones, but even the small ones had erased towns – had touched down at the mouth of the Bristol Channel, sent an accelerating wall of water upstream, according to the stories. Cardiff and Newport were inundated; Weston-super-Mare had simply been erased. By the time the wave reached Gloucester, it had been almost sixty feet high and moving at around a hundred miles an hour. The whole South Wales coast was deserted now; everyone had fled north, forming scattered communities in the Brecon Beacons.
“They want to talk,” he said. “Some of them do, anyway; the rest just want to be left alone.”
“I haven’t had a chance to look at your report.”
“Good; I haven’t had a chance to write it.”
She grunted. “Well, we’ll get you debriefed before you leave again.”
They reached the place where they had chained their bicycles to a set of railings, unlocked them, and pedalled off through the town. The weather was easing off, and people were coming out onto the streets. They looked, for the most part, content and well-fed and prosperous. Adam thought of the people he’d seen in Wales, just one bad day away from starvation.
Plymouth had come through the disaster almost unscathed, and in those early days when order was breaking down across the country, the garrison at HMS Drake had managed to keep a lid on things. Later, people had started to drift into the town from all over the West, looking for security, and for quite a long time they had buttoned themselves up against the world and the chaos in it. Times changed, though. The weather was improving, finally, and in the past few years the people who ran Guz had looked farther afield, wondering what was going on, sending out representatives to have a look, check things out, make assessments. It was still early days, they were still formulating a position, but Adam had a sense that the country was beginning to wake up from a long and terrible nightmare.
At the gates of the naval base, they showed their identification and were waved through. Reaching the Bureau, the minders peeled off in the direction of the canteen, while Adam and Chrissie went on up to her office.
“I really wouldn’t send you if there was someone else,” she said, taking off her coat and hanging it on the back of the door.
“It’s okay,” he said.
“No, it isn’t.” She sat down at the desk and started unlocking drawers. “It isn’t okay. You must be shattered.”
In all honesty, Wales had not been terribly taxing. Just a lot of walking and talking to people, sleeping indoors when he got the chance, living rough when he had to. He said, “What do you want me to do if Eleanor’s being held?”
“Use your initiative.” She opened a drawer and took out a cardboard folder. “But it might be best if you don’t start a war with these people just yet.”
“Not authorised to start wars,” he said. “Got it.”
She glanced at him, decided to let it go. She held out a sheet of paper. “Here’s a chit; when you’re ready, get yourself down to the stores and kit yourself out. Anna Mendonça’s leaving the day after tomorrow; you can go with Ricky.”
“I can go now,” he suggested. He’d only been home to check on the cat, which was being looked after by old Mrs Spicer downstairs, but the cat appeared to have forgotten who he was.
She shook her head. “Try to get a little rest, at least. Twenty-four hours, and then back into it. You’ll get a nice long leave when you get back.”
“You said that when you sent me to Wales,” he reminded her.
She thought about it. “I don’t remember that.”
“I should have got you to write it down.”
Chrissie looked at him again. Then she took out a clean sheet of paper, scribbled some words on it, and signed it. She held it up. “Happy now?”
He shrugged.
“Go home,” she said. “Rest.”
HOME WAS A flat in a three-floor conversion in Beaumont. Going up the front steps, he saw the cat waiting at the top. He held out his hand and made kissing noises, but the cat, a stray ginger tom he’d named Happy because it seemed permanently pissed-off, just looked at him for a few moments and then wandered away.
Upstairs, everything was as he’d left it a month ago when he left for Wales. Although to be fair there wasn’t very much; he hadn’t spent enough time here, over the past couple of years, for it to feel much like home. It was just the place he came to when he wasn’t away. Maybe the cat had been a mistake, now he t
hought about it.
He spent twenty minutes with sticks and wadded-up paper and coal, lighting the fire, then he took off his boots and stretched out on the sofa. Closed his eyes and listened to a hail shower rattling on the skylights and thought about the hills of the Brecon Beacons, where only a handful of people spoke English and everyone was too busy simply trying to survive to distrust him. It was hard country, scattered farms, no real organisation to speak of. The death toll in Wales, during the Long Autumn, had been ferocious. It had been hard enough in Guz, but out there in the wilds, well. He’d liked the Welsh; they were tough, capable, direct people and to have survived out there at all was quite a feat, but they were tired. Some of them had heard about Guz and wanted to cross the Channel into the West Country. They thought it was a land of milk and honey, which it was not, but at least there was a semblance of order here, almost cut off from the rest of the country by the shallow inland sea which had once been Wiltshire.
During the Long Autumn, everyone had hunkered down, no one travelled very much. Entire communities died of starvation or disease unremarked by their neighbours just a few miles away. He’d been up in Northamptonshire the previous year and found it almost completely deserted, stripped of its population by what sounded, if the stories were accurate, like a flu epidemic which could have wiped out the whole country had people moved about more. The North was still pretty much a mystery to the people in the West, and Scotland might as well have been a place of legends.
As for the rest of the world, it was anyone’s guess. Guz had maintained contact with the elements of the Devonport Flotilla which had been at sea when The Sisters came, but one by one they had fallen silent. From time to time, there were sporadic, garbled radio transmissions from the East Coast of America. The US had taken a big fragment of the comet in the face, and things sounded as if they were still very bad there. France was a charnel house, the Low Countries were mostly underwater. Adam imagined little communities everywhere, like Guz, or probably more like the fortified farms he’d seen in the Beacons, getting by with only the most basic technology and medical care, eternally dreading a crop failure or a livestock disease or a burst appendix, on the edge of failure for so long that they couldn’t remember anything else. Exploration, finding out what had happened to the rest of the country, let alone the rest of the world, was a luxury no one could afford.
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