The Remnant

by Charlie Fletcher

  The general air of anonymity was carried on in the décor of the house which, unlike other such old manors, had no family portraits on the walls. But instead, in his study at least, there was a mirror. And it was from that looking-glass, hung on the wall behind him, that a figure stepped without a word, the carefully placed foot landing on a floorboard that creaked alarmingly.

  Issachar turned with surprising speed, the pistol already in his hand.

  “That’s new,” said Dee, calmly looking down at the offending floorboard.

  Templebane breathed again and returned the firearm to its former duty as a paperweight.

  “I had them all loosened specially,” he said. “I do not like being crept up on.”

  “You could just shroud the mirror,” said Dee. “Hang something over it. That would stop it working.”

  “But then how would I avail myself of your valuable and instructive company, Doctor Dee?” said Templebane. “Will you take some brandy?”

  Dee stood with his back to the fire and accepted a glass, which Issachar filled liberally. He sipped and nodded.

  “Good,” he said.

  “My fathers built a cold house, but laid in a good cellar,” said Issachar. “But you didn’t come to sample my liquor, doctor. Please proceed.”

  He sat back in his chair and looked up into the goat-bearded man in front of the fire.

  “You took it upon yourself to move against The Oversight?” said Dee, disapproval dripping from his words.

  “I did.”

  Templebane answered frankly, as if it was nothing. Dee scowled.

  “Your success was only partial.”

  “It was.”

  “You did not think to tell me of your plans?”

  “I did not.”

  “You did not?”

  “The matter was personal. They killed my brother Zebulon. It was a matter of great distress to me.” Issachar looked profoundly, almost insolently undistressed as he said this.

  “And Mountfellon knew nothing of it either?”

  “Indeed not,” said Issachar. “He would have objected strongly, obsessed as he was about stealing what was within the house and the library. I think he wished to take the whole library itself, all the esoteric incunabula and the various arcane objects stored there into the bargain. He is a very greedy man. One momentary keek at their strange cabinet of curiosities and he must have it for his own …”

  “And he knows nothing of our connection?”

  “Not from me,” snorted Templebane, as if the suggestion was faintly shocking. “The house of Templebane prides itself on its discretion, as you know.”

  “I have known the Templebanes since they were burning old women and simple young girls for three ha’pence apiece,” said Dee. “So don’t come it with me, cunning man.”

  Issachar let a small smile tiptoe swiftly across his lips and then disappear.

  “Mountfellon imagines himself the prime mover in all he does, such is the conceit of all great titled men.”

  “Good,” said Dee. “Lucky for you that your success was only partial.”

  Issachar tasted more brandy, swirling it around the inside of his great pouchy cheeks before he swallowed it.

  “It was partial in the heroic sense,” he said, “in that though a failure, it was considerable in its impact: the house is destroyed and all the contents burned …”

  “No,” said Dee. “Not all the contents.”

  “Are you sure?” said Issachar. “My eyes and ears on the streets tell me it is no more than a rubble-strewn midden …”

  “I assure you,” said Dee. “If the item I have in mind had been touched by your pyromaniac efforts, considerably more than one house would now be ruined. It is, as I said, greatly to your advantage that it was not.”

  “Is that so?” said Issachar, hiding his interest by reaching for the brandy bottle and offering it to his guest.

  “I would not say it if it were not so,” said Dee, holding his glass steady as it was refilled. “They will have saved it and put it somewhere for safekeeping, most likely beneath running water as before.”

  Issachar’s eyes flickered, and as he turned to replace the brandy bottle, he made sure to slide the note containing the rentable Ruby’s information about Sharp and his interest in Irongate Steps back under the day-book.

  “And,” he said, “if I was to have an idea of its likely whereabouts?”

  “You would be rewarded greatly. More in fact than we have ever paid you or your fathers. And even more so if you also found a way to retrieve it, or perhaps even better to persuade Mountfellon to use his considerable resources to do so,” said Dee. “His riches and his hunger are—”

  “—something for us to work with. Of course,” said Issachar as he leant back in his chair and stared at the reflection of the fire playing across the simple plasterwork overhead. A slow smile flowered as he thought.

  “You have a plan, cunning man?” said Dee, who had missed none of this, hiding his own satisfaction at having planted the seed about Mountfellon in the other’s brain in such a way that Templebane was clearly in the process of making the whole stratagem his own. Issachar sat forward, suddenly all business.

  “I am a simple man before I am a cunning one, Doctor Dee,” he said. “I have three fears: I fear penury, like anyone else in this world. I fear The Oversight, for they would revenge themselves most pitilessly upon me if they knew, as I believe they do, that it was my hand that moved against them, and I have a similar but slightly lesser apprehension about our friend the noble lord, who would be most unsympathetic and I dare say spitefully vindictive if he knew I had destroyed the plunder he hoped to have off them.”

  “These are reasonable anxieties,” said Dee. “And yet you smile.”

  “And yet I smile,” said Issachar. “For I think I can see a way to kill all three birds with one stone.”

  “Can you?” said Dee, leaning forward with interest sparkling in his eyes.

  Issachar reached for the bottle again.

  “Yes, doctor, with a little bluff and some good planning, I think I can see a way to have the noble lord use his resources to get what you want, and then to have the Sluagh relieve him of it and give it to us. Brandy?”

  CHAPTER 26

  THE UNKINDNESS OF RAVENS

  At midnight they made their way from the warmth of the fireside in the blackhouse to a point further up on the hillside. The moon was silvering the rocks and the sea below as they pushed through the unkempt heather towards a scrabble of larger rocks indistinguishable from several other groups around them. The Smith carried his long bag with the hammer in it in one hand, and a driftwood ladder over the other shoulder. Beira had a bale of dry heather-bedding on her back.

  She stopped next to a rock seemingly picked at random, dropped the heather beside it and rolled the stone to one side with surprising ease, revealing a carefully made stone-lined hole leading down into the darkness below. He lay on his stomach and fed the ladder down into the shaft. It was an eight-foot ladder and he had to lean far into the hole to get its feet down on the floor of the chamber.

  He pulled a candle from his pocket and snapped it alight, dropping it onto the rough slabs that had been laid on the floor of the underground cell. The walls were made of small flat rocks, laid like a dry-stone wall, making a rough beehive shape around a central pillar, itself made from stones similarly stacked one on top of the other. Just visible at the far edge of the souterrain a low tunnel led away, angled upwards with the slope of the hill, barely broad enough for a man to fit in, and tapering as it disappeared in the gloom beyond the throw of the candle flame.

  “You know. I was thinking on what you said about how this feels like forever to you,” she said. “And I think that’s because you can’t let go.”

  “I have let go of her,” he replied, rolling around and dropping his legs into the hole, finding a rung on the ladder and pulling his bag closer, looping the handles over his arm.

  “Not of her. I
don’t mean her,” she said. “Though since you mention it, I don’t believe you have let go of her either, and I’d be the very last to blame you—I mean you can’t let go of an idea. Maybe it can’t let go of you.”

  “An idea?”

  “A belief then,” she said. “The belief that you can change things.”

  “I do change things,” he said. “We have changed things.”

  “And yet here you are. Once more,” she said, looking down at him. “In this hole. Asking for your own blood again.”

  She could see the moon reflected in his eyes as he looked up at her silhouetted against the clear night sky.

  “If you don’t get up when you’re knocked down, the fight is over,” he said. “It’s not more complicated than that.”

  “Exactly,” she said.

  “You agree?”

  “No. I didn’t say that. I said exactly. That’s the precise cleft you’re stuck in. That you’ve always been in. Maybe it’s simply to do with being a man.”

  “That’s all I’ve ever been. A simple man trying to do a simple thing.”

  “No. That’s who you were before all this began,” she sighed. “Neither of us have been simple since then, have we?”

  “You’re not so complicated, Beira,” he said.

  “If you believe that you’re a fool, and I know you’re not a fool, so don’t go dirtying up a perfectly clean night with a lie like that,” she said, voice sharp. Then she exhaled heavily and knelt on the lip of the shaft.

  “I’m not fighting anything, Wayland. I’m just watching and being. Being and watching. That’s why time does not chafe me as it does you, who try and swim against its current. And it is a flow, time, just like a tide in the sea; if you just be, if you just watch, you float with it, and its passage doesn’t irk you at all.”

  “You know what I think?” said The Smith.

  “Yes,” she said. “After all the long years, I think I probably do.”

  “I think that just watching and being what you are is how you choose to fight.”

  “Do you?” she said.

  “I do.”

  “Well,” she said, rising and dusting nonexistent dirt from the front of her skirt. “Maybe you aren’t as simple as you pretend to be. Make a hole there—”

  She threw the bale of cut heather down the hole beside him.

  “Everything you need is where you left it. No reason you should lie on the stones. Heather makes a good enough mattress, as you well know.”

  “I may take a full day,” he said.

  “How bad are you?” she asked, her hand reaching down and touching his arm. He shrugged.

  “The Raven flew with me all the way in case I did not get to you. I knew it wasn’t necessary, but Hodge insisted.”

  “The present Terrier Man.”

  “He’s a good one.”

  “I know. He keeps a good guard on my ravens, and he has a young apprentice with a new dog.”

  “You do watch everything, don’t you?”

  “No one can watch everything. But like The Raven herself, I do keep an eye on those I am bound to. I think it’s good that the Hodge man has a replacement in training.”

  Smith’s head came up. Like a dog on point.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You well know what I mean,” she said. There was something in his face that said part of him did not want to go down the ladder.

  “I’ll see you soon,” he said.

  “You will,” she grinned.

  She watched him go down the hole with a smile on her face. And then she dragged and rolled the big slab back on top of the hole, lost the smile and walked back down the hill towards her house, brow furrowed in thought.

  She didn’t see The Raven flap into position on top of the rock, like a guard.

  But she knew it was there.

  She got halfway to the house before she shook her head and walked wearily back up the hill. She snapped her finger and The Raven jumped off the boulder and floated onto her wrist. She bowed her head and whispered to it. It was a long conversation. And when it was done she put two fingers in her mouth and split the night with a shrill whistle, and all the other ravens flapped into the sky and came to wheel around her in the silver moonlight, like a slow black whirlpool in the air, until she lofted the Raven on her wrist towards the moon. It circled once, twice and then thrice for the luck of it, as if bidding a farewell to the others who were already flapping slowly southwards, and then dropped again and took up its former position on the boulder.

  She slumped against the rock and sat with her back to it. Her eyes were wet. She picked up a smaller rock and tapped the bigger one.

  Inside the souterrain The Smith was sitting in the dark. He looked up at the noise.

  “Beira?”

  She bent down and spoke through a thin crack in the rock.

  “I’ve sent the ravens.”

  “Good.”

  She took a deep breath.

  “But The Raven will stay. You will need an overwatch.”

  He tried to stand in shock, but was horrified to find his legs didn’t work, and staggered back, steadying himself with a hand against the rough edges of the stone-stacked wall.

  “What have you done?” he shouted hoarsely. “I can’t …”

  “It wasn’t just the peat in the whisky, Wayland,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”

  “Beira!”

  “Sleep,” she whispered into the crack. “I know it’s hard, but it’s done. So take it soft. You sleep now. It will feel like sleep if you let it.”

  She wiped the tears from her eye.

  “They need me!” he shouted, trying to claw himself to his feet. “The Oversight needs me!”

  “They must stand or fall on their own now,” she said. “In your heart you know this. In your head you know there are greater things at stake than this Last Hand. In your heart you know the game is much, much longer than that.”

  “You trapped me,” he breathed hoarsely, his eyes fluttering in the dark.

  “But I sent the ravens,” she said. “I did do that.”

  “You trapped me,” he repeated, hands falling limply to his side.

  “And you forgot, Wayland,” she said, her eyes watching the last of the ravens flap over the brow of the hill. “Everything is a circle, and not all the old stories come from the past. Some were born in the future. Now settle yourself on the heather before you fall, for the dark is coming and the floor is hard beneath you.”

  THIRD PART

  BREAKING AND ENTERING

  Malum quidem nullum esse sine aliquo bono.

  There is, to be sure, no evil without something good.

  Pliny the Elder

  ON THE AMERICAS

  Of the Americas I have less to say—knowing little and wishing to learn more … but I will say that though some believe America to be Aravot … as described in the Zohar, viz. Seventh Heaven and location of the Garden of Eden: “for there are the treasures of good life, blessing and peace” … I can as yet see no proof of it, nor can I believe the claims made by Thomas Thorowgood in his “Jews in America or Probabilities that The Americans are of That Race” holding the likely antecedents of the native American to be the ten lost tribes … the contrary view posited in the answering tract by Sir Hamone Lestrange refutes this spurious pamphleteer better than I …

  (Handwritten addendum to the above, in the rabbi’s hand:

  The Great and Hidden History of the World is a living work, and in time I hope I or those that follow will correct the present lacuna, since the New World may yet vastly surprise the Old, if Old Mistakes are not re-visited.)

  From The Great and Hidden History of the World by the Rabbi Dr. Hayyim Samuel Falk (also known as the Ba’al Shem of London)

  CHAPTER 27

  THE CUNNING MAN CASTS A FLY

  Issachar Templebane had had himself driven at great speed and almost greater discomfort from his anonymous hiding place in the countryside to the much more ostentati
ous bolthole that was Gallstaine Hall, ancient family seat of the Blackdyke family. He endured the awkward cross-country journey, jolting from turnpike to high road to cart track and back again, by telling himself that he was going a-fishing, possibly for the biggest catch of his lifetime, and that if he was to land his prey, he would need all his faculties about him, and there was thus no benefit in wasting any valuable energy in venting his frustration at the discomfort of the journey. It was a bone-shaking passage, and the only good thing that could be said of it, he thought as the carriage swept along the underground tunnel from the estate gates to the house itself, was that he finally arrived.

  There was nothing in his demeanour as he strode up the ironstone steps to Gallstaine that betrayed this, or his intentions of using Mountfellon—who he had long secretly discounted as being useless to his own ambitions—as a stalking horse to draw out the last of the hated Oversight, in order that he might ambush them and finish the destruction he had previously seen so badly and perilously bungled. Nothing betrayed the inner glee that he felt at the thought that once this final stratagem was executed (and it was, in his mind, a simple enough one and very hard to bungle if he played it right) London would be his.

  He was also not surprised by the thunderously discourteous way he was greeted once inside the echoing cavern of the inner hall. Mountfellon came hurtling down the wide marble staircase like an avalanche of ill will, one fist clenching the thigh bone of the ape that he had taken to carrying with him wherever he went like a comforting bludgeon, enjoying the destructive heft of it in his hand.

  “What the devil do you want?” he snarled.

  “An explanation,” said Issachar, holding his ground with remarkable equanimity.

  Mountfellon skidded to a halt right in front of him and leant in offensively close.

  “An explanation?” he roared, spittle flecking the collar of Templebane’s travelling cloak and the saggy wattles of the chin above it. “The devil you do, damn your impudence!”