“Who are you and what do you want?”
“I am Lawrence Aldingford.” Lawrence spoke quietly.
Bartram displayed no surprise. His face did not so much as twitch. The only change was an introspection in the eyes as a calculation took place. Lawrence recognised a man accustomed to making swift judgements of safety. There was nothing he could do to change Bartram’s mind. All he could do was wait and hope. Bartram delved in a pocket and drew out a key with which he unlocked the gate and pulled it open.
“Follow me inside—and keep your mouth shut.”
Lawrence did exactly that, while relief flooded him. The mastiff followed his every inch, training its head in silence. They passed a couple of immensely strong, wide men lifting a sack of potatoes into one of the barges. Bartram said to them:
“I’ll be back out in a min. This guy’s got news about Sarah-Kelly.”
He led inside the house. Lawrence entered a glorious warmth and smell of bacon, toast and coffee. The whole ground floor was one room, the roof held up by an ad hoc arrangement of props to control the worst of the sagging. He could hear children thumping around and laughing upstairs. An attractive women—startlingly like Sarah-Kelly apart from being older and a bit stouter—turned from the cast iron range. She wore a long black skirt and a pure white apron. Her face opened in curiosity on seeing Lawrence, although she said nothing until Bartram spoke.
“Sit there.” Bartram shot an arm out at a worn leather armchair with its back to the windows. He made a tour of the ground floor, searching all its alcoves and obscured areas, before coming back to the woman at the stove. He said in a low voice: “That’s Lawrence Aldingford, Sarah-Kelly’s boyfriend who got fogged up in Oban. We’ve got to help him.”
“Of course we will.”
“The big problem is his voice, well actually, his whole manner. You know what the courtier class of town are like—superiority is bred into them.”
“Can’t he put on an accent?”
Bartram looked over at Lawrence.
“Do you think you can put on a slummy accent?”
Under-sergeant Brummie came to mind. His whine still echoed around Lawrence’s mind, having put up with it almost every day he had been the Value System.
“How about Soho?” Lawrence suggested.
“Say: ‘Do you reckon he saw us?’”
Lawrence gave it a try. Their faces grew patient.
“Maybe not Soho,” Bartram said. “Tell you what, get a wash and a change of clothes and in the meantime we’ll think of something else. Rosa will get one of the gals to wash all your stuff…” He bent closer to inspect the overalls, then stooped to examine the boots. “Lift your foot up, will you? Let us see the sole.” Lawrence obeyed, feeling like a horse being checked. When Bartram straightened up, his eyes thinned with a mixture of suspicion and bafflement.
“You didn’t get this stuff in the Night and Fog, so what have you been up to?”
“It was issued to me in the Night and Fog—not the normal Fog, I was in a special camp where we made this stuff.”
“Oh really?” Bartram frowned. “That complicates things. A lot. Let me explain my problem, Lawrence. Sarah-Kelly and me had a row a couple of weeks ago. Her problem is she’s headstrong, which is fine, except she’s got nothing to be headstrong about. She’s just stubborn. But she’s my sister and a family don’t get nowhere by falling apart, you see, least of all in our business. Barging is a hard business, it’s a fight for everyone. Families that fall apart fail—and that’s the end of them. On top of that, she’s quite big in the National Party now. She knew Vasco Banner quite close—” His eyes flickered down. He clenched his jaw for a moment. “We’ve heard nothing since those glory bastards attacked the Party office at Bloomsbury College. All we can do is hope. The thing is, from the business perspective it would be champion if she got us close to the National Party big-shots to get more deals. I think the National Party is going to be big, at least here in the Thames Valley. I just want to make clear why I’m putting my neck out to help a stranger. Because you are deadly poison to this business if the ultras get the slightest whiff we’re helping Fog on the run.”
“I understand all of this.”
“How did you get inside the frontier?”
“Cut my way through the bushes with pliers and a lot of shove.”
“You’ve no passport or nothing?”
“Nothing. I lost all that when I was arrested up in Oban.”
“You tell me you were in a camp that made those clothes and boots?”
“The less you know about it, the safer you are. Now my father is dead, there is nothing I can do with the secret except live with it and hope it doesn’t kill me.”
“We trade this stuff, The Captain’s Best. It’s our biggest earner. If this secret can kill you, it can kill us too. Maybe we deserve to know.”
Lawrence assumed Bartram was jumping to conclusions. There must be many places that made canvas and leather working clothes. Such garments were in ubiquitous demand in every industrial asylum, in the sovereign lands and in the glory trusts. It was not far-fetched that two brand stamps were similar.
“That I doubt—show me a crate of it.”
Bartram led him back outside and across the yard into one of the warehouses. The interior was well lit with electric lights, revealing an extensive stock of fundamental industrial goods: engine and gearbox castings, steel pipe, truck tyres, stacks of wooden crates. He levered the top off one crate with a crowbar. It was loaded with high quality leather goods: officers’ boots, riding boots, raincoats, finely crafted ladies’ gloves, motorcycle jackets and more. Lawrence reached in and pulled out a jacket: “Style Captain”. There was no mistaking the logo. He straightened up, aware his right eyelid was twitching with shock.
“How does this cargo get here?” Lawrence asked.
“We pick it up from Limehouse basin and bring it over on the Regent’s Canal. We sort it out here and distribute to customers in the north mostly, but a few in the south. That’s our business; distribution.”
“Whom do you collect the cargoes from?”
“Barges come in up the Thames—not inland barges like ours, I’m talking big hundred-tonners; sea-going sailing barges. They have to drop their load at Limehouse basin as they’re too big for inland working.”
“Where do they come from?”
“No idea. You don’t stay in business asking questions like that—you don’t stay alive long, neither.”
“Are the barges extremely smart welded steel ships with black hulls and white rigging?”
“Yup. Pure heirloom quality. The best I’ve ever seen.”
Lawrence sat down on the crate while he tried to think through the angles of this. Sarah-Kelly’s family traded products from the Value System? He struggled to believe that was a coincidence. Yet he struggled to believe it was anything else. What else could it be?
Pezzini claimed he had met Sarah-Kelly on the Neptune. That was a coincidence. As he said, society was no longer a vast, teeming ocean as it had been in the Public Era. Coincidences happened, especially amongst people who moved about a lot. Most of the population of Britain did not move at all. They were fixed to the soil or asylum of their birth.
“Is there something you need to tell me?” Bartram asked.
“I have not changed my mind. The less you know, the safer you are. It would be extremely dangerous for you to know what I know. So, you’re not going to know.” Lawrence was still thinking through the implications of risk. Barges over in Limehouse ten miles away on the far side of the Central Enclave were of no risk to him here in the Newman business of North Kensington basin. No one in the Newman business had any motivation to tell Value System barge crews about him. It was troubling to know the family made a living from Value System products, but it did not in itself create danger.
“This has no relevance to my situation. You are not endangered by this secret. Trust me on that, I’m an ex
pert on risk,” Lawrence said. “The ultras must not find out I’m here. How often do they come into the compound?”
“Never. We pole our barges across the basin and through the tunnel under the frontier to the Grande Union Canal where we pick up the teams and off we go. Ultras aren’t allowed inside our basin, except as special guests. What worries me is that one of the kids might blurt something about you. There’s plenty of folk who’d snitch to the ultras to get in better standing. It’s your voice that’s the real problem. That, plus you’re a rotten actor.”
Lawrence dwelled on his failure to pose as a dumb marginal and could only accept that Bartram was right.
“Then I’ll stay away from children.”
“They’ll be off to school in half an hour. Take a seat over in that office—” He swung an arm towards a cabin in the corner. “I’ll tell Bill and Dave—the guys you saw outside—and my brothers you’re a friend of Sarah-Kelly’s we’re helping out. It’s no lie. It gives you cover for today at least. As for the longer term—”
Lawrence reassured him the longer term was not going to be a problem. He set up the impression brother Donald would have the clout to secure a pardon through his links to Tom Krossington. Perhaps Lawrence’s acting skills continued to flop; Bartram’s response was non-committal:
“We’ll take it one day at a time. All I really want to know is that Skay is safe, not dead at Bloomsbury College.”
“I could go and look for her.”
“We’ll discuss it later. Wait there in that cabin. We’ll get you a bath and fresh clothes, some grub and… Maybe I’ll have had some ideas by then.”
Chapter 19
Lawrence sought an escape route. The warehouses had internal archways allowing him to explore all three bays without going out into yard. There were no exits from the premises. No windows, not even barred ones, no doors. The external walls were very solid mortared brick. The buildings were probably of Public Era vintage adapted from a previous purpose. A ladder ran up the wall from the corner cabin to a hatch in the roof. No doubt this was used by the fire watch to check for torches or burning arrows landing on the roof. Lawrence made a hasty ascent and peered out from under the hatch. It offered a fine view across the bushes and gaping basements of the Strip. Looking back in daylight over his route of the night, Lawrence was amazed he had avoided a lethal fall.
A quarter of a mile to the south, the red saw-tooth battlements of the Grande Enceinte formed the silhouette over which the morning sun blazed. Its battlements were so crowded with heads and shoulders that he could only suppose tourists had invaded the galleries and stairwells within. That meant tourists could roam armouries stacked with 155mm shells, bags of propellant, crates of 0.303 ammunition, racks of rifles… Well, it was thankfully not his problem. It did reveal the National Party was still some way from exerting its presumptuous rule upon its subjects. At the gates of White City fort was a little cluster of dark suits handing out sheets, no doubt more of their bulletins. They did not appear to be hindering the flow in and out. Lawrence risked a quick lift of the hatch to scan the roof. It was slate, with a moderate slope. The gap across to the neighbouring premises was too far for even a desperate man to jump, unless he was desperate enough to believe a broken spine was going to improve his safety. The other way, at the west end of the Newman property, the warehouse was only two floors high. That was low enough to risk a jump and roll onto grass—after which one had to get over the frontier. Lawrence ran his eyes along its prickly thatch. He noted a thin area about a hundred yards to the left, to the east. A man could bore through that in half a minute and be away. Whether he enjoyed the motivation of mastiffs snapping at his buttocks was all a matter of how intensely his pursuers wished to bring him back.
He descended back to the little cabin and sat surrounded by wooden filing cabinets neatly labelled by years and customers: Soho KBS 2100 on, Pallingham Arrivals 2090-2100, Braunston Grant & Culworth 2100 on etc. The names meant nothing to Lawrence. He was conscious of how alien this nation of the Newman family was compared to the corporate nation of General Wardian. Each did its business totally unaware of and independent of the other. Lawrence was fairly sure the glory trusts did not rely on the canals for logistics. The glory trusts were self-sufficient for safety’s sake. They moved their troops by ship as much as possible. After disembarking ashore the troops moved inland by route-marching, any heavy gear being towed by steam trucks (which could burn wood from any locale).
Still, it was a massive luxury to be amongst friends. He relaxed back and shut his eyes, the exhaustion of lonely struggle coming over him, turning him into sagging plasticine. If it came to the worst, would he bother fleeing by the hatch to the Strip? What was the point? It was like jumping over the rail of a ship into wild open sea—it changed the manner of death, not the end result. Why not just face up to execution? At least it was a dignified end compared to skulking on the public drains dying of cold and hunger. He lingered on the realities of such a wretched death. It would be frostbite, then gangrene, then death by carrion, ripped apart by a pack of dogs or worse, blinded by feeding rooks—eaten alive strip by strip. That was how a rabbit died. No, if his time came, he was going to stand and face it like a man.
He woke up in the process of sliding off the chair, startling a cat that had been staring at him around the door. For some seconds he remained listening, trying to judge if much time had passed. A quick look outside to the yard revealed shadows stretched long westwards—it was still quite early. The sleep must have been brief. For amusement, he watched the cat hunt. It had spotted a mouse under a pallet. It lunged into the gap and emerged with the mouse dangling by the tail, whereupon it rolled about, pawing at the mouse, batting it, letting it sneak off, then pouncing on its tail and dragging the miserable creature back. The cat tired of play and bit the mouse’s head off, crunching the skull with an air of introspection.
Lawrence ruminated on being taken for execution. Did he seriously see no better end for himself? He must have suffered a blip of courage. He was the guy who had fought his way out of the fens and survived the asylum margins to get this far. He could not just give up—he had to keep the great adventure going. Christmas was coming! All sorts of travelling troupes and circuses flowed the public drains at this time of year. They would need a guy like him who could use his fists and make weapons. There was always a new chapter for those with the guts to turn the page.
Steps approached. The cat dashed off with its prize. Into the warehouse strode Rosa. The swaying of her hips under the black dress stirred Lawrence’s loins. God how he wanted a woman.
“It’s all clear, the kids are off to school. They won’t be back until lunch, so we’ve plenty of time. I’ve spoken to everyone else. It’s best if you don’t say anything unless it’s just me or Bartram. That keeps things simple.” She looked closely at his face. “Some of those scratches need a bit of iodine.”
He followed her outside. While the north-facing yard was in the cool gloom of a November morning, the flying boat shone in the sun. He was amazed to see the machine was built of plates of metal rivetted together just like a ship. No wonder it sat deep in the water, rather than on it like a duck.
“That flying boat is made of metal?”
“Isn’t it extraordinary? I’ve never seen another like it.”
“How does it fly if it’s metal?”
“It’s aluminium. I’ve been inside it. The doors are light as paper.”
“It’s an heirloom?”
“Actually, it’s not. Every sheet of that was hand beaten and every rivet hand sealed. The owner is an old friend of the family going back to Bartram’s father’s day. The story I heard is that he helped Bartram’s father in some trouble with the ultras and they were partners after that. Now he’s practically a member of the family. Very rich I must say, at the same time right on our level, not stuck-up. He’s very clever. He can stand out here on a clear night and name every bright star and every constipation… Oo
ps, I mean consolation. Oh, just ignore me. He’s a Party member too. For all his wealth, he’s got no more time for the sovereigns than we have.”
She leaned towards Lawrence and dropped her voice.
“Between you and me—strictly between you and me—he’s the reason Bartram and Skay had such a row. He proposed to her a couple of weeks ago and she turned him down flat. Bartram was livid. Any sensible girl would jump at a man like that. Her problem is she has to go her own way, she won’t accept she’s a woman.
“Last winter, she got a scholarship from the Krossingtons and away she went to Oban at the ends of the Earth, then she was back again four months later half starved… She wouldn’t play the game. Still, I do have to admire her guts. She went and got herself another scholarship from Bloomsbury College to study echo-nomics. That covers her college fees but nothing else. Bartram didn’t think she was paying her way—and then she turns down a proposal from a man who could have kept her like a sovereign lady…” Rosa sighed, probably not least in regret she had never received such an offer. “Come on, we can’t stand out here yattering all day.”
Lawrence enjoyed the luxury of disrobing the filthy Value System clothing to step into his first hot bath in months, enjoy the second shave of the day, and dress in fresh clothes. These were borrowed from one of Sarah-Kelly’s cousins absent on a trip up north. Lawrence descended to a late breakfast wearing brown plus fours, long white socks, a black corduroy shirt and a crottle pullover of dubious taste. Rosa served him bacon and egg sandwiches and a tankard of genuine tea, all the while continuing her saga of the Newmans:
“I do have some good news for you Lawrence and that is, so far as we can tell, Sarah-Kelly does not have another man. I don’t think she’s got time for romance any more. Something changed her up in Oban… I don’t mean you put her off men or anything!” She gave him a dig in the ribs. “Oh, just ignore me. Something changed her. Now she’s very outspoken and critical of the sovereigns. She’s read heaps of books from the library at Bloomsbury College. I do have to admit she’s become very knowledgeable, as if she’s up with the gulls looking down at our little lives amid the big wide world. I give you fair warning to be prepared for some berating. The glory trusts are another of her pet hates. Just before she walked out, she told us at dinner every glory officer above the rank of team lieutenant should be hanged for mass murder. So—” She broke off laughing. “If you were above team lieutenant, you better watch out!” Askance must have shown on Lawrence’s face. She laid a hand on his shoulder and said: “Oh, I don’t suppose she really meant it. The thing is, there’s extreme types at that college. They get together and build up this pressure inside and they come out with these awful things.”
Sovereigns of the Collapse Book 2 Page 23
