Sovereigns of the Collapse Book 2

by Malcolm J Wardlaw

  Lawrence was finally outside the breakfast. As she cleared away the dishes, she said:

  “If Sarah-Kelly comes back, you and her will want… You’ll get the best bed in the house is what I’m trying to say.” She laughed her way back to the sink by the iron range.

  *

  Bartram ushered Lawrence up to the top end of the ground floor where they took seats at a roll-top desk. It faced a barred window with a view across the Newman’s harbour. The roll-top was apparently Bartram’s office. Its shelves were loaded with leather files of financial records, by month and year.

  “Feeling good?” Bartram asked.

  “Like a new man.”

  “Now, I’ve been thinking. The problem is what we do with you until Skay gets in touch, or else your brother comes out.”

  “Donald would never come outside the Grade Enceinte—”

  “He will. He came out here a month back and he went up to Brent Cross after the glories shelled the place. He’s a right man is your brother. It takes guts for a townie to come out here all alone. He would have fetched a pretty ransom from the ultras if they’d got him. Even our Skay was impressed, although she was too proud to admit it to his face.”

  “Donald came here?” Lawrence just did not believe it. “Describe him.”

  “Not your height, but still a well-built man. Very fit. He must do boxing or wrestling to stay like that. He had that calmness genuinely tough people have. Plus, he had two pistols on him. He’s a guy prepared to hold his own.” Bartram looked squarely at Lawrence’s face. “He’s like you, yet not all that like you.”

  “What type of pistols?”

  “One was a bloody great revolver best for knocking posts in the ground. The other was neater, a damned nice shooter. A Colt it was.”

  It was true that Father’s pistol was a Colt. It was true Donald was a few inches the shorter and had pursued boxing after almost being expelled from school for fighting. Lawrence had been so fixated on his brother as a sycophant that he had forgotten there was a violent side.

  “My brother must have changed since I knew him.”

  “Well you should know him again. I never knew any good come to people who abandoned their roots. My partner, who owns that fantastic flying boat out there—” Bartram jabbed an arm down towards the main basin. “—which he devised and built all off his own brainpower, he came out of nothing at all in Bermondsey Asylum. He once took me over to meet his mum and dad. Their house would have fitted on one of our barges, yet he never for an instant gave me to think he was too good to know them. He’s a great man and we’re honoured to have him with the business. I can’t even begin to think what’s biting Skay to believe she’s too good for him, the silly bitch.”

  Bartram paused, taking a greater interest in Lawrence’s complexion.

  “You’re a pale man,” he said. “But you just went a shade paler. What’s up?”

  “When’s he coming back?”

  “Don’t know. Rosa! When’s Prentice coming back?”

  “He never said. He just left me a hamper of goodies—you know what a dear he is, that’s where the nice tea came from—and went up to the compound to get his car. I suppose he must have gone behind the Enceinte to see his other customers.”

  Bartram just shrugged.

  “It’s anyone’s guess. You won’t know him, if that’s what you’re worried about. He’s nothing to do with the Night and Fog. He hates the ultras. He once told me the achievement he’s most proud of is, he’s never had anything to do with them. He reckons they’re no better than slavers and I suppose he’s got a point, except that I can’t afford to say so openly.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “He’s a big man, Big Knight my dad Jakub used to call him, from his last name Nightminster. Very distinguished looking. You would never guess he’s from an asylum, not even from his speech. He’s a bit like your brother—very fit and calm. Quite a superior sort of man.”

  Lawrence struggled between rage and discombobulation at the ludicrousness of the coincidence. The words pounded around and around his mind: it can’t be a coincidence. When he saw the truth—and it was the plainest, simplest truth in the world—a long sigh flowed from him. No, it was not coincidence. It was the explanation. It had been personal. Lawrence had captured the heart Nightminster could never win, not even with all his self-made wealth.

  The release from confusion left him so weak he almost fell sideways off the chair. Did it go all the way back to Oban? Had Nightminster’s prying attentions followed Sarah-Kelly’s life via whatever channels gold might open through the ultramarine network? Or it could have begun later, after Sarah-Kelly got back home and told her tale of lost love? It would have been no challenge for Nightminster to track down Lawrence at Chatham camp and fetch him out for a lifetime’s ‘adding value’.

  “I sense there are great things going on inside that head,” Bartram said.

  “It’s critical that Nightminster never learns I came here.”

  Bartram did not bother to hide his complete disbelief.

  Lawrence continued: “Not for me—I have the element of surprise, I can handle meeting him. The problem is that it would destroy everything your family has achieved here.”

  “You need to make yourself clear.”

  “Nightminster is an owner in the ultras—he’s a full member of the Ultramarine Guild. If he so much as caught a whiff I was here, the ultras would shun you. Without teams to haul your barges, you’d be finished—on the public drains.”

  Bartram dabbed the nib of a fountain pen on a blotting pad, watching the ink flower, whilst he thought this over.

  “I don’t believe what you’re saying, and I don’t know why you’re making these claims” he said. “But I’ll make sure everyone keeps their trap shut. As for you—”

  “Forget about me. I’m gone.” As Lawrence stood to go, he looked down at Byron’s clothing. For the second time, he was going to have to give up borrowed clothes. “When will my own stuff be ready?”

  Bartram did not answer. He appeared fazed absorbing what Lawrence had just told him. His initial disbelief seemed to be waning. Perhaps certain little observations over the years or occasional slips of phrase by Nightminster were returning to niggle?

  Lawrence’s mind was dashing ahead. Fortune had tossed him a perfect opportunity to kill Nightminster with the bow hidden out on the Strip. The warehouse roof offered a fine shooting point to the flying boat at a range of about forty yards. Killing the man would decapitate the Value System. The rest of its organs—the ultra thugs and the barge crews—would all be surplus without Nightminster’s sovereign leadership. As for the value population, their fate Lawrence could not control. He could only hope they would grasp their power in numbers and recapture their own destinies.

  But none of this could be, for the bow was not yet tillered and Lawrence had no practice with the arrows taken from Donald’s room. He did not waste energy cursing about it. Nightminster would be here some other time. The man hardly kept his travels a secret using that magnificent silver flying boat. What counted was that the initiative now lay entirely with Lawrence. The power of that fact swelled his morale. For the first time since his arrest back in July, he felt like a winner.

  “I can’t wait for my clothes to be ready. Just let me have a sou’wester and an oilskin.”

  “Just a minute. You’re rushing me.”

  “What’s the problem? I’m death to your family.”

  “Skay has got to see you. She would never forgive me if you left without seeing her.”

  Lawrence was accustomed to dealing with minds more stolid than his. It had been his burden throughout the years with General Wardian, indeed, his contempt of such minds had been part of his downfall. He was wary of making the same mistake again.

  “I’m leaving of my own free will—I can write a letter for her.”

  “Where’re you going now?”

  “I can look aft
er myself.”

  “Won’t you at least wait to see your brother?”

  That did give Lawrence pause for thought. Only a fool neglected his family in this world—that was a lesson he had learned in a hard school. What was the risk? Lawrence could not recall any occasion of Nightminster’s being absent from his Value System for more than a couple of days. Staying out of his sight should not be a great challenge.

  “I’ve a better idea,” Lawrence said. “We’ll wait for Donald to get here. He can escort you and I back inside the Central Enclave as guests on his passport. We’ll go to Bloomsbury College and start to trace Sarah-Kelly from there.”

  “Done! That’s a plan.” Bartram smiled up at Lawrence with a new admiration. “But until he gets here, we need you right out of sight. I’ve a string of barges moored at the island—we’ve our own little island out there in the main basin. We’ll wrap you in blankets and Bill and I will take you out and leave you on a barge like you’re just a bit of freight. No one will bother you out there, as it’s our land. We hang trespassers, so folk don’t trespass. After Prentice is gone, we’ll fetch you back and wait for Donald.”

  “There is one danger: suppose Donald arrives and asks about me in front of Nightminster?”

  Bartram suppressed a retch of fear.

  “Don’t even think about that.”

  Chapter 20

  Lawrence relaxed after being deposited in the small cabin of a barge where he was comfortable and out of the wind. The lapping of little waves and the twittering of robins and starlings in the bushes of the island made a soothing background to his rising sense that at last, at last, he was starting to win.

  After some time, Lawrence put a cautious nose out of the cabin. The island was shaped like a long, narrow horse shoe, forming a discreet harbour to store long boats. They were little craft, not as wide as a man is tall, and no longer than a wagon with a team of a dozen men, say forty feet long. He crawled across the neighbouring barge and from it pulled himself onto dry land under a rhododendron bush. The island was smothered under these bushes. Being evergreen, they hid the modest anchorage all year around. From beneath their cover, he could look at the rear view of the flying boat and beyond it to the yard of the Newman’s business.

  Whereupon, nervous exhaustion caught up with him and he dozed off.

  What sounded like distant gunfire yanked him alert, blinking and scanning all about. A cloud of dark smoke swirled behind the flying boat, pulsing from one of its engines, which chugged like a diesel locomotive. Another engine fired up, then another and another until a grey haze drifted in a long tail across the waves. Two men in a rowing boat—Bill and Dave, the human cranes—towed the machine out and swung it around to point its dogfish snout pointing down the length of North Kensington basin. They unhitched the rope from a cleat on the nose and pulled back to the shore. The engines lifted in tone, the machine eased out further from the quays, steadied and passed the island close enough for Lawrence to get a clear look at the unmistakable swept-back hair and high-domed cranium of Nightminster, The Captain. The flying boat sustained its modest pace, gradually shrinking into the distance until it became difficult to make out against the outline of warehouses at the far end of the basin. It seemed to fold up and then spread out again. The flying boat had turned about to face the prevailing wind. Now its propellers hurled up clouds of spray, the nose lifted, its keel skimmed the water, it bounced and was airborne, bellowing overhead leaving two thin trails of smoke. Lawrence’s eyes followed it all the way out of sight as it banked to the north, its heavy, thrumming beat fading.

  “I beat you, you bastard,” he murmured. Truly, he glowed with the victory he had won over Nightminster.

  A few minutes later, Bartram and Bill returned to find Lawrence once again wrapped in blankets inside the cabin of the barge. He acted the role of inert load until he was back under cover in a warehouse, whereupon he rolled out of the blankets and stood up.

  “When will Nightminster be back?”

  “No idea, he keeps his own schedule.”

  Lawrence detected a coolness about both men. The earlier excitement Bartram had displayed at the prospect of looking for Sarah-Kelly was gone. Lawrence sensed they were about to tell him to sling his hook and not come back.

  “Won’t the children be home soon?”

  “They’re back at school.”

  Lawrence glanced anew at the sun. He must have slept for several hours, it was mid-afternoon now. Bill returned to his labours in the Newman’s basin, while Bartram led in silence into the house and stood at the head of the dining table, where he laid a hand on several sheets of good-quality typed paper. He was agitated about something.

  “There’s been some developments—quite a few developments. My problem, Lawrence, is that out there—” He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder to indicate the outside world. “—out there a bunch of idiots is running around screaming this and that and threatening to shoot everyone. The National Party are ruling the roost now and I don’t like their flavour at all. Skay made me believe they were quite sensible people. What I’ve seen of them is that they’re a bunch of kids with guns. Except one. There is one who is an intelligent human being He came here to talk with the Basin Council. Can you guess who it was?”

  “No.”

  “Your brother Donald.”

  Lawrence was too baffled to respond.

  “Now he’s got a grand title,” Bartram said. “Minster for trade of the Republic of the New Nation, or something like that, longer than any of my barges.”

  “Did you say that Donald, my brother, is with the National Party?”

  “He’s one of their head honchoes, right up there with Farkas.”

  “And he was here in this basin?”

  Bartram took up the papers from the table.

  “This lot came down from the National Party HQ—by dedicated motorcycle courier no less. It scared the shit out of me when I opened the envelope, because Prentice was right where you are. The National Party want to speak with you up at Brent Cross. They’ve sent a cover letter that will get you through any check point and into their main office up there. Do you know where it is?”

  Lawrence tried to say “yes” but only managed a croak. He cleared his throat. “Yes. I did some work there a few days ago.”

  “The summons has been signed by no less than Madam Sarah-Kelly Newman. Seemingly she is something called lead statement manager for the Atrocity Commission. I have absolutely no idea what that is all about, but she’s alive and obviously thriving and that’s all I care about.”

  Lawrence took the cover letter and put it in the side pocket of the plus fours. He felt liquid fear inside, even if he hoped to maintain his poise on the surface.

  “How did she know I was here?” he asked.

  “No idea. I’m simply not getting involved with radicals. All I care about is my business and getting her back into it.”

  “I understand. Could I have a sou’wester and oilskins?”

  “Of course you can. I’ve a warehouse full of that stuff.”

  *

  Outside the gates of the Friendly Cooperative of North Kensington basin, Lawrence hung about, indecisive. He watched a company of the new National Army march past in smart step on its way to Ladbroke fort. The uniforms were a hotchpotch of General Wardian, Universal Parrier and Guards to the People. It was the national tricolour armband that bound them now. The National Party was the new power in London.

  He tried to think through the risk in this summons. Donald must have struck up some kind of relationship with Sarah-Kelly—that in itself was extraordinary. Donald had been wholly cynical in his pursuit of women, often bragging to Father about his plans to marry into a sovereign clan. Notwithstanding that, there was no other way she could have known where to find her old lover.

  It was not credible that Sarah-Kelly meant to hand him back to the ultras, of that at least he could be reasonably confident. That hardly reassured him, h
owever. The truth was, his worst fears had happened, she had delved into the dirty work of the glories and obviously excelled at it. Now she was a big wheel in the Atrocity Commission. How might dreadful truths change a person? Perhaps she wanted to look in his eyes to tell him he was named for arrest and was going to hang.

  Lawrence stared at his boots for a long time, frowning. Dread hung on his soles as he finally turned north towards Brent Cross. Why not go the other way—collect the bow and arrows and disappear into the chaos of the marginal lands? To live as what—top killer of rats? It was not the lowness of the life that repelled him, it was the skulking evasion of it. He was not going to flee his own past, least of all before the eyes of Sarah-Kelly. So, he trudged with a heavy gait over Duddon Hill to the frontier of Brent Cross, where the fanciful guards had been replaced by troopers with national armbands.

  The frontier guards accepted the cover letter with barely more than a glance. Lawrence walked across the market place towards the neat two-storey building where a few days previously he had unloaded furniture and spotted his old friend Kalchelik. Might Kalchelik have something to do with this summons? Lawrence shrugged. Perhaps.

  The market place was quiet compared to his previous visits. The great crowds of the weekend had gone. The seething traffic of man-hauled ultramarine wagons was also gone. Indeed, he could not see any black uniforms, despite making a thorough study of the area. All he could see were National Army troops at ease gathered around field kitchens or else being drilled in squares. He slowed approaching the National Party headquarters building. His instincts yelled at him to run, find a new life elsewhere, see the big, wide world. His intellect told him he admitted everything if he ran, and what was more, he admitted it to Sarah-Kelly.