“I can’t leave Grace—” Noah began.
“I’ll stay behind,” Weyland said. “The king needs Harry, Jack and you, not me. I’ll stay.”
Noah nodded, although she was clearly still unhappy.
Jack looked at Weyland. “Thank you,” he said.
FOURTEEN
The Ruins of Coronation Avenue, London
Monday, 14th October 1940
GRACE SPEAKS
Ilay there, listening to Matilda die, and couldn’t do anything for her. I should have been able to do something: ease her pain, move some of the rubble, still her breathing into the relief of death if that was what she wanted. I should have been able to do that for myself.
But I couldn’t do a thing. The rubble not only trapped me physically, but crushed and trapped most of the Darkwitch and labyrinthine powers I had as well. I had enough to dredge some light out of the single diamond band that was free, but that was all, and I wondered if that was not my power, but something residual of Jack in the diamonds. Even that died, after an hour or two, and we were left in the dark.
So I lay there and listened to Matilda die. I could hear her anguish in every breath: each harsh inhalation, each ragged exhalation. I could hear it in the way she cried sometimes, or the pitifully tiny movements I heard her head make as she struggled uselessly against the weight of the rubble about her. I kept calling her name. It annoyed her, I know, but oh, gods, I so desperately wanted to hear her voice, to know that she was still alive.
To know she was still with me.
I couldn’t bear to think of what lay even further beneath us in the basement shelter. Ecub and Erith were dead. Truly dead. Gone forever, and both Matilda and I cried for them. But there were others, and in the first hours after the bomb blast, they were still alive. I knew, because at first I could hear pitiful cries for help coming from below us, or desperate scratchings at the rubble.
Oh, the image, those trapped people scratching away with broken fingernails at the bricks atop them.
I could also hear the trickling of water and, after some time (how long? Hours? Days?) the unmistakeable stench of sewage.
All the cries for help below us gradually ceased, and I no longer heard the pathetic scratchings at the rubble.
When Matilda said her feet were wet I wept, because I knew that somewhere a water pipe had been broken—a sewer, too—and that whoever had been left alive after the blast had now drowned. Now that horror threatened Matilda.
“Matilda?” I whispered. “Matilda?”
She didn’t answer, and after a moment I realised I could no longer hear her ragged breathing.
“Matilda!” I stretched out my fingers, trying to feel her face, thinking only to jab at her cheek and remind her to breathe, but my fingers encountered not dry flesh, but cold, watery rubble.
Matilda had slipped away, down further into the rubble, down, down, down into her grave.
I started to sob, not caring about the pain it caused my chest, calling out Matilda’s name over and over until I could barely breathe.
All about me there was silence, save for the gentle lap of water against my fingers and the gentle grinding of rubble as it settled deeper into the water.
After a while, Catling came to me.
FIFTEEN
Buckingham Palace, London
Monday, 14th October 1940
They convened in the early afternoon in a study in the private quarters of Buckingham Palace. The queen had already gone back to Windsor, where she and George slept (the government feeling that Buckingham Palace was too easy a target for Luftwaffe bombers), and George dismissed his secretary as soon as he had shown Noah, Jack, Harry and Stella into the room.
Without asking if they wanted it, George poured everyone a large whisky, then waved them into deep, comfortable chairs.
“Jack,” said George, “what’s been happening?”
As briefly as he could, yet not omitting any necessary detail, Jack told the king about the labyrinthine shadow which hung over London. “We don’t know truly if it is a help or a hindrance, if it is a trap or a weapon, and we call it a shadow because it is too insubstantial for any of us to see it clearly. After what has happened in the past night…” Jack paused, collected himself, and went on. “After what has happened over the past night I am inclined to think it is more hindrance than help. If not for that bomb…Noah, please tell us now what you heard from Long Tom.”
Jack looked at George and lifted his hands in a gesture of despair. “She said she would wait until we got here.”
“I’m sorry, Jack,” Noah said. “Long Tom told me that he’d heard that the shadow, and thus perhaps the voice, belonged to a creature, a woman, so shadowy, so fleeting, that none could know her. He said she had not ever lived, and when I asked why it was that I could not sense her, or know of her, Long Tom said it was because she was lost to me.” She paused. “Long Tom said she is known as the White Queen for her face is as cold and pale as the winter landscape. She—”
“The White Queen?”
Noah stared at Jack. “You know her?”
“Yes, maybe I do,” Jack said. “While Grace has been staying with Ariadne, we have met on several occasions at the White Queen Cafe on Cromwell Road in Kensington. We were, so far as I could tell, the only customers. Certainly no one else was ever there when we were. There was a woman who ran the cafe…Mrs Stanford.”
Now everyone was staring at Jack.
“I don’t know any more,” he said. “Sorry. Grace and I would go there to meet, have tea and—” he gave a faint smile “—Mrs Stanford’s speciality, marmalade cake, and talk. But she was so ordinary. and nothing much ever happened there…except, of course,” he sighed, “that this strange voice spoke to us both in that place.”
“So we have a creature, the White Queen,” said Harry, “who masquerades as a Mrs Stanford, who makes marmalade cake and, in her spare time, strange labyrinthine shadows which hang over London. Marvellous. What does any of this tell us?”
“It raises more questions than it answers,” said Noah. “Who is she, this cold, unborn woman? Why can’t we know her?”
“Because she is somehow attached to Grace,” said Jack. “I think it is Grace she is interested in, or drawn to. None of us, not really.”
“But she called to you as well,” said the king.
“Maybe only because I am ‘attached’ to Grace,” Jack said with a shrug.
Stella had been sitting back, listening to the conversation, her brow creased in thought, the fingers of one hand tapping against the arm of the chair. “No, no. I don’t think you’re incidental, Jack. I think she is interested in you as well as Grace, although not perhaps as interested. Damn it! I wish we had Grace here. She must have the key. She must know something…”
“I wish we had Grace here, too,” said Noah, looking at Stella with steady eyes, “not for any information she might give us, but merely so I can hold her again, and know she is safe.”
“This is getting us nowhere,” said Jack. “All we’re doing is blowing useless words about the room. Catling has clearly given us a choice. Promise to complete her, and she will get Grace out of the nightmare that is Coronation Avenue—as well, please gods, anyone else who may still be alive—or Grace will continue to suffer, as well as London.” He shook his head. “Catling is going to escalate the violence, the death and the destruction if we don’t agree, Noah. I told her I lacked two of the kingship bands, but Catling didn’t believe me. She believes I do have them, and am just trying to deceive her. Noah, what choice do we have? What?”
No one replied immediately.
“Grace…” Stella said slowly.
“Grace is buried under several score tons of rubble and can’t get out until Noah and I—”
“I know, Jack,” Stella said. “I’m sorry.”
“Is there any way of contacting the White Queen?” George said. “Jack? Apart from Grace you are the only one who has had any contact with her.”
“She contacts us, we don’t contact her,” Jack said. “Look, if someone can arrange a car, I can drive around to the cafe from here.”
“It’s a start,” said Harry. “But if it fails?”
“My advice,” said George, “is to give Catling the promise, but to somehow delay the completion. Is that possible?”
Jack and Noah exchanged a glance.
“Yes,” said Jack, “Catling herself has made it possible. When she allied herself so closely to the land she managed to tie herself closely to its restrictions. That’s even more the case since she ‘arranged’ that Noah and I take on such vital roles within the life of the land.”
“The December solstice,” said Noah. “That would be the best time to complete her, and it is two months away. It would buy us time.”
“But if you promised,” said Harry, “would you need to go through with it?”
Noah shrugged. “No. But I dread to think of the consequences if Jack and I didn’t turn up for our ‘date’.” She grimaced. “We need to use those two months well.”
“And I need those final two bands,” Jack said. “Catling will be neither completed nor defeated without them.”
“Jack…” Noah said, sitting forward.
“Yes?”
“Do you think this White Queen might have them?”
For a moment Jack stared at Noah. “But Aeneas said…”
“Aeneas may have been duped.”
“Christ,” said Jack, “you may be right. Now it is even more important to either manage to contact the White Queen, or, better, to get Grace out of that rubble.”
“Then are we agreed,” said George. “Jack tries his best to contact the White Queen, and if that doesn’t work, then Jack and Noah give their promise to Catling…and we all hope to God that once Grace comes out she can give us more information, or that she gives Jack and Noah the key that will destroy Catling. Yes?”
No one looked very happy about it, but eventually everyone nodded. After a little more desultory conversation, Jack, Noah, the Lord of the Faerie and Stella rose to leave.
After he farewelled the others, George pulled Jack to one side. “I will send for a car for you,” he said, “but first I wanted to ask you something.”
“Yes?”
Having initiated the conversation, George now hesitated. “I was watching your face as you talked of Grace,” he said. “I wanted to ask…if…”
Jack smiled. “Are you remembering that night in the Broken Bough, when we both lamented the fact neither of us would ever have Noah?”
George’s face relaxed. “Yes.”
“Well…I thought then, and thought for too many years afterwards, that I would never find another woman I could possibly love as much as Noah. But…maybe I have. As you have.”
Now George smiled, honestly and truly. “Yes. I have. Jack…good luck.”
Jack wasn’t sure if George wished him well with Grace, or more generally with the battle against the Troy Game. But he smiled, shook the king’s hand, and left feeling marginally better than when he had entered the room.
Half an hour later he drew up in his borrowed car outside the White Queen Cafe in Cromwell Road.
Very slowly Jack got out of the car and closed the door behind him.
Both windows and door were boarded up, and the cafe looked as if it had been abandoned for many months. Cobwebs hung between planks, and, through a gap in the planks covering the door, Jack could see a pile of mail on the floor.
He felt very cold and, for a moment, closer to despair than ever.
There was a postman walking past, and Jack stopped him, asking him if he knew how long the cafe had been boarded up.
“Mrs Stanford took herself down to her sister’s place in Devon at the beginning of the war,” the postman said, watching curiously the expressions crossing Jack’s face. “The cafe hasn’t been open in over a year.”
“Of course it hasn’t,” said Jack. “Thank you.”
As the postman continued on his way, looking back over his shoulder once or twice at the American who had stopped him, Jack looked up at the sky.
The shadow had vanished.
There was nothing left.
“Grace?” Jack whispered.
He received no reply. Whatever he’d been able to perceive of Grace previously had now vanished.
Grace was as “gone” as the White Queen and the labyrinthine shadow.
It was then, also, that Jack realised Matilda was dead, and he turned to the car, and, leaning against it, crossed his arms on the car’s roof, bent his face down into them, and wept.
SIXTEEN
The Ruins of Coronation Avenue, London
Monday, 14th October 1940
GRACE SPEAKS
If I had wanted to escape previously, it was nothing to how I felt now. My right hand scrabbled desperately amongst the rubble, scraping and cutting my fingers, but there was little I could do.
I could feel Catling drawing closer, a terrifying, malignant presence, far worse than anything else I had ever felt from her, seeping down through tiny cracks in the rubble.
How are you feeling, sweet Grace?
I gave a single sob, loathing myself for the weakness. The feeling of evil was so overpowering that every sense I had was screaming at me to run, run, run…
I’d never felt this sense of evil before, and I wondered at the fact she’d been saving it for so long.
I asked you how you were feeling, Grace.
I could see her now, although this made no sense in the confined (and pitch-black) crack I had as a space about me. Catling sat on a pile of rubble a few feet away, a young woman of malevolent air and a nasty, childishly spiteful face.
“I am not at my best,” I whispered, amazed that I could even speak.
Catling laughed. “You’re about to get even worse, sweeting. Tell me, can you feel the weight of bricks crushing you?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know that you’d be dead now if it weren’t for my intervention?”
What did she want? My gratitude? “Yes.”
“Your parents and Jack are quite distraught. Did you know that?”
“No.”
“Are you happy about it?”
What did she want? “No. I wish they didn’t suffer or worry.”
“Well, I want them to suffer and worry. It is good for them. Might concentrate their minds. I’ve told them that if they don’t agree to complete me then…well, here you’ll stay. Given that I think they rather want you out, I have high hopes they’ll do what I want.”
I was crying again, silently this time, feeling the tears trickle down my grit-covered cheeks.
“So I expect they’ll get you back, dear Grace.” She paused, and in that pause I could hear malevolence gathering. “Of course, they’re not going to get you back quite the way they want.”
As soon as she finished speaking, I heard it. What sounded like a huge boulder tumbling down through the rubble. There shouldn’t be space for it, no boulder should be able to force its way down through the rubble.
But one did nonetheless.
“It is the lintel from the doorway into the flats, Grace. Heavy concrete. Able to do much damage, I imagine. Poor Jack, won’t he weep when he sees you?”
I struggled, crying out in horror as I heard the lump of concrete tumbling closer, over and over, over and over…
“I’m going to say to you what I once heard your father saying to Jack, when he was welcoming him back into London after an unfortunate period of time spent in exile. I only need you alive, Grace. I don’t need you whole.”
The concrete slid closer, rasping and rumbling, and it was the most terrible thing I have ever heard in my entire life.
I only need you alive, Grace. I don’t need you whole.
Now the concrete was sliding towards me at a frightful pace. I was screaming, not caring about the pain that tore through my chest with the effort, when I felt a sudden rush of warm air, and then something slammed i
nto my head.
SEVENTEEN
The Ruins of Coronation Avenue, London
Tuesday, 15th October 1940
Nauseated with fear and worry, Jack rejoined Noah and Weyland’s vigil at Coronation Avenue.
It was late at night now, almost midnight, but still the emergency personnel worked at the rubble, shifting it by hand, piece by piece, desperately searching for the entrance to the stairwell leading down to the basement shelter. It had been over twenty-four hours since the bomb had struck, and most of the initial crowd of onlookers had gone home to bed or their shelters, but a score or more still huddled about, sharing thermoses of tea or chocolate, transfixed by the horror before them.
The tent was still there, its interior as stark with despair as it had been when Jack had left it hours earlier. There was a table set out with the remnants of tea and sandwiches, but the Red Cross staff and volunteers had gone home an hour or so earlier. Noah and Weyland, the only two left within, had stood up when they heard the car pull up, its door slam, and then footsteps walking towards the tent, pausing as their owner stared for a long minute at the rubble.
When he entered, his uniform dishevelled, his face stubbled with beard, his eyes haggard, Noah gave a soft cry and turned her own face into Weyland’s shoulder.
“You didn’t find the White Queen,” Weyland said, his voice flat and emotionless. He looked even worse than Jack, his face grey, his eyes bloodshot, and he wavered slightly on his feet, as if exhaustion was but a few minutes from claiming him completely.
Jack gave a terse shake of his head. “The cafe was boarded up. A passing postman told me it had been that way since the beginning of the war. What Grace and I entered had been a construct of the White Queen.”
“Who is she?” Noah said, turning her head to look at Jack although she kept it resting against Weyland. “What does she want. Why? Why?”
Weyland’s arm tightened about her, and Jack looked away briefly before continuing: “There’s worse. The shadow has gone.”
“What?” Noah and Weyland said together.
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