by F. G. Cottam
When she’d regained some of her post-spell strength, once the pills kicked in and the headache became manageable, she’d put the Pete channel on and seen them scuttling around one another like a pair of cannibalistic fighting crabs. Grandpa was by far the older of the two, but he’d returned with that disconcerting vigour they brought back with them. And he’d grown a vicious set of teeth. She thought too that her dead brother’s missing arm made it a more even match than it would otherwise have been.
She didn’t bother to watch. Dawn wasn’t at all a squeamish person, but she didn’t take much of an interest in sport and was opposed on principle to blood sports such as hare coursing and fox hunting and badger baiting. Foxes were enterprising creatures. Badgers were cute looking. And hares were funny when they went bonkers in the spring.
Something both serious and sombre had occurred to Dawn, and it concerned cause and effect. She had finally begun to think the odd goings on in the Greater London area were perhaps connected to the spell book. She’d noticed that double rainbow immediately after performing the displacement spell and had known from physics that it was an impossible contradiction, meteorologically absurd. And it had been followed by the wind now raging around her four walls.
The wind was strong enough to be classified as a hurricane. They’d said so excitedly on the radio. The house she considered herself now to have inherited was extremely substantial in its build. But the hurricane had flattened their garden shed. Its roof had cartwheeled away over the garden wall. If she was extremely unlucky, it might have flattened a neighbouring cat. She just didn’t know. But she knew she’d know all about it if it had. There’d be a querulous, complaining knock on her door.
She did know that the Esmeralda disaster had followed a weird and unpredicted solar eclipse. Statues had wept blood prior to the bubonic plague outbreak. There’d been that weird fog before the flooding. Something odd must have preceded the earthquake, but everyone was too preoccupied by the flood’s death toll and the scale of general damage to notice it. A maelstrom in the English Channel? A unicorn turning up at London Zoo? Something odd and generally overlooked, and then the quake. And then the impossible rainbow auguring the storm.
Good word, ‘auguring’. Dawn didn’t think many people her age would know what the Auguries were. Her dimbo brother wouldn’t have known. She was pretty confident Handy Andy Baxter wouldn’t know either.
Magic exacted a price. That much was becoming clear to Dawn. And it made her think two things. The first was that even if the consequent hurricane really battered London, she hadn’t actually had a choice over her grandfather. He’d come back with an ungovernable appetite and no discretion whatsoever. He pissed himself, for God’s sake. He chomped his way through pigeons. She’d had to get rid of him.
The second thing that occurred to Dawn was that it might be possible to practise magic without it incurring these rather unfortunate repercussions. What was required was further study of the book.
Her brain felt a bit stale from all the Special Study Group revision, if she was honest with herself. She’d had to take two extra-strength paracetamol caplets after the effort required to cast the displacement spell successfully. And the elemental weather raging outside wasn’t helping her head at all. But a girl had to do what a girl had to do, and Dawn knew, sighing, that she was in all truth a bit of a perfectionist.
She put on the TV. Not the Pete channel and the crab action, but the news channel for the latest on the crisis, because Dawn took the interest in current affairs which absolutely proved she wasn’t on any kind of spectrum.
The lead item concerned the capital of England. That was no longer London, where the infrastructure was so badly damaged that no timeframe could be put on its repair and rejuvenation as any sort of business or domestic hub. Most Londoners were now living in a vast impromptu refugee camp established in the New Forest. Though some had dispersed to live with relatives elsewhere and many others had returned to their countries of origin. Since there were no civilian flights, they’d boarded ferries.
Birmingham was sulking about it, but Manchester was now the capital. It was the seat of government. It had excellent communication facilities. It had two first-rate football teams and a thriving gay community. On the downside, it was in the shadow of the Pennines, and it rained a lot there.
There’d been a chemical attack on the Moscow underground. The Kremlin were pointing the finger at MI6, who were saying it was Chechens, who in turn were blaming the Ukraine.
An Air France Airbus had exploded at 30,000 feet over the Alps. Too early to say whether it had been triggered by a suicidal passenger with a bomb, or by a heat-seeking missile from the ground.
In the US, an outspoken isolationist Republican senator had been shot dead at a political rally. The chief suspects were a Cuban American and a Mexican American, possibly working together. To Dawn, they both looked deranged, with their matching Viva Zapata! moustaches in old police mugshots.
‘Maybe they’re the same bloke,’ Dawn said at the TV. Two passports, two identities, one assassin. Just a thought. She switched the TV off again, thinking that it might be a slow news day, but at least she didn’t have to go out in the appalling weather. She’d stumbled upon her grandfather’s cash stash, three grand in twenties in a thick roll bound by an elastic band in an ancient sports sock hidden in an equally ancient canvas cricket boot at the bottom of his bedroom wardrobe. The significance of this find was that she’d been able to stock up on supplies at the supermarket anonymously, without having to use a debit card that didn’t belong to her. So she didn’t have to risk attracting curiosity and unnecessary attention.
She’d been in that wardrobe before, when they’d first arrived here, groping for fir trees in the darkness, hoping with all her heart for Narnia. He’d told her off at the time and now she knew why. She’d been a lot younger in her mind then, had dreamed often of happy endings. The difference was that now, she knew there were none.
THIRTY-ONE
February 24, 1528
He claimed to be a mathematician only. But our spies found proof that he studied astrology and divination and dabbled also in alchemy. He was not a significant figure in the secret world of occult practitioners. What was done to him was done only on the understanding that he might reveal a significant name.
He was a defrocked priest with what he termed a workshop buried among the warren of such establishments used by the skilled and industrious clockmakers of Clerkenwell. In truth, when I went there after his incarceration to witness the actuality, I discovered it was more of a laboratory, with astral charts pinned to walls sooty with the residue of experimentation involving bellows and a forge. Equations on a slate testified to the partial truth of what he had claimed, but there was clearly mischief at work there. A mathematician would not need a pestle and mortar, or the herbs and minerals stored on shelves in labelled jars.
He became the subject of a severe interrogation. Pliers were used to pull a healthy tooth from a gum reluctant to part with it. But it was only after the second fingernail was pulled from his right hand that he surrendered a name and location. The name belonged to a German alchemist named Gunter Keller. The city where Keller could be located was given as Hanover.
I disapprove of torture, and have yet to have it proven to me personally that magic is capable of doing anything more than entertaining a gullible child or adult fool when practised by a skilled illusionist. But the man we questioned clearly lived in fear of Keller. The name was given up only with the utmost reluctance to practised purveyors of human pain in a cell deaf to his cries of agony deep in the bowels of the Tower.
For reasons which must be obvious, I did not confront this unfortunate man myself. If Keller is genuine and a significant figure in this murky occult underworld, he must believe my own motives to be innocent of conspiracy, fuelled entirely by worldly ambition, nothing to do with a general desire to eradicate evil. He cannot know that my intentions towards him are in any way hostile.
&n
bsp; If he suspected that, he would go to ground when he must be teased out and must take on the lucrative project dreamed up for him. He must recruit fellows as misguided as he and thereby expose them. Though I confess I would have greater personal enthusiasm for the plot if I had seen proof first hand of what these people claim to be possible.
We dispatched spies straight away to Hanover. They discovered that Gunter Keller is not a wealthy man. Quite the opposite, in truth. His antics have proven costly because he lives like a fugitive, moving from address to address, only ever a step or so ahead of discovery and arrest and exposure. Thus he is sometimes obliged to abandon equipment and expensive texts. The authorities have yet to prove that any of this compromising evidence has ever been in his direct ownership. But they strongly suspect it and the man is generally unpopular wherever he has settled. He brings with him a bad odour, the stench of human corruption.
I have written to Keller, the letter coded, the content characterized by flattery, promising to dispatch my emissary with the lure of fifty gold sovereigns, should he agree to cooperate in my scheme. A down-payment only, I have made plain.
I have to hope that greed and desperation trump his innate habit of suspicion. My own name has been sullied, quite deliberately, in an effort to make my ambitions concerning Keller seem genuine to him. I am a womanizer. I have killed a host of unfortunate opponents in duels fought over trivial insults. I am a petulant loser at the card tables of London. I flogged a horse to death for refusing a jump in the hunt. I live in relentless defiance of the teachings of the Church and am a moral corruption to my daughter as well as my sons. And I am the richest man in England.
This last detail might be the only truth Keller is aware of concerning me. Certainly, I think, it will be the most significant to him. I await his reply with some trepidation. That is indeed if he bothers to reply. I think avarice and vanity will combine to compel him to do so. I wait, and I hope, and I pray. I pray to the God in whom by report I do not believe. There is much more than the loss of fifty sovereigns at stake. There is the heartfelt will of kings.
I have confided all to my wife. Catherine is my love, my ally and, I am unashamed to say, my best, most constant, most loyal friend. I know my wife, but she listened with an expression I confess I had not seen on her comely face before. It was as though she was preoccupied, remembering something. She did not speak at all until I had finished.
Then she said, ‘Scepticism is dangerous in this enterprise of yours, husband. You would be wiser to believe until Keller’s powers are disproven.’
‘Is there a reason for your caution?’
‘It is a story I have never spoken of before. I will tell it now, to you.’
Catherine grew up the daughter of a vicomte, at his castle above a village thirty miles north of Amiens. The story she related occurred when she was fourteen. An impressionable age for a girl, on the cusp of womanhood.
There was a string of deaths in the village, all children, all taken in the same way. They would develop an uncontrollable fever and eventually suffer a series of brain seizures their immature bodies could not endure to live through.
Catherine’s father paid for physicians. They were summoned from Paris at considerable expense and they were learned men. They were also skilled at saying what this fatal condition was not. It was not cholera, or dropsy, or typhus. It was not some virulent strain of influenza. It was not plague and black humours were not responsible for it either.
The water supply was blamed. Someone was poisoning the village wells. Though no one could explain how this poisoning afflicted only the young. Catherine’s father paid for water to be brought to the village in barrels bound to carts from a pure spring source five miles away. More expense; but the same result, the deaths simply continued.
It was inevitable that eventually witchcraft would be held responsible and accusatory fingers pointed.
They pointed at one village resident in particular. A crone, this woman. An elderly spinster with the requisite ugliness and deformities: facial warts and a hump where old age had buckled her back. And the usual reputation as a healer, someone skilled in the use of herbs for poultices and potions, dressings and cordials. A woman said to be able to heal wounds and stop bleeding and even restore sight in those stricken blind.
‘A woman to whom I have personal cause to be grateful,’ her father told Catherine. ‘You came into the world enfeebled by an early birth. The physicians said you would surely die. Your mother had no milk. My heart was cleaved in two.
‘And the crone came to the castle. She had with her a wet-nurse. And she begged an audience, which I granted only out of desperation. She said the wet-nurse was her niece and that her milk had an enchantment, a blessing that gave it special potency. She said this enchanted milk would make you grow strong and enable you to live. And it did.’
Catherine’s father grew afraid, after the accusations, that the crone would be lynched. Fourteen years after his only daughter’s birth, she still had his gratitude. He stationed an armed guard outside her cottage. This guard had been there for a month and had not seen the crone for a week when he smelled a scent he knew from the battlefield – the smell of decomposition. He went inside. And the crone was stretched out stale with death on her floor of beaten earth.
Then he noticed three wax effigies by her fireplace. They were the size of small dolls and they were clothed as children. The likenesses were so uncannily good that he recognized two of them as children he had seen playing in the village square on his occasional trips to the tavern. There was pooled wax in the fireplace. There were swatches of fabric burned to ash in the wax.
Thus ended Catherine’s story. I confess I found it contradictory.
‘She was a healer who murdered using magic,’ I said. ‘She killed those children, but when you were a dying baby, she saved your life. It is too paradoxical. Why would she do both?’
‘Only because she could,’ Catherine said. ‘I think, Edmund, that such people become seduced by the potency of their powers. There is no good or bad to them any more. There is only the reach of what they can accomplish.’
‘I see.’
‘And that sentry recognized also the face of the third little doll. Which, of course, he should have, since he saw me at the castle almost every day.’
There is one more detail worthy of note. And it is this. The sometime mathematician tortured in the Tower was found dead, hanged by the neck, in what he called his workshop, two days after his release. I do not think it was the prospect of re-arrest that led to the victim’s hasty self-murder. I think instead it was the fate he feared would befall him were his betrayal of Gunter Keller ever to reach that man’s ears.
THIRTY-TWO
Juliet and Paul walked to a pub on the banks of the Cherwell to get some lunch. The blissful summer weather held. There were wild swimmers and punts and canoes sharing the sparkling river waters. To Juliet, the scene that had greeted them on waking in the park only that morning seemed surreal and nightmarish. Something out of a disaster movie or a science fiction film. There was a post-apocalyptic look to London, and an atmosphere of bewilderment and defeat. The fleeing population was still unable to grasp the magnitude of the carnage. Juliet didn’t really think that the city would ever come back from this. Not the heart of it, which was coming to resemble a modern version of Pompeii.
She studied Paul as he examined the bar menu. Their shared bed experience of two nights earlier had been neither innocent nor chaste, in the end. The lovemaking had seemed to her slow, deliberate and inevitable. There had been almost a therapeutic quality to it, as though they both craved human intimacy after the appalling flood footage they had seen on the screen in that German bar.
Well, I craved intimacy, Juliet thought, blind now to the words on her lunch menu despite her strong appetite. Quite what you wanted out of it, I can’t be sure. Had there been an opportunistic element on his part? She didn’t know. Neither did she feel she was familiar enough with him to know how to
couch that question aloud, in words. It would have to remain a mystery.
He placed his menu back on the table in the pub’s river garden and smiled at her and held her eyes with his, which were a pale blue she wanted to believe honest. They could be cold, eyes like that, and hypnotic, equally. Charm and callousness were qualities that could happily walk side by side, even hand in hand.
‘I know what you’re thinking about,’ he said. ‘You’re thinking about the sex.’
‘Was it only sex?’ The sentence sounded limp and self-pitying to her own ears as soon as it was completed, but it was out of her mouth before her brain could control her voice. Or her thinking.
He said, ‘That was badly phrased. I think that Germans tend to discuss this subject in blunter language than the English.’
‘Everyone discusses this subject in blunter language than the English, Paul. But I suppose actions speak louder than words, and there was no shortage of action from either of us the night before last.’
‘The truth is that I wanted you from the moment I laid eyes on you,’ he said. ‘But it’s also true to say that I believe you only ever get what you give. That goes for all our human relationships. I very much want you, and not only in bed. I want you in my life.’
‘You’re on the rebound.’
‘You insult yourself by saying that. And it isn’t true.’
‘It was true when you told me about the break-up.’
‘It’s a lie now, because of you.’
‘Lousy time to start a romance.’
That made him smile. ‘It’s been my experience that one never chooses the time.’
And that made Juliet flash back briefly to her months of internet dating. She said, ‘It’s been my experience that it’s disastrous when one tries to.’