Swiftly: A Novel (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  And he bowed again and was gone.

  [4]

  11-12 November

  Where does it go, the melancholia, when some startling event evaporates it, sublimes it into vapour that dissolves into the wind? Bates’s downheartedness vanished. He washed, shaved, dressed, ate and bustled from his rooms in an hour. Everything had been turned topsy-turvy, and the evil spirit squatting spiderish in his head had somehow been shaken free.

  He hurried. D’Ivoi had been his only contact with the French, and perhaps by limiting his contact to a single individual he had, at some level, believed that he limited his treason too. And for a day or two the very notion of a French victory - of French troops marching up the Mall - was too shocking for him to think about it at all. But the idea percolated through his mind anyway, and soon he was almost welcoming it. It would at least bring his cause to fruition. The Lilliputians would be freed, the Brobdingnagians reprieved from race-death.

  He was up, up, up.

  He went to his club, and wrote three letters. Then he caught a cab (a rare expense for him) and visited a sympathetically-minded gentleman in Holborn. He spent the evening with a gaggle of churchmen, duck-like individuals who paced about the room with their heads forward and their hands tucked into the smalls of their backs, talking ponderously of God and Grace and Sin. He told the sympathetically-minded gentleman little, but he told the churchmen all. Their worry, it transpired, was not of French political rule so much as the danger of an oppressive Catholicism being imposed as the official religion. Bates was too excited, too elevated in spirit, to worry about this.

  ‘Are you certain that these events are going to come to pass?’ one of the clerics asked him. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I am sure,’ gabbled Bates. He tended to talk too rapidly when the mood was on him, when his blood was hurtling through his body, but it couldn’t be helped. ‘Now that they have declared themselves for the humanity of the Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians, all of the civilised world will support them, surely. And their alliance has meant that they could recruit a regiment of giants to fight us. To fight the English. Moreover,’ he went on, wide-eyed, ‘they have perfected a device, a machine, a thinking machine. Have you heard of Mister Babbing?’

  Babbing? Babbing?

  ‘Do you mean Babbage,’ said one elderly churchman, a whittled, dry-faced old man who had been a main agent in the campaign since its first days. ‘The computational device?’

  ‘The French have perfected it,’ said Bates. ‘And with it they have constructed new engineering devices, and plotted new techniques of war-making.’

  ‘Incredible!’

  ‘It is credible indeed.’

  ‘The computing device has been perfected!’

  On the Saturday he attended a tea-party at which he was the only male present. He sat on a chair too small for him, and listened politely to half-a-dozen wealthy matrons and maidens expatiate upon how beautiful the little people were, how marvellous, and how wicked it was to chain them with tiny fetters and make them work in factories. Bates did not mention the Brobdingnagians, of course, who lacked the daintiness to appeal to this class of person. But he smiled and nodded, and thought of the money these women might gift to the cause.

  One woman confided in him. ‘Since my husband passed through the veil,’ she said in a breathy tone of voice, ‘my life has become divided between these darling little creatures and my cats.’

  The Sunday, naturally he went to chapel. But he could not bring his mind to focus on the sermon. Something fretted at its margins, some piece of thought-grit. These darling little creatures. But, Bates thought, there was so much more to the Lilliputians than this! They were messengers, in a manner as yet uncertain to him. He had not managed to distil the thought thoroughly enough through his brain to fully understand it, but he felt it, he felt it genuinely and thoroughly. Messengers. There was something about them, something special, that deserved preservation in the way few ordinary-sized people did.

  She had sat next to him, with purple crinoline and a lace cap covering her hair, but with these intense, beautiful air-blue eyes, and had said: these darling little creatures and my cats.

  Cats preyed on them, of course. One of Bates’s acquaintances said that he had first become interested in their cause after watching two cats fighting over a stray Lilliputian in the kitchen of his uncle’s house.

  And so it slid again, dropping like leaves from a tree until the tree has lost all its leaves. Bates went to bed Sunday night with a heart so heavy it registered not only in his chest, but in his throat and belly too. And waking the following morning was a forlorn, interfered-with sensation. The urge not to rise was very strong: merely to stay in bed, to turn the heavy-body and heavy-head and lie there. So it was that after a spurt of energetic living Bates’s was again usurped by melancholia.

  His rooms, on Cavendish Square, looked over an oval of parched winter grass and four nude trees. Some days he would sit and stare, emptying one cigarette after another of its smoke, and doing nothing but watching the motionlessness of the trees.

  When he had been a young man, some six or seven years earlier, Bates had had an intrigue with a tobacconist’s daughter called Mary. The romance had included physical impropriety. To begin with, Bates had felt a glow in his heart, something fuelled by equal of parts pride and shame. The necessary secrecy had enlarged his sense of himself. He felt the sin, but he also felt strangely elevated. He could walk the streets of London looking at others and knowing something they did not know. The aftermath, the potent stew of good and bad emotions, was more pleasurable than the physical enjoyment of the act itself, pleasurable though that act was.

  Then Mary told him that she was carrying a child. This altered the balance of feelings inside him to a form of fear. He could not bring himself to confront his own father (still alive at that time) to declare himself the destined parent of an infant. It was impossible. Inner shame is, perhaps, a sensation so powerfully mixed of delight and disgust that it approximates glory - but public shame is a very different matter. A very different matter. Bates senior was not a wealthy man, but he was proud. Marriage to a tobacconist’s daughter was out of the question. And Mary was a sweet girl. But what could he do? What could be done?

  Of course nothing could be done.

  There was a very uncomfortable interview between the former lovers. There were tears and recriminations from her. These made it easier for him to adopt a stony exterior manner. Afterwards he spent the evening in his club, and drank most of a bottle of claret. A walk home and a half-hour in a chapel along the way. Prayer blended his awkwardness, his shame, his self-loathing, his weakness, into a cement of strength. He would be strong from this moment, and Christ required only repentance, in that moment, and clean living the future. He would go and sin no more.

  His resolution required a blanking-out of Mary, which he managed by pretending that she did not exist. For weeks this strategy worked well. For hours at a time he forgot that there was such a person in the world. Only when he indulged in his occasional night-time bouts of impure thought and manual stimulation did her image insert itself into his mind, and this only encouraged him to quit that degrading business anyway.

  Then, a month or more later, he saw her at the booth, paying to cross London Bridge. He hurried after her, uncertain whether the face glimpsed under the bonnet was indeed hers. ‘Excuse me, Madam,’ he called. And she turned.

  She looked blankly into his face, neither pleased nor displeased to see him.

  ‘Mary,’ he said, catching up with her.

  Her stomach was flat.

  ‘A gentleman,’ she chided, following his gaze, ‘would not stare so.’

  Light made painterly effects on the river, speckles of white brilliance spread in a swathe against the dun.

  He didn’t know how to ask the question. They walked together.

  ‘Don’t worry yourself, sir,’ she said, blushing plum-red, her voice as angry as Bates had ever heard it. ‘No child w
ill come and threaten you and your loved honour.’ At first he heard this last word as on her.

  ‘No child?’

  She was quiet for a time. ‘A friend of mine knows a doctor, see. Not that I’d call him a real doctor, see.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Bates, soft, realising what had happened. They were a third of the way over the bridge now. The sunlight swelled, and the Thames was glittering and sparkling like a solid. Bates’s mouth was dry.

  ‘What did you do with it?’ he asked, a pain growing in his chest as if his ribs were contracting like sphincters and squeezing his lungs.

  ‘It?’ she replied.

  ‘The,’ he said, his voice sounding alien to himself, ‘child.’

  She stopped and stared at him, stared for long seconds, her face immobile but her eyes wide. ‘I buried him,’ she said. ‘I dug under a hedgerow in Hampstead, beside the churchyard, and buried him there. To bury him I thought in proper ground.’

  For days afterwards Bates had been unable to get this image out of his mind. His child, his son, buried and mixed into the earth. Like ore. He dreamt of the little creature, its eyes closed and its mouth pursed against the chill. He imagined it with hair, long blond strands of hair. He imagined it miniature, Lilliputian in size. In the dream he scuffed at the dirt with his feet, knowing his child was interred beneath the spot. A strand of gold grazed his wrist. Boys in brown, crossing-sweepers, leant together to talk, somewhere in the distance. Through a window, perhaps. One of them yawned. But he was in a room, with velvet curtains. The strands of gold were woven into a cobweb. A strand of gold grazed his wrist. The baby’s tiny hand was reaching for him, and when it touched him its skin was so cold he yelped out loud.

  At that point he awoke.

  [5]

  On the 19th of the month French forces crossed the Channel. The fighting in the northeast of France had been the hardest, British troops having pulled back with a military alacrity to trenches dug earlier in the campaign and then stuck to their positions in and around Saint Quentin. But the French army was renewed. Three battalions of regular troops attacked the British positions; but then the premier corps de géants stormed the eastern flank. They carried enormous weaponry, great hoops of iron ringing massive staves of treated wood, cannonaders that the Brobdingnagians could fire from their shoulders, sending fissile barrel-shaped charges hurtling onto troops below. The packages were filled with Greek Fire. The giants proved remarkably resistant to rifle fire; although cannon-shells could fell them.

  The battle fought at Saint Quentin was the major engagement of the whole war, with conventional troops charging the English line of defence from two sides at once, and a platoon of Brobdingnagians wading amongst the fighting with studied, slow-footed seriousness, smashing and killing about them with long, weighted pikes - sixty feet long, and carrying nearly a ton of metal shaped at the killing end. And the cannonaders wrought havoc. One Colonel growled like a dog as he read the paper containing the casualty figures after the battle. ‘If this number were pounds rather than corpses,’ he told his aide-de-camp, ‘we would be wealthy indeed.’ His bon mot went around the camp. The English army, the soldier joked grimly, was wealthy indeed in corpses, but poor in terms of the sovereign. The Commander in Chief was still hanging men for High Treason because this joke had passed their lips when the rest of the army had retreated to the coast. He himself escaped on a sapient horse as French forward troops broke through the camp and past the dangling bodies.

  From Saint Quentin the English fell back across the Pas de Calais. Orders to establish a series of redoubts were ignored, or heroically followed to the death of everyone concerned. Commanders attempted to co-ordinate an evacuation on the beaches around Calais town, but the French pressed their advantage and embarkation turned to rout. Eventually the Brobdingnagians swam through, pulling English boats down to perdition from underneath. Commanders fled the scene in small skiffs. There was screaming, weapons fire, commotion and confusion. Clots of Greek Fire burned on the sea like shining seaweed. The English losses were even worse than they had been at the battle of Saint Quentin. Corpses sank to the bottom of the Manche as stones, or bobbed on the surface, tangled with the waves, or rolled and trundled dead in the surf, sand in their mouths and in their hair and in their sightless eyes.

  Bates followed the news, reading the hastily printed newssheets with a fearful avidity. He wanted the French repulsed, like any Englishman. But then again he wanted the French victorious, and with it the noble God-endorsed cause to which he had devoted so much of his adult life. He didn’t know what he wanted. He wanted to sleep, but he could only toss and roll on his dirty sheets.

  His servant disappeared. This abandonment didn’t surprise him. Everywhere, people were leaving the capital.

  The premier and troisième corps de géants walked and swam the Channel, pulling troop-barges behind them. The army beached at Broadstairs. The English army, with all reserves called up and all available men under orders, assembled on the hills south of Canterbury. Travellers and passengers began carrying word-of-mouth reports of the fighting into the capital. Terrible, like the end of the world, they said. It can but be the world ’s end, a preacher was saying on Gad’s Hill. These gigantic men are God’s wrath.

  The flood of people out of London increased.

  Bates found his mood undergoing one of those peculiar bubblingsup that correlated only poorly to his surroundings. He took to rising relatively early, and walking the streets of London with a dispassionate, observer’s eye. He watched servants load belongings onto carts outside lankily opulent town houses in Mayfair; watched shopkeepers fitting boards over their windows, whilst their wives wrapped whimpering Lilliputians in handkerchiefs for the journey. On the Great North Road a great worm of humanity pulsed slowly away to the horizon, people walking, trudging, hurrying or staggering, handcarts and horse-carts, men hauling packs stacked yards high with clinking pots and rolled cloth, women carrying children, animals on tight tethers. Bates stood for an hour or more watching the stream of people moving on, as seemingly sourceless and endless as the Thames itself. Militiamen trotted by on horseback, hawkers cried wares to the refugees, clockwork aerial craft buzzed up and down the line left and right across it.

  Eventually, Bates wandered back into the city, and went to his club to take luncheon. Only Harmon was there, and one cook in the back room. ‘Dear me,’ Bates muttered. ‘What’s the matter, here?’ Harmon was all apologies, a good man in trying times. ‘Luncheon should not present problems, sir, if you’d care to eat.’

  Bates ate. He smoked a cigar. His thoughts kept returning to the war. Could he, perhaps, persuade the generals that England was losing the war because it had flouted God’s ordinance? A general proclamation from Parliament freeing the Lilliputians, and God’s radiance would smile on His people again - surely? Surely?

  He wandered, pensive, taking twice his normal time back to Cavendish Square. A stranger, dressed in an anonymous brown, was waiting outside his front door.

  ‘Sir?’ he said, starting forward. ‘You are Mister Bates?’ His accent was French.

  Bates felt suddenly panicky, he knew not why. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Calm yourself, sir, calm yourself,’ said the stranger. ‘You are a friend of Mister D’Ivoi, I believe?’

  ‘D’Ivoi,’ said Bates. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I bring a message from him. Could we go inside your apartment?’

  ‘Your army is in Kent, sir,’ said Bates, his fight-or-flight balance teetering towards the aggressive again. ‘It loots Kent as we speak, sir.’

  The stranger only said: ‘I bring a message from him.’

  The stranger did not introduce himself, or give a name. He carried a leather attaché case, and his boots were well worn at toe and heel. Inside, as Bates unclasped his own shutters (having no servant to do the job for him), the man placed his case carefully on a table, took off his three-cornered-hat, and bowed.

  ‘Swiftness is to be desired, sir,’ he said. ‘I apolog
ise for my English, for the speaking. You will pardon my poorly speaking?’ Without waiting for an answer, he went on. ‘Mister D’Ivoi has you asked for particularly.’ He enunciated every syllable of this latter word with care. ‘He, and I, ask for help. You have faith in our cause, I believe.’

  ‘Cause?’

  ‘For the Pacificans. For the little and the great, of the people. The Holy Father has declared the war a holy war, to free these creatures from their bondage. Yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Our army will soon be in London. We wish for you to do something for us, which it will make more swift the ending of the war. If you do this thing for us, the war will end sooner, and the holy cause achieved.’