by F. G. Cottam
She had enjoyed teaching the children. Her escape had been more forced on her than planned. They had pleasant natures and were both clever and gifted. But when they reached the age when they began to be taught their lessons in ethics, when their deliberate corruption began, she found that her fondness for them made that an unbearable process to witness.
She resigned her position and went north. Disguising the natural refinement with which she spoke, she opened a tavern and the tavern prospered. She discovered there just how popular she was with men.
It was said that the king never forgot. Probably it was true. Certainly it was true that he never forgot anything he might perceive as a slight. So she was not at all surprised when the letter from Sebastian Dray arrived, saying that it was the king’s wish for her to return to her music teaching duties at the court. She was only really surprised that it had taken two years for the missive finally to come summoning her back.
Dray was a courteous man. He was very careful not to show it, but she also thought him instinctively kind. He disguised this tendency, which would have been construed as weakness, but she thought it was there. He was considerate and compassionate. It was the reason, she thought, that his letter allowed her a month in which to frame her response. If it was time enough to prepare for returning, it was also time enough to plot her escape.
She was sure the melancholy sailor with the kind eyes was from earth. Once in a while he would come and sit and drink alone in the tavern. Once he had been careless with one of the sleeves that covered his arms and she had caught a glimpse of some motif inked there. On Endrimor, only assassins wore tattoos.
The sailor was not an assassin. He spoke little, only to order a drink and pass a comment about the weather, but the tongue had not been rent from his head to guarantee his silence. However reticent, he was capable of speech.
One evening, very late, a week after the letter, she saw her opportunity. He had drunk a little too much. Melancholy had become moroseness in him. Men in such a condition always liked to talk about what was laying low their spirits. She fetched him a beer he had not ordered and joined him at his table. The candles were guttering. The rain hammering at the panes had deterred her trade. The place was almost empty. Her serving girl would cover in her absence from the bar.
‘What ails you?’
He blinked and looked at her before replying. Then he told her that he had two sons. Fate had deprived him of the presence of the one he loved. The other, he said, he had been given cause only to fear and fret over. He had failed at fatherhood. He had failed at everything in life. He had achieved nothing remarkable and was sorrowfully confident that he never would.
‘You could take me back to earth with you,’ she said, so quietly that she hardly heard herself say the words. ‘Once there, you could help me pass. That would be remarkable. It would also be very brave.’
‘It would be foolhardy,’ he said.
‘It would be my salvation.’
He did not reply. He sipped from the pot of beer she had brought him, then wiped his lips with the back of his hand.
‘Are you thinking about it?’
‘I am thinking about the Miasmic Sea and my immunity to its charms,’ he said. ‘I am thinking of something an old man once said to me when he said chance is how we describe events when we don’t yet know their purpose.’
‘Does that mean you will help me?’
‘Yes, I think it does.’
Possibility rose and just as swiftly sank in her. ‘But you are drunk.’
‘In the morning I’ll be sober. And I won’t have changed my mind.’
Delilah expected that Maul would find her because he had found her already and she did not think now that she would be able ever to lose him. She would hide nevertheless.
First she would post the letter to the son of the man who had gifted her with seven years of carefree, earthbound life. She thought that it might be of help to him in what he was trying to do. She had never known a man who could resist her once they had tasted her kiss. He was remarkable, if only for that. But he was remarkable in more important ways. He had been chosen to fight in a noble cause and she would assist him if she could with what she knew.
His father had paid for a funeral mass. Adam was surprised his dad had retained his Catholic faith. The six candles burned in their big brass holders, three each side, flanking the coffin. Catholic churches were scarce in Rotterdam. Holland was proudly Protestant in its national religion. But the Dutch were a tolerant people, were they not? Apart from the Jews they happily surrendered under occupation in the Second World War, he thought. Apart, too, from the nation’s million Muslims now.
He supposed such thoughts were provoked by what he had seen and heard the previous evening. His interest stirred by the discarded newspaper featuring Martin’s picture, he had watched the Sky News channel in his hotel room.
He had discovered that the descendants of the victims of the Spanish flu epidemic in several North American cities had launched a class action seeking damages against their own government for the deaths. Legal experts said the compensation claim could run into billions of dollars. The United States had already struck a compensation deal with the major European nations affected, which did run into billions. The exact figure would remain undisclosed. Great Britain, Ireland and France had been the major beneficiaries. The president was to deliver a public apology for the Bragg Fiasco.
Adam thought fiasco a frivolous word to describe a blunder that had cost millions of innocent lives. Then he watched in disbelief as the channel ran footage of the sacked and burned-out Russian embassy in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare. The Russian embassy in Cape Town was besieged.
There was nobody inside the embassy to be concerned about that, because South Africa had expelled the embassy staff and severed diplomatic relations with Russia altogether. Moscow wasn’t dishing out compensatory roubles, though. Nor did an apology seem likely. The Kremlin had strongly denied and continued to deny the Tashkent story about the mistaken creation of AIDS.
It wasn’t just a question of Martin’s face popping up on television. The medium required sound bites. And Adam had to concede to himself that Martin was very good at giving them.
He sat open-mouthed at the incredible detail concerning Martin’s bodyguard. There had been death threats against this fearless crusader for truth. The British security services were providing him with twenty-four-hour protection at the taxpayers’ expense. He was pretty good value, Adam thought, in terms of what Britain had just gained in dollars for the Spanish flu. But the bigger picture was that his antics were stirring up resentments that could have terrible consequences for international relations and for the moral authority of the nations his stories besmirched and scandalized.
There was almost nobody in the church. He was the only mourner, the sole occupant of the front pew. A couple of elderly mass groupies sat somewhere towards the back of the church, missing out, Adam thought, on the smell of the incense the priest coaxed from the burner when he swung it over the coffin.
He did not personally care for the smell. Nor did he care for the smell of burning candle wax. They reminded him of poverty and loss. They were the smells of too much of his childhood when his prayers had gone unanswered and his own faith unrewarded by events.
Eventually the service concluded and the coffin was wheeled out into the rain and slid into the back of the hearse. His father’s remains were to be cremated. He had not cried during the funeral mass and would not do so at the crematorium, he knew.
The body in the hearse was his father’s but was a cadaver only, cold and dressed. His father had gone on the afternoon he had grieved, watching him slip from life aboard the barge a few days earlier. He was here to honour his passing formally but had done his mourning already, elsewhere. He would maintain the family dignity. He had recently discovered he possessed a great name. And now he was the last of his line.
Waiting to climb into the funeral car, Adam became aware that he was
being watched. It was a sensation like the trickle of an icicle between his shoulder blades. The cold discomfort of it could not be ignored. The two-car convoy occupied a circle of gravel outside the main entrance to the church. The scrutiny came from behind him. He turned. Grass stretched beyond the gravel to a wooden fence. Over one section of it was a small stand of trees. In the wet and gloomy light under the boughs, a lone figure stood.
He was heavily built but poised, his considerable weight balanced perfectly on the balls of nimble feet. He was entirely still but looked restless, as though this motionless attitude was an act of will, unnatural to him. He looked powerful and quick, a human weapon cocked and lethal should the discipline restraining him fail and the trigger of his temper be pulled. Adam knew immediately who it was.
He had never been in the proximity of anyone more dangerous. He felt no fear at all. That was odd, he thought, even illogical. But it was true. He walked across the grass. The air thickened with impending violence the closer he got to the man. It was like wading through static. The atmosphere grew gravid with threat, heavy, immense. It was a struggle to breathe it in. Silence spread outward from the well-dressed figure in the shade of the trees. Rain fell on to the grass around him in a respectful whisper. Adam stood before him.
‘You would be Proctor Maul,’ he said. ‘Have you come here to pay your respects?’
The assassin did not reply. He could not.
Adam did not feel respectful towards Maul. ‘Cat got your tongue?’
Maul still stood entirely still, his eyes concealed by black sunglasses. He was around six feet tall, bald-headed and attired in a beautifully tailored three-piece suit. The cloth was brown and had to it a slight sheen. He filled the suit, Adam observed, as solidly as someone might if sculpted from marble.
He raised a hand, took off his sunglasses and stared Adam in the eye. His face was tattooed. The ink made deep recesses of his eyes, which were almost black. His skin was roughly textured and had a reddish quality to it. His exhaled breath smelled sharp like vinegar. He bowed curtly, just his head moving on his thick neck, and when it was raised and still again the hand not holding the glasses snapped up in a blow that Adam raised his own arm instinctively to block.
Maul smiled. His teeth were uniformly capped in gold.
It was like being clubbed with an iron street bollard. Maul had been testing him and he had passed the test. The expression on the assassin’s face told him he had been expected to. It had been a playful strike. They would not fight today, on the day of his father’s funeral; decorum would rightly prevent it. But their day would come, he knew. When it did he would need to be stronger. The block had rocked him on his feet. The bruise to his arm would likely put the limb beyond practical use for days.
Maul turned and vaulted the fence. He put his shades back on and walked away, dusting his hands drily together, not looking back.
Dora sat smoking and chewing her nails on a park bench. There was a febrile quality to her that Jane thought was probably to do with too much coke. Not now – she was not coked up at eleven o’clock in the morning – but she had been the night before and was suffering her narcotic hangover now. She had an appetite for life. And the life she chose to live was edgy and excessive. She partied hard. Partying was the point. Accomplishment was what her father had already done on her behalf.
That was Jane’s opinion, anyway. That was her summation of her sister as she studied her for a moment before approaching to greet her. She had pretty much written Dora off. She was not usually an intolerant or ruthless person but she had been both of those things with her twin. Then again, Dora had been pretty consistent in earning her disapproval. Jane had concluded a couple of years ago that change would never come. Dora dismayed everyone close to her. She dismayed everyone, that was, except herself. But she was very happy with who she was and would remain contented as long as the parental allowance continued to bankroll her ramshackle life.
She smiled and stood when she saw Jane, flicking her cigarette away and treating her twin to an extravagant hug. Jane saw that her teeth were becoming discoloured and that her roots were showing. She dyed her hair an uncompromising black that hardened her features, and her nails were bitten crescents of chipped scarlet polish.
She was well dressed. She spent a lot on clothes and had on a red wool coat of asymmetric cut. She had inherited their mother’s interest in fashion. She had no talent for it but good taste. The coat was teamed with black leather boots cut tight on the calf to compliment the length of her legs. The day was mild and the coat open, and under it she wore a grey sweater and a short grey pleated skirt. Her tights were the red of the coat. Jane thought she had probably dressed down as a back-handed compliment to her student sister.
They sat down together on the bench. For the first time since Scotland, Jane craved a cigarette herself.
‘I hate you for looking so good,’ Dora said. ‘You always look fantastic, you bitch.’
‘I want to talk to you about a man you’ve met called Bloor.’
‘Jesus,’ Dora said. ‘Why don’t we just cut right to the chase.’ What little colour her face possessed drained from it. She looked uncomfortable. ‘This is not something I can talk about.’
‘He talks about it. He boasts about you.’
Dora’s eyes flicked right and left. She looked trapped. She must have hammered the coke the night before, Jane thought. Up close her breath smelled thick with tar from chain-smoking and she lacked her usual breezy indifference to what was being said to her. Then again, Jane imagined that Adam’s half-brother might be a handful.
Dora lit another cigarette. She did not offer the pack to Jane. Jane was grateful for this, because she knew she would have taken one.
‘You don’t wake up one morning and realize your life is empty,’ she said. ‘There’s no Paul on the road to Damascus moment, Jane. At least, there wasn’t for me. There’s just this sort of corrosive scooping out of you until you feel quite hollow and know that you are a shell with nothing inside it. Oh, you look the same. And provided you are very careful and don’t actually crack, no one really notices. But it doesn’t feel good, emptiness. It really doesn’t.’
‘Bloor is not a therapist,’ Jane said. ‘He’s not one of Mum’s self-help gurus. He doesn’t come from a very nice place, Dora. I can’t see where this story is going.’
Her sister looked at her, held her gaze. It was uncharacteristic. She usually had evasive eyes, the fugitive look of someone concealing something. When she held you like that, by contrast, Jane thought her eyes actually rather compelling. She still had time to be beautiful, if she could discover the inclination and cut the long list of self-destructive vices.
‘I met him in a bar. He’s tall and strikingly good looking and he has this dry wit I found appealing. And he told me about a place where there’s no bullshit or consumer greed and where lives are not sacrificed on the altar of material gain. The population are not robotic servants to technology. It’s a serene and unspoiled place with real and proper human values.’
‘He brainwashed you.’
She laughed. ‘No, he didn’t. He fucking well took me there. And I loved it. And I want to go back and live there because this is my chance not to be hollow and to have and be someone of real substance.’
‘The shadow world is not Utopia. It isn’t Goa or Marrakesh, somewhere on the old hippie trail you tune in and drop out to. It’s alien and evil.’
‘Have you been there?’
‘No.’
‘Well shut up, Jane. Take your talent for sermonizing off to somewhere it’s welcome. Don’t pass judgment on something you know nothing about.’
‘I know about Bloor. He’s bad news.’
Dora shrugged. She was looking away again, down at the grass of the park, at the path the bench faced, at anything but her sister’s expression. ‘Maybe he’s bad news for you,’ she said. ‘But I honestly believe he could be my salvation.’
‘Think about this. Please.’
/> ‘Your interference isn’t welcome, Jane. Fuck off.’
THIRTEEN
Delilah had hand-written her letter to him. Adam was more touched by this than he would have expected or even imagined. She had written it in a neat hand in the English he presumed his father must have taught her. She had done so after receiving the message from the shadow world confirming that she had been found.
He thought it selfless of her to have taken the time and courageous too to write what she had to him. He had no doubts about the significance of the letter’s contents, about its possible ramifications and the chance it gave them. He told Jane about it straight away and together they told Grayling. And with the professor, they made the trip once more to Brighton to seek McGuire’s counsel on this new and crucial revelation.
Dear Adam,
The purpose of these pages is to recount a true story. I hope that it will be of help in arresting matters. It may be too late to halt the speed and repercussions of the undermining now. Events, once set in chain, have their own momentum. But in all conscience, I must do what I can to intervene and offer whatever modest assistance I can to the cause of earth. The knowledge I am about to impart is secret. It is said that knowledge is power. We shall see. You can be the judge when you reach my concluding words.
This account involves your great and terrible ancestor, Sir Robert de Morey. You cannot know the impact his marauding adventures had on the world into which I was born. I know you have read his personal recollections, but they will not describe the baleful legend he left in his bloody wake. To refer to him there is to invoke a demon’s name. Mischievous children are still harried to bed at the threat of his visitation. He is both devil and phantom. The shock of his outrages still lingers in folktale and song.
A decade ago I was a teacher at court. I taught music to the young children of the king. It was a pleasant life in some aspects, but women are more servile creatures in Salabra than in Rotterdam. They are not considered the equals of men. Birth, beauty and brains can achieve a woman privilege, but nothing is hers really by right. It is often oppressive and sometimes disappointing. It is a situation that makes allies of women who might on earth more naturally view one another as rivals.