The Revolutions

by Gilman, Felix

  Chapter Sixteen

  Either his wound had been shallower than it had looked, or Sun was a master surgeon, because Arthur was soon on his feet again. His thoughts turned to Borel, who, if he’d taken Arthur’s advice, was probably half-way to the seaside by now.

  Atwood permitted Arthur to use his telephone—which occupied a room of its own, like a sacred object, a little black-and-gold Ark—to consult with the clerks at the Hôtel Métropole in Brighton. Around midnight, clerks of the Metrôpole at last brought Borel to the telephone. By that time the rest of Atwood’s Company had gone to their various homes.

  Borel’s voice sounded very distant as it emerged from the glistening black speaker—as if he were calling not from the seaside but from the bottom of the sea. He was lost, and anxious, and confused. He kept shouting, as if he didn’t entirely understand what a telephone was.

  “You said that there was danger. My daughter, Mr Shaw. What are you involved in, Mr Shaw? My shop. Is it—political?”

  “Political? Oh—no! No, not in that way, Mr Borel. Josephine—Josephine is very ill, Mr Borel.”

  “Miss Bradman?”

  “It’s a—it’s a sort of sleeping sickness, Mr Borel.”

  Borel was slow to answer. “Is there danger or is there not, Mr Shaw?”

  Arthur covered the speaker and asked Atwood if the house on Rugby Street was safe.

  Atwood shrugged. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. If I knew what Podmore and his fellows would do next, we wouldn’t have lost Gracewell, would we?”

  Arthur could feel Borel’s silent anger over the line.

  Shortly after that the connection was lost, and Arthur couldn’t reach the Metrôpole again. He resisted the urge to smash Atwood’s telephone to kindling.

  “I’ll have a bed made for Josephine,” Atwood said. He glanced at Arthur with obvious irritation. “You may stay, of course.”

  The maid and her candle led the way as Arthur and Atwood carried Josephine upstairs to bed, past what seemed to Arthur like an endless series of rooms: one full of half-finished paintings, presumably Atwood’s; another that contained nothing but a very fine Turkish carpet on a dusty floor; rooms cluttered with furniture under white funereal shrouds; empty rooms; smartly appointed rooms that looked as though no one had set foot in them in years; rooms full of vaguely Egyptian bric-a-brac; and a room with crossed foils over the mantelpiece, and above them crossed oars … though, to Arthur’s eye, Atwood looked a head too short to be a rowing man.

  They found a bedroom, and Atwood’s maid found clothes suitable for Josephine to sleep in. Throughout the whole process Josephine breathed steadily, but never opened her eyes. The maid was nervous and tongue-tied, as well she might be, and said few words. Arthur talked and talked to fill the silence, about how Josephine was only a little unwell, and how she would be right as rain again in no time. After a while he had almost convinced himself of the truth of this.

  “A lot of hocus-pocus,” he said. “Mars, indeed! It’s hypnotism—that’s all it is. I dare say she thinks she’s on Mars, but in the morning it will be a strange dream—wait and see.”

  The maid wouldn’t meet his eyes. “Yes, sir.”

  “Yes indeed!”

  When she left, he locked the door behind her.

  He’d told Borel. He supposed next he should write to Josephine’s family. But how could he possibly explain what had happened? To them, or to anyone. God, he could just picture it—Waugh would want to offer medical advice, he just knew it. The lies he’d have to tell!

  On the other hand, she might be herself again in the morning. Wake with a smile. Just a bit of fun. Find her own way back. Was that possible? He didn’t know. He was quite as out of his depth as anyone had ever been. He wanted to shake her awake, and ask her what to do.

  Her eyes fluttered open. An empty gaze. She didn’t see him. She didn’t see the ceiling, with its fussy white plaster mouldings. What did she see?

  Of course, it was unthinkable that he should sleep in the same bed as her. Too awful and uncanny to even imagine it. It was agony even to touch her. He made himself a bivouac of bedclothes and lay on the floor. He lay on his side for an eternity, his wound aching and itching, thinking of all the terrible things Josephine might be suffering. He thought of all the things that the astronomers had to say about the horrors of space, of the cold and the vacuum and the dreadful solar winds. But if you could travel to the stars in spirit, and lock up a Martian in your library, then everything astronomy had to say might be wrong. He spent another hour thinking of all the other things that modern science had to say that might be wrong, until he felt as if the floor beneath him might vanish in a puff of uncertainty, and the Earth with it.

  Two hundred pounds. That was real, and certain. She’d put herself in danger for two hundred pounds; which was to say that she’d put herself in danger because of his impecunity, his fecklessness, his idleness, all the things that his foster-father had always accused him of.

  When he finally slept, he dreamed of Mars. Oddly, despite all his waking terrors, the dream was lovely. He dreamed of red plains, cloud-capped mountains, forests of violet flowers, cyclopean aqueducts of white marble carrying sparkling blue water across vast unknown continents. And blue men, tens of thousands of them, aloft on Martian winds.

  * * *

  He woke in a panic. Someone was banging on the door. He leapt to his feet thinking of fire or Podmore’s thugs or worse, and snatched up a poker. He opened the door to see Atwood standing there.

  “Well? Shaw?”

  “Well what?”

  “Put that down, unless you intend to strike me with it. Has her condition changed?”

  “See for yourself,” he said.

  She couldn’t be woken, not by shaking or shouting or sal volatile or pleading, not by tears or by whispering sweet nothings, not by lighting matches or ringing bells or singing or cymbals or familiar songs on the piano, not by Arthur’s kiss, or by the various spells Atwood uttered, or by anything else that occurred to them in the course of the morning. Sometimes she smiled. Sometimes she furrowed her brow. She could be coaxed to swallow water. Atwood had a servant make soup, and Arthur managed to make her eat a little. Sometimes she sighed, or made other small motions—matters of habit. Her mind and her soul were elsewhere.

  Atwood’s guilt seemed quite genuine. For most of the morning he looked like he might be sick at any moment. Then, around half past ten, he decided that it was somehow all Lord Podmore’s fault, and he went off to plan his revenge.

  Of course his affections for Josephine were quite plain. He hardly troubled to hide them, which was insulting in itself. Arthur didn’t for a moment suppose that Josephine had succumbed to Atwood’s dubious charms, but that didn’t mean he had to like the bastard.

  * * *

  Atwood returned for dinner. The cook produced a late meal—pork cutlets in tomato sauce. Arthur ate at the table in Atwood’s parlour. On the wall facing him was a hideous painting. It depicted the Titan Saturn devouring his children, or at least Atwood said it did. All Arthur knew for sure was that it depicted a twisted old man in the dark eating a child, and that it did nothing for his digestion, and that he did not consider it art. Otherwise, the room was decorated with photographs of Atwood on bicycles, or in fencing garb, or hiking. Atwood sat primly, legs crossed, watching Arthur across the table. He claimed that he wasn’t hungry.

  “Listen, Atwood.” Arthur pointed his fork at him. “I can’t call these people Jupiter and Mars and Halley’s bloody Comet. Twinkle twinkle little bloody star. What are their names?”

  “Our Company has always had nine in its inner circle, and we have always been identified, in our ritual roles, by the names of the planets.”

  “Immemorial tradition, and all that.”

  “On the contrary—we’re scarcely five years old; and tradition means nothing to me, except when it’s of use. We go by ritual names to facilitate the correct mental state for our experiments. And because some of us are secretive. I do
n’t know who Jupiter is—not in the way you mean. She goes by Moina, but I believe it to be an alias.”

  “Hmm.”

  “And why should I care? She is a woman of extraordinary perception—one of the few in London I would consider my equal. She is—perhaps you will understand this, Shaw—she is the other half of my soul. Between us there is a profound communion, as of the Moon and the Earth. Why should I want to know more? Why should I want to know that she is married to a solicitor, let’s suppose, or lives in Chelsea, or if she has children, or God, what their names are?”

  “If you say so, Atwood.”

  Arthur chased sauce around his plate, and tried not to let his gaze wander to the horrible painting. “And you must be some sort of grand something-or-other. Lord of something, I expect.”

  “Yes.”

  “Thought as much. And Sun is a prince of some sort? Hmm? The bloody lot of you!”

  Atwood raised an eyebrow. Arthur continued eating. He was far past the point of ordinary deference.

  One of Atwood’s flunkeys had left a pot of tea on the side-table. Arthur attacked it with gusto.

  “What are our plans, then, Atwood? For getting Mr Gracewell back, that is, if that’s the only way to get Josephine back.”

  Atwood picked up a knife and toyed with it.

  “Well?”

  “I don’t know, Shaw. We will confer. I don’t know where Gracewell is. Lord Podmore will be well defended. Sun will counsel patience—he always does.”

  “I always say the way to attack a problem is by thinking clearly.” Arthur ignored Atwood’s expression of unmitigated contempt and went on. “Let’s hear about these enemies of yours, Atwood. These rivals. Who are they? What are their numbers? Their motives? Their—”

  “I don’t know precisely who is or isn’t opposed to us. I suspect Mathers is one of their fraternity. But Mathers is mostly show—a posturer. Dr Sandys at King’s College has made his opposition to our experiments plain. But … some of our enemies may be men I meet at my club every morning, and talk to about the newspapers, and exchange cards with, and consider friends, while behind my back they are bent on my destruction. Podmore was a friend of my father’s. Until quite recently, I would have said we were on cordial terms. I once offered to bring him into the Company, as a matter of fact.”

  Atwood sighed, and poured himself tea. “The forces arrayed against me are great. And subtle. Any beggar I pass by as he lies in the road may be my enemy. Any woman who smiles at me or glances my way. Any shopkeeper or cab-driver or policeman. I do not even trust the cats or the pigeons. My enemies are not some criminal conspiracy. They are London; they are all of its old magic.”

  “Those kidnappers looked like common criminals to my eye.”

  “So much the worse for your eye, Shaw.”

  “Podmore owns a lot of newspapers. Man about town. I’m certain we can find out where he lives.”

  “Of course. I was a guest at his house last November! But to attack him in his place of strength would be disastrous.”

  Atwood sipped his tea, then frowned at Arthur’s sceptical expression. “My enemies are not to be taken lightly.”

  “I take them very seriously, indeed. I expect the police would too—arsonists and kidnappers and knife-wielding maniacs…”

  “I refer to their magic. They caused the storm last winter.”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “Oh, you have, have you? I hope I’m not boring you.”

  “Mr Gracewell believed that they caused the storm, and so did Mrs Archer. Which reminds me: who is Mrs Archer? Your friends seemed quite put out to hear you’ve been employing her.”

  “Archer,” Atwood sighed. He went to the mantelpiece and found a case of cigarettes. “Archer! You’re quite right, Shaw. I kept her involvement a secret from the others. You put me in an embarrassing spot. Jupiter will want an explanation.”

  “Well—who is she?”

  “An awful old woman. You have no idea how old or how awful. Even my father was scared of her. There are—Mr Shaw, there are old ways of doing things. Do you understand what I mean? Old-fashioned superstitions. Bats and rats and eye of newt. The calling up of devils.”

  “Devils?”

  “Black cats. Et cetera. Nonsense, of course. The modern practitioner of the art understands that there are no devils; there is only the will. Nothing but. But old nonsense is sometimes more efficacious than the new-fangled kind. Nobody in London knows the stars quite like Mrs Archer. Nobody has watched them for quite so long. And so I enlisted her aid, yes, that’s true—it was necessary in the construction of the Engine, Shaw! The others don’t always understand necessity.”

  He lit his cigarette, tossing the match into the fireplace.

  “She doesn’t know what we’re doing. Piecework, that’s all. She has certain talents that we can use. We told her nothing. You steer clear of her, do you hear, Shaw?”

  Arthur poured himself some thick black tea.

  “So Lord Podmore caused the storm,” he said. “Mrs Archer said it was … how did she put it? She said they did it to bugger about with her stars.”

  “No, no—well, in a way. The storm that you saw was merely a side-effect. The wind, the rain, and so on. That was the smoke, not the fire. The shadow, not the act. No, Shaw—they moved the spheres. Or, rather, they moved the Earth in relation to the spheres. Ever so slightly—ever so very slightly—just the tiniest degree, almost immeasurable, even if there were tools to measure it.”

  He held up his thumb and forefinger, almost touching, to illustrate—as if that somehow made anything clearer. “Can you imagine the strength that would take? What it must have cost them? How much they must hate and fear me? And yet, that was enough to render years of calculations, and experiments, and observations, and plans quite obsolete. Jupiter and I were engaged in an experiment at the time, and it was a miracle we weren’t stranded, too—we fought our bloody way back! And in the physical realm it caused floods and wind—did they mean to flood Gracewell’s Engine, or was that luck? I don’t know. A good magician is always doing two things at once.”

  “You know, if it weren’t for the storm, I would never have met Josephine.”

  Atwood said nothing. He stood beneath that horrible gory painting, smoking, while Arthur drank the last of the tea.

  “I should see if Josephine’s all right,” Arthur said.

  “No, no. I’ll send someone up to ask Abby.”

  “Abby?”

  “The maid,” Atwood said. “Who helped you dress Josephine last night, and is presently sitting with her.”

  “Ah. Yes. A good girl.”

  “Come with me. I want you to see something.”

  “No, Atwood.” Arthur stood. “I’ve seen quite enough for one night.”

  Atwood smoked his cigarette, breathing in until the tip of it was bright red. Then he quickly stubbed it out on the mantelpiece.

  The room went dark, as if the cigarette had been the only light in it, though Arthur was sure that just moments ago there had been a lamp on the wall behind him. In the darkness he could make out the shadow of Atwood’s head, the line of the mantelpiece, the white face of hungry Saturn in the painting behind Atwood’s head.

  Saturn lifted his mad bloodshot eyes up to meet Arthur’s, and opened his long bloody maw to speak.

  Arthur swore and dropped his teacup.

  “Ha!” Atwood said.

  The room was lit again—as it had always been—and the painting was still.

  “What—”

  “A parlour trick! Shaw, you won’t last five seconds if someone like Podmore sets his sights on you. If you mean to be of any use, then come with me.”

  * * *

  They went together down to Atwood’s library. Arthur scratched at his stitches as he followed Atwood. His wound was hot, and itched furiously. A good sign. Whatever else he was, Mr Sun was clearly a first-rate doctor.

  Servants had tidied the library a little since last night. The multi-colou
red lamps that had stood on the table were gone, replaced with a single, sensible white light. The paraphernalia in the corners had been straightened up, and the rifle that Arthur had last seen in the hands of one of Atwood’s Company—the fellow in the black suit—now hung on the wall over a writing-desk.

  Atwood collected something from a shelf. Two pieces of card and a book. “Sit,” he said, and they sat at the table. Atwood tossed one card across to Arthur, and placed another one in front of himself. He opened the book to a middle page and consulted it, his finger tracing slowly down lines of what appeared to be Greek.

  The two cards appeared identical. Both were made of thick white card, and were about the length and width of a book. On one side they were blank. On the other there was a painted design consisting of a black dot surrounded by a circle of pale watercolour yellow, which in turn was surrounded by a ring of pale blue, and around the outside of it all was a ring of pale red.

  “What—”

  “Shh.” Atwood turned a page, and continued reading. His lips moved, like an actor committing his lines to memory.

  “What is this?”

  “A tattva,” Atwood said, with the air of someone explaining to a hopeless bumpkin which fork to use.

  He closed the book with a thump that echoed in the empty library. He stood, and lit a little stick of oily incense.

  “Opium?” Arthur said.

  “You do have a vivid imagination. Are you afraid I plan to shanghai you?”

  Arthur said nothing.

  “Now—you have a little magical talent,” Atwood went on, sitting again. “Certainly you don’t have the gift that Josephine has. But we shall see what we can do with you.”

  “Get on with it, will you?”

  “I want you to understand where Josephine is.”

  “Mars, I’m told.”

  Atwood shook his head. “Listen. The Cosmos is ordered into nine spheres of being. Each has a different energy state, and different laws. The planets are the signs of those spheres within our own sphere.”

  “But—”