Triumff: Her Majesty's Hero

by Dan Abnett

  "Then enlighten me, please," he said, "before I am forced to fetch a big stick, lend it to my naked friend here and turn a blind eye."

  Keeping the hammer handy, the leader of the trio took a step forward and said, "I be Bruvver Bob. This be Bruvver Thomas and Bruvver Colm." Brother Bob nominated each man with a wave of the hammerhead.

  "Mornin'," said Brother Thomas (the sometime joiner).

  "Mmmm," nodded Brother Colm, less cheerfully.

  "Are you monks?" asked Agnew.

  "You what?"

  "Or friars? Monastics of some kind? Or are you brothers?"

  Short, red-haired Bob looked at gangly, balding Thomas and pudgy, grey-haired Colm. They exchanged frantic, cataplectic looks.

  "I said we was," Bob began.

  "You share the same parents?" asked Agnew.

  "No, mister. No, we don't. My dad's old Handy George," Thomas said, "and Bob is the son of-"

  Brother Bob told him to shut up.

  "Then on what basis do you call yourself 'brothers'?" asked Agnew.

  "We are," Brother Bob explained curtly, "bruvvers in the sensa fraternity, sworn, devoted acolytes of a secret trust, conjoined in the 'armonious relation of a brevrin o' true men."

  Agnew nodded. "You're members of a secret society."

  The trio looked at him nervously.

  "You won't tell?" asked Brother Thomas.

  "Which society?" asked Agnew with a sigh.

  "We can't be tellin' the uninitiated that sorta thing! Pox on you, for yourn impertinence! Why, I'd bleedin' die afore I blabbed o' the private and most secret knowings of our bruvverood."

  "It's the Housing Committee, isn't it?" asked Agnew flatly.

  They shuffled awkwardly.

  "Isn't it?"

  "Yes," peeped Brother Bob.

  "Honestly, you will drive me to an early grave with your agendas and minutes, and association meetings. If it's not the state of the cobbles, it's the provision of street lighting, and if it's not that, it's a torch-bearing mob with a petition about unsound guttering. What is it this time? Not enough wallmounted cats on display to meet by-law requirements?"

  Brother Bob straightened up and adjusted his cartwheel ruff.

  "I," he began in stentorian tones, suddenly reinforcing his ramshackle accent with a bold over-elocution that disembowelled itself on his terminal aphesis. Agnew winced. "I am Chairman-Elect of the Owsin' Committee's Moral Turpitude Action Group."

  "We meet of a Thursday in the room over the Chuffing Pheasant," put in Thomas, by way of a gloss.

  "Don't tell 'im that, you twonk! It's a secret!" Brother Bob said, turning back to Agnew as Brother Thomas rocked backwards with a reddening hammer-mark in the middle of his forehead. "It's come to our Action Group's attention, as it as to the City at large, that tewible anus doin's are bein' perpetrated in this town. The college went up in smoke last evenin'. You musta sin it. There's evil wizardry abroad, bein' done by evil wizards specially trained in fiendishness."

  "And?" asked Agnew.

  "It frettens to corrupt this 'ere nayberood, and we won't be standin' for it," said Bob.

  "And?" Agnew asked again.

  "Well Sir Rupert is to blame, inne?"

  "No," said Agnew firmly. "Good day," he added, and slammed the door.

  He reopened it a moment later as Brother Bob was taking a show-of-hands vote about continuing with the hammering.

  "So what's this poor cat got to do with it?" Agnew asked.

  Brother Bob set his head on one side in the sneering manner of a master craftsman judging the work of his most unpromising apprentice. "Don'cha know anyfing? Tis a warnin'. To demarcate for de attention o' de public the property known to be ripe with de curse o' bedevilment and tewible anus doin's."

  "Why a cat?"

  Brother Thomas edged forward with an air of certainty.

  "Has to be," he said. "Says so in Committee Ordnances. Point of Order One Seven Six and after: 'An cat or similar shall be used to denote an offending property, due to the traditions of superstition associated therewith'."

  "Thank you, Bruvver Thomas," said Brother Bob. Brother Colm nodded in serious approval.

  "The only superstition associated with cats I can think of is that a black one crossing your path brings good luck," remarked Agnew.

  "Aha, but nailed to yer door! A black cat nailed to yer door brings bad luck."

  "Particularly, I would think, if you were a blind door-todoor salesman with a hard knock," Agnew replied, and then chose his next words carefully.

  "Bugger off - and take your cat with you."

  He slammed the door again. In the hall, with the murmurings of the Housing Committee still audible through the door, Uptil looked at Agnew and sighed.

  "We have to find Rupert," he said. "This is getting beyond a joke."

  Agnew nodded.

  "Let me get my coat, and have a cup of tea," he said. "That always helps my thinking process. Then we'll begin to search."

  Uptil followed him down the passageway into the kitchen, saying, "I wouldn't mind a cup of that stuff too, if it's as good as you say. I can't even begin to think where we'll start."

  Agnew spooned out two heaps of what looked like gunpowder from the caddy.

  "We start at the front door," he said, "and move out from there."

  A dishevelled Friday plodded wearily across the City. In the scalding houses of Eastcheap, the butchers grumpily swept out the grisly by-products of their hog-trade into the gutter to make sure that Pudding Lane lived up to its name, but their hearts weren't in it. Many of them wished they were cast away with the offal on a drifting Thames dung-boat rather than living in the City. The thinning pall of smoke over Westminster only served to remind them of the bleak outlook.

  In the blackened wreck of the college seminary, the Militia inspectors made themselves as busy as they could with tweezers and magnifying scopes, but there was a nasty quality to the air that wasn't just the fumes of the dead fire, and they all longed to be elsewhere. De Quincey had brought his outlining chalk, though he was sure there would be nothing worth drawing a line around.

  He retreated to a bench in the west corner of the college quad from where he could oversee the work, and smoke a comforting pipe. Even here, half a furlong from the husk of the chamber-hall, he had to brush the seat clear of glass fragments before he could sit. The building's demise had been volcanic.

  Gull was due to arrive shortly, and de Quincey didn't relish the prospect of making his SOC report. Its brevity was going to be matched only by its lack of an enlightening narrative. There had been nothing left in the leaded chamber, apart from some traces of adipocere and glomerated fat: no sign, no clue, no cause, no answers, except, of course, for the plaintive, emotional statement of the divine, Jaspers, corroborated by over a dozen traumatised initiates. Jaspers made the deceased praetor out to be a meddling, incompetent fool, who carried on with the perilous business in the face of reasoned advice. The few short minutes in Enoch's company the night before made de Quincey doubt that character sketch very much.

  De Quincey knocked out his pipe on the leg of the bench and got up. Gull and two huscarl wing-men were stooping like hawks down into the quadrangle, the vast wings of their Vincis beating against the pulls of wind and gravity. De Quincey began to walk across to them. Steely yet unsubstantiated worries filled his mind, but he didn't know who to tell, or even how to begin to tell them.

  All the same, he couldn't get the image of the divine's laughing, firelit face out of his mind.

  To the north, Mother Grundy sat on a fallen gatepost at the edge of the Moorfields Bog and ate the last of her Bath Olivers. The City was only a few hours away. Thunderclouds, heading in from the Shires, rolled overhead on their way to London. They would be there before her. Something was drawing them on.

  Far, far to the south-west, Giuseppe Giuseppo licked the salt-spray from his lips, and looked out into a Channel thick with fog. The bells of low-water buoys tinkled through the dead air. The r
igging of the Battista Urbino creaked softly. It was taking longer than he had hoped.

  On the apron stage of the Swan, Louis Cedarn was restringing his lute.

  Who was it who said that "Theatre is the blessed balm to all life's cruel workings"?9

  Or that "The play doth rightly smooth back the cares of this work-a-day life"?10

  Or even "On this stage of wooden fancy, the muse doth wrap us in a cloak of imaginings that our finest dreams might be made flesh for one jewel hour"?11

  As Wllm Beaver Esq. strode purposefully across the threshold of the Swan, such thespian mottos filled his eager mind, and a thick sheaf of scribbled paper filled his breeches pocket. He hummed a cheerful tune. The City was in emotional tatters, the cornerstone of Magickal power was a smoking ruin, as rumour had it that some Goetic bogey-man had been unleashed to stalk the London streets. As far as Wllm Beaver was concerned, however, this was a good, fine, promising, happy day. To him, the Swan, and all it represented, was a million miles divorced from the horrors of the world and that damned traitor-culprit, Rupert Triumff, who everyone said was the root of all the evils.

  Wllm Beaver Esq. is, of course, your loyal servant the author, i.e.: me, in case you had forgot, the sheer wonder of this gripping narrative being enough to dazzle and distract you.

  "Excuse me," said I, Wllm Beaver, to the blond man with the lute, "I'm looking for Messrs Gaumont or de Tongfort. Are they about?"

  "Probably," the lutenist told me. "Try over there." He pointed the neck of the aged lute at the door to the tiring room. It was a little before eleven-thirty, and few of the company were up.

  I, myself (Wllm Beaver), nodded in a friendly way that tried to suggest comfortable familiarity with the Way of the Boards.

  "Rehearsing, I imagine," I said with a grin.

  "Sleeping, farting or receiving extreme unction if yesternight was anything to go by," said the lutenist. "All three at once in some cases, I suspect."

  "Uhm," said I, not quite certain what one might retort to that.

  The lutenist stood up. His second B snapped around like a coach whip and whined softly.

  "Louis Cedarn," he said, holding out his hand.

  "Oh, right. William Beaver. Pleased to meet you. Lovey."

  Cedarn looked at me strangely.

  "Actors do call each other 'lovey', don't they?" I checked anxiously.

  "Not the ones I've met. But don't ask me. I'm new here, monsieur."

  "Are you French?"

  "For a limited period only," said Cedarn in a low growl, before adding quickly, "Beaver Beaver You write for the broadsheets, don't you?"

  Your author felt quite proud at this recognition from a foreign talent, and confirmed it.

  "The stuff you come out with sometimes" said Cedarn.

  "You are familiar with my work?"

  "I have bowel movements like the next man. Passes the

  time. That article you wrote about Rupert Triumff's homecoming and discoveries."

  "Sharp journalistic scrutiny? Fluid articulate prose? Consummate handling of factual material enmeshed in a lyrical weave of wit?" I suggested.

  "'Bollocks' was the word I was searching for," said Cedarn, "and that was just the tone. Your facts were pretty threadbare. He had two ships, not six. He was away for three years, not two"

  "Must've got my notes muddled there," stammered I.

  "Yeah, right. As for the stuff about what he found. I don't know where you got that from except, maybe, the bottom of a cask of musket."

  I cringed painfully, and stammered, "You've no idea what it's like. Deadlines approaching editors balling you out and screaming for exclusives copy-choppers wanting glitz and glam and sex."

  "That would explain the stuff about 'dusky aboriginal maids' then, would it?" asked Cedarn.

  "Yes. Sorry. I"

  I broke off and thought for a moment. I looked more closely at the scruffy lutenist.

  "Why are you so concerned about it?"

  Cedarn shrugged.

  "I um know him," he said. "Quite well. He was awfully upset by the stuff the papers came out with."

  I leaned forward with a keen, bright look in my eyes, as my journalistic instinct went into overdrive.

  "You know him? You don't know where he is, do you?" I asked. "The whole blessed City is after him I mean What's he really like? Did he tell you anything? Does he, you know, dabble?"

  "No. And no and so on. I haven't seen him for ages." Cedarn sat back down and secured the loose B. He strummed the courses and began to twist the pegs into tuneful obedience. He seemed to me anxious, as if he had nearly undone himself with a slip of the tongue.

  "What are you here for?" he asked sharply as the strings wailed into harmony, urgently changing the subject.

  "I'm known for my" I replied, and stopped. If nothing else, I had recognised that I was in the presence of a man to whom bullshit was transparent. I didn't want to push my luck, or get off on the wrong foot. "They're looking for standup acts to please the rabble at the interval. Just a little divertissement, really. I want to broaden my horizons. The papers aren't my first love. I have ambitions to be a comic."

  "Well, you're a funny guy," said Cedarn, mordantly.

  "Yeah?"

  No, said Cedarn's threatening look. I felt small and grubby. I sighed. This wasn't going the way I had imagined things would go. I glanced around, trying to identify the nearest exit I could slope out of. The wings and flies were a forest of flaking, painted coulisses and jumbled chunks of mise en scčne.

  "Hang on," said Cedarn, softening. "How do I know? I haven't heard your stuff."

  "Would you like to?" asked your loyal servant, me, Wllm Beaver, re-igniting his smile.

  "Not on an empty stomach. What's the deal here?"

  I moved back across the apron to the lutenist, and said, "I spoke to Mister Gaumont last week, in the Boar's Head. He seemed to like my one-liners."

  "Had he been drinking?"

  "Like a fish. But I look at it this way Is the audience ever sober?"

  Cedarn chuckled.

  "No. Never," he said. "That's a promise. So what did Gau

  mont tell you?"

  "That he'd give me a spot in the interval as a warm-up for the third act. Ten minutes, he said. Politics, social comment, penis jokes. As long as I didn't pillory the Queen or mention the Triumff scandal, he said it would be fine."

  "It will be. I'll find him for you." Cedarn said, getting to his feet and holding out the Service-issue lute to me. "Look after this, will you?"

  I took the lute like a trainee animal-handler with a turtle phobia.

  "Thanks," he said.

  "I understand there's also to be a visiting company," I said. "The Wooden Oh troop have been flooded out, and-"

  "That's right. They'll be here before noon to set up. A stay of execution for the Swan Players. I don't think they've even learned their lines." Cedarn said, pausing on his way to the tiring room, and turning to regard me and my lute-husbanding skills.