by Kim Wilkins
“As soon as we can. We have quite a few jobs waiting, and this is a long work.”
“Before Christmas?”
“Notwithstanding some unforeseen problem, I should say shortly after Christmas.” Simmons smiled and reached out to grasp Father’s hand. “Now go home and take a long rest, John. You must have worked on this for many years.”
“In some ways, my entire life,” Father said with a proud smile.
A life’s work. Deborah was suddenly frightened. “Will you put the manuscript somewhere safe?” she asked, eyeing it perched precariously on the corner of his desk.
He winked at her. “Put your mind at ease, Miss Milton. ’Tis in my good care.”
Anne was in mid-sentence, though she could not later remember what that sentence was, when she and Mary opened the door to their bedroom after an afternoon with the laundry.
Lazodeus paced the floor, his hands clasping and unclasping in front of him. His head jerked up as they came in. Before either of them could say a word, he said, “Where is your sister?”
Anne and Mary exchanged glances.
“Your other sister. Where is Deborah?”
“Out with Father,” Anne said.
“What on earth is the matter?” Mary asked.
“Nothing on earth,” he snapped. “The matter is in Pandemonium.”
“You are angry,” Anne said, afraid. Lately she had only experienced his love and sensuality. Anger was a shock to her.
“I have been waiting for you for hours. I would have appeared down in the kitchen, right in front of you and your stupid maidservant, if you hadn’t returned soon.” Anne had never seen him so agitated. His face was flushed, and his usual soft glow was dissipated. He would not stand still.
“What is the matter in Pandemonium?” Mary asked, growing impatient herself. “And what has it to do with Deborah?”
“How long has she been gone?”
“I know not. I didn’t know she had left. Anne?”
Anne shrugged.
Lazodeus shook his head impatiently. “This is not a big house. How can you lose each other?”
“Lazodeus, tell us what the problem is,” Mary said. “We cannot help you if you do not tell us.”
He pressed a thumb and forefinger to his forehead and sighed. “Yes, yes. Sit down.”
Anne and Mary sat on the bed. Lazodeus kneeled before them, leaned forward and began to speak. His words were deliberately slow. “I idly mentioned your father’s poem to a colleague of mine. He is a seer angel, which means he has a partial ability to predict future events. Mostly in Pandemonium, but sometimes on earth. As hard as you may find this to believe, your father’s Paradise Lost is fated to last through the ages, to be read many hundred years from now, to inspire generations.”
“Death! Is the world destined to grow so much more dull? I should be glad to die if it is.”
“Do not make light of it, Mary, for you have not heard the whole story,” Lazodeus said.
Mary dropped her head, chastened.
“We went directly to Lucifer with the information, of course. Because of the poem’s future wide influence, and because of Deborah’s alterations, our story is destined to be mistold for generations. Our relationship with mortals, which I hoped to improve by dictating to your father, will be worsened.” He took a deep breath as though trying to brace himself against an awful fear. “Lucifer was angry with me.”
“Angry? But why? You were innocent of blame,” Anne said, feeling somehow guilty. She was related by blood to the two people who had brought him into mischief.
“I am not. For I did not tell him immediately of my involvement in its composition, I did not warn him of the …” He trailed off, and Anne thought she saw tears in his eyes, but they were soon blinked back. Her chest ached from trying to control her heart. She could not fling her arms about him and comfort him in front of Mary.
“I don’t understand,” Mary was saying, impatient with all this information. “’Tis just a poem. Why does anybody care? Why is it your fault?”
“Mary, I do not necessarily expect you to understand. Pandemonium is a different place with different rules. But in Lucifer’s eyes, I am guilty for not stopping the progress of a work which will sully our name for centuries.” He dropped his head. “He has named my punishment.”
“You are to be punished?” Anne’s heart beat a little faster.
“Yes, imprisoned.”
“But you have been imprisoned ere now. It is not so bad, is it?” Anne realised she sounded desperate. “You will soon be free again.”
He shook his head, met first her gaze then Mary’s. “I am to be imprisoned for a century.”
“A century?” Mary had grown pale. “But … I’ll be dead when you are released.”
“Yes. Such a punishment I could endure, were it not that it means … the end of …”
Anne’s head suddenly felt light. Everything directly in front of her was sharply focussed, but around the periphery of her vision shadows collected. “I …” She stood, and a loud ringing started in her ears.
“Anne!” she heard Lazodeus cry, right before the floor rushed up and she swooned.
Consciousness seemed to grind back down on top of her, and she became aware of Mary roughly pinching her cheeks.
“Be gentle, Mary,” Lazodeus said. “She has already hurt herself by falling.”
“Come, Anne, don’t be a dolt. Wake up.”
Anne’s eyes tried to focus. What had happened? Then she remembered: her angel was leaving and she was no longer to see him. Her grief was too profound for ordinary tears and sobs.
“I can’t breathe,” she said.
Lazodeus gently scooped an arm beneath her shoulders and helped her sit. “Yes, you can. Come, in and out.”
She took a few deep breaths.
“Anne, don’t be a fool,” Mary said. “He has been given until midnight on Tuesday to destroy the manuscript.”
“Tuesday …?” Today was Friday; they had four days.
“Wait until she is better, Mary. Can you not see that she is still in a swoon?”
Relief crept into her fingers. “Is it true? Do you merely have to destroy the manuscript?”
“And any copies, but you have to do it. The two of you. Lucifer is afraid I will hide in the mortal world. I am expected back in Pandemonium in moments, to be taken to my cell. As soon as the poem is destroyed, you may call me and let me know.” He pressed an object into Mary’s hand. “Here. This should help.”
Mary opened her palm and Anne peered over to see what was in it. A round, clay disk with a complicated symbol on it; all geometric lines contorted together. “What is it?” Mary asked.
“It is a fire charm,” Lazodeus said. “For the manuscript when you find it. In case there is no fire nearby.”
Anne was pained with jealousy. Why give the charm to Mary and not her? She was the eldest.
Mary, pleased with herself over this bestowal of favour, fixed Anne with a serious gaze. “Now, Anne, can you remember which publisher Father said was going to print the foul thing?”
Anne shook her head. “I was not present when he imparted the news to you.”
Mary chewed her lip. “If only I could … wait. Simmons, I think his name was.”
“A common name in a city this size, Mary. We should ask Deborah.”
Mary snorted. “Deborah will not tell us, you idiot.”
“Think hard, Mary,” Lazodeus said, grasping her hands in his.
Anne could not stop staring, assessing his grasp for any evidence of favour. Why did he hold Mary’s hands so? Did he prefer her sister?
“Simmons at … Yes! Aldersgate! I remember, next to the Golden Lion.”
“Well done,” Lazodeus said. Mary turned her face up as though expecting a kiss, but Lazodeus ignored her and stood. Anne took great satisfaction in the downturn of Mary’s disappointed mouth. “Now, you must destroy all the drafts of the poem.”
“Yes. Anne, you search Debora
h’s closet, and I shall search Father’s study. We must be quick, they could be home soon.”
Anne nodded. “Lazodeus? Can you stay to help us search?”
He shook his head sadly. “I am afraid I must go to my incarceration. But I trust you, both of you. I know the love you bear me, and I trust you to help me.” He touched Mary’s hand again. “If nothing else, you have this charm to remember me by.”
“Of course you can trust us,” Anne said, her voice desperate.
“I shall not let you down,” Mary said, with a competitive glance towards her sister.
“Nor shall I,” Anne added.
Lazodeus placed a hand over his heart, the movement slow and mesmerising. “I thank you,” he said. “For now, goodbye.” The shimmering which signalled his disappearance began to emanate from his body. “Let us hope we meet again very soon.”
Mary wished she could do this alone.
Most of all because then Lazodeus’s favour would be hers only, and not stupid Anne’s. She could not understand why the angel paid her pinch-faced sister so much attention. She was ugly, she was dull, and she always wore a slack-jawed expression of incomprehension which drove Mary wild with impatience. The other reason she would prefer to be alone was because she knew she would be more efficient. So far, Anne had baulked at scaling the back fence — “I have only just learned to walk properly, you mustn’t expect me to climb” — so they’d had to sneak past Father’s study where he sat snoring. Then Anne had been hesitant about walking down dark alleys at night. Did she not understand that if they walked through the glow of lanterns in windows they would be seen and perhaps recognised later? And now this, standing there wringing her hands together, biting her lip, pleading with Mary to be careful.
“One cannot break a latch with care, Anne. One must break it with force.” She hefted the rock again and brought it cracking down on the edge of the door of Simmons’s printery. She was rewarded with a loud snap. “There. Now we shall go in.” Mary kicked the door gently, and the bottom half swung in. “You first.”
“I …”
Mary rolled her eyes and groaned. “Lordy, you are no use to me at all.” She ducked under the door and found herself standing in the office of the printery. Anne soon joined her.
“What if someone has heard us?”
“Do you want Lazodeus to spend the rest of our lives in prison?”
“I do not want to be imprisoned either.”
“Stop worrying. There is nobody living here. The windows upstairs are boarded up.” Mary edged around the side of the desk and towards the doorway to the printing workshop. “And the neighbours won’t care. If they hear anything they’ll think we are armed thieves and stay well away.”
“You’re right. I should be of more use to you,” Anne muttered, for the third time so far that evening.
Mary stopped and fixed her sister with an exasperated gaze. “Honestly, Annie, how have you managed to get through life thus far? What is most important in this matter?”
“Lazodeus.”
“And why did we burn the drafts from Father’s study today?”
“For Lazodeus.”
“And what if we don’t find the manuscript?”
Anne hung her head. “Let us search for it then.”
The printery was a large room with a profusion of benches and tables laid out at even spaces. The floorboards were bare and stained with spilled splotches of ink. Dark, iron boxes were stacked on the floor. A large black contraption stood next to the doorway, with a heavy handle and drawers on all sides. Fresh printed pages lay in tidy piles next to it. At another table were gridded boxes full of letters, rows and rows of them. Behind the table was a wall of shelving, and packed neatly into each shelf were manuscripts.
“There,” Mary said, pointing.
Anne approached the shelf and started to leaf through the manuscripts carefully. Mary joined her and pulled a manuscript from the shelf. It wasn’t Father’s. She scattered it across the floor.
“Mary, what are you doing?” Anne asked, horrified.
“If a single manuscript is missing, Anne, they will know someone came for it deliberately. But if the whole printery is in chaos, they will suspect vandals rather than thieves.” She violently pulled another manuscript from the shelf, checked it, then threw it behind her.
Anne followed her lead, but much more cautiously. “It seems a shame to upset everybody else’s work.”
Mary rounded on her. “You are simply not passionate enough, Anne. Do it for Lazodeus. Forget about everyone else.”
Anne set her jaw and was soon creating as much chaos as Mary. After a few minutes, the two of them stood in a mess of paper, but Father’s manuscript was nowhere to be seen. Mary, enraged by this, glanced around her. “Where else could it be?”
“I see no other … Mary!”
Mary had strode to the press and was pulling the freshly printed pages from the bench beside it. She glanced at them, tore them up, scattered them. She pushed a box of letters over, and they rattled to the floor. How dare Father write something which endangered her relationship to the angel? How dare this idiot Simmons think it a good idea to publish it? She turned more boxes of letters over. P’s and M’s crashed into piles of B’s and K’s; Roman letters mingled with italics; and numerals and foreign characters consorted. It would take the printers weeks to sort the mess out. Damn them. Damn them all.
She turned to see Anne watching her with her big, dull eyes.
“Yes, yes, I know,” Mary said. “I’m behaving badly again.”
“The manuscript is not here.”
“He must have it at his house.”
“Do you know where he lives?”
Mary shook her head. “No, I don’t. But we shall find him. We shall return tomorrow and we shall follow him home after work.”
“And then?”
“Simple,” Mary said, blowing an untidy curl away from her cheek. “We shall burn his house down.”
19
Thy Choice of Flaming Warriors
Deborah hated being in the kitchen in this hot weather. She could feel sweat in damp patches under her arms and across her stomach as she helped Liza prepare soup for the evening supper. This job should have been Anne’s, but both her sisters had wandered off together just after dinner and hadn’t been seen since.
Jealous. That’s what she was. She wiped the back of her hand across her perspiring brow and tried to concentrate on cutting up the potatoes in front of her. Her sisters were friends with each other and she was excluded. She had never felt this way before. Anne and Mary had never been particularly close. Deborah had always seen herself as the connection between the two of them. But everything had changed, as Anne had warned them all it would, a long time ago when Deborah had still thought it a good idea to call an angel into their service.
Everything had changed.
“Miss Deborah, could you check the water?” Liza said. If Deborah was suffering in the heat, Liza was finding it worse. Most days she was confined to the kitchen with the fire, scouring the stone floor, or out in the blazing sun freshening rugs, linen and tapestries. There was no escape for her from the awful heat, which still refused to fade. The dry gusty winds still roared over the eaves, banging shutters and setting errant tiles free.
What Deborah wanted more than anything was to wade fully clothed into the brook near Grandmamma’s house, let the cool, deep water close over her, make her feel alive again. She savoured the fantasy as she turned to the fire to see if the water was boiling in the big hanging cauldron, but was distracted by something which caught her eye at the edge of the fire.
Her handwriting. On a piece of paper.
She gasped, leaned forward.
“Carefully, Miss Deborah, you’ll burn yourself.”
“Liza, were these pieces of paper here this morning?”
“I know not, Miss,” Liza said, peering over her shoulder. “I didn’t notice nothing. Is it important?”
Deborah grabbed t
he poker and coaxed the clump of burned fragments out onto the hearth. Leaned close to examine them. It was her handwriting, but her tired, messy scrawl; this was not the fair copy. Had Father burned the drafts? Surely not, he was not such a fool. To have only one copy of so many years of work was unthinkable.
“Liza, I have to go and see Father for a few minutes,” she said, pulling off the cloth she had tied around her waist and dumping it on the big wooden table.
“But the soup —”
“The soup can wait. This can’t.”
She hurried to Father’s study. He had moved his chair under the window in the hopes of a breeze. The window was open wide, but only hot air blew through it.
“Deborah?” he said, his head cocked to one side listening.
“Yes, Father, it is me. I’m looking for something.”
“What is it?” he asked.
She walked directly to Father’s desk. The drafts should all be collected in the lower drawer. “An old inkwell I used to use. I’ve been trying to remember what was carved on it. Mary and I have a wager.”
“A wager!”
“Not money, just chores,” Deborah said distractedly as she pulled open the drawer.
Empty. Completely empty. Her heart thudded hollowly in her chest. She looked over her shoulder at Father, who gazed back at her oblivious. She could not tell him. How frantic would he be, knowing only one copy of his life’s work existed? And that in someone else’s care?
“Not here,” she said, closing the drawer.
“You didn’t look very hard.”
“Father, can Simmons be trusted to take good care of your manuscript?”
Father smiled a tight smile. “I find your concern charming. Of course he can.”
“But he doesn’t live above the printery. What if …”
“He has it at home with him. He came by this morning to tell me how much he’s enjoying reading it.”
“It is not at the printery?”
“He sleeps with it under his pillow,” Father chuckled. “At least, that’s what he said.”