CHAPTER SEVEN
Objects in Mirror may Appear
THE CLANK-AND-CLATTER boys escorted us back. An honour, of course, but the kind that keeps you thinking. Dee strode along just as regally as before, but I could tell he was practically skipping like a kid let out of school. Any minute now he’d be twirling his staff majorette-style. When the soldiers left us at our gate he startled me by clapping my shoulder.
‘Well, young sir! You have acquitted yourself well before His Highness! Has he not, Brother Edward?’
Kelley was as genial as ever, and as opaque. ‘Oh aye, very modest, demure as a girl! But he’s a close-handed fellow indeed. Had he but thought to share what he was saying with us—’
Dee chuckled benevolently. ‘And whose fault’s that, dear brother? Have I not urged you to learn more of the indigenous tongue? You can tattle with the angelic host, yet scarce command an alejack from mine host!’ Another of Dee’s little jokes. I produced a dutiful smirk. No wonder Shakespeare’s clowns went down big.
‘Anyhow, you had no cause to fear,’ he added. ‘Master Maxie said naught but in proper support of our efforts, in most politic fashion.’
‘They spoke of my efforts,’ he riposted. ‘That much was clear.’
‘Of course they did!’ said Dee. ‘And Master Maxie vowed his help. For which you shall know our lasting gratitude, sir!’ He put a fatherly arm round my shoulder and led us in. ‘You know now what our purpose is, and why we said you would be well rewarded. If we are to establish the new angelic order, we shall have need of temporal power – for the guidance of others, of course. To this the Emperor is our key! But alas, the key to his purposes is gold. With that he can withstand the power of corrupt Rome, of obdurate Greece and savage Muscovy, and launch his new crusades across the world. So, we must swink to give it him.’
He tapped Kelley’s homage to Rube Goldberg as we passed. ‘Our efforts have staled of late. We need new guidance, and perhaps ’tis through you, sir, we are destined to find it. Think upon that!’
‘Aye, but not over long!’ said Kelley, slightly less genially. ‘The burden you bear may bring us the wisdom we lack. The sooner we lift it from you, the better for all our sakes!’ He stumped over to the fire and began poking it fiercely.
‘Festina lente, festina lente!’ said Dee in gentle reproof. ‘I agree, Brother, naturally. Yet still we must not stint our precautions, and take solemn auguries and observations to choose a propitious hour.’ He contemplated the ruined notes on his slate. ‘The wisdom of the stars seem a little obscure, for now. Perhaps we should seek a few hours of rest before we recommence.’
I failed to stifle a yawn. ‘I could use that.’ I slumped down in the best chair at the fireside, kicked off my shoes and set my feet to toast.
Kelley picked up the obsidian mirror. ‘Maybe. But what if the best, perhaps the only time soon were this coming eve? We should have no time to prepare. I am not so weary I could not still turn my hand and mind to some scrying.’
‘Noble of you, brother!’ exclaimed Dee. ‘There’s much in what you say, alas! But Master Maxie seemed close to some revelation earlier, and it is for him the rite’s to be held. Perhaps, if he be not too weary, he should be the first to seek what he may see.’
Right then I felt I’d seen more than I ever wanted to; but I could guess what kind of answer that sly bastard Kelley would summon up. I had to have a go first, if only to keep said bastard off my back. He was as genial as ever, but there’d been a dig to that little business about my speaking German – the equivalent of a tantrum, maybe, in somebody less controlled. I’d nettled him. And I knew damn well why.
He was running the old gold potato routine – as old as the Canterbury Tales, at least. Of course, back here that was a lot younger. They do the modern variation with diamonds sometimes, or, if you’re really sophisticated, designer drugs, but the basic principles are the same. Cheap stuff in one end, pricey stuff out the other by the mysterious process in between.
The Spiral, of course, could make things happen, and we were close enough to it here; I remembered the light from Dee’s staff. So could Kelley really have had some luck? Probably he’d tried. He must have had a hell of a shock when he found that his scrying trick actually worked hereabouts; so maybe he’d confidently assumed that his transmutation scam would, as well. But somehow I didn’t think it had. The same old question applied, the one the marks never ask – the one Rudolph evidently hadn’t, not yet. Namely, if this process has even a hope in hell of working, why the blazes is this guy bothering to sell it to me?
If Kelley could ever whip up gold to order, he wouldn’t be sitting around wooing Rudolph, angelic order or no. But that wouldn’t occur to His Majesty. He’d be convinced because he wanted to be convinced. That’s the secret with born marks; they do half the work themselves. Your job is to soothe them along and get some kind of down-payment. Once they’ve paid out for something, they’re hooked; they’ve got a stake too. They’ll defend you because they’re defending their own judgement, bolstering their dreams. Ask any adman. Hair restorers, beauty aids, mysterious hifi enhancements – you think they work because you’ve paid for them.
No, dollars to doughnuts this was the classic scam. It had all the hallmarks – such as getting Rudolph to work the process himself. That’s one of the advanced variations, because it gives the mark a big kick and he thinks it proves something.
No it don’t. Have the gold potato gizmo inspected or sealed or witnessed or anything else the mark wants, no matter. All you need to be is a moderate sleight-of-hand man, and able to keep the process nice and complex and scientific-looking. You stand over the mark muttering about how it’s dangerous and doesn’t always work; you show him how to use the tongs, or ‘save’ him from spilling molten metal, or blind everyone with a bit of magnesium in the furnace, any one of a thousand conjuror’s distractions. And presto! a pinch of dust or a couple of molten-looking nodules get slipped into the works for the mark to crow over. There are all sorts of wrinkles, such as coating the stuff in low-temperature alloy which looks remarkably like lead but melts off in boiling water under the guise of ‘cooling’. Every generation discovers new ones, but the game’s the same.
Once again, a tip of the hat to Brother Edward. I slumped back comfortably in the inglenook, toasting my toes and contemplating Destiny, and wondering whether there wasn’t anything I could try selling His Itchiness. Double-glazing, maybe, or aluminium siding – the Hradcany Castle would account for a lot of that …
Then an awful sinking feeling set in. There’s one big drawback to bunco routines of all kinds. The same old principles of action and reaction apply. The deeper the mark hooks himself, the worse it hurts when he finds out. It makes him ten times meaner when the scam’s shown up, because all the guilt and shame and stupidity he feels, he’s going to offload on to you. That’s hairy enough at the best of times; almost any mark worth taking is going to have a certain amount of influence. But when he’s an absolute ruler and an even more absolute son of a bitch, with his own personal dungeons and no doubt monogrammed torture chamber as well …
It’s absolutely bloody suicidal. You’d have to be a thicko to try it.
I looked at Kelley, with his perpetual air of armour-plated good nature. Oh, shit.
A thicko – or an ego. Now I really recognised his type, one I knew a little too well. A clever dick, a bit of a lad, thought the sun shone out of his exhaust pipe, no doubt. Too damn pleased with himself by half, fooling all these brilliant, powerful people, all of the time. He’d never heard the other half of that one, though, because Lincoln hadn’t said it yet. It just wouldn’t occur to him. Things like that didn’t happen to him, period. When they did begin to slip it wouldn’t be his fault; it would be Dee’s, mine, anybody’s.
And by the same kind of almost psychopathic blindness he’d be just the lad to risk fiddling around with dubious forces like these brigand creatures, or whatever was behind them. He’d be like a moth round a candle flame
at the prospect of power. Risks were something that happened to other people. Kelley would always win through.
He wouldn’t like rivals, either. I found myself thinking about that poor little Greek alchemist, and who might have put him up to offering the Emperor an untried potion. Maybe there was something more to this hurry of Kelley’s. Maybe he did want me to come to harm, to be sure the power stayed his …
I made up my mind to have a talk with Dee, the first chance I got. A long talk, and in private. But how the hell could I get him to believe me?
I picked up the black stone mirror. ‘I’ll have another stab at it.’
Dee beamed. ‘Splendid!’
‘Should we not first turn to the orb?’ insisted Kelley, and now there was a definite distrustful edge to his voice. ‘I’ve ever had the best results with the orb, as you know!’
Dee shook his head firmly. ‘It was with this looking-glass, or stone rather, we had our first successes here. It may be better suited to a novice. There is great virtue in glasses. With them I made my first essays, after the passages in Pliny, and later with the surfaces of water, wine and other liquids, as related in the Ars scintillia of Artephius. Now Psellus—’
Kelley’s shrug could have said a lot of things. I damped down Dee’s discourse, and I was grateful for that at least. I angled the mirror this way and that. It was well polished in the centre, but the halo of light scratches around the rim gave its reflections a cloudy, suspended look. Probably easy enough to imagine you saw things in there. ‘What do I do?’
Dee was chalking notes on another tablet. ‘What you do now, only with all your mind and soul concentrated upon the truth. Look into the stone as you would into a great distance. Strive to make clear the smallest flicker. For a simple inquisition such as this we need no great rites of invocation, at least not yet. But let us not neglect a brief prayer for our success.’
Dee’s idea of brief and mine were different. I began to get bored long before he’d finished. All I saw in the stone was my reflection, and I wasn’t too hot on staring at myself. I saw too much.
What’s worse, there was an annoying tickle in my ear, a buzz almost, as if some kind of insect had got in – not one of Rudolph’s, I hoped. More like a hair; I fidgeted at it with a finger, but that only made it worse. Some kind of tinnitus – maybe this coal-ridden air was giving me catarrh. Lovely; all this, and extra snot.
It was maddening, almost like an insistent whisper. The only thing to do was pay no attention and hope it would go away. To distract myself I started looking around the room. Through an open door I caught a glimpse of the wives, stopping to listen as they passed by. Joan had a tolerant smile on her doughy face, like when hubby has his cronies round to watch the big game, but Jane Dee’s looked pinched and nervy. There was nothing much else interesting, and as the prayer wound down to an amen I let the mirror settle back on my knee. The buzz was still there, louder even and irregular, as if there were shapes in the sound. I was aware of Dee and Kelley looking over my shoulder.
‘I thought—’ began Kelley in a portentous voice, then he stopped suddenly. Dee exclaimed. My jaw dropped in astonishment, but what came out was more like a scream. I jumped up and more or less flung the mirror down as if it had bitten my fingers. Dee squeaked in horror, but luckily it clattered down among the papers on the table. On what happened next I’m not too clear, though I remember the floor beneath me slowly welling up and sinking like a very slow wave. I don’t think I fainted, but the surf roaring in my ears was my heartbeat, and I was somehow huddled down on a bench, shivering. Dee shook my shoulder gently. ‘Why, what’s amiss, sir! Whence this fright and alarum?’
I drew a deep breath. I’d been too dismissive. I’d forgotten that whatever else Kelley was faking, the scrying worked. I just hadn’t realised it would for me, too. ‘Didn’t you bloody see?’
‘Aye indeed!’ said Dee paternally. ‘Truly one might well recoil from such an awesome sight, but there was no need.’
‘There wasn’t?’
‘Why, never so! Did it not speak? No? Ah, well, ’tis my case also. Many times have I been vouchsafed that glorious sight, but ’tis with Brother Edward alone the angelic beings will converse—’
‘Wait a minute,’ I managed to break in. ‘That was an angel?’
He looked at me wonderingly. ‘Why, what else? The fair form, the radiant clouds, the high and noble features—’ He wittered off dreamily.
I was still vibrating with shock. Whatever he’d seen, it pretty clearly wasn’t what I had. But Kelley? His smile gave away exactly nothing. ‘A sight of wonder, as ever. And ere the link was untimely severed, it spoke clearly, to me at all events. Decreeing that we should hold the rites without delay, this very eventide.’
Dee looked troubled. ‘Brother, are you certain? There was only that momentary vision. We should enquire further.’
Kelley considered. ‘No doubt you’re right, Brother. Perhaps Master Maxie’s vision was distorted by weariness and ill-preparation.’
Dee exclaimed with relief. ‘That will be it, indeed! My young sir, I owe you an apology. In my zeal I’d forgotten you have had many days of travail and sleeplessness ere this. Wife, is our friend’s chamber prepared? Then do you light him to it, with our grace. Fear no evil intrusion; I have shielded this house against it. You shall sleep as long as you will, Master Maxie, and in safety, and with your awakening we shall seek clearer counsel.’
It could only have been midmorning, but the prospect of bed was like being sandbagged with a blanket. My limbs went laden, and the idea of just stretching out and thinking of sod all seemed irresistible. I mumbled my goodbyes, and let Jane Dee, candle in hand, lead me up the narrow, shadowy stair to the upper rooms, where a door stood open. Her manner was as cool and aloof as ever, but there was something else in it. She kept glancing at me, as if she was hovering on the edge of a question. The room looked bare, with nothing but a carved wooden press, a bench and a narrow bed with posts and heavy curtains; but right then anything short of an antheap would have looked inviting. She set the candle down on the table and began to draw back the curtains, but hesitated, twisting her hand nervously in the heavy fabric.
‘Gentle zur—’ Her accent sounded far broader than the mens’.
‘Yes, er … my lady?’
‘May I ask of thee … wast truly an angel thou sawst?’
‘I don’t know, my lady. Since you ask – I don’t think so.’
‘Yet my ’usband and Maisteer Kelley—’
‘Perhaps your husband saw something else.’
‘And Maisteer Kelley? To him it spoke, did it nowt?’
‘Well … I heard something that might have been a voice, or voices. But that too—’
‘No angelic likeness?’
It still made me shiver. I avoided her eye. ‘I … can’t say.’
She looked at me properly for the first time. ‘I thank thee ne’er the less, good sir. Rest and be ’ealed of thine affright.’ She did me a deep curtsey, then turned away before I could say anything else. She strode out with smooth dignity, her wide skirt sweeping the threshold, and closed the door softly. There was something lithe in her walk that suggested good legs underneath. Ah well, chalk up one more mystery Maxie would never solve.
Whose bed would she go to? Brother Bastard Kelley’s? Or did they share – no, that was about more than I could stand to imagine. His type – his bloody type. I knew my moment of terror had loused up my great idea, but I was too exhausted to care. I stripped down to my new silk underwear and dived between the coarse linen sheets, sinking into the feather mattress like a fat aunt’s embrace. It felt good, and sleep came racing up on me like a train. But behind it there was a restless, feverish feeling. Suddenly I had the leisure to realise just how far from home I was, out of my time, out of my place, surrounded by menaces, very much alone. In every sense. And the train had a shrieking whistle—
I woke up sharply, instantly, with my fists clenched. Somebody had said something, not lo
udly, but clearly, about an inch from my ear. I couldn’t remember what. I pulled back the curtains, but the room was empty. The sun shadow on the wall had hardly shifted. I must have been asleep for minutes at the most. Breathing hard, I sank back again. And back, and back …
Falling through the bolster, through the moulded mass of feathers and down into blackness. What I did best, wasn’t it? Falling. I’d been doing it all my life. Images came crowding in – the chilly cling of the school bed sheets as I lay awake the night I’d been expelled, afraid of my father coming to get me next morning. The gloating face of the teacher who hated ‘my type’. The jeering cops pulling me out of my first car wreck. The ripping sound as my wrist tore the neckline of my first girlfriend’s party dress. The prison warders suddenly laying into me on the last night of my trial, spitting with class hatred. The stink of my first cellmate, a crop-headed type who mugged pensioners and amused himself putting the frighteners on me. Slopping out next morning – every morning. The muck and chill of the gutter on my first night out, picked up puking drunk by a tart and ripped off for everything I carried. Hopeless, dragging job interviews, where they started staring out of the window. The stocks I’d been sold crashing to junk values, the horses that narrowly missed a place; the one outsider that made a killing, and the bookie’s goons mugging me when I came to collect. The blank-faced bank adviser telling me my last cash had been swallowed up by all sorts of peculiar charges, and the overdrafts were being called in. Suddenly even the horrible hot dampness of my pants at kindergarten and the voice of my nanny, the vicious old bitch.
Where the hell was all this coming from? It didn’t feel like anything I was doing. More as if somebody’d run a line into my unconscious and started fishing for all the really juicy humiliations they could. I struggled to fight clear of them, and sink free into the black oblivion of proper sleep. But that began to feel worse and worse, because the blackness seemed to take on a glassy glimmer like that bloody mirror. It scared me shitless, in case that thing appeared again.
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