Cannonbridge

by Jonathan Barnes

  “Kara and Sam must’ve gone out,” she says, sounding a little worried at the prospect. “Help yourself to a cup of tea or something. I’ll see if I can dig out that book.” Toby nods and thanks her. As the girl disappears into the bedroom, she calls over her shoulder: “Milk’s in the fridge if you want it.”

  Toby watches her go—notices, in a way, that he accepts is entirely inappropriate, the sway of her bottom in her tight blue jeans—but he makes no move towards the kitchen or the fridge. Instead, he treads towards the window and gazes pensively out onto the street below, expecting, although he cannot say quite why, a dark figure watching him, staring back up with implacable malice in his eyes. But the street is empty. Of course it is. Cars pass by but none stops here. The world churns on, seemingly with scant regard for the troubles of Toby Judd.

  As he watches, he thinks of that strange question the librarian had used. What will come after humanity?

  He looks and thinks a while longer before, skin prickling in a most unpleasant way, he becomes aware that he is being watched. He turns slowly, as if wary of making any sudden moves.

  Two women—Kara and Sam—have emerged, presumably from one of the bedrooms and are standing close together, watching him from the edge of the room.

  “Hello,” Toby says. “Hope we didn’t disturb you.”

  They only look at him, wide-eyed and fretful.

  Toby is at a loss as to how best to respond when Gabriela walks noisily back into the room, a bulky paperback under one arm, its cover emblazoned with a familiar face.

  She stops, takes in the scene: “What’s going on here?”

  Nobody speaks until eventually one of the girls (Kara? Sam? Toby can’t be sure) shuffles forward and says: “I’m sorry, Gabs.”

  The other one echoes the sentiment. “We’re both sorry.”

  “Why?” Gabriela snaps. “What have you done?”

  Again: “We’re really, really sorry.”

  Toby hears a sound—distant but drawing swiftly closer—which starts to make a horrible sense of this strange tableau.

  “We’ve been watching the news,” says one of the women. “We’ve been hearing what he’s done. About that man Spicer. And then the copper—Angeyo.”

  “I don’t believe any of it,” Gabriela says. “I think it’s all lies.”

  “We’re not so sure,” says one flatmate.

  “We didn’t want to take the risk,” says the other.

  The sound is closer now.

  Toby swallows hard. “Gabriela…”

  She holds up a hand to silence him. “Wait. This is important.” She turns back to the others. “Well?”

  “We were worried about you. We just wanted you to be safe. So we decided to call them.”

  “Call who?” Gabriela asks but Toby already knows the answer. He knows now what they have done.

  He touches Gabriela gently on the arm and together they listen to the approaching sound, its insistent, condemnatory wail.

  Sirens. Sirens almost at their door.

  1853

  HAMPSTEAD HEATH LONDON

  A STRANGE INTERSECTION of country and city, eight hundred acres of well-tended green. “Heath” seems somehow too modest a name for this proud sprawl of grass and tree, of undergrowth and gentle, wooded hill. It is rather as if a piece of rural England has been carved from its bucolic homeland and set down, with little mind for the incongruity of the act, as a parkland at the heart of the greatest metropolis on Earth.

  Yet the city has not allowed this rustic space to flourish unchallenged. Rather, it has peopled it with Londoners, who swarm on this bright, sunny day in June, along its paths and up its inclines, who linger by its lake and stroll amiably beneath its trees. All here is variation and diversity: grand ladies and gentlemen arm in arm, families on happy expeditions, working people, on a rare few hours of rest, slouched, squinting miserably up at the sky. There is a darker, more sorrowful element also—itinerants and beggars, homeless children scouting for change, brokendown old soldiers pleading for alms—as well as a class of person who are brazenly criminal in their demeanour and deportment (pickpockets, cut-throats, ladies of the night) together with that breed of indefinable person which is altogether timeless: sad-faced women of no detectable class or occupation, ruddy-faced single men who exist perpetually on the knife-edge between eye-bulging joviality and unchecked aggression, glimpsed figures moving between the tree-trunks, strange faces at the edge of the crowd, sombre outsiders, who might just as well be an incognito lord or a Clapham bachelor, watching the mêlée with expressions of such weird intensity that those who venture near them are compelled at once to move discreetly away. It is, in other words, the city that has won this battle in the interminable, doomed war with the countryside. It has placed five hundred individuals upon this shard of meadow, stamped without compunction on the sod, filled the woodlands with refuse and spoiled food, chased the birds away with screams and sounds of unthinking entertainment.

  London the victorious, London the undeniable, London the true eternal city.

  Amongst all of these who have come upon this warm, bright afternoon to gambol upon the heath there is only one particular party who require our attention, labouring up the steepest of the hills in this place, towards the urban view that is promised by its pinnacle. There are six in this party: three children (a boy and two small girls, all under ten), two women (one tall and dark-haired and with a certain nobility in her bearing, the other smaller and more timid, her hair worn close to her scalp) who, between them, labour with a ratty-looking picnic basket. Evidently in charge of the outing is a stout, full-bearded man, dressed, even according to the customs of the time, too formally for the temperature and for the nature of the trip, perspiring heavily yet still contriving (perhaps because, unlike the women, he is unburdened by their wicker-bound luncheon) to stride some few paces before the rest and to declaim, in an accent that is unmistakably Germanic, a snatch of soliloquy. He thinks it apt in this place to speak of another, quite different heath and thinks it of material benefit to his children to be exposed as often as is practicable to the culture of their new-adopted home:

  “‘Cannot be ill, cannot be good: if ill, Why hath it given me earnest of success, Commencing in a truth? I am thane of Cawdor: If good, why do I yield to that suggestion Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair And make my seated heart knock at my ribs, Against the use of nature? Present fears Are less than horrible imaginings: My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, Shakes so my single state of man that function Is smother’d in surmise, and nothing is But what is not.’”

  The children listen as attentively as they can, having been made aware from birth of the penalties for their inattention, but the words are strange to them and, at least to the youngest, the boy, aged but six, mean little. The women all but ignore the speech, having heard it (or something very like it) several times before. There is, perhaps, something in the taller woman’s eyes which speaks of old adoration and something in the smaller which suggests instinctive deference, but these things are buried deep beneath difficulty, poverty and tragedy, and they have about them the familiar slow resentment exhibited by the practical partners of he who is an inveterate dreamer.

  As soon as the gentleman’s speech has reached its apogee (or, at least, a temporary version of the same for it is far from certain in the household how long these impromptu recitations might last) the two women, as if having communicated by telepathic means, stop as one, lay down the picnic and exhibit no indication whatever that either of them meant to move a single step until a respectable time has passed beyond luncheon.

  The man with the beard peers at them, as if in surprise at this small mutiny. The little ones sigh and chatter with mingled excitement and relief. The taller of the two women, whose profile had once been admired by the great majority of the discerning bachelors of Saxony-Anhalt, stands her ground. “This seems to me to be an excellent spot,” she says, to which her husband (for such he is, their union having al
ready endured one decade and set to continue for another three more) manages only the most token complaint (“I had hoped, my dear, that we might venture just a little further…”) before falling silent, sensing that he has been thwarted, though not especially minding the rout. As the picnic is decanted from the hamper and a profusion of blankets, rugs and cushions produced on which the party are expected to sit, his children run around his legs and, teasingly insistent, tug him towards the ground. It is, he will often think in future times, a moment of pure, uncomplicated pleasure, breaking bread with his family here in this amiable place which if it has not proved especially welcoming has, at least, not spurned him. The food is pleasant, though more meagre than they would like, there is a bottle of porter for him and there are sweetmeats for the ladies and the children. There is between the six of them a bond of fierce loyalty and love. All, he considers, is relative contentment and cloudlessness.

  The meal is finished and the party, sated, has begun to drowse when a shadow falls across the group and a voice which is known to none of them is heard to declaim with (it will later be said) something of the sly charm of Milton’s anti-hero: “Mr Marx? Mr Karl Marx?”

  Our bearded fellow looks up in wary recognition and perceives the following sight: a tall, dark-haired man, clad, in defiance of the season, wholly in black (though he exhibits not the least sign of discomfort) and with something about him of the buccaneer, accompanied by three of the most senselessly attractive ladies that he has ever beheld arrayed in flagrant admiration about him. There is a second man also, rather shyer than the first, a short, stout person with an air of hard-won affluence whose presence is half-obscured by the undeniable physical magnetism of his companions.

  “Have we met, sir?” asks Mr Marx.

  “We have not, sir,” says the dark-clad man, “at least not in person, though I half-fancy that I am well acquainted with you through your writings. My associates and I simply chanced to see you here amongst your charming family.” An appreciative nod at this in the direction of Mrs Marx. “I fear I simply could not pass up the opportunity of paying my respects.”

  The great beard wags once, in acknowledgement. “Your name, sir?”

  The dark-clad man smiles, broad and easy, and his sinuous female confederates (not a one of them, Marx thinks, more than four and twenty) twitter at the jocular absurdity of the request. “You know my name, Mr Marx.”

  The casual confidence of the man! The maddening, swaggering droit du seigneur!

  The head of the family hesitates for just long enough to make it clear that his ignorance is feigned. “The English Golem?” he asks eventually, as though he has been searching wildly through some mental directory in search of the interloper’s identity.

  The dark-clad man nods, mock-encouraging.

  “Ezekiel Frye?”

  Another nod.

  “The Lamentation of Eliphar, Mununzar’s Son?”

  The same gesture—flecked now with irritation.

  “Ah, so you must be…”

  The name is spoken then. The name of power.

  Matthew Cannonbridge offers the other man his hand. “The names of these ladies are not in the slightest bit important but this other gentlemen, Mr Marx, now he is quite another matter. Allow me to introduce you to my particular friend, Mr Daniel SwaineTaylor.”

  The plumper, wealthy-looking man bows in suave greeting.

  “I know your name, sir. You are concerned, I think, with… capital?”

  Swaine-Taylor nods. “Indeed I am, sir. I am of the City. A pleasure indeed to make your acquaintance.”

  “And I yours,” Karl says. “My family,” he adds, vaguely indicating his brood.

  Cannonbridge pays them no heed. “I wondered, sir, if we might talk awhile.”

  “I am at leisure, sir, as you have surely observed, amongst my family.”

  “We need speak only briefly.”

  Karl finds that he is squinting. “Of what do you wish to speak, sir?”

  Wide smile, glittering eyes. “Why, of what else, Mr Marx? Of what else but of things to come?”

  NOW

  THE SIRENS ARE closer now, closer than before, the neurotic screech of them cutting through the afternoon’s desultory hum.

  All four players—Kara, Sam, Gabriela and Dr Judd—are simply looking at one another, as if in unarmed stand-off.

  It is, surprisingly, the academic who speaks first, his words almost swallowed by the noise outside. It is not entirely clear to whom he addresses his remarks. “I suppose this is it then,” he says glumly. “Probably best to admit when you’re beaten.” He wrinkles his nose in meditative resignation. “I’d best just wait here till they come. Of course, I’ll deny that any of you offered me any help. I can I say I lied to you. Forced you, even. Either way you won’t get in trouble.”

  The slap that follows a second after this mournful declaration shocks Toby as it shocks all present. The thwack of Gabriela’s palm on his left cheek seems to echo round the flat. The waitress bares her teeth and for an instant Toby glimpses the limitlessness of her determination.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t give up now.”

  “But…” Toby gestures towards the women and inclines his head in the probable direction of the squad cars. “When the odds are so stacked…”

  Thwack! She slaps him again.

  “Ow!”

  “Fight!” Her voice is raised against the sounds of authority. “Fight!”

  “But… it’s… no good…”

  Thwack!

  “Fight, Toby. Fight!”

  A moment’s more uncertainty. Then new steel.

  “Yes.” Toby nods. “Yes.”

  “Excellent. Then let’s go.” She throws Toby the book that has, until recently, been stowed beneath her arm. He catches it, a little less maladroitly than he might have done before. It’s Forgotten Genius, of course—the Blessborough book. “You can read the dedication as we go. Now, come on!”

  And they run, the two of them, from the room, from the apartment and out into the street beyond.

  It all happens so quickly that Kara and Sam have no time to interject or to attempt any intervention. They make no comment at first, not, at least, until just before the arrival of the police. Instead, they simply gaze at one another in wounded, baffled solidarity and listen to the roar of engines.

  OUTSIDE, THE MAN in the Saab, he of the earplugs and the supply of toffees, watches a battered little Fiat hurtle out of the end of the street and career towards the city’s edge, its workings still warm from its previous excursion. On this occasion, he makes no move to initiate pursuit, but only watches as the vehicle speeds hectically into the distance.

  Seconds later, three police cars drive past in the wrong direction, back towards the apartment.

  The man in the Saab is not the smiling sort—if he were, he might allow himself a small moue of amusement at their noisy incompetence. Instead, he simply watches unblinkingly. Once the sound of them has died (and their drivers have doubtless begun to quiz the two bemused and apologetic flatmates) he removes a single foam bud, takes out his phone, touches one button and places the device disdainfully to his right ear.

  A moment’s silence, then: “They’re heading north, sir… Yes. My assessment also… If you think that’s best… Have we a copter on stand-by? Just to be sure… Good… Good.”

  The call is ended, the phone is returned to his pocket, the bud is dexterously replaced.

  Externally, the man is patience personified. Within, however, something is stirring which, in the past, many have had good cause to fear.

  The man in the Saab is getting restless.

  It has been too long since he last performed an act of violence. Not since the madman in the hotel room and the copper in the alley by the café, his guts ribboning out, oddly beautifully, upon the pavement.

  Now the man senses the approach of withdrawal symptoms. He’s getting itchy. Not long, not long now and he’ll be needing another fix. He finds himself thi
nking about the guts of Toby Judd and those of the little waitress.

  He wonders if they’ll look beautiful too.

  “SO WHAT DOES it say?” Gabriela asks, still slightly breathless, as they break once more into the Scottish countryside, the air blessedly free of the sound of sirens. She is driving too fast and too recklessly. He thinks about saying something but glimpses the look of indomitability in her eyes and remembers the sting of her hand on his face and decides to button it.

  “What does what say?” he begins, realising almost immediately. “Oh. Oh, yes.”

  Fumbling for the book, with its saturnine portrait on the cover, he brings it up to his lap and flicks to the beginning, almost dropping it again as Gabriela tackles a curve in the road in the manner of a stuntwoman with a death wish.

  At last, Toby finds the dedication. It is only a single line which conveys nothing to him.

  He reads aloud: “‘To the guardian of Faircairn, with more gratitude than they know.’” He shrugs. “Faircairn. What’s that?”

  Gabriela does not take her eyes from the road. “It’s an island,” she says. “Just off the coast of Scotland.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. It’s very small. Privately owned. I wouldn’t expect you to have heard of it.”

  “Good. Because I haven’t.”

  “You think there’s some connection?”

  “I’m not sure,” Toby says, “but at the moment it’s the best we’ve got.” He is thinking of the documents in the cabinets, of those pages which seemed to fade in and out—not of focus exactly but almost, somehow, of existence.

  “That’s good,” says the woman.

  “How do you figure that one out?”

  She smiles. “Because I know exactly where it is. And, more to the point, I know how to get us onto it.”

  And she pushes the accelerator harder still and Toby is forced backwards in his seat and, for a moment, as they speed on, all things seem possible.