J.

by David Brining

  xxx

  ROOM 42 had a nice view of the town square, an en-suite bathroom with jacuzzi, a comfortable-looking double bed with an orange and purple bedspread, a little desk with a telephone, a stack of Welcome folders emblazoned with the Jedburgh Arms logo of a sheep and two crossed leeks and some newspapers. When Veda woke, in that comfortable bed surrounded by pillows and cushions and other fluffy things, she felt that everyone in the world must have sent her flowers. An enormous collection of bright orange dahlias contained enough pollen to make a hay-fever sufferer's nose explode.

  Jumbuck Jorum was sitting in the bedside chair. "Don't try to move," he said.

  Veda closed her eyes and a Vision of Jura bubbled into her mind.

  It had started raining, heavily, thunderously, the downpour extinguishing the flames in the house with much hissing and steaming. Veda had knelt with Jargo in her arms staring at the moon and the stars, her hair plastered against her face and skull, the tide coming in, swirling around her, and sobbed desperately. After a while, as the tide had risen, Jumbuck Jorum and some others had come to her, made her release him, borne him away from her desperate, clutching, reaching hands and her howls of despair.

  The same tide had caught at the body of Tantivy and carried him away, unseen, unmourned and unobstructed. Strings of blood marked the trail where the sea had dragged the body into itself, into the Jura Sound, the wildness of nature reclaiming something, perhaps, of itself.

  Jarrah Jambres had flung a blanket round Veda's shaking body and helped her away, past the gutted, smoking, smouldering wheelchair framed in the entrance to the blackened shell of the house, past the grotesque blackened doll which had once been Zutphen Avermann, past Tulchan, struggling sullenly with his captors, and away to a jump-jet. The rest had blurred into

  grey.

  In fact, nothing else was clear until this moment. She dully recalled being carried up some stairs, two women carefully cutting away her clothes, the torn, ragged clothing, the socks, muddy beyond cleaning, the sweater and the jeans, ripped, baggy, stained, utterly ruined, lifted her legs between the sheets, covered her over and kissed her gently on the forehead. She had slept for twelve hours.

  "There's some tea here." Jumbuck Jorum's solicitous voice eased through her consciousness. "Plenty of sugar. Try to drink some."

  Veda struggled upright, opened her eyes, sipped the hot liquid and wondered if, in addition to sugar, any tea had been put in this tea. "Avermann." she croaked. "Is he..?"

  "Dead?" Jorum looked at the window. "Yes, he's dead."

  Veda stared bleakly at the yellow curtains. "And Jargo?"

  "Jargo," said Jorum softly, "Will recover. He is young, he is strong, he is also the Tarboy. We knew Avermann was planning to abduct you. We watched him watching you, and we sent the Tarboy to infiltrate the Consistory. He was arrested for breaking into an underwear shop. Tulchan and Tantivy snatched him from the police cell. We needed him there to protect you when the time came. He is hurt, but you, Veda, you saved his life, as you saved JASOn. We are all greatly in your debt."

  ''He's a boy,'' said Veda.

  ''He's the Tarboy,'' Jorum corrected. ''His job is to protect the organisation.''

  "Why?" she croaked angrily. "Explain to me. I have followed the trail, played the game, now I want answers."

  "Defence of the Realm," said Jumbuck Jorum.

  Veda felt very very tired. Whose Realm? No longer hers, at any rate. "It'd make a great story," she muttered. "Circulation'd go through the ceiling." She glanced at the newspaper proprietor. " 'Cept it won't, will it? Ever be told, I mean."

  "No," said Jorum. "It's a story that can never be told. Lives would be jeopardized. You know that now."

  "There'll be a cover-up."

  "Naturally. The Consistory has much to lose. The bodies will vanish." Jorum shrugged. "Something will be organised."

  Silence.

  Broken eventually by Jorum

  "The original purpose of Julius' League, and JASOn, was to preserve the tradition of humanist intellectual pursuit and artistic free thinking and restoring the Monarchy would restore that tradition of tolerance. James II wasn't overthrown by a popular revolution. He was betrayed by a bunch of self-serving upper class aristocrats and Anglicans who saw tolerance of other viewpoints, other ways of living or thinking as a threat to their own power. The Anglican Church and the English Lords would clearly rather sell their country to foreigners, Dutchmen and Germans, than tolerate tolerance."

  "Avermann said there was a fourth attempt, after 1776."

  "Indeed. Two hundred years later, 1976. The year before the usurpers celebrated their jubilee." Jorum's face was impassive. "The Judd Street Conspiracy. They all but wiped us out. Someone betrayed us. We never knew who." And Jumbuck Jorum unfolded a story of secret policemen (British secret policemen with Sarf London accents) crashing through the wall from the National Car Park and Jessel House, of silenced guns popping and crimson blood splurting, of three men running for their lives down a corridor and through a concealed door into Camden Town Hall, hounded and harried by smoking guns and flying bullets and splintering glass and chippering bricks. They had dashed across the Euston Road for sanctuary in St Pancras to be met by a man in a wheelchair and a hulking thug in incongruous sea boots as the house in Judd Street had erupted in a geyser of smoke and fire.

  "We got away," said Jorum, "But they saw our faces. One of us made it into Kilburn but a helicopter was tracking him. They ran him down in Shoot Up Hill."

  "Iestyn's father," breathed Veda. "Elwyn Thomas." Jorum nodded slowly. "And the others were you and Jemadar Jannock."

  "They murdered him," Jorum said. "Murdered him in cold blood."

  "Avermann?"

  "The Consistory."

  ''Calvin's lot?'' She racked her memory for the information Jazey Joskin had given her. ''Geneva, 1509-1564?''

  ''The same.'' He sipped his tea. ''The Puritans who run the Western world. Sometimes, when we have strong leadership, we gain an ascendancy and society lightens up – take the Sixties, for example, or rock and roll, but sometimes the Consistory takes control. They are in control now, with their fun-hating, freedom-denying misery.'' His tone hardened. ''Smoking is evil, drinking is wicked, being fat is sinful, being thin a disease, sex is a weakness and to be controlled at all times and in all places, people are defined, categorised and put in boxes. The education system is designed to produce socially-acceptable robots. Censorship is all around, not by banning stuff but more subtly, by not publishing, printing, filming or broadcasting. People are fed a diet of cheap entertainment, in the theatres and cinemas, on the TV, in the press. They are never challenged, but always policed, and they are punished if they step out of line. Newspaper headlines such as the one about you...''

  'It's your paper,'' Veda tried to point out.

  ''Kids can't play conkers without body-armour. They can't climb a tree without a harness. They can't play in the park because of the kiddy-fiddlers lurking in the bushes. Meanwhile parents can't photograph their own children in the school play or at sports day in case they are going to do something dodgy with the pictures. It's ridiculous.'' Jorum snorted. ''I despise them, with their pathetic PC-ness, their feeble attempts to regulate behaviour, their absolute contempt for the individual's right to make choices masquerading as concern. It's the Consistory controlling us so we behave like good little children and don't challenge the status quo. The Puritan streak is not British, it has never been British. It's a modern conceit and it has sapped our strength.''

  Veda considered all the things she had read, about The Earl of Jedburgh, Jankyn and his theatre, about the artists, the saints, the thinkers who had circumvented their context, who had thought beyond the system and made their mark.

  ''We have produced a generation of weaklings,'' said Jorum, ''Demanding their rights from in front of the telly, sofa-based whingers who can't see that the rights they are granted are limiting and restrictive, not liberating and renewing. I despise them all. They ki
lled King Charles, raised Cromwell to be their Puritan dictator, but ultimately we rejected it and restored Charles II. Ha! How they squirmed! But they conspired against their King again and invited their Dutchman to usurp the throne and return us to their Puritan misery. But what makes me so angry is how they impose their mean-spiritedness on the rest of us. Be a Puritan if you want. Just don't impose it on me.''

  He drained his cup and set it on the dresser. "I got involved in the movement several years ago. Like you, I moved from a small flat in a town centre to a village property. Unlike you, I wasn't a reporter or anything like that. No, I was a businessman, an entrepeneur. I left school at fifteen and got a job."

  Veda steeled herself for the 'Self-Made Man' routine-

  - I 'ad it tough,

  - 'ad to leave school to support mi ol' man who 'ad a bad back,

  - young 'uns today don' know they're born

  - we ate spud peel and scrapings o' marge, and we were lucky

  - an' lived in a shoe box in t'road wi' forty-six o' us huddlin' together

  for fear o' t' trafficetc. etc.-

  and she was not disappointed.

  "Do you know what it was, my first job?" Jorum said. "Painting garden gnomes, that's what. I'd sit in the sun painting the little beards white and the little hats green or red depending on whether he was a little fishing gnome with a stick and a string, or a woodchopper gnome with a silver foil axe. I got a pound per gnome. But it was a good grounding. It taught me to value hard work.

  "From there, I went into selling garden furniture, sun loungers, bird baths, novelty dustbins, those plastic herons you stand in the middle of your pond .... all that experience gave me an insight into satisfying the needs of the customer. I'd talk to them, find out what they wanted, then go away and modify the designs. If they wanted a bird bath with a fluted pedestal or a neo-Gothic garden shed or plastic Corinthian columns with bunches of grapes carved into the plinth to support their car port, that's what they'd get."

  Jorum leaned forward proudly. "I pioneered the Hawksmoor Conservatory, you know, the Wilkins National Gallery Greenhouse, the Christopher Wren Bird Bath with its removable cover in the shape and style of the Dome of St Paul's, and my Richard Rogers Compost-Container, modelled on the Lloyd's Building in London won an award."

  "Excellent," murmured Veda, realising that her tea was now as cold as a garden paving slab as Jorum continued to list his creations.

  "I invented a whole set of wonderful pieces called the Jorum Range of Architectural Gems for the Garden. Made a small fortune. Garden Centres all over Britain snapped 'em up. The Basil Spence Coventry Cathedral sheds made me a millionaire." Jorum smiled suddenly. "You could do with one of those. Or maybe a stylish Gilbert Scott Gazebo. It looks a little like St Pancras Railway Station.

  "Anyway, I bought a house with the money I'd made. When I unlocked the front door, and stepped across that threshhold, across the bare boards of the hall, and into the living room, I noticed that the room was empty, totally empty, except for a telephone, plugged in and working, a single piece of cardboard from a jigsaw puzzle and a curious drawing of a jumbo-jet in blue crayon." He reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and removed a celluloid fragment. "I also found this tucked inside the Yellow Pages under the letter J." And he handed Veda a photograph. "It was a clue, you see."

  Of course it had to be him.