“He was a matinée idol, Joe. He told them he loved them when everyone else thought they were hopelessly obsolete. He swept them off their feet. And he was surrounded by people, all the time, photographers and journalists writing everything down. Even a television camera. You have to remember how rare that was then, Joe. We only had three channels until eighty-two. But they watched everything he did, and we knew he was important. There’s nothing so impressive as someone everyone wants to be with, who says he only wants to be with you.
“I sat at the back,” Cecily Foalbury growls, “and I hated him. I hated him with everything I had because I knew he was a liar and he would leave them with nothing. He stood in the pulpit and looked down at them and he broke them, and they thought he was making it all better.
“ ‘Artisanship,’ ” he said, “ ‘is a means to an end for us. Is it not? Did we become artists because we love art, or because we love God?’ And Joe, you have to understand, they hadn’t been addressed like that in a sermon before. They weren’t Charismatics, they didn’t feel the Holy Spirit in them, and they didn’t ask one another to testify. They were Ruskinites. They were makers, and very sensible. Very calm.
“Well, that just made them easy pickings. I saw, next to me, an old fellow stop breathing for a moment as if he was frightfully offended, and then he got this odd sort of smile, as if he’d always wanted to do this and suddenly he was being allowed.
“ ‘We love God,’ someone said, and then they were all nodding, and I heard a lot of people saying ‘God.’
“ ‘We seek revelation,’ Brother Sheamus said. ‘Is it not so?’
“ ‘Yes,’ they said.
“ ‘Well, God has abandoned us. Perhaps it is a test. Perhaps He does not care. Who can say? He is God. He is ineffable. He has done many things in our shared history, but He has never explained Himself. But there is a keener revelation in this world than art and craft. There is a machine which could reveal God. An automated prayer wheel which will show us the truth. But it might … it will do more than that.’
“ ‘What more?’ they said.
“ ‘If God has abandoned us—if our creator has left us to our own devices—then this device will draw His eye.’
“ ‘Draw it?’
“ ‘The Engine is most compelling. It is like a puzzle to the eye of God, a whirlpool. With it, we will end the silence of God. We will see Him. And He will see us. We will pass His test, and we will come of age. We will demand—demand, as Moses did—we will demand that he speak to us.’
“Well, that was blasphemy, clear and simple, but it didn’t sound like it when he said it then and there, it sounded like a perfectly reasonable thing. They all sat there for a moment as if he’d hit them with a kipper, and then someone shouted ‘Sheamus!’ and then they were all on their feet and shouting and poor Sholt, the little fellow who was supposed to be Keeper, was bundled off the platform and they elevated Sheamus on the spot.
“He didn’t hang about, Joe. He got right to it. That same night he told them to cover their faces as a symbol of God’s disregard, and they did, and somehow there were bits of that horrible gauze ready and anyone who wouldn’t wear it was out into the dark. They tried to take possession of all the other buildings and so on, but someone blocked it, I always assumed it was the government.
“And very soon after that, the Ruskinites became something else. The craftsmen were gone, people we’d known for years were either sent into seclusion or kicked out, and Sheamus brought in his own people, thugs and bullies as lay members, and a whole host of new monks who never spoke. He called them the Cornish Orphans.”
Joe jolts a little in his chair.
“It was a hostile takeover,” Cecily Foalbury says, brokenly. “Well, it was the eighties, wasn’t it?”
Into the mournful quiet, Joe ventures a last question. “Cecily … the friend who took you along …”
“Yes,” she mutters. “It was. It was your grandfather, Daniel.”
They sit for a moment without speaking.
“Joe,” Polly Cradle says at last, “we should go. We have to check in with Mercer.”
“One minute, I just need to make a call,” Joe says.
“Joe—”
“It’s important, Polly, I promise. It might help.”
She sighs a yes, and Joe gets permission from Cecily Foalbury to use the telephone. Cecily’s gaze sweeps over Polly, resting for a moment on the bag of records on its strap over one shoulder. She raises her eyebrows just a little, and Polly nods. The Man-eater smiles, and pats Polly lightly on the back of the hand.
“Partner in crime,” Cecily says happily. “The right sort of girl. At last!”
The phone is in a separate wooden booth, an elegantly carved enclosure with a special noise-reducing design. It was made, according to the handwritten label, for an Estonian noble in the late 1800s. Joe cannot remember the number, but he can remember dialling it on his father’s grey desk phone, the purr of the tone and the endless clickety-clack as he went through the digits. Back then, it was an oh-one number. Now it’s oh-two-oh-seven. He hopes the rest remains the same.
Someone answers on the second ring.
“Fucking intolerable cow!” cries an aggravated male voice.
“Don?”
“Oh, I’m terribly sorry. I thought you were Erika. My lover,” the voice clarifies, in case Joe knows more than one Erika who might be an intolerable cow. “Who’s that?”
“Don? It’s Joe Spork.”
“Joe? Joe Spork? Oh, for God’s sake, little Josh?”
“Yes.”
“Little Josh, who must now be almost as old as I am, you have the pleasure of addressing the Honourable Donald Beausabreur Lyon, master of a thousand bureaucrats and Prince of Quangos! That’s Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organisation, for those in the audience who don’t know, such as the intolerable cow who thinks she can boss me around like a puppy dog and make me go to bloody Sheffield when I don’t bloody want to … Honestly, it’s bloody Sheffield, not Saint-Tropez … How may I be of service?”
“I’ve got a spot of bother, Don, and I thought you might be able to help out. For old times’ sake, as it were.”
“Well, I don’t know. I might. What sort of bother?”
“I’m involved in this bee thing. By accident.”
“The bee thing?”
“The crazy bees from Cornwall? The police were called out.”
“Oh, bloody hell. That bee thing. That’s far beyond me, old lad. Go and see that weasel at the office and confess all, is my advice. Unless …”
“Unless what?”
“Unless you’d prefer not to?” This last in a strangely wheedling tone.
“I’d really prefer not to.”
The Hon Don doesn’t speak. Joe realises he’s waiting for something. There’s a password, but I don’t know what it is.
Finally, “Well, I’ll look into it, Josh—Joe, is it?—but I can’t promise anything. Where are you?”
“I’ll call you, Don. It’s better that way.”
“What? Oh, yes, of course. I see what you mean. But you can trust me. Mum’s the word.”
“Oh! Yes. Don, did Mathew ever mention anything to you about his mother?”
“God, no. Harriet was the only person he ever talked to about that sort of thing. Go and see her, is my advice. Tell her I said to sing ‘Georgia Brown’ one more time for the Hon Don! All right? Then I’ll hear from you? Grand. Grand …”
And Donald Beausabreur Lyon is gone, in a flurry of false bonhomie.
Joe turns to find Cecily Foalbury watching him from the doorway. From the non-display collection in the basement her husband has retrieved a small portable gramophone known as a Piglet (Jacobs Bros. of Stroud, 1940) because of the noise it makes when you wind it. “We’re always here, Joe,” she says very seriously. “We’d go to the wall for you. Don’t ever forget it. That’s what Harticle’s is for, and it’s our trust. ‘No craftsman stands alone, nor in his darkness la
cks for light, nor has no shield against his patron’s spite.’ Frightful piece of doggerel, but it’s real to me. And I love you like my own, all right?” She hugs him powerfully, then turns hurriedly away.
Subdued, Joe allows Polly to drive him back to her home. Mercer calls when they are still a few streets away with strict instructions that they remain in the house.
“I’m coming to you,” he tells her. “Something’s happening.”
“What sort of something?”
“Turn on the television when you get home,” Mercer says, “and then stay exactly where you are, which is what you’re supposed to be doing right now. Where did you go?”
Polly tells him.
“Well,” Mercer says after a moment, “that was insane. But apparently it was also a good idea. I find the combination unsettling. Please try not to have any more good ideas until I get there to measure them against the possibility that you have gone entirely off your rocker.”
Polly Cradle sits close to her old television set and waits. She has crossed her legs in a position which Joe finds almost yogic. On her right is a yellow legal pad and in her hand she has a pen. One of two pieces of up-to-date technology she owns, a digital TV recorder, is running so that she can replay the news. The other—a chunky laptop with a thick cord snaking out of it to the wall—rests on a stack of thick foreign dictionaries so that she can follow the signals chatter of the internet.
“Do you speak all those languages?” Joe wonders aloud.
“No,” Polly Cradle says. “That’s why I have dictionaries.” She wiggles and waves her arms, and by this strangely powerful method she conveys an image of herself, with a stack of documents, painstakingly working out the precise meaning of each, phrase by phrase.
“Watch!” she says abruptly, and turns up the sound. On the screen, a fishing fleet in mid-ocean, seen from a helicopter. The newsreader is playing for drama. His voice is filled with the special “keep calm” tone which suggests crisis. The shot cuts to a shot from on board one of the boats.
It is awash in perfect, golden bees.
There is no one on board.
And, as the camera pans, so it is across the entire fleet.
The news cuts away to a coastguard ship a few miles away. The sailors are here, in life jackets and blankets.
“We had to abandon ship,” one of them says.
“Why? Why did you have to abandon ship?” the reporter demands.
“Too much,” the man says obscurely.
“Too much what?”
The man doesn’t answer immediately. He looks up and off to the side, remembering. “I understood things,” he says at last.
“What sort of things?”
“Just things.”
“I see—”
“No,” the man says. “You don’t. You think you do. But you don’t.”
“I don’t think people will understand what you mean.”
“No. They won’t. Not until it happens to them.”
“Is it going to, do you think?”
“Oh, yes. Definitely. And when it does, they’ll know what I know.”
“Which is?”
“Too much,” he says again. “Questions I ask myself in my head, and don’t really want the answers to. I knew them, I couldn’t not know. I have to go home and apologise to my wife. I screamed at her before we left. And my kids. I was wrong and I need to be better. I need to eat right, too. And my uncle, he’s a monster. I’ve told the police: he beats my aunt. I don’t know why I never said it before. That’s all right, I suppose, but it’s hard feeling it all at once. But then there’s more and more. There’s too much of it. You do what you can and there’s never an end, just more things wrong that don’t have to be.” He shudders, and starts to cry.
A moment later, the bees depart skyward in a great rush, and the show cuts back to the studio where people with no notion of what is going on speculate on what it all means. There is a note of panic, and fear.
Mercer comes through the door about ten seconds later.
He looks at his sister, and then at Joe. His eyes open very wide.
“Oh, God,” he murmurs. “As if there wasn’t enough trouble in the world, you two have had sex.”
“We made speculative love,” Polly replies airily.
“What?”
“Honestly, you sound just like him. Well, no. That sounds wrong … I mean that he also asks an enormous number of questions about perfectly obvious things. We made speculative love, Mercer. We had sex pre-emptively, in case we fall in love later. I think of it as an investment in satisfaction.”
“And if you don’t?”
“Then you’re right. We had really great sex.”
Mercer appears to consider this for a moment.
“Suddenly,” he says, “I find that my present line of questioning has lost its appeal.” He glances at Joe. “Well. Not before time. The rest of the picture, as you see, is not so bonny. So … Fasten your seat belts, my lad and lass. This could get rocky.”
A moment later the doorbell rings, and one of the Bethanys is standing on the stoop with a concerned-looking man in his forties.
“Mr. Cradle? Mr. Long is here to see you.”
“How does he even—” Mercer breaks off as Polly drums her fingers on the desk. “Fine. Mr. Long, who he?”
“A curator.”
“Is he relevant?”
“No. He has a kind face and he keeps cats and I thought … yes, Mercer, of course he is. This is what I do.”
Mercer waves his hands vaguely, as if already wanting his teacup.
“Sorry.”
Bethany—it’s number two, Joe Spork is fairly sure—follows this exchange with a suffused expression of concealed but potent delight.
Mr. Long is a damp sort of specimen with a jowly neck and a large, square head. Joe thinks of him immediately as a nervous local darts champion.
“Mr. Long,” Polly murmurs, bringing him inside, “would you like some coffee?”
“Oh!” Mr. Long says, his balloonish nose pointing briefly at the ceiling as he tosses his head to indicate enthusiasm. “Oh, yes, that would be marvellous. Only not too much.” He makes an apnoeac clunking noise in his sinuses which is apparently indicative of humour. “Ahaha knuu haha, because it makes me extremely jumpy! Aha ha hnn.”
Polly favours him with a devastating smile.
“Mr. Long,” she murmurs as she lounges out, “is the director of the Alternative Paradigms Institute at Brae Hampton. I believe he may also be the victim of some sort of confidence trick.”
“Oh, I am!” Mr. Long nods again. “I am. A rather wicked trick has been played upon us. At least, I trust it’s a trick. I do hope it’s nothing more serious.”
Mercer looks at Joe. This one’s yours. I do coppers and spies and lairs and monsters. I don’t do curators.
“I’m afraid I’m not familiar with your organisation,” Joe murmurs invitingly.
“Oh, no one is. We’re very quiet. Although recently we’ve been getting some tourism for the tank exhibit.”
“Tank? Like …” Joe mimes a vague armoured vehicle, machine gun firing.
“Oh, not like Panzers, oh no! Knuu-knuu haha! We have the largest freshwater tank in Great Britain, and the largest enclosed one in the world, for the exclusive use of model-boat enthusiasts, you see. Just a sideline, of course.”
“A sideline?”
“Oh, yes. The purpose of the Institute is to preserve lines of research science and technology which are presently unfashionable. So, for example, we carry the translated notes of Akunin, the eighteenth-century Russian specialist in bacteriophage medicine.” Mr. Long smiles as if this should make things perfectly clear; a wide, millennialist’s grin filled with genial crazy. “Treasures which one day, when they are retrieved from obscurity, may greatly benefit mankind … although between you and me some of them should probably stay hidden, they’re a bit daft. Ahah knuu! Ahahah.”
“And you also have …”
; “Oh, yes, a collection of … well. I say ‘a collection’ … in fact it’s several collections, classified together by the Institute. They’re all Second War, you see. There’s the Pyke Papers. There’s a very small set on Tesla’s work, donated by an American gentleman, and some Russian documents regarding psychical research which I personally regard as disinformation, like the SDI programme in reverse …”
“Perhaps you should ask Mr. Long about his present problem,” Polly Cradle says, re-entering with a tray.
“Oh, indeed!” cries Mr. Long, “Indeed! The item we had was linked with a rather special woman, a scientist … Gave Pyke himself a run for his money, though if I’m honest he was more an innovator and an engineer than a pure scientist, of course …” It’s as if he’s telling a very dirty joke. All of us over the age of consent here, eh? Don’t mind a bit of engineering, do we? Nudge, nudge.
Joe abruptly misses Billy Friend very much.
“I understand the Americans were working on some of her early research when they had that rather unfortunate accident with the USS Eldridge … That’s another one most people think is a myth, but of course we know better, don’t we? Aknuu-knuuu!” Mr. Long is nodding so hard now that it seems possible he will strain himself. Mercer stares fixedly at the ceiling.
Polly Cradle turns her smile on Mr. Long again, and he goes back to his theme. “And then there’s the Abel Jasmine collection. That’s the problem for today, I’m afraid. We allowed an exhibit to be taken away for cleaning by one of the original donors—though on examination it appears she did not donate this specific item—and I rather fear it’s gone for good. It was supposed to come back days ago. A very pretty item, too—unique, so far as I know.”
Joe looks at Polly, and she nods. “A mechanical book,” he says.
“Yes! However … oh, well, of course you know, otherwise why would I be here? We did place an advertisement offering a reward for its safe return. I don’t suppose you have it?”
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