The one who has now betrayed him.
Edie Banister, orphan child, born of some poor knocked-up wench in a poor town west of Bristol, adopted ward of schoolmistresses, charities, and latterly the British Government, occasionally has trouble understanding what other people see in families.
She glances at Shem Shem Tsien’s photograph again, then flicks to the beginning of the file. The name on the frontispiece unsettles her: Angelmaker. It sounds altogether too churchy, too much like a funeral hymn. She shivers, and turns the page.
The Ruskinites are artisans for hire. They do not discuss the projects they work on. They evidence the spark of the divine in the detail of human labour; they do not engage in espionage.
But nine days ago, according to the file, the Keeper requested Abel Jasmine’s presence at Sharrow House, the converted stately home over the Hammersmith Bridge, which serves the Ruskinites as their home.
The Keeper had a message. He was uncomfortable. He was betraying a confidence. This one time, with considerable misgivings, the Keeper wished Abel Jasmine to be aware of something. The Ruskinites felt what was taking place was more important than their general mission.
“More important than the human soul?” Abel Jasmine asked, with a smile on his lips. It was his pleasure to tease the Keeper, very kindly, just as it was the Keeper’s pleasure to suggest by his bland expression and benevolent eyes that he had not noticed. This time, he frowned.
“Than the excellence we might achieve and the benefit to a finite number of souls. Yes. Possibly.”
Abel Jasmine put away his sense of humour.
“In a far-off place,” the Keeper said, “we are assisting a Frenchwoman with the construction of … things.”
“What things?”
“We are not sure. She changes her mind a great deal. At first it was Mechanical Turks.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Automata. Like the von Kempelen chess player, although that eventually turned out to be a fake. These … are not. You see the notion. Soldiers made of metal.”
Abel Jasmine nodded. He did, indeed, see the notion. It had been a staple of popular fiction since at least the Great War. Artists had pondered it, thinkers had written on it. The horror of all those limbless heroes returning from Verdun and Ypres had made a forcible impression on Europe’s ideas of war. It pleased many to look for a surgical solution to conflict, a clean, bloodless version of the thing. It did not please Abel Jasmine. A war fought by empty suits of armour did not strike him as a particularly merciful one; it did not even occur to him to imagine that they would do battle only with other machines. The world as he had seen it was not so fastidious.
The Keeper was still talking.
“Then the automata were discarded—somewhat; her sponsor remains rather enamoured of them—and she needed a great hydroelectric station. And mosquito traps. I don’t know why. Then for a month it was vital that we construct a cinema for elephants, although … we are reasonably certain that represented a digression. Brother Scheduler tells me she is prone to enthusiasms. But now she is building something new. Something extraordinary.”
“And this extraordinary thing …”
“Is what is—or may be—more important for the moment than our chosen task on Earth. Yes.”
“Why?”
“The Frenchwoman—she is from the south somewhere—has stopped making soldiers. I think … when she was summoned, you see, she was one part refugee. It was the beginning of the war. I have the impression that she lost someone, and she was running from it all. She was asked by the client to create a device to end war, for ever. Well. That’s usually a shorthand, isn’t it? For a bigger gun.
“She now proposes to take her client at his word. She believes the device she is constructing will achieve that. She calls it an Apprehension Engine.”
“I do not immediately see what that might be.”
“Nor do we.”
“The intention is very noble, of course, but …”
“But it has in the last generation given us the machine gun, poison gas, and germ warfare, and may shortly yield the atomic explosive.”
“Yes.” The Keeper drew his hand across his mouth, and then went on. “So. The mother of the original client has asked us to make contact with you. She proposed an indirect contact with the Crown through a friend from her time here. However, under the circumstances, we wished to alert you directly.”
“What circumstances?”
“The client is Shem Shem Tsien.”
Abel Jasmine sucked lightly through his teeth.
“That is not ideal.”
“No.” The Keeper bowed his head for a moment. “It is not, however, what ultimately caused us to take this step. By God’s grace, even the works of a monster may inspire salvation—and indeed, by fostering our work, a man such as Shem Shem Tsien may learn to appreciate the miracle that is humanity, and become … better. That is our purpose. Temporal tyrants are of limited concern to us. The issue which causes us concern is the Frenchwoman. We have come to believe that she is Hakote.”
Abel Jasmine listened to the sound of the wind rushing around his carriage, and the noise of the rails. Hakote. Outcast. Unclean. But so much more than that; Abel Jasmine, like the Keeper, knew the origin of the word, and what it entailed.
“Oh,” he said unsteadily. “Well, yes. That does change things.”
Attached to the file is the letter itself, and an assessment of the curious and circuitous route it took to arrive here. The handwriting is a spidery copperplate, very well-tutored but uneven, and there are faint traces of the blade of the writing hand, as if the author had to rest it in the wet ink to retain her grip.
To:
His Britannic Majesty King George VI,
c/o Tweel,
Chalbury House,
Chalbury,
Tweel
From:
Dowager-Khatun Dalan,
(Formerly Dotty Catty of 2 Limerick Street, St. James’s, London, and previously of Coddisford School for Young Ladies, Toxbury, where I took the second prize for Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic languages in my final year, and don’t you pretend you don’t remember me, Georgie, because I know better)
c/o Brother Scheduler,
The Order of John the Maker,
15 Barleycorn Street,
Dhaka
Dear George,
(or, I suppose I should say some such thing as “Dear Brother Sovereign” or “Dear Britannic,” but I am extremely old, and foreign, so you will just have to make do.)
I was so sorry to hear about all your troubles. It really is too bad: this Mr. Hitler seems quite the wrong sort, although I understand he is vegetarian and so not getting his protein. One must make some allowances for a weakness of the brain. Also, I have heard it said he contracted a rotting disease early on and has curious spells. Be that as it may: he is hateful when he shouts and screams. We had a newsreel here in the palace, and it made me quite ill to see. Was it not enough that half Europe’s manhood must die in the ‘teens, that we must have another Great War about the world again?
Well, now my son has a Grand Idea and I am most afraid that it will be a horror. You know how it is between us, I think. I am quite amazed, to wake each day alive and not murdered. I would leave, but he holds over me the lives of my other children—no, George, not really my children: I mean the elephants, the great grey cavalry mounts of my fathers’ fathers. They are most proper and most straightforward, and I must take care for them one how or another. Promise me you will help with that, too, if only you can?
Yes, yes, I know, I wander. Old women do that, George, so don’t be unkind. Here it is, laid out the way he laid it out for me, most rational:
Addeh Sikkim is a small nation among stronger powers, and not always convenient to them.
In time of war, a nation may be contested by one power, defended by another, and in the confusion cease to exist altogether, so that even when the storm subsides, the small island that wa
s has been quite inundated and cannot be got back.
Thus: the only weapon of use in the modern world is the vast and terrible one which cannot be understood or defended against, whose shadow will be a block on the dreams of madmen; a weapon so awful that the world cannot survive its use, so that no one would use it save in the moment of their own inevitable destruction, and no one seek or allow the destruction of the one whose hand is on the hilt, lest they find the blade cuts every throat on Earth.
Do you see, George, why I am afraid? This is a new talk, not like the good old days at all. It is entirely the wrong kind of Modern, and not Enlightened at all.
And so he has found a scientist—a woman, if you will credit it—to execute this construction for him. Find me a tool, he has told her, a thing which will end all wars. He has brought her here and she is prisoned, but I am not sure, but that she does not see things after his own fashion. She is an odd fish. Her family name is Fossoyeur, and she has letters after her name from a university in France. Because she is French and I cannot say her proper name—I lisp now, after my sickness last year—I call her “Frankie.”
George, you must spirit her away, as you could not do for those poor Russians, while she still wants to go, for my son is a compelling man in all senses, and if she is persuaded, she will make this thing and then where shall we all be?
Send me someone fast and clever, George, and make it well again.
Please give my regards to your family and tell them I continue healthy.
Yours in haste,
Dotty
[Post script: Dear Tweel, I’m sorry to bring up the Anglo-Saxon prize, but you did promise if I helped you pass the exam, you would one day help me, and that day is today, Coddis girls together! Do please bring this to G. as swiftly as can be, keep it away from those frightful little Civil Service fellows or they’ll want Frankie’s wotnot for themselves. And “wot not” is the word, Tweel, I promise you: things we are not meant to wot of, and do not dare tell me that’s a hanging preposition, because I know. Would you have me write “things of which we are not meant to wot”? It’s sheerest drivel, Tweel, and I shall have no part of it. In any case I’m old and foreign. See above.]
Dotty Catty, in the fine tradition of Addeh Sikkim and Merry England, will not receive a man in private. Thus, Edie is the perfect agent. However, the Opium Khan regards women in general as chattel. No female admitted to the palace would have any freedom of movement nor security of person. Thus, an invitation has been secured for one Commander James Edward Banister, of His Majesty’s Royal Navy, to come on a goodwill visit and discuss the disposition of the Khan’s forces in any invasion of India by the Empire of Japan. Lodged in the palace, James Edward will hide away at night and transform once again into Edie, who will then present herself to the Dowager-Khatun in respectable style, albeit by climbing in through her window at dead of night.
The Opium Khan, in the finest modern fashion, desires that Frankie Fossoyeur create for him an Ultimate Weapon. Abel Jasmine would prefer that such a thing—if exist it must—exist in Cornwall, instead.
And all this is now the sole responsibility of one Edie Banister, the girl who wished to serve her country.
In the Pig & Poet, Edie drains the last of her brandy and shifts her backside on the ragged, uncomfortable stool. Since her eighty-ninth birthday, she’s had a bad relationship with backless chairs. She stares at the darts board as a young tough with bad skin lands a trio in the treble twenty. Not bad at all. She sees Biglandry’s face in the pattern of holes in the board, a martyred, hapless murderer, sent to do a job he was never fitted for. Not that he lacked talent in the direction of death. Just intelligence. She wonders if he’ll be the last, and concludes that, if he is, she will almost certainly have failed—so she must assume at least one more session like this, with corpseguilt glaring at her from an empty chair.
She sighs, and begins to gather her belongings, not without a measure of bitterness. Here she is, a million years later, and not an older brother in all the world. No family to speak of at all, save for a foul-smelling dog clinging to life with grim determination in her handbag. And at that, he’s liable to outlast her.
Edie Banister stands—a process which takes a distressingly long, awkward time—and goes upstairs to the relative tranquillity of her rented room. She stares around her. Oscar Wilde, she recalls, acknowledged the close of his mortal existence by remarking: “It’s me or the wallpaper. One of us has got to go.”
Looking up at the brown floral print, she feels a fleeting kinship. All the same, there’s work to be done. Her shopping expedition was not just for clothes. A kitchen shop, two supermarkets, and a garden centre have yielded ingredients for some small advantages in what she suspects will turn out to be a very unfair fight. Tupperware boxes, thermos flasks, and liquid fertiliser, a kettle for a witch’s cauldron: Edie lays it all out, and then jots down proportions from memory.
In the brown room, amid the cheap, well-intended furniture, Edie Banister makes saboteur magics, alchemies of resistance. And then she lowers herself gratefully into bed, and finds that Bastion has so far bestirred himself as to claim a space by her feet. She sleeps, and dreams of old work, unfinished.
VI
If ever;
not arrested;
the Bold Receptionist.
Joe Spork holds his telephone in his left hand and pokes at it with his right. He has lost an indeterminate amount of time and is shivering, symptoms he identifies as shock. Fortunately, he knows the number by heart. He has never used it before, but it is the rule of the House of Spork, and always was, since he was old enough to count: if in doubt; if you ever; if you are accused; if you are nearby; if you are taken hostage; if you are arrested; if you hear a rumour that someone; if you wake up and she’s dead; if, if, if, you call the magic number and you bare your soul.
At nine-twenty at night, it takes two rings for someone to pick up the phone.
“Noblewhite Cradle, Bethany speaking.” A woman’s voice, not a girl’s. This number is not answered by receptionists or temps. It rings on the desk of Noblewhite Cradle’s formidable office manager. When the actual Bethany is not in residence, there are three surrogate Bethanys who will take the call. At no time, ever, will it take more than two rings for one of them to lift the receiver. The extra Bethanys, in private life, go by the names Gwen, Rose, and Indira. It’s not important. When they answer this phone, they are Bethany.
“Good evening, Bethany, it’s Joshua Joseph Spork.” Bethany (all of her) knows the name and history of every single client with access to this number. There aren’t many—but even if there were, the name “Spork” is an absolute passport at Noblewhite Cradle.
“Good evening, Mr. Spork, how may I help you?”
“I need Mercer, please.”
“Mr. Mercer?” Even Bethany hesitates for a second. “Really, Mr. Spork? Are you sure?”
“Yes, Bethany. I’m afraid so.”
There is a brief stutter on the line. Bethany has just switched over from a standard phone to a headset, leaving both of her hands free to work. She’s ambidextrous and she has two computers in front of her, each set up for use with one hand and patched into the communications system at Noblewhite Cradle. In other words, Bethany is now able to perform three distinct actions at once. One hand is tapping out an extension number in response to Joe’s request. The other is discreetly alerting the senior partners to the fact that Mercer Cradle is now in play, and they should therefore expect the usual degree of insane fallout. In the meantime, she continues the conversation with Joe.
“I have the List here, Mr. Spork. Are there any matters arising from the last few days of which I should be aware?”
The Cradle’s List is a celebrated joke in the legal journals, the Loch Ness Monster of documents. Jonah Noblewhite in his day was occasionally cartooned as a sort of black-lettered Santa, with his List displaying the peccadilloes of the mighty and the notorious, the better to conceal them from the world. If the matter
being lampooned featured the Scottish courts, Nessie herself was often the client. Joe tells Bethany that his entry is as accurate as he knows how to make it.
“Putting you through now. Will you require any subsidiary services?” Meaning, will you be needing us to bail you out, or get hold of the negatives, or arrange a poker game for you to have attended last night?
“For the present, no, thank you,” Joe says politely.
“Very well,” Bethany says, not without a measure of congratulation. Joe has never availed himself of Noblewhite Cradle’s more outré services, at least, not directly, though he suspects his father may have deployed them on his behalf when he was a child. Bethany is always glad when her charges are bystanders rather than arrestees.
“I am in the lobby of Wilton’s,” Mercer Cradle’s voice says pleasantly, “where my rack of lamb has just arrived and is even now cooling next to a glass of unimpeachable Sassicaia. Since my dinner companion threw her gin and tonic at me shortly after the fish course, you have my full attention as long as someone is dead. Is someone dead? Because otherwise—”
“It’s me, Mercer,” Joe says.
“Oh,” Mercer says. And then, “Joe, for God’s sake, you’ve got my cellphone number.” And then meditatively, “Oh, crap. What’s happened? Don’t say anything to anyone except me.”
“Billy’s dead, Mercer. I’ve just found him.”
“Billy Friend?”
“Yes.”
“Dead like slipped on a bar of soap or like Colonel Mustard in the library with the lead piping?”
“Very much the latter.”
“And you, you poor rube, are standing there at the crime scene up to your neck in shit.”
“Yes.”
“Bethany? Police?”
“On their way, Mr. Cradle. Someone called them five minutes ago.”
“Joe, you are a pillock. Was that you?”
Joe doesn’t know. It may have been.
“Never mind, then. First question: are you Colonel Mustard?”