Soon, the water will cover the generators and then the game will be over.
Frankie Fossoyeur throws the switch, then grasps Edie’s arm and drags her up on top of one of the benches.
“You must not be in the water,” Frankie says. It seems like a rather silly thing to be worried about.
Crush-depth is somewhere around nine hundred feet. No one knows for certain. They are falling fast. They will reach it very soon now, if they haven’t already.
Edie’s good ear registers creaking.
And then, something changes. Something strange, but—Edie can tell this by the Frenchwoman’s pleased expression—something expected, and good. The water stops rising. And then it goes white. Frozen in place.
Cuparah shudders, as if throwing off a great weight, rolls and heaves.
Down deep—too deep—Cuparah does not implode. She hangs in the dark. After a moment, the depth charges stop falling. Edie stares at the frozen block a few feet below her.
“They think we are dead,” Frankie says.
“Why?”
“Because we lost a large piece of the hull, of course.”
“Then why aren’t we dead?”
“Because we have a new one.”
“A new one?”
“Yes.”
“How? Where did it come from?”
Frankie smiles brightly.
“Ice,” she says, as if nothing could be more natural. “And kelp fibre, for flexibility, about fourteen per cent. In an irregular pearl formation. About ten foot of it, I think … yes. It’s only slightly weaker than steel.” She smiles. “And, of course, we have rather a lot of it. This vessel is excellent. I had not considered the idea; rather than seeking to rule out variations in quality, accept and adopt the reality of imperfection. A very powerful model indeed.”
Cuparah, in the night of a thousand feet down—the ghost of a fly, caught in ice instead of amber.
X
Buggeration to the enemy;
Brother Sheamus;
Ahh-knuu-haha.
I must be out of my mind,” Polly Cradle mutters, as the car turns into Guildholt Street. She sounds for a second so like her brother that Joe laughs, then stops sharply and looks to see if this has annoyed her.
“No,” she says, grinning, “don’t stop. You have a nice laugh. Although it sounds a bit rusty.”
He grins back. “It probably does.” He tries again, a variety of chuckles and cackles, then hears himself and wonders if he now sounds quite mad. But Polly is still smiling.
He points. “Over there. We have to walk the rest of the way.”
“Yes, sir!” She makes a Girl Guide salute, and for some reason that makes him laugh, too.
The building Joe is heading for rears up on the far side, a weird, helter-skelter piece of old English stonework topped with some ghastly Victorian Gothic additions. The doors are vast: black oak weathered and stained by coal fires and then by petroleum fumes, the only bright part of them the great bronze knocker and handles worn shiny and pale with constant use.
Joe Spork has not been here for months. He has nightmares sometimes about turning a corner in the stacks and finding an empty case with a white card in front of it, waiting for his brain.
“Name?” says Bob Foalbury, Harticle’s factotum and husband of Cecily the archivist, through the thick wood.
“Spork,” Joe answers, though Mr. Foalbury has known him for twenty years and more.
“Enter and be welcome in the house of art. Abide by Harticle’s rules and settle all debts amicably before leaving the building.
“Hawking, spitting, solicitation, speculation, gossip-mongering, usury, duelling, and gambling,” Mr. Foalbury says severely, as he opens the door, “are not countenanced within these walls. Good morning, Joe.”
“I need help with something,” Joe says, and there’s just enough tension in him that Bob Foalbury grows serious.
“Not the law, is it?”
“It’s bailiffs, Bob, and all manner of government.”
“Venal office-holders?”
“By the bucketload, I think.”
“Buggeration! The worm shall eat them up like a garment, Joe, and the moth shall eat them up like wool, but your righteousness shall be from generation to generation. The Bible, that is, and I’ve always fancied the Lord was particularly thinking of revenuers and debt collectors.”
“Thank you, Bob. And this is Polly,” Joe says awkwardly, and Mr. Foalbury puffs out a sergeant major’s chest and extends his hand.
“And very nice too, Miss Polly. Bob Foalbury, commissionaire of the house of art. Would you be maker, mischief, or muse?”
“A bit of everything.”
Mr. Foalbury smiles. “Call it muse,” he says. “Always my favourite.” He leads the way down the main corridor, proudly showing off his domain. On wood-panelled walls, oil paintings of Brunel and Babbage rub shoulders with works by lesser-known (but excellent) watercolourists, early blueprints, and pages from ancient mathematical texts. Everything at Harticle’s, Mr. Foalbury explains to Polly, is special, handmade, or orphaned—usually all three. Even the building is special, riven through with trial technologies: Victorian pneumatic message tubes, a Thomas Twyford sanitation system, a retractable roof on the third-floor annexe for observation of the moon. There’s also an antique burglary-prevention device, including panic buttons in all the main rooms, though even Bob Foalbury is a little wary of actually using it.
“You’ll be wanting the old Man-eater, then?” Bob says. “She’s writing a monograph on her teeth.” Cecily Foalbury has a personal collection of assorted sets of false teeth down through the years. The most remarkable is probably the clockwork set made for a sailor who had lost part of his brachial plexus to a cannonball and therefore could not chew. The somewhat grisly archive of gnashers is kept in its own room at Harticle’s and has resulted in this alarming nickname, an insult Cecily resolutely courts—and this is where Joe Spork baulks somewhat—wearing items from her collection to suit her mood.
Bob Foalbury apparently finds this quirky and charming.
“I want both of you. And I need to borrow a record player.”
“Well, we’re here! I’ll sort you out a portable, shall I? … Taxmen! Buggeration to the enemy!” Then, over his shoulder into the woody hallway and the dim, panelled rooms beyond, “Darling? It’s the Spork boy!”
From within comes a noise like a trombonist being goosed during the overture, and then a mighty roar from a pair of elderly female lungs.
“Well, well, don’t just stand in the bloody doorway, come on in. You’re letting out the heat and that’s a grave infraction of our environmental policy, and bloody chilly to boot!” Cecily, silver-capped and mountainous, is still invisible behind a half-closed door, but her writ runs through the house of art.
As they enter the room, a chair skitters back from a kidney desk, and sensible shoes slap on burnished boards. A short, muscular woman with hair like a steel bathcap bounds towards them from the gloom, a vast pair of clear-rimmed National Health glasses making her eyes enormous.
“The Spork boy? Joe Spork? Why didn’t you say so sooner, you bloody fool! Joe? Joe! Joseph! Get in here and give me a kiss!”
The Man-eater spreads wide her arms and clasps him to her chest. Mr. Foalbury sighs.
“Shout out if she gets peckish, Joe, or even looks at you funny. We’ve got some raw meat in a biscuit tin for emergencies.”
“Calumnies!” cries the Man-eater. “Lies, lies, lies! Who’s this? What? What? How can you possibly be called Wally? Oh, Polly, yes, of course. How splendid. Got some meat on her, thank God, not like these modern pipe-cleaners … Foalbury, hush your mouth! I was not considering her for the pot. No. No! This nonsense about anthropophagy must cease! Make tea. Make it thick and orange. I sense the Sporklet is mired in shit and comes with a mission. And how do I sense it? Because the ungrateful little sod is here at all.” She scowls at him, goldfish eyes and Mona Lisa brows behind the lenses. Bob
Foalbury departs, smiling.
And now, in the quiet, she surveys Joe Spork once more, with greater care. She takes in his lantern jaw all covered in stubble and his drawn, deep eyes. Then she glances at Polly Cradle and sees something between them of which she approves. X-ray vision with subtitles. Old lady fu. She embraces him tenderly.
“My dear boy,” she murmurs. “My dear, dear boy. You must go and hug Foalbury when the chance presents itself, please, and tell him I’ve forced you to agree to dinner some day soon. He misses you when you don’t come for a while.”
“I will,” Joe says.
“He gave me a scare,” she says. “I mean, a real one. Woke up and couldn’t breathe, and of course I thought it was his heart. Turns out he’s allergic to our new pillows. But come, Joe, please?”
“I will.”
“Because one day, you know, it will be his heart.”
“I will,” Joe says. She peers at him, weighs the promise.
“All right, then. Now, what can I do for you?”
“Ted Sholt. The Ruskinites. Brother Sheamus.”
“Oh, Joe. Bad stories and old deaths. And half of it lies, I’m sure. You ignored me, didn’t you? You went and pressed ahead with that wretched Hakote business!”
“Yes.” He cannot lie to her.
“I told you and told you!”
“Yes. But it was too late by then.”
“Yes, I suppose it was. You best give me the lot, then, and we’ll go from there. I shall not interrupt.”
She never does. Cecily Foalbury’s unique brand of eidetic memory is cantankerous and wayward, making strange connections and seeing unlikely consonances, but it is absolute and requires no second chances. She sits in silence as Joe tells her, belatedly, about Wistithiel and the machine, about Ted Sholt, and about the thin man and the fat man running, and the robed strangers with their alarming heron’s gait, and finally about Billy Friend and Mercer’s rescue. More than once during the narrative, her eyes narrow, and Joe knows she is cross-referencing, walking the long alleys of her memory’s maze and pulling out old business for new examination.
When Joe has finished, Cecily Foalbury sits in absolute silence for a long while with her eyes fixed on the tabletop, and her lips wriggle as she combs the front and sides of her false teeth. The soft sucking is the only sound in the room, and the only indication that she has not fallen asleep. Then, at last, she opens her eyes.
“Bees,” she says. “As in, the golden swarm.”
“I think so.”
“They say there are more, now. Other hives in other cities. They must have been just sitting there, forgotten in corners, waiting for … whatever this is. People will be frightened. I was. I am, actually. There were riots in Moscow and Nanjing yesterday. And Caracas. They’re all over the place, Joe. Put there. Hidden, maybe.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she snaps. “You were set up.” She glowers at him, then looks closer. “You do see that, don’t you? Good Lord, boy, of course you were. Don’t tell me,” she says to Polly, “he’s been moping about imagining this was all his own work?” And when Polly nods, “Tcha! You know better. If you cut yourself with a chisel, is it the chisel’s fault? No. Don’t blame the tool.”
He really hadn’t thought of it that way. He smiles at her in gratitude. She frowns at him thunderously, then goes on.
“All right: the Ruskinites, then … There’s a lot to tell, and things you need to know. I’ll get Foalbury to type it up. But for now, I think you need the quick version, right away.”
“With notes as necessary,” Polly Cradle says, and Cecily Foalbury shoots her an approving glance, and replies that she will condense, but that a breath of context would be just as well.
Harticle’s, Cecily Foalbury says by way of caution, is like an old Victorian gas lamp in a dark street: a flickering light atop a wrought-iron post, surrounded by greenish smog. Close to the centre, everything is clear. The history of the wristwatch, the rise and fall of the clockwork toy, the enduring charm of the gramophone—all these are stories well known and simple. Further out, things become bizarre, like Mad Ludwig’s clockwork carriage, complete with iron horses driven by a flyweight, which probably never existed save in the mind of an Austrian confidence man.
Finally there are stories which make no sense or cannot be quite right: rumours of half-truths and reports of whispers. The fall of the Order of John the Maker—also known as the Ruskinites—is one of them.
The Ruskinites were a society of craftsmen who believed in the power of art to raise the human soul, to enlighten and uplift. They were so good that, when the British government found itself short of resources and in desperate need, they drew as many of them as were in England to their cause and set them to work with a genius to create machines of war.
The genius was a woman, come to England for refuge. By all accounts she was temperamental and infuriating, as such people often are.
The nature of the collaboration being what it was, the products of this endeavour were unusual, even eccentric. And yet, they were effective for all that. They made machines and vehicles and uncovered scientific secrets which were of use, and they rivalled Bletchley Park for their ability to solve insoluble riddles and deceive the enemy. They were so effective that they continued long after the war was over, shoring up Britain’s defences against the Soviets, and never discussed even with the Americans, who had by that time defaulted (Cecily Foalbury snorts) on the deal to share nuclear information with their wartime allies.
And then, sometime around the end of the sixties or the beginning of the seventies, there was a tragedy. Something went wrong with the greatest project of the collaboration, and a village on the coast was wiped out. It was rumoured the experiment itself was not to blame for the physical destruction, that that was done afterwards to conceal the consequences. The genius behind the thing fled, died, who knew? It was over, and the Ruskinites were cut loose to fend for themselves after thirty years in the warm breadbasket of government. They lost their way.
“Soot and sorrow,” murmurs Joshua Joseph Spork.
“Exactly, darling,” Cecily Foalbury replies. “Exactly.” She draws a phlegmy breath—tears unshed or a winter cold, he isn’t sure—and looks up at him with suffering eyes. “You’ll want to know that bit, won’t you? And there’s no one better to tell you, because I was there the night it all began; the night they chose Brother Sheamus.”
And then she settles to tell it, mouth turned down and damp eyes staring into history.
What the Ruskinites wanted—had always wanted—was to be part of any project in the secular world which might, by its presence and execution, reveal the divine in man. Indeed, the bravest of them whispered, was it not likely that the eye of God was drawn to the most profound, most perfect artefacts of human effort? And were these not in any case the ones which touched closely upon the divine within?
Cecily sighs. “But they were fighting a losing battle, weren’t they, Joe?”
“I suppose.”
“Oh, yes. Of course they were. That time was gone. After the war, there was no room for craft. If it couldn’t be machine made, mass-produced, almost no one could afford it. So there was a new doctrine: uniqueness was elitist, mass-produced art was good. Perfection should be made available to all, just small enough to put in a cloth bag and carry home.
“They soldiered on, but by 1980 they couldn’t pretend any more. All those shoulder pads and the beginnings of consumer gizmos. Walkmen instead of music boxes. VHS instead of charades. A nation plugged into the industrial machine. Everything had to be mega. Megabucks. Megastar. Megadeath. It means ‘million,’ you know. Well. If you’re a Ruskinite, a million is too many. A million days is more than thirty human lifetimes. A million miles is four times the distance to the moon. But the eighties were all about millions.
“It tore them up. If God was in the detailing, then God was dead.”
The Order of John the Maker began to wither
, which would have been sad, but fitting. Artisanal movements do that; they go a certain distance, and then they stop. But then, as a new, inexperienced Keeper named Theodore Sholt cast around for a remedy for the secular world itself, he found himself beset by a rival. A false prophet.
“I was there,” Cecily says dully, as if speaking of a public hanging. “A friend of Foalbury’s called us and said there was a wonderful man. A strange, compelling man who was going to save the Ruskinites. Well, we went, of course. Wouldn’t you? But when we got there it was something awful. He wasn’t rescuing anything. He was taking it away and making it his own, and none of them could see.”
Bob Foalbury puts an arm around her, and—when Cecily seems unable to continue the story—he takes it up.
“He called himself Brother Sheamus, and he was … he was perfect. He looked like Professor bloody Moriarty. You just wanted Basil Rathbone to come in and stop him. Or I did. And he was no more Irish than a Scotch egg.”
Sheamus went to the heart. He came as a prodigal son, a bird returning to the nest at dusk. He came to Sharrow House on foot, through wrought-iron gates and past the old rails of the artillery store from the war, down the yew alley and past the moat some Victorian fellow had felt the need for, and over the drawbridge. He stood with them on the grand balcony, looking at London’s rooftops and hearing the traffic and the clock tower, lamented the housing blocks which obscured the view of the river. He let them know he loved it all, the garden, the view, the house which was the soul of the Order of John the Maker. He loved them. He understood their pain and their fear. He was a man of God.
His English was expensive, and foreign. Rumour had it that he’d trained in Jerusalem with the Armenian Orthodox Church. It was whispered he’d been to Eton and served in the SAS, that he had worked with Wilhelm Reich. He said he’d taken the cowl in Burma with a monk who’d died of malaria, then gone to Rome in the sixties to study with the Jesuits. Before he even arrived, he was a sort of myth.
The world was changing too fast, Sheamus said, and in the wrong way, so he had come to make a stand. In the grand hall at the heart of Sharrow House, beneath stone arches cut by hand, ceilings painted and sculpted so that each column and nook was a statement of identity and uniqueness, Brother Sheamus wove a trap in words.