“You didn’t feel it?” Jack said to Noah.
She shook her head. “I was concentrating only on Grace,” she said. “And I…we…”
Noah burst into tears, and it was Weyland who finished what she’d been trying to say. “We lost any sense of her about an hour ago,” he said.
“Aye,” Jack said, then sat down abruptly on a nearby chair. “Matilda is dead—”
He’d been about to add “too”, and stopped himself only just in time.
“Oh, gods…” Noah said brokenly. “Not Matilda. Not Matilda as well.”
Weyland sat down in a chair, pulling Noah down into one beside his. “They can’t all be…”
“She isn’t dead,” Jack said, and Noah and Weyland understood he wasn’t referring to Matilda. “She can’t be. Catling can’t kill her without killing herself.”
They were empty words, and he knew it. Catling patently had the capability of making things far worse than death for Grace.
Noah straightened up, wiping away her tears. “Jack, we’ve got to—”
“I know,” he said.
“Dear gods,” Weyland said. “Complete the Troy Game? But—”
We will promise only, said Jack into Weyland’s mind, holding the man’s eyes with his. And, in promising, free Grace from whatever hell Catling has constructed for her.
“We must, Weyland,” Noah said.
Then pray to all the gods and heavens you can get out of the promise when you need to, Weyland said.
Jack and Noah walked slowly through the crypt of St Paul’s. Again, while there were many members of the cathedral Watch about, none of them were aware of the man and woman—of the two ancient gods—who walked among them.
Jack and Noah had come straight from Coronation Avenue. Both looked terrible, close to exhaustion both physically and emotionally. They walked hand in hand, their steps dragging, their faces pale and drawn.
As they neared the tomb of Florence Nightingale, Catling emerged from the shadows.
This was the first time Noah had seen her in centuries, and she instinctively drew closer to Jack as they came to a halt a few paces away from Catling.
“Well,” said Catling, “for a Kingman and Mistress of the Labyrinth, you’re looking rather dilapidated. Where your pride? Your elegance? Your might?”
“Buried with Grace,” said Jack, “as well you know.”
Catling smiled, the expression terribly cruel. “And look what it has brought me, eh? What I wanted. My Kingman and Mistress, at my feet. So, tell me, what do you here? What do you have to say?”
“You know why we are here,” said Jack. “We’ve come with what you want. A promise to complete you, to raise the final Flower Gate.”
Something came over Catling then, and it took Noah and Jack a moment to realise it was intense excitement. Her entire form blurred, became a dense mass of darkness, before she returned to her usual form of the white-faced young woman.
“When?” Catling said.
“The winter solstice,” said Noah.
“No. No delays. Do it now.”
“Blame yourself for the delay!” snapped Jack. “You bound the Game to the land, you bound both your Kingman and Mistress to the land, and if you want this done properly then you need to wait until one of the nights of power which will bring the entire land behind us. The winter solstice it will have to be…unless you want something less than what we’re capable of delivering.”
Catling went very still, so much so that for a long moment she appeared to be a statue capable of neither breath nor movement.
“Two and a half months,” she said, finally. “I’ll tell you what, Jack. If you don’t mind me pushing Grace deeper and deeper into torment during those two and a half months, then I’m happy to wait. It’s no trouble on my part to strip Grace’s soul a little barer for each hour you delay. Your choice, Jack. Your choice.”
Jack wanted nothing more than to reach out and strangle her. “You said you’d give Grace back to us once we’d promised—”
“And so I will. Most of her, anyway. The best bits I may keep. Play with a little bit, if you understand my meaning. Whatever happens, Jack, Grace is not going to be the same girl if ever she wakes up.”
Suddenly Catling’s face twisted. “Complete me!” Then she was gone, and Jack and Noah were left staring in horror at the space where she’d been.
They fled back to Coronation Avenue, using their power rather than more conventional means.
It was a vastly different place to that they had left but an hour earlier. The rescue efforts were now frantic, and directed in one spot, whereas previously they had been desultory and spread over most of the mound of rubble.
“Weyland?” Noah said as she and Jack appeared at his side (it was well that everyone’s attention was concentrated on the rescue effort, so that their sudden appearance raised no eyebrows).
“They’ve found the stairwell,” Weyland said, his voice tight. “You’ve promised, then.”
Noah and Jack glanced at each other, their faces gaunt.
Then they looked back at the rescue efforts, not bothering to answer.
Catling seethed. Icy dread be damned, she’d succumbed to incandescent rage. Jack was delaying.
Very well. If he wanted to delay then he was going to pay the price.
When he finally got Grace back he was going to wish she had died instead.
An hour later came a shout, then the activity became even more frantic. Noah moaned and would have started forward, save that Weyland held her back. “They’ll bring her out soon,” he said. “Wait.” The waiting was the worst thing any of the three had ever endured. It took another three hours before enough of the rubble had been removed that the rescue workers could lift a limp, bloody figure onto a stretcher. Medical and rescue personnel leaned over her and, after several terrible, long minutes, the fire chief trudged over to where Noah, Weyland and Jack stood.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and Noah burst into tears.
Part Six
THE WHITE QUEEN
London, November 1703
The weather had been shocking over northern and western Europe throughout mid-November, but no one had anticipated the fury of the storm that blew in over Europe in the early hours of the twentysixth of that month. A fleet of one hundred Russian ships in the North Sea was scattered, and many lost. Four hundred coal barges which had just left port in northern England were sunk. In Norfolk fire swept through a town as chimney stacks were blown over.
London was devastated by the storm. At one a.m. most residents woke terrified as hurricane-force winds battered the capital. Over two thousand chimneys toppled in the first ten minutes of the tempest, and the air became a lethal mix of flying shards of glass, bricks, slates and nails. The lead on the roof of many churches rolled up like parchment, and spire after spire cracked, leaned and sometimes toppled in the raging winds. On the Thames, every single ship moored at wharves, save for four, were torn from their moorings and carried downriver to collide and break apart as the wind drove them ashore. Scores of houses blew down completely, thousands more had walls topple and roofs fly off, so that by next morning it appeared as if the city consisted only of the skeletal framework of houses.
Every building appeared to have been damaged.
Save one…
St Dunstan’s-in-the-East.
Alone of all the churches in the city it had survived completely intact.
When, later in the day, Sir Christopher Wren, now an old man, arrived, he stood for long minutes gazing up at the spire.
“You don’t appear amazed,” said an onlooker, “that a miracle has saved St Dunstan’s spire.”
“Not a miracle,” murmured Wren, “but the genius of a tiny girl.”
And with that strange remark Wren turned his back and stumped through the wreckage of Idol Lane towards Thames Street.
ONE
St Bartholomew’s Hospital, Smithfield, London
Wednesday, 11th December 1940
The nurses in the little annexe of St Bart’s which housed the long-term patients (those waiting to die, or those so chronically ill they could not be looked after at home) tried as best they could to get as many early morning shifts as possible. It was then, during the early morning, that Major Jack Skelton came to sit by the bed of the girl who lay in the verandah ward. Every morning, without fail, as soon as the dawn light stained the sky, he could be found sitting at her bedside.
There he would stay for most of the morning. No one ever saw him arrive, no one witnessed his departure, and the ward sister had long since stopped asking him to confine his visits to regular visiting hours.
Everyone on the nursing staff, from the ward sister to the most junior aide, had long since fallen under the man’s spell.
It wasn’t so much his looks, or his charm, although both these attributes were undisputed. It was the major’s silent vigil by Grace Orr’s bedside that won the nursing staff’s hearts, and broke them, all in one. The girl’s parents came every day as well, but Major Skelton affected the staff so much more deeply.
Most, although they would never have admitted it, were thoroughly in love with the man, and spent many of their daydreaming hours wondering if they might possibly be the one to comfort him when Grace Orr died, as she undoubtedly would.
Grace Orr was lovely (or at least she had once been, from the photographs that her mother showed everyone), but they all knew that she would not survive. It was a miracle she had clung to life for this length of time; there was no hope she could continue to do so for much longer.
So they brought the major cups of tea, and the sisters engaged him in conversation, and the nurses offered to sew the buttons on his jacket, although all were in perfect order and placement, and polish his shoes, although they already shone brilliantly. From time to time the more daring among them suggested an afternoon in a cafe somewhere, perhaps, to take his mind off things, to which the major always suppressed a wince, then smiled and rejected the offer with endearing charm.
His loyalty to the girl lying motionless on the bed was enchanting, and every nursing sister or aide who came into contact with Jack Skelton wondered what it would be like if they were the recipient of that loyalty and devotion.
Although they suspected some degree of despondency in the man, they did not realise the level of his despair.
Although the emergency workers had pulled Grace Orr from the rubble alive, none thought she would survive more than a few hours. Both her legs were crushed, as was her left arm and most of the ribs down her left side. Her left lung had collapsed and her right one was in imminent danger of following suit. Her spleen had ruptured, her heart was bruised so badly it was a wonder it still continued to beat. Her aorta leaked into her abdomen.
All of these injuries were critical, but it was the trauma to her head that was fatal. A huge wedge of concrete had crushed the top of her skull, penetrating deep into the brain. It was not merely the physical damage done, but the resulting inevitable infection that would surely kill the girl.
No one, including the fire chief who had given the news to her parents and Jack Skelton, had thought she’d survive longer than the day.
The ambulance had taken her to St Bart’s, where Grace’s injuries were cleaned and she was placed in a bed to die. None of the doctors thought there was any point in doing anything more. Her parents and the major were given access, much sympathy, and left to watch Grace die while the doctors and nurses bent their efforts to patients who might actually live.
Grace survived.
None among the staff could quite credit it. She shouldn’t have been able to live more than a few hours. Almost a third of her brain had been destroyed, and the damage to her aorta and heart should have killed her within hours of it being inflicted. Grace Orr simply should not have lived through her burial in the rubble, let alone a day or more outside.
When Grace continued to cling to life, and after much pleading from her parents and aggressive arguing from the American major, the doctors decided they would do what they could for her. She went to surgery (the surgeons warning that the anaesthetic alone was likely to prove fatal) and set her bones as best they could, stitched up her aorta, reinflated her lung, cleaned her intracranial cavity (with many a wince) and, discarding the shattered fragments of her skull, inserted a steel plate over the gaping hole and stitched her scalp back over it.
Grace survived both the surgical procedures and the anaesthetic. She went into traction for those broken bones not able to be set in plaster, she had intravenous therapy and a nasogastric tube inserted for feeding, and was then shunted into the verandah ward of the annexe to die.
She didn’t die.
The doctors warned her parents and Major Skelton that if she survived she would be a vegetable.
They nodded, thanked the doctors and settled down to wait.
Many long weeks passed.
Jack was slouched down in the wickerwork easy chair the nurses had brought in for him weeks ago, elbow on the armrest, head resting in his hand.
His eyes did not leave Grace’s still form.
She was long out of plaster and traction now, and her external injuries had healed. Her limbs once more lay straight by her side, the drainage tube into her lung had gone, her scalp had grown over the steel plate (grown over emptiness), and her curls had sprung back to cover the raised red scars on her scalp. The doctors said her aorta had healed well.
They shook their heads whenever Jack or Noah and Weyland asked about her brain.
The ravages of her trauma and deep coma had left their own marks on her body. Grace, always slim, was now skeletal. Her body fat had vanished, and her bones poked out vast ranges of hills and valleys in her skin. Her colour was either yellow or grey, depending on the time of the day.
Her chest rose and fell, slowly, in desperately shallow, inadequate breaths.
The red rubber of the nasogastric tube looked like a line of blood running down her face and over her shoulder.
Grace had gone. Jack could feel nothing of her. The doctors told him she was in a deep coma, a vegetative state, but even so Jack would have expected to be able to sense something of Grace.
But there was nothing. Jack could not even sense, let alone see, the diamond bands.
They had vanished with Grace.
Catling had her. Catling was playing with her, and Jack’s guilt was now almost unbearable.
Grace, Grace, I am sorry, I am so sorry, I don’t know what to do.
In the afternoons and evenings, and the long, long nights, when he was alone, Jack often gave into despair and wept. But tears were something he refused to give into before Grace. He thought that if she woke, and turned her head and opened her eyes, the last thing he would want her to see were his tears.
So, stoic Jack came to St Bart’s. Despairing Jack inhabited the rest of London and Epping Forest, alternating between anger and frenetic guilt-ridden activity, searching out the solution to Grace’s terrible coma.
To the Troy Game.
He found no solution, save that the Troy Game continually whispered in his ear: You can have her back, Jack, but only when you and Noah complete me.
In his darker moments, and they were ever more frequent, Jack wondered if this fight against the Troy Game was worth it.
Perhaps they should just complete her and have done with it.
Grace was locked in a nightmare so terrible she did not think she would survive it sane. She existed in a hell of jumbled, ancient memories that appeared to be those of her parents and Jack in previous lives, as well as the memories of the Troy Game itself and of all it had eaten.
None of the memories were pleasant. She lived through the sack of Troy, and the rape and murder of all those Trojans who had not managed to escape the Greeks.
She endured each violation, each death, as if it were dealt to her own body.
She endured through Ariadne’s Catastrophe, suffering along with the tens of thousands who were the Dar
kwitch’s victims.
She suffered with her mother, at the hands of Brutus, and then at those of her father, Asterion.
She despaired with all those who had been Asterion’s victims—the women he had raped, the men he had murdered (and, oh, gods, these included her own half-brothers, the sons of Cornelia and Brutus!), the children he had tortured and sodomised, the girls he had prostituted.
She suffered under her father’s hands every indignity, every vile nightmare, he had visited on other women.
She felt every stab, every hurt, every wrench to flesh and spirit and soul.
Grace knew what was happening. Catling was tormenting her in order to destroy her.
And Grace thought the only way she could survive this was to lose her sanity.
Today was one of the worst days for Jack, and, sitting here with a faraway Grace, he’d sunk into his deepest despair yet. He had picked up a copy of the Daily Express on the way to the hospital, and sat in the waiting room and read it while the nurses bathed Grace.
The paper reported on a speech Hitler had made yesterday. It included a translated transcript of the speech, and Hitler’s opening words made Jack’s blood run cold.
We are in the middle of a conflagration which is not just a struggle between two countries. It is the struggle of two different worlds. There is no way for these worlds to exist side by side. One of them must perish.
The struggle of two different worlds, for which there was no hope of existing side by side…Jack wondered who had sent this message, for no matter what Hitler himself may have thought, those words were put into his mouth by someone, or some thing, else.
A message from Catling? Why not? It would serve her purpose well enough, and the bearer even better.
But it might just as well have come from the Faerie…perhaps even from this mysterious White Queen.