Aurorarama (47 page)

It was only later that he would learn what had happened to the Councillors, when Lilian told him the story, or at least some of it.

Passing in a flurry of silk and steel through the curved colonnades that extended on each side of the Blazing Building, the Sophragettes had soon reached its rear. There, a narrow embankment with a semicircular landing stage led directly to a discreet canal, hidden from public view by the surrounding livestock farms on the opposite bank.

Lilian and the Sophragettes stumbled on the Councillors huddled there, hastily dressed for the great outdoors, while some servants and ushers still in livery were loading steamer trunks onto a few reindeer-drawn brougham sleighs bearing the arms of the Council members. Lilian noticed that no Gentlemen of the Night or Varangian Guards were there to protect them, nor was there anyone from her own side, it seemed, to watch over this evacuation. Were they attempting to escape
unnoticed? Had they just been kicked out? Should she arrest them and tow them back to the Building? Should she make sure that they would be banished for good? She was unsure of what she should do, but knew that whatever had to be done, had to be done now or never. This was the moment she had been waiting for, true, but in panoramic way, and she found it hard to step forward and tear down the picture her own imagination had drawn so often, for fear of making a bloody mess of it.

“Do not move!” she improvised, as the Sophragettes advanced cautiously from both sides of the pier, their guns aimed at the men. With the little training they had, she hoped none of them would fire without her order, or the situation would be totally out of her velvet-gloved hand.

Thus the scene froze before her, looking like a bas-relief. The Councillors, not knowing what to do, kept their hands up or stuck in mid-motion. She approached their dazed hebdomad and their startled servants, stiffening her backbone, cocking the hammers of her eyes. She had not the slightest idea of what she was going to say.

“What is it you want from the Council?” asked a dishevelled Surville, stepping in front of her as if he were ready to get himself cut to pieces for his masters. “They have been forced into resignation by the vilest imaginable means, with no respect for their age or their service to the city.”

“I am certainly glad to hear that,” said Lilian icily. “I just want to make sure that this is where we say good-bye.”

“We have been granted free passage and we expect you to respect at least this,” said a sturdy fat bald man, who she supposed was De Witt. He tried to assert his authority, but she could sense that it was more to reassure himself after whatever had happened in the Blazing Building. The Councillors, indeed, looked rather crestfallen and ghastly, more eager to get away
than dwell on recent events. She could not resist knocking one more nail into their coffin.

“You’re right. There is
at least
something to respect here.”

A livid and trembling Brainveil, whom some ushers were propping up as best they could, cast her a venomous look.

“Lake,” he hissed, “Will nothing be spared us? First those monsters and now you, little ungrateful trollop. You should be ashamed of yourself!”

His imprecation ended in a fit of throaty coughs that shook his frame. A drop of saliva that he was too weak to wipe off slowly rolled down his chin.

Softly but firmly, Lilian pushed Surville aside and took a step closer to Brainveil, planting her eyes in his.

“Please, Mr. Brainveil, what is it that gives that you the right to tell me what I should be ashamed of? Is it the dazzling intellect that has led you to the position in which I’m seeing you right now? Is it the moral integrity that you have demonstrated these past few weeks? Shhh …!” she said, with a commanding gesture, as Surville tried to silence her.

She could feel the anger seething in her, and how helpless she was to control it.

“Is it the
fear
you have of me? You who cannot bear the sight of a woman except in bondage?” she kept on, looking straight into Brainveil’s narrow, malevolent eyes. Weak as he was, he held her look with a strength that surprised and further enraged her. His body may have been a wreck, but something in his soul still refused to yield; there burned some stubborn fire that would rather set the whole world aflame than let itself die out. Suddenly, it occurred to her that she knew this gaze, had known it, in fact, for longer that she could remember. And she could see that he, too, slowly recognized something in her eyes, as his stare had got lost in hers and seemed to contemplate not her person but a distant, infinite horizon. Her fury turned into something different,
something she was fearing herself: the light suddenly changed, becoming brighter all around; she could hear a buzzing in the air, as a cold sweat broke out on her palms and her neck. A thrill ran along her spine. The Councillors stared at Lilian in disbelief as if her face had undergone some metamorphosis she wasn’t aware of. Then she heard herself speak with a different voice, huskier and deep, and she felt scared as words that were not hers forced their way out of her mouth.

“A trollop, you poor old fool Is that any way to talk to your mother? Have you forgot where you came from? Will I have to watch over you again, or will you put an end to your pranks for good, you and your repulsive associates, whose very name blackens the universe? Look where your arrogance and stupidity have brought you, you who think yourself a lion when you are the vilest snake, unworthy to even creep at my feet. Oh, you, shameless tyrannical child, see how this world that you deemed your plaything has been wrenched away from you in a single moment. The day will come when you will have to think of your own end. Before I think of it myself.”

At her first words, the anger in Brainveil’s stare had died down. He now looked at her with an awe that bordered on terror, searching around him for a proof that he had not dreamed it all, that he was not going mad. He felt his mind slide away from him. She had known him. She had seen through him. “Forgive me … mother,” he babbled, grasping the arms of his servants. The Councillors ran toward him, as he slumped down to the ground.

Lilian progressively came back to her senses, still a little dizzy, trying to make sense of the scene in front of her. Embarrassment seized her, and, God knows why, some pity for the fallen old man. Helen … you old bitch … doing this to me … she muttered to herself, while a distant peal of laughter echoed somewhere in her head. She cleared her throat, and resetting her
feathered hat, said to Surville, who trembled at her side, “No man calls me a trollop unless I ask him to do so.”

Leaving him gaping, she took a deep breath and turned toward the Sophragettes:

“Let us not delay these gentlemen any longer.”

The day had darkened, and the cold had become stinging. As if working under some invisible whip, and without so much as a word, the servants of the Seven hurried, passing luggage from hand to hand, cramming it and piling it into the carriages. The Councillors themselves stepped down to lend a hand, except Brainveil, who, reduced to some sort of puppet with tangled strings, was carried into the leading sleigh and wrapped inside a fur blanket.

“What is your destination?” Lilian asked Surville, who still avoided her eyes.

“It is a secret. The farthest away from here we can get, I hope.”

“This at last is a hope we have in common.”

Eventually the sleighs were loaded and the Councillors installed. They did not seem to care that their equipment or clothes were not quite fit for a ride in the wilderness, or for the cold night that was about to fall. Lilian almost felt like asking the girls to fetch some extra blankets, but renounced the idea for some reason. This ain’t the time to go maudlin, she said to herself, clasping her hands behind her back. The Sophragettes weren’t at their service, were they?

“Well” said Guinevere de Nudd, watching at her side, “you certainly got carried away.”

“Did I? Oh yes. Very far away,” she answered pensively, “or maybe a little too close.”

The sleighs started to move, vanishing one by one into the dusk with a ghastly jangle of bells. However much she hated the Councillors, Lilian could not help feeling their departure was sad, lacking in dignity. She felt, with a distant pang, the cruelty
of the situation. So what? She had not made this world, had she? Brainveil had. Or people like him. And she was not like them, or, well, she had been just a little today, to beat them at their own game. But not tomorrow, she promised herself, as the last sleigh disappeared into the night, not tomorrow.

I
t was around midnight, and the city was quiet. The cold, the uncertainty, and the Scavengers had sent people home with little resistance, and the Navy Cadets had done the rest. Brentford could be sure that Venustown was well under their control tonight.

News had come that in the afternoon and evening the Inuit had looted some of the arcades, but Blankbate and Hardenberg had advised him to forget about it. Brentford did not mind the poetic justice. He merely worried about how he would make it up to the looted shopkeepers. Now, at any rate, only a few people prowled the streets and the canals, out of curiosity and excitation—some of them, Brentford had heard, wearing carnival outfits. This, too, seemed apt.

A kind of celebration had broken out in one of the reception rooms of the Blazing Building. Maybe Hardenberg was right: a city was just a petrified party. But this “feast of all firsts” was a portent of the difficulties to come. Brentford had never seen such a motley community, if it could even be called that. It looked like some mirage that would vanish with the dawn. Scavengers were flirting with Sophragettes in a hall-of-mirrors staging of
Beauty and the Beast
. The Inughuit were trying to joke with Varangian guards twice their size, playing around with their halberds as if they were harpoons. Anarchists clinked (many) glasses with Navy Cadets. He could even see the Ghost Lady walking among the living, who did not perceive her as she glided past them, but still they shivered and hushed, and looked about with a worried frown at some empty space in the room.

And then the kaleidoscope rotated again, showing new scenes Brentford found equally unlikely.

The sight, which had at first gutted him, of Sybil following Tiblit everywhere with amorous eyes, her slender jewelled arms around his fur-clad muscles, was now starting to make a little more sense, if only as an allegory of the days to come. It was better than poor Phoebe, who had fallen in love with a masked Scavenger, and not knowing which one, made advances to all. Here, the allegory escaped him. It couldn’t be Love, could it?

One Sophragette came up to him, the one he had seemed to know from before, and, red-cheeked with glittering eyes, introduced herself as Daria Norton, Lilian Lake’s protégée, and Douglas Norton’s daughter. Brentford smiled at the coincidence. He always liked it when things clicked together. As a young girl she had been in direct telepathic contact with the Polar Kangaroo, which was, if he had got it right, the very companion pet her father had offered to Isabella Nixon-Knox. Daria had fled to England after the Blue Wild and Lilian had found her there, a boarding-school rebel known
as Lucy Lightning in the thriving suffragette scene, and had brought her home. He had no doubt that the Polar Kangaroo would be glad to have her back.

Daria handed him a little propaganda leaflet the girls wanted to distribute across the city. Brentford read it quickly, but his eyes stopped on one particular sentence that said:
“This community aims to be rich, not in the metallic representative of wealth, but in the wealth itself, which money should represent; namely, LEISURE TO LIVE IN ALL THE FACULTIES OF THE SOUL.”
He could not have phrased it better, he thought.

Lilian had joined them.

“Lake or Lenton?” he asked.