Down: Trilogy Box Set (82 page)

“Leave my son alone,” Gareth said, trembling with anger. “He came over and saw Christine. He wasn’t believing her. He wanted nothing to do with her. He left before they did. You won’t find them with him.”

“There you go, that wasn’t so hard, was it?” Hathaway said. “Don’t you feel good you spared your son all the bother?”

“Will you leave now?” Gareth asked.

“Soon, soon,” Hathaway said. “Now think on this. Who else would the ladies wish to see after all these years? Any friends or relations still alive and kicking?”

“I wouldn’t know anything about Molly.”

“Christine?”

“Her sister’s in London. I told her that. Her mother, Gavin’s gran, is still alive too.”

“All right then, Gareth. Why don’t you tell me about sis and gran.”

Hathaway found a pen and an old envelope and joked that he’d probably forgotten how to write. Gareth gave him the addresses. Talley wandered off and came back after a rummage in the hall closet.

“Finished with him?” he asked Hathaway.

Hathaway said he was.

“I’ll crash him then,” Talley said, swinging the heavy hammer he’d found in Gareth’s toolbox.

If Giles Farmer had ever doubted the wealth of his friend, Ian Strindberg, his two-day stay at his flat in Belgravia had put an end to it. His guest bedroom on Eaton Mews overlooked a leafy garden and its en-suite bathroom alone was nearly as large as his entire bedsit. He’d pretty much had the town house to himself because shortly after he arrived Ian had to pop off to Brussels for business. Giles had always been at a loss to understand what it was that Ian did. It was something to do with insurance or re-insurance, but he glazed over on the details. Chums from university, Ian had always lent an ear and an occasional few pounds to his eccentric pal as he tilted at windmills.

Giles had spent his time in this lap of luxury feeling cut-off and adrift. He dared not log onto his own email or blog site from Ian’s desktop for fear of being tracked. Likewise, he was scared to contact any of his network of conspiracy theorists. Unsure of the robustness of government web-crawlers, he wasn’t even comfortable searching for power-grid perturbations or information about the South Ockendon and Iver North incidents. That left occupying himself with television, radio, and a Trollope novel.

Stir-crazy as he was, he welcomed Ian’s keys fiddling in the door and his voice calling to see if Giles was still about.

He met him in the lounge.

“How’re you getting on then?” Ian asked.

“Going out of my flipping gourd.”

“That bad? Come on. Let’s get some wine in you. Red or white?”

“Both.”

“That’s my lad. Sorry I couldn’t give you the time of day before. I’m all ears now. Tell me your tale of woe. Who did you say was spying on you?”

Ian kicked off his loafers and stretched his long legs onto an ottoman. He sipped wine and furrowed his brow at Giles’s story and examined the small camera Giles had plucked from his cooker’s ventilation hood.

“Christ, Giles, how do you know it’s still not transmitting?”

“Because it’s not connected to a power source?”

“Don’t be snide,” Ian said. “I was only an economics major, remember?”

“Sorry.”

“I mean seriously, I can’t even change a light bulb. Look, mate, planting a camera in a man’s house is hard-core. I’m no expert but I think they’d need an order of the High Court. My cousin Harry’s a lawyer. I could ask him.”

Giles waved his hands like he was playing tambourines. “Don’t talk to anyone. If it’s a lawful operation, they’d need a court order. If it’s a black-ops job then they can do anything they want.”

“Who are they?”

“MI5. MI6. Army intelligence. Some other group of assholes we don’t even know exists.”

“And you think all this is because you’ve been rattling their cages?”

“I think I’m onto something really scary, Ian. Something’s gone very wrong with their precious supercollider. I think they want to shut me down and they’ll do anything to keep me quiet. I don’t know where else to go. Can I stay a few days longer until I figure it out?”

Ian wet his lips with his tongue and pulled his fingers through his pompadour. “Sure you can, mate. No worries.”

King Henry’s lord admiral, the Duke of Suffolk, seemed poorly suited to his job. Norfolk, his previous naval commander whom John had committed to the sea floor, had been arrogantly comfortable in his command of a naval vessel. Suffolk was ill at ease on the high seas and had spent all his time in his cabin, never appearing once at the captain’s table during their passage to Francia.

John had asked the captain of the
Whirlwind
about the man.

“Norfolk was a bastard but a capable bastard. Suffolk’s a horse’s arse but the king seems to like him. What else matters?”

When they arrived at Dover, Suffolk had cost them a precious few days, insisting that the
Whirlwind
be kitted out with excessive provisions for the brief channel crossing. John had asked repeatedly why they needed so many barrels of wine, ale, and food for a journey to the French coast but Suffolk had shut down his enquiries and had sent out foraging parties to strip the surrounding towns of food and drink.

It was dawn and all the Earthers were on deck watching the hazy coast of Francia. John drew a short line on the piece of paper he kept in his pocket. Seven lines, their seventh day in Hell. The days were passing too quickly and they had made little progress. Arabel, Delia, and the children eluded them. They had no way of knowing how Brian and Trevor were getting on in their passage to Iberia. But when he looked into the apprehensive but appreciative faces of Martin, Tony, Charlie, Alice, and Tracy, he took some solace. They had rescued these people, hadn’t they, given them hope, saved them at least for a time?

Suffolk came onto the deck and weaved toward them on his bandy legs. John didn’t know if he was drunk or seasick or both but when he came closer there was no alcohol on his breath.

“Ah, good, captain,” Suffolk said to the ship’s master. “You are flying the white flag.”

“We wouldn’t want to be holed by those cannon, would we, sir,” the captain said.

“Where?” Suffolk asked in alarm.

John pointed at two dark pillboxes on the cliffs. They were at Calais. He had landed there weeks earlier in his quest for Emily. His landing party had taken fire from these cliffs and he wasn’t keen on history repeating itself.

“Do you think they will honor the flag of truce?” Suffolk asked.

“There’s only one way to find out,” John said.

The
Whirlwind
dropped anchor a few hundred yards from the coast. By the captain’s reckoning they could have drawn in closer but Suffolk was too wary of the French artillery. A rowing crew took the landing party into shore, one of the sailors holding aloft an oar with a white flag flying.

By the time they made landfall, a French troop had assembled on the beach, their muskets ready.

John and Emily helped Alice and Charlie helped Tracy through calf-deep waters. Once they were onshore the longboat was hastily turned and the English sailors rowed off.

The leader of the greeting party asked in a haughty French who they were and why they thought they could land at will on the sovereign territory of Francia. All the while he stared at the women.

John started to ask if anyone among the soldiers spoke English when Tony interrupted to translate.

“Why didn’t you say you spoke French?” John asked.

“Never thought about it. Anyway, I’m glad to be of some use,” Tony said.

John said, “Tell him we’ve come from far away, from the land of the living. Tell him King Maximilien knows us and that we are friends with Minister Forneau. Tell him we helped Francia defeat the English, German, and Russian armies. Tell him we’re on our way to Paris and need their assistance.”

The soldiers seemed astonished at what Tony was saying. They approached slowly and sniffed. One toothless man got too close to Tracy and reached out to touch her, making her cringe and whimper. After her assault by William Joyce, Tracy had been even more brittle than before and Emily stepped in protectively with an expert martial-arts kick, sweeping the man’s leg and toppling him.

Rather than provoking them, the French soldiers found the maneuver hilarious. When the laughter died down and the man picked himself up, their leader told them to follow along. But first he required John to hand over his sword and pistol and searched their packs. John’s pack was heavy with the rest of the books they’d stopped to recover along the way from Hampton Court to Dover, but the soldiers were wholly disinterested in them.

“That move of yours was amazing,” Alice told Emily as they trudged through the soft beach sand toward a trail leading up the cliffs.

“John taught me everything I know,” she said. “It’s called Krav Maga.”

“My best student,” John said.

“I’d like to learn,” Alice said. “Seems an essential skill in this bloody place.”

“I should learn too,” Charlie said sadly. “My brothers could fight but I was always rubbish.”

“Tell you what,” John said. “We’ll teach you a few moves when we have the chance.”

“Count me out,” Tony said. “I abhor violence.”

“I’ll sit it out too,” Martin said. “We’re birds of a feather, Tony and I.”

When they reached the cliff top the lead soldier pointed to a tower in the distance and said it belonged to the Earl of Calais. It proved to be a two-mile trek through marshland and when they arrived the soldiers guarded them outside the small castle while their captain entered through the portcullis.

Emily noticed something in the distance and pointed it out to John.

“Do you see that?” she asked.

“Telegraph poles,” he said. “I heard the French had the technology. They probably use it to send word to Paris about invasions.”

A one-armed man emerged from the castle, awkwardly buttoning his ruffled coat and fussing with his long hair to make himself presentable.

“Is it true?” he muttered on seeing the Earthers. “Can it be true?”

Tony stepped forward to translate but the earl shifted to broken English to address them. “I am the Earl of Calais. My eyes they are amazed to what I am seeing. How is possible?”

“We’ll explain later,” John said, “but first I need your help to get to Paris. We need horses and wagons. We have urgent business with King Maximilien and Minister Forneau.”

“But the king, he is no more,” the earl said, gesturing a throat slash. “The telegraph brings the news. Maximilien is destroyed.”

“Is this bad?” Martin asked John.

“Depends.” John asked the earl who the new king was.

“It is too incredible,” the earl said. “He is not even French.”

John grinned. “It wouldn’t be Giuseppe Garibaldi, would it?”

“But how could this be known to you?” the earl asked.

“Just a lucky guess.”

“You know this man?”

John said, “I’d say we’re very good friends with Garibaldi.”

The earl saw an opening for himself. “Would you tell King Giuseppe the news that the Earl of Calais is good man who helped his strange friends to achieve Paris?”

John nodded eagerly. “We will tell him that you are a terrific guy and if you give us an armed escort to Paris we’ll tell him you are the single greatest earl in all of Francia.”

He had died when he was young, a strapping man of thirty-five, murdered by his own bastard brother. Pedro of Castile, whom history would call Pedro the Cruel for his panoply of monstrous acts, departed the world in 1369 as King of Castile and León to become a far more powerful and ruthless king in Hell. To be sure, many pitiless Iberians would follow him Down, and many would try to seize the reins of power from his iron fist, but Pedro was strong and cunning. In all of Europa, only King Frederick of Germania had a longer grip on power.

He had chosen as his seat of power the Iberian region he had known best in life and he built his great castle in Burgos, the arid city where he had been born. From there he waged constant campaigns over the centuries against his perpetual European enemies, attacking, defending, attacking, defending. His latest adventure, striking at the English with his great armada, had ended in an ignominious defeat that had set him into a rage from which he had not yet recovered.

Following the debacle at sea, he had summoned the Duke of Medina Sidonia, his naval commander, to Burgos to give an account of himself. The king had listened long and patiently to tales of whistling cannon balls hurled incredible distances from English batteries then put a long finger to his full lips.

“I can no longer bear to hear your voice,” Pedro had said. On his command, his palace guard then seized the duke and held him down while Pedro pulled on his tongue with tongs and cut it away, instructing his cook to fry it in oil for his supper.

The castle was at the highest geographical point above the River Arlanzón with a commanding view over the central Iberian plateau. It was widely considered the most impenetrable fortress in all of Europa. From the squalid town an intruding army would first have to penetrate the outermost curtain wall patrolled by archers and soldiers wielding stones and oil to rain down on enemy heads. Then a drawbridge would have to be lowered to bypass a deep ditch. The bridge itself would funnel advancing foes into a narrow passageway where crossbow and pike men would meet them in the outer bailey. Another drawbridge led to the middle bailey and then a third drawbridge pierced the inner curtain wall to the heart of the castle, the inner bailey, where the king and his court resided in the royal apartments.

This was the route Arabel Loughty took to reach the castle keep.

On her arduous sea and land journey, Count Navarro, the Iberian ambassador to the English court, and his loyal officials, De Zurita and Manrique, had personally accompanied her. Navarro’s dysentery worsened during the journey and by the time they arrived in Burgos he was panting and unresponsive. King Pedro had no interest in his condition. Ambassadors could easily be replaced. When informed about the arrival of this precious cargo Pedro at first scoffed at the notion that a living woman had been procured, but de Zurita and Manrique, though unable to offer any explanation for her presence, nevertheless swore on pain of eternal torture that Arabel was no Heller and moreover, that she was a fetching beauty. With that, centuries of ennui dropped away and in a frenzy of excitement, Pedro ordered his seamstresses to fashion new outfits for himself and this special woman, his cooks to lay on a feast, his cellar master to decant his best wines and ports. He would entertain Arabel that very evening.