The Revolutions (36 page)

“We have no choice,” Jupiter said.

“We must have Gracewell,” Sun said. “I see that you fear this woman. But I also recall that you once promised you could control her, if it was necessary.”

“I
see
,” Atwood said. “Then I suppose you should do as you please, Mr Shaw, if you think you know best.”

He stormed off in a sulk, as if he planned to send a telegram to his Hidden Masters in Tibet and complain of insurrection.

*   *   *

The capture and recapture of Norman Gracewell were just the opening moves of London’s Great Magical War. It continued through autumn, and on into winter.

Mrs Archer (gloating happily) took on the title of Terra Mater. Sergeant Jessop, the previous holder of that title, was dead—Podmore hadn’t lied about that. No members of the Company attended his funeral.

Thérèse Didot had suffered too. She wouldn’t say how, but her hair had gone grey.

When asked about the bird that had saved Arthur from Podmore’s men, Sun merely smiled, and said that he was sure Arthur would have an opportunity to repay his debt in due course.

*   *   *

They rebuilt Gracewell’s Engine.

Gracewell refused to speak about his confinement, except to say that it had given him a lot of time to think. He was thinner, and quieter, and he no longer looked anyone in the eye or made conversation. He wouldn’t shake hands, and he hardly ate. He took cocaine and worked all night without rest. His third Engine was superior to the second, cheaper and more efficient. It had to be—sensitives were becoming increasingly hard to find in London.

They built the third Engine just a few miles from Gravesend, not far from Rudder Hill. Since Gracewell had become quite incapable of handling ordinary responsibilities, Arthur took on the job of organizing construction. The building was a sprawling ugly thing of timber and concrete, hastily built and prone to collapse, at the end of a trail through the woods. They told the locals it was a clerical office for the Europa Shipping Company. Mrs Archer said that she liked being able to sit on the bench outside her house of an evening and look down from the hillside onto the Engine, buzzing away in the wooded valley below.

One moonlit midnight at the end of October, a black storm brewed up over the sea and rushed inland, where it drove the trees of Rudder Hill so violently that some of the locals (staggering home from the pub) claimed to have seen the trees themselves get up and march downhill, thrashing their heads in a frenzy. By the morning, a good part of the western side of the Engine had been reduced to rubble, and there were drifts of leaves and broken branches everywhere. It was obviously the work of the enemy. Archer claimed that if it wasn’t for her protection, it would have been worse.

*   *   *

The week after the incident at the Savoy, Arthur visited George in the hospital, where George lay with his head and his ribs bandaged while his wife, Agnes, fussed over him. George didn’t recall very much about the incident at the Savoy, except what he read in the newspapers. He snapped at Agnes and spoke of suing the Savoy, which was unlike him—he’d never been the litigious sort. In fact, even after he was out of the hospital and walking around again, he seemed rather a different person. The doctors said that blows to the head could have that effect. They didn’t know if it would last—the brain was largely unexplored territory to modern science. In the meantime, George, who’d always been slow to anger, now had a vicious temper. He’d always been quick to make a joke; now he was humourless. He stopped writing his stories. The newspapers convinced him that it was the electrical lighting at the Savoy that had caused the episode of hysteria, and he became obsessed with the study of electricity. At Agnes’s suggestion, Arthur tried to invite him out to Gravesend to get his mind off things, but he refused to travel. He said it was dangerous to go outside. He was afraid of electrical currents, baleful astronomical influences, nameless forces.

*   *   *

It was a year of storms and other strange events.

The Company negotiated rules of engagement with Podmore and his allies: magic, but no guns, or knives, or burglary, or other activities that the Metropolitan Police would recognise as ordinary crime. That left a great deal of room for creative unpleasantness.

The incident at the Savoy, in which two people had died, was generally considered to be an episode of mass hysteria. There was a common theory that it was due to the pernicious effects on the brain of too much electrical lighting and the sudden acceleration of elevators. There were lawsuits against the Savoy and against the London Electric Supply Corporation. There were diplomatic difficulties arising from injuries sustained by a minor Italian Prince, and injuries inflicted on a Bishop of the Church of England by a German Grand Admiral; but whoever’s job it was to smooth things over smoothed well, and by the end of the year the lawsuits had been settled and peace between nations maintained.

There were riots in London. The mob took exception to something unpatriotic printed in one of Podmore’s newspapers (though no two members of the mob could agree on what exactly had been said, or what was wrong with it). They set fire to one of Podmore’s warehouses, and feathered a delivery boy, and heaved expensive printing equipment into the river. Another mob (with a certain overlap in personnel) assaulted Sun’s house, which—rumour had it—hosted immoral practices and was a prison for unfortunate young women. A curious sensation of vertigo swept through the mob before they’d broken more than a couple of windows; a sensation that left them reeling, vomiting, clutching at lamp-posts for fear of falling into the vast night sky above. This was generally blamed on a gas leak. A few of the ringleaders turned up the next morning on nearby rooftops, hanging on to chimneys for dear life. Sun’s house survived, but his psychic exertions left him bedridden for a week. The mob, Atwood observed, could be a dangerous weapon, especially when one’s opponent owned the newspapers.

Dr Sandys, the King’s College theologian, hung himself in his kitchen. Archer was quick to claim credit.

Ravens amassed in the sky in great numbers, forming noisy black thunderclouds. Rats swarmed up out of the Underground. The vermin of London went to war. Their struggle lasted all through autumn, but ended inconclusively. Every morning there were dead birds and rats in the streets, on rooftops and window-sills, tangled in laundry. The newspapers concluded that the unusual weather of the past year had driven the wretched creatures mad.

In October, a Mrs Ada Carroll, a known associate of Lord Podmore, lost her house to a quite extraordinarily aggressive infestation of termites; but Mr and Mrs Carroll were noted amateur Egyptologists, and the popular theory was that they had probably brought back some sort of virulent strain of insect in an urn or a sarcophagus. Some friends of Lord Atwood’s in Parliament proposed an investigation of the Carrolls’s trade in antiquities.

*   *   *

The new rules of engagement left Dimmick mostly idle. He took to drinking and fighting down by the docks. He suffered no significant injuries, apart from a broken nose and a lost tooth. He grinned and told Arthur that he should see what he’d done to the other fellows.

*   *   *

The Company of the Spheres recruited a woman called Sadie Paget, but she didn’t last. One September evening, as she sang by the piano in the Queen’s Head, the instrument improbably (a dropped match?) burst into flames. She left London in a panic the next day, her hands bandaged. Arthur never even met her replacement—a young painter who styled himself
Parsifal.
When Parsifal left the Company (for the madhouse), Dimmick took his place. Scraping the barrel, rather, Arthur thought; but though Dimmick’s magical talents were somewhat questionable, and his morals worse, he was undeniably brave.

Arthur didn’t pay too much attention to the ins and outs of the war, to who was on whose side, to the daily news of alliance and outrage and plot and counterplot. He moved out of London, glad to say good-bye to the city’s growing atmosphere of unease and discord. He bought a ramshackle little house outside Gravesend, not far from the new Engine, where he worked all day and half the night to keep the thing running. He installed a hand-cranked telephone and hired a housekeeper and a nurse to take care of Josephine. They whispered behind his back; thought he was mad, poor fellow. Mad, but rich. He had the backing of the general fund of the Company of the Spheres, so money was just about limitless. It was time that was scarce. Every day Josephine seemed fainter, paler, weaker. He had almost forgotten the sound of her voice.

The third Engine was staffed—at its height—by fifty individuals. Some of them had been in the second Engine, and a few had been in the first. They generally looked at Arthur with a certain dread and awe—Gracewell’s mysterious enforcer; the great, gaunt, never-sleeping giant of the Engine; the man who knew the terrible secrets of the Work. He was rumoured to perform all sorts of odd rituals, and to keep his wife in an enchanted sleep. It amused him, in a bleak sort of way. He told a select few of the workers about his confrontation with Lord Podmore, and he showed an even more select few some tricks he’d learned from Atwood and Miss Didot, like glass-breaking, table-rapping, some small sleights of will. His small legend grew. They were afraid of him, and rightly so. He was not a cruel master, but nor was he especially kind. Time was of the essence. The Work remained hard. It was his policy that men on the verge of madness should be relieved of duty before they succumbed. A humane policy, under the circumstances; Atwood considered it folly. It didn’t always work.

On nights when he couldn’t sleep, or when the Engine was idle, he took long walks. He took up stargazing. He was menaced once or twice by a black dog, or a pack of owls. He was quick with a prayer or a charm to drive off evil spirits.

The Company expanded their ambitions. They refined their mathematics. Fortnightly, Arthur caught the train into London to join their experiments. Archer threw herself cackling into their business, and got her hands on the
Liber Ad Astra
over Atwood’s objections. She said she didn’t think much of this modern stuff—thin-blooded, she called it. She had
ideas
, which, much to Atwood’s disgust, turned out to be good ones. The Work progressed rapidly. Each successive expedition into the void progressed further. Each time the face of Mars loomed larger before them. They began to plan an expedition.

*   *   *

It was Arthur and Atwood’s habit to communicate weekly by telephone, to discuss the Engine, the experiments, Josephine’s condition. In November, Atwood informed Arthur that the Germans had indeed arrived in London.

“How do you know?”

“It was in the newspapers. Professor Bohm and Professor Bastian of Heidelberg University arrived in London on the
Lady Margaret,
and are staying at the Grosvenor.”

“And who are they, Atwood?”

“They are scholars. But they are also—and this is known only to those who know this sort of thing—members of the Hyperborean Society.”

“And what’s that?”

“The
Society
, Shaw—I’m quite sure I’ve told you. Honestly, you should pay attention to these things if you plan to move in these circles. You can’t hide in the country for ever, Shaw—burying your head!”

“I don’t see why not. Someone has to keep the Engine running. Well, so they’re Hyperboreans; good for them. What are their plans?”

“Professor Bastian intends to lecture on political economy at King’s, and Professor Bohm intends to visit the British Museum. That’s what the
Times
reports. Bastian is terribly famous among the sort of people who like that sort of thing—economics, I mean; quite incomprehensible to me, I’m afraid. But both of them are up to their necks in the left hand path. Well, I suppose one can’t be up to one’s neck in a path—but the point is, their motives are without doubt ulterior. And we must assume that their allies will follow; or are already here.”

“Podmore said that the Germans would intervene. I suppose he was right.”

“We won’t let the Germans stop us.”

“What will they do?”

“Their worst. At least they haven’t brought in the Americans—yet—so far as I know. Or the Chinese. I expect they’ll do something dreadful. We will weather it. I’m more concerned about Archer, frankly.”

Arthur didn’t bother to respond to that. Atwood regularly complained about Archer—her repulsive habits, her base and primitive and unfashionable superstitions, her crude and vulgar conception of magic, her open and aggravating contempt for the Company’s philosophy.

There was a long pause, during which Arthur pictured Atwood staring silently up at the ceiling, lost in thought. He wondered where Atwood was. The man had half a dozen flats, and he moved among them frequently, to confuse the enemy.

“Lord Podmore strikes at my investments,” Atwood said.

“Floods; fire at the mill. Funds are short. The Engine is damnably expensive.”

“God. Flood and fire. Will there be anything left when we’re done?”

“Don’t be dramatic, Shaw. There will be enough to run the Engine. I’ll spend it all, if I must. Money is an illusion.”

“There speaks a man who’s never lacked it.”

“It’ll last. It need last only another month.”

“A month?”

“Or thereabouts. We’re closer—every time we get closer. We can see the shoreline. Are you ready? Are you eager?”

Atwood had set down a regimen of daily exercises for the members of the expedition—rehearsals for the ritual and meditations to prepare them for cold and darkness, hunger and fear, and whatever awaited them among the spheres. They were quite exhausting.

“Eager as ever, Atwood.”

“Good. Good man. Closer and closer. It’s hard to find good men, Shaw, hard to find the right men for this sort of thing. But we will. When will you get us the latest calculations, Shaw?”