Triumff: Her Majesty's Hero (21 page)

    Returning to Deptford, thriving little boom-town Deptford, was like coming home for the man Cedarn used to be.

    He stood for a long moment on the cobbles of Oxstalls Lane, and watched the bustle all around. Since the first days of the United Fleet, it had been a place of chandlers, caulkers, hemp-dressers, joiners, and all the associated industries of sail. Just now, as clocks and hollow bellies announced lunchtime, a legion of such artisans scurried to and fro, mixing with, and through, knots of sailors on furlough. Loud and raucous, the seamen caroused rather more aimlessly down the busy street, with the eager intention of replacing the grim shipboard regimen of burgoo, botargo and banyan days with boiled brisket, floured hobs and frothy porter. Cedarn could hear a hurdy-gurdy wailing out the song about the Guinea Coast from a tavern by the Creek-Bridge.

    Kentish matrons in straw hats and broad, white aprons, like galleons asail, tacked down through the market stalls with baskets of fish, cherries and marrows on their arms. Less dowdy ladies, the powdered bawds, rested their décolleté bosoms on the sills of tap-room windows and stew balconies, and winked or called cheerfully to the passing mariners. Ragged wharf-brats ran tops and hoops through the alleys between the riverside rents. A tame monkey gibbered and chirruped from the awning of a knife-sharpener’s shop. Rising up behind the Deptford streets, to the west of the Creek, stood the merchants’ Private Dock, the Royal Dock shipyards, the warehouses and excise barns, and a vast, gently rocking forest of masts and stays.

    Cedarn’s nose breathed in the smells of sea-breeze and estuary mud, timber shavings and pitch, and his ears soaked up the multi-lingual chatter of the cosmopolitan thoroughfare. It all made him feel rather homesick for distant places, even though he hadn’t actually ever been to some of them.

    Reluctantly, he broke his reverie and strode down the street onto Butt Lane, which ran through to the main London Road. On either side were wide market gardens, ripe with manure, trim orchards, herbal plots of madder and woad, and the wide tenter-yards where cloth was stretchered. A twin-gabled victualling house stood at a bend in the land with a walled garden to the rear. By its sign, it promised “Fine foods and suppage in the Roman Mannere”. Cedarn stooped in under the low door and took a seat at an empty table. The restaurant was filling up with a noisy throng of merchants and gentlemen traders, dining on spiced faggots, spaghetti, olive bread and gnocchi. A young girl in a long smock brought him a menu slate and a bowl of pitted olives.

    “Is the padrone in?” Cedarn asked her. She studied him suspiciously for a moment, and then replied that she would fetch him.

    Cedarn sat back and studied the menu. It was inscribed with the house name - The Go-Betweene - at the head, under which was the scrolled legend:
“The Pasta is a Foreign
Countrye; they chew things differently there.”

    A plump, balding Italian in a gooseturd-green doublet wandered over to the table, wiping his chunky hands on a dish cloth.

    “Signore? You ask-a for me?”

    Cedarn looked up and returned the man’s curious stare with a soft smile.

    “Drew Bluett. Since when did you become Italian?”

    “You make-a the mistake, signore. I am-a Guido Severino, host of this-a-“

    “Drew, pull up a chair and lose that ridiculous accent,” hissed Cedarn.

    The man obliged, quickly, sitting across the table from Cedarn, and keeping his head and his voice low as he scrutinised him with angry bemusement.

    “What’s your bloody game, mate? Do I know you from somewhere?”

    Cedarn nodded, still smiling, and said, “From Aleppo, and Gravelines, and an evening in Monte Cabiarca when the Prussian flag caught fire a little.”

    The man’s eyes widened in slow realisation. He gawped, blinked and then began to chuckle in wonderment.

    “Rupert-“

    Cedarn hushed him.

    “Call me Louis,” he said. “Like you, I have found it expedient to be re-christened. Is there somewhere we can talk?”

    To the back of the Go-Betweene, the walled garden held trellised vines and plum trees en espalier. Kitchen smells mingled with the garden scents, and almost-warm sunshine bathed the grass. Drew Bluett latched the back-door behind them, and then whooped and howled and hugged his guest.

    “What is it? Five years?” he asked, laughing.

    “Yes, but it feels like less somehow,” said Triumff. Bluett punched him playfully on the arm.

    “What about this Frenchie crap? This cutesie blond bob?”

    “And this Roman nonsense? ‘I ask-a you, signore’ Honestly!” said Cedarn.

    “A man has to survive. Italian food is the very fashion now, not that I expect you to know that. You always were miserably behind the times. This is a trattoria, in the Roman style all prosciutto, saltimbocca and chintz table-cloths. The punters expect the accent. It’s all part of the ambience.”

    “Do tell.”

    “So why are you here? Catching up on old times at last?” asked Bluett.

    Triumff shook his head.

    “I need help, Drew,” he said. “I’m trying to stay alive, and you were always good at that.”

    Drew Bluett had served the Unity with distinction for twelve celebrated years. That is to say, Drew Bluett hadn’t done so much as Tom Dabyns, Truffock Roundeslay, Joachim Brukk, Geriant Malpowys, Steffan Droigt, Baldesar Boccho Triumff forgot the rest. Bluett’s talent was espial, that so-called second oldest of professions (the first, of course, being cave realtor), and in the guise of three dozen or more fictions, had plied his art of intelligence across the courts of the European Unity. They had met in Venice in ninety-six, and their paths had crossed many times since. Twice, Rupert Triumff had run Bluett’s coded letters of espial down the Channel in a fast sloop, and delivered them to anonymous spymasters and case-officers at nervous midnight trysts. Once, with only a rapier, a burning artillery linstock and a leaking dorey, he had pulled Bluett from the clutches of a torturer of the Prussian navy, and rowed his comatose form to safety across the Monte Cabiarca Sound, while two Prussian galleasses burnt and foundered at their moorings. This had been during the six-month Prussian Uprising, when the
Blameless
had been blockaded in Gramercy Harbour, and Triumff had had nothing better to do.

    Since such glory days, times had changed. The Privy Council - with Lord Slee its chief mover - had become alarmed at the autonomous power of the intelligence community, and had cooked up ways of curtailing its powers, or turning them in ways the Council could control. Then came the infamous “Sedangate” affair, when Lord Effingham, Her Majesty’s Comptroller of Espial, had been disgraced and banished.

    This was a shameful matter, blown up into lurid myth by the pamphleteers and tabloiders. Effingham had been caught kerb-crawling in his sedan chair off Holborn, propositioning gigolos in cipher. In the wake of the scandal, Effingham had died in exile, a broken man (when a harpsichord mysteriously fell on him), and his espial “Circus” had been dismantled. In a house-cleaning purge authorised by Effingham’s Council-sponsored replacement, Lord Blindingham, the Circus’s many brave agents were deemed untrustworthy, and either hounded from the country, or suffered long, fabricated treason-trials and came to sticky ends, thanks to Lord Slee’s newly imposed capital punishment of hanging, drawing and syruping.

    A few, a very few, turned to their hard-learned skills, and melted into the fabric of British life as different men. In the power vacuum that followed, the previously impotent CIA rose to dominance as the new Secret Service. Many at Court believed it wouldn’t be long before they too found themselves on the business end of a “treason-purge” from the Privy Council. In his present circumstances, Rupert Triumff found that last concept fundamentally reassuring.

    Drew Bluett had been one of those who had survived it all. Quiet hearsay, from one confidante to another, had allowed Triumff to learn of Bluett’s new station in life, running a victualling house cheekily named after his old profession. Triumff had remained, dutifully, out of contact. He had reasoned that Bluett would ill-favour a visit from his past life, and the potential damage that it might do.

    But now, Triumff had a reason.

    “You’re in a pretty fix, by all accounts,” mused Bluett, sitting on a bench under the plum arbour and uncorking a bottle of cassis. “All London is a-chatter with your ‘treason’, Rupert. They say you’ve made a pact with Beelzebub and plan to threaten the Queen’s person. They say you’re specially trained in fiendishness. They say you’ve brought back new Magicks from your new continent.”

    “Do they?” asked Triumff, all but growling. It wasn’t a question. He took the glass of liquor that Bluett offered, and downed most of it in one gulp.

    “Let me tell you, Drew, of some secret things,” he began.

    So it was, in that walled garden in Deptford, that Rupert Triumff unfolded his deepest confidences to Drew Bluett, confidences that, until then, had been known only to Triumff, Agnew and Doll, and Uptil, of course. Only one other great secret in the Unity was known by so few personages, and that was the secret conspiracy of Slee, Jaspers, Salisbury and de la Vega.

    In this momentous hour, a close-kept secret grew a little larger. A cloud passed in front of the sun and the garden grew chill. Triumff shuddered, and felt as if all London was hushed and listening. He waited for a moment as the hubbub of Deptford around about filled his ears and reassured him, and then he drank another glass and began.

    “The voyage to the South was arduous,” said Rupert Triumff. “I would that others knew of its perils, but it was necessary to burn my logs and claim they were washed over-rail in a squall. Months we sailed, not knowing to where, out of sight of land or friends or even other ships. There was a time when I would have welcomed the sight of a pirate sail. Forty men sailed with me on the
Blameless,
forty good men. Piers Packenhamme, Morris Roughly, Tom Tibbert and Swainey Gould. Old Roger Frizer remember him? South of the Tropics, we were becalmed for weeks. Illness wracked the ship, and twelve men died, Piers among them. Two others went so sun-mad they mutinied, and were taken by sharks as they tried to swim for home. All the while, I buckled under my responsibilities, knowing what the Crown expected of me, new lands, yes, but more than that: new Magick, new wonders for the Church to employ. Before I left, I had an audience, in camera, with a senior prelate of the Guild. He implied that the Arte was burning out, and only a new lease of Magicks would save it. He urged me to bring back miracles. I needed that sort of burden as much as I needed a brimming privy.”

    Triumff sat back on the bench and sighed.

    “So it was, we found the new land,” he continued, “this Australia. It was paradise. A bright, big country of multiple delights, a New World with its own proud people.”

    Drew nodded. “These autochthons. I have read the reports of your endeavour in all the journals. You have made a fine discovery.”

    “It is a rod for my own back,” Triumff replied, sadly. “Beach, for that is the name of the land in its people’s tongue, is a worthier world than ours by far. It’s noble and clean, and civilised beyond compare. And the things they can do”

    “Their Magick?” asked Drew.

    Triumff shook his head, and said, “No Magick, Drew, no Arte. The folk of Beach renounced the Magick way centuries ago, seeing it for the curse it was. No, they have based their beautiful world on industry on machines. They have advanced the rude skills we left to languish when Leonardo and his kind re-midwifed the Arte. While the Unity buried itself in centuries of misbegotten sorcery, Beach grew up healthy and strong, and able, by the power of their own minds and hard-working hands. Their entire continent is pure and uncorrupted by the stink of Magick.”

    Triumff realised that his glass was empty. He took the bottle from the bench-seat and refilled it with slightly shaking hands.

    “So now, on my return,” he continued, “I was faced with a dilemma. I had no Arte to bring back, no new Cantrips, no new jinx. But what I had Ahh, what a thing! News of a noble world, secrets of technologie that would baffle and illuminate the Unity. And I realised my duty.”

    “Duty?” asked Bluett.

    “To keep it from the Church and Court,” answered Triumff. “Once they knew of it, an armada of reavers and wreckers would put out from Plymouth and Southampton, and all points east, off to despoil and break and invade and steal. They would want it for themselves. At worst, my friends, those folk of Beach who had treated me with kindness and generosity, would be enslaved and murdered, and driven from their cities, like the noble kind in the Indies and wherever else the Unity stains the map. At halfway best, they would fight back, and war would wreck the globe. We would have no shield against their machines, and they no shield against our Arte. I held a million lives in my own two hands.”