Triumff: Her Majesty's Hero (9 page)

    The old lady chuckled to herself as if “eviscerated” meant “bopped on the head with an inflated sheep’s bladder” (which it does in the Welsh Marches, though the usage is offset by their understanding of the expression “bladdered”).

    “Are you walking out with that nice Master Rupert tonight?” added Mistress Mary, rethreading her barb.

    “Ohhh,” mused Doll, “I don’t think so. He’s busy, very probably.”

    “Such a nice young jackanapes,” babbled Mistress Mary, regardless.

    “Well, that’s one word for him,” said Doll, smiling sourly. She got to her feet. “I’m off now, Mary. I’m as tired as a baited bear at a ragged staff. I’ve got to get some sleep. It’s the Masque this Saturday.”

    “And I’m so excited,” replied Mistress Mary. “I do love a good firework.”

    “Indeed you do,” smiled Doll, remembering the last Great Masque Day, when they had been required to ouija for a twenty-four hour glazier because Mistress Mary’s Great Apollo Rocket had blown out all the back windows.

    Mary nodded, and continued to murder her embroidery, as Doll turned and stomped up the narrow stairs into the upper levels of the boarding house. On the first landing, the air stank of turpentine. She peered in through the open doorway of the rooms rented by Luigi, a struggling, bohemian artist from Italia.

    “How’s it going, bambino?” she called. The long-haired painter looked up from his canvas and smiled his beautiful Latin smile, all teeth and flecks of oil paint.

    “You tell me!” he invited, gesturing to his canvas, which was a fine but horsey portrait of a woman in a lettice cap and frangipani gloves. Portrait work like this helped him to earn his crust.

    “It’s not quite La Giaconda,” Doll remarked, ducking out of the doorway.

    “Ahh! What do you expect?” exclaimed Luigi in her wake, waving a mahl stick and a hog-bristle brush after her. “I can only work with what I have! The plain wives of coarse gentlemen who want a portrait for their fireplace! Ugly children who won’t stand still! Wedding couples where my skill must hide the bride’s bump better than her gown did! Horses! Horses and dogs!”

    “Yeah, it’s a hard life,” she replied, heading on towards her room.

    “But it could be so much better!” he protested. “Come back! I want to talk to you again, my lady, about you being my model! Dolce! The wonder of it! The sublime invocation of worldly beauty!”

    “Nice try,” Doll called back, as she clambered up the final flight to her rooms, “but you’ll have to wax a lot more lyrical if you expect me to get my kit off and pose for you with swans and all that other nonsense.”

    “I try my very best!” he shouted up after her. “Take me to your Leda!”

    Doll went into her lodgings, and closed the door behind her, shutting off Luigi’s heartfelt pleas. Every night they were the same, and every night they were just as earnest, but Doll was reasonably sure they had less to do with the painting of pictures and more to do with the removal of clothing.

    Her room was dark and cool, resounding with the pelt of rain outside. She breathed a deep sigh, threw aside her fan, and began to struggle with the savagely tight laces of her bodice, aching to be free of the drenched, festooning folds of the gown.

    Doll was a striking woman in her late twenties, blessed with the sort of slender yet double-D cupped figure that made men swallow hard and behave attentively. Her face had been variously described as “well proportioned”, “pleasing” and “finely featured”. What it came down to, in simple terms, was that she was heart-stoppingly lovely. And she was an actress, but don’t hold that against her just yet.

    Doll crashed down on her bedspread and wriggled off her sopping slippers, pantofles and netherstocks, which she hurled at the drapes.

    “Ow,” said the drapes as a slipper bounced off them.

    Cat-like, Doll got up on her bare feet and tip-toed towards the window, hefting up her right fist into a stiff cudgel, which she swung at the bulging curtains at nose-height.

    There was a loud crack of displaced cartilage, and a faint whiff of the great smell of A Scent of Man.

    “What was that for?” asked Rupert Triumff.

Triumff attempted to staunch the blood issuing from his nose with the corner of a lace kerchief.

“Nice punch really nice punch,” he moaned.

    “Oh, shut up,” said Doll, pouring two glasses of musket. “I’ve said I was sorry. It’s your own bloody fault for hiding in the first place.”

    Triumff shook his head. “No, no. The first place would have been the closet. I was hiding in the second place.”

    “Shut up,” she repeated, proffering him a glass of the famous Old Skinner’s.

    “I’ve had a bad day,” muttered Triumff, nasally.

    “Really?”

    “Gull wants to kill me, the Queen wants to see me, and two knife-boys tried to stitch me up a treat in the baths. Plus, if I don’t come up with something, sharpish, Uptil’s homeland is going to get chewed into little bits by the reaver-fleet. And there’s something going on at Court.”

    “Like what?”

    Triumff got to his feet, felt faint, and sat down again. “Rumours,” he said. “Everybody’s so tense. They say there’s something not right with the Cantrips.”

    “Define ‘not right’?” she asked.

    He shrugged, and said, “Last night, before I got a little overenthusiastic and challenged Gull to a duel-“

    “You did what?”

    “Forget that part,” Triumff said with a testy wave of his hand. “Anyway, before that, I was in The World Turn’d Upside Your Head with Johnny Hacklyutt and the boys, and he said he’d heard that something was not right with the Cantrips.”

    “Wow, talk about your authentic and unimpeachable source.”

    “I’m just repeating what he said,” Triumff shrugged.

    “Actually, I’ve heard things too,” said Doll. She sipped her drink. “All these rumours are going around. Everyone backstage was gossiping.”

“Rumours?”

    “Rumours of bad omens. Portents. People on the ouija hearing sinister voices on crossed lines. There’s talk of stuff. There’s talk of Goety, and worse.”

    “This is exactly my point,” said Triumff. “I’ve half a mind to-“

    “You’ve half a mind, let’s leave it there,” said Doll. “And for God’s sake, leave the jinxy conjuration stuff and nonsense to the cardinals and the Union.”

    “Oh, like they’re the experts,” said Triumff. “Come on, Doll. Everyone knows the Arte only lets the Church play with it. I just wish the country could forget about Magick and try and do things for itself. Machines, now-“

    “You’ve been thinking about Beach again, haven’t you?” asked Doll, cutting him off.

    “What if I have? Uptil’s people have got it all worked out. I have this horrible feeling I’m going to let them down badly,” said Triumff.

    Doll leaned across and kissed his mouth. It was one of the better things that had happened to him that day.

    Doll smiled, and then blotted out her smile with a frown.

    “What was that?” she asked.

    An animal squalled somewhere under the window.

    “Cats,” said Triumff. “Cats fighting. That’s all.”

    It wasn’t. In the coal-blackness of the alley next to number five, Paternoster Lane, stood a bruiser of a ginger tom called Rusty, who owned Mistress Mary (this is perfectly correct usage. Humans, in their arrogance and lack of insight, believe they own cats, like they do dogs. The reverse is so utterly true that they entirely fail to see it). Rusty, who was ordinarily pretty confident that he was chief kahuna thereabouts in the spranting, siring, hackle-raising and territorialising departments, howled again and fled like a furry cannonball.

    Under normal circumstances of alarm and agitation, Rusty would inflate himself to three times his normal size, and pull the sort of face usually only found on outraged racoons that have been mistaken for novelty pencil sharpeners. Right now, he was so scared, he clean forgot, and exited, thin and lank and jittery, into the lane.

    The cause of his concern stood in the alley, pulled its cloak around its shoulders, and stamped its booted feet to keep warm. A gutter-drip spattered across its ear. It took off its glove, licked the back of its paw, and washed the droplets from its furry, whiskered cheek.

    Meanwhile, in a garret in the attic spaces of a house on Fleet Street, a garret which was all he could afford unless his fortunes changed, as it is nigh on impossible to rent a decent place on the sort of page-rate the tabloids offer, not that there was much of that around, even, and lord knows he looked, sniffing out a story here and there, always coming home to this stinking garret that perpetually smelled of fried garlic and rancid poultry thanks to the tandoori three doors down, and there was no bath to speak of, and a cooked meal would be a luxury, and even the cockroaches had taken to looking in the property section of the Standard each Thursday

    In a garret on Fleet Street, your humble servant, the author, Master Wllm Beaver, sat, scribbling away by the light of the single overhead lamp. It was a piece on “Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Hose”, as I recall. It was destined never to be finished. My HB pencil had just broken, and a rummaging search was underway in the drawers of the desk for a clasp knife with which to re-point it before item four (“You can wear it upon thine head if you seek to obtain money with menaces from a Banking House, Real Estate Society or Postal Depot”) slipped from my mind.

    Whereupon, everything went black.

    I, Wllm Beaver, discounted a sudden, crippling stroke, mainly because I believe it pays to be optimistic. I straightened up slowly in my chair, my eyes becoming accustomed to the gloom. The only light was the faintest outside sheen of the far-away lightning. The City, from the window, was black as pitch. There was a crashing, and the sound of voices from below as fellow residents realised it wasn’t just a prolonged blink, and set about walking into things in a search for matches.

    The City was utterly, utterly dark.

    It wasn’t local. If you’d been there, you would have seen the sprawl of the whole city in darkness, or rather you wouldn’t. There was only the merest hint of something big and black against something bigger and blacker. Just the Thames, like a ribbon of mirror, glittered in the storm-light. Usually, the city at night lies like a black velvet cape encrusted with winking sequins, spread across the muddy earth by some titanic Raleigh for some celestial Elizabeth.

    That night, even the poetry had been turned off. Everything in London, under the beating rain, was dark, and blind, and cold and frightened.

    In the Rouncey Mare, Boy Simon believed for some moments that he had gone blind, and coped with the sudden affliction stoically, considering first how his ailment might earn him the sympathetic shillings of passers-by if he took to wearing a placard around his neck reading “God hath blinded me and made me thirsty”. He also figured that being blind, he wouldn’t get as much work as a drover, which, on balance, meant he would get more time to spend in the Rouncey Mare. Then he realised that it was the lights that had failed and not his optic nerves, and at once joined in the general activity of bumbling around. It is strange, but true that every time the power fails, and people are plunged into darkness, they immediately start blundering around three or four times as much as they do when the lights are on. God knows what they think they’re going to achieve, apart from bruises and broken ornaments.

    At Richmond, Cardinal Woolly rose from his darkened lectern in the library, and crossed himself. The void beyond the rain-spattered window confirmed his fears. He fumbled for the hanging bell-pull, and rang on it repeatedly for the domestic staff.

    All the while, his lips silently moved in prayer.

    At the Yard, the sudden gloom set the prisoners in the cells to chanting, and rattling on the bars with their tin cups. The only light in the Affray Room was the coal of de Quincey’s pipe.

    “Dear me,” muttered de Quincey in the sudden silence that immediately followed the abrupt lack of light, “here’s something you don’t see every day of the week.”

    “What’s that, doc?” asked an invisible serjeant named Tomkins to his left.

    “Absolutely bastard nothing at all,” said de Quincey.

    At Windsor, in the Oriel Banqueting Hall, the light had dwindled, but not died. Fourteen candle flames cast out long shadows from the table, glinting across glasses and cutlery, and hollowing the features of the four conspirators. Slee began a slow, approving handclap. Jaspers chuckled in response.