Angelmaker (45 page)

Tes a zertin cure, Mam, I ’zure ’ee, starps ’ey bagg’rin’ wetchess f’om g’wen te zay in eggbote
.

It took her years to work out what it means. She says it now, and Frankie stares at her.

“It is a certain cure, madam, I assure you; it stops those buggering witches from going to sea in an eggboat!”
Cuparah
, eggboat. Far below crush-depth, metal shell fit to fail. It’s just right, somehow; meaningless, idiotic, and right.

One of the Ruskinites laughs, and repeats it. His voice is Cornish—the woman she heard, Edie reckons, must have been from Dorset—and Mockley says it, too, miming eggs and toasted soldiers, and it becomes the rhythm of their work, an antidote to the percussion all around. Frankie swears in French that they have all gone utterly mad,
but they connect the compressor and the pumps to the pipes as she requires, and fire them up. Frankie peers at the switch, then starts to scribble in chalk on a bulkhead.

“Yes, yes, seawater, good, so far, so good, yes … cold, of course, very good, better! So. The pressure is a factor, and the salt … The units will have to work hard initially. The cold inside the vessel will be … it will be cold. Everyone must dress warm. We have no time for that. After it is done, we can warm the interior, yes. Then there will be … 
bon
. Then …” and she’s off, seconds ticking, bombs kicking, until Edie realises she’s gone abstract, and nudges her hard. “Oh,
mordieux
, I am an idiot, there is an issue of trapped air,” Frankie mutters, and begins drilling a hole in the bulkhead wall, which is when one of Amanda Baines’s sailors comes in and screams at her to stop.

The visceral horror in his voice is enough to cut through the other sounds of fear and horror on the boat, and another man looks around the door. He screams as well.

“Idiot!” Frankie Fossoyeur is shouting. “I am a professional!”

Twenty seconds later, and it has all gone significantly to hell, as if the previous situation—depth charges, water pressure, deteriorating vessel, general doom—had not been bad enough. Now the bosun is holding a gun on Frankie and Frankie won’t stop drilling, and sailors are starting to shout at the chief to shoot her down. Any second now the whole thing will become moot because, with the sailors here instead of where they should be, vital tasks are not getting done, and in any case
Cuparah
is responding only sluggishly, with one engine’s bearings not doing their job and a shriek of dying metal ripping and buzzing through the air. Up above, the enemy knows they’re on the edge of the kill. One of the Ruskinites starts to mutter:
Into Thine arms, O Lord, I commend my soul, that Thou hast made and nourished. Look kindly on me now, that am flawed
, and then Edie treads on his toe.

And then there comes a moment of perfect quiet. Edie can’t understand how, at first, and then she realises that a charge has gone off right on top of the boat, and the pulse of pressure has burst her left eardrum and the other one is shrieking. The pain is so awful that she can only feel it in slivers, little bright fragments which punctuate everything. In between times the world is grey and purple as if she is in the dark and her agony is the only illumination. Everything happens in pieces.

She sees the water welling up, up, up from below them, far too fast.

The chief of the boat waves his hands, ordering everyone out of the compartment.

Frankie Fossoyeur ignores him.

The flood door swings shut, sealing them in.

The water rushes up, so cold Edie can actually feel it over the pain. But she can’t move. She has nothing left.

Through the deck, she can feel bad things happening all around.
Cuparah
is wallowing, rebounding off one blast after another, reeling like a drunkard in a bar brawl. Another blast kicks her sideways, and she does not right. She begins to fall. Edie can feel it in the hairs on the back of her neck.
Cuparah
is going down, down in an anticlockwise spiral, not sinking but plummeting.

Soon, the water will cover the generators and then the game will be over.

Frankie Fossoyeur throws the switch, then grasps Edie’s arm and drags her up on top of one of the benches.

“You must not be in the water,” Frankie says. It seems like a rather silly thing to be worried about.

Crush-depth is somewhere around nine hundred feet. No one knows for certain. They are falling fast. They will reach it very soon now, if they haven’t already.

Edie’s good ear registers creaking.

And then, something changes. Something strange, but—Edie can tell this by the Frenchwoman’s pleased expression—something expected, and good. The water stops rising. And then it goes white. Frozen in place.

Cuparah
shudders, as if throwing off a great weight, rolls and heaves.

Down deep—too deep
—Cuparah
does not implode. She hangs in the dark. After a moment, the depth charges stop falling. Edie stares at the frozen block a few feet below her.

“They think we are dead,” Frankie says.

“Why?”

“Because we lost a large piece of the hull, of course.”

“Then why aren’t we dead?”

“Because we have a new one.”

“A new one?”

“Yes.”

“How? Where did it come from?”

Frankie smiles brightly.

“Ice,” she says, as if nothing could be more natural. “And kelp fibre, for flexibility, about fourteen per cent. In an irregular pearl formation. About ten foot of it, I think … yes. It’s only slightly weaker than steel.” She smiles. “And, of course, we have rather a lot of it. This vessel is excellent. I had not considered the idea; rather than seeking to rule out variations in quality, accept and adopt the reality of imperfection. A very powerful model indeed.”

Cuparah
, in the night of a thousand feet down—the ghost of a fly, caught in ice instead of amber.

I
must be out of my mind,” Polly Cradle mutters, as the car turns into Guildholt Street. She sounds for a second so like her brother that Joe laughs, then stops sharply and looks to see if this has annoyed her.

“No,” she says, grinning, “don’t stop. You have a nice laugh. Although it sounds a bit rusty.”

He grins back. “It probably does.” He tries again, a variety of chuckles and cackles, then hears himself and wonders if he now sounds quite mad. But Polly is still smiling.

He points. “Over there. We have to walk the rest of the way.”

“Yes, sir!” She makes a Girl Guide salute, and for some reason that makes him laugh, too.

The building Joe is heading for rears up on the far side, a weird, helter-skelter piece of old English stonework topped with some ghastly Victorian Gothic additions. The doors are vast: black oak weathered and stained by coal fires and then by petroleum fumes, the only bright part of them the great bronze knocker and handles worn shiny and pale with constant use.

Joe Spork has not been here for months. He has nightmares sometimes about turning a corner in the stacks and finding an empty case with a white card in front of it, waiting for his brain.

“Name?” says Bob Foalbury, Harticle’s factotum and husband of Cecily the archivist, through the thick wood.

“Spork,” Joe answers, though Mr. Foalbury has known him for twenty years and more.

“Enter and be welcome in the house of art. Abide by Harticle’s rules and settle all debts amicably before leaving the building.

“Hawking, spitting, solicitation, speculation, gossip-mongering, usury, duelling, and gambling,” Mr. Foalbury says severely, as he opens the door, “are not countenanced within these walls. Good morning, Joe.”

“I need help with something,” Joe says, and there’s just enough tension in him that Bob Foalbury grows serious.

“Not the law, is it?”

“It’s bailiffs, Bob, and all manner of government.”

“Venal office-holders?”

“By the bucketload, I think.”

“Buggeration! The worm shall eat them up like a garment, Joe, and the moth shall eat them up like wool, but your righteousness shall be from generation to generation. The Bible, that is, and I’ve always fancied the Lord was particularly thinking of revenuers and debt collectors.”

“Thank you, Bob. And this is Polly,” Joe says awkwardly, and Mr. Foalbury puffs out a sergeant major’s chest and extends his hand.

“And very nice too, Miss Polly. Bob Foalbury, commissionaire of the house of art. Would you be maker, mischief, or muse?”

“A bit of everything.”

Mr. Foalbury smiles. “Call it muse,” he says. “Always my favourite.” He leads the way down the main corridor, proudly showing off his domain. On wood-panelled walls, oil paintings of Brunel and Babbage rub shoulders with works by lesser-known (but excellent) watercolourists, early blueprints, and pages from ancient mathematical texts. Everything at Harticle’s, Mr. Foalbury explains to Polly, is special, handmade, or orphaned—usually all three. Even the building is special, riven through with trial technologies: Victorian pneumatic message tubes, a Thomas Twyford sanitation system, a retractable roof on the third-floor annexe for observation of the moon. There’s also an antique burglary-prevention device, including panic buttons in all the main rooms, though even Bob Foalbury is a little wary of actually using it.

“You’ll be wanting the old Man-eater, then?” Bob says. “She’s writing a monograph on her teeth.” Cecily Foalbury has a personal collection
of assorted sets of false teeth down through the years. The most remarkable is probably the clockwork set made for a sailor who had lost part of his brachial plexus to a cannonball and therefore could not chew. The somewhat grisly archive of gnashers is kept in its own room at Harticle’s and has resulted in this alarming nickname, an insult Cecily resolutely courts—and this is where Joe Spork baulks somewhat—wearing items from her collection to suit her mood.

Bob Foalbury apparently finds this quirky and charming.

“I want both of you. And I need to borrow a record player.”

“Well, we’re here! I’ll sort you out a portable, shall I? … Taxmen! Buggeration to the enemy!” Then, over his shoulder into the woody hallway and the dim, panelled rooms beyond, “Darling? It’s the Spork boy!”

From within comes a noise like a trombonist being goosed during the overture, and then a mighty roar from a pair of elderly female lungs.

“Well, well, don’t just stand in the bloody doorway, come on in. You’re letting out the heat and that’s a grave infraction of our environmental policy, and bloody chilly to boot!” Cecily, silver-capped and mountainous, is still invisible behind a half-closed door, but her writ runs through the house of art.

As they enter the room, a chair skitters back from a kidney desk, and sensible shoes slap on burnished boards. A short, muscular woman with hair like a steel bathcap bounds towards them from the gloom, a vast pair of clear-rimmed National Health glasses making her eyes enormous.

“The Spork boy? Joe Spork? Why didn’t you say so sooner, you bloody fool! Joe? Joe!
Joseph!
Get in here and give me a kiss!”

The Man-eater spreads wide her arms and clasps him to her chest. Mr. Foalbury sighs.

“Shout out if she gets peckish, Joe, or even looks at you funny. We’ve got some raw meat in a biscuit tin for emergencies.”

“Calumnies!” cries the Man-eater. “Lies, lies, lies! Who’s this? What? What? How can you possibly be called Wally? Oh,
Polly
, yes, of course. How splendid. Got some meat on her, thank God, not like these modern pipe-cleaners … Foalbury, hush your mouth! I was not considering her for the pot. No. No! This nonsense about anthropophagy must cease! Make tea. Make it thick and orange. I sense the Sporklet is mired in shit and comes with a mission. And how do
I sense it? Because the ungrateful little sod is here at all.” She scowls at him, goldfish eyes and Mona Lisa brows behind the lenses. Bob Foalbury departs, smiling.

And now, in the quiet, she surveys Joe Spork once more, with greater care. She takes in his lantern jaw all covered in stubble and his drawn, deep eyes. Then she glances at Polly Cradle and sees something between them of which she approves. X-ray vision with subtitles.
Old lady fu
. She embraces him tenderly.

“My dear boy,” she murmurs. “My dear, dear boy. You must go and hug Foalbury when the chance presents itself, please, and tell him I’ve forced you to agree to dinner some day soon. He misses you when you don’t come for a while.”

“I will,” Joe says.

“He gave me a scare,” she says. “I mean, a real one. Woke up and couldn’t breathe, and of course I thought it was his heart. Turns out he’s allergic to our new pillows. But come, Joe, please?”

“I will.”

“Because one day, you know, it
will
be his heart.”

“I will,” Joe says. She peers at him, weighs the promise.

“All right, then. Now, what can I do for you?”

“Ted Sholt. The Ruskinites. Brother Sheamus.”

“Oh, Joe. Bad stories and old deaths. And half of it lies, I’m sure. You ignored me, didn’t you? You went and pressed ahead with that wretched Hakote business!”

“Yes.” He cannot lie to her.

“I told you and told you!”

“Yes. But it was too late by then.”

“Yes, I suppose it was. You best give me the lot, then, and we’ll go from there. I shall not interrupt.”

She never does. Cecily Foalbury’s unique brand of eidetic memory is cantankerous and wayward, making strange connections and seeing unlikely consonances, but it is absolute and requires no second chances. She sits in silence as Joe tells her, belatedly, about Wistithiel and the machine, about Ted Sholt, and about the thin man and the fat man running, and the robed strangers with their alarming heron’s gait, and finally about Billy Friend and Mercer’s rescue. More than once during the narrative, her eyes narrow, and Joe knows she is cross-referencing, walking the long alleys of her memory’s maze and pulling out old business for new examination.

When Joe has finished, Cecily Foalbury sits in absolute silence for a long while with her eyes fixed on the tabletop, and her lips wriggle as she combs the front and sides of her false teeth. The soft sucking is the only sound in the room, and the only indication that she has not fallen asleep. Then, at last, she opens her eyes.