The Whispering Swarm (11 page)

I came to know what death was. I couldn't tell anyone. I knew what it felt like when they said they were in God's hands. Even now I had almost no control over my thoughts or my limbs. I watched the black tendrils snake amongst the brightness, appearing to absorb it. I saw what looked grey and yellow like flames flaring and dying. I felt I was actually outside the universe. From Limbo I regarded it. The universe was a rippling pool of many dimensions. My hands especially burned but were numb at the same time. Everything had the familiarity of a recently remembered dream. All kinds of strange, uncomfortable thoughts came to me. They blossomed into images. Faces leered. Faces cried out, begging me for aid. Molly? She was there in a thousand aspects. Faces showed pity, love, pain. I couldn't help them. I had no volition. My whole being, every part, every inch of me, wanted to rest, to sleep. Slowly I became unable to move or think. I lost any sense of identity, any memory, any emotion. Yet still Father Grammaticus continued to talk in that calm, cultivated voice. I wanted to escape. I could neither move nor think. I felt myself grow entirely numb. I wept until there were no more tears.

 

5

PROTECTING THE PROTECTOR

And then I was standing again in the chapel as an exhausted old man said goodbye before handing me back into the keeping of Friar Isidore.

Another pat on the shoulder from the abbot and I was led from the abbey grounds. Friar Isidore was childishly excited by what he called our successful s
é
ance. When he kissed me as we parted at the gate, I was in no way surprised. The act was entirely spontaneous and without any kind of sexual overtones. I cheerfully agreed to see him the following Wednesday at the typesetter's and I shook his hand. Afraid of hurting his feelings, I didn't mention that I had agreed to meet Moll Midnight the next day. I could think of nothing to ask him about the beautiful young woman whom I'm sure he would not have known. Besides, I felt at liberty to come and go for reasons which had nothing to do with him or his church. I would have found the pub eventually, I was sure. That said, I did feel as if I betrayed the monks and didn't want to lie to them by omission.

Turning to make my way home I was surprised again by the fog's rapid descent. Suddenly I could recognise nothing. The street lights would not come on again for an hour or so. As carefully as I walked I could not avoid crashing suddenly into a hard, masculine shoulder and gasped, feeling for a bruise. At the same time I apologised as the English always do. I expected an automatic reply in kind but the answering voice was surly, affronted, haughty. I smelled danger. The Brookgate Courts were full of it. I had always been able to sniff potential violence on the wind. This ability to anticipate threat is the urban form of a countryman's sixth sense.

Here we go again. I tried to guess what happened next.

‘What's this? A king's weasel slips from its lair, hoping to do the Protector and his people some evil.' This rolling Welsh brogue had a sinister music to it. Out of the fog loomed a massive red head, all bristling orange eyebrows and whiskers. The black halo of a befeathered hat brim shrouded his glaring blue eyes above a vast, wicked grin. ‘Did ye think ye could avoid our defences?'

‘Steady on,' I said, playing the shocked citizen. ‘You've got the wrong person. I don't know you from Adam and London hasn't had any wall for centuries, certainly not in these parts. So I'd be glad—'

‘
Glad
is he? Hear that Corporal Love? He's
glad
. And he's just an innocent young fellow strolling home through the fog without a lamp to light his way. Correcting his betters on the subject of walls. Happen he can see in the dark? The way a
witch
can, is it?' The Welshman's voice was fractured limestone. ‘A
witch,
Corporal Love, do you see.
Tsk, tsk, tsk
.'

‘Them witches, Colonel, sir, are as wicked and devious as they come.' A dangerous toady, this, by his ingratiating tone. ‘Consorting with Romans, I don't doubt, sir. Gypsies are all slaves of the pope, sir. Falsely seeking God's protection. Very bad, sir, them
gypsies
.' The unseen speaker, evidently from somewhere like rural Sussex, imitated its master's
tsk
-ing.

All this menacing melodrama had the desired effect. I was frightened. I paused. I had been talked to like that before by Teddy Boys in the Brookgate tenements. I knew the colonel's tone, the self-righteous taunting voice of a bully who thinks he's found an easy mark. ‘Corporal Love,' lurking like a sly ape in the folds of his cloak, was a classic bully's creature. I had been taught by my mother always to resist them or, if necessary, report them. She knew crime dressed as the law. In Berlin in the thirties my mum would have been arrested. She recognised that tone in policeman and gangster alike and never let herself be cowed. She was, in that respect, a typical London working-class mother. I had yet to prove her wrong.

I laughed as confidently as I could. ‘Witches? You poor superstitious buggers.' I walked on. But now they threatened to lay hands on me. Wide brims partly hid their faces. Corporal Love's was all but fleshless with planes of bone from which grey eyes gleamed. I saw long rapiers at their belts as they pressed towards me. I had a police whistle but no time to reach it. I got a good look, through the strands of fog, at the colonel's tall, crouching companion, the cadaverous corporal, and guessed their ranks to be self-given, for neither wore uniform, just stage clothes like the rest. The colonel was all lace and brocade and feathered flounces. He even had a big black feather in his hat. The corporal wore a Quaker's plain black and white.

‘Don't be silly, lads. You're really out of your depth here. Go on, get back to your panto or your puffed-wheat advert.' Although scared, I spoke with the quiet authority I had learned from all the serious local gangsters. But this didn't do much more than give them a moment's pause.

‘It is not
we
who are silly, knave!' The redheaded Welshman sneered dramatically, as only Welshmen can, his eyes bright with aggressive malice. ‘You need a lesson, look you. Something to teach you to respect Parliament's laws and its keepers. It would do you good to cool your heels in the Bridewell!'

I realised I might not be able to talk my way out of this. Those blades looked real. I was in serious trouble. I'd determined all this even as I laughed spontaneously at his self-impressed tone and his weird accent. But this encounter in the fog was not the same. Bent coppers? I wasn't much of a mark. They meant business and I didn't want to find out what that business was. Fog was guaranteed to cloak an evil deed. The redheaded Welshman had more than a few evil deeds written on his lean, satanic muzzle. He now thrust his head forward with a ‘Colonel Clitch', by way of introducing himself. Off came the greasy, plain-black hat. A horrid smile. A sarcastic bow. ‘Upon Parliament's service.' He was about to pounce.

I heard a low sound like someone clearing their throat. Another figure stepped out of the fog, a short man also wearing a wide-brimmed hat, a sash around his waist in which were stuck two large pistols. He, too, had a sword in his hand. ‘I do not believe, gentlemen, that this young lad is of any threat to man nor God. But if you wish to contest that opinion I'll be happy to oblige you.' The pair immediately lowered their weapons and began explaining themselves. While that was happening, the short newcomer, possibly their employer or a feared enemy, called to me to get on home. I was happy to oblige. I cried out my thanks and took to my heels as if I were a kid running from those particularly nasty Clerkenwell Court Teds who had tried to set up a kind of juvenile protection racket in the market area until the men of our families had a word with the chief Teds and that was that.

I had remembered Mr Ackermann's advice that it was always best to run from danger if there was a good chance of getting away. ‘One big punch and then run like buggery, my boy.' Wondering why they showed such fear of the third man, I ran like an Olympic athlete, looking for the nearest crowded place, preferably a pub or a restaurant, but discovered myself somehow at the same gate. Opening it for the second time, I expected to be back in the Sanctuary where I could at least find allies. Instead I was again standing at the far end of that Inn of Court through which I'd come. Maybe Clitch and Love had been unable to follow me any further. Local statutes? A genuine fear of God's wrath if they drew blood outside their established precinct? And was the third man still around?

Clearly, visiting the Alsacia was more perilous than I had first realised. I was very happy that the Alsacians seemed confined, for whatever reason, to their own particular manor. Custom or superstition or both? I knew in my bones I was afraid of that pair for good reason. I recognised them as men of terrible, gleeful sadism, like some serious East End gangsters I'd been around all my life. Unlike the Teds, the Kray brothers had real ambition to do murder. I had no intention of getting beaten up or killed by their like on that foggy night. They recognised my saviour and feared him, but who was he? Tomorrow I would make sure I reached Alsacia when it was still light. I would tell my mum I was going to a late-night movie with a friend in Earls Court and would probably stay over. That way I could leave at daylight on Saturday morning.

I got home breathless. Now I was completely uncertain about the nature of what I'd witnessed. The costume party at the pub? The old monk and his Cosmolabe? The cloak-and-dagger stuff in the square? Part of me was a sceptic—even a cynic—but part of me was also romantic and gullible. I felt distinctly dizzy. Was I in some waking dream? Maybe someone wasn't telling me all they should. Had I gone mad? Could the supernatural really exist? If the last were true, I was in a serious moral dilemma. I was still young enough to try telepathic experiments with my friends; gullible enough to wonder if, just possibly, the tarot could tell the future. But I believed there were scientific, not magical, explanations. I was determined to know the truth, fully prepared for some perfectly ordinary explanation.

Of course it never once occurred to me that I might simply forget the whole thing, as one does a dream, and not keep the next day's appointment with Moll Midnight, whose reality or lack of it had me so thoroughly mesmerised. She was not even, I told my teenage self, my type. I should have recognised the symptoms. This wasn't the first time. I had fallen in love again.

 

6

MOLL

That following night, I swapped my jumper for my knitted black tie and a stiff stud-at-the-back white collar, with cuff links showing at my wrist, and a black duffel coat. Pretty damned dapper! Definitely stylish. I skipped my Woody Guthrie railroad hat. To my own eyes I looked as much like Max Stone as possible. Even more presentable. I was, however, still awkwardly self-conscious as I went to meet Moll Midnight on that darkening Friday afternoon. I planned to go to Greek Street, Soho. Romano Santi was one of London's best restaurants. They would take several pounds out of my earnings, but it would be worth it. I believed in treating a girl the way my mother always expected to be treated.

Even then, as now, I thought in terms of what a piece of work would buy. A short story brought me a minimum of a guinea a thousand words, often two, sometimes three. That was the rent. The slick magazines were at that time beyond my aspirations but later I would earmark so much for new furniture, so much for utilities and so on. Once I had earned what I needed, I would take it easy for a while. Anticipating a stiffish bill at Romano's, I knew I could always do more freelance work to improve my fortunes. A posh meal for two was the equivalent of six pages of text in
Tarzan Adventures
. I had more than enough cash to cover tonight.

Running down a virtually deserted New Fetter Lane, I got to the inn gate in a hurry. It was growing dark by five and I wanted to be early so that I should not be caught by Messrs Clitch and Love at night. I would ask Moll how much I should fear them. Maybe I should find a new way out of Alsacia?

The square was lighting up as the lawyers' offices completed their week's work. Solicitors' clerks scampered from one door to another carrying briefcases of every size. Messengers ran to and fro with large manila envelopes under their arms. Wigs on heads or in hands, QCs walked briskly from the law courts or the Old Bailey to their chambers. The lamplighter rode around the square on his solid black bike, igniting the gas in the globes of the big-bracketed wall lamps and the diamond-shaped pole lamps. The Inns of Court worked a little later on Fridays but rarely opened, these days, at the weekend. Even then the City was beginning to stop working on Saturday mornings. The neighbourhood would be almost deserted by Friday evening.

I rarely noticed it back then, but I always had a very faint humming in my ears. Too faint to be a nuisance, it was almost below my consciousness. I don't think I even realised that it had stopped. In some momentary conflict, I pushed open the big gate into Alsacia.

There was no sign of last night's aggressive duo. I was relieved and instantly relaxed. A few more steps and I was outside The Swan With Two Necks. Two more and I was in the snug camaraderie of the private bar, looking for Moll. I knew I was earlier than we had arranged but my need to avoid that pair of self-elected ‘Parliamentary' policeman had its boot on the neck of my thoughts. Who the hell were they? But now I was through the gate and in the pub I worried about Moll standing me up. Several of her companions of the previous evening were there, including a tall, rather gloomy man with a silver streak through his black hair, dressed up as Pecos Bill, the legendary hero of Texas.

Bill seemed a little grey and haggard, rather like my uncle Larry when he was treated for cancer. Here he wore a simple suit of dark tweed. In his comic book he sported an exaggerated cowboy outfit, with wide chaps and a heavy, tooled-leather vest, as well as a white shirt, a red bandanna and a gun belt with a single holster for his .45, and he carried his lariat. Bill kept his own counsel at the bar and I was far too shy to introduce myself. I sat on a bench against a wall in the shadows and watched as Bill was joined by Colonel Carson, in a well-cut, if Victorian, three-piece suit. Kit's hair was shorter and less fair than in the comics, as had been Bill Cody's. He was trying to cheer up Pecos Bill, recruiting the older Turpin to help. He kept holding his hand to the light and pointing. I realised then how old he was. I could almost see through his skin. His friends shook their heads and smiled supportively. But the Texan hero refused consolation and eventually the others shrugged and parted from him.