Triumff: Her Majesty's Hero (8 page)

    De Quincey smiled.

    “Leave it with me,” he said. “Things are a little lunatic at the moment, but later tonight, when it’s quietened down, I’ll get on the ouija, make a few calls, and see what I can turn up.”

    “I appreciate it,” said Gull.

    “No problem,” de Quincey replied.

Little did de Quincey know, it would be a problem. Later would not turn out to be quiet at all.

    At one minute past eight, the rain began again.

    Night reclined languorously over the City, its darkness swaddling ten thousand winking lights. Somewhere in the sky’s black interior, thunder rumbled like moving furniture. A cold wind took up from the south, and then, as the last, delayed chime of the hour rang away from the tower of St Mary-le-Tardy, whose mechanism is famously thirty seconds slow, the rain returned.

    The reflections of street-lamps shivered and broke as the raindrops pelted down into puddles left over from the morning. An air of gloom gathered over the rainy streets. Windows closed and curtains were drawn. Fires were built up, and pots and pans returned to their places under leaking roofs.

    In the Rouncey Mare, Boy Simon attempted to get a discussion going on the possibility of England becoming too waterlogged to float on the Seas, but most of the Allhallows Walk regulars were banged up in a holding tank a mile away across the City, and the notion soon fizzled out.

    In the tiered stalls of the Globe, theatre-goers groaned audibly and opened programmes out into roofs for their heads. The Chamberlain’s Players, ten minutes into the first act of the provocative new drama Bard Lieutenant, sighed, and struggled on manfully as their costumes and scenery wilted.

    Across the river, under the gathering storm and the tremble of thunder, the rain caused harmless arcs of blue, Magickal energy to short and discharge between the high stacks of the Battersea Powerdrome. Somewhere in Woolwich, a spear of lightning lanced down into a weathervane, and destroyed the tiled roof of St Carpel le Tunnel. The church caught, and the flames quickly spread to the scalding houses nearby. A terrible stench of burning offal pudding filled the night, and drove back many would-be firefighters. The resulting inferno soon filled half a street, and could be seen from the river. Old Father Thames, oily, sluggish and rain-dimpled, became a broken mirror for the firelight.

    Upriver, at Windsor, the castle staff heard the distant, disgruntled thunder, smelt the rain in the air, and set about closing shutters and fastening windows. Baskets of logs were ferried in from the stores, and the drapes and wall-hangings pulled into place. The Queen was safely at Richmond for the night, but the comfort of other noble guests meant that the Castle had to maintain peak operating efficiency.

    In the Oriel Banqueting Hall, Lord Slee turned from the window, swirling a crystal balloon of cognac in his hand. Sheet lightning flashed across the sky behind him as he looked at the three men still seated at the long table, the remains of the feast spread between them. Roustam de la Vega was quartering an orange with a silver dirk, and slowly consuming the juicy segments. He returned Slee’s watchful gaze with a flick of his eyebrows. Jaspers was sitting well back in his chair, like a child slid low on a throne. A glass of port hung in his hand, and he looked drunk and vacant, but Slee knew better than to write off the Divine’s sharp brain. The Duke of Salisbury was busy devouring the remains of the dressed swan, left on its platter, with noisy, champing relish. He tugged at the greasy flesh and gristle, spitting out inedible chunks, his mountainous stomach gurgling like a fermentation vat. Slee looked away, in distaste.

    “Well, my friends,” he said at length.

    “Well indeed,” replied the almost disembodied voice of the Divine. “We have eaten well, talked to excess, and plotted to the point of treason.”

    Salisbury coughed out a lump of swan-fat.

    “I don’t like that word,” he announced, wiping his chin.

    “Then what euphemism for our scheming would you like to use?” asked the Divine snidely. “It is treason, the deepest, darkest kind of treason. There is no gain to be made by disguising that.”

    Salisbury shrugged.

    De la Vega put down his knife and washed his hands in the finger bowl.

    “I am uneasy about the complexity of what we propose, seńors,” he said. It is all quite desmańado clumsy. There is no direct action to take. We rely upon the whims of others, waiting hungrily for their mistakes and errors. Is there not a more direct way?”

    “No,” replied Slee, softening the negative with a smile as de la Vega looked up. “Act directly, and we incriminate ourselves directly. There is a true art to intrigue, one bedded in bluffs, deceits and guile. I won’t be another Crompton Finney.”
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    Slee resumed his place at the head of the table.

    “This place this Australia is the key to our desires,” he said. “I am sure there is new Arte there, new Arte that might be ours to tap. To have it, we must be subtle. It must be given to us, and we must receive it with gratitude and feigned surprise. The skill lies in making Triumff lose his grip on the prize by his own misdeeds and foolishness. With his feuding, his drunkenness, his reluctance to conform, he is already playing for us. His disgrace, or death, will suit our purpose. Either is simplicity itself to arrange.”

    Salisbury chuckled through a mouthful of pecan stuffing.

    “Hockrake?” said Slee, sharply. “Something amusing?”

    “That last thing might already be done,” the Duke of Salisbury murmured, tugging at a flopping leg of the ex-swan.

    “What do you mean?” asked Slee, getting to his feet. “What have you done?”

    Salisbury looked up.

    “Two rowdies, from the Cockspur in Cheapside, took laughably little of my gold to do the deed this afternoon” he said, his voice trailing off as he became aware of the fierce gaze Slee had fixed him with. Worse still, Jaspers had sat forward, alert and beady-eyed.

    “I I mean there’s no way it can be traced. The knifemen had no idea who hired them. I-“

    “If your moronic action has any ill repercussions, Hockrake, rest assured they will roost only in your house. We will deny everything. You’ll go to the block alone.” There was a malevolence in Slee’s words that seemed to echo the encroaching storm outside the castle. Slee was especially good at that.

    “I’m sorry,” mumbled Salisbury, averting his eyes.

    “No matter, for now,” Slee said, refilling his glass from the decanter. “We shall soon see if your work is useful to us. If Triumff is already dead, so much the better. If not, then perhaps it will merely add to the collapse of his reputation.”

    “But hear me well, Hockrake,” Slee added. “I will not brook your unilateral tinkerings again. If you are with us, then you are with us in all details. Is that clear?”

    “It is,” replied the Duke of Salisbury, pushing the dish of exploded swan away. Thunder rolled.

    “So our next action?” asked de la Vega, bursting his last segment of citrus fruit with the point of his dagger.

    “If Triumff lives, we continue to harry him, and engineer for the worst each aspect of his life until he breaks. The meanwhile, we will stir trouble in the City, from a safe distance. Anything and everything that can be upset, we will throw over by stealthy manipulation. The public must be made unhappy, ill at ease frightened. The more we trouble the Queen and the Council with petty annoyances, the more we will distract them from the true threat we pose. Is your camp, dear Regent, all set for this?”

    De la Vega nodded, and sipped his wine.

    “The Spanish factions are rife with dispute,” he said. “I have laid the foundations of diplomatic problems that will keep them at the throats of the English Court. Tomorrow, Pedro de Gramplo will petition again for his pork subsidy, and the Escorial will announce the observation of a day to commemorate the Armada, despite Lord Sutcliffe’s lobby.”

    “That’ll really get up the Navy’s nose,” mused Jaspers, “and old Three Ex’s too.”

    “Indeed,” smiled de la Vega. “Further, I have pressed my contacts in the Basque region to needle the Liberté Gauloise faction into resuming their nonsense. We have supplied them, clandestinely, with black powder and Toledo steel. I’ll wager a New World coffer that the Queen sends at least another division of Light Horse to France before the end of the month. Troubled times for England, times that could split the Unity under a weak Queen, or so the public will perceive. A good time for us to commit treason and still be seen as heroes.”

    Slee plucked a grape from the dish in front of him and chewed it thoughtfully.

    “All that remains is the Church,” he said. “The Arte is the one thing trusted by all. Confound that belief, and the Unity will be squalling in our hands for help.”

    Jaspers got to his feet and crossed to the long walnut cabinets by the wall. He bent down and produced two seven-stemmed candelabra, which he set on the table and carefully lit with a match.

    “I have that part of our treason in hand,” he said with a grin. “It begins tonight. Fear, devilment, superstition, Goety the banished trappings of Magick will return and be our handmaids. By dawn, the Church will be in uproar, and the Union too, and the Court and public will be outraged by that same uproar.”

    He looked up, his eyes starkly blue in the flame-light. “I caution you, gentlemen, that we have, this evening, passed beyond that place of no return. Such things will come to pass tonight that we can never undo. It is too late for regret or changed minds. There is no going back. Tonight, the Unity will shake and reel. Tomorrow, we will awaken to a different world.”

    Slee nodded, feeling a chill in his bones. De la Vega toyed with his blade as if his mind were far, far away. Salisbury trembled so much he was unable to contain his tumultuous wind any longer. As the outburst died away, de la Vega gestured up at the ceiling lamps with his dirk.

    “Why the candles, mi amigo?” he asked.

    “Wait, mi amigo,” replied Jaspers with a voice that seemed to have been waiting in some dank, heathen barrow for thousands of years. “Wait and see.”

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Named after their inventor, these are the files of miniature portraits kept of all known felons.
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Spencer Crompton Finney, the fifth Earl of Tewkesbury during the reign of Elizabeth XXVII, who rose in revolt against his monarch after the lamentable Leek Famine of 1911. Historians described his plot to dethrone the Queen by marching his retainers to Richmond Palace and hammering on the door as, “lacking in the finer points of everything except sheer balls.”

In which there is a great darkness.

Doll Taresheet was wetter than a mallard’s bum, as the saying goes, and crosser than a cardinal on a diet of Worms (as that other fine expression has it). She pulled her shawl up over her head and scurried across Paternoster Lane, hopscotching the puddles and the near-tidal gutters. The rehearsals had gone on for an hour too long and, of course, everyone was quite het up about the looming Masque, and they had finished ten minutes after the renewed downpour had begun. The trek across town from the Wooden Oh had all but ruined her second best gown. The ruff was sagging, the bodice and support waterlogged, and the petticoats and bum roll were stained with mud, and quite ruined. Furthermore, her Chinese fan, bought with a week’s pay at the East India Company auction, was well and truly knackered.

    Doll vaulted the far gutter’s sluice, cursed the night openly, and darted into the doorway of number five, Paternoster Lane, slamming the door behind her.

    The interior smelt of carrots and mutton, and a fire crackled in the grate. She shook off her cape, and tousled her ruined hairdo so that the fine chestnut locks slumped down loosely around her slender shoulders. Mistress Mary was embroidering by the fire with a bodkin so big she could have disembowelled a caribou with it. The dowdy old woman looked up with a short-sighted frown.

    “Doll?” she queried, narrowly avoiding her thumb with the stabbing spike.

    “Evening, Mary,” said Doll. “I’d say ‘good’ but it isn’t. Thank heavens for your fire.” Doll chafed her hands and sat for a moment on the stool opposite the old lady.

    “Have you heard the news today?” asked the elderly dam, impaling her work with ruthless stabs of the bodkin. “Some fellow went mad with a sword at the Dolphin Baths. Two dead. Eviscerated, they say.”

    “How nice,” grimaced Doll.