The Revolutions (17 page)

They said nothing at all.

“There’s a shop upstairs,” she said, “And people in the street. If I scream, someone will call for the police.”

The man in her chair nodded, acknowledging her point.

“Atwood,” he said. His voice was very low and flat.

She waited.

“Yes,” she said. “I am acquainted with him.”

“Atwood,” said the man in the chair, “is dangerous.”

He poked aimlessly at the typewriter’s keys. Then he turned his attention back to Potter’s manuscript. Josephine supposed he was waiting for her to say something.

Outside, an omnibus went by.

She wasn’t sure what to make of them. They reminded her in an odd way of policemen. They were both rather badly dressed, and there was something strange about their movements and their expressions, as if they were not quite in control of themselves, but were sleep-walking. Their eyes—glistening black—were the only memorable things in their faces, which were otherwise pale, unshaven, indistinct, and tired.

Not so long ago she would have assumed that they were an unusual sort of albino, or wearing odd glasses, or something of the sort. Having seen what she’d seen in Atwood’s library, she wasn’t even sure they were men. She was quite willing to believe that they were ghosts, or spirits, or who knew what. Perhaps they were the consequences of Atwood’s ritual, of poking one’s nose in places where it didn’t belong, some sort of frightful supernatural nemesis. Or perhaps they had something to do with Arthur’s work.

Arthur’s employer had dispatched him out of London that morning, to Gravesend, on some mysterious errand. He wasn’t expected back until the day after tomorrow, so there was no possibility that anyone might interrupt, unless one of the Borels happened to come downstairs for some reason. She hoped they wouldn’t. Menacing though they were, these odd intruders seemed to show no inclination to lay hands on her; but who knew what they might do if they were startled?

The one in the chair looked up from Potter’s manuscript, as if he’d just remembered that she was there, and said, “You won’t marry him.”

“I beg your pardon?”

He smiled as if he’d just tasted something delicious.

“What do you
want
?”

Neither of them answered that. She supposed that was part of their method, part of their way of being menacing.

Suddenly the one behind her—the one in the doorway—grunted in surprise. The one in the chair stood, reaching into his pocket, as if for a weapon.

She turned to see the woman who called herself Jupiter coming down the stairs—boots first, and then the rest of her, all in purple and black: tall, narrow-waisted, high-shouldered dark purple, her black-and-grey hair pinned up. An imposing figure.

The man in the doorway glared at Jupiter but stepped aside to let her enter. She acknowledged him with a contemptuous glance.

“I know what you are,” she said. “I know who you belong to. Tell your employer there will be consequences if he continues to menace my colleagues.

There was a long silence, in which it seemed that no one in the room but Josephine was breathing. Then the two men walked out without another word. The bell rang as the door closed, leaving Josephine alone in the room with Jupiter.

She didn’t feel a great deal safer.

“Walk with me,” Jupiter said.

*   *   *

It was a sunny day, and street-traders were out in force, forming fragrant barricades of soup-stalls and cake-stalls. Scholars and poets and assorted ne’er-do-wells wandered back and forth between the Museum and their attic rooms, not looking where they were going. A procession of nurses advanced behind black perambulators, huge and implacable as Juggernaut.

“Those men were employees of one of our company’s rivals,” Jupiter said. “Any great enterprise has its enemies, of course. The jealousy of little men. I expect they meant to unnerve you.”

“They did.”

“Well—that’s to be expected.”

“They didn’t seem to unnerve
you
.”

“Their master might; not them.”

“Their master?”

“If I told you, you would think it mere slander.”

No trader ever accosted Jupiter. No one got in her way. The perambulators and rude nursemaids circled around her. This seemed to happen without any particular effort on her part.

“What can I call you, ma’am? I can’t call you—”

“I believe in anonymity. No one comes to
my
house uninvited, you can be certain of that.”

“But—”

“You may call me Moina.”

“Thank you. Moina, then. Moina—will those men come again?”

“Perhaps not. I expect they imagine they’ve made their point. Did they give you dire warnings of what would happen if you ever spoke to us again?”

“I suppose so. They were—circuitous.”

Now that she was less afraid, she was starting to be very angry. “What
will
they do if I speak to you? What will they do now that you’ve sent them away?”

“Perhaps nothing. Their quarrel is with me and with Atwood.”

“Perhaps?”

Jupiter shrugged.

“How did you know they were—they were in my office?”

“I didn’t. Good fortune. A good omen, don’t you think? I came to speak to you. The young man you met at our last meeting—the one who affected the turban—has decided not to return. He wrote Atwood a very long letter, complaining of the shock he’d had, and departed for Switzerland to calm his nerves. That leaves us at eight. Nine is greatly to be preferred. Are
you
our ninth, Miss Bradman?”

“I don’t know. I’ve had rather a shock too.”

“You saw what you saw. You know that our work is real, and important.”

“I don’t know what I saw.”

“Of course you do! You have a rare talent. Atwood showed me your poetry.”

“Oh. He did?”

“I don’t intend to flatter you. What interests us is that your report of the heavens resembles, in certain respects, our own observations. In dreams, or in religious ecstasies, one may stumble into the very states of perception that we are attempting to observe and control through a process of rigorous experimentation. We need such talents.”

“Who are you, Moina?”

“I do
not
like to waste my time. Will you be our ninth, or not?”

Josephine found that she rather liked the woman’s manner. She was rude, but she was frank. It was preferable, at least, to Atwood’s coy secretiveness.

If she said no, what would Jupiter do? She could hardly kidnap her and force her to take part in their rituals. If she said no, she need not fear things from the stars, or menacing black-eyed men at the window, or mirrors.

And Arthur—she shuddered at the thought of the danger Arthur might be in, all unknowing.

“What happened to the—the manifestation?”

“Manifestation?”

“You know what I mean, Moina.”

“It’s safely locked away.”

“Is it hurt? May I see it again?”

Moina walked in silence for a while.

“Once upon a time,” she said, “when I was as young as you are now, I had a notion that I might make a career for myself in astronomy. My family, you may imagine, disapproved quite strongly—and yet I applied myself diligently to the study of mathematics, and to the mastery of Kirchhoff’s theorem and Kepler’s laws and Herschel’s hypotheses. I did indeed succeed, through certain work in mathematics, in attracting the patronage of some learned long-bearded astronomers. Perhaps I should have been grateful. But I was not. I was impatient. I am a terribly impatient person, Josephine, as perhaps you can see. I had no time for fiddling about with telescopes, or waiting twenty years for a comet to pass, or growing old. I still do not. I believe that there is a better way to seize the heavens, that a revolution in thought is possible—indeed, inevitable.”

“You and Lord Atwood—”

“The very first time you joined us, we achieved something we had never achieved before—never dreamed of. In forty-four experiments, our travel has been merely psychic; a matter of the perceptions. That night we worked something
quite
different. A
conjuration
. I know no better word for it. A
tulpa
, Atwood calls it…”

Moina stopped and looked into Josephine’s eyes, as if she were searching for something behind them. “Was our circle incomplete, Miss Bradman, until we found you?”

“I simply don’t remember, Moina. I don’t remember what happened that night before we woke, to see that, that extraordinary thing—”

Moina sighed. “I
cannot
have will-you or won’t-you, I
cannot
have nerves and weeping and girlishness. We meet tomorrow night. The hour cannot be postponed. You see that our enemies nip our heels. Will you join us?”

“Why are you here, and not Atwood, Moina?”

“He dithers. He has a soft spot for you, Miss Bradman.”

“Then the experiment is dangerous.”

“Of course. What worthwhile enterprise isn’t?”

Josephine didn’t know quite what to say to that.

It was a pleasant afternoon, the streets were crowded, the shops bright and full of inviting and curious things. They paused to admire the window of a glass-maker’s shop. Glass soldiers mustered beneath electric-light; a profusion of brightly-coloured bubbles and stems and spheres of glass hung overhead.

A boy ran up and tried to hand Josephine an advertisement for a photographer’s studio. Jupiter tweaked his ear and sent him running.

“Does Mr Gracewell do what you ask him, Moina?”

“He’s Atwood’s creature. But I have influence.”

“Then these are my terms. I will join you; God help me. But only for tomorrow night. And afterwards, in return, Mr Gracewell will let Arthur go—with a fair sum for his trouble; I have a figure in mind—and then you and Gracewell and Atwood and all the rest of you will never trouble either of us again.”

Chapter Thirteen

The boat to Gravesend bobbed and lurched in busy Thames traffic, belching smoke and soot. On the bench beside Arthur, two old women ate an endless succession of noxious sandwiches from a hamper; while on the other side a youngish father argued with his three sons, who were not looking forward to their holiday by the sea and intended, by God, that everyone should know all the reasons why not. In other words, all the usual irritations of travel. But the fact was that, after a couple of months as a variable in Gracewell’s Engine, Arthur found that he had a wonderful immunity to everyday irritations. The city slid by under a bright summer sky, church spires gleaming. The boat emptied and filled again. It passed into the cool shadow of a great industrial steamer, a towering metal behemoth making its way east. Arthur half-dozed, and woke at Gravesend.

He stopped in at St. Andrew’s Hotel on the High Street, and arranged for a room for the night. After all that water he was in no mood for fish, which was the hotel’s specialty, but they made him a very decent lunch of chops and stewed apples. Then, with his stomach settled and some strength in him, he set off on the next stage of his mission, which was rather a hike out into the country. A policeman at the pier gave him directions.

He wore his suit of good walking clothes. He set a brisk pace; away from the river and out of the wetlands, past little villages and mossy graveyards. Country lanes and hedgerows. A summer’s day and butterflies. Up and over a stile, and across a wheat-field. A muddy path through the woods. Stopping at a farmhouse for directions. All those other touches of homeliness and civilization, without which (in Arthur’s opinion) no landscape could be said to be truly beautiful. Crows. Sheep. Gnats. Sunburn. Getting lost and stepping in who-knows-what.
Et cetera.

*   *   *

In the late afternoon he came to a house half-way up the side of Rudder Hill, on the outskirts of a village so tiny and so unkempt that it seemed almost accidental. Looking back along the path, he could see for miles through clear skies, all the way to the river and the smoke and the tiny toy houses of London.

The house was made of grey stone, grown over with ivy and moss; the roof was thatched and uneven. Ramshackle wooden sheds sprouted from it. In the garden a rusty red pump stood in the tall grass, garlanded with weeds and violet flowers.

He knocked on the door, to which a sprig of something had been nailed.

The man who opened the door was something of a giant. He was half a head taller than Arthur, who was by no means small; the outstretched arm that held the door was muscular, and also spattered with black mud. He wore wading boots and an apron. He had a square face, under a head of black hair as flat as a cap. His eyes, under heavy brows, were strikingly dark, and oddly inexpressive. He said nothing.

Behind him a voice called out, “Who?”

Arthur peered around the man in the door and into the gloom of the cottage. It was cluttered beyond belief. It resembled a tool-shed.

The big man stepped aside. Behind him stood a witch.

That was Arthur’s first thought:
witch
. She was ancient, and tiny, and bent; she wore shabby black, and her hair was white and wild. She was sharp-nosed, sharp-eyed, yellow-toothed. She had the look of something left behind from a bygone century.

Arthur said, “Mrs Archer?”

She wrinkled her nose. “Who’s asking?”

“I have a message from Mr Gracewell, for Mrs Archer, on Rudder Hill.”

Arthur offered her Gracewell’s envelope—a thick packet of papers, which had been folded uncomfortably inside his coat.

Mrs Archer nodded. The big man took the packet, tore it open, and handed the papers inside to her. They were covered in dots and dashes and other symbols of Gracewell’s Engine. Arthur didn’t know what exactly they meant.

“Hmm-hmm,” she said. A bent finger traced the lines. “Hmm-hmm. Where’s Dimmick?”

“Dimmick?”

“Dimmick. You know. Your master’s usual dogsbody.”