The Revolutions (3 page)

“Hello, Mr Borel. Is everything all right?”

It quite plainly wasn’t. The door had blown open, shelves had fallen, and Borel’s stock was soaked. Tins of tobacco and creams and medicines lay scattered on the floor. The wind and the rain had made sad heaps out of German newspapers, French photographs of dancing girls, and the magazines of various obscure trades. Arthur realised that he was standing on a ruined copy of the
Metropolitan Dairyman.

“By God. It’s extraordinary out there. Extraordinary. You’d think you were in the tropics. I lost my umbrella. There was a horse.”

He closed the door. The wind opened it again. He sat on the floor with his back against it.

The eel thrashed. It appeared to be getting weaker. Borel poked it again.

The green-eyed woman said, “Your coat.”

“My coat?”

“To pick up the eel. I’m afraid it might bite otherwise.”

He tossed his coat to Mr Borel, who groaned and wrestled the creature out through one of the shattered window-panes.

“Good,” Arthur said. “Well. Glad I could be of service. Perhaps I should go and see what’s come in through my own windows.”

“Oh—I wouldn’t. It’s dreadful out there. Besides, you’re the only thing holding the door closed.”

“Well. Yes. That’s best. In my current state, I feel just about competent to be a door-stop.”

Wind howled and thumped at the door.

“The fellow downstairs,” Arthur said. “The typewriting business—that sign’s gone too.”

She looked up in surprise.

“Oh God. Where?”

“Halfway to the moon, for all I know.”

“I’m sorry. A silly question. God, what an awful night!”

“You know the owner, Miss…?”

“I do. I
am
the owner, Mr Shaw. Or, I
was
, I suppose.”

Arthur was very surprised.

He introduced himself as Arthur Archibald Shaw, noted journalist for
The Monthly Mammoth
, and author of detective stories—
aspiring
, he acknowledged.
J. E. Bradman—
whom he’d vaguely imagined as gnarled, grey-bearded, and whiskery—turned out to be
Josephine Elizabeth
. She had the office downstairs, and lived in a tiny flat upstairs. She’d come down to help when she heard Sophia screaming.

“Perhaps,” Mr Borel said, “we could move a shelf to stop the door. And of course you may be guests here until this storm departs.”

*   *   *

They bustled about, making what repairs they could by candlelight. Sophia fell asleep somehow. Arthur and Miss Bradman talked as they worked, between interruptions from thunder and branches crashing against the window, with Borel as an odd sort of chaperone.

They talked about detective stories while they picked up and dusted off Borel’s jars of ointment. She seemed to have some very distinct ideas about how a detective story ought to go, though Arthur wasn’t sure he followed everything she said. Blow to the head, perhaps. He wondered if she were a literary type herself—this being Bloomsbury, after all. After some cajoling, she confessed that she was a poet. “But not for a while. One can’t find the time.”

“Time,” he agreed. “Time and money!”

She glanced sadly at the window. “That sign was practically new! And awfully expensive.”

“Typing, it used to say, if I recall. I suppose that means—I don’t know—document Wills? That sort of thing?”

“From time to time.”

He helped Borel heave a shelf upright. “And you do translation, of course. French? Italian? Russian? I came here from the Reading Room, if it’s still standing—one hears every sort of language around there…”

“Greek; Latin.”

“Scholarly monographs, that sort of thing?”

“In a manner of speaking,” she said, and busied herself arranging the magazines.

“A manner of speaking?”

She turned back to him. “You promise you won’t think it odd?”

“Tonight, Miss Bradman, nothing could seem odd.”

“In the safe downstairs I currently have a half-typed treatise on the Electric Radiance by a Lincoln’s Inn barrister; a monograph on Egyptian burial rites by a clerk for the Metropolitan Railway Company, who wants the whole thing translated into Latin so as to be kept obscure from rival magicians; and an account of a telepathic visit to Tibet by a—well, I shouldn’t say more. She’s been in the newspapers. An actress.”

“Good Lord.”

“You do think it odd. I knew you would. I’m telling you this in confidence, Mr Shaw.”

“Of course.”

“The thing about—about that sort of person, Mr Shaw, is that he or she will quite often pay very well for a certain … trust. Confidence. A kindred spirit. Anonymity. And Greek and Latin, of course. I have a certain reputation.”

She went to calm Sophia, who’d woken in a panic at the sound of thunder. Arthur watched her with a certain amazement.

“How does one get into that line of work?”

“Accident, I suppose.”

“Accident?”

“Most things in life are, aren’t they? May I ask how you came to be writing about science for the
Mammoth
?”

“My uncle, to be frank. Old George—”

Outside there was a terrible crash, possibly a tree falling. Sophia shrieked. Mr Borel told her to go and make coffee. At the prospect of hot coffee, Arthur lost his train of thought.

“The accident,” Miss Bradman said, a little later, as they stood around the stove.

“Yes? Please, do tell me.”

She took a deep breath. “It was after I came to London, though not long after. My father, having left me a little money for an education—he was the rector in a little village you’ve never heard of, but forward-thinking, and he believed in education. Anyway, after Cambridge there was a little left over for a typewriter, though hardly a room to put it in; and for enrollment in the Breckenridge School for Typewriting and Stenography. From whose dingy and dismal premises I stepped out one bright spring afternoon to see a silver-haired lady of dignified appearance staring into the window and weeping. Naturally I asked if I could help her.”

“Naturally.”

“As it turned out, her name was Mrs Esther Sedgley, and her husband was just lately deceased. From time to time she suffered what you might call memories, or you might call visions—I don’t know—she herself was never sure what to call them. The sight of her reflection in a window might bring them on, or a flight of pigeons, or all sorts of things. It reminded me of—well, now I’m wandering off from my story, aren’t I? You must tell me if I do it again, Mr Shaw. By this time we’d already moved to Mrs Sedgley’s parlour, and then she invited me to dinner, which I was certainly in no position to refuse. We quickly became friends.”

Miss Bradman sipped her coffee.

“Her husband had been a barrister—quite a good one, I think, though of course I wouldn’t know—but also the Master of a … well, a sort of society, a club for discussion of spiritual matters, and the esoteric sciences, and so on. And so after the poor fellow died, my friend had found herself presented with a bewildering array of mediums offering to call him up by spirit-trumpet, or table-rapping, or what-have-you … So that summer she engaged in travel all across London, and she was lonely. Besides, she needed a secretary, and a witness, because she considered it her business to sniff out fraud and imposture and nonsense. And so Mrs Sedgley and I went to Bromley to see Mrs Hutton’s spirit-trumpet.”

“Good Lord,” Arthur said.

“And we saw Mrs Gully turn water into rose-water in Spitalfields, and Mr H. C. Hall lift a spoon by animal magnetism in St. John’s Wood. And together we attended the re-launch of the
Occult Review
where Miss MacPhail—the actress—said that we were all Exemplars of the Super-Man. Though of course I’m sure she says that to everyone. I saw Brigadier MacKenzie fail to levitate, and I saw Mr Wallace’s spirits play the piano. A lot of those sort of people come to the meetings of Mrs Sedgley’s society, for which Mrs Sedgley employs me to take the minutes. And in the course of all that I suppose I earned a certain reputation. The Brigadier had a monograph he wanted typed, and Miss MacPhail wanted to learn Greek—and so on, and so on. And so—since you ask, Mr Shaw—it’s because of that chance meeting that I fell into that sort of company; and it’s because of
that
that I came to be here—renting the office downstairs, that is, and the room upstairs. Aren’t chance meetings terribly important, don’t you think?”

“Did the spirits really play the piano?” Sophia said.

“A good trick if they did,” Arthur said. “A good trick either way.”

“I don’t know. I will say this: that for every fraud I have met, I have met a dozen sincere and intelligent seekers after truth. After all, isn’t it nearly the twentieth century? And is it more outlandish, Mr Shaw, that there should be revolutionary advances in the science of telepathy, or clairvoyance, than that there should be electric lighting, or telephones?”

“I won’t deny that,” Arthur said.

Miss Bradman stared down at the hem of her skirt, which was soaking wet. “I’ve said altogether too much, haven’t I? You let me talk too much, Mr Shaw; you should have said something. I don’t know quite what’s got into me. It must be the storm.”

*   *   *

After a while Mr Borel found some relatively dry playing cards and the four of them played whist by candlelight. They were by that time all quite merry, in the way of people who’ve survived the worst of things and have nothing to do for the time being but wait. Every time lightning flashed they cheered—even Mr Borel. God knows what the hour was. Already Arthur felt as if he’d known Miss Bradman all his life.

By chance their hands touched across the table, and there was a sensation that Arthur would later swear was a sort of electric shock. The candle flickered. Something lurched inside Arthur, too, at the thought of how big London was, and how many people were in it; and at the thought of how fast the world moved, whirling through the dark, and how improbable and uncanny it was that any two people should ever, under any circumstances, meet—and that they should then find themselves talking to each other, and playing cards around a table, as if it were all perfectly normal.

Miss Bradman flushed red and drew back her hand. She went to the window and peered out into the dark.

Chapter Three

The sky was beautiful the next morning, full of an unusual flickering rose-pink light, and odd tall towers of cloud that slowly, over the course of the morning, crumbled to cloud-dust—but few people had the time to notice it. There was damage to inspect, losses to calculate, repairs to make; hands to shake and congratulations and condolences to extend to one’s neighbours and friends; rumours of miraculous escapes; and tragic deaths to pass on.

The most newsworthy rumour, which had spread all over London before it was time for breakfast, concerned the death of Augustus Mordaunt, Duke of Sussex. The origin of the rumour was variously thought to be a nurse, a servant in the ducal household, or a policeman. The circumstances of the old man’s death were somewhat mysterious—he certainly hadn’t been out and about on the streets at night in the storm.

Arthur slept late that morning. He heard the news at lunchtime, when he called at Borel’s shop to offer to help with repairs, and in the hope of running into Miss Bradman again.

“Sad news, Mr Shaw,” Borel said. “Sad news indeed.”

Borel adjusted his spectacles. He looked anxious. Arthur had heard that the Duke had been the landlord for half of London; his death would be as disruptive in its way as the storm.

“The old fellow was in London for Christmas,” Borel added.

“The storm did it,” Sophia whispered. “The noise and the lightning. He was always afraid of bad weather—that’s what people say.”

“Good God,” Arthur said.

If he hadn’t already lost his hat, he would have taken it off.

The fact was that he’d always thought of the Duke, in so far as he’d thought about him at all, as something of a figure of fun. The Duke had been a staple of the newspapers since long before Arthur was born. He was a second cousin—or some such complicated and mysterious relation—to the throne, and it was said that after the Prince died he was one of the very few people whose company Her Majesty could tolerate. In his old age he had become a reformer, an advocate for the education of women, and exercise, and modernization of the prisons, and other more controversial causes. His health was said to be bad; there were stories of rare and dreadful ailments and eccentric remedies, strange foreign doctors, and obsessions with mesmerism and meditation and hieroglyphics and telepathy and reincarnation and spirit-writing and astrology. He’d lavished a fortune on the construction of a tremendous telescope near Hastings, but did it fifteen years ago, when astronomy was not nearly so fashionable as it had recently become.
The Monthly Mammoth
had published a memorable cartoon—it was pinned up in the
Mammoth
’s offices—in which he wore a turban, and levitated slightly, while he proposed the transport of convicts to the Moon.

“Her Majesty’s beside herself,” Sophia whispered. “She’s locked herself in the church beside his body, and won’t let the doctors near. They say he used to talk to the old Prince for her—rest his soul—they say—”

Mr Borel frowned. “Do not tell stories, child.”

Sophia lowered her head, scowling.

Borel took off his spectacles. Arthur recognised that gesture; it indicated that Borel was about to raise the unpleasant subject of the money that Arthur owed him. He excused himself.

*   *   *

Overnight, in one of those sudden reversals that the public mood sometimes experiences in the presence of death, the Duke became a hero of the nation, faultless and universally loved. No one recalled ever saying or hearing a bad word about him. The death was an occasion for national mourning; a brief ecstasy of sudden and rather theatrical grief. Her Majesty—by all accounts confined to her chambers, too heavy-hearted even to get out of bed—set the tone. London’s battered streets unfurled black banners. Flowers appeared on fences, tied with black ribbons. Wreaths hung from lamp-posts. Little shrines appeared in windows. Bells rang sorrowfully through the fog. the
Times
suggested that it was, perhaps, not too much to say that, in a way, an Augustan Age had passed. At Arthur’s church, prayers were said for the late Duke’s soul and for a grieving nation. Sunday crowds on the Embankment wore black, and even the sellers of roast chestnuts and iced lemonade and apple fritters somehow contrived to do their jobs in a mournful way. All along the cold grey river there were broken jetties and cranes and half-sunk boats, all left where they’d fallen, as if the whole city were in too dreadful a state even to think of doing anything about them.