The Revolutions (5 page)

Josephine and Arthur were oblivious to most of this. London’s bad mood didn’t infect them. They were suddenly out of step with their times: blissfully, almost sinfully so. They spent the winter walking, and writing long letters, and exchanging cards, flowers, gifts, poems, love-notes.
Dearest love. My own darling heart, my only, my fondest, my soul.
They compared notes on their dreams, and attended lectures. They made plans to move to the seaside, to Brighton perhaps, where Josephine would write poetry in a room looking out on the sea, and Arthur would take the train into London twice weekly to meet with newspaper editors … They kissed in Regent’s Park by the lake, in the spot where the rotunda had been, under the disapproving glare of police officers.

Arthur proposed towards the end of February, at the edge of a half-frozen pond in the park, the words turning crystalline in the cold air as he spoke them. A mere formality by that point; an inevitability. The main impediment to their engagement was that it took Arthur two weeks to get his foster-father to send him his late mother’s ring down from Edinburgh—the old sod dragged his feet, counselling against marrying a clever woman.

In fact, the winter would have been entirely blissful, and quite dream-like, if not for one fly in the ointment; the usual: money.

Several of Josephine’s clients, being highly strung types, had fled London after the storm. Meanwhile, the
Mammoth
had gone silent. A lightning-struck warehouse and flooded printing press had put it out of commission. It hadn’t paid Arthur in a month; then two months; then three.

*   *   *

“I should acquaint you,” Arthur said, “with the system of my debts.”

Josephine frowned. “You have a system?”

“One may regret the necessity but be proud of the engineering. First the
Mammoth
—a notoriously forgetful beast—pays me late. A tradition of long standing, but my landlord and the grocer, not being literary folk, don’t see the charm of it; so to pay
them
I borrow from Borel, or from Waugh—who has a good inheritance, and, besides, will one day be a doctor. To pay Waugh and Borel I borrow from Uncle George—who is something of a big man in publishing and makes a very good living off comic stories about chaps messing about in boats, and is forgiving of debts, but only up to a point. And so
in extremis
I borrow from my foster-father in Edinburgh to pay George. The old man is
not
forgiving. It is for God to forgive, he says, as if that were the most baffling and ineffable of all His attributes. And then because of the money I send to Edinburgh, the rent is late. And so on.”

“A well-oiled mechanism.”

“Except that the storm has played hob with it. Sand in the gears. Old Borel has windows to mend, and George has a roof to mend, and Waugh—
same boat
, Waugh says,
same bloody boat, old chap
. And I wonder if the
Mammoth
hasn’t absconded entirely.”

He didn’t mention that he had received that morning a letter from his foster-father, expressing disappointment at Arthur’s impecuniousness and fecklessness, and scolding him for his refusal to apply himself to any manly profession. The old man himself had lost a £500 investment in the
Annapolis
, wrecked in harbour at St. Katharine’s, and expected no pity for this, but nor did he plan to throw good money after bad. He said that it was madness for Arthur to think of marriage, his prospects being so utterly, disgracefully bleak.

“Well, then,” Josephine said, taking his arm. “We shall simply have to find a new system.”

*   *   *

At the end of March, Arthur went to pay one last visit to the
Mammoth
’s offices. He found the door locked and the windows shuttered. Nobody answered his knocking. Nobody had answered his letters for weeks. He pried open the letter-box and shouted into the void.

It was drizzling, and he still had no umbrella. He stumbled for refuge into the closest pub, the Moon & Star. Inside it was empty and dark, low-ceilinged. There was a terrible reek of stale tobacco. The man at the bar nodded to him in vague recognition. Arthur couldn’t remember his name—big fellow, bald, Tom or John or something of the sort. No doubt Arthur was the last of the
Mammoth
folk who would ever enter the man’s establishment. The storm had been a bad business all round, and it kept getting worse.

They shared a gloomy drink. There was an old newspaper on the bar, and Arthur pored in silence over the employment advertisements—God, could he contemplate teaching? Would Josephine be a teacher’s wife, out in the country? The thought of a roomful of schoolboys made him order another drink.

“Impossible,” he said.

“Hmm?”

“Oh—nothing.”

“As you like, sir.”

He pushed the newspaper away. The landlord picked it up.

A story about the late Duke’s funeral caught the landlord’s attention. A photograph showed the stately procession: the long thin coffin on the great black gun-carriage, the cavalry in their snow-white plumes, and Her Majesty’s black and windowless coach.

“Empty, of course.” The landlord pointed with a stubby finger at the coffin.

“Empty?”

“You haven’t heard? Being a journalist, sir, I would have thought you’d have heard. Everyone says—there was a few fellows in here saying it just the other day; said they heard it from His Lordship’s own servant—there never was a body, sir. He burned, poor sod.”

“Burned?”

“Oh, it happens, sir! It happens more than you’d think.
Spontaneous combustion
, they call it. Sometimes a fellow’s just minding his own business and
whoosh
, or he takes a lady’s hand or puts on his hat too fast, and up in flames he goes. It’s been proved by science. Could happen to any of us, just like that, one day—who knows. Like lightning, if you get my meaning, sir.”

“
Whoosh. Well. Certainly a theory.”

“They say”—the landlord warmed to his theme—“it happens more often these days. Sunspots, or the influence of the stars—”

Bells interrupted. It was five o’clock, and Arthur had an appointment. “God,” he said. “Sorry. Stars, eh? Must run.” He drained his drink and hurried out into the rain.

THE

SECOND

DEGREE

{
The Modern Age
}

Chapter Four

Josephine stepped out of her office into the rain. She opened her umbrella, checked her watch, and sighed. Mr Borel nodded to her through the shop window and she waved to him. She stretched; she’d been typing all day and had a half-dozen little aches to show for it. Then she hurried to catch the bus across town, to an address on Blythe Street, in Kensington, a large and handsome house with lilies in the window. By the time she arrived, the rain had stopped but the sky was darkening. Arthur was there, waiting in the street for her, red-faced and a little short of breath, as if he’d run all the way. She took his arm and he took her umbrella. He smelled of beer and bad news. She gave him a look.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Nothing?”

He sighed. “Dead as a dinosaur.”

“Oh. What awful luck.”

“Left in the lurch, rather. Perhaps your wizard friends can help.”

“Please don’t call them that; they take themselves awfully seriously.”

She rang the doorbell.

A servant opened the door. Behind him stood Mrs Sedgley, in a white mutton-sleeved dress and a necklace of gold and pearls. There was the sound of a young woman singing something vaguely Celtic somewhere inside.

Mrs Sedgley peered myopically out into the night before putting her glasses on. “Oh, good! There you are, Josephine.”

“Good evening, Matron. This is—”

“Arthur Shaw,” he said, bowing.

He was rather looking forward to making Mrs Sedgley’s acquaintance. He’d never given much thought to this sort of thing before he met Josephine. A whole new world. Just what he needed.

“Hmm. Yes. The writer. I see. Well, come in, come in, Mr Shaw; the meeting is almost ready to begin.”

They entered the premises of the Ordo V.V. 341. Arthur paused to say good evening to a very handsome grey cat asleep on a side-table in the hall. Mrs Sedgley said that his name was Gautama, or George, if Arthur preferred.

*   *   *

The Ordo V.V. 341, though it pretended to a certain immemorial tradition, had in fact been founded not very many years ago by the late Mr Sedgley and a few friends, all of whom had previously been members of Mr Mathers and Mr Westcott’s Temple of Isis-Urania. The V.V. 341 had broken away from its parent order after a row, which—depending on whom one listened to—was either about Mr Sedgley’s scandalous discovery that the Hidden Secret Chiefs of the Temple were merely a fraud, or about an unpaid £200 loan. In any case, it involved doctrinal schism, threats of litigation, and several months of open magical warfare, during which Mr Mathers and Mr Sedgley wrote half a dozen letters each to the
Occult Review
and the
Proceedings of the Theosophical Society
describing the terrible forces they’d been forced to invoke, the unspeakable curses they’d performed. It ended with both magicians declaring themselves the victor. The Temple went on to become one of London’s most fashionable spiritual fraternities, with an illustrious membership and successful satellite temples in Paris, Edinburgh, and Bradford; while Mr Sedgley went on to considerable success as a barrister before dying of a heart attack, leaving the care of the V.V. 341 to his widow.

This was the Order’s first meeting since the storm. They met in a room at the back of Mrs Sedgley’s house: large and comfortable, lined with bookshelves, and thick with the scents of coffee and liqueurs and cigarettes, perfume and incense and paraffin lamps. Ornamental columns in the corners were decorated with fat plaster
putti
, and the paintings on the wall displayed beautiful and gauzily-dressed nymphs. An imposing oak table dominated the centre of the room; Mrs Sedgley explained to Arthur that her late husband had acquired it at auction, and that it was of prehistoric druidic origin.

“Druids,” he agreed. “By God.”

He circled the room, shaking hands. Mr Innes (the Hegemon) seemed to have taken a liking to him. They discovered a shared fondness for Sherlock Holmes, and decided to treat it as if it were a remarkable and significant coincidence.

Josephine sat down near the window and took out her shorthand pad.

MEMBERS PRESENT:

Mrs Esther Sedgley (Matron V.V. 341
)

Mr James Innes, Esq. (Hegemon V.V. 300
)

Mr Mortimer Frayn (Officer)

Mr John Hare, Esq. (Officer)

Mrs Lottie Hare (Officer)

Miss Florence Shale (Probationer)

Miss Roberta Blaylock (Student)

Mr T. R. Compton, Esq. (Student)

Mr Henry Park, Esq. (Treasurer)

Dr A. D. Varley (Adeptus Major)

Mrs A. D. Varley (Adeptus Minor)

Mr Martin Atwood (Guest)

Mr Ranjit Chatterji (Guest)

Miss Eliza Hedges (Guest)

Mr Llywelyn ap Hywel (Guest)