The Revolutions (8 page)

“What’s that? A newspaper? I don’t have time to read newspapers.”

A bell rang somewhere below. Gracewell lifted one finger, waited, as if for the bell to ring again. It didn’t. Gracewell’s finger slowly lowered, and he turned his attention back to Arthur. He blinked twice.

“Where were we?”

“The
Mammoth
, Mr Gracewell.”

“Oh. Yes.”

Gracewell raised his voice. “Dimmick!
Dimmick
!” Gracewell’s voice was not pleasant to listen to; it cracked when he shouted.

“Mr Gracewell—”

“
Dimmick!
Get in here! It’s a bloody
journalist
.”

“Mr Gracewell! Sir! I’m not a journalist. The
Mammoth
is gone. I’m here—”

“Are you here to snoop, Mr Shaw? Are you here to pry? Are you here to tell stories? You wouldn’t be the first and you won’t be the last. But by God you will hold your tongue or Mr Dimmick will know the reason why.”

The door opened. Gracewell held up a hand.

Arthur heard Dimmick’s footsteps behind him, and the tap of his stick on the floor. He smelt Dimmick’s stale odour—tobacco and sweat. Arthur’s throat went dry; there was suddenly nothing quaint or comic about Dimmick.

“Mr Gracewell—I wouldn’t dream of—there’s no call for that sort of—I have debts, Mr Gracewell, and I’m engaged to be married, and I need the money—that’s all—I’m not here to tell stories. The
Mammoth
is gone.”

“Engaged?” Gracewell appeared confused for a moment. “Oh yes.” He slowly lowered his hand.

Dimmick chuckled, then gave Arthur’s shoulder a rough but not unfriendly shake. Then his footsteps receded and the door closed behind him. Arthur tried to hide his relief.

“Well then.” Gracewell sat. “Far be it from me to thwart young love. Or to thwart Atwood, for that matter. But you won’t tell the young lady to whom you are engaged what you do here, and by God you won’t write about it.” Gracewell shook his head. “Writers. Perhaps a third of the men are poets. It seems disproportionate. But it’s all one to me so long as they follow the rules. For six pounds a week, I expect obedience.”

“Six pounds a week?”

“Is that not good enough for you, sir?”

“On the contrary, it’s…” Six pounds a week; more than three hundred in a year. It was far more than he’d expected.

“Well.” Gracewell shrugged. “Not every man can do the job. Few last. A question of
will.
”

“Mr Gracewell—I—I’ve never seen anything quite like this.”

“Well, there’s never been anything quite like my Engine. And there’s your answer; or more precisely, there it isn’t. Now, to begin with: you will be paid six pounds a week. If you do not run away there will be more—last a month and it will be seven.”

“Seven!”

“Rapid ascent. You’ll earn it. You’ll see.”

Mr Gracewell took a card out of a drawer and pushed it across the desk. It read:

COPY THESE WORDS

I, THE UNDERSIGNED, DO SWEAR BEFORE GOD THAT I COME HERE IN GOOD FAITH, AND WILL DO NO SABOTAGE, AND WILL NOT REVEAL WHAT I SEE HERE TO ANYONE.

Gracewell pointed at one of the typewriters. “Type it. Sign it.”

Arthur did so. Gracewell took the paper without looking and filed it in one of the cabinets.

“A word of advice, Mr Shaw. Pay off whatever debts drove you here as soon as you can. Debt is weakness. I will have you beholden to no one but me.”

The ringer box in the corner of the office started to sound. Gracewell picked up the telephone.

“Find Dimmick, wherever he’s got to. Tell him we’re giving you to Mr Irving. Off you go.”

*   *   *

The next morning there was a postcard under the door of Josephine’s office. It came from Borel’s shop, and depicted a sunny seaside vista. On the back of it she recognised Arthur’s handwriting.

Dearest love—I could write all day and not say half of what I could wish to say—nor do I know yet what quite what I mean to say—so first an apology: I did not take your advice. I went to Deptford. But one never knows these days where or when fortune may strike—and struck it has! I have employment, at six pounds a week. Underline that—it is no joke. And that is all I can say, because I cannot say yet what they mean to have me do (because I do not understand!) and so if any friend asks you what your dear heart does, you shall have to say you do not know, but you know that he does it at six pounds a week—soon to be seven—and you may reckon for yourself what that will mean for the two of us, and how soon.

She didn’t see or hear from him for another week, though she wrote and called round. He was out at all hours. His landlord hadn’t set eyes on him since Tuesday, when Arthur had knocked on his door and pressed the rent into his hands, late, but with interest. She began to worry about him. She slept badly. On Sunday he arranged for flowers to be delivered to her office; but there was no note of explanation. She saw him by chance on Monday morning, in the street, frightfully early. Not, of course, that she’d woken early in hopes of catching him—she had errands to run, and she couldn’t sleep. He was hurrying to catch the omnibus in the rain. He’d found time to buy a new umbrella, she noticed.

He turned when she called out, blinking as if he hardly recognised her.

“A week?” he said. “Has it really been that long?” He counted off days on his fingers, in obvious surprise.

“Arthur—are you all right? You look tired. I got your postcard. Did you get my letters? Are you working for Atwood now? What on earth does he have you doing?”

“Not Atwood. A colleague of his, I suppose. Gracewell. Conspiracy, so to speak; oh, Josephine, I shouldn’t say any more.”

“Why not—is something wrong?”

“Nothing! It’s—it’s quite extraordinary. I don’t understand it fully myself. But I swore secrecy. Even from you. It’s—well, it’s rather like working for an insurance firm, or a bank, or the civil service, I suppose—nothing sinister. Only with an oath of secrecy, as if one were a freemason. But the six pounds a week is real.”

She stood as close to him as their umbrellas would allow, and studied him. He looked exhausted and hungry. He had an odd and slightly feverish air about him.

He lunged forward and kissed her, taking her quite off guard. He held her for a very long time. She felt his heart pound. Then he let her go and turned away, checking his watch.

“I’ll be late. Gracewell can’t abide lateness—he says it’s a sort of imprecision. What day is it?”

“Monday.”

“Monday!” He started counting on his fingers again, as if calculating something. “Thursday, then—a half-day. I’ll find you then. Wait, Josephine—take this!” He pressed two gold coins into her hand—then, after a moment’s thought, a half-crown for good measure. “For Mr Borel. That squares us, I think. Would you?”

He started off for the bus. Then he turned back and took her hand. “Steer clear of Atwood,” he said. “Now, don’t worry. Don’t worry; nothing’s wrong. It’s just—it’s just awfully odd.”

“What do you mean?”

“The whole thing. I don’t understand it yet. Promise me you’ll steer clear of him.”

“Of course. Wasn’t it me who told you to throw his card away? Arthur—are you in danger?”

“No. I don’t think so. It’s terribly hard to explain. I don’t have the time.”

He turned and ran.

Chapter Six

The Ordo V.V. 341 met again next month, on a balmy evening at the end of April. Mrs Sedgley’s rose-garden bloomed, birds sang, bees drifted lazily from flower to flower, and the house was packed to the rafters. Somehow Mrs Sedgley had persuaded the celebrated American spiritualist Emma Bloom, recently arrived from New York, to pay a visit—her first engagement in London—to the Ordo V.V. 341. Mrs Sedgley was inclined to believe that Mrs Bloom—of whom she was a great admirer—had recognised in her letters the spark of a kindred soul. Josephine suspected that Mrs Bloom’s secretary, confused by the flood of invitations from unlikely sounding persons and entities that had greeted her on her arrival at Claridge’s, had picked at random. In any case, the visit had attracted publicity. Guests bartered for invitations, and elderly members who’d hardly left their houses in years journeyed in from the suburbs. Three journalists were in attendance, from the
Morning Chronicle,
the
Spectator,
and the
Occult Review
.

Mr Atwood was there again, standing at the back of the room. He wore black tie and tails, and an expression of quiet amusement. Josephine approached him at once, meaning to ask for an explanation of last month’s awkward scene, who on earth Gracewell was, and what was going on; but by the time she’d forged her way through the crowd he was gone, and it was too late to pursue him further because the meeting had come to order, and Bloom was about to speak.

Bloom was very tall, strikingly handsome, and had exquisite poise. Her dress was burgundy, her hair a perfect black, her skin lily-white, her eyes sharp emeralds. She had not the slightest trace of false modesty, or any other kind. She spoke slowly and carefully, to be sure that the journalists captured her every word. She told her audience that she had come to London to attend the memorials for the Duke of Sussex, who’d been such a patron of spiritual pursuits. She said that she brought condolences from all of New York and from her contacts in the world beyond. She said that she could not say whether she had or had not been invited by the Metropolitan Police to lend her psychic resources to the investigation; nor could she say for sure yet whether his death had left London under a curse; nor whether the murder of the Duke was or was not, in her view, connected to the storm or to the terrible Whitechapel murders of the last decade.

Mr Innes and Mrs Sedgley begged her to put on a display of her abilities. Bloom put on a great show of reluctance, explaining that she was tired from her long journey, that her spiritual powers were not parlour tricks, and so on; but finally she relented. She asked to be given space alone at a table, and silence, and darkness. Mr Innes dimmed the lamps.

“We shall see,” Bloom said, “what the spirit world has to teach us tonight—if anything.”

She called for a sheet of paper and a pen to be placed in front of her, and for a blindfold. Mrs Sedgley provided her with a black veil.

“The spirits,” she said, “will write through me, if it suits their plans to communicate with us.”

She held the pen over the paper like a dowsing-rod, and began to softly hum.

Most of her audience closed their eyes and sat in reverent silence. The journalists watched Mrs Bloom, and Mrs Sedgley watched the journalists. Josephine sat massaging her wrists. From where she sat, a row of heads at the other side of the room was silhouetted against the window. A muffled glow came through the curtains from the streetlights outside.

Innes coughed, and his wife hissed at him. Miss Shale started humming along with Bloom, then stopped, apparently embarrassed.

It seemed to Josephine that a strange light had crept into the room.

Josephine was not credulous. She was not the sort of person who swallowed every story of table-rapping and saw fairies under every flower. In fact, she thought of herself as rather less credulous than the average person. She’d seen her fair share of hidden mirrors, blacked threads, and concealed compartments. At one memorable séance, she’d felt what she thought at first was a mouse brushing against her foot, and had peered under a table to see a small girl crouched there, her bony hands and face bright with luminous paint. She didn’t reveal her. Mrs Sedgley, on the other hand, was a fiend for nosing out fraud, and merciless when she found it, banishing the guilty party from the premises of the Order and sparing no efforts to expose them in the letters pages of the
Occult Review
or the
Journal of the Society for Psychical Research
.

So when Josephine perceived that there was a faint red light in the room, her first thought was to wonder how Bloom had tampered with the lamps, and what Mrs Sedgley would say if she found out. She looked around the room to see if she had an accomplice. It could be done with phosphorous oil, or with a mirrored lantern.

The light was both a rather vulgar display—not the sort of thing one would expect from a person of Mrs Bloom’s sophistication—and rather splendidly eerie. The odd thing was that no one else appeared to have noticed it. The room was quiet; the journalist from the
Morning Chronicle
stared idly at the ceiling.

Bloom lowered pen to paper, and began to scratch.

Josephine supposed that she might have had an accomplice standing outside the window with a red lamp. But how, then, to explain the
shape
of the light: a faint and trembling sphere?

It wasn’t bright. Its faded colour awoke a memory.

When Josephine’s father died, he had left a collection of specimens, curios, and oddities. He was an amateur antiquarian, and a man of varied and eccentric interests. There were old farmer’s almanacs, and rusty nails that he had marked as
Roman circa AD 400?
, and a verdigris’d sextant, and a small collection of saints’ fingernails,
et cetera.
Among the collection were four cases of butterflies, which Josephine had never seen before—and did not see again, because her mother promptly sold them. That was shortly before her mother, who’d always been of a nervous disposition, began to suffer headaches, and night terrors, and then waking visions—hell-fire and warring angels—as if those awful visions had been held in check by her husband’s rather mild and scholarly form of religion and released upon his death.

There’d been well over a hundred butterflies in the cases, of many different and beautiful colours. Josephine had studied them for days after her father’s death. She remembered one beautiful creature in particular; it had occupied an undistinguished position near the bottom left of its case, with nothing written on the scrap of yellowed paper beneath it except “
AFRICA (?),
” but its wings had been the most extraordinary shade: a deep and dusty damask-rose, edged with azure and indigo; a morbid and passionate and sad and violent colour; the same colour that hovered now over Mrs Sedgley’s table, slowly revolving.