Cannonbridge (2 page)

“I am curious as to the identity of our caller. Do you not share my sentiment?”

“I do. Yet you seemed to me to be ill at ease long before.”

“Perhaps, my lord. I am unsettled.”

“Your step-sister, perhaps? Her behaviour irks you? You are jealous of her privileges?”

“Her choices are her own. I have no dominion over her.”

“Yet I assuredly do. And that irks you?”

“Not at all, my lord. In so many ways, the two of you strike me as a most excellent match.”

They move through a place which seems to have been given over to the theatre—a small, abandoned stage, a flock of costumes, stacks of manuscripts and ancient books, the text of an unorthodox and even a scandalous kind. Outside, rages the thunder and the rain.

“Tell me,” he urges. “What troubles you? Was it something about our game?”

“In that you may be right, my lord.”

“Indeed?”

“I simply believe that the telling of tales should not
be
a game.”

“You understand that I meant only to provide us with a little amusement?”

“Yes. But then all the world is a joke to you.”

The lord gives no sign that he disagrees with her judgement. “Do you not believe it to be so?”

“I can see how you might form such an opinion.”

“You choose your words with care, I think. Extrapolate.”

They walk through the theatre, into a library, an antechamber and out into the main corridor of the house. In the distance: the outer door, heavy and fortified.

The woman’s words are hurried, as though the swift speaking of them may serve to hide their meaning. “Your position, my lord. Your power. And, above all, your money. These things protect you from the truth of the world.”

The man does not reply but merely steps rather clumsily onwards, as though concentrating now to the exclusion of all else upon the feat of forward motion.

At last, they reach the door. Although they have heard no further knocks—and for all that they know the visitor may have departed—both can sense the presence of something that does not truly belong on the other side, something waiting which ought not to be there at all. As they open the house to the storm, the woman and the lord dare not look at one another.

Outside, drenched and framed by the glowering sky, his arrival heralded by another clap of thunder, stands a stranger. Black-clad, dark-haired, his face lean and intelligent, his eyes a penetrating shade of blue, he seems almost to have been brought to this place by the storm itself. Although kindly in his manner there is even now, even at this, the earliest of all known phases, something about him—some dormancy, some potential—which makes the couple step, instinctively, half a pace backwards.

In spite of the tempest, the stranger smiles. “I was expecting servants.”

“The servants have fled, sir. Appalled, they said, at our depravity.”

The stranger’s smile does not falter. “You must be Lord Byron.”

The object of this observation nods crisply.

“And you—oh, I know your name. You are Mary.”

“Do I know you, sir?”

“Not yet, I fear. And I hope that you’ll forgive me for arriving unannounced and without an introduction.”

“What do you want?” asks the lord.

“Only shelter. For tonight. Nothing more. Shelter from the storm. And perhaps a little company. I can recompense you handsomely for both.”

“I have no need of money.”

“I did not speak of money.”

“No?”

“I have heard (I cannot at present recollect where or from whom) that tonight you tell tales. Stories meant to curdle the blood and to quicken the beatings of the heart.”

Byron inclines his head. If he is surprised, he takes pains not to disclose it. “That is so.”

“Then I’ve come to help. To contribute, if I can.”

“Indeed?”

“As chance would have it, I know just such a story—the most terrible, and I would warrant, the most chilling of them all.”

He smiles again and this time neither of them can resist the force of it.

Deafening thunder. Torrential rain.

The stranger, soaked yet resolute: “My lord, the storm is quite unrelenting.”

“Then come in,” says Byron and how odd it is, how very odd, to hear that curious note of deference in his voice. “And be right welcome.”

“Forgive me,” says the girl, “but I did not hear your name.”

“I did not give it.” The stranger glances behind him, somewhat nervous all of a sudden, as though he suspects himself to have been followed, as though some shadow dogs him. But, almost at once, uncertainty fades and the smile comes again. “My name is Cannonbridge. It is Matthew Cannonbridge.”

“Then pray come in, Mr Cannonbridge.”

And the dark-haired man, invited, steps inside.

For a long time to come, Mary will tell herself that it was all coincidence—how lightning struck close by at the very moment when the stranger crossed the threshold, how in that instant she should herself have felt a tremor in her heart as if she were suddenly unwell and how (and this, she will tell herself over and over, must surely have been her imagination) she seemed to hear, quite distinctly, though she knows it to be impossible, the infant having died some fifteen months beforehand, the desperate, mournful weeping of her child.

NOW

T
WO HUNDRED YEARS
later—give or take a couple of months—and the mind of Dr Toby Judd is also filled with thoughts of Matthew Cannonbridge.

Judd is standing in the furthermost carriage of the 18:12 from Waterloo, coming home from a day of prickly meetings and academic brouhaha at the premises of his employer, the University of Draye. The train is full—more than full—and its passengers are sour and restive. No seat, of course, for Toby. He’s standing up with a dozen others, squashed against the windowpane, wedged uncomfortably between a pot-bellied man in a suit who holds a paper bag of McDonald’s (from which he pulls item after item—nuggets, French fries, beef patty, onion rings) and a slab-faced woman in late middle age who has a mobile phone clamped to her right ear and into which she is bellowing orders of baffling specificity.

Toby is a small man—just over five feet, slim, bespectacled, unassuming—and, in this instance, he resembles a shrimp between two sea beasts. He holds out before him, angled awkwardly against the glass, a tubby paperback, the cover of which proclaims its title to be
Cannonbridge: A Celebration of English Genius
. It is illustrated by a reproduction of an etching—that famous, saturnine profile—and, affixed to the slick card is a round red sticker which reads ‘Matthew Cannonbridge: WINNER of the Waterstones Poll to find the Nation’s FAVOURITE Writer’.

Its back cover is taken up by a sepia photograph of the author of the piece: an intense, hawkish-looking man, not more than forty and in possession of enviable cheekbones. His smile reveals suspiciously perfect teeth and his name (printed on back, front and spine) is Dr J J Salazar—also, as it happens, a Draye employee, albeit of a starrier kind than Dr Judd.

Toby has just reached the end of a rather lurid chapter concerning the earliest known Cannonbridge sighting—by the shores of Lake Geneva and in distinguished company, the first recorded appearance in history of that extraordinary man—when a slip of paper flutters from between the pages and glides towards the ground. He bends over to retrieve it, an action which seems to cause the goliaths on either side of him to recognise his presence for the first time. The woman interpolates a single “tsk” into her stream of recondite commands, whilst the man, slowing his ingestion momentarily, glances down at his smaller fellow traveller and stifles, almost wholly unsuccessfully, a belch.

The paper, in Toby’s hands again, turns out to be mere publicity material—something to do with the Cannonbridge Gala, due in eight weeks and set to represent the acme of the nation’s bicentennial celebrations. Scrumpling up the flier, Toby slides it into the pocket of his jacket (his favourite, made of blue cord and better suited, after fifteen years of almost daily use, to the undiscerning charity shop, the fabric reclamation centre). As he straightens, he glimpses the almost-empty first-class carriage beyond and sees there, in one of those coincidences which although not uncommon in life would be dismissed out of hand in fiction, sitting in an aisle seat, his legs stretched out before him with lordly indifference, Dr J J Salazar.

Salazar holds in one hand not a book but a sleek, black tablet from which he is reading. Whatever these words may be, they cause a flicker of ironical amusement to play about his lips. Alerted by some sixth sense, the author turns and catches sight of Toby. That smile intensifies. He waves. Toby considers pretending not to have seen him but, deciding that it’s probably too late now for that particular gambit, attempts to wave back. His arms are constricted and he ends up succeeding only in jostling the giant flask of cola from which his neighbour is slurping, an action which earns Toby another look of furious disapproval.

Salazar, witnessing all of this from the security of his first-class booth, nods once and smiles, affecting the kind of expression with which he favours certain of his students—an adult tolerance of the gaucherie of youth. Toby looks down at his book, remembering too late just what it is that he is reading. But Salazar has already seen and at the sight of his own face gazing back at him, his smile (or so it seems to Toby) grows broader still. Those remarkable teeth (almost American!) gleam and shimmer in the early evening light.

What little appetite he had for the book now having dissipated, Toby passes the rest of the journey by gazing out of his little patch of window. The train passes at speed through the cat’s cradle of Clapham Junction, after which the sprawl of the city—its black, concrete complexity—begins to recede and the suburbs start to impinge. Through Earlsfield, Wimbledon, New Malden, Surbiton and on towards Ashbury, the excesses of London, her grime and savage energy, are overtaken by the apparent placidity of her outlying districts—by quiet and patient streets, by the increasing preponderance of green spaces. Not quite the city nor yet the country either, the train passes into those liminal, well-mannered states which thrive discreetly at the borders of metropolises.

Eventually, it pulls into its first stop. Toby has never ridden on the service for any longer—it ends up, he believes, in Portsmouth and sometimes he imagines what it would be like to stay on board the train until that terminus, picturing cool, invigorating, salty air, the shriek of seabirds, the distant honking of ferries and liners, chips by the seafront, bracing afternoon walks beside the ocean. But today, like every other day, he does not wait to find out. The doors open with a whoosh which, had the train been human, might have sounded like relief.

Judd and his companions step out onto the concourse. The big man, having finished his sack of fast food, stares mournfully into its depths as if in the hope of spying some neglected crumb, while the woman strides swiftly away, the stream of orders now overtaken by a catechism of what sound like expressions of endearment and assurances of affection. Whether the interlocutor is the same as before, Toby cannot say.

There is the usual, urgent rush towards the stairs which lead out of the station and Toby lets himself be caught up in the flood, succumbing to the seductive momentum of the crowd. He is swept along with the herd of his fellow commuters, down the platform, up the stairs and out the station exit, towards the cab rank and the car park and the high street beyond.

Free of the mob, pausing for breath, Toby notices with surprise that J J Salazar has also alighted from the train, here, in Ashbury, in Toby’s town, where he can surely have no proper business. Salazar is waiting halfway along the line for taxis, his face set in an expression of good sportsmanship, like a movie star trying out self-deprecation on a talk show or a politician at the kind of photocall which involves some slight risk of appearing foolish but which his people have assured him will make him seem approachable and everyday.

Toby considers passing by without speaking but, his curiosity getting the better of him, he walks over to the author and taps him on the shoulder, a part of the other man’s anatomy which is, approximately, level to his own head.

“J J?”

The tall man turns and smiles, a little vaguely, as if the name of the newcomer might at any moment dart away from his recollection like a salmon in the stream.

“Toby! This is a coincidence.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Good to see you earlier at the University. Sorry we didn’t get a chance to chinwag. There’s always so many people at those meetings and—you understand—one has to prioritise.”

Toby keeps his expression as neutral as he can. “Of course.” He breathes in slowly. “We’ve not seen you for a while. Been enjoying your sabbatical?”

“Sure. Sure, Toby. Yeah. It’s been a lot of hard work. Mostly this gala thing. And all the publicity around the book. God knows why, but it really seems to have caught people’s imagination. Man, but the media have just picked it up and run with it.”

“Well... Congratulations.”

“Cheers. I see you’ve got yourself a copy.”

“I have, yes.”

“That’s cool. Hope you’re not finding it too much of a primer. Of course, it’s meant really for a big, popular audience. Just a nice, lucrative mass-market thing. Though I reckon I’ve unearthed a few tasty new facts. Cannonbridge is one of your own areas of interest, isn’t he?”

“One of them, yes.”

“I’ve not had a chance to read you on him yet, I’m afraid. Well, you know what Cannonbridge studies are like—
such
a competitive field. I was especially fortunate, of course—what with earning the blessing of the estate and being allowed to riffle at will through that fabulous archive in Edinburgh. As you know, they’re normally pretty strict about who they let in there but... well, I’m just very grateful for such terrific opportunities.”

A taxi arrives, a black cab, its yellow light ablaze. A woman at the head of the queue gets inside and the line shuffles forwards.

“Forgive me for asking...” Toby begins.