Cannonbridge (6 page)

At the back, another person leaves. And then another. One of them shouts, before the door slams shut, “Nutter!”

Now, Toby really begins to warm to his theme. He improvises. He freestyles, he plays to the crowd, he loses control of his emotion. He allows himself to be swept up and gives himself over to the moment. It will be some time before he realises quite what a show it is that he puts on.

In the end, Toby is allowed to speak for a little under eleven minutes—the novels and short stories and plays that he believes to have been faked, the widespread tampering with the archives, the expert falsification of records, the long-term bribery and blackmail of the academic world. Each claim is more scandalous than the last, each more dementedly complex and frothingly baroque. More of the audience leave, while others stay and laugh openly. Thomasina looks ashen. Salazar tries hard to seem sorrowfully noble. Caroline might be in tears. The man in the pinstripe suit, however, drinks all of it in, that phone held out before him the whole time, as if warding away something evil.

Toby has just begun to explain how he believes Cannonbridge’s epic verse cycle
The Lamentation of Eliphar, Mununzar’s Son
to be a twentieth-century forgery when Professor McGovern takes action. She climbs on stage, stops in front of him and says, with soft, pitying authority: “And there, I’m afraid, we must leave it. We’re out of time, Dr Judd.”

Toby stops, in mid-flow. “So soon?”

“I’m afraid so.” A tight smile. “And no time for questions either.” She is addressing only the audience now. “Thank you for your attention.”

Back to Toby, she hisses in his ear. “Come to my office. Please. I mean, straightaway.”

Toby does not seem to react. He only touches a button. Behind him, the screen goes black. He turns and stares towards it, swallowed for an instant by the void.

When he looks back, the audience are filing out. None seem willing to meet his eye. Caroline and J J have already gone.

He waits until the room is empty before he stirs.

In the corridor, on his way to Thomasina’s office, Toby is ambushed by the man in the pinstripe suit. The stranger, Toby sees, has put away his phone now.

“Good lecture,” the man says. “
Good lecture.
” He seems agitated and ill at ease and perhaps (Toby considers, not unkindly) in need of medication.

“Thank you,” says Toby and tries to get past.

“You’re not alone, you know.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I’ve seen the truth of it. I’ve glimpsed the Cannonbridge Conspiracy.”

“Oh? Oh, really?”

“Yes. And there are more of us, you know. We’re underground. Off the grid, mostly. But you’ll need to be careful now. You’ll have attracted attention.” He mutters the next sentence. “From rich and powerful people.”

Toby stops, looks the man in the eye. “What do you mean?”

“There’s more I can tell you. About how it’s been done. About
why
it’s been done. The scale of it, the scope... The hideous implication. But not here. Not now.”

“Why not?”

“Too public. Too exposed. Walls with ears. Listen, I’ll give you my number. Yeah? And then you’ll call me?”

Toby hesitates but only for a moment. “Yes. Yes, I suppose I might at that.”

“Very good. Here it is.”

The stranger pulls out a scrap of paper on which a string of digits have been scrawled. Toby considers that the man must have prepared this earlier and finds this realisation to be an unsettling one.

Judd takes the paper all the same, thrusts it into his jacket pocket and says, “Thank you. But you’ll have to excuse me now.”

“Of course. But please, please phone me, yeah?”

“OK,” Toby murmurs and in that moment he feels pretty certain that, in the end, he probably won’t make that call. The man looks at him, wild-eyed and trembling, as if he has read his thoughts. Then Toby says: “Wait.”

“Yes?” The man looks up at Dr Judd, skittish and afraid.

“If you share my suspicions about Cannonbridge...”

“Yes?”

“What led you here today? The real content of my lecture wasn’t advertised at all.”

“I knew what you were going to say.”

“
How?
”

“I had a dream, Dr Judd. A dream of prophecy. And you—you were in it.”

“A...” Toby is about to say “dream” incredulously, but stops himself just in time. “I see.”

“And now, I have some sympathy...” The other man’s nose twitches and his tongue dampens the corner of his mouth: “... with John the Baptist.”

“Oh.”

“The laying straight of the ways. For he who is coming.”

“I see,” Toby says briskly. “And thank you. But I think this is goodbye.” And he turns and starts to walk away, not looking back.

“Goodbye, doctor. You’ll still call me, won’t you?”

Toby walks, still without turning. “Yes. Absolutely. Without fail.”

The unkempt man watches him go.

Toby goes further up the corridor until he reaches a white, unnumbered door. He knocks once and a woman’s voice calls out: “Come in!”

The door opens. Judd slips inside.

The man in the pinstripe suit lingers for longer than he ought in the precincts of a place in which he has no legitimate business. He creeps closer to the white door, close enough to overhear some of what is taking place behind it and catches stray phrases of conversation: “more than a little concerned”; “University’s reputation to consider”; “private life”; “by no means an easy decision” and then, with doleful finality, “I think we’re going to have to say indefinite.”

The voices, had the stranger known them well, he might have recognised as belonging to Professor McGovern and to J J Salazar. Toby himself does not appear to speak. If he does then he talks too softly for the eavesdropper to hear.

After that, there are footsteps towards the door and the man in the pinstripe suit springs away. He steps back and walks, with suddenly sure-footed purpose, towards the exit, out of the institution and back into the real world, his eyes ablaze with inexplicable intensity.

1824

WARREN’S BLACKING FACTORY

LONDON

T
HE BOY IN
the blacking factory—a vast and ugly warehouse which looms beside the banks of the Thames—looks down at the filthy, twilit river and barely succeeds in suppressing a shudder.

More than ever today that stretch of dark water seems to him to be alive, a long, grey beast, bloated yet sinuous, with strange hungers, an appetite for sacrifice. As he gazes out from his tiny alcove upon this miserable scene, the boy’s hands work quickly and efficiently on the bench before him. A row of earthenware bottles, filled with boot blacking, is lined up there and the boy covers each of them, first with oil paper then with blue paper, before tying them round with string. A few gross of these completed, he turns, without thinking, to a pile of printed labels and affixes one with paste to every receptacle. The work is repetitive and dull but the boy is diligent and nimble. He goes on without thinking, letting his imagination roam, absenting himself from the clamour of the factory, from the cries and complaints of his fellow workers, the grind and whinnying of machinery, the thick, repulsive smells of the place and its atmosphere of despair.

Stout, sandy-haired Mr Lamert passes by, favouring the child with a glance and an injunction. “Keep up, boy! Concentrate on the task in hand!”

The child bows his head, redoubles his efforts. When Lamert has left, he raises his gaze once more to look from the window and down towards the Thames, upon which he sees, at first with curiosity and then, oddly, with a mounting sense of nervousness, that, standing beside the river almost as if the water itself has but lately disgorged him, is the figure of a man, dark-haired and clad in black, staring up at the factory windows. The boy peers closer, half-wondering if he might not be imagining the stranger, if the man is some trick of the fading light, some weird combination of shadows.

But no, he is real. A moment more and the fellow disappears, stamping along the riverbank towards (or so, at least, the boy assumes) the street beyond.

The next half hour passes very slowly indeed. Not for the first time, the boy considers how fluid is time in this place, how it seems to swirl and eddy as if subject to some fickle, mysterious power. In the factory, a minute might last an hour, an hour a day or, in certain unusual circumstances when something like a trance descends upon him, an afternoon pass by in the manner of a dream.

The boy feels a hand upon his shoulder. He does not have to turn to recognise the touch. Mr Lamert’s voice is calm and firm yet his breath is scented by liquor.

“Finish that one and you can go home.”

The child busies himself with his task. “Thank you, Mr Lamert.”

A squeeze on his shoulder. “And, my boy?”

“Yes, sir?”

“There is a gentleman outside who says he knows you.”

“Indeed, Mr Lamert?”

“His name is Cannonbridge. Says he’s a writer of repute.”

“A writer?” the boy asks wonderingly.

“That’s what he said. I can turn him away if you wish.” Another, longer squeeze. “I promised your father I’d take care of you.”

There is a note of concern in the man’s voice which certainly sounds genuine enough and which causes the boy, for the first and, as things would turn out, the last time, to feel something like sympathy for his employer.

“No, Mr Lamert. Thank you, sir. But I believe I recognise the name.”

O
UTSIDE ON THE
squalid street, beside the steps which lead to something more closely resembling civilisation, stands the man whom the boy had spied earlier that afternoon—saturnine and black-clad though, for all of that, smiling with clear sincerity.

“Charles?”

“Mr Cannonbridge?”

As the boy approaches, the man bends down to the child’s level and extends his hand.

“I’m very pleased to meet you.”

Warily, he takes the offered hand and shakes it. “What do you want with me, sir?”

“Only to talk.”

The boy juts out his chin imperiously. “Then I am to walk home. You may walk with me.”

The man smiles again and seems to be about to speak when another boy, a little older than the first and with a wild crop of red hair, pushes past them and trots spryly up the steps, calling over his shoulder as he goes. “See you tomorrow, Charlie!”

The younger boy replies. “Tomorrow, Bob!”

Cannonbridge looks with gravity at the boy. “Let us walk,” he says.

And walk they do, for the best part of three miles, up the Hungerford Stairs and the maze which lies immediately beyond and then, breaking into the relative sanctity of the Strand, up St Martin’s Lane and Broad St Giles, along Tottenham Court and Hampstead Road, heading, eventually, towards open spaces, to the green of Camden Town.

They talk, a little nervously at first, a little stiffly but then with increasing warmth and honesty. It is a conversation that the boy shall remember for the rest of his life. He will also remember this—that the man, with some regularity, glances behind him and, imagining that his companion does not notice, seeks out reflections of the street in window panes and polished surfaces, as if he believes himself to have been followed. Though he will hug the memory close, on this the boy does not remark.

“I trust you will forgive me,” Cannonbridge begins, “for introducing myself in this way.”

The boy does not reply directly but only asks another question: “Do you know my father, sir?”

“I don’t believe I do.”

“Oh. I thought that you might. It is only that...”

“Yes?”

“He has lately proved himself... rather clumsy.” The boy pauses, thinking of the arrest, his mother’s shame, the great and terrible fortress of the Marshalsea. “He would be grateful, I am certain, of a friend.”

“I understand. But I do not believe that I have ever had the pleasure.”

The boy nods glumly, expecting this answer. “You are a writer, sir, are you not?”

“I am. Three works of fiction now. Though I have hopes in the future of applying my talents to the theatre and even to verse.”

They negotiate the streets largely in silence until the boy pipes up. “I think that I should like to be a writer also.”

“Indeed?” Cannonbridge does not sound surprised. “I think that you would be well suited to the life.”

“Thank you, sir. Though I fear at present that I must spend the chief portion of my adult years in paying off my father’s debts.”

“Is he... greatly embarrassed?”

“He is a bankrupt, sir.”

The boy would not, with many others, have been so forthright. In the company of this man, however, he feels curiously able to be frank.

“Our family has much to pay and we all must do our part. That is why they sent me to the factory. So that I might contribute and earn my keep.”

“Charles?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Given all that you’ve said, I don’t wish to trouble you with my own concerns.”

“No trouble, sir. Not that.”

“You are most kind. Suffice to say that certain of my origins are obscure even to me. I am far from certain how I have come to be who I am in such a time and place as this. I mean these things not, you understand, in any philosophical sense but rather in a literal and material one. I have, of late, been endeavouring to uncover the truth. I have visited wise men. Oracles. Priests. Doctors. Magicians. Sages of every stripe. Though they’ve cast no light. Not a man jack of them.”

The boy nods, more from courtesy than comprehension.

“Nonetheless, whilst I pursue this... mystery I wish also to do good.”

“Then you are a philanthropist, sir?”

“Yes. I suppose I am. As much as is possible. Though my time does not always seem to be my own. And I am greatly concerned that the part of my life which I shall spend as any force for good is soon to come to an end.”

“Sir?”

“In recent nights, in certain dreams and visions, I have seen several clues. I have been vouchsafed details of the future. Glimpses only. Fragments of the puzzle. Last night, I saw something of what I shall become. A new kind of creature. A new kind of... intelligence. There are storm clouds gathering above me. My destiny approaches.”