Dawn's Early Light (2 page)

The archivist knew better than to argue with her. Besides, he had his own uncomfortable feeling she was right.

G
etting a summons to appear before Her Majesty the Queen was something that Doctor Basil Sound had not been expecting. Not today. Not even this week. In fact, when the message had arrived through the pneumatic delivery system and Miss Shillingworth presented it to him in his office, the Director of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences had quite lost his appetite. He'd pushed away the ham sandwich he'd just been ready to devour, and read the note with growing trepidation.

Despite the stack of papers on his desk, and a full afternoon of meetings scheduled with his agents, he'd risen quickly from his work, told Shillingworth to cancel all of his appointments, and caught a hansom cab to Buckingham Palace.

His mind was whirring as he went, his thoughts not even scattered by the rumbling of the occasional motorcars. Perhaps signs of technological progress like that would have held his attention, but unannounced summonses such as this rarely, if ever, meant good news. Though he always maintained as jovial an exterior as possible when dealing with his Ministry staff, that always melted away the closer he drew to the heart of the British Empire. Once he had an ally in the Crown; but according to the clockwork model in his office and calculations from the Restricted Area, the Queen's favours were nearing an end.

Sound adjusted his gloves and watched out the window as his hansom approached the broad façade of Buckingham, its smooth white edifice with the new east wing presenting a strong, indeed stern, face to the great, unwashed masses. It conveyed all of the majesty of the Empire, but none of its humanity.
A commentary,
he mused as they rolled up to the gates,
on the state of Britannia.

Reluctantly surrendering his place in the cab, he stepped down, and presented the message to the Royal Guard on duty. He in turn fed the message to the tiny
cryptoregister
that sat in his station. The device gobbled up the paper, and in the process read the almost invisible series of indentations on the paper itself. If it did not match the code for that day, or indeed had none at all, things could get intimate between Doctor Sound and the fixed bayonet on the end of the Guard's rifle.

Sound passed through a warren of passages and entry halls, and through additional screening processes where his likeness was examined in every detail. With each additional layer of security—far many more in place than on his last visit—the whisper of suspicion in his head grew louder.

The Queen had only just recently returned to Buckingham Palace, having spent more than thirty years in various states of seclusion at Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight, or at Windsor Castle. Many said her return was too late to salvage the public's perception of her. Sound could not decisively conclude if that opinion were true, but she was without question not the woman she had been before the death of her husband in '61. In her early years Victoria had been quite the wonder—a veritable force of nature, determined to lead her country to greatness. It was one of the great sorrows of Director Sound's life that he had not been able to save her from a life of widowhood.

Such melancholy and fruitless thoughts were diverted however, when Manning, the Queen's manservant, finally opened the door to the Marble Hall, and walked smartly over to Sound. That their meeting was taking place in the more intimate surroundings of these less formal apartments, the director chose to take as a good sign.

He got to his feet, dusted off his trousers, and followed Manning into the Centre Room. It was not a simple room by any standards, but remarkably intimate by royal ones. It was painted a deep red that reminded Sound immediately of blood—another change from the last time he'd visited. Every light fitting, piece of furniture, and the whole ceiling was covered in gilt. It looked rather like a bordello he had found an unfortunate need to visit in Marseille. It was a fraction off-putting to be visiting one's aging monarch in such a setting.

So, the director was momentarily distracted when he found the veiled Queen seated at a modest desk close to a lit hearth, and at her right hand . . .

“Ah, Basil, old man, looking fit and confident, as always,” spoke the Duke of Sussex, Peter Lawson. “I was just talking about you.”

Doctor Sound tightened his jaw for a moment, but then forced himself to relax. “Favourably, I hope.”

Lord Sussex merely smiled in reply. “I am just heading out on holiday to Europe with my family, but before parting I needed a moment of Her Majesty's time.” Sussex turned back to Victoria and bowed low. “Thank you for that most precious commodity. I now depart with a light heart.”

“Your loyalty in this matter is appreciated,” the woman in black spoke gently. “Please give my regards to your lovely wife.”

He straightened to his full height and made to leave, but paused on reaching the director. “Your agents, Sound, do live dangerously, don't they?”

“We serve at the behest of Her Majesty,” he replied.

“But of course you do.”

Sound gave a slow nod to him. “Bon voyage, m'lord.”

“Merci,”
Sussex returned.

The door closed behind him, but the director found no comfort whatsoever with the departure of Lord Sussex. In fact, Sound felt as if the heaviness of the room were threatening to suffocate him.

“Thank you for coming.” Her Majesty Victoria, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland Queen, Defender of the Faith, Empress of India, finally spoke, her voice muffled but as strong as it had ever been in her youth.

Though what expression went along with it Doctor Sound could not tell. A heavy black veil obscured her face, and her body, swathed in voluminous yards of dark fabric, didn't move as she addressed him. Her hands wrapped in black velvet gloves rested still on the desk in front of her. The fact that this woman had started her reign as a bright-eyed, energetic young woman was impossible to imagine.

He cleared his throat. “Your Majesty knows that she can call on me night or day and I will come. You and I have shared so much that I owe you more than I would any other sovereign.”

“It is lucky then,” Victoria went on, “that you do not have any other sovereign than I.” He could not ignore the sharp edge in her voice, and he wondered if he had somehow given her the wrong impression that he wanted another one? He felt immediately that he'd got off on the wrong foot.

He shifted his stance and averted his eyes lest she think he was staring. Without any visible clues to her mood this was going to be an awkward interview.

The Queen leaned towards him, her veil swinging but remaining in place. “I will keep this short, Doctor Sound. I need you to do something about Bertie.”

He blinked. The
last
thing he expected from Victoria was what had just come out of her mouth. The Queen knew full well that he and the Prince of Wales shared a close relationship—just as had once existed between Sound's predecessor and Prince Albert, Edward's father.

She had always resented her eldest son for reasons that baffled Sound, and that meant she'd left Bertie to his own devices. In such circumstances he could easily have become a dilettante, flush with the excesses that his position would have allowed him, but Sound had been careful to guide the young prince away from such a life, and towards passions that his father once pursued. Science. Physics. Engineering. The director was very glad to have succeeded, and the prince had become a staunch supporter of the Ministry—something that often worked against them when it came time for his mother to be involved.

Doctor Sound sighed, and only just managed to avoid pressing his fingers to the bridge of his nose. Victoria knew that expression of his far too well. Instead, he straightened. “And what would Your Majesty suggest I do, exactly?”

The Queen clasped her gloved hands together before her. “I wish my son to leave our shores for a little time. He has become entirely too concerned about our health and general well-being, and has stopped taking an interest in his own pastimes.”

“I see,” the director replied evenly. “That doesn't sound like Bertie at all.”

“Indeed not,” the Queen said, her voice firm and resolute. “I took it upon myself to enquire on what might improve his demeanour.” She turned away from Doctor Sound to the desk and read from what appeared to be a series of notes written in her own hand, “The Americans are hosting a clankerton symposium in San Francisco. Quite the gathering of inventive minds. Rumour has it that they've even managed to winkle old McTighe out of the Highlands for it.”

She extended the paper to him, and Sound raised an eyebrow at the gesture. The slip in her hand never faltered or waivered as it remained stretched out towards him.

“Knowing of the bond between you and Bertie, I charge you with overseeing the particulars of this trip. Perhaps a few weeks among those of his curious ilk will lighten his mood. Even though I never can, or shall, look at him without a shudder, he is still my son and heir.”

It was not the first time Sound had heard his monarch's dismissal of her child in such a heartless manner, but it still distressed him that she held him accountable in the incident that had killed her husband. Bertie had been working with his father in his laboratory when the experiment suffered a catastrophic failure. Bertie had not been able to save his father, but no sane person would ever have blamed him for that. However, the Queen had been driven quite mad by the loss of her beloved husband, and rather than blame God, or fate, or just blind chance, she had fixated on Bertie as the one responsible.

As he was musing on that, he abruptly realised that the pause had stretched out into a rather long and uncomfortable one. Her Majesty had been the last to speak, so convention demanded he have some kind of answer.

“Indeed,” he muttered through his moustache, “but Bertie will make an excellent monarch when it is finally time for—”

“Basil!” her voice cracked from beyond the veil, jerking him out of his reckless talk. “I am not in the ground yet, and my son needs to be made aware of that, and not constantly poking and prodding at me.”

Her tone verged on hysterical, and the director felt a chill rush across his skin. At one time Sound had been apprised of the Queen's health on a weekly basis, but in the previous year she had got rid of the venerable Doctor Benson and replaced him with what Bertie described to him as “a young Turk of a general practitioner.” Perhaps this was the prince's concern.

Sound decided that the best way to deal with this powder-keg situation was to back up slowly and come at it another way. “I was merely pointing out his melancholy could be borne from a deep-seated concern. It is that compassion, no doubt inherited from you, that will make him an excellent monarch.”

No reaction, no response. Damnable veils.

He sketched a little bow and kept his voice as low and deferential as possible. “I will do all I can to assure his safety when abroad, Your Majesty.”

The gloved hands resting on the desk clenched. “He's waiting for you in the Bow Room. I suggest you talk to him immediately. Good day, Doctor Sound.”

He was just backing away when Victoria spoke again, seemingly unable to resist another jab. “I sincerely hope that you are a better judge of character with Bertie than with your Australian.”

“Ma'am?” Sound enquired, hoping to sound as clueless as possible.

“Agent Bruce Campbell,” the Queen went on, her voice light but somehow packed with venom. “I understand he was one of your brightest stars—you even made him deputy director—but I read the report this morning that you had to sever his employment with the Ministry. It seemed his negligence led to the death of a Miss Ihita Pujari, another agent of yours. If you were not a covert branch of my government, it would be quite the scandal.”

For a long moment the only sound in the room was the relentless ticking of the clocks. That Her Majesty knew about Campbell's fall within the Ministry impressed him particularly as he had omitted it in his report to Sussex. His suspicions of Campbell's loyalties and Sussex's reach were no longer as such.

“Yes, I suppose it could have been, but unfortunately Agent Campbell's dismissal was the only appropriate disciplinary action. I could no longer trust him to act for the well-being of the Ministry. Most unfortunate, but not the first time such tragedies occur, as I am sure you are well aware, Your Majesty.”

“I stay apprised of all activities within my Ministries, Doctor Sound, but I am pleased to hear you are in control of your agents. Several of them have come very close to earning the same fate as the Australian.” Her veil swayed—the only indication that she was annoyed.

Sound gave a polite nod in reply, silently relishing in his assurance concerning Books' and Braun's goodwill mission to America. It would possibly stop them from drawing the attention of the Queen—unless it was already too late.