The Printer's Devil (21 page)

‘Have you got anything on the practising of magic?’ she asked the bookseller.

‘What, like a grimoire? No,’ he replied without looking up.

Kim shook her head. ‘I was thinking more of
defensive
magic. Have you read this about Southwell?’

‘Not recently.’

‘You should.’

This time Rendall did look up. ‘Why?’

‘Because it does explain something - but not what to do about it.’

‘When I’ve found out - ah!’

‘Success?’

‘Yes. Here we are. The book came from a library in Wiltshire belonging to a Mr Joseph Baker; he died about five years ago and his widow sold the books - what is it?’

‘Probably a coincidence,’ replied Kim, who didn’t believe it for one minute. She told Rendall about their trip to Market Peverell. ‘You’d better read the chapter.’

Rendall took back his book and began to read, while Kim picked up the dilapidated pamphlet once again and squinted at the spiky handwritten message.

But what became of Roger Southwell?

She sighed, more inclined to think the question should read
What’s to be done about Roger Southwell?

‘I suppose you’ll be going to Wiltshire, then?’ asked Rendall when he had finished the chapter.

Kim looked at her watch. It was ten to two. ‘Looks like it,’ she said glumly. ‘I wasn’t cut out to be a detective.’

‘Take the pamphlet,’ he suggested. ‘If you happen to find the rest of it, I’d be willing to pay a reasonable amount for it.’

‘I’d rather make a copy - it’s a bit old to be carted around in my pocket.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t have a photocopier. But I’ll pop it in a plastic folder. Look, it’ll be quite safe like that.’ ‘I suppose so,’ said Kim dubiously, accepting it.

‘Good luck,’ said James Rendall. He did not ask for a receipt, as she had half-expected he might.

Kim thought she’d need more than luck. She remembered the ravens and her hectic flight from Rome. Powers were ranged against her. ‘Well, you knew that,’ she told herself, starting the car.

She had always been a fast driver, even before she could afford a fast car. It was impatience as much as anything: chafing at the fact that she couldn’t actually do anything while driving - except drive.

Whereas Alan - thinking of Alan, Kim gritted her teeth. No three-centuries-sleeping wizard was going to take him over. Not if she had anything to do with it.

It started to rain, and she flicked the wipers on: their metronome movement dislodged a few leaves and threw them past her vision. With a burst of rifle fire at the execution of Cavaradossi,
Tosca
drew to its close, and Kim groped for another tape.

Water poured in a cataract over the windscreen, as if someone had suddenly thrown a small reservoir at it. Kim swore violently and clicked the wipers to fast. It appeared to make little difference. She slowed, carefully. The rain gushed down, blown at her by a buffeting wind which rocked the car in a cocoon of whirling spray. Kim turned on the headlights.

The wind grew worse, yowling across the exposed road. Kim saw a lorry toiling towards her down a long

hill, its canvas sides flapping like the sails of a clipper ship in the teeth of a tropical typhoon. She changed
down to tackle the hill, right hand tense on the steering wheel.

Twenty yards from her the lorry began to slide sideways over the white double line in the centre of the road. She saw its driver’s blanched, panic-stricken face as he wrestled to bring his juggernaut under control -even as she hauled on the wheel to bring her own car round in a desperate U-turn, feeling its wheels lock and skid for a few dreadful seconds before gripping the road again and allowing her to accelerate away from the careering lorry.

Escaping up the next side-road, Kim slewed her car to a stop just in time to see the lorry tip completely over, crashing and sliding in the hurricane-like winds. Sparks flew up from the road, instantly quenched by the teeming rain. As the lorry shuddered to a halt against trees splintered by its impact, she scooped up her phone and shakily punched out
999
.

‘We shall drink dishonour, we shall eat abuse For the Land we look to - for the Tongue we use.

We shall take our station, dirt beneath his feet,

While his hired captains jeer us in the street.

Cruel in the shadow, crafty in the sun,

Far beyond his borders shall his teachings run.

Sloven, sullen, savage, secret, uncontrolled,

Laying on a new land evil of the old -

Long-forgotten bondage, dwarfing heart and brain -All our fathers died to loose he shall bind again.

Here is naught at venture, random nor untrue -Swings the wheel full-circle, brims the cup anew.’

Rudyard Kipling,
The Old Issue

By the time Kim had told several different people what had happened, and the shocked and bruised (but otherwise unhurt) lorry driver had been conveyed to hospital, it was too late for her to continue on to Market Peverell. The rain, unabated, had brought on early night; Kim was damp and chilly and tired, and still shaken by her narrow escape.

She drove slowly home, too weary to make the effort of selecting an accompanying opera: Radio Three piped Brahms and less pleasant things at her. The wipers snipped across the windscreen, to and fro, to and fro, producing their own monotonous music, counterpointed by the rain.

Alan was still at work when she finally got back. Genuinely at work, it seemed: pencilled roughs were strewn over his desk, bearing the headline
‘Enter our great Treasure Trail Prize Draw and you could win £50,000’.

He had Joan Sutherland singing quietly in the background:
‘The soldier tir’d of war’s alarms/Forswears the clang of hostile arms/And scorns the spear and shield. /But if the brazen trumpet sound/He burns with conquest to be crown’d/And dares again the field.’

So engrossed was he that he did not notice Kim until she spoke.

‘You all right?’ she asked.

He raised his head, looking reassuringly like the old Alan, and nodded.

‘How was your day?’ he said, putting down his pen - he still liked to do first drafts in longhand, and the first two fingers of his hand were habitually grey with old ink - ‘Find any decent locations?’ This was the convenient fiction Kim had invented to explain her absence.

‘Ugh. Don’t ask,’ she groaned. ‘I was very nearly mashed by a lorry.’

Alan got to his feet, looking concerned.

‘Oh, don’t worry - no harm done. Only I had to waste the rest of the day hanging round in the bloody rain
while the police took dozens of statements.’ She yawned cavernously.

‘Poor you,’ said Alan, and she could almost believe he was back to normal. ‘Let me get you a drink.’

‘G and T. Easy on the T.’

‘Coming right up.’

‘First I’m going to change.’

‘Have a bath,’ Alan suggested. ‘I’ll bring it to you.’

Kim found the temptation of immersing herself in quantities of very hot water irresistible. She soaked herself and consumed her drink, feeling the cold and the annoyance drain away, and nearly fell asleep in the tub. She returned downstairs to find Alan making supper. It was all so normal that, perversely, she felt herself growing suspicious, yet was too tired to do anything about it; contenting herself with devouring a large plate of spaghetti bolognese. Outside, rain still lashed against the windows.

‘...deepening anticyclone,’ Kim heard a television weatherman say. She brought up her head, startled: she’d almost been asleep again. On the screen the forecaster flickered in front of his blue-and-green map, which was strewn with the tarot symbols of his art, like an image in the scrying-glass. ‘Heavy rain and strong winds, gale force in places, gusting up to...’ A snore made her look towards Alan. He was sound asleep, his head tucked into his shoulder, almost like a bird’s. Somehow he looked very alien.

Collecting up the debris of plates and glasses, Kim passed into the kitchen and stared at the windswept garden for a while before turning the light on. There was something unnatural about this storm: something that reeked of malice.

That thought identified, Kim shivered. Storms and demons - how could she combat them? She thought of looking in the glass again, but something held her back. Still, somehow, she was going to have to regain control of her life, if she were to thwart this invisible puppet-master who commanded wind and weather to confound her.

Moved by an impulse to impose a sort of order at least upon the sounds of chaos - she resorted again to music, slipping the tapes of
La Boheme
into the deck and donning a pair of earphones so as not to wake Alan.

Exuberant music, passionate music. This opera which, many years ago, had first opened up that world to her, still managed to bring inchoate tears to her eyes at its close. Silly, but there it was. Having music within herself, she had always rejoiced in the miracle which once had enabled composers to go on and on continuing to produce such melody, aria upon aria, upon duet, trio, quartet, ensemble. Chorus upon chorus. Divine music, the art of its finding now lost in cacophony. How had Rossini borne
not
composing, all those barren years? Kim wondered. Surely it was like relinquishing magical power: a loss too bitter to bear.

Power.
The word snagged like a bramble, caught in her brain. Music has power - that could not be denied. But just how much?

Kim drew a deep breath, her heart suddenly pounding with possibilities. The possibility that music had real power - it was a kind of magic, after all. And the possibility, at last, that here might be a weapon in this curious and arcane fight into which she had unwittingly been drawn. If she could learn how to use it, of course. How to gather it up and fling it, like a missile. Like a Mills bomb. And, of course, where to direct it.

Quietly, experimentally, Kim joined in with the voice she heard in her ears,
‘Che gelida manina, Se la lasci riscaldar... How cold your little hand is; let me warm it up for you...’
and as she came to
‘Ma per fortuna e

una notte di luna... But luckily tonight the moon is shining,’
she drew back the curtain and stared fiercely out
at the driving rain. Did it abate, momentarily? Did the moon try to shine through the blanketing clouds? In all honesty, she could not be sure. But the thought remained, like a jewel inside her.

Sighing, she let the curtain fall back and allowed the music to overwhelm her, welling in her head with its full commanding power.

In the morning a washed-out world awaited. Water lay gleaming sullenly in puddles, in gutters, across streets where drains were blocked. Each separate and self-contained little flood was pocked with the changing splashes of more rain. Above, an ill-tempered pregnant sky glowered over the flat drenched landscape.

Kim swore softly when she saw. Evidently it wasn’t done yet. ‘Time’s a-wasting,’ she muttered, tucking her hands into the sleeves of her dressing-gown.

‘Wha?’ mumbled Alan, wrestling with the duvet in which he was cocooned.

‘Still pissing down,’ said Kim, ‘But I need to go out again. I didn’t find a location yesterday, so it’ll have to be done today.’

‘Well, drive carefully.’

‘Don’t worry. I don’t want a repeat of yesterday’s little diversion, thanks. Coffee?’

‘Mm.’

‘You okay today?’

‘I think so,’ murmured Alan sleepily.

If she had cherished a vague hope that the weather might have improved, Kim was disappointed. She splashed down the path, cursing as her trainers let in the wet, and dived into her car with alacrity. It started first time, despite the rain, which caused her to wonder fleetingly why Roger Southwell had not acted to sabotage her means of travel. Perhaps he just doesn’t know how, she reasoned. Not a lot of motor cars around in the seventeenth century.

She waved to Alan, who was standing at the front window, and stuck a cassette in the slot. No sacred music, though she had briefly considered it, but a selection of tenor arias. Music which was challenging; valedictory; defiant; triumphant. Nothing elegiac, nothing of loss, but something which she could, perhaps, pick up and hurl at her enemy.
‘All’armi,’
she breathed,
‘To arms,’
although that cry would not be raised for a while, and bared her teeth at the wild rain as the inside of the car filled up the joyful aria from
Fille du Regiment.
She bellowed out its succession of exuberant top Cs at the top of her voice.

All the tales Kim had ever read about magic emphasised its perils as well as its seductive power; stressed the need for balance; taught that knowledge was the key: the knowledge of a thing’s true essence, sometimes symbolised by a secret true name. Sometimes, indeed, music was allied to power, but still with those caveats. She felt no temptation, no lust for power; just a certain desperation and a vague sense of clutching at straws. If this were magic, she had little idea how to use it, unless the music itself were the knowledge of the core.