Vellum (57 page)

seven

ZEUS IRAE

OF MARRIAGE AND MOTHERHOOD

“W
ait. Please, now,” says Maclean and “thank you, thank you,” as they settle down. “I'd like to say again how much of an honor it is to have Ms. Pankhurst and Ms. Messenger here with us to speak tonight. As you'll all know, there's few has worked as hard in the cause of universal suffrage as Ms. Pankhurst, so I'll do what's right, right now, and hand the floor to her without more song and dance.”

The crowd applauds again and Ms. Pankhurst steps forward to the podium on the small stage of the Labor Club, looking down at the area that's filled to the brim so it is with the folk sitting on all the folding metal chairs and standing round the edges and the back. A sea of people, it is, and Seamus only wishes he could drown in it because all he can do is look at Anna standing up there on the stage behind Ms. Pankhurst and hope she doesn't see him. He's too close to the front, standing here at the side of the hall, behind the fellow in the flat cap. Hand shoved in his jacket pocket he fiddles with a box of matches, like an embarrassed child kicking sand under his feet.

“First let us hear this woman,” says Ms. Pankhurst, “tell her tale of her terrible fortune.”

“Then let her learn the rest of her trials from you,”
the bitmites hiss in Seamus's ear. For a second, the Labor Club flickers, shimmers.

Shut up,
he thinks. Yer not fookin real. This is what's fookin real.

Pankhurst is speaking quiet words of sympathy, encouragement, to Anna.

“It is your place to do this, for all the sisters under the same patriarchal yoke, and for all the other reasons. Remember, it may be worth the pain, even to weep again for your misfortunes, when to do so teaches sympathy to those who hear.”

And Anna nods, quiet and nervous, steels herself she does, and Seamus sees the spark in her he always saw, as she steps forward.

“I don't know how,” she says, “how I can find the strength to trust you with this, but I shall try to give you all you ask for in plain speech, though I'm ashamed even to speak of it, that…storm sent by the saints above. And how it swept away all my decorum.”

And Anna tells the crowd about her fine upstanding English Army officer—a gentleman, he was, a hero of the Great War with his noble bearing and stiff upper lip. Seamus listens, pushed back against the wall. He doesn't really hear all that she's saying though, as he's too busy remembering it the way she told him on the beach at Inchgillan.

“O, Seamus, he sent me messages night after night, and when I read them I could hear his voice moving about my room, as if he softened me with his smooth words. Seamus, you have to understand.”

O greatly happy maid, he'd written, why be a maid forever when the highest marriage could be yours to take. A Duke's heart has been warmed by you, by love's dart, and wants only to be one with you in love; Anna, my child, my dear, my dove, do not disdain the bed of Dukes. Go out to Lerna's meadows, to the stables of your father's fine estate, and I will meet you there, only to see you Anna, that the eye of this Duke may be eased in its desire.

With such messages she was distressed each night, until…

Until one day she found herself pregnant and her fine fiancé lost on some damnfool boy's own adventure in the middle of nowhere.

ARGUS-EYED HUMANITY

“I dared to tell my father of the dreams that plagued my night, and all I dreamed of was the same as any young lass dreams, marriage and motherhood.”

And she was foolish, yes, and she should never have let him do that to her, should have waited, yes, she should have waited, but she had the ring on her finger—just not the right finger—and—and she had looked at Finnan there on the beach, the cold wind whipping his hair across his face and bringing tears to his eyes—and she said, “It wasn't the first time, was it, Seamus?”

But Enoch Messenger had tried to make things right, to do right by his daughter, even though she'd brought such shame upon them. He had tried to track down Carter's family or friends, this noble hero's roots. But he'd found nothing. He sent letter after letter to the man's commanding officer, to friends or colleagues that he'd mentioned, scattered far afield, as far as Pytho and the oaks of the Dordogne, that he might learn what it was necessary he should say or do, to do right by the lords of tradition. But they came back with dark, ambiguous and indistinctly uttered riddles. Her fiancé had not been heard of, hide nor hair.

“Till finally,” she says, “a plain report came back, as clear and sharp as any order given to an army underling, telling my father that my shame was mine alone. A fine upstanding man, an
officer
and a
gentleman,
why he would never, never…I was a liar, so they said, and if it was the reputation of his family my father cared for, he should do as any good man would and send away his shame, expel me from my home and country, if he didn't want to see his family's good name…wiped out.”

So she was sent away to have her child—“
to wander to the earth's ends,”
Seamus hears the bitmites say, and as he looks at her onstage he has a vision. He sees Anna as she is now but with images of other selves laid over her, like reflections in a window that she stands behind. He sees a slightly younger girl but with the same red hair and freckled face, wearing a sort of zipped-up leather jacket like a man's, a pilot or a motorcyclist's; and there's another Anna who again is different, this one dressed in a simple robe of white, some Grecian maid of olden days. He sees her as a triple being, past, present and future. Seamus blinks and rubs his eyes. He squeezes his eyelids shut, his fingers squeezing the bridge of his nose, trying to force the old nerve trouble back down into the depths of him where it belongs. When he opens his eyes, the world is normal again, without the whispering ghost images of his turns pressing in on him the way they do. He's calm.

Against his will, she's telling them, forced by these forecasts of judgmental stares like fiery thunderbolts, forced by the never-ending reign of high society's earls and dames, he drove her out, for shame, he threw her out from her own home, as if her very form and mind were changed to some horned beast. Anna, the cow. Anna, the rutting, sweating, filthy sow, unmarried mother, slave to her desire as much as any creature lusting and fucking in the barn.

“Now here I am before you,” Anna says, “driven by the lash of sharp tongues, words that bite like flies, and stung from land to land.”

The hall is quiet. There are some here and there, as Seamus looks around, that look uncomfortable. They may be socialists, they may believe in the struggle of the working classes and in the kindred souls of others oppressed around the world, the Irish, and the Negroes of America, and woman's suffrage, sure, but there's still the matter of decency and taste. A lad has to sow his wild oats, sure, but the lass he plants them in, she's still disgraced. These are still men who, well, they think a woman should have the vote, but sure and her place is in the home, it is, and these are still women who'd tut and tsk about the wee lassie down the road who let her boyfriend get her up the duff. But the hall is quiet. Sure and it's altogether a different story when yer face-to-face with a young girl put out of her own home with an infant son and with nowhere else to go but on the streets.

Ah, Jesus wept, thinks Seamus. How can a gentle shepherd have such a violent temper, or is it not Himself that's watching over our every step, dead as He is? The bitmites whisper in his ear of “
Argus-eyed humanity and peacock pride”
and quietly, unnoticed by the others in the hall, he slips a hip flask from his pocket, takes a wee sip from it. He still remembers his own reaction when she told him, how his mind leapt frantically with her tumbling words across a century's stream of dreams it seems, of what they had and what they could have had, before it all went wrong, before poor Thomas died, before the war, before her bloody English officer, before his illness, back to spring in Lerna.

Spring in Lerna. Summer in the Somme. It's autumn now, outside the hall, autumn in Glasgow, all brown and red and orange and yellow leaves looking golden in the setting sun of Evenfall.

“And…that's my story,” Anna says.

“O Seamus, speak to me,” she said as he stared off into the ocean. “If you have anything to say, just say it. Speak to me. I don't care if it hurts me; I deserve it, Seamus. Please just say something.”

She reached out and he felt the calfskin of her glove touching the back of his hand.

“It's not comfort I'm looking for, Seamus. It's not false words and empty pity. It's just…You've never lied to me. You never lied.”

He could see what she wanted in her eyes, hear it in what she didn't say.
What's going to happen to me, Seamus?

“Lies are the cruelest ill of all,” she said.

In His Black Pinpoint Pupils

“Ah, no. Enough, alas.”

The air in the hall seems to vibrate and Seamus Finnan watches Anna on the stage dissolve, and Pankhurst and Maclean, until there's nothing but the velvet curtain at their back, the banner welcoming the speakers and the red flag and the Union Jack at each side. The audience shimmers, a mirage in a desert, the air over tarmac on a hot, summer road.

“We never thought we'd hear a tale so full of cruelty,” the bitmites whisper, such ugly and intolerable hurts, such sufferings.

He pushes through the ghost images of his memory until he's standing in the center of the room. There's only one chair now, one of the folding metal chairs—with a circle of white salt around it on the floor—and as he lays his hand on the backrest, he feels it biting cold under his skin. His breath steams, white and swirling in the air in front of him. He sits down in the chair, closes his eyes.

“Your love,” the voices whisper, “is a two-edged sword. It chills our souls.”

He opens his eyes and the abattoir is crisp and clear. A cold reality. Ah, Christ, thinks Finnan. He hadn't thought of Anna for years, for decades even.

Henderson stands at the doorway with its plastic strips swaying like folds of curtains and Henderson himself turned away, speaking quietly to some absent underling or superior by link, one hand up to his earpiece; he catches snippets of phrases
—
making progress, physically stable, yes, no, MacChuill, needs to be watched, I can assure you, maybe you should, can't depend on him, under control. There's an edginess in his tone and stance, Finnan thinks.

“You're sure?” he hears the man say, saying it slow and clear, the way you do when you're looking for clarity in return. “This…situation with the bitmites couldn't affect us here?”

He glances over his shoulder and Finnan drops his eyes, mumbles like a man lost in delirium. Henderson turns away again.

“OK. Yes sir,” he says, “I think he's nearly ready for you.”

Metatron, thinks Finnan. If the Covenant is behind this—and Henderson is so fucking Covenant it makes you sick—then it has to be Metatron pulling the strings here. Last he heard, the other big guns were all tied up in the War. Angels with swords of fire walking through Jerusalem. A Sovereign's compound in Fallujah wiped out in an explosion. An earthquake in Iran. A nuclear accident in North Korea. The angel war isn't two armies facing each other across a battlefield. No, it's a correspondent in a fawn flak jacket and webbed helmet talking straight to the camera—and Finnan had swallowed as he looked into the man's eyes and saw the unkin mark in his black pinpoint pupils, because even over the fuzz of a link disrupted by extremist jammers, Finnan had read the name in his blank gaze. Azazel, angel of death. Jesus, the birdman had stared out at his VR audience, smooth as a milk shake, and shown his soul to the world deliberately, so that anyone out there with the knowledge to read it, any unkin out there, Covenant or otherwise, would get the message. We're in charge now.

So, it's pretty clear what Gabriel and Michael and Azazel and all their little minions, all their little Hendersons, are up to these days. Hunting Sovereigns. But Metatron isn't a field agent, not like them. Information and analysis. Intel and intercept. Bitmites. This is his operation. He looks down at his open chest, wondering why they've given him this respite, this chance to get his thoughts clear.

“Alas, a lass's fate,” the bitmites hiss. “We shudder, seeing Anna's state. If we were flesh all we would pray is that our fates should never bring us any husband from the heavens, never see us share the bed of Dukes.”

Again the sympathetic words. Sure and with a bit of practice they might even come close to passing a Turing Test, but he's not fooled for a minute by their fucking crocodile tears. He's willing to concede that maybe Metatron's little machines are fancy enough to have developed some sort of…curiosity. But empathy? No, he thinks. It's all part of Metatron's plan. Peel him open, strip him down and soften him up. Anna is just a wound they want reopened.