OLD BAILEY'S BIRDS AND INFORMATION 3 page

"I know," said the man.

An enormous Irish wolfhound padded down the aisle and stopped beside a lute player, who sat on the floor picking at a melody in a desultory fashion. The wolfhound glared at Richard, snorted with disdain, then lay down and went to sleep. At the far end of the carriage an elderly falconer, with a hooded falcon on his wrist, was exchanging pleasantries with a small knot of damsels of a certain age. Some passengers obviously stared at the four travelers; others, just as obviously, ignored them. It was, Richard realized, as if someone had taken a small medieval court and put it, as best they could, in one car of an Underground train.

A herald raised his bugle to his lips and played a tuneless blast, as an immense, elderly man, in a huge fur-lined dressing gown and carpet slippers, staggered through the connecting door from the next compartment, his arm resting on the shoulder of a jester in shabby motley. The old man was larger than life in every way: he wore an eye-patch over his left eye, which had the effect of making him look slightly helpless, and unbalanced, like a one-eyed hawk. There were fragments of food in his red-gray beard, and what appeared to be pajama pants were visible at the bottom of his shabby fur gown. That, thought Richard, correctly, must be the earl. The earl's jester was an elderly man with a pinched, humorless mouth and a painted face. He led the earl to a thronelike carved wooden seat in which, a trifle unsteadily, the earl sat down. The wolfhound got up, padded down the length of the carriage, and settled itself at the earl's slippered feet. Earl's Court, thought Richard. Of course. And then he began to wonder whether there was a baron in Barons Court Tube station, or a Raven in Ravenscourt or,…

The little old man-at-arms coughed asthmatically and said, "Right then, you lot. State your business." Door stepped forward. She held her head up high, suddenly seeming taller and more at ease than Richard had previously seen her, and she said, "We seek an audience with His Grace the Earl."

The earl called down the carriage. "What did the little girl say, Halvard?" he asked. Richard wondered if he was deaf.

Halvard, the elderly man-at-arms, shuffled around and cupped his hand to his mouth. "They seek an audience, Your Grace," he shouted, over the rattle of the train.

The earl pushed aside his thick fur cap and scratched his head, meditatively. He was balding underneath his cap. "They do? An audience? How splendid. Who are they, Halvard?"

Halvard turned back to them. "He wants to know who you all are. Keep it short, though. Don't go on." "I am the Lady Door," announced Door. "The Lord Portico was my father."

The earl brightened at this, leaned forward, peered through the smoke with his one good eye. "Did she say she was Portico's oldest girl?" he asked the jester.

"Yus, your grace."

The earl beckoned to Door. "Come here," he said. "Come-come-come. Let me look at you." She walked down the swaying carriage, grabbing the thick rope straps that hung from the ceiling as she went, to keep her balance. When she stood before the earl's wooden chair, she curtseyed. He scratched at his beard and stared at her. "We were all quite devastated to hear of your father's unfortunate-" said the earl, and then he interrupted himself, and said, "Well, all your family, it was a-" and he trailed off, and said, "You know I had warmest regards for him, did a bit of business together… good old Portico… full of ideas… " He stopped. Then he tapped the jester on the shoulder and whispered, in a querulous boom, loud enough that it could be heard easily over the noise of the train, "Go and make jokes at them, Tooley. Earn your keep."

The earl's fool staggered up the aisle with an arthritic step. He stopped in front of Richard. "And who might you be?" he asked.

"Me?" said Richard. "Um. Me? My name? It's Richard. Richard Mayhew."

"Me?" squeaked the fool, in an elderly, rather theatrical imitation of Richard's Scottish accent. "Me? Um. Me? La, nuncle. Tis not a man, but a mooncalf." The courtiers sniggered, dustily.

"And I," de Carabas told the jester, with a blinding smile, "call myself the marquis de Carabas." The fool blinked.

"De Carabas the thief?" asked the jester. "De Carabas the bodysnatcher? De Carabas the traitor?" He turned to the courtiers around them. "But this cannot be de Carabas. For why? Because de Carabas has long since been banished from the earl's presence. Perhaps it is instead a strange new species of stoat, who grew particularly large." The courtiers tittered uneasily, and a low buzz of troubled conversation began. The earl said nothing, but his lips were pressed together tightly, and he had begun to tremble.

"I am called Hunter," said Hunter to the jester. The courtiers were silent then. The jester opened his mouth, as if he were going to say something, and then he looked at her, and he closed his mouth again. A hint of a smile played at the corner of Hunter's perfect lips. "Go on," she said. "Say something funny."

The jester stared at the trailing toes of his shoes. Then he muttered, "My hound hath no nose."

The earl, who had been staring at the marquis de Carabas with eyes like a slow-burning fuse, now exploded to his feet, a gray-bearded volcano, an elderly berserker. His head brushed the roof of the carriage. He pointed at the marquis and shouted, spittle flying, "I will not stand for it, I will not. Make him come forward."

Halvard waggled a gloomy spear at the marquis, who sauntered to the front of the train, until he stood beside Door in front of the earl's throne. The wolfhound growled in the back of its throat.

"You," said the earl, stabbing the air with a huge, knotted finger. "I know you, de Carabas. I haven't forgotten. I may be old, but I haven't forgotten."

The marquis bowed. "Might I remind Your Grace," he said urbanely, "that we had a deal? I negotiated the peace treaty between your people and the Raven's Court. And in return you agreed to provide a little favor." So there is a raven's court, thought Richard. He wondered what it was like.

"A little favor?" said the earl. He turned a deep beet red color. "Is that what you call it? I lost a dozen men to your foolishness in the retreat from White City. I lost an eye."

"And if you don't mind my saying so, Your Grace," said the marquis, graciously, "that is a very fetching patch. It sets off your face perfectly."

"I swore… " fulminated the earl, beard bristling, "I swore… that if you ever set foot in my domain I would… " he trailed off. Shook his head, confused and forgetful. Then he continued. "It'll come back to me. I do not forget."

"He might not be entirely pleased to see you?" whispered Door to de Carabas.

"Well, he's not," he muttered back.

Door stepped forward once more. "Your Grace," she said, loudly, clearly, "de Carabas is here with me as my guest and my companion. For the fellowship there has ever been between your family and mine, for the friendship between my father and-"

"He abused my hospitality," boomed the earl. "I swore that… if he ever again entered my domain I would have him gutted and dried… like, like something that had been gutted, first… like… "

"Perchance-then dried a kipper, my lord?" suggested the jester.

The earl shrugged. "It is of no matter. Guards, seize him." And they did. While neither of the guards would ever see sixty again, each of them was holding a crossbow, pointed at the marquis, and their hands did not tremble, neither with age nor with fear. Richard looked at Hunter. She seemed untroubled by this: she was watching it almost with amusement, like someone attending the theater.

Door folded her arms and stood taller, putting her head back, raising her pointed chin. She looked less like a ragged street pixie; more like someone used to getting her own way. The opal eyes flashed. "Your Grace, the marquis is with me as my companion, on my quest. Our families have been friends for a long time now-"

"Yes. They have," interrupted the earl, helpfully. "Hundreds of years. Hundreds and hundreds. Knew your grandfather, too. Funny old fellow. Bit vague," he confided.

"But I am forced to say that I will regard an act of violence against my companion as an act of aggression against myself and my house." The girl stared up at the old man. He towered over her. They stood for some moments, frozen. He tugged on his red-and-gray beard, agitatedly, then he thrust out his lower lip like a small child. "I will not have him here," he said.

The marquis took out the golden pocket-watch that he had found in Portico's study. He examined it, carelessly. Then he turned to Door and said, as if none of the events around them had occurred. "My lady, I will obviously be of more use to you off this train than on. And I have other avenues to explore."

"No," she said. "If you go, we all go."

"I don't think so," said the marquis. "Hunter will look after you as long as you stay in London Below. I'll meet you at the next market. Don't do anything too stupid in the meantime." The train was coming into a station,

Door fixed the earl with her look: there was something more ancient and powerful in that glance than her young years would have seemed to allow. Richard noticed that the room fell quiet whenever she spoke. "Will you let him go in peace, Your Grace?" she asked.

The earl ran his hands over his face, rubbed his good eye and his eye-patch, then looked back at her. "Just make him go," said the earl. He looked at the marquis. "Next time… " he ran a thick old finger across his Adam's apple "… kipper."

The marquis bowed low. "I'll see myself out," he said to the guards, and stepped toward the open door. Halvard raised his crossbow and pointed it toward the marquis's back. Hunter reached out her hand and pushed the end of the crossbow back down toward the floor. The marquis stepped onto the platform, turned and waved with an elaborate flourish. The door hissed closed behind him.

The earl sat down on his huge chair at the end of the car. He said nothing. The train rattled and lurched through the dark tunnel. "Where are my manners?" muttered the earl to himself. He looked at them with one staring eye. Then he said it again, in a desperate boom that Richard could feel in his stomach, like a bass drumbeat. "Where are my manners?" He motioned one of the elderly men-at-arms to him. "They will be hungry after their journey, Dagvard. Thirsty, too, I shouldn't wonder."

"Yes, Your Grace."

"Stop the train!" called the earl. The doors hissed open, and Dagvard scuttled off onto a platform. Richard watched the people on the platform. No one came into their car. No one seemed to notice that anything was at all unusual.

Dagvard walked over to a vending machine on the side of the platform. He took off his metal helmet. Then he rapped, with one mailed glove, on the side of the machine. "Orders from the earl," he said. "Choc'lits." A ratcheting whirr came from deep in the guts of the machine, and it began to spit out dozens of Cadbury's Fruit and Nut chocolate bars, one after another. Dagvard held his helmet below the opening to catch them. The doors began to close. Halvard put the handle of his pike between the doors, and they opened again and began bumping open and shut on the pike handle. "Please stand clear of the doors," said a loudspeaker voice. "The train cannot leave until the doors are all closed."

The earl was staring at Door lopsidedly, with his one good eye. "So. What brings you here to me?" he asked.

She licked her lips. "Well, indirectly, Your Grace, my father's death."

He nodded, slowly. "Yes. You seek vengeance. Quite right, too." He coughed, then recited, in a basso profundo, "Brave the battling blade, flashes the furious fire, steel sword sheathed in hated heart, crimsons the… the… something. Yes."

"Vengeance?" Door thought for a moment. "Yes. That was what my father said. But I mostly just want to understand what happened, and to protect myself. My family had no enemies." Dagvard staggered back onto the train then, his helmet filled with chocolate bars and cans of Coke; the doors were permitted to close, and the train moved off once more.

Lear's coat, still on the floor of the tunnel, was covered in coins and bills, now, but it was also covered with shoes-kicking the coins, smearing and tearing the bills, ripping the fabric of the coat. Lear had begun to cry. "Please. Why won't you leave me alone?" he begged. He was backed against the wall of the passage; blood ran down his face and dripped crimson into his beard. His saxophone hung limply, awkwardly, on his chest, dented and scraped.

He was surrounded by a small crowd of people-more than twenty, less than fifty-every one of them shoving and pushing, in a mindless mob, their eyes blank and staring, each man and woman desperately fighting and clawing in order to give Lear their money. There was blood on the tiled wall, where Lear had knocked his head. Lear flailed out at one middle-aged woman, her purse wide open, a fistful of five-pound notes thrust out at him. She clawed at his face in her eagerness to give him her money. He twisted to avoid her fingernails and fell to the tunnel floor.

Someone stepped on his hand. His face was pushed into a slurry of coins. He began to sob, and to curse. "I told you not to overuse that tune," said an elegant voice, nearby. "Naughty."

"Help me," gasped Lear.

"Well, there is a counter-charm," admitted the voice, almost reluctantly.

The crowd was pressing closer now. A flung fifty-pence coin opened Lear's cheek. He curled into a fetal ball, hugging himself, burying his face in his knees. "Play it, damn you," sobbed Lear. "Whatever you want… just make them stop… "

A pennywhistle piping began softly, and echoed down the passage. A simple phrase, repeated over and over, slightly different every time: the de Carabas variations. The footsteps were moving away. Shuffling, at first, then picking up pace: moving away from him. Lear opened his eyes. The marquis de Carabas was leaning against the wall, playing the pennywhistle. When he saw Lear looking at him he took the whistle from his lips and replaced it in an inside pocket of his coat. He tossed Lear a lace-edged handkerchief of patched linen. Lear wiped the blood from his forehead and face. "They would have killed me," he said, accusingly.

"I did warn you," said de Carabas. "Just count yourself lucky that I was coming back this way." He helped Lear into a sitting position. "Now," he said. "I think you owe me another favor."

Lear picked up his coat-torn and muddy and imprinted with the marks of many feet-from the passage floor. He suddenly felt very cold, and he wrapped the shredded coat around his shoulders. Coins fell, and bills fluttered to the floor. He let them lie. "Was I really lucky? Or did you set me up?"

The marquis looked almost offended. "I don't know how you could even bring yourself to think such a thing."

'"Cos I know you. That's how. So what is it that you want me to do this time? Theft? Arson?" Lear sounded resigned, and a little sad. And then, "Murder?"

De Carabas reached down and took back his handkerchief. "Theft, I'm afraid. You were right the first time," he said, with a smile. "I find myself in rather urgent need of a piece of T'ang dynasty sculpture." Lear shivered. Then, slowly, he nodded.

Richard was handed a bar of Cadbury's Fruit and Nut chocolate and a large silver goblet, ornamented around the rim with what appeared to Richard to be sapphires. The goblet was filled with Coca-Cola. The jester, whose name seemed to be Tooley, cleared his throat loudly. "I would like to propose a toast to our guests," he said. "A child, a bravo, a fool. May they each get what they deserve."

"Which one am I?" whispered Richard to Hunter.

"The fool, of course," she said.

"In the old days," said Halvard dismally, after sipping his Coke, "we had wine. I prefer wine. It's not as sticky."

"Do all the machines just give you things like that?" asked Richard.

"Oh yes," said the old man. "They listen to the earl, y'see. He rules the Underground. The bit with the trains. He's lord of the Central, the Circle, the Jubilee, the Victorious, the Bakerloo-well, all of them except the Underside Line."

"What's the Underside Line?" asked Richard. Halvard shook his head and pursed his lips. Hunter brushed Richard's shoulder with her fingers. "Remember what I told you about the shepherds of Shepherd's Bush?"

"You said I didn't want to meet them, and there were some things I was probably better off not knowing."

"Good," she said, "So now you can add the Underside Line to the list of those things."

Door came back down the carriage toward them. She was smiling. "The earl's agreed to help us," she said. "Come on. He's meeting us in the library." Richard began to follow, as he realized that the question What library? had not risen to his lips. The longer he was here, the more he took at face value. Instead, he followed Door toward the earl's empty throne, and round the back of it, and through the connecting door behind it, and into the library. It was a huge stone room, with a high wooden ceiling. Each wall was covered with shelves. Each shelf was laden with objects: there were books, yes. But the shelves were filled with a host of other things: tennis rackets, hockey sticks, umbrellas, a spade, a notebook computer, a wooden leg, several mugs, dozens of shoes, pairs of binoculars, a small log, six glove puppets, a lava lamp, various CDs, records (LPs, 45s, and 78s), cassette tapes and eight-tracks, dice, toy cars, assorted pairs of dentures, watches, flashlights, four garden gnomes of assorted sizes (two fishing, one of them mooning, the last smoking a cigar), piles of newspapers, magazines, grimoires, three-legged stools, a box of cigars, a plastic nodding-head Alsatian, socks… the room was a tiny empire of lost property.

"This is his real domain," muttered Hunter. "Things lost. Things forgotten."

There were windows set in the stone wall. Through them, Richard could see the rattling darkness and the passing lights of the Underground tunnels. The earl was sitting on the floor with his legs splayed, patting the wolfhound and scratching it underneath the chin. The jester stood beside him, looking embarrassed. The earl clambered to his feet when he saw them. His forehead creased. "Ah. There you are. Now, there was a reason I asked you here, it'll come to me… " He tugged at his red-gray beard, a tiny gesture from such a huge man.

"The Angel Islington, Your Grace," said Door politely.

"Oh yes. Your father had a lot of ideas for changes, you know. Asked me about them. I don't trust change. I sent him to Islington." He stopped. Blinked his one eye. "Did I tell you this already?"

"Yes, Your Grace. And how can we get to Islington?"

The earl nodded as if Door had said something profound. "Only once by the quick way. After that you have to go the long way down. Dangerous."

Door said, patiently, "And the quick way is…?"

"No, no. Need to be an opener to use it. Only good for Portico's family." He rested a huge hand on her shoulder. Then his hand slid up to her cheek. "Better off staying here with me. Keep an old man warm at night, eh?" He leered at her and touched her tangle of hair with his old fingers. Hunter took a step toward Door. Door gestured with her hand: No. Not yet.

Door looked up at the earl, and said, "Your Grace, I am Portico's oldest daughter. How do I get to the Angel Islington?" Richard found himself amazed that Door was able to keep her temper in the face of the earl's losing battle with temporal drift.

The earl winked his single eye in a solemn blink: an old hawk, his head tipped on one side. Then he took his hand from her hair. "So you are. So you are. Portico's daughter. How is your dear father? Keeping well, I hope? Fine man. Good man."

"How do we get to the Angel Islington?" said Door, but now there was a tremble in her voice.

"Hmm? Use the Angelus, of course."

Richard found himself imagining the earl sixty, eighty, five hundred years ago: a mighty warrior, a cunning strategist, a great lover of women, a fine friend, a terrifying foe. There was still the wreckage of that man in there somewhere. That was what made him so terrible, and so sad. The earl fumbled on the shelves, moving pens and pipes and peashooters, little gargoyles and dead leaves. Then, like an aged cat stumbling on a mouse, he seized a small, rolled-up scroll, and handed it to the girl. "Here y'go, lassie," said the earl. "All in here. And I suppose we'd better drop you off where you need to go"

"You'll drop us off?" asked Richard. "In a train?"

The earl looked around for the source of the sound, focused on Richard, and smiled enormously. "Oh, think nothing of it," he boomed. "Anything for Portico's daughter." Door clutched the scroll tightly, triumphantly.

Richard could feel the train beginning to slow, and he, and Door, and Hunter were led out of the stone room and back into the car. Richard peered out at the platform, as they slowed down.

"Excuse me. What station is this?" he asked. The train had stopped, facing one of the station signs: BRITISH MUSEUM, it said. Somehow, this was one oddity too many. He could accept "Mind the Gap" and the Earl's Court, and even the strange library. But damn it, like all Londoners, he knew his Tube map, and this was going too far. "There isn't a British Museum Station," said Richard, firmly.

"There isn't?" boomed the earl. "Then, mm, then you must be very careful as you get off the train." And he guffawed, delightedly, and tapped his jester on the shoulder. "Hear that, Tooley? I am as funny as you are."

The jester smiled as bleak a smile as ever was seen. "My sides are splitting, my ribs are cracking, and my mirth is positively uncontainable, Your Grace," he said.

The doors hissed open. Door smiled up at the earl. "Thank you," she said. "Off, off," said the vast old man, shooing Door and Richard and Hunter out of the warm, smoky carriage onto the empty platform. And then the doors closed, and the train moved away, and Richard found himself staring at a sign which, no matter how many times he blinked-nor even if he looked away from it and looked back suddenly to take it by surprise-still obstinately persisted in saying:

BRITISH MUSEUM

EIGHT

It was early evening, and the cloudless sky was transmuting from royal blue to a deep violet, with a smudge of fire orange and lime green over Paddington, four miles to the west, where, from Old Bailey's perspective anyway, the sun had recently set.

Skies, thought Old Bailey, in a satisfied sort of a way. Never a two of them alike. Not by day nor not by night, neither. He was a bit of a connoisseur of skies, was Old Bailey, and this was a good 'un. The old man had pitched his tent for the night on a roof opposite St. Paul's Cathedral, in the center of the City of London.

He was fond of St. Paul's, and it, at least, had changed little in the last three hundred years. It had been built in white Portland stone, which had, before it was even completed, begun to turn black from the soot and the filth in the smoky London air and now, following the cleaning of London in the 1970s, was more or less white again; but it was still St. Paul's. He was not sure that the same could be said for the rest of the City of London: he peered over the roof, stared away from his beloved Sky, down to the sodium-lit pavement below. He could see security cameras affixed to a wall, and a few cars, and one late office worker, locking a door and then walking toward the Tube. Brrr. Even the thought of going underground made Old Bailey shudder. He was a roof-man and proud of it; had fled the world at ground level so long ago…

Old Bailey remembered when people had actually lived here in the City, not just worked; when they had lived and lusted and laughed, built ramshackle houses one leaning against the next, each house filled with noisy people. Why, the noise and the mess and the stinks and the songs from the alley across the way (then known, at least colloquially, as Shitten Alley) had been legendary in their time, but no one lived in the City now. It was a cold and cheerless place of offices, of people who worked in the day and went home to somewhere else at night. It was not a place for living anymore. He even missed the stinks.

The last smudge of orange sun faded into nocturnal purple. The old man covered the cages, so the birds could get their beauty sleep. They grumbled, then slept. Old Bailey scratched his nose, after which he went into his tent and fetched a blackened stew-pot, some water, some carrots and potatoes, salt, and a well-hanged pair of dead, plucked starlings. He walked out onto the roof, lit a small fire in a soot-blackened coffee can, and was putting his stew on to cook when he became aware that someone was watching him from the shadows by a chimney stack.

He picked up his toasting fork and waved it threateningly at the chimney stack. "Who's there?"

The marquis de Carabas stepped out of the shadows, bowed perfunctorily, and smiled gloriously. Old Bailey lowered his toasting fork. "Oh," he said. "It's you. Well, what do you want? Knowledge? Or birds?"

The marquis walked over, picked a slice of raw carrot from Old Bailey's stew, and munched it. "Information, actually," he said.

Old Bailey chortled. "Hah," he said. "There's a first. Ehh?" Then he leaned toward the marquis. "What'll you trade for it?"

"What do you need?"

"Maybe I should do what you do. I should ask for another favor. An investment for one day down the road." Old Bailey grinned.

"Much too expensive, in the long run," said the marquis, without humor.

Old Bailey nodded. Now the sun had gone down, it was getting very cold, very fast. "Shoes, then," he said. "And a balaclava hat." He inspected his fingerless gloves: they were more hole than glove. "And new gloveses. It's going to be a bastard winter."

"Very well. I'll bring them to you." The marquis de Carabas put his hand into an inside pocket and produced, like a magician producing a rose from thin air, the black animal figure he had taken from Portico's study. "Now. What can you tell me about this?"

Old Bailey pulled on his glasses. He took the object from de Carabas. It was cold to the touch. He sat down on an air-conditioning unit, then, turning the black obsidian statue over and over in his hand, he announced: "It's the Great Beast of London." The marquis said nothing. His eyes flickered from the statue to Old Bailey, impatiently. Old Bailey, enjoying the marquis's minor discomfort, continued at his own pace. "Now, they say that back in first King Charlie's day-him 'as got his head all chopped off, silly bugger-before the fire and the plague, this was, there was a butcher lived down by the Fleet Ditch, had some poor creature he was going to fatten up for Christmas. Some says it was a piglet, and some says it wusn't, and there's some-and I list meself as one of them-that wusn't never properly certain. One night in December the beast runned away, ran into the Fleet Ditch, and vanished into the sewers. And it fed on the sewage, and it grew, and it grew. And it got meaner, and nastier. They'd send in hunting parties after it, from time to time."

The marquis pursed his lips. "It must have died three hundred years ago."

Old Bailey shook his head. "Things like that, they're too vicious to die. Too old and big and nasty."

The marquis sighed. "I thought it was just a legend," he said. "Like the alligators in the sewers of New York City."

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 761