Send me someone fast and clever, George, and make it well again.
Please give my regards to your family and tell them I continue healthy.
[Post script: Dear Tweel, I’m sorry to bring up the Anglo-Saxon prize, but you did promise if I helped you pass the exam, you would one day help me, and that day is today, Coddis girls together! Do please bring this to G. as swiftly as can be, keep it away from those frightful little Civil Service fellows or they’ll want Frankie’s wotnot for themselves. And “wot not” is the word, Tweel, I promise you: things we are not meant to wot of, and do not dare tell me that’s a hanging preposition, because I know. Would you have me write “things of which we are not meant to wot”? It’s sheerest drivel, Tweel, and I shall have no part of it. In any case I’m old and foreign. See above.]
Dotty Catty, in the fine tradition of Addeh Sikkim and Merry England, will not receive a man in private. Thus, Edie is the perfect agent. However, the Opium Khan regards women in general as chattel. No female admitted to the palace would have any freedom of movement nor security of person. Thus, an invitation has been secured for one Commander James Edward Banister, of His Majesty’s Royal Navy, to come on a goodwill visit and discuss the disposition of the Khan’s forces in any invasion of India by the Empire of Japan. Lodged in the palace, James Edward will hide away at night and transform once again into Edie, who will then present herself to the Dowager-Khatun in respectable style, albeit by climbing in through her window at dead of night.
The Opium Khan, in the finest modern fashion, desires that Frankie Fossoyeur create for him an Ultimate Weapon. Abel Jasmine would prefer that such a thing—if exist it must—exist in Cornwall, instead.
And all this is now the sole responsibility of one Edie Banister, the girl who wished to serve her country.
In the Pig & Poet, Edie drains the last of her brandy and shifts her backside on the ragged, uncomfortable stool. Since her eighty-ninth birthday, she’s had a bad relationship with backless chairs. She stares at the darts board as a young tough with bad skin lands a trio in the treble twenty. Not bad at all. She sees Biglandry’s face in the pattern of holes in the board, a martyred, hapless murderer, sent to do a job he was never fitted for. Not that he lacked talent in the direction of death. Just intelligence. She wonders if he’ll be the last, and concludes that, if he is, she will almost certainly have failed—so she must assume at least one more session like this, with corpseguilt glaring at her from an empty chair.
She sighs, and begins to gather her belongings, not without a measure of bitterness. Here she is, a million years later, and not an older brother in all the world. No family to speak of at all, save for a foul-smelling dog clinging to life with grim determination in her handbag. And at that, he’s liable to outlast her.
Edie Banister stands—a process which takes a distressingly long, awkward time—and goes upstairs to the relative tranquillity of her rented room. She stares around her. Oscar Wilde, she recalls, acknowledged the close of his mortal existence by remarking: “It’s me or the wallpaper. One of us has got to go.”
Looking up at the brown floral print, she feels a fleeting kinship. All the same, there’s work to be done. Her shopping expedition was not just for clothes. A kitchen shop, two supermarkets, and a garden centre have yielded ingredients for some small advantages in what she suspects will turn out to be a very unfair fight. Tupperware boxes, thermos flasks, and liquid fertiliser, a kettle for a witch’s cauldron: Edie lays it all out, and then jots down proportions from memory.
In the brown room, amid the cheap, well-intended furniture, Edie Banister makes saboteur magics, alchemies of resistance. And then she lowers herself gratefully into bed, and finds that Bastion has so far bestirred himself as to claim a space by her feet. She sleeps, and dreams of old work, unfinished.
VI
If ever;
not arrested;
the Bold Receptionist.
Joe Spork holds his telephone in his left hand and pokes at it with his right. He has lost an indeterminate amount of time and is shivering, symptoms he identifies as shock. Fortunately, he knows the number by heart. He has never used it before, but it is the rule of the House of Spork, and always was, since he was old enough to count: if in doubt; if you ever; if you are accused; if you are nearby; if you are taken hostage; if you are arrested; if you hear a rumour that someone; if you wake up and she’s dead; if, if, if, you call the magic number and you bare your soul.
At nine-twenty at night, it takes two rings for someone to pick up the phone.
“Noblewhite Cradle, Bethany speaking.” A woman’s voice, not a girl’s. This number is not answered by receptionists or temps. It rings on the desk of Noblewhite Cradle’s formidable office manager. When the actual Bethany is not in residence, there are three surrogate Bethanys who will take the call. At no time, ever, will it take more than two rings for one of them to lift the receiver. The extra Bethanys, in private life, go by the names Gwen, Rose, and Indira. It’s not important. When they answer this phone, they are Bethany.
“Good evening, Bethany, it’s Joshua Joseph Spork.” Bethany (all of her) knows the name and history of every single client with access to this number. There aren’t many—but even if there were, the name “Spork” is an absolute passport at Noblewhite Cradle.
“Good evening, Mr. Spork, how may I help you?”
“I need Mercer, please.”
“Mr. Mercer?” Even Bethany hesitates for a second. “Really, Mr. Spork? Are you sure?”
“Yes, Bethany. I’m afraid so.”
There is a brief stutter on the line. Bethany has just switched over from a standard phone to a headset, leaving both of her hands free to work. She’s ambidextrous and she has two computers in front of her, each set up for use with one hand and patched into the communications system at Noblewhite Cradle. In other words, Bethany is now able to perform three distinct actions at once. One hand is tapping out an extension number in response to Joe’s request. The other is discreetly alerting the senior partners to the fact that Mercer Cradle is now in play, and they should therefore expect the usual degree of insane fallout. In the meantime, she continues the conversation with Joe.
“I have the List here, Mr. Spork. Are there any matters arising from the last few days of which I should be aware?”
The Cradle’s List is a celebrated joke in the legal journals, the Loch Ness Monster of documents. Jonah Noblewhite in his day was occasionally cartooned as a sort of black-lettered Santa, with his List displaying the peccadilloes of the mighty and the notorious, the better to conceal them from the world. If the matter being lampooned featured the Scottish courts, Nessie herself was often the client. Joe tells Bethany that his entry is as accurate as he knows how to make it.
“Putting you through now. Will you require any subsidiary services?” Meaning, will you be needing us to bail you out, or get hold of the negatives, or arrange a poker game for you to have attended last night?
“For the present, no, thank you,” Joe says politely.
“Very well,” Bethany says, not without a measure of congratulation. Joe has never availed himself of Noblewhite Cradle’s more outré services, at least, not directly, though he suspects his father may have deployed them on his behalf when he was a child. Bethany is always glad when her charges are bystanders rather than arrestees.
“I am in the lobby of Wilton’s,” Mercer Cradle’s voice says pleasantly, “where my rack of lamb has just arrived and is even now cooling next to a glass of unimpeachable Sassicaia. Since my dinner companion threw her gin and tonic at me shortly after the fish course, you have my full attention as long as someone is dead. Is someone dead? Because otherwise—”