“Not the law, is it?”
“It’s bailiffs, Bob, and all manner of government.”
“Venal office-holders?”
“By the bucketload, I think.”
“Buggeration! The worm shall eat them up like a garment, Joe, and the moth shall eat them up like wool, but your righteousness shall be from generation to generation. The Bible, that is, and I’ve always fancied the Lord was particularly thinking of revenuers and debt collectors.”
“Thank you, Bob. And this is Polly,” Joe says awkwardly, and Mr. Foalbury puffs out a sergeant major’s chest and extends his hand.
“And very nice too, Miss Polly. Bob Foalbury, commissionaire of the house of art. Would you be maker, mischief, or muse?”
“A bit of everything.”
Mr. Foalbury smiles. “Call it muse,” he says. “Always my favourite.” He leads the way down the main corridor, proudly showing off his domain. On wood-panelled walls, oil paintings of Brunel and Babbage rub shoulders with works by lesser-known (but excellent) watercolourists, early blueprints, and pages from ancient mathematical texts. Everything at Harticle’s, Mr. Foalbury explains to Polly, is special, handmade, or orphaned—usually all three. Even the building is special, riven through with trial technologies: Victorian pneumatic message tubes, a Thomas Twyford sanitation system, a retractable roof on the third-floor annexe for observation of the moon. There’s also an antique burglary-prevention device, including panic buttons in all the main rooms, though even Bob Foalbury is a little wary of actually using it.
“You’ll be wanting the old Man-eater, then?” Bob says. “She’s writing a monograph on her teeth.” Cecily Foalbury has a personal collection of assorted sets of false teeth down through the years. The most remarkable is probably the clockwork set made for a sailor who had lost part of his brachial plexus to a cannonball and therefore could not chew. The somewhat grisly archive of gnashers is kept in its own room at Harticle’s and has resulted in this alarming nickname, an insult Cecily resolutely courts—and this is where Joe Spork baulks somewhat—wearing items from her collection to suit her mood.
Bob Foalbury apparently finds this quirky and charming.
“I want both of you. And I need to borrow a record player.”
“Well, we’re here! I’ll sort you out a portable, shall I?… Taxmen! Buggeration to the enemy!” Then, over his shoulder into the woody hallway and the dim, panelled rooms beyond, “Darling? It’s the Spork boy!”
From within comes a noise like a trombonist being goosed during the overture, and then a mighty roar from a pair of elderly female lungs.
“Well, well, don’t just stand in the bloody doorway, come on in. You’re letting out the heat and that’s a grave infraction of our environmental policy, and bloody chilly to boot!” Cecily, silver-capped and mountainous, is still invisible behind a half-closed door, but her writ runs through the house of art.
As they enter the room, a chair skitters back from a kidney desk, and sensible shoes slap on burnished boards. A short, muscular woman with hair like a steel bathcap bounds towards them from the gloom, a vast pair of clear-rimmed National Health glasses making her eyes enormous.
“The Spork boy? Joe Spork? Why didn’t you say so sooner, you bloody fool! Joe? Joe! Joseph! Get in here and give me a kiss!”
The Man-eater spreads wide her arms and clasps him to her chest. Mr. Foalbury sighs.
“Shout out if she gets peckish, Joe, or even looks at you funny. We’ve got some raw meat in a biscuit tin for emergencies.”
“Calumnies!” cries the Man-eater. “Lies, lies, lies! Who’s this? What? What? How can you possibly be called Wally? Oh, Polly, yes, of course. How splendid. Got some meat on her, thank God, not like these modern pipe-cleaners… Foalbury, hush your mouth! I was not considering her for the pot. No. No! This nonsense about anthropophagy must cease! Make tea. Make it thick and orange. I sense the Sporklet is mired in shit and comes with a mission. And how do I sense it? Because the ungrateful little sod is here at all.” She scowls at him, goldfish eyes and Mona Lisa brows behind the lenses. Bob Foalbury departs, smiling.
And now, in the quiet, she surveys Joe Spork once more, with greater care. She takes in his lantern jaw all covered in stubble and his drawn, deep eyes. Then she glances at Polly Cradle and sees something between them of which she approves. X-ray vision with subtitles. Old lady fu. She embraces him tenderly.
“My dear boy,” she murmurs. “My dear, dear boy. You must go and hug Foalbury when the chance presents itself, please, and tell him I’ve forced you to agree to dinner some day soon. He misses you when you don’t come for a while.”
“I will,” Joe says.
“He gave me a scare,” she says. “I mean, a real one. Woke up and couldn’t breathe, and of course I thought it was his heart. Turns out he’s allergic to our new pillows. But come, Joe, please?”
“I will.”
“Because one day, you know, it will be his heart.”
“I will,” Joe says. She peers at him, weighs the promise.
“All right, then. Now, what can I do for you?”
“Ted Sholt. The Ruskinites. Brother Sheamus.”
“Oh, Joe. Bad stories and old deaths. And half of it lies, I’m sure. You ignored me, didn’t you? You went and pressed ahead with that wretched Hakote business!”
“Yes.” He cannot lie to her.
“I told you and told you!”
“Yes. But it was too late by then.”
“Yes, I suppose it was. You best give me the lot, then, and we’ll go from there. I shall not interrupt.”
She never does. Cecily Foalbury’s unique brand of eidetic memory is cantankerous and wayward, making strange connections and seeing unlikely consonances, but it is absolute and requires no second chances. She sits in silence as Joe tells her, belatedly, about Wistithiel and the machine, about Ted Sholt, and about the thin man and the fat man running, and the robed strangers with their alarming heron’s gait, and finally about Billy Friend and Mercer’s rescue. More than once during the narrative, her eyes narrow, and Joe knows she is cross-referencing, walking the long alleys of her memory’s maze and pulling out old business for new examination.
When Joe has finished, Cecily Foalbury sits in absolute silence for a long while with her eyes fixed on the tabletop, and her lips wriggle as she combs the front and sides of her false teeth. The soft sucking is the only sound in the room, and the only indication that she has not fallen asleep. Then, at last, she opens her eyes.
“Bees,” she says. “As in, the golden swarm.”
“I think so.”
“They say there are more, now. Other hives in other cities. They must have been just sitting there, forgotten in corners, waiting for… whatever this is. People will be frightened. I was. I am, actually. There were riots in Moscow and Nanjing yesterday. And Caracas. They’re all over the place, Joe. Put there. Hidden, maybe.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she snaps. “You were set up.” She glowers at him, then looks closer. “You do see that, don’t you? Good Lord, boy, of course you were. Don’t tell me,” she says to Polly, “he’s been moping about imagining this was all his own work?” And when Polly nods, “Tcha! You know better. If you cut yourself with a chisel, is it the chisel’s fault? No. Don’t blame the tool.”
He really hadn’t thought of it that way. He smiles at her in gratitude. She frowns at him thunderously, then goes on.
“All right: the Ruskinites, then… There’s a lot to tell, and things you need to know. I’ll get Foalbury to type it up. But for now, I think you need the quick version, right away.”