Aubrey had one substantial regret: he’d been unable to contact Caroline by telephone. He’d tried for two days, with increasing feverishness, but in the end he’d had to write a letter advising her of the sudden change of plans. He’d spent a whole morning trying to find the words to explain that she wasn’t being left behind – it was simply unfortunate circumstances and he’d do his best to make up for it and he’d make sure it wouldn’t happen again and...
It sounded feeble even as he wrote it, and he could imagine her disappointment only too well.
In his mind, he could see a graph of Caroline’s estimation of him. When they first met at Prince Albert’s estate, he hadn’t made a good impression – the graph would begin at a very low level. In the adventure of the Prince’s near-assassination, he could imagine the graph sloping upwards. Not rapidly, and with a few dips where he managed to put his foot in things, but the trend would have definitely been upward, to a high point just after his father’s election as Prime Minister.
Then the Gallian imbroglio. Aubrey winced, because after a reasonably positive series of escapades where he thought he’d conducted himself quite well – graph heading upward again – he’d made a disastrous miscalculation in manipulating Caroline’s plans for his own ends. When his mother – his own mother – had taken Caroline on a polar expedition with the express point of putting some distance between Aubrey and her, the graph must have plunged, crossing the neutral axis, he imagined, with Caroline’s attitude actively negative toward him.
From this nadir, however, thanks to some painful humility and hard work, Aubrey hoped that the graph had been inching its way into positive territory. The underground pursuit of Dr Tremaine and the affair with the Bank of Albion had been a chance for him to show his capabilities, which he hoped weren’t unimpressive. Their rapprochement after these affairs may not have restored matters entirely, and their agreement to remain colleagues meant that a limit was placed on how far the graph could climb, but surely it had peeped into positive territory. Surely.
Now? Caroline would be affronted at being left out of this Fisherberg trip, and unhappy at the lack of communication. The graph was about to dive again.
He sighed. If only human matters worked like mathematics. A mathematical function was crisp, clear and open to understanding – with enough effort. To Aubrey’s mind, human affairs were just the opposite – opaque, baffling and profoundly difficult.
The trip to Fisherberg had been planned as a cross-continental train journey, much to the displeasure of the navy. The Admiralty was mightily miffed when Lady Rose declined the offer to sail on the HMS Invulnerable, one of the latest class of cruisers that the navy was taking to Fisherberg to show off to the Holmlanders. While Aubrey would have enjoyed the chance to spend a few days exploring the most modern ship in the Albion fleet, he thought his mother’s decision was wise. Entering Fisherberg by train would be far more discreet than steaming into harbour aboard a warship. Lady Rose was visiting Holmland as a scholar, not as a symbol of national power.
The boat train crossed south-east Albion with steely efficiency. The special carriage allocated to Lady Rose at the end of the train was plush and comfortable, but before they left, Aubrey – taking his job seriously – inspected it to make sure that it was secure, even though this had already been done by some of Tallis’s operatives. He approved when he found it had only two entrances. One opened directly into the carriage and the other was the interconnection between it and the second-last carriage. This interconnection included an alcove constantly manned by one of Tallis’s operatives.
Lady Rose was equally well guarded on the ferry across the channel, while the train that was waiting for them in Gallia had another reserved carriage at the rear, and Aubrey could see the work of the friendly Gallian government in the squad of police who surrounded it at Legras Station, the departure point for the train to Lutetia. They postured and preened when Lady Rose approached, and Aubrey thought a fist-fight was going to break out on the platform to see who was going to have the honour of opening the door for her.
The train sped across the countryside toward the capital of Gallia. While clean and comfortable, it rattled in disconcertingly erratic ways. Aubrey generally enjoyed the regular clicketty-clack rhythm of trains. This one, however, had nothing regular about it. It groaned up gentle slopes, protested around the mildest of corners, made hard going over bridges and was reluctant to enter tunnels, as if afraid of the dark.
All the while, it shifted between a clicketty-clicketty and a clacketty-click-click as it ran over the rails, at intervals that were gratingly and irritatingly random.
George, however, was immune to this. He had spread a newspaper on one of the mahogany tables near the windows and was poring over it, frowning, as if he meant to memorise every word. After an hour or so, Aubrey had become so edgy from the non-rhythm of the train that he stood and began pacing the length of the carriage. His mother was at one end, writing in a large notebook, consulting one of the many volumes she’d plucked from the trunk she’d brought with her. He tried to start a conversation, but the voice dried in his throat when she held up a hand without looking up. He knew that gesture. She was in the middle of something important and didn’t want to be interrupted. He went to look at what she was writing, but as soon as he leaned over her open hand turned to a single, admonitory finger.
It was enough. He left her in peace. He’d sighted enough to see that she was working on another draft of her symposium presentation. Why she’d be doing this baffled him. He thought each of the previous nine drafts had been fine.
That left only one source of distraction. ‘Anything interesting in the paper, George?’
Aubrey inserted himself into the bench seat on the opposite side of the table from his friend. Outside, the afternoon sun beat on the cosy fields of northern Gallia. It was almost like a picture book, with well-behaved flocks of sheep staring at the train as it whistled past. In the distance, a thick forest marched up the side of a modest hill. To one side, a church stood, as if happy to be there.
George didn’t look up. ‘Always interesting things in the paper, old man. You should know that.’
‘You’re applying yourself to this one with special intensity, though. What is it? The world of sport in uproar over a race-fixing scandal?’
‘Not much, apart from some sort of commotion on the border with Holmland.’ George shook his head. ‘This is just the last newspaper I’m bound to enjoy for some time. I wanted to make it last.’
‘I knew your lack of languages would come home to roost. You should have paid more attention in class.’
‘I did. Just didn’t understand a thing, that’s all. Was all foreign to me.’
George’s inability to come to terms with anything beyond the most basic niceties of foreign languages had never concerned him. He was convinced he could get by anywhere in the world with a firm handshake and a sunny smile. It generally worked, but it seemed as if newspapers were immune to this approach.
‘So you’re going to devour the last of good old Albion’s newspapers, then.’
‘It’s all I can do. Every last little word, I’ll read.’
‘No matter how trivial, how boring?’
‘Advertisements for bootblack will be like religious texts to me. Details of shipping consignments I’ll ponder as if they hold the mysteries of the ages.’
Aubrey cocked his head. ‘Are you sure you can’t spend your time any more usefully?’