The Summoning Page 24

  He wanted things to be successful between them. He wanted everything to be perfect. You could not choreograph the mechanics of sex. You could not rehearse it mentally. It happened pretty much spontaneously and was good or bad, felt right or impossibly wrong, indifferent to what you hoped for it.

  They had come close before to making love. It had seemed right then, on her sofa in her Cambridge flat. But there was no knowing, was there, until it was too late, if it was to be a failure or an anti-climax.

  Jane said, ‘Are you as nervous about tonight as I am?’

  ‘No. More so, I should think.’

  She stood. ‘Let’s go back to the hotel.’

  ‘You want to get it over with?’

  She smiled. ‘No, Adam. I just can’t wait a moment longer to get started.’

  In the event, neither of them need have worried. In one another’s arms, as the night unfolded, they discovered ecstasy and then a blissful refuge in one another.

  They were woken in the morning by the bedside radio, which had come on automatically at eight o’clock. It must have been set to do so by the previous occupant of the room. Jane had her back to Adam. The duvet had wriggled down in the night and he looked at her back, from the splayed tangles of hair that covered it between her shoulder blades, along the creamy skin of her spine to the cleft at the top of her bottom.

  The radio was on her side of the room. It was a talk station and people were phoning in with shrill opinions about the Congressional Hearing the Americans were holding over what was now called the Fort Bragg Vaccine Exposé. It seemed surreal to hear Martin’s name reverentially mentioned on a national broadcast. It also seemed miraculous to be lying beside Jane after the naked passion of the previous night. He reached for her and stroked her hair, then pushed the strands away to kiss her neck, reaching over her to switch off the shrill row erupting over the airwaves.

  ‘We can’t hide from it,’ she said drowsily.

  ‘We can for a while. We’ll be forgiven.’

  She laughed into her pillow, her shoulders trembling against the touch of his lips. Her skin was warm and smooth. She smelled of shampoo and Shalimar perfume and sex. ‘Who will forgive us? Martin won’t.’

  ‘Fuck Martin.’

  ‘Ugh. No thanks.’ She laughed again. Then she rolled towards him to return his kisses.

  They showered together and shared a late breakfast on their balcony. There was no wind and the sun shone from a clear sky. Their room overlooked the sea. From their balcony chairs they could hear the breaking waves hissing into the shingle. The pier was a distant, spindly, abbreviated bridge.

  ‘Back to the usual routine next week,’ Adam said. ‘Lectures, seminars, essay topics to pick.’

  ‘Nothing will ever be normal again,’ Jane said. ‘That’s the point of our night in this hotel. It’s Grayling’s treat, our last before the serious business begins.’

  ‘You think he knew we’d sleep together when he booked the rooms?’

  ‘When it comes to reading people, on a scale of one to ten, he’s an eleven. He’s very shrewd and alert to situations. It’s why he’s still alive.’

  ‘Do you still think he’s gay?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘I wouldn’t put it past you to think Robert de Morey swung both ways. He was awfully fond of the count.’

  She smiled. She enjoyed being teased. ‘I don’t think de Morey had issues with his masculinity. I suspect he was fully in touch with his feminine side.’

  ‘You should share that insight with the professor, in exactly those words. It would go down really well.’ Adam looked out towards the pier. ‘I had a kind of hallucination out there the first time I came to see McGuire. I realized last night when he was talking that it was about Incomparable. I know it sounds a bit bizarre, but I sort of saw what happened to the sailors aboard her, the state they were in on the Miasmic Sea. It was nightmarish.’

  ‘I dreamed about it,’ Jane said. ‘I fell asleep in the front passenger seat of the Land Rover on the road back from Cree to Cambridge and I was aboard her. It must be a sort of telepathy or shared vibe between us all. I thought about it when Grayling quoted what that Whitehall mandarin said to him.’

  ‘Chance is how we describe events when we don’t yet know their purpose,’ Adam said. ‘My dad quoted that line to me on his deathbed. We don’t have a choice, do we, about any of all this?’

  ‘We don’t have any choice about being involved,’ Jane said. ‘We have to believe, though, that we can affect the outcome. We have to think we can stop the undermining. If we don’t, the future will be very bleak. Are you still determined to go back to Rotterdam?’

  ‘There’ll be nobody else. If I don’t attend that funeral, he will have gone to his grave unlamented. I’ll regret it for the rest of my life.’

  ‘It might cost you your life, Adam. I couldn’t bear that.’ She reached across their table for his hand.

  He squeezed hers. ‘It won’t,’ he said.

  ‘Grayling was attacked in Canterbury.’

  ‘Opportunistically, I think. He was being watched, observed. He made the mistake of straying on to isolated ground and his stalker saw his chance. That’s my reading of it. There’s been no second attempt. He hasn’t given them the chance.’

  ‘When will you go?’

  ‘I’ll leave this afternoon.’

  ‘I’m not going to sit in Cambridge waiting for you to come back. I’m going to go and see my father. And then I’m going to go and find Dora and ask her a few questions about her romantic life.’

  ‘You don’t much care for your dad, do you?’

  ‘It’s more that I’ve never believed he greatly cared for me. But what Rabanus Bloor said about my sister makes me think I might have misjudged my dad rather badly. I can be a complete bloody idiot at times, it’s very annoying.’

  ‘I’ll remind you that you said that.’

  ‘Don’t bother,’ she said. ‘I’ll just deny it.’ She reached over and ruffled his hair and kissed him. ‘And I’m such a good liar, you’ll believe me.’

  He crunched over ground he couldn’t see under the night cloud cover, in the absence of the neon which had flashed over the door with lurid optimism the last time he was here. The door was slightly ajar. He went inside. There was a smell of stale cigarette smoke and beer. There was stillness and cold and neglect. He skirted items of bar furniture and found a power switch in a back room. He switched it on and the strip lights buzzed and flickered and came alive.

  She had fled, funded by his father’s money. She had stayed to care for the man who had delivered her from Endrimor until his death. He was gone now, but he would have left her something, wouldn’t he? The bar would have provided only a subsistence living, Adam thought. The money left her by his father would be needed to enable Delilah to travel. The bar felt and looked dismal in her absence. She had endowed even this drab place with a desperate sort of glamour. It had departed with her. He wondered where a woman with her impact on men could successfully conceal herself. He wondered also whether her abrupt disappearance signalled a specific threat.

  He helped himself to a bottle of beer from a cold shelf puddled with melted ice. It was cool rather than properly chilled, but it would do. He opened it and raised a silent toast to absent friends. There it was again, that feeling of lost intimacy, of someone he knew well and cared for deeply, gone.

  It was an emotional response the facts did not really justify. He had known Delilah for only a couple of weeks and spent only a matter of hours in her company. Yet the strength of feeling couldn’t be denied. He did not know what it signified, unless it meant that there was something unfinished between them and they were destined to share some future encounter.

  He saw the letter, then. Or rather, he saw the pale envelope on the bar, the letter shoved hastily back inside it as though by doing so, the message it contained could actually be undelivered. It was not good news, Adam knew with a feeling of cold dread, as he put down his beer and picked
up the envelope. He opened its contents.

  It was a single, thick sheet of paper, folded into four. Unfolded, he saw that it contained no written words. In that sense it was blank. But it was heavily embossed. A large bird with outspread wings and fierce beak and talons stretched in flight in raised relief from the centre of the sheet.

  It looked like something mythic, like some heraldic beast dreamed up by the craftsmen who decorated warriors’ shields in the time of his own noble ancestor. But he knew that it was a representation from life and he knew too where it came from. It was a Vorp. And it was also a warning. They had located and were coming for her.

  Unless, that was, they had come for her already.

  Adam refolded the sheet of paper and put it into his pocket. He sniffed at the air. He could not smell violence the way that McGuire had claimed he could. Blood smelled coppery and fear was a sour secretion, and he could detect neither odour. None of the chairs or tables had been knocked over in a struggle. No glasses or bottles had been smashed. He opened the till. It was empty. She had not been abducted. Her departure might have been hasty and fearful, but it had been escape rather than capture. That was something.

  Why had they warned her? He thought that he knew. It was an established protocol, a formal beginning to the punishment ritual. The dread it provoked was the point of the warning. The slow process of her execution had begun with the letter’s delivery. But it was as much a boast as a threat, wasn’t it? It told her that she could not elude them. The tongue would be torn from her head and she would choke on it. Her fate had been decided and her attempts to avoid it would be futile.

  He switched off the lights and walked out of the bar. It had a derelict look already. He could walk the few hundred yards to the creek and take a last look at his father’s barge, but the barge was no longer home to his father. His stuff was neatly crated and packed safely away in a storage facility until Adam decided what to do with it.

  The barge had been sold to someone else. He would be a trespasser aboard her. Two lives he had only recently learned of had now gone from here. He would walk instead to his hotel. In the morning, he had a burial to attend.

  Pages of a discarded newspaper blew on the ground around his feet. He flattened a spread with the sole of his boot, his eye caught by something there. There was a banner headline he could not read because the language was Dutch. Under it was a picture of a young man standing at a podium addressing some kind of formal gathering.

  Adam’s first thought on seeing the photograph was that Martin Prior looked good in a suit. His second was that there was something that had not been there previously in the expression in Martin’s eyes.

  Jane visited her father in Canterbury. She thought that he had lost weight. They met at a restaurant for lunch and after their casual kiss of greeting, once she had sat down and ordered a glass of sparkling water, she sneaked a look over her menu at him and thought him definitely thinner and paler than she remembered him being the last time, back in the late summer, before the start of the term.

  It was odd, because he was almost always tanned. He would travel to somewhere in Africa or the Middle East to oversee some critical period of construction of something and come back with his face brown and his famously shaven head burnished. But he was pale today.

  ‘This fish is very good,’ he said. ‘I can recommend it with my conscience clear.’

  ‘I need to talk to you about Dora.’

  ‘I’ve been worried about you. You read the document I found?’

  ‘Once Grayling had transcribed it, yes, I did. I don’t share your scholarly fluency in Latin.’

  ‘You could, dear. You picked up Greek in about a fortnight, as I recall.’

  ‘I think Dora might be in trouble.’

  Sir Rupert put down his menu and looked at Jane. ‘Dora is trouble,’ he said. ‘She always has been. You are opposites.’

  ‘Like darkness and light?’

  Her father blinked. ‘Who suggested that comparison?’

  ‘Someone from the land we dare not name. The same man I saw in the forest at Cree. The one I’m sure Professor Grayling told you about when he broke it to you that I would need to read the de Morey to prepare me. I think she’s been there, Dad. I think Dora might have been to the shadow world. The Siren of Rotterdam said the traffic travels both ways and always has.’

  ‘Who the bloody hell is the Siren of Rotterdam?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘I understand you are courting, Jane.’

  ‘I am. His name is Adam. He is directly descended from de Morey.’

  ‘Yes, well, I suppose he would be, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘You’re not shocked?’

  ‘Stuart Grayling said the struggle was dynastic. I don’t suppose I found the deposition by accident at all.’

  ‘Chance is how we describe events when we don’t yet know their purpose,’ Jane said.

  ‘There is something malign in your sister. It has been there since she was born, I think, by which I mean she was born with it. It repelled me. In trying to treat you both equally, for the sake of fairness, I treated you with the coldness and disdain with which I treated her. But I always loved you, Jane. I love you very much. God forgive me, I love your sister too.’

  She reached for his hand across the table and held it. ‘You don’t have to explain, Dad.’ She could afford the generosity of saying that, she thought, now that he had done so.

  He coughed. There were tears, unconstrained, leaking from his eyes. ‘Tough love, your mother called it. She convinced me it would work. But it punished you and left your twin indifferent.’

  Their waiter arrived. They ordered their food. They ate their starters. Jane could not even have said what it was she was having. ‘Did you ever wonder why de Morey wrote the account at all?’

  ‘I’ve had twenty-five years to think about it. He wrote it as a double-bluff, a long and truthful litany of events concealing the lie at its heart. I am convinced Eleanor Bloor crossed and they were reunited. If I’m right, the blood of more than one world runs through Adam’s veins.’

  ‘I think you’re right and so does he. Why do they hate us so much?’

  ‘It’s gone well beyond whatever original motive they had. They haven’t solved the problem of the Miasmic Sea, I don’t think. I expect its polluting sickness has spread. And I suspect the Kingdom of Parasites is a bigger problem to them now than it’s ever been. They seek a fresh start. They want our world, but they want it unpopulated.’

  ‘Do you think the undermining can be stopped?’

  Sir Rupert seemed to ponder this question for a long time. Then he said, ‘They do things in a particular way. They have a feudal predilection for single combat, for champions. They appear to be capable of some kind of sorcery. Beyond that, they like the volatile nations of the earth to do the dirty work on their behalf, as the events of the twentieth century demonstrated so bloodily. We barely survived that.

  ‘The truthful answer is that I don’t know, Jane. In some ways it seems the shadow world is very predictable and that’s to our advantage, if we’re clever. But the complexity of our world makes it a far more volatile and fragile place than it was in the time of the Black Death. The Cold War came much closer to destroying us than the pestilence.’

  ‘A nuclear war wouldn’t be to their advantage. It would destroy the new home they covet, the world they want to colonize.’

  ‘There is far less chance of any war being nuclear now than there was fifty years ago. The old balance of the superpowers is gone. Wars are won with anthrax vials and improvised roadside bombs and suicide vests. The world is far more fragmented now, and there is a great deal of latent hostility. Have you noticed the international impact of that poisonous nonsense Martin Prior is peddling on the internet?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Believe me, Jane. We’re more vulnerable than we’ve ever been.’

  Their main courses arrived and for a while they ate in silence. Jane was
aware that this was the most grown-up conversation she had ever shared with her dad. After what he had said to her, she could barely taste the food. The texture of the flakes in her mouth told her that she was eating fish. It was a waste, really. It was probably delicious.

  ‘Where’s Dora?’

  Sir Rupert smiled. ‘You’ve never been close, have you?’

  ‘I don’t even know where she’s living. So there’s your answer.’

  ‘She rents a flat in Chelsea.’

  ‘You mean that you rent it on her behalf.’

  He shrugged. ‘She is my daughter. I do not like her and never have. But I think that an unadulterated regime of tough love would have lured Dora into crime or prostitution by now. I tell myself that helping her out economically encourages what little morality she possesses.’

  ‘How does it do that?’

  ‘By providing her with stability and a measure of domestic security and earning her gratitude.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘It’s a small price to pay.’

  For a man with her father’s wealth, Jane thought it certainly true that it was a small price. She also thought it a dubious investment. From what she had heard, Dora’s lifestyle choices were dodgy enough without a subsidy to encourage them.

  The Siren of Rotterdam would have enjoyed the irony of this appellation, had Delilah been aware of the nickname Jane had given her. She had her charms and they were sensuous and potent, and they would do nothing at all to protect her from the deadly attentions of Proctor Maul.

  She remembered him at court, when her job had been to teach music to the son and daughter of the king. She had seen him almost daily and though it was said, at least on earth, that familiarity bred contempt, she had not become contemptuous of him.

  She had feared him, as she was supposed to do, as everyone did. Uncertainty was the currency of the court and fear was what underwrote it and maintained its value.