softly, knowing from pillow talk exactly how to extract this confession.
‘My sister and my nieces, her two daughters, who to this day live their lives in modest gentility free from the clutches of such as Jolly, or his successors thereof. Yes, and when my nieces grow up, let them live decent lives as best they can. It is a cliché, is it not: the bad man, to wit me, who has sacrificed himself so that others may live free, but there you are, so be it, laugh all you will, this is the truth.’
‘Jolly would not have done what you have done,’ Angela observed.
‘No.’ Tagalong sipped his whiskey and said no more.
‘Jolly was a man of principle, Tagalong. His principle was that he was the king and no-one crossed him, not even over a single strada.’
‘Someone crossed him,’ Tagalong laughed, and drained his whiskey glass and set it down as if determined not to have another. ‘But I’ll tell you something even more unbelievable than Raspero, yes, Raspero-Raspero-Raspero, complain all you like, turning his back on that money, because this is unbelievable, or more unbelievable, if what is unbelievable can ever be more than it already is, Raspero took Jolly’s notebooks, with all the juicy details in them, not just about Foxley and your other paramours, but many other equally important New Landern grandees, yes indeed, Raspero took these notebooks and burned them in the fire before my utterly disbelieving eyes. You want to talk about principle? What kind of principle is that? How totally mad is someone who does that?’
‘I didn’t know that,’ Angela admitted, smiling at Tagalong’s outrage.
‘I wish I didn’t know it,’ Tagalong complained, interlinking his fingers as if to keep them away from the whiskey bottle, and closing his eyes as if to hide from his memories, ‘but can knowledge be unknown? I saw it myself with my own eyes and I cannot now unremember it. I wish I could.’
The driver signalled that they had completed the circuit so Angela instructed him to set them down in Kenina Park. She let Tagalong go with a reminder about the apartment ownership papers being delivered to her (or else!), then set off for the Emperor Theatre for the afternoon’s rehearsals. She had a lot to think about, but she was no nearer to the answer she sought, which was how to manage her life in a post-Jolly world.
It was well after two o’clock in the morning when she managed to extricate herself from a sleeping Lord Foxley’s embrace and make her way back to her own apartment. There she took up the piece of paper with Nicholas’s name and address on it, and contemplated it for the fortieth time. It was then that she came to a decision.
She simply had to speak to Nicholas in person. That was clear enough. So she took up pen and paper and wrote to Nicholas. She invited him to attend a performance of The Lady in Peril, and then to visit her afterwards in her dressing room. She asked him to let her know by return of post if he could be so kind as to honour her invitation by an acceptance which could only ensure her happiness.
While waiting for his reply, Angela made arrangements to provide Nicholas with a free ticket for a performance of The Lady in Peril for the last night of the season, the most eagerly sought after performance, because she thought that he deserved no less. She wanted a box seat, she wanted a front row seat, she wanted a stall seat, but in the end she could only get Nicholas a seat in “the gods”, the cheapest and highest seats at the very tippety top of the theatre, and when Nicholas wrote back to say how delighted he would be to come, she sent him the ticket she had obtained, with a reminder that he was to visit her afterwards in her dressing room, and so it was done.
The paths through time and space of the lives of Nicholas and Isabel, twisting and turning their separate ways through the New Landern continuum, were now lined up and moving along to a second point of intersection: Friday 20 May 1544 A.F. at the Emperor Theatre in New Landern.
NINE
The Visit of Lady Isabel Grangeshield
to the Emperor Theatre
7:15 PM, Friday 20 May 1544 A.F.
Nicholas stepped into the theatre and stood to one side for a while looking around as people poured past him. He had never been in a theatre before. He was struck first of all by the luxury of red: the curtains were red, the seats were red, the carpeting was red, and the walls and ceiling were ornately painted a mixture of glittering white and red. He stood to one side taking it all in, and then Isabel leaped into his view.
She was sitting in one of the box seats, talking to a companion next to her. At the sight of her Nicholas felt unaccountably nervous, so he ended his inspection of the theatre and began to look for his seat. He was in “the gods”, which Ben had told him was right at the very top. They were the poorest seats in the theatre, Ben had told him further, envious that he had not himself got a free ticket, and they were not for people who suffered from vertigo. Nicholas made his way up the stairs, a deferential space around him as he moved amongst the denizens of “the gods”, the only theatre-goers poor enough to know who he was, and found his seat and sat down.
He attracted a fair amount of open-mouthed attention from his fellow patrons, which he ignored with a lofty disdain. The story of how he had taken down Jolly had oscillated through New Landern in its rotating voyage changing form as it went along until the form in which it was now most commonly told was as follows: Jolly had abducted Miss Ashton, the most beautiful woman in New Landern and held her prisoner in his stronghold, intending to have his evil way with her. Nicholas Raspero had stormed this stronghold single-handed, taking down hundreds of Jolly’s men without killing a single one of them, capturing them as easily as if they had been children; he had freed Angela and taken Jolly prisoner. Jolly had a room full of treasure, with jewellery and strada coins and bank notes piled up to the ceiling, an Aladdin’s cave of treasure beyond counting, treasure beyond imagining. Nicholas had tied Jolly up and thrown him into this treasure room, leaving Jolly there and carrying Angela away with him in his arms; all the demi-monde knew that the four successors of Jolly had thrown their discs into his neck at the same time and taken his treasure for themselves.
Nicholas had not replaced Jolly as king of the New Landern demi-monde but he had in a sense become its patron saint. Despite being poor he had turned his back on a fortune and no-one could understand this; it was as inexplicable as the action of a deity. It was fear of Nicholas the wandfighter that led the most violent and dangerous criminals in New Landern to step courteously out of his way as he came walking along but it was something like the honour due to a saint that meant that Nicholas was no longer charged for anything by the poor of New Landern. If he got a drink the barmaid refused to take his money with a disapproving shake of the head; if he bought freshly-baked fish with fire-baked potatoes, drizzled in lemon juice and seasoned with salt and pepper, the street vendor of his meal would wave away the strada Nicholas offered in payment with a furious gesture of his hands as if Nicholas had deeply insulted him by offering to pay for his meal.
Nicholas obviously couldn’t know this but some of the streets of New Landern he wandered along would in the decades to come have pubs named “Sir Nicholas” in his honour, their most common sign being that of a man tied up next to a pile of money. The story of what he had done to Jolly would continue to be told and, in time, it would perhaps even become a fairytale.
The play Nicholas was watching tonight had once been a fairytale. A woman had been obliged to remain silent for seven years in order to lift a curse on her twelve brothers who had all been turned into ravens, and so even when falsely accused she had maintained silence despite the imminent danger to her life; the audience, as was common in those days, did not take any of this lying down— they shouted out to her to beware the villain, there was at times a deafening bedlam of conflicting and advisory comments being hurled at the stage when it was clear that innocence was being taken advantage of
