‘Spare us your discretion,’ Charlotte Feaver said. ‘You know what we’re talking about. Oscar hasn’t employed you for twenty-five years and kept his counsel.’
‘I know very little,’ Dowd protested.
‘But enough to know there’s an anniversary imminent,’ Shales said.
My, my, Dowd thought, they’re not as stupid as they look.
‘You mean the Reconciliation?’ he said.
That’s exactly what I mean. This coming midsummer - ‘
‘Do we have to spell it out?’ Bloxham said. ‘He already knows more than he should.’
Shales ignored the interruption, and was beginning again when a voice so far unheard, emanating from a bulky figure sitting beyond the reach of the light broke in. Dowd had been waiting for this man, Matthias McGann, to say his piece. If the Tabula Rasa had a leader, this was he.
‘Hubert?’ he said. ‘May I?’
Shales murmured: ‘Of course.’
‘Mr Dowd,’ said McGann, ‘I don’t doubt that Oscar has been indiscreet. We all have our weaknesses. You must be his. Nobody here blames you for listening. But this Society was created for a very specific purpose, and on occasion has been obliged to act with extreme severity in the pursuit of that purpose. I won’t go into details. As Giles says, you’re already wiser than any of us would like. But believe me, we will silence any and all who put this Dominion at risk.’
He leaned forward. His face announced a man of good humour, presently unhappy with his lot.
‘Hubert mentioned that an anniversary is imminent. So it is. And forces with an interest in subverting the sanity of this Dominion may be readying themselves to celebrate that anniversary. So far, this’ - he pointed to the newspaper - ‘is the only evidence we’d found of such preparations, but if there are others they will be swiftly terminated by this Society and its agents. Do you understand?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘This sort of thing is very dangerous,’ he went on. ‘People start to investigate. Academics. Esoterics. They start to question, and they start to dream.’
‘I could see how that would be dangerous,’ Dowd said.
‘Don’t smarm, you smug little bastard,’ Bloxham burst out. ‘We all know what you and Godolphin have been doing. Tell him, Hubert!’
‘I’ve traced some artifacts of … non-terrestrial origin … that came my way. The trail, as it were, leads back to Oscar Godolphin.’
‘We don’t know that,’ Lionel put in. These buggers lie.’
‘I’m satisfied Godolphin’s guilty,’ Alice Tyrwhitt said. ‘And this one with him.’
‘I protest,’ Dowd said.
‘You’ve been dealing in magic,’ Bloxham hollered. ‘Admit it!’ He rose and slammed the table. ‘Admit it!’
‘Sit down, Giles,’ McGann said.
‘Look at him,’ Bloxham went on, jabbing his thumb in Dowd’s direction. ‘He’s guilty as hell.’
‘I said sit down,’ McGann replied, raising his voice ever so slightly. Cowed, Bloxham sat. ‘You’re not on trial here,’ McGann said to Dowd. ‘It’s Godolphin we want.’
‘So find him,’ Feaver said.
‘And when you do,’ Shales said, ‘tell him I’ve got a few items he may recognize.’
The table fell silent. Several heads turned in Matthias McGann’s direction. ‘I think that’s it,’ he said. ‘Unless you have any remarks to make?’
‘I don’t believe so,’ Dowd replied.
‘Then you may go.’
Dowd took his leave without further exchange, escorted as far as the lift by Charlotte Feaver, and left to make the descent alone. They were better informed than he’d imagined, but they were some way from guessing the truth. He turned over passages of the interview as he drove back to Regent’s Park Road, committing them to memory for later recitation. Wakeman’s drunken irrelevancies; Shales’s indiscretion; McGann, smooth as a velvet scabbard. He’d repeat it all for Godolphin’s edification, especially the cross-questioning about the absentee’s whereabouts.
Somewhere in the East, Dowd had said. East Yzordderrex maybe, in the Kesparates built close to the harbour where Oscar liked to bargain for contraband brought back from Hakaridek or the Islands. Whether he was there or some other place Dowd had no way of fetching him back. He would come when he would come, and the Tabula Rasa would have to bide its time, though the longer he was away the more the likelihood grew of one of their number voicing the suspicion some of them surely nurtured: that Godolphin’s dealings in talismans and wantons were only the tip of the iceberg. Perhaps they even suspected he took trips.
He wasn’t the only Fifther who’d jaunted between Dominions, of course. There were many routes from Earth to the Reconciled Dominions, some safer than others, but all used at one time or another, and not always by magicians. Poets had found their way over (and sometimes back, to tell the tale); so had a good number of priests over the centuries, and hermits, meditating on their essence so hard the In Ovo enveloped them and spat them into another world. Any soul despairing or inspired enough could get access. But few in Dowd’s experience had made such a commonplace of it as Godolphin.
These were dangerous times for such jaunts, both here and there. The Reconciled Dominions had been under the control of Yzordderrex’s Autarch for over a century, and every time Godolphin returned from a trip he had new signs of unrest to report. From the margins of the First Dominion to Patashoqua and its satellite cities in the Fourth, voices were raised to stir rebellion. There was as yet no consensus on how best to overcome the Autarch’s tyranny. Only a simmering unrest which regularly erupted in riots or strikes, the leaders of such mutinies invariably found and executed. In fact on occasion the Autarch’s suppressions had been more draconian still. Entire communities had been destroyed in the name of the Yzordderrexian Engine. Tribes and small nations deprived of their gods, their lands and their right to procreate, others simply eradicated by pogroms the Autarch personally supervised. But none of these horrors had dissuaded Godolphin from travelling in the Reconciled Dominions. Perhaps tonight’s events would, however, at least until the Society’s suspicions had been allayed.
Tiresome as it was, Dowd knew he had no choice as to where he went tonight: to the Godolphin Estate and the folly in its deserted grounds which was Oscar’s departure place. There he would wait, like a dog grown lonely at its master’s absence, until Godolphin’s return. Oscar was not the only one who would have to muster some excuses in the near future: so would he. Killing Chant had seemed like a wise manoeuvre at the time - and, of course, an agreeable diversion on a night without a show to go to - but Dowd hadn’t predicted the furore it would cause. With hindsight, that had been naive. England loved murder, preferably with diagrams. And he’d been unlucky, what with the ubiquitous Mr Burke of the Somme and a low quota of political scandals conspiring to make Chant posthumously famous. He would have to be prepared for Godolphin’s wrath. But hopefully it would be subsumed in the larger anxiety of the Society’s suspicions. Godolphin would need Dowd to help him calm these suspicions,
