Lewis had hit a dry spell lately, as he drew inevitably closer to the point where Edward (now a political, supposedly in the pay of Her Majesty’s Foreign Office but in reality an agent of the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society) was to be given his assignment to go to California. Quite apart from the fact that he wasn’t looking forward to killing off his hero, Lewis had certain qualms about depicting Edward’s relationship with Mendoza. It seemed an invasion of privacy, unforgivably frivolous to dramatize something that had resulted in heartbreak for her, not to mention ruin.
He had made some attempts to block out a different scenario, one with a happy ending, but it had given off no more warmth than a painted fire. Nothing to do but set the whole project aside for a few decades and see if something suggested itself . . .
Lewis sighed and leaned back, looking up at the sky with its Mercator lines of cable crossing. Vast canvas walls straining in the brisk breeze, the
Unrepentant Monarch
skimmed along like a seabird. Perhaps Edward had come to America on a clipper. Ought Lewis take notes for a future scene?
He couldn’t let the story alone, could he? He closed his eyes, sorted through his mental list of gods, and invoked Apollo and the Muses to grant him inspiration.
“I say, aren’t you Literature Specialist Lewis?”
Lewis opened his eyes. There before him, leaning on the rail, was Facilitator Nennius, nattily dressed in white cruise attire. In some other dimension, Apollo smirked and threw Lewis a salute.
“Nennius, isn’t it?” he said, after a moment’s stupefaction. “Heavens, how long has it been? 1836, wasn’t it?”
“To be sure. That evening at Johnson’s.” Nennius stepped forward, surefooted though the
Unrepentant
was rising on a particularly mountainous swell just then, and settled himself into the deck chair next to Lewis. He was a tall immortal, dark and aristocratic-looking. “Well, well, what are the odds of this? Are you taking the whole cruise?”
“As far as Panama. I’m on my way to my next posting,” Lewis replied, fighting down panic. Was it so remarkable they should run into one another again, after four hundred years? He looked on as Nennius ordered a bottle of Chateau Rothschild from the deck steward and wondered how on earth he could refrain from leading the conversation around to Edward, whom this man had actually known, spoken with, perhaps even set on his course in life.
“I’m on holiday, personally,” Nennius said, lounging back. “And a damned well-earned one, I might add. I’ve just come off forty years as a politician in Australia. I envy you Conservationist chaps, I really do. When you’re done with a job, you’ve at least got something to show for it. How I’d love to have an old book or a painting or
anything
I could point to and say, ‘There, that was my work, I rescued that for the ages.’ But nothing we Facilitators do shows, you know, in the long run.”
“Well, but surely that’s the point,” Lewis said. “If your work’s done well, it doesn’t show. It’s a much more difficult job being a Facilitator. You’re the men behind the scenes, the stage managers for history, the men in black.”
“A very flattering assessment.”
“True, all the same.”
“Well, thank you.”
They fell silent as the steward brought the wine—service was superb on these cruises—and Nennius accepted his glass, inhaled, sipped, and approved. The steward, waiting until Nennius’s nod, vanished unobtrusively. Nennius watched him go and shook his head.
“What that chap could teach his fellow mortals. Does it seem to you they’ve gotten ruder as the ages roll by? To think the day would come when you’d have to go on a cruise like this to experience courtesy!”
“It’s one of the things promised in the brochure,” Lewis said. “Every one of the staff has to take social interaction classes.”
“Not like the old days, eh?” Nennius drank with relish. “The little monkeys might have been ignorant and bloodthirsty, but by God they knew how to be polite when they had to. Remember that night we sat up talking till all hours at Johnson’s? That waiter
waited
, there in the corner, and not a word of complaint or a cough or an impatient look from him.”
“Johnson’s,” Lewis said, remembering.
“Abominable coffee, but a lovely place for privacy. Gone long since, I suppose.”
“Utterly. That whole block went during the Blitz.”
“That’s right, you were stationed over there then, weren’t you? You’ve had some lively postings over the years. I was there until the twentieth century. Then I was off to Greece, thank God.” Nennius waved indulgently at the mortal pirate party, which was making another pass along the starboard bow. “Look at the silly little beggars. They do everything they can to make their world as dull and inhibited as it can possibly be, and run off at weekend to pretend they’re having adventures. They do love their adventures.”
“So few of them ever get to have real ones,” Lewis said.
“True. Good thing too, on the whole. Though I remember one who did, by God!” Nennius reached for his glass. “Do you recall those papers I gave you for the archives, that night in 1836? Nasty inky schoolboy mess the Company wanted, for some unimaginable reason?”
Lewis felt the shiver of warning, sensed the pit thinly screened with branches. He stared out at the wide horizon, pretending to think. “Vaguely. I was more interested in your anecdotes about Londinium.”
“So you were. The leather-knickers-down-the-well story.” Nennius sniggered. “And to think they ended up in a museum exhibit! Anyway. I was a headmaster at a public school at the time, and the papers were nothing more than exercises I’d set one of my pupils. Remarkable boy, really, though I thought he’d no future at all. Illegitimate, you see, even if he was the bastard of somebody awfully important. They’d paid to send him to Overton, at least. But you know how it was back then: you simply had no place in the world with that kind of mark against you, unless you cut one out for yourself.
“I never thought the boy would manage it. Too fond of using his fists to answer an argument, though he was certainly a clever little fellow. He was shaping up into a scholar of some promise, actually, but then he was nearly sent down for fighting, so his people—whoever they were—took him out of school and sent him off to the Navy for a midshipman, and I thought, well, that’s the last I’ll hear of
him
. Our padre was desolated. He had some idea the little brute could have gone out for divinity!”
“Was he a religious boy?” Lewis asked.
“Oh, he was full of idealistic nonsense at first, but he woke up to the reality of the world pretty damn quickly. No fool he.”
“Really,” said Lewis, trying to sound bored but polite.
“Edward Bell-Fairfax, that was his name,” Nennius said, and Lewis’s heart contracted painfully. He raised a hand in a casual gesture, and the deck steward stepped within earshot, inquiringly.
“Another martini, please,” Lewis said. The steward ducked his head and hastened away.
Nennius went on: “So anyway, a dozen years went by, and then a few more, and I’d long since forgotten about Bell-Fairfax. In those days I used to belong to Redking’s Club. There was a cabinet minister I was dogging on the Company’s behalf—you don’t need to know whom, of course, but it was more of what you so kindly call stage-managing history. Well, we had our annual function welcoming new members, and to my utter astonishment I found myself seated opposite Bell-Fairfax.”
“What a surprise,” agreed Lewis. “I suppose that sort of man didn’t get into that sort of club?”
“I should say not! But there was no mistaking Bell-Fairfax: remarkably ugly fellow, big horse-faced gawk with a broken nose, so tall he couldn’t walk through a doorway with his hat on. Beautiful speaking voice, though,” Nennius said, “and tremendously charming when he wanted to be. At any rate he’d charmed his way into the club. A retired naval commander on half pay, mind you! I thought it must be his people who’d arranged it, of course. Funnily enough, I was dead wrong.” Nennius poured himself another glass of wine.
“Was he some sort of hero?” Lewis said carefully.
“Oh, I gather he’d served with some distinction off the Ivory Coast. Been sent out there to fight the slave trade, you know, probably some of that youthful idealism coming to the fore. But he got himself into trouble again. Nobody spoke of it to his face, but the rumor was he’d very nearly been court-martialed. Fighting again, just as he’d done in school. This time he’d laid his hands on a superior officer, and from what I heard, the only reason he was allowed to retire honorably was that he threatened to make the damnedest scandal.” Nennius looked arch. “The captain in question was notorious for certain things, even by the standards of the British Navy.”
“Rum, sodomy, and the lash,” quoted Lewis.
“Oh, rather worse than that, I think. However it happened, Bell-Fairfax came out of it all right.” Nennius watched as the deck steward set down Lewis’s martini and slipped away. “After all, there he was, across the table from me. Properly respectful, of course, to his old headmaster, and I was obliged to converse with him. I was gratified to discover that he hadn’t rotted away his brain on grog, or turned into one of those blustering seafaring gentlemen. Actually rather learned, for a Navy man. Superb command of rhetoric, though his Latin was abysmal.”
“Not much call for it in the Navy, I suppose.” Lewis took a bracing sip of his cocktail.
“No. No. But still a fine raconteur, quite dryly clever, and I
found myself liking him. We became friends, as much as a former pupil and master can, saw one another at the club when he wasn’t traveling abroad. He did a lot of traveling abroad,” Nennius added in a meaningful tone.
Lewis merely raised his eyebrows in inquiry, not trusting himself to speak.
“You’ll recollect I said I was wrong to assume his people had bribed the admittance council,” Nennius continued. “Well. He had been sponsored by one of the Old Members!”
“You don’t say,” said Lewis faintly, marveling at the permanence of certain things Victorian.
“It seems he got in with a rather remarkable set.” Nennius lifted his glass and studied it. “A clique of Foreign Office people with certain esoteric interests.”
“Freemasons?” Lewis wondered to what god he ought to pray just now. Mercury, god of liars? Minerva, goddess of wisdom?
“No. You remember how it was back then, most of the ruling classes were Freemasons. That was old hat compared with what Bell-Fairfax and these other people—most distinguished some of them were, too—were doing.” Nennius looked sternly across at Lewis. “Did you ever hear of the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society?”
Mercury, Lewis decided, and as he wrinkled his brow in apparent perplexity, he uttered a silent but profound prayer of supplication. “Debating team at Oxford?” he said at last.
Nennius laughed. “Not likely,” he said scornfully. “Imagine a secret fraternity that might admit Victor Frankenstein, Jules Verne, and Indiana Jones on equal terms. Sounds like a hoax, doesn’t it? However, I happen to know it was very real indeed, and Bell-Fairfax was a member.”
Nennius himself had been a member. Did he know Lewis knew? Was this a trap? Or was he simply leaving out his own involvement in order to be able to tell the tale? “Your mortal must have had no end of adventures,” said Lewis.
“Perfectly astonishing ones, if rumor prove true,” said Nennius.
“Of course, at this late date very little evidence remains. I can assure you, though, that there were any number of quasi-scientific expeditions authorized by my cabinet member, who was also one of the Gentlemen’s number, as were some of the best scientific brains in England at the time. Their goal seems to have been world domination, in a mild sort of way.
“That was where Bell-Fairfax fit in, you see. He was no scientific genius, but he was frightfully clever and a damned good man of his hands, if you take my meaning: he’d grown accustomed to dirty work in a just cause and could be relied on utterly. He was one of their best agents, I believe.”
Lewis giggled shakily. “What a novel this would make.”
“If mortals read such things anymore,” said Nennius, looking out at the pirate ship in contempt.
“Well, but go on. This is fascinating,” Lewis said, remembering his martini and gulping half of it down. “I worked in Hollywood once, you know. I can’t help thinking what John Ford might have done with such a story.”
“Unfortunately, I don’t know many details.” Nennius shook his head. “They sent him to Egypt, and Jerusalem, and once—I believe—to a Jewish ghetto in Prague, of all places. Bell-Fairfax was a closed-mouthed chap, though. Wouldn’t have been much of a political if he hadn’t been. No, I got most of what I learned of his adventures from my cabinet member, who was rather a fool.”
“A ghetto,” said Lewis. New chapters were dancing before his eyes, in spite of his fear.
“The only mission I have any detailed knowledge of is his last one: poor old Bell-Fairfax disappeared, presumed killed.” Nennius sighed. “We kept his room at the club for seven years. Still, the adventure must have been choice. Ever hear of Santa Catalina Island? But you must have, you worked in Hollywood. I understand it became a fashionable resort in the early twentieth century.”
Lewis nodded, light-headed. “Twenty-six miles from the mainland.
One used to be able to see it, on clear days, when there still were any in Los Angeles. I suppose one can again, now.”
Nennius leaned forward and lowered his voice. “As near as I could piece it together, the Gentlemen had got hold of a mysterious document that dated back to God only knew when and lay forgotten in the royal archives. An early explorer was out there, it seems, and discovered something damned queer on Santa Catalina. There were supposed to have been artifacts with the document, but I was never able to confirm that. The rumors, though! Hints about Atlantis, the Fountain of Youth, fabulous treasure. Whatever was actually there, the Gentlemen felt strongly enough about it to send an expedition, and so of course they prodded the Foreign Office into mounting one.”
“Now we’re getting into George Lucas’s territory,” said Lewis, surprised at his own sangfroid.