The Revolutions (14 page)

It was Mr Irving, the Master of Rooms 12, 13,
et cetera
. His suit in tatters, his face streaked with soot, his eyes red. Under his arm he carried a number of ledgers. Despite his sorry condition he stood straight and seemed remarkably calm.

“Hey there!” Arthur called. He waved, then started coughing. “Hey! Irving!”

Mr Irving approached the obstruction. He peered through the flames and smoke and nodded to Arthur as if making a note of his tardiness.

“Irving!” A croak, unintelligible. Feeble.

Mr Irving put the ledgers down on the floor, and held up a hand for Arthur to be silent. He seemed to be thinking.

It looked as if the corridor behind Irving was also blocked by fire. The man was trapped, but he showed no fear. Mr Irving’s calm was in its own way as unnerving as Dimmick’s fury.

“Irving!” Arthur wasn’t sure what he meant to say.
Go back
was futile,
help me
was futile.

Mr Irving reached out to move the fallen beams from his path. Instantly his sleeves caught fire and the skin of his hands reddened and swelled and blackened and cracked. He didn’t flinch or retreat. Arthur had never seen such extraordinary self-control. Irving leaned in, shoving at the timbers. His shirt went up. He didn’t make a sound. Arthur reached out to help him but the heat drove him back. Irving pressed forward. His hair went up with a sudden flash. He stumbled. The beams were too heavy, jammed so that he couldn’t move them. Arthur looked away as he fell to the ground.

Arthur turned and staggered back the way he’d come.

Josephine, my dear,
he thought to himself,
I think I am going mad. I think I have already gone mad. As a matter of fact, I don’t see how I can go much madder
.

Set aside the mystery of Irving’s superhuman calm. Where had he come from? From his office, perhaps, where some of the men imagined that he slept. Perhaps the fire had woken him. But his office was just outside Room 13. If that was Irving, and if Irving had perished in the vicinity of his office, then Arthur had run in a circle.

There was a dumbwaiter hatch on the wall. Arthur wiped his eyes again, and saw that it was labelled
D.
He tried to remember what the hatch outside Room 13 had been labelled.

Then he let out a great roar of joy, and he threw himself forward and flung up the hatch.

Behind it was a rope, and a chute into which he was just about able to squeeze once he’d abandoned his coat. His shirt tore at the shoulders, and his elbows scraped and bled as he squeezed his way with frantic violence up the chute. He supposed he must have resembled an overgrown chimney-sweep—a chimney-sweep who’d indulged in one of Alice’s potions and now found himself swelling, stretching, his head fit to burst! He felt dizzy. He thought he might be stuck. Smoke tickled his feet. He kicked and bellowed.

*   *   *

The hatch at the top of the chute opened onto a dark corridor on the building’s second floor.

The second floor of Gracewell’s building had no rooms, no workers. So far as Arthur knew it held nothing except storage rooms. Perhaps the bell-ropes led there, too.

The corridor ran all the way to a window, which he broke. It opened onto fresh cold air and an expanse of flat rooftop.

At the end of the rooftop he lowered himself down then dropped to the ground. He stumbled away as far as he could before he came to a fence. He leaned on it, heaving and retching.

Behind him Gracewell’s building was ablaze. Hellish flames reflected out over the river. A crowd had gathered in the firelight. He couldn’t make out who they were. Workers who’d escaped the fire, he supposed, or neighbours who’d come out to watch the blaze.

He didn’t join them. Dimmick might be among them, and he had no desire to see Dimmick again.

He breathed in freezing air and winced. His throat was in agony and he thought he might have a broken rib. His head was still ringing. His legs wobbled.

Vaz and Harriot and Malone had either escaped Dimmick and got out, or not. Nothing he could do about it now.

He wanted to go home. He wanted to see Josephine again.

He walked all the way back to Rugby Street, barefoot and bleeding through the cold night—dead beat and staggering and half-frozen. All the way home he thought of Josephine. He thought of the warm and boozy offices of
The Monthly Mammoth
. He thought of his uncle George, and his friends Waugh and Heath, and he even spared a few fond thoughts for his foster-parents, who were not such bad sorts after all; he would write to them, he thought. He thought of hot coffee, and curried rabbit, and bacon, and sausages, and oxtail, and kidneys, and fried fish, and hot pea soup, and ragout of lamb—and sometimes he thought of Dimmick, or Irving, or whatever had happened to Mr Vaz, and shuddered.

He got to Rugby Street shortly before dawn. In his exhaustion, it didn’t strike him as at all odd that instead of his own home, he’d come to Mr Borel’s shop, and Josephine’s flat above it. Where else would he go? He banged on the door until Borel came out clutching his broom, and Josephine came downstairs to meet him.

She clapped a hand to her mouth in shock.

“Arthur! Where were you? What happened? What happened to your moustache—Arthur, what on earth happened to your
shoes
?”

He swept her up in his arms, lifting her bodily from the floor, and kissed her. She smelled extraordinarily sweet.

His knees started to wobble, and he put her down again. He saw that his hands had left streaks of blood and ash on her face and on her dress. He noticed that she was fully dressed, though it was the small hours of the morning, and briefly wondered why.

“Arthur—”

His legs seemed about to give out entirely.

“There was a fire,” he said. “I handled myself tolerably well, I think. I shall tell you about it one day, but now I think I should go to bed.”

He stumbled. She tried to catch him as he fell toward the floor, but missed.

*   *   *

He spent the better part of a week in bed. The bruise on his head swelled and he developed a fever. He had burns on his hands and his face and the back of shoulders, where falling cinders had burned through his shirt. His moustache was mostly gone. His friend Waugh, the medical student, came to help move him from Josephine’s bed to his own, at the other end of the street, and gave a lot of advice about draining this and elevating that and compresses and not being such a bloody fool as to walk into a burning building in the first place. Then Waugh assured Josephine that if Arthur
had
walked into a burning building, it was no doubt for good reason, and that he had probably acquitted himself heroically. She thought perhaps Waugh was a little drunk. He kept winking at her.

She nursed him for a few days. He could hardly stand. She was no Lady of the Lamp but she managed to feed him soup and dab his burns with hot water and apply all the compresses and ointments that the housekeeping magazines recommended. She tried not to upset him with questions, or to wake him when he moaned in his sleep. He wouldn’t say anything more about the fire than that it had been an awful accident, and that the worst part was that he thought his job was gone. She read him the newspapers. It really was remarkable, they agreed, how a clever newspaper writer could make
DUKE’S KILLER STILL NOT FOUND
into a new story every day for a week, or at least into something that seemed like a new story long enough that you were half-way through it before you noticed. She said nothing about Atwood or the events of his séance. At first she didn’t want to frighten him; then after a while the secret grew too big to be released. She was afraid of what he might say, or do. She was afraid he wouldn’t believe her; she was afraid he would.

Arthur’s condition improved. On Wednesday afternoon he asked what day it was (the answer made him groan). By Thursday he was well enough to sit up and take her hand as she sat beside his bed reading him the newspapers. He said that she looked troubled. She said that she wasn’t; then she said that of course she was, of course, of course. She fell against him, suddenly tearful, frightened but overjoyed to be alive. He winced—his ribs. She laughed. He was solid, sane, apparently indestructible. He laughed too, and kissed her. She kicked the newspaper away. Then the bristly remains of his moustache were tickling her neck, while she traced the bruises on his ribs with one hand under his nightshirt—the other hand fumbled with the sheets. The bed was too small for the both of them. He was suddenly on top of her. He still smelled faintly of smoke—not unpleasantly. They both breathed heavily, as if from the sheer joy of being alive and breathing. She could hear her heart beating like a metronome, its rhythm alternating with his. She closed her eyes and remembered Atwood’s words: our souls, made of star-stuff, burning bright. Arthur tugged urgently at buttons. His fingers on her skin were electric. That spark might, Atwood had said, be mistaken for something carnal. Good, she thought; she was happy to be mistaken, then.

*   *   *

It was silly, she thought afterwards, but his bruises and burns had made it all seem rather—well,
chivalrous
, as if he were a wounded knight or a lost explorer, and that made it all rather less alarming than it might have been, and sweeter. She lay awake listening to him snore, studying the red scars on his back with a mixture of trepidation and excitement, as if they were a map of some unexplored and dangerous territory.

There would be consequences, she supposed. Well, so be it. She felt that nothing in the world could scare her; not after what she’d seen.

It was a fine, warm night, and the moon shone brightly through the window and across the floorboards. She wondered what Atwood and Jupiter were up to.

THE

FOURTH

DEGREE

{
Analysis
}

Chapter Ten

Arthur was up on his feet again in no time. Sooner than Waugh had predicted. He should have bet money on it! Well, he had the best nurse in London, and the best medicine, and no time to waste.

After thinking on it for a day or two, he decided that the only decent thing was to tell Josephine everything. A clean sweep of all his secrets. He considered his oath to Mr Gracewell to have been cancelled—if not by fire, then by Dimmick’s attempt to murder him. He told her about the numbers, the instructions, the ledgers, Vaz and Simon and Harriot and Malone and Dimmick. He told her about the headaches, and the nightmares, and the other unpleasant side-effects of the Work. He edited the confrontation with Dimmick a little, so as not to worry her unduly—and hadn’t it just been a misunderstanding, after all? He left out the Irving Incident entirely, having half-convinced himself that it had been a hallucination brought on by the smoke.

She was appalled to hear that he intended to go in search of Mr Gracewell, to try to get his job back.

“Look, Josephine—a little while longer, that’s all. That’s all we need.”

“I don’t like Gracewell; I don’t like Atwood. We don’t need the money that badly.”

“It won’t be long; and it will make all the difference in the world.”

“Arthur—what if … What if they pay so much because what they’re doing is…” She seemed to be struggling for the right word. “… something
wrong
somehow?”

“Then I’ll find out what it is, and go to the police. But first I must find out. I’ll be careful, I promise.”

She stared down at her feet and said nothing. She looked angry.

“But I don’t even know where Gracewell’s got to, that’s the thing. What about Atwood? Atwood must know. But how do I get ahold of Atwood? Does he still come to meetings of the, what were they called, the Order V.V. whatever it was?”

“Oh no—he was far too fashionable to stay there long. Men of his sort get bored very quickly.”

“Hah. Yes, that would be altogether too easy, wouldn’t it? Where’s the challenge in that? What rotten luck. Oh well.”

*   *   *

Mr Gracewell’s enterprise lay in ruins. The fire had spread to some nearby buildings, too, and caused God only knows what expense and waste and loss of life.

The building’s walls were mostly gone now, so that one could see the whole structure of the thing laid out as if in a diagram. The second storey had fallen in. White gulls perched on black timbers and dogs nosed among the ashes. Otherwise it was abandoned. There wasn’t even enough left for vagrants to take shelter in. Arthur entered carefully, alert for the warning sounds of further collapse, and even more alert for the sounds of Dimmick. He heard only gulls taking flight, the wind from the river whistling through the building’s bones, and the usual noises of ships.

In two places, he came across wrecked machines. These were large columns of steel and brass and wood that once had intricate parts, levers and cylinders, like typewriters or telegraphs, but were now ruined—melted and broken and fused. They lay like fallen asteroids. He thought they had been on the upper floor, and had dropped through when it collapsed. They were in the heart of the ruins, which was perhaps why no thief had scavenged them. Or perhaps they were just too heavy to move.

No bodies. No bones.

What little paper had survived the fire had been ruined by rain. Arthur found what he thought were the filing cabinets from Gracewell’s office, but someone else had already emptied them. Dimmick, perhaps; creeping back at dawn, streaked with soot like a savage, to steal away the evidence under the very noses of the police …

Probably the police had already been and gone. No trail, no clues. He poked around until it started to rain, then went home.

He asked at Guy’s Hospital and at St. Thomas’s after a student by the name of Simon, nervous fellow, recently unwell. No luck.