The UnTied Kingdom (5 page)

Will looked like he was going to punch Sholt, and Eve couldn’t blame him. Then what the horrible little man had said penetrated her brain.

She stared at the crown on Will’s shoulder.

‘Don’t you have something else to do, Sholt?’ he said, making the man’s name sound like a bad word.

‘Yes sir, Major Harker, sir,’ said Sholt, saluting greasily and oiling away, and Will turned back to her with a face like thunder.

Conversation suddenly resumed around them.

‘Well, he was a horrible little man,’ Eve said brightly to Will. ‘Not one of your friends?’

‘If there was a way to blast him off the face of the planet I’d do it,’ he said, and the look on his face frightened Eve.

‘Can’t you just order him to take a long walk off a short bridge?’ she said. ‘I mean, you are a higher rank than him, aren’t you? Major Harker.’

He scowled and threw himself into the chair by the overburdened desk, lighting up a new cigarette and pulling on it furiously.

‘Why did you lie to me?’ Eve said, lowering herself into the chair opposite him.

Harker ran his hands through his already dishevelled hair. ‘I didn’t lie,’ he said.

‘You said your name was Will–’ Eve began.

‘It is.’ He gave her an unconvincing smile and poked gingerly at the debris on the desk. ‘There’s a sign around here somewhere.’

Wordlessly, the man at the next desk reached to the floor and picked up a desk sign. Into the slot at the front a piece of card had been inserted with a typed name on it. He handed it to Eve, who read
Maj. Wm. Harker
. It had a slightly temporary look about it.

‘You let me think you were a rank-and-file soldier,’ she said, edging the sign on to the desk, from which it promptly fell off again.

‘Would you have made friends with a major? Would you have told him what you were really doing with that glider…’ he waved his hand, ‘thingy?’

Eve scowled. ‘Yes,’ she said, and honesty forced her to add, ‘maybe.’

There was silence between them. Eve waved away some of Harker’s smoke. ‘Thank you for saving my life,’ she said, unable to inject much gratitude into it.

Harker dragged on his cigarette. ‘Weren’t going to let you drown, was I?’

‘Well, I don’t know.’ He didn’t talk like a major, Eve thought. Matter of fact, he didn’t look like one, either. Majors ought to be stout, hearty fellows with greying handlebar moustaches, who said things like, ‘What ho!’ and called everyone Old Stick.

A major shouldn’t be a man in his thirties who looked like a vagrant, talked like a steelworker and smoked as if it was the only thing keeping him alive.

Harker looked up as a woman approached, her frizzy hair battled into a plait, her face bare of make-up. Eve itched to tell her to get some decent conditioner, but judging by the stuff she’d found in the hospital showers, that sort of thing wasn’t military at all.

‘Sir,’ said the woman, ‘I’ve just been speaking to Major Dennison. They’re already clearing people from No Man’s Land. They’re sending in the fire throwers before it gets dark.’

Harker nodded, rocked his feet off the desk and stood up. ‘Right. I’m going to need a driver, Charlie, and some handcuffs.’

Charlie didn’t blink, but she did glance at the bandaged ankle Eve had managed to fit her unlaced trainer over.

‘How far do you think she’s going to get, sir?’

‘She could be faking it.’

‘I am not!’ Eve said. ‘The doctor – Captain – whoever he is, he said my ankle is sprained. It bloody hurts!’

They both ignored her. Harker glanced at something on the far wall. Charlie continued to watch him, like a dog awaiting instruction.

‘Fine,’ Harker sighed. ‘Get me a driver though. I’m not letting her out of my custody. Wheeler’ll have my head. Get
Lu. I’m sure she can drive. Do her good to see No Man’s Land.’

‘Hold on,’ Eve said. ‘Custody? Handcuffs?’

Again, she was ignored.

‘Byward Tower, ten minutes,’ Harker said.

‘Sir.’ Charlie nodded and left, but she didn’t salute, and Harker wheeled round to face Eve.

‘So!’ he said, voice like a gunshot and a glint in his eye Eve didn’t like one bit. ‘Mitcham. Mitcham, Mitcham. I don’t know much about it, I wasn’t born in London.’

‘Neither was I,’ Eve said, warily.

‘No, of course not. Still, you’ll have to point it out to me.’

He gestured to a large map covering the far wall, and Eve got clumsily to her feet. ‘Am I in some sort of trouble?’ she said.

‘What makes you think that?’

‘The handcuffs conversation? Just because you ignored me doesn’t mean I couldn’t hear you.’

‘Military rules,’ Harker said vaguely, and led her to the map. A few people watched her go by – maybe they recognised her. Well, that was humiliating.

But when Eve got up close to the map, she rolled her eyes. ‘Very funny.’

‘What is?’

‘The map. What is this, Elizabethan?’

Harker stared at her a minute, then said without turning around, ‘Ensign Bowhurst, how old is this map?’

A fairly young male voice replied, ‘Er, about a month, sir.’

‘All right, smart arse,’ Eve said. ‘What map is it based on? ’Cos I’m expecting to see the Globe on here. The old one.’

‘The theatre?’ Harker pointed to a blob south of the river. ‘That one?’

She peered at it. Yes, it was labelled Globe Theatre, but she didn’t see any of the stuff that ought to be near it. Where was the Tate Modern? The Millennium Bridge? Where was freaking Waterloo Station?

Why was there a long, uninterrupted ribbon of river, running all the way from the Tower, whose lopsided pentagon she could make out, off past Westminster and into the countryside? Where were all the bridges? Where were all the landmarks?

Where, in point of fact, was London?

‘Found it yet?’ Harker said. ‘Your house?’

‘It’s not on here,’ Eve said, because south of the river there was virtually nothing. A couple of circular theatres by the river and that was it.

‘Hmm,’ said Harker, in a voice that was starting to annoy her. ‘Well, maybe we’d better get in a car and you can show me.’

Eve scowled. ‘And if we drive to Mitcham and I show you where I live, will you let me go?’

‘If we get there and you can show me your house, then yes. You can go.’

Eve gave him a distrustful look, and Harker raised his palms. ‘Oath of an officer,’ he said.

‘Considering you allowed me to believe you were no such thing until ten minutes ago, that does not count for much,’ Eve said, but she followed him anyway.

Chapter Five

The Wolf rattled down toward the Byward Tower, clanking and jarring. Harker shaded his eyes to see if the poor unfortunate driver was Tallulah, and smiled. It was Tallulah perched behind the wheel, her back ramrod straight, clearly horribly uncomfortable and never likely to admit it.

‘Lu,’ he said when she eased the rickety vehicle to a halt, ‘this is Eve Carpenter. We’re going to be taking her home.’

Surprise showed on Tallulah’s pretty face.

‘To Mitcham,’ Harker added, and Tallulah’s mouth opened, then closed again.

‘Yes sir,’ she said, and got out to open the door for Eve.

Harker held out his arm to assist Eve into the car, but she batted him away sharply.

‘I don’t need any help,’ she snapped, and Harker raised his eyebrows at Tallulah, who hid her smile and waited. Harker waited too, arms folded across his chest as if he had all the time in the world. It was perverse fun to watch her struggle, her cheeks going red as she realised she couldn’t do it by herself.

She was pretty, his alien, a little softer than most of the women he knew. Good bone structure under that scowl, a tangle of damp blonde hair to her collar, green-blue eyes that she turned, annoyed, on him.

Harker smiled amicably. ‘All right?’

Nostrils flaring, she shoved her crutches at him and grabbed the side of the open vehicle, swinging herself in and tumbling on the seat with a total lack of grace. Harker, winking at Tallulah, followed, pushing Eve gently over to one side of the seat and propping her crutches in the corner.

‘Isn’t there a seatbelt?’ she asked, and Harker, who had no idea what she was talking about, just shook his head.

‘Well, that’s safe. Thank you for helping me,’ Eve said, her voice thick with sarcasm, as the Wolf rattled across the cobbles under the Middle Tower. Her fingers clutched the seat, her knuckles white.

‘You said you didn’t want any help,’ Harker replied mildly as they drove out on to the road.

‘Well, clearly I needed some! I have a sprained ankle!’

A sprained ankle
. Harker had seen men drag themselves uncomplainingly for miles with half one leg blown away.

‘Ah. So when you said you didn’t want help, what you actually meant was the exact opposite? You’ll have to forgive me, Miss Carpenter, sixteen years in the army does dreadful things to a man’s capacity to disobey orders.’

Eve scowled.

‘Don’t take the Bridge, Lu,’ he added, picturing the noisy, smelly snarl of people, horses, wagons and donkeys which clogged it at all times of the day and night.

‘But you want to cross the river, sir?’

‘Yeah. Drive down to Blackfriars, there’s a pontoon.’

Eve snorted, but a minute later when London Bridge came into view, she sat up straight and said, ‘What’s
that
?’

‘That,’ said Harker, lighting up a cigarette, ‘is the bridge you nearly drowned under last night. You’re welcome, by the way.’

‘What the–?’ Eve twisted around to look behind them. ‘Where’s Tower Bridge?’

‘Tower what? The bridge across the moat? You can’t see it from here.’

‘No, I mean the bridge across the river.’

There was a short silence. Harker gazed at the unmissable bulk of the only permanent river crossing in London.

‘That is the bridge across the river,’ he said eventually. ‘London Bridge. The bridge that crosses the river in London. That’s why they call it London Bridge,’ he added helpfully.

‘But …’

He looked over at the Bridge, in all its decrepit glory, and tried to imagine it as someone who’d never seen it before. The stone columns, crumbling in places, slimy and lashed by the water frothing over the wooden piers. Even when the river was calm, the water churning through the narrow gaps in the low stone of the Bridge made a dozen or more fierce whirlpools. If Eve had been caught in any one of them, she’d have been smashed to pieces on the rotten wood of the battered piers. There wouldn’t have been enough left for him to drag out.

Above the creaking stone, the buildings clustered together, outgrowing the Bridge by horrifying proportions. Some had been extended outwards so far they required supports to stop them toppling into the river. Each building tottered under the weight of six or seven storeys, leaning sideways or even forwards to rest on the structure opposite. Crossing the bridge meant dodging through a dark, narrow tunnel, the overhanging storeys allowing grudgingly little daylight to pass through.

People lived on the Bridge, shopped and worked and even prayed there in St Thomas’s Chapel. It had always seemed to Harker as if it could exist entirely separately from the city, and that it might be possible for a person to live their entire life there, without ever stepping on to solid ground.

‘… that’s not London Bridge,’ Eve said forlornly. ‘And where
is
Tower Bridge? It should be just … there, right next to the Tower!’

‘Why would we put a bridge next to the Tower?’ Harker said, glancing back along the docklands, which looked as crowded and unfathomable as ever. ‘It’d be an open invitation to attack the fortress, and nothing could get past to the docks.’

‘No, that’s why it opens,’ Eve said. ‘To let ships through. Holds up the traffic something chronic. Where
is
it?’

Silence again. Even Tallulah glanced back upriver where there was, unmistakeably, no bridge.

Eventually Harker exhaled. ‘No idea,’ he said. ‘You tell me.’

Tallulah drove on towards Blackfriars, while Eve bounced around in her seat, exclaiming and protesting. ‘Where’s HMS Belfast? Where’s the Tate Modern? Why is everything so
low
? There’s nothing on the south bank!’

‘Couple of theatres,’ Harker said, trying not to notice how attractively she bounced. ‘See, that’s the Globe. And that’s the Curtain.’

‘But … but …’ Eve said.

‘Dunno if the Rose is still there. You go to the theatre much, Lu?’

‘Not really, sir.’

‘Yeah. It all went to hell after the taverns moved out. No audience.’

‘There’s … like … a shanty town there,’ Eve said, disbelief heavy in her voice.

‘There is now,’ Harker said. Come tomorrow there wouldn’t be.

‘But … what is it? Who lives there?’

‘Oh, refugees, vagrants, spies, whores. Big brothel industry over there. They get shut down every few months, lie low in the city for about a week, then go back and start rebuilding their huts. They’re resilient, you’ve got to give them that.’

‘But …’ Eve said, and Harker attempted to close his ears to her prattling. Soon enough, they’d reach the pontoon, and it’d be nice if Eve shut up long enough for Tallulah to concentrate on driving over it. After all, it was little more than a collection of planks laid over some boats. He could see it now, swaying gently in the tide. One slip of the wheel, and they’d all be in that filthy old river. Again.

Tallulah glanced back, her eyes worried, as they approached it. ‘Sir? Are you sure this can take the weight of a car?’

‘It can take a fully loaded infantry truck, Lu, it can take us.’

Carefully, experimentally, Tallulah drove on to the bridge, and Harker fancied that she didn’t take another full breath until they’d reached solid land again.

Beside him, Eve prattled on about things that she expected to see but couldn’t, and then she said, ‘
Where the hell is Westminster
?’

Harker sighed. He was getting pretty tired of this.

He put one hand on the top of her head and turned it towards the huge, complex bulk of the palace. ‘There. Look. That really big building? With the gardens? And them flying ... er, what’re they, Lu? Flying buttocks or whatever.’

‘Buttresses,’ Tallulah murmured.

‘Yeah. Them. That’s Westminster Palace.’

‘It is not!’

‘It is.’

‘It isn’t!’

‘It is.’

‘It isn’t!’

Harker sighed. Again.

‘That’s not Westminster!’ Eve shouted eventually. ‘It’s not the Houses of Parliament!’

‘Yes, it is,’ he said patiently. ‘Why would there be that many soldiers guarding it, if it wasn’t important? See that big long roof there? That’s Westminster Hall where the Chancery court is. And that bit sticking out there, that’s the House of Commons where all our good elected Members of Parliament sit and try to save the country.’ The ones that haven’t buggered off to form their own army, he added inside his head.

‘It isn’t! Where’s Big Ben? And … how come I can see it from here anyway?’

‘Wait,’ Harker said. ‘Are you asking me why something you don’t think you should be able to see isn’t there?’

‘Get lost,’ Eve snarled. Harker, unconcerned, lit another cigarette.

‘Where are we going, sir?’ Tallulah asked, surveying the squalid huts and temporary shelters on the south bank.

Up until recently, this had been the town of Southwark, with proper houses and shops and a rather lovely cathedral. Three years ago, the Coalitionists had made their biggest attempt at taking London, and Southwark had become the battleground. The suburbs and villages south of the river had been overcome by the rebels, burning buildings and shooting civilians, and the army had met them full on.

Harker’s fingers flexed, the back of his hand aching. The Battle of Southwark had taken the whole country by shock. Suddenly the war wasn’t just a few skirmishes happening miles away, it was a battle raging in the capital. It was the destruction of homes and the slaughter of innocents.

It was a watershed moment for the British Army, and for Harker. He’d taken command of C Company after Major Chesterton had lost half his head to a grenade supplied to the rebels by the French. He’d been awarded a promotion to Major. He’d listened to General Wheeler announcing that after the army’s narrow victory, losses were so great that Britain’s women were not just to volunteer for the front line, but be conscripted for it.

And he’d turned to Saskia, knowing what this meant for her family. All her brothers and sisters, bar one, had been taken by the war. Only Saskia, the oldest, and Tallulah, the youngest, remained. Sheltered by her parents, he had rarely seen her due to his military duties, although Saskia, of course, had kept in contact.

‘It won’t come to that,’ Harker said, trying to take Saskia in his arms. To comfort his wife. ‘The war’ll be over before Lu’s eighteen. She’ll be fine.’

He tried to smile, but Saskia just spat tearfully, ‘Don’t be a bloody fool, Harker. And how many times have I told you, stop manhandling me in public!’

She tore herself from him, and as he watched her stalk away across the wasteland south of the river, Harker realised he wouldn’t be married for much longer.

Now Southwark was a shanty town of buildings so flimsy a good storm would wash them away. No one bothered to build properly, since the army came around every few months to clear the place. The town was a barren sweep of fire-blackened trees and transient shelters. Here and there low walls surrounded large piles of earth. The graves of soldiers.

‘Well,’ Harker said, clearing his throat as the engine idled and Eve surveyed the desolation in shocked silence, ‘I do have one thing to confess.’

‘What?’ Eve said distantly.

He extracted from his jacket a very grubby, tattered bit of paper. ‘I have a map that’s about five years old. It has Mitcham on it. Couldn’t find your street, but I found the village.’

‘Mitcham’s not a village,’ Eve said, but she took the map, shaking her head as if it was all wrong. Eventually she said, ‘Well, okay then. Drive … um … this way.’

She handed the map to Tallulah, who took it gingerly as Eve asked, ‘Do I want to know what those stains are?’

‘Most likely blood,’ Harker said, and Tallulah hurriedly put the map on the dashboard as she set off again. ‘I was carrying that at the Battle of Southwark.’

‘The Battle of Southwark,’ Eve said, sarcasm heavy in her voice.

‘Yep.’ Harker stared at a tree stump. He remembered sheltering under its huge, high branches. ‘Lost a lot of good men then.’

‘But no good women?’ Eve asked archly.

‘Lost a lot of them, too.’ He kept his voice even.

‘I thought women didn’t serve in combat situations?’

‘
They do
,’ Harker said, and even Eve didn’t argue with that.

‘Stick to the marked paths, Lu,’ he said. ‘There are still some mines in the fields.’

‘Excellent,’ Tallulah muttered, her voice nearly lost under the rattle of the ancient Wolf’s engine.

They drove in relative silence. South of Southwark, and the swarm of army wagons clearing people out, there was nothing but rubble and the skeletal remains of buildings. Some of them were black with fire. The fields surrounding them were pockmarked with shell holes, and in one meadow there was a big crater, with mud spattered for miles around, and bits of the unlucky animal who’d set off the mine decorating the rubble and the stark trees.

A sheep mine, the lads called them.

Occasionally, something in one of the ruined houses gleamed white, and Harker looked away, because he’d seen enough naked human bones in this lifetime.