Angelmaker

X Buggeration to the enemy; Brother Sheamus; Ahh-knuu-haha.

I must be out of my mind,” Polly Cradle mutters, as the car turns into Guildholt Street. She sounds for a second so like her brother that Joe laughs, then stops sharply and looks to see if this has annoyed her.

“No,” she says, grinning, “don’t stop. You have a nice laugh. Although it sounds a bit rusty.”

He grins back. “It probably does.” He tries again, a variety of chuckles and cackles, then hears himself and wonders if he now sounds quite mad. But Polly is still smiling.

He points. “Over there. We have to walk the rest of the way.”

“Yes, sir!” She makes a Girl Guide salute, and for some reason that makes him laugh, too.

The building Joe is heading for rears up on the far side, a weird, helter-skelter piece of old English stonework topped with some ghastly Victorian Gothic additions. The doors are vast: black oak weathered and stained by coal fires and then by petroleum fumes, the only bright part of them the great bronze knocker and handles worn shiny and pale with constant use.

Joe Spork has not been here for months. He has nightmares sometimes about turning a corner in the stacks and finding an empty case with a white card in front of it, waiting for his brain.

“Name?” says Bob Foalbury, Harticle’s factotum and husband of Cecily the archivist, through the thick wood.

“Spork,” Joe answers, though Mr. Foalbury has known him for twenty years and more.

“Enter and be welcome in the house of art. Abide by Harticle’s rules and settle all debts amicably before leaving the building.

“Hawking, spitting, solicitation, speculation, gossip-mongering, usury, duelling, and gambling,” Mr. Foalbury says severely, as he opens the door, “are not countenanced within these walls. Good morning, Joe.”

“I need help with something,” Joe says, and there’s just enough tension in him that Bob Foalbury grows serious.

“Not the law, is it?”

“It’s bailiffs, Bob, and all manner of government.”

“Venal office-holders?”

“By the bucketload, I think.”

“Buggeration! The worm shall eat them up like a garment, Joe, and the moth shall eat them up like wool, but your righteousness shall be from generation to generation. The Bible, that is, and I’ve always fancied the Lord was particularly thinking of revenuers and debt collectors.”

“Thank you, Bob. And this is Polly,” Joe says awkwardly, and Mr. Foalbury puffs out a sergeant major’s chest and extends his hand.

“And very nice too, Miss Polly. Bob Foalbury, commissionaire of the house of art. Would you be maker, mischief, or muse?”

“A bit of everything.”

Mr. Foalbury smiles. “Call it muse,” he says. “Always my favourite.” He leads the way down the main corridor, proudly showing off his domain. On wood-panelled walls, oil paintings of Brunel and Babbage rub shoulders with works by lesser-known (but excellent) watercolourists, early blueprints, and pages from ancient mathematical texts. Everything at Harticle’s, Mr. Foalbury explains to Polly, is special, handmade, or orphaned—usually all three. Even the building is special, riven through with trial technologies: Victorian pneumatic message tubes, a Thomas Twyford sanitation system, a retractable roof on the third-floor annexe for observation of the moon. There’s also an antique burglary-prevention device, including panic buttons in all the main rooms, though even Bob Foalbury is a little wary of actually using it.

“You’ll be wanting the old Man-eater, then?” Bob says. “She’s writing a monograph on her teeth.” Cecily Foalbury has a personal collection of assorted sets of false teeth down through the years. The most remarkable is probably the clockwork set made for a sailor who had lost part of his brachial plexus to a cannonball and therefore could not chew. The somewhat grisly archive of gnashers is kept in its own room at Harticle’s and has resulted in this alarming nickname, an insult Cecily resolutely courts—and this is where Joe Spork baulks somewhat—wearing items from her collection to suit her mood.

Bob Foalbury apparently finds this quirky and charming.

“I want both of you. And I need to borrow a record player.”

“Well, we’re here! I’ll sort you out a portable, shall I?… Taxmen! Buggeration to the enemy!” Then, over his shoulder into the woody hallway and the dim, panelled rooms beyond, “Darling? It’s the Spork boy!”

From within comes a noise like a trombonist being goosed during the overture, and then a mighty roar from a pair of elderly female lungs.

“Well, well, don’t just stand in the bloody doorway, come on in. You’re letting out the heat and that’s a grave infraction of our environmental policy, and bloody chilly to boot!” Cecily, silver-capped and mountainous, is still invisible behind a half-closed door, but her writ runs through the house of art.

As they enter the room, a chair skitters back from a kidney desk, and sensible shoes slap on burnished boards. A short, muscular woman with hair like a steel bathcap bounds towards them from the gloom, a vast pair of clear-rimmed National Health glasses making her eyes enormous.

“The Spork boy? Joe Spork? Why didn’t you say so sooner, you bloody fool! Joe? Joe! Joseph! Get in here and give me a kiss!”

The Man-eater spreads wide her arms and clasps him to her chest. Mr. Foalbury sighs.

“Shout out if she gets peckish, Joe, or even looks at you funny. We’ve got some raw meat in a biscuit tin for emergencies.”

“Calumnies!” cries the Man-eater. “Lies, lies, lies! Who’s this? What? What? How can you possibly be called Wally? Oh, Polly, yes, of course. How splendid. Got some meat on her, thank God, not like these modern pipe-cleaners… Foalbury, hush your mouth! I was not considering her for the pot. No. No! This nonsense about anthropophagy must cease! Make tea. Make it thick and orange. I sense the Sporklet is mired in shit and comes with a mission. And how do I sense it? Because the ungrateful little sod is here at all.” She scowls at him, goldfish eyes and Mona Lisa brows behind the lenses. Bob Foalbury departs, smiling.

And now, in the quiet, she surveys Joe Spork once more, with greater care. She takes in his lantern jaw all covered in stubble and his drawn, deep eyes. Then she glances at Polly Cradle and sees something between them of which she approves. X-ray vision with subtitles. Old lady fu. She embraces him tenderly.

“My dear boy,” she murmurs. “My dear, dear boy. You must go and hug Foalbury when the chance presents itself, please, and tell him I’ve forced you to agree to dinner some day soon. He misses you when you don’t come for a while.”

“I will,” Joe says.

“He gave me a scare,” she says. “I mean, a real one. Woke up and couldn’t breathe, and of course I thought it was his heart. Turns out he’s allergic to our new pillows. But come, Joe, please?”

“I will.”

“Because one day, you know, it will be his heart.”

“I will,” Joe says. She peers at him, weighs the promise.

“All right, then. Now, what can I do for you?”

“Ted Sholt. The Ruskinites. Brother Sheamus.”

“Oh, Joe. Bad stories and old deaths. And half of it lies, I’m sure. You ignored me, didn’t you? You went and pressed ahead with that wretched Hakote business!”

“Yes.” He cannot lie to her.

“I told you and told you!”

“Yes. But it was too late by then.”

“Yes, I suppose it was. You best give me the lot, then, and we’ll go from there. I shall not interrupt.”

She never does. Cecily Foalbury’s unique brand of eidetic memory is cantankerous and wayward, making strange connections and seeing unlikely consonances, but it is absolute and requires no second chances. She sits in silence as Joe tells her, belatedly, about Wistithiel and the machine, about Ted Sholt, and about the thin man and the fat man running, and the robed strangers with their alarming heron’s gait, and finally about Billy Friend and Mercer’s rescue. More than once during the narrative, her eyes narrow, and Joe knows she is cross-referencing, walking the long alleys of her memory’s maze and pulling out old business for new examination.

When Joe has finished, Cecily Foalbury sits in absolute silence for a long while with her eyes fixed on the tabletop, and her lips wriggle as she combs the front and sides of her false teeth. The soft sucking is the only sound in the room, and the only indication that she has not fallen asleep. Then, at last, she opens her eyes.

“Bees,” she says. “As in, the golden swarm.”

“I think so.”

“They say there are more, now. Other hives in other cities. They must have been just sitting there, forgotten in corners, waiting for… whatever this is. People will be frightened. I was. I am, actually. There were riots in Moscow and Nanjing yesterday. And Caracas. They’re all over the place, Joe. Put there. Hidden, maybe.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she snaps. “You were set up.” She glowers at him, then looks closer. “You do see that, don’t you? Good Lord, boy, of course you were. Don’t tell me,” she says to Polly, “he’s been moping about imagining this was all his own work?” And when Polly nods, “Tcha! You know better. If you cut yourself with a chisel, is it the chisel’s fault? No. Don’t blame the tool.”

He really hadn’t thought of it that way. He smiles at her in gratitude. She frowns at him thunderously, then goes on.

“All right: the Ruskinites, then… There’s a lot to tell, and things you need to know. I’ll get Foalbury to type it up. But for now, I think you need the quick version, right away.”

“With notes as necessary,” Polly Cradle says, and Cecily Foalbury shoots her an approving glance, and replies that she will condense, but that a breath of context would be just as well.

Harticle’s, Cecily Foalbury says by way of caution, is like an old Victorian gas lamp in a dark street: a flickering light atop a wrought-iron post, surrounded by greenish smog. Close to the centre, everything is clear. The history of the wristwatch, the rise and fall of the clockwork toy, the enduring charm of the gramophone—all these are stories well known and simple. Further out, things become bizarre, like Mad Ludwig’s clockwork carriage, complete with iron horses driven by a flyweight, which probably never existed save in the mind of an Austrian confidence man.

Finally there are stories which make no sense or cannot be quite right: rumours of half-truths and reports of whispers. The fall of the Order of John the Maker—also known as the Ruskinites—is one of them.

The Ruskinites were a society of craftsmen who believed in the power of art to raise the human soul, to enlighten and uplift. They were so good that, when the British government found itself short of resources and in desperate need, they drew as many of them as were in England to their cause and set them to work with a genius to create machines of war.

The genius was a woman, come to England for refuge. By all accounts she was temperamental and infuriating, as such people often are.

The nature of the collaboration being what it was, the products of this endeavour were unusual, even eccentric. And yet, they were effective for all that. They made machines and vehicles and uncovered scientific secrets which were of use, and they rivalled Bletchley Park for their ability to solve insoluble riddles and deceive the enemy. They were so effective that they continued long after the war was over, shoring up Britain’s defences against the Soviets, and never discussed even with the Americans, who had by that time defaulted (Cecily Foalbury snorts) on the deal to share nuclear information with their wartime allies.

And then, sometime around the end of the sixties or the beginning of the seventies, there was a tragedy. Something went wrong with the greatest project of the collaboration, and a village on the coast was wiped out. It was rumoured the experiment itself was not to blame for the physical destruction, that that was done afterwards to conceal the consequences. The genius behind the thing fled, died, who knew? It was over, and the Ruskinites were cut loose to fend for themselves after thirty years in the warm breadbasket of government. They lost their way.

“Soot and sorrow,” murmurs Joshua Joseph Spork.

“Exactly, darling,” Cecily Foalbury replies. “Exactly.” She draws a phlegmy breath—tears unshed or a winter cold, he isn’t sure—and looks up at him with suffering eyes. “You’ll want to know that bit, won’t you? And there’s no one better to tell you, because I was there the night it all began; the night they chose Brother Sheamus.”

And then she settles to tell it, mouth turned down and damp eyes staring into history.

What the Ruskinites wanted—had always wanted—was to be part of any project in the secular world which might, by its presence and execution, reveal the divine in man. Indeed, the bravest of them whispered, was it not likely that the eye of God was drawn to the most profound, most perfect artefacts of human effort? And were these not in any case the ones which touched closely upon the divine within?

Cecily sighs. “But they were fighting a losing battle, weren’t they, Joe?”

“I suppose.”

“Oh, yes. Of course they were. That time was gone. After the war, there was no room for craft. If it couldn’t be machine made, mass-produced, almost no one could afford it. So there was a new doctrine: uniqueness was elitist, mass-produced art was good. Perfection should be made available to all, just small enough to put in a cloth bag and carry home.

“They soldiered on, but by 1980 they couldn’t pretend any more. All those shoulder pads and the beginnings of consumer gizmos. Walkmen instead of music boxes. VHS instead of charades. A nation plugged into the industrial machine. Everything had to be mega. Megabucks. Megastar. Megadeath. It means ‘million,’ you know. Well. If you’re a Ruskinite, a million is too many. A million days is more than thirty human lifetimes. A million miles is four times the distance to the moon. But the eighties were all about millions.

“It tore them up. If God was in the detailing, then God was dead.”

The Order of John the Maker began to wither, which would have been sad, but fitting. Artisanal movements do that; they go a certain distance, and then they stop. But then, as a new, inexperienced Keeper named Theodore Sholt cast around for a remedy for the secular world itself, he found himself beset by a rival. A false prophet.

“I was there,” Cecily says dully, as if speaking of a public hanging. “A friend of Foalbury’s called us and said there was a wonderful man. A strange, compelling man who was going to save the Ruskinites. Well, we went, of course. Wouldn’t you? But when we got there it was something awful. He wasn’t rescuing anything. He was taking it away and making it his own, and none of them could see.”

Bob Foalbury puts an arm around her, and—when Cecily seems unable to continue the story—he takes it up.

“He called himself Brother Sheamus, and he was… he was perfect. He looked like Professor bloody Moriarty. You just wanted Basil Rathbone to come in and stop him. Or I did. And he was no more Irish than a Scotch egg.”

Sheamus went to the heart. He came as a prodigal son, a bird returning to the nest at dusk. He came to Sharrow House on foot, through wrought-iron gates and past the old rails of the artillery store from the war, down the yew alley and past the moat some Victorian fellow had felt the need for, and over the drawbridge. He stood with them on the grand balcony, looking at London’s rooftops and hearing the traffic and the clock tower, lamented the housing blocks which obscured the view of the river. He let them know he loved it all, the garden, the view, the house which was the soul of the Order of John the Maker. He loved them. He understood their pain and their fear. He was a man of God.

His English was expensive, and foreign. Rumour had it that he’d trained in Jerusalem with the Armenian Orthodox Church. It was whispered he’d been to Eton and served in the SAS, that he had worked with Wilhelm Reich. He said he’d taken the cowl in Burma with a monk who’d died of malaria, then gone to Rome in the sixties to study with the Jesuits. Before he even arrived, he was a sort of myth.

The world was changing too fast, Sheamus said, and in the wrong way, so he had come to make a stand. In the grand hall at the heart of Sharrow House, beneath stone arches cut by hand, ceilings painted and sculpted so that each column and nook was a statement of identity and uniqueness, Brother Sheamus wove a trap in words.

“He was a matinée idol, Joe. He told them he loved them when everyone else thought they were hopelessly obsolete. He swept them off their feet. And he was surrounded by people, all the time, photographers and journalists writing everything down. Even a television camera. You have to remember how rare that was then, Joe. We only had three channels until eighty-two. But they watched everything he did, and we knew he was important. There’s nothing so impressive as someone everyone wants to be with, who says he only wants to be with you.

“I sat at the back,” Cecily Foalbury growls, “and I hated him. I hated him with everything I had because I knew he was a liar and he would leave them with nothing. He stood in the pulpit and looked down at them and he broke them, and they thought he was making it all better.

“‘Artisanship,’” he said, “‘is a means to an end for us. Is it not? Did we become artists because we love art, or because we love God?’ And Joe, you have to understand, they hadn’t been addressed like that in a sermon before. They weren’t Charismatics, they didn’t feel the Holy Spirit in them, and they didn’t ask one another to testify. They were Ruskinites. They were makers, and very sensible. Very calm.

“Well, that just made them easy pickings. I saw, next to me, an old fellow stop breathing for a moment as if he was frightfully offended, and then he got this odd sort of smile, as if he’d always wanted to do this and suddenly he was being allowed.

“‘We love God,’ someone said, and then they were all nodding, and I heard a lot of people saying ‘God.’

“‘We seek revelation,’ Brother Sheamus said. ‘Is it not so?’

“‘Yes,’ they said.

“‘Well, God has abandoned us. Perhaps it is a test. Perhaps He does not care. Who can say? He is God. He is ineffable. He has done many things in our shared history, but He has never explained Himself. But there is a keener revelation in this world than art and craft. There is a machine which could reveal God. An automated prayer wheel which will show us the truth. But it might… it will do more than that.’

“‘What more?’ they said.

“‘If God has abandoned us—if our creator has left us to our own devices—then this device will draw His eye.’

“‘Draw it?’

“‘The Engine is most compelling. It is like a puzzle to the eye of God, a whirlpool. With it, we will end the silence of God. We will see Him. And He will see us. We will pass His test, and we will come of age. We will demand—demand, as Moses did—we will demand that he speak to us.’

“Well, that was blasphemy, clear and simple, but it didn’t sound like it when he said it then and there, it sounded like a perfectly reasonable thing. They all sat there for a moment as if he’d hit them with a kipper, and then someone shouted ‘Sheamus!’ and then they were all on their feet and shouting and poor Sholt, the little fellow who was supposed to be Keeper, was bundled off the platform and they elevated Sheamus on the spot.

“He didn’t hang about, Joe. He got right to it. That same night he told them to cover their faces as a symbol of God’s disregard, and they did, and somehow there were bits of that horrible gauze ready and anyone who wouldn’t wear it was out into the dark. They tried to take possession of all the other buildings and so on, but someone blocked it, I always assumed it was the government.

“And very soon after that, the Ruskinites became something else. The craftsmen were gone, people we’d known for years were either sent into seclusion or kicked out, and Sheamus brought in his own people, thugs and bullies as lay members, and a whole host of new monks who never spoke. He called them the Cornish Orphans.”

Joe jolts a little in his chair.

“It was a hostile takeover,” Cecily Foalbury says, brokenly. “Well, it was the eighties, wasn’t it?”

Into the mournful quiet, Joe ventures a last question. “Cecily… the friend who took you along…”

“Yes,” she mutters. “It was. It was your grandfather, Daniel.”

They sit for a moment without speaking.

“Joe,” Polly Cradle says at last, “we should go. We have to check in with Mercer.”

“One minute, I just need to make a call,” Joe says.

“Joe—”

“It’s important, Polly, I promise. It might help.”

She sighs a yes, and Joe gets permission from Cecily Foalbury to use the telephone. Cecily’s gaze sweeps over Polly, resting for a moment on the bag of records on its strap over one shoulder. She raises her eyebrows just a little, and Polly nods. The Man-eater smiles, and pats Polly lightly on the back of the hand.

“Partner in crime,” Cecily says happily. “The right sort of girl. At last!”

The phone is in a separate wooden booth, an elegantly carved enclosure with a special noise-reducing design. It was made, according to the handwritten label, for an Estonian noble in the late 1800s. Joe cannot remember the number, but he can remember dialling it on his father’s grey desk phone, the purr of the tone and the endless clickety-clack as he went through the digits. Back then, it was an oh-one number. Now it’s oh-two-oh-seven. He hopes the rest remains the same.

Someone answers on the second ring.

“Fucking intolerable cow!” cries an aggravated male voice.

“Don?”

“Oh, I’m terribly sorry. I thought you were Erika. My lover,” the voice clarifies, in case Joe knows more than one Erika who might be an intolerable cow. “Who’s that?”

“Don? It’s Joe Spork.”

“Joe? Joe Spork? Oh, for God’s sake, little Josh?”

“Yes.”

“Little Josh, who must now be almost as old as I am, you have the pleasure of addressing the Honourable Donald Beausabreur Lyon, master of a thousand bureaucrats and Prince of Quangos! That’s Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organisation, for those in the audience who don’t know, such as the intolerable cow who thinks she can boss me around like a puppy dog and make me go to bloody Sheffield when I don’t bloody want to… Honestly, it’s bloody Sheffield, not Saint-Tropez… How may I be of service?”

“I’ve got a spot of bother, Don, and I thought you might be able to help out. For old times’ sake, as it were.”

“Well, I don’t know. I might. What sort of bother?”

“I’m involved in this bee thing. By accident.”

“The bee thing?”

“The crazy bees from Cornwall? The police were called out.”

“Oh, bloody hell. That bee thing. That’s far beyond me, old lad. Go and see that weasel at the office and confess all, is my advice. Unless…”

“Unless what?”

“Unless you’d prefer not to?” This last in a strangely wheedling tone.

“I’d really prefer not to.”

The Hon Don doesn’t speak. Joe realises he’s waiting for something. There’s a password, but I don’t know what it is.

Finally, “Well, I’ll look into it, Josh—Joe, is it?—but I can’t promise anything. Where are you?”

“I’ll call you, Don. It’s better that way.”

“What? Oh, yes, of course. I see what you mean. But you can trust me. Mum’s the word.”

“Oh! Yes. Don, did Mathew ever mention anything to you about his mother?”

“God, no. Harriet was the only person he ever talked to about that sort of thing. Go and see her, is my advice. Tell her I said to sing ‘Georgia Brown’ one more time for the Hon Don! All right? Then I’ll hear from you? Grand. Grand…”

And Donald Beausabreur Lyon is gone, in a flurry of false bonhomie.

Joe turns to find Cecily Foalbury watching him from the doorway. From the non-display collection in the basement her husband has retrieved a small portable gramophone known as a Piglet (Jacobs Bros. of Stroud, 1940) because of the noise it makes when you wind it. “We’re always here, Joe,” she says very seriously. “We’d go to the wall for you. Don’t ever forget it. That’s what Harticle’s is for, and it’s our trust. ‘No craftsman stands alone, nor in his darkness lacks for light, nor has no shield against his patron’s spite.’ Frightful piece of doggerel, but it’s real to me. And I love you like my own, all right?” She hugs him powerfully, then turns hurriedly away.

Subdued, Joe allows Polly to drive him back to her home. Mercer calls when they are still a few streets away with strict instructions that they remain in the house.

“I’m coming to you,” he tells her. “Something’s happening.”

“What sort of something?”

“Turn on the television when you get home,” Mercer says, “and then stay exactly where you are, which is what you’re supposed to be doing right now. Where did you go?”

Polly tells him.

“Well,” Mercer says after a moment, “that was insane. But apparently it was also a good idea. I find the combination unsettling. Please try not to have any more good ideas until I get there to measure them against the possibility that you have gone entirely off your rocker.”

Polly Cradle sits close to her old television set and waits. She has crossed her legs in a position which Joe finds almost yogic. On her right is a yellow legal pad and in her hand she has a pen. One of two pieces of up-to-date technology she owns, a digital TV recorder, is running so that she can replay the news. The other—a chunky laptop with a thick cord snaking out of it to the wall—rests on a stack of thick foreign dictionaries so that she can follow the signals chatter of the internet.

“Do you speak all those languages?” Joe wonders aloud.

“No,” Polly Cradle says. “That’s why I have dictionaries.” She wiggles and waves her arms, and by this strangely powerful method she conveys an image of herself, with a stack of documents, painstakingly working out the precise meaning of each, phrase by phrase.

“Watch!” she says abruptly, and turns up the sound. On the screen, a fishing fleet in mid-ocean, seen from a helicopter. The newsreader is playing for drama. His voice is filled with the special “keep calm” tone which suggests crisis. The shot cuts to a shot from on board one of the boats.

It is awash in perfect, golden bees.

There is no one on board.

And, as the camera pans, so it is across the entire fleet.

The news cuts away to a coastguard ship a few miles away. The sailors are here, in life jackets and blankets.

“We had to abandon ship,” one of them says.

“Why? Why did you have to abandon ship?” the reporter demands.

“Too much,” the man says obscurely.

“Too much what?”

The man doesn’t answer immediately. He looks up and off to the side, remembering. “I understood things,” he says at last.

“What sort of things?”

“Just things.”

“I see—”

“No,” the man says. “You don’t. You think you do. But you don’t.”

“I don’t think people will understand what you mean.”

“No. They won’t. Not until it happens to them.”

“Is it going to, do you think?”

“Oh, yes. Definitely. And when it does, they’ll know what I know.”

“Which is?”

“Too much,” he says again. “Questions I ask myself in my head, and don’t really want the answers to. I knew them, I couldn’t not know. I have to go home and apologise to my wife. I screamed at her before we left. And my kids. I was wrong and I need to be better. I need to eat right, too. And my uncle, he’s a monster. I’ve told the police: he beats my aunt. I don’t know why I never said it before. That’s all right, I suppose, but it’s hard feeling it all at once. But then there’s more and more. There’s too much of it. You do what you can and there’s never an end, just more things wrong that don’t have to be.” He shudders, and starts to cry.

A moment later, the bees depart skyward in a great rush, and the show cuts back to the studio where people with no notion of what is going on speculate on what it all means. There is a note of panic, and fear.

Mercer comes through the door about ten seconds later.

He looks at his sister, and then at Joe. His eyes open very wide.

“Oh, God,” he murmurs. “As if there wasn’t enough trouble in the world, you two have had sex.”

“We made speculative love,” Polly replies airily.

“What?”

“Honestly, you sound just like him. Well, no. That sounds wrong… I mean that he also asks an enormous number of questions about perfectly obvious things. We made speculative love, Mercer. We had sex pre-emptively, in case we fall in love later. I think of it as an investment in satisfaction.”

“And if you don’t?”

“Then you’re right. We had really great sex.”

Mercer appears to consider this for a moment.

“Suddenly,” he says, “I find that my present line of questioning has lost its appeal.” He glances at Joe. “Well. Not before time. The rest of the picture, as you see, is not so bonny. So… Fasten your seat belts, my lad and lass. This could get rocky.”

A moment later the doorbell rings, and one of the Bethanys is standing on the stoop with a concerned-looking man in his forties.

“Mr. Cradle? Mr. Long is here to see you.”

“How does he even—” Mercer breaks off as Polly drums her fingers on the desk. “Fine. Mr. Long, who he?”

“A curator.”

“Is he relevant?”

“No. He has a kind face and he keeps cats and I thought… yes, Mercer, of course he is. This is what I do.”

Mercer waves his hands vaguely, as if already wanting his teacup.

“Sorry.”

Bethany—it’s number two, Joe Spork is fairly sure—follows this exchange with a suffused expression of concealed but potent delight.

Mr. Long is a damp sort of specimen with a jowly neck and a large, square head. Joe thinks of him immediately as a nervous local darts champion.

“Mr. Long,” Polly murmurs, bringing him inside, “would you like some coffee?”

“Oh!” Mr. Long says, his balloonish nose pointing briefly at the ceiling as he tosses his head to indicate enthusiasm. “Oh, yes, that would be marvellous. Only not too much.” He makes an apnoeac clunking noise in his sinuses which is apparently indicative of humour. “Ahaha knuu haha, because it makes me extremely jumpy! Aha ha hnn.”

Polly favours him with a devastating smile.

“Mr. Long,” she murmurs as she lounges out, “is the director of the Alternative Paradigms Institute at Brae Hampton. I believe he may also be the victim of some sort of confidence trick.”

“Oh, I am!” Mr. Long nods again. “I am. A rather wicked trick has been played upon us. At least, I trust it’s a trick. I do hope it’s nothing more serious.”

Mercer looks at Joe. This one’s yours. I do coppers and spies and lairs and monsters. I don’t do curators.

“I’m afraid I’m not familiar with your organisation,” Joe murmurs invitingly.

“Oh, no one is. We’re very quiet. Although recently we’ve been getting some tourism for the tank exhibit.”

“Tank? Like…” Joe mimes a vague armoured vehicle, machine gun firing.

“Oh, not like Panzers, oh no! Knuu-knuu haha! We have the largest freshwater tank in Great Britain, and the largest enclosed one in the world, for the exclusive use of model-boat enthusiasts, you see. Just a sideline, of course.”

“A sideline?”

“Oh, yes. The purpose of the Institute is to preserve lines of research science and technology which are presently unfashionable. So, for example, we carry the translated notes of Akunin, the eighteenth-century Russian specialist in bacteriophage medicine.” Mr. Long smiles as if this should make things perfectly clear; a wide, millennialist’s grin filled with genial crazy. “Treasures which one day, when they are retrieved from obscurity, may greatly benefit mankind… although between you and me some of them should probably stay hidden, they’re a bit daft. Ahah knuu! Ahahah.”

“And you also have…”

“Oh, yes, a collection of… well. I say ‘a collection’… in fact it’s several collections, classified together by the Institute. They’re all Second War, you see. There’s the Pyke Papers. There’s a very small set on Tesla’s work, donated by an American gentleman, and some Russian documents regarding psychical research which I personally regard as disinformation, like the SDI programme in reverse…”

“Perhaps you should ask Mr. Long about his present problem,” Polly Cradle says, re-entering with a tray.

“Oh, indeed!” cries Mr. Long, “Indeed! The item we had was linked with a rather special woman, a scientist… Gave Pyke himself a run for his money, though if I’m honest he was more an innovator and an engineer than a pure scientist, of course…” It’s as if he’s telling a very dirty joke. All of us over the age of consent here, eh? Don’t mind a bit of engineering, do we? Nudge, nudge.

Joe abruptly misses Billy Friend very much.

“I understand the Americans were working on some of her early research when they had that rather unfortunate accident with the USS Eldridge… That’s another one most people think is a myth, but of course we know better, don’t we? Aknuu-knuuu!” Mr. Long is nodding so hard now that it seems possible he will strain himself. Mercer stares fixedly at the ceiling.

Polly Cradle turns her smile on Mr. Long again, and he goes back to his theme. “And then there’s the Abel Jasmine collection. That’s the problem for today, I’m afraid. We allowed an exhibit to be taken away for cleaning by one of the original donors—though on examination it appears she did not donate this specific item—and I rather fear it’s gone for good. It was supposed to come back days ago. A very pretty item, too—unique, so far as I know.”

Joe looks at Polly, and she nods. “A mechanical book,” he says.

“Yes! However… oh, well, of course you know, otherwise why would I be here? We did place an advertisement offering a reward for its safe return. I don’t suppose you have it?”

“We may know where it is,” Mercer says judiciously, then holds up a hand as Mr. Long hoots again through his restricted airway. “I need to make further inquiries. But out of curiosity, what is it? Where does it come from?”

“Well, we don’t really know. Very hush-hush, we think. Mr. Jasmine, you know, was a very senior fellow. Deeply involved. Meetings with Mountbatten and even Churchill himself. Bath meetings. You are aware…”

“That Churchill took meetings in his bath. Yes.”

“Well, these were often two- or even three-tub meetings!”

“Remarkable.”

“Oh, it is, it is.”

“But you have no idea what it might actually be?”

“Well… one doesn’t wish to speculate…” He’s dying to, actually, flirting with them, daring them to ask. Mercer makes a face of utmost interest.

“There are rumours,” Long says. “Quite unsubstantiated, so one can hardly call it serious research… the book, now… we fancied that was quite special. All that code along the edges…” He looks at them hopefully: Have you seen it? Joe suppresses the urge to nod. “Well, in a way, it’s the Crown jewels for some of us, because it harks to a time when Britain was at the pinnacle of science and everyone else was just… well.” Mr. Long leans close, with the air of one imparting a tremendous secret.

“We think… it’s a command set… for the British space effort!” He smiles triumphantly. There is a long, uncomfortable pause.

“British…” Mercer says faintly.

“… Space effort!” Mr. Long repeats. “Von Braun was working for German dominance in space! We couldn’t let that happen in the long run, could we? Of course, it was all covered up later.” He puts a finger alongside his nose and shows them his septum a few times.

Mutinous glares flow in two directions while Mr. Long sips oblivious at his coffee and makes another weird little noise.

Polly rolls her eyes at her brother and perches on the arm of Joe’s chair. He does not pay attention to the way her backside compresses firmly against his arm. He listens to Mr. Long.

Mostly.

The theft was deftly accomplished. It was probably done to order. It was particularly vexing because a gentleman representing a large company had recently inquired about taking the item on loan for a substantial sum. Joe describes Rodney Titwhistle and then Arvin Cummerbund, and even the Ruskinite who visited his shop, but Mr. Long does not recognise them. Nor is he familiar with the Apprehension Engine—though the mention of an engine intrigues him, of course—or the word “Angelmaker.” Then Mercer shows him a picture of Billy Friend.

“Oh, yes, he was there, definitely. Oh, dear, is he a criminal?”

“Yes,” Mercer says, at the same time that Joe Spork says “No.”

“He’s dead,” Polly says gently.

“Oh, dear,” Mr. Long says again. “His poor mother.”

“His mother?” Mercer repeats.

“Very respectable lady! I hardly think she was involved. Rather too old to go shinning up a balcony, ahah aknuu hahaha. And who’d take care of the terrible dog?”

Joe Spork is abruptly paying very close attention. “What dog?”

“Right little monster, aknuu, yes, with pink glass eyes, if you can credit it.”

“A pug,” Joe suggests, “with only one tooth.”

“Horrible! Mind you, aknuu, you have to admire the tenacity, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes. I suppose you do.”

Mercer asks a few questions and then bundles Mr. Long gently out of the door with a promise of vague assistance down the line. When he has gone, his expression speaking somewhat of disappointment at their reaction to his revelation, Joe Spork introduces Mercer to the name of Edie Banister, and Bethany adds her to the list.

“To recap,” Polly Cradle says, in a tone Joe Spork finds both school-marmish and extremely sexy, “it would seem that at some time between 1945 and 1980, Joe’s grandfather and grandmother built a bee-machine which is either a rocket ship, a mobile sculpture, or a brain-melting lie detector. They were assisted in this questionable enterprise by the Order of John the Maker, at that time under licence from the British Government to create objects of philosophically and militarily efficacious art. Sadly, during the testing phase, the item in question immolated the town of Wistithiel and the project was discontinued. Subsequently, the Ruskinites were co-opted by a sinister personage determined to attract God’s attention—to wit, one Brother Sheamus—who ousted the Keeper at that time, Theodore Sholt, but was unable to lay his nasty mitts on the Apprehension Engine itself, being blocked by person or persons unknown. We shall hypothesise a combination of the aforementioned government entities and the good Keeper himself, who then removed to a greenhouse to look after the item personally until such time as Joe’s grandmother should choose to resume its purpose, which as far as we know she never did.

“At some point in the recent past, it would seem that an old lady living in Hendon took it into her head to unleash the Apprehension Engine and in doing so save or possibly destroy the world. She deployed Billy Friend as a catspaw, roped Joe in to do the technical bit, and gulled poor Mr. Long out of his prize exhibit. Joe activated the machine, the bees flew, and both the Ruskinites and some shady bit of the Civil Service, possibly but probably not known as the Legacy Board, realised what was going on and pounced, acting for the moment in concert—though we should not take that to mean that they are united in their goals. They grabbed Sholt and the machine under the appearance of a fire in an old house, traced the whole thing to Billy and he got killed either under interrogation or because someone is very keen to keep this from getting out. From Billy they found Joe, and would have vanished him also without the intervention of Mercer Cradle of the old established et cetera, et cetera. And here we all are. Does anyone have anything to add?”

“Yes,” her brother says. “It’s getting a lot bigger very, very fast.”

He thumbs on the television, without the sound, and they watch as bulletins interrupt regular programming. Parliaments debate and leaders demand explanations from one another. The UN is in session, and so is NATO. Britain is on high alert; the government’s misdeeds in Congo have become painfully public. Israel and Egypt, once friendly, now nervous, are positively spitting. So are Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. A swarm of bees in Santiago has revealed secrets: excesses, debauches, and betrayals. The United States, China, India, and Pakistan have all announced their intention to destroy the bees, though what they will do—Shoot them? Nuke them?—is unclear. To the leaders of the world, though, they are bad bees. They are bees of aggression, not bees of honey and peace. They are evil bees, and cannot be tolerated.

Too much truth cannot be allowed.

In London—stung, perhaps, by the implication that all this originated here—a nasty red-topped anger is building. Bee-keepers are told they must register, must submit their hives for inspection. No, of course, these are no ordinary bees, but it pays to be safe. It helps to rule people out. Any bee-keeper, after all, might be a sympathiser, a fifth columnist. Meanwhile the people growl back at Westminster: Who is responsible? Who is answerable? Who must give back his pension? (Not that anyone ever is, or does.)

Who will be held to account?

Who did this?

Who must be thrown to the beast?

“It’s getting much bigger,” Mercer Cradle repeats.