Triumff: Her Majesty's Hero Read online

  Some fourteen miles west of the Palace, the timbered Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park shook with the sound of tramping boots and yapping bow-hounds, those robust, lugubrious, liver-spotted retrievers from Abyssinia, noted for their reliability as hunting dogs, their extensive dewlaps, and their copious spittle. "Drooling like a fine bow" is a common expression across the Unity. Almost every physical aspect of a bow-hound seems to loll.

  A watercolour sky of the most dilute blue washed around the swollen sun. Fine mist, like cold smoke, rose from the soggy nettles and elderbushes, around about, and wafted through the forest of beech, mature oak and hawthorn. Distantly, fallow and roe, preternaturally sensing that something was up, scattered from deer-licks into the early afternoon.

  The Windsor Lodge had been built for the twenty-fourth Elizabeth as a gift from the Duke of Cartagena, one Gonzalo de Ruiz, a keen huntsman and keener suitor to the Royal Personage. Many at Court said it was the Lodge that had put the final nail in Gonzalo's coffin. This was untrue. The final nail had been put in by one Ralph Logge, a joiner from Church End, but it was a safe bet that Logge had only got the job as a direct result of Gonzalo's gift. Elizabeth XXIV was less than enthusiastic about the pastime of inserting iron-barbed darts into fleeing deer at very high velocity through holes not previously there. Poor Gonzalo, blinded by the double visors of love and ambition, failed to realise this, and would attend the Gloriana at Windsor regularly, wearing the latest chequered hunting-breeches, the most fashionable stalking-doublets, tweedy sporting hats with ear flaps, and bandoliers packed full of lures, calls, whistles, castanets and a comprehensive trousse de chasse that contained so many specialised blades it could have armed an entire company of Landsknechts and still have some bits spare to hang over the fireplace.

  Gonzalo would attempt to distract Her Majesty with discourses on the correct stringing of the composite bow, the training of the dog pack, the pros and cons of the frog-crotch barb, crossbows for pleasure and profit, detecting grot-worm in the stools of bow-hounds, and sundry other secrets of the huntsman's art. Frequently, he would invite the Queen to join him for an afternoon in the Park. She always declined, having pressing business of national import to attend to in the Star Chamber. Elizabeth XXIV's private diaries reveal that the "pressing business of national import" was almost always a game of tiddlywinks with members of the Privy Council. They also relate that she referred to Gonzalo as "that smelly maniac with the arrows".

  Eventually, Gonzalo became desperate for some sign of progress in his suit, and forced things by making a gift of the hunting lodge to the Queen. He had it designed by the celebrated architect Morillo of Barcelona, who devised it to be "churrigueresque". Technically speaking, this was a style characterised by twisted columns, broken and arched pediments, and pilasters with more than one capital. In practice, it was an overly enthusiastic wealth of decoration beneath which the actual structure of the building was largely hidden. Morillo assured Gonzalo that this was "the latest thing".

  Elizabeth was certainly impressed by the gift. Within a week, she'd had Gonzalo beheaded on a charge of Conspiring To Mock The Royal Person. Elizabeth XXIV is reckoned to have been a mild and gentle queen, so the affair vividly demonstrates that there's only so far you should push a monarch.

  On that misty St Dunstan's Day afternoon, the men who emerged from the Lodge had thoughts of the hapless Gonzalo and his ill-advised churrigueresque very far from their minds. (Apart, obviously, from passing thoughts such as "If this is a broken and arched pedimental ornamentation, where's the bloody door?" And "How the bastard do you get out of this benighted shed?")

  Leading out the beaters, the pack and the hound-master was Sir John Hockrake, Duke of Salisbury, resplendent in his green stalking gaiters and leaf-pattern tabard. Salisbury, a rotund, gouty ox, was one of the richest men on the mainland, and one of the country's largest landowners to boot. His Court influence, however, was scant, as he and the Queen had precious little time for one another. It had something to do with the Queen's manners, and Salisbury's complete lack of them.

  The Duke of Salisbury hawked in a rasping noseful of air, coughed, and spat what appeared to be an entire bed of shucked oysters into the nearby scrub.

  "Let's be off!" he bellowed to all present, and flourished his cry with a fanfare of expelled wind that trained men with bugles would have been sore pressed to mimic. The bowhounds set to yapping excitedly.

  Roustam Allasandro de la Vega, Regent of Castile, Governor of Toledo and victor of Lille, scowled at the obese Duke as he followed him out of the Lodge. An athletic, handsome six-footer, reputed world-master with the rapier, de la Vega busied himself with checking the brace of pearl-inlaid matchlocks that his bearer carried for him. The noblest of Spanish blood ran in de la Vega's veins, but the pressure of that blood was not as low and tranquil as one might expect in a high-born aristocrat. Steadily, through the preceding century, the power of the Unity had swung further and further towards Britain and the demi-goddess Glorianas. Resentful frustration underlay most of the Spanish politicking, and behind the pleasant smiles and the charming manners of their regal scions lay rancour and unrest. In Madrid, Zaragoza, Sevilla and Salamanca, the pamphleteers cranked out bitter diatribes about "the Virgin thief" and the "scales of partnership overbalanced". A constitutional crisis loomed across the Unity, and even the most Anglophile of commentators foresaw a time, not far away, when the Queen would have to begin to make reparations that restored the potency of the Spanish political machine.

  But Roustam de la Vega wasn't going to wait for some unspecific time. He had always been a man of action, and his action always got him what he wanted.

  He took one of the primed matchlocks, and trial-aimed it at a distant tree-bole. Salisbury looked at the firearm in disgust.

  "Good hunting today, you think, seńors?" de la Vega asked, by way of making things more convivial.

  "Poor as I reckon for you, if you persist with that black powder nonsense," growled Salisbury. "A stout bow of English yew is good enough for me."

  "My dear Regent," said Lord Slee diplomatically as he joined them from the Lodge, pulling on his leather bowstring protectors, "I for one am keen to see your new devices in operation. I trust they will not alarm the pack?"

  Salisbury stooped with a wheeze to knuckle-rub the scalp of a panting bow-hound that worried at his heels.

  "These dogs don't scare for nothing," he observed, rising again and shaking the ropes of dog-drool from his hand. "Don't you fret, Slee. My men trained 'em well."

  "Good, good!" smiled Slee, thinly. He and de la Vega exchanged knowing grins that Salisbury was too busy to see. They were grins of tolerance. Slee clicked his fingers and called for his bow and quiver. He tested the tension, and exchanged a little technical wisdom with the bowmaster.

  Robert Slee was a short, mobile man of forty-three, his patrician's profile set off by a receding head of silver hair. He owned ancestral lands in Hertfordshire and Essex, but his power stemmed entirely from a hard-won career in law, through the Inns of Court and Whitehall. He had won himself a seat in the Privy Council, and was tipped to take the post of Lord Privy Seal from Thomas Arbuthnot before the year was out. Slee's scholarship and learning was admired across the Unity. His many books and treatises were required reading for all young men with political aspirations. It was said he spoke and wrote nine languages. He had travelled extensively, and participated in some of the most formidably important legislation of the last six Parliaments. His only fault, it seemed, was his lack of charm, which was often remarked upon. Dignitaries from across Europe queued up eagerly to meet the author of such articulate writings, and they were all disappointed. In the flesh, Slee was a cold, dry, plaster-of-Paris man. No one actively disliked him, but he'd have had trouble forming a cricket side if he only called on his friends.

  The Divine Aleister Jaspers, fourth and final member of the illustrious party, joined his three waiting companions from the Lodge, and took a pair of polished Swiss crossbows from
a waiting bearer. An austere young man with fleshy lips and cropped hair, Jaspers wore the knee-length robes of the Magickians' Union. When the Arte of Magick had been rediscovered, the Church had been forced to accept and accommodate it, or be ousted from the structures of power. The Protestants had simply enlarged their doctrines. The Catholic Church had "fortuitously" discovered six more books of the New Testament in a cave in Sinai, all of which thoroughly expanded the motif of "moving in mysterious ways" to include Magick.

  This additional doctrine was included in the very first edition of the Steve Gutenberg Bible, and its textual authority was embraced rapidly by the Church of England, which was, at that time, an uneasy blend of Catholic pomp and Protestant simplicity, and formed one of the fundamental tenets of belief. The Church of England became, in time, the United Church, and absorbed almost all the other Christian religions of the Unity (except for various underground movements and secret societies, and, of course, the Bollards of Ghent, the Stevenage Prurients, and the Vatican, who were allowed to continue as usual if they didn't bother anyone). The Church closely regulated all official usage of Magick through the Magickians' Union, which was part trade guild and part holy order. All members of the union were skilled and potent users of the Arte, answering only to the Queen, the Privy Council and the Church cardinals. Through them, the Cantrips and the Jinx were operated for domestic use.

  Jaspers also displayed the collar pin of Infernal Affairs, the union's disciplinary department, charged with investigating and punishing any individuals conducting unauthorised dabbling in the Arte. Jaspers was reckoned to be Infernal Affairs' finest. His twinned powers of Magick and Prosecution gave him a status at Court far, far above his actual social rank.

  "Are we ready?" he asked, smoothly, examining with hooded eyes the oiled, machined perfection of his weapons. To the other three, his soft voice sounded like Turkish Delight: sweet, rich, intense, and the sort of thing you can quickly have enough of.

  "I 'ope you won't be using any Goety to improve yorn aim," commented Salisbury to the Divine.

  There was a pause. Even the agitation of the hunting dogs skirled to a halt. A shadow passed over the sun. Salisbury, unaccountably cold for a moment, looked into Jaspers's piercing eyes. What he saw there, he patently didn't like.

  Slee stepped forward quickly, and executed what was, on balance, probably the most graceful diplomatic manoeuvre of his career. He said, "Ha ha! As if!"

  "As if!" joined Roustam de la Vega, catching on quickly, and adding his deep laugh to Slee's thin, piping chuckle. Only Salisbury, who seemed incapable of getting anything out of his voicebox, didn't laugh. In ten seconds, his tomatored face had become cabbage-white. He managed a pale, valiant smile.

  Jaspers smiled too, though it was not a reassuring smile.

  "As if," he echoed. Then he turned, and sauntered away towards the dog-pack and the hunt-team.

  Salisbury sagged, and then, as his colour flushed back, he busied himself volubly with unnecessary checks of the hounds and their handlers.

  "Close," whispered Slee to de la Vega, as they stood, side by side, buttoning up their coat collars. "Your assistance was appreciated. Salisbury is profoundly clumsy in almost every respect, politics included. No wonder the Queen can't abide him."

  De la Vega smiled dryly, and said, "I'm not about to marry him myself, my good Lord Slee. If it weren't for his considerable financial reserves I'd be more than happy to be part of a tragic hunting accident this very afternoon."

  Slee allowed himself a thin smile at the delicious thought. To their left, the runners were blowing shrill whistles and calling guttural encouragements to the pack, which surged away through the sunlit mist of the forest space. As the volume of the hounds dipped away, they could hear birdsong, dripping water and the crackle of undergrowth all around them. Slee and de la Vega set off after the others.

  "Shall we," asked Slee, "discuss your disengańo, my dear cousin? The woods are close and deaf."

  "Good," replied the Spaniard crisply, "for my words would seem calumny to most English ears, but not yours, or those of our other two friends. We all share a certain hunger. My family, my faction they ache for the taste of power, but we are famished of the influence that is our due. Magick, my lord, that is what we need. Without access to the Cantrips, we have no leverage. With them"

  Slee caught at his sleeve and pointed at their companions ahead through the trees.

  "Do you see, Lord Regent, the way that no hound will go voluntarily within a lance-length of the Divine?" he asked.

  "They are wiser than us, perhaps," said de la Vega. "I often doubt it is entirely safe to have Jaspers around, even if he is of our cause."

  Slee nodded, and breathed deeply. The two men hefted up their weapons and moved on through the ferny chiaroscuro of the forest.

  "So," said Slee, "you were saying?"

  THE SECOND CHAPTER.

  And so to Soho. Ah, Soho. What are we ever to do about it?

  Number seventeen, Amen Street, Soho, was a three-storey residence built in the Neo-Rococo fashion that was typical of its neighbourhood (to wit, generously proportioned and not quite buttoned up). It stood in a quiet, well-guttered lane just off the more commercial streets, which was surprisingly decent and presentable considering that it lay only a short stagger from some of the most disreputable taverns and stews in the City, as well as the Windmill Theatre, where the famous burlesque show "All The World's A Fan-tail Stage" was now in its record-breaking seventeenth year ("Come and come again!" declared Jack Tinker in the Daily Maile), not to mention the Stratford Revue Bar, with its nightly presentation of such entertainments as "As You Lick It" and the ever-popular "Two Gentlemen of Vagina".

  Number seventeen had been built in the time of the ninth Gloriana, and had withstood five unseasonal gales, a Great Fire, two plagues, six riots and, in its more recent history, a number of apocalyptic parties. Rupert Triumff had purchased it with some of the five thousand marks the Navy had awarded him for his part in the Battle of Finisterre.1

  His neighbour on one side was a nondescript member of the diplomatic service by the name of Bruno de Scholet. De Scholet was abroad for much of the year, and Triumff had only met him twice. He had come round to complain about the noise one evening in 2003, and then again about an hour later. To the other side lived the distinguished composer Sir Edoard Fuchs. Fuchs had made his name and fortune in the early nineteen-eighties with some top-ten galliards and rondeaus, but he hadn't had a notable success since the release of his "Greatest Hits" sheet-music quarto. He lived off his royalties and the occasional guest appearance, and was almost permanently soused on musket. Fuchs never complained about the loud parties at number seventeen. He was usually at them.

  The effects of three bottles of Old Skinner's Notable Musket was by that stage of the day beginning to wear off the owner of number seventeen. It was three o'clock.

  Rupert Triumff lay supine and rather Chatterton-esque upon a chaise-longue in the Solar, washed in the hazy light that filtered down through the high, leaded windows. He had bathed, shaved, put on a splash of his favourite aftershave (A Scent of Man), and changed into grey netherstock hose, patterned canions, and a dark damask shirt, all topped off by an embroidered peascod doublet of beige murray. Only the small grille of black sutures across his swollen cheek hinted that the previous parts of the day had been anything less than respectable. Triumff was idly rotating the large, brass armillary sphere that stood on the floor beside the chaise with his draped hand. It thrummed like a roulette wheel. On a side table nearby sat a half-eaten nantwich. The Couteau Suisse lay in a waste-paper bin beside the door.

  A few yards away from Triumff, at an oak desk lined with copies of Wisden, sat a large man with braided black locks. The man was entirely naked, his gleaming skin as dark as turned ebony, and he had the sort of gargantuan musculature that would have made Rubens whistle like a navvie, and Michelangelo place want-ads for a big ceiling. Naked though he was, the man had a pair of small wire-framed sp
ectacles perched on the end of his broad nose. He was perusing a huge book of charts.

  The door to the Solar creaked open, and Agnew entered, bearing a tray of beakers. He offered them to Triumff.

  "Your elixir vitae, sir," he said in precisely the same disapproving tone of voice with which he would have announced "The Prince of Wales", or "Who, precisely, has popped off?"