“Lady tells me you’re looking for your daughter,” she muttered at last, sparing Theo not a nod.
“Yes.”
“How’s that going?”
“Looking isn’t as hard as doing.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I know where she is. I know which prison. But getting her out is meaningless, impossible, until I can keep her safe.”
“Does she want to be found? Does she want you keeping her safe—keeping her anything?”
“Don’t know. Maybe not. She can make that choice, if she wants to, when the moment comes. Least there’ll be a choice.”
The woman nodded at nothing much, scraped the last aphid from a flower, straightened up, wiped her insect-smeared fingers down her skirt, peeled away the gloves, draped them over the side of a plant box, and turned to examine Theo.
“Don’t look like much,” she mused. “Come have a cuppa.”
Theo hesitated, and was duly poked in the back to follow her inside.
There was a wood-burning stove with an iron kettle on top, a smell of lavender and lace. The woman stood on a plastic orange stool to fumble on the top shelf of a cupboard, before bringing down a teabag. “It’s not proper tea of course,” she muttered as the kettle boiled and her escorts draped themselves around the low, sky-blue kitchen. “I think it has dandelions in it. Dandelions, it’s just…”
A scoff, a half-guffaw, you know how ridiculous it is it’s just…
“But it’s what we have and tea is an important binding social ritual, so sit you down.”
A hand on Theo’s shoulder plonked him down in a wooden chair at a small square table in the centre of the room. A bowl containing almost-blooming winter bulbs sat between knitted table mats. A mug stained with tannins, the front depicting a penguin performing a probably impossible sexual act, was put in his hands. He sniffed the tea and flinched. Sipping, his host watched him. He drank cautiously, and then quickly, getting as much of the heat and fluid as he could without having to spend too much time with the taste.
The woman beamed, sat down opposite him, let the heat from her mug seep into her skin.
“I’m the queen,” she said at last. “You’re Theo, yes?”
He nodded.
“You can call me ma’am, or your maj, or Bess. If you call me your maj without looking proper about it, my boys will take you out back and beat you till you bleed out your ears.”
“What’s proper?” he mumbled over the lip of the mug.
“Proper! Respectful. Proper respect.”
“But I can call you Bess?”
“Respectfully, yes.”
“All right.”
“And I shall call you Theo.”
“Okay.”
“So!” She slapped the table brightly with the open palm of her right hand. “Helen tells me that you’re looking for help. Says you have information that’ll take down the government, rip the Company apart and generally set things a-burning, is that about the short of it?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Is it proper?” Theo hesitated, sucked in more liquid, tried to guess again at proper, at the mystic meanings of this word. Bess flapped impatiently. “Proper, proper, is it good, is it decent, or are you spinning me a yarn and are we gonna have to do the beating business?”
“I can prove that the Company is murdering thousands of people, imprisoning people without trial, all in the name of profit.”
She shrugged. “So? Stuff like that never makes it to court.”
“I know.”
“Then you’re wasting my time, yes?”
“I have financial records from the Company. Documents, records of—”
“This sounds like shite to me it sounds like—do you think this sounds like shite I think it’s…”
“I have Philip Arnslade’s mother. She is willing to testify against her own son. I can make the Company destroy itself, and in the process take down the government and all who sail in it.”
Bess raised a hand, stopping the men who’d already begun to move towards Theo’s slouching back. “Okay. Don’t be boring.”
Theo spoke, and by the way she listened, it wasn’t boring.
Chapter 60
The queen of the patties, Good Queen Bess, her name isn’t Bess of course she took it because it seemed nice, it seemed sort of regal, sort of majestic but also very down-to-earth, it was a name that implied a much grander name somewhere behind it but she wasn’t grand she wasn’t…
She killed her husband a long time ago. It was self-defence. She called the ambulance immediately, but he hadn’t paid for the health insurance like he’d said he had, so the ambulance didn’t come. He hadn’t paid for a lot of things that he said he had. The money was a big part of how the troubles began.
That was when she was still a teacher. Things were different, back then.
“So why’d you come to me?” she asked when Theo’s story was done.
“People are looking for us. Mostly looking for Helen, but also for me. We needed a place to go. Somewhere safe.”
“This ain’t safe. The police don’t bother to come here no more, but sometimes the Company sends in the boys and shoot the village up a bit, just to keep things ripe. They used to try to take the kids, or the pretty ones, but we shot back and it wasn’t a worthwhile economic investment. They think there might be some gas down beneath these hills, they want to dig it up, so they cut off the water, the electric, the roads, trying to starve us out. We are starving. It may look all lovely but they’re starving us to death. We go raiding for grub but they make it harder every year. This isn’t safe.”
“I heard the patties had a queen, they say these prayers, blessed are the—”
“Even atheists pray when they’re gonna lose a thing they love and know they can’t stop it. It’s the knowing they can’t stop it that makes them do the whispering.”
“They pray to you.”
She shrugged. “They pray to the idea that somewhere in the north there’s a place where the patties can be free, where we try again. They pray to that. I’m just sitting here.”
“Will you help us?”
“Maybe. Maybe. I don’t know about you, boy. But I like Helen. She’s got class. They don’t teach that, class, they don’t teach it at all. Now some might say I’m just responding to a certain socio-economic stereotype, that it’s the accent and maybe that’s true, maybe it is at that, but I dunno. If she’s willing to shaft her kiddy, that’s something. You think she’s got long left for this world?”
“I don’t know.”
“You think she knows?”
“Yes.”
“But she ain’t telling.”
“No.”
Bess beamed. “It’s that sorta attitude that makes the aristocracy so goddamn sexy.”
They took him back to the room where the shadows crawled, left Helen and Theo in the dark.
“How’d it…?” asked Helen.
“Fine. Fine. I think… fine.”
“Did she…?”
“She didn’t shoot us, did she?”
Helen laughed at nothing, and Theo realised just how stupid these words were, all things considered.
After a few hours, a man opened the door, gave them a bowl of thin potato soup each, and a couple of blankets, chewed a little around the edges.