Neither spoke for a long time after he finished, but just stared dreamily at the fire, smiling occasionally as they recalled passages. Then, roughly, Callan pulled himself together.
‘Sleep, my friends,’ he said. ‘We have a hard day’s work tomorrow, and I intend to make you remember just what hard work is.’
‘I will sit awhile, if you don’t mind,’ Jay said. ‘I will sleep soon enough.’
Kate had pitched Callan’s little tent some way off; he didn’t like sleeping by fires, he had said, and never felt the cold. He went, leaving the warmth to the soft house dwellers. Jay scarcely noticed him going. Nor did he pay much attention when he felt her settle down beside him and gently knead his shoulders. She said nothing, but laid her head on his shoulder so he could feel her hair against his neck.
‘Now I understand what Henary sees in you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It doesn’t matter tonight. Now you must rest. We are all transformed by the forest, no? I the servant, you the Storyteller, Callan the master. Soon enough I will again be the great lady, and you will be a simple student, and he will be but a forester once more. The magic will fade. Then we must talk. But not now. Now your servant Kate will soothe you to sleep. So lie down, my master Jay, and rest.’
He lay down, and Kate folded him in her arms and held him close, stroking his hair and kissing his forehead until the oblivion of sleep took him over.
36
The three people standing in Lytten’s porch were a mismatched bunch, and none of them looked particularly comfortable, despite the effusive welcome they received.
‘Do come in! So lovely to see you!’
‘Are you the lady I talked to on the phone?’
‘I am indeed. You must be Sergeant Maltby?’
‘Yes, ma’am. This is the man here.’
‘You don’t mind waiting while we have a chat with him?’
‘Ah, no. Glad to help.’
She nodded at her new visitor, who was staring at her in a way which many would have considered rude. She led him to the kitchen at the back of the house, shut the door, gestured for him to sit down and then sat herself on the other side of the table, cupped her face in her hands and studied him calmly.
‘Well, well, well,’ she said. ‘Alexander Chang. What a surprise! After such a long time, too. What brings you here?’
She could see that he was still in a state of shock. He recognised her, but she was so much older; he hadn’t taken that into account.
‘To find you, of course, Dr Meerson,’ he said.
‘Call me Angela. No point standing on ceremony here, eh?’
‘Do you have any idea the trouble you’re in?’
‘Nothing like the trouble you’re in.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You have been arrested as a suspected Soviet spy,’ she said, shaking her head in barely suppressed delight. ‘When did you get here?’
‘About a week ago.’
‘What have you been doing since?’
‘Getting my mind back. I didn’t realise...’
‘Yes, nasty, isn’t it? I was off my head for the better part of a year. It’s the implants. Without them, you’d be fine. So why now? I got fed up waiting years ago.’
‘Why would anyone think I’m a Soviet spy?’
‘You’ve just been exceptionally unlucky. No point explaining it; you wouldn’t understand the complications. At the moment they are wondering whether to lock you up, accidentally push you under a train, or send you back to the Soviet Union. This would, no doubt, be a great surprise to the Russians, who might just shoot you themselves to be on the safe side. Answer my question. Why now?’
‘It was the only link we could find. The reference in that article.’
‘What article?’
‘The one Lytten wrote on Shakespeare.’
‘I didn’t know anything about that,’ Angela said.
‘I was sent to check. It has implications for how they use your machine.’
‘Use my machine?’ she said. ‘They can’t use it.’
‘They can if they figure out where you hid the data.’
Angela thought for a long time. ‘I think we need to have a little understanding here.’
‘What?’
‘A little help for you, a little help for me.’
‘You scratch my backside, I’ll scratch yours,’ he said proudly.
‘Not quite,’ she said.
The door opened and Lytten came in. He glanced at the new arrival, then grunted and ignored him. ‘Half an hour,’ he said to her. ‘Then they’ll be coming to take him away. So we won’t need tea.’
Chang looked worried as Lytten disappeared once more.
‘Interrogation.’ Angela smiled, and shook her head sympathetically.
‘That sounds bad.’
‘Torture, beatings. Possibly a painful execution. Have you ever been in unbearable agony for days on end?’
‘No.’
‘The dark side of the age,’ she explained. ‘They can’t just fiddle with people’s brains, so they have to be more crude. Electrodes on sensitive bits of the body, that sort of thing. Pliers. We don’t have much time, so we need to get going. Use my machine, you say. They can’t. I wiped everything.’
‘You blacked out most of Europe and killed nearly ten thousand people.’
‘Did I? I didn’t mean to. I was in a hurry.’
‘You don’t sound very upset.’
‘What can I do? I will fix it in due course.’
‘Can you?’
‘I think so. Not that it matters at the moment. They can’t use the machine. As I said, I erased the data.’
‘No.’
‘Yes.’
‘No. I found two pages of your work in the Tsou script. A security man has been sent off to try and recover the rest of it.’
‘That’s simply not possible.’
Chang smiled. ‘Got you worried, eh? It’s true. It was buried in an article by this man Lytten, published last year. That and the reference to you in the article I found...’
‘That’s absurd.’
‘Here I am. And you, too.’
‘You say it may still exist?’
‘Yes. Hanslip assumed it was some devious fraud on your part. He still thinks that you are hiding with renegades and have concealed the data somewhere. I’ve been sent here just to make sure, and a security man called Jack More has been sent after the data.’
‘More? I remember him. Tall, strong, out of place. All dark and dangerous. I’m not convinced, though.’
‘The article says that the document was known as the Devil’s Handwriting and dates from the eighteenth century. There is a possibility that it is in Lytten’s papers, which went to some library on his death.’
‘When does he die?’
‘1979.’
‘Oh, poor Henry! At least he will miss Mrs Thatcher. He’d hate her.’ She thought for a moment about what she had heard so far. ‘Have they used the machine? Apart from sending you.’
‘I don’t think so. I don’t think they can. Someone said they’d have to recalibrate it after sending me, and couldn’t without the data.’
‘I wonder,’ she said after a moment, ‘if that is connected to the difficulties I am having with the universe in the cellar.’
‘The what?’
‘I’ve made a universe in the cellar,’ she said with a modest blush. ‘A prototype, little more than an outline, really, but a jolly good one. Except that I can’t shut it down. I was assuming it was a glitch, but maybe not.’
She now looked pointedly at her watch. ‘Oh, dear, time’s nearly up. They start with fingernails, you see,’ she explained kindly. ‘That’s what the pliers are for. It’s not very nice, but much better than what follows.’
‘Dr Meerson...’
‘Angela,’ she reminded him. ‘Or you can hide in Anterwold.’
‘What’s that?’