He would have said more, but another priest hurried over and coughed politely. “My Lord,” he said in English. He looked at Michael and bowed. “We’ve just had a response from London to your message,” he continued in Latin. Lawrence took the sheet of paper covered over in small machine writing. He read it, his face going tight. He looked again across the water, and again at the message. He got up. “Michael,” he said, “you must forgive me for taking your young lady aside, and for speaking with her in English. But there is a matter of great urgency.”
Cardinal Lawrence stood just beyond the highest point of the Channel tide. Jennifer sat before him on the thin grass. “Are you completely sure,” he asked, “that it was General Rockville you saw by Vauxhall Bridge?” Jennifer nodded. The old man she’d spoken with had been emphatic. Aside from that, she had seen the American Secretary of State on television. His increasingly wild threats weren’t things anyone could overlook. Lawrence pursed his lips, and asked her to repeat other details of what she’d seen and heard.
“Then we really must conclude that these people have adapted their Doomsday Project.” He shaded his eyes and looked again towards the English coast. He looked for a long time, a faint longing on his face. Jennifer began to think the interview was over. But Lawrence pulled his eyes away from England.
“It’s something the British and American Governments had been working on since the 1980s,” he explained. “It was always ultra-secret, and all we ever got was rumours at second or third hand. Some of us even wrote it off in the early days as propaganda to scare the Russians. But the outlines were clear enough. Its idea was the teleportation of matter—just like in those episodes of Star Trek. The twist was that the same human soul—these people never spoke in such unscientific terms, but it didn’t work for inanimate matter, or animals—couldn’t exist in two places at the same time: whatever soul was interjected would itself by annihilated, and would annihilate several million times the mass of the body in which it was contained. It was hoped that one teleportation machine could be put together in Moscow, and a human being pushed through it from another machine in the Pentagon. This unfortunate would arrive several seconds earlier in time, and make the Kremlin vanish in a puff of smoke.”
“Is this what caused The Break?” Jennifer asked.
Lawrence shook his head. “So far as we can tell, they never got it to move anyone back in time for more than a few millionths of a second. It was just long enough to indicate that the weapon could work, but not enough to bring on a mutual annihilation. But is seems that, after The Break, the British side of the Project was able to reach through all the infinite dimensions of space and time to re-establish contact with the Americans. What you tell me implies that they have made contact some while before The Break. Americans can step through into our world, so long as none of them already exists here. His Majesty’s ministers cannot go across, because they already exist on the other side. But this is conjectural. Our interest before The Break was moral and intermittent, rather than practical. Since then, we have not been able to find an able or a trustworthy spy to tell us what is happening.”
“So what are they planning to do?” Jennifer asked. “And why do they want Michael?”
Lawrence shook his head. “Too many questions, my dear, and too few answers. You will already have seen how rudimentary our English network is. We’re eleven months from The Break. Most of the higher reaches of the Church remain committed to the established order. Like everyone else, we dissenters were too busy at first with staying alive, and then with trying to puzzle out where our duty lay. I was appointed just a few weeks ago. It will be weeks more until I can start my mission in England. In the meantime, all I can do is keep one step ahead of Abigail Hooper and her de facto allies on this side of the water, and try to piece the facts together of what is going on in London. Until a few minutes ago, I knew less than you did. Perhaps I still know less.”
He stopped and looked once more across the Channel. “When I was a boy, I used to enjoy the novels of John Wyndham. Do you remember him?—The Day of the Triffids, The Midwich Cuckoos, and so on?” Jennifer nodded. “Well, if this were a John Wyndham novel, you could imagine a less dark working out of the plot than we’ve seen. In his imagination, square-jawed ministers would clench firmly on their pipes, and bring in a fair rationing of food and petrol. Scholars would be sent out to study the Outsiders. Little by little, another and equally benevolent Pax Britannica would be established over this new world, and everything would work out for the best.”
He smiled. “Sadly, if you were to derive a motto from the actions of those who have ruled England since the 1980s, it would be something like Better to serve in hell than reign in heav’n. They lost their European Union and their New World Order. They lost their membership of the global ruling class. And so, at their first opportunity, they shone the lights of their perverted science into the void, and were able to whore themselves back into America’s good books. Whatever they have in mind is evil. We can take it as read that they have no good intentions towards His Excellency the Byzantine Ambassador. Your duty is to get that young man safely back to Constantinople. There, he must do what he can to ready the Empire to play its part in a defence that Holy Mother Church will lead. I say that the Crusades have started. But our crusade is not, this time, against the Moslem. It is against this hideous parody of England.”
He stopped to watched Michael walk across the sand towards them. Dressed now in the clothes of his proper station in life, he seemed taller and immensely more commanding. Lawrence smiled. “I see you are preparing to leave at once,” he said in Latin. “Before then, however, we have business to transact that you will surely agree is of the highest importance.” He hardened his face. “Since our churches should be already regarded as in full communion, you will not object if I insist upon an immediate ceremony of marriage. Whatever age we care to call now—whoever may be the Patriarch to whom we look—the Church does not and never will regard fornication as an acceptable mode of conduct.” He pointed at a low building a few hundred feet beyond the line of sand. “I suggest we get our business out of the way over there.”
He turned to Jennifer. “Are you a Catholic?” Confused, she shook her head. Wasn’t marriage, in this age, a matter of mutual promises? What claim was being made here for church authority? But Lawrence continued: “Then I see that I shall need to baptise you first. Since your heresy doesn’t yet exist on this side of the water,” he went on with another smile, “I will dispense you from any formalities of recantation from the Errors of Canterbury—which, I regret, have proliferated beyond the ability of an ecumenical council to number, let alone condemn. But do you consent to be married?” Still dazed, Jennifer nodded again. “Then let us proceed with all due haste.”
Michael stood back and bowed to Alexius, who took Jennifer by the arm. Everyone bowed to Lawrence, who was putting on what may have been a deeply anachronistic Cardinal’s hat.
And so, on the northern shore of mediaeval France, according to a rite that no one present saw fit to question, Jennifer and Michael were pronounced man and wife.
Chapter Thirty Eight
Jennifer reached down to scratch a fleabite behind her left knee. The movement made her all the more aware of how her lower body ached from day after day on horseback. “So Michael’s family is really important?” she asked again in Latin. Alexius gave his standard answer in Greek—the three Emperors in the maternal line, the estates in Asia Minor and the Peloponnese, the palace in Constantinople, the silk spinning workshops in Athens, and so on and so forth. Limited though her knowledge was of Byzantine history, she had read somewhere of the Acominatus family. She tried to smile as Alexius repeated himself with slow patience. If what he said only set her nerves on edge again, it was useful to make sense of the Greek that he’d been appointed to teach her.