The Revolutions Read online

  Arthur Archibald Shaw staggered and slid from shelter to shelter. An abandoned bus in the middle of Southampton Row gave him protection from the wind. God only knew what had become of the horses. An advertisement on the side for something called KOKO FOR HAIR took on a fearful pagan quality. What dreadful god of the storm was Koko? He stumbled on, clutching at lampposts, and turned the street corner (by now quite lost) just as lightning flashed and snapped a tree in two. He stopped in a doorway and watched leaves and roof tiles whip past. Someone’s house. A light in the window. He could expect no Christian charity on a night like this. A horse ran down the street before him, wide-eyed and panicking.

  He shivered, wrapped his arms around himself, stamped his feet. He was young, and he was big—running to fat, his friend Waugh liked to say. Well, thank God for every pound and ounce. Skinny little Waugh would have been airborne half a mile ago.

  The storm appeared to have engulfed all of London. Lightning overhead flashed signals, directing coal-black hurrying clouds to their business in all quarters of the city.

  His fear was mostly gone; what had taken its place was excitement, accompanied by a nagging anxiety over the cost of replacing his hat and umbrella. He wondered if he might defray the expense by selling an account of the storm to the Mammoth—he was already thinking of it as The Storm of ’93—or, better yet, the New York periodicals: Our correspondent in London. Monsoon in Bloomsbury. Typhoon on the Thames. An Odyssey, across the city, or at least across the mile between the Museum and home. They’d like the panicked horse—it would make a good picture.

  He peered back south in the direction the horse had fled. Behind the rooftops and out over the river there was something like a black pillar of cloud. It resembled a gigantic screw bolting London to the heavens, turning tighter and tighter, bringing the sky down. Behind it there was an unpleasant reddish light.

  * * *

  The Isle of Dogs and the West India Docks suffered the worst of it. For years afterwards, those who’d seen the Storm, and those who hadn’t, but remembered it as if they had, spoke of crashing waves; the lights of troubled boats swinging crazily in the dark, and then, dreadfully, going out; and bells ringing, and thunder, and timbers creaking, and chains snapping, and cranes falling, and men screaming as the waves swept them off the docks and downriver, perhaps all the way to the sea.

  What wasn’t much remarked on was that the Storm also flooded Norman Gracewell’s Engine—for the simple reason that few people who didn’t have business with the Engine knew it was there. Mr Dimmick kept away sneaks and snoops—he was better than a guard-dog, Gracewell liked to say. But there was nothing Dimmick could do to keep out the flood waters. The Engine was mostly underground, which had seemed, when the Company built the thing, like a good way to ensure secrecy, but now ensured that the flood quickly filled all the Engine’s rooms. Most of the workers fled before the flooding got too severe, abandoning their desks and their ledgers; but Gracewell himself remained until the last minute, pacing back and forth in his office, shouting into a telephone, demanding an explanation, demanding more time and more money, demanding an accounting for this outrage, long after the flood had severed the wires and the line had gone dead.

  * * *

  Arthur lived in a small flat on the end of Rugby Street. Under ordinary circumstances it was a short walk from the Museum, but that night it took an hour, and by the time he approached home he’d had more than enough weather to last him a lifetime.

  Through the rain he saw Mr Borel’s stationery shop on the corner. He knew the shop well—he often bought ink and tobacco and newspapers there. In fact, he owed Borel a moderate sum of money. The place was in a sorry state: the sign was askew, the windows had shattered in two or three places, and the door swung open. There was usually a bright blue-and-yellow sign over a basement office that read J.E. BRADMAN, STENOGRAPHY, TYPEWRITING & TRANSLATIONS, but that was gone, too, ripped off its hinges and blown God knows where. Poor old Borel and poor old Mr Bradman whoever he was.

  Someone inside—a girl—screamed.

  Arthur abandoned caution and ran headlong across the street, sliding and stumbling in the wind, and in through the door. Lightning flashed behind him. When his vision cleared he saw Mr Borel’s daughter, Sophia, standing behind the counter, screaming. Her father stood in a puddle, holding a broom. An eel flopped at his feet. Sophia stared at it in horror, as if were a vampire that had broken into her bedroom. It was, no denying it, hideous.

  A young woman Arthur had never seen before held a candle, inspecting the eel with a mixture of curiosity and distaste. Her hair was tangled and her dress dishevelled, as if she’d dressed in a hurry. She looked up at Arthur in surprise.

  “Hello,” she said. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes. As well as can be expected. There was—I heard screaming.”

  “It was a very heroic entrance. I’m sorry—it was! Sophia cried out—well, you can hardly blame her—it’s a frightful-looking monster, poor thing.”

  Strikingly green eyes, he noticed; emerald-like by candlelight. A quick, pleasing face.

  He straightened his coat, wiped twigs and leaves from his hair.

  “So I see,” he said.

  “Are you hurt?”

  There was blood on the hand that had wiped his hair, but not a great deal. His head stung a little, now that he noticed it.

  “Not at all,” he said. “Could be worse, anyway.”

  She looked out the open door behind him and shuddered.

  Arthur shrugged off his overcoat. In its current state it would hardly be gallant to offer it to her. She’d be better off without it.

  “Mr Shaw,” Borel said. The eel snapped at his broom.

  Borel’s shop was a long way from the river or any fish-market that Arthur knew of, and the eel’s presence was a small mystery. He’d heard of hurricanes blowing things all over the place in the sort of places that had hurricanes, but one didn’t expect it in London. No doubt it was even more puzzling to the eel.

  “Hello, Mr Borel. Is everything all right?”

  It quite plainly wasn’t. The door had blown open, shelves had fallen, and Borel’s stock was soaked. Tins of tobacco and creams and medicines lay scattered on the floor. The wind and the rain had made sad heaps out of German newspapers, French photographs of dancing girls, and the magazines of various obscure trades. Arthur realised that he was standing on a ruined copy of the Metropolitan Dairyman.

  “By God. It’s extraordinary out there. Extraordinary. You’d think you were in the tropics. I lost my umbrella. There was a horse.”

  He closed the door. The wind opened it again. He sat on the floor with his back against it.

  The eel thrashed. It appeared to be getting weaker. Borel poked it again.

  The green-eyed woman said, “Your coat.”

  “My coat?”

  “To pick up the eel. I’m afraid it might bite otherwise.”

  He tossed his coat to Mr Borel, who groaned and wrestled the creature out through one of the shattered window-panes.

  “Good,” Arthur said. “Well. Glad I could be of service. Perhaps I should go and see what’s come in through my own windows.”

  “Oh—I wouldn’t. It’s dreadful out there. Besides, you’re the only thing holding the door closed.”

  “Well. Yes. That’s best. In my current state, I feel just about competent to be a door-stop.”

  Wind howled and thumped at the door.

  “The fellow downstairs,” Arthur said. “The typewriting business—that sign’s gone too.”

  She looked up in surprise.

  “Oh God. Where?”

  “Halfway to the moon, for all I know.”

  “I’m sorry. A silly question. God, what an awful night!”

  “You know the owner, Miss…?”

  “I do. I am the owner, Mr Shaw. Or, I was, I suppose.”

  Arthur was very surprised.

  He introduced himself as Arthur Archibald Shaw, noted journalist for The M
onthly Mammoth, and author of detective stories—aspiring, he acknowledged. J. E. Bradman—whom he’d vaguely imagined as gnarled, grey-bearded, and whiskery—turned out to be Josephine Elizabeth. She had the office downstairs, and lived in a tiny flat upstairs. She’d come down to help when she heard Sophia screaming.

  “Perhaps,” Mr Borel said, “we could move a shelf to stop the door. And of course you may be guests here until this storm departs.”

  * * *

  They bustled about, making what repairs they could by candlelight. Sophia fell asleep somehow. Arthur and Miss Bradman talked as they worked, between interruptions from thunder and branches crashing against the window, with Borel as an odd sort of chaperone.

  They talked about detective stories while they picked up and dusted off Borel’s jars of ointment. She seemed to have some very distinct ideas about how a detective story ought to go, though Arthur wasn’t sure he followed everything she said. Blow to the head, perhaps. He wondered if she were a literary type herself—this being Bloomsbury, after all. After some cajoling, she confessed that she was a poet. “But not for a while. One can’t find the time.”

  “Time,” he agreed. “Time and money!”

  She glanced sadly at the window. “That sign was practically new! And awfully expensive.”

  “Typing, it used to say, if I recall. I suppose that means—I don’t know—document Wills? That sort of thing?”

  “From time to time.”

  He helped Borel heave a shelf upright. “And you do translation, of course. French? Italian? Russian? I came here from the Reading Room, if it’s still standing—one hears every sort of language around there…”

  “Greek; Latin.”

  “Scholarly monographs, that sort of thing?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” she said, and busied herself arranging the magazines.

  “A manner of speaking?”

  She turned back to him. “You promise you won’t think it odd?”

  “Tonight, Miss Bradman, nothing could seem odd.”

  “In the safe downstairs I currently have a half-typed treatise on the Electric Radiance by a Lincoln’s Inn barrister; a monograph on Egyptian burial rites by a clerk for the Metropolitan Railway Company, who wants the whole thing translated into Latin so as to be kept obscure from rival magicians; and an account of a telepathic visit to Tibet by a—well, I shouldn’t say more. She’s been in the newspapers. An actress.”

  “Good Lord.”

  “You do think it odd. I knew you would. I’m telling you this in confidence, Mr Shaw.”

  “Of course.”

  “The thing about—about that sort of person, Mr Shaw, is that he or she will quite often pay very well for a certain … trust. Confidence. A kindred spirit. Anonymity. And Greek and Latin, of course. I have a certain reputation.”

  She went to calm Sophia, who’d woken in a panic at the sound of thunder. Arthur watched her with a certain amazement.

  “How does one get into that line of work?”

  “Accident, I suppose.”

  “Accident?”

  “Most things in life are, aren’t they? May I ask how you came to be writing about science for the Mammoth?”

  “My uncle, to be frank. Old George—”

  Outside there was a terrible crash, possibly a tree falling. Sophia shrieked. Mr Borel told her to go and make coffee. At the prospect of hot coffee, Arthur lost his train of thought.

  “The accident,” Miss Bradman said, a little later, as they stood around the stove.

  “Yes? Please, do tell me.”

  She took a deep breath. “It was after I came to London, though not long after. My father, having left me a little money for an education—he was the rector in a little village you’ve never heard of, but forward-thinking, and he believed in education. Anyway, after Cambridge there was a little left over for a typewriter, though hardly a room to put it in; and for enrollment in the Breckenridge School for Typewriting and Stenography. From whose dingy and dismal premises I stepped out one bright spring afternoon to see a silver-haired lady of dignified appearance staring into the window and weeping. Naturally I asked if I could help her.”

  “Naturally.”

  “As it turned out, her name was Mrs Esther Sedgley, and her husband was just lately deceased. From time to time she suffered what you might call memories, or you might call visions—I don’t know—she herself was never sure what to call them. The sight of her reflection in a window might bring them on, or a flight of pigeons, or all sorts of things. It reminded me of—well, now I’m wandering off from my story, aren’t I? You must tell me if I do it again, Mr Shaw. By this time we’d already moved to Mrs Sedgley’s parlour, and then she invited me to dinner, which I was certainly in no position to refuse. We quickly became friends.”

  Miss Bradman sipped her coffee.

  “Her husband had been a barrister—quite a good one, I think, though of course I wouldn’t know—but also the Master of a … well, a sort of society, a club for discussion of spiritual matters, and the esoteric sciences, and so on. And so after the poor fellow died, my friend had found herself presented with a bewildering array of mediums offering to call him up by spirit-trumpet, or table-rapping, or what-have-you … So that summer she engaged in travel all across London, and she was lonely. Besides, she needed a secretary, and a witness, because she considered it her business to sniff out fraud and imposture and nonsense. And so Mrs Sedgley and I went to Bromley to see Mrs Hutton’s spirit-trumpet.”

  “Good Lord,” Arthur said.

  “And we saw Mrs Gully turn water into rose-water in Spitalfields, and Mr H. C. Hall lift a spoon by animal magnetism in St. John’s Wood. And together we attended the re-launch of the Occult Review where Miss MacPhail—the actress—said that we were all Exemplars of the Super-Man. Though of course I’m sure she says that to everyone. I saw Brigadier MacKenzie fail to levitate, and I saw Mr Wallace’s spirits play the piano. A lot of those sort of people come to the meetings of Mrs Sedgley’s society, for which Mrs Sedgley employs me to take the minutes. And in the course of all that I suppose I earned a certain reputation. The Brigadier had a monograph he wanted typed, and Miss MacPhail wanted to learn Greek—and so on, and so on. And so—since you ask, Mr Shaw—it’s because of that chance meeting that I fell into that sort of company; and it’s because of that that I came to be here—renting the office downstairs, that is, and the room upstairs. Aren’t chance meetings terribly important, don’t you think?”

  “Did the spirits really play the piano?” Sophia said.

  “A good trick if they did,” Arthur said. “A good trick either way.”

  “I don’t know. I will say this: that for every fraud I have met, I have met a dozen sincere and intelligent seekers after truth. After all, isn’t it nearly the twentieth century? And is it more outlandish, Mr Shaw, that there should be revolutionary advances in the science of telepathy, or clairvoyance, than that there should be electric lighting, or telephones?”

  “I won’t deny that,” Arthur said.

  Miss Bradman stared down at the hem of her skirt, which was soaking wet. “I’ve said altogether too much, haven’t I? You let me talk too much, Mr Shaw; you should have said something. I don’t know quite what’s got into me. It must be the storm.”

  * * *

  After a while Mr Borel found some relatively dry playing cards and the four of them played whist by candlelight. They were by that time all quite merry, in the way of people who’ve survived the worst of things and have nothing to do for the time being but wait. Every time lightning flashed they cheered—even Mr Borel. God knows what the hour was. Already Arthur felt as if he’d known Miss Bradman all his life.

  By chance their hands touched across the table, and there was a sensation that Arthur would later swear was a sort of electric shock. The candle flickered. Something lurched inside Arthur, too, at the thought of how big London was, and how many people were in it; and at the thought of how fast the world moved, whirling throu
gh the dark, and how improbable and uncanny it was that any two people should ever, under any circumstances, meet—and that they should then find themselves talking to each other, and playing cards around a table, as if it were all perfectly normal.

  Miss Bradman flushed red and drew back her hand. She went to the window and peered out into the dark.

  Chapter Three

  The sky was beautiful the next morning, full of an unusual flickering rose-pink light, and odd tall towers of cloud that slowly, over the course of the morning, crumbled to cloud-dust—but few people had the time to notice it. There was damage to inspect, losses to calculate, repairs to make; hands to shake and congratulations and condolences to extend to one’s neighbours and friends; rumours of miraculous escapes; and tragic deaths to pass on.

  The most newsworthy rumour, which had spread all over London before it was time for breakfast, concerned the death of Augustus Mordaunt, Duke of Sussex. The origin of the rumour was variously thought to be a nurse, a servant in the ducal household, or a policeman. The circumstances of the old man’s death were somewhat mysterious—he certainly hadn’t been out and about on the streets at night in the storm.

  Arthur slept late that morning. He heard the news at lunchtime, when he called at Borel’s shop to offer to help with repairs, and in the hope of running into Miss Bradman again.