‘I would imagine that getting by is the thing that weighs most on your soul. Ever a guest, on sufferance at the feast. Have you been inside Parliament, the visitors’ gallery perhaps?’
Charlotte shook her head.
‘You would like it. Its chamber is packed to the gunnels with all the richest and most powerful people in the land. The ones who should have been your peers at some expensive finishing school. Instead, there you were as a child, scraping around for bones with meat left on in the dustbins outside the capital’s hotels.’
I did a little better than that. Eventually. ‘What’s this about, honey? Nobody keeps their valuables in the House of Guardians.’
‘Not quite true,’ said Twist. He pulled a small wooden box out of his jacket, placed it on the table next to her calling card, and clicking open a pair of clasps on its side he opened it, an interior lined with cloth as crimson as the lining of his cape. On top of the cloth lay three or four punch cards, the heavy card edged with gold.
‘To open locks?’
‘Perfectly correct — locks in Parliament.’ Twist lovingly brushed the tattoo of information that would slot into a transaction-engine’s punch card injector, calculation drums turning to the beat of the cipher contained on the cards until heavy bolts withdrew from an armoured door. ‘Enough open doors to create an opportunity for, what is it the Illustrated calls the Sable Caracal, the nation’s most extraordinary and audacious thief?’
‘One of their politer headlines. What’s inside Parliament you want?’
‘A little thing,’ said Twist. ‘A box under the speaker’s chair containing three things. The two amputated arms of the present puppet monarch, stuffed of course-’
‘Of course.’ He’d said ‘ puppet’, were these two jokers royalists, then?
‘You can leave those behind. It’s not Parliament’s stooge raising arms against the people that the guardians need to worry about. The other item under the speaker’s chair is far more valuable — the sceptre, the only one of the crown jewels to have survived being melted down and sold off during the innumerable economic crises of the last few centuries.’
‘King Jude’s sceptre!’ Charlotte was incredulous. ‘You think I can steal King Jude’s sceptre? It must be priceless!’
‘Purely sentimental value to me, I can assure you,’ said Twist.
‘So you two are rebels. You must be insane. There won’t be a constable or soldier in the land that Parliament won’t set on the trail of it if it goes missing.’
‘I would be disappointed by anything less. It’s a symbol,’ said Twist. ‘Of Parliament’s hegemony over the royal family. Value far beyond the gold and jewels that the sceptre is composed of, and that value is substantial. Think of it, every First Guardian since Isambard Kirkhill overthrew the rightful king has appointed a speaker to sit above that sceptre, their fat arses sweating and wiggling on top of its jewels and crystals. By such acts are history made.’
‘I thought the crown jewels were kept in a safe room below Parliament?’
‘So they are. When the house is not in session, the box is lowered into a vault, very well protected by guards and traps and doors and thick walls of concrete and metal. We hold the punch cards here to many — but not all — of those doors.’
‘Unfortunately, I don’t work for sentimental or symbolic value.’
‘Nor would I expect you to. You are an artist Damson Shades, and we are asking you to produce your masterwork for us.’ Picking up a pen from an inkwell in the table he scrawled a figure on the calling card’s blank slide, and pushed it across to her.
Charlotte’s eyes widened when she saw the amount, and she worked hard to halt her face from expressing any flicker of interest. The money helped, it always helped. ‘And the painting from tonight?’
‘Already removed from the false bottom of the cabinet you used to saw the duke in half, and returned upstairs. We require the sceptre’s delivery with the minimum of fuss; and the postponement of police interest until later.’
‘The Cat-gibbon will not be pleased.’
‘She is a pragmatist, like all the rulers of the flash mob. We have made, let us say, an accommodation with her.’
That would have been an interesting conversation. Wish I could’ve been there.
‘May I say that one exists between us also?’
Charlotte slipped her calling card back into his lapel pocket. ‘For art, Mister Twist. For my masterwork.’
Charlotte made to leave the room, but the man casually raised his cane blocking her exit.
‘You appear to be practised in the arts of mesmerism, for-’
‘For…?’
‘For one so young, Damson Shades. Where did you learn such an art?’
‘An old gypsy woman taught me.’
He shrugged and lowered his cane, disappointed. ‘Well, hold to your craft’s secrets then. We will be in touch through the contact woman you use to intermediate with the Cat-gibbon.’
No, really. A gypsy woman.
Twist’s broken-nosed companion lowered his pistol as the door closed. ‘Do think she believed you, sir?’
‘Not everything, Mister Cloake. I sense there is a little more to her than that which she professes to be. But she will do the job for us. That is all that matters.’
‘We could get the sceptre ourselves, given time. Steal more pass cards; threaten the guards and the people protecting the vaults.’
‘Time,’ sighed Twist. ‘I think we have waited long enough, don’t you? Better it looks like a robbery. No questions asked about how the thief got so close to the sceptre. Nothing to implicate us and our friends until it is too late for events to be stopped.’
‘And if she is successful?’
‘Charlotte Shades trade is a high-risk occupation. It wouldn’t do for her to be captured and coerced into telling others who she sold the sceptre to. If she succeeds, it will be time for her to retire, Mister Cloake.’
The bruiser licked his lips as he pocketed his pistol. Retiring people like her always provided such good amusement.
CHAPTER THREE
In Greenhall, the heart of the Jackelian civil-service, you could always hear the beat of government — even here on the top floor of the jumble of buildings that sprawled for miles, the throb of the transaction-engines housed in the underground chambers could be felt underfoot. Unlike the great towers of the capital’s business district, the natural order of the placement of offices was inverted here. Those government departments with the most pull and political capital got the rooms closest to the eternally warm underground chambers housing the house-sized thinking machines. Those with the least got the unheated rooms near the top of the civil service’s spread out complex. It was not by accident that the State Protection Board occupied the unheated rooms under the great glass palace that formed the roof.
Dick Tull looked out of the crystal panels as he waited for his meeting with the head of the service, playing with the edges of his greying moustache. If he looked carefully through the forest of chimneys venting steam, he could just make out the network of canals running between the Greenhall buildings, navvies with axes chipping away at the ice. Even now, in the depths of winter, the great engines of government needed to be cooled with water.
Miserable, cheapskate jiggers, those engine men are. Sweating in comfort down in their echoing caverns, shovelling coal into their furnaces while they let me freeze up here. They get paid more than me too, closed shop with guild exams to get in. Sods. That’s why they give out regimental ranks in the board, so they don’t have to pay me civilian civil service rates.
And here, walking down the corridor, was a prime example of the board’s officer class. Another one of the chinless wonders who had joined after him, then unfairly risen so far above Dick’s position in life: Walsingham. He stopped before Dick, scratching his dark sideburns, his neat moustache twitching as if it had a life of its own.
