“Mr Gustavus Rackland, Your Decency.”
“Thank you, Vanessa. Please take a seat Gustavus. I must apologise for—”
Donald heard an impact, like a leather saddle hit with a metal bar.
“Come and take a look, Donald,” invited TK.
Donald came out to find the plump form of Gustavus Rackland sprawled across the floor in the process of being ‘packaged’ by Nightminster; the wrists bound tight behind the back and the same rope used to bind the ankles and pulled tight so that heels touched palms. Nightminster shoved a balled-up rag in Rackland’s mouth and then wrapped most of his head inside a scarf. Out the door went the ‘package’. TK stooped and wiped some smears of blood off the tiles.
“Well that’s one down,” he said. He smiled at Donald. “We’ll get these traitors out of the way and then discuss Lawrence.”
“All this came of my report from North Ken basin?”
“I know a hell of a lot about barging I never knew before,” TK said, smiling. “In seriousness, yes, it helped direct our enquiries.” A quiet smile hinted at how the enquiries had been pursued. “It seems a pretty little scheme has been running here since my grandfather’s days to steal exotic skins and ivories from Loch Sunart Nature Reserve and sell them into the fashion trade at substantial profit. It’s been going on so long it was considered a kind of right. What a pity a few take advantage of trust—those few will vanish into the Nameless Gone; let the rest savour the harvest of virtue.”
“What about Turner?”
“I can’t get everyone. Turner is out of the deal. The executive-marshal of General Wardian was adamant he’s keeping the bugger—too good an officer to lose, by which he means… Supposedly a straight man surrounded by crooks, or so I was told.”
Donald did not press the point. He was too relieved TK’s hammer had fallen on others. He had nothing personally against Turner, after all.
*
The Lydia departed down the loch, heading for the open Atlantic, where her crew would repaint and rename her before continuing to the Caribbean. She would never sail in British waters again.
Nightminster and Donald loaded the bound-up condemned into the hold of the flying boat, which was moored to the pier. The condemned were all conscious by this time, communicating with terrified, pleading eyes. Peterson-Veitch was the most awkward, being a large man. He put up a struggle like a tuna, until Nightminster beat his knees with a steel pipe. He lay still after that.
“What will happen to them?” Donald asked.
“You don’t need to know.”
Nightminster’s tone warned Donald off taking responsibility. They returned inside, where TK beckoned them up to the top end of the big lounge to bask in armchairs before the open fire. Vanessa served whiskeys. Donald dropped the first in one gulp, glad to feel it soothing off the jittery edge of his mood.
The exhibition of violence had shocked him, truth be told. Urbane, intelligent men—exceptional men—were thugs beneath. They gulped prey whole like Great White sharks. As he sipped at the second whisky, Donald looked from one to the other. Were these men really fit to rule? It was a pointless question, since they did rule and Donald could not change the fact.
They were all laughing together like family. Nightminster had Vanessa on his knee, carnivore grin leering at her neck, while he shot a few quick jokes and she laughed and wrapped an arm around his door-like shoulders. If ever they decided that he, Donald Aldingford had become a problem, would they be laughing just as loud after they had beaten him unconscious and bound him up? Yet he faced a lifetime as their servant—and there was nothing he could do about it except restrain the seething objection in his guts. His eyes drifted into the flames of the fire. When he died, the last thing he would ever feel in this world was that seething objection carried across decades, only for it to die silent within him.
Isabelle announced it was dinner time. They shifted to the modest dining table. The ladies served the first course of fish soup and sat down to join in, Vanessa beside Nightminster and Isabelle beside TK. Donald sat alone with his ears open and his mouth shut.
The dining conversation provided Donald the best panorama of the world he had ever had. The National Party was part of an international ‘fungus’ of radical politics, which had returned from the Continent in the years since the purges following the Sack of Oxford in 2073. The fungus had even crossed the Atlantic to grow across the Northern Occident. That was what made it so dangerous. The sovereign caste had no international assembly. Even the clubs that had developed from the old nation-state parliaments were nowadays only squabbling shops. They were not remotely competent to mount unified action against the wave of international radical politics. No doubt in about a century, one sovereign land would emerge as the de facto national sovereign of Britain, much as Athelstan had emerged as the first king of England in the tenth century. Such tortoise reform was being left in the dust of history by the radical hare.
“After the Glorious Resolution, every country reverted to its Dark Age precedent with remarkable consistency,” TK said. “Or in the case of the Northern Occident, to its pre-industrial caricature. The states of the South leaped back to the plantations with gusto, the main novelty being…” He could not repress a grin. “…on many plantations, the new owners were black, Jewish, Chinese or Indian, and the new slaves white… But I digress. The big problem is the National Party here on our doorstep.”
The Party had opened branches at Brent Cross, Elephant and Castle and Bermondsey asylums, with support growing exponentially as converts multiplied. Most alarming was the penetration into the
