“Have you ever made contact with these marsh people?”
“They are stone-age throwbacks. Their idea of fun Friday is getting high on mushrooms followed by self-immolation in the nearest bonfire. They are not approachable people.”
“What language do they speak?”
“It’s a bastard patois of old Norfolk mixed up with Cockney and West Midlands. There’s a tradition—which I can quite believe—that they’re descended from criminals and lunatics of the Public Era set free as the nation state collapsed. That would explain their utterly bizarre beliefs and practices.”
“They’re our only hope of tracking down Lawrence. We have to find him, Wings. We must not allow any leakage of the secrets of the Value System—we have to be certain he perished in the wilderness however hard it is to achieve that certainty.”
“It will be a challenge, Tommy Boy. Still, what is life without challenges? Leave it with me.”
“And quickly.”
“What about Donald?” Wingfield asked.
TK sighed. A grim duty descended upon him, one he had most earnestly wished to avoid.
“I must now face the unbearable.”
“I believe the death rate in the Night and Fog is about 10% per annum,” Wingfield said. “They’re quite careless people, these ultramarines, you cannot be blamed that Lawrence perished.”
“I told Donald I would return his brother and now I will fail in his eyes. He will no longer respect me. Then he becomes dangerous, for he knows too much—far, far too much—to be disillusioned, especially with the nationalists baying for reform.” TK propped his elbows on the table and hunched. “He’s confirmed for the Advent Dinner, we’ll take him then, I can’t imagine Laxbury Manor will bother over him.”
“What about Nightminster?”
“It has to be good, Wings; there must be no suspicions, or at least, no substantiable suspicions that we the Krossingtons had anything to do with his disappearance. I don’t need a war with the Ultramarine Guild on top of everything else.”
TK was conscious of a sick regret coming over him. He was looking back three decades to the outstanding young man who reached Oxford from nothing, full of zeal to change the world. What had gone wrong? Why had Nightminster thrown his life away, just frittered away the best years of his life in a squalid conspiracy against humanity? Perhaps the flaw had always been there, unnoticed until tragedy ripped it wide to endure as a livid ulcer of malice.
“It’s done, Your Decency,” Wingfield said. “Flying boats disappear all the time—especially in times such as these.”
“It doesn’t stop there. Dismantling the Value System will be a vast undertaking.”
“Perhaps we could turn the place into a pig farm?”
“That’s not funny, Wings.”
Chapter 16
Donald’s household was starting to notice changes in him. To begin with, the changes were subtle, perhaps a shift of tone in addressing his servants, the pitch rising rather than falling, as if making suggestions rather than giving orders. Some days after the meeting with Sarah-Kelly at ZEEBRI, he made the boldest jump yet, when he welcomed Butler Campbell back from a long weekend.
“Ah, Jonathan, had a nice few days off?”
Butler Campbell slowed his pace, scowling at his boss as if he were some dirty animal wandered in from Hyde Park.
“Good day to you, sir,” he snapped back, marching past and disappearing into his office under the main stairs.
A few minutes later, Donald heard screeches of laughter from the kitchen and then a hearty bellow from the footmen’s dormitory in the basement. From then on, his servants eyed him with a cautious curiosity, as if they suspected their master had turned putty-brained.
That evening he briefed his chauffeur Okeke to have the limousine ready at half past seven to take him to the gymnasium. Now, Okeke had never been on quite the level of formality of the other servants. Donald knew a fair amount about Okeke’s private life from the man’s habit of continuous personal commentary while driving. On this evening, Okeke grinned.
“By the way, Donald, I’ll permit you to call me Okeke.” He turned over his lapel to reveal the orange circle on a green background of the National Party. “Butler Campbell is the only one in the house who isn’t a member, did you know that?”
“We’ll discuss it later,” Donald said.
After dinner, Okeke brought out the limousine and off they rumbled into the dim streets of Bloomsbury.
“So, are you a member now?” Okeke asked.
“No. I don’t think the National Party is the right group to reform our system. Banner is pursuing a path of dangerous extremism.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because the historical record tells me to say that.” In recent days, Donald had crammed much reading from his father’s library. The history books had illuminated the ground beneath his feet. Now he walked on glass plate and could see down through the centuries beneath his lifetime. “Banner wants us all living in stables and offering our genius to some great god of state power. He claims it has not been tried before. He’s wrong—Marxism was tried again and again during the Public Era and every occasion ended in barbarous tyranny.”
“Don’t you think that describes the sovereign system? Have you ever been out on the public drains and seen how the surplus dies?”
Donald was shocked at Okeke’s blatant derision, even while entirely agreeing with it. He dodged both questions.
“There’s a better way than either. It requires the sovereigns to sit across the table from the National Party and both to exchange concessions. We have to put machines back on the land and bring the natives into the cities to make more machines. If the process was carefully managed over decades, it would raise food production enough to end the vile practice of surplus discharges to the drains.”
“If you don’t mind my saying so, Donald, you need to get real. It will never happen.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Well…” Okeke was obviously making judgements about how much he could say. “My brother is a sergeant in General Wardian, he’s seen things you would never believe. What I’m getting at is there’s too many dirty secrets. Once they come out,
