Somehow, and very likely under the subliminal direction of the White Queen, Robert Wilkinson had spent twenty years of his life mapping out the key points of the White Queen’s Shadow Game.
And here it was (save for that single, critical piece of information), in their hands.
Every pamphlet concentrated on one of the key, or cardinal, points of the Shadow Game. Some were important landmarks—St Paul’s itself, the church of St Alphage in London Wall, St Paul Shadwell—but just as many of them were forgotten or ignored landmarks: a kitchen, a cellar, a water pump, a tumbledown wall. Many of the landmarks had been removed, and only the power associated with them remained. Of the two Eleanor Crosses that had been built in London, only one remained, at Charing Cross. The other, Cheapside Cross, had long vanished.
Wilkinson also mentioned key points that he didn’t have time to cover, or that he felt had been covered sufficiently by other authors: all of Christopher Wren’s spires on the churches he had rebuilt in London after the Great Fire of 1666, as well as all the public and private buildings he had planned and constructed.
Among the key points that Wilkinson mentioned, there were two surprises.
The first was Copt Hall.
“I wonder who suggested that,” said Grace late one night as they sat in her bedroom, eating egg sandwiches and chocolate biscuits that Malcolm had brought them. “Boudicca or the White Queen herself?”
Jack had a hand resting on her shoulder, his thumb idly toying with one of her curls. “The Shadow Game is tied into Epping Forest,” he said.
“Into your power as Ringwalker,” Grace said.
“How long has the White Queen been planning this?” Jack said, his voice soft.
“Thousands of years,” Grace said. “Some of these places were built…oh, during the Dark Ages.”
And the White Queen had known he would become Ringwalker. Jack shook his head, not sure whether it was in wonderment or irritation.
The other surprise was a pamphlet on the building that had replaced Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in Southwark.
Skelton’s Meeting House.
That caused Jack and Grace much thought and discussion.
“What is its significance?” Grace wondered.
Jack gave a wry grin. “Perhaps only to point out that so much of my history has been meaningless theatre.”
Grace smiled. “Look, the Meeting House was named after a Reverend Mr Charles Skelton, a Dissenting Independent preacher. After his death the Meeting House was used as a mill to grind bones and stone.”
Now Jack laughed. “The mills of the White Queen grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small,” he said, paraphrasing the well-known proverb: The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. “She’s telling us that nothing has been left unplanned. Nothing left to chance.”
On another day, the Friday after they’d met Sutherland and acquired the books, they spent the afternoon walking about London, studying as many of the cardinal points of the Shadow Game as they could manage. They had wondered whether or not to be worried about Catling seeing them, but in the end they decided she would be able to gain little from their, to her, aimless wanderings.
“Do you remember,” Jack said as they stood by the ancient water pump at the junction of Leadenhall and Fenchurch streets, “the Sunday that your father drove us down to London after we’d listened to the declaration of war on the radio?”
“Oh, aye, I remember. I was trying to fade into the upholstery.”
Jack looked at her. “You didn’t want to be a nuisance, and I felt a pig at the way I’d been behaving.”
“I was so scared of you.”
“You were so…”
“Pathetic?”
“So not what I had expected from Noah and Weyland’s daughter. Dear gods, I had wanted to resent you so much.”
She smiled. “You brought me to this water pump to tell me that?”
“It isn’t quite the place, is it?” Jack looked around. The junction was one of the busiest in the City, leading as it did to Aldgate and the roads to the East End.
“Soon, Jack,” she said, and Jack looked back at her.
Aye, soon indeed. This relationship had been such a slow, sweet slide for Jack that, for the moment, he didn’t want the journey to end in either consummation or declaration. Neither of them had ever spoken of what they felt for each other, although that they did feel, and feel powerfully, was undoubted. Neither did either of them want to rush towards making love, although that they would was also undoubted.
Particularly now that they knew of the Shadow Game. To make it, as Kingman and Mistress, their union would need to be both physical and magical.
“Jack,” said Grace, grinning, “what did you want to say when you spoke about that day my father drove us down to London?”
He laughed. “My mind had drifted!” He shared with her a brief fragment of where his thoughts had been drifting, and her smile broadened, but he returned to the original topic of conversation. “Harry and I walked about London, and this spot is where I first felt the presence of the shadow, although I had no idea what it was then.”
Jack looked down, tapping the pavement with his foot. Beneath the busy intersection, forgotten by all save those who had ever bothered to read Londina Illustrata, lay a twelfth-century crypt which had belonged to a now long-gone priory which had stood close to Aldgate.
It was one of the White Queen’s cardinal points.
“What does it do?” Jack said softly, his foot still tapping at the pavement.
“We won’t know until we have the key,” said Grace, knowing Jack referred not so much to this single point but to the Shadow Game as a whole. What was its purpose? How could it help them? How did it work?
Jack sighed, giving his head a slight shake. Finding all these cardinal points, finding the map, was, on the one hand, exciting (particularly after so long of not knowing what the shadow was), but on the other, singularly frustrating. None of the points made any sense and formed no pattern without knowing where they originated—where lay the heart of the new labyrinthine Game. It was impossible to work out the pathways of the new labyrinth without knowing the point at which they should start.
The dark heart of the White Queen’s labyrinth.
Jack repressed a shiver. Every day his mind returned to Boudicca’s warning, and he kept going back over each encounter he’d had with the White Queen, trying to guess at the subtleties of her words, and he wished he had somehow understood then who she was.
The best marriage you will ever make is in my dark heart, she’d told him. Then Jack had thought she was Catling, and that she referred to Jack’s “marriage” with Noah during the completion of the Troy Game.
Now, he knew differently. It was not Noah he needed to make the marriage with, but Grace, and it would be in the heart of the Shadow Game, not the Troy Game.
But who would that marriage serve? Him? Grace? The land? Or whatever mysterious purpose the White Queen owned?
Would it save Grace, or would it murder her?
He reached out silently and took Grace’s hand, and they walked up Leadenhall Street, passing over several more buried crypts (and cardinal points) as they went. Within half an hour, they approached St Paul’s.
They stopped well away from it, staring.
Most of those buildings surrounding the cathedral which had been destroyed on the twenty-ninth of December had now been cleared away, and St Paul’s stood in a vast, open area. Parts of its outer walls had been blackened, but that the structure had survived had been popularly labelled a miracle.
“I can’t believe you and my mother got out of that alive,” Grace said softly.
Jack squeezed her hand, but did not otherwise respond. Christ, the horror of struggling through the fires and collapsing buildings, and worrying about Grace trapped by Catling—
“Jack…”
“Hmmm?”
“St Paul’s is one of the cardinal points of the Shadow Game. It isn’t…”
“It isn’t the heart,” he said. Between the end of December, when Grace had realised the true nature of the shadow, and the previous Monday, when they’d acquired the incomplete set of Londina Illustrata, Jack, as Grace and everyone else who had the training, had assumed that the new Game would be centred over St Paul’s. But it wasn’t…St Paul’s was a part of the Shadow Game, but the heart lay elsewhere.
“I wonder what she has made,” Grace said, still looking at St Paul’s, and Jack knew she wasn’t referring to Catling.
“She’s been lost in death for almost four thousand years,” he said, thinking again of the murders. “I shudder to think what she may have made.”
FIVE
The Athenaeum Club
Monday, 10th March 1941
On Sunday the ninth of March Harry rang Copt Hall to tell Jack that the king would meet with Jack and Grace at the Athenaeum Club in Pall Mall late the next afternoon.