“You want to complete the Game?” Weyland said, aghast.
“You want your daughter to suffer any more than she is? Or this land?” Jack countered.
“Stop,” said the king. “What are the alternatives? For Christ’s sake…my wife and I have toured the bombed-out areas of London week in, week out. The grief and destruction—not just of buildings but of lives—is more than I think I can bear. Do I want Jack and Noah to complete the Game and condemn this land to subservience to that thing who calls herself Catling? No. Do I want Catling to crucify my people because you refuse to complete her? No. Give me an alternative.”
“We thought there might be a way…” Jack began, then drifted off, not knowing how to explain about the shadow.
“Oh,” Noah said, “I forgot to tell you what I’d heard from Long Tom. George,” she said to the king, “can you stay ten minutes? You need to hear this.”
Jack, Weyland and Harry all opened their mouths, but Noah waved them to silence. “George?”
He chewed his lip and looked over his shoulder. “I have already stayed too long. Elizabeth and my minders will be wondering what I am doing. Can you come to the palace in two hours? Yes, yes, I know you don’t want to leave here, but there’s not much you can do, and we need to discuss this in more detail than we can in this tent. Somewhere more discreet. I’ll talk to my private secretary on my way back to the car. He will stay behind and get you to the palace. Okay?”
“I can’t leave Grace—” Noah began.
“I’ll stay behind,” Weyland said. “The king needs Harry, Jack and you, not me. I’ll stay.”
Noah nodded, although she was clearly still unhappy.
Jack looked at Weyland. “Thank you,” he said.
FOURTEEN
The Ruins of Coronation Avenue, London
Monday, 14th October 1940
GRACE SPEAKS
Ilay there, listening to Matilda die, and couldn’t do anything for her. I should have been able to do something: ease her pain, move some of the rubble, still her breathing into the relief of death if that was what she wanted. I should have been able to do that for myself.
But I couldn’t do a thing. The rubble not only trapped me physically, but crushed and trapped most of the Darkwitch and labyrinthine powers I had as well. I had enough to dredge some light out of the single diamond band that was free, but that was all, and I wondered if that was not my power, but something residual of Jack in the diamonds. Even that died, after an hour or two, and we were left in the dark.
So I lay there and listened to Matilda die. I could hear her anguish in every breath: each harsh inhalation, each ragged exhalation. I could hear it in the way she cried sometimes, or the pitifully tiny movements I heard her head make as she struggled uselessly against the weight of the rubble about her. I kept calling her name. It annoyed her, I know, but oh, gods, I so desperately wanted to hear her voice, to know that she was still alive.
To know she was still with me.
I couldn’t bear to think of what lay even further beneath us in the basement shelter. Ecub and Erith were dead. Truly dead. Gone forever, and both Matilda and I cried for them. But there were others, and in the first hours after the bomb blast, they were still alive. I knew, because at first I could hear pitiful cries for help coming from below us, or desperate scratchings at the rubble.
Oh, the image, those trapped people scratching away with broken fingernails at the bricks atop them.
I could also hear the trickling of water and, after some time (how long? Hours? Days?) the unmistakeable stench of sewage.
All the cries for help below us gradually ceased, and I no longer heard the pathetic scratchings at the rubble.
When Matilda said her feet were wet I wept, because I knew that somewhere a water pipe had been broken—a sewer, too—and that whoever had been left alive after the blast had now drowned. Now that horror threatened Matilda.
“Matilda?” I whispered. “Matilda?”
She didn’t answer, and after a moment I realised I could no longer hear her ragged breathing.
“Matilda!” I stretched out my fingers, trying to feel her face, thinking only to jab at her cheek and remind her to breathe, but my fingers encountered not dry flesh, but cold, watery rubble.
Matilda had slipped away, down further into the rubble, down, down, down into her grave.
I started to sob, not caring about the pain it caused my chest, calling out Matilda’s name over and over until I could barely breathe.
All about me there was silence, save for the gentle lap of water against my fingers and the gentle grinding of rubble as it settled deeper into the water.
After a while, Catling came to me.
FIFTEEN
Buckingham Palace, London
Monday, 14th October 1940
They convened in the early afternoon in a study in the private quarters of Buckingham Palace. The queen had already gone back to Windsor, where she and George slept (the government feeling that Buckingham Palace was too easy a target for Luftwaffe bombers), and George dismissed his secretary as soon as he had shown Noah, Jack, Harry and Stella into the room.
Without asking if they wanted it, George poured everyone a large whisky, then waved them into deep, comfortable chairs.
“Jack,” said George, “what’s been happening?”
As briefly as he could, yet not omitting any necessary detail, Jack told the king about the labyrinthine shadow which hung over London. “We don’t know truly if it is a help or a hindrance, if it is a trap or a weapon, and we call it a shadow because it is too insubstantial for any of us to see it clearly. After what has happened in the past night…” Jack paused, collected himself, and went on. “After what has happened over the past night I am inclined to think it is more hindrance than help. If not for that bomb…Noah, please tell us now what you heard from Long Tom.”
Jack looked at George and lifted his hands in a gesture of despair. “She said she would wait until we got here.”
“I’m sorry, Jack,” Noah said. “Long Tom told me that he’d heard that the shadow, and thus perhaps the voice, belonged to a creature, a woman, so shadowy, so fleeting, that none could know her. He said she had not ever lived, and when I asked why it was that I could not sense her, or know of her, Long Tom said it was because she was lost to me.” She paused. “Long Tom said she is known as the White Queen for her face is as cold and pale as the winter landscape. She—”
“The White Queen?”
Noah stared at Jack. “You know her?”
“Yes, maybe I do,” Jack said. “While Grace has been staying with Ariadne, we have met on several occasions at the White Queen Cafe on Cromwell Road in Kensington. We were, so far as I could tell, the only customers. Certainly no one else was ever there when we were. There was a woman who ran the cafe…Mrs Stanford.”
Now everyone was staring at Jack.
“I don’t know any more,” he said. “Sorry. Grace and I would go there to meet, have tea and—” he gave a faint smile “—Mrs Stanford’s speciality, marmalade cake, and talk. But she was so ordinary. and nothing much ever happened there…except, of course,” he sighed, “that this strange voice spoke to us both in that place.”
“So we have a creature, the White Queen,” said Harry, “who masquerades as a Mrs Stanford, who makes marmalade cake and, in her spare time, strange labyrinthine shadows which hang over London. Marvellous. What does any of this tell us?”
“It raises more questions than it answers,” said Noah. “Who is she, this cold, unborn woman? Why can’t we know her?”
“Because she is somehow attached to Grace,” said Jack. “I think it is Grace she is interested in, or drawn to. None of us, not really.”
“But she called to you as well,” said the king.
“Maybe only because I am ‘attached’ to Grace,” Jack said with a shrug.
Stella had been sitting back, listening to the conversation, her brow creased in thought, the fingers of one hand tapping against the arm of the chair. “No, no. I don’t think you’re incidental, Jack. I think she is interested in you as well as Grace, although not perhaps as interested. Damn it! I wish we had Grace here. She must have the key. She must know something…”
“I wish we had Grace here, too,” said Noah, looking at Stella with steady eyes, “not for any information she might give us, but merely so I can hold her again, and know she is safe.”