“This is getting us nowhere,” said Jack. “All we’re doing is blowing useless words about the room. Catling has clearly given us a choice. Promise to complete her, and she will get Grace out of the nightmare that is Coronation Avenue—as well, please gods, anyone else who may still be alive—or Grace will continue to suffer, as well as London.” He shook his head. “Catling is going to escalate the violence, the death and the destruction if we don’t agree, Noah. I told her I lacked two of the kingship bands, but Catling didn’t believe me. She believes I do have them, and am just trying to deceive her. Noah, what choice do we have? What?”
No one replied immediately.
“Grace…” Stella said slowly.
“Grace is buried under several score tons of rubble and can’t get out until Noah and I—”
“I know, Jack,” Stella said. “I’m sorry.”
“Is there any way of contacting the White Queen?” George said. “Jack? Apart from Grace you are the only one who has had any contact with her.”
“She contacts us, we don’t contact her,” Jack said. “Look, if someone can arrange a car, I can drive around to the cafe from here.”
“It’s a start,” said Harry. “But if it fails?”
“My advice,” said George, “is to give Catling the promise, but to somehow delay the completion. Is that possible?”
Jack and Noah exchanged a glance.
“Yes,” said Jack, “Catling herself has made it possible. When she allied herself so closely to the land she managed to tie herself closely to its restrictions. That’s even more the case since she ‘arranged’ that Noah and I take on such vital roles within the life of the land.”
“The December solstice,” said Noah. “That would be the best time to complete her, and it is two months away. It would buy us time.”
“But if you promised,” said Harry, “would you need to go through with it?”
Noah shrugged. “No. But I dread to think of the consequences if Jack and I didn’t turn up for our ‘date’.” She grimaced. “We need to use those two months well.”
“And I need those final two bands,” Jack said. “Catling will be neither completed nor defeated without them.”
“Jack…” Noah said, sitting forward.
“Yes?”
“Do you think this White Queen might have them?”
For a moment Jack stared at Noah. “But Aeneas said…”
“Aeneas may have been duped.”
“Christ,” said Jack, “you may be right. Now it is even more important to either manage to contact the White Queen, or, better, to get Grace out of that rubble.”
“Then are we agreed,” said George. “Jack tries his best to contact the White Queen, and if that doesn’t work, then Jack and Noah give their promise to Catling…and we all hope to God that once Grace comes out she can give us more information, or that she gives Jack and Noah the key that will destroy Catling. Yes?”
No one looked very happy about it, but eventually everyone nodded. After a little more desultory conversation, Jack, Noah, the Lord of the Faerie and Stella rose to leave.
After he farewelled the others, George pulled Jack to one side. “I will send for a car for you,” he said, “but first I wanted to ask you something.”
“Yes?”
Having initiated the conversation, George now hesitated. “I was watching your face as you talked of Grace,” he said. “I wanted to ask…if…”
Jack smiled. “Are you remembering that night in the Broken Bough, when we both lamented the fact neither of us would ever have Noah?”
George’s face relaxed. “Yes.”
“Well…I thought then, and thought for too many years afterwards, that I would never find another woman I could possibly love as much as Noah. But…maybe I have. As you have.”
Now George smiled, honestly and truly. “Yes. I have. Jack…good luck.”
Jack wasn’t sure if George wished him well with Grace, or more generally with the battle against the Troy Game. But he smiled, shook the king’s hand, and left feeling marginally better than when he had entered the room.
Half an hour later he drew up in his borrowed car outside the White Queen Cafe in Cromwell Road.
Very slowly Jack got out of the car and closed the door behind him.
Both windows and door were boarded up, and the cafe looked as if it had been abandoned for many months. Cobwebs hung between planks, and, through a gap in the planks covering the door, Jack could see a pile of mail on the floor.
He felt very cold and, for a moment, closer to despair than ever.
There was a postman walking past, and Jack stopped him, asking him if he knew how long the cafe had been boarded up.
“Mrs Stanford took herself down to her sister’s place in Devon at the beginning of the war,” the postman said, watching curiously the expressions crossing Jack’s face. “The cafe hasn’t been open in over a year.”
“Of course it hasn’t,” said Jack. “Thank you.”
As the postman continued on his way, looking back over his shoulder once or twice at the American who had stopped him, Jack looked up at the sky.
The shadow had vanished.
There was nothing left.
“Grace?” Jack whispered.
He received no reply. Whatever he’d been able to perceive of Grace previously had now vanished.
Grace was as “gone” as the White Queen and the labyrinthine shadow.
It was then, also, that Jack realised Matilda was dead, and he turned to the car, and, leaning against it, crossed his arms on the car’s roof, bent his face down into them, and wept.
SIXTEEN
The Ruins of Coronation Avenue, London
Monday, 14th October 1940
GRACE SPEAKS
If I had wanted to escape previously, it was nothing to how I felt now. My right hand scrabbled desperately amongst the rubble, scraping and cutting my fingers, but there was little I could do.
I could feel Catling drawing closer, a terrifying, malignant presence, far worse than anything else I had ever felt from her, seeping down through tiny cracks in the rubble.
How are you feeling, sweet Grace?
I gave a single sob, loathing myself for the weakness. The feeling of evil was so overpowering that every sense I had was screaming at me to run, run, run…
I’d never felt this sense of evil before, and I wondered at the fact she’d been saving it for so long.
I asked you how you were feeling, Grace.
I could see her now, although this made no sense in the confined (and pitch-black) crack I had as a space about me. Catling sat on a pile of rubble a few feet away, a young woman of malevolent air and a nasty, childishly spiteful face.
“I am not at my best,” I whispered, amazed that I could even speak.
Catling laughed. “You’re about to get even worse, sweeting. Tell me, can you feel the weight of bricks crushing you?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know that you’d be dead now if it weren’t for my intervention?”
What did she want? My gratitude? “Yes.”
“Your parents and Jack are quite distraught. Did you know that?”
“No.”
“Are you happy about it?”
What did she want? “No. I wish they didn’t suffer or worry.”
“Well, I want them to suffer and worry. It is good for them. Might concentrate their minds. I’ve told them that if they don’t agree to complete me then…well, here you’ll stay. Given that I think they rather want you out, I have high hopes they’ll do what I want.”
I was crying again, silently this time, feeling the tears trickle down my grit-covered cheeks.
“So I expect they’ll get you back, dear Grace.” She paused, and in that pause I could hear malevolence gathering. “Of course, they’re not going to get you back quite the way they want.”
As soon as she finished speaking, I heard it. What sounded like a huge boulder tumbling down through the rubble. There shouldn’t be space for it, no boulder should be able to force its way down through the rubble.
But one did nonetheless.
“It is the lintel from the doorway into the flats, Grace. Heavy concrete. Able to do much damage, I imagine. Poor Jack, won’t he weep when he sees you?”
I struggled, crying out in horror as I heard the lump of concrete tumbling closer, over and over, over and over…
“I’m going to say to you what I once heard your father saying to Jack, when he was welcoming him back into London after an unfortunate period of time spent in exile. I only need you alive, Grace. I don’t need you whole.”
The concrete slid closer, rasping and rumbling, and it was the most terrible thing I have ever heard in my entire life.
I only need you alive, Grace. I don’t need you whole.
Now the concrete was sliding towards me at a frightful pace. I was screaming, not caring about the pain that tore through my chest with the effort, when I felt a sudden rush of warm air, and then something slammed into my head.