“This is his real domain,” muttered Hunter. “Things lost. Things forgotten.”
There were windows set in the stone wall. Through them, Richard could see the rattling darkness and the passing lights of the Underground tunnels. The earl was sitting on the floor with his legs splayed, patting the wolfhound and scratching it underneath the chin. The jester stood beside him, looking embarrassed. The earl clambered to his feet when he saw them. His forehead creased. “Ah. There you are. Now, there was a reason I asked you here, it’ll come to me . . . ” He tugged at his red-gray beard, a tiny gesture from such a huge man.
“The Angel Islington, Your Grace,” said Door politely.
“Oh yes. Your father had a lot of ideas for changes, you know. Asked me about them. I don’t trust change. I sent him to Islington.” He stopped. Blinked his one eye. “Did I tell you this already?”
“Yes, Your Grace. And how can we get to Islington?”
The earl nodded as if Door had said something profound. “Only once by the quick way. After that you have to go the long way down. Dangerous.”
Door said, patiently, “And the quick way is . . . ?”
“No, no. Need to be an opener to use it. Only good for Portico’s family.” He rested a huge hand on her shoulder. Then his hand slid up to her cheek. “Better off staying here with me. Keep an old man warm at night, eh?” He leered at her and touched her tangle of hair with his old fingers. Hunter took a step toward Door. Door gestured with her hand: No. Not yet.
Door looked up at the earl, and said, “Your Grace, I am Portico’s oldest daughter. How do I get to the Angel Islington?” Richard found himself amazed that Door was able to keep her temper in the face of the earl’s losing battle with temporal drift.
The earl winked his single eye in a solemn blink: an old hawk, his head tipped on one side. Then he took his hand from her hair. “So you are. So you are. Portico’s daughter. How is your dear father? Keeping well, I hope? Fine man. Good man.”
“How do we get to the Angel Islington?” said Door, but now there was a tremble in her voice.
“Hmm? Use the Angelus, of course.”
Richard found himself imagining the earl sixty, eighty, five hundred years ago: a mighty warrior, a cunning strategist, a great lover of women, a fine friend, a terrifying foe. There was still the wreckage of that man in there somewhere. That was what made him so terrible, and so sad. The earl fumbled on the shelves, moving pens and pipes and peashooters, little gargoyles and dead leaves. Then, like an aged cat stumbling on a mouse, he seized a small, rolled-up scroll, and handed it to the girl. “Here y’go, lassie,” said the earl. “All in here. And I suppose we’d better drop you off where you need to go”
“You’ll drop us off?” asked Richard. “In a train?”
The earl looked around for the source of the sound, focused on Richard, and smiled enormously. “Oh, think nothing of it,” he boomed. “Anything for Portico’s daughter.” Door clutched the scroll tightly, triumphantly.
Richard could feel the train beginning to slow, and he, and Door, and Hunter were led out of the stone room and back into the car. Richard peered out at the platform, as they slowed down.
“Excuse me. What station is this?” he asked. The train had stopped, facing one of the station signs: BRITISH MUSEUM, it said. Somehow, this was one oddity too many. He could accept “Mind the Gap” and the Earl’s Court, and even the strange library. But damn it, like all Londoners, he knew his Tube map, and this was going too far. “There isn’t a British Museum Station,” said Richard, firmly.
“There isn’t?” boomed the earl. “Then, mm, then you must be very careful as you get off the train.” And he guffawed, delightedly, and tapped his jester on the shoulder. “Hear that, Tooley? I am as funny as you are.”
The jester smiled as bleak a smile as ever was seen. “My sides are splitting, my ribs are cracking, and my mirth is positively uncontainable, Your Grace,” he said.
The doors hissed open. Door smiled up at the earl. “Thank you,” she said. “Off, off,” said the vast old man, shooing Door and Richard and Hunter out of the warm, smoky carriage onto the empty platform. And then the doors closed, and the train moved away, and Richard found himself staring at a sign which, no matter how many times he blinked—nor even if he looked away from it and looked back suddenly to take it by surprise—still obstinately persisted in saying:
BRITISH MUSEUM
EIGHT
It was early evening, and the cloudless sky was transmuting from royal blue to a deep violet, with a smudge of fire orange and lime green over Paddington, four miles to the west, where, from Old Bailey’s perspective anyway, the sun had recently set.
Skies, thought Old Bailey, in a satisfied sort of a way. Never a two of them alike. Not by day nor not by night, neither. He was a bit of a connoisseur of skies, was Old Bailey, and this was a good ‘un. The old man had pitched his tent for the night on a roof opposite St. Paul’s Cathedral, in the center of the City of London.
He was fond of St. Paul’s, and it, at least, had changed little in the last three hundred years. It had been built in white Portland stone, which had, before it was even completed, begun to turn black from the soot and the filth in the smoky London air and now, following the cleaning of London in the 1970s, was more or less white again; but it was still St. Paul’s. He was not sure that the same could be said for the rest of the City of London: he peered over the roof, stared away from his beloved Sky, down to the sodium-lit pavement below. He could see security cameras affixed to a wall, and a few cars, and one late office worker, locking a door and then walking toward the Tube. Brrr. Even the thought of going underground made Old Bailey shudder. He was a roof-man and proud of it; had fled the world at ground level so long ago . . .
Old Bailey remembered when people had actually lived here in the City, not just worked; when they had lived and lusted and laughed, built ramshackle houses one leaning against the next, each house filled with noisy people. Why, the noise and the mess and the stinks and the songs from the alley across the way (then known, at least colloquially, as Shitten Alley) had been legendary in their time, but no one lived in the City now. It was a cold and cheerless place of offices, of people who worked in the day and went home to somewhere else at night. It was not a place for living anymore. He even missed the stinks.
The last smudge of orange sun faded into nocturnal purple. The old man covered the cages, so the birds could get their beauty sleep. They grumbled, then slept. Old Bailey scratched his nose, after which he went into his tent and fetched a blackened stew-pot, some water, some carrots and potatoes, salt, and a well-hanged pair of dead, plucked starlings. He walked out onto the roof, lit a small fire in a soot-blackened coffee can, and was putting his stew on to cook when he became aware that someone was watching him from the shadows by a chimney stack.