Force Majeure (4 page)

Don’t let them –

‘You should go in,’ Luna breathed into her ear, ‘she’s waiting for you.’

– get to you.

She pushed at the door. The two child-women didn’t follow her but streamed abruptly back from where they’d come. Kay stepped nervously and respectfully into the library and the presence of the chatelaine.

The-Lady, Azure called her, though she was properly named Flower-of-the-Lady in honour of some local legend. Kay expected her to be serene and blooming, like her name, like the Pre-Raphaelite half-beauty it suggested. No. She sat at the desk at the far end of the library’s huge central atrium, under shafts of coloured light that dropped from the glass-domed roof. She was writing with a fountain pen and didn’t look up as Kay entered. It was difficult to gauge her height or her age or even the colour of her skin. Her face was obscured by her hair, which fell in neat curls like woodshavings, an old-fashioned look that suited her narrow, meatless build. She licked her lips as she wrote. She had a tongue for catching flies.

Kay crept steadily along the line of the carpet towards her while, either side of her, towering bookshelves stood in ranks, the perfume of oak and varnish mingling with leather and slow-crumbling paper. Though she didn’t dare stop to inspect them, Kay saw that the shelves weren’t uniform but each was carved with a unique and tactile design. The sense of organisation intrigued her.

Captain Esteban propped himself up on a rickety chair to Flower-of-the-Lady’s right. His uniform looked only mildly less shabby than when he had crashed into the dirt the previous day. His raw red eyes and taut skin betrayed a hangover and lost love. He seemed to grin as Kay approached, though it could equally have been a wambling, seasick smile. There was another chair to the-Lady’s left, but this was empty. Two-thirds of an inquisition then, and nowhere else to sit.
Don’t relax. Stand if you have to. Stay alert.

She must have struck an unimpressive figure in her T-shirt and shorts, with her bare blue goosefleshed arms and legs on show, her dense freckle-archipelagos fully visible. There was a draught in the library but also a well of heat from somewhere close by. She hoped not to shiver.

Without looking up, Flower-of-the-Lady said, ‘Stay there. I won’t keep you a minute.’ That made Kay crane round automatically for a clock. Overhead there were platforms and half-storeys, all swollen with shelves, but there was no hint of the time anywhere. Esteban – clearly as irritated by the promised delay as Kay, but worse at concealing it – groaned briefly and lowered his heavy head into his hands.

Kay looked for the trace of a smile on Flower-of-the-Lady’s lips, but if there was one, it was well-hidden. Her pen moved patiently along the page and she didn’t look up. The skin of her face, visible below the heavy overhang of curls, was unmarked. Her eyes were wide and brown, floating up briefly to regard Kay before sinking down again into her work. They were humourless but not incurious. Kay stood stiffly with her hands clamped together over her navel and let time pass. Her skin was prickling from her embarrassment in the anteroom.

Presently Father Christmas brought a cup of tea for the-Lady in a bone-china mug that didn’t shake or spill in his surprisingly steady hand. Father Christmas was black and blind and wore a scarlet frockcoat instead of reindeer skins but was otherwise unmistakable. Kay felt vaguely embarrassed to christen the newcomer this way, but his birdnest beard made her think of no-one else. She looked to the surface of the tea, which was milkless but swirling with small, dissolving lumps of butter.

Flower-of-the-Lady’s pen moved. ‘Thank you, Luis,’ she said. ‘Would you be kind enough to fetch a chair for our guest? And perhaps some tea …?’

White marbled eyes turned towards Kay and didn’t see.

‘No tea, thank you,’ she said. Luis moved away and returned moments later with a chair hoisted confidently in one hand ahead of him. In the meantime, the-Lady’s pen ticked and tickled, Esteban sank in his chair and Kay stood.

Don’t let them intimidate you.

Once Kay was seated, Flower-of-the-Lady clicked the top onto her pen, set it aside, and looked up. Even as the light fell across her face, the detail remained elusive. She might be Hispanic, she might be Caucasian, she might be something else altogether. She made a bridge of her hands. ‘Do you know who I am?’ she asked.

‘I think so,’ Kay nodded.

‘Good. Captain Esteban you know. Luis’ – she indicated Father Christmas, who had taken his seat beside her and now leaned forward curiously, his ear cocked towards the conversation – ‘is our librarian. You may be seeing a lot more of him. I am the chatelaine of this house, which means you are under my protection and are my responsibility for as long as you stay within these walls. As such, I hope that your stay here has been agreeable?’

‘It has,’ Kay agreed.

‘And the young lady who calls herself Azure has been helpful in every respect?’

‘She has.’

‘Perhaps you could tell me something of yourself and your business here.’

Kay launched into a practised introduction, her basic curriculum vitae embroidered with details about her assignment to Candida, though giving nothing special away. It took some minutes, and in that time the chatelaine sat poised with amusement rather than interest, Captain Esteban tried and failed to conceal his frazzled lethargy and Luis gave nothing away beyond his sardonic Yuletide smile.

Flower-of-the-Lady tapped her pen on the table. ‘I hope you realise you aren’t the first to Appear in Candida with a scheme to open the city to outside interests. Doctor Arkadin himself found the project beyond his abilities. He had the good sense to give up.’

Kay nodded, though in fact the thought had not occurred to her, had not even been hinted at in her notes. She did prospectus-babble: ‘I understand your concerns, but my employers believe we have the right moment, the right skills and the right people for the job.’

‘Of course,’ the chatelaine murmured, and the long-awaited secret smile seemed to pass over her face at last. ‘This house has a long-standing amity with the civil authorities of Candida’ – an acid glance at Esteban – ‘such as they are. We have some influence of our own that may be brought to bear on your plans. For the moment, however, I’m concerned only with your presence in this house. You may stay here for as long as you like on certain terms. You may leave whenever you like, though if you find no suitable alternative accommodation, I would forcefully recommend that you stay. While you’re under the purview of Captain Esteban’s bureau, I will also have to take his opinions and recommendations – such as they are – into consideration. How do you feel?’

She blinked, the first time Kay had registered that from her chocolately Basilisk-eyes. Kay realised that she had been given a rehearsed speech, as plastic and familiar as her own.

‘I have contacts in the city that Mr Esteban here –’

‘
Captain
.’ Petulant kid, he was.

‘– that Captain Esteban said he would chase up for me. Assuming he’s done his job properly, I should be able to gather myself together and move out today.’

And why are her eyes smiling now, and why does this feel like a trial, when did you last see your father,
eppur si muove
, and what is the guilt in Esteban’s eyes, and why does Father Christmas shift so uncomfortably in his chair, revealing to the child-in-the-grotto that she was just slightly too
naughty
this year?

Esteban, realising the silence was meant for him to fill, hoisted himself up out of the slouch he’d made, looked to her apologetically and said: ‘The address you gave me doesn’t exist. It was burned out a year ago and it doesn’t appear to have been occupied before the fire anyway. What was your friend’s name?’

‘Prospero.’

Luis chuckled throatily. Merry Christmas.

‘Nothing like that in our records. Such as they are.’ Esteban shrugged then, slowly and dreadfully. He ran a hand down his leg and began to scratch conspicuously at the back of his ankle, as if commanded by an unbearable irritation.

Kay nodded businesslike at the chatelaine, to make it clear that her words were meant for Esteban alone. Then she made him look up with the force of her glare.

‘I don’t,’ she said, ‘believe you.’

‘Shit!’

Kay stood at the epicentre of the devastation. Around her, blackened timbers and scorched concrete spread in widening circles like a map of Hell, with the normal streets and buildings of Candida blue and hazy beyond the edge. This had been a huge building once, maybe even a Folly. The wind blew charcoal dirt on her clothes and exposed skin and mocked her flimsy holiday-wear. Esteban paced in a spiral around her, glass and debris crunching underfoot. The combination of hangover and cold air turned his skin faintly blue. Kay’s legs were frozen, but she didn’t want him to see her rub warmth into them.

He looked at her like worshipful meat, like female territory.

Remembering Azure’s dream, she asked: ‘Do you get a lot of fires?’

‘Less than you’d think,’ Esteban remarked. ‘Fire’s the bastard, isn’t it?!’

‘I’m in insurance,’ she remarked, but the thought had nowhere else to go.

They’d ridden by rickshaw to the site of the building, and he’d pointed out the name of the street and the numbers so she’d be sure he wasn’t pulling a fast one. Mildly impressed, she forgot to press him about Azure’s bike.

She spat. ‘Shit!’

‘Do you know where I can get Internet access or an international phoneline?’

‘You seem to forget how isolated we are. There are good practical reasons why no-one has ever invested in laying miles of fibre-optic cable to draw Candida into the global village. You might want to think on that.’

‘Yes-thank-you-I-appreciate-the-advice. Is there a decent mobile signal? No, I didn’t think so.’
Besides, you decided to leave your mobile in the UK and get a new one here.
‘Radio?’

Esteban snorted. ‘Below a peak in the largest mountain range on the planet?’

‘A satellite phone should work.’

‘If you find such a thing,’ said Flower-of-the-Lady, and Kay was no longer certain she could count on the woman’s patience or goodwill, ‘then you’re welcome to try.’

‘Can I even write a letter?’

‘That would be sensible. The local Indians have been known to carry messages.’

‘Do you have any idea what century we’re in, where the only way I can contact my employers on urgent business is by writing with pen and ink and hope that some half-naked savage will pass it on to the right person eventually?’

The-Lady inspected Kay’s blue, exposed limbs and pointedly said nothing.

Most importantly, don’t let them make you angry.

The tribunal resumed, informally. Flower-of-the-Lady had put away her papers and sat perched on the edge of the desk with the winglike folds of her dress spilling down her legs until it reached the naked points of her feet. Esteban returned to his seat, rubbing warmth from his palms into the backs of his hands. The third chair still held Luis’ formidable Sumo-bulk. He hadn’t moved in Kay’s absence.

She and Esteban had returned through a side tunnel, giving her little impression of the house façade in close-up. As with her first journey here from Azure’s room, she had been taken through rough wood passages where the building’s electrical nerves and pipe arteries were fully exposed. There were few windows, which disorientated Kay so that occasionally she felt she was walking in circles inside an impossibly deep labyrinth. Esteban, like Azure before him, picked his way easily ahead of her with the confidence of a native-born.

‘It’s possible,’ Esteban ventured, after clearing his throat and receiving a nod from the-Lady, ‘that Prospero might still show up on the radar. I could make further enquiries.’

‘That would be helpful.’ Kay’s frustration subsided into calculation. It would be possible to leave Candida. No, it would
not
be possible. Retreat would be a sign of weakness and the disappointing capstone of her career. She’d never return, and Prospero would be taken from her.

She had not been seated. She sank onto the chair, supplication, and looked to the-Lady.

‘What are your terms?’ she asked.

‘You have to work,’ was the simple reply.

‘Work.’ She hummed.

‘In the house. You would be paid in cash – enough for your material needs – and in trust. We also provide food and lodging, and I expect you might end up in the kitchen and the refectory from time to time.’

‘I could do with a permanent assistant,’ Luis rumbled, the first time she had heard him speak, and he sounded tempered and mellow, as Father Christmas would, as Santa Claus.

‘No, not permanent, though I can see her working here as-and-when. Kay, I think, should experience a spectrum of activities.’

‘What work do you have in mind? I’m good at Maths. Maths and Stats.’

‘Not useful.’

‘What’s your line of business?’

Flower-of-the-Lady slipped off the desk and strode around Kay’s chair, a brusque inspection. She was shorter than Kay but seemed to loom.

‘You’re too old to be introduced to our Mystery, too old and not supple enough, not by half. You know your mind, Good-at-Maths-Girl, and you’d object.’