The Printer's Devil (22 page)

But by the time the tape got to
‘Com’e gentil/La notte a mezzo april! E azzurro il ciel... Lovely as an April night, and the skies are blue,’
she knew it was working. The rain still fell from a leaden sky, but without the fury. Wind still flurried it, but without the malice. It was a September storm; nothing more. Presently Kim replaced Donizetti with Verdi, humming nonsense where she didn’t know the words.

It was rising midday when she parked in the broad High Street of Market Peverell, between an engagingly reedy and be-ducked pond and a delicatessen full of interesting-looking jars and cheeses. She used her
portable phone to call the number which Alan had dialled at the very start of their quest, and received the same reply from the former tower captain’s widow.

‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ said Kim in answer, ‘but I was trying to trace some books which belonged to your late husband.’ She jumped as a bell began to sound from the church, and glanced down the road to see the cluster of beribboned cars which indicated that a wedding was about to take place. By this time, the rain had virtually ceased.

‘Well,’ said the firm, elderly voice, ‘I suppose you could come round to the house. Do you know where it is?’

Elizabeth Baker proved to be a formidable old lady who had lost none of her marbles and did not draw Kim’s attention to the George Cross with its blue ribbon in a yellowed box on the mantelpiece.

Kim asked about it all the same. The elderly lady shook her head slightly.

‘I don’t quite know why I leave it there now, except that Joe used to like to see it. Joe was a VC, you know—got it in Burma. But he was always prouder of my old gong.’

Kim, who came from an army family and knew a little about war, was tactful in her probing; Elizabeth Baker acknowledged this with a small smile and said merely, ‘I was with the SOE in France.’

The photographer in Kim looked at angles and saw her hawky nose and bright blue eyes; the businessman in her recognised a will to match her own and a mind which was proof against illusion. She instantly cast aside her prepared story about searching for the remains of James Rendall’s pamphlet.

‘I have my own little war,’ she said carefully, ‘and it’s very odd.’

‘Odd - how?’ enquired the widow, with more (it seemed to Kim) than normal curiosity.

Taking a deep breath, Kim tried to put it into coherent order. Meticulously, she tried to omit nothing, not even the most trivial-seeming events.

‘There are some wicked folk around,’ nodded the old lady, then added, unexpectedly, ‘Both alive and dead.’

Kim, seeing steel in her eye, could easily picture her much younger self killing German soldiers.

As if she felt she had to explain, Elizabeth Baker continued, ‘And they killed my Joe three years ago.’ She flexed the remains of her left hand (two-and-a-half fingers and a thumb) as if it pained her yet.

‘Oh no,’ whispered Kim. ‘Why?’

‘For money. Riches he never had.’

‘Riches,’ repeated Kim in astonishment, a vision of the carvings popping unbidden into her mind. ‘There were never any riches.’

‘I know; It was just the - the
“auri sacra fames”,
I think.’

‘The accursed hunger for gold. Yes. It keeps coming back to that.’

‘So, anyway - you’ve found a way of fighting back.’

‘Rather a guerilla sort of way,’ replied Kim, choosing her words with care. Part of her, deeply buried, was still wailing
Why me?

‘I expect there’s a little voice inside you saying “why me?”’

‘Oh, hell,’ said Kim, ‘someone’s got to do it.’

‘It won’t be a picnic.’    
₁₀₅

‘Tell me about it,’ muttered Kim.

The elder gestured with her mutilated hand - not, apparently, out of a desire to draw Kim’s attention to it, but her eyes followed it nonetheless.

‘It wasn’t a Nazi shot me,’ she said, pronouncing the word the way Churchill used to, with a long
a
and an English z sound, ‘it was a French collaborator.’

‘You’re telling me to suspect everyone - anyone at all.’

‘Indeed. But you may also find allies in unexpected places.’

‘And somehow I have to find the magic - or the music - which will not only fix Roger Southwell in his non-existent grave, and then find - if I can - a way of getting rid of this... this demon.’ Kim was thinking out loud, and was a little startled to be answered.

‘You believe it is a demon, then? A thing of Satan?’

‘I call it a demon. I’m not sure about Satan. It’s something - inherent in the scrying-glass, as if it’s tuned to it. Southwell called it, I suppose, and couldn’t control it, any more than Alan can. But I believe I can.’ There, she’d said it.

After a pause in which Kim could hear her own heart beating, Elizabeth Baker stood up stiffly.

‘I didn’t get rid of all Joe’s things,’ she said.’ Come with me.’

Great,
thought Kim.
More musty old tomes -
though she didn’t say anything.

The old lady opened the green door of what Kim had taken to be a cupboard, revealing a flight of stairs, and started up them. Climbing in her wake, Kim saw the old-fashioned, slightly threadbare carpet, anchored with brown rails and flanked on either side with dark-stained wood; and was visited by a sensation which was not quite an ancient deja vu, a sense of past and present not simply askew, but overlapping.

All the old houses she’d ever been in were this house, just as all she’d done in her life up until that moment was preparation for what she had to do. Whatever had moulded Kim throughout her life - had made her solely and-completely Kim Sotheran, a person as unique as her own fingerprints - seemed no longer wholly random, but a means to a particular end: giving her the strength and the will and the valour to fight this specific battle.

So might this courageous old lady she followed have thought, parachuting on a night without a moon into occupied France. Both of them knew what it was to face a foe of such magnitude that there was no room left for illusion.

The room they came to was sparsely furnished, as if Elizabeth Baker lived only on the fringes of her house, concentrating her home comforts into the few rooms she used. Through the dusty glass doors of a cupboard Kim could see the dull matt covers of old books and some aged red-tabbed box files whose labels were yellow, whose inked captions were sepia with the passage of the years and spotted with the detritus of flies.

‘Joe was something of a pragmatist, but he saw enough queer things during the war to learn to keep an open mind. There was a demon in Burma that he saw when he was with the Chindits, who wears her feet back to front... He once said to me he thought evil feeds on evil; he meant that the more there is around, the more it will wake and draw out. And evil as great as Nazi Germany meant many wicked things were stirring.’ She unlocked the cupboard and took out one of the box files.

‘Not just Hitler?’ murmured Kim.    
₁₀₆

‘Evil itself is a dictator, whether it’s dressed up like a pompous little man with a moustache, or a bunch of faceless terrorists, or a fundamentalist state. That’s what the devil is, you know. And it’s precious difficult to combat. Or rather, it’s not so much difficult, as demanding of great courage. Will, and wit. You’re in occupied territory now, my girl.’

Kim nodded slowly, although she hadn’t been called ‘girl’ in years, and took the proffered box. ‘What’s in here?’

‘The accumulated wisdom of Sergeant Joe Baker,’ replied his widow. ‘I only sold the dross, my dear. All the important things are in there, though you may have to do a lot of reading before you know exactly what to do.’

The box was heavy, bowed outwards with its paper burden.

‘Will you keep it for me - just for another hour?’ Kim asked. ‘First I want to take a look at ’’Roger’s Mount”.’

‘As you like,’ said Elizabeth Baker, her mouth quirking in a grin which gave a glimpse of the girl she’d once been, before she went to France. ‘The house
is
protected.’

‘I thought it might be,’ said Kim, and did not ask how.

Roger’s Mount gave her no clues, however. Shaped rather like a steak-and-kidney pudding, which robbed it of any sense of menace, it sat complacently in the middle of a field of hummocky grass in which moles had been busy. A green National Trust sign on a post added to the mundanity of the site.

Kim walked all round the mound’s circumference, singing quietly to herself all the while. It was little larger than the average suburban semi, and she felt no sense of awe. No fear; no threat.

He’s not home,
she thought curiously.
The only bones in there are much more ancient than Master Southwell’s, lying among their old potsherds and spearheads.
The thought brought a memory of barrow-wights, but even that had no power over her.
No, he’s not home. He’s in Alan, somehow. Occupied territory.

She returned to collect Joe Baker’s box with an odd sense of having achieved something, made some sort of advance, yet with no idea how.

Stopping once on the way home, in a pub for a hasty beer, Kim leafed through the contents of the file, noting as she did so that the missing pages of James Rendall’s booklet were there, though that hardly seemed important now.

The box also contained a motley assortment of yellowed newspaper cuttings, brittle old pamphlets, tiny chap-books through which she leafed carefully, a heavy white envelope folded round a flat box, which she did not open yet because she knew what it contained.

And, at the bottom, wrapped in oiled cloth so old that even its folds were cracked, a bundle of sheets of ancient thick paper stitched crudely together to form a rough book.

The writing was spiky and strange, but not impossible to decipher. Save for the conventions of the period, it was very like her own. She squinted to read, and her gaze skimmed down the page to encounter the words:

‘This day to ring St-Mary bells with the Scholars, whither by and by comes Roger Southwell...’

Kim’s heart thudded. This was, it had to be, the diary mentioned in Dunning’s book.
Or my name’s Luciano Pavarotti,
she thought.

The Journal of Fabian Stedman
5: The Demon

I did fall to thinking of this year gone by, for ’tis scarce a twelve-month that I did come to London-town for a printer; Nor do I regret the experience thereof.
Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis;
¹
did I remain in another place I’d not be married nor have no trade neither; but groan and sweat under my father his yoke, nor doth he take kindly to the ringing of bells (I wot not of one thing he doth pleasure in, unless it be chastising the heretic, of which number he always did count me one).

But now I am in hope that Roger Southwell shall take himself hence and trouble and vex us no longer, and that he will have the good sense not to look again in that scrying-glass; nor that I ever did believe that Roger hath any sense at all, not good or other-wise, he never hath shown it to me an he did. Love-philtres, disguises, homunculi and demons, nor did any thing but grief come out on any of them.

I do yet, in spite of all, in some wise give the man credit for his achievements for he hath found power and hath used it, the which is a thing not given to many men. Though give any man power and he will misuse it, as we do see every day in those that presume to govern over us; not to mention the Sir-Johns.

Now I do find ’tis harder labour in the print-shop than ever I did as a prentice; we yet make for our-selves the leisure to go a-ringing. And becoming by and by aweary of Grandsire Bobs and such-like I bethought myself to introduce mine own small creation to my fellow ringers.
Aut non tentaris aut perfica
,
²
as Catherine did say with very truth; although I’d liefer quote the English proverb, Venture naught, gain naught.

For when the art of cross-pricking lay enveloped in such obscurity, that it was thought impossible that double changes on five bells could be made to extend farther than ten, and triple and double changes on six farther than sixty; then it was that a worthy and knowing gentle-man, to dissipate those myths of ignorance, and to usher in the bright morn of knowledge, pricked those much applauded peals of Grandsire and Grandsire Bob; which for their excellency have for many years together continued triumphant in practice amidst all others whatsoever; which indeed have been a great light in the production of a great variety of new peals.

So that thing I did presently do, and when that we had all learned it well there was such music coming out on the belfry as I never did hear.

For three run merrily before, and two do bob behind, and they change places each with another swift and melodious and with pleasant symmetry; the changes are all double, two singles excepted; the bells have all a like course and by this method the peal will go sixty changes, and to carry it farther extremes must be made, as elsewhere I have showed more fully.

’Tis most harmonious to hear and I am most pleased with it, being the most Ingenious peal upon five bells that I ever could imagine. And Matthew Boys the musician was well enamoured on it, he says he’ll use it in a song, though I know not how he shall do this.

As the original design of casting peals of bells was in order to make pleasant music thereon; so the notes in every peal are formed apt for that end and purpose, every peal of bells behind tuned according to the principles of music; for in a peal of six bells are the six plain song-notes, whereupon all music consists, namely,
la sol fa mi re ut
. But in regard that in ringing of them the notes cannot be had at command, as the notes of other instruments may.