Take flight, p.30
Take Flight, page 30
The entire project was massively complex, took months of organization, and consumed vast resources, but until now, it had been considered a resounding success. The most dangerous items had been removed, although there were still scores of lesser items waiting to be taken to new homes. The emergence among the populace of powered artifacts that were supposed to be in Checquy custody, like Pawn Santosuosso’s femur, made for some very alarming possibilities.
“One of the other items, a seashell, has also been confirmed as having come from a Checquy collection,” said Lady Carmichael grimly. “We are still checking the provenance of the third item, a brooch of some sort. But given that the other two came from our holdings, I can only conclude that someone has taken advantage of the movement of Checquy materials and is stealing items and selling them.”
Bloody hell, thought Bridget. Quite aside from the alarming prospects of a potential traitor selling classified government material and a weakness in the Checquy’s operations, this meant that supernatural materials were being moved onto the street and seeding manifestations.
“If this is an inside job,” the Lady said, “then we cannot take the risk of alerting the culprit. And if word gets out about this, it could make our position within the government very awkward. There are always some who do not think we should be enjoying our current level of autonomy.” She sighed. “It has only gotten worse now that Britain is at war. These parties could use this breach in our internal security as a pretext to exert much more direct control over the Checquy.” Everyone in the room was silent at the thought of this.
“Now, I have consulted with Lord Pease, and we have agreed that we need to know exactly how widespread a problem this is without ordering a gigantic and embarrassing audit that would only serve to warn any traitors. That is where you come into play, Henry. Investigate, discreetly. If it’s localized, I trust you to gather all the relevant information and eliminate the source. If it’s bigger than four or five people, then let me know, and we’ll escalate appropriately.”
“Absolutely, my Lady,” said Wattleman. “You can trust me.”
“I have no doubt of that. Once we know how this is happening, I hope we will be able to find out how many artifacts have been lifted and where they are. We can then turn our attention to retrieving them. Here is the file. I do not want it to leave this room, so sit over at the conference table and take any notes you need.”
“Yes, my Lady.” Predictably, he sat down next to Bridget. She sighed and did not acknowledge him as he jotted down in his notebook some key details in the Checquy’s esoteric shorthand. Despite herself, she noticed that his cologne was very nice. Still, she jerked her leg away when his thigh brushed against hers.
Finally, he stood up. “I believe I have all I need, my Lady. I’ll move immediately.” He paused thoughtfully for a moment. “I could do with some assistance on this one, though. If this supernatural spiv is selling mainly to women, well, a woman would come in handy.”
Oh God, no, thought Bridget. She kept her eyes fixed on her papers. Please don’t, please don’t . . .
“Bridget,” said the Lady.
“Hmm?” She looked up, eyes wide, as if she hadn’t heard a word of the conversation. Lady Carmichael looked at her skeptically, and she felt herself flush.
“Will you be all right to assist Pawn Wattleman on this assignment?”
Bridget looked down at her hands. Upon arriving at the office that morning, Lady Carmichael had pulled her aside to talk about Gerald’s decision to enlist in the war. Both of them had been nearly in tears, but Bridget had assured the Lady that she could continue in her duties and did not need to take any time off.
What about the Nazi? she thought. I won’t be able to help the other two if I’m attached to this mission for Wattleman. She wavered but couldn’t think of a good excuse. “Yes,” she said finally. “I’m fine.”
“Good. I do not anticipate it taking more than a few days, and it will be a valuable learning experience.”
Bridget looked from the Lady to the grinning Pawn. “Yes, my Lady,” she said reluctantly.
“Good. Pamela, you can go and advise Lord Pease that we’ve set this in motion. Let the Bishops know that Pawn Wattleman is not available for any operations, but they do not need the exact details. It is enough for them to know that he is on assignment for the Lord and me. Tell them directly, please, without their staff present.”
“Yes, my Lady,” said Pamela. She did not take any notes.
“Everyone, I want this kept quiet for the moment,” said Lady Carmichael. Her tone was forbidding. “Very quiet. The fact that at least one of those manifestations was rooted in a Checquy artifact has some very serious implications. I have ordered a very discreet check of the other recovered item to see if it also came from our holdings. But this must be kept a close secret. It would not do at all for word to leak out beyond this office.”
“Yes, my Lady,” everyone said in intimidated unison.
“Good. Now, you two, go.” Bridget nodded, got up, and joined Wattleman at the door. “Oh, Bridget,” called Lady Carmichael, “if you’re not going to be home tonight, please send word to the house and let Leominster know.”
“My Lady, I can advise you now that she will not be returning home this evening,” Wattleman said with a smirk; he shut the door before Bridget could say anything.
11
Wake up, Lyn, it’s Christmas!” Georgina was shaking her.
“Shouldn’t you be sullenly sleeping in?” asked Lyn, her eyes bleary. “Isn’t that what teenagers do?”
“Not on Christmas! Wake up!” Georgina swept back the curtains on the window, and light flooded into the room. The morning sun was blinding off the snow outside. Lyn recoiled like a hungover vampire.
“What time is it?” Lyn’s bedside clock advised her that it was seven. Beyond it was a framed photo of her with Richard and Emma and another of Skeksis looking quizzical in a knit hat. Richard had sent them to the clinic where he believed she was staying, and the staff had forwarded them to the Estate. She sighed and touched the picture of her family lightly before turning her attention to the matter at hand. There was a brightly colored stocking bulging with small wrapped gifts at the foot of her bed. Outside the door, there were sounds of giggling and people moving about.
“Come on, put on your dressing gown. We have to go to our common room for presents!”
“And coffee,” said Lyn firmly. She picked up her Christmas stocking and followed Georgina out the door. There were students of all ages rushing about the corridors in their pajamas and nighties and robes, laughing and talking. Some of the smaller ones had clearly been unable to resist the urge to open some gifts from their stockings, and they had plastic toys and chocolate bars in hand.
Over the past few weeks, Lyn had come to realize that Christmas was a very big deal at the Estate. As winter set in, Kirrin Island experienced several heavy snowfalls, and the winds coming in off the sea turned bitterly cold. Much to Lyn’s dismay, this had not been accepted as sufficient reason to suspend the mandatory outdoor runs. Instead, it was viewed as an excellent opportunity to work on arctic maneuvering capabilities. There had also been several gargantuan snowball fights.
As the nights became longer, students decorated the hallways with holly, ivy, tinsel, and lengths of laboriously stapled paper chains. Holiday music constantly played in the common areas, and each tutor group had been assigned one of the many common rooms to decorate and gather in for opening presents on the day.
“That way, there is a good spread of ages brought together in easily managed little celebrations,” Frau Blümen explained to Lyn one evening as the two of them enjoyed a glass of wine and some trashy television in the headmistress’s apartment. Since the affair with the head lice, Lyn and Blümen—or Steffi, as Lyn was now allowed to call her in private—had become quite good friends. Steffi’s husband, an equally plump man named Gerhardt, bustled about in the background preparing dinner. “If we have everyone gathered in the dining hall for the presents, the occasion loses its intimate charms and very swiftly becomes chaos.”
“Isn’t this rather a lot of attention going into a religious holiday?” asked Lyn. “Are there any problems with everyone celebrating a Christian occasion?”
“We are a state school,” said Steffi. “Although, officially, I believe we are classified as a state weapons emplacement. But when the Estate was established after the war, it was nominally Anglican. Of course, no religion really addresses our students with a constructive or appropriate attitude. They could be considered miraculous or infernal . . .” She trailed off. “It is not good for children to regard themselves as either divine agents or candidates for stoning. Both scenarios promote unhealthy esteem situations and a disinclination to do homework,” she said disapprovingly.
“So you raise them to be atheists?”
“We encourage a reverence for the universe and a gratitude that it exists,” said Steffi vaguely. “We teach them to value human life and the dignity of all living things and to accept that some things cannot be explained. We have to, really, because they themselves cannot be explained. For those who come to us already adhering to a specific religion, we maintain facilities and support them, but we do not encourage a particularly religious atmosphere.”
“Then why the Christmas madness?”
“Children like to receive presents,” Steffi said with a shrug. “And the winters here are so dire that we have to have something to look forward to. Plus, if we tried to cancel it, there would be riots.”
Lyn and her group were allocated one of the smaller rooms. Furnished with squashy dark leather furniture and red rugs, it was normally reserved for quiet reading. There was a working fireplace, and the windows looked out onto the forest side of the Estate. A tree that brushed the ceiling had been set up on a stand, and they’d spent several hours decorating it—an endeavor characterized by vigorous debate and mild to moderate threats. Each child at the Estate received one Christmas tree ornament every year, so the placement of each treasured item was a matter of supreme importance.
In the weeks leading up to Christmas, after dinner, the group gathered in the cozy warmth of their assigned common room to watch films, play games, or read stories aloud. While the wind howled off the dark sea outside or the snow fell, they toasted marshmallows and roasted chestnuts at the fireplace or over the soles of Isaac’s feet. Even the older students seemed to love it; there were none of the scoffings and eye-rollings that Lyn would have expected.
Lyn would sit wrapped in a blanket on one of the sofas, two small children nestled on either side of her, listening to Georgina read The Church Mice at Christmas. It was especially hard then not to think of her own small child. Richard and Emma would soon be taking Skeksis to Richard’s parents’ house to spend the holidays with his enormous family. Sometimes, her real life seemed impossibly distant, but whenever one of the littlest children came to her for a hug, she would feel his weight in her arms or smell her hair and feel a snatch of sorrow.
In the week before Christmas, each age group went on a special holiday trip, traveling to different cities. Lyn accompanied the nine-year-olds to Edinburgh—a city where she knew no one, so there was little chance of meeting an acquaintance. Mercifully, she was not obliged to wear the hideous purple-orange-and-lime-green-striped uniform and was passed off as a chaperone. They saw a pantomime of Aladdin, toured the city, and visited the Checquy offices, where the staff made much of the children and took Lyn out to the pub for some much-needed grown-up conversation. It was a good time, and when they returned to Kirrin Island, Lyn felt a sense of coming home.
On Christmas Eve, just before lunch, Father Christmas and four burly-looking elves parachuted down to the island from a gigantic Royal Air Force bomber to rapturous applause from the gathered student body. Lyn was a trifle surprised that they hadn’t made a more mystical appearance but then remembered the target audience. These were children who, if confronted with a flying reindeer, would probably gather in a protective formation and evaluate what kind of threat it posed and its vulnerabilities. A really big plane, however, was inherently cool. Children under the age of twelve were each given one present to open to tide them over until morning.
The entire school was then at a fever pitch, subdued only slightly by an immense Christmas Eve dinner. Afterward, Lyn was barely able to keep her eyes open, but the students maintained their energy. The choir sang, and there was a memorable Christmas pageant featuring Louise the bear as the Virgin Mary. Then for all students over fourteen, there was a disco in the assembly hall that sounded incredibly raucous. Lyn gave in to the pleadings of some of the students and danced for a while, but she felt too ridiculous and decamped to a lounge, where she sat comfortably digesting and watching television with some of the staff and their spouses. When she finally rolled into bed, Georgina was still at the disco, all regular curfews apparently suspended for the night.
So why isn’t she exhausted? Lyn wondered now as her roommate scampered ahead of her. Please God, let it be some supernatural thing linked to her mouth, because if this is just youthful energy, then I feel far too old.
The two of them were met with cries of delight as they entered the common room. Most of the tutor group had already arrived and were barely managing to wait for the required presence of everyone before any presents could be opened. A fire crackled in the fireplace, and Christmas music played on a stereo. In a corner of the room, the tree stood glittering. Lyn noticed that some of the ornaments had been strategically shifted about since the night before, part of the ongoing war for prominence. The gifts under the tree had been speculatively squeezed and rattled as soon as they began to appear a few days earlier, and they’d been obsessively cataloged and gloated over by the younger ones.
In addition to the stockings, which were filled with a variety of small gifts and treats, every student at the Estate received a gift from Steffi, a gift from the dorm parent, a gift from Father Christmas (regardless of the child’s age), a gift selected by a randomly assigned student at the Estate, and a gift from each child’s godparents—Checquy operatives who wrote letters and sent postcards throughout the year and sent the children gifts on their birthdays and at Christmas. Lyn’s own godparents were a financial manager named Colette in the Checquy’s Penzance office and a man named Marijn who had a very long Dutch job title.
“You have a Grafter godparent,” said one of the children enviously. “They give really good presents.” This one certainly sent unorthodox presents. Colette had sent her a bottle of very good champagne; Marijn’s gift was a cubical fishbowl filled with exceptionally rigid gelatin. Nestled in the center of the transparent mass were two brightly colored tropical fish. The handwritten note from Marijn wished her a vrolijk kerstfeest and advised her that when the bowl was put in direct sunlight, the gelatin would melt into water and the fish would come out of stasis. They would require no feeding ever but should receive a couple of hours of direct sunlight every day. The faint smell of pineapple that they would emit was quite normal, and he hoped that she would enjoy them.
“And you’ve got a box from your family!” squealed one of the littler children.
“Yes indeed!” said Lyn carefully. She was always a little tentative about mentioning her family around the other students, unsure how they would feel about the idea. After all, they’d been taken from their families. There were only a couple of children on the Estate who had actual blood siblings attending the school. She’d mentioned this concern to Steffi, who had encouraged her to be open about it.
“All of these children are well aware of their circumstances,” the plump headmistress said. “They grow up here knowing that they are different from other children but also knowing that they are loved. However, when they go out in the world, many of them will marry normal people. I think it is probably a good idea for them to see you and understand how others live.”
“Open it!” the children gathering around her now squealed. There were several boxes inside—clearly Richard had gotten a few friends to contribute to her care package. The tutor group was fascinated by the earrings from Richard, the homemade cookies from her mother-in-law (which were promptly shared around), and the framed painting by Emma. Her friends had sent along small treats appropriate for someone who was supposed to be tucked away in a private hospital room.
“And my friend Jenny has sent me . . .” Lyn opened it carefully. “A fireman calendar!” There were appreciative oohs from around the room. A sexy fireman calendar. Thanks, Jen.
“Can I see?” asked a little boy named Rupert. “You know, I want to be a fireman!” Lyn hastily scanned the back of the calendar. The firemen in the pictures weren’t wearing much in the way of upper-body protection, but they were all wearing pants.
“Here you go!” She handed it to him. That’s definitely not getting put up in the bedroom, she told herself. She felt a responsibility to be a good example for Georgina, and a series of muscular firemen portraits did not match the tone she wanted to set. Especially the picture with the suggestive placement of the hose. I’ll hang it up in my workroom.
Once she’d reached a certain level of skill, Lyn had been assigned a room for her own private studies and experimentation. Rather than a quiet little carrel in the library, however, it turned out to be a battered white room with one glass wall and a sprung floor, located in a thick-walled building some distance from the rest of the school. The furniture consisted of a scarred desk and chair and a decades-old armchair. It put her in mind of the studios that art students at her university had been assigned, although this one had much greater insulation. When the Estate students were at work, the corridors of the building echoed with the sound of controlled explosions, the screeching of spectral parrots, and the sloshing of whatever lurid fluids José was producing out of his skin that day.
