What the ravens sing, p.1
What the Ravens Sing, page 1
part #4 of The London Charismatics Series
What the Ravens
Sing
THE LONDON CHARISMATICS
BOOK FOUR
Jacquelyn Benson
VAUGHAN WOODS PUBLISHING
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Copyright
Epigraphs
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 15
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
The London Charismatics
Acknowledgments
About the Author
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents described here are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons—living or dead—is coincidental.
Copyright @ 2022 by Jacquelyn Benson
Cover design by Sara Argue of Sara Argue Design
Cover copyright © 2022 by Vaughan Woods Publishing
Proofread by Casey Fenich of Thoth Editing
Typeset in Minion Pro and ALS Script based on design by Cathie Plante
All rights reserved. The scanning, uploading, photocopying and distribution of this book without permission is theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from this book for purposes other than reviews, please fill out the contact form at jacquelynbenson.com.
First edition: April 2023
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2023900733
ISBN: 978-1-7345599-9-6
Published by Vaughan Woods Publishing
PO Box 882
Exeter, NH 03833 U.S.A.
Stay up-to-date on new book releases by subscribing to Jacquelyn’s newsletter at jacquelynbenson.com.
Content warning for What the Ravens Sing:
Contains warfare, catatonia, post-traumatic stress disorder, animal death, plane crash, murder, medical experimentation, captivity, violent fights involving death and serious physical injury, blood. Descriptions of pregnancy loss. References to prostitution and human trafficking. References to sex.
“Sed fortuna, quae plurimum potest cum in reliquis rebus tum praecipue in bello, parvis momentis magnas rerum commutationes efficit; ut tum accidit.”
(Fortune, which has great influence in affairs generally and especially in war, produces by slight disturbance of balance important changes in human affairs.)
- GAIUS JULIUS CAESAR, THE CIVIL WAR, BOOK III:68
(TRANSLATION BY A.G. PESKETT)
“If a man were to know the end of this day’s business ere it come;
But it suffice us that the day will end, and then the end be known.
If we meet again, well then we’ll smile, and if not then this parting was well made.”
- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, JULIUS CAESAR, V.I
ONE
Monday, April 8, 1918
Eight-thirty in the evening
Kentish Coast, outside Whitstable
Lily Rivers, Lady Strangford, roared across the cliffs on the back of her motorcycle, pushing for speed as though it were possible to shorten the distance to London by sheer force of will.
The headlamp of her Triumph spilled across the pale, winding path of the road, the sky deepening from purple to cobalt over the fields to the east. To the west lay the sea, a darkly moving mass she could hear rushing against the coast over the engine’s roar.
The motorbike had been improved since Lily first rode it four years earlier. After the pistons wore out on her original configuration, His Majesty’s government had arranged for a retrofit, installing the new 550cc three-speed block onto her old frame. Lily could feel the difference in the way the motorbike sped out of the turn, the force pushing her against the narrow seat.
She had been granted the upgrade for the same reason she now rode through the dark on the remote Kentish coast. Lily wore the uniform of the Wrens—the Women’s Royal Naval Service. For the last three years, she had served as a courier shuttling messages from the naval listening stations that peppered the coast. The intercepted, encrypted German wireless transmissions picked up by the stations were too sensitive to be trusted to the telegram lines.
Lily dropped gears and rolled the Triumph to a halt at the top of a slight rise. She took a long draught from her canteen, washing the dust from her throat. The road was dry today, the sky clear and cloudless. Stars glittered overhead against the dark blanket of the night, emerging with a splendor that was rare to see in perpetually fog-bound England.
The sight of those distant points of light gave her a distinct twinge of unease.
The hour was later than she would have liked. The Triumph’s chain had loosened as she arrived at the Herne listening station, and it had taken nearly two hours for her to fix it. In a way, the accident was a boon, as the delay meant one last additional intercept found its way to her before she departed, a communication that would otherwise have waited at the station until the next courier arrived in the morning. Lily had shoved the slim yellow paper into her pocket just before firing up her engine. She could feel it there now, the envelope slightly stiff against the wool.
Wind rippled the long, coarse grass beside her, soft with the scent of the sea and touched with spring warmth. The waves sounded a gentle susurration against the shore at the base of the cliffs below.
She slugged once more from the canteen and twisted on the cap. Pulling down her goggles, she tugged her linen scarf up to block the worst of the dust from her nose. She would not stop again before reaching London.
Spinning the pedals, Lily sparked the Triumph back to life and roared down the road.
~
She tore into the city two hours later, covered in a film of dry earth. London was dark as she rode towards Whitehall, the gas lamps that lined the streets either unlit or painted to direct their dim light down at the ground. The windows of the houses she passed were blackened with shades or cardboard, and the shops and taverns were already closed for the night. Few automobiles or carriages ventured out on the roads at this hour, and those that did navigated by shaded headlamps that gave out only a vague illumination. No one wanted to make the city an easier target for a German air raid.
A policeman turned at the sight of Lily’s own headlamp, necessarily undimmed to allow her to safely speed across the rural roads of Kent. He blew his whistle, motioning for her to halt, but waved her on as he noted her uniform and courier’s satchel.
The Admiralty Building, headquarters of the Royal Navy, could barely be made out against the neighboring government offices lining Whitehall. It was nothing but a crenelated silhouette against the softer darkness of the clear night sky. No one inside would risk revealing a glimmer of light through a poorly-shaded window. The Germans would happily have bombed the place to dust if they could find it.
Lily sped past the shadowed facade, leaning into a quick turn around the statue of Charles I that marked the entrance to Trafalgar Square. She whipped into a narrow alley closed in by monumental buildings. The shadows were darker here, the light of her headlamp more starkly painting the paving stones.
She stopped the motorbike near an unobtrusive door nestled into a corner, killing the light and dismounting. Grabbing her satchel, she stalked up to the uniformed sentry who stood by the step.
“Good evening, Mr. Greene,” she said as she approached.
“Lady S,” he acknowledged with a tired nod, opening the door.
The hallway beyond was cramped, the floor a patchwork of chipped tiles. It was lined with offices, most of the doors shut at this hour. The few that were open revealed men in shirtsleeves leaning over desks covered in papers. Farther along, a room full of lady typists clattered with the noise of their keys. A fellow Wren in the conventional skirted uniform pushed along a trolley with urns of hot coffee and tea. She eyed Lily’s trousers with a note of envy as she passed by.
Lily neatly navigated the labyrinth until she reached the central hall, a wide space framed by open-air staircases that rose in elegant angles to the floors above. During the daytime, it roared with hurried conversations and rapid footsteps. It was quieter at this late hour, the noise dimmed instead to a low hum of activity.
The weighty oak desk at the center was manned by a single duty clerk, a grim young lieutenant with a stiff back who wearily set aside a stack of papers as Lily approached. She pulled three thick envelopes of intercepts from her satchel and handed them to him.
“Manston, Westgate, and Herne,” Lily announced.
She abruptly recalled the final Herne intercept, pulling it from her pocket.
“Oh—and this,” she added, slapping it onto the pile.
“Acknowledged,” the clerk replied stiffly.
“Aren’t you going to put them in the tubes?” Lily pressed.
The pneumatic tubes ran like arteries throughout the massive complex of the Admiralty. Lily could see the mouth of one behind the clerk’s desk. Papers were inserted into cylinders that fit neatly into the tube and were then sucked into a distribution center on the ground floor. They were sorted there and shot on to their destinations. It was a far faster and more efficient method of moving documents through the building than relying on couriers running up and down the massive staircases.
“The tubes are down,” the lieutenant clipped out in reply without looking at her. “Someone will be along shortly.”
It was a perfectly reasonable answer. Lily’s only charge was to see that the intercepts were delivered to the Admiralty. She had completed that task, and the hour was already late. The notion of crawling into her bed was deeply appealing, but as she stepped aside to let a postman drop his enormous bag of mail onto the desk, that late yellow message from Herne glared at her from the top of the pile.
A resonance rose in her bones, one that Lily both recognized and did not welcome. It was the distinct buzz of her onmyōdō.
Lily had been plagued with a straightforward form of foresight for as long as she could remember. It was a power that subjected her to both humdrum and terrible visions of what was to come. Something critical had changed four years ago on the night that she plunged into Regent’s Canal. In a strange moment between life and death, a transformation had taken place, one that left her coughing up muddy water onto a slab of concrete carrying something far different back with her.
Lily’s power to glimpse the future had been joined by an ability to feel out the places in the present upon which different outcomes rested. She thought of them like switches on railroad tracks, little changes that sent the course of things to come rattling down an altogether different path.
Onmyōdō was the name James Cairncross had given her complicated new gift. As The Refuge’s former librarian, Cairncross knew perhaps more than any other living soul about the arcane gifts their mentor, Robert Ash, had called khárisma.
Lily’s onmyōdō glared at her unexpectedly from objects, moments, or people, filling her with an often irresistible urge to make some seemingly innocuous change to the present. One of the earliest impulses of the power had led her to a fight that broke her relationship with her closest friend. Then three and a half years ago, Lily had succumbed to the onmyōdō-fueled compulsion to shift the position of a single decorative porcelain vase and, in doing so, turned her fiancé into a suspected murderer and fugitive.
A wise and difficult man had once told her that her visions of the future weren’t random. They had a cause, one that lay with the powers that moved the universe—fate, perhaps, or what Ash had poetically referred to as the Parliament of Stars.
Lily acknowledged that the actions driven by her onmyōdō had ultimately prevented greater evils from coming to pass, but the power had never shown a great deal of concern for her personal stake in the whole business. If it really was some impulse of the divine, then the divine seemed indifferent to Lily’s own well-being or that of the people she cared about.
It left her instinctively wary of the unmistakable pull of the onmyōdō—a pull she felt now from that ordinary slip of yellow paper.
She could ignore it, walking away from the desk and leaving the intercept where it lay. The future would play out as it was currently meant to, the alternative promised by the yellow paper remaining forever unrealized. No one around her would ever know the difference.
But Lily would know. She knew it now, looking at the page and feeling something very like a scream ring through the back of her mind, desperate and unrelenting.
It was not a choice she necessarily had to make blindly. If posed the question of why the late intercept from Herne mattered, her onmyōdō would respond. Sometimes the answer was simple—an heirloom mirror that would no longer be broken or an automobile accident avoided. Other times, the push to know more unlocked a barrage of foresight, throwing open doors to complex and confusing outcomes spilling far into the future. It was an experience overwhelming enough to bring her to her knees.
Falling to the ground in the throes of a prophetic maelstrom in the hall of the Admiralty was not an ideal proposition.
A pair of admirals strolled past, ambling like men on their way to the club. Another courier pushed his way through the door behind her. Lily’s skin burned with the feeling that she was running out of time—that in a few more minutes, the window to choose between two possible futures would close.
Now, the onmyōdō hummed inside of her. Nownownownow …
The courier’s briefcase spilled open. Papers slid across the tiled floor. The duty clerk’s head snapped to the right, and Lily’s hand flashed out as though making the decision for her. Her fingers closed around the slip of yellow paper, and then she was gone, turning for the stairs with the intercept shoved into her pocket.
She climbed quickly, moving as though she knew exactly where she was going. To do anything less in this place would invite questions about her purpose Lily couldn’t possibly answer.
The onmyōdō pulled at her, drawing her like the needle of a compass. It tugged upward.
It wasn’t until Lily was halfway to the top of the building that the rest of her brain caught up, and she realized where she must be going.
Her destination was one of the Navy’s most carefully guarded secrets. Lily certainly wasn’t supposed to know its location—or even that it existed—despite the fact that her husband often collaborated with the people who worked there.
Strangford had been serving in the Naval Intelligence Division for nearly four years now, ever since the memorable day when he was recruited by none other than Winston Churchill, then Lord Admiral of the Royal Navy.
Churchill had since moved on to serve as Minister of Munitions, and Strangford had evolved from an analyst and translator to more active forms of duty. He had been to both Ireland and Norway, helping to foil attempted uprisings and an effort by the Germans to infect Scandinavian livestock with anthrax.
It was forbidden for officers of the NID to discuss their work with their spouses, but Strangford had good reason to trust Lily’s ability to keep a confidence. The balance of secrets in their relationship was also terribly skewed for reasons that could not possibly be avoided. Hiding the true nature of his employment from her had felt wrong.
Lily knew that what she was contemplating could earn Strangford a reprimand or worse. Before she chanced it, she ought to know exactly what was at stake.
Reaching the third-floor landing, she left the main staircase and strode down the hall. She blended in well enough in her uniform. Even at this late hour, there was still a scattering of other Wrens about, shuttling orders from the kitchens below or serving as typists and telephone operators.
Lily caught only a few uninterested looks as she moved purposefully past the offices until she reached a narrower, enclosed service stairwell at the back of the building. She pushed inside and stopped, listening.
The noises of the Admiralty hummed around her—the faraway ring of a telephone bell, the murmur of quiet voices. None of them came from within the echoing enclosure of the stairwell. She was alone here . . . for the moment.
It would have to do.
The onmyōdō still pulsed through her blood. Steeling herself, she took a breath, pushed gently at that uncanny hum—and fell.
Lily lands on a railway platform.
It is a location she knows well, one she has passed through dozens of times—London’s Waterloo Station, situated on the south bank of the Thames.
The glass ceiling overhead is painted black, blocking the glare of the electric lights from escaping into the night. The lights themselves are dimmed, leaving long shadows where, before the war, everything blazed with illumination. It is late, the sprawling space around her sparsely populated.
A train emits a soft hiss of steam. A conductor cries out a departure.
From somewhere above those familiar sounds, Lily hears the low, dull buzz of an enormous bee.
