Chapter 32
Chapter thirty-two
London
Blackfriars Ring was located in one of the most squalid parts of the city, and during a match it was both noisy and malodorous.
It was not the sort of place Crispin would go for his own amusement, but as he scanned the roiling crowd, he found the experience rather pleasant than otherwise.
At last, he spotted the well-brushed top hat of the man he was looking for.
“Evening, sir,” Crispin murmured, slipping into the seat next to the Home Secretary.
“Which one would you put your money on?” the Home Secretary asked, nodding beyond the ropes.
Crispin considered the two gleaming men dancing under the spotlights. His own regular practise of pugilism equipped him to follow the spectacle with a certain degree of insight.
“The big one’s too cocky,” said Crispin. “He’s all gas. If the smaller fellow can keep clear and tire him out, he’s got a chance.”
“Not a bad summary of world affairs,” said the other, then added offhandedly, “you know, I had a vision once.”
“A vision, sir?”
He got out a cigar from his breast pocket.
“When I was at school. It was of London, on fire. I had to be the one to save it. I still believe in that vision—I’ve never been able to shake it.
” Now he lit the cigar carefully. “But I have a problem. I don’t know who starts the fire, you see.
And as with any fire, how much better to stop it being lit, than to wait and put it out!
If you were to ask any one of these men, where would they look for a threat to the empire? ”
Crispin looked around at the crowd. “Anyone in this room would say the same thing, sir.” He gave a shrug. “Germany. Her imperial ambitions have never been satisfied.”
The Home Secretary nodded and exhaled smoke.
“Exactly. And that’s why I want to look closer to home.
The press likes to stir us up against the foreigner—the international Jew, the Yellow Peril, the Russian anarchists, the German airships!
Excellent for selling papers, no doubt. But I fear we aren’t paying attention to what’s under our noses.
Someone could be laying a fire as we speak, right here, right now, while we’re all goggling at the sky for phantom airships. ”
Crispin reflected on this. The British public’s panic over airships the previous summer—fanned to flames by popular invasion fiction serialised in the newspapers—had finally burned itself out.
The Kaiser’s air captains, instead of descending from the night skies on a terrified population, had simply faded away like the phantoms they were.
The widespread global hysteria had been a subject of great amusement in Germany, and Crispin knew from his father that there were no airships capable of nocturnal attacks. Not yet, anyway.
“You don’t take the air threat seriously, sir?” Crispin asked.
“I take all threats seriously,” the man replied smoothly. “But it’s pretty hard not to see an airship coming. It’s what I don’t see coming that keeps me awake at night.”
The men around them surged to their feet with a roar of mingled euphoria and despair. The bigger man lay insensible.
The Home Secretary chuckled. “See what I mean?” He leaned close to mutter in Crispin’s ear, “There’s a man here tonight who has been recruiting men—misfits, nervous types.
Their catchphrase is England for the English.
Find out everything you can. Don’t come to the Home Office.
We’re going to keep this very quiet, you and I.
“ He pressed a scrap of paper into Crispin’s hand.
“Find me the fire before the tinder is lit.”
Then he got up and left.
Crispin opened the paper to find an address:
Report to C at Ashley Mansions, Vauxhall Bridge Road.
After the match, Crispin paid for a pint at the pub across from the arena.
“I’m looking for someone,” he said to the harassed-looking barmaid.
“That’s not a description,” she retorted, “that’s desperation, that is.”
He suppressed a laugh, instead schooling his expression to sullen displeasure. “I’m looking for someone who thinks England ought to be for people like you and me.”
She gave him an up-and-down look that could have stripped varnish, then jerked her head towards a doorway. “Upstairs, second door.”
Crispin downed a mouthful before following her directions.
Misfits and nervous types. It certainly wasn’t hard to appear nervous as he knocked on the grimy door in the ill-lit passage upstairs.
A voice grunted, which Crispin took for encouragement. He opened the door. As dark as it had been in the passage, it was darker in here. He blinked on the threshold.
“Are you afraid of the darkness?” said a voice.
It felt like a line in a play. Crispin groped about for his own, and happened upon the simplest.
“Yes,” he answered.
“Do you want to be afraid?“ the voice asked.
Again, the simplest answer seemed the best. “No,” he said, “I don’t.”
“Then step into the darkness.”
Crispin shuffled across the floor. Stories with secret societies always had trapdoors in them as well.
Without warning, an electric light hummed on, pinning him in place. Crispin felt as exposed as the boxers in the ring.
“Sit down,” said the voice. Was it the same voice, or another? He could not see the person or persons behind the electric lamp at all. “How did you find us?”
“A man in a pub. He’d lost his job to cheap foreign labour. He told me to come here.” It amazed Crispin how smoothly the lies unfolded. Where did they come from? Something that hadn’t existed a moment before felt disarmingly solid.
“And you?”
“Me?” It was like getting to the end of a line of typing—the machine just stopped.
Crispin imagined giving it a jolly good whack to start a new line and found himself suddenly inspired.
“I was a stenographer. A woman took my job. She’ll take less pay, you see.
” He made his voice go a bit higher. “I wouldn’t mind so much if she was ugly.
But she’s decent-looking, she could get a husband and have one of those nice little villas to keep tidy!
Why did she have to go and take my job? I can’t do hers, can I? It’s not fair.”
Crispin tried not to think what his sister would do to him if she ever heard him make such a speech.
There was a scornful sound from behind the light, which hurt him a little, because he knew he’d been lying beautifully.
“Stop whingeing,” it scoffed. “You look as if you’re doing all right.”
Crispin cursed himself for dressing with such care.
“I had an interview for a job,” he said, shuffling his feet in a show of embarrassment. “I needed to come off well. Nobody wants you if you’re desperate.”
There was a long pause. Had he bungled it? Was someone about to club him over the head and dump him in the Thames?
He could sense the person on the other side of the light lean forward in his chair. “Would you say you’re lost? Between? Hungry?”
At the sound of these words, something inside Crispin stirred disconcertingly, like a mole burrowing under the smoothest lawn.
“Yes,” he said, and for the first time since coming into the room, he wasn’t lying.
He rather resented it.