Chapter Twenty-Six #2
“Oh yes. Shrouded in great secrecy, of course. The Glorious Revolution, the Enlightenment, industrialism and modern science—these things eventually drove out the superstitions of the Stuart age, just as our culling of the great forests drove out the Huldu themselves. The amateur idiots and the sadists, the witch finders and their kind, all found themselves eventually unemployed. But the Huldu were never wholly gone, and there are those in positions of quiet power who have always known as much. The King’s Flame has renamed and reinvented itself repeatedly over the past three hundred years—under Cromwell, it was briefly suppressed, but it didn’t last. In fact, there are rumors that the Flame used its Faerie connections to hasten Cromwell’s demise, excruciate his pains, and that the Huldu came on the wings of a mighty storm to claim his soul at the end…
But again, I digress. The Flame is still with us.
It exists within Whitehall as a subdepartment in the Directorate of Military Intelligence called Section J. ”
“Not Section F?”
Bainbridge smiled again, convivial. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you.
But no—someone in the department clearly has some aggrieved sense of history.
Following Cromwell’s demise and the Restoration, you see, the Flame took the name the Jacobus Assembly, to honor its original founder, and it stuck until 1688 when Jacobus was deemed…
impolitic as a choice of name. So then they became the Brotherhood of the Flame for a time, then the Honorable Society of Forest Rangers, then—well, no matter.
Suffice it to say, that as their titles grew less grandiose and dramatic, so their size and influence also waned.
Section J was, until very recently, no more than a small advisory group, largely voluntary, almost invisible in funding terms.” The smile came back, broader still. “That’s all changed now, of course.”
“I’ll bet.”
A quiet fell in the room that was almost comfortable. Bainbridge sipped at his cordial. Duncan took a third sandwich. The fire snapped and hissed, burning low in the grate.
Duncan finished up, brushed away crumbs from his lap.
“What do you want from me, Bainbridge?”
“Ultimately?” The archmage shrugged. “Your allegiance. Though I appreciate that will have to be earned over time.”
“I’m not much for allegiances. And right now, I’m busy.”
Bainbridge got up and took a poker to the fire, prodded it brusquely into brighter life. Once again, as he leaned in, his eyes lit with proximity to the flames.
“You will search for the child again.” It wasn’t a question.
“The mother, too, I imagine. Everything I have learned about you suggests as much. If the Forest held them, you would be in your element and I have no doubt you would bring them home. But Mimi and her mother are captives in the world of men. A world you have largely rejected. To operate here, you will need help.”
“What makes you think I don’t have help?”
The archmage straightened, put the poker aside. He faced Duncan again, head framed by the eerie Tam o’ Shanter painting over the mantel at his back.
“Oh, I’m sure you do. But not at the level I can offer it. You see, I may be regarded as somewhat of an enfant terrible in polite society these days, but you’d be surprised how many elevated members of that same society owe me favors they’d rather not talk about.”
Duncan nodded. “And you’d like me to owe you some favors, too.”
“If you choose to see it in those terms, then I suppose—yes. That is what I’m offering.
A mutual pact, for mutual advancement. These are unstable times, Mr. Silver.
Delicate times. But also times of great opportunity.
The Lloyd George coalition is hanging by a thread; without the dangers posed by the Forest, I daresay it would already have collapsed by now.
The Conservatives sniff undiluted power on the wind, but they can’t find their way to it.
Bonar Law is too ill to lead them into an election, Curzon too privileged and wealthy in the eyes of voters, Baldwin, of course, too green. ”
“If you say so.”
“You do not follow politics, then?”
“Not if I can help it.”
“Well, then you must take my word for it. It is a moment in which a man with access to the right levers may rise, make great gains, perhaps even make history.” Eyes still filled, somehow, with the white-hot wash of light from the fire. “And, of course, raise up his friends and followers with him.”
Duncan considered. “You really think you can find Mimi Rush and her mother for me?”
“I am in absolutely no doubt that I can. I have adepts searching for them as we speak. Though, of course, what you do about mother and child once you know their location is likely to be a more…protracted issue.”
“With which you can also help?”
Bainbridge smiled, a kindly teacher whose normally dense student suddenly sees the light. He seated himself again in the renewed warmth of the fire. He steepled his fingers.
“Leaving aside the favors I am owed, the ears whose attention I have, our brute material resources as an order are…not inconsiderable. Now more than ever, funds are flooding in.”
Duncan grunted. He wasn’t surprised. The need for answers, as the burning facade of authority creaked and collapsed in the night, was a palpable ache in everyday life. You could feel it like a bruise, laid across the whole nation.
“Yes,” Bainbridge mused. “I do sometimes wonder how we might all have foundered and shrunk into obscurity without the Unbinding. But now the skeptics are thrown down, their carping modernist voices cowed. People seek meaning, deep meaning, and only we can offer it to them—have been offering it to them for decades. It is our time for the taking. I only wish Helena could have lived to see it all.”
“You talking about Blavatsky?”
The archmage said nothing, only inclined his head and stared into the flames as if hoping they’d transmit a message from his old mentor.
Duncan stirred impatiently.
“All right, Bainbridge—let’s allow you can help me out. What’s in it for you? Why are you so keen for me to owe you favors?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Still gazing into the flames.
“I already told you I’m not here for guessing games.”
Bainbridge looked up at him. “Why, it’s the Forest, Mr. Silver.”
“What’s the Forest?”
“Everything. Everything to come, the new order of things. The Forest is an unavoidable feature of all our lives now, the dominant factor in all we do—as if the ocean had somehow roared in to take away vast portions of the land we previously considered our birthright. We are still reeling from the impact. But soon the time for reeling will be at an end, and we must make headway. In that at least, Colonel Hardy is correct. To make that headway, we will need men who know the Forest, who can survive there, who have the courage to face what it holds. In short, we will need men like you.”
The fire chuckled to itself, as if it liked the idea. Duncan frowned into the flames.
“You think I’m not afraid in there like anyone else?”
“An American writer acquaintance of mine once told me courage is not the absence of fear—it is resistance to fear, mastery of fear. I think you mastered your fear early, Mr. Silver, replaced it perhaps with something else.”
“I had very little choice. None of us did. Howitzers don’t care about your feelings.”
“Indeed, no. But I’m not talking about the trenches, and I think you know that. I’m talking about much, much earlier in your life.”
In the warmth of the fireside, something chilly came to walk on the nape of Duncan’s neck. He stared at the archmage.
“You don’t know me, Bainbridge.”
“I am beginning to.”
It sounded like a threat. Duncan’s voice hardened. “Is that right? Been looking in your crystal ball, have you?”
“I have been looking in a number of ways.” If Bainbridge had noticed the change in tone, he appeared not to take offense.
“Scrying stones are not properly part of the Order’s rituals, so no, not in a crystal ball as such.
Of course, I do not expect you to accept our magic as wholeheartedly as you have that of the witches.
You are oriented firmly toward the feminine, that much is clear.
You reek of it, in fact. And this is not surprising, given what I can surmise of your history.
But the ways in which we work here under the Sword and Orb are just as effective, I do assure you. ”
“My history,” said Duncan flatly.
“Yes, genealogy is an interest of mine. Your name, for example. Silver, from the Portuguese da silva—meaning, as I’m sure you know, of the forest, from the forest. Curious, no? Not many da Silvas in this country, especially not north of the border.”
Flash recall of the grubby little workshop in Shoreditch. Grime on the poky windows, sounds of drunken merriment in the alley outside. Murdoch the forger, shaking his head.
Risky, he says. Very risky.
What is?
Goin’ for a foreign name like that. You a Scotchman an’ all.
“Wouldn’t know about Portuguese,” he told Bainbridge evenly. “My people are from Edinburgh. I’m told Silver was a German name—Silber or Silbermann—if you go back far enough. Though we don’t shout that too loudly these days.”
“Understandable, yes. People are remarkably stupid about these things. Did you know they’ve renamed the German shepherd, of all the numbskull ideas? Apparently, people were throwing stones at the poor creatures in the streets. They call it the Alsatian now.”
Duncan shrugged. “Good enough for the king. I guess dogs just have to get in line.”
“Yes. Windsor, a stout English surname if ever there was one. Sounds almost bourgeois, though, doesn’t it? Who knows, perhaps the shape of things to come. But do tell me, what was this family of Germans called Silbermann doing in Edinburgh?”
“Apparently, they were silversmiths.” Run through the litany, the fistful of lies that Murdoch had long ago warned him to invent and rehearse.
“Named for their trade, back in medieval times. Came to Edinburgh in the 1400s, by appointment to the Scottish kings. Prospered, stayed and settled. Not that anyone in the family does that now.”
“What, prosper? Or work in silver?”
“Either one. I grew up a schoolmaster’s son.”
“Fascinating.” Bainbridge, nodding amiably, like a man told a good, if obviously embellished, anecdote. “And your father, does he still teach?”
“No, he died while I was still away in France. My mother, too. The flu took both of them.”
“I am sorry.”
“Don’t be.” Duncan said, and looked the other man hard in the eye. “It’s the past, it’s done. I let go of it a long time ago.”