The Bookman - Lavie Tidhar [34]
There was a silence.
Orphan sank deeper into his chair. I want to find him too, he wanted to say. But what makes you think that I will? The tiredness threatened to consume him. He said, "For what purpose," not quite forming it into a question. Intuition told him what the answer would be.
"Tell him," Mycroft said, and his voice was heavy and suddenly old, the voice of a man making a compromise against his will, against his very nature, "that I am willing to bargain with him. He is the enemy of Les Lézards. He will want to talk to me."
"Bargain for what?" Orphan whispered, but he knew the answer even before he heard it, and before the blimp turned, away from the palace, and back towards the river.
"For my brother's life," Mycroft said. "Tell him that, when you finally find your Lucy."
TWELVE
At the Nell Gwynne
Love in these Labyrinths his Slaves detains, And mighty Hearts are held in slender Chains.
– Alexander Pope, "The Rape of the Lock"
He had been left on the riverbank, at the same place from which he was taken. The blimp touched down softly. The silent butler escorted him out of the car and deposited him outside. There was no sign of the other man who helped abduct him. It was still dark. The blimp rose into the air and silently departed, gliding as soft as a whisper into the sky.
He could barely think. His feet felt heavy and unresponsive underneath him. He made his slow, weary way up the Strand. Soon he would have to open the shop. Did Jack expect him to work today? Then he thought of Tom, and a small smile formed on his tired face.
He walked past Simpson's and the Savoy Theatre. Stopping to rest for a moment, he stood outside the newly relocated abode of Stanley Gibbons and admired the display in the windows. Though the streetlights still burned the sun was slowly climbing out of the depths of night and natural light began to awaken the capital's streets. How long have I been awake? Orphan thought. His body ached for sleep.
Nevertheless, he was captivated by Gibbons' display: stamps of all shapes and sizes and colours collected in the window like a cloud of still butterflies. There was, for instance, a Penny Black, the first stamp ever issued, bearing the profile of the young Queen Victoria, her scaly face regal underneath the burden of the crown. There was a rare, triangular Cape of Good Hope stamp bearing the smiling head of Mpande, the third of the Zulu kings and the father, so the note in the window said, of Cetshwayo kaMpande, the current king of that far-off protectorate of the Everlasting Empire. For a moment, Orphan was a child again, pressing his nose against the window, where a whole, unknown, exciting world was compressed into small pieces of paper. There was a Kashmiri "Old Rectangular" from twenty years before, with a script he couldn't read; there was a celebratory stamp bearing the grinning face of Harry Flashman, the Hero of Jalalabad; there was a Vespuccian First Day Cover with three stamps bearing the proud heads of leaders of the Great Sioux Nation; there was even a series of French stamps depicting artists' wildly romantic impressions of what Caliban's Island might look like. He lingered over the display for a long moment, savouring each of these tiny mementos of a world he hadn't seen. It was also, he realised, a thorough display of the greatness of the empire, of its boundless reach. It was meant to excite – but also to humble.
He walked away from the closed shop at last, feeling a small regret, as if he had lost something but hadn't known what it was. His tired feet carried him onwards, across the wakening Strand. Just before the Adelphi Theatre he turned right, and into the dark confines of Bull Inn Court. The alleyway was always dark; tall grey-brick walls rose on either side of it, permanently obscuring the sun. It was a narrow path, almost a scratch on the face of the city, a thin line connecting the Strand with Maiden Lane above it. It was too narrow for gas lamps, a small, hidden way one could have passed a