LITMIR.BIZ

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comprise part of the aforementioned twenty million strada and as such —’

      ‘Yes, Miss Ashton, the apartment is yours! Or else!’

      Tagalong sighed again. ‘Yes, Miss Ashton, the apartment is yours. I will see to it myself.’

      ‘Yes, you will,’ Angela said fiercely, ‘or else I will complain to Nicholas — Mr Raspero to you — about my treatment, and believe me, the content and manner of my complaint will bring about results that you will find deeply misfortunate. You see, Tagalong, you and the others have a lot to lose now, don’t you? You’ve gone from being Jolly’s slaves to running the empire yourself. You’re a lot higher now, but that just means that you have a lot further to fall, doesn’t it? Take a look out of the window at the ground below if you don’t understand me. That’s a long way to fall, isn’t it? Now Nicholas might not actually kill you if I complain about my mistreatment at your hands, but he might remove a certain portion of your anatomy as a punishment that fits the crime, so to speak, if I make a certain kind of complaint about you and the same goes for Pay, Kassie, Pastime and No Tin, and you can tell them so. Do you understand me?’

      Tagalong winced and shifted about in his seat. He clearly understood her all too well. ‘I assure you —’

      ‘Your assurances mean nothing, Tagalong, they are as worthless as you are. You have three days, until two o’clock on Sunday, to deliver the ownership papers to 3 of 67 Cranston Avenue made over to me. If I have not received those papers by then, I will go to Nicholas in a flood of tears over my mistreatment at your hands. Is that clear?’

      Tagalong nodded. ‘That is very clear, Miss Ashton. It will be done as you insist.’ Angela’s repeated references to Mr Nicholas Raspero by his first name had not escaped his attention, nor had he failed to draw the logical inference to be made from her apparent assurance of his intimate acquaintance.

      There was a silence for a while as they flew along, with Angela looking out of the window and Tagalong looking at the drinks cabinet. Angela gave in after a while. ‘Help yourself, Tagalong,’ she said with a gesture to the drinks cabinet.

      Tagalong didn’t need telling twice. He poured a stiff whiskey, downed it in one, then poured himself an even larger second glass and sat back to enjoy the ride. Angela was an experienced enough courtesan to wait for when the alcohol had dissolved tension before asking the question that was foremost on her mind, the question that troubled her night and day. When Tagalong leaned back in his chair and stretched his feet forward with a gentle sigh, Angela asked, ‘Why do you think, Tagalong, that Nicholas — Mr Raspero — didn’t take any of Jolly’s money?’

      ‘What did he say to you about it?’ Tagalong prevaricated.

      Angela sighed. ‘What do you think about it, Tagalong?’

      Tagalong shrugged. ‘How would I know? Mr Raspero is not like you or me, Miss Ashton. I have no idea. Some kind of principle, probably.’

      Angela considered this in silence for a while. Tagalong poured himself a third whiskey, his movements as he poured the golden liquid as careful as if he were slightly inebriated.

      ‘Principle,’ Angela said scornfully, ‘what’s the good of that, Tagalong?’

      ‘It’s as good as it can be,’ Tagalong said with a smile, leaning back in his chair and ready now to be witty. ‘And there you have it, if you ever do.’ He laughed and sipped more of his third whiskey.

      Angela considered him for a moment. She had never understood Tagalong. ‘So what’s your story, Tagalong? You were a gentleman once, right? You were a man of principle, weren’t you?’

      Tagalong shrugged, but he was drunk enough by now to say more than he would have normally. ‘Yes, I was once a gentleman, and I once nearly lost everything and I had only ten thousand strada so I went to the gaming house of The One Wheel. I lost all that and I got a line of credit and then I lost that. I was fifty thousand strada down, Miss Ashton, and I had really lost everything. So I made a deal with the devil, Miss Ashton, his name was Jolly, and I saved what I could. And there you have it.’

      ‘What did you save?’ Angela asked softly, knowing from pillow talk exactly how to extract this confession.

      ‘My sister and my nieces, her two daughters, who to this day live their lives in modest gentility free from the clutches of such as Jolly, or his successors thereof. Yes, and when my nieces grow up, let them live decent lives as best they can. It is a cliché, is it not: the bad man, to wit me, who has sacrificed himself so that others may live free, but there you are, so be it, laugh all you will, this is the truth.’

      ‘Jolly would not have done what you have done,’ Angela observed.

      ‘No.’ Tagalong sipped his whiskey and said no more.

      ‘Jolly was a man of principle, Tagalong. His principle was that he was the king and no-one crossed him, not even over a single strada.’

      ‘Someone crossed him,’ Tagalong laughed, and drained his whiskey glass and set it down as if determined not to have another. ‘But I’ll tell you something even more unbelievable than Raspero, yes, Raspero-Raspero-Raspero, complain all you like, turning his back on that money, because this is unbelievable, or more unbelievable, if what is unbelievable can ever be more than it already is, Raspero took Jolly’s notebooks, with all the juicy details in them, not just about Foxley and your other paramours, but many other equally important New Landern grandees, yes indeed, Raspero took these notebooks and burned them in the fire before my utterly disbelieving eyes. You want to talk about principle? What kind of principle is that? How totally mad is someone who does that?’

      ‘I didn’t know that,’ Angela admitted, smiling at Tagalong’s outrage.

      ‘I wish I didn’t know it,’ Tagalong complained, interlinking his fingers as if to keep them away from the whiskey bottle, and closing his eyes as if to hide from his memories, ‘but can knowledge be unknown? I saw it myself with my own eyes and I cannot now unremember it. I wish I could.’

      The driver signalled that they had completed the circuit so Angela instructed him to set them down in Kenina Park. She let Tagalong go with a reminder about the apartment ownership papers being delivered to her (or else!), then set off for the Emperor Theatre for the afternoon’s rehearsals. She had a lot to think about, but she was no nearer to the answer she sought, which was how to manage her life in a post-Jolly world.

      It was well after two o’clock in the morning when she managed to extricate herself from a sleeping Lord Foxley’s embrace and make her way back to her own apartment. There she took up the piece of paper with Nicholas’s name and address on it, and contemplated it for the fortieth time. It was then that she came to a decision.

      She simply had to speak to Nicholas in person. That was clear enough. So she took up pen and paper and wrote to Nicholas. She invited him to attend a performance of The Lady in Peril, and then to visit her afterwards in her dressing room. She asked him to let her know by return of post if he could be so kind as to honour her invitation by an acceptance which could only ensure her happiness.

      While waiting for his reply, Angela made arrangements to provide Nicholas with a free ticket for a performance of The Lady in Peril for the last night of the season, the most eagerly sought after performance, because she thought that he deserved no less. She wanted a box seat, she wanted a front row seat, she wanted a stall seat, but in the end she could only get Nicholas a seat in “the gods”, the cheapest and highest seats at the very tippety top of the theatre, and when Nicholas wrote back to say how delighted he would be to come, she sent him the ticket she had obtained, with a reminder that he was to visit her afterwards in her dressing room, and so it was done.

      The paths through time and space of the lives of Nicholas and Isabel, twisting and turning their separate ways through the New Landern continuum, were now lined up and moving along to a second point of intersection: Friday 20 May 1544 A.F. at the Emperor Theatre in New Landern.

      NINE

      The Visit of Lady Isabel Grangeshield

      

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