Lewis had never been able to determine just how the infant wound up in the Bell household, but in 1836 young Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax was enrolled in Overton School, and his guardian’s address was given as No. 10, et cetera. On discovering this, Lewis searched out Mr. Septimus Bell’s bank records, and found evidence of quarterly deposits of large sums of money beginning in 1825, though so far he had been unable to trace the source. The deposits continued even after Mr. and Mrs. Bell were lost in a shipwreck off the coast of Italy during a grand tour, late in young Edward’s first term at Overton.
Edward’s progress in school was exceptional, particularly in maths, at which he excelled, though there were disciplinary actions on two occasions for fighting. Scholastic brilliance notwithstanding, at the age of fourteen he was pulled from school and entered the Royal Navy as a midshipman. Admiralty records revealed that young Edward progressed with remarkable speed to the rank of lieutenant, and within five years was given command of a schooner and sent to the coast of Africa to patrol against the slave trade.
This was not the reward it might appear. It was dirty work and dangerous, given to young officers in no position to protest being sent in humble little boats to chase after slave ships. It appeared, however, that Edward turned the slight to his advantage. Mangrove swamps, poisoned spears, fever, alcohol, shipwreck: none of them
managed to take him out. He distinguished himself by conducting a ferocious campaign against the slave traders, proving so effective a fighter that he was promptly pulled from the job, made a commander, and reassigned to a man-of-war doing nothing in particular off the coast of France.
And this appeared to be his downfall; he “violently quarreled” with a Captain Southbey over the matter of a flogging ordered for an ordinary seaman “in excess of a hundred strokes.” However violent the quarrel may have been, Edward must have received some help from the unknown benefactor he so disdained; for the threatened court-martial never materialized. He was instead allowed to retire, retaining his rank of commander and on half pay. Captain Southbey, on the other hand, was murdered by his own crew the following year.
That was all the Admiralty records had to say on the subject of Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax, and for many years Lewis was unable to trace him any further.
But Lewis was patient as only an immortal can be, and had decades of gray London evenings to spend combing through every records cache that had survived the intervening centuries.
No record of marriage for Edward, no record of children, no record of what duties kept him from going to see Robert Richardson in his last illness—the old soldier died on October 10, 1852, and was buried in a churchyard in London, one of the tiny crowded places Dickens described. Lewis went to the grave site, found the ancient stone with its nearly effaced inscription; but there was no corresponding stone for Edward in any cemetery that kept records.
Lewis checked the ones without records, too, spent interminable sunless weekends pacing between leaning headstones, broken angels, toppled urns, wildernesses of moss and ivy. Passersby sometimes glanced through rusted railings and were startled by the slight man in the long coat, like a ghost himself.
Year after year Lewis searched, not knowing what he wanted to find or what he sought to prove. He cautiously admitted to himself that the hunt for Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax had become more than
a hobby for him. The mystery possessed all the elements of a novel: the highborn foundling infant, the brilliant boy cut off from human affection except for an old servant, the heroic career at sea and in the coastal swamps of Africa, the furious protest against injustice and evil—and then nothing but the hint of some secret duty that prevented him from coming home. How did the story end?
Or, rather, how did it end with Edward’s dying in Mendoza’s arms in far-off California? How had this man, who’d risked his life repeatedly to prevent slaves from being taken, wind up shot to death by agents of a nation fighting to end slavery?
Lewis invented half a hundred scenarios, none of them satisfactory. To be a Literature Specialist is not necessarily to be able to write, though Lewis longed to. The fantasy was like a fire that kept the chill out of his immortal bones: he’d gaze off between the crumbling tombs and the willows and see the couple embracing there for a moment, the bright wraiths of the stern young man and the black-eyed girl. Edward smart in the uniform he’d worn for his portrait and Mendoza happy as Lewis had never seen her, wearing a summer dress of peach silk . . .
The image sustained him somehow. And it kept away the quiet horrors of his own life.
The nightmares came on Lewis gradually, after the return from the Yorkshire trip, and had nothing to do with the downscaled standard of living or the bombs in the streets, or even with living alone in a garret. They had everything to do with what he had forgotten about Ireland.
Sometimes he would be fine for years on end, and then something would set the nightmares off. Once he was in the Tube when the lights failed, and that did it. Once he tuned into a BBC program on the pathetic survivors of the human cloning experiment (it had worked, but the resulting children all suffered from progeria). Once it was no more than a customer bringing in a book to sell, a late-twentieth-century facsimile of the
Book of Kells
.
The symptoms were always the same, just what mortals suffered:
shortness of breath, pounding heart, cold sweats. He’d sit up reading until he was exhausted, fearful of turning out the light. The nightmares would come eventually anyway, sometimes when he thought he was still awake.
They tended to begin with sleep paralysis. He knew he was awake, sitting up in a well-lighted room, safe and in full possession of his immortal faculties. He was completely paralyzed, however, and as soon as he acknowledged this to himself, the real horror began, a sensation of slipping downward into shadows.
After that followed chaos, darkness, and a sense of imminent and personal danger. There was a voice that spoke in Latin. A cell with a trick door. Children crowding into a tunnel. A suffocating smell. Red lightning. Sometimes the specific sequence of these events was confused, but they built, always, to the same conclusion: he would begin to go gradually blind. He’d be lying somewhere, helpless, unable to see, and he could hear his own voice saying,
My God, is this what it’s like?
Lewis never woke screaming. He’d get his sensation and his sight back a little at a time, finding himself at last perched on a chair or sprawled on the daybed in his clothes. He would be cold as ice, shivering, nauseated. Running a self-diagnostic never revealed anything wrong with him.
And then six months ago, something different happened.
The nightmare began again—this time simply an oddly familiar face glimpsed in the street had done it. He fell into dreams and was shuddering in the dark, fighting back the panic, knowing he was too damaged to stop them, knowing he might die, really die, the way mortals died—
Someone took hold of his hand.
Complete sensory confusion, sight flowing up his arm from his hand, caught hard in the grip of the other hand. It was pulling him out of the darkness. The sight reached his eyes, and he found himself staring into Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax’s stern young face.
Edward kept pulling, and the darkness snarled and flowed away
from Lewis like a fast tide receding. He found himself standing on a London street in his modern clothes, as the shuttle traffic roared past, as cripples pulled themselves along and shopkeepers unlocked their iron gates for the morning’s commerce. But Edward was still standing there before him, in his nineteenth-century naval officer’s uniform, frowning down at Lewis from his great height.
Pale blue eyes, just as Lewis had always thought, and high color in his face, yes, just as Mendoza had described it. Mendoza! If he could only tell Edward, if he could warn him, as he hadn’t been able to warn Mendoza—
“I will not be silenced,” Edward said grimly, looking him in the eye. Having said that, he straightened, kept going up and up, lengthening, and he seemed to have stepped back into the facade of a building too. No, he had
become
part of the facade behind him. For a second Lewis could still make out his face, rigid in stone; then the features faded, and Lewis was staring up at a great Ionic column, one of three holding up the pediment of an enormous neoclassical public building.
He knew the building, it dated from the early twenty-first century and was a copy of the Temple of Zeus at Lemnos. Lewis looked around in confusion, uncertain whether he had just awakened after a spectacular episode of sleepwalking. Cripples, pigeons, shopkeepers, traffic, all very real, and here was the morning sunlight just creeping over to illuminate the inscription in sedate Roman capitals on the front of the building:
NEW SYON HOUSE
2355 BOND STREET
“Surely, that’s wrong, though,” he found himself saying to his reading lamp. He sat up. He was in his room in the gray morning light.
And in fact the address proved to be wrong, when he showered, shaved, and went running out into the real morning of London to
see; though only in respect to being at No. 205 Bond Street. Every other detail was just as he had seen it in his nightmare. Was that even a suggestion of an aloof face, in the design of the capital on the middle column?
Lewis murmured a prayer of thanks to Carl Jung. He even did a little skipping dance in his honor as he hurried home, for this was the intuitive leap he had needed to make.
New Syon House was some sort of government office. You could go in and fill out forms on the ground floor, and the clerk would forward them somewhere for you. Lewis knew, as any other operative of Dr. Zeus knew, that the place was actually a dump for outworn state secrets. It was an archive of documents that had never been declassified but that were now so old, there was nobody left alive who even knew why they had been secrets in the first place or (in the case of some encoded material to which the keys had been lost) what they even were about.
When the time came to transform moldy sheepskin into magnetic ink, somebody dutifully encrypted everything and shredded the originals. There the secrets hid, to this day, in databanks never accessed from one year’s end to the next, masses of arcane gibberish.
For an immortal with empty nights to fill after eight hours a day in a grubby little bookshop, and no transfer to a better posting in sight, New Syon House was like one of those old Christmas calendars with twenty-five little windows: a new one to be opened every day, with no idea of what treat might be behind it, while one grew closer and closer to the window with the ultimate treat.
It took Lewis three months to scan the inventory. It took another month to sort out encryptions dating from the nineteenth century. Two weeks sufficed to break the old-fashioned code; all he had to do then was search for any occurrences of the name Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax.
The first reference was a list of members of a Redking’s Club for the years 1849 to 1869. The list was profoundly interesting. For a
smallish club, Redking’s appeared to have had a disproportionate number of members whose names had made it into history books. There were politicians, there were men of science, there was a writer or two—and a virtual nobody, a retired naval officer on half pay. Lewis marveled. What was Edward doing in company like this? And why was this information classified?
Lewis found another peculiarity on the members list: the name of one William Fitzwalter Nennys. Lewis remembered this man perfectly, for the simple reason that he was in reality Nennius, an immortal with whom Lewis had worked briefly in the 1830s. Nennius was a Facilitator, and nothing was more likely than that he’d be strategically positioned in an exclusive club whose fellow members were in politics.
The next reference to Edward turned up when Lewis found a list of members of a Gentlemen’s Speculative Society. Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax was one of their number. So were most of the other members of Redking’s Club, including William Fitzwalter Nennys.
Lewis frowned as he read. Wasn’t there something disreputable about the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society? A moment’s hasty access of
Smith’s History of Esoteric Cults
, volumes 1 through 10, brought it back to him:
In the year 1885 a mortal named David Addison Ramsay held several public lectures, claiming to be a representative of a hitherto secret brotherhood that presently went by the name of the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society. He was unwise enough to mention several prominent statesmen and academics who he claimed were fellow members.
He said further that their purpose was to advance humanity to a state of perfection through scientific means. This, he claimed, was where similarly well-intentioned secret societies had missed the mark: by clinging to outworn magical and religious rituals.
Ramsay then displayed what he claimed were inventions that had been suppressed out of religious superstition and ignorance. He apparently got quite a reaction out of his audience with his “thermoluminous
globe,” “speaking automaton,” “true philosopher’s stone,” and several other remarkable objects. These inventions, he claimed, were not new; the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society had rescued and collected them from laboratories of persecuted martyrs to the cause of Science. Da Vinci had contributed several, as had Dr. John Dee, who had also been a member of the Society, though in a former time when it bore another name.
Ramsay concluded by saying that the purpose of this demonstration was not merely to enlighten or entertain, but to enlist uninitiated Britons in the great cause for which he and his fellow Gentlemen labored. He admitted that his brother members did not entirely agree with him that the need for secrecy was past, but he believed that in this age of steam propulsion and industrial capitalism, mankind was ready to understand what science might achieve, if unfettered. He intimated that all the fantastic possibilities of legend were not beyond man’s grasp, even, indeed most particularly, immortality itself.