The earl was staring at Door lopsidedly, with his one good eye. “So. What brings you here to me?” he asked.
She licked her lips. “Well, indirectly, Your Grace, my father’s death.”
He nodded, slowly. “Yes. You seek vengeance. Quite right, too.” He coughed, then recited, in a basso profundo, “Brave the battling blade, flashes the furious fire, steel sword sheathed in hated heart, crimsons the . . . the . . . something. Yes.”
“Vengeance?” Door thought for a moment. “Yes. That was what my father said. But I mostly just want to understand what happened, and to protect myself. My family had no enemies.” Dagvard staggered back onto the train then, his helmet filled with chocolate bars and cans of Coke; the doors were permitted to close, and the train moved off once more.
Lear’s coat, still on the floor of the tunnel, was covered in coins and bills, now, but it was also covered with shoes—kicking the coins, smearing and tearing the bills, ripping the fabric of the coat. Lear had begun to cry. “Please. Why won’t you leave me alone?” he begged. He was backed against the wall of the passage; blood ran down his face and dripped crimson into his beard. His saxophone hung limply, awkwardly, on his chest, dented and scraped.
He was surrounded by a small crowd of people—more than twenty, less than fifty—every one of them shoving and pushing, in a mindless mob, their eyes blank and staring, each man and woman desperately fighting and clawing in order to give Lear their money. There was blood on the tiled wall, where Lear had knocked his head. Lear flailed out at one middle-aged woman, her purse wide open, a fistful of five-pound notes thrust out at him. She clawed at his face in her eagerness to give him her money. He twisted to avoid her fingernails and fell to the tunnel floor.
Someone stepped on his hand. His face was pushed into a slurry of coins. He began to sob, and to curse. “I told you not to overuse that tune,” said an elegant voice, nearby. “Naughty.”
“Help me,” gasped Lear.
“Well, there is a counter-charm,” admitted the voice, almost reluctantly.
The crowd was pressing closer now. A flung fifty-pence coin opened Lear’s cheek. He curled into a fetal ball, hugging himself, burying his face in his knees. “Play it, damn you,” sobbed Lear. “Whatever you want . . . just make them stop . . . “
A pennywhistle piping began softly, and echoed down the passage. A simple phrase, repeated over and over, slightly different every time: the de Carabas variations. The footsteps were moving away. Shuffling, at first, then picking up pace: moving away from him. Lear opened his eyes. The marquis de Carabas was leaning against the wall, playing the pennywhistle. When he saw Lear looking at him he took the whistle from his lips and replaced it in an inside pocket of his coat. He tossed Lear a lace-edged handkerchief of patched linen. Lear wiped the blood from his forehead and face. “They would have killed me,” he said, accusingly.
“I did warn you,” said de Carabas. “Just count yourself lucky that I was coming back this way.” He helped Lear into a sitting position. “Now,” he said. “I think you owe me another favor.”
Lear picked up his coat—torn and muddy and imprinted with the marks of many feet—from the passage floor. He suddenly felt very cold, and he wrapped the shredded coat around his shoulders. Coins fell, and bills fluttered to the floor. He let them lie. “Was I really lucky? Or did you set me up?”
The marquis looked almost offended. “I don’t know how you could even bring yourself to think such a thing.”
‘”Cos I know you. That’s how. So what is it that you want me to do this time? Theft? Arson?” Lear sounded resigned, and a little sad. And then, “Murder?”
De Carabas reached down and took back his handkerchief. “Theft, I’m afraid. You were right the first time,” he said, with a smile. “I find myself in rather urgent need of a piece of T’ang dynasty sculpture.” Lear shivered. Then, slowly, he nodded.
Richard was handed a bar of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut chocolate and a large silver goblet, ornamented around the rim with what appeared to Richard to be sapphires. The goblet was filled with Coca-Cola. The jester, whose name seemed to be Tooley, cleared his throat loudly. “I would like to propose a toast to our guests,” he said. “A child, a bravo, a fool. May they each get what they deserve.”
“Which one am I?” whispered Richard to Hunter.
“The fool, of course,” she said.
“In the old days,” said Halvard dismally, after sipping his Coke, “we had wine. I prefer wine. It’s not as sticky.”
“Do all the machines just give you things like that?” asked Richard.
“Oh yes,” said the old man. “They listen to the earl, y’see. He rules the Underground. The bit with the trains. He’s lord of the Central, the Circle, the Jubilee, the Victorious, the Bakerloo—well, all of them except the Underside Line.”
“What’s the Underside Line?” asked Richard. Halvard shook his head and pursed his lips. Hunter brushed Richard’s shoulder with her fingers. “Remember what I told you about the shepherds of Shepherd’s Bush?”
“You said I didn’t want to meet them, and there were some things I was probably better off not knowing.”
“Good,” she said, “So now you can add the Underside Line to the list of those things.”
Door came back down the carriage toward them. She was smiling. “The earl’s agreed to help us,” she said. “Come on. He’s meeting us in the library.” Richard began to follow, as he realized that the question What library? had not risen to his lips. The longer he was here, the more he took at face value. Instead, he followed Door toward the earl’s empty throne, and round the back of it, and through the connecting door behind it, and into the library. It was a huge stone room, with a high wooden ceiling. Each wall was covered with shelves. Each shelf was laden with objects: there were books, yes. But the shelves were filled with a host of other things: tennis rackets, hockey sticks, umbrellas, a spade, a notebook computer, a wooden leg, several mugs, dozens of shoes, pairs of binoculars, a small log, six glove puppets, a lava lamp, various CDs, records (LPs, 45s, and 78s), cassette tapes and eight-tracks, dice, toy cars, assorted pairs of dentures, watches, flashlights, four garden gnomes of assorted sizes (two fishing, one of them mooning, the last smoking a cigar), piles of newspapers, magazines, grimoires, three-legged stools, a box of cigars, a plastic nodding-head Alsatian, socks . . . the room was a tiny empire of lost property.