David F. Porteous's Blog

A few weeks ago I started to rework some of the material in TSOFL. I had previously shared first draft material, and much of that has been changed, but I want to leave it on the site as a record of progress.

The book currently sits at just under 57,000 words, and I would guess that this is around a quarter of the story (it's going to be a big book). I've made some revisions which are purely structural - what were 10 chapters are now 25, making each a bit more digestible and each focused on a narrower point in time. I've removed a lot of the "tell" narrative and replaced it with "show", and this significantly improves the quality of the first 20-or-so chapters. More work on this will be needed later, but it's a big step up.

One of the most significant narrative reworks is that Alice being a magician is introduced more clearly and earlier in the story. Alice's admission to the University of Bologna is now linked to an in-story character, rather than the Archbishop of Paris - who was never going to feature in this story in detail. And the story starts a few days back in time, with Alice's escape from brutal imprisonment in the dungeon of the medieval Castle Bouchard, before she flees to Italy. I've included the NEW chapter two below.

As always, thoughts and comments welcome here or on socials.

II – Wednesday, 17 July 1839
 
Where the skin had rubbed away from her thumb, the rust from the manacle formed a gritty paste with her blood. It was a new, fresh smell and it would attract the rats.

​For weeks she had been force-fed on potage laced with hallucinogens. When she was unable to hold her mind together, they allowed her to speak, and by the light of the lamp they brought into the dungeon they scribbled down every word she said. They covered the floor in straw – for they did not dare free her hands – and they cleaned away whatever dripped out of her. When she had said enough, the questions stopped, and the straw went unchanged. Her thrice-daily poisonings came to an end, and the perfect dark became timeless.

She grunted through the metal brace that held her jaw fixed in place and the rat by her feet retreated from her toes and squeaked. It did not run away far, and the faint skittering sounds revealed the presence of others. The rats were waiting.

She cried out in pain as the iron sliced her, as the pressure threatened to break her knuckles – but her right hand slithered through. The tight muscles of her back fought to regain their shape after weeks of being held above her head. She contorted and wailed in relief.

With her left arm still stretched out above her, she shook the circulation into the right. The other manacle was locked around her left wrist and was tighter than the right had been. The heavy chain which connected the two cuffs was looped on a hook driven into the stone wall and she strained and failed to make the small jump needed to lift the link a single inch.

Blood dripped down – hot and sticky – onto her bare feet. Furry bodies grazed her, and tiny mouths swiftly suckled on her skin. Alice screamed in incoherent rage, and the rats again drew back.

She swayed, and her blindness made her more unsteady. Her right hand found the damp, cold wall and she leaned against it as her body was wracked by a coughing spasm. There was nothing in her to throw up, so she wheezed, and her legs sagged under the unfamiliar weight of her body.

With her head pressed against the wall, her fingers searched in her dirty, matted hair for the buckles and catches that kept the brace in her mouth and as her fingers rediscovered their dexterity, she unfastened it and let it fall to the floor. She worked the muscles of her jaw, but her mouth was too dry to speak, and the skin of her lips and her tongue cracked as she moved.

Her name was Alice Black, and she was a true magician.

She had been born to the gift and schooled in its practice so that she could perform magic in all four forms – by movement and touch, by spoken word, by will alone, and by design. They had bound her hands to prevent gestures, they had addled her mind to sap her will, and they had robbed her of her voice.

Using her forefinger as a stylus and her thumb as an inkwell, from memory she painted the symbol on the wall in blood. The charm of unmaking burrowed into the stone and shook free the mortar, it gnawed at the forged iron, and the chain snapped away from the hook under its own weight before the manacle fell from her left wrist and shattered on the flagstones with their thin covering of mouldering straw.

She found her way across the cell to the door, which was hardwood and iron-studded. At her touch the wood contracted, splintered and fell out of the frame becoming a pile of kindling. She fumbled in the darkness of the hallway for a piece of wood that she could carry in one hand and lifted it above her head.

By will alone, she set the faintest ember to burn on the topmost part of the wood. It was more match than torch, but by this faint light she found her way up stairs until the total darkness of the underground was replaced by the blue-black of night and finally the blue-grey of moonlight.

Alice emerged into the silent courtyard of the Castle Bouchard. The structure was ancient – not a palace or a country house, but a medieval fortress the largest tower of which was artless as an ogre. In its high, narrow windows, flickering witchlight sent shafts of yellow into sky.

The night was warm, and the sweet smell of basswood trees carried on the air. Alice was naked and with the benefit of the breeze bringing contrasts, she could now smell the rancid stink of her body.

A tinkling sound, as of wine glasses met in a toast, came from the tower’s lit windows. She tensed and checked every door she could see, but there was no motion.

They had won, and they were celebrating their victory. In a stupor, Alice had surrendered her second-best secret: a product of science and magic that had taken her years of effort: the method of transforming lead into gold. When they had what they wanted, they stopped asking questions.

She raised the bucket from the old well and drank until she was sick, then drank again. Two carriages sat idle in the courtyard, with their horses and drivers elsewhere. Under the driver’s seat she found a long raincoat and draped it around her shoulders. It was only two miles to the nearest town, and she would make less noise walking than stealing a horse from the stable.

She had a little time. They would be drunk on wine and ambition tonight and might not notice her escape for days.

​And it would be at least a week before they would come to understand their gold would not benefit them. What they needed was the thing they had never thought to ask for: it was Alice Black’s best secret: how to turn lead into gold and stay alive.

Hello. I feel like The Sculptor of Frog Lane really begins to hit its stride in chapter four. We move the narrative back to Alice in 1840, during her first year of studies at the University of Bologna, and introduce her contemporaries - Endrizzi, Patricello, and Gallo - as well as the political landscape of the city.

Comments welcome. Who's your favourite character of the book so far? Are you enjoying John's narrative or Alice's more?

IV – March 1840
 
“Is every Godforsaken man, woman and child in this city a beggar?” the young Italian noble snapped as he slammed the door of the wood-panelled chamber behind him. The others were already gathered, though it was still early.

“Ciao, Endrizzi – tutto bene?” Alice asked.

“Tutto bene,” Endrizzi replied, mocking her question and her accent. He took a seat next to her in the second row. “I mean really. I was accosted a dozen times, and I live two streets away. The grasping, wretched poverty of this city disgusts me. I should bring guards with me. I shall bring guards.”

​It was an empty threat. Though Marco Endrizzi was of an old noble family with a brace of castles to their name, he was the fifth-born son of a woman who had produced a prodigious quantity of children. He stood to inherit nothing but trinkets and keepsakes from his father – not even a title. What money he received, he spent on clothes and wine. He could not afford guards, and his lodgings were actually half a mile away and worse than Alice’s. All of that was a familiar story.
There were fourteen of them gathered in the tight gallery whose seating was circular, steep, and arranged in four levels around a stone slab in the centre – covered, for modesty’s sake, with a white sheet. Alice was the only woman and the only non-Italian. Of the thirteen men, eight were in the same situation as Endrizzi. They were the sons or grandsons of powerful and wealthy men, but they happened to have the misfortune of being born far too late to be useful.

For first and second sons there were good marriages, lands, a practical education in finance or diplomacy, and enough money to indulge in art or mistresses or even the occasional small war. Third sons went to the church. That was understood. The noble houses of Europe paid their tithes, and the Holy Mother Church of Rome took their unwanted children and gave them something respectable to do. Endrizzi’s brother was already an archdeacon at twenty-five.

But for the fourth, fifth and – God be merciful in his blessings – sixth sons, there were no end of bad options. If an Italian boy had any kind of real military training, then he could become a mercenary and wander around killing people for money. If he killed the right people, he might even get a medal from the Pope. But syphilis ran rampant through the Italian Free Companies, a lot of people died trying to kill other people, and when considering those factors, the pay wasn’t great.

If a boy were especially interested in physical labour, then several countries in the new world were basically giving land away to anyone willing to farm it and shoot natives. But land which had never been farmed before was like a horse that had never been ridden. Natives sometimes shot back. And the return on investment wasn’t great. In twenty years, the problem of what to do with all the extra sons would come up again and things would be even worse. The church was not interested in the third sons of people who weren’t rich.

What was left were the professions. If a boy were clever – not a requirement for all the previous roles, and in some ways a hinderance – then he might do well as a lawyer or a doctor. It took years to be taught these professions and even longer to learn them. There was some money in it – enough that one might indulge in unfashionable art or rural mistresses. Some doctors got medals from the Pope, and though the lawyers deserved to be killed, they rarely were. But the most important benefit was the ability to build relationships – lawyers and doctors knew as many people and as many secrets as priests, and those connections created different kinds of opportunities. Perhaps there would be no land to pass on to the grandchildren, but there would be trust, a name, and a network.
“I know they’re starving, but can’t they just fuck off and die somewhere else?” Endrizzi said as he took off his hat with the dramatic plume of ostrich feathers.

Alice replied, provocatively rather than helpfully, “Perhaps if you dressed more modestly people wouldn’t bother you.”

Endrizzi narrowed his eyes at her. “If I dressed more modestly, what would be the point of anything?” He unfastened the clasp on his fur-lined green velvet winter cloak and dropped it into the empty seat beside him.

“You seem to be miserable regardless of what you wear,” said Gallo. He half-turned from his seat in the front row and looked at Endrizzi and Alice over the reading glasses which pinched the bridge of his nose. In his lap were two large books from which he had been studying anatomical drawings.

“I am miserable,” Endrizzi said. “You would also be miserable if you were me. Just yesterday I received a letter from my mother. She writes that my brother is to be made a bishop.”

“How awful,” said Gallo.

“If the smug bastard becomes Pope, I shall convert to another religion entirely. What’s the one with the hats?”

“Please,” said Patricello, who was sitting directly behind Alice. He was the only one of the group who was able to grow a full beard, and he stroked it for emphasis excessively. With a gesture to the centre of the room he added, “No blasphemy.”

“He doesn’t mean it,” Alice said and patted Endrizzi’s arm sympathetically. “His brother is the son of his mother and his father – who are married to each other – he can’t very well call him a bastard.”

Endrizzi ruffled. “I wasn’t there for any of it. Who can say?”

“Besides that,” Alice continued, “he’s a terrible catholic. His soul would be no loss to us and no gain to anyone else.”

“That is also blasphemous,” Patricello grumbled and stroked his beard.

“There will be some kind of celebration for your brother?” Alice asked Endrizzi. In response he dropped his head into his hands and groaned. She transferred her hand from his arm to the top of his head. “One day, my friend, you will be a famous doctor surgeon, and your patients shall include perhaps two or three – maybe even four Popes at a time.”

“Mademoiselle Black, I implore you.”

“Signor Patricello!” Alice snapped and turned in her seat. “You owe me near two scudi. Your morals are in debt to my purse and I will not hear them squeak until we are square.”

“The end of the week.” Patricello’s voice fell to a whisper. “I promise.”

Some of the other students smirked, and some pretended not to hear. After all, Patricello was not the only one who owed debts to the young woman. She had become a small-time banker, managing cash flow problems for her classmates who were forever vacillating between living lean and living fat. Hardly any could budget their expenditure, and none could keep to a budget they made. When money was sent from home, they all knew about it quickly and with great generosity they helped to spend it.

In the previous six months she had learned about the security of every man. How his future career was financed; whether they were like Endrizzi – a late son of a great house – or Gallo – who received a scholarship from the little town where he was born in the expectation that he would return to be their doctor.

Alice knew how risky each loan might be based on these relationships. She made notes. January was three weeks of hard frost for Gallo’s town – perhaps he would not be able to afford the tuition come autumn. Acardi’s uncle had died unexpectedly in February and he had not received word of the will. Uncertainty hung over him like a guillotine.

As their financial confessor, she had taken all the respect she needed. In the long run, she might lose money through unrecoverable debts, but the debts were trifling compared to the value of being one of the students. They argued with her as if she were a man. They fought her and cursed at her without any consideration of politeness. She was included.

Of course, they had all fallen in love with her at some point. She was, after all, the only woman they spoke to on most days, and she was the only person they knew socially who seemed to have any money. A fertile woman with even a small fortune would be an excellent match for any of them. She had expected it to happen. But the best of them she regarded with only a little fondness – as if they were an idiot cousin.

Professor Medici entered the room and studied the skylight high above them in the arched ceiling of the room, before adjusting the large, polished metal reflectors. Gallo quickly moved to assist the professor in redirecting light to the sheet covering the slab.

“Good morning,” said Medici, and with a flourish he pulled away the white sheet.

The body was male and around thirty to forty years old. He had been suffering from an infected cut on his leg at the time off death, evidenced by profound discolouration and visible discharge. He had sustained injuries to his hands, likely caused by the torture which extracted his confession. However, he had certainly died as a result of being hanged by the neck.

“This gentleman died yesterday. He was convicted of killing another man in a drunken brawl and fled, only to be captured at his home some hours later. What can we tell from a prima facia investigation of the body?”

“St Anthony’s fire,” said Gallo. “A cut on his leg has become poisonous and inflamed.”

“If he were alive, what symptoms might he present with?”

“Pain, itching, fever, and if progressed, nausea and fatigue.”

“Treatment?”

“Bloodletting to balance the humours and a poultice of herbs to pull out the infection.”

“Anything else?” Medici scanned the students.

Alice said, “Professor. With respect. We have no effective treatments for St Anthony’s fire.”

Medici nodded and replied, “Our future Doctor Gallo calls for leeches and a poultice. Our future Doctor Black recommends?”

“Wash the wound every day, keep it clean and dry. The patient should rest and would benefit from being fed little and often.”

“This is the challenge that you will face throughout your professional lives,” Medici said. “To treat, or not to treat. Gallo’s prescription is accepted in the literature as being correct and therefore many doctors would administer it. However, Black is also correct that this treatment does little to benefit a patient with this condition. You will find that even after administering the best medicine at your disposal that your patient will die, and you will find that even when you do nothing for a severe illness that your patient will live. How do we resolve this? If we can act without injury to the patient, we should act, even if the benefits are limited.”

“The patient is malnourished,” said Alice. “Pragmatically, I would rather he spent whatever money he had on a bath and bowl of soup than on my time.”

“Good point, well made,” said Medici. “This man was clearly wretchedly poor. He might come to a free hospital and then, with limited resources, and dealing with a condition which is not contagious, Black’s advice of food and rest is superior.”

Gallo said, “So we should leave the poor to die?”

Alice said, “If we had a miracle tonic in infinite supply, we should administer it to rich and poor equally. We don’t. Therefore, we should treat according to the patient’s circumstances. Leeches for the rich and food for the poor, with rest for everyone.”

“Different treatment means inferior treatment.”

“It might,” Alice said, “but what would you do about that?”

“We will not find an answer to this today,” said Medici, cutting off any reply from Gallo. “I am not sure how successful a doctor will be if all she prescribes is soup—” he spoke over a little laughter “—but Signor Gallo may need it if he spends all his time giving mercury pills to the indigent.”

Medici moved on to a surgical demonstration, opening the skin around the throat and the neck, describing the anatomy of each in detail and noting the trauma. He concluded, as he washed his hands in a basin, that their unfortunate patient had not died from a broken neck – which was the preferable outcome for someone who was hanged. The vertebrae were all intact. Instead, the throat had been crushed by the rope – he had been strangled, probably for a minute or two, before he finally died. He allowed each student to examine the body up close and gave Endrizzi and Acardi the job of sewing the cadaver’s skin back together. It would be preserved and used for many more lessons for months to come.

“Professor,” said Patricello, “the infection of St Anthony’s fire seemed advanced to me. Is that correct?”

“Quite advanced, I agree.” Medici dried his hands on a small towel.

“Likely he would have fever, fatigue? Perhaps some dizziness and exhaustion?”

“Perhaps.”

“It does not seem to me that a man with this condition would be able to kill another man, run half-way across the city without being seen, and make it back into his own bed. It seems to me that St Anthony’s fire this progressed would keep a man in bed for a week, or until he died.”

“You have been following the case?” Medici asked.

Patricello nodded.

Medici looked over at the body being worked on by his students and said, “I teach medicine, Signor Patricello. You must seek justice elsewhere.”
 
* * *
 
The murder of Giovanni Aiello by Paulo Abate had appeared to be quite ordinary. Two men had taken too much wine and fallen into a disagreement which became violent. Abate produced a knife and stabbed Aiello. The former fled the scene. The latter died. There were many such incidents in Bologna each year and most suspected murderers fled the city, travelled to some remote region under an assumed name, and were never heard from again. When murderers were caught, they were convicted and hanged.

“The Austrians have been here for ten years,” said Gallo. He leaned into the centre of their small table to do so. He, Endrizzi, Patricello and Alice were having lunch at an osteria near the location of their afternoon class. All had ordered cotechino con lenticchie – a dish of lentils and spiced sausage, which was especially good there – and were sharing a bottle of lambrusco.

“They are here to stop people from saying exactly what you are about to say,” Patricello muttered into his lentils.

“They did not come to create order, and that is not why they have stayed.”

“There was an uprising of some kind?” Alice asked.

“Many uprisings,” Gallo corrected. “Italy should be one nation. As powerful as France or Britain or Austria.” Patricello made several shushing noises, but Gallo continued, only becoming more animated. “Instead we are a few cities always under the heel of one country or another. The Holy Roman Empire, the French empire, the empire of Austria-Hungary. And you see what comes of this? Endrizzi? There are thousands of beggars in Bologna. People starve in the street. While this city is run by a military governor who answers to Vienna, on behalf of a Pope who cares only about the authority of the church, people in Bologna will starve and suffer.”

“You speak as if he had his hands around your throat,” said Patricello. “Gregory does not want to see Italy become like France, where everyone now is a fashionable atheist. Where everyone is a democrat, and the newspapers print a new constitution every day based on the whims of their publishers and not the will of God. It is a mad anarchy that governs France.” He turned in his seat towards Alice and said, “I mean no offence in saying any of this.”

“None taken,” Alice replied. “I am sure that I have told you several times that I am not French.”

Patricello scoffed through a mouthful of lentils. “Of course you are French. Your accent. Your ideas. Your dress. You are as French as Napoleon.”

“I was not aware that Napoleon wore a dress. Certainly he did not wear this one, which was made for me in this city.”

“For a woman with French tastes,” Patricello said dismissively. “A good Italian seamstress is not going to be so foolish as to make in the Italian style for a woman who so clearly loves France.”

“I don’t believe I shall win that one,” said Alice. “Go on, Gallo.”

“Please no,” said Patricello.

“Go on,” Alice insisted.

“The gendarmerie are all Austrian soldiers. They are here to continue Austria’s rule over northern Italy as it was before the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved. It serves the interests of the Pope that it continues, because while Milan and Genoa and Venice are Austrian, Bologna and Ravenna shall remain the property of the Papal States.”

“He is not wrong,” said Endrizzi to Patricello, who did not reply.

Gallo said, “What is strange about the murder of Aiello? The man who has been hanged for it – Patricello – you saw yourself – that man was not out carousing and fighting. He was – all night – in the bed where he was found by the gendarmerie.”

“We see his leg three days later,” Patricello demurred. “Prisons are full of ill humours. His condition could have worsened.”

“But he is still ill at the time of the murder, at least,” Alice said and Patricello shrugged acknowledgment.

“What do you know of Abate or of Aiello?” Gallo asked the others.

Endrizzi finished the bottle into his cup and said, “Both of them were nationalists, at least this is what I heard. Abate more so. Aiello spoke better.”

“He did,” said Gallo.

“And was better looking.”

“He was.”

“So was there political tension between them?” asked Patricello. “Or something romantic? Aiello sleeping with Abate’s wife?”

Gallo pulled his wooden stool closer, so that he was all but sitting in their food. He whispered, “Aiello was sleeping with someone. With Martha Bachleitner.”

“Stop,” said Patricello.

Gallo continued, “The wife of Oberst Bachleitner.”

“You will see us flogged through the streets!” Patricello hissed. For a moment the osteria fell silent and the group ate in strained silence.

“Oberst is a German military rank?” Alice whispered. “Like a French major?”

“Colonel,” said Gallo.

“Then Bachleitner would be the highest-ranking officer in the city.”

“He is.”

“The scandal,” said Endrizzi, who was suddenly interested in something other than his own foul mood.

“It might not be the end of his career,” Alice said, “but he would progress no further. Back in my homeland of France things are a little different, but in Austrian society he would be considered fatally compromised by his wife’s indiscretion. Austrian women of any social class do not discuss their lovers – which does not mean they do not take lovers, only that they are expected to be especially discrete.”

“And French women are not discrete?” Patricello asked.

“Only when it suits them. A lady at court is expected to have a lover and she is distinguished if her lover is powerful, or younger and more beautiful than she is. But she cannot enjoy the prestige if she doesn’t drop a few hints. Therefore, a woman who isn’t rumoured to be having an affair is considered the least desirable of all.”

“I could never live in France,” Patricello grumbled.

Gallo continued, with an ideal Austrian lady’s level of discretion, “It is said that the argument that took place was not between Aiello and Abate, but between Aiello and Bachleitner. An accident – or an overreaction – I am sure. But when what is done, is done, why not kill two birds with one stone? Bachleitner has his soldiers find the most convenient and most annoying nationalist they can and blame him for the murder.”

“Amazing,” said Endrizzi. “Is any of it true?”

“This is what I have heard,” said Gallo.

“Fanciful,” said Patricello.

“What if the noose was not an accident?” Alice said. “Imagine that you are a clever man, and that you want to conceal your crime. How might you do that? Well, you would put the murder weapon in his house, because you have the weapon, and you can enter any house in the city. Straightforward: you have a story, but there can be only one story. You must break a man’s fingers so that he cannot write and crush his larynx so that he cannot speak. Then you hang him badly to conceal the injury, and give the body to medical science where, rather than a crime being discovered, a hundred minor surgeries will obliterate all trace of it.”

“Why bother?” Endrizzi asked. “An Oberst can probably kill any Bolognese peasant.”

“He wouldn’t be concerned about hiding the crime from the Bolognese,” said Alice. “He has to hide it from the Austrians.”

“Medici has more experience than any of us,” Gallo said. “He would know.”

Patricello drank all that remained in his cup.

“Medici does know,” said Alice. “The gallows are not short of business and the executioner is familiar with his trade. There was no mistake. In fact, it seems to me all too practiced: I doubt it’s the first time that the body of an inconvenient nationalist has found its way to an anatomy class.”

They ate the rest of their meal together in silence.
 
* * *
 
The Reno River cut through the city walls and rolled into a network of canals, vanishing under the city’s streets and generally flowing beneath the city unnoticed by most of its residents. But the short walk from the walls, where the river was still visible, was pleasant. Wherever the river exited Bologna was likely a sewer, but its entry was refreshing, and it brought an earthen scent from the hills.

It did not remind Alice of London or of Paris, both of which had vast, rancid rivers that were poisonous to look upon, much less drink. But there was something of Scotland about it. The Water of Leith was potable before it got too far into Edinburgh, and she had been a child in a land of a hundred mountain burns that ran cold as ice even on summer days.

She sat by the river and practiced her will-as-muscle on the deep currents. Water was heavy and changing its flow over stones at the bottom was as tough as lifting those stones out of the grime by hand. There was little true magic involved in this. She did not command the spiora: it was her and the current matched against each other in something like an arm wrestle, something like a dance. Those walking by her saw nothing of interest and felt no disturbance in the air or the earth. For them, she was just a girl staring into a river.

After an hour or so, she would lose the contest. The current was endless. The point of the exercise was not to win, but to resist, and to understand how and when to fail. As a child she could halt the flow of a rivulet of snowmelt for as long as she could hold her breath, watching it pile up against and overtop an invisible dam a handspan high. She wondered what she could do now. She could cause the water to froth and foam anywhere she chose. Could she separate the fish into speciated groups by feel, and herd them like cattle? Perhaps she could stop the Reno altogether and walk along it like a road.

Alice took a handkerchief from her sleeve and patted away the sweat from her brow. Perhaps she could do these things – but not today.

The sun hovered above the western wall. It would soon by evening. She and three other students had been invited to a small dinner at the home of Professor Lombardi. Alice was, she suspected, supposed to make conversation with the professor’s wife, who had been born in Marseille half a century earlier and had not been back to France in thirty years.

She would ask for news and Alice would reply with – what? Disturbing stories of being abducted and almost burned as a witch? How she had spent two months in a cellar in an opium-induced stupor as they tried to pull from her the secret of turning lead into gold? How she had given it to them – knowing that it would turn their bones to liquid and fill their organs with tumours? None of that was dinner party conversation. It would be safer to stick to fashion and literature.

She had brought her copy of Gérard de Nerval’s French translation of Goethe’s Faust and intended to make a present of it. The other invited students – Rossi, Acceto and Endrizzi – would not think to bring a gift of any kind, except perhaps for cheap wine. It was an ideal opportunity to stand out even from the small crowd that Lombardi regarded pleasant enough to invite to his home.

There had been an awkward conversation with Professor Lombardi about a young lady wandering the city unaccompanied at night, and Endrizzi had volunteered as her escort. To Alice, that felt like the lamb defending the virtue of the lion, but there was nothing to be done about it. Endrizzi had agreed that she could meet him at his lodgings, as they were somewhat mid-way between Alice’s house and Lombardi’s. In truth, she had left several chemical experiments that would continue to process for several days, and she did not want Endrizzi to ask awkward questions about the source of the mysterious smell of sulphur. (It was caused by a large quantity of sulphur).

Endrizzi’s apartment was the top floor of a dilapidated four-storey building that was home to at least six families, Endrizzi, and the building’s landlord. A section of roof tiles was missing and had been substituted by a square of black tarpaulin. The front door often stuck, as she knew from experience, and the second step on the staircase was missing and had been replaced by piled-up dirt and rocks.

She slipped between two young children playing on the top landing and knocked on Endrizzi’s door. It opened to reveal half of the young man’s face.

“Give me a minute,” he said. “I’m not decent.”

Alice smirked and said, “I don’t know what difference a minute will make.”

Endrizzi stepped away from the door but left it ajar.

“There’s a seat outside,” he said. “I will meet you down there.”

“I’m not an old woman, and if I was you shouldn’t have had me climb up here in the first place. Professor Lombardi will expect us in fifteen minutes.”

“I know,” he called, his voice muffled by the sound of some item of clothing going over his head.

“This is a very gracious offer,” Alice said. She leaned her back against the wall and smiled at the children sitting on the floor engaged in a game of Tarocchino Bolognese. She did not understand the rules well enough to know who was winning. “You must thank him for inviting you. As soon as you meet, and then again before you depart.”

“I do have manners.” There was a hopping sound as Endrizzi put on one leg of a piece of clothing.

“You have the manners of a lord because your father is a lord – which is to say you have no manners at all. You are like a cow: perfectly acceptable in a field but awkward at all other times and in all other locations. Professor Lombardi is the son of a cloth merchant—”

“How do you know that?”

“I asked.”

“Oh.” Endrizzi sounded surprised. “Well, my manners are better than those of some cloth merchant.”

Alice tutted. “Nothing could be further from the truth. Lombardi has bourgeoise manners – which is to say excellent. He is conscious of his social position, which is, in fact, beneath yours. He will display his manners tonight as a sign of respect and he will be insulted if you don’t reciprocate.”

“I thought this was supposed to be fun.” There was a solid thud from inside as a man-sized object fell heavily on a floor-sized object then got up again. “It’s fine! I’m fine.”

“Tonight will be fun. Don’t worry. Just make sure you do everything right. You must compliment his wife on the appearance of their home and remark on how much you enjoy the food. At a suitable point you must ask her about their son’s medical practice in Ravenna.”

“How do you—? Never mind. But presumably it’s going well, and you know, so I know, so why am I asking?”

“This kind of idiocy is why Italy hasn’t been a country for thirteen centuries. It doesn’t matter how it’s going. You ask the mother about the son, I will ask the father about the daughter, and whatever they tell us we will be most impressed.”

“What if both of their children have recently died under tragic circumstances?”

“Then their deaths will be very impressive. What an impressive death – you must be very proud. I hope one day to die half as impressively. And so on. When Signora Lombardi compliments you on your brother becoming a bishop, you must appear to be very happy about this—” Endrizzi groaned loudly. “You must appear to be very happy, and you must thank her.”

“Perhaps I could open my wrists with a knife instead?”

“You aren’t good enough as a surgeon to open a second wrist with a hand that you’ve already butchered.”

After a brief silence, Endrizzi replied, “That is fair.”

“Say it after me. Thank you, signora, you are very kind.”

“Thank you, signora,” Endrizzi mocked her accent. “You are very kind.”

“I will pass on your congratulations to my brother.”

“I will fucking not!”

The children playing cards giggled.

Alice repeated, “I will pass on your congratulations!”

“I will pass on your congratulations to Lucifer himself, on infiltrating the church with one of his greatest devils, and soon shall I see him, for the seventh seal is broken and judgement is at hand.”

Alice continued, “To my brother whose love shines upon me like the golden light of the morning sun and the infinite grace of Jesus Christ combined.”

“You have come directly from hell to torture me.”

“Good God! If I had a father who was a count and an older brother who was a bishop, I would already be married to a handsome Duke. Or to a man who owns a dozen mills! You have no idea how lucky you are, Endrizzi. Lombardi wants to help you, and when the time comes he could place you – with a single letter – in any hospital within three hundred miles. You have been given a ladder – all you must do is climb it.”

He chuckled and replied, “I didn’t think you the marrying kind. Haven’t you turned down five offers already this year?”

“From men who are going to be doctors – if they aren’t beaten senseless by moneylenders. I’m going to be a doctor, Endrizzi. I don’t want to be married to some… to someone who—”

Endrizzi’s face appeared in the gap in the doorway. He grinned wickedly and was now fully dressed. “Who what? Ah! Say it! Someone who’s not as clever as you? Who’s not going to be as good a doctor as you?”

“I am not about to marry beneath me.”

“Principessa!” Endrizzi slipped out of his room and took her face gently in both of his hands. “There is no man above you.”

Alice frowned and stepped away, saying, “You flatter me.”

“I did not mean to. I meant to warn you.”

The door to Endrizzi’s room opened and a man exited and began to immediately descend the stairs. Alice caught only a glimpse of him – tanned skinned, simple clothing, a red neckerchief – before he had reached the landing on the floor below and moved out of sight.

Endrizzi took a key from his pocket and his hand shook as he locked the door to his rooms. Still facing the door, he took a breath, then turned back to Alice with an affected smile.

“Shall we go?” he said. Alice nodded and followed Endrizzi. The street outside was now lit by the small windows of houses, and the sky had revealed its brightest stars. She took his arm as they walked.

“You would like Paris,” she said.

Endrizzi replied, “I like it here.”

​Alice said, “This is not Paris.”

The Sculptor of Frog Lane continues to be enormous fun to write and has sailed by 35,000 words this week. My instinct is that this will be slightly longer than my previous novels - all three of which were around 100k-110k.

In chapter three, John has just been made to pay for entry to the Great Exhibition to avoid being caught stealing the money he used to pay for entry to the Great Exhibition. Although the world of this novel exists in an alternative history, all the displays John visits are real and were present in 1851, including Samuel Colt, leech-powered weather prediction, and the invention of emojis.

Yes, emojis were invented before email, the internet and mobile phones. Intrigued? It's almost as if that was my plan. Read on...


III – Thursday, 1 May 1851
 
“But where does the key go?” the elderly gentleman asked, pointing to the pocket watch that lay in his palm and which he held as if it were delicate as a quail’s egg.

“Ah, monsieur! That is our innovation. If you pull gently on the stem, it moves into the first position where you can turn it to wind the watch.” The vendor’s accent was a muddle, with English being at least his third language.

“Oh my, I say, that’s a clever thing.”

“And if you pull slightly farther, you hit the second position, where using the same mechanism it is possible to change the time.”

“So there’s no key at all?” the elderly gentleman said, finally arriving at the conclusion he had been given two minutes earlier and was written on a sign above the stall – keyless pocket watches.
A selection of the watches were on display and a good deal of effort had gone in to polishing the brass casings so that they shone like gold, and ensuring the glass was free of smudges.

“No need for a key, and no more scratches on your watch.”

“Cunning device. Very cunning.”

John thought about stealing one, but it was early, and the man had yet to make a sale. The watch would be missed and the boy who stole it would not. John looked out of place. He looked obvious. He hoped none of the rich and powerful of British society were inclined towards impulsive petty theft, because he would be the one the police would snag for it. The old man could stuff his pockets so full of watches that he ticked and just point at John.

He found the watches interesting in general, as well as professionally. As explained, he could see the clear benefits of having a watch key that was built in. He’d stolen four or five watches that were missing their keys and – because they wound down – he’d had to take a lower price for them in case they were broken. These new watches were guaranteed.

John was less impressed by some of the other displays. A gentleman calling himself Dr Merryweather had invented a Tempest Prognosticator. To the uninitiated, the device looked an awful lot like twelve jars full of leeches. But according to the doctor, depending on how the leeches moved within the jars it was possible to predict the weather. How did the leeches know?

“Leeches, being mostly composed of liquid, are more sensitive to changes in temperature and barometric pressure. A marvel of nature: the leech can tell when a stormfront is approaching more reliably than any scientific instrument known to man.”

John studied the jars and asked, “How is it that some of the leeches are at the top of the jars predicting storms, and other leeches are at the bottom of the jars predicting good weather?”

Dr Merryweather displayed that effusive easy smile that was a reliable predictor of someone being a liar. He said, “The leeches at the bottom aren’t predicting good weather, they’re just not predicting a tempest.”

“Are they working shifts?” John asked.

Dr Merryweather leaned in and, still wearing the same smile, said, “Maybe they’re tired. Why don’t you fuck off before I clout you, there’s a good lad?”

John had been threatened better, but there was plenty elsewhere to draw his attention. There seemed to be no shortage of aspiring inventors who wanted people to know they were fully cracked. As a notice in the Times would have achieved the same thing, inventors must have derived a thrill from standing in front of strangers and seeing the realisation in their eyes – they were talking to an honest-to-goodness lunatic.

Amongst the maddest and most entertaining was Mr Smith’s Comic Electrical Telegraph. What it resembled was a human head in a birdbox. But Mr Smith’s elucidation made it clear that this object was the future of telegraphy.

“Imagine,” Smith began, “two old friends separated by an ocean. What is it that becomes friends more than anything else? Why – humour. It is laughter than marks us apart from the animals, and shared jokes that distinguish friends from strangers. But how can these two old friends truly share a joke without the proper context, without the face of the other person? It cannot be done, it cannot be done – until today. G R Smith’s telegraph transmits not simple words – but entire expressions!”

Smith pressed a button on a control panel before him and the head in the box sprang to action, generating a ratcheting noise and twisting its sackcloth flesh into something that could have been a smile. At the pressing of other buttons, the face displayed other emotions, all exaggerated, approximate and grotesque.

John hooted laughter.

“In the not-so-distant future,” Smith continued, “every home in the country will contain its own telegraph machine and its own mechanical electrical face for the conveyance of jokes, japes, expressions, and emotions of all flavours.”

John knew boys who were runners for telegraph stations. There were more of them each year, taking short, printed notes out and – if they were lucky – earning a tip and coming back with replies. The first central telegraph station had been built in London in 1850. Previously, all telegraph stations sent a message from one point to another along a single physical wire between the two locations. Now an exchange could route a signal from any location to any other location the exchange was connected to.

However, there were only a small number of telegraph stations in the city. John couldn’t say precisely, but he guessed there were fewer than a hundred, and there was not a single private home that had a telegraph. It was possible that Victoria had them at Windsor and Buck House for secret government business – or so she could tell the butler to put the kettle on. But queens, castles and palaces were different. Mr Smith’s telegraph messages would still need to be taken the final mile by boys who would have to remember the face produced by the machine and recreate it for the recipient of the message. It did not sound like the sort of work that would generate tips.

While John did not expect Dr Merryweather or Mr Smith to sell anything, the Colt Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company had come to do business. The business’s ledger had been left casually open on the glass display. Not close enough that it could be read, but there had clearly been pages of orders.

He had seen guns before. Former soldiers brought old rifles home from the Anglo-Sikh War – some were their own weapons, and a few were exotic and unreliable designs captured from their enemies. Every other pub had some ancient firearm from the English Civil War rusting quietly over the bar.

The Colt display did not include anything John was familiar with. Handguns gleamed. Mother-of-pearl handles shone. Steel glinted in the afternoon sun. Pistols inlaid with gold seemed like piled pirate treasure in their velvet-lined polished wooden presentation boxes.

“How do you do, young man?” The accent was American, the voice was deep, and it came from a portly man with a full beard and moustache.

“Very well, sir,” John replied. “How are you finding the weather in England?”

“Oh, it finds me,” he said. “Can I show you something?”

“Show me? I don’t think I can afford any of these, sir, begging your pardon.”

Normally when he was interested in buying anything, John wore an expression of disappointment and expressed frustration – do you call this an apple? I’ve had bigger plums – come to think of it, I’ve got bigger plums. But there was no shame in being awestruck by something you could never have. 

“Well, I am not about to sell a revolver to a child. But there’s no harm in looking.” He threw John a wink and picked up one of the pistols on display. “This is ranger-size; might still be a little big for you. Brand new design. Thirty-six calibre. Fires six rounds.” He passed the pistol to John, who took it with one hand – and it fell straight down, yanking his shoulder and almost pulling him off his feet.

“Grown men use two hands to fire that, son. Here—” the American stifled a chuckle and replaced the pistol in John’s hand with an alternative “—this is a revolving pocket pistol. Thirty-one calibre and more than a smidge lighter, but I’d still use both hands until you got used to it.”

John hoisted the dark metal gun and was able to hold it reasonably steady. The Colt stall had set up a target for people to aim at – though none of the guns had ammunition. John took aim down the tiny iron ridges that served as sights and pulled on the trigger.

He may have whispered, “Bang!”

“Ha! All right, so you’ve got something to learn.” The American moved John by means of soft kicks and pokes so that his stance was formed of triangles – his feet and legs, his waist and shoulders, his arms and hands. “With any firearm, it’s important to understand the trigger isn’t launching anything. The trigger releases the hammer, the hammer strikes the cap, the cap shoots the bullet. If you yank the trigger back, you’ve compromised your stance, and you’re not going to be able to resist the hammer, or the percussion cap, and your bullet can go just about anywhere. Squeeze the trigger. When you’re just starting out, don’t try to be a fast gun – be a straight shooter.”

“Thank you, sir,” John said. Correctly interpreting a subtle cue of body language, he understood it was time to return the gun, which he did with a little reluctance.

“When you’re ready to buy a firearm of your own – buy a Colt.” The American returned the revolver to its place on the stand and visibly locked his attention on another customer.

John smiled and walked backwards into a couple, then hurried off to avoid any further embarrassment. He had never held a gun before and the weight of it in his hand made him feel powerful – also a new experience. He had felt clever, quick, funny, and even wise, but never powerful, and he was both clever and wise enough to understand that feeling made the people who held guns dangerous.

He had roamed the exhibition for the first few minutes feeling glum about his bad luck in being cheated out of an entire quid – which he had stolen fair-and-square. But the Crystal Palace was an Aladdin’s cave of wonders. John had seen things he could barely describe, let alone explain. He had fifty stories to tell – some even less realistic or believable than the steam-powered knickers he had imagined. He wondered if he should patent that idea, since anything, it seemed, was possible.

In the centre of the Crystal Palace, under the high arch of the glass roof, there was a pond surrounded by exotic palms and ferns, and ivy that climbed the ironwork. In the centre of the pond was a fountain that was twice John’s height. A slender pillar of cut and carved glass whose shape vanished into the water that flowed over it, becoming one liquid form, hanging in the air exactly as the Crystal Palace itself appeared to.

A man in a grey suit was sitting on a chair nearby. Aside from the fact that the suit was clean, he otherwise looked as out of place as John did; nobody would have remarked on him digging a ditch in Islington.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said John. The eyes of the man in the grey suit flicked to John, seeing him for the first time, though he said nothing in reply. “Who would have thought of making a fountain out of glass? The best I could come up with was Chinese false teeth… See, they’re made of China—”

“It’s crystal,” he said.

“Oh. That’s just glass though, isn’t it?”

He shrugged, slowly and with a tortured effort, as if his body had forgotten how to be indifferent.

“Are you feeling okay, mate?” John asked. “Your colour’s not right. If you get seasick, maybe turn yourself so you’re not looking at the water.”

The more John looked at the man in the grey suit, the more uneasy he felt. The man’s skin was pallid, as if he had spent weeks in bed recovering from an illness or hadn’t eaten for a few days. He otherwise showed no signs of neglect: he had shaved that morning, his hair was combed, and even at a polite distance John could tell he was clean – except for his boots. His boots were heavily worn, punctured in a couple of places, muddy and generally in a worse state than the fourth-hand pair John was wearing.

The boots were incongruous with the rest of the man, but what John found chilling was his eyes. The eyes of the man in the grey suit were flat and lifeless. John had seen a few dead bodies – most recently that morning – and a few hundred inebriate drunks. They all shared a common quality – they all seemed to be somehow empty. A man who looked like that might go home from the pub and beat his wife black and blue, or kick a dog to death in the street, or never find his way home at all and turn up in the Union Canal the next day.

“I reckon you need a cup of tea,” John said. “There’s a place in here does tea. It’s probably gonna cost you an arm and a leg.”

“Why don’t you mind your own business?”

“You know, I ask myself that all the time.” He had better things to do than try and stop a miserable drunk he didn’t know from drowning himself in a public fountain. Yet he couldn’t quite find either the courage or the cowardice he needed to walk away.

As John debated what – if anything – to do, his sense of smell was overwhelmed by strong foreign odours. It was not unpleasant, but it was so different that it took him a moment to realise he didn’t hate it. A figure in a long, red, hooded cloak had walked behind him going towards the fountain. John turned to watch as they stepped over the stone rim of the pond and into the water.

No – not into the water. Onto the water.

The figure pulled down their hood revealing a cascade of blonde hair curled around their shoulders and she looked left and right, seeking something or someone in the bustling crowds.

Her face was how he would have imagined a Russian princess to look. Her eyes were a captivating, brilliant blue, and her lips were the colour of fresh blood spilled in snow. She was the most beautiful woman John had ever seen.

She was still mostly facing away from him, but he saw her reach under her cloak and grab an object which she held with both hands. His pickpocket’s instincts told him it was not much larger than a teacup – though he couldn’t get an eye on it.

The man in the grey suit beside him stood up, and John noticed mirrored movements. Two… three… four other men, all in matching grey suits, were now standing amongst the crowd. They were still and attentive, and their empty eyes tracked the people milling around them.

The woman in red reached both of her arms above her head. In her hands she was holding a glass cube, perhaps four inches wide on each side, and John watched in stunned amazement as she took her hands away and the cube remained floating in the air. Its stillness was disturbing. If it had been hanging from a line, it would have spun in place. Instead, the cube seemed to have been inserted – like a brick into the side of an invisible building, or a key in a lock.

“Come now, Miss. You can’t stand in—” The police officer had approached on John’s left, and he saw the man in the grey suit move swiftly to put himself between the officer and the woman in red.

John watched as the right arm of the man in the grey suit swelled impossibly. Veins stood out on the back of his hand that were as thick as John’s fingers. The arm more than doubled in breadth from the shoulder all the way down to the hard, white knuckles, and the fabric of the suit expanded as the flesh inside it had.

The officer had not seen it happen and on being approached he managed to say, “What’s all—?”

The man in the grey suit grabbed the officer by the throat. His fingers were long enough that they closed around the back of the neck. And he squeezed – once – violently. The sound was of so many little bones breaking, and of solid flesh suddenly becoming fluid and squirting between the gaps in those fingers. A pint of blood was spilled, and John felt some of it splatter on his face.

When the officer was released, he fell to the ground. His top hat rolled away, and his head flopped backwards, with the remains of his neck stretching out like an empty sack that had once contained raw meat.

Ten people screamed at once. John didn’t know if he was one of them.

A yellow-orange vapour had filled the air. It was billowing in all directions from the floating cube, some strands going directly up and through the glass roof of the building, while others went straight down into the water and the earth below. John tried to swat away a strand which was penetrating his chest, but his hands could not change the flow any more than his ribs could.

The light in the Crystal Palace was fierce. The vapour glowed brighter than a furnace, so that the cube itself – where the vapour was thickest – was impossible to look at without feeling pain. It was not a pain in the eyes that came from looking into a candle flame, it was a gnawing discomfort in the back of the skull. When John looked towards the cube, he somehow knew that he was not looking at a physical object, but through a hole and into a different place on the other side. And he did not know how to look away.

He was falling towards the other side. Becoming stretched out. Becoming thinner. John knew that in a moment he would die. Some vital part of him would snap and a pile of bones and skin would slump to the floor while a transcendent sliver – perhaps his soul – was sucked away to that other place. He was pulled apart for a length of time that was equal to all the days of his life to that point, but not long enough for his heart to beat once.

The light vanished. He saw her fingers close around the cube, pluck it from the air – as easily as a man might pick up a hole – and tuck it away under her cloak.

Another man in a grey suit ran forward into the pond – he looked to be in his forties, with leathery, sun-browned skin and close-cropped, greying hair. Whereas the woman in red stood on top of the water seemingly without touching it, he sank in up to his knees.

“You lying witch!” His yell came from the pit of his stomach. It was more like the cry of a sick child than a man. Its emotion was naked and furious. His right hand pulled a slender white dagger from inside his suit jacket, and he swung it an arc over his head towards the chest of the woman in red. John heard the impact and watched breathlessly for a reaction on her porcelain face.

She smiled.

The man pulled back his hand. The dagger was gone. He stared in alarm as he watched the fingers on his hand begin to turn ashen, then black, then fall away from his body in a stream of dust. He dropped into the pond, sending a ripple that overtopped the stone edge on all sides.

The woman in red turned towards John, revealing her dress of diaphanous dress of pale gold which had been embroidered with an array of gemstones. She gestured with her left hand, and next to John the man in the grey suit tensed, as if expecting some supernatural attack. The palm of his gargantuan right arm was flat against the floor and had left bloody handprints on the wooden boards.

There was a roar and a whooshing release of steam that caused John and the man in the grey suit to pivot. From out of one of the displays behind them, a collection of a copper and steel kitchenware – pots, saucepans, ladles, knives and new inventions with preposterously grand names – had conglomerated into the shape of a metal bull. Steam blew out of its nostrils and a leg made from three differently sized kettles began to paw at the ground.

“Thank you for all your help,” said the woman in red. When John turned his head back to look at her, she was gone, and in that same instant John and the man in the grey suit were hit by the charging metal bull and thrown sprawling, spiralling into the air.

John saw the sky pass underneath him three times before he landed on something that broke under him – perhaps a glass display case. He tried to breathe and felt sharp pain across the side of chest, then in his legs, his back, and the back of his head. Then was cold as a January night. His lungs crackled with frost. It felt as if all the blood had run out of his body through a thousand cuts.

He lay still and looked up at the sky. The screams got quieter and had longer gaps between them.

It was a nice day. In fact, it had been the most remarkable day of his life, so there was justice in it being his last. Some people had an interminable and dull existence full of boring work and crushing responsibility. John McNamara was probably eleven years old, and he had laughed, robbed, and feasted at every opportunity God had given him. It had not been the threescore and ten years the Psalms promised, but it had been a life worth the cost of living.

The pain eased until he felt nothing at all. He wished that he had a chance to tell his friends about the things he had seen. He worried about how they would manage without him, and he prayed that God would do His best for them.

John closed his eyes.

And felt a stinging slap across his face that made his left ear ring like a tiny bell.

​“None of that, young man,” said a woman with fiercely red hair and a strong Scottish accent. She peered into his eyes as if looking for something, and John couldn’t tell whether she found it or not. “Yes indeed. Yes, I can fix all of this.”

Here is the third chapter of my untitled Egyptian spy thriller. The young slave boy continues to travel south after the death of his master, the elderly priest Gatsu.

Comments welcome, follow on socials for more. And you can search "WIP" on this site to see other work in progress extracts.

3
 
The quarry was visible from two miles away, a dark red mound rising over the green swathe of vegetation. A gentle curve in the progress of the Nile meant that for an hour he seemed to be walking alongside the stone outcroppings, but it was not until he was closer that he could see in detail their artificial appearance. The red granite was not smooth or eroded; it had been cut many times to remove angular blocks and now looked much like a building itself, divorced from the organic shapes of its landscape.
The quarry was some way back from the river and higher than the Nile would rise during the flood. A flat road of finely crushed sandstone had been laid, reaching into the quarry and proceeding at a constant, shallow gradient until it dipped smoothly into the water.

As he approached, he saw men heaving a stone. It was a mottled red-black, though the dust made it more grey than any other colour. It had been hewn from the rock face of the quarry and had been given only a cursory shaping. The block was two feet long by a foot wide – a size suitable for a bust of the pharaoh or a small statue of a god, such as had been in the temple at Djeba – but it still took four men to pull the stone using ropes. Two more were attentive with long sticks to act as wedges when the stone became occasionally lodged on the road. A seventh and final man supervised them. He moved around the stone, from the front to the back of the team, always watching, alternating commands to keep their burden sliding at a controlled speed.

The men were Nubian. They worked naked except for the supervisor, whose sole concession to modesty was a loin cloth matched with a pair of leather sandals.

Their skin and close-cropped hair shone with sweat, though where the dust of the road had risen it stuck to them and they, like the stone, were ashen.

At the foot of the ramp, a boat had been moored on top of the submerged road. A large wooden post had been sunk into the ground and a second post sat across it at a right angle, secured by a bronze spike as thick as a man’s forearm. It had been created to enable stones to be lifted from the road and onto ships. The wooden posts themselves had been imported from the far south – no trees in Egypt grew so tall or straight.

The supervisor saw him first, but made no acknowledgement and permitted no interruption of the work. The stone was secured. It took all six of the men to lift it using ropes and pulleys, then to lower it down onto a platform on the narrow wooden boat. It creaked and crackled under the weight and sank further into the water. Only when the ropes were untied did the supervisor turn his attention to the boy in the white skirt carrying the heavy pack.

Everyone was watching him, even the crew of the ship – which was a shorter vessel than might be used to carry stone on the Nile beyond the first cataract, and was better suited to travelling up river where the navigable ways were more narrow. The crew were all Nubians and likewise did their work without clothing.

The boy cleared his throat and in his best Nubian he hoped he said, “Hello, I am looking for Artam.”

A deep and profound silence settled, and he found himself scrutinised by unfriendly eyes.

“You are Egyptian,” the supervisor said. He was a tall man – half a head above any of the men around him and all of those would be considered large men by Egyptian standards. He was neither old nor young but possessed the confident command of a man who had earned the respect of others.

“Yes, I am.”

“You are far south, Egyptian.”

There was no war between the pharaoh and the Nubians. They did not have a king, or any great chief who could be said to rule over a scrap of land bigger than what he could see from standing on flat ground. Infrequently the Egyptians took slaves from Nubia, and more commonly they bought the slaves the Nubians took in their own internal conflicts.

He could read resentment in their expressions. Having been powerless and inconsequential his whole life, nobody had ever looked at him that way before – as if he were responsible for those forces to which he was equally subject. By any fair assessment, including his own, the Egyptian boy was more done-to than doing.

Yet, if they killed him, nobody in Egypt would know. And even if it became common knowledge in every household from that quarry to the delta, nobody in Egypt would care.

“I am going farther; to the city of Artam.”

“The city of Artam?” the supervisor repeated. His men laughed, as did the crew of the boat. It was the kind of belly laughter that was not made in amusement, but in acknowledgement of something shamefully foolish.

“Did I say something funny?” he asked, sticking out his chest at little more, holding his head a little higher.

“Yes, Egyptian. You did,” said the supervisor.

He was standing on their road, calling from a distance of twenty feet or so from him to the nearest man. The quarry workers might be tired from their exertions – though they did not seem it, no more so than he was tired from carrying his pack all day. He might be able to out-run them and his furtive glances to the south gave every indication that he was considering it. But then he might not. And running might give them the idea that he feared them – a dangerous idea to give to people who he found so frightening.

What would they do to him? Laugh at him? Kill him? The Nubians at the temple had never said their people were cannibals – but that was exactly the kind of thing a cannibal wouldn’t tell you. Or, on discovering that he was a slave, would they seize him and sell him? 

There was nothing behind him in Egypt. A slave who returned with a story of his master eaten by a crocodile would himself be fed to the crocodiles. This was not a theory, it was normal, occurring perhaps once every two years. The idea was to incentivise the slaves to do everything possible to protect the priests. It also had the effect of encouraging slaves to misrepresent the frequency of crocodile-related deaths at the temple of Sobek – a place that maintained at least half a dozen large crocodiles at any given time.

Master Ibo was not bitten by a crocodile during a careless feeding but had fallen down the stairs a landed in such a way that his arm popped off at the shoulder and – in the panic that ensued – the arm had been lost. Master Merkha accidentally disembowelled himself by drinking too much beer – three slaves had sworn this to be true.

Two masters who vanished at the same time were – so the slaves said – living together as lovers in a house in the desert. Whether it was the forty-year age gap between the priests or the rotundity of a nearby crocodile that swayed the verdict more was unclear, but it was not the result the slaves had hoped for.

He could not go back to Egypt. Not as a slave nor as a free man. He had no trade, no skills to speak of, and his ability to read and write extended only to the letter owl. If he was to seek his fortune, he had to go south. To a place where there were no gods. A land where no-one had any experience of the priests of Egypt.

The boy cleared his throat and asked, “How much is your stone?”

“Why would you need to know the price of my stone?” asked the supervisor.

He tilted his chin higher, lifted his brows slightly, as he had seen so many of the masters do when dealing with tradesmen. “I am a priest. When I get to Artam I will raise a temple there.”

“You are a child,” said the supervisor.

“I am a priest of Sobek the crocodile god.”

“He must be a small god if he has such small priests,” shouted one of the boat crew. Everyone laughed.

“You should learn to respect the god. Sobek is god of the Nile and god of semen.”

“I am the god of semen around here,” the crewman yelled, grabbing his own testicles and shaking them jovially. There was some truth in his statement; the man was, as far as could be judged at distance, possessed of the largest testicles of any of the men assembled. Though this might be proof of his masculinity it could also be a sign of parasitic infestation.

In the temple in Djeba, a slave would have been beaten for speaking impolitely to a priest, or even to one of the noviciates training to become priests. He knew this – it had happened to him several times. Many times. More times than he knew the numbers to count. He had never heard of anyone shaking their testicles at a priest before, but this would surely have earned a more severe punishment.

“Sobek will punish you for disrespecting his priest.” Abstract threats were always useful for priests, because whenever something bad happened to an offender later, the priest could point to it as divine justice. Neglect your donations to the temple, crocodile bites your leg off – justice. Blaspheme against the gods, donkey kicks you in the head – justice. Murder your wife, break a pot – justice. Vague justice was always imminent.

“You are not in Egypt anymore,” said the crewman. He climbed up onto the side of the boat, the better to proclaim his displeasure, and he rose exulting, “Fuck Egypt!”

The others in the boat shouted, “Fuck Egypt!” and other short, easy-to-shout phrases that conveyed an abiding dislike of the land to the north. “Egypt drinks our piss!” “The pharaoh fucks his daughters!”

“Fuck the gods of Egypt!” the crewman continued. “And fuck you, little priest. Fuck all the gods of Egypt, fuck you, and fuck Sobek in his—”

There were only a handful of options regarding the exact form of dishonour the crewman intended for the crocodile god, but no-one would ever know for sure. He was plucked from where he was standing on the edge of the boat – by a crocodile. It leapt up some five feet from the still surface, sheltered from the flow of the river by the moored boat. The booming snap came as its jaws closed on his arm at the shoulder, and when it fell back into the water the crewman went with it.

The splash was large, but the water by the boat was deep. As soon as the spume dispersed there was no visible sign of the crewman. He had been taken so fast he had not even bled onto the place he had been standing. Ten seconds of silence passed and when nothing was said it became clear that there would be – could be – no attempt to save him.

Every head turned back to the shore.

The boy considered what a priest would do under such circumstances, then he did it.

He rose his finger to the sky to focus attention on him and declared, “Justice!”

All the men who had blasphemed against Sobek ran towards his priest and fell into the dust. Apologies spilled from their lips when those lips were not kissing the hem of his shendyt.

“Bread and beer for ten men for five days,” said the supervisor. “For a block that size.”

“Thank you,” he said with a sage nod, though his previous life as a slave had not given him the knowledge to judge whether this price was the height of generosity or the most perfidious depth of thievery.

“I am Ayo,” said the supervisor. “What is your name, priest of Sobek?”

​The boy replied, “I am Gatsu.”

I've been working steadily on The Sculptor of Frog Lane for the last couple of weeks and I'm very happy with how it's been going. Chapter 2 steps further back in time by 12 years and introduces the second narrative character (there will only be two) on her flight from recent disaster in Paris to a new life in Bologna. This chapter also introduces some of the mechanisms of magic to the world, as when we meet Alice Black she is already a skilled magician.

II – July to August 1839
 
Her dress was long, black and plain. It was made of heavy wool, and it had been a great comfort in the Mont Cenis Pass when she crossed the Alps from Lyon to Turin. The Emperor had built the road so that a coach could make the journey reliably in summer, but even Napoleon could not ensure summer would reach into the mountains, and there had been cold wind and rain for the whole of her journey.
​
There was nothing she could do about the temperature of an entire mountain range, and nothing she could do about the temperature of a single carriage without becoming the subject of unwanted attention. What was necessary to cross the Alps was endurance. So she huddled in the coach between two elderly Milanese ladies to avoid being groped by the men travelling with them, and mostly succeeded.

By the time they rolled into the town of Susa on the Piedmont side the temperature had started to rise, and it continued to rise as they wound their way down the Susa Valley and into the Monferrato Hills where it seemed every available hillside was covered by vineyards and dotted with an occasional village or farmhouse.

In Paris she had heard artists remark that the Italian masters had the benefit of superior light. France was dull and when it wasn’t dull it was muddy yellow, but Italy was cloudless and enjoyed long hours of bright white. Though she perceived little difference in the colour of the sun they had on the far side of the Alps, she found the scenery to be profoundly beautiful. During a break when the horses were watered and the passengers stretched their legs and eased their behinds, she found wild tulips with a soft lemon scent growing by the road and picked one, along with several less remarkable local plants, for pressing.

The final leg of the carriage journey was the worst. Everyone was unwashed for a week and dressed for cold weather. When they reached Turin, it was hot; as hot as it had ever been in her years in Paris and far warmer than England. The ladies, who had grown fond of her, gave her a blessing in Italian which she barely understood and – because kindness should always be repaid – she gave them a blessing in return, in Gaelic, which they also did not understand but found equally delightful.

“Slàinte mhòr agus a h-uile beannachd dhuibh.”

From Turin she travelled by boat down the Po River and for the first time in a month she felt like she was in charge of her own mind. The boat had the dual advantage of being faster down-river than a carriage and far more comfortable. With nothing else to do for two days, she re-read books and worried proactively. She could not allow herself to worry about the chaos she had left behind in Paris. She knew, with reasonable certainty, that her friends were dead. She was entirely alone in the world for the first time, and she moved towards a dim hope. Bologna meant safety for a time, and perhaps a future.

At Ferrara she swapped back to a carriage for the final day of travel. She wished there had been a minute to spare for the art and architecture. For the food. Or a week to find better clothing. Her dress was ideal for her memories of the short, cold, wet summers in the north-west of Scotland, but was smothering for an August day in Bologna. In the city, she made temporary arrangements for accommodation at a lodging house charging more than it deserved. As the brilliant white light of the day faded to orange and red, she took a cold bath in her room, barricaded the door, and slept heavily and dreamless in a real bed.

Nerves prevented her from eating in the morning. She inspected her dress – still her only dress – and did what she could to repair it. Her mother had been better with material – she could spin sackcloth into silk with enough time – but her mother’s daughter could at best smooth out the ruffles, remove the bobbles, and make the rather drab fabric seem new. It was as much magic as she had permitted herself to use since she left Paris and she felt her knuckles pop with the exertion. Practice made perfect, but before then practice made good enough, and she was out of practice.

From the moment she descended the stairs from her room she was the subject of whispers and stares. She held herself taller and moved more smoothly, and by this artifice she tried to seem older than she was and more confident than she felt. It was her red hair – she told herself – that was all. She was just a girl with red hair. And perhaps they found her pretty, in the way that all young women were, in the way that all distinction had its appeal.

She did not feel pretty. The short walk from her lodging house to the Palazzo Poggi had left her with colour in her cheeks and sweat dripping down her back. She clasped her reticule with both hands and fidgeted, reassuring herself that its contents had not vanished in the minute since she last checked.

The Palazzo Poggi was a building of pink plaster and cream-coloured stone that had been built almost two centuries earlier as a splendid home to the Poggi family in the heart of Bologna. It had since become the central building of the city’s university. Though the university had existed in some form for more than seven hundred years, it was initially just some men in some rooms and over time it had acquired grander rooms and even some buildings to put them in. By 1839 it was a collection of adaptations and donations of various ages and varying suitability for academic instruction of which the Poggi family’s home was the most impressive.

At the high arched door to the entrance, under cover of the arcade that ran the full length of the front of the building, three young Italian men exchanged pleasantries. Their clothes were made from rich silk brocade, and all wore court swords and flamboyant hats – one with a scarlet band that supported several ostrich feathers.

She skirted around them awkwardly and found her way to a hall that was both crowded and quiet. More than a dozen plainly dressed young men, ranging from late-teens to mid-twenties, stood in a queuing system before four older men each behind a small desk. When called on to speak each of the applicants’ voices were hushed, mindful that anything they said could be overheard. The loudest sounds were the scratching of quill pens against paper.

“Excuse me,” she said in Italian to the man closest to her, and she was determined not to notice when all eyes in the room locked onto her. “Which line is for applications?”

He whispered, “They all are.”

“Which one is for medicine?”

He nodded to the line to his left and she smiled and side-stepped into the correct queue behind two others. To avoid making eye contact with anyone else, she deliberately studied the painted ceiling, which was as magnificent as any she had seen in Paris and might as well have been plain white for all the attention it was receiving the prospective scholars. Nine panels depicted key scenes from the Odyssey; directly overhead a cyclops held a boulder the size of a man’s head, poised to crush two figures that cowered before it.

She knew the story of the Odyssey well; it had been one of the primary texts from which she had learned ancient Greek, and it was the first time she had encountered a story that looked a little like real magic.

In the Odyssey, the magician Circe was said to be able to turn men who displeased her into animals. Using herbs and sorcery, she transformed sailors into pigs and kept a menagerie of former humans on her island. If that had ever been true, the magic required to change the shape of a man had long vanished from the world.

But Circe’s enchantment of Odysseus’s crew was not her first lesson on magic. She had been learning all her life.
On her grandmother’s knee she learned the word that iron fears and watched as the old woman lit and extinguished the reed lamp with just a touch of her fingers. Her mother had never learned to read in any language, but she taught her the secret name of the north wind, and how to call back a lamb that was lost. From her aunt she learned Coulomb’s Law – though her aunt had never heard of Charles-Augustin Coulomb and did not know the meaning of the term electromagnetism. Those women knew deep truths about the world which they could only describe in folklore and song, as the truths had been described to them for unnumbered generations.

The magic of her infancy had been poetic and imprecise. Those that spoke the incantations did not think of themselves as sorcerers, as a bird does not think it remarkable to fly through the air. When the soldiers came, it did not occur to them to raise a hand or speak a word in self-defence. A hand that might pull lightning from a clear sky. A word that might turn a bullet in flight.

When they were killed, she found all their wise lessons to be cold comfort; their ancient understanding of the world to be insufficient. The child of the wild women was taken south, where there were no lambs to call home, and the old north wind could no longer hear. But the candle came to light just as the reed once had, and the truth abided.

“Who are you?” asked the man behind the desk. He was leaning to the side to look at her around the two people in front of her. He looked like a shrew, if shrews were notoriously unkind. His eyes were narrowed even though he wore spectacles pinching his nose, and his bushy brown hair was swept back to disguise a large bald patch.

She managed to pull herself up one final half of an inch and replied, “My name is Alice Black.”

“I do not know this name.” He frowned in irritation. “Why are you here?”

“To study medicine,” Alice said. She retrieved the bundle of letters wrapped in black silk ribbon from her reticule and advanced, holding them before her and thrusting them into the man’s hands.

“You are applying to study here? How old are you?” He looked down at the letters as if they were entirely alien and made no move to inspect them further.

“Sixteen,” Alice said.

“You look fourteen.”

“I am sixteen,” she repeated. “To the very best of my knowledge.”

“Sixteen is too young,” he said and shook his head. He waved the bundle of letters at her with terse rejection, but she would not take them back. His frown deepened and he dropped the letters on the very edge of his desk and watched as they tipped towards the floor.

Alice caught them – urgently, as if they were made of porcelain and might shatter upon the tile floor. She snapped, “The university regularly admits students at sixteen.”

“Signorina, please.” He smiled at her and made a shooing motion with his hands. “Go back to your home. Find a husband. Perform as much medicine on him as you like.”

She allowed the chuckles and smirks of the men in the room to peak and ebb before she replied, “Signore, if you are not authorised to approve my admission, I must speak to the person who is.”

“If God wills it, I will admit you,” the man said. He cupped a hand to his ear and looked up for a second, then shrugged with mock sadness. The laughter resumed, louder and bolder than it had been before.

“I have written to the Secretary of Admissions, and I have written to Professor Medici.”

“Did you receive any replies inviting your application?”

He could see the answer before she said it and she replied grudgingly. “I was not able to wait for a reply.” The laughter around her was stinging. “I came from Paris and had to travel immediately to make admissions.”

“Then, mademoiselle, you have had a wasted journey. Perhaps,” he said – and now that he had enjoyed some fun with her there was a note of compassion in his voice, “in a few years.”

“I wish to speak to the Secretary of Admissions.”

“There is no such person at this university. Each department manages its own admissions. I am medicine, this is law—” he indicated the queue to his right “—and so on.”

“Then I wish to speak to Professor Medici.”

“I do not have him in my pocket. If you find him, you can speak to him.”

“I am here, Antonio.”

There was a silence that came as suddenly as an intake of breath. Every prospective scholar rediscovered their serious face. From an adjacent chamber, a short, white-haired and fine-featured Italian man had emerged.

“It is quite impossible to get any work done when there is a commedia dell’arte performance taking place in the next room. Someone was looking for me?”

“This young girl,” indicated Antonio – the clerk responsible for registering medical admissions.

“Alice Black, Professor,” she said. “I wrote to you in advance.”

“Your Italian is bad,” Medici said with simple, easy cruelty.

“It is,” Alice said. She swallowed physically and a measure of her pride went down too. “I speak Gaelic, English, French, Latin and Greek with fluency, but I have had few opportunities to learn Italian.”

“You did not think it necessary to learn Italian to live in the Papal States and study at the University of Bologna? Ah – I see.” It was not difficult to read Medici’s assumption: she had intended to study at the University of Paris, and Paris had closed its doors to her. “You have references?”

Alice pressed the bundle of letters into Medici’s hands. He unwrapped them and began to study each in turn. Progress on all other admissions had come to a halt.

“Your tutor speaks highly of your gift for mathematics. You were educated separately in Greek… but with similar praise. Both of these, of course, we would need to examine here. I do not know these instructors.”

“Of course,” Alice said. She had expected that she would be examined on all the claims made in her references and she was untroubled by the thought, since everything they said was true.

He paused on the third letter in the bundle, read it twice, and considered her with his sharp and penetrating gaze. Medici had been a professor at Bologna for thirty years and must have received endorsements and personal recommendations from every notable person in southern Europe.

He asked, “How did you come to have a personal reference from the Archbishop of Paris? You are a relative? His niece or – daughter?”

“His Grace and I are not related, unless it is through Adam and Eve. I was of assistance to the archdiocese and the nature of that assistance is under confessional seal. I’m sure you understand.”

“I do not, but I am at least intrigued.” Medici continued reading the other letters but spoke of the reference from the Archbishop. “His sponsorship did not persuade Paris to admit you? De Quélen is a traditionalist. Has France descended so far that an Archbishop in good standing with the mother church cannot get a bright girl an education?”

“Local politics,” Alice lied. She might have intended to study in Paris – though the university was less egalitarian than Bologna – but she had never applied. “I think his sponsorship made my admission in Paris less likely.”

In France the July Monarchy managed pressures from still-existing revolutionaries and traditionalists, it promoted Bonapartists, and it was in thrall to a powerful merchant class. Louis-Philippe, in the manner of all French kings for three hundred years, sat upon a throne of temporary economic prosperity. That he styled himself the Citizen King did nothing to stop talk of revolution in every café in Paris. The often-foretold revolution would come when famine returned to France – and that change would likely sweep away kings altogether, as the Americans had, and formally separate the enduring French Catholic church from their basket case state.

All this was true and sufficient as an explanation for anyone who was not French, but it was not her reason for leaving.

Medici folded the letters and returned them to her. Speaking to Antonio, he said, “We will examine her in two weeks.”

“You will admit me?” Alice said, pleased but also surprised.

“We will examine your qualifications,” said Medici, his tone cold. “Here, two weeks, the same time. Everyone else should try to keep the noise down.” Without further remark he left through the same door he had arrived through.

Antonio coughed and took a printed sheet from a small pile. He said, “The examination fee is five scudi, which must be paid in advance. The tuition costs for the study of medicine are sixty scudi this year. This amount must be paid in advance. You will require your own copies of four texts for the first year and you must have your own surgical tools—”

“Where do I—”

“Through the university. The details are here.” He handed her the printed sheet. “You will also require glassware and materials for pharmacology – everything is listed.”

Alice totalled the amounts in her head. It was just over a hundred scudi – the silver currency of the Papal States used in Bologna – or around five hundred Sardinian lire. The exchange rate depended on the quantity of silver in the coins. In any currency it was around half the wages a newly qualified Italian doctor might expect to make in a year; far above the salary of any ordinary Italian craftsman – and this was before she had paid for accommodation and food.

She nodded. To herself she muttered, “Rooms. Glassware. Lead.”

“We will see you in two weeks, mademoiselle.”
 
* * *
 
The most pleasant solution would have been to stay at a lodging house where she could easily obtain meals and where basic cleaning would be done for her. Two large rooms to separate sleep from practical work, near her classes, with good ventilation and a view of something – whatever they had in Bologna that people looked at, she would have liked a view of it.

But what she needed was a basement. Ideally a sub-basement. Something built into the side of a hill with solid rock on all four sides, or soil that was rich in boron. Alice accepted that even the most informed of landlords would not know the chemical composition of the earth surrounding the basements of rental properties, and she did not have time or equipment to check.

After two days she found the best fit. A narrow, four-storey building tucked into an even narrower alley. Having lived in Paris for several years, Alice immediately recognised the utility of the alley as a workplace for prostitutes and robbers, a convenient latrine, and a popular location for murders. Perhaps because of these charming features, the house also had a very solid door, and bars on the small ground-floor windows.

What it lacked in pleasantness, it made up for in basement. Down an L-shaped stair barely wider than her shoulders was a vaulted wine cellar than ran under the alley and the adjacent properties. It was probably as large as the entire rest of the house combined. The walls were made of unglazed red clay bricks without pattern or ornamentation, but they had been well-set without too much mortar and the walls were cold and dry to the touch on all sides. It did smell as if the rats in the street had been using the basement to store their plague dead, but other than that it exceeded her expectations.

She would have her bedroom on the top floor, in the single room whose narrow balcony provided her with a view of the murder alley below and the sloping clay tiles of the opposite building’s rooftop. But she could see the sky and she had sat one evening watching it turn from blue to black with the assistance of a bottle of Pignoletto.

Her laboratory would be in the basement of the property and there would be nothing of any consequence in-between. She would have no salons, no parties, and no social intrigues as there had been in Paris. She would work and she would sleep. Perhaps she would get a cat, but only if the rats became a problem, and if the rats became a problem most likely a cat would show up whether she wanted one or not.

Aside from the evenings, where she read a little by candlelight, her days were filled with preparations.

She had traded all her francs for scudi at a prominent cambisti – a moneychanger – a minute’s walk from the Torre dell’Orologio clocktower in the Piazza Maggiore – the bustling centre of the city. She had made a point of introducing herself, of striking a reasonable bargain, and of assuring the cambista that she would visit again in a few weeks.

There was a skilled glassblower attached to the university who was used to making borax glassware. He had most of what she required in stock and the rest – with the benefit of some technical drawings – he was able to provide within the week. It was similarly easy to source lead and to have sheets hammered into hemispheres.

The potters, by contrast, complained about everything. The job was too small, the job was too unusual, the materials were strange, the pay was too low, the job was too large – “how about two nice fruit bowls instead, mademoiselle?” – the time was too short, the weather was too hot. She found her way to a workshop outside of the city, where a mute old man simply nodded, and arrived with what she had requested three days later, packed with straw, in a small donkey-drawn wagon that he had walked beside.

The mute potter’s payment all but emptied her purse. Whether her process in the basement was successful or not, she would go to bed hungry that night.

Her laboratory was complete – at least, as much as it needed to be – two days before her examination date, and she began work in the early evening by dissolving a quantity of lead in heated nitric acid, guessing the proportions as best as she could without scales – which she could not afford. She had assumed the university’s supply of nitric acid would be pure and strong enough, and she was relieved when it was. She captured the gas that was released, cooled it and dissolved it in water to prevent the process from killing her. That had been a painful lesson which had left her with a rasping sore throat and a wheezing cough that lasted for months.

After a few hours, what remained in the glassware were small cubic crystals, which she scraped out of the vessel and placed into a crucible. It was too small an amount to guess by feel, but by eye Alice estimated she had perhaps sixty grams of crystals, to which she added water and stirred until they disappeared into a completely clear solution. It smelt of nothing. She had no idea how it tasted, because it was certainly poisonous.

In one corner of the basement was the device of her own design. She called it the catalyst chamber – which was a grand title, though its purpose was to do nothing. A hemisphere of clay sat on the floor. It was hollow inside with walls that were three inches thick, made with a heavy mix of boron in the clay, and it had been wrapped on the outside with a tight-fitted sheet of curved lead that was around one sixteenth of an inch thick. A second hemisphere, an exact duplicate, was suspended from a pully so that the two halves might be combined into a sphere.

Alice placed the crucible into the centre of the catalyst chamber and slowly lowered the top half. She had to rotate the top by hand until it ground to a close fit and then she placed a lead band around the join and pulled it closed with leather straps and buckles.

The half of the process that could be done by chemistry alone was complete.

“Appare!” she commanded, and at her will the gossamer wisps of orange-yellow smoke appeared. It was normally invisible, and it drifted over the world shifting through all physical matter, moving through animals and people and lead plates as easily as air. It was present deep under the earth and on top of high mountains. But while a person walking through it would not change its pattern or flow in the least, it could be channelled by a magician, it could be harnessed, drawn and directed.

This was the mutable fluid whose presence made magic possible. Alice called the vapours spiora, a mock-Latin term she derived from the Gaelic word for spirit.

All magical spells were in four parts – or sometimes three. It was possible to perform magic without commanding the spiora to become visible, but anything done this way would be imprecise, like sewing with closed eyes. A properly performed spell required spiora to become visible first, and then to be gathered.

There was a limited about of magical potential energy in any one place. Other types of energy could be substituted for spiora in a pinch – with heat being the most readily available. Alice could draw on general environmental heat or localised heat like a fire to cast a spell, and she had theorised that it would be possible to use chemical potential energy in the same way.

The spell Alice was attempting would draw in all the magic around her for several miles. As a result, performing any other spells would be difficult or impossible for several weeks until the flow of spiora returned. Attempting the same thing with heat energy would be impossible. She had approached the calculations once and given up when she realised the constraining factor was not the availability of heat – she could, in purely theoretical terms, lower the air temperature of northern Italy by twenty degrees centigrade to get her the two hundred quadrillion calories of heat energy she needed.

But well before she could concentrate all that heat energy in one place, the crucible, her body, the room, the house, and Bologna would have exploded.

Her body would fail first. Channelling magical energy at scale was difficult, but unless used the spiora dispersed quickly. It did not seem to interact with physical matter even at high concentrations.

Alice completed the second phase of the spell. The catalyst chamber was swathed in thick yellow light that spun and swirled like a dense fog.

The third phase was formation – this was the purpose of the spell, usually the most complex element and where problems, if any, would arise. The spiora needed to be given a pattern to follow. This could be a pattern held mentally, which required the magician to actively concentrate on the spell for its whole operation. But for more complex spells, it was only possible to use written patterns. In this case, Alice had inscribed the soft lead plating with diagrams and runes learned from ancient sources – and a few she had created herself. The magic flowed into these structures as a river follows a path of least resistance. As the spiora found the arcane carvings, the concentration of energy made it seem as if they were glowing and all the while the fog diminished as more of the energy found its place.

The final phase of the spell was activation. Everything until that point had been relatively safe. Alice could, even then, have released the spiora with few and mild consequences. When the spell was activated, she would learn if she had made any mistakes. Though she wouldn’t be able to do anything about them, because the consequence of any mistake in this endeavour would be dramatic and fatal.

There was no magic word. It was the exercise of will-as-muscle. The spell began.

And she was not dead.

Alice breathed a deep sigh of relief and fatigue, and quickly retreated up the stairs, going through the empty rooms and to her bedroom. It was past midnight. The magic would need hours to run its course, and hours more to become safe to touch. As Alice sat on her bed, she felt all strength leave her and she slept that night in her clothes.
 
* * *
 
“Signor Gualtieri, bon de,” Alice said. The greeting was in Bolognese rather than Italian. She had picked up a few phrases and idioms in the regional dialect, having quickly learned that Italian could feel rigidly formal for everyday commerce and marked its user as being of a certain class. Specifically the class that didn’t know how much things should cost.

“Mademoiselle,” Gualtieri said. The cambista rose from his chair and they kissed each other on the cheeks as if they were old friends. Alice paid no attention to the armed guards that stood only three feet to their left and right – this seemed to be normal; for the people who did not annoy the guards, the guards were invisible.

Alice was pleased that Gualtieri had remembered her as the French girl, even if he had not necessarily remembered her name. He invited her to sit at the table by his strongbox and they exchanged brief pleasantries.

“I am shortly to begin studies at the university,” she said.

“Oh! Congratulations,” he said with a broad smile. “I hope to send one of my sons there. The one who is worst with money.”

She laughed. “Indeed. Unfortunately, I will need to part with a small family treasure to pay for tuition.”

“Ah,” he drew in air over his teeth. “What is it now?”

“Sixty a year.”

“Mother Mary. I am in the wrong line of work. You hear that, Marco? Sixty scudi to study at the university.” The guard Gualtieri had spoken to did not react. “He heard. He hears everything. Well, let me see what we can do about that?”

Alice withdrew a white handkerchief and unwrapped the small trinket, holding it out to the cambista.

“Such a thing,” he said appreciatively, though it was clear he had no idea what it was.

“A triskelion,” Alice supplied. “A spiral knot of Celtic design. It has been in the Black family for generations.”

“Gold?”

She nodded.

“Unusual design—” Gualtieri began with an awkward shrug.

“No, no,” Alice interrupted. “I am only interested in the value of the gold by weight. God willing, may you find it a home with someone who has loved it as much as I have, but I will not take you hostage.”

He wagged his finger at her approvingly. “You are a very pragmatic girl. If you were younger, you would make a fine wife for my Eduardo.”

“Eduardo better be the one who is good with numbers.”

He laughed, slapped his thigh, and replied, “Of course, I will have to test its purity.”

She nodded and said, “You do not mind if I observe? To study your practices?”

Alice was familiar with all the methods of testing gold, and with all the methods of cheating those tests, but Gualtieri was seemingly honest. He rubbed the triskelion along a touchstone and then applied a few drops of nitric acid to the trade residue and watched for a reaction – there was none. He had a fine set of scales and a measuring cup which enabled him to determine the density and weight of the item – the results were consistent with pure gold. A strong magnet was run over the item – it did not react. And finally, with permission, he used a short blade to scratch into the surface and found the colour to be consistent. 

“Good quality gold,” he said. He meant that it was the purest gold he had ever seen, but honesty could be overdone. “Forty-one grams in weight.” Alice was pleased by how close her guess was. “Shall we say one hundred and ten?”

“Shall we say one hundred and twenty scudi and it’ll still be the best day you have all week?”

Gualtieri smiled at her offer and replied, “I’m not going to find out you students at the university are making gold out of lead, am I?” He opened his strongbox and began to count the money.

“Signore,” Alice said, “if I know one thing for certain, it is that a thousand years of alchemical study have proved that it is not possible to transform lead into gold.”

​However, if one were careful, clever and diligent, and if one knew the right spell, then it was perfectly possible to precipitate gold from a solution of lead nitrate. If one contained the transformation within a sphere of boron and lead, it was even possible to do without dying in agony a week later. But next time she would smelt in a little silver, so the final product didn’t look too perfect.

My drawing of Connor Maxwell from The Wicker Man Preservation Society. Also my first drawing of 2025.

Here's Chapter 2 of the untitle Egyptian spy thriller. While Chapter 1 was about Gatsu and the slave child, Chapter 2 moves forward in time by about five thousand years and focuses on Maloof and his new boss. Comments very welcome.

2

​​In the years before the Rose Revolution there had been a lot of money to be made building mansions. On the airport road they sprung up in hundreds – conveniently located for people who did not really live anywhere and might need to come and go quickly.

They stood apart from the apartments – which were themselves a world of experience away from the normal accommodations of the city of Cairo and had been designed to meet foreign living standards. As in London – and many other cities besides – these luxurious homes were mostly empty; a few had never been lived in at all. They were investments for people used to owning money rather than making it.

​In Egypt, buying a home would have been unusual until the late twentieth century. By tradition, a great patriarch would purchase a square of land and he and his sons would build the family home. As his sons grew up and married, they would construct their own homes over the first, so each large family might in the space of two generations erect its own tower block. The practice began in mud brick and was continued in concrete and steel. Such family homes were easy to spot; their flat roofs were marked by clusters of rebar rods rising into the air in expectation of the next home and the next generation.
Though it was still common outside of the main cities, the practice had been deliberately crushed in urban areas after a minor earthquake caused six such buildings to collapse, killing fifty people. Though this was all twenty years ago and Egypt, North Africa and the Middle East had changed much in that time.
The success of alternative energies brought about a permanent fall in oil prices and demand. America ceased propping up the House of Saud and events followed a predictable course. It had been inevitable – everyone said so. The former princes of Arabia followed their money abroad: to Egypt, to Paris, and of course to London.
With an end to the supply of petty monarchs with infinite means and limited taste, the construction of mansions on the airport road came to a halt and Egypt experienced, not for the first time, the sad silence that followed a great endeavour.
The company that owned the offices on the Tahrir Qasr El-Einy in downtown Cairo was called Mohammed and Sons. It had never been a partnership of father and sons – the name was a marketing trope intended to inspire trust and discourage anyone from negotiating hard on price. As the fortunes of the company fell, the directors who had named the firm sold their controlling interest. The company flirted with insolvency for a decade. Always profitable enough to stay afloat. Never such a good investment that it attracted any attention from the markets.
This situation continued until one otherwise uneventful Thursday morning when Mohammed and Sons became the most westerly solely-owned subsidiary of the Yangzhou Corporation. Every share was purchased in an hour, mostly through personal arrangements which must – said those who knew about these things – have been months in the planning. Before the company was officially withdrawn from listings on the Cairo exchange, its value had increased by only three percent – not even in the top ten fluctuations for the day.
The Chinese had bought the company almost in secret. They kept the old offices in central Cairo. The post of CEO had been vacant for several weeks – and this they filled with one of their own – but otherwise they kept the staff. And they kept the name.
“Who is this man?”
“What business is that of yours?”
The driver shrugged, “I was only making conversation.”
“Did I ask you for conversation?” said Mr Maloof. “I did not. You are a driver, so drive. When I want conversation, I will go to a . . . someone else.”
The highway from the airport was in parts literally that – an elevated road that ran over low-rise buildings and wound through the grey and cream tower blocks. In gaps between these, one might see a pyramid on the near horizon, still shockingly large; the sandstone zenith of Khufu’s Great Pyramid visible even above modern structures made of glass and light.
Though the city had come to envelope the pyramids, it maintained a respectful distance and the three wonders were always separate: still serene after five thousand years. Different in character from Rome’s Colosseum – a comparatively recent construction – where the Italians had built a curving road that followed the building, getting as close as they could without putting two lanes of traffic through the fighting pit.
Depending on the preferences of the drivers and the width of their vehicles, there were anywhere between three and five lanes of traffic on the highway. White markings – where they had been painted at all – did not serve to meaningfully delineate. A car going too slow for the drivers behind might find itself overtaken on the left and the right simultaneously and where there had been one lane in front of it, there would then be two.
The cars and vans and trucks moved like five-year-olds playing football. Articulated lorries and pick-ups loaded with great piles of goods – by people who had never heard of the dangers each additional straw posed to the camel – jostled for space in an immediate future no further than two or three seconds away.
Though the car horn was employed frequently, it did not convey any information or change the behaviours of other drivers. It would have been equally useful if it had been disabled on all cars in Egypt, or if it had been set by the manufacturers to go off at random intervals whenever the engine was running.
An Egyptian would tell any foreigner that they had proper traffic laws and that these laws were enforced by diligent government officials and taken seriously by a law-abiding citizenry. Any foreigner who had travelled in Egypt would recognise all such assertions as nonsense.
“Conversation is included,” said the driver, “free gratis. You do not want to travel with one of these machines that drive themselves. I heard they killed three people just last week. Maybe four. They are not safe.”
“I did not hear this. Where was this? In Egypt?”
The self-driving car had found it difficult to negotiate any route alongside typical Egyptian drivers. India was having similar problems introducing the system, which was otherwise commonplace.
“He is your boss,” said the driver, ignoring the question. “I pick up a lot of bosses. I think that people do not like their bosses – so I am pleased I do not have one.”
Maloof was fifty and the two sides of his head were balding in an asymmetrical pattern. He dabbed the sweat from his neck with a handkerchief and shoved it back into the pocket of his suit jacket. The air conditioning in the car was on full, but Maloof’s heartbeat was racing. It was mid-day and even though he was not in the heat, he could see it on the other side of the car windows – baking the sand, burning the ground so it would be hotter to walk upon than coals.
“How is it that you have not met this man before?” asked the driver.
“How do you know I have not met him?” Maloof said defensively.
“You are carrying a sign with his name on it.”
Maloof looked at the cardboard sign on the seat next to him. He had spent an hour carefully transcribing and enlarging the Chinese characters of Mr Jonathon Lee’s name from the small image on Google.
“How do you know that is his name? Can you read Mandarin? Are you a spy?”
“What else would you write on a sign except someone’s name? I have been to the airport many thousands of times. This is a normal thing. I think you are overwrought. This man is working you too hard.”
They passed the last of the chain of Hollywood-style signs that marked the approach to Cairo Airport in giant, western lettering.
“I will park the car and come and join you.”
“What? No. You must wait to collect us at the door.”
“I cannot wait at the door; the police will think there is a bomb in my car, and they will shoot me. I will park at a very close spot, very nearby. I know a place. I use it just for very important parking.”
“Well . . . You must never speak to Mister Lee. He is a very important man.”
“He must be if he has business that would interest spies.” 
Sail-shaped buildings stood over Terminal One and an intricate construction of crisscrossing mesh spanned the road, forming an architectural screen that cut out half of the direct sunlight. The car stopped at the arrivals hall, the driver opened the door and Maloof got out and swooned in the heat. He had little fat legs somewhere under his large round belly, and they propelled him with difficulty into the building.
He fanned himself with his sign and searched the boards for the daily flight from Beijing.
Maloof grabbed at a handful of his sparse hair when he saw that the flight had already landed, having arrived twenty minutes early.
He raced off towards the baggage collection hall that served gate nine.
“God,” he wheezed. “Let the baggage handlers be incompetent and surly.”
Maloof’s eyes danced from person to person, searching for a round, yellow face. There was an old woman pushing a cart loaded with three times her weight in luggage and she was Chinese, but not a man. A man pulling on the trunk of a suitcase shaped like an elephant had a balloon head and slanted-eyes, but he was retarded and not Chinese. Otherwise the faces in the milling crowd were the same as Maloof’s – olive and brown and sweating.
“May they be as slow in handling Mister Lee’s luggage as they are in handling mine.”
Maloof paused to lean on a railing next to a picture of a smiling woman in an EgyptAir uniform. EgyptAir flew to sixty-three destinations from Cairo. None of those flights could take Maloof from where he was standing to gate nine.
Over seating areas, four ceiling-mounted television screens locked on the same news channel turned the events of the day into lyrics that accompanied the tune of every day. An enemy of the state arrested. A champion of the people elected. Bombs in Bangalore and refugee boats approaching the unguarded shore. Sometimes those watching joined in – as best they could – adding muttered indignation at a too-fast tempo.
Maloof set off again. Each of his footsteps made a thunderous slapping sound against the floor. People turned to watch him run.
“Does he know something we don’t?” a wife asked her husband.
The husband looked critically at Maloof and replied, “No.”
Then he had come to the end of the domestic arrivals and could go no farther. Border Control checked passports with bored thoroughness and the human traffic was all one-way. Somewhere beyond that point was Lee, or somewhere else in Cairo was a furious Asian who had not been met and escorted by someone from the company he now ran.
“If it be your will, let someone on the plane have died so that everyone is delayed getting off,” muttered Maloof. He stood in the centre of the corridor and held his sign at chest height. Where his sweaty hands touched it, the card had warped and the writing had smudged.
“God is great. Ameen,” Maloof said, and concluded his prayer with an involuntary squeak of flatulence that made a little girl, passing with her parents, frown and put her hand to her face.
Then the trickle of people that came through the security gate turned Chinese.
They were men in their fifties and sixties who walked with their hands behind their backs, surveying the world as if it were their factory that made doll parts or cosmetics or consumer electronics.
They were women of all ages who believed that smiling was what whores did for money, so they did not. Not for a trip to the Forbidden Palace, not for a journey to the Sphinx.
They were whores, following with demure obligation the men who had adopted the expectations of a previous age; of the Japanese, when those men had briefly ruled the world.
They were the young and immeasurably privileged, whose fine dark hair was styled into spikes and angles that were much different and much the same as those their parents had worn.
Maloof oscillated, turning his body and his sign left and right across the crowd, catching every eye, but no-one did more than read it and realise it was not intended for them.
A tall, American-looking man stopped directly in front of Maloof. His expression was amused and from the inside pocket of his jacket he withdrew a black Sharpie and made a quick mark on Maloof’s sign.
“What do you think you are doing?” Maloof said. “You cannot write on a man’s sign.”
“You had made a mistake,” said the man, who spoke Egyptian Arabic with a Baltimore accent. “The first name is Jonathan, with two ah sounds – like Nathan or Nathaniel – and not Jonathon with two oh sounds – like, well, I don’t know.”
“You are a bastard son of a pig!”
The man put the marker pen away and smiled as if he had not heard the insult, but replied, “I believe that would simply make me a piglet. Marriage not being common amongst pigs I wouldn’t think they find the offspring of an unconsecrated union to be shameful. Where I am from, we wouldn’t think of piglet as being a term of anything but endearment.”
“Be on your way, before I call for the police and have you arrested for vandalising my sign!”
“You must be Mister Maloof,” said the man. He offered his hand.
“I will not shake your hand, you criminal! How is it that you even know my name? Did you steal my wallet when you distracted me with your wickedness?”
The man did not withdraw his hand.
“My name is Jonathan Lee.”
“You must take me for a fool. Mister Lee is Chinese.”
“I work for the Yangzhou Corporation, Mister Maloof. I am not Chinese. My name is a coincidence – in the sense that it is similar to a Chinese name, not in the sense that it is my name, because you see it was also my father’s name, and so on.”
Maloof fell to his knees and clutched the sign to his chest, his arms embracing his body. His jaw fell slightly farther than the rest of his body, his eyelids a little less, so that when Maloof hit the floor his expression of horror was level with the plain buckle on Lee’s belt.
“Now pull yourself together,” said Lee. “There’s no need for that.”
“Forgiveness!” Maloof yelled pathetically. “I had no idea, I swear!”
“I believe you. We’ll say no more about it. Let me help you up.”
Maloof shook Lee’s hand and apologised multiple times in Arabic and incomplete Mandarin, alternating forms that were too formal then too familiar. Lee withdrew his hand with calm conviction and left Maloof to straighten his tie and jacket.
“Do you have a car?” Lee asked.
“It is parked very nearby,” said the driver. Maloof jumped at the sound of his voice and left his right knee undusted, a circular patch of pale dirt on his dark grey trousers. 
“How long have you been standing behind me?” Maloof demanded.
“I could not answer that question honestly, Sir; you would be most embarrassed.”
“You are my driver?” Lee asked.
“I am, Sir,” said the driver.
Maloof scowled and said, “This is the driver I have arranged for you.”
“Ah, thank you,” said Lee. “Thank you, Mister Maloof. Shall we go?”
The metallic-black Ford – an executive saloon made to appeal to new world sensibilities – was parked across two disabled spaces a minute’s walk from the airport exit.
“I haven’t seen one of these in a long time,” said Lee. “You’ve kept her looking well.”
“Thank you very much, Sir,” said the driver. “The trick is to make sure you keep on top of the sand.” The driver took Lee’s suitcase and put it in the boot of the car. “Every week I get underneath and clean her with a small brush. As if she were a horse. My father used to own a horse. After the self-driving cars came, we had to put him down – the horse, not my father. It was very sad. He was not even nice to eat.”
“I am sorry to hear that,” said Lee.
“Mister Lee does not need to be bothered with your dead horses,” said Maloof. “I am the one who is paying you, I have heard all these dead horse stories and you will get nothing extra for them from me. Take us to the office and do not speak unless you are spoken to.”
The driver opened the nearest door for Lee, closed it once he had climbed in, and moved to open the other door for Maloof. The fat man’s hand held the door closed and he leaned toward the driver to speak in a whisper. A bead of sweat dripped down from the top of his head to the end of his nose. It dried the same second it hit the ground.
“Do not drive quickly back to the office. Do not take the main roads, take some other road that is slow and quiet.”
“Some other road? Which other road?”
“Am I the driver? No, I am not the driver. You are the driver. So drive.”
Maloof opened his own door and got inside. The car was still cool, though the air conditioning had been off since it was parked. He took the handkerchief from his pocket and mopped at his neck and face.
“Are you from Cairo originally, Mister Maloof?” asked Lee.
“Almost, I was born a little outside, in a town called Benha. There is no reason you would know it. Why do you ask?”
The driver got in and pressed the starter, which for a moment caused hot air to blast into the back of the car before quickly cooling again. The transition elicited sighs of relief from Maloof. Chatter from the radio returned, just louder than the sound of people and traffic. It whispered stories of murder with a lover’s intimacy, though its fearsome nothings were no more remarkable than the rumble of indistinct humanity it crowded out. The car reversed and was soon part of the ant-line of sober-coloured private hire taxis returning to the city.
“No reason,” said Lee. “The place I grew up is very different.”
“I heard that America also has desert.”
“Sure. Out west it’s not so different. But I’m from the east coast. We have winters there: it snows.”
“It snows where you come from?”
“Not so much anymore. We had snow two feet deep when I was a boy, right in the middle of the city. It was faster to take the subway than to walk two blocks. With snow more than waist-high to me, my father carried me to see the Christmas lights around Mount Vernon. And the only place that was open was this one old greek guy, dressed up like Saint Nick, selling gyros out of a van that got stuck in the snow in the day before. I had no idea where his pitch was supposed to be, and I never saw him again. In a way, that gyro was a kind of Christmas miracle.”
“Two feet of snow?” said Maloof, his voice full of wonder. “Why would you ever leave such a place?”
“Travel broadens the mind: it embiggens a person. Jiādà, as the Chinese say. I tell you I never get over racing the sun. I got onto a plane in the morning in Beijing, I flew for what felt like a day, then I get here and it’s only lunch time.”
“Two feet of snow,” repeated Maloof.
“Now, do you have something for me, Mister Maloof?”
“Something for you? Oh yes, of course.”
The back of the Brasilia was spacious. An extension of the driver’s console included a mini fridge with a frosted glass door. Maloof slid a battered leather briefcase from under the front passenger seat and fiddled with the combination locks. Lee put his hand on the fridge door.
“May I have one of these bottles of water?” Lee asked.
“Of course, Sir,” said the driver.
“Do not take one, Mister Lee,” said Maloof, placing his clammy hand on top of Lee’s. “This water is not good for you.”
“It is good water,” said the driver. “I filled it myself from my own tap. My house has the best water in Cairo.”
“I see,” said Lee. “Maybe I’m not as thirsty as I thought I was.”
Maloof released Lee, the briefcase opened with a click and Maloof handed him its entire contents – a slim folder of green card which contained the company’s most recent financial statements and performance information. Lee read them, at first grimly, then turned the pages, searching for something that was not there.
“How many units has the company built in the last year?” Lee asked.
“The market is very depressed,” said Maloof, he made an expansive gesture intended to encompass a broad range of matters which men of the world would surely understand. His face became downturned and affected an expression bordering on funereal.
“I would like a number, please.”
“A number?” said Maloof, again dabbing around his face with the handkerchief – a pointless process, as it was as sodden as he was.
“Yes, if you please.”
“A number,” Maloof said, as if he had never before been asked for such a thing. “If you were to press me for a number, I do not know what I would say.”
“I am pressing you for a number.”
“I would not like to say.”
“I must insist.”
“You insist?”
“I do.”
“Then, only as you are insisting, I would say . . . four?”
“Are you asking me if you built four units or telling me that you built four units? Because I do not know the answer to my question.”
“Yes. I would say four.”
“That is not good news, Mister Maloof. Not good news at all. The board of Yangzhou were under the impression that we were purchasing an operating company, one which had employees who had experience in high-value construction and who were ready to start work.”
“We are experienced. And we have teams of men standing idle, just waiting to be given work. Many dozens of men, in fact.”
“I see,” said Lee. He closed the folder of information. “I should most like to meet the company’s chief government liaison. The person who is responsible for planning and strategic development at the highest level, for making sure we get buy-in from appropriate local and national agencies. Who is responsible for that?”
“Of course, of course. And, ah, what good news I have for you. That is my job.”
“You are the government liaison for Mohammed and Sons?”
“Yes, Mister Lee. The liaison must be a man of tact and subtlety who is at ease in all social situations.”
“I agree. And this is your job?”
“For two weeks.”
“I see. Then I would very much like to also meet with the CFO and the COO immediately.”
“They will both be waiting for you as soon as you get to the office.”
“What happened to the road?” Lee asked. The scenery on the other side of the tinted glass had become rural and rolling, arid countryside with nothing but rocks and the occasional sun-blasted tree to mark the passing miles of rough asphalt.
“This is the normal way from the airport,” said Maloof.
“I have been to Cairo before, Mister Maloof, and this is not the way from the airport to anywhere I wish to go. What is your name, driver?”
“He is just a driver, do not pay any attention to him,” said Maloof.
“Nonsense, tell me your name.”
“Oh no, I am only a driver. Please do not think of me at all. I am beneath you, Sir, far beneath you, and it would only embarrass me to think that a man such as yourself knew my name.”
“Where I am from it is considered polite to know the name of every person who provides a personal service to you, especially if you engage that person in conversation.”
“You must have to remember a great many names, Sir.”
“Faces too. I pride myself on never forgetting a name or a face.”
“Is that so?” asked the driver, making eye contact with Lee in the rear-view mirror.
“It is,” Lee said.
The car braked hard and skidded, moving sideways across the empty road. Lee and Maloof were jostled forward but were restrained by their seat belts and pinned by inertia. Maloof was pressed to the left-hand-side of the car and his short arms could not get purchase on the door of the mini fridge against which Lee had been pushed.
Lee flipped open the frosted glass door. Lodged between the refilled plastic bottles of water was the square barrel and textured handle of a Glock 17 9mm pistol. He pulled it out of the fridge, turned off the safety and brought it level to the driver’s head in one smooth motion as the car came to a halt.
The driver had turned in his seat and was holding a smaller revolver, which he had been able to conceal somewhere on his person.
The driver smiled. His door opened and he flopped backwards and out of the car then kicked the door closed.
Lee tried his own door and found the child safety locks had been engaged. The controls for the electric windows were unresponsive.
“Cover your ears,” Lee said to Maloof. The fat man pushed his palms over his ears while the best Lee could manage was covering one ear with his hand while pressing the other against the headrest of his seat. He fired three times at the glass. A hand-sized section fell out in safe, irregular, broken pieces and he pushed away the rest with his elbow.
Lee reached through and opened his door from the outside. Maloof struggled over the console with difficulty. Lee grabbed the fat man by his lapels and yanked him out, together managing a score of stumbling steps away from the car.
The fireball was hotter than the Egyptian mid-day sun and the force – both a sound and a rushing of air – knocked the two men off their feet and kicked the car inches into the air. It landed with a crash and the alarm sounded once, twice, then those electronics burned-up and the final noise was a throttled fraction of what the alert had been.
But from within the flames the radio managed a few more seconds; breaking into the predictable news to announce the predictable weather, as the wreck breathed black smoke that rose quickly into the cloudless blue sky.
Lee climbed to his feet, leaving Maloof to hyperventilate in the dust. Already a hundred metres away and dodging left and right, the driver was heading for a cluster of structures that might have been a small village or could have been only farm buildings. Heat haze made him a flicker, yet Lee kept his stance solid, and the driver stayed in the Glock’s sight until he was well beyond the pistol’s effective range.
“Bahrain is still burning!” the driver shouted as he ran, his voice carrying over the sound of the fire. “Bahrain is still burning!”
Lee put the safety back on the pistol and slipped it into the waistband at the back of his trousers. He pulled out his phone and activated an app that would summon a self-driving car, then called a hotline number with a Chinese dialling code.
“Wèi,” said a woman’s voice.
“This is Jonathan Lee,” he said in English. “An attempt was made on my life.”
“We are advised,” she said, her voice clear but accented. “Are you in immediate danger?”
“No.”
“Do you require medical attention?”
“No.”
“Standing order number one applies. Go to a place of safety. We will contact you.”
He ended the call and looked at the fat man, who was still face-down, but had progressed from uncontrolled breathing to uncontrolled sobbing.
“Four units is not good, Mister Maloof. Not good at all.”

I mentioned previously that I was working on another project at the same time - alongside my Egyptian spy thriller. This one is set mostly in London in 1851 around alternative history events following on from the Great Exhibition. While it begins very real world and normal, it will eventually switch into a steampunk fantasy. I've included the full text of the draft first chapter below. Comments welcome, and if you want to read more in future, please follow on dfpiii.bsky.social or x.com/dfpiii. Or both. I'll post updates to both. 

I – Thursday, 1 May 1851
 
Charlie found the body first thing and ran up the City Road to get a copper. The other boys waited on the tow path because they had nothing better to do, but soon decided they were guarding the body and made a game of it.

The Regent’s Canal was black and still, and the man floated face down, just below the surface. He had white hair, a long black coat, and his trousers were neatly rolled up to his knees, as if he’d planned to dip himself into the canal only that far.

“What do you think happened to his feet?” asked Aidan. 

“Must have been wearing very fancy shoes,” said John.

“You wouldn’t cut off a man’s feet to steal his shoes.”

​“Of course not,” said John, but with consideration he added, “not unless they were very fancy, and he had tied the laces very tight.”

Michael used the long stick he found to guide the body back into the side of the canal. The current threatened to pull it towards the City Basin where the canal barges transferred cargo with the factories and workhouses of central London.

“Watch out,” said John with false anxiety. “He’s making a run for it!”

“I’ve got him,” said Michael.

“We should say a prayer,” said Aidan.

“We should go through his pockets,” said Michael.

“You wouldn’t rob a dead man!” said Aidan.

John shook his head and pointed up. The canal vanished into a long, dark tunnel that crossed under a good portion of the city. A handful of people had gathered on the bridge above the tunnel’s entrance. Not gentlemen, not ladies, but not the sort of people who would let a group of urchins strip an old dead man to his underclothes. Some would prevent it out of decency, others out of jealousy.

“No chance today, lads,” said John, “but that is a nice coat.”

“What do you know about nice coats?” asked Michael.

“The same thing as anyone with eyes in their head. You could live fat for a month off what he paid for that coat. Wash it in clean water, dry it out, it’s still worth something.” John’s expression was bitter as he thought about the roast beef dinners he was being denied by the watchful crowd. There was always someone in London minding other people’s business.

“Charlie said he’d get a reward for telling the police,” said Aidan.

“Yeah, well, Charlie got kicked in the head by a tinker’s horse,” said John. “He’s lucky to be alive, but he’s not lucky enough to get a farthing for finding a corpse in a canal.”

Aidan was about the same age as John – as far as either of them knew. They were alike in height and weight. On days when the wind was calm and the brown smog settled thick on the brick buildings of Islington, even someone who knew them both well might mistake one for the other. But Aidan had been on the streets in London for less than three months – through a mild spring – while John was passed six years and didn’t remember much of his life before.

“What are you doing to that gentleman?” demanded an old woman from the overlooking bridge. A mote of white spittle flew from her mouth as she spoke and vanished in the air before it reached the water’s surface.

Aidan and Michael hunched their shoulders and shuffled in place under her gaze, but John nudged them and took half a step forward so that the ragged toes of his too-big brown leather boots hung above the water. His actual toes stayed planted on the stones of the canal wall.

“Begging your pardon, ma’am,” he said. “We were debating whether, seeing as how we found the old guy in the water, we should have maritime salvage rights. Or if he belongs to her majesty like the swans do. My associate has gone to find a judge.”

A few of those assembled laughed and one man called out, “He looks like a wreck to me, son!”

“You’re a cheeky little bastard,” the old woman shouted, and seemed to have no shortage of spit to share. Her eyes were wild and never alighted in one place for but a moment. She was, by John’s estimation, not clean or sane enough to be a domestic servant; most likely she was a washer woman or had some other occupation that could be done in solitude.

“On the first two claims you’re correct, but as to the third, I can’t say that I knew my mother well enough to enquire after my father.”

John grinned up at the laughing faces. He hoped the old woman would snap back at him, and he could feel his audience wanted the same. But he also felt a physical tug on his shirt between his shoulder blades.

“Careful you don’t fall in,” said a man with a strong Scottish accent, and he pulled John back by slow inches.

“That’s him,” said Charlie. “That’s the dead man.” Charlie pointed into the water.

“Aye, so I see,” said Constable Macleod. He wore the deep blue uniform and top hat of every Scotland Yard police officer, but had a large, waxed moustache and thick sideburns that were much more unusual. A ruffled copy of yesterday’s Times of London was tucked under his arm.

“You took your time,” said John.

“What’s wrong, is he not dead anymore?” Macleod asked. With John out of the way, the constable took his newspaper and put it on the ground, then knelt onto it, reached down to the water and tugged the body close enough that he could lift the head by its white hair. He peered at the old man’s face for perhaps twenty seconds, all the while his own face stayed expressionless.

“Anybody you know?” John asked.

Macleod dropped the head back and repeated the question. “Anybody you know?”

“Course,” said John. “I killed him myself then stood around and waited for the Peelers. Got his missing feet in my pockets. Search me if you like.” A ripple of laughter caused the constable to raise his head.

“All right, clear off!” Macleod called up to the crowd. “Nothing else to see here.”

The crowd made no immediate movement to disperse, but diminished over several minutes as people remembered they had places to be and discovered there really was nothing else to see.

“You found him when? About an hour ago?” Macleod asked. He stood and returned the newspaper to its previous place, then took a pencil and a small notepad from his jacket chest pocket and began to make notes.

“Yes,” said Charlie.

“An hour and a half,” said John.

“And he was here?” Macleod pointed with his pencil to the spot where the body floated.

“Yes,” said Charlie.

“He was about ten feet inside the tunnel entrance,” said John. “Just about as far in as you can see at night. That’s where Charlie sleeps sometimes.”

“Only sometimes,” said Charlie. 

Macleod frowned and continued writing. “And did you see his feet anywhere?”

“Yes,” said Charlie.

“No,” said John, “and neither did he. We haven’t touched him except to keep him where he is.”

The Regent’s Canal was overlooked on all sides by clusters of small homes – single room and two-room flats in two-storey houses – and large, brick-built factories whose windows were often voids crossed by iron bars or covered by sack cloth or wooden shutters as often as glass. In the City Basin, the thirty or so barges tied up at night were under the care of a watchman. Just beyond the canalside were more homes and any number of taverns and inns, some of which only closed to newcomers at midnight and would disgorge their customers all through the night until they opened to the public again first thing in the morning. There was no guarantee of privacy along this stretch of water.

“He wasn’t dumped here,” John said, more to himself than to the constable.

“Aye, there’s no guarantee of privacy.”

“And it’s not as if the poor old sod walked here.”

“Aye,” said Macleod again, and his eyes went to the darkness of the canal tunnel before he put his notebook away. “Well, nothing to be done about it for the time being. Give me that stick.”

Michael handed over his body nudging tool and Macleod took control.

“You can’t mean to leave him there,” said Aidan.

“No better place for him,” Macleod said and gave the body a tentative poke. “I can’t lift him out myself. He can wait there for a few more hours until the cart shows up.”

“And he can’t take a dead body on the omnibus,” said John. “Not on a policeman’s salary.”

Macleod laughed but smothered the sound with a cough. “We might not have found him until tomorrow. Nearly every policeman in the city is at Hyde Park today.”

“That’s where we’re headed,” said Aidan.

Standing behind Macleod, Michael’s eyes went wide and he threw a threatening expression.

Macleod said, “You and every other man, woman and child in London, unless I miss my guess.”

John cocked his head. There was less noise from the city. Fewer horses. No sound from the pubs. The constable’s estimate might not be far off – perhaps everyone had taken themselves to Hyde Park, even if there was no chance of them getting into the Crystal Palace. 

The normal morning rush saw the pubs of the borough of Islington overcrowded for the first pint of the day. Almost all Londoners drank beer – about five pints a day for a woman, perhaps as much as eight pints for a man. John and his friends took what they could get.

London water wasn’t for drinking. The Thames was a sewer by the time it hit Putney and most wells weren’t much better. Unless boiled, a glass of London well water meant a week of loose bowels. Even the rain was grey and tasted of coal smoke.

If the Islington pubs were quiet, a migration had already taken place.

“Busy days mean heavy truncheons,” said Macleod. “Stay out of trouble.”

“I will,” said Charlie.

“I wasn’t talking to you, lad.”
 
* * *
 
“It’s a quid to get in,” said Michael.

“A quid!” said Aidan. “That can’t be true.”

“Just for today,” said Michael. “Just for the opening. It goes down over time.”

“When will we be able to go?” Charlie asked.

“Never!” said Michael, sounding surprised that even Charlie would raise the question. “Not if it was open for ten years – and it’s closing in the autumn.”

“Oh,” said Charlie.

The opening of the Great Exhibition was scheduled for midday, but well before they reached Hyde Park and well before opening, they encountered the milling crowds making their way there. It had been talked about for half a year. Initially, it was an impossible madness: gathering so many exhibits to be displayed in a custom-built structure made entirely of glass and iron had never been imagined or attempted. It was called hubris – even by those who did not understand the word – and surely it would be a lasting shame on the nation.

Latterly, as the building stretched out over the park, as the panes of sheet glass in place became innumerable, as whole trees were swallowed by the Crystal Palace, what had been impossible began to seem inevitable. The building, so it was said, was the biggest in the world. The largest of any kind. And it had been assembled in only a few months.

The exhibits were still a mystery, but Prince Albert – the architect of the scheme – had determined that they would embrace every aspect of science and engineering, and wonders from every part of the world. That Great Britain could command such an event was a sign of its imperial hegemony, and another shining jewel to add to its collection.

“We’re here to beg and steal,” said John. “Not to look at steam-powered knickers and Chinese false teeth.”

“What would the steam do?” asked Aidan.

“Makes them go up and down faster,” John said. “So the dollymops don’t get caught at it. A thrupenny upright plus a farthing’s worth of coal for the steam engine.”

“You have to include capital costs,” said Michael.

“Didn’t I teach you well?” John said. “Call it a joey for up against a wall, including insurance in case the Peelers turn up. And, if they don’t, you’ve got enough hot water for a cup of tea afterwards.” John used both hands to simultaneously mime having an erect penis and drinking from a teacup with his pinkie out.

“What makes the teeth Chinese?” asked Charlie, who laughed mostly because the others were laughing.

“Easy. Made of China, in China. You don’t even clean ‘em yourself – after you eat you send them down to the kitchen with the rest of the plates. You can get a really fancy set in case you need to have dinner with a duchess. Those ones have got dragons painted on them.”

“I’d really like to see those,” said Charlie.

John put his arm around Charlie’s shoulder. Charlie was a little taller than him, a little broader. Several of the local widows had taken to feeding him as if he were a pampered cat, and it was compounding.

“You’re to stick to begging,” John said, and Charlie nodded. “Who do we target for begging?”

“Nice ladies.”

“Nice young ladies with well-dressed young gentlemen. Women want men who are compassionate, and men want women. With most of these toffs, it’s not their money anyway, so they don’t care.”

“Please miss, can you spare a penny for some bread?” Charlie said, his tone well-practised.

“Bigger eyes,” John said as he released Charlie and put some distance between them. “Pretend one of your legs isn’t that good.”

“But not diseased,” said Michael.

“Maybe you broke it a few years ago,” said John. “Or you have rickets.”

Charlie listed to one side, his left knee turned towards his right, and he opened his eyes as far as they would go. He looked to John for approval.

“I don’t know why I’m trying to teach you anything. Just do whatever you normally do. For the rest of us—”

“I don’t feel comfortable stealing,” said Aidan. His voice was a whisper, even though the noise of the crowd was loud enough to drown out every word of their chatter, and nobody was paying the four boys any attention. His hands were at his sides and his knuckles shone through the dirt.

Michael looked at John, shrugged his shoulders and turned away to kick a stone down the road. Aidan had been brought into the group by John, even though Michael thought Aidan was soft. That made any foolishness on Aidan’s part John’s responsibility.

John moved close up to Aidan, so that they could feel each other’s breath, and he asked, “You feel comfortable eating?”

“I’m not a thief.” His jaw clenched and he met John’s stare.

“Man, you are gonna have to toughen up. None of us have that kind of luxury. You don’t want to? I don’t want to. Maybe you want Charlie to beg for you as well?”

Aidan was equally disgusted and embarrassed. “No, I—”

“So you want Michael to feed you?”

“I don’t mean—”

“Me, then?”

Aidan looked down at his boots, which were touching John’s. “No.”

“You’re a thief,” John said. “You’re a beggar. If a drunk sailor throws you some scratch and tells you to dance, then you’re a monkey. You’re whatever you need to be.”

“He’s right,” said Michael.

Aidan continued to look at the ground and said nothing. Charlie put a hand on his shoulder and John stepped back and continued his instructions.

“Money’s best, because the Queen’s face looks the same on all of it. Once it’s in my pocket, it’s mine. Anything other than money we can fence – but you know who’s here today? Along with Victoria and Albert and half of Scotland Yard? Ever single pickpocket in London. The supply of snuff boxes and pocket watches is going way up and nobody we know likes to hold stock.”

“So don’t steal watches?” asked Michael.

“If you can pinch a watch, good for you, but don’t expect to be happy when you get a bent shilling and a clip round the ear in payment. Remember – bide your time and—”

“Tread lightly,” Charlie and Michael said together.

“Exactly.” John smiled.

From the canal in Islington to the Great Exhibition was halfway across London, perhaps four miles. More significant than the distance was the change in class. In Islington the buildings were all made of yellow London bricks, from the dosshouses to the pubs to the merchants’ homes. As they moved west along Oxford Street and down Regent Street, the brick was increasingly hidden by white stucco facades, that gave the appearance of cut white stone without the expense, but in greater numbers were buildings of actual stone construction. As the buildings changed, the people changed.

A man in Islington might own one suit, which he would wear to dig ditches and go to church. But a man who lived at the edge of a great park might have a different outfit for each day of the week, and none of them would be suitable for work of any kind. John noticed the fashions change as people could afford better and had the time to learn what better meant. Cloth caps became top hats. Bluchers and boots became Oxford ties and dress Wellingtons.

The crowd became denser as they approached the entrance to Hyde Park. Those travelling by carriage were forced to disembark at Piccadilly and walk the rest of the way as the throng spilled out into the road all along Park Lane.

A red and white striped barrow stall had stopped on the kerbside and its owner was loudly announcing his wares – packaged fudge and butterscotch, and toffee apples on sticks. He was a higher class of barrowman than would ever make his way to Islington, his shirt was white and starched, and his hair was slicked with macassar oil, a small amount of which had melted and stained the back of his collar.

As a policeman approached, the vendor made to pick up the handles of the barrow and wheel his business away.
John nodded to Michael, who quickly stepped between the policeman and vendor, and said, “How much for two?”

“You can’t sell in the street round here,” said the policeman, ignoring Michael entirely. “Move along, and not towards the park. Park’s full.”

“Oh, come on, gov, I only want a couple of apples,” Michael protested. As he did, he stepped back so that the vendor and the policeman were both looking away from the cart. “What harm’s he doin’? Is there a law against selling toffee apples in Westminster?”

“I wasn’t even selling any apples here,” the vendor protested for the policeman’s benefit. “I just stopped to rest my arms.”

“Pull the other one,” said Michael. “Now are you going to let me buy two toffee apples or not?”

The policeman gave Michael a sharp slap on the side of his head that knocked his cap off and into the road, and he turned back to the vendor, saying, “Fuck off the pair of you. If I see that cart again today, it’ll be in my fire tonight.”

The issue of whether the policeman had any legal authority to move the barrowman on wasn’t relevant. The London constabulary were the police: the coppers (so nicknamed after their badges): the Peelers (after their founder the late Sir Robert Peel). While not randomly violent, they were also not used to urchins or barrowmen questioning them, even on issues about which they knew little – like the law.

When the policeman looked around for Michael again, perhaps to give him another slap, he saw no-one, and the barrowman trundled urgently to the east.

Around the nearest corner, John passed out three of the four toffee apples on sticks before enjoying his own, biting through the hard shell into the slightly overripe fruit underneath.

“I love a Hawker’s Mate,” said Michael, though he absently rubbed his ear, which had become scarlet.

Some of the tricks they used were learned from others and the origin of their names was lost to history. Some they believed they had invented and named themselves. A Hawker’s Mate was a versatile trick that could be done by three, two, or even one person – if they were quick. In a three person Hawker’s Mate, one made threats to a person selling, one tried to intercede on behalf of the person doing the selling, both creating a distraction while a third person pinched whatever they could. But the most common was the two-person version, where a quick reaction to the arrival of a police officer, a gangster – or really any authority figure – could be exploited.

“Sugar turns your teeth black,” said Charlie through a mouthful of apple.

“Sure,” said Michael. “But not right away.”

“That’s good.”

“He’s not coming this way,” said Aidan, who was checking round the corner, his own toffee apple untouched in his hand.

“He didn’t see anything,” said John. “Couldn’t get any fudge though, there was a guy watching on the other side of the street.”

“Yeah, but if he comes round the corner, he’d recognise Michael standing with an apple.”

“He wasn’t a runner,” said Michael. “He had fat little legs. He’s not chasing anyone for an apple.”

“And he’s not one of ours,” said John.

The Peelers had patches and John knew everyone that had an Islington beat – and he suspected that they all probably knew him by sight. He wasn’t concerned. John was amiable. He never started fights and never frightened women or horses. And most important of all – he had never been caught. Back in Islington his reputation was small, and he liked it that way. Outside of his part of London he was an anonymous face just below eye level.

“But there will be some of them here today,” said Aidan.

“Sure, but don’t introduce yourself and you’ll be grand.” John pulled the rim of his cap down slightly. “Okay, here’s as good a place as any. We split up now. Everyone meets back here at five. We wait until half-past for stragglers, then you need to make your own way.”
 
* * *
 
What impressed the people of London most was the building itself. The huge, curved roof, the apparent lightness of the structure, the ability to see through from one side to another – and wave at people. As the steel supports were relatively modest compared to the scale of the building, it seemed as though the Crystal Palace hung in space and shone in the light the way a chandelier might.

It was a great distraction.

As John moved through the crowd he tried to seem as if he were doing nothing. He was a lost boy looking for his friends or family. His eyes did not linger in any one place and he neither stayed in one spot for too long nor hurried.

Gentlemen carried their money in pocketbooks, which they kept inside their jackets and were difficult to steal. But all men usually carried some small coins in their trouser pockets, either loose or inside a coin purse. Careful study of the line of a man’s trouser could reveal if he were carrying a lot of coinage – though this was not guaranteed.

Ladies had reticules – bags that tied with drawstrings which they either wore around their wrist or carried. A few women had discrete pockets in their dresses where money could be concealed, but spotting a pocket with change in a dress was impossible.

As a general rule this meant that it was better to snatch a lady’s reticule and run or pick a gentleman’s pocket and not get noticed. In the dense crowds in Hyde Park, running meant getting caught by some well-meaning, law-abiding prick after fifty yards, and that only left stealth.

After an hour of casual fleecing, John was up more than six shillings in small coins and had to distribute the money to all his pockets to stop himself jingling when he walked. He knelt, appearing to tie his bootlaces, and pushed four silver sixpences into a worn slot in the inside of his boot. It had been a while since there had been any money in his secret stash and the press of it against his ankle felt good.

Six shillings was more than an apprentice bricklayer made in a week – which was the highest paid trade available to a boy his age. It was heavy, boring labour, since most of the work of the apprentice was carrying loads of bricks up miles of rickety ladders – and worse still, the bricklayers all hired their own sons to do it.

John stood up and casually bumped into a gentleman. Once his hand was out of the man’s pocket he immediately apologised – “Sorry, sir” – but the man did not even acknowledge him, and instead carried on his conversation. John was five steps away before he opened his hand and caught the colour of what he had taken.

Two small gold coins were nestled in his palm. One face-down bearing the royal coat of arms, and the other face-up showing the queen and printed with the words Victoria Dei Gratia. John could read a little and knew enough to recognise when the thing he couldn’t read was written in Latin. The coins were sovereigns – each was worth twenty shillings – one pound, or, in common slang, a quid. He closed his fingers tightly around the coins and buried his hand in his trouser pocket. John had never even held a gold coin before. If he had tripped and fallen forward at that moment, he would have kept his hand firmly in his pocket all the way to the ground and willingly taken the force of the fall on his face.

“It is a glasshouse and nothing more.” The voice of an elderly lady next to John brought him back to his senses. She wore a dress of lavender coloured silk and a large floral hat. Though her clothes were colourful, her expression was sour and her mouth downturned. She continued, “The gardens at Kew have one for palm trees. They heat it with hot air in the winter, which is very pleasant I’m sure, but hardly a marvel of the industrial age. I have a splendid fire at home.”

“Come auntie, you must admit it is far more impressive than Kew.” A young lady standing next to her forced a laugh. She wore a dress of pale blue which had been made for a taller woman with a fuller bust and hadn’t been altered to fit. She reminded John of Charlie, though Charlie only laughed at nothing when other people were laughing, while the young woman seemed to be trying to make other people laugh at nothing. “The Crystal Palace is, at least, much larger.”

Somewhere at the front of the crowd, Queen Victoria finished a short speech, and a military band began to play a rousing anthem. Both the older and younger ladies applauded politely, though it was clear neither had been listening.

John stepped around the older lady’s wide bustle and headed towards Hyde Park Corner where he could exit the park and wait for his friends. He did not manage another step before he felt a hand clamp firmly on his shoulder.

“You, boy!” said a man’s voice.

John tried to remain calm, turned his head and said, “Yes, sir?”

He had been apprehended by a gentleman, but not the one he had pickpocketed. He was clean shaven and wore a dark suit and matching top hat. His expression was neutral, but his eyes seemed to twinkle.

The gentleman asked, “Do you find this construction impressive?” He had a foreign accent that wasn’t French, German, Irish or Scottish – which were the four John knew well enough to identify. John felt himself being turned towards to the two ladies, who were obviously companions of the gentleman.

John smiled at the ladies and replied, “Yes, sir. Best thing to see in the whole of the park – and that’s including the ducks.”

The younger lady laughed, but the elderly lady rolled her eyes and said, “Are we really to converse with such people?”

“You do not value the opinion of your countrymen?” he asked.

“I do not value things which have no value,” she said.

“Tell me, boy,” he continued, his hand still firm on John’s shoulder. “How would you rank this Crystal Palace alongside the wonders of the ancient world? Compared to the Pyramids of Egypt, perhaps, or to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon?”

“It’s right up there, sir,” John said. He seemed expected to play the fool and he was well able to do so. “All the more impressive for being built somewhere convenient like London.”

“Built somewhere convenient?” the young lady repeated and laughed again. “Heavens.”

“I had never thought of it like that,” said the gentleman. “How many of these people will ever see the Pyramids? Easy enough to have a wonder that nobody can see. Almost like a fairy story. But to make something great that a boy in London can walk up to and put their hands on.” He said this with heavy meaning and put his finger went under the brim of John’s cap and lifted it slightly. John couldn’t help but make eye contact. “Is this not the greater achievement?”

Behind John a man’s voice said, “They must have fallen out of my pocket! Look around you, woman!”

John twitched, testing the grip on him, and the foreign gentleman smiled.

“I shall know your face if we meet again,” he said, and in that same moment he released John. “Inside, perhaps.”

“Perhaps, sir,” John said. He nodded to the ladies and tugged down the front of his cap. But now the crowd was moving against him, pressing towards the Crystal Palace rather than away. Rather than seeming conspicuous or being trampled, he allowed himself to be swept up. All the time he could somehow feel the foreign gentleman’s eyes on him, and he turned his head twice to confirm his suspicion.

Without realising it, John had joined the queue for the entrance. People shuffled themselves into an orderly line and John found himself perhaps one hundred places away from the glass doors that Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and an entourage of richly dressed people had gone through a minute earlier.

John fought against panic. There was clear open space on either side of the queue. If he stepped out of line, would the man he stole the gold sovereigns from recognise him? Would the foreign gentleman call him out as a thief?

He watched time vanish before him. He was fifty places away and when he got to the front he would be ejected anyway. Nobody was going to let a street urchin into the Great Exhibition whether he had the ticket price or not.

Of course, he wouldn’t be arrested as such. Being arrested meant being charged with a crime and hauled up before a magistrate and sentenced. John would have the shit kicked out of him by a couple of mean bastards who joined the Yard just for that kind of perk. Then he’d be taken to a workhouse, and he wouldn’t see the sky again except through bars for another four years. He’d be made to pull wire into pins or some other task that small, nimble fingers were well suited to. And he’d do it from morning to night, with food withheld if he didn’t make quota. No lawyer, no judge, no trial, no sentence – an urchin was like a stray dog; anyone who could put a lead around his neck was his owner.

Two quid had put him on a path to being a slave until he was a grown man.

“I think you may be in the wrong line,” said a robustly built and well-dressed usher who looked curiously, but not unkindly down at John from behind a small lectern serving as a ticket desk. John had run out of time and the whole of the queue stretched out behind him.

“I’m sure I saw some filthy boy behind you a minute before,” cried an outraged woman – somewhere in the queue, out of sight but within earshot. “You’ve been robbed in broad daylight!”

“Chief, you’ve got no idea,” John said. He pulled his right hand out of his pocket and used the fingers of his left hand to remove a coin from inside the fist. He dropped the gold sovereign onto the lectern. “One, please.”

The usher looked at the coin with grave seriousness, turned it over a few times and chewed on the edge of it. He lifted a pen from its resting place and made some scratchings on a piece of paper.

​“Very good, sir,” the usher concluded, and handed John a small ivory-coloured ticket bearing the day’s date. John took the ticket and trudged miserably through the entrance.

I've been working on a book on-and-off since before I wrote The Wicker Man Preservation Society. The core idea is to tell a "spy story" in multiple timelines set in both the ancient period five thousand years ago and the near future, moving between those time periods. I thought I'd share the first chapter.

If you like this and want to know more if/when this goes anywhere, follow me on socials for more news in future on x.com/dfpiii and dfpiii.bsky.social.

1

“This symbol makes the mmm sound,” said Gatsu. The papyrus scroll lay across his knees and he pointed at the hieroglyph with a finger that was crooked with age.

“It looks like an owl,” said the boy. He knelt, sitting on his heels in the dirt in front of the old priest, and read the symbols upside down.

“It is an owl,” said Gatsu. “The owl makes the mmm sound.”

“But an owl makes an ooo sound. Why is the mmm sound an owl when an owl does not make an mmm sound?”

“Gods!” Gatsu said and lifted his ancient face to the newborn sun. “How can I teach such a curious boy?
They waited, but there was no reply to the question and the boy spoke again.

“I only ask because I don’t understand.”

“You will never learn if you keep trying to understand things.” Gatsu picked up the stick he used for walking. Waxed and embellished with geometric patterns – it was the finest walking cane the boy had ever seen, and he had cause to resent its craftsmanship.

Gatsu grunted as he pulled back his arm, and with some effort struck the boy on the side of his head. The attack had no sense of urgency, and the boy did not flinch, or even close his eyes. If he made any sound, it was only that of an object being struck.

He was not afraid. His hand went to the spot in his dark curly hair where he had been hit and came away bloody.

“If not the book, then the stick will teach you,” said Gatsu, but the end of the stick dropped into the dust after a moment. Master Gatsu had patience and energy for neither kind of learning. Though he had only become angrier as they had journeyed together, he was also increasingly frail. His beatings were less frequent and though it was the boy who received the cuts and bruises, at the end it was Gatsu who seemed defeated.

“I should have been given a slave who knew how to read. A slave who knew how to read would have been at least as useful as a donkey.”

Gatsu’s no-donkey was the third member of their party. It had been with them from the beginning, never leaving the priest’s side. He made frequent reference to it, extolling its virtues with the earnest conviction of rheumatic pain as his feet swelled, his joints ached, and his back curved under the weight of itself. Gatsu liked the no-donkey better than he liked the boy. The boy was not sure how he felt about being ranked third in importance behind a pack animal that did not exist. But Gatsu had spoken so highly of the no-donkey and so poorly of the boy that their hierarchy was established and could no more be disregarded than the no-donkey could be made real.

The boy put his bloody hand flat against his leg, making as little fuss as he could. Either it would stop bleeding in a moment and he would be fine, or it would not, and he would die. There was nothing to be done about it either way.

Yet Gatsu’s assertion bothered him. It was a twisting, burrowing larvae that ate its way through the soft flesh of his body, to sit on his tongue and dry its new-formed wings in his breath. He opened his mouth to speak and it escaped, brightly coloured and unworried about the further beatings it might invite.

“If the priests of the temple wished me to know how to read, why was I not taught?”

Gatsu’s eyes bulged – in affront, in confusion, and finally in anger – until it seemed they might pop out of his head entirely. He pushed through his uncertainty and blustered, “Doubtless there are already too many slaves who know how to read. Someone probably recognised that you were too stupid to teach. As I now realise.”

“But there are no slaves that know how to read, Master Gatsu.”

“Yet there are plenty who know how to speak back!” Gatsu stuck out his chin, obviously pleased to have achieved a victory in this war of words with an illiterate boy. He seemed almost sufficiently invigorated to strike him again.

If any of the masters at the temple had ever described the slave Gatsu had been given using a single word – instead of a string of curses – they would have called him different. He was the only slave who knew how to irritate the priests with endless impertinent questions that made any who answered him seem foolish. As a monkey knew how to steal and a lark knew how to sing, antagonism was his born skill. He looked at the priests in a way that was not impertinent, but somehow ignorant of the concept of impertinence.

“I am sorry, Master Gatsu.”

“Of course you are sorry. I have struck you, that is why you are sorry. Do not think that I believe you are sorry to have so agitated an old man than he was forced to strike you. You have no concern for my wellbeing – though yours is ever-most in my mind.”

“I apologise for my thoughtlessness.” The cut on his head was small and the bleeding had already stopped. His hair had matted over the wound and a brown trickle marked his face and chest where the blood had dripped.

“If I had the strength I would beat you every day, because that is what you need. When we reach Artam I will employ a man to beat you when you ask foolish questions. And when you are disrespectful. And when you do not listen. This man will never want for other work. His wife and children will be fat. He will be buried in splendour.”

“Thank you, Master. Will you teach me, please, what else the scroll says? And I shall, if I may, remain silent and attentive to your lesson.”

“You may. Whether you shall, we shall see.” Gatsu stared at the boy for a long time, then made a grumbling noise that was not happy, but satisfied with its unhappiness. He returned to reading the scroll, using his finger to trace the markings up and down the page. “The most excellent High Priest of Sobek – he has so identified himself – proclaims that Gatsu of Adebju has been chosen by Sobek to bring his cult to the people of Nubia, who are known to be without the care of the gods of Egypt. To the people of Nubia, do not be confused by the age of Gatsu, for he is strong with the god of the Nile and the god of semen. By my hand, Neruphat, High Priest, so on and so forth.”

Gatsu rolled up the scroll of pressed papyrus and returned it to the leather scroll case in which it was kept safe alongside a dozen other documents.

“Do the people of Artam know that you are coming?” asked the boy.

“I am already exhausted, do not make me strike you again. Help me with my shendyt, I wish to go to the river to bathe before the sun is too high and the beasts become frisky.”

With the sun low in the east, the sandstone cliffs that marked the beginning of the high desert were still in shadow. Past those cliffs, perhaps a hundred and fifty miles, was the Red Sea.

Death was much closer.

From their camp close to the river, only the untended grasses and palms were visible on the west bank. Rising far behind the sedge and fronds, the western cliff faces were yellow in the morning light and as high as those to the east.

Beyond the western wall there was nothing but desert for as far as a bird could fly. This was the truth, and everyone knew it.

Gatsu left the scroll case where he had been sitting and stood up with much ceremony, leaning heavily on his striking implement. Once upright he was more stable and dropped the cane to the ground.

The boy took the edge of the old man’s pleated white skirt – a shendyt – an item of clothing worn by higher-ranking Egyptian men. As a slave, the boy wore nothing, and never had – unless he had been swaddled at birth by whatever woman bore him. The priest’s shendyt was stained cream-coloured by sand but was otherwise finely made from woven flax.

Gatsu was a mass of bony protrusions; his spine was twisted, and his ribs pressed against loose skin that bore the marks of wounds received in his youth. With the skirt removed, his penis was visible as a nub poking out of a brush of grey-black hair. His testicles, which hung half-way to his knees, were barely concealed even when he was clothed.

Against the brown flesh of his naked body was a second leathery pouch, held tight-closed with a long cord wrapped around its folded end, then tied around the old man’s waist. It never left his person and the priest had never opened it. The contents of that pouch were Gatsu’s secret, and he had kept it, though he had caught the boy looking at it several times. Like the other pouch, it hung slightly below the line of the skirt, but the boy saw it exposed regularly as it was the priest’s preference to have a cold bath once a day.

The boy folded the shendyt and placed it on the bedroll next to the head wrap that had served as his pillow and would be his defence against the sun in the coming day. Then he fell into line behind Gatsu.

The old priest stopped and turned. “Where do you think you are going?”

“To the river. To bathe.”

“You are covered in blood. You will bring crocodiles all the way from Waset.”

As the last city in Upper Egypt and Gatsu’s farthest knowledge of the world, Waset was a mysterious place. Invocation of the name made him feel worldly and its use was always accompanied by a knowing sneer. The effect was somewhat lost on the slave; until their current journey, the boy had never left the small, crowded town of Djeba.

Their trip up-river had taken them to places the boy had never heard of. As an idea, this excited him. As an experience, it left him underwhelmed. All the new and exotic locations were much the same as the town where he had spent his entire life. Temples. Boats. River. Fish. Bread. Beer. Being hit with a stick. Crocodiles. Gods. It was all Egypt. It just kept on going.

They were three days past the cataract and their destination felt no closer. As far as Abu they had travelled by boat, but when the slow and stately Nile became shallow, swift and rocky, there were no boats to take them farther. When the Nile was not in flood, the cataract was impassable. So they walked out of Egypt and into Nubia, carrying only such things as were precious and could be borne by Gatsu, or were essential and heavy and could be heaped upon the boy’s back.

The boy believed that if he were doing no-donkey’s work, he should receive the level of respect no-donkey was due. Gatsu disagreed.

“After I have bathed, then you may bathe.”

With these words, Gatsu resumed his slow trudge down to the river, through a steep and narrow parting in the reeds, where the bank had recently collapsed and the plants had yet to reclaim their lost ground. His footsteps left indentations in the damp silt, becoming deeper until he reached the water, which was dark and lazy about his feet. He walked in until he was waist deep, then with shivering reluctance submerged himself and rubbed at his body and bald head in a way that seemed practised rather than enjoyable.

The boy looked at the water flowing down the Nile, glistering in the light, moving with a sound that could be mistaken for silence – were it not for Gatsu’s splashing.

He could see no people on the river.

There were villages that dotted the riverside between the towns of Djeba and Nubt, Nubt and Abu. And between those villages there had been mud-brick houses standing in relative isolation. Along all the Nile in Upper Egypt there was no more than half a mile between one building and the next: a continuous line of habitation synonymous with security and with the protection of the gods and the army of the pharaoh.

There had been no individual homes for two days. This far south of Abu it was not safe for a man to live by himself, or to raise a family. There had been no villages for more than a day. They had come to a place beyond the pharaoh’s reach – though for all the distance they had travelled, the sun was the same, the earth was the same, and the Nile flowed endless from its unknown source to its unknown destination.

Nubians were not unknown in Egypt. The temple to which the boy had belonged owned Nubian slaves too – black-skinned, broad-nosed, wide-mouthed men and women. They spoke a different language, and it was only the accident of association that had allowed him to learn to speak it.

When Master Neruphat decided that he was a High Priest, and that Master Gatsu had to leave the temple for Nubia, the boy was selected to go with him. He had been told it was his job to translate for the local people. It was hinted that perhaps, in time – after many years of dutiful service – he could become a priest of Sobek himself. Such an honour could not have been bestowed on one of the Nubian slaves – and in any case their loyalty would be suspect when they were again amongst their own people.

“Get my stick!” Gatsu shouted.

The priest was wading out with urgent steps. The boy’s eyes went wide when he saw the shape in the water behind Gatsu and rushed to their campsite to retrieve the cane. He had run back as far as the top of the riverbank when an eruption of water and crocodile struck the priest of Sobek.

The beast was twice as long as the boy was tall. Its triangular mouth opened and slammed closed on Gatsu’s leg. The sound of the impact was combined with the crack of bone as the old man’s thigh snapped.

Gatsu made a feeble grasp at the grasses as the crocodile pulled him into the water, leaving him holding only torn reed fronds in each hand. The boy leapt down the bank with the stick raised high over his head and hit the beast on a row of armoured ridges that ran down either side of its spine.

The crocodile tossed Gatsu away and charged at the boy. Its green-brown banded tail thrashed in the water, its splayed legs and claws dug into the sand and pushed it upwards. The boy retreated, running backwards all the way up the bank. He hit the crocodile on the nose, fuelling the animal’s rage but doing it no more injury than with his first attack.

At the top of the bank, he tripped over his feet and the crocodile’s jaws snapped only inches away. Then again, furiously chomping at the air. He crawled away, regained his footing with the grace of a newborn deer, and held out the cane like a sword.

The route they had used to go down to the river was too narrow and as the crocodile had pursued it became wedged on either side, unable to ascend the final few steps that the boy and the thin priest had negotiated easily.

“You are not so smart, I think,” said the boy. He bopped the crocodile on the nose again, dancing back and forth. “You have got yourself stuck and you are not so scary when you are stuck.”

He attempted another strike on the great lizard’s head, but this time it caught the boy’s play sword as it came down and its teeth turned the cane into splinters. The crocodile made a hissing, growling sound and scuffed its feet, sending up a spray of silt. In the seconds that followed it was not clear whether the grassy overhang would hold, or the crocodile would break through and kill him.

It was said that a man could not outrun a crocodile, but the boy had mostly heard this said by priests of the crocodile god – who were obviously not impartial. He had already decided to give it a try.

The boy looked into the green eyes of the beast.

The beast stared into him.

“Sobek,” the boy whispered, “if you spare me – your servant – from this – your creature – I will—”

His vow was interrupted when the ground the crocodile had been standing on gave way. It slipped into the river with a splash. The bank was now so steep that even the boy could not have climbed it. And there was no reason to.

Gatsu floated face-down in the water. His heart had not been able to endure the excitement of the attack. Other submerged green shapes in the river made tentative nudges at the body.

The crocodile who had killed Gatsu, and would have killed the boy, emerged from the clouded water amid bubbles and flailing limbs and flashing teeth. It roared at the boy – a deep, booming hiss that disturbed the surface of the water and which he felt in his stomach and his bowels.

Circumstances dictated that their confrontation was over. The crocodile could not reach the boy. The boy was not coming down to fight. There would be none of the priest left if the crocodile didn’t claim its share. Glaring viciously even as it turned away, it slipped beneath the surface of the water, and its shape headed to the feast.

It had become clear to the other crocodiles that Gatsu was not going to struggle. They nibbled him at first, pulling off chunks and strips where they could. When one had freed a red clump of flesh, it tossed the morsel into its throat and swallowed with a bobbing motion of its head. The action looked like approval – as if they were all polite friends enjoying dinner and conversation, nodding at the considered points made by their fellows, appreciating the flavour of the food being served.

The boy flattened the grasses atop the ridge and made a seat for himself overlooking the feast. He had made two decisions that morning. He would watch the crocodiles eat the priest of the crocodile god – how often did anyone see such a thing? – and he would have a bath tomorrow. Or possibly never.

When there was nothing left of Gatsu, the boy went back to their campsite. It was more curiosity than intent which made him pick up the old priest’s shendyt and wrap it around his waist.

“No-donkey,” said the boy, “I cannot see my penis. What an amazing thing. This means that I am in charge now and you must do what I say.”

​The no-donkey did not object.

I first played (Advanced) Dungeons & Dragons as a teenager, and one of the main differences between the D&D I play as an adult and what I played back then is description. “Inside the room are six orcs. Roll initiative.” This is pretty close to the adventures run, and participated in, by a teenage murder hobo.

I recently started running a low combat, high mystery campaign set in real world Victorian England in 1851. As the tea parlours and opium dens of smog-ridden London contain - so far - zero orcs, it’s made me reflect on how much has to be done through description. I’ve created some rules for myself as I plan and deliver each session, and I thought I’d share my rules in case they’re useful to anyone else.

DFP’s rules for descriptionsDescription must serve a purposeDescription should always use multiple sensesDescription should not override player autonomyThe overall effect of description should convey activity which occurs separately from the players
Description must serve a purpose
For me, there are four good purposes for description: to provide information; to establish tone and create character; to provide opportunities for interaction; and to deliberately deceive.

Providing information is probably the easiest of these and needs to preempt the obvious player questions. Is there anything trying to kill me? Is there anything here I can have sex with? Is there any treasure I can steal? How big is this orc sex dungeon and what equipment do they have? Is it obvious that what’s going on is consensual? And so on.

Game Master’s love to use description to set tone and develop character. Whether it’s the warm and welcoming halfling tavern at the end of the adventure, the warm and welcoming ancient black dragon they slew, or the warm and welcoming sphere of annihilation they looted from it’s hoard - we all know description matters, but not all descriptions are equal.

Good descriptors of tone and character are about what your players can perceive about the world, not what your players feel about the world. You probably thought “warm and welcoming” was a pretty bad description for a sphere of annihilation, but fine for a halfling tavern. And when you thought that, you were wrong. It’s a bad description for all three of those examples - even the ancient black dragon.

Let’s assume what we want our players to experience is a warm and welcoming tavern. Instead of saying warm, we could mention a large fire burning in the hearth. Easy. Instead of saying welcoming, we could have a tavern patron shout “Norm!” as our characters enter - providing one or all of them are called Norman, or something similar. Why is this better? Because now our players have a better shared concept of the world, and that improves their ability to interact with each other and with that world. You’ve probably heard this concept described as “show, don’t tell” in writing. While it’s most commonly quoted in relation to character dialogue, it’s also true of objects, places, appearances, etc.
Opportunities for interaction are - for me - the most fun parts of D&D. From a random encounter of between 5 and 7 orcs in a nondescript room, to meeting a warm and welcoming fishmonger in the town market, there should always be things for players to interact with. This is a pretty broad concept and I’ll use an example to explain.

The fishmonger in the town market is someone who has information your party needs, but this isn’t immediately obvious to them or to the fishmonger. You need to provide the party with an opportunity to get this information. If a game stalls, it’s often because players don’t know how to interact with the world.
Big and obvious - the fishmonger is loudly declaring that their fish are fresh this morning from [area of interest]. Sometimes you need to be big and obvious.Just obvious - the fishmonger wears a bandana which is made from the well known flag of [area of interest].Subtle - you see the fishmonger giving change from their cash box and a glint of newly minted coins draws your eye to an unfamiliar coat of arms, but too quickly for you to get a clear glance.Ambiguous - the other stallholders in the market have set themselves up away from the fishmonger, providing a cordon of clear space around their stall. Strangely, many of the locals also appear to skirt around it, as if avoiding the area.Weird - periodically you hear a strangled cry from across the market square. As if being occasionally throttled by an invisible hand, the local fishmonger blurts out a confession - “I’ve got a secret about [area of interest]”. After each such outburst, they go back to filleting fish as if nothing had happened.
Finally, a description may exist solely for the purpose of deception. If you want your players to think about the north wall in a room - describe it and don’t mention the east wall where you bricked up Jonathan’s body after your fight. Set a DC for passive perception and unless a character beats it or specifically investigates, don’t say a fucking word about the east wall. We will get through this if you can just keep your mouth shut.

Anyway, if your description isn’t doing at least one of the four things above - it’s probably bad. And people definitely know.

Descriptions should always use multiple senses
Yes, always. Fight me.

There are five traditional senses which were defined by Aristotle - sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell. Back then (in the Greek times) you could just name senses, not even including temperature sense, hunger, or balance and people still thought you were a big time smart guy. But Aristotle’s five senses are a good start - try to use two or three each time you introduce a new place to players.

I would suggest that when providing descriptions you think about how your players normally experience the world. For most, sight is the dominant sense, followed by hearing, smell, touch and taste. If you happen to be the GM for a group of people with no sense of smell, don’t go around describing how everything smells, you monster. Stick to describing the texture of flowers and the sound of food.

I try to split my descriptions into 50% things that can be seen, 30% things that can be heard, 15% things can be smelled, and 5% for all other sensations as appropriate - you may find a different ratio works better for you. In my last session, I realised that I hadn’t described any sounds for a bit, so I added a banging in an upstairs room. What was the banging? It was probably nothing. Probably.

Descriptions should not override player autonomy
One of the most important things about D&D is that it is collaborative. In a combat scenario most GMs would feel comfortable saying, “the orc slashes you with its black ichor-coated dagger” but would never add, “your character says ‘ouchie ouchie’ and pouts like Little Miss Muffet after the spider incident - awww, who’s a sad wittle baby?” Your GM should never do this. Except maybe one time because it’s funny. But otherwise never. Players are in charge of how their characters react to the events of the world the GM sets out.

This is a principle you can honour in all areas of the game. As discussed previously, by describing the tavern as warm and welcoming - which are character experiences - you override autonomy. Some characters may find the tavern stifling and over-familiar. But just by mistaking one (or all) of the characters for a man (or men) called Norman (or Normen), the ball is very much in their court over how they feel about that. Maybe they’ve always wanted to be called Norm. Maybe they’ve always wanted to be called Sally. We can’t know what nibbles we’ll get until we drop the bait in the water.

The overall effect of description should convey activity which occurs separately from the players
In setting up a scene, I like to take a moment to think - what is everyone else doing here? What were the key players doing just before the characters arrived and what physical signs are there of this activity? For craftspeople, partially completed items. For scholars, a note indicating that the Grail is to be found at the Castle Aaaaargh! How about cleaners? I bet you’ve never even considered who’s cleaning up dragon shit, but it must happen, and surely that iron broom leaves marks.

Even if you’re describing an empty room - think beyond cobwebs. Cobwebs are pretty static. How about trails left in the dust by the tiny feet of mice searching for food? How about a pile of pigeon excrement under a beam where birds roost at night?

Most importantly of all, when the door of the orc sex dungeon opens, the swing should already be in motion.

These are my thoughts. If you like them, consider chucking this a RT on the old Twitter @dfpiii.