2
In the 1780s, when Highgate Hill was so steep and deeply rutted that carriages regularly failed to make the grade, and the drive to town sufficiently dangerous that a wise man went with pistols, a merchant called Thomas Roxborough had constructed a handsome house on Hornsey Lane, designed for him by one Henry Holland. At that time it had commanded fine views: south all the way to the river; north and west over the lush pastures of the region towards the tiny village of Hampstead. The former view was still available to the tourist, from the bridge that spanned the Archway Road, but Roxborough’s fine house had gone, replaced in the late thirties with an anonymous ten-storey tower, set back from the street. There was a screen of well-tended trees between tower and road, not sufficiently thick to conceal the building entirely, but enough to render what was already an undistinguished building virtually invisible. The only mail that was delivered there was circulars, and official paperwork of one kind or another. There were no tenants, either individuals or businesses. Yet Roxborough Tower was kept well by its owners, who once every month or so gathered in the single room which occupied the top floor of the building in the name of the man who had owned this plot of land two hundred years before, and who had left it to the society he had founded.
The men and women (eleven in all) who met here and talked for a few hours and went their unremarkable ways, were the descendants of the impassioned few Rox-borough had gathered around him in the dark days following the failure of the Reconciliation. There was no passion amongst them now, nor more than a vague comprehension of Roxborough’s purpose in forming what he’d called the Society of the Tabula Rasa, or the Clean Slate. But they met anyway, in part because in their early childhood one or other of their parents, usually but not always the father, had taken them aside and told them a great responsibility would fall to them: the carrying forward of a hermetically protected family secret, and in part because the Society looked after its own. Roxborough had been a man of wealth and insight. He’d purchased considerable tracts of land during his lifetime, and the profits that accrued from that investment had ballooned as London grew. The sole recipient of those monies was the Society, though the funds were so ingeniously routed, through companies and agents who were unaware of their place in the system, that nobody who serviced the Society in any capacity whatsoever knew of its existence.
Thus the Tabula Rasa flourished in its peculiar, purposeless way, gathering to talk about the secrets it kept, as Roxborough had decreed, and enjoying the sight of the city from its place on Highgate Hill.
Kuttner Dowd had been here several times, though never when the Society was assembled, as it was tonight. His employer, Oscar Godolphin, was one of the eleven to whom the flame of Roxborough’s intent had been passed, though of all of them surely none was so perfect a hypocrite as Godolphin, who was both a member of a Society committed to the repression of all magical activity, and the employer (Godolphin would have said owner) of a creature summoned by magic in the very year of the tragedy that had brought the Society into being.
That creature was of course Dowd, whose existence was known to the Society’s members but whose origins were not. If it had been, they would never have summoned him here and allowed him access to the hallowed Tower. Rather they would have been bound by Roxborough’s edict to destroy him at whatever cost to their bodies, souls or sanity that might entail. Certainly they had the expertise; or at least the means to gain it. The Tower reputedly housed a library of treatises, grimoires, cyclopaedias and symposia second to none, collected by Roxborough and the group of Fifth Dominion magi who’d first supported the attempt at the Reconciliation. One of those men had been Joshua Godolphin, Earl of Bellingham. He and Roxborough had survived the calamitous events of that midsummer almost two hundred years ago, but most of their dearest friends had not. The story went that after the tragedy Godolphin had retired to his country estate, and never again ventured beyond its perimeters. Roxborough, on the other hand, ever the most pragmatic of the group, had within days of the cataclysm secured the occult libraries of his dead colleagues, hiding the thousands of volumes in the cellar of his house where they could, in the words of a letter to the Earl, ‘no longer taint with unChristian ambition the minds of good men like our dear friends. We must hereafter keep the doing of this damnable magic from our shores.’ That he had not destroyed the books, but merely locked them away, was testament to some ambiguity in him, however. Despite the horrors he’d seen, and the fierceness of his revulsion, some small part of him retained the fascination that had drawn him, Godolphin and their fellow experimenters together in the first place.
Dowd shivered with unease as he stood in the plain hallway of the Tower, knowing that somewhere nearby was the largest collection of magical writings gathered in one place outside the Vatican, and that amongst them would be many rituals for the raising and dispatching of creatures like himself. He was not the conventional stuff of which familiars were made, of course. Most were simpering, mindless functionaries, plucked by their summoners from the In Ovo - the space between the Fifth and the Reconciled Dominions - like a lobster from a restaurant tank. He, on the other hand, had been a professional actor in his time; and fêted for it. It wasn’t congenital stupidity that had made him susceptible to human jurisdiction, it was anguish. He’d seen the face of Hapexamendios Himself, and half-crazed by the sight had been unable to resist the summons, and the binding, when it came. His invoker had of course been Joshua Godolphin, and he’d commanded Dowd to serve his line until the end of time. In fact, Joshua’s retirement to the safety of his estate had freed Dowd to wander until the old man’s demise, when he was drawn back to offer his services to Joshua’s son Nathaniel, only revealing his true nature once he’d made himself indispensable, for fear he was trapped between his bounden duty and the zeal of a Christian.
In fact Nathaniel had grown into a dissolute of considerable proportions by the time Dowd entered his employ, and could not have cared less what kind of creature Dowd was as long as he procured the right kind of company. And so it had gone on, generation after generation, Dowd changing his face on occasion (a simple trick, or feit) so as to conceal his longevity from the withering human world. But the possibility that one day his double-dealing would be discovered by the Tabula Rasa, and they would search through their library and find some vicious sway to destroy him, never entirely left his calculations. Especially now, waiting for the call into their presence.
That call was an hour and a half in coming, during which time he distracted himself thinking about the shows that were opening in the coming week. Theatre remained his great love, and there was scarcely a production of any significance he failed to see. On the following Tuesday he had tickets for the much-acclaimed Lear at the National, and then two days later a seat in the stalls for the revival of Turandot at the Coliseum. Much to look forward to, once this wretched interview was over.
At last the lift hummed into life and one of the Society’s younger members, Giles Bloxham, appeared. At forty, Bloxham looked twice that age. It took a kind of genius, Godolphin had once remarked when talking about Bloxham (he liked to report on the absurdities of the Society, particularly when he was in his cups) to look so dissipated and have nothing to regret for it.
‘We’re ready for you, now,’ Bloxham said, indicating that Dowd should join him in the lift. ‘You realize,’ he said as they ascended, ‘that if you’re ever tempted to breathe a word of what you see here the Society will eradicate you so quickly and so thoroughly your mother won’t even know you existed?’
This over-heated threat sounded ludicrous delivered in Bloxham’s nasal whine, but Dowd