The crows of London welcomed Badb as well as any had in Belfast. More so! She’d stowed away on a lorry, hiding under a pallet of frozen fish. When the vehicle came to a stop in a place called Billingsgate and she had tumbled out of the back, exhausted and dehydrated, a spiral of crows had descended around her to pay homage.
They did not flinch as she bit through the skulls of the two closest, swallowing the brains, sating her thirst on their blood. She sent the rest of them flying again, watching the glory of London through their eyes. Oh, this city! This unfamiliar city! Its might swept out below her in all directions. How it had ripened until such a time as she could come for it.
She flitted from one bird to the next, learning the shape of the river. There were towers tall enough to house every soul in Belfast. Glass glittered, steel shone. But not everywhere. She landed outside a room where twelve immigrant workers snored beside their own washing. She soared over a knot of narrow streets where only jokers walked or slithered or hopped. Divisions. Yes, there were divisions here too. Poverty lived within stabbing distance of wealth.
Down there, in a place called Greenwich, the IRA had a safe house. Less than a mile away, their sworn enemies in the UVF kept a hidey-hole of their own. She knew all their secrets. They would do as they were bid.
Most satisfactory.
And then, a distant crow heard the peal of bells.
Great crowds gathered around a white cathedral whose dome would have swallowed Belfast City Hall. Security guards pushed back a forest of microphones at the main entrance, but they couldn’t stop Badb drifting down to listen.
Annoyingly, the city had put in those spikes intended to discourage pigeons from landing. But the crow impaled itself willingly and would live long enough to see what came next. She left it to suffer, taking the mind of another bird and then another, circling, circling until she saw what she was looking for: weakness.
A guard absent from his post, mobile phone in hand.
She landed right behind him.
‘Not now, babe,’ he said in a thick accent. He knew nobody could hear him. The crowd was too loud, the reporters too many. ‘What? Absolutely no! They find out I’m Serbian instead of Croat, what then? Home on first plane, that’s what. Marriage? Ha! They’ll read my war record. It will be prison not Belgrade where they send me.’
Fascinating.
‘Of course, I am changed, babe, but only you know. Only you. What?’ He laughed. ‘Crazy bitch. I see you tonight.’
Behind him, the doors of the cathedral swung open. A new king emerged and at his back a wealth of other important people. So handy to have them all gathered here in one place. Leaders she would follow with crows, listening to their every word for hidden cracks in this magnificent city.
It was a raw day with lowering clouds and a cold rain that had ambitions of becoming sleet. Noel tightened Jasper’s scarf, pulled on his gloves and opened his umbrella. ‘Can we wait and watch the King leave?’ Jasper asked. ‘It’s kind of like when I play Dragon Age with all the kings and stuff. I mean, to see one for real is kind of cool.’
Noel scanned the loitering crowd and realized that a lot of people apparently shared his son’s fascination with royalty. And if he was honest, he felt it too. Not for any fanciful sense of brave kings and beautiful princesses but because of what it represented: Magna Carta and Trafalgar and the Battle of Britain and fighting on the beaches. It was that sense of history, permanence and continuity embodied in an institution to which Noel had sworn his allegiance.
He hugged his son. ‘Okay, we’ll wait a bit.’
At the bottom of the stone steps the press and paparazzi lay in wait. Camera lenses stared up at him like dead eyes. There was a growing murmur as Henry and his fiancée emerged, the young woman walking a few steps behind her husband-to-be, which left Noel wondering about that relationship.
‘Answer a few questions, Your Majesty?’ a reporter yelled from the crowd.
‘Certainly.’
Noel noted that the equerry, a man in his fifties with the upright stance of a former military officer, blanched a bit at the response from Henry.
‘So what are your hopes for your reign, sir?’
‘I’d like to bring England back to being England again,’ Henry responded.
‘What does that mean? Exactly, sir’?’ another called.
‘Well, take London. In my youth you heard English spoken everywhere. Now you’d be lucky to hear your own language in amongst all the other gabble.’
Noel thought the equerry was going to have a stroke. The rapid fire of digital cameras was like claws clicking on ice.
‘So you don’t like the fact that London has become a multilingual, multicultural and multi-ethnic city?’ came a third voice out of the crowd.
‘It’s all well and good until it isn’t. If we lose sight of who we are we’ll be done for.’
‘Does that mean white and European, sir?’
Henry gazed down his nose at the questioner, a tall, elegant black man. ‘It means Anglo-Saxon. Make of that what you will.’
‘Damn right, I will,’ the journalist muttered.
Another voice rose out of the crowd. ‘The Pakis are one thing, sir, but what about those freaks down in the East End?’ Noel searched the crowd for the speaker and also for any sign that a riot was about to break out. It proved to be an older white man with a bulging belly hanging over his belt. ‘They’re driving down property values.’
‘It is a problem, but now there is that thing up on the moon.’ Henry waved vaguely skyward. ‘Perhaps they can be encouraged to emigrate. They’ll no doubt be happier among their own kind. Better for all concerned if they leave.’
There were more cheers than Noel liked to hear, and only a few muttered objections, but no one booed. We are so British, Noel thought. Henry was king despite the ignorant words that had just fallen from his mouth and no one was going to be overtly rude. It was at this point that Henry’s people wisely decided to rush him to the waiting car.
People began to disperse. Noel stood watching the motorcade making its way back towards Buckingham Palace and wondered if maybe a removal to his bolt-hole in Paris or even the one in Vienna was called for. Things were likely to become tense in the city after Henry’s performance. But if he left for a foreign capital it might add to the perception that he was merely a kidnapper and not a devoted father.
He also had a performance to prepare and getting sued for cancelling it was not going to aid his effort to seem like a fit parent. It was ironic that he had to keep working. His company Ace in Hand back in New York continued generating income despite him no longer doing the day-to-day management, and he was technically a millionaire because of his share of the money after that ill-fated poker game in Chicago, but he had mentally set those funds aside for Jasper; for his education and to set him up in life.
Jasper tugged at his jacket. ‘Dad?’
He looked down. ‘Hmmm?’
‘Does this mean people don’t like any wild cards? I mean, I’m an ace, but if they don’t like jokers does that mean they don’t like me too?’
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