It was said the young former earl, who had abdicated his ancestral seat, sent word that he would indeed accept a meal, but only “in front of the Banqueting House,” a defiant reference, of course, to the execution site of Charles I.
Hampton Court Palace was no longer home to flower shows and chubby Belgian tourists. The decision to turn it into the Sovereign’s heavily fortified seat of residence, and to give Buckingham Palace over strictly to England’s dying sightseer trade, was all based on Henry’s sometimes paranoid calculations about the exercise of, and defense against, military force. The maze and real tennis court were still there, but the palace’s perimeter was practically upholstered in powerful weaponry. There were advanced neural cannons, blood-gas beams, various sophisticated EMP emitters, and a rumored pièce de résistance—a dangerous, identity-wiping mobile mortar called ?thelstan’s Bliss.
This device, which purportedly resembled a sort of giant sea anemone with pink tentacles and, it was said, screeched like the golden dragons of ancient Wessex, entirely dissolved all traces of one’s existence, in both corporal and digital form.
ST. CLEMENTS’S REPUTATION was well known. Nexar-hooded or not, its patients almost never recovered. It was a grim, yellow-brick house of dread, built as a workhouse, and eventually one of the last Victorian asylums. A passé NHS Trust placard still appeared on its inevitable squeaking iron gate. It was, in Baj’s view, a national disgrace. The last time he had visited, it had been filled exclusively with crazy Indigents.
Out of a sense of responsibility, Dr. Bajwa decided to have another look at St. Clements after receiving Dr. Reece’s report. Perhaps it wasn’t quite as bad as he remembered. From the outside, surrounded by lime trees and pavements heavily trod by all manner of daydream carvers, roast pigeon sellers, house-bot repairers, etc., there was a sense of happy bustle. But once past the iron gate, Baj saw a familiar awfulness he associated with decrepit buildings where Nexar patients were usually warehoused.
An old caretaker with a pinched brow smiled as Baj approached the main doors.
“Lovely day,” the man said.
Baj looked up at a nearly cloudless cerulean sky, as if for the first time that year. Apart from a few cloud-doodles of elongated cats and crooked letters (“mums!”) by children, the sky was a happy blank.
“Yes!” he said. “It is lovely, isn’t it?”
Inside, he ambled slowly along. A few patients with simpering grins came up to him and shook his hand. The main common area of the hospital had a strange, nicotine-stained cornice molding—(yellowed) acanthus leaves and all—along the tops of the walls. Some well-intentioned staff member had allowed one of the patients, obviously, to decorate the molding. In delicate blue, yellow, and red hand-painted lines, all the way around the room, was a constellation of mathematical gibberish—direct sum-of-module symbols, various integrals, Euclidean distance marks—interspersed with the silhouettes of lions and some other, vaguer creature—a weasel or ferret or indeed otter or something?
How very odd, Dr. Bajwa had thought, that Cuthbert also often mentions otters, and here they are at St. Clements? The doctor tried to work out the cornice molding formulae and realized they (or it?) made utterly no sense, unless, somehow, lions and otters were ascribed mathematic value. Perhaps there was, he pondered, to people like Cuthbert, some undisclosed dimension in which otter ? 2.98311 or where the curves of mustelid tails followed the precise bends of timespace as they folded upon themselves?
Just then, a short, tubby orderly carrying a Nexar hood greeted Baj in a less than friendly manner.
“I wouldn’t hang around here, mate. All the joy’ll rub off on you.”
Baj started coughing. He felt utterly breathless. He had begun a regimen of light chemotherapy. The bloody coughing had nearly vanished, but he felt weak and sick to his stomach.
Baj said, snorting a bit, “All this—it hasn’t seemed to affect you.”
“No,” the man said bitterly. “I just hoods ’em, and bury ’em in pleasure. I don’t like it, but it’s me job, innit?” He squinted at Baj. “You poorly, man?”
“Just a little. Do they . . . ever get better?”
“Ha!” said the orderly. Then he leaned in, confidentially. There was a stench of eel and vinegar on his breath. “This is a place of where the spirit thrives. And even the ghosts live well.” The man greasily chortled for a moment, then slapped Baj’s shoulder.
“Right, mate,” said Baj.