Chapter 37

AUGUSTUS

It was just after ten in the morning, yet the sun already blazed down from a vast, deep blue sky that seemed washed clean of all impurities. Sunlight burnished the surface of the grey-green water, making it seem dense and yet clear, like melted glass. The tide was high but on the turn, lapping sluggishly against the rocks at the river’s edge.

In midstream Meg let Ben take the oars from her, changing seats with him nimbly as the boat drifted slowly about. Then she sat back, watching him as he strove to right their course, his face a mask of patient determination, the muscles of his bare, tanned arms tensing and untensing. Ben clenched his teeth then pulled hard on the right-hand oar, turning the prow slowly towards the distant house, the dark, slick-edged blade biting deep into the glaucous, muscular flow as he hauled the boat about in a tight arc.

‘Are you sure it’s all right?’

Ben grimaced, concentrating, inwardly weighing the feel of the boat against the strong pull of the current. ‘She’ll never know,’ he answered. ‘Who’ll tell her?’

It wasn’t a threat. He knew he could trust her to say nothing to their mother. Meg looked down briefly, smiling, pleased that he trusted her. Then she sat there, quiet, content to watch him, to see the broad river stretching away beyond him, the white-painted cottages of the village dotted against the broad green flank of the hill, while at her back the house grew slowly nearer.

Solitary, long abandoned, it awaited them.

The foreshore was overgrown. Weeds grew waist-high in the spaces between the rocks. Beyond, the land was level for thirty yards or so then climbed, slowly at first, then steeply. The house wasn’t visible from where they stood, in the cool beneath the branches, and even further along, where the path turned, following the contours of the shoreline, they could see only a small part of it, jutting up, white between the intense green of the surrounding trees.

The land was strangely, unnaturally silent. Meg looked down through the trees. Below them, to their right, was the cove, the dark mouth of the cave almost totally submerged, the branches of the overhanging trees only inches above the surface of the water. It made her feel odd. Not quite herself.

‘Come on,’ said Ben, looking back at her. ‘We’ve not long. Mother will be back by two.’

They went up. A path had been cut from the rock. Rough-hewn steps led up steeply, hugging an almost sheer cliff face. They had to force their way through a tangle of bushes and branches. At the top they came out into a kind of clearing. There was concrete underfoot, cracked but reasonably clear of vegetation. It was a road. To their left it led up into the trees. To their right it ended abruptly, only yards from where they stood, at an ornate cast-iron gate set into a wall.

They went across and stood there, before the gate, looking in.

The house lay beyond the gate; a big, square, three-storey building of white stone, with a steeply pitched roof of grey slate. They could see patches of it through the overrun front garden. Here, more noticeably than elsewhere, nature had run amok. A stone fountain lay in two huge grey pieces, split asunder by an ash that had taken seed long ago in the disused fissure at its centre. Elsewhere the regular pattern of a once elaborate garden could be vaguely sensed, underlying the chaotic sprawl of new growth.

‘Well?’ she said, looking up at him. ‘What now?’

The wall was too high to climb. The gate seemed strong and solid, with four big hinges set into the stone. A big, thick-linked steel chain was wrapped tightly over the keyhole, secured by a fist-sized padlock.

Ben smiled. ‘Watch.’

Taking a firm hold of two of the upright bars, he shook the gate vigorously, then gave it one last sharp forward thrust. With a crash it fell inward, then swung sideways, twisting against the restraining chain.

Ben stepped over it, then reached back for her. ‘The iron was rotten,’ he said, pointing to the four places in the stone where the hinges had snapped sheer off.

She nodded, understanding at once what he was really saying to her. Be careful here. Judge nothing by its appearance.

He turned from her.

She followed, more cautious now, making her way through the thick sprawl of greenery towards the house.

A verandah ran the length of the front of the house. At one end it had collapsed. One of the four mock-doric pillars had fallen and now lay, like the broken leg of a stone giant, half-buried in the window frame behind where it had previously stood. The glass-framed roof of the verandah was cracked in several places where branches of nearby trees had pushed against it, and the whole of the wooden frame – the elaborately carved side pieces, the stanchions, rails and planking-was visibly rotten. Ben stood before the shallow flight of steps that led up to the main entrance, his head tilted back as he studied the frontage.

‘It’s not what I expected,’ he said as she came alongside him. ‘It seems a lot grander from the river. And bigger. A real fortress of a place.’

She took his arm. ‘I don’t know. I think it is rather grand. Or was.’

He turned and looked at her. ‘Did you bring the lamp?’

She nodded.

‘Good. Though I doubt there’ll be much to see. The house has been boarded up more than eighty years now.’

She was silent a moment, thoughtful, and knew he was thinking the same thing. Augustus. The mystery of this house had something to do with their great-uncle, Augustus.

‘Well?’ she prompted after a moment. ‘Shall we go inside?’

‘Yes. But not this way. There’s another door round the side. We’ll get in there, through the kitchens.’

She stared at him a moment, then understood. He had already studied plans of the old house. Which meant he had planned this visit for some while. But why this morning? Was it something to do with the soldiers’ deaths? Or was it something else? She knew they had had a visitor last night, but no one had told her who it was or why they’d come. Whatever, Ben had seemed disturbed first thing when she had gone to wake him. He had been up already. She had found him sitting there, hunched up on his bed, his arms wrapped about his knees, staring out through the open window at the bay. That same mood was on him even now as he stood there looking up at the house.

‘What exactly are we looking for?’

‘Clues…’

She studied his face a moment longer but it gave nothing away. His answer was unlike him. He was always so specific, so certain. But today he was different. It was as if he was looking for something so ill defined, so vaguely comprehended that even he could not say what it was.

‘Come on, then,’ he said suddenly. ‘Let’s see what ghosts we’ll find.’

She laughed quietly, that same feeling she had had staring down at the cove through the trees – that sense of being not quite herself – returning to her. It was not fear, for she was never afraid when she was with Ben, but something else. Something to do with this side of the water. With the wildness here. As if it reflected something in herself. Some deeper, hidden thing.

‘What do you think we’ll find?’ she called out to him as she followed him, pushing through the dense tangle of bushes and branches. ‘Have you any idea at all?’

‘None,’ he yelled back. ‘Maybe there’s nothing at all. Maybe it’s an empty shell. But then why would they board it up? Why bother if it’s empty? Why notjustleaveittorot?’

She caught up with him. ‘From the look of it it’s rotted anyway.’

Ben glanced at her. ‘It’ll be different inside.’

A broad shaft of daylight breached the darkness. She watched Ben fold the shutter into its recess, then move along to release and fold back another, then another, until all four were open. Now the room was filled with light. A big room. Much bigger than she’d imagined it in the dark. A long wooden worksurface filled most of the left-hand wall, its broad top cleared. Above it, on the wall itself, were great tea-chest-sized oak cupboards. At the far end four big ovens occupied the space, huge pipes leading up from them into the ceiling overhead. Against the right-hand wall, beneath the windows, was a row of old machines and, beside the door, a big enamel sink.

She watched Ben bend down and examine the pipes beneath the sink. They were green with moss, red with rust. He rubbed his finger against the surface of one of them, then put the finger gingerly to his lips. She saw him frown then sniff the finger, his eyes intense, taking it all in.

He turned, then, surprisingly, he laughed. ‘Look.’

There, in the middle of the white-tiled floor, was a beetle. A rounded, black-shelled thing the size of a brooch.

‘Is it alive?’ she asked, expecting it to move at any moment.

He shrugged, then went across and picked it up. But it was only a husk, the shell of a beetle. ‘It’s been dead years,’ he said.

Yes, she thought, maybe since the house was sealed.

There was another door behind them, next to an old, faded print that was rotten with damp beneath its mould-spattered glass. Beyond the door was a narrow corridor that led off to the right. They went through, moving slowly, cautiously, side by side, using their lamps to light the way ahead.

They explored, throwing open the shutters in each of the big rooms, but there was nothing. The rooms were empty, their dusty floorboards bare, only the dark outlines of long-absent pictures interrupting the blankness of the walls.

No sign of life. Only the husk, the empty shell of what they’d come for.

Augustus. Not Amos’s son, Augustus, but his namesake. His grandson. No one talked of that Augustus. Yet it was that very absence that made him so large in their imaginations. Ever since Ben had first found that single mention of him in the journals. But what had he been? What had he done that he could not be talked of?

She shivered and looked at Ben. He was watching her, as if he knew what she was thinking.

‘Shall we go up?’

She nodded.

Upstairs it was different. There the rooms were filled with ancient furniture, preserved under white sheets, as if the house had been closed up for the summer, while its occupant was absent.

In one of the big rooms at the front of the house, Meg stood beside one of the huge, open shutters, staring out through the trees at the river. Light glimmered on the water through gaps in the heavy foliage. Behind her she could hear Ben, pulling covers off chairs and tables, searching, restlessly searching for something.

‘What happened here?’

Ben stopped and looked up from what he was doing. ‘I’m not sure. But it’s the key to things. I know it is.’

She turned and met his eyes. ‘How do you know?’

‘Because it’s the one thing they won’t talk about. Gaps. Always look for the gaps, Meg. That’s where the truth is. That’s where they hide all the important stuff.’

‘Like what?’

His face hardened momentarily, then he looked away.

She looked down, realizing just how keyed up he was; how close he had come to snapping at her.

‘There’s nothing here,’ he said. ‘Let’s go up again.’

She nodded, then followed, knowing there would be nothing. The house was empty. Or as good as. But she was wrong.

Ben laughed, delighted, then stepped inside the room, shining his lamp about the walls. It was a library. Or a study maybe. Whichever, the walls were filled with shelves, and the shelves with books. Old books, of paper and card and leather. Ben hurried to the shutters and threw them open, then turned and stared back into the room. There was a door, two windows and a full-length mirror on the wall to his left. Apart from that there were only shelves. Books and more books, filling every inch of the wall-space.

‘Whose were they?’ she asked, coming alongside him; sharing his delight.

He pulled a book down at random, then another. The bookplates were all the same. He showed her one.

She read the words aloud. ‘This book is the property of Augustus Raedwald Shepherd.’ She laughed, then looked up into Ben’s face. ‘Then he lived here. But I thought…’

Ben shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe he used this house to work in.’

She turned, looking about her. There were books scattered all about their cottage, but not a tenth as many as were here. There must have been five, maybe ten thousand of them. She laughed, astonished. There were probably more books here – real books – than there were in the rest of Chung Kuo.

Ben was walking slowly up and down the room, looking about him curiously. ‘It’s close,’ he said softly. ‘It’s very close now.’

What’s close? she wanted to ask. But the question would only anger him. He knew no better than she.

Then, suddenly, he stopped and turned and almost ran outside into the corridor again. ‘There!’ he said, exultant, and she watched him pace out the distance from the end of the corridor to the doorway. Fifteen paces. He went inside and did the same. Twelve. Only twelve!

She saw at once. The mirror. The mirror was a door. A way through.

He went to it at once, looking for a catch, a way of releasing it, but there was nothing. Frustrated, he pulled books down from the shelf and knocked at the wall behind them. It was brick, solid brick.

For a moment he stood before the mirror, staring into it. Then he laughed. ‘Of course!’

He turned and pointed it out to her. ‘Level with the top of the mirror. That row of books opposite. Look, Meg. Tell me what you see.’

She went across and looked. They were novels. Famous novels. Ulysses, Nostromo, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Vanity Fair, Howard’s End, Bleak House, Daniel Martin, Orlando and others. She turned back to him. ‘I don’t understand. What am I looking for?’

‘It’s a cryptogram. Look at the order. The first letter of the titles.’

She looked, doing as he said. D.A.E.H.R.E. V.O.N.O.T.T.U.B. Then she understood. It was mirrored. You had to reverse the letters.

He laughed, ahead of her, and reached up to find the button.

With a faint hiss of escaping air the mirror sprang free. Beyond it was a room. Ben shone his lamp inside. It seemed like a smaller version of the library, the walls covered with books. But in its centre, taking up most of the floor space, was a desk.

He shone his lamp over the desk’s surface, picking out four objects. A letter knife, an ink-block, a framed photograph and a large, folio-sized journal. The light rested on the last of these for some while, then moved upward, searching the end wall.

Meg came alongside him. ‘What are you looking for?’

‘A window. There must have been a window.’

‘Why? If he really wanted to keep this room a secret, having no window onto the outside would be the best way, surely?’

He looked at her, then nodded. But she, watching him, was surprised that he hadn’t seen it for himself. It was as if, now that he’d found it, he was transfixed by his discovery. She shone her lamp into his face.

‘Meg…’ He pushed her hand away.

She moved past him, into the room, then turned back, facing him.

‘Here.’ She handed him the journal, knowing, even before he confirmed it, whose it was. Augustus. There was a space for it on the shelf on her father’s study, amongst the others there. She recognized the tooled black leather of its cover.

Ben opened it. He turned a page, then smiled and looked up at her.

‘Am I right?’ she asked.

In answer he turned the book and showed her the page. She laughed uneasily, shocked, then looked back up at him. It was a picture of Ben. An almost perfect portrait of him. And underneath, in Ben’s own handwriting, was a name and a date.

‘Augustus Shepherd. Anno Domini 2120.’

‘But that’s you. Your handwriting.’

He shook his head. ‘No. But it’s a clue. We’re getting close, Meg. Very close.’

Beth Shepherd set the two bags down on the kitchen table then went to the garden door and undid the top catch. Pushing the top half back, she leaned out and called to the children.

‘Ben! Meg! I’m back!’

She went inside again and busied herself, filling the cupboards from the bags. Only when she had finished did she go to the door again and, releasing the bottom catch, go out into the rose garden.

There was no sign of them. Perhaps they’re indoors, she thought. But then they would have heard her, surely? She called again, moving out through the gate until she stood at the top of the lower garden that sloped down to the bay. She put her hand up to her eyes, searching the sunlit meadows for a sign of them.

‘Strange…’ she muttered, then turned and went back inside. She knew she was back quite early, but they usually came when she called, knowing she would have brought something special for each of them.

She took the two gifts from her handbag and set them on the table. An old-fashioned paper book for Ben – one he had specifically asked for – on sensory deprivation. And for Meg a tiny Han ivory. A delicately carved globe.

Beth smiled to herself, then went down the steps, into the relative darkness of the dining room.

‘Ben…? Meg?’

She stopped at the bottom of the steps and listened. Strange. Very strange. Where could they be? Ben had said nothing about going into town. In any case, it was only a little after twelve. They weren’t due to finish their lessons for another twenty minutes.

Curious, she went upstairs and searched the rooms. Nothing. Not even a note on Ben’s computer.

She went out and put her hand up to her brow a second time, searching the meadows more thoroughly this time. Then she remembered Peng Yu-wei. The android tutor had a special location unit. She could trace where they were by pinpointing him on Hal’s map.

Relieved, she went back upstairs, into Hal’s study, and called the map up onto the screen. She waited a moment for the signal to appear somewhere on the grid, then leaned forward to key the search sequence again, thinking she must have made a mistake. But no. There was no trace.

Beth felt her stomach flip over. ‘Gods…’

She ran down the stairs and out.

‘Ben! Meg! Where are you?’

The meadows were silent, empty. A light breeze stirred the waters of the bay. She looked. Of course, the bay. She set off down the slope, forcing herself not to run, telling herself again and again that it was all right; that her fears were unfounded. They were sensible children. And, anyway, Peng Yu-wei was with them.

Where the lawn ended she stopped and looked out across the bay, scanning the water for any sign of life. Then she turned and eased herself over the lip, clambered down the old wooden steps set into the clay wall, and ran across towards the jetty.

The rowboat was gone.

Where? She couldn’t understand it. Where? Then, almost peripherally, she noticed something. Off to the far left of her, jutting from the water, revealed by the ebb of the tide.

She climbed up again, then ran along the shoreline until she was standing at the nearest point to it. It lay there, fifteen, maybe twenty ch’i from the shore, part-embedded in the mudbank, part-covered by the receding water. She knew what it was at once. And knew, for a certainty, that Ben had done this to it.

The android lay unnaturally in the water, almost sitting up, one shoulder, part of its upper arm and the side of its head projecting above the surface. It did not float, like a corpse would float, but rested there, solid and heavy, its torn clothing flapping about it like weeds.

‘Poor thing,’ she might have said another time, but now any sympathy she had for the machine was swamped by her fears for her children.

She looked up sharply, her eyes going immediately to the far shore and to the house on the crest above the cove. They had been forbidden. But that would not stop Ben. No. The sight of Peng Yu-wei in the water told her that.

She turned, her throat constricted now, her heart pounding in her breast, and began to run back up the slope towards the cottage. And as she ran her voice hissed from her, heavy with anxiety and pain.

‘Let them be safe! Please, gods, let them be safe!’

Ben sat at the desk, reading from the journal. Meg stood behind him, at his shoulder, holding the two lamps steady above the page, following Ben’s finger as it moved from right to left, up and down the columns of cyphers.

Ben had explained it to her. He had shown her how the frontispiece illustration was the key to it. In the illustration a man sat by a fireplace, reading a newspaper, his face obscured, the scene reflected at an angle in the mirror over the mantelpiece. Using the magnifying glass he had found in the left-hand drawer, Ben had shown her how the print of the reflected newspaper was subtly different from the one the man held. Those differences formed the basis of the cypher. She understood that – even the parts about the governing rules that made the cypher change – but her mind was too slow, too inflexible to hold and use what she’d been shown.

It was as if all this was a special key – a coded lexicon – designed for one mind only. Ben’s. It was as if Augustus knew that Ben would come. As if he had seen it clearly, as in a glass. It reminded her of the feeling she had had in the room below this one, stood there amongst the shrouded furniture; that the house was not abandoned, merely boarded up temporarily, awaiting its occupant’s return.

And now he was back.

She shuddered, and the light danced momentarily across the page, making Ben look up.

He smiled and closed the journal, then stood and moved past her, leaving the big, leather-bound book on the desk.

Meg stood there a moment, staring at the journal, wondering what it said, knowing Ben would tell her when he wanted to. Then she picked it up and turned, following Ben out.

Always following, she realized. But the thought pleased her. She knew he needed her to be there – a mirror for his words, his thoughts, his dark, unworded ambitions. She, with her mere nine years of experience, knew him better than anyone. Understood him as no one else could understand him. No one living, anyway.

He was standing there, at the window, looking down thoughtfully through the broad crowns of the trees.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘I’m trying to work out where the garden is.’

She understood at once. There had been a picture towards the back of the journal – a portrait of a walled garden. She had thought it fanciful, maybe allegorical, but Ben seemed to think it was an actuality – somewhere here, near the house.

She stared at the book-filled wall above the desk, then turned back, seeing how he was looking past her at the same spot. He smiled and moved his eyes to her face.

‘Of course. There was a door at the end of the bottom corridor.’

She nodded. ‘Let’s go down.’

The door was unlocked. Beyond it lay the tiny garden, the lawn neatly trimmed, delphinia and gladioli, irises and hemerocallis in bloom in the dark earth borders. And there, beneath the back wall, the headstone, the white marble carved into the shape of an oak, its trunk exaggeratedly thick, its crown a great cumulus.

‘Yes,’ Ben said softly. ‘I knew he would be here.’

He bent down beside the stone and reached out to touch and trace the indented lettering.

AUGUSTUS RAEDWALD SHEPHERD

Born December 7 2106

Deceased August 15 2122

Oder jener stirbt und ists.

Meg frowned. ‘That date is wrong, surely, Ben?’

He shook his head, not looking at her. ‘No. He was fifteen when he killed himself

‘Then…’ But she still didn’t understand. Only fifteen? Then, belatedly, she realized what he had said: the whole of what he had said. ‘Killed himself?’

There was a door set into the wall behind the stone. A simple wooden door, painted red, with a latch high up. Ben had stood up, facing it, and was staring at it in his usual intent manner.

Doors, she thought, always another door. And behind each door something new and unexpected. Augustus, for instance. She had never dreamed he would be so much like Ben. Like a twin.

‘Shall we?’ Ben asked, looking at her. ‘Before we set off back? There’s time.’

She looked down at the headstone, a strange feeling of unease nagging at her. She was tempted to say no, to tell him to leave it, but why not? Ben was right. There was time. Plenty of time before they’d be missed.

‘Okay,’ she said quietly. ‘But then we go straight back. All right?’

He smiled at her and nodded, then went to the door, stretching to reach the latch.

It was a workroom. There were shelves along one wall on which were a number of things: old-fashioned screwdrivers and hammers, saws and pliers; a box of nails and an assortment of glues; locks and handles, brackets and a tray of different keys. A spade and a pitchfork stood against the wall beneath, beside a pair of boots, the mud on them dried, flaky to the touch.

Meg looked around her. At the far end, against the wall, was a strange upright shape, covered by an old bedspread. Above it, hanging from an old iron chain, hung a bevelled mirror. As she watched, Ben went across and threw the cloth back. It was a piano. An old upright piano. He lifted the lid and stared at the keys a while.

‘I wonder if it’s…’

Some sense – not precognition, nor even the feeling of danger – made her speak out. ‘No, Ben. Please. Don’t touch it.’

He played a note. A chord. Or what should have been a chord. Each note was flat, a harsh, cacophonic noise. The music of the house. Discordant.

She heard the chain break with a purer note than any sounded by her brother; heard the mirror slither then crash against the top of the piano; then stepped forward, her hand raised to her mouth in horror, as the glass shattered all about him.

‘Ben!!!’

Her scream echoed out onto the water beyond the house.

Inside the room there was a moment of utter stillness. Then she was at his side, sobbing breathlessly, muttering to him again and again. ‘What have you done, Ben? What have you done?’

Shards of glass littered his hair and shoulders. His cheek was cut and a faint dribble of blood ran towards the corner of his mouth. But Ben was staring down at where his left hand had been only a moment before, sounding the chord. It still lay there on the keys, the fingers extended to form the shape. But the arm now ended in a bloodied stump. Cut clean, the blood still pumping.

For a moment she did nothing, horrified, her lips drawn back from her teeth, watching how he turned the stump, observing it, his eyes filled with wonder at the thing he had accidentally done. He was gritting his teeth against the pain, keeping it at bay while he studied the stump, the severed hand.

Then, coming to herself again, she pressed the stud at her neck and sounded the alarm.

Much later Meg stood at the bottom of the slope, looking out across the water.

Night had already fallen, but in one place its darkness was breached. Across the bay flames leapt high from the burning house and she could hear the crackling of burning vegetation, the sudden sharp retorts as wood popped and split.

Smoke lay heavy on the far side of the water, laced eerily with threads of light from the blaze. She could see dark shapes moving against the brilliance; saw one of the Security craft rise up sharply, its twin beams cutting the air in front of it.

‘Meg? Come inside!’

She turned, looking back up the slope towards the cottage. Lamps burned at several of the windows, throwing faint spills of light across the white-painted stonework. Her father stood there, a dark, familiar figure, framed in the light of the doorway.

‘I’m coming, daddy. Just a moment longer. Please.’

He nodded, somewhat reluctantly, then turned away.

Meg faced the blaze again, looking out across the dark glass of the bay. She thought she could see small shapes in the uprush of flame, like insects burning, crackling furiously as their shells ignited in a sudden flare of brilliance. Books, she thought, all those books…

Ben was upstairs, in his bed. They had frozen the stump but they had not saved the hand. He would need a new one now.

She could still hear the chord he had sounded; still see his fingers spreading to form the shape. She looked away from the blaze. After-images flickered in the darkness. The eye moved on, but the image remained. For a time.

She went indoors. Went up and saw him where he lay, propped up with a mound of pillows behind his back. He was awake, fully conscious. She sat at his bedside and was silent for a time, letting him watch her.

‘What’s it like?’

‘Beautiful. The way the light’s reflected in the dark water. It’s…’

‘I know,’ he said, as if he’d seen it too.

She looked away, noticing how the fire’s light flickered in the window pane; how it cast a mottled, ever-changing pattern against the narrow opening.

‘I’m glad you did what you did,’ he said, more softly than before. ‘I would have stood there and watched myself bleed to death. I owe you my life.’

It was not entirely true. He owed his life to their mother. If Beth had not come back early then what she had done would not have mattered.

‘I only wrapped it with the sheet,’ she said. But she saw how he was looking at her, his eyes piercing her. She could see he was embarrassed. Yet there was something else there, too – something that she had never seen in him before – and it touched her deeply. She felt her lips pucker and her eyes grow moist.

‘Hey, little sis, don’t cry.’

He had never called her that before; neither had he ever touched her as he touched her now, his good right hand caressing both of hers where they lay atop the bedclothes. She shuddered and looked down.

‘I’m fine,’ he said, as if in answer to something she had said, his hand squeezing both of hers. ‘Father says they can graft a new hand onto the nerve ends. It’ll work as good as new. Maybe better.’

She found she could not look up at him. If she did she would burst into tears, and she didn’t want him to see her weakness. He had been so strong, so brave. The pain – it must have been awful.

‘You know, the worst thing was that I missed it.’

‘Missed what?’

‘I didn’t see it,’ he said, and there was genuine surprise in his voice. ‘I wasn’t quick enough. I heard the chain break and I looked up, but I missed the accident. It was done before I looked down again. My hand was no longer part of me. When I looked it was already separate, there on the keyboard.’

He laughed. A queer little sound.

Meg looked at him. He was staring at the stub of his left arm. It was neatly capped, like the end of an old cane. Silvered and neutral. Reduced to a thing.

‘I didn’t see it,’ he insisted. ‘The glass. The cut. And I felt… only a sudden absence. Not pain, but…’

She could see that he was searching for the right words, the very thing that would describe what he had felt, what he had experienced at that moment. But it evaded him. He shrugged and gave up.

‘I love you, Ben.’

‘I know,’ he said, and seemed to look at her as if to gauge how love looked in a person’s eyes. As if to place it in his memory.

After Meg had gone he lay there, thinking things through.

He had said nothing to her about what was in the journal. For once he felt no urge to share his knowledge with her. It would harm her, as it had harmed him: not on the surface, as the mirror had, but deeper, where his true self lived. In the darkness.

He felt angered that he had not been told; that Hal had not trusted him enough. More than that, he felt insulted that they had hidden it from him. Oh, he could see why it was important for Meg not to know; she responded to things in a different way. But to hide it? He clenched his fists, feeling the ghostly movement in the hand he had lost. Didn’t they know? Didn’t they understand him, even now? How could he make sense of it all unless he could first solve the riddle of himself?

It was all there, in the journal. Some of it explicit, the rest hidden teasingly away – cyphers within cyphers – as if for his eyes alone.

He had heard Augustus’s voice, speaking clearly in his head, as if direct across the years. ‘I am a failed experiment,’ he had said. ‘Old Amos botched me when he made me from his seed. He got more than he bargained for.’

It was true. They were all an experiment. All the Shepherd males. Not sons and fathers, uncles and grandfathers, but brothers every last one of them – all the fruit of Amos’s seed.

Ben laughed bitterly. It explained so much. For Augustus was his twin. Ben knew it for a certainty. He had proof.

There, in the back of the journal, were the breeding charts – a dozen complex genetic patterns, each drawn in the tiniest of hands, one to a double page; each named and dated, Ben’s own amongst them. A whole line of Shepherds, each one the perfect advisor for his T’ang.

Augustus had known somehow. Had worked it out. He had realized what he was meant for. What task he had been bred for.

But Augustus had been a rebel. He had defied his father; refusing to be trained as the servant of a T’ang. Worse, he had sired a child by his own sister, in breach of the careful plans Amos had laid. His mirror had become his mate. Furious, his ‘father’, Robert, had made him a prisoner in the house, forbidding him the run of the Domain until he changed his ways, but Augustus had remained defiant. He had preferred death to compromise.

Or so it seemed. There was no entry for that day.

There were footsteps on the stairs. He tensed, then made himself relax. He had been expecting this; had been rehearsing what he would say.

Hal stood in the doorway, looking in ‘Ben? Can I come in?’

Ben stared back at him, unable to keep the anger from his face. ‘Hello, elder brother.’

Hal seemed surprised. Then he understood. He had confiscated the journal, but he could not confiscate what was in Ben’s head. It did not matter that Ben could not physically see the pages of the journal: in his mind he could turn them anyway and read the tall columns of cyphers.

‘It isn’t like that,’ he began, but Ben interrupted him, a sharp edge to his voice.

‘Don’t lie to me. I’ve had enough of lies. Tell me who I am.’

‘You’re my son.’

Ben sat forward, but this time Hal got in first. ‘No, Ben. You’re wrong. It ended with Augustus. He was the last. You’re my son, Ben. Mine and your mother’s.’

Ben made to speak, then fell silent, watching the man. Then he looked down. Hal was not lying. Not intentionally. He spoke as he believed. But he was wrong. Ben had seen the charts, the names, the dates of birth. Amos’s great experiment was still going on.

He let out a long, shuddering breath. ‘Okay… But tell me. How did Augustus die? Why did he kill himself?’

‘He didn’t.’

‘Then how did he die?’

‘He had leukaemia.’

That too was a lie, for there was no mention of ill health in the journal. But again Hal believed it for the truth. His eyes held nothing back from Ben.

‘And the child? What happened to the child?’

Hal laughed. ‘What child? What are you talking about?’

Ben looked down. Then it was all a lie. Hal knew nothing. Nor would he learn anything from the journal unless Meg gave him the key to it; for the cypher was a special one, transforming itself constantly page by page as the journal progressed.

‘Nothing,’ he said finally. ‘I was mistaken.’

He lifted his eyes. Saw how concerned Hal was.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to trouble anyone.’

‘No…’

Then, strangely, Hal looked down and laughed. ‘You know, Ben, when I saw Peng Yu-wei stuck there in the mud, all my anger drained from me.’ He looked up and met Ben’s eyes, his voice changing, becoming more serious. ‘I understand why you did it. Believe me. And I meant what I said the other night. You can be your own man. Live your own life. It’s up to you whether you serve or not. Neither I nor the great T’ang himself will force you.’

Ben studied his brother – the man he had always thought of as his father – and saw suddenly that it did not matter what he was in reality, for Hal Shepherd had become what he believed he was. His father. A free man, acting freely, choosing freely. For him the illusion was complete. It had become the truth.

It was a powerful lesson. One Ben could use. He nodded. ‘Then I choose to be your son, if that’s all right?’

Hal smiled and reached out to take his good hand. ‘That’s all I ever wanted.’