The Dream Thief Read online

  ‘Yes, Miss Lin?’

  ‘Does your natural and boundless curiosity about the world extend to foreign parts?’

  Lyle thought about this a good long while. ‘Yes,’ he said at last, a note of caution in his voice, ‘but unfortunately, the current fashion among my peers is to exhibit great curiosity about foreign parts, journey to them, discover that they’re not like Taunton at all, not at all, you see, and immediately go about imposing civic order on said far-flung climes.’

  ‘And you’re not tempted by this cultural occupation?’

  ‘Miss Lin,’ sighed Lyle, ‘I have discovered, to my great distress, that I can’t impose order on my own household, let alone on the classical poets of your native land. I can, on the other hand, induce all sorts of elements to assume an excitingly stable crystalline form through the mere application of pressure at a fixed volume and through this begin to derive some concept of the—’

  ‘Horatio?’

  Lin’s voice is gentle, quiet, old.

  ‘Yes, Miss Lin?’

  She spoke long and slow. ‘In time,’ she said carefully, ‘my people will fade and die. I accept this. I understand this. I do not blame any one man, woman, toothless crone, drooling widow or fresh-faced child. I am not a creature of this time. The people you call your peers have spread across the face of this world and with them come machines: railways, great engines, chimneys, smoke, coal, iron, steel. An inevitable future, power in machines, and no one, especially not humans, can resist power, whatever face it wears. You spread knowledge, science, order - crystal order - created of nothing more than pressure and heat, and the volume of the world. We cannot change. We are compressed by your science into this ridged form.’ A twinge of something more than sadness, a hint of playful resentment entered her voice. ‘You spread cricket.’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘Cricket, Mister Lyle! You spread cricket!’

  ‘Miss Lin, I wish you to know that despite my cultural background, I still to this day don’t know which end of the stick thing hits the ball or to what purpose, although I can probably give you a mathematical explanation of the ballistic properties that result.’ Lyle half turned his head to stare at her direct and rude. Her face was turned down to the river, her hands folded together in front of her, her eyes half shut as if lost in some distant world. ‘Lin. . .’ he stammered. ‘I . . . can’t . . . it’s not . . .’

  ‘It is inevitable, Mister Lyle,’ she replied, not looking up. ‘The world will change. Everyone must change.’

  Lyle sighed, turned back to the river, drooping over the balustrade, shoulders hunched, fingers tangled together in front of him. ‘Very well,’ he said at last. ‘I understand. I imagine I’ll see you the next time some mystic chaos walks the street. Good luck - until then.’

  Silence.

  He looked up.

  Lin was still there.

  She was smiling.

  ‘Aren’t you going to vanish mysteriously into the fog to go and perform acts of unspeakable, scientifically unexplained - for now! - acts of mystery?’ he asked carefully.

  ‘Why would I do that?’

  ‘I don’t know. It just seems the thing you do.’

  ‘Horatio Lyle,’ said Lin brightly, ‘for a reasonably well-educated sample of your species, you sometimes manifest the intellectual properties of what Mr Gladstone would probably term a complete dolt.’

  ‘I do?’

  ‘Does it not occur to you, Mister Lyle, that if change is all this world will bring, the inevitable unpredictable destiny of everything, a certainty of chaos, that if this is so, it is my duty as a modern, highly educated, extremely capable, breathtakingly handsome, magnificently nimble, extraordinarily well—’

  ‘I think I get the idea,’ mumbled Lyle.

  Lin threw her arms open, not missing a breath, as if she was embracing the whole world. ‘Is it not the wisest thing for me to do to say, “Welcome, change, chaos, and a future in which cricket is the sport of islands yet untarnished by the advance of progress. My name is Lin Zi, and I am here to make this future mine!”’

  Lyle stared, eyes agog, mouth hanging open, waiting to see if there was anything more.

  ‘Well?’ she demanded. ‘Come on, think about it.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well then!’

  ‘Uh . . . Well then, what?’

  Lin almost stamped a foot in petulant frustration. ‘There are civil servants in the rural provinces of Sichuan with more social graces than you, Horatio Lyle!’

  Lyle scratched his chin uneasily, head on one side. Then, like a man solving a great and difficult problem, he said, ‘You mean . . . that despite the fact that you are the product of a people who have been known more than once to scheme in a distinctly evil way . . .’

  ‘Piffle!’

  ‘. . . that you have a tendency to resort to violence as a problem-solver. . .’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘. . . that you take pride in your ability to ensorcell and ensnare . . .’

  ‘Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘. . . and that you, Miss Lin, wouldn’t know a linear Newtonian force if it kicked you smartly in a region that even the grave-robbing anatomist would not refer to in polite society . . .’

  ‘See how I refrain from violence right now?’ she sang sweetly.

  ‘. . . are you perhaps suggesting, Miss Lin, that despite all these hindrances, against society, wisdom, politics and prudence, we might have something in common after all? Something more than something in common?’

  Lin’s eyes flashed the brilliant bright reflected green of a cat caught in the light. Her fingers slipped into Lyle’s own. ‘Me, Mister Lyle?’ she asked. ‘I am a polite gentlewoman. I would never suggest anything of the kind.’

  . . . and perhaps here . . .

  . . . on Westminster Bridge, with the river below and an infinite sky lost somewhere far, far above, spread over an infinite world of infinite change . . .

  . . . perhaps just for a moment . . .

  . . . until the sun came up and the fog parted and the tide turned and the strangers flooded back onto the streets, until the next time . . .

  . . . just for tonight . . .

  They all lived, happily ever after.