Free Time's Mistress by Steven Savile Page B

softly.
    Carruthers pocketed the coin. “What news?”
    “None of the good variety, I am afraid,” Millington said.
    “And of the other variety?” Eugene Napier asked. Millington watched him tap out the ash from a thin cigarillo into the silver salver resting on the arm of his high-backed leather Chesterfield. Smoke curled lazily out of Napier’s mouth, rafting up across his pale face. He was a beast of a man, almost six and a half feet tall and built like the proverbial brick out house, his crisply laundered and starched white shirt straining across his barrel chest. His eyes were overshadowed by thick-knitted eyebrows and an atavistic brow. For all that, he was curiously soft-spoken.
    “Plenty of that, I’m afraid,” Millington said, tossing his white gloves onto the table beside one of the empty armchairs. He sank rather theatrically into the Chesterfield, gesturing with two fingers at the decanter. Mason nodded once and took down one of the Waterford crystal snifters, filled it with two fingers of Delord Freres, 1848 and served it to the actor. The rich Armagnac clung to the glass as Millington rolled it in his hand. He watched it with utter fascination before raising it to his nose, and breathed deeply of its nutty bouquet. He knocked it back in a single swallow and smacked his lips. “But where to begin?”
    The Greyfriar’s Gentleman’s Club, nineteen spacious rooms—and a few not so spacious ones crammed with curiosities—in what used to be a lodging house on Grays Inn Road, was a sanctuary, a haven, a place for a few like-minded men to sit in quiet meditation undisturbed by the world, to smoke their hand-rolled cigars and Meerschaum pipes while leafing through the London Times and sipping vintage cognacs. There was an air of culture, of class, about the gentleman’s club. The wood panelling in every room was polished to a rich lustre and smelled of both wood and the ingrained wax, while old leather and smoke added to the flavours of the place. The marble floor in the reception room was inlaid with a stylised sun within a sixteen-pointed star fashioned out of overlaid triangles. Each of the points was engraved with alchemical elements; the devil’s fork or Poseidon’s trident of antimony; the interlocking closed and open triangles of arsenic; the broken figure eight of bismuth; the triple-barred figure x of copper; the circle within a circle of gold; the circle and arrow of iron, so like the symbol of man; the zigzag lines of lead; the D broken by what appeared to be an axe that represented magnesium in this very different rendition of the elements; and the rest, mercury, phosphorus, platinum, potassium, silver, sulphur, tin and zinc. None but the initiated would realise that they were walking across the First Matter of the universe, or the Khem, as the old alchemists of the Nile delta knew it. It was the most overt clue as to the true nature of the building and the purpose its inhabitants put it to.
    Twin open stairways, one on either side of the mosaic, lead up to the heart of the old lodging house. Each one was immaculately carved out of oak and closer inspection would reveal more of those telling details, in this case, carvings of chthonic snakes, salamanders, sometimes represented with wings the higher up the staircase one climbed, the solar phoenix and the cauda pervonis , both important alchemical symbols of rebirth, while on the central wall where both stairs met hung a huge portrait of a beautiful hermetic couple, male and female in a single body. Behind them the great spread black wings of a raven seemed to fold around the loving couple to embrace them.
    There was an immaculate carving of a hippogriff beside the double doors that opened into the Smoking Room. The detail of every single feather and claw was beautifully rendered. To the casual eye it was nothing more than a curiosity, but of course, like everything else in this place, that was deliberate misdirection. The hippogriff was an