Free The Whispering Swarm by Michael Moorcock Page B

how she had embarrassed me and gave me a friendly wink as I blushed by. For all my early experience with girls, I was still a teenage boy. I could only mumble something, stare at the floor, try not to step on her pretty feet, grope for a nonexistent handrail and get away from the source of my embarrassment as soon as possible. ‘Will you be here for lunch?’ I stammered.
    â€˜Oh, if I’m up, no doubt,’ she said.
    Before I knew it I was running out of Alsacia and was halfway up Fetter Lane, almost at the Tarzan Adventures office.
    My mind wasn’t on my work that day. My hangover didn’t get much better. I felt vaguely let down by Barry, who had failed to confirm what I had seen in the Alsacia. Mostly, however, my head was full of the young woman I had seen again. She was everything I had ever dreamed of since I was a boy. Her red hair! Her violet eyes! With final page proofs gone to press, Thursday was always a bit slow. Our boss at Tarzan, Donald Peters, usually went home to the country that day. After he left, we, too, tended to take things a bit easy. That was also payday, when I treated myself to a large Dover sole at the Globe, whose lunches I had enjoyed long before I knew about the SF meetings. They used light matzo batter and served thick, crisp chips, fresh green peas or cauliflower, depending on the season. A bit of salad on the side. A pint of best bitter. But this time I put the proofs to press and got down to Carmelite Inn Chambers as fast as I could, back across Fleet Street, through the same Inns of Court and into Alsacia. Over gleaming flint cobbles I entered The Swan With Two Necks , crowded with what I determined was a noisy group of actors, probably from the theatres of Aldgate or the Strand. I understood the costume the young woman had worn. And why she was such a beauty. She was a film star! Being fairly secluded, this pub was taken over by people who might be recognised by the public. They certainly couldn’t enter an ordinary pub dressed as they were.
    I had hard work pushing myself through men in long leather-and-silk coats, lacy shirts, brightly coloured velvet trousers. The three-cornered hats perched on their wigs made me think of actors in a TV production of The Beggar’s Opera. The names on the beer casks were unfamiliar, so I asked for a pint of ‘best’ and was about to pay for it when the grinning girl, now barefoot in skirts and blouse, spotted me and made a sign to the barman. My beer was free. She gestured for me to follow her through a door into a small private bar where she greeted me with her own glass against mine. By their finery the people here were the stars of the production. She remembered me. Her name was Molly, she said. Oh, those eyes and ringlets!
    She asked my name and then, jumping onto a chair, called out for silence. ‘Now boys, I’d like to introduce you to our guest. This here’s Master Michael Moorcock, a scrivener by trade.’ Did I hear Irish in her voice? ‘Yonder’s Captain King and next to him old Captain Turpin and next to him young Captain Turpin. Captain Langley, Captain Jack Sheppard. Colonel Billy Pike. Colonel Carson. Colonel Bowie and Colonel Cody.’
    I gasped, barely able to speak. These actors were got up like my boyhood heroes! I was still writing about some of them! I could see them, hear them, certainly smell them and what they were drinking. As I turned to look around, my arm grazed one’s unshaven chin. I could practically feel the weight of their greatcoats, noted a grease spot here, a frayed cuff, a tear, a burn mark there. Tom King looked a little redder in the cheeks than I knew from his pictures, Turpin a little too old or a little too young, depending which one was the legendary highway robber. Both looked tired. Overworked, I thought. Jack Sheppard, the same age as me, wore his doom and his youth in equal measure. Jack Rann: ‘Sixteen String’ Jack. So many Jacks and