"The Beaumont Street Syndicate," Julian repeated. "Well, well. How deeply do you think they"re involved?"
"Too early to say," Mountjoy replied. "It might be," he added cautiously, "that their involvement is entirely innocent."
"Well quite," Julian replied, nodding. "In fact, I expect we"ll find that that"s it, entirely. I mean, everybody"s got to have a financial adviser, even Jean de Nesle. No law against it."
"No indeed."
"Just common sense, really."
"Quite so."
"Well, there you are, then," Julian said. "Nevertheless," he added, "we"d better keep an eye on them. Discreetly, of course. Wouldn"t want to start a scare on the Exchanges, would we?" He laughed brightly. "Right, you get that in hand straight away. Put Pursuivant on to it, why don"t you? He"s got more brains than the others. I"ve even known him switch on a light without blowing all the fuses. Oh, and Mountjoy
"Yes?"
"I wonder if you"d mind just sending a fax for me. To my broker, you know," Julian said. "Just a little bit of personal business."
"Blondel."
"Testing, testing, one, two, three," said Blondel. "Yes?"
Guy frowned. He didn"t want to appear faint-hearted or anything like that, but he felt he had a right to know. "Those people," he said. "You know, in that pub?"
Blondel thought for a moment. "Oh," he said, "you mean in that pub in the Elephant and Castle?"
"That"s right," Guy said. "After we"d been sorting things out with the Lombards; the men who came in and..."
"Got you, yes," Blondel said. He peered at the microphone and blew into it, giving rise to a sound like G.o.d coughing. "What about them?"
"It"s nothing, really," Guy replied. "It"s just ... well, does that sort of thing happen very often? Because first there was the fight we had with the man when we followed the stag, and then that business in the Houses of Parliament, and now this..."
"The Houses of Parliament thing was different," Blondel said. He adjusted the microphone stand slightly and tightened up the little clips. "They were just ordinary guards. Must be an awful job, I always think, being a guard. Complete strangers forever hitting you and so forth."
"But the other ones," Guy persisted. "What about them?"
Blondel shrugged. "I don"t really know all that much about them myself. They just keep turning up and trying to attack me. They"re not very good at it, as you"ll have seen for yourself. Their arms and legs don"t seem to ... well, to work properly, if you know what I mean. They"ve been doing it for as long as I can remember."
"How can you tell?" Guy asked. "That it"s the same lot, I mean."
"Easy," Blondel replied. "It"s always the same people. They never seem to get a day older, you know. Been jumping out on me for years, some of them have."
"Have you tried finding out who they are?"
"What, from them, you mean? No point."
"Why not?" Guy asked. "Do they refuse to talk, or something?"
Blondel scratched his ear. "It"s not that," he said, "far from it. It"s just that when you try questioning them, they go all to pieces.
"Perhaps if you tried, I don"t know, being a bit less intimidating..."
"No, you don"t understand," Blondel said. "When I say they go all to pieces, I mean all to pieces. If you don"t duck pretty sharpish, bits of them hit you. Legs, kidneys, that sort of thing."
Guy stared. "You mean they ...?"
"Blow up, yes. Now, where does this wire go?" He traced the course of the wire to the back of a huge amplifier and pulled it out. "There," he said, "that"s better. Never could be doing with all this gadgetry." He picked up the microphone and tapped it. Silence. "I always reckon that if you can"t make them hear you at the back of the hall then you shouldn"t call yourself a singer. Why they blow up, of course, I haven"t the faintest idea, but they do. The odd thing is that it can"t do them much harm, because a month or so later they come bouncing back, club in hand..."
"You"re telling me," Guy said, "that the same men who blow up
"That"s right," Blondel said. "Anyway, that"s all I know about them. Except, of course, that they"re something to do with the Chastel des Larmes Chaudes. They"ve got the Chastel livery, you see."
"Fine," Guy said. "So what"s the ...
But Blondel had gone off to disconnect the boom mikes, and Guy thought it was best to leave it at that. The h.e.l.l with La Beale Isoud, he had decided. If there was any way he could get back to his own time, he"d do it. If not, well, he"d have to settle down here (wherever here was) and get a job. But no more of this being lumped on by strange exploding a.s.sa.s.sins. Not his cup of tea at all.
"Now where"s he gone?" said a voice behind him. It was Giovanni, the senior partner.
"He went off to look at something," Guy replied. "Something technical, after my time. Look, can I ask you something?"
Giovanni raised an eyebrow. "What can I do for you?" he asked.
"It"s like this," Guy said. "Have you known Blondel long?"
Giovanni grinned. "Yes," he said.
Guy nodded. "All this stuff, about time travel and the civil service and Richard the Lion-Heart. It"s not for real, is it?"
"I"m sorry?"
"I mean," Guy said, "it"s not actually true, is it? None of this is actually happening, or about to happen or whatever; it"s all just.
Giovanni had both eyebrows raised. "Of course it"s true," he said. "What a very peculiar thing to suggest. After all, here you are experiencing it; it must be true, don"t you think?"
"I ..."Guy rallied his thoughts. "I just find it hard to accept," he said, looking out over the auditorium, "that I"m here with the court poet of Richard the First, who"s about to give a concert in a specially built auditorium somewhere in the middle of the Hundred Years War. With a public address system," he added, "which makes the sort of thing we have back in my own century look like two cocoa tins and a length of string. I mean, you"ll understand my being a bit confused."
"Indeed I do," Giovanni said. "And I think I can help."
"You can?"
Giovanni smiled. "I believe so," he said. "What you"re really saying is that you"re worried."
"Extremely worried."
"Perfectly understandable," Giovanni said. "After all, you can"t be expected to know what"s going to happen next. You"ve absolutely no way of knowing, from one moment to the next, what the future, immediate or long-term, has in store for you."
"Exactly," Guy said. "So perhaps ...