The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Chapter 60

I had no choice.

I slunk back to Berwick.

Back to Hulne House, back to Patrick and Harriet, to Rory and Constance. Back to where I’d come from, back where it all began.

I arrived, four days after I’d left, grimy, tired, bedraggled. A thief child who’d run away and found nowhere to run to. Harriet wept when she saw me, held me close and rocked me in her arms, sobbed until my clothes were damp with it. Patrick took me out the back and gave me the worst hiding of my life. Then, he dragged me up to the house and made me apologise, still bleeding, to Mr Hulne and all the family, who told me I was very lucky that I wasn’t being thrown out entirely, to starve like the little brat I was, and that from now on I would have to work every day and every night until I’d made it up to them, nasty, ungrateful child that I was.

I took my beating and humiliation in silence. I had no choice. The luxury, the lifeline of my last few lives had been pulled out from beneath my feet. I was six years old. I was seven hundred and fifty. I was being hunted.

The Hulnes refused to pay for me to go to school, and Patrick, humiliated by my escapade, didn’t argue the point. Harriet began dying early in this life, and I wondered if, in my way, I had contributed. I stayed by her bed to the end, feeding her poppy juice thieved from my aunt Victoria and holding her hand in silence. Perhaps my vigil gave me some credit in Patrick’s eyes, for her funeral was the first time he looked me in the face since I had run away, and after that the beatings grew less.

In the wake of Harriet’s death, and refusing to see her unacknowledged nephew grow up entirely wild, my aunt Alexandra secretly took to teaching me letters. Naturally, I knew all she had to say, but I was so grateful for the company, for the conversation, the books and the encouragement she gave me that I indulged her, a tiny compensation for her great gift. Five months in, Constance found out, and the argument between the two was audible even from the fish pond outside. Alexandra had more guts than I’d given her credit for, as her visits, in the aftermath of the argument, became even more regular. She was impressed by how fast I learned and, having no children of her own, failed to appreciate fully how abnormal my development was. As she became more a part of my life, Patrick grew less, until, by the age of twelve, barely a word passed between us, and no more seemed required.

I was biding my time and had very little choice but to do so until such time as I could pass for an adult. By my fifteenth birthday I considered that I could perhaps get away with the deceit, and, as manner is half the battle, I certainly had the bearing and intellectual capacity to pull it off. I went to Alexandra, asked to borrow some small amount of money, wrote her a letter thanking her for her kindnesses, and another to Patrick expressing the same, and left the very next day without looking back.

My task was that of a historian. I needed to learn the fate of the Cronus Club without exposing my own survival. It seemed likely that, whatever had happened to the Club, those in the know would be hiding. It also seemed likely that, no matter how determined Vincent’s reach, he could probably not influence kalachakra more than a few generations older than his own. There would have been a London Cronus Club before, maybe not in the 1900s, but possibly in the 1800s and surely in the 1700s, or even if Vincent had somehow managed to stamp out all trace of it so far in the past, there would be other branches, in other cities, which he had not affected. I had to find them.

I began my research in the University of London library. Security was almost non-existent, and it was easy enough to pass as a student, swaggering my way into the reading room to pull out tomes on the social history of London. I also began, very cautiously, sending out feelers to other cities. Telegrams to academics in Paris and Berlin, never kalachakra themselves but those who might have an interest in society, enquiring after the Cronus Club on their turfs. Paris came back with nothing, and so did Berlin. In desperation, I sent messages further afield. New York, Boston, Moscow, Rome, Madrid–all silent. The Beijing Cronus Club was, I knew, in too much turmoil at this time anyway to necessarily answer enquiries, as it spent a large part of the 1920s–40s as a shadow Club, referring its members to more prosperous and reliable institutions. Finally I received a hit from a collector of trivia in Vienna, who reported that in 1903 a organisation called the Cronus Club had held a party for the city’s ambassadors and their wives, but in all the troubles of the First World War it had closed its doors and never reopened them.

In London I scoured the history books and finally found a reference in the London Gazette to the Club. In the year 1909 the directors of the Cronus Club were closing its doors owing to “a lack of suitable member interest”. That was almost all I could find.

1909.

The date gave me a clue and to a degree some relief. The Cronus Club had existed until the end of the nineteenth century, which suggested that whatever allies Vincent might have, they could not extend too far back in time. A child born in 1895 would by 1901 have recovered enough mental faculties to hunt down kalachakra at their point of origin and terminate their births. By 1909 the trend would have been noticed, the threat to the Club clear, and suddenly the organisation which was meant to protect its members would be a trap, a lure, and a danger to all who sought its aid.

Then again, even if the London branch was being so targeted, I couldn’t believe the scale of these events, global in their proportion. No one, not even Vincent, could possibly have discovered the points of origins of so many ouroborans and wiped them out, not on such a massive scale. Even as that thought passed through my brain, another promptly occurred–that Vincent did not necessarily need to know the points of origins of Club members to kill them; he merely needed to make them forget. That would do the job well enough, and whole generations of the Cronus Club would tumble. Finding mature Cronus Club members would be easy enough, and I had no idea what kind of action Vincent had taken against them in my last life, since I had died too young to observe. He could have had forty years, maybe more, in which to hunt down every kalachakra on the planet and wipe their thoughts or, as he had intended to do with me, determine their point of origin. Either would be devastating and yes, potentially damaging on a global scale.

If this was so, then I needed to find a survivor, someone to confirm my suspicions.

I headed to Vienna.