The Black Fox by H. F. Heard

Author:H. F. Heard [Heard, H. F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Horror, Fantasy, Historical, Dark Fantasy
ISBN: 9781504037815
Google: zwwyDAAAQBAJ
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2016-07-04T22:00:00+00:00

11

He was always called the P. S. by all the other Secretaries, that rose above him to the towering Secretaries of State. The P. S., they said, deserved his name because everyone in the know knew one of the P.M.’s ways of ending certain of his political letters—“P.S. the following piece of Church Preferment is now available: suggest someone sound.” For the P.S. was, of course, the Patronage Secretary. But the P.S. did not share the contempt for his office nearly all his colleagues showed. Nor for that matter did the P.M. Both of them had a sense of humour and also a sense of romance, an uncommon blend that made a common bond.

This was the P.S.’s morning. Once a fortnight—if the political sky was not too lowering—he had his hour, or at least thirty minutes, alone with the Magician. And today the Wizard, as he did when in high expansive humour, dressed for the part. The Patronage Secretary in the Whitehall uniform of black frock-coat, rose, as there entered a flowered silk dressing gown and a scarlet fez. Between these two splashes of Oriental colour, looked out the half mummified features of the most powerful face in Europe. But it looked no more formidable than the fez that crowned it. Besides, even the eyes, that could not hide their penetration, were now wrinkled round with humour.

“Her Majesty’s Chief Minister”—he swept a bow to the standing Secretary and the fez nearly fell off—“soon may be saluted as Grand Vizier by far more subjects than have ever hailed him under the dubious title of First Lord of the Treasury. The Royal Titles Bill is now assured of its passage into Law, when, May the Queen Live Forever!”—the fez bobbed its tassel again—“the long, thin line seen by Macbeth extending down the centuries will suddenly ‘conglobulate’ (as the Great Lexicographer has phrased it) and produce—if I may be forgiven, under the stress of emotion for mixing my metaphors—and produce, as a crowning pendant, an Oriental empress!” The fez was whipped off, revealing for a moment a skull so bare and wrinkled that it seemed more like a fossilized brain than an ordinary head. Then the scarlet cone resumed its uneasy seat at an even jauntier angle.

“That, my young friend, is neither rhetoric nor irrelevance but a very pertinent introduction to our business. Let us be seated. What fare have you for me today?”

Before, however, the P.S. could settle on the chair he drew up beside the couch on which the tired garish figure had sunk, the voice crowed again, “‘The Imponderables’—as my ‘opposite number,’ the Kurfurst Kanzler calls them—they decide, he knows, not arms nor battles but, as he’s finding, Kulturkampfs. So, young sir, to the Church, to the Church. ‘No Bishop, No King’ as the ‘British Solomon’ so wisely remarked. But, as he and his son didn’t know, if the monarch should become an Oriental empress, then the episcopus must become equally spacious, equally latitudinarian to embrace East as well as

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