Band of Gypsys Read Free

sat in on the meetings when they needed a witness, smoking his horrible marijuana bidis and looking disgusted. Fiorinda stayed at home, working a different crowd.
    Today it was the Restore The Thames Party (main platform, massive slave-labour engineering to return the Thames to its pre-iceage route, thus persuading Gaia to reverse the collapse of the thermohaline circulation and restore the North Atlantic Drift). Then a few minor suppliants, and a genuinely fascinating presentation from the Devon couple who could make wind turbines invisible.
    The delegates from the New Plantagenet Society had been left until last, sent off to get nervous in the brown and gold salon next door. These lunatics had been holed-up in Paris since Ax’s dictatorship—when the French had provided asylum (out of sheer cussedness) for a hotbed of dodgy former-UK opposition groups. The “Plantagenets” were not the harmless kind. The two delegates were in full reenactment regalia, jewelled badges pinning sprigs of broom pinned to their velvet caps; velvet robes over formal business suits. Mr Red, sallow and middle-aged, thin mousy-grey hair in a long bob, bore an eerie resemblance to a famous portrait of Henry Tudor; suitably enough. Mr White, a much younger, rosy-cheeked and hearty rosbif , didn’t look much like Richard Crookback, but he did have a Yorkshire accent
    There goes your project, thought Ax, with mordant amusement, frowning at the sprigs of hothouse planta genista . Don’t you know we’re soldiers of the queen, and Fiorinda hates cut flowers?
    Nah, the New Plantagenets knew nothing.
    The Reds and the Whites had buried their differences, and were ready share power. They’d approached Ax with a plan whereby he would marry—purely for legitimacy—the Yorkist heir, a young Greek woman: but it was fine if he preferred to be adopted by the Lancastrian heir (and elderly Canadian) instead. Their hopes were high. They had quasi-legal documents, including a ‘writ’ declaring Ax’s Islamic faith was not an impediment, and a ‘writ of perpetual abdication’ from the Hastings family, living Plantagenets who didn’t want anything to do with these nuts. They had fanfold genealogies in oak-gall, scarlet and gilt; they had a recorded video message from the elderly Canadian. They had detailed plans for the ceremony where Ax would simultaneously be adopted, by video-proxy, and consecrated king. He would take the dynastic name Richard Henry the First.
    The conference room was bitterly cold, heated only by a trash-eater stove in the back of a cavernous baroque fireplace, where its heat went straight up the mighty chimney. The former Dictator of England and his Minister did not remove their coats. Mr Preston wore Dickensian, fingerless dark mittens that looked none too clean. He smoked one of the expensive cigarettes that were proffered (but declined the carton); showed an interest in the ornate paperwork, and asked gentle questions about the dirty business of actually taking over a country. Tall Mr Pender, with the intimidating good looks, never spoke except in an undertone, to his chief—murmured asides that won Mr Preston’s flashing smile, and made the negotiators envious.
    Alain sat at the end of the table, chain-smoking, and followed the proceedings with exasperated disbelief. Sage stared at curling satellite image print-outs of London and the south coast of England, thumb-tacked to the panelled walls. Must have been there since this was the nerve centre of Ax’s Velvet Invasion. He wondered why Alain kept any relics of that hellish time. Poor housekeeping? A phalanx of landline phones stood on a side-table, gathering dust.
    The stove hissed. At last Ax squared the documents, slipped an ancient vellum into its silk-lined folder, and swept the lot across the board.
    ‘Mr Red, Mr White, thank you. That’s all I have time for: you may go.’
    The delegates looked at each other, nonplussed.
    ‘You could move that stove out into the