"2315 is cross-referenced to 3477," said Anathema.
"You can remember details like that at a time like this?"
"Since you mention it, yes," she said. She held out a card.
Newt read it again. There was a sound outside like a sheet of corrugated iron pinwheeling across the garden, which was exactly what it was.
"Is this supposed to mean," he said slowly, "that we're supposed to become an, an item? That Agnes, what a joker."
Courting is always difficult when the one being courted has an elderly female relative in the house; they tend to mutter or cackle or bum cigarettes or, in the worst cases, get out the family photograph album, an act of aggression in the sex war which ought to be banned by a Geneva Convention. It's much worse when the relative has been dead for three hundred years. Newt had indeed been harboring certain thoughts about Anathema; not just harboring them, in fact, but dry-docking them, refitting them, giving them a good coat of paint and scraping the barnacles off their bottom. But the idea of Agnes's second-sight boring into the back of his neck sloshed over his libido like a bucketful of cold water.
He had even been entertaining the idea of inviting her out for a meal, but he hated the idea of some Cromwellian witch sitting in her cottage three centuries earlier and watching him eat.
He was in the mood in which people burned witches. His life was quite complicated enough without it being manipulated across the centuries by some crazed old woman.
A thump in the grate sounded like part of the chimney stack coming down.
And then he thought: my life isn't complicated at all. I can see it as clearly as Agnes might. It stretches all the way to early retirement, a whipround from the people in the office, a bright little neat flat somewhere, a neat little empty death. Except now I'm going to die under the ruins of a cottage during what might just possibly be the end of the world.
The Recording Angel won't have any trouble with me, my life must have been dittoes on every page for years. I mean, what have I ever really done? I've never robbed a bank. I've never had a parking ticket. I've never eaten Thai food—
Somewhere another window caved in, with a merry tinkle of breaking glass. Anathema put her arms around him, with a sigh which really didn't sound disappointed at all.
I've never been to America. Or France, because Calais doesn't really count. I've never learned to play a musical instrument.
The radio died as the power lines finally gave up.
He buried his face in her hair.
I've never—
There was a pinging sound.
Shadwell, who had been bringing the Army pay books up to date, looked up in the middle of signing for Witchfinder Lance-Corporal Smith.
It took him a while to notice that the gleam of Newt's pin was no longer on the map.
He got down from his stool, muttering under his breath, and searched around on the floor until he found it. He gave it another polish and put it back in Tadfield.
He was just signing for Witchfinder Private Table, who got an extra tuppence a year hay allowance, when there was another ping.
He retrieved the pin, glared at it suspiciously, and pushed it so hard into the map that the plaster behind it gave way. Then he went back to the ledgers.
There was a ping.
This time the pin was several feet from the wall. Shadwell picked it up, examined its point, pushed it into the map, and watched it.
After about five seconds it shot past his ear.
He scrabbled for it on the floor, replaced it on the map, and held it there.
It moved under his hand. He leaned his weight on it.
A tiny thread of smoke curled out of the map. Shadwell gave a whimper and sucked his fingers as the red-hot pin ricocheted off the opposite wall and smashed a window. It didn't want to be in Tadfield.
Ten seconds later Shadwell was rummaging through the WA's cash box, which yielded a handful of copper, a ten-shilling note, and a small counterfeit coin from the reign of James I. Regardless of personal safety, he rummaged in his own pockets. The results of the trawl, even with his pensioners' concessionary travel pass taken into consideration, were barely enough to get him out of the house, let alone to Tadfield.
The only other people he knew who had money were Mr. Rajit and Madame Tracy. As far as the Rajits were concerned, the question of seven weeks' rent would probably crop up in any financial discussion he instigated at this point, and as for Madame Tracy, who'd only be too willing to lend him a handful of used tenners…
"I'll be swaggit if I'll tak the Wages o' Sin frae the painted jezebel," he said.
Which left no one else.
Save one.
The southern pansy.
They'd each been here, just once, spending as little time as possible in the room and, in Aziraphale's case, trying not to touch any flat surface. The other one, the flash southern bastard in the sunglasses, was—Shadwell suspected—not someone he ought to offend. In Shadwell's simple world, anyone in sunglasses who wasn't actually on a beach was probably a criminal. He suspected that Crowley was from the Mafia, or the underworld, although he would have been surprised how right he nearly was. But the soft one in the camelhair coat was a different matter, and he'd risked trailing him back to his base once, and he could remember the way. He thought Aziraphale was a Russian spy. He could ask him for money. Threaten him a bit.
It was terribly risky.
Shadwell pulled himself together. Even now young Newt might be suffering unimaginable tortures at the hands of the daughters o' night and he, Shadwell, had sent him.
"We canna leave our people in there," he said, and put on his thin overcoat and shapeless hat and went out into the street.
The weather seemed to be blowing up a bit.
ziraphale was dithering. He'd been dithering for some twelve hours. His nerves, he would have said, were all over the place. He walked around the shop, picking up bits of paper and dropping them again, fiddling with pens.
He ought to tell Crowley.
No, he didn't. He wanted to tell Crowley. He ought to tell Heaven. He was an angel, after all. You had to do the right thing. It was built-in. You see a wile, you thwart. Crowley had put his finger on it, right enough. He ought to have told Heaven right from the start.
But he'd known him for thousands of years. They got along. They nearly understood one another. He sometimes suspected they had far more in common with one another than with their respective superiors. They both liked the world, for one thing, rather than viewing it simply as the board on which the cosmic game of chess was being played.
Well, of course, that was it. That was the answer, staring him in the face. It'd be true to the spirit of his pact with Crowley if he tipped Heaven the wink, and then they could quietly do something about the child, although nothing too bad of course because we were all God's creatures when you got down to it, even people like Crowley and the Antichrist, and the world would be saved and there wouldn't have to be all that Armageddon business, which would do nobody any good anyway, because everyone knew Heaven would win in the end, and Crowley would be bound to understand.
Yes. And then everything would be all right.
There was a knock at the shop door, despite the CLOSED sign. He ignored it.
Getting in touch with Heaven for two-way communications was far more difficult for Aziraphale than it is for humans, who don't expect an answer and in nearly all cases would be rather surprised to get one.