Underworld

Katherine Barley took a moment to admire herself in the full length mahagony mirror in the hall. She fastened the top button of her frock coat, brushed a sliver of ash from her bell bottoms and, ajusting her cap to a suitably rakish angle, braved her first step into the frigid streets of Knightsbridge in June.

The choking ash from the Icelandic eruptions, which had driven that hardy people into exile over three years before, drifted down all around her like ghostly snow on christmas day. There seemed no end to the permanant gloom, although the more optimistic natural philosophers still held to the opinion that the ordeal must end soon. The catastrophic failure of three successive harvests in the blighted northern hemisphere had cut a swathe through man's arrogant presumption of civilisation and were it not for the bounty of her benificent Empire, England surely would have starved. As it was the peasantry of France begged for crusts at Spain's fortified borders and whole towns in Russia were white with gnawed bones. The growing industrial might of the newly united Germany had stilled the iron claw of famine at its throat for a year longer but her lack of a navy or sun blessed foriegn dominions had lately exhausted her attempts to see the crisis through.

Katherine's friend L, a refugee from the Icelandic melts, had brought their two horse carridge round to the front of the house. It was all the more important to keep up appearances when no-one was watching. When the Prince Regent had died of asthma brought on by the first of the falls a long line of noble carriages had followed his cortege with few but their footman aware they were empty inside. Thanks to the tireless navigations of her majesties merchant navy, every ship carrying food to the motherland had ferried refugees back to the Antipodes or the cape. England's five and twenty million was but a tenth of that now. Katherine had chosen to stay, if England was to die she would share her grave she told herself, but in truth her motivations were mixed. The loss of so many of the first wave of ships to the revived pirates of the Barbary Shore had decimated the ranks of the landed gentry and new industrial class alike. Their distant relatives on foriegn shores, or panicking creditors packing their trunks back home, were all too happy to liquidise their new found assets for a song. Katherine found herself the owner of a string of properties in London's most sought after districts and estates in Scotland she'd never heard pronounced, let alone seen. She was gambling on living through this, but what else was there to do?

L whipped up the horses and they clopped over the cobbles. L was accustuomed to the cold of course but Katherine still found it strange. It was like a permanant October of a particurly cheerless kind. The white shroud of pumice, blasted high into the stratosphere to carpet the northern latitudes, reflected the sun's energy uselessly into space, she'd heard, while the dust caused the rains to fall impotently into the sea. Potable water was now rarer than champagne, they would all die of thirst before they ran out of tinned oysters.

The party was being held, with a stunning lack of imagination, at the main dinosaur hall in the Natural History museum. As the parties dwindled in number and attendance so they increased in debauchary and L had wondered if they were still fit for their company. Katherine, who required no want of competition to stand out in any crowd, regarded them as mere opportunities to conduct business. A deal made with someone with his trousers around his ankles was seldom struck to her disadvantage. L kept a wary eye out for the packs of abandoned dogs which had posed such a threat after the first mass evacuations. Though a brief, bloody campaign by the Inland Militia had put paid to the worst of them, as they had to the rioters and looters, one couldn't be too careful.

They clipped past the Palace. The Royal Family were safely ensconsed in Bermuda where what was left of the Navy sheltered them from the American hordes. The windows were boarded, the stumps cut eight feet up, tracing the line of last winter's snow. Katherine tried to remember the feel of the sun on her face, the sparkle of light in the first leaves of spring, even bird song. She couldn't really do it. She'd either adapted entirely to this situation, in which case she was saved, or surrendered to it, in which case she was doomed. She ajusted the silk bandana protecting her
nose and mouth and thought of nothing. The hooves of the horses were stilled in the feathery ash, though the grit was so engrained in their skins it was almost impossible to feel clean. She remembered how the first sunsets, before news of the eruptions had reached them, had been so beautiful. The first sprinking of the dust which was to obliterate the sun had painted the sky in a cornflower riot of colour. Now there was only shades of black and grey and brown. Even L's blonde hair was washed of all colour. Even the blue of her eyes was lost in the sepulchre of London. The Thames frothed with pumice. She squeezed L's cold hand.