The Difference Engine (12 page)

“It sounds splendid. I’m glad for you.” Mallory sipped his ale. “Now tell me what should happen if disaster strikes?”

Godwin smiled. “Then I lose, and am left penniless. Lord Scowcroft was liberal, by his own lights, but there are always extra costs in such a project. I’ve put everything in my machine: my expedition bonus from the Royal Society, even a small bequest I had of a maiden aunt, God rest her.”

Mallory was shocked. “Everything?”

Godwin chuckled dryly. “Well, they can’t take what I know, can they? I shall still have my skills; mayhap I’d undertake another Royal Society expedition. They pay well enough. But I’m risking all I have in England. It’s fame or famine, Ned, and naught between.”

Mallory stroked his beard. “You startle me, Mr. Godwin. You always seemed such a practical man.”

“Dr. Mallory, my audience today is the very cream of Britain. The Prime Minister is here today. The Prince Consort is in attendance. Lady Ada Byron is here, and betting lavishly, if rumor’s true. When will I have another such chance?”

“I do follow your logic,” Mallory said, “though I can’t say I approve. But then, your station in life allows such a risk. You’re not a married man, are you?”

Godwin sipped his ale. “Neither are you, Ned.”

“No, but I have eight younger brothers and sisters, my old dad mortal ill, my mother eaten-up with the rheumatics. I can’t gamble my family’s livelihood.”

“The odds are ten-to-one, Ned. Fool’s odds! They should be five-to-three in Zephyr’s favor.”

Mallory said nothing. Godwin sighed. “It’s a pity. I dearly wanted to see some good friend win that bet. A big win, a flash win! And I myself can’t do it, you see? I wanted to, but I’ve spent my last pound on Zephyr. ”

“Perhaps a modest wager,” Mallory ventured. “For friendship’s sake.”

“Bet ten pounds for me,” Godwin said suddenly. “Ten pounds, as a loan. If you lose, I’ll pay you back somehow, in days to come. If you win, we’ll split a hundred pounds tonight, half-and-half. What do you say? Will you do that for me?”

“Ten pounds! A heavy sum . . .”

“I’m good for it.”

“I trust that you are . . . ” Mallory now saw no easy way to refuse. The man had given Tom a place in life, and Mallory felt the debt. “Very well, Mr. Godwin. To please you.”

“You shan’t regret it,” Godwin said. He brushed ruefully at the frayed sleeves of his frock-coat. “Fifty pounds. I can use it. A triumphant inventor, on the rise in life and such, shouldn’t have to dress like a parson.”

“I shouldn’t think you’d waste good money on vanities.”

“It’s not vanity to dress as befits one’s station.” Godwin looked him over, sharp-eyed. “That’s your old Wyoming tramping-coat, isn’t it?”

“A practical garment,” Mallory said.

“Not for London. Not for giving fancy lectures to fine London ladies with a modish taste in natural-history.”

“I’m not ashamed of what I am,” Mallory said stoutly.

“Simple Ned Mallory,” Godwin nodded, “come to Epsom in an engineer’s cap, so the lads won’t feel anxious at meeting a famous savant. I know why you did that, Ned, and I admire it. But mark my word, you’ll be Lord Mallory some day, as surely as we stand here drinking. You’ll have a fine silk coat, and a ribbon on your pocket, and stars and medals from all the learned schools. For you’re the man dug up the great Land Leviathan, and made wondrous sense from a tangle of rocky bones. That’s what you are now, Ned, and you might as well face up to it.”

“It’s not so simple as you think,” Mallory protested. “You don’t know the politics of the Royal Society. I’m a Catastrophist. The Uniformitarians hold sway, when it comes to the granting of tenures and honors. Men like Lyell, and that damned fool Rudwick.”

“Charles Darwin’s a Lordship. Gideon Mantell’s a Lordship, and his Iguanodon’s a shrimp, ranked next to your Brontosaur.”

“Don’t you speak ill of Gideon Mantell! He’s the finest man of science Sussex ever had, and he was very kind to me.”

Godwin looked down into his empty mug. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “I spoke a bit too frankly, I can see that. We’re far from wild Wyoming, where we sat about a campfire as simple brother Englishmen, scratching wherever it itched.”

He put his smoked spectacles on. “But I remember those theory-talks you’d give us, explaining what those bones were all about. ‘Form follows function.’ ‘The fittest survive.’ New forms lead the way. They may look queer at first, but Nature tests them fair and square against the old, and if they’re sound in principle, then the world is theirs.” Godwin looked up. “If you can’t see that your theory is bone to my sinew, then you’re not the man I take you for.”

Mallory removed his cap. “It’s I who should beg your pardon, sir. Forgive my foolish temper. I hope you’ll always speak to me frankly, Mr. Godwin, ribbons on my chest or no. May I never be so unscientific as to close my eyes to honest truth.” He offered his hand.

Godwin shook it.

A fanfare rang from across the course, the crowd responding with a rustle and a roar. All around them, people began to move, migrating toward the stands like a vast herd of ruminants.

“I’m off to make that wager we discussed,” Mallory said.

“I must get back to my lads. Join us after the run? To split the winnings?”

“Certainly,” Mallory said.

“Let me take that empty pint,” Godwin offered. Mallory gave it to him, and walked away.

   Having taken leave of his friend. Mallory instantly regretted his promise. Ten pounds was a stiff sum indeed; he himself had survived on little more per annum, during his student days.

And yet, he considered, strolling in the general direction of the book-makers’ canopied stalls, Godwin was a most exacting technician and a scrupulously honest man. He had no reason whatever to doubt Godwin’s estimates of the race’s outcome, and a man who wagered handsomely on Zephyr might leave Epsom that evening with a sum equivalent to several years’ income. If one were to bet thirty pounds, or forty . . .

Mallory had very nearly fifty pounds on deposit in a City bank, the better part of his expedition bonus. He wore an additional twelve in the stained canvas money-belt firmly cinched beneath his waistcoat.

He thought of his poor father gone feeble with hatter’s madness, poisoned by mercury, twitching and muttering in his chair by the hearth in Surrey. A portion of Mallory’s money was already allocated for the coal that fed that hearth.

Still, one might come away with four hundred pounds . . . But no, he would be sensible, and wager only the ten, fulfilling his agreement with Godwin. Ten pounds would be a sharp loss, but one he could bear. He worked the fingers of his right hand between the buttons of his waistcoat, feeling for the buttoned flap of the canvas belt.

He chose to place his bet with the thoroughly modern firm of Dwyer and Company, rather than the venerable and perhaps marginally more reputable Tattersall’s. He had frequently passed Dwyer’s brightly lit establishment in St. Martin’s Lane, hearing the deep brassy whirring of the three Engines they employed. He did not care to lay such a wager with any of the dozens of individual book-makers elevated above the throng on their high stools, though they were nearly as reliable as the larger firms. The crowd kept them so; Mallory himself had witnessed the near lynching of a defaulting betting-man at Chester. He still recalled the grisly shout of “Welsher!” pitched like a cry of “Fire!” going up inside the railed enclosure, and the rush against a man in a black cap, who was buried down and savagely booted. Beneath the surface of the good-natured racing-throng lay an ancient ferocity. He’d discussed the incident with Lord Darwin, who’d likened the action to the mobbing of crows . . .

His thoughts turned to Darwin as he queued for the steam-racing wicket. Mallory had been an early and passionate supporter of the man, whom he regarded as one of the great minds of the age; but he’d come to suspect that the reclusive Lord, though clearly appreciating Mallory’s support, considered him rather brash. When it came to matters of professional advancement, Darwin was of little use. Thomas Henry Huxley was the man for that, a great social theorist as well as an accomplished scientist and orator . . .

In the queue to Mallory’s immediate right lounged a swell in subdued City finery, that day’s number of Sporting Life tucked beneath an immaculate elbow. As Mallory watched, the man stepped to the wicket and placed a wager of one hundred pounds on a horse called Alexandra’s Pride.

“Ten pounds on the Zephyr, to win,” Mallory told the betting-clerk at the steam-wicket, presenting a five-pound note and five singles. As the clerk methodically punched out the wager, Mallory studied the odds arrayed in kino-bits above and behind the glossy faux-marble of the papier-mache counter. The French were heavily favored, he saw, with the Vulcan of the Compagnie Generate de Traction, the driver one M. Raynal. He noted that the Italian entry was in little better position than Godwin’s Zephyr. Word of the try-rods?

The clerk passed Mallory a flimsy blue copy of the card he’d punched. “Very good, sir, thank you.” He was already looking past Mallory to the next customer.

Mallory spoke up. “Will you accept a check drawn on a City bank?”

“Certainly, sir,” the clerk replied, raising one eyebrow as if noticing Mallory’s cap and coat for the first time, “provided they are imprinted with your citizen-number.”

“In that case,” Mallory said, to his own amazement, “I shall wager an additional forty pounds on the Zephyr.”

“To win, sir?”

“To win.”

Mallory fancied himself a rather keen observer of his fellow man. He possessed, Gideon Mantell had long ago assured him, the naturalist’s requisite eye. Indeed, he owed his current position in the scientific hierarchy to having used that eye along a monotonous stretch of rock-strewn Wyoming riverbank, distinguishing form amid apparent chaos.

Now, however, appalled by the recklessness of his wager, by the enormity of the result in the event of his losing, Mallory found no comfort in the presence and variety of the Derby crowd. The eager roaring of massed and passionate greed, as the horses ran their course, was more than he could bear.

He left the stands, almost fleeing, hoping to shake the nervous energy from his legs. A dense mass of vehicles and people had congregated on the rails of the run-in, shrieking their enthusiasm as the horses passed in a cloud of dust. The poorer folk, these, mostly those unwilling to put down a shilling fee for admission to the stands, mixed with those who entertained or preyed upon the crowd: thimble-riggers, gypsies, pick-pockets. He began shoving his way through toward the outskirts of the crowd, where he might catch his breath.

It occurred to Mallory suddenly that he might have lost one of his betting-slips. The thought almost paralyzed him. He stopped dead, his hands diving into his pockets.

No — the blue flimsies were still there, his tickets to disaster . . .

He was almost trampled by a jostling pair of horses. Shocked and angered, Mallory grabbed at the harness of the nearer horse, caught his balance, shouted a warning.

A whip cracked near his head. The driver was trying to fight his way free of the entangling crowd, standing on the box of an open brougham. The fellow was a race-track dandy, gotten up in a suit of the most artificial blue, with a great paste ruby glinting in a cravat of lurid silk. Beneath the pallor of a swelling forehead, accentuated by dark disheveled locks, his bright gaunt eyes moved constantly, so that he seemed to be looking everywhere at once — except at the race-course, which still compelled the attention of everyone, save himself and Mallory. A queer fellow, and part of a queerer trio, for the passengers within the brougham were a pair of women.

One, veiled, wore a dark, almost masculine dress; and as the brougham halted she rose unsteadily and groped for its door. She tried to step free, with a drunken wobble, her hands encumbered by a long wooden box, something like an instrument-case. But the second woman made a violent grab for her veiled companion, yanking the gentlewoman back into her seat.

Mallory, still holding the leather harness, stared in astonishment. The second woman was a red-haired tart, in the flash garments appropriate to a gin-palace or worse. Her painted, pretty features were marked with a look of grim and utter determination.

Mallory saw the red-haired tart strike the veiled gentlewoman. It was a blow both calculated and covert, jabbing her doubled knuckles into the woman’s short ribs with a practiced viciousness. The veiled woman doubled over and collapsed back into her seat.

Mallory was stung into immediate action. He dashed to the side of the brougham and yanked open the lacquered door. “What is the meaning of this?” he shouted.

“Go away,” the tart suggested.

“I saw you strike this lady. How dare you?”

The brougham lurched back into motion, almost knocking Mallory from his feet. Mallory recovered swiftly, dashed forward, seized the gentlewoman’s arm. “Stop at once!”

The gentlewoman rose again to her feet. Beneath the black veil her rounded, gentle face was slack and dreamy. She tried to step free again, seeming unaware that the carriage was in motion. She could not get her balance. With a quite natural, ladylike gesture, she handed Mallory the long wooden box.

Mallory stumbled, clutching the ungainly case with both hands. Shouts arose from the milling crowd, for the tout’s careless driving had infuriated them. The carriage rattled to a halt again, the horses snorting and beginning to plunge.

The driver, shaking with rage, tossed his whip aside and leapt free. He marched on Mallory, shoving by-standers aside. He whipped a pair of squarish, rose-tinted spectacles from his pocket, and slipped them over the pomaded hair at his ears. Halting before Mallory, he squared his sloping shoulders and extended one canary-gloved hand with a peremptory gesture.

“Return that property at once,” he commanded.

“What is this about?” Mallory countered.

“I’ll have that box now, or it will be the worse for you.”

Mallory stared down at the little man, quite astonished at this bold threat. He almost laughed aloud, and would have done so, save that the fellow’s darting eyes behind the square spectacles had a maddened gleam, like a laudanum fiend’s.