The Difference Engine (50 page)

She left the cardboard “dishes” utterly devoid of scraps or crumbs, contriving to sop up the last dross of gravy with a chip she had carefully retained for this purpose.

Oliphant took out his notebook. Opening it, he removed a plain white card stippled with Florence Bartlett’s Bow Street portrait. “Are you familiar at all with Flora Barnett, the American actress. Miss America? She’s enormously popular in Manhattan, or so I was recently told . . . ” Oliphant displayed the card.

“She’s no actress, mister. Nor an American either. She’s a Southron, if you can even call her that; next thing to a damn’ Frenchie. The People Risen don’t need her kind. Hell, we’ve already hung our share of ‘em!”

“Her kind?”

Helen America met his gaze with a defiant stare. “In a pig’s eye, you’re a journalist . . . ”

“I’m sorry if —”

“Sorry like the rest of ‘em. You give just about that much of a damn . . . ”

“Miss America, please, I wish only to —”

“Thanks for the feed, mister, but you can’t pump me, understand? And that brontosaur, that’s got no damn’ business over here in the first place! You got no right to it, and one day it’ll sit in the Manhattan Metropolitan, for it belongs to the People Risen! And what makes you limeys think you can come digging up the People’s natural treasures?”

And in through the door, as if on cue, marched the very formidable Clown of the Manhattan Women’s Red Pantomime Troupe, her bald pate hugely bonneted in polka-dot gingham, and her Chickamauga boots even larger than Helen America’s.

“Coming right this minute, Comrade Clystra,” Helen America said.

The Clown fixed Oliphant with a murderous glare, and then the two were gone.

Oliphant looked at Mori. “A peculiar evening, Mr. Mori.”

Mori, apparently lost in contemplation of the Autocafe’s clatter and bustle, took a moment to respond.

“We will have places such as this in my country, Oriphant-san! Clean! Modern! Rapid!”

Bligh, upon Oliphant’s return to Half-Moon Street, followed him upstairs to the door of the study. “May I come in for a moment, sir?” Locking the door behind them with his own key, Bligh crossed to a miniature parquet bureau that supported Oliphant’s smoking-things; unsealing the top of a humidor, he reached inside and removed a squat little cylinder of black-japanned tin. “This was brought ‘round to the kitchen door by a young man, sir. He wouldn’t give his name, when asked. I took the liberty of opening it myself, sir, recalling some of the more heathen attempts, abroad . . . ”

Oliphant took the canister and unscrewed its lid. Perforated telegraph-tape.

“And the young man?”

“A junior Engine-clerk, sir, to judge by the state of his shoes. Aside from the fact that he wore a clerk’s cotton gloves, which he didn’t remove.”

“And there was no message?”

“There was, sir. ‘Tell him,’ he said, ‘that we can do no more, there is great danger, he mustn’t ask again.’ ”

“I see. Would you mind bringing up a pot of strong green-tea?”

Alone, Oliphant set about removing the heavy glass from his personal receiving-telegraph, a matter of loosening four brass wing-screws. Placing the tall vitrine-like dome out of harm’s way, he spent some minutes consulting the maker’s instructional manual. After rummaging through several drawers, he located the requisite implements: a walnut-handled brass hand-crank and a small gilt screw-driver embossed with the monogram of the Colt & Maxwell Company. He located the knife-switch at the base of the instrument and severed the electrical connection with the Post Office. He then used the screwdriver to make the necessary adjustments, carefully threaded the end of the tape onto the bright steel sprockets, locked the guide-plates into position, and took a deep breath.

He was all at once aware of the beating of his own heart, and of the night’s silence pressing in from the darkness of Green Park, and of the Eye. He took up the crank, thrust its hexagonal tip into the mechanism’s socket, and began, steadily but slowly, to turn it clockwise. The character-hammers began to rise and fall, rise and fall, deciphering the punch-code of the Post Office tape. He refused to look at it, as it emerged from the slot.

It was done. With scissors and paste-pot, he assembled the message on a sheet of foolscap:

DEAR
CHARLES
COMMA
NINE
YEARS
AGO
YOU
PUT
ME TO
THE
WORST
DISHONOR
THAT
A
WOMAN
CAN
KNOW
STOP
CHARLES
COMMA
YOU
PROMISED
ME
THAT
YOU
WOULD
SAVE
MY
POOR
FATHER
STOP
INSTEAD
YOU
CORRUPTED
ME
COMMA
BODY
AND
SOUL
STOP
TODAY
I AM
LEAVING
LONDON
COMMA
IN
THE
COMPANY
OF
POWERFUL
FRIENDS
STOP
THEY
KNOW
VERY
WELL
WHAT
A
TRAITOR
YOU
WERE
TO
WALTER
GERARD
COMMA
AND
TO ME
STOP
DO
NOT
ATTEMPT
TO
FIND
ME
COMMA
CHARLES
STOP
IT
WOULD
BE
USELESS
STOP
I DO
HOPE
THAT
YOU
AND
MRS
EGREMONT
WILL
SLEEP
SOUNDLY
TONIGHT
STOP
SYBIL
GERARD
ENDIT

Only barely aware of Bligh arriving with the tea, he sat unmoving for the better part of an hour, the message before him. Then, after pouring himself a cup of luke-warm tea, he gathered stationery, took out his reservoir-pen, and began to compose, in his flawless diplomat’s French, a letter to a certain Monsieur Arslau, of Paris.

Flash-powder still stank in the air.

The Prince Consort turned, with his full Teutonic gravity, from an elaborate stereoptic camera, of Swiss manufacture, and greeted Oliphant in German. He wore aquamarine spectacles, their circular lenses no larger than florins, and was draped in a photographer’s smock of spotless white duck. His fingers were stained with silver nitrate.

Oliphant bowed, wishing His Highness a good afternoon in what amounted to the Royal Family’s language of choice, and pretended to examine the Swiss camera, an intricate creation whose stereoptic lenses, like eyes, stared from beneath a smooth brass brow. Like the eyes of Mr. Cart, the Consort’s muscular Swiss valet, they struck Oliphant as being set rather too widely apart.

“I’ve brought Affie a little gift, Your Highness,” Oliphant said. His German, like the Prince Consort’s, had the accent of Saxony — the legacy of a prolonged and delicate mission Oliphant had undertaken there at the behest of the Royal Family. Prince Albert’s Coburg relatives, ever ingenious at the ancient craft of marriage-politics, were eager to expand their tiny domain — a delicate matter indeed, when the policy of the British Foreign Office was to keep the German mini-states as fragmented as politically possible. “Has the young Prince concluded his day’s lessons?”

“Affie is ill today,” Albert said, peering through his tinted spectacles at one of the camera’s lenses. He produced a small brush and lightly whisked at the surface of the lens. He straightened. “Do you think the study of statistics too much a burden for a tender young mind?”

“My opinion, Your Highness?” Oliphant said. “Statistical analysis is indeed a powerful technique . . . ”

“His mother and I disagree on the matter,” the Prince confided mournfully. “And Alfred’s progress in the subject is far from satisfactory. Nevertheless, statistics is the key to the future. Statistics are everything in England.”

“Does he progress well in his other studies?” Oliphant hedged.

“Anthropometry,” the Prince suggested absently. “Eugenics. Powerful fields of learning, but less taxing, perhaps, to the youthful brain.”

“Perhaps I might have a word with him. Your Highness,” Oliphant said. “I know the lad means well.”

“He is in his room, no doubt,” the Prince said.

Oliphant made his way through the drafty glamor of the Royal Apartments to Alfred’s room, where he was greeted with a whoop of glee, the Prince scrambling in bare-feet from mounded bedclothes and hopping nimbly across the tracks of a most elaborate miniature railway. “Uncle Larry! Uncle Larry! Brilliant! What have you brought for me?”

“Baron Zorda’s latest.”

In Oliphant’s pocket, wrapped in green tissue and smelling strongly of cheap fresh ink, was a copy of ‘Paternoster the Steam Bandit’, by one “Baron Zorda,” the third volume in the popular series, young Prince Alfred having expressed his unbridled enthusiasm for the two previous numbers, ‘The Skeleton Amy’ and ‘Wheelmen of the Tsar’. The book’s garishly colored cover depicted the daring Paternoster, pistol in hand, climbing from the cabin of a hurtling vehicle one took to be a gurney in the latest style — sheathed in tin, bulbous at the prow, and very narrow in the rear. The frontispiece, which Oliphant had examined in the Piccadilly news-agent’s where he had purchased the volume, offered Baron Zorda’s raffish highwayman in rather more detail, particularly in regard to his dress, which included a broad belt of studded leather and bell-bottomed trousers with buttoned vents at the cuffs.

“Super!” The boy eagerly tore the green tissue from Paternoster the Steam Bandit. “Look at his gurney. Uncle Larry! It’s line-streamed like sixty!”

“Nothing but the swiftest for wicked Paternoster, Affie. And see the frontispiece. He’s got up like Smashjaw Ned.”

“Look at his narrow-go-wides,” Alfred said admiringly. “And his bloody great belt!”

“And how have you been, Affie,” Oliphant asked, ignoring the boy’s lapse in language, “since my last visit?”

“Very well, Uncle Larry” — and a shadow of anxiety crossed the young face — “but I’m afraid I — I’m afraid she — she’s broken, you see —” The Prince pointed to where the Japanese tea-doll slumped disconsolately against the foot of the massive four-poster, surrounded by a tumbled sea of lithographed tin and painted lead. A long sharp sliver of some translucent material protruded grotesquely from her gorgeous robe. “It’s the spring, you see. I think it was wound too tightly, Uncle Larry. It sprang right out, on the tenth turn.”

“The Japanese power their dolls with springs of baleen, Affie. ‘Whale-whiskers,’ they call the stuff. They haven’t yet learned from us the manufacture of proper springs, but soon they shall. When they do, their dolls shan’t break so easily.”

“Father says you’re too keen on your Japanese,” Alfred said. “He says you think them the equal of Europeans.”

“And I do, Affie! Their mechanical appliances are presently inferior, due to their lack of knowledge in the applied sciences. Some day, in futurity, they may lead civilization to heights yet untold. They, and perhaps the Americans . . .”

The boy regarded him dubiously. “Father wouldn’t like that at all, what you said.”

“No, I rather doubt he would.”

Oliphant then spent half-an-hour, down on his knees upon the carpet, watching Alfred demonstrate a toy French Engine — operated, as was its cousin the Great Napoleon, by compressed air. The little Engine employed lengths of telegraph-tape, rather than cards, reminding Oliphant of his letter to M. Arslau. Bligh would have taken it ‘round to the French Embassy by now; very likely it was already on its way to Paris by diplomatic pouch.

Alfred was connecting his Engine to a miniature kinotrope. There came a ceremonious rattle at the door-knob; the doors of Buckingham Palace were never knocked. Oliphant rose, and opened the tall white portal, to discover the well-known face of Nash, a palace valet-de-chambre, whose unwise speculations in railway shares had briefly made him the unwilling intimate of the Metropolitan Fraud Bureau. Oliphant’s politesse had successfully smoothed the matter — a kindness well-invested, he saw now, by Nash’s unfeigned air of respectful attention. “Mr. Oliphant,” Nash announced, “a telegram has come, sir. Most urgent.”

The velocity of the Special Branch vehicle contributed in no small part to Oliphant’s general sense of unease. Paternoster himself could have asked for nothing faster, or more radically line-streamed.

They flew past St. James’s Park with the speed of dream, the bare black branches of the lime-trees flashing by like wind-driven smoke. The driver wore leather goggles with round lenses, and plainly relished their headlong flight, periodically sounding a deep-throated whistle that sent horses rearing and pedestrians scurrying. The stoker, a burly young Irishman, was grinning maniacally as he shoveled coke into the burner.

Oliphant had no idea of their destination. Now, as they neared Trafalgar, the traffic caused the driver to yank the whistle-cord continually, steadily, setting up a mournful bellowing ululation, like the grief of some marine behemoth. The traffic, at this sound, parted like the Red Sea before Moses. Helmeted policemen saluted smartly as they sped past. Urchins and crossing-sweepers turned cartwheels of delight, at the sight of a sleek tin fish racketing down the Strand.

The evening had grown quite dark. As they entered Fleet Street, the driver applied the brake and worked a lever that released a mighty gout of uprushing steam. The line-streamed gurney bumped to a halt.

“Well, sir,” the driver commented, raising his goggles to peer through the fretted glass of the vehicle’s prow, “would you look at that.”

Traffic, Oliphant saw, had been halted completely by the erection of wooden barricades hung with lanterns. Behind these stood grim-faced soldiers in combat drab, Cutts-Maudslay carbines unslung and at the ready. Beyond them, he saw sheets of canvas, loosely hung from raw timber uprights, as though someone were attempting to erect stage-scenery in the middle of Fleet Street.