The Difference Engine (7 page)

“Jones, sir,” Sybil quickly cried, “Edwin Jones of Nacogdoches, who worked for Hedgecoxe’s Railway Company.”

“I believe I know young Edward!” Houston declared, his surprise evident in his tone. He clutched his cane angrily and his heavy brows knotted.

“Listen to her, Sam!” came a sudden deep voice. Sybil, alarmed, turned to look. It was the man from the Argyll Rooms — the fat actor, with his red hair and brushed velvet waistcoat. “Those junta rascals appropriated the Hedgecoxe Railway! A pretty business, that, from a supposed British ally! Is this the gratitude they show, for years of British guidance and protection?” He sat back down.

“They’re nothing but thieves and villains!” Sybil shouted alertly. She groped quickly in memory, picking up the thread. “General Houston! I’m a defenseless woman, but you’re a man of destiny, a man of greatness! Can’t there be justice for Texas, sir? Some redress for these affronts? Must my poor brother die there in misery, while cheats and tyrants steal our British property?”

But Mick’s fine rhetoric was drowned; there were shouts from the audience, here and there, over a muttered undertone of surprise and approval. Loud boyish hooting came from the penny-gallery.

A bit of London fun, all told. Perhaps, Sybil thought, she had made some of them believe her story, and pity her. Most simply howled and joked a bit, pleased to see some unexpected liveliness.

“Sam Houston was always a true friend of Britain!” Sybil shrieked, into the crowd’s upturned faces. The words half-lost, useless, she raised the back of her wrist to her damp forehead. Mick had given her no more lines, so she let the strength seep from her legs and fell back, eyes fluttering, half-sinking into her seat.

“Give Miss Jones air!” Houston commanded, an excited bellow. “The lady is overcome!” Sybil watched through half-closed lids as blurred figures haltingly gathered round her. Dark evening-jackets, a rustle of crinoline, gardenia perfume, and a masculine smell of tobacco — a man seized her wrist, and felt for a pulse there with pinching fingers. A woman fanned Sybil’s face, clucking to herself. Oh heaven, Sybil thought, shrinking, the fat mama from the row before her, with that intolerable oily look of a good woman doing her moral duty. A little thrill of shame and disgust shot through her. For a moment she felt genuinely weak, sinking with a buttery ease into the warmth of their concern, a half-dozen busybodies muttering around her in a shared pretense of competence, while Houston thundered on above them, hoarse with indignation.

Sybil allowed them to get her to her feet. Houston hesitated, seeing it, and there was a light gallant scatter of applause for her. She felt pale, unworthy; she smiled wanly, and shook her head, and wished she were invisible. She leaned her head on the padded shoulder of the man who had taken her pulse. “Sir, if I could go, please,” she whispered.

Her rescuer nodded alertly, a little fellow with clever blue eyes. His long greying hair was parted in the middle. “I shall see the lady home,” he piped at the others. He shrugged into an opera cape, perched a tall beaver hat on his head, and lent her his arm. They walked together up the aisle, Sybil leaning on him heavily, unwilling to meet anyone’s eyes. The crowd was roused, now. For the first time, perhaps, they were listening to Houston as a man, rather than as some sort of queer American exhibit.

Her little gentleman held dingy velvet aside for her as they emerged into the Garrick’s chilly foyer, with its flaking gilt cupids and damp-marked faux-marble walls. ” ‘Tis very kind of you, sir, to help me so,” Sybil offered, noting that her escort looked as though he might have money. “Are you a medical man?”

“I was a student once,” he said, with a shrug. His cheeks were flushed, twin hot points of red.

“It gives a man a certain air of distinction,” Sybil said, not for any particular purpose, but just to fill the silence. “Schooling of that sort, I mean.”

“Hardly, madame. I wasted all my time versifying. I must say that you seem fit enough now. Very sorry to hear about that unfortunate brother of yours.”

“Thank you, sir.” Sybil looked at him sidelong. “I’m afraid it was very forward of me, but General Houston’s eloquence earned me away.”

He shot her an opaque glance, the look of a man who suspects that a woman is gulling him. “In all honesty,” he said, “I do not entirely share your enthusiasm.” He coughed explosively into a wadded handkerchief and wiped his mouth. “This London air will be the death of me.”

“Nonetheless, I do thank you, sir, though I regret we’ve not been introduced . . . ”

“Keats,” he said, “Mr. Keats.” He drew a ticking silver chronometer from his waistcoat, a many-dialed thing the size of a small potato, and consulted it. “I’m not familiar with the district,” he said distantly. “I’d thought to hail you a cabriolet, but at this hour . . .”

“Oh, no, Mr. Keats, thank you, but I shall go by the underground.”

His bright eyes widened. No respectable woman rode the underground unescorted.

“But you haven’t told me your profession, Mr. Keats,” she said, hoping to distract him.

“Kinotropy,” Keats said. “The techniques employed here tonight are of some special interest! While the screen’s resolution is quite modest, and the refresh-rate positively slow, remarkable effects have been secured, one presumes through algorithmic compression — but I fear that is all a bit technical.” He put away his chronometer. “Are you entirely certain you wouldn’t rather I attempted to hail a cab? Do you know London well, Miss Jones? I might escort you to the local omnibus stand — ‘tis a railless carriage, you see . . . ”

“No, sir, thank you. You’ve been exceptionally kind.”

“You’re quite welcome,” he said, his relief evident as he opened and held one of the half-glass doors to the street. Just then a skinny boy sidled rapidly up behind them, brushed past, and out of the theatre without a word. He was draped in a long dirty coat of canvas, something a fisherman might wear. A singular thing to wear to a lecture, Sybil thought, though one saw queerer garments on the poor; the sleeves flapped emptily, as though the boy were hugging himself, against a chill perhaps. His gait was odd, bent-backed, as if he were drunk or ill.

“I say there! Young man!” Mr. Keats had produced a coin, and Sybil understood that he wished the boy to hail a cab for her, but now the wet eyes gleamed at them with alarm, the pale face hollowed by gaslight. Suddenly he bolted, something dark tumbling from beneath his coat, where it rolled into the gutter. The boy halted and looked warily back at them.

He’d dropped a hat, a top-hat.

He came trotting back, eyes still on them, snatched it up, stuffed it under his coat, and off again, into the shadows, though this time not nearly so rapidly.

” ‘Pon my word,” Mr. Keats said in disgust, “that fellow’s a thief! That water-proof is stuffed with the hats of the audience!”

Sybil could think of nothing to say.

“I imagine the rascal took cruel advantage of that commotion you caused,” Keats told her, his tone lightly etched with suspicion. “Pity! One never knows who to trust these days.”

“Sir, I do believe I hear the Engine getting up steam for the kinotrope . . . ”

And that was enough for him.

The installation of exhaust-fans, said the Daily Telegraph, had wrought a perceptible improvement in the atmosphere of the Metropolitan, though Lord Babbage himself held that a truly modern underground railway would operate on pneumatic principles exclusively, involving no combustion whatever, rather in the way mail was conveyed throughout Paris.

Seated in a second-class carnage, breathing as shallowly as possible, Sybil knew it all for humbug, or in any case the improvement part, for who knew what marvels the Rads mightn’t bring forth? But hadn’t the Rad papers also published the testimony of medicals, in the pay of the railroad, that sulphurous fumes were therapeutic for asthma? And it wasn’t only the fumes from the Engines, but vile sewer-seepings as well, and gassy leakings from collapsible India-rubber bags, that lit the carriage-jets in their wire-netted glass shades.

It was a queer business, the underground, when you thought about it, racketing along at such speeds, through the darkness under London, where the navvies had come upon lead water-pipes of the Romans, and coins, mosaics, and archways, elephant’s teeth a thousand years old . . .

And the digging went on, this and every night, for she’d heard their great machine huffing, as she’d stood by Mick on the Whitechapel pavement; they worked unceasingly, the excavators, boring newer, deeper lines now, down below the tangle of sewers and gas-pipes and bricked-over rivers. The new lines were shored with steel, and soon Lord Babbage’s smokeless trains would slide through them silent as eels, though she found the thought of it somehow unclean.

The lamps flared all at once, the flow of gas disturbed by a particularly sharp jolt, the faces of the other passengers seeming to leap out at her: the sallow gent with something of the successful publican about him, the round-cheeked old Quaker cleric, the drunken dandy with his coat open, his canary waistcoat all dotted down the front with claret . . .

There were no other women in the carriage.

Farewell to you, sirs, she imagined herself crying, farewell to your London, for she was a ‘prentice adventuress now, sworn and true, bound for Paris, though the first leg of the voyage consisted necessarily of the tuppenny trip back to Whitechapel . . .

But the clergyman had noticed her, his contempt quite open, there for anyone to see.

It was really quite horribly cold, making her way from the station to her room in Flower-and-Dean Street; she regretted her vanity, for having chosen her fine new shawl rather than her mantelet. Her teeth were chattering. Sharp frost shone in pools of gas-light on the street’s new macadam.

The cobbles of London were vanishing month by month, paved over with black stuff that poured stinking hot from the maws of great wagons, for navvies to spread and smooth with rakes, before the advance of the steam-roller.

A daring fellow whisked past her, taking full advantage of the gritty new surface. Nearly recumbent within the creaking frame of a four-wheeled velocipede, his shoes were strapped to whirling cranks and his breath puffed explosively into the cold. He was bare-headed and goggled, in a thick striped jersey, a long knit scarf flapping out behind him as he sped away. Sybil supposed him an inventor.

London was rife with inventors, the poorer and madder of them congregating in the public squares to display their blueprints and models, and harangue the strolling crowds. In a week’s time she’d encountered a wicked-looking device meant to crimp hair by electricity, a child’s mechanical top that played Beethoven, and a scheme for electro-plating the dead.

Leaving the thoroughfare for the unimproved cobbles of Renton Passage, she made out the sign of the Hart and heard the jangle of a pianola. It was Mrs. Winterhalter who’d arranged for her to room above the Hart. The public house itself was a steady sort of place, admitting no women. It catered to junior clerks and shopmen, and offered as its raciest pleasure a pull at a coin-fed wagering-machine.

The rooms above were reached by way of steep dark stairs, that climbed below a sooty skylight to an alcove presenting a pair of identical doors. Mr. Cairns, the landlord, had rooms behind the door on the left.

Sybil climbed the stairs, fumbled a penny box of lucifers from her muff, and struck one. Cairns had chained a bicycle to the iron railing overlooking the stairwell; the bright brass padlock gleamed in the flare of the match. She shook the lucifer out, hoping that Hetty hadn’t double-latched the door Hetty hadn’t, and Sybil’s key turned smoothly in the lock.

Toby was there to greet her, padding silently across the bare boards to twine himself around and about her ankles, purring like sixty.

Hetty had left an oil-lamp turned down low on the deal table that stood in the hallway; it was smoking now, the wick in need of trimming. A foolish thing to have left it burning, where Toby might’ve sent it crashing, but Sybil felt grateful not to have found the place in darkness. She took Toby up in her arms. He smelled of herring. “Has Hetty fed you, then, dear?” He yowled softly, and batted at the ribbons of her bonnet.

The pattern of the wallpaper danced as she lifted the lamp. The hallway had seen no sunlight in all the years the Hart had stood, yet the printed flowers were gone a shade like dust.

Sybil’s room had two windows, though they opened on a blank wall of grimed yellow brick, so near she could’ve touched it, if someone hadn’t driven nails into the casements. Still, on a bright day, with the sun directly overhead, a bit of light did filter in. And Hetty’s room, though larger, had only one window. If Hetty was here, now, she must be alone and asleep, as no light was visible from the crack at the bottom of her closed door.

It was good to have one’s own room, one’s privacy, however modest. Sybil put Toby down, though he protested, and carried the lamp to her own door, which stood slightly ajar. Inside, all was as she’d left it, though she saw that Hetty had left the latest number of the Illustrated London News on her pillow, with an engraving from Crimea on the front, a scene of a city all aflame. She set the lamp down on the cracked marble lid of the commode, Toby prowling about her ankles as though he expected to discover more herring, and considered what she should do.

The ticking of the fat tin alarm-clock, which she sometimes found unbearable, was reassuring now; at least it was running, and she imagined that the time it showed, quarter past eleven, was correct. She gave the winder a few turns, just for luck. Mick would come for her at midnight, and there were decisions to be made, as he’d advised her to travel very light.

She took a wick-trimmer from the commode’s drawer, raised the lamp’s chimney, and scissored away the blackened bit. The light somewhat improved. She threw on her mantelet against the cold, opened the lid of a japanned tin chest, and began to make an inventory of her better things. But after setting aside two changes of undergarments, it came to her that the less she took, the more Dandy Mick would have to buy for her in Paris. And if that wasn’t thinking like a ‘prentice adventuress, she didn’t know what was.