Gideon Smith and the Mechanical Girl (2 page)

Annie paused on Cleveland Street, where she had rooms. It was mid-June and quite a scorcher, though the sun had dipped over black-slate roofs. The flare of gaslight at Sickert’s window meant he was working. But it would not be Annie who posed for him tonight, glad as she was of the extra shillings. Tonight was for Annie and her man.

Cleveland Street was not far from the towering gothic spires and massive ziggurats of central London, from the Lady of Liberty flood barrier on the Thames, and Highgate Aerodrome. It was just off the Tottenham Court Road, where costermongers plied their trade and where Annie worked in a small tobacconist shop. The street was the haunt of the streetwalkers and cutpurses who lurked between its tall tenements. Every other window held an impecunious artist raging against the ever-present smog or a grizzled writer churning out some romance for Grub Street. But it was Annie’s home, and she was blind to its faults, because she was in love.

In her tiny bedroom, she considered herself in the cracked mirror. Her Irish brogue and mass of jet-black curls suggested a more pastoral life for Annie, but she had always lived in London. She would like a bath before he came, but a quick wash would do, and she would change into the scandalously close-fitting Chinese silk dress he had gifted her at Christmas. He would have to take her as he found her. He always did. She wasn’t, she had to admit, what you might call a
good
Irish Catholic.

Annie had barely fastened the last hook on the dress and arranged her hair into a bun with black wisps trailing to frame her angular, pale face, when there was a rap at the door. A flush rose on her cheeks, and she could barely contain a girlish squeal as she threw open the door.

He smiled broadly beneath the black bowler and silk scarf he always wore around his face when he visited, whatever the weather.

“Darling Annie!” He took her in his arms and kissed her. Annie wanted to shout it from the rooftops. She had a sweetheart, and he was a toff to boot.

To be young and in love in London in spring was very heaven. Not quite the words he’d read to her as they lounged in Hyde Park that sweltering July day the previous year, taking refuge from the merciless sun in the shadow of the platform of the stilttrain that criss-crossed Westminster, but close enough. They’d watched the first pinkish stones of the Taj Mahal that had been shipped over from India being relaid in honor of Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee. He told her it had first been built as a declaration of love.

“Is there nothing Victoria can’t do?” Annie had sighed.

A rare cloud had passed his brow. “No,” he’d said thoughtfully. “Nothing.”

Annie had met Eddy in that spring of 1887, while modelling for old Walter Sickert. Any given day could find Sickert drinking in the gin houses with bright-eyed villains or lunching in gentlemen’s clubs. Some of his acquaintances looked hungrily at the girls who posed. Eddy was different. The first time Annie met him, she was sitting astride a felt ottoman, aping the act of riding horseback. Eddy, curled into an easy chair, smoking cheroots and drinking brandy, never took his eyes off her.

“Is it true, Sickert,” he’d drawled nonchalantly, “that there’s what they used to call a molly house on Cleveland Street where the
earnest
young men go for solace?”

“I wouldn’t know,” rumbled the paint er. Annie snorted to herself; Sickert knew full well of the brothel down the road. “Perhaps you should ask Annie; she is of the common classes.”

Eddy smiled mischievously. “I doubt it, miss, looking at your angelic beauty.”

“I could take you to the molly house,” she’d said, surprising herself. “If that’s your thing.”

Eddy had chuckled. “A raven-tressed colleen, and saucy with it. What say we go for a more intimate soiree, dark-eyed Annie Crook?”

“Don’t be a fool,” Sickert had hissed, his teeth clamped around the shaft of a paintbrush. “She works in a tobacconist, and she’s no stranger to coining it on street corners, if rumor be true.”

Annie pursed her lips. “I
am
here, Mr. Sickert,” she said. “I’d thank you not to talk as though I were some stray dog off the street.”

Sickert shrugged; evidently that was as high as his opinion of Annie rose. But Eddy continued to stare, and when the session was done he insisted on taking her for a drink.

“I’ll have a drink off you,” she conceded. “But nothing else. Despite what Mr. Sickert thinks, I’m not that sort of girl. What did you say your name was?”

“Eddy,” he’d said. “Just Eddy.”

Over the next year he courted her properly and chivalrously, and if Annie had, in the past, lain with someone for a few shillings as rent day approached, she foreswore such behavior for Eddy. She was his and his alone. They lay in a tangle of bedsheets in the darkness, listening to each other’s gradually slowing breathing. Night had fallen, and Annie stepped naked from the bed to light the gas lamp on the wall.

Eddy whistled. “You’re a fine figure of a woman, dark-eyed Annie Crook.”

She smiled thinly as she got back into bed. “That’s what you called me the first night we met.”

“A lot has changed since then,” he said, rooting in his trousers for his cheroots.

“Yet so much remains the same,” she said thoughtfully. Annie always fell into a funk after they made love. “I know nothing about you, not even your full name. You could have a wife and children, for all I know.”

She thought he’d laugh, but he said softly, “I’ve not treated you well, have I, Annie?”

She took his thin face in her hands and kissed his lips. “You have your reasons, I’m sure. You’re my sweetheart, Eddy, but you’re a toff. It wouldn’t be right, me hanging on your arm in polite society.”

He enclosed her hands in his. “But that’s what I want!” he whispered fiercely. “They’ve finished the Taj Mahal. We should go and see it. Tomorrow.”

“And will you be wrapped in your scarf, like last time?” she asked. “Even though it was July?”

Eddy looked broodingly at his cheroot. “No,” he said with finality. “That’s over. I’ve decided. We should be together.”

Annie’s heart skipped, but she kept her voice steady. “And we should also take a dirigible to New York and walk in the Albert Gardens on Manhattan Island. There are many things we should do, Eddy.”

“The Albert Gardens aren’t all that,” he muttered.

She stared. “You’ve seen them?”

“Many times.” He took her hands in his. “It’s a big world out there, and my . . . and Queen Victoria has most of it in the palm of her hand.” His eyes shone. “We could go to New York, you know, see the vast gothic towers. We could take a dirigible ride over the vast, untamed land that stretches right over to the Pacific, and the Japanese territories, or see the Mason-Dixon Wall they built to keep the Texans out. We can do all this together, if . . .”

She raised an eyebrow. “If?”

He dug into his pocket again and withdrew a small, dark box. “Annie,” he said seriously. “Look at me.”

She did. Something in his eyes made her heart take flight and stampede in her chest. He said, “I love you, Annie Crook. I want you to be my wife.”

She opened her mouth, but he quieted her with a finger on her lips and pressed the box into her hands. Fingers trembling, she opened it, and gasped. It was a gold ring, set with a huge, intricately cut stone glowing redly in the dim lighting. “Eddy,” she whispered. “It’s beautiful.”

“A mere gewgaw from my family’s coffers. We have thousands like it. Not one of them holds a candle to you for beauty, Annie.”

She placed the ring on her finger. “Thousands?” she said as she admired it. She looked at him. “Who exactly is your family, Eddy?”

He took a long drag of his cheroot, and the door to Annie’s rooms crashed inward with a shriek of splintering wood. There were six of them. Four were tall, stocky, with bowlers pulled over their eyes, wearing black leather gloves that screamed danger at Annie. Of the other two, one was a short, fat man carrying a leather doctor’s bag, and the last was tall and thin, dressed in dapper tails and carrying a cane. He had a topper on his greased gray hair, and a thick moustache dangled beneath his hawkish nose.

Annie screamed and pulled the sheet around her nakedness, while Eddy gawped at the intruders.

“Do quiet the woman down, sir,” said the tall man mildly. It took Annie a moment to realize he was talking to Eddy.

“Walsingham! What is the meaning of this?” demanded Eddy, shuffling into his trousers. “What are you doing here with those . . . those gorillas? And Gull! You bloody bone saw!”

“I’m afraid this has gone quite far enough,” said the man whom Eddy had called Walsingham “It would be best if you came with us now, sir.”

“I won’t!” said Eddy stoutly. “You have no right!”

At last, Annie found her voice. “Eddy, who are they? Do you owe them money?”

Walsingham laughed. “My dear . . .” He paused, frowning. “Do you not know?”

Annie felt her cheeks burn. “It’s Eddy,” she said quietly. “We are to be married.”

The short man, Gull, barked a laugh, then stared at her. He said, “I don’t think she does.”

“It’s true!” said Eddy, standing. “Annie Crook is to be my wife.”

Walsingham shook his head sadly. “I think not, sir. Gentlemen.”

Two of the bull-necked men shouldered their way into the room, and in a swift movement clambered over Annie’s screaming form and took each of Eddy’s arms. The one called Gull laid down his bag and took from it a dark bottle and a handkerchief.

“This is an outrage!” cried Eddy. “When Grandmama finds out . . .”

Gull tipped liquid from the bottle into the handkerchief and clamped it over Eddy’s surprised face. In seconds, he slumped, and the men began to drag him to the parlor.

Walsingham lit a cigarette and looked pityingly at Annie, cowering in the bed.

“I am truly sorry for the trouble you have been put to,” he said almost tenderly. “Things should not have gotten this far.”

“Where are you taking Eddy?” she wailed.

He exhaled a plume of blue smoke. “Do you not know who he is, really? Do you not read the newspapers?”

Annie shook her head.

Walsingham told her.

Annie’s eyes widened and her jaw dropped. She was about to tell him she was not falling for his sick joke, when she noticed Gull withdrawing a brace of cruel-looking metal instruments from his bag.

“What are those?” she asked in horror. “What are you going to do to him?”

Walsingham looked down at Gull, who waited by the bed. “He will spend some time in a private sanatorium, perhaps in Switzerland. He will recover. He will get over you. We have a match planned for him with a German girl.” He stepped forward and took a lock of Annie’s hair in his thin fingers. “Not a patch on you in the beauty stakes, but more his social equal.”

“Then . . . ,” said Annie, unable to tear her eyes away from the devices in Gull’s hands.

“Those are for you,” said Walsingham, as the other two men entered the room and roughly took hold of Annie’s shoulders. “We can’t have you running around London talking about this. It shouldn’t hurt. . . .”

“Much,” said Gull, grinning.

Walsingham waved his cigarette. “Much,” he agreed. Then he took his leave as Annie began to scream, “Eddy! Eddy! Save me!”

1
The Smiths of Sandsend

The night before, Gideon Smith had dreamed a dragon ate the sun. But there was no dragon in the blue sky, only a gull hovering on the hot air rising from the dry sand, seemingly screaming,
save me, save me
. And the sun had risen as usual, just ahead of Gideon, emerging from the iron- gray sea and traversing the cloudless blue until it began its descent toward the Yorkshire moors far where he now stood.
Save me, save me
, cried the gull, its black face to the sea.

“And me,” whispered Gideon as he leaned on the tarnished railings, watching the men drag the day’s meager catch from their trawlers moored alongside the ancient wooden jetty to the tarpaulins laid out on the fine golden sand. Gideon’s day had been as unremarkable as the sun’s, and as he observed the men standing and shaking their heads at the small piles of haddock and cod glittering in the dying day, he idly prayed a dragon really would come and devour them all, if only to give them some respite from the unending boredom that was life in Sandsend. But the only things that came were the hovering gulls, their minds on eating only fish.