The Bullet-Catcher's Daughter (8 page)

For myself, the Republic offered safety. When I finally waded the river north of Atherstone and dropped to my knees on the bank, exhausted from hunger and cold, I had moved beyond the Duke’s reach. The Republic recognised no man’s right to the ownership of another human being. But for my fictional brother things were different. Though the Duke, as an aristocrat, could not himself cross into the Republic, yet the men in his employment could come and go with the flourishing of a permit.

A diplomatic scandal would ensue if they kidnapped an innocent woman and rendered her across into the Kingdom. Border skirmishes had been fought over lesser crimes. But to snatch a wanted man, a criminal – this would raise no comment among the masses.

As for my father, I never saw him again. He died in the debtor’s prison.

“Tell the truth and there’s nothing to fear,” said Farthing, still sitting on the corner of my bed.

“You think me an accomplished liar?” I asked. “Look at me. Watch me say it: since arrival in Sleaford, I’ve not set eyes on my brother. I’ve not heard him speak. He’s sent me no message.”

John Farthing did look. His eyes held mine steadily as I spoke. They were not pure brown, as I’d thought before, but flecked with grey. “I can’t decide,” he said, “if you are such an accomplished liar as to be one of the most dangerous people I’ve ever met, or if you’re perhaps telling the simple truth. It’d be more comfortable for me to think you honest. In the airship I’d thought...” He shook his head.

“I have told the truth.”

“And yet I can’t help feeling there’s more you haven’t said.”

From his face, I knew the decision had been made but not which way it had gone.

“Up,” he said, gesturing with the crossbow pistol. “You’ll need clothes for a night journey.”

He had given no sign of noticing my travelling case of male disguises hidden beneath the embroidered cloth. Its discovery would be a disaster. Thus I used misdirection to draw his eye – a show of fluster and embarrassment as I lifted my other case onto the bed and selected a set of under garments. It would have been too obvious to fool a conjuror, but Farthing seemed taken in. He blushed as I gathered bloomers, camisole and corset. These, together with a blouse, skirt and shawl from the cupboard, I took to the small dressing room, closing the door behind me.

“I’ll hear if you slide the bolt,” he said.

“The world will hear if you try to force yourself on me!

“You mistake me,” he said.

“What else am I supposed to think?”

There were a few seconds of silence before he spoke again. “Please talk to me as you change.”

The window of the dressing room being ajar, I peered out and cast my eye up and down the wall of the hotel. A drainpipe ran from the gutter just above me all the way to the rear yard, some thirty feet below. People used to say that children raised in the Circus of Mysteries were deprived of a proper education. But there are some things an acrobat can teach you that a Latin master never could.

“Talk!” ordered Farthing.

“Of what?”

“Of anything so that I know where you are. Tell me where you were born.”

“We haven’t been introduced,” I said, reaching out to grip the drainpipe – cast iron, it seemed, painted over and smooth to the touch. Testing it, I felt it shift a fraction, though not too much to alarm me. Back inside and away from the window, I quickly began to change, pulling my corset around me and hooking the eyes at the front.

“Not introduced?” he said. “You remind me of your lie in the air carriage. Will I regret believing your brother didn’t make it to your room? I ask again, where were you born?”

“In the Kingdom,” I said, unrolling my stockings up my legs.

“Why is your voice strained?”

“You wish me to give an account of my under garments? Is this for your work, Mr Farthing, or for your pleasure?”

“I... forgive me. Where in the Kingdom?”

“I don’t know.”

“A foundling?”

“A daughter of loving parents.”

“Your father’s profession?”

“Are you thinking of proposing marriage?”

He made a noise like a cough, and I remembered how he had used just such a sound to cover his laugh in the air carriage. After a moment he said, “You have a way of steering the conversation, Miss Barnabus. I don’t know if you do it to avoid answering or merely to rile me.”

“I’m not accustomed to being questioned as I dress! It flusters me.”

“Your father?” he asked again.

“Ringmaster of a travelling show.”

Our conversation had passed back and forth like a tennis ball but now it paused.

“I may think you more of a liar for admitting such an upbringing,” he said at last.

“Ironic that you’d like me to lie so that I might seem trustworthy!”

“Why is this taking so long?” he asked, his voice coming from close to the door, as if his ear were pressed against it.

“I take it you’re not a married man, Mr Farthing. Else you’d know what women must go through as we dress!”

“You’re right,” he said. “I’m not. And I apologise.”

“For the lies or the threats?”

“They’re tools of my office. But if I’ve gone beyond the professional... I’m sorry.”

That was the third time he’d said it. Agents of the Patent Office should be made of sterner stuff. It occurred to me that were I to weep, the sound might dislodge him from his equilibrium. He would try to find calming words to speak through the door. I would run water into the basin, as if composing myself and washing the tear tracks away. Twenty seconds from my silence, he would begin to suspect. Ten seconds beyond that he would burst through the door to see me clambering down the drainpipe. I would have slipped into the night before he could run the stairs and reach the ground floor to give chase.

“Miss Barnabus?” he called. “Please speak.”

The drainpipe felt too smooth for a reliable grip. And to find answers we must sometimes turn to face those who would chase us. Thus I opened the door and stood before him, fully dressed.

“Please don’t present your actions as virtue, Mr Farthing. I’ve nothing but contempt for you and for the office you serve.”

Chapter 9

Which is easier to switch
–
the bullet into which a josser has scratched his name or the gun that is to fire it?

– The Bullet Catcher’s Handbook

Two years after the end of the British Revolutionary War, the first nations signed the Great Accord. With the ink still wet they put their signatures to a second document – the charter that established the jurisdiction and powers of the International Patent Office. More nations signed and the Second Enlightenment spread. Soon it encompassed the globe, as did the Patent Office itself.

When the Earl of Liverpool coined the phrase Gas-Lit Empire, it was to ridicule the leaders then rushing to add the names of their countries to the agreement. This was no empire, he said, because no single government ruled over it, nor would gas lighting ever reach beyond the cities. Yet, he had misjudged the mood of the age and the name quickly passed into common usage, the irony seemingly lost on the vast multitudes of working men and their families who regarded the awful powers of the Patent Office as having been established for their own protection.

Perhaps it did once protect the common man. Those machines legitimised with a patent mark never put great numbers out of work. And for almost two hundred years warfare had been restricted to the level of the border skirmish. But if the founding fathers believed the power they had bestowed would not corrupt, they were naive.

Listening to the horses’ hooves beating time on the road, I watched the lights of Sleaford thinning towards nothing. John Farthing sat next to me, bracing himself against the lurch and sway of our progress. The crossbow pistol he had now folded away. I might have had the slim possibility of escaping through the door. But where could I run? He had followed me to the airship in Anstey. He would know of my home on the canal cut.

The role of informative flying companion had suited him well. Witty, modest, easy to trust and unthreatening. But for the starched and disapproving presence of the elderly lady who’d sat opposite, would I have been so easily taken in by the illusion? Perhaps he had chosen exactly that persona to counterpoint her lecture on Republican morals.

What is a chameleon’s colour, when all pretence is stripped away?

I had seen conmen in the Circus of Mysteries working easy marks among the jossers. But too long in that game and they forgot the person under the disguise. Then they would grow overconfident and try to play a member of the circus troop. Invariably they were found out. Confronted, a new story would emerge – an unhappy childhood, a widowed mother, a disease of the mind, a momentary lapse of morals, deep regret, a plea for forgiveness. They would beg for one more chance. But with each new face, we saw more clearly that far from being disguises to cover the person hidden underneath, the lies had corroded whatever they once were until nothing remained.

“I must endure your bad feelings towards me,” John Farthing said, speaking into the taut silence. “But please don’t think badly of the Patent Office.”

“Thinking badly is the only power you’ve left me.”

In truth I had some remaining power. Where running and hiding are impossible, one may still misdirect. Thus my real secret remained safe, for the moment at least, contained within the smaller of my two travelling cases, resting next to the wall of the hotel room, concealed under an embroidered cloth.

Becoming aware that we had slowed, I peered outside. The moonlight revealed a stone gatepost just beyond the carriage window. We were turning onto a long, straight gravel road lined with tall poplar trees.

I had no doubt now that we were heading towards one of the many mysterious properties owned by the Patent Office across the land. But as to the nature of what I would find there I could not guess. Popular belief had it that the Patent Office possessed vast resources and had nigh unlimited manpower at its disposal. How else could it keep watch for the stirrings of new and unseemly technology across the entire civilised world? Yet it was so secretive that notwithstanding its many tentacles and vast reach, its inner workings remained entirely mysterious.

The dark shape of a large building loomed ahead. The horses slowed towards a stop.

Farthing opened the carriage door and held it for me. “Speak only the truth,” he said.

“Or what?”

“Please spare me another stain on my conscience.”

Stepping out onto the gravel, I saw that the building was some kind of manor house. A set of low steps ran from the drive up to a terrace along the front of the building. The grand entrance sat plumb in the centre, with two sets of bay windows symmetrically arranged to either side. Strangely, none of the windows were lit, though the sulphurous tang of coal smoke in the air suggested the presence of humanity somewhere near.

While Farthing was instructing the coach driver to stable the horses, I turned full circle, hoping to see lights in the distance or any sign of habitation. There was none. A thin mist clung to the ground, from which the black fingers of bare tree branches reached towards the sky.

It was through a servants’ door at the rear that we entered, stepping from the chill damp of the night into the dry cold of a boot room that seemed to have been long unoccupied. Striking a lucifer, Farthing lit a storm lantern and held it high.

I followed close behind as he walked along a corridor. Shadows swung as we progressed. Through open doorways I glimpsed a scullery, a pantry, a kitchen. Then we emerged into a grand hallway and a sudden warmth.

Though I had not witnessed any sign of occupation when standing outside, I now saw a crack of light under the door opposite.

“Who lives here?” I asked.

“No one.”

“Then what is it for?”

“For the work of the Patent Office.”

“But how can...?”

“You’re here to answer questions, not to ask them.” So saying, he rapped a knuckle on the door.

I had never seen a room like the one into which we stepped. In scale it fitted the grandness of the house. Ornate plaster coving edged an exuberantly painted ceiling depicting Jesus watching Saint Peter haul in a net laden with fish. The gold leaf of their haloes shone in the lamplight. The religious theme and conspicuous excess dated the room to before the British Revolutionary War.

A generous fire burned in the stone fireplace opposite me. Book cases lined the other walls. Only when I glanced up and around did I realise why the place made me feel so uneasy, for it was entirely devoid of windows.

Stepping forward I took in the seating. Six leather wing-backed armchairs arranged in a horseshoe, and a seventh chair placed at the focus of the others. It was towards this that Farthing directed me. Only when I took my place did I see the room’s sole occupant – a gaunt and deeply wrinkled man with such a sunken frame that he had been hidden within the embrace of the armchair.

“Miss Elizabeth Barnabus,” Farthing announced from behind me.

The fact that he had not himself taken a seat gave me no comfort.

The gaunt man smiled encouragingly. “You are brother to Mr Edwin Barnabus?” Coming from such a desiccated figure, the voice resonated with a surprising volume.

“Who are you?” I asked, hoping my own voice did not betray the dread that had started to replace my anger.

“A servant of the Patent Office,” the wrinkled man replied.

“I’m Elizabeth Barnabus,” I said.

“And your brother?”

“I haven’t seen him since arriving in Lincolnshire.”

Behind me, John Farthing cleared his throat. “He was in the lobby of her hotel. And asking to see her.”

The skin of my arms and the back of my neck prickled as a sweat started to break.

“What do you know of your brother’s business?” the wrinkled man asked.

“He finds information,” I said. “And people.”

“For whom?”

“For paying clients.”

“And who is presently paying for his services?”

I hesitated, but not for more than half a second. In all likelihood this was information they already possessed. “He’s in the employ of the Duchess of Bletchley.”