The Difference Engine (25 page)

“No, sir,” Fraser agreed. “But you should go about your scientific business, same as always. Put a bold face on matters, and likely your enemies will think their stratagems failed.”

The advice seemed sound to Mallory. At the least, it was action. He rose at once to his feet. “Go about my daily business, eh? Yes, I should think so. Quite proper.”

Fraser rose as well. “I will accompany you, sir, with your permission. I trust we will put a sharp end to your troubles.”

“You might not think so, if you knew the whole damned business,” Mallory grumbled.

“Mr. Oliphant has informed me on the matter.”

“I doubt it,” Mallory grunted. “He has closed his eyes to the worst of it.”

“I’m no bloody politician,” Fraser remarked, in his same mild tone. “Shall we be on our way, sir?”

Outside the Palace, the London sky was a canopy of yellow haze.

It hung above the city in gloomy grandeur, like some storm-fleshed jellied man-o’-war. Its tentacles, the uprising filth of the city’s smokestacks, twisted and fluted like candle-smoke in utter stillness, to splash against a lidded ceiling of glowering cloud. The invisible sun cast a drowned and watery light.

Mallory studied the street around him, a London summer morning made strange by the eerie richness of the sooty amber light.

“Mr. Fraser, you’re a London man born and bred, I take it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have you ever seen weather like this?”

Fraser considered, squinting at the sky. “Not since I were a lad, sir, when the coal-fogs were bad. But the Rads built taller stacks. Nowadays it blows off into the counties.” He paused. “Mostly.”

Mallory considered the flat clouds, fascinated. He wished he’d spent more time on the doctrines of pneumo-dynamics. This pot-lid of static cloud displayed an unhealthy lack of natural turbulence, as though the dynamical systematics of the atmosphere had stagnated somehow. The stinking underground, the droughty, sewage-thickened Thames, and now this. “Doesn’t seem as hot as yesterday,” he muttered.

“The gloom, sir.”

The streets were such a crush as only London could produce. The omnibuses and cabriolets were all taken, every intersection jammed with rattle-traps and dogcarts, with cursing drivers and panting, black-nostriled horses. Steam-gurneys chugged sluggishly by, many lowing rubber-tired freight-cars loaded with provisions. It seemed the gentry’s summer exodus from London was becoming a rout. Mallory could see the sense in it.

It was a long walk to Fleet Street, and his appointment with Disraeli. It seemed best to try the train and endure the Stink.

But the British Brotherhood of Sappers and Miners stood on strike at the entrance to Gloucester Road Station. They had set up pickets and banners across the walk, and were heaping sandbags, like an army of occupation. A large crowd looked on, keeping good order; they did not seem annoyed by the strikers’ boldness, but seemed curious, or cowed. Perhaps they were glad to see the underground shut; more likely they were simply afraid of the sand-hogs. The helmeted strikers had boiled up from their underground workings like so many muscular kobolds.

“I don’t like the look of this, Mr. Fraser.”

“No, sir.”

“Let’s have a word with these fellows.” Mallory crossed the street. He accosted a squat, veiny-nosed sand-hog, who was bawling at the crowd and forcing leaflets upon them. “What’s the trouble here, brother sapper?”

The sand-hog looked Mallory up and down, and grinned around an ivory toothpick. There was a large gold-plated hoop in his ear — or perhaps real gold, as the Brotherhood was a wealthy union, owning many ingenious patents. “I’ll give ye the long and short of it, mister, since ye ask so civil-like. ‘Tis the goddamn’ bloody hare-brained pneumatic trains! We told Lord Babbage, in petition, that the bleedin’ tunnels never would air proper. But some spunking bastard savant give us some fookin’ nonsense lecture, and now the bastard things’ve gone sour as rotten piss.”

“That’s a serious matter, sir.”

“Yer fookin’ right it is, cove.”

“Do you know the name of the consulting savant?”

The sand-hog talked the question over with a pair of his helmeted friends. “Lordship name of Jefferies.”

“I know Jefferies!” Mallory said, surprised. “He claimed that Rudwick’s pterodactyl couldn’t fly. Claimed he’d proven it a ‘torpid gliding reptile’ that couldn’t flap its own wings. The rascal’s an incompetent! He should be censured for fraud!”

“Savant yerself, are ye, mister?”

“Not one of his sort,” Mallory said.

“What about yer pal the fookin’ copper here?” The sandhog tugged agitatedly at the ring in his ear. “Wouldn’t be taking all this down in yer bleeding notebooks, would ye?”

“Not at all,” Mallory said with dignity. “Simply wanted to know the full truth of the matter.”

“Ye want to know the bloody truth, yer savantship, you’ll crawl down there and scrape yerself a bucketful of that moldy shite off the bricks. Sewermen o’ twenty years’ standing are tossing their guts from the Stink.”

The sand-hog moved to confront a woman in banded crinoline. “Ye can’t go down there, darlin’, ain’t a single train rolling in London —”

Mallory moved on. “We haven’t heard the last of this!” he muttered aloud, vaguely in Fraser’s direction. “When a savant takes on industrial consultation, he needs to be sure of his facts!”

“It’s the weather,” Fraser said.

“Not at all! It’s a matter of savantry ethics! I got such a call myself — fellow in Yorkshire, wants to build a glass conservatory on the pattern of Brontosaurus spine and ribs. The vault-work is fine and efficient, I told him, but the glass seals will surely leak. So, no job, and no consulting-fee — but my reputation as a scholar is upheld!” Mallory snorted on the oily air, cleared his throat, and spat into the gutter. “I can’t believe that damned fool Jefferies would give Lord Babbage such poor advice.”

“Never saw any savant talk straight to a sand-hog . . . ”

“Then you don’t know Ned Mallory! I honor any honest man who truly knows his business.”

Fraser considered this. He seemed a bit dubious, if one could judge by his leaden expression. “Dangerous working-class rioters, your sand-hogs.”

“A fine Radical union. They stood stoutly by the Party in the early days. And still do.”

“Killed a deal of police, in the Time of Troubles.”

“But those were Wellington’s police,” Mallory said.

Fraser nodded somberly.

There seemed little help for it but to walk all the way to Disraeli’s. Fraser, whose long-legged, loping stride matched Mallory’s with ease, was nothing loath. Retracing their steps, they entered Hyde Park, Mallory hoping for a breath of fresher air. But here the summer foliage seemed half-wilted in the oily stillness, and the greenish light beneath the boughs was extraordinary in its glum malignity.

The sky had become a bowl of smoke, roiling and thickening. The untoward sight seemed to panic the London starlings, for a great flock of the little birds had risen over the park. Mallory watched in admiration as he walked. Rocking activity was a very elegant lesson in dynamical physics. Quite extraordinary how the systematic interaction of so many little birds could form vast elegant shapes in the air: a trapezoid, then a lopped-off pyramid, becoming a flattened crescent, then bowing up in the center like the movement of a tidal surge. There was likely a good paper in the phenomenon.

Mallory stumbled on a tree-root. Fraser caught his arm. “Sir.”

“Yes, Mr. Fraser?”

“Keep an eye peeled, if you would. We might perhaps be followed.”

Mallory glanced about him. It was not much use; the park was crowded and he could see no sign of the Coughing Gent or his derbied henchman.

On Rotten Row, a small detachment of amazon cavalry — “pretty horse-breakers” they were called in the papers, this being a euphemism for well-to-do courtesans — had gathered about one of their number, thrown from her side-saddle by her chestnut gelding. Mallory and Fraser, as they came closer, saw that the beast had collapsed, and lay frothily panting in the damp grass by the side of the trail. The rider was muddied but unhurt. She was cursing London, and the filthy air, and the women who had urged her to gallop, and the man who had bought her the horse.

Fraser politely ignored the unseemly spectacle. “Sir, in my line of work we learn to cultivate the open air. There are no doors ajar or keyholes about us at the moment. Will you inform me of your troubles, in your own plain words, as you yourself have witnessed the events?”

Mallory tramped on silently for some moments, juggling the matter in his mind. He was tempted to trust Fraser; of all those men in authority whose aid he might have sought in his troubles this sturdy policeman alone seemed primed to boldly grapple problems at their root. Yet there was much hazard in that trust, and the risk was not to himself alone.

“Mr. Fraser, the reputation of a very great lady is involved in this affair. Before I speak, I must have your word as a gentleman that you will not damage the lady’s interests.”

Fraser walked on with a meditative air, hands clasped behind his back. “Ada Byron?” he asked at length.

“Why, yes! Oliphant told you the truth, did he?”

Fraser slowly shook his head. “Mr. Oliphant is very discreet. But we of Bow Street are often called upon to put the muzzle on the Byrons’ family difficulties. One might almost say that we specialize in the effort.”

“But you seemed to know almost at once, Mr. Fraser! How could that be?”

“Sad experience, sir. I know those words of yours, I know that worshipful tone — ‘the interests of a very great lady.’ ” Fraser gazed about the gloomy park, taking in the curved benches of teak and iron, crowded with open-collared men, flush-faced women fanning themselves, wilted hordes of city children gone red-eyed and peevish in the stinking heat. “Your duchesses, your countesses, they all had their fancy mansions burnt down in the Time of Troubles. Your Rad Ladyships may put on airs, but no one calls them ‘great ladies’ in quite that old-fashioned way, unless referring to the Queen herself, or our so-called Queen of Engines.”

He stepped carefully over the small feathered corpse of a starling, lying quite dead in the graveled path, with its wings spread and its small wrinkled claws in the air. A few yards on, the two slowed to pick their way through a score of them. “Perhaps you’d best begin at the beginning, sir. Start with the late Mr. Rudwick, and that business.”

“Very well.” Mallory wiped sweat from his face. His kerchief came away dotted with specks of soot. “I am a Doctor of Paleontology. It follows that I’m a good Party man. My family is somewhat humble, but thanks to the Rads I took a doctorate, with honors. I loyally support my Government.”

“Go on,” Fraser said.

“I had two years in South America, bone-digging with Lord Loudon, but I was not a leading savant on my own account. When I was offered the chance to lead my own expedition, generously financed, I took it. And so, I later learned, did poor Francis Rudwick, for similar reasons.”

“You both took the money of the Royal Society’s Commission on Free Trade.”

“Not merely their financing, but their orders, Mr. Fraser. I took fifteen men across the American frontier. We dug bones, of course, and we made a great discovery. But we also smuggled guns to the red-skins, to help them keep the Yankees at bay. We mapped routes down from Canada, taking the lay of the land in detail. If there’s war between Britain and America some day . . .” Mallory paused. “Well, there’s an almighty war in America already, is there not? We are with the southern Confederates, in all but name.”

“You had no idea that Rudwick might be in danger from these secret activities?”

“Danger? Of course there was danger. But not at home in England . . . I was in Wyoming when Rudwick was killed here; I knew nothing of it, till I read of it in Canada. It was a shock to me . . . I fought bitterly with Rudwick over theory, and I knew he had gone to dig in Mexico, but I didn’t know that he and I had the same secret. I didn’t know that Rudwick was a Commission dark-lantern man; I only knew that he excelled at our profession.” Mallory sighed on the foul air. His own words surprised him; he had never fully admitted these matters even to himself. “I rather envied Rudwick, I suppose. He was somewhat my elder, and he was a pupil of Buckland’s.”

“Buckland?”

“One of the greatest men of our field. He’s gone now as well. But truth to tell, I didn’t know Rudwick well. He was an unpleasant man, haughty and cold in his relations. He was at his best exploring overseas, at a good distance from decent society.” Mallory wiped the back of his neck. “When I read of his death in a low brawl, I wasn’t entirely surprised at the manner of it.”

“Do you know if Rudwick ever knew Ada Byron?”

“No,” Mallory said, surprised. “I don’t know. He and I were not that highly placed in savant circles — not at Lady Ada’s level, certainly! Perhaps they were introduced, but I think I should have known it had she favored him.”

“He was brilliant, you said.”

“But not galante.”

Fraser changed the subject. “Oliphant seems to believe that Rudwick was killed by the Texians.”

“I don’t know about any Texians,” Mallory said angrily. “Who knows anything about Texas? A damned wilderness, seas and continents away! If the Texians killed poor Rudwick, I suppose the Royal Navy should shell their ports in reprisal, or something of the sort.” He shook his head. The whole foul business, which had once seemed so daring and clever to him, now seemed something inglorious and vile, little more than a low cheat. “We were fools to get involved in that Commission’s work, Rudwick and I. A few rich lords, scheming in camera to harass the Yankees. The Yankee republics are already tearing at each other’s throats, over slavery or provincial rights or some other damned foolishness! Rudwick died because of that, when he might be alive now, and digging up marvels. It makes me ashamed!”

“Some might say it was your patriotic duty. That you did it for the interests of England.”

“I suppose so,” Mallory said, shaking himself, “but it’s a great relief to speak out on the matter, after so long a silence.”