The Immorality Engine (4 page)

Newbury nodded. “Quite so, Miss Hobbes. Quite so.”

*   *   *

Veronica eyed the object on the table and tried unsuccessfully to suppress a shudder. She wished she hadn’t seen it, and now that she had, she wished she could simply ignore it. But things were never that simple where Newbury was concerned.

She hadn’t known where to start. The drawing room was an intolerable mess, but she didn’t have the time—or, if she were truly honest with herself, the will—to clean it up. Instead, she had resolved to discuss the matter with Bainbridge and plot a means by which to recover Mrs. Bradshaw—or, if that proved too difficult—to make alternative arrangements on Newbury’s behalf. But then she had realised that there wasn’t even a place to sit, her sense of duty got the better of her, and she began to tidy up regardless. She’d started with the landslide of discarded newspapers beside Newbury’s favourite armchair, collecting them up into a tidy stack. And that’s when she saw it: the
thing
resting on the coffee table, as if it had always been there. A human hand, dismembered at the wrist, fingers in the air like the legs of a dead spider. It had been carefully dressed and arranged, the pale flesh inked or tattooed with a variety of arcane symbols.

Now Veronica was perched on the edge of the chair, staring at the object with a growing sense of unease. What was Newbury up to? Where had he gotten such a thing? She knew she shouldn’t be surprised: Newbury had a study full of bizarre objects, the trophies of many years. But this was different. Strange words had been written on the fingertips in Newbury’s own handwriting.

Veronica reached over and tentatively picked it up. The flesh was cold and pliable; the hand had been treated with some sort of chemical preservative. A pentagram had been neatly drawn on the palm in black ink. Various objects had been wedged between the fingers: a penny, a holly leaf, a sprig of parsley, a rolled-up fragment of parchment. She was careful not to dislodge any of them. Where the wrist had once been, the stump was carefully wrapped in waxed paper and bound with rough string. She was thankful for that.

Veronica carefully turned the hand over. More strange symbols had been drawn on the back of it, and again she recognised Newbury’s handwriting. The symbols meant nothing to her; she had no way of discerning meaning from what she saw, no frame of reference against which to judge them. But they worried her nonetheless. They signified that Newbury was once again dabbling in the occult, and the implications of that were too dreadful to even contemplate. Her duty to the Queen was to keep a discreet eye on Newbury, to ensure he didn’t stray too far from what Her Majesty deemed to be an acceptable path. Veronica had already failed in that duty by neglecting to report Newbury’s recent escalation of opium abuse. Discovering this grotesque, dismembered hand meant that she now either had to report to the Queen or pretend that she hadn’t seen it. She knew that she should tell the monarch, but also that she wasn’t very likely to. Nevertheless, that still left her with a question. Should she tackle Newbury on the issue and try to put a stop to it herself?

In the end, the decision was made for her when she heard a polite cough. She looked up to see Newbury framed in the doorway, grinning and dressed in a smart black suit, hair swept back from his face. “I see you’ve found Angus,” he said, his voice now filled with the confidence it had been lacking since they’d pulled him out of Johnny Chang’s earlier that morning.

“Don’t be so morbid,” she scolded in reply.

“You’re the one holding the body part,” he reminded her, laughing.

She placed it hastily back on the table. “What is it? What’s it for?”

Newbury crossed the room, coming to perch on the arm of the chair beside her. He looked suddenly serious, all sign of his recent levity gone. He searched her face as if looking for a sign in the way she returned his gaze. “I have the notion that something dreadful is going to come to pass, Veronica. This—” He gestured towards the mummified hand on the occasional table. “—this
experiment
was an attempt to divine some meaning from all that, to give substance to my instincts.”

Veronica frowned. She measured her next words very carefully, in a level tone. “Forgive me, Sir Maurice, if I speak frankly … but couldn’t this simply be the effects of the Chinese weed? Lucid dreams, hallucinations, that sort of thing? You have to admit, you’ve not exactly been yourself of late. Couldn’t the drug have inspired a kind of paranoid delusion?”

Newbury looked pained. “On the contrary, my dear Veronica. I believe the weed has helped me obtain a certain measure of clarity in the matter. The skein between this world and the supernatural world is thin, and sometimes, under the influence of the drug, I feel that veil lifting. I see … other things, glimpses of the spirit world, of the future and the past. It’s beguiling, like a siren song. The weed is a medium for that. Nothing more.”

“And did it work, this experiment of yours? Did you come to any conclusions?” Veronica didn’t know what to make of his words. She couldn’t easily discount them. She, who had a clairvoyant sister locked away in an institution, channelling visions of the future through her seizures. She, who had fought Newbury’s predecessor, Aubrey Knox, the rogue agent who had lost himself to the mysteries of the occult and become obsessed with the pursuit of power through ancient pathways.

The Queen would not have appointed her to monitor Newbury’s interest in the dark arts if she was not concerned that there was real power to be gained from its exploitation. A siren song, as Newbury had called it, luring him towards the rocks, full of promises of enlightenment. That was exactly what the Queen feared.

But this? It sounded more like the delusions of a man who had given himself over to the vagaries of the poppy than anything rational.

As if hearing her thoughts, Newbury put his hand on her arm. “The only conclusion I could draw was that we need to pay a visit to your sister at the Grayling Institute. She is perhaps the one person who could shed some light on the matter—the only one who can tell me if I’m going mad, or if we really are on the precipice of something disastrous.” He smiled. “Assuming you have no objections, of course.”

Veronica tensed. She hadn’t expected this. And of course, she trusted Newbury implicitly. But Amelia was ill, terribly, terribly ill, and Dr. Fabian had insisted that she stay away. More than that, in fact: he had insisted on her complete and total isolation from Amelia while she underwent her treatment. The notion did not sit easily with Veronica, but she had observed the doctor’s wishes, hoping to do the right thing for her sister’s recovery. And now Newbury, the man who had done so much for Amelia, needed something from her in return.

Veronica didn’t know how to respond. She would do anything for Newbury, of course. But was he thinking straight? To jeopardise her sister’s treatment on a whim, a simple search for validation …

“I—” She turned at the sound of clinking china, thankful for the interruption. Sir Charles shouldered open the door, carrying a silver tray filled with teacups, saucers, milk jugs, and sugar bowls. His cane was dangling from the crook of his arm. He glanced over at the two of them and saw Newbury sitting on the arm of her chair, freshly dressed and shaved. “Ah, Newbury. Much better, old chap. Come and give me a hand.”

Newbury smiled at her, a twinkle in his eye, and went to rescue his old friend from the embarrassment of having anything more to do with making the tea.

Veronica gave a sigh of relief. She would consider her next move carefully. If Newbury was right—if something awful
was
going to happen—surely Amelia would be able to help, to offer them an insight of some kind. But she feared that any instincts of Newbury’s might be compromised by his growing addiction to the opium poppy. And that left her with a horrible quandary. For if she couldn’t trust Newbury, whom on earth could she trust?

She watched the two men bustling around each other as they poured the tea, just like old times. It was a case of taking things a day at a time. That was all she could do. Newbury was there, and he was more like himself than she had seen him in months. They had a mystery to solve. That was enough for now. The rest could wait.

At least until after tea.

CHAPTER

5

The garden was alive with activity. A red squirrel scrambled up the side of a nearby bush that had been elaborately shaped to represent an ancient god: Poseidon, thrusting his trident triumphantly towards the sky. Other gods surrounded him, looking on with austere, unwavering gazes: Ares, Zeus, Hades, Aphrodite. The entire pantheon was there, silent in their evergreen vigil.

Elsewhere, birds described wide, concentric circles in the sky, or dived elegantly towards the lake, skimming the surface of the water as they attempted to plunder its murky depths for small silvery fish.

Amelia Hobbes pressed her fingertips against the cold glass of the windowpane, as if trying, unconsciously, to touch the world outside. She’d been locked in her room for days, cooped up like a bird, wings clipped and useless. She longed to inhale the fresh spring air, to walk about on her own two feet—anything but being perpetually confined to this uncomfortable wheelchair.

She sighed, pushing herself away from the window. The wheels of the chair creaked and groaned in protest. She was only torturing herself. Soon she would be able to walk outside again, to see other people. That’s what she had to focus on.
Soon
. At least, that’s what Dr. Fabian had told her.

Amelia turned the wheels of her chair, rolling slowly back into the gloom of her small room. She felt better than she had in months—years, even—and Dr. Fabian finally appeared to have found a means of suppressing her episodic fits, those brief, harrowing spasms in which she was able to see, momentarily, into the future. The last episode had been over two weeks ago, the end of a horrendous period of almost constant seizing, from which she recalled only the briefest moments of lucidity. That was when the doctor was experimenting with the dosage of the new drug he had prescribed for her—an anticonvulsant, he had explained, to put an end to her nightmares.

While his methods were clearly extreme—keeping her locked in her room with no visitors, for a start—Amelia had no real reason to fault the doctor’s regime. She
was
showing signs of improvement. She felt her strength returning. She’d gained weight. She’d taken a few tentative steps on her own, when she knew she wasn’t being observed. And most important, the seizures had stopped.

All of this, she knew, should have left her feeling revitalised, uplifted. But she couldn’t shake the persistent sense of melancholy that had stolen over her. Melancholy and … fear. Fear of the future, of the things she had borne witness to in her dreams. Fear of the unknown, too: the things she hadn’t seen. And more acutely, more urgently, fear of Mr. Calverton, that deranged, frightful assistant of Dr. Fabian’s, that
thing
with all the qualities about him of a creature from a nightmare and none of anything right and sane.

From what she had managed to glean from snatches of conversation with the doctor, Mr. Calverton had once been a normal man, but lost his legs “in the course of duty.” Dr. Fabian had personally crafted machine replacements for him, steam-powered pistons that operated in a bizarre parody of their biological counterparts, enabling him to walk with a juddering, almost comical gait. His face was hidden behind a smooth porcelain mask, leaving only his vacant, watery eyes on display. And he always wore a black velvet evening jacket, a cravat, and white gloves. He seemed unable to speak, for in the few months she had been at the Grayling Institute, Amelia never heard him utter a sound. She wondered what terrible fate had befallen him to reduce him to such a state.

Amelia turned her head, glancing toward the door. She was expecting him at any moment: the
click-clack
of his metal feet on the tiled floor, the scraping of the key in the lock, and then those strange eyes, boring into her from across the room.

She shivered. In other circumstances, she might have been differently disposed towards the man, but she had had glimpsed his future and knew his story was still unfolding. The truth of Mr. Calverton had yet to be uncovered.

Well, it wouldn’t do for him to know of her fear. She should look busy when he arrived. Amelia leaned back in her wheelchair and reached for a book that she had left, upturned, upon a side table. It was a romance of sorts, the tale of a rich landowner who had fallen in love with a girl from the village. She knew it was nonsense, of course, that it was a reflection of desire rather than reality, but nevertheless she’d been enthralled by the tale. It was her one source of contact with the outside world, the means by which she could reach out and touch something other than the drab, day-to-day existence of her life inside the Grayling Institute.

Amelia parked her chair beside the fireplace and turned the pages of her book, drinking in the colourful fictional world, imagining the garden of the manor house in the story to be filled with the same topiary and scampering animals she had seen from her own window that morning. Imagining herself in that place.

*   *   *

A short while later, Amelia became aware of the clanking steps of Mr. Calverton in the passageway outside her room. She stirred, realising she’d been dozing in her chair. Hurriedly, she reclaimed her book from where she’d let it fall on her lap and flicked the pages, trying to find her place. The key scraped in the lock and slowly the mechanism turned with a metallic
click
.

Amelia didn’t look up as she heard the hinges creak open. Instead, she kept her eyes on the book, scanning the same line over and over, never actually taking it in. Her mind was racing. The sheer presence of the half-mechanical man made her skin crawl. Something about his blank, featureless face, his rasping breath, his perpetual silence. And those eyes: always watching, gazing down at her, drinking her in. She couldn’t help but imagine a lascivious sneer hidden away behind that porcelain mask. She attributed all manner of deplorable thoughts to him, murderous thoughts, deranged, deviant thoughts. But she had no way of knowing the truth. She could only put her faith in Dr. Fabian and the knowledge that he was doing his best to make her better.