Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon bas-3
Page 9
“Then I'm delighted,” Burton replied. “You were pivotal in our securing of the South American diamond, and your presence might be of crucial importance when-or, rather, if-we reach the African stone. Welcome to the team, Herbert!”
“Marvellous!” Swinburne added.
The clockwork man pulled the door far enough open for them to pass through.
“Enter, please, gents.”
The two men stepped into the Technologists' headquarters and were almost blinded by the bright lights within.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel had built Battersea Power Station in 1837. At the time, he'd been full of strange ideas inspired by his acquaintance Henry Beresford, and had designed the station to generate something he referred to as “geothermal energy.” The copper rods that stood in each corner of the edifice rose high above it like four tall chimneys, but they extended much farther in the opposite direction, plunging deep into the Earth's crust. Brunel, just thirty-one years old in '37 and still rather prone to exaggeration, had announced that these rods would produce enough energy to provide the whole of London with electricity, which could then be adapted to provide lighting and heat. Unfortunately, since its construction, the only thing Battersea Power Station had ever managed to illuminate was itself, although it was rumoured that this might soon change, for Brunel was thought to have discovered a means to significantly increase the output of the copper rods.
Shielding their eyes, Burton and Swinburne looked into the station and observed a vast workshop. A number of globes hung from the high ceiling. Lightning bolts had somehow been trapped inside them, and they bathed the floor beneath in an incandescent glare, which reflected off the surfaces of megalithic machines-contrivances whose functions were baffling in the extreme. Electricity fizzed, crackled, and buzzed across their surfaces, and shafts of it whipped and snapped across the open spaces, filling the place with the sharp tang of ozone.
Among all this, over to their right, there stood a bulky vehicle. Around twelve feet high and thirty-six in length, it was tubular in shape-the front half a cabin, the back half a powerful engine-and it was mounted on a large number of short jointed legs. Rows of legs also projected from its top and sides. At its rear, steam funnels stuck horizontally outward, while its front was dominated by a huge drill, which tapered from the outer edges of the vehicle to a point, the tip of which stood some eighteen feet in advance of the main body.
Spencer, noticing them looking at it, explained: “That's a Worm-one of the machines what they're usin' to dig the London Underground tunnels. They reckons Underground trains will make it easier for people to move around the city, now that the streets are so congested with traffic. But you won't find me gettin' into one o' them trains. I'd be afraid o' suffocatin'!”
“You can't suffocate, Herbert,” Swinburne objected.
“Aye, so you says!”
Another contrivance caught their eye. Surrounded by a group of technicians and engineers, it was a large barrel-shaped affair on tripod legs with a myriad of mechanical arms, each ending in pliers or a blowtorch or a saw or some other tool. As Burton, Swinburne, and Spencer entered, it swung toward them, lurched away from the Technologists, and stamped over.
“Greetings, gentlemen,” it said, and its voice was identical to Herbert Spencer's, except pitched at a low baritone.
“Hello, Isambard,” Burton answered, for, indeed, this hulking mechanism was the famous engineer-or, more accurately, it was the life maintaining apparatus that had encased him since 1859, earning him the nickname the Steam Man. The king's agent continued: “The crew of the Orpheus is standing ready to take delivery of the vehicles and further supplies. Is everything prepared?”
“Yes, Sir Richard. My people will tarry-harry-excuse me, carry- everything aboard.”
“I say, Izzy!” Swinburne piped up, with a mischievous twinkle in his green eyes. “Has your new speech-rendering device broken?”
“No,” Brunel answered. “But it is not currently interacting sufficiently-effusively-expectantly-I mean, efficiently-with the calculating elephants-um-elements-of my cerebral impasse-er, impulse-calculators. Unanticipated variegations-vegetations-my apologies-variations are occurring in the calibration of the device's sensory nodes.”
“My hat!” Swinburne exclaimed. “The problem is obviously chronic! I didn't understand a single word you just said! It was absolute gibberish!”
“Algy,” Burton muttered. “Behave yourself!”
“It's all right, Sir Pilchard-er, Sir Richard,” Brunel interjected. “Mr. Spinbroom has not yet forgiven me for the way I treated him during the String Filled Sack affair. I mean the Spring Heeled Jack despair-um-affair. Kleep.”
“Kleep?” Swinburne asked, trying to stifle a giggle.
“Random noise,” Brunel replied. “A recurring poodle. I mean, problem.”
The poet clutched his sides, bent over, and let loose a peal of shrill laughter.
Burton sighed and rolled his eyes.
“Mr. Brunel's speakin' apparatus is the same as me own,” Herbert Spencer put in, raising a brass finger to touch the rounded arrangement of pipes on his head. “But, as you know, me intellect is knockin' around inside the structure o' black diamonds, whereas his ain't, and the instrument responds better to impulses from inorganic matter than from organic.”
“Ah-ha!” Swinburne cried out, wiping tears from his eyes. “So you still have fleshly form inside that big tank of yours, do you, Izzy?”
“That's quite enough,” Burton interrupted, pushing his diminutive assistant aside. He steered the conversation back to the business at hand: “Are we on schedule, Isambard?”
“Yes. We have to declare-compare-repair the ventilation and leaping-um, heating-system, but the League of Chimney Sweeps has guaranteed periphery-I mean, delivery-of a new section of pipe by six o'clock today, and the work itself will slake-take-but an hour or so.”
Swinburne, who'd regained control of himself, asked, “Why can't you fabricate the pipe yourself?”
“Reg-parp-ulations,” Brunel answered.
Burton explained: “The Beetle has recently secured the sole manufacturing and trading rights to any pipes through which his people must crawl to clean or service.”
“That boy is a genius,” Swinburne commented.
“Indeed,” Burton agreed. “Very well, we'll leave you to it, Isambard. The ship's crew will help your people to load the supplies. The passengers will reconvene here tomorrow morning at nine.”
“Would you like to suspect-inspect-the vehicles before you depart?”
“No time. We have a murder investigation under way. I have to go.”
“Before you do, may I peek-speak-with you privately for a moment?”
“Certainly.”
Burton followed Brunel and stood with him a short distance away. They conversed for a few minutes, then the Steam Man clanked off and rejoined the group of Technologists.
Burton returned.
“What was all that about?” Swinburne asked.
“He was telling me a few things about the babbage device that John Speke has fitted to his head. Let's go.”
“Should I join you, Boss?” Spencer asked.
“No, Herbert. I'd like you to stay and check the inventory against the supplies loaded.”
“Rightio.”
Leaving the clockwork man, Burton and Swinburne walked out through the doors, crossed the courtyard, and joined Detective Inspectors Trounce and Honesty, Commander Krishnamurthy, Constable Bhatti, Isabella Mayson, Mrs. Angell and Fidget, and various other passengers at the foot of the rotorship's boarding ramp. Crewmembers D'Aubigny, Bingham, and Butler were also there, having been granted a few hours' shore leave.
The pea-souper swirled around them all, dusting their clothes and skin with pollutants, clogging their nostrils with soot.
“Are we all ready?” Burton asked his friends. “Then let us go and bid civilisation farewell, except for you, Mother Angell. I fully expect you to maintain its standards w
hile we're gone.”
The group walked out through the station gates and passed alongside the outer wall beside a patch of wasteland that stretched down to nearby railway lines-a location which held bad memories for the king's agent and his assistant, for two years ago they'd been pursued across it by wolf-men and had narrowly avoided being hit by a locomotive.
They followed a path down to Kirtling Street, which took them the short distance to Battersea Park Road. Here they waved down conveyances. Monckton Milnes's guests gradually disappeared, as they each caught cabs home. Mrs. Angell and Fidget climbed into a hansom, bound for 14 Montagu Place; Isabella Mayson took another, for Orange Street; and a growler stopped for Detective Inspector Honesty, Commander Krishnamurthy, and Constable Bhatti, ready to take them each in turn to their respective homes.
A fourth vehicle-a steam-horse-drawn growler-was hailed by Burton for himself, Swinburne, and Trounce.
“Scotland Yard, driver!” the latter ordered.
“Not to Otto Steinruck's house?” Burton asked, as he climbed into the carriage and settled himself on the seat.
“It's out in Ilford,” came the reply. “Too far by cab, so I thought we'd each borrow one of the Yard's rotorchairs.”
The growler swung out onto Nine Elms Lane and chugged along next to the Thames. Its passengers took out their handkerchiefs and held them over their noses, the stench from the river so intense it made their eyes water.
Burton looked out of the window. Somewhere along this road there was a courtyard in which a young girl named Sarah Lovitt had been assaulted by Spring Heeled Jack back in 1839-just one of many attacks Edward Oxford had committed while searching for his ancestor. That was twenty-four years ago, and in that short time Oxford's influence had totally transformed the British Empire. That one man could effect such a change so quickly seemed utterly incredible to Burton but it wasn't without precedent; after all, history was replete with individuals who'd done the same-the Caesars, Genghis Khans, and Napoleons. Oxford had caused the death of Queen Victoria. After that, his influence had been subtler; he'd simply made unguarded comments about the future to Henry Beresford. The marquess had passed that information on to Isambard Kingdom Brunel, whose remarkable creative talents had been set alight by the hints and suggestions, leading to the creation of the political and cultural juggernaut that was the Technologist caste.
While Brunel's Engineers and Eugenicists succumbed to their inventive zeal, Oxford's presence in the form of Spring Heeled Jack had also inspired an opposing force: the Libertines, who sought to change social policies and create a new species of liberated man.
All of these elements had given rise to a condition of rapidly growing chaos, as scientific developments and social experimentation accelerated without check. For Charles Darwin, the man they called “God's Executioner,” who'd fallen under the sway of his cousin, the Eugenicist Francis Galton, the possibilities had been so overwhelming they'd pushed him beyond the bounds of sanity.
How many others? Burton thought. How many have become something they should never have been?
The growler turned left onto Vauxhall Bridge and joined the queue of vehicles waiting to pay the toll to cross.
“The devil take it!” Trounce grumbled. “For how long are we to sit here breathing in this funk?”
“I can barely see a thing,” Swinburne said, leaning out and peering ahead. “There's no telling how far from the toll booths we are. Surely, Pouncer, you don't expect us to fly rotorchairs in this?”
“Oy!” the police officer objected. “Don't call me Pouncer! But you're right, of course. After all that fresh Yorkshire air, I forgot how damned impenetrable these London particulars can be.”
Burton made a suggestion: “It's only a couple of miles to the Yard. Why don't we leg it there and borrow penny-farthings instead?”
Trounce agreed, and moments later they were crossing the bridge on foot, cursing the stink, cursing the traffic, and cursing the fog.
“I tell you, Captain, I'll be delighted to leave this bloody cesspool of a city behind for a few months,” Trounce declared.
It was six o'clock by the time they reached Ilford, and, though the fog was thinner there, the daylight was fading and the ill-lit town was wreathed in gloom.
They steered their velocipedes along the Cranbrook Road, then turned left into Grenfell Place.
“We're looking for number sixteen,” Trounce said.
A minute later, they found it: an isolated house set back from the road and concealed by a gnarled and unnaturally twisted oak tree.
“By Jove!” Trounce exclaimed. “Why would anyone want this monstrosity in their front garden?”
They opened the gate, passed through, ducked under the branches, and walked along the path to the front door. No lights were showing in the house.
Trounce exercised the door knocker with his usual vigour but was met with nothing but silence.
“This is a murder investigation,” he said, taking two steps back, “so I have no qualms about breaking in. Stand aside, would you, while I put my shoulder to it.”
Burton held up a hand. “No need for that, old chap.” He produced a picklock from his coat pocket and went to work on the keyhole. Moments later, there was a click.
“Open sesame!” Swinburne commanded, with an effusive wave of his arms.
“Go back to the gate and stand guard, would you, Algy?” Burton asked. “We'll need to light lamps, and if our strangler returns while we're here and sees the windows blazing, he'll do a runner before we've a chance to nab him. Yell if you see anyone acting in a suspicious manner.”
The poet nodded and moved away while Burton and Trounce entered the house. The Scotland Yard man took out a box of lucifers, struck one, and put it to a wall lamp in the hallway. It illuminated three doors and a flight of stairs.
The first door opened onto a small lounge. Trounce got another lamp going and the two men saw five chairs positioned around a coffee table on which ashtrays and empty glasses stood.
“It looks like there was a meeting of some sort,” Burton observed. He checked a bureau and found it empty, then the cupboards of an armoire and found the same.
The second door led to a dining room in which they found nothing of interest, and the third door into a kitchen. Its pantry was empty.
“I fear our quarry is long gone,” Trounce muttered.
The bedrooms upstairs added weight to his suspicion, for the wardrobes were bare and there were no personal possessions to be found anywhere.
“Let's take another look at the lounge,” Burton suggested.
They returned to that room and began a thorough search of it. The king's agent picked through the ashtrays, lifting cigar butts to his nose.
“Revealing,” he murmured. “Four different Germanic brands and one English.”
“Look at this, Captain.”
Burton moved over to where his friend was squatting by the fireplace.
Trounce pointed at a reddish-brown patch at the back of the hearth. “Is that dried blood?”
Burton crouched and examined the stain. “Yes, I think so. Well spotted. But how the blazes did blood get there?” He thought for a moment, then said: “Would you call Algy in, please?”
Trounce grunted, straightened, and left the room. While he was gone, Burton pulled the ashes and half-burned coals out of the fireplace and pushed them to one side, careless of the mess he made on the hearthrug. He lifted out the grate and set that aside, too.
“There was a hansom outside,” Swinburne said as he entered the room with Trounce behind him. “It trotted past in the normal manner. I don't think it was anything untoward. What's happening here?”
“You're the chimney expert,” Burton said. “Have a look at this.”
Swinburne cast his eyes over the fireplace. “It was recently cleaned,” he noted.
“It was?”
“Yes. Look how thin the layer of soot is. Is that a bloodstain?”
“We think so.”
Burton reached into his pocket and pulled out his clockwork lantern. He shook it open and wound it, then handed it over to his assistant.
Swinburne removed his topper and laid it on the coffee table, then ducked down, stepped into the fireplace, and raised the light into the chimney.
“I'm going up,” he said, and, bracing his legs against either side of the opening, he began to climb.
“Be careful, lad!” Trounce cautioned.
“Don't worry,” Burton said. “Vincent Sneed trained him well.”
“Don't mention that cad!” came Swinburne's hollow voice. “I say! There's a sort of niche up here and a little stash of food. There are more bloodstains, too. I'm going to go all the way up to the roof.”
Little showers of soot fell into the hearth, but less than Burton would have expected; evidently the poet was correct, and the chimney was fairly clean.
Five minutes passed, then scrapes and trickles of black dust and an occasional grunt indicated that Swinburne was on his way back down. His feet appeared, then the poet in his entirety, his clothes and skin blackened, his green eyes sparkling from his sooty face.
“My guess is that a chimney sweep was hired to clean the chimney then came back later to steal food from the house,” he said. “It's not uncommon. Most of the boys are half-starved and those that lodge with master sweeps are often so brutalised that they occasionally seek refuge for a night in suitable chimneys.”
“Suitable chimneys?” Trounce asked. “What constitutes a suitable chimney?”
Swinburne turned off the lantern and handed it back to Burton. “One like this, with a niche in it and a shelf wide enough for the nipper to sleep on.”
“And the blood?” Burton asked.
“They shot him.”
“What?”
“Halfway up there's a furrow in the brickwork with a bullet lodged at the end of it. That shot obviously missed. Another one didn't. There's blood smeared all the way to the top and a lot of it on the roof tiles. The lad got away by the looks of it, but I doubt he survived for long, the poor little blighter.”