by Tony Pollard
The arrival of summer had once again been accompanied by the rising stench from the river, and it could only be hoped that Bazalgette was driving his sewers through the wet London clay with all possible speed. It was the day before the meeting and I was walking to my club to take supper when a carriage drew up alongside me, the door swinging open to block my path. ‘Good evening, Dr Phillips, can I offer you a lift?’ called a voice from within.
Brunel was back.
I stepped into the carriage and pulled the door closed behind me. ‘Where to, sir?’ asked the driver, peering through a flap in the roof. Brunel looked across at me.
‘I was on the way to my club in William Street for supper,’ I said.
‘Excellent. Did you hear that, Samuel?’
‘William Street. Very good, sir.’
The engineer had changed little since last I saw him, looking less tired around the eyes perhaps but still no picture of health, and if the thick fog of smoke was anything to go by his prodigious cigar consumption remained undiminished. I had rehearsed a number of greetings for this occasion, many of them less than cordial and all of them very quickly moving on to a barrage of questions. But his appearance had taken me by surprise and it was Brunel himself who set the groundwork for my interrogation.
‘Well, my friend, how have things been?’
‘That is going to take a little explaining,’ I said, snorting at my understatement. ‘But before I do, can I ask when you got back?’
‘This morning. We left Cairo two weeks ago. Did you get my letter?’
I nodded dismissively. ‘Who have you spoken with since then?
‘I have seen nobody yet – apart from you, of course,’ he said, somewhat surprised at the urgency of my question. ‘I plan to meet with Russell tomorrow morning and see what progress the scoundrel has made with the ship over the last six months. Today I just wanted to get away from the unpacking. Tell me: what news? What have I missed?’
‘Wilkie is dead,’ I said.
Brunel paled. ‘My God, how?’
‘He was murdered when I was in Bristol.’
The engineer silently mouthed the word ‘murder’ as he stubbed out his cigar. ‘Nate – what about young Nate? My God, the poor lad.’
‘The boy’s in America. I saw him on to the boat.’
‘Gone to stay with his uncle, no doubt. Good man, Phillips. But why? Why would anyone want to kill Wilkie?’
‘That is a question I have been waiting to ask you for some time.’
Brunel was clearly shocked. ‘He was a craftsman, a damn good engineer. Why would anyone wish him dead?’
This thin stew of queries was getting us nowhere, so I added more information to the pot. ‘I know about the heart, Isambard.’
‘The heart? I suppose Ockham told you about it? Are you telling me the heart has something to do with it?’
‘Ockham didn’t need to tell me – I have seen the minutes of the meeting in which you unveiled the concept.’ Then, at the risk of spoiling the recipe, I threw in more ingredients. ‘Wilkie was killed because he refused to surrender the components you commissioned. He gave them to Nate, who escaped to hand them on to me. Later, his killers broke into my rooms and held me at gunpoint; they were looking for the heart. But the whole of the heart, not just pieces. What the hell is going on here, Isambard?’ The carriage came to a halt. ‘Join me for supper,’ I said. ‘We have much to discuss.’
Brunel nodded and opened the roof flap. ‘Samuel, leave us here. Collect me again at…’ he pulled out his watch and flipped the lid ‘… at ten thirty. In the meantime return home and inform my wife of my intention to take supper with Dr Phillips.’
‘Very well, sir. Ten thirty, it is,’ came the dismembered reply.
After signing in my guest we entered the lounge, but it was busy so I asked the porter for a private room, where we could take a drink and talk without fear of being overheard.
‘I know all about the Lazarus Club and I know about Ockham.’
‘My congratulations,’ said Brunel, a note of irritation in his voice. ‘Should we not give a little thought to what you don’t know?’ Before I could reply a servant reappeared with our drinks and when he left Brunel continued. ‘Forgive me, Dr Phillips, but I have known Wilkie for a long time. Illness, an accident, that would be another thing entirely, but murder? And as for your suggestion that the mechanical heart is the root cause of all this, I find that hard to believe.’
‘It has troubled me also. Why would anyone go to such extremes to get their hands on a device with no hope of… well, of fulfilling the role for which it was created?’
Brunel gazed into the fire. ‘You need not spare my feelings, Phillips. An optimist might call it a prototype a hundred years before its time, but you are right. Anyone else would probably dismiss it as nothing more than a piece of whimsy, a castle in the air. Why then, you ask, would anyone want to kill for it?’
‘Exactly,’ I said, relieved to be getting somewhere.
He dipped a splint into the flames and proceeded to light his first cigar since leaving the carriage.
He was lost in his thoughts for a moment, but then, keeping his back to me and gripping the mantelpiece with both hands, said, ‘Perhaps, my friend, the device is more than just a mechanical heart.’
‘How so?’
He turned to face me. ‘It is an engine.’ I looked at him blankly while he sat down again. ‘You see, in my youth I spent many years dabbling with a design for an engine that was powered not by steam but compressed air. I called it a gaz engine. But it performed badly in tests and seemed like time and money wasted. Then along came Ockham with his dreams of mechanical organs.’
‘Our mutual friend seems to come from a long line of dreamers.’
‘You have been doing a little research into his family tree?’
‘It wasn’t difficult. He told me about his mother, about his grandfather and Frankenstein. But I learned more from Babbage.’
‘Ah, I see. And just what did he tell you?’
‘He told me about the woman in the picture on his mantelpiece, which I saw when he hosted that meeting in his house.’
‘Go on.’
‘A few weeks ago I was in Ockham’s cabin on the ship and there was a picture of a woman on his wall, which he was keen to hide away. It took me a while to realize it, but it was the same woman as in the picture at Babbage’s house. It was Ockham’s mother, Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter. I spoke to Babbage while we were at Darwin’s house and he told me all about her. About how she had helped him in his work on the difference and analytical engines, how they became friends. She had a peculiar talent for mathematics but being a woman did not have the opportunity to pursue these interests as she would have liked. The strain began to show, she became estranged from her husband and, despite Babbage’s efforts, fell into bad company. Ada had been gambling for some time and eventually lost almost the entire family fortune on the horses. According to Babbage, she had hoped that his devices could be used to calculate odds, to predict which horse was most likely to win a given race. But then she fell ill and died of cancer. Babbage seems to have been one of the few people who treated her with any decency; she doesn’t appear to have been an easy person to get along with. That’s why her devoted son, who himself could be described as a difficult character, gets on well with Babbage, regarding him almost as a father figure. And to cut a long story short, that’s how he ended up in your company, working at the yard and becoming a founder member of the Lazarus Club.’
‘I am pleased you have learned more about him. The knowledge may help you better understand his peculiarities. Many would regard his interests as eccentric but his enthusiasm helped me to see my gaz-powered device in a new light, as did you with your surgical understanding of the workings of the human body. Over time I refined the design and created the heart, but in doing so may also have inadvertently designed a gaz engine that actually works.’
‘And a new type of engine that work
s would be highly desirable. Much more so than a mechanical heart that does not?’
‘That is so, but we will not know whether it works until it is finished and tested.’
‘I suppose Ockham sees no other purpose for it, other than as a heart?’
Brunel took a contemplative draw on his cigar. ‘You can rest assured that he is entirely single-minded about the issue. He set out to build a heart not an engine.’
This assessment was entirely in keeping with the impression I had gained from my shipboard conversation with the peculiar young aristocrat. ‘Then who else knows about it? The engine, I mean, not the heart.’
‘Any number of people. I freely discussed the idea with my colleagues.’
So much for narrowing the field, but then after a little more thought he continued, ‘Most of them dismissed it as a bad idea, but there was one who showed great interest in the project.’ The sense of expectation was unbearable, but then just as he was about to speak the name he shook his head. ‘No, it couldn’t be. Not him. Scoundrel he may be but murderer?’
The description was enough. ‘Russell, you think it was Russell?’
It took Brunel the remaining lifespan of his cigar to describe how, almost four years earlier, just as a young Viscount Ockham appeared on the scene, Russell had voiced an enthusiasm for the engine and claimed to have come up with a use for it in a machine of his own design. The project, Russell had claimed, would be highly rewarding for them both, but he had refused to provide any further detail on what he had in mind. At the time, Brunel explained, their working partnership had been at an especially low ebb, though I had never known it to enjoy a buoyant high tide. Russell had just been sacked by the ship company, which not for the last time was on the verge of bankruptcy and so, not surprisingly, the last thing Brunel wanted was further collaboration with the man.
With Ockham’s arrival, however, and apparently his financial backing, the design for the device went through a radical transformation, and it evolved from an engine into a heart. But this redesign only served to encourage Russell further and he made several more attempts to talk Brunel round, though he still fell short of explaining what his idea was. Then, not long after my introduction to the Lazarus Club Brunel began commissioning the manufacture of parts, including those from Wilkie. Ironically, or perhaps suspiciously, just as the gaz engine became more of a realistic proposition, so Russell’s interest declined, or so it seemed.
‘While I still cannot believe him capable of murder, he is the only obvious suspect, and it won’t be the first time I’ve caught him stealing.’
‘Really?’
‘We had two and a half thousand tons of iron plate destined for use in the ship go missing. It turned out Russell had appropriated them for use in another of his projects. I never managed to prove it but I am certain it was him.’
‘Are you just as certain this time?’ I asked, concerned that Brunel was letting his emotions colour his views.
‘There is one way to be sure,’ he said. ‘I will have it out with the man tomorrow.’
‘I would strongly advise against that, Isambard. We cannot afford to make our suspicions known, not yet. If he is guilty Lord knows what powers he has under his control. Russell didn’t kill Wilkie but the men who did may be in his employ. We must approach this matter with the utmost care. Firstly, we need to find out what use he had in mind for your little engine.’
‘You are right, of course,’ said Brunel, calmer now. ‘And I know where we are most likely to get that information.’
The details were hammered out in hushed tones over supper and by the time our brandies arrived we had agreed on how to proceed.
The fight back had begun.
As fate would have it the presentation scheduled for the following evening was to be made by none other than Russell. He was to talk about the fitting out of the great ship, but Brunel’s return from his travels had put an end to that and the Scotsman, who in any case was not a natural public speaker, seemed only too glad to step down and let the engineer talk in his place.
Brunel was greeted as though he were a victorious general back from the wars. Glasses were raised to his health and it seemed quite natural for him to share his Egyptian adventures with his fellow Lazarians.
He explained to us how the massive stones for the pyramids were quarried and then transported by barge along the River Nile; how the vast monoliths were moved across the land on wooden rollers and dragged up on great earthen ramps; how the dead pharaohs were preserved through a process called mummification, their bodies dried out with salts and wrapped in bandages; how these mummies were placed in wooden and stone coffins, bedecked with gold and jewels, and then sealed inside the pyramids, many of them accompanied by their freshly slaughtered wives and slaves, all of them waiting to serve in the afterlife.
With his audience captivated, Brunel placed an object wrapped in muslin on the table. The breath caught in my throat as he began to remove the protective bindings; surely it couldn’t be? But to my relief, the removal of the shroud did not reveal the mechanical heart but a gently tapered cylindrical vessel with a shouldered top. The alabaster lid took the form of a falcon’s head, the piercing eyes still highlighted by the layers of paint and gold leaf applied all those thousands of years ago.
‘This is a canopic jar,’ he said. ‘Inside is the heart of a pharaoh, plucked from his chest and sealed inside the jar before the body was mummified.’
He handed the jar to Russell, who proceeded to examine it, even to the point of sniffing the wax-sealed top in expectation of detecting some aroma of the organ inside; apparently disappointed, he passed the jar to his neighbour. Whitworth repeated the process, but in addition gently shook it, perhaps hoping to hear the organ slap against the walls of the vessel. Babbage avoided any contact whatsoever by pushing himself back into his seat, thus allowing Whitworth to reach across his front and pass the object to me. Setting down my pencil, I took hold of it with both hands and first brushed my finger across the faint pattern carved into the neck of the vessel just below the falcon’s head. Then I upturned the jar and, finding no maker’s mark on the base, I handed it on to Stephenson; and so round it went, moving from hand to hand around the table, each recipient adding something new to the ritual of examination. By the time it reached Ockham the only thing left to do was to break it open. But he just set it down in front of him and stared at it.
Brunel continued to enlighten us as the object was doing the rounds. ‘All of the major organs were removed, not by surgeons,’ he explained, casting a glance at me, ‘but by priests. The brain was removed through the nose, and like the heart, liver and lungs, deposited in a jar to be sealed and placed in the tomb with the mummified body. It could only be presumed, he told us, that these organs were reunited with the body on its arrival in the afterlife, where the pharaoh would enjoy immortality in the company of the gods.
‘How do we know all this?’ asked Whitworth.
Brunel produced a card depicting a series of symbols and motifs. ‘These are hieroglyphics. The writings left by the Ancient Egyptians, carved into the columns of their temples and painted on the walls of their tombs. In these they bequeathed us descriptions of their beliefs and practices.’
I squinted at the card, trying to make out the shapes so as to complement my written notes with some rough sketches. Noticing my difficulty, Brunel passed the card to Russell, which like the jar before it began its halting journey around the table. All manner of objects were depicted: there was a feather, what I took to be a bushel of corn, an owl, a boat, a snake, a human leg and an arm.
‘How on earth are we to understand their meaning?’ asked Brodie.
‘They have been deciphered, translated into the modern tongue. Each symbol represents a word or letter. We can now read them as though they were written in English. Or indeed French, for the work was done by a Frenchman, a gentleman called Champollion.
‘It is written,’ he continued, ‘that before a man can pass into hea
ven his worth must be judged. This was achieved by weighing his heart on a set of scales. If it were heavy with sin, then it was devoured by a demon and the body passed into hell, but if the balance tipped the other way because his heart was free from sin then he passed into the afterlife.’
‘Are these similar to the patterns carved into the jar?’ I asked.
Brunel picked up the vessel and peered at it. ‘Indeed they are. As far as I can make out they provide information on the jar’s contents.’
There was a brief pause and then another question, but this time not from the audience. ‘Gentlemen,’ said Brunel, ‘I wonder how many of us carry heavy hearts inside our chests?’ He glanced around the table. ‘I certainly do, but the cause is not sin but grief. Only yesterday, on my return to England, did I learn of the tragic death of Leonard Wilkie, my friend and colleague in Bristol and sometime member of the Lazarus Club. We can only hope that his brutal murder will not go unpunished.’
There was a muttering of agreement. ‘His loss,’ Brunel continued, ‘represents a double blow, both personal and professional, and I am sure you will all wish to join me in a silent prayer to his memory.’ Brunel bowed his head, and we followed suit. After a few moments I risked a glance at him. Acknowledging me with a subtle nod, his gaze finally came to rest on the crown of Russell’s lowered head. Then, after a minute or so he cleared his throat. ‘Thank you, gentlemen, but before we move on I have one more thing to say on this matter. With the death of Wilkie I am afraid that progress on the mechanical heart, a project I set before you some time ago, has been seriously delayed, for he was still to produce a number of essential components. I had hoped to present the finished device to you in the near future, but that will no longer be possible.’
Thanks to Brunel’s splendid performance our plan had gone off better than we could have hoped. He had carried the whole thing off with a panache that Ockham and myself would have come nowhere near to achieving. The meeting closed in a subdued mood, but this was all to the good – further evidence that Brunel had succeeded in his aim.
