series 02 01 Conspiracy of Silence

by Andy Frankham-Allen

  “I am all right. Just give me a moment to collect myself,” Annabelle answered.

  The little maid retrieved Annabelle’s cane from where it had slid under a sofa, gave it to her, and did a little curtsy before hurrying back to the valise.

  Nathanial had built her a proper leg, using some of the finely machined gears and coiled spring steel of the Drobate’s City of Light and Science, although set to his own design. It was a marvellous thing and she was just getting used to it when it was taken from her and she returned to using her peg. For a week, ever since their return from Luna, she and her uncle had been held in the Tower of London—that is where they had made her surrender the articulated artificial leg. She and Uncle Cyrus had clearly been prisoners, although none of their jailers would answer any questions as to the reason for their incarceration. Then an official told them they were being moved to Dorset House.

  She had never heard of that before, but it sounded so much better than the Tower. She had imagined something other than this soot-blackened brownstone in a poor neighbourhood, stuffed with ill-matched and cast-off furnishings. She looked at her uncle, now staring in silent bewilderment at the dozens of paintings on the walls, and she thought, of course. Where better to store the two of us than with the other ill-matched and cast-off things?

  Using her cane and an arm of the wingback for support, she struggled to her feet. As she turned, Stanhope, the bald-headed butler, hurried to her side, his face creased in concern.

  “Are you all right, Miss? I am terribly sorry I wasn’t here. The maid just told me you fell. Do you require a doctor?”

  “No, but thank you for your concern. The injury is to my pride only, and it is not the greatest wound it has suffered of late. Please just show us to our rooms.”

  2.

  HER BEDROOM WAS, in contrast to the lower floors of the house, almost empty: a bed, wardrobe, dresser, and straight-backed chair were the only pieces of furniture. There were no pictures to break the dingy blankness of the wall. She and her uncle’s bedrooms adjoined a small sitting room where she imagined they would spend most of their time. The butler pointed out the lavatory at the end of the hall.

  The maids had already unpacked their meagre possessions and put them away. Neither she nor her uncle had a rag of clothing between them when they alighted from the cutter at Chatham Dockyard, but a few garments had been given them to replace the mismatch of Martian attire and naval uniforms pressed into service. The dresses were large on Annabelle, nearly hanging from her frame, while Uncle Cyrus’s clothing was generally too small—trouser legs which showed several inches of sock at the ankle, shirts which strained against the buttons, vest and jackets which defied buttoning altogether. Thankfully the shoes provided fit.

  She supposed their incarceration followed from the affair on Peregrine Station. Months earlier she and Nathanial had discovered the secret and experimental heliograph station in solar orbit between Mars and Earth, had discovered it quite by chance and would have passed it by had Esmeralda, their aether flyer, not been in the final stages of mechanical failure. The station’s subsequent destruction at the hands of a saboteur, and the loss of its entire company save only Nathanial and Annabelle, had been blamed on Nathanial—preposterously—and he had been placed under arrest after their arrival on Mars. Nothing had ever been said about Annabelle having been part of the imagined conspiracy, however, but now here she was, under what amounted to house arrest, and with no alternative explanation offering itself.

  An hour after their arrival the maid served tea in the sitting room and Annabelle realised her hands trembled with hunger. She had skipped dinner moving from the Tower to here, and breakfast had only been a bit of porridge. Unfortunately, the only accompaniments to the tea were a half dozen buttered toast points, all of which her uncle immediately gobbled down. Well, better to have his stomach full than risk exciting his anger again, she thought. Two spoons of sugar in her tea today, instead of one—it would do until supper. She had, after all, endured far worse than an irritable relative and one missed meal. For his own part, Uncle Cyrus retired to his own bedroom soon after to take a nap.

  She heard a knock on the sitting room door. “Come in,” she said and Stanhope appeared with a small silver platter holding a white card.

  “A gentleman to see you, Miss,” he said and offered her the card. For a moment her heart raced at the thought of George Bedford, or perhaps Nathanial, finally finding her, but the card dashed her hopes.

  Major Walter Hallam Gordon, CGM

  5th Regiment of Foot, Northumberland Fusiliers

  “Very well, show him in,” she said, knowing very well this was merely a polite formality. Jailers do not require permission from prisoners to enter their cells.

  Major Gordon was tall and slender, dark-haired, and she might have found him good looking under different circumstances—or perhaps not. Whatever attraction his face might have had was ruined by his grey-blue eyes: cold and calculating.

  “Miss Annabelle Somerset? Please accept my apologies for having to introduce myself under these circumstances. Major Walter Gordon, at your service,” he said with a little bow.

  “I doubt that very much, Major Gordon. Were you at my service you would have two steamer tickets to America in your pocket and a carriage waiting out front.”

  “Nothing would give me more pleasure, Miss Somerset, I assure you, but my duty comes first. I am sure you understand.”

  “I understand nothing. No one has told me why we are being held against our wills, nor has anyone told me what has become of our friend, Professor Stone. Unless you can do so, I suspect this interview will be brief.”

  “Of course,” Gordon answered. “You undoubtedly have many questions.” He gestured to an arm chair. “May I?”

  “Your vocal powers seem to function satisfactorily while standing,” she answered.

  He inclined his head slightly in acceptance. “Very well. I can hardly fault your hostility. I apologise for your having been kept in ignorance, although in truth I doubt any of your…keepers knew quite what to tell you. Let me remedy that at once. Professor Stone has been released from custody and all charges against him have been dropped.”

  Annabelle felt an immediate surge of relief. Finally this ridiculous business of sabotage had been dispensed with! “When can we see him and when can we expect to return home?” she asked.

  “It is my understanding Professor Stone left for Surrey to visit his family. He expressed no desire to visit you that I am aware of.”

  That is very odd, Annabelle thought. Nathanial could be quite forgetful at times, but to show no interest in contacting her was very unlike him. Immediately her suspicions rose, but she chose to say nothing to Major Gordon. At least for now.

  “As to your own freedom, that is a more complicated matter. Your uncle, Doctor Cyrus Grant, is held here for his own safety. As you can see, he is incapable of caring for himself, and may come to some harm left untended.”

  “I tended him in the Tower, and I tend him here. I can as easily tend him in Arizona,” Annabelle answered.

  “Ah…yes, well, that is where it becomes complicated. You are not free to go, Miss Somerset, I am sad to say. While no formal charges have been filed, I am obliged to say that the Lord Chancellor is currently studying the evidence and is deliberating whether charges should be levied. Until such time as a decision is made, I am afraid you must remain here. I know that a week in the Tower as a prisoner must have been a harrowing experience, and now the thought of further captivity must be positively terrifying, but I ask you to…”

  Annabelle laughed, and Gordon broke off speaking, his eyebrows lifting in surprise. “When I was twelve years old my parents were murdered and I was taken captive by a band of the Chiricahua Apache. The chief, Goyahkla, led that band and I was held prisoner by him for two years until rescued. Three months ago I laid in a filthy tent in the Martian desert while, to save my life, two dear friends, neither of them physicians, sawed off my rotting right
leg—rotting, I might add, due to a pistol ball from the French saboteur who was the actual architect of the Peregrine Station explosion. Major Gordon, if you honestly believe I find this,” and her gesture encompassed the sitting room, “or the austere comforts of the Tower harrowing, or the prospect of being held captive by the British Army terrifying, then you are a fool.”

  She sat on the sofa with her back to the arm on the left and her artificial leg, her peg, extended out on the sofa itself. It was not heavy and did not require support, but it did not bend at the knee and if she allowed it to stick straight out she feared Uncle Cyrus, in his aimless wandering, would trip over it and hurt either himself or her, or both. She looked at it, at the reddish-black wood carved to look like a piece of machinery, with rivets and the suggestion of gears and pistons. Her Martian friend Kak’hamish, who had carved it and saved her life time and again, was dead, but she knew that near the top of the peg he had carved a legend in an arcane Martian script. It read, he had told her, Annabelle’s Spirit. It’s meaning, he explained, was that her spirit was like the peg carved from Martian blackwood—alive, but like steel.

  She did not feel like steel, not really. Despite her defiant words she felt powerless and frightened and very much alone, but she would never let this Major Gordon see that. Perhaps that was what Kak’hamish had meant.

  “I admire your courage, Miss Somerset,” Gordon said. “You will have need of it in the times to come. I must tell you that the charge the Lord Chancellor is considering is one of high treason, which is a capital offense.”

  “High treason?” she exclaimed, and she felt her voice rise even as blood rushed to her face. “You must think me very silly and gullible to take such a threat seriously. I am an American citizen, not a British subject, and so whatever you imagine I have done, it could not possibly constitute treason. Really, this is too much. I must ask you to go, Major, and I demand to speak with the United States Envoy at his earliest convenience. That is my right, I believe.”

  “As you wish, Miss Somerset,” Major Gordon answered. “I will arrange the meeting with the envoy.” With another small bow he left her.

  Annabelle sat on the sofa for several minutes, struggling to get her emotions under control, or at least her breathing and heart rate. The nerve of the British! Who did they think they were to treat Americans this way? And treason? What a preposterous threat! It was so preposterous…in some ways she found it more unsettling than a more modest and believable threat would have been. Why would he even say such a thing?

  3.

  “BECAUSE I UNDERSTAND you, Nathanial, I am your mother after all.”

  There was no doubting that, and Nathanial knew she had a point. It was a conclusion he had been fast approaching since returning to Putney earlier that day. Night had fallen since Edwin had left him in his lab, and he had drifted off to a much needed deep sleep. For the first time in over a week he could not remember a single moment of his dream, and for that he was thankful.

  Perhaps it was the letter he had composed to Annabelle, which remained folded in the inner pocket of his jacket? He had no idea to where he should post such a letter, but writing it had been cathartic in itself.

  He had returned to Fairfax House to find it empty. No doubt the Reverend was still at All Saints’, preparing the sermon he was to be deliver tomorrow, and he suspected Dorian and Emily had returned to their respective homes. There was little reason for either of them to remain overnight in Putney, after all; their objectives had been achieved: the denigration of Nathanial before Colonel Sanford and Miss Ashe. Edwin could have been engaged in all manner of things; he had never been one short of distractions, a fact the Reverend often bemoaned. As to his mother, Nathanial suspected she was still attending to her duties at the Royal Hospital on West Hill, which left only Cummings, the Stone’s butler.

  Nathanial was admitted without fuss; indeed Cummings seemed to go out of his way to ensure Nathanial had whatever he needed, but really all he wanted was to be alone. He would have been quite happy to remain at his lab were it not for the promise he had made to Edwin. Cummings, after preparing a touch of sherry for Nathanial, had retired to the servants’ quarter, and Nathanial had finally been left alone to reacquaint himself with his childhood home. Such an act did last long before he found himself bored and strangely dissatisfied. Fairfax House contained too many memories that meant nothing to him anymore.

  He was not too sure how long he had spent looking out of the window of his old bedroom, watching the quiet life of Putney High Street, before his mother returned home. Certainly he did not see her walking down the street. He first became aware of her presence by a gentle clearing of the throat. He turned to find her standing in the doorway, looking as resplendent as he remembered her. For a moment neither said a thing, until, with a smile, she beckoned him over.

  “Welcome home, Nathanial, you have been missed so dearly,” his mother had said as she embraced him.

  Nathanial was not sure how to respond, so instead he returned the embrace, lowering his head, with some effort, to rest on his mother’s shoulder. Like she had done countless times when he was a child, she gently stroked his hair, and Nathanial immediately felt a well of affection overflow for the woman who had guided him so much in his life.

  “I would have thought this room would be turned into a guest room during my absence,” he said, once he released his mother.

  She smiled at him and walked the length of the room. “Why would I allow that? This will always be your room.” She picked up a book from the bedside table. “Although something tells me this is not yours. You were never one for fanciful stories.”

  Nathanial regarded the book, a grey affair with the words A Study in Scarlet printed on the cover. Unless he was much mistaken it was by that chap Conan Doyle, something to do with a consulting detective living on Venus. He dimly recalled its appearance in Beeton’s Christmas Annual, a gift he had bought for his brother two years ago. No doubt that copy had been thumbed so much it had fallen apart. “Edwin’s, I suspect. He was ever one for dreaming.”

  His mother nodded. “He has been keeping watch. Did you notice how he maintained your lab when you escaped to that little sanctuary of yours earlier?”

  For a moment Nathanial did not respond. She did not look offended by such a sleight against the party she had arranged, but nonetheless… “I merely wished to store my luggage. Escaped, indeed! Why would you even say such a thing?”

  “Because I understand you, Nathanial, I am your mother after all.” She sat on the bed and patted the space beside her. Once Nathanial had sat down, she placed a hand on his leg and turned to look him in the eyes. Even sitting down her eye line was some distance from his. “You are in pain, that much is clear. I shall not pretend to understand what experiences you have had since you left Mercury, but I see none of the joy and excitement I read about in your telegrams to Edwin and me.”

  Nathanial looked away. She had always understood him better than any other, and as such he chose not to mention that the heliograms were for Edwin only. It seemed to matter very little now. Pandora’s Box had been opened.

  “When I received your telegram last night, Nathanial, I could have burst with joy. My son, the great Professor Stone, was returning home.” She patted his leg gently. “Where else would you go, but to the bosom of your mother?”

  “It is hardly seemly that a man of twenty-six years should seek the comfort of his mother. I will take care of my own problems.”

  “Of course you will. You always knew your own mind, but in the meantime you will remain here. This room is still yours.”

  Nathanial looked back at his mother, and was surprised by the tears in her eyes. “Mother, I…”

  She smiled softly. “I will accept no rebuttal, Nathanial. You are home now, and you will remain here. Whatever transpired in the last few months is over, and now you will make a new life for yourself in London. I am certain there is plenty of work for a man of your talents. As I understand it, you do not n
eed to leave London to work on those machines that enable ships to traverse the heavens.”

  “No, this is quite true.” Nathanial let out a sigh and stood up. He walked over to the window. Perhaps his mother was right. For whatever reason he had been given a reprieve from the charges of treason that were levied against him; it would be foolish to investigate such a change of fortune. He had tried being an adventuring scientist, and look how that had ended.

  He retrieved the pocket watch and looked down at it. It may well be that he would never see or hear from Annabelle again. He remembered the look of horror on her face when he had been propelled to the waiting four-wheeler, but what struck him most was the way in which George Bedford had embraced her. That was where Annabelle’s future lay. As the wife of a Navy officer, not gallivanting the aether with a scientist who was, deep down, running away from his own truth.

  Nathanial placed the pocket watch beside Edwin’s book. “Very well, Mother, I shall do as you ask.”

  Chapter Three

  “A Past that Haunts”

  1.

  “BETTER IS A handful with quietness, than both the hands full with travail and vexation of spirit.”

  Nathanial listened to the Reverend, standing in the pulpit, as he began his sermon with his chosen reading from the Scriptures. Unless Nathanial was mistaken the words came from Ecclesiastes, possibly chapter four. It could be he was wrong, after all it had been some time since he’d sought comfort from the Good Book. Listening to his father brought Nathanial back to the days when he was made to sit through many a sermon rehearsal; he, only eight years of age, and Edwin a mere three years. His elder siblings were saved such exquisite experiences, although their mother promised that when Nathanial reached ten years then he, too, would no longer sit through the rehearsals. As it turned out, Nathanial remained a participant of such events until he was fifteen to spare Edwin being the sole recipient. If anyone in the family showed any sign of disinterest in the sermons it was Edwin.