Fiddlehead (The Clockwork Century)

by Priest, Cherie

  It’d been an overstatement on Gideon’s part, or so he’d assumed when he said it. But now, in the silence between asking admission and receiving it, he second-guessed himself. They’d come for him at the Jefferson building, hadn’t they? Why wouldn’t they follow him, hunt him to someplace less conspicuous than the Capitol, or the home of a beloved former president?

  He eyed the passing pedestrians, wondering who was safe, and who might be watching him … closing in on him. It wasn’t like him to be paranoid, but then again, it wasn’t like him to have murderers on his trail. Not specialized murderers, anyway. Bloodhounds were a generic lot entirely, and he could scarcely bring himself to count them.

  In another half-minute, the door opened again. The girl said, “You can come inside. Mr. Douglass will be with you shortly. Let me take your coat, and—”

  “No,” he said. “I’ll keep the coat.”

  “As you like.” She nodded. “But come this way, and I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

  “I’d rather have coffee.”

  “I’ll … I’ll see what I can find.”

  The parlor was a warm, intelligent place, lined with shelves covered in books, most of which were well loved and well read. A fire burned in the hearth, and two pairs of shoes were drying before it, propped up with their soles facing the flames. Gideon pulled up a chair and aimed himself toward the heat.

  From the columned entryway to the home’s main wing, a voice asked, “So what’s this about you getting shot, or stabbed, or poisoned?”

  Gideon rose from the chair. “Anything’s possible.”

  “But is it likely?” asked Frederick Douglass, a handsome, graying negro in his early sixties. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, and his waistcoat held a small notebook with a pencil strapped against it. He wore a nice pair of house slippers, and a set of reading spectacles pushed up over his forehead.

  The men shook hands, and retreated to the warmest seats in the room. Gideon again cocked his feet toward the fire and finally answered, “It’s hard to say. They started with guns and dynamite, and neither one worked out for them. I can only assume they’ll move on to something more subtle next. Knives or potions.”

  “They could always go the opposite way, and reach for larger guns.”

  “Maybe,” Gideon agreed. “But I suspect that I’ve been targeted by someone more cautious and cunning. Brute force isn’t her style, unless she’s playing political games.”

  “And that’s not what you’re caught up in? A political game?”

  Now that someone else said it aloud, it was silly to insist otherwise. “All right, then it’s a political game. There’s always the chance that I’m wrong, so let’s call it a hunch and hope for the best.”

  Douglass said, “I’d like to think that the ‘best’ would imply that you were destined for a long, happy life, with no interference from dynamite or politics. What’s going on, Gideon? What can I do for you? It’s been … oh, six months since I saw you last. Should I assume you’ve had your nose buried in that Fiddlehead project all this time?”

  “Yes. And the Fiddlehead is why they want me dead.”

  “On that ominous note…” Douglass raised a finger to indicate that the maid had returned with coffee for Gideon, and tea for her employer. He told her to leave the tray behind, so that they could serve themselves at their leisure. When she was gone he selected two cubes of sugar, and took up the question he’d left dangling before her arrival. “Now, why don’t you tell me who ‘they’ are. The mysterious ‘they,’ who you’ve used a feminine pronoun to describe—so I am terribly curious, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

  Over the next half hour, Gideon told him everything, starting with Abraham Lincoln and the Confederate spy Belle Boyd working for the Pinkertons, and moving right along to the Fiddlehead’s conclusions, Katharine Haymes, and the tenuous connection between her company’s war crimes and the walking plague. It felt good to lay it out on the table, even if the table wasn’t his own, and didn’t belong to his usual benefactor. If anything, being forced to tell it all from start to finish, to someone who hadn’t heard it yet and wasn’t familiar with all the details, gave his brain room to sort through the particulars and see the connections better himself.

  When he’d exhausted the subject from several angles, he held his still-full, now-cooled cup of coffee untouched in his right hand as he waited for a response.

  “I must say,” Douglass began slowly, “it sounds like a very fine mess.”

  “It’s not the first time people have wanted to kill me,” Gideon noted. “I refuse to be cowed.”

  But Douglass was less firm on the matter. “Perhaps you should be cowed by it, a little if not a lot. And I’m not perfectly confident that they’d prefer you dead. It’d be smarter to discredit you. If I were you, I’d be more worried about that.”

  Taken aback, Gideon set his coffee down too hard. It rattled, and all the small spoons quivered on the silver tray. “You think I should back down? Hide? Run back to Lincoln with my tail between my legs, until he gives me permission to speak?”

  “No one can make that decision for you, but there’s good reason to consider a more cautious stance than the one you’re taking right now. When you left Tennessee, you risked no one but yourself and your family. If everything you’ve said about your machine and its calculations is true, then you’re gambling much more these days when you put yourself at risk. Upon your message could rest the fate of two nations, millions of people—including yourself and your family, a fact I wish to underscore. Let it not be said that I fruitlessly urged you on a path toward altruism.”

  “I give the world the fruits of my labor. That’s worth something, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but you don’t do so from a sense of duty. You do it because you prefer an audience, and because the more people respect your results, the more grant money you acquire in order to produce more results. You will change the world, Gideon Bardsley. Whether you give a damn about it or not.”

  “I’m trying to save it. They won’t let me save it.”

  “They, they, they. Another ‘they’ for you to blame.” Douglass shook his head. “You’re so single-minded at times. Think broader. Think in another direction. That’s your forte, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but I don’t know what I’m thinking toward, not anymore. And what does it matter right now? No one will deign to hear me until Wednesday.”

  “Deign to hear you, yes—you say that like it’s the easiest thing on earth to waltz into Congress and make people listen. Lincoln pulled strings and called favors to put you on that podium next week, so it’s a pity you begrudge him the delay. He’s working for you, not against you. But since he can’t help you the way you want, right this moment,” Douglass continued, “you beat your head against the wall because you think your only path is blocked. But it isn’t. Lincoln’s right about taking time to craft your message, but he’s wrong that you’ll have to wait until Wednesday to have it heard.”

  Gideon’s unhappy fugue flickered, but he did not straighten up from his position in the chair. “How so?”

  Frederick Douglass sighed. “Son, Congress isn’t the only stage in the nation. It’s not even the largest, not by a far cry. You don’t have to start there, and you don’t have to stop there, either. You need the audience, as much as you want it. You need to shine a brilliant light into the shadows, and teach people that things are being hidden. The governors are buying things and paying for them with blood, without the knowledge—if not yet against the will—of the governed.”

  “Ah.” He understood. “You think I should go to the papers.”

  “Not just ours, but up and down the coast—to Baltimore and Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, and Boston. For that matter…” he pulled out his notebook and began jotting things down. “If you have that Southern woman in your camp—infernal Cleopatra though she may be—she might be useful. Once we’ve written up your findings and made your case in a straightforward, compelling fashion, she
might be able to place the editorial in the Richmond papers, or Atlanta. You never know, she might have contacts in Houston. The Texians are a tricky lot, but they don’t like being exterminated any more than anyone else. You might find a more willing audience there than you’d expect.”

  It was a lot to consider, but Gideon considered it. “You’re right. I should bring the message to the people who would be most affected by it. I thought I should appeal to the authorities, but the authorities are very likely causing the problems in the first place.”

  Douglass smiled like a proud tutor whose student has finally seen the light.

  “Which is why you can’t ignore them altogether. If you want to be heard, you can make yourself heard in the halls of government, it’s true—and you’ll have to take your case there eventually. But that case will be all the stronger when the masses stand behind it. Change happens two ways: from top to bottom, and the reverse. If one avenue is cut off, you must try the other.”

  Eight

  “But Captain, what is it?” Maria asked.

  And as the laundry fell, the workwomen sorted, and the crank and grind of the generators and washers drowned out all but the very nearest noise, Captain Sally leaned in close. She said, “They’re notes, from a half-abandoned backwater on the West Coast, in the Washington Territory. They were written by one of my nurses. She’s been sending them every few weeks like clockwork—observations, suggestions, and prescriptions for dealing with a poisonous gas.”

  Maria could hardly believe her ears. Was this the connection they’d all been seeking?

  Sally continued. “It occurs naturally out there, near a volcano called Rainier. This gas has destroyed one city already, and it’s destroyed countless soldiers here on the fronts, because it converts to a substance that’s sold as a narcotic. There are a hundred names for it, and a hundred names for the men who become addicted.”

  A loud shout pierced the workday commotion in the hot, disgusting incoming room, and Sally jerked to attention. Maria checked to make sure the satchel was fastened shut, and she slung it over her chest. “Was that Adam?” she asked. It was too loud to tell. Too many other things were going on around her.

  But Sally didn’t know. A second shout led to a third—and soon the laundry commotion began to wane as the laundresses became curious about what was happening outside.

  The captain took Maria by the shoulders. It felt like a funny gesture, coming from a smaller woman. “Now go to Washington, and raise some hell.”

  Then a gunshot shook the basement, and the laundry women screamed. “Go!” Sally said more urgently. “Not the way we came. Take that side door—over there!”

  “But, Captain!”

  “Leave us,” she insisted. “Leave, and there’s nothing here for them to take!”

  Maria still had a thousand questions, but someone on the other side of the incoming door had a gun. She had one, too, but she also had something heavy to carry. She ran where Sally’d pointed her, dodging dirty laundry, sidestepping puddles, and almost forgetting the smell that surrounded her.

  Out the door she fled, into a narrow corridor without any windows—but there was a door at one end, so she raced for it and paused long enough to withdraw her Colt. She jammed the gun into the satchel so its handle was easily grabbable, and she opened the door.

  On the other side she found stairs going up, but also leading down. To some kind of subbasement or cellar, she assumed. Only a fool would go down farther, and probably wind up trapped there. No, she’d go up and take her chances.

  First floor.

  She pressed her ear to the door with the large number “1” painted on it. She heard hollering on the other side. Hollering for her? Hollering at her? No, it didn’t sound like it. These were the shouts of doctors giving orders, and the sounds of wheeled gurneys squeaking hastily between the rows. Maria heard nurses answering the doctors, and asking for supplies; injured men moaning or vomiting, and explanations being cast back and forth across the turmoil. Was it truly loud enough that no one here had heard the gunshots below?

  Maria took her chances with the door and opened it, revealing utter chaos: dozens of freshly arrived patients, rolled in on chairs or tables, being sorted and positioned and addressed with professional but imperfect haste.

  “Oh, God,” she said into her mask, then pulled it off because she hadn’t realized until then that she still wore it. She dropped it on the floor and pushed her way forward, through the teeming crowd of the wounded and their caretakers, taking a gurney to the hip with such force that she cried out, bounced off it, and stumbled forward around an operating table that had been wheeled into place right beside it.

  On the table was a man who was about to lose his leg; even a laywoman like herself could see that for a fact. A nurse held the man down as he writhed and cried, and a doctor struggled to put a molded glass mask over his face for ether, but the patient thrashed. Maria watched, fascinated, unable to tear herself away. The nurse lost her grip on the mangled leg and a jet of blood gushed several feet in the air, spraying Maria across the face.

  She could hardly move for the horror of it, but she forced herself toward the rear of the room, where another door promised an exit, or so she hoped. She wiped at her face, tracking a streak of crimson across the back of her hand. Though she blinked and blinked, the vision in her right eye still swam with red. A bucket of clean rags in soapy water sat by the door, and although she remembered what Sally had said about every rag being sacred, she took one anyway. As she retreated, she wrung it out and wiped at her face, working the rag’s corner into her eye even though the soap stung.

  Her sight cleared, and she swabbed her décolletage, fretting over a splotch or two on her scarf and another on her bodice. But she’d have to wash them later, there was no time to take a trip to the washroom now. Not when she heard—bang—another gunshot somewhere behind her.

  It might’ve been anything, she told herself. Might’ve been some agitated, delirious soldier burning through ammunition, threatening the very people who would bring him back from the brink if he’d give them but a chance.

  But she wasn’t prepared to wait around and find out.

  As she reached the door that should take her into the main lobby, the stairwell door crashed open and another gunshot rang out.

  The reaction was immediate and loud; nurses screamed, patients howled, every able-bodied person ducked for cover. One of the doctors drew a weapon of his own to fire back at the man in the doorway.

  Maria only got a glimpse of him and all she could tell was that he was a white man in a long brown coat. He ducked back into the stairs, only to return fire … right into the room where all the wounded were waiting for help.

  “Despicable!” she gasped, and reached for her Colt’s handle, but came to her senses before adding to the fray.

  Besides, the doctor was returning fire with the skill and calm of a sharpshooter, and maybe he was one, or had been. This was a war hospital, after all, and surely most of the surgeons had seen the field at some point in their service. Maria said a prayer and wished him luck, concluding that the best way she could help defuse the situation would be to leave it behind and let the gunmen chase her to another place.

  So she kept running, out the door and into the circular driveway, where four ambulances of military make were jumbled together, having just arrived from the front. Their rear doors hung open, bloody rags and clothing spilling out from within, as if the vehicles had been disemboweled. At least two of these mechanical carriages had been left with their engines still running, pumping black smoke from their exhaust pipes, their idling motors gurgling.

  Maria had never driven an ambulance before.

  But when she looked inside the nearest cab and scanned the controls, she recognized most of them. The machine wasn’t wholly different from the newfangled taxis she’d driven in Atlanta during one summer’s desperate effort to feed herself.

  She came to a decision. She tossed the satchel onto the seat
, seized her Colt, and jumped back onto the lawn in front of the house-turned-hospital … and fired her gun twice into the air. “Hey!” she shouted at the top of her lungs. “Hey, I’m out here! Follow me, boys—I’ve got what you want, so come and get it!”

  Silence fell in the wake of her proclamation. For a moment, she didn’t know what to do. Try again? Wait a little longer? See what happened? But the decision was made for her. One of the hospital’s front windows broke as an elbow smashed through it and the barrel of a gun emerged in the hole.

  Before the attempted assassin could squeeze off more than a shot, she dived back into the cab of the ambulance and shut the door, hunkering down as low as she could while still operating the controls. There was a clutch? Yes, a clutch. There, that pedal. And the diesel injector, yes. That pedal there. Where was the gearshift? She fumbled around until she found it on the side of the steering wheel—doing most of this by feel, since she couldn’t see much of anything. But she got the vehicle moving.

  And immediately struck one of the other ambulances.

  She didn’t hit it hard, but the impact knocked her head against the dash, and she swore like no lady ought to.

  A bullet shattered the windscreen and she was showered with shards of glass, but she shook her head and brushed them away, then sat up just long enough to see where she was going—and to shove her foot onto the accelerator as soon as she spied an opening.

  Over the grass the vehicle hopped, winging a low stone retaining wall as she skidded inexpertly over the driveway and then alongside a ditch, into which the ambulance leaned sharply, threatening to flip and fall. But she urged it up, up, and onto level ground. Now the shooters were far enough behind her that they couldn’t hit her except by the most outrageous accident. Or so she was fairly certain, because she could still hear the shots cracking behind her, but nothing striking home.

  She guided the unwieldy craft onto the road and did her best to avoid any horse-drawn carriages, dogs, men or women on foot, wagons, or other motored devices; but it was hard to see with the windshield gone and the sharp, cold air flying into her face without mercy. Maria squinted against the wind and wished for goggles like the airship flyers used … but if wishes were fishes they’d all cast nets. So she drove on, paying so much attention to her technique that she’d gone a mile before putting any thought into where she was headed.