“The research facility is located two floors down. Please use the vertical transport unit,” the tiny voice replied through a mesh-grille. Magnus quickly walked away; automatons had always unnerved him. He really didn’t know how Declan could work with them.
Striding across the open foyer, dodging the reporters and publishers as they hurriedly raced to destinations unknown yet vastly important, Magnus made it to the back of the room, where a large metal cage stood waiting. He pulled the bell pull and the doors slid open with a painful squeal. He stepped in.
And he faced, unsurprisingly, another automaton. This one was a cheaper model, merely a fashioned torso and head, perched on a stationary metal column.
“Fifth floor executive offices fourth floor editing third floor reporting second floor graphics first floor pulse station ground floor inquiries lower ground floor archives basement research. Name floor please.” After that flood of information, Magnus blinked twice and then replied,
“Basement.”
Without another word the doors shimmied shut. Magnus was locked in a cage with a sinister, legless piece of metal. He felt his heart start to patter irregularly, and began to feel droplets of sweat careen down his neck, under his cravat and down his back. He quickly pulled out a comb from his breast pocket and pulled it through his pristine hair.
“Pull it together, man,” he told himself sternly, but just as he thought he might have to pull the emergency lever in the corner, the cage came to a sudden halt and the doors opened. He quickly dashed out, barely hearing the intoned directions,
“Last door on the left.”
Even as he followed the dark, obviously un-renovated hallways lit with diming luminosity tubes, he was dreading dealing with another automaton.
Not bothering to knock on the grubby door labelled ‘research’ in swirling letters, he entered.
“Hello, there,” said a surprisingly lyrical voice. Surprised, Magnus took a moment to recalibrate himself.
The room was much brighter than the dark hall, with hundreds of new luminosity tubes gleaming to reveal hundreds of selves, filled with thousands of pigeon holes.
Seated a few feet in front of the door was a large desk piled high with papers and empty tubes, each one waiting to be sealed in the other. Behind the desk was a small man with a very lush, dark moustache, and equally dark and lush hair that was half-hidden under a shapeless hat.
“You’re- you’re Welsh!” was all the barrister could think of saying.
“Well, now, you are the observant one,” said the young man, no older than Magnus himself. Though his words were harsh, the lilting tone to his voice belied a sardonic sense humour.
“Excuse me,” apologized Magnus, “I was just expecting an automaton.” Understanding dawned in the dark eyes across from his.
“Oh, yes,” the man nodded, wiping crumbs from his moustache. “Not a fan of the walkin’, talkin’ scrap heaps then, are you?” Magnus shook his head. “Don’t blame you a’tall, mate. Over the last two years, they’ve put more than their fair share out of work here. That’s why I was banished down here. Damn things just can’t seem to be able to research and file things properly.
“I’m Twym Glyndwr, by the way, researcher extraordinaire and keeper of the files.” He swept out his arms to encompass the room behind him, then wiped his hands on his pants and sat down. He beckoned to an old chair in front of his desk, indicating Magnus should do the same.
Magnus sat, feeling a spring curl up into his backside as he tried to work out just how to say the Welshman’s name. Behind the piles of paper and tubing, Magnus could see and smell the unidentifiable remains of a lunch tin. Seeing his gaze, the researcher offered him some.
“Um, what is it?”
“Leftovers from the breakfast my fiancé made for me. Just a bit of eggs and cockles fried with bacon and sausage on a bit of bara lawr. That’s laverbread, made with seaweed, to you,” he smiled widely, cheekily.
“I think I’ll pass, thank you” Magnus swallowed.
“So,” he leaned back in his squeaky chair, “how can I help a Cogspeare?”
“How did you know I’m a Cogspeare?”
“There aren’t that many well-dressed men with that shade of red hair in this city,” he pointed a finger at Magnus’s head, “and only one with a custom made hearing-augmenter.” Magnus ignored the comment about his hearing aid and observed instead,
“You should be an investigator.”
“If it hadn’t been for some reductions upstairs, I would be, and a reporter too. The last bloke who was promoted…well, never mind.” At Magnus’s suddenly darkened expression, the man nodded a subtle apology for his harsh observation.
“So, how can I help?”
“I need some information on the SWSMC.”
For a few moments, the man across from him stared at him silently, frowning and biting on the ends of his moustache. Finally he asked,
“May I ask why?” Ordinarily, Magnus would say, no, confidentiality and all that, but something in the Welshman’s expression said that his answer was very, very important.
“I’m working on a case that involves the SWSMC. The file I was given was meagre to say the least, so I – naturally” he added with a slight curve of his lips, “came here for unbiased information.”
More moments of mustachio biting, but finally Glyndwr came to a decision.
“You can find information on the SWSMC in the files of any newspaper, or on the lips of any of their employees. But here, you might just find the truth.” He said with a touch of pride. He rose, and Magnus saw that he was only a few inches above five feet tall, and wore corduroys and waistcoat. His collarless, well-pressed shirt was rolled up over his furry forearms.
As Magnus rose to follow him, he saw that there was a small cushion on the seat of the Welshman’s chair depicting an oriental dragon curled around black embroidered words that read croeso i uffern. His host saw his gaze and smiled,
“My fiancé made that when I was moved down here. She has a sense of humour.” Magnus raised his eyebrows in question.
“It means, welcome to hell.”
Magnus followed him down the centre of the cases of shelves, all labelled in spidery handwriting. The newsman turned, and led Magnus down another, narrower row, coming to a sudden halt.
“This is it.” He indicated more than a dozen, empty pigeon holes.
“What do you mean?” A sigh from his companion accompanied his next words, and he leaned back against the steel shelves.
“Three weeks ago, George Talliburn, a friend and seasoned reporter, came down from upstairs and asked for all the files on the SWSMC. I thought it was a bit odd that he would need all of the files, considering he would just need a few for a bit of background on the company if it were a general piece. But he said that, since the miners down in Port Prudence banned together, he wanted to do a larger story on them. As a friend, I let him have the majority of the rolls.
“The reporters are allowed to check out the research papers for a week at a time.”
“Has Talliburn brought them back? What did his article say?”
“As far as I know, he never wrote it. Hasn’t brought the papers back, either, and hasn’t been seen upstairs since.” Magnus paused, then asked,
“But it’s been three weeks?” Glyndwr nodded grimly. He then reached up and snatched down a tube from a pigeon hole. The tube was a metal cylinder approximately a foot long. He twisted it in his meaty hands, and with a hydraulic hiss it opened, unfurling a small ream of pages.
Magnus gingerly took the curled leaves and began to quickly scan them for any information he didn’t yet have. Immediately, some things began to catch his eye.
“What are these names here?” he pointed to a list at the bottom of the fourth page. “Is this the Board of Directors?”
“No- that list in on page…” Glyndwr stuffed the cylinder under his arm, took back the pages and quickly leafed through them, scanning the type-set letters even more quickly th
an Magnus. “Here,” he finally pointed to one of the earlier pages, “Sir Edgar Clinton, of course; Mr. Obadiah O’Brian- you probably heard of him, he was paralyzed after drunkenly riding a horse as a wager- Mr. Percival Price, the secretary of the board, and so on. But you could find this information in any back edition of the Pulse. But you wouldn’t be able to find this,” he returned to the list Magnus had originally pointed out.
“Why not?”
If Twym Glyndwr wore glasses, he would have looked over them at Magnus.
“For an expert in the law, you don’t know much about corporations, do you?” Magnus tried not to look bashful as he replied, following in Glyndwr’s wake back to the main desk,
“I mostly focus on family law.” And since I do mostly work on family law, why was I assigned to this? He wondered
Once back at the main desk, Twym fully unravelled the papers and held them down with pieces of laverbread.
“This is a list of the specialists Sir Edgar hires for the SWSMC.”
“But why is that important? And who would want that information?”
“For a start, you should!” he exclaimed, almost baffled at Magnus’s seeming obtuseness, given that he came from such a remarkably intelligent family. “You should find these people and interview them, find out if everything is as it was reported.”
“Isn’t that your job, to make sure everything is truthful?” Glyndwr shook his head ruefully.
“If only that were the case. I’m just in charge of the facts. It’s the reporters, and the editors, who decide what the so-called truth is. I’ve tried to influence them…” he trailed off, looking wistfully at the cushion.
“…which is why you ended up here, isn’t it?” Magnus finished. There was no need for Glyndwr to answer.
“If even a tenth of what is stored here ever made it to press, companies would crumble and the government would groan under the weight of its sins.” Twym Glyndwr mused morosely, his eyes going unfocused into the bardic mists of Wales. Magnus rolled his eyes.
“Then why keep all of this useless information?” he asked, sharply jerking Glyndwr out of his reverie.
“Information is power, Mr. Cogspeare, and our editor-in-chief, Mr. Thaddeus Frisket, lives and breathes it.”
After a quiet moment, Magnus asked,
“Mr. Glyn…um, Glwn…well-”
“Just call me Twym,” he offered. Struggling since that name wasn’t much better, Magnus continued,
“Do you think I could borrow these for a few days, just to read up on the subject?” Twym frowned.
“I don’t know, Mr. Cogspeare. You see, this is the last of the information we have on the SWSMC and I wouldn’t like the office to be without anything. But tell you what I’ll do; I’ll go over to Talliburn’s and see what he’s been up to with the rest of the files. Hopefully he’s done with a couple of them at the very least. Blazes, he’s probably on a bender and forgot about life outside the bottom of a bottle.” The suddenly friendly Welshman made to jovially slap Magnus’s shoulder, but the barrister quickly sidestepped him and nervously straightened his impeccable cravat, then fiddled with his hair.
“That would be most kind, Mr...um, Twym. Yes, if you’ll just send a messenger or a pulse to my offices, I’ll send my assistant to pick up whatever you find. Yes, most kind- thank you.” And with that, he quickly replaced his hat and strode out of the dank room in a whirl of fine leather.
As Twym Glyndwr re-rolled and replaced the cylindrical file, he shook his head, muttering,
“I knew that that one was odd, but…blazes!”
Chapter 17:
It was a few seconds before Twym was going to pat his shoulder that Magnus felt an episode coming on. That’s why he knew he had to get out of that room, fast, and find somewhere small, quiet, calm, and preferably dark. Somewhere where he could lose himself, and then collect himself quickly.
He frantically raced down the subterranean corridor, looking right and left, pulling at doors, all locked. Finally he found one that was unlocked, but when he poked his head in, it was filled with a row of headless automatons fixing broken printing parts.
He choked down a scream and backed out and almost hysterically went down a side corridor until he found another unlocked door and, regardless of the dim interior, plunged in.
The door swung shut behind him, and he was in totally darkness.
It was always a source of confusion to most people- or rather, all of the nine people who knew of his ‘affliction’- that he would find the darkness comforting instead of terrifying. But here in the dark, it was still. He didn’t have to see or be seen. He could focus on his wildly thumping heart, and could gasp and sob and cry if needed, unheeded.
He sank down onto his haunches and rocked himself slowly.
Almost a year ago, a little after Jim Addison had come to work for him and after a day in court that most would consider merely mediocre but which he had thought devastating, Magnus had curled up like this under his desk. Addison had come in to have him sign some files, and had found him thus. Magnus didn’t think that he could ever come out from underneath that desk after that.
But instead, Addison had merely thumped the files on the desk, declared he was going out for lunch at four o’clock in the afternoon, and Magnus could crawl out at his leisure. Since that day, there had been, if not a friendliness exactly, then a cordiality that was lacking in all his other relationships, save perhaps with Sebastian.
It was certainly lacking in every encounter, let alone relationship, that he had with women, he mused as his thoughts began to clear again. Take, just for example, that McFlynt woman, who would push and push and push. How could any man possibly like a woman like that?
Granted, she was intelligent, which was a point in her favour. But she was utterly insufferable, and grated on his nerves.
Magnus shook his head, and took out a handkerchief from his breast pocket, moping his wet face. He finally pushed himself off the ground and timidly opened the door, first poking his head out to see if anyone was about.
The hall way was clear, and he fully emerged…to find that his pristine suit, leather cloak and hat and hands were all covered with a black, sticky, oily residue. He opened the door he had just closed, and realized that he had been hid- um, meditating in the ink room, dark so as to preserve the blackness of the ink. He could only imagine how bad his face looked.
Pulling his hat low over his now truly dishevelled hair, he realized that returning to the office in his state was not an option. At this point, other men might go to the pub, but all the people would upset him further, and he didn’t belong to a club, and his apartment was ruined. He had no choice but to return to the Cogspeare mansion.
Chapter 18:
The door to the research room had barely shut behind Magnus, when Twym Glyndwr jumped up and raced back into the shelving, heading for the ‘C’ section. Sectioned between the pigeon holes entitled ‘Cog-reliant Felspuring wheel’ and ‘Cohabitus gentilitus’ was one labelled ‘Cogspeare’. He grabbed the surprisingly heavy tube and brought it back to his desk.
The papers revealed little that Glyndwr, and the whole of London for that matter, didn’t already know. The Cosgpeares were an eccentric bunch, not least because all evidence pointed to Cornelius being utterly devoted to his wife, and vice versa. They had six boys, all of whom were as brilliant as the last. The four middle boys were all currently at Oxford, and the youngest was at St. George’s College, a prestigious day school in Kensington. There may have been questions as to why the boys were never sent away to school, but that was quickly answered by a piece of correspondence, intercepted by a past reporter via nefarious means, stating that boys with such a propensity for trouble could never be allowed to stay overnight, let alone a full term, at a boarding school.
By all accounts, an eccentric but essentially harmless family. What was less clear were their origins. For instance, all that was known about Edwina Cogspeare was that her father had been a landowning Englishman in Ir
eland and had disappeared almost thirty years ago. Her mother had died shortly before, and the last known whereabouts of her brother were in the East Indies, where it was said he had a failing sugar plantation.
Glyndwr continued to browse through the papers and found even less on Cornelius. All that was known about him was that he had attended Steele College at Oxford University. However, sometime during his final year he had suddenly left without explanation. The next that was heard of him, he turned up in London a year later with a wife and a chemical discovery that would change the world. That had been 1846.
Sighing with his rather fruitless effort, Glyndwr pinched the bridge of his nose and idly wondered if Alis, his fiancé, was right that he needed spectacles.
Thinking of Alis, he realized that if he wanted to get to the jewellers and visit Talliburn, he would have to leave a bit early. He glanced around his dim, dusty and frankly, boring, domain- then jumped up, grabbed his short leather jacket and quickly locked the door behind him. He didn’t think he would be missed. He was right.
Out in the cesspool of the streets, the sun made a valiant but failed attempt to shine through the misty red cloud cover. Hawkers and traffic battled each other to be heard, creating a general din that never quieted, but merely moved around to different parts of the city according to the time of day. Glyndwr sidestepped an eel stew cart and stepped in something noxious. He smiled. He was in heaven, or at least as far away from Wales, as he could get.
The jeweller’s was his first stop, though he didn’t go in the posh front door. Instead, he headed to the back, where the workshop was housed in a makeshift lean-to. There, among the whir of the engraving drills and the puff of the spesium-coal burners, he met a massive, beefy man, who surprisingly had the gentlest touch in London. At least when it came to precious metals, and his mother.
Silently, Myrrh Jones handed over a black box. Glyndwr opened it, and saw a small silver ring imbedded with an oval onyx carved with his and Alis’s initials. It wasn’t all that he had hoped for her, but he also knew that she would like it. Her three younger sisters had certainly given him enough ‘suggestions’. He could hardly wait to see it on her finger!
The Cogspeare Conspiracy (The Cogspeare Chronicles Book 1) Page 6
