Fiendish Schemes (3 page)

Above its bridge, other crew concerned themselves with the operation of the light-casting apparatus. They appeared to me as moths, shortly to be consumed by the dazzling glare of the flames magnified by the curved reflector mirror behind and focused by the immense Fresnel lens before them.

Shielding my eyes with an uplifted hand, I caught a glimpse of the lighthouse’s commander. The cheering party having gone, Captain Crowcroft set his profile and narrowed his vision, looking out from the bridge to the world’s farthest reaches, as might one who had planted the flag of Empire amongst savages and deserts of barren stone.

Behind me, I heard the snap of the carriage driver’s whip, bringing about the matched pair of horses and setting them toward the Fusibles’ destination. But there had been two carriages, I knew, and the second had not stirred.

I glanced over my shoulder. Sufficient moonlight slid from behind the night clouds that I could recognize Lord Fusible’s daughter, Evangeline, a knotted shawl wrapped about her shoulders, leaning forward from where she sat. She also gazed up toward the height of the tower, her gaze fervent upon the distant visage of her
fiancé
.

No surprise, that she should display such tender concern for the man to whom she had given her heart—

What struck me with dismaying force, though, was the expression she displayed to me, when she saw that I still remained, only partially obscured by the roadside shadows.

Rarely have I been the recipient of admiring glances from young women, especially the beautiful amongst them, but not before this had such an eye-slitted mask of pure loathing been tossed my way. The girl Evangeline’s features tightened as she gazed upon me with murderous contempt. Indeed, if the force of such hatred-fueled regard had been transmuted into an actual weapon, I would have been struck down, a dagger through my heart.

I could not breathe, until she gave a quiet command to her driver. My heart still pounding from this unexpected event, I watched as the carriage vanished down the road.

Of the cause of such disdain, I had no idea. I had scarce exchanged more than half a dozen words with the young lady, upon being introduced to her at the commencement of the launch party. My life might have been such that many have wished me ill, but never upon such short acquaintance as this.

Perhaps it was an omen, and no more than the world’s general assessment of my worth. I turned away from the lighthouse and began making my way along the path upon which I had come that morning. Seeking some advantage from Lord Fusible and his friends had always been but an alternate plan, a wistful and idle hope. Once I had returned to the inn at which I was staying, I could set about with an unencumbered conscience on the course which I had already determined. To wit, that of killing myself with a merciful bullet to the head.

A
S
with so many endeavours in my life, the intent was more easily formed than the deed accomplished.

Footsore, dispirited, and damp—during one of the Cornish coast’s inevitable rain squalls, I had lost the narrow footpath and had nearly toppled from a cliff’s edge in the resultant dark—I returned to the inn where I had taken lodging for the sole purpose of attending the lighthouse launch party. It would have been difficult to devise any other reason for doing so: travelers more impecunious than myself might well have balked at its mean and shabby aspect. Ill-favoured with a roof so sway-backed that the floor and ceiling of its verminous attic met in the middle, in silhouette the establishment resembled nothing so much as a loaf of bread fallen from a provisioner’s cart and run over in the mud by one of its wheels. Its proximity to the sea—lying in my equally concave bed upstairs, I could hear the waves crashing against the shore with their dullish, unending drumbeat—allowed the full wrack of the saline winds to have warped every timber embedded in the wattle-and-daub structure. One might as comfortably have dined in the horseyard outside, so large and numerous were the gaps in the walls.

The landlord appeared similarly to have suffered from the harsh locale. Invariably clad in vest and apron so spotted with ancient, unattended stains that he might have been mistaken for one of the encrusted rocks at the sea’s edge, the man was suited to his position in the like degree of his decay. As the inn grew more roundshouldered and slovenly, without ever completely collapsing upon itself—though the rooms above the stable were now but naked beams, scrabbled by owl and rat—so had its keeper, as though the constant damp had mildewed his bones as well. However dismal it might have been to contemplate the extent to which the inn would devolve into the mouldy earth through the coming years, it was even less cheering to imagine into what state its proprietor would be transformed.

So late was my return from the launch party that the public rooms’ hearth was nothing but cold ashes, the candles extinguished upon the rickety, beer- soaked tables. The inn managed to turn a small business amongst the few sodden locals, who nightly hunched over their tankards, growling in a dialect as coarse as dogs barking; I preferred to take meals in my room. Though that arrangement appeared to have come to an end. The landlord had initially been content enough to deposit upon the dresser a battered pewter plate bearing a greasy chop and some squat root ostensibly boiled to edibility, but he had ceased this practice on the previous evening. From the squint-eyed glare he bestowed on me, I deduced he had formed the suspicion that he would be somehow illuded of full settlement of his bill.

In which uncharitable notion, alas, he would have been completely correct. As I mounted the stairs toward the room housing my meager luggage, the few coins rattling in my trousers pocket represented nearly my entire worldly capital. If I had been able to wangle some sort of commission from Lord Fusible, my first act would have been to plead for an advance against my wages. Approaching the landing, I heard a door creak partway open below and could feel the innkeeper’s darkly assessing glare upon my spine. I unlatched the door to the room I had engaged and silently slipped inside, grateful for what little refuge it provided.

The bed groaned beneath my weight as I extracted the half- empty packet of Swan Vestas from inside my waistcoat. I managed to coax to life the lantern on the small deal table, turning the flame as low as possible, not for reasons of economy but to spare myself a brighter examination of the circumstances to which I had been reduced. The room’s wobbling chair was fit for nothing but draping my rain- soaked coat upon. I leaned back against a thin pillow and contemplated the speckled copperplate etching that hung framed upon the opposite wall, its depiction of the bombardment of Taganrog being the room’s only decoration.

“I rather suppose,” I murmured aloud, “that I should not have returned here at all.”

Speaking aloud is, of course, a sign of derangement. That I had lapsed into such came as little surprise to me, nor did I make any great effort to abstain from the practice. What skills or even desire for sociability that I might ever have possessed, my rural exile had eroded. But my journey here to Cornwall had placed me amongst natives whose dialect seemed to possess even fewer and odder vowels than did the Welsh. The innkeeper, for purposes of trade, no doubt, managed to emit a few sounds resembling the Queen’s English; but that much had been the limit of my spoken intercourse with others until I had arrived amongst Lord Fusible’s guests.

“Having gotten away without confrontation”—an intelligible voice, even though my own, provided a measure of comfort—“I should have taken advantage of that.” My nod was emphatic, however late my decisiveness. That the landlord was brooding upon the demand of payment from me, I had already been sure; thus my departure before the sun’s rising. I had naturally not wished to carry my slight luggage with me to the launch party, my arrival on foot rather than by carriage being unprepossessing enough. Taking a bunk, as low slang expressed the notion, would have entailed abandoning the one bag that now sat at the foot of the bed. “No great loss,” I judged. What garments I had that could be described as other than threadbare, I had worn upon my back this day.

It had hardly been for the comb and mirror and other gentleman’s accessories, arranged beside the room’s bowl and pitcher, that I had returned to the inn. But there was one other object, of sinister but needful purpose, that weighted my luggage.

“Now’s the time.”

Sitting cross-legged upon the bed, I unlocked the bag, threw it open, and drew out the final article of my father’s legacy to me.

That the device was a pistol, I had no doubt, though of typically eccentric design. Guns of every size and variety could be manufactured in the rudest foundry, comprising the simplest workings, and they would all be roughly equal in lethality. Such would never have been sufficient for an inventor and craftsman such as my father. The weighty metal contraption now resting in both my hands was of an intricacy that rivaled what one might have viewed upon prying open a
montre à secousses
from the clever cantons of the Jura Mountains, with all of its whirring, ticking escapements and complications. As to why a pistol would require that much clockwork for the elementary task of propelling a bit of lead toward its target— as ever before, the cogs and wheels of my father’s mind remained equally as baffling.

However elusive its design might be, that the weapon was capable of accomplishing that which I would ask—namely, propelling the aforementioned lead through my skull—I also had little doubt. It possessed a fearsome
gravitas,
as fine guns often do, combining their etched beauty with the darkly oiled scent of those machines which so easily throw open the doors of Eternity for all comers.

My father had seen fit to craft curved plates of Gaboon ebonywood for the pistol’s checked grip, which added to its fatal allure in the way that mourning jewelry carved of black jet, draped about the snowy throats of certain smiling widows, makes its owners the objects of men’s desire. Two barrels—one octagonal in cross section, the other rounded—extended nearly a foot in length, similar in arrangement to the nine- shot LeMat revolver I had briefly glimpsed in the offices of the London Arms Company, while making a minor mainspring adjustment to the corporate treasurer’s wall clock. The functions of the miniature engagement rods and piston-like mechanisms festooning the barrels were lost on me, as were those of the interlinked constellation of escapements and ratchet-mounted balances extending through and above the central rotating cylinder. Even the cartridges inside the cylinder were of intricate design; though unable to find a method of removing them for closer inspection, I was still able to peer through a circular lens mounted before the hinge of the cocking hammer and marvel at the exquisite details just as would an entomologist dissecting a scarab beetle beneath a microscope.

Technically, by letter of the law, the device did not properly belong to me. Years before, at the conclusion of those travails that had once made my name a popular synonym for disaster and iniquity, I had turned over all the creations of my father still in my possession to the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, that august scientific body having pledged to make a complete examination of them, with the hope of benefiting society by a revelation of those secrets that had been my father’s stock-in- trade. In exchange, I had received a not inconsiderable sum of money. It had only been some time later, after the last of the carts laden with the boxes and hammered crates of these treasures had rumbled off to the Society’s Collection of Curiosities, lately relocated from Crane Court, that I discovered the pistol. In gathering up the few sentimental items I wished to take with me in my flight from London, I had accidentally put my elbow through what I had always assumed to be a solid wall in the storeroom of what had been my Clerkenwell watch shop, and before that my father’s shuttered laboratory. After examining the revealed hole more closely, I had soon extracted the pistol, my breath blowing the dust from its surfaces and my sleeve burnishing the metal to its original gleaming.

While I possessed no more of the virtue of honesty than the average man, thievery was still not a vice that could be attributed to me, likely due to cowardice more than stern morality. Yet even while initiating a communication to the Society’s officers, requesting them to return to the now abandoned shop and claim this last bit of the properties they had purchased, I found myself instead laying down my pen and picking up the heavy, hand-filling device from the desk before me.

Some magic in its silent gears had lured me, and thus had made the decision, separate from the ratiocinating centers of my brain. It wasn’t thieving, I had reasoned, in that the Royal Society had received more than ample value for their money, carting away a collection that generations of their Newtons and Babbages might analyze and tinker with, before answering all its riddles. What was one more piece to that grand, inexhaustible puzzle? Surely a loving son—or as close to one as I could simulate being—was entitled to one memento of the man whose name I bore.

Thus I thought, and thus I sealed my fate. . . .

Which I had unlocked now and weighed in my hands.

Granted, I had had no notion of suicide at that time, when I had removed myself and my few belongings to that remote rural village, where I had hoped to live unnoticed while enduring the slow ebb of my infamy. My affairs had been in order then, or at least their financial aspect. A stuporous future had been laid out for me, much desired in that regard after all I had endured. But Man—or at least George Dower, it seems—cannot evade his destiny. However innocent of cause I had been in my first ruination, the second one was all the result of my own folly. The thought provided scant satisfaction.

Now, in this bleak Cornish inn, I raised my father’s pistol and examined it with care greater than that which I had undertaken upon previous occasions. I had made attempts before to fire the thing, aiming it at some bottle placed upon a countryside boulder. Some subtlety in its operation eluded me, though. I had discovered a tiny key that could be withdrawn from a repository in the pistol’s black grip and had further discerned that this simple gilded piece, not much bigger than a mouse’s forelimb, could be inserted into various points about the device and used to wind its coils and mainsprings to readiness, much as one attended to the single driving force in one’s pocket watch. On the occasions when I had done so, the pistol’s inner gears and escapements had immediately begun their busy whirrings and tickings, just as would similarly be the result with the aforementioned timepiece. A perceptible vibration had coursed out of the supposedly dead metal, as though my hand had seized upon a living creature, the pulse of its minute heart racing faster than my own. The first time I had experienced this sensation, I had immediately dropped the pistol, so startled was I by the impression of it having sprung to the same vibrant animation Man shares with the beasts of field and branch. And if brass and tin and iron could be possessed of life, it also seemed that they could own that degree of mulish stubbornness that Man has heightened to the level of Principle. For try as I might, forefinger tightening upon what was self-evidently the pistol’s trigger, I could not get the blasted device to fire. Various latches and levers protruded from the mechanism, all of which I had prodded and adjusted, singly and in combination, but to no avail. The shivering release of the clockwork pistol’s wound-up mainspring was as much liveliness as it had been willing to display. The cartridges had remained entombed inside, rather than bursting forth with a martial roar to spang upon the nearest stone wall.

That had been frustrating, but only to the idle curiosity I had roused to break the monotony of the agrarian existence to which I had resigned myself. Now, I was rather more motivated.

Having once again wound the pistol’s various springs and coils, I returned the key to its niche. Optimism is a desirable virtue in all pursuits, but never so much as in suicide. A host of considerations form impediments to the wished result, from the dreaded pain of the bullet’s impact, however brief, to a vision of the ungainliness of one’s body, limbs splayed at the sort of comical angles that would provide amusement to callous onlookers. (No doubt the latter prompts the enthusiasm for quick-acting poisons amongst women committed to self-annihilation, the efficacy of such compounds allowing for a more decorous arrangement of the corporeal remains, free of repulsive gore. The last scene of the Bard’s
Tragedy of Romeo & Juliet
would hardly have seemed so tragic, though perhaps a bit more exciting to the groundling rabble, if it had included a gunshot to the head rather than a maidenly swoon upon the sarcophagus—though my fragmentary memory of the classics does recall something about a dagger as well.) If the
soi-disant
suicide entertains notions of failure in the attempt, he is likely to give up altogether and pessimistically resign himself to his miserable life.