Gideon Smith and the Brass Dragon (5 page)

“Hello, Prickly Pear,” he said softly. Her name, Michi, meant “pathway”—Akiko had chosen it, felt it embodied the pioneer spirit of the Californian Meiji. Serizawa always called her Prickly Pear. She was of the Californian soil, beautiful and strong yet with a spiky will all her own.

“Happy birthday, Daddy,” she said. “I have a present for you.”

From beneath her sheet she withdrew a crudely wrapped ball, no bigger than a pebble. “We went on a trip with school to the hills.”

“The hills?” Serizawa frowned. Although Nyu Edo was safe, the outskirts of the Meiji were still subject to the attentions of the Americans from the British enclaves back east and bandits from the wild country in between. Just that morning he had heard that Texan slavers had been seen far to the south.

“It was quite safe,” said Michi, in that same tone her mother used on him when he was being silly. “I found this in the river and kept it for you.”

He unwrapped the layers of tissue until a small, hard lump fell into his hand. He held it up to the light shafting between the screens, turning it between his thumb and forefinger.

“Isn't it pretty?” said Michi, settling back into the low bed, her eyelids drooping. “Doesn't it shine?”

“Yes,” said Serizawa thoughtfully. It did shine indeed. It was a tiny nugget of what was unmistakably gold.

Michi snored lightly, and Serizawa kissed her on her freshly smooth forehead. He heard Akiko quietly clearing away the dinner things, and he slipped the nugget into his pocket. It was time for him to show his wife how grateful he could be.

 

4

A V
ISIT
FROM
M
R
. W
ALSINGHAM

The door to 23 Grosvenor Square banged open and Aloysius Bent stepped into the cool, tiled hallway, agreeably sniffing at the smells of cooking wafting from the kitchens. “By effing Christ, it's good to be home!” he roared.

Mrs. Cadwallader, the housekeeper, emerged from the study and threw her hands into the air. “Land's sakes! Mr. Bent! And Mr. Smith!”

Gideon elbowed past Bent, who remained stock-still in the doorway, breathing deeply of the aromas of Mrs. Cadwallader's famous home cooking. He gave the housekeeper a warm embrace and she flapped her hands at him.

“One for me, too, Sally,” said Bent, extending his fat arms around Mrs. Cadwallader, who wrinkled up her nose and pushed him away. “Come on, I might have a face like a stocking full of porridge, but I deserve a hug.”

“Mr. Bent!” she cried. “Please don't be so familiar! It's Mrs. Cadwallader to you. And do let go. You smell as though you have been sleeping with horses!”

“The scent of good, honest work!” said Bent, sniffing the limp and blackened collar of his shirt. “Come on, Mrs. C, we've been saving the effing world again! Is that the best you've got?”

“Ignore him,” said Gideon. “We landed at Highgate Aerodrome two hours ago and—”

“And we're famished,” finished Bent. “What is that wonderful smell coming from the kitchens?”

Mrs. Cadwallader allowed herself a self-indulgent smile. “Pie and mash, Mr. Bent. Made with the very finest ingredients bought from the Tottenham Court Road just this morning. I take it you are ready to dine?”

“Not effing half,” said Bent.

Gideon's stomach rumbled. For once, he was inclined to agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Aloysius Bent.

*   *   *

Bent sat back in his chair and farted as Mrs. Cadwallader began to clear the plates from the long mahogany table in the wood-paneled dining room. She wrinkled her nose and cast a pointed glance at Gideon, who said, “Mr. Bent, if you could try to remember your manners…”

Bent belched for good measure. “Left 'em in the East End, Gideon. They're not the sorts of manners that would be fit for high society in Mayfair, I'm afraid. Besides, breaking wind after a meal is considered a great compliment to the chef in some far-off lands. And after that bang-up spread from Mrs. C, she's lucky I didn't follow through as well.”

Gideon shook his black-curled head. It had seemed a grand idea, at first, the suggestion that he take up residence in the former home of Captain Lucian Trigger, the erstwhile Hero of the Empire, following the events in London the previous month. And as Mr. Bent had been assigned to him as his official chronicler and companion, it was only natural that he be on hand. Bent had kept lodgings in some East End slum and readily agreed to give them up to move into the palatial apartments formerly owned by Trigger and his lover John Reed. It had a kind of symmetry, Mr. Walsingham had said. With both Trigger and Reed dead, Mrs. Cadwallader had been more than happy to have someone else to look after. The reality of living in close proximity to Aloysius Bent, however, had soon begun to pall.

Bent poured himself a generous measure of claret. “Think I'll finish off the piece for
World Marvels & Wonders
before I turn in, get it couriered over to them tomorrow. Then the day's my own. They'll be missing me in the Crown and Anchor. You didn't happen to see whether that cabbie brought my typewriter in from the steam-carriage, did you, Mrs. C?”

Mrs. Cadwallader brought the battered leather case from the hall. “Was it a terribly dangerous adventure, Mr. Smith?”

“Oh, like you wouldn't effing believe,” Bent answered for him. “Dinosaurs, Mrs. Cadwallader. A … what was it, Gideon?”

“Tyrannosaurus rex.”

“Tyrannosaurus rex, that's the effer.” Bent nodded. “Tall as this house, teeth like the swords of the Iron Guard on the Queen's birthday parade. Nearly had us for breakfast.”

Mrs. Cadwallader's hand flew to her mouth. Bent, warming to his tale, said, “Oh, yes, I didn't think we'd escape alive. Took one of the sailors in its vast jaws and cut him in two. Horrible.”

“That's enough, Bent,” said Gideon gently as Mrs. Cadwallader's complexion faded to a gray pallor.

“That's right,” said Bent, pulling open the typewriter case. “You can read it in the next issue of the penny blood, like the rest of the sensation-hungry mob out there.” He peered at the words he'd already battered out. “Think I'll call this one
The Lost World
. What do you think, Gideon?”

“Perfect,” said Gideon, excusing himself and following Mrs. Cadwallader out of the dining room, as Bent began to hammer the keys.

Gideon found Mrs. Cadwallader in the study, amid all the trophies from the adventures of Dr. John Reed and Captain Trigger, who wrote up his international exploits in deathless prose for the penny bloods. The claw from the Exeter Werewolf, Lord Dexter's Top Hat, Markus Mesmer's Hypnowheel, the electric eyes of the Viennese Wardog … they were all there in glass cabinets, labeled and resting on velvet cushions. The housekeeper was standing before a portrait of Captain Trigger and Dr. Reed above the mantelpiece, her back to Gideon. He softly closed the door and walked over to her.

“You miss them, don't you?”

“Oh, terribly, Mr. Smith,” she said tremulously, without turning around. “Do you know, before I came to work for them I would never have believed two men could be so in love. But their attachment was stronger than that of any married couple I have ever met.”

“The memorial to them will open in Hyde Park on the first anniversary of their deaths, I believe.”

Mrs. Cadwallader turned at last, tears in her eyes. “It's been a month now, Mr. Smith, but I still cry every day. Can it really be true, that Dr. Reed had gone bad?”

Gideon sighed. “I don't know, Mrs. Cadwallader. I never knew him before. But he had been trapped in that pyramid for a year. The loneliness he must have felt … only those horrible frog-faced mummies for company … who knows what that does to a man's mind?”

“But to come home with such … such vengeance in his heart! He was going to turn that brass dragon on Buckingham Palace! Kill Queen Victoria! If he had succeeded…”

“He didn't,” said Gideon. “Lucian stopped him. I watched them fall from the dragon, Mrs. Cadwallader. They held each other all the way down. I truly believe that John had come back to Lucian at that moment.”

She nodded, wiping away her tears with the corner of her apron. “It was how Captain Trigger would have wanted to go. He had become such a shadow of himself in that year that Dr. Reed was missing, Mr. Smith. If you hadn't come here, if you hadn't stopped Dr. Reed … I don't know what that would have done to Captain Trigger, if he had just watched from afar as Dr. Reed exacted such a mad revenge. It would have broken him. At least he died a whole man.”

“He died a hero, Mrs. Cadwallader.”

She smiled and cocked her head to one side. “And look at you, Mr. Smith. You were just a boy when you came knocking on this door. Now you're a man. The Hero of the Empire, no less.”

It was Gideon's turn to smile. “It was only a month ago.”

But much had changed in a month. From fisherman to … well, as Mrs. Cadwallader said. He had been appointed as the Hero of the Empire by Queen Victoria herself, to fill the gap left in the public consciousness by the death of Captain Trigger. He had been sent to Sandhurst for intensive training in firearms and hand-to-hand combat for an exhausting two-week period before being dispatched to rescue Professor Rubicon and Charles Darwin from that lost island in the Pacific. But already he was hungry for more. Hungry to pursue the turncoat Louis Cockayne and the purloined brass dragon Apep to America, hungry to rescue Maria from whatever fate to which Cockayne had delivered the beautiful automaton with a human brain.

As if reading his mind, Mrs. Cadwallader laid a hand on his forearm. “You will find Miss Maria, Mr. Smith. I am sure of it. Never was a thing more meant to be.”

Gideon protested weakly, but his thoughts had been consumed by nothing else since the aerial battle over Hyde Park. The intervening month, as filled with activity as it had been, had done nothing to resolve his confusion regarding his feelings for the mysterious Maria. A clockwork-powered automaton with the pilfered, living brain of a dead London streetwalker, she was a scientific marvel, wrought by the genius of the missing scientist Hermann Einstein. But the effect she had on Gideon's heart could not be explained by a thousand scientists or a million formulas. He had denied what he felt for too long, and when he had finally reconciled his head with his heart, it had been too late. Louis Cockayne had betrayed them and stolen Maria away from him.

“Was there any news while we were away?” he said, by way of trying to force Maria from his thoughts.

“Another letter from the Grosvenor Square Residents' Committee,” said Mrs. Cadwallader. “Complaining about Mr. Bent being … indisposed in the communal gardens on more than one occasion.” She slapped her palm against her forehead. “Oh! Land's sakes! Your coming home has quite put me out of my mind! News! Of course! Mr. Bram Stoker!”

“They have recovered his body from the Rhodopis Pyramid?” said Gideon.

“His body? No, Mr. Smith! He is alive! He arrived home safe and well just after you departed for the Pacific!”

Gideon gaped at her. Stoker alive? It was impossible. The Irish writer had been crushed at the bottom of the collapsing pyramid. Elizabeth Bathory herself had seen him die—indeed, the noble vampire had taken his blood from his shattered body to enable her own escape from the ruined monument. There was a tinkle of bells from the hall. Mrs. Cadwallader said, “Tradesmen again. Or autograph hunters.”

Gideon raised an eyebrow. “Autograph hunters?”

“They come with copies of
World Marvels & Wonders
for you to add your signature to. I shall get rid of them.”

Gideon remembered the first time he had knocked at the door of the house on Grosvenor Square, the high hopes he had for Captain Lucian Trigger. He didn't know then, of course, that Trigger was merely the public front and that it was Dr. John Reed who was the true adventurer, doing the Crown's bidding in secret. “No, don't send them away,” he said. “A signature costs nothing.”

As Mrs. Cadwallader went to the door Gideon retreated back to the dining room, where Bent was rolling a cigarette in his meaty fingers. He saw Gideon and nodded toward that morning's
Illustrated London Argus,
on the table beside his typewriter.

“Seen this? Only another Jack the effing Ripper attack, two days ago.” He shook his head. “Quality of reporting's gone right down the shitter since they shifted me to the penny blood.”

Gideon turned as Mrs. Cadwallader coughed and showed in a familiar tall, thin man wearing his customary tails and carrying his topper in the crook of his arm. His cane tapped on the wooden floorboards and he arched one gray eyebrow, fixing Gideon with his unflinching stare.

“Mr. Walsingham,” said Gideon.

Walsingham nodded. “Mr. Smith. Mr. Bent. I heard you had returned.”

“Yes, that'll be the hour we spent being debriefed by your chaps at Highgate Aerodrome,” said Bent.

“Quite so,” said Walsingham, smoothing his mustache with white-gloved fingers. “A rather successful expedition, so I believe. You have returned one of our most eminent scientists and our beloved Professor of Adventure back home. Well done.”

“All here,” said Bent, tapping the sheaf of papers before him.

Walsingham held out his hand. “You have written your first fully-fledged Gideon Smith adventure for the penny dreadful? Excellent. I shall give it the once-over, Mr. Bent, and dispatch it to them myself.”

Bent narrowed his eyes. “You'll censor it, you mean?”

Walsingham shrugged. “Merely edit out anything that might prove … damaging to the Empire.”

Bent reluctantly handed over the manuscript, and Walsingham said, “What were your immediate plans, gentlemen?”

“Sleep, and lots of it,” said Bent. “With ale and gin at regular intervals.”