Infernal Devices (2 page)

  Restoring my name, my father's name, seems a shallow vanity now. What matter glory or ignominy, when such visions have altered the world itself in my sight? Riven in twain, as in Lord Bendray's intent towards the earth, yet still whole. For me, London's grey veil, smoke and fog, has been brushed aside. Happy are those who mistake the painted curtain for the reality behind.

  The dog drops his head to his paws and resumes his slumber. Thus chastened, mindful of my own futility, I persist, scratching ink on to paper. Let the reader, thus warned, mindful of the perhaps ignoble interest he shows in these matters, do as he wishes.

 

Creff was visibly agitated by the stranger's appearance at our door. Memory calls to mind the anxious wringing of his hands, resembling two furless pink badgers wrestling for each other's throats, and the perfect circularity of his widened eyes.

  "Lord, Mr Dower, it's an Ethiope!" whispered Creff. "And crazed – a murderous savage!" The badgers throttled themselves bloodless.

  I kept my own voice level, as, the shop being downstairs from the room where I took my breakfast, the visitor was in no danger of hearing the calumnies he had occasioned. "'Ethiope' may be apparent on the surface," I said. "But by what means did you discern the state of his mind?" The grey-filled window at my back necessitated the gas bracket's flame, despite the advancing hour of the morning; by its yellow light I turned over a wedge of toast, in the vain hope that the one frugal rasher of bacon had a twin hidden there.

  "Mr Dower – his eyes." Creff's own grew even wider. "Nothing but little slits, they were. Like he was maddened with some heathen liquor, and prepared for murder!"

  Intoxication was, in fact, a possibility. With discretion sufficient to avoid offending Creff, I inhaled deeply, endeavouring to detect the fumes signalling a lapse in his conduct. Episodes of indulgence produced unfortunate fancies in him; only a few months before I had been compelled to exert a good deal of diplomacy on the wife of the shopkeeper several doors over. Creff had been discovered in the alleyway, on his knees before a bemused shop-cat. Stale beer had convinced him the cat was the Recording Angel, and he had been attempting to bribe it with small confectionery lozenges, the erasure of certain regretted sins being the object of his negotiations. Mrs Draywaite had been mollified only by my hastily concocted explanation that a congenital weakness in Creff's knees produced genuflections without warning.

  In similar fashion, although there was no tell-tale odour of strong drink on the air, the Ethiopian reported downstairs might be nothing more than an Italian of unusual swarthiness. Africans had been much on Creff's mind of late, due to the then widely celebrated performances of Prince Ko-Mo-Lo, the Abyssinian Tenor, upon a Mayfair music-hall stage, as well as the appearance of several common street-singers of similar hue. The latter, upon investigation by the constabulary, turned out to be ordinary Irish buskers underneath the lampblack they had employed to transform themselves into Africans. They had hoped that the public, now dark-minded, would reward chanted gibberish with more coins than their previous incarnations' repertoire of sentimental ballads had earned. Even after these frauds had been exposed, Creff seemed fixed on the subject, as though the anthropophagi of his childhood stories had set up kettle and knackers in every alley.

  Mistaking my wary attitude, Creff leaned close over the breakfast table. "Here's what we can do, Mr Dower. You sneak down the back steps and call out the peelers, and I'll hold 'im at bay until they arrive." From under his scullery apron he displayed a carving knife, the blade barely sharp enough to threaten a cheese.

  The meagreness of the breakfast, indicative of the state of both the larder and the bank account behind it, prompted me to other strategies. I desired no client, dark-complected or angel-fair, to be frightened out of the shop with a knife. I took the weapon from Creff's grasp, and bade him tell the gentleman that I would be down to wait upon him presently.

  The spectre of losing trade, of whatever nature Creff's "Ethiope" had brought, drew forth further meditation as I dissected the distinctly aged egg standing in its cup. Since my inheritance of the shop and its business from my deceased father, trade and my fortunes had gone through fluctuations resembling a leaf in autumn, that at moments is carried upward by the wind but always flutters lower afterwards. Having neither my father's inborn genius at the contrivance of the timepieces, clockwork devices, and scientific apparatus by which he established his reputation, nor having received a compensatory education in these matters from him, such trade as I had consisted of the minor servicing and adjustment of those creations that my father's former clientele brought to me. That is, whatever service I was capable of making upon my father's devices, as I could boast very little skill at this, either. The quality of my father's craftmanship warranted that simple repairs were seldom required, and the intricacy of his inventions placed the finer adjustments well beyond my scope.

  Indeed, I would have been hard put to do other except sell off the collection of partially assembled machinery, cogs, flywheels, gear trains, escapements, and such in my father's workroom, and pocket whatever cash the scrap value of the brass and other metals brought as my inheritance, but for the continued tenure of my father's assistant Creff. When I had first come to the shop, mourning band from the funeral still around my sleeve and the solicitor's notification of death in my pocket, I had found the loyal Creff sweeping out the premises, the window panes and counter brightwork polished as he had done for my father. Keeping him on for these and other household tasks, I soon discovered that, while Creff's slowness of wit had prevented him from grasping the principles my father had employed in his creations, his dogged attention had by sheer rote impressed a certain pragmatic knowledge of them upon his brain. When I first managed to open the case of one of my father's simpler timepieces, a watch that a gentleman of Kent had brought me for adjustment, and I saw the dense universe of intermeshed gears and coiled springs, incomprehensible and gleaming in a thin sheen of oil, it was only Creff's guidance as he leaned over my shoulder that prevented my weeping openly. What his blunt, work-calloused fingers could not do, mine could, the minute jeweller's tools of my father's bench guided by his instruction.

  As my father's shop stood near Clerkenwell Green, in that London district long noted for its watchmakers, I stocked a few timepieces crafted by my neighbours, hoping to sell one to the odd passer-by. Creff had assumed this to be the caller's pretext for gaining entry and murdering us.

  When I at last roused myself from my thoughts, what remained of my breakfast had passed from unattractive to inedible. I pushed it away and stood up. On the stairs I passed Creff, still muttering dark worries about "savage cannon-balls", as I went to see what manner of trade had come that morning.

  My first sight of that figure, whose crossings and recrossings through the course of my travails would be the source of so much mystification, instilled in me no such apprehension as had seized Creff. The gentleman had his back to me as I reached the bottom of the stairs. He waited, hat by his elbow upon the counter, and studying one of my father's clocks upon the opposite wall. Of more than average stature, yet with a narrowness through the shoulders that his greatcoat could not conceal, the man stood stockstill, absorbed in the clock's recording of hours, date, and position of the major planets.

  "May I be of some assistance?" I announced my presence, and the man turned towards me, pivoting on his heel with a slow, fluid grace.

  I saw then how Creff's fears had been triggered. At first I thought that the shop's gas bracket was turned too low, leaving the stranger's face in shadow; then the flame's glow shimmered across the high points of his countenance. The skin of his face and hands, as I then saw that his gloves were folded beside his hat, were of a deep, rich brown, reminding me of burnished mahogany or fine morocco leather, its patina grown smooth and lustrous with age. It could be no disguise, no lampblack smudged over skin pale as my own, but only the pigment of nature. Reinforcing the supposition of the stranger's African birthplace were the symmetrical lines of minute scars curving across the cheeks and forehead, such as are reported to be the self-inflicted adornment of certain tribesmen, the small wounds pricked with a thorn and rubbed with sand to make them more pronounced when healed.

  His eyes were as Creff had described them, the lids drawn together to form two slits over the slightly protuberant spheres of the eyes behind them. I did not find this as disconcerting as the more excitable Creff had; indeed, the grave, unsmiling expression lent a calm dignity to the stranger's presence. Whatever savagery might have remained in his breast was well concealed under the expensive cut of his clothing.

  "Mr Dower." He spoke distinctly but softly, the thin lips barely moving apart.

  "I am. The son, that is." I always made this emendation to those who might have known my father only through his creations, in an effort to forestall any disappointment in my own inferior services. "The founder of the business is deceased."

  "My condolences I extend." An unplaceable accent revealed itself in his speech. His slight bow allowed the gas bracket's light to graze the equally dark and polished curve of his skull.

  "Two years have passed. The grief has ebbed a little, I believe." My own words mocked my true feelings, as they often did when I spoke of my father. How grieve over a man one has never known, no matter how intimate the connection? I stepped behind the .shop's counter and spread my hands upon it. "Now to business, Mr… ah…" Through observation of my neighbours I had cultivated the tradesman's obsequious smile. "I have the pleasure of addressing…?"

  The gentleman ignored my forays towards his name, and produced a paper-wrapped parcel from the crook of one arm. Placing it on the counter between us, the Brown Leather Man (as I had already begun to identify him in my thoughts) undid the knotted cord and pushed aside the paper with his dark hands. "I was a client of your late father," he said. "For me he built this, upon my commission. Some element of disorder has entered its workings, and I seek to employ you in the setting right of it."

  The last of the wrappings fell away. "What is it?" I asked. My eyes turned upward at the Brown Leather Man's silence, and found the narrow slits studying me with an unnerving intensity.

  In relief I looked back down to what lay before me. A mahogany box a little over a foot in length, half that in its other dimensions; a pair of brass hinges faced me. With one finger I attempted to swivel the box around, but the surprising weight of it kept it motionless upon the counter. I was forced to grasp it with both hands in order to turn it about.

  I unlatched the simple brass hasp and tilted the box's lid open. My heart sank within me as I looked down at the intricate anatomy of the device.

  This feeling of despair was not unfamiliar to me; it often welled up at the sight of one of my father's creations. His genius had not been limited to the production of the pocket watches and larger timepieces whose subtlety of design and intricacy of execution had established his name among admirers of the horological art. Since his death and my inadequate assumption of his place, I had become acquainted with facets of his work that are still little known, having been undertaken at the behest of a select arid discreet clientele. Scientific and astronomical apparatus of every description, ranging from simple barometers, though of a fineness of calibration rarely if ever equalled, to elaborate astrolabes and orreries, the latter distinguished by a set of reciprocating eccentric cams in the clockwork drive mechanism capable of showing the true elliptical orbits of heavenly bodies rather than the simplified circular motions employed in other such mechanical representations of the universe – all of these and more were my father's children. More so than my own self, I would often think as I gazed at some intricate intermeshing of gears and cogs such as the one revealed inside the Brown Leather Man's mahogany casket. The bits of finely turned and crafted brass showed the care and attention that had been absent in the creation and assembly of my own person into manhood.

  The purpose and function of some of the devices brought to me were unfathomable, and an odd secretiveness prevailed among my father's former clients. Amateur scientific pursuits had long been a preoccupation with serious-minded gentlemen of property and leisure, but the ones who came to me were often as uncommunicative as the devices they wished to be repaired. Sextants that divided the sky into angles not found in the usual geometries, microscopes whose hermetically sealed lenses distorted the viewed object into shimmering rainbow images, other instruments whose complexity and manifold adjustments quite overwhelmed my powers of speculation as to their use – all of these had in time been brought into the shop. With Creff's assistance I had managed the simpler repairs, a hair-thin chain slipped from its proper place or a minute cogwheel grown toothless and replaceable with a duplicate from the vast jumble of parts and half-assembled machines left in my father's workroom. The well-heeled clientele for whom I performed these services paid handsomely enough. Other devices, where the malfunction was as mysterious as the function, I was forced to return to the distraught owners with my apologies. I fear it was from the growing number of these admissions of inadequacy that my trade had fallen off, the word passing among the cognoscenti that the son was not the equal of the father. The disastrous episode of the Patented Clerical Automata, who completion and setting into motion in a London church I had undertaken while my confidence in dealing with my father's creations had not yet been sufficiently discouraged, had been suppressed from public notice, else the notoriety would have ended my trade once and for all.