Infernal Devices (6 page)

  I took the object he thrust towards me, and with but small curiosity examined it. It was a doll as is often sold in the streets, cheaply manufactured of
pappy-mashy
, as the costers term it, dipped in wax. The striking aspect was its extraordinary face: a crude parody, as though the maker's rude art had meant to represent some animal other than the human. Sloping forehead, goggling rounded eyes, and protruding lips over a non-existent chin; these features, in combination with the greenish cast of the wax, gave a distinctly piscine impression, as if a herring fresh off the fishmonger's slab had been dressed in a plaything's clothes. For a moment, as I turned the thing over in my hands, I again felt as if I were toiling through the rigours of a dream; it reminded me of the sea water – from where? – on the floor of my workroom.

  "Extraordinary," I agreed. I reached to hand it back to my host, but he waved it away.

  "Keep the damned thing," he said.

  "Your little girl–"

  "Faugh. She can't abide the sight of it. No, no, do us a kindness and take it away from here."

  I laid it on the arm of the chair. My thoughts drifted away, to their former channels, as my host expostulated on some other subject. My hands came to rest on my stomach – stuffed to bursting against future famine – and I felt a circular shape in my waistcoat pocket. The coin the Brown Leather Man had paid me; idly, as the other's voice droned on, I took it out. A familiar shape and weight; perhaps not familiar enough of late. I looked down at it in my palm, and felt my gut hollow beneath the half-digested meal.

  The face, in profile, on the coin was the twin of the hideous doll.

  A sudden panic pushed me up from the depths of the chair. I made a hasty excuse to my host and, gathering up my hat and cloak, rushed from his house. Outside, I realised that the doll had found its way into my hands along with the coin. I thrust them into my pocket to remove them from my sight.

  The mist had thickened, swallowing every aspect of the houses and the railings in front of them. Under the sulphurous glow of the street lamps, mere smudges of light swathed in grey, indistinct forms scurried from one dark cranny to the next. I hastened home, guided by memory rather than sight, unable to look behind me to see what blurred shadow might be entwined with my own.

 
 

 

I awoke the next morning, half-believing that the preceding day's events had been but a dream, driven by its own eccentric machinery to a baffling conclusion. My sleep had been vexed with shadowy figures, darkskinned and sombre, or with eyes hidden by blue glass and spouting incomprehensible obscenities; I would have been grateful to shake them out of my muddled head, to disappear with all the nocturnal phantoms that had gone before them. My waistcoat had been left draped over the chair by the side of my bed; reaching out my hand from under the covers, I felt the shape of the Brown Leather Man's coin in the garment's pocket. With my thumb I could trace through the wool the oddly shaped profile that had been twice revealed to me in my dinner host's parlour. If it were a dream, I had not been released from it yet.

  Once dressed, I scarce touched the breakfast that Creff brought to me. I pushed aside the scant fare and set before me on the table the tangible remnants of the previous evening. The doll stood upright, its ichthyomorphic face goggling at me. A crude thing; if its ugliness could be attributed to its maker's lack of skill in capturing a human physiognomy, it would have been only a sad bit of rubbish, and no more. Its power to disturb, however, lay in what seemed the craftman's intent: however awkwardly formed, these were the features he had meant it to have.

  "Here, Creff," I said. He was clearing the dishes away, maintaining an offended silence as though the untasted food were a comment on his own abilities. I picked the doll up and offered it for his inspection. "Did you ever see the like?"

  Creff peered at it suspiciously, then shook his head. "Damned if I have." His taste for novelty had been exhausted by the turmoil of the day before. Perhaps he held me to account for that parade of oddities; the doll was evidently seen as another jape at his expense. "No, sir, I never have." He bore away the dishes in aggrieved dignity.

  I had hoped to obtain from him some further idea of the doll's origin. He had far more experience than I with the costermongers that filled the London streets, deriving many of his simple pleasures from their wares. I had often seen him return to the shop poking among the remnants of a pennyworth's whelks wrapped in a twist of paper, or some other ambulatory delicacy. His purchases were not just of eatables: shortly after I first came to London and the shop, he began to sport a chain and timepiece. Unable to purchase one of the expensive articles offered in his employer's shop, he had bought from an itinerant vendor an example of that cheap imported article known to the watchmaking trade as a
white jenny
, and festooned his stomach with its glittering links. It little mattered to him that its hands soon froze in one position, never to circulate over the face again, as he was in fact ignorant of the art of telling the hour in any manner than the sun's overhead position; he did feel somewhat swindled when the chain's sheen wore off, revealing the base metal beneath.

  Regardless, he lacked either the capability or the desire to furnish enlightenment concerning the ugly doll. I laid the thing aside for future pondering, and picked up the coin from the tablecloth.

  The sovereign glittered between my thumb and forefinger. As before, a comforting weight and shape to the hand, with the shield on one side, and on the obverse – the profile of, not Queen Victoria, but rather the doll's exophthalmic twin. The craft employed in the coin's depiction was finer, of a quality equal to that ever used to show a monarch of the realm. With what self-assurance as such repulsive features could muster, the figure – I assumed it to be male, from the old-fashioned short periwig shown above the sloping forehead – gazed towards the coin's margin. If the denizens of the sea had wished to acclaim themselves a ruler, the profile might have been that of their most noble candidate.

  An inscription ran underneath. I held the coin up to read the words. They identified the personage as one
Saint Monkfish.

  Such a figure was outside any calendar of saints of which I was aware. Admittedly, my religious education had been sparse: the aunt who had reared me had little interest of her own, other than maintaining the conventions of respectability, and had received no instructions from my father on the point. Indeed, the disastrous affair at Saint Mary Alderhythe had been the only occasion in adulthood of my entry into a church for other than a funeral service. Even now, such accumulated grim experience produced an involuntary shudder in me if I merely passed by any sanctified premises. Thus, so narrow was the compass of my Christian knowledge, I could not be without doubt, as I gazed at the coin in my hand, that there wasn't a Saint Monkfish somewhere in the minor hagiology – perhaps the patron of truly ugly people? A vision came to me of those facial deformities that we pass hurriedly on the street, dropping alms into upturned hands while averting our eyes; perhaps those unfortunates made their devotions at the shrine kept in some church's darkest corner, where they and their intercessor would be hidden from pitying gaze.

  My mind was filled with conjecture and query, raised by the two strange objects before me. I resolved upon a course of immediate investigation; there was no work in the shop, other than the mahogany cabinet that the Brown Leather Man had left with me. Even if I had felt my cerebral powers up to the task of examining and repairing the device, my thoughts were too preoccupied with what mysterious connections there might be between the clockwork assemblage, the ugly doll, and the coin with its curious saint. Perhaps the dullness that is engendered by long periods of poverty, and the lack of sociability and amusement that it entrails, had bred in me a thirst for that which we should name Folly, but prefer to call Adventure. Things which a wiser man would dismiss as mere coincidence or oddities too trivial for notice, had claimed my attention. In a small velvet bag, ordinarily used to preserve the polished metal of a watch lying in the counter drawer, I placed my two small curios, and pulled the drawstring tight. I instructed Creff to keep the shop's window shutters down, and to inform any callers that I would resume business on the next day; then I set out to discover what I could do.

  The parish church was situated closest to my shop. I made for it as my first point of inquiry, resolving thereby, if not to banish my fear of churches, to at least swallow the bitter pill of a visit to one before anticipation could make it worse.

  Begrimed windows cast dim shapes of the coloured glass upon the stone floor as I peered around the arched wooden doors. A few candles guttered and flared in the draughts whispering around the pillars, revealing the huddled shapes of those at prayer or in surreptitious slumber after a cold night shuffling over the pavements that provided them their only home. A thin figure, whom I took to be the verger, left off clearing cobwebs from the corners of one of the larger pews, the point of the willow branch in his gnarled hand swathed in dusty spider silk, and shuffled towards me.

  "I wish to see the parson," I informed him. I let the church door creak shut behind me, thus completing the gloom inside its buttressed walls.

  "Do ye, then?" His age and labours bent him in such a way that his neck protruded at a right angle from his hollow chest, giving him a tortoise-like appearance reinforced by the snap of his near-toothless jaws. "If ye're another scroof come round with yer bunkum letters of reference, ye kin just bugger off. The parson's been burned fair enough times on that dodge to rickinize one of yer ilk be now." His yellow eye glared at me, as if he were about to snip my arm between his Punch-like nose and chin.

  "You mistake me," I protested. "I've no intention of asking for money." Evidently, the clergyman had been the victim of those professional beggars who gain sympathy, and a sizeable gift, through their portrayal of distressed gentility. "Only information – that's all I seek. I have a few questions of a…
theological
nature."

  "Bloody likely," muttered the verger. He did; however, lead me to the rectory attached to the church.

  I was soon ushered into the parson's study, the only ornament within its severe confines being the thick volumes of sermons lining the walls. The smell of their aged morocco bindings mingled with the fumes still rising from a blackened clay pipe resting in a bowl on the desk. From behind it the aged clergyman rose, pushing himself upright with a well-worn blackthorn cane, as the verger coughed out some vague introduction before retiring behind the door.

  The parson, beneath the grey tangle of his brows, glared at me with little less suspicion, as a mariner might peer through a dense sea fog to discern the friendliness of another ship spotted in pirate-filled waters. "Your name was…?" he growled with no attempt at polite formality.

  "Dower, sir." I approached the desk. "George Dower. Of this parish, actually."

  He lowered himself back into his chair. "I seem to have some memory of your face," he mused. "But not here in the church." He gestured brusquely at a point near me.

  I sat down in the smaller chair he had indicated. "My attendance at services has been… irregular. Perhaps, on the street – my shop is nearby." In truth, his lined, scowling visage bore some reminder for me as well – but from where and what time I could not then recall.

  His disordered white mane brushed his collar as he shook his head. "I do not go out from here." He raised his cane for explanation. "My mobility has been impaired for some time." His blunt hands folded across the papers on the desk as he leaned forward. "Your business, sir – I have pastoral matters to attend to."

  "I only require a moment of your time," I said. "I'm attempting to find out whatever I can about a certain saint. Rather an obscure one, I feel. And I'd be grateful for whatever help you could give me."

  "A saint, you say?" He nodded, frowning reflectively. "Well, that is a praiseworthy endeavour – the lives of the blessed should be an inspiration to us. Very commendable, I'm sure. What period?"

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "When," said the clergyman patiently, "did this saint of yours live?"

  "I have absolutely no idea."

  "Hm." He studied me, my commendable nature apparently lowered in his eyes. "Very well – this saint's name, then."

  I gathered my breath before speaking: "Saint Monkfish, actually. "

  "Indeed." One shaggy eyebrow arched as he pinched his lower lip between thumb and forefinger; my query had apparently plunged him deep into thought. "Saint Monkfish, you say."

  "Yes," I replied eagerly. "You know of him?"

  He mused in silence, rubbing his lip.

  "You see, I came across the name in rather a peculiar way." I brought out the velvet bag and undid its drawstring. "I was given this coin–"

  Before I could fetch it out, the parson's voice sounded in a deep rumble. "Saint Monkfish, is it? A moment… now I think I remember you–"

  I looked up and saw the penetrating stare from under his lowered brows. In the same moment, we recognised each other.

  "Insolent whelp!" His cane landed across his desk with a mighty crack, scattering the papers like frightened birds. "Blaspheming wretch!"

  I pushed myself backwards in the chair, away from the trembling point of the cane. The clergyman's sudden wrath made the identification complete in my mind. He had been one of the dignitaries invited to the inaugural service of my father's Clerical Automata at the church of Saint Mary Alderhythe. Indeed, my panic-unleashed memory informed me that his incapacity was a direct result of injuries suffered on that lamentable occasion.