The Difference Engine (20 page)

Mallory found this news of remarkable interest. “Suppose I asked for my own file?” he said.

“Well, sir, you’re a gentleman, not a criminal. You’re not in the common police-files. Your magistrates, and court-clerks and such, would have to fill out forms, and show good cause for the search. Which we don’t grant easily.”

“Legal protocols, eh?” Mallory said.

“No, sir, it’s no law that stops us, but the simple trouble of it. Such a search consumes Engine-time and money, and we’re always over budget in both. But if an M.R made that request, or a Lordship . . .”

“Suppose I had a good friend here in the Bureau,” Mallory said. “Someone who admired me for my generous ways.”

Tobias looked reluctant, and a bit coy. “It ain’t a simple matter, sir. Every spinning-run is registered, and each request must have a sponsor. What we did today is done in Mr. Wakefield’s name, so there’ll be no trouble in that. But your friend would have to forge some sponsor’s name, and run the risk of that imposture. It is fraud, sir. An Engine-fraud, like credit-theft or stock-fraud, and punished just the same, when it’s found out.”

“Very enlightening,” Mallory said. “I’ve found that one always profits by talking to a technical man who truly knows his business. Let me give you my card.”

Mallory extracted one of his Maull & Polyblank cartes-de-visite from his pocket-book. Folding a five-pound note, he pinched it against the back of his card and passed it over. It was a handsome sum. A deliberate investment.

Tobias dug about beneath his apron, found a greasy leather wallet, stuffed in Mallory’s card and money, and extracted a dog-eared bit of shiny pasteboard. J. J.
TOBIAS
,
ESQ
. , the card said, in grotesquely elaborate Engine-Gothic.
KINOTROPY
,
AND
THEATRE
COLLECTIBLES
. There was a Whitechapel address. “Never mind that telegraph number at the bottom,” Tobias told him. “I had to stop renting it.”

“Have you any interest in French kinotropy, Mr. Tobias?” Mallory said.

“Oh, yes, sir,” nodded Tobias. “Some lovely material is coming out of Montmartre these days.”

“I understand the best French ordinateurs employ a special gauge of card.”

“The Napoleon gauge,” Tobias said readily. “Smaller cards of an artificial substance, which move very swiftly in the compilers. That speed is quite handy in kino-work.”

“Do you know where a fellow might rent one of these French compilers, here in London?”

“To translate data from French cards, sir?”

“Yes,” Mallory said, feigning an only casual interest. “I expect to receive some data from a French colleague, involving a scientific controversy — rather abstruse, but still a matter of some scholarly confidentiality. I prefer to examine it privately, at my own convenience.”

“Yes, sir,” Tobias said. “That is to say, I do know a fellow with a French compiler, and he’d let you do whatever you like with it, if the pay were right. Last year, there was quite a mode in London clacking-circles for the French standard. But sentiment has turned quite against it, what with the troubles of the Grand Napoleon.”

“Really,” Mallory said.

Tobias nodded, delighted to show his authority. “I believe it’s felt now, sir, that the French were far ahead of themselves with their vast Napoleon project, and made something of a technical misstep!”

Mallory stroked his beard. “That wouldn’t be British professional envy talking, I hope.”

“Not at all, sir! It’s common knowledge that the Grand Napoleon suffered some dire mishap early this year,” Tobias assured him, “and the great Engine has never spun quite properly since.” He lowered his voice. “Some claim sabotage! Do you know that French term, sabotage” Comes from ‘sabots,’ the wooden shoes worn by French workers. They can kick an Engine half off its blocks!” Tobias grinned at this prospect, with a glee that rather disquieted Mallory. “The French have Luddite troubles of a sort, you see, sir, much as we once did, years ago!”

Two short notes were sounded on a steam-whistle, reverberating through the white-washed ceiling. The two studious gentlemen, who had been joined by an equally studious third, now closed their albums and left.

The bell rang once more, summoning Tobias to the wall-tray. The boy rose slowly, straightened a chair, wandered down the length of the table, examined the albums for nonexistent dust, and shelved them. “I think that’s our answer waiting,” Mallory said.

Tobias nodded shortly, his back to Mallory. “Very likely, sir, but I’m on overtime, see. Those two blasts on the horn . . . ”

Mallory rose impatiently and strode to the tray.

“No, no,” Tobias yelped, “not without gloves! Pray let me do it!”

“Gloves, indeed! Who’s to know?”

“Criminal Anthropometry, that’s who! This is their room, and nothing they hate worse than the smudges from bare fingers!” Tobias turned with a sheaf of documents. “Well, sir, our suspect is one Florence Bartlett, nee Russell, late of Liverpool . . . ”

“Thank you, Tobias,” Mallory said, creasing the sheaf of fan-fold so as to slip it more easily into his Ada-Checkered waistcoat. “I do appreciate your help.”

One arctic Wyoming morning, the frost thick on the brown and beaten prairie-grass, Mallory had crouched beside the tepid boiler of the expedition’s steam-fortress, prodding at its meager buffalo-dung fire, trying to thaw an iron-hard strip of the jerked beef that the men ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. At that moment of utter misery, his beard rimed with frozen breath and his shovel-blistered fingers frost-bitten, Mallory had sworn a solemn oath that he would never again curse the summer heat.

But never had he expected so vile a swelter in London.

The night had passed without a breath of wind, and his bed had seemed a fetid stew. He’d slept atop the sheets, a drenched Turkish towel spread across his nakedness, and had risen every hour to dampen the towel again. Now the mattress was soaked and the whole room seemed as hot and close as a greenhouse. It stank of stale tobacco as well, for Mallory had smoked half-a-dozen of his fine Havanas over the criminal record of Florence Russell Bartlett, which dealt primarily with the murder of her husband, a prominent Liverpool cotton-merchant, in the spring of 1853.

The modus operandi had been poisoning by arsenic, which Mrs. Bartlett had extracted from fly-paper and administered over a period of weeks in a patent medicine. Dr. Gove’s Hydropathic Strengthener. Mallory, from his nights down Haymarket, knew that Dr. Cove’s was in fact a patent aphrodisiac, but the file made no mention of this fact. The fatal illness in 1852 of Bartlett’s mother, and of her husband’s brother in 1851, were also recorded, their respective certificates of death citing perforated ulcer and cholera morbus. These purported illnesses featured symptoms very like those of arsenic poisoning. Never formally accused of these other deaths, Mrs. Bartlett had escaped custody, overpowering her jailer with a concealed derringer.

The Central Statistics Bureau suspected her of having fled to France, Mallory assumed, because someone had appended translations of French police-reports of 1854 dealing with a crime passionel trial in the Paris assizes. One “Florence Murphy,” abortionist, purportedly an American refugee, was arrested and tried for the crime of vitriolage, the flinging of sulphuric acid with intent to disfigure or maim. The victim, Marie Lemoine, wife of a prominent Lyons silk-merchant, was an apparent rival.

But “Mrs. Murphy” had vanished from custody, and from all subsequent French police-records, during the first week of her trial as a vitrioleuse.

Mallory sponged his face, neck, and armpits in tap-water, thinking bleakly of vitriol.

He was perspiring freely again as he laced his shoes. Leaving his room, he discovered that the city’s queer summer had overwhelmed the Palace. Sullen humidity simmered over the marble floors like an invisible swamp. The very palms at the foot of the stairs seemed Jurassic. He trudged to the Palace’s dining-room, where four cold hard-boiled eggs, iced coffee, a kippered herring, some broiled tomato, a bit of ham, and a chilled melon somewhat restored him. The food here was rather good, though the kipper had smelled a bit off — small wonder, in heat like this. Mallory signed the chit, and left to fetch his mail.

He had been unjust to the kipper. Outside the dining room, the Palace itself stank: bad fish, or something much like it. There was a soapy perfume in the front lobby, left from the morning’s mopping, but the air was heavy with the humid distant reek of something dreadful, and apparently long-dead. Mallory knew he had smelled that reek before — it was sharp, like acid, mixed with the greasy stench of a slaughterhouse — but he could not place the memory. In a moment the stink was gone again. He stepped to the desk for his mail. The wilted clerk greeted him with a show of courtesy; Mallory had won the staff’s loyalty with generous tips. “Nothing in my box?” said Mallory, surprised.

“Too small. Dr. Mallory.” The clerk bent to lift a large woven-wire basket, crammed to the brim with envelopes, magazines, and packages.

” ‘Struth!” Mallory said. “It gets worse every day!”

The clerk nodded knowingly. “The price of fame, sir.”

Mallory was overwhelmed. “I suppose I shall have to read through all of this . . . ”

“If I may be so bold, sir, I think you might do well to engage a private secretary.”

Mallory grunted. He had a loathing of secretaries, valets, butlers, chambermaids, the whole squalid business of service. His own mother had been in service once, with a wealthy family in Sussex, in the old days before the Rads. The fact rankled.

He carried the heavy basket into a quiet corner of the library and began to sort through it. Magazines first: the gold-spined ‘Transactions of the Royal Society’, ‘Herpetology of All Nations’, ‘Journal of Dynamickal Systematics’, ‘Annales Scientifiques de l’Ecole des Ordinateurs’, with what seemed to be an interesting article on the mechanical miseries of the Grand Napoleon . . . This business of the scholarly subscriptions had been a faggot-above-a-load, though he supposed it kept the editors happy, happy editors being half the key to placing one’s own articles.

Then the letters. Swiftly, Mallory divided them into piles. Begging-letters first. He had made the mistake of answering a few, that had seemed especially tearful and sincere, and now the scheming rascals had swarmed upon him like lice.

A second pile of business-letters. Invitations to speak, requests for interviews, bills from shopmen, Catastrophist bone-men and rock-hounds offering co-authorship of learned papers.

Then the letters in feminine hand. The broody-hens of natural history — “flower-snippers,” Huxley called them. They wrote in their scores and dozens, most merely to request his autograph, and, if he so pleased, a signed carte-de-visite. Others would send him coy sketches of common lizards, requesting his expertise in reptile taxonomy. Others would express a delicate admiration, perhaps accompanied with verses, and invite him to tea if he was ever in Sheffield, or Nottingham, or Brighton. And some few, often marked by spiky handwriting, triple underlining!!!, and ribboned locks of hair, would express a warm womanly admiration, and this in terms so bold as to be quite disconcerting. There had been a remarkable flurry of these after his fancy portrait had appeared in ‘The Englishwoman’s Domestic Weekly’.

Mallory stopped suddenly. He had almost flung aside a letter from his sister Ruth. Dear little Ruthie — but of course the baby of the family was a good seventeen years old now. He opened the letter at once.

DEAR
NED
,

I write to you at Mother’s dictation as her hands are quite bad today. Father thanks you very much for the splendid lap-rug from London. The French liniment has helped my hands (Mother’s) very nicely thow more in the knees than the hands. We all miss you much in Lewes thow we know you are busy on yr great affairs of the Royal Society! We read aloud each of yr American adventures as they are written by Mr. Disraeli in Family Museum. Agatha asks will you please please get her Mr. Disraeli’s autograph as her favorite novel is his “Tancred”! But our great news is that our dear Brian is back from Bombay, safely with us this very day June 17! And he has brought with him our dear brother-to-be Lt. Jerry Rawlings, also of the Sussex Artillery, who asked our Madeline to wait for him and of course she did. Now they are to be married, and Mother wants you to know particularly that it will
NOT
be in a Church but a civil seremony with the J.R Mr. Witherspoon in Lewes City Hall. Will you attend June 29 as Father gives away almost his last bride — I did not want to write that but Mother made me.

All our Love,

RUTH
MALLORY
(Miss)

So — Little Madeline, with her man at last. Poor creature, four years was a long engagement, more worrisome still when betrothed to a soldier in a tropical pest-hole like India. She had taken his ring at eighteen, and was now all of twenty-two. A long engagement was a cruel thing to ask of a young and lively girl, and Mallory had seen, in his last visit, that the ordeal had sharpened Madeline’s tongue and temper, and made her almost a trial to the household. Soon there would be no one left at home to look after the old folks but little Ruthie. And when Ruth married — well, he would consider that matter in due time. Mallory rubbed his sweating beard. Madeline had had life harder than Ernestina, or Agatha, or Dorothy. She should have something fine for herself, Mallory resolved. A wedding-gift that would prove that she had put an end to her unhappy time.

Mallory took the letter-basket to his room, piled the mail on the floor beside his overflowing bureau, and left the Palace, dropping the basket at the desk on his way out.

A group of Quakers, men and women, stood on the pavement outside the Palace. They were droning another of their intolerable sermonizing ditties, something about a “railway to Heaven,” by the sound of it. The song did not seem to have much to do with Evolution, or blasphemy, or fossils; but perhaps the sheer monotony of their bootless protests had exhausted even the Quakers. He hurried past them, ignoring their proffered pamphlets. It was hot, uncommon hot, beastly hot. There was not a ray of sun, but the air was mortally still and the high cloudy sky had a leaden, glowering look, as if it wanted to rain but had forgotten the trick of it.