The Difference Engine (52 page)

“You bet,” the bellman said, or some similar bit of American dialect, and led Oliphant smartly away, down a corridor lined with mirrors and rubber-plants.

Fifty-five minutes later, having toured the club’s premises at some length, having been shown a photographic album of the Lambs’ annual “gambols,” having applied for membership, and having paid a not inconsiderable initiation fee, nonrefundable, via his own number in the National Credit, Oliphant shook hands with the pomaded steward, gave the man a pound-note, and requested that he be let out by the club’s most obscure trade-entrance.

This proved to be a scullery-door which opened on exactly the sort of dank and narrow passage he had hoped for.

Within a quarter-of-an-hour, he stood at the public bar of a crowded house in Bedford Road, reviewing the text of the telegram that one Sybil Gerard had once dispatched to Mr. Charles Egremont, M.P., of Belgravia.

“Lost both me boys o’ sickness in the Crimea, squire, an’ innit allus the tele-gram comes — innit?”

Oliphant folded the sheet of foolscap into his cigar-case. He watched his dim reflection in the polished zinc of the bar. He looked at his empty tumbler. He looked up at the woman, a raddled hairidan in rags gone a color that had no name, her cheeks roseate with gin-blossoms under a patina of grime.

“No,” he said, “that tragedy is not mine.”

“Me Roger it was,” she said, ” ‘n’ Tommy-lad too. An’ not a rag come ‘ome, squire — not a bloody rag . . . ”

He handed her a coin. She thanked him, mumbling, and retreated.

He seemed to have thoroughly slipped the traces for the moment. He was entirely alone. It was time to find a cab.

In the dim, high hollow of the great station a thousand voices seemed to mingle, the constituent elements of language reduced to the aural equivalent of fog, homogeneous and impenetrable.

Oliphant went about his business below at a measured and deliberate pace, purchasing a first-class railway ticket to Dover, reserved, for the ten o’clock evening-express. The ticket-clerk seated Oliphant’s National Credit plate in the machine and cranked hard on the lever.

“There you are, sir. Reserved in your name.”

Thanking the clerk, Oliphant made his way to a second wicket, where he again produced his plate. “I wish to book a cabinette on the morning mail-boat to Ostend.” Apparently as an afterthought, as he was putting the boat-tickets and his National Credit plate into his note-case, he requested a second-class ticket on the midnight boat to Calais.

“Would that be this evening, sir?”

“Yes.”

“That would be the Bessemer, sir. On National Credit, sir?”

Oliphant paid for the ticket to Calais with pound-notes from Mr. Beadon’s safe.

Ten till nine, by his father’s gold hunter.

At nine o’clock he boarded a departing train at the last possible moment, paying the first-class fare to Dover directly to the conductor.

The swinging-saloon ship Bessemer, her twin turtle-decks awash with Dover spray, steamed for Calais sharp on the midnight. Oliphant, having visited the purser with his second-class ticket and his pound-notes, was seated in a brocade armchair in the saloon cabin, sipping mediocre brandy and taking the measure of his fellow passengers. They were, he was pleased to note, a thoroughly unremarkable lot.

He disliked swinging-saloons, finding the Engine-controlled movements of the cabin, intended to compensate for the vessel’s pitch and roll, somehow more unsettling than the ordinary motion of a ship at sea. In addition, the cabin itself was effectively windowless. Swung on gimbals in a central well, the cabin was mounted so deeply in the hull that its windows, such as they were, were located high up along the walls, well above one’s line of sight. All in all, as a remedy for mal-de-mer, Oliphant thought it excessive. The public, however, were apparently fascinated by the novel employment of a small Engine, somewhat on the order of a gunnery Engine, whose sole task consisted of maintaining as near a level footing in the cabin as was deemed possible. This was accomplished via something the press referred to, in clacker’s argot, as “back-feed.” Still, with twin paddles fore and aft, the Bessemer customarily performed the distance of twenty-one miles between Dover and Calais in an hour and thirty minutes.

He would rather have been above-decks, now, facing into the wind; able then, perhaps, to imagine himself steaming toward some grander, more accessible goal. But the promenade of a swinging-saloon offered no bulwark, only an iron railing, and the Channel wind was damp and cold. And he had, he reminded himself, only the one goal now, and it, in all likelihood, a fool’s errand.

Still: Sybil Gerard. He had decided, upon reading the telegram to Egremont, against having her number spun. He had expected it might attract unwanted attention; with Criminal Anthropometry holding sway at Central Statistics, of course, he had been proven correct. And he rather suspected that Sybil Gerard’s file might no longer exist.

Walter Gerard of Manchester, sworn enemy of progress, agitator for the rights of man. Hanged. And if Walter Gerard had had a daughter, what might have become of her? And if she had been ruined, as she claimed to have been, by Charles Egremont?

Oliphant’s back began to ache. Beneath the chair’s stiff brocade, Jacquard-woven with repeated images of the Bessemer, the horsehair stuffing held a chill.

But if nothing else, he reminded himself, he at least had temporarily escaped the soft black pit of Dr. McNeile’s patent Swiss bath-tub.

Putting his brandy aside unfinished, he nodded then, and napped.

And dreamed, perhaps, of the Eye.

The Bessemer docked at Calais at half past one.

Monsieur Lucien Arslau’s apartments were in Passy. At noon, Oliphant presented his card to the concierge, who conveyed it via pneumatic tube to Monsieur Arslau’s establishment. Almost immediately, the whistle attached to a nickeled speaking-tube peeped twice; the concierge bent his ear to the funnel; Oliphant made out faint tones of shouted French.

The concierge showed Oliphant to the lift.

He was admitted, on the fifth floor, by a liveried manservant wearing an ornate Corsican stiletto through a pleated sash of gros de Naples. The young man managed to bow without taking his eyes from Oliphant. Monsieur Arslau regretted, the servant said, that he was unable at the moment to receive Monsieur Oliphant; in the meantime, would Monsieur Oliphant care for any sort of refreshment?

Oliphant declared that he would very much appreciate an opportunity to bathe. He would also find a pot of coffee most agreeable.

He was led through a broad drawing-room, rich in satin and ormolu, buhl cabinets, bronzes, statuettes, and porcelain, where the lizard-eyed Emperor and his dainty Empress, the former Miss Howard, gazed from twin portraits in oil. And then through a morning-room hung with proof-engravings. A graceful curve of stairway mounted from an octagonal anteroom.

Some two hours later, having bathed in a marble-rimmed tub of gratifying solidity, having taken strong French coffee and lunched upon cutlets a la Maintenon, and wearing borrowed linen with far more starch than he cared for, he was ushered into the study of Monsieur Arslau.

“Mr. Oliphant, sir,” Arslau said, in his excellent English, “it is a great pleasure. I regret not having been able to see you earlier, but . . . ” He gestured toward a broad mahogany desk littered with files and papers. From behind a closed door came the steady clatter of a telegraph. On one wall hung a framed engraving of the Great Napoleon, its mighty gear-towers rising behind a grid-work of plate-glass and iron.

“Not at all, Lucien. I’m grateful to have had the time to take advantage of your hospitality. Your chef has an extraordinary way with mutton; a sublimated meat that could scarcely have grown on any mundane sheep.”

Arslau smiled. Nearly Oliphant’s height, broader in the shoulders, he was some forty years of age and wore his greying beard in the Imperial fashion. His cravat was embroidered with small golden bees. “I’ve had your letter, of course.” He returned to his desk and settled himself in a high-backed chair upholstered in dark-green leather. Oliphant took a seat in an armchair opposite.

“I must admit my curiosity, Laurence, as to what it is you are currently about.” Arslau made a steeple of his fingers and peered over them, raising his eyebrows. “The nature of your request would hardly seem to warrant the precautions you deem necessary . . . ”

“On the contrary, Lucien, you must know that I would not presume in this way upon our acquaintance for any but the most pressing of reasons.”

“But no, my friend,” Arslau said, with a dismissive little wave of his hands, “you have asked the merest of favors. Among colleagues, men such as ourselves, it is nothing. I am simply curious; it is one of my many vices. You convey to me a letter by Imperial diplomatic pouch — no mean feat in itself, for an Englishman, though I know that you are familiar with our friend Bayard. Your letter requires my help in locating a certain English adventuress, no more. You believe she may be resident in France. Yet you stress the need for very great secrecy; you warn me particularly against communicating with you either by telegraph or by the regular post. You instruct me to await your arrival. What am I to make of this? Have you succumbed at last to the wiles of some woman?”

“Alas, I have not.”

“Given the current model of English womanhood, my friend, I find that entirely understandable. Far too many of your gentlewomen aspire to be elevated to the level of masculine intellectuality — superior to crinoline, superior to pearl-powder, above taking the pains to be pretty, above making themselves agreeable in any way! What a dreary, utilitarian, entirely ugly life an Englishman shall eventually lead, if this trend continues! So why then, I ask, have you crossed the Channel to find an English adventuress? Not that we haven’t our share of them. They’re rather thick upon the ground, actually, not to mention the origin” — Arslau smiled — “of our own Empress.”

“You yourself have never married, Lucien,” Oliphant remarked, attempting to deflect Arslau from his purpose.

“But look at matrimony! Who is to say which shall be the one judicious selection out of the nine hundred and ninety-nine mistakes? Which is to be the one eel out of the barrel of snakes? The girl on the kerbstone may be the one woman out of every female creature in this universe capable of making me a happy man, my friend, yet I pass her by, and bespatter her with the mud from my wheels, in my utter ignorance!” Arslau laughed. “No, I have not married, and your mission is a political one.”

“Of course.”

“Things are not well with Britain. I don’t need my British sources to tell me that, Oliphant. The papers suffice. The death of Byron . . .”

“Great Britain’s political direction, Lucien — indeed, her ultimate stability as a nation — may even now be at stake. I need not remind you of the paramount importance of our two nations’ continued mutual recognition and support.”

“And the matter of this Miss Gerard, Oliphant? Shall I take it you suggest she is somehow pivotal in the situation?”

Oliphant took out his cigar-case and selected one of Beadon’s habanas. His fingers brushed the folded text of Sybil Gerard’s telegram. He closed the case. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Please do.”

“Thank you. The matters which hinge upon Sybil Gerard are entirely British, entirely domestic. They may stand, ultimately, to affect France, but in a most indirect way.” Oliphant clipped and pierced his cigar.

“Are you entirely sure of that?”

“I am.”

“I am not.” Arslau rose to bring Oliphant a copper ashtray atop a walnut stand. He returned to his desk but remained standing. “What do you know of the Jacquardine Society?”

“They are the approximate equivalent of our Steam Intellect Society, are they not?”

“Yes and no. There is another, a secret society, within the Jacquardines. They style themselves Les Fils de Vaucanson. Certain of them are anarchists, others in league with the Marianne, others with the Universal Fraternity, others with any sort of rabble. Class-war conspirators, you understand? Others are simply criminals. But you know this, Laurence.”

Oliphant took a lucifer from a box emblazoned with a stippled image of the Bessemer, and struck it. He lit his cigar.

“You tell me that the woman you know as Sybil Gerard is of no concern to France,” Arslau said.

“You think otherwise?”

“Perhaps. Tell me what you know of our difficulties with the Great Napoleon.”

“Very little. Wakefield of Central Statistics mentioned it to me. The Engine is no longer functioning accurately?”

“Ordinateurs, thank the good God, are not my specialty. The Napoleon performs with its accustomed speed and accuracy in most instances, I am informed, but an outre element of inconstancy presently haunts the machine’s higher functions . . . ” Arslau sighed. “Those higher functions being deemed a matter of considerable national pride, I have myself been forced to peruse reams of the most abstruse technical prose in the Empire. To no ultimate avail, it now seems, as we’ve had the culprit in hand.”

“The culprit?”

“An avowed member of Les Fils de Vaucanson. His name is of no importance. He was arrested in Lyons in connection with an ordinary case of civil fraud involving a municipal ordinateur. Elements of his subsequent confession brought him to the attention of the Commission of Special Services, and hence to ours. During interrogation, he revealed his responsibility for the current lamentable state of our Great Napoleon.”

“He confessed to le sabotage, then?”

“No. He would not confess to that. He refused, until the end. With regard to the Napoleon, he would admit only to having run a certain sequence of punch-cards, a mathematical formula.”

Oliphant watched the smoke from his cigar spiral toward the high ceiling’s ornate plaster rosette.

“The formula came from London,” Arslau continued. “He obtained it from an Englishwoman. Her name was Sybil Gerard.”

“Have you attempted analysis of this formula?”

“No. It was stolen, our Jacquardine claimed, spirited away by a woman he knew as Flora Bartelle, apparently an American.”