The Doomsday Machine (Horatio Lyle) (5 page)

He opened up his palm, and Tess’s eyes widened at the sight of a big, shiny sovereign. An indignant squeak tried to crawl out and she put her hands over her mouth to trap it.

Mrs Cozens looked uneasy. ‘Truly, sir, there ’s no need ...’ ‘If you do not take it, Mrs Cozens, I shall be greatly offended,’ said Lyle.

She looked him in the eye, and saw nothing out of keeping with the flat tone of his voice. Hesitantly, she closed her fingers around the sovereign and slipped it into a pocket. Lyle beamed, and said, ‘Good day, Mrs Cozens. I trust you’ll give my regards to your master when you see him. Tess, Tate.’

Tate shuffled after Lyle with a bored expression, and Tess followed. However, at the last moment, she hesitated, turned and executed an inelegant curtsey. ‘Evenin’, ma’am,’ she said, holding out one small hand to be shaken. Taken aback, Mrs Cozens shook it and Tess’s eyes lit up. Brushing within an inch of Mrs Cozens’s wide skirts, she scampered after Lyle and out of the front door.

 

The three of them walked in silence down the street for a long minute, until they reached the gateway into Gray’s Inn, with its stately buildings and throngs of lawyers. Entering the Inn, Lyle, not taking his eyes off the people passing back and forth, said quietly, ‘All right, what did you find?’

‘Don’t know what you mean, sir,’ said Tess sweetly.

‘In Mrs Cozens’s pocket.’

‘I never!’

‘Teresa, I would never give anyone a sovereign in your sight unless I was sure you were going to steal it off them within a minute.’

‘You imp ... impu ... you sayin’ as how I’m all thievin’, like?’

‘Yes.’

Tess hesitated. So long as it wasn’t actually moving by itself, there was indeed very little in this life that Teresa Hatch wasn’t prepared to steal. The cogs in her brain kept moving, and she reached a shocking conclusion.

‘Hold on! You
used
me, you did! You gave her a sovereign so as how you know I’d go and pinch it an’ all, without tellin’ me! You went and were all sneaky!’ Lyle beamed, Tess pouted. ‘I think I liked you more when you was a soft mark, Mister Lyle.’

‘The pockets, Teresa; what did you find in her pockets?’

‘I found . . .’ Tess rummaged in her own bulky jacket, ‘a silver thimble, a roll of black thread, two copper buttons, an old bit of pencil and somethin’ all metal.’

‘And my sovereign, let ’s not forget that.’

‘I think I must have gone and missed that.’ Tess’s face was a study of innocence.

‘Teresa,’ said Lyle in a strained voice. ‘Surely with your free education, fine room and board, liberal weekly budget and healthy, full meals provided gratis every day to a menu usually of your own devising, you don’t
need
to steal my sovereign, you don’t
need
to pick the pockets of strangers. Surely you could just . . .
not
do these things?’

‘I only do it for you, Mister Lyle, so as I can keep in practice an’ all.’

Lyle sighed. ‘What metal thing?’

Tess handed it over. It was the size of a small pencil-sharpener, dull, grey and cold. Lyle felt its weight in his hand. ‘Ah.’

‘Oh oh oh oh I know what “ah” means. “Ah” means as how you’ve just got a
clue
!’

‘It’s a magnet,’ said Lyle.

‘Oh.’ Tess looked disappointed. ‘An’ that ’s a good thing?’

‘Teresa, who do you know in this life that don’t like magnets? ’

‘Um . . . people who like brass?’

‘Think more adventuresome than that. Think brushes with death and disaster, think explosions, think epic toil across the morally confusing landscape, think St Paul’s Cathedral and thunderstorms, think ...’

‘
Them?
’ Tess had turned white. ‘
They
don’t like magnets, do they? What ’ve
They
got to do with anythin’?’

‘Teresa,’ sighed Lyle, ‘it was
They
who wanted to know where Berwick is.’

Tess stopped dead in the middle of the street. ‘Oh . . .’ she whimpered. ‘Oh, this is bad. Can we go on holiday? That’s why you wanted to go out the secret way, ain’t it? Can we, Mister Lyle, can we go on holiday? Somewhere a long way away? This ain’t my kind of adventure at all.’

‘Think of it as ... as ...’ Lyle’s voice trailed off.

‘See! They cause nothing but trouble, with their wicked ways an’ all! Let’s go on holiday; you know it ain’t going to be right ...’

‘The question is,’ began Lyle in a distant voice, ‘why would
she
be carrying a magnet? Is she afraid of
Them
too? But then why do they want to find Berwick?’

‘Dunno, dunno, let ’s go ...’

‘Tess,’ sighed Lyle, ‘if
They
want to find him, he’s got to be in trouble. He’s an old family friend. I can’t just ...
not
find out. Not when there ’s so much I don’t yet understand.’

‘But he ’s in America!’ wailed Tess.

‘No, he ’s not.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘Did you look at the letter?’

‘Yeesss ...’

‘Did you notice the watermark?’

‘Erm. Not so as you’d say . . .’

‘Chalfont Printers: an
English
paper company. Now, even if I did accept for an instant that Berwick would have gone anywhere without taking his books, would he really have thought, “Ah-ha, I must pack a sheet of English paper with me to send back to England from the uncivilized beyond”? He’s in England - perhaps he wrote the letter himself, I don’t know, I’m not familiar with his handwriting. Perhaps he was forced, who knows? But the paper is English.’

At length, in a weak voice, Tess said, ‘There ain’t nothin’ I can say what will tell you how bad this is?’

He patted her on the shoulder. ‘It ’s all right. I already know this can’t be a good thing.’

‘But you’re gonna do it anyway?’

‘I rather think I am.’

She let out a long sigh. ‘So what now?’

‘We go straight back to Berwick’s house.’

‘An’ confront the evil housekeeper lady?’

‘Not exactly.’

CHAPTER 3

At the same time that Lyle, Tess and Tate were making their way into the mews behind Berwick’s house, where old nags and new saddle horses nipped at hay bags drooping from low stone ceilings, and every other corner held manure filled with hungry worms, the Machine, rattling away with the sound of many steam locomotives racing along the same track, gave off the mechanical equivalent of a fart.

The invisible thing that accelerated at about three hundred thousand miles a second from the Machine’s spinning heart therefore took approximately 0.00003 seconds to rise up from under the earth, ripple out in every direction and shimmer off beyond the limits of London. No one really noticed its passage, except for one clockmaker who found his delicate little iron springs unhappily straining for an instant in their frame, and one well-meaning scientist at the Royal Institute, who was surprised to find every one of his carbon bulbs, each the size of his own head, flaring up and popping into darkness as the unseen thing rippled through the room. Neither he nor the clockmaker even guessed at what the cause might be.

There was, however, someone who did. That someone, sitting in an armchair, reading a copy of the
Graphic
, looked up sharply as the thing passed by. His expression of astonishment didn’t fade until he was distracted by a little
drip, drip, drip
sound. Unthinkingly, he reached to his nose and, with all the decorum of a custard-pie fight, wiped it on the back of his sleeve. White blood smeared the black velvet of his jacket, dripped from his nose and tasted salty in his mouth. He looked up and was surprised to see static rising across his vision and to hear a sloshing sound in his ears. With an embarrassed, ‘Oh dear,’ he tried to stand up, took one step and collapsed on the floor without another sound.

By the time all this had happened, the fading remnant of the thing risen up from the Machine had been to the moon and back twenty-seven and a half times, before dissolving out into insubstantiality.

Outside, it started to rain.

 

Horatio Lyle liked back doors. They encouraged the secret part of him that wanted to be a rebel; they made him feel reckless and dangerous. He also liked people who answered back doors more than those who answered the front, since they usually had other things on their mind and couldn’t be bothered to ask him relevant and embarrassing questions such as, ‘Who are you, what’s that child doing, is that your dog, are you carrying any explosive substances, do you have any identification, is there any danger associated with talking to you?’ and so on. What they said instead, and what indeed the man who answered this door said, was, ‘You’re selling something?’

‘Whatcha wantin’?’ said Tess quickly.

‘We ’re not selling anything,’ said Lyle, putting a firm hand on Tess’s shoulder. ‘We ’re . . . do I know you?’

The man who’d opened the door and was wiping his inky hands on a once-white apron said, ‘I don’t think so.’

‘You’re the butler, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Been here long?’

‘A few weeks - what is this?’

‘What ’s your name, sir?’

‘Cartiledge; look, if you don’t tell me what this is about I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave.’

‘Mr Cartiledge,’ said Lyle brightly, holding out his hand. ‘Special Constable Lyle.’

‘What ’s a “Special Constable”?’

‘The less-well-paid kind,’ confided Lyle. ‘Can I come in?’

‘I should probably ask Mrs Cozens . . .’

‘Mr Cartiledge, of all the things to do, that is the last.’

Cartiledge’s eyes narrowed. ‘She ’s not in some sort of trouble, is she?’

‘Police business. I really couldn’t say.’

And there it was, that look in the eye, that slight gleam of ambition that said here was a butler whose apron had been stepped on once too often. ‘Perhaps we could talk in the kitchen?’

 

London rain takes one of two forms. Most commonly during the day, it drizzles so imperceptibly that it ’s like walking through a thin mist, droplets so small they won’t even leave a gleam on the hairs on the back of your hand and which yet, inexplicably, manage to soak you through to the bone and leave a coldness in the air once it’s stopped. The drizzle comes out of a constantly overcast sky that always promises more than it gives.

However, when it rains properly in London, it comes quickly, surprisingly, sometimes from an empty sky and only later do you notice how black the clouds are - in summer, when the temperature is high and getting higher from the chimneys belching smoke and the furnaces and clattering of the new looms down on the dockside and the new iron ships paddling up the Thames, there are thunderstorms and spontaneous downbursts that churn up the mud. The rest of the time, the rain is a clatterer. It comes without warning and clatters
tumtedetumtedetumtede
on the roofs and windows; it brings a clear, almost leafy smell from a cleaner place; it pocks holes in the river and races downhill to the very few, inevitably blocked drains that the city boasts. It turns noon-day a dark, bruised colour, drives away all shadows and extinguishes all light except a pervasive greyness; and just thrums and thrums and thrums against the pavement, tracking huge stains down the soot-covered walls and making the heaps of rotting refuse steam in the yards behind the buildings.

And as it rains, the water of the Thames begins to rise. At Richmond, it begins to slosh up the street, in Chelsea, it laps at the stairs up to the houses, and at Deptford, it slithers up the pipes into the two sewers - the old and the new - disturbing the rats, and a few things more besides.

This, as it turns out, is going to be very, very important.

 

Tess had found a small bag of roasted chestnuts and taken a seat by the fire to eat them. Lyle had found dried tea leaves and was busy straining them by the kettle on the stove, while one of the maids scampered back and forth into the rain to the black iron waterpipe just outside the back door to bring in more buckets.

At the table sat the cook, the butler, the stablehand, the upstairs maid and the cook’s assistant, and they were bickering. Tess got the impression that bickering was something that happened a lot in this household; it had the quiet but fervent tone of a group of people who know that they’re not going to win whatever their particular argument is, but are sure as hell not going to allow
her
to win instead! Lyle let them argue, fixated on the passage of water through the tea leaves into a small clay mug. Tess nibbled on her chestnuts, occasionally passing one to the expectant Tate, who knew where the next meal was coming from and always waited by her side for such an eventuality.

Only when Lyle was satisfied with the thin brownish liquid left at the bottom of his mug did he put down the drink and turn to the kitchen table with a resounding, ‘I’m sorry, I missed that last thing.’