Unseemly Science (9 page)

T
he vexed question of woman’s suffrage has ever been the cause of discord
.
But when put to the test, the electorate have found no enthusiasm.

From Revolution

Unlike the housemistress, Mrs Raike showed no signs of hurried dressing. Her immaculate plaits were wound and held up under a cream house cap. Her dress and shawl were the same bombazine that I had seen in every photograph. I would have called them widow’s weeds – though if she was in mourning the period must have been indecently long.

I followed her through the opening into a smaller chamber, insufficiently lit. A single oil lamp rested on a table carved in the Chinese style. I could make out comfortable chairs and lace antimacassars. The fire in the grate crackled reluctantly, suggesting a fresh shovel of coal on the embers of the previous evening.

Mrs Raike pulled the bookcase door closed and we were alone. From this side it was wood panelled.

“They told me you weren’t here,” I said.

“You are excessively determined, Miss Barnabus. Persistence is a virtue only in moderation.”

At the rally in the park, there had been noise and distance between us. But I was now close enough to hear every subtle layer of her voice. There was nothing false about it. And though the neck of her dress was high, it would not have concealed the Adam’s apple of a man. My theory had been dashed.

“May I sit?” I asked, trying to process the flood of new information.

She nodded. I chose the chair nearest the fire and watched as she lowered herself into the other one, moving as if her limbs were dry sticks.

“I overheard some of your conversation with the housemistress,” she said.

“Overheard?” I glanced at the wood panelling, unable to see a spy hole but certain it would be there – behind one of the hanging pictures perhaps. A secret room is not built without the means to look out unobserved.

“You spoke loudly,” she said. “I found myself listening. Forgive me, but you seemed to be saying that I don’t exist.”

Her tone of voice mocked me. For a moment I forgot the opening of the speech I had prepared.

“Well?” she prompted.

“I... was brought up in a travelling show.”

“How singular.”

“My father made me disappear. On stage.”

Her eyes were boring into me. “A charming story. Though perhaps less than ideal as an upbringing. We run orphanages, did you know that?”

“No.”

“Yes. And we feed the destitute, for which we’re criticised. We rescue women who have fallen. Girls younger even than you were when you came to the Republic.”

It seemed I wasn’t the only one to have rehearsed a speech. And her words were having an effect.

“Do you know how I disappeared on stage?” I asked, trying to get back on track but no longer comfortable with the place I was driving towards.

“Would you have those girls sent back to their bawdy houses?” she asked.

“No. Of course. But–...”

“Can you imagine what they suffer?”

“But–...”

“Then why are you attacking me?”

I took in a deep breath and asked again, with more force: “Do you know how I disappeared on stage?”

No answer.

“I didn’t. I was still there. In full view. But disguised. That was my art – appearing to be someone else. I recognise the same art in you.”

Her hands gripped the arms of the chair. “Stop!”

But I pressed on. “You
are
in disguise. There
is
no Mrs Raike.”

Seconds ticked past. Then her rigid shoulders dropped and I knew a barrier had been crossed.

She stood. As she stepped across to the table, her movements were already changing from a brittle shuffling to the smooth-limbed gait of a woman in her prime. I watched her adjust the lamp, letting out more wick. The flame grew and the room brightened.

“I don’t want to harm you,” I said.

“Then why have you done this?”

“We can help each other.”

“Indeed?”

Her voice was smoother than before. It still had an edge, though its nature seemed different, more dangerous perhaps. It came to me that the only people to have seen me enter the building were some poor insane creatures on the street and the two women from within the organisation who conducted me to this secret room.

She sat back in the chair. “Tell me – who do you think I am?”

“The first time I saw you, I figured you for a man in disguise,” I said.

“Ridiculous!”

“I’m sorry. It was from a distance. You were speaking in Abbey Park.”

Recollection flickered across her face. “You asked a question.”

“Yes.”

She nodded. “And now what do you think?”

“Your work divides opinion. You’ve enemies. Your disguise is to protect a reputation from scandal. I’d thought you were Wallace Jones, Minister of Patents. But now I know you’re a woman... I believe you’re his wife.”

“You’re wrong.”

“Then his sister.”

She acknowledged the truth with an almost imperceptible nod.

“So much makeup can’t be comfortable.”

I watched as she took off the cap. Then she picked at her cheek and started peeling away the wrinkled skin, revealing a rosy glow beneath. She must have painted herself with some kind of rubber solution. In moments the false mole was removed. A woman of perhaps thirty- five years sat before me.

“There was no perspiration,” I said. “The other women on stage looked set to faint but you weren’t even glowing. And the haste with which you left the stage. The mayor was still speaking. I think perhaps it could not have lasted longer.”

I wondered what the price of this revelation would be. My gun had been taken. But there was a horn of black powder in the travelling case. I resisted the temptation to glance at it.

“You are not only persistent, Miss Barnabus. Astute also. I wonder if your brother has these qualities in such measure.?”

“Perhaps,” I said. “But what of
your
brother?”

“If my work is loved by some it’s loathed by many. As a Councillor he may frame our laws, but he has voters to thank for his position. My supporters are overwhelmingly women. Thus they have no say in the elections.”

“You mean he’d be voted out if the truth were known?”

“It’s certain. And without the protection that his office allows, this whole enterprise would crumble. Thus I hide.”

The more plainly she laid out her situation, the clearer it became that I wouldn’t be allowed to leave. The risk I posed to her was greater than anything I had to offer in exchange.

“You hide in full view of the public eye,” I said.

“And you hide doubly. The newspapers covered your recent adventure. None of it made sense until I imagined the story turned around with you as the private intelligence gatherer and your brother perhaps helping from the background.”

I had made the mistake of projecting my own deception onto her – thinking she was a man in disguise. Now she pictured me with a brother less able.

“We’re victims of our sex,” I said. “Both of us. We have minds to think but aren’t supposed to use them.”

“And that means I should help you?”

Her question had a mocking tone. I wondered if she would have the stomach to kill me, or if she intended to lock me away. There would be many secure rooms in a warehouse such as this.

She stiffened as I got to my feet. “Help will come running if I shout,” she said.

“I simply want to show you something.”

Keeping eye contact, I reached down and unclipped the case. With my right hand, I flourished Julia’s letters, a distraction from the work of my left hand. One smooth movement and I was back in the chair, feeling the sharp angles of the powder horn hidden beneath my thigh.

“Letters?” she asked.

“From Julia Swain.”

I needed enough smoke and confusion to make my escape. But even if I plunged the horn into the heart of the fire, it might take several seconds to detonate.

“What have Miss Swain’s letters to do with me?” she asked.

“They speak of the ice farmers.”

The explosion would not kill. I would shout a warning. We could shield ourselves behind the chairs.

“What of the ice farmers?”

“I could still help you solve their case.”

I inched my hand from my lap towards my side, ready to grab.

“And in return, you wish me to hide you from the authorities?”

My hand stopped. I had not expected her to take my feeble bargaining position seriously.

“I don’t need help in hiding. But your brother is on the Council of Guardians. The treaty isn’t signed. He could
–”
...

“He’s one minister among many. The treaty can’t be stopped.”

“It could be... amended,” I said. “An amnesty for those who crossed the border before it came into force.”

The fire popped and crackled as new flames broke through. We both jumped.

“It wouldn’t be easy,” she said. “The law change is popular. Forgive me, but Kingdom exiles aren’t looked on kindly.”

“But you’d try?”

“In return you’d investigate the ice farmers?”

The conversation had taken such an unexpected turn and so quickly that I was certain I had missed something important. “I... that is, yes. The investigation would take me further from the border. That would be a blessing.”

“If you’ll do that – and no mention of your connection to me – I will ask my brother to try.”

My hand inched away from the powder horn.

That night we made the most insubstantial of bargains. I promised to not reveal her identity. She promised to ask her brother to attempt an amendment of the treaty. And all the while, I tried to understand why the little I had to offer was of value to her.

Money was the only solid thing that passed between us – expenses for my journey. As she took it from the housemistress and signed for receipt in a ledger, I slipped the powder horn from under my thigh and back into the travelling case. She placed the purse in my hand, reminding me of the promises we had undertaken to honour. Later, I would check them for forgeries.

“There’s one more thing,” I said, before leaving. Someone’s been watching me for the last two weeks – ever since Julia made contact with you. I’ve caught glimpses of him. Will you now call him off?”

She shook her head. “I know of no such man. If you’re being followed, it is nothing to do with me.”

There i
s no such thing as half a bluff.

The Bullet Catcher’s Handbook

Deceptions, like coaches, seldom singly come. Though I had uncovered Mrs Raike’s disguise, I could not trust her. There were surely more layers to be peeled back before I knew the whole truth of the woman.

Yet our motives seemed inexplicably in alignment. She wished to avoid a scandal. I certainly did not wish to cause one. She wanted me away from Upper Wharf Street. I wanted to be further from the border and constables who could recognise me as a fugitive. She wanted to have the case of the ice farmers resolved – though I still did not understand the reason. And I wished to see my friend again.

Thus, with a purse of money from the charitable foundation and with my father’s pistol returned to me, I set off to Ashbourne, where Julia had gone to gather information on the ice trade. I would help solve the case and Mrs Raike would pull what levers she could. If the extradition treaty was amended, I could be free again. If not, perhaps I could hope that the weight of my knowledge might motivate her to hide me.

The walk to Ashbourne would have taken less than a day unencumbered. But I was hauling a travelling case and my foot had not fully healed. I dared not risk opening the wound again. Neither would I dare the coach station undisguised for fear of the constables, who might well hope to acquire me at such a place.

Fugitives are fated to make slow progress.

Having left the warehouse via a courtyard and a flight of brick steps, I set out in the pre-dawn gloom. Dew beaded the metal railings of the empty street. There were no more animal noises from dark doorways. But once I thought there were footsteps following. And another time, hearing a metallic scrape, I swung my head to see a sewer covering askew that before I hadn’t noticed. After that I left the wharves and warehouses behind me. The streets were still shabby but my heart calmed with the lessening of dread.

Presently I found guest houses of the kind where a single woman would be asked no questions on taking a room. There were food stalls on the street outside, selling to men who trudged towards morning shifts. Most of the food looked as filthy as the hands that served it. But needing to eat, I bought two flat loaves griddled before my eyes, over a fire of smashed up furniture. I chose the middle of a row of three guest houses and paid for two nights, though I intended to stay for only a few hours.

The room was uncleaned, the linen stained and crawling with mites, the lock broken. I hefted the iron bed frame across so that it would stop the door from being opened. Then I settled myself on a wooden chair, injured foot raised on my travelling case.

I supposed it would be impossible to sleep, propped as I was. My mind darted over dark thoughts and suspicions too quickly to dismiss any of them. When fatigue at last won out, I carried those half-formed fears with me into sleep. My dreams were stalked by monsters.

I awoke stiff-necked having slept through most of the day. Motes of dust drifted in the air before my face. In the gloom earlier I hadn’t noticed the moth holes that patterned the curtain. But with the evening sun outside, each hole allowed a pencil of light to penetrate the darkened room.

The gas lamp offered but a feeble splutter. Come dusk it would be too dim to work by. So I half drew the curtain and began my transformation while the sun was still over the roofs. Working with the mirror inside the lid of my travelling case, I darkened my skin tone, laying down the gum and fake facial hair that would alter my appearance to that of a young man. I thickened my eyebrows, replaced corset with binding cloth, blouse with shirt, skirt with trousers. I let the flattened top hat pop out on its springs and extended the telescopic walking cane.

In the Bullet Catcher’s Handbook it says that of all disguises, expectation is the deepest. It was only eleven hours into the two days for which I had booked the room. Whatever suspicion the landlord entertained as he watched a young man stepping out of the door, it was not that the young woman tenant had chosen to leave. I read the thought behind his smirk –
Under that respectable dress she was no better than the others
.
He didn’t look at the travelling case in my hand.

Ignoring him, I walked out onto the cobbled street, leaning on my cane to hide the limp as best I could. I had to force myself to keep my eyes on the road ahead and not to look back in the give-away manner of those who fear themselves followed. Paranoia breeds in the mind when you are on the run. And I, a double fugitive, running from the law of the Kingdom and the Republic.

The coach station was silent in the night. A grand iron framework supported the arch of the high roof. Underneath ran a wide road. Here, coaches would line up during the day. It would bustle with the loading and unloading of such goods and people as could not afford to travel by air and were in too much of a hurry to go by boat.

Sheltered under the canopy of the coach station were a row of squat and functional structures – the porters’ lodge, ticket and overseer’s offices, strong rooms, feed store, pigeon house, news stand, tea shop and the waiting room in which I would be spending the night.

The ticket office was empty. I pinged the counter bell and presently a sleepy young man emerged from the back and asked if I had read the opening hours. I slid a tenpence across to him by way of an apology. Having palmed it with practiced sleight of hand, he gestured to a plaque on the wall.

Derby Coach Station is recognised for

- excellence in passenger care -

“Timetables aren’t everything,” he said.

I would have saved Mrs Raike’s money, but the 3
^rd
class waiting room would be locked until morning. So I walked away with a 1
^st
class ticket and
a
copy of the timetable, which told me that the first coach to Ashbourne would leave at half past eight.

The waiting room was warm, though it smelled faintly of sausage. The chairs were clean and comfortable. I chose one furthest from the door and next to a pot- bellied stove. With my back to the wall and my case next to me on the floor, I ate the last of the bread from the street vendor and settled down for a long wait.

With the stillness pressing, my anxieties began to return. In the filthy guest house, troubles had flitted through my mind on dark wings, moving so fast that I had no way to fix onto any of them. But now, fortified by some hours of sleep during the day, I plucked one from the air.

Mrs Jones, sister of Councillor Wallace Jones, was pursuing the rights of women as she saw them. Hers was a distinctly Republican approach – liberation through labour. Let us work as volunteers and our status will rise. That was the argument. Our talents will be recognised and we will enter into a more balanced partnership with men. Mrs Raike was a fiction created to drive the movement forwards and take the criticism, so that her brother could quietly support the same agenda from within government. In secret they were both lobbyist and lobbied.

I instinctively disliked Mrs Raike’s sanctimonious displays of virtue. But the illusion itself – its audacity – this I could not help but admire. I knew the ways of the bullet catchers. I had been with the greatest alchemist of the day and seen through his tricks. But here was a woman who wished to change more than lead into gold – she had set about the transmutation of the entire Republic. It was a goal which, had I thought it possible, I might have shared.

But I did not trust her.

She had claimed to know nothing about a spy on my trail. This was the thought I kept returning to. For weeks I had been noticing movements and sounds where there should have been none. At first I’d put it down to paranoia. Then, just as I’d begun to entertain the idea that I was being watched, the constables came to arrest me. Whoever was following, it seemed they had lost my trail at that point. But when I returned to the wharf, I was found again. The flicker of movement I had glimpsed through
Bessie
’s porthole after she was moved into the boat house – there was no explanation for it, but that someone had been outside watching.

Then I had been followed from the canal to the warehouse on Upper Wharf Street. “The asylum is full,” the woman had said. Poor creatures, she had called them. I had been too panicked to think clearly at the time. But it came to me, there had been more than one shadow following me along the street. When I disembarked from the boat, before the madness, there had been the sound of stealthy footsteps.

It was the next step of logic that I’d not been able to think about until now. Perhaps it had been too disturbing to entertain. When I walked to the police house in Syston, I’d heard a noise from the bushes. And now again, walking to the coach station. But these times, I was in disguise. If the same person was following me when I walked in the guise of a man, the secret of my double identity had been pierced.

My thoughts were interrupted by the opening of the waiting room door. A man in uniform peered inside. But for the peaked cap, I would have thought him a constable.

“Evening, sir,” he said, glancing around the room and sniffing the air.

Without my voice warmed up, I didn’t trust myself to speak, so I nodded to return his greeting.

“Where would you be travelling?”

Digging in my jacket pocket, I retrieved my ticket and held it up for him to see.

He stepped across to me, releasing the door to swing back on its spring. It closed with a creak and a thud. I could read his badge now.
Anglo
-
Scottish Republic
–
-
Transport Police.
He bent to examine my ticket.

“Ashbourne, is it?”

I nodded.

“Gateway to the Peaks,” he said. “On holiday?”

I pointed to my throat and then my chest. He frowned.

“Recovering from influenza,” I whispered. “A rest cure.”

He straightened himself. “Anyone been here? A woman on her own, perhaps?”

I shook my head.

“Well, I won’t disturb you any longer.”

I watched the door creaking closed after he was gone.

The fire shifted in the pot- bellied stove. Outside the waiting room, the station clock ticked laboriously. More distant and fainter still was the sound that every city makes as it breathes, even in sleep.

If I had been tailed from Upper Wharf Street, then the one who followed me must be near. I stood and moved silently to the waiting room door. Through its single glass panel, I could see the wide roadway and the arch of the high roof above it. Two barrels had been left upright next to a small pile of crates on the far side. There wouldn’t be space behind for anyone to hide. I shifted my head across to see further around the station, searching for places in which I might have positioned myself to keep watch. If I was tailing someone alone, I would need to take what sleep I could. The question was – where could a person sleep and still be sure the target would not slip away?

I gazed at the ceiling, trying to remember the appearance of the building from the outside. It was single storey, for sure. Flat roofed, I thought, with a low balustrade. That is where I would have gone, perhaps lying with one ear to the ground. A light sleeper might be woken every time the waiting room door thudded closed on its spring.

With great gentleness, I twisted the door handle. The latch clicked, sounding like a gunshot to my ear, though it can have been little louder than the clock ticking. Pulling the door inwards, I propped it open with my travelling case.

Cold night air reached into the room. I held my breath and listened.

Nothing.

If my watcher was up there and awake, he was keeping still and silent. Because the door opened inwards, he would not be able to see it. Indeed, if he wished to avoid giving himself away, he would need to keep his head back from the edge. Or she. Whoever it was had been light footed and probably small.

I counted the seconds by the ticking of the station clock. After five minutes of silence I slipped through the door and began to side-step, following the wall of the building as closely as I dared – for a touch of fabric against brick would be loud enough to give away my plan. At the first corner, I thought I heard something so stopped to listen. The sound was faint and it took me a moment to identify it as a tuneless whistling. I scanned the other side of the station and saw a movement – the transport constable in his peaked cap ambling from the back of the animal feed store. His path would bring him in my direction.

I was around the corner of the building in one quick movement. He would be with me in under a minute. He would want to know why I had left my suitcase propping the door.

Quickly now, I stepped down the side of the waiting room and round behind it. Turning the corner, I saw an iron ladder, fixed to the rear wall.

Aware of the sound of my clothes moving, I started to climb. Two rungs up, I remembered to remove my top hat. There was no one else to see and anyone who had followed me thus far must already know my sex.

Two more rungs and my head was just below the cornice of stonework that projected from the top of the wall. I took a final step, bringing my eyes to the edge. And there crouched a figure with his back to me. He peered out from the front of the building. It was a teenage boy. A ragged coat hung loose from his malnourished frame.

I did not need to see his face to recognise him. His name was Tinker and we had met before.

But the constable would be returning. I was down the ladder in three steps and dashing back towards the waiting room door, knowing the boy would hear. Braking hard, I rounded the final corner in the semblance of a relaxed stroll.

I had misjudged the time. The constable was standing barely two paces away.

“And what,” he said, “might you be doing?”