The Difference Engine (2 page)

“So now you feel a bit shy with me, do you?” he said at last. “Well, I prefer it that way. What I know, that gives me a bit more grip on you, don’t it, than mere tin.”

His eyes narrowed. “It’s what a cove knows that counts, ain’t it, Sybil? More than land or money, more than birth. Information. Very flash.”

Sybil felt a moment of hatred for him, for his ease and confidence. Pure resentment, sharp and primal, but she crushed her feelings down. The hatred wavered, losing its purity, turning to shame. She did hate him — but only because he truly knew her. He knew how far Sybil Gerard had fallen, that she had been an educated girl, with airs and graces, as good as any gentry girl, once.

From the days of her father’s fame, from her girlhood, Sybil could remember Mick Radley’s like. She knew the kind of boy that he had been. Ragged angry factory-boys, penny-a-score, who would crowd her father after his torchlight speeches, and do whatever he commanded. Rip up railroad tracks, kick the boiler-plugs out of spinning jennies, lay policemen’s helmets by his feet. She and her father had fled from town to town, often by night, living in cellars, attics, anonymous rooms-to-let, hiding from the Rad police and the daggers of other conspirators. And sometimes, when his own wild speeches had filled him with a burning elation, her father would embrace her and soberly promise her the world. She would live like gentry in a green and quiet England, when King Steam was wrecked. When Byron and his Industrial Radicals were utterly destroyed . . .

But a hempen rope had choked her father into silence. The Radicals ruled on and on, moving from triumph to triumph, shuffling the world like a deck of cards. And now Mick Radley was up in the world, and Sybil Gerard was down.

She stood there silently, wrapped in Mick’s coat. Paris. The promise tempted her, and when she let herself believe him, there was a thrill behind it like lightning. She forced herself to think about leaving her life in London. It was a bad, a low, a sordid life, she knew, but not entirely desperate. She still had things to lose. Her rented room in Whitechapel, and dear Toby, her cat. There was Mrs. Winterhalter, who arranged meetings between fast girls and political gentlemen. Mrs. Winterhalter was a bawd, but ladylike and steady, and her sort was difficult to find. And she would lose her two steady gentlemen, Mr. Chadwick and Mr. Kingsley, who each saw her twice a month. Steady tin, that was, and kept her from the street. But Chadwick had a jealous wife in Fulham, and, in a moment of foolishness, Sybil had stolen Kingsley’s best cufflinks. She knew that he suspected.

And neither man was half so free with his money as Dandy Mick.

She forced herself to smile at him, as sweetly as she could. “You’re a rum’un, Mick Radley. You know you’ve got my leading-strings. Perhaps I was vexed with you at first, but I’m not so cakey as to not know a rum gentleman when I see one.”

Mick blew smoke. “You are a clever one,” he said admiringly. “You talk blarney like an angel. You’re not fooling me, though, so you needn’t deceive yourself. Still, you’re just the gal I need. Get back in bed.”

She did as he told her.

“Jove,” he said, “your blessed feet are two lumps of ice. Why don’t you wear little slippers, eh?” He tugged at her corset, with determination. “Slippers, and black silk stockings,” he said. “A gal looks very flash in bed, with black silk stockings.”

From the far end of the glass-topped counter, one of Aaron’s shopmen gave Sybil the cold eye, standing haughty and tall in his neat black coat and polished boots. He knew something was up — he could smell it. Sybil waited for Mick to pay, hands folded before her on her skirt, demure, but watching sidelong from beneath the blue fringe of her bonnet. Under her skirt, wadded through the frame of her crinoline, was the shawl she’d nicked while Radley tried on top-hats.

Sybil had learned how to nick things — she’d taught herself. It simply took nerve, that was the secret. It took pluck. Look neither right nor left — just grab, lift her skirt, stuff and rustle. Then stand quite straight, with a psalm-singing look, like a gentry girl.

The floorman had lost interest in her; he was watching a fat man fingering watered-silk braces. Sybil checked her skirt quickly. No bulge showed.

A young spotty-faced clerk, with inkstained thumbs, set Mick’s number into a counter-top credit-machine. Zip, click, a pull on the ebony-handled lever, and it was done. He gave Mick his printed purchase-slip and did the parcel up in string and crisp green paper.

Aaron & Son would never miss a cashmere shawl. Perhaps their account-engines would, when they tallied up, but the loss couldn’t hurt them; their shopping-palace was too big and too rich. All those Greek columns, chandeliers of Irish crystal, a million mirrors — room after gilded room, stuffed with rubber riding boots and French-milled soap, walking-sticks, umbrellas, cutlery, locked glass cases crammed with silver-plate and ivory brooches and lovely wind-up golden music-boxes . . . And this was only one of a dozen in a chain. But for all of that, she knew, Aaron’s wasn’t truly smart, not a gentry place.

But couldn’t you just do anything with money in England, if you were clever? Someday Mr. Aaron, a whiskery old merchant Jew from Whitechapel, would have a lordship, with a steam-gurney waiting at the curb and his own coat of arms on the coachwork. The Rad Parliament wouldn’t care that Mr. Aaron was no Christian. They’d given Charles Darwin a lordship, and he said that Adam and Eve were monkeys.

The liftman, gotten up in a Frenchified livery, drew the rattling brass gate aside for her. Mick followed her in, his parcel tucked under his arm, and then they were descending.

They emerged from Aaron’s into Whitechapel jostle. While Mick checked a street-map he took from his coat, she gazed up at the shifting letters that ran the length of Aaron’s frontage. A mechanical frieze, a slow sort of kinotrope for Aaron’s adverts, made all of little bits of painted wood, clicking about each in turn, behind leaded sheets of bevel-glass.
CONVERT
YOUR
MANUAL
PIANO
, the jostling letters suggested,
INTO
A
KASTNER’S
PIANOLA
.

The skyline west of Whitechapel was spikey with construction cranes, stark steel skeletons painted with red lead against the damp. Older buildings were furred with scaffolding; what wasn’t being torn down, it seemed, to make way for the new, was being rebuilt in its image. There was a distant huffing of excavation, and a tremulous feeling below the pavement, of vast machines cutting some new underground line.

But now Mick turned left, without a word, and walked away, his hat cocked to one side, his checkered trouser-legs flashing under the long hem of his greatcoat. She had to hurry to match his step. A ragged boy with a numbered tin badge was sweeping mucky snow from the crossing; Mick tossed him a penny without breaking stride and headed down the lane called Butcher Row.

She caught up and took his arm, past red and white carcasses dangling from their black iron hooks, beef and mutton and veal, and thick men in their stained aprons crying their goods. London women crowded there in scores, wicker baskets on their arms. Servants, cooks, respectable wives with men at home. A red-faced squinting butcher lurched in front of Sybil with a double handful of blue meat. “Hallo, pretty missus. Buy your gentleman my nice kidneys for pie!” Sybil ducked her head and walked around him.

Parked barrows crowded the curb, where costers stood bellowing, their velveteen coats set off with buttons of brass or pearl. Each had his numbered badge, though fully half the numbers were slang, Mick claimed, as slang as the costers’ weights and measures. There were blankets and baskets spread on neatly chalked squares on the paving, and Mick was telling her of ways the costers had to plump out shrunken fruit, and weave dead eels in with live. She smiled at the pleasure he seemed to take in knowing such things, while hawkers yelped about their brooms and soap and candles, and a scowling organ-grinder cranked, two-handed, at his symphony machine, filling the street with a fast springy racket of bells, piano-wire, and steel.

Mick stopped beside a wooden trestle-table, kept by a squint-eyed widow in bombazine, the stump of a clay pipe protruding from her thin lips. Arrayed before her were numerous vials of some viscous-looking substance Sybil took to be a patent medicine, for each was pasted with a blue slip of paper bearing the blurred image of a savage red Indian. “And what would this be, mother?” Mick inquired, tapping one red-waxed cork with a gloved finger.

“Rock-oil, mister,” she said, relinquishing the stem of her pipe, “much as they call Barbados tar.” Her drawling accent grated on the ear, but Sybil felt a pang of pity. How far the woman was from whatever outlandish place she’d once called home.

“Really,” Mick asked, “it wouldn’t be Texian?”

” ‘Healthful balm,’ ” the widow said, ” ‘from Nature’s secret spring, the bloom of health and life to man will bring.’ Skimmed by the savage Seneca from the waters of Pennsylvania’s great Oil Creek, mister. Three pennies the vial and a guaranteed cure-all.” The woman was peering up at Mick now with a queer expression, her pale eyes screwed tight in nests of wrinkles, as though she might recall his face. Sybil shivered.

“Good day to you, then, mother,” Mick said, with a smile that somehow reminded Sybil of a vice detective she’d known, a sandy little man who worked Leicester Square and Soho; the Badger, the girls had called him.

“What is it?” she asked, taking Mick’s arm as he turned to go. “What is it she’s selling?”

“Rock-oil,” Mick said, and she caught his sharp glance back at the hunched black figure. “The General tells me it bubbles from the ground, in Texas . . . ”

Sybil was curious. “Is it a proper cure-all, then?”

“Never mind,” he said, “and here’s an end to chat.” He was glancing bright-eyed down the lane. “I see one, and you know what to do.”

Sybil nodded, and began to pick her way through the market-crowd toward the man Mick had seen. He was a ballad-seller, lean and hollow-cheeked, his hair long and greasy under a tall hat wrapped in bright polka-dot fabric. He held both his arms bent, hands knotted as if in prayer, the sleeves of his rumpled jacket heavy with long rustling quires of sheet-music.

” ‘Railway to Heaven,’ ladies and gents,” the ballad-seller chanted, a veteran patterer. ” ‘Of truth divine the rails are made, and on the Rock of Ages laid; the rails are fixed in chains of love, firm as the throne of God above.’ Lovely tune and only tuppence, miss.”

“Do you have “The Raven of San Jacinto’?” Sybil asked.

“I can get that, I can get it,” the seller said. “And what’s that then?”

“About the great battle in Texas, the great General?”

The ballad-seller arched his brows. His eyes were blue and crazily bright, with hunger, perhaps, or religion, or gin. “One of your Crimea generals then, a Frenchy, this Mr. Jacinto?”

“No, no,” Sybil said, and gave him a pitying smile, “General Houston, Sam Houston of Texas. I do want that song, most particular.”

“I buy my publications fresh this afternoon, and I’ll look for your song for you sure, miss.”

“I shall want at least five copies for my friends,” Sybil said.

“Ten pence will get you six.”

“Six, then, and this afternoon, at this very spot.”

“Just as you say, miss.” “The seller touched the brim of his hat.

Sybil walked away, into the crowd. She had done it. It was not so bad. She felt she could get used to it. Perhaps it was a good tune, too, one that people would enjoy when the balladman was forced to sell the copies.

Mick sidled up suddenly, at her elbow.

“Not bad,” Mick allowed, reaching into the pocket of his greatcoat, like magic, to produce an apple turnover, still hot, flaking sugar and wrapped in greasy paper.

“Thank you,” she said, startled but glad, for she’d been thinking of stopping, hiding, fetching out the stolen shawl, but Mick’s eyes had been on her every moment. She hadn’t seen him, but he’d been watching; that was the way he was. She wouldn’t forget again.

They walked, together and apart, all down Somerset, and then through the vast market of Petticoat Lane, lit as evening drew on with a host of lights, a glow of gas-mantles, the white glare of carbide, filthy grease-lamps, tallow dips twinkling among the foodstuffs proffered from the stalls. The hubbub was deafening here, but she delighted Mick by gulling three more ballad-sellers.

In a great bright Whitechapel gin-palace, with glittering gold-papered walls flaring with fishtail gas-jets, Sybil excused herself and found a ladies’ convenience. There, safe within a reeking stall, she fetched the shawl out. So soft it was, and such a lovely violet color too, one of the strange new dyes clever people made from coal. She folded the shawl neatly, and stuffed it through the top of her corset, so it rested safe. Then out to join her keeper again, finding him seated at a table. He’d bought her a noggin of honey gin. She sat beside him.

“You did well, girl,” he said, and slid the little glass toward her. The place was full of Crimean soldiers on furlough, Irishmen, with street-drabs hanging on them, growing red-nosed and screechy on gin. No barmaids here, but big bruiser bully-rock bartenders, in white aprons, with mill-knocker clubs behind the bar.

“Gin’s a whore’s drink, Mick.”

“Everybody likes gin,” he said. “And you’re no whore, Sybil.”

“Dollymop, bobtail.” She looked at him sharply. “What else d’ye call me, then?”

“You’re with Dandy Mick now,” he said. He leaned his chair back, jabbing his gloved thumbs through the arm-holes of his waistcoat. “You’re an adventuress.”

“Adventuress?”

“Bloody right.” He straightened. “And here’s to you.” He sipped his gin-twist, rolled it over his tongue with an unhappy look, and swallowed. “Never mind, dear — they’ve cut this with turpentine or I’m a Jew.” He stood up.

They left. She hung on his arm, trying to slow his pace. ” ‘Adventurer,’ that’s what you are, then, eh, Mr. Mick Radley?”

“So I am, Sybil,” he said softly, “and you’re to be my ‘prentice. So you do as you’re told in the proper humble spirit. Learn the tricks of craft. And someday you join the union, eh? The guild.”