The Difference Engine (3 page)

“Like my father, eh? You want to make a play of that, Mick? Who he was, who I am?”

“No,” Mick said flatly. “He was old-fashioned, he’s nobody now.”

Sybil smirked. “They let us wicked girls into this fancy guild of yours, do they, Mick?”

“It’s a knowledge guild,” he said soberly. “The bosses, the big’uns, they can take all manner of things away from us. With their bloody laws and factories and courts and banks . . . They can make the world to their pleasure, they can take away your home and kin and even the work you do . . . ” Mick shrugged angrily, his lean shoulders denting the heavy fabric of the greatcoat. “And even rob a hero’s daughter of her virtue, if I’m not too bold in speaking of it.” He pressed her hand against his sleeve, a hard, trapping grip. “But they can’t ever take what you know, now can they, Sybil? They can’t ever take that.”

Sybil heard Hetty’s footsteps in the hall outside her room, and the rattle of Hetty’s key at the door. She let the serinette die down, with a high-pitched drone.

Hetty tugged the snow-flaked woollen bonnet from her head, shrugging free from her Navy cloak. She was another of Mrs. Winterhalter’s girls, a big-boned, raucous brunette from Devon, who drank too much, but was sweet in her way, and always kind to Toby.

Sybil folded away the china-handled crank and lowered the cheap instrument’s scratched lid. “I was practicing. Mrs. Winterhalter wants me to sing next Thursday.”

“Bother the old drab,” Hetty said. “Thought this was your night out with Mr. C. Or is it Mr. K.?” Hetty stamped warmth into her feet before the narrow little hearth, then noticed, in the lamplight, the scattering of shoes and hat-boxes from Aaron & Son. “My word,” she said, and smiled, her broad mouth pinched a bit with envy. “New beau, is it? You’re so lucky, Sybil Jones!”

“Perhaps.” Sybil sipped hot lemon-cordial, tilling her head back to relax her throat.

Hetty winked. “Winterhalter doesn’t know about this one, eh?”

Sybil shook her head and smiled. Hetty would not tell. “D’ye know anything about Texas, Hetty?”

“A country in America,” Hetty said readily. “French own it, don’t they?”

“That’s Mexico. Would you like to go to a kinotrope show, Hetty? The former President of Texas is lecturing. I’ve tickets, free for the taking.”

“When?”

“Saturday.”

“I’m dancing then,” Hetty said. “Perhaps Mandy would go.” She blew warmth into her fingers. “Friend of mine comes by late tonight, wouldn’t trouble you, would it?”

“No,” Sybil said. Mrs. Winterhalter had a strict rule against any girl keeping company with men in her room. It was a rule Hetty often ignored, as if daring the landlord to peach on her. Since Mrs. Winterhalter chose to pay the rent directly to the landlord, Mr. Cairns, Sybil seldom had call to speak to him, and less with his sullen wife, a thick-ankled woman with a taste for dreadful hats. Cairns and his wife had never informed against Hetty, though Sybil was not sure why, for Hetty’s room was next to theirs, and Hetty made a shameless racket when she brought men home — foreign diplomats, mostly, men with odd accents and, to judge by the noise, beastly habits.

“You can carry on singing if you like,” Hetty said, and knelt before the ash-covered fire. “You’ve a fine voice. Mustn’t let your gifts go to waste.” She began to feed individual coals to the hearth, shivering. A dire chill seemed to enter the room then, through the cracked casement of one of the nailed-up windows, and for a strange passing moment Sybil felt a distinct presence in the air. A definite sense of observation, of eyes fixed upon her from another realm. She thought of her dead father. Learn the voice, Sybil. Learn to speak. It’s all we have that can fight them, he had told her. This in the last few days before his arrest, when it was clear that the Rads had won again — clear to everyone, perhaps, save Walter Gerard. She had seen then, with heart-crushing clarity, the utter magnitude of her father’s defeat. His ideals would be lost — not just misplaced but utterly expunged from history, to be crushed again and again and again, like the carcass of a mongrel dog under the racketing wheels of an express train. Learn to speak, Sybil. It’s all we have . . .

“Read to me?” Hetty asked. “I’ll make tea.”

“Very well.” In her spotty, scattered life with Hetty, reading aloud was one of the little rituals they had that passed for domesticity. Sybil took up the day’s Illustrated London News from the deal table, settled her crinoline about her in the creaking, damp-smelling armchair, and squinted at a front-page article. It concerned itself with dinosaurs.

The Rads were mad for these dinosaurs, it seemed. Here was an engraving of a party of seven, led by Lord Darwin, all peering intently at some indeterminate object embedded in a coal-face in Thuringia. Sybil read the caption aloud, showed the picture to Hetty. A bone. The thing in the coal was a monstrous bone, as long as a man was tall. She shuddered. Turning the page, she encountered an artist’s view of the creature as it might have looked in life, a monstrosity with twin rows of angry triangular saw-teeth along its humped spine. It seemed the size of an elephant at least, though its evil little head was scarcely larger than a hound’s.

Hetty poured the tea. ” ‘Reptiles held sway across the whole of the earth,’ eh?” she quoted, and threaded her needle. “I don’t believe a bloody word of it.”

“Why not?”

“They’re the bones of bloody giants, out of Genesis. That’s what the clergy say, ain’t it?”

Sybil said nothing. Neither supposition struck her as the more fantastic. She turned to a second article, this one in praise of Her Majesty’s Artillery in the Crimea. She found an engraving of two handsome subalterns admiring the operation of a long-range gun. The gun itself, its barrel stout as a foundry stack, looked fit to make short work of all Lord Darwin’s dinosaurs. Sybil’s attention, however, was held by an inset view of the gunnery Engine. The intricate nest of interlocking gearwork possessed a queer beauty, like some kind of baroquely fabulous wallpaper.

“Have you anything that needs darning?” Hetty asked.

“No, thank you.”

“Read some adverts, then,” Hetty advised. “I do hate that war humbug.”

There was
HAVILAND
CHINA
, from Limoges, France;
VIN
MARIANI
, the French tonic, with a testimonial from Alexandre Dumas and Descriptive Book, Portraits, and Autographs of Celebrities, upon application to the premises in Oxford Street;
SILVER
ELECTRO
SILICON
POLISH
, it never scratches, never wears, it is unlike others; the “
NEW
DEPARTURE”
BICYCLE
BELL
, it has a tone all its own; DR.
BAYLEY’S
LITHIA
WATER
, cures Bright’s disease and the gouty diathesis;
GURNEY’S
“REGENT”
POCKET
STEAM-ENGINE
, intended for use with domestic sewing machines. This last held Sybil’s attention, but not through its promise to operate a machine at double the old speed at a cost of one halfpenny per hour.

Here was an engraving of the tastefully ornamented little boiler, to be heated by gas or paraffin. Charles Egremont had purchased one of these for his wife. It came equipped with a rubber tube intended to vent the waste steam when jammed under a convenient sash-window, but Sybil had been delighted to hear that it had turned Madame’s drawing-room into a Turkish bath.

When the paper was finished, Sybil went to bed. She was woken around midnight by the savage rhythmic crouching of Hetty’s bed-springs.

It was dim in the Garrick Theatre, dusty and cold, with the pit and the balcony and the racks of shabby seats; but it was pitch-dark below the stage, where Mick Radley was, and it smelled of damp and lime.

Mick’s voice echoed up from under her feet. “Ever seen the innards of a kinotrope, Sybil?”

“I saw one once, backstage,” she said. “At a music-hall, in Bethnal Green. I knew the fellow what worked it, a clacker cove.”

“A sweetheart?” Mick asked. His echoing voice was sharp.

“No,” Sybil told him quickly, “I was singing a bit . . . But it scarcely paid.”

She heard the sharp click of his repeating match. It caught on the third attempt and he lit a stub of candle. “Come down,” he commanded. “Don’t stand there like a goose, showing off your ankles.” Sybil lifted her crinoline with both hands and picked her way uneasily down the steep damp stairs.

Mick reached up to grope behind a tall stage-mirror, a great gleaming sheet of silvered glass, with a wheeled pedestal and oily gears and worn wooden cranks. He retrieved a cheap black portmanteau of proofed canvas, placed it carefully on the floor before him, and squatted to undo the flimsy tin clasps. He removed a stack of perforated cards bound with a ribbon of red paper. There were other bundles in the bag as well, Sybil saw, and something else, a gleam of polished wood.

He handled the cards gently, like a Bible.

“Safe as houses,” he said. “You just disguise ‘em, you see — write something stupid on the wrapper, like ‘Temperance Lecture — Parts One Two Three.’ Then coves never think to steal ‘em, or even load them up and look.” Hefting the thick block, he riffled its edge with his thumb, so that it made a sharp crisp sound, like a gambler’s new deck. “I put a deal of capital in these,” he said. “Weeks of work from the best kino hands in Manchester. Exclusively to my design, I might point out. ‘Tis a lovely thing, girl. Quite artistic, in its way. You’ll soon see.”

Closing the portmanteau, he stood. He carefully slid the bundle of cards into his coat-pocket, then bent over a crate and tugged out a thick glass tube. He blew dust from the tube, then gripped one end of it with a special pair of pincers. The glass cracked open with an airtight pop — there was a fresh block of lime in the tube. Mick slid it loose, humming to himself. He tamped the lime gently into the socket of a limelight burner, a great dish-shaped thing of sooty iron and gleaming tin. Then he turned a hose-tap, sniffed a bit, nodded, turned a second tap, and set the candle to it.

Sybil yelped as a vicious flash sheeted into her eyes. Mick chuckled at her over the hiss of blazing gas, dots of hot blue dazzle drifting before her. “Better,” he remarked. He aimed the blazing limelight carefully into the stage-mirror, then began to adjust its cranks.

Sybil looked around, blinking. It was dank and ratty and cramped under the Garrick stage, the sort of place a dog or a pauper might die in, with torn and yellowed bills underfoot, for naughty farces like That Rascal Jack and Scamps of London. A pair of ladies’ unmentionables were wadded in a corner. From her brief unhappy days as a stage-singer, she had some idea how they might have gotten there.

She let her gaze follow steam-pipes and taut wires to the gleam of the Babbage Engine, a small one, a kinotrope model, no taller than Sybil herself. Unlike everything else in the Garrick, the Engine looked in very good repair, mounted on four mahogany blocks. The floor and ceiling above and beneath it had been carefully scoured and whitewashed. Steam-calculators were delicate things, temperamental, so she’d heard; better not to own one than not cherish it. In the stray glare from Mick’s limelight, dozens of knobbed brass columns gleamed, set top and bottom into solid sockets bored through polished plates, with shining levers, ratchets, a thousand steel gears cut bright and fine. It smelled of linseed oil.

Looking at it, this close, this long, made Sybil feel quite odd. Hungry almost, or greedy in a queer way, the way she might feel about . . . a fine lovely horse, say. She wanted — not to own it exactly, but possess it somehow . . .

Mick took her elbow suddenly, from behind. She started. “Lovely thing, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s . . . lovely.”

Mick still held her arm. Slowly, he put his other gloved hand against her cheek, inside her bonnet. Then he lifted her chin with his thumb, staring into her face. “It makes you feel something, doesn’t it?”

His rapt voice frightened her, his eyes underlit with glare. “Yes, Mick,” she said obediently, quickly. “I do feel it . . . something.”

He tugged her bonnet loose, to hang at her neck. “You’re not frightened of it, Sybil, are you? Not with Dandy Mick here, holding you. You feel a little special frisson. You’ll learn to like that feeling. We’ll make a clacker of you.”

“Can I do that, truly? Can a girl do that?”

Mick laughed. “Have you never heard of Lady Ada Byron, then? The Prime Minister’s daughter, and the very Queen of Engines!” He let her go, and swung both his arms wide, coat swinging open, a showman’s gesture. “Ada Byron, true friend and disciple of Babbage himself! Lord Charles Babbage, father of the Difference Engine and the Newton of our modern age!”

She gaped at him. “But Ada Byron is a ladyship!”

“You’d be surprised who our Lady Ada knows,” Mick declared, plucking a block of cards from his pocket and peeling off its paper jacket. “Oh, not to drink tea with, among the diamond squad at her garden-parties, but Ada’s what you’d call fast, in her own mathematical way . . . ” He paused. “That’s not to say that Ada is the best, you know. I know clacking coves in the Steam Intellect Society that make even Lady Ada look a bit tardy. But Ada possesses genius. D’ye know what that means, Sybil? To possess genius?”

“What?” Sybil said, hating the giddy surety in his voice.

“D’ye know how analytical geometry was born? Fellow named Descartes, watching a fly on the ceiling. A million fellows before him had watched flies on the ceiling, but it took Ren6 Descartes to make a science of it. Now engineers use what he discovered every day, but if it weren’t for him we’d still be blind to it.”

“What do flies matter to anyone?” Sybil demanded.

“Ada had an insight once that ranked with Descartes’ discovery. No one has found a use for it as yet. It’s what they call pure mathematics.” Mick laughed. ” ‘Pure.’ You know what that means, Sybil? It means they can’t get it to run.” He rubbed his hands together, grinning. “No one can get it to run.”

Mick’s glee was wearing at her nerves. “I thought you hated lordships!”

“I do hate lordly privilege, what’s not earned fair and square and level,” he said. “But Lady Ada lives and swears by the power of gray matter, and not her blue blood.” He slotted the cards into a silvered tray by the side of the machine, then spun and caught her wrist. “Your father’s dead, girl! ‘Tis not that I mean to hurt you, saying it, but the Luddites are dead as cold ashes. Oh, we marched and ranted, for the rights of labor and such — fine talk, girl! But Lord Charles Babbage made blueprints while we made pamphlets. And his blueprints built this world.”