The Difference Engine (46 page)

Betteredge, almost immediately and to his considerable pride, had discovered that one Mr. Fuller, the Texian legation’s sole and woefully overworked clerk, was in Pinkerton pay. In addition, Mackerel had demonstrated a profound curiosity about the affairs of General Sam Houston, going so far as to personally burglarize the country estate of the exiled Texian President. Some months subsequently, the Pinkertons had shadowed Michael Radley, Houston’s flack, whose murder in Grand’s Hotel had led directly to a number of Oliphant’s current lines of inquiry.

“And you saw our Mrs. Bartlett, attending the Communard performance? You’re entirely positive?”

“No question, sir!”

“Mackerel and company were aware of her? She of them?”

“No, sir — they were watching the Communard panto, hooting and jeering. Mrs. Bartlett crept back-stage between acts! She kept well in the rear, afterwards. Applauding, though.” Betteredge frowned.

“The Pinkertons made no attempt to follow Mrs. Bartlett?”

“No, sir!”

“But you did.”

“Yes, sir. When the show was done, I left Boots and Becky Dean to ghost our chaps, and set out to dog her alone.”

“You were very foolish, Betteredge.” Oliphant’s tone was exceptionally mild. “You should rather have dispatched Boots and Becky. They’re far more experienced, and a team is invariably more efficient than a single watcher. You might easily have lost her.”

Betteredge winced.

“Or she might have killed you, Betteredge. She’s a murderess. Quite appallingly accomplished. Known to conceal vitriol about her person.”

“Sir, I take full —”

“No, Betteredge, no. None of it. She’d already killed our Texian Goliath. Highly premeditated, no doubt. She was in a position to provide him food, aiding and abetting him, just as she and her friends did, during that night of terror at Grand’s Hotel . . . She’d bring him round his tinned beans, you see. He depended on her; he’d gone to ground in a garret. Simply a matter of doctoring a tin.”

“But why should she turn on him now, sir?”

“A question of loyalties, Betteredge. Our Texian was a nationalist zealot. Patriots may league with the very devil in pursuit of a nation’s interest, but there are matters at which they balk. Likely she demanded some deadly service from him, and he refused.” He knew as much from the confession of Collins; the nameless Texian had been a fractious ally. “The fellow crossed her, spurned her schemes; as did the late Professor Rudwick. So he met the same fate as the man he killed.”

“She must be desperate.”

“Perhaps . . . But we have no reason to believe you alerted her by following her here.”

Betteredge blinked. “Sir, when you sent me to see the Communards, did you suspect she might be there?”

“Not at all. I confess, Betteredge, I was indulging a whim. Lord Engels, an acquaintance of mine, is fascinated by this fellow Marx, the Commune’s founder . . . ”

“Engels the textile magnate?”

“Yes. He’s quite eccentric about it, actually.”

“About those Communard women, sir?”

“About Mr. Marx’s theories in general, and the fate of the Manhattan Commune in particular. Friedrich’s generosity, in fact, made this current tour possible.”

“The richest man in Manchester, funding that sort of tripe?” Betteredge seemed genuinely disturbed by the revelation.

“Peculiar, yes. Friedrich is himself the son of a wealthy Rhineland industrialist . . . In any case, I was curious for your report. And, of course, I did rather expect our Mr. Mackerel to put in an appearance. The United States take the dimmest possible view of the Red revolution in Manhattan.”

“One of the women gave a sort of, well, sermon, sir, before the panto, and ranted like sixty! Some business about ‘iron laws’ —”

” ‘The iron law of history,’ yes. All very doctrinaire. But Marx has borrowed much of his theory from Lord Babbage — so much so, that his doctrine may one day dominate America.” Oliphant’s nausea had passed. “But consider, Betteredge, that the Commune was founded during city-wide anti-war riots, protesting the Union conscription. Marx and his followers seized power during a period of chaos, somewhat akin to last summer’s affliction in London. Here, of course, we’ve come through in good form, and that in spite of having lost our Great Orator in the very midst of the emergency. Proper succession of power is everything, Betteredge.”

“Yes, sir.” Betteredge nodded, distracted from the matter of Lord Engel’s Communard sympathies by Oliphant’s patriotic sentiments. Oliphant, suppressing a sigh, rather wished that he himself believed them.

Oliphant nodded and napped, on the journey home. He dreamed, as he often did, of an omniscient Eye in whose infinite perspectives might be sorted every least mystery.

Upon arrival, he found, to his ill-concealed chagrin, that Bligh had drawn a bath for him in the collapsible rubber tub recently prescribed by Dr. McNeile. In robe and nightshirt, slippered in embroidered moleskin, Oliphant examined the thing with resigned distaste. It stood, steaming, before the perfectly good and perfectly empty tub of white porcelain which dominated his bath-room. It was Swiss, the rubber bath, its slack black trough gone taut and bulbous with the volume of water it presently contained. Supported by an elaborately hinged frame of black-enameled teak, it was connected to the geyser with a worm-like hose and several ceramic petcocks.

Removing his robe, and then his nightshirt, he stepped from his slippers, then from the chill of octagonal marble tiles, into the soft, warm maw. It very nearly overturned as he struggled to sit. The elastic material, supported on all sides by the frame, gave distressingly beneath one’s feet. And was, he discovered, quite horrid in its embrace of one’s buttocks. He was, according to McNeile’s prescription, to recline for a quarter-hour, his head supported on the small pneumatic pillow of rubberized canvas supplied for this purpose by the manufacturer. McNeile maintained that the cast-iron body of a porcelain tub confused the spine’s natural attempts to return to its correct magnetic polarity. Oliphant shifted slightly, grimacing at the obscene sensation of the clinging rubber.

Bligh had arranged a sponge, pumice, and a fresh bar of French-milled soap in the little bamboo basket attached to the side of the tub. Bamboo, Oliphant supposed, must also lack magnetic properties.

He groaned, then took up sponge and soap and began to wash himself.

Released from the pressing business of the day, Oliphant, as he often did, undertook a detailed and systematic act of recollection. He had a natural gift for memory, greatly aided in youth by the educational doctrines of his father, whose ardent interest in mesmerism and the tricks of stage-magic had introduced his son to the arcane disciplines of mnemonics. Such accomplishments had been of great use to Oliphant in later life, and he practiced them now with a regularity he had once devoted to prayer.

Almost a year had passed since his search through the effects of Michael Radley, in Room 37, Grand’s Hotel.

Radley had owned a modern steamer-trunk of the sort that, upended and opened, served as a compact combination of wardrobe and bureau. This, along with a scuffed leather hat-case and a brass-framed Jacquard satchel, constituted the whole of the publicist’s luggage. Oliphant had found the intricacy of the trunk’s fittings depressing. All these hinges, runners, hooks, nickeled catches, and leather tabs — they spoke of a dead man’s anticipation of journeys that were never to be. Equally pathetic were the three gross of fancily stippled cartes-de-viste, with Radley’s Manchester telegraph-number arranged in the French manner, still wrapped in printer’s-tissue.

He began by unpacking each section in turn, laying Radley’s clothing out on the hotel bed with a valet’s precision. The publicist had entertained a fondness for silk nightshirts. As he worked, Oliphant examined maker’s labels and laundry-marks, turning out pockets and running his fingers over seams and linings.

Radley’s toilet articles were secured in a removable envelope of water-proofed silk.

Oliphant examined the contents, handling each object in turn: a badger shaving-brush, a self-stropping safety-razor, a toothbrush, a tin of tooth-powder, a sponge-bag . . . He rapped the ivory handle of the brush against the foot of the bedstead. He opened the razor’s leatherette case: nickel-plate gleamed against a bed of violet velour. He emptied the toothpowder out on a sheet of Grand’s engraved stationery. He looked in the sponge-bag — and found a sponge.

The glitter of the razor drew his eye. Dumping its various components atop the starched bib of an evening-shirt, he used the penknife on his watch-chain to pry the fitted velour nest from the case. It came away easily, revealing a tightly folded sheet of foolscap.

Upon this sheet, in pencil, quite smudged with frequent erasure and re-erasure, was written what appeared to be the start of a draft letter. Undated, lacking any term of address, it was unsigned:

I trust you recall our two Conversations of th past Aug, during and of which you so kindly entrusted me w yr Conjectures. I am pleased to inform you that cert manipulations have yielded a version — a true vers of yr orig — which I feel most confidently can at last be run, thereby demonstrating that Proof so long sought & expected.

The remainder of the sheet was blank, with the exception of three faintly penciled rectangles, containing the Roman capitals
ALG
,
COMP
, and
MOD
.

ALG
,
COMP
, and
MOD
had subsequently become a fabulous three-headed beast, frequent visitor to the higher fields of Oliphant’s imagination. His discovery of the probable meaning of this cipher, while examining transcripts of the interrogation of William Collins, had failed to dispel the image; Alg-Comp-Mod was with him still, a serpent-necked chimera, its heads nastily human. Radley’s face was there, quite dead, mouth agape, eyes blank as fog, and the cool marble features of Lady Ada Byron, aloof and impassive, framed by curls and ringlets that were proofs of a pure geometry. But the third head, sinuously swaying, evaded Oliphant’s gaze. He sometimes imagined its face was Edward Mallory’s, resolutely ambitious, hopelessly frank; at other times he took it to be the pretty, poisonous visage of Florence Bartlett, wreathed in fumes of vitriol.

And sometimes, particularly as now, in the rubber bath’s cloying embrace, drifting toward the continent of sleep, the face was his own, its eyes filled with a dread he could not name.

The following morning, Oliphant slept in, then kept to his bed, Bligh supplying him with files from the study, strong tea, and anchovy toast. He read a Foreign Office dossier on one Wilhelm Stieber, a Prussian agent posing as an emigre newspaper editor named Schmidt. With considerably more interest, he read and annotated a Bow Street file detailing several recent attempts to smuggle munitions, each incident involving cargo destined for Manhattan. The next file consisted of Engine-printed copies of several letters from a Mr. Copeland, of Boston. Mr. Copeland, who traveled in lumber, was in British pay. His letters described the system of forts defending the island of Manhattan, with extensive notes on ordnance. Oliphant’s gaze, from long practice, slid lightly over Copeland’s account of the south battery on Governor’s Island, something of a relic by the sound of it, and quickly arrived at a report of rumors that the Commune had strung a chain of mines from the Romer Shoals to the Narrows.

Oliphant sighed. He very much doubted that the channel had been mined, but the leaders of the Commune would certainly wish it to be thought to have been mined. As indeed it might soon be, if the gentlemen of the Commission for Free Trade were to have their way.

Bligh was at the door.

“You’ve an appointment with Mr. Wakefield, sir, at the Central Statistics Bureau.”

An hour later, Betteredge greeted him from the open door of a cab. “Good afternoon, Mr. Oliphant.” Oliphant climbed in and settled himself. Pleated shades of black-proofed canvas were drawn firmly across either window, shutting out Half-Moon Street and the stark November sun. As the driver urged the cab-horse forward, Betteredge opened a case at his feet, took out a lamp, which he lit in a rapid and dextrous fashion, and fixed, with a brass apparatus of screws and bolts, to the arm of the seat. The interior of the case glittered like a miniature arsenal. He passed Oliphant a crimson file-folder.

Oliphant opened the file, which detailed the circumstances of the death of Michael Radley.

He had himself been in the smoking-room with the General and poor doomed Radley, the both of them awash with drink. Of their respective styles of drunkenness, Radley’s had been the more presentable, the least predictable, the more dangerous. Houston, in his cups, delighted in playing the barbarous American; red-eyed, perspiring, foul-mouthed, he lounged with one great coarse boot propped muddily atop an ottoman. As Houston spoke, and smoked, and spat, roundly cursing Oliphant and Britain, he sullenly shaved curls from a bit of pine, periodically pausing to strop the jack-knife on the edge of his boot-sole. Radley, in contrast, had positively quivered with the liquor’s stimulant effect, cheeks flushed and eyes flashing.

Oliphant’s visit had been intended deliberately to disturb Houston on the eve of his departure to France, but the display of ill-concealed mutual hostility evident between the General and his publicist had been quite unexpected.

He had hoped to sow seeds of doubt with regard to the French tour; to this end, and primarily for Radley’s benefit, he had managed to imply an exaggerated degree of cooperation on the parts of the intelligence services of Britain and France. Oliphant had suggested that Houston already possessed at least one powerful enemy among the Police des Chateaux, the bodyguard and secret personal agency of the Emperor Napoleon. While the Police des Chateaux were few in number, Oliphant insinuated, they were utterly without legal or constitutional restraint; Radley, at least, in spite of his condition, had obviously taken note of the implied threat.

They had been interrupted by a page, who brought a note for Radley. As the door opened to admit the man, Oliphant had glimpsed the anxious face of a young woman. Radley had stated, as he excused himself, that it was necessary that he speak briefly with a journalistic contact.