Gideon Smith and the Mask of the Ripper (19 page)
Read Gideon Smith and the Mask of the Ripper Online
Authors: David Barnett
“But what is it doing here?” asked his wife. “Has the professor sent it as some kind of ghastly joke?”
Maria put her hand up and closed her eyes momentarily. “Please,” she said. “Please. You know Professor Einstein?”
Elmwood shook his head wonderingly and addressed her directly. “You can properly speak? You can understand me?”
“Henry,” admonished Mrs. Elmwood, “of course it can’t—”
“I can!” said Maria, more sharply than she had intended. “I can. Oh, I know this must be a shock for you. But I was unaware of your daughter’s existence until you came to see Gideon. I apologize for appearing on your doorstep like this, but I had to know…”
“Gideon Smith?” said Mr. Elmwood. “He has sent you?”
She shook her head. “I am on my own errand. I reside with Mr. Smith. I am…” She paused. She was
what
? “I am his compatriot,” she finished. “I aid him in his endeavors.”
Mrs. Elmwood sat forward. “But why did he not tell us about you, when we visited him in Mayfair?”
And why did he not tell
me
about
Charlotte
?
thought Maria. She said, “Please, I beg of you. Professor Einstein has been missing for a year. I must know what has become of him. I thought perhaps your daughter’s resemblance to myself might have been mere coincidence, but you say you know the professor…?”
Mrs. Elmwood narrowed her eyes. “It is more that you have a resemblance to our daughter. And that is no accident. Some years ago my husband applied for membership at a gentlemen’s club in Holborn.” She shot him a glare. “Always trying to better himself, my husband. Always trying to have us move in circles beyond our class and our finances.”
“Please, Martha,” hissed Mr. Elmwood. “I merely wanted to improve our situation.…”
Mrs. Elmwood ignored him. “An occasional member of this club, when he was in town, was your Professor Hermann Einstein. After some months of Henry drinking brandy and smoking cigars he could ill afford, the professor invited us to an exhibition he had planned at the club. That was the unveiling of his latest invention.”
“Me,” said Maria.
“You recall?” asked Mr. Elmwood.
Maria shook her head tightly. Mrs. Elmwood smiled sourly. “I am surprised you do not, if you are as
real
as my husband seems to think you have become. You caused quite a stir. Not least among ourselves when the Professor took off that drop cloth. My daughter almost fainted.”
“She saw me?” asked Maria. “Charlotte?”
“She was only seventeen at the time. The professor had met her on several occasions at social functions, and I think he had become quite taken with her.” She cast a disgusted glance at her husband. “I do believe in my heart you encouraged this, Henry. And the professor with a wife and son of his own back in Germany. Was there nothing you were not willing to sacrifice to improve your standing?”
“Martha,” said Mr. Elmwood, a note of warning in his voice. He took up the tale. “We were shocked, of course, but also strangely touched. The work that had gone into it … you … was quite astonishing.”
“Until you ran amok,” said Mrs. Elmwood, raising an eyebrow.
Maria stared at her. “Ran amok?”
“No sooner had he wound you up with that huge key—which, I must say, sickened me to my stomach to see—and instructed you to waltz with him, but you began to thrash about and made for the doors. One poor man from the club who tried to bar your way received a fractured arm for his trouble.”
Maria put her hand to her mouth, eyes wide. Mrs. Elmwood said, “They found you three hours later, on Cleveland Street, I believe. You had been terrorizing the locals.”
Cleveland Street. The home of poor old Annie Crook, who had loved the queen’s grandson and ended up a mutilated husk on the banks of the Thames, thanks to Gideon’s paymaster Mr. Walsingham, her brain removed and dispatched to Professor Einstein, who had used it to perfect his ultimate creation. Maria. And like a dog to its vomit she had blindly found her way back to Cleveland Street, driven by the final, fading memories of tragic Annie Crook.
“I didn’t see old Einstein again for a few months,” said Mr. Elmwood. “He was very apologetic when he came back to the club. Said he’d ironed out a few kinks in the … in you. Taken it … taken you all to pieces and put you back together again. Said you were safe and sound, now.”
So that explained why Maria had no memories of her unveiling to society and her terrifying flight to Cleveland Street. Whatever
ironing of the kinks
the Professor had done must have all but wiped the memory from the stolen brain that resided in the strange Atlantic Artifact in her head. But a trace of it must have remained, allied with the ghosts of Annie Crook’s memories, that forged the stolen, fractured dreams she’d had of London in the dark days between Professor Einstein disappearing and Gideon liberating her from the country house where the old scientist performed his secret tasks for the British Government.
As if Maria’s very thoughts were laid bare in her eyes, Mr. Elmwood said, “Curious, though, that you are now residing in the company of Mr. Smith, whom we petitioned for help in finding Charlotte. When you said you were associated with him I thought perhaps there might be news.…”
“Mr. Smith has been searching for your daughter since Friday night,” said Maria. “He went out to observe Markus Mesmer’s performance.”
“And has he interviewed the blackguard?”
“He is following several lines of inquiry,” said Maria carefully. “I am sure he is giving the matter his undivided attention.”
The day had grown old outside while they were talking, and in the gloom of the Elmwoods’ parlor Maria had a sudden realization. Gideon had indeed rushed out on Friday to find the girl, barely even waiting for Maria to return from her exhausting battery of tests and examinations in Cornwall.
“Why do you think Mesmer singled out Charlotte for such treatment?” asked Maria.
“Perhaps he thought we were rich,” sighed Mrs. Elmwood. “The party we attended was one thrown for the daughter of one of Henry’s associates from that club. He had persuaded us to enroll Charlotte in the finishing school the girl attended, another expense. I knew no good would come of us reaching so far above our station.”
“So merely for a ransom, then?”
“Perhaps,” said Mr. Elmwood. “But Mesmer did seem somewhat interested in Charlotte.… One of his attendants—a rough-looking chap, Spanish I think—had with him a notebook and drew Mesmer’s attention to something within it. I saw them both looking at whatever was within and then scrutinizing Charlotte across the room. It was almost as though they were looking for someone, and thought it might be her.”
“Mr. Mesmer approached us and asked us all kinds of questions about Charlotte,” said Mrs. Elmwood. “I fancy he was trying to be casual, but his approach was so stiff, so …
Germanic
… well. It felt more like an interrogation.”
“What kind of questions?” asked Maria.
Mrs. Elmwood shrugged. “When she was born, what she had been like as a child, which schools she had attended. It almost felt as though he could catch us out, as though we were somehow
lying
about Charlotte being our daughter.” She laughed mirthlessly. “It was very strange.”
They sat in silence for a moment. There was a small cloth doll with buttons for eyes and a gingham dress lying on the sofa. It had pigtails of red wool. Mrs. Elmwood fixed her eyes on Maria’s. “I made that for Charlotte when she was four years old. Even before she disappeared, she loved it and carried it everywhere in the house.”
Maria looked at it, suddenly feeling very sad at the thought of the girl, out there, without her dear doll. “It’s beautiful.”
Mrs. Elmwood continued to stare at her. “You’re really Professor Einstein’s invention?”
“Automaton,” said Mr. Elmwood, snapping his fingers. “That’s the word old Einstein used.”
“Yes,” said Maria. “I am Professor Einstein’s automaton.”
“Sitting here, talking … I confess that my husband is right. You are an exceptional thing. I almost forgot you weren’t a real young woman.”
“Are you sure you’re not Charlotte, hypnotized afresh to think you’re this automaton?” asked Mr. Elmwood, screwing up his eyes.
Maria smiled. “I can take off my dress and open up my chest, if you like.”
“That won’t be necessary,” said Mrs. Elmwood briskly. “I thank you for coming to update us on Mr. Smith’s progress.” She stood, and Maria did the same. Mrs. Elmwood said, “I would prefer it if you did not come again. It is too distressing, while Charlotte remains missing.”
Maria bowed her head. “I understand.”
As they walked to the door, Mrs. Elmwood said, “It is like a story I read as a child. The fairies whisked away a human child, and left in its place a changeling.”
“Martha,” said Mr. Elmwood, placing a hand on her arm.
She shrugged him off and glared at Maria. “You will never replace Charlotte, do you understand? It is not a fair exchange, a beautiful young woman for an unholy thing of brass cogs and copper pipes. It should be you who is gone, gone to the scrapyard, not a living young woman like my daughter.”
Maria stepped backward against the door, surprised by the sudden ferocity of Mrs. Elmwood’s words, at the angry tears flowing down the woman’s cheeks.
“It should be you,” said Mrs. Elmwood again, but more weakly. “Who would miss you? I just want my daughter back. I want my little girl.”
Mr. Elmwood began to steer his wife toward the stairs, looking over his shoulder. “I am sorry. Come on Martha, let me take you upstairs for a lie down. You can let yourself out … uh…?”
“Maria.”
“Maria. Thank you.” He turned to help his sobbing wife up the stairs. “Come on, darling, it’s all right. The Hero of the Empire is on the case. Mr. Gideon Smith will not let us down.”
Maria quickly let herself into the cold snow flurries. A little way up the street she could make out the dark shape of her steam-cab.
It should be you who is gone.
Who would miss you?
Mr. Gideon Smith will not let us down.
The metal and glass in her chest weighing her down more heavily than any human heart could, Maria stifled a sob of her own and ran toward the waiting vehicle, the rag doll still unwittingly clutched in her hand.
He stared at the monster, which paced up and down in the short space that its chain tether allowed and beheld him with furious yellow eyes, saliva dripping from its teeth, until the man standing by the brazier finally spoke, wrenching his attention from the beast.
“It appears you will not have to go out into the snow after all, Deeptendu. Providence has brought us meat for our pet.”
The monkey leaped onto a simple wooden stool and then to the shoulder of the man, who fed it a nut from a paper bag in his hand. He had a lined, weathered face and dark, long hair pulled into a plaited ponytail that hung over his collarbone. He was perhaps fifty years of age, lithe and athletic of build beneath a rough cotton shirt and worn leather trousers, a crudely stitched collarless jacket of tanned hide over his simple outfit. His right leg ended at the knee; beneath was a thick rod of wood, capped with tin or some other malleable metal at the foot.
“You mean to feed me to your tyrannosaur?” Smith said, glancing around the dimly lit cellar at the one the man had addressed as Deeptendu, one of four who had hauled him into the room. He was swarthy, too, but more obviously Indian than the one-legged man. He was tall and wore a length of black cloth wound into a turban on his head, and he regarded Smith with dark eyes that sat closely together above a hooked nose. There were three other men in turbans, one fatter than his fellows, one with a cruel-looking scar that ran from above his right eye to the left corner of his mouth, giving him a sneering expression. All four wore loose cotton trousers and long-sleeved linen shirts, their feet shod in leather sandals.
The one called Deeptendu flexed his fists in front of him, and Smith saw a thin leather thong snap tight between them. “Do not fear,” said Deeptendu. “We will kill you first.”
The man with the ponytail held up his hand, one eyebrow raised in his deeply tanned face. “Wait, friend.” He scrutinized Smith. “Tyrannosaur, you say? You know this beast?”
Smith turned back to look at the monster, which had settled down expectantly to wait for its meal. Memories bobbed maddeningly around the periphery of his understanding. He said, “I met one, once. A little bigger, though.” He smiled, despite himself. “Its mother, perhaps.”
The man fed the monkey another nut and murmured to it, “Well, what a surprising thing you’ve led to us, Jip.”
“Who are you?” asked Smith. “What are you up to, skulking in the shadows like this, with a monster chained up in the sewers?”
Before he could even register that the man had moved, the one with the scar had crossed the space between them and slapped him sharply across the face. “Do not disrespect Fereng in this way!”
Smith felt himself drop to a defensive crouch, but the turbaned man had stepped back. He put a hand to his lip and glanced at the blood coloring his fingertips. “Fereng?” he said, looking to the one-legged man. “You?”
“A name.” He shrugged. “One of many I have used.” He raised his head in a sharp upward nod at the scar-faced man. “Kalanath. That is no way to treat our guest.”
Kalanath’s face contorted unpleasantly. “Guest, Fereng? I thought he was the monster’s dinner.”
Smith’s stomach rumbled, and he realized it was a long time since he himself had eaten. Fereng heard it, too, and said, “You are hungry? Come, sit with us. We have a little dhal simmering. Then you can tell me what you’re doing down here and how you know so much about our little pet.”
The tyrannosaur howled in apparent indignation at losing out on its meal. The youngest of the turbaned men, who looked no older than Smith, sighed. “Does this mean we have to go and find the monster food, Fereng?”