Shadow Conspiracy (43 page)

She had one brief moment to act before he overwhelmed her with superior size and strength. While he hovered between lying on his face and looming over her, in the moment of most precarious balance, she aimed a kick at his jaw.

Her aim was excellent. The poorly fitted shoe, which by a miracle had remained in place through all her struggles, impeded it not at all. His head snapped back.

By the Devil’s mercy, he was still conscious. Even as he fell, he strove to take her down with him.

What came next unfolded in the same slow expanse of time as her assault upon him. Her shoe had flown wide, ricocheted from the wall, and come to rest on the landing. As he started backwards, his heel caught it. Leather slid on stone; and he slid with it.

He completed three full revolutions on his tumble down the stair, in a most dramatic flailing of limbs. When at last he struck bottom, he lay terribly still.

Emma stood, incongruously and unexpectedly, with his greatcoat in her hand. He had slipped out of it when he fell.

Her first emotion was wild and utterly mad: it was glee. Her second was more becoming to a civilized person: horror, superseded by the white emptiness of shock.

George Fraser was dead. She should, in the spirit of strictest scientific proof, descend the stair and confirm that fact. But she could not master her body to do so. Her intelligence remained clinically detached. Her lower faculties trembled so hard that she could scarcely keep her feet.

The coat fell from her palsied fingers. She turned, spurning it, then paused. She needed several attempts, so unsteady were her hands, but she reached into the pocket and extricated the packet of papers in their leather case.

Clutching the case to her breast with the rags of her nightdress, she stumbled away from the scene of her unwitting but by no means unwished for crime.

The inner chapel was the most ancient of the buildings in the abbey. It had seen close upon a thousand years of holiness, first of scholar monks, then of the brides of God. Its low arches and heavy pillars seemed well suited to the ranks of black-clad figures that filed into the choir.

Not all of those figures walked with a human stride. Some glided with the gait of automata. These sang as they moved, perpetually, for that was their sole and most sacred function.

Sister Annunciata lay on her bier before the altar. She still lived through the offices of Sister Theodosia’s mechanical lung, but the end was palpably near.

The altar before which she lay was bare save for a chalice of remarkable workmanship, the base wrought of gold. The smoke-coloured glass nestled within a webwork of gold and copper wire. It was larger by far than a priest’s chalice, as wide and deep as the span of Mother Agatha’s two hands.

A luminous substance filled the cup to the brim. The shimmering not-quite-liquid seemed intent on climbing out of its vessel into the air. It was, Mother Agatha had been informed when it was first developed, a compound of phlogiston, spirits of mercury, and a distillation of the most exquisite cognac.

As she meditated upon the apotheosis of wine, two nuns in the same variation on the habit as Sister Theodosia entered from the sacristy, guiding between them a shrouded figure. It stood to the height of a woman; its face within the hood was the perfect likeness of Sister Annunciata’s own as she had been in her youth: a life mask, delicately moulded, serene and still.

The figure’s guides positioned it beside the bier, on the side opposite the lung-beast. Reverently, with murmured prayers, they relieved it of its shroud. It stood before them in the habit of a Sister of Perpetual Adoration, waxen hands folded, waxen face expressionless.

Mother Agatha drew a breath. It always shook her to see the glory of the Lord’s creation as expressed through His servants. This was a triumph of the mechanical arts, a form more refined, more sophisticated, more nearly human than any that had yet stood in this place for this purpose. It would, the dear Lord willing, endure for generations.

First however it must be made complete. Sister Infirmarer took her place beside the bier, escorted by the automaton that had, through Sister Theodosia’s whimsy, been wrought in the shape of a monkey. It bore a tray of gleaming instruments.

Mother Agatha raised her voice in the first of the Psalms of this most holy rite.

“Sing to the Lord a new song,

For He has done wondrous deeds....”

Emma had passed through shock into a kind of frozen serenity. Pain was her constant companion, but she managed to keep it at bay. She had a plan, which she had some hope of implementing: her extreme disarray would offer proof enough, surely, of the violence done her. She had looked for the abbess in her office but found the chamber deserted; likewise the infirmary, the dormitory nearby, and every other portion of the abbey. Even the chapel was silent, which surprised and disconcerted her.

She could still hear the heavenly sounds of singing. They had moved deeper into the abbey. For lack of greater inspiration, she followed them to their source.

She found the inner chapel where it stood, up against the spur of a peak. Its doors were open, for what had the sisters to fear? Any guest who came so far would surely be welcome, or else would have no hope of escape.

She entered cautiously because that was her nature, and stood rooted.

At first glance it seemed to be a sacred service in the rite of Rome, the funeral of a departed sister. Then she saw the flash of the knife and the glistening scarlet of blood.

It was a profoundly shocking, pagan vision, like a ritual of the ancient Aztecs, but set to the stately plainsong of the Roman Mass. They removed the sister’s heart and laid it in a chalice of glass and gold, which seemed filled with liquid light. The light perfused through the organ, which was, Emma realised, still beating.

The woman who had removed the heart bowed over it in its vessel and turned toward what Emma had taken for another of the nuns. But no living woman would stand with her chest laid open and the gleam of coils and gears within.

The centre of the mechanism was a globe of glass that opened to the surgeon’s touch, presenting a receptacle for the heart. She bound it in a netting of golden wires, moving swiftly and yet meticulously, connecting each separate artery and vein to a waiting conduit within the automaton. And all the while, the heart continued to beat, as the light that had filled it faded slowly.

Before the light was altogether gone, the heart was secure in its new home, beating strong and steady, though what fluid or supernatural ichor it pumped through the metal body, Emma could not perceive. The surgeon closed and sealed the receptacle, then sealed the compartment itself, restoring the automaton to its semblance of humanity.

Perhaps by coincidence, perhaps by design, the waves of chanting died away into silence. In that silence, the automaton stirred. Its face did not go so far as to take on an expression; that most likely was beyond it. Yet its eyes opened, and in them was the light of a human soul.

It opened its mouth. The sound that came forth was so pure, so clear, so piercing in its beauty, that Emma broke down and wept.

Emma made no move to resist the nuns who descended upon her. They offered no violence, but they suffered no escape. They escorted her politely but firmly from the chapel back to the infirmary, where they stood guard over her until, at some considerable length, the reverend abbess appeared to judge her.

She was allowed in the interim to read, but the packet she had taken from Fraser’s greatcoat disappointed her sorely. Its contents were nearly entirely in code. Even the map of the Alpine tracks and the plan of the abbey were labelled in a cipher that she lacked the time or the knowledge to read. Two documents only were written in the Queen’s English: a brief accounting of expenses that included a week’s lodging in the hotel in which Emma had first encountered Fraser, and an even less lengthy letter on the same flowing hand as that which had drawn the plan of the abbey.

The letter’s contents were intriguing to say the least.
B. and I shall attend the première of the new ballet in Paris: ‘Giselle,’ it is called. It would be in your interest to attend us there.
It was signed, simply and without a flourish,
A.

While Emma pondered this mystery, the abbess appeared at last. Emma had been given no opportunity to repair her tattered clothing, but that was well enough to her mind: it served as proof of what she had endured. In the same wild and disreputable state in which she had appeared in the chapel, she faced Mother Agatha.

The abbess offered no censure of her condition, but Emma had no doubt that it was weighed, reckoned, and judged accordingly. Mother Agatha did not at once reveal that judgment. She said with perfect calm, “Your husband has been found in a place and in a state which has given rise to a number of questions. Am I correct in my judgement that you may provide answers for them?”

“That was not my husband,” Emma said. She made no effort to keep the disgust from either face or voice.

Mother Agatha raised a brow. “Indeed? Were we misled?”

“You were lied to,” said Emma bluntly. “That was a rake and an adventurer. He lured me away from the walking party with which I was associated, and bore me off into the storm. He was, it seems, on a mission to seek and find this abbey; I was to be the bait. Or so I presume. He was not inclined to share his secrets with a mere and brainless female.”

The abbess considered Emma’s words with care. After some little time she said, “He does not seem to have treated you with either tact or respect. Yet if he is what and who I suspect he is, not only is he capable of treating somewhat honourably with a woman, he is in the pay of one.”

“Ada,” Emma said abruptly. “He spoke the name Ada.”

“Yes,” said the abbess. “Indeed. That would, I believe, be Ada Byron King, Lady Lovelace: a most estimable woman and a powerful mathematical intellect. She and her associate Mr. Babbage have been causing rather a stir in certain parts of the world.” The abbess paused; she smiled at Emma’s expression. “What, child? You mistook remoteness of location for dearth of information? Our connexions are numerous and extensive. We are well aware of Lady Ada’s mission and her works.”

“I fear I cannot say the same,” Emma said. “Of that lady indeed I have heard, but only fragments of her mathematical and mechanical attainments. Mr. Babbage of course, being a man, has a wider fame and a greater renown.”

“That is the gross inequity of this world,” the abbess agreed. “Nonetheless Lady Ada is a powerful woman, and not only by dint of her illustrious, indeed notorious, ancestry. She has set herself upon a quest, a sacred mission if you will, to discover the whereabouts of a certain...mistake in which her father was involved. That was not the first of her agents to attempt to find us, though he was the first to penetrate our walls. The storm served him well in that regard.”