The Affinity Bridge (16 page)

Veronica heard footsteps. She didn’t look up. A moment later two more nurses were by Amelia’s side, one of them cradling her head whilst the other took over from Veronica, pinning her sister’s legs to the floor. Veronica heard a familiar voice from behind her.

“Miss Hobbes. Please step away.” She clambered to her feet, looking round to see Dr. Mason standing by the edge of the sofa. He looked serious. “I think it is time for you to leave now, Miss Hobbes. Your sister is in safe hands.” Veronica glanced back at her sister’s writhing body, held down by a small army of nurses. She looked torn.

“Really, it’s for the best. We can see her through this unfortunate episode, and then afterwards she’ll be in need of rest.” For once, Veronica thought, the swarthy-looking man in the brown suit had a kindly expression on his face. She believed he really did want to help her sister. “You can call again in a week’s time. I’m sure she’ll be up and about again by then. If the weather is tolerable you could even take her for a walk around the airing court.” He smiled. “But now it is time to go. I’ll walk you to the exit.

Veronica relented, glancing back at her sister one last time as Dr. Mason led her towards the door. Just as she was about to cross the threshold, however, she heard Amelia scream her name.

“Veronica!”

She looked back, startled. Amelia was trying to force herself up into a sitting position, facing her sister as the nurses struggled ineffectually to hold her down. Her eyes were still rolled back in their sockets, showing nothing but a disturbing sheen of milky-white, but Amelia seemed to be looking straight at her, as if she could actually
see
where Veronica was standing in the doorway.

Shocked, she whispered her response. “Amelia?”

The reply was a tortured rasp, as if dragged from somewhere within the depths of the girl’s nightmare. “It’s all in their heads, don’t you see, Veronica? You must see!” She collapsed back into her spasms and, shaking his head, Dr. Mason took Veronica by the arm, leading her away from the terrible scene of her sister’s distress and on towards the secure exit of the hospital.

Outside, Veronica looked up at the asylum and used her handkerchief to wipe away the tears that were still stinging her eyes. The clock tower showed that it was fast approaching two in the afternoon, and she knew she’d be wise to head back to her rooms in case Newbury decided to call. She hated what was happening to her sister, back inside that terrible red brick building, locked inside a ward with no reasonable company, no decent clothes, no respect. She hated the fact that she couldn’t do anything about it, either; that her parents had forbidden her from even discussing the issue with them, after she had railed so hard against their decision to place Amelia in the hands of these strangers in the first instance. Consequently, she hadn’t had any contact with them for over two months, and neither had they been to visit her sister since her incarceration in September. She knew that, soon, she was going to have to write to them and insist that they pay a visit to the asylum to see their daughter. Amelia had enough to endure; it was unfair for her to have to suffer feelings of embarrassment, guilt and rejection too.

Veronica regained her composure and made her way along the gravel path towards the exit to the railed compound and the street beyond. She passed the airing court on her left; a large, paved courtyard used to exercise the patients when the weather was clement enough for them to venture outside. She smiled. Next week, she would return to Wandsworth and take Amelia for a walk around this little yard, admiring the flowers and the birds like they had when Amelia was a young girl and Veronica would take her for morning walks along the country lanes by their parents’ house. In the meantime, she would throw herself into the case with Newbury and spend some time deliberating on the meaning of Amelia’s outburst. She could hear the words echoing around in her mind as she walked. “It’s all in their heads, don’t you see…”

She had no idea what it meant, and whether it was simply the ramblings of a disturbed, frightened mind, or something far more pertinent to her immediate future.

Only time, she supposed, would tell.

_{Chapter Twelve}

The next day Veronica woke early and decided that, after breakfast, she would head straight to the office. She’d had no word from Newbury and she was anxious to find out if there had been any further developments in the case. He may have been able to solicit further information from Her Majesty during his visit to the palace, and she wanted to press him to speak with Sir Charles, to find out if Inspector Foulkes had managed to uncover anything further at the scene of the crash.

Following her trip to the manufactory earlier that week, Veronica was still engaged with the notion that the vessel’s automaton pilot may have crawled its way out of the wreckage, scrabbling away into the trees before anyone else arrived at the scene. It wasn’t an outlandish idea; the automaton she had seen demonstrated had a hardy skeletal structure. She could see how the unit may have found itself confused, damaged but still functional, climbing out of the ruined cockpit before its more delicate components were consumed by the heat and the flames. Perhaps it had lain there inactive for some time before its preprogrammed systems engaged and it had been driven to move, not in an effort to escape the fire but simply because it was compelled to start the winding mechanism within its chest,

as Villiers had described to them during the demonstration in his workshop. She would discuss these thoughts with Newbury at length when she arrived at the office.

Veronica pulled back the curtains in her living room and looked out over the street. The sun was only just poking up over the clouds, but already the high street was bustling with people. Mechanical carriages trundled rudely along the road, puffing clouds of steam high into the air, their drivers shouting down at pedestrians to make way. She shook her head. She couldn’t understand Newbury’s obsession with progress. Of course, the automatons were marvellous inventions, but she couldn’t help wondering what would happen to all of the people they would displace if they were ever properly applied to industrial work in the city. Besides, London was a city still finding its way out of the last century. In her eyes, before there could be any major scientific revolutions, there were other more pressing social inadequacies in need of resolving. For a country run by a woman, Britain was still a nation in awe of its men.

Stepping away from the window, Veronica made her way to the small kitchen and put a flame to the grill. She’d take her toast and tea, and then, without further ado, she’d hail a cab to Bloomsbury and allow her head to be filled with the details of the case. That way, she thought, she might be able to forget the sight of her sister, her eyes shining white in the harsh light of the gas lamps, screaming Veronica’s name as she was pinned to the floor by a coterie of nurses and reassured by the doctors that the only reason she was suffering so much was because she was entirely insane.

The office door was locked when Veronica arrived at the museum. She fished around in her purse, searching out the key that she carried with her for the rare occasions when she was the first to arrive for the day. She turned the key hastily in the lock and stepped inside, closing the door behind her.

“Hello?”

The place was deserted. In fact, glancing around, she was convinced that it hadn’t been disturbed since she was last there herself, with Newbury and Miss Coulthard, almost two days before. She knew that Newbury had given Miss Coulthard leave to take as much time as she needed in the search for her missing brother. The fact that she was not here did not bode well for her success in locating his whereabouts. Sighing, she slipped her bag from her shoulder and placed it on the stand. She did the same with her coat and hat a moment later. Then, glancing at the grandfather clock in the corner, decided to press on for a while in the hope that Newbury would soon put in an appearance. If not, she would head over to his lodgings in Chelsea to see if she could find him there.

She set about making herself a pot of tea, and decided to take some notes, trying to put all of her haphazard thoughts about the case into some sense of order. That way, when she did finally manage to catch up with Newbury, she’d be able to present her ideas in something of a more coherent form.

An hour later it was past nine o’clock and there was still no word of Newbury. Veronica had filled two sheets of paper with copious notes on the case of
The Lady Armitage,
recounting not only her own thoughts on the matter but the chain of events that had led them to this point in the investigation. If she were asked to write a report on the case at a later date, the notes would prove an invaluable basis for the endeavour.

Glancing up at the clock again, she decided that it was time she tried to find out what had happened to her employer. She hoped that he hadn’t been called away to another crime scene during the night, at least without attempting to get a message to her first. Even though she didn’t relish the idea of encountering more cadavers, she also didn’t want to find herself suddenly left out of proceedings. It wasn’t like Newbury to leave her in the dark, though. She’d only known him for a matter of weeks, but already they had formed a mutual respect for one another, and no matter how secretive some of his pursuits may be she knew that he wasn’t in the business of shutting her out. She’d just have to track him down and find out what it was that had delayed him.

Veronica gathered her things and scrawled a brief note, which she left on Newbury’s desk, just in case they accidentally missed each other as she made her way over to Chelsea. She locked the office door behind her, climbed the stairs to the ground floor—where the exhibitions were already beginning to fill with the noisy hubbub of the public—and left through the main entrance in search of transport.

Newbury’s home was a delightful terraced house in a quiet suburban district of Chelsea. The entire street in which it sat appeared comfortably middle-class, residential and relatively unassuming. As she stepped down from the cab and paid the driver, Veronica tried to reconcile this fact with her knowledge of the man himself. Everything about the look of the house, at least from the outside, seemed to represent exactly the opposite of what she had taken to be Newbury’s taste. The place looked decidedly
old-fashioned;
a traditional English home, with a small rose garden at the front of the property and a door painted in bright pillar-box red. An ornate, black railing ran around the edges of the garden and a short path led up to the door itself, terminating in a series of tall steps. A bay window looked out onto the street below, although the light was reflecting brightly on the glass panes, making it difficult for Veronica to see if there was anyone inside. She shook her head. For a man so obsessed with the benefits of progress, the house seemed a trifle understated and traditional. Still, she supposed it was good to challenge stereotypes.

Hesitating for a moment, the thought flashed through her mind that she might have given the cab driver the incorrect address. She searched out her notebook and double-checked the number on the door. It was certainly the address Newbury had given her, written in her book in her own neat copperplate:
10 Cleveland Avenue, Chelsea.
She shrugged to herself and approached the door, rapping the knocker briskly. Behind her, the cab rolled away down the road, its horse’s hooves clattering noisily on the cobbles.