Time's Mistress (2 page)

The Mechanisms of Grief

“There is no truth, there is only beauty,” cried the Aesthetics

“There is no art, there are only lies,” was the response of the Mechanicum

It wasn’t so much the rise of man as it was the fall.

If they were to believed it was the day that science would stop the world. Magisters of the Mechanicum had placed advertisements in the more respectable broadsheets inviting the good people of London, the greatest city in the world, to attend the grand unveiling of the Machine, on the Meridian, at the Meridian. Noon, at Greenwich, for the uninitiated. The advertisement reeked of hyperbole but it caught the attention, which, of course, was its entire raison d’être.

A glass house capable of holding five hundred wide-eyed Londoners had been constructed for the event, though in truth no-one could know whether a single soul would show. They called it the Palace of Illusion. Even now, twelve hours before the show, the tangible thrill of anticipation fairly crackled through the air. Secrets and lies, the sign driven into the dirt on the embankment proclaimed. It did not say what secrets and gave no hints of the lies it promised to tell.

“Ask me no lies and I will tell you all of my secrets,” Josiah Bloome said, deliberately mangling the truism.

He stood one foot on either side of the golden line that marked the prime meridian. It was a place of power, for sure, but it was a most curious location for the unveiling of any new invention when a few miles away the International Exhibition of Inventions was unfolding in the Albert Hall galleries up in South Kensington. Indeed, the fact that the Mechanicum had chosen to construct a parody of Paxton’s great glass house from the 1851 World’s Fair smacked of thumbing the nose up at the Establishment. He stood before the glass house at midnight, staring up at the multi-faceted windows. Each one caught and refracted the moonlight to create a mother-of-pearl ripple across the roof. It was a breathtaking piece of architecture, but he expected nothing less from the Magisters. After all, they were nothing if not the masters of shape and form.

Josiah walked slowly around the building, watching his own ghost in the glass as he completed the circuit. There was no door and no noticeable flaw in the glass to suggest a hidden entry. It was a curious thing, to be sure. Perhaps the most peculiar thing about it though was that it was more like something the Aesthetics would create—so much useless beauty as opposed to the functional ugliness of a machine. The dichotomy amused him. The two movements might strut and swagger claiming that each was the way forward and the other was the way to Hell, but they had more in common than either cared to admit. Life was seldom as simple as to be black or white, or even some subtle shade of grey; it went into colours that even the eye could not perceive. Curiously, he pressed his palm against the glass wall and felt the cold glaze beneath his hand. He didn’t know what he had expected … a thrill of life perhaps? A shocking jolt of electricity? A pulse? He was almost disappointed that nothing of the sort greeted his touch.

The familiar fog of the city thickened along the river; for now it was a white serpent coiled along the Thames but come morning the snake would have shed its skin all across the city streets reducing visibility down to five or ten feet at best. People would die. It was the one irrefutable truth of the London fogs: death walked within those choking mists. The old, the asthmatic, the emphacymic, anyone with respiratory problems of any sort suffered. There would be a dozen deaths at least, just from people who simply couldn’t breathe. More would die as they staggered, lost, into trouble. Thieves and muggers would be out in force, and shiv men with their wicked knives. It was that kind of weather. Old grudges had a way of getting settled in the fog. The Peeler’s couldn’t hope to keep the peace when they couldn’t see it slipping away for love or money. Come morning he expected to be hearing about corpses in the Serpentine, perhaps some poor sap would be found impaled on the sword of Old Bailey or some unlucky Mudlark would come to a sticky end in the Thames. It always happened.

It always puzzled him that the great minds of the Mechanicum didn’t look for ways to purge the fogs, a light source capable of cutting clean through it, or at the very least some breathing devices filled with fresher air for the sufferers. Using their genius to save lives seemed to Josiah to be such an obvious thing for the Great Minds to do. Unfortunately such application of the mind necessitated that these people care about something beyond the pursuit of science. They didn’t, as a man drummed out of their hallowed halls Josiah Bloome knew that all too well. Indeed, as a man wont to flutter on the ponies and not averse to a game of cards, he would have rather wagered that the Magisters had in their possession an infernal device that pumped out the pea-soupers that smothered the city. After all, it was the fog that proved once and for all that beauty was an irrelevance, didn’t it? It was almost as though Nature herself had weighed in to settle their dispute: if it couldn’t be seen how could its’ physical form be of any value?

“Oh yea of little faith,” Josiah Bloome muttered, giving up on the glass house. He would come back in the morning, fighting his way through the smog to witness the great reveal. His curiosity was piqued by—of all things—the lack of any tangible science on display. He almost expected to return to a Medway filled with freaks and sideshow barkers enticing the gullible to come see the bearded lady and the world’s strongest man, but that wasn’t the way of the Mechanicum.

Josiah was lost; not in the traditional sense. He knew where he was in space and time, his disorientation was spiritual. Since he had met Fabian Stark and been introduced to the Club on Old Grey’s Lane, everything he believed in had been brought into question. His world was one of science and reason, not one of the supernatural and the outré. He believed only in the quantifiable and the qualifiable. His was a world of rational thought not populated by ghoulies and ghosties and all of those imaginative constructs that went bump in the night.

And yet he had seen things his science was at a loss to explain.

Six years was a long time to miss someone, to yearn for them. Annabel Leigh had been the light of his life. Cholera was such a cruel disease and an utterly horrible way to die. Worse though by far was his sense of guilt at not having been there to see to, to tend to her as she failed. That was what it meant to be a husband; that had been core to his vows, instead he had been with Pulleine and Durnford and the dying men in Isandlwana. He had fought the good fight for Queen and Country against the might of the Zulu nation, and his reward? To return home to an empty house and be told Annabel Leigh had died while he was over there, clinging to the thoughts of her to see him through. The war was terminal in every way, a bleak reflection of the darkness within. He knew no language to express the sadism, the barbary, the brutality of the human spirit. He had lived through such horrors, and even now, six years on, he could not bear to imagine it. Josiah Bloome had survived Eshowe and Tinta’s Kraal and the Hell of the Inyezane River; he had taken a tribal spear in the shoulder and another in the gut, and come through, but he had crumbled then. Not slowly but rather like a great building with its foundations undermined by gunpowder plots.

A man is the sum of his memories, he had argued with McCreedy only the night before, that is the notion of the soul, not some spiritual thing but rather a construction of memories absorbed to create something new and unique. But what was a man who could not bear his own memories? Was he some soulless cage of flesh?

That was how he had felt for the longest time now.

He kicked at stones as he walked. Nothing around him felt real anymore. It was fitting then that this beautiful construction called itself an illusion.

He had read all of the new literature, seeing the same need in it as the writers like Stephenson and Shelley sought to remove the Divine from the world. Science had effectively killed the God he had grown up worshipping, reason had undone the rest of the miracles He had supposedly wrought. All that remained, the last power man had not usurped was that of creation. Life. Shelley sought to claim that through electricity and butchery for her vile Doctor Frankenstein, Stephenson dared suggest that an elixir could find a second soul within the mortal cage. These Aesthetics sought to complete the robbery of Eternity by effectively emasculating the Lord and denying Heaven. He did not know what to think of that—it excited the scientist in him, the possibilities of it, but it devastated the man who had lost love. The thought of Annabel Leigh in some sheltered heaven, sat upon clouds with the angels was all that he had clung to during the deepest depressions her death had wrought. The scientist and the believer warred within him.

More than ever, he needed to believe in this other world the Greyfriar’s Gentlemen opened up to him.

Of course, in turn he had shown Stark and McCreedy and the others things they would never have countenanced in their own peculiar philosophies. He took one such miracle from his pocket, a small brass arachnoid. It wasn’t a spider per se, and most assuredly didn’t live or breathe, but it was no less marvellous than any of God’s creatures. Bloome set it down upon the ground. The bug was of his own design, with small barbs set into the spindly legs that allowed it to scale almost sheer surfaces. Being the size of a halfpenny the mechanism only allowed for a few hours life even when fully wound, but for as long as it crept along the arachnoid would digest all that it saw and heard, allowing him to listen to it later. The brass spider scuttled toward the glass house. Bloome watched it go. If anything of interest happened between now and the grand unveiling he would know about it. For a few moments at least, he was a life giver.

In his world, secrets had a way of coming out no matter how much fog tried to obfuscate them.

He walked back through the city at night, looking at the young girls lined up in the doorways of Piccadilly and at their mothers lurking behind them in the shadows. That mothers would sell their own daughters for a few coins disgusted him, it was exploitation at its very worst. Yet for every too-pretty girl there was a greedy mother hiding in the doorway behind her. It was an ugly interpretation of the ‘behind every great man’ notion. How great were these women?

Saddened by the depths humanity had sunk to, Josiah Bloome retired to his chambers in Pimlico, took a snifter of brandy and smoked a pipe of dry tobacco while puzzling over the glass house.

Come dawn he was no closer to unravelling the mystery, if indeed there was any mystery to be unravelled. He finished his morning ablutions and walked out into a city of smells. The street market was in full flow with fat-bellied merchants hawking their wares, most culled from Billingsgate or Spittlefields the day before and resold now with a penny tacked on to the price for their efforts. Had it been a hot summer day the street would have reeked of fish and pickles before noon, mercifully the low-lying fog had the effect of turning the cobbles into something approaching an ice house, preserving the catch of yesterday for a few hours longer.

He was a lonely man walking lonely streets.

He watched a bump and run, not remotely interested in bringing attention to the young pickpocket. The fat old stallholder would learn of his loss soon enough and finish the day tacking on two or three pennies to make up for it. Josiah was one of that breed of bleeding hearts who believed theft was driven by necessity. He wandered down toward the river, and then hailed a hansom cab to take him the rest of the way to Greenwich. He would be early but that didn’t matter. It would give him time to study the arachnoid. The ride was unpleasant, the iron-rimmed wheels seeming to hit every crater in the road as they clattered toward the glass house of the Mechanicum.

Josiah lay back in the leather banquette, folding his arms behind his head. The driver lashed the horse on with cries of “Hie!” and slowed her with an occasional “Whoa, girl!”

Josiah listened to the steady clip-clop of the hooves on the cobbles, letting the sound lull him. He spent the short ride thinking through what he knew: the Mechanicum, scholars of machine, cog and motor, were promising to show their ultimate creation to the world, but had chosen not to do it amid the fife and drum of the World Fair where so many other grand creations were being unveiled. Why? What could be their motivation? No doubt it bore some relationship to the long running argument with the Aesthetics.

He took out his time piece; all would be revealed in little over four hours.

Crowds were already in place, he saw, clambering out of the cab. He paid the driver, tipping him well in return for the promise to return to collect him after all of the pomp and circumstance was over. The driver, a hunch-backed, thin-faced, pock-marked man tipped the brim of his cap and assured Josiah he would meet him in the alleyway behind the observatory in six hours.

Josiah saw a few familiar faces in the crowd, Dorian Carruthers stood beside his latest fling, wrapped up against the elements and flapping his arms to keep the blood circulating. The woman on his arm was some elfin-faced doyen of the theatre world Bloome half-recognised. No doubt she was treading the West End boards in some production or other; unlike some, he didn’t keep up with the comings and goings in The Stage. He tried not to stare, but she was beautiful, and the way she met his gaze suggested she rather enjoyed the attention of his eyes.

“Fancy seeing you here, old man,” Carruthers said, stepping away from the actress to pump his hand.

“Seems like a whole lot of fuss for nothing,” Bloome said, looking beyond him at the glass construction: the Palace of Illusion.

“But isn’t that always the way? Still, one can’t help but wonder what the mad scientists have up their sleeve,” he cocked an eyebrow toward the building behind him. In daylight it was a spectacular thing to be sure, but after the mystery of the night, seeing it so bold and lit up seemed almost to diminish it. Beyond the throng Josiah saw a number of men identically costumed in immaculately tailored Savile Row suits, great coats and top hats, he counted thirteen in all: the gentlemen of the Mechanicum. It was no surprise that they would choose to match the precision of their machines with their dress. They were identical down to the smallest detail, taking the similarity to the extremes with the neat trim of their facial hair. He recognised a few of them from back in the day when they had called him brother, but others were new. Bloome wanted to laugh at the preposterousness of it all, but there was something almost fascistic about the regimented appearance that placed a chill in his heart. It was decidedly fascistic, in truth. There was no individuality or uniqueness to it, as though the scientists were saying look at us, we are all the same, built from the same building blocks.