The Difference Engine

FIFTH ITERATION The All-Seeing Eye

An afternoon in Horseferry Road, twelfth of November, 1855, image recorded by A. G. S. Hullcoop of the Department of Criminal Anthropometry.

The shutter of Hullcoop's Talbot "Excelsior" has captured eleven men descending the broad steps from the entrance of the Central Statistics Bureau. Triangulation locates Hullcoop, with his powerful lens, concealed atop the roof of a publishers' offices in Holywell Street.

Foremost among the eleven is Laurence Oliphant. His gaze, beneath the black brim of his top-hat, is mild and ironical.

The tall, dull-surfaced hats create a repeated vertical motif common to images of the period.

Like the others, Oliphant wears a dark frock-coat above narrow trousers of a lighter hue. His neck is wrapped in a high choker of dark silk. The effect is dignified and columnar, though something in Oliphant's manner manages to suggest the sportsman's lounging stroll.

The other men are barristers, Bureau functionaries, a senior representative of the Colgate Works. Behind them, above Horseferry Road, swoop the tarred copper cables of the Bureau's telegraphs.

Processes of resolution reveal the pale blurs dotting these lines to be pigeons.

Though the afternoon is unseasonably bright, Oliphant, a frequent visitor to the Bureau, is opening an umbrella.

The top-hat of the Colgate's representative displays an elongated comma of white pigeon-dung.

Oliphant sat alone in a small waiting-room, which communicated by a glazed door with a surgery. The buff-colored walls were hung with colored diagrams depicting the ravages of hideous diseases. A bookcase was crammed with dingy medical volumes. There were carved wooden pews that might have come from a wrecked church, and a coal-dyed woolen drugget in the middle of the floor.

He looked at a mahogany instrument-case and a huge roll of lint occupying places of their own on the bookcase.

Someone called his name.

He saw a face through the panes of the surgery door. Pallid, the bulging forehead plastered with drenched strands of dark hair.

"Collins," he said. " 'Captain Swing.' " And other faces, legion, the faces of the vanished, names suppressed from memory.

"Mr. Oliphant?"

Dr. McNeile regarded him from the doorway. Vaguely embarrassed, Oliphant rose from his pew, automatically straightening his coat.

"Are you entirely well, Mr. Oliphant? Your expression was most extraordinary, just then." McNeile was slender and neatly bearded, with dark brown hair, his grey eyes so pale as to suggest transparency.

"Yes, thank you, Dr. McNeile. And yourself?"

"Very well, thank you. Some remarkable symptoms are emerging, Mr. Oliphant, in the wake of recent events. I've one gentleman who was seated atop an omnibus, Regent Street, when that vehicle was struck broadside by a steam-gurney traveling at an estimated twenty miles per hour!"

"Really? How dreadful…"

To Oliphant's horror, McNeile actually rubbed his long white hands together. "There was no evident physical trauma as a result of the collision. None. None whatever." He fixed Oliphant with that bright, nearly colorless gaze. "Subsequently, we have observed insomnia, incipient melancholia, minor amnesiac episodes—numerous symptoms customarily associated with latent hysteria." McNeile smiled, a quick rictus of triumph. "We have observed, Mr. Oliphant, a remarkably pure, that is to say, a clinical progression of railway spine!"

McNeile bowed Oliphant through the doorway, into a handsomely paneled room, which was sparsely furnished with ominous electro-magnetic appliances. Oliphant removed his coat and waistcoat, arranging them upon a mahogany valet-stand.

"And your… 'spells,' Mr. Oliphant?"

"None, thank you, since the last treatment." Was this true? It was difficult to say, really.

"And your sleep has been undisturbed?"

"I should say so. Yes."

"Any dreams of note? Waking visions?"

"No."

McNeile stared with his pale eyes. "Very well."

Oliphant, feeling utterly foolish in his braces and starched shirt-front, climbed upon McNeile's "manipulation table," a curiously articulated piece of furniture that in equal parts resembled a chaise-lounge and a torturer's rack. The thing's various segments were upholstered in a stiff. Engine-patterned brocade, smooth and cold to the touch. Oliphant attempted to find a comfortable position; McNeile made this impossible, spinning one or another of several brass wheels. "Do be still," McNeile said.

Oliphant closed his eyes. "This fellow Pocklington," McNeile said.

"I beg your pardon?" Oliphant opened his eyes. McNeile stood above him, positioning a coil of iron on an adjustable armature.

"Pocklington. He's attempting to take credit for the cessation of the Limehouse cholera."

"The name isn't familiar A medical man?"

"Hardly. The fellow's a works-engineer. He claims to have ended the cholera by the simple expedient of removing the handle from a municipal water-pump!" McNeile was screwing a braided copper cable in place.

"I'm afraid I don't follow you."

"Little wonder, sir! The man's either a fool or the worst sort of charlatan. He's written in the Times that the cholera is nothing more than the result of contaminated water."

"Is that entirely unreasonable, do you think?"

"Utterly counter to enlightened medical theory." McNeile set to work with a second length of copper. "This Pocklington, you see, is something of a favorite of Lord Babbage's. He was employed to remedy the ventilation troubles of the pneumatic trains."

Oliphant, detecting the envy in McNeile's tone, felt a slight and spiteful satisfaction. Babbage, speaking at Byron's state funeral, had regretted the fact that modern medicine remained more an art than a science. The speech, naturally, had been most widely published.

"Do close your eyes, please, in the event of a spark being discharged." McNeile was pulling on a pair of great, stiff, leather gauntlets.

McNeile connected the copper cables to a massive voltaic cell. The room filled with the faint eerie odor of electricity.

"Please try to relax, Mr. Oliphant, so as to facilitate the polar reversal!"

Half-Moon Street was illuminated by a massive Webb lamp, a fluted Corinthian column fueled by sewer-gas. Like the rest of London's Webbs, it had remained unlit, during the summer's emergency, for fear of leaks and explosions. Indeed, there had been at least a dozen pavement-ripping blasts, most attributed to the same firedamp that powered the Webb. Lord Babbage was an outspoken supporter of the Webb method; as a result, every school-boy knew that the methane potential from a single cow was adequate for an average household's daily heating, lighting, and cooking requirements.

He glanced up at the lamp as he neared his own Georgian facade. Its light was another apparent token of returning normalcy, but he took little comfort in tokens. The physical and more crudely social cataclysm was past now, certainly, but Byron's death had triggered successive waves of instability; Oliphant imagined them spreading out like ripples in a pond, overlapping with others that spread from more obscure points of impact, creating ominously unpredictable areas of turbulence. One such, certainly, was the business of Charles Egremont and the current Luddite witch-hunt.

Oliphant knew with absolute professional certainty that the Luddites were defunct; despite the best efforts of a few manic anarchists, the London riots of the past summer had shown no coherent or organized political agenda. All reasonable aspirations of the working-class had been successfully subsumed by the Radicals. Byron, in his vigorous days, had tempered justice with a well-dramatized show of mercy. Those early Luddite leaders who had made their peace with the Rads were now the tidy, comfortably well-to-do leaders of respectable trades-unions and craft-guilds. Some were wealthy industrialists—though their peace of mind was severely perturbed by Egremont's systematic disinterment of old convictions.

A second wave of Luddism had arisen in the turbulent forties, aimed, this time, directly against the Rads, with a charter of popular rights and a desperate zest for violence. But it had crumbled in a welter of internecine treachery, and its boldest spirits, such as Walter Gerard, had met a distressingly public punishment. Today, such groups as the Manchester Hell-Cats, to which Michael Radley had belonged as a boy, were mere youth-gangs, quite devoid of political purpose. Captain Swing's influence might still be felt occasionally in rural Ireland, or even in Scotland, but Oliphant attributed this to the Rads' agricultural policies, which tended to lag behind their brilliance in industrial management.

No, he thought, as Bligh opened the door at his approach, the spirit of Ned Ludd was scarcely abroad in the land, but what was one to make of Egremont and his furious campaign?

"Good evening, sir."

"Good evening, Bligh." He gave Bligh his top-hat and umbrella.

"Cook has a cold joint, sir."

"Very good. I'll dine in the study, thank you."

"Feeling well, sir?"

"Yes, thank you." Either McNeile's magnets or the devilishly uncomfortable manipulation table had set his back aching. McNeile had been recommended to him by Lady Brunel, Lord Brunel's spine being assumed to have suffered an inordinate amount of railway-shock in the course of his famous career. Dr. McNeile had recently diagnosed Oliphant's "numinous spells," as he insisted on calling them, as symptoms of railway-spine, a condition in which the magnetic polarity of the patient's vertebrae was assumed to have been reversed by trauma. It was McNeile's thesis that this condition might be corrected by the application of electromagnetism, and to this end Oliphant now paid weekly visits to the Scot's Harley Street premises. McNeile's manipulations reminded Oliphant of his own father's unhealthily keen interest in mesmerism.

Oliphant senior, having served as Attorney-General of the Cape Colony, had subsequently been appointed Chief Justice of Ceylon. Consequently, Oliphant had received a private and necessarily rather fragmentary education, one to which he owed both his fluency in modern languages and his extraordinary ignorance of Greek and Latin. His parents had been Evangelicals of a markedly eccentric sort, and though he himself retained, however privately, certain aspects of their faith, he recalled with an odd dread his father's experiments: iron wands, spheres of crystal…

And how, he wondered, climbing the carpeted stairs, would Lady Brunel be adjusting to life as the Prime Minister's wife?

His Japanese wound began to throb as he gripped the banister.

Taking out a triple-splined Maudslay key from his waistcoat-pocket, he unlocked the door to his study. Bligh, who held the key's only duplicate, had lit the gas and banked the coals.

The study, paneled in oak, overlooked the park from a shallow triple-bay. An ancient refectory-table, quite plain, running very nearly the length of the room, served as Oliphant's desk. A very modern office-chair, mounted on glass-wheeled patent casters, regularly migrated around the table as Oliphant's work took him from one stack of folders to the next, then back again. The casters, in the chair's daily peregrinations, had begun to wear away the nap of the blue Axminster.

Three Colt & Maxwell receiving-telegraphs, domed in glass, dominated the end of the table nearest the window, their tapes coiling into wire baskets arranged on the carpet. There was a spring-driven transmitter as well, and an encrypting tape-cutter of recent Whitehall issue. The various cables for these devices, in tightly woven sleeves of burgundy silk, snaked up to a floral eyebolt suspended from the central lavalier, where they then swung to a polished brass plate, bearing the insignia of the Post Office, which was set into the wainscoting.

One of the receivers began immediately to hammer away. He walked the length of the table and read the message as it emerged from the machine's mahogany base.

Bligh entered with a tray of sliced mutton and pickle. "I've brought a bottle of ale, sir," he said, setting out linen and silverware on a section of the table kept cleared for this purpose.

"Thank you, Bligh." Oliphant raised the tape of Wakefield's message with his fingertip, then let it droop back toward its wire basket.

Bligh poured the ale, then departed with his tray and the empty ceramic bottle. Oliphant trundled the office-chair around the table and sat down to spread his mutton with Branston pickle.

He was startled from his solitary meal by the clatter of one of his three receivers. He glanced down the table and saw the tape beginning to unspool in the machine to the right. The machine to the left, on which Wakefield's invitation to lunch had arrived, was on his personal number. Right meant police business of some kind, likely Betteredge, or Fraser. Putting down knife and fork, he rose.

He watched the message emerge from its brass slot.

He took his father's German hunter from his waistcoat to note the time. Tucking it away, he touched the glass that domed the centermost of the three receiving-telegraphs. There had been no message on that one since the death of the late Prime Minister.

The address to which the cab earned him was in Brigsome's Terrace, off a thoroughfare of the sort that speculative builders delighted in carving through the ancient and still largely unexplored wilderness that was East London.

The terrace itself, Oliphant decided as he alighted from his hansom, was as dismal a block of buildings as had ever been composed of brick and mortar. The builder who had speculated on these ten dreary prison-houses, he thought, had likely hung himself behind the parlor door of some adjacent tavern before the hideous things were finished.

The streets through which the cab had conveyed him had been those one seemed to traverse at times such as these—all those thoroughfares seemingly unknown to day and the ordinary pedestrian. A thin rain was falling now, and Oliphant momentarily regretted not having accepted the water-proof that Bligh had offered at the door. The two men before No. 5 wore long drooping black cape-like articles of waxed Egyptian cotton. A recent innovation from New South Wales, Oliphant knew, much praised in the Crimea and precisely the thing for concealing weapons of the sort that these two most certainly concealed.

"Special Bureau," Oliphant said, briskly climbing past the guards. Abashed by his accent and manner, they let him pass. It would be necessary to report that to Fraser.

He entered the house, finding himself in a parlor lit by a powerful carbide-lantern, atop a tripod, its merciless white glare magnified by a concave round of polished tin. The parlor was furnished with scraps salvaged from the ruins of gentility. There was a cottage-piano, and a chiffonier several sizes too large for the room. The latter struck him as pathetically gorgeous, with its tarnished gilt moldings. A threadbare patch of Brussels carpet swarmed with roses and lilies, amid a desert of colorless drugget. Knitted curtains shaded the windows overlooking Brigsome's Terrace. Beside the glass, two hanging wire baskets were festooned with plants of the cactus species, which grew in prickly and spider-like profusion.

Oliphant noted an acrid stench, more penetrating than the reek of carbide.

Betteredge emerged from the rear of the house. He wore a high-crowned derby hat that made him seem altogether American, so that he might easily have been mistaken for one of the Pinkerton operatives he shadowed daily. Likely the effect was deliberate, down to the patent boots with their elasticated side-gores. His expression, quite uncharacteristically, was one of grave anxiety. "I'll take full responsibility, sir," he stammered. Something was very wrong. "Mr. Fraser's waiting for you, sir. Nothing's been moved."

Oliphant allowed himself to be led through the doorway, and up a narrow, perilously steep flight of stairs. They emerged in a barren hallway, illuminated by a second carbide-lantern. Great spreading continents of niter marred the bare plaster walls. The burnt smell was stronger here.

Through another doorway, into yet brighter glare, and Fraser's dour face looking up from where he knelt beside a sprawled body. Fraser seemed about to speak; Oliphant silenced him with a gesture.

Here, then, was the source of the reek. Upon an old-fashioned coaching-case stood a compact modern Primus stove of the sort intended for camp, its brass fuel-canister gleaming bright as a mirror. Upon its ring rested a pannikin of black cast-iron. Whatever had been cooking in this vessel was now a charred and bitterly odorous residue.

He turned his attention to the corpse. The man had been a giant; in the small room, it was necessary to step over his outspread limbs. Oliphant bent to study the contorted features, the death-dulled eyes. He straightened, facing Fraser. "And what do you make of this?"

"He was warming tinned beans," Fraser said. "Eating them straight out of the pot there. With this." With the toe of his shoe, Fraser indicated a kitchen-spoon of chipped blue enamel. "I'd say he was alone. I'd say he managed to choke down a good third of the tin before the poison felled him."

"This poison," Oliphant said, taking his cigar-case and sterling cutter from his coat, "what do you suppose it was?" He extracted a cheroot, clipped and pierced it.

"Something potent," Fraser said, "by the look of him."

"Yes," Oliphant agreed. "Big chap."

"Sir," Betteredge said, "you'd best see this." He displayed a very long knife, sheathed in sweat-stained leather. A sort of harness dangled from the sheath. The weapon's handle was of dull horn, its hilt of brass. Betteredge drew the thing from its sheath. It was something on the order of a sailor's dirk, though single-edged, with a peculiar reverse curve at the tip.

"What is that bit of brass along the top?" Oliphant asked.

"To parry another man's blade," Fraser said. "Soft stuff. Catches the edge. American business."

"Maker's mark?"

"No, sir," Betteredge said. "Hand-forged by a smith, from the look of it."

"Show him the pistol," Fraser said.

Betteredge sheathed the knife, set it atop the coaching-case. He produced a heavy revolver from beneath his coat. "Franco-Mexican," he said, sounding remarkably like a salesman, "Ballester-Molina; cocks itself automatically, after the first shot."

Oliphant raised an eyebrow. "Military issue?" The pistol was somewhat crude in appearance.

"Cheap stuff," Fraser said, with a glance for Oliphant. "For the American war trade, evidently. The Metropolitans have been confiscating them from sailors. Too many of them about."

"Sailors?"

"Confederates, Yanks, Texians… "

"Texians," Oliphant said, and tasted the end of his unlit cheroot. "I take it we agree in assuming our friend here is of that nationality?"

"He'd a sort of nest, in the garret, reached by a trapdoor." Betteredge was wrapping the pistol back into its oilcloth.

"Terribly cold, I imagine?"

"Well, he'd blankets, sir."

"The tin."

"Sir?"

"The tin that contained the man's last meal, Betteredge."

"No, sir. No tin."

"Tidy," Oliphant said to Fraser. "She waited for the poison to do its work, then returned, removing the evidence."

"The surgeon will have our evidence out for us, never you fear," Fraser said.

Oliphant was overtaken by an abrupt nausea—at Eraser's manner, at the proximity of the corpse, at the pervading stink of burnt beans. He turned and stepped out into the hallway, where another of Eraser's men was adjusting the carbide-lantern.

What a foul house this was, in a foul street, harboring the foulest sort of business. A wave of loathing overtook him, a fierce hopeless detestation of the secret world, its midnight journeys, labyrinthine lies, its legions of the damned, the lost.

His hands were trembling as he struck a lucifer to light his cheroot.

"Sir, the responsibility—" Betteredge was at his elbow.

"My friend at the corner of Chancery Lane hasn't given me such a good leaf as usual," Oliphant said, frowning at the tip of his cheroot. "One must be very careful how one chooses one's cigars."

"We've been over the place top-to-bottom, Mr. Oliphant. If she was living here, there's no trace of her."

"Really? And to whom does that handsome chiffonier downstairs belong? Who waters the cacti? Does one water cacti? Perhaps they reminded our Texian friend of his homeland… " He puffed resolutely on his cheroot and descended the stairs, with Betteredge on his heels like an anxious young setter.

A prim-looking sort from Criminal Anthropometry was lost in thought in front of the piano, as though trying to recall a tune. Of the various articles carried in this gentleman's black case, Oliphant knew, the least unpleasant were the calibrated linen tapes employed in taking Bertillon measurements of the skull.

"Sir," Betteredge said, when the anthropometrist had moved upstairs, "if you feel I was responsible, sir… For losing her, I mean—"

"I believe, Betteredge, that I dispatched you earlier to a matinee, at the Garrick, to report on the acrobatic ladies of Manhattan, did I not?"

"Yes, sir… "

"You saw the Manhattan troupe, then?"

"Yes, sir."

"But—do let me suppose—you saw her there, as well?"

"Yes, sir! And Mackerel and his two as well!"

Oliphant removed his spectacles and polished them.

"The acrobats, Betteredge? To attract such an audience they must have been quite remarkable."

"Lord, sir, they batter one another with brickbats! The women run about in their dirty bare feet, and, well, scarves, sir, bits of gauze, no proper garments to speak of… "

"And you enjoyed yourself, Betteredge?"

"Quite honestly, sir, no. Like a panto in Bedlam, it was. And I'd the job of it, with the Pinkers there… "

"Mackerel" was their name for the senior Pinkerton agent, a side-whiskered Philadelphian who most frequently presented himself as Beaufort Kingsley DeHaven, though sometimes as Beaumont Alexander Stokes. He was Mackerel by virtue of his seemingly invariable choice of breakfast, as reported by Betteredge and the other watchers.

Mackerel and two subordinates had been regular London fixtures for some eighteen months now, and Oliphant found them remarkably interesting, and a solid pretext for his own Government funding. The Pinkerton organization, while ostensibly a private firm, served as the central intelligence-gathering organ of the embattled United States. With networks in place throughout the Confederate States, as well as in the Republics of Texas and California, the Pinkertons were often privy to information of considerable strategic importance.

With the arrival in London of Mackerel and his cohorts, certain voices in Special Branch had argued for the various classic modes of coercion. Oliphant had quickly moved to quash this suggestion, arguing that the Americans would be of inestimably greater value if they were allowed to operate freely—under, he made it clear, the constant surveillance of both the Special Branch and his own Special Bureau of the Foreign Office. In practice, of course, the Special Bureau utterly lacked the manpower for any such undertaking, which had resulted in Special Branch assigning Betteredge to the task, along with a steady rota of nondescript Londoners, all of them experienced watchers, personally vetted by Oliphant. Betteredge reported directly to Oliphant, who assessed the raw material before passing it on to Special Branch. Oliphant found the arrangement thoroughly agreeable; Special Branch had so far refrained from comment.

The movements of the Pinkertons had gradually revealed minor but hitherto unsuspected sub-strata of clandestine activity. The resultant information constituted a rather mixed bag, but this was all the more to Oliphant's liking. The Pinkertons, he had happily declared to Betteredge, would provide the equivalent of geological core-samples. The Pinkertons would plumb the depths, and Britain would reap the benefits.

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:

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.

Radley had returned to the smoking-room some ten minutes later. Oliphant then took his leave, having endured an extended and particularly florid tirade from the General, who had consumed the better part of a pint of brandy during Radley's absence.

Summoned back to Grand's by telegram in the early hours of dawn, Oliphant had immediately sought out the hotel-detective, a retired Metropolitan named McQueen, who had been called to Houston's room, number 24, by the desk clerk, Mr. Parkes.

While Parkes attempted to calm the hysterical wife of a Lancashire paving-contractor, resident in number 25 at the time of the disturbance, McQueen had tried the knob of Houston's door, discovering it to be unlocked. Snow was blowing in through the demolished window, and the air, already chilled, stank of burnt gunpowder, blood, and, as McQueen delicately put it, "the contents of the late gentleman's bowel." Spying the scarlet ruin that was Radley's corpse, all too visible in the cold light of dawn, McQueen had called to Parkes to telegraph the Metropolitans. He then used his passkey to lock the door, lit a lamp, and blocked the view from the street with the remains of one of the window-curtains.

The condition of Radley's clothing indicated that the pockets had been gone through. Sundry personal objects lay in the pool of blood and other matter surrounding the corpse: a repeating match, a cigar-case, coins of various denominations. Lamp in hand, the detective surveyed the room, discovering an ivory-handled Leacock & Hutchings pocket-pistol. The weapon's trigger was missing. Three of its five barrels had been discharged—very recently, McQueen judged. Continuing his search, he had discovered the gaudy gilded head of General Houston's stick, awash in splintered glass. Nearby lay a bloodied packet, tightly wrapped in brown paper. It proved to contain a hundred kinotrope-cards, their intricate fretting of punch-holes ruined by the passage of a pair of bullets. The bullets themselves, of soft lead and much distorted, fell into McQueen's palm as he examined the cards.

Subsequent examination of the room by specialists from Central Statistics—the attention of the Metropolitan Police, at Oliphant's request, having been swiftly deflected from the matter—added little to what the veteran McQueen had observed. The trigger of the Leacock & Hutchings pepperbox was recovered from beneath an armchair. A more peculiar discovery consisted of a square-cut white diamond, of fifteen carats and very high quality, which was found firmly wedged between two floor-boards.

Two men from Criminal Anthropometry, no more than usually cryptic about their purposes, employed large squares of tissue-thin adhesive grid-paper to capture various hairs and bits of fluff from the carpet; they guarded these specimens jealously, and took them away promptly, and nothing was ever heard of them again.

"Are you done with that one, sir?"

He looked up at Betteredge, then down at the file, seeing Radley's blood spread in a tacky pool.

"We're in Horseferry Road, sir."

The cab came to a halt.

"Yes, thank you." He closed the file and handed it to Betteredge. He descended from the cab and mounted the broad stairs.

Regardless of the circumstances surrounding a given visit, he invariably felt a peculiar quickening upon entering the Central Statistics Bureau. He felt it now, certainly: a sense of being observed, somehow—of being known and numbered. The Eye, yes…

As he spoke to the uniformed clerk at the visitor's-desk, a gang of journeymen mechanics emerged from a hallway to his left. They wore Engine-cut woolen jackets and polished brogues soled with creped rubber. Each man earned a spotless tool-satchel of thick white duck, cornered with bronze rivets and brown hide. As they moved toward him, conversing among themselves, some drew pipes and cheroots from their pockets in anticipation of a shift's-end smoke.

Oliphant experienced a sharp pang of tobacco-hunger. He had often had call to regret the Bureau's necessary policy regarding tobacco. He looked after the mechanics as they passed, out between the columns and the bronze sphinxes. Married men, assured of a Bureau pension, they would live in Camden Town, in New Cross, in any respectable suburb, and would furnish their tiny sitting-rooms with papier-mache side-boards and ornate Dutch clocks. Their wives would serve tea on gaudily japanned tin trays.

Passing an irritatingly banal quasi-biblical bas-relief, he made his way to the lift. As the attendant bowed him in, he was joined by a glum gentleman who was daubing with a handkerchief at a pale streak on the shoulder of his coat.

The articulated bars of the brass cage rattled shut. The lift ascended. The gentleman with the soiled coat made his exit at the third stop. Oliphant rode on to the fifth, the home of Quantitative Criminology and Non-Linear Analysis. While he found the latter infinitely more compelling than the former, it was Q C he needed today, most particularly in the person of Andrew Wakefield, the departmental Under-Secretary.

The clerks of Q C were individually walled into neatly cramped cells of rolled-steel, asbestos, and veneer. Wakefield presided over them from a grander version of the same scheme, his sparse sandy head framed by the brass-fitted drawers of a multitude of card-files.

He glanced up as Oliphant approached, prominent front teeth displayed against his lower lip. "Mr. Oliphant, sir," he said. "A pleasure as ever. Pardon me." He shuffled a number of punch-cards into a sturdy blue envelope lined with tissue-paper, and meticulously wound the little scarlet string about the two halves of the patent-clasp. He set the envelope aside, in an asbestos-lined hutch containing several other envelopes of identical hue.

Oliphant smiled. "Fancy I can read your punch-holes, Andrew?" He levered a spring-loaded stenographer's-chair up from its ingenious housing and took a seat, his furled umbrella balanced across his knees.

"Know what a blue envelope's about, do you?" Springs clanged as Wakefield folded his articulated writing-desk into its narrow slot.

"Not a specific one, no, but I rather imagine that's the trick of it."

"There are men who can read cards, Oliphant. But even a junior clerk can read the directive primaries as easily as you read the kinos in the underground."

"I never read the kinos in the underground, Andrew."

Wakefield snorted. Oliphant knew this to be his equivalent of laughter. "And how are things among the corps diplomatique, Mr. Oliphant? Coping with our 'Luddite conspiracy,' are we?" It would have been impossible to mistake the man's sarcasm, but Oliphant pretended to take him quite literally.

"It really hasn't had too great an effect, as yet. Not among my own areas of special interest."

Wakefield nodded, assuming that Oliphant's "areas of special interest" were limited to the activities of foreign nationals on British soil. On Oliphant's request, Wakefield regularly ordered the files spun on groups as diverse as the Carbonari, the Knights of the White Camellia, the Fenian Society, the Texas Rangers, the Greek Hetairai, the Pinkerton Detective Agency, and the Confederate Bureau of Scientific Research, all of whom were known to be operative in Britain.

"I trust that the Texian material we provided has been of some use?" Wakefield inquired, coil-springs creaking behind him as he leaned forward.

"Quite," Oliphant assured him.

"You wouldn't know," Wakefield began, taking a gold-plated propelling-pencil from his pocket, "if their legation intends a change of premises?" He tapped the pencil against his front teeth, producing a loud clicking sound that Oliphant found repulsive.

"From their present location in St. James's? 'Round from Berry's the wine-merchant?"

"Precisely."

Oliphant hesitated, seeming to weigh the matter. "I shouldn't think so. They haven't any money. I suppose it would depend upon the good-will of the landlord, finally… "

Wakefield smiled, his teeth dimpling his lower-lip.

"Wakefield," Oliphant said, "do tell me—who wishes to know?"

"Criminal Anthropometry."

"Really? Are they involved in surveillant activities?"

"I gather it's technical, actually. Experimental." Wakefield put his pencil away. "Your savant chap—Mallory, was it?"

"Yes?"

"Saw a review of his book. Off to China, is he?"

"Mongolia. Heading up an expedition for the Geographical Society."

Wakefield pursed his lips and nodded. "Out from underfoot, I should think."

"Out of harm's way, one should hope. Not a bad sort, really. Seemed to keenly appreciate the technical aspects of your Bureau's work. But I've a technical matter for you myself, Andrew."

"Really?" Wakefield's springs creaked.

"Having to do with Post Office procedure."

Wakefield made a small, entirely noncommittal sound in his throat.

Oliphant took an envelope from his pocket and passed it to the Under-Secretary. It was unsealed. Wakefield took a pair of white cotton gloves from a wire basket at his elbow, drew them on, extracted a white telegraphic address-card from the envelope, glanced at it, then met Oliphant's gaze.

"Grand's Hotel," Wakefield said.

"Quite." The establishment's crest was printed on the card. Oliphant watched as Wakefield automatically ran a gloved fingertip across the lines of punch-holes, checking for indications of wear that might cause mechanical difficulties.

"You wish to know who sent it?"

"That information is in my possession, thank you."

"Name of addressee?"

"I am aware of that as well."

The springs creaked—nervously, it seemed to Oliphant. Wakefield rose, with a twanging of steel, and carefully inserted the card in a brass slot set into the face of a glass-fronted instrument which overhung a bank of card-files. With a glance at Oliphant, he reached up a gloved hand and cranked down an ebony-handled lever. On the down-stroke, the device thumped like a shopman's credit-press. As Wakefield released the lever, it began to slowly right itself, humming and clicking like a publican's wagering-machine. Wakefield watched as the whirling character-wheels ticked and slowed. Abruptly, the device was silent.

"Egremont," Wakefield read aloud, but quietly, " 'The Beeches,' Belgravia."

"Indeed." Oliphant watched as Wakefield extracted the card from the brass slot. "I require the text of that telegram, Andrew."

"Egremont," Wakefield said, as though he hadn't heard. He took his seat again, replaced the card in its envelope, and removed his gloves. "He seems to be everywhere, our Right Honorable Charles Egremont. No end of work he's making for us here, Oliphant."

"The text of the message, Andrew, is here in the Bureau. It exists physically, I believe, as however many inches of telegrapher's tape."

"Do you know I've fifty-five miles' gear-yardage under me, still fouled from the Stink? Aside from the fact that your request is rather more than usually irregular…"

" 'Usually irregular'? That's rather good… "

"And your friends from the Special Branch trooping in hourly, demanding that our brass be spun and spun again, in hope of shaking loose these Luddites alleged to be lodged in the nation's rafters! Who is this bloody man, Oliphant?"

"A rather junior Rad politician, I understand. Or was, till the Stink and the resulting disorders."

"Till Byron's death, rather."

"But we've Lord Brunel now, haven't we?"

"Indeed, and bloody madness under him in Parliament!"

Oliphant let the silence lengthen. "If you could obtain the text of the telegram, Andrew," he said at last, very quietly, "I should be very grateful."

"He's a very ambitious man, Oliphant. With ambitious friends."

"You are not alone in that assessment."

Wakefield sighed. "Under the circumstances, extreme discretion—"

"By all means!"

"Aside from which our yardage is filthy. Condensed particulate matter. We're working the mechanics on triple-shifts, and having some success with Lord Colgate's aerosol applications, but I sometimes despair of ever having the system properly up and spinning!" He lowered his voice. "Do you know that the finer functions of the Napoleon have been unreliable for months?"

"The Emperor?" Oliphant pretended to misunderstand.

"The Napoleon's gear-yardage, in equivalent terms, is very nearly double ours," Wakefield said. "And it simply isn't functioning!" The thought seemed to fill him with a special horror.

"Had a Stink of their own, have they?"

Wakefield grimly shook his head.

"There you are, then," said Oliphant, "most likely the gears are jammed on a bit of onion-skin… "

Wakefield snorted.

"Do find me that telegram? At your earliest convenience, of course."

Wakefield inclined his head, but only very slightly.

"Good fellow," Oliphant declared. He saluted the Under-Secretary with his furled umbrella and rose, to retrace his steps through Q C's cubbies and the bowed and patient heads of Wakefield's clerks.

Oliphant had made his professionally circuitous way to Dean Street from the Soho tavern where he had instructed Betteredge to deposit him. Now he entered a soot-streaked house, its door unlatched. Latching it carefully behind him, he climbed two flights of uncarpeted stairs. The chill air smelled of cooked cabbage and stale tobacco.

He rapped twice at a door, then twice again.

"Come in, come in, you'll let in the cold… " The heavily bearded Mr. Hermann Kriege, late of the New York Volks Tribune, appeared to be wearing every article of clothing he possessed, as though he had wagered that he could all at once don the entire contents of a ragman's barrow.

He locked and chained the door behind Oliphant.

Kriege had two rooms, the one with the view of the street being the drawing-room, and behind it a bedroom. Everything broken and tattered, and in the greatest disorder. A large, old-fashioned table, covered with wax-cloth, stood in the middle of the drawing-room. On it lay manuscripts, books, newspapers, a doll with a Dresden head, bits and pieces of a woman's sewing things, chipped teacups, dirty spoons, pens, knives, candlesticks, an inkpot. Dutch clay pipes, tobacco-ash.

"Sit, sit, please." More ursine than ever in his bundled attire, Kriege waved vaguely toward a chair with only three legs. Blinking through a haze of coal– and tobacco-smoke, Oliphant made out a chair that seemed whole, though Kriege's daughter had been playing kitchen on it. Choosing to risk a pair of trousers, Oliphant swept jammy crumbs aside and sat, facing Kriege across the sad domestic litter of the crowded table-top.

"A small gift for your little Traudl," Oliphant said, taking a tissue-wrapped parcel from his coat. The tissue was secured with a self-adhesive rectangle, embossed with the initials of an Oxford Street toy-emporium. "A doll's tea things." He placed the parcel on the table.

"She calls you 'Uncle Larry.' She shouldn't know your name."

"Many's the Larry about Soho, I should imagine." Oliphant produced a plain envelope, unsealed, and placed it beside the parcel, precisely aligned with the table's edge. It contained three well-circulated five-pound notes.

Kriege said nothing. A silence lengthened.

"The Manhattan Women's Red Pantomime Troupe," Oliphant said at last.

Kriege snorted derisively. "The Bowery's Sapphic best, come to London? I remember them in Purdy's National. They wooed and won the Dead Rabbits to the cause, whose sole previous involvement with politics had consisted of rock-fights and punch-ups in municipal elections. The butcher-boys, the bootblacks, the prostitutes of Chatham Square and the Five Points, that was their audience. Sweaty proletarians, come to see a woman shot out of a gun, flattened against a wall, and peeled off like paper… I tell you, sir, your interest is misplaced."

Oliphant sighed. "My friend, it is my job to ask questions. You must understand that I cannot tell you my reasons for asking a given question. I know that you have suffered. I know that you suffer now, in exile." Oliphant glanced meaningfully about the tragic room.

"What then do you wish to know?"

"It has been suggested that among the various criminal elements, active during the recent civil disruptions, were agents of Manhattan." Oliphant waited.

"I find that unlikely."

"On what basis, Mr. Kriege?"

"To my knowledge, the Commune has no interest in disturbing the British status-quo. Your Rads have shown themselves to be benevolent bystanders, with regard to America's class-struggle. Indeed, your nation has behaved as an ally of sorts." There was much bitterness in Kriege's tone, a curdled cynicism. "One imagines it was in Britain's own interest to see the Northern Union lose its greatest city to the Communards."

Oliphant shifted cautiously on the uncomfortable chair. "You knew Mr. Marx intimately, I believe." In order to extract a given piece of information from Kriege, he knew, it was necessary to engage the man's dominant passion.

"Knew him? I was there to greet him off the boat. He embraced me, and not a minute later had borrowed twenty gold dollars, to pay his rent in the Bronx!" Kriege assayed a sort of laugh, strangled with abiding rage. "He'd his Jenny with him, then, though the marriage didn't survive the revolution… But he'd a Brooklyn Irish factory-girl in his bed when he expelled me from the Commune, sir, for preaching 'religionism and free-love'! Free-love indeed!" Kriege's large pale hands, with their unkept nails, plucked abstractedly at a sheaf of papers.

"You have been badly used, Mr. Kriege." Oliphant thought of his friend. Lord Engels; it did seem extraordinary, that the brilliant textile-manufacturer should involve himself, however distantly, with people of this sort. Kriege had been a member of the Commune's so-called "Central Committee," before Marx had sent him packing. With a price on his head in the Northern Union, he had sailed in steerage from Boston, penniless, under an assumed name, with his wife and child, to join London's thousands of American refugees.

"These Bowery pantomimes…"

"Yes?" Oliphant leaned forward.

"There are factions within the Party…"

"Do go on."

"Anarchists disguising themselves as communists; feminists, all manner of incorrect ideologies, you see, covert cells not under Manhattan's control…"

"I see," Oliphant said, thinking of the reams of yellow fan-fold representing the confession of William Collins.

Again on foot, Oliphant made his roundabout way through Soho, to Compton Street, where he paused before the entrance of a public house known as the Blue Boar.

"A SPORTING-GENTLEMAN," he was informed by a large bill, "a Staunch Supporter of the destruction of these Vermin," would give "A GOLD REPEATER-WATCH TO BE KILLED FOR BY DOGS under 13 3/4 pounds weight." Below the smudged bill, a painted wooden placard advertised "Rats always on hand for the accommodation of Gentlemen to try their dogs."

He entered, and shortly was greeting Fraser in the rank smell of dogs, tobacco-smoke, and hot penny-gin.

The long bar was crowded with men of every grade of society, many with their animals under their arms. "There were bull-dogs, Skye terriers, small brown English terriers. The room was low-ceilinged and quite unadorned. About the walls were hung clusters of leather collars.

"You came by cab, sir?" Fraser inquired.

"On foot, from a previous appointment."

" 'Ere now," cried the barman, "don't block up the bar!" There was a general movement toward the parlor, where a young waiter now shouted, "Give your orders, gentlemen!" With Fraser at his side, Oliphant followed the crowd of sporting-men and their dogs. Above the parlor fireplace were glass-fronted cases displaying the stuffed heads of animals famous in their day. Oliphant noticed the head of a bullterrier, its glass eyes bulging hugely.

"Looks as though this one died of strangulation," Oliphant remarked, pointing the thing out to Fraser.

"They've spoilt her in the stuffing, sir," said the waiter, a fair-haired boy in a greasy striped apron. "Good as any in England, she was. I've seen her kill twenty at a go, though they killed her at the last. Your sewer-rats are dreadful for giving a dog canker, though we'd always rinse her mouth out well with peppermint and water."

"You're Sayers' boy," Fraser said. "We want a word with him."

"Why, I know you, sir! You were 'ere about that savantry gent—"

"Your old dad, Jem, and brisk about it," Fraser interjected, preventing the boy from announcing the arrival of a copper to the assembled sportsmen.

" 'E's upstairs lighting the pit, sir," the boy said.

"Good chap," Oliphant said, giving the boy a shilling.

Oliphant and Fraser mounted a broad wooden staircase, which led to what had once been the drawing-room. Opening a door, Fraser led the way into the rat-killing apartment.

"Pit's not bloody open," bellowed a fat man with ginger side-whiskers. Oliphant saw that the pit consisted of a wooden circus, some six feet in diameter, fitted with a high rim at elbow-height. Above it branched the arms of an eight-mantle gas-light, brightly illuminating the white-painted floor of the little arena. Mr. Sayers, the Blue Boar's proprietor, in a bulging silk waistcoat, stood with a live rat in his left hand. "But it's you, Mr. Fraser. My apologies, sir!" Having caught the creature somehow by the throat, he deftly prized out its larger teeth with no more implement than his strong thumbnail. "Order for a dozen with their teeth drawed." He dropped the mutilated rat into a rusted wire cage with several others and turned to face his visitors. " 'Ow might we be of service, Mr. Fraser?"

Fraser took out an Engine-stippled morgue-portrait.

"Aye, 'e's your man," Sayers said, his brows rising. "Big chap, long in the leg. And a dead'un, by the look of 'im."

"You're quite positive?" Oliphant could smell the rats now. "This is Professor Rudwick's murderer?"

"Aye, sir. We gets all sorts 'ere, but none too many Argentine giants. I recall 'im quite plain."

Fraser had taken out his notebook and was writing in it.

"Argentine?" Oliphant asked.

" 'E spoke Spanish," Sayers said, "or so I took it to be. Now mind you, we none o' us saw 'im do the deed, but 'e was on the premises that night, so 'e was."

"Cap'an's here," Sayers' son called from the doorway.

" 'Ell! And I've not drawed the teeth of 'alf 'is rats!"

"Fraser," Oliphant said, "I fancy a warm gin. Let us retire to the bar and allow Mr. Sayers to complete arrangements for the evening's sport." He bent to examine a larger cage, this one of iron bands. It seemed to contain a solid mound of rats.

"Mind your fingers there," Sayers said. "For believe me, you get a bite and you'll not forget it. These 'ere are none o' the cleanest… "

In the parlor, a young officer, evidently the Captain, was threatening to leave the place if he were kept waiting any longer.

"I shouldn't drink that if I were you," Fraser said, looking at Oliphant's noggin of warm gin. "Almost certainly adulterated."

"Actually it's quite good," Oliphant said. "It has a very faint after-taste, rather like bitter wormwood."

"An intoxicant poison."

"Quite. The French use it in the preparation of herbals. What do you make of our good Captain here?" Oliphant gestured with his gin, indicating the man in question, who was pacing about in an agitated fashion, examining the paws of various animals as their owners presented them, all the while shouting that he should depart immediately if the pit weren't opened.

"Crimea," Fraser said.

The Captain bent to peer at the claws of a young terrier in the arms of a swarthy, rather portly man whose pomaded spit-curls protruded like wings from beneath his high-crowned derby.

"Velasco," Fraser said, as if to himself, something nastily akin to pleasure in his tone, and was instantly beside the fellow.

The Captain started, his handsome young face convulsed with a violent tic, and Oliphant's eye abruptly filled with all the red Crimea—whole cities aflame like bonfires, and shell-churned wastes of jellied filth sprouting white flowers that were men's hands. He shuddered with the intensity of the vision, then forgot it utterly.

"Do I know you, sir?" the Captain inquired of Fraser, with a brittle murderous jollity.

"Gentlemen!" Mr. Sayers cried from the stairs. Led by the Captain, the entire company, save only Oliphant, Fraser, the swarthy man, and a fourth man, made for the pit above. The fourth man, perched on the arm of a ragged brocade armchair, began to cough. Oliphant saw Eraser's grip tighten about his prey's upper arm.

"Shouldn't bloody ought to do that, Fraser," the man on the chair-arm said, unfolding his legs and standing. Oliphant noted a certain calculation evident in his tone. Like the swarthy man, he was newly and nattily kitted out, all in Oxford Street's latest, his coat of Engine-cut gabardine dyed a blue that verged on lavender. Oliphant saw that his lapel, like that of his companion, was decorated with a gleaming cloisonne badge in the shape of the Union Jack.

" 'Bloody,' Mr. Tate?" Fraser said, a schoolmaster about to deliver a tongue-lashing or worse.

"Fair warning, Fraser," the swarthy man said, his dark eyes protruding. "We're about Parliamentary business!" The little brown terrier shivered in his arms.

"Are you, then?" Oliphant inquired mildly, "and what business has Parliament in a rat-pit?"

"Might ask the same of you, eh?" the taller man said insolently, then coughed. Fraser glared at him.

"Fraser," Oliphant said, "are these gentlemen the confidential agents you mentioned in regard to Dr. Mallory?"

"Tate and Velasco," Fraser said grimly.

"Mr. Tate," Oliphant said, stepping forward, "a pleasure, sir. I am Laurence Oliphant, journalist." Tate blinked, confused by Oliphant's cordiality. Fraser, rather reluctantly taking Oliphant's cue, released Velasco's arm. "Mr. Velasco." Oliphant smiled.

Velasco's face clouded with suspicion. "Journalist? What sort of journalist?" he demanded, glancing from Oliphant to Fraser and back.

"Travel pieces, primarily," Oliphant said, "though I'm currently engaged, with Mr. Fraser's able help, in compiling a popular history of the Great Stink."

Tate peered narrowly at Oliphant. "Mallory, you said. What about 'im?"

"I interviewed Dr. Mallory prior to his departure for China. His experiences during the Stink were most remarkable, and highly illustrative of the perils that might befall anyone during such a chaotic period."

" 'Befall anyone'?" Velasco challenged. "Rubbish! Mallory's trouble was savantry trouble and your Mr. Fraser knows it well enough!"

"Yes, yes, quite," Oliphant agreed. "And that is why I am delighted to have encountered you gentlemen tonight."

Velasco and Tate glanced uncertainly at one another. "You are?" Tate ventured.

"Utterly. You see. Dr. Mallory explained to me the unfortunate contretemps with his rival and fellow savant, Peter Foulke. It seems, you see, that even in the most rarified circles, during a period of such unprecedented stress—"

"You'll not see Peter bloody Foulke moving in your rarified bloody circles now," Velasco interjected, "not for all his gentry posing." He paused for effect. "He was discovered in bed with a girl not twelve years old!"

"No!" Oliphant feigned shock. "Foulke? But surely—"

"He was," Tate affirmed, "in Brighton, and those as found him beat the bugger silly and flung him stark-naked into the street!"

"But it wasn't us did that," Velasco stated flatly, "and you'll not prove it was."

"There's a new trend of thought about," Tate said, thrusting his shallow chest forward so as to better display his Union Jack insignia, the gin-reddened tip of his button-nose glinting wetly, "such as doesn't tolerate decadence," giving equal stress to the word's three syllables, "be it in the savantry or however high at all. Hidden wickedness ran rife under Byron, all manner of it, and well you know it, Fraser!" Fraser's eyes widened at this effrontery, as Tate turned in his excitement to Oliphant. "That Stink was Ned Ludd's work, mister, and there's your history of it!"

"Sabotage on a titanic scale," Velasco pronounced darkly, as if quoting from a speech, "abetted by conspirators in the highest ranks of society! But there are true patriots among us, sir, patriots at work to root that evil out!" The terrier growled in Velasco's arms, and Fraser looked on the verge of throttling man and dog alike.

"We're Parliamentary investigators," Tate said, "about a Member's business, and I'm sure you'd not care to detain us."

Oliphant put his hand upon Fraser's sleeve.

With a smirk of triumph, Velasco soothed his little dog and sauntered to the stairs. Tate followed. From overhead came the mad yapping of dogs and the hoarse cries of sportsmen.

"They're working for Egremont," Oliphant said.

Fraser's face twisted with disgust. Disgust and something akin to amazement.

"There seems nothing more to be done here, Fraser. I take it you arranged for a cab?"

Mr. Mori Arinori, Oliphant's favorite among his young Japanese "pupils," took a fierce delight in all things British. Oliphant, who customarily breakfasted lightly if at all, would sometimes subject himself to massively "English" breakfasts to please Mori, who on this particular occasion wore the burliest of golfing-tweeds and a scarf in the tartan of the Royal Hibernian Order of Steam Engineers.

There was a certain enjoyably melancholy sense of paradox, Oliphant mused, in watching Mori spread a slice of toast with marmalade, while he himself indulged a nostalgia for his own days in Japan, where he had served as first-secretary under Rutherford Alcock. His stay in Edo had nurtured in him a passionate regard for the muted tones and subtle textures of a world of ritual and shadow. He longed now for the rattle of rain blown against oiled paper, for flowering weeds a-nod down tiny alleys, the glow of rush-lamps, for scents and darknesses, the shadows of the Low City…

"Oriphant-san, toast is very good, is most excellent! You are sad, Oriphant-san?"

"No, Mr. Mori, not at all." He helped himself to bacon, though he wasn't hungry in the least. He put aside a sudden intrusive memory of the morning's hideous bath, the black clinging rubber. "I was recalling Edo. That city possessed great charm for me."

Mori chewed bread and marmalade, regarding Oliphant steadily with his bright dark eyes, then dabbed expertly at his lips with a linen napkin. " 'Charm.' Your word for the old ways. The old ways hinder my nation. Only this week have I posted to Satsuma an argument against the wearing of swords." The bright eyes darted, for a fractional moment, toward the crooked fingers of Oliphant's left hand. As if stung by the pressure of Mori's awareness, the scar beneath Oliphant's cuff began a slow ache.

"But, Mr. Mori," Oliphant said, setting his silver fork aside to abandon the unwanted bacon, "the sword, in your country, is in many respects the focal symbol of the feudal ethic and the sentiments attaching to it—an object of reverence second only to one's own lord."

Mori smiled, pleased. "Odious custom of rude and savage age. This is good to be rid of, Oriphant-san. This is modern day!" This latter a favorite and frequent expression.

Oliphant returned the smile. Mori combined boldness and compassion with a certain problematical brashness that Oliphant found most appealing. More than once, to Bligh's dismay, Mori had paid some cockney cabman, full fare plus tip, and then invited the fellow into Oliphant's kitchen for a meal. "But you must learn to proceed apace, Mr. Mori. While you yourself may regard the wearing of swords as a primitive custom, to openly oppose this minor matter might well provoke resistance to other, more important reforms, the deeper changes you wish to implement in your society."

Mori nodded gravely. "Your policy no doubt has merit, Oriphant-san. Far better, for example, if all Japanese were taught English. Our meager tongue is of no use in the great world beyond our islands. Soon power of steam and the Engine must pervade our land. English language, following such, must suppress any use of Japanese. Our intelligent race, eager in pursuit of knowledge, cannot depend on weak and uncertain medium of communication. We must grasp principal truths from precious treasury of Western science!"

Oliphant tilted his head to one side, considering Mori carefully. "Mr. Mori," he said, "pardon me if I misunderstand you, but am I correct in assuming that you are proposing nothing less than the deliberate abolition of the Japanese language?"

"This is modern day, Oriphant-san, modern day! All reasons support our tongue's disuse."

Oliphant smiled. "We must arrange to discuss this at length, Mr. Mori, but now I must ask if you are engaged this evening. I propose an entertainment."

"By all means, Oriphant-san. English social festivities are ever gratifying." Mori beamed.

"We shall go then, to Whitechapel, to the Garrick Theatre, for what I understand is a most unusual pantomime."

According to the spottily stippled program, the Clown was known as "Jackdaw Jaculation," though this was perhaps the least peculiar aspect of that evening's performance, by the Manhattan Women's Red Pantomime Troupe, of 'Mazulem the Night Owl'. Other characters included "Freedman Bureau Bill, a black boy," "Levy Stickemall, a merchant, offering two segars for five cents," "a Yankee Peddler," "a Lady Shop-Lifter," "a Roast Turkey," and the eponymous "Mazulem."

All of the players, to judge by the program, were female, though in several cases this would otherwise have been quite impossible to determine. The Clown, ornate with frills, in elaborately spangled satin, boasted an egg-bald shaven pate and the sinister white-face of the Pierrot, touched with color only in the outlined lips.

The performance had been preceded by a brief, ranting address from one "Helen America," her heaving, apparently unconstrained bosom, through layers of diaphanous scarves, serving to hold the attention of the predominantly masculine audience. Her speech had consisted of slogans Oliphant found rather more cryptic than rousing. What exactly did it mean, for instance, when she declared that "We have nothing to wear but our chains…"?

Consulting the program, he was informed that Helen America was in fact the authoress of 'Mazulem the Night Owl', as well as 'Harlequin Panattahah' and 'The Genii of the Algonquins'.

Musical accompaniment was provided by a moon-faced organist—her eyes, it seemed to Oliphant, glinting either with lunacy or laudanum.

The pantomime had opened in what Oliphant supposed was meant to be taken as a hotel dining-room, with the peripatetic Roast Turkey—apparently played by a dwarf—attacking the diners with a carving-knife. Oliphant had very quickly lost track of the narrative, if indeed there were one, which he doubted. Scenes were punctuated repeatedly by characters firing stuffed bricks at one another's heads. There was kinotropic accompaniment, of a sort, though it consisted of crudely polemical cartoons that seemed to bear little relationship to the action.

Oliphant stole a glance at Mori, who sat beside him, his treasured topper upright on his lap, his face expressionless. The audience was howlingly rowdy, though less in response to the substance of the pantomime, whatever that might be, than to the whirling, curiously formless dances of the Communard women, their bare shins and ankles plainly visible beneath the ragged hems of their flowing garments.

Oliphant's back began to ache.

The choreography accelerated into a sort of balletic assault, the air thick with brickbats, until, quite abruptly, 'Mazulem the Night Owl' was ended.

The crowd hooted, applauded, jeered. Oliphant noted a hulking, gaunt-jawed man with a stout rattan over his shoulder, lounging beside the entrance to the pit. The fellow was watching the crowd through narrowed eyes.

"Come then, Mr. Mori. I sense a journalistic opportunity."

Mori stood, hat and evening-cane in hand. He followed Oliphant toward the pit.

"Laurence Oliphant, journalist." He presented his card to the hulking man. "If you would be so kind, you might convey this to Miss America with my request for an interview."

The man took the card, glanced at it, and let it fall to the floor. Oliphant saw the knobby fist tighten around the rattan. Mori emitted a brief hiss, as if of steam; Oliphant turned; Mori, his top-hat jammed firmly forward on his head, had assumed the pose of the samurai warrior, the handle of his evening-cane grasped in both his hands. Immaculate linen and gold links glinted at his supple wrists.

The untidily coiffed, extravagantly hennaed head of Helen America appeared. Her eyes were ringed with kohl.

Mori held his pose.

"Miss Helen America?" Oliphant produced a second card. "Allow me to introduce myself. I am Laurence Oliphant, journalist… "

Helen America performed a rapid manipulation before the stony face of her compatriot, as though she were conjuring something from the air. The man lowered his length of rattan, still glowering fiercely at Mori. The stick, Oliphant saw, was obviously weighted. "Cecil's a deaf mute," she said, pronouncing the name with a case-hardened American e.

"I'm very sorry. I offered my card—"

"He can't read. You say you're a newspaper-man?"

"An occasional journalist. And you, Miss America, are an authoress of the first-water. Allow me to introduce my good friend, Mr. Mori Arinori, an envoy of the Mikado of Japan."

With a deadly glance at Cecil, Mori reversed his cane with admirable grace, removed his hat, and bowed in the European fashion. Helen America, wide-eyed, regarded him as one might a trained dog. She wore a neatly mended military cloak, threadbare but apparently clean, in the shade of grey the Confederates called butternut, though the original regimental buttons had been replaced with plain round horn.

"I haven't ever seen a Chinaman dress like that," she said.

"Mr. Mori is Japanese."

"And you're a newspaper-man."

"After a fashion, yes."

Helen America smiled, revealing a gold tooth. "And did you enjoy our show?"

"It was extraordinary, quite extraordinary."

Her smile widened. "Then come to Manhattan, mister, for the People Risen have the old Olympic, east of Broadway, over Houston Street. We're best appreciated in our own venue." Thin bands of silver pierced her ears, amid a tangled cloud of hennaed curls.

"It would be my great pleasure. As it would be my pleasure to conduct an interview with the authoress of—"

"I didn't write that," she said, "Fox did."

"Pardon me?"

"George Washington Lafayette Fox—the Marxian Grimaldi, the Tamla of socialist pantomime! It was the Troupe's decision to put that I wrote it, though I continue to argue against it."

"But your prefatory message…"

"Now I did write that, sir, and am proud of it. But poor Fox… "

"I hadn't heard," Oliphant submitted, somewhat baffled.

"It was the terrible pressure of toil," she said. "The great Fox, who'd single-handedly elevated socialist pantomime to its present level of revolutionary importance, was sweated mad by one-night stands, sir; driven to sheer exhaustion at having to contrive sharper tricks and quicker transformations. He slid into dementia then, his grimaces hideous to behold." She had assumed her stage delivery; now she lapsed back into a more confidential tone. "He'd lapse into the crudest indecency, mister, so we kept his dresser in a monkey-suit, to run out and belabor him, if he got too obscene."

"I'm very sorry—"

"Manhattan's no place for the mad, sir, sad to say. He's in the asylum in Somerville, Massachusetts, and if you'd care to publish that, be my guest."

Oliphant found that he was staring at her, entirely at a loss for words. Mori Arinori had retired somewhat, and seemed to be watching the crowd as it made its way out of the Garrick. The deaf-mute Cecil had vanished, taking with him his shot-loaded length of rattan.

"I could eat a horse," Helen America said cheerfully.

"Allow me, please, to provide you with a meal. Where do you wish to dine?"

"There's a place around the corner." As she stepped from the topmost of the steps that ascended the pit, Oliphant saw that she wore a pair of the rubber boots Americans called Chickamaugas, great clumsy things of military origin. With Mori at his side, he followed her out of the Garrick. She had not waited for him to offer his arm.

She led them down the street, and as she had said, around a corner. Gas-light flared, before a clacking kino-sign that checkered from MOSES & SONS AUTOCAFE into CLEAN MODERN RAPID and back again. Helen America glanced back with an encouraging smile, her callipygian hips swaying beneath the Confederate cloak and the tattered muslin of her remarkable stage-garment.

The Autocafe was crowded and noisy, packed with Whitechapel locals. Its iron-mullioned windows were opaque with steam. Oliphant had seen nothing like it before.

Helen America demonstrated how business was conducted here, taking up a rectangular gutta-percha tray from a stack of the things, and pushing it along a ledge of shining zinc. Above the ledge were several dozen miniature windows, trimmed with brass. Oliphant and Mori followed her example. Behind each window, a different dish was displayed. Oliphant, noting the coin-slots, fumbled for his change-purse. Helen America chose a slice of shepherd's pie, a helping of toad-in-the-hole, and fried chips, Oliphant providing the requisite coinage. An additional tuppence produced a copious quantity of very dubious-looking brown gravy, from a spigot. Mori chose a baked potato, a particular favorite of his, but declined the gravy-spigot. Oliphant, disoriented by the oddness of the place, opted for a pint of machine-made ale, from another spigot.

"Clystra's liable to kill me for this," Helen America remarked, as they arranged their trays on a ridiculously small cast-iron table. The table, like the four chairs around it, was bolted into the concrete floor. "Doesn't hold with us talking to gentlemen of the press." She shrugged, beneath her butternut cloak. She smiled happily and began to sort a small pile of cheap tin-ware, giving Mori a knife and dinner-fork. "Have you been to a town called Brighton, mister?"

"Yes, actually, I have."

"What kind of place is that?"

Mori was examining, with keen interest, the rectangular dish of coarse grey cardboard beneath his potato.

"It's very pleasant," Oliphant said, "very picturesque. The Hydropathic Pavilion is quite famous—"

"Is it in England?" Helen America asked, around a mouthful of toad-in-the-hole.

"It is, yes."

"Lot of working-folks?"

"Perhaps not, in the sense I take you to mean, though the various facilities and attractions employ a great many people."

"Haven't seen a real factory-crowd since we got here. Well—let's eat!" And with that, Helen America bent to the task. Dinner-conversation, Oliphant gathered, was not highly valued in Red Manhattan.

She left the cardboard "dishes" utterly devoid of scraps or crumbs, contriving to sop up the last dross of gravy with a chip she had carefully retained for this purpose.

Oliphant took out his notebook. Opening it, he removed a plain white card stippled with Florence Bartlett's Bow Street portrait. "Are you familiar at all with Flora Barnett, the American actress. Miss America? She's enormously popular in Manhattan, or so I was recently told… " Oliphant displayed the card.

"She's no actress, mister. Nor an American either. She's a Southron, if you can even call her that; next thing to a damn' Frenchie. The People Risen don't need her kind. Hell, we've already hung our share of 'em!"

"Her kind?"

Helen America met his gaze with a defiant stare. "In a pig's eye, you're a journalist… "

"I'm sorry if—"

"Sorry like the rest of 'em. You give just about that much of a damn… "

"Miss America, please, I wish only to—"

"Thanks for the feed, mister, but you can't pump me, understand? And that brontosaur, that's got no damn' business over here in the first place! You got no right to it, and one day it'll sit in the Manhattan Metropolitan, for it belongs to the People Risen! And what makes you limeys think you can come digging up the People's natural treasures?"

And in through the door, as if on cue, marched the very formidable Clown of the Manhattan Women's Red Pantomime Troupe, her bald pate hugely bonneted in polka-dot gingham, and her Chickamauga boots even larger than Helen America's.

"Coming right this minute, Comrade Clystra," Helen America said.

The Clown fixed Oliphant with a murderous glare, and then the two were gone.

Oliphant looked at Mori. "A peculiar evening, Mr. Mori."

Mori, apparently lost in contemplation of the Autocafe's clatter and bustle, took a moment to respond.

"We will have places such as this in my country, Oriphant-san! Clean! Modern! Rapid!"

Bligh, upon Oliphant's return to Half-Moon Street, followed him upstairs to the door of the study. "May I come in for a moment, sir?" Locking the door behind them with his own key, Bligh crossed to a miniature parquet bureau that supported Oliphant's smoking-things; unsealing the top of a humidor, he reached inside and removed a squat little cylinder of black-japanned tin. "This was brought 'round to the kitchen door by a young man, sir. He wouldn't give his name, when asked. I took the liberty of opening it myself, sir, recalling some of the more heathen attempts, abroad… "

Oliphant took the canister and unscrewed its lid. Perforated telegraph-tape.

"And the young man?"

"A junior Engine-clerk, sir, to judge by the state of his shoes. Aside from the fact that he wore a clerk's cotton gloves, which he didn't remove."

"And there was no message?"

"There was, sir. 'Tell him,' he said, 'that we can do no more, there is great danger, he mustn't ask again.' "

"I see. Would you mind bringing up a pot of strong green-tea?"

Alone, Oliphant set about removing the heavy glass from his personal receiving-telegraph, a matter of loosening four brass wing-screws. Placing the tall vitrine-like dome out of harm's way, he spent some minutes consulting the maker's instructional manual. After rummaging through several drawers, he located the requisite implements: a walnut-handled brass hand-crank and a small gilt screw-driver embossed with the monogram of the Colt & Maxwell Company. He located the knife-switch at the base of the instrument and severed the electrical connection with the Post Office. He then used the screwdriver to make the necessary adjustments, carefully threaded the end of the tape onto the bright steel sprockets, locked the guide-plates into position, and took a deep breath.

He was all at once aware of the beating of his own heart, and of the night's silence pressing in from the darkness of Green Park, and of the Eye. He took up the crank, thrust its hexagonal tip into the mechanism's socket, and began, steadily but slowly, to turn it clockwise. The character-hammers began to rise and fall, rise and fall, deciphering the punch-code of the Post Office tape. He refused to look at it, as it emerged from the slot.

It was done. With scissors and paste-pot, he assembled the message on a sheet of foolscap:

Only barely aware of Bligh arriving with the tea, he sat unmoving for the better part of an hour, the message before him. Then, after pouring himself a cup of luke-warm tea, he gathered stationery, took out his reservoir-pen, and began to compose, in his flawless diplomat's French, a letter to a certain Monsieur Arslau, of Paris.

Flash-powder still stank in the air.

The Prince Consort turned, with his full Teutonic gravity, from an elaborate stereoptic camera, of Swiss manufacture, and greeted Oliphant in German. He wore aquamarine spectacles, their circular lenses no larger than florins, and was draped in a photographer's smock of spotless white duck. His fingers were stained with silver nitrate.

Oliphant bowed, wishing His Highness a good afternoon in what amounted to the Royal Family's language of choice, and pretended to examine the Swiss camera, an intricate creation whose stereoptic lenses, like eyes, stared from beneath a smooth brass brow. Like the eyes of Mr. Cart, the Consort's muscular Swiss valet, they struck Oliphant as being set rather too widely apart.

"I've brought Affie a little gift, Your Highness," Oliphant said. His German, like the Prince Consort's, had the accent of Saxony—the legacy of a prolonged and delicate mission Oliphant had undertaken there at the behest of the Royal Family. Prince Albert's Coburg relatives, ever ingenious at the ancient craft of marriage-politics, were eager to expand their tiny domain—a delicate matter indeed, when the policy of the British Foreign Office was to keep the German mini-states as fragmented as politically possible. "Has the young Prince concluded his day's lessons?"

"Affie is ill today," Albert said, peering through his tinted spectacles at one of the camera's lenses. He produced a small brush and lightly whisked at the surface of the lens. He straightened. "Do you think the study of statistics too much a burden for a tender young mind?"

"My opinion, Your Highness?" Oliphant said. "Statistical analysis is indeed a powerful technique… "

"His mother and I disagree on the matter," the Prince confided mournfully. "And Alfred's progress in the subject is far from satisfactory. Nevertheless, statistics is the key to the future. Statistics are everything in England."

"Does he progress well in his other studies?" Oliphant hedged.

"Anthropometry," the Prince suggested absently. "Eugenics. Powerful fields of learning, but less taxing, perhaps, to the youthful brain."

"Perhaps I might have a word with him. Your Highness," Oliphant said. "I know the lad means well."

"He is in his room, no doubt," the Prince said.

Oliphant made his way through the drafty glamor of the Royal Apartments to Alfred's room, where he was greeted with a whoop of glee, the Prince scrambling in bare-feet from mounded bedclothes and hopping nimbly across the tracks of a most elaborate miniature railway. "Uncle Larry! Uncle Larry! Brilliant! What have you brought for me?"

"Baron Zorda's latest."

In Oliphant's pocket, wrapped in green tissue and smelling strongly of cheap fresh ink, was a copy of 'Paternoster the Steam Bandit', by one "Baron Zorda," the third volume in the popular series, young Prince Alfred having expressed his unbridled enthusiasm for the two previous numbers, 'The Skeleton Amy' and 'Wheelmen of the Tsar'. The book's garishly colored cover depicted the daring Paternoster, pistol in hand, climbing from the cabin of a hurtling vehicle one took to be a gurney in the latest style—sheathed in tin, bulbous at the prow, and very narrow in the rear. The frontispiece, which Oliphant had examined in the Piccadilly news-agent's where he had purchased the volume, offered Baron Zorda's raffish highwayman in rather more detail, particularly in regard to his dress, which included a broad belt of studded leather and bell-bottomed trousers with buttoned vents at the cuffs.

"Super!" The boy eagerly tore the green tissue from Paternoster the Steam Bandit. "Look at his gurney. Uncle Larry! It's line-streamed like sixty!"

"Nothing but the swiftest for wicked Paternoster, Affie. And see the frontispiece. He's got up like Smashjaw Ned."

"Look at his narrow-go-wides," Alfred said admiringly. "And his bloody great belt!"

"And how have you been, Affie," Oliphant asked, ignoring the boy's lapse in language, "since my last visit?"

"Very well, Uncle Larry"—and a shadow of anxiety crossed the young face—"but I'm afraid I—I'm afraid she—she's broken, you see—" The Prince pointed to where the Japanese tea-doll slumped disconsolately against the foot of the massive four-poster, surrounded by a tumbled sea of lithographed tin and painted lead. A long sharp sliver of some translucent material protruded grotesquely from her gorgeous robe. "It's the spring, you see. I think it was wound too tightly, Uncle Larry. It sprang right out, on the tenth turn."

"The Japanese power their dolls with springs of baleen, Affie. 'Whale-whiskers,' they call the stuff. They haven't yet learned from us the manufacture of proper springs, but soon they shall. When they do, their dolls shan't break so easily."

"Father says you're too keen on your Japanese," Alfred said. "He says you think them the equal of Europeans."

"And I do, Affie! Their mechanical appliances are presently inferior, due to their lack of knowledge in the applied sciences. Some day, in futurity, they may lead civilization to heights yet untold. They, and perhaps the Americans…"

The boy regarded him dubiously. "Father wouldn't like that at all, what you said."

"No, I rather doubt he would."

Oliphant then spent half-an-hour, down on his knees upon the carpet, watching Alfred demonstrate a toy French Engine—operated, as was its cousin the Great Napoleon, by compressed air. The little Engine employed lengths of telegraph-tape, rather than cards, reminding Oliphant of his letter to M. Arslau. Bligh would have taken it 'round to the French Embassy by now; very likely it was already on its way to Paris by diplomatic pouch.

Alfred was connecting his Engine to a miniature kinotrope. There came a ceremonious rattle at the door-knob; the doors of Buckingham Palace were never knocked. Oliphant rose, and opened the tall white portal, to discover the well-known face of Nash, a palace valet-de-chambre, whose unwise speculations in railway shares had briefly made him the unwilling intimate of the Metropolitan Fraud Bureau. Oliphant's politesse had successfully smoothed the matter—a kindness well-invested, he saw now, by Nash's unfeigned air of respectful attention. "Mr. Oliphant," Nash announced, "a telegram has come, sir. Most urgent."

The velocity of the Special Branch vehicle contributed in no small part to Oliphant's general sense of unease. Paternoster himself could have asked for nothing faster, or more radically line-streamed.

They flew past St. James's Park with the speed of dream, the bare black branches of the lime-trees flashing by like wind-driven smoke. The driver wore leather goggles with round lenses, and plainly relished their headlong flight, periodically sounding a deep-throated whistle that sent horses rearing and pedestrians scurrying. The stoker, a burly young Irishman, was grinning maniacally as he shoveled coke into the burner.

Oliphant had no idea of their destination. Now, as they neared Trafalgar, the traffic caused the driver to yank the whistle-cord continually, steadily, setting up a mournful bellowing ululation, like the grief of some marine behemoth. The traffic, at this sound, parted like the Red Sea before Moses. Helmeted policemen saluted smartly as they sped past. Urchins and crossing-sweepers turned cartwheels of delight, at the sight of a sleek tin fish racketing down the Strand.

The evening had grown quite dark. As they entered Fleet Street, the driver applied the brake and worked a lever that released a mighty gout of uprushing steam. The line-streamed gurney bumped to a halt.

"Well, sir," the driver commented, raising his goggles to peer through the fretted glass of the vehicle's prow, "would you look at that."

Traffic, Oliphant saw, had been halted completely by the erection of wooden barricades hung with lanterns. Behind these stood grim-faced soldiers in combat drab, Cutts-Maudslay carbines unslung and at the ready. Beyond them, he saw sheets of canvas, loosely hung from raw timber uprights, as though someone were attempting to erect stage-scenery in the middle of Fleet Street.

The stoker swabbed his face with a polka-dot kingsman. "Something here the press aren't meant to see."

"They've put it in the wrong street, then," the driver said, "haven't they?"

As Oliphant climbed from the gurney, Fraser came walking quickly toward him. "We've found her," Fraser said glumly.

"And seem to have attracted considerable publicity in the process. Perhaps a few less infantry would be in order?"

"It isn't a matter for levity, Mr. Oliphant. You'd best come with me."

"Is Betteredge here?"

"Haven't seen him. This way, please." Fraser led the way between a pair of barricades. A soldier curtly nodded them past.

Oliphant glimpsed a mustachioed gentleman in urgent conversation with two Metropolitans. "That's Halliday," he said, "chief of Criminal Anthropometry."

"Yes, sir," Fraser said. "They're all over this one. The Museum of Practical Geology has been broken into. The Royal Society is angry as a nest of hornets, and bloody Egremont will be in every first-edition, calling it a Luddite outrage. Our only bit of luck would seem to be that Dr. Mallory is well away in China."

"Mallory? Why is that?"

"The Land Leviathan. Mrs. Bartlett and her cohorts attempted to make away with the thing's skull."

They rounded one of the makeshift barriers, its coarse fabric stamped at intervals with the broad-arrow mark of the Army Ordnance Department.

A cab-horse lay on its side in a great pool of darkening blood. The cab, a common one-horse fly, was overturned nearby, its dull black-lacquered panels stitched with bullet-holes.

"She was with two men," Fraser said. "Three if you count a corpse they left behind in the Museum. The hack was driven by a Yankee exile called Russell, a bully-rock bruiser living in Seven Dials. The other man was Henry Dease of Liverpool, quite the accomplished cracksman. I'd our Henry in dock ten times, when I was on the force, but no more. They're laid out there, sir." He pointed. "Russell, the driver, evidently got into a shouting match with a real cabman, over who should give way. A Metropolitan on traffic-duty attempted to intervene, at which point Russell produced a pistol."

Oliphant was staring at the overturned cab.

"The traffic officer was unarmed, but a pair of Bow Street detectives happened to be passing… "

"But this cab, Fraser…"

"That's the work of an Army-gurney, sir. The last of the temporary garrisons is just by the Holborn viaduct." He paused. "Dease had a Russian shotgun… "

Oliphant shook his head in disbelief.

"Eight civilians taken to hospital," Fraser said. "One detective dead. But come along, sir—best we get this done with."

"What is the meaning of these canvas screens?"

"Criminal Anthropometry ordered them."

Oliphant felt as though he were moving through a dream, his limbs numb and without volition. He allowed himself to be led to where three canvas-draped bodies were arranged upon stretchers.

The face of Florence Bartlett was a hideous ruin.

"Vitriol," Fraser said. "A bullet shattered whatever container she employed."

Oliphant turned quickly away, retching into his handkerchief.

"Sorry, sir," Fraser said. "No point in you seeing the other two."

"Betteredge, Fraser—have you seen him?"

"No, sir. Here's the skull, sir, or what remains of it."

"The skull?"

Perhaps half-a-dozen massive fragments of petrified bone and ivory-tinted plaster were neatly arranged atop a varnished trestle-table. "There's a Mr. Reeks here, from the Museum, come to take it back," Fraser said. "Says it isn't as badly damaged as we might think. Would you like to sit down, sir? I could find you a folding-stool—"

"No. Why does there seem to be fully half of Criminal Anthropometry about, Fraser?"

"Well, sir, you're in a better position to determine that than I," Fraser said, lowering his voice, "though I've heard it said that Mr. Egremont and Lord Galton have recently discovered they've much in common."

"Lord Galton? The eugenics theorist?"

"Lord Darwin's cousin, that is. He's Anthropometry's man in the House of Lords. Has a deal of influence in the Royal Society." Fraser brought out his notebook. "You'd best see why I thought it urgent you come here, sir." He led Oliphant back around the ruin of the cab. Glancing about for possible observers, he passed Oliphant a fold of blue flimsy. "I took it from the Bartlett woman's reticule."

The note was undated, unsigned:

The elegant hand, as familiar to Oliphant as it was to Fraser, was Lady Ada Byron's.

"The two of us alone have seen that," Fraser said.

Oliphant folded the paper in quarters before putting it away in his cigar-case. "And what exactly was it, Fraser, that was hidden in the skull?"

"I'll escort you back through the line, sir."

Reporters surged forward as Fraser and Oliphant emerged from the barricades. Fraser took Oliphant's arm and led him into a cluster of helmeted Metropolitans, some of whom he greeted casually by name. "To answer your question, Mr. Oliphant," Fraser said, the policemen walling off the shouting crowd behind blue serge and brass buttons, "I don't know. But we have it."

"You do? By whose authority?"

"None but my own lights," Fraser said. "Harris here, he found it in the cab, before Anthropometry arrived." Fraser very nearly smiled. "The boys on the force aren't too keen on Anthropometry. Bloody-minded amateurs, aye, Harris?"

"Aye, sir," said a Metropolitan with blond side-whiskers, "they are that."

"Where is it, then?" Oliphant asked.

"Here, sir." Harris produced a cheap black satchel. "Just as we found it, in this."

"Mr. Oliphant, sir, I think you'd best take that straight away," Fraser said.

"Indeed, Fraser, I agree. Tell the Special Branch chap in the fancy gurney that I won't be needing him. Thank you, Harris. Good evening." The policemen parted smoothly. Oliphant, satchel in hand, strode smartly out through the throng who jostled for a better view of the soldiers and the canvas screens.

"Pardon, guv, but couldyer spare a copper?"

Oliphant looked down into the squinting brown eyes of little Boots, every inch the crippled jockey. He was neither. Oliphant threw him a penny. Boots caught it adroitly, then edged forward on his cut-down crutch. He stank of damp fustian and smoked mackerel. "Trouble, guv. Becky'll tell yer." Boots wheeled about on his crutch and hobbled determinedly away, muttering as he went, a beggar intent upon finding a better pitch.

He was one of Oliphant's two most talented watchers.

The other, Becky Dean, kept pace beside Oliphant as he neared the corner of Chancery Lane. She was gotten up as a rather successful tart, brass-heeled and brazen.

"Where has Betteredge got to?" Oliphant asked, as if talking to himself.

"Taken," Becky Dean said. "Not three hours ago."

"Taken by whom?"

"Two men in a hack. They'd been following you. Betteredge got on to them, then set us to watching the watchers."

"I knew nothing of this."

"Day before yesterday, he came to us."

"And who were these men?"

"One's a greasy little ponce of a private detective. Velasco his name is. The other was Government by the look of him."

"He was taken in broad daylight? By force?"

"You know well enough how it's done," Becky Dean said.

In the soothing reek of his tobacconist's quiet stock-room, at the corner of Chancery Lane and Carey Street, Oliphant held the corner of the blue flimsy above the concise jet of a bronze cigar-lighter in the shape of a turbaned Turk.

He watched the paper reduce itself to delicate pinkish ash.

The satchel had contained a Ballester-Molina automatic revolver, a silvered-brass pocket-flask filled with some sickly, sweet-scented decoction, and a wooden case. "This last was plainly the object in question, encrusted as it was with raw white plaster. It held a very large number of Engine-cards in the Napoleon gauge, cut from a novel material, milky and very smooth to the touch.

"The parcel," he said to Mr. Beadon, the tobacconist, "is to be held for me alone."

"Certainly, sir."

"My man Bligh to be the sole exception."

"As you wish, sir."

"If any inquiry at all should be made, Beadon, please send a boy 'round to advise Bligh."

"Our pleasure, sir."

"Thank you, Beadon. Could you possibly give me forty pounds cash, against my account?"

"Forty, sir?"

"Yes."

"Yes I could, sir. With pleasure, Mr. Oliphant." Mr. Beadon took a ring of keys from his coat and went to unlock an admirably modern-looking safe.

"And a dozen prime habanas. And Beadon?"

"Yes, sir?"

"I think it might be a very good idea if you were to keep the parcel in your safe there."

"Of course, sir."

"I believe that the Lambs is nearby, Beadon, the dining-club?"

"Yes, sir. Holborn, sir. A short walk."

The year's first snow began to fall, as he made his way up Chancery Lane, a dry gritty stuff that seemed unlikely to adhere to the paving.

Boots and Becky Dean were nowhere to be seen, which could reliably be taken to mean that they were about their customarily invisible business.

You know well enough how it's done.

And didn't he? How many had been made to vanish, vanish utterly, in London alone? How could one sit among friends at pleasant little dinners, sipping Moselle, listening to kind and careless talk, yet carry in one's mind the burden of such knowledge?

He'd meant Collins to be the last, absolutely the last; now Betteredge had gone, and at the hands of another agency.

In the beginning, it had made so horribly elegant a sort of sense.

In the beginning, it had been his idea.

The Eye. He sensed it now—yes, surely, its all-seeing gaze full upon him as he nodded to the tasseled doorman and entered the marbled vestibule of the Lambs, Andrew Wakefield's dining club.

Brass letter-boxes, a telegraph-booth, an excess of French-polished veneer, all thoroughly modern. He glanced back, through glass doors, to the street. Opposite the Lambs, beyond twin streams of snow-dusted traffic, he glimpsed a solitary figure in a tall derby hat.

A page directed him to the grill-room, which was done in dark oak, with an enormous fireplace topped with a mantel of carved Italian stone. "Laurence Oliphant," he told the tightly jacketed head-waiter, "for Mr. Andrew Wakefield."

A look of unease crossed the man's face. "I'm sorry, sir, but he isn't—"

"Thank you," Oliphant said, "but I believe I see Mr. Wakefield."

With the head-waiter at his heels, Oliphant marched between the tables, diners turning as he passed.

"Andrew," he said, arriving at Wakefield's table, "how very fortunate to find you here."

Wakefield was dining alone. He seemed to experience a temporary difficulty in swallowing.

"Mr. Wakefield, sir," the head-waiter began.

"My friend will be joining me," Wakefield said. "Sit down, please. We're attracting attention."

"Thank you." Oliphant took a seat.

"Will you be dining, sir?" the head-waiter asked.

"No, thank you."

When they were alone, Wakefield sighed loudly. "Damn it all, Oliphant, but didn't I make my terms clear?"

"What exactly is it, Andrew, of which you've become so frightened?"

"It should be fairly obvious."

"Should it?"

"Lord Galton's in league with your bloody Mr. Egremont. He's the great patron of Criminal Anthropometry. Always has been. Their virtual founder. He's Charles Darwin's cousin, Oliphant, and he wields great influence in the House of Lords."

"Yes, and in the Royal Society, and in the Geographical as well. I'm thoroughly familiar with Lord Galton, Andrew. He espouses the systematic breeding of the human species."

Wakefield put down his knife and fork. "Criminal Anthropometry have effectively taken over the Bureau. For all intents and purposes, the Central Statistics Bureau is now under Egremont's control."

Oliphant watched as Wakefield's upper teeth began to worry at his lower-lip.

"I've just come from Fleet Street," Oliphant said. "The level of violence in this society"—and he drew the Ballester-Molina from within his coat—"or rather, I should say, the level of unacknowledged violence, has become remarkable, don't you think, Andrew?" He placed the revolver on the linen between them. "Take this pistol as an example. All too readily obtainable, I'm told. It is of Franco-Mexican manufacture, though the invention of Spaniards. Certain of its internal parts, I am informed, springs and whatnot, are actually British, available on the open market. It becomes rather difficult, then, to say where a weapon like this comes from. Emblematic of something in our current situation, don't you think?"

Wakefield had gone quite white.

"But I seem to have upset you, Andrew. I'm sorry."

"They'll erase us," Wakefield said. "We'll cease to exist. There'll be nothing left, nothing to prove either of us ever lived. Not a check-stub, not a mortgage in a City bank, nothing whatever."

"Exactly what I'm on about, Andrew."

"Don't take that moral tone with me, sir," Wakefield said. "Your lot began it, Oliphant—the disappearances, the files gone missing, the names expunged, numbers lost, histories edited to suit specific ends… No, don't take that tone with me. "

Oliphant could think of nothing to say. He rose, leaving the pistol on the table-cloth, and left the grill-room without looking back.

"Pardon me," he said, in the marbled vestibule, to a burgundy-jacketed bellman who was sifting cigar-ends from a sand-filled marble um, "but could you please direct me to the office of the club steward?"

"You bet," the bellman said, or some similar bit of American dialect, and led Oliphant smartly away, down a corridor lined with mirrors and rubber-plants.

Fifty-five minutes later, having toured the club's premises at some length, having been shown a photographic album of the Lambs' annual "gambols," having applied for membership, and having paid a not inconsiderable initiation fee, nonrefundable, via his own number in the National Credit, Oliphant shook hands with the pomaded steward, gave the man a pound-note, and requested that he be let out by the club's most obscure trade-entrance.

This proved to be a scullery-door which opened on exactly the sort of dank and narrow passage he had hoped for.

Within a quarter-of-an-hour, he stood at the public bar of a crowded house in Bedford Road, reviewing the text of the telegram that one Sybil Gerard had once dispatched to Mr. Charles Egremont, M.P., of Belgravia.

"Lost both me boys o' sickness in the Crimea, squire, an' innit allus the tele-gram comes—innit?"

Oliphant folded the sheet of foolscap into his cigar-case. He watched his dim reflection in the polished zinc of the bar. He looked at his empty tumbler. He looked up at the woman, a raddled hairidan in rags gone a color that had no name, her cheeks roseate with gin-blossoms under a patina of grime.

"No," he said, "that tragedy is not mine."

"Me Roger it was," she said, " 'n' Tommy-lad too. An' not a rag come 'ome, squire—not a bloody rag… "

He handed her a coin. She thanked him, mumbling, and retreated.

He seemed to have thoroughly slipped the traces for the moment. He was entirely alone. It was time to find a cab.

In the dim, high hollow of the great station a thousand voices seemed to mingle, the constituent elements of language reduced to the aural equivalent of fog, homogeneous and impenetrable.

Oliphant went about his business below at a measured and deliberate pace, purchasing a first-class railway ticket to Dover, reserved, for the ten o'clock evening-express. The ticket-clerk seated Oliphant's National Credit plate in the machine and cranked hard on the lever.

"There you are, sir. Reserved in your name."

Thanking the clerk, Oliphant made his way to a second wicket, where he again produced his plate. "I wish to book a cabinette on the morning mail-boat to Ostend." Apparently as an afterthought, as he was putting the boat-tickets and his National Credit plate into his note-case, he requested a second-class ticket on the midnight boat to Calais.

"Would that be this evening, sir?"

"Yes."

"That would be the Bessemer, sir. On National Credit, sir?"

Oliphant paid for the ticket to Calais with pound-notes from Mr. Beadon's safe.

Ten till nine, by his father's gold hunter.

At nine o'clock he boarded a departing train at the last possible moment, paying the first-class fare to Dover directly to the conductor.

The swinging-saloon ship Bessemer, her twin turtle-decks awash with Dover spray, steamed for Calais sharp on the midnight. Oliphant, having visited the purser with his second-class ticket and his pound-notes, was seated in a brocade armchair in the saloon cabin, sipping mediocre brandy and taking the measure of his fellow passengers. They were, he was pleased to note, a thoroughly unremarkable lot.

He disliked swinging-saloons, finding the Engine-controlled movements of the cabin, intended to compensate for the vessel's pitch and roll, somehow more unsettling than the ordinary motion of a ship at sea. In addition, the cabin itself was effectively windowless. Swung on gimbals in a central well, the cabin was mounted so deeply in the hull that its windows, such as they were, were located high up along the walls, well above one's line of sight. All in all, as a remedy for mal-de-mer, Oliphant thought it excessive. The public, however, were apparently fascinated by the novel employment of a small Engine, somewhat on the order of a gunnery Engine, whose sole task consisted of maintaining as near a level footing in the cabin as was deemed possible. This was accomplished via something the press referred to, in clacker's argot, as "back-feed." Still, with twin paddles fore and aft, the Bessemer customarily performed the distance of twenty-one miles between Dover and Calais in an hour and thirty minutes.

He would rather have been above-decks, now, facing into the wind; able then, perhaps, to imagine himself steaming toward some grander, more accessible goal. But the promenade of a swinging-saloon offered no bulwark, only an iron railing, and the Channel wind was damp and cold. And he had, he reminded himself, only the one goal now, and it, in all likelihood, a fool's errand.

Still: Sybil Gerard. He had decided, upon reading the telegram to Egremont, against having her number spun. He had expected it might attract unwanted attention; with Criminal Anthropometry holding sway at Central Statistics, of course, he had been proven correct. And he rather suspected that Sybil Gerard's file might no longer exist.

Walter Gerard of Manchester, sworn enemy of progress, agitator for the rights of man. Hanged. And if Walter Gerard had had a daughter, what might have become of her? And if she had been ruined, as she claimed to have been, by Charles Egremont?

Oliphant's back began to ache. Beneath the chair's stiff brocade, Jacquard-woven with repeated images of the Bessemer, the horsehair stuffing held a chill.

But if nothing else, he reminded himself, he at least had temporarily escaped the soft black pit of Dr. McNeile's patent Swiss bath-tub.

Putting his brandy aside unfinished, he nodded then, and napped.

And dreamed, perhaps, of the Eye.

The Bessemer docked at Calais at half past one.

Monsieur Lucien Arslau's apartments were in Passy. At noon, Oliphant presented his card to the concierge, who conveyed it via pneumatic tube to Monsieur Arslau's establishment. Almost immediately, the whistle attached to a nickeled speaking-tube peeped twice; the concierge bent his ear to the funnel; Oliphant made out faint tones of shouted French.

The concierge showed Oliphant to the lift.

He was admitted, on the fifth floor, by a liveried manservant wearing an ornate Corsican stiletto through a pleated sash of gros de Naples. The young man managed to bow without taking his eyes from Oliphant. Monsieur Arslau regretted, the servant said, that he was unable at the moment to receive Monsieur Oliphant; in the meantime, would Monsieur Oliphant care for any sort of refreshment?

Oliphant declared that he would very much appreciate an opportunity to bathe. He would also find a pot of coffee most agreeable.

He was led through a broad drawing-room, rich in satin and ormolu, buhl cabinets, bronzes, statuettes, and porcelain, where the lizard-eyed Emperor and his dainty Empress, the former Miss Howard, gazed from twin portraits in oil. And then through a morning-room hung with proof-engravings. A graceful curve of stairway mounted from an octagonal anteroom.

Some two hours later, having bathed in a marble-rimmed tub of gratifying solidity, having taken strong French coffee and lunched upon cutlets a la Maintenon, and wearing borrowed linen with far more starch than he cared for, he was ushered into the study of Monsieur Arslau.

"Mr. Oliphant, sir," Arslau said, in his excellent English, "it is a great pleasure. I regret not having been able to see you earlier, but… " He gestured toward a broad mahogany desk littered with files and papers. From behind a closed door came the steady clatter of a telegraph. On one wall hung a framed engraving of the Great Napoleon, its mighty gear-towers rising behind a grid-work of plate-glass and iron.

"Not at all, Lucien. I'm grateful to have had the time to take advantage of your hospitality. Your chef has an extraordinary way with mutton; a sublimated meat that could scarcely have grown on any mundane sheep."

Arslau smiled. Nearly Oliphant's height, broader in the shoulders, he was some forty years of age and wore his greying beard in the Imperial fashion. His cravat was embroidered with small golden bees. "I've had your letter, of course." He returned to his desk and settled himself in a high-backed chair upholstered in dark-green leather. Oliphant took a seat in an armchair opposite.

"I must admit my curiosity, Laurence, as to what it is you are currently about." Arslau made a steeple of his fingers and peered over them, raising his eyebrows. "The nature of your request would hardly seem to warrant the precautions you deem necessary… "

"On the contrary, Lucien, you must know that I would not presume in this way upon our acquaintance for any but the most pressing of reasons."

"But no, my friend," Arslau said, with a dismissive little wave of his hands, "you have asked the merest of favors. Among colleagues, men such as ourselves, it is nothing. I am simply curious; it is one of my many vices. You convey to me a letter by Imperial diplomatic pouch—no mean feat in itself, for an Englishman, though I know that you are familiar with our friend Bayard. Your letter requires my help in locating a certain English adventuress, no more. You believe she may be resident in France. Yet you stress the need for very great secrecy; you warn me particularly against communicating with you either by telegraph or by the regular post. You instruct me to await your arrival. What am I to make of this? Have you succumbed at last to the wiles of some woman?"

"Alas, I have not."

"Given the current model of English womanhood, my friend, I find that entirely understandable. Far too many of your gentlewomen aspire to be elevated to the level of masculine intellectuality—superior to crinoline, superior to pearl-powder, above taking the pains to be pretty, above making themselves agreeable in any way! What a dreary, utilitarian, entirely ugly life an Englishman shall eventually lead, if this trend continues! So why then, I ask, have you crossed the Channel to find an English adventuress? Not that we haven't our share of them. They're rather thick upon the ground, actually, not to mention the origin"—Arslau smiled—"of our own Empress."

"You yourself have never married, Lucien," Oliphant remarked, attempting to deflect Arslau from his purpose.

"But look at matrimony! Who is to say which shall be the one judicious selection out of the nine hundred and ninety-nine mistakes? Which is to be the one eel out of the barrel of snakes? The girl on the kerbstone may be the one woman out of every female creature in this universe capable of making me a happy man, my friend, yet I pass her by, and bespatter her with the mud from my wheels, in my utter ignorance!" Arslau laughed. "No, I have not married, and your mission is a political one."

"Of course."

"Things are not well with Britain. I don't need my British sources to tell me that, Oliphant. The papers suffice. The death of Byron…"

"Great Britain's political direction, Lucien—indeed, her ultimate stability as a nation—may even now be at stake. I need not remind you of the paramount importance of our two nations' continued mutual recognition and support."

"And the matter of this Miss Gerard, Oliphant? Shall I take it you suggest she is somehow pivotal in the situation?"

Oliphant took out his cigar-case and selected one of Beadon's habanas. His fingers brushed the folded text of Sybil Gerard's telegram. He closed the case. "Do you mind if I smoke?"

"Please do."

"Thank you. The matters which hinge upon Sybil Gerard are entirely British, entirely domestic. They may stand, ultimately, to affect France, but in a most indirect way." Oliphant clipped and pierced his cigar.

"Are you entirely sure of that?"

"I am."

"I am not." Arslau rose to bring Oliphant a copper ashtray atop a walnut stand. He returned to his desk but remained standing. "What do you know of the Jacquardine Society?"

"They are the approximate equivalent of our Steam Intellect Society, are they not?"

"Yes and no. There is another, a secret society, within the Jacquardines. They style themselves Les Fils de Vaucanson. Certain of them are anarchists, others in league with the Marianne, others with the Universal Fraternity, others with any sort of rabble. Class-war conspirators, you understand? Others are simply criminals. But you know this, Laurence."

Oliphant took a lucifer from a box emblazoned with a stippled image of the Bessemer, and struck it. He lit his cigar.

"You tell me that the woman you know as Sybil Gerard is of no concern to France," Arslau said.

"You think otherwise?"

"Perhaps. Tell me what you know of our difficulties with the Great Napoleon."

"Very little. Wakefield of Central Statistics mentioned it to me. The Engine is no longer functioning accurately?"

"Ordinateurs, thank the good God, are not my specialty. The Napoleon performs with its accustomed speed and accuracy in most instances, I am informed, but an outre element of inconstancy presently haunts the machine's higher functions… " Arslau sighed. "Those higher functions being deemed a matter of considerable national pride, I have myself been forced to peruse reams of the most abstruse technical prose in the Empire. To no ultimate avail, it now seems, as we've had the culprit in hand."

"The culprit?"

"An avowed member of Les Fils de Vaucanson. His name is of no importance. He was arrested in Lyons in connection with an ordinary case of civil fraud involving a municipal ordinateur. Elements of his subsequent confession brought him to the attention of the Commission of Special Services, and hence to ours. During interrogation, he revealed his responsibility for the current lamentable state of our Great Napoleon."

"He confessed to le sabotage, then?"

"No. He would not confess to that. He refused, until the end. With regard to the Napoleon, he would admit only to having run a certain sequence of punch-cards, a mathematical formula."

Oliphant watched the smoke from his cigar spiral toward the high ceiling's ornate plaster rosette.

"The formula came from London," Arslau continued. "He obtained it from an Englishwoman. Her name was Sybil Gerard."

"Have you attempted analysis of this formula?"

"No. It was stolen, our Jacquardine claimed, spirited away by a woman he knew as Flora Bartelle, apparently an American."

"I see."

"Then tell me what you see, my friend, for I myself am very much in the dark."

The Eye. All-seeing, the sublime weight of its perception pressing in upon him from every direction.

Oliphant hesitated. Ash from his cigar fell unnoticed to Arslau's rich carpet. "I have yet to meet Sybil Gerard," he said, "but I may be able to offer you information regarding this formula you've mentioned. It may even be possible to obtain a copy. I can promise nothing, however, until I myself am allowed to interview the lady in question, privately and at some length."

Arslau fell silent. He seemed to look through Oliphant. At last he nodded. "We can arrange that."

"She is not, I take it, in custody?"

"Let us say that we are aware of her movements."

"You allow her apparent freedom, yet observe her closely?"

"Precisely that. If we take her now, and she reveals nothing, the trail goes cold."

"As ever, Arslau, your technique is impeccable. And when might it be arranged for me to meet with her?"

The Eye, the pressure, the pounding of his heart.

"This evening, if you so desire," said Monsieur Arslau of the Police des Chateaux, adjusting his gold-embroidered cravat.

The walls of the Cafe de l'Univers were hung with paintings, etched mirrors, and enamel plaques advertising the ubiquitous product of Pernod Fils. The pictures, if one could call them that, were either grotesque daubs, seemingly executed in a messy imitation of Engine-stippling, or queer geometric formulations suggesting the restless motion of kinotrope-bits. In some cases, Oliphant supposed, the painters themselves were present—or such he took them to be, these long-haired fellows in velvet caps, their corduroy trousers smeared with pigment and tobacco-ash. But the majority of the clientele—according to his companion, one Jean Beraud—consisted of kinotropistes. These gentlemen of the Latin Quarter sat and drank with their black-clad grisettes at the round marble tables, or held forth on theoretical matters before small groups of their peers.

Beraud, in an unseasonable boater and a brown suit of intensely Gallic cut, was one of Arslau's mouchards, a professional informer who referred to the kinotropists as members of "le milieu." He was fresh and rosy as a young pig, he drank Vittel and peppermint, and Oliphant had taken an immediate dislike to him. The kinotropists seemed to favor the absinthe of Pernod Fils; Oliphant, sipping a glass of red wine, watched the ritual of glass and water-decanter, of sugar-lump and trowel-shaped spoon.

"Absinthe is the bed of tuberculosis," Beraud said.

"Why do you suppose that Madame Tournachon would choose to appear tonight in this cafe, Beraud?"

The mouchard shrugged. "She is a familiar of le milieu, monsieur. She goes to Madelon's, also to Batiffol's, but it is here, in l'Univers, that she most nearly finds companionship."

"And why is that, do you think?"

"Because she was Gautier's mistress, of course. He was a kind of prince here, monsieur, it must be understood. Her relationship with Gautier has necessarily limited her contacts with ordinary society. He taught her French, or such French as she has."

"What sort of woman, exactly, do you take her to be?"

Beraud smirked. "She is perhaps attractive, but cold. Unsympathetic. In the manner of Englishwomen, you understand."

"When she arrives, Beraud—if she arrives, I should say—you are to take your leave immediately."

Beraud raised his eyebrows. "On the contrary, monsieur—"

"You are to go, Beraud. Take your leave." A measured pause. "Vanish."

The sharply padded shoulders of Beraud's brown suit rose at the word.

"You will instruct the cab to wait, and the stenographer as well. The stenographer, Beraud—his English is adequate? My friend—my very good friend. Monsieur Arslau—has assured me that this is the case… "

"Entirely adequate, yes! And monsieur"—getting up so quickly that he nearly overturned his bentwood chair—"it is she… "

The woman now entering l'Univers might easily have been mistaken for a modish Parisienne of more than common means. Slender and blond, she wore a somber merino crinoline with matching cloak and bonnet, narrowly trimmed in mink.

As Beraud continued his hasty retreat into the depths of the cafe, Oliphant rose. Her eyes, very alert, very blue, met his. He approached her, hat in hand, and bowed. "Forgive me," he said in English. "We have not been introduced, but I must speak with you regarding a matter of great urgency."

Recognition dawned in the wide blue eyes, and fear.

"Sir, you mistake me for another."

"You are Sybil Gerard."

Her lower-lip was trembling now, and Oliphant experienced an abrupt, powerful, and entirely unexpected sympathy. "I am Laurence Oliphant, Miss Gerard. You are presently in terrible danger. I wish to help you."

"That is not my name, sir. Pray let me pass. My friends are waiting."

"I know that Egremont betrayed you. I understand the nature of his betrayal."

She started at the name, Oliphant in terror of her swooning on the spot, but then she gave a little shudder and seemed to study him quietly for a moment. "I saw you in Grand's, that night," she said. "You were in the smoker with Houston and… Mick. You had a gammy arm, up in a sling."

"Please," he said, "join me."

Seated opposite her at his table, Oliphant listened as she ordered absinthe de vidangeur in quite passable French.

"Do you know Lamartine, the singer?" she asked.

"I'm sorry, no."

"He invented it, 'scavenger's absinthe.' I can't drink it otherwise."

The waiter arrived with the drink, a mixture of absinthe and red wine.

"Theo taught me to order it," she said, "before he… went away." She drank, the wine red against her painted lips. "I know you've come to take me back. Don't gull me otherwise. I know a copper when I meet one."

"I have no desire to see you return to England, Miss Gerard—"

"Tournachon. I'm Sybil Tournachon. French by marriage."

"Your husband is here in Paris?"

"No," she said, lifting an oval locket of cut-steel on its black ribbon. She snapped it open, displaying a daguerreotyped miniature of a handsome young man. "Aristide. He fell at Philadelphia, in the great inferno. He volunteered, to fight on the Union side. He was real, you know; I mean, he actually existed, and wasn't just one of them the clackers make up… " She gazed at the little image with a look of mingled longing and sadness, though Oliphant understood that she had never in her life set eyes upon Aristide Tournachon.

"It was a marriage of convenience, I take it."

"Yes. And you've come to take me back."

"Not at all, Miss… Tournachon."

"I don't believe you."

"You must. A great deal depends upon it, not least your own safety. Since you departed London, Charles Egremont has become a very powerful, a very dangerous man. As dangerous to the well-being of Great Britain as he is no doubt dangerous to you."

"Charles? Dangerous?" She seemed suddenly on the verge of laughter. "You're gulling me."

"I need your help. Desperately. As desperately as you need mine."

"Do I, then?"

"Egremont has powerful resources at his command, branches of Government easily capable of reaching you here."

"You mean the Specials, and that lot?"

"More to the point, I must inform you that your activities are even now monitored by at least one secret agency of Imperial France… "

"Because Theophile chose to help me?"

"Indeed, that seems to be the case… "

She drank off the last of the vile-looking concoction in her glass. "Dear Theophile. What a lovely, silly sort of cove he was. Always in his scarlet waistcoat, and madly clever at clacking. I gave him Mick's set of fancy cards, and he was terribly kind to me then. Spun me up a marriage-license and a French citizen-number rat-tat-tat. Then, one afternoon, I was to meet him here…"

"Yes?"

"He never came." She lowered her eyes. "He used to boast of having a 'gambling modus.' They all do, but he talked as if he meant it. Someone might have believed him. It was foolish of him… "

"Did he ever speak with you about his interest in the Engine known as the Great Napoleon?"

"Their monster, you mean? Your Paris clacker speaks of little else, sir! They're mad for the thing!"

"The French authorities believe that Theophile Gautier damaged the Great Napoleon with Radley's cards."

"Is he dead, then, Theo?"

Oliphant hesitated. "Alas, I believe so, yes."

"That's so vicious bloody cruel," she said, "to spirit a man away like a rabbit in a conjuring trick, and leave his loved-ones ever to wonder, and worry, and never rest! It's vile."

Oliphant found that he could not meet her eyes.

"There's a deal of that about in this Paris, there is," she said. "The things I've heard their clackers jest about… And London, they say, is no better, really, to them as know. Do you know they say the Rads murdered Wellington? They say the sappers, the sand-hogs, hand-in-glove with the Rads, cut a tunnel beneath that restaurant, and the master sapper himself tamped the powder and set the fuses… Then the Rads lay the blame on men like…"

"Your father. Yes. I know."

"And knowing that, you'd ask me to trust you?" There was defiance in her eyes, and perhaps a pride long-buried.

"Knowing that Charles Egremont betrayed your father, Walter Gerard, unto his destruction; that he betrayed you as well, bringing about your ruin in the eyes of society; yes, I must ask that you trust me. In exchange, I offer you the complete, utter, and virtually instantaneous negation of your betrayer's political career."

She lowered her eyes again, and seemed to consider. "Could you do that, really?" she asked.

"Your testament alone will serve. I shall be merely the instrument of its delivery."

"No," she said at last, "if I were to denounce him publicly, then I would expose myself as well. Charles isn't the only one I need to fear, as you yourself have said. Remember, I was there that night, in Grand's; I know how long an arm revenge can have."

"I've not suggested denouncing him publicly. Blackmail will suffice."

Now her eyes were far away, as if she walked the distant pavements of memory. "They were so close, Charles and my father, or so it seemed… Perhaps if things had taken a different turn…"

"Egremont lives daily with that betrayal. It is the crucial grain of constant irritation around which his depraved politics have been allowed to form. Your telegram galvanized his guilt—his terror of those early Luddite sympathies being revealed. Now he would tame the beast, make political terror his constant ally. But you and I stand in his way."

The blue eyes were strangely calm. "I find I wish to believe you, Mr. Oliphant."

"I will keep you safe," Oliphant said, quite startled by his own intensity. "So long as you choose to remain in France, you shall do so under the protection of powerful friends, colleagues of mine, agents of the Imperial court. A cab awaits us, and a stenographer, to take down the details of your testimony."

With a tortured, flatulent wheeze of compressed air, a small panmelodium was activated at the rear of the cafe. Oliphant, turning, caught the eye of the mouchard Beraud, who was smoking a Dutch clay pipe amid a cluster of chattering kinotropistes.

"Madame Tournachon," Oliphant said, rising, "may I offer you my arm?"

"It's healed, has it?" She rose in a rustle of crinoline.

"Entirely," Oliphant said, remembering the lightning-stroke of the samurai's sword, in Edo, amid the shadows. He had been attempting to hold the fellow off with a riding-crop.

As the Engine-driven music of the grand panmelodium brought the grisettes from their chairs, she took his arm.

A girl burst in, then, from the street, her naked breasts daubed with green. About her waist were strung angular constructs of copper-foil, like the leaves of a date-palm approximated by a kinotrope. She was followed by two boys in a similar lack of attire, and Oliphant felt utterly lost.

"Come then," Sybil said, "don't you know they're art students, and been to a bal? It's Montmartre, you know, and the art students, they've such a mad and lovely time."

Oliphant had entertained the gallant notion of personally delivering to Charles Egremont a transcript of Sybil Gerard's testimony. But upon his return to England, those symptoms of advanced syphilis which Dr. McNeile had incorrectly diagnosed as railway-spine temporarily overcame him. Disguised as a commercial traveler from M. Arslau's native Alsace, Oliphant went to ground in Brighton's hydropathic spa, to take the waters and dispatch a number of telegrams.

Mr. Mori Arinori arrives in Belgravia at a quarter past four, driving a new-model Zephyr gurney leased from a commercial garage in Camden Town, just as Charles Egremont is departing for Parliament and a most important speech.

Egremont's body-guard, on assignment from the Central Statistics Bureau's Department of Criminal Anthropometry, a machine-carbine slung beneath his coat, watches as Mori descends from the Zephyr, a diminutive figure in evening-clothes.

Mori marches straight across the new-fallen snow, his boots leaving perfect prints upon the black macadam.

"For you, sir," Mori says and bows, handing Egremont the stout manila envelope. "Very good day to you, sir." Donning round goggles with an elasticated band, Mori returns to his Zephyr.

"What an extraordinary little personage," Egremont says, looking down at the envelope. "One hasn't seen a Chinaman, got up like that…"

Recede.

Reiterate.

Rise above these black patterns of wheel-tracks,

These snow-swept streets,

Into the great map of London,

forgetting