“You can carry on singing if you like,” Hetty said, and knelt before the ash-covered fire. “You’ve a fine voice. Mustn’t let your gifts go to waste.” She began to feed individual coals to the hearth, shivering. A dire chill seemed to enter the room then, through the cracked casement of one of the nailed-up windows, and for a strange passing moment Sybil felt a distinct presence in the air. A definite sense of observation, of eyes fixed upon her from another realm. She thought of her dead father. Learn the voice, Sybil. Learn to speak. It’s all we have that can fight them, he had told her. This in the last few days before his arrest, when it was clear that the Rads had won again—clear to everyone, perhaps, save Walter Gerard. She had seen then, with heart-crushing clarity, the utter magnitude of her father’s defeat. His ideals would be lost—not just misplaced but utterly expunged from history, to be crushed again and again and again, like the carcass of a mongrel dog under the racketing wheels of an express train. Learn to speak, Sybil. It’s all we have.…
“Read to me?” Hetty asked. “I’ll make tea.”
“Very well.” In her spotty, scattered life with Hetty, reading aloud was one of the little rituals they had that passed for domesticity. Sybil took up the day’s Illustrated London News from the deal table, settled her crinoline about her in the creaking, damp-smelling armchair, and squinted at a frontpage article. It concerned itself with dinosaurs.
The Rads were mad for these dinosaurs, it seemed. Here was an engraving of a party of seven, led by Lord Darwin, all peering intently at some indeterminate object embedded in a coal-face in Thuringia. Sybil read the caption aloud, showed the picture to Hetty. A bone. The thing in the coal was a monstrous bone, as long as a man was tall. She shuddered. Turning the page, she encountered an artist’s view of the creature as it might have looked in life, a monstrosity with twin rows of angry triangular saw-teeth along its humped spine. It seemed the size of an elephant at least, though its evil little head was scarcely larger than a hound’s.
Hetty poured the tea. “ ‘Reptiles held sway across the whole of the earth,’ eh?” she quoted, and threaded her needle. “I don’t believe a bloody word of it.”
“Why not?”
“They’re the bones of bloody giants, out of Genesis. That’s what the clergy say, ain’t it?”
Sybil said nothing. Neither supposition struck her as the more fantastic. She turned to a second article, this one in praise of Her Majesty’s Artillery in the Crimea. She found an engraving of two handsome subalterns admiring the operation of a long-range gun. The gun itself, its barrel stout as a foundry stack, looked fit to make short work of all Lord Darwin’s dinosaurs. Sybil’s attention, however, was held by an inset view of the gunnery Engine. The intricate nest of interlocking gearwork possessed a queer beauty, like some kind of baroquely fabulous wallpaper.
“Have you anything that needs darning?” Hetty asked.
“No, thank you.”
“Read some adverts, then,” Hetty advised. “I do hate that war humbug.”
There was HAVILAND CHINA, from Limoges, France; VIN MARIANI, the French tonic, with a testimonial from Alexandre Dumas and Descriptive Book, Portraits, and Autographs of Celebrities, upon application to the premises in Oxford Street; SILVER ELECTRO SILICON POLISH, it never scratches, never wears, it is unlike others; the “NEW DEPARTURE” BICYCLE BELL, it has a tone all its own; DR. BAYLEY’S LITHIA WATER, cures Bright’s disease and the gouty diathesis; GURNEY’S “REGENT” POCKET STEAM-ENGINE, intended for use with domestic sewing machines. This last held Sybil’s attention, but not through its promise to operate a machine at double the old speed at a cost of one halfpenny per hour.
Here was an engraving of the tastefully ornamented little boiler, to be heated by gas or paraffin. Charles Egremont had purchased one of these for his wife. It came equipped with a rubber tube intended to vent the waste steam when jammed under a convenient sash-window, but Sybil had been delighted to hear that it had turned Madame’s drawing-room into a Turkish bath.
When the paper was finished, Sybil went to bed. She was woken around midnight by the savage rhythmic crunching of Hetty’s bed-springs.
It was dim in the Garrick Theatre, dusty and cold, with the pit and the balcony and the racks of shabby seats; but it was pitch-dark below the stage, where Mick Radley was, and it smelled of damp and lime.
Mick’s voice echoed up from under her feet. “Ever seen the innards of a kinotrope, Sybil?”
“I saw one once, backstage,” she said. “At a music-hall, in Bethnal Green. I knew the fellow what worked it, a clacker cove.”
“A sweetheart?” Mick asked. His echoing voice was sharp.
“No,” Sybil told him quickly, “I was singing a bit.… But it scarcely paid.”
She heard the sharp click of his repeating match. It caught on the third attempt and he lit a stub of candle. “Come down,” he commanded. “Don’t stand there like a goose, showing off your ankles.” Sybil lifted her crinoline with both hands and picked her way uneasily down the steep damp stairs.
Mick reached up to grope behind a tall stage-mirror, a great gleaming sheet of silvered glass, with a wheeled pedestal and oily gears and worn wooden cranks. He retrieved a cheap black portmanteau of proofed canvas, placed it carefully on the floor before him, and squatted to undo the flimsy tin clasps. He removed a stack of perforated cards bound with a ribbon of red paper. There were other bundles in the bag as well, Sybil saw, and something else, a gleam of polished wood.
He handled the cards gently, like a Bible.
“Safe as houses,” he said. “You just disguise ’em, you see—write something stupid on the wrapper, like ‘Temperance Lecture—Parts One Two Three.’ Then coves never think to steal ’em, or even load them up and look.” Hefting the thick block, he riffled its edge with his thumb, so that it made a sharp crisp sound, like a gambler’s new deck. “I put a deal of capital in these,” he said. “Weeks of work from the best kino hands in Manchester. Exclusively to my design, I might point out. ’Tis a lovely thing, girl. Quite artistic, in its way. You’ll soon see.”
Closing the portmanteau, he stood. He carefully slid the bundle of cards into his coat-pocket, then bent over a crate and tugged out a thick glass tube. He blew dust from the tube, then gripped one end of it with a special pair of pincers. The glass cracked open with an airtight pop—there was a fresh block of lime in the tube. Mick slid it loose, humming to himself. He tamped the lime gently into the socket of a limelight burner, a great dish-shaped thing of sooty iron and gleaming tin. Then he turned a hose-tap, sniffed a bit, nodded, turned a second tap, and set the candle to it.
Sybil yelped as a vicious flash sheeted into her eyes. Mick chuckled at her over the hiss of blazing gas, dots of hot blue dazzle drifting before her. “Better,” he remarked. He aimed the blazing limelight carefully into the stage-mirror, then began to adjust its cranks.
Sybil looked around, blinking. It was dank and ratty and cramped under the Garrick stage, the sort of place a dog or a pauper might die in, with torn and yellowed bills underfoot, for naughty farces like That Rascal Jack and Scamps of London. A pair of ladies’ unmentionables were wadded in a corner. From her brief unhappy days as a stage-singer, she had some idea how they might have gotten there.
She let her gaze follow steam-pipes and taut wires to the gleam of the Babbage Engine, a small one, a kinotrope model, no taller than Sybil herself. Unlike everything else in the Garrick, the Engine looked in very good repair, mounted on four mahogany blocks. The floor and ceiling above and beneath it had been carefully scoured and whitewashed. Steam-calculators were delicate things, temperamental, so she’d heard; better not to own one than not cherish it. In the stray glare from Mick’s limelight, dozens of knobbed brass columns gleamed, set top and bottom into solid sockets bored through polished plates, with shining levers, ratchets, a thousand steel gears cut bright and fine. It smelled of linseed oil.
Looking at it, this close, this long, made Sybil feel quite odd. Hungry almost, or greedy
in a queer way, the way she might feel about … a fine lovely horse, say. She wanted—not to own it exactly, but possess it somehow.…
Mick took her elbow suddenly, from behind. She started. “Lovely thing, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it’s … lovely.”
Mick still held her arm. Slowly, he put his other gloved hand against her cheek, inside her bonnet. Then he lifted her chin with his thumb, staring into her face. “It makes you feel something, doesn’t it?”
His rapt voice frightened her, his eyes underlit with glare. “Yes, Mick,” she said obediently, quickly. “I do feel it … something.”
He tugged her bonnet loose, to hang at her neck. “You’re not frightened of it, Sybil, are you? Not with Dandy Mick here, holding you. You feel a little special frisson. You’ll learn to like that feeling. We’ll make a clacker of you.”
“Can I do that, truly? Can a girl do that?”
Mick laughed. “Have you never heard of Lady Ada Byron, then? The Prime Minister’s daughter, and the very Queen of Engines!” He let her go, and swung both his arms wide, coat swinging open, a showman’s gesture. “Ada Byron, true friend and disciple of Babbage himself! Lord Charles Babbage, father of the Difference Engine and the Newton of our modern age!”
She gaped at him. “But Ada Byron is a ladyship!”
“You’d be surprised who our Lady Ada knows,” Mick declared, plucking a block of cards from his pocket and peeling off its paper jacket. “Oh, not to drink tea with, among the diamond squad at her garden-parties, but Ada’s what you’d call fast, in her own mathematical way.…” He paused. “That’s not to say that Ada is the best, you know. I know clacking coves in the Steam Intellect Society that make even Lady Ada look a bit tardy. But Ada possesses genius. D’ye know what that means, Sybil? To possess genius?”
“What?” Sybil said, hating the giddy surety in his voice.
“D’ye know how analytical geometry was born? Fellow named Descartes, watching a fly on the ceiling. A million fellows before him had watched flies on the ceiling, but it took René Descartes to make a science of it. Now engineers use what he discovered every day, but if it weren’t for him we’d still be blind to it.”
“What do flies matter to anyone?” Sybil demanded.
“Ada had an insight once that ranked with Descartes’ discovery. No one has found a use for it as yet. It’s what they call pure mathematics.” Mick laughed. “ ‘Pure.’ You know what that means, Sybil? It means they can’t get it to run.” He rubbed his hands together, grinning. “No one can get it to run.”
Mick’s glee was wearing at her nerves. “I thought you hated lordships!”
“I do hate lordly privilege, what’s not earned fair and square and level,” he said. “But Lady Ada lives and swears by the power of gray matter, and not her blue blood.” He slotted the cards into a silvered tray by the side of the machine, then spun and caught her wrist. “Your father’s dead, girl! ’Tis not that I mean to hurt you, saying it, but the Luddites are dead as cold ashes. Oh, we marched and ranted, for the rights of labor and such—fine talk, girl! But Lord Charles Babbage made blueprints while we made pamphlets. And his blueprints built this world.”
Mick shook his head. “The Byron men, the Babbage men, the Industrial Radicals, they own Great Britain! They own us, girl—the very globe is at their feet, Europe, America, everywhere. The House of Lords is packed top to bottom with Rads. Queen Victoria won’t stir a finger without a nod from the savants and capitalists.” He pointed at her. “And it’s no use fighting that anymore, and you know why? ’Cause the Rads do play fair, or fair enough to manage—and you can become one of ’em, if you’re clever! You can’t get clever men to fight such a system, as it makes too much sense to ’em.”
Mick thumbed his chest. “But that don’t mean that you and I are out in the cold and lonely. It only means we have to think faster, with our eyes peeled and our ears open.…” Mick struck a prize-fighter’s pose: elbows bent, fists poised, knuckles up before his face. Then he flung his hair back, and grinned at her.
“That’s all very well for you,” Sybil protested. “You can do as you like. You were one of my father’s followers—well, there were many such, and some are in Parliament now. But fallen women get ruined, d’ye see? Ruined, and stay that way.”
Mick straightened, frowning at her. “Now that’s exactly what I mean. You’re running with the flash mob, now, but thinking like a trollop! There’s no one knows who you are, in Paris! The cops and bosses have your number here, true enough! But numbers are only that, and your file’s no more than a simple stack of cards. For them as know, there’s ways to change a number.” He sneered, to see her surprise. “It ain’t done easy, here in London, I grant you. But affairs run differently, in the Paris of Louis Napoleon! Affairs run fast and loose in flash Paree, especially for an adventuress with a blarney tongue and a pretty ankle.”
Sybil bit her knuckle. Her eyes burned suddenly. It was acrid smoke from the limelight, and fear. A new number in the Government’s machines—that would mean a new life. A life without a past. The unexpected thought of such freedom terrified her. Not so much for what it meant in itself, though that was strange and dazzling enough. But for what Mick Radley might demand for such a thing, in fair exchange. “Truly, you could change my number?”
“I can buy you a new one in Paris. Pass you off for French or an Argie or an American refugee girl.” Mick folded his elegant arms. “I promise nothing, mind you. You’ll have to earn it.”
“You wouldn’t gull me, Mick?” she said slowly. “Because … because I could be really and specially sweet to a fellow who could do me such a great service.”
Mick jammed his hands in his pockets, rocking back on his heels, looking at her. “Could you now,” he said softly. Her trembling words had fanned something inside him, she could see it in his eyes. An eager, lustful kindling, something she dimly knew was there, a need he had, to … slip his fishhooks deeper into her.
“I could, if you treated me fair and level, as your ’prentice adventuress, and not some cakey dollymop, to gull and cast aside.” Sybil felt tears coming, harder this time. She blinked, and looked up boldly, and let them flow, thinking perhaps they might do some good. “You wouldn’t raise my hopes and dash them, would you? That would be low and cruel! If you did that I’d—I’d jump off Tower Bridge!”
He looked her in the eye. “Bar that sniffling, girl, and listen close to me. Understand this. You’re not just Mick’s pretty bit o’ muslin—I may have a taste for that same as any man, but I can get that where I like, and don’t need you just for that. I need the blarney skill and the daring pluck that was Mr. Walter Gerard’s. You’re to be my ’prentice, Sybil, and I your master, and let that be how things stand with us. You’ll be loyal, obedient, truthful to me, no subterfuge and no impertinence, and in return, I’ll teach you craft, and keep you well—and you’ll find me as kind and generous as you are loyal and true. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, Mick.”
“We have a pact, then?”
“Yes, Mick.” She smiled at him.
“Well and good,” he said. “Then kneel, here, and put your hands together, so”—he joined his hands in prayer—“and make this oath. That you, Sybil Gerard, do swear by saints and angels, by powers, dominions, and thrones, by seraphim and cherubim and the all-seeing eye, to obey Michael Radley, and serve him faithfully, so help you God! Do you so swear?”
She stared at him in dismay. “Must I really?”
“Yes.”
“But isn’t it a great sin, to make such an oath, to a man who … I mean to say … we’re not in holy wedlock.…”
“That’s a marriage vow,” he said impatiently, “and this a ’prentice oath!”
She saw no alternative. Tugging her skirts back, she knelt before him on cold gritty stone.
“Do you so swear?”
“I do, so help me God.”
“Don’t look so glum,” he said, helping her to her feet, “that’
s a mild and womanly oath you swore, compared to some.” He pulled her to her feet. “Let it brace you, should you have doubts or disloyal thoughts. Now take this”—he handed her the guttering candle—“and hunt up that gin-soak of a stage-manager, and tell him I want the boilers fired.”
They dined that evening in the Argyll Rooms, a Haymarket resort not far from Laurent’s Dancing Academy. The Argyll had private supper-rooms in which the indiscreet might spend an entire night.
Sybil was mystified by the choice of a private room. Mick was certainly not ashamed to be seen with her in public. Midway through the lamb, however, the waiter admitted a stout little gentleman with pomaded red hair and a gold chain across a taut velvet waistcoat. He was round and plush as a child’s doll.
“Hullo, Corny,” Mick said, without bothering to put down his knife and fork.
“Evening, Mick,” the man said, with the curiously unplaceable accent of an actor, or a provincial long in service to city gentry. “I was told you’d need of me.”
“And told correctly, Corny.” Mick neither offered to introduce Sybil nor asked the man to sit. She began to feel quite uncomfortable. “ ’Tis a brief part, so you should have little trouble remembering your lines.” Mick produced a plain envelope from his coat and handed it to the man. “Your lines, your cue, and your retainer. The Garrick, Saturday night.”
The man smiled mirthlessly as he accepted the envelope. “Quite some time since I played the Garrick, Mick.” He winked at Sybil and took his leave with no more formality than that.
“Who’s that, Mick?” Sybil asked. Mick had returned to his lamb and was spooning mint sauce from a pewter serving-pot.
“An actor of parts,” Mick said. “He’ll play opposite you in the Garrick, during Houston’s speech.”
Sybil was baffled. “Play? Opposite me?”