The Difference Engine

  He stood then, but slowly, with a creak of leather, like some huge wooden puppet that had lain years in the dust. He was wrapped in a long and shapeless grey coat. His nose and jaw were draped with a dark kerchief.

  “Best be quiet now, missy,” he said, holding up the massive blade—dark, cleaver-like steel. “Sam comin’?”

  Sybil found her voice. “Please don’t kill me!”

  “Old goat still whorin’, is he?” The slow Texian voice slid forth like treacle; Sybil could barely make out his words. “You his fancy-gal?”

  “No!” Sybil said, her voice strangled. “No, I’m not, I swear it! I … I came here to steal from him, and that’s the truth!”

  There was a ghastly silence.

  “Take a look ’round you.”

  Sybil did so, trembling. The room had been ransacked.

  “Nothin’ here to steal,” the man said. “Where is he, gal?”

  “He’s downstairs,” Sybil said. “He’s drunk! But I don’t know him, I swear! My man sent me here, that’s all! I didn’t want to do this! He made me do it!”

  “Quiet, now,” he said. “I wouldn’t hurt a white woman, ’less I had to. Put out that lamp.”

  “Let me go,” she pleaded. “I’ll go straight away! I meant no harm!”

  “Harm?” The slow voice was heavy with gallows certainty. “What harm there is, it’s for Houston, and that’s justice.”

  “I didn’t steal the cards! I didn’t touch them!”

  “ ‘Cards’?” He laughed, a dry sound at the back of his throat.

  “The cards don’t belong to Houston. He stole them!”

  “Houston stole plenty,” the man said, but clearly he was puzzled. He was thinking about her, and was not happy about it. “What they call you?”

  “Sybil Jones.” She took a breath. “I’m a British subject!”

  “My,” the man said. He clicked his tongue.

  His masked face was unreadable. Sweat shone on a strip of pale smooth skin across the top of his forehead. A hat-brim had rested there, Sybil realized, to shield him from the Texian sun. He came forward now and took the lamp from her, turning down the wick. His fingers, when they brushed her hand, were dry and hard as wood.

  In the darkness, there was only the pounding of her heart and the Texian’s terrible presence.

  “You must be lonely here in London,” Sybil blurted, desperate to avoid another silence.

  “Maybe Houston’s lonesome. I got a better conscience.” The Texian’s voice was sharp. “You ever ask if he’s lonesome?”

  “I don’t know him,” she insisted.

  “You’re here. A woman come alone to his rooms.”

  “I came for the kino-cards. Paper cards, with holes in them. That’s all, I swear!” No answer. “Do you know what a kinotrope is?”

  “ ’Nother damn machine,” the Texian said wearily.

  Another silence.

  “Don’t lie to me,” he said at last. “You’re a whore, that’s all. You ain’t the first whore I ever seen.”

  She heard him cough behind his kerchief, and snort wetly. “You ain’t bad-lookin’, though,” he said. “In Texas, you could marry. Start all over.”

  “I’m sure that would be wonderful,” Sybil said.

  “Never enough white women in the country. Get you a decent man, ’stead o’ some pimp.” He lifted his kerchief, and spat on the floor.

  “Hate pimps,” he announced tonelessly. “Hate ’em like I hate Injuns. Or Mexicans. Mexican Injuns … French Mexican Injuns with guns, three, four hundred strong. On horseback, got them wind-up rifles, closest thing to devils on earth.”

  “But the Texians are heroes,” Sybil said, desperately trying to remember a name from Houston’s speech. “I heard about … about Alamo.”

  “Goliad,” the voice gone to a dry whisper, “I was at Goliad.”

  “I heard about that, too,” Sybil said quickly. “That must have been glorious.”

  The Texian hawked, spat again. “Fought ’em two days. No water. Colonel Fannin surrendered. They took us prisoner, all the niceties, polite as you please. Next day they marched us out of town. Shot us down in cold blood. Just lined us up. Massacred us.”

  Sybil said nothing.

  “Massacred the Alamo. Burned all the bodies.… Massacred the Meir Expedition. Made ’em pick beans. Little clay lottery pot, pull out a black bean and they kill you. That’s Mexicans for you.”

  “Mexicans,” she repeated.

  “Comanches are worse.”

  From somewhere off in the night came the scream of a great friction-brake, and then a dull distant pounding.

  Black beans. Goliad. Her head was a Babel. Beans and massacre and this man whose skin was like leather. He stank like a navvy, of horses and sweat. Down Neal Street she’d once paid tuppence to view a diorama of some vast waste in America, a nightmare of twisted stone. The Texian looked born from such a place, and it came to her then that all the wildernesses of Houston’s speech, all the places with such queer improbable names, were truly real, inhabited by creatures such as this. And Mick had said that Houston had stolen a country once, and now this one had followed, avenging angel. She fought down an insane desire to laugh.

  She remembered the old woman then, the vendor of rock-oil in Whitechapel, and the queer look she’d given Mick when he’d questioned her. Did others work in concert with the angel of Goliad? How had so strange a figure managed to enter Grand’s tonight, to enter a locked room? Where could such a man hide, even in London, even amid the tattered hordes of American refugees?

  “Say he’s drunk?” the Texian said.

  Sybil started horribly. “What?”

  “Houston.”

  “Oh. Yes. In the smoking-room. Very drunk.”

  “Be his last, then. He alone?”

  “He …” Mick. “He’s with a tall man. I don’t know him.”

  “Beard on ’im? Arm broke?”

  “I … Yes.”

  He made a sucking sound between his teeth; then leather creaked as he shrugged.

  Something rattled, to Sybil’s left. In the faint glow from the curtained window she glimpsed the gleaming facets of the cut-glass door-knob as it began to twist. The Texian leapt from his chair.

  With the palm of one hand pressed tight against her mouth, he held the great dirk before her, a hideous thing like an elongated cleaver, tapering to a point. A length of brass ran along its spine; with the blade inches from her eyes she saw notches and nicks along the brass. And then the door was opening, Mick ducking through, his head and shoulders stenciled out by the light in the corridor.

  She must have struck her head against the wall when the Texian flung her aside, but then she was kneeling, the crinoline bunched beneath her, watching the man hoist Mick against the wall, a single great hand about his throat, the heels of Mick’s shoes beating a frantic tattoo against the wainscoting—until the long blade struck, twisted, struck again, filling the room with the hot reek of Butcher Row.

  And all that happened after, in that room, was a dream to Sybil, or a play she watched, or some kino-show wrought with balsa-bits so numerous, so tiny, and so cleverly worked, as to blur reality. For the Texian, lowering Mick quietly to the floor, closed and re-locked the door, his movements unhurried and methodical.

  She swayed where she knelt, then sagged against the wall behind the bureau. Mick was dragged away, heels scraping, into the deeper darkness beside the wardrobe. The Texian knelt over him—there was a rustle of clothing, the slap of the card-case flung aside, a jingle of change and the sound of a single coin, falling, rolling, spinning on the hardwood floor.…

  And there came from the door a scratching, the rattle of metal on metal—the sound of a drunken man trying a keyhole.

  Houston, throwing the door wide, lurched forward on his heavy stick. He belched thunderously and rubbed the site of his old wound. “Sons of bitches,” he said, hoarse with drink, listing violently, the stick coming down with a sharp crack at each step. ?
??Radley? Come out, you little whelp.” He’d neared the bureau now, and Sybil snatched her fingers back silently, afraid of the weight of his boots.

  The Texian closed the door.

  “Radley!”

  “Evenin’, Sam.”

  Her room above the Hart seemed distant as childhood’s first memories, here in the smell of slaughter, in this dark where giants moved—Houston reeled suddenly to slash at the curtains with his cane, tore them open, gas-light catching the patterns of frost on the glass of each mullioned pane, illuminating the Texian’s kerchief and the grim eyes above it, eyes distant and merciless as winter stars. Houston staggered at the sight, the striped blanket sliding from his shoulders. His medals gleamed, quivered.

  “Rangers sent me, Sam.” Mick’s little pepperbox pistol looked a toy in the Texian’s hand, the clustered barrels winking as he took aim.

  “Who are you, son?” Houston asked, all trace of drunkenness abruptly gone from his deep voice. “You Wallace? Take off that neckcloth. Face me man-to-man.…”

  “You ain’t giving no more orders, General. Shouldn’t ought to have took what you did. You robbed us, Sam. Where is it? Where’s that treasury money?”

  “Ranger,” Houston said, his voice a rich syrup of patience and sincerity, “you’ve been misled. I know who sent you, and I know their lies and slanders against me. But I swear to you that I stole nothing—those funds are mine by right, the sacred trust of the Texas government-in-exile.”

  “You sold Texas out for British gold,” the Ranger said. “We need that money, for guns and food. We’re starvin’, and they’re killin’ us.” A pause. “And you mean to help ’em do it.”

  “The Republic of Texas can’t defy the world’s great powers, Ranger. I know it’s bad in Texas, and my heart aches for my country, but there can’t be peace till I’m back in command.”

  “You got no money left, do you?” the Ranger said. “I looked, and it ain’t here. You sold your fancy estate in the countryside.… You threw it all away, Sam, on whores and drink and fancy theatre shows for foreigners. And now you want to come back with a Mexican army. You’re a thief, and a drunk, and a traitor.”

  “God damn you,” Houston roared, and flung open his coat with both hands, “you’re a cowardly assassin, you filthy-mouthed son of a bitch. If you think you have the guts to kill the father of your country, then shoot for the heart.” He thumped his chest.

  “For Texas.” The pepperbox spat a flare of orange flame, edged with blue, hurling Houston back against the wall. Houston crashed to the floor as the avenger pounced, crouching to thrust the muzzles of the little pistol against the gaudy leopard waistcoat. There was a gun-blast into Houston’s chest, then another, then a loud snap as the delicate trigger broke in the Ranger’s fist.

  The Ranger flung Mick’s gun aside. Houston sprawled, unmoving, red sparks crawling through the fur of the leopard waistcoat.

  There were sleepy shouts of alarm from another room. The Texian seized Houston’s cane and began to batter the window; glass shattered, crashing to the pavement below; mullions gave way, and then he was scrambling out, across the sill. He froze there, for an instant, icy wind tugging at his long coat, and Sybil, in her trance, was reminded of her first sight of him: a vast dark crow, poised now for flight.

  He jumped from sight, Houston’s destroyer, the angel of Goliad, and was gone, leaving her in silence and rising terror, as if his vanishing had broken a spell. She began to crawl forward, quite without aim and cruelly hampered by her crinoline, yet it was as if her limbs moved of their own accord. The heavy cane lay on the floor, but its head, a gilt brass raven, had snapped free of the shaft.

  Houston moaned.

  “Please be quiet,” she said. “You’re dead.”

  “Who are you?” he said, and coughed.

  The floor was littered with shards of glass, sharp under her palms. No. Bright. Like pebbles. The cane, she saw, was hollow, and had spilled its tight nesting of cotton-wool, where more of the pebbles nested. Bright, bright diamonds. Her hands scooped them together, wadding the cotton-wool, to thrust the lot into her bodice, between her breasts.

  She turned to Houston then. He still lay on his back, and she watched in fascination as a bloodstain spread along his ribs. “Help me,” Houston grunted. “I can’t breathe.” He tugged at his waistcoat’s buttons and it came open, showing neat inner pockets of black silk, stuffed tight with dense packs of paper: thick punch-card packs in glued brown wrappers, their intricate perforations surely ruined now by the hot impact of bullets.… And blood, for at least one slug had struck him true.

  Sybil rose, and walked, giddily, toward the door. Her foot squelched moistly in the red-splashed shadows by the wardrobe, and she looked down, to see an open card-case in red morocco, with a pair of tickets in a heavy nickel-plate clip. She stooped, picked it up.

  “Get me to my feet,” Houston demanded, his voice stronger now, tinged with urgency and irritation. “Where’s my walking-stick? Where’s Radley?”

  The room seemed to rock beneath her, like a ship at sea, but she crossed to the door, opened it, stepped out, closed it behind her, and continued, like any gentry-girl, along the gaslit and utterly respectable corridors of Grand’s Hotel.

  The South-Eastern Railway Company’s London Bridge Terminus was a vast drafty hall of iron and soot-blown glass. Quakers moved among the avenues of benches, offering pamphlets to the seated travelers. Red-coated Irish soldiers, red-eyed from the night’s gin, glowered at the close-shaven missionaries as they passed. The French passengers all seemed to be returning home with pineapples, sweet exotic bounty from the docks of London. Even the plump little actress who sat opposite Sybil had her pineapple, its green spikes protruding from a covered basket at her feet.

  The train flew through Bermondsey and out into little streets of new brick, red tile. Dust-heaps, market-gardens, waste-ground. A tunnel.

  The darkness about her stank of burnt gunpowder.

  Sybil closed her eyes.

  When she opened them, she saw crows flapping above a barren down, and the wires of the electric telegraph all alive, blurring, moving up and down in the intervals between poles, dancing in the wind of her passage toward France.

  This image, surreptitiously daguerreotyped by a member of the Public Morals Section of the Sûreté Générale, January 30, 1855, presents a young woman seated at a table on the terrace of the Café Madeleine, No. 4 Boulevard Malesherbes. The woman, seated alone, has a china teapot and cup before her. Justification of the image reveals certain details of costume: ribbons, frills, her cashmere shawl, her gloves, her earrings, her elaborate bonnet. The woman’s clothing is of French origin, and new, and of high quality. Her face, slightly blurred by long camera exposure, seems pensive, lost in thought.

  Justification of background detail reveals No. 3 Boulevard Malesherbes, the offices of the Compagnie Sud Atlantique Transport Maritimes. The office window contains a large model steamboat with three funnels, a French-designed craft for the trans-Atlantic colonial trade. A faceless elderly man, evidently an accidental subject, seems lost in contemplation of the ship; his lone figure emerges therefore from the swiftly moving blurs of the Parisian street-crowd. His head is bare, his shoulders slump, and he leans heavily on a cane, apparently of cheap rattan. He is as unaware of the young woman’s proximity as she is of his.

  She is Sybil Gerard.

  He is Samuel Houston.

  Their paths diverge forever.

  SECOND ITERATION

  Derby Day

  HE IS FROZEN in mid-stride as he edges diagonally into the depths of the holiday crowd. The angle of aperture has captured a fraction of his face: high cheekbone, thick dark beard trimmed close, right ear, stray lock of hair visible between corduroy coat-collar and striped cap. The cuffs of his dark trousers, buttoned tight in leather spats above hobnailed walking-boots, are speckled to the shins with the chalky mud of Surrey. The left epaulet of his worn, waterproof coat buttons sturdily over the strap of a mi
litary-issue binocular case; the lapels flap open in the heat, showing stout gleaming toggles of brass. His hands are jammed deep in the long coat’s pockets.

  His name is Edward Mallory.

  He tramped through a lacquered gleam of carriages, blindered horses cropping noisily at the turf, amid childhood smells of harness, sweat, and grassy dung. His hands inventoried the contents of his various pockets. Keys, cigar-case, billfold, card-case. The thick staghorn handle of his multi-bladed Sheffield knife. Field notebook—most precious item of all. A handkerchief, a pencil-stub, a few loose shillings. A practical man, Dr. Mallory knew that every sporting-crowd has its thieves, none of them dressed to match their station. Anyone here might be a thief. It is a fact; it is a risk.

  A woman blundered into Mallory’s path, and his hobnails tore the flounce of her skirt. Turning, wincing, she tugged herself loose with a squeak of crinoline as Mallory touched his cap, and marched quickly on. Some farmer’s wife, a clumsy, great red-cheeked creature, civilized and English as a dairy-cow. Mallory’s eye was still accustomed to a wilder breed, the small brown wolf-women of the Cheyenne, with their greased black braids and beaded leather leggings. The hoop-skirts in the crowd around him seemed some aberrant stunt of evolution; the daughters of Albion had got a regular scaffolding under there now, all steel and whalebone.

  Bison; that was it. American bison, just that very hoop-skirt silhouette, when the big rifle took them down; they had a way of falling, in the tall grass, suddenly legless, a furry hillock of meat. The great Wyoming herds would stand quite still for death, merely twitching their ears in puzzlement at the distant report of the rifle.

  Now Mallory threaded his way among this other herd, astonished that mere fashion could carry its mysterious impetus so far. The men, among their ladies, seemed a different species, nothing so extreme—save, perhaps, their shiny toppers, though his inner eye refused to find any hat exotic. He knew too much about hats, knew too many of the utterly mundane secrets of their manufacture. He could see at a glance that most of the hats around him were dead cheap, Engine-made, pre-cut in a factory, though looking very nearly as fine as a craftsman-hatter’s work, and at half the price or less. He had helped his father in the little haberdashery in Lewes: punching, stitching, blocking, sewing. His father, dipping felt in the mercury bath, had seemed not to mind the stench.…