The Rise of the Automated Aristocrats

  The door lock clicked and the portal banged open. Two green-painted clockwork men entered and positioned themselves to either side. Commander Kidd strode in. He, too, stood aside. An SPG unit followed and, behind it, dressed in a black uniform, wearing black leather gloves and with a swagger stick in his right hand, came Colonel Christopher Palmer Rigby.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” he said, removing his left glove. He paced up and down the middle of the room, pausing in front of each man. “Sir Roderick, I trust you are enjoying this break from your various duties. Captain Murray, you appear a little gaunt. Are you not eating? Mr. Ashbee, hello, and Mr. Hankey, good day to you, sir. I regret that I must inform you both that your printing presses have been confiscated and your publications destroyed. Ah, Doctor Quaint! Separated from your shipmates, hey? And Mr. Bendyshe, are you—”

  “Go to hell!” Bendyshe snapped.

  A momentary silence. Rigby smiled. He jerked his right arm up and sliced his swagger stick across Bendyshe’s face, leaving behind a livid welt.

  “I didn’t order you to speak, sir. Commander Kidd, have this man taken outside and taught some manners. Don’t break any bones.”

  Kidd nodded and waved his two guards forward. The clockwork men pounced on Bendyshe and hauled him, kicking and yelling, out of the hut. Kidd followed. Monckton Milnes made to move after him but Burton hissed, “Don’t.”

  “Where was I?” Rigby said pleasantly. “Ah yes, Sir Charles Bradlaugh, Sir Edward Brabrooke, and Doctor Hunt, greetings to you all. Mr. Monckton Milnes, it is good to see you again. We met once at one of Lady Pauline Trevelyan’s little gatherings. You probably don’t recall the occasion. I rather think I was invited by mistake. Not my kind of people, if you understand my meaning. Far too—what shall we say?—artistic?”

  He stopped in front of Burton and stared into his eyes.

  “And you must be Count Palladino, the man who did the wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong place, eh? I have something that belongs to you, sir.”

  Rigby stretched his left arm out sideways. The SPG unit strode forward and proffered an item around which Rigby’s fingers closed.

  “Your cane. Confiscated from you. I rather expect you’d like it returned. It’s certainly an unusual piece. Unique handle. A panther’s head. Fine craftsmanship. It impressed me to such a degree that I was moved to do a little research. Do you know what I found? That only one such cane was ever made. It was commissioned by the late Laurence Oliphant, Lord Elgin’s former secretary, and stolen from him when he was murdered—by a man, I might add, who has since been declared an enemy of the empire. I refer to Sir Richard Francis Burton. Are you acquainted with him? Did he make a gift of it to you, perhaps? You have my permission to speak.”

  “Freely?” Burton asked.

  “Why, of course.”

  “Then I shall say that you’re a cad of the first order, Rigby. Were you to submit yourself for examination by Doctor Monroe at the Bethlem Lunatic Asylum, I’m certain he’d declare you a homicidal maniac. Your brain is marred by a criminal aberration. I saw it twenty years ago in India, I saw it again two years ago in Zanzibar, and it appears to have become even more severe in its effects in the time since. You cannot reason like a normal man. Disraeli—who has apparently also lost his mind—did well in hiring you to do his dirty work, for you are utterly lacking in the finer sentiments and are more akin to a rabid beast than to a rational person. I shall have to deal with you as I would such an unfortunate creature. I will have no option but to hold you down and put a bullet through your diseased head.”

  Rigby, whose face had purpled, stood silently with his eyes blazing and his thin lips white.

  Burton sensed that his fellow prisoners were holding their breaths. He slowly raised a hand, gripped his false moustache and tore it from his face. With the sleeve of his shirt, he smeared away the make up around his eyes and cheeks.

  He heard Monckton Milnes, to his right, expel a small sigh. No doubt, he was thinking, I should have bloody well known!

  What felt like two minutes passed in absolute silence.

  Rigby threw back his head and roared with laughter.

  “Oh!” he shouted. “Oh! What marvellous games we play!”

  He called for Kidd. The commander stepped in and was told, “Get that other one back in here. I assume he’s had enough by now?”

  Commander Kidd grinned. “The clockwork men are fast and efficient.” He leaned out and beckoned to his mechanical subordinates.

  “Burton,” Rigby said, turning back to the explorer. “If you want to completely ruin my morning, you’ll reveal to me now where I can find Algernon Swinburne, Detective Inspector Trounce, and Daniel Gooch. Tell me where your brother is and where Lawless has taken the Orpheus. Furnish me with those items of information, and I shall be obliged to leave here immediately to round them up. Stay silent, and I’ll remain, which is what I’d much prefer.”

  Burton didn’t respond.

  Rigby clicked his heels and gave a little bow. “Thank you. Thank you very much indeed.”

  The two clockwork men dragged Bendyshe in. His uniform was ragged and stained with blood. His face was a mess, the eyes swollen to slits, the lips puffed up and split, the nose dribbling gore.

  “Sit him on his bunk,” Rigby said.

  Bendyshe mumbled the worst expletive he knew—and he knew more than most men.

  The contraptions dumped him down then backed away and stood to attention.

  The Colonel pushed his glove and swagger stick through his belt, unholstered his revolver, and, taking two strides, pressed its barrel against Frederick Hankey’s forehead. He issued an order to the mechanical guards. “Secure their hands behind their backs. Gentlemen, I assure you that, should any of you resist, Mr. Hankey’s brains will be decorating the wall.”

  It was done, and they all succumbed to the handcuffs without a struggle.

  Only Hankey remained unshackled. Rigby shoved him to the middle of the hut and told the guards to hold his arms. They did so, gripping with evident force, and Hankey groaned with the pain of it. His upper limbs were outspread, so that he stood as if crucified.

  Rigby, positioning himself in front of him, put away his gun, raised Burton’s cane, and used it to lightly prod Hankey in the stomach.

  He addressed the SPG device. “Strip him of his upper garments. Tear them off.”

  The inky-blue machine obeyed. The material ripped, pulling at Hankey’s skin and leaving red marks. Only the tattered sleeves, held fast against his arms by metal digits, remained.

  Burton’s friend was a tall man whose naturally bony physique had been made skinnier by his week of near starvation. He looked awful, and Burton’s jaw ached as he clenched his teeth in fury.

  “Let us deal with one question at a time,” Rigby announced. “I don’t care who answers, but I highly recommend that one of you does. First, where is Swinburne?”

  No one said a word.

  Rigby sighed. He crouched and cracked Burton’s cane with all his strength across Hankey’s kneecaps. The man screeched.

  “I’ll ask again. Swinburne. Where is he?”

  Silence but for Hankey’s agonised moans.

  Rigby pulled at the cane’s handle, which slid up.

  “Great heavens!” he exclaimed. “Will you look at that! A concealed blade!”

  He unsheathed the rapier and clumsily thrust it in Hankey’s direction, though not touching the prisoner.

  “My goodness, but it’s well balanced. Sharp, too, I should venture.”

  He rested its point against Hankey’s right bicep.

  “Swinburne? An answer, if you please?”

  The blade slid through Hankey’s arm and out the other side.

  “God in heaven!” the man screamed. “God! God! God!”

  Burton cried out, “Bismillah, Rigby! Your argument is with me! If you must commit such atrocities, I should be your victim, not any of these men.”

  “But you are.” Rigby chuckled. He
tested the blade against Hankey’s right thigh. It slipped through the muscle with ease.

  Hankey’s atheism continued to fail him. “Sweet Mary, Mother of Jesus! God! God! Don’t tell him, Burton! Don’t tell the bastard son of a whore bitch a bloody thing! Rot in hell, Rigby, you cur! Rot in hell!”

  “If I do, I’ll see you there,” the colonel replied. He pushed the sword into Hankey’s heart. “Marvellous! A very fine weapon. I shall keep it, Burton.”

  With a wave of his hand, Rigby had the guards drag Hankey’s corpse to the end of the cabin. When they returned, he touched the tip of the rapier to Doctor Quaint’s chin. “This one next. But I must practice a little more restraint. We’re still on the first question and—” he looked at each of the prisoners in turn, “resources are limited.”

  Quaint, also tall but much more beefy in build than Hankey, was quickly divested of his handcuffs, stripped, and held. He turned his head and his eyes met Burton’s. “Sir Richard, if you give this mongrel an answer and, as a result of it, he allows me to live, I shall kill you with my own hands. Is that understood?”

  Burton struggled for breath.

  I can’t watch them all die. What should I do? What should I do?

  “That goes for all of us,” Monckton Milnes declared.

  “Shut up!” Rigby barked. “Not another damned word from anyone but Burton.”

  “This man represents everything we must resist,” Monckton Milnes continued forcibly. “If we have to perish so that Swinburne and the others can live to fight on, then perish we shall, and willingly. Disraeli has to be stopped, else the word British will stand for nothing.”

  “Hear, hear!” the others cheered.

  Rigby snarled, dropped the rapier and its scabbard, removed his remaining glove, and ploughed a fist into Quaint’s stomach. A second punch, a third, a fourth, in rapid succession. With his left hand, he grabbed the doctor’s hair, held his head, and sent the knuckles of his right hand smashing again and again into the man’s face. The onlookers cried out. Rigby’s wrath increased.

  “Stop!” Burton yelled. “For pity’s sake, stop! I don’t know where Swinburne is! I don’t know, I tell you!”

  The barbarity continued. The colonel appeared to have utterly lost control. He set about Quaint with such vicious precision that his victim quickly became unrecognisable. Blood sprayed. It pooled on the floor. There were broken teeth in it.

  “I’ll beat you all to within an inch of your lives!” Rigby shrieked. “And when you’ve recovered, I’ll do it again! And again! And again! Now tell me, where—”

  His fist crunched into Quaint’s ribs.

  “is—”

  A right cross to the doctor’s jaw. The head, already dangling—the man was by now unconscious—snapped loosely to the side.

  “Swinburne?”

  A downward swing onto the mashed nose. Red droplets arced through the air.

  The colonel stepped back and his shoulders slumped. He flicked his hands so that gore spattered across Monckton Milnes’s face. “Phew! I’m puffed!”

  “Let him be, man. Have mercy. Let him be,” Burton croaked. “I don’t know where Swinburne is. Since I was relieved of my duties, I’ve hardly seen him.”

  “Liar!” Rigby straightened. He thudded his fist into Quaint’s side with such force that a rib was heard to crack. “You were with him at Verbena Lodge.”

  “Yes, I was. We met there to enjoy ourselves and to catch up after weeks without contact, but Trounce burst in on us, and the next thing I knew, I was running from the police. I have no idea why. I have no notion what the confounded poet is up to or why the police are after him or why Trounce took it upon himself to defy his superiors.”

  Rigby sneered. “A likely story.”

  He set about Quaint again, his barbarity terrifying, his violence unrestrained, the brutality feeling to the onlookers as if it would never cease. But, after a few minutes, it did, and Rigby stepped back again and grinned happily. He held his arms out wide, looked up at the ceiling, and slowly turned on the spot.

  “Ah! Burton! Burton! Burton! You are most generous. You refuse to supply the answer I require and thus you favour me with many more days in which to enjoy myself with your friends. It is perfectly splendid.”

  Burton, despairingly, looked at his fellow prisoners. They were weeping.

  The colonel bowed his head until his respiration had stabilised. He retrieved the rapier and cane from the floor, and said to Burton, “You’ve quite tired me out, man. I’m too impatient by half. There’s no pressing urgency, and I have other matters to attend to this afternoon, so let us reconvene at the same time tomorrow, hey?” He paused and gazed balefully at James Hunt. “Oh, I say, two doctors! That rather weighs the odds, don’t you think? Allow me to level the playing field somewhat.”

  Touching the blade to the base of Quaint’s chin, he pushed it in and up, transfixing the brain. After sliding it out, he handed it and the sheath to Commander Kidd. “Have it cleaned, oiled, and returned to me before I depart.” He turned to the clockwork guards. “Dispose of the bodies.” To the SPG machine, he said, “Remove their handcuffs.”

  Stepping over to Bendyshe’s bunk, he regarded the tattered mess that was lying half senseless upon it, then said to Hunt, “Use him to brush up on your skills, Doctor. They’ll be required over the next few days.”

  Hoarsely, Hunt answered, “I’ll need alcohol to clean his wounds and bandages to bind them.”

  Rigby kicked at the shredded remains of Hankey and Quaint’s shirts. “Here are your bandages. You’ll not receive anything more. See to it that he attends roll call, else he’ll have further penalties to pay.”

  The SPG unit finished unshackling the prisoners. Rigby gestured for it and Commander Kidd to precede him through the door. At its threshold, he turned back and smiled at them. “Gentlemen, it’s been a tremendous pleasure. I look forward to visiting you again. Rest assured, Burton, one way or another, I shall have you and Trounce and Swinburne standing before me. Good morning.”

  The door closed. The lock clicked. They were alone.

  Murchison doubled over and vomited.

  Bradlaugh, Ashbee, Murray, and Brabrooke collapsed onto their bunks and buried their faces in their hands. Hunt got to work on Bendyshe.

  Monckton Milnes and Burton stood, staring straight ahead, their faces drained, their mouths slack.

  “We cannot submit to him,” Monckton Milnes finally whispered. “Even if it means death for us all.”

  “It will,” Burton rasped. “He has no boundaries and a heart that pumps only animosity. I was speaking the truth when I called him a homicidal maniac.”

  The surviving Undesirables spent the remainder of the morning struggling to recover from their ordeal. What rags Hunt didn’t require to bind Bendyshe’s wounds were used to wipe up the puddles of blood.

  When the lunch whistle blew, a guard unlocked their door, and they filed out into the fog and stood in line. Hunt and Brabrooke supported Bendyshe, who could hardly stay upright. As always, their guard stayed with them, that it might overhear any plotting.

  The pall had turned a putrid yellow. Anything farther than twelve feet away was made shadowy. An odour like smouldering rubber pervaded the atmosphere, so strong it even covered the stench of the latrines. Everyone was coughing and repeatedly brushing flakes of ash from their faces.

  They held out their mess tins and cups, waited for them to be filled, and when they were, returned to hut 0. Burton indicated that Monckton Milnes should sit with him on his bunk.

  “I tried to warn you. I sent a message by the Whispering Web. Did you not receive it?”

  “I did. I was in the act of gathering the Cannibals that we might all travel up to Fryston Hall together.” Monckton Milnes was referring to his country estate in Yorkshire. “Charlie was the first to arrive. He’d not been with me more than ten minutes before the clockwork men showed up. You know the rest. My fault. I should have acted with more haste.”

  Burton
shifted away from him and pulled back the side of the mattress in the space between them.

  “Rigby will torture and kill you all to hurt me,” he murmured. “I wish I wasn’t here, then he’d have no reason to do so.”

  Using his body to block his movements from Laughing Boy’s line of sight, he dipped a finger into his tea and used the liquid to write on the exposed wood of his bunk.

  I EFFUGIET.

  I shall escape.

  He thought it unlikely that the clockwork man’s babbage was equipped with a knowledge of Latin.

  “But you are here,” Monckton Milnes said, “and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  Following Burton’s example, he wrote, QUOMODO?

  Burton shrugged. How? He didn’t know.

  He wrote: VIGILATE ET PARARENT.

  Watch and be ready.

  Wiping his palm across the board to smear the tea, he pulled the mattress back into place.

  Monckton Milnes rested his elbow on his knee and dropped his forehead into his hand. He closed his eyes. “God in heaven.”

  They ate without enthusiasm. The afternoon passed with barely any conversation, though Sir Roderick Murchison made frequent complaints, as he had done since his arrival. Bendyshe slowly recovered from his ordeal. As Rigby had ordered, none of his bones had been broken, but his left shoulder was so cruelly bruised that he required his arm to be supported in a sling, and his shins bore abrasions that caused him agony when he tried to walk.

  At one point, it occurred to Bradlaugh that he might be able to cause Laughing Boy’s babbage to stop working by baffling it with a variation of the famous “Liar’s Paradox.” He approached the brass figure. “Listen very carefully to the next thing I tell you. It will be true.” He paused. “What I just said was a lie. What do you think about that?”

  The clockwork man sat motionless and uttered not a word. There was no crunch of confused gears, no wisp of smoke as the synthetic brain overheated, and no sign of a mechanical muddle.