The Japanese Devil Fish Girl and Other Unnatural Attractions

  Ada Lovelace caught her breath and curtseyed unconsciously before the holy sculpture. ‘Oh George,’ she whispered. ‘She really does look very like me.’

  ‘Well, my, my, my,’ came a most familiar voice. ‘If it is not my dear friend and fellow traveller, George. And if my senses do not deceive me, he has married the lovely Ada.’

  George looked up towards the canvas awning that served as a sloping ceiling. There, amidst lofty scaffolding, was a sort of throne chair, bolted to safety and containing the unsavoury personage that was Professor Cagliostro Coffin.

  ‘You swine,’ said George simply. But simple can often say so very much.

  ‘That is no way to speak to your ex-business partner. Have you seen the crowds, George? Thousands of Rubes. I shall be a millionaire by the end of the week. And six months from now—’

  ‘There may not be a six months from now,’ called George. ‘Do you not realise what you have done? You have committed the Great Blasphemy. The Martians may even now be rising from the volcano crater in their war craft to murder us all.’

  ‘Oh please, George, do give me some credit.’ Professor Coffin laughed. ‘I am not a fool, far from it. There will be no Martian attack. The volcano is, how shall I put this, somewhat full. I purchased many, many, many boxes of explosives before I returned to the island. If any of the Martians survived the enormous rockfall, it will take them many years to dig themselves out.’

  ‘You fiend!’ cried Ada Lovelace.

  ‘Oh come now, my dear,’ returned the professor. ‘I have brought the greatest treasure in the universe to London. Her Majesty is awarding me a knighthood. My autobiography will, I believe, top the list of best-selling tomes for years to come. A fiend, you think? Me? Surely not. I am Professor Coffin. Hero of the Empire.’

  George Fox felt himself at a loss for words.

  Ada snarled at the man who sat above.

  ‘I do wish we could chat some more,’ called down Professor Coffin, ‘but so many people are queuing and anxious to see my treasure that I regret you must take your leave.’

  ‘I will be back,’ called George and he shook his fist. ‘You have not heard the last of me.’

  ‘Oh, on the contrary.’ Professor Coffin leaned most forward in his throne-like chair. ‘You fail to understand. You will be taking your leave now, but you will not be returning. You cannot be allowed to wander abroad telling who knows what kind of tales about me. I regret to tell you, George and dear Ada, that this is a final farewell.’

  Professor Coffin clapped his hands. ‘Gentlemen,’ called he.

  Two unsavoury types, none other than the burly protectors, appeared, one from either side of the statue’s base.

  ‘Allow me to introduce you to my business associates, ’ called Professor Coffin. ‘This gentleman is Bermondsey Bob, the bad bruising bare-fist brawler.’

  Bermondsey Bob grinned evilly and gave a little bow. He was big, brawny and sported hands the size of Christmas turkeys.

  ‘And this is his companion Limehouse Lenny, the Laughing Lepidopterist.’

  George said, ‘Lepidopterist?’

  ‘A geezer ’as to ’ave an ’obby,’ growled Limehouse Lenny. ‘For when ’e ain’t owt mutilatin’ corpses and a-droppin’ of small children down wells.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said George.

  ‘Show him your cut-throat razor, Lenny,’ cried Professor Coffin.

  Limehouse Lenny showed his razor. It was a very large razor.

  ‘Mr Bob and Mr Lenny will now escort you from the premises.’ Professor Coffin rose from his chair and gave a little bow. ‘Please do not make a fuss about this. It would be almost blasphemous to shed blood upon holy ground. Farewell to you, George, farewell to you, Ada. We will not be meeting again.’

  39

  Ada and George were led from the inner temple. They were nudged along a stone corridor and out through a small door into the cathedral yard. A yard that was surprisingly quiet, given all the thousands who mobbed about the cathedral’s front. Here was a little island of peace in the midst of a human sea.

  A four-wheeled funeral cortège carriage with blinds at its windows and high black plumes to each corner stood at the centre of the yard, with two rather wretched-looking black ponies attached to the shafts.

  ‘On board,’ demanded Bermondsey Bob, giving George just a hint of the biffings to come with a monstrous fist. ‘We’re goin’ on a little journey, we are.’

  ‘A one-way journey,’ said Limehouse Lenny, laughing as he said it.

  Ada turned upon the deadly duo. ‘Gentlemen,’ she said, ‘I do not believe for one moment that such fine specimens of manhood as yourselves would harm a helpless female.’

  ‘You’d be surprised at the depths we’d stoop to.’ Bermondsey Bob did sinister grinnings.

  ‘Especially me,’ said Limehouse Lenny. ‘I’m a ravin’ nutter, me.’

  Ada winked at Limehouse Lenny. ‘You’re very handsome, ’ she said.

  The Laughing Lepidopterist, a leprous brute with a broken nose, few teeth that were not blackened stumps and a single eye to call his own, viewed the lovely tousled woman with interest.

  George looked aghast at Ada, but she merely squeezed at his hand.

  ‘There’s little I would not do for a beau like you,’ she said to Lenny.

  ‘And what about me?’ asked Bermondsey Bob.

  ‘Oh, you too,’ said Ada, fluttering those gorgeous lashes of hers.

  The East End thugs made atavistic gruntings.

  ‘Perhaps within the carriage,’ said Ada. ‘One at a time? Or together?’

  George’s jaw was on his chest.

  ‘Could I have my perfume, dear?’ asked Ada.

  George Fox managed a, ‘What?’

  ‘My perfume, dear. You have it in your waistcoat pocket. A slim glass phial of colourless liquid with a screw-on cap.’

  ‘Ah,’ said George. ‘Yes,’ said George. ‘And here,’ said George, ‘please take it.’

  And he withdrew from his pocket the slim glass phial that contained the Scent of Unknowing.

  ‘And I’ll take that,’ bawled Bermondsey Bob, snatching it from George’s hand. ‘The professor warned us that you might just have this in your possession and that it would be best to relieve you of it should it so appear.’

  George Fox made a desperate face. He was a desperate man.

  ‘You did not drop your h’s when you made that little speech,’ Ada observed.

  ‘Nah,’ said Bermondsey Bob. ‘We do all that simply for effect. East Enders don’t speak in that fashion to each other, only to strangers. But then neither myself, nor my, to use one of Mr Oscar Wilde’s terms, “life partner” Lenny here, would wish to engage in any unsavoury sexual hanky-panky with you in the carriage.’

  ‘Gag me with a spoon,’ said Limehouse Lenny.

  ‘So,’ Bob continued, ‘no more old nonsense. Into the carriage and away to the river, where you will be weighted down with stones and sent off to feed the fishes.’

  ‘Gor blimey, guv’nor,’ said Limehouse Lenny.

  ‘Gor blimey, guv’nor indeed, my friend.’ Bermondsey Bob did urgings forward. Ada and George did climbings into the carriage. Limehouse Lenny shinned up to the rear and took up the driver’s whip.

  Exactly how the carriage managed to evade the crowds and find its way almost at once onto open roads was beyond George’s comprehension. And as the blinds were down over the carriage windows, he would never know whether even his wildest speculations, should he actually have them, were founded in fact.

  George and Ada sat in the carriage’s rear seats, Ada clinging to her love and looking every bit the damsel in distress, George trying hard to affect the stiff upper lip of a Hero of the Empire, but failing for the most part dismally.

  Opposite them sat Bermondsey Bob, manicuring his nails.

  ‘I do not suppose,’ George whispered to Ada, ‘that you have any more plans at all?’

  Ada Fox shook her head in sadness. ‘None whatsoever, ’ she
said. ‘But in all fairness, I do feel that we had, to use another of Mr Wilde’s expressions “milked that particular gag for all that it was worth”.’

  ‘I do not really wish to end my days feeding fishes,’ whispered George. ‘And I certainly will not stand idly by and let any harm come to you. I will think of something.’

  ‘Do you think blue or purple?’ asked Bermondsey Bob of a sudden.

  ‘Excuse me?’ said George. ‘What?’

  ‘I was talking to your wife,’ said Bermondsey Bob. ‘Purple, or blue, for my tailcoat and matching accessories? When the professor goes to the palace to receive his knighthood, Lenny and I are to accompany him as his personal escort. I was just wondering which would be an appropriate colour for my turnout.’

  ‘Surely black,’ said Ada, through her teeth.

  ‘Oh no, love, black is so “last season”. Purple is said to be the new black, but I don’t know. Purple tends to bring out the broken veins in my nose.’

  ‘Are you sure that you two are in the right profession? ’ George asked. ‘You would not be happier working in, say, the theatre?’

  ‘No thanks, love. Too many old queens trolling about.’

  The carriage bumped over a manhole cover and conversation ceased.

  The carriage then did a bit more bumping and took a sudden veering to the right. Ada found herself upon George’s lap, and Bermondsey Bob lost his nail file.

  ‘What’s goin’ on ’ere?’ he demanded to be told, back in character once more.

  The voice of his life partner called down from above. ‘Some raving loony in one of them new steam cars keeps bumping up against us.’

  ‘Put a whip to the ’orses, Lenny,’ called Bermondsey Bob. ‘We’ll outpace any clankin’ steam car.’

  Limehouse Lenny whipped up the horses and George fell back in his seat.

  Bermondsey Bob lifted a corner of a window blind and peered out. ‘Nothin’ like a good old race between ’orse-drawn and ’orseless to prove the superiority of the ’orse,’ said he.

  ‘The man is a mass of contradictions,’ Ada observed. ‘I expect he had a very troubled childhood.’

  And, ‘Oooh!’ now went Ada Fox, thrown up into the air. As speed was being gathered, with further bumpings taking place aplenty.

  ‘Run ’im off the road!’ cried Bob to Lenny.

  ‘I’m tryin’ to,’ cried Lenny, trying to.

  The race was well and truly on and Devil take the hindmost now. George glimpsed the steam car through the gap in the lifted blind. A rather sleek affair of polished metal with a glass dome mounted upon the top. George had never seen anything quite like it before and marvelled at its advanced design and clear ability to keep pace with galloping horses.

  Lenny was whipping and yelling and bawling.

  Bob dipped into his jacket pocket and brought out a small revolver.

  George was going to remark that shooting at the steam car was somewhat unsporting, but he thought better of it and concentrated on clinging on to Ada as the carriage bounced every which way upon the cobbled road.

  They had somehow reached Tower Bridge now, which looked for the most part deserted. All of London, it appeared, was crammed about St Paul’s, eager to see the Wonder of the Ages.

  On the bridge now was the carriage, the steam car still alongside. The steam car swerved and caught the carriage, which struck the side of the bridge. Clouds of sparks flew as the wheels scraped metal. Lenny jerked at the horses’ reins, and the carriage slammed the steam car to the side.

  Bermondsey Bob had the window down and was leaning out with his pistol in his hand. He let off a shot that missed the steam car, then one that struck and whined as it ricocheted.

  George and Ada exchanged but a single glance. Before each grasped a leg of Bob and pitched him out of the window.

  It might have been a satisfactory result if Bob had simply bounced into the road. However, he did not. He managed to hang on to the carriage door with a single hand, his feet kicking out at the steam car, still puffing with apparent ease alongside.

  The ejection of Bob solicited much profanity from Lenny, who now tried to draw out a pistol of his own. His efforts were, however, hampered by the sheer chaos of what was occurring. The carriage was lurching and bouncing as the steam car plunged into it again and again, forcing it up against the bridge, raising more showers of sparks. And Bob was now somehow caught on the front of the steam car and—

  There was a moment, it seemed, when all became silent. And actions slowed from blurry madness down to the slowest of motions. A rear carriage wheel caught on something that ripped it from its axle. The carriage lifted and crashed down again, shattering the horse shaft and freeing the horses, which leapt on rather beautifully in this balletic slowness.

  Bermondsey Bob lost his grip upon the carriage door and indeed upon being as he was swept most elegantly under the wheels of the steam car. Whose panting exaltations of steam appeared as Heavenly wraiths in this transcendent infinite moment.

  Then speed renewed as with a crash and a bang as the carriage overturned.

  George and Ada spun head over heels, then heels over head over heels. Limehouse Lenny was catapulted from his driver’s perch, over the balustrade of the bridge and down to the Thames below. He howled terribly as he fell, but with the splash fell silent.

  The carriage slid to a grinding halt. The steam car slewed to a stop before it.

  The glass dome atop the steam car raised and slid back. Two men issued forth. Stern-looking, cadaverous men, all in black with pince-nez spectacles, lensed in a similar hue. They stalked to the side-fallen carriage, one front wheel still spinning lopsidedly around, climbed upon it and peered in through the open door.

  ‘Everyone all right?’ asked a Gentleman in Black.

  The untidy huddle that Ada and George had become moved painfully. George said, ‘Somebody help us,’ and somebody did.

  They were lifted carefully from the carriage and set down upon the road.

  ‘Might I ask,’ said George, most shaken up, as a Gentleman in Black did dustings down at him, ‘exactly why you did that?’ And George raised his fists and prepared to make quite a fight.

  ‘In order to save your lives,’ said another Gentleman in Black. ‘Would I be correct in assuming that I am addressing Mr George Fox?’

  ‘Yes,’ said George. ‘But how—’

  ‘And Mrs Ada Fox?’ said the Gentleman.

  Ada curtsied and nearly fell over.

  ‘You nearly killed us,’ cried George.

  ‘Nearly but not quite,’ said the Gentleman in Black. ‘Which is how it should be, don’t you think?’

  George did not know quite what to think. George was most confused. And this confusion did not resolve itself even to the slightest degree when added to the further confusion that the Gentleman in Black’s next statement accorded.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Fox,’ said he, ‘the Prime Minister wishes to see you.’

  40

  Mr Gladstone sat once more in the secret room at Westminster.

  Flanked once more by anonymous men of dark, funereal aspect.

  To the right of them dwelt the great Charles Babbage. Red-faced, in his abundance of tweed, but no longer looking so jolly. Opposite Charles sat Nikola Tesla, with one arm in a sling. Next to Mr Tesla sat a man with a baby’s face, the up-and-coming chap named Winston Churchill. And opposite him, Mr Silas Faircloud, the Astronomer Royal.

  A Gentleman in Black knocked lightly upon the door to this secret room, awaited permission to enter, received same and ushered George and Ada Fox inside.

  George Fox looked along the table. And there was Mr Gladstone.

  ‘George Fox, I presume,’ said he. And he made introductions all round.

  George Fox nodded his head and said, ‘Sir.’

  ‘And this is your lovely wife?’

  Ada Fox curtsied prettily. ‘What are we doing here, George?’ she whispered to her husband.

  ‘If you will both be so kind as to seat yourse
lves, I will explain,’ said the Prime Minister. Whose hearing was most acute.

  There were two seats at the door-end of the table. George drew back a chair for Ada and then seated himself.

  ‘So good of you to join us, Mr Fox,’ said Mr Gladstone. ‘We find ourselves in a difficult situation and would be grateful for any assistance that you might offer.’