by D. J. Butler
Then Tam noticed that Sam’s well-used crate of tools was missing.
He heard the rough Englishman’s voice in his mind. They only have a few hours to catch us.
“Bloody hell!” he yelled, his voice gigantic and booming in the engine room. He remembered the Pinkertons, and squeezed his voice back down to a whisper. “It’s sabotage! We’re holed by the English!”
He rushed back up the stairs to the deck, whipping out his revolver again, and flung himself prone to survey the stockade yard. No sign of the Pinkertons (and isn’t that a blessed relief, after me going stupid and shouting my head off inside a great metal drum?), but there was a fellow on his hands and knees just below the electricks, vomiting on himself, and two men in frock coats strolled casually across the yard, from the far shadowed corner where Tam had heard the English voices towards the Saloon doors.
A little too casually. Forced casual, like people pretending they hadn’t just been having a quarrel. Squinting, Tam saw that the older fellow, with the big wild mustache, looked like he might bite the head off a mountain lion any second, and the younger, who was clean-shaven and wore a top hat, appeared on the edge of tears, like a little girl.
That’d be the bloody Etonian.
Tam lay flat and out of sight, waiting for the Englishmen to go inside the Saloon.
* * *
“All ticketed passengers on the Liahona, Fort Bridger to Salt Lake City! Attention, all ticketed passengers on the Liahona!” The man yelling looked to be about fifty, with a square face, serious eyes and curly hair under a shapeless blue cap. He was dressed in white shirtsleeves under a brass-buttoned blue vest and his accent was some kind of English-Irish-somethingerother, Jed had seen enough of the world to know there were different kinds of Brits, but he couldn’t really tell them apart. Jed had been twenty years old when he finally saw Little Rock for the first time, and there hadn’t been any English, Irish or Scotch there. “This is Captain Dan Jones of the Liahona, attention, all ticketed passengers!”
Captain Jones had the lungs of a professional barker, but he didn’t rely on them alone. He bellowed through a speaking trumpet, an S-bent copper tube with an India-rubber mouthpiece on its lower end and a broadly-flowering cone on top, like a periscope for the mouth. His voice came out tinny, but clear, and loud enough to be heard over the rumbling din. A boy, a little dark-haired kid in overalls, sailor’s jacket and a gray slouch hat who couldn’t be older than five or six, but might be as young as four, knocked against Jones’s knees and threatened constantly to be squashed underfoot, he stuck so close to the older man. He kept one hand out and tugging at the Captain’s pant leg, as if reassuring himself that the man wouldn’t evaporate. The sight of the kid made Jed shake his head in irritation; he’d been that kid once, only even smaller, and a hell of a lot less awkward. You can’t afford to get underfoot when the feet belong to a mule pulling the family plow.
“Departure time will be eight o’clock sharp, by my watch!” Captain Jones warned his passengers, stumping a circular route among the gaming tables and turning his head as he delivered his message. The din rumbled a little louder and hands waved here and there in acknowledgement. “There is a return trip and a time table to make and we will not be late. To those of you who are not accustomed to operating on a schedule, I say welcome to Deseret! I will fire a ten-minute warning gun. No refunds or exchanges will be offered to passengers who sleep in and miss the departure, but you may hold your ticket and I will honor it on a future run. Any passengers desiring to sleep in the Liahona tonight may do so for the very affordable price of ten cents, payable in American, Mexican, Californian, New Russian or Deseret. Breakfast will be provided, for an additional five cents. Any passengers who have not yet purchased their tickets may see me now, or in the morning at the Liahona. Thank you.”
Jed dropped off the barstool where he perched, plunking down two bits for his drink, rectangular like all of California’s coinage. He ambled in an intercepting course into Jones’s path. “Captain Jones!” he called out. He’d done a bit of barking in his own time, and knew how to make himself heard.
“Aye,” Jones answered, and his voice was crisp and pleasant. “How may I help you?”
The little boy hid behind his legs and peered out between them like they were prison bars. Jed made an effort to smile at the kid, knowing that on his homely mug it could only come out as a grimace. Not that he cared about the kid’s feelings, but no sense pissing off the captain if it wasn’t necessary. The boy shuddered and closed his eyes tight, the ungrateful little shit.
“I’m paid for the journey tomorrow morning, party of two,” Jed explained, and he waved their two dog-eared tickets as a sign of good faith. “I reckon I’d like to book two berths for tonight.” He shot his winningest grin at the boy, who only cringed further away from him. Good money after bad, gramma would have said. “And two breakfasts, if you’ll vouch for your cook.”
“I’m the cook, boyo,” Jones said, “and St. David himself will vouch for my work.” He beamed a warm, trust-inspiring smile. “That’ll be thirty cents.”
“I reckon I can believe St. David,” Jed smiled back as friendly as he knew how, “whoever he might be.” He paid with six tarnished nickels, three of them American and three rectangles stamped with the California bear. The Captain dug a pencil stub out of his vest pocket and marked both of Jed’s tickets with the initials DJ and some obscure symbol.
“Bring your gear aboard whenever you want,” the Captain invited his passenger, and then extended down a friendly hand. “I’m Dan Jones.”
They shook. “I’m Jed Coltrane, Captain Jones.”
“Just Dan will do, when we’re not aboard. This is John Moses, my midshipman.” He gestured to the boy hiding behind his knee, who heard himself talked about and took a deep breath to swell out his chest. “Your first journey to the Great Salt Lake City, is it?”
Jed snorted. “Can’t be many folks as’ve been twice, can there? Thirty-odd years ago, there weren’t nothing there but dust, buffalo, and Paiutes, and old Jim Bridger paddled around the Salt Lake in a boat sewn outta his own shirt. Hell, even twelve years ago, the Mormons was all living in tents and possum bellies.”
“Ah, but that was twelve years ago,” Dan chided the dwarf gently, “and travel gets easier every year.”
“You find easier travel brings better passengers?” Jed joked.
“A passenger who pays full fare is a fine passenger,” Dan Jones said, his eyes opening up and twinkling, “and it’s a very good passenger indeed who pays full fare but takes up only half the space.”
Jed was caught off guard by the jest and found himself laughing hard. “You’ll think better of it, Dan, don’t you worry,” he roared, “when you find out I eat three times my share!”
Dan Jones joined in the laughter. “Is that what brings you to the Kingdom, then, boyo? You’ve come to enter all our pie-eating contests?”
“No, I’ve come to bring you high culture,” Jed tried to say with a straight face, but instead had to wipe tears from his eyes.
“Oh, aye?”
Jed took a deep breath and managed to still his riotous laughter. “Yeah, as a matter of fact, I have. I’m with a traveling showman, feller name of Doctor Jamison Archibald. He’s a scholar of anquiquities… anquit…”
“Antiquities,” Jones suggested, his own laughter subsiding.
“Really old shit,” Jed finished. “Egyptian, mostly. We heard as there might could be some interest in it in the Great Salt Lake City.”
“Mummies?” whispered John Moses. He had inched around Jones’s leg and stood trembling, eyes wide open and round, both hands gripping Dan Jones by the knee. His voice was so soft that a man of normal height wouldn’t have heard it.
Jed nodded, then let his arms fall suddenly slack, held half-up at a forty-five degree angle in front of him, fingers drooping. Reaching deep into his bag of medicine show skills, he rolled his eyes back in their sockets until he could see nothing and he knew the
lad could only see the yellowish whites of the dwarf’s eyeballs. “Muuuuummmmmieees…” he groaned, and lurched forward half a step.
John Moses yelped and jerked back behind Captain Jones, trembling. Both men laughed, though Jed thought that Jones’s laughter was more forced this time, for his benefit rather than out of real amusement. “Maybe you’ll show us these mummies aboard the Liahona,” he suggested politely. “It’s not a long ride from Fort Bridger to Salt Lake, but there’s time enough to spread the word among the passengers in the morning and put on an exhibition in the afternoon.” He smiled, and Jed found it a shrewd and calculating expression. “If you were to charge, say, a nickel a head, I could take two cents of that and let you use the Liahona’s stateroom.”
Jed nodded as if he thought that were a good idea, and maybe, he reasoned with himself, maybe it was a good idea, from the point of view of maintaining their cover story. Of course, Poe would overthink the thing six ways to Sunday before agreeing to anything, so odds were it could never happen anyway. “I’ll pass on the suggestion to Doctor Archibald,” he told Dan Jones, and the Captain nodded. “We’ll load in tonight, then, and I reckon I’ll most likely see you again at breakfast.”
They shook hands again.
“Boo!” Jed hissed at John Moses before he turned to go, and the boy looked like he might cry.
* * *
Absalom Fearnley-Standish hunched over the bar and wrote furiously in his Patent Metallic Note-Paper-Book, racing to record all of Dick Burton’s offenses of the evening before he forgot them. The morning, of course, had already filled a page. Now he had to add to it. A lesser man might have surrendered, deciding that Burton had already seen through him and it was no longer worth continuing to write down the misdemeanors and felonies of the famous explorer. Absalom carried on, because he hoped Burton might yet come to believe in Absalom’s authority, because it was proper to make a record of material infractions, that was just good Foreign Office procedure, and also out of sheer bloody-minded pride.
That at least, he thought, we have in common.
Evening of 22 July 1859. Persists in calling me by woman’s name. Will not use correct form of address. Accuses me of cowardice, stupidity. Repeatedly disobeys direct orders. Questions my authority, accuses me of forgery. Commits likely crime (check Wyoming Territory statutes—burglary? trespass to chattels?).
He fortified himself with a sip of whisky from the shot glass in front of him.
Upon consideration, he scratched out the last item, and sighed. Any crime Burton had committed, he’d committed too, as an accomplice.
What are you doing here, Absalom? he asked himself. You’re thousands of miles from home, on a fool’s errand and shackled to a baboon.
There is a war to avert, he reminded himself. Or if it cannot be averted, then the Empire’s interests must be protected, and England, as everyone knows, expects that every man will do his duty.
And, of course, there is Abigail.
He looked up from his Note-Paper-Book and his eye fell on an angel. She sat one-quarter-turn pivoted away from him, as did the man graced with her presence, so Absalom could see them both clearly. He—he was nothing, another brute American, a surly-looking thug whose brushy mustache and gorilla eyebrows would have suited some redcoat in India, but here looked overstated, an exaggeration, a false and overly masculine swagger. Something in the back of his mind told him he should recognize the man, but he had no patience either for the man’s face or for the nagging thought. He was focused entirely on… her—she was grace and refinement and elegance and beauty, all bound in the delightful package of perfect, freckle-kissed feminine charms under a crest of curly brown hair. Absalom thought he could smell her perfume, over all the human stinks of the Saloon, from where he sat, twenty feet away.
“Why no,” the Angel was saying to the Brute, “I know shockingly little of the Mississippi River, really. I was carried across it as a small child, and have not been back since. Please, tell me all about it.”
“Your first problem with the Mississippi, Miss Annie,” the Brute began to spout back in answer, “is distinguishing fact from fiction.”
“Does that make it different from any other place, really?” she asked.
“Some would say not,” the Brute admitted with a chuckle. “But when a man’s riding a river that’s so wide he can’t see either bank, I find that he becomes particularly susceptible to the pernicious influence of fable.”
“Tell me more,” the Angel urged him on.
“Consider the case of the famous Mike Fink,” the Brute mused. “You’ll have heard of Mike Fink, I take it?” He stubbed out his cigar. The cigar, anyhow, smelled sweetly civilized to Absalom, and he regretted its disappearance, but the Brute immediately fumbled in the inner pocket of his coat for another.
“He was a boatman of some sort, was he not?” Clearly, distinctly, unmistakably… the Angel looked Absalom in the face and winked at him.
Absalom’s heart stood still and he was dimly aware of his Patent Metallic Note-Paper-Book falling to the Saloon floor from nerveless hands. Some time passed, and some conversation between the Angel and her Brute, and all Absalom could hear was the rushing of his own blood and the outrageous hammering of his own heart.
“…but he did in fact, that scalawag, ride a moose,” the Brute was saying when Absalom’s hearing returned. “Saddled an ornery bull and rode it around the muddy streets of St. Louis when that good old town wasn’t much more than a trading post for Frenchmen and Injuns.”
Absalom swallowed with a very dry mouth and, feeling suddenly terrified, raised his eyes to look upon the face of his Angel. She was nodding at the Brute’s droning oratory, and smiling, but when Absalom looked at her, she shifted her eyes slightly to look back at him, and her smile widened a little more.
“Mr. Fink sounds terribly brave,” she observed to the Brute.
Instantly Absalom dropped his gaze, stared at the floor. Good heavens, man, get hold of yourself! He tried to seize command of his suddenly shaky spirits. Are you a Cambridge man or aren’t you? Don’t shame the Foreign Office by acting the overgrown child!
He swallowed again, still dry, and couldn’t raise his eyes. The drone filled his ears—he found he couldn’t make out the Brute’s words at all, but every mmm, hmmn and I see of the Angel rang like a church bell.
On the floor he saw his Note-Paper-Book. He must pick it up, mustn’t leave work papers on a Saloon floor, those were property of the Crown, really. He stood from his stool, shaking slightly in the knees, stooped to the floor, wrapped his fingers around the paper—
and suddenly found himself propelled face-first across the room.
Absalom gasped for air and almost dropped the Note-Paper-Book. Midsections of dancing people and the startled faces of gamblers swerved in and out of his vision as he launched horizontally forward. His trousers seemed to be dragging him ahead as if possessed, and when Absalom twisted to look back, he saw that he was gripped with both hands by the belt by a wild-eyed man with a gnarled and bushy beard.
“Unhand me!” Absalom meant it as a manly command, but even in his own ears it rang as a shrill squeak.
The wild-eyed man swung Absalom through the doorway and into the back hall of the Saloon. There were heated lavatories, he knew, in this hallway, and an exit, but little traffic. The stranger slammed Absalom up against the wall, held him there with one fist twisted in his shirt, and stared into his face.
Absalom gulped. The stranger wore an eye patch, and his one unveiled eye drilled into Abalom with the piercing blue stare of a madman. His face was scarred and weatherworn, his beard tangled and streaked with gray, and whatever hair he had was hidden under a large bear-fur hat like that worn by the Coldstream Guards, though shabbier and more thoroughly used. He stank of meat, smoke and sweat. He was half a foot shorter than Absalom, but somehow he seemed enormous.
“You use me ill, sir,” Absalom managed to protest, though he felt it was a weak expression of his true sentiments.
“I need to be sure I got your full attention,” the stranger growled. His free hand disappeared from Absalom’s view, and when it returned, it held a long, triangular, straight-edged knife.
Chapter Two
Burton threw the whisky back and let it burn. He looked to the bar again and saw that Fearnley-Standish’s stool was empty. Where had that pompous little pigeon-fart gone? He was probably off getting into trouble, trying to exercise the authority of his patently fraudulent commission letter over the Shoshone, and Burton would have to go drag him from the fire again before he sizzled. At least the Shoshone weren’t cannibals, like the Kwakiutl, or like the Iroquois had once been. Not that Burton had anything against cannibals—he’d had more than one good friend who’d been an eater of man-flesh.
Why the Foreign Office had really sent Absalom Fearnley-Standish, Burton might never know. Why, or whether. He seemed like a paper-shuffler, a time-server, at the best of times a passably competent civil servant, and not like the diplomat he made himself out to be. Burton’s own letter gave him wide discretion and referred only to a companion who may assist you in diplomatic appeals, directed as you see fit. He poured himself another shot. He’d been told he’d be getting a skilled bureaucrat, and instead he got a two-penny Napoleon.
“Is there enough whisky in that bottle that you’d be willing to share?” a woman asked in a husky voice. She sat down opposite him and Burton completely forgot about Absalom Fearnley-Standish and all the obnoxious things he had ever done. The woman was small, with a face of straight lines and a natural grace to her movements that made Burton’s heart stammer. Her appearance was ageless, though faint lines around the eyes suggested to Burton that she might be his age, or even older. Not that that put him at ease—the she-wolf can bite to her last breath. Her dress was a shiny scarlet crinoline with what looked like whalebone snaps down the front of it, the most eye-catching thing in the Saloon, without the steel bell around the hips that so marred the fashions of London, hiding women’s legs and buttocks, their most naturally fascinating lures. The nearly-unveiled glimpse of her form made him regret the frock coat and waistcoat that hid Burton’s own excellent, manly physique. At least he had good, virile facial hair.