Ghosts of Engines Past

by McMullen, Sean

  I lay absolutely still. True, I had my father's flintlock, but I am no flash shot, and would have trouble hitting a steam train from the platform. Norvin had killed a man with every shot, and still had one bullet remaining in his six-barrel pistol. Apparently satisfied that he had killed Gainsley and his men, and that Angelica and myself were the dead farm laborers, he mounted and rode away. We remained hidden in amid the trees until more people arrived at the balloon and discovered the massacre. When the authorities arrived I emerged and played the part of a yokel who had come late to the scene, and of course Angelica was quite convincing as a village idiot. It was no great effort for us to slip away and walk back to London.

  That was two years ago, and since then I have prospered. I have my own workshop, where a steam engine chugs night and day to maintain the world's only altitude chamber. It is the size of a small room, and within it lives Angelica, in conditions of pressure that can be found at eight miles. Otherwise, it is furnished very comfortably in red and green leather upholstery, Regency furniture, a small library, a desk where she draws diagrams of things for me to build, and a workbench where she builds tiny, intricate metal machines like surreal insects with wings of blue and silver lace. Food and drink passes in through an equalization chamber. What comes out is mainly diagrams.

  I am building a voidcraft. The thing resembles a streamlined steam train with no wheels. It stands on grasshopper-like legs driven by pistons plated in gold. In place of a cabin there is an airtight double chamber with portholes. One side is for Angelica, the other is mine, and they are at very divergent atmospheric pressures. I tell the artisans who help with construction that it is a new type of armored balloon, and in their ignorance they believe me.

  The parts were made at a thousand different workshops in Britain, continental Europe, and even America. It is a beautiful thing, with a body of brass pipes, steel tubes, crystal mechanisms mounted in gaslight enclosures, and riveted boilers in which nothing boils. Even in its incomplete state, it is awesome in its performance. Last night we rolled back the moveable roof of the workshop, ascended into the night, and looked down upon the gaslit, smoky haze of London in comfort... from eight miles. How easily the frontier becomes the commonplace. Angelica spoke within my thoughts, asking whether I wished to fly on to the moon, but I was not ready for that. Like lungs acclimatizing to the air at great altitudes, my mind needed time to adjust to such wonders.

  Currently I am having four quite different engines built to add to our craft. To me they make no sense, but Angelica insists that they will work. The clever and industrious Mr Brunel has contracts to make some of the parts. If only he knew that he was really building boilers to confine matter more black than soot that has no real existence as we know it. The electrical experimenter Faraday is supplying many of our electromagnetic and electrostatic controls, while the jewelers Pennington and Bailey fabricate crystals to almost-conduct electricity, and Harley Brothers Watchmakers build control clockwork that they do not understand.

  The voidcraft of rivets and iron plate will be able to travel to the stars, even though my mind cannot comprehend the distances in any more than the most general sense. It will be armed with a tube being built in two sections in the workshops of Glasgow and Sheffield, a tube that will one day enclose a fragment of a star's heart. With it one can vaporize a warship at ten miles using not one thousandth of the power available. Angelica will be the captain, navigator and gunner, yet when she leaves, I will be with her. After all, what engine can work without a humble stoker and oiler?

  Norvin was right in a sense. Angelica is a Napoleon from an unimaginably advanced race, and Earth is the Elba where she was exiled. Norvin also feared her, but in this he was mistaken. It is with worlds too distant to comprehend that Angelica has her quarrel. After all, why would a Napoleon want to conquer a little Elba when so much more is within reach?

  2. THE CONSTANT PAST

  It is 2008. A municipal librarian in London is about to reserve a book for a Regency serial killer.

  The Regency period is the forgotten era of steampunk. They had steam trains, electric generators, batteries, visual telegraphs, military codebreakers, electric lights, punched card programming and a world war. They also had a lot of dashing young heroes and beautiful young women in very fashionable clothes. That all adds up to a steampunk setting, so if the Victorians thought a time machine was feasible, why let them have all the fun? Whether Regency or Victorian, a viable time machine brings the same problems to the user. If you are not a nice person to begin with, your love life cannot be sorted out by changing the past.

  ~~~

  Mister Brandel did try to blend in with the fashions of the London of 2010, but only in the sense that he played down the more strident aspects of his own time's fashions. He wore a heavy, calf-length garric overcoat, and it was such a dark shade of green that when I first met him I took it for black. This he kept buttoned all the time, and it reached down to a pair of black, fringed, knee-length boots. Although he wore a cadogan wig, which did tend to stand out, his black beaver hat was pulled down very low, so that the wig was almost lost between the hat and the collar of his coat. In his right hand was a malacca cane, while in his left he held a well-worn leather folder filled with papers.

  What intrigued me from the start was that he did not make a point of seeming from the late Eighteenth Century. A serious re-enactment fanatic would have used a quill and jar of ink, but Mister Brandel had found a ballpoint pen somewhere and was happy to use this for his writing. He did not write very much, but that which he did write was in an elegant script, and was mainly names, dates, places, and descriptions. He did read a great deal, however, and it was always the biographies of Elizabeth Crossen, the early Nineteenth century poet. As a librarian I have noticed that most readers show little emotion as they read, but Mister Brandel generally scowled. For someone with such an interest in Crossen, he never seemed at all happy to be reading about her.

  Mister Brandel never became a registered borrower, and this struck me as odd. Borrowing was far more convenient than playing book roulette with other library customers. As a former forensics professional, this also told me that he might have an identity to hide. Some of the staff were running a competition to find out both who he was and who he was pretending to be. On the evening that I learned both his name and his alias, he had been visiting the library on and off for seven months. As usual, he had gone to the shelves in search of the Crossen biographies, then come to the information desk.

  “Your pardon, the books about Elizabeth Crossen are missing,” he said.

  “Do you mean the biographies?” I asked.

  “Yes, yes. There were five of them.”

  “Just a moment.”

  I checked our holdings. All five books were on loan.

  “They have been borrowed, all at the same time and by the same person,” I explained. “Some student writing an essay about her, I'd say. We can reserve them for you.”

  “Reserve them?”

  “Yes. When they are returned, I'll sent you a message. What is your address?”

  “My address,” he sighed. “I—I travel.”

  “Well, do you have email?”

  “Ah, no.”

  “What about a phone number?”

  “I have no phone number address. Sir, were I to come here in three weeks, will the book be, ah, reserved as you say?”

  “Well yes, but they might be returned early.”

  “But you said they were on loan for three weeks.”

  “Most books are returned before they are due.”

  Mister Brandel looked both weary and exasperated, as if even something as simple as a library loan was too much for him to comprehend. He knew just enough of the system to find the biographies of Elizabeth Crossen, and had no interest in learning any more.

  “If I return in three weeks, will the books be here for me to read?”

  There was something subtly dangerous about the man's attitude. In another career, a
lmost in another life, I had worked in a police laboratory. I know the signs to look for, and Mister Brandel had them. In theory he had to be a member of the library to have books reserved in his name, but by now I was more than intrigued by him and wanted him to trust me.

  “Return three weeks from today, the books will be here,” I answered.

  This was all that he wanted to hear, and his manner softened at once.

  “So much... everything... it is such a strain,” he said wearily, as if almost beyond words. “My thanks, you do ease my path.”

  “That is what I'm paid to do,” I said cheerily. “What name shall I put against them?”

  “Goldsmith. James Goldsmith.”

  With that he turned away, strode for the doors, and vanished into the night. Upon the reference desk was his leather folder, battered with use and greasy with handling. I picked it up, suspecting that a man like him would be back soon. Very soon he was indeed back, looking flushed and wild-eyed.

  “Is this yours?” I called, holding his folder up.

  Our strangest customer came hurrying over and snatched it from my hand.

  “Yes, yes, praise all saints, I thought it lost,” he babbled in relief.

  “You were lucky you left it on my desk,” I said casually. “Try not to leave anything valuable lying about, the library is full of thieves.”

  “Indeed, is it so?” he said, his relief still apparent. “My thanks for your warning.”

  With that he gave me a curt bow, then hurried from the library again. Having a background in forensics I tend to pick up odd details about people, and Mister Brandel had just confirmed my suspicions about being a little out of the ordinary. Within the space of a minute he had grown at least two days of beard stubble.

  It was not a busy night, so I plugged my phone into a USB port on the reference desk computer and accessed the image store. Mister Brandel had been separated from his leather folder for a little more than three minutes, yet this had been enough for me to use my phone to take twelve double page photographs of the notes he had made.

  His real name, Edwin Charles Brandel, was on the inside of the folder. He was meticulous and methodical in his studies, particularly about dates. On the first page he stated the date to be 15th April 2010, and noted the name of Colonel Graham Harridane. Quite a lot of details were noted down about this man, including his first meeting with Elizabeth Crossen. This was on the 23rd of November 1803. Following this was the cryptic 'marr 3 May 1805.

  I looked up Colonel Harridane on an online genealogical database. He had been shot and killed in a duel on 25th November 1803. On the second page was an undated 'Valé' with a line drawn under it. I looked up 'Valé'. It was Latin for goodbye. Next came an entry for Sir Gregory Cottington, noting that an introduction to Elizabeth Crossen had been arranged for 30th November 1805. Again there were details of addresses, dates of concerts, and even the names of brothels that the knight had been known to visit. Eerily, 'marr.' again appeared, now dated 16th March 1805, and again followed by 'Valé.'

  As I accessed another website dealing with Crossen, I already suspected what I would find an entry about an untimely death. Sure enough, Sir Gregory had been stabbed to death in the company of a prostitute the very next night after meeting with the poet. The woman had been hanged for his murder, and Crossen had even commented on the matter in a letter to her sister.

  'Sir Gregory has been murdered in the most scandalous of circumstances. He was found dead in the company of a common woman. And to think, he was in this very house just the day before. He was courting me, no less.'

  I scanned the remaining pages of Mister Brandel's notes. There were details of fifteen men who, to use the terminology of the time, were men of quality. All but one had died violently, within a few days of their first meeting with Elizabeth Crossen. The single exception had an entry on the very last page, and his name was Robert Bell. The name was familiar, but I could not quite place it. Unlike most librarians, I have little background in the arts and literature. Networks and databases are my areas. Give me a reference or a name and I can track it down, but without a reason to do the search I am lost.

  Now I did a combined search on Robert Bell and Elizabeth Crossen. Bell was an early romantic poet of no particular talent, and the sample of his works that I glanced over involved medieval knights and ladies meeting after long separations, then marrying and living contentedly. Crossen had met him in 1809, and they had indeed married the following year and gone on to live happily for several decades.

  The records of the Old Bailey are on the web, and it took only moments to call up the murder of Sir Gregory Cottington. A prostitute named Gwen Bisley had been convicted of the crime, but were modern forensics in use at the time she might have walked free. That was my opinion, anyway. She testified that she had entertained a very strange gentleman in her room by merely taking her clothes off. He had paid her and left, then she had gone in search of her next client. When she had returned with him, a man was lying 'stabbed, dead and naked' on her bed. The client ran screaming, raising a hue and cry. The authorities found Gwen's bully drunk in a nearby tavern. The magistrate concluded that the pair had conspired to murder Sir Gregory, but that the bully had got 'too far into drink' with the money stolen from him, and had forgotten to dispose of the body.

  I re-read the description that Gwen had given of her first client. He had worn a dark beaver hat whose brim shadowed his face, but she was sure that he had been wearing a wig. All else was concealed by his coat, but his voice had been that of a 'Frenchy,' as she had put it. Apart from the accent, that was Mister Brandel's description, and even I could fake a French accent.

  By then it was getting near closing time, so I checked out several anthologies of early Nineteenth Century poetry to myself. Returning home on the Underground I discovered that Elizabeth Crossen was not best known as an early romantic poet, but a pioneer of the Gothic style. In the years leading up to 1809 her works grew increasingly dark in tone, and she often wrote of being 'been courted by death'. Anthology introductions spoke of her suitors having an extraordinarily high mortality rate, but her marriage to Robert Bell had given her a last chance for happiness. With Robert she had been lucky. He was mentioned as being from a noble family, but working as an assistant to a magistrate 'for the common goode.' He had abandoned this career for his poetry after marrying Elizabeth.

  I was so intrigued that I not only missed my station, I missed it by eight stops.

  The following morning saw me in the British Library's reading rooms at St Pancras, and by lunchtime I was in the nearby bookshops. I arrived at the municipal library with my own copies of all five biographies of Elizabeth Crossen, along with several books of her poetry. I had even memorised her most famous work, Death is a Gentleman in Love. The poem described a shadowy figure that stalked her in the shadows, jealously taking the lives of anyone bold enough to court her.

  Literary authorities were unanimous that this was her finest work, and some Gothic scholars even lamented the beginning of her liaison with Bell because it brightened her mood. Others argued that she had done more good with her later pastoral works, because she had gone on to promote the glories of the English countryside at a time when it was under threat from industrialisation. I even found myself developing an empathy for Bell as well as his wife. After all we were both refugees from law enforcement.

  Those who have not worked in forensics can never appreciate how very attuned one becomes to a case. Every detail becomes worthy of investigation, because important clues can never be anticipated. Thus it was that I decided to review the security tapes from the cameras in the library. There were several cameras, all feeding into old-style video cassette tapes, and these were rotated every three days. I had hoped to catch a good view of Mister Brandel, in particular his face. I was disappointed. He appeared on only two tapes, because all other cameras had been moved to the hidden corners of the book stacks. At that time we were trying to catch the Phantom Crapper, who was touring the
municipal libraries of London and leaving steaming hot turds in secluded areas.

  In a strange way I was very relieved to see Mister Brandel on the tape of the information desk, because it confirmed him to be real. Everything was as I remembered it, however, and I learned nothing. On the tape from the library entrance he appeared four times. These were images of him that I had not seen, so even though they did not provide a better view of his face, I stared at them intently. I could even see myself sitting at the information desk in the background, for the camera was trained on people leaving the library. This was to catch customers leaving with stolen goods. I saw Mister Brandel collecting his folder from me, then approaching the camera. The inner glass doors slid aside, he walked through... and I remained dimly visible as he passed between me and the camera!

  Several dozen viewings later I had established that the library's most intriguing borrower had started fading as he had passed through the inner doors. Were he really from the first decade of the Nineteenth Century, he would not know about cameras. Amid everything that did not make sense, here was consistency at last.

  For the rest of that evening I studied trends in clothing from around 1800. It was a time of transition for men's fashions in England, influenced heavily by George Brummel. Being a favourite of the Prince Regent, Brummel's opinions were taken seriously. He had established trends to personal hygiene, wearing clean clothes, and the abandoning of wigs and hair powder for more natural grooming. In general, the lighter colours of the late Eighteenth Century were giving way to dark green, sombre brown, and even black. Mister Brandel's wig and beaver hat were a little old fashioned for the early 1800s, but his long, dark garrick overcoat with its high collar was certainly in period. Slowly I established a profile for him. He was not overly conscious of fashion, and even lagged a little behind in some matters of style, but generally he made an effort to blend in. He did not have a stale, unwashed reek about him, which fitted in with Brummel's decrees on washing being fashionable.