Gideon Smith and the Brass Dragon

by David Barnett

  “Mr. Bent!” she cried. “Please don’t be so familiar! It’s Mrs. Cadwallader to you. And do let go. You smell as though you have been sleeping with horses!”

  “The scent of good, honest work!” said Bent, sniffing the limp and blackened collar of his shirt. “Come on, Mrs. C, we’ve been saving the effing world again! Is that the best you’ve got?”

  “Ignore him,” said Gideon. “We landed at Highgate Aerodrome two hours ago and—”

  “And we’re famished,” finished Bent. “What is that wonderful smell coming from the kitchens?”

  Mrs. Cadwallader allowed herself a self-indulgent smile. “Pie and mash, Mr. Bent. Made with the very finest ingredients bought from the Tottenham Court Road just this morning. I take it you are ready to dine?”

  “Not effing half,” said Bent.

  Gideon’s stomach rumbled. For once, he was inclined to agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Aloysius Bent.

  * * *

  Bent sat back in his chair and farted as Mrs. Cadwallader began to clear the plates from the long mahogany table in the wood-paneled dining room. She wrinkled her nose and cast a pointed glance at Gideon, who said, “Mr. Bent, if you could try to remember your manners…”

  Bent belched for good measure. “Left ’em in the East End, Gideon. They’re not the sorts of manners that would be fit for high society in Mayfair, I’m afraid. Besides, breaking wind after a meal is considered a great compliment to the chef in some far-off lands. And after that bang-up spread from Mrs. C, she’s lucky I didn’t follow through as well.”

  Gideon shook his black-curled head. It had seemed a grand idea, at first, the suggestion that he take up residence in the former home of Captain Lucian Trigger, the erstwhile Hero of the Empire, following the events in London the previous month. And as Mr. Bent had been assigned to him as his official chronicler and companion, it was only natural that he be on hand. Bent had kept lodgings in some East End slum and readily agreed to give them up to move into the palatial apartments formerly owned by Trigger and his lover John Reed. It had a kind of symmetry, Mr. Walsingham had said. With both Trigger and Reed dead, Mrs. Cadwallader had been more than happy to have someone else to look after. The reality of living in close proximity to Aloysius Bent, however, had soon begun to pall.

  Bent poured himself a generous measure of claret. “Think I’ll finish off the piece for World Marvels & Wonders before I turn in, get it couriered over to them tomorrow. Then the day’s my own. They’ll be missing me in the Crown and Anchor. You didn’t happen to see whether that cabbie brought my typewriter in from the steam-carriage, did you, Mrs. C?”

  Mrs. Cadwallader brought the battered leather case from the hall. “Was it a terribly dangerous adventure, Mr. Smith?”

  “Oh, like you wouldn’t effing believe,” Bent answered for him. “Dinosaurs, Mrs. Cadwallader. A … what was it, Gideon?”

  “Tyrannosaurus rex.”

  “Tyrannosaurus rex, that’s the effer.” Bent nodded. “Tall as this house, teeth like the swords of the Iron Guard on the Queen’s birthday parade. Nearly had us for breakfast.”

  Mrs. Cadwallader’s hand flew to her mouth. Bent, warming to his tale, said, “Oh, yes, I didn’t think we’d escape alive. Took one of the sailors in its vast jaws and cut him in two. Horrible.”

  “That’s enough, Bent,” said Gideon gently as Mrs. Cadwallader’s complexion faded to a gray pallor.

  “That’s right,” said Bent, pulling open the typewriter case. “You can read it in the next issue of the penny blood, like the rest of the sensation-hungry mob out there.” He peered at the words he’d already battered out. “Think I’ll call this one The Lost World. What do you think, Gideon?”

  “Perfect,” said Gideon, excusing himself and following Mrs. Cadwallader out of the dining room, as Bent began to hammer the keys.

  Gideon found Mrs. Cadwallader in the study, amid all the trophies from the adventures of Dr. John Reed and Captain Trigger, who wrote up his international exploits in deathless prose for the penny bloods. The claw from the Exeter Werewolf, Lord Dexter’s Top Hat, Markus Mesmer’s Hypnowheel, the electric eyes of the Viennese Wardog … they were all there in glass cabinets, labeled and resting on velvet cushions. The housekeeper was standing before a portrait of Captain Trigger and Dr. Reed above the mantelpiece, her back to Gideon. He softly closed the door and walked over to her.

  “You miss them, don’t you?”

  “Oh, terribly, Mr. Smith,” she said tremulously, without turning around. “Do you know, before I came to work for them I would never have believed two men could be so in love. But their attachment was stronger than that of any married couple I have ever met.”

  “The memorial to them will open in Hyde Park on the first anniversary of their deaths, I believe.”

  Mrs. Cadwallader turned at last, tears in her eyes. “It’s been a month now, Mr. Smith, but I still cry every day. Can it really be true, that Dr. Reed had gone bad?”

  Gideon sighed. “I don’t know, Mrs. Cadwallader. I never knew him before. But he had been trapped in that pyramid for a year. The loneliness he must have felt … only those horrible frog-faced mummies for company … who knows what that does to a man’s mind?”

  “But to come home with such … such vengeance in his heart! He was going to turn that brass dragon on Buckingham Palace! Kill Queen Victoria! If he had succeeded…”

  “He didn’t,” said Gideon. “Lucian stopped him. I watched them fall from the dragon, Mrs. Cadwallader. They held each other all the way down. I truly believe that John had come back to Lucian at that moment.”

  She nodded, wiping away her tears with the corner of her apron. “It was how Captain Trigger would have wanted to go. He had become such a shadow of himself in that year that Dr. Reed was missing, Mr. Smith. If you hadn’t come here, if you hadn’t stopped Dr. Reed … I don’t know what that would have done to Captain Trigger, if he had just watched from afar as Dr. Reed exacted such a mad revenge. It would have broken him. At least he died a whole man.”

  “He died a hero, Mrs. Cadwallader.”

  She smiled and cocked her head to one side. “And look at you, Mr. Smith. You were just a boy when you came knocking on this door. Now you’re a man. The Hero of the Empire, no less.”

  It was Gideon’s turn to smile. “It was only a month ago.”

  But much had changed in a month. From fisherman to … well, as Mrs. Cadwallader said. He had been appointed as the Hero of the Empire by Queen Victoria herself, to fill the gap left in the public consciousness by the death of Captain Trigger. He had been sent to Sandhurst for intensive training in firearms and hand-to-hand combat for an exhausting two-week period before being dispatched to rescue Professor Rubicon and Charles Darwin from that lost island in the Pacific. But already he was hungry for more. Hungry to pursue the turncoat Louis Cockayne and the purloined brass dragon Apep to America, hungry to rescue Maria from whatever fate to which Cockayne had delivered the beautiful automaton with a human brain.

  As if reading his mind, Mrs. Cadwallader laid a hand on his forearm. “You will find Miss Maria, Mr. Smith. I am sure of it. Never was a thing more meant to be.”

  Gideon protested weakly, but his thoughts had been consumed by nothing else since the aerial battle over Hyde Park. The intervening month, as filled with activity as it had been, had done nothing to resolve his confusion regarding his feelings for the mysterious Maria. A clockwork-powered automaton with the pilfered, living brain of a dead London streetwalker, she was a scientific marvel, wrought by the genius of the missing scientist Hermann Einstein. But the effect she had on Gideon’s heart could not be explained by a thousand scientists or a million formulas. He had denied what he felt for too long, and when he had finally reconciled his head with his heart, it had been too late. Louis Cockayne had betrayed them and stolen Maria away from him.

  “Was there any news while we were away?” he said, by way of trying to force Maria from his thoughts.

  “Another letter from the Grosv
enor Square Residents’ Committee,” said Mrs. Cadwallader. “Complaining about Mr. Bent being … indisposed in the communal gardens on more than one occasion.” She slapped her palm against her forehead. “Oh! Land’s sakes! Your coming home has quite put me out of my mind! News! Of course! Mr. Bram Stoker!”

  “They have recovered his body from the Rhodopis Pyramid?” said Gideon.

  “His body? No, Mr. Smith! He is alive! He arrived home safe and well just after you departed for the Pacific!”

  Gideon gaped at her. Stoker alive? It was impossible. The Irish writer had been crushed at the bottom of the collapsing pyramid. Elizabeth Bathory herself had seen him die—indeed, the noble vampire had taken his blood from his shattered body to enable her own escape from the ruined monument. There was a tinkle of bells from the hall. Mrs. Cadwallader said, “Tradesmen again. Or autograph hunters.”

  Gideon raised an eyebrow. “Autograph hunters?”

  “They come with copies of World Marvels & Wonders for you to add your signature to. I shall get rid of them.”

  Gideon remembered the first time he had knocked at the door of the house on Grosvenor Square, the high hopes he had for Captain Lucian Trigger. He didn’t know then, of course, that Trigger was merely the public front and that it was Dr. John Reed who was the true adventurer, doing the Crown’s bidding in secret. “No, don’t send them away,” he said. “A signature costs nothing.”

  As Mrs. Cadwallader went to the door Gideon retreated back to the dining room, where Bent was rolling a cigarette in his meaty fingers. He saw Gideon and nodded toward that morning’s Illustrated London Argus, on the table beside his typewriter.

  “Seen this? Only another Jack the effing Ripper attack, two days ago.” He shook his head. “Quality of reporting’s gone right down the shitter since they shifted me to the penny blood.”

  Gideon turned as Mrs. Cadwallader coughed and showed in a familiar tall, thin man wearing his customary tails and carrying his topper in the crook of his arm. His cane tapped on the wooden floorboards and he arched one gray eyebrow, fixing Gideon with his unflinching stare.

  “Mr. Walsingham,” said Gideon.

  Walsingham nodded. “Mr. Smith. Mr. Bent. I heard you had returned.”

  “Yes, that’ll be the hour we spent being debriefed by your chaps at Highgate Aerodrome,” said Bent.

  “Quite so,” said Walsingham, smoothing his mustache with white-gloved fingers. “A rather successful expedition, so I believe. You have returned one of our most eminent scientists and our beloved Professor of Adventure back home. Well done.”

  “All here,” said Bent, tapping the sheaf of papers before him.

  Walsingham held out his hand. “You have written your first fully-fledged Gideon Smith adventure for the penny dreadful? Excellent. I shall give it the once-over, Mr. Bent, and dispatch it to them myself.”

  Bent narrowed his eyes. “You’ll censor it, you mean?”

  Walsingham shrugged. “Merely edit out anything that might prove … damaging to the Empire.”

  Bent reluctantly handed over the manuscript, and Walsingham said, “What were your immediate plans, gentlemen?”

  “Sleep, and lots of it,” said Bent. “With ale and gin at regular intervals.”

  “We were going to go to the Stokers tomorrow,” said Gideon, eyeing Bent. “I was just about to tell Mr. Bent … Bram has apparently returned alive from Egypt.”

  Bent goggled. “Alive? But he was crushed … Countess Bathory said so.”

  “I would not visit him in the mornings,” said Walsingham mildly. “Mr. Stoker has become something of a … night owl since his return to London. Besides, you have another mission.”

  “But we’ve only just come back,” protested Bent. “Where are you sending us this time?”

  Walsingham looked Gideon in the eye. “America, Mr. Smith. We have had reports of a sighting of what we believe is the brass dragon, Apep.”

  Gideon stared at him. “Apep? Then I’m finally going for Maria?”

  “Miss Rowena Fanshawe is cleared for takeoff from Highgate at noon,” said Walsingham. “She will take you to New York, where you will meet Governor Edward Lyle and be briefed on what we know so far.”

  Gideon swallowed drily. Maria. He was going to rescue Maria. At last.

  Walsingham placed his topper on his head. “I shall see myself out. Godspeed, Mr. Smith, Mr. Bent. May you do the Empire proud once more.”

  5

  LIGHTER THAN AIR

  The steam-carriage deposited them on the stone apron outside the wooden, single-story building that was the headquarters of Fanshawe Aeronautical Endeavors just in time to see Rowena, her face smeared with black grease and carrying a foot-long wrench in her hand, chasing two boys in gray rags from the front door.

  “And don’t come back!” yelled Rowena, spotting Gideon and Bent unloading their luggage from the steam-cab and waving at them. She abandoned the chase and the two boys disappeared behind the piles of rusting gear wheels, cogs, and piston parts that were steadily growing beside Rowena’s business premises.

  “Autograph hunters?” asked Gideon, dropping his leather bag to embrace Rowena.

  Bent paid the steam-driver, hovering a penny over his outstretched palm before changing his mind and exchanging it for a ha’penny. He ignored the man’s baleful glare and said, “Knicker-nickers, more like. Trying to steal a pair of the Belle of the Airways’ panties.”

  “It’s good to see you, too, Aloysius,” said Rowena, stretching her arms around his broad shoulders. She extracted herself from his pungent hug and cast a thumb back at the boundary fence of the Highgate Aerodrome, where the boys had fled. “Actually, they’re after brass goggles. They’ve become quite the fashion accessory at high-class parties, by all accounts. These urchins can get a good price for the genuine article in some of the costume shops in Covent Garden.”

  “Who’d have thought?” said Bent, shaking his head. “I swear, since I’ve been hanging around with Smith here I’ve completely lost touch with what’s going on in high society. I’ve more idea what they’re wearing in Outer Mongolia than in Mayfair.” He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Brass goggles, eh?”

  Gideon shielded his eyes from the late summer sunlight and looked up at the Skylady III, tethered by steel cables as thick as his wrist to huge iron rings set into the stone-flagged apron. The first time he had seen the vast dirigible, it had been under the command of Louis Cockayne. He said, “She looks grand, Rowena.”

  Bent turned to appraise the dirigible, patting the pockets of his shapeless brown overcoat for his tobacco. “Don’t rightly know if I should be even thinking about stepping an effing foot on that thing,” he said sourly. “Not after that damn Louis Cockayne threatened to throw me off it. And then stole poor old Maria off Smith here.”

  “She was the Yellow Rose then,” said Rowena, wiping the grease from her hands on a square of dirty cloth. “She’s a whole different ’stat now, Aloysius. She’s the Skylady III. That makes her mine, not Cockayne’s. And you’ll come to no harm under my command.”

  “As I recall, the Skylady II was blown to bits high above the Mediterranean,” said Bent mildly. “Remind me what happened to the first one?”

  “Shredded on the north face of the Eiger.” Rowena smiled and ran a hand through her short, auburn hair. “Gideon, we’ve got an ascent slot at midday. She’s wound and loaded; I just need to take a bath and get a few papers in order before we depart for New York. Which reminds me, Gideon … Walsingham left something for you.”

  “More effing problems, no doubt,” said Bent.

  “You don’t have much faith in Mr. Walsingham,” said Gideon as Rowena walked toward the offices. “He is the representative of the Crown, after all.”

  “Which is precisely why I don’t trust him,” said Bent. “Gideon … I’ve been around the block too many times. I know what they’re capable of. Christ, you saw what happened to poor old Annie Crook.”

  But Gideon hadn’t seen what had h
appened to Annie Crook—no one had, save for Mr. Walsingham and his most trusted advisers. Annie Crook had fallen in love with the wrong man, and Walsingham had been called in—or had taken it upon himself—to sort out the mess on behalf of his employer, the British Crown. Gideon didn’t like to think about what they knew had happened—Annie Crook, a common shopgirl known to dabble in prostitution had been “seen to,” her body dumped in the mud on the banks of the Thames, her brain transferred to Professor Hermann Einstein where the scientist implanted it into his automaton, Maria.

  So yes, they knew what had happened to Annie Crook. And Mr. Walsingham would stop at nothing to protect the British Empire. But that was past history, and there was nothing Gideon could do about that. He had been tasked with a job by Queen Victoria herself, and if that meant taking orders from Walsingham …

  “You must learn to trust more, Aloysius,” said Gideon. “They pay our wages, after all.”

  “And you must learn to trust less, Gideon.” Bent tapped the side of his nose. “They pay us, but they don’t own us. Now, where did I put me pipe…?”

  Gideon left the other man trying to strike a match in the face of the crosswinds that tore across the wide apron of the aerodrome, following Rowena into the shadows of her offices. The gift of the former Yellow Rose from Cockayne and the recent fame from being honored by Queen Victoria herself for her part in defeating the crazed John Reed’s plot to raze London had, by Rowena’s own admission, done wonders for her business. But that had evidently not brought with it any improved organization skills. The office of Fanshawe Aeronautical Endeavors was piled high with yellowing documents, abandoned mugs of tea that had started to nurture cultures of blossoming blue mold, sections of clockwork, and steam-powered devices in various stages of being repaired or stripped down. One wall was dominated by a huge map of the world, into which colored pins had been stuck and connected with crisscrossing lengths of woolen yarn. Mandates, schedules, and handwritten notes were tacked up and down the sides of the massive chart.