The Immorality Engine nahi-3

by George Mann

  Throughout the entire interview, the main thought she’d had running through her mind had been that the woman in front of her was going to die. The reign of Victoria would be coming to an end when her life-preserving machines failed without Fabian’s ministrations, and, Veronica thought, she deserved it. She deserved all of it. Victoria had earned Veronica’s distrust, her disrespect, and her scorn. She had played a fundamental part in Amelia’s misery, and for that, Veronica could never forgive her. She only hoped the woman’s death would come swiftly, and soon.

  Veronica glanced over at Bainbridge, who stood by the edge of the grave, huddled against the rain and leaning on his cane, his legs wreathed in mist. She felt a pang of remorse at being unable to talk to him about what had really occurred, to tell him the truth about Amelia; at having to keep yet more secrets from someone she cared about. And that, also, was down to the Queen. But she knew Bainbridge wouldn’t understand. At least, not until he had seen the Queen for what she really was.

  Bainbridge had been in Her Majesty’s service for nearly twenty years, through thick and thin, and Veronica simply didn’t think he could accept the truth. Earlier that year he’d been confronted by the reality of the Queen’s machinations when he’d discovered the truth about William Ashford, a former agent who had been rebuilt by Fabian to live a life of painful servitude to the Queen, and although it had damaged his confidence for a time, he had soon convinced himself that the Queen must have been working for the good of the country. Perhaps that’s what he had to believe to stop himself from going mad. Veronica didn’t think any less of him for that.

  On the other hand, she found the entire matter much harder to stomach. She’d come to believe that the Queen acted only for the benefit of herself and her regime, and that she, Newbury, and Bainbridge, along with all the other agents, had been working only to forward those ends. If the Queen had a master plan, it didn’t involve a great deal of altruism.

  Veronica watched the six pallbearers lower the coffin into the ground. She was still weeping, and the rain was thrashing her, soaking her clothes, and plastering her hair across her face. But she didn’t mind. She hoped, in some way, that the rain could wash away all the fear and tension and pain of the last few days. She wanted the rain to rinse away the doubts and the disgust she felt about killing a man, no matter who he was or what he had done. She wanted to bury all those feelings with this duplicate that everyone thought was Amelia, deep in the ground where no one would ever find it again.

  She stepped forward, grabbing a handful of wet soil from the bank beside the open grave, and cast it into the hole. “Good-bye,” she said. She hoped that would be enough, but somehow she doubted it would be that easy.

  Veronica caught sight of Newbury, smiling at her sadly. He looked smart in his formal black suit, even soaked through as he was. “Come on. Let’s get you out of this dreadful rain, Miss Hobbes.” Veronica nodded, and then Newbury stepped forward, wrapping his arms around her shoulders protectively. She folded into his embrace, putting any thoughts of scandalising her parents out of her mind. “Veronica. Come now, before you catch a chill. This place will do you no good.”

  Veronica rested her head on his shoulder and allowed the tears to come. She wanted to exorcise the spirits, to leave them here in this graveyard so she didn’t have to carry them with her any longer when they left.

  They stayed like that for a few moments, the rain pattering down against their shoulders. Then, without looking back, she allowed Newbury to lead her away to the waiting carriage. She climbed in, and Newbury stepped up and took a seat beside her, shaking out his hat and running a hand through his hair.

  “Lead on, Driver,” he called, and she heard the snap of the whip. The carriage rocked and the horses crashed into motion, dragging the carriage out of its muddy trench and away into the torrential downpour.

  Veronica turned to Newbury, dripping all over the seats. “Thank you,” she said, and then realised how horribly inadequate those words seemed for what she really wanted to say to this man. “You… I…” She didn’t know how to go on.

  Newbury laughed and cupped her left cheek with his hand, wiping away a tear with his thumb. He didn’t have to say anything: His silence, and the look in his eyes, spoke volumes.

  She leaned over and kissed him, pulling him close, the rainwater running down her face as she wrapped her arms around his neck. She wanted nothing more than to be with him, this man who had given everything for her. To be held in his arms, safe from the world and all its terrible tribulations. “What are we going to do, Maurice?” she said when they had parted.

  Newbury met her gaze levelly. “I’ll get well, Veronica. I promise you that.”

  She shook her head. “Not that. About the Queen; about Amelia and what happened.”

  Newbury’s eyes drifted away from her face, gazing instead out of the window at the driving rain. “We can’t resign our commissions. She’d never allow it.” He sighed. It was clear he’d been considering this carefully. Veronica was relieved that he didn’t seem likely to back out, to try to justify their position and argue that they’d made a mistake. Until now, that had been her biggest fear. “I can’t see we have a great deal of choice. We have to carry on for now, at least. Until…” He trailed off.

  Until she’s dead, Veronica finished, although she didn’t say the words aloud. They both knew the consequences of Fabian’s death. And she knew he was right: They really didn’t have a choice. The Queen was ruthless, and they would be branded traitors and hunted down if they so much as gave her the impression they doubted her motives.

  “But can we ever trust her again?” she asked, genuinely unsure what she expected his response to be.

  He shook his head. There was sadness and fear in his eyes. “No. I don’t believe we can.”

  Veronica put her hand on his sleeve. “Then we’ll just have to trust each other,” she said, and she laid her head upon his chest, listening to the thumping of his heart as the carriage careened through the wet, cobbled streets towards Chelsea.

  CHAPTER

  28

  “So the intruder at the palace was nothing but a diversion, a red herring? A means of making us look in the other direction?” Bainbridge shook his head in disbelief. “It seems Graves was more conniving than even I gave him credit for.” He tugged at his moustache thoughtfully. “But how did the Queen know about the attack? That’s what puzzles me. And why was she so sure it was going to be the palace?”

  Newbury shrugged. “I suppose we’ll never know.”

  They were sitting in a quiet booth at the Whitefriars Club, Newbury’s regular haunt, a place typically frequented by literati, poets, artists, and other associated vagabonds. The type, Bainbridge considered, who were loose with other people’s money and even looser with their own morals. Or at least, that was how he saw it. Newbury seemed blind to the fact, and-as far as Bainbridge could see-actually seemed to like being surrounded by these people. In deference to his friend, he went along with it. And besides, the food was really rather good-and as Newbury had stated on more than one occasion-they did keep a shockingly good brandy.

  Tonight, however, the place was relatively quiet, with only a few others milling about, drinking, smoking, and talking to one another in hushed tones. The general atmosphere was subdued, and Bainbridge wondered if it had something to do with the news of what had occurred in recent days. Sensationalist stories had appeared in many of the newspapers, holding forth with all manner of fabrications and lies. They were claiming that the Bastion Society had been a terrorist organisation opposed to medical progress and that they had laid siege to the Grayling Institute in protest against the new methods being pioneered there by Dr. Lucien Fabian. He supposed there was some measure of truth in that, judging by what Newbury had uncovered, but their motives had been somewhat inaccurately portrayed.

  Still, he mused, at least the stories helped obscure the truth, which-to him, at least-was infinitely more distressing. That the Bastion Society had want
ed to destroy the Queen, all the while claiming they were doing it for the good of the Empire, made little sense to him. The monarch was the glue that bound the Empire together. To destroy her would be to remove the very heart of the Empire itself, all that was great about England. He rather thought the whole affair had more to do with Enoch Graves and his delusions of grandeur than any sense of assumed duty or righteousness he may have laid claim to. He was as power mad as the rest of them, all the other madmen and criminals he and Newbury had come up against in their time. The difference was, he’d had money and influence. That was all.

  Bainbridge took a long pull on his brandy and winced as his shoulder flared with pain. It was still strapped beneath his jacket, and he’d been grateful these last few days for the use of his cane, which he’d recovered from the police morgue after it was pulled from the belly of the dead man who’d attacked him. He still hadn’t discovered the man’s name, but he knew it was likely to be buried in one of the files on his desk, associated somehow with the Bastion Society.

  He’d spent the last two days poring over those files again, looking for any details that might aid him in his investigation. Not that there was much left to do. The former members of the Bastion Society were all dead, to a man, hounded, caught, and executed by the Queen’s agents, rooted out as terrorists and smote down. All but one: a man named Warrander, who had been found dead in his apartment, having slashed his own wrists in the bathtub. The whole thing had evidently proved too much for him.

  Graves himself had been found dead at the scene, knifed in the chest, his neck broken. Bainbridge hadn’t known what to make of that, but had settled on the notion that one of his own men must have turned on him in the chaos of the siege, or else one of Fabian’s people had finished him off before being killed himself. He’d decided not to devote too much effort to finding out; the very fact that Graves was dead was enough for him. Whether the man’s wild claims about rebirth and resurrection were true or not, he wouldn’t be troubling anyone else in Bainbridge’s lifetime.

  Now, the chief inspector was engaged in weeding out all the Bastion Society’s connections, trying to discover who had supported them in their quest to destroy the monarchy. But he was finding their organisation had been built on smoke: every trail led to a dead end or a dead man, every address to a place that had never existed. He didn’t know what to make of it all, but he knew the threat had dissipated, for now at least. There would be more like them in time. His lot, he had learned from experience, was a never-ending battle against the enemies of the Crown.

  He glanced over at Newbury, who was nursing his brandy and staring vacantly at the fireplace over Bainbridge’s shoulder. He looked better than he had in some time-aside from the scars on his face from where he’d fought the mechanical spider-but his eyes had taken on a haunted look. He didn’t know whether it was due to his longing for the weed, or something else entirely.

  “You were right about the duplicates,” Bainbridge said, trying to provoke a reaction.

  Newbury looked up. “What was that, Charles?” He sounded distracted.

  “I said you were right about the duplicates. That business at the morgue, the things you said about Sykes. You were right. We found the room you’d told me about at Packworth House. All those corpses.” Bainbridge shuddered at the very thought of it. “Dreadful business.”

  He’d walked into the room with Foulkes, and he knew the image of the dangling, eviscerated bodies would stay with him for the rest of his days. He couldn’t understand what had driven those men to commit such atrocities. A sickness of the mind, no doubt. Nothing else could explain it.

  Newbury nodded. “It’s why they murdered Sykes. The real Sykes-the one you and I found at Cromer Street. He’d stolen his own duplicate and left it in a gutter on Shaftesbury Avenue, dressed in his old clothes. He was trying to trick us-to trick you-into thinking he was dead. He must have realised you were on to him.”

  Bainbridge sighed. “It would have worked, too, if he hadn’t continued with the burglaries. I wonder why he did it.”

  “One last job before disappearing, perhaps? Most likely it was just an addiction, a part of his life he couldn’t live without. Sometimes, Charles, a thing like that comes to define someone. They become so used to living their life in a certain way that, when the time comes for that way of life to end, they don’t know who they are anymore.” Newbury took a swig of his brandy. “Do you understand?”

  “I think I do,” said Bainbridge. “I think I do.”

  They were both silent for a minute.

  “Do you ever doubt the Queen, Charles?” Newbury asked suddenly, before downing his brandy in one short gulp.

  Bainbridge considered his answer for a long while. In the end, he nodded. “All the time, Newbury. All the time,” he said, swilling his brandy round in the bottom of his glass. “But I have faith that she acts for the good of the nation, and that’s enough. That keeps me sane.”

  Newbury frowned. “I’m not so sure anymore. All that stuff with Ashford and Knox… I’m beginning to think it was just the tip of an iceberg. The closer I get to the truth, the more I see things I’d rather not.”

  “Then stop looking,” said Bainbridge. “Victoria didn’t build this Empire without getting her hands dirty, Newbury. You must realise that. I’ve been working for her for twenty years, and I’ve seen enough of it in my time. I’m not as blind or as ignorant as you might think”-he offered Newbury a wry smile-“but you learn to live with it. You have to. You learn to accept that it’s a necessary part of what we do. We all have to get our hands dirty from time to time. The Queen is no exception.”

  Newbury placed his empty glass on the tabletop. “I admire your ability to turn a blind eye, Charles. Really I do.”

  Bainbridge took a deep breath. “Don’t be so bloody facetious, Newbury! You know what I mean.”

  Newbury nodded. “I do. I’m sorry, Charles. I’m just not sure if I can live like that.”

  Bainbridge sighed heavily. “Is there any other way? Do you really think there are people who don’t? I mean, aren’t we all part of something that, sometimes, we’d rather forget? That’s just part of being alive, learning to cope with the horror of it all.” He leaned forward, his hands on the table. “Better that than the alternative.”

  “Do you think so?” Newbury asked quietly. “Better to survive at any cost? I’m starting to think that perhaps that’s the only thing that Enoch Graves got right.”

  Bainbridge shook his head. “Now you’re just being maudlin.” He could tell Newbury needed some time to mull over what had happened. Pressing him any further would simply incite an argument. He wondered how much of it was a symptom of his friend’s abstention from the opiates-which, he had assured Bainbridge, he had maintained since his brutal, enforced withdrawal in the cell beneath Packworth House.

  Newbury smiled. “Well, you have me there, Charles,” he said airily. He looked up, and Bainbridge twisted in his seat to see one of the wait staff making a beeline for their table. “Can I tempt you with something to eat, Charles?”

  Bainbridge shook his head. “No, not tonight. I have an appointment with the Home Secretary for dinner.”

  Newbury raised his hand to wave the waiter away. He turned back to Bainbridge. He was smiling, interested now. “The Home Secretary?”

  Bainbridge smiled. “Yes. Something about a bureau he’s setting up. He’s asked for my advice.”

  Newbury laughed. “Did you tell him how you felt about politics?”

  Bainbridge chuckled. “I told him he could talk while I eat, and we’d see where that led us.” They both laughed heartily.

  “Have you any notion of what it’s about, this bureau?”

  “None at all,” Bainbridge replied. “Although I’d hazard a guess it has something to do with this Bastion business. No doubt the government have got the fear of God in them now, having seen the damage a small bunch of upstarts like Graves and his friends could wreak. They’re probably planning to send some
sorry beggars on a wild goose chase, hunting down similar outfits all across the Empire. A fool’s errand, in my opinion. I’ll tell him as much over dinner.”

  Newbury raised an eyebrow. “Interesting,” he said, but didn’t elaborate.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask after Miss Hobbes. How is she holding up after the business with her sister?” Bainbridge tugged on his moustache. He’d seen Newbury leave with the poor girl after the funeral, and hadn’t heard anything of her since.

  “As you’d expect,” Newbury said rather cryptically. “It’ll take her some time to get over the blow, Charles. She cared deeply for her sister, and the shock of what has happened… Well, she’ll need some time.”

  Bainbridge nodded. “Absolutely right,” he said, glancing at his pocket watch. It was close to seven o’clock. “Good heavens!” he pronounced suddenly, standing up and nearly sending the table flying. “I’m supposed to be in Whitehall.” He bustled around, looking for his cane. “Lost all track of the time,” he muttered under his breath.

  Newbury fell back in his chair, laughing.

  “Yes, that’s right, you enjoy yourself at my expense, Newbury. You’re not the one who’s keeping the Home Secretary waiting!” He tried to sound scornful, but he couldn’t keep the laughter out of his voice. It was good to see Newbury smile.

  “Dinner tomorrow at Chelsea? Scarbright’s promised to cook his famous venison again.”

  Bainbridge grinned. “How could I resist?” Then he offered Newbury a scornful look. “You’re not keeping him, you know. A temporary arrangement, that was all.”

  Newbury laughed. “Whatever you say, Charles. Whatever you say.” He rose and took Bainbridge by the hand. “Now go on, go and find out what the Home Secretary is up to. I’m dying to know.”