The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eleven

by Jonathan Strahan

  Mr. Holmes shook his head. He seemed about to remonstrate with Sir Arthur when Angharad chimed in, “Order: State second possibility.”

  After a pause, which Tacy could not help perceiving as startled, the Reasoning Machine said, “Two: A personal enemy. Suspect: Mr. Amos Gotobed.”

  “Impossible!” Sir Arthur said, and this time, Tacy agreed.

  “But he is in prison,” she exclaimed. “Thirty years in Dartmoor, the sentence was.”

  Mr. Holmes shrugged. “Order,” he said. “Search newspaper files. Subject: Amos Gotobed.”

  “Amos Gotobed. Remitted to Dartmoor Prison, August 1880. Escaped from Dartmoor Prison, October 24, 1880.”

  Escaped! Tacy grew cold. A hand took hers—a mechanical hand, hard and chill under its kidskin covering, but the hand of a friend, and she clutched it desperately. Angharad understood. She had been present in her ghostly form the night Gotobed and his thugs had overturned Sir Arthur’s workshop at Cwmlech Manor. With true Cwmlech recklessness, she had leapt into an expensive French automaton Sir Arthur had purchased to study and attacked Gotobed with a hammer. Even though the adventure had ended with the criminal safely locked up in prison, Tacy still woke in the night from dreams of a hulking Gotobed smashing machines and mechanicals and delicate tools as he laughed like the fiend he was.

  Oblivious to Tacy’s distress, the Reasoning Machine went on, “Scotland Yard have received reports from Newcastle, Maidenhead, and Aberdeen. It is thought that he—”

  “Order: Stop,” Mr. Holmes said, and the Machine fell silent.

  Sir Arthur looked stricken. “I borrowed money from Gotobed, you know, after my father died, leaving me without a feather to fly with. I regretted it almost immediately. It seems I am still to regret it.” He lifted his head. “Will you take the case, Mr. Holmes?”

  “My dear fellow,” the big man said. “Of course we will. We should be at your disposal by this evening—tomorrow forenoon at the latest. In the meantime, I suggest you report the robbery to the police. Inspector Gregson is the man to ask for. He has called us in several times to consult on one affair or another, and understands our methods. You may use my name.”

  The interview was over.

  THAT AFTERNOON, TACY and Angharad sat in the drawing room, waiting for Sir Arthur to return from Scotland Yard. Angharad turned over the cards of a game of patience while Tacy stared blankly at a monograph she’d been meaning to read by one Peter Cantrip, Esq., DSc(Oxon). It concerned the effects of certain sound waves on metal, a subject of deep interest to her, but try as she might, she could not progress past the first paragraph, or say what had been in it.

  Tacy laid the monograph aside, collected her wooden whistle from the mantel, and raised it to her lips. There was a whistle in the library, too, and a clarinet in the workshop, for Tacy found music a great aid to thought, as well as a balm to a troubled spirit. She had tootled her way through one Welsh hymn and was beginning another when Angharad said, “Your clarinet I can bear, but ‘Llef’ upon a pennywhistle is beyond human endurance. Give over, Tacy, my little one, and come watch my play.”

  Reluctantly, Tacy set down the whistle and sat at the table where Angharad was shuffling for another game. The mechanical fingers creaked like an ancient beldam’s as she tapped the cards even. Tacy regretted, not for the first time, that the automaton Angharad haunted was only a rich man’s toy, its joints and gears not designed for hard use. The legs had weakened first, then the finger and jaw hinges, so that the rosy mouth always hung slightly ajar.

  As Tacy watched, Angharad fumbled the shuffle, spraying the cards broadcast. She cursed blisteringly in Welsh. “Oh, why cannot I have a body like the mechanical detective’s, with its joints like oil and its mouth that could smile did the creature only know how?”

  “Perhaps Mr. Holmes will make you one,” Tacy said.

  “More important things to do, he has—playing God on the sixth day, for one. In any case, I do not know how a transfer from one body to another might affect me. I did but jest.”

  “I know. But perhaps you might let him replace your joints with something better. A pulley more or less cannot make a difference.”

  Angharad raised a warning hand. “Enough. If I will not suffer you— whom I love and trust as a sister—to lay hands upon this mechanical body, why would I suffer Mr. Mycroft Holmes, who is entirely unknown to me? I haunted Cwmlech Manor for upwards of two hundred years while it crumbled around me. At least in this new ruin I can be seen and heard and go about the world a little.”

  And that was her last word on the subject. Defeated, Tacy gathered up the cards, shuffled them, and returned them to Angharad, who laid out another hand. As they contemplated the new spread, Sir Arthur burst into the sitting room, accompanied by an acrid whiff of fog and a tall, tow-haired man in a checked coat.

  “This is Inspector Gregson of the Metropolitan Police,” Sir Arthur said. “Inspector, this is the lady I was telling you of, Miss Tacy Gof.”

  Inspector Gregson linked his hands behind his back. “Yes. Your assistant, I believe you said?”

  Something in his voice made Tacy lift her chin. “Sir Arthur is too kind. His apprentice, I am, articled before the Guild of Mechanics.”

  “I felicitate you,” Gregson said. This time the sneer was clearly audible. He turned his deep-set eyes to Angharad. “And this is the famous Ghost in the Machine.”

  Angharad placed a card with mechanical precision.

  “I thought it would move more natural-like,” Gregson remarked. “Does it talk?”

  “Of course I talk,” Angharad said without lifting her head. “Though not, I think, to you.”

  Sir Arthur’s thumb stole to his mouth and he nibbled at it uneasily. Tacy pressed her lips hard to keep from smiling. Gregson flushed brick red, but before he could gather his wits to speak, Sir Arthur’s butler appeared with the tea tray.

  Swindon had come into Sir Arthur’s service from the household of the Marquess of Nether Covington. He was a stately man who, Tacy suspected, felt as if he’d come down in the world. Today, in the wake of a theft, and with police in the house, he had something of the air of an early Christian martyr surrounded by lions. He accepted Gregson’s order to gather the servants for questioning with awful courtesy and bowed himself out.

  Tacy asked the inspector if he would like tea.

  Gregson eyed her with disdain. “This is an investigation, miss, not a tea party. Sir Arthur, if you will show me the workshop, I can get on with my job.”

  As the door closed behind Sir Arthur and the inspector, Angharad launched into a thoroughly seventeenth-century rodomontade on the subject of the encroaching ways of the lower classes when given the least measure of power.

  Tacy let her rant for a while, then said, mildly, “A member of the lower classes I am myself, look you. There’s nothing he said that has not been said to you before, by gentlemen of learning. You had your revenge on him. Now let it go.”

  Angharad lapsed into a sulky silence and Tacy addressed herself to Mrs. Swindon’s excellent salmon sandwiches and Mr. Cantrip’s monograph. She was lost in the effects of sonic wave-length on various metal alloys when Sir Arthur entered, looking worn.

  Angharad lifted her head with a click. “I suppose that fool Gregson has clapped Swindon in prison?”

  Sir Arthur sank into a chair and thrust his hands through his hair—not for the first time that day, judging from its wild tangle. “He has not. He has, however, driven both Mrs. Swindon and the parlor-maid into hysterical fits.”

  “Oh, dear.” Tacy handed him a cup of tea. “Did he discover anything of interest?”

  “He did. It seems Swindon is in the habit of playing darts at the Running Footman with a man called Albert Norris.” He sipped. “Tacy, this tea is cold!”

  “Drink it anyway.” With an effort, Tacy banished the image of the dignified Swindon at play. “Who is Albert Norris?”

  “A coachman, Swindon said. Swindon asked him to supper in the servant’s hal
l, where, as I understand, he was the life and soul of the party. Ethel was quite taken with him.”

  This meant nothing; the maid Ethel was taken with anything in trousers. “A handsome brute, no doubt.”

  Sir Arthur set down his cup. “Swindon described him as being of a fleshy habit, tall as a giant and red-faced. Mrs. Swindon mentioned fish eyes and a mouth like a letter-box, but that may be hindsight.”

  “Gotobed!” Angharad and Tacy exclaimed in chorus.

  Sir Arthur shrugged. “That is certainly what Gregson thinks. It seems this Norris appeared at the Running Footman not long after Gotobed’s escape from Dartmoor.”

  It all lined up like ducklings on a pond. After all, Gotobed was a convicted thief. Furthermore, he hated Sir Arthur and would be glad to do him a mischief. Even now, Tacy remembered how the scoundrel had scowled at her and Angharad throughout the trial and how he’d laughed when the judge sentenced him, saying he was sorry that convicts were no longer transported to Australia, as he’d always fancied foreign travel. A pity for Sir Arthur Cwmlech, too, he’d added, and smiled meaningfully.

  It was not a comfortable memory.

  “If it is Gotobed,” Sir Arthur said, “he might have been employed by someone else. Swindon mentioned Norris being in the service of one Mr. Peter Cantrip, whoever he may be. Though,” he added hopelessly, “I suppose the scoundrel must have been lying.”

  “Peter Cantrip! I was just reading—” Tacy handed the monograph to Sir Arthur, who glanced at it without much attention.

  “Very interesting. I shall certainly show it to Mr. Holmes when he comes. If he comes.” He let the pamphlet drop and buried his face in his hands.

  Tacy grasped his wrist and shook it gently. “Take heart, my dear. It’s tired you are, and no wonder, dealing with mechanicals and police and domestic upheaval, all on top of losing the Engine. We must trust in Mr. Holmes and his mechanical detective, and if they fail us, in our own ingenuity.”

  TACY WOKE THE next morning to a brisk wind, a clear sky, and a smell of boiling linen rising from the yard where Mrs. Swindon was washing sheets. She dressed quickly and came down to the morning room. After days of fog and rain, it was good to see the sunlight playing over the breakfast table, illuminating the London Times Angharad had spread out before her and flashing from the letter knife Sir Arthur plied on the morning’s post.

  He did not look as though he had slept well.

  A glance at the toast rack established that Mrs. Swindon had burnt the toast quite black. Tacy understood this as a sign that the coddled eggs were likely to be hard as rocks, but took one anyway, piled marmalade on the toast to counteract the taste of carbon, and poured herself a cup of lukewarm tea.

  “Nothing from Mr. Holmes, I fear,” said Sir Arthur, “A letter from Mr. Slovinsky in Budapest, asking if his remarks on escapement pins were useful. I must have forgotten to write and thank him.”

  Angharad gave a discordant chime. “There’s dull you are, Arthur, with your endless mechanics! Can we not speak of something else? The agony column of the Times is full of interest this morning.” She leaned over the paper. “A gentleman has lost his mechanical dog in the fog, and a lady left her market basket on the Clapham bus. Full of eels it was, all alive-o— at least when she left them. Ah! Here’s a wonder: a medical doctor, lately returned from Afghanistan. Any decent employment considered, it says. A story there is in that, sure as eggs. Medical men do not easily abandon their Hippocratic oaths.”

  Sir Arthur, who had been surreptitiously reading his mail, gave a strangled cry and held up a sheet of heavy cream notepaper, his face alight. “From Mr. William Spottiswoode—the president of the Royal Society, you know—an invitation to luncheon! Perhaps he wishes me to speak at the symposium on artificial humanity.” He read further, his brow creasing. “This is odd. He most particularly asks me to bring Angharad with me.”

  Angharad turned her doll-face upon him. “Does he? Well, you may write your Mr. President Spottiswoode and tell him the Ghost in the Machine declines to be questioned and poked at and taken to bits, like as not.”

  Sir Arthur frowned. “I cannot write that to the president of the Royal Society!” he wailed. “Oh, this invitation could not have come at an unhappier time! What if he wants to see the Illogic Engine? And Mr. Holmes and his Reasoning Machine may be here at any moment!” He turned an anxious blue gaze on Tacy. “What am I to do?”

  “Meet Mr. Spottiswoode for lunch, of course,” she said briskly. “And you must go with him, Angharad. Nobody who has spoken with you would think of taking you apart, not for any reason.”

  Angharad was silent, glass eyes glimmering slightly. “Well. I’ll charm the old noddlepate—for Arthur’s sake, mind. It may be amusing.”

  Tacy knew a moment of pity for Mr. Spottiswoode. “Not too amusing, I hope. Arthur, pray do not concern yourself over Mr. Holmes and his great detective. I will engage myself to answer any questions they may have.”

  He smiled at her warmly. “Yes, of course. Bless you, Tacy. We shall go at once.”

  AFTER PACKING ANGHARAD and Sir Arthur off to Burlington House in the steam carriage, Tacy retired to Sir Arthur’s workshop, with the intention of doing a little investigating of her own.

  The workshop had been a conservatory when Sir Arthur first took the house, roofed and walled with glass panes, its tile floor cluttered with dying ferns, orange trees in tubs, aspidistra, and sentimental marble statuary. Sir Arthur had replaced it all with bookshelves and tables covered with papers; mechanical instruments; tools; books strayed in from the library; and boxes of assorted gears, springs, escapements, fuses, and fittings. To Ethel, the workshop was a wilderness of tiny objects she was not allowed to move. To Tacy, it was a model of Sir Arthur’s mind and hers. She knew precisely where she might lay her hand on any tool or paper she needed. Or at least she had, before Inspector Gregson had wantonly reduced it to a chaos of paper, brass, and steel.

  Tacy picked up a box containing a set of miniature tools, set it on its shelf, gathered an armful of papers, and began to sort them.

  As the clock in the church on the corner struck one, then two, Tacy worked steadily, clearing the floor. By three, with the room restored to its usual state, Tacy set to examining the window latches with a hand lens. By four, when Swindon brought in the tea tray, she was spreading the inward parts of a guard mechanical across a workbench. Her hair had unraveled down her back, her skirt was streaked with oil and dust, and her cuffs were in a high state of grime.

  At the clink of china on silver, she turned. “Oh, Swindon, it’s you! Is Sir Arthur returned?”

  “No, miss.”

  “Any word from Mr. Holmes?”

  “No, miss.”

  She bit her lip impatiently. “I wonder what is keeping him?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know, miss.”

  His tone was repressive, but Tacy was too distracted to notice. “I do wish he’d come. I have more data for him, or at least for that mechanical detective of his.” She turned suddenly. “You’re a clever man, Swindon. Tell me what you think.”

  The butler’s small eyes widened. “I hardly think, Miss. . .”

  “I’ve examined everything,” she went on, “doors, windows, floor—with a hand lens, look you. But apart from the fact of the missing Engine and its notes, I can find no sign of anyone other than ourselves—and Gregson, of course—having entered the room. Do you not think it curious, Swindon, that a thief should leave no trace at all?”

  “No, miss,” said Swindon.

  “Well, perhaps you are right. Only in romances are thieves so obliging as to leave piles of ash or flecks of mud or monogrammed pocket-handkerchiefs behind them.” She rubbed her forehead, smudging it with oil. “And then there’s the question of the jammed mainsprings. Every clockwork object in the house, Swindon, saving only the kitchen clock, which runs on a pendulum. How could Gotobed possibly know how to jam them?”

  She gazed expectantly at Swindon, who frowned. “Perhaps he learned
the trick in prison, miss.”

  “Perhaps he did. And perhaps he learned patience, as well. For, between the two of us, the Gotobed I knew was a vicious bully. Grievous bodily harm and destruction of property is what I’d expect from him, not a carefully plotted robbery.”

  Swindon appeared to give the point some thought. “Perhaps Gotobed did not plot it.”

  “Ah!” said Tacy. “Well-thought-of, Swindon! I wonder...” She fell silent, her eyes fixed on vacancy. Something hovered at the edge of her mind. If only Arthur would return! She always worked better when she was able to talk things over with him. He wasn’t particularly clear-headed, but he was brilliantly intuitive. And kind, and dear, and. . . Oh, where was he?

  “Will you drink your tea, miss?”

  To her surprise, the supercilious butler sounded positively avuncular. She blinked at him. “Oh. Yes. Thank you, Swindon. I expect Sir Arthur and Mistress Angharad will be home any moment. Send them in when they come, will you?” She picked up a tiny turnscrew and bent over the workbench again.

  At six, Swindon came to collect the tea tray and inquire whether Mrs. Swindon should hold dinner.

  Tacy laid down the clarinet, with which she had been endeavoring to soothe her excited nerves. “Yes—wait, no. I’ll take it here on a tray. I confess, I do not know what Sir Arthur is about, to stay so long with Mr. Spottiswoode when the fate of the Illogic Engine is still unknown!”

  “As you say, miss.”

  “Swindon,” she said impulsively, “you don’t think anything could have happened to them, do you?”

  Swindon’s mouth tightened. “I shouldn’t think so, miss. But I could send Ethel around to the Royal Society to inquire.”

  Tacy shook her head. “Thank you, but no. I’ll wait a little longer.”

  And wait she did, as the workshop grew cold and her heart grew colder. Would stealing the Illogic Engine satisfy Gotobed’s hunger for vengeance? Would he progress to abduction, even murder?