And yet, fully a year after her arrival, here she still was. Other recruits had come through the Café, received such training or instruction as Madame Magdala deemed suitable, then been sent on to far and exotic destinations. That most of those hopefuls were male, Emma had not failed to notice, but not all of them had been.
The country curate’s daughter with her big, dreaming eyes and her consumptive cough, sent off to Brussels only last month on a mission of hushed and high importance — Charlotte, that was her name: she had some claim to literary accomplishment, so Emma had gathered, but none whatever in the physical realm. What would she do if she faced imminent threat to life or limb, but faint dead away?
Whereas Emma, who could with equal ease impersonate an instructor of English in a school for genteel young ladies and hold her own in a match with either épée or sabre, was left in London to face the truly death-defying choices: Coffee or chocolate? One lump or two?
Her only diversion had been to indulge herself in the occasional, casual — but useful — investigation of small mysteries that vexed the Café’s clientèle. A purloined letter, a misplaced fan, Lady Albemarle’s lost spaniel — Emma had solved them all. But she would much rather have been searching for a communiqué from Her Majesty’s Admiralty to the Sublime Porte regarding the capture of a shipload of pirates, than an unfortunate billet-doux addressed by a silly fool of a girl to a hopelessly unsuitable swain.
“Miss Rigby?”
The voice was soft, cultured, and fashionably French. It was also, however lifelike, discernibly inhuman. Emma stared at the automaton’s finely moulded face as if she had never seen its like before. “Yes?” she responded, automatically.
The automaton was not designed to show expression, but its words managed to convey a sense of urgency. “Lady Albemarle, Miss, begs your indulgence and entreats your aid on behalf of her dear friend, Lady Jocasta Merriwell. If you would be so kind...?”
“I would be most pleased to be of assistance,” said Emma with no attempt to conceal either her pleasure or her relief. She put off her ruffled apron and her irritating little cap in favour of a sturdy and practical bonnet and wrap, smiled brilliantly at the gentleman who was just opening his mouth to order — coffee or chocolate? Coffee, she would surmise, not that it mattered at all — and strode off in the wake of Lady Albemarle’s maid.
Lady Jocasta Merriwell’s house in London was neither the largest nor the richest that Emma had seen. It was stoutly built and comfortably furnished, with an eye more toward practicality than the height of fashion.
It suited its mistress admirably. Lady Jocasta was a stout and comfortable lady of early middle years, dressed well but not in the height of fashion, with a clear eye and a brisk, unsentimental voice.
“My brother, Sir Willoughby Smythe, is missing,” she said. “He is a lecturer in the physical sciences at Queens’ — Cambridge, not Oxford, if you please — pursuing an obscure and arcane speciality which I will not pretend to understand. He was to present a paper at the Royal Society yesterday evening, for which he neither appeared nor sent his apologies.
“Now mind you,” Lady Jocasta said, “Willoughby is as otherworldly as you might expect of his occupation, and has been known to so lose himself in his work that he vanishes for weeks at a time. But he would never, whatever the distraction, fail of his courtesy not only to the Royal Society but to me. He was to spend the night in this house after he had presented his paper; he did not do so. Nor has he been seen in his lodgings in Cambridge or in his laboratories at Queens’. He is nowhere to be found.”
Emma inclined her head in respect. “It seems, my lady, that you have investigated the matter quite thoroughly.”
“That I have,” said Lady Jocasta. Her lips set; her brows drew together. “Nevertheless, Miss Rigby, my skills are merely those of the dedicated amateur, and my position prevents me from pursuing all possibilities.”
“There are agencies devoted to such troubles as yours,” Emma pointed out as tactfully as she could manage. “Perhaps the police might wish to celebrate the founding of their Detective Branch with an investigation into a case of such clearly aristocratic interest?”
“The police,” Lady Jocasta said, “have offered me the comfort due my rank and station: namely, a pat on the hand, a nod of commiseration, and the sage observation that ‘The good Professor is famously absent-minded and has been known, as you yourself noted, dear lady, to embark on a lengthy walking tour of the more rural parts of England at this very time of year. We shall put out the word in his favoured haunts among the Lakes and in Yorkshire, but indeed, dear lady, we believe you have no cause for distress. He will be found, and soon; and all will be well.’
“In a word,” said Lady Jocasta, “they dismiss me as a mere and hysterical female, distraught over a man who has only been missing, if at all, since the day before yesterday, when he was last seen leaving his laboratory. I am not a lady of delicate sensibilities, Miss Rigby, and I make no claim to such flights of intuition as are so often attributed to our sex, but I know my brother. I am indeed, though not quite as the good Inspector may imagine, distressed.”
So she was, although she bore it admirably. Emma would have taken the case out of simple curiosity; for Lady Jocasta’s sake, she determined that she would solve it, and swiftly. “Tell me all that you know of your brother and his work,” she said, “and any other facts or suspicions that may occur to you. Anything, my lady, can be a clew, however trivial or irrelevant it may seem.”
“So it can,” said Lady Jocasta.
This was a woman after Emma’s own heart. She nodded briskly. “Tell me, then, my lady.”
Emma had an excellent memory. She forgot nothing; whatever she observed, her mind retained. It served her well as Lady Jocasta drew a portrait in words of her missing brother.
She produced a painted portrait as well, a miniature that she wore on her breast in a golden locket. The face depicted there bore little resemblance to Lady Jocasta’s plump fair cheeks and forthright chin. The young man — a decade the younger, indeed — was a lean and aquiline creature, with a shock of dark hair that yielded only reluctantly to restraint. Even through the clouded lens of conventional portraiture, Emma detected the signs of a not at all conventional mind.
To his sister he was the beloved younger brother, the collector of frogs and snails and infant hedgehogs, who set all the clocks in the family manse to chime in symphony, and who tried to construct a new body for the dying hound that had been his closest companion.
At that, Emma’s attention sharpened. “Did he succeed?” she asked.
“Of course not,” said Lady Jocasta. “The device had a most doglike appearance and manner, but it was merely a machine. Willoughby kept it for a while to remind himself of the creature that was gone, but when at length it broke, he made no effort to repair it. By then he had gone on to new enthusiasms: worms, as I recall, and salamanders. Disgusting things, but he found them fascinating.”
“Did he ever say why?”
“‘The secret of all life is in them,’ he said. I could never understand his explanations, save that, in some strange way, he had found his life’s work.”
Emma raised a brow. “I had thought his work was in the design of automata?”
“So I have been given to understand,” said Lady Jocasta. She rang the bell that reposed on the table beside her. “I place my trusted servant at your disposal. His name is Ratisbon. You may call on him for any assistance you require, and any funds that may be necessary.”
As lordly dismissals went, it was only slightly abrupt. It was, like the rest of the case, intriguing. Emma bowed and permitted herself to be ushered out of the lady’s presence.
The servant was waiting with a carriage: a phaeton, fast and light. Its driver was built on much the same lines. Emma had expected to find an automaton, but he was as human as she.
His features were those of the Igbo of western Africa, but the accent with which he greeted her had not the slightest hi
nt of that continent. In its cultured tones she heard a distinct echo of Lady Jocasta, with beneath it a suggestion of the West Indies. “Madam,” he said, “you will begin your investigation in Cambridge. I’ve undertaken to provide certain essentials for the journey, and for your sojourn there.”
“Thank you,” Emma said, “but I shall begin in London. The Royal Society, please.”
Ratisbon’s face remained as bland as ever, but a spark had kindled in his eye. “As to that, madam, the title of the young master’s paper was to be, ‘Notes on the Phyla of Planariidae.’”
“Indeed?” said Emma. “Not the order of Caudata?”
“That had been the subject of his last three papers for the Society, madam. This was to reveal a new facet of his work — very important, he said; he hoped to demonstrate an altogether novel ramification thereof.”
As Ratisbon spoke, he urged the team of glossy but sturdy and practical bays into a brisk trot. His hands on the reins, Emma noted, were adept at their task.
She had seldom encountered a set of wits as quick as her own. It was a heady if somewhat disconcerting sensation. “He confided in you,” she said.
“Say rather, madam, that I have served at times as a convenient audience.”
“And occasional critic?”
He shrugged slightly: a lift of the shoulder, an ironic glint of the eye.
“Suppose,” said Emma, “that you tell me what you know of Sir Willoughby. If, of course, you will.”
He did not respond at once, but there was cause: they had emerged from the quiet of Lady Jocasta’s elegant avenue into the hurly-burly of greater London. In that confusion of crowds and noise and vehicles, he needed all of his substantial wits to keep the horses steady.
It was the better part of an hour before he spoke. When he did, it was as if there had been no interruption in their conversation. “I shall tell you, madam, as we go, but it all comes to these three things: Sir Willoughby is a gentleman of the old school and a scientist of the new; he performs no experiment on any living creature that he will not perform upon himself; and the heart of his work is a great and terrible thing: to give life and living soul to that which is not, of its nature, ensouled.”
Emma had some little knowledge of that herself, but now was not the time to speak of it. “And his studies of worms and salamanders? What bearing did they have on that work?”
“That, madam, I can only guess,” said Ratisbon. “In his laboratory at Queens’, his studies have tended towards the mechanical: building ever more refined automata in hopes of creating one so like to life that only a highly educated eye may distinguish it from a living creature. But in his own house, his experiments have taken a different direction. He was fascinated by the capacity of the salamander to re-grow a lost limb.”
“And the planarian,” Emma mused, “when divided in two, can live on as two separate creatures.”
Ratisbon nodded.
“Did you ever know him to partake of the trade in human corpses?”
His glance was keen, his headshake firm. “He did not. That I know.”
Emma frowned. She had been evolving a theory, but Ratisbon’s response rendered it much less likely. Then again...”Perhaps he concealed it,” she said.
“I think not,” said Ratisbon.
Emma was disinclined to argue. After a moment of barbed silence, she said mildly as she had to Lady Jocasta, “Tell me what you know of him.”
Ratisbon knew Sir Willoughby very well indeed. He recalled even the most minute of details: such as that Sir Willoughby favoured strong tea over coffee, and that he tied his cravat in a rather old-fashioned manner, because he fancied it made him look dashing.
It was a small vanity in a man who otherwise had none. A good man, as the servant saw him. “He looks at those whom the world deems to be beneath him,” said Ratisbon, “and sees them. Truly sees them, as fellow creatures.”
For Ratisbon, Emma could see, there was no higher praise. She would judge the man well for it herself, if that magnanimity extended to the so-called gentler sex.
There was nothing in Ratisbon’s tale of Sir Willoughby’s relations with women. He had no wife and no sweetheart. He lived the life of a monk, without apparent temptation.
On that, Emma reserved judgement. That there were men who could live such lives of stainless purity, she could not categorically deny. But she had never met one.
The spires of Cambridge floated dreamlike above the fens, tinged with pale gold in the morning light. They had travelled until after sunset the night before, having changed horses twice; the third pair, a team of broad-rumped greys, trotted sturdily onward towards the ancient university city.
“It will be a joyous day when the railway joins London with this place,” Emma observed.
“Soon, one hopes,” said Ratisbon, “but I should miss the horses. As intriguing as gears and steam may be, nothing quite compares with the warmth of a living thing.”
“Gears and steam are our future,” said Emma.
“Then I hope we shall not forget our past,” he said.
That past rose up before them in brick and stone. Emma had seen far older cities, and many that were more beautiful, but this gathering of colleges by its shallow river had its own considerable charm.
Lady Jocasta’s name and countenance opened the halls of Queens’ to Emma — gingerly, with sidelong glances in this bastion of the male, but with grace enough.
She would dearly have loved to explore Sir Willoughby’s public laboratory at leisure, but he was still missing and time was running on. His assistants knew nothing; his work, while of great scientific interest, invited no controversy. The automata that whirred and ratcheted and sang in their cages and on their pedestals told Emma little but that their maker was very clever indeed.
There was nothing to learn here. The assistant who had seen Sir Willoughby departing the laboratory was quite sure of the fact. “I saw him,” the young man said, “dressed in his gown, departing at dusk two days ago.”
“You are certain that it was he?” Emma enquired. “For surely, in such dim light, one figure in a scholar’s gown might look very like another.”
“It was Professor Smythe,” the assistant said. He managed not quite to sniff at her plebeian ignorance. “He had a distinctive gait, which all in College knew well: long-legged, like a wading bird — ardea cinerea, perhaps, or that rarest of vagrants, the great ardea herodias, which —”
“Great indeed,” said Emma, “and most helpful. You have my thanks.”
He nodded curtly. It was clear that he had work to do, and she was interrupting it. It was equally clear that he not only expected Sir Willoughby to return, he was not excessively perturbed by the professor’s absence.
That might serve Emma’s purpose, in its way. No one yet, save Lady Jocasta, had called out the hounds. Emma was free to pursue the hunt in peace.
Sir Willoughby had rooms in college, but those told Emma no more than his laboratory had. The answer, or a clew to it, must be in the house that he kept on the edge of town, in a village that looked out upon the Backs, the long lawns that rolled from the river to the colleges. It was, for his station, a smallish house, hardly worthy of the title of mansion, built in the style of old King George.
Beneath that old-fashioned elegance lay a secret. Emma followed Ratisbon through a door hidden in a tall and thorny hedge, down a steep and unexpected stair, into a world that had already been old when the first Gothic cathedral raised its spires up to heaven. Sir Willoughby’s house perched atop a mediaeval foundation: a dungeon indeed, a shadowy crypt of low stone pillars and Romanesque arches.
Whatever edifice had once risen above this place had been much larger than the house that marked it. Ratisbon retrieved a pair of candlesticks from a niche, lit them and passed one to Emma, and led her through the maze of columns. She had counted somewhat more than twice the number of paces required to traverse the house above, even allowing for turns and twists and sudden walls, when at last her g
uide reached an iron-bound door.
Ratisbon knew where the key was hidden. He knew the use of the brass lever by the door, as well: to bring about a veritable sunrise in the dungeon beyond.
Electric lights drove every shadow into hiding, illuminating what seemed at first to be a mere and disappointing echo of the laboratory in Queens’. The same long wooden tables; the same assortment of instruments. The same glass-fronted cabinets. Even, though in much reduced numbers, the same collection of automata.
Those in the College had been as often bestial as human in form. These were uniformly human, and beautifully wrought. By coincidence or design, the light in that place recalled the sharp clear light of Greece, and the automata had an air about them of Classical statuary.
Unlike the automata in Queens’, however, these were lifeless and still. They were also, on closer inspection, lacking in varied ways: missing a limb, a face, a heart.
Emma stood over the automaton that lay supine on a table, with its hollow breast and its empty eyes. Her mind had been denying for some time what her own eyes recorded.
These were not constructions of metal and gears. They were, to the eye and to the touch, flesh. Cold, empty of life, as dead things must be — but they had, or had once had, the capacity to breathe and walk and live.
“But,” said Emma, “how are they preserved? If they are indeed flesh, they should decay.”
“That was one of his lordship’s secrets,” Ratisbon said.
“Were you perhaps privy to it? Or inclined to speculate?”
“No,” he said, “and yes. Electricity, I believe. Phlogiston, possibly. And perhaps certain qualities of the flesh itself, born not of mortal womb but in what he liked to call the brow of Zeus.”
The Shadow Conspiracy II Page 5