The Doomsday Machine (Horatio Lyle)

by Catherine Webb

  As she worked, she sang under her breath, an odd tune, wordless, whose notes see-sawed up and down like a bow drawn across a mountain top, seeing what tune could be scratched from stone. That said, she sang with a strong voice, and well enough to anyone who knew what kind of music she enjoyed and could recognize skill at it. As she sang, she oiled the cogs of the crossbow, and now and then glanced through the open window of the cab, watching a door down at the bottom of the street, and waited.

  She watched a bobby in a dark blue cape walk down the pavement. Fat ginger whiskers stuck out from under his helmet like spilt paint overflowing from a tin. A woman with a little parasol, a collection of street snipes trying to get it off her, a plump vicar on his way to morning tea, a chimneysweep and his boy, and the bobby again, on the other side of the road, going back the way he ’d come. From the recesses of the cab the woman watched him pass, waited, and a few minutes later, saw him pass again. Letting out a patient sigh, she laid the little crossbow on the floor and climbed out of the cab. She walked up to the bobby, tapped him on the shoulder, and smiled.

  He turned, and looked straight into a pair of bright green eyes.

  ‘Good morning, sir,’ she said. ‘I think it’s time for you to leave now.’

  And he did. Of course, that still left the girl with the hoop and stick and the gentleman in the vegetable garden hiding out behind a particularly large marrow, but at least one of them was on her side anyway and as for the other . . . well, if the enemy really thought that Lyle would leave through the front door after his encounter last night, they were gravely mistaken.

  She sat back, smiled, and settled down to wait.

  Horatio Lyle was, Tess had to admit, very good at what he did. Recent activity at Lyle ’s house had involved large parts of it being destroyed by fire, rampaging mobs and what Lyle always tactfully described as ‘excitable exothermic reaction’ and Tess translated as ‘a really big bang’. All this had led to extensive refurbishment, during which Tess managed to blag her way into an even bigger bedroom. It had also led to reconstruction both in Lyle ’s house and, to Tess’s surprise and the amazement of Lyle’s neighbours, throughout the entire area.

  Horatio Lyle had established himself as something of a charitable figure in his neighbourhood, which was on that socially ambiguous boundary between the criminal slums of Blackfriars where only the most intrepid bobbies went, and the more genteel, old-fashioned houses of the Strand. With money gleaned from previous family adventures, wise investment and the selling of occasionally crackpot ideas to the interested, he ’d met the cost of repairing several nearby buildings. A Methodist chapel found its roof mended, a pickle manufactory had new windows installed, and a small workhouse was graced, from the roof right down to the ground, with an iron staircase which, though the owners weren’t sure what purpose it served, did look immensely impressive. The Fountain pub, where rumour went that more politics were decided than in any palace in the country, was gifted with a new set of polished doors and a brass plate to put next to them. A group of ladies who walked every day up to the flower market next to the Royal Opera, to sell blooms mostly stolen from the graveyard behind the rectory, suddenly lived with solid roofs, and new washing lines to string end to end across the narrowing streets that bridged the recently covered ditches leading towards the river and Charing Cross.

  There was a genuinely charitable streak in Lyle’s nature. But it tended to be thwarted, as with most things, by how much time he had and who was trying to kill him at that particular instance. These left him little opportunity to find causes to defend other than his own skin, and very few people bothered appealing to him for cash, for fear that while they were in his presence something excitingly scientific might happen and they’d never get the chemical smell out of their clothes. That Lyle would go out of his way to act as a benefactor had therefore been a surprise to his neighbours. But only Tess, a few select workmen and some startled pigeons had the faintest idea of the world he had been creating above the streets, in which the repaired weathervane on a church could be a lighting conductor to a lab, the window in a workhouse could be opened at the twisting of a concealed handle, and the chimney so considerately swept and repaired could now fit not just the monkey-like apprentices to the chimneysweeps, but a fully grown man on his way to somewhere else.

  On some nights, Tess had climbed up the ladder in Lyle’s attic, on to his sloping, red-tiled roof. There she would sit, and listen to the city a long way below, and watch the lights on the river, and feel at home.

  This morning, Lyle climbed the ladder on to his roof with Tess in tow and, cradled in his arms, a bundle consisting mostly of two huge drooping ears and a large nose. The bundle’s name was Tate, and though scholars and zoologists could never quite believe it, he was Lyle’s pet dog.

  Lyle took a deep breath of smelly morning air and declared, ‘Today, it will rain just after lunch.’

  Tess looked up at a grey overcast sky, and shrugged.

  Lyle looked annoyed. ‘Do you want to know why it ’ll rain just after lunch?’

  Tess considered her options. ‘If I says ... no ... you’ll be sulky all day, right?’

  ‘On the contrary, I’ll consider it merely sad that this is information you have chosen to neglect, a new insight into a world of ...’

  ‘All right then!’ Tess bounded to the edge of the roof with reckless abandon, picking her way easily down the sloping tiles while Lyle turned green and even Tate ’s usually dour brown eyes widened at the sight of her. She peered into the street below and said, ‘So why we going out this way?’

  ‘I don’t want to use the front door.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It might be being watched.’

  ‘Why? What you gone and done?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing.’

  ‘And you ain’t gone and told me why you want to see this Berwick bloke so sudden!’

  ‘I met some people last night who were . . . interested in his well-being. Their interest has piqued my interest. Or rather, I want to know why they’re interested, and suspect that they are going to be interested in my interest and following it with as much interest as I follow theirs, while of course never forgetting our common . . . interest.’

  ‘That were a very odd thing you just gone and said, Mister Lyle.’

  ‘I trust it was sufficiently obscure for you to fail completely to comprehend it.’

  ‘You’re usin’ big words to scare me, ain’t you?’

  ‘Absolutely. Come back from the edge.’

  ‘I ain’t going to fall.’

  ‘Teresa,’ declared Lyle firmly, ‘a Good brush with death and adventure is a Safe brush with death and adventure, yes?’

  ‘Yes, Mister Lyle.’

  ‘A Safe brush with death and adventure involves being Prepared.’

  ‘Yes, Mister Lyle.’

  ‘It involves Caution and Consideration. It is, in short, all about steering clear of steep drops when you see any and never, ever pulling the big lever marked “Bang”. I hope we understand each other.’

  ‘So ... we ’re goin’ on an adventure?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Oh. All right.’ She scampered up the roof again, balanced for a moment on the raised edge of the top, swung round to cling on to a chimney, looked out across the city and beamed. ‘If we ’re playin’ at the how-we-mustn’t-be-followed game again, can I choose the way we go?’

  ‘Very well.’

  The route chosen by Tess took them across the old tavern with its wharfside crane, admittedly now a good fifty yards from the nearest water, down a ladder into a vegetable garden, up over a wall into an alley running down to a watergate, and through the back door of the local bakery - which suddenly found itself short of three scones and a loaf - and out into the black, crammed and overshadowed streets that ducked and struggled under and past the railway lines of Charing Cross, where every other face was a grey shadow, blacked out under the stinking belches of smoke from the trains passing o
verhead and across the river. From there, a very out-of-breath Lyle hailed a hansom cab.

  The residence of Mr Andrew Berwick Esquire, was in one of the wide, shiny streets north of Gray’s Inn, defined by straight lines and relatively clean windows all the way up to that other patch of splotched off-green, Coram’s Fields. The streets in most other directions around this enclosure of gentility largely consisted of tenements compressed together. This, and the fact that just a bit further up Gray’s Inn Road the unwary traveller hit King’s Cross, where the murders were almost as regular as the trains, was something the inhabitants tended to ignore.

  Berwick was no exception. The maid who answered the door wore an immaculately white apron, and requested that Lyle and Tess use the iron scraper at the door to wipe their feet clean of manure and mud from the streets. Valiantly she merely winced when Tate snuffled his way into the house, nose down and eyes suspicious of the clean carpet that smelt of expensive soap scrubbed into it by hand.

  Mr Berwick wasn’t in, the maid politely informed them, but the housekeeper was available if they wanted to speak to her. With that, she led them into a small living room containing a large piano. The walls were lined top to bottom with books, at the sight of which Lyle’s eyes lit up and Tess let out a patient little sigh.

  ‘Oh, magnets,’ exclaimed Lyle, his fingers tracing the edge of one cover. ‘“A Study of the Magnetic Properties of Brass Conducted by Mr J. Krebbers, a Gentleman”,’ he read. ‘A timeless classic.’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘An exercise in perfect, scientific futility. Over the course of four hundred immaculately bound and printed pages, Mr J. Krebbers demonstrates with sweeping insight, experimental gusto and scrupulous method that there are no magnetic properties of brass whatsoever.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘At least, none worth talking about.’

  ‘So . . . so . . .’ began Tess cautiously, like a blind woman trying to work out what she’s just stood in, ‘exactly what were the point in . . .’

  ‘Good morning, sir.’

  The woman who stood in the door had a bosom that could have besieged a small castle, a nose like the rocky surface of an Alpine mountain, and hair tied up in a bun so tight it could have been used for playing the drums. Tess shuffled automatically behind Lyle ’s legs for protection, and Tate shuffled behind hers. Even Lyle, who usually refused to be intimidated by anything that wasn’t actively waving a sharpened stick, found himself tugging at his collar in the face of the woman’s expression. It wasn’t that her look was particularly hostile. It simply regarded anyone it encountered in the same manner as it would a lump of wood - an inanimate object to be assessed, shaped, ignored or discarded according to its unique, lifeless properties.

  ‘Are you the housekeeper?’

  ‘I am, sir. And you are ... ?’

  ‘Horatio Lyle,’ said Lyle, hurrying forward, hand extended. Her eyes moved to his hand, then away, while her own hands remained tightly folded in front of her. Lyle deflated. ‘Erm . . . I’m looking for Mr Berwick?’

  ‘The master is in America.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Business calls him abroad; I’m sure you understand, Mister Lyle.’ Tess almost gave a start - even the housekeeper was ready with ‘mister’, as if she had instantly realized that in Lyle’s voice there weren’t quite enough good vowels to put him on the same level as other gentlemen of the town; never mind that he used long words and his coat was relatively clean.

  ‘He didn’t say anything?’

  ‘No, sir, it was very sudden.’

  ‘Will he be gone long?’

  ‘Indefinitely.’

  ‘But he left his books.’

  The housekeeper’s eyes darted to the shelf and back again, as if they’d never moved. But that had been enough for Tess to think, ah, and feel the start of a suspicious grin. Somewhere around Tess’s ankles, Tate looked up through deep, lethargic brown eyes, suddenly more interested.

  ‘He was unable to pack many books.’

  ‘I’m sorry, what did you say your name was?’

  ‘I didn’t - Mrs Cozens.’

  ‘Mrs Cozens, may I ask how long you’ve worked here?’

  ‘Nine months, sir.’ She was back on ‘sir’ now, her voice sharp and to the point.

  ‘And how long has Mr Berwick been away?’

  ‘Almost five months, sir. But I have had a letter informing me of his safe crossing - you may see it if you wish.’

  ‘Thank you, I would like that.’

  She didn’t so much walk as glide out through the door - if there were feet under her voluminous black skirt, they were doing their best not to be noticed.

  The second she was gone, Tess tugged at Lyle ’s coat. ‘Oi!’

  ‘Yes, Teresa?’ said Lyle in a tone of infinite, martyred patience.

  ‘Oi, why’s she fibbin’?’

  ‘Now let ’s not leap to conclusions about a highly suspicious and deeply implausible situation coming on top of bizarre coincidence, shall we?’

  While Tess tried to translate that into a language she understood, Mrs Cozens returned, an opened letter in her hand. Lyle took it and read. Tess fidgeted at his elbow until he lowered it to her height. As she read, her mouth silently moved with big words like ‘the’ and ‘and’. The letter read:

  Dear Mrs Cozens,

  I am safely arrived in America, and settled well. My work is going well. I hope all things are good with you in Britain. I deeply miss the country of my birth but business has called me away. Please ensure that the house is kept in good condition during my absence, and forward the correspondence attached here to the relevant addresses.

  Yours sincerely,

  Berwick

  Lyle quickly held the paper up to the light, then lowered it again with an innocent expression as if he hadn’t taken even that small action. He looked up to find Mrs Cozens’s eyes fixed firmly on him. ‘You can see the letter is in his hand, Mister Lyle,’ she said sharply.

  ‘Could there be any reason to doubt that?’ Lyle replied. He added, ‘There was other correspondence with this?’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘To whom?’

  ‘A few people to whom Mr Berwick owed money, tying up business affairs. I’m afraid I didn’t keep a comprehensive list.’

  ‘That’s somewhat lax of you, Mrs Cozens.’

  ‘I do my best, Mister Lyle.’

  ‘Has anyone else been enquiring about Mr Berwick’s location? ’

  ‘A few friends have called. I’ve told them what I’ve told you, sir.’

  ‘Of course, of course. Naturally. Tell me, what has Mr Berwick been working on lately?’

  ‘I believe he was attempting to develop a safer form of loom. He is very entrepreneurial.’

  ‘A loom?’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘That hardly seems a useful employment of his skills. When last I heard, he was still absorbed in material properties.’

  ‘I believe he found such study unsatisfactory.’

  ‘He must have left a forwarding address, some other way of contacting him?’

  ‘Yes, I can give it to you, if you wish.’

  Lyle seemed taken aback, then smiled and shrugged. ‘Where ’s the harm?’ And in the same breath, ‘I apologize for the trouble I’ve caused, and if my tone has in any way been inappropriate.’

  ‘Not at all, sir. It was a pleasure.’

  ‘Nevertheless, I do feel I have been less than cordial in my manner - please, accept this.’

  He opened up his palm, and Tess’s eyes widened at the sight of a big, shiny sovereign. An indignant squeak tried to crawl out and she put her hands over her mouth to trap it.

  Mrs Cozens looked uneasy. ‘Truly, sir, there ’s no need ...’ ‘If you do not take it, Mrs Cozens, I shall be greatly offended,’ said Lyle.

  She looked him in the eye, and saw nothing out of keeping with the flat tone of his voice. Hesitantly, she closed her fingers around the sovereign and slipped it in
to a pocket. Lyle beamed, and said, ‘Good day, Mrs Cozens. I trust you’ll give my regards to your master when you see him. Tess, Tate.’

  Tate shuffled after Lyle with a bored expression, and Tess followed. However, at the last moment, she hesitated, turned and executed an inelegant curtsey. ‘Evenin’, ma’am,’ she said, holding out one small hand to be shaken. Taken aback, Mrs Cozens shook it and Tess’s eyes lit up. Brushing within an inch of Mrs Cozens’s wide skirts, she scampered after Lyle and out of the front door.

  The three of them walked in silence down the street for a long minute, until they reached the gateway into Gray’s Inn, with its stately buildings and throngs of lawyers. Entering the Inn, Lyle, not taking his eyes off the people passing back and forth, said quietly, ‘All right, what did you find?’

  ‘Don’t know what you mean, sir,’ said Tess sweetly.

  ‘In Mrs Cozens’s pocket.’

  ‘I never!’

  ‘Teresa, I would never give anyone a sovereign in your sight unless I was sure you were going to steal it off them within a minute.’

  ‘You imp ... impu ... you sayin’ as how I’m all thievin’, like?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Tess hesitated. So long as it wasn’t actually moving by itself, there was indeed very little in this life that Teresa Hatch wasn’t prepared to steal. The cogs in her brain kept moving, and she reached a shocking conclusion.

  ‘Hold on! You used me, you did! You gave her a sovereign so as how you know I’d go and pinch it an’ all, without tellin’ me! You went and were all sneaky!’ Lyle beamed, Tess pouted. ‘I think I liked you more when you was a soft mark, Mister Lyle.’