The Doomsday Machine (Horatio Lyle)

by Catherine Webb

  ‘The pockets, Teresa; what did you find in her pockets?’

  ‘I found . . .’ Tess rummaged in her own bulky jacket, ‘a silver thimble, a roll of black thread, two copper buttons, an old bit of pencil and somethin’ all metal.’

  ‘And my sovereign, let ’s not forget that.’

  ‘I think I must have gone and missed that.’ Tess’s face was a study of innocence.

  ‘Teresa,’ said Lyle in a strained voice. ‘Surely with your free education, fine room and board, liberal weekly budget and healthy, full meals provided gratis every day to a menu usually of your own devising, you don’t need to steal my sovereign, you don’t need to pick the pockets of strangers. Surely you could just . . . not do these things?’

  ‘I only do it for you, Mister Lyle, so as I can keep in practice an’ all.’

  Lyle sighed. ‘What metal thing?’

  Tess handed it over. It was the size of a small pencil-sharpener, dull, grey and cold. Lyle felt its weight in his hand. ‘Ah.’

  ‘Oh oh oh oh I know what “ah” means. “Ah” means as how you’ve just got a clue!’

  ‘It’s a magnet,’ said Lyle.

  ‘Oh.’ Tess looked disappointed. ‘An’ that ’s a good thing?’

  ‘Teresa, who do you know in this life that don’t like magnets? ’

  ‘Um . . . people who like brass?’

  ‘Think more adventuresome than that. Think brushes with death and disaster, think explosions, think epic toil across the morally confusing landscape, think St Paul’s Cathedral and thunderstorms, think ...’

  ‘Them?’ Tess had turned white. ‘They don’t like magnets, do they? What ’ve They got to do with anythin’?’

  ‘Teresa,’ sighed Lyle, ‘it was They who wanted to know where Berwick is.’

  Tess stopped dead in the middle of the street. ‘Oh . . .’ she whimpered. ‘Oh, this is bad. Can we go on holiday? That’s why you wanted to go out the secret way, ain’t it? Can we, Mister Lyle, can we go on holiday? Somewhere a long way away? This ain’t my kind of adventure at all.’

  ‘Think of it as ... as ...’ Lyle’s voice trailed off.

  ‘See! They cause nothing but trouble, with their wicked ways an’ all! Let’s go on holiday; you know it ain’t going to be right ...’

  ‘The question is,’ began Lyle in a distant voice, ‘why would she be carrying a magnet? Is she afraid of Them too? But then why do they want to find Berwick?’

  ‘Dunno, dunno, let ’s go ...’

  ‘Tess,’ sighed Lyle, ‘if They want to find him, he’s got to be in trouble. He’s an old family friend. I can’t just ... not find out. Not when there ’s so much I don’t yet understand.’

  ‘But he ’s in America!’ wailed Tess.

  ‘No, he ’s not.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘Did you look at the letter?’

  ‘Yeesss ...’

  ‘Did you notice the watermark?’

  ‘Erm. Not so as you’d say . . .’

  ‘Chalfont Printers: an English paper company. Now, even if I did accept for an instant that Berwick would have gone anywhere without taking his books, would he really have thought, “Ah-ha, I must pack a sheet of English paper with me to send back to England from the uncivilized beyond”? He’s in England - perhaps he wrote the letter himself, I don’t know, I’m not familiar with his handwriting. Perhaps he was forced, who knows? But the paper is English.’

  At length, in a weak voice, Tess said, ‘There ain’t nothin’ I can say what will tell you how bad this is?’

  He patted her on the shoulder. ‘It ’s all right. I already know this can’t be a good thing.’

  ‘But you’re gonna do it anyway?’

  ‘I rather think I am.’

  She let out a long sigh. ‘So what now?’

  ‘We go straight back to Berwick’s house.’

  ‘An’ confront the evil housekeeper lady?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  CHAPTER 3

  Laundry

  At the same time that Lyle, Tess and Tate were making their way into the mews behind Berwick’s house, where old nags and new saddle horses nipped at hay bags drooping from low stone ceilings, and every other corner held manure filled with hungry worms, the Machine, rattling away with the sound of many steam locomotives racing along the same track, gave off the mechanical equivalent of a fart.

  The invisible thing that accelerated at about three hundred thousand miles a second from the Machine’s spinning heart therefore took approximately 0.00003 seconds to rise up from under the earth, ripple out in every direction and shimmer off beyond the limits of London. No one really noticed its passage, except for one clockmaker who found his delicate little iron springs unhappily straining for an instant in their frame, and one well-meaning scientist at the Royal Institute, who was surprised to find every one of his carbon bulbs, each the size of his own head, flaring up and popping into darkness as the unseen thing rippled through the room. Neither he nor the clockmaker even guessed at what the cause might be.

  There was, however, someone who did. That someone, sitting in an armchair, reading a copy of the Graphic, looked up sharply as the thing passed by. His expression of astonishment didn’t fade until he was distracted by a little drip, drip, drip sound. Unthinkingly, he reached to his nose and, with all the decorum of a custard-pie fight, wiped it on the back of his sleeve. White blood smeared the black velvet of his jacket, dripped from his nose and tasted salty in his mouth. He looked up and was surprised to see static rising across his vision and to hear a sloshing sound in his ears. With an embarrassed, ‘Oh dear,’ he tried to stand up, took one step and collapsed on the floor without another sound.

  By the time all this had happened, the fading remnant of the thing risen up from the Machine had been to the moon and back twenty-seven and a half times, before dissolving out into insubstantiality.

  Outside, it started to rain.

  Horatio Lyle liked back doors. They encouraged the secret part of him that wanted to be a rebel; they made him feel reckless and dangerous. He also liked people who answered back doors more than those who answered the front, since they usually had other things on their mind and couldn’t be bothered to ask him relevant and embarrassing questions such as, ‘Who are you, what’s that child doing, is that your dog, are you carrying any explosive substances, do you have any identification, is there any danger associated with talking to you?’ and so on. What they said instead, and what indeed the man who answered this door said, was, ‘You’re selling something?’

  ‘Whatcha wantin’?’ said Tess quickly.

  ‘We ’re not selling anything,’ said Lyle, putting a firm hand on Tess’s shoulder. ‘We ’re . . . do I know you?’

  The man who’d opened the door and was wiping his inky hands on a once-white apron said, ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘You’re the butler, yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Been here long?’

  ‘A few weeks - what is this?’

  ‘What ’s your name, sir?’

  ‘Cartiledge; look, if you don’t tell me what this is about I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave.’

  ‘Mr Cartiledge,’ said Lyle brightly, holding out his hand. ‘Special Constable Lyle.’

  ‘What ’s a “Special Constable”?’

  ‘The less-well-paid kind,’ confided Lyle. ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘I should probably ask Mrs Cozens . . .’

  ‘Mr Cartiledge, of all the things to do, that is the last.’

  Cartiledge’s eyes narrowed. ‘She ’s not in some sort of trouble, is she?’

  ‘Police business. I really couldn’t say.’

  And there it was, that look in the eye, that slight gleam of ambition that said here was a butler whose apron had been stepped on once too often. ‘Perhaps we could talk in the kitchen?’

  London rain takes one of two forms. Most commonly during the day, it drizzles so imperceptibly that it ’s like walking th
rough a thin mist, droplets so small they won’t even leave a gleam on the hairs on the back of your hand and which yet, inexplicably, manage to soak you through to the bone and leave a coldness in the air once it’s stopped. The drizzle comes out of a constantly overcast sky that always promises more than it gives.

  However, when it rains properly in London, it comes quickly, surprisingly, sometimes from an empty sky and only later do you notice how black the clouds are - in summer, when the temperature is high and getting higher from the chimneys belching smoke and the furnaces and clattering of the new looms down on the dockside and the new iron ships paddling up the Thames, there are thunderstorms and spontaneous downbursts that churn up the mud. The rest of the time, the rain is a clatterer. It comes without warning and clatters tumtedetumtedetumtede on the roofs and windows; it brings a clear, almost leafy smell from a cleaner place; it pocks holes in the river and races downhill to the very few, inevitably blocked drains that the city boasts. It turns noon-day a dark, bruised colour, drives away all shadows and extinguishes all light except a pervasive greyness; and just thrums and thrums and thrums against the pavement, tracking huge stains down the soot-covered walls and making the heaps of rotting refuse steam in the yards behind the buildings.

  And as it rains, the water of the Thames begins to rise. At Richmond, it begins to slosh up the street, in Chelsea, it laps at the stairs up to the houses, and at Deptford, it slithers up the pipes into the two sewers - the old and the new - disturbing the rats, and a few things more besides.

  This, as it turns out, is going to be very, very important.

  Tess had found a small bag of roasted chestnuts and taken a seat by the fire to eat them. Lyle had found dried tea leaves and was busy straining them by the kettle on the stove, while one of the maids scampered back and forth into the rain to the black iron waterpipe just outside the back door to bring in more buckets.

  At the table sat the cook, the butler, the stablehand, the upstairs maid and the cook’s assistant, and they were bickering. Tess got the impression that bickering was something that happened a lot in this household; it had the quiet but fervent tone of a group of people who know that they’re not going to win whatever their particular argument is, but are sure as hell not going to allow her to win instead! Lyle let them argue, fixated on the passage of water through the tea leaves into a small clay mug. Tess nibbled on her chestnuts, occasionally passing one to the expectant Tate, who knew where the next meal was coming from and always waited by her side for such an eventuality.

  Only when Lyle was satisfied with the thin brownish liquid left at the bottom of his mug did he put down the drink and turn to the kitchen table with a resounding, ‘I’m sorry, I missed that last thing.’

  ‘I was just sayin’,’ said a huge woman in an off-white dress dotted with a mixture of flour, blood and chicken feathers, ‘as how this is just the right time to buy eels!’

  ‘Eels?’ repeated Lyle, in the strained voice of a man who can’t quite believe this is a conversation he’s involved in.

  ‘It’s the season for them,’ she said firmly. ‘Any later and you have to cook them up in something special to give them any taste. But now, just give me an eel and whack it into a cold eel pie and I’ll have the master drooling, you’ll see.’

  ‘Master ain’t liking eels!’ said someone else.

  ‘He does!’

  ‘He don’t!’

  ‘He does!’

  ‘I’m tellin’ you, he don’t ever . . .’

  ‘Perhaps he only likes in-season eels?’ hazarded Lyle, before the argument could become violent.

  Five pairs of disbelieving eyes turned in Lyle ’s general direction. Seeing that this was the way the feeling in the room was going, Tess glared at Lyle as well, to make it clear that she was on the side of the masses in this debate, whatever it was about. Tate took advantage of the pause to steal another chestnut from Tess’s lap.

  ‘What was you after again?’ said the cook.

  ‘He ’s here about Mrs Cozens,’ hissed the butler in a conspiratorial voice.

  ‘Oh, that bat! What ’s she gone and done?’

  ‘Can’t really say that, ma’am,’ said Lyle in his best pompous voice. ‘I just need to ask you some questions.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Mr Berwick - when did you last see him here?’

  There was an embarrassed silence. Then the maid muttered, ‘He’s in America an’ all.’

  The silence stretched out so long Tess became aware of the sound of the upstairs grandfather clock ticking, and the fall of feet on the crackety floorboards above. Finally Lyle said, ‘America?’

  ‘That’s right.’ No one met his eye.

  ‘Have you heard of Newgate exercise yard?’ Five pairs of eyes gave nothing away. Lyle sighed like a patient man and in the same breath said, ‘It ’s a space about five foot by five foot, where every day the prisoners of the Crown are allowed to march round and round in circles for an hour stretch, maximum, wearing masks so that they can’t see the faces of the others and holding a piece of string for guidance. If they speak, they are punished. And then there’s the oakum hall, where you have to sit working at getting rope from oakum until your fingers bleed, and then there ’s the treadmill which is rather self-explanatory, and the crank, where you wind and wind and wind a crank on a barrel for no good reason until you collapse from eventual exhaustion and then . . .’

  ‘He ain’t in America,’ muttered the cook’s assistant.

  ‘No,’ said Lyle kindly, ‘I know he ’s not. So, where is he?’

  ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘Why did you say he was in America?’

  ‘He told us to!’

  ‘Him, personally, he told you to lie?’

  ‘It ain’t a lie if your master tells you to tell it.’

  ‘I wouldn’t use that as a defence in court, if I were you. When was this?’

  ‘’Bout five months back.’

  ‘Five months? My goodness - does he turn up here at all?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Well,’ Lyle ’s voice had taken on the tones of infinite patience, ‘when was he last here?’

  ‘What ’s this got to do with Mrs Cozens?’

  ‘Your master has told you to lie and is pretending to be in America, a lie Mrs Cozens maintains with gusto. I think I’m entitled to a question or two, don’t you? When was he last here?’

  ‘Four days ago.’

  ‘He doesn’t stay the night here?’

  ‘No, he stays where he works.’

  ‘Where does he work?’

  ‘Don’t know!’

  ‘What did he do here?’

  ‘Looked at some books, ate some food, left clothes for washing, and left again! He gets paid really well.’ The maid’s eyes lit up.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘He gave us all a rise! And with him hardly here we need do nearly nothing; he ’s just throwing away the money!’

  ‘What books did he look at?’

  ‘Don’t know. It’s all just books, right?’

  Lyle flinched. ‘There’s no such thing as just ...’ he began painfully, saw Tess’s reproving expression and swallowed the words down again. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Yes. Well, perhaps. So he comes here every now and again . . . how regularly?’

  ‘Every other week or so, you know? No predicting for sure when he’s going to turn up.’

  ‘And then leaves almost immediately?’

  ‘Yes, that ’s about right.’

  ‘And Mrs Cozens - she’s new?’

  ‘Hired in special to look after the house while he’s gone. Don’t think he interviewed her or anything, she just sort of ... turned up.’

  ‘Who does she talk to?’

  ‘Sometimes this bloke in a top hat comes to talk to her.’

  ‘The city is full of blokes in top hats,’ scowled Lyle. ‘Who? What name does he leave?’

  The butler sat up. ‘Mr Augustus Havelock,’ he said. ‘The man’
s called Mr Augustus Havelock.’

  In the silence, the tick of the upstairs grandfather clock became deafening. At length, in a voice rattling from a throat suddenly tight as a noose, Lyle said, ‘Are you sure of that name?’

  ‘Yes. Is he important?’

  ‘He . . . has his moments. I need to see Berwick’s room.’

  ‘I ain’t sure if that’s ...’

  ‘Miss,’ snapped Lyle, grey eyes suddenly burning, ‘in my time, I have been hit by lightning and chased by madmen, I have built a machine that can fly above the city and fought a battle on the ice of a frozen river. If you could imagine half the things that frighten me, you would never be able to sit alone in a darkened room by yourself, and of all the things in this world that alarm me, Augustus Havelock is right up there, next to demons with glowing eyes, on the top of my list. If your master is mixed up with Augustus Havelock, and wanted by Them at the same time, then your salary had better be very, very good, because I swear all manner of trouble is just itching to come your way. Now show me his room!’

  Tess had just one memory of Augustus Havelock, and even then, she couldn’t put a face to it. It had been an encounter that felt an infinity ago, when the world was fuzzy and out of focus, and she woke up every day surprised to find that a week had gone by, not sure of when the next week would come, a time before the night she ’d met Horatio Lyle, and everything had changed.

  Even if there was no face, there was the voice still firmly in her mind, as sharp as the snap of a silk flag in a strong breeze, soft until the click of the sharper sounds, when she could hear the teeth in his mouth as sure as if he was a feeding piranha closing his jaws for the kill.

  He had said, ‘Miss Teresa Hatch. I’m informed you are a very, very good thief.’

  She had said, ‘I’m good, yep. Whatcha want, bigwig?’

  He had said, ‘For a start, respect. You may call me Mr Havelock. And I will pay you five pounds for the privilege.’