He was pink faced and wheezing by the time he pushed open the double doors into the gloomy newsroom, passing the ranks of copy- takers and secretaries.
“Fear not,” he boomed. “Aloysius Bent is here to save the day with another cracking front-page story.”
The earnest, stiff-collared and waxed-mustached gentlemen of the arts and culture section frowned at him as he lumbered past, heading toward the long desk of the City Editor, Gordon Bingley, who was squinting at a sheet of copy beneath the pool of light emitted by the gold and green banker’s lamp perched behind his typewriter. He looked up and raised an eyebrow.
“Mr. Bent. So pleased to have you with us at last.”
“Straight out on the job, Bingley old chap,” said Bent, stuffing the last of his pasty into his mouth. “Clear the front of the afternoon edition. We’ve got another Ripper murder.”
“Then you should get typing, Mr. Bent,” said Bingley, allowing him a small smile.
Bent nodded and headed for his desk, which shone like a beacon of mess and chaos among the ordered ranks of his colleagues. Bingley turned his chair around and hollered, “Hold the front page!”
Bent grinned broadly. He loved it when Bingley did that.
When he’d filed his story Bent felt he was due a treat, which was probably going to take the form of a drink in the Punch Tavern, provided he could take advantage of Bingley’s agreeable mood and beg two shillings off him.
First, though, he had his board to update. The wall by Bent’s desk was dotted with photographs and scrawled notes, and to this array he added the print Flash Harry had dropped on his desk, the portrait of poor old Frances Coles.
Sixteen prostitutes with their heads sliced off. When it all first kicked off with Mary Ann Nichols in August 1888, Bent had wanted to dub the killer Jack the Slicer, on account of that’s what he did—slice the tops of their heads off. But Wright had insisted on Ripper, and the name stuck. Sixteen, not counting Bent’s ace in the hole—the woman no one else had ever drawn a Ripper link to. He’d tried to get his theories into print, but Wright wouldn’t go for it without some firmer evidence. Annie Crook had died two summers ago, two months before Nichols. Witnesses said her body had been dumped by the Thames with the top of her head gone. Only trouble was, the body disappeared soon after: probably rats, possibly worse. The police refused to consider Annie Crook as a victim of Jack the Ripper, because they had no corpse, and therefore no proof. And, at the end of the day, she was just some lowly shopgirl about whom no one gave a flea’s fart. There’d been talk of a commotion in her flat, of comings and goings in the dead of night. Every instinct Bent had told him there was a story there, a connection between Annie Crook and Jack the Ripper. Crook had sat for Walter Sickert, a painter on Cleveland Street. Bent had tried to get to him several times, and a year ago had managed to get a foot in his door. Sickert had the look of a haunted man about him, and he told Bent not to meddle in things that could turn very, very bad. Which, of course, was like a red rag to a bull.
Bent wandered over to the news desk and picked up a paper from some coastal town in Yorkshire. He glanced at the front page, then began to read with interest. He said to Belvoir, the deputy news editor, “Some Russian schooner found abandoned on a beach. And a bloke with his throat ripped out. And a fishing boat with no crew. All in one little shithole.”
Belvoir shrugged. “We’ll have stringers up north to deal with that.”
Bent spied Bingley at the far end of the newsroom, through the Venetian blinds leading into Wright’s office. Norman Wright, the editor of the Argus, had a broom handle so far up his arse he could brush his chair when he sat down. Bent hauled himself out of his chair and trundled down to the office, hoping to buttonhole Bingley when he came out. As he neared the office the door opened and a third man, led by a frowning Bingley, emerged. He was tall and thin, wearing an immaculate black frock-coat and carrying a topper and cane in his long hands. He had the eyes and nose of a hawk, and he regarded Bent with interest. From behind him, Wright bobbed his stern face over their shoulders.
“Ah, Mr. Bent,” he said. “Most judicious you should be skulking around outside my office. I should like a word.”
Bent gave Bingley a quizzical waggle of his eyebrows, but the City Editor looked away and escorted the visitor to the staircase. Bent shrugged. Wright probably wanted to grudgingly thank him for the Ripper story. He brightened. Maybe he could scrounge two shillings off him as well.
“You’re what?” said Bent, standing before the broad, tidy desk while Wright, ramrod- stiff, stood with his hands clasped behind his back, gazing out the wide window at the bustle of Fleet Street below.
“You are neither deaf nor, despite appearances to the contrary, stupid, Mr. Bent,” said Wright. “You heard and understood. I am relieving you of your duties vis à vis any further Jack the Ripper stories.”
“Have you seen the front page of the late edition?” asked Bent. “Where do you think that story came from, Wright? Did you think the fucking ink fairies left it under Bingley’s pillow?”
“I shall not deny you have done good work, Bent,” said Wright calmly. “But it is time for you to explore fresh ideas. New avenues. Different stories.”
Bent waggled a finger at him. “I know what this is about. This is because I threw up on Inspector Lestrade’s shoes this morning, isn’t it? I wasn’t drunk, you know. I think I had some dodgy jellied eels on Cleveland Street yesterday.”
Wright frowned. “Why where you in Cleveland Street?”
“Ongoing inquiries,” muttered Bent.
“Not ongoing inquiries into your spurious idea that the Crook girl is somehow wrapped up in the Jack the Ripper murders, by any chance? She was a shopgirl who died. A whole two years ago. Do you know how many people die in London each year, Mr. Bent? Do you know how desperate and uncaring life is among the lower classes?”
Bent shrugged. “Pretty much. I’m one of ’em.” Wright wrinkled his nose. “That you are, Mr. Bent. Smarten yourself up. And if you want a job to come to at all in this building in the future, your attitude will have to improve, also.”
Bent glared at him. “You’re threatening to give me the elbow?”
“If you do not desist with your wild theories, Mr. Bent, then yes. You are wasting your own time and that of this newspaper.”
Bent screwed up his eyes and glanced back toward the door. “Who was that geezer? The one with the funny eyes and big nose?”
“Not your concern, Mr. Bent.”
Bent tapped his lips thoughtfully, looking at the portrait of Queen Victoria hanging on the wall behind Wright’s desk. “You’ve been got at, ain’t you? Told to lay off the Annie Crook line. He stank of Secret Service. I’m right, ain’t I? This goes right to the bloody top, doesn’t it?”
Wright turned back to his window. “You are free to go, Mr. Bent. I look forward to seeing what new and exciting stories you dig up for the readers of the Argus.”
Bent opened his mouth to let loose a stream of invective, then thought better of it. He paused at the door to Wright’s office. “Uh, I don’t suppose you could lend me two shillings until payday, could you?”
10
London
Gideon had never seen so many houses crushed together, never seen so many people living beside, on top of, and beneath each other. He tugged at his collar, suffocated just by the sight of the city. The sky had gradually disappeared behind a low-lying fog fed by chimneys as far as the eye could see, contributing plumes of black and gray smoke to the choking layer of smog that reduced the sun to a pale yellow orb struggling to pierce the murk.
The omnibus’s speed on the M-Route had meant they made good time to the outskirts of London; now the vehicle crawled along Maida Vale, the roads clogged with bicycles, horse-drawn carriages, steam-cabs, and pedestrians. The omnibus beeped its air-horn repeatedly as children ran blithely in front of the lumbering leviathan, and velocipede riders wove in and out of the slow-moving traffic.
Gideon�
��s disquiet at the revelations in Einstein’s book was momentarily set aside; like so many new to London’s sights and wonders, he was agog. He could see the soaring towers reaching into the smoggy clouds, smell the combined stench of a city home to six million souls wafting through the open windows of the omnibus. And the noise! He had never heard such a racket, such a relentless clamor. Machinery clanked, bells tolled, horses whinnied, people shouted, music tinkled, drunks roared, and babies cried. Gideon jumped as a face appeared at his window, a man in a creased suit and a battered brown derby, teetering on stilts as he kept pace with the omnibus, waving strings of picture postcards at them until the vehicle, entering the wider, more orderly thoroughfare of the Edgware Road, gained more momentum and pulled jerkily away.
The electric lights strung along Marylebone Road were fizzing into orange life in the artificial dusk brought on by the thickening smog, and the omnibus had to pause at the junction of Bayswater Road and Oxford Street as a marching band traversed the road in front of them.
“Look!” said Gideon, leaning across Maria to peer through the window. “Hyde Park! And the Taj Mahal!”
The Indian temple to true love glowed pinkly in the afternoon sun, and beyond it Gideon saw sweethearts punting on the Serpentine or walking in the shade of the trees. Everything he had ever dreamed of, everything he had thought he would only see in newspaper illustrations or grainy photographs, was laid out before him. Hungry for more, he peered far to the west and he saw the hazy shape of the Lady of Liberty flood barrier. She held her torch high in the sky, and though Gideon couldn’t see it from where he sat, he knew she clutched with her left hand the book bearing the date of the failed revolution, April 18, 1775. He had always wanted to see America and dreamed that one day he would go there. He longed to see the vast plains peopled with the mysterious Red Indians, witness the ever-higher skyscrapers being built in New York, the city determined to be the grandest in the Empire. He even hoped he might visit New Spain, where the ancient lost cities of the Aztecs and Mayans had, for many years, inspired a long-lasting architectural fashion in London.
But yes: London. America could wait; he had never truly thought he would visit London, let alone New York or New Spain or Nyu Edo, and here he was. Dirigibles crisscrossed the sky—perhaps on their way to the Americas—and tethered blimps floating just above the rooftops advertised Cadbury’s Cocoa, Beecham’s Pills, Bovril, and, with a leering, painted devil, McIlhenny Tabasco Sauce.
Gideon yelped delightedly as there was a thunderous clattering from overhead, and he craned his neck back to Maria’s window to watch the rapid-transit electric stilt-train rattling on its elevated rails across Hyde Park and toward Big Ben. Barely able to absorb any further wonders, he sat back in his seat, beaming broadly, as the omnibus crossed Piccadilly, heading between the tall townhouses toward the greenery-garlanded steppes of the Victoria Ziggurat. The omnibus entered the artificial illumination of the cavernous transport ziggurat and was waved into a bay by a uniformed employee.
“We’re here,” said Gideon needlessly.
“Yes,” said Maria, and if Gideon noticed the quiet dullness of her voice, he did not mention it. He led her off the omnibus and gasped. As he stepped on to the stone apron where the omnibus settled in a hiss of steam, he thought the Victoria Ziggurat might very will occupy him forever. Teeming masses crushed into its vast pyramid, which was styled after the ruins explorers had discovered in New Spain. London’s high society was still delighted with the legends of human sacrifice and lost civilizations.
Travelers hurrying for their transport elbowed each other out of the way as match girls and flower sellers moved between them, forging serene paths through the chaos. A small boy with a dirt-lined face waved a rolled up newspaper and hollered, “Jack the Ripper strikes again! Late afternoon edition! Jack the Ripper strikes again!”
A fat man in a top hat and bristling whiskers barged past them, dragging a train of children and a subservient, bonneted wife behind him, separating Gideon from Maria. As he was whirled away by the push and shove of the crowd he saw her face looking for him, and something inside him suddenly felt heavy and leaden. He had barely been able to look at her since reading Einstein’s book. Yet, his heart insistently leaped each time he did meet her eyes, against everything his mind told him was right and proper. Gideon shook his head and forged through the masses until he was back at her side.
“We should get out of here,” he said. “I can’t think straight with so many people.”
He cast around for an exit, took Maria’s hand—not cold, not clammy, but still a thing possessed of strange, unholy life—and pulled her to where the crowds seemed thinner. They paused before a newsstand. Gideon momentarily delighted in a clanking ten-foot- tall brass man with oil lamps for eyes who danced in a heavy, marching gait. Steam hissed from his joints and onlookers threw coppers into the hat of his owner, who played a merry jig on a fiddle. A smiling man with a tidy goatee beard and an extravagantly ruffled shirt walked toward them, strumming what appeared to be a lute strung on a leather strap around his neck.
“Care for a song from the Guild of Scientific Troubadours?” he asked, grinning broadly and fixing a monocle to his right eye.
“You’re American!” said Gideon with excitement. He had never met anyone from the New World before.
The man bowed low and doffed his cloth cap. “That I am, sir. Floridian, my family was, though we relocated north during the Clearances, when they built the Mason-Dixon Wall and the slavers began to strike in the far south. Now me and my fellow guildsmen sell songs, ha’penny a shout. What could I sing for you? ‘Isopods In My Aquarium?’ perhaps? Or maybe ‘Sixty- Four Actuators’? What about ‘My Fingertips Are Weightless’?”
Maria pulled Gideon away, and she was about to murmur something in his ear when he spotted one of the periodicals hung up by a clothespin on the newsstand.
“The Adventures of Captain Lucian Trigger Special Summer Issue!” he gasped. Gideon took the magazine down from the newsstand and leafed through it. “All the Captain Trigger adventures of the last six numbers, in one edition. Plus a brand new, exclusive story.” He looked at Maria. “May I buy it?”
She shrugged. “You may do as you wish with that money, Mr. Smith. But there is something I must tell you. . . .”
Gideon paid for the penny magazine and stuffed it into his bag. “Maria? Did you want to say something?”
She looked at him with what he thought was sadness, and it stabbed him in his chest. Then she said, “Mr. Smith . . . I fear I am . . . winding down.”
Gideon took Maria into a quiet alley close to the transport hub and wound her back into clockwork life. She stood facing a red-brick wall with her hands braced against it while Gideon unlaced her corset and exposed her back and the small, brass- ringed aperture at the base of her spine. For one moment he considered leaving her, propped up against the wall, and fleeing. The thought shocked him.
He was Gideon Smith of Sandsend, seeker of adventure, avenger of deaths. Not Gideon Smith, abandoner of women. No matter how unreal they were. What did it mean, this collision of heart and mind, this thudding in his breast and sickness in his stomach? Maria was undoubtedly beautiful. But beautiful in the way that a well- turned piece of furniture was, or a work of art. She walked and talked and smiled—oh, how she smiled!—but no heart beat in her chest, no blood ran in her veins. The only part of Maria that could truly be said to be real was the brain that pulsed in her head . . . and that was not her own. Gideon had not had much time for girls, but he was still a man. Maria fascinated him, despite what she was. He pushed the thoughts away. What was the point? So he inserted the key, to a shallow gasp from Maria, and turned it until it held fast and she was once again herself. After winding Maria’s workings and hiding the key back in the cotton bag, he stood awkwardly as Maria fixed her clothing, as though they had shared a most intimate act. His stomach rebelled, or fluttered. He didn’t know which, or what it meant.
“What should be our nex
t step, Mr. Smith?” she said.
“We should perhaps go to Fleet Street,” he said. “They will be able to put me in touch with Captain Trigger.”
“The man in the periodical?” said Maria. “Mr. Smith, could you tell me more of your errand in London? Perhaps we could take tea in one of the street cafés near the station.”
They took a table on the street and ordered sandwiches and a pot of tea. Gideon goggled at the prices. “Is everything so expensive in London?” he hissed.
Maria sipped at her tea. “Now, Mr. Smith, your tale.”
“And you think this Captain Trigger can aid you in your quest for justice?” she asked when he had finished.
Gideon nodded, taking the magazine from his bag. “He is the Hero of the Empire. He has faced the creature before. He will be able to help me defeat it and save Sandsend.”
Maria contemplated her beverage. She said, “Mr. Smith? Would you awfully mind telling me about your father, and your childhood? What recollections I have are mere shadows, and I fear not even under my ownership, and would very much like to hear about where you grew up.”
Gideon slowly closed out the sounds and bustle of London all around him, and transported himself back to Sandsend.
“I remember being happiest when I was ten years old. I had an older brother, Josiah, who was like all older brothers: joshing and harrying one moment, protective and loving the next. My mother was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, and she was having another baby. Dad worked hard on the trawlers. We never had more money than we needed, but only rarely less. Sandsend was a wonderful place for a little boy, Maria. Tall cliffs and a beach, a river running down to the sea. We would walk along the sands to Whitby on market days, and on Sundays we would climb Lythe Bank to St. Oswald’s Church. My dad didn’t hold much with religion, but Mother insisted.”
“It sounds idyllic,” said Maria happily.
Gideon Smith and the Mechanical Girl Page 11