The Great Eastern

by Howard Rodman

  At last the cab came to rest, dockside. Two men emerged, one from either side of the quay. They opened the cab’s doors, did some work, departed. The driver decamped with them.

  The streets were silent save the caw of terns, the slow lap of river water, and the occasional shout. The cab remained at rest until the morning when it would be approached by police, who claimed and ultimately identified the slain physician within, then returned the stolen cab to its rightful owner, after charging said owner for cleaning and storage.

  There was an investigation, of course, as a physician cannot be slain without the social order demanding its due. An autopsy disclosed the presence of petechia with ruptured capillaries under the eyelids, upper airway edema, a fractured hyoid, all consistent with death by strangulation. It also disclosed the marks, front and back, of flagellation. But there were no witnesses to the crime and there was abundant motive: the physician had earlier that evening been seen flashing, with some ostentation, gold coins; and when the body was found, he was penniless. Simple robbery. The fact that the cabriolet had been stolen prior to the robbery did not figure in to that account so it was ignored. As was an eyewitness account of the speeding cab, which held that its driver was dark in hue. Had the police investigated further, they might have pondered the proleptic theft of the cab, the description of its driver, the particular dockside location where the cab and its passenger came to rest, and come to a conclusion other than random robbery and murder committed in that robbery’s furtherance.

  They might have looked into the identity and recent activity of the passenger and his role in ministering to the late Mr. Brunel. They might have made a connection between the lascars who brought Mr. Brunel to Mile End and the dark-complected driver. The fact that the slaying was committed by handkerchief, rather than by knife as was then the custom among the local footpads, would typically be viewed by the police as a sign of “Thuggee,” or of “Dacoity” (words they used to ascribe to those with darker skin most any unsolved crime committed in worrisome precincts). But those words were not here invoked.

  The constabulary might also have examined the gold sovereigns that Dr. Murdstone had been dispensing with such profligacy at his club and of course at the establishment in Marylebone. They might have found one that was an older five-guinea piece bearing the image of Queen Anne and the single word VIGO. The VIGO coins were re-minted from Spanish gold, the face of the jut-jawed Carlos II over-stamped with the image of Queen Anne, and were limited in number to twenty. They have a specific history that we will not here convey. Even a cursory numismatic investigation would have raised the largest and most chilling questions about the source of Dr. Murdstone’s recent windfall.

  But as it was, the matter of the gold coins, as so much else, went un-scrutinized. The physician was not a prominent member of his profession and it was widely whispered that he indulged in unsavory habits. (There were marks on his body consonant with such whispers.) Why lift that rock? We all know, all of us, what scurries beneath.

  * * *

  —

  WHILE DR. MURDSTONE believed that “the Brunel episode,” as he thought of it, could mean nothing but improvement in his station, an optimism that persisted until his untimely final breath, young Shropham possessed, perhaps from birth, a different temperament. His assumption was that the worst that could happen would happen with the inevitability of an incoming tide. So when Brunel was admitted to Mile End, Shropham felt that no good could come of it; when he saw the financial arrangements between Murdstone and the lascar, he felt the presentiment of doom; and when he spied, despite himself, the errant toe emerging from the shroud, flexing, clenching, then pulling itself back beneath, he knew that he was done for. For Shropham, the only question was when.

  Shropham attended Brunel’s funeral out of curiosity, and also hoping that within a large throng, a large doom would have more difficulty finding him. He survived. Attendance at Dr. Murdstone’s funeral was more obligatory, but owing to the vastly smaller number of mourners, far less safe. He survived that as well. A week later and Shropham found himself still alive and not yet ruined. Murdstone’s replacement was a kindly older man, not particularly swift of wit but gentle, with an avuncular manner that comforted both patients and staff.

  Shropham quickly settled into the new routine which was much like the old routine, before the irruption of the engineer, the lascars, the enquiring press. He missed the tumult to be sure but was also glad to have long dark evenings, without calamity or the prospect of chaos, in which to continue to indite his sonata. He was happy with the allegro but the scherzo needed work, so he went back to it. The largo wasn’t working either but he decided to write the finale first and then, with his bookends intact, solve the architecture between them.

  It was just after seven p.m. one evening in the month of October, and Shropham, composition book under his arm, coat buttoned against the sharp wind, had just rounded the corner off Bancroft Road and onto the loop that led to Mile End. As he was entering, others were departing. Two men, side by side, strode calmly through the hospital doors. They were lascars. The same lascars who had attended the stricken Brunel. The third lascar was absent: the one who spoke, the one who left and returned, the one who had dispensed the gold.

  Shropham at once found himself shivering, as if the sharp wind had penetrated his coat. Did they come for him and, finding him not yet there, were they now walking the hospital paths, seeking a dark covert in which to lay wait? Had they got word of the night that Shropham, in his local, had quaffed perhaps too many ales and gone on a bit about the unshrouded toe?

  He ducked behind a hedge and held his head low. Their footsteps approached, then receded, without the pause or hesitation that would have let Shropham know that he’d been spotted. The only thing that had paused or stuttered was his own heart.

  When they were fully gone he entered Mile End, sat at his desk, tried to work on the finale, but the notes in front of him swirled and swarmed. They made no sense. He spent the evening and evenings subsequent imagining the arrival of his own death. Via kerchief garrote as it had come to Dr. Murdstone. Via migrating thromboembolism as it had come, it seems, to Brunel. Via chest stab during attempted robbery. A cornice piece of a tall building, choosing that exact moment to fall. The speeding carriage that veers, crashes, then disappears down the adjacent road. Shropham was a freethinker, a rationalist, and believed that neither he, nor any other man, could predict the future. (That was the province of second-sight merchants, sixth-sense apostles, psychics, mystics, clairvoyants, widow-fleecers, and Christians.) So, for Shropham, each death foreseen became, perforce, a death evaded.

  By that week’s end Shropham had catalogued well over a thousand images of his own demise, each distinct. The omelette filled with sage, onion, arsenic. The “accidental” nick, causing a commotion in the blood. The fire in his apartments, doors locked from the outside. No, they would not get him any of those ways. The more exhaustive the list, the more his mind began to clear, the melodies to recommence, the notes to snap into focus. Now the finale was done, and there were but a few passages of the largo to emend, the better to foreshadow the sweet progression of the finale’s last chords.

  When three days later death did come to Shropham—an ether’d rag to the face, then swift injection—it was all of a moment, and left him no time to thumb through his catalogue to ascertain whether he’d previously imaged it or not. His body was bound with nautical cordage, taken down to Scott Russell’s slip, where the Great Eastern was being fitted with her new boiler funnel. The parcel was dropped, feet-first, through a small hatch on her foredeck. After a few muffled, reverberant clangs it came to rest, cradled by iron plates, in the space between outer and inner hulls. Shropham had few friends and his family assumed he’d simply up and gone, lit out, as his father and grandfather had done before him. The males of the Shropham family were not so good at sticking around. His composition book was never found, and it was assumed that wherever he’d gone, he’d taken it wit
h him. Which was true.

  * * *

  —

  BY NOW YOU know, or have surmised with confidence, that the events surrounding the death of Isambard Kingdom Brunel were not as published in the daily press, or as have been purveyed to us in various encyclopaediae. But the glimpses you have heretofore gotten have been partial and obscure. It is time to lift the veil a bit and let you see the story as it would have been seen by its protagonists.

  On the evening of 14th September the lead lascar, here simply called N.—but know that we will disclose more at the proper time—returned to London from Hastings and rejoined his crew at Mile End, where he told them that Brunel would die the following morning. At five a.m. on the 15th N. found Dr. Murdstone and informed him that Brunel had passed. Murdstone entered the solitary ward, listened for heartbeat, felt for pulse, bowed his head, then busied himself filling out the requisite documents, a supply of which Mile End always had at the ready. Murdstone was delegated to inform Mary Elizabeth, now the widow Brunel, and to make arrangements for the onslaught of journalists.

  The morning proved chaotic—there were as is always the case some unanticipated moments—but in the main all went as N. had planned.

  That afternoon two of N.’s crew bore, on cloth litter, a shrouded body out of Mile End. But the body was not Brunel’s, nor was it lifeless. What was wanted was a show of transport even as Brunel himself continued his residence upstairs. Brunel’s heart, which had for the examination and pronouncement been stopped via the administration of a careful dose of belladonna and other substances, was now, via the administration of a countervailing dose of pilocarpus, revivified. The effects of a specific subcontinental tincture that had, since the 5th, mimicked in Brunel the condition of an embolism-induced stroke, continued. His heart was beating, his breath would mist a mirror— Yet his death certificate had been signed, his “body” spirited away, his family thrown into full mourning.

  That family, through a funeral establishment in Regent Park, had ordered a carved-wood coffin. It was as they had specified of dark walnut, clean of line, magisterially proportioned.

  With a few acts of distraction and some significant bribery N. and his crew were able to weight the coffin with lead and have it sealed so that when it was conveyed to the Brunel home, thence to Kensal Green, thence sent down beneath the sod, no one among the large throng suspected that anything was amiss. Those who were by direct knowledge or surmise privy to the substitution were subsequently tidied up. That list would include, without limitation, the undertaker, two of his staff, Dr. Murdstone, and, sadly, young Shropham, who saw a thing he should not have seen, and had, concerning it, in his cups said a thing he should not have said.

  You may now be asking: if Isambard Kingdom Brunel was not interred in Kensal Green; if the headstone bearing his name has no remains beneath; if the “death” induced was, subsequently, uninduced; if the stroke itself was perhaps not a stroke at all— What, then, became of Brunel himself? Of that we will have more to say. For now let us attend, simply, to questions of geographical coordinates.

  From Mile End Infirmary the torpified body of Isambard Kingdom Brunel was under cover of night brought to an unlit warehouse on the Isle of Dogs. When it was clear they’d not been tracked or followed the crew proceeded from the warehouse down to a dark quay. A line of dank wooden steps brought them to a waiting chaloupe. The four lascars and the immobile Brunel boarded the boat, then two of the lascars took up oars and swiftly, silently pulled the boat into the Thames transverse, out around the bend to where the river widens. Through the light fog they now could see their goal: the riveted sheets of a conning tower, then, of a clad-iron deck. The lascars threw their lines and singled up to the hull. A hatch was opened. The lascars passed Brunel belowdecks, then followed, pulling the hatch shut behind them and securing it with several turns of the wheel.

  And then the vessel disappeared: through the fog, into the night, below the Thames. For this was a sub-marine vessel, as remarkable in its own way as the Great Eastern. Remarkable, but flawed: limited in propulsion, scant of range, capable of attaining only shallow depth. The vessel’s captain—again, we shall, for the moment, refer to him only as N.—wanted to repair and perfect his flawed, limited craft, and knew that there was but one man alive who possessed the connaissance. That man was Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and now you are sensing the purpose for which he’d been brought, and, as well, the motivation behind most of what you have just been told.

  Yet there is a deeper, darker set of questions. Who, then, is N.? How did he come to be here? What cataclysm—accidental or malign—so extinguished the flames of conscience that kidnapping and murder were to him as means to an end? Hold to your thoughts, for those calls may soon find a response— E’en as our vessel, the Neptune, sinks beneath the gentle lap and plash of the River Thames.

  FOUR

  WE NOW TURN back the clock some thirty-one months, from late October of 1859 to late March of 1857: to an event (or, perhaps, occurrence) sufficiently large to have captured the notice of History. It was to have the most profound impact on the life of the man whom you know as N., but now, with a lift of the curtain, we shall refer to by the name he was given at birth, and by which he was known to his countrymen: Prince Dakkar.

  Indeed, it might be said that this event set into motion the machineries that would cause Prince Dakkar to quit his homeland, renounce the terrestrial world entire, and become N. Resulting—nine years later and in the North Atlantic—in N.’s death at sea.

  And what was this singular event? The spark which the prairie fire did light occurred in Barrackpore. That spark was struck by a sepoy, Mangal Pandey, whose name may be known to you. Mangal Pandey, whose visage now graces postage stamps, but who in March of 1857 was a soldier in the Bengal Native Infantry: a loyal sepoy taking orders from the British East India Company. Until one morning when he awoke otherwise and with vengeance in his heart.

  Mangal Pandey’s revolt was less a demand for redress than something more inchoate, and it might be ventured that not even Mangal Pandey himself fully understood his motivations. Mangal Pandey did not want: he needed. And what he needed was a world utterly unlike the one in which he found himself. That newer world could not be attained by dint of labor, nor even by dint of dream. To get there—if to get there were even possible—he would have to rend the fabric of the everyday, do it so dramatically and thoroughly that the real world might be glimpsed beyond the scrim. He was nothing and needed to be everything. But that was not the thought in his uppermost mind. Rather, it expressed itself to him as an impulse, one that could not be denied. He awoke knowing, with calm certainty, that he was going to kill the next white man he encountered.

  What the sepoy Mangal Pandey staged the morning of 20th March was later referred to as “a one-man rebellion,” but at the time it seemed less rebellion than an act, to use Rimbaud’s locution, of “elegance, science, violence.” Before leaving his quarters, Mangal Pandey equipped himself with a talwar—a bowed sabre, whose honed edge made it more than ceremonial—and with a Jezail musket whose stock was crescent carved. And so he quit his quarters a weapon in each hand, one for the longer range, the other more intimate. The curve of the Jezail musket, the curve of the sabre, were as smiling moons. Mangal Pandey he was smiling too, but it was not a smile that rained warmth upon those who beheld it. There were those—disturbed by Mangal Pandey’s affect, and the arms which he that morning bore—who went on to alert the command.

  And so within moments of exiting his housing Mangal Pandey did see a British lieutenant on horseback. That man was Lieutenant Baugh, responding to reports of an armed and feral sepoy. Lieutenant Baugh, who’d donned a sword, and had strapped two pistols to his belt, rode in to examine at first-hand the behavior of this soldier-gone-wrong. Examine and, if necessary, put down. But Lieutenant Baugh had opportunity neither to examine nor to use his weapons—for even as he approached the sepoy houses, Mangal Pandey raised musket to his shoulder and fired.

  The
shot missed the lieutenant but found home in the flank of his horse—which cried, buckled, crumpled to ground. Before the lieutenant could fully comprehend that his mount had been shot out from under him, Mangal Pandey closed the distance between himself and the officer. Lieutenant Baugh sought, and found, one of his pistols, then fired. Missed. Now Mangal Pandey, talwar in hand, was slashing at the lieutenant’s head and chest. Mangal Pandey worked with a great ferocity but little skill—he had not done this kind of work before. Still he managed to inflict real injury and to shed a goodly quantity of the lieutenant’s blood, before one Shaikh Paltu—who by caste was a Rajput but who in his own mind owed fealty to the Queen—did swarm and restrain Mangal Pandey. The other sepoy members of the quarter guard merely looked on. They were not—at least not in the moment—fierce like Mangal Pandey. Yet they were not of a mind to assist the British at the expense of one of their own.

  As they watched, their Mangal Pandey—as if possessed—squirmed and flailed with the strength of ten. He handily evaded Shaikh Paltu’s attempts to subdue him. An English sergeant major appeared on the scene, pushing through the sepoy crowd toward the end of quashing Mangal Pandey. Yet even as Shaikh Paltu still clung to his ankles, Mangal Pandey was able once more to load, and raise, and aim, and fire, his Jezail musket. The English sergeant major too went down, blood spurting from his leg.

  Only later did more British officers arrive on scene, and only then was Mangal Pandey taken down. Pounded to the ground. Yet Mangal Pandey—with the determination of the mad—escaped long enough to retrieve the musket from the officer who’d taken it from him. As ten tried to restrain Mangal Pandey, he did his musket again reload and then, holding it at arm’s length, did fire a shot into his own chest.