The fog was definitely sparser here, and the street was wider, smoother, largely free of rubbish piles. “Made it!” Katarina murmured in a tone of satisfaction. “The disadvantage of a regular patrol. I’ve never been able to determine whether they think we can’t count, or—” She glanced over, took note of the blankness on Elizabeth’s face, and actually offered an explanation. “Spitalfields—where the warehouse is—is the oldest part of the city, and possesses many streets too narrow to allow the constructs to traverse them. They patrol what they can, but they know their surveillance is imperfect, so they are all the more careful to guard the edges of the stews. They patrol with great care the streets just outside, drawing a ring around us, trying to keep us penned in—but they walk a beat to do it, and there’s one very specific disadvantage to having a routine like that: people like me can figure out what it is. If that copper had seen us cross into a respectable neighborhood from Spitalfields—dressed like this, no less—there would have been questions. But until they actually build that fence they’re talking of, it’s easy enough to slip through the alleys when their backs are turned. At least for those of us who can count.”
Elizabeth almost understood. They walked through a better neighborhood now, she could tell that. The buildings stood straight-backed rather than bent with age, and horse-drawn carriages clopped along the smooth cobblestone between them. There was plenty of foot-traffic in between the carriages, but no shoving as there had been in the streets of Spitalfields. The voices from this crowd were not so shrill.
Two young gentlemen passed close by them, arm in arm, talking in low tones of something that sounded important. They were dressed more like Maxwell than Trevelyan, so they were not laborers. They might be barristers or office clerks. Discussing business concerns, perhaps. The nearer one glanced at Elizabeth, then looked her up and down in a way that confirmed her suspicion about the significance of breeches. If we had crossed into a respectable neighborhood dressed like this, Katarina had said. The other man was staring now too; the two breech-clad women were attracting attention. Katarina would have attracted attention even had Elizabeth not accompanied her. What were they doing here?
Katarina, apparently oblivious to the stares, drew the tiny timepiece pendant from her bodice and consulted it. The gentlemen moved on. Katarina leaned against the closest piece of brick wall, arms folded and legs improbably crossed, and fixed her eyes on a door opposite.
“We are waiting for someone?” Elizabeth asked.
“We are.”
“So you can discuss the weather?”
Katarina smiled, but did not otherwise reply.
The door in question opened a few minutes later, and a young woman exited—very obviously a lady by her dress and bearing, though something in the drab beige shade of her costume made Elizabeth think not a wealthy one. Katarina pushed off the wall at once and crossed the street to her. “Beg pardon, miss?”
The young lady turned her head. Elizabeth saw fair hair gathered into a knot under the drab hat, large blue eyes, a plain countenance. She was closer to Katarina’s age than Elizabeth’s. Her eyes passed over the two of them, and she made as if to walk away. “This is a respectable neighborhood,” she said. The heads of respectable people were turning all over the street, watching the breech-clad woman and the gown-clad lady.
“I mean no harm,” Katarina said, the guttersnipe whine twining through her words. “Please, miss, just a moment of your time? My friend and me, we’re in a bad way, we just need a bit of help—”
The woman was walking away now, but not quickly, and Katarina’s long legs kept pace with her easily. There was no way the woman could outdistance Katarina wearing that gown, Elizabeth thought. It was more like a cage than any garment she had ever seen. It seemed the fashions of the previous century had returned, and with a vengeance, for the top half of the dress pinched close around a waist whose incredible narrowness could have only been achieved by a long corset full of whale-bone, and that savagely tight-laced. The bulging bottom half was so stiff it must be held in place by a metal frame in the shape of a skirt, rather than anything soft like a petticoat. Not that the last century’s underskirts had been so very comfortable, but this seemed to be worse; the sight of it made Elizabeth feel lightheaded in sympathy with the woman’s little puffing breaths. It must be as difficult to sit in such a gown as it was to breathe. It must be as difficult to stand upright—with the weight of all that metal and cloth tugging at the lower back—as it was to take more than a mincing step. The inconveniences inherent in her own simple frock, now drying in the warehouse scullery, seemed tame by comparison.
“—we’ve nowhere to sleep, and there’s a storm coming tonight—”
“Is there?” The woman turned her head at that, eyes meeting Katarina’s for a bare instant before she dropped them and resumed the performance. “I am sorry to hear it, but I cannot—”
Katarina had not ceased talking. “—even a penny or two would help—”
“Is this person bothering you, miss?” a gentleman’s voice asked, raised to be heard about the thundering construct footsteps that shook the street. Elizabeth looked up to see a man dressed as Maxwell had been, hovering before their little tableau.
“No.” The woman in the cage-dress likewise raised her voice, though her accent stayed genteel. “No, there’s no trouble; I’m sure she was just leaving—”
The tremors in the cobblestones did not subside as they should have, and Elizabeth looked around for the construct. Of course, in this part of the city, with wider streets, it could come closer—
It slammed around the corner as Elizabeth thought the words, standing still for an instant and blocking all view of the cross-street with its bulk. Then it paced deliberately forward, one pounding step at a time. The street shook even after it had stopped moving—Elizabeth jerked her head to look behind her—and from the other side came a second one, likewise blocking the way to the cross-street, likewise moving in. Behind each construct filed a line of half a dozen men, wearing black uniforms trimmed with copper and helmets that somehow echoed the lines of the constructs’ smooth expressionless heads. They were all carrying muskets.
A voice came from the mouthless head of the first construct, seeming to set the street shaking all on its own. “Miss Temple?”
The woman’s face went gray. Katarina’s had already drained of color, and the gentleman had disappeared. “Oh my God,” Miss Temple whispered. Katarina grabbed Elizabeth’s hand and dragged her at a run back into the alleyway.
“Miss Rachel Temple of the Gazette?” the voice repeated behind them.
Katarina was pulling her deeper into the alleyway, or trying to, but Elizabeth set her feet and twisted her wrist against Katarina’s sweat-slick palm. It was like the moment under Maxwell’s coat the night before; she couldn’t bear to be shielded and not know, and her promise to avoid anything dangerous was momentarily the farthest thing from her mind. She wrenched free and got most of the way around before Katarina caught hold of her again.
Elizabeth had an instant’s plain view of the woman in the drab beige dress, standing framed by two walls of brick, looking up at the construct who had just asked her a question.
“Yes,” the woman said hoarsely.
“Miss Temple, we have some questions for you regarding your friend Lord Seward. Please come with us.”
There was a moment of absolute stillness. Then Rachel Temple made a mad dash for the alleyway.
Elizabeth knew what was going to happen the instant before it did. She had seen it the night before. But she was still shrieking a denial, struggling against Katarina’s grip to run forward and somehow stop it, when her vision was dazzled by blue fireworks and Miss Temple fell in a bloodied pile on the cobblestones. It was a metal frame holding her skirts out, after all.
“Be quiet,” Katarina was hissing, “Elizabeth, be quiet, you will draw their attention, now come away, come away from this—” But Elizabeth could make no proper sense of the words, coul
d hardly hear them over the sound she only later realized was her own sobbing voice. Katarina tried to pull her into an embrace, less perhaps to comfort than to smother the sobs, but Elizabeth fought blindly against her. She wrenched free a second time by using her nails like some mad cat, and she ran back through the twisting alleyway and as far from the body on the cobblestones as she could get.
She stumbled as though through a nightmare, down a path that twisted and turned and offered no way out. Bricks bruised her hands as she tripped and fell and caught herself, and she must have drawn the attention of the constructs after all, for she could hear them keeping pace on the broader streets to either side. She gave a little gasping moan and tried to run faster, but caught her foot and pitched forward, fetching up against an iron fence twice her height and wrought into ornate flower-shapes.
A short distance away stood a building like nothing so much as a great crystal palace out of a fairytale, but there was no time to scale the fence and hide there. She could hear the constructs. They had circled around somehow and were in front of her. They were coming. She could hear them—but why could she not see them? The fog had broken finally—she ought to be able to see them—where were they?
The sound was higher-pitched and faster than she had been expecting, and she still could not see a construct anywhere. A burst of sulfur struck the back of her throat and set her coughing. The noise was now distinctly a clatter rather than a stomp, and even as she thought this, it grew rapidly into a roar. Clouds of black smoke poured down the street in front of her, enveloping her in a brimstone embrace, and she stumbled away from the iron fence. Someone caught her—Katarina caught her, murmuring reassuring and senseless words. Elizabeth watched something enormous and black hurtle into the space between the iron fence and the crystal palace, and her teeth chattered with the force of the jolting ground beneath her feet. The thing rushed along the fence line, seemingly without end.
It squealed to a stop finally, with one last shriek and then a series of shudders. A flash of white smoke split the black clouds and a shrill whistle screamed in reply. Then the worst was over. Elizabeth, peering through the fog and smoke, could see a door in the side of the thing swing open and a man in green uniform descend from it. It was a conveyance. A carriage? Or a great many carriages, strung together? A wave of people poured out of it, and a different wave of people hurried and jostled toward it.
Katarina turned her around and held her, right hand gripping firmly enough that Elizabeth knew she would not be able to escape a third time, but left hand rubbing comforting circles on Elizabeth’s back. “It’s all right,” Katarina said. “It’s all right. This one’s nothing to worry over. I didn’t think to warn you. Of course you’ve never seen a locomotive.”
Elizabeth jerked away from the soothing fingers. “We should have helped her! We should have done something. But you ran away!”
“Because there was nothing I could do for her,” Katarina said, dark eyes steady, voice unwavering, hand still firm on Elizabeth’s arm. “Not one thing. And there are other people I can still help, but only if I’m alive to do it.”
“But they shot her—a woman—they killed her in the street, and no one did anything! What could she have possibly done, to deserve—?”
“She was a reporter for the London Gazette. She wrote what they did not want to have read. And she was a friend of Lord Seward’s.” Katarina sighed. “She did nothing to deserve it. I didn’t say I liked it, Elizabeth! God, I knew her, I’ve known her for two years, we—But there wasn’t anything we could do for her. There are things I can fix, but that wasn’t one of them.” On the other side of the wrought-iron flowers, the crowd went about its business, women in dresses like cages and men in tailored suits with loose trousers and too-long coats, paying no attention to the two wanton women quarrelling and crying in the alleyway. Elizabeth watched the parade of hats and boots and brass-tipped umbrellas, feeling vaguely sick. And then more than vaguely, and then she found herself crouched over and vomiting while Katarina rubbed her back.
“I did that too, after the first day I walked through London,” Katarina murmured. “And again the first time I saw someone die. You’d think I’d learn to carry gin on me, but I’m afraid I haven’t any.”
Elizabeth slumped against the wall, not even pausing to consider how filthy the ground must be. She accepted Katarina’s handkerchief to wipe her face, and then she closed her eyes.
She jumped when the great iron monstrosity behind her gave its piercing whistle again. “What—” She cleared her throat. “What did you say that was?”
“A locomotive. A steam-train, actually; the locomotive is the part on the front that makes it go.”
“It’s not a construct.” Elizabeth felt the need for pedantic clarification. “Nor a monster. It’s a third thing.”
“A third thing,” Katarina agreed. “Not dangerous unless you stand in front of it. The first locomotive was demonstrated in, oh, 1830-something, if I recall correctly. It caught on very quickly, and now there’s scarcely a hamlet in Britain where the train lines don’t run. Every morning gentlemen come up from fine country houses to transact their business in the City. At night, they go home again. Yes, every day,” she added, though Elizabeth had not spoken. Her throaty voice was calm, soothing, slightly sing-song in a way that evoked Trevelyan’s Welsh accent or a lullaby. “Every morning, trains bring the daily newspaper from London out to the country, and other trains bring fresh milk and vegetables from the country to London.” Elizabeth felt herself relaxing, almost unwillingly, in response to the easy tone. She closed her eyes again and listened. It sounded like a bedtime story, a fairytale of a fairy kingdom. “There isn’t any place in England you can’t get to by train in a day or less,” Katarina said. “I don’t remember a time when it was any other way, but Lord Seward spoke of the journey to London being a long slow one by coach, when his father was a boy. He said that the folk who lived in on his father’s estate never left it their whole lives. Now there’s hardly a coach to be found—private carriages, yes, but not public coaches—and it’s commonplace to take a weekend trip to the seashore or a day trip to London.”
She fell silent then, and after a time Elizabeth opened her eyes to find the gypsy woman crouched in front of her, watching her. “Do you realize,” Elizabeth said, mumbling a little, feeling that the words came from a long distance, “that I myself have hardly ever been out of Hartwich?”
“I know,” Katarina said. “The old folks do say the railway changed the world as surely as the constructs did. Not so destructively, though; as I said, it can’t hurt you unless you stand in front of it.”
“Because it can’t think for itself,” Elizabeth said.
Katarina gave her a surprised look. “The constructs can’t either. I thought you realized. It takes three men each to make them go. Each one has a pilot inside driving it, a second managing the fuel, and a third—” She broke off.
“—firing the artillery,” Elizabeth said.
“Yes.” Katarina’s mouth twisted. “Makes it worse, doesn’t it?”
“Who are they?”
“Englishmen. Which—” Katarina sighed. “—makes it worst of all.”
Behind them, the steam-train shrilled again, and began the ear-piercing business of getting itself underway. There was a long while where the sound of jerking wheels and squealing metal and cumbersome moving weight made conversation impossible. Finally the clickety-clack noise resumed, and the train sped away from them, belching out a last burst of black as it went.
Elizabeth licked her lips and started to speak, but stopped when she heard a child’s voice raised. Craning around, she made him out—standing on the other side of the gate, on the other side of the track where the train had sat, in front of the crystal palace. He was waving a folded paper and chanting in a voice nearly as shrill as the train whistle, “Lord Seward arrested for treason! Read about it in The Times!”
A gentleman handed the boy a coin and took a paper. The cro
wd that had arrived by steam-train had now mostly streamed out of the street and onward to whatever business brought them to London. In the aftermath of their departure, the people who remained were so comparatively few that true silence might as well have descended.
“Seward plotting to bring down Parliament! Read about it in The Times!”
Elizabeth turned back to Katarina, who was still crouched and watching her. The unnatural position did not seem to trouble the gypsy woman, and her eyes had an odd luminous quality in the shadows. Elizabeth took a breath. “Was Lord Seward really going to bring down the House of Parliament? Like...like Guy Fawkes?”
“Not exactly like Guy Fawkes,” Katarina said, but her tone had the quality of “yes” rather than “no.”
“What good would that have done, if he had succeeded? Would it have fixed—” Elizabeth gestured. “—all this?”
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