Black Iron

by Franklin Veaux

  Commoners? Expressing what they wanted in these chambers? Nonsense! Everyone knew the commoners barely even knew what they wanted until you told them. And telling them was so easy…

  Eventually, when he felt the point had been adequately made, he raised his hands and called for order. “Does anyone else wish to speak?”

  Lord Hamilton stood. He was a burly man, broad of chest and still filled with the vigor of youth. He possessed a booming voice that filled the Chamber. “If it please the Chancellor and your lordships,” he said, “I wish to contribute my voice to those of our esteemed colleagues. A curfew on the foreigners of the Highpole District seems prudent and measured. Until the Lady Alÿs is safely back with us and, God willing, assuming the worst has not happened,” and here he crossed himself, “we cannot afford to be reckless. One murder has been committed already.”

  He put his hands together in a gesture of pleading. “My lords, you all know the Lady Alÿs, some of you quite well. There are none among us who do not look upon the young lady with favor. The nation of France has honored us by entrusting her to our care. We must allow no harm to come to her. I am informed that she was last seen running away though the Highpole District, seeking, I have no doubt, to escape whoever committed the most tragic murder that took place there. I fear the worst, and would beseech this Council to instruct the Metropolitan Police and the Royal Guard to spare no effort to search every part of the Highpole District for her. Let nothing stand between us and her safe return. Every shop must be searched, every house turned upside down, every house of worship examined, every basement and storeroom investigated until she is safely back with us. Each moment we delay brings us closer to the worst.”

  A chorus of cheers and calls poured from the balcony. None of the people there knew Alÿs, of course, but that didn’t matter. The image of a young and defenseless girl held captive by dark-skinned foreigners in some basement somewhere in Highpole had a way of dislocating reasoned thought.

  Gaton smiled his tight little smile. It was all so easy. It almost didn’t seem fair.

  The debate was swift. When it had ended, new emergency measures limited travel and nighttime activity of foreign-born citizens and non-citizens of Britain, effective immediately. The proposal to search every building on Highpole Street was defeated by the slenderest of margins. The rest passed handily, with only Lord Wombly and the regent for the Duke dissenting.

  And that, Gaton thought to himself, is how it’s done.

  The moment the vote was taken, Lord Chancellor Gaton called an immediate dismissal of the Council.

  If the Queen or the Cardinal felt any surprise that the main topic of debate never arose, neither of them showed it. They merely rose and left, Queen Margaret through the private door, the Cardinal via the main door. The other lords, save for Lord Wombly, lingered, congratulating one another for Taking Firm Action to Deal With the Matter at Hand.

  Margaret caught up with the Cardinal in the hallway outside the great chamber, moving so fast the two men assigned to her personal guard had to run to keep up. “What was that about?” she demanded. Her face was suffused with rage.

  “I’m sorry, Your Grace?”

  “You went to a lot of trouble to bring us here to this…this…assassination of our character.”

  “Your Grace, I assure you—”

  “Silence!” Margaret thundered. “We will not stand for this attack you have engineered on our person.”

  The Cardinal’s face grew dark. “Your Grace, I assure you this was not my doing. That this meeting was engineered as an attack on your character, I have no doubt. But as to the identity of its architect, I am quite ignorant. I have little to gain and almost as much to lose by this as you do. What possible benefit would there be for me to undermine you before the Council? Damaging the special relationship between the Church and the Crown serves neither of our interests.”

  The Queen studied him for a long moment. Then, without a word, she gathered up her dress and left. Eleanor, who had been waiting outside the chamber, fixed the Cardinal with a look that spoke ill and followed after.

  Wombly, for his part, was eager to get back to his garden. At least petunias didn’t stab other flowers in the back, or foment unrest against the hibiscus bush. When you got right down to it, petunias were a better class of people than most people.

  17

  Thaddeus kept to the shadows, following closely behind the man he’d seen leaving the Hall of Assembly. This was harder to do in New Old London, with its wide streets and uniform buildings, than it would have been in Old New London, in whose windy cobblestone alleys you could be followed by an entire circus parade with brass band and troupe of performing monkeys without being aware of it. The role of the civil engineer in shaping a city’s character is often underappreciated by everyone save for the criminal classes. The architecture of a neighborhood shapes the kinds of criminality that take place in it. Broad, open streets point to a higher class of crook, the kind who steal with limited liability companies instead of daggers.

  It didn’t seem to matter. The man moved with purpose, giving no sign he was even thinking about being followed.

  The man Thaddeus was tailing was named Miles Daffern. He moved without regard to being followed because, while he was unquestionably a criminal sort engaged in a criminal enterprise, he was also a True Believer.

  There are two sorts of people who commit atrocities: those who know that they’re engaged in the business of atrocity, and those who don’t.

  The first sort are careful. They realize the evil of what they’re doing, and they know that other people realize it as well. They tend toward paranoia, these sorts, trusting little, always keeping one eye looking over their shoulder. They understand that the business of evil is one that earns a man many enemies, so they take care not to be caught. They’re cautious and pragmatic.

  This is not to say that none of the first sort genuinely believe in their cause, of course. But the second sort truly believe destiny is on their side. They don’t recognize the moral dimension of their own actions, but see instead only the good that will come about in the end. If people must suffer twixt hither and yon, well, that’s just the way it was meant to be. This sort generally rely on divine providence to look after them, which means they’re not very good at looking after themselves.

  It was fortunate that Miles Daffern belonged to the second sort, as the priest who was also following him knew as little about following a mark discreetly as Thaddeus knew of the inner workings of the Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary. Miles went on his way, completely unaware of the twin shadows following behind.

  Thaddeus sent a brief prayer to Saint Dismas that the priest would not spook their target. He felt a churlish sense of resentment at the priest’s clumsy shadowing. Generally speaking, Thaddeus steered clear of the business of saving souls, and he felt it only fair that the Church should return the favor by keeping out of matters of petty thievery. Leave the experts to their domains, Thaddeus thought. It helped avoid embarrassing incidents.

  The unholy Trinity—the agitator, the thief, and the man of God—traveled in a row north and west toward Westminster Bridge. When Miles reached Old New London, he headed north along Highpole Street, which was jammed with its conventional mix of unconventional people.

  They passed through a vast open-air market midway up Highpole Street, a noisy, chaotic mass of unfettered commercialism that filled the air with the scent of spices, incense, grilled meats, and human enterprise. Thaddeus’s stomach rumbled a reminder that he hadn’t bothered to eat breakfast before leaving Bodger & Bodger. His mouth watered.

  He was tempted, for a moment, to call off the pursuit. But no, the priest was following too, which meant the man was of interest to the Cardinal, which made him that much more interesting to Thaddeus.

  The crowded streets made following both easier and harder. Easier, because with the crush of peopl
e, it would be difficult for Thaddeus to be spotted; harder, because the crowd made keeping an eye on his quarry more logistically challenging.

  Fortunately, the strange man was as inexpert at knowing he was being followed as the priest was at following him. That was a strange thing; normally, if one were to hire a plant to rile up a crowd, one would choose someone familiar with the practice of criminal enterprise. This fellow seemed to Thaddeus to be woefully naive in the practical matters of the criminal arts. Thaddeus burned with curiosity. On two occasions, he was worried the priest might lose the scent just through sheer inexpertise. He didn’t want that to happen, because he was dying to see what the holy man would do once the man they were following reached his destination. What was it Donnie had said? Schemes within schemes—and he, Thaddeus Mudstone, was a pawn.

  “I’m getting more pieces,” Thaddeus told himself grimly. “I just wish I knew how to play chess.”

  Thaddeus’s quarry, still cheerfully oblivious, turned off Highpole Street just south of the Great Mosque. Here, a block away from the glitz and glamour of Highpole Street, the buildings were older and more shabby. Brick and limestone gave way to wood, most of it sun-bleached to a dull gray color. There were fewer people out on the street, and the priest in his red robes stood out like a haddock in a fruit salad. Thaddeus hung back, keeping well away from both target and priest.

  The man headed toward the water and stopped in front of a three-story brick building that looked to have seen better days. Steps led up to a broad porch with a row of doors, all painted different colors. A faded wood sign out front advertised “Flats for Let” in English, French, German, Spanish, Hebrew, and Ottoman Turkish.

  The man fished a large brass key out of his pocket. The priest stood in the middle of the street watching him. Thaddeus shook his head sadly at the follies of amateurs outside their area of expertise.

  He held his breath, waiting for their quarry to turn around and notice the red-robed priest. It didn’t happen. The man opened the door and disappeared inside. The priest stood there for a moment wearing the timeless expression of men everywhere who find themselves with no idea what to do next. Then, he turned and sprinted back the way they had come, as fast as his clerical legs would carry him.

  Thaddeus briefly debated following him. But he could only be in one place at one time, and he didn’t relish the thought of trying to run after the priest in these ridiculous shoes. He watched the front door of the flat from the shade of a lonely and slightly pathetic-looking tree, curious to see if the man would show a sudden, unexpected burst of sense by leaving once the priest was out of sight. It’s what he might do if he were being followed, after all: pick the lock on some suitably dilapidated building, wait for the person following him to either make a move or leg it, then go about his business again. The only thing more satisfying than giving someone the slip was tricking him into thinking you hadn’t given him the slip.

  The sun beat down. The sad, scraggly tree had little shade to offer. Thaddeus’s feet ached. The shoes seemed cruelly designed to try to contort his toes into positions that nature had clearly never intended. He wondered, not for the first time, if “fashion” wasn’t perhaps a French word meaning “the vengeance of cobblers and artisans against the rich.”

  Still no sign of the man. Perhaps he really hadn’t spotted either of his tails. Remarkable, that. Thaddeus couldn’t remember a time when he’d ever been so unobservant.

  Thaddeus crept around behind the building. The rear of the building was enclosed by a low stone wall. He scaled it easily, shoes notwithstanding. Keeping low, approached the grimy, dirt-streaked windows that punctured the shabby sun-bleached building. He crouched beneath what he hoped would be the right one, took a deep breath, held it for a moment, and risked a quick peek inside.

  The window was almost completely blocked by a stained sheet of canvas that had been nailed up inside the room. Almost completely blocked, but not completely blocked. The canvas was worn and threadbare, with a convenient rip that allowed Thaddeus to peer inside. Thaddeus gave a silent prayer of thanks to whichever saints might inspire those engaged in criminal enterprises to save money on security. A brand-new bit of canvas might have made his life significantly more difficult.

  The room beyond was grubby even by Thaddeus’s permissive standards. A filthy mattress was pressed up against one wall, supported by a rusted bed frame that sagged until it nearly touched the floor.

  It would be a lie to say the peeling wallpaper had seen better days. It had seen fewer days, certainly, once upon a time—days when it was less peeling, days when large swaths of it did not hang in sad, tattered strips from the plaster wall beneath. But for that particular shade of green, there are no better days.

  The floor was littered with a collection of old newspapers, piled so thick and so deep that they formed a rough chronology of the whole of human civilization. Teams of paleontologists could have spent years in that room, exploring the various linguistic strata of newspapers. At the deeper levels, where the papers made up a newsprint Cambrian era, the letterforms might be seen in their simplest forms, the Phoenician alphabet evolving over time, gradually assuming the shape of the characters inhabiting the modern world of written language.

  Empty glass milk bottles, dozens of them, lay scattered over the layers of newsprint or piled in wooden carrying boxes. A battered table, one leg missing, leaned uneasily against the wall opposite the bed, an equally battered chair beneath it. Wooden chests, the only absolutely pristine, new-looking things in the room, lay atop the table in neat rows. A pile of clothes had settled in a heap at the foot of the bed but looked ready to scurry off at the slightest provocation. A pair of work boots peeked out from beneath the mound of greasy rags.

  The door into the room opened. Thaddeus ducked down, counted slowly to ten, then raised himself up to peer in again.

  The man was sitting at the shabby table, balanced precariously on the beat-up chair. Carefully, almost reverentially, he opened one of the small chests. From it, he scooped a measure of fine black powder, which he poured with exaggerated caution into one of the milk bottles. He scooped up a handful of little bits of metal and poured it into the bottle atop the powder. Then he tore a strip from a bit of rag and stuffed it tightly into the mouth of the bottle. Thus prepared, the bottle was placed gently in a wooden box with a handle on it.

  He worked steadily, filling bottles with the black powder, adding handfuls of rusty bits of iron, stuffing the mouths with rags, and setting them delicately in the boxes. As he filled each box, he carefully closed the lid, then stacked it next to the door, where a pile of similar boxes already stood.

  Thaddeus flattened himself against the wall, heart pounding. He felt out of his depth. Schemes within schemes. Here he was playing poker, while all his adversaries were playing chess. And the stakes kept climbing.

  He risked another quick peek. The man was still working. He turned his head, and Thaddeus had a sudden, acutely uncomfortable sensation of peering through a mirror into an alternate reality. The man was the very image of Thaddeus—same height, same build, same hair. Thaddeus had the uncomfortable feeling that come dawn, he would be wanted for questioning in connection with something rather horrible.

  He fought back an urge to run. It was an impulse that had served him well in the past, but here, it seemed inadvisable. These were extraordinary times. Extraordinary times required an extraordinary response.

  Even a pawn can topple a king if he’s in the right place at the right time.

  What would Claire or Donnie do in his position? Something brilliant, probably. They’d find some clever way to save their skins and also save the day, and everything would turn up roses.

  He really wasn’t smart enough for this. No point pretending otherwise. In his line of work, smart could get you in trouble. Smart people were easy to fool. Smart meant you could think of all sorts of logical-sounding reasons to believe what you alrea
dy wanted to believe. Thaddeus preferred cunning to smart. Cunning made you wary.

  But this was not his area of expertise. What he needed now was Claire and Donnie’s kind of smart, which was a different sort of smart altogether. Thaddeus was cunning, but cunning wasn’t good enough. Cunning told you to run; smart told you what to do once you were done running.

  A pounding at the front door jolted him out of his self-pity. “Open up! Open up in the name of His Eminence the Cardinal of London!”

  Thaddeus peeked into the room. The man was sitting bolt upright, face ashen. The pounding came again. The man bolted from the room, slamming the door behind him.

  Voices came through the thin wall. Thaddeus could not make them out, but he recognized their character from personal experience: suspicion and hostility from the Cardinal’s men, placatory innocence from their suspect.

  Think. Think. What would Claire and Donnie do?

  His eyes fell on the work boots. A plan took shape in his head. It probably wasn’t a smart plan. Truth be told, it might not even be a good plan. But it was a plan, and dodgy as it was, it had the singular advantage of being the only plan he had.

  Carefully, with as little noise as possible, he prized at the window. It resisted. He placed both hands on the jamb and pulled with all his strength, fueled by urgent desperation. It relented, sliding up just far enough for Thaddeus to scramble inside.

  The canvas nailed over the window posed a problem. Shabby at it was, it was still quite tough, and it didn’t seem disposed to tear easily. Thaddeus pushed and pried at it until he had ripped enough of it free of the nails that sealed it around the edge of the window that he could crawl through. He had a brief moment of panic when he found himself trapped, hanging upside down halfway into the room. Then the canvas gave way with a tearing sound and he tumbled to the floor. His head whacked into the floorboards with a thump. Stars danced in his vision. Outside the door, the voices paused for a second, then continued.