Black Iron

by Franklin Veaux

  Lord Gaton blinked several times, trying to clear his vision. “Nonsense. Hearsay and nonsense. A person will say anything if you torture him enough.”

  “True. Though I did not say we actually tortured him. Torture is such a blunt instrument. It turned out that merely showing him the devices and explaining their use was enough. No matter. He told an interesting tale. A tale of being commissioned to start a violent riot in Highpole, pin the blame on the Italian spy who snuck aboard the Queen’s airship, and then use black-powder bombs in a place of worship. It was all very…oh, what is the word I am looking for? At my age, we sometimes lose words. Ah, conspiratorial, that’s it.”

  There was a long silence. Then Chancellor Gaton shook his head. “You are bluffing. If you had any proof, my head would be disconnected from my neck right now. You have nothing.”

  “It is true that the Church would, for reasons I prefer not to go into just now, rather not reveal the existence of the prisoner of whom I spoke,” the Cardinal said. “So you see the dilemma. I cannot turn you over to the Queen, for then I would be faced with inconvenient questions about how I know of your involvement, a matter the Church feels some eagerness not to discuss.”

  “What is it, then?” Gaton said. “Blackmail?”

  The Cardinal laughed. The sound was as unnatural coming from him as a quack from a dog. “Nothing so crude. I merely wished to inform you that I am aware of some tales that have been told about you.”

  “Tales.”

  “Tales. But the day grows late. I have many things to do, and if I am not mistaken, the proprietor of this establishment is attempting to signal to us that he would like to close.” He rose and bowed slightly. “Lord Chancellor Gaton, my men will help you to your carriage.”

  The Cardinal left. His men remained behind. One of them offered Gaton a hand. He brushed the man away angrily. “No, no, no. I don’t need your help.”

  He rose unsteadily. The guards put their arms around him to support him. They led him from the opium den into the alley, where a carriage waited.

  One of the men opened the door for him. Gaton started to climb aboard, then paused halfway through the door. “This is not right!” he said. “You imbeciles! This is not my carriage! You’ve taken me to the wrong carriage! I say, do you realize what you’re doing? What is wrong with you? Stop! Fools! Cretins! This is not my carriage!”

  The door closed, cutting his protests short. A lock clicked. The driver shook the reins. The carriage drove off.

  ✦

  “Muddy! You have a visitor!” Claire called.

  Thaddeus swung his legs out, climbing painfully to his feet. He’d spent the entire month sleeping on the cot formerly belonging to the old number two apprentice. There was considerable gossip about who might be the new number two apprentice, a role the Bodgers had been uncharacteristically slow to fill.

  He pulled a shirt over his body, wincing as he brought it down over the bandages. The wounds were already forming two large, puckered scars, almost perfectly circular, one on each side. It looked for all the world like someone had run him straight through with a skewer, in one side and right out the other.

  He leaned on Claire’s shoulder. She guided him across the flat expanse of grass, strewn with bolts and rivets and small incomprehensible bits of iron that Thaddeus didn’t recognize, into the workshop.

  It was, for midafternoon, unusually quiet. The apprentices were all gathered about one of the long workbenches, goggling at the man seated beside it. Thaddeus joined them in goggling. Disorder, the big orange cat, hopped on the workbench and pressed his head against the Cardinal’s hand. A tabby cat with six legs twined around Donnie’s leg.

  “Ah, just the person I wished to see” the Cardinal said. He rose and bowed. “Thank you for agreeing to meet with me.”

  “Don’t recall agreeing to any such thing,” Thaddeus said.

  “No? Well, here we are. Let us make the most of it. Mister Bodger, may I have a moment with Mister Mudstone, if you please?”

  “You ’eard the man,” Donnie said. “You lot, clear out.”

  The workshop emptied quickly. Soon, only Thaddeus and the Cardinal remained.

  “You are Thaddeus Mudstone,” the Cardinal said. It was a statement, not a question.

  “My friends call me Muddy, Your Eminence. You can call me Thaddeus.”

  “No need for petulance, Thaddeus.” The Cardinal looked him up and down. “It really is remarkable.”

  “What is?”

  “Beneath the Pontifical Guard’s barracks there is a cell, and in that cell is a man who looks exactly like you. We caught him making explosive bombs.”

  “Are there any other kind?” Thaddeus said.

  The Cardinal bowed his head slightly. “Quite right. My mind is not as sharp as it once was.”

  “Is that so?” Thaddeus narrowed his eyes. “You came a long way to tell me all this.”

  “Yes. It seems you’ve been a very naughty boy, Thaddeus Mudstone. First, you implicated the Queen in a conspiracy involving the false Church in Rome, then you set out to commit acts of violence and terror in Highpole Street. After that, you were scheduled to play the role of dead Italian spy, as a testament, you see, to Rathman’s success at stopping the foreign agents in our midst.” He smiled thinly. “You look rather hale for a dead man.”

  “So do you,” Thaddeus said. “I saw you get killed.”

  “They tell me had the blade gone an eighth of an inch in any direction, that would indeed be the case. I’m not sure what was more surprising, seeing a man I knew to be locked up in my cell turn up at Mass, or having an inhuman creature leap at me with a knife.” He coughed. Pain flickered across his face. “But that’s not why I’m here.”

  “Whatever it is you’re about to ask, the answer is no,” Thaddeus said.

  The Cardinal looked genuinely surprised. “What makes you think I’m going to ask for something?”

  “If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be here,” Thaddeus said. He was, all in all, feeling more than a little testy and saw no reason not to allow it to show. “You’ve come here to talk to me, instead of summoning me to talk to you. That leads me to think there’s something you want from me, something you don’t want to ask for in a precisely…official capacity.”

  The Cardinal looked at Thaddeus for a long moment. He seemed oddly pleased. He nodded. “Quite. Well, as I mentioned, we have, in our cells, a man who looks uncannily like you. That man has been very forthcoming in helping us put all the pieces together. He has confessed to a number of things, including entering the Queen’s airship under a false name using an invitation procured for him by a person or persons unknown for the purpose of planting evidence to implicate her in a conspiracy, thereby setting the stage, so to speak, for…well, you know the rest.”

  Thaddeus’s face registered no surprise. “Has he?”

  “He has. It was the shoes that did it. The shoes and the comb.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

  “No, I’m sure you don’t. Because only the person who had boarded the airship would have possession of those items, and since the man in our cells had them in his possession, the inescapable conclusion is that he must be the guilty party. Indeed, it can be nobody else. Which means everything is neatly wrapped up.”

  “I’m glad you have it all sorted,” Thaddeus said.

  “There is just one thing that doesn’t quite fit,” the Cardinal said. “He seemed sincerely surprised to see both shoes and comb. In my line of work, you develop a special affinity for reading people, you see.”

  Thaddeus waited.

  The Cardinal nodded again, as if to himself. “If there were someone else, someone with the courage to jump out of an airship and the wit and resourcefulness to recognize an opportunity to leave a comb and a pair of shoes where they would become someone else’s problem, such a pers
on could be of value to me.”

  “Could he,” Thaddeus said, careful to keep his voice neutral.

  “He could,” the Cardinal said. “He wouldn’t even have to do very much. Just go about his life, doing...well, whatever it was he did, and while he was about it, collect the occasional stray bit of information.”

  “What kind of information?”

  “Oh, nothing, really. Gossip. Things overheard. Such a person would probably know the pulse of the city far better than an old man sitting in a church office.”

  “And when you say such a man is valuable…” Thaddeus prodded.

  “I think that I would like to offer such a man a stipend,” the Cardinal said. “Three shillings a week, payable a month in advance. Bonuses to be negotiated for special assignments.” He drew a heavy pouch from his robe and placed it carefully on the workbench in front of him. “In exchange for weekly conversations. Conversations to be had, shall we say, after the midweek commoner’s Mass?”

  Thaddeus’s eyes flitted back and forth between the bag and the Cardinal’s face. “If such a man existed,” he said.

  “Yes. If such a man existed.” The Cardinal rose, leaning heavily on a cane. He left the bag on the workbench. “Thaddeus Mudstone, I look forward to seeing you in church. Much as I would love to stay longer, duty calls.”

  He walked out the front, between the stacks of iron ingots. The sign over the door creaked.

  Epilogue

  The man read the letter silently. When he was finished, he read it again. Then he set it down and regarded the youth who had handed it to him through skeptical eyes.

  The workshop was a mess. It had the look of a place that had been built in haste by someone who did not intend it to be a permanent structure, and then, over the years, it had…settled. The walls, made mostly of scrap wood and bits of old barn, had been replaced piecemeal as they fell or rotted away. New rooms had been added in an ad hoc fashion wherever they were needed or could be worked in, giving the place a chaotic, confusing layout. Holes had been cut in the makeshift walls to allow for windows, each of a different size. The entire building spoke of a fearsome dedication to utility above all else.

  There was an anvil in the corner, and a second under the largest window. Outside, seagulls spiraled through the air, filling it with the sounds of their cries. The surf rolled in from the harbor toward the rows of clapboard houses lining Boston’s beachfront.

  A large coal-fired forge took up most of the space in the back half of the workshop. The benches, of which there were many, were littered with bits of iron and machine parts, of which there were also many. A small, crude clanker, barely four feet high, sat half-disassembled in the center of the workshop. It looked like it had been sitting there long enough for a family of rats to have built a nest in its innards.

  “So,” the youth said, “is it true? Did you really apprentice under Claire and Donnie Bodger?”

  The man pointed to the door. Over it, mounted on two iron brackets, was a blacksmith’s hammer. The head was stamped with a stylized “B&B” set in a square.

  “Oh.”

  He crossed his arms. Finally, he said, “You’re a bit old for an apprentice…” He squinted at the letter. “Alex?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” the youth said. “Alex.”

  “Y’ain’t foolin’ anyone,” the man said.

  “What?”

  “Y’ain’t no apprentice, because if you were, you would’ve said ‘yes, that’s right, sir.’ And no offense intended, but you’re a terrible liar…Alex.” He looked back at the letter. “Claire an’ Donnie says you’re a quick learner. Says here I should give you a job.”

  “Thank you, sir, I—”

  “Hang on, I didn’t say I was gonna do it. I ain’t got no use for you.”

  “What?”

  “Look at you! You got soft hands. You barely look strong enough to swing a hammer. This ain’t like London. We don’t make fine things here. It’s heavy work what takes a lot of muscle. Asides, I got all the apprentices I need. I ain’t got nothin’ you can do that needs doin’.”

  “Please! I can’t go back, and I don’t know where else to go.”

  “Well, now, calm yourself down. I ain’t gonna turn you out in the cold neither. You got Claire an’ Donnie vouching for you an’ that’s no small thing. How do you feel about electricity, Alex?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “There’s a fellow up in Manhattan who’s makin’ a name for hisself doin’ all sorts of stuff with generators an’ whatnot. Says electricity is the wave of the future. Says it’ll replace gas for lightin’ an’ maybe even steam. He’s lookin’ for people with quick wits an’ small hands. Claire an’ Donnie says you got the first, an’ I can see you got the second. Let me do some introducin’ and we’ll see how it goes.”

  ✦

  There was an order underneath the chaos. It was visible, even from the deck of the ship, if you knew how to look. The pier swarmed with people, all rushing about pushing, moving, loading, unloading, hauling, and rolling crates and boxes in unbelievable variety. If you looked at each individual man, focused on just one person out of that mad bustle, his actions might look random. But when you looked at it as a whole, oh, then the patterns came together, yes they did. How clear, how obvious the underlying order was.

  That had always been his gift, he knew. Seeing things that nobody else could see didn’t always make him popular with the slow and the stupid, and there were so very many people around him who were both slow and stupid. You could spot them; they were the ones who rejected the gifts you offered them.

  No matter. This was a bold new world, and on the frontier, he would find people who were not afraid of new ways of doing things.

  “Can I give you a hand with your things, Doctor Frank—”

  He sighed and turned. “Please, call me Victor.”

  The captain of the ship was polite to the point of obsequiousness, which was as it should be, considering how much money he’d paid to book passage. He was also insufferably dull, and Victor had tired of him almost immediately. The captain had little to offer in the way of conversation or personality. He’d insisted that Victor join him for dinner every evening. Victor had come to loathe those meals, filled as they were with insipid gossip and dreary stories about people in faraway lands who were of no use, and therefore no interest, to him. Even worse was the nonstop stream of crushingly dull anecdotes about life at sea, most of which revolved around headings and sails and weather. Endless, endless talk about weather. Now he found himself unable to remember the man’s name.

  No matter.

  “Thank you, Captain,” he said. “I can manage.”

  He rolled the huge trunk and its precious cargo down the gangplank to the pier. The trunk was imposing in its size, but lighter than it looked. For the first time since the disaster at Lord Rathman’s estate, he felt cheerful. A new world awaited.