by K. W. Jeter
“So it might,” I said. “Through you, his daughter, there would be another channel of information as to the operations and maneuvers upon which the Sea & Light Book accepts its clients’ wagers.
Or possibly, your father and his associates might be able to induce your husband to steer his various light-bearing craft in such a manner as they had predetermined, and upon which they had appropriately made their bets.”
“No doubt,” conceded Evangeline, “my father’s reasoning was something along those lines. Though I little cared at the time, when the engagement between myself and Captain Crowcroft was announced—the shame and chagrin I felt, at being affianced to a man with whom I was barely acquainted, let alone loved, was more than I could bear. However, as I came to know him, my feelings altered.”
“Very likely.” I gave a shrug. “He doesn’t seem such a bad sort.”
“Oh, more than that, Mr. Dower; he is a very fine man, indeed.
He has more than won my heart, though the first tenderness of my regard for him was motivated more by pity than affection.” Her words puzzled me. “Why pity? He seems almost literally on top of the world he inhabits.”
“If you but knew! I am sure that many things seem benign and straightforward to an honest man such as yourself—”
I said nothing.
“But if you obtained any sense of the deviousness of those in whose schemes my poor Captain Crowcroft has become ensnared, I am sure you would fear for his prospects, as well as mine.” She slowly shook her head, gaze drifting beyond me to some horrid vision of disaster. “How cruelly ironic it seems, that my own father’s machinations should have brought about both my greatest happiness and my direst forebodings.”
“Well . . . I am not sure irony is the correct term to use in this case.” I was at a loss for anything else to say, though I felt compelled to make an utterance of some kind. “It might just be simpler to call it a dastardly thing to do to one’s own child.”
“If I believed that destroying all my hopes had been my father’s intent,” said Evangeline, “I might agree with you. But his wickedness is more of the unthinking kind, that lays waste without prior consideration, rather than the premeditated variety. He and his associates construct their schemes, then wind them up as though they were but clockwork toys, setting them into motion with no care as to what ultimate damage they might wreak. And as my father bears no actual malice toward me, I am certain that if he were aware of the blighted desert he were about to make of my life as well as Captain Crowcroft’s, he would be greatly chagrined.”
“Perhaps you should mention it to him.”
“I would as profitably speak to a wall!” Her inclination to the higher sort of personal drama manifested itself again. “You’ve spoken with my father, Mr. Dower; you know what he is like when he is caught up in one of his various enthusiasms. Nothing else matters; others’ voices are as the buzzing of gnats to him. Ruin might lie straight, and even his own flesh and blood could no more speak warning of it than alter the course of the sun in the sky.” Stonebrake was taking an inconveniently long time in arranging for my transportation from this place. If Fusible’s daughter spent much more time unburdening her maidenly heart, I feared I might collapse under the weight.
“Your apprehension, then, is that your father’s current scheme might fail, and disastrously so?”
“Worse, Mr. Dower! It will succeed! And then all my felicitous hopes are dashed.”
Now I was confused. “I fear I am not quite following you in this regard. . . .”
She regarded me with dismay. “Do you not see?”
“Quite frankly, no.”
“It is my betrothed’s very soul for which I am so concerned!”
“Oh.” I nodded my head. “That’s very good of you, I am sure.
And the captain undoubtedly has a care for yours.”
“Mine is not in the same peril,” said Evangeline. “You apparently do not understand—”
I held my tongue, feeling it redundant to agree with her once more on that point.
“Perhaps no man is capable of doing so.” Her head drooped mournfully. “Perhaps it is only a woman’s tender senses, so easily bruised by this world’s hard, unyielding realities, that can apprehend such a dolorous future as the one that awaits us now.”
“I am sure that is the case.” Perhaps it would be better if I concocted some pretext for making my excuses and going off in search of Stonebrake and the carriage. “These do seem like unnerving times, to even one as dull as myself.”
“You have little idea, Mr. Dower. Situated as I am here, in the midst of all these schemes and plots, I find myself close to the center of events, the unfolding of which will horrify you.”
“I have been sufficiently horrified already.” The automated Orang-Utan still ticked and leered at the back of my thoughts. “It has been a long day, and a disagreeable one.”
“Worse will come,” predicted the young lady in somber tones.
“You men have been so clever, with all your tinkering about and devising, setting great hissing pipes across the countryside and through the urban streets, the better that machines might serve you—”
“I wouldn’t exactly call it serve—”
“Just so!” She seized my arm, her features alighting, as though suddenly recognizing a fellow disciple in some deeply held faith.
“For now, we are their masters—but soon they shall be ours.”
“Indeed.” As my arm was numbing with the fervour of her grip, I thought it best to concur. “I have heard similar premonitions expressed before. Though if such is to be our species’ fate, I am not exactly sure what I can do about it.”
“Do you really think I care about our species, as you call it?” She let go of me, so as to lay the back of her hand against her own brow. “A woman’s heart is not so capacious as that, Mr. Dower! We love the individual, the fleshly creatures who hold us in their embrace, not these huge, gaseous abstractions spoken of by bearded philosophers. And I have already witnessed the horrible process commenced, in the one who has captured my heart. When you look upon my fiancé, you see a man admired by every level of our society, a hero to all— but I discern more deeply than that. I know the price he pays, the burden that his commanding rank imposes upon him. These ‘walking lights’—the intricacy of their construction, the minute adjustments necessary for their mobility, the fearsome explosive forces at their core, the scalding deaths that might be inflicted upon every man inside, the result of the slightest miscalculation at the helm—it is more than any man can bear, no matter his strength and resolve.”
“It does seem,” I allowed, “to be a demanding job—”
“More than demands, Mr. Dower; it consumes. This truth is known to me, as all that impinges upon my good captain is known.
I have watched it happen to him. Little by little, a bit at a time; a bit more today than yesterday, and a bit more to come tomorrow. The intricacies and complications of operating such a device have taken over his soul; he is at risk of becoming no more than a sort of flesh-and-blood appendage to whichever lighthouse he commands.”
Evangeline’s voice softened for a moment. “This is why I hope that you might pardon me, for I blush to recall with what venomous regard I looked upon you, when first I apprehended that you were the son of that genius-possessed inventor who created the essential elements upon which the walking lights depend.”
“Think nothing of it,” I assured her. In fact, a degree of relief was evoked by her confession; it was but another instance of someone’s opinion of me being based more upon my lineage than any personal failing. “I’m sure you are aware of what is so often said, regarding the sins of the fathers being visited upon their sons.”
“No, Mr. Dower; it is kind of you not to condemn, but it was still wicked to hate someone I did not even know, if only for a moment.
Though it was a dark moment indeed; the sight of you at the launch party, there in Cornwall, overwhelmed all my better in
stincts—you seemed to represent to me all the evils of such cleverness, which values intricately working machinery more than human beings.”
“Whatever cleverness I possess, as it were, has been greatly overestimated.”
“So I have discovered,” said Evangeline. “The resolution I had already vowed, to forgive you upon our next encounter, was made considerably easier by the reports I received just this evening, as to the degree of not just ineptitude but sheer terror that you appear to display when confronted by your father’s creations.”
My own resolution, vowed at this immediate moment, was to dismantle that accursed Orang-Utan at the earliest opportunity. “Ineptitude, perhaps.” I attempted not to bristle at her comments. “Though I believe terror to be putting it a trifle harshly.”
“Please don’t be angry with me, Mr. Dower.” She laid her hand upon my arm, lightly enough to allow the blood to continue to circulate. “For if you had been terrified, it would only cause me to regard you even more highly. For such is my reaction, when I contemplate all these so-called technological wonders that have marched and hissed their way into our world.” To my paralyzed surprise, she leaned forward and kissed me on one side of my face, then drew back as though to assess the effect this momentary tenderness had upon me. “Though Captain Crowcroft owns all my heart,” she spoke softly, “I have some gentle feeling for you as well. For I have now come to see that you are as much a victim as he is, of all this unrelenting machinery.”
I remained silent, oddly touched as I was by Evangeline’s confession. I had not led so bleak a life as would render a young woman’s kiss, however slight and momentary, completely unknown to me.
Yet arriving as that intimacy had now, upon the eve of my advancing years and their concomitant personal decline, the impact was substantial. Another resolution formed inside me, which I also left unspoken to her. I might be a confirmed and aging bachelor, for whom the love of a beautiful young woman such as her could never be realized, but nevertheless: I did not know how I would accomplish it at the moment, I was unsure of how I would accomplish much of anything—but whatever was required to save her fiancé, Captain Crowcroft, from the sharp-edged gears of the trap into which the young man had fallen, that I would do.
“Take some comfort from my words.” Her evident distress enabled my speech; she had turned from me, attempting to conceal the tear that had coursed from her eye. “However well-founded your apprehensions of the Future, we at least know that nothing more dangerous threatens us, than these clattering, hissing instances of my father’s handiwork.”
Evangeline turned again toward me, her eyes now wide with astonishment. “How is it possible that you could believe such a thing?”
“Mere logic is the proof,” I said calmly. “Of all matters mechanical, my father stood at the pinnacle of human ingenuity. As appalling as his creations are—and I have seen more of them than any other person has—they nevertheless represent the limits of what can be accomplished along these lines. It’s obvious that any subsequent technician could do better—or worse, as the case might be.”
“Oh! Mr. Dower!” She looked upon me with pity. “There is clearly so much of which you are not yet aware. Has no-one spoken to you of the Iron Lady?”
“Such a terms seems familiar,” I allowed, “but rather more as an historical reference, than in a context of technological advance.” Evangeline sprang from the seat beside me, her hand shielding her mouth as though to stifle a cry of dismay. I awaited any explanation as to the cause of such high emotion; instead, she turned and fled from the room, abandoning me to my now multiplied perplexity.
CHAPTER
10
Greater Pressure Is Placed
Upon Mr. Dower
A YOUNG lady’s fretting should not concern you.” Stonebrake gazed out the carriage’s window as he spoke. “We have matters of more consequence with which to concern ourselves.”
“You heard of which she spoke?” To a large degree, I was not surprised. Back at the townhouse from which we had just departed, he had manifested himself immediately upon Evangeline’s departure from me, indicating a strong possibility that he had been eavesdropping upon our conversation.
“All of it. And not for the first time.” Outside the carriage, the dark city shapes rolled by, swathed in the vapours emitted by the swarming steam pipes. To one with his eyes closed, it might have seemed that we were traveling through some tropical rainforest, so warm and moist was the moonlit air. “Lord Fusible’s daughter, despite her many charms, is one of those tiresome individuals who view the Future as some dark pit to which Humanity is madly rushing, in order to throw ourselves upon whatever razor-sharp crags lie below. Attitudes such as that are basically gloomy and unhealthy; you would think that one as young and full of vitality as herself would know better. I ascribe it as the result of reading too many popular and sensational novels, which is a pastime that afflicts many of the coming generation.”
As the attitudes derisively attributed to the young woman were in their essence shared by me, I made no comment on them. Instead, I hazarded a more factual enquiry: “She spoke of some things, of which I confess I am still ignorant—”
“Imagine that.”
I let that comment slide by as well. “Specifically,” I continued, “there was mention of some entity she named as the Iron Lady. It seemed to arouse considerable trepidation in her. Are you familiar whereof she referred?”
“Of course,” allowed Stonebrake. He folded his arms across his chest, letting his chin sink toward them. “As would be the raggedest urchin scurrying barefoot through London’s gutters.”
The surliness of his response caught me unprepared. In our so far brief acquaintance, I had become used to a certain level of enthusiastic spirits on his part, bordering on the maniacal. Before this moment, his mood had seemed as perennially elevated as though he had already laid hands upon those fortunes whose imminent arrival he anticipated. Now he seemed immersed in sullen reflection, the shadows of which clustered about him as though they were personally appointed storm clouds.
“Is there a chance that you might elucidate upon them to me?”
“For God’s sake, man.” He turned his wrath-filled scowl upon me. “Do you believe it is my responsibility to instruct you in every slight detail of the world? You ask about things which are common knowledge; so common as to be near the province of infants in their cradles.” He shook his head, indicating the dismay produced by his contemplation of me. “If you are ignorant of these matters—as well be unaware of the ground beneath your feet!—it is the damnable fault of no-one other than yourself. While you were sequestered in your mouldering little village, you might have raised your head from your slumbers now and again, and surveyed the aspect beyond your window.” He sank back into the carriage’s seat. “You exhaust me, Dower.”
“Very well,” I said stiffly. “It had been my belief that we were embarked upon an endeavour that was to be of mutual benefit. Such remarks as you have just made indicate that you have thought better of that effort, and that you regard my continued association with you as being more burdensome than beneficial. So be it. I can easily say farewell to London, and make my own return to those rural haunts I previously frequented.”
“Do so, and you are a dead man.” Stonebrake’s sullen torpor was quickly dispelled, with sufficient force as to allow him to seize the front of my shirt and pull me toward his fierce expression. His eyes narrowed as he spoke through gritted teeth. “We are not engaged upon an enterprise designed for your amusement. Our futures have become tangled with the interests of serious men, who expect a return upon their investment. People such as Fusible and his associates did not become as wealthy as they already are by letting the odd farthing slip through their fingers. It’s not a game with them.”
“It had not been my assumption that it was.” I drew back as far as possible from him. “What makes you believe that I’m not as committed to the enterprise as yourself?”
“Inde
ed; exactly so.” He loosed his choking grasp upon my garments and dropped himself heavily into his portion of the carriage’s seat, his anger seeming to have evaporated as quickly as it had come upon him. “You’ll have to forgive me, Dower; while you were engaged in conversation with that ridiculous Viscount Carnomere, with his tatty furs and silly notions, I was having a less pleasant conversation upstairs, with Fusible and his friends.”
“I gather that it somehow did not go well for you.”
“To put it mildly,” said Stonebrake. “While his lordship might have displayed an affable façade in public, I can assure you that he is considerably less so when encountered in private. It would seem that he and his associates were not as amused by their reception of the various accounts of your dalliances back at Featherwhite House as they had previously portrayed themselves as being.”
“My dalliances? I’m not quite certain that I know to what you’re referring.”
“Do I have to spell it out for you? I was trying to be discreet in this regard, in order to spare your feelings. But if everything needs to be rendered explicitly for you, so be it: The subject of their remarks was your recent unfortunate involvement with your father’s creation, the steam-powered Orang-Utan.”
Again, that miserable beast—or contraption, to be more precise. My mood darkened as I envisioned the device once more.
“Excuse me,” I said. “But the damnable thing pressed its attentions upon me, rather than the other way around. I hardly see how I can be held to blame for those events, however sordid they might appear to others.”
“Nevertheless,” continued Stonebrake, “I was given to understand by Fusible and the others—rather strenuously, I might add—that the accounts, at least in the versions that reached their ears, indicated a paucity of serious intent as far as you are concerned. They have invested a great deal of money into investigating your father’s creations, in particular those that have come to be lodged at Featherwhite House; your larking about and making a fool of yourself with one of the machines reflects poorly upon a man of your tenuous position.”