The Dastardly Miss Lizzie

by Viola Carr

  “Ha ha!” shouted Lizzie, delighted. “That’ll learn the steel-faced sally!”

  Eliza reeled, the shock of what she’d said—what Lizzie had said with her mouth—sinking in. Damn it, Lizzie! But too late to take it back.

  Veronica’s metal jaw hung stupidly. Inside her visor, little blue electrical signals flashed frantically back and forth. Flabbergasted.

  “How quaint,” said Eliza coldly, but her pulse still jabbed at her to scream, laugh in Veronica’s face, attack her again. “No longer used to being defied? Perhaps it will recall you to proper manners.” And she grabbed her skirts to flounce away.

  “Not so fast.” Veronica’s hand twitched, and a weapon gleamed in it. An ugly black contraption, with a glittering green glass phial where the electrical coil should be.

  Eliza’s throat corked. With a terrified squawk, Hippocrates fled up the stairs and away.

  Veronica advanced, visor glittering with twin pinpoints of red. “I heard your phonograph. Clever of you. I should have known Crane would give the game away. Question is: What will you do about it?”

  Eliza stammered, heart pounding. “I-I’m sure we can work something out—”

  “Sadly, no.” The green liquid in Veronica’s weapon winked evilly. Some kind of nerve poison. Convulsions and screaming, an agonizing death. “I can cover for you no longer. Do you deny that your lover Remy Lafayette is a sorcerer and a lycanthrope?”

  She knows! hissed Lizzie fiercely in her blood. Wring her scrawny neck before she says anything else, or I will.

  Alarmed, Eliza backed off. Alone, in a room full of corpses with a half-automaton Royal Society zealot. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Do you deny that you and said Remy Lafayette IRS conspired to murder the Countess of Lovelace and escape the Royal’s justice?”

  “Veronica, please, I don’t know what you’re—”

  “Do you deny you’re guilty of unorthodox practices? That you deploy heretical substances, devices, and contrivances to pervert the good name of science? That you’re plotting to poison His Majesty the King? That you are a sorcerer and an alchemist, and you deserve to burn?”

  Eliza’s insides melted, a puddle of despair.

  This was it. This was how she ended. The fate she’d feared for so many years.

  She trembled, shrinking. How she longed to shout in defiance, marshal her arguments, deploy every glib denial and excuse and decoy she’d ever invented to save herself.

  Don’t just stand there, you limp-brained clod! screamed Lizzie in her ear. Do something!

  But it was too late. Veronica knew everything. The Philosopher wasn’t here to pull rank. Remy wasn’t here to talk Veronica down. All Eliza could do was let it happen.

  “Guilty.” Veronica grinned, showing black metal teeth like a shark’s. “But you know far too much to risk due process. Oh, look. You resisted arrest. You tried to escape.” She raised her poison pistol, finger creaking on the trigger.

  “Wait—uhh!” Eliza choked, her throat clawed by invisible hands. And snap! Like a writhing serpent, Lizzie whiplashed out and punched Veronica Burton in the face.

  Crrunch! “Take that, you humorless tart. Ha ha!”

  Veronica flies backwards, her face a mess of torn skin, metal cheekbones ripped bare. My knuckles ache and bleed . . . but it’s me, Lizzie Hyde, by God, popped out so hard and fast, my hair springs from its pins. My body swells, a rush of giddy blood, and a clip on Eliza’s corset snaps, buttons popping off onto the floor.

  Burton’s expression is priceless. Her jaw hangs, those teeth glistening. I laughs meself wretched, guts aching. “O-ho-ho, you nosy she-dog. Now you really know our secret!”

  We’ve done it at last. Changed in front of a Royal Agent and lived to tell the tale, and fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.

  But Burton’s already dragging that pistol up to fire. We won’t live much longer if we stand here thumb-up-bum.

  So I grab Eliza’s bag and leg it up the stairs.

  Out into the coppers’ shop, skidding across the tiled floor past a trio of gaping constables, with Burton on my heels screaming “Stop that woman! Sorcerer!”

  That murdering bastard Flash Toby blows me a kiss as I pass. No time to make him regret it. Two at a time down the steps into Bow Street, leaping puddles and dodging carriages. Crackk! Burton fires into the crowd. People scream and duck, and a man falls, writhing, white foam bubbling from his mouth.

  Out o’ my way, you glocky squirts. I batter through a tangle of spectators, and doinng! I bounce off a horse’s arse and nearly fall under a swerving velocipede. Past the Opera’s glass arches, out onto Long Acre. If I can reach Seven Dials, we’ll lose her.

  Burton screeches again. “Sorcerer! Stop her!”

  But I’m gaining. She curses, her yells ever more shrill and distant. I duck between a cart’s whirring wheels and out the other side, and now there’s a rushing line of traffic between us. “Kiss my alchemist’s arse!” I yell, and sprint off laughing, only to skid on my heel in fright.

  Enforcers. Two big ones, muscle grafted to brass bones. Must be bits of Eliza popping out on my face, because their red eyes dilate, and electric pistols whip from holsters with twin mechanical snaps!

  Oops.

  I whirl, Eliza’s bag banging my hip, and tear off down a by-street thick with rubbish and soot. The Enforcers run after, brass clodhoppers going plop! plop! plop! through the mud. Where’s Eliza’s little pet? Lost in the crowd. I leap a dead dog, swerve around a corner, burst through an impromptu fist-fight. Still the metal-arse monkeys follow, scattering the crowd, spreading out to hunt me down. Fuck me, the bastards are quick.

  Zzap! An electric shot sets fire to the lintel above my head. My legs are filled with lead. I’m stumbling. My skin ripples, muscles wrenching, as if my bones—her bones—are fighting to escape. My vision blurs, her spectacles fogging. Hair flaps over my face, dark and blond and dark once more.

  Dizziness strikes like a madman’s axe. Can’t stay out of sight, not like this. Eliza, can’t you see you’re crueling us here?

  I-me-her-we splash through a fountain—who knows, maybe Enforcers track scents like bloodhounds—and lurch towards Great Earl Street, where the twisting lanes are full of dead-end courts and scissor-blade traps. Enforcers got no friends there. If I can make it to the rookery, we’re safe.

  But it’s still a long, long way.

  A hand grabs our shoulder. It’s the green-turbaned Ottoman with the gold-wired beard, what offered me sweet smoke and oblivion. Only this time he’s sneering, a curved blade glinting wickedly in his hand. “Jack Dawkins says how-do,” he snarls, and pulls back to strike . . . but my face ripples and pops, and he sees her face, my grin on her lips. He falters, mouth flapping in horror.

  I grab his knife and stick it into his guts. Squelch! Blood gushes. He jerks, a wet contorted groan. The Sultan’s man, a-killing for the Artful? Shit. Can’t trust no one to stay bought in this town.

  But no time to bemoan his treachery now. “There’s sweetness, you rotten turncoat,” I snarl, and shove his toppling frame into the crowd. My hands are coated in warm blood. Her hands, slim and genteel. There, Eliza. Eddie would be proud. Now you’re a killer, too.

  People scream and jostle. “Murder! Sorcerers! Run for your lives!” A shop window smashes as a velocipede hurtles into it, rider cartwheeling over the handlebars. Someone starts throwing rocks. Blokes pummel each other, fists swinging. A girl leaps on an old cove and claws for his eyes. A nice old riot you’ve started, Eliza. Ha ha!

  “Death to the Royal!” I holler with her voice, shaking her fist in the air. “Long live the sorcerers! Liberté du Sang!” And I grab her skirts and pump her legs and make her run, run, run.

  The Enforcers come after, hurling folk left and right, walls smashing and bones breaking like sticks. Our lungs are filled with burning gin, toxic and unbreathable. And the fuckers still come on, plop! plop! sizzle! With every step, they’re closer. Ha ha! How’d you like them apples, El
iza?

  Mud splashes to my knees. I drag up my flapping wet skirts—when’d they get so god-rotted heavy?—and stumble on. My face swells like the plague, her face forcing its way out, my legs clumsy with her bones. Across a square I sprint, round a darkened corner, and trip over a log some dipshit’s left in the road.

  Pain lurches up my shin, and as I go flying, muscles cramp hard like lumps of wood and I try to hold her back but I can’t and spoinng!

  Eliza hit the ground, her breath knocked away. Head swimming, she staggered up to run.

  And slammed full tilt into Seymour Locke.

  “Follow me,” he hissed, “unless you want to get shot.” And he dragged her into a dingy room that stank of rotting onions, and banged the door shut.

  A FIXED AND UNALTERABLE THING

  ELIZA BROKE FREE, SCRABBLING FOR HER WEAPON. Locke could still be the killer’s accomplice. Lying to confuse her, distracting her at the crime scene while Wyverne burned down her house . . .

  “Follow,” snapped Locke again, wild eyes burning in the dark. And he scuttled under a low doorway and out into a shaded yard.

  Outside, Enforcers’ footsteps pounded the mud. Still hunting for her, Eliza, the killer sorcerer, thanks to Lizzie’s cursed antics. Enforcers with guns, versus a potential murderer.

  Clutching her bag, she stumbled after Locke.

  Across the yard, dodging a sullen dog that snarled over a scrap of bone. Under a lintel, down some moldy steps, a leap across a scum-stained ditch, up another rickety wooden stair—and in suddenly glaring gaslight, they emerged into a wide, respectable street. Horses snorting, ladies promenading, crossing sweepers dodging the tramping feet of carriages and omnibuses, coils crackling in the tart smell of hot aether.

  No Enforcers in sight. Back to the real world. And Lizzie was nowhere to be seen.

  Catching her breath, Eliza collapsed against the bay window of a chandler’s shop. “Thank you,” she panted. “I shan’t forget this. Now I really must be going—”

  “Just smile and look natural.” Beside her, Locke inclined his head towards a trio of red-coated soldiers, who patrolled nonchalantly, carbines slung and black hats carefully brushed. Locke wore a frock coat with a glittering watch chain, his frothy blond hair stuffed under a bowler hat. More like a swell mobsman than the bookish scientist she remembered.

  “Natural?” she whispered fiercely. “Veronica Burton just tried to kill us. She’s an enemy spy!”

  He gazed across the street, as if they were merely friends chatting. “Of course! We know too much. Ephronia thought she was selling Interlunium for the war effort. She was. Just not ours.”

  Oh, my. The secret meeting in Soho, whispering to that strange man with a withered arm and a disturbingly familiar stone on a silver chain around his throat. Our mutual friend, Beaconsfield’s note had said. A French agent. La Belle et la Bête. “So Burton killed the others to cover her tracks? First Antoinette, then Crane and Ormonde at the same time? How?”

  Casually, Locke checked his pocket watch. “She likely has minions to do her bidding. Trust me, Doctor, whoever gets their hands on the project will win this war.”

  “But Burton had the Foreign Secretary’s authority in her pocket. She doesn’t need to kill anyone. It makes no sense—”

  “I know you visited Starling,” cut in Locke impatiently. “Give me the book and let’s be done.”

  Her mind whirled, unconvinced. “Why is everyone obsessed with this book? I don’t have it! That worm Wyverne stole it. It’s gone.”

  Locke’s eyes held murder. “But it’s mine. I need it. The clues must be in there. I need to find that hidden prototype!”

  “You don’t understand. Interlunium . . . Wyverne’s already finished it.”

  “Rubbish,” snapped Locke. “Wyverne knows nothing.”

  Eliza stared. “But I saw him. He can make himself invisible. He’s been spying on you, your friends, me. He’s heard everything!”

  But Locke just laughed, mocking. “His infernal refractive indices? A charlatan conjurer’s trick. You’ve still got no idea what we’ve made, have you?”

  Her guts chilled. “Then what? Tell me!”

  He checked his watch again. “Change of plans, Doctor. We must stop them, or they’ll kill us both. Agreed?”

  “Stop who doing what? I don’t understand.”

  “Don’t ask questions,” hissed Locke. “Just do as I say. Go home to Cavendish Square. Lock yourself in and don’t answer to anyone. At a quarter past seven tonight, go to Henry Jekyll’s laboratory—”

  “How do you know about that?”

  A steely glare. “Didn’t I say don’t ask? Jekyll’s laboratory. You’ll know what to do when you get there.”

  “But—”

  “A quarter past seven, Doctor, and don’t be late—” His eyes saucered. “Watch out!”

  A body jostled her, knocking her flying. She hit the filthy pavement on her backside, her bag dropping into the mud. She glimpsed a slim figure, dark coat and fawn trousers, ragged hair falling beneath a top hat—and the miscreant scooped up her bag and tore off.

  She scrambled up. “I say, give that back! Stop, thief!”

  But he—or she?—had already darted away.

  She punched her thighs, frustrated. Notes, her autopsy tools, a bottle of elixir, for heaven’s sake. At least her optical was safe in its case on her belt. She was only lucky Hippocrates hadn’t been snoozing in there.

  Bloody thieves.

  But her fingers twitched, unsettled. Another coincidence? What if that thief were the killer? What if, like Locke, the killer thought she still had the book? Or some other incriminating evidence?

  She racked her brain for the bag’s contents. The evidence from Ireton House. Phials, slides, the blue scarf—and the phonograph roll from Ephronia Crane’s pocket, too, which implicated Veronica Burton for treason.

  But Veronica would simply have shot Eliza, or arrested her. She wouldn’t bother with a clumsy smash-and-grab. Besides, she wasn’t convinced Veronica was the killer. And the thieving rascal had been too small to be Byron Starling, too thin to be Wyverne. No, this was someone else. Some long-haired reprobate in a dirty coat. The famous Blue Scarf again.

  If Burton was the murderer, who was Blue Scarf? A minion, as Locke had suggested? It didn’t sit right. This zealous, metal-brained Burton would surely take matters in hand herself. No need for skulking about. She had all the authority she needed.

  Sighing, Eliza turned back. “Did you see that? Typical. That scoundrel filched my bag—”

  But an empty wall greeted her. Once again, Seymour Locke was gone.

  Damn it. She banged her skull back against the window. What a vexing fellow. He’d told her nothing. She hadn’t even asked him if he’d known Ephronia was with child. What had he meant about Henry’s laboratory? What would happen at a quarter past seven?

  But she shuddered, as the wider implications of what Locke had confirmed sunk in.

  Veronica Burton, a French spy. If Liberté du Sang were secretly buying Project Interlunium, it must be a weapon. A bomb, some kind of cannon, one of Marcellus’s mind control machines.

  She laughed, feeling a little hysterical. Spies are everywhere—even in your HOME! Perhaps a perfectly calibrated toaster, or a better mousetrap. She’d no way of telling. She’d just have to wait for tonight.

  In the meantime, she needed to return to Cavendish Square. Preferably without being dragged to the Tower by Burton’s over-zealous Enforcers. Grab an omnibus or two, dash across a few parks, maybe the Electric Underground to shake off any pursuit.

  Eliza sidled into the street, glancing left and right, and searched her pockets. One shilling and threepence. It’d have to do. Burton probably knew her new address. It didn’t matter. Once she’d barricaded herself inside, she wasn’t coming out for anyone until she’d sent for help to Inspector Griffin in person.

  “Right y’are.” Lizzie skipped gaily amongst the puddles, no longer ghostly but frighteningly o
paque. “Let’s be off, lickety-split.”

  “Stop drawing attention!” hissed Eliza. She wished she’d never dabbled with that prickly blue mixture. Could this new, disruptive Lizzie burst out whenever she chose? Would she never leave Eliza be? “Are you insane? Jumping out in front of a Royal Society agent who just accused us of murder and sorcery? Are you trying to get us burned?”

  “Should I have let her shoot us? You just gawped like a stuffed bird,” said Lizzie loftily. “I saved our lives.”

  “And that’s why you stabbed that poor man, is it? To save our lives? Or just to make me angry?”

  Lizzie gestured rudely with two fingers. “Screw you. I’m better off without you.”

  “Fine. Don’t come back.” She glared, and with a snarled curse, Lizzie vanished.

  Hmph. So much for her.

  Where was this, anyway? Red-coated soldiers everywhere, muskets and swords bristling. Enlisted men, with no love for the Royal. That would work in her favor. Typically the regiments had nothing but scorn for the Philosopher’s rules. An alchemist, you say? Right y’are. Boil us a nice cup o’ tea, can’t you? An electric omnibus clanked up on metal feet, packed with commuters, men back-to-back on the roof and ladies inside. “Leicester Square!” yelled the red-faced conductor, swinging from the spiral steps and waving a yellow top hat. “Regent Street!”

  Lizzie was already on board, grinning from the foggy window. “No room for you! How’d you like them apples?”

  Ignoring her, Eliza gripped the railing and heaved herself up.

  A brassy hand dragged her back down.

  Her heart somersaulted, and she tensed to flee.

  “Telegraph!” The clockwork messenger bounced on long hinged legs. It wore a black tailcoat and top hat over its metal skeleton. “Jekyll, Eliza. Telegraph!”

  “Away with you, idiot.” Feeling foolish, she grabbed the ticker tape.

  SLASHER. MRS FLETCHER’S. GOOD NEWS.

  ATTEND SOONEST. HG.

  She brightened. Surely “good news” could only mean one thing. Harley’s career was saved, and hers, too, and be damned to the Commissioner and Reeve both. “Lizzie, look! Perhaps we got him!”