The Constantine Affliction

by Tim Pratt

  A Cage of One’s Own

  The carriage pulled in through the oversized doors of a warehouse, which closed after them, and then Ellie and Winnie were herded into the interior gloom. The space was echoing and vast, with birds fluttering in the rafters, and great heaps of twisted ironwork piled up at seemingly random intervals on the hard floor, along with large objects covered by sheets. Gray light filtered in through windows high up close to the ceiling, and a single alchemical lamp of the tall free-standing variety cast a pool of light in the dimness. “This way,” Carrington said, prodding Ellie in the side with the tip of Winnie’s parasol, herding them toward the light. “Into the cage.”

  Ellie drew up short, staring. The nearest pile of scrap metal resolved in her light-starved eyes into a great metal cage, of the sort seen at the zoological gardens at Regent’s Park, suitable for confining ferocious lions or tigers or leopards. “You mean to cage us?”

  “Would you prefer being tied up with ropes and chains?” Carrington said. “I could be persuaded to go that route instead. My employer wishes a captive audience, but he left the specific method of that captivity up to me.”

  “Tying them up might be best.” Crippen emerged from the shadows—he was the one who’d shut the door after them, Ellie surmised—and cracked his knuckles. “You can’t trust a woman, especially if she’s got a frying pan or a flower vase near to hand.”

  “I will bow to your expertise in such matters.” Carrington didn’t bother to hide his sneer, obviously considering himself superior to Crippen. As if he wasn’t someone’s dog as well. “What say you, ladies?”

  “The cage will do,” Winnie said, in the tone of one consenting to be sold a new settee for the parlor. “It seems roomy enough.” She strolled into the cage—the ceiling was just inches above the top of her head—and Ellie swallowed her trepidation and followed. Carrington swung the door shut and fitted an enormous iron key into the lock, turning it to produce a clank that seemed to ring in Ellie’s ears with a distressing finality. “See to the horses, would you?” he called to Crippen, who grumbled and then set about leading the animals and the carriage away.

  Carrington dragged a wooden chair close to the cage, near the lamp, and sat down, beaming at the women inside. Ellie stood with her back against the bars in the far corner, while Winnie lounged close to the front, elbow resting on a crossbar, one ankle crossed over the other, managing to look entirely at ease. Carrington glanced around, watched Crippen lead the horses off into the darkness, and returned his gaze to his captives. “I’m so sorry I don’t have separate accommodations for the men and the women in your party,” he said. “I know it’s terribly uncivilized. You don’t mind, do you, Freddy?”

  “You are a cad, sir,” Winnie said, in a tone that dripped with ice. She turned to Ellie. “I should tell you something, Ellie, if only to spoil Carrington’s cruel fun, though I’m not sure why he’s taken such an elemental dislike to me. It was only a glancing blow across the face with a parasol. I’m sure a man with a face as eminently slap-able as his has suffered worse. Ellie, I must confess—I was not born a woman. Until two years ago, I was a Frederick, not a Winifred.”

  “Oh, boo,” Carrington said. “Spoilsport. I’d planned to draw that out a bit more, with many vicious remarks about your private parts. What will I do to pass the time now?”

  Ellie blinked. “You… are a victim of the Constantine Affliction?”

  “I’d never call myself a victim of anything,” Winnie said, “but, yes, I contracted the illness. I was not always… cautious in my choice of intimate friends, I’m afraid.”

  Ellie had met people transformed by the Affliction before, but only in the course of researching her articles. She’d begun to think of Winnie as a friend, and to find out there was the mind and soul of a man in that body was a shock. She blurted out the first question that came to mind: “Does Pimm know?”

  Winnie raised one elegant eyebrow. “Yes, of course. We’ve been best friends since we were boys. When I… changed… I knew my family would not be understanding about my new station in life. Far better for Freddy, who was always an unreliable chap, to take a long vacation in America without prior notice. Pimm offered to make an honest woman of me.”

  “But—but do you—” Ellie blushed.

  “Oh, heavens, no!” Winnie said, and actually shuddered. “I know some people who are transformed find their, ah, preference of partners changed as well, but I feel no attraction to men, which is in some ways deucedly inconvenient. And even if I did want to be intimate with a man—with Pimm? Never. It would be incest, practically. No, dear, we are roommates alone, our marriage a fiction, almost entirely for my benefit.”

  “Then is Pimm… ah…”

  “A mandrake?” Carrington said cheerfully. “An invert? A devotee of certain Greek philosophers? Yes, indeed, I’ve been curious about that myself—what did the two of you get up to together at school, Freddy, that made marriage seem such a natural progression in your relationship?”

  Winnie ignored him, seemingly with ease. “No, dear,” she said gently. “Pimm quite likes women, when he can tear himself away from his work long enough to notice the fairer sex.”

  “But to marry you… it means he can never marry anyone else…”

  Winnie nodded. “That is, in fact, a source of great conflict between us. I refused his offer, initially, but Pimm has a strange conviction that he would make a terrible husband, and that our arrangement would spare some other woman the misery of his late nights working on cases—”

  “Oh, please, the man’s a drunk by most accounts,” Carrington broke in. “Quite the detective when sober, of course, but how often is that? Though it’s jolly good of him to recognize his weakness and want to spare a woman the shame. Anyway, your marriage isn’t legal—you’re still a man, Freddy, in the eyes of the world.”

  “Freddy is gone,” Winnie said. “I am Winifred. Ask anyone.”

  “What does anyone know? We know the truth, and there are ways to prove it, as I’m sure you well know. A hair of yours, a hair from your old life, a dash of magnetic fluid, a sympathetic link established—we can prove Freddy and Winifred are one and the same.” He shrugged. “Not that we’ll bother. We have no reason to want to ruin Pimm, really. I just thought Miss Skye should know to look upon you with suspicion, Freddy. You were a rake when you were a man, and I understand you frequent salons with a keen eye for any followers of Sappho—”

  “I do not recall asking you to speak with our guests,” a voice said from the shadows.

  Carrington flinched like a beaten dog at the sight of the onrushing boot. “I’m sorry, master.”

  “Your pettiness exhausts me, Mr. Carrington,” the newcomer said, still in darkness, beyond the reach of the alchemical lamp’s light. “Forgive him, ladies. He grew up impoverished, and has a profound bitterness toward those who ate regular meals as children. His nature and upbringing conspire to give him a nasty tongue, especially when speaking to his betters. Apologize, Mr. Carrington.”

  “You have my most profound apologies,” Carrington said, in a tone that Ellie would have sworn was sincere, had she not known better.

  “Is that you, Sir Bertram?” Ellie called.

  “Indeed it is.” He approached, a tall and well-attired man, holding a walking stick of some peculiar metal. He approached the bars, squinted, and then began to chuckle. “Oh, my,” he said. “It is a pleasure to meet you again, Miss Skyler. Or, should I say, Mr. Jenkins?”

  “What, they were both born men?” Carrington said in bewilderment.

  A Note from the Underground

  Pimm hurried up his front steps and through the door, hoping to find Freddy—and, dare he hope, Ellie?—inside, but the apartment was deserted. He sighed, and took the opportunity to refill the flask he’d emptied that morning. He was just putting the funnel away when a knock sounded at the door.

  “Just a moment,” he called, walking to the door. He opened it to reveal a filthy street boy of nine or ten s
tanding uncomfortably on the steps, shifting his weight back and forth as if on the point of dashing away. “Are you ’alliday?” he mumbled.

  “I am.”

  “Mr. Adams sent me with a message.” The boy’s eyes darted in all directions, as if expecting attack at any moment.

  “Indeed? What message is that?”

  “He said you’d give me a half-crown.” Now the boy looked at him, directly and defiantly.

  “Make it a half-sovereign.” Pimm took a coin from his pocket and held it between his thumb and forefinger, out of the boy’s reach. “The message?”

  The boy chewed his lower lip in thought—apparently a nervous habit, to judge by the state of said lip. Then he dipped his head in a nod. “He says come see him straightaway. He has news about somebody named Mr. O. I’m to show you the way in.”

  “I think I know the way—” Pimm began.

  The boy shook his head. “Not this way in, I don’t think.”

  “That sounds ominous,” Pimm said. The boy didn’t answer, either because he didn’t understand the remark, or didn’t deem it worthy of comment. Pimm flipped the coin to him, and the boy snatched it from the air and made it disappear in an instant. “Lead on, my good man.”

  “It’s a bastard of a walk,” the boy said. “Can you hire us a cab? I never rode in one before, but you look like you could afford it.”

  The boy eventually led them to the same broken-down district Pimm had visited previously, but when Pimm suggested they approach the alleyway that led to Adams’s laboratory, the boy shook his head. “It’s all piled up with stones and rubbish,” he said. “Two big men knocked down some posts with sledgehammers and a whole wall fell down. It’s blocked up proper.”

  “Why?” Pimm said.

  The boy shrugged with the simple eloquence of one who does not know, and does not particularly care to know. Instead he took Pimm through a warren of leaning buildings and narrow alleys, and finally to a small courtyard in back of several forbidding buildings, close enough to walled Whitechapel to smell the whiff of greenish alchemical vapor escaping from the vents in the dome.

  The boy picked up a long wooden pole from a pile of rubbish, slotted it into a metal grate on the ground, and heaved the grate free, revealing a hole that was approximately the same circumference as Pimm himself, with a wooden ladder leading down. “I’ll go first,” the boy said, and descended as Pimm watched him vanish into the gloom.

  This was too elaborate to be merely a ruse to rob him, Pimm decided, and chose to follow. As he descended, far enough down to make the light above fade to a distant circle, he wished he’d worn more practical clothing. He was dressed more for a business meeting than a spell of spelunking. At least he’d worn decent walking shoes. Though when he reached the bottom of the ladder, and stepped in something that softly squished, he wished he’d worn less decent shoes.

  Light suddenly flared as the boy lit a lamp—not alchemical, just a bit of candle stuck in a tin dish with a wire handle. Pimm squinted at the old brickwork around them. “We started out crawling down into a drainpipe, but we’ve broken through to something deeper, haven’t we? Was this a cellar?”

  “Dunno,” the boy said. “Mr. Adams says London is like a trash heap, with things piled on top of other things, but the other things are mostly just more London, from a long time ago.”

  “True enough,” Pimm said, and followed the boy’s flickering light through the darkness. They ducked through holes smashed through stone walls, crouched—Pimm did, anyway—through narrow tunnels with dirt ceilings, and finally, after so many turnings that Pimm lost all sense of his position in terms of surface geography, pushed open a roughly-cut wooden door and emerged into a corridor where electric lights were strung up on wires above. Broken bits of brick were scattered all over the ground, and a sledgehammer leaned against the wall, as if the entryway had just recently been smashed open. “Adams’s laboratory?” Pimm said. “How remarkable!”

  “I’ll leave you to it then,” the boy said, and disappeared back into the tunnel without further farewell, taking his light with him.

  “Wait!” Pimm called, but the boy did not return. Pimm had tried to pay attention to all the turns they’d taken underground, but he didn’t entirely trust himself to find his way back out again with a guide. He’d best find Adams. Perhaps the man could draw him a map back to the surface after he delivered whatever message he had.

  Pimm checked his walking stick to make sure it seemed operational, and patted his pockets to confirm the presence of his pistol, along with one or two items of Freddy’s invention he’d brought along in case Value proved to take disappointment violently. Adams had never threatened him, but a man who could remove a human brain so easily was probably not to be underestimated. “Adams?” Pimm called. “I received your summons.”

  “Down the hall, my lord,” the hoarse voice called, and Pimm proceeded in the proper direction, ducking low to pass through what was less a doorway and more another ragged hole smashed through a wall. He emerged into the familiar main room of Adams’s laboratory, though the slab was, blessedly, free of corpses today. Pimm glanced toward the brain in the jar, attached to its convoluted tubes and brass fixtures, and suppressed a shudder. Was the poor thing still aware? Did the woman not deserve the peace of death after her suffering?

  Adams lurched into view from behind a shelf full of large clay pots, wires emerging from their lids. He seemed to be favoring his injured leg more than usual, dragging it after him, and when he turned his head, Pimm realized he’d dispensed with his mask.

  Pimm stared, and Adams reached up, touched his face, and winced—at least, Pimm thought he winced. It was hard to tell. “Apologies,” Adams said. “I will hide my face.”

  “No need, sir,” Pimm said, controlling himself. “This is your home, and you certainly need not hide yourself here on my account.”

  “No, no. I would rather you listen to my words than be distracted by my figurement.”

  Surely he meant disfigurement, Pimm thought, but didn’t say so. Adams retrieved his white mask from a long table and fastened it on, then sat on a stool, gesturing for Pimm to take a seat as well. “Thank you for coming,” Adams said. “I was afraid you would not receive my summons before I departed.”

  “You’re leaving the city, sir?” Pimm said.

  Adams nodded. “I am no longer as welcome in this city as I once was.”

  Ah ha, Pimm thought. Value had said much the same thing. Was Oswald severing all ties with his less-than-savory associates? And did that severing involve things being literally severed? Like, say, jugular veins?

  “The time has come for me to move on, once I make some… final arrangements. But I thought, before I left, I could pass on some information you might find interesting, in your capacity as a criminal investigator.” Adams coughed, a terrible, rasping noise, and pressed his hand to his chest, as if suffering a pain there. “Ah. Though calling such acts merely criminal is an understatement. I refer to nothing less than treason.”

  Pimm leaned forward. “And who, may I ask, is the traitor?”

  “You know I work for Abel Value. But, in truth, Value and I are both employees of another man—”

  “Bertram Oswald.”

  Adams inclined his head. “Indeed. You are a keen investigator. What have you learned about Oswald?”

  “I’m fairly certain he’s involved with the clockwork brothels, and may be the creator of the mechanical courtesans himself.”

  “That is true,” Adams said, and Pimm thought he detected a hint of amusement in the disfigured giant’s voice. “That is scandalous, perhaps, but not criminal.”

  “And far from treasonous,” Pimm agreed. “I have also wondered… with no proof at all, mind you, just something I’ve mused about… whether Sir Bertram may have been involved in the creation of the Constantine Affliction?”

  “Ah, that certainly would be a crime, wouldn’t it?” Adams said. “If you could find a statute that covered such a thing. Pr
obably the deliberate creation and release of a plague could be considered akin to, oh, a mass poisoning? The difficulty would be in proving such an act. I know Oswald’s laboratory and original samples were destroyed in a fire that was by no means accidental. Once the plague was loosed and proved suitably contagious, there was little need to maintain his facility to manufacture more. Which is not to say he doesn’t have a few vials set aside against future needs. The toxin is quite effective when injected through a needle, or slipped into food or drink and ingested.”

  Pimm whistled. “Can it be possible? For a man to create a plague?”

  “Nature does it,” Adams said. “Without even trying, through a series of endless mindless iterations that don’t even warrant the term ‘trial and error.’ If a man like Oswald turned his intellect toward the problem, of course he would find it tractable. He could never quite get the mortality rate as low as he liked, I’m afraid, and he never intended for people to die halfway through their transformations. He only wanted to change people, and to see what effect such transformations would have on society, but such a profound physical alteration could not be accomplished without occasional deaths.”

  “And he started with Mabel Worth as his first patient?”

  “His first patient that survived, at any rate,” Adams said. “Well done. You are a bright man.” Pimm was annoyed that the huge anatomist sounded so surprised. “Imagine what you could accomplish if you did not allow liquor to dull your nerves. I do not know all the details, but I understand Oswald approached Mabel Worth and… offered to make a man out of her, and fund her expansion into greater criminal realms, in exchange for the use of her illicit connections. Mrs. Worth—soon Mr. Value—allowed Oswald to infect the prostitutes in his employ, spreading the disease throughout society. Though society has proven strangely intractable to the changes wrought by the Affliction. I think Oswald anticipated rather more social upheaval, perhaps a sudden universal realization that men and women aren’t so different, genitalia and certain anatomical differences aside—that a mind, as it were, is a mind, and that one’s sex does not necessarily define one’s character.”