by Tim Pratt
“Winnie, you can’t be serious!” Ellie said.
“No, never,” Winnie said. “But I can be notorious, and give lectures, and become very rich from the fame, in my own right. But we have to be quick, Ellie dear, because the Queen’s transformation is going to make changing into the opposite sex a cause célèbre, and will doubtless bring the Afflicted out in droves to tell their own stories. But I have the best story, I’m sure. What do you say?”
“But… what about your marriage to Pimm? If you tell the truth—”
“I daresay the marriage will be revealed as a sham,” Winnie said. “It shall be stricken from the books, I’d think. The Queen has promised to exert her influence to smooth over any little… technical difficulties with the Church.” She put one hand on Pimm’s shoulder, but smiled down at Ellie. “Poor Pimm! He looks as if he’s been hit in the forehead with a hammer. See, my lord? I told you I’d think of something. But it seems there’s no need to fake my own death to set you free. I can live my own true life instead. And if I’ve misjudged the public and people are too disapproving, that’s fine—I’ll just move to Paris. Someone might as well use that vast tunnel they’re digging under the channel.”
She knelt and threw her arms around Pimm’s and Ellie’s necks, dragging them down from their chairs to the floor in a three-way embrace. “You had better treat this woman properly, Pimm. She and I have been in battle together. She is my sister in arms.”
“I, ah—” Pimm stammered.
“Oh, dear,” Winnie said. “I’ll have the most difficult decision of my life ahead of me!”
Pimm and Ellie drew back, exchanged a glance, and then frowned at Winnie together. “You will?” Ellie said.
“What decision is that?” Pimm said.
“Whether I should be the maid of honor at your wedding,” Winnie said, “Or best man!”
The Music of Flowers
With Oswald dead, Adam had no particular reason to flee the city. He had no particular reason to stay, either, but habit sent him back to the tunnel near the Serpentine after he finished beating the monster to death. He slipped into a fetid hole in the ground and plodded along a dark tunnel, the ichor of a fell beast drying on his fists. Killing the monster had left him feeling curiously hollow. He wanted to create life, and to kindle love, but he was only skilled at murder, and destruction.
After a time, he reached his workshop. He flung his mask to the floor, where it cracked in two, and then he stretched out on his own operating table, closing his eyes. He never slept, and did not own a bed, but he was so terribly weary, now. He envied mortals their capacity for rest.
A hand brushed his forehead, and his eyes shot open. He grabbed the wrist hard enough to crush bone, but the person who’d touched him did not cry out. She simply gazed down at him, then stroked his cheek with her other hand.
“Margaret,” he whispered. “You… what are you doing here?”
“You must promise you will try not to frighten me again,” Margaret said. “Do not shout, or smash things, when we disagree. Can you promise?”
“I… of course. I promise.”
“I, myself, can make no promises,” she said. “But you saved my life, and as I ran through the tunnels, I thought back on our talks, when I was lost in the dark. I thought of your voice. You are fearsome to look upon, Adam. You know that. And you may be capable of fearsome acts as well. But you have a gentle heart. I believe that. A heart that is capable of love.”
Adam closed his eyes. He held her cool hand in his own. “Oh, Margaret.”
“You said you thought we might visit someplace warm. I… have always wanted to see Spain.”
“We will go to Cordoba,” Adam said, and opened his eyes to look upon her beautiful, perfect face. The perfect thing he had made, given life by a beautiful soul no man could have created. “In the spring. When the scent of orange blossoms fills the air. That smell… it smells like the chiming of church bells, Margaret.”
“I look forward hearing them,” she said.
THE END
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the writers of some of my favorite detective novels, without whom I wouldn’t have invented Pimm—he came to life as a thought experiment, one part Sayers-ish nobleman detective, one part functional alcoholic PI with a troubled past. Ellie Skye is a slightly ahistorical homage to the great journalist Nellie Bly (the novel is set in the year of Bly’s birth). I wouldn’t have written this book without the formative influence of K.W. Jeter’s Infernal Devices and The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers, which introduced me at an impressionable age to the joys of the gonzo-historical novel. I owe a similar debt to the wonderfully weird English mysteries of John Dickson Carr. (The debts I owe to Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf, Arthur Conan Doyle, and some others are likely more apparent from the text.)
Thanks to Jess Nevins, our field’s leading expert on fictional histories, for providing details for some of my little meta-fictional Easter eggs; and to Shannon page for heroic acts of copyediting.
A complete bibliography of research materials would be exceedingly long and likely of minimal interest, but I owe special debts to Murray’s Modern London (1860), Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, Dickens’s Dictionary of London, and Edward Stanton’s astonishingly detailed 1863 map of London (which spent much of the past year spread out across nearly the entirety of my office floor).
My gratitude to Jeremy Lassen at Night Shade for acquiring this book; to Ross Lockhart for his editing; and to my agent Ginger Clark, for handling practical matters so I could concentrate on the impractical ones.
And, of course, the utmost thanks to my wife and son for their tolerance and patience with me over many months of writing, muttering to myself, and wandering around the library for entirely too long at a time.