Steampunk Omnibus: A Galvanic Century Collection

by Michael Coorlim

  "Mr. Dobbson?" Bartleby asked, covering his nose with his kerchief against the sulfuric odor.

  "Did you make greasepaint with mica for the stage magician D'Agostino?" I asked, quick and to the point, before Bartleby started with the small talk. He was my people. I could speak to him.

  "What? Yes. I think so. Possibly." Suspicion crept into his voice. "Why? Who are you?"

  "Do you still make it?"

  With any luck, he'd think us potential clients and let his guard down. Strangers asking questions were cause for caution. Customers could be safely dealt with and forgotten.

  "Only had one man want that slop. Idiot. He insisted on using a white lead base, despite my warnings. The poor girls he coated with it all died of lead poisoning."

  "He didn't care?" Bartleby asked.

  "Men like him never care about what their subordinates go through."

  "Do you have any left?" I asked.

  If he hadn't been making any recently, it was possible that the Spider was one of D'Agostino's old assistants with a supply of the paint. We'd have to compare samples to be sure, but it was a starting point, at the very least.

  "Are you hard of hearing or just simple-minded?" Dobbson asked. "I just told you that it was toxic. Or don't you care about the poor girl you'll have wearing it either?"

  "It's not for use," Bartleby said. "We're investigating a matter for the police."

  His thin frown vanished. "Well, then, you should have said so. If you'll follow me."

  Dobbson stepped back, letting us into the old church's chapel. The pews and other furnishings had been removed, replaced with a number of racks holding commonly available alchemical concoctions for sale. Make-ups, purgatives, abortifacient, exfoliants, analgesics. Along the opposite wall hung a number of sophisticated clocks and novelty clockworks.

  "You're a tinkerer and an apothecary?" Bartleby asked.

  "And author, painter, sculptor, and engineer," Dobbson replied. "The working class likes to keep busy, good sir."

  I chuckled at Bartleby's discomfort. It was a rare thing to see him unbalanced.

  "Wait here. I'll fetch what's left of the magician's greasepaint."

  Bartleby and I busied ourselves looking through the old man's wares while waiting for his return. Most of the clockworks he had on display were toys and gimmicks -- idle fancies that perform no useful functions and serve only to entertain the easily bored. The sort of use of mechanics I despise, so after a brief glance I left Bartleby to it and examined the medicinal goods for sale. Alongside the apothecary staples-- the aloe vera, the chamomile, the fennel, the hemp-- were substances of more dubious use. Wormwood and aconite, hemlock and nightshade. There were some jars that went unlabelled, and I'm not enough the chemist to hazard at their contents.

  "Bartleby?" I asked.

  "Mmm?"

  "D'Agostino seemed to have an odd reaction to your mention of the Queen. Instant obsequious compliance beyond normal, healthy patriotism. I've seemed to notice that quite a bit lately. Is this some sort of recent nationalistic trend I'm unfamiliar with?"

  Bartleby gave me an odd gaze. "My friend, you need to step out of your workshop more often."

  Something in his tone compelled me to drop the subject.

  First five, and then ten more minutes of idle browsing passed before Bartleby glanced towards me with a questioning look. I nodded, and we left the clockworks and herbs behind, heading to the back of the chapel where Dobbson had disappeared to. There were no other exits, save a ladder heading up into the steeple tower above us. Bartleby stood aside as I began to climb, spanner in hand.

  "Dobbson?" I called, ascending into the space above, which apparently served as his bedroom. A simple box mattress sat against the wall, barely leaving enough room for the small wardrobe next to it.

  A streak of red and black fell from the bell tower above before I could climb into the room, breaking my grip on the ladder and sending me crashing down to the chapel below. Sharp knees dug into my abdomen as a rain of powerful fists fell upon my brow, each blow knocking my skull back against the chapel's wooden floor. I managed to get a forearm up to guard my face in time to see a girl--- the Spider, a slight thing dressed in a red and black Jester's motley--- spring back from her kneeling position atop my torso. My face felt raw and numb from her vicious attack, and my lower back screamed as I scrambled back into a half-standing crouch.

  The girl's leap away took her towards the wall beyond the ladder. Her legs folded again as she hit the wall, whatever purchase she managed there sufficing to spring off and away at an angle that carried her past the shocked Bartleby and towards the narrow window. It was thin-- too thin for even the slender girl that had attacked me-- but somehow she slipped through it effortlessly, and was gone into the night.

  Bartleby ran up to me. "Oh god, James, are you alright?"

  "Don't worry about me, go after her!" The fingers I put to my face came away red and sticky. She'd split my lip at the very least, and it felt as though one of my eyes was swelling shut. Thankfully all my teeth were in place, and it didn't feel like my skull had been cracked.

  Self inventory complete, I ran after Bartleby.

  ***

  A few hours later we were back at the church with a small army of Metropolitan Police, searching the place by gaslight.

  Inspector Abel approached with a frown. He had been against hiring outside contractors to assist with a police matter, but when the order came down from the Home Office, he'd had no choice but to comply. "No sign of the old man or the girl. We did find, in his apartment, schematics and drawings of the parade route with a number of choke-points indicated."

  "He's smart," I begrudgingly allowed. "He'll have changed his plans."

  "No he won't," Bartleby disagreed. "It's all the spectacle of the thing, yes? Choosing hard targets, dramatic entrances, the attention-getting greasepaint. He knows we have his plans, and he'll have the girl do her work in spite of us. Imagine the publicity he'll garner if he pulls it off."

  "I didn't think engineers cared about that sort of thing," Inspector Abel said.

  "We don't," I replied.

  "He won't pull it off." The Inspector was adamant. "If you don't manage to catch him, my boys will stop this Spider of his in the act."

  Bartleby and I glanced at one another, not sharing his enthusiasm.

  ***

  The Home Office didn't appear to, either. The next day we were called into a meeting with the Home Secretary, Herbert Gladstone.

  "The Queen's Jubilee is rapidly approaching, gentlemen. The spectacle is vital to the mental and economic health of this Empire."

  "More so than Her Majesty's life?" Bartleby asked.

  Gladstone's face darkened. "Cancelling the parade is an admission of weakness, of fear, something I cannot tolerate even if the Queen were to allow such a craven response."

  "Seeing the monarch gutted on a parade float would be a good deal worse for morale, I'd imagine," I said.

  Gladstone and Bartleby stared at me in abject horror before doing the respectable thing and pretending I'd never said it.

  "It is imperative that the two of you catch this Spider before the parade." Gladstone set a doll atop the desk. Garbed in red and black with a porcelain face it was the very image of the assassin.

  "What's this?" Bartleby asked.

  "Blast if I know. The Scotland Yard found it in the church after you two departed for the evening. It's some sort of clockwork-- see if it gives you some insight into the killer."

  ***

  The doll was incredible. An absolute marvel of clockwork ingenuity disguised as a children's toy. It was capable of articulation impossible by most engineer's standards, and when wound moved with an almost prescient autonomy. The patterns it moved through-- gymnastic routines, capering, mime-work-- were varied and almost human. Its creator was a true master. Sadly, once disassembled, I lacked the skill or tools to put it back together. No matter-- it had served its purpose down in my workshop.

&n
bsp; I joined Bartleby in the dining room to tell him my findings of a supper over cold knots of beef and ginger beer.

  "If Dobbson made the clockwork then he's got to be guild-accredited. We should visit the Academy hall of records and see what they have on him."

  Bartleby put his plate aside. "Well. We'd best hurry, then-- the Jubilee is but days away."

  "What? I thought we had a week?"

  "It's Thursday, James. You've been obsessing over that doll for thirty-six hours."

  "That makes sense. Yes, of course. To the Academy then?"

  "Maybe you should take some time and rest?"

  "I'll sleep when I'm dead." I gave my partner a grin borne on wings of sleep-deprivation, enthusiasm fuelled by my examination of a true masterwork of modern clockwork engineering.

  "That's what I'm afraid of."

  ***

  "Dobbson. Two 'B's'."

  "I'm afraid I'm not seeing it here." Mr. Gregory, the aged clerk at the Academy register's office wasn't a member of the Guild; no guild member worthy of membership would be content with a paper shuffling job. I had known him since my own academy days, and rumour claimed that he'd worked as an administrator since the founding, though that would put his age well beyond the reasonable.

  "Hm. It'd make sense that he'd be using a pseudonym. Still, it's unlikely that a man with such skill wouldn't be a member."

  "What did you say it was that he'd made?"

  "Toys. Dolls. Clockworks of various sorts."

  Bartleby wasn't here to handle the talking, citing an appointment with his own contacts elsewhere. It wasn't a problem, though-- old Gregory was well used to engineers and our social shortcomings.

  "And how aged would you say he was?"

  "Indeterminate. Somewhere between sixty and seventy if I had to hazard a guess."

  The clerk nodded and turned, disappearing between the stacks of folders and walls of filing cabinets. After a few minutes he returned, laden with leather-bound folios. "These are the class pictures of the men in the Academy clockworks program between 1840 and 1860. I don't know if they'll help, but this is the best I can do."

  I thanked the clerk and set about looking through the materials he'd offered me. Class sizes over the last century weren't very large-- even in my own graduating class of 1894 we only numbered fifteen-- but that still gave me over one hundred poorly lithographed clockwork engineers to sift through. Trying to match those almost identical small portraits to the old man I'd met earlier was a daunting task. Bartleby had a better eye for this sort of thing, but the records were for the perusal of alumni alone.

  After a few hours work I'd narrowed the likely engineers down to three possibilities, and Gerald was all too happy to lend me their files. Truth be told, most of those permitted to look through the records--- Guild-members--- didn't have the drive, desire, or need to. I think that the old man was just pleased to be able to at least partially justify the pay he'd been receiving all these years.

  ***

  "Our most likely candidate," I told Bartleby over dinner, "is one Hector Whitney, class of 1853. In 1870, his masterwork was accepted egregia cum laude by the council of Masters, though he never completed the administrative paperwork for advancement."

  "As with your journey-work advancement?"

  "Yes. It's fairly common that we forget the small details. Advancement isn't really the point, you understand? It's all about the work."

  "But in your case they basically took care of all that for you."

  "Yes, and my work was simply maxima cum laude. For a man with this talent-"

  "That makes little sense."

  "No, it does not. Oh, a bit of luck. One of his classmates is still alive. He might have some insight into Whitney."

  "We're running out of time, James." Bartleby reminded me.

  I wasn't concerned. Just one more constraint under which to solve this puzzle, as surmountable as any other.

  ***

  "Hector was the best of us, the poor fellow." Bonner had been a civil engineer at the Nash Conservatory for the last decade, and had worked for the Royal Gardens since graduation. He was kind enough to meet with us in the Conservatory visitor's centre.

  He was a small, wizened man with a surprisingly soft and wheezing voice. "Not only was he brilliant engineer, but a good man. Had the soul of a toymaker. His first inventions were military, yes, but after the birth of his grandson all he made were toys. He took a lot of scorn for that from a lot of short-sighted people, but they shut up when they saw his masterwork. So much talent. So much tragedy."

  "Tragedy?" Bartleby asked.

  "Oh yes. This was just after he'd finished his masterwork-- a man-sized doll with a functional circulatory system. Stunned the lot of us. Nothing compared with what you lads are doing now, of course, but this was back in the seventies."

  "What happened?" I asked.

  "Geopolitics happened. The Franco-Prussian war happened. Hector's daughter and grandson were in Paris when Wilhelm and Bismark's airships lay siege to the city. Killed in the bombing. I think that was what broke Hector's spirit, at last-- he said he was done with the work of men and generals, cleared out his workshop, and disappeared."

  "That's terrible," Bartleby said.

  "His critics called him a toymaker, but he was so much more. Skilled in a dozen fields from medicine to chemistry to mechanics... the world is worse off without him."

  "The Home Office believes he's still alive," Bartleby said. "We're trying to find him. There's a matter of import he can help the Crown with."

  "The Queen?"

  "Precisely."

  "Well. If anyone could come up with a fantastic Platinum Jubilee gift it would be Hector." Bonner seemed ignorant of the irony coming out of his mouth. "I wish I could help you, but I haven't heard from him in over thirty years."

  "If there's anything you can remember, any places he used to frequent, other people he used to see..."

  "Well, there's this church down in Southwark-"

  "We've already been there." I shook my head.

  "Oh. Hm. Then what about his daughter and grandson's mausoleum?"

  "They were transported to London for burial?"

  "Well, no. There wasn't anything to bury. But he had a monument built to them in Abney Park."

  ***

  "The more I consider the matter the more sense it's beginning to make," Bartleby said as we entered the cemetery.

  "What is?"

  We walked along the main path through the Egyptian-inspired gates. I was half-listening to Bartleby, enamoured of the fact that the trees around Abney Park seemed to have been planted in alphabetical order. It appealed to my driving need for orderly structure. Acer... Alder... Apple...

  "Everything. A brilliant engineer, his daughter and grandchild killed in a war, grows disenchanted by the political world of man. He disappears from the world and comes back to kill the politicians and industrialists who represent the powers that be."

  "I don't know, Bartleby. Where has he been keeping himself the last thirty years?" Birch... Beech... Box...

  "Doing what you do. Playing the hermit, forgetting the world, losing himself in his work. Building himself the perfect assassin."

  Cherry... Elm... Hawthorne..." Building? Bartleby, do you mean to suggest that the Spider is some sort of advanced clockwork automaton?"

  "Why wouldn't it be?"

  "Because it's not possible. Even the most advanced of clockworks can only run simple mechanical routines. They can't react to stimuli. They can't make choices. They just do whatever it is that they've been built to do."

  "I'm disappointed in you, James." Bartleby laughed lightly. "Nothing's impossible in this age, you've told me so yourself. What if you combined a clockwork with one of Babbage's difference machines?"

  I scoffed. "I would hardly think that--"

  "And what could you do if you were locked down in your workshop for thirty years, uninterrupted?"

  The only answer I had to that was "a good deal."
Bartleby was correct-- every day the limitations of science and technology were being pushed further and further back. One simply had to look at the work of the chemist Jekyll or the galvanic tragedies in Germany over the last century to see that the world as it is bears little resemblance to the world as it could be. An autonomous clockwork-- it wasn't entirely impossible, even if I myself couldn't see a way to do it. Remembering the complexity of Whitney's masterwork, I had little doubt that if anyone could manage it, it would be he.

  The Whitney mausoleum was Gothic in its architecture, long with a high pointed front archway. Its exterior carvings mimicked a trellis of interlaced tracery with a repeating pattern of trefoils and quatrefoils. The doors in particular were made to resemble cathedral doors, and upon inspection, we found them to be slightly ajar.

  Bartleby drew his pistol as I shouldered the heavy doors open. A lantern in one hand, I hefted a pry-bar across my shoulders and entered. Despite the length of the chamber within, the interior was sparse and empty, containing but two sarcophagi-- one of which was open. I approached it cautiously, length of iron raised, but found that instead of a corpse swaddled in funerary shroud it held a spiral staircase descending down into darkness. Bartleby stuck close to my light, and together we descended deep into the earth.

  ***

  A small light from below grew more visible as we descended, and we found Hector Whitney waiting for us at the bottom of the stairs, in what appeared to be a subterranean workshop. He greeted us with a pistol levelled at my chest.

  "Stop right there." His hands were gnarled but steady. "I'll shoot if you come any closer. Drop your weapons."

  Bartleby slowly put his gun down on the steps, and I followed suit with my pry-bar and lantern.

  "What happened, Whitney?" I asked. Bartleby isn't very useful when faced with the prospect of violence; I knew the talking would be left up to me. "You were such a genius. Your work was amazing."