Her first thought, which she dismissed as soon as it occurred, was that she had found the gates of Hell. Those would surely not be set with nails in the shape of antique crosses. As she looked up and to the side, she saw the stone wall and carving above the gate, the Lamb with his banner of the Chi and Rho.
She came perilously near to bursting out laughing. It was a monastery, of course, here in this remote corner of the Alps, and divine Providence, or George Fraser’s map, had led her straight to it.
There was a bell in a niche, out of reach of the wind. When Emma rang it, she started: the sound that emerged was not the simple clangour of clapper on bronze, but a clear and supernaturally resonant phrase of liturgical Latin. The bell, she realised, was a mechanical construct, and very finely done.
The echoes faded into the roar of the storm. A lesser portal opened within the greater one; a shrouded figure stood against a backdrop of flickering light.
The voice that invited them in was female, low and well modulated, speaking in French. Emma could discern few details of her habit, save that it was dark and voluminous. The nun glided ahead of them across a wind- and rain-swept courtyard, then up a wan-lit stair. Emma saw as she passed them that what she had taken for small and feeble lanterns were a variety of electrical illumination: globes of glass encasing arcs of incandescent light.
Someone in this remote fastness, it seemed, had expanded upon a lesser-known experiment of Sir Humphry Davy. Even in her near-frozen and exhausted condition, Emma was intrigued.
So much so, in fact, that she nearly forgot to maintain her façade of enfeebled femininity. Fraser however had kept it well in mind. He pressed close behind her, driving her upward when she would have slowed to investigate one of the dimly glowing lamps.
For strictest verisimilitude she should have fainted against him, but that, even for the sake of her art and her life, she would not do. In truth, she would rather die.
The stair ended at last in a long whitewashed corridor, at the end of which was a chamber of baronial magnificence. The ornately carved details of its beams and panelling bespoke the later Middle Ages; its rounded stone arches were older still, crowned with Romanesque stonework, faces of beasts and birds and semi-human grotesques. The lamps that cast light upon its curiosities however were as distinctly of the modern age as those that had lit the stair.
Their guide had left them at the door. She who received them, rising from a chair that would have well pleased a mediaeval baron, was clad in a habit of fine black wool and snowy linen that recalled no order Emma knew. The details of the scapular, the workmanship of the silver cross that adorned it, and the specific folding and arrangement of the wimple and veil were distinctive but unknown to her. The woman within the habit however was of a mould that she knew well: brisk, intelligent, with a penetrating eye.
This might not be a friend, but she could well be an ally. “I welcome you to the Abbey of Our Lady of Perpetual Adoration,” she said in lightly accented English. “I am Mother Agatha.”
Fraser had assumed his most charming and gentlemanly semblance, bowing over her hand and kissing her ring of silver set with a ruby like a drop of blood. “Mr. George Fraser of Rosings in Derbyshire, at your service, reverend abbess. My wife and I are most grateful to have found sanctuary on such a night.”
Emma heard herself so titled, and so summarily altered in marital state, with such a mingling of shock and outrage and perilous mirth that she judged it most advisable to sink down in a faint. Not all of it was feigned: her head was light with hunger and sudden warmth after hours of brutal cold. Her knees were well inclined to co-operate in the venture.
Fraser, as she had taken care to arrange, was well out of reach. The abbess however was not. As those firm arms caught her, she tried her utmost to speak with her eyes, to flash a warning. She could not tell whether she succeeded, but in one respect she had won the day: when sturdy nuns were summoned to carry her out, they bore her not to a falsely connubial chamber but to the infirmary.
As Emma had calculated, there was nothing Fraser could do to prevent it. This was an abbey of holy women, and his putative bride was manifestly ill. He was swept off to some suitably safe and, Emma hoped, securely locked and guarded chamber. She lay in the very bosom of the abbey, on a narrow cot of immaculate cleanliness, closest to the hearth that warmed the long narrow room. The fire on the hearth was of mechanical origin; it burned steadily, without the uncertain flicker of a living flame.
She counted two rows of six beds each, none occupied save for hers. The sister who tended her had, it seemed, taken a vow of silence, but her face and eyes were eloquent; she had a smile of quite remarkable sweetness. Without a word spoken, Emma learned much from her: how to warm frozen limbs without danger to the extremities, how to brew a decoction that warmed the heart as well as the stomach, how to train her ear to hear the music of Heaven.
It must be the chanting of nuns in the chapel, and it must be fairly close by, for even with the chimney to enhance the sound, it was strikingly near and clear. They were vowed to perpetual adoration, Sister Infirmarer indicated to her. They sang forever the praises of the Almighty, untiring and unceasing, filling the abbey with the echoes of their devotion.
That was most admirable and indeed most beautiful, but Emma found more of interest in the casual curiosities of the abbey. They had a notable mastery of the electrical sciences, and of the mechanical arts no less. When Emma confessed her hunger, that which brought the light collation of bread sopped in warm milk and honey was indubitably an automaton. It bore little resemblance to a human servant; it was of such size and aspect as to recall one of the monkeys she had seen in great numbers in India, but with none of the mischief that made the creatures so amusing. This thing of glass and metal and leather strappery glided smoothly to her bedside, unburdened itself of tray and cup and bowl, and waited, silent and expressionless, for her to dispose of their contents.
The persistent rumour of automata endowed with immortal souls gained no corroboration in this one, and yet Emma found much about it to marvel at. Not least was the fact that the Church had banned the creation or the use of automata, and punished with excommunication any who should be guilty of either. Nonetheless here was an abbey under the apparent rule of Rome, practicing the forbidden arts and betraying no indication of guilt.
She was beginning to understand what had brought George Fraser here, though she did not know in whose interest he might have come. Someone must have provided him with the map and the knowledge to find this place, and made it worth his while to search out whatever secrets it might hold. Emma was a bon-bon: a day’s dalliance, and through her fragility and her membership in the gentler sex, a means of entry to this most unusual nunnery.
Her satisfaction upon eluding him faded considerably. A man travelling alone would get no farther within these walls than a carefully warded guesthouse. A husband whose wife was ill would in all due course insist upon visiting her.
An hour’s rest in a warm bed, with bland but sufficient sustenance, had restored her considerably. Her body longed to turn that hour into a long and luxurious night’s sleep, but instincts honed through a singularly eclectic childhood warned her against any such temptation.
The nuns had taken away her soaked and sodden garments and left her in the bare sufficiency of a linen nightdress. It was heavy linen however, tightly woven and surprisingly warm. In a cupboard by the outer door, she found a pair of soft leather shoes. They were wide and somewhat short for her feet, but they shielded her soles against the chill of the stone floor.
She paused in the doorway, every sense alert. The wave of sound from the chapel had risen in volume, as if the number of voices had doubled and trebled. The sisters, with Sister Infirmarer among them, would be celebrating one of their nightly offices.
Emma intended merely to reconnoitre her surroundings, with a quick return to the infirmary before the office was concluded, but as she slipped down the long corridors and crept up the narrow and invari
ably electrically lit staircases, she realised that the abbey was much larger than she had supposed. That portion which the nuns inhabited was substantial enough, but above and behind it she found a veritable fortress, a shadowy realm of barred doors and steep staircases and long, echoing corridors.
Beyond the doors she heard the clanking of metal and the hissing of steam; as she passed she breathed in the unmistakable effluvium of the mechanical arts. These chambers, if she could but penetrate them, bade fair from their evident size and extent to rival the workshops of the Sublime Porte in Constantinople, which were the greatest in the world—though many a proponent of British wit and ingenuity would sincerely beg to differ.
How peculiar, and how intriguing, that such a place should be hidden away in a remote and inaccessible mountain fastness. What arts and skills the sisters must have required to import so great a quantity of glass and metal—for even if they had their own forges, they still must bring in the ores and the means to transmute them—and what wealth they must command in order to have achieved it, taxed even Emma’s agile imagination.
She would dearly have loved to master the lock of one of the noisier chambers, but time was passing and she would be missed. She retraced her steps with care, negotiating the maze as swiftly as she could, prepared to vanish into shadows at the slightest sign of a passer-by.
She met none however until she had come within two passages and a staircase of the infirmary. A shadow flitted across the light. Its lines were indistinct, but she could not mistake the distinctly arrogant turn of that head, even in the extremity of stealth, nor was it likely that any other person in this place should bear with him the faint odour of tobacco, leather, and Dr. Jayne’s hair tonic—unusual choice for a British gentleman; it was, like the man, not quite what it should have been.
Prudence bade her give him a wide berth and return to her sanctuary, but her darker self observed that the infirmary was behind him; all too likely he knew that she was abroad in the abbey.
If so, he seemed singularly unperturbed. He paused in the light of the landing to perform a familiar gesture: reaching into his greatcoat and drawing forth the well-worn packet. She glimpsed enough to recognize the plan of a building, heavily annotated in a clear, bold, yet delicate script.
He peered, and frowned. “Damn you, Ada,” he muttered. “Either you’ve drawn it backwards, or your connection sold you false information.”
Emma’s brows rose, not only at the content of the words but at the accent in which he spoke them. Mr. George Fraser, in the privacy of his own company, spoke with the distinctively flattened vowels of Boston in the United States.
Certainly that did explain the Dr. Jayne’s. His execrable conduct toward a young woman of no family and poor circumstances was, alas, all too common on both sides of the Water.
She could not now return to her bed; neither curiosity nor her debt of gratitude to her hostesses permitted. When he went on up the stair, she inserted herself into one of many crowding shadows behind.
Midway through the Night Office, the novice who had been set on watch brought word to Mother Agatha. With apologies to the Divine Artificer Who after all had ordained the time, the abbess caught Sister Magdalen’s eye and nodded. She genuflected then, crossed herself, and slipped out of the chapel.
Sister Annunciata still breathed, with assistance from the mechanism that Sister Theodosia had designed. The sister herself attended it, clad as was her custom in the working habit of the order: a plain gown cut spare and straight, with sleeves that could be rolled and fastened out of the way; an apron, in this instance of leather rather than linen or cotton, in place of a scapular; and a veil abbreviated to a turban. Her hands, scarred and stained with fire and chemicals, played upon the controls of the mechanical lung with the delicacy of a musician plying a harp.
She looked up at Mother Agatha’s arrival and dipped her head in brisk respect. “The vessel is ready?” Mother Agatha enquired.
“Ready and awaiting its inhabitant,” Sister Theodosia replied.
Sister Magdalen slipped into the cell with two of the younger sisters. They set rods into the appropriate receptacles in Sister Annunciata’s cot and raised it like a bier. For a moment then they paused, while Sister Agatha signed the dying woman with the Cross, and Sister Theodosia released the brake on the mechanical lung. The machine stood up on legs fashioned like those of a lion.
Slowly as if in procession, with the machine pacing beside the bier, they made their way out of the dormitory. Others joined them as they passed, until they were a procession indeed, winding through the maze of the abbey toward the inner chapel.
Fraser appeared somewhat stymied by the abbey’s maze of chambers and passages, but as Emma had before him, he soon found the less liturgical regions. Unlike Emma, he was at leisure to investigate; his set of picklocks was extensive and impressive, though much of it, in Emma’s estimation, was distinctly inferior to a sturdy hatpin.
The chambers he managed to open, apparently at random, proved to be a lavatory, a cavernous, deserted, and long unused kitchen, and a set of apartments suitable for a person of means. The person appeared to have been female, from the evidence of the dressing gown and slippers arrayed on the silken coverlet of the bed, yet whoever she was, she had not been in residence in some time. Although the rooms were kept in good order, they had an air of disuse: a light film of dust on the brushes and the hand mirror that lay on the dressing table, a wardrobe empty of aught but a faded cloak and a single delicate boot in the style of a decade ago.
Fraser struck the wardrobe’s door with his fist. “Damnation! I’d give a kingdom for a piece of intelligence that’s less than ten years out of date. Still,” he mused as he turned to survey the room, “she was here. With the other? Possible. She’s not so old, the biddy in charge. I’ll get an answer out of her. She’d be game for a gallop, I’ll wager, with the right kind of persuasion.”
Emma so far forgot herself as to let out a gasp. The very thought of a reverend abbess at the “gallop” with that wolf in gentleman’s clothing was too revolting to be borne.
As quickly as she had betrayed herself, she withdrew still deeper into the shadow that had concealed her. The wind was wild still without; he well might mistake the sound for a gust among the shutters.
Apart from a vanishingly slight stiffening of the shoulders, he failed to react at all. He continued his investigation of the room, prowling its edges, prying into drawers and corners. He found nothing of consequence: a sachet of roses and rue, a ribbon abandoned as utterly as the boot.
At length he gave up the hunt. He restored such disarray as he had caused to what, no doubt, a man would consider its former order, and strode forth from the apartment.
Emma knew all too well that she would have been wise to retreat while he was occupied. Her native bent toward investigation both scientific and otherwise, and her desire to miss no clue as to his purpose here, held her in place.
She was well hidden in the deep shadow between two of the electrical lamps. He passed so close that she could have reached out and touched the sleeve of his coat. He never paused, never glanced aside.
Belated prudence kept her where she was until he had slipped through the door at the end of the passage. That would be the stair either down toward the chapel or up into the realm of mechanical wonders. She waited some time longer, long enough to determine from the timbre of his footsteps that he had gone upward rather than downward, and trod softly in his wake.
He awaited her on the landing just above. His dark coat was a much more reliable concealment than her pale nightdress: she scented him before she saw him, but not quickly enough. Even as she recoiled, he seized her in that unmistakable iron grip.
“Well now,” he said in a tone of the most deceptive good humour. “What brings you here?”
Emma debated the wisdom of a fit of hysterics, but she had had her fill of pretence. She stood rigid in his hands and said nothing save with her eyes. In those she set all the hate that
he had nurtured in her since this adventure began.
He laughed at it. “By God! You’re as plain as a schoolmarm when you’re simpering under your parasol, but naked under a nightgown and glaring daggers at me, you’re damned near beautiful.”
She prayed for him to succumb to temptation and verify the verdict of nakedness, for then she had a hope of breaking free, but he was too clever by half. He swung her about with one arm, clasping her with bruising force against him, and heaved her off her feet, while with the other he fumbled for the latch of the door.
She went limp and began to slip. His arm clamped tighter. Her ribs creaked. Her vision darkened with pain and want of air.
With as little warning as she could contrive, she brought up her knees and flailed. Her feet struck the wall. In the same instant the door burst open. He overbalanced, with her ample help, and fell headlong through the opening.
His grip slackened. She wrenched herself free. He snatched at her nightdress. Fabric tore. Clawed fingers raked down her arm and locked about her wrist. She twisted free.
She shut away both pain and fear with cold and deliberate concentration. Time had slowed. She observed how he gathered himself, tensing to rise. There was murder in his eyes: and he would take care that she did not die quickly.
She had one brief moment to act before he overwhelmed her with superior size and strength. While he hovered between lying on his face and looming over her, in the moment of most precarious balance, she aimed a kick at his jaw.
Her aim was excellent. The poorly fitted shoe, which by a miracle had remained in place through all her struggles, impeded it not at all. His head snapped back.
By the Devil’s mercy, he was still conscious. Even as he fell, he strove to take her down with him.
Shadow Conspiracy Page 27