‘Bigwig!’ Lyle raised his eyebrows, Thomas did his best not to huff at Tess’s shouted interruption. She waited until she was sure she had their complete attention, and then, smiling brightly, folded her arms, treated them to her least crooked smile and said, ‘I were just goin’ to say, seein’ as how you two were blatherin’ on ’bout narcotic stuff, as how maybe you’d need a sample of the cake thin’ in which there were all this poison thin’, and if either of you ever went an’ treated me with a little respect as one of my professionatanism deserved, then how I might have just what you went an’ needed.’ She reached into her pocket, and pulled out a fistful of crumbling dark cake. ‘You didn’t really think as how I’d go an’ leave grubs behind, now did you?’
The lights burnt late in Horatio Lyle’s house.
They burnt in the guest bedroom, where Thomas Edward Elwick read by dim candlelight a book lifted from the great stacks of papers on Lyle’s study floor, whose title had been nothing more than a mathematical code and whose contents, for all Thomas could tell, appeared to have been written by a man who spoke no language but multiples of eight.
They burnt in Tess’s bedroom, where she sat huddled with her knees to her chin and read Mrs Bontoft’s Practical Advice. Lyle would, she imagined, be a little irritated to discover that the book was missing from his jacket pocket when he next went to look for it, but he would quickly become distracted by other concerns like chemical reduction, magnetic induction and people trying to kill him, so Tess wasn’t greatly worried.
Her lips moved silently as she tried to muddle through the fat plodding words.
It is a truth of our times that more often than not, a parent will die before a child has reached maturity. Mothers will die in childbirth, a risk only increased by the more children they bear; fathers engaged in manual labour will often pass away before their time. In many cases, hard though it be to bear, such a thing can be accounted a blessing as well as a grief, for there are few means to support the elderly and it is unnatural to turn out a member of the family who is too old to work - and yet this is a practice more commonly done than confessed to. A child does not need the burden of feeding its parents, let alone before that child has reached a mature age. As maturity embraces the comprehension of all things, then let the child comprehend this: that their parents are mortal, and it is their duty to honour, support and obey in both life and death all that their fathers and mothers command and bequeath. The sooner they accept this reality, the swifter they shall learn and develop into successful citizens of the empire.
For a long while, Tess thought about these words, with the book in her lap. Then she reached down, tore out the page with a long slow ssssshhhllllipp! of thick rupturing paper, touched its dangling tip to the candle, and watched it burn to ash.
In the basement of Lyle’s house, Horatio Lyle Esquire, a gentleman too busy to own a hat, sat with his chin in his hands and watched liquid drip, one slow drop at a time, into the bottom of a glass funnel. He was aware that there were probably more charismatic ways to spend his time, but on the other hand, you never knew whether the next drip would be the one that made the entire thing catch fire, and somewhere in the boredom of waiting for chemical processes to do their thing, was the fascination of waiting to find out.
He had, in truth, never before attempted to isolate narcotic substances from cake, and wasn’t entirely convinced that it could be done without causing irreparable contamination of the sample. But Horatio Lyle was not a man to run away from a challenge, and so he sat, and waited, to the sound of Tate snoring gently at his side.
Someone was watching the house.
She doesn’t sleep like ordinary people do.
She doesn’t do anything like ordinary people do.
This thought gives her a good deal of pride.
The fact that she was the only one in the still deadness of the night to be awake to see the carriage pull up in front of the main door, and the clown get out on the pavement side, caused her rather less delight.
The church bells struck across the city.
Once, then twice. St Paul’s, St Peter’s, St Anne’s, St Giles’, St Mark’s, St Luke’s, St-Andrew’s-in-the-Wardrobe - although no one ever really enquired what St Andrew was doing in the wardrobe to begin with - from Westminster to Bow they struck, each in their own key, each to their own time.
And in the house of Horatio Lyle, Sissy Smith dreams of . . .
Run away to the circus!
And Thomas dreams of . . .
Father looking old.
And in the laboratory, snoozing peacefully at Lyle’s feet, Tate dreams of . . .
Dinosaur bones, great big fossils from great big reptiles with huge yellow eyes that look down at little dogs and don’t really care because they’re big and dogs are small and who’d hurt a fluffy dog anyway? Not a dinosaur, that’s for sure . . .
Horatio Lyle, his head on the table in front of his experiments, dreams of . . .
Old Harry Lyle, eyes bright with wonder, explaining, ‘Water will expand when cold, a crystalline form. No snowflake is ever the same.’
In the biggest bed in the biggest room in the house (‘Cos you don’t understand what it is that ladies need, Mister Lyle, but I is gonna tell you - we needs the biggest room.’), Teresa Hatch dreams of . . .
Black cupboards perhaps now it is tomorrow or perhaps now or perhaps now perhaps at this moment they’ll open the door or perhaps at this perhaps if I hammer and shout they’ll let me out let me out! it must have been a day it must have been two and must have been for ever please let me out I’ll never speak words never again, so quiet in the cupboard so quiet and LET ME OUT!
And wakes, gasping for breath, dragging the blanket up to her neck, heart beating in her brain.
And because she is the only one awake in this sleeping, dreaming house, she is the only one who hears a sound like . . . click-thump . . . like an almost nothing sound, so infinitely small and harmless and tiny that it shouldn’t have mattered, didn’t matter, didn’t mean anything and yet . . .
If you were savvy, if you were smart . . .
If you were, in short, the kind of girl who knew about locks . . . it sounded a hell of a lot like someone trying to ease open the front door.
But this being the house of Horatio Lyle, a man who understood that, yes, there were nasty people out there and, no, sometimes they couldn’t be reasoned with and, yes, when you were an eccentric inventor with a taste for irritating people with very short tempers and no sense of humour, sometimes there would be consequences - because of all this, no sooner had Tess heard the unmistakeable little click-thump of the pick sliding into the front door, than she heard the thwap-pop-argh! of a hundred volts being pumped straight into the tumblers of the door, up the lock pick and into the arms of whoever it was trying to break in. She reflected that, under normal circumstances, being mildly electrocuted while trying to open a door illegally would discourage most meddlers. It was therefore testimony to how much trouble they were in that rather than run away, as would have been the sensible reaction of the average thief, this would-be housebreaker threw aside his scorched lock picks, and set about breaking down the front door of Lyle’s house by brute force.
Which was why, as the doorframe began to splinter, Tess was already halfway downstairs, heading for the laboratory, and accelerating.
CHAPTER 9
Break-In
Had anyone, other than the one person who did, paid attention to the events outside Lyle’s house on that lamp-washed night, they might have been surprised to see the strangest gathering of housebreakers as had ever assembled to do wrong. A man wearing a ridiculous purple cloak, with a moustache that stuck out further than his ears, was sucking on a pair of scalded fingers; two more men, sporting old-fashioned Napoleonic side whiskers and cavalry uniform from that time, all gold braid and tight trousers, strutted imperiously up and down outside the house, while a man wearing a lion skin across one shoulder and white trousers that warped under the pressure of his straining t
highs, slammed a shoulder wider even than his head against the front door. Downstairs, at the basement entrance, a man dressed like a Spanish dancer, all cloak and mane, drew a knife from a sheath on his arm, flourished it dramatically like a conductor’s baton, and threw it, tip first, at the nearest window.
All the time, posted in the street like a guard, stood the organ grinder. His hair was white, his nose was round, his chin badly shaven below his pendant lips. His eyes - above all, people noticed his eyes - stared unblinking like diamonds in a corpse’s skull from above a fixed smile. All the while he wound the handle on the side of his little mechanical organ, oblivious to any sort of criminal protocol regarding discretion in burglaries, while on the roof, a tiny monkey, nothing more than bones and coconut skull, danced in its little red hat to the tinkling of the circus song: Alas my love, you do me wrong, to cast me off so discourteously . . .
For that, right there, was what they were: the circus, who, rather than waiting for Lyle to come to them, had come to Lyle.
Tess moved at speed. It wasn’t running, it wasn’t scuttling, it certainly wasn’t walking, but it was a frantic speed that meant the hands at least got the job done even before the mind realised that the job needed doing. In the laboratory where he slept, Tate shuffled and growled, nose twitching at the distant smashing of a window, teeth slipping out beneath the ripple of his lips as a new distant sound intruded on his senses. He smelt . . . lead and mud and dust and. . . and grass . . . definitely grass . . . and fabric and horse manure and . . . and other kinds of dung that he hadn’t even smelt before, and Tate thought he had smelt every kind of manure there was to smell, and metal and oil and grease and cheap soup and something else, as well, something . . . familiar. Not quite alcohol, not quite opium, something not quite sharp, bitter and organic but in between. He growled, opened one lethargic eye, saw the half slouched slumbering shape of Lyle in the fading lamplight and noticed that, on the table in front of his pet human, a half full glass tumbler of clear white liquid was slowly filling with a milky precipitate.
Ears twitched. This took some time, since Tate was composed of a very large percentage of ear relative to the rest of him, and the ripples only died away when the tips of the white-brown stained ears reached the floor and came to rest. He heard little clanking metal notes being struck by little clanking metal handles, that he supposed were what Tess (his favourite pet human, the one with the biscuits) would have called ‘music’. This strange human phenomenon, one that seemed to serve no useful purpose as far as Tate could tell, had an irritating, low-pitched rhythm and seemed to originate from outside the heavy wooden door of the lab. It was accompanied by the more traditional sounds of Lyle’s house - the regular kh-thump kh-thump of a great human shoulder slamming against the front door and the shicka shicka shicka of breaking glass being pushed aside from somewhere near the kitchen. Someone was breaking in, they were breaking into his human’s house, and the most useful pet human in these sorts of circumstances, was lying asleep in front of an experiment that was starting to bubble.
Tate considered all his options.
He reached the most viable conclusion, and firmly bit Horatio Lyle on the ankle.
Thomas woke with a start.
He thought, Interesting. I didn’t know men could scream so loudly.
He thought, Men screaming? What a ridiculous notion. Men don’t scream. Women scream. Women scream when mice appear and other delicate womanly things like that. Men don’t scream because it’s - Well, it’s just not the done thing.
Consciousness after a long sleep was a slow process for Thomas Edward Elwick at the best of times.
He thought, wait, wait, wait. Gentlemen don’t scream because it’s not the done thing, but common people - common people might be an entirely different matter, not bred for it, you see.
Not bred for it? shouted that part of his brain that was already figuratively halfway up the trousers and reaching for the shirt. Not bred for working twelve hours a day in a coal mine at constant risk of collapse, not bred for battle against native hoards angered at the civilisation of their barbaric lands, like India or China and other savage places, not bred for a life spent in the company of rats and cholera - not bred for not screaming? Besides . . .
Besides, agreed the rest of his mind, which was finally catching up with the better part of his brain, let’s be honest, you’re not exactly in the company of gentlemen here, are you?
A moment, while Thomas shuddered towards full consciousness.
He thought, So was that Mister Lyle who just screamed? And why can I hear the sound of an organ grinder?
Tess was in the parlour, lit by nothing more than a trickle of lamplight through the small window above. She could hear footsteps on the floorboards above her, and as she worked she whispered under her breath, almost inaudible over the beating of her heart. ‘Oxygen, oxygen, oxygen . . . where’s the bloody mask?’ Tess swept thick bundles of drying herbs off their shelves as she rummaged through the stores. ‘Bloody mess!’ she snapped in frustration. ‘Oh, yes, such a bloody organised bloody scientist bloke.’
With a sudden cry of joy, Tess pulled out something from a chest of drawers that to Tate’s eye looked little more than a leather sack, and smelt of all the worst by-products of amateur tanning. Even Tess’s insensitive human nose wrinkled in distaste as she pulled the thing over her head, covering her entire skull so that just a pair of eyes peeped out through a pair of spectacle-like circles stitched into the fabric. Somewhere close - too close - she heard a door creak open and bit back the desire to scream for Lyle. I ain’t bloody screamin’ till the bigwig does, else I won’t never hear the end of it. She pushed the drawer shut, grabbed a pair of charred work gloves from a table, dragged them onto her small hands and ran for the opposite side of the room.
Before she left, she reached up for the gas lamp, or perhaps, more exactly, for the thing that looked like a gas lamp embedded in the wall, turned it on but didn’t bother to strike a light.
Thomas walked uneasily down the corridor, a candle in his hand.
He could hear sounds in the house.
Instinct said, Run run run for God’s sake. This is not a gentleman’s house. Of course it’s not good news. Of course it’s not, why don’t you run?
But against what was essentially sound instinct, a lifetime of good breeding and upbringing said, No no no. Surely it’s a misunderstanding. I wouldn’t want to seem a fool now, just a little misunderstanding. It will sort itself out soon.
It was a testimony, therefore, to the strength of instinct that, as he rounded the end of the corridor and saw the door to Sissy Smith’s bedroom open, rather than advance and demand an explanation as his father would have, he carefully blew out the candle, and wondered where the nearest steel poker was.
Inwardly, good breeding rolled its eyes and sighed at so many years of fine work undone as Thomas crept towards Sissy Smith’s door.
Tess ran downstairs into the darkness below Lyle’s house. There were gas lamps set in every wall. As she ran, she opened the valves in every brass pipe so that the long, slow sssssss of the unlit gas began to shimmer and twist on the air.
Below - a long way below, close enough to below so that she could smell the old sewers washed with tidal trickles from long-dead rivers - she looked round the darkness of the lowest room, this other room, the laboratory where even Lyle didn’t like to go unless he had to, and saw the thick black pipes in the walls that supplied the house.
Sometimes Tess hated Lyle’s approach to ‘non-lethal’. She didn’t like dead things, and didn’t want to kill anyone. Of course not, not at all. She just didn’t like the idea of being deaded any time soon herself, let alone by a . . . whatever it was, a whoever it was, who kept on playing, relentlessly playing that damn organ!! What kind of bloody burglar played the bloody organ on a job?! It was unprofessional, gave her whole chosen industry a bad name!
There were hidden ways out of Lyle’s house, of course there were. You didn’t annoy that m
any people with that much power and so few scruples without building ways out that others wouldn’t see: down through the sewers, perhaps, or up over the rooftops. Tess knew about them, had eyed them up on the first night of her acquaintance with Mister Lyle, but then, that wasn’t really the point, because if - whoever it was, whoever played the organ, while they came in through the front door - if they were looking for anything of Lyle’s, it was almost certainly going to be Sissy Smith. She knew she had what Lyle would call a ‘tragic lack of verifiable evidence’ for this assumption, but more importantly, she knew she was right, and that meant she couldn’t just run away. If no one stood up for the nobody, then who’d stand up for her?
She didn’t like this place, this old abandoned cellar that Lyle had once made his main workplace. In one corner was a darker patch of empty space where formerly there’d been a machine of magnets and coils. Across the ceiling were scars where a blast had taken out chunks of ancient stone. Round the door were burn marks from twisted magnetic wires, and on the floor, a lingering dark tracery of stuff that only she, Lyle, Thomas and dead not-quite-men had known for blood. This had been the room where it had all begun - the adventures, the men with the green eyes and the fear of magnets, the dead things and the lives saved - and it occurred to her now, that the only reason she wasn’t afraid of the things she’d seen was that there’d never been a moment to think about it, not in a dark place like this.
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