‘You know what they say about the Demimonde, madam. No-one has any secrets.’
‘Go on.’
‘I understand how independent your people are,’ Soames paused, then rolled out the lie he’d prepared, ‘but what if you knew that the Immortals were interested in moving on you?’
‘What?’
‘Information has come into my possession to indicate that the Immortals are keen to possess some of your machines.’
Damona put her fists together, one on top of the other. Massive fists. Soames wasn’t heartened to see the scabs on the knuckles. ‘Of course,’ she said softly.
Soames was relieved. Paranoia was useful in others, especially when it could be manipulated. The Immortals had indicated no such thing, but the Neanderthal was more than willing to believe it. ‘Quite interested in machines, the Immortals are. They’ve brought a number of interesting devices back from India. Manipulators, they call them, blending magic and mechanics.’ He chuckled. ‘They say they can change matter, move things about without any visible means, even propel people through time.’
‘Hah?’ Damona put a hand to her mouth and rubbed it while frowning furiously. ‘Time?’
Jabez, you are a master! He’d planted multiple hooks, and now it was time to reel in his prize. ‘As a trusted customer,’ he said, ‘I didn’t like to consider your people being wiped out.’
‘Wiped out?’
‘This is what the Immortals are planning, in order to put their hands on your machines. Or so I understand.’
Damona stood. For a heartbeat, Soames thought she was going to advance on him and his hand went to his pocket. His Bulldog might be useless, but he was prepared to give it a chance to bite.
The Neanderthal, however, stalked to the door before turning. ‘Where are they?’
‘The Immortals? Currently?’ The lie came easily to his lips. ‘I don’t know.’
‘You can find out?’
‘I can.’
‘Price?’
This was the nub of the nub of the negotiation. ‘I’d like to suggest an arrangement. If I can facilitate your – how shall we put it? – access to the Immortals, I want to take possession of the real estate where we find them.’
‘You have it.’
She slammed the door behind her.
Soames mopped his brow with a handkerchief, allowed himself a small level of satisfaction as he ticked one item from his list, and grinned up at the rat in the rafters.
Anger mounted inside Damona like steam in a boiler. She seethed. She climbed the shaft that connected the pumping station to a disused railway spur. The Immortals wanted the creations of the True People! She cursed. It echoed from the bricks.
She should have asked Soames for more details. What exactly were the Immortals after? Was it the phlogiston extractor? Or was it the air interchange mechanism?
She punched the wall of the shaft. She was so angry she could hardly walk straight.
She stopped. Her jaw sagged. Could they be after the time machine?
No! Her fury redoubled. She had trouble breathing. She steadied herself against the side of the tunnel. It was cool under her cheek. Soothing.
Soames. Loathsome, cunning but necessary Soames. She would rather tear him to pieces but he had his uses. Perhaps in the future his usefulness would diminish. Then she would see how he’d taste.
Rolf and Magnus were waiting for her. They stood at a collapsed archway. ‘Your armoury is well stocked?’ she asked.
Magnus beamed. ‘It’s in prime shape, Eldest.’
‘How many of your kin can you assemble for a raid?’
‘A raid?’ Rolf gaped. ‘We haven’t raided for years!’
‘Two dozen, immediately.’ Magnus nudged his brother in the ribs. ‘Twice that by the end of the day.’
‘Bring them all to my workshop. And any others you can find.’
‘We shall, Eldest.’ Magnus paused. ‘Who are we raiding?’
‘Leave that to me.’ Damona swung around. ‘Go.’
Magnus lit two lanterns. He handed one to Damona. Then Rolf and he hurried off. They leaped over rubble from the ceiling of the tunnel, joy in every bound.
Damona trudged after them.
True People had once been great raiders. Raids were now few. With their dwindling numbers, the Assembly had voted that raiding was dangerous and needless. Damona had agreed but it hurt. Even when they were so few, what of the warrior spirit? What of their martial skills?
Battle was one of the few times the True People worked well together. A raid might let them know the value of such cooperation. It could help in the project to come.
Damona spat on the floor of the tunnel. The True People today were passive. Lost. Drowning in gloom. She would right this. She would restore their spirit.
Damona climbed a rough stairway. Ruins of an ancient Roman temple. Damona liked the idea of the Romans. She liked their engineering, their building. She also liked Invaders invading Invaders. Any harm they could do to each other was good.
Her grand plan needed warriors. A raid now would help her select a team. Many young people were engineering in the workshop, but not all. Raiding would occupy the others.
Her plan would work. A time machine could be built. Her people were capable. The only uncertainty was the timing. How far back should they go? When did the True People and the Invaders diverge from the common ancestor? A mistake could wipe out the True People as well as their hated foe. Determine the right time. When the numbers of Invaders would be small. Crushing them would be easy. The True People would dominate.
Damona was close to finding the answer. Dr Malcolm Ward was stubborn but he would crack. She would have it.
Damona laughed. It was wheezy, creaky. She put a hand to her chest. If she could find Ward’s son she would have the answer sooner. Much sooner.
Damona slogged through knee-deep water. Cold in the tunnel. Dark. Old. Then she lifted herself up by a rope through a hole in the ruin. Awkward. She lost some skin from an elbow. Finally she wrenched herself into a short tunnel.
It led to the workshops.
Drilling. Clamour. Smoke. Activity. True People crowded into one large space together. A sight unseen for decades. Damona was impressed. She clapped but couldn’t hear it over the din.
Gustave straightened from tightening a bolt. He wiped his face with the back of his hand. He waved to her. He had grease on one sleeve of his green overalls.
The east wall was gone. The space was three times what it had been. No signs of hastiness in the work. The pillars that supported the ceiling were solid, patterned, as if they’d been there forever.
Three separate work areas. The gantry crane had been extended, covering all of them. Cables snaked in and around the girders. Large machines were taking shape in each of the work bays. Each had a dozen or more True People swarming over them. Sparks. Haze. Steam.
Damona wandered about the giant workshop. Inspecting. She was heartened by what she saw.
The pace of construction was remarkable. A single one of her kind could build faster than three Invaders. A team of True People was an elemental force. Machines grew while she watched. Brass, steel, glass. Shaped, welded, moulded.
What made Damona even more satisfied was the demeanour of the workers. Gone was the listlessness, the gloom, the resignation. Faces beamed. Backs were slapped. Good-natured chaffing while two young women heaved at a bar of steel large enough to anchor an Invader battleship. Arguments, of course, over designs, functions, but not harsh, not violent.
And laughter. She hadn’t heard so much laughter for years. Good spirits as the True People dedicated themselves to reclaiming their future.
Damona passed a hand over her eyes. She wasn’t going to cry. Not yet. Not until the job was done.
T
he remains of her unfortunate phlogiston extractor had disappeared. Damona squeezed between a half-constructed sheet metal mill and an electrical transformer. She wrinkled her nose at the smell of ozone, shook her head at the two youngsters who flailed away at the transformers with hammers.
‘Eldest?’
Gustave approached, wiped his forehead. His beard dripped with sweat.
‘The phlogiston supply?’ she asked immediately.
‘We have a new machine already. Over there.’ He pointed at the far wall. ‘Prospects are much better than the old ways, already. Your plans were good.’
Damona nodded. Her grand plan. First, build a better phlogiston extractor. The True People had four of them. Old, slow, inefficient. They produced barely enough to power their subterranean life. A time machine would need much more phlogiston than they could process.
‘The time machine?’
‘Much work done already. Great progress.’ Gustave looked at his hands. He rubbed them together. ‘Hilda has taken your plans. She’s improving them.’
‘Improving?’
Gustave shrugged. ‘She’s very good. Looks at things differently.’
Damona was pleased. She’d always thought Hilda the brightest of the youngest True People. Hilda saw things others didn’t.
‘She is also moving the phlogiston stockpile. The time machine will need it most.’
It made good sense, but Damona was nervous. The stockpile was the work of years. ‘If she thinks it best.’
She looked around the giant workshop. Her throat tightened with emotion. Her dying people weren’t going to slip quietly into the darkness.
Good, she thought. Fight. Struggle. Refuse to surrender.
A huge burst of steam billowed across the workshop. Hoots and catcalls. Someone rang a bell that was decidedly derisory. Every single one of the workers cheered. A white-coated figure threw his hands up and then bowed. I take responsibility for this embarrassing error, his bow said, and I revel in it in front of you all!
Damona was grateful for the cloak of steam. It gave her time to compose herself.
The next day, Kingsley was grateful, and amazed, when Evadne presented him with a new suit before they left her refuge. His stage outfit had become a sad ruin but he wondered where she had obtained his measurements. He gave up wondering when his conclusions made him blush, and instead he admired the deep charcoal wool of the suit and how it went with the lighter grey of the waistcoat and the straw boater.
‘You’re presentable,’ she announced after standing back and subjecting him to the sort of scrutiny he imagined stock agents gave to potential steeplechasers.
‘I’m glad.’
‘And you remember your instructions?’
‘I go to the Imperial Sports Club, ask to be seated at Mr Kipling’s table, and wait for you to bring him along.’
‘Excellent.’
‘And remind me again why going out in public is a sensible idea for someone who is no doubt being pursued by the police for the murder of his housekeeper and the disappearance of his foster father?’
‘Ah. That person, if you remember, was only glimpsed by a somewhat terrified young constable, and looked rather more fiendish than your current debonair self.’
‘What about the desk sergeant at the Hyde Park police station?’
‘You were only there as a young man accompanying Rudyard Kipling, the famous writer.’ She brushed his shoulder with the tips of her fingers. ‘Regardless, you can’t stay in the Demimonde forever, not if you want to resume your stage career.’
‘Finding my foster father comes first.’
‘Of course, and limiting yourself to a Demimonde existence would make that more difficult.’
‘True.’
‘And Mr Kipling has asked to meet there.’
‘Why didn’t you mention that first? And how do you know?’
‘I was working up to it. Myrmidon.’
‘You’ve lost me.’
‘Two answers to two questions. Mr Kipling asked to meet us at the Imperial Sports Club, and I received this message via myrmidon, which confirms that Mr Kipling knows his way around the Demimonde. He found someone who – for a goodly price, no doubt – passed his message on to Lady Aglaia, an old and very strange friend of mine, who found one of my messengers.’
‘But Kipling? The Demimonde? He’s so . . .’
‘Respectable?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Many respectable people move in and out of the Demimonde. It’s important to them.’
‘I imagine a writer might be interested in what he could find there.’
‘Many a tale has begun in the Demimonde.’
‘I hope he has news about my foster father.’
‘I’ll fetch him and we shall find out.’
‘You’ll fetch him? He requested the meeting; can’t he find his own way to the club?’
‘Almost certainly, but I want to observe him a little before we meet, just in case.’
‘Oh. Can we trust him, you mean?’
‘Precisely.’
Kingsley decided that the Olympic Committee knew what it was doing when it built the Imperial Sports Club. The club was near the elaborate confection that was the Palace of Fine Arts, an elegant domed edifice with a covered loggia on the western side of the Great White City – home to the vast Franco-British Exhibition. More importantly, the Imperial Sports Club was close to the stadium for the Olympic Games and provided a venue for the upper crust of society unused to the environs of Shepherd’s Bush, so far from what they no doubt thought of as the comforts of the city.
It was a measure of the writer’s influence that the porter’s disdain for Kingsley’s youth didn’t prevent him from showing Kingsley to a seat in a drawing room. Kingsley sat and waited while the crowd in the stadium nearby cheered lustily at whatever running, jumping or throwing was happening at the moment, while those in the club continued their business in blithe unconcern.
Kingsley envied all of them for living simple lives, untroubled by bloody murder and missing foster fathers.
He put such thoughts to one side and gazed about with what he hoped was the requisite degree of surreptitiousness.
The Olympic Committee had spared nothing in order to make comfortable those whom they deemed necessary for the success of the sporting competition. The upshot was a building jammed full of drawing rooms, smoking rooms and dining rooms, all stuffed with furniture so heavy it had probably needed a team of elephants to drag it into place. The overwhelming decor was dark wood, and it had been applied with lavishness on panels, doors, fireplaces and trout stretchers. This was only leavened by a splash of marble and silver here and there, to remind one that there were things in life other than cutting down forests.
The club was designed to be a place where a chap could read a newspaper and tuck into a lamb chop or two before ambling over to watch our boys give the foreigners a thrashing.
Kingsley had come to this conclusion because he was surrounded by those doing exactly that. Men – or some strange hybrid of man and walrus – stalked about in tweeds and expensive sporting suits, muttering knowledgeably about the deficiencies of the cinder track, or the practicalities of having the racing pool in the middle of the arena. All of them, in the time he’d been sitting in a corner, had glanced at him and wondered from what far-off country he’d come, to be so unwhiskered.
This is civilisation, Kingsley thought as he tried to be inconspicuous in his corner. A great and shining expression of it. The suspicion between nations, the jealousies and rivalries, had been mostly put aside for this manifestation of civilisation. Kingsley decided that if this was what civilisation could do, he was in favour of it.
He also wondered if Kipling were making a point by choosing this place to meet.
A huge clock in the corner opposite, near a piano that looked as if had never been played, told him that just over an hour had passed, which meant that Evadne was half an hour late. Which obviously indicated that Evadne had abandoned him, or forgotten him, or denounced him to the police, who were no doubt surrounding the club at this very moment.
Or had she observed something dangerous about Kipling?
A crackling of newspapers swept through the room as, one by one, the walrus gentlemen lowered their reading matter in profound astonishment. A female had entered their domain! And not just a female, but a young female with snowy white skin and pink eyes!
Relieved, Kingsley stood as Evadne and Kipling approached. ‘I hope they have good medical staff on the premises,’ he said to Evadne, whose lips were twitching with amusement. She was wearing a pale yellow coat over a lavender dress, topped with a sharp vermilion hat that Kingsley imagined deserved the description ‘dashing’. She carried something larger than a parasol and smaller than an umbrella. A parabella? An umbersol? ‘You’ve probably inspired a few heart attacks already.’
‘That, Kingsley, was most gallant.’
‘I’m glad. I’ve always aspired to gallantry,’ Kingsley said. ‘Hello, Mr Kipling.’
‘I’m glad you’re safe.’ The writer shook Kingsley’s hand and studied his face intently before taking them to a trio of unoccupied chairs near a window that looked towards the stadium. ‘After that business at the police station I was distressed. If it weren’t for Miss Stephens’s advising that we should retreat, I fear what might have happened.’
‘Safe is a relative matter, sir,’ Kingsley replied, ‘as I’m starting to understand.’
Kipling gestured with his head. ‘You should be well enough in this place. At least, for the time being.’
‘That, Mr Kipling,’ Evadne said, ‘sounds ominous.’
‘I should hope so. We’ve landed ourselves in some deep stuff indeed.’ He looked about, casually, but Kingsley could see the observer’s eye in the way the writer took in the surroundings. ‘While I’m happy with ominous, I don’t want to stray into the melodramatic, but I need to say that dark forces are afoot.’
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