The Mammoth Book Of Steampunk Part 29

Scores of workers remembered that their daily job was something other than what it had been in reality and set forth each day to meddle; renowned experts in delusion. Steam carriages crashed, a dozen a day, into storefronts, pedestrians, each other. A fellow, believing himself one of the gleaming characters at the Hot Air Opera, rushed up on stage and was cut to ribbons by the twirling metal edges of his new brethren. There was an accident in one of the factories on the eastern edge of town an explosion and then thick black smoke billowed out of its three stacks, blanketing the city in twilight at midday. The police, not quite knowing what to do, and some in their number as deranged as the deranged citizenry, resorted to violence. Shootings had drastically risen.

The gas of the streetlamps ran low and the city at night was profoundly black with a rare oasis of flickering light. I was scurrying along through the shadows back to my office from a critical case of fever an old man on the verge of death who elicited a shot of Margold from me. As I'd administered it, his wife went on about a vacation they'd recently taken on a floating island powered by steam. I'd enquired if she'd had the fever and she stopped in her tale for a moment to nod.

I shivered again, thinking of her, and at that moment rounded a corner and nearly walked into Millicent. She seemed to have just been standing there, staring. The instant I realized it was her, a warmth spread quickly through me. It was I this time who initiated the kiss. She said my name and put her arms around me. This was why I'd stayed in the city.

"What are you doing out here?" I asked her.

"They're after me, Lash," she said. "Everybody even remotely involved with the government is being hunted down. There's something in the collective imagination of those struck by the disease that makes them remember that the Republic is responsible for their low wages and grinding lives."

"How many are after you?" I asked and looked quickly over my shoulder.

"All of them," she said, covering her face with her hand. "I can tell you've not yet succ.u.mbed to the Plague because you are not now wrapping your fingers around my throat. They caught the Quotidian of Health Care today and hanged him on the spot. I witnessed it as I fled."

"Come with me. You can hide at my place," I said. I walked with my arm around her and could feel her trembling.

At my quarters, I bled the radiators and made us tea. We sat at the table in my parlor. "We're going to have to get out of the city," I said. "In a little while, we'll go out on the street and steal a steam carriage. Escape to the country. I'm sure they need doctors out among the sane."

"I'll go with you," she said and covered my hand resting on the table with her own.

"There's no reason left here," I said.

"I meant to remember to tell you this," she said, taking a sip of tea. "About a week ago, I was summoned out one night on official business of the Republic. My superior sent me word that I was to go to a certain address and treat, using all my skill and by any means necessary, the woman of the house. The note led me to believe that this individual's well-being was of the utmost importance to the Republic."

"The President's wife?" I asked.

"No, the address was down on the waterfront. A bad area and yet they offered me no escort. I was wary of everything that moved and made a noise. Situated in the middle of a street of grimy drinking establishments and houses of prost.i.tution, I found the place. The structure had at one time been a bank. You could tell by the marble columns out front. There were cracks in its dome and weeds poked through everywhere, but there was a light on inside.

"I knocked on the door and it was answered by a young man in a security uniform, cap, badge, pistol at his side. I gave my name and my business. He showed me inside, and pointed down a hallway whose floor, ceiling and walls were carpeted a tunnel through a mandala design of flowers on a red background. Dizzy from it, I stepped into a large room where I saw a woman sitting on a divan. She wore a low-cut blue gown and had a tortoisesh.e.l.l cigarette holder. Her hair was dark and abundant but disheveled. I introduced myself, and she told me to take a seat in a chair near her. I did. She chewed the tip of the tortoisesh.e.l.l for a brief period, and then said, 'Let me introduce myself. I'm the Prisoner Queen.' "

My heart dropped at her words. I wanted to look in Millicent's eyes to see if I could discern whether she'd contracted the Plague in recent days and survived to now be mad, but I didn't have the courage.

Although I tried to disguise my reaction, she must have felt me tremble slightly, because she immediately said, "Lash, believe me, I know how odd this sounds. I fully expected you not to believe me, but this really happened." Only then did I look into her face, and she smiled.

"I believe you," I said. "Go on. I want to hear the rest."

"What it came to," said Millicent, "was that she'd summoned me, not for any illness but to tell me what was about to happen."

"Why you?" I asked.

"She said she admired earnest people. The Prisoner Queen told me that what we have been considering the most terrible part of the disease, the blending of memory and the imagination, is a good thing. 'A force of nature', was how she put it. There's disorganization and mayhem now, but apparently the new reality will take hold and the process will be repeated over centuries."

"Interesting," I said and slowly slid my hand out from under hers. "You know," I went on, rising, "I have to get a newspaper and read up on what's been happening. Make yourself comfortable, I'll be right back." She nodded and took another sip of tea, appearing relaxed for the first time since I'd run into her.

I put on my hat and coat and left the apartment. Out on the street, I ran to the east, down two blocks and a turn south, where earlier that day I'd seen an abandoned steam carriage that had been piloted into a lamp-post. I remembered noticing that there really hadn't been too much damage done to the vehicle.

The carriage was still there where I'd seen it, and I immediately set to starting it, lighting the pilot, pumping the lever next to the driver's seat, igniting the gas to heat the tank of water. All of the gauges read near-full, and when the thing actually started up after a fit of coughing that sounded like the bronchitis of the aged, I laughed even though my heart was broken.

I stopped for nothing but kept my foot on the pedal until I'd pa.s.sed beyond the city limit. The top was down and I could see the stars and the silhouettes of trees on either side of the road. In struggling to banish the image of Millicent from my mind, I hadn't at first noticed a cloud of steam issuing from under the hood. I realized the carriage's collision with the lamp must have cracked the tank or loosened a valve. I drove on, the steam wafting back over the windshield, enveloping my view.

The constant misty shower made me hot. I began to sweat, but I didn't want to stop, knowing I might not get the carriage moving again. Some miles later, I began to get dizzy, and images flashed through my thoughts like lightning a stone castle, an island, a garden of poisonous flowers spewing seed. "I've got to get out of the steam," I said aloud to try to revive myself.

"The steam's not going anywhere," said the Prisoner Queen from the pa.s.senger seat. Her voluminous hair was neatly put up in an ornate headdress and her gown was decorated with gold thread. "Steam's the new dream," she said. "Right now I'm inventing a steam-powered s.p.a.ce submarine to travel to the stars, a radiator brain whose exhaust is laughing gas, a steam pig that feeds a family of four for two weeks." She slipped a hand behind my head, and after taking a toke from the tip of the tortoisesh.e.l.l, she leaned over, put her mouth to mine, and showed me the new reality.

Lady Witherspoon's Solution.

James Morrow.

Personal Journal of Captain Archibald Carmody, R.N. Written aboard HMS Aldebaran Whilst on a Voyage of Scientific Discovery in the Indian Ocean 13 April 1899.

Lat. 110' S, Long. 7142' E.

Might there still be on this watery ball of ours a terra incognita, an uncharted Eden just over the horizon, home to n.o.ble aborigines or perhaps even a lost civilization? A dubious hypothesis, at least on the face of it. This is the age of the surveyor's s.e.xtant and the cartographer's calipers. Our planet has been girded east to west and gridded pole to pole. And yet what sea captain these days does not dream of happening upon some obscure but cornucopian island? Naturally he will keep the coordinates to himself, so he can return in time accompanied by his faithful mate and favorite books, there to spend the rest of his life in blissful solitude.

Today I may have found such a world. Our mission to Ceylon being complete, with over a hundred specimens to show for our troubles, most notably a magnificent lavender b.u.t.terfly with wings as large as a coquette's fan and a green beetle of chitin so shiny that you can see your face in the carapace, we were steaming southbysouthwest for the Chagos Archipelago when a monsoon gathered behind us, persuading me to change course fifteen degrees. Two hours later the tempest pa.s.sed, having filled our hold with brackish puddles though mercifully sparing our specimens, whereupon we found ourselves in view of a green, ragged ma.s.s unknown to any map in Her Majesty's Navy, small enough to elude detection until this day, yet large enough for the watch to cry "Land, ho!" whilst the Aldebaran was yet two miles from the reef.

We came to a quiet cove. I dispatched an exploration party, led by Mr Bainbridge, to investigate the inlet. He reported back an hour ago, telling of bulbous fruits, scampering monkeys and tapestries of exotic blossoms. When the tide turns tomorrow morning, I shall go ash.o.r.e myself, for I think it likely that the island harbors invertebrate species of the sort for which our sponsors pay handsomely. But right now I shall amuse myself in imagining what to call the atoll. I am not so vain as to stamp my own name on these untrammeled sands. My wife, however, is a person I esteem sufficiently to memorialize her on a scale commensurate with her wisdom and beauty. So here we lie but a single degree below the Line, at anchor off Lydia Isle, waiting for the c.o.c.katoos to sing the dawn into being.

14 April 1899.

Lat. 110' S, Long. 7142' E.

The pen trembles in my hand. This has been a day unlike any in my twenty years at sea. Unless I miss my guess, Lydia Isle is home to a colony of beasts that science, for the best of reasons, once thought extinct.

It was our naturalist, Mr Chalmers, who first noticed the tribe. Pa.s.sing me the gla.s.s, he quivered with an excitement unusual in this phlegmatic gentleman. I adjusted the focus and suddenly there he was: the colony's most venturesome member, poking a simian head out from a cavern in the central ridge. Soon more such apemen appeared at the entrance to their rocky dosshouse, a dozen at least, poised on the knife-edge of their curiosity, uncertain whether to flee into their grotto or further scrutinize us with their deep watery eyes and wide sniffing nostrils.

We advanced, rifles at the ready. The apemen chattered, howled and finally retreated, but not before I got a sufficiently clear view to make a positive identification. Beetle brows, monumental noses, tentative chins, barrel chests I have seen these features before, in an alcove of the British Museum devoted to artists' impressions of a vanished creature that first came to light forty-three years ago in Germany's Neander Valley. According to my Skeffington's Guide to Fossils of the Continent, the quarrymen who unearthed the skeleton believed they'd found the remains of a bear, until the local schoolmaster, Johann Karl Fuhlrott, and a trained anatomist, Hermann Schaffhausen, determined that the bones spoke of prehistoric Europeans.

Fuhlrott and Schaffhausen had to amuse themselves with only a skullcap, femur, scapula, ilium and some ribs, but we have found a living, breathing remnant of the race. I can scarcely write the word legibly, so great is my excitement. Neanderthals!

16 April 1899 Lat. 110' S, Long. 7142' E Unless there dwells in the hearts of our Neanderthals a quality of cunning that their outward aspect belies, we need no longer go armed amongst them. They are docile as a herd of Cotswold sheep. Whenever my officers and I explore the cavern that shelters their community, they lurch back in fear and if I'm not mistaken a kind of religious awe.

It's a heady feeling to be an object of worship, even when one's idolaters are of a lower race. Such adoration, I'll warrant, could become as addictive as a Chinaman's pipe, and I hope to eschew its allure even as we continue to study these s.h.a.ggy primitives.

How has so meek a people managed to survive into the present day? I would ascribe their prosperity to the extreme conviviality of their world. For food, they need merely pluck bananas and mangoes from the trees. When the monsoon arrives, they need but retreat into their cavern. If man-eating predators inhabit Lydia Isle, I have yet to see any.

Freed from the normal pressures that, by the theories of Mr Darwin, tend to drive a race toward either oblivion or adaptive trans.m.u.tation, our Neanderthals have cultivated habits that prefigure the accomplishments of civilized peoples. Their speech is crude and thus far incomprehensible to me, all grunts and snorts and wheezes, and yet they employ it not only for ordinary communication but to entertain themselves with songs and chants. For their dancing rituals they fashion flutes from reeds, drums from logs and even a kind of rudimentary oboe from bamboo, making music under whose influence their swaying frames attain a certain elegance. Nor is the art of painting unknown on Lydia Isle. By torchlight we have beheld on the walls of their cavern adroit representations of the indigenous monkeys and birds.

But the fullest expression of the Neanderthals' artistic sense is to be found in the cemetery that they maintain in an open field not far from their stone apartments. Whereas most of the graves are marked with simple cairns, a dozen mounds feature effigies wrought from wicker and daub, each doubtless representing the earthly form of the dear departed. The details of these funerary images are invariably male, a situation not remarkable in itself, as the tribe may regard the second s.e.x as unworthy of commemoration. What perplexes Mr Chalmers and myself is that we have yet to come upon a single female of the race or, for that matter, any infants. Might we find the Neanderthal wives and children cowering in the cavern's deepest sanctum? Or did some devastating tropical plague visit Lydia Isle, taking with it the entire female gender, plus every generation of males save one?

17 April 1899 Lat. 110' S, Long. 7142' E This morning I made a friend. I named him Silver, after the lightning flash of fur that courses along his spine like an externalized backbone. It was Silver who made the initial gesture of amicability, presenting me with the gift of a flute. When I managed to pipe out a reasonable rendition of "Beautiful Dreamer", he smiled broadly yes, the aborigines can smile and wrapped his leathery hand around mine.

I did not recoil from the gesture, but allowed Silver to lead me to a clearing in the jungle, where I beheld a solitary burial mound, decorated with a funerary effigy. Whilst I would never presume to plunder the grave, I must note that the British Museum would pay handsomely for this sculpture. The workmanship is skillful, and, mirabile dictu, the form is female. She wears a crown of flowers, from beneath which stream glorious tresses of gra.s.s. Incised on a lump of soft wood, the facial features are, in their own naive way, lovely.

Such are the observable facts. But Silver's solicitous att.i.tude toward the effigy leads me to an additional conclusion. The woman interred in this hallowed ground, I do not doubt, was once my poor friend's mate.

19 April 1899 Lat. 110' S, Long. 7142' E An altogether extraordinary day, bringing an event no less astonishing than our discovery of the aborigines. Once again Silver led me to his mate's graven image, whereupon he reached into his satchel an intricate artefact woven of reeds and drew forth a handwritten journal ent.i.tled Confidential Diary and Personal Observations of Katherine Margaret Glover. Even if Silver spoke English, I would not have bothered to enquire as to Miss Glover's ident.i.ty, for I knew instinctively that it was she who occupied the tomb beneath our feet. In presenting me with the little volume, my friend managed to communicate his expectation that I would peruse the contents but then return it forthwith, so he might continue drawing sustenance from its numinous leaves.

I spent the day collaborating with Mr Chalmers in cataloguing the many Lepidoptera and Coleoptera we have collected thus far. Normally I take pleasure in taxonomic activity, but today I could think only of finishing the job, so beguiling was the siren call of the diary. At length the parrots performed their final recital, the tropical sun found the equatorial sea, and I returned to my cabin, where, following a light supper, I read the chronicle cover to cover.

Considering its talismanic significance to Silver, I would never dream of appropriating the volume, yet it tells a story so astounding one that inclines me to rethink my earlier theory concerning the Neanderthals that I am resolved to forego sleep until I have copied the most salient pa.s.sages into this, my own secret journal. All told, there are 114 separate entries spanning the interval from February through June of 1889. The vast majority have no bearing on the mystery of the aborigines, being verbal sketches that Miss Glover hoped to incorporate into her ongoing literary endeavor, an epic poem about the first-century AD warrior queen Boadicea. Given the limitations of my energy and my ink supply, I must reluctantly allow those jottings to pa.s.s into oblivion.

Who was Kitty Glover? The precocious child of landed gentry, she evidently lost both her mother and father to consumption before her thirteenth year. In the interval immediately following her parents' death, Kitty's ne'er-do-well brother gambled away the family's fortune. She then spent four miserable years in Marylebone Workhouse, picking oak.u.m until her fingers bled, all the while trying in vain to get a letter to her late mother's acquaintance, Elizabeth Witherspoon of Briarwood House in Hampstead, a widowed baroness presiding over her dead husband's considerable fortune. Kitty had reason to believe that Lady Witherspoon would heed her plight, as the circ.u.mstances under which the baroness came to know Kitty's mother were unforgettable, involving as they did the former's deliverance by the latter from almost certain death.

Kitty's diary contains no entry recounting the episode, but I infer that Lady Witherspoon was boating on the Thames near Greenwich when she tumbled into the water. The cries of the baroness, who could not swim, were heard by Maude Glover, who could. The author doesn't say how her mother came to be on the scene of Lady Witherspoon's misadventure, though Kitty occasionally mentions fishing in the Thames, so I would guess an identical diversion had years earlier brought Maude to that same river.

Despite the machinations of her immediate supervisor, the loutish Ezekiel Snavely, Kitty's fifth letter found its way to Briarwood House. Lady Witherspoon forthwith delivered Kitty from Snavely's clutches and made the girl her ward. Not only was Kitty accorded her own cottage on the estate grounds, her benefactor provided a monthly allowance of ten pounds, a sum sufficient for the young woman to mingle with London society and adorn herself in the latest fashions. In the initial entries, Lady Witherspoon emerges as a muddle-minded person, obsessed with the welfare of an organization that at first Kitty thought silly: the Hampstead Ladies' Croquet Club and Benevolent Society. But there was more on the minds of these six women than knocking b.a.l.l.s through hoops.

Confidential Diary and Personal Observations of Katherine Margaret Glover The Year of Our Lord 1889 Sunday, 31 March Today I am moved to comment on a dimension of life here at Briarwood that I have not addressed before. Whilst most of our servants, footmen, maids and gardeners appear normal in aspect and comportment, two of the staff, Martin and Andrew, exhibit features so grotesque that my dreams are haunted by their lumbering presence. Their duties comprise nothing beyond maintaining the grounds, the croquet field in particular, and I suspect they are so mentally enfeebled that Lady Witherspoon hesitates to a.s.sign them more demanding tasks. Indeed, the one time I attempted to engage Martin and Andrew in conversation, they regarded me quizzically and responded only with soft huffing grunts.

I once saw in the Zoological Gardens an orangutan named Attila, and in my opinion Martin and Andrew belong more to that variety of ape than to even the most b.e.s.t.i.a.l men of my acquaintance, including the execrable Ezekiel Snavely. With their weak chins, flaring nostrils, sunken black eyes, proliferation of body hair and decks of broken teeth the size of pebbles, our groundskeepers seem on probation from the jungle, still awaiting full admittance to the human race. It speaks well of the baroness that she would hire such freaks as might normally find themselves in Spitalfields, swilling gin and begging for their supper.

"I cannot help but notice a bodily deformity in our groundskeepers," I told Lady Witherspoon. "In employing them, you have shown yourself to be a true Christian."

"In fact Martin and Andrew were once even more degraded than they appear," the baroness replied. "The day those unfortunates arrived, I instructed the servants to treat them with humanity. Kindness, it seems, will gentle the nature of even the most miserable outcast."

"Then I, too, shall treat them with humanity," I vowed.

Wednesday, 10 April This morning I approached Lady Witherspoon with a scheme whose realization would, I believe, be a boon to English letters. I proposed that we establish here at Briarwood a school for the cultivation of the Empire's next generation of poets, not unlike that artistically fecund society formed by Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Sh.e.l.ley and their acolytes in an earlier part of the century. By founding such an inst.i.tution, I argued, Lady Witherspoon would gain an enviable reputation as a friend to the arts, whilst my fellow poets and I would lift one another to unprecedented promontories of literary accomplishment.

Instead of holding forth on either the virtues or the liabilities of turning Briarwood into a monastery for scribblers, Lady Witherspoon looked me in the eye and said, "This strikes me as an opportune moment to address a somewhat different matter concerning your future, Kitty. It is my fond hope that you will one day take my place as head of the Hampstead Ladies' Croquet Club and Benevolent Society. Much as I admire the women who const.i.tute our present membership, none is your equal in mettle and brains."

"Your praise touches me deeply, madam, though I am at a loss to say why that particular office requires either mettle or brains."

"I shall forgive your condescension, child, as you are unaware of the organization's true purpose."

"Which is?"

"Which is something I shall disclose when you are ready to a.s.sume the mantle of leadership."

"From the appellation 'Benevolent Society', might I surmise that you do charitable works?"

"We are generous toward our friends, rather less so toward our enemies," Lady Witherspoon replied with a quick smile that, unlike the Society's ostensible aim, was not entirely benevolent.

"Does this charity consist in saving misfits like Martin and Andrew from extinction?"

Instead of addressing my question, the baroness clasped my hand and said, "Here is my counter-proposal. Allow me to groom you as my successor, and I shall happily subsidize your commonwealth of poets."

"An excellent arrangement."

"I believe I'm getting the better of the bargain."

"Unless you object, I should like to call my nascent school the Elizabeth Witherspoon Academy of Arts and Letters."

"You have my permission," the baroness said.

Monday, 15 April A day spent in Fleet Street, where I arranged for the Times to run an advertis.e.m.e.nt urging all interested poets, "whether wholly Byronic or merely embryonic", to bundle up their best work and bring it to the Elizabeth Witherspoon Academy of Arts and Letters, scheduled to convene at Briarwood House a week from next Sunday. The mere knowledge that this community will soon come into being has proved for me a fount of inspiration. Tonight I kept pen pressed to paper for five successive hours, with the result that I now have in my drawer seven stanzas concerning the marriage of my flame-haired Boadicea to Prasutagus, King of the Iceni Britons.

Strange fancies buzz through my brain like bees bereft of sense. My skull is a hive of conjecture. What is the "true purpose", to use the baroness's term, of the Benevolent Society? Do its members presume to practice the black arts? Does my patroness imagine that she is in turn patronized by Lucifer? Forgive me, Lady Witherspoon, for entertaining such ungracious speculations. You deserve better of your adoring ward.

The Society gathers on the first Sat.u.r.day of next month, whereupon I shall play the prowler, or such is my resolve. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but I trust it will serve to enlighten this Kitty.

Sunday, 28 April The inauguration of my poets' utopia proved more auspicious than I had dared hope. All told, three bards made their way to Hampstead. We enjoyed a splendid high tea, then shared our nascent works.

The Reverend Tobias Crowther of Stoke Newingtown is a blowsy man of cheerful temper. For the past year he has devoted his free hours to Deathless in Bethany, a long dramatic poem about Lazarus's adventures following his resuscitation by our Lord. He read the first scene aloud, and with every line his listeners grew more entranced.

Our next performer was Ellen Ruggles, a pallid schoolmistress from Kensington, who favored us with four odes. Evidently there is no object so humble that Miss Ruggles will not celebrate it in verse, be it a flowerpot, a tea kettle, a spiderweb, or an earthworm. The men squirmed during her recitation, but I was exhilarated to hear Miss Ruggles sing of the quotidian enchantments that lie everywhere to hand.

With a quaver in my throat and a tremor in my knees, I enacted Boadicea's speech to Prasutagus as he lies on his deathbed, wherein she promises to continue his policy of appeasing the Romans. My discomfort was unjustified, however, for after my presentation the other poets all made cooing noises and applauded. I was particularly pleased to garner the approval of Edward Pertuis, a wealthy Bloomsbury bohemian and apostle of the mad philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Mr Pertuis is quite the most well-favored man I have ever surveyed at close quarters, and I sense that he possesses a splendor of spirit to match his face.

The Abyssiad is a grand, epic poem wrought of materials that Mr Pertuis cornered in the wildest reaches of his fancy and subsequently brought under the civilizing influence of his pen. On the planet Vivoid, far beyond Ura.n.u.s, the ubermensch prophesied by Herr Nietzsche has come into existence. An exemplar of this superior race travels to Earth with the aim of teaching human beings how they might live their lives to the full. Mr Pertuis is not only a superb writer but also a fine actor, and his opening cantos held our fellowship spellbound. He has even undertaken to ill.u.s.trate his ma.n.u.script, decorating the bottom margin with crayon drawings of the ubermensch, who wears a dashing scarlet cape and looks rather like his creator Mr Pertuis, I mean, not Herr Nietzsche.

I can barely wait until our group reconvenes four weeks hence. I am deliriously anxious to learn what happens when the visitor from Vivoid attempts to corrupt the human race. I long to clap my eyes on Mr Pertuis again.

Sat.u.r.day, 4 May An astonishing day that began in utter mundanity, with the t.i.tled ladies of the Benevolent Society arriving in their cabriolets and coaches. Five aristocrats plus the baroness made six, one for each croquet mallet in the spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. After taking tea in the garden, everyone proceeded to the south lawn, newly scythed by Martin and Andrew. Six hoops and two pegs stood ready for the game. The women played three matches, with Lady Sterlingford winning the first, Lady Unsworth the second, and Lady Witherspoon the last. Although they took their sport seriously, bringing to each shot a scientific precision, their absorption in technique did not preclude their chattering about matters of stupendous inconsequentiality the weather, Paris fashions, who had or had not been invited to the Countess of Rexford's upcoming soiree whilst I sat on a wrought-iron chair and attempted to write a scene of the Romans flogging Boadicea for refusing to become their submissive client.

At dusk the croquet players repaired to the banquet hall, there to dine on pheasant and grouse, whilst I lurked outside the open window, observing their vapid smiles and overhearing their evanescent conversation, as devoid of substance as their prattle on the playing field. When at last the ladies finished their feast, they migrated to the west parlor. The cas.e.m.e.nt gave me a coign of vantage on Lady Witherspoon as she approached the far wall and pulled aside a faded tapestry concealing the door to a descending spiral staircase. Laughing and trilling, the ladies pa.s.sed through the secret portal and began their downward climb.

Within ten minutes I had furtively joined the Society in the manor's most subterranean sanctum, its walls dancing with phantoms conjured by a dozen blazing torches. A green velvet drape served as my cloak of invisibility. Like the east lawn, the bas.e.m.e.nt had been converted into a gaming s.p.a.ce, but whereas the croquet field bloomed with sweet gra.s.s and the occasional wild violet, the sanctum floor was covered end to end with a foul carpet of thick russet mud. From my velvet niche I could observe the suspended gallery in which reposed the six women, as well as, flanking and fronting the mire, two discrete ranks of gaol cells, eight per block, each compartment inhabited by a hulking, snarling brute sprung from the same benighted line as Martin and Andrew. The atmosphere roiled with a fragrance such as I had never before endured a stench compounded of stagnant water, damp fur and the soiled hay filling the cages even as my brain reeled with the primal improbability of the spectacle.

In the gallery a flurry of activity unfolded, and I soon realized that the women were wagering on the outcome of the incipient contest. Each aristocrat obviously had her favorite apeman, though I got the impression that, contrary to the norms of such gambling, the players were betting on which beast could be counted upon to lose. After all the wagers were made, Lady Witherspoon gestured toward the far perimeter of the pit, where her major-domo, Wembly, and his chief a.s.sistant, Padding, were pacing in nervous circles. First Wembly sprang into action, setting his hand to a small windla.s.s and thus opening a cage in the nearer of the two cellblocks. As the liberated apeman skulked into the arena, Padding operated a second windla.s.s, thereby opening a facing cage and freeing its occupant. Retreating in tandem, Wembly and Padding slipped into a stone sentry box and locked the door behind them.

Only now did I notice that the bog was everywhere planted with implements of combat. Cudgels of all sorts rose from the mire like bulrushes. Each apeman instinctively grabbed a weapon, the larger brute selecting a shillelagh, his opponent a wooden mace bristling with toothy bits of metal. The combat that followed was protracted and vicious, the two enemies hammering at each other until rivulets of blood flowed down their fur. Thuds, grunts and cries of pain resounded through the fetid air, as did the Society's enthusiastic cheers.

In time the smaller beast triumphed, dealing his opponent a cranial blow so forceful that the latter dropped the shillelagh and collapsed in the bog, p.r.o.ne and trembling with terror. The victor approached his stricken foe, placed a muddy foot on his rump, and made ready to dash out the fallen creature's brains, at which juncture Lady Witherspoon lifted a tin whistle to her lips and let loose a metallic shriek. Instantly the victor released his mace and faced the gallery, where Lady Pembroke now stood grasping a ceramic phial stoppered with a plug of cork. Evidently recognizing the phial, and perhaps even smelling its contents, the victor forgot all about decerebrating his enemy. He shuffled toward Lady Pembroke and raised his hairy hands beseechingly. When she tossed him the coveted phial, he frantically tore out the stopper and sucked down the entire measure. Having satisfied his craving for the opiate, the brute tossed the phial aside, then yawned, stretched, and staggered back to his cage. He lay down in the straw and fell asleep.

Cautiously but resolutely, Wembly and Padding left their sentry box, the former now holding a Gladstone bag of the sort carried by physicians. Whilst Padding secured the door to the victor's cage, Wembly knelt beside the vanquished beast. Opening the satchel, he removed a gleaming scalpel, a surgeon's needle, a variety of gauze dressings and a hypodermic syringe loaded with an amber fluid. The major-domo nudged the plunger, releasing a single glistening bead, and, satisfied that the hollow needle was un.o.bstructed, injected the drug into the brute's arm. The creature's limbs went slack. Presently Padding arrived on the scene, drawing from his pocket a pristine white handkerchief, which he used to clean the delta betwixt the apeman's thighs, whereupon Wembly took up his scalpel and meticulously slit a portion of the creature's anatomy for which I know no term more delicate than s.c.r.o.t.u.m.

The gallery erupted in a chorus of hoorays.

With practiced efficiency the major-domo appropriated the twin contents of the scrotal sac, each sphere as large as those with which the ladies had earlier entertained themselves, then plopped them into separate gla.s.s jars filled with a clear fluid, alcohol most probably, subsequently pa.s.sing the vessels to Padding. Next Wembly produced two actual croquet b.a.l.l.s, which he inserted into the cavity prior to suturing and bandaging the incision. After offering the gallery a deferential bow, Padding presented one trophy to Lady Pembroke, the other to Lady Unsworth, both of whom, I surmised, had correctly predicted the upshot of the contest. Lady Witherspoon led the other women Baroness Cushing, the Marchioness of Harcourt, the Countess of Netherby in a round of delirious applause.

The evening was young, and before it ended, three additional battles were fought in the stinking, echoing, glowing pit. Three more victors, three more losers, three more plundered scrota, six more harvested spheres, with the result that each n.o.blewoman ultimately received at least one prize. During the intermissions, a liveried footman served the Society chocolate ice cream with strawberries.

Dear diary, allow me to make a confession. I enjoyed the ladies' sport. Despite a generally Christian sensibility, I could not help but imagine that each felled and eunuched brute was the odious Ezekiel Snavely. I had no desire to a.s.sume, per Lady Witherspoon's wishes, the leadership of her unorthodox organization, and yet the idea of my tormentor getting trounced in this arena soothed me more than I can say.

Clutching their vessels, the ladies ascended the spiral staircase. I pictured each guest slipping into her conveyance and, before commanding the coachman to take her home, demurely snugging her winnings into her lap as a lady of less peculiar tastes might secure a purse, a music box, or a pair of gloves. For a full twenty minutes I lingered behind my velvet drape, listening to the b.e.s.t.i.a.l snarls and savage growls, then began my slow climb to the surface, afire with a delight for which I hope our English language never breeds a name.

Monday, 6 May To her eternal credit, when I confessed to the baroness that I had spied on the underground tournament, she elected to extol my audacity rather than condemn my duplicity, adding but one caveat to her absolution. "I am willing to cast a sympathetic eye on your escapade," she told me, "but I must ask you to reciprocate by supposing that a laudable goal informs our baiting of the brutes."

"I don't doubt that your sport serves a greater good. But who are those wretched creatures? They seem more ape than human."

The baroness replied that, come noon tomorrow, I must go to the north tower and climb to the uppermost floor, where I would encounter a room I did not know existed. There amongst her retorts and alembics all my questions would be answered.