Shadow Conspiracy (45 page)

Emma held her breath until the heart beat within the luminous chalice. Then at last the body lay unmoving, truly and inarguably dead.

The light of this heart was not nearly so bright as that of the nun which she had seen before. The good Sister’s had been washed in white light. This was darker, closer to crimson, yet there was light enough in it, of such a quality, that after a long and careful inspection, both the abbess and the surgeon nodded. “It will do,” Mother Agatha said.

The procedure to incorporate the heart into the vessel seemed much longer than before. The surgeon moved so slowly and with such patient deliberation that Emma was ready to cry aloud when at last the receptacle was sealed and the vessel’s ensoulment complete.

She drew a sharp breath as the head lifted and the eyes opened. They wandered about in manifest confusion. When they fell upon her, they lit with recognition. The waxen lips moved; the throat swelled. Emma braced for a curse or a burst of wickedness. Instead she heard a voice as pure as any in the choir, tuned to a deeper register, like the low notes of an organ. The words it sang were Latin, of which she knew enough to recognize the verse:

Judex ergo cum sedebit,

quidquid latet apparebit:

nil inultum remanebit.

Oh, that was irony indeed, for that of all souls to sing of the Judge at the final Judgement, when all that is hidden shall be revealed, and no wrong shall remain unavenged. Emma was not foolish enough to hear it, however, as repentance. Those eyes of glass and tinted stone were burning with rage.

The wondrous voice died into silence. The long hands lifted; the automaton stared at them. It must hear the turning of gears within the body of metal and wax and leather tanned as supple as flesh; it must wake to the realisation of what it had become. That realisation burst out of it in a great and melodious cry, a long melisma of pure anguish.

The surgeon frowned. She reached toward the back of the vessel and pressed a key. The vessel froze in place, its mouth still open, empty of song. She played upon the keys for some little time, pausing once to replace a card scattered with tiny openings like a lacework of gold, before she stood back at last with an air of satisfaction. “That should serve us better,” she said.

She pressed the first key once more. The vessel woke again to life, but its movements were much constrained. It glided toward the altar of the chapel, bowed and began to murmur in Latin. Emma had seen many a priest do exactly the same, but not with such a glance as this one cast at her, of pure, trapped desperation.

Mother Agatha confirmed Emma’s suspicions. “The automaton has been bound to perform in all ways as a priest should do: to say Mass, to hear confessions, to preside over the divine offices. There will be no further displays of indecorum. Sister Theodosia has been most careful on that account.”

Mother Agatha was a kind and Christian woman, but she was, Emma reflected, quite merciless. Emma, who was neither kind nor Christian, could almost spare a moment’s pity for that rake and sinner trapped now forever in the life of a Roman priest. He could perform no action, speak no word, sing no song, but what would be most strictly permitted to the vessel in which he was confined.

If there was a Hell, George Fraser was in it—for the greater glory and the service of God.

Emma was not to be so trapped. Mother Agatha had pondered while she dealt with the matter of Fraser’s translation; when that was done, she looked Emma in the face, long and steady, and then said, “I fear for your safety if I let you out upon the world, but you are truly not meant for this life. You may go, with my blessing and with such gifts and comfort as I or my sisters can give. We will pray for you; we will beseech God to keep you safe.”

“If you pray on my behalf,” said Emma, “I’m certain that God will listen. You have my thanks and my vow: I will not betray your secret.”

“I do believe that,” said Mother Agatha.

Emma left the Abbey of Perpetual Adoration just past noon on a bright day of early summer, so warm and so golden-splendid that the storm of the day before seemed but a wild and dreadful dream. She had her story polished and ready, of how she had been caught in the storm, bravely and nobly rescued by Mr. George Fraser, and cared for by him until, tragically, while striving to keep her from falling from a precipice in the dark, he had fallen himself, lost forever in a deep and impenetrable crevasse. She would weep; she would faint becomingly. She would make certain that no one discovered where in truth she had been.

She strode lightly down the steep track, head high, contemplating her rescue and her reunion with her employer, and thereafter a meeting in Paris with those who might offer her a far more stimulating existence than she had dared to hope for. “Lady Ada Lovelace,” she said to the pellucid Alpine air, “I present you with your newest and most eclectically talented agent.”

She laughed, a bit of youthful lightness that she would never have permitted herself where others could see, and skipped a step or two. It was a beautiful day, and Miss Emma Rigby looked ahead to a marvellous life.

Far behind her, within the walls of stone and steel and glass, a supernally sweet voice cried to Heaven:

Kyrie eleison!

Lord have mercy, indeed, thought Mother Agatha. For no one on this earth would grant him such a gift.

Judith Tarr is an acclaimed author of historical novels and historical fantasy. Her novel of Alexander the Great,
Lord of the Two Lands
, was a World Fantasy Award nominee, and she most recently published a prequel to the story of Alexander,
Bring Down the Sun
(Tor). She also writes as Caitlin Brennan (
The Mountain’s Call
and the forthcoming
House of the Star
) and Kathleen Bryan (
The Serpent and the Rose
). This is her first foray into the Age of Steam, but she has had a long love affair with the fiction, fashions, and foibles of the period.

… by Irene Radford

“...B. will not relent. He will not concede the complete madness of the man Fletcher. He comes and tells me Lord Melbourne himself is approving experiments to demonstrate that the living soul may be transferred into an inanimate housing of sufficient complexity.

I am afraid that I must acknowledge that until B has satisfied his obsession, he will have no rest, neither will he permit me any. All he sees are the faces of his dead. And I, to my torment, all I see is the deceptively fair face of mine.

I am not wrong. I cannot be wrong. The soul is resident in and rooted in the human body. Upon death, it is gone from this world. It is God’s alone and He cannot permit our corrupted fingers to pick it over like housewives pawing cheap linens at the market stall. These children said to be without souls are victims of gin and malnourishment and fevers left untreated.

At the same time, I cannot deny that something real happened that awful summer of ’16. I am equally certain that
something
continues forward. Mrs. F goes about the lecture circuit asserting she’s killed “The Promethean” of Mary Godwin’s creation. She is wrong, or she is lying. The woman who would create such a being would not permit it to be so casually and neatly disposed of.

I can say nothing of this to B. So, I must be resolved in this new and much un-wanted task. Hand-in-hand we shall descend into the world of rumor and dread and here I take the part of Orpheus to his Eurydice.

I pray I do not look back too soon and trap us both in the darkness.

—from the private journal of Ada Lovelace

“Who may I say is calling?” the black-clad butler demanded. He tried looking down his long nose at me, but he underestimated my height and his gaze affixed instead to my décolletage. Pink tinged his cheeks. A human servant. How delightfully old fashioned.