Steampunk Omnibus: A Galvanic Century Collection (2 page)

"Of course!" he said, raising his hands. "Your space is your own."

And They Called Her Spider

"She moves, at times, with the fluid grace particular to acrobats and dancers, and at others her motions are sudden and jerky, feral and darting. A birdlike tilt of the head, an abrupt twist of the spine; that's all the warning given before she changes, transforming from entertainer to killer, from elegant to lethal. My pet theory is that when she becomes the perfect assassin she gains a new awareness of time and kinetics, her movements so graceful and quick that the human mind can only process them in sudden still images, like the frames of a zoetrope. Mere words can barely suffice to convey the purity of her motion. I have to think of her in alchemical terms. She's quicksilver."

Bartleby strode the perimeter of my workshop as he spoke, quartz knob on the end of his walking stick clacking a steady metronome beat against brass fittings set into the walls. He did it to irritate me, of that I'm sure; both the tapping and the purple-prose drenched answer to the simple question I'd put to him.

"That's all well and good. But who is she?" I asked.

He turned away, cane rattling along the baluster of the staircase leading up to the rest of our townhouse. "I swear, James, if you'd spend less time down here and more at the club with me, you'd know what was going on in London. The social season doesn't last forever, you know, and people find you odd enough as it is."

"I've little regard for the opinions of toffs or the clubs they inhabit."

"But they're so useful, James!"

"Then save your patter for the swells. Just tell me who this 'Spider' woman is."

"Nobody knows, and that's the thrill of it. She comes out of nowhere, a flash of red and black fabric, powdered white face, the tinkling of bells, drawing near in that sinuous way she has, mesmerising and captivating even those with the presence of mind to recognise her as a threat. What else is one to do but watch when presented with a beautiful spectre of death? When I saw her, at first it was the sheer oddness of the sight that stayed my hand: a small girl, slender of frame and fine of feature, dressed as a jester. She entered the airship impossibly, through a port window a thousand feet up--"

"A thousand? Airships cruise at four or five-hundred, maximum."

"--a thousand feet up, to dance and pirouette through the crowd with precision and aplomb, and then someone was dead."

"So what you're saying is that this woman killed someone while you stood and stared, slack jawed?"

I hefted a long slender blade, a weapon purported to belong to the assassin herself. It -- along with the rest of the artifacts littering my workbench -- made up the sum product of Scotland Yard's investigations thus far. With the Queen's Platinum Jubilee but days away, they'd resorted to commissioning our services as consulting detectives. There were older agencies, larger ones, and many with a better reputation, but in the short year since we'd begun this detective business Bartleby and I had accrued some small name for handling the more outlandish and sensitive matters.

"That's not what I'm saying at all," Bartleby stopped, settling into a relaxed stance. "She danced, and then the American industrialist sponsoring the gallery flight was dead. I was watching... we were all watching her, but she barely approached the man. She went from her smooth acrobatic dancing to a jerkier sort of movement. She... I swear... seemed to flicker for a moment, and her target collapsed."

"You didn't actually see her cut him."

"Nobody did. Just like her prior victim and the ones before that. When we landed the airfield physician gave the same diagnosis -- poor bastard had been neatly eviscerated."

I later learnt that it had been the cleanliness of her cuts that had given cause to the broadsheet's efforts to link her to the Ripper, one even going so far as to label her "Jack's Daughter" before some other publication started calling her "The Spider." Lord only knew why that name stuck when the half-dozen others put forth fell by the wayside.

"I'm honestly just grateful for the opportunity to have seen her in the flesh," Bartleby said. He ran his delicate hands over the rest of the evidence the Met had given us: shattered glass, scraps of fabric, a smear of greasepaint from a curtain she'd brushed against. While ignorant eyes might have seen nothing but bored fiddling in his actions, I knew Alton Bartleby well enough to know that his mind was working, collating the data it perceived, categorising it and making inexorable progress towards an inevitable solution. His method was as singular as the Old Man's but sprang from a different genesis.

Bartleby was a true savant, and while the Great Detective had always made his deductions look easy and natural, in my partner's case they truly were. Building conclusions from disparate scraps of data was easy for him as deciding what to have for lunch would be for you and me.

Deciding what to have for lunch -- now that he found challenging.

"And if enchantment she wove, then the death she delivered was the key to breaking it. Not that it mattered. In the chaos that followed she escaped, somersaulting through the doors from gallery to galley, and from there? God only knows. Back out the window, perhaps; gone before a single hand could be raised against her."

For months, the Spider had been the terror and scourge of London, an assassin without equal, a perfect murderess against whom no precaution was adequate. None could speculate at what hand it was that moved her across the board, and she seemed to strike out without prejudice against all targets, her daggers finding ready homes in the innards of Anglican bishops, Turkish ambassadors, union agitators, French statesmen, Royal Academy lecturers, and visiting American plutocrats alike. The only thread weaving together her web of victims was the exemplary security with which they protected themselves; her partners in this danse macabre were the men no other killer could reach.

"You're fond of her enough," I said.

"She's news. She's scandal. She's morbid entertainment for peerage and hoi polloi alike, a penny dreadful come to wicked life. I'm honestly surprised that you haven't heard of her before now, James."

"You know how it is," I replied. "When I'm working the rest of the world fades into an annoying niggle which I can safely ignore."

"That hardly sounds healthy."

"The isolation helps me think."

Truth be told, while I don't care for most people I didn't even like Bartleby descending into my workshop. He felt wrong there, out of place, a grain of sand in my oyster; company in my working place was always an intrusion. He knew how I felt, and most of the time respected that, sending down meals in the dumbwaiter, or calling from the top of the stairs if matters were important. This was perhaps the third time he'd been down in my workshop since I'd moved from Spitalfields. It probably wasn't quite fair, considering that his wealth had paid for it.

In the social regard Bartleby was my opposite. While I preferred the isolation of what he had playfully but accurately termed my "lair," he was a social animal, flitting about the London scene like a butterfly, supping at the nectars high society had to offer. A gentleman forever on the cusp of the latest fashions and trends, of means, with an addictive personality and too much free time, he had fallen in love with the idea of the Spider from the moment he first saw her lithograph.

In short order she had become his obsession. He eagerly purchased any publication that so much as hinted her, dined and interrogated any that claimed to have witnessed her murderous performances, and had waxed melancholic at his own ill-fortune in not having seen her himself, until that fateful airship voyage. His morbid interest did not go unnoticed, and the expertise my dilettante partner had acquired lead directly to the Home Office calling on us.

Bartleby was in heaven. Even to those with connections as influential as his, the evidence lockers at Scotland Yard were off-limits, and the crumbs available at auction were only those artifacts that the Met didn't feel were relevant to their investigation. As proud of it as he was, Bartleby's collection of Spider memorabilia had been somewhat on the paltry side, things of value and interest only to the morbidly obsessed... but creative sorts live and thrive on just that sort of obsession.

A fact I understood all too well, so I refrained from needling Bartleby about it.

Too much.

The evidence the police had transported to us, on the other hand, held treasures that Bartleby could have only dreamed of. Recovered murder weapons. Shards of glass from her more explosive entrances, mixed in with possible fibres from her costume. A bit of lipstick scavenged from the cheek of a victim she'd pecked while driving a dagger into his sternum. All of it tagged, logged, labelled, and displayed, laid out in my workshop.

Bartleby abruptly rose and began to ascend the steps, seemingly having lost interest in the artifacts. I turned from the table to watch him go, befuddled at his abrupt change in demeanour before realising that he'd come to some sudden conclusion about the case.

"Lunch then?" he asked.

"Any conclusions?" I asked.

He ignored my question until we were in the entrance hall at the top of the stairs. I'd insisted upon my workshop entirely cut off from the rest of the basement, the kitchen and the servants quarters. It wasn't that I didn't like or trust them -- I came from a working class upbringing myself. While I find our servants less tiresome than Bartleby's peers, I do not much care for any company when I'm working, and Bartleby calls such fraternisation with those he deems my lesser unseemly.

"I've concluded that I'm in the mood for a light fruit compote for lunch," Bartleby said. "What shall I have Mrs Hoddie fix you?"

"Bread with drippings," I said. "No, Bartleby, conclusions about the Spider. You've worked something out?"

"What I cannot work out is your taste for bread soaked in last night's dinner. I'm rather well off, you know. You needn't eat like an east end factory worker."

"It was how I was raised," I said.

I have little patience for small talk. It isn't my way. I had grown up in a working class family, raised by a father with little tolerance for idleness or affection for his children, and I preferred conversation be short and to the point. Bartleby knew this, of course, and his continued deflections were his attempt to rile my temper for his own amusement. I would not give him the satisfaction.

Still, I had to wait with growing impatience and discomfort while the cook prepared Bartleby's compote, and again while he took his goodly time nibbling at it. It was a good ten minutes of idle chatter concerning matters of little interest until he placed his napkin to the side of his plate and abandoned the facade of disinterest that he wore so very well.

"I say, do you know what I fancy, James?"

"You fancy any number of terrible things." Out with it, already.

"I fancy some entertainment. Do you care to take in a show?"

"Is this related to the case we've taken or have you just gotten distracted again?"

He ignored my hostility. "Perhaps an Italian opera. Something jocular. Some sort of
dramma giocoso
-- yes. How about
Il filosofo di campagna
?"

"On with it, Bartleby."

"Oh, I think you'll like it. It's no
opera buffo
, but your working-class sensibilities will enjoy the
intermezzi
at the very least."

I glared at him while the housemaid cleared our dishes away, but he seemed impervious to my sincere desire to throttle him with my mind.

***

I am not a fan of opera, nor any passive entertainment, really. It isn't so much that I am incapable of grasping them as Bartleby has on occasion implied, but when I'm not working (and, as Bartleby will tell anyone shortly after meeting them, I am almost always working) I prefer a good earthy carouse to sitting in some stuffy theatre, watching painted men prance around like women, and listening to songs I cannot begin to understand the lyrics to. I like things simple. I like things precise. Efficient. Art is none of those things, and I daresay I'll never understand it.

Still, through my association with my partner I am not entirely ignorant of the venues the city offers to patrons of the arts, and I was thus surprised when Bartleby didn't lead me to the Royal Opera House. He didn't lead the way to the recently opened London Coliseum, or Sadler's. He instead traveled down a maze of side-streets and walkways, past pawn shops and brothels, almost beyond the outskirts of the city to what looked like a ramshackle warehouse worn by years of neglect.

"This can't be right," I said.

Bartleby simply smirked, gesturing towards a hand painted sign declaring that yes,
Il filosofo di campagna
was to be performed that evening, and swept through the front doors. The interior was in scarcely better condition than the exterior, dark curtains placed over cracks and gaps in the walls, paint and graffiti splattered over the plywood that seemed to be holding everything together. A small crowd of what I presumed were actors and crew hustled about, completing whatever construction they hoped would make the place suitable.

"It looks as though they're still building the theatre," I said.