The Constantine Affliction (2 page)

Pimm struggled into his Oriental silk robe—it was a bit like wrestling an ape, which Pimm had done once, though not while sober—and walked with great care into the front room of his apartment. He called “Ransome, are you here?” in a uselessly soft voice, but a louder cry would only have invited further cranial cataclysm.

“Ransome has given his notice,” Freddy said. Pimm’s oldest friend and dearest confidant sat in a bright corner of the room, reading a newspaper, at ease in a chair placed regrettably beneath an unshaded window that faced east. “Have you seen the latest
Argus
? Well, of course not, you’ve been abed. This article by Mr. E. Skye, about the so-called river monsters purportedly seen in the Thames, with each witness drunker than the last? It’s marvelous. Though I’d wager none of the witnesses were drunker than you last night, dear—you wouldn’t have noticed a river monster if it swam through your bathtub. Mr. Skye’s story strikes just the right tone of mordant hilarity without edging quite into disrespect, quoting liberally from the river men and letting their own words do the job. His talents are really wasted on journalism, he should—”

Pimm’s mind slowly began operating at something approaching its usual level of efficiency. “Ransome is gone? He’s left our service? Why the devil would he do that?” Pimm sat down in another chair, as far from the light as possible. He squinted; Freddy didn’t appear to be wearing much in the way of clothing, and if not for the backlighting, shocking amounts of flesh would likely be on display. “Lord, man, cover yourself! How often have I told you I have no desire to gaze upon your flesh?”

“So avert your eyes.” Unperturbed, Freddy sipped tea, somehow deftly managing cup, newspaper, and cigarette all at once. “If you had to wear a corset every time you went outside, you’d relish these unconfined moments as much as I do. As for Ransome, he said he simply couldn’t abide the prospect of cleaning out another basin of your vomit, and so he gave his regrets. I told him I quite understood, and paid him through the end of the month. I promised him a glowing reference, though I gather he already has another offer.”

“I hope you weren’t dressed like this during that conversation.” Pimm squirmed down in the chair and pulled the front of his robe up over his head to cover his eyes. Ah, blissful dimness. “Or should I say undressed.”

“If I’d been dressed like this, he would certainly have stayed, don’t you think? He probably would have pledged himself to my service—he was always scandalized that I don’t have a ladies’ maid.”

“Not as scandalized as any ladies’ maid who came to serve you would be,” Pimm said. “Couldn’t you have tried to change his mind? Ransome made a good cup of tea, and an even better brandy and soda. I could use one of those now. Either one, really. Both, for preference.” He briefly peeked out of the robe. “That was a hint.”

“There’s a kettle in the kitchen. Help yourself.”

“You know I’m terrified of that stove. In my day we cooked over fire, not bottled lightning. Well.
One
cooked. I did not cook.”

“You’re a child, Pimm. We live in an age of wonders, the world transformed by electricity, magnetism, alchemical innovations—”

“And what’s it used for, hmm?” Pimm uncovered his head and gave Freddy his most cutting glare. “New ways to murder people and the fabrication of clockwork prostitutes.”

“Clockwork prostitutes could have come a little sooner, by my preference,” Freddy said frostily.

Pimm winced. “Quite, of course, I didn’t mean… I apologize.” During the early days of their current arrangement Freddy had descended fairly often into black moods that sometimes lasted for days, sullen storms punctuated by furious flashes of unreasoning anger, but in the past year things had settled down as Freddy grew accustomed to the new status quo, and had been positively chipper on the whole. It was impressive, really. Freddy had been through a rough few years, a victim of illness and society and family all at once. Pimm wasn’t sure he’d have adapted half so well.

When Freddy rose and walked across the room, Pimm couldn’t help himself. He peeked. An instant later he turned his eyes away from the creamy flash of breasts, the shapely line of leg, the smooth muscle of thigh. “Cover up, please, I can’t bear it!”

“You’re a beast,” Freddy said, amused, and stood sorting through a pile of paper on the table by the door. “It’s a good thing I’m not
really
your wife, or such an outcry might bruise my feelings.”

“Tell that to the Church of England,” Pimm said. “They certainly consider us well and truly wed.”

“Except that legally I’m still a
man
, which tends to invalidate your argument.”

“What the Church doesn’t know…” Pimm muttered. Victims transformed by the Constantine Affliction were, legally speaking, considered to be the same sex they’d been at birth—otherwise you could have a daughter transforming into a firstborn son and inheriting her father’s estate over her younger brothers. In practice, though, most victims of the Affliction went into hiding, or tried to pass as their original sex, or—like Freddy—simply changed their identities and began a new life. The women transformed into men preferred that latter path, especially, as it tended to open up all sorts of new possibilities for them.

“Never has there been a more inconvenient marriage of convenience, eh?” the lady of the house said. “Fine, I’ll dress.” Freddy went into the bedroom, not bothering to shut the door, and called out. “I’m going to a salon later today. Christina Rosetti may be there. Her recent poetry isn’t up to the standards of her
Goblin Market
, but still, she’s very interesting.” Freddy emerged, walking and gazing into a hand mirror at the same time.

“You modern women and your intellectual pursuits. Between your tinkering with inventions downstairs and your writing of poetry upstairs, you constitute a one-person society of arts and sciences.” Pimm risked a glance at his friend, then winced and looked away. “You were hideous when you were a man, Freddy, with a face like a frog, and ankles like a stork’s. How is it that after the fever you became so, so….”

Freddy put the mirror down on a side table and stepped in front of Pimm’s chair, hands on hips. He—she—Curse it. Pimm tried, in private, to avoid the use of pronouns in relation to this person who was technically his spouse, though to most eyes, Freddy was indeed female, and was more generally known by the
nom de
what-have-you of “Winifred Halliday née Sandoval,” or more properly “Lady Pembroke.” Calling Freddy “she” and “her” seemed more and more natural every day, which made public appearances less fraught with opportunity for confusion, but also seemed in some way a betrayal of the man who had been Pimm’s friend for so long.

Freddy now wore a partially-unbuttoned and fortunately oversized man’s shirt and, it seemed, nothing else. Her hair was a golden cloud, her nose adorably snub, her lips plump and currently frowning. “If I were uglier, I’d be wearing a false mustache and binding down my breasts with strips of cloth and passing for male like some of the
other
bastards, who were luckier in their transformations.” Freddy sighed. “Though I suppose I’m lucky too—I didn’t die, or get stuck halfway through the change, like some.” The Constantine Affliction was unpredictable and cruel in its course, though many expressed the opinion that being transformed into a woman must surely be a fate worse than death. Spoken like someone who had never died, Pimm always thought.

“And you spared me the horrors of marrying someone else,” Pimm said. “Someone of whom my relatives might have
approved
.” Pimm’s marriage to the mysterious Winifred Sandoval—a person of no particularly notable family connection—hadn’t delighted his aunts and uncles or his elder brother the Marquess, but he’d made an impassioned speech about true love and they’d eventually agreed to go along with things, mostly just to stop him quoting love poetry. The wise old heads of the family were happy to see him married to
someone
, anyway, and hoped he would stop embarrassing his illustrious older brother and the rest of the Halliday line now that he’d settled down with a good woman.

He had, alas, disappointed them. They didn’t mind the drinking and the gambling and the
bon vivant
lifestyle, really—every well-established family had its dissolute spendthrifts. It was… the other thing. His hobby. The one thing he did well
other
than drinking and playing whist. The thing that got his name in the papers.

“Mmm,” Freddy said. “It’s good to know I saved some poor woman from a life of misery at your side. Oh, a letter came for you. It’s by the door—I had intended to place it in your hands, out of deference to the headache you clearly have, but then you insulted my physique and demanded I cover myself up.”

“Your physique is fine. That’s the problem.” Pimm rose, groaning, and went to the table by the door while Freddy sashayed away back to her bedroom. His spouse had been practicing a feminine carriage, but took too many lessons from women of the wrong class. Pimm sorted through the post until he found the letter Freddy meant. He tore it open and read the few lines while standing by the door, then crushed the paper in his fist. “Damnation. Freddy!” he shouted. “What time is your salon?”

“I have a few hours yet, though I thought I’d do some shopping beforehand.” Freddy emerged, still underdressed. “Why do you ask?”

“Abel Value wants to meet with me.”

“Oh, my.” Freddy looked at the ceiling for a moment, humming a bit. “When?”

“He proposes to meet for lunch.”

“Drat. And we had a scientist coming to the salon today, an expert on certain fish who sometimes change their sex. He has some interesting ideas about the causes of the Constantine Affliction. Something about pollution in the water supply, I think.”

“Better than the ministers who say the transformations are judgments from God, because men have become too feminine and women too much like men, though to be honest I’m not fit to judge either argument on its merits, being as ignorant of biology as I am of theology. I suppose I can handle things with Value myself…”

“Pish,” Freddy said. “Where will you meet him? The Luna Club?”

“I wouldn’t want to be seen with him in my club, and he knows it. No, he proposes to meet here.”

Freddy nodded, thoughtful. “Hmm. The closet in your bedroom shares a wall with this room, and at midday that side of the room is fairly well shadowed. I can drill two small holes, one to look through, the other to press the barrel of the air-pistol against. Just make sure Mr. Value sits in
that
chair, facing the window, so the sun is in his eyes, and so I can get a clear shot at him, if need be.”

“He’ll probably bring one of his men,” Pimm said. “Who will, doubtless, loiter by the door unless called upon.”

“Three holes, then,” Freddy said. “And I’ll prepare both pistols.”

“You’re the best wife a man could hope for,” Pimm said.

Freddy grinned wolfishly, and that, at least, had not changed a bit with his transformation from man to woman. “In certain respects, at least,” Freddy agreed.

Scandal and Poppycock

E
leanor Irene Skyler, called Ellie by her friends (though her byline ran as “E. Skye,” with the extra “e” at the end because her editor felt it added a touch of sophistication), stepped off the self-propelled streetcar and directly into a heap of horse manure. She did not curse aloud, because though she was of necessity more independently-minded than most women in the city, she could not entirely forsake her upbringing. After scraping off her shoe as best she could on a cobblestone, she stepped around another heap of horse leavings and made her way toward the offices of the
London Argus
, not far from Printing House Square.

The streets of London were still very much contested territory, with the new electrified carts rumbling along their pre-ordained routes while more traditional folk tried to prevent their horses from being run over. And, of course, most everyone was far too poor for horse
or
electric cart, and made their way on foot. There had been a few noteworthy crashes involving the electrical omnibuses, some of which she’d covered for the paper, and so she rode the bright red “devil carts” as often as she could in hopes of being a firsthand witness to another such disaster. Even most Londoners who could spare the fare didn’t bother with the carts, both for fear the things would crash and because they didn’t go much faster than a brisk walk anyway—though the latter problem tended to mitigate the severity of the former. The omnibuses were part of Sir Bertram’s brave new vision for the future for London, though, and so the Queen insisted they keep running. Perhaps they’d vanish into the background of the city’s life in time, and cease to be a novelty. After all, even the railroads had seemed dangerous and shocking once upon a time.

The city—the world—had changed immeasurably since Ellie’s girlhood. Just over a dozen years ago the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace had trumpeted the coming of a new world of scientific advancement and industry, and that conceptual world had come into being even more swiftly than she’d ever imagined. Parts of central London were electrified, with night never seeming to truly fall; swiftly whirring calculating engines made greater and greater feats of engineering possible, including the tunnel beneath the English Channel first proposed by George Ward Hunt, with excavations recently commenced; and medical advances like magnetic field manipulators and Pasteur’s controversial germ theory had improved life for everyone—why, without Pasteur’s innovations, the Prince Consort would surely have died of Typhoid fever. (Not that staying alive had done Prince Albert much good, ultimately—he probably wished he
was
dead, now.)

There were more advances rumored every day, from flying machines that could go faster than the swiftest airships, to expeditions into the depths of the Earth, to high mountain telescopes so powerful they could reportedly glimpse the contours of vast alien cities on the moons of Jupiter. And now Bertram Oswald was preparing his own Great Exposition to be held in Hyde Park, a spectacle devoted to showcasing the newest technological wonders created in England—mostly, it was worth noting, developed by Oswald himself, the greatest mind of their age, as he never tired of reminding anyone who would listen. The worst part was, he was almost certainly right.