The Constantine Affliction (3 page)

Of course, there were darker sides to progress, too—the depraved uses of advanced automatons, the terrible new engines of war, the Constantine Affliction and its high-profile victims. (The objectively meaningless term “The Constantine Affliction” was itself a printer’s error from a rival newspaper—“The Constantinopolitan Affliction” had proven too difficult to for the typesetter to manage, and the simplified form had stuck in the public consciousness, to the dismay of grammarians and historians both.)

For good and for ill it was a cracking good time to be a journalist—disasters made better stories than glorious successes, but even the brighter side of progress would fill column inches and draw the reader’s eye. If she could only get away from covering society galas and the weddings of the rich, delightful as the food usually was at both. Her editor Cooper had finally given in to her complaints and sent her to interview the river men and the tide-wives and mud-larks about the monsters seen in the Thames, thinking that such rough company would dissuade her from requesting more interesting assignments, but he’d been disappointed. He’d cut the portions of her article that featured more sensible and reasonable voices admitting to seeing strange things in the river, but she didn’t blame him—they’d run short of space, and the more buffoonish quotes made for better reading. Ellie had seen no monsters in the river herself… but she’d spoken to people who genuinely believed they had.

The newsroom today was the usual buzz of activity, shouting voices, and the smell of ink, and she wove through the desks and knots of her colleagues with the grace of a dancer before ducking into the editor-in-chief’s office without bothering to knock.

“Oh, good, you got my message.” Cooper looked up from the wreckage that was his desk. “You’ll take passage at week’s end, then?”

“No, I will not.” There was no chair on this side of the desk—Cooper didn’t like to encourage his reporters to dawdle and chat—so she leaned over it, pressing her hands down on two unyielding piles of newsprint for balance. “I have no interest in reporting on the latest French fashions.”

“Contrary woman.” Cooper puffed at his pipe, dispersing clouds of foul-smelling spiced tobacco. “You demanded I send you abroad, and now you refuse a trip to Paris—”

“Send me to Mexico to cover the war. That’s the kind of travel I meant.”

“Mexico? I hardly think so. Do you even speak Spanish?”

She was prepared for objections based on her safety or the weakness of her sex—she had been arguing against both lines of argument for most of her twenty-five years of life, it sometimes seemed—but this tactic gave her pause. “Well, no, I don’t—”

“But you
do
speak fluent French?”

“Yes, of course, but—no! I have no interest in fashion, Cooper.”

“That much has long been apparent,” Cooper said, still infuriatingly calm. She had a sudden urge to tell him his mustache and whiskers looked ridiculous, but refrained. Mustaches and elaborate Dundreary whiskers were the current craze among men—proof they hadn’t contracted the Constantine Affliction and tried to conceal it, she supposed, though fake mustaches were no doubt readily available to those who
had
transformed, and wished to put up a masculine pretense. Cooper’s nasal undergrowth was, she decided, no more foolish than most, for what little that was worth.

“Please,” she said, trying for sweetness. “Perhaps I could do something closer to home and spare you the expense of a trans-Atlantic crossing. Send me to Paris when the tunnel is done, and I’ll report on both the novelty of the journey
and
the dresses I see on the other side. In the meantime, I have something else in mind, and I have already written the first lines.” She opened her journal, annoyed as usual at the graceful looping curves of her handwriting, which did not match the crispness and seriousness she attempted to convey—she much preferred to see her prose in neatly typeset lines. She put the journal on the desk before Cooper, and he sighed and began to read. The lines were fresh in her mind, and she could almost follow along as his eyes tracked the page:

It is a great irony that no rich or influential man will ever admit to entering a clockwork pleasure house—when only rich and influential men are
permitted
through those elegant and well-guarded doors. We at the
Argus
are pleased to give you vicarious entree, and provide a rare opportunity to glimpse the velvet-lined rooms in these houses of—

“Oh merciful heaven.” Cooper slammed the journal shut. “You can’t seriously propose an investigation like this! You know I believe you write as well as most men, but you are
not
a man, and no woman would ever be permitted inside one of those, those—”

“Clockwork brothels? Temples of mechanical immorality? Gear-driven bordellos?”

“Yes.
Those
. How do you expect to get inside?”

“Deception, of course. I can pitch my voice low—” she demonstrated “—and disguise myself as a man. Such disguises aren’t hard to come by, and at the risk of sounding crude, I am well aware that my figure is better suited than
some
to such a ruse. It’s not as if I would need to consummate a liaison with a clockwork courtesan in order to write about them.”

“Nor would we print such details—we aren’t the
Lantern
, after all, we have depths beyond which we will not descend.” He shook his head. “But, no. I cannot permit this.”

“Ah, but if I go on my own, despite the lack of permission—would you be interested in the resulting story? Or should I sell it instead to the
Lantern
?”

He sighed. “Ellie… if I were your father, or your brother…”

“You are neither.” Nor was anyone else. She had no living near relations, which made living by her pen a necessity as well as a choice. Cooper had been a friend of her family—Ellie sometimes wondered if he’d wooed her mother, once upon a time—and had initially given her work out of pity, before coming to count on her for dependable prose delivered in a timely fashion. He sometimes still treated her like a sort of honorary younger sister, but not as often as he once had.

“It would have to be published anonymously,” Cooper said after a long moment of contemplation.

“‘E. Skye’ is already a pen name, and everyone assumes it’s a man’s name, besides. Yet you see the need for greater subterfuge?”

“The men who run these establishments are unsavory characters, and it is better if they cannot easily identify the source of such an article. The truth behind a pen name can be uncovered. Better to have no name attached at all. If you write it—which I wish you would not—we will simply credit it to ‘A Gentleman.’ Let me reiterate, I strongly object to—”

“So noted,” Ellie said.

“But of course you won’t heed my advice. Why should today depart from the norm?” He sighed. “When do you propose to undertake this invasion?”

“Oh, not until later tonight. I doubt such establishments are open before nightfall.”

Cooper tapped the end of his pen against the desktop. “First you report on monsters in the river, and now you propose to expose the prurience of the city’s elite. You do go from poppycock to scandal, Ellie.”

“If you don’t like it, send me to be a war correspondent.” She dropped an ironic curtsey and strolled out of the office, visions of mustaches and trousers dancing in her head.

A Meeting with Value

I
n the end, they decided to be more cautious, and hung a not-very-good Chinese tapestry over the two holes drilled for the pistol barrels, leaving only one hole unobstructed and unhidden, for Freddy to peer through. The rounds fired by the air-pistols would not be impeded by the tapestry’s cloth. Pimm sincerely hoped all these preparations would prove unnecessary—even paranoiac—but from what he knew of Abel Value, it was wise to take precautions. The man was in the sort of business where the occasional murder was necessary to keep things running smoothly, and while Pimm did not expect to be assassinated in his own home, it never hurt to be careful.

When the knock came at the door, Pimm was largely over his headache and taking his ease in the chair under the window where Freddy had been lounging that morning. He waited a moment, then remembered their one servant had quit that morning, and frowned. Another knock, more peremptory, and he said, “Let yourself in!”

The door swung open, though Value did not enter first. A man roughly the size of a river barge came in, ducking his head to avoid bumping it on the doorframe, and scanned the room. He then stood against the wall by the door, clasping gloved hands together, and looked at Pimm impassively.

“Big Ben, isn’t it?” Pimm said.

The man scowled. He clearly didn’t like the idea of someone like Pimm knowing his name. “Yes, sir.”

Abel Value entered the room, but Pimm didn’t pay him any attention yet, still talking to the bodyguard. “Do they call you that after the prizefighter, Benjamin Caunt? You’re at least as big as he is. Or, ha, after the bell in the clock tower?”

“They call me that, sir, because I am of large stature, sir, and because my given name is Benjamin.” His voice was calm, his diction clear, his tone dry as chalk, and Pimm mused that it was foolish to assume a man the size of a plow horse would be no smarter than one.

“I find that eminently logical.”

“They call you ‘Pimm,’ don’t they, sir?” Big Ben asked, his tone deferential, his expression anything but.

“Some do,” he acknowledged.

“Why is that, if I may ask, sir?”

“I assume because my own given name is Pembroke, and because I’m a notorious drunkard, Benjamin. Pimm’s Cup isn’t my libation of choice, but it’s still a good enough joke, by the standards of my usual drinking companions.”

Pimm turned his attention to Abel Value, who was either the most notorious criminal or the most prosperous businessman in London, depending on whom you asked, and on what sort of people were within earshot when you did the asking. Value was dressed in a suit that was certainly more expensive than Pimm’s own, and he had iron-gray hair, an unfashionably clean-shaven face, and a nose that had been broken at least once. He didn’t bother to hide his smirk, and he patted his bodyguard on the arm when he passed by.

“Good day, sir,” Pimm said. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” He gestured at the only other empty chair in the room, the other seats having been removed earlier by Freddy to make sure Value arranged himself properly.

“Necessity,” Value said, and Ben shut the door behind him. Value looked at the empty chair for a moment, as if assessing whether or not it might be a trap, then sat down, crossing one leg over the other and lacing his fingers across his knee. “I need your help, Halliday. And you need to help me.”

“Ah,” Pimm said. “I confess a measure of surprise. I had assumed you wished to speak to me regarding Mr. Martinson.”

Abel frowned. “I can’t imagine what you mean. It was a terrible tragedy, of course, that the blackguard could not be brought to justice, but his unfortunate demise has nothing to do with me.”

“Really. I was under the impression that my investigation into his business had displeased you.”

Abel shrugged. “Martinson was an old friend. I was, naturally, reluctant to believe the allegations of criminal behavior against him, and assumed you were acting on false information—or else in bad faith—when you made your report to the police. But since Martinson took his own life, I can only conclude he suffered from a guilty conscience. A shame. He was a good man, but weak.”

Pimm limited himself to a nod. Martinson had been the headmaster of a prestigious public school, but he had also been selling his students illegal alchemical stimulants, and a handful of the children had died from overindulgence—including the nephew of one of Pimm’s old school chums, who’d asked him to investigate. Proving Martinson’s guilt had been easy, but Pimm had hoped to use him as a stepping-stone to incriminate the seemingly untouchable Value, who had certainly supplied the illicit substances. Instead… well. Martinson’s death had been ruled suicide—death before dishonor and all that—but Pimm had his doubts.

“I am here now,” Value said, “to retain your services as a consulting detective.”

Pimm could not have been more surprised if Value had proposed marriage. “I think you misunderstand my, ah, situation. That is, I have occasionally intervened on behalf of certain friends, or assisted the police, making what poor efforts I could to aid their inquiries. But I have always operated on a purely informal basis. Though I have a certain amateur interest in matters of criminology, I am hardly a detective, and I regret that my services, such as they may be, are not actually for hire.” He chuckled self-deprecatingly. “My family wouldn’t stand for it, I’m afraid, if I adopted such a vocation. It would hardly strike them as a gentlemanly pursuit.”

“He does use a lot of words to say ‘no,’ doesn’t he, Ben?” Value said.

“Some might say that’s the sign of an educated man,” Big Ben opined.

“Listen,
Lord
Pembroke,” Value said, leaning forward. “Someone is murdering my whores, and I need to find out who.”

Womanly Arts

E
llie numbered among her acquaintances a certain tailor on Savile Row who, in addition to his other business, also catered to those men who’d been transformed by the Constantine Affliction—and hoped to hide that fact. Though Mr. James had the usual distrust for the press (a stance that was, if anything, amplified by the necessarily confidential nature of his back-room business), he’d been fond of Ellie ever since her engagement to his nephew David, and tolerated her inquisitiveness. David had worked for the British East India Company, and had sadly perished in 1858 during the Indian uprising, crushed by one of the Steel Raja’s terrible steam elephants. For Ellie, his death had been the end of her hopes for a traditional life as a wife and mother, and her dabbling in writing for women’s periodicals had blossomed—both due to passion and from financial necessity—into a life’s work as a journalist.

Mr. James greeted her warmly, taking her by the hand and directing his assistant to watch the store while he led her through the workroom at the back and into a small office, where he had a gas ring and a kettle, and busied himself preparing tea. “Such a pleasure to see you, Eleanor,” he said, setting out cups and spoons and sugar with the same sort of precise movements he used when taking measurements for a new suit. “How are you keeping yourself?”