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Authors: T. Aaron Payton

Tags: #Fantasy, #General, #Historical, #Fiction

The Constantine Affliction (39 page)

BOOK: The Constantine Affliction
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“And what of Adams?” Pimm said.

Whistler shook his head. “No sign of your mystery man, Pimm. You’re sure he exists? We did find one of those beasts, with all its tentacles torn off, and a hole punched right in its—forgive me, ladies, I forget myself. But of our fifth hero, no sign. From what you told me about his criminal entanglements, he may have wanted to avoid attention.”

Ellie yawned. “When do you think we’ll be permitted to go home and sleep?”

“Ah,” Whistler said, and smiled. “Not quite yet. My friend the secretary was sent to fetch you, but I said I’d run that errand for him. I’m told the Queen wants to see you.”

“Why?” Pimm said.

“I think it’s best you find out for yourself.”

***

“I dub thee knight,” the Queen said, touching Ellie on first one shoulder with her sword, and then the other. The officials gathered behind them in the opulent chamber muttered, and Ellie’s head spun as she stared at the Queen’s shoes.

Women were not
knighted
. A woman could be made a
dame
, but not a knight. And yet: Sir Eleanor! The Queen had refused to brook any argument in this matter, and had insisted on knighting them
all
, in the old style, with a sword.

Ellie rose from the knighting stool, and barely heard the words as the Queen invested her with her knightly orders. Then the Queen moved on to Winnie, dubbing her Sir Winifred. Since Winnie had begun life as a man, perhaps that honor made more sense, but…

Pimm and Ben had been knighted already, and stood off to one side of the chamber, looking as dazed as Ellie felt. She joined them as the Queen completed the ceremony, then handed the sword to a waiting official. “We feel most secure,” the Queen said, glaring at the men clustered together in the back of the chamber, “with defenders such as these to protect our realm.”

The room was silent, but then someone began to applaud. Ellie recognized the horse-faced woman clapping her hands as Prince Albert, now restored to the position of prince consort—or perhaps princess consort? Who could say? If Ellie could be a knight…

With Albert leading the applause, the others joined in, some with what seemed to be genuine enthusiasm. Ellie recognized members of Parliament, cabinet ministers, and other assorted dignitaries, some of them familiar from the flight at Hyde Park, all brought together to deal with the crisis of monsters from another world—a crisis which was, more or less, finished by the time they arrived.

The crowd came forward to congratulate the new knights. A man with enormous whiskers greeted Winnie as “Lady Pembroke,” and earned an icy stare. “I think you’ll find you mean ‘Sir Winifred,’” she said coolly, and the man fell over himself apologizing.

Somehow, in all the milling of people, Pimm managed to take Ellie by the elbow and lead her away to a pair of chairs in a corner, where they sat, knees just touching, half hidden behind an enormous leafy plant in a pot. “You’ve got quite a story to write, I suppose,” he said. “A firsthand account of the madness in the park. When I saw you wielding that sparking sword! I should
not
have been surprised, I know, but I was. You never stop surprising me, Ellie.”

Writing. The newspaper! How could such mundane matters still exist? “Heavens. I suppose I do have to go to work again, don’t I? Somehow I don’t think I’ll ever be able to convey the experience properly, but I’ll have to try.”

“Alas, the knighthood does not bring with it a guaranteed income for life,” Pimm said. “You will need to go on living by your pen. And we readers are all the luckier for your necessity.”

“It occurs to me,” Ellie said, “to wonder what poor Ben will do? Now that he’s Sir Ben he can hardly carry on being a street tough. How will his old friends treat him now?”

“It’s not entirely fitting for his new station,” Pimm said. “But I was thinking of inviting him to join my household. He was in service, actually, as a boy, before circumstances conspired to send him to London to seek his fortune. And I am in desperate need of a valet. Of course, I’ll have to call him something like captain of the guard, to avoid offending his knightly dignity, but I can hardly think of a better man to have at my back.”

“So you shall all live together, in that lovely house,” Ellie said. “You, and Winnie, and Ben.”

Pimm cleared his throat. “I, ah. Ellie. I wish… well, that is to say…”

“I know,” Ellie said. “It is complicated. Do you know what Winnie said to me, after we electrocuted the last of those monsters? She said we’d ruined everything. If Oswald’s plan had gone off, things would have changed, all of
society
would have changed, all the old rules would have fallen by the wayside, and you and I, we could have…”

Pimm took her hand. “Our Queen is now a man, but is still somehow a Queen. We have driven off monsters brought from a place stranger than the stars. You have been made a
knight
. I would say things
are
changing. I know nothing is simple, but… perhaps we can cope with things that are complicated?”

“I—”

Winnie appeared. She was holding a glass of champagne, acquired from who knows where. “Ellie! There you are. I have a proposal for you. How would you like to help me write a book?”

Ellie blinked. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I’m a fine storyteller, but I’ve never been good at getting the
words
to line up on paper, as it were. I want you to help me turn my life story into something people would actually care to read. We’ll skim over my undistinguished youth, I think, devote a chapter to my Affliction, another to my subsequent despair, another to my peculiar arrangement with Pimm, another to my frequenting of salons and gatherings of artists, with perhaps a hint of scandal, subtly done, and for the climax, of course, my heroic actions in saving Queens, slaying horrible monsters, and etc.—”

“Winnie, you can’t be serious!” Ellie said.

“No, never,” Winnie said. “But I
can
be notorious, and give lectures, and become very rich from the fame, in my own right. But we have to be quick, Ellie dear, because the Queen’s transformation is going to make changing into the opposite sex a
cause célèbre
, and will doubtless bring the Afflicted out in droves to tell their own stories. But
I
have the best story, I’m sure. What do you say?”

“But… what about your marriage to Pimm? If you tell the truth—”

“I daresay the marriage will be revealed as a sham,” Winnie said. “It shall be stricken from the books, I’d think. The Queen has promised to exert her influence to smooth over any little… technical difficulties with the Church.” She put one hand on Pimm’s shoulder, but smiled down at Ellie. “Poor Pimm! He looks as if he’s been hit in the forehead with a hammer. See, my lord? I told you I’d think of something. But it seems there’s no need to fake my own death to set you free. I can live my own true life instead. And if I’ve misjudged the public and people are too disapproving, that’s fine—I’ll just move to Paris. Someone might as well use that vast tunnel they’re digging under the channel.”

She knelt and threw her arms around Pimm’s and Ellie’s necks, dragging them down from their chairs to the floor in a three-way embrace. “You had better treat this woman properly, Pimm. She and I have been in battle together. She is my sister in arms.”

“I, ah—” Pimm stammered.

“Oh, dear,” Winnie said. “I’ll have the most difficult decision of my
life
ahead of me!”

Pimm and Ellie drew back, exchanged a glance, and then frowned at Winnie together. “You will?” Ellie said.

“What decision is that?” Pimm said.

“Whether I should be the maid of honor at your wedding,” Winnie said, “Or best man!”

The Music of Flowers

W
ith Oswald dead, Adam had no particular reason to flee the city. He had no particular reason to
stay
, either, but habit sent him back to the tunnel near the Serpentine after he finished beating the monster to death. He slipped into a fetid hole in the ground and plodded along a dark tunnel, the ichor of a fell beast drying on his fists. Killing the monster had left him feeling curiously hollow. He wanted to create life, and to kindle love, but he was only skilled at murder, and destruction.

After a time, he reached his workshop. He flung his mask to the floor, where it cracked in two, and then he stretched out on his own operating table, closing his eyes. He never slept, and did not own a bed, but he was so terribly weary, now. He envied mortals their capacity for rest.

A hand brushed his forehead, and his eyes shot open. He grabbed the wrist hard enough to crush bone, but the person who’d touched him did not cry out. She simply gazed down at him, then stroked his cheek with her other hand.

“Margaret,” he whispered. “You… what are you doing here?”

“You must promise you will try not to frighten me again,” Margaret said. “Do not shout, or smash things, when we disagree. Can you promise?”

“I… of course. I promise.”

“I, myself, can make no promises,” she said. “But you saved my life, and as I ran through the tunnels, I thought back on our talks, when I was lost in the dark. I thought of your voice. You are fearsome to look upon, Adam. You know that. And you may be capable of fearsome acts as well. But you have a gentle heart. I believe that. A heart that is capable of love.”

Adam closed his eyes. He held her cool hand in his own. “Oh, Margaret.”

“You said you thought we might visit someplace warm. I… have always wanted to see Spain.”

“We will go to Cordoba,” Adam said, and opened his eyes to look upon her beautiful, perfect face. The perfect thing he had made, given life by a beautiful soul
no
man could have created. “In the spring. When the scent of orange blossoms fills the air. That smell… it smells like the chiming of church bells, Margaret.”

“I look forward hearing them,” she said.

The End

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the writers of some of my favorite detective novels, without whom I wouldn’t have invented Pimm—he came to life as a thought experiment, one part Sayers-ish nobleman detective, one part functional alcoholic PI with a troubled past. Ellie Skye is a slightly ahistorical homage to the great journalist Nellie Bly (the novel is set in the year of Bly’s birth). I wouldn’t have written this book without the formative influence of K.W. Jeter’s
Infernal Devices
and
The Anubis Gates
by Tim Powers, which introduced me at an impressionable age to the joys of the gonzo-historical novel. I owe a similar debt to the wonderfully weird English mysteries of John Dickson Carr. (The debts I owe to Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf, Arthur Conan Doyle, and some others are likely more apparent from the text.)

Thanks to Jess Nevins, our field’s leading expert on fictional histories, for providing details for some of my little meta-fictional Easter eggs; and to Shannon Page for heroic acts of copyediting.

A complete bibliography of research materials would be exceedingly long and likely of minimal interest, but I owe special debts to
Murray’s Modern London
(1860), Henry Mayhew’s
London Labour and the London Poor,
Dickens’s
Dictionary of London
, and Edward Stanton’s astonishingly detailed 1863 map of London (which spent much of the past year spread out across nearly the entirety of my office floor).

My gratitude to Jeremy Lassen at Night Shade for acquiring this book; to Ross Lockhart for his editing; and to my agent Ginger Clark, for handling practical matters so I could concentrate on the impractical ones.

And, of course, the utmost thanks to my wife and son for their tolerance and patience with me over many months of writing, muttering to myself, and wandering around the library for entirely too long at a time.

BOOK: The Constantine Affliction
11.17Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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