The Iron Duke (8 page)

“A man like that, given a duke’s title.” Sheffield lowered his handkerchief from his mouth, revealing a disgusted frown. “It’s an insult to the rank. He knows nothing of honor or duty. Only the idolatry heaped on his head keeps it out of a hangman’s noose—and even this murder will be pardoned.”

Mina bristled. Though she held a similar opinion of Trahaearn, a bounder didn’t get to determine the Iron Duke’s worth, or judge the buggers who valued him over any other man
or
title.

Hale cast Sheffield a severe look. “If all he’s done is made an enemy, then he hasn’t done anything that needs pardoned.”

That wasn’t the response Mina would have given, but she appreciated Hale’s. Though Hale was also a bounder, the destruction of the tower had given her a measure of freedom, as well—and so perhaps she understood better why the Iron Duke was so revered. In Manhattan City, Hale had been an assistant to her late husband, a chief inspector. When he’d died, the Manhattan City police hadn’t let her step into his place or continue in the same occupation, though she’d been well-qualified for it. She’d been one of the first who’d returned from the New World following the revolution, and had joined London’s newly formed and critically understaffed Metropolitan Police Force.

Sheffield coughed again. Hale’s expression softened and her brow furrowed, perhaps wondering if he would relent and visit a blacksmith or physician who could infect him with the nanoagents. With his every cough, Mina wondered the same. Sheffield would have to gain special permissions to return to Manhattan City after being infected, but he had money enough for bribes, and enough power that even a New Worlder’s fear of the bugs wouldn’t affect his business or his status.

But perhaps Sheffield was the one who needed to overcome his fear of the bugs.

Hale’s gaze returned to Mina’s. “I’ll inform the commissioner that we are confirming identity and motive—and that we anticipate
imminent
apprehension.”

Mina suppressed her smile. “Yes, sir.”

“Mr. Sheffield, would you please wind the machine?” Hale selected letter-specific punch cards from the stack on her desk, arranging their order and forming her message. At the wiregram, Sheffield began spinning the influence machine’s handle, building up static stored in the battery of Kleistian jars. As if suddenly remembering Mina’s presence, Hale glanced up again, and raised her voice over the whir of the influence machine. “You’re dismissed, inspector. Send me a wiregram detailing your progress at every step, starting after your meeting with the Blacksmith in the morning.”

So that Hale could update their superiors. Mina nodded. “I will. Good night, sir.” She looked to the gentleman. “Mr. Sheffield.”

He bowed his head, never pausing in his spinning. “My lady.”

Inspector
, Mina almost corrected him, but held her tongue.

As she turned, she saw Hale’s mouth tighten and the sharp glance she gave Sheffield. The superintendent didn’t hold with privileging the title over the occupation.

And Sheffield wasn’t a bad sort, but he would have to figure out a few things before Hale changed one of her titles to his missus.

When Mina came down for breakfast, her parents were
already seated at one end of the dining table, wearing enough layers to ward off the chill in the room. The gray early-morning sunshine trickling in through the windows seemed more like a drizzle, so that everything the pale light touched appeared damp.

Even her mother’s white hair seemed muted by it. Without glancing up from the newssheets spread across her father’s reading apparatus, she observed, “You forgot to wind your clock, Mina.”

Mina hadn’t thought she would need to. The night had been a sleepless one . . . except during the hour she was supposed to have risen. “Yes.”

“Are you in a hurry, then?”

“Not yet.” Newberry wouldn’t bring his cart around for another quarter hour.

From the sideboard, Mina selected a boiled egg and thinly sliced toast. Simple fare, perhaps, but Cook’s toast was unequaled anywhere—even her mother had not yet devised a machine that could replicate it. To Mina’s surprise, a length of sausage was leftover, given as payment after her father had infected the butcher’s newborn with nanoagents. If her brothers Henry and Andrew had still lived here, not even a smear of grease would have remained. Suddenly missing them acutely, she slid the sausage onto her plate and took the chair across from her mother.

She poured the cheap Liberé coffee and pretended not to notice as, on her left, her father looked up from the newssheets and subjected her to a quiet scrutiny—looking for bruises or stiffness in her movements, she knew. In the first years following the revolution, she’d tried to hide them, scuffling with her brothers as cover. Stupid, perhaps, because her father hadn’t been fooled. But she couldn’t bear the helpless anger in her father’s eyes every time she returned home with a puffy lip or a bruised cheek. At least the fights with her brothers let him
do
something, even if it was only a reprimand.

Fortunately, she hadn’t needed to cover any bruises of late—not since Newberry had been assigned to her. A giant hulk of a man following her about dissuaded anyone from striking her, no matter how much they hated the Horde.

And if not for Newberry, her brothers might never have felt they could leave—first the practical Henry, gone to Northampton to see if he could wrestle order and prosperity from an estate that no one in their family had seen for two hundred years, followed by Andrew, embarking on the first steps toward a career at sea. Her gaze fell on Andrew’s empty seat.
Marco’s Terror
should have reached the Caribbean by now, and so his letters would be arriving from the French Antilles within a few weeks. She wondered if he’d write of how much he hated the ship, or how much he loved it.

Strange, that she couldn’t guess. Unlike Henry, whose steely good sense rivaled their father’s, Andrew’s and Mina’s characters had been assembled from both parents—though neither were as high-strung as their mother, whose emotions even the Horde hadn’t been able to suppress. Typically, Andrew’s opinions and reactions mirrored Mina’s, but she couldn’t predict how he would find life aboard the ship. Would he chafe against the rigid order on the
Terror
, or revel in the freedom of the open seas and every new sight that his journey presented? And if it were both, which would win out over the other?

Whatever his response, she was certain of one thing: that he would be grateful for the opportunity to
know
whether it suited him, rather than forever wondering. Mina would always be similarly grateful to Hale—and for finding a job that so perfectly suited her.

Dead people of all sorts were more tolerable than most of those living.

Her father finished his silent examination and returned to his newssheets, clicking the page turner. Though faster by hand, anyone living with her mother soon learned the simple pleasure of watching a well-designed machine at work. A stylus with a rubber ball at its tip slowly pushed the paper over, treating Mina to a sideways view of the caricature of a Horde magistrate: rat-faced, his eyes nothing more than slits drawn with heavy slashes of a pen, and a wispy mustache drooped over loose, bulbous lips.

She looked down at her plate. Reading the story that accompanied the drawing was unnecessary; it had played out several times over the past months. The few Horde officials who hadn’t fled or been killed during the revolution had been imprisoned at Newgate for the past nine years. Now, they underwent trials for the horrors committed during the occupation. Thus far, all had been found guilty and sentenced to hang. No doubt this magistrate would, too.

When the page finished turning over, Mina looked up again. Her mother read along with her father, the newssheet a tiny upside-down reflection in her silver eyes; Mina couldn’t have hoped to discern the small print from the same distance, even reading right-side up. Not long after the Blacksmith had grafted the mechanical eyes, her mother had tried to explain how everything appeared through them. She’d mentioned telescopes, magnifying goggles, and the glow of a fire before giving up, frustrated by her inability to describe what she saw. The gist had been clear enough, however: Not only was her mother’s vision more acute, it was
different
. She saw not just in color and shapes, but temperatures. She’d stumbled around for almost a year—stumbled far more than she had while completely blind—before finally learning to interpret the images the new eyes gave her.

Mina had never asked what price the Blacksmith had put on her mother’s eyes, but after six years, the debt hadn’t yet been paid off. Her mother’s automata sold at his shops for enormous amounts, yet she received a pittance after the Blacksmith took his portion.

Her dead man’s arm had cost someone. Perhaps he or his family had money—but if he was still indebted, the Blacksmith would have information regarding the dead man’s recent whereabouts. Rumor was, if anyone missed a payment, the Blacksmith always found them.

Information about where the man had been might prove useful. All Mina
needed
, however, was a name.

The reading apparatus clicked again. As the stylus slowly turned the paper over, her father said, “Until your mother saw the blood on your dress, she’d thought that you’d bribed young Newberry to help you escape the Victory Ball.”

Mina laughed and saw her mother’s quick smile. No one could accuse her father of inefficiency. He could poke fun at them both with one statement.

His brown beard hid most of her father’s smile, but the corners of his mustache twitched as he continued, “Whereas I suspected that you put the blood there simply to convince your mother. It wasn’t fresh.”

Her father had probably examined the stains to make certain the blood wasn’t Mina’s. “It wasn’t. He’d been frozen for some time.” She glanced across the table at her mother. “Is the dress ruined?”

“Quite.” No censure filled her voice, only acceptance. She seemed downtrodden this morning. “We will see what Sally can salvage of the fabric.”

“Unfortunately, Newberry did not think to bring my wardrobe.” Mina looked down at her black trousers tucked into sturdy boots. She should have worn this to the ball. People might as well meet her as she truly was . . . though it hardly mattered. She could parade naked down Oxford Street, and no one would notice anything but her Horde features. She glanced to her father. “Were you able to speak with Mr. Moutten?”

The patients her father tended were often worse off than Mina’s family, and payment rarely came as money. Her father accepted anything—chickens, food, repairs—but asked for broken machines above all else, which her mother used to build the automata sold in the Blacksmith’s shops. Mina’s salary covered the bare necessities. After paying the taxes, which were hardly lower than the Horde had demanded, and wages for the cook and two maids—far fewer than the town house needed, even with most of the rooms closed up—all together Mina’s family earned just enough to scrape by.

But her father had heard that a bounder’s personal physician had fled back to the New World. To bring in more ready cash, he’d intended to recommend his services to the gentleman.

“I am,” he said, puffing himself up in parody and adopting a bounder’s flat accent, “a jolly good man to offer such a favor.”

A favor?
That didn’t sound promising. “In exchange for what?”

“His good esteem? A reference?” He shook his head, his chest deflating to normal size. “I couldn’t say. But clearly, payment did not enter Moutten’s mind.”

Did they assume her father’s work was a hobby?
Blast those thickheaded bounders.
What in the blazes did they eat in Manhattan City?
Air?
Maybe the food fell from the trees and rolled onto golden plates.

Or maybe they thought the services of a Horde-trained physician weren’t worth anything. Arrogant bigots, those bounders were—the whole lot of them.

“Perhaps it’s for the best, however,” he continued evenly, and Mina didn’t know how he could remain so calm when steam all but spouted from her ears. “I would advise them all to infect themselves, and none of them want to hear that.”

Her mother lifted her chin, gesturing at the newssheets. “They’ll not be able to anyway, once the Free Party has their way.”

Unlike every nation in the New World, England hadn’t outlawed the practice of injecting someone with blood infected by the nanoagents. Any physician or blacksmith could perform the injection. The process posed no risk; some people contracted low-grade bug fever in the first hours, but Mina had never heard of anyone dying from the injection—and her father had infected thousands, most of them children.

But the health risks concerned the Free Party less than the nanoagents themselves, and had become the most divisive issue in the upcoming general election. And it shouldn’t have been so, but with the bounders reclaiming their seats and the influence of merchants on pocket boroughs, the Free Party had the buggers themselves arguing against their own interests. Political opponents debated whether a bugger should be able to hold office or inherit, citing the danger of a judge or a lawmaker whose decisions could be influenced by a radio signal. Pointing out that the Horde hadn’t controlled their thoughts did little to help, because the Horde
had
made King Edward a puppet, yanking on his strings so hard and so often that they’d ruined his mind.

Fear of control had become the Horde’s legacy, and the Free Party did little to dispel it. The paranoia had become so prevalent that Mina had even heard tales of a Black Guard—silent agents of the Horde who stole into buggers’ homes during the night, freezing their nanoagents and leaving them helpless, or taking others away to enslave.

Mina didn’t know how many letters her father had written to aristocrats and the influential merchants, asserting the need for common sense over fear, but he spent almost every evening composing them. When Parliament came into session again, he’d be occupied by matters in the White Chamber during the daytime hours—and tend to fewer patients.