“And how are you, Dr. Mallory?” Fraser inquired glumly.
“A bit fatigued,” Mallory told him, sitting, “but nothing a bite of food and a huckle-buff wouldn’t set to rights. How are you, Fraser? Quite recovered, I hope?” He lowered his voice. “And what line of clever nonsense have you been telling my poor brothers, pray?”
Fraser said nothing.
“Sergeant Fraser’s a London policeman,” Mallory said. “Of the dark-lantern variety.”
“Truly?” Tom blurted, alarmed.
A waiter worked his way toward the table, one of the regular staff, looking harried and apologetic. “Dr. Mallory—the Palace larder’s a bit low, sir. Simple fish-and-taters would be best, sir, if you don’t mind it.”
“That will be fine. And if you could mix a huckle-buff—well, never mind. Bring me coffee. Strong and black.”
Fraser watched the waiter leave, with melancholy patience. “You must have had a lively night,” Fraser remarked, when the man was out of ear-shot. Both Tom and Brian were watching Fraser with a new, half-resentful suspicion.
“I have discovered that the tout—Captain Swing, that is—has gone to earth in the West India Docks,” Mallory said. “He’s attempting to incite a general insurrection!”
Fraser’s lips tightened.
“He has an Engine printing-press, and a rabble of confederates. He’s printing seditious documents by the scores and hundreds. I confiscated a few specimens this morning—obscene, libelous, Luddite filth!”
“You’ve been industrious.”
Mallory snorted. “I’ll shortly be a deal busier yet, Fraser. I mean to hunt the wretch down directly and put a sharp end to this!”
Brian leaned forward. “It was this ‘Captain Swing’ who wrote that lying slander against our Maddy, then, was it?”
“Yes.”
Tom sat up straight in his chair, with a flush of excitement. “West India Docks. Where’s that, then?”
“Down on the Limehouse Reach, clear across London,” Fraser said.
“That don’t matter a hang,” Tom said quickly. “I’ve my Zephyr!”
Mallory was startled. “You brought the Brotherhood’s racer?”
Tom shook his head. “Not that old banger, Ned, but the latest model! She’s a spanking-new little beauty, sitting in your Palace stables. Took us all the way from Sussex in a morning, and would have gone faster yet, if I hadn’t had a coal-wain hitched to her.” He laughed. “We can go wherever we like!”
“Let’s not lose our heads, gentlemen,” Fraser warned.
They fell unwillingly silent for a moment, as the waiter deftly set Mallory’s food before him. The sight of fried plaice and sliced potatoes made Mallory’s stomach knot with a famished pang. “We are free British subjects and may go as we please,” Mallory said firmly, then seized his silverware and fell to at once.
“I can only call that foolish,” said Fraser. “Riotous mobs are roaming the streets, and the man you seek is as cunning as an adder.”
Mallory grunted derisively.
Fraser was dour. “Dr. Mallory, it is my duty to see that you don’t come to harm! We can’t have you stirring up dangerous serpent’s-nests in the vilest slums in London!”
Mallory gulped hot coffee. “You know that he means to destroy me,” he told Fraser, locking eyes with him. “If I don’t finish him now, while I’ve the chance, he’ll slowly peck me into pieces. There’s not a dashed thing you can do that can protect me! This man is not like you and I, Fraser! He is beyond the pale! The stakes are life and death—it is him, or me! You know that is the truth.”
Fraser, struck by Mallory’s argument, looked shaken. Tom and Brian, even more alarmed at this new revelation of the depth of their troubles, glanced at one another in confusion, then turned to glare angrily at Fraser.
Fraser spoke reluctantly. “Let’s not act hastily! Once the fog lifts, and law and order have returned—”
“Captain Swing lives within a fog that never lifts,” Mallory said.
Brian broke in, with a swipe of his gilded sleeve. “I see no point in this, Mr. Fraser! You have deliberately deceived my brother Thomas and myself! I can put no credit in any of your counsel!”
“Brian’s right!” said Tom. He regarded Fraser with a mingled scorn and wonder. “This man claimed he was a friend of yours, Ned, and got me and Brian to talking free-and-easy about you! Now he’s a-trying to order us about!” Tom shook his clenched fist, sinewy and work-hardened. “I mean to teach this Captain Swing a sharp lesson! If I need to start with you, Mr. Fraser, then I stand a-ready!”
“Softly now, lads,” Mallory told his brothers. Other diners nearby had begun to stare. Mallory deliberately wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Fortune favors us, Mr. Fraser,” he said quietly. “I have acquired a pistol. And young Brian is also armed.”
“Oh, dear,” said Fraser.
“I’m not afraid of Swing,” Mallory told him. “Remember, I knocked him flat at the Derby. Face-to-face, he’s nought but a yellow cur.”
“He is at the Docks, Mallory!” Fraser said. “D’ye think you’re going to waltz and polka through a riot in the hardest part of London?”
“We Mallory lads aren’t fancy-jacks from any dancing academy,” Mallory told the policeman. “D’ye think the London poor more frightful to face than Wyoming savages?”
“Actually, yes,” Fraser said slowly. “Considerably worse, I should judge.”
“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, Fraser! Don’t waste our time with this trifling! We must grapple once and for all with this slippery phantom, and a better chance will never come! In the name of sanity and justice, put an end to your useless, officious grizzling!”
Fraser sighed. “And suppose, in this brave expedition, that you are cunningly trapped and murdered, like your colleague Rudwick? What then? How would I answer to my superiors?”
But now Brian fixed Fraser with a soldier’s steely eye. “Did you ever have a little sister, Mr. Fraser? Did you ever have to watch that girl’s happiness shattered like a china cup, trampled by a monster? And with her broken heart, the honest heart of a Crimean hero, whose simple, manly intention was to make her his bride—”
Fraser groaned aloud. “Enough!”
Brian leaned back, looking somewhat crestfallen at the interruption.
Fraser smoothed his dark lapels with both hands. “It seems the fated time for risks,” he admitted, with a lopsided shrug, and a passing wince. “I haven’t had a bit of luck since I met you, Dr. Mallory, and I daresay I’m due for a change of fortune.” Suddenly, his eyes glittered. “Who’s to say that we might not bag the scoundrel, eh? Arrest him! He’s clever, but four brave men might catch the nasty wretch with his guard down, whilst he swaggers about in poor stricken London like some Jacobin prince.” Fraser scowled, his lean face twisting with genuine anger. It was an unexpectedly fearsome sight.
“Fortune favors the brave,” Brian said.
“And God looks after fools,” muttered Fraser. He leaned forward intently, plucking his trouser-legs from his bony knees. “This is no light matter, gentlemen! No lark for amateurs. This is dire work! We shall be taking the law, and our lives, and our honor, into our own hands. If it is to be done at all, it must be done in the strictest and most permanent secrecy.”
Mallory, sensing victory, spoke up with an adroitness that surprised even himself. “My brothers and I respect your special expertise, Sergeant Fraser! If you will guide us toward justice, then we will gladly place ourselves at your command. You need never doubt our discretion or our resolve. The sacred honor of our own dear sister is at stake.”
Tom and Brian seemed taken aback at this sudden change of tack, for they still distrusted Fraser, but Mallory’s somber pledge brooked no objection from them. They followed his lead.
“You’ll never see me peaching!” Tom declared. “Not to my grave!”
“I should think the sworn word of a British soldier still accounts,” Brian said.
“Then we shall try
the venture,” Fraser said, with a wry look of fatalism.
“I must get steam up in the Zephyr!” Tom said, rising from his chair. “Half-an-hour my little beauty takes, from a cold start.”
Mallory nodded. He would put every minute to good use.
Outside the Palace, washed, combed, and intimately dusty with flea-powder, Mallory sought a lumpy purchase atop the Zephyr’s wooden coal-wain. The chugging little gurney had barely room for two men within its line-streamed tin shell. Tom and Fraser had taken those seats. They were arguing now over a London street-map.
Brian stamped out a rude nest within the wain’s flabby canvas, stretched atop a diminishing heap of coal. “They take a deal of shoveling, your modern gurneys,” Brian observed, with a stoic smile. He sat across from Mallory. “Tom does take-on about this precious machine of his; talked my ear off about Zephyrs, all the way from Lewes.”
The gurney and wain lurched into motion, the coal-wain’s wooden-spoked rubbered wheels turning with a rhythmic creak. They rolled down Kensington Road with a startling celerity. Brian brushed a flaming smokestack spark from his dapper coat-sleeve.
“You need a breathing-mask,” Mallory said, offering his brother one of the makeshift masks the ladies had sewn within the Palace: a neatly stitched ribboned square of gingham, stuffed with cheap Confederate cotton.
Brian sniffed at the rushing air. “Ain’t so bad.”
Mallory knotted the ribbons of his own mask neatly behind his head. “Miasma will tell against your health, lad, in the long run.”
“This don’t compare to the pong of an Army transport boat,” said Brian. The absence of Fraser seemed to have relaxed him. There was something more of the Sussex lad about him, and less of the stern young subaltern. “Coaly fumes pouring out our engine-room,” Brian reminisced, “and the lads tossing-up their rations from the mal-de-mer, right and left! We steamed through that new Frenchy canal in Suez, straight from Bombay. We lived in that bloody transport for weeks! Rotten Egyptian heat—straight through to hard Crimean winter! If the cholery, or the quartan fever, didn’t carry me off from that, then I needn’t worry over any little mist in London.” Brian chuckled.
“I often thought of you, in Canada,” Mallory told his brother. “You, with a five-year enlistment—and a war on! But I knew you’d do the family proud, Brian. I knew you’d do your duty.”
“We Mallory lads are all over the world, Ned,” said Brian, philosophically. His voice was gruff, but his bearded face had colored at Mallory’s praise. “Where’s brother Michael right now, eh? Good old Mickey?”
“Hong Kong, I think,” Mallory said. “Mick would be here today with us surely, if luck had put his ship in port in England. He was never the sort to flinch from a proper fight, our Michael.”
“I’ve seen Emestina and Agatha, since I was back,” Brian said. “And their dear little ones.” He said nothing about Dorothy. The family did not talk about Dorothy anymore. Brian shifted on the lumpy canvas, turning a wary eye on the looming crenellations of a palace of savantry. “Don’t care much for a fight in the streets,” he remarked. “That was the only place the Russkies really stung us, in the streets of Odessa. Scrapping and sniping house-to-house in the city, like bandits. That’s no civilized war.” He frowned.
“Why didn’t they stand up straight, and give you an honest battle?”
Brian glanced at him in surprise, then laughed, a bit oddly. “Well, they surely tried that at first, at Alma and Inkermann. But we gave ’em such a hell of a toweling that it knocked ’em into a panic. You might call that partly my doing, I suppose. The Royal Artillery, Ned.”
“Do tell,” Mallory said.
“We’re the most scientific of the forces. They love the Artillery, your military Rads.” Brian snuffed another fat smokestack spark with a spit-dampened thumb. “Special military savantry! Dreamy little fellers with specs on their noses, and figures in their heads. Never seen a sword drawn, or a bayonet. Don’t need to see such things to win a modern war. ’Tis all trajectories, and fuse-timings.”
Brian watched with alert suspicion as a pair of men in baggy raincoats sidled down the road. “The Russkies did what they could. Huge redoubts, at the Redan, and Sevastopol. When our heavy guns opened up, they came apart like cracker-boxes. Then they fell back into trench-works, but the grapeshot from the mortar-organs worked like a marvel.” Brian’s eyes were distant now, focused on memory. “You could see it, Ned, white smoke and dirt flying up at the head of the barrage-line, every round falling neat and true as the trees in an orchard! And when the shelling stopped, our infantry—French allies mostly, they did a deal of the footwork—would trot in over the palisades, and finish poor Ivan off with wind-up rifles.”
“The papers said the Russians fought with no respect for military decency.”
“They got mortal desperate when they found they couldn’t touch us,” Brian said. “Took to partisan work, fighting from ambush, firing on white flags and such. Ugly business, dishonorable. We couldn’t put up with that. Had to take measures.”
“At least it was all over swiftly,” Mallory said. “One doesn’t like war, but it was time to teach Tsar Nicholas a lesson. I doubt the tyrant will ever tug the Lion’s tail again.”
Brian nodded. “It’s right astonishing, what those new incendiary shells can do. You can lay ’em down in a grid-work, neat as pie.” His voice fell. “You should have seen Odessa burning, Ned. Like a flaming hurricane, it was. A giant hurricane …”
“Yes—I read about that,” Mallory nodded. “There was a ‘storm-fire’ in the siege of Philadelphia. Very similar business, very remarkable principle.”
“Ah,” said Brian, “that’s the problem with the Yankees—no military sense! To think of doing that to your own cities! Why, you’d have to be a cack-handed fool!”
“They’re a queer folk, the Yanks,” Mallory said.
“Well, some folk are too chuckleheaded to manage themselves, and that’s a fact,” Brian said. He glanced about warily as Tom piloted the Zephyr past the smoldering wreckage of an omnibus. “Did you take to the Yankees, at all, in America?”
“Never saw Americans, just Indians.” And the less said about that the better, thought Mallory. “What did you think of India, by the way?”
“It’s a dreadful place, India,” Brian said readily, “brim-full of queer marvels, but dreadful. There’s only one folk in Asia with any sense, and that’s the Japanese.”
“I heard you took part in an Indian campaign,” Mallory said. “But I never was quite sure who those ‘Sepoys’ were, exactly.”
“Sepoys are native troops. We had a rash of trouble with mutineers, Moslem nonsense, about pig-fat in their rifle-cartridges! It was sheer native foolishness, but Moslems don’t care to eat pork, you know, all very superstitious. It looked dicey, but the Viceroy of India hadn’t given the native regiments any modern artillery. One battery of Wolseley mortar-organs can send a Bengali regiment straight to hell in five minutes.”
Brian’s gold-braided shoulders glittered as he shrugged. “Still, I saw barbarities at Meerut and Lucknow, during the rebellion.… You’d not think any man could do such vile, savage things. Especially our own native soldiers, that we ourselves had trained.”
“Fanatics,” Mallory nodded. “Your common Indian, though, must be surely grateful for a decent civil government. Railroads, telegraphs, aqueducts, and such.”
“Oh,” said Brian, “when you see some Hindu fakir a-sitting in a temple niche, filthy naked with a flower on his hair, who’s to say what goes on in that queer headpiece of his?” He fell silent, then pointed sharply over Mallory’s shoulder. “Over there—what are those rascals doing?”
Mallory turned and looked. In the mouth of an adjoining street, the paving had been taken over by a large and thriving ring of gamblers. “They’re tossing dice,” Mallory explained. A knot of shabby, disheveled men—scouts of some primitive kind, lawless pickets—were standing lookout under an awning, passing a bottle of gin. One fat
ruffian gestured obscenely as the Zephyr chugged past, and his startled companions hooted disbelieving taunts from behind their rag-masks.
Brian flung himself full-length across the coal-wain, and peered over the wooden wall. “Are they armed?”
Mallory blinked. “I don’t think they mean us any harm—”
“They’re a-going to rush us,” Brian announced. Mallory glanced at his brother in surprise, but to his greater astonishment he saw that Brian was quite right. The shabby men were capering after the Zephyr, almost skipping down the empty street, with a shake of their fists and a slosh of their gin-bottle. They seemed possessed with an angry yapping energy, like farm-dogs pursuing a carriage. Brian rose to one knee, untoggled his holster-flap, set his hand to the large queer pistol-butt within it—
He was almost flung from the wain as Thomas hit the Zephyr’s throttle. Mallory grabbed his brother’s belt and hauled him back to sprawling safety. The Zephyr racketed smoothly up the street, a small cascade of coal pattering out the back with the shock of acceleration. Behind them the pursuers stopped short in disbelief, then stooped like idiots to pick at the fallen coals, as if they were emeralds.
“How did you know they would do that?” Mallory asked.
Brian knocked coal-dust from his trouser-knees with a pocket-kerchief. “I knew it.”
“But why?”
“ ’Cause we’re here, and they’re there, I suppose! ’Cause we ride and they walk!” He looked at Mallory red-faced, as if the question were more trouble to him than a gun-fight.
Mallory sat back, looking away. “Take the mask,” he said mildly, holding it out. “I brought it just for you.”
Brian smiled then, sheepish, and knotted the little thing about his neck.
There were soldiers with bayoneted rifles on the street-corners in Piccadilly, in modern speckled drab and slouch hats. They were eating porridge from mess-kits of stamped tin. Mallory waved cheerily at these minions of order, but they glared back at the Zephyr with such militant suspicion that he quickly stopped. Some blocks on, at the corner of Longacre and Drury Lane, the soldiers were actively bullying a small squad of bewildered London police. The coppers milled about like scolded children, feebly clutching their inadequate billy-clubs. Several had lost their helmets, and many bore rude bandages on hands and scalps and shins.