The reports had been not shots but small explosions. It was just Foley’s folly, again. Massingham was relieved, but then annoyed when he wiped his brow with his cuff to find his face coated with a gritty, oily discharge.
Through smoke and steam, he saw Foley and his familiar, the boy Gerald, fussing about a machine, faces and hands black as Zulus’, overalls ragged as tramps’. George Foley was a young man, whose undeniable technical skills were tragically allied to a butterfly mind that constantly alighted upon the most impractical and useless concepts.
‘My apologies, Count,’ said Massingham. ‘I am afraid that this is what one must expect when one devotes oneself to the fantastic idea of an engine worked by explosion. Things will inevitably blow up.’
‘Combustion,’ snapped Foley. ‘Not explosion.’
‘I crave your pardon, Foley,’ said Massingham. ‘Infernal combustion.’
Foley’s written proposals were often passed round the under-managers for humorous relief.
‘Internal,’ squeaked Gerald, an eleven-year-old always so thickly greased and blackened that it was impossible to tell what the colour of his hair or complexion might be. ‘Internal combustion, not infernal.’
‘I believe my initial choice of word was apt.’
‘That’s as may be, Massingham, but look...’
The device that had exploded was shaking now, emitting a grumble of noise and spurts of noxious smoke. A crank was turning a belt, which was turning a wheel. Massingham had seen such toys before.
‘Five times more efficient than steam,’ Foley said. ‘Maybe ten, a dozen...’
‘And five times more likely to kill you.’
‘In the early days of steam, many were killed,’ said the Count. He gazed into Foley’s engine, admiring the way the moving parts meshed. It was a satisfyingly complicated toy, with oiled pistons and levers and cogs. A child’s idea of a wonderful machine.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said Foley, ‘and you are...’
‘This is the Count de Ville,’ explained Massingham. ‘An important connection of the firm, from overseas. He is interested in railways.’
‘Travel,’ said the Count. ‘I am interested in travel. In the transport of the future.’
‘You have then chanced upon the right place, Count,’ said Foley. He did not offer a dirty hand, but nodded a greeting, almost clicking his heels. ‘For in this workshop is being sounded the death-knell of the whole of the rest of the factory. My transport, my horseless carriage, will make the steam engine as obsolete as the train made the stagecoach.’
‘Horseless carriage?’ said the Count, drawing out the words, rolling the idea around his mind.
‘It’s a wonder, sir,’ said Gerald, eyes shining. Foley tousled the boy’s already-greasy bird’s nest of hair, proud of his loyal lackey.
Massingham suppressed a bitter laugh.
Foley led them past the still-shaking engine on its fixed trestle, to a dust-sheeted object about the size of a small hay-cart. The inventor and the nimble Gerald lifted off the canvas sheet and threw it aside.
‘This is my combustion carriage,’ said Foley, with pride. ‘I shall have to change the name, of course. It might be called a petroleum caleche, or an auto-mobile.’
The invention sat squarely on four thick-rimmed wheels, with a small carriage-seat suspended above them to the rear of one of Foley’s combustion engines.
‘There will be a housing on the finished model, to keep the elements out of the engine and cut down the noise. The smoke will be discharged through these pipes.’
‘The flat wheel-rims suggest this will not run on rails,’ said the Count.
‘Rails,’ Foley fairly spat. ‘No, sir. Indeed not. This will run on roads. Or, if there are no roads, on any reasonably level surface. Trains are limited, as you know. They cannot venture where rail-layers have not been first, at great expense. My carriage will be free, eventually, to go everywhere.’
‘Always in a straight line?’
‘By means of a steering apparatus, the front wheels can be turned like a ship’s rudder.’
Massingham was impatient with such foolishness.
‘My dear Count,’ said Foley, ‘I foresee that this device, of which Mr Massingham is so leery, will change the world as we know it, and greatly for the better. The streets of our cities will no longer be clogged with the excrement of horses. No more fatalities or injuries will be caused by animals bolting or throwing their riders. And there will be no more great collisions, for these carriages are steerable and can thus avoid each other. Unlike horses, they do not panic; and, unlike trains, they do not run on fixed courses. Derailments, obviously, are out of the question. The first and foremost attribute of the combustion carriage is its safety.’
The Count walked round the carriage, eyeing its every detail, smiling with his sharp teeth. There was something animal-like about de Ville, a single-mindedness at once childish and frightening.
‘May I?’ The Count indicated the seat.
Foley hesitated but, sensing a potential sponsor, shrugged.
De Ville climbed up into the seat. The carriage settled under his weight. The axles were on suspension springs, like a hansom cab. The Count ran his hands around the great steering-wheel, which was as unwieldy and stiff as those that worked the locks on a canal. There were levers to the side of the seat, the purpose of which was unknown to Massingham, though he assumed one must be a braking-mechanism.
Beside the wheel was a rubber-bulbed horn. The Count squeezed it experimentally.
Poop-poop!
‘To alert pedestrians,’ explained Foley. ‘The engine runs so quietly that the horn will be necessary.’
The Count smiled, eyes rimmed with red delight. He poop-pooped again, evidently in love. His craze for trains was quite forgotten. Poop-poop had trumped toot-toot.
Foreigners were a lot like children.
‘How does it start?’
‘With a crank.’
‘Show me,’ de Ville ordered.
Foley nodded to Gerald, who darted to the front of the contraption with a lever and fitted it into the engine. He gave it a turn, and nothing happened. Massingham had seen this before. Usually, the dignitaries summoned to witness the great breakthrough had retreated by the time the engine caught. Then it would only sputter a few moments, allowing the carriage to lurch forward a yard or two before at best stalling and at worst exploding.
If Foley’s folly blew up and killed the Count, Massingham would have to answer for it. The man clearly had an impulse towards death.
Gerald cranked the engine again, and again, and...
... nipped out of the way sharpish. Small flames burst in the guts of the machine, and the pistons began to pump.
The carriage moved forward, and the Count poop-pooped the blasted horn again. He would have been as happy with the noise-maker alone as the whole vehicle.
Slowly, the carriage trundled towards the open doors of the workshop. Foley looked alarmed, but didn’t protest. Picking up more speed than usual, the carriage disappeared out of the doors. The Count’s straw hat blew off and was wafted up towards the roof by the black smoke that poured thickly from the pipes at the rear of the machine.
Massingham, Foley and Gerald followed the carriage to the doorway. Astonished, they saw the Count piloting the machine, with growing expertise, yanking hard on the steering-wheel and turning in ever tighter circles, circumnavigating the pile of rails, weaving in and out between sheds and buildings.
A cat shot out of the way, its tail flat. Workmen passing by stopped to stare. A small crowd gathered, of idle hands distracted from their appointed tasks. Some of the directors poked their heads out, silk hats held to their heads.
It was a ridiculous sight, but somehow stirring. The Count was very intent, very serious. But the machine just looked silly, not majestic like a steam engine. Still, Massingham had a glimpse of what Foley saw in the thing.
The Count poop-pooped the horn. Someone cheered.
Gerald, delighted, danced in the wake of the carriage.
The Count made a hard turn and suddenly the boy’s legs were under the front wheels. Bright blood spurted
