Anti-Ice

“But as to the rest, I am scarcely qualified to judge. As with so much of this horrible adventure, we are reduced to waiting and seeing.”

The minutes stretched out without event, and my fear became supplemented by boredom and irritation. “I say, Holden, I know Traveller is a great man—and that one must expect such chaps to display the odd eccentricity—but all the same, it seems inhuman to keep us sitting down here in suspense like this.”

Holden turned to the servant. “Pocket? Do you think we should check if Sir Josiah is well?”

Pocket shook his thin head, and I saw how sweat beaded over the bristles of hair at his neck. The manservant, restrained by circumstance from his customary round of chores, seemed the most nervous of all of us. “Sir Josiah doesn’t like to be disturbed at his work, sir.”

I ground my fist into the palm of my hand. “But this is scarcely a normal time, damn it.”

Holden said, “I think we had best let Traveller get on with his work, Ned, and try to be patient.”

“Perhaps you’re right.” I cast about the Cabin, seeking diversion from my own thoughts, and lit on the unhappy figure of Bourne; the Frenchman sat with his head lolling against his chest, a prisoner even within this prison. I said, “I have to say again, Holden, it’s damn heartless of you to have wanted to keep this poor chap restrained still. What further damage can the fellow do?”

Holden glared at Bourne. “He is an Anarchist, Ned; and as such cannot be trusted.”

Now Bourne looked up with some defiance; in his heavily accented English he said, “I am no Anarchist. I am a Frenchman.”

I studied his thin, proud features. “You told me you took the Phaeton because of the tricolore. What did you mean?”

He fixed me with a condescending stare. “That you need to ask such a question, English, is sufficient answer.”

I felt angry that my overtures, friendly enough in the circumstances, should be treated in this way. “What the devil is that supposed to mean? Look here—”

“You won’t get any civility out of that one, Ned,” Holden said wearily. “The tricolore—the flag of their Revolution in which the rabble murdered their anointed rulers, and then turned on each other; the tricolore—which the upstart Corsican carried all over Europe; the tricolore—symbol of blood, chaos and murder—”

“Yes, but what’s it got to do with the Phaeton?”

“Think about it, Ned; try to see the last few decades from your Frenchie’s point of view. His famous Emperor is thrashed by Wellington and carted off to exile. The Congress of Vienna, which has settled the Balance of Power in Europe for all time, and which seems such a noble achievement to us, is invidious to him; for no more can he count on the division of his foes in order to spread his creed of lawlessness and riot across Europe—”

Bourne laughed softly. “I point out that we are now ruled by an Emperor, not by a Robespierre.”

“Yes,” said Holden with disdain, “by Louis Napoleon, who calls himself the bastard son of Bonaparte—”

“The nephew,” interjected Bourne. “But—despite the legitimacy of Louis’ original election to power—your King would have the Emperor replaced, would he not, by a restoration of the old monarchy?” He laughed again.

Holden ignored this. “Ned, your Frenchman has, this century, been thwarted in his ambitions of greed and lawlessness. He has been forced to witness the influence of Britain extend still further across the Continent—and the world—buttressed by the robust nature of our constitutional settlement, and the power of our industrial economy. And his resentment has grown.”

Bourne continued to laugh quietly.

Holden snapped, “Do you deny this?”

Bourne became still. “I do not deny your hegemony in Europe,” he said. “But it is based on one thing, and one thing alone: anti-ice, and your monopoly on the substance. Thus you lay your anti-ice Rails across our fields, and build your stations with English names into which English goods are brought for sale.

“And worse—worse than all this—is your hidden threat to use anti-ice as a final weapon of war. Where is your Balance of Power now, Mr. Holden?”

“There is no such intention,” Holden said stiffly.

“But you have deployed such weapons of terror already,” Bourne said, “against the Russians in the Crimea. We know what you are capable of. You British talk, and act, as if anti-ice was some supernatural outcropping of your racial superiority. It is not; your possession of it is no more than a historical accident, and yet you use this transient superiority to impose your ways, your policies, your very thinking, on the rest of mankind.”

Now it was Holden’s turn to laugh, but I sat quietly, thinking over Bourne’s words. I will admit that even a month earlier I would instinctively have sided with Holden in this debate, but now, hearing the cold, precise words of this Frenchie—no, of this man, a man about my own age—I found my old certitudes more fragile than I had supposed. “But,” I asked Bourne, “what if this is true? Is the British way so bad? Holden has described the Congress of Vienna; Britain’s diplomats have striven for a just peace—”

“I am French, not British,” he said. “We want to find our own destiny, not follow you to yours. The Prussians, and the rest of the Germans, too; if history says that fragmented nation is to unify, who is Britain to stand in the way? And even—even if our nations wish to go to war, then it is not for you to say ‘no’.” His face was pale, but his eyes were clear and steady.

“Then your taking of the Phaeton—perhaps ultimately at the expense of your own life—”

“—was an act designed to waste a few more pounds of the wretched anti-ice. To remove the reckless genius-criminal Traveller. It is known already that your stock of the substance is running low. There is no nobler way for a Frenchman to spend his life than to speed this process.”

Despite the starkness of this statement, I was irresistibly reminded of Traveller’s remarks to the effect that his purpose in building such great devices as the Albert was to distract the politicians and generals from the military exploitation of anti-ice! Was Bourne’s analysis of the situation really so different from that of the great Englishman?

I frowned. “Holden thinks you are a saboteur.”

He shook his head, smiling thinly. “No. I am a franc-tireur.”

“A what?”

“A free-shooter. A new type of soldier; a soldier in a gentleman’s clothes, who fights to free his homeland with any tools available.”

“Damn pretty sentiments,” Holden said with loathing and contempt. “And when the anti-ice is all gone— wasted by such acts as this—then what? Will you rise and murder us in our beds?”

Bourne’s smile widened. “You are so afraid, aren’t you, English? You fear even your own mobs, who perhaps might become infected by ours. And you understand so little.

“I heard Sir Josiah call himself an Anarchist.” He spat. “And in the same breath describe how each man will know his ‘place.’ Traveller and his like do not know the meaning of the words ‘free man.’ Was it not the industrialists who, in 1849, overturned Shaftesbury’s working conditions reforms of a few years earlier?”

I looked blankly at Holden, who raised a hand dismissively. “He means some aberrant pieces of legislation, Ned, long since thrown out and forgotten. Shaftesbury introduced a ten-hour working day limit, for example. Conditions on the use of women in the mines. That sort of thing.”

I was puzzled. “But industry could not function under such restraints. Could it?”

“Of course not! And so the ‘reforms’ were discarded.”

“But,” said Bourne, “at what cost to your British souls. Eh? Vicars, do you remember an English writer called Dickens?”

“Who?”

Again Holden explained, impatiently. Charles Dickens had turned out pot-boilers in the 1840s, achieving a brief popularity. Holden sighed briefly. “Do you remember Little Nell, Pocket?”

The manservant’s face creased to a smile. “Ah, yes, sir. Everyone followed the serials then, didn’t they? And when Nell died there was scarce a dry eye in the country, I dare say.”

“Dickens. I never heard of the fellow,” I admitted. “What happened to him?”

“About 1850 he began a new serial,” Holden remembered. “David Copperfield. Another heavy, weepy work. It flopped completely, being utterly removed from the mood of the day. Ned, it was in that same year of 1850 that the first Light Rail, between Liverpool and Manchester, was opened! People were