there was of course no sign; and neither did we find any survivors in that part of the city.
More than once I came across the engineer, Traveller, laboring with the rest of us; and once I saw tears coursing down his grimy cheeks. Perhaps, we speculated, even he had not appreciated the devastation to be achieved by his invention. I wondered how this Traveller would spend the rest of his days; and what other miracles—or curses—of anti-ice he might spawn.
But I did not approach him, and I know no one who did.
There is little else to say, dear Father. I was relieved of my work in Sebastopol once fresh troops and equipment arrived from Britain and France; now, after nine or ten days, the town—though wrecked—is a little less like a scene from the “Divine Comedy;” and the harbor is beginning to function again.
The months of siege are, of course, at an end, and the war is won. But since our occupation of the town we have learned that prior to the anti-ice bombardment the Russians were already losing a thousand lives a day, thanks to our artillery shots and the various privations they suffered. Their mood apparently had been growing increasingly desperate, and—I am told—their Officers had been considering a final gamble, a break-out and assault which, I am confident, we could have fielded and so won the war.
So, Father—did the anti-ice have to be used? Could we have won without such suffering among the population of the town?
I fear that only God, the Master of more Worlds than this, knows the answers to such questions.
As to myself: the Doctor has told me that I should regain partial use of my burnt hand, with time, though it will never be a pretty sight, and I will never hold a fiddle with it! And speaking of pretty sights—I must report this in advance of the meeting and reconciliation between us which, I hope, will one day come—I fear that my face has been scarred by the anti-ice flames, and will remain so marked throughout my life—all save the distinctive and quite unmistakable shadow of the hand which I had held cupped over my eyes, at the moment when that unusual shell fell on Sebastopol.
Father, I will close now. Please forward my love and devotion to Mother and Ned; as I say, I hope to see you all once more, if you will have me, on my return to England; at which date I will be able to thank you, Father, for the reparations you have made to the young lady whose honor I so carelessly mistreated with the actions of my youth.
1
AT THE NEW GREAT EXHIBITION
It was at the opening of the New Great Exhibition, on the 18th of July 1870, that I first encountered the famous engineer Josiah Traveller in person, although I had grown up with my brother Hedley’s tales of the devilism wrought by Traveller’s anti-ice in the Crimean campaign. Our first meeting was brief enough and quite overshadowed in my mind by the wonders of the Crystal Cathedral and all it contained—not to mention the beautiful face of one Francoise Michelet—and yet the chain of events initiated by that first casual encounter were to lead link by link into the astonishing adventure which would lift me above the very stratosphere; and plunge me at last into the depths of a man-made hell at Orleans.
In that climactic year of 1870 I was a junior attache to the Foreign Office. My father, despairing of my shallow character and shallower intellect, had been eager to find me a role in which I would be of significant service to the country. I believe he had toyed with the idea of purchasing a commission for me in one or other of the Services; but, blighted as he was by Hedley’s Crimean experiences, he had decided against that course. Also I have always shown a certain facility with languages, and Father vaguely imagined that might be useful in overseas postings. (He was wrong, of course; English remains the common tongue of the civilized world.)
And so a diplomat I became.
You must picture me, then, at the age of twenty-three, somewhere beneath the bottom rung of the great Ladder of Diplomacy. I was five feet ten inches in height, of slender build, fair-haired and clean-shaven—of acceptable appearance, if I may say so, if not noticeably overbright. I was not long down from college but already rather bored by my work, which largely consisted of desk-bound paper-shuffling in a congested office deep in the bowels of Whitehall. (I had been looking forward to a posting to the capital, Manchester, but I soon learned that London had remained the administrative hub of the Empire, despite its reduced national status.) How I anticipated my first overseas posting! As I stared sightlessly at my blotter I strolled before the bejeweled palaces of the Raj princes; I confronted the wild Indians of Canada armed with nothing but Treasury tags and crocodile clips; and my teacup was a schooner in which I sailed in the wake of Cook into the dusky arms of South Pacific maidens.
With all that to do each day I didn’t complete a great deal of work; and Mr. Spiers, my superior, soon began to show dangerously high steam levels.
Therefore I was more than happy when my facility with languages won me an assignment to attend the opening of the New Great Exhibition.
Spiers stood over my ink-stained desk, his gin-blown cheeks aquiver and his sad little walrus moustache working over his mouth. “You’re to be attached to the Prussian party,” he said. “Old Bismarck himself will attend, I’m told.”
I could sense an envious stirring among the fellows at their desks. To rub shoulders with Prince Otto von Schцnhausen Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor of Prussia—who not four years earlier had given the armies of old Franz Joseph of Austria a damn good licking in under two months… Said Spiers, “The Prussians will be traveling by Light Rail to the Belgian ports, and then by fast packet to Dover. You’ll be in the party to meet them when they land.”
“Sir, why such a circuitous route? The Light Rail from Calais is much faster—”
He eyed me bleakly. “Vicars, every time I think I’ve underestimated you, you come through again. Because of the situation between Prussia and France, boy. Don’t you read the newspapers? For God’s sake don’t talk to Bismarck or you’ll start another blessed war…” And so on.
In any event, I packed up my desk with a light heart and set off for Dover. The Prussian delegation traveled from that port by Light Rail to London; the Rail company had provided a carriage especially decorated with the arms of the Prussian King William, and the Prussian eagle flew on pennants at each corner. A fine sight we must have made as we soared along our single rail at fifty miles per hour a hundred feet above the rolling Kent countryside!
The party dined in the Imperial Embassy off St. James’s Square, and a grand affair it was too. The dozen Prussians in their grand uniforms, their chests ablaze with medals, looked like a row of aging peacocks. I in my new cummerbund, the most junior of our party and utterly unbemedalled, felt tongue-tied; but once the wine and other liqueurs worked their spell my spirit seemed to expand to fill the airy, ornate spaces of His Excellency’s dining room. I toyed with silver cutlery and savored the aroma of a brandy that had been casked before Napoleon was a boy, and my world of ink-stained desks seemed as far away as the Little Moon. At last, I fancied, I knew why I had joined the diplomatic service.
As the evening wore on Bismarck himself took rather a liking to me. Otto von Bismarck was a rotund, rather grandfatherly gentleman; and to him I was “Herr Vicars, my polite host.” I smiled glassily and sought topics of conversation. Bismarck ate heartily but would drink only a foul- smelling Germanic beer from a great lidded tankard; I fancied that he strained the worst elements of the brew through his impressive moustache. The beer, Bismarck whispered to me in his halting English, helped him to forget the complexities of his life at the court of King William, and to fall into sleep each night.
On the morning of the eighteenth we rose early. The Little Moon was still visible in the dawn sky, a fist of light tracking steadily toward the horizon. We caught the Light out of Euston for Manchester Piccadilly, and thence made our way by hansom to Peel Park, at the north of the city. By noon we had joined the procession of dignitaries approaching the vast gates of the Crystal Cathedral which had been erected in the Park. Even Bismarck, Colossus
