quotations from Paracelsus, although they were quite likely wasted here. The woman gave his arm a squeeze, screwed her face up awfully so that her eyes seemed to disappear behind the flesh of her nose. She gouged Kraken playfully with a bent finger.
Before them was a lit house, on the door of which hung a sign reading, “Beds to be had within” Kraken found himself in a state of mingled desire and regret, being dragged up the stoop and finally into a darkened room little bigger than a pair of end to end closets. He stumbled against a disheveled bed and collapsed onto his face, hunched over his peapot, the lid of which sailed off and clattered into the opposite wall.
The bedclothes wanted perfume — a tubful. He pushed himself up. “Miss,” he said, peering around him in the dark. A hand shoved him roughly down again. She was frolicsome, Kraken had to admit. “If you’ve a drop of something,” he began, wondering if he were reading aright the heavy breathing and shuffling behind him. A warm hand grasped the thong round his neck, and, as he once again began to clamber onto his elbows, yanked the peapot from under him — rather roughly, he thought. He collapsed sideways when his right hand flopped up to allow the pot to travel beneath it. He’d have to be a bit more forward. That was the ticket.
He rolled over to have a look at his companion in the moonlight that illuminated the room. A woman of that stature… He anticipated a monumental revelation. But standing over him was a man, slowly chewing at his own tongue. He wore a black chimney pipe hat, smashed in and perched atop his head like a carton. Raised above it was the peapot. “Deener!” shouted Kraken. The peapot smashed down at him. There was a grunt of effort from the man in the hat. Kraken lurched aside, his left hand shielding his face. His wrist snapped down as the peapot glanced off it, smashing against his cheek. Kraken rolled into a wall. There seemed to be nothing in the tiny room but the villainous bed — nowhere to retreat.
The man swung the pot by its thong, bouncing it off Kraken’s forehead and hauling it back for another blow. He seemed to be growling through his gaping mouth, and Kraken noticed in a moment of frozen clarity the droplets of spittle that flew in a little arc as the man’s head was tossed backward with the momentum of his next swing.
Kraken regretted in a mist that his own head seemed to have stopped the peapot very handily, and through eyes suddenly blurred behind a wash of gore from his forehead, he watched with removed wonder as Billy Deener very slowly hauled a pistol from his coat, cocked it, and aimed it.
The being confronting a sleepy William Keeble chewed at the end of an ostentatious cigar. Keeble didn’t half like his looks. He liked them less, in fact, than he had when the man had visited him once before. It was his moneyed air that was so annoying — an air that betrayed a sort of Benthamite smugness and superiority, that exclaimed its own satisfaction with itself and its faint dissatisfaction with, in this case, William Keeble, who had been surprised in his nightshirt and cloth cap and so was automatically one down.
Kelso Drake hauled his cigar from his mouth and pried his lips apart into an oily, condescending smile. He wore a MacFarlane coat and a silk hat, both of which had left Bond Street, it was reasonably certain, not more than a week or so earlier. Keeble felt a fool in his cloth pointy-hat — doubly so, for he was wearing the one onto which Dorothy had embroidered a comical face, one eye of which was closer to the sideways nose than was the other, an eccentricity which gave the stitched countenance a look of cockeyed lunacy. Drake wouldn’t understand such a thing. Keeble could see that in a glance.
The industrialist’s desires hadn’t changed. He was prepared to offer Keeble a sum of money — a substantial sum for the plans to the engine, for the patent. Keeble wasn’t at all interested. Drake’s eyes narrowed. He doubled the sum. Keeble didn’t care for sums. Damn all sums. He was suddenly powerfully thirsty. On the hall table sat a walrus tusk, carved into the semblance of the beast that had sprouted it. Keeble imagined twisting its foolish head off and draining the peaty contents. But he’d have to offer Drake a glass, and he wasn’t about to. Damn Drake and all of his affairs. He and his notion of textile mills run by perpetual motion engines made Keeble sick. The idea of a textile mill alone — a mill of any sort — made Keeble sick. Practicality in general made him sick, and the contrived practicality of Drake’s utilitarian vision instilled in him an inexplicable mixture of indifference and loathing that made him long for his bed and a glass with which to chase Drake into nonexistence.
Drake champed at his cigar, rolling it in his mouth, his eyes squinting up into tight little slits. This wasn’t, insisted Drake, merely a casual offer. He had certain methods. He had vast resources. He could exert pressure. He could buy and sell Keeble a dozen times. He could ruin him. He could this; he could that; he could the other. Keeble shrugged in his ridiculous cap. The clock on the wall opposite the hall table suddenly went off, pealing in a sort of doleful, leaden tone, utterly out of keeping with the little clockwork apes who charged grinning out of their lair in the interior and banged away with mallets at a bell-shaped iron octopus.
Drake frowned at it, recoiling slightly. The door opened behind him, and Dorothy, a troubled look on her face, stepped through, stopping in sudden surprise at the sight of the stranger’s back. Keeble motioned with his eyes toward the stairway, but Dorothy hadn’t taken a half step toward them when Drake turned, a broad smile betraying splayed yellow teeth. He clamped his mouth shut at the sight of Dorothy’s involuntary grimace, and bowed slightly, flourishing his hat. “Kelso Drake, ma’am,” he said, rolling his chewed cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. “Very happy to make your acquaintance.”
Dorothy nodded and proceeded toward the stairs, saying, “Pleased, I’m sure,” over her shoulder, impolite as it seemed. Her father nodded his head toward the stairs in quick little jerks, stopping abruptly when Drake turned and looked at him quizzically. The questioning look turned once again into a leer, as if Drake’s face naturally molded itself that way out of long practice. “What was I saying?” he asked the toymaker. “I was momentarily,” he paused and pretended to search for a word, then said theatrically, “distracted.”
“You were just saying good day,” Keeble stated flatly. “You’ve got my answer. There isn’t any room for discussion.”
“No, I suppose there isn’t. I’m averse to discussion anyway. A waste of time. Very pretty daughter, that one. Fetching, you might say. You have three days.”
“I don’t need three days.”
“Thursday, let’s say. And do stay sober. This business will require all of your efforts, regardless of the outcome.” And with that, Drake raised his stick and neatly flipped Keeble’s nightcap from his head, turned, and strode through the yawning door. He climbed into the interior of a waiting brougham and was gone.
Keeble stood still for a moment, as if his blood had solidified. His neck and face were hot. Without turning his head he plucked up the cap from where it had fallen on the hall table. A door shut with a bang upstairs. Had Dorothy listened? Had she witnessed Drake’s departure? Keeble peered up the stairwell, a forced grin stretching his mouth. The stairs were empty. He pulled on the cloth cap and reached for the walrus tusk. There was really nothing to think about. Drake was all bluff. He wouldn’t dare come meddling round again. He’d be sorry for it if he did. Keeble’s hand shook as he drained the tusk, and he set it back onto the table uncapped. What did he care for threats? He stood thinking for a moment then tottered away up the stairs to bed.
FIVE
The darkness of Hammersmith Cemetery was complete. Not a star shone in the clouded heavens, and the occasional gaslamps that burned in oval niches in the block wall of scattered crypts illuminated nothing but a few befuddled moths that stumbled out of the night, fluttered woodenly around the flame, then disappeared once again into darkness. A heavy river fog lay along the ground, and the old yew trees and alders whose bent branches shaded the grounds dripped moisture onto the neck and shoulders of Willis Pule, who clumsily stamped on the backside of a spade. He pulled the collar of his coat around his neck and cursed. His doeskin gloves were a ruin, and on the palm of his hand below his thumb a blister the size of a penny threatened to tear open.
He looked at his companion’s face. He loathed the man — doubly so for his poverty and stupidity. His face was expressionless. No, not entirely. There was a trace of fear on it, perhaps, a shimmer of dread at the sound of the sudden creaking of a limb overhead, at the sigh of rustling leaves. Pule smiled. He raised his left foot again and brought it down sharply on the spade. It slid off, and the shovel dug in a mere inch or two and canted to the side.
There was something utterly distasteful about this sort of work, but the evening’s prize couldn’t be trusted to
