Angelmaker

V The trouble with shooting people; girls wishing to serve their country; S2:A.

The trouble with shooting people, Edie Banister now remembers, is that it’s so hard to do just one. Having shot her would-be assassin, and now being, as it were, on the lam, she has to return to her former quite abstemious attitude and not just shoot anyone who impedes her passage. She has already had to speak to herself quite firmly about nearly shooting two irritating pedestrians and a slow driver. She is positively proud not to have ventilated Mr. Hanley, the street-sweeper, who popped up behind her as she was leaving and wished her good morning, and she is really astonished at her own good behaviour in not shooting Mrs. Crabbe, who was merely walking by on the other side of the street, but whom she has never liked.

Focus, old cow.

The gun is extremely heavy in her bag. She has reloaded, out of habit; she does not honestly expect to be assailed in the street, and all that mystical jabber about expecting the unexpected is just so much toffee. Expect the unexpected, Edie was told by a sour veteran sergeant in Burma, and the expected will walk up to you and blow your expectations out through the back of your head. Expect the expected, just don’t forget the rest.

The expected, then, is for her enemy to imagine that Mr. Biglandry has squished her like a bug. The assassin won’t be missed for at least another half-hour, perhaps as much as a day, depending on how long his leash was. Edie has exactly that long to disappear. First step: a change of clothes.

She takes a taxi to a nondescript street in Camden Town, and tells the driver a story about her great-grandchildren so asinine that even she feels slightly sick. After a couple of minutes, he cannot actually look at her in the mirror, and Edie can feel her face sliding in his memory until it is generic: little old lady, average height, average dress. Lawdamercy, but the old baggage can talk.

Still twittering banalities, Edie pays the man, then fishes in her purse for an old-style penny, dated 1959. A proper tip back then, worth nothing at all today. She has a small trove for convincing people she’s dotty.

“Here you are, driver, and God bless!”

He takes it hurriedly, eyes everywhere but on her. He just wants to forget that she was ever in his cab. The feel of round, cold metal, the wrong size and the wrong weight, makes him freeze for a moment. Then he looks down.

“Oh,” he says automatically, “thanks very much.” You poor lamb. She almost feels guilty, but hasn’t the time.

She leaves him staring at the coin. He will recall the sense of aggravation she has engendered, but not much else. In an hour, he will remember her if at all as an amalgam of every fare he has ever disliked.

And then she goes shopping.

Four hours later, in the snug of the Pig & Poet: Edie has tied her hair up in not one but three separate knots, and she is wearing a T-shirt purchased from a barrow trader, a black skirt, and heavy leggings and boots. Camden Town has been good to her. She begged some safety pins from the respectable peeping Tom who runs a dry-cleaner’s at the end of the road, and put the whole thing together to make a formidable new identity: mad old lady punk.

The Pig & Poet isn’t much of a pub. It’s a couple of tables and a miserable jukebox which didn’t work even before Edie took one of her safety pins and shoved it across the two bottom bars of the plug and stuck it back in the wall, thereby causing a short circuit and a strong smell of melted plastic. The snug is now in partial darkness, which just about conceals how mournful it is, and how cheap.

The Irishman who used to run this place managed to get some joy into it just by being who he was, a kind of punchy, endlessly profane little man with a liking for large women. He went off to Exeter, apparently, and has nevermore been seen. Since his departure, the poetry has ebbed from the saloon bar, and the remainder is decidedly piggy. In consequence, it wasn’t hard to get the attic room on cash deposit, no questions asked.

Edie is doing her accounts. By rule of long-ago decision, she does not allow herself unconsidered killings. For all that her recent shooting spree was in the heat, no death should go unnoticed, least of all if she had a hand in it. The power of knowing how to extinguish life in so many ways—and the power which stems from having done it—must be balanced with a respect for what it means to bring someone else’s narrative to a close.

Edie, as she sips on her rum and Coke, takes a moment to wonder if she might have done things differently, and to appreciate the significance of Biglandry et fils, and the appallingness of having snuffed them out. For all that they were grotty, wicked, venal men, they were extraordinary things, both of them ravishing, complex creatures. Perhaps they were loving, too, in their own way. Soldiers for hire, certainly, and rough-hewn. That doesn’t mean they weren’t also dads or sons. Will Mrs. Biglandry curse and wail? Of course she will. Her horror at this circumstance will not be diminished by her husband’s profession—if she ever finds it out. Her son will not be less orphaned, nor her daughter less broken, if she tries to explain that Biglandry’s end was just.

If I were younger, Edie thinks. Or if I had allies. Or if I’d thought a bit longer and planned a bit better. She goes through it in her head, one more time. Killed two, spared one. Bad mathematics, but better than it might have been. Less good than it could have been, too, old cow.

So here’s to the bungled dead, expired of their own incompetence and my experience. Here’s to the long habit of survival. I’m sorry, Mrs. B and all the little Bs. I truly am. If I could bring them back—at a safe distance and possibly with a summary kick in the testes for justice’s sake—I would do it. No one is so wicked as to deserve extinction.

Long ago and far away, Edie Banister was told that a human soul infallibly knew its own value when it was reflected in the eye of an elephant. She wonders what she would see if she went to London Zoo and somehow got close enough to check. The question of value has been very much on her mind of recent months. She can feel a coldness reaching for her, a chill she knows all too well, though these days it possesses a terrible finality. Mrs. Crabbe (whom she does not like) recently suggested on this basis that Edie must be a little bit psychic. Edie privately thought that anyone who didn’t feel death approaching after nine decades on Earth was probably some sort of idiot.

Last dance. Best make it a good one.

She raises her glass in recognition of the recent dead, and, to everyone’s vast embarrassment, not least her own, collapses into tears in the corner of the Pig & Poet. And then, little by little and aided above all by the damp, halitotic nose which settles on her chest as Bastion emerges from her shopping bag to give succour, she pulls herself together again, and very soon she is the woman she was, has always been—just a little older, and reddish about the eyes.

All those years. Bloody hell.

“Girls wishing to serve their country will need flat shoes and modest underwear.”

It is the word “underwear” which wakes Edie Banister from the contented slumber into which she has fallen during Miss Thomas’s morning notices. The teachers at Lady Gravely School very rarely speak of underwear, and the reference to flat shoes is astonishing, because all other kinds are most strictly forbidden. As for the implied existence of immodest underwear—Edie can barely believe her tender young ears. This much is clear: Miss Thomas did not write the notice she is reading, and the matter is considered very serious—sufficiently so that this informational contraband is all the same being given a place here, between duty roster and closing prayers.

“Underwear,” she murmurs, as everyone else says “Amen,” and duly presents herself at the appointed time in the headmistress’s study, wearing her most unimpeachable shoes.

Three other girls have been bitten by the patriotic bug; presumably either the other sixty or so are not as mind-numbingly bored as Edie, or they fear they may be asked by their government to do something unladylike, a suspicion which was raised in Edie’s mind by the mention of underwear and to which she clings like a drowning woman to a spar. Prostitutes were sent to assassinate Napoleon, she recalls, and in a racy novel of which she read two-thirds before being betrayed by a prim little cow called Clemency Brown (and consequently slapped thrice with a ruler across the palm), the heroine had given herself regretfully but unswervingly into the lustful embraces of Skullcap Roy the pirate in order to deflect his wrath from her younger brother. Not, Edie suspected, without a certain measure of anticipation. In time of war, she reasons, one must be prepared to sacrifice oneself. She imagines herself lying back and thinking of England in the arms of a brutishly delicious enemy. The horror is very nearly too much for her.

“Plant, good. Dixon, good. Clements, no, I don’t think so, girl, you’re in the Christmas play. Where shall we find another Magdalene who can sing? No, no. And… hmph.” Which is all the approbation Edie is likely to see, but no denay, and that will do.

“I’m so sorry, Miss Thomas, I didn’t catch that last?”

The little man is long-faced and pomaded. A pimp, Edie decides, like Quick Jack Duggan or Herb the Knife. On the other hand, he wears a blue suit of the most conservative kind, with a longish waistcoat and a fob watch. The fob has a small gold flower on the far end. Not worth pinching, or not yet, but a chunk of stuff all the same and very fine. Not Masonic, which is disappointing. The Masons, she has heard, perform depraved rites.

“Banister,” Miss Thomas mutters. “A lost child.”

“My, my. How so, lost?”

“In every sense, I’m afraid. Lost, because orphaned. Lost, because she must ask every question in her head and then another and another, and lost because she is stepped in spiritual grime and even in my most blessed and hopeful dreams I cannot see her ever casting out sin and admitting the Lord of Hosts.”

“Oh, dear.”

“Indeed.”

“Well, I shall certainly pray for her.”

“Oh, indeed.”

“Is there a particular prayer one offers up for young girls adrift on a sea of dreadful temptation? Something in the line of ‘Oh hear us, when we cry to thee’?”

“No,” Miss Thomas says, displaying some exhaustion with the topic. “Just whatever you can manage.”

“I shall manage what I can, then.”

Miss Thomas nods, and proceeds to vaunt the other two girls and ignore Edie entirely. No surprise, and in any case Edie is not concerned. She has seen the spark in the gentleman’s eye, and knows that he has seen her seeing it. And she knows, too, by the flat-faced sincerity of his mien and his bland, unamused expression, that this man is a most unmitigated crook. Crooks do not go looking in distant corners for virtue. They can find that anywhere. Kindred wickedness, on the other hand, is a thing which must be sought out, and the seeking is the more difficult because it naturally masquerades, where virtue is drably ostentatious.

“My name,” the little gentleman says, “is Abel Jasmine. I am in the employ of the Treasury of His Majesty George VI, who is, of course, our king. At least, I assume he is. Is there anyone here who isn’t a subject of His Majesty?”

Tittering. Even Miss Thomas titters. Edie does not. It’s a perfectly valid question. There might be an Irish person, or an American, or even a French citizen in the room. Mr. Jasmine smiles and leans forward, hands clasped.

“Excellent. All Brits together, eh? So, ladies. I’m afraid we come to a most difficult question. Which of you has recently told an absolutely egregious lie? Miss Thomas?”

“No,” Miss Thomas says sniffily. More tittering. Never, Jessica Plant says, has she even embroidered the truth. (Which is, of course, an egregious lie, but a very stupid one.) Holly Dixon admits to having lied about having a stomach upset to avoid kitchen duty. Miss Thomas makes a note. Edie smiles and says nothing, and sees Mr. Jasmine’s eye settle immediately on her face.

“No deceptions in your life, Miss Banister?” Mr. Jasmine asks at last.

“It’s frightfully embarrassing,” Edie says breathlessly. “There must have been some, I’m sure. But for the life of me,” she offers him a broad, empty-headed smile, “I can’t think what they might have been, sir. Is that terribly bad?” She cancels the smile and the fluttery panic, and meets his gaze as hard as she can. “Is that what you had in mind, sir? Or more in the way of outrage at the very notion?”

Miss Thomas makes an outraged little noise in preparation for a scolding, but the little man holds up his hand and smiles.

“I believe you hit it on the head, Miss Banister,” Abel Jasmine says. He shrugs. “Well. Welcome to Science 2. You best go and pack. Thank you, Miss Thomas.”

Edie keeps her face absolutely even, as if she had expected nothing less, and sees Abel Jasmine notice that, too.

Tally-ho, Edie Banister thinks, with considerable pleasure.

Abel Jasmine’s word is backed by most elevated persons, and while the laws of England cannot casually be broken, their action can be most miraculously expedited. Edie Banister finds herself in transit that very day, and her guardianship—never her most serious concern—is transferred from Miss Thomas to a stout woman named Amanda Baines who is Mr. Jasmine’s Second Director.

Not “secretary,” Edie notes, as they drive away in an official-looking car, and her old life—such as it was—vanishes behind her. Not “mistress” or the more cowardly “companion,” nor “housekeeper” nor “cook.” Second Director, meaning deputy and fully empowered, which if it is not an entirely new thing is all the same a notable and important thing. Amanda Baines is a force in her own right. When Edie calls her “Miss Baines,” the woman responds with a deep, earthy chuckle, heavy hands on the steering wheel, and says that it is in fact “Captain Baines,” but that Edie should in any case call her Amanda.

Captain as in—of—a ship?

Yes. The good ship Cuparah.

Is it a big ship?

It is a research ship.

What kind of research? What kind of ship?

Amanda Baines produces a narrow pipe in white clay, and allows Abel Jasmine to light it.

“A Ruskinite ship,” she replies, and her grey eyes peer at Edie through the smoke.

Edie has not heard the word, but has no intention of admitting it. She has studied, in the cool classrooms of Lady Gravely, the work of an art critic named John Ruskin, who elected to refer to himself in Greek as Kata Phusin (“According to Nature”) and whose distaste for the processes of industrial construction had once led him to describe the Lady Gravely school itself as “impoverished of heart, devoid of soul, and unsuited to its function; a carbuncle of a building festering upon the fundament of Shropshire.” It is an assessment with which Edie can only agree. She pictures Ruskin leaning sadly on an oak at the far end of the drive and jotting in his notebook: Lady G, Shrop. Bloody ghastly. Write to The Times. Spare no spleen.

Ho hum. Ruskin was against standardisation. He liked each aspect of a building to be the product of a unique human soul, an expression of the relationship with (inevitably) God. So, and so.

“A unique ship.”

“Yes.”

“A special ship.”

“We like to think so.”

“A… a Victorian Gothic ship?”

Amanda Baines makes a snorting noise which could be either affirmation or disdain, and that is all Edie learns, because they have arrived at Paddington station and, through the gloom and smoke, she sees the train.

In this year of Our Lord 1939, of course, many people of means have private carriages which can be shackled to a train to provide the discerning—id est the wealthy and empowered, whose discernment need only reach so far as to know that they’re more important than anyone else—with a railway voyage at some remove from the common rabble. The wagons of the Rothschilds, the Kennedys, the Spencers and the Astors are spoken of in hushed tones at Lady Gravely as the symbol of grande luxe life and the thing to which every gal of character, charm and class might aspire. But no one Edie has ever heard of had his own train entire, complete with an engine, twice the height of a man, scrolled and chased in brass and trimmed in black iron. Certainly no one has anything so absolutely warlike, so defensible, armour-plated and fitted with a ram at the front, the engineer’s compartment sheltered from incoming fire. And…

“Steam?” Edie murmurs.

“Hah!” Abel Jasmine says. “Thought you’d like that. It goes over a hundred miles an hour, and barely makes a sound. And of course, it burns whatever you shove in the furnace, so it doesn’t deplete our resources as badly as a petroleum engine would.”

“But it’s vulnerable,” Edie argues in spite of herself. “A shot to the pressure tank…” She trails off. This sort of interjection is the kind of thing which caused Miss Thomas to call her a lost child.

“Quite right, Miss Banister!” Abel Jasmine cries, delighted, “quite right, indeed, which is why the steam is contained in the very heart of the vehicle and the cylinder is most heavily shielded. But you have spotted our vulnerability, all the same. Well done. The Ada Lovelace is a compromise between stealth, strength, versatility, and security. It is perfect in no respect save that it functions excellently in all.”

Amanda Baines—the woman who has a ship of her own—looks at Edie as if to say “boys and their toys,” but Edie is smiling at the improbable thing, not for what it is, but for the world it promises. Having your own engine means no timetables, no delays. It implies that Abel Jasmine, indeed, can command delay, can re-arrange the structure of the nation’s rapid-transit system for his own convenience.

“It’s amazing,” she says, and Abel Jasmine allows that it’s not bad at all. Edie stops, considering. “It’s Ruskinite, isn’t it?”

He looks at her very sharply, then at Amanda Baines, who grins like a big dog around her pipe.

“Yes,” Abel Jasmine says. “It is. Mind you, it’s behind the curve now. Out of date by the time we finished it. That’s the pace of change… Well,” he adds to the driver, a dour moustachioed fellow in blue, “carry on, Mr. Crispin. Let’s be about it!”

The train is not less wondrous inside. Edie stares at rippling surfaces of wood and brass, trimmed with a rich azure and gold like a cathedral, and windows of resin-ish stuff which is like Bakelite, only tougher. She walks up an open spiral stair to the upper deck and peers out at the night as it hurtles by. For the first time in her life, she feels free. She presses her head against the not-glass and smiles a wide smile.

“Blue colour is everlastingly appointed by the deity to be a source of delight.”

She turns. A broad, grey-haired man in overalls stands at the far end of the carriage. Edie judges him to be nearly sixty, but very strong.

“The train,” he says. Edie scrutinises him for signs of condescension, finds none. As he turns, she sees a monk’s tonsure at the back of his head.

“It’s amazing,” she says.

“It’s called the Ada Lovelace. Do you know who she was?”

“Lord Byron’s daughter.”

“Much more. A genius. A visionary. We named this engine for her.”

“I’m sure she would have approved.”

“Perhaps. It’s enough that we remember her a little. I’m the Keeper,” he adds, and then, because Edie’s mouth must be open as she tries to think of a polite way of asking, “Of the Order of John the Maker.” When she doesn’t immediately nod, he adds, “The Ruskinites.”

It had not occurred to Edie until this moment that “Ruskinite” might be a noun. She ponders. The adjective, she has no problem with. A Ruskinite item is going to be crafted, considered, inspired. It will have respect for the human scale of things. It will strive to exemplify the divine in the everyday. It’s an admirable set of qualities for, say, a tea service, or even a giant secret locomotive.

A Ruskinite person, however, is something other, and she’s not entirely comfortable with it. A strange sort of Christian with strong feelings about the working man and the essence of the world.

The Keeper smiles.

“What?” Edie Banister demands.

“You’re trying to work out if I’m an engineer or a cultist,” he replies.

“I suppose I am.”

“Excellent, Miss Banister. Very good, indeed. Come. Let me show you the Lovelace. You can interrogate me on the way.” And to her amazement, he offers her his arm, like a baron to a duchess.

The Lovelace is eleven carriages long. There is accommodation, a kitchen, bathrooms, and two carriages of strange machinery in glass and metal which the Keeper will not explain, but which looks to Edie like a mixture of a franking machine, a music box, and an abacus. She deduces it has to do with numbers and therefore with logistics, and possibly also with ciphering.

There is a radio set, an engineering room, and a pair of administrative offices, a private stateroom occupied by Abel Jasmine himself, and a doorway leading to the engine beyond. From the cowcatcher at the front (first designed by a friend of the original Lovelace herself, a man named Babbage, remade by the Ruskinites and manufactured to specification by a foundry in Padua) to the scrolled ironwork at the back of the last carriage, there is not one inch of it which is not made and maintained by hand.

“This train is our blood,” the Keeper says. “It is the product of our work. We know every part of it. The designs were perfect, but the materials are not. They cannot be. So we compensated. Does it look sheer? Does it look absolutely true? It’s not. Here we shaved an eighth. There we padded. The rivets are not exactly the same. They are positioned to avoid splitting the wood. They are loosened here and there to allow for expansion. The machine doesn’t know when it is vulnerable. The mechanical drill has no idea when it is destroying the substance it cuts. But we know. We feel and hear. We touch. Touch is a truer sense than sight.”

“And all this… it makes your machines better?”

The Keeper shrugs. “It makes us better,” he says. “Or at least, it means we do not become casual about effort and art. We appreciate the weakness of the world and come to understand the glories and stresses of our selves. But yes. The product is better, by perhaps a single percentage point, than it would be if it were made by machines to perfect tolerances. It doesn’t matter until you stress it. Stress this train, and it will hold. It will hold beyond what the specifications say; beyond what any of us believes. It will hold beyond reason, beyond expectation, beyond hope. Derail it, drive it across sand, twist and heat it. It will do what it can for you. It will hold as if it was alive, and filled with love. And when it fails, it will fail hugely, heroically, and take your enemies with it. Because it has been made that way. But we trust it will not need to, in this case. The Lovelace is not a ship of the line.”

“Cuparah is.”

The Keeper smiles. “Cuparah will hold, too.”

Which is reassuring, but does not tell her any more about Amanda Baines’s vessel. Drat.

Edie Banister, six months later, in sensible shoes and modest underwear—although not entirely modest, because she has long legs and just a hint of womanliness about her now—sweats and toils amid strange machines. Ada Lovelace is narrow and sways with a strange, eerie motion, as if she were dangling off the edge of a precipice. For the first few weeks, this made Edie extremely nauseous, but now she hardly notices, except when something sticks briefly in its gimbal and falls out of sync with the rest of the room. The sound of metal against metal rings beneath her feet, and then is replaced by a sudden whooshing of waves and wind. Edie feels, around her ankles, a blessed gust of cool air. The machine room sheds a great deal of heat when it goes over a bridge.

The ciphering machinery—if that is what it is—burps frenziedly. Edie’s hair stands up and she feels dust and grime rush to settle on her. She scowls and taps the earthing rod on her left before reaching out to adjust the pegs and feed a new set of numbers into the machine.

The Ada Lovelace is where Edie works and lives and—to her amazement—learns. Before her shift begins in Hothouse 6 (this being the secret designation of the machine room on board the Ada Lovelace), she has four hours each morning spent studying any number of things girls are not generally encouraged to know, while the train rips across the British countryside, occupying empty sidings and blank slots in the timetable, rolling and slipping around the edges of the map.

The Ada Lovelace, she has begun to understand, is but one part of a curious pattern, a cross-hatched web of connections. Not all of them are trains, but each surely houses a machine room used for this kind of numerical unravelling. The work is not limited to code-breaking, but includes more generalised number problems and mathematical assessments of probability and chance. In the course of carrying answers from the machine to Abel Jasmine’s office at the head of the train, Edie has glimpsed enough to understand what the numbers signify: maps, armies, and fleets. She cannot begin to guess which numbers relate to which problem, but she knows now what is being asked in Hothouse 6: the rate of the enemy’s resupply; the depth of water in a harbour revealed by wave heights and frequencies; the presence of a secret installation by the early thawing of a snow-capped mountain. Properties of the real world, she realises, may be predicted by numbers on a slate. She has a sense that learning these things without ever being told them is a species of test, a continual assessment. Secrets, here, are prizes to be winkled out.

The train ducks into a tunnel, and Edie sighs as the heat immediately becomes stifling. She suggested a few weeks ago that they could probably go with a considerably less modest set of garments, and even the most reserved of the girls readily agreed until the Keeper respectfully submitted that a) it was hard enough to keep a group of monks and soldiers focused on running the engine and the galvanic system without surrounding them with sweating, naked girls and b) a lady should certainly not care, however patriotic she might be, to sustain a burn in a sensitive place such as might result from (here he hesitates, casting around for respectful terminology) an uncorseted bosom brushing against a hot pipe or valve.

Edie Banister: code-wife, secret engineer, plucking strange truths from the white-hot iron of progress to fight the advance of terror across Europe’s fields. Learning poetry and history and languages and marksmanship. And doing much of it all but nude, too, surrounded by other girls in similar undress.

Edie has read some Greek drama, and is feverishly aware of the possibilities. Such understanding is one of the benefits of a classical education.

Edie Banister glimpses her reflection in a smooth brass plate, and tries to see resolve in her own face. This is the day on which she has determined to find out more about where she is working. She understands that Abel Jasmine is practising a thing called information sequestration—which is a clever way of saying that no one is allowed to know much about Science 2 beyond what is required for them to perform their function within the network—but three things occur to her about this: the first, that Abel Jasmine knows and presumably also Captain Amanda Baines, and also whatever minister has governance of their efforts and any number of that person’s assistants and clerks, and that the addition of one junior employee to the list, while irregular, will not greatly compromise security; the second, that it is—while vanishingly unlikely—at least conceivable that Science 2 is in fact not a British operation at all, but a German one, and she has a duty to be sure she has not inadvertently been duped into betraying her country; and third, that she really, really wants to know about what’s going on. If she is caught—and assuming that, being caught, she has not also been shot by German spies for uncovering their evil plan—she will lean heavily on items [1] and [2] as justification and skate over item [3].

Thus Edie Banister, now eighteen years of age and slender as the rails she rides, prepares for her first covert mission.

Over the last weeks, she has surveyed the parts of Hothouse 6 to which she has ready access. The dormitories are at the rear; the monks’ last, with a small contingent of soldiers—it’s a barracks, really, and defensible—then the women’s, then the baths and communal mess, then the work area and the classrooms and finally a locked door leading to Abel Jasmine’s study and the output room, snuggled up against the engine and, like the barracks, armed to repel invasion. It seems to Edie—in her new guise as a student of strategy and war—that there is a tacit prioritisation here, a tactical triage. Edie has already ascertained that there is a remote decoupling system threaded through the train, operable only with a special key. There are access points along the main corridor, which zigzags around the rooms, making them more private but also obviating the possibility of an enfilade. A great deal of thought has gone into the construction of the Lovelace, above and beyond the strange, tactile prayers of the Ruskinites.

Which implies, of course, that measures have been taken to guard against infiltration as well as assault, but she’s fairly sure none of the security systems she is likely to encounter will kill her unless Abel Jasmine specifically orders them to.

Seventy per cent sure, at least.

Edie racks a new valve and glances at the girl next to her—Clarissa Foxglove—with some wistfulness. Clarissa Foxglove has smooth skin and short hair, and Edie, working beside her, has become acutely aware of her proximity and her energy, and the strong, purposeful way in which she does things. Clarissa Foxglove’s voice is husky, as if she has a throat cold all the time, and she smokes cheap cigarettes which her Free French uncle sends her in a monthly package which also contains admonishments to greater efforts in the cause of His Britannic Majesty’s United Kingdom. Edie, observing Clarissa purse her lips and wet each cigarette before they go in, suffers from pangs of envy. Not that she wants a cigarette. Just that she wishes, sometimes, with a belly-curdling lurch of desire, that Clarissa Foxglove would treat her in the same way. Two days ago, Edie had to pass a pair of pliers to Alice Hoyte, Clarissa’s neighbour on her other side, and at full stretch found herself pressed corps à corps with Clarissa, their hips rubbing gently and Clarissa’s shoulders moving under her chemise as she worked on replacing a blown fuse. Upon a soft cushion I dispose my limbs, oh, indeed.

Edie Banister pushes this thought firmly down—not because of its content, which she files away for extensive later consideration—but because it is liable to distract her from the task at hand. Before she can move her eyes away from Clarissa Foxglove, the girl catches her looking and smiles a conspiratorial smile, then quite deliberately leans forward to borrow Edie’s screwdriver, her lace-clad left breast drawing a line across Edie’s arm and shoulder which she can feel long after the contact has finished.

Focus.

The interior corridor of the Lovelace is patrolled and likely impassable. Thus, Edie has ruled it out. But in a few moments, the bell will sound for end-of-shift and another opportunity will present itself. Edie’s workmates (including Clarissa Foxglove, oh, my) will head for the showers. And isn’t that an opportunity worth savouring? Mm.

Focus.

A slim girl—a girl with strong arms and no chest to speak of—might lift herself out of the carriage onto the roof, if she had a screwdriver to open the filter on one of the ventilation hatches. So long as the train was not going through any tunnels and so long as it was travelling relatively slowly, she might then make her way along the roof to the engine, and slip back in via the roof maintenance hatch, then rejoin the train proper in Abel Jasmine’s study via the connecting door.

The bell rings. Time to go.

“Just got to fnafflebrump caddwallame, all right?” Edie says, and no one pays attention. She learned at Lady Gravely’s that nonsense which can be misheard is a very good way to lie without getting caught. People just insert whatever they think you must be doing, and—having lied to themselves on your behalf—are disinclined to check up on you. She turns.

Clarissa Foxglove bends down, quite unselfconsciously, to pick up a spool of copper wire. Edie Banister, caught in amber, slides past her gingerly, trying extremely hard not to feel the rasp of cotton on cotton or the contours of Clarissa’s buttocks against her hips. Edie hears a faint, earthy chuckle, or it might be a pleased yelp, and shakes her head to clear it.

Really need to corner her later and discuss this. It’s very distracting. The whole thing needs discussion. Resolution. Needs to be laid out. We should bare our thoughts.

Um. Mm-hm. Upon a soft cushion…

Fortunately, Clarissa Foxglove’s backside is now twenty foot away and the door to the companionway and the hatch is ahead of her. The other girls are heading in the opposite direction.

That’s good, Edie tells herself sternly. That is not a pity. It is the whole point of the plan. I do not want to be wedged in here with Clarissa Foxglove.

God, I want to be wedged in here with Clarissa Foxglove.

But not now.

She levers open the hatch, and air roars in. Her ears pop. The rest of the train won’t notice, though, because Edie has already closed the hermetically sealed doors between carriages.

This stretch of the line—which she has selected carefully—is somewhere in Cambridgeshire. There are no hills to pass through, and the winding track restrains the speed of the train somewhat. It’s a gloomy, desolate stretch of fenland, though, with very little topographically between it and Siberia except shivering reindeer and mournful bears—so it’s bitterly cold. Well, nothing for it. She had considered wearing two sets of underclothes for today’s shift, but that would have made her sweat more, and thus increased the chill. She thought about concealing at least a jumper here, but reasoned that it would be discovered. The distance is comparatively short. She will be cold, yes. She will not be frozen.

She grasps the sides of the hatchway and lifts herself up.

Edie’s first impression is of having accidentally coincided with a bucket of cold water hurled upward from the carriage in front. The air is a liquid, clinging and chilly, filled with moisture. It takes away her sense of smell, flattens her skin against her bones. She nearly lets go and falls back into the train.

No.

She heaves again, and flies up into the airstream, catches the breeze, and blows over backwards, rolling towards the edge of the train. She flails, and catches the hatch cover, then draws herself to a crouch. Her hand is cut across the fingers, not deeply, but jaggedly. She’s covered in soot. And the alarming numbness in her fingers tells her that she has underestimated the chill.

She moves into the wind. Bloody-minded, much? Yes, she replies to herself. Yes, I am.

Half a minute later, she is standing on the next carriage, bare feet padding on the slick surface, toes gripping rivets and bolt-heads, hands reaching for ladder rails and corners, ventilation chimneys and antennae. Twenty seconds more, the next, and then the engine is in sight, long, sinister, strange, and dark. And what the bloody hell is that huge black thing blotting out the sky? Edie drops flat, and a scourging devil’s hand slams over her head, spiny fingers and thorns, then another and another, one catching her back and scratching, tearing at her.

Ow, ow, ow. And blast, I like this chemise. Buggery bugger. A chunk of her hair is gone, too, pulled out in a handful, but she has at least identified the enemy: a copse, hawthorn and oak, gnarled branches clasping.

And now she can’t undo the hatch. Her fingers are too cold, and she has no lever. She left the screwdriver she used to open the one in the companionway behind. Careless.

So. The way back is painful, the way forward, hard. Choose.

Edie’s fingers clamp around the handle, and she heaves. Slowly, stiffly, it comes up. Mercifully this one has no filter, just a shutter which lifts up, so… and then it gives way entirely and almost throws her on her back again.

She lets herself down into the shadows. The chamber is lit in red, covered in lights and buttons: the generator room, turning steam power into electricity for the code machines. She touches nothing, sees herself reflected in the door panel and almost screams: red light behind her, hair mussed up and flyaway, blood on her face and eyes like holes in a mask. She looks like her own ghost, if ghosts can be mussed.

Out through the door, ten steps to the back of Abel Jasmine’s office. Is there an alarm? Edie doesn’t know. Certainly, there is one on the other door. But did he consider the possibility of infiltration from this end? Perhaps not. How would they get here? Parachute onto a moving train? Drop from a bridge, perhaps—but to do so without being seen and awaited? Academic, anyway—she’s come this far. She checks it once with her eyes and—thinking of the Keeper—with her fingertips, too. No wires. No bulges. No secret switches. Surely there should be something?

She wonders whether there’s just a bomb on the other side, then reasons that Abel Jasmine or the Keeper or someone must come through here all the time to check on the generator, and it is therefore unlikely to explode without warning. And then, too, that would run counter to her perceptions about the strategic construction of the train: everything runs to preserve this room, not destroy it… though no doubt there is a mechanism for that, in extremis…

Enough. She opens the door.

Nothing happens. No klaxons, no furious shouts. So. She gropes along the wall, finds the desk, switches on the lamp.

“You owe me five shillings, Abel,” Amanda Baines says cheerfully. “She made it all the way.”

They are sitting in the shadows on a leather couch, Abel Jasmine in his dressing gown, and Amanda Baines with a jaunty sailor’s outfit complete with captain’s hat. It is not the kind of outfit you would go to sea in. It brings new meaning to the description “saucy tar.”

“Bloody hell, girl,” Amanda Baines says, “we need to get you cleaned up.”

“Good work, all the same, Miss Banister,” Mr. Jasmine says. “Very good, indeed.” He smiles.

“I’m not in trouble?” Edie asks.

“Oh, God, yes, of the most frightful kind. But no, you are not being disciplined. You are being promoted and transferred. You may shortly regard that as very big trouble indeed. But you passed what you may wish to think of as an informal test. You formulated a plan, acquired information, timetabled the whole thing, and refused to be distracted by… shall we say, physical blandishments?”

Edie blushes from the roots downwards.

“So now, my dear, you are moving up in the world. However, that’s tomorrow. Today, we need to get that cut seen to and—good Lord, whatever happened to your hair?”

“A tree,” says a husky voice from the doorway. “The Bracknell Woods.” And there is Clarissa Foxglove, in her dressing gown. “I waited until they were gone,” she tells Edie, “and the Ely bridge nearly took my head off altogether.”

Abel Jasmine smiles paternally.

“Off you go, both of you. Things are going to change for you, Edie. We’ll talk about it in the morning. But from all of us: well done. Well done, indeed. Now, Clarissa will sort out that hand for you.”

Edie allows herself to be led away.

Clarissa Foxglove cleans her hand quite ruthlessly, and Edie yelps a couple of times as she goes after an embedded bit of dirt. Then she escorts Edie to the baths and hands her warm towels with a very professional air, and finally walks her back to her stateroom.

“You knew all along?”

“Oh, yes. Someone goes for it about once a year. It’s who we all are. Fools for love of country, and so on.” Clarissa smiles. “Come on. Time to put you to bed.” She shunts Edie gently forward, pressing against her back, and Edie remembers the question of whether they should bare their souls. She can feel the other girl very clearly behind her. She turns around, smells mint and cigarettes, and knows it is the scent of Clarissa’s mouth.

Clarissa Foxglove stretches. She throws her arms out to the side and lifts them very deliberately up above her head. Edie watches.

“I expect you’re very tired,” Clarissa says. “I know I am. It’s been a long day. But on the other hand, you might—just might…” she shifts her weight against the door and lets it close, her back arched just a little, revealing a deep, broad V of skin “… want to stay awake a bit longer.”

Edie makes a noise which is almost a groan and lunges forward. Clarissa Foxglove is already half out of her gown.

Edie Banister, girl superspy, lands on her back and makes a noise like someone dropping a set of bagpipes. She can see blithering yellow sparkles, playing on her eyeballs. Ooh. Pretty…

She tries to breathe. It’s extremely uncomfortable. She can feel the train rolling under her, the rails in her chest. Zigadashunk tchakak. Points. Shaddadtakak.

Little yellow sparkles. Bit spangly and brown. Mrs. Sekuni appears next to her and pokes her sharply. It provokes a cough, and suddenly she can breathe again, clear and deep.

“That was not very good,” Mrs. Sekuni says. “It was very not very good.”

“Bad,” says Edie hoarsely, now that normal services have been restored to her lungs.

“No,” Mrs. Sekuni replies. “It was not bad. It was very not very good.”

For Mrs. Sekuni, who is small and South-East Asian and very pretty, precision is important. If English does not possess the necessary nuances, the language will be modified until she can convey what she wishes to say. Thus a sequence of not-goodnesses ranging from “quite not very good” which is better than “not very good” but not actually acceptable, downwards to “very not very good” and “really very not very good” and “very very not very good.” Mrs. Sekuni is entirely capable of using a selection of English words to fill these positions in her measure, but English words mean subtly different things to each individual English person, and Mrs. Sekuni some months ago got tired of demonstrating her version of those words and having soldiers and spies and policemen argue with her. So now she just uses English in her own way, and one of the first things her students have to learn is where on the slide rule of catastrophe their latest effort comes.

“Very not very good,” Mrs. Sekuni says sorrowfully, and Edie feels a pang of remorse. Reading a dusty book from a great stack on his table, Mr. Sekuni clears his throat and glances at his wife reproachfully.

“It was better,” Mrs. Sekuni allows. “Better.”

So Edie, revitalised by the knowledge that although she is still useless she is at least improving, scampers to her feet and takes her position on the tatami. This is a Japanese word meaning “practice matting,” except that it doesn’t quite mean that, so now there is a new Sekuni-English word to mean exactly what the original means, and by happy coincidence this word sounds like an English person trying to say the word “tatami” in Japanese.

Edie has recently learned a number of interesting concepts from Mrs. Sekuni as part of her study of budo. “Not just bujutsu!” Mrs. Sekuni says sharply. “Budo! You will learn more than my skin and flesh.” At which Edie blushed enormously and looked the other way.

Mr. Sekuni shouts “Hajime!” and Edie attacks, then finds herself flying through the air again, though this time she manages her landing well and rolls to her feet, once more on guard. Mrs. Sekuni nods judiciously.

“Better?” Edie asks hopefully.

“Very better,” Mrs. Sekuni says.

“I don’t understand,” Edie says later, while Mrs. Sekuni watches a company of special soldiers work through their training in orderly pairs against the backdrop of the Lovelace’s dojo. “I thought Japan was our enemy.” Because Japan and Britain have not been cordial since Tientsin.

“No,” Mr. Sekuni says. “Japan is no one’s enemy. It is an island composed of rock and earth, washed by the sea and the rain and shadowed by a great volcano. Japan itself has no political or even imperial opinions of any kind. Even the people of Japan—and there are many different kinds of people in Japan—even they are not your enemy. The Emperor, perhaps. The state, most definitely. But not us—which is why we are here.”

“Do many people in Japan feel this way?”

“Yes,” says Mr. Sekuni.

“No,” says Mrs. Sekuni.

“Many,” Mr. Sekuni asserts firmly.

“But not a large fraction of the overall population,” Mrs. Sekuni says with great precision, and this Mr. Sekuni has to acknowledge is quite true.

“We are communists,” Mrs. Sekuni says matter-of-factly. “We do not believe in emperors or queens or free markets or even the dictatorship of the proletariat. We believe in a world where people are equal in dignity, not contempt, and where resources—which under Capital are distributed through the quasi-randomness of a market operating blindly with respect to things which cannot easily be measured—are allocated in a sane fashion by the State.

“But that is all I have to say about that because I am not allowed to promulgate my disgusting Nippo-Marxian propaganda to operatives of S2:A, by special order of Mr. Churchill, who by the way is a fat, smoke-filled reactionary warthog and a very nice man.”

She sighs. For a moment, her face relaxes and Edie can see the signs of early age in her: lines of gentle care and creeping sorrow. Then she rolls her head briskly, and there’s a gristly popping sound.

“Come,” Mrs. Sekuni says, drawing Edie back onto the mat. “Yama Arashi. The mountain storm.” A wide space forms around them; Mrs. Sekuni has stern views about people who stray into her personal training area.

“Take this and strike.” She hands Edie a long wooden stick, notionally a sword. “No hesitating! Strike!”

Edie does, as she has been taught. Mrs. Sekuni does not roll away or retreat. Instead, she moves forward, arms open as if she intends to embrace the blade. Edie has a horrible image of her doing just that, some furious soldier of the Emperor delightedly cutting her in half, and Mrs. Sekuni’s beautiful, tiny figure parting company along a diagonal line, and Mr. Sekuni’s genial, clever face moving from grief to rage as he tears the soldier apart and runs howling at his nation’s lines and is in turn shredded by more modern weapons.

Edie has stopped dead. The wooden practice blade is hovering halfway down. Mrs. Sekuni meets her eyes.

“Yes,” she says. “What we do here is very serious indeed. Again.”

This time, Edie does not stop. Mrs. Sekuni does not stop either, and her arms embrace, not the sword, but Edie’s own, and squeeze and turn, and Edie finds herself rotating and flying and landing on the ground, and now by some strange process Mrs. Sekuni controls the weapon, and Edie lies flat on her back, vulnerable in a way which is so total as to be very erotic. Mrs. Sekuni is locked along her, one knee on her chest and one hand on her face, the other on the hilt of the practice sword, which lies across Edie’s neck. Her eyes stare into Edie’s, brown and deep and very grave. They wear the traditional gi, a training suit, and Edie can smell sweat, wartime detergent, and something spiced and lingering which makes her mouth pucker. With a great effort of will, she does not glance down at the v-line of Mrs. Sekuni’s jacket. She can feel the pressure of one small, muscular breast against her.

Mrs. Sekuni grins wickedly, then releases Edie and rolls smoothly upright. The Sekunis have an unconventional approach to issues of marital fidelity owed to their conviction that more familiar understandings of love are the province of patriarchal totalitarianism. They also, to Edie’s considerable frustration, have a firm rule against sleeping with students.

Mrs. Sekuni’s tongue appears briefly as she taps her front teeth with it. Edie looks away.

“Why is it called ‘Yama Arashi’?”

“Possibly because uke hits the ground with a very loud bang,” Mrs. Sekuni suggests. “Learn it, Edie. Yama Arashi is very good budo. Difficult, because it contains many things within it. But very very good.” And then, looking over Edie’s shoulder, she claps her hand to her forehead in horror.

“Mr. Pritchard! What are you doing? Is that O-soto-gari? No! It is not! It is a yak mating with a tractor! That is really very very not very good! My grandfather is weeping in Heaven, or he would be if there were such a place, which there is not because religion is a mystification contrived by monarchists! Again! Again, and this time do it properly!”

When Mrs. Sekuni is content with Edie’s combat skills, Mr. Sekuni begins teaching her about guns and explosives.

Edie knew that her training was at an end as soon as she saw the message ordering her “station side”—this being slang in Abel Jasmine’s organisation for the railway equivalent of dry land. She has a strange feeling in her legs, like a kind of inverted motion sickness; for the first time in weeks, she is standing on solid ground. She can smell bracken and earth, and on the wind, the unmistakable scent of heavy construction: hot metal and burned stone-dust.

In front of her is a rather grim Victorian manor or farm—if your idea of farming is waking at ten and walking along the hedges saying things like “I say, Jock, the wheat looks very fine this year, well done!”—made over into what she can only think of as a secret hideout. There is apparently also a secret greenhouse presumably filled with highly classified tomatoes.

On the other side of the manor, though, something else is taking shape; something the size of an aircraft hangar or a concert hall, with an earthen roof which resembles a hill or a burial mound and a great gawping maw of a doorway. Soon enough, Edie supposes, when the gorse grows back and the grass covers the works, the whole thing will look natural. Into the maw runs a row of railway sleepers without rails—yet—and this giveaway is being carefully painted green and brown, and broken with clever trompe l’oeil so that from the air it will look like nothing very much.

Some things, self-evidently, are either too big or too dangerous or too delicate to be done aboard a moving train, even a Ruskinite train with gas-baffle suspension and Brunel-Zeiss-Bauersfeld geodesic architecture, both of which the Ada Lovelace possesses and neither of which Edie even vaguely understands.

Edie ponders. The more aggressive aspect of Science 2 is called, prosaically, S2:Active, and is tasked with investigating and very occasionally implementing genuine scientific ideas which are probably completely impossible, but which, if confirmed, will reshape the world. If someone is going to invent a Gatling gun which can fire through solid steel, or an earthquake generator, or a heat-ray, or a devastating sonic cannon which causes tanks to shake themselves apart, Abel Jasmine is the man to ensure that fellow is working for the Crown and not the Axis.

Which brings up a question. “Is anyone doing anything like that?”

Abel Jasmine smiles. He did not announce himself, but Edie always knows when someone is behind her. This time she has also identified him, personally, and continued their conversation from the day before.

“Like what?”

“Superguns in space. Energy beams and lightning weapons.”

“Oh, yes. And not just that. This is a strange time, Miss Banister. The invisible world, it turns out, is considerably larger than the one we know. Men and women wrestle with intangibles and produce… well. Wonders and horrors. Such as the X-ray. A medical triumph. A miraculous thing. Except that direct exposure for too long rots the body like fire and plague. What’s the range? What’s the most powerful effect? Imagine a battlefield of invisible light, scorching from a mile away.”

Edie does, and doesn’t like it.

“Is that what all this is for?”

“No, Miss Banister. This is much more important. Come.” He gestures towards the manor house. A man is waiting for them on the step, an odd, elongated person in artificer’s black.

“Ruskinites,” Edie says, not without a measure of resignation.

It’s not that Edie has a problem with the Ruskinites, exactly. The Keeper—who turns out to be not only the designer of the Lovelace but also the top of the Ruskinite tree—is a nice enough person to be around, because his passion is so obvious and so entirely unthreatening. And, yes, she has some sympathy for the notion that all these perfectly reproduced, same same same objects which are gradually replacing the more awkward handmade things she grew up with may be in some way damaging her country’s relationship with itself, causing some kind of ghastly exile of the soul.

She just doesn’t trust people who take things on faith, and suspects that a uniform group which purports to celebrate uniqueness is leaving itself open to going what Miss Thomas would have called “a bit funny.”

She smiles as she reaches the manor.

“Hello,” the Ruskinite says. “I’m Mockley.”

“And what do you do?” Edie responds politely, because to a Ruskinite this is the most important question that can be asked.

“Welding, mostly. I’ve got a sort of gift for asymmetric joints which will experience extreme irregular shear. You have to get to know them a bit.” He waves his hand vaguely.

“Oh,” she says. “How wonderful.”

Mockley beams.

“Take us in, please, Mockley,” Abel Jasmine says.

Inside, the whole room is ringing. Edie can feel it in her chest, a wild, exultant creel of power. They’re cutting solid rock away, digging and burrowing down towards the sea caves below. There’s a glass oven (i.e. an oven for the preparation and blowing of glass, not an oven made of glass, although nothing would surprise her) and a furnace, a crucible, and several giant tubes or tanks whose function Edie cannot begin to guess. There are chemistry retorts and demijohns and vats and condensers and odd-looking gear which somehow resembles the code gear on the Lovelace but also looks a bit like a Jacquard loom. A wild hodgepodge, a scientific playground. Or, as Edie walks closer to the central pit, she realises she is wrong. Not a playground at all. A god’s forge, for the making of magic swords and talking sculptures and all the stuff of fairy tales.

Down in the depths, the great, blue-green Atlantic is black and cold and seething, and something is being lowered down and down into the cauldron: a bomb-shaped thing with cables snaking back up the cliff. Below even that, in the probing glare of the giant searchlights which are pointed not up but down, Edie can see something else, a whale-shaped, whale-sized monster lurking on the edge of the light, a hundred foot underwater and more.

She looks back and around, and sees what’s missing from this titanic mosaic.

“Who’s the lucky girl?” she asks, because sure as chips and vinegar this lot is not for her.

“A scientist. It is a woman, actually.”

“Well, where is she?” Edie glances around, looking for a bespectacled schoolmarm with chalk on her fingers. Abel Jasmine sighs.

“Ah. We were hoping you might be able to help us with that, Miss Banister. There’s a slight problem.”

“What sort of problem?”

“His name is Shem Shem Tsien.”

The face in the photograph is in monochrome, tinged with a deep celluloid blue. It is no brighter than the faces around it, no older, no closer to the camera. And yet, it is indisputably the face, unique and apart.

Granted, it belongs to the man to whom everyone else is apparently deferring. He is richly dressed, and surrounded by dependants, concubines, and offspring. And yet, Edie has seen other pictures in the past where one child, caught by chance in an attitude of casual joy, has completely outshone such a parent; where one unthinking scullery maid has glanced at the camera and displayed for a moment her natural beauty, and the social order has been quite overturned. Photography is without mercy—though it’s nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat’s meat men.

There’s no such revolution here. The camera has fallen in love. It has given itself entire to Shem Shem Tsien, thrown itself at his feet and worshipped at his altar. He absolutely gleams, matinée-idol splendid, with broad white teeth and a hero’s moustache in two delicate bars, as if drawn on with charcoal, emphasising the masculinity of his curving upper lip.

Shem Shem Tsien: graduate of St. John’s College, Cambridge; debater, gambler, and rake; born the second son of the second son of the Khaygul Khan of Addeh Sikkim, a tiny tinpot nation on the edge of the British Raj. Industrialist and moderniser, favourite dinner guest of presidents and commissars alike, hunter of big game and bronze medallist at the Olympics in the foil event—would have done more, no doubt, but he’d spent the preceding six days drunk in the arms of a Hollywood starlet of pneumatic and renowned athleticism. His smile shatters marriages, unfrocks nuns. As a youth, he ravished Europe and the Americas, was the darling of the society pages—and then, disaster: his father, brother, and his royal master were taken all in one night by a sickness which swelled the brain, leaving Shem to look out for his beloved nephew (seen, indeed, in Abel Jasmine’s photograph, carrying a butterfly net and clinging shyly to his uncle’s knee) which he did by burning the corpses with due ceremony and installing the boy on the Khaygul’s throne. Alas, all unforeseen and unimaginable, a fishbone lodged in the new sovereign’s throat and could not be got out, leaving the wise, educated, clubbable Shem Shem Tsien the last (officially recognised) son of his line.

Or perhaps: Shem Shem Tsien, unfavoured and suspect child, his birth nine months after the visit of a noted British libertine, his face a little too beautiful, his hair too thick to be his father’s boy. Not exiled so much as encouraged elsewhere, he served in the British Army and the Russian, carved out a kingdom in opium country before he ever came back to Addeh Sikkim, knows the Camorra of Naples and the Yakuza of Kyoto, the Boxer Triads of Beijing and the Kindly Men of London. Red-handed enemy of the Barqooq Beys of neighbouring Addeh Katir, he is a trader, a producer, and a supplier of laudanum to kings and potentates, of anaesthetics and pain relief to armies; a Svengali, a Mesmerist, a blackmailer, an extortionist, and a kidnapper (all things one might expect, notes sniffy Abel Jasmine, in a Cambridge man). He is also a poisoner, a sponsor of thugs and an assassin, a bringer of plagues. Were his brother, father, uncle all dead when he locked them in an iron room and set them on fire? Not known. His inconvenient nephew, Abel Jasmine’s agents report, was quite unquestionably held face down in a plate of Giant Mekong Catfish (and what idiot would eat such a magnificent, doomed thing? It’s like tucking into the last mammoth, a dish for the dissolute and the small) until he choked.

Shem Shem Tsien owns the largest collection of preserved lepidoptera in the world.

He keeps nearly one hundred thumbs in a display case.

He is received in embassies from Brunei to Moscow, owns property in Mayfair.

Fifteen thousand infantry, nine thousand cavalry, and three thousand artillerymen, sappers, and murderers take their orders from his lips alone.

His word is law from Kalimpong to the southern reaches of the Katirs.

Shem Shem Tsien is the Opium Khan.

It occurs to Edie, powerfully, that Shem Shem Tsien is entirely Britain’s fault. For whatever pressing reasons, the mother of democracies has given suck to this man. The Empire’s great educational institutions have shaped him, her military has trained him, and her drawing rooms and salons have completed his development. Oh, all of Europe has played a part. In Shem Shem Tsien, Marx rubs shoulders with Wellington and Paine with Napoleon, each jostling for the unwelcome title of Kingmaker—but it is in Britain’s melting pot that he has been composited. A British fiend, all manners and poisonous politesse, in every sense a home-made International Bastard of Mystery.

Of his whole family, saving himself, only one other member now remains: his revered and gentle mother, Dowager-Khatun Dalan, still known in Bloomsbury as Dotty Catty—quite the girl in 1887, got herself ejected from a music hall with a peer of the realm, and that was no easy task back then—the only one of the whole brood he trusts enough to leave alive.

The one who has now betrayed him.

Edie Banister, orphan child, born of some poor knocked-up wench in a poor town west of Bristol, adopted ward of schoolmistresses, charities, and latterly the British Government, occasionally has trouble understanding what other people see in families.

She glances at Shem Shem Tsien’s photograph again, then flicks to the beginning of the file. The name on the frontispiece unsettles her: Angelmaker. It sounds altogether too churchy, too much like a funeral hymn. She shivers, and turns the page.

The Ruskinites are artisans for hire. They do not discuss the projects they work on. They evidence the spark of the divine in the detail of human labour; they do not engage in espionage.

But nine days ago, according to the file, the Keeper requested Abel Jasmine’s presence at Sharrow House, the converted stately home over the Hammersmith Bridge, which serves the Ruskinites as their home.

The Keeper had a message. He was uncomfortable. He was betraying a confidence. This one time, with considerable misgivings, the Keeper wished Abel Jasmine to be aware of something. The Ruskinites felt what was taking place was more important than their general mission.

“More important than the human soul?” Abel Jasmine asked, with a smile on his lips. It was his pleasure to tease the Keeper, very kindly, just as it was the Keeper’s pleasure to suggest by his bland expression and benevolent eyes that he had not noticed. This time, he frowned.

“Than the excellence we might achieve and the benefit to a finite number of souls. Yes. Possibly.”

Abel Jasmine put away his sense of humour.

“In a far-off place,” the Keeper said, “we are assisting a Frenchwoman with the construction of… things.”

“What things?”

“We are not sure. She changes her mind a great deal. At first it was Mechanical Turks.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Automata. Like the von Kempelen chess player, although that eventually turned out to be a fake. These… are not. You see the notion. Soldiers made of metal.”

Abel Jasmine nodded. He did, indeed, see the notion. It had been a staple of popular fiction since at least the Great War. Artists had pondered it, thinkers had written on it. The horror of all those limbless heroes returning from Verdun and Ypres had made a forcible impression on Europe’s ideas of war. It pleased many to look for a surgical solution to conflict, a clean, bloodless version of the thing. It did not please Abel Jasmine. A war fought by empty suits of armour did not strike him as a particularly merciful one; it did not even occur to him to imagine that they would do battle only with other machines. The world as he had seen it was not so fastidious.

The Keeper was still talking.

“Then the automata were discarded—somewhat; her sponsor remains rather enamoured of them—and she needed a great hydroelectric station. And mosquito traps. I don’t know why. Then for a month it was vital that we construct a cinema for elephants, although… we are reasonably certain that represented a digression. Brother Scheduler tells me she is prone to enthusiasms. But now she is building something new. Something extraordinary.”

“And this extraordinary thing…”

“Is what is—or may be—more important for the moment than our chosen task on Earth. Yes.”

“Why?”

“The Frenchwoman—she is from the south somewhere—has stopped making soldiers. I think… when she was summoned, you see, she was one part refugee. It was the beginning of the war. I have the impression that she lost someone, and she was running from it all. She was asked by the client to create a device to end war, for ever. Well. That’s usually a shorthand, isn’t it? For a bigger gun.

“She now proposes to take her client at his word. She believes the device she is constructing will achieve that. She calls it an Apprehension Engine.”

“I do not immediately see what that might be.”

“Nor do we.”

“The intention is very noble, of course, but…”

“But it has in the last generation given us the machine gun, poison gas, and germ warfare, and may shortly yield the atomic explosive.”

“Yes.” The Keeper drew his hand across his mouth, and then went on. “So. The mother of the original client has asked us to make contact with you. She proposed an indirect contact with the Crown through a friend from her time here. However, under the circumstances, we wished to alert you directly.”

“What circumstances?”

“The client is Shem Shem Tsien.”

Abel Jasmine sucked lightly through his teeth.

“That is not ideal.”

“No.” The Keeper bowed his head for a moment. “It is not, however, what ultimately caused us to take this step. By God’s grace, even the works of a monster may inspire salvation—and indeed, by fostering our work, a man such as Shem Shem Tsien may learn to appreciate the miracle that is humanity, and become… better. That is our purpose. Temporal tyrants are of limited concern to us. The issue which causes us concern is the Frenchwoman. We have come to believe that she is Hakote.”

Abel Jasmine listened to the sound of the wind rushing around his carriage, and the noise of the rails. Hakote. Outcast. Unclean. But so much more than that; Abel Jasmine, like the Keeper, knew the origin of the word, and what it entailed.

“Oh,” he said unsteadily. “Well, yes. That does change things.”

Attached to the file is the letter itself, and an assessment of the curious and circuitous route it took to arrive here. The handwriting is a spidery copperplate, very well-tutored but uneven, and there are faint traces of the blade of the writing hand, as if the author had to rest it in the wet ink to retain her grip.

Dotty Catty, in the fine tradition of Addeh Sikkim and Merry England, will not receive a man in private. Thus, Edie is the perfect agent. However, the Opium Khan regards women in general as chattel. No female admitted to the palace would have any freedom of movement nor security of person. Thus, an invitation has been secured for one Commander James Edward Banister, of His Majesty’s Royal Navy, to come on a goodwill visit and discuss the disposition of the Khan’s forces in any invasion of India by the Empire of Japan. Lodged in the palace, James Edward will hide away at night and transform once again into Edie, who will then present herself to the Dowager-Khatun in respectable style, albeit by climbing in through her window at dead of night.

The Opium Khan, in the finest modern fashion, desires that Frankie Fossoyeur create for him an Ultimate Weapon. Abel Jasmine would prefer that such a thing—if exist it must—exist in Cornwall, instead.

And all this is now the sole responsibility of one Edie Banister, the girl who wished to serve her country.

In the Pig & Poet, Edie drains the last of her brandy and shifts her backside on the ragged, uncomfortable stool. Since her eighty-ninth birthday, she’s had a bad relationship with backless chairs. She stares at the darts board as a young tough with bad skin lands a trio in the treble twenty. Not bad at all. She sees Biglandry’s face in the pattern of holes in the board, a martyred, hapless murderer, sent to do a job he was never fitted for. Not that he lacked talent in the direction of death. Just intelligence. She wonders if he’ll be the last, and concludes that, if he is, she will almost certainly have failed—so she must assume at least one more session like this, with corpseguilt glaring at her from an empty chair.

She sighs, and begins to gather her belongings, not without a measure of bitterness. Here she is, a million years later, and not an older brother in all the world. No family to speak of at all, save for a foul-smelling dog clinging to life with grim determination in her handbag. And at that, he’s liable to outlast her.

Edie Banister stands—a process which takes a distressingly long, awkward time—and goes upstairs to the relative tranquillity of her rented room. She stares around her. Oscar Wilde, she recalls, acknowledged the close of his mortal existence by remarking: “It’s me or the wallpaper. One of us has got to go.”

Looking up at the brown floral print, she feels a fleeting kinship. All the same, there’s work to be done. Her shopping expedition was not just for clothes. A kitchen shop, two supermarkets, and a garden centre have yielded ingredients for some small advantages in what she suspects will turn out to be a very unfair fight. Tupperware boxes, thermos flasks, and liquid fertiliser, a kettle for a witch’s cauldron: Edie lays it all out, and then jots down proportions from memory.

In the brown room, amid the cheap, well-intended furniture, Edie Banister makes saboteur magics, alchemies of resistance. And then she lowers herself gratefully into bed, and finds that Bastion has so far bestirred himself as to claim a space by her feet. She sleeps, and dreams of old work, unfinished.