Chapter 2

THE KING OF CARTS

1

Mr Bryde was conscious of the difficulties of his task. To resolve the murder of Sir Martin meant more than simply identifying a murderer. It meant untangling the strange manner of the death itself – an actual locomotive, running on rails that were then removed? A spectral apparition? (But if spectral, how did it interact with Sir Martin’s flesh?) Some manner of contrivance murderously kitted-up, for the occasion, by a mob of angry men, much as a guy might be wheeled through the streets on Bonfire Night?

And then there was the question of motive. Of the many possible reasons a malefactor or malefactors might own for committing such a crime, what was the true motive here? Revenge? Greed? Revolution?

Bryde walked the streets of North London. He spoke with his various people, acquaintances and familiar faces: postboys and crossing-sweepers, pallet-men and lamplighters, men trudging to work and returning, women on errands through the streets.

The one thing to which Bryde cleaved, a conviction which his febrile interview with Ninecroft had not shaken, was that the murder must have a rational explanation. There must be some commonsense, material narrative that explained how the tycoon had met his end; and all stories of ghosts and goblins, of devils and demons, were to be dismissed. It is not that Bryde harboured atheistical beliefs, for he was as conventional a churchgoer as any. It was only that his experience as a designer and engineer disposed him to believe that God and the Adversary, though they watched the drama of the world from their respective thrones with interest, took no day-to-day part in how the complex mechanism worked through its motions. It had been made, in its astounding scale and intricacy, as a huge machine, and set alive, and now it worked according to the laws of Newton and Humphrey Davy.

As a rational man, Bryde did not condescend to the people who talked of Hellish locomotives driven by Beelzebubs. Superstition was a, though perhaps understandable, manifestly atavistic desire of the uneducated to make sense of the world. As for Ninecroft’s narrative: opium had hallucinogenic properties, as was well known. The only part of that story that couldn’t be reframed in commonsense and materialist terms was the note with which Ninecroft had woken, upon which was written “Bruinstack”, and which wouldn’t burn. As to that, Bryde could at least hypothesize: for presumably Ninecroft had written the word himself upon the paper whilst opiated, and then forgotten about it. Perhaps the word had been spoken by Sir Martin during that last conversation, and had stayed in the recesses of Ninecroft’s mind without him quite realizing it. His long-term addiction to the smoke of the poppy had surely rendered the fellow’s consciousness as full of holes as a colander. And any ordinary piece of paper, cast upon the open fireplace, might be borne aloft without quite catching fire.

What Ninecroft’s story confirmed – as did, in its way, the fantastical narrative of the diabolic locomotive – was not their material specifics, but only Sir Martin’s reputation in the world as a whole. It spoke to a situation where people considered him so wicked that any and all other manifestations of wickedness clustered around him in their minds. Something similar had happened with his erstwhile fellow money-man, Scrooge. His alteration in manner had been so pronounced that all manner of strange stories, goblins and ghosts and devils, were passed from mouth to ear all over town to explain it. The reality, Bryde believed, was simpler. People do sometimes reassess their life choices, after all. The wicked have been known to pass along the Tarsus Road and convert. Even the devil might repent.

Bryde strolled the streets of Camden. He made his way across to the works, the site of Sir Martin’s demise. Work had recommenced in the space opened up. Workmen with handcarts brought gravel and shingles. Others carried railway sleeper spars across their shoulders, their arms hooked round the beam like men walking the stations of the cross. Picks and sledgehammers swung and clattered. Tubs of boiling tar steamed like puddings being cooked. Bryde stood behind a low fence of splintery wood and watched the work proceeding.

This was the very spot where Sir Martin had died. Now it was being dug over, laid with broken stones and rolled. Further back, men pressed spaced blocks of wood, each one hefty as the crossbar of a Christ’s cross. The idle fancy crossed Bryde’s mind, of the dead man’s spirit pinned by this wood, as they say vampyres are in their graves, lying unquiet as the locomotives rolled over and over forever. He was not a superstitious man, but something in this made him shudder. But after all: why should Sir Martin’s ghost lie quiet?

Of course, the London and Middlemarch Grand Congruence Railway Company was not one man. A million pounds sterling had been raised in stock, and such a quantity of money possessed a momentum that was not to be prevented by a single death, even of so important a figure as Martin Malprelate.

Bryde introduced himself at the worker’s gate and was granted entrance. Down the path, stepping aside to permit a workman passage as he wheeled a barrow full of dirt up. Bryde walked the unlaid stretch of ground. He examined the space where Sir Martin had died. The northwest reaches of this stretch of dirt had been spread with gravel and laid with sleepers ready for the iron rails, but to the south and east the ground was much as it had it been on the night of the killing. Bryde walked slowly, stooped forward, for evidence of – something, anything, he did not know what. Cart tracks? Wheel lines? Evidence, perhaps, that rails had been laid and removed?

It was just mud.

There was no evidence that there had been rails laid and then removed, improbable as that hypothesis had always been. Had it been performed, Bryde told himself, the ground would have been very greatly disturbed and some indication would remain. But the ground over which he now walked did not support the simpler theory either: for a cart, weighted with train-like paraphernalia, horseless and therefore pushed by a great many men in order to achieve a killing velocity, would surely have left the imprints of its wheels, and of the footprints of men. But there was nothing. The pages of this levelled mud were blank.

“Friend,” Bryde called, to a working man who was bringing down a barrow of gravel. “Has this area been raked over?”

“Raked over, sir?”

“This stretch, where I’m standing, and going south. Has it been raked over, or smoothed? Since Sir Martin Malprelate’s death?”

“This is the land on which Sir Martin was standing when the Demon Train struck him down,” said the man, setting the barrow down and wiping his brow on the underside of his forearm. “No, sir. Workmen are not over-eager to loiter there, sir, I can tell you. As we work, we settle the ground for the small stones, but we haven’t touched that ground, sir, not since the evil one snatched away the old man’s soul.”

“The evil one? You’re sure it was he?”

“Whom else, sir?”

“Did you see it happen?”

“Not I, sir. That was a depot night for me. But Pat saw it – the name is short for Patience, sir, not Patrick – he was working on the fence, up yonder. Pat? Pat!”

Pat came down, a wide-faced man with a forked scar on his big left cheek that made it look as though that side of his head was pieced together from three components that didn’t quite fit. “Sir?”

Bryde introduced himself and explained his business. “You saw the moment of death?”

“Can’t unsee it, sir,” growled Pat, sounding as though lava were gurgling in his throat. “I pray to the lord Jesus Christ every night to relieve me of the vision, but it haunts – haunts, sir.”

“It was a train?”

“I should think I know a train when I see one,” said Pat.

“What I mean, good fellow, is to ask, might it have been a cart or carriage?”

“Cart?” retorted Pat, as if nothing could affront him more than such a suggestion, until he added “carriage?” and it became clear that a greater affront was indeed possible.

“You grasp the purport of my question,” Bryde pressed. “I look at this ground, this very ground here, which your comrade assures me has been left untouched since that night. How can a train have passed down here? Without sleepers or rails? How can it have left no track?”

“No mortal train,” said Pat. “I know what I saw.”

“Perhaps a carriage might be tricked out to resemble a train,” Bryde offered.

“As if I wouldn’t know the difference!” scoffed Pat.

The other workman put in: “Besides, to what end, sir, if you’ll pardon my reply? Who would set up a cart to look like a train? Why?”

“It is a good question,” Bryde conceded. “But I am only trying to make sense of the evidence.”

“That’s not it, sir,” said Pat. “For wouldn’t a cart of such a size – for it was a colossus, that I saw – leave tracks? Wouldn’t it spin its wheels? Hooves and tracks? There were no horses, that I am sure. It was a locomotive of a size I ain’t have never seen, in all of my born days. It was big as the A-warehouse up at depot, which is bigger than any barn. Big as the ware’us, mind: not big as any of the locomotives within the ware’us. And it moved faster than any locomotive I’ve ever seen, shining with a grinning light. I’ll tell you something more, Mr Bryde sir: it flew.”

“You mean, it was rapid?”

“I mean it floated above the ground. Oh it had wheels, sir, as a locomotive must – but they did not touch the ground.”

This was more than Bryde could believe. “Come, my friend,” he remonstrated. “There was a fog that night – several feet deep of mist blanketing the ground. How can you know whether the train touched the ground or not?”

“Because the fog was there, sir,” said Pat. “I saw the wheels of the locomotive running over the top of the fog. It left no trace on the ground, as you have seen sir, because it hurtled through the air, as Satan’s sled flies across the moon on the witches’ sabbath.”

Bryde thanked the man with a shilling for his time, and made his way up the chopsticking path out of the works, pondering this bizarre information.

There was one more bizarreness to encounter, before his day’s investigating was complete. As he climbed the shallow rise, to reach again the High Camden Street, Bryde noticed a man watching him.

There was no mistaking it: as Bryde moved, the man moved his head to follow his movements. As Bryde stood at the top, the man stared frankly at him. He was muffled up against the late November cold: a thick overcoat, a scarf wrapped about his lower face, and the space beneath his felt hat occupied by spectacles of violet-coloured glass. With his face thuswise wholly hidden it was not possible for Bryde to see whom this person might be, or to see if he might recognize the fellow.

He stepped across to him. “Good day, sir,” he said. “You are, I think, observing me?”

“I am,” the man replied.

“I must ask you: why?”

“You know, I believe, Sir Persimmon Hawk?” The man’s voice was somewhat muffled by the scarf so tightly wrapped around his face, but even with this softening his speech possessed a grating, unpleasant quality.

“I know of him and have met him, precisely, once,” said Bryde. “He is a managing director of the company that employs me.”

“He is,” said the stranger, with an odd pause, “a friend of mine.”

“I congratulate you on the honour,” Bryde returned. “My understanding is that he is not a man to dispose his friendship to many, or with facility, which means you are one of a select and favoured group. Might I ask your name?”

“Griffin,” said the man, adding, “like the fabled bird, you know.”

“And what does Sir Persimmon have to do with you undertaking this surveillance upon me?”

“Oh,” Griffin drawled, insolently. “He asked me, you know.”

“Sir Persimmon asked you to watch me?”

“To check-up, I think. To make sure you were indeed undertaking the work with which he had tasked you. To be sure things were hurrying along. He’s keen to wrap up the matter, you know. Speed! Speed! That’s the logic of the railways, ain’t it? Rap-ee-do.”

Bryde felt his grip on his temper begin to loosen. “It is hard to see this as anything other than an insult, Mr Griffin,” he said. “Am I not trusted to undertake my commission? Must spies be set to dog my footsteps?”

“Not spies, dear fellow,” said Griffin, adjusting his scarf, which was beginning to slip. “Just the one spy. Only me. But don’t take on, so. I’m no hireling. It is a favour. Sir Percy and I are engaged in a certain endeavour – a certain technical endeavour together. That’s all.” He touched the brim of his hat. “Good day, Mr Bryde.”

Griffin walked jauntily away before the astonished Bryde could reply. His astonishment reflected, in part, the sheer brazen rudeness of the man, his manner, his words. But there was another thing too, more startling yet. As he had adjusted his scarf he had, only for a moment, revealed a patch of his naked face. And it wasn’t there. A portion of jaw, simply missing, opening sight into a shadowy cavern. The man was deformed – phossy-jaw perhaps, a war wound perhaps – and that was why he covered his face.

2

There was more to this mystery than Bryde could unravel, alone and unaided, and it was to that end he called upon his friend Vavasour Holmes. Of all the people currently in London, none had a greater intellectual capacity when it came to the solution of riddles, the unpicking of puzzles, the pathmaking through briar-patches.

Holmes’ family were Hampshire people, squires of longstanding, but young Vavasour had taken rooms in London and was as often to be found in the metropolis as in the countryside. He pursued certain interests for which the British Library, and the laboratories of the new University College, were needful.

“Bryde,” Holmes exclaimed, as the engineer knocked upon his door. “What a capital surprise. How do you do, my friend?”

“Not imposing, I hope?” Bryde asked, making to put his hat down on a table and then stopping. Holmes’s rooms were crowded with myriad objects, books piled in heaps, scientific reports and vials, an articulated skeleton, boxes and samples and equipment. The small table by the door was occupied by a boxy device made of metal spikes and coils. “A galvanic pile,” said Holmes, proudly, coming over and taking the hat from Bryde’s hand. “I’m rather proud of it.” He tossed the hat, more or less carelessly, onto a heap of papers by the fireplace: charts, blueprints and other publications. “Move those boxes from that easy chair and sit yourself down.”

The boxes were half a dozen small, sealed cardboard containers, all of which, according to the stickers posted on their outsides, contained lenses and other glassware. Unsure where to put them, Bryde put them down carefully upon the rug beside the chair.

Holmes himself, seated opposite, was filling his pipe, his long legs stretched straight down at an angle of thirty-five degrees from the horizontal.

“I should say that Gwendolin is on her way here this very day.”

“My dear fellow,” said Bryde, standing up. “You should have said! I really can’t intrude on a reunion of man and wife – “

“Sit down, sit down,” said Holmes, gesturing with the stem of his pipe. “She’ll be half an hour yet. Plenty of time! Besides I was with her only last week: it’s hardly a reunion! She’s just coming up into town to do a little shopping. Do sit down, Bryde. Will you have a drink?” Holmes did not offer his friend any tobacco, for he knew that, though Bryde was himself a smoker, his more refined palate revolted against the rough shag that Holmes himself favoured.

“Nothing to drink, thank you,” said Bryde, re-seating himself, a little tentatively. “I only wanted to – as the phrase goes – pick through your brains. The company has asked me to investigate the recent, strange death of Sir Martin Malprelate.”

“Oh yes!” said Holmes, animatedly. “I have of course been reading about it in the newspapers. Even granted the tendency of the press to exaggerate and melodramatize, it is a most striking and unusual case. Are you working with the police?”

“In parallel to them,” said Bryde. “Sir Martin was, it seems, a man with many enemies. My challenge is in narrowing down the list of possible suspects; for such a list might otherwise stretch out to encompass the whole of London town, and possibly beyond.”

“A hard and grinding fellow, it seems, this Malprelate,” said Holmes, drawing a deep mass of smoke into his lungs and exhaling it vigorously.

“I was wondering how you might go about…” Bryde began. But Holmes interrupted him.

“Oh no, my friend, I’ve no time to get involved. No time! I won’t deny that raptor adventure was diverting, but my researches here are at a crucial juncture. Busy busy! You see, with the application of a galvanic current, it proves possible to…”

“Forgive me, Vavasour,” said Bryde. “I don’t mean to cut you off. But, if we only have a short time, until your lady wife arrives… Please don’t misunderstand me: I am not here to recruit you to the case. Naturally I understand how busy you are. But to be honest, my friend: I find our conversations on these mysteries to be so wonderfully clarifying.”

“Very glad to hear it,” said Holmes. “So yes, I see your task. A matter of narrowing the rogues’ gallery down to a manageable number, what? Well there’s an obvious way to begin.”

“There is?”

“Let us say: the King of Carts.”

“Let us say what?”

“Let us say: the man had many enemies. So I make this proposition: we divide this population into two groups: his personal enemies and his collective enemies. In the former group are to be found individuals with a personal grudge against the man. In the latter, people who object, as we might say, to the Malprelate project – to, let us say, the railways he is building, at the cost of ordinary houses and businesses. I suggest that, merely by making this distinction, we have identified the group of the two more likely to be responsible and so have triaged your task.”

“The second group?”

“Precisely. An individual might, of course, be moved to kill Sir Martin. Reading about the fellow I’m sure several were. But in that case they would act the assassin: shoot him with a firearm, stab him with a dagger, bludgeon him with a club. A woman might put poison in his potation. In each case the purpose would be to rip out the fellow’s life. But what happened to this man was far more theatrical than this! A gigantic, seemingly spectral locomotive running him down? This was more than merely killing him. This was making a point.”

“And so our task is to identify which groups might want the man dead, and what kind of message this elaborate and complicated mode of murder communicates to the world.”

“Precisely so. Think of Ned Ludd, from the eighteen-teens. A few short decades ago. The Luddites smashed up machinery, and sometimes killed manufactory owners. It was no personal animus that motivated such crimes, but a collective anger against the coming of machinery as such. The perpetrators dressed in women’s attire and banded together: a performance of ridicule as well as strength, of disguise as well as intimidation. And so we may ask ourselves: what purpose might this display of ghost-locomotion serve?”

He drew another lungful from his pipe, and expelled a spear of smoke up towards the corner of the room. Bryde coughed a little. The air in the room was growing mistier with tobacco.

“Sir Martin had many business interests,” Bryde said. “Of course, as you know, he came to prominence marketing stocks, trades, debts and other forms of legal usury. But were the animus against him motivated by this side of him, a locomotive engine would not be the mode of assassination.”

“Indeed not,” agreed Holmes. “Consider the place in which the killing happened, and the prominence of Malprelate himself as an, as it were, figurehead of the new motile-machinery that is presently rending London, ripping through its ancient suburbs and filling its skies with smoke. Is it likely that one group, or another, antagonistic to the coming of the railways might have staged this death? A warning to other railway magnates – a display for the people of the city – a statement that Saturn will devour its young!”

“The King of Carts,” said Bryde. “Yes, I see. Thank you, Holmes!”

“There is one more question to consider,” Holmes added. “Though – as a rational man, and an engineer, you may believe it already settled. You consider the locomotive that struck Malprelate down to be a… material object?”

“That is surely the more likely hypothesis,” said Bryde. “More likely than that it was, as the populace excitedly exclaim, a train-engine driven out of Hell by demonic drivers for the purpose of collecting Malprelate to the nether world!”

“I would not be so hasty to dismiss the possibility. There are other forms of the immaterial. Perhaps it was a mere hallucination, like Banquo’s ghost?”

“An hallucination could hardly have beaten Malprelate to death!”

“No, of course, of course. Let us agree Sir Martin died because something solid, not spectral, collided with him. But how to explain the reports of so many that it was spectral?”

“You propose an hallucination observed by two dozen independent people, simultaneous? Macbeth solus saw Banquo’s ghost, my friend – none of the other guests at his feast saw a thing. And is that not what one would expect? Surely hallucinations are the product of a derangement of the individual consciousness?”

“Collective hallucinations are not unknown. And what of other possibilities? The ghostly or spectral world,” Holmes went on, accompanying his words with his pipe stem as an orchestral conductor uses his baton, “may soon prove amenable to science, just as the material world is. Experiments are being conducted even as we speak concerning the communication of the dead, spirit-writing, and the spectral plane.”

“Surely, Holmes!” Bryde cried out. “You don’t believe in all that jibberish? I thought you a man of the natural sciences!”

“And so I am. I am not proposing a vulgar superstition of bogeymen and dancing devils. But there is something else: an account of the dimensions of our world, width, breadth and height, that encompass also time – for no object can exist instantaneously, everything around us must persist in time for their various widths and breadths and heights to figure – and conceivably time as a triple-form iteration, just as space is. Dimensions, you see, Bryde. We know what it is if an object becomes unmoored in space – as a hat is blown off a man’s head in a strong gale, and he must go running after it. Might something equivalent not explain the appearance of this machine?”

“But a locomotive must have rails to run along,” pointed out Bryde, who, to be honest, had not quite followed this last lucubration of his friend’s. “It cannot run on mud. Go to the place yourself, Holmes, if you don’t believe me – there were no rails, no wheel-tracks, nothing at all.”

“It is an important consideration,” agreed Holmes. “Indeed, indeed. You don’t think the rails were perhaps laid down, and then afterwards removed?”

“I don’t see how they could have been,” said Bryde. “It would have been a vast labour – not just the rails, but the sleepers. And surely, if that had happened, the mud would bear the impress of the removed metal roadway? No, no, it is not conceivable.”

“I must take your word,” said Holmes.

“A locomotive as such,” said Bryde, “seems to me a plain impossibility. A cart or carriage, on the other hand, might very well roll along the bare ground. And perhaps a cart or carriage could be fitted-up to resemble a train – for that would be in keeping, precisely, with the Luddite performance to which you earlier alluded. It is as I knew it would be,” Bryde, went on: “wonderfully clarifying to speak with you, Holmes!”

“I mention the King of Carts,” said Holmes, “though I have no notion as to how to locate him.”

“It so happens that I do, though, my friend. His path and mine have crossed before. Given my profession – and the fact that I sometimes go out into the world to investigate mysteries – perhaps that news does not surprise you.”

“And yet it does! Still, I am glad to hear it. Perhaps a conversation with this King will help resolve the whole mystery.”

“I am keen to resolve it, believe me. And my employers are even keener. Do you know they have set a man to watch me?”

“To watch you? You mean – to spy on you?”

“Just so.”

“How extraordinary! You are sure of this? It might be merely a curious passer-by, watching you without ulterior motive.”

“I confronted the fellow, and he confessed all. Name of Griffin.”

Holmes opened his eyes very wide at this. “The devil it is – his name is Griffin, you say? Tall pale fellow?”

“As to pallor I cannot testify,” said Bryde. “For he wore his face muffled against the cold with a scarf, and had on spectacles fitted with smoke-tinted glass. I honestly did not see his face at all.”

“But it is the very man,” said Holmes. “I know him by the spectacles. He has some derangement of the retinas, something to do with albinism I believe, and needs the coloured eyeglasses to facilitate his sight. Griffin – you met him!”

“You know him?”

“He is an acquaintance of Sir Persimmon Hawk’s. Not exactly a partner, and yet not exactly a friend. I do not know him, Griffin I mean, directly, but I have seen him at Sir Percy’s. I believe him to be some manner of natural scientist, a chymist perhaps. He is, so far as I know, assisting Sir Percy’s own researches.”

“He did mention the baronet in speaking to me,” said Bryde. “Boasted of his friendship. But this is too striking a coincidence, Holmes! I did not realise you were in Sir Percy’s orbit?”

“The galvanic device I mentioned earlier, and which you were too much of a brute to tolerate hearing about – it is part of a larger project, overseen and – frankly – financed by Sir Percy. He has a larger device, for which my galvanic apparatus is key, for which it will be the power source.”

“I cannot imagine he is an easy man with whom to work!”

“He is bristly, as these aristocrats so often are. He can be brusque, as the French term it. But he is genuine in his interest in scientific advance, and generous with his disbursements to that end. I cannot say for certain what role Mr Griffin plays in the project, for I have hardly exchanged a half dozen words with the man, and Sir Percy is not forthcoming. But Griffin is sometimes there when I call at Sir Percy’s townhouse, and I have seen him.”

“And now Sir Percy has sent him to spy on me!”

“Extraordinary,” conceded Holmes, drawing another large dose of smoke into his body and exhaling it again.

“You do not know what is the matter with his jaw?” Bryde asked.

“Jaw?”

“He was, as I say, muffled against the cold, but when he adjusted his scarf I could detect the briefest glimpse of his face beneath, and there is a portion missing from his chin, or lower cheek. Is it disease, I assume. A wasting disease perhaps.”

“I saw him two days ago,” said Holmes, puzzled, “and his face was complete. Pale, as I say: painted as a woman paints with white-lead so as to regularize her complexion. I believe it to be some medicinal paste, perhaps painted against the harm the sun’s blaze may cause an albinic skin. But his face was certainly all there.”

“That’s queer,” said Bryde. “I was sure I saw…” He shook his head. “It was but a moment. Perhaps I was mistaken in what I saw.”

At this point the bell sounded downstairs, and Holmes’s landlady could be heard below opening the door. “Gwendolin,” said Holmes, leaping to his feet.

Bryde also rose. He recovered his hat from where it had been thrown and turned to see the handsome figure of Mrs Holmes coming into the room.

“Mr Bryde,” she said. “How lovely to see you again.”

Bryde kissed her gloved hand. “Mrs Holmes,” he said.

She was, he noticed, in that happy state of incipient motherhood that rounded her figure, and with which she glowed.

There was a commotion on the stairway, which resolved itself as a maid brought a perambulator and awkwardly clattered up the steps, into the cluttered room. The noise, and shaking, did not seem to have awoken the baby within.

“Vavasour,” said Mrs Holmes, “you really must arrange your town possessions in a more orderly manner. There’s hardly space, in all this clutter, to bring the baby inside!”

“And how is my little Mycroft?” Holmes asked, leaning over the perambulator with fatherly affection. “Prospering? Still oligocephalic? Prone to wind?”

“I must leave you,” said Bryde. “But before I go, please allow me to congratulate you, Mrs Holmes, on what will evidently soon be the new addition to your family?”

Mrs Holmes folded her gloved hands over her bump. “Vavasour believes it will be a son, Mr Bryde,” she confided. “Where I feel it will be a daughter. Into that impasse we find ourselves unable to propose a name.”

“I really must get out from under your feet – as you say, Mrs Holmes, Vavasour doesn’t exactly keep a trim or shipshape apartment. Thank you, though,” he said, shaking Holmes’s hand. “I believe you have set me on the proper path.”

“The King of Carts,” said Holmes.

“The King of Carts,” agreed Bryde, and went out.

3

He opened the door to his own lodgings. As the lock clucked loudly with the turning of the key he called out, “It is I, Mrs Orbit, returning home” – for if he did not do so, his landlady became alarmed that an intruder was breaking into the property.

He went inside, hung up his coat and hat, and before he could do anything else Mrs Orbit had come bustling down the stairs to ask if he required her to set a fire. She offered to do this whenever Bryde returned, no matter the weather.

“There will be no need, Mrs Orbit, thank you. I leave this afternoon by train and won’t be back until tomorrow.”

At this Mrs Orbit shook her head very hard and fast, such that her large, stiff hat of lacquered blue could not keep up, her head moved independently within its ambit. “I don’t hold with trains, Mr Bryde, which likewise you know, though I don’t consider you to be trains you understand, your mode of employment notwithstanding.”

“No Mrs Orbit,” he replied. “That’s quite alright, Mrs Orbit.”

“Too fast and far too fiery,” the landlady continued. “Not your employment, which I understand be located respectable and stationary behind a desk in an office. But actually to travel by such beasts? Did you hear, Mr Bryde, and Lord forgive me for the gossip of it, what happened to that big London financier? Sir Martin was his name, and he was who put all his money into the railways only to be knocked down by one of his own trains!” She shook her head again, leaving her hat in its position in space. “A judgement, it was,” she said. “A judgement.” Abruptly she fixed Bryde with a stern look. “Where are you off to on the infernal tumbrel, Mr Bryde?”

“I have business in Essex, Mrs Orbit, but it will only detain me for one night. I shall return tomorrow before midday.”

“Does it – “and here Mrs Orbit actually shuddered, her whole body trembling, “does it under go?”

“I believe the train does pass through a tunnel, Mrs Orbit, yes. As it approaches Brentwood. My understanding is that the company made a cutting through the Essex hills and have now covered it.”

Mrs Orbit shrieked. “I can’t bear the thought of it!” she exclaimed. “Not the thought of it, ne’rmind the actuality. Just to think of that great engine, scurrying along through a tunnel, like a rat along a sewer pipe. I can’t think how you could do it Mr Bryde, to volunteer to sit within the belly of such a beast.”

“I shall screw my courage,” Bryde told her, solemnly, “to the sticking point.”

“Well,” Mrs Orbit said, in a doubting voice, “if there truly is no better way of getting there, and if it’s business that can’t be put off…”

“I plan on interviewing the King of Carts.”

“Of Cards?” Mrs Orbit had exacting opinions where gambling was concerned.

“Carts, drays, tumbrils, Mrs Orbit.”

“You wish to speak to a carter?”

“I do.”

“To hire a cart?”

“No, Mrs Orbit. Only to ask some questions. You remember I told you: I am looking into the murder of the gentleman you previously mentioned.”

Mrs Orbit threw her hands up. “Such a dreadful crime!” she said. “But I shall tell you, and tell you true, I doubt if it went just as the gossip says it went. I doubt if it was truly a spectral locomotive from Hell. God would never permit such a spectre to run through London town.”

“I agree, Mrs Orbit,” said Bryde. “I believe the murderers to be flesh and blood, men with a grudge against Sir Martin.”

“Wicked men! And you believe these carters might be such men?”

“I will see you tomorrow Mrs Orbit. A light luncheon at one pm, if you please, here in my rooms.”

“Very good, Mr Bryde,” Mrs Orbit replied, though in a voice that suggested she was doubtful a traveller who ventured so perilously as to pass into the belly of a train that itself passed through the innards of the Earth, would ever be seen again.

Bryde put a fresh shirt, his toothpicks and his pipe and tobacco into a leather satchel, redonned his coat and hat, and stepped back out onto the street. It was a chill but bright afternoon and the walk to Shoreditch was enlivening. Sunshine gleamed off the lancet spire of St Leonard’s Church, whose bells though presently dumb were liable to break at any moment to peal out their when I grow rich. The pavements were busy, and carriages and drays rattled through the streets. Bryde walked past the theatre and then mounted the stairway to the railway station itself. He paid tenpence and collected his ticket: a piece of taupe card, stiff as a mahjong tile.

From the platform he watched as the engine backed its carriages up to the platform. Birds scattered and trilled through the air. The barrel of the locomotive bore on its side a metal crest: “Grand Eastern Counties Railway”, the words disposed circularly around a corrugated five-petalled rose.

Bryde took a seat inside his compartment. He was alone. Unfolding the paper from his inside jacket pocket, he read of the ups and down of stocks and money-rates, of the shocks that had passed through the city with the violent murder of so prominent a man as Malprelate, of the speculations and rumours swirling around the death.

Hissing with a goose-like self-importance, the engine stirred and roused its motile power. It disposed several great white bales of smoke into the sky. The train shuddered, eased forward and soon picked up speed. It passed over the viaduct through Spitalfields, high across Wheeler Street and Brick Lane, and on. At the stop at Mile End station another traveler entered Bryde’s carriage, tipped his hat, and disappeared behind the paper panels of the Times.

Bryde stared through the window as the train proceeded over Globe Lane and then curved round the East London Waterworks at Old Ford. It chugged on, across the Marshes, and as the city fell away there was less for Bryde to observe. At Ilford the train paused for a long while as the driver and the station master exchanged a series of angry shouts with one another. Whatever the issue between them, it was eventually resolved and once again the mechanical dragon shook itself awake again to grumble onward, across the Great Essex Turnpike and thereafter chundering along to Romford Station, where Bryde’s fellow passenger alighted. From here it was a straight run to Warley Lane, Brentwood, though the adverse incline caused the locomotive to cough and strain itself. Forward motion slowed noticeably.

At Brentwood Bryde alighted, found himself a nearby hotel – a new building, varnish still resinously odiferous on all the woodwork – and took a room. He beguiled the evening by strolling about the town, and admired the sunset across the flat land whilst he smoked a cigar. He took an early supper and retired to bed, requesting a very early alarm call. “Up before dawn, sir?” asked the concierge.

“I have an appointment with the King of Carts,” said Bryde.

“Oh!” said the concierge. “Needs to be up betimes to snatch any meeting with him. Very good, sir.”

Bryde slept poorly, as he usually did, waking at odd moments, for an instant startled to find himself not in his usual bed, before recalling where he was and why he was there, and sliding only slowly back into sleep. He had unnerving dreams, some of which had adapted the story he had heard from the clerk Ninecroft, of the diabolical steam locomotive and its devilish crew. Nonsense of course. But how pungent to the imagination!

There was a banging inside his head and it took him a long minute to separate this out from himself and understand that the banging was coming from outside himself – from outside the room. “I am coming,” he croaked. “I am awake, you can stop your knocking.” From the other side of his bedroom door he heard: “Begging your pardon mister but my gaffer says I ain’t at stopping until you are at coming out.”

“Infernal urchin,” Bryde muttered, disentangling himself from his sheets and blanket and shiveringly opening the door. The boy was there with a candle in his hand and a gleam in his eyes. “Only,” he said, “cusmers say they are awake and then they fall back asleep, and then I catches it, don’t I.” The lad then opened his eyes very wide and said, with enormous emphasis, “Good morning!”

“Yes, yes,” said Bryde, pressing the sleep-sand from his eyes with the heel of his hand. “Good morning to you, my lad.” When the boy did not withdraw, Bryde said: “I am in my nightshirt, and such small change as I carry is in the pocket of my breeches. I shall tip you when I am dressed, and have come downstairs.”

“Only,” the boy said, in no way retreating, “cusmers say as they’ll tip me later and then later comes and the tip has slipped their mind, and then I’m tipless.”

“Good grief,” said Bryde, crossing the room and retrieving tuppence from his breeches.

Later, dressed, huddling by the downstairs fire with a cup of rough-tasting coffee in his hands, Bryde coughed the last of the night mist away.

“It’s a precious early start for you, mister,” the boy opined, from just outside the saloon.

“I am in need of a lantern, my boy, and I haven’t brought one with me. Might I have the benefit of borrowing one of the lanterns of this establishment?”

“Only,” said the boy, “seeing as the gaffer ain’t awake yet, so it falls to me to lay out,” he nodded at this, as if impressed at the professional idiom in which he was expressing himself, “to lay out the terms of such a, as we might say, mister, rental of sich and sich an item.”

Bryde eventually settled for sixpence for the light, and a promise to return it within twenty-four hours. He buttoned his coat and turned up its collar, and stepped out into the darkness.

It was an affrontingly cold predawn. The steam from Bryde’s breathing glinted in his lanternlight.

He passed up the unlit High Steet and across a meadow. A pond had trapped a number of stars beneath its surface. The quiet of the night meant that he heard the snorting and huffing of the dray-horses before he saw the carts – a great line of carts, two abreast all along the London road, each one with a carter at the front, swaddled up in coat, greatcoat and overcoat, wrapped about with scarf, sitting stiller than their animals. Bryde reached the roadside and held up his lantern. To his right were cattle – hundreds of beasts, standing as patient as statues in the bluey gloom, waiting to be driven along the London road to Smithfield.

Before him and to his left were the carts.

Seeing the gleam from his lantern, the driver of the nearest cart turned his head. “Early hours for a stroll, stranger,” he said.

“I’m looking for the king,” said Bryde. He added: “I have an appointment.”

“Appointment!” said the carter. “Upon my soul.” The reins were slack in his lap, but he lifted them and sent a wave down their leather to indicate the direction Bryde was to go.

Bryde walked along the pike, passing cart after cart after cart. Each cart was piled high with produce: cabbage-lettuce, endive and succory, soil still adhering to their roots. Here were huge bundles of spinach, wraps of sorrel, clusters of artichokes. Here was a cart bearing a heaped hill of cos-lettuce, each one tied round with straws. The light from the lantern touched colours out of the darkness: a sheeny lacquered green of the beans, deep-toned blue-green of the foliage of the kale; stacks of leeks white as shinbones sprouting lime-green at their heads; the jewel-like oranges of the heaped carrots, snowy turnips, all strewn in prodigious quantities in all these carts. White cabbages as compact and round as metal balls, purpled savoys whose great leaves made them look like basins of green bronze, red cabbages which the lantern caught with hue of wine-lees, splotched with dark purple and scarlet.

And here, at the head of the procession, was one cart wider than all the rest: a huge, broad flatbed of ancient timber, carrying perhaps a half ton of potatoes.

“So I have the honour of addressing the King of Carts?” Bryde asked.

The man seated at the front was of unusual and prodigious stature, such that, large though his conveyance was, he did not seem dwarfed by his huge cart. “Mr Bryde, is it?” he asked. There was a rumble in his voice, as of giant cartwheels trundling across metalled roads, and a shudder in his fleshy chest. His eyes flashed in the lanternlight as he glanced down.

“You received my communication,” said Bryde. “I am most grateful for the opportunity to meet with you, sir.”

“Clamber up,” instructed the king. There was plenty of space on the bench beside him. “To Barking,” said the king, “before the east starts to lighten. To Whitechapel as the sun rises.”

“I shall not presume upon your time for so long,” Bryde assured him. “What we have to discuss may be encompassed within a half hour at most.”

The King of Carts turned his gigantic head slightly, and, for the first time, took in Bryde’s whole countenance with his eye. “The carts wait on no man,” he rumbled. He gave a hoick to his reins and called out up-up. His team of shires shuffled and strained, and the giant cart began to roll forward.

The carters behind stirred and called to their horses, the ones behind them likewise, and so, motion itself passing as a wave down the entire enormous train, the entire mighty parade of carts began their journey.

“It occurs to me that I might,” Bryde observed, “have met you in the Covent Garden, and saved myself the journey out here.”

“Busy,” growled the king, “at tother. Here’s where we can talk, if anywhere. Now’s when we can talk if anynow.”

“Very well,” said Bryde, setting the lantern down on the bench beside him.

For a while the king was silent, and Bryde waited. The grind of the wheels against the turnpike surface, and the plodding rocking imparted from the stepping of the drays, and the movement of the cart, generated an almost lulling effect upon Bryde. After his poor night’s sleep, the rocking sent him back, in memory, to the cradle. He clapped his hands, and pulled his own beard, to rouse himself.

“Sir,” he said. “You have perhaps some intimation of why I am come to speak with you?”

For a long time the King of Carts said nothing. They rumbled on, under the starlight.

“I am here every night, afore dawn,” he said, eventually, speaking slowly. “These folk are my folk. They bring down all the victuals for the great city yonder – all that its hordes eat, borne into the metropolis aboard my people’s carts and carriages.”

“I comprehend.”

“You are here,” said the king, shortly, “following that much-publicized death in town.”

“Sir Martin Malprelate’s demise, yes.”

“The railway man,” said the king.

“He.”

“You, Mr Bryde, are a respectable man. Yet you work for the rail-carriage folk.”

“I do.”

The king shook his massy head. “Do you drive them?”

“The locomotives? No, I work in an office building. I am an engineer.”

“Not the locos. The roads. Do you drive them?”

“I have nothing to do with that side of the, eh,” said Bryde. “Business.” Dawn was starting to melt into dimness and light. Bryde blanked the lantern at his side and waited for his eyes to acculturate to the darkness.

“That’s the damage,” said the king. “That’s where it is. This Sir Martin – he was driving a road into the heart of the smoke?”

“He was. But north and west – not into this territory.”

“My territory has already been spiked,” growled the king. “That great metal spear, thrust into the flesh all the way up to Brentwood hills.”

Bryde omitted to remind the king that it was on that very railway that he had, the previous day, made his way into Essex. His sight was now dark-adapted enough to see the silk-thin crescent moon, its bulk emptied out into nothing except a half-circle thread of silver, so slender as almost not to be there. The stars poured lactically across the sky.

The pole star stared fixedly down, a royal eye of its own.

“Men,” said the king, looking again at Bryde with one hard eye, “have driven carts across the land since there’s been a land. Adam put his belongings in a cart drove it out of Eden.”

“I am not sure I recall such being specified in the Bible,” said Bryde, mildly.

The King of Carts was quick to retort: “You want to tell me he laid metal rails and hurtled out of paradise in a locomotive? Booming and spitting sparks and hurling smoke at God’s clean sky? No!”

“Such is not scripturally specified, certainly.”

“Carts is God’s own moveable. Steam trainage belongs to the other feller, in his cavernous kingdom below, where all is fire and smoke anyway.”

“Many say,” Bryde offered, “that railways are roads that lead into the future. Times change, sir. Perhaps the steam locomotive and the dray can cohabit?”

“It is not to be,” said the king. “This is a fight to the death. The locomotive and its tail is a snake, and it seeks to throttle young Hercules.”

“Do you believe the railways can be stopped?” Bryde asked.

“I believe it would be the action of a coward, Mr Bryde, not to fight. All my life, my folk have ported victuals into the great city. All my father’s life it was the same. And his father.”

“But Railways move people,” Bryde objected. “If you were king of stagecoaches I might understand why you feel threatened. But cargo of such bulk…”

“Permit me to contradict you, Mr Bryde. Cargo is already being moved by rail. It will increasingly be moved by rail – if we permit it.”

“There are many who feel as you do?”

“You mean,” growled the king, “others who might act to murder a prominent railwayman? Nay, sir. Do not impute such baseness to us. We do the Lord’s work. There’s neither fire nor brimstone in our passage, sir. Look to the steam-engine men for that.”

“I beg you not to misunderstand me, sir,” said Bryde. “I have not come to accuse you. That is not my intention.”

“What then?”

“Only that I have heard of the letter,” said Bryde.

The cart rolled on. For a long time the king said nothing. Looking behind himself, Bryde could see the first faint intimations of dawn in the east, and starting to amass shape and distinctiveness, the great caravan of drays following.

“I did write it. I wrote to her majesty,” said the king eventually. “I wrote as one monarch to another. The letter was delivered to her ministers. A copy was delivered to the railwaymen. A copy shall go to the Times newspaper when the railwaymen are agreeable.”

“You propose a contest?”

“Let the steam-engine men compete with us in open contest, aye. Let them bring in the supplies I stipulate – in the letter – in their way, and let us bring ’em in our way. We shall see who does the better job.”

“The tortoise and the hare,” objected Bryde. “Do you truly hope to bring such a fairy tale into real life?”

“A fair contest,” the king insisted. “Let them see how fragile is their panting-puffing beast. How solid and dependable are our carts.”

“Even assuming the railway barons agreed to your contest – they could simply fill their carriages with potatoes, drive them into town at top speed and claim victory. A cart such as this – sturdy, certainly, reliable I do not doubt, but not rapid – could not compete.”

“I do not say,” the king said, “that this cart, this one upon which you and I are sitting, Mr Bryde, would compete.”

“You have another, more rapid cart?” Bryde asked, sharply. He was aware, for the first time, of a kindling in his solar plexus, a sparking sense of excitement as if comprehension was about to dawn; as if he, by understanding one small thing, would start to understand a series of interlinked large things. But the king of carts did not reply. Bryde repeated the question: “Is there some new, velocitous manner of cart, in your tribe, that might challenge the railways for celerity? Is such a thing behind your proposal of competition?”

Instead of answering this question, the King of Carts said: “We run along the roads, the ancient highways. These steam machines must lay their rails before them as they roll, and might as well pull them up behind them after they have gone, for all such startling novelty could ever endure. We feed the city! The roads have done so, and the roads will do so in the future.”

“I ask because – “Bryde began. But the King of Carts interrupted him.

“Mr Bryde, you have come here to ask me about the death of this railwayman, this moneyman, Sir Martin. You have heard something from the streets, from the gossipers, from the people the police pay to spy and eavesdrop and pass on what they hear to the authorities. It is what you have heard that has brought you here, to me. And you ask me about this man’s death! Mr Bryde, I have no words to communicate to you on this matter. I have no words to say to you concerning this knight’s death – a knight who never rode a horse, I’ll warrant, this Sir Martin! I am sorry you have been put to the trouble of travelling out here, and of rising so early as to meet me, but there is nothing I can say to you will repay that labour. Here – “He put his head back, ponderously gesturing forward with his chin, and then dropped said chin to his breast again. “Romford. I’d say you could step down from the cart here, Mr Bryde, and be on your way, with no ill-will between us.”

Bryde knew better than to press the king on this matter. He thanked him for his time, and for the ride, and climbed down from the cart as it rolled into the outskirts of Romford village.

There Bryde stood, among the dark houses, watching the King of Carts rolling on, and the procession of his many subjects rolling after him. The procession, like that queue of Banquo’s observed so bitterly by Macbeth, seemed to stretch on to the crack of doom. Cart after cart after cart went by.

Bryde found an inn where one window glimmered with the lit candle behind the pane and knocked at the door. The maid was surprised to encounter custom so early in the day, and could do nothing more for Bryde than beg him to sit and wait for a little, as she continued laying and then lighting the fire. Only when this was burning was she able to boil-up a pot of coffee for him. Bryde sat, solitary in that firelit room, sipping his coffee and smoking his pipe, revolving in his mind the substance of his conversation with the King. He had not said my people have nothing to do with the death of this man. He had not said that. I have nothing I can say to you on this matter, was quite another thing to pronounce.

But was Bryde any closer to a solution to this great mystery?

After a while the window glass began to glimmer with the coming dawn. Bryde paid and left, walking down a side street and out across a square towards the railway station.

The various properties of Romford were gradually emerging from the gloom and into the dawn, a greenish-grey colour in the chill eastern sky. The sun itself was not up, but solar imminency stained the east horizon a soft grey.

The station master was opening his main entrance as Bryde approached. He waited patiently for the fellow to ready his establishment. I have nothing I can say to you on this matter, was what the King of Carts had said. Was this a politician’s answer?

As Bryde waited, the sun swelled up over the landscape eastward in a fine watercolour wash of citron and pale orange light. The brickwork of the station building itself assumed delicate shadowy tints: violet, blush-rose, and greenish yellow.

“My dear man, I must make arrangements,” Bryde explained to the station master, holding up the lantern he was still carrying, “for this to be returned – taken up the line to the George in Brentwood. Perhaps a shilling would cover the cost of delivering it? As for myself I require only a single ticket, into London.”

“Of course sir,” said the station master. “Of course.”

4

Dawn appeared slowly, softly grey in hue, and spreading a watercolour tint over all the world, the awake and the awakening and the sleeping, across the living and the dead. Surging piles of cloud, akin to hurrying waves, assumed their delicate shadowy tints – tender violet, blush-rose, and greenish yellow, all the soft, light hues which at sunrise make the sky look like a canopy of shot silk. And by degrees, as the fires of dawn rose higher and higher at the far end of the Romford Road, the mass of the world, trees and fields, rooftops and bald hills, grew brighter and brighter, emerging more and more distinctly from the blue gloom that clung to the ground.

Bryde breakfasted in the station hostelry, where a yawning innkeeper provided a bowl of coffee and a thickly sawed slice of bread upon which was spread lard sprinkled with sugar. After he had eaten Bryde merely sat, for a while staring out of the window at the colourful changes in the sky. His lack of sleep muddled his head, and he drifted into a state that was neither entirely awake nor exactly asleep.

In this state, sitting, a vision of sorts manifested to Bryde. It was as if he floated over the city, a skylark drifting up in the zenith and looking down. With preternatural focus he could see every detail: London like a shield upon the face of which was drawn the undulating line of the Thames, the encrustation of houses and shops, of factories and churches, graveyards and hardens, two million people fitted snugly together. From his imaginary vantage Bryde could see the radial roadways along which people travelled into and out of town. And here came the army of carters, northeast from the flatlands of Essex, southeast from the orchards and hop fields of Kent, the corrugated farmlands dug out of the downs to the south and southwest, the market gardens north of the city. Gathering long before dawn, their carts loaded with cabbages and leeks, with potatoes and turnips, with tomatoes and lettuce and spring onions, with clanking pails gravid with frothy milk – carts crammed with sacks of flour plump as cushions – carts heaped with coals and charcoal, or stacked high with firewood – carts bringing barrels of beer and barrels of brandy, racks of champagne bottles so excited to be drunk their enthusiasm threatens to explode the dark green glass in which they are penned. Stacks of butter, racks of hams. Drovers flourished their switches like orchestral conductors, leading the shuffling lines of cattle along the roads in towards the Smithfield shambles; pigs keening and lambs creaking out little bleats. Carts stacked with wood-and-wire boxes inside which chickens clicked and clucked. Every morning it was the same, day in, day out: a vast army of people assembling and loading and driving the city’s daily necessities.

But then, his head lolling against the back of his chair, Bryde’s vision, or dream, changed. This swarm of humanity, trudging slowly into the heart of the city and returning into the outskirts unladen, faded away. New roads were gouged through the fabric of the city, and ruled with doubled lines of iron. Bryde understood that he was seeing things as the Sybil does, with the future breaking through into the present. Down every one of the new railed roads came giant trains: cyclops-eyed, steam and smoke pouring from their snouts, elbowed-wheels spinning tirelessly, and each train drawing after it a vast caravan of carriages. From his impossible vantage, Bryde was able to look more closely. The chuntering rhythm of the trains rattling over the rails, pressing and releasing the sleepers in sequence as each engine passed over, was augmented with the groaning of the timber. Except it wasn’t timber. It was, Bryde could see, a long string of supine human beings, trussed and pinned beneath the iron, their life-breath pressed from their bodies with every roll of their wheel. Now that he had heard it, Bryde couldn’t unhear it.

Bryde woke with a start. The innkeeper was clearing away his bowl and plate. Not wholly in the land of the waking, Bryde thanked him and paid.

Outside, revived by the freshness of the dawn air, he made his way to the platform to await the first train into town.