September 2009
There is no lie but what they discover. There is no truth but what you can make them believe.
The Bullet-Catcher’s Handbook
Under scant moonlight, I picked my way through the gardens of the university. With a grand dinner underway, there was no one to challenge me. No need this time for me to carry a box on the pretence of making a delivery. The smell of roasting meat hung in the still air around the back door of the kitchens. I could hear the clatter of pans and a shouted order to plate up the puddings. Then I was through into the lawned quadrangle and quickly under the ink shadow of a pergola. All the windows of the ivy clad building were dark but one.
I had not yet knocked when the door opened and Professor Ferdinand drew me inside. His office felt different in lamplight. Objects that had been mere curiosities in the daytime now seemed menacing. Shadows made statues appear to lean forwards from their shelves.
The picture had been removed from the wall behind his desk. He stepped to the safe door and pulled it open, for it was already unlocked. I received the book.
“You tricked me into this,” he said.
“You were keen enough to have it.”
“It was still a trick.”
“I’d like to be open,” I said. “Lay my life bare for everyone to see. I just don’t have that luxury.”
“If you try to blackmail me again, I’ll say I’ve never met you.”
“So you do understand that the truth’s a luxury.”
“That’s different!”
I let his words hang. The silence became uncomfortable. He looked down to the floor, ashamed, I thought. Perhaps it was different. I was well used to living on the ragged edge. For him the experience must have been a shock.
At last he said, “This isn’t just dangerous for us. There are powerful men who’d use what I’ve told you if they knew it. People who’d rather the Great Accord had never been signed. You must burn the book. Please.”
I found myself holding it more tightly to my chest. “You’ve given me what I asked. So our bargain has been honoured. I won’t trouble you again.”
I had turned and was reaching for the door handle when he called me back.
“Miss Barnabus. Your story – it reminded me of something I’d read. I traced it and… Well, it’s here if you want it.” He held out a white envelope. “Read it later. I only hope it’ll bring more help than sorrow.”
I had intended to wait until I was back on the boat before examining the professor’s gift. But as I walked, a sense of foreboding grew, becoming unbearable. I speeded my step, hurrying to be home. Halfway there, I found that I had stopped. Then I was backtracking towards the sickly hiss of a streetlamp.
Under its yellow light, I ripped open the envelope and extracted two strips of paper pinned together. One was a newspaper article. The other, the banner from the top of the page, gave the publication date as two weeks before.
The newspaper article had been set out as a cautionary tale. The ingredients were familiar enough – a blacksmith who lived beyond his means, too ready to venture money on dogs or horses, empty gin bottles found by a reporter stacked at the back of the man’s log store, gossip of profligacy among the neighbours. None of the blacksmith’s debts were huge, to be sure. But when added together they amounted to a sum beyond his substance. This lifestyle he had maintained through an increasingly precarious feat of balance, borrowing from one creditor to pay off another.
I could have named any number of men and women about whom the same had been said. Few on workers’ wages could afford to live without debt. A poor man never throws away a bottle. Gambling is merely hope by a different name. And were it not for hope, how could a poor man decide each day to live?
Yet the man was a wastrel, the newspaper said. His excesses might have remained unnoticed for a time yet, but for a vigilant agent of the International Patent Office. The blacksmith had made and sold some novel devices without a licence. The agent detected the breach and imposed a fine. Thus was the balance upset and the blacksmith toppled into bankruptcy.
His many creditors would surely have been injured by his inability to pay – themselves not wealthy men? However, a high-minded nobleman of that county saw their plight and bought up all the bad debts at a generous rate by way of service to the community.
The newspaper praised his actions. He knew he would suffer financial injury, yet pressed ahead for the common good. Naturally enough, he took the blacksmith to law in an attempt to recoup some of the loss. But once legal fees had been paid, even with the sale of the blacksmith’s cottage, forge, and tools, there remained a shortfall of seven hundred and seventy-five guineas.
The blacksmith was locked in debtors’ prison and his nineteen year-old daughter indentured to work in the nobleman’s kitchens for a period of thirty-five years, or until the debt be otherwise paid.
The generous nobleman wished to remain anonymous, saying, “There is no virtue in a good deed proclaimed.”
I became aware of a tacky feeling between my lips. And then a metallic taste. I spat onto the cobbles, my saliva bloody. I had been biting the side of my tongue while I read. I was breathing deeply, though I still couldn’t seem to get enough air.
The story in the newspaper was my own retold. It came to me that the reporter had mistaken only the fine details – my father’s profession, my age, the sum of the debt. Everything else fitted precisely with the nightmare that had rent my family. An agent had found a supposed violation in one of my father’s devices, there was a fine, the gathering of debts, a trial, a verdict, indentured servitude.
And yet the date on the newspaper banner proved the article was recent. Either the banner came from a different paper or they were reviewing the news of six years before. I stared at the newsprint, no longer able to read the words.
There was a thought, puzzlingly out of focus and on the edge of my mind. It took the shape of a man riding towards me, his face yet too distant to discern. I could hear the hooves of his horse drumming the ground. But still his features were a blur. If I could but see clearly, I would be able to recognise him. Then I would understand. He had drawn so close now that he towered over me, impossibly tall. I found myself straining my neck to look up into the blinding yellow of his face. He reached down. I could see his gloved hand in every detail. Fine white leather. Stitches perfectly even. It extended towards my own hands, which cradled my face. Somehow I knew that if it took me, I would be lost. I wrenched my eyes from his hand and looked up to the face, forcing myself to see it.
A cruel gaze bore down on me, a face I had glimpsed but twice. It was the Duke of Northampton. But the story in the newspaper was not my own. It was happening again. To a different family. Another father had been ruined. Another daughter acquired.
I found myself kneeling, staring up at the spluttering gas lamp as understanding broke over me. I saw it all with vertiginous clarity. Then my stomach heaved. I braced myself, hands on the cold cobblestones and vomited.
When it was done – my hands no longer trembling and the sweat drying on my forehead, when I had got back to my feet, using the lamppost for support – it came to me that the duke had exercised the same monstrous practice before. And he would continue to repeat it until death toppled him.
But this time was different. This time I was watching. I had the means to identify the corrupt agent. What was more, I had a contact on the inside. John Farthing could walk the corridors of the Patent Office itself. He could investigate. For once, we could be fighting on the same side. And if the duke’s corruption could be proved, I had at last the means to end him.