The Constantine Affliction Page 2

  “You modern women and your intellectual pursuits. Between your tinkering with inventions downstairs and your writing of poetry upstairs, you constitute a one-person society of arts and sciences.” Pimm risked a glance at his friend, then winced and looked away. “You were hideous when you were a man, Freddy, with a face like a frog, and ankles like a stork’s. How is it that after the fever you became so, so....”

  Freddy put the mirror down on a side table and stepped in front of Pimm’s chair, hands on hips. He—she—Curse it. Pimm tried, in private, to avoid the use of pronouns in relation to this person who was technically his spouse, though to most eyes, Freddy was indeed female, and was more generally known by the nom de what-have-you of “Winifred Halliday née Sandoval,” or more properly “Lady Pembroke.” Calling Freddy “she” and “her” seemed more and more natural every day, which made public appearances less fraught with opportunity for confusion, but also seemed in some way a betrayal of the man who had been Pimm’s friend for so long.

  Freddy now wore a partially-unbuttoned and fortunately oversized man’s shirt and, it seemed, nothing else. Her hair was a golden cloud, her nose adorably snub, her lips plump and currently frowning. “If I were uglier, I’d be wearing a false mustache and binding down my breasts with strips of cloth and passing for male like some of the other bastards, who were luckier in their transformations.” Freddy sighed. “Though I suppose I’m lucky too—I didn’t die, or get stuck halfway through the change, like some.” The Constantine Affliction was unpredictable and cruel in its course, though many expressed the opinion that being transformed into a woman must surely be a fate worse than death. Spoken like someone who had never died, Pimm always thought.

  “And you spared me the horrors of marrying someone else,” Pimm said. “Someone of whom my relatives might have approved.” Pimm’s marriage to the mysterious Winifred Sandoval—a person of no particularly notable family connection—hadn’t delighted his aunts and uncles or his elder brother the Marquess, but he’d made an impassioned speech about true love and they’d eventually agreed to go along with things, mostly just to stop him quoting love poetry. The wise old heads of the family were happy to see him married to someone, anyway, and hoped he would stop embarrassing his illustrious older brother and the rest of the Halliday line now that he’d settled down with a good woman.

  He had, alas, disappointed them. They didn’t mind the drinking and the gambling and the bon vivant lifestyle, really—every well-established family had its dissolute spendthrifts. It was... the other thing. His hobby. The one thing he did well other than drinking and playing whist. The thing that got his name in the papers.

  “Mmm,” Freddy said. “It’s good to know I saved some poor woman from a life of misery at your side. Oh, a letter came for you. It’s by the door—I had intended to place it in your hands, out of deference to the headache you clearly have, but then you insulted my physique and demanded I cover myself up.”

  “Your physique is fine. That’s the problem.” Pimm rose, groaning, and went to the table by the door while Freddy sashayed away back to her bedroom. His spouse had been practicing a feminine carriage, but took too many lessons from women of the wrong class. Pimm sorted through the post until he found the letter Freddy meant. He tore it open and read the few lines while standing by the door, then crushed the paper in his fist. “Damnation. Freddy!” he shouted. “What time is your salon?”

  “I have a few hours yet, though I thought I’d do some shopping beforehand.” Freddy emerged, still underdressed. “Why do you ask?”

  “Abel Value wants to meet with me.”

  “Oh, my.” Freddy looked at the ceiling for a moment, humming a bit. “When?”

  “He proposes to meet for lunch.”

  “Drat. And we had a scientist coming to the salon today, an expert on certain fish who sometimes change their sex. He has some interesting ideas about the causes of the Constantine Affliction. Something about pollution in the water supply, I think.”

  “Better than the ministers who say the transformations are judgments from God, because men have become too feminine and women too much like men, though to be honest I’m not fit to judge either argument on its merits, being as ignorant of biology as I am of theology. I suppose I can handle things with Value myself...”

  “Pish,” Freddy said. “Where will you meet him? The Luna Club?”

  “I wouldn’t want to be seen with him in my club, and he knows it. No, he proposes to meet here.”

  Freddy nodded, thoughtful. “Hmm. The closet in your bedroom shares a wall with this room, and at midday that side of the room is fairly well shadowed. I can drill two small holes, one to look through, the other to press the barrel of the air-pistol against. Just make sure Mr. Value sits in that chair, facing the window, so the sun is in his eyes, and so I can get a clear shot at him, if need be.”

  “He’ll probably bring one of his men,” Pimm said. “Who will, doubtless, loiter by the door unless called upon.”

  “Three holes, then,” Freddy said. “And I’ll prepare both pistols.”

  “You’re the best wife a man could hope for,” Pimm said.

  Freddy grinned wolfishly, and that, at least, had not changed a bit with his transformation from man to woman. “In certain respects, at least,” Freddy agreed.

  Scandal and Poppycock

  Eleanor Irene Skyler, called Ellie by her friends (though her byline ran as “E. Skye,” with the extra “e” at the end because her editor felt it added a touch of sophistication), stepped off the self-propelled streetcar and directly into a heap of horse manure. She did not curse aloud, because though she was of necessity more independently-minded than most women in the city, she could not entirely forsake her upbringing. After scraping off her shoe as best she could on a cobblestone, she stepped around another heap of horse leavings and made her way toward the offices of the London Argus, not far from Printing House Square.

  The streets of London were still very much contested territory, with the new electrified carts rumbling along their pre-ordained routes while more traditional folk tried to prevent their horses from being run over. And, of course, most everyone was far too poor for horse or electric cart, and made their way on foot. There had been a few noteworthy crashes involving the electrical omnibuses, some of which she’d covered for the paper, and so she rode the bright red “devil carts” as often as she could in hopes of being a firsthand witness to another such disaster. Even most Londoners who could spare the fare didn’t bother with the carts, both for fear the things would crash and because they didn’t go much faster than a brisk walk anyway—though the latter problem tended to mitigate the severity of the former. The omnibuses were part of Sir Bertram’s brave new vision for the future for London, though, and so the Queen insisted they keep running. Perhaps they’d vanish into the background of the city’s life in time, and cease to be a novelty. After all, even the railroads had seemed dangerous and shocking once upon a time.

  The city—the world—had changed immeasurably since Ellie’s girlhood. Just over a dozen years ago the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace had trumpeted the coming of a new world of scientific advancement and industry, and that conceptual world had come into being even more swiftly than she’d ever imagined. Parts of central London were electrified, with night never seeming to truly fall; swiftly whirring calculating engines made greater and greater feats of engineering possible, including the tunnel beneath the English Channel first proposed by George Ward Hunt, with excavations recently commenced; and medical advances like magnetic field manipulators and Pasteur’s controversial germ theory had improved life for everyone—why, without Pasteur’s innovations, the Prince Consort would surely have died of Typhoid fever. (Not that staying alive had done Prince Albert much good, ultimately—he probably wished he was dead, now.)

  There were more advances rumored every day, from flying machines that could go faster than the swiftest airships, to expeditions into the depths of the Earth, to high mount
ain telescopes so powerful they could reportedly glimpse the contours of vast alien cities on the moons of Jupiter. And now Bertram Oswald was preparing his own Great Exposition to be held in Hyde Park, a spectacle devoted to showcasing the newest technological wonders created in England—mostly, it was worth noting, developed by Oswald himself, the greatest mind of their age, as he never tired of reminding anyone who would listen. The worst part was, he was almost certainly right.

  Of course, there were darker sides to progress, too—the depraved uses of advanced automatons, the terrible new engines of war, the Constantine Affliction and its high-profile victims. (The objectively meaningless term “The Constantine Affliction” was itself a printer’s error from a rival newspaper—“The Constantinopolitan Affliction” had proven too difficult to for the typesetter to manage, and the simplified form had stuck in the public consciousness, to the dismay of grammarians and historians both.)

  For good and for ill it was a cracking good time to be a journalist—disasters made better stories than glorious successes, but even the brighter side of progress would fill column inches and draw the reader’s eye. If she could only get away from covering society galas and the weddings of the rich, delightful as the food usually was at both. Her editor Cooper had finally given in to her complaints and sent her to interview the river men and the tide-wives and mud-larks about the monsters seen in the Thames, thinking that such rough company would dissuade her from requesting more interesting assignments, but he’d been disappointed. He’d cut the portions of her article that featured more sensible and reasonable voices admitting to seeing strange things in the river, but she didn’t blame him—they’d run short of space, and the more buffoonish quotes made for better reading. Ellie had seen no monsters in the river herself... but she’d spoken to people who genuinely believed they had.

  The newsroom today was the usual buzz of activity, shouting voices, and the smell of ink, and she wove through the desks and knots of her colleagues with the grace of a dancer before ducking into the editor-in-chief’s office without bothering to knock.

  “Oh, good, you got my message.” Cooper looked up from the wreckage that was his desk. “You’ll take passage at week’s end, then?”

  “No, I will not.” There was no chair on this side of the desk—Cooper didn’t like to encourage his reporters to dawdle and chat—so she leaned over it, pressing her hands down on two unyielding piles of newsprint for balance. “I have no interest in reporting on the latest French fashions.”

  “Contrary woman.” Cooper puffed at his pipe, dispersing clouds of foul-smelling spiced tobacco. “You demanded I send you abroad, and now you refuse a trip to Paris—”

  “Send me to Mexico to cover the war. That’s the kind of travel I meant.”

  “Mexico? I hardly think so. Do you even speak Spanish?”

  She was prepared for objections based on her safety or the weakness of her sex—she had been arguing against both lines of argument for most of her twenty-five years of life, it sometimes seemed—but this tactic gave her pause. “Well, no, I don’t—”

  “But you do speak fluent French?”

  “Yes, of course, but—no! I have no interest in fashion, Cooper.”

  “That much has long been apparent,” Cooper said, still infuriatingly calm. She had a sudden urge to tell him his mustache and whiskers looked ridiculous, but refrained. Mustaches and elaborate Dundreary whiskers were the current craze among men—proof they hadn’t contracted the Constantine Affliction and tried to conceal it, she supposed, though fake mustaches were no doubt readily available to those who had transformed, and wished to put up a masculine pretense. Cooper’s nasal undergrowth was, she decided, no more foolish than most, for what little that was worth.

  “Please,” she said, trying for sweetness. “Perhaps I could do something closer to home and spare you the expense of a trans-Atlantic crossing. Send me to Paris when the tunnel is done, and I’ll report on both the novelty of the journey and the dresses I see on the other side. In the meantime, I have something else in mind, and I have already written the first lines.” She opened her journal, annoyed as usual at the graceful looping curves of her handwriting, which did not match the crispness and seriousness she attempted to convey—she much preferred to see her prose in neatly typeset lines. She put the journal on the desk before Cooper, and he sighed and began to read. The lines were fresh in her mind, and she could almost follow along as his eyes tracked the page:

  It is a great irony that no rich or influential man will ever admit to entering a clockwork pleasure house—when only rich and influential men are permitted through those elegant and well-guarded doors. We at the Argus are pleased to give you vicarious entree, and provide a rare opportunity to glimpse the velvet-lined rooms in these houses of—

  “Oh merciful heaven.” Cooper slammed the journal shut. “You can’t seriously propose an investigation like this! You know I believe you write as well as most men, but you are not a man, and no woman would ever be permitted inside one of those, those—”

  “Clockwork brothels? Temples of mechanical immorality? Gear-driven bordellos?”

  “Yes. Those. How do you expect to get inside?”

  “Deception, of course. I can pitch my voice low—” she demonstrated “—and disguise myself as a man. Such disguises aren’t hard to come by, and at the risk of sounding crude, I am well aware that my figure is better suited than some to such a ruse. It’s not as if I would need to consummate a liaison with a clockwork courtesan in order to write about them.”

  “Nor would we print such details—we aren’t the Lantern, after all, we have depths beyond which we will not descend.” He shook his head. “But, no. I cannot permit this.”

  “Ah, but if I go on my own, despite the lack of permission—would you be interested in the resulting story? Or should I sell it instead to the Lantern?”

  He sighed. “Ellie... if I were your father, or your brother...”

  “You are neither.” Nor was anyone else. She had no living near relations, which made living by her pen a necessity as well as a choice. Cooper had been a friend of her family—Ellie sometimes wondered if he’d wooed her mother, once upon a time—and had initially given her work out of pity, before coming to count on her for dependable prose delivered in a timely fashion. He sometimes still treated her like a sort of honorary younger sister, but not as often as he once had.

  “It would have to be published anonymously,” Cooper said after a long moment of contemplation.

  “‘E. Skye’ is already a pen name, and everyone assumes it’s a man’s name, besides. Yet you see the need for greater subterfuge?”

  “The men who run these establishments are unsavory characters, and it is better if they cannot easily identify the source of such an article. The truth behind a pen name can be uncovered. Better to have no name attached at all. If you write it—which I wish you would not—we will simply credit it to ‘A Gentleman.’ Let me reiterate, I strongly object to—”

  “So noted,” Ellie said.

  “But of course you won’t heed my advice. Why should today depart from the norm?” He sighed. “When do you propose to undertake this invasion?”

  “Oh, not until later tonight. I doubt such establishments are open before nightfall.”

  Cooper tapped the end of his pen against the desktop. “First you report on monsters in the river, and now you propose to expose the prurience of the city’s elite. You do go from poppycock to scandal, Ellie.”

  “If you don’t like it, send me to be a war correspondent.” She dropped an ironic curtsey and strolled out of the office, visions of mustaches and trousers dancing in her head.

  A Meeting with Value

  In the end, they decided to be more cautious, and hung a not-very-good Chinese tapestry over the two holes drilled for the pistol barrels, leaving only one hole unobstructed and unhidden, for Freddy to peer through. The rounds fired by the air-pistols would not be impeded by the tapestry’s cloth. Pimm sincerely ho
ped all these preparations would prove unnecessary—even paranoiac—but from what he knew of Abel Value, it was wise to take precautions. The man was in the sort of business where the occasional murder was necessary to keep things running smoothly, and while Pimm did not expect to be assassinated in his own home, it never hurt to be careful.

  When the knock came at the door, Pimm was largely over his headache and taking his ease in the chair under the window where Freddy had been lounging that morning. He waited a moment, then remembered their one servant had quit that morning, and frowned. Another knock, more peremptory, and he said, “Let yourself in!”

  The door swung open, though Value did not enter first. A man roughly the size of a river barge came in, ducking his head to avoid bumping it on the doorframe, and scanned the room. He then stood against the wall by the door, clasping gloved hands together, and looked at Pimm impassively.

  “Big Ben, isn’t it?” Pimm said.

  The man scowled. He clearly didn’t like the idea of someone like Pimm knowing his name. “Yes, sir.”

  Abel Value entered the room, but Pimm didn’t pay him any attention yet, still talking to the bodyguard. “Do they call you that after the prizefighter, Benjamin Caunt? You’re at least as big as he is. Or, ha, after the bell in the clock tower?”

  “They call me that, sir, because I am of large stature, sir, and because my given name is Benjamin.” His voice was calm, his diction clear, his tone dry as chalk, and Pimm mused that it was foolish to assume a man the size of a plow horse would be no smarter than one.

  “I find that eminently logical.”

  “They call you ‘Pimm,’ don’t they, sir?” Big Ben asked, his tone deferential, his expression anything but.

  “Some do,” he acknowledged.