Fiendish Schemes Page 17

  “You said there were others? Of a nature that I would somehow find even more impressive?” I attempted to steer her attention back to the matters from which she had digressed. “I find that difficult to believe.”

  “Oh, you have no idea, Mr. Dower. But you will! Given the elite circles into which you have just begun to set your feet. The wealthy are different from you and me—and the fabulously wealthy are fabulously so. The whole world, or at least the British species, adores Steam. They would eat and drink it if they could—and why not?— and sleep upon billowing clouds of its vapours, if they could but knot their bedsheets around them. Would that not be Heaven?”

  “A charming notion, indeed.” The woman’s enthusiasms continued to frighten me. “You must think about it a great deal.”

  “Not so much. If there were a way to generate a profit thereby, I might—but otherwise my interest is markedly less than that expressed by other people. They are the real enthusiasts! But, alas, for so many the world is not constructed as kindly as it is for the rich and powerful. The abilities of most people to indulge their fancies is confined by the meagerness of their pocketbooks. A few ill-manufactured contraptions, boilers and compressors and copper tubes, clanking pistons, snag-toothed gears grinding against one another—” She shook her head in dismay. “Scarcely a day goes by here in London, in which some tenement or other shabby hovel is not exploded to flinders by a malfunctioning steam-powered device, the mere possession of which had served as some scribbling lawclerk’s or seamstress’s testament and shrine to this, their new faith, supplanting the puny prayer-books and flickering votary candles of former beliefs. Indeed, these incendiary events happen so frequently that they go virtually uncommented upon by either the mundane press or the city’s appointed keepers of public order. But if you take the time to listen carefully—” She cupped a hand to one ear and inclined herself toward the nearest of the shrouded windows. “You can hear them, off in the distance or as close as the neighbouring building, one after another . . . all through the day and the night. . . .”

  So evocative was her description of this auditory phenomenon, I imagined that I heard—or did in fact—a muffled, repeated boom traveling through the unseen streets, as though from the cannons of a besieging army that had managed to set itself up in Londoners’ drawing-rooms, or what was left of them after Miss Stromneth’s adored Steam had finished its destructive work.

  “Poor sods,” observed Stonebrake. “Rather gone off the deep end, one might say. Victims of their own enthusiasms.”

  “Well, I’m hardly one to be censorious in that regard.” Miss Stromneth took her teacup from the table and daintily sipped from it. “If people weren’t so ridden by their fancies, I and the rest of the staff here at Fex would be out on the streets instead. We pay our rent from others’ follies.”

  “I would think you have more at stake than mere finances.” Her comment had evoked another raised eyebrow from me. “Your mode of dress—or undress, as the case might be—indicates some degree of enthusiasm on your own part.”

  “Oh, Mr. Dower, there is—as I said before—so much of which you are unaware. This—” She laid both hands upon her corseted midriff. “This is but mere surface phenomena, as your scientific friends in the Royal Society might describe it. Something which can be discarded at a moment’s whim—”

  “Please; don’t—”

  “Have no fear. I perceive your discomfiture. That, too, is something which can be addressed when your own finances are at that higher tide you anticipate. All good things come in time. At this moment, however, all I wished to impart to your understanding was that my participation in this, as you have termed it, ‘enthusiasm’ is very minor indeed, compared to those who have both greater passion for it—and the monetary resources to indulge what can be a rather expensive taste.”

  “Which is, I presume, the custom you serve here. At Fex.”

  “Exactly so! To everyone’s satisfaction, I have been assured.”

  “I rather hope,” spoke Stonebrake, “to ascertain such facts for myself.”

  “Rest assured, you would be most welcome.” Miss Stromneth tilted her head to direct her roguish smile at him. “Along with your ample bank account.”

  “Please . . .” I attempted by main force to drag the conversation back to a more productive channel. “You indicated but a moment ago that there was some hidden—or at least hidden to me—significance to the monosyllabic name of this enterprise. At this point, I would be satisfied myself, to know that much.”

  “That? Simple enough, Mr. Dower—though I estimate that it would require a deal more to satisfy a manly specimen such as yourself.”

  I held my silence. The woman seemed fixated on unseemly things.

  “Consider the surgeon, if you will.”

  “Pardon?” That comment’s approach had not been foreseen by me. “I’m not quite sure what is meant . . .”

  “A surgeon,” Miss Stromneth. “A man of medicine, who employs a scalpel in the performance of his craft. You are aware, I’m sure, that are some such, who cut and trim not because their patients’ lives might be endangered by some awkward growth lodged in their tissues, but rather on behalf of some vanity conceived in their thoughts?”

  “Certainly—though why scars and stitches, however minor or well-concealed, would be considered attractive is a matter beyond my comprehension.”

  “De gustibus non est disputandem, Mr. Dower—an observation from the ancients, the truth of which I know better than most.”

  “It seems,” I observed, “to have been adopted as the exculpatory motto of this new, ever-accommodating society.”

  “Regardless,” she continued, “there is no disputing that if a person desired such services, and had the means to pay for them, it would have been to just such a skilled doctor the person would have turned. Now consider a pipe-fitter.”

  “Why?” The discourse had again veered onto an unexpected tangent. “What does that—”

  “Just do,” chided Miss Stromneth. “Indulge me for a moment. Surely it would seem equally obvious to you that individuals skilled in the juncturing of pipes, the securing of one to another so that their contents, however forceful, are channeled to the desired point—such individuals would be uniquely prized and rewarded in this, our world transformed by Steam?”

  “Now that you mention it . . .” The possibility seemed logical enough. “I am sure they are.”

  “Thus we progress. Now imagine, as I expect you are capable, that certain wealthy individuals, who in previous duller times might have indulged their vanity by employing a scalpel-wielding surgeon, now wish to incorporate their enthusiasm for all things Steamy into their very bodies, their flesh and blood.”

  “What a ghastly notion.”

  “Please refrain from judgement, Mr. Dower. Money buys one a great deal of indulgence in this world; that is why people, including yourself, seek its possession. That which is considered rashly mad, even criminal, when practiced by the impecunious—acquires an ample if perhaps somewhat eccentric nobility when indulged in by the rich. Continue with your imagining, based on that principle. Which would such a wealthy, impassioned individual require for the fulfillment of his desires—a surgeon skilled in slicing through the soft and spongy tissues of the human body, or a fitter with the knowledge sufficient for coupling pipes and junction boxes so that the desired Steam would be steered to its appropriate destination?”

  “I suppose such desires would call upon the services of both specialists.”

  “Yes! Exactly so.” Miss Stromneth clasped her hands before the swell of her partially revealed bosom. “And thus our enterprise here at Fex has thrived. As in earlier days, when the proprietors of certain discreet establishments—such as my dear, now departed mentor, Mollie Maud—brought a grateful clientele into contact with those who could provide satisfaction to their desire, so do I and my staff, at the direction of our senior management, achieve the same result for a new but just as fortunate set of custom
ers. In rather an augmented fashion, of course; such are the blessings of these new forces and contrivances that men as clever as your father have unleashed upon a submissive world. As in this case, with the establishment of the entire concept and dependent institution of ferric sex.”

  Of all the things of which the woman had spoken, this sounded the worst.

  “It only seems distasteful,” continued Miss Stromneth, “upon first encounter.” She had perceived my poorly disguised revulsion. “But as I am sure your own experience has been with fleshly pleasures, further acquaintance leads to not just acceptance, but even enthusiasm, of exactly those things from which one had first shrunk in horror.”

  “That might be the course of events,” I allowed, “with those activities that are necessary for the continuation of the species. But such is Nature’s cruel wisdom; our kind would have died out long ago if we had no innate, brutish capacity for those private activities which our higher selves regard as indecorous.”

  “Thanks be to a merciful Providence for that.” She spoke with renewed cheer. “Otherwise I would be out of business, and Fex’s senior management would be hard-pressed to eke out a living from an ironmonger’s shop.”

  “Which would have seemed to be their appropriate calling in this world, or at least in what it used to be.” Belatedly, I had managed to form a strategy for remaining abreast of her continuous string of revelations: I merely had to envision the least likely and most repellent possibility, and it would very likely be the next thing imparted to me. “Propagating the species is one matter, and if the means of doing so are on the unseemly side, it becomes more duty than pleasure. So be it—but I rather doubt that this notion of ferric sex qualifies in that regard. No doubt you and your customers have found some way of indulging your mania for Steam”—her odd manner of emphasizing the word had crept into my own speech—“with those biological proclivities with which they were born. ‘Ferric’ being the descriptor for metals such as iron, I can only assume that this is the well- spring of all your talk of surgeons and pipe-fitters enabling the wishes of your esteemed clientele.”

  “Clever lad,” muttered Stonebrake from behind me. “How can we fail, with one such as you on our side?”

  “You have seized upon it in a trice, Mr. Dower!” Upon setting her cup down, Miss Stromneth clapped her hands together in delight. “Exactly so! Thank God for rich people, who have already jaded themselves through the satiation of those tastes they share with the less enabled rabble, so that it requires virtually no inducements at all to convince them to fling off the restraints of Nature, and not just embrace Science, but incorporate its seductions into their very being!”

  “These are people with more money than brains, of which you speak.”

  “Thus we progress,” she answered primly. “Common sense is but an anchor which keeps us mired in the shoals of existence. Our clientele has hoisted sail for those shores of experience which lie beyond the farthest horizons of possibility.”

  To myself, I thought it rather likely that the woman’s clients would dash themselves to pieces upon those shores, as misguided ships did upon the rocks of that Cornish coast from which I had recently fled. But I kept silent upon that point.

  “And thus this . . . whatever it is . . .” I gestured about the room and its opulent fixtures, as though they somehow signified all upon which we had discoursed. “This thing called Fex— both concept and commercial establishment.”

  “Well, yes—though it’s rather difficult to say which came first.” Miss Stromneth waxed philosophical, as was her occasional wont. “It’s my recollection, however, that our senior management—bless their hearts! and their business acumen—desired a name for the enterprise, the alluring brevity of which would encompass all the power of that to which it pointed. In retrospect, it seems rather an obvious coinage, from ‘ferric sex’ to ‘fex’—but are not all such strokes of genius marked by a seemingly inevitable simplicity?”

  “Very clever, I am sure. Little wonder that you’ve done so well.”

  “As I indicated before, Mr. Dower—you have no idea. Those wealthy personages with whom you’ve recently consorted—the Fusibles and their lot, and no doubt others—they are but negligible in this grand transformative scheme. Oh, they know what they’re about, all right—but their plots and maneuvers are on a smaller scale. Not that I’m belittling your own involvement with them, of course.”

  “Of course,” I politely echoed.

  “But there are others, of greater wealth, greater power, whose headlong leap into the fexual world has wrought such changes upon them, that one might scarcely regard them as human now.”

  “Hm.” I shifted uncomfortably upon the settee. “Is being less than human actually a desirable state?”

  “I did not say less, Mr. Dower. This is perhaps why the great spiritual leaders have commanded us to Judge not—so that we might see things as they are, and have become, rather than with our otherwise clouded perceptions.”

  “Perhaps.” Another point over which I felt it was not worth arguing. Such was my general tendency toward matters religious. “If you say it is so, I am perfectly willing to take it on faith.”

  “You needn’t.” The woman stepped closer to me, so that I needed to tilt back my head to its farthest extreme in order to view her face. “There is nothing of which I speak, that I cannot prove to you.”

  This near to her, the heat radiated from the steam-powered corset commanded my senses, the hissing vapours seeming as portentous as storm clouds massing in the distance, lit sharply by flickering lightning. My own breath laboured in my throat, just above my accelerating heart.

  “Would you like me to do that, Mr. Dower?” She reached down and stroked my hair. “Do you desire proof? Or more?”

  I could not answer her. Suddenly, the room seemed vastly larger, and I lost within it.

  My empty teacup shattered on the low table as though it were an egg-shell, as she brushed it from my compliant hand—the better to seize that hand in her own soft one and pull me will-less to my feet.

  “We shall return,” she assured Stonebrake, “in but a moment. This won’t take long.”

  As a captive linnet tethered to a street vendor’s thread, I allowed her to lead me to the chambers that lay deeper in the house of Fex.

  CHAPTER

  12

  A Dreadful Consummation

  Is Achieved

  I THOUGHT it remarkable that someone would have a train station in their house.

  “It’s only a small one,” Miss Stromneth replied to my observation. Anticipating the cooler temperature of the high-ceilinged space to which I had been escorted, she had acquired a Japanese kimono along the way, to serve as an exotic dressing gown. Beneath its sash and silken cherry-blossom pattern, the steam-powered corset continued to hiss. “And actually, for us here at Fex, it is more of a business expense than an amenity.”

  “Nevertheless—” Standing at the entrance to the platform, I gazed up at the spanning ironwork, oddly reminiscent of Victoria Station’s dark, cathedral-like spaces. “I would not have anticipated that you have such a volume of clientele, that a dedicated rail spur was necessary to receive them all.”

  “Scarcely the reason, Dower.” From the parlour, Stonebrake had sauntered along behind us, stepping over the pliant steam-hose trailing from beneath the hem of Miss Stromneth’s Oriental gown. “The customers arrive here however they wish; their wealth affords transportation we can scarcely imagine. And for some of them, their requirements are . . . unusual.” With a gesture of his hand, he directed my attention to the iron tracks and other industrial details. “But this has all been installed here for their enjoyment, as it were, while partaking of those specific services provided by the establishment.”

  “Once more,” I spoke, “you have exceeded my imagination. I have no idea of what is meant by that.”

  “Oh, but you shall.” Miss Stromneth took my arm. “Let us retire to a more . . . shall we say, discreet location, from wh
ich our regard will discomfit no-one.”

  A rackety spiral staircase, its iron treads clanking beneath our feet, brought us to an elevated chamber, scarcely large enough to accommodate the three of us. From its unlit windows, concealed behind a bolted lattice, we could vertiginously look down upon the platform we had left below and the tracks paralleling it. A few disoriented pigeons flapped about, marking the girders laced beneath the ceiling. The rain that the morning threatened had at last commenced, drizzling its soft percussion above our heads and adding to the general melancholia of the otherwise empty scene. The effect upon my spirits was similar to that experienced by a solitary traveler, who, having disembarked from a train shared by no other passengers, finds himself equally alone at a destination abandoned due to the lateness of the hour.

  “What are we expecting to see?” I wrapped my arms across my chest in a vain attempt to fend off the surrounding chill. “Or is this the entirety of your exposition?”

  “Patience, my dear Mr. Dower.” It was rather more easily accomplished for Miss Stromneth to retain her smiling equanimity, given the comforting warmth of the undergarment now concealed. “All shall be revealed—perhaps more than you, in your impatience, wish to have.”

  “I fully expect as much.”

  “Ah!” She perceived the sour apprehension in my voice. “Let me attempt to soothe your mind in this regard—forewarned is forearmed, as the customary wisdom maintains. What you must realize is the essentially erotic nature of the technology of Steam.”

  “Surely you jest.” I spoke my objection as forcefully as possible. “These are machines, not flesh and blood.”

  “Ah, yes—but consider the elements, both of construction and motion. All those furious pistons, pumping within cylinders so tight as to require constant lubrication; the mounting boil of the fiery chambers; the explosive release of the summoned energies—surely all these remind you somewhat of the more primitive animal passions?”