The Difference Engine

But now she'd let Mick Radley set her to thieving. If she were clever, she should walk out of the Grand Hotel, vanish into the depths of London, and never see Radley again. She should not let the 'prentice oath hold her. To break an oath was frightening, but no more vile than her other sins. Yet somehow here she was; she had let him do with her as he would.

She stopped before the door, looked up and down the deserted corridor, fingered the stolen key. Why was she doing this? Because Mick was strong, and she was weak? Because he knew secrets that she didn't? For the first time, it occurred to her that she might be in love with him. Perhaps she did love him, in some strange way, and if that were true, it might explain matters to her, in a way which was almost soothing. If she were in love, she had a right to burn her bridges, to walk on air, to live by impulse. And if she loved Radley, it was finally something she knew, which he didn't. Her secret alone.

Sybil unlocked the door nervously, rapidly. She slipped through, shut it behind her, set her back against it. She stood in darkness.

There was a lamp in the room somewhere. She could smell its burnt wick. In the wall opposite, the outline emerged of a square curtained window to the street, between the curtains a faint knife-slice of upwashed gas-light. She faltered her way into the room, hands outstretched, until she felt the solid polished bulk of a bureau, and made out the dim sheen of a lamp-chimney there. She lifted the lamp, shook it. It had oil. Now she needed a lucifer.

She felt for drawers in the bureau. For some reason they were already open. She rustled through them. Stationery. Useless, and someone had spilled ink in one of the drawers; she could smell it.

Her fingers brushed a box of lucifers, which she recognized less by touch than by the dry familiar rattle. Her fingers, really, didn't seem to be working properly. The first lucifer popped and fizzled out, refusing to light, filling the room with a vile smell of sulphur. The second showed her the lamp. Her hands were trembling badly as she raised the chimney and applied flame to the wick.

She saw her own lamp-lit reflection staring wild-eyed from tilted cheval-glass, then doubled in beveled mirrors set into the twin doors of a wardrobe. She noticed clothing scattered on the bed, on the floor…

A man was sitting on the arm of a chair, crouched there like a great shadowed crow, an enormous knife in his hand.

He stood then, but slowly, with a creak of leather, like some huge wooden puppet that had lain years in the dust. He was wrapped in a long and shapeless grey coat. His nose and jaw were draped with a dark kerchief.

"Best be quiet now, missy," he said, holding up the massive blade—dark, cleaver-like steel. "Sam comin'?"

Sybil found her voice. "Please don't kill me!"

"Old goat still whorin', is he?" The slow Texian voice slid forth like treacle; Sybil could barely make out his words. "You his fancy-gal?"

"No!" Sybil said, her voice strangled. "No, I'm not, I swear it! I… I came here to steal from him, and that's the truth!"

There was a ghastly silence.

"Take a look 'round you."

Sybil did so, trembling. The room had been ransacked.

"Nothin' here to steal," the man said. "Where is he, gal?"

"He's downstairs," Sybil said. "He's drunk! But I don't know him, I swear! My man sent me here, that's all! I didn't want to do this! He made me do it!"

"Quiet, now," he said. "I wouldn't hurt a white woman, less I had to. Put out that lamp."

"Let me go," she pleaded. "I'll go straight away! I meant no harm!"

"Harm?" The slow voice was heavy with gallows certainty. "What harm there is, it's for Houston, and that's justice."

"I didn't steal the cards! I didn't touch them!"

" 'Cards'?" He laughed, a dry sound at the back of his throat.

"The cards don't belong to Houston. He stole them!"

"Houston stole plenty," the man said, but clearly he was puzzled. He was thinking about her, and was not happy about it. "What they call you?"

"Sybil Jones." She took a breath. "I'm a British subject!"

"My," the man said. He clicked his tongue.

His masked face was unreadable. Sweat shone on a strip of pale smooth skin across the top of his forehead. A hat-brim had rested there, Sybil realized, to shield him from the Texian sun. He came forward now and took the lamp from her, turning down the wick. His fingers, when they brushed her hand, were dry and hard as wood.

In the darkness, there was only the pounding of her heart and the Texian's terrible presence.

"You must be lonely here in London," Sybil blurted, desperate to avoid another silence.

"Maybe Houston's lonesome. I got a better conscience." The Texian's voice was sharp. "You ever ask if he's lonesome?"

"I don't know him," she insisted.

"You're here. A woman come alone to his rooms."

"I came for the kino-cards. Paper cards, with holes in them. That's all, I swear!" No answer. "Do you know what a kinotrope is?"

" 'Nother damn machine," the Texian said wearily.

Another silence.

"Don't lie to me," he said at last. "You're a whore, that's all. You ain't the first whore I ever seen."

She heard him cough behind his kerchief, and snort wetly. "You ain't bad-lookin', though," he said. "In Texas, you could many. Start all over."

"I'm sure that would be wonderful," Sybil said.

"Never enough white women in the country. Get you a decent man, 'stead o' some pimp." He lifted his kerchief, and spat on the floor.

"Hate pimps," he a

"But the Texians are heroes," Sybil said, desperately trying to remember a name from Houston's speech. "I heard about… about Alamo."

"Goliad," the voice gone to a dry whisper, "I was at Goliad."

"I heard about that, too," Sybil said quickly. "That must have been glorious."

The Texian hawked, spat again. "Fought 'em two days. No water. Colonel Fa

Sybil said nothing.

"Massacred the Alamo. Burned all the bodies… Massacred the Meir Expedition. Made 'em pick beans. Little clay lottery pot, pull out a black bean and they kill you. That's Mexicans for you."

"Mexicans," she repeated.

"Comanches are worse."

From somewhere off in the night came the scream of a great friction-brake, and then a dull distant pounding.

Black beans. Goliad. Her head was a Babel. Beans and massacre and this man whose skin was like leather. He stank like a navvy, of horses and sweat. Down Neal Street she'd once paid tuppence to view a diorama of some vast waste in America, a nightmare of twisted stone. The Texian looked born from such a place, and it came to her then that all the wildernesses of Houston's speech, all the places with such queer improbable names, were truly real, inhabited by creatures such as this. And Mick had said that Houston had stolen a country once, and now this one had followed, avenging angel. She fought down an insane desire to laugh.

She remembered the old woman then, the vendor of rock-oil in Whitechapel, and the queer look she'd given Mick when he'd questioned her. Did others work in concert with the angel of Goliad? How had so strange a figure managed to enter Grand's tonight, to enter a locked room? Where could such a man hide, even in London, even amid the tattered hordes of American refugees?

"Say he's drunk?" the Texian said.

Sybil started horribly. "What?"

"Houston."

"Oh. Yes. In the smoking-room. Very drunk."