The Difference Engine

"Try it," Mallory suggested, shaking his fist.

The tout's eyes met his in reptilian fury, as the man leaned heavily on his woman; then the two of them were gone, stumbling into the throng. Mallory snatched up the box triumphantly, turned and shoved his way through the laughing ring of men. One of them clapped him heartily on the back. He made for the abandoned brougham.

He pulled himself up and inside, into worn velvet and leather. The noise of the crowd was dying down; the race was over; someone had won.

The gentlewoman sat slumped in the shabby seat, her breath stirring the veil. Mallory looked quickly about for possible attackers, but saw only the crowd; saw it all in a most curious way, as if the instant were frozen, daguerreotyped by some fabulous process that captured every least shade of the spectrum.

"Where is my chaperone?" the woman asked, in a quiet, distracted voice.

"And who might your chaperone be, madame?" Mallory said, a bit dizzily. "I don't think your friends were any proper sort of escort for a lady… "

Mallory was bleeding from the wound in his left thigh; it was seeping through his trouser-leg. He sat heavily in the worn plush of the seat, pressed his palm against his wounded leg, and peered into the woman's veil. Elaborate ringlets, pale and seeming shot with grey, showed the sustained attentions of a gifted lady's-maid. But the face seemed to possess a strange familiarity.

"Do I know you, madame?" Mallory asked.

There was no answer.

"May I escort you?" he suggested. "Do you have any proper friends at the Derby, madame? Someone to look after you?"

"The Royal Enclosure," she murmured.

"You desire to go to the Royal Enclosure?" The idea of troubling the Royal Family with this dazed mad-woman was rather more than Mallory was willing to countenance. Then it struck him that it would be a very simple matter to find police there; and this was a police business of some kind, without a doubt.

Humoring the unhappy woman would be his simplest course of action. "Very well, ma'am," he said. He tucked the wooden box under one arm and offered her his other elbow. "We shall proceed at once to the Royal Enclosure. If you would come with me, please."

Mallory led her toward the stands, through a torrent of people, limping a bit. As they walked, she seemed to recover herself somewhat. Her gloved hand rested on his forearm as lightly as a cobweb.

Mallory waited for a break in the hubbub. He found one at last beneath the whiled pillars of the stands. "May I introduce myself, ma'am? My name is Edward Mallory. I am a Fellow of the Royal Society; a paleontologist."

"The Royal Society," the woman muttered absently, her veiled head nodding like a flower on a stalk. She seemed to murmur something further.

"I beg your pardon?"

"The Royal Society! We have sucked the life-blood from the mysteries of the universe… "

Mallory stared.

"The fundamental relations in the science of harmony," the woman continued, in a voice of deep gentility, great weariness, and profound calm, "are susceptible to mechanical expression, allowing the composition of elaborate and scientific pieces of music, of any degree of complexity or extent."

"To be sure," Mallory soothed.

"I think, gentlemen," the woman whispered, "that when you see certain productions of mine, you will not despair of me! In their own way, my marshaled regiments shall ably serve the rulers of the earth. And of what materials shall my regiments consist?… Vast numbers."

She had seized Mallory's arm with feverish intensity.

"We shall march in irresistible power to the sound of music." She turned her veiled face to him, with a queer sprightly earnestness. "Is not this very mysterious? Certainly my troops must consist of numbers or they can have no existence at all. But then, what are these numbers? There is a riddle… "

"Is this your box, ma'am?" Mallory said, offering it to her, hoping to spark some return to sense.

She looked at the box, without apparent recognition. It was a handsome thing of polished rosewood, its corners bound in brass; it might have been a lady's glove-box, but it was too stark, and lacked elegance. The long lid was latched shut by a pair of tiny brass hooks. She reached out to stroke it with a gloved forefinger, as if assuring herself of its physical existence. Something about it seemed to sting her into a dawning recognition of her own distress. "Will you hold it for me, sir?" she asked Mallory at last, her quiet voice trembling with a strange, piteous appeal. "Will you hold it for me in safe-keeping?"

"Of course!" Mallory said, touched despite himself. "Of course I will hold it for you; as long as you like, madame."

They worked their way slowly up the stands to the carpeted stairs that led to the Royal Enclosure. Mallory's leg smarted sharply, and his trouser was sticky with blood. He was dizzier than he felt he should have been from such a minor wound; something about the woman's queer speech and odder demeanor had turned his head. Or perhaps—the dark thought occurred to him—there had been some sort of venom coating the tout's stiletto. He was sorry now that he had not snatched up the stiletto for a later analysis. Perhaps the mad-woman too had been somehow narcotized; likely he had foiled some dark plot of abduction…

Below them, the track had been cleared for the coming gurney-race. Five massive gurneys—and the tiny, bauble-like Zephyr—were taking their places. Mallory paused a moment, torn, contemplating the frail craft upon which his fortunes now so absurdly hinged. The woman took that moment to release his arm and hasten toward the white-washed walls of the Royal Box.

Mallory, surprised, hurried after her, limping. She paused for a moment beside a pair of guards at the door—plain-clothes policemen, it seemed, very tall and fit. The woman brushed aside her veil, with a swift gesture of habit, and Mallory caught his first proper glimpse of her face.

She was Ada Byron, the daughter of the Prime Minister. Lady Ada Byron, the Queen of Engines.

She slipped through the door, beyond the guards, without so much as a glance behind her, or a single word of thanks. Mallory, lugging the rosewood box, hurried after her at once. "Wait!" he cried. "Your Ladyship!"

"Just a moment, sir!" the larger policeman said, quite politely. He held up a beefy hand, looked Mallory up and down, noting the wooden case, the dampened trouser-leg. His mustached mouth quirked. "Are you a guest in the Royal Enclosure, sir?"

"No," Mallory said. "But you must have seen Lady Ada step through here a moment ago. Something quite dreadful has happened to her; I'm afraid she's in some distress. I was able to be of some assistance—"

"Your name, sir?" barked the second policeman.

"Edward… Miller," Mallory blurted, a sudden chill of protective suspicion striking him at the last instant.

"May I see your citizen-card, Mr. Miller?" said the first policeman. "What's in that box you carry? May I look inside it, please?"

Mallory swung the box away, took a step back. The policeman stared at him with a volatile mix of disdain and suspicion.

There was a loud report from the track below. Steam whistled from a ruptured seam in the Italian gurney, fogging out across the stands like a geyser. There was some small panic in the stands. Mallory seized this opportunity to hobble off; the policemen, worried perhaps about the safety of their post, did not choose to pursue him.

He hurried, limping, down the stands, losing himself as soon as possible amid the crowd. Some notion of self-preservation caused him to snatch his striped engineer's cap from his head and shove it in the pocket of his coat.

He found a place in the stands, many yards from the Royal Enclosure. He balanced the brass-bound box across his knees. There was a trifling rip in his trouser-leg, but the wound beneath it was still oozing. Mallory grimaced in confusion as he sat, and pressed the palm of his hand against the aching wound.