London, 1862
Sluicing past Fogg's hired carriage as it progressed up Regent Street, a stream of Londoners hurried to end the chill, cheerless day in the comfort of their homes. The morning's rain had early washed the life from the day and the long, sunless afternoon had doused whatever joy remained. Fogg had yet to see a smiling pedestrian. A woman pulled a small boy down the footway, ignoring his screams. A little further on a pudgy man elbowed past two others in his haste to make some few seconds speedier progress home.
A dark and heartless evening, impatient to be about, had already sent out heralds with ladders and punks in hand. The carriage had passed one lamplighter shortly before crossing Berwick, and another had just set flame to gas jet as the carriage turned off Regent onto Vigo. Fogg would be at Savile Row in under two minutes.
Fogg's fingers twitched where they rested on the carriage's frame. He'd nearly forgotten this – the keenness racing through him scalp to toes. It had plagued him almost since he'd left Chatsworth's office, tying his stomach in knots and occasionally vibrating his hands when he least expected it. It had made it devilish hard to play cards. Much to his partner's disgust, they'd lost every game, and it tasked him to sit still now. He felt like jumping out of the carriage and jogging alongside.
Absently his hands explored the hard metal shape under his coat. He'd worn the pistol all day to familiarize himself with the weight, but upon his arrival at Baumer's to pick up his bullets, Baumer the younger, a thickset man whose short fingers were permanently engrained with black powder, had insisted that Fogg try an invention he called a "cartridge harness" -- a strap supporting loops for carrying extra bullets. A clever conceit. Filled with thirty or so bullets it hung off his right shoulder and counterweighted the new pistol.
Rebecca would be green with envy. But not for long. He'd already ordered one for her, appropriately stained and tooled to match her leather cuirass. Although it would arrive after he'd left for Berlin, Baumer's made all of Rebecca's body armour and could be trusted to get it right.
The carriage stopped. He was home.
"Do you have something to keep you warm, Leo?" Fogg asked as his cabman pulled open the hansom's half door. Fogg stepped down to the kerb then reached back for his hat. A disadvantage of above average height – Fogg had to remove his hat to fit in almost any carriage. And often as not, he forgot to retrieve it again. He'd lost many a fine hat that way. If Passepartout noticed him hatless, he'd uncover to match his master and Verne, if he was about, would discreetly shed his as well. Raz would've rolled his eyes at their cavalcade of unfashionably bare heads. They often reduced Rebecca to giggles.
Leo answered Fogg with a grin full of five yellow teeth and a great deal of pink gum. "Yessir, Mr. Fogg." Picking up the other item from the carriage seat, a long package wrapped in newspaper that smelled sweetly of roses, he handed it to Fogg then lifted the bench to pull out two blankets. "We're finely set up, sir. Me'n Matilda have 'ur blankets and summat to eat. We may go down to the water trough to get drinkies for me gurl." He stopped and regarded the sky. "But any road up, there be no rain near, though 'spect there be fog later. You and Miss Fogg best dress warm." Pulling one blanket over his shoulders, he inspected Matilda's harness then released her check reins so she could drop her head. Horse and man communed quietly about business matters while Leo spread the second blanket over Matilda.
Fogg smiled at Leo's back. Leo's rig had carried Fogg around London for the last two hours -- since he'd left the Reform Club, in fact. Fogg had counted himself lucky to snag a cabbie he knew and had hired Leo for the rest of the day as well as Rebecca's foray this evening.
"If my cousin isn't ready, it's quite possible we shall. But if you walk Matilda about, stay near."
Fogg turned to regard his home. Most of No. 7's windows glowed. Rebecca must have been up and about for a while. When at home she turned on gaslights upon entering a room then left them burning behind her. As she never saw the gas bill, he seldom faulted her the extravagance. And tonight it would take more than a few pence of wasted gas to irritate Fogg. On her birthday tomorrow he'd leave her without a proper farewell or explanation. He'd much to repent and very little time for it.
Rebecca may have turned every gas key in the house, but she had, somehow, overlooked the stoop. Darkness still pooled the front of No. 7 and Fogg couldn't see the lock, but he'd be damned if he'd knock on his own door. Shifting the roses and his stick to his left hand, Fogg pulled off the glove with his teeth and took the key out of his pocket. He brushed a fingertip near the jointure of the polished oak double doors, searching for the keyhole.
With both hands thus occupied, he would have made an easy target. Even an amateur executioner could end it for him here on his own stoop. What a happy thought. He'd have no burden of farewell lies to tell Rebecca in the morning, no miserable sleepless train journey across the Continent, and no body bleeding out at his feet in Berlin at the end of the week. Very happy thought, indeed.
He paused to look over his shoulder, but although the dark around him felt thick as death and bristling with eyes, all he saw were Leo's carriage, a covered coach standing idle before No. 15 down the street and a woman entering No. 10. Thrusting aside fancy, Fogg turned back to the door. In another second his finger found the round dimple and slot of the keyhole, and with a tinging of brass to brass, he opened the door into a brightly lit entry. Shutting it behind him, he paused to turn the ignition for both of the stoop lights.
"Rebecca?" he called as he shut the door. Silence. "Rebecca?" Placing the roses on the lowest stair, he doffed his coat and hat and hung them on the hall tree.
There had been no Passepartout to feed the fires today. The front hall was as chill as the street, and instead of the comforting rattle of kitchen noises, the townhouse lay still. Only the hissing gaslights broke the hush. Where the Devil was Rebecca? She had to be here somewhere.
Fogg paused at the foot of the staircase, torn between yelling again and a more dignified ascension to the bedrooms; but to his surprise, Rebecca's voice did not float down from above.
"I'm in the kitchen, Phil!"
A smile briefly flitted across Fogg's face. He shouted back. "I'll join you in a minute, Cousin. I have something to take upstairs." Retrieving the roses, Fogg ran up the staircase.
It seemed likely Buckingham Palace's huge ice cellar -- reputedly stacked with a veritable alp of ice blocks and cold enough to freeze whole beeves rock hard -- was a warmer clime than the interior of Leo's cab.
Just as Leo had predicted, a November fog skulked along Savile Row looking for travelers to confound. When Fogg and Rebecca climbed into the carriage, the fog had already be-dewed Matilda a glistening gray. Up on his perch behind them, Leo would be fair chilled even under the protection of his blanket. Fogg made a mental note to double whatever fare Leo asked.
But the cold in the carriage had less to do with the weather than with Rebecca. It emanated from the corner where she'd retreated. Not a far corner. She sat less than an arm's reach from Fogg, nearer a hand's breadth, so close he feared chilblains.
He tugged the lap blanket a bit higher over them both, Rebecca glaring as he reached across. She broke the frigid quiet, her voice still shaking but once again under control. "I can't believe you'd cancel Passepartout's contract, Phileas. Tell me you didn't. Please."
Fogg looked out the cab's window, trying to think of something new to say, his fingers playing with the brim of the hat in hands. He hadn't intended to tell her until tomorrow. She'd forced it out of him, with her chatter about the chill house and the tribulations of assembling a meal from food canisters labeled in fifteen languages, not to mention the monstrous pile of laundry in her bedroom, so coated with Scottish mud that only an expert's touch would do, and she didn't even remember the #name# of her laundress, much less the address. And how it would be all set aright when Passepartout returned.
Laughing at her own domestic imbecility, Rebecca had asked if Passepartout would be back soon and let an easy smile bend her mouth – the same effortless smile Fogg had known for the past thirty years or more.
He'd stood admiring the twinkling eyes and red lips, wondering where he'd find the strength to leave her tomorrow, and she'd asked again, "Phil, when is Passepartout coming back?"
Then he'd told her and the smile had disappeared.
Mist obscured the few remaining pedestrians out and about, creating a parade of spirits that seemed to drift rather than walk through the night. Within the carriage the thick air dimmed the light of the side lamp and turned Rebecca's uncovered head, like Matilda, faux gray. Fogg sighed. Rebecca with gray hair -- what a horrid thought. If Rebecca had gray hair, then he would be … old.
Old and lonely with the horror of what he would do in Berlin. Every one of his gray hairs had been purchased with blood. Surely he would be white-haired when he returned to England. If he returned -- he'd yet to decide.
He might be leaving Rebecca tomorrow; but if he didn't reply soon, she'd leave him tonight, this moment, now. The tense lines of her body made that clear. Her hand was at the ready on the carriage frame, as though she intended to vault the low half-door and dash away into the depths of the fog. #Not tonight, Rebecca. Please, not tonight.# "It's a business matter, Rebecca. Please, let's not argue anymore."
Rebecca didn't answer. She'd pushed off the lap blanket to the cab's floor and crossed her legs. With a booted foot she tapped out a beat on the dashboard. He could see her fair, heart-shaped face clearly through the mist, but her dark wool jacket and trousers blended into the upholstery. She'd left her leather and whalebone cuirass at home in favor of warmer wool attire. Even Rebecca knew better than to defy a London fog. "You're being a dunce, Phileas. You'll lose Passepartout to von Bresslau."
Of course he would. Tomorrow he'd lose Passepartout like he'd lose everything else -- his peace of mind, his self-respect, his soul. In the end, Father would take it all.
Fogg looked ahead over Matilda's back and tried not to think about the morning. In the mist the glowing lamps of the streetlights seemed suspended in mid-air. He turned slightly and pushed up the trap door in the cab's roof. "Leo, let me know when we're close, will you?"
"Certainly, Mr. Fogg. It be a while. This fog makes fer vury slow going. We be just past Southwark bridge."
As Fogg's arm came down, Rebecca's hard grip locked on his wrist, pinching his bracelet into his skin. She said, "Look at me, Phil, and tell me the truth about Passepartout. I know you're hiding something. Tell now, or it will be the worse for you." She lifted her chin and narrowed her eyes.
Fogg looked down into the bluest eyes in London, their shade shrouded by the fog and the night, but blue in the years and years of Fogg's memory. As deeply blue as Raz's had been brown. And always bluer by far than Father's faded ice.
Hiding something? Probably not. Likely she already knew what he'd been in the Service, the vile code name, and all the sordidness. At the last, Father had been desperate to hold her. He wouldn't have neglected such a juicy bit of familial poison. But she'd never spoken of it in all the years since.
Belief in family was God's special gift to women. Or was it a curse to believe that worth lingered, despite every evidence against it? She'd believed in Father so long. Now she believed in him. Neither of them had had any worth to earn it, and still she believed. Yes, surely a curse.
Fogg checked an impulse to burden Rebecca with the mission to Berlin, his reason for taking it -- the need to uphold Fogg honour, even if only he knew it'd been besmirched. She'd worry, or more likely insist on accompanying him. He wouldn't allow that. She had too much to live for.
Rebecca only worried about Passepartout. Some of that he could alleviate, at least in part with the truth. Passepartout's future was much brighter than Fogg's.
He took a deep breath and shaped his answer. "Harbin has begun a new project. He won't tell me the details, but he proposes relocating Passepartout to his train yard in Bremen, so it may be a new type of locomotive, possibly a new engine design. He offered me a great deal of money to buy out Passepartout's contract. I turned him down." Regrettably, all true.
"Then why …?"
"Why am I canceling the contract instead? Rebecca, you know of Passepartout's, uh, bent and his former relationship with the Baron." Fogg turned to face Rebecca squarely, to look into her eyes. "I #won# Passepartout, Rebecca. He was handed over to me as chattel and had no choice in the matter. I shan't hold him back if he wants to return to his, uh, former situation. The Baron was to tender an offer today; I'm letting him make his choice free and clear." Fogg had made a choice for the future. Passepartout deserved the same opportunity.
Rebecca's hand slipped into his and squeezed through his glove. "But does he know you want him back?"
He rubbed the back of her hand with his thumb. "I hope so. God, I hope so." That was the lie. He looked to see if Rebecca had detected it, but her head hung down, looking at their clasped hands. He couldn't read her eyes.
Souls lived in the eyes. This morning Fogg had read the longing in Passepartout's, and yesterday when he'd met with the Baron, von Bresslau had been no less anxious.
Before Passepartout had come to Fogg, he'd spent five years with the Baron creating wondrous, magical machines. Surely a more desirable career than valet, pilot and occasional bodyguard for Mr. Phileas Plato Fogg, Gentleman and lodestone for ill-fortune and danger.
And that without considering the comfort the Baron and Passepartout found in each other.
What was that? Fogg straightened smartly and his eyes strained to see beyond their moving islet of illuminated mist. Something distorted had moved out there. While in itself no cause for alarum -- war and disease filled London with horrors that once had been human, and the fog turned everything ghastly as well -- the way it had moved … surely nothing living could move quite so fast or stop so abruptly.
The trapdoor above their heads opened and Leo's cheerful voice announced, "We be vury close now, Mr. Fogg."
Focused on the night, Fogg didn't look up. Rebecca's head tilted back and she answered for him. "Thank you, Leo. You may pull over."
For an hour of their waiting, light had blazed from almost every window on the first two floors of No. 7 Savile Row, then a half hour ago one of those unhealthy London fogs had drifted in dimming the radiance. But from their coach waiting in front of No. 15, rectangles of light could yet be discerned. The Foggs were still to home.
Finally, the rectangles extinguished one by one, and as the front door opened, only the stoop lights remained. Two shadows exited and, floating through the mist, crossed the footway to the waiting hansom. Schnabel grunted German gutturals into Richter's ear. "There he is again, Kapitan! There's Nebelmann!"
"It's Fogg, not Nebelmann. Don't forget your English, Sergeant," Richter whispered back. He'd been expecting a man and a woman. This looked more like two men, as both shapes were definitely clad in trousers.
Richter shifted to the coach's other bench to view the two loading paraphernalia into the hansom's boot. Swinging his head out a bit too far, he sharply tapped the gash above his eye on the window frame. Damn, if that started bleeding again! He reached up and patted the white adhesive holding the wound closed. No, still tight. Stung like the very Devil, though. Rebecca Fogg would pay for that. Mein Gott, she would pay!
This morning when Richter had arrived back from Scotland, Sergeant Schnabel had been injudicious enough to remark on the strip of white. He'd acquired a fine array of bruises for his stupidity. This evening Flitcraft had been yet more dim-witted. Even as the drek palmed the money for his transcript, he couldn't keep his eyes off Richter's forehead.
Richter had required Flitcraft to linger -- fidgeting like a mayfly and popping up and down from the hotel room chair every half minute or so -- while he read through the confrontation between Fogg and Chatsworth. Disappointingly incomplete, the transcript had been scarcely worth the exorbitant price Flitcraft had charged for what he'd called critical information.
"Is this all you have?" Richter had demanded. "Who is Fogg to eradicate and who's this 'old friend'?" Someone had persuaded Fogg to take on a new assignment after he'd been adamantly inactive for years. But who? And more importantly, how? Or rather, why?
Tonight in No. 7 Savile Row he and Schnabel would seek Fogg's "why." Fogg would soon die, of course, but since corpses rarely spoke, if one had questions, answers were best sought while the target still lived.
Flitcraft's sharp, unpleasant voice had babbled, "You have everything I know there in your hands, Herr Richter. That, and the Chief's sent Miss Fogg to Southwark tonight. Fogg might very well go with her. He does often as not. With the Foggs, the Service gets two agents for the expense of one, but …"
The barrel of Richter's pistol pressed into the prominent Adam's apple bobbing under Flitcraft's chin, and the gibbering ended with a strangled gasp. "If you do not know who sends Fogg to Berlin, Mister Flitcraft, I'm not interested in your ramblings. Now, I will ask a simple question and you will give me a simple answer: Do you know who sends Fogg?"
The man must have had a faucet in his eyes, tears filled them so quickly. One over-flowed down Flitcraft's cheek. "No, sir, I don't know, Herr Richter."
"How very disappointing." Flitcraft sniffled loudly and made a half-hearted gesture toward rubbing his running nose. Seen across the room, he was an unattractive stick of a man. With his tear-streaked face at a distance of three or four inches, Richter found even less to admire. Richter removed the pistol before Flitcraft could drip on it. "Now, you will tell me about the Foggs and this mission in Southwark."
The Foggs's carriage passed the coach, the iron tires rattling loudly on the cobblestones, and quickly faded into the fog. Richter tapped Schnabel on the shoulder and motioned that it was time. He stepped down out of the coach and paid off the coachman. Sergeant Schnabel tucked the pry bar under his coat. Together they slipped into the fog.
The last time Phileas had taken Rebecca to the London Zoo, oh it must have five years ago, if not more, they'd strolled through the cat house to look at the new panther on display. From Burma, the plaque had read, a suspected man-eater. Only saved because of the rare black fur.
The cat had been as black as the original sin, and in the shaded building, only its fluid pacing made it visible. That and its eyes. God, those eyes had followed them as they walked past and a pink tongue had licked a black mouth as if the cat recalled with relish the taste of human bones. "Handsome brute, isn't he?" Phileas had said.
In action, Phileas became that panther – carnivorous, graceful, a poem of muscle. A magnificent beast, withal, and beautiful to see, even at the kill. Tonight he moved through the Southwark warehouse, checking rooms with a pistol held out ready to fire, a rapacious panther hunting for hot blood and sweet meat.
Rebecca could almost forgive him for this preposterous business with Passepartout when he looked like that. Almost, not quite. After all, she'd probably spend all of tomorrow convincing the valet that his master truly wanted him back.
Even great beauty only got one so far, and tonight it would get Phileas nowhere at all. He'd started their evening badly, deliberately infuriating her with, "I've canceled Passepartout's contract." And all through their ride, although he sat only a few inches away, his mind seemed to be on another continent, his answers coming only after long pauses, if at all. Then when Leo pulled up just short of the intersection of Clink and Stoke, Phileas had jumped out of the carriage before it even stopped and dashed off without explanation and only the admonition to "wait here!"
Slamming the carriage door behind her, Rebecca frowned after him. He'd seen something, no doubt, and had gone to investigate without backup. Keeping all the fun to himself! Well, if that's what he wanted, tonight he could have it all. She looked up at the cabbie sitting above her on his perch. "Would you mind helping me unload, Leo?"
She'd had the police whistle between her lips tweeting the "fetch-us-out" signal for Leo, when Phil re-materialized out of the fog, breathing hard. He didn't tell Rebecca and Leo what he'd sought and she was in no mood to ask. Dropping the whistle to dangle on the cord around her neck, she thrust a loaded revolver into Phil's hands. "Here, make yourself useful." She took the unlit lantern, the other revolver and a bag of supplies and set out without a backward glance. She'd finished briefing Leo; and as for Phileas, if he wanted to come, he would, and if he didn't, well, all the better.
Their warehouse turned out to be a red-brick affair, supposedly three-storeys tall but she couldn't confirm that in the poor light. It was situated across from the last weather-worn debris of Clink Prison's former site, where piles of fire-blasted brick had seemed to throng with the misty ghosts of former inmates as they walked past.
Finally arriving at the warehouse's corner, Phileas had motioned his pistol for her to take the parameter counter-clockwise while he moved in the opposing direction. Without even thinking she'd obeyed. Infuriating. She'd been trained like a dog or a horse to submit by reflex.
In ten minutes they'd met at the far corner. She hadn't seen a thing, not even recent footprints in the mud, and shook her head emphatically in answer to Phileas's inquiring look. Apparently he hadn't seen anything either, for he'd lit their lamp and with another broad wave of the pistol, invited her to work her magic on a door ten feet back along the wall.
Something within this warehouse had turned Phil uneasy, as he didn't panther prowl without reason, no matter how beautiful it made him look. Constantly scanning the balconies above, he checked each room before allowing her to enter with the revealing lamp. She ought to be insulted. She was insulted.
But she'd be bloody damned before she'd ask. #She# saw nothing amiss. Despite Sir Jonathan's worries, this warehouse was as empty as a moor at midnight. Two or three wharf rats had scurried away from them into the dark, but otherwise the building stood empty. Apparently it had stored baled cotton for a mill up north until America's war had cut off supply, as the rooms smelled dryly of cotton. With every gliding step Phileas kicked up lint floats from the thickly covered floor, flecking his black wool trousers with white as far as the knees.
But no ghosts. Or smugglers, not even a slaver. And definitely nothing as smelly as an opium den. Just lint, dust and stale air.
Pirouetting, trying to cover every corner of the room at once, Phileas danced them through two empty echoing chambers but as they stole along the wall to the door of a third, his demeanor changed. He staggered, and the gun dropped to his side. Stopping, he leaned against the bare boards of the wall, his head down and his shoulders bowing in. The pistol in his hands shook, or was that the lamplight flickering? Rebecca moved closer. "What is it, Phil?" Passepartout had said her cousin hadn't eaten properly for days; perhaps the deprivation had caught up with him.
When he didn't speak, she raised their lantern to his face. He looked ill. Sweat beaded his forehead and his unfocused eyes stared at her vaguely. He panted as though he'd been running hard. "Are you feeling well, Phileas? You look positively nauseous."
"I don't know. I feel a bit light-headed. And that … that stench." He shook his head as if to clear it. "Balaclava," he mumbled. "Yes, Balaclava, that's what it smells like. Blood, and bloated carcasses and more death than the eyes can take in. It's, it's -- no, 'putrid' doesn't even begin to ..." He stopped and tried to straighten up a bit. "You can't smell that? Rotting flesh? Gassy gangrene?"
Decaying meat? Rebecca adjusted her opinion of the barren warehouse. Dead flesh in such a place suggested all sorts of vileness. But her nose hadn't caught it yet. She lifted said feature and tested the air. "No, I'm not catching it. Just cotton smells." She whispered for no particular reason other than the hugeness of the space.
Putting the lantern down on the floor, she looked back the way they'd come, considering. "Perhaps it's a dead rat; or you know, Saint Thomas's is only a street or so over. Perhaps you've caught a whiff of the surgery. Florence Nightingale once told me the pong off their refuse heap gagged even the nurses. But I'll scout about, see if I can get a fix on it. You stay here. Catch your breath."
Phileas really did look peaked. Her hand rubbed his arm above the elbow, and he agreed to her suggestion with a nod and a sigh, then put his pistol in a coat pocket and mopped at his bare forehead with a kerchief.
Rebecca smiled. Yet again Phileas had left his hat in a carriage. Generally, he did a fine job emulating Raz's fashion sense, but Phil still had his weak points, retention of hats being the foremost.
Rebecca turned and took a dozen or more steps toward the center of the large, empty room, and stood, with her back to Phileas, trying to decide on a quartering pattern. Now if the hospital was southeast and the wind, what little there was tonight, blew from the east ...
Fogg's head buzzed like the apiary at Shillingworth when the keeper smoked his bees into stupor before stealing their honey. He felt as though he'd been gassed. The heavy repulsive atmosphere sucked the breath from his lungs and the sense from his brain. But at least Rebecca had let go of her snit. That was something. For that he'd endure more than a bad smell any day.
Fogg watched Rebecca's trouser-clad bum as she strode purposefully away; then the far wall caught his eye. It glowed with a reflected light much too bright for their lantern. Water stains below a high window sharpened from a vague bifurcated shadow into a tangled, multi-shaded alluvial map. That pane had apparently been missing for years.
Keeping one hand on the wall to support him, Fogg straightened to survey the room. The light intensified and judging by the patterns of radiance on the walls, the source lay near him, but he saw nothing.
The floor resolved into planks covered by a drift of the snow-like cotton fluff. Out-shone, the sphere of illumination about the lantern disappeared. Breathless waiting filled seconds that stretched until time groaned under the strain. Something was coming. Something from Hell.
Fogg's chest heaved; he wiped his lips with the back of his gloved hand. Was this real or one of his visions? Rebecca stood in the middle of the room facing the far wall, unmoving and apparently oblivious to threat. He must warn her. Tell her to run for her life.
"Rebecca!" he called and staggered away from the wall. Despite his anxiety, his movement was dawdling and halt. She turned, oh so slowly, so painfully slow, and moved toward him as though miming a run, each step taking two, three, four times longer than normal. Slowly she raised her hand, regarded it with horror then let it drift down again. The scene had the feel of a nightmare, but Fogg didn't wake up.
"P—h—i—l." Rebecca's ghostly moan took long seconds to finish as she continued to advance in agonized delay, her mouth open and her lips pulled back in an anxious grimace.
A cloud of smouldering plasma coalesced between them. Rapidly it thickened and elongated. It squirted into arms and legs, then split more finely into hands, fingers, feet and toes. A round knob of a head popped out like a grape squeezed from its skin. Within its translucent, sparking sack, protoplasm writhed.
The thing stank like a battlefield of corpses, a month dead and unburied. It had no face. It made no sound.
And still Fogg and Rebecca moved as if bound with the weight of centuries.
The unsettling figure seemed to discover itself. It twirled in place, jumped up and down and flexed its arms, moving much more freely than either of the corporeal inhabitants of the room. Then with a cock of its head, it noticed Fogg. It took a gliding step toward him, then another.
Fogg recognized the spectre. He'd seen it less than a year ago in Paris. #Lazarus,# he thought. #Come for his revenge.# Lethargic, swaying with weakness, Fogg stopped and waited for the onrushing apparition. There was no point in fleeing. He could barely walk. But if he engaged it, he might give a Rebecca chance to escape. And somehow it all seemed so fitting. He wouldn't go to Berlin seeking revenge after all; instead he'd join Lazarus in Hell.
Rebecca continued her relentless advance behind the now nearly opaque form, her sluggish movement barely visible to Fogg.
Lazarus was three feet from him, then two, then one. Fogg stood, waiting and growing impatient for his end. The blasted ghost certainly took its time. And of all the un-sportsman like braggadocio! After the rout Madame Soretsky had served him, one would think, Lazarus -- who in his time had been an English Gentleman – ought to know he'd been bested and move on to haunting a castle or some other sedately eternal recreation. Of one thing Fogg was sure, #his# vendettas would end at the grave.
Fogg watched the translucent hand touch his glove. There was no sensation through the leather. Fingers like glow-worms slithered past his jacketed wrist and explored his waistcoat, tapping the black buttons and tweaking the lapels. The digits disappeared under his chin, undoubtedly fingering his neck cloth. Lazarus had always fancied he'd a better fashion sense than Fogg. Must be devilish hard to keep up with trends when one was dead. Shrouds generally lacked style, and corpses saw little else.
His smell had grown nearly solid in Fogg's nose and he involuntarily gagged.
The ghastly hand touched his face … or tried to. Fogg felt no touch, no pressure, had no unholy sensation of the grave as the hand passed up through his jaw, his lips, nose and eyes and out through his hair. Nothing.
Rebecca had nearly reached him. She had one of her throwing knives in hand. Stopping just short of Lazarus's cloudy presence, she slowly and awkwardly tried to slash the ghost into pieces, to dispel him or somehow affect his existence with the sluggishly wild passes of her knife. The blade passed through Lazarus's protoplasm without rip or ripple.
The spectre tipped its head to look down at the knife passing through. It spun about, thrust its head toward Rebecca and formed a slit of a mouth to roar, but all Fogg heard was a distant huffing much like a locomotive when one rides the caboose. Rebecca roared back at the top of her lungs and, picking up her whistle, blew that too. Even muted by the dilated time, she made a glorious racket.
Spinning back, Lazarus tried his roar on Fogg. Fogg smiled. Lazarus had failed to even touch Fogg's flesh. Polite skepticism would seem the appropriate rejoinder to an obviously hollow threat.
Perhaps it was the influence of Fogg's restraint, but Lazarus finally demonstrated a bit of English reserve. He withdrew. The unreal body left the floor and dispersed into a shapeless cloud that circled the room faster and faster looking for something, a door perhaps.
As the cloud moved faster, Rebecca, who had resumed her efforts to reach Fogg's side, began to move yet slower, until she seemed suspended in mid-air, out-stretched, one hand raised to touch Fogg, hanging there frozen.
Lazarus found the exit he sought in the high window with the missing pane and without so much as a "fare-thee-well" threaded itself through the opening and out into the misty night.
The room's brilliance shrank to a dim circle about the lantern. Time corrected suddenly –- returning to shape much as a piece of stretched rubber snaps after release -- and Fogg found himself abruptly captured by a breathlessly excited Rebecca. Her encircling arms squeezed so hard he was certain a rib would crack.
"Don't you have any nerves at all, Phil?" she exclaimed, her face on his chest. "How could you just stand there waiting for it? I thought you were going to … Phil? Phil?"
For Fogg the remaining light in the room fled as he began to collapse onto Rebecca. She struggled to hold him up, but at thirteen stone and six foot, he over-balanced her, and with a cry of warning she had to let him gracelessly measure his limp length on the floor, the impact kicking up an eddy of cotton that puffed away then settled back on his jacket and trousers.
#What a mess,# Fogg thought as the room faded completely to black. #I'll never get this wool clean now.# Maybe he shouldn't let Passepartout go after all.
Sergeant Schnabel had never seen anything like it – an entire small room filled with exquisite jackets, trousers, waistcoats, hats, boots, stacks of shirts, and racks of neck cloths. He put down the candle on a chest and pulled one of the beautiful sticks from the cured elephant's foot in the corner. A dragon's head had been carved in the ivory handle, complete with two gleaming red crystal eyes. The open mouth hissed at him and the eyes glittered and seemed to follow him when he twisted the cane about. He hastily thrust it back in the foot.
Kapitan Richter was searching the main floor, in particular the large desk in the study and the library of books. The Sergeant had been assigned the bedrooms. He'd already been through the servant's room on the third floor, a fine, comfortable space but completely empty of clews to Fogg's mission.
The other bedroom on this floor, a lady's boudoir by all the signs, had yielded little more. A bouquet of a dozen or so perfectly formed pink roses lay carefully arranged on the sheets of an unmade bed. Across their long, de-thorned stems lay a small jewelry box. It had held a ruby bracelet with stones that glittered much like the dragon's eyes. Very expensive. A note inside said, "To my beloved cousin Rebecca on her 33rd birthday, Phileas." He'd slipped the bracelet out its case and into his pocket. Fogg would die tonight or tomorrow, probably his cousin too. No one would ever miss this little trinket.
The Sergeant never honored any of his cousins' birthdays, let alone gave them fine presents. He wondered why Fogg and his cousin bothered with two bedrooms. Surely not to deceive the valet. Since servants changed bedding and soaked out any stains, they always knew the family's sleeping habits. Schnabel's mother had been a maid in Kapitan Richter's household. Following her on the rounds of the bedchambers as a child, he'd seen it all – except a wardrobe as fine as Fogg's. All this elegance in one place was almost enough to make a man change sides.
Taking one last longing look at the beautiful clothes, Schnabel picked up his candle, stepped out of the walk-in closet and closed the door. He looked about. The bed in this room was made up -- further proof of the Fogg cousins' convivial sleeping arrangements – but nothing lay about on any of the stands. There was, however, a small writing desk.
Putting his candle down, he began to riffle through the few papers that lay in its single drawer -- bills (Schnabel lifted an eyebrow at the gas bill) and the valet's contract, but nothing else save blank paper, quills and ink. He looked over the end of desk to check the dustbin and found it overflowing with tightly wadded balls of white.
At last something promising. This ought to sweeten the Kapitan's foul mood. Schnabel rotated his shoulder experimentally at that memory. The Kapitan had a vicious way when angry, and this morning Schnabel had not been able to get out of the way.
The Sergeant plucked one ball out of the dustbin and flattened it on the desk. Addressed to Her Majesty Queen Victoria, it began, "Ma'am, it is with a deep sense of shame that I put pen to paper. I have always had the honour to be your obedient servant, but in the situation that I now find myself, I am …"
The next word had been crossed out. It looked like "obliged," but the Sergeant's command of written English was a bit weak – much worse than his spoken. At any rate, it was the last written word on the page. Yes, this was promising indeed. The Sergeant tucked the full dustbin under his arm, picked up his candle and hurried down the stairs.
The stack of the discarded letters addressed variously to "my dearest Rebecca," "my beloved Rebecca," and "sweet cousin" turned out to be by far the deepest. The pile of smoothed and flattened sheets was nearly an inch high. The other stacks were, in counter-clockwise (and descending) order, addressed to Jean Passepartout, Queen Victoria, Prime Minister Gladstone, Sir Jonathan Chatsworth, and a solicitor named Edwards.
A little over half the notes to Miss Fogg held proposals of marriage, the remainder were lachrymose farewells, and pleas for understanding. The notes to the valet Passepartout had also been split between two opposing poles. Six of the eight offered to re-hire Jean Passepartout at whatever wages he should want. The other two were chill notices that his services were no longer required.
The single note to the solicitor had begun with an instruction to wait one week before delivering the letters in his possession. The word "one" had been crossed out. Two had been written next to it. "Two" also had been crossed out.
But it had been the five or so discarded false-starts to Queen Victoria and Prime Minister Gladstone and the two to the head of the British Secret Service that had revealed the most extensive details of Fogg's mission, the reason and the consequences he expected: The short of it was that Fogg planned to assassinate Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in Berlin at the end of the week during the monthly dress-review of the troops, and that he sought revenge for the deaths of both his father and his brother. And the consequences? As Fogg was no fool, he expected all proverbial Hell to break loose. Possibly war between England and Prussia. At the very least a break in diplomatic relations. Needless to say his apologies to the Queen and the Prime Minister were lengthy.
Squatting among his piles of flattened notes, Richter rocked back on his heels. He held in his hand the longest and most detailed of the notes, addressed to Sir Jonathan Chatsworth.
"This is it?" he asked, cocking his head back to look up at the sergeant. "There were no other papers in the room?"
Schnabel shook his head. "No sir, just a few bills. You would not believe what he pays for his gaslight … sir." He added the last as Richter stood up.
Richter bent over and scooped up all the papers from the floor, folded them over and tucked them inside his coat. "Here he tells us why and who, Sergeant. I could almost believe this is enough. I just wish … I feel sure there is someone behind Fogg." The Kapitan chewed on his lower lip for a moment, then shook his head. He sighed. "It will have to be enough. Fogg will leave for Berlin in the morning, therefore, he must die tonight."
Richter picked up the candle from the floor and walked to the gun cabinet beside the fireplace. "Which of these muskets is the most accurate, Sergeant?"
Schnabel joined him. "They're both lovely pieces, Kapitan." He opened the cabinet, took out the longer of the two muskets and began to load.