Quite suddenly, Houston's tone changed, becoming lingering, sentimental, a honeyed lilt creeping into his drawl. He was talking about a woman.
   Sybil sat up straighter, listening.
   Houston had been elected Governor, it seemed, and had gotten himself some tin, and been cheery about it. And he'd found himself a sweetheart, some Tennessee gentry-girl, and married her.
   But on the kino's screen, fingers of darkness crept in snake-like from the edges. They menaced the State Seal.
   Governor and Mrs. Houston had scarcely settled in when wifey kicked over the traces, and fled back to her family. She'd left him a letter, Houston said, a letter that contained an awful secret. A secret he had never revealed, and had sworn to carry to his grave. "A private matter, of which a gentleman of honor cannot and should not speak. Black disaster struck me… " The newspapers—apparently they did have newspapers, in Tennessee—had attacked him. "The tattling mouths of libel poured their venom on me," Houston lamented, as the Greek shield with the raven appeared, and black kino-blobs—mud, Sybil supposed—began to spatter it.
   Houston's revelations grew shocking. He'd actually gone through with it, had divorced his wife, of all the unlikely, awful things. Of course he'd lost his position in Government; outraged society had bounded him from office, and Sybil wondered why Houston had dared to mention such an ugly scandal. It was as if he expected his London audience to morally approve of a divorced man. Still, she noticed, the ladies seemed intrigued, and not entirely without sympathy perhaps. Even the fat mama fluttered at her double-chins with a fan.
   General Houston was a foreigner, after all, half a savage by his own account; but when he spoke of his wife it was tenderly, as of a true love, a love slain by some cruel mysterious truth. His bellowing voice broke with unashamed emotion; he mopped at his forehead a bit, with a fancy handkerchief from his leopard-skin vest.
   In truth, he wasn't a bad-looking cove, over sixty but that sort could be kinder to a girl. His confession seemed bold and manly, for he himself had brought the matter up: the divorce scandal and the secret letter from Mrs. Houston. He wouldn't stop talking about it, but neither would he tell them the secret; he'd pricked the curiosity of his audience—and Sybil herself was simply dying to know.
   She chided herself, for being so cakey, for it was likely something stupid and simple, not half so deep and mysterious as he feigned. Likely his gentry-girl wasn't half so angelic as she'd looked. Likely she'd had her maiden virtue stolen from her by some good-looking Tennessee beau-trap, long before Raven Houston came along. Men had hard rules for their brides, if never for themselves.
   Likely Houston had brought it all on himself. Perhaps he had beastly vile ideas about married life, come from living with savages. Or perhaps he'd milled his wife about with his fists—for Sybil fancied he'd be a right bully-rock, in his cups.
   The kino came alive with harpies, meant to symbolize Houston's slanderers, those who'd smeared his precious honor with the ink of a gutter press. Nasty crooky-back things, crowding the screen in devilish black and red. As the screen whirred steadily, they twitched their cloven hooves. Never had she seen the like, some Manchester punch-card artist having gotten the gin-horrors sure… Now Houston was ranting about challenges and honor, by which he meant dueling, Americans being most famous duelists, who loved guns and shot each other at the drop of a hat… He'd have killed some of those newspaper rascals, Houston insisted loudly, if he hadn't been Governor, and on his dignity. So instead he'd thrown in his cards, and gone back to live with his precious Cherokees… He had a real head of steam up, now; he'd stoked himself so, it was almost frightening to watch. The audience was entertained, their reserve broken by his bulging eyes and veiny Texian neck, but none too far from disgust.
   Maybe it had been something really dreadful that he'd done, Sybil thought, rubbing her hands together inside her rabbit-skin muff. Maybe it was lady's-fever, that he'd given his own wife a case of the glue. Some types of glue were horrible, and could make you mad, or blind, or crippled. Maybe that was the secret. Mick might know. Very likely Mick knew all about it.
   Houston explained that he had left the United States in disgust, and gone to Texas, and at the word a map appeared, a sprawl of land in the middle of the continent. Houston claimed he'd gone there seeking land for his poor suffering Cherokee Indians, but it was all a bit confusing.
   Sybil asked the clerky fellow next to her for the time. Only an hour had passed. The speech was a third gone. Her moment was coming.
   "You must envision a nation many times the size of your home islands," said Houston, "with no roads greater than the grassy tracks of Indians. Without, at that time, a single mile of British railroad, and lacking the telegraph, or, indeed, Engine resources of any kind. As commander-in-chief of the Texian national forces, my orders had no courier more swift or more reliable than the mounted scout, his way menaced by the Comanche and Karankawa, by Mexican raiding-parties, and by the thousand nameless hazards of the wilderness. Small wonder then that Colonel Travis should receive my orders too late; and place his confidence, tragically, in the reinforcing-party led by Colonel Fannin. Surrounded by an enemy force fifty times his own. Colonel Travis declared his objective to be Victory or Death—knowing full well that the latter was a surely fated outcome. The defenders of the Alamo perished to a man. The noble Travis, the fearless Colonel Bowie, and David Crockett, a very legend among frontiersmen"—Messrs. Travis, Bowie, and Crockett each had a third of the kino screen, their faces gone strangely square with the cramped scale of their depletion—"bought precious time for my Fabian strategy."
   More soldier talk. Now he stepped back from the podium and pointed up at the kino with his heavy polished cane. "The forces of Lopez de Santa Anna were arrayed as you see them here, with the woods upon his left flank and the San Jacinto river-marshes at his back. His siege engineers had dug in around the baggage-train, with emplacements of sharpened timber, represented thusly. By a forced march through Burnham's Ford, however, my army of six hundred had seized the wooded banks of Buffalo Bayou, unbeknown to enemy intelligence. The assault began with a brisk cannon-fire from the Texian center… Now we can witness the movement of the Texian light-cavalry… The shock of the foot-charge sent the enemy reeling in confusion, throwing his artillery, which was not yet limbered, into utter disarray." The kinotrope's blue squares and lozenges slowly chased the buckling red Mexican regiments through the checkered greens and whites of woods and swamps. Sybil shifted in her seat, trying to ease the chafing of her hoop-skirt. Houston's bloodthirsty boasting was finally reaching a climax.
   "The final count of the fallen numbered two Texian dead, six hundred and thirty of the invader. The massacres of Alamo and Goliad were avenged in Santanista blood! Two Mexican armies utterly defeated, with the capture of fourteen officers and twenty cannon."
   Fourteen officers, twenty cannon—yes, that was her cue. Her moment had come. "Avenge us. General Houston!" Sybil shrieked, her throat constricted with stage-fright. She tried again, pulling herself to her feet, waving one arm, "Avenge us, General Houston!"
   Houston halted, taken aback. Sybil shouted at him, shrilly. "Avenge our honor, sir! Avenge Britain's honor!" A babble of alarm rose—Sybil felt the eyes of the theatre crowd in upon her, shocked looks that people might give a lunatic. "My brother," she shouted, but fear had seized her, bad nerves. She hadn't expected it to be so frightening. This was worse than singing on stage, far worse.
   Houston lifted both his arms, the striped blanket spreading behind him like a cloak. Somehow he calmed the crowd by the gesture, asserted command. Above his head, the kinotrope wound slowly down, its flickering domino-tricks whirring to a stop, leaving San Jacinto frozen in mid-victory. Houston fixed Sybil with a look of mingled sternness and resignation. "What is it, my dear young lady? What troubles you? Tell me."
   Sybil gripped the back of the seat before her, closed her eyes tight, and sang it out. "Sir, my brother is in a Texian prison! We are British, but the Texians imprisoned him, sir! They seized his farm, and his cattle! They even stole the very railroad that he worked on, a British railroad, built for Texas… " Her voice was faltering, despite herself. Mick wouldn't like that, he would scold her performance… The thought put a jolt of vitality into her. She opened her eyes. "That regime, sir, the thieving Texian regime, they stole that British railroad! They robbed the workers in Texas, and the stockholders here in Britain, and paid us not a penny!"
   With the loss of the kinotrope's bright play of images, the theatre's atmosphere had changed. Everything was quite different suddenly, oddly intimate and strange. It was as if she and the General were somehow framed together, two figures on a silvered daguerreotype. A young London woman, in her bonnet and elegant shawl, reaches up with eloquent distress to the old foreign hero; both part-players now, with the surprised eyes of the public silently fixed on them.
   "You suffered because of the junta?" Houston said.
   "Yes, sir!" Sybil cried, a practiced quaver stealing into her voice. Don't frighten them, Mick had said, but make them pity you. "Yes, the junta did it. They have flung my brother into their vile prison, for no crime, sir, but simply because my dear brother is a Houston man! He voted for you when you became President of Texas, sir! And he would vote for you today, although I fear very much they will kill him!" "What is your brother's name, my dear lady?" Houston asked.

   "Jones, sir," Sybil quickly cried, "Edwin Jones of Nacogdoches, who worked for Hedgecoxe's Railway Company."
   "I believe I know young Edward!" Houston declared, his surprise evident in his tone. He clutched his cane angrily and his heavy brows knotted.
   "Listen to her, Sam!" came a sudden deep voice. Sybil, alarmed, turned to look. It was the man from the Argyll Rooms—the fat actor, with his red hair and brushed velvet waistcoat. "Those junta rascals appropriated the Hedgecoxe Railway! A pretty business, that, from a supposed British ally! Is this the gratitude they show, for years of British guidance and protection?" He sat back down.
   "They're nothing but thieves and villains!" Sybil shouted alertly. She groped quickly in memory, picking up the thread. "General Houston! I'm a defenseless woman, but you're a man of destiny, a man of greatness! Can't there be justice for Texas, sir? Some redress for these affronts? Must my poor brother die there in misery, while cheats and tyrants steal our British property?"
   But Mick's fine rhetoric was drowned; there were shouts from the audience, here and there, over a muttered undertone of surprise and approval. Loud boyish hooting came from the penny-gallery.
   A bit of London fun, all told. Perhaps, Sybil thought, she had made some of them believe her story, and pity her. Most simply howled and joked a bit, pleased to see some unexpected liveliness.
   "Sam Houston was always a true friend of Britain!" Sybil shrieked, into the crowd's upturned faces. The words half-lost, useless, she raised the back of her wrist to her damp forehead. Mick had given her no more lines, so she let the strength seep from her legs and fell back, eyes fluttering, half-sinking into her seat.
   "Give Miss Jones air!" Houston commanded, an excited bellow. "The lady is overcome!" Sybil watched through half-closed lids as blurred figures haltingly gathered round her. Dark evening-jackets, a rustle of crinoline, gardenia perfume, and a masculine smell of tobacco—a man seized her wrist, and felt for a pulse there with pinching fingers. A woman fanned Sybil's face, clucking to herself. Oh heaven, Sybil thought, shrinking, the fat mama from the row before her, with that intolerable oily look of a good woman doing her moral duty. A little thrill of shame and disgust shot through her. For a moment she felt genuinely weak, sinking with a buttery ease into the warmth of their concern, a half-dozen busybodies muttering around her in a shared pretense of competence, while Houston thundered on above them, hoarse with indignation.
   Sybil allowed them to get her to her feet. Houston hesitated, seeing it, and there was a light gallant scatter of applause for her. She felt pale, unworthy; she smiled wanly, and shook her head, and wished she were invisible. She leaned her head on the padded shoulder of the man who had taken her pulse. "Sir, if I could go, please," she whispered.
   Her rescuer nodded alertly, a little fellow with clever blue eyes. His long greying hair was parted in the middle. "I shall see the lady home," he piped at the others. He shrugged into an opera cape, perched a tall beaver hat on his head, and lent her his arm. They walked together up the aisle, Sybil leaning on him heavily, unwilling to meet anyone's eyes. The crowd was roused, now. For the first time, perhaps, they were listening to Houston as a man, rather than as some sort of queer American exhibit.
   Her little gentleman held dingy velvet aside for her as they emerged into the Garrick's chilly foyer, with its flaking gilt cupids and damp-marked faux-marble walls. " 'Tis very kind of you, sir, to help me so," Sybil offered, noting that her escort looked as though he might have money. "Are you a medical man?"
   "I was a student once," he said, with a shrug. His cheeks were flushed, twin hot points of red.
   "It gives a man a certain air of distinction," Sybil said, not for any particular purpose, but just to fill the silence. "Schooling of that sort, I mean."
   "Hardly, madame. I wasted all my time versifying. I must say that you seem fit enough now. Very sorry to hear about that unfortunate brother of yours."
   "Thank you, sir." Sybil looked at him sidelong. "I'm afraid it was very forward of me, but General Houston's eloquence earned me away."
   He shot her an opaque glance, the look of a man who suspects that a woman is gulling him. "In all honesty," he said, "I do not entirely share your enthusiasm." He coughed explosively into a wadded handkerchief and wiped his mouth. "This London air will be the death of me."
   "Nonetheless, I do thank you, sir, though I regret we've not been introduced… "
   "Keats," he said, "Mr. Keats." He drew a ticking silver chronometer from his waistcoat, a many-dialed thing the size of a small potato, and consulted it. "I'm not familiar with the district," he said distantly. "I'd thought to hail you a cabriolet, but at this hour…"
   "Oh, no, Mr. Keats, thank you, but I shall go by the underground."
   His bright eyes widened. No respectable woman rode the underground unescorted.
   "But you haven't told me your profession, Mr. Keats," she said, hoping to distract him.
   "Kinotropy," Keats said. "The techniques employed here tonight are of some special interest! While the screen's resolution is quite modest, and the refresh-rate positively slow, remarkable effects have been secured, one presumes through algorithmic compression—but I fear that is all a bit technical." He put away his chronometer. "Are you entirely certain you wouldn't rather I attempted to hail a cab? Do you know London well, Miss Jones? I might escort you to the local omnibus stand—'tis a railless carriage, you see… "
   "No, sir, thank you. You've been exceptionally kind."
   "You're quite welcome," he said, his relief evident as he opened and held one of the half-glass doors to the street. Just then a skinny boy sidled rapidly up behind them, brushed past, and out of the theatre without a word. He was draped in a long dirty coat of canvas, something a fisherman might wear. A singular thing to wear to a lecture, Sybil thought, though one saw queerer garments on the poor; the sleeves flapped emptily, as though the boy were hugging himself, against a chill perhaps. His gait was odd, bent-backed, as if he were drunk or ill.
   "I say there! Young man!" Mr. Keats had produced a coin, and Sybil understood that he wished the boy to hail a cab for her, but now the wet eyes gleamed at them with alarm, the pale face hollowed by gaslight. Suddenly he bolted, something dark tumbling from beneath his coat, where it rolled into the gutter. The boy halted and looked warily back at them.
   He'd dropped a hat, a top-hat.
   He came trotting back, eyes still on them, snatched it up, stuffed it under his coat, and off again, into the shadows, though this time not nearly so rapidly.
   " 'Pon my word," Mr. Keats said in disgust, "that fellow's a thief! That water-proof is stuffed with the hats of the audience!"
   Sybil could think of nothing to say.
   "I imagine the rascal took cruel advantage of that commotion you caused," Keats told her, his tone lightly etched with suspicion. "Pity! One never knows who to trust these days."
   "Sir, I do believe I hear the Engine getting up steam for the kinotrope… "
   And that was enough for him.

   The installation of exhaust-fans, said the Daily Telegraph, had wrought a perceptible improvement in the atmosphere of the Metropolitan, though Lord Babbage himself held that a truly modern underground railway would operate on pneumatic principles exclusively, involving no combustion whatever, rather in the way mail was conveyed throughout Paris.
   Seated in a second-class carnage, breathing as shallowly as possible, Sybil knew it all for humbug, or in any case the improvement part, for who knew what marvels the Rads mightn't bring forth? But hadn't the Rad papers also published the testimony of medicals, in the pay of the railroad, that sulphurous fumes were therapeutic for asthma? And it wasn't only the fumes from the Engines, but vile sewer-seepings as well, and gassy leakings from collapsible India-rubber bags, that lit the carriage-jets in their wire-netted glass shades

   It was a queer business, the underground, when you thought about it, racketing along at such speeds, through the darkness under London, where the navvies had come upon lead water-pipes of the Romans, and coins, mosaics, and archways, elephant's teeth a thousand years old…
   And the digging went on, this and every night, for she'd heard their great machine huffing, as she'd stood by Mick on the Whitechapel pavement; they worked unceasingly, the excavators, boring newer, deeper lines now, down below the tangle of sewers and gas-pipes and bricked-over rivers. The new lines were shored with steel, and soon Lord Babbage's smokeless trains would slide through them silent as eels, though she found the thought of it somehow unclean.
   The lamps flared all at once, the flow of gas disturbed by a particularly sharp jolt, the faces of the other passengers seeming to leap out at her: the sallow gent with something of the successful publican about him, the round-cheeked old Quaker cleric, the drunken dandy with his coat open, his canary waistcoat all dotted down the front with claret…
   There were no other women in the carriage.
   Farewell to you, sirs, she imagined herself crying, farewell to your London, for she was a 'prentice adventuress now, sworn and true, bound for Paris, though the first leg of the voyage consisted necessarily of the tuppenny trip back to Whitechapel…
   But the clergyman had noticed her, his contempt quite open, there for anyone to see.

   It was really quite horribly cold, making her way from the station to her room in Flower-and-Dean Street; she regretted her vanity, for having chosen her fine new shawl rather than her mantelet. Her teeth were chattering. Sharp frost shone in pools of gas-light on the street's new macadam.
   The cobbles of London were vanishing month by month, paved over with black stuff that poured stinking hot from the maws of great wagons, for navvies to spread and smooth with rakes, before the advance of the steam-roller.
   A daring fellow whisked past her, taking full advantage of the gritty new surface. Nearly recumbent within the creaking frame of a four-wheeled velocipede, his shoes were strapped to whirling cranks and his breath puffed explosively into the cold. He was bare-headed and goggled, in a thick striped jersey, a long knit scarf flapping out behind him as he sped away. Sybil supposed him an inventor.
   London was rife with inventors, the poorer and madder of them congregating in the public squares to display their blueprints and models, and harangue the strolling crowds. In a week's time she'd encountered a wicked-looking device meant to crimp hair by electricity, a child's mechanical top that played Beethoven, and a scheme for electro-plating the dead.
   Leaving the thoroughfare for the unimproved cobbles of Renton Passage, she made out the sign of the Hart and heard the jangle of a pianola. It was Mrs. Winterhalter who'd arranged for her to room above the Hart. The public house itself was a steady sort of place, admitting no women. It catered to junior clerks and shopmen, and offered as its raciest pleasure a pull at a coin-fed wagering-machine.
   The rooms above were reached by way of steep dark stairs, that climbed below a sooty skylight to an alcove presenting a pair of identical doors. Mr. Cairns, the landlord, had rooms behind the door on the left.
   Sybil climbed the stairs, fumbled a penny box of lucifers from her muff, and struck one. Cairns had chained a bicycle to the iron railing overlooking the stairwell; the bright brass padlock gleamed in the flare of the match. She shook the lucifer out, hoping that Hetty hadn't double-latched the door Hetty hadn't, and Sybil's key turned smoothly in the lock.
   Toby was there to greet her, padding silently across the bare boards to twine himself around and about her ankles, purring like sixty.
   Hetty had left an oil-lamp turned down low on the deal table that stood in the hallway; it was smoking now, the wick in need of trimming. A foolish thing to have left it burning, where Toby might've sent it crashing, but Sybil felt grateful not to have found the place in darkness. She took Toby up in her arms. He smelled of herring. "Has Hetty fed you, then, dear?" He yowled softly, and batted at the ribbons of her bonnet.
   The pattern of the wallpaper danced as she lifted the lamp. The hallway had seen no sunlight in all the years the Hart had stood, yet the printed flowers were gone a shade like dust.
   Sybil's room had two windows, though they opened on a blank wall of grimed yellow brick, so near she could've touched it, if someone hadn't driven nails into the casements. Still, on a bright day, with the sun directly overhead, a bit of light did filter in. And Hetty's room, though larger, had only one window. If Hetty was here, now, she must be alone and asleep, as no light was visible from the crack at the bottom of her closed door.
   It was good to have one's own room, one's privacy, however modest. Sybil put Toby down, though he protested, and carried the lamp to her own door, which stood slightly ajar. Inside, all was as she'd left it, though she saw that Hetty had left the latest number of the Illustrated London News on her pillow, with an engraving from Crimea on the front, a scene of a city all aflame. She set the lamp down on the cracked marble lid of the commode, Toby prowling about her ankles as though he expected to discover more herring, and considered what she should do.
   The ticking of the fat tin alarm-clock, which she sometimes found unbearable, was reassuring now; at least it was running, and she imagined that the time it showed, quarter past eleven, was correct. She gave the winder a few turns, just for luck. Mick would come for her at midnight, and there were decisions to be made, as he'd advised her to travel very light.
   She took a wick-trimmer from the commode's drawer, raised the lamp's chimney, and scissored away the blackened bit. The light somewhat improved. She threw on her mantelet against the cold, opened the lid of a japanned tin chest, and began to make an inventory of her better things. But after setting aside two changes of undergarments, it came to her that the less she took, the more Dandy Mick would have to buy for her in Paris. And if that wasn't thinking like a 'prentice adventuress, she didn't know what was.
   Still, she did have: some things she was 'specially fond of, and these went, along with the undergarments, into her brocade portmanteau with the split seam she'd meant to mend. There was a lovely bottle of rose-scented Portland water, half-full, a green paste brooch from Mr. Kingsley, a set of hairbrushes with imitation ebony backs, a miniature flower-press with a souvenir view of Kensington Palace, and a patent German curling-iron she'd nicked from a hair-dresser's. She added a bone-handled tooth-brush and a tin of camphorated dentifrice.
   Now she took a tiny silver propelling-pencil and settled herself on the edge of her bed to write a note to Hetty. The pencil was a gift from Mr. Chadwick, with THE METROPOLITAN RAILWAY CORPORATION engraved along its shaft; the plate was starting to flake away from the brass beneath. For paper, she found she had only the back of a handbill advertising instantaneous chocolate.
   'My dear Harriet', she began, 'I am Off to Paris', but then she paused, removed the pencil's cap, and used the rubber to erase those last three words, substituting 'run Away with a Gentleman. Do not be alarmed. I am Well. You are welcome to any Cloathes I leave behind, and please do take Care of dear Toby and give him Herring. Yrs. sincerely, Sybil.'
   It made her feel queer, to write it, and when she looked down at Toby she felt sad, and false, to leave him.
   With this thought came thoughts of Radley. She was struck by a sudden and utter conviction of his falsehood.
   "He will come," she whispered fiercely. She put the lamp and the folded note on the narrow mantel.
   On the mantel lay a flat tin, brightly lithographed with the name of a Strand tobacconist. She knew that it contained Turkish cigarettes. One of Hetty's younger gentlemen, a medical student, had once urged her to take up the habit. Sybil generally avoided medical students. They prided themselves on studied beastliness. But now, in the grip of a powerful nervous impulse, she opened the tin, drew out one of the crisp paper cylinders, and inhaled its fierce perfume.
   A Mr. Stanley, a barrister, well-known among the flash mob, had smoked cigarettes incessantly. Stanley, during his acquaintanceship with Sybil, had frequently remarked that a cigarette was the thing to steel a gambler's nerve.

   Fetching the lucifers, Sybil placed the cigarette between her lips, as she'd seen Stanley do, struck a lucifer, and remembered to let the bulk of the sulphur burn away before applying the flame to the cigarette's tip. She drew hesitantly on the lit cigarette and was rewarded with an acrid portion of vile smoke that set her wracking like a consumptive. Eyes watering, she nearly flung the thing away.
   She stood before the grate and forced herself to continue, drawing periodically on the cigarette and flicking pale delicate ash onto the coals with the gesture Stanley had used. It was barely tolerable, she decided, and where was the desired effect? She felt abruptly ill, her stomach churning with nausea, her hands gone cold as ice. Coughing explosively, she dropped the cigarette into the coals, where it burst into flame and was swiftly consumed.
   She became painfully aware of the ticking of the clock.
   Big Ben began to sound midnight.
   Where was Mick?

   She woke in darkness, filled with a fear she couldn't name. Then she remembered Mick. The lamp had gone out. The coals were dead. Scrambling to her feet, she fetched the box of lucifers, then felt her way into her room, where the tinny ticking of the clock guided her to the commode.
   When she struck a match, the face of the clock seemed to swim in the sulphur glare.
   It was half past one.
   Had he come when she was sleeping, knocked, had no answer, and gone away without her? No, not Mick. He'd have found a way in, if he wanted her. Had he gulled her, then, for the cakey girl she surely was, to trust his promises?
   A queer sort of calm swept over her, a cruel clarity. She remembered the departure date on the steamship ticket. He wouldn't sail from Dover till late tomorrow, and it seemed unlikely that he and General Houston would be departing London, after an important lecture, in the dead of night. She'd go to Grand's, then, and find Mick, confront him, and plead, threaten blackmail, exposure, whatever proved necessary.
   What tin she had was in her muff. There was a cab-stand in Minories, by Goodman's Yard. She would go there now, and rouse a cabman to take her to Piccadilly.
   Toby cried once, piteously, as she closed the door behind her. She scraped her shin cruelly in the dark, on Cairns' chained bicycle.
   She was half the way down Minories to Goodman's Yard when she remembered her portmanteau, but there was no turning back.

   Grand's night doorman was heavy-set, cold-eyed, chin-whiskered, stiff in one leg, and very certainly wouldn't allow Sybil into his hotel, not if he could help it. She'd twigged him from a block away, climbing down from her cabriolet—a big gold-braided bugaboo, lurking on the hotel's marble steps under great dolphin-wreathed lamps. She knew her doormen well enough; they played a major role in her life.
   It was one thing to enter Grand's on Dandy Mick's arm, by daylight. But to walk in boldly from the midnight streets, as an unescorted woman, was another matter. Only whores did that, and the doorman would not let whores in. But she might think of a likely story to gull him, perhaps, if she thought of a very good lie, and if he were stupid, or careless, or weary. Or she might try to bribe him, though she had little enough of tin left, after the cab. And she was dressed proper, not in the flash clothes of a dollymop. She might, at a pinch, distract him. Smash a window with a cobblestone, and run past him when he came to look. It was hard to run in a crinoline, but he was lame, and slow. Or find a street-boy to throw a stone for her…
   Sybil stood in darkness, by the wooden hoardings of a construction site. Broadside posters loomed over her, bigger than bed-sheets, with great tattered shouting print: DAILY NEWS World-Wide Circulation, LLOYD'S NEWS Only One Penny, SOUTHEASTERN RAILWAY Ramsgate & Margate 7/6. Sybil pulled one hand from her muff and gnawed feverishly at her fingernail, which smelled of Turkish tobacco. She was dully surprised to notice that her hand was blue-white with the cold, and trembling badly.
   Pure luck, it seemed, rescued her then, or the nod of a sorrowing angel, for a shining gurney brougham came to a chugging halt in front of Grand's, its blue-coated fireman jumping down to lower the hinged step. Out came a rollicking mob of drunken Frenchmen in scarlet-lined capes, with brocade waistcoats and tasseled evening-canes, and two of them had women with them.
   Sybil grabbed up her skirt on the instant and scurried forward, head down. Crossing the street, she was hidden from the doorman by the barricade of the gurney's gleaming coachwork. Then she simply walked around it, past the great wood-spoked wheels with their treads of rubber, and boldly joined the group. The Frenchies were parley-vousing at each other, mustache-stroking and giggling, and did not seem to notice her, nor care. She smiled piously at no one in particular, and stood very close to a tall one, who seemed drunkest. They staggered up the marble stairs, and the tall Frenchman slapped a pound-note at the doorman's hand, with the careless ease of a man who didn't know what real money was. The doorman blinked at it and touched his braided hat.
   And Sybil was safely inside. She walked with the jabbering Frenchies across a wilderness of polished marble to the hotel-desk, where they collected their keys from the night-clerk and staggered up the curving stairway, yawning and grinning, leaving Sybil behind at the counter.
   The night-clerk, who spoke French, was chuckling over something he'd overheard. He sidled down the length of linteled mahogany, with a smile for Sybil. "How may I be of service, madame?"
   The words came hard, almost stammering at first. "Could you tell me please, has a Mr. Michael… or, rather… is General Sam Houston still registered here?"
   "Yes, madame. I did see General Houston, earlier this evening. However, he's in our smoking-room now… Perhaps you could leave a message?"
   "Smoking-room?"
   "Yes—over there, behind the acanthus." The clerk nodded toward a massive door at the corner of the lobby. "Our smoking-room is not for the ladies, of course… Forgive me, madame, but you seem a bit distressed. If the matter's vital, perhaps I should send a page."
   "Yes," Sybil said, "that would be wonderful." The night-clerk obligingly produced a sheet of cream-laid hotel stationery and proffered his gold-nibbed reservoir-pen.
   She wrote hastily, folded the note, scrawled MR. MICHAEL RADLEY on the back. The night-clerk crisply rang a bell, bowed in response to her thanks, and went about his business.
   Shortly, a yawning and sour-faced little page appeared and placed her note on a cork-topped salver.
   Sybil trailed anxiously behind as he trudged to the smoking-room. "It is for the General's personal secretary," she said.
   " 'Tis awright, miss, I know 'im." He heaved one-handed at the smoking-room door. As it opened, and the page passed through, Sybil peered in. As the door slowly closed, she had a long glimpse of Houston, bare-headed, shiny-faced, and sweaty-drunk, with one booted foot propped on the table, beside a cut-glass decanter. He had a wicked-looking jackknife in his hand, and was puffing smoke and jabbing at something—whittling, that was it, for the floor around his leather chair was littered with wood-shavings.
   A tall bearded Englishman murmured something to Houston. The stranger had his left arm caught in a white silk sling, and looked sad-eyed and dignified and important. Mick stood at his side, bending at the waist to light the man's cheroot. Sybil saw him rasping at a steel sparker, on the end of a dangling rubber gas-tube, and then the door shut.
   Sybil sat on a chaise-longue in the echoing marble lobby, warmth stealing through her damp, grimy shoes; her toes began to ache. Then the page emerged with Mick on his heels, Mick smiling back into the smoking-room and sketching out a cheery half-salute. Sybil rose from her seat. Seeing her there, his narrow face went bleak.
   He came to her quickly, took her elbow. "Bloody Christ," he muttered, "what kind of silly note was that? Can't you make sense, girl?"
   "What is it?" she pleaded. "Why didn't you come for me?"
   "Bit of a contretemps. I'm afraid. Case of the fox biting his own arse. Might be funny if it weren't so bleeding difficult. But having you here now may change matters… "
   "What's gone wrong? Who's that gentry cove with the gammy arm?"
   "Bloody British diplomat as doesn't care for the General's plan to raise an army in Mexico. Never you mind him. Tomorrow we'll be in France, and he'll be here in London, annoyin' someone else. At least I hope so… The General's queered things for us, though. Drunk as a lord and he's pulled one of his funny little tricks… He's a nasty bastard when he drinks, truth to tell. Starts to forget his friends."
   "He's gulled you somehow," Sybil realized. "He wants to cut you loose, is that it?"
   "He's nicked my kino-cards," Mick said.
   "But I mailed them to Paris, poste restante" Sybil said. "Just as you told me to do."
   "Not those, you goose—the kino-cards from the speech!"

   "Your theatre cards? He stole 'em?"
   "He knew I had to pack my cards, take 'em along with me, don't you see? So he kept a watch on me somehow, and now he's nicked 'em from my baggage. Says he won't need me in France after all, so long as he's got my information. He'll hire some onion-eater can run a kino on the cheap. Or so he says."
   "But that's theft!"
   " 'Borrowing,' according to him. Says he'll give me back my cards, as soon as he's had 'em copied. That way I don't lose nothin', you see?"
   Sybil felt dazed. Was he teasing her? "But isn't that stealing, somehow?"
   "Try arguing that with Samuel bloody Houston! He stole a whole damn country once, stole it clean and picked it to the bone!"
   "But you're his man! You can't let him steal from you."
   Mick cut her off. "When it comes to that—you might well ask how I had that fancy French program made. You might say I borrowed the General's money for it, so to speak." He showed his teeth in a grin. "Not the first time we've tried such a stunt on one another. It's a bit of a test, don't you see? Fellow has to be a right out-and-outer, to travel with General Houston… "
   "Oh Lord," Sybil said, collapsing into her crinoline on the chaise. "Mick, if you but knew what I've been thinking…"
   "Brace up, then!" He hauled her to her feet. "I need those cards and they're in his room. You're going to find them for me, and nick 'em back. And I'm going back in there and brass it out, cool as ice." He laughed. "The old bastard mightn't have tried this, if not for my tricks at his lecture. You an' Corny Simms made him feel he was right and fly, pulling strings! But we'll make a pigeon of him yet, you and I, together… "
   "I'm afraid, Mick," Sybil said. "I don't know how to steal things!"
   "You little goose, of course you do," Mick said.
   "Well, will you come with me and help, then?"
   "Of course not! He'd know then, wouldn't he? I told him you were a newspaper friend of mine. If I stay too long talking, he'll smell a rat sure." He glared at her.
   "All right," Sybil said, defeated. "Give me the key to his room."
   Mick grunted. "Key? I haven't any bloody key."
   A wash of relief went through her. "Well, then. I'm not a cracksman, you know!"
   "Keep your voice down, else you'll tell everyone in Grand's…" His eyes glinted furiously. He was drunk, Sybil realized. She'd never seen Mick really drunk before, and now he was lushed, lightning-struck. It didn't show in his voice or his walk, but he was crazy and bold with it. "I'll get you a key. Go to that counter-man, blarney him. Keep him busy. And don't look at me." He gave her half a shove. "Go!"
   Terrified, she returned to the counter. The Grand's telegraph stood at the far end, a ticking brass machine on a low marble pedestal decorated with leafy gilt vines. Within a sort of bell-glass, a gilded needle swung to and fro, pointing out letters in a concentric alphabet. With every twitch of the needle, something in the marble base clunked methodically, causing another quarter-inch of neatly perforated yellow paper tape to emerge from the marble base. The night-clerk, who was punching binder-holes in a bundle of fan-fold paper, set his work aside, clipped on a pince-nez, and came toward her.
   "Yes, madame?"
   "I need to send a telegram. It is rather urgent."
   The clerk deftly assembled a small box of punch-cards, a hinged brass perforator, a neatly ruled form. He took out the reservoir-pen Sybil had used earlier. "Yes, madame. Citizen-number?"
   "Oh… Would that be my number, or his?"
   "That would depend, madame. Are you planning to pay by national credit?"
   "May I charge it to my room?" Sybil hedged.
   "Certainly, madame. Room number?"
   Sybil hesitated for as long as she dared. "I suppose I'll pay cash, actually."
   "Very well. Now, the addressee's citizen-number?"
   "I'm afraid I don't know it, actually." She blinked at the clerk and began to chew on one knuckle.
   He was very patient. "You do have a name and address, though?"
   "Oh yes," Sybil said hastily. "Mr. Charles Egremont, M.R, 'The Beeches,' Belgravia, London."
   The clerk wrote this down. "It is rather more costly to send a wire with only an address, madame. It's more efficient to route it direct through the Central Statistics Bureau." Sybil had not been looking for Mick. She had been afraid to look. Now, from the corner of her eye, she saw a dark form scuttle across the lobby floor. Mick was bent almost double, with his shoes off, the laces knotted around his neck. He charged headlong at the waist-high mahogany counter, grabbed the forward edge two-handed, vaulted over it in a split-second, and vanished.
   He had made no sound at all.
   "Something to do with the way an Engine handles messages," the clerk was explaining.
   "Indeed," Sybil said. "But I haven't his citizen-number. I shall have to pay the extra, then, shan't I? This is very important."
   "Yes, madame. I'm sure it is. Pray go on, and I shall take dictation."
   "I don't suppose I should begin with my address and the date? I mean, a telegram's not a letter, really, is it?"
   "No, madame."
   "Or his address, either?"
   "Brevity is the essence of telegraphy, madame."
   Mick would be creeping to the hotel's mahogany pegboard, which hung clustered with room-keys. She couldn't see him, but now she imagined she could hear him moving, almost smell him, and the clerk needed only to glance to his right to discover a sneak-thief creeping toward him, crazy-eyed and crouching like an ape.
   "Please take this down," Sybil quavered. "Dear Charles." The clerk began scribbling. "Nine years ago you put me to the worst dishonor that a woman can know."
   The clerk stared in horror at his pen, a hot flush creeping up past his collar.
   "Charles, you promised me that you would save my poor father. Instead you corrupted me, body and soul. Today I am leaving London, in the company of powerful friends. They know very well what a traitor you were to Walter Gerard, and to me. Do not attempt to find me, Charles. It would be useless. I do hope that you and Mrs. Egremont will sleep soundly tonight." Sybil shuddered. "Sign that 'Sybil Gerard,' if you please."
   "Yes, madame," the clerk muttered, eyes downcast as Mick sprang silently back over the counter in his stocking feet. Mick crouched low, hidden by the counter's bulk, then crept off quickly on his haunches, waddling across the marble floor, like a monstrous duck. In a moment he had rolled behind a pair of overstuffed chairs.
   "What do I owe?" Sybil asked the clerk politely.
   "Two and six," the clerk stammered, quite unable to meet her eyes.
   She counted it out from the little clasp-purse she took from her muff, and left the red-faced clerk at his station, punching telegram-cards from his box.
   Mick came strolling like a gentleman across the lobby. He paused beside a reading-rack hung with neatly ironed newspapers. He bent down, coolly re-tying his shoes, straightened, and she saw the glint of metal in his hand. Not bothering even to catch her eye, he tucked the key behind a cut-velvet cushion on the chaise-longue. Then he stood briskly, straightened his tie, brushed at his sleeves, and strode straight off into the smoking-room.
   Sybil sat for a moment on the chaise, pretending to read a gold-spined monthly, 'Transactions of the Royal Society'. Carefully, with the fingertips of her right hand, she fished behind her for the key. Here it was, with the number "24" engraved on the oval brass. She yawned, in what she hoped was a ladylike fashion, and stood, to retire upstairs, entirely as if she had a room there.

   Her feet ached.
   As she trudged along the silent gas-lit hall, toward Houston's suite, she felt a sudden amazement at having struck out at Charles Egremont. Needing some dramatic message to distract the clerk, she'd blurted out threats and rage. It had come boiling out of her, almost without her will. It puzzled her, and even frightened her, after having imagined that she'd almost forgotten the man.
   She could imagine the fear on Egremont's face when he read her telegram. She remembered his face well enough, fatuous and successful, which always looked as though it meant well, always apologized, always preached at her, and whined, and begged, and wept, and sinned. He was a fool.
   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 announced tonelessly. "Hate 'em like I hate Injuns. Or Mexicans. Mexican Injuns… French Mexican Injuns with guns, three, four hundred strong. On horseback, got them wind-up rifles, closest thing to devils on earth."
   "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 Fannin surrendered. They took us prisoner, all the niceties, polite as you please. Next day they marched us out of town. Shot us down in cold blood. Just lined us up. Massacred us."
   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."
   "Be his last, then. He alone?"
   "He…" Mick. "He's with a tall man. I don't know him."
   "Beard on 'im? Arm broke?"
   "I… Yes."
   He made a sucking sound between his teeth; then leather creaked as he shrugged.
   Something rattled, to Sybil's left. In the faint glow from the curtained window she glimpsed the gleaming facets of the cut-glass door-knob as it began to twist. The Texian leapt from his chair.
   With the palm of one hand pressed tight against her mouth, he held the great dirk before her, a hideous thing like an elongated cleaver, tapering to a point. A length of brass ran along its spine; with the blade inches from her eyes she saw notches and nicks along the brass. And then the door was opening, Mick ducking through, his head and shoulders stenciled out by the light in the corridor.
   She must have struck her head against the wall when the Texian flung her aside, but then she was kneeling, the crinoline bunched beneath her, watching the man hoist Mick against the wall, a single great hand about his throat, the heels of Mick's shoes beating a frantic tattoo against the wainscoting—until the long blade struck, twisted, struck again, filling the room with the hot reek of Butcher Row.

   And all that happened after, in that room, was a dream to Sybil, or a play she watched, or some kino-show wrought with balsa-bits so numerous, so tiny, and so cleverly worked, as to blur reality. For the Texian, lowering Mick quietly to the floor, closed and re-locked the door, his movements unhurried and methodical.
   She swayed where she knelt, then sagged against the wall behind the bureau. Mick was dragged away, heels scraping, into the deeper darkness beside the wardrobe. The Texian knelt over him—there was a rustle of clothing, the slap of the card-case flung aside, a jingle of change and the sound of a single coin, falling, rolling, spinning on the hardwood floor…
   And there came from the door a scratching, the rattle of metal on metal—the sound of a drunken man trying a keyhole.
   Houston, throwing the door wide, lurched forward on his heavy stick. He belched thunderously and rubbed the site of his old wound. "Sons of bitches," he said, hoarse with drink, listing violently, the stick coming down with a sharp crack at each step. "Radley? Come out, you little whelp." He'd neared the bureau now, and Sybil snatched her fingers back silently, afraid of the weight of his boots.
   The Texian closed the door.
   "Radley!"
   "Evenin', Sam."
   Her room above the Hart seemed distant as childhood's first memories, here in the smell of slaughter, in this dark where giants moved—Houston reeled suddenly to slash at the curtains with his cane, tore them open, gas-light catching the patterns of frost on the glass of each mullioned pane, illuminating the Texian's kerchief and the grim eyes above it, eyes distant and merciless as winter stars. Houston staggered at the sight, the striped blanket sliding from his shoulders. His medals gleamed, quivered.
   "Rangers sent me, Sam." Mick's little pepperbox pistol looked a toy in the Texian's hand, the clustered barrels winking as he took aim.
   "Who are you, son?" Houston asked, all trace of drunkenness abruptly gone from his deep voice. "You Wallace? Take off that neckcloth. Face me man-to-man… "
   "You ain't giving no more orders, General. Shouldn't ought to have took what you did. You robbed us, Sam. Where is it? Where's that treasury money?"
   "Ranger," Houston said, his voice a rich syrup of patience and sincerity, "you've been misled. I know who sent you, and I know their lies and slanders against me. But I swear to you that I stole nothing—those funds are mine by right, the sacred trust of the Texas government-in-exile."
   "You sold Texas out for British gold," the Ranger said. "We need that money, for guns and food. We're starvin', and they're killin' us." A pause. "And you mean to help 'em do it."
   "The Republic of Texas can't defy the world's great powers, Ranger. I know it's bad in Texas, and my heart aches for my country, but there can't be peace till I'm back in command."
   "You got no money left, do you?" the Ranger said. "I looked, and it ain't here. You sold your fancy estate in the countryside… You threw it all away, Sam, on whores and drink and fancy theatre shows for foreigners. And now you want to come back with a Mexican army. You're a thief, and a drunk, and a traitor."
   "God damn you," Houston roared, and flung open his coat with both hands, "you're a cowardly assassin, you filthy-mouthed son of a bitch. If you think you have the guts to kill the father of your country, then shoot for the heart." He thumped his chest.
   "For Texas." The pepperbox spat a flare of orange flame, edged with blue, hurting Houston back against the wall. Houston crashed to the floor as the avenger pounced, crouching to thrust the muzzles of the little pistol against the gaudy leopard waistcoat. There was a gun-blast into Houston's chest, then another, then a loud snap as the delicate trigger broke in the Ranger's fist.
   The Ranger flung Mick's gun aside. Houston sprawled, unmoving, red sparks crawling through the fur of the leopard waistcoat.
   There were sleepy shouts of alarm from another room. The Texian seized Houston's cane and began to batter the window; glass shattered, crashing to the pavement below; mullions gave way, and then he was scrambling out, across the sill. He froze there, for an instant, icy wind tugging at his long coat, and Sybil, in her trance, was reminded of her first sight of him: a vast dark crow, poised now for flight.
   He jumped from sight, Houston's destroyer, the angel of Goliad, and was gone, leaving her in silence and rising terror, as if his vanishing had broken a spell. She began to crawl forward, quite without aim and cruelly hampered by her crinoline, yet it was as if her limbs moved of their own accord. The heavy cane lay on the floor, but its head, a gilt brass raven, had snapped free of the shaft.
   Houston moaned.
   "Please be quiet," she said. "You're dead."
   "Who are you?" he said, and coughed.

   The floor was littered with shards of glass, sharp under her palms. No. Bright. Like pebbles. The cane, she saw, was hollow, and had spilled its tight nesting of cotton-wool, where more of the pebbles nested. Bright, bright diamonds. Her hands scooped them together, wadding the cotton-wool, to thrust the lot into her bodice, between her breasts.
   She turned to Houston then. He still lay on his back, and she watched in fascination as a bloodstain spread along his ribs. "Help me," Houston grunted. "I can't breathe." He tugged at his waistcoat's buttons and it came open, showing neat inner pockets of black silk, stuffed tight with dense packs of paper: thick punch-card packs in glued brown wrappers, their intricate perforations surely ruined now by the hot impact of bullets… And blood, for at least one slug had struck him true.
   Sybil rose, and walked, giddily, toward the door. Her foot squelched moistly in the red-splashed shadows by the wardrobe, and she looked down, to see an open card-case in red morocco, with a pair of tickets in a heavy nickel-plate clip. She stooped, picked it up.
   "Get me to my feet," Houston demanded, his voice stronger now, tinged with urgency and irritation. "Where's my walking-stick? Where's Radley?"
   The room seemed to rock beneath her, like a ship at sea, but she crossed to the door, opened it, stepped out, closed it behind her, and continued, like any gentry-girl, along the gas-lit and utterly respectable corridors of Grand's Hotel.

   The South-Eastern Railway Company's London Bridge Terminus was a vast drafty hall of iron and soot-blown glass. Quakers moved among the avenues of benches, offering pamphlets to the seated travelers. Red-coated Irish soldiers, red-eyed from the night's gin, glowered at the close-shaven missionaries as they passed. The French passengers all seemed to be returning home with pineapples, sweet exotic bounty from the docks of London. Even the plump little actress who sat opposite Sybil had her pineapple, its green spikes protruding from a covered basket at her feet.

   The train flew through Bermondsey and out into little streets of new brick, red tile. Dust-heaps, market-gardens, waste-ground. A tunnel.
   The darkness about her stank of burnt gunpowder.
   Sybil closed her eyes.
   When she opened them, she saw crows flapping above a barren down, and the wires of the electric telegraph all alive, blurring, moving up and down in the intervals between poles, dancing in the wind of her passage toward France.

   This image, surreptitiously daguerreotyped by a member of the Public Morals Section of the Surete Generale, January 30, 1855, presents a young woman seated at a table on the terrace of the Cafe Madeleine, No. 4 Boulevard Malesherbes. The woman, seated alone, has a china teapot and cup before her. Justification of the image reveals certain details of costume: ribbons, frills, her cashmere shawl, her gloves, her earrings, her elaborate bonnet. The woman's clothing is of French origin, and new, and of high quality. Her face, slightly blurred by long camera exposure, seems pensive, lost in thought.
   Justification of background detail reveals No. 3 Boulevard Malesherbes, the offices of the Compagnie Sud Atlantique Transport Maritimes. The office window contains a large model steamboat with three funnels, a French-designed craft for the trans-Atlantic colonial trade. A faceless elderly man, evidently an accidental subject, seems lost in contemplation of the ship; his lone figure emerges therefore from the swiftly moving blurs of the Parisian street-crowd. His head is bare, his shoulders slump, and he leans heavily on a cane, apparently of cheap rattan. He is as unaware of the young woman's proximity as she is of his.
   She is Sybil Gerard.
   He is Samuel Houston.
   Their paths diverge forever.

SECOND ITERATION
Derby Day

   He is frozen in mid-stride as he edges diagonally into the depths of the holiday crowd. The angle of aperture has captured a fraction of his face: high cheekbone, thick dark beard trimmed close, right ear, stray lock of hair visible between corduroy coat-collar and striped cap. The cuffs of his dark trousers, buttoned tight in leather spats above hobnailed walking-boots, are speckled to the shins with the chalky mud of Surrey. The left epaulet of his worn, waterproof coat buttons sturdily over the strap of a military-issue binocular case; the lapels flap open in the heat, showing stout gleaming toggles of brass. His hands are jammed deep in the long coat's pockets.
   His name is Edward Mallory.
   He tramped through a lacquered gleam of carriages, blindered horses cropping noisily at the turf, amid childhood smells of harness, sweat, and grassy dung. His hands inventoried the contents of his various pockets. Keys, cigar-case, billfold, card-case. The thick staghorn handle of his multi-bladed Sheffield knife. Field notebook—most precious item of all. A handkerchief, a pencil-stub, a few loose shillings. A practical man. Dr. Mallory knew that every sporting-crowd has its thieves, none of them dressed to match their station. Anyone here might be a thief. It is a fact; it is a risk.
   A woman blundered into Mallory's path, and his hobnails tore the flounce of her skirt. Turning, wincing, she tugged herself loose with a squeak of crinoline as Mallory touched his cap, and marched quickly on. Some farmer's wife, a clumsy, great red-cheeked creature, civilized and English as a dairy-cow. Mallory's eye was still accustomed to a wilder breed, the small brown wolf-women of the Cheyenne, with their greased black braids and beaded leather leggings. The hoop-skirts in the crowd around him seemed some aberrant stunt of evolution; the daughters of Albion had got a regular scaffolding under there now, all steel and whalebone.
   Bison; that was it. American bison, just that very hoopskirt silhouette, when the big rifle took them down; they had a way of falling, in the tall grass, suddenly legless, a furry hillock of meat. The great Wyoming herds would stand quite still for death, merely twitching their ears in puzzlement at the distant report of the rifle.
   Now Mallory threaded his way among this other herd, astonished that mere fashion could carry its mysterious impetus so far. The men, among their ladies, seemed a different species, nothing so extreme—save, perhaps, their shiny toppers, though his inner eye refused to find any hat exotic. He knew too much about hats, knew too many of the utterly mundane secrets of their manufacture. He could see at a glance that most of the hats around him were dead cheap, Engine-made, pre-cut in a factory, though looking very nearly as fine as a craftsman-hatter's work, and at half the price or less. He had helped his father in the little haberdashery in Lewes: punching, stitching, blocking, sewing. His father, dipping felt in the mercury bath, had seemed not to mind the stench…
   Mallory was not sentimental about the eventual death of his father's trade. He put it from his mind, seeing that drink was being sold from a striped canvas tent, men crowding the counter, wiping foam from their mouths. A thirst struck him at the sight of it. Veering around a trio of sporting-gents, crops under their arms, who argued the day's odds, he reached the counter and tapped it with a shilling.
   "Pleasure, sar?" asked the barman.
   "A huckle-buff."
   "Sussex man, sar?"
   "I am. Why?"
   "Can't make you a proper huckle-buff, sar, as I haven't barley-water," the fellow explained, looking briskly sad. "Not much call for it outside Sussex."
   "Very nearly two years since I've tasted huckle-buff," Mallory said.
   "Mix you a lovely bumbo, sar. Much like a huckle-buff. No? A good cigar, then. Only tuppence! Fine Virginia weed." The barman presented a crooked cheroot from a wooden box.
   Mallory shook his head. "When I've the taste for something, I'm a stubborn man. A huckle-buff or nothing."
   The barman smiled. "Won't be drove? A Sussex man, sure! I'm a county-man meself. Take this fine cigar gratis, sir, with my complimums."
   "Very decent of you," Mallory said, surprised. He strolled off, shaking a lucifer from his cigar-case. Firing the match on his boot, he puffed the cheroot into life and tucked his thumbs jauntily in the arm-holes of his waistcoat.
   The cigar tasted like damp gunpowder. He yanked it from his mouth. A cheap paper band girdled the foul, greenish-black leaf, a little foreign flag with stars and bars and the motto VICTORY BRAND. Yankee war-rubbish; he flung it away, so that it bounced sparking from the side of a gypsy-wagon, where a dark-headed child in rags snatched it quickly up.
   To Mallory's left, a spanking new steam-gurney chugged into the crowd, the driver erect at his station. As the man drew his brake-lever, a bronze bell clanged in the gurney's maroon prow, people scattering sulkily before the vehicle's advance. Above them, passengers lounged in velvet coach-seats, the folding spark-shield accordioned back to admit the sun. A grinning old swell in kid gloves sipped champagne with a pair of young misses, either daughters or mistresses. The gurney's door gleamed with a coat-of-arms, cog-wheel azure and crossed hammers argent. Some Rad's emblem unknown to Mallory, who knew the arms of every savant Lord—though he was weak on the capitalists.
   The machine was headed east, toward the Derby garages; he fell in behind it, letting it clear his path, easily keeping pace and smiling as draymen struggled with frightened horses. Pulling his notebook from his Docket, stumbling a little in the gouged turf-tracks of the brougham's thick wheels, he thumbed through the colorful pages of his spotter's guide. It was last year's edition; he could not find the coat-of-arms. Pity, but it meant little, when new Lords were ennobled weekly. As a class, the Lordships dearly loved their steam-chariots.
   The machine set its course for the gouts of greyish vapor rising behind the pillared grandstands of Epsom. It humped slowly up the curb of a paved access-road. Mallory could see the garages now, a long rambling structure in the modern style, girdered in skeletal iron and roofed with bolted sheets of tin-plate, its hard lines broken here and there by bright pennants and tin-capped ventilators.
   He followed the huffing land-craft until it eased into a stall. The driver popped valves with a steaming gush. Stable-monkeys set to work with greasing-gear as the passengers decamped down a folding gangway, the Lord and his two women passing Mallory on their way toward the grandstand. Britain's self-made elite, they trusted he was watching and ignored him serenely. The driver lugged a massive hamper in their wake. Mallory touched his own striped cap, identical with the driver's, and winked, but the man made no response.
   Strolling the length of the garages, spotting steamers from his guidebook. Mallory marked each new sighting with his pencil-stub and a small thrill of satisfaction. Here was Faraday, great savant-physicist of the Royal Society, there Colgate the soap magnate, and here a catch indeed, the visionary builder Brunei. A very few machines bore old family arms; landowners, whose fathers had been dukes and earls, when such titles had existed. Some of the fallen old nobility could afford steam; some had more initiative than others, and did what they could to keep up.
   Arriving at the southern wing. Mallory found it surrounded by a barricade of clean new saw-horses, smelling of pitch. This section, reserved for the racing-steamers, was patrolled by a squad of uniformed foot-police. One of them carried a spring-wind Cutts-Maudslay of a model familiar to Mallory, the Wyoming expedition having been provided with six of them. Though the Cheyenne had regarded the stubby Birmingham-made machine-carbine with a useful awe. Mallory knew that it was temperamental to the point of unreliability. Inaccurate to the point of uselessness as well, unless one were popping off the entire thirty rounds into a pack of pursuers—something Mallory himself had once done from the aft firing-position of the expedition's steam-fortress.
   Mallory doubted that the fresh-faced young copper had any notion what a Cutts-Maudslay might do if fired into an English crowd. He shook off the dark thought with an effort.
   Beyond the barricade, each separate stall was carefully shielded from spies and odds-makers by tall baffles of tarpaulin, tautly braced by criss-crossed cables threaded through flagpoles. Mallory worked his way through an eager crowd of gawkers and steam-hobbyists. Two coppers stopped him brusquely at the gate. He displayed his citizen's number-card and his engraved invitation from the Brotherhood of Vapor Mechanics. Making careful note of his number, the policemen checked it against a thick notebook crammed with fan-fold. At length they pointed out the location of his hosts, cautioning him not to wander.
   As a further precaution, the Brotherhood had appointed their own look-out. The man squatted on a folding-stool outside the tarpaulin, squinting villainously and clutching a long iron spanner. Mallory proffered his invitation. The guard stuck his head past a narrow flap in the tarpaulin, shouted, "Your brother's here, Tom," and ushered Mallory through.
   Daylight vanished in the stink of grease, metal-shavings, and coal-dust. Four Vapor Mechanics, in striped hats and leather aprons, were checking a blueprint by the harsh glare of a carbide lamp; beyond them, a queer shape threw off highlights from curves of enameled tin.

   He took the thing for a boat, in the first instant of his surprise, its scarlet hull absurdly suspended between a pair of great wheels. Driving-wheels, he saw, stepping closer; the burnished piston-brasses vanished into smoothly flared openings in the insubstantial-looking shell or hull. Not a boat: it resembled a teardrop, rather, or a great tadpole. A third wheel, quite small and vaguely comical, was swivel-mounted at end of the long tapered tail.
   He made out the name painted in black and gilt across the bulbous prow, beneath a curved expanse of delicately leaded glass: Zephyr.
   "Come, Ned, join us!" his brother sang out, beckoning. "Don't be shy!" The others chuckled at Tom's sauciness as Mallory strode forward, his hobnails scraping the floor. His little brother Tom, nineteen years old, had grown his first mustache; it looked as though a cat could lick it off. Mallory offered his hand to his friend, Tom's master. "Mr. Michael Godwin, sir!" he said.
   "Dr. Mallory, sir!" said Godwin, a fair-haired engineer of forty years, with mutton-chop whiskers over cheeks pitted by smallpox. Small and stout, with shrewd, hooded eyes, Godwin began a bow, thought better of it, clapped Mallory gently across the back, and introduced his fellows. They were Elijah Douglas, a journeyman, and Henry Chesterton, a master of the second degree.
   "A privilege, sirs," Mallory declared. "I expected fine things from you, but this is a revelation."
   "What do you think of her. Dr. Mallory?"
   "A far cry from our steam-fortress, I should say!"
   "She was never made for your Wyoming," Godwin said, "and that accounts for a certain lack of guns and armor. Form emerges from function, as you so often told us."
   "Small for a racing-gurney, isn't she?" Mallory ventured, somewhat at a loss. "Peculiarly shaped."
   "Built upon principles, sir, newly discovered principles indeed. And a fine tale behind her invention, having to do with a colleague of yours. You recall the late Professor Rudwick. I'm sure."
   "Ah, yes, Rudwick," Mallory muttered, then hesitated. "Hardly your new-principle man, Rudwick…"
   Douglas and Chesterton were watching him with open curiosity.
   "We were both paleontologists," Mallory said, suddenly uncomfortable, "but the fellow fancied himself gentry of a sort. Put on fine airs and entertained outmoded theories. Rather muddy in his thinking, in my opinion."
   The two mechanics looked doubtful.
   "I'm not one to speak ill of the dead," Mallory assured them. "Rudwick had his friends, I've mine, and there's an end to it."
   "You do remember," Godwin persisted, "Professor Rudwick's great flying reptile?"
   "Quetzalcoatlus," Mallory said. "Indeed, that was a coup; one can't deny it."
   "They've studied its remains in Cambridge," Godwin said, "at the Institute of Engine Analytics."
   "I plan to do a bit of work there myself, on the Brontosaurus," Mallory said, unhappy with the direction the conversation seemed to be taking.
   "You see," Godwin continued, "the cleverest mathematicians in Britain were snug there, spinning their great brass, while you and I froze in the mud of Wyoming. Pecking holes in their cards to puzzle out how a creature of such a size could fly."
   "I know about the project," Mallory said. "Rudwick published on the topic. But 'pneumo-dynamics' isn't my field. Frankly, I'm not sure there's much to it, scientifically. It seems a bit… well… airy, if you follow me." He smiled.
   "Great practical applications, possibly," Godwin said. "Lord Babbage himself took a hand in the analysis."
   Mallory thought about it. "I'll concede there's likely something to pneumatics, then, if it's caught the eye of the great Babbage! To improve the art of ballooning, perhaps? Balloon-flight, that's a military field. There's always ample funding for the sciences of war."
   "No, sir; I mean in the practical design of machinery."
   "A flying machine, you mean?" Mallory paused. "You're not trying to tell me this vehicle of yours can fly, are you?"
   The mechanics laughed politely. "No," Godwin said, "and I can't say that all that airy Engine-spinning has come to much, directly. But we now understand certain matters having to do with the behavior of air in motion, the principles of atmospheric resistance. New principles, little-known as yet."
   "But we mechanics," said Mr. Chesterton proudly, " 'ave put 'em to practical use, sir, in the shaping of our Zephyr."
   " 'Line-streaming,' we call it," Tom said.
   "So you've 'line-streamed' this gurney of yours, eh? That's why it looks so much like, er…"
   "Like a fish," Tom said.
   "Exactly," said Godwin. "A fish! It's all to do with the action of fluids, you see. Water. Air. Chaos and turbulence! It's all in the calculations."
   "Remarkable," Mallory said. "So I take it that these principles of turbulence—"
   A sudden blistering racket erupted from a neighboring stall. The walls shook and a fine sifting of soot fell from the ceiling.
   "That'll be the Italians," Godwin shouted. "They've brought in a monster this year!"
   "Makes a mortal hogo of a stink!" Tom complained.
   Godwin cocked his head. "Hear them try-rods clacking on the down-stroke? Bad tolerances. Slovenly foreign work!" He doffed his cap and dusted soot against his knee.
   Mallory's head was ringing. "Let me buy you a drink!" he shouted.
   Godwin cupped his ear blankly. "What?"
   Mallory pantomimed; lifted a fist to his mouth, with his thumb cocked. Godwin grinned. He had a quick, bellowed word with Chesterton, over the blueprints. Then Godwin and Mallory ducked out into the sunshine.
   "Bad try-rods," the guard outside said smugly. Godwin nodded, and handed the man his leather apron. He took a plain black coat, instead, and traded his engineer's cap for a straw wide-awake.
   They left the racing-enclosure. "I can only spare a few minutes," Godwin apologized. " 'The Master's eye melts the metal,' as they say." He hooked a pair of smoked spectacles over his ears. "Some of these hobbyists know me, and might try to follow us… But never mind that. It's good to see you again, Ned. Welcome back to England."
   "I won't keep you long," Mallory said. "I wanted a private word or two. About the boy, and such."
   "Oh, Tom's a fine lad," said Godwin. "He's learning. He means well."
   "I hope he'll prosper."
   "We do our best," Godwin said. "I was sorry to hear from Tom about your father. Him taking so ill, and all."
   " 'Ould Mallory, he won't a-go till he's guv away his last bride,' " Mallory quoted, in his broadest Sussex drawl. "That's what Father always tells us. He wants to see all his girls married. He's a game sort, my poor old dad."
   "He must take great comfort in a son like yourself," Godwin said. "So, how does London suit you? Did you take the holiday train?"
   "I've not been in London. I've been in Lewes, with the family. Rode the morning train from there to Leatherhead; then I tramped it."
   "You walked to the Derby from Leatherhead? That's ten miles or more!"
   Mallory smiled. "You've seen me tramp twenty, cross-country in the badlands of Wyoming, hunting fossils. I'd a taste to see good English countryside again. I'm only just back from Toronto, with all our crates of plastered bones, while you've been here for months, getting your fill of this." He waved his arm.
   Godwin nodded. "What do you make of the place, then—now you're home again?"