Ник Харкуэй - Angelmaker

“Plant, good. Dixon, good. Clements, no, I don’t think so, girl, you’re in the Christmas play. Where shall we find another Magdalene who can sing? No, no. And… hmph.” Which is all the approbation Edie is likely to see, but no denay, and that will do.

“I’m so sorry, Miss Thomas, I didn’t catch that last?”

The little man is long-faced and pomaded. A pimp, Edie decides, like Quick Jack Duggan or Herb the Knife. On the other hand, he wears a blue suit of the most conservative kind, with a longish waistcoat and a fob watch. The fob has a small gold flower on the far end. Not worth pinching, or not yet, but a chunk of stuff all the same and very fine. Not Masonic, which is disappointing. The Masons, she has heard, perform depraved rites.

“Banister,” Miss Thomas mutters. “A lost child.”

“My, my. How so, lost?”

“In every sense, I’m afraid. Lost, because orphaned. Lost, because she must ask every question in her head and then another and another, and lost because she is stepped in spiritual grime and even in my most blessed and hopeful dreams I cannot see her ever casting out sin and admitting the Lord of Hosts.”

“Oh, dear.”

“Indeed.”

“Well, I shall certainly pray for her.”

“Oh, indeed.”

“Is there a particular prayer one offers up for young girls adrift on a sea of dreadful temptation? Something in the line of ‘Oh hear us, when we cry to thee’?”

“No,” Miss Thomas says, displaying some exhaustion with the topic. “Just whatever you can manage.”

“I shall manage what I can, then.”

Miss Thomas nods, and proceeds to vaunt the other two girls and ignore Edie entirely. No surprise, and in any case Edie is not concerned. She has seen the spark in the gentleman’s eye, and knows that he has seen her seeing it. And she knows, too, by the flat-faced sincerity of his mien and his bland, unamused expression, that this man is a most unmitigated crook. Crooks do not go looking in distant corners for virtue. They can find that anywhere. Kindred wickedness, on the other hand, is a thing which must be sought out, and the seeking is the more difficult because it naturally masquerades, where virtue is drably ostentatious.

“My name,” the little gentleman says, “is Abel Jasmine. I am in the employ of the Treasury of His Majesty George VI, who is, of course, our king. At least, I assume he is. Is there anyone here who isn’t a subject of His Majesty?”

Tittering. Even Miss Thomas titters. Edie does not. It’s a perfectly valid question. There might be an Irish person, or an American, or even a French citizen in the room. Mr. Jasmine smiles and leans forward, hands clasped.

“Excellent. All Brits together, eh? So, ladies. I’m afraid we come to a most difficult question. Which of you has recently told an absolutely egregious lie? Miss Thomas?”

“No,” Miss Thomas says sniffily. More tittering. Never, Jessica Plant says, has she even embroidered the truth. (Which is, of course, an egregious lie, but a very stupid one.) Holly Dixon admits to having lied about having a stomach upset to avoid kitchen duty. Miss Thomas makes a note. Edie smiles and says nothing, and sees Mr. Jasmine’s eye settle immediately on her face.

“No deceptions in your life, Miss Banister?” Mr. Jasmine asks at last.

“It’s frightfully embarrassing,” Edie says breathlessly. “There must have been some, I’m sure. But for the life of me,” she offers him a broad, empty-headed smile, “I can’t think what they might have been, sir. Is that terribly bad?” She cancels the smile and the fluttery panic, and meets his gaze as hard as she can. “Is that what you had in mind, sir? Or more in the way of outrage at the very notion?”

Miss Thomas makes an outraged little noise in preparation for a scolding, but the little man holds up his hand and smiles.

“I believe you hit it on the head, Miss Banister,” Abel Jasmine says. He shrugs. “Well. Welcome to Science 2. You best go and pack. Thank you, Miss Thomas.”

Edie keeps her face absolutely even, as if she had expected nothing less, and sees Abel Jasmine notice that, too.

Tally-ho, Edie Banister thinks, with considerable pleasure.

Abel Jasmine’s word is backed by most elevated persons, and while the laws of England cannot casually be broken, their action can be most miraculously expedited. Edie Banister finds herself in transit that very day, and her guardianship—never her most serious concern—is transferred from Miss Thomas to a stout woman named Amanda Baines who is Mr. Jasmine’s Second Director.

Not “secretary,” Edie notes, as they drive away in an official-looking car, and her old life—such as it was—vanishes behind her. Not “mistress” or the more cowardly “companion,” nor “housekeeper” nor “cook.” Second Director, meaning deputy and fully empowered, which if it is not an entirely new thing is all the same a notable and important thing. Amanda Baines is a force in her own right. When Edie calls her “Miss Baines,” the woman responds with a deep, earthy chuckle, heavy hands on the steering wheel, and says that it is in fact “Captain Baines,” but that Edie should in any case call her Amanda.

Captain as in—of—a ship?

Yes. The good ship Cuparah .

Is it a big ship?

It is a research ship.

What kind of research? What kind of ship?

Amanda Baines produces a narrow pipe in white clay, and allows Abel Jasmine to light it.

“A Ruskinite ship,” she replies, and her grey eyes peer at Edie through the smoke.

Edie has not heard the word, but has no intention of admitting it. She has studied, in the cool classrooms of Lady Gravely, the work of an art critic named John Ruskin, who elected to refer to himself in Greek as Kata Phusin (“According to Nature”) and whose distaste for the processes of industrial construction had once led him to describe the Lady Gravely school itself as “impoverished of heart, devoid of soul, and unsuited to its function; a carbuncle of a building festering upon the fundament of Shropshire.” It is an assessment with which Edie can only agree. She pictures Ruskin leaning sadly on an oak at the far end of the drive and jotting in his notebook: Lady G, Shrop. Bloody ghastly. Write to The Times. Spare no spleen .

Ho hum. Ruskin was against standardisation. He liked each aspect of a building to be the product of a unique human soul, an expression of the relationship with (inevitably) God. So, and so.

“A unique ship.”

“Yes.”

“A special ship.”

“We like to think so.”

“A… a Victorian Gothic ship?”

Amanda Baines makes a snorting noise which could be either affirmation or disdain, and that is all Edie learns, because they have arrived at Paddington station and, through the gloom and smoke, she sees the train.

In this year of Our Lord 1939, of course, many people of means have private carriages which can be shackled to a train to provide the discerning— id est the wealthy and empowered, whose discernment need only reach so far as to know that they’re more important than anyone else—with a railway voyage at some remove from the common rabble. The wagons of the Rothschilds, the Kennedys, the Spencers and the Astors are spoken of in hushed tones at Lady Gravely as the symbol of grande luxe life and the thing to which every gal of character, charm and class might aspire. But no one Edie has ever heard of had his own train entire, complete with an engine, twice the height of a man, scrolled and chased in brass and trimmed in black iron. Certainly no one has anything so absolutely warlike, so defensible, armour-plated and fitted with a ram at the front, the engineer’s compartment sheltered from incoming fire. And…