Kevin Anderson: The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

“No, sir.” Pilkins’ shoulders sagged. The sound of wheels and hoofbeats came from the courtyard. “Oh; that’ll be our Ralph bringing the constable, I reckon.”

“Very good.” Ludbridge surveyed them all. “Gentlemen, in view of the tragic circumstances of this evening, and considering the Rawdons’ noble history — to say nothing of your own reputations as shrewd men of the world — I do think nothing is to be gained by bruiting this scandal abroad. Perhaps I ought to quietly withdraw.”

“If you only would, sir—” said Pilkins, weeping afresh.

“The kitchens are down here, sir,” said Lady Beatrice, leading the way. As they descended, they heard the constable’s knock and Ali Pasha saying, “Should someone not go waken the count?”

“A splendid farrago of lies, sir,” said Lady Beatrice, as they descended.

“Thank you. Perhaps we ought to quicken our pace,” said Ludbridge. “I should like to be well clear of the house before anyone goes in search of the Frenchman.”

“Where did you put him, sir, if I may ask?”

“In his bed, where else? And a nice job someone did on his partner, I must say. Let the Austrians clean that up!”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Did anyone hear us?” asked Dora, as they entered the kitchen. “I had to get Jane to help me lift it — not heavy, you know, but awkward.”

“They didn’t hear a thing,” said Lady Beatrice, kneeling beside the chest. “Jumbey? Jumbey, dear, is poor Hindley all right?”

“He’s frightened,” said the eerie voice. “He can tell there are strangers about.”

“Tell him he needn’t worry. No one will disturb him, and soon he’ll have a bigger and better laboratory to play in.”

“Maude, just you go catch your Ralph before he puts the horses away,” said Mrs. Corvey, and Maude went running out crying:

“Ralph, my love, would you oblige us ever so much? We just need a ride to the village.”

The tragedy of Lord Basmond’s death set tongues wagging in Little Basmond, but what really scandalized the village was the death of the French count at the hands of his Austrian valet; a crime of passion, apparently, though no one could quite determine how the valet had managed to break all the count’s bones. The local magistrate was secretly grateful when an emissary of the Austrian government showed up with a writ of extradition and took the valet away in chains. More: in a handsome gesture, the Austrians paid to have the count’s corpse shipped back to France.

Ali Pasha and Prince Nakhimov returned alive to their respective nations, wiser men. Sir George Spiggott returned to his vast estate in Northumberland, where he took to drink and made, in time, a bad end.

When Lord Basmond’s solicitors looked through his papers and discovered the extent of his debts, they shook their heads sadly. The staff was paid off and dismissed; every stick of furniture was auctioned in an attempt to satisfy the creditors, and when even this proved inadequate, Basmond Park itself was forfeit. Here complications ensued, with the two most importunate creditors wrangling over whose claim took precedence. In the end the case was tied up in chancery for thirty years.

I say, ladies!” Herbertina tilted her chair back and rested her feet on the fender. “Here’s a bit of news; Basmond Hall has collapsed.”

“How awfully sad,” said Jane, looking up from the pianoforte.

“Indeed,” said Miss Otley. “It was an historic site of great interest.”

“It says here it fell in owing to the collapse of several hitherto unsuspected mine shafts beneath the property,” said Herbertina.

“I don’t doubt it,” remarked Mrs. Corvey, with a shudder. “I’m surprised the place didn’t fall down with us in it.”

“And soon, no doubt, shall be a moldering and moss-grown mound haunted by the spectres of unquiet Rawdons,” said Lady Beatrice, snipping a thread of scarlet embroidery floss. “Speaking of whom, has there been any word of poor dear Jumbey?”

“Not officially,” said Mrs. Corvey. “There wouldn’t be, would there? But Mr. Felmouth has intimated that the present Lord Basmond is developing a number of useful items for Fabrication.”

“Happily, I trust?”

“As long as he gets his candy floss regular, yes.”

“Jolly good!” Maude played a few experimental notes on her concertina. “Who’s for a song? Shall we have ‘Begone, Dull Care,’ ladies?”

A note about the story: Kage Baker wrote science fiction and fantasy, but what she loved to read was history . The Women of Nell Gwynne’s (Subterranean Press, 2009) was born from a vignette in Kage Baker’s steampunk novel Not Less Than Gods (Tor, 2010). Kage had built the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society, a Victorian predecessor to Dr. Zeus, Inc. in the Company stories. She wanted a player she could send into that Great Game of top hats and aetheric energies and geared death ray machines; the eponymous ladies of Nell Gwynne’s were intended to provide a saucy little interlude for her novice spies. But then they got away from her. She said their voices would not fall silent .

Kage had an enormous background in stage management and improvisation. That contributed a lot to the genteelly perverse theater of Nell Gwynne’s. The demimondaines of Nell’s were inspired by backstage lunacy at the Dickens Fair where Kage spent every December; it all drew on every desperately underprovisioned show she ever wrote, directed, or performed in. And because Kage was Kage, there was a wide streak of rather black humor in all this. There’s an undeniable element of farce in the business of a brothel anyway: so much strained fantasy and desperate make-believe! A Victorian whore house, she said, was a perfect place wherein to poke fun at authority with its breeches round its knees .

Kage Baker (1952 to 2010) was a daughter of Hollywood. She grew up in the Hollywood Hills, as close as the modern world can come to the Border of Faerieland — the Wild Hunt came to cocktail parties in her mother’s rose garden, and Kage got to eat the fruit spears out of their drinks.

All this gave her a unique vision of what was real and what was not, and how the many realities of the world blend together. She was fascinated with the layers of reality, and how strangeness peeks out between those layers to confound everyday life. Often, in fact, strangeness stands up and shouts and waves its arms to get our attention — then life gets very odd indeed. Those were the moments she liked the best: the collision between mundane and fantastic. How every elfin prince has to worry about how to pay the rent; how even a Dark Lord’s fortress needs functional plumbing; how immortality can only be endured by clinging to mortal appetites. How you make a living home on Mars.

Kage started writing about all this when she was nine years old, and she wrote until the week before her death from cancer in January 2010. What Kage mostly did was write. Everything else she did — acting, painting, one-thousand-mile-a-weekend commutes up and down California — poured straight into her stories. Once the stories and novels began to sell, she rebuilt her life around writing — ecstatic to be making her living doing what she loved best. By the last year of her life, she couldn’t write fast enough to keep up with the demands; many notes and story lines are still waiting in her files. She ran out of time before she ran out of ideas.

Kage was lucky, and she knew it. She said that writing never failed, that there was nothing as satisfying as sitting down and falling into the world behind the keyboard. She had a clear picture of her muse — her very male muse — and she said she could always feel his hand on the nape of her neck, urging her on as she wrote. That may have been why she wrote so constantly, at such a breakneck speed — like a runner chasing the rising sun, like a woman running toward her lover. And in the end, I think she caught him.