The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club - [Diogenes Club 02] Read online

“Nooooo,” said Quinn, milking it. “A new name. A true name. A name fit for the councils of Bobbin Swiftshaft and Billy Boggart.”

  “Grumpia Goatess,” she ventured, quietly. She knew her face was red. The bear’s bristles were scraping.

  “I have the very name! Brenda Banshee!”

  Kate, surprised, was horrified.

  “Brenda Banshee, Brenda Banshee,” chanted the children. Many of them booed.

  Brenda Banshee was the sloppy maidservant in the house of Seamus O’Short, always left howling at the end of the tale. It struck Kate that the leprechaun was less than an ideal employer, given to perpetrating “hilarious pranks” on his staff, then laughing uproariously at their humiliations. In the real world, absentee landlords in Ireland were boycotted for less objectionable behaviour than Seamus got away with every month.

  “What does Brenda Banshee do?” asked Quinn.

  “She howls! She howls!”

  “If you think I’m going to howl,” she told Sir Boris quietly, “you’re very much mistaken.”

  “Howl, Brenda,” said Quinn, grinning. “Howl for the boys and girls.”

  She set her lips tight.

  If Brenda Banshee was always trying to filch coins from her employer’s belt o’ gold, it was probably because she was an indentured servant and received no wages for her drudgery.

  “I think you’d howl most prettily,” whispered Sir Boris de Bruin.

  It dawned on her that she knew the voice.

  She looked into the bear’s mouth and saw familiar eyes.

  “Charles?”

  “If I can wear this, you can howl.”

  She was astounded, and very conscious of the embrace in which she was trapped. Her face, she knew, was burning.

  “Please howl,” demanded Quinn, enjoying himself.

  Kate screwed her eyes shut and howled. It sounded reedy and feeble. Sir Boris gave her an encouraging, impertinent squeeze.

  She howled enough to raise a round of applause.

  “Very nice, Brenda,” said Quinn. “Howl-arious. Shall we go inside?”

  The book covers opened.

  * * * *

  ii: “details, young miss”

  Whatdid Charles Beauregard think he was about?

  She scarcely believed that an agent of the Diogenes Club would take it into his head to supplement his income by dressing up as a storybook bear in the service of Mr. Satterthwaite Bulge. She recalled John Watson’s story in the Strand of the respectable suburban husband who earned a healthy living in disguise as a deformed beggar. Kate wondered at the ethics of publicising such a singular case; it now served as an excuse for the smugly well-off to scorn genuine unfortunates on the grounds that “they doubtless earn more than a barrister.” Money would not come into this. Charles was of the stripe who does nothing for purely financial reward. Of course, he could afford his scruples. He did not toil in an underpaid calling still only marginally willing to accept those of her sex. The profession Neville St. Clair had found less lucrative than beggary was her own, journalism.

  Sir Boris hung back as Quinn escorted her along a low-ceilinged tunnel hung with green-threaded muslin. Underfoot was horsehair matting, dyed dark green to approximate forest grass.

  “We proceed along the Airy Path, to Noggart’s Nook...”

  Quinn led her to a huge tree trunk which blocked the way. The plaster creation was intricate, with grinning goblin faces worked into the bark. Their eyes glowed, courtesy of dabs of luminous paint. An elaborate mechanical robin chirruped in the branches. Quinn rapped three times on the oak. Hidden doors opened inwards.

  “.. .and into the Realm of Bobbin Swiftshaft, Prince of the Pixies...”

  Kate stepped into the tree, and down three shallow steps. Cloth trailed over her face.

  “Mind how you go.”

  She had walked into a curtain. Extricating herself, she found she was in a vaulted space: at once cathedral, Big Top, and planetarium. The dome sparkled with constellations, arranged to form the familiar shapes of B. Loved creatures. Miss Fay, Bobbin Swiftshaft, Jack Stump, Sir Boris, Seamus, and the rest cavorted across the painted, glittering ceiling. Tinsel streamers hung, catching the light. All around was a half-sized landscape, suitable for little folk, created through tamed nature and theatrical artifice. Kate, who spent most of her life peering up at people, was here taller than the tallest tree—many were genuine dwarves cultivated in the Japanese manner, not stage fakery—and a giant beside the dwellings. The woods were fully outfitted with huts and palaces, caves and castles, stone circles and hunting lodges. Paths wound prettily through miniature woodland. Water flowed from a fountain shaped like the mouth of a big bullfrog, whose name and station escaped her. The respectable torrent poured prettily over a waterfall, agitated a pond beneath, and passed out of the realm as a stream which disappeared into a cavern. An iron grille barred the outflow, lest small persons tumble in and be swept away.

  All around were strange gleams, in the air and inside objects.

  “The light,” she said, “it’s unearthly.”

  Looking close, she found semiconcealed glass globes and tubes, each containing a fizzing glowworm. Some were tinted subtle ruby-red or turquoise. They shone like the eyes of ghosts.

  “We’re mighty proud of the lighting,” said Quinn. “We use only Edison’s incandescents, which burn through the wizardry of the age, electricity. Beneath our feet are vast dynamos, which churn to keep the Aerie illuminated. The Gift quite literally puts the Savoy in the shade.”

  Mr. d’Oyly-Carte’s Savoy Theatre had been fully electrified for over a decade. Some metropolitan private homes were lit by Edison lamps, though the gas companies were fighting a vicious rearguard campaign against electrification, fearing the fate of the candle-makers. Despite scare stories, the uninformed no longer feared lightning-strikes from newfangled gadgetry. They also no longer gasped in wonder at the mere use of an electrical current to spin a wheel or light a room. There was a risk that electric power would be relegated to quack medicinal devices like the galvanic weight-loss corset. In America, electrocution was used as a means of execution; in Britain, the process was most familiar from advertisements for the miracle food Bovril—allegedly produced by strapping a cow into an electric chair and throwing the switch. From H.G. Wells, the Pall Mall Gazette’s scientific correspondent, Kate gathered that the coming century would be an Era of Electricity. At present, the spark seemed consigned to trivial distraction; that was certainly the case here.

  A bulb atop a lantern-pole hissed, flared, and popped. A tinkling rain of glass shards fell.

  “Some trivial teething troubles,” said Quinn.

  A lanky fellow in an overall rushed to attend to the lantern. He extracted the burned-out remains, ouching as his fingers came into contact with the hot ruin. He deftly screwed in a replacement, which began at once to glow, its light rising to full brightness. Another minion was already sweeping the fragments into a pan for easy disposal.

  “Unusual-looking elves,” she commented.

  “It takes a crew of twenty-five trained men to keep the show going,” said Quinn. “When the Gift is open, theywill be elves. Each will have their own character and place.”

  Uncle Satt was insistent that in Færie, as in mundane society, there was a strict order of things. If a woodsman wed a fairy princess, it was a dead cert he was a prince in disguise rather than a real peasant. The reader was expected to guess as much from a well-born character’s attention to personal cleanliness. Children knew the exact forms of protocol in Uncle Satt’s imaginary kingdom, baffling adults with nursery arguments about whether a knight transformed into a bear by Witch-Queen Coelacanth outranked a tiger-headed maharajah from Far Off Indee.

  Charles had shambled in and was sitting on a wooden bench, head inclined so he could talk quietly with one of the worker elves. Quinn had not noticed that Sir Boris had abandoned the other Merry Guardians.

  When Mr. Henry Cockayne-Cust, her editor, sent Kate to the Gift, she had
considered it a rent-paying exercise, a story destined for the depths of the inside pages. Much of her work was fish-wrap before it had a chance to be read. It was a step up from “Ladies’ Notes”—to which editors often tried to confine her, despite an evident lack of interest in the intricacies of fashionable feminine apparel or the supervision of servants—but not quite on a level with theatre criticism, to which she turned her pen in a pinch, which is to say when the Gazette’s, official reviewer fell asleep during a first night.

  An item (“puff piece”) about the Færie Aerie seemed doomed to fall into the increasingly large purview of Quinn’s profession. She lamented the colonisation of journalism by organised boosterism and the advertising trade. In some publications, people were deemed worthy of interest because of a happenstance rather than genuine achievement. The day might come when passing distraction was valued higher than matters of moment. She held it a sacred duty to resist.

  If Mr. Charles Beauregard, ifthe Diogenes Club, took an interest in the Gift, an interest was worth taking. Some aspect of the endeavour not yet apparent would likely prove, in her uncle’s parlance, “news-worthy.”

  Quinn’s jibe about “daredevil” lady reporters had niggled. Now, she wondered whether there might not be a Devil here to dare.

  “This, dear Brenda, is Uncle Satt.”

  While she was thinking, Mr. Satterthwaite Bulge had come up out of the ground.

  Illustrations made Bulge a cherubic fat man, a clean-shaven Father Christmas or sober Bacchus, always drawn with gleam a-twinkle in his bright eye and smile a-twitch on his full, girlish lips. In person, Bulge was indeed stout but with no discernible expression. His face was the colour of thin milk, and so were his long-ish hair and thin-ish lips. His eyes were the faded blue of china left on a shelf which gets too much sun. He wore sober clothes of old-fashioned cut, like a provincial alderman who stretches one good suit to last a lifetime in office. Bulge seemed like an artist’s blank: a hole where a portrait would be drawn. More charitably, she thought of actors who walked through rehearsals, hitting marks and reciting lines without error, but withheld their performance until opening night, saving passion for paying customers.

  Bulge had climbed a ladder and emerged through a trap-door, followed by another elf, a clerkish type with clips on his sleeves and a green eyeshade.

  “This is Katharine Reed, of thePall Mall Gazette,” said Quinn.

  “What’s the circulation?” asked Bulge.

  “Quite large, I’ll wager,” she said. “We’re under orders not to reveal too much.”

  That, she knew, was feeble. In fact, she had no idea.

  “I know to the precise number what the Treasury sells by the month. I know to the farthing what profit is to be had from the Annual. Details, young miss, that is the stuff of my enterprise, of all enterprises. Another word for detail ispenny. Pennies are hard to come by. It is a lesson the dear children learn early.”

  She did not think she would ever be able to call this man “Uncle.” The instant Bulge used the phrase “thedear children” and slid his lips into something he fondly imagined to be a smile, Kate knew his deepest, darkest secret. Mr. Satterthwaite Bulge, Uncle Satt of Uncle Satt’s Treasury for Boys and Girls, greatly disliked children. It was an astonishing intuition. When Bulge used the word “dear,” his meaning was not “beloved” but “expensive.” Some parents, not least her own, might secretly agree.

  “Do you consider the prime purpose of your enterprise to be educational?” she asked.

  Bulge was impatient with the attempt at interview.

  “That’s covered in the, ah, what do you call the thing, Quinn... the press release. Yes, it’s all covered in that. Questions, any you might ask, have already been answered. I see no purpose in repeating myself.”

  “She has the press release, Mr. Bulge,” said Quinn.

  “Good. You’re doing your job. Young miss, I suggest you do yours. Why, all you have to do to manufacture an article is pen a general introduction, copy out Quinn’s release and sign your name. Then you have your interview with Uncle Satt at a minimum of effort. A fine day’s work, I imagine. A pretty penny earned.”

  The flaw, of course, was that she was not the only member of the press to receive the “release.” If an article essentially identical to her own appeared in a rival paper, she would hear from Mr. Harry Cust. The editor could as devastatingly direct disapproval in person at one tiny reporter as, through editorial campaign, at an entire segment of society or tier of government. For that reason, the excellent and detailed brochure furnished by Quinn lay among spindled documents destined for use as tapers. The “press release” would serve to transfer flame from the grate to that plague of cigarettes which rendered the air in any newspaper office more noxious than the streets during the worst of a pea-soup fog.

  “If I could ask a few supplementary questions, addressing matters touched upon but not explored in the release...”

  “I can’t be doing with this now,” said Bulge. “Many things have to be seen to if the Gift is to open to thedear children on schedule.”

  “Might I talk with others involved? For instance, B. Loved remains a man of mystery. If the curtain were lifted and a few facts revealed about the artist, you could guarantee a great deal of, ah, publicity.”

  Bulge snorted. “I have a great deal of publicity, young miss.”

  “But...”

  “There’s no mystery about Loved. He’s just a man with a paint-box.”

  “So, B. Loved is a man then, one man, not...”

  “Talk with Quinn,” Bulge insisted. “It’s his job. Don’t bother anyone else. None can afford breaks for idle chatter. It’s all we can do to keep everyone about their work, without distractions.”

  Quinn, realising his employer was not making the best impression, stepped in.

  “I’ll be delighted to show Kate around.”

  “You do that, Quinn.”

  “She has her fairy sack.”

  Kate held it up.

  “Tuppence lost,” said Bulge. “Quinn’s extravagances will be the ruin of me, young miss. I am surrounded by spendthrifts who care nought for details.”

  “Remember, sir,” said Quinn, mildly, “the matter we discussed...”

  Bulge snorted. “Indeed, I do. More jargon. Public image, indeed. Arrant mumbo jumbo and impertinence.”

  If Uncle Satt wrote a word published under his name, Kate would be astounded. On the strength of this acquaintance, she could hardly believe he even read his own periodicals.

  Which begged the question of what exactly he did in his empire.

  See to details? Add up pennies?

  If B. Loved was a man with a paint-box, was he perhaps on the premises? If not painting murals himself, then supervising their creation. She had an intuition that the trail of the artist might be worth following.

  A nearby tower toppled, at first slowly with a ripping like stiff paper being torn, and then rapidly, with an almighty crash, trailing wires that sparked and snapped, whipcracking towards the stream.

  Bulge looked at Kate darkly, as if he suspected sabotage.

  “You see, I am busy. These thingswill keep happening...”

  Wires leaped like angry snakes. Elves kept well away from them.

  “Accidents?” she asked.

  “Obstacles,” responded Bulge.

  Bulge strode off and stared down the cables, which died and lay still. The electric lamps dimmed, leaving only cinder ghosts in the dark. Groans went up all around.

  “Not again,” grumbled an elf.

  Someone struck a match.

  Where the tower had fallen, a stretch of painted woodland was torn away, exposing bare lath. Matches flared all around and old-fashioned lanterns lit. It was less magical, but more practical.

  “What is it this time, Sackham?”

  “Been chewed through, Uncle,” diagnosed the clerk, examining the damage. “Like before.”

  Bulge began issuing orders.

  Kate to
ok the opportunity to slip away. She hoped Bulge’s attention to details would not extend to keeping track of her.

  These things will keep happening.

  That was interesting. That was what they called a lead.

  * * * *

  iii: “goblins”

  “Is this a common event?” she asked an idling elf.

  “Not ‘arf,” came the reply. “If it ain’t breakin’ down, it’s fallin’ down. If it ain’t burnin’ up, it’s messin’ up.”

  This particular elf was staying well out of the way. Several of his comrades, under the impatient supervision of Uncle Satt, were lifting the fallen tower out of the stream. Others, mouths full of nails and hammers in their hands, effected emergency repairs.