The Friday Society Read online

“I said no thank you.”

  There was a small gasp. “Are you . . .”

  “Very busy? Yes. Good day.” Cora resumed her journey through the crowd, desperate to brush off the encounter. She would not go back there. Even if she had to physically, now and again, she would never go back there in her mind.

  Though, “Are you . . .?”

  Cora turned, but the girl was nowhere to be seen.

  She hoped upon hope that the rest of the sentence hadn’t been, “. . . Cora Bell?”

  Only a few steps more and she was facing the door to the Red Veil, a plain wooden thing with a small dragon carved into it at eye level. Cora pushed the brief encounter with the flower girl from her thoughts and focused on the task ahead.

  Deep breath.

  She didn’t bother knocking, just burst her way inside. Maybe it was a little overly enthusiastic of her, but her nerves were on edge.

  She found herself in a small vestibule where a short, pockmarked Chinese man, his flesh sagging off his face, stood staring at her, clearly shocked by her sudden arrival.

  She approached him and, as casually as she could, said, “I’m looking for Lord White.”

  The way the man’s eyes widened instantly told her that her boss was definitely here. Where he was precisely, though, she had no idea, as it looked like there were no other rooms or hallways off this one.

  “Where is he?” she asked, turning back to the man.

  The man suddenly launched into a speech in his native language, but of course Cora couldn’t understand a word of it. He gesticulated wildly, punctuating his thoughts with his finger thrusting into her face. Cora nodded, growing impatient.

  “Yes, yes, I see,” she interrupted loudly. “Now, as to Lord White . . . ?”

  “Lord White?” asked the man as if it was the first time she’d mentioned the name.

  “Stop pretending. There’s no need for secrecy. I know for a fact he’s here. Where is he?”

  The man shook his head vehemently.

  “No Lord White,” he said.

  “Don’t be difficult; just show me.”

  “No. No Lord White here. Now go.”

  He pointed toward the exit. Cora noticed the man glance for a brief moment at a faded tapestry hanging on the wall beside him, and then glance back at her. It was the smallest of moves, but Cora had seen it.

  “Yes, fine,” she said slowly, “I’ll go.” And she turned her body slightly to give the impression she was leaving.

  The man relaxed, and Cora knew that finally his guard was down. It didn’t take much effort to push beyond him to the tapestry. He’d clearly had no idea she was going to just whip past him like that, and, as she pushed her way through the tapestry and into the dark stairwell beyond, he stood totally still, paralyzed with confusion.

  She was already halfway down the stairs when he finally came rushing down after her, shouting, “No, no!” When he put his sweaty palm on her shoulder, Cora had had enough.

  “Sir,” she said, turning around abruptly and aiming her small pistol between his legs, “I am not the police. I am not here to make a scene, nor to report any activity to anyone. I am merely here to find my boss and bring him home so he can prepare for an event this evening for which it would be best if he were sober. You have been most unhelpful, and if you don’t let me take care of my business, I can assure you I will do away with yours.”

  The man offered a weak “No,” but it was clear he took her threat seriously. Cora raised an eyebrow at him, and he took two steps back upstairs.

  She lowered the pistol and tucked it back inside her small purse. “Good.” Then she turned and continued her descent into the dark.

  She wasn’t feeling half as confident as she pretended to be. This place freaked her out. Though she’d rescued Lord White many, many times, this was the first time she’d been anywhere quite so . . . skeevy. Usually opium dens were simple places. A front room for money to exchange hands, a back room to get high. Really a very straightforward business model.

  This place was different, though. For one thing, it was huge. Far too huge to house an opium den alone. And it all made her feel slightly uncomfortable to think what else might be hidden away down the dark, damp passages.

  Cora made her way down the hall, past several doors on either side with small square windows cut into them. She decided to avoid looking through the windows. She knew that his lordship was not likely to be in one of those rooms. Such proclivities just didn’t suit his taste. Also she really didn’t need to see anything that might keep her awake at night.

  Finally the hall opened up onto a room a lot like the ones in smaller opium dens, a simple square open space with pillows strewn about and pipes littering the floor. It was here she spotted Lord White, lying surrounded by half a dozen or so women. All of them appeared dead to the world, including his lordship, and Cora wondered why he’d bothered to come to this particular den only to pass out. Seemed impractical.

  The room was pleasant, though, artfully decorated with fabric that draped across the ceiling, down the walls, and over the bodies strewn about. Chinese lanterns lit the scene most ineffectively; they seemed to be more for atmosphere than anything else.

  “Very picturesque,” she said as she approached Lord White.

  His glasses were askew, falling across his face, and he was hugging a silk pillow. He opened his eyes a crack.

  “Miss Bell,” he said, the words drooling out of his mouth.

  “Indeed. Come; it’s time to go.”

  “Five more minutes.”

  “No, now.” Don’t make me sift through all these bodies to pull you up, sir. Please.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Well, we all have to do things we don’t want.” Cora considered pointing out that the things that most people had to do that they didn’t want to do were probably a little more unpleasant than his not wanting to go home and get ready for an extravagant gala.

  But of course she didn’t.

  “This is intolerable,” he said, shifting himself up onto his elbows. “Where are my glasses?”

  “On your face.”

  “They’re clearly not.” His voice was getting louder, a little too loud.

  “Well, no, I mean . . . You aren’t wearing them properly, true, but they are lying across your face.”

  “No.”

  “They are . . . right on your . . .” Cora sighed hard and leaned over, plucking his glasses from his face and showing them to him.

  “Oh, look, my glasses!” said his lordship with great pleasure.

  “I know. What a wonderful magic trick. Up, now.”

  It was Lord White’s turn to release a sigh. He reached out his hand, and Cora, with much effort, helped him to stand. For a small man, his lordship’s body mass was awfully dense.

  Lord White teetered dangerously. He finally looked at her. He squinted. Then the squint slowly turned into eyes closing.

  Dear God, sobering him up was going to be a task.

  “Time to go home,” she said, giving him a firm shake. It took a lot of work to get him up the stairs, but fortunately she met a helpful Chinese man carrying a tea tray who gave her a hand dragging him.

  When they arrived in the foyer that led back through the tapestry, Cora gave an indulgent smile to the man she’d met earlier. Then, reaching into his lordship’s breast pocket, she pulled out a sovereign and passed it to him. He stared at it in surprise.

  “For your discretion,” she said.

  The man nodded in silence and helped them to the door. Once more Cora’s hand flew inside Lord White’s pocket and she withdrew a pair of dark round sunglasses. She exchanged his normal glasses for these, and then, with a sharp nod, she directed the man to open the door to bright daylight.

  3

  An Unexpected Guest

  “LET HIM SLEEP it off,” instructed Cora as she and Lord White entered his darkened foyer. Barker nodded and took over escorting duties, leading his lordship up the grand staircase.
r />   Cora sighed and slowly removed her hat, gloves, and jacket. But she didn’t have time to relax yet. She still had to unpack that shipment which might or might not have arrived, and which she was obviously now doing alone, considering that his lordship could barely carry a conversation, let alone heavy boxes.

  She made her way along the dark hall to Lord White’s library.

  A modern addition to the Tudor home, it stood two stories tall, with bookshelves packed with every book imaginable covering all walls. It had a huge fireplace at one end opposite an equally huge double set of doors. A giant-domed, stained-glass skylight lit the place by day, and nearly a hundred lanterns by night. Rugs from all corners of the earth lay wherever they damn well felt like, covering one another and the floor. And in the center of the room was a giant globe that spun slowly on its axis.

  Cora loved his lordship’s library. Who could blame her? For someone who loved reading as much as she did, it was pure heaven.

  But what she loved even more was the lab beneath it. Only a handful of people knew of its existence, and of Lord White’s private business operation: his staff, obviously his lordship himself, and Cora. Anyone who commissioned an invention from his lordship did so through a third party.

  Cora made her way over to the stack of books at the foot of the globe. It looked like they’d been piled there without much thought. Hidden underneath a volume of The Origin of Species was an oversized copy of Dante’s Inferno. She opened the book. It was hollow and empty except for the giant brass button that stared up at her. And, as most giant buttons tended to do, it invited her, by its mere giant buttonness, to push it.

  She did.

  The globe beside her slowly stopped its rotation.

  There was a moment of nothingness.

  And then.

  A seam appeared in the middle of the globe, cutting the top hemisphere in two. Light poured out of it, up toward the darkening skylight. Slowly the seam grew wider as each side of the top hemisphere pulled apart and sank into the lower hemisphere until the latter was all that remained, open, like a giant punch bowl.

  Cora climbed up the stepladder that stood conveniently to the globe’s side and looked down into the depths. A curling wrought-iron staircase wound deep into the ground, leading to a white marble floor.

  Cora skipped lightly down the steps.

  Then she pulled her pistol from her purse and placed it firmly between the fifteenth and sixteenth vertebrae of the stranger standing in the middle of the room.

  “Is that a pistol you’ve placed firmly between my fifteenth and sixteenth vertebrae?” The young gentleman’s voice was surprisingly calm, Cora thought, considering the situation.

  “It is indeed,” she replied.

  The young man didn’t say anything for a second—Cora assumed probably because he hadn’t been expecting the person who was threatening him to be, you know, a girl.

  Then:

  “I ask only because there have been occasions when an individual might pretend to be threatening a person with a pistol when really they are using something far more mundane. Like a finger, maybe.”

  “I suppose that could happen.”

  “And if I spin around and use a spectacular set of moves I learned while at school, and I disarm you of this instrument of death, I will indeed be removing a weapon and not, say, pulling your finger.”

  “I can assure you, sir, this is no finger.”

  There was a sudden flurry of activity as the young man spun on the spot, his arms a blur, and Cora found herself no longer holding on to her pistol. Why did he underestimate her like that? I mean, who threatens someone without a backup plan? Honestly. She removed the knife from its sheath at her waist and placed it at the young man’s throat as he came at her in some kind of attack. He froze in place.

  “Ah, well, now I know for certain you’ve got a knife to my throat because I saw it,” he said, tensing his neck against the blade pushing into his skin. “And can feel it. Very bladelike.”

  “No mistaking this for a finger now, is there?” Okay, so now she was kind of having fun with this.

  “No indeed. Very well played.”

  “I’m good at games. I always win.”

  “Well, it’s easy to win when you cheat.”

  “I don’t cheat!” Maybe Lord White would hide a card or two up his sleeve, but she’d never do that. . . .

  “You did approach a man with his back turned, you did reveal a secondary, previously undisclosed, weapon. That’s not playing fair.”

  Cora thought about this for a moment. Okay . . . fair point . . . “A burglar with a sense of propriety. How interesting.”

  “I’m no burglar, miss.”

  “No?” Actually, with his accent and his clothes, he didn’t seem likely to be one. Then again, with her accent and her clothes, he’d never have thought her to have been a common street urchin once upon a time either.

  “I am a legitimate employee of Lord White, as a matter of fact.”

  A lie. She knew all of Lord White’s employees—both at home and at the office. “How legitimate?”

  “It depends. I’ve been legitimately hired, with a contract. However, having perused his lordship’s inventions now, I can see that some of them might cross the line of what is considered legal. And so possibly there is a degree of illegitimacy in being such a man’s lab assistant . . . Ow!”

  “Sorry.” Cora lightened the pressure of the blade against his skin, revealing a small red mark on his neck. With her heart pounding in her chest, she asked, “Did you say ‘lab assistant’?”

  “Yes.”

  She lowered her arm. It was starting to ache from holding the knife to his throat anyway.

  It wasn’t possible that after all this time Lord White had just decided to replace her. Not now, not when she was really getting into the whole inventing thing.

  She made her way over to the far end of the room. Barker had done his usual remarkable job and there wasn’t a trace of her earlier disaster, or goo. Though . . . she reached up to her hair and felt a dried clump of the stuff. Great. She’d gone out looking like this. Next time, Cora, maybe glance in a mirror before you step outside.

  She collapsed into the chair at Lord White’s desk, feeling small and insignificant surrounded by the large ticking machines.

  “I say, what’s made you so sullen?” said the young man.

  “Nothing.” A jet of steam exploded from the pipe to her right and just missed the top of her head. She didn’t flinch. She was used to jets of steam exploding around her at unexpected intervals.

  “Nothing?” asked the young man, finally coming over and leaning against the desk, looking down at her. “I’d say there’s a sudden lack of enthusiasm for killing me. Here,” he said, returning her pistol and standing back. “Threaten me.”

  “I’m not in the mood.” Cora replaced her pistol in her purse and crossed her arms over her chest.

  “Oh, come now . . . where’s that little knife of yours . . . ?”

  Cora sighed. His charm wasn’t helping the situation. She had to hate him. After all, he was replacing her.

  Why didn’t his lordship think she was good enough?

  She could feel her throat tense. No, she scolded herself, I will not cry. Crying is what other girls do. I am not “other girls.”

  “Fine, I’ll just have to find . . . where’s that cabinet . . . ?” The young man had crossed the floor to Lord White’s armory and opened the door before Cora registered what was happening.

  “No!” she said, standing up abruptly.

  The young man turned to face her, holding a gear-covered gun so large that his lordship had crafted a device to wear around one’s waist to support it.

  “How about this?”

  “Not the Chekhov!” Cora rushed over to his side and very gently pried the weapon from his hands. She returned it to its position in the armory and stared down at it, feeling short of breath.

  “Is everything okay?” the young man asked, coming u
p from behind.

  “What the bloody hell is wrong with you?” she said, turning to him, her rage bringing back traces of her old accent. “You don’t touch anything in the lab unless you’ve been instructed to. And you never, ever, go into the armory. The danger you just put us in—”

  “Well, why’s it unlocked, then?”

  “Why should his lordship lock up anything in a secret lab? The whole point of having a secret lab is that it’s secret. There’s no fear of stupid young men coming along and grabbing at whatever shiny object suits their fancy without any consideration of the considerable destructive power of said object.” This? This was the person Lord White wanted to replace her? This fool?

  “I . . .” The young man was speechless.

  “Yes, very well articulated. Now move out of my way. I have work to do.” She pushed past him and crossed to the rear of the room where the loading doors were located. There were four large crates waiting for her to unpack. She grabbed her brass goggles and leather gloves and put them on as she made her way to the long table beside the wall next to the doors. It was a mess of tools, and Cora sighed hard as she looked for the wrenching instrument.

  “Can I help?” asked the young man, appearing at her side.

  “No.”

  “Are you trying to open the crates? I can help with that.” He showed her the crowbar he’d found.

  Cora found the wrenching instrument, a small piece of flat metal attached to a square box with a crank, and moved past him silently.

  “Look, I think this will be a bit better,” he said, following her to the crates. “I think you’re more likely to break that thing you’re holding than open up these boxes.” He stepped in front of her and held up his hands to stop her.

  “Move,” she ordered.

  “Come on, let me help. You shouldn’t have to do such hard labor, not a pretty thing like you.”

  The fact that he thought a compliment hidden in condescension was the right tactic to get her to listen to him confirmed what a perfect idiot he was. Once more she decided to ignore him and, pushing past him roughly, made her way over to the first crate.

  She heard him sigh and glanced up. He was standing over another crate and examining it closely. Then he whipped off his jacket, rolled up his shirtsleeves with great purpose, and with a wink in her direction, began, with great effort, to pry the lid open with the crowbar.