The Difference Engine Read Free

difficult to find. And she would lose her two steady gentlemen, Mr. Chadwick and Mr. Kingsley, who each saw her twice a month. Steady tin, that was, and kept her from the street. But Chadwick had a jealous wife in Fulham, and, in a moment of foolishness, Sybil had stolen Kingsley’s best cufflinks. She knew that he suspected.
    And neither man was half so free with his money as Dandy Mick.
    She forced herself to smile at him, as sweetly as she could. “You’re a rum’un, Mick Radley. You know you’ve got my leading-strings. Perhaps I was vexed with you at first, but I’m not so cakey as to not know a rum gentleman when I see one.”
    Mick blew smoke. “You are a clever one,” he said admiringly. “You talk blarney like an angel. You’re not fooling me, though, so you needn’t deceive yourself. Still, you’re just the gal I need. Get back in bed.”
    She did as he told her.
    “Jove,” he said, “your blessed feet are two lumps of ice. Why don’t you wear little slippers, eh?” He tugged at her corset, with determination. “Slippers, and black silk stockings,” he said. “A gal looks very flash in bed, with black silk stockings.”

    From the far end of the glass-topped counter, one of Aaron’s shopmen gave Sybil the cold eye, standing haughty and tall in his neat black coat and polished boots. He knew something was up — he could smell it. Sybil waited for Mick to pay, hands folded before her on her skirt, demure, but watching sidelong from beneath the blue fringe of her bonnet. Under her skirt, wadded through the frame of her crinoline, was the shawl she’d nicked while Radley tried on top-hats.
    Sybil had learned how to nick things — she’d taught herself. It simply took nerve, that was the secret. It took pluck. Look neither right nor left — just grab, lift her skirt, stuff and rustle. Then stand quite straight, with a psalm-singing look, like a gentry girl.
    The floorman had lost interest in her; he was watching a fat man fingering watered-silk braces. Sybil checked her skirt quickly. No bulge showed.
    A young spotty-faced clerk, with inkstained thumbs, set Mick’s number into a counter-top credit-machine. Zip, click, a pull on the ebony-handled lever, and it was done. He gave Mick his printed purchase-slip and did the parcel up in string and crisp green paper.
    Aaron & Son would never miss a cashmere shawl. Perhaps their account-engines would, when they tallied up, but the loss couldn’t hurt them; their shopping-palace was too big and too rich. All those Greek columns, chandeliers of Irish crystal, a million mirrors — room after gilded room, stuffed with rubber riding boots and French-milled soap, walking-sticks, umbrellas, cutlery, locked glass cases crammed with silver-plate and ivory brooches and lovely wind-up golden music-boxes . . . And this was only one of a dozen in a chain. But for all of that, she knew, Aaron’s wasn’t truly smart, not a gentry place.
    But couldn’t you just do anything with money in England, if you were clever? Someday Mr. Aaron, a whiskery old merchant Jew from Whitechapel, would have a lordship, with a steam-gurney waiting at the curb and his own coat of arms on the coachwork. The Rad Parliament wouldn’t care that Mr. Aaron was no Christian. They’d given Charles Darwin a lordship, and he said that Adam and Eve were monkeys.
    The liftman, gotten up in a Frenchified livery, drew the rattling brass gate aside for her. Mick followed her in, his parcel tucked under his arm, and then they were descending.
    They emerged from Aaron’s into Whitechapel jostle. While Mick checked a street-map he took from his coat, she gazed up at the shifting letters that ran the length of Aaron’s frontage. A mechanical frieze, a slow sort of kinotrope for Aaron’s adverts, made all of little bits of painted wood, clicking about each in turn, behind leaded sheets of bevel-glass. CONVERT YOUR MANUAL PIANO , the jostling letters suggested, INTO A KASTNER’S PIANOLA .
    The