Time's Mistress Read Free

be hearing about corpses in the Serpentine, perhaps some poor sap would be found impaled on the sword of Old Bailey or some unlucky Mudlark would come to a sticky end in the Thames. It always happened.
    It always puzzled him that the great minds of the Mechanicum didn’t look for ways to purge the fogs, a light source capable of cutting clean through it, or at the very least some breathing devices filled with fresher air for the sufferers. Using their genius to save lives seemed to Josiah to be such an obvious thing for the Great Minds to do. Unfortunately such application of the mind necessitated that these people care about something beyond the pursuit of science. They didn’t, as a man drummed out of their hallowed halls Josiah Bloome knew that all too well. Indeed, as a man wont to flutter on the ponies and not averse to a game of cards, he would have rather wagered that the Magisters had in their possession an infernal device that pumped out the pea-soupers that smothered the city. After all, it was the fog that proved once and for all that beauty was an irrelevance, didn’t it? It was almost as though Nature herself had weighed in to settle their dispute: if it couldn’t be seen how could its’ physical form be of any value?
    “Oh yea of little faith,” Josiah Bloome muttered, giving up on the glass house. He would come back in the morning, fighting his way through the smog to witness the great reveal. His curiosity was piqued by—of all things—the lack of any tangible science on display. He almost expected to return to a Medway filled with freaks and sideshow barkers enticing the gullible to come see the bearded lady and the world’s strongest man, but that wasn’t the way of the Mechanicum.
    Josiah was lost; not in the traditional sense. He knew where he was in space and time, his disorientation was spiritual. Since he had met Fabian Stark and been introduced to the Club on Old Grey’s Lane, everything he believed in had been brought into question. His world was one of science and reason, not one of the supernatural and the outré. He believed only in the quantifiable and the qualifiable. His was a world of rational thought not populated by ghoulies and ghosties and all of those imaginative constructs that went bump in the night.
    And yet he had seen things his science was at a loss to explain.
    Six years was a long time to miss someone, to yearn for them. Annabel Leigh had been the light of his life. Cholera was such a cruel disease and an utterly horrible way to die. Worse though by far was his sense of guilt at not having been there to see to, to tend to her as she failed. That was what it meant to be a husband; that had been core to his vows, instead he had been with Pulleine and Durnford and the dying men in Isandlwana. He had fought the good fight for Queen and Country against the might of the Zulu nation, and his reward? To return home to an empty house and be told Annabel Leigh had died while he was over there, clinging to the thoughts of her to see him through. The war was terminal in every way, a bleak reflection of the darkness within. He knew no language to express the sadism, the barbary, the brutality of the human spirit. He had lived through such horrors, and even now, six years on, he could not bear to imagine it. Josiah Bloome had survived Eshowe and Tinta’s Kraal and the Hell of the Inyezane River; he had taken a tribal spear in the shoulder and another in the gut, and come through, but he had crumbled then. Not slowly but rather like a great building with its foundations undermined by gunpowder plots.
    A man is the sum of his memories, he had argued with McCreedy only the night before, that is the notion of the soul, not some spiritual thing but rather a construction of memories absorbed to create something new and unique. But what was a man who could not bear his own memories? Was he some soulless cage of flesh?
    That was how he had felt for the longest time now.
    He kicked at stones