Read The Doomsday Machine (Horatio Lyle) for Free Online Page B

whose apron had been stepped on once too often. ‘Perhaps we could talk in the kitchen?’
     
    London rain takes one of two forms. Most commonly during the day, it drizzles so imperceptibly that it ’s like walking through a thin mist, droplets so small they won’t even leave a gleam on the hairs on the back of your hand and which yet, inexplicably, manage to soak you through to the bone and leave a coldness in the air once it’s stopped. The drizzle comes out of a constantly overcast sky that always promises more than it gives.
    However, when it rains properly in London, it comes quickly, surprisingly, sometimes from an empty sky and only later do you notice how black the clouds are - in summer, when the temperature is high and getting higher from the chimneys belching smoke and the furnaces and clattering of the new looms down on the dockside and the new iron ships paddling up the Thames, there are thunderstorms and spontaneous downbursts that churn up the mud. The rest of the time, the rain is a clatterer. It comes without warning and clatters tumtedetumtedetumtede on the roofs and windows; it brings a clear, almost leafy smell from a cleaner place; it pocks holes in the river and races downhill to the very few, inevitably blocked drains that the city boasts. It turns noon-day a dark, bruised colour, drives away all shadows and extinguishes all light except a pervasive greyness; and just thrums and thrums and thrums against the pavement, tracking huge stains down the soot-covered walls and making the heaps of rotting refuse steam in the yards behind the buildings.
    And as it rains, the water of the Thames begins to rise. At Richmond, it begins to slosh up the street, in Chelsea, it laps at the stairs up to the houses, and at Deptford, it slithers up the pipes into the two sewers - the old and the new - disturbing the rats, and a few things more besides.
    This, as it turns out, is going to be very, very important.
     
    Tess had found a small bag of roasted chestnuts and taken a seat by the fire to eat them. Lyle had found dried tea leaves and was busy straining them by the kettle on the stove, while one of the maids scampered back and forth into the rain to the black iron waterpipe just outside the back door to bring in more buckets.
    At the table sat the cook, the butler, the stablehand, the upstairs maid and the cook’s assistant, and they were bickering. Tess got the impression that bickering was something that happened a lot in this household; it had the quiet but fervent tone of a group of people who know that they’re not going to win whatever their particular argument is, but are sure as hell not going to allow her to win instead! Lyle let them argue, fixated on the passage of water through the tea leaves into a small clay mug. Tess nibbled on her chestnuts, occasionally passing one to the expectant Tate, who knew where the next meal was coming from and always waited by her side for such an eventuality.
    Only when Lyle was satisfied with the thin brownish liquid left at the bottom of his mug did he put down the drink and turn to the kitchen table with a resounding, ‘I’m sorry, I missed that last thing.’
    ‘I was just sayin’,’ said a huge woman in an off-white dress dotted with a mixture of flour, blood and chicken feathers, ‘as how this is just the right time to buy eels!’
    ‘Eels?’ repeated Lyle, in the strained voice of a man who can’t quite believe this is a conversation he’s involved in.
    ‘It’s the season for them,’ she said firmly. ‘Any later and you have to cook them up in something special to give them any taste. But now, just give me an eel and whack it into a cold eel pie and I’ll have the master drooling, you’ll see.’
    ‘Master ain’t liking eels!’ said someone else.
    ‘He does!’
    ‘He don’t!’
    ‘He does!’
    ‘I’m tellin’ you, he don’t ever . . .’
    ‘Perhaps he only likes in-season eels?’ hazarded Lyle, before the argument could become