A Wilde Steampunk Adventure

“Ah, yes, the famous Dr. Wilde. We meet at last.”

Lord Malvert Malice stood, arms crossed, in front of an enormous control panel, riddled with buttons, valves and gadgets. Steam rose from several floor grates behind the panel and the chug of engines echoed from the damp underground cavern walls.

I strained against my bonds but they held fast.

“You won’t get away with this, you villain.”

He merely laughed.

“But I will,” he said. “You see, Doctor, I have your pretty accomplice, too.”

I bit off a curse as a cadre of those insidious clockwork spiders pushed forward Penelope, hands secured behind her back and stripped of her rifle.

Damn. She was my only back up. Should have known better than to trust a girl. “Whatever you do,” I had said, “stay hidden. Don’t let them know you’re there until you have to shoot.” Fat lot of good her supposed marksmanship did me now.

My stare could have bored a hole in her forehead but she refused to look at me. Instead, she glared daggers at Lord Malice.

Lord Malice laughed again, clearly delighted with our discomfort.

He was a tall, well-built man, in his mid-50s. I supposed he might have been handsome except for a large scar down the side of his face. And those eyes. One was blue and one was green, both a startling contrast to his black hair and well-tailored but entirely black clothing.

“Now, tell me how much you know of my plans,” he said.

This man was the embodiment of evil, the man responsible for the ruin of dozens of wealthy and powerful men, including my own father. Over the weeks of my investigation, the plot had emerged, a plot to discredit men and confiscate their fortunes and land-holdings in order to take control of the country. Only yesterday, the mastermind of the plot had been revealed: Lord Malvert Malice. His guilt was undeniable, my proof rock solid, and so, through a series of back alley connections, I had followed his trail into his underground lair.

My one mistake had been to visit Mrs. Godwin’s School for the Education of Girls in Charm, Deportment, and Lady-like Accomplishments, a school which secretly hand-picked certain pupils with promising talents and trained them in hand-to-hand combat, marksmanship, bareback horse riding, and a variety of other useful and un-ladylike accomplishments. My friends in the foreign office often used these young ladies and so I went, and, on the recommendation of Mrs. Godwin, hired Miss Penelope Hammersmith, best known at Mrs. Godwin’s establishment for her marksmanship and feather-light soufflé. Why choose a young lady as my back up? Well, soufflé aside, her marksmanship was remarkable, as I saw for myself, and her services were far cheaper than a male marksman. And as she was no more than passably pretty, despite blonde hair and blue eyes, I felt safe from any distractions.

But this one mistake had cost me far more than the 50 gilders Mrs. Godwin had so eagerly accepted.

Lord Malice raised a black eyebrow. “You refuse to answer?” He turned and pressed a button on the control panel.

Immediately, more of his clockwork minions emerged from somewhere behind me and scrambled over the rocky floor toward Penelope.

I could see the effort it cost her to keep her lips from trembling as four of the creatures clambered up her trousers and blouse and positioned themselves on her shoulders.

I glanced at Lord Malice and saw the gleam of excitement in his eyes. He licked his lips and smoothed back his black hair.

At a small whimper of pain, I looked back at Penelope. Four trickles of blood soaked through her blouse and ran down her chest and arms. The spiders had squeezed their razor-sharp legs through her skin.

Despite my annoyance, I had to give the girl marks for her bravery. Tears welled in her eyes but the only sound which escaped her was that one small whimper.

“Stop!” I cried. “Don’t hurt the girl.”

Lord Malice pressed the button again and the spiders disentangled their legs, scurried back down Penelope’s body and disappeared.

Lord Malice sauntered over to Penelope with a smile. He watched her intensely but spoke to me.

“The girl is not seriously harmed, nor will she be. If you talk.”

He put out a long, cadaverous finger and touched some of the blood on Penelope’s shoulder. He looked at his finger and then put it in his mouth, tasting her blood.

A small shudder passed through her body, of revulsion or fear, I didn’t know, but she lifted her chin and stared into the man’s eyes with a hatred as intense as his lust.

“Your hair,” he murmured. “Pardon me, my dear, but I haven’t been this close to a woman in far too long.” He reached out and pulled the pins from Penelope’s hair; rampant gold-blonde curls tumbled half-way down her back.

“You’ve doubtless scared them all away,” she said, sneering.

Lord Malice gently tangled a hand in her hair, then violently pulled her head back. He ran the fingers of his other hand down her exposed neck, but stopped at the top button of her blouse.

“Do not answer me, young lady. I do not tolerate women who speak. This is your one warning.” His voice was silky smooth and deadly.

Penelope’s blue eyes were suddenly wide with fear.

“I know everything!” I shouted, desperate to distract him from his victim.

He did not turn to me, though, but kept his gaze on the white skin of the girl’s neck.

“So soft,” he whispered.

I tried again. “I know that you have planted rumors of treason and sedition in order to ruin powerful men!”

He kept his grip on her hair and slowly unbuttoned her blouse, from her neck to the waistband of her trousers. He pulled at the gap to widen it and licked his lips again at the sight.

As a man, I had to appreciate the cleavage, surprisingly ample, spilling over the top of her corset. I was recalled to my senses, though, when I recognized the blood which had soaked into that corset and still ran in slow rivulets down her white skin.

“You paid agents to buy up the confiscated property.” I was straining against my bonds again, desperate to turn the danger to myself rather than this blameless girl.

Penelope sucked in a breath as Lord Malice slid the back of his hand down her neck and over the exposed flesh above her corset. She couldn’t have made a sound with her neck held at that angle, but something told me she would suffer in stubborn silence no matter what this man did.

“You’re blackmailing the prime minister until you can finish your scheme and take over the country.” My voice broke with the strain.

Lord Malice slowly pulled Penelope’s blood-soaked blouse further open, exposing one wounded shoulder. Malice leaned down and slowly licked her shoulder.

I made a sound of inarticulate rage. I had told him everything I knew and was out of ideas.

Still intent on Penelope’s shoulder, Malice chuckled. “Thank you, Wilde, you’ve told me all I need to know. You and the girl will clearly have to die.” He spoke matter-of-factly and took another small lick, like a kitten with a bowl of sweetened milk. “But that’s no reason why we shouldn’t have some pleasure in the meantime.” He rolled out the word ‘pleasure’ as though savoring it.

He moved in front of her then and released his hold on her hair but grabbed her hard around the waist and lowered his mouth to her neck. He pressed her back against the control panel and flattened his body against hers.

“Don’t do this, Malice,” I said, my voice deep and desperate. “You will pay.”

He pulled back and turned to look at me over his shoulder.

“You’ll pardon me if I’m not terribly concerned by threats from a schoolteacher, particularly when he’s tied up and in the competent care of my minions.”

At that, several minions took up positions on my shoulders and legs. They did not sink their legs into me but I had no doubt that the threat existed.

“That does remind me, though,” Malice said, turning back to Penelope, “we really could use some privacy. Come, my dear.” He pulled her away from the control panel and guided her toward a curtained off area several yards away.

“Malice, there’s more,” I lied. “I know more.”

He paused. “Let me guess. You found my stash of ether explosives hidden under Parliament.” He merely waved his hand and said, “It can wait. First things first.”

The curtain fell behind them. I watched the wall of curtain, as though my vigilance could protect the girl I had unwittingly put in harm’s way. How could I have not foreseen this possibility? Had my own arrogance blinded me to the dangers to which I was exposing her? The terrible fact was that I had been so confident in my own ability to track down and defeat Lord Malice that I simply had not thought of her safety at all.

A small cry of pain echoed off the cavern walls and I hung my head in an agony of shame.

A moment later, booted feet rang out across the stone floor. I lifted my head and there she was, triumph in her eyes and a knife in her hand.

“What…?” I didn’t even know how to frame my question.

She cut the bonds which held my ankles then ran behind and cut my hands free. With the short blade of her knife, she picked up the guard minions and dashed them against the cavern walls where they exploded into fragments of gears and wires.

She pulled me to my feet and said, “Well, professor, how do we get out of here?”

She stood there, eyes glowing with excitement, blond hair spilling around her ravaged shoulders, borrowed baggy trousers and tall brown leather boots, and she was beautiful.

A moan emanated from behind the curtain and we both glanced that way.

“Come on.” I grabbed her hand and we ran. Back through winding tunnels and empty caverns, we followed the map in my head.

Behind us an angry roar echoed through the caverns and tunnels. The ominous silence which followed, though, spurred us to run faster.

Finally I felt her lagging behind and heard her labored breathing. I led her into a small side tunnel and pulled her against the wall.

“Here,” I said. “Catch your breath.”

“What about…” she gasped, “…minions?”

“It’s okay,” I said, “we’ll wait.” We both bent and grabbed our knees, sucking in air.

When the stitch in my side eased, I said, “What happened back there, anyway?”

She pushed her hair back and grinned at me. “When he was talking to you, I saw the knife on the control panel but couldn’t figure out how to get it. When he backed me against the panel, I grabbed the knife and stuck it into the waistband of my trousers.”

She paused to breathe a few more times. “When we went behind the curtain, he tried to tie me to his bed.”

She wiped a hand across her mouth, remembering. “That meant he had to put my hands in front of me, though, and as he did so, I brought the knife with me. I tried to stab his neck but I think I only got his shoulder. He stumbled back, though, and hit his head on the stone wall. I didn’t even wait to see if he was unconscious, which I guess he was; I just ran.”

“Miss Hammersmith,” I said, “you are a wonder.” I pushed away from the wall and held out my hand.

She straightened, smiled, and shook my proffered hand.

We both laughed with mingled relief and exhaustion. The laughter soon faded and we stared at each other.

She glanced down and quickly dropped my hand. I cleared my throat and rubbed my hands together.

"I'm a university professor, you know."

She looked up, clearly puzzled. "I know."

"I mean," I bumbled on, "I only mention it because Malice called me a schoolteacher. Which I'm not."

"Oh, of course." She smiled and I felt like an idiot.

“I’m sorry we didn’t stop him, though,” she said.

“We’ll fight him another day,” I said. “Let’s just get out of here.”

“Sounds good,” she said. “I…”

I halted in the act of turning back toward the main tunnel and looked at Penelope. Her eyes were wide with horror and fixed on a point behind my head. I whirled and was face to face with a minion clinging to the tunnel wall.

Immediately, the creature let out a loud warning siren.

“Stop it,” Penelope yelled at me. I grabbed the knife out of her hand and stabbed the minion through its single onyx button eye. Its wailing silenced, the minion fell to the floor with a dull clank.

“Come on,” I said. “There will be a million of those things here in a matter of seconds. Can you run?”

The girl, pale from fright and exhaustion, raised her chin and said, “Of course.”

I grinned and nodded. “Good girl.”

I grabbed her hand and cautiously put my head into the main passage.

“All clear,” I whispered. And we ran.

Once, I took a wrong turn and we ran up against a dead end.

I swore helplessly at the wall, then doubled back to the main tunnel. I paused and glanced around. Thankfully, a small pinpoint of daylight many stories above us allowed in enough light that we could see a little just here, rather than continuing to grope in the dark. Five passages led away from this one juncture. One we had come from. One was a dead end. That left three possible routes. We could not afford another time-consuming mistake.

Suddenly, some sixth sense warned me of danger. I put a hand over Penelope’s mouth and we crouched behind a boulder.
She grabbed at my hand and I realized that with careless adrenaline I had also covered her nose. Silently apologizing, I removed my hand. She shot me an angry glare but kept quiet.

Soon my caution was rewarded. We heard minions scuttle down the passage we had come from. They paused at the juncture, then moved on down a different tunnel.

As the noise receded, I became aware that Miss Hammersmith was pressed extremely close to me, almost on my lap, one might say. Her hair tickled my chin and she smelled faintly of sweet lemon soap. I began to sweat. Humidity of the caves, you know.

In the half-dark and the silence, she turned to me and her mouth was so close I could feel her breath on my lips.

“What now?” she whispered.

I answered in a whisper since my throat had dried completely. “We follow them.”

“What?” Her brow wrinkled and made a little dimple above one eyebrow.

“The minions wouldn’t bother with any but the main tunnel. So we follow them.”

“What if they…?”

I interrupted. “What choice do we have?”

She pressed her lips together and looked into my eyes. What she saw there, I don’t know, but she said no more, simply nodded her head.

As delightful as it was to have her soft derriere on my lap, I knew we had to keep moving.

We disentangled our legs and headed down the correct tunnel. Thus far, our progress had been a pell-mell dash; now we proceeded with the utmost caution, aware that at any moment we might be faced with minions. We left any hint of light behind us as we moved farther into the tunnel and Penelope’s grasp on my hand grew tighter. I do not mind confessing, though, that I clung to her hand just as hard. She was a human anchor in a sea of darkness.

Penelope bumped into me when I stopped abruptly.

I turned slightly to whisper, “Did you feel that? Fresh air.”

She did not answer but squeezed my hand in response. We both knew that meant that the end was near, freedom was within reach. And yet those minions were somewhere ahead of us.

Suddenly, she ripped her hand away from mine and shrieked. A moment later I knew why. The tunnel was illuminated by a pale green light and the walls seemed to undulate. Minions.

One minion had dropped into her hair and was seeking to gain a grip with its razor-sharp legs. I reached for it but felt three minions drop onto my back and shoulders. For several moments, all was a chaos of motion as I grabbed for minions and dashed them against the walls. I was not entirely successful in avoiding their legs, although if I got a clear grab at that single protruding eye, I could handle them with relative ease. Trouble was, there were so many of them.

In my own fight, I lost sight of Penelope, but when I did see her, blood streaked and sweating, she was fighting valiantly.

I was suddenly aware of the ground shaking under us.

“What the…” I glanced down and saw a cavern opening under us. Beyond the widening gap lay the end of the tunnel and freedom. I knew that if we were trapped on this side of the opening, we would fall back into the grasp of Lord Malice and would never see daylight again.

I pulled one more minion off – there seemed to be fewer than before, though perhaps that was wishful thinking – and ran to Penelope. I grabbed her hand and turned her toward the gap.

She looked down and gasped. I pulled her arm hard to gain her attention. She looked at me with huge blue eyes, blood streaking down her lovely face.

“Jump,” I yelled. I dragged her back several feet, pulled five more minions off of us, and counted to three. We took two huge, running steps and jumped.

I landed on my knees on the other side, but nearly fell back as Penelope’s weight nearly pulled my arm out of its socket. She had jumped short and now dangled over a huge, black pit, suspended by my strength and connected by our hands which were slippery with blood.

She managed to grasp the ledge with her other hand but her position was, well, precarious at best.

“Come on, Pen,” I said. “Get a leg up here and I’ll pull you up.”

She looked at me and then closed her eyes.

“No,” she whispered. “I can’t.”

It hardly seemed useful to contradict her at this moment so I tried a trick that always worked on my sister.

“You’re probably right. You are, after all, a girl.”

Her eyes snapped open, instantly full of righteous indignation.

“Too bad Mrs. Godwin put all that time and effort into training you. Waste of time, I say. Teach a woman to cook and keep house.”

“You…” was the only barely articulate word I heard from her, but her grip tightened and she fought to pull herself up. In a moment, she had her knee up over the edge and I dragged her clear of the opening.

Before she could catch her breath, I grinned and said, “You can punish me later.”

“Don’t worry,” she said, “I will.” But her eyes were mischievous. “Most of all, I hate being predictable,” she grumbled.
I looked back down the tunnel, across the black expanse of the pit and saw the last minion retreating.

Penelope looked, too.

“Are they leaving?”

“For now,” I said. “But they’ll be back with more. We’ve got to get moving.”

I looked back at Penelope. Her face, hair and blouse were streaked with blood and sweat, her clothing was torn in several places, and her hair was a ragged mess.

“You look awful,” I said with more truth than tact.

She put a hand up to her head. “Those blasted minions cut my hair.” In fact, a bright pile of gilded curls lay forlornly on the floor of the tunnel. She glared at me then. “You don’t look so great yourself, professor.”

I smiled ruefully. “Doubtless.” I stood and held out a hand. “Can you walk?”

She took my hand and I pulled her to her feet. I put an arm around her waist and she put an arm around mine.

“Walk?” Her chin went up in a gesture I was beginning to recognize. “I could run.”

A few minutes later the tunnel ended in a flight of stairs. We ran up and through the tinker’s shop which fronted for Malice’s evil underground network. We burst through the front door of the shop, which gave a friendly jingle of its bells, and drew in huge lung-fuls of fresh air.

“Well, professor,” she said finally. “We made it.”

I grinned and, with a sudden burst of energy, picked her up in a hug and spun her around.

I put her down abruptly, though, as I remembered.

“Wait. Parliament. Ether explosives.” I didn’t seem to be able to frame a complete sentence but it was enough. We turned toward Westminster and the Houses of Parliament.

We had lost track of time in the tunnels. We had entered the tinker’s shop about ten o’clock the night before but it appeared to be early morning now and few vehicles or pedestrians were abroad yet.

We managed to find a hackney, though, and sped off to warn the government of Malice’s intentions.

Several hours later, the door to Mrs. Godwin’s establishment opened to my insistent kicks and I carried Penelope across the threshold.

Mrs. Godwin did not bat an eye, but directed me to a small room beside the kitchen. I laid a sleeping Penelope on a cot. I straightened and flexed the muscles in my arms. Exhaustion threatened and I swayed on my feet.

Mrs. Godwin took charge and I hadn’t the strength to resist. “Right, then, professor. You have a bath and we’ll have Susan look at your wounds and then we have a room where you can sleep.”

I cocked a half-grin at the older woman. “You’ve done this before, haven’t you?”

She smiled and pursed her lips, a twinkle in her soft brown eyes. “Mayhap.”

A small moan made us look down at the cot. Penelope opened tired blue eyes and put out a hand. I knelt and took her hand in both of mine.

“M’tired,” she said, her words slurred with exhaustion.

“I know, Pen. So am I. Rest now.” I stared at this girl, a stranger and yet now so familiar, even dear to me. “Pen, I don’t know how to thank you.”

She hushed me and smiled. “We’ll get ‘im nex’ time.”

I shook my head. “No next time,” I said. “I won’t be so foolish another time. If there is a next time, I’ll hire an army to help me.”

She frowned and started to object, but Mrs. Godwin cut her off. “Come on, professor. No, Penelope, you can fight with him later. You both need some sleep. And a bath,” she said, eyeing our blood-stained faces and matted hair.

Penelope’s face relaxed. “An’ a haircut,” she said with a rueful smile.

“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Godwin assured her. “We’ll even it up and you’ll have a lovely short haircut for a bit. Nice in the summer.”

Penelope laughed. “Don’ go ‘way,” she said to me.

I smiled. “I’ll be here when you wake.”

She was asleep before we left the room.

WC 3918