THREE YEARS AGO. THIRD OF AUGUST, 1896. A MONDAY, RATHER GRAY.
The Widow decided to kill herself on something of a spur of the moment. She was walking laundry through the streets of London and came upon a turning and rather than going left, she went right. Stripped off her shawl and fell face-first into the Thames.
When she comes back up, she’ll be someone different.
Lord Messen waited for his daughter, anxiously. August Bidlow wheeled his imperious sister through the gardens. Penance Adair fixed a cranky faucet. Doctor Horatio Cousens, in the Black part of town, was happily married and with children of his own. It was a regular Monday in most respects, if gray.
Standing in line outside the theatre, Mary Brighton kissed her fiance goodbye and waited for her chance to sing.
He was a good chap, quiet. Not the sort to take advantage. He’d a vicious history but was now an inspector. Mundi was his name and he meant the world to her.
ORPHANAGE
Amalia True sleeps under a giant’s bed, in St. Romaulda’s Orphanage. She sleeps in a slip and she has her own bedroom, where she only goes come morning.
Joss Whedon once said we will not know peace until we can deal with the part of ourselves that will never know peace.
Amalia’s trying. She’s a good deal more wild than she used to be.
Penance Adair has been up all night with her inventions — oh, how they sparkle and sizzle and move. One of them is a clock that tells her it’s nearly time for their appointment.
The girls wish Mrs. True a good morning as she heads out, and Penance remembers to grab their parasols and some shiners on her way out. They’ll come in handy later.
“Mrs. True, you look very fine!” Penance says, and Mrs. True smiles.
“I think so too.”
THE CITY
The ladies ride through London in a carriage of their own making, with an unflappable driver whose face you can’t exactly see. Clockwork things that look like men are everywhere in London, when you know where to look.
The boy selling The Star on the corner offers his opinion on our murderess at large, codenamed Maladie: “Read it in The Star! Maladie kills fifth victim! Murder spree soon to eclipse The Ripper!”
Among the Touched it’s easy to see all the things you’re prevented from doing, but there are certain advantages (beyond the obvious): Everywhere on the streets there are men behaving like men, bothering women or just ignoring them as they push their way through the city. But Mrs. True and Miss Adair are safe in their carriage. For now.
Penance wonders, as they approach the Haplisch house, whether Mrs. True’s ripplings of the future have shown her any outcome of today’s adventure. But the ripplings don’t come when they’re called, and rarely when it’s convenient. She’s right to worry, or to wonder — sometimes they have shotguns, when the ladies come calling. There’s still a lot out there afraid of the Touched, and more than a few with good reason.
Today we are looking for Myrtle Haplisch. Something to do with her voice. Myrtle is interesting, I’ll tell you now, because she speaks every language at once. You never know what’s going to come out of her mouth. And as we’ll see, Mary Brighton speaks one very specific nonlanguage, which everyone feels but almost nobody really understands, when she sings.
They fit together, these Turns. Something to do with our voices.
HAPLISCH HOUSE
The ladies learned about Myrtle Haplisch from the Beggar King, who hears about everything that happens in London, and whom they additionally pay for protection on the streets. They told the Reverend they were going to visit the Haplisches in turn, and now have arrived.
In 1800s London it’s already complicated, calling on people. Even the poor, like the Haplisches, who’d put all their children out to work if the new labor laws didn’t prohibit it.
“We heard about those girls the last few years,” say the Haplisches. “They’re… not right?”
Amalia True is curt, but not offended. “Neither right nor wrong. Being Touched is not a defect of character.”
And what about Maladie? “Maladie’s homicidal. I don’t know if she’s Touched.”
There’s a lot Mrs. True doesn’t know about Maladie. But she’ll learn.
More to the point, we don’t even know yet if Myrtle’s Touched, for all that. Mother says yes, “Touched by Red Boot Teddy,” which is a name for Satan I’d never heard. He goes by many names. The Haplisches think it’s Satan squatting on their daughter’s tongue, “Spewing out his foulness, making a chamber pot of our Myrtle’s mouth…”
Just then the teapot goes off — one of those newfangled sort that whistles when it’s ready — and it’s all a bit much for Mrs. True, who tends to tap her fingers to her thumb one by one when she’s nervous. The kettle, the Satan talk, the unlovely Haplisches… And the rippling that tells her she’ll soon be flat on her back, with children looking down. It’s all a bit much, so Penance asks after Myrtle.
UPSTAIRS
The girl is chained, which makes the ladies physically ill. And why? To keep the other children from being infected, of course.
“We’ve come to help with what’s been troublin’ ya,” says Penance in her very Irish lilt. “There’s plenty of girls who’ve been shown a strangeness of some kind, a ‘Turn,’ but Mrs. True and I, we’ve worked with them, and they come up fine. Would you like that?”
When Myrtle speaks, with her parents still calling her Satan, it’s a mixture of languages the Haplisches would have no occasion to recognize. I mean to say it sounds like foulness, because they’ve never heard it before. Because it’s new.
“Myrtle — you can understand me, yes?”
Mrs. True speaks to her first in English, then Chinese. Myrtle nods: She understands both. She speaks them all.
DOWNSTAIRS
Chinese, most of it. Some of it may have been Russian. And Mrs. True thinks possibly Turkish: “I’d guess every known language is crowding her mind…”
But Mrs. Haplisch is still stuck on the first thing Mrs. True said: “Those acrobats,” she nods, when her husband wonders where she’d even have heard Chinese. “They come to Barney Park doing flips and balancing. They had an unnatural air. I said it then. And there was a monkey! He looked right at me.”
You can almost hear Joss Whedon laughing to himself, sometimes, as he writes these things. But Mrs. True is unimpressed, and prepares to lay down the law — is interrupted by Miss Adair, who goes into overtime thanking the unworthy Haplisches…
BUT JUST THEN
Mrs. True hears a bump upstairs. That’ll be the rippling coming due.
Of the fight that ensues, suffice to say that Mrs. True acquits herself quite well, that the gentlemen don’t mind saying the word “bitch,” that Penance’s shiner — a little fairylight that spins through the air and then explodes into brightness — comes in handy, and that in the end she has taken down two of them by handcuffing them with something of Miss Adair’s design and toppling them out the window.
“Da!” shout the unemployed children. “The lady did a wrestle!”
But it’s not enough. There is a host of ugly things outside that have Myrtle, a bag over her head, and faces like burlap sacks with crude features carved in. There is something like an automated metal coffin they’re preparing to stuff her in when Mrs. True attacks. One of the beasts gets her with a knife, but eventually they get away in their own mysterious carriage.
“I think I preferred when people just had shotguns,” Penance begins, which is when the beasts begin shooting at the carriage. After a good deal of screaming through the streets of London, hairpin fast turns and lots of jumping out of the way, it has become clear the three ladies will not be able to escape.
“We’re going to have to change it out,” Mrs. True says, with an edge of excitement to her wildness. She means the prototype — an automated moving carriage that drops out the back of their carriage just as one beast is revealing the clockwork nature of their driver — and then the three ladies are on their way backwards through the city, far away from the beasts and slicing through the crowd.
Miss Adair is proud of herself once Mrs. True reminds her to be so. Myrtle sits easily at the prow of the thing, watching London go by with a dreamy air. And Mrs. True has another rippling.
“I think it’s best if you come stay with us for a bit. If that suits ya. We can, we can deal with those fellas. We can find out what they want, or what they… Are.* How are we gonna deal with those fellas? True?”
According to the rippling, “We’re going to the opera.” Mrs. True says it so matter-of-factly that it almost sounds like a plan. They’ll see Faust, somehow, for some reason. In the near future. Penance will be there, and others besides, and it’ll be an event to remember. And perhaps it will help Myrtle, and perhaps — only just perhaps — it will save every one of the Touched.
*(This line tells me we’re not meant to really believe the beasts are simply men, so I will tell you: They are half-clockwork things, meat puppets of their master, and there is no coincidence in the fact that Miss Adair’s carriage is driven by a clockwork man, driven before a clockwork mob. If Penance ever meets these monsters’ master, they’re going to have at least one thing in common.)
LORD MASSEN
Sits with several lookalikes — patrician in the most inelegant sense, all top hats and cravats and smoky backroom energy — discussing this television show we are watching. (I must confess I don’t know what this collection of men truly is meant to be, beyond a visual and emotional echo of the Watchers’ Council, or the wizards’ college in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, or what the hourglasses mean that they keep flipping over, but it’s all offered in such a way as to seem like something everybody should know, and I simply don’t. Some sort of Invisible College or proto-Illuminati one hopes, but probably nothing so extraordinary.)
“It’s just a woman,” one of them says, which is a Whedon red flag: It’s never just a woman. “Five men murdered,” they cough. “I’d say she’s more than that!” And one exposits more than the rest: “This ‘Maladie’ is a lunatic. Scotland Yard has their Special Detail to catch her…What matter if she’s Touched?”
“She is not killing whores, Your Grace. These are respectable men,” they say. “Psychoanalysts,” another one murmurs almost as a counterpoint. But that’s not what she calls them.
She calls them angels, and I’ll tell you why — it’s not a secret. These aren’t spoilers, either: On a gray Monday three years ago, a woman named Sarah was in the company of three or four men taking her to a hospital for the insane when God appeared to her in the sky overhead London and gave her a sense of her own agency and power — and when God was gone again, she was Touched, and the angels attending her remembered nothing that had happened. She pointed at the sky, where the lights were still fading, demanding that they admit what she’d just seen. And that’s crucial, because of what we would today call “gaslighting,” which is the most efficient way to drive someone absolutely around the bend.
Imagine you were already diagnosed with some hysteria or another, all right, and then God Himself appears to you — in the form of a sort of steampunk spaceship, granted — and gifts you with not just immense power but also a certain knowledge. In a language noone speaks, but everyone can understand. And when it’s said and done, nobody but you remembers that it happened. The day God reached out and Touched you, in front of witnesses who’ve now gone blind and mute.
And then those same witnesses, they pack you into the wagon: Absolutely sure you’ve gone twice as crazy as when they came to take you away to begin with. And thence to a bedlam where they don’t care if you’re Touched or what God did to you, and where they are just beginning to understand science and psychology, and where horrible things will be done.
Murder isn’t ever justifiable, but the madness is certainly understandable. I don’t think criticisms of “bargain-basement Drusilla” are invalid exactly but I do think this madness comes from an altogether different place within the story and should be decoded and considered differently from other madnesses.
If anything, Maladie is closer to a River Tam than a Dru, in that she only speaks the truth and she’s never wrong. (If it makes you feel funny to discuss Joss Whedon’s body of work in the year of our Lord 2021 I do not blame you but I will tell you the secret of how I made peace with it: I simply asked myself, “Has Joss Whedon ever made anything you didn’t love — and that, more importantly, did not change you forever?” Because the answer to that is a no, which puts the oeuvre back on the table.)
“The Prime Minister intends to take a public position on the Touched,” they argue: “We need to decide what it is.” It’s not just women pulling parlor tricks, either — it’s not just women at all. “There are hundreds, at least, of unique, inexplicable afflictions. Lavinia Bidlow has made a cause of them.” One of them is sympathetic to the cause this clearly generates: “Women are being attacked! Accused of witchcraft, or some island voodoo,”but as you can imagine, this concern is negligibly considered.
One of them is convinced it’s the biological effect of this new “electricity.” One man tells a drawn-out story of an employee of his engine works who destroyed a plating press when her arm got caught in it: “Three tons of pressure and she snapped the hydraulic without so much as a bruise. People cheered!”
“Well, I say enlist her,” laughs one of them. “Point her at the bloody Boers!”
But it’s no joke for Lord Massen. He has his reasons. But mostly he’s correct about what’s coming.
“Gentlemen, this isn’t a troop deployment, or a, a market crash. The Prime Minister will not be taking a position on the Touched, nor will he allow any official debate on the subject. Not until we understand the nature and breadth of the attack.”
The assembled men are sworn to protect the British Empire contra hostes omnes, even those that look like mere women, he says. But what attack does he mean?
“It came three years ago. Third of August, 1896. A Monday. Rather gray. Not one case of someone being Touched before then. Not one outside London — those reported overseas were all here at the time — and not one man of stature afflicted. That’s the genius of it, they came at us through our women.”
Massen’s madness is no less understandable, then, though his cruelty is no more justified than Maladie’s. Because he’s not wrong. What’s coming may or may not be an attack in the sense that we think of it, but we must imagine the Empire as resting upon certain artificial “just-is” propositions.
It just is that white men such as these are the sole deciders of the Empire’s fate. It just is that men of color and women do not. That women of color fall even lower on the chain of command. It just is that other countries in 1899 fall under British rule. All this just is.
And yet it must be viciously protected, this just is — almost as though it’s a lie these men are telling themselves. In America in 2021 the “just is” is so imperiled that the hypersensitivity pops up even around the most trivial changes and questions: Statues and monuments as ancient as the 1970s, children’s books and cartoons and history. It’s funny how we define the default, isn’t it? And how hard it is to change that, even in our minds and hearts. Even when the truth is so much more beautiful, and standing right in front of us.
“I’m still not sure I can equate a few bizarre anecdotes with the Mongol horde,” one chortles, but Massen is not speaking in theories anymore: “Only a blind man measures the length of a blade by how much is in his belly. This was designed so that we would see the parts, not the whole.”
Philanthropists, like Lavinia Bidlow, see the suffering of the afflicted. The common throng see a macabre murderess… “And you see a broken machine,” one laughs. But he’s exactly right.
“The greatest machine. The heart of our Empire brought to a shuddering halt by the caprice and ambitions of those for whom ambition was never meant. This is the Age of New Power. The x-ray, the wireless” — Electricity!, that one pipes up — “We are the first generation accustomed to the impossible. What women are appalled by today, they will accept tomorrow, and demand the day after that. And the immigrant. And the deviant. That is the power being wielded, and not by us. The blade is in, gentlemen. We need to know whose hand is on the hilt.”
We talk muchly sometimes about how there are two kinds of science fiction — the kind that fears and says “watch out” and the kind that hopes and says “what if.” And so I found this little speech even more chilling in its use of hopeful language to describe the end of everything. Because Massen sees the whole gameboard: How there is the Old Power and the New, and how easily the Touched could unbalance it. But instead of seeing that for the marvel that it is, he’s threatened terribly. He has his reasons.
THE UNDERGROUND
They mentioned Scotland Yard’s Special Detail, before, and he’s an important player in this tale. Detective Frank Mundi, last seen escorting his fiancée to her audition three years ago. He heads down into the Underground, where they’re expanding quickly — men digging have found a corpse, arranged like one of Maladie’s killings…
But Mundi makes quick work of this, noting that the writing on the wall is misspelled — claiming to be from “the Angle of Death” — and written in pig’s blood besides. When the foreman pushes back against his assertions, and even harder against his order to shut down the digging until the true murderer, whose hands will be covered in that blood and who moved the body down into the tunnels, is found.
We get a lot about Mundi from this scene — such as, on a scale of Lavinia-to-Massen he’s quite sympathetic to the Touched, despite his work’s focus — but the best is when the foreman points out the Catch-22: If Mundi’s right and this is a common murder, it’s out of his Maladie jurisdiction.
“What, you think you’re the first to try and pin something on Maladie? People think every Touched they meet might be her!” he says, and gets angry enough that we see his old face. “East End Ape. Always fists first. He could beat a confession out of a headstone. You can play the righteous man, but even you answer to someone.”
“Yes, I do,” he grunts. “She’s right there.” That’s the part I liked.
ORPHANAGE
Of the assembled Orphans there to greet our trio when they arrive, the most immediately notable are Lucy Best, Amalia’s harsh/kind second-in-command, Primrose Chattoway who is revealed to be quite as large as an apple tree, and Harriet Kaur, who is East Indian and has a neat Turn of making things into glass. There’s also a girl causing plants to grow quite quickly, which is one of the first Turns you’d think of if you were inventing Turns, but still wonderful to watch.
Harriet wants to be married in the prototype autocarriage, which they all agree is amazing. Primrose feels left out because she’s too tall to ride in it, and makes her excuse: “Mother says motorcars are common. I wouldn’t expect you to understand, but Mother says they’re a blight.” Of course, we’re all orphans here, and Lucy smarts off: “Yeah? She say that lately? On a visit, maybe, that we all missed?”
What Primrose says next is, “As though you know anything about being a mother,” which time will tell us is world-threateningly devastating and yet, in this case, only occasions a very Lucy line — “Does she think she’s too big for a spanking?” — which makes me think the details of Lucy’s tragic backstory were not so filled in at this point in filming.
“It’s only a carriage,” Dr. Horatio Cousens says to the assembled crowd of Touched, but revises his opinion on coming closer: “No. That’s fuckin’ amazing.”
Mrs. True wants two things now: Paper and pen from Lucy, to write Lavinia Bidlow about the attack, and for Dr. Cousens to lay his hands on her. His Turn is healing, which is lucky for a doctor — but luckier for the widow Mrs. True, who of course has just recently been stabbed by a clockwork monster.
Meanwhile, Miss Adair turns Primrose’s big old bad day around by introducing her to Myrtle (“What’s your Turn? I’m large!”) who is the only other Orphan of her age.
“Myrtle has a language situation,” Penance explains. “She does speak English, just not with her mouth.”
Primrose takes her to get some tea, and Myrtle happily follows after.
SHOP TALK
Some time later in Penance’s shop, there is a meeting of the informal leadership — Mrs. True, Miss Adair, Lucy Best and Harriet — as Myrtle wanders around, seeing wonders and touching them silently.
“How is this new?” asks hard Lucy. “People been attacking us since they known we was Touched. We knew people would come down on us the more we were thriving…”
Harriet points out that in some cases they’ve been attacked for their differences for more than three years, which is just about all we’re going to hear on the subject this week. The question remains, why would these people be interested in Myrtle specifically? Why, with her useless Turn?
“I don’t think she’s the first. I think they’ve been doing this for some time. All those girls we went after who’d ‘just run away’…” Mrs. True demands tighter security, strict signouts and windows bolted — “Nothing lethal,” Miss Adair offers, “But very discouraging” — and Lucy proudly announces she’s been teaching the girls to fight.
Which is interesting because it occasions a warning not to use their Turns in doing so, which speaks to the mission — and the sort of innately disappointing nature of being special: The thing that makes you special is the thing that makes you dangerous, and they’ll hate you for one while claiming it’s the other, and you can’t demonstrate or protect yourself without making it come true.
“There’s plenty you can do with what’s at hand. It’s about confidence,” Lucy says, which reminded me of one of my all-time favorite song lyrics (Every tool’s a weapon if you hold it right), “As my mum used to say, if you can look a man in the eye, you can stab him in it.”
Everybody gets worried when Mrs. True announces her next move: To summon the Beggar King Declan Orrun, and see who else he’s been telling about the Touched.
“That’s not how it works,” they say. “You don’t just ask the Beggar King to come calling.”
“I am, in fact, not asking.”
Now’s the time to praise Laura Donnelly, who takes the plum role of Mrs. Amalia True and does wickedly wonderful things with it. She’s exhausted and invigorated, wild and guilty, violent and tender, and sometimes all at once.
The Orphans themselves are all individual enough, which is itself a feat considering we’re dealing with a subset of a subset — women mostly of a certain age, who differ in class but all lived in or found their way to London three years ago. They’ve more in common than they don’t. Lucy Best is a brittle house mother of the lowest sort, and speaks for the streets. Harriet is a minority on top of the other ways she’s a minority. Hell, Penance Adair’s a Whedon classic, the Women-in-STEM type even he admits is just based on Kitty Pryde from the X-Men.
But Mrs. True is a creation on the level of Buffy Summers, and even more than that because she is damned inscrutable and has the most and strangest history of them all. Her mouth quirks when she says her Jossisms, she lands in three-point superhero poses, she is constantly forced to think about her clothes and violence. Maladie’s more than a mirror for her — more than a “but for the grace of God” — but we can start with that: She’s a lonely soldier. You can see it in the eyes.
LORD HUGO SWANN
Rises from betwixt two lovers, arching his back to make sure we see that the male lover’s skeleton body paint has transferred itself onto Swann’s back, if you know what I mean. He is running late; he is always running late and never late, because he is absolutely a man of leisure. He puts a dressing gown on over his hotness and we say a prayer for Canon Sidney of Grantchester (and Cole of Dragon Age: Inquisition, of course), who would surely be scandalized and confused by the wonderful creature before us. But, we assume, charmed as well.
Waiting for him is Augustus Bidlow, Lavinia’s little brother whom we last saw pushing her chair three years ago. A nervously good-looking, well-meaning fellow, he’s nonetheless clearly a social mishap. You’d never know it by Lord Swann’s behavior, though: He so loves his Augie, ever since Eton. The most indulgent smiles and emotional carefulness abound, even as he’s manipulating his friend — it’s all something to see.
“Augie, sorry I kept you waiting. Did I keep you waiting? I’m at odds with time…”
Augie’s more concerned with the circling crows, who are amassing in a way he finds strange. His strange attachment to the crows is something of a hoot for Hugo Swann.
“Do you mean to say we’re… Witnessing a murder?”
A term Augie hates, “murder of crows.” Crows are brilliant, as all corvidae, and much more social than for example the lark, who get to mass in “exultations.” Hugo pronounces his “stance on avian nomenclature” quite “radical,” and rests his chin upon sweet Augie’s shoulder.
“I think they’re here as a Greek chorus to your distemper. So… what has you so ruffled? I assume your sister is angry about something…”
It isn’t that. He takes the wine from Hugo’s hand even though it’s not yet noon, I think, and is pleasantly surprised by its quality. Only the best for Augie.
“You know Lavinia’s charity endeavor? The Touched, the Orphanage…”
Hugo has trouble placing it at first, which is at odds with his later behavior but I haven’t figured out whether he’s strictly playing a game with Augie or whether he is this scattered: “Orphans, right. No, the Touched,” he nods, “Yes, they’re terrible.” No. “Wonderful?” No. “Absurd?” Augie asks if he even knows what the term means, and Hugo “finally” remembers, dimly: “They’re all, uh, they have, uh, weird, um, deformities and afflictions. And… Oh! Um, Alderton Musgrove has a niece who can float… Just an inch or so off the ground. She can’t go anywhere unless you tow her about! Musgrove is apoplectic. I’m not supposed to tell.”
There’s of course a ton of Wilde here, but the truer comparison is, I think, Saki. He has altogether a different moral sense and humor than Wilde, even at the latter’s most playful. Plus I get to recommend Saki — the somewhat regrettable pen name of H. H. Munro and, not to mention, a major influence on Coward and Wodehouse and even my own novelette The Commonplace Book — which is always good. Seek out the Clovis stories if you can.
“Oh! And uh, Lavinia’s opened a home for them? And it’s all rather controversial?” he continues. Augie explains he’s just had word about the attack on Myrtle: “The girl’s fine but Lavinia, she’s aflame!” This is the first time we’re hearing from Lavinia, even secondhand, so it’s worth considering:
“It’s time society accepted that the Touched are amongst us,” Augustus quotes as Hugo gazes at him sweetly, lovingly, “And I said ‘Well, they’re not amongst us, you know — they’re in the Orphanage.’ And she called me a genius. Which is worse than when she calls me an idiot, because I never know what she…”
Anyhow: In response to the attack, Lavinia will be bringing two of the Touched — Mrs. True and Miss Adair, of course — to the opera, as previously rippled. Visibility as protection. Kind of an odd jump, but we have Augie to show us how it happened.
“Are they hideous?” asks Hugo, curious: “Whatever they are, flirt with the ugly one.”
Augie shivers, saying “these people” make him uneasy. There’s a lot to unpack there, as we’ll see. But it’s possible he’s just talking about society in general, too: The full quote is “I don’t know how to flirt.
God, these people make me uneasy. What if she’s some sort of Elephant Man-woman?”
“Well then, she’s probably the ugly one!”
Augie begs Hugo to attend with him and Hugo loves every second of it, finally deciding on a proper trade: If Hugo attends the tragically commonplace Faust with Augie, Augie will in turn appear at the next meeting of the Ferryman’s — which is, of course, the “pagan sex club” that he’s planning on turning into a major venture once Augie’s onboard: “It’s more than just a club, it’s an ethos” and so on.
This part’s interesting too: “I won’t sit through three hours of moralistic bellowing with everyone I know and hate, just because Lavinia’s gone weird…” and Augie hisses, “She’s not weird,” and Hugo fairly blushes, contrite, as if he’s really crossed a line. “I’m an ape. But she does push you around.”
“Sex club is just… That’s just flirting on a much scarier level,” Augie Whedons, and Hugo assures him it’s less about flirting and more about relaxing: “Endure someone flirting with you.” Which I’ll point out he has been this entire conversation, but doesn’t consider it that way because they went to Eton.
“As far as society is concerned,” Hugo epigrams at the maid, who was also one of the two lovers we began the scene in bed with, “Augustus Bidlow is above reproach, and beneath contempt. He’s perfect.”
He really is. And there’s a level, I think, on which Hugo means what he says. Augie’s perfect. But he’s also a perfect mark, for what Lord Swann is planning. It’ll complicate matters later so I’ll just tell you now:
Hugo is in bed with Frank Mundi, who is passing him Touched the same way the Beggar King is feeding info to the Orphanage. Where the latter are attempting a sort of harmonious commune, what Hugo envisions is all the more mercenary: A collection of the most interesting whores who’ve ever existed. A new use for a new commodity, a sort of market for women-plus.
So it’s an ethos, in fact, pointed directly at the heads of the Touched no less than Lord Massen’s own designs: With the Touched in the Ferryman’s employ, Hugo’s taste for the rather unusual — vide his friendship with Augustus Bidlow — will find its ultimate form: The perfect mating of predilection and avocation. Never mind the fact that it’s an easy and destructive out to offer a despised minority: He offers them worship, not disgust, and all it will cost them is everything.
And to digress further: Every successive iteration of Joss Whedon’s story sense has gotten closer to outright socialism but this is the first time that it attains primacy: This is a story about labor, specifically underappreciated but nevertheless exploited, finally waking up to its own power.
The feminism is there and central, of course — whatever you think of Joss, it’s there — but in a steampunk story, or at least one about the Industrial Revolution, you have something of a duty to at least check off the “Labor” box on your docket, because it’s the last time things changed for workers in any meaningful way. So the same way that “women” here telescopes “minorities,” meant as a blurry synecdoche, so too does “workers” telescope “women,” in the end.
Which isn’t to say it overwrites it, just that we’re meant to be operating on at least three levels at all times: We have the X-Men/social justice story of the Touched, and the feminist story of women realiing their own power, and the socialist story of societal upheaval. The job becomes not conflating them, but seeing how they operate in intersection. Harriet has a nonuseful skill, brown skin, and a cis male lover: That’s one recipe. Bonfire Annie, whom we’ll meet soon, has Black skin and a very useful offensive Turn, but is coded queer: That’s a different system of interlocking privileges and powers and disadvantages altogether. Miss Adair is Irish, Maladie is bananas, Mrs. True has the freedom of a Widow, and so on.
It’s all of these things at once, not just one flattened “women good, men bad” identity-politics whinge, which I’ll tell you a secret: It never is. It’s always just this complicated, we don’t always get to hear it or talk about it but it’s always there.
Whatever that Invisible College of old white men is up to, know this: They play identity politics, to win, and they are very, very good at it. Their politics is what “just is” but that’s a territory they’ve had to defend for a long time. And no matter what happens with the Touched, they’re here now: And the men on top will have to defend their station more fiercely than they ever have.
Men with the power, versus women with powers. It’s an oldie but a goodie. Have you read The Power, by Naomi Alderman? I found it: Oogy.
ORPHANAGE
“I like watching you work,” says Mrs. True, of Doctor Cousens’s healing. “It’s like you’re conducting.” Get in wrong with the Beggar King, he says, “And you’ll get a symphony.” She changes the subject: “Gift like yours you should be the Royal physician,” but they both know why he’s not. That’s when Myrtle enters, ecstatic about something and bearing a gorgeous gown. She chatters, excited, and hands over Lavinia’s invitation.
“Oh right, I’m going to the opera tonight. I had a rippling…”
Horatio points out the odd jump in logic — we’ve been attacked/come out and play — but Mrs. True just shrugs. “Even sent an outfit.” Will there be trouble? Yes. Will she be able to fit into the dress? Hmm, just barely. “It’s a good dress for you,” Horatio says on his way out. “It’ll keep pressure on the wound.”
Mrs. True and Miss Adair meet at the top of the stairs in their respective gowns — True in a dramatic black-and-claret, Penance in a Cinderella-blue fantasy — and send the other girls’ heads reeling.
“Mrs. True, you look very fine!” Penance says, and Mrs. True smiles: “I think so, too.”
In the carriage they banter, nervously: “I’m not confident in my curtsying,” says Penance, “I’m not confident in my breathing, responds Mrs. True. “Oh, I wasn’t planning to breathe! I think it’s considered rude.” They discuss Mrs. True’s healing wound — it itches, much worse than simple pain — and then in the middle of things they’re driven to a halt by horses all around. A chain-bound man appears at the window, scaring Miss Adair to death.
THE BEGGAR KING
“That’s Odium,” says the Beggar King Declan Orrun.” Pardon the stench, you cannot get that man into a bath.” (See if I can’t!) He calls Penance “the great inventress” before launching into a bitch sesh about how he’s now been seen coming to her call like a puppy, and how dangerous that is for them both. Him because he’s a king, of course, and her because he’s angry.
“We were attacked today.”
“Only once?”
Mrs. True explains quickly and simply that she’s deduced someone’s been snatching the Touched, and now that they’ve been seen by the ladies, a danger to them and their associates as well. Which, he points out, she’s made sure he is.
“I’m genuinely searching for a way that this spins out that I don’t kill you!”
“It would be better if you didn’t,” Mrs. True says, with that customary twist in her brow.
After some negotiation, it’s decided: He will help the Orphanage in return for money and for, Penance supplies, “an automated motor-carriage, designed to your specifications.” The deal is struck. But he wouldn’t be the Beggar King if he didn’t get out, then turn with a razor to Mrs. True’s face.
“You’re mad enough to make this worth it. But you’re mad enough to try not to. If it goes that way, I will cut your face to a mess.”
She presses her face into the blade: “This isn’t my face.”
A curious line — but one three years in the making, I’d wager.
When the ladies have resumed their journey, one of the henchman — one of Orrun’s employed, you might say — gets a little too jovial with the Beggar King, and we’re to assume he loses one or more fingers as a result.
One might hope for better employment, come this glorious revolution.
BEFORE THE SHOW
Backstage, Hugo Swann is making time with an ingenue named Kitty, or Katie, who is cleverer than she needs to be. And in the main plaza of the theatre, Bidlow and Massen are discussing language with a doctor. Specifically a psychoanalyst, or what Maladie would call an “angel,” of one kind or another.
The crux of the argument is this: Do we hold fast to the mother tongue, refusing to import words from France? Dr. Beldon agrees that in his field, new terminology is constantly coming into vogue.
“Language requires not stasis, but specificity,” says Miss Bidlow. She’s talking about what’s new, what’s abhorrent until it isn’t — about a crack in the great machine of empire. She doesn’t even know how close she is, only that she’s found another thing Massen can’t abide.
“I should be thrilled to excise the word “nice.” It’s vague as paste. Isn’t that right, Augustus?”
Augie is woolgathering; it makes his sister impatient.
“We were discussing it earlier. The specificity of modern language.”
“Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes. It’s very [don’t say it don’t say it] nice.”
She tilts her head in eloquent disappointment, and who should swing in to rescue his Augie but Lord Hugo Swann himself, fresh from backstage.
“If it’s, uh, French terminology we’re discussing, there are a few terms we Britons simply don’t have a word for…” The group is sufficiently scandalized, and the focus is off Augie and onto Swnan, and all’s right with the world. Lavinia is almost impressed with Augie’s ability to fuck things up, this time by bringing a rake to the opera, but in society’s terms Hugo’s above both contempt and reproach, which is why he pursues them so ardently.
“We were discussing the panic a few old men are having about certain French terms,” she says, enjoying herself finally, and we learn of one recently debated on the Parliament floor: Employees.
“And here we say it, and yet live,” Lavinia laughs, but Massen knows what he’s about: “It is not panicking to abhor something,” he says, which is as chilling as it is reasonable.
“Neither is it useful to replace a perfectly good Anglo-Saxon word with some foreigner’s flourish. In England, we say the employed. What possible benefit in replacing it with employees?”
Enter Mrs. True and Miss Adair, because what would be the point of a linguistic digression in a Whedon script that doesn’t further the central theme aggressively? Language is the ultimate meta drug, after all, and he loves playing with its conventions more than anything — silence, musical theatre, poetry. We knew something big was coming the second they brought up words.
Anyway. Mrs. True’s been teed up, and she goes for it. “The singular. One may refer to a single employee, whereas the employed can only be used to describe a mass of people. It doesn’t allow for the idea that a single worker may be a whole and meaningful being.”
One might imagine that among Lord Massen’s chief horrors, when it comes to the Touched, is how each Turn is unique. A single Touched maiden is a whole and meaningful being, yes: But one twisted by powers beyond her simple mind’s ability to comprehend. What women are appalled by today, they will accept tomorrow, and demand the day after that. And the immigrant, and the deviant. And they’ll be none the wiser for having been used. Every tool’s a weapon, if you hold it right.
Introductions are made as Augie and Hugo whisper (“Which one’s the ugly one?!”) and Mrs. True once again reminds society that the Touched are not “afflicted,” merely Touched.
“Perhaps some women are more fortunate in the nature of their ailment than others,” it is offered, and Mrs. True shrugs. “That’s true. But more suffer from society’s perception than their own debilitation.”
Poor Augie takes them in, Miss Adair’s luminous and curious beauty and Mrs. True’s darker charm, and blurts out, “Well? So what’s wrong with you?”
Hugo jumps in to save Augie — “I think he means me! Where to begin…” — but Augie does okay. He manages to imply through his stutters, if not state outright, that both women are beautiful — and “quite nice,” which sends Lavinia off again. He started today uneasy with the whole idea of the Touched and now that he’s met them, he’s bewitched. Exactly what Lavinia was hoping for.
“And you have the charity, The Orphanage. That seems… normal…”
Mrs. True nearly nods, correcting him. “Miss Bidlow runs The Orphanage. We’re just the employed.” She says it just cheekily enough that Massen can only slightly rumble his displeasure.
“Shockingly, I’d say my brother has spoken for everyone,” Lavinia says meanly: Everybody wants to know what their Turns are.
“Penance is an inventor. A creator, really…”
“— Oh, there’s only one Creator. No, uh, I can see energy. Potential energy. Like with electricity. I can see where it wants to go, or, move, or settle. It helps me put things together.”
And her companion?
“Mrs. True tends to be a few steps ahead of the rest of us,” Lavinia smiles.
“A prognosticator!” Hugo marvels, but she demurs. “So I shouldn’t ask how I’m going to die?”
“No,” Miss Bidlow smirks, “But one can safely assume it will involve a French word…”
“It’s as confusing as it is useful,” Mrs. True tries to explain. “You were a soldier, you’ve seen men who suddenly feel themselves back in battle — well, sometimes I go forward.”
Massen’s wary: He never said he was a soldier. Penance smiles hugely: “You’re probably going to!”
But no, it’s in the eyes, Mrs. True says. Assessing every threat.
“Lord Massen is the last line of defense against the scourge of modernity,” Lavinia laughs, but again he’s chilling and reasonable:
“I’m old and I’ve seen too much change to fight against the tide. But chaos is not change. Shouting for recognition does not make a people worthy of it. There’s a harmony to our world that’s worth preserving.”
Mrs. True knows he’s talking about the power, about New and Old Power, and she sees where he’s aiming and she sees the danger. It’s in the eyes, you see: Assessing every threat.
“As I understand it, a harmony is made up of different voices sounding different notes,” she says, maybe just a tad bit deadly. And then the worst thing happens: He wins.
“Yes. And one is always above the other.”
He is smug, she is annoyed, and it’s time to start the show.
FAUST
Is three hours of moralizing, but Penance likes the costumes and the drama of it all, and Augie seems to like the Adair of it all. The Widow is having ripplings and flashbacks to the ripplings and counting her fingertips one by one: Trouble is coming. Trouble is coming, like a tiger moving through the grass, and she can see it.
Then it arrives. Just as Mephistopheles rises from the floor, his throat is slit — he arrives onstage with his head leaning back at a grotesque angle, blood spurting as one of the singers onstage begins to scream.
Once he’s dropped dead, we see behind him the culprit: A flower-seller type of waif, hair grungy and teeth filthy and eyes occasionally but not yet bestial. She wears a veil and a mask of soot, and dances like a dolly on a string. It’s Maladie. Here’s what she has to say:
“I killed the Devil! Is no one going to say thank you? …It’s okay, petal. It’s not your fault. It’s the doctor. Oh!,” she says, suddenly looking out at the crowd. She is attended by Bonfire Annie and a man with a gun for an arm. “Oh, there’s so many people. Did you all come in hats? Now all of your brains are naked. No? You shall have a wreath of eels with the tail in your mouth” — and when they rise, she points her blade at them to sit — “Please! Please. Don’t… go. Devil’s speciality is eels. Which is known by you as a serpent. Oh, but it’s only Adam. It’s all the same when it slithers. Eve had a cunt. Why am I here? I came to kill an angel” — she indicates she’s done the opposite — “Oops. But the closer I came, the more I felt I was here for a r… Because I… saw God. He was all light. And He put on me His wreath. He came. He came to us all, and you all turned your backs on Him. You lied. You said He never. But He makes hum. Oh, He sings. I could never make it out, but I feel His hum, like a comb in my throat. And I feel it. I feel it. Him. Here. Who… Who… Ah, bugger it. Take the angel.”
The gun takes aim at Dr. Beldon and those around him, and they all begin to fall.
Mary Brighton steps forward, a light in her heart, and begins to sing then: A song of hope, and triumph, and more besides. It pins the Touched there, onstage and in the audience, like butterflies. Chains of light, connecting them all — the men and women in the audience who haven’t fled or died. Mrs. True, looking like her heart will break. Penance Adair, grinning at the light around our Augie.
When Maladie and Annie take Mary and go running through the theatre’s backstage, Mrs. True jumps down to deliver the man of his gun-arm. They scamper past Hugo and Katie, who recently were fucking, and Mrs. True spares him an unimpressed glance as she follows. He’s still hard, and Katie doesn’t know why — but Hugo does. He’s never been harder.
Mrs. True jumps the fast way down a winding staircase, her tight dress ripping away conveniently until she lands in that three-point superhero pose in just the slip underneath. It’s part Alice Liddell and part Buffy, the movie, but as a visual it works. She stops Maladie at the bottom of the stairs and they tussle until Maladie’s animal eyes show up, glowing in the dark.
“Just let me have the girl,” Mrs. True begs. “Just let me have the girl…” but Maladie sees something, catches something, realizes something, and comes after the Widow twice as hard. Eventually they’re both beaten bloody — “You’ve made a mess, little songbird,” murmurs Bonfire Annie — and eventually Maladie gets away with her prize. And just in the nick.
FRANK MUNDI
Is on the case. He surprises Hugo Swann where he’s loitering with Katie after the excitement, and you’d be forgiven for thinking they’ve met before.
“I’ll need to interview his lordship alone, Katie. It’ll be quicker. But don’t leave the theater, please.”
She rises and floats out of the room, putting on a hilarious air: “Oh, I could never leave the theatah…”
Frank asks whether Hugo even tried to stop Maladie, which he didn’t, but Hugo just pours him a glass of champagne. “I have it that that’s your job. Oh, and that there’s a young widow doing it for you…”
Maladie kidnapped a girl, Mrs. True gave chase. “Champion of the unfortunate, and she knocks dangerous men about.” But then Frank says something interesting, he says, “Then I guess you’re lucky she don’t know what you’re up to.”
What we’re up to, Hugo corrects him. For as mentioned above, they are partners in Hugo’s mysterious plan: “Once you’ve sent enough suitable girls my way, and a certain investor is invested, The Ferryman’s Club will become not just a profitable business, but a phenomenon. I might even forget a few debts…”
Frank looks like the East End Ape for a moment, and they stare. Ape looking at ape.
“Take the fucking champagne, Frank. You’ll want it. You see, I know the name of the girl Maladie took. And so do you.”
And so he does. Once, three years ago, they were to be wed. He dropped her off at an audition and things were never quite the same after that.
THE DOCTOR EDMUND HAGUE
Is American, something of a Ripper himself, played by Denis O’Hare, and seems to be a torturer of some rigor.
“One little polyglot. One tiny Touched girl. That’s all you had to bring me… I like that word, Touched. Like the finger of God gave a few of us a little poke. Woke us up.” And as he begins to drill, it’s a mask over the subject’s head like a beast with the face drawn crudely on. Somewhere between a clockwork and a trepanation.
“Every subject gets me closer to finding exactly where it is He touched us. Not today, though. Mmm. No. Today… Let’s just see where it hurts.”
THE STREETS
One short Bonfire later, Penance tracks Amalia True by the sewer in which she escaped the flames, then by the trail of her victims: Two bros hanging on each other, bleeding — “We didn’t want it anyway! Fucking tart!” — and she tosses them a shiner on her way to find Amalia, still dealing with the third of her attackers.
“Mrs. True, you look very fine!” Penance says, and Mrs. True nearly smiles.
“Got into a fight. I didn’t win. Maladie has the girl. She won’t kill her. Not right away. We have time.”
And, Penance notes, an invigorating way to spend it, knocking around punters just for having the temerity to accost her. “I started it.”
“I know,” says Miss Adair, leaning on Mrs. True’s shoulder with great tenderness. “Trouble makes you troublesome, but nothing sets you off like good fortune: Mary’s song. Reachin’ right into me. Tellin’ me that… that I’m here. I belong here. And you. And… all of us that’s Touched. We’re woven into the fabric of the world, and we’re meant to be as we are. We find Mary, we get her singin’… They’ll all come to us, and they’ll be safe.”
Or if not safe, “Less lonely, then. And that’s a start.”
But it’s not the start:
THREE YEARS AGO. THIRD OF AUGUST, 1896. A MONDAY, RATHER GRAY.
Augie woke up and shook it off. Penance smiled in wonder, before she forgot. Mary Brighton and the other theater ladies were relieved when the air went clear again. Massen’s daughter fell to the ground, afflicted. Dr. Horatio Cousens’ future changed indelibly and in an instant.
Men who’d fallen to their knees at the sight got up and brushed themselves off, not quite aware enough to be embarrassed. Everywhere in London people were standing back up. Those who’d been Touched, perhaps, standing just a tad taller than they had before.
And the Widow, she swam up toward the light, and pulled herself back up onto the ledge.
When she came back up she was someone different.
She was a soldier.
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