Free The Bullet-Catcher's Daughter by Rod Duncan Page A

was no empire, he said, because no single government ruled over it, nor would gas lighting ever reach beyond the cities. Yet, he had misjudged the mood of the age and the name quickly passed into common usage, the irony seemingly lost on the vast multitudes of working men and their families who regarded the awful powers of the Patent Office as having been established for their own protection.
    Perhaps it did once protect the common man. Those machines legitimised with a patent mark never put great numbers out of work. And for almost two hundred years warfare had been restricted to the level of the border skirmish. But if the founding fathers believed the power they had bestowed would not corrupt, they were naive.
    Listening to the horses’ hooves beating time on the road, I watched the lights of Sleaford thinning towards nothing. John Farthing sat next to me, bracing himself against the lurch and sway of our progress. The crossbow pistol he had now folded away. I might have had the slim possibility of escaping through the door. But where could I run? He had followed me to the airship in Anstey. He would know of my home on the canal cut.
    The role of informative flying companion had suited him well. Witty, modest, easy to trust and unthreatening. But for the starched and disapproving presence of the elderly lady who’d sat opposite, would I have been so easily taken in by the illusion? Perhaps he had chosen exactly that persona to counterpoint her lecture on Republican morals.
    What is a chameleon’s colour, when all pretence is stripped away?
    I had seen conmen in the Circus of Mysteries working easy marks among the jossers. But too long in that game and they forgot the person under the disguise. Then they would grow overconfident and try to play a member of the circus troop. Invariably they were found out. Confronted, a new story would emerge – an unhappy childhood, a widowed mother, a disease of the mind, a momentary lapse of morals, deep regret, a plea for forgiveness. They would beg for one more chance. But with each new face, we saw more clearly that far from being disguises to cover the person hidden underneath, the lies had corroded whatever they once were until nothing remained.
    “I must endure your bad feelings towards me,” John Farthing said, speaking into the taut silence. “But please don’t think badly of the Patent Office.”
    “Thinking badly is the only power you’ve left me.”
    In truth I had some remaining power. Where running and hiding are impossible, one may still misdirect. Thus my real secret remained safe, for the moment at least, contained within the smaller of my two travelling cases, resting next to the wall of the hotel room, concealed under an embroidered cloth.
    Becoming aware that we had slowed, I peered outside. The moonlight revealed a stone gatepost just beyond the carriage window. We were turning onto a long, straight gravel road lined with tall poplar trees.
    I had no doubt now that we were heading towards one of the many mysterious properties owned by the Patent Office across the land. But as to the nature of what I would find there I could not guess. Popular belief had it that the Patent Office possessed vast resources and had nigh unlimited manpower at its disposal. How else could it keep watch for the stirrings of new and unseemly technology across the entire civilised world? Yet it was so secretive that notwithstanding its many tentacles and vast reach, its inner workings remained entirely mysterious.
    The dark shape of a large building loomed ahead. The horses slowed towards a stop.
    Farthing opened the carriage door and held it for me. “Speak only the truth,” he said.
    “Or what?”
    “Please spare me another stain on my conscience.”
    Stepping out onto the gravel, I saw that the building was some kind of manor house. A set of low steps ran from the drive up to a terrace along the front of the building. The grand entrance sat plumb in the centre, with two sets of