Free The Difference Engine by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling Page B

London, after an important lecture, in the dead of night. She’d go to Grand’s, then, and find Mick, confront him, and plead, threaten blackmail, exposure, whatever proved necessary.
    What tin she had was in her muff. There was a cab-stand in Minories, by Goodman’s Yard. She would go there now, and rouse a cabman to take her to Piccadilly.
    Toby cried once, piteously, as she closed the door behind her. She scraped her shin cruelly in the dark, on Cairns’ chained bicycle.
    She was half the way down Minories to Goodman’s Yard when she remembered her portmanteau, but there was no turning back.

    Grand’s night doorman was heavy-set, cold-eyed, chin-whiskered, stiff in one leg, and very certainly wouldn’t allow Sybil into his hotel, not if he could help it. She’d twigged him from a block away, climbing down from her cabriolet — a big gold-braided bugaboo, lurking on the hotel’s marble steps under great dolphin-wreathed lamps. She knew her doormen well enough; they played a major role in her life.
    It was one thing to enter Grand’s on Dandy Mick’s arm, by daylight. But to walk in boldly from the midnight streets, as an unescorted woman, was another matter. Only whores did that, and the doorman would not let whores in. But she might think of a likely story to gull him, perhaps, if she thought of a very good lie, and if he were stupid, or careless, or weary. Or she might try to bribe him, though she had little enough of tin left, after the cab. And she was dressed proper, not in the flash clothes of a dollymop. She might, at a pinch, distract him. Smash a window with a cobblestone, and run past him when he came to look. It was hard to run in a crinoline, but he was lame, and slow. Or find a street-boy to throw a stone for her . . .
    Sybil stood in darkness, by the wooden hoardings of a construction site. Broadside posters loomed over her, bigger than bed-sheets, with great tattered shouting print: DAILY NEWS World-Wide Circulation, LLOYD’S NEWS Only One Penny, SOUTHEASTERN RAILWAY Ramsgate & Margate 7/6. Sybil pulled one hand from her muff and gnawed feverishly at her fingernail, which smelled of Turkish tobacco. She was dully surprised to notice that her hand was blue-white with the cold, and trembling badly.
    Pure luck, it seemed, rescued her then, or the nod of a sorrowing angel, for a shining gurney brougham came to a chugging halt in front of Grand’s, its blue-coated fireman jumping down to lower the hinged step. Out came a rollicking mob of drunken Frenchmen in scarlet-lined capes, with brocade waistcoats and tasseled evening-canes, and two of them had women with them.
    Sybil grabbed up her skirt on the instant and scurried forward, head down. Crossing the street, she was hidden from the doorman by the barricade of the gurney’s gleaming coachwork. Then she simply walked around it, past the great wood-spoked wheels with their treads of rubber, and boldly joined the group. The Frenchies were parley-vousing at each other, mustache-stroking and giggling, and did not seem to notice her, nor care. She smiled piously at no one in particular, and stood very close to a tall one, who seemed drunkest. They staggered up the marble stairs, and the tall Frenchman slapped a pound-note at the doorman’s hand, with the careless ease of a man who didn’t know what real money was. The doorman blinked at it and touched his braided hat.
    And Sybil was safely inside. She walked with the jabbering Frenchies across a wilderness of polished marble to the hotel-desk, where they collected their keys from the night-clerk and staggered up the curving stairway, yawning and grinning, leaving Sybil behind at the counter.
    The night-clerk, who spoke French, was chuckling over something he’d overheard. He sidled down the length of linteled mahogany, with a smile for Sybil. “How may I be of service, madame?”
    The words came hard, almost stammering at first. “Could you tell me please, has a Mr. Michael . . . or, rather . . .