In short, was the Analytical Engine merely delayed or forever aborted?
When that question was resolved, then and only then, Babbage would turn his great intellect towards exactly who’d framed him. And why.
It wouldn’t work out that way. Reality shoulders innocence aside. It has powers of veto over even clever plans laid by clever people.
Mr Babbage was a clever man (perhaps the very cleverest of his Age) but the police constable (who’d barely skimmed schooling) could have corrected him. The difference was that the constable had been around the seamier seams of life. So, in some specific cases, he knew better.
Like about penal conditions for instance. Like how hard-labour and the treadmill left no energy for thinking, let alone detective work. Neither during the long days or at day’s end.
And when each of those of days had done with you there was no margin left for luxuries. No reserves. By the end of the first week Mr Babbage would be doing well to remember his name. One month in and his world would have shrunk down to his resultant double hernia. The treadmill had that focussing effect.
Sad to say therefore, this side of the grave, whoever had done Mr Babbage this ill-turn stood a good chance of escaping scott-free.
But this world is not an entirely cold place. When he was able (which was infrequent), the constable was a kind man. And so he kept his counsel and left Babbage a little while longer in blissful ignorance.
Unlike Mr Babbage, Lady Ada Lovelace didn’t go quietly. She’d no idea that was the done and dignified thing when faced with the inevitable. Her parents were to blame.
Papa, a poet, had scandalised his age (and wife) and so Mama, fearful of feeding the bad blood, fiercely shielded young Ada from all philosophy and liberal arts. Her education being strictly scientific Ada grew to womanhood having never heard of stoicism or noble resignation.
Thus when the Lazaran assassins came into her study Ada fought back in a most unladylike way. A lighted candle thrust in the face saw one off, and bringing the curtains down, pelmet and all, draped two more in a velvet shroud. Meanwhile, Ada shrieked like a banshee and generally made a drama out of a crisis.
Wasted wails and vain tears. From Lord Lovelace to the humblest servant in Horsley Towers, all were fast asleep, as all good people should be in the early hours before a busy day. Even the peacocks in the grounds who might have added their screams to hers dreamt peacock dreams. In short, she was the only living soul about. Unnatural Ada had troubled the silent night with her scribblings once too often.
Finally, the whey-faced Lazarans caught her. One pinned Ada to her desk and another brained her repeatedly with a bottle.
While her spirit and the other assassins fled, the best looking Lazaran stripped off his clothing and awaited developments.
Chapter 1: THEY MARCH BY NIGHT
‘Twenty pound and not a farthing more. Don’t waste breath trying to budge me.’
‘You’re a thief!’ said the solicitor. It demeaned him, haggling in the street like this, a source of amusement to urchins and passers-by, but he knew Babbage’s yard and workshop held material worth ten times that, even at scrap value.
The scrap merchant looked down on the solicitor from a great height of commercial and moral advantage.
‘That’s rich coming from a land-pirate!’ he said. ‘Anyhow, I’m the only ‘thief’ interested in the deal. Take it or leave it.’
He spoke truth: word had got around and a sulphurous taint hung over 1 Dorset Street and all its appurtenances. Offers for the house and contents had been thin on the ground. What respectable family wished to buy an abode where it was a blessing the walls could not speak? ‘Crimes against Nature,’ and ‘Unspeakable necrophilic depravity,’ as the judge had termed them, hardly enhanced property prices
Early hopes for some perfumed confirmed-bachelor house-buyer to appear and save the day went unfulfilled (there was never one about when you needed one). Accordingly, winding up Mr Babbage’s affairs had been a tale of woe and robbery and waste.
The hagglers had to leap for their lives as a hackney cab ploughed through without so much as a ‘mind y’backs!’ or flick of the whip. Arrogant prole-aristocrats!
Then, adding insult to injury, in passing it splashed them with mud and probably worse. Yet the indignity seemed strangely appropriate in the circumstances.
‘Done,’ snapped the solicitor. ‘And I damned well have been!’
Beggars (or buggers) could not be choosers—which was an apt epithet. By the time the solicitor’s fees and reasonable expenses were deducted from the proceeds of sale Mr Babbage might find begging his sole career option once his prison term was done.
The scrap merchant spat into his palm and offered to shake on it. The solicitor shrinkingly brushed two fingers past that general direction.
In went the scrap merchants’ street-arabs. Out in due course and in carts came metal components galore, off to be reused or recycled. A short while before they’d been Mr Babbage’s ‘Analytical Engine’: his hope of immortality and the blessing of mankind with mechanical computers.
So that was the end of that for a century or so.
When the sun set, the columns set out. There was no law against daylight movement, but it was for the best.
The Heathrow Hecatomb: a brutal slab of jerry-built concrete, devoid of the slightest humanising touch. Not even a Royal coat of arms graced the gate, for no one on earth, from high to low, wished their name associated with it.
Happily, Nature’s revenge for the blot on the landscape had a head start due to that careless construction. Rain selectively streaked those parts with excess sand in the mix and drove its fingers in. The Hecatomb’s hard edges were already crumbling. Particles of it dissolved down to whiten the dying grass below.
Accordingly, Heathrow Hecatomb wasn’t going to outlive the great Cathedrals it matched in size—but that hardly worried its begetters. It kept people out and other people (sort of) in, and that sufficed. Aesthetic considerations could go hang—and appropriately enough there were gibbets enough atop the place, gibbets so busy there was a queue for their services.
A moat had been started but never completed: the finished structure’s appearance and contents were found to be deterrent enough. Now the demi-ditch was a dog’s graveyard and rubbish-record of every successive inhabitant. Other than in the depth of winter it stunk to high Heaven and glowed yellow-green in the dark.
So, all in all, the Hecatomb was no adornment to Hounslow Heath! Coaches passing through on the Great West Road put on a burst of speed—or even extra speed.
Because even before the Hecatomb arrived, ‘Heathrow’ had an evil reputation: the haunt of highwaymen and sad wanderers. As the name suggested it was a waste with a road running through it. Few lingered there by night and fewer still with honourable intentions.
Come the Hecatomb in the Year of Our Lord 1823, things soon reverted to business as normal—only more so. The scattered natives (innkeepers and/or misanthropes) barred all doors as dusk fell and then stayed indoors till morning. Highwaymen they could deal with, but now there were stories about escapes…
Unofficial escapes, that is. The regulated kind occurred regularly, as they did this particular night. The Hecatomb’s main doors cracked to spill yellow light onto the heath. There emerged scouts—bona fide human hussars in scarlet and gold—to check the coast was clear. They scattered all over the scene in the interests of thwarting spies and scandal.