7 November 1848

Swiftly, expertly, the tiny hand worked, ticked up and down, moved over the face of the miniature pallet. The worker was wearing yellow silk trousers, a close-woven cotton blue waistcoat; it (Bates could not see whether it was a he or a she) had on spectacles that shone like dewdrops in the light. Its hair was black, its skin a golden-cream. Bates could even make out the creases of concentration on its brow, the tip of its tiny tongue just visible through its teeth.

Bates stood upright. "It hurts my back," he said, "to lean over so."

"I quite understand," said Pannell. "Might I fetch you a chair?"

"Ah, no need for that, thank you," said Bates. "I think I have seen all I need. It is, indeed, fascinating."

Pannell seemed agitated, shifting weight from one foot to another. "I never tire of watching them work," he agreed. "Pixies. Fairies! Creatures from childhood story." He beamed. You smile sir, thought Bates. You smile, but there is sweat on your lip. Perhaps you are not altogether lost to shame. Nerves, sir, nerves.

"What is it, eh, making exactly?"

"A mechanism for controlling the angle, pitch and yaw, in flight you know. I could give you its technical name, although it is Mister Nicholson who is the greater expert on this matter."

"Is it a sir or a madam?"

"It?"

"The creature. The workman."

"A female." Pannell touched Bates's elbow, herding him gently towards the staircase at the far end of the workshop. "We find they have better hands for weaving the finest wire-strands."

Bates paused at the foot of the wooden stairs, taking one last look around the workshop. "And these are Lilliputians?"

"These," replied Pannell, "are from the neighbouring island, Blefuscu. We believe Blefuscans, sir, to be better workers. They are less prone to disaffection, sir. They work harder and are more loyal."

"All of which is," said Bates, "very interesting."

"I am pleased you think so," said Bates.

From where he was sitting the view was clear through the quartered window of Pannell's office. Grime marked the bottom right hand corners of each pane like grey lichen. Each patch of dirt was delineated from clean glass by a hyperbolic line running from bottom left to top right. X equals y squared, thought Bates. The pattern on the glass was distracting, the eye hardly noticed the view that was actually through the window, the dingy street, the grey-brick buildings.

He shifted his weight in the chair. It complained, squeaking like a querulous baby. I, too, am nervous, he thought to himself.

"Brandy?" Pannell asked for the second time.

"Thank you."

"Mr. Burton expressed his desire to meet you himself."

"I would be honoured."

"Indeed …"

A bell tinkled, as tiny a sound as ice-glass breaking. A Lilliputian sound. Bates looked to the patch of wall above the door. The bell was mounted on a brass plate. It shivered again, and silver sound dribbled out.

Pannell stood, staring at the bell like a fool, a glass of brandy in his hands. "That means that Mr. Burton is coming here directly. It rings when Mr. Burton is on his way here directly. But I was to bring you to Mr. Burton's office, not he to come here …"

And almost at once the door shuddered, as with cold, and snapped open. Burton was a tall man who carried a spherical belly before him like an O of exclamation. His jowls were turfed with black beard, but his forehead was bald, as pink and curved as a rose petal. He moved with the fierce energy of the financially successful. As Bates got up from his chair he tipped his glance down with a respectful nod of the head: Burton's shoes were very well-made, tapering to a point, the uppers made of some variety of stippled leather. Standing to his full height brought Bates's glance up along the fine cloth of Burton's trousers, past the taut expanse of dark waistcoat and frock, to the single bright item of clothing on the man: a turquoise and scarlet bow tie, in which actual jewels had been fitted.

He faced the proprietor with a smile, extending his hand. But the first thing Burton said was: "No, sir."

"Mr. Burton," gabbled Pannell, "may I introduce to you Mr. Bates, who has come in person to negotiate the contract. I was just telling him how generous we considered the terms he offered …"

"No sir," repeated Burton. "I'll not stand it."

"Not stand it, sir?" said Bates.

"I know who you are, sir," fumed Burton. He stomped to the far side of the office, and turned to face them again. Bates noticed the bone-coloured walking stick, capped at each tip with red gold. "I know who you are!"

"I am Abraham Bates, sir," replied Bates.

"No sir!" Burton raised the cane, and brought it down on the flat of Pannell's desk. It reported like a rifle discharge. Pannell jerked at the sound, and even Bates found sweat pricking out of his forehead again.

"No sir," bellowed Burton. "You'll not weasel your way here! I know your type, and you'll not come here with your false names and false heart. No."

"Mr. Burton," said Bates, trying to keep his voice level. "I assure you that Bates is my name."

"You are a liar, sir! I give you the lie, sir." The cane flourished in the air, inadvertently knocking a picture on the wall and tipping a perspective of the South Seas through forty degrees.

"I am not, sir," retorted Bates.

"Gentlemen," whimpered Pannell. "I beg of you both …"

"Pannell, you'll hold your tongue," declared Burton, emphasising the last word with another flourish of the cane. "If you value your continued employment at this place. Do you deny, sir," he added, pointing the cane directly at Bates, "do you deny that you came here to infiltrate? To weasel your way in?"

"I came to discuss certain matters," insisted Bates. "That is all. Sir, do you refuse even to talk with me?"

"And if I do?" said Burton, his voice dropping a little. "Then? You'll have your members of parliament, your newspaper editors, your many friends, and with them you'll turn on me? A pack of dogs, sir! A pack of dogs!"

"I admire your cane," said Bates, lowering himself back into his chair in what he hoped was a cool-headed manner. "Is it bone, sir?"

This took the wind from Burton's sails. "We'll not discuss my cane, sir."

"Is it Brobdingnagian bone? From which part of the body? A bone from the inner-ear, perhaps?"

"There is nothing illegal," Burton began, but then seemed to change his mind. The sentence hung in the air for a while. "Very well," he said, finally, somewhat deflated. "You have come to talk, sir. We will talk, sir. Pannell, you will stay in this room. Pour me a brandy, in fact, whilst I and this … gentleman discuss the affairs of the day. Then, Mr. Bates, I'd be obliged if you left this manufactory and did not return."

"One conversation will satisfy me, sir," said Bates, rounding the sentence off with a small sigh, like a full-stop given breath.

"I am one of Mr. Martineau's party."

"Oh!" said Burton, with egregious sarcasm. "A party man!"

"I am honoured to be so styled."

"And no patriot, I'll lay any money."

"I love my country, sir," replied Bates, "love her enough to wish her better managed."

"Faction and party," Burton muttered grimly, raising the brandy glass to his face like a glass muzzle over his bulbous nose. "Party and faction." He drank. "They'll sunder the country, I declare it." He put the empty glass down on the table with an audible ploc.

Pannell was hovering, unhappy-looking, by the door.

"We can agree to differ on the topic, sir," said Bates, a little stiffly.

"Well, sir," said Burton. "What conversation is it you wish to have with me? I own this manufactory, sir. Yes, we employ a cohort of Blefuscans."

"Employ, sir?"

"They cost me," said Burton, bridling. "A fortune. Regular food does not sit in their stomachs, so they must be fed only the daintiest and most expensive. Regular cloth is too coarse for their clothing, so they must be given the finest silks. The expense is very much greater than a regular salary would be. True, I own them outright, and this makes them slaves. But they are well treated, and they cost me more as slaves than employees ever could. I suppose Mr. Bates here," Burton added, addressing Pannell in a raised voice that aimed for sarcasm, but achieved only petulance, "would see them free. Mr. Bates considers slavery an evil. Is it not so, Mr. Bates?"

Bates shifted in his chair. It squeaked again underneath him. "Since you ask, I do consider such slavery as you practice here an evil. How many of your employees die?"

"I lose money with each fatality, sir," said Burton. "I've no desire to see a single one die."

"And your cane, sir? How many Brobdingnagians are left alive in the world?"

"I have nothing to do with those monsters. Indeed not. One of their kind could hardly fit inside my building."

"Yet you carry a cane made from their bodies, sir. Do you not consider that a small wickedness? A celebration of their pitiable state?"

"Some people, Pannell," said Burton, addressing his employee again. "Some people have leisure and predisposition to be sympathetic towards animals. Others are too busy with the work they have at hand."

"Your Lilliputians …"

"Blefuscans, sir."

"Your little people, sir—and the giant people also—are hardly animals."

"No? Have you worked with them, Mr. Bates?"

"I have devoted many years now to their cause."

"But actually worked with them? No, of course not. The midgets are mischievous, and their wickedness is in the bone. And the giants—they are a clear and present danger to the public good."

"The Brobdingnagians have endured homicide on an appalling scale."

"Homicide? But that implies man, don't it? Implies killing men, don't it?"

"Are not the Brobdingnagians made in God's image, sir? As are you and I? As are the Lilliputians?"

"So," said Burton, smiling broadly. "It's God, at the heart of your disaffection, is it?"

"Our nation would be stronger," said Bates, struggling to keep the primness out of his voice, "if we followed God's precepts more, sir. Or are you an atheist?"

"No, no."

"Let me ask you a question, Mr. Burton: are your Blefuscan workers—are they white-skinned, or black?"

"What manner of question is this, sir? You've just examined my workers out there. You know the answer to your own question."

"Their skins are as white as mine," said Bates. "Now, the Bible is clear on this. God has allotted slavery to one portion of his creation, and marked that portion by blackening their skins—Ham's sons, sir. There are enough Blacks in the world to fill the places of slaves. But it mocks God to take some of his most marvellous creations and enslave them, or kill them."

"I do not kill my workers, sir," insisted Burton.

"But they are killed, sir. Worldwide, only a few thousand are left. And the Brobdingnagians—how many of them remain alive? After the affair with the Endeavour and the Triumph?"

"I have met the Captain of the Triumph, sir," said Burton, bridling up again. "At a dinner party of a friend of mine. An honourable man, sir. Honourable. He followed the orders he was given. What naval gentleman could do otherwise? And," he continued, warming to his theme, "was it so great a crime? These giants are twelve times our size. Had they organised, had they known cannon, and ordnance, and gunpowder, they could have trampled us to pieces. Not only England neither, but the whole of Europe—they would have come over here and trampled us to pieces. Who'd have been the slaves then? You may answer me that question, if you please. With an army of monstrous giants trampling England's green fields, who'd have been the slaves then?"

"The Brobdingnagians are a peace-loving people," said Bates, feeling his own colour rise. "If you read the account of the mariner who discovered their land …"

Burton laughed aloud. "That fellow? Who'd believe a word he wrote? Riding the nipple of a gentlewoman like a hobby-horse, begging your pardon—it was nonsense. And the reality? A race of beings big enough to squash us like horseflies, and destroy our nation. Our nation, sir! Yours and mine! We had but one advantage over them, and that was that we possessed gunpowder and they did not. The King did well to destroy the majority of that population and seize their land. Our people are the best fed in the world, now, sir. Perhaps you do not remember how things were before the gigantic cattle were brought here, but I do: many starved in the streets. Now there's not a pauper but eats roast beef every day. Our army is the strongest and manliest on the continent. Would we have had our successes invading France and Holland without them?"

"You speak only of temporal advantages," insisted Bates. "But to do so is short sighted. It is true that the discoveries of our navy have enriched our country in purely material terms—but the spiritual, sir? The spiritual?"

"God," said Burton.

"Indeed, my friend. God created all these creatures as marvels. We have spat upon his gift. Lilliputians may seem small to us, but they are part of God's universe."

"There are giants in Genesis, I believe," said Burton. "Did not the flood destroy them?"

"The flood may not have reached the northwestern coast of America," said Bates. "At least, this is one theory as to the survival of these peoples."

"It hardly seems to me that God's Providence was greatly disposed towards these monsters. He tried to destroy them in the flood, and again in the form of two British frigates." His face twitched with smiling.

"After much prayer," Bates insisted, not wanting to be distracted. "After much prayer, it has become obvious to me …"

At this Burton laughed out loud, a doggy, abrasive noise; each laugh parcelled into sections, like the "ha! ha! ha!" of conventional orthography, although the noise he made was not so aspirated as this representation implies. More like: nugh! nugh! nugh! It broke through Bates's speech. "Pannell," said Burton. "Mr. Bates has come to vex us, not to divert us, and yet how diverting he is!"

"Mockery is," began Bates, his anger rising. He swallowed his words. Better to turn the other cheek. "I come, sir, to invite you. To invite you to join a communality of enlightened employers and financiers—a small core, sir, but a vital one. From us will grow a more proper, a more holy society."

"A society? So that's it. And if I joined your communality, I would not be allowed to possess any slaves, I suppose?"

"You might own slaves, sir, provided only they were slave—blacks I mean. The Lilliputians are not slaves, sir, in God's eye, and it is God you mock by treating them so. God will not be mocked."

"I daresay not," agreed Burton, hauling his cumbersome body from its chair. "It's been a pleasure, sir, talking with you. Mr. Pannell here will show you out."

Bates rose, flustered, unsure exactly where he had lost the initiative in the interview. "Am I to take it, sir, that you …"

"You are to take it any way you choose, sir. I had thought you a spy for Parliament, sir: there are MPs who would gladly outlaw slavery in all its forms, and they have the power to do actual harm. But you, sir, do not—I doubt nothing but that you are harmless, as are your God-bothering friends. Good day, sir!"

Bates's colour rose fiercely. Godbothering! The insolence! "You are rude sir! Believe me, God is more powerful than any parliament of men."

"In the next world sir, the next world."

"You veer towards blasphemy."

"It is not I," Burton growled, "who attempted to infiltrate an honest workman's shop with lies and deceit, not I who broke the commandment about bearing false witness to worm my way inside a decent business and try to tear it down. But you knew that you would not gain admittance if you spoke your true purpose. Good day, sir."

Bates paced the evening streets of London, the long unlovely streets. He passed gin-shops and private houses. He walked past a junior school with ranks of windows arrayed along its brick walls like the ranks of children within. He passed churches, chapels and a synagogue. Up the dog-leg of Upper St. Martin's Lane and past the rag-traders of Cambridge Circus, now mostly putting away their barrows and boarding up their shops. Bates, lost in his own thoughts, walked on, and up the main thoroughfare of Charing Cross Road.

Around him, now, crowds passed. Like leaves at autumn, drained of their richness, dry and grey and rattling along the stone roads before the wind. He thought of the French word: foule. A true word, for what was of greater folly than a crowd? The stupidity of humankind, that cattle-breed. Hiding, unspeaking, in some crevice of his mind was a sense of the little Lilliputians as daintier. More graceful. More faery. But he didn't think specifically of the little folk as he walked the road. There was an oppressive weariness inside him, as grey and heavy as a moon in his belly. Melancholia was, he knew it of course, a sin. It sneered at God's great gift of life. It was the sin against hope. It was to be fought, but the battle was hard. It was hard because melancholia corroded precisely the will to fight; it was a disease of the will.

Over his head, one of the new clockwork flying devices buzzed, dipping and soaring like a metal dragonfly, long as his arm. It croaked away through the air up Charing Cross Road, flying north and carrying who knew what message to who knew what destination. Only the wealthy could afford such toys, of course; the wealthy and the government. Perhaps it was the noise, the self-importance humming of it, that always gave the impression of a creature hurrying off on an errand of the mightiest importance. The war! The empire! The future of humankind!

Probably a financial facilitator, a manufactor, somebody with nouveau riches in the city, one of that type, had sent it flying north to let his servants know he would be late home from work.

The thought was sour in Bates's belly, a tart, undigested pain. He should not have drunk the brandy.

He stopped to buy the Times from a barrow-boy, and ducked into a mahogany-ceilinged coffee shop to read it, sitting with hot chocolate breathing fragrant steam at his elbow. Gaslight from four lamps wiped light over the polished tabletops, reflecting blurry circles of light in the waxed wood of the walls. He brought his face close to the newsprint, as much to bury himself away from the stare of the other coffee-drinkers as to make out the tiny printface. Miniature letters, like insects swarming over the page.

News.

British forces had seen action again at Versailles; the famous palace had been pocked with cannonshells. There was little doubt that Christmas would see the flag of St. George flying over Paris. Anxiety of the French people; reassurance from the King that there would be no anti-Catholick repression after an English victory. The mechanics of the Flying Island had been thoroughly analysed by the Royal Society, and a paper had been read before the King. It seemed that a particular ore was required, against which a magnetic device of unusual design operated. This ore was found only rarely in His Majesty's dominions, and in Europe not at all. But deposits were known to lie in portions of the North American and Greater Virginian continent. The way was clear, the paper announced, for a new island to be constructed as a platform for use in the war against the Spanish in that continent.

Still Bates's spirits sank. He could not prevent it: some malign gravity of the heart dragged him down.

He turned to the back of the paper, and studied the advertisements. For sale, one Lilliputian, good needleworker. For sale, two Lilliputians, a breeding couple; four hundred guineas the pair. For sale, stuffed Lilliputian bodies, arranged in poses from the classics: Shakespeare, Milton, Scott. For sale, prime specimen of the famed Intelligent Equines, late of His Majesty's Second Cognisant Cavalry; this Beast (the lengthy advertisement spooled on) speaks a tolerable English, but knows mathematics and music to a high level of achievement. Of advanced years, but suitable for stud. And there, at the bottom, swamped and overwhelmed by the mass of Mammonite hawking and crying, was a small box: Public Lecture, on the Wickedness of Enslaving the Miniature Peoples from the East India Seas. Wednesday, no entrance after eight. Wellborough Hall. Admission one shilling.

Hopeless, all hopeless.

For Bates, the sinking into the long dark night of the soul had begun. It had happened before, but every time it happened there was never anything to compare it to, never any way to fight it off. He stumbled down Oxford Street in a fuggy daze of misery. Where did it come from? Chapels littered both sides of the road, some polished and elegant, some boxy and unpretentious, and yet none of them held the answer to his indigestion of the spirit. If only some angel would swoop down to him, calling and weeping through the air like a swift, varicoloured wings stretching like a cat after a sleep, the feather-ends brushing the street itself in the lowest portion of Its flying arc, its face bland and pale and still and beautiful. If only some angel could bring God's blessing down to him. Or perhaps the angel would actually be a faery, a tiny creature with wings of glass and a child's intensity of innocence. Grace was Grace, even in the smallest parcels.

11 November 1848

"Go away, Baley," Bates groaned. "Leave me in peace."

"Off to your club today? It's Thursday—you told me most particularly to remind you of Thursday."

"Yes," he muttered, more to himself than to his servant. "Yes, Thursday. I will be getting up today. My … stomach feels a little better."

"There you go sir." The head withdrew, with only the faintest of smirks upon it that seemed to say we all know there's nothing the matter with your stomach, you old stay-a-bed.

Bates turned over in the bed. The sheet underneath him was foul with two days" accumulated stink, creased and wrinkled like the palm of a white hand. His bedside cabinet was littered with glasses, bottles, a newssheet, an ivory pipe. The curtain was of cotton-velvet, and muffled off most of the daylight. The joints between knuckles and fingers'-ends ached in both hands; the small of his back murmured complaint. His feet hurt from inaction. A series of bangs, miniature sounds, goh, goh, goh. Bates could not tell whether the thrumming sound was the spirit of Headache rapping inside his scull, or the sound of something thudding far away. The volatile acid of his melancholia had even eroded away the boundaries of self and world, such that Bates's misery spread out and colonised reality itself, it became a universal pressure of unhappiness. It seemed to Bates at that moment that the Biblical flood had been, symbolically speaking, a type or trope for Melancholia itself, washing away strength, joy, will, hope, diluting the very energy of life itself and spreading it impossibly weakly about the globe. Grey waves washing at a rickety water-front.

He pulled the pot from under the bed and pissed into it without even getting up, lying on his side and directing the stream over the edge of the mattress. Flecks of fluid messed the edge of the bed, but he didn't care. Why should he care? What was there to care about? When he had finished he did not even bother pushing the pot back under the bed. He turned on his other side and lay still. There was a faint noise, a repeated thud-thud-thud.

It stopped. Bates turned over again.

Turned over again. Ridiculous, ridiculous.

He pulled himself upright, and snatched at the paper. Baley had brought it to him the night before, but Bates's fretful, miserable state of mind had not allowed him to concentrate long enough to read the articles. He started on the first leader, an imperial puff about the prospects for a British European Empire once France had been defeated. He read the third sentence three times—our glorious history reasserts itself, our generals revitalise the dreams of Henry the Fifth—without taking it in at all. The words were all there, and he knew the meaning of each, but as a whole the sentence refused to coalesce in his mind. Senseless. It was hopeless. In a fit of petty rage, he crushed the whole paper up into a ragged ball and threw it to the floor. It started, creakily, to unwind, like a living thing.

He lay down again.

"Gentleman at the door, sir." It was Baley, his head poking into crib.

"I'm not at home," Bates said into the mattress.

"Won't take that for an answer, sir," said Baley. "A foreign gentleman. Says he's High Belgium, but I'd say France, sir."

Bates hauled himself upright. "His hair black, in a long knout at the back of his head?"

"A what, sir?"

"Long hair, idiot, long hair?"

"Continental fashion, yes sir."

Bates was struggling into his gown. "Show him through, you fool." He pressed the crumbs of sleep from his eyes and wiped a palm over his sleep-ruffled hair. Here? D'Ivoi had never before come to his rooms, they had always met in the club. Perhaps Baley had made a mistake—but, no, coming through to the drawing room there was D'Ivoi, standing facing the fire, with a turquoise hat under his arm, the sheen of his silk suit gleaming, and his ridiculous tassel of hair dangling from the back of his head. Baley was loitering, and Bates shooed him away.

"My friend," said D'Ivoi, turning at the sound of Bates' voice.

"I was coming to the club today," said Bates at once. "Perhaps I seem unprepared, but I was about to get dressed."

D'Ivoi shook his head very slightly, no more than a tremble, and the smile was not dislodged from his face. "There is no need for us to meet at the club." His ths were brittle, tare is no need for us to meet at tea club, but otherwise his accent was tolerably good. "I regret to say my friend, that I leave this city this afternoon." Tat I leave tiss city.

"Leave?" Bates reached without thinking for the bell-rope, to call for tea; at the last minute he remembered that this was a conference to which the servant must not be privy.

"I regret to say it. And before I depart, I bring a warning of sorts. Events in the war are about to take a turn … shall we say, dramatic?"

"Dramatic? I don't understand. The paper says that we … that, ah, the English are on the edge of capturing Paris. When that happens, surely the …"

"No my friend," said D'Ivoi. "You will find tomorrow's newspapers tell a different story. France and the Pope have declared a common right with the Pacificans."

It was all a great deal for Bates to take in at once. "They have?" he said. "Why that's excellent news. Excellent news for our cause. Common right with Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians, both?"

"Certainly, with both. The petite folk, and the giant folk, both are made in God's image. The talking horses, not; the Pope has decreed them devilish impostures. But of course he does so more because the English has its cavalry regiment of sapient horses. And the French army now has its own regiments. Regiments of the little folk would be useless enough, I suppose, but the giants make fearsome soldiers, I think."

"The French army has recruited regiments of Brobdingnagians?" repeated Bates, stupidly.

"I have not long, my friend," said D'Ivoi, nodding his head minutely. "I come partly to warn you. There are other things. The President of the Republic has relocated to Avignon, as you know. Well, there have been great things happening in Avignon, all in the south you know. And these great things are about to emerge to the day's light, for all the world to see. It will be terrible to be an English soldier before them."

"Monsieur," said Bates. "Are you …?"

"Forgive me, my friend," interrupted D'Ivoi. "When these things happen, it will be uncomfortable to be a French national in London, I think. And so I depart. But I warn you too: your cause, your pardon our cause, for the liberation of the Pacificans, has aligned you with the nation of France. Your government may take action against you for this reason."

"I am no traitor," Bates asserted, though his tongue felt heavy in his mouth uttering the sentiment.

"No no," assured the foreigner. "I only warn you. You know best, of course, how to attend to your own safety. But before I depart (and time is close, my friend), let me say this: contemplate a French victory in this war. I advise it. Believe that, with the Pope and the President now allied formally to the petites and the giants, believe that a victory for France will spell freedom for these people. Perhaps one smaller evil counterbalances a larger good? Perhaps?"

Bates did not know what to say to this. "I know that my actions here," he started saying, speaking the words slowly, "have benefited the French government. And I am not ashamed of this."

"Good! Excellently good! Because it will be less time than you think before French soldiers arrive here in London town, and you would be well to consider how your duty lies. Your duty, my friend, to God above all. No?"

"Monsieur," said Bates again anxiously.

But D'Ivoi was putting his top hat on and bowing, stiffly. "I regret I must depart."

"French soldiers here?"

"Ah, yes. I will say only this, at last. There has been a very great series of inventions. We have a machine, a thinking and calculating machine … have you heard of this?"

"A machine?"

"Mister Babbage, and his French mistress, have been working in Uzes, in France's south, for many years now. You have heard, perhaps, of mister Babbage?"

"The name is familiar …" said Bates. His head was starting to buzz unpleasantly. This conference was a shock, there was no mistaking it.

"He has built a machine. It can undertake a week's calculations in a moment. It is nothing more than a box, the size of a piano I think, but it gives great power of calculation and ratiocination, of the power of thought in this box. Forgive me, I am forgetting my English already. But our engineers now use this box, and with it they design fantastic new machines. Our generals use it, and with it they plan all possible military strategies. This box will win the war, for us."

And he bowed again and was gone.

11-12 November 1848

He hurried. D'Ivoi had been his only contact with the French, and perhaps by limiting his contact to a single individual he had, at some level, believed that he limited his treason too. And for a day or two the very notion of a French victory—of French troops marching up the Mall—was too shocking for him to think about it at all. But the idea percolated through his mind anyway, and soon he was almost welcoming it. It would bring his cause to fruition. The Lilliputians would be freed, the Brobdingnagians reprieved from race-death.

He was up, up, up.

He went to his club, and wrote three letters. Then he caught a cab (a rare expense for him) and visited a sympathetically-minded gentleman in Holborn. He spent the evening with a gaggle of churchmen, duck-like individuals who paced about the room with their heads forward and their hands tucked into the smalls of their backs, talking ponderously of God. He told the sympathetically-minded gentleman little, but he told the churchmen all. Their worry, it transpired, was not of French political rule, so much as the danger of an oppressive Catholicism being imposed as the official religion. Bates was too excited, to elevated in spirit, to worry about this.

"Are you certain that these events are going to come to pass?" one of the clerics asked him. "Are you sure?"

"I am sure," gabbled Bates. He tended to talk too rapidly when the mood was on him, when his blood was hurtling through his body, but it couldn't be helped. "Now that they have declared themselves for the humanity of the Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians, all of the civilised world will support them, surely. And their alliance has meant that they could recruit a regiment of giants to fight us. To fight the English. Moreover," he went on, wide-eyed, "they have perfected a device, a machine, a thinking machine. Have you heard of Mister Babbing?"

Babbing? Babbing?

"Do you mean Babbage," said one elderly churchman, a whittled, dry-faced old man who had been a main agent in the campaign since its first days. "The computational device?"

"The French have perfected it," said Bates. "And with it they have constructed new engineering devices, and plotted new techniques of war-making."

"Incredible!"

"It is credible indeed."

"The computing device has been perfected!"

On the Saturday he attended a tea-party at which he was the only male present. He sat on a chair too small for him, and listened politely to half-a-dozen wealthy matrons and maidens expatiate upon how beautiful the little people were, how marvellous, and how wicked it was to chain them with tiny chains and make them work in factories. Nobody mentioned the Brobdingnagians, of course, who lacked the daintiness to appeal to this class of person. But Bates smiled and nodded, and thought of the money these women might gift to the cause.

One woman confided in him. "Since my husband passed through the veil," she said in a breathy tone of voice, "my life has become divided between these darling little creatures, and my cats."

The Sunday, naturally he went to chapel. But he could not bring his mind to focus on the sermon. Something fretted at its margins, some piece of thought-grit. These darling little creatures. But, Bates thought, there was so much more to the Lilliputians than this! They were messengers, in some way or other. He had not managed to clear the thought thoroughly enough through his brain to fully understand it, but he felt it, he felt it genuinely and thoroughly. Messengers. There was something about them, something special, that deserved preservation in the way few ordinary-sized people did.

She had sat next to him, with purple crinoline and a lacecap covering her hair, but with these intense, beautiful air-blue eyes, and had said: these darling little creatures, and my cats.

Cats preyed on them, of course. One of Bates's acquaintances declared that he had first become interested in their cause after watching two cats fighting over a stray Lilliputian, in the kitchen of his uncle's house.

And so it slid again, dropping like leaves from a tree until the tree has lost all its leaves. Bates went to bed Sunday night with a heart so heavy it registered not only in his chest, but in his throat and belly too. And waking the following morning was a forlorn, interfered-with sensation. The urge not to rise was very strong: merely to stay in bed, to turn the heavy-body and heavy-head and lie there. After a few days of energetic living, Bates's life had been usurped again by melancholia.

His rooms, on Cavendish Square, looked over an oval of parched winter grass and four nude trees. Some days he would sit and stare, emptying one cigarette after another of its smoke, and doing nothing but watching the motionlessness of the trees.

When he had been a young man, some six or seven years earlier, Bates had had an intrigue with a tobacconist's daughter called Mary. The romance had strayed into physical impropriety. To begin with, Bates had felt a glow in his heart, something fuelled by equal parts pride and shame. The necessary secrecy had built him up inside his suit. He felt the sin, but he also felt elevated, enlarged. He could walk the streets of London, looking at the others, and knowing something they did not know. The aftermath, the potent stew of good and bad emotions, was more pleasurable than the physical enjoyment of the act itself, pleasurable though that act is.

Then Mary told him that she was carrying a child. This changed the balance of feelings inside him to a form of fear. He could not bring himself to confront his own father (still alive at that time) to declare himself the destined parent of an infant. It was impossible. Inner shame is, perhaps, a sensation so powerfully mixed of delight and disgust it approximates glory; but public shame is a very different matter. Bates senior was not a wealthy man, but he was proud. Marriage to a tobacconist's daughter was out of the question. And Mary was a sweet girl. But what could he do? What could be done?

Of course nothing could be done.

There was a very uncomfortable interview between the former lovers. There were tears and recriminations from her. They made it easier for him to adopt a stony exterior manner. Afterwards he spent the evening in his club, and drank most of a bottle of claret. A walk home and a half-hour in a chapel along the way. Prayer blended his awkwardness, his shame, his self-loathing, his weakness, into a cement of strength. He would be strong from this moment, which was all that Christ required. He would sin no more.

His resolution included a blanking out of Mary, which he managed by pretending that she did not exist. For weeks this strategy worked well. For hours at a time he forgot that there was such a person in the world. Only when he indulged in occasional, night-time bouts of impure thought and manual stimulation did her image pop into his mind, and this only encouraged him to quit that degrading business anyway.

Then, a month or more later, he saw her at the booth, paying to cross London Bridge. He hurried after her, uncertain whether the face glimpsed under the bonnet was indeed hers. "Excuse me, madam," he called. And she turned.

She looked blankly into his face, neither pleased nor displeased to see him.

"Mary," he said, catching up with her.

Her stomach was flat.

"You're looking," she chided, following his gaze. "Tis not decent."

Light made painterly effects on the river, speckles of brightness spread in a swathe.

He didn't know how to ask the question.

"Don't worry yourself, sir," she said, blushing plum-red, her voice as angry as Bates had ever heard it. "No child will come and threaten your family honour." She pronounced this last word on 'er.

"I don't understand."

She was quiet for a time. "Well, a friend of mine knows a doctor. Not that I'd call him a real doctor, if you see what I say."

"Oh," said Bates, soft, realising what had happened. They were a third of the way over the bridge now. The sunlight swelled, and the Thames was glittering and sparkling like a solid. Bates's mouth was dry.

"What did you do with it?" he asked, a pain growing in his chest as if his ribs were contracting and squeezing his lungs.

"It?" she replied.

"The," he said, his voice sounding somehow different to himself, "child."

She stared at him, stared for half a minute, her face immobile but her eyes wide. "I buried him," she said. "I dug under the hedgerow in Somer's Town, beside the churchyard, and buried him there."

For days Bates had been unable to get this image out of his mind. His child, his son, buried and mixed into the earth. Like ore. He dreamt of the little creature, its eyes closed and its mouth pursed against the chill. He imagined it with hair, long blonde strands of hair. He imagined it miniature, Lilliputian in size. In the dream he scuffed at the dirt with his feet, knowing his child was interred beneath the spot. A strand of gold grazed his wrist. Boys in brown, crossing-sweepers, leant together to talk, somewhere in the distance. Through a window, perhaps. One of them yawned. But he was in a room, with velvet curtains. The strands of gold were woven into a cobweb. A strand of gold grazed his wrist. The baby's tiny hand was reaching for him, and when it touched him its skin was so cold he yelped out loud.

At that point he awoke.