Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02 (28 page)

 
          
 
"Stop it!" he said out loud. His
voice rang off the brass walls, and he peered forward, trying to work the
looped end of line around the far side of the machine.

 
          
 
"Pardon me, sir?" The stalwart voice
of Hasbro sounded through the speaking tube.

 
          
 
"Nothing.
It's
close down here."

 
          
 
"Perhaps if I had a go
at it, sir?"

 
          
 
"No. It's nothing. I'm at the end of
it."

 
          
 
"Very well," the voice said
doubtfully.

 
          
 
He let go of the line, and it slowly sank
across the copper shell of the machine, drifting off the far edge and settling
uselessly on the ocean floor. Failure—he would have to try again. He closed his
eyes and sat for a moment, thinking that he could easily fall asleep. Then the
idea of sleep frightened him, and he looked around himself, taking particular
note of the dials and levers and gauges. He needed something solid to use as
ballast for his mind—something outside, something comfortable and homely.

 
          
 
Abruptly he thought of food, of cottage pie
and a bottle of beer. With effort, he began to think through the recipe for
cottage pie, reciting it to himself. It wouldn't do to talk out loud. Hasbro
would haul him straight out of the water. He pictured the pie in his head—the
mashed potatoes whipped with cream and butter, the farmer's cheese melted
across the top. He poured a mental beer into a glass, watching it foam up over
the top and spill down the sides. Keeping the image fresh, he pulled in the line
again, working diligently until he gripped the noose once more. Then, slowly,
he carried it back out with the mechanical hand. He dropped it carefully, and
this time it floated down to encircle a solid piece of outthrust metal.

 
          
 
"Cottage pie," he muttered.

 
          
 
“I’m sorry, sir?"

 
          
 
"Got its . . . eye," he said weakly,
realizing that this sounded even more lunatic than what he had said. It didn't
matter, though. He was almost through. Already the feeling of desperation and
confinement was starting to lift. Carefully, he clamped on to the line again,
pulling it tight inch by inch, working steadily to close the loop. If he could
attend to his work he would be on the surface in ten minutes. Five minutes.

 
          
 
"Up we go," he said, loud this time,
like a sea captain, and in a matter of seconds there was a jolt, and the
bathyscaphe tilted just a little, lifting off the ocean floor. It
rose
surfaceward in little jerks, and the
school
of
John Dory
followed it up, nosing against the portholes.
St. Ives was struck suddenly by how friendly the fish were, nosing against the
glass like that. God bless a fish, he thought, keeping a man company. The water
brightened around him, and the feeling of entombment began to dissipate. He
breathed deeply, watching bubbles rush past now and the fish turn in a school
and dart away. Suddenly the wave-lapped surface of the gray ocean tossed across
the porthole, and then the sea gave way to swirling fog, illuminated by a
morning sun and enlivened by the muffled sound of water streaming off the sides
of the bathyscaphe. Then there was the solid clunk of metal feet settling on a
wooden deck.

 
          
 
St. Ives opened the hatch and climbed out, and
immediately he and Hasbro swung the dripping bathyscaphe across the deck so as
to make room for Lord Kelvin's machine. They unfastened it from the jib crane
and lashed it down solidly, hiding it beneath oiled canvas, working frenziedly
while the sun threatened to burn off the fog and to reveal their efforts to the
light of day. Hurrying, they fixed the line that grappled Lord Kelvin's machine
to the jib crane and set about hauling it out of the water, too, afterward
hiding it beneath more tied-down canvas.

 
          
 
In another twenty minutes the steam trawler,
piloted by the man that St. Ives knew as Uncle Botley, made off northward.

 
          
 
St. Ives remained on deck for a time, watching
through the mist. Soon they would be far enough from the site that they could
almost pretend to be innocent—to have been out after fish.

 
          
 
It had been six months since anyone from the
Royal
Academy
had been lurking in the area. So they ought
to have been safe; the issue of the machine was officially closed. Yet St. Ives
was possessed with the notion that he would be discovered anyway, that there
was something he had missed, that his plans to save
Alice
would fail if he wasn't vigilant night and
day. Fears kept revealing themselves to him, like cards turned up in a deck. He
kept watch for another hour while the fog dissipated on the sea wind. The
horizon, when he could see it, was empty of ships in every direction.

 
          
 
Exhausted, he went below deck and fell into a
bunk as the trawler steamed toward
Grimsby
, bound, finally, up the
Humber
to Goole. In three days he would be home
again, such as it was, in
Harrogate
. Then
the real work would start. Secrecy now was worth—what?
His
life, pretty literally.
Alice
's life.
They would transport the machine overland
from Goole, after disguising it as a piece of farm machinery. Even so, they
would keep it hidden beneath canvas. No one could be trusted. Even the most
innocent bumpkin could be a spy for the
Royal
Academy
.

 
          
 
When they reached the environs of
Harrogate
they would wait for nightfall, sending
Kraken ahead to scout out the road. That's when the danger would be greatest,
when they got to within hailing distance of the manor. If the Academy was
laying for St. Ives, that's where they would hide, waiting to claim what was
theirs. How desperate would they be? More to the point, how far would St. Ives
go to circumvent them?

 
          
 
He knew that there were no steps that Parsons
wouldn't take in order to retrieve the machine. If Parsons
knew,
that is, that the machine was retrievable. For the fiftieth time St. Ives
calculated the possibility of that, ending up, as usual, awash with doubts.
Parsons was a doddering cipher. He had out-tricked St. Ives badly in
Sterne
Bay
, and the only high card
left
 
to
St. Ives now was the machine
itself. Parsons hadn't expected St. Ives to destroy it, and he certainly couldn't
have expected St. Ives to pretend to destroy it. Perhaps he should pretend to
destroy it again, and so confuse the issue utterly. He could spend the
remainder of his life pretending to have destroyed and recovered the machine.
They could scuttle Uncle Botley's trawler after transferring the machine to
some other vessel, making Parsons believe that it was still on board. Of
course, Parsons didn't know it was on board in the first place; they would have
to fmd a way to reveal that. Then they could pretend to pretend to scuttle the
ship, maybe not move the machine off at all, but only pretend to . . .

 
          
 
He tossed in his bunk, his mind aswirl with
nonsense. Finally the sea rocked him to sleep, settling his mind. Water swished
and slapped against the hull, and the ship creaked as it rose and fell on the
ground swell. The noises became part of a dream—the sounds of a coach being
driven hard along a black and muddy street.

 
          
 
He was alone on a rainy night in the Seven
Dials, three years past. At first he thought his friends were with him, but
around him now lay nothing but darkness and the sound of rain. There was
something—he squinted into the night.
A shopwindow.
He
could see his own reflection, frightened and helpless, and behind him the
street, rain pelting down. The rainy curtain drew back as if across a darkened
theater stage, and a picture formed in the dusty window glass: a cabriolet
overturned in the mud, one spoked wheel spinning round and round past the
upturned face of a dead woman . . .

 
          
 
He jerked up out of his bunk, fighting for
breath. "Cottage pie," he said out loud. Damn anyone who might hear
him. What did they know? He was a man alone. In the end, that was what had
proved to be true. It wasn't anybody's fault; it was the way of the world. He
lay down again, feeling the ship rise on the swell. He thought hard about the
pie, about the smell of thyme and rosemary and sage simmering in a beef broth,
about the herb garden that Alice had started and that was now up in weeds. He
hadn't given much of a damn about food before
knew
Alice
, but she had got him used to it. He had
kept the herb garden flourishing for a month or so, in her memory. But keeping
the memory was somehow worse than fleeing from it. Moles were living in the
garden now—a whole village of them.

 
          
 
He drifted off to sleep again, dreaming that
he watched the moles through the parlor window. One of them had the face and
spectacles of old Parsons. It pretended to be busy with mole activities, but it
regarded him furtively over the top of its spectacles. Away across the grounds
lay the River Nidd, fringed with willows. Through them, his beard wagging,
stepped Lord Kelvin himself, striding along toward the manor with the broad ever-approaching
gait of a man in a dream. He wasn't in a jolly mood, clearly not coming round
to chat about the theory of elasticity or the constitution of matter. He
carried a stick, which he beat against the palm of his hand.

 
          
 
Willing to take his medicine, St. Ives stepped
out into the garden to meet him, nearly treading on the mole that looked like
Parsons. Weeds crackled underfoot and the day was dreary and dim, almost as if
the whole world were dilapidated. This wasn't going to be pretty. Lord Kelvin wasn't
a big man, and he was getting on in years, but there was a fierce look in his
eyes that seemed to say, in a Glasgow brogue, ''You've blown my machine to
pieces. Now I'm going to beat the dust out of you."

 
          
 
What he said was, "I spent twenty-odd years
on that engine, lad. I'm too old to start again." His face was saddened,
full of loss.

 
          
 
St. Ives nodded. One day, maybe, he would give
it back to the man. But he couldn't tell him that now.

 
          
 
"I'm truly sorry . . .," he began.

 
          
 
"Ye can't imagine what it was, man."
He gestured with the stick, which had turned into a length of braided copper
wire.

 
          
 
On the contrary, St. Ives had imagined what it
was on the day that he walked into Lord Kelvin's barn, looking to ruin it.
"

 
          
 
He took the braided wire from the old man, but
it fell apart in his hands, dropping in strands across his shoes.

           
 
"We might have gone anywhere in it,"
the old man said wistfully.
"The two of us.
Traveled across time ..." He could be open and honest now that he thought
the machine was blasted to pieces. There was nothing to hide anymore. St. Ives
let him talk. It was making them both feel better, filling St. Ives with
remorse and happiness at the same time: the two of them, traveling together,
side by side, back to the Age of Reptiles, forward to a day when men would sail
among the stars. St. Ives had worked too long in obscurity, shunned by the
Academy and so pretending to despise it—but all the time pounding on the door,
crying to be let in. That was the sad truth, wasn't it? Here was its foremost
member. Lord Kelvin himself, talking like an old and trusted colleague.