Flights and Chimes and Mysterious Times (4 page)

“Yes, Mother,” he said, lying down and turning his head to the window. She would not punish him, not now. She couldn’t spare the time.

“Honestly! These moods of yours, I don’t know from where they come.”

She was always worried about moods. And that he was
odd.
Her sister had been put in an asylum because of moods and had died there. They never spoke of her, but Mrs. Pond told him the story once when he’d found a photograph of a woman he didn’t recognize.

“Good night, Jack.”

“Good night, Mother.”

He did not see her, or Father, the following morning. It was a leaden day, a gathering gloom of clouds low over the house, but rain couldn’t dampen his excitement for an outing. Even for something as tedious as shopping. Mrs. Pond called enough instructions to Verity to keep the girl busy for a whole week as Jack ate breakfast in large bites. He stood on the checkered floor, a little pawn, for a full five minutes before Mrs. Pond joined him, a large bag over one arm, apron gone from her proper brown dress.

A pair of black horses, gleaming, stomping restlessly, stood in front of a carriage on the street. Curtains hung at windows cut into the doors, an ironwork step just below. Lanterns were fixed on either side of a bench, high and open to the air. The horses’ eyes flickered to the house, the road, the great green park opposite. A sea of trees and grass surrounding the famous Serpentine, where Mrs. Pond sometimes took Jack to feed the ducks, its waters steel gray under the stormy sky. Out of sight at the northern corner
stood the towering Marble Arch, white stone choked by soot and grime.

“Oxford Street, if you please, Wilson,” said Mrs. Pond to the man on the bench, leather reins loose in his equally leathery fist. “A hair shy of Tottenham Court Road, and do try to avoid getting mired in that mess at Grosvenor Square.”

“Right you are, Effie,” said Wilson, jumping down. “Hullo, young Jack.” Wilson was a big man, more like a boxer than a merchant’s trusted servant, playing dress up in a suit stretched to bursting over his muscles, a top hat shadowing his pockmarked face. “Home for the holidays, eh? Glad to be back?”

“Er,” said Jack. Thunder rumbled to the west, and Mrs. Pond nudged him to the carriage door.

“We’d best be off. I don’t much like the sound of that. Up you go, Jack.” Wilson closed the door the moment they settled on the seats and climbed easily back to his bench. The horses, overeager and snorting, took off with a jolt at the barest snap of leather on their flanks, along narrow streets lined with tall, sugar-confection houses.

Carriages rattled over cobblestones, pulled by horses of every color. Here and there, Jack caught a glimpse of a motorcar and pressed his face to the window until it was out of sight. Mr. Foster sometimes hinted at buying one,
but Mrs. Foster would mutter things about
those beastly machines
not being safe until he dropped the subject.

Mrs. Pond sat on the opposite seat, a large bag beside her on the plush red velvet. Knitting needles clicked and flashed, churning out row after row of neat stitches. The goings-on of the city didn’t seem to interest her nearly as much as they fascinated Jack.

“How much longer?” asked Jack, who wanted to be out among all the people, not trapped inside the shaking, stuffy carriage. Smoke curled upward behind spiky roofs as they traveled down crooked streets like rainwater finding a crack, flowing until they reached the end and it spat them out, into another crack.

“Nearly there,” she answered, not looking up.

But, in fact, it was nearly half an hour before Wilson managed to urge the carriage through the traffic to their destination, through a London Jack barely knew, though his father spoke of it as the world’s greatest city, the seat of the most magnificent empire ever to stand.

Street vendors in grubby trousers hawked ice creams and glasses of sherbet; uniformed maids scurried through their errands. They passed a music hall where, on a rare outing—a birthday treat two years previously—Jack had watched from a box as acrobats in striped tights flew through the air and a medium with a cloth over her eyes
predicted the contents of people’s pockets. A magician had levitated a vase only to send it smashing to the ground. As the audience booed and laughed, the shards turned to butterflies that fluttered up to the rafters.

He’d begged and begged to be allowed back the following night, but his parents refused, saying too much excitement would spoil him. Now the place was dark, empty, the performers still slumbering in their beds.

And his mother wouldn’t let him go with Mr. Havelock to learn even better tricks than those.

Because he was odd, but not odd enough.

“Have you eaten a lemon, child? Cheer up. We might find some way to amuse ourselves for an hour or two if we’re not long getting you kitted out.”

And, indeed, it took no time at all—or so it seemed—for a pile of shirts that were too loose, trousers three inches too long, and jumpers that scratched at his neck to pile on the counter in the shop. An old, bald man with bugged eyes promised to send his boy out with the delivery the very next day, just as soon as the needlewoman had finished with them. Jack gazed at a small wooden compass, edges bound with brass, until Mrs. Pond added it to the bill.

“That’s a lovely thing,” said Mrs. Pond. “Don’t lose it, mind.”

“I won’t.” Jack had never lost anything in his life except on purpose, which cheated the rule of lost things. Sometimes it was simply easier to misplace a toy or a hat than to tell Mother he did not like her gift.

Outside, Wilson was chasing away an urchin with big eyes for the horses, the bits of ribbon and silver on their bridles. Grubby, rail thin, the wretch slipped around a fruit stall to be swallowed by the city in one meager mouthful.

“Rascal,” scoffed Wilson, returning to where Jack waited with Mrs. Pond. “Home, Effie?”

She looked at the sky. Still the color of old ghosts, haunting the streets and spires from above, but no worse than it had been an hour before. “The Embankment,” she decided. “We’ll have an early lunch, and Jack—”

“Can see the boats!” said Jack, grinning so hard his face might split and earning himself a halfhearted cuff around the ear.

“Don’t interrupt, you. Off we go.”

The gardens, not yet crisp and brown as they would be when the August heat came, cradled a curve of the wide, stinking river. Nannies pushed prams along the curving paths cut into the grass, the babies asleep despite the constant bells, horns, whistles, and shouts that rang out between the ships, carrying over the water. Soot clouded the air and gave white birds black feathers. Below the
walkway, mudlarks scavenged in the shallows for anything to sell, trousers rolled up to their knees.

They left Wilson waiting with the carriage, Mrs. Pond having been raised, many years before, among the East End toughs and thus able to do strange and terrible things with a hat pin should the need arise. Not that anything would, in broad daylight in the genteel, landscaped greenery.

But it was the boats, rather than the flowers, that drew Jack’s eyes and feet, and he ran as far toward them as he could get away with before being shouted at. Everything about them crowed of adventure. The towering masts holding rippling sails that caught winds blowing across the world. The curved bows that sliced through water as if it were air and raced over the seas. He knew all about them—he’d read a very thick book—but Jack would one day sit behind his father’s desk while other men captained the ships used by the company, or ones whose engines and portholes had been forged in its factories.

There were pies and lemonade for lunch, bought from a man with a barrow near the gates, which tasted like the food at school. That is to say, they didn’t taste of much at all, and Jack had to chew hard on bits of gristle. He wanted another, but Mrs. Pond was still carefully eating her first, sipping lemonade between bites.

“Stay close,” she said, wiping gravy from her mouth with a handkerchief. Jack left her on the bench set on the grass, called again by the boats. He slipped among a group of well-dressed folk with odd accents who clustered along the rail, pointing, chattering, words stretched and twanging like violin strings.

“Wouldja lookit that,” said one. He raised a pair of brass binoculars. Jack wondered where the people came from, pitying them. London was magnificent.

They began to blather about setting off to climb the Monument, that towering column with its gilded urn atop, dedicated to the terrible fire that once nearly devoured the city, and Jack stopped listening. Mrs. Pond had taken him, once, gasping and wheezing her way up the corkscrew staircase as he ran ahead. It had made him dizzy, and anyway, the funny people were leaving and a steamboat, belching lungfuls of gray, had just blown its horn, ready to chug away to lands unknown.

He looked back. Evidently she had seen a friend, and it was odd to think of Mrs. Pond having friends beyond the bright kitchen from which she bossed the maid about. They were talking, laughing, a toddling child clinging to the other lady’s skirts.

The compass weighted his pocket. Jack took it out, touching the fine wood with his thumb, releasing the catch so the
lid sprang open. This way and that, he turned, the needle wobbling, always coming to rest with its point to the north.

But something else caught his eye.

Mr. Lorcan Havelock, spiritualist—or magician, as Jack preferred to think—was hurrying along one of the paths through the park. Jack recognized the suit, the hat, the dark glasses most of all.

Mrs. Pond chatted away. Jack hesitated for the space of a breath.

He wanted to know. Know what Mr. Havelock wanted to show him, to teach him. The noise from the river hammered in his ears. Calling out was useless; Mr. Havelock might hear him, but Mrs. Pond would, too.

If Jack could just stop him a little farther away.

He followed.

Twenty paces behind, Jack dodged around the flower beds and prams, the picnickers, and fountains spraying fine clouds of rain.

Mr. Havelock quickened his steps. The Houses of Parliament loomed ahead, pointed roofs like treetops of a stone forest.

“Gracious!”

“Sorry, miss!” Jack said, but he didn’t stop.

Ahead, Mr. Havelock passed through the garden gates, into the clamor of carriages and motorcars snarled at the
brink of the bridge. Sentinel at the corner of the grand government buildings stood the enormous clock tower everyone called
Big Ben.

Which was completely, uselessly wrong, irritatingly so. Big Ben was the enormous bell inside, not the clock. The clock was just a clock.

On the other side of a hansom cab pulled by four tall horses, Mr. Havelock’s hat—and presumably the rest of him—began to run.

Jack’s feet slid in the mud. Someone shouted at him. At some point between spotting Mr. Havelock and the garden gates, Jack had stopped following just because he wanted to speak to the man.

No. A far more interesting question, just at the moment, was where he was going in such a hurry. A meeting?

It could be with anyone. Another magician, perhaps.

But Mr. Havelock stopped, so sharply a nearby horse startled, outside the wrought-iron fence of the Palace of Westminster, where lords in frock coats made their important decisions about running the country.

The clock began to chime. So close, the peal was shockingly loud.

A small gate sliced into the fence, its squeak, if it made one, lost in the cacophony of the bell. Jack felt the gongs in his teeth.

Two.

Three.

The base of the tower was smooth stone, cold as an enemy’s smile. Mr. Havelock pressed one velvet-gloved hand to it.

The stone cracked. Cracked neatly, lines growing to meet one another.

A door.

Magician
,
Jack thought, as Mr. Havelock pushed it open, slipped through. It started to swing shut behind him.

Seven. Eight. And Jack knew in his bones that the door would close, the lines would fade, and it would be gone by the twelfth ring of the bell, because it was magic.

He reached it just as the hinges—if indeed there were any—flattened, the cracks closing.

Perhaps it would not even work for him. Jack wasn’t a magician, never would be, because his mother was horrible and never let him do anything.

Ten.

Jack touched the stone. The cracks stuttered, spluttered, regrew. He
was
special, he thought as it opened for him.

Inside was the pitch-black of trapped nighttime, and loud, so loud. Jack clapped his hands to his ears. Overhead, the grand, great bell with its silly name rang twelve o’clock, echoing for an age through the tower and over the rooftops, and then all was still.

I
T REALLY WAS
very dark in the clock tower, but Jack was not afraid of the dark, and anyone who said otherwise was a liar. Bertie Ducksworth at school was a liar.

“Mr. Havelock?” Now it was Jack’s own voice that rang, but there was no answer.

Blindly, Jack felt his way along the wall. Mr. Havelock must have a job seeing in here, what with those dark spectacles. Possibly he took them off, folding them neatly into a pocket so as not to scratch the lenses.