Flights and Chimes and Mysterious Times (9 page)

“There is no hope in Londinium, nor in all of the Empire. Even the fanciful comforts people once invented to give them solace have been forgotten, not that
it
ever existed at all. It is not safe for you here. You are as much of a curiosity to us as our faeries and clockwork birds must be to you. And if Sir Lorcan discovers that you followed him, well, I should say that’s a thing we don’t want to happen.”

“I’ll be careful,” said Jack, thinking of the motorcars turning sharp corners, the evil-looking machine in the room below that would bite off a finger without hesitation.

“If only it were that simple—”

“If only what were that simple?” Beth asked, skipping into the room.

“Now, dear, we’ve talked about interrupting. Your friend here wishes to stay.”

Beth turned her strange, seeing glass eyes to Jack. “Oh, yes!”

“No.” The doctor’s voice was firm. “I’ve things to see to. Go amuse yourselves, the pair of you, and leave the crystal ball alone.”

Jack still hadn’t told either of them about the thing inside the ball that made it break. It felt like his alone, somehow, if indeed he hadn’t imagined it entirely. And in any case, it made him feel better to have a secret, certain as he was that Dr. Snailwater and Beth were still not telling him everything.

Beth showed him how to direct the tiny people on and off the train and to control the engine by means of an odd box with buttons that glowed when pressed. Together they made it stop at every bookshelf, alongside one of the bars of the chandelier, and trapped it in a tunnel set into the wall until they heard tiny, tinny screams from within.

They could not
make
him leave.

The bird in the ball was not Jack’s only secret. For he had told Beth and Dr. Snailwater of following Lorcan through the door, but not precisely how he had come to do so. Not that the man had waited, eyes hidden behind his dark spectacles, for the clock in its famous tower to chime precisely twelve o’clock. That it might be just as simple to get home again.

Another clock, cloaked in a bell of pink glass, stood
on the mantel. Jack waited, pushed buttons with Beth, watched the little people with their satchels and shopping dart around thick, leather-bound tomes that would surely crush them if they were to tip over. The hands, needle-sharp, slowly swept the morning away.

W
HEN LORCAN RETURNED
to the doorway, he did not need to wait for the chime of the bells. Not on this side, and in any case, they would not come. This side required a different trick. Heavy-pocketed, impatient, he stepped into the dark room, waited a breath, and stepped out again.

The light burned his eyes. Damnable people, with their electric lights and bright colors and the sun, oh, the sun most of all, without so much smoke and steam and soot to smother it. But the spectacles, slipped on, helped. Made it bearable.

He scarcely remembered the great fire here. He had been so young, and it was such a long time ago, but surely it
was as bright as this when it tore through the hovel where Lorcan was born. He
did
remember the shiny golden coin, like a tiny flame itself, that had been his price, slipped into the grime-stained palm of a woman whose face Lorcan could no longer recall. Six hungry mouths had cried with wanting since the fire raged, and if the nice young man wanted to take one of them off her overworked hands, well, that was a blessing. It was over in moments, the exchange of coin and boy, and soon he was in a grand room in a grand palace with the grandest of ladies.

The
Lady. That was where his memories truly began, and so he would do anything for her. What the Lady wanted, she would get, and she wanted this new son. The boy would still be at home, not yet returned to the school in the North.

Outside the gates of the Palace of Westminster, a score of hansoms waited for generous fares from the purses of pithy lords.

Such a pretty city. It was a shame about the people, the light. But he directed the Lady’s architects to copy the bits he liked. It amused her to rule over her own London, the way she always should have. Two centuries before, Londinium had been a mess, a jumble of shacks cobbled together by the descendants of the first people to live there. Only the palace had been beautiful, though this, too, Lorcan had changed over the years.

To Mayfair, then, in the musty cab, above the cesspit of pickpockets and urchins, muck and mundanity.

The boy’s street was quiet, but for a few carriages clustered outside his home. The fool was evidently entertaining again, but no matter. Indeed, this might be all to the good. She might not be so quick to refuse him a second time, not in front of her silly guests.

And if she did, well, he had other ways.

The chit of a maid answered the bell, apron creased, petticoats crusted with dirt.

“Mr. Lorcan Havelock, for Mrs. Foster.” So polite. So careful.

For the moment.

“Madam isn’t”—the girl sniffled, possibly under the weather—“receiving today, sir.”

Lorcan frowned, quick as winking. “My business is, indeed, with young Master Jack. Would he be about?”

The girl goggled. A crumpled handkerchief peeked from her fist. “Jack?” she whispered. “But he’s missing, sir, gone since yesterday, and Mrs. Pond ’as been dismissed for not mindin’ ’im close enough! And we’ve had all the coppers ’round, all last night and into the dawn, but he’s nowhere! How can a boy be nowhere?”

Gone
. But it couldn’t be.

“I
must
see Mrs. Foster,” Lorcan insisted, dry
mouthed. “I can assist.” Such a smooth lie. Nearly.

The girl simply would not move, but she was a tiny thing. Lorcan pushed past, onto the checkerboard floor. The parlor door stood ajar, letting through a rustle of whispers and tears.

“YOU! What have you done with my son?” screamed the fool the moment Lorcan stepped inside. He lacked normal blood in his veins, certainly it would never run cold, but he imagined it there, turning to ice.

“Pardon me?” he asked quite cautiously.

“What is the meaning of this?” demanded a man, bearded and portly, rising from a chair beside her. Lorcan removed his glasses, unnecessary with the drawn curtains, the low lamps. Mrs. Foster’s eyes were red-rimmed, her hair falling from its pins.

“You asked me for him! What have you done with him?”

“I did not take young Jack,” Lorcan said. A very careful truth. “I do not know where in this great city he is. You have my word.”

The fool deflated as if pricked with a pin. “This is Mr. Havelock, Wallace, darling,” she said quietly. “Of the Spiritualist Society. But what he is doing here, I’m sure I couldn’t say. We had no appointment.”

“Then I will thank him to leave,” said her husband. The boy’s father. Months and months, and Lorcan had
barely caught glimpses of him, stepping from the house to the carriage before the sun woke, returning for a supper by light of candles and diamonds. “Jack is missing. There’s no time for your nonsense.”

A fresh wave of tears slicked the fool’s face. But Lorcan felt no pity. There was no room for it, what with all the hope suddenly welling inside him.

If he could only find the boy first, before the constables, before he came home of his own accord, weary of adventure. These people would never know he
could
have been found. The grief now was at its very worst. It would get better with age, as so many things did.

“In fact,” said Lorcan, not moving an inch on the rug, “I do believe this is precisely the time. Your good wife can attest to my skills as a spiritualist.” Parlor tricks, all, but perhaps not such a very great waste of time now. “We have ways, you see, that policemen do not.”

“Tosh!” said Wallace Foster, turning his back, but the fool sat straighter in her chair.

“You can find him?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps.” Oh, yes. The Lady would get what she desired, and she would be happy and smiling. She would clap her hands and give him apples and all would be right in Londinium, even if this city crumbled to dust. “But I will require something.”

“Anything, anything you need.”

Wallace Foster snorted, but he said not a word. Lorcan told her, and the maid was summoned.

Moments later, he had it, held between thumb and forefinger. A wisp. Almost nothing, but the girl had freshened the beds and cleaned the combs at Mrs. Pond’s direction while she and Jack went to the outfitters.

A single hair. Enough, with any luck.

W
E SHALL HAVE TO DISGUISE
you,” said Dr. Snailwater. “You can’t stay shut up in here forever, not if we’re to get you home.”

Home. Already it seemed distant to Jack, far more so than simply on the other side of a door. Home was a large house and Mrs. Pond. Or it was a cluster of schoolrooms and dormitories and the booming voice of Headmaster Adams. It was deep in the countryside, or it was London.

But this was London, too. Almost.
Londinium.

“We can’t do an arm or a leg,” the doctor was saying. “Much too complicated, unless you’d be willing to lose one of your own. No? Well, yes, I can quite understand. Something, however. Hmmm. Aaaah.”

Jack wasn’t entirely certain he liked the sound of that, but Dr. Snailwater did make a point. There was nothing for the pink of his skin, where everyone else was so pale. He thought of the brass grille worn by the man whom he’d asked for directions to Mayfair, as if getting home were so very simple as that even then.

“Eyes closed.” Dr. Snailwater sounded so like Mrs. Pond in tone that Jack did as he was told at once.

Hands washed
.

It was cold, so cold against his skin, and a metallic smell strong enough to taste. A leather strap was fastened around the back of his head, pulling at his hair.

“What say you, Beth?” asked the doctor, and Jack took this as permission to open his eyes again. The workshop was dark as a fib, the thick glass of the goggles smudging the truth. Brass rims dug into the soft part of his cheeks and above his eyebrows; his head pitched forward from the weight.

“Very smart,” said Beth. “Add a topper and his own mum won’t know him. Oh! I do beg your pardon, Jack.” Through the glass, he could see one of her hands clapped over her mouth.

“Remember your lessons, Beth, my dear.” He frowned. “Perfect brain, perfect size, best materials I could find,” he said to Jack, “but still sometimes says things she oughtn’t.”

“It’s all right,” Jack mumbled, remembering the time that Mother had come to fetch him from school and had not, in fact, recognized him among the cluster of boys.

A hat was placed on his head, too big but held up quite conveniently by the goggles. It sank down only a little at the back. Beth’s key was wound up to its tightest, and out the door the three slipped, off on what Dr. Snailwater would only describe as “a fool’s errand, and an errand to visit a fool.”

“Ohh, I know,” said Beth. The doctor smiled.

It was the first opportunity since he’d met Beth that Jack had to truly look at Londinium, its cobblestones
and clockwork and steam, and to appreciate what he was seeing. The goggles made it difficult, but still he could make out the enormous carriages, loud as thunder, reckless as racehorses, though not the writing on their sides. At home those were for perfectly ordinary things, like toothpaste and red currant jam, but he did not think that would be the case here. His head grew damp beneath the hat; the air choked his lungs. Everywhere, positively
everywhere
, there were people, clanking and jangling and peering through bulbous eyes of colored glass or goggles like his own.