Starcross (24 page)

Knowing not what else to do, I took down a pewter scoop which hung upon the wall and began shovelling quantities of each substance into a heavy iron pot which rested beside the oven, its surface scorched and rainbowed by the intense heats it had endured. After the russet and the green I found some red Mercury, like crumbly cake. Its very smell told me that it was poisonous, and so I put on some heavy fireproof gloves and broke it up between my fingers, dropping the fragments
into my mixture of powders until some womanly instinct told me that the proportions were just right.

For it had struck me as I worked that this Alchemy was very like cooking, and might therefore be a ladylike thing to do after all – not so much a science as a
domestic
science. I began to grow quite elated as I sought along the racks of phials and bottles for the colours and textures which I felt my mixture lacked, and added them, and stirred them in.

And when at last all seemed ready, I used a handy shovel to push my pot inside the alembic, and shut the door upon it.

And … nothing happened.

It was most embarrassing. I had become quite carried away with my cookery, and had almost convinced myself that Delphine was right and that I had a natural talent for things alchemical. She and Jack were both looking at me most expectantly, and even her goblins ceased shovelling to stare at me, until she scolded them and ordered them back to work. Yet nothing happened, and slowly Delphine’s wide, waiting eyes narrowed, and her mouth widened into a most disagreeable sneer, and she drew back the hammer of her silver pistol and set it once more against Jack’s head, enquiring, ‘Well?’

I turned to the mass of pipes and dials and levers which grew like ivy on the wall behind the oven. Oh, how I have always
loathed
pipes and dials and levers! They are so very Modern, and Lack Soul. I should much rather have lived in olden times, in Merrie England, when a girl had to concern herself with nothing more complicated than a little light dulcimer-playing and the occasional lovelorn swain. Dials, levers, pipes – these things mean nought to me! But in my helplessness I chose a dial, quite at random, and gave it a sharp rap with my knuckles, which set the needle within it a-trembling. And, thus encouraged, I settled upon a lever, and pulled it. And at that, every pipe in the place set up a strange lowing, a howling song, quite unearthly, which rose and fell and twisted itself into the strange harmonies I had heard before aboard the
Sophronia
, when Ssilissa was preparing to loft us into space.

‘She has done it!’ cried Jack. ‘The engine sings!’

‘I hope it does rather more than that,’ Delphine said. ‘To the helm, Mr Havock. Sergeant Tartuffe, keep watch on him; Boke, Gaggarat, Sneave, go along and assist Mr Havock in the working of the ship. The rest of you, keep shovelling! Shovel for all you’re worth! Get this ship spaceborne and back to our own time, where there are fat
British ships to prey upon, and you’ll have wool beyond the dreams of avarice!’

The goblins hastened to do as she commanded, and Jack had no choice but to let them hustle him up that spiral companionway and away to whatever part of the old ship the helm was housed in. Yet he shot me a look as he went which seemed full of pride and affection, as if I had surprised him with my cleverness.

He could not, of course, have been half so surprised as me!

Delphine remained in the wedding chamber. ‘Now take us aloft!’ she said.

I was about to say that I couldn’t, when I realised that I could. If I closed my eyes I could see the ship beneath me, a golden pod shining in my mind’s eye. I could sense the alchemical power which strained to escape and drive her upward, free from the shackles of Mars’s gravity. And I knew that if I just adjusted the controls of the alembic by a whisker, she would obey me.

‘But where will we go?’ I asked. ‘There cannot be much fuel aboard, and there is nowhere in this desolate era where we may find more!’

‘Then let us leave this desolate era,’ vowed Delphine. She
had out her pocket watch, and was consulting it. ‘We shall find the rift in time which brought my grandfather here, and use it to return to 1851.’

I could sense the pressure building inside the ship. It made me feel quite unwell – a sensation which I had often felt aboard
Sophronia
, but had put down to simple space sickness. Unable to restrain myself, I reached out and touched the controls, and at once the old ship rose, trembling, creaking …

‘Careful!’ cried Delphine. ‘Do you wish to run us upon a mountainside?’

I suppose that that is exactly what I should have done. Being a patriot and loving Britain, as I do, much more dearly than my own life, I should have steered the USSS
Liberty
to her destruction, rather than return her to Known Space to begin her campaign of piracy and revolution against the established order. But I was carried away by the strangest emotions. I felt as if the power of the Alchemical Realm, which lies beyond the world we know, were surging through me in a golden tide. Not only that, but I could feel the pull of other tides: the great slow tug of the planet’s gravity, the warm yearning call of the mighty Sun, and amid it all, just a few miles away, and as ugly as a grease spot
upon a much-loved dress, a kind of hole, a nothingness, a tunnel mouth leading to quite other tides entirely …

The
Liberty
rose. The bottles jingled, jangled, jingled in their racks – and then jingled no more. A glance at the porthole told me why. We had left behind the fetters of Martian gravity and were soaring on our course through open space! My feet left the deck, and my bathing skirts drifted up about me, but I could not spare a hand to hold them down. Strange to say, I did not care. I felt as free as a bird, soaring through a golden sky, and I was barely aware of the ship straining and complaining as it was dragged along with me. I supposed that this
was how Ssilissa felt each day as she helped the
Sophronia
across the aether’s seas, and I am sorry to say that I felt envious of her, and most regretful that I had not known such splendour until now.

Ahead of us I sensed again that hole, its ragged edges trailing threads of lost time. I cried out for Jack to steer us a mite to the left, if he pleased, and Delphine translated my request into more nautical terms and barked them up the speaking trumpet to Jack without troubling to add the ‘please’.

He did as she asked. The
Liberty
seemed to hesitate for an instant on the boundary of that gash in time. In that instant I fancied that she had become a million, million ships, all laid one atop the other, some smelling of fresh paint and new-cut timber and full of the voices of American buccaneers, some mere rotted hulks, whose rusted nails were turning to powder and letting her mouldy timbers fall away into the blackness of the night. A wave of dizziness o’erwhelmed me! I thought at first that it was because my simple, feminine mind was too weak to comprehend the grandeur and the mystery of Time. Then I realised that I had felt that sensation before, at Starcross, each time the hotel had plunged back or forth through
history; it is the sensation aroused in a mortal body when it travels through the Fourth Dimension.

Then it passed. We were through the rift, we had crossed a gulf of many centuries, and all, all was changed! Instead of the simple tides which had swirled about the planet Mars I faced the churning rapids of the asteroid belt. Wherever I turned there was a gravity field or a reef of dreadful rocks, which seemed to me like hard, dark points in a great confusion of light. ‘Oh!’ and ‘Eek!’ I cried, and I felt the ship swerve this way and that as Jack, far above me, responded to the alarums of a goblin look-out and swung us narrowly past each obstacle.

‘I do not know which one is Starcross!’ I said, bewildered by all the different gravity fields, which seemed to want to pull the
Liberty
in every direction at once, but none strongly enough to actually capture her. ‘Miss Beauregard, you must find your grandpapa’s atlases and star charts and work out a course …’

‘There’s no need for us to call at Starcross,’ said Delphine, prowling the shuddering deck like a panther.

‘But Art, and Mother!’

‘A fig for Art and Mother,’ said Delphine. ‘Find us a path to Modesty and Decorum, so we can fill our holds with
stolen fuel and vittles and burn a ship or two to let the British know they don’t have Heaven to themselves any longer!’

‘But I cannot tell which one is Modesty, either. Nor Decorum.’

‘Then follow the railway line,’ said Delphine.

I sought through the gaudy washes of light and gravity which filled my mind with most upsetting, garish effects, like one of those disagreeable modern paintings by Mr Turner. At last, amid it all, I sensed the gaunt, gleaming straightness of a railway line, and felt the
Liberty
settle into a course quite near it. I relaxed a little then, and pushed myself back from the alembic, feeling quite faint from my exertions, yet filled with a sort of happy tiredness. Beyond the porthole sable space rushed by, flecked with asteroids. I was disappointed to see that the
ship was not enfolded in the golden veils that I had seen sometimes trailing around the
Sophronia
. Ssilissa had more experience than I, and must have been able to accelerate Jack’s ship to vastly greater speeds. But we were moving fast enough, I thought, quite pleased by what I had achieved. Judging by the way the railway tracks kept sliding by outside, we should reach Modesty and Decorum within a few more hours.

And
then
what? I wondered, and my complacency began to fade. How could I prevent Delphine from blasting and burning Her Majesty’s settlements there, and her goblins from looting every wool shop in the place, and unravelling all the inhabitants’ cardigans?
²²

Delphine, meanwhile, had glided over to the porthole, and was peering out of it with her telescope, perhaps hoping to confirm that I really had brought her to our own time, and not ten years ago or the middle of next week. ‘There’s a train ahead,’ I heard her say. And then, ‘Why, what’s this?’

Glad of anything which distracted her from her
rebellious mission, I took the opportunity to slide a coldshelf into the alembic. This cooled the reactions within somewhat, and I felt the
Liberty
slow accordingly. The pipes about us gave out strange moans and creaks as the alembic’s heat faded. (One seemed to murmur ‘Moob!’, but I assured myself that it was only my overwrought imagining.)

Delphine did not notice. She was intent upon whatever distant object had caught her attention. ‘D——d extraordinary!’ she muttered. ‘Miss Mumby, there is a train upon the track ahead. Two men in top hats are scrambling about upon its boiler, and it is pushing ahead of it a hand-car in which I can clearly see your brother Art and Mrs Spinnaker.’

‘Art?’ I said. ‘Oh, whatever mischief is Arthur about now? Do let me see!’

‘Oh!’ cried Delphine, ignoring my request. ‘They have jumped the rails! They’re done for! A wheel is off – glass breaking – what a smash! They are off the track, and falling free in space! The train will stop and help, surely? But no! It races on! It vanishes, and leaves them to die!’

‘Then
we
must rescue them!’ I cried.

Delphine glanced round at me, and I thought for a moment that she was about to forbid the notion, and insist
that I drove on towards Modesty. But even in Delphine’s unwomanly breast there still beat some semblance of a heart, and within that heart there yet survived some trace of feminine compassion! She could not fly on and leave poor Mrs Spinnaker to breathe her last in the vastness of the empty aether. (I say nothing of Art, of course; she did not know him well, and so it is quite possible she might have stopped to rescue him even if he had been quite alone.)

Delphine snatched up the speaking tube mounted on the chamber wall and shouted up it, ‘Alter course! Lay us alongside that hand-car!’

I knew, somehow, that only the ghost of power would be required for such delicate manoeuvrings, and so, despite Delphine’s protests, I left the alembic to attend to itself. I heard Delphine shout out something as I scurried upstairs, but it seemed hardly likely that she would put a bullet through me now that I proved myself so useful. The knotted cloth which held my hair came undone and fell, yet I did not look back, but hurried up to the top deck, where I found Jack turning the wheel, while Delphine’s goblins clustered at an open hatch.