The Explosionist (19 page)

“A number of prominent men count themselves part of the peace party as well,” Miss Grant objected.

“In the Hanseatic states as a whole, certainly,” said Great-aunt Tabitha, “but in Scotland, at least over the last ten or fifteen years, willingness to speak boldly of war has become a kind of shibboleth of masculinity. No, if Joanna’s used unacceptable means to put together the case for war, she must be exposed and brought to account, but I’m not saying I don’t feel for her. We must see what we can do to stop her.”

She fell silent, then spoke again. “One thing’s certain, Ruth.”

“What’s that?”

“The program at IRYLNS must be expanded at once. I tell you, those girls provide the single most effective bulwark against the Europeans. There’s not a moment to be lost.”

They spoke for a few more minutes, then left the room.

Still in shock at her great-aunt’s continued support of
IRYLNS, Sophie wondered if she should confess to Great-aunt Tabitha she’d overheard the whole thing. No, discretion sometimes really was the better part of valor. It was strange how often she’d benefited in the last few days from eavesdropping—though perhaps
benefited
wasn’t the right word.

She opened the sitting-room door a crack and heard Great-aunt Tabitha let Miss Grant out, then lock the front door and descend to the kitchen for her evening cup of chamomile tea.

Sophie slipped upstairs to her bedroom, tore off her clothes, and threw herself into bed. Ten minutes later, when a knock came at the bedroom door, Sophie lay still as a dead mouse. The knock came again, but Sophie didn’t answer. She could hear Great-aunt Tabitha’s breathing outside on the landing. After a few minutes more, the sound of departing footsteps told Sophie that her great-aunt had decided not to disturb her.

It was a relief in a way to know that Great-aunt Tabitha hadn’t just given in and accepted the ascendancy of the minister of public safety. If anyone could stop Joanna Murchison, surely it was Great-aunt Tabitha. But how could she speak with such approval of expanding IRYLNS? Why was she so willing to give the girls—except Sophie—up to the knife? And would anything intervene to halt the proceedings when Sophie’s turn came?

“W
E CAN’T DO IT
, we simply can’t,” Mikael said, pacing back and forth on an isolate patch of grass in the Meadows the next afternoon.

“What’s your objection, though?” Sophie asked. “I know you’re not wild about spiritualism. But you were willing to pose as a client for Mrs. Tansy, and I don’t see how this is different, except that the stakes are an awful lot higher now. You were the one who told me to see if the spirits could tell me anything about your brother!”

“I was
joking
!” Mikael shouted.

Sophie hoped nobody could overhear them.

“I wouldn’t have actually sat in a séance, besides,” he
added in a quieter voice. “Here you’re asking me to take part in exactly the kind of shady transaction I most despise!”

“It won’t be shady at all,” Sophie said, struggling to keep her temper. “Keith says himself that most of what’s presented as spirit photography is fraudulent. He wouldn’t have anything to do with that sort of thing, he’s mostly just excited about trying out his new invention. In fact, in a way it’s us who’ll be helping him, not the other way around. You’ll see how good he is when you meet him.”

“What is it with you, Sophie? You meet this chap and all of a sudden it’s
Keith this, Keith that
. You’re ridiculously impressionable! I don’t think much of your loyalty to your old friends, I can tell you that much.”

He picked up a large pebble and flicked it toward the ducks in the small ornamental pond nearby. The flock of birds flapped up off the surface of the water and flew away.

Mikael sounded almost jealous of Keith, though Sophie couldn’t think why. She hadn’t adopted Keith as her new best friend. People were so
silly
about things like this. Sophie had to push away a strong sense of irritation as she applied herself to the task of soothing Mikael’s injured feelings.

Half an hour later, Mikael had agreed to help operate the camera that evening and to reserve judgment on the authenticity of the results.

“After all, we can’t afford to waste time argy-bargying
when there’s a murderer running loose,” he concluded, looking smug.

It took all of Sophie’s self-control not to roll her eyes.

To seal their reconciliation, they shared a dry hunk of cake pilfered by Sophie from the tin in the kitchen at Heriot Row.

“Aren’t you going to eat yours?” he asked Sophie, who had picked off the icing and left the cake in several pieces on the greaseproof paper.

“I don’t like cake very much,” Sophie said. “The one really good thing about cake is that it’s an excellent icing delivery system.”

“What an extraordinary thing to say! You don’t mean to say you’d rather have icing than cake? Can I have yours if you don’t want it?”

“It’s all yours,” Sophie said, and the cake vanished into Mikael’s mouth.

“Wouldn’t it make more sense, then,” Mikael asked through a spray of crumbs, “not to bother with the cake at all, and to eat icing with a spoon straight from the bowl?”

Sophie passed him the bottle of fizzy lemonade.

“That wouldn’t be the same at all,” she said. “For one thing, the icing goes all lovely and hard when it’s actually on the cake, with a sort of crust of crumbs on the side where it’s attached. Picking it off and leaving the rest feels naughty and luxurious.”

They finished the lemonade and put the rubbish into a bin nearby, already overflowing with refuse. In central Edinburgh all the bins had been removed because they provided such ready receptacles for bombs, but the city council had evidently spared this one, probably because the terrorists wouldn’t waste their matériel outside the densely populated city center.

“How long have we got before our appointment with the Boy Photographic Wonder?” Mikael asked.

“Three hours,” said Sophie, ignoring his sarcasm.

“Good. I’m dead set on seeing the exhibition.”

“I don’t see why we shouldn’t walk through the displays,” Sophie said. “They don’t charge admission, except for a few of the pavilions.”

“Right, then. What are we waiting for?”

Sophie led the way to the Bruntsfield Links, formerly a golf course, now home to the tents and permanent pavilions of the Hanseatic Expo. On the other side of the links were ancient burial pits supposed to contain more than ten thousand plague victims, and Sophie thought for one queasiness-inducing second that she could actually smell the half-decayed bodies. A moment later the smell resolved itself into an agricultural miasma rising from the first display area, a show of prize livestock proclaiming Scotland’s superiority in the matter of pigs, sheep, chickens, and dairy cows.

They watched a Punch-and-Judy show, Sophie struck by a strong resemblance between the Judy puppet and Miss Henchman (could one of the puppeteers possibly have attended Sophie’s school?), then sampled thirteen different kinds of jam, all made of fruit native to Scotland. Sophie was afraid that Mikael must have seen much better exhibitions in Denmark, but he seemed well entertained by what was on offer, particularly when it was edible.

The fair was thronged with buskers and beggars, most of them veterans of the armed services. Sophie gave away a few coins, although Great-aunt Tabitha always said not to because the money would just be spent on drink.

They coughed up the entrance fee for the Grand Pavilion, which housed a rotating set of scientific exhibits designed to demonstrate Scotland’s achievements in technology. Outside it was impossible to tell exactly what they were paying for, but by the time the line snaked forward into the main tent Sophie was no less eager than Mikael to lay eyes on the Miracle of Life Extended.

Inside, two pretty girls in skimpy one-piece spangled outfits posed on either side of a giant glass box. Mikael whistled his appreciation.

A person who wore something like that on the beach at North Berwick, Sophie thought sourly, would surely be arrested. That was to say, if she didn’t freeze to death first! But
she decided not to say anything in case Mikael thought she was jealous.

Closer up, the two girls looked older and less pretty, their long slim legs and acrobatic torsos belied by the wrinkles on their faces and the ropy skin of their necks.

As they got close enough to see inside the glass case, Sophie craned forward to read the label below.

Mikael suddenly clutched Sophie’s arm.

“Tell me those aren’t real babies,” he said.

Sophie looked at him with surprise.

“Of course they’re real!” she said, laughing at his expression. “If they were just dolls, what kind of a demonstration would it be?”

Six tiny babies lay almost motionless in the incubator. The legend below told the history of the artificial incubator, known to the ancient world in primitive versions but refined over the nineteenth century for hatching chicken eggs. At the turn of the century, the Irish obstetrician Oscar Wilde saw one of these chicken incubators in the Edinburgh Zoological Garden and realized it could be adapted for the care of babies delivered before the full term. The incubator box’s double walls were filled with hot water for insulation, its lower half a reservoir containing roughly sixty liters of warm water. The preterm babies lay in the top of the box, where a thermometer kept track to make sure the temperature never fell beneath
thirty degrees centigrade, a miracle of technology that Wilde and his colleagues had popularized by sending incubators to expositions throughout the Hanseatic states.

“Does it really seem a good idea to exhibit live babies like this?” Mikael said. “It’s like an agricultural show! Whose babies are they, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” Sophie said curtly. If one had any choice, of course, one wouldn’t let one’s own baby be put on display like this. But Sophie didn’t like it when Mikael criticized Scotland. “Probably babies born at the Lying-In Hospital for the Poor.”

“Sophie, let’s get out of here,” said Mikael. “This place is too horrible for words.”

They hurried out of the tent and back into the daylight. As they left the park and cut through the grounds of the Infirmary north toward Lauriston Place, Sophie couldn’t get the sight of the infants out of her head. The rational part of her brain knew they wouldn’t have been put there if the incubator hadn’t represented their best, perhaps their only, chance of survival. But to be exposed in public like that would surely haunt one’s dreams in later life, assuming one survived.

“Sophie?” Mikael said, sounding odd.

“What’s the matter?” she said, stopping and turning to look at him. He grabbed her arm and hustled her onward.

“Hey, that hurts!” Sophie protested, trying to loosen his bruising grip.

“I don’t want to frighten you, but I think we’re being followed,” Mikael said. Then, as Sophie reflexively began to turn her head to look in back of her: “No! Don’t look. I don’t want him tipped off that we’ve spotted him.”

They sped up, Sophie soon gasping and frightened, despite herself, by Mikael’s grim expression.

“This area’s no good for losing him,” Mikael said. “Anywhere that’s public enough for us to be allowed in, he’ll be able to follow us.”

“Who is he, do you think?” Sophie ventured, hoping Mikael wouldn’t be angry with her for asking. It was difficult enough just to talk at all, at this speed, and the leg on the side of her slight limp was already throbbing.

“Do you remember that beggar you gave a shilling to, back at the Meadows?”

Sophie remembered, though it was almost impossible not to look around and confirm it with her own eyes.

Something occurred to her and she let out a short sharp exclamation. “Mikael, I’ve just thought of something. What if the man following us is a kind of colleague of the Veteran? What if this man’s working for the same person that hired the Veteran to murder Mrs. Tansy?”

What if he’d been hired to kill
them
?

“I think it’s very likely he’s working for the same person,” Mikael said, speeding up again so that Sophie had to break into a jog. “It’s possible that the true murderer has a whole pack of veterans working for him. If that’s so, it might be another clue we can use to figure out who he really is.”

Sophie hadn’t breath enough to fill him in on her current state of thinking concerning the minister; it would have to wait till later.

“This wretch can’t possibly mean to kill us in public, Sophie,” Mikael added, though he didn’t slow down. “If he did, he’d not have a dog’s chance of getting away afterward. He’d have to be a really super marksman to hit either of us with a pistol at this distance, and it’s easy to see he’s not carrying a rifle. Still, I’ll feel a lot better if we can lose him.”

“Mikael?” Sophie panted.

“What?”

“I think he might have followed me from Heriot Row.”

She had a sketchy memory of seeing a lame figure on the tram. It seemed very likely that it was the same man.

“We’ll certainly assume that they know who you are and where you live,” Mikael said. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t get some privacy for this evening. We’ll go to the most crowded part of the Old Town and see if we can’t give him the slip there. We’re moving so fast he’ll know that we’ve spotted him, but let’s not slow down—I don’t want him getting too
close to us, just in case he’s got a gun after all.”

Sophie felt calmer because of Mikael having a plan. The most frightening thing was not knowing what was going on; putting even one’s worst fear into words always made it less awful.

By now they’d reached Grassmarket, and they turned right and hurried toward St. Giles’ Cathedral. They raced up Old Fishmarket Close to the High Street, where they slipped into a draper’s shop. While Mikael peered out the window, Sophie watched a customer give a ten-shilling note to the assistant, who wrapped the money in the customer’s invoice and packed it into an egg-shaped container that she pulled down from a wire hanging above her head. The container shot up and away through pneumatic tubes to the countinghouse, where a boy made the correct change. When the container shot back down, a bell rang and the assistant reached up and pulled out the change from its cocoon.

“He saw us come in,” Mikael reported, pressing his face up against the window. “He’s lurking now in the area downstairs from the shop across the road. What we need to do is walk out of here, stroll up the High Street, and then make a break for it. We’ll run up one of those little streets and hide before he can follow, and with luck he’ll think we’ve only gone into another shop.”

“And if he sees us?”

“Then we split up. You’ll go ahead. I’ll find a way to slow him down, then lead him astray and lose him. I can outrun him if I’m by myself. Then we’ll meet up at the bookstall in Waverley Station.”

“Good thinking,” said Sophie, glad Mikael hadn’t suggested splitting up as the first line of defense. He could run much faster than she could, but the thought of their being separated made her feel rather ill.

“Ready?”

Sophie nodded.

They pushed open the door and sauntered out into the street.

They crossed the road, the beggar stuck on the other side behind a line of schoolchildren.

“Now!” Mikael said.

They began running.

“Here!” Sophie grunted.

They turned into a narrow alley whose name she couldn’t remember, running now through narrow streets of tenements like blond sandstone cliffs.

“I’ve got an idea,” Sophie said, clutching the stitch in her side as they came out into Market Street. Her hip was pulsing like the devil, a dull pain that was quite tolerable so long as she didn’t think about it. She couldn’t hear the beggar’s footsteps behind them, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t there. “Let’s get a taxi!”

“Have you enough money?” Mikael asked.

“Yes,” she said, grabbing his hand and practically dragging him to the nearest taxi rank. Fortunately there were three cabs waiting for customers—on a nice afternoon like this, a properly frugal citizen wouldn’t waste money on a taxi—and they jumped into the backseat of the first one.

“What’s all this, then?” said the driver when they asked him to drive in the direction of St. Mary’s. “How am I to know this isn’t just a silly game?”