The Skin Map (7 page)

“You will appreciate, my lords and gentlemen all, that there remain many unanswered queries in the diverse, but nevertheless intimately related, fields of natural mechanics and animal magnetism. The subtle energies of our earthly home are even now beginning to surrender secrets long held and jealously guarded. We in our present generation stand on the cusp of a new and glorious dawn when mastery of these energies lies fully within our grasp as secret yields to inquiry, which yields to experimentation, which leads to verification and duplication, which, in the final course, leads to knowledge.”

He paused to allow a polite smattering of applause to ripple through the auditorium.

“In conclusion, I beg the indulgence of this body in allowing me to reiterate the central premise of my lecture this evening, to wit: that an expedition shall be made to undertake the experiment outlined in your hearing this evening. The experiment will commence as soon as an expeditionary force numbering not fewer than five, nor more than eight, Royal Members in good standing has been selected and proper arrangements can be made for travel, lodging, and matters attending. Therefore, it is with the greatest anticipation that I look forward to addressing this august assembly once again in the near future to divulge the results of the aforementioned experiment.”

There were shouts of “Hear! Hear!”

The lecturer took a few steps toward the other side of the stage and resumed. “My friends, esteemed colleagues, noble patrons, and honoured guests, I leave you with this: when next you turn your eyes to the vast reaches of heaven, gentlemen, you would be well advised to remember that not only is it far more magnificent than the human mind can fathom, it is far more subtle. All the universe is permeated, upheld, knit together, conjoined, encompassed, and contained by the Elemental Ether, which we recognise as an all-pervading, responsive, and intelligent field of energy, eternal and inexhaustible, which is nothing less than the ground of our very being and the wellspring of our existence—that which in ages past and present men have been pleased to call God.”

Enthusiastic applause concluded the speech, and the man on stage bowed low and received the accolades of his colleagues. Another man joined the first on stage and made a brief announcement of which Kit failed to understand a single word, and then the audience was on its feet, crowding the aisles, and moving toward the doors. “This way!” said Cosimo, pushing into the aisle. He proceeded to fight his way upstream toward the front of the auditorium, dragging Kit behind him.

“Sir Henry!” called Cosimo, waving his arm. “Sir Henry!”

“Mr. Livingstone!” came the reply. The tall, lanky man surged toward them using his long black walking stick to ease his passage through the throng. “Welcome, dear friend,” he cried, gripping Cosimo’s hand. “I trust this meeting finds you as well as you appear.”

“Never better. It is good to see you, Sir Henry. I must say, it has been far too long.”

“I was beginning to fear you had forgotten our rendezvous,” said the lecturer. “I am delighted to discover my trepidations were completely unfounded.”

“Wild horses could not keep me away,” replied Cosimo. Turning to the young man beside him, he said, “Sir Henry, I am delighted to present my great-grandson, Christopher.”

The nobleman turned his attention to Kit, who was in no way prepared to be the object of an almost blistering intensity of interest. One glance into those razor-keen eyes and Kit felt he had been peeled to the pith. “A pleasure, sir!” cried the lecturer, seizing the young man’s hand in a ferocious grip. “An unalloyed pleasure.”

“Likewise,” mumbled Kit.

“Kit,” said Cosimo, “I present to you my dear friend and colleague Sir Henry Fayth, Lord Castlemain, a man of extraordinary accomplishments in many fields—astronomy, chemistry, geology, and engineering to name a few. In short, a polymath and scholar of the first order.”

Lord Castlemain gave a tap of his walking stick and bowed low. “As always, dear friend, your flattery overreaches its humble mark.”

“Nonsense! It is the simple truth, nothing more,” replied Cosimo grandly. “Now then, I believe I requested the pleasure of your company at dinner tonight. Will you honour me with your presence at my table, Sir Henry?”

“Nothing would delight me more, dear fellow. Indeed, I have held myself in the utmost anticipation all day. But—and I really must insist on this—it shall be my pleasure and mine alone to treat you to table.” Cosimo opened his mouth to object, but Sir Henry held up his hand. “No, sir! I will not hear nay. Come, let us not fall out over trifles.”

“What can I say?” Cosimo bowed in deference to his friend’s wishes. “We accept your hospitality.”

“Splendid! I do hope you are hungry, good sirs.”

“Ravenous!” roared Cosimo—so loudly that Kit gave a start. But no one else seemed to pay the least attention. “But, might we first pass by Pudding Lane? I have that errand we discussed.”

“Certainly, sir. Let us not suffer a moment’s delay,” said Sir Henry and, stick held high, charged off through the crowd. “Please, this way my friends, if you will. My chariot awaits.”

Kit fell into step behind the two men and, although labouring under the strong impression that he had wandered onto a movie set during filming, he had to admit that he was taken in by the very formal, and wholly archaic, manner of the man. And in all his wildest dreams, he had never once imagined he would ever hear anyone actually say the words “my chariot awaits” and mean it literally.

The vehicle in question turned out to be a large and well-appointed coach with an enclosed passenger box and generous windows. As the night was good, the windows were open, and taking the seat facing rearward opposite the two older men, Kit settled into the sumptuous upholstered leather. The door closed, the driver flicked his whip, and they were soon bumping along the darkened streets of Olde London Towne to the fine
clip-clop
of a matched pair of enormous chestnut mares. This, thought Kit, feeling more and more like minor royalty, was the only civilised way to travel.

Hard on the heels of this thought came another: none of this is real.

This thought led inevitably to a third: you’ve fallen and struck your head on a rock, and when you wake up in hospital three weeks will have passed and you will be on a ventilator with tubes up your nose and wires attached to your broken cranium.

That was surely a safer explanation than the one where he was forced to admit that what was happening to him was in some way really happening.

Still, weren’t those horses a lovely sight?

CHAPTER 6
In Which Kit Acquires an Apostle Spoon

T
he carriage clattered along the darkened streets of an alien London, the iron-rimmed wheels bouncing over uneven cobbles, until at last it rolled to a stop outside a tumbledown thatched house in a cramped street of low clapboard dwellings. “Please remain seated, gentlemen,” said Cosimo. “It is but the work of a moment.” He disembarked and hurried to the rough plank door that supported a crudely hand-lettered placard: T
HOS
. F
ARRYNER
, B
AKER.

Glancing up and down the narrow street, Cosimo banged on the door with the flat of his hand. When that failed to produce a result, he picked up a loose cobble and began beating on the planks, rattling the door on its hinges. In a moment, there came a cry from inside and the door flung open. “Here! Here now! Wot’r ye about then?”

“Sorry to bother you at this late hour, my good man,” said Cosimo. “I wonder if I might trouble you for a loaf of bread?”

“I be closed!” cried the somewhat woozy man. “You’ve woke me up, you have!”

“I do most heartily apologise and beg your pardon,” replied Cosimo. “But, seeing as you are awake now, might I purchase the bread? Any old loaf will do.”

“Hold yer water, then,” grumbled Thomas the baker. He shuffled back inside, reappearing a few moments later with a round lump of bread. “That’s a ha’penny to you.”

“Here’s tuppence for your trouble,” said Cosimo, passing over the coins. “You can thank me later.”

“Tch!” replied the baker, and slammed the door.

Cosimo returned to the coach with the bread under his arm. “That should do it very nicely,” he chortled, climbing back into the coach. “Drive on!”

As the coach jolted to a start once more, Kit puzzled over the meaning of the charade he had just witnessed. Finally, when he could no longer help himself, he asked, “What was all that about? What do you want with stale bread?”

“Oh, this?” His great-grandfather glanced at the loaf beside him on the seat. “But I don’t want it at all.”

With that, he took the loaf and, calling, “Free bread!” tossed it from the carriage to a clutch of poorly dressed women who had gathered around a lantern that cast a pale circle of light onto their bare heads and shoulders. One of them caught the loaf and at once began dividing it up among the others. “Thank-ee!” she called with a gap-toothed smile.

“Don’t you remember
anything
you learned in school?” asked Cosimo.

“Not much,” confessed Kit.

“Second of September . . . year 1666 . . . Pudding Lane? No?”

“Sorry, not with you.” Neither the date nor the place rang any bells.

“Why, it’s the Great Fire, dear boy. Never heard of it? What
do
they teach in school these days?”

“
That
I’ve heard of.” Kit thought for a moment. “So, by waking the baker you’ve prevented the fire—is that it?”

“Well done! There might be hope for you yet.”

“But isn’t that hazardous—messing with events?”

“Well, why not?”

“You’re changing the course of history. I thought that sort of thing was strictly forbidden.”

“Forbidden by whom?” inquired Cosimo. “Who’s to say the reality in which we find ourselves is the best one possible?”

“Yes, but—” Kit objected.

“See here, if a simple act of kindness or generosity, such as buying a loaf of bread for some poor working women, can mean that wholesale death and destruction will be avoided—why, a man would be a monster who had it in his power to alleviate all that suffering yet stood by and did nothing.”

The thought of messing about with history occupied Kit until the coach rolled up outside a large torch-lit house with a painted sign hanging above the door. The sign read T
HE
P
OPE’S
N
OSE
, and had a picture of—it was difficult to tell in the flickering light of the torches—what appeared to be the plucked rear end of a somewhat startled goose.

“Ah, here we are, gentlemen!” cried Sir Henry, snatching up his walking stick and leaping to his feet the moment the coach creaked to a stop. “This is my preferred chophouse. The food is uncommonly good, but the place is ferociously noisy, I fear, and likely to be crowded. I do hope you will not mind.”

“Not in the least,” replied Cosimo. “As usual, Sir Henry, you have anticipated my desires precisely. Lead on!”

They stepped from the landau and marched up to the public eating house arm in arm, with Kit bringing up the rear. As they approached the entrance, Kit caught Cosimo’s elbow and pulled him back for a word. “Look, I’m hungry as anything—but what’s going on here? Aren’t we worried about Wilhelmina? I thought it was important to find her.”

“Rest assured, dear boy, it is my main concern and the focus of all our efforts. Trust me. We are definitely working on it. But it will do no one any good if we starve ourselves into a state of mental and physical exhaustion. We’ve got to keep up our strength and acuity, do we not?”

“I suppose so,” Kit allowed dubiously.

“And does not Sir Henry strike you as exactly the sort of ally who might aid our search?”

“I guess so.”

“Well then!” Cosimo waved him through the wide-open door.

The ground floor of the house was given to two large public rooms with smaller, more private chambers upstairs. They were met inside the door by a red-faced man in a shabby leather jerkin with a greasy white apron around his more-than-ample middle and a sweat-stained blue scarf knotted around his neck. A limp cap of folded linen, balanced atop his round head, was listing to the side and causing him to hold his head at an angle. “Welcome, gentlemen! Come in! Come in! I am honoured, good sirs. Honoured, I declare.” He clapped his hands, and a boy came running and offered to take charge of any hats, cloaks, swords, or pistols they might wish to shed for the evening.

They handed over their hats, and the landlord gave a flick of his hand and sent the boy away. “I have prepared your customary room, Sir Henry. The fire is made up and fresh cloth is laid.”

“Thank you, William, but we will begin down here,” declared Sir Henry, indicating the large open room before them. “I feel like eating in company tonight. If you please, we will make our way upstairs in due course.”

“Certainly, sir,” replied the landlord. “Whatever your pleasure. Right this way.” He led them into the room, as into a den noisy with feasting lions. They passed among three long tables crowded with other diners, of which there were perhaps twenty or so, all munching and chomping with true abandon. Lord Castlemain appeared to know many of these, and he paused often to exchange a greeting or a word, shaking hands and bowing, before moving on.

The landlord conducted them to a small table near the hearth where a coal fire burned brightly in the grate. They settled into large, heavy carvers, and Kit surveyed the table, which was spread with a spotted and stained blue tablecloth and white napkins folded into vaguely boatlike shapes. There were no utensils, so he reached for the napkin closest to him, took it, and shook it out just as a gangly young adolescent wearing a faded, much-stained yellow turban approached the table and plunked down three wide-bottomed crockery jars overflowing with frothy ale. Sir Henry raised the jar before him and cried, “To friends old and new! May they always remain true!”

“
Was hael!
” answered Cosimo, and drank.

The ale, though flat, was sweet and nutty with a warming flavour of cloves. Very nice, Kit decided, sipping liberally from the jar. Meanwhile, the turbaned lad had begun laying wooden bowls of soup before them. Sir Henry lowered his face to the bowl and sniffed. “Ah! Periwinkle! My favourite.” Taking a large silver spoon from an inner pocket of his coat, he began to ladle soup into his mouth.