The Aylesford Skull (47 page)

“I take your meaning,” St. Ives said. “And it’s just as well in any event. I quite agree with Jack. You’re not going into the sewers, Finn. And as for coming along with Mr. Hasbro and I, it is quite impossible. The two of us make up the crew, do you see? The dirigible doesn’t want the weight of a third hand, and there’s certainly more danger in the air than beneath the streets of London.”

“But I can’t miss out on the fun, sir.”

“You’ve saved Eddie’s life, Finn, and I can scarcely repay you for that. But I won’t put you in harm’s way, not for King Solomon’s treasure. If something were to happen to you... No,” St. Ives said, shaking his head with utter finality, “the thing is impossible. If Gilbert Frobisher needs another hand in the bustard search, perhaps you can spend some idle time here – a sort of holiday, although Mrs. St. Ives would welcome you home, as would Cleo and Eddie.”

Finn said nothing to this, and they tramped along in a heavy silence for the few minutes that it took to reach the camp. The dirigible rode at anchor as they had left it, but it shifted with the wind now, moving downward so that the mooring lines went slack, and then rising again on an updraft and straining against its tether like a living thing. From atop the sand hill that hid the ship from the bay, St. Ives saw a heavy line of purple clouds in the far distance – foul weather, without a doubt – and the air seemed to him to be laden with urgency, although it might as easily have been his mind.

Into one of the crates from Gleeson’s Mercantile they loaded beakers of water and sandwiches and other delicacies from Uncle Gilbert’s larder – things that could be eaten out of hand – hauling it straight down to the dirigible, where St. Ives ascended the ladder and climbed aboard. The deck beneath him shifted awkwardly on the billows of air, and he nearly pitched bodily through the open gate when he leaned out to pluck the crate from Hasbro’s shoulder.

“Cast her loose!” St. Ives shouted, and he sat in the pilot’s chair and focused his mind on the wheel and vertical tiller, reviewing the many things he had discovered during their earlier flight. With the wind up as it was, he would have little room for error, or at least that’s how he would play it, and he was happy that they had taken the time to describe the great circle when they were over London this morning. He knew something of the way the airship would sail with the wind in various quarters, and it seemed to him that if they sailed fairly close to the wind they might slant round into London with some success.

Finn, Uncle Gilbert, and Madame Leseur, who were waiting to help with the unmooring, stood at three of the corners, Barlow with his game leg and Mr. Hodgson at the fourth, holding tightly to the various mooring lines, with orders to drop them rather than to be lifted off the ground. Hasbro appeared and disappeared below, releasing the knots from the wooden stakes, which they would leave behind, since the stakes were easily replaceable and would do them precious little good in London. One more stake and Hasbro could leave the rest to Uncle Gilbert’s party and ascend the ladder himself.

The wind gusted now, and the airship fell alarmingly, St. Ives fully expecting the gondola to smash down onto the sward. He saw that Madame Leseur had dropped her line and thrown herself out of the way in order to avoid being hit, and he heard a general shouting break out, although it wasn’t sensible. The nose of the ship ascended sharply now, the gondola swinging on its pendulum. The mooring lines at the bow snapped tight and then jerked loose with an audible twang. The gondola rose skyward, almost certainly unmoored. St. Ives heard incoherent shouting again, and he looked down through the open window beside him, where Madame Leseur sat in the grassy sand, Uncle Gilbert standing beside her, both of them pointing upward in amazement. He couldn’t see Hasbro at all.

The ship was clearly unmoored, the wind blowing it out toward the Thames. St. Ives pushed down on the tiller, trying to land the craft along the shore of the bay, and he managed to turn into the wind enough to see the dunes receding behind him. His friends appeared to be quite small now, the lot of them looking upward, Madame Leseur and Hodgson helping Gilbert to his feet, Hasbro sprinting along in the wake of the ship, but powerless to do anything to stop it. There was no sign of Finn Conrad, and then St. Ives couldn’t see them at all as the airship turned away in a gust of wind. He was helpless before the weather, aloft and alone and damn-all he could do about it.

The craft reacted strangely, dragged down at the stern, it seemed to St. Ives, but there was nothing to be done save to establish control over it. The gate swung closed on its hinge, but failed to latch, and then swung open hard again as the ship listed to port, tearing itself straight off the hinges and disappearing. St. Ives fervently hoped that it wasn’t a sign of things to come, the ship falling apart piecemeal. Launching the airship had been a mistake, perhaps his last mistake. Already the encampment was some distance behind him, and it was clear that there was no going back. He thought of the obvious problem of landing and mooring the craft, wherever he ended up. The airship was pointed northwest now, and was straining against the wheel as St. Ives tried to force it farther around into the west.

He saw the Thames below, the ships and boats plying up and down in the dusk. There were stars visible on the western horizon, and the air was cool, with night coming on. The clouds he had seen from the dune were closer, the wind blowing them toward London, or so it seemed. He looked back toward the port side of the gondola to get a bearing along the shore of Egypt Bay before night hid it from him, but what he saw utterly baffled him. Finn Conrad stood in the open doorway, gripping the stanchions on either side, his hair blown back on his head. He nodded briskly and then turned to haul in the ladder.

“I grabbed hold of the ladder, sir,” he said, catching his breath as he took the seat that Hasbro had occupied on the trip out. “I couldn’t hold her back, though, and in a nonce I was swept aloft and too high to drop. Mr. Hasbro was holding onto one of the lines and dragging along the dunes, but the two of us didn’t make an anchor, and he dropped off.”

“Not from a height?”

“Not much of a one. He got up again, anyway, and for a moment I thought he would try to catch up to us, but it was no go.”

“And you climbed the ladder when the ship was rising?” St. Ives said incredulously.

“No more trouble than standing atop a moving horse, sir. Less so, with my hands to grip. Can we make our way back to camp, then?”

“No, we cannot,” St. Ives said. “Not in this wind.”

“But what of Mr. Hasbro?”

“He must find his own way into London, which should be no great thing. It’s the two of us that will be hard pressed to get there in time to be of use. Take a look through that lens there and try the controls of the telescope, Finn. It’ll move opposite what seems right, but you’ll see the way of it soon enough. We’ll need to know where we are if we’re to find our way. I’m damned glad to see you, I can tell you that.”

Finn smiled at him, looking around the gondola now and nodding his head, as if he were happy with what he saw.

St. Ives realized that he himself meant what he said – heartily so. He had badly wanted a navigator, and now he had one. There was a look of profound joy on Finn’s face, too, as he looked out over the patchwork of fields and meadows north of the river, still visible in the waning light, and it seemed to St. Ives that the boy’s evident joy was worth a stack of ten-pound notes.

The Thames itself was some distance behind them now, a narrow black ribbon dotted with tiny, moving lights, and although they were making some headway, it wasn’t enough. In the west lay the burnished gold remnants of the sunset above the Dover Strait. The sky, intensely purple overhead and deepening to black in the east, was already coming out in stars, the moon up, the evening having passed away in what seemed like minutes. God knows where they’d find themselves if they didn’t soon put down in a cow pasture and abandon the airship – on the moon itself. St. Ives considered the possibility that the winds might diminish, or perhaps blow in some contrary direction at a higher altitude – something that would be useful to discover soon. He drew back on the tiller, and the airship canted upward, still drifting inexorably north. Eddie was safe, he told himself. His own fate, and that of Finn Conrad, must be given over to the eccentricities of moving air.

THIRTY-NINE

LONDON ARRIVALS

A
lice watched the pistol uneasily as they covered the miles into London. She had no doubt that the woman would use the weapon if she were pressed, but probably not otherwise. Why Narbondo had set up this ruse was unclear, but certainly not simply to murder them in a moving coach. If murder were his goal, he would bring it about himself in some more loathsome and picturesque way.

“Mrs. Marigold,” Alice said after half an hour of silence, “perhaps you would agree to point the pistol at the floor if I give you my assurance that we’ll cooperate fully. We seem to have no choice in the matter, after all.”

“My name is not in fact Marigold,” the woman told her, “as you well know. And your assurances are worth nothing to me.”

“You were
much
more pleasant when you
were
Mrs. Marigold. You could choose to be Mrs. Marigold again, you know, and improve the general condition of the world.”

“The world can go to the devil, as can you. You will call me Helen.”

“As you say,” Alice said to her. Best to keep the peace, after all, what there was of it.

They traveled in silence again, the coach passing through Plumstead now and into Woolwich – familiar territory to Alice, for she had lived here as a girl – and she pointed out to Eddie the gate of the Royal Arsenal, where her father had worked as a mechanical engineer. He had taught her to hunt and shoot in the Plumstead Marshes, and her Aunt Agatha had taught her to fish in the ponds there and along the banks of the Thames. She had spent long afternoons tramping through Abbey Wood, often alone, carrying a novel or a book of poetry, and could recall the heavy scent of wildflowers on the spring air and the shocking explosions when cannon were tested at the arsenal – something that she had never quite got used to. Eddie listened to her attentively as they rattled through Greenwich and on into London, the road rolling up behind them, the stubborn Helen having nothing at all to say.

By now darkness had fallen, but the City of London was well lit with gas lamps, and Alice looked roundabout attentively, searching out street names, trying to get a sense of just where they were. What good it would do her she couldn’t say, but surely it was better than not knowing.

The coach turned north, caught up in a crowd of pedestrians, omnibuses, carts, and wagons, all of which crossed the very beautiful Blackfriars Bridge in a great mass. Beyond it, rising skyward, its glass panels reflecting gas lamps and the shadowy movement of the city roundabout it, stood the newly built Cathedral of the Oxford Martyrs, which Alice pointed out to Eddie, although very shortly they lost sight of it when the coach turned up the carriageway along the Victoria Embankment.

Almost at once they drove through the gates of a dark courtyard at the rear of an equally dark, shuttered house of three stories, which appeared to be very old, a relic of London’s past. The gates of the courtyard shut behind them, the carriage drew to a stop, and there was the sound of the driver climbing down from his seat. The door opened – its locking mechanism clearly meant to keep people in and not out – and Alice and Eddie were ushered from within at gunpoint.

The driver rang a bell at the rear door of the house, and Alice could see now that lamps burned inside. There was an answering ring, and they entered, Helen peering around, as though she had never been there before. The house felt utterly abandoned, as if in fact no one had occupied it for an age, and had perhaps just arrived. The furniture was Jacobean – massive and dark, with enormous, deeply carved sideboards and cupboards and straight-backed chairs with turned posts, the seats flat, no doubt monstrously uncomfortable to sit in. Heavy curtains covered the windows, but here and there the curtains were not quite closed, and still no light shone through the glass, as if the ground floor windows were perhaps shuttered. There was little dust and no sign of cobwebs, the house having been cleaned in anticipation of someone’s arrival perhaps, or it might have been maintained that way for two or three centuries. The Turkey carpets, equally old from the look of them, and very rich, were apparently unworn.