The Bullet-Catcher's Daughter (22 page)

And the loyal boy, Tinker, had come with them.

Did Mr Orville willingly share his knowledge of the machine? What other choice could he have? Until he learned to harness its power, it was just a box that drew light in the air. How would they work? I pictured Orville and Timpson experimenting together in the dark confines of the windowless wagon. It seemed impossible that light could change lead into gold. But whatever they had discovered together had convinced Timpson he was close to his heart’s desire. His name would be immortal.

When did Orville see that glint in the great impresario’s opalescent eyes and understand that Harry Timpson would share top billing with no other man? And then the fight. Orville saying some final goodbye to the loyal boy who had followed him, then running in the night, encumbered by his alchemic device.

Tinker passed the apple back through the bars and placed it in my hand. I took another small bite. Sweet juice flowed around my tongue as I chewed. “Where did he go?”

“Mustn’t say.”

“If I’m to help, I need to know.”

So hard did Tinker press his lips together that they seemed to disappear.

“Please,” I said.

Now he placed both hands over his mouth and shook his head.

Somewhere in the distance a horse’s hooves slowed from a canter to a stop. Sal’s voice called out a greeting. I peered through the crack in the side panels and felt my heart constrict within my chest. The tall grey mare stood near the big top, steam rising from her into the cold morning air. And holding the reins was the Sleepless Man.

Chapter 25

To perform the impossible is to show that you have mastered trickery. But to perform the improbable is to leave a suspicion of genius.

– The Bullet Catcher’s Handbook

On seeing the Sleepless Man, Tinker’s face flared into an expression of alarm. He dropped the side panel next to the hedge and slipped out, closing it silently behind him. In a second he had disappeared from the narrow crack of my vision.

The Sleepless Man hurried across the field in the direction of Timpson’s wagon, leaning into his stride as one bent on a single purpose. Silvan met him halfway. The two men put their heads close. Others were watching at a distance, tension written into each frozen posture.

Silvan called to Sal, pointing in my direction. The giant shook his head in distress, but set out towards me nonetheless. Both lions were on their feet and pacing. The wagon seemed to resonate to their rumbling growls. For a moment, Sal’s frame blocked out my view of the field. Then the side panels were swinging down. He gripped and lifted the iron rod, unlocking the cage. The gate swung open with a metallic clang.

“Bring your bag,” he said.

“Where are you taking me?”

He shook his head. “I trusted you.”

I could think of no possible reply.

My first destination was the wagon Timpson had hidden in during the visitation of the Patent Office. Though I had previously paid it no attention, I saw now that thick staves of wood reinforced the door and that its lock was more substantial than any other I had seen in the travelling show. The key appeared large, even in Sal’s huge hand.

He pushed me inside. “Wait here,” he said, not a trace of irony in his voice as he closed the door. I heard the lock click behind me.

Unlike Timpson’s wagon, this one allowed in light through a small window high on the right-hand side. Netting hung across the glass. And inside that were two metal bars, each as thick as my thumb. I had assumed that Timpson would keep his valuables close. In a secret compartment of his over-sized wagon. It seemed that I had been wrong.

There were no chairs or furnishings here. Wood and metal boxes lined the walls, some piled three deep. I stepped along the narrow central aisle, brushing my fingertips over padlocks, metal banding, leather straps, handles and wooden panels worn down in places like the stone steps of an ancient house. Smells of camphor and wood polish pervaded.

Chinks of light in the floor revealed six small holes, each the size of a penny. I had seen similar things before – anchor points for a belly box suspended between the axles of a wagon. On hands and knees, I placed my eye close to one of the holes and found myself looking at the grass directly below. If a box had once been suspended there, it had since been removed. Feeling through the hole with a finger, I discovered the floor planking had been laid two layers thick.

Standing again, I turned my attention to the boxes, a few of which were without locks. Opening the largest of these, I found the furnace and bellows from the alchemic display, packed securely with straw. The tongs stood vertically in a corner of the box. Of the crucible there was no sign.

It was once said of a famous bullet catcher who had been convicted of a capital crime, that in the moments before his execution, he pondered the mechanism of the guillotine, not to find a means of escape, but rather to devise a grand illusion. Could a man be so detached with his head resting on the block?

Feeling now death’s sharp scythe close behind my own neck, the bullet catcher’s story seemed less fanciful. In the arrangement of props, I found myself taking some small degree of satisfaction. Had the crucible not held the secret of the trick, it would have been packed in the unlocked box with the other things.

This brief respite from fear ended with the sound of hoof-falls, the jangle of a harness and the shifting of the wagon on its springs. I fell backwards as we began to move. Scrambling to my feet, I gripped the window bars to steady myself and pulled the netting aside. Sal and Fabulo stood watching as we bumped our way over the uneven field and onto the lane.

The facts of my predicament suggested no good outcome. But it was Sal’s expression of sorrow that drove the knifepoint of dread fully into my chest. Always the man for the dirty job, it would be Silvan at the reins. By the time my body was found, the troop would be long gone.

Thoughts come swiftly when death is close. I could use the tongs to break the window glass. In the quiet of the lane, the sound might attract attention. I could shift the bottom layer of boxes a few inches and hide between them and the wagon side. I could search for a weapon and defend myself. But rushing after each new idea came a dozen fatal flaws. The lane was quiet because no one was there. No one to hear. Hiding behind a box in a securely locked wagon would deceive no one. And even should I find a blade, what chance would I have against Silvan in a knife fight?

Though it seemed hopeless, I hefted the metal tongs above my shoulder and brought them crashing against the window. The glass shattered outwards. In three more strikes, I had knocked out most of the remaining shards. If Silvan had heard the noise, he had chosen to ignore it. The window would have been wide enough for me to climb through but for the bars. A contortionist might still manage it. Or a child.

I opened boxes and crates quickly after that, bracing myself against the rocking of the wagon as it trundled along the pot-holed lane. In one I found fake knives, made from wood but coated in some silvery paint. In another, a great quantity of chain and rope. A third contained metalworking tools, pincers and files, too small and delicate to make any impression on the window bars. I tried them on the padlocked boxes, but could do nothing more than scratch the metal.

The wagon swung left, throwing me to the floor again. The light through the window lessened. Trees crowded close outside.

Onwards we rolled. Slower now. Every few moments a wheel would drop into another pothole, sending me tumbling. I could not believe he intended to take me much further.

The crate of chain and rope was somehow nagging at my thoughts. Gripping the lid, I opened it once more. Part of an escape act, it seemed. Lifting out an end of chain, I let the links shift over my fingers.

The idea was not yet fully formed, but my hands were moving anyway, guiding the end of the chain down to the floor, and into one of the six bolt holes, expecting it to stick, surprised when it slid easily through. At first I fed it from the crate, arm-length at a time. It clinked softly as it went, but as the weight that had already passed through the hole increased, it started to drag behind the wagon, and I found the links twitching and jumping treacherously as they passed over my fingers.

As the strength of the pull increased, so too did the noise. Loud enough, I feared, for Silvan to hear it over the clatter of wheel rims against the stony track. To release the pressure and quieten the rattling, I hauled out great armfuls of chain from the crate and laid them on the floor. Such was the weight already trailing behind us that should it snag, the wagon would surely come to a juddering stop.

Then, quite suddenly it seemed, the pile of chain was gone, the last links flicking through like the tail of a snake escaping into a crack in the ground. I looked back into the crate, which was half empty. Only rope remained, which I now removed.

In a second I had dropped my bag into the crate and clambered in after it. Reaching under my blouse, I unhooked my corset. With the restriction released, I crouched low and started folding myself into the smallest possible space, preparing to pull the rope on top of me and close the lid after that.

But the illusion was too perfect. The escape impossible.

Out I jumped, pulling myself up to the window, one hand gripping a bar, bringing my other hand down sharply on the jagged fringe of glass. I felt no pain. Only the welling of blood between my fingers. Wetting both hands, I reached through the window and smeared two prints outside, as if I had climbed through and hauled myself onto the roof.

Then I was back into the box, hidden under the rope, with the lid closed, feeling more calm than I had right to. Feeling also the slow throb growing in my bloody hand.

Chapter 26

As a bullet can be removed through a barrel breach, so can one be added. Therefore, never trust anything or anyone, or even your own self when a gun is pointing at your head.

– The Bullet Catcher’s Handbook

In the sudden dark and enclosure of my hiding place, three discomforts crowded in on me – the dizzying smell of camphor, the steadily increasing pain in my palm where the window glass had cut and the fact that every lurch of the wagon now sent the angles of my tightly folded body into hard contact with the walls of the crate.

I had embarked on my course of action without any clear view of an ending. Like a hunted animal, I had bolted into the nearest hiding place. Fear had driven me, not reason. But in the stillness after the chase, my mind continued to run.

The broken window. My bloody handprints. The locked door. The bars. The chain lying on the track behind us, waiting to be discovered should Silvan turn the wagon around and head back towards the pitch.

We lurched into another left turn. The back of my neck pressed hard on the wood panel behind. Three deep ruts bounced me against the floor. Then the wagon rolled to a stop. For a moment, the silence was abrupt and intense. Then the wagon swayed again as the driver jumped down, his boot falls just audible from where I lay.

A second silence followed, lengthening, becoming unbearable. I was acutely aware of the rapid and heavy beating of my heart. I tried to breathe deeply to calm myself, but with my knees pressed up to my chest it was impossible.

The lock clicked. The door opened. I felt the movement of the wagon as he climbed up. I could feel his footsteps through the wooden floor. A drop of sweat ran across my forehead. Silence again. My heart was beating with such frantic energy it seemed the crate must be vibrating in response.

Boxes were being shifted. He was searching. Slowly at first, but with increasing violence. The lid of the crate pulled away and light flooded in, filtering between the mass of ropes above me. A shadow passed over the box. Then with a crash that left my ears ringing, the lid slammed back down. His footsteps moved away. The wagon lurched as he jumped from it.

All this time I had believed the man to be Silvan. But now I knew it for sure. He cried out in anger and frustration, using such curses as I cannot repeat.

The swearing stopped as abruptly as it had started.

“Boy!” he shouted.

There was an answer, too distant to make out.

“Has she been found?”

This time the answer was closer. “Don’t know, sir.” Tinker’s voice.

“Why did you follow me?”

“Wanted to see.”

“Hell and damnation! Unhitch the horse. Quick now! She broke the window back on the lane. Can’t have got far.”

“No, sir,” said Tinker.

“Stay here!”

I was out of the crate before the hoof falls had faded, jumping from the wagon in time to see Silvan spurring the horse away down the track. On seeing me, Tinker opened and closed his mouth like a beached fish. In half a minute Silvan would find the chain. It would take him perhaps fifteen seconds to understand its meaning. Then he’d be back up the lane at a gallop. I might have one minute before he came within sight of the place I was standing.

Why was there never time?

I grabbed Tinker’s shoulders and looked straight into his eyes. “Tell him I jumped you from behind.”

“But...”

“Tell him I ran into the woods. That way.” I pointed to the right of the track.

“Yes, miss.”

I pushed the boy back, lowering him to the ground. At first he struggled, then submitted as I rolled him in the mud. “I’m sorry,” I said, pressing his head, so his cheek scraped across the stones. “First he won’t believe you. But keep saying it.”

“He’ll catch you,” said Tinker.

“Maybe so,” I said, dropping to the ground next to the rear wheel.

From the holes in the floor, I’d known a belly box must have hung between the axles. Now, looking from the outside, I saw that the place it would have been was hidden from view by planks running the length of each side of the wagon. I rolled underneath and looked up. Sure enough, the six anchor points above me were arranged symmetrically within a discoloured rectangle – the missing box’s shadow.

I could hear the returning hoofbeats. Damn but Silvan was quick. I wedged my fingers in a crack in one of the side planks. Placing first one foot and then the other against the opposite plank, I lifted myself into position, tightly braced, muscles trembling from the strain.