The Doomsday Vault (10 page)

“Get out!” the clerk bawled, scrambling to his feet. His nose dripped blood on his spotless white shirt. “Get out! You'll never work for us again! Police! Police!”

Gavin turned on his heel and stomped out.

An hour or so of mindless walking later, he managed to calm down, and anger gave way to fear. He forced himself to think. Money was the main issue. He needed it for the short term, and, unless he wanted to risk a life of crime, there was only one way to earn it. Eventually he found his way to Hyde Park.

Hyde Park wasn't simply a park—exhibition halls, gazebos, outdoor auditoriums, carnivals, and other attractions peppered the place, and thousands of people visited every day. It was late spring, and many of the bushes were in full bloom, scenting the air with sweetness. Couples with chaperones, groups of young people and families, and schoolchildren on outings trod the roads and footpaths beneath green trees, some wandering aimlessly, some scampering with glee, some walking to a specific event. Food sellers with trays around their necks or pushing small carts hawked their wares. Gavin found a likely corner, got out his violin, dropped two of the small coins from his pocket into the open fiddle case at his feet for seed money, and set to playing.

He had done this before, busking street corners in Boston as soon as he'd been able to scratch out a tune on his grandfather's fiddle. Being hungry had provided a certain amount of impetus to learn music faster; people didn't give money to bad players, even when they were little boys with big blue eyes. He had done some busking again on three or four other occasions when he'd been caught short in other ports and needed some quick money, but it had never occurred to him that his livelihood might once again depend on his music. He smiled with all his might at passersby and nodded his thanks whenever someone dropped a coin into his case.

It felt better than playing for pirates.

Sometime later, he had several farthings—quarter pennies—and a few pence in his case, enough to buy half a loaf of bread. He kept on playing. A woman in a wine red velvet dress, unusual for spring, paused on the path to listen. Gavin knew from experience that if he met her gaze for long, she would feel awkward and move on, so he avoided looking directly at her, though he studied her out of the corner of his eye. She was tall for a woman, slender, and old enough to be his mother. Her hair was piled under a red hat, and the buttons on her gloves and shoes were actually tiny gold cogs. She carried a walking stick, also unusual. Behind her came an automaton, a stocky brass mechanical man with a boiler chest and pistonlike arms and legs. It carried a large shopping basket. The woman practically screamed wealth, and Gavin swept into “O'Carolan's Argument with the Landlady,” a particularly difficult tune with complicated scales and turns. The woman stared at Gavin as if she were a lion and he a gazelle. Gavin felt uncomfortable, and he looked elsewhere so he wouldn't make a mistake. The song rippled from his fiddle, and when it ended, applause fluttered about the park. A small audience had gathered. Gavin smiled and bowed. Several people tossed farthings into his case and went on their way. The woman in red velvet was nowhere to be seen. Gavin scooped the coins out of his case to avoid tempting thieves, and among them he found a shilling. He stared at it. This was enough to feed him for two days. Had it come from the Red Velvet Lady? It seemed likely—she had been the only one in the crowd who looked wealthy enough to throw that much money into a busker's case. He went back to his fiddle. Maybe he
could
do this. He could earn enough money for a ticket back to Boston, where he could plead his case to BSMC in a country where he knew the people and where—he hoped—they wouldn't have heard about Gavin punching a clerk in the face.

The rest of the day Gavin earned very little, though he played until his fingers burned and his feet ached from standing in one place. When darkness threatened and the automatic lamplighters clanked from lamp to lamp, he bought a day-old roll from a vendor who was on her way out of the park and searched the area until he found a hiding place between a bush and a boulder. Safe from night marauders and patrolling bobbies, he wrapped his ashen coat around himself and curled up to sleep.

Gavin jerked awake with a yelp of pain. His body was so stiff he could barely move. His back howled with pain when he sat up, and he hobbled about with old-man steps in the damp morning air, breathing sharply and heavily, until his body relented. In the interest of saving money, he skipped breakfast. At least the sun drove the plague zombies into hiding and he didn't have to worry about them for the moment.

Hyde Park was largely deserted in the morning—no point in playing—so Gavin spent the time looking for a better place to spend his nights. Public buildings such as train stations were bad because the bobbies would make him move on, possibly with a crack on the head first. He considered looking for a job, then discarded the idea. The factories were almost all automated and hired few human workers. His reading and writing were decent for everyday use but not up to scratch for an office. And the thought of manual labor that required him to strain his half-healed back made him shake. The main trouble was, he had no real skills except music and flying.

He was wandering aimlessly around side streets, fiddle case on his back, and eventually found himself taking a dogleg through an alley. Brick walls broken by windows and ragged doors rose up to a narrow strip of sky, though the alley itself was quite clean—trash attracted plague zombies, and people rarely left it out. Still, human refuse might show up at any moment. Gavin hurried his steps, then paused. A trick of the light brought his attention to a ground-level window. It was supposed to be boarded over, but he could just see that the wood was coming loose. Gavin glanced around to ensure he went unobserved, then pushed the boards aside, crawled through the opening, and risked a drop into darkness.

A damp, echoing room of stone lay beyond. The only light crept in through the window he had just violated. Rats scattered as Gavin came to his feet, groaning with reawakened pain. Then he cut the sound off. What if this place was used by plague zombies as a daytime hiding place? He froze, listening, until his eyes adjusted to the gloom. The cellar room was small, maybe ten feet across. A pile of crates jumbled up in one corner, and a door loomed opposite them. No zombies. Gavin heaved a relieved sigh and examined the door, which had no knob and had been nailed shut from the other side. A real piece of luck at last—no one would enter from the main building. It wouldn't be safe to leave anything valuable in here, but it would be a place to sleep.

He piled the crates under the window as a makeshift staircase and crawled cautiously back into the alley. His stomach growled, reminding him that he hadn't eaten at all that day. Furtively, Gavin moved the loose boards back into place and hobbled away. He deserved lunch, at least.

Gavin spent the next two weeks playing Hyde Park for farthings in the afternoons and evenings. After nightfall, he spent a precious penny to ride an omnibus to the West End, where he played for people entering and exiting the music halls and theaters. He arrived in his cellar long after dark, feeling his fearful way down the alley away from the gaslights and toward potential plague zombies. Fortunately, he didn't encounter any. Unfortunately, even this frugal lifestyle didn't allow him to save much. Some days he didn't earn the two pennies it cost him to get to the theater district and back. Some days it rained, preventing him from playing at all. The dampness in the cellar finally forced him to buy a blanket, which ate up several days' money. He had to buy food, of course. And sleeping in the cellar seemed to stop his back from healing completely. Every afternoon he jerked awake, stiff and sore, every muscle on fire. He never woke slowly or peacefully anymore, not since his encounter with Madoc Blue and the first mate's lash. One day he spent nine pence at an apothecary's, and the medicine helped with the pain, but only for a time, and then he was right back where he started. Gavin was beginning to feel desperate. Eventually, spring and summer would end, bringing the chill winds of winter. He would be in deep trouble then.

One soft afternoon in Hyde Park, he had managed to wash up a bit in one of the ponds and was feeling a little better. Gavin's skin itched terribly under his clothes—he hadn't even rinsed them since the
Juniper.
Maybe today he would catch sight of the Red Velvet Lady. She had shown up twice more with her automaton to listen to him, and both times he had found a shilling in his case, though she never said a word. If she came today, maybe he'd use the money to visit a bathhouse and have his clothes laundered to boot.

A fog rolled in from the Thames and mixed with the ever-present coal smoke from the chimneys and streetlamps, creating a thick yellow mist that covered the park in a sulfurous cloak. Gavin sighed as he walked. So much for optimism. Fewer people would be out in weather like this—the chill kept people indoors and lack of sunlight let the plague zombies roam. The damp also worsened his back.
Clip-clop
hooves and quiet voices mingled with the mist, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere. Men in coats and women in wide dresses ghosted in and out of view. The itching under Gavin's coat was growing worse, and he pulled his jacket off to scratch vigorously once he arrived at his usual corner.

At that moment, a commotion broke out somewhere in the distance. A woman squawked in fear or outrage. Voices shouted, and a pistol shot rang out. Gavin froze. Footsteps pounded down the walkway toward him, and out of the yellow mist emerged a boy a year younger than Gavin. With a start, Gavin realized he was Oriental and dressed in a red silk jacket and wide trousers. He tore down the footpath with angry voices coming behind him, their owners still hidden by fog. The boy skidded to a halt in front of Gavin and grabbed his elbow.

“Help me!” the boy begged in a light Chinese accent. “Please!”

Gavin didn't pause to think. He pushed the boy to the ground in a crouch and flung his filthy jacket over him. Then he sat down on the boy's covered back and opened his fiddle case just as half a dozen angry-looking men came into view, sliding out of the mist like sharks from murky water.

“Where'd the little Chink go, boy?” one of them snarled. He brandished a pistol.

Gavin could feel the boy shaking beneath him. “That way, sir,” he said, pointing down a random path.

The man flipped Gavin a small coin as the others tore off. Gavin caught the coin and pulled his fiddle from its case as if nothing interesting had happened. The boy didn't move. Once the noises of pursuit died away, the boy shifted a bit.

“Don't,” Gavin murmured. He set bow to strings and played as if he were simply perched on a rock covered by his jacket. Not much later, the men materialized out of the mist again.

“Did the little bastard come back here?” the man with the pistol demanded.

Gavin shook his head and continued playing a bright, happy tune, though his fingers felt shaky. The men conferred a moment, then rushed off in another direction. When their footsteps and voices had faded completely, Gavin whipped his jacket off the boy, who leapt to his feet.

“Thank you,” he said, pumping Gavin's hand. “Thank you so much.”

“What happened back there?” Gavin demanded.

“A misunderstanding with the lady,” he said.

Gavin squinted at him. “That usually means the man did something he shouldn't have.”

“No, no.” The boy put up his hands. “She kissed
me
. But then her husband jumped out of the bushes with friends. I didn't even know she was married. She screamed, he fired that pistol, and I
ran.
You were wonderful.” He fished around in his pockets and thrust something into Gavin's hands. “Take this.”

Gavin looked down. He was holding a tiny mechanical bird no bigger than a pocket watch. Its silver feathers gleamed in the pale light. Tiny sapphires made up its eyes and tipped its claws.

“It's beautiful,” Gavin breathed. He touched the bird's head. It opened its little beak and trilled a miniature melody, a perfect replica of a nightingale's song, then fell silent.

“I can't accept this,” he said. “I don't even know your name.”

But when he looked up, the boy was gone.

Although a carriage horse clopped in the distance, crowds in the park were nonexistent, so Gavin put his fiddle away, perched on a bench, and examined the bird. Its wings were etched with tiny Chinese pictograms, and more tiny gems were hidden among the strange icons. Whenever he pressed the head, it trilled the same song over and over, without fail. The first few times, it was beautiful, but after a while Gavin realized it was really nothing more than a music box—very pretty, but lacking the soul of real music. Still, the bird was immensely valuable. The money he'd get from a pawnshop or fence would be five times the cost of a ticket home, though it would be only a fraction of the bird's true worth.

Gavin stroked the nightingale's smooth feathers again. It seemed a dreadful shame to sell something so beautiful for so little money.

Footsteps shuffled through the yellow mist. Gavin stuffed the nightingale in his pocket and leaned casually back on the bench as two well-dressed young men strolled into view. They were engaged in an animated discussion that involved a great deal of hand waving. Gavin whipped out his fiddle and set to playing—no sense in losing a chance. The men stopped just in front of Gavin and continued their discussion.

“This is the best time to invest in China,” the first man was saying. “War always makes money. That little tiff they had over the opium trade proves that—I made a mint. And now it's flaring up all over again. When the conflict ends, China will become much more open to foreigners, and those of us with money on the inside will make our fortunes.”