The Boy Who Flew

by Fleur Hitchcock

  “You should see what he’s––” She opens her mouth to argue again so I change tack. “All right, I promise,” I say, my fingers crossed behind my back. “I promise not to go on the roofs any more, I promise to stay in at night if I’m not wanted for work – how’s that?”

  Ma seems to double in size. “I don’t care a whit for your promises, boy. You’re always promising things. I’ll ask your uncle about getting you work directly I see him.”

  “But I work for Mr Chen!” I pull the gold coins from my pocket. “See!”

  “Not any more you don’t, boy.” A metal voice grates across the flagstones of the kitchen floor. Grandma totters around the corner from the stairs. She’s dressed in black with her face powdered white. She spots me at the door. “Not any more.”

  “What?” I say.

  There’s a long horrible silence while she shuffles into the centre of the room, accompanied by the rank smell of stale urine. She stops in the empty space in front of the stove and looks from me to Ma and back to me.

  She gathers every scrap of air in the room into her ancient lungs.

  “Because he’s dead,” she coughs, jabbing at me with a purple finger. “Dead, dead, DEAD!” The words echo from the walls. Behind me Poll gasps and Beatty whimpers.

  “No,” I say. “That can’t be true, I saw him—”

  Grandma stops me with her hand held high. She lumps herself on to a chair and surveys her audience. A horrible grin breaks over her crumpled old face. “Mrs Love’s just found the devil in his kitchen – and he’s dead as a doornail. Lying in a pool of blood. Murdered!”

  “What?!” My voice rings in the silent kitchen.

  “I expect he was murdered by fiends,” says Grandma. “Demons sent by God to do Satan’s work against the diabolical.”

  “That doesn’t even make sense,” mutters Beatty.

  “Hush, devil child,” says Grandma.

  I turn to face her. Her horrible smile stretches from ear to ear. “But that can’t possibly be true!”

  “Oh it is, boy,” she says, lumbering right up close and breathing her dead breath over me. “It’s true, all right. What are you going to do now, eh?”

  Chapter 3

  It takes only a second for me to abandon the kitchen and get away from Grandma and her stink. I find the street’s full of gawpers, and Mr Chen’s door’s open, and I can hear Mrs Love’s voice holding forth over their heads. I turn and walk fast down the hill, away from his house.

  I don’t want to see anything.

  I don’t want it to be true. Something drips on my hands and I realise I’m crying. Stopping in the doorway of the Griffin I wipe my face on my sleeve, sniff away my tears and tuck the parcel under my arm before turning back up the street. If my collar’s pulled up, perhaps no one will see my face.

  “He’d have been the last person to see him alive,” says a voice. “Athan Wilde.”

  I stare, and realise that the crowd of people outside Mr Chen’s house are staring back at me.

  “Me?” I say.

  “Yes – you,” says Mrs Love. “You knew all his business, didn’t you? You worked for him.”

  “Did he?” says someone.

  “Worked for the old man? Really?” says someone else.

  “Don’t be daft,” says a soft, northern voice. “He’s just a boy. He won’t know anything.”

  There’s a general murmur of agreement and the crowd turn away from me and go back to peering into Mr Chen’s front door.

  It’s true. I probably was the last person to see him alive.

  Except for his murderer.

  I turn into New King Street and stop outside the Clay house.

  All I can think about while I knock on the door is Mr Chen’s smiling face. How could anyone murder him?

  “Yes? What is it?” A dark-faced girl no older than I am stands in the doorway tapping her foot impatiently. “Oh – it’s you.”

  I shake Mr Chen away and pin my best smile to my face. “Mary, a parcel for – Mr K –?” The letters on the package wriggle and flex. I can’t read it. “He lives here now?”

  “Katz,” she says in disgust. She holds out her hand. “Hand it over.”

  I shake my head and clutch the parcel close to my chest. “I need the money first or Ma’ll have my guts.”

  “Well, you can’t come in,” she says, looking at me as if she’s found me on the sole of her shoe. “You’ll just have to wait there.” She points at the front step, turns and slams the door in my face.

  I’m not surprised. She hasn’t really forgiven me for stealing a pudding from the kitchen table last year. It was a dare. It was also a very good pudding.

  I sit back, leaning against the door. I try really hard not to think of Mr Chen, but then the windows across the road catch my eye and all I can do is remember last night. The magic. The engine.

  And a little spark of anger lights. I’d like to know who did it. I’d like to…

  Behind me the door springs open. It’s not Mary. This time it’s a pockmarked woman. She’s very short, barely reaching my chest, and not once does she look up.

  “Ten shillings,” I say.

  She drops ten shillings into my palm and vanishes back inside without a word.

  The door slams, and I hear the bolts shoot across inside.

  “It’s as if he knew. As if he was expecting to be murdered. Before I left he gave me four sovereigns, just in case,” I say to Tod Ballon, when we meet on the rooftops hours later.

  I haven’t cried again about Mr Chen and now I’m just angry. Angry and thinking. Angry that anyone could think of murdering such a gentle, intelligent man. And I’m thinking about finishing what he started, but I need Tod’s help so now we’re lying on our favourite building, with our feet in the gully, our backs on the slates, staring up at the moon. Side-by-side.

  It’s good up here. Private.

  Below us the city’s asleep. Except for all the things that aren’t. The nightmen and their horses clatter trucks through the streets, emptying the cesspits. Flying things settle on chimneys and window sills around us. Small creeping things scrape their claws on the slates. Someone drags something across the floor in the room below us.

  “Thing is, Tod, we were close, nearly there. We got the engine started last night.”

  “Is that what all the glass was about?”

  “Yes,” I laugh, remembering the fan spinning across the road and into the shop window. “He showed me how to put it together and it works.” I sit up. “The engine works.”

  “You mean without a man or a horse or anything?”

  I nod. “Just some oil and the electric box. It’s like magic. Although he didn’t like the word magic – he called it science.”

  Tod whistles again.

  “But I need your help, to finish it and to fly it.”

  “What do you need me for then? I don’t know anything about magical engines.”

  “You’re clever with wood. I can’t do that stuff on my own – you’d make it quick and strong.”

  Tod lets out a long sigh. “Flattery,” he says. “Might work on some.”

  “Oh go on, Tod – you know you want to.”

  “So half of it’s in the cellar, and the rest’s on the roof?”

  “It is,” I say. It was a month ago when Tod and I dragged the wings of the machine through a hole in the ceiling and out of a skylight on to the church tower. “I hope no one goes to check the church bells. But even with one half in one place and the rest in another, it’s only a spit away from flying.” I don’t tell Tod that I don’t know how to launch it. I mean, how difficult can that be?

  “Do you know how the whole thing goes together?”

  “Mostly,” I say. I’ve been trying to remember all the elements of the machine. The engine, the fuel, the electric box and the bird herself. And where they all are.

  And where Mr Chen hid the plans.

  “He never told me where he kept his drawings, but if I can get all the pieces w
e can fiddle about with it till it works.”

  “Ah,” says Tod. “Haddock’s going to auction all of Chen’s stuff tomorrow. I’ve got to help him bring everything out of the house. You could buy it all with your four sovereigns.”

  A tiny cloud crosses the moon and I imagine Mr Chen’s things lugged out on to the street. The fan, and the engine, and the electric box, full of acid. I also imagine three of the four sovereigns, now safely tucked away in Polly’s purse. She’d probably give them back.

  “I wonder,” I say. “If I drew them, do you think you could ‘lose’ one or two things?”

  “You mean, one or two things could get forgotten or left on the roof?”

  “Exactly,” I say. “And then you could help me finish it!”

  “Course,” he says, as if he’s already agreed.

  “And the henhouse?”

  “The henhouse? What’s that got to do with it?”

  “It’d make Ma happy – or at least happier,” I say.

  “And the henhouse, and then we’ll rule the world,” says Tod, standing up and dancing half a jig on the ridge. “Athan Wilde – Fly Boy. Tod Ballon – Builder Extraordinaire. They are Kings of the City! Yay!” He stamps his feet, jumps into the air and vanishes.

  “Tod?” I shout down. “Tod!”

  Stumbling on to my stomach I lean over the top of the roof. There’s no parapet on the far side, just a long black hole into nothing.

  “Tod?”

  “Athan.” His voice comes from not very far away, but sounds strangled. “Help!”

  Carefully I slide down the roof, resting my toes in the gutter on the far side. “Where are you?”

  “Here!” he replies, his voice coming from just below my feet. I crouch, putting far too much of my weight in the gutter and look down between my ankles. I can see the top of Tod’s curly head but the rest is too murky to make out.

  “What’s holding you up?” I ask.

  “I am!” says a deep voice from below.

  “Help,” says Tod again. “He’s got his hands around my neck.”

  “And I will drop him unless you promise never to climb on my roof at night again,” says the voice. “You’ve woken me every night for years and years and I can’t stand any more of it.”

  “I promise,” says Tod.

  “And you up there?” asks the voice. “Do you promise?”

  “I promise,” I say, with my fingers crossed behind my back. “On the life of my sister Beatty, I promise.”

  I’m up before the others in the morning. Up before Ma, up before Grandma can start mixing her incantations with her prayers but not up before Mr Haddock and Tod start to empty the house opposite.

  I nip out, have a gentle word with Tod, slip him some drawings of what to look for, tip my hat to Mr Haddock and go back indoors. Even after a few minutes outside I have to hold my fingers under my armpits to warm up and I wonder at Tod, who seems unaware of the cold.

  But he’s tough. His dad’s mean. A brute. Everyone, even Ma, is scared of him. He’s gloomy and he drinks and he works in the coffin yard, building boxes for dead people. Ma’s got a sharp tongue but Tod’s father’s handy with his belt.

  I coax the little fire in the grate so that the shop goes from icy to cold, and sweep yesterday’s dust balls into the ash.

  Then I busy myself in the shop. Uncle’s replaced the glass in the window, so I pretend to clean it, wiping off the smears of putty and then, when I can’t pretend any longer, I take down the bolts of cloth from the shelves and roll and reroll them.

  Footsteps sound upstairs. Probably Poll.

  Without actually pressing my face to the glass and staring like a pig I watch the dawn light falling on the stuff outside.

  Polly comes down to join me, both of us staring out at Mr Chen’s things. As the sun rises, bright colours shine out of the darkness, spilling over the road; grass green, gold, purples and sea blues. Rich enamels, tapestries, embroidered silk cushions all jumbled together on drugget sheets keeping them from the dirt. Heaped on top, lacquer tables and chairs, themselves draped with more patterned fabrics. The whole of Mr Chen’s house is out there.

  Almost.

  “There ought to be something good,” says Polly. “Some silks for us.”

  I nod, searching the heaps for anything from our machine, but so far Tod seems to have done well. I wonder how he hid the electric box.

  People begin to drift out of their houses, assembling in little crowds on the street. A man with a brush and a pot of glue tries to paste numbers on the larger objects. He’s struggling with a huge globe that’s spinning wildly in the middle of the street, but it’s all lopsided because it’s been dumped on a pile of maps and leather-bound books, and his feet are sliding around on the books and there’s paper flying all over the street.

  Polly presses one of my sovereigns and six shillings into my hand. “Go and take a look at those silks, over there.” She points at a heap by the globe. “If there’s more than a few yards of one colour, we’ll have it for linings.”

  Giving me the excuse I need, she stuffs me out through the door and I scoot around peering under the piles and inside the cabinets, pretending to look for silk.

  As soon as the team stop lugging things out of the house, Mr Haddock the auctioneer scrambles up on to the back of a carriage, sporting a leery green jacket and begins the auction.

  For a man made of gristle, he’s got a lovely warm voice that reaches up and down the street and into some of the houses. Within a minute he’s in full flight, while by his side Tod wobbles under the weight of a massive green bowl.

  “What am I bid? Ladies and gentlemen, who’ll chance a price? A magnificent example of eastern skill and quality!” he bellows across the sea of objects.

  Avoiding the crowds, I check through the piles, stopping at the boxes from Mr Chen’s larder. In fact they’ve only brought out the dried fruits and spices; they’ve left the all the chemicals behind. I point and wink at Tod, he winks back and his little finger gestures towards the house.

  Beneath some pans, I find a bundle of cloth lying on the drugget, glowing like fresh spring grass, bright in the gloom of the street. A breeze catches it and a tiny sail billows along the selvedge. It might do for Polly. It might take Ma’s mind off rooftops.

  “Western winds, when wilt thou blow…” Not far away, Columbine Good’s picking her way through the stuff, muttering and singing. A circle clears around her.

  “…the small rain down does fall, would my love were in my arms…” Strange tufts of reddish hair cover her head, and half a bonnet dangles around her neck. They all think she’s mad and they’d be right. Rumour says that she fell in love with our father, but he loved Ma. Then she fell for a soldier and was jilted at the altar. That she had a child that died. That she never recovered.

  She gets on with Grandma. They worship the same mix of superstition and witchcraft but Ma can’t abide her. It goes way back.

  I’m never sure what I think about her.

  The crowd shuffles and closes in, forcing Columbine out through the back. She droops against the wall and looks surprised before wandering off towards the Griffin Inn.

  A nearby couple catch my eye. An odd pair, they’re picking their way through the piles and junk and material as if they’re looking for something.

  She’s what Ma might call a lady. She might once have been pretty, but she’s frowned once too often and the wind has changed leaving a sharp face. Handsome, but sharp.

  Her dress is perfect. Perfect cut, perfect stitch, perfect embroidery. She looks as if she’s got money and plenty of it, which means that she doesn’t fit round here at all. In fact, she’s tucked her delicate gloved hand close to the arm of the man she’s with as if the rest of us might eat her. I don’t suppose she’s ever been over here, among us grubby people.

  The man’s well kitted out. Dressed in a broadcloth coat trimmed with blue, he’s tall and grey-whiskered with huge shoulders, like a man who has worked for his living. He
doesn’t look the equal of the lady; he’s rougher, coarser, more like us. It’s the way he stands, and the battered sword, and the knife in his boot.

  He’s not really a gentleman even if he’s pretending he is.

  “Come, ladies and sirs, you must be able to see the beauty in these glorious receptacles…”

  A dog raises its leg on a bale of linen and the sharp woman jabs it with her umbrella.

  Someone bids for the green bowls and Tod clunks them on to a dresser top, rubbing his arms. He slips me a grin and shrinks back into the piles of junk.

  Another lad takes over. Tod vanishes. Mr Haddock sells the globe, a stuffed bird and a mahogany bedstead.

  The rain starts, darkening the silks, dulling the embroideries. The sharp woman puts up her umbrella.

  “You all right there?” Tod stands at my side. He holds up an umbrella with two spokes and barely any cloth.

  “You did well,” I say. “No sign of the machine anywhere here.”

  “S’all safely tucked away inside.”

  “Where?”

  “Here and there. You just need to get in the house later to pick it up. How are you going to get it out?”

  I ignore him as Mr Haddock starts off again. “And lot 271, a fine example of the Orient. This emerald fabric, a length of grass green to grace any fair lady, beauteous silks of India or Japan, a gown or bed linen perhaps?”

  “That’s mine,” I say, moving myself into line with Mr Haddock.

  “Young man – do I hear a shilling bid?”

  I put up my hand.

  “A shilling, we are bid by the … young fellow to my left.”

  Nobody else moves.

  I’m going to get it for a shilling.

  “Two,” he says, pointing at the sharp woman.

  I stick my hand up again.

  “Three,” says Mr Haddock.

  Quickly, she raises her hand. This time the man beside her turns to look at me. His face is scarred and dark with pox and whiskers, but his eyes are ice blue. He looks right through me.