He gazes at me, and I stare at his hands shuffling the cheese into new lines. There’s a horrible long silence. I glance over to Columbine; she’s watching us.
“Not that stuff. I don’t mean the valuables. I mean the man’s diaries, his accounts – the day to day of his living. Who’s got that, eh?” The stranger’s hand creeps over mine and holds it to the table. “A clever person’d share their secrets, they’d see their way to a few shillin’s.”
I watch the candle flame. I want to find out about Mr Chen’s murder – he wants to find out about Mr Chen. So far, he’s winning. “What’s your interest in Mr Chen? Why do you want to know about him?” I ask it as casually as I can although my mouth is so dry the words barely make it past my teeth.
He presses his hand down a little harder. It’s cold and hard as iron. “I’ve got some friends. Powerful, rich, clever friends as would like to know things the old man knew.”
“Oh,” I say, sounding bored. “But I don’t know anything.” He’s so close I can feel his warmth.
“That’s interesting.” With his knife he skewers a square of cheese to the bench top.
I say nothing.
“Because,” he lays his arm along my shoulders, pressing his cheek right next to mine, “a little bird told me that the Chinaman had a lad working for him, a lad from the tailoring shop. And that lad, and his uncle, cleared up the ’ouse afterwards, that they would have found anything left and that this lad was a lad very like yourself.”
“Boy!” shouts Peter from the steps.
The stranger lets go. Quick as mercury he stands by the table, his hand outstretched. “Nice to meet you, Athan. I’m sure our paths’ll cross soon. Very soon.”
He takes the jug from Peter, presses it into my hand and shoves me towards the door.
“Don’t forget me, will ye? I won’t forget you.” He grins. “I promise.”
Chapter 10
I run from the inn. My feet skid on the cobbles, and when I reach our house I throw myself inside and bolt the door. After pulling down the heavy shutters, I slip down the stairs to the kitchen and lock the yard door.
Only then do I run back upstairs with the cider. The room seems fine, it all seems ordinary. Ma and Uncle laugh and drink. Beatty’s gone to bed, Polly’s flicking through song sheets. In the room it’s yellow and warm and safe.
Taking a stub of candle I step back on to the landing. The darkness seems darker. The cold colder.
After touring the house, checking the doors and windows once more, I halt in the kitchen. Pressing my cheek against the glass, I peer into the dark yard. The snow’s falling now, thick and fast. It’s settling on the heap of silk, the makeshift henhouse, the sticks of rubbish I’ve collected from the builder’s yards. There’s no scarred stranger turning into a snowman in our yard. But the feeling that someone’s walking down my spine happens again and again, until I’m shivering.
Is he still in the Griffin? Or waiting for me out there in the darkness, the snow landing on his horrible skin?
Back in my room, I sit on my bed and pull the sphere from under my pillow. By candlelight little ivory crescent moons shine white; between them, ebony stars. I slide my fingers over the surfaces of the different woods. There seems to be no way in, no join between top and bottom or side to side.
“Oh, Mr Chen,” I say. “Why did you have to make it so difficult?”
Footsteps ring on the paving. Someone walking up the road. They stop outside the shop. I sneak to the window and peer through the grimy glass.
Snowflakes eddy in the darkness. A figure stands waiting.
It’s him. I can see the sword.
He steps forward.
I wait.
The door handle of the shop clanks downstairs but I locked it behind me and the figure stays on the pavement, standing, staring up at the windows before shaking his head and walking on up the road.
I watch the corner, waiting for him to reappear, but the snow falls steadily and he stays away.
Raising the sash, I stick my head out of the window.
Outside, everything’s white. Even the stranger’s footprints have disappeared.
Almost silence. Only the faintest rustle as the snowflakes rest on each other, layer on layer smothering all the sounds of the city.
Closing the window, I watch the clock outside the shop.
I watch the street.
I listen to my heart. Slower, steadier.
Midnight. Perhaps I’m worrying over nothing. Perhaps he’s just one of those people that likes to put the wind up people like me. He might have nothing to do with Mr Chen’s murder. Though I’ve never seen him before today.
Polly goes to bed and Uncle’s boots thump on the stairs.
“Night, Moll!” he shouts from the shop, and stamps out through the front door. I watch him roll down the street and turn off to leave the city. He’ll pick his way down the frozen cart tracks, between the smoking rubbish heaps, to home.
I roll the ball across the bed.
10,000 guineas.
I’ll have to find another job. Something, anything. A day job so that I can finish the bird and stop Ma sending me off to be a nightman. And maybe – just maybe – win that money.
A tiny avalanche of snow slips down past the window.
Tomorrow I’ll go round, knock on the doors, present myself as a useful anything boy. Cleaning, messages, horses, hens, anything. It won’t buy us peaches, but it would let me pay my way, and it would keep me around to help Polly and carry Beatty, and share the load with Grandma.
And then that would leave me the evenings to complete the machine.
My fingers play over the ball, turning it over and over in my hands, looking for a way in, a top or a bottom or a sliding drawer. It’s like a block of wood, but it isn’t solid. The grain runs in different directions, and the moons and stars seem to mark out a pattern. Ten moons, ten stars.
I thump about in my room, making the noises of bedtime as Ma hauls herself up the staircase. She stops on the landing, listens and goes on up. The moment she’s passed, I break my promise. I sit on the window ledge and throw the sash up until a blast of freezing air fills my room.
Sticking the ball inside my coat, I pull myself up until I’m standing on the sill outside the window. It’s very cold, and the snow’s settling on my coat and head. If I could see the colour of my fingers, they’d be white.
I lower myself by my fingertips and drop down silently into the street. The snow’s covered everything, sugar white, glistening. Pristine.
It crunches under my feet and I walk down the front of our shop and stop by our tall back wall. The electric box is still there, perched on the top, the blackthorn almost covering it, and I give myself a grin, knowing that the scarred stranger has walked straight past it without a clue.
I clamber on top of a crate and slither over the wall into our yard. The hens make little warm cheeping sounds.
“S’all right, girls, only me,” I say. Gritting my teeth, I raise the electric box and lower it on to the chicken straw below. The wooden fan and the brass engine fit alongside nicely and I grab a piece of oilcloth and cover all three from the weather. I hope the snow hasn’t done them any harm, but they weren’t there for long. And they won’t be, if I can just get Tod to give me a hand with them down to his loft.
Tod.
I look up.
Just to my left, the drainpipe runs down from the roof gully and I slip my arm around it to pull myself up to the parapet above. The metal is so cold, I burn my fingers touching it, but there’s no other way to reach the roof, so I move as fast as I can, up through the cloud of smoke and soot coming from our chimney until I can roll over on to the gully.
Although the sky’s thick with snowflakes, it’s not completely dark. Somewhere up there the moon’s shining, and if the clouds blow over, the city’ll be astonishing.
The snow’s settled thickly on the outer roof. Even the feeble trees that grow out of our gutter have snow piled on their
little branches. I swing my leg over the front roof so that I reach the safe and secret gully between front and back. At the end of the gully, the neighbour’s chimney stack rises into the whirling snowflakes. I’ve climbed it many times, and even though the ledges are icy, it’s only a minute before I’m able to run along the roof tops all the way around to the square. From there, I slip down to the ground, scuttle past the Beaufort, across the gravel, and clamber up on to the big houses on the east side. I could walk on the ground, but the world’s better from high up.
Up here the snow’s blown itself against the chimney stacks, so that the roofs look tipsy – half bare, half snug in a white blanket. I stand and peer over the parapet. Through the snowflakes, I can see the street below, but it’s unclear, as if the ground’s a dream, or I’m a dream.
“Athan!” Tod appears behind me. He climbs over from the front roof then rests his chin on the ridge tiles.
“Look!” I say, pulling the sphere out of my coat.
“What’s that?”
“It’s the plans, I think, but I can’t open it.”
He stares. Because of the moon and the snow, I can see his face quite clearly. Black and white but light.
“Where’d you get it then? I looked all over.”
“Mr Chen’s privy.”
“Get away?” Tod grabs it from my hand, twisting and turning. “Come on then. Can’t be that difficult. Nothing’s that difficult.” He goes on turning it one way, then the other. His fingers dance over the inlay, the moons shine in the snowlight. I have a sudden thought.
“Try pressing the white bits as I turn it.”
Ping. Like a flower it opens up.
“Blimey!” Tod looks up at me.
I reach my fingers inside, half expecting to have them bitten by some invention of Mr Chen’s hidden in the darkness but instead meet the crackle of paper. I tug and a wedge of folded paper slowly emerges from the inside of the sphere.
A single snowflake falls and settles on my hand.
“Open it out,” says Tod, holding his jacket over me.
It’s thick paper. I unfold it, once, twice, three times. It becomes so big we have to hold it between us. But in the dark I can see nothing more than a large triangle marked out in ink.
“Are these the plans?” whispers Tod.
“Think so,” I say. We stare at them in the snowlight.
“I don’t understand most of it though,” says Tod.
“I do,” I say. “I think.”
He peers over my shoulder, my fingers trace the lines, working out how the pieces join when, below us, I hear a sash go down.
We freeze.
“You’re there again, aren’t you?” shouts a man’s voice. The same man who caught Tod by the neck a night or two back.
Tod stands, really slowly, but as he does, he knocks the chimney next to him and a blob of snow falls and whisks down the slope, tumbling off the roof to the street below.
“It’s no good pretending you’re not,” says the voice.
Reaching my arm across the pitch of the roof I half stand.
“Well, you swore on the life of your sister, boy – remember that.” And the sash slams down, shaking the whole building and sending snow cascading past us.
“He’s got no sense of humour,” says, Tod, cramming a handful of snow down my collar. He turns and runs straight back over the side of the house.
“Tod! Don’t you…” I shout, and jamming the ball and the plans in my pocket I race him down across the frozen slush in the square and straight up another down pipe, more than five storeys up, until I see him break through the eddies of snow and suddenly the world becomes clear.
I drag myself over the parapet, hot under my jacket but with frozen fingers. Moonlight falls on the snow-covered tiles, showing the softened ridges. It all looks like a perfect world, black and white, no dead leaves, no dead seagulls. At our feet, mist fills the bottom of the town; above us, the black sky glitters with a million stars, and the air shimmers with cold. It’s going to be a hard frost.
Tod slides down the roof and lies flat on his back on the snow. He’s talking. “Glorious,” he says. “Your grandma says the stars twinkle more in the cold; it’s to show the way for the angels when they come to pick up the people who’ve died of cold in the ditches.”
“Rubbish,” I say.
I lie down beside him, slipping my hand back in my pocket, feeling the heavy wooden ball and the crunch of paper.
We sit in silence. Finally I tell Tod about the man from the auction, him being at the pub and threatening me.
We lie staring at the sky, thinking.
“Do you think he killed him?”
“I don’t know,” I reply. “He might just be a chancer, but he’s scary, Tod. And I’m not easily scared.”
Tod thinks for a while. “If he’s going to make trouble, perhaps you should just give him what he wants?”
“Do you really think that?” I ask.
“No,” says Tod after a while.
“Exactly,” I say.
“You could burn the plans,” says Tod. “Destroy everything that we know Mr Chen left behind. Then he can’t get hold of it and it would be safe. Let some other gawney have a go at it.”
”But there’s a prize, Tod.” I say. “Some lord or other’s offering ten thousand guineas for the first person to fly.”
“S’teeth, Athan! Are you thinking of going for it?” Tod rolls on to his stomach so that all I can see is a ring of shaggy hair.
“We, Tod, we! We’re going for it.” We both stare as a tiny cloud drops a handful of flakes across the moon. “We could win. Mr Chen knew that bamboo was light, like the hollow bones in bird’s wings. He knew that the silk was strong and thin. I don’t think anyone else has ever thought about that.”
“You mean their machines are too heavy.”
“That’s what Mr Chen thought,” I say, sitting up.
“Sounds a fine idea. I’m up for it,” Todd says, stretching his legs behind him, and waving his arms, making a snow angel.
I grab at his legs, and he turns round to swipe me. I dance to one side and we skip across to the next house. Then we begin to run, jumping over the joins between the houses, landing on the slanted slates, two steps and on to the next roof, leaping and laughing, our arms outstretched, almost flying between the rooftops. Racing over the heads of the sleeping people inches below us.
Like birds.
Chapter 11
On the edge of sleep, I dream. I’m flying over the city. I skim the snowy tiles, I brush the chimney pots, but the streets are cold and empty.
I rise, breaking through the thick wool of cloud to breathe the clear night air. Up here it’s so cold that my eyelashes freeze, but I want to play up here among the stars; they tempt me and the moon smiles, her mouth a wide, crooked grin.
I’m drawn back down by the city, and I drift until the lights spread out beneath me.
Beyond the city a lane winds westward. Between smoking bonfires I find a small collection of broken houses. By them, there is a pond, clogged with rubbish. Two white swans sleep still. Their heads tucked under their wings while silently a fox steals off with their cygnet. No one sees, no one hears, although I, high above, catch the reedy cry of alarm as the little bird gives up the struggle.
Behind a barn, two figures lit by a dim lantern rummage through a waggon. They are collecting paper, making crunching sounds. I dive low over their heads but so intent are they on searching that I pass them by.
They hear nothing but the faint rustle of wings.
An owl, they might think.
I circle again, breaking through the cloud, high, up towards the laughing moon. I breathe and plunge again.
I rise to drift up there on the rim of space and through a break in the cloud I see a heavy man walk back from the city. I need to see more, so I swoop until I can almost feel his breath. His path is unsteady as he weaves between the freezing ruts, and I hear him whistle. A cheerful tune that turns roun
d and round itself like children playing.
He halts and challenges the men. Was that a knife I see? A blade of some sort?
A cry. The two men run.
I try to shout, but my words fly off in the wind. I watch as the heavy man sinks to the ground. I call to him, but my voice has gone, and anyway he cannot hear.
The men are almost back at the city.
I circle again. The man lies still on the ground.
The snow is white.
The snow is red.
I wake and even though I don’t know why, I know I’m worried. I stare stupidly at the falling snow, trying to remember what I’m doing slumped by the window fully dressed.
That dream – the man on the ground. Red snow.
The pub, the scarred man.
The plans.
I pull the paper from my pocket. It’s scattered with Mr Chen’s writing. A mixture of words and drawings all surrounding that familiar shape of the arrow. The flying machine. The plan folds easily back into the sphere and I push the wooden petals closed until it clicks shut. I roll it back and forth across my bedcover, thinking of somewhere to hide it. It’s awkward, too big to conceal under something. Tod’s loft would be best, but for now it’ll have to be in this house. I slip into the parlour and feel behind the top of the clock. There’s a wide ledge and I’ve used it before to hide things from Ma and Polly. It’ll have to do again. The sphere rolls along and stops in the middle. From the front it’s invisible and from the sides it blends into the mahogany clock case.
Downstairs I find Polly and Beatty at the kitchen table, sharing a cup of tea and whispering. Beatty’s face is pale and crinkled with worry. There’s no sign of Ma.
“What’s happened?” I ask.
“Uncle’s been nearly murdered,” says Beatty. “It’s the curse of Mr Chen, you know. Grandma says so – she says that because he was being a follower of Mephistopheles—”
“Ssshh, Beatty – that’s not it, he’s not been murdered,” says Polly.
The Boy Who Flew Page 5