by Peter Bunzl
“You brightened a dark day for me then,” Lily said. “May I ask your name?”
The mechanical man gave a deep sigh. “Alas, I don’t have one, just my serial number: Seven-Six-Five-G-B-J-Four-Zero-Seven. It’s a bit of a mouthful, so some of the airmen call me Brassnose, on account of, well…my brass nose.” He polished it proudly with the sleeve of his jacket until the sun winked off its coppery surface. “Perhaps you’d be kind enough to introduce your friends, Miss Hartman?”
“Of course, Mr Brassnose, this is Robert and Malkin.”
Robert doffed his cap to the mechanical and Malkin gave a non-committal grunt.
“I see you quite regularly round the airstation,” Mr Brassnose said.
“I’m no tocking zep-spotter, if that’s what you’re implying,” Malkin snapped back. “Personally, I can’t abide airships – such vulgar vehicles! It’s these two who are the aficionados. Robert here knows every flight path. He even has a book full of zep registrations. Show him, Robert.”
“I do not.” Robert bristled. “Besides,” he told Mr Brassnose, “we’re not around that often, only once…or twice a week.”
“Why’s the mail-ship so late today?” Lily asked, trying to change the subject.
“Could be anything…” Mr Brassnose said. “But I heard on the telegraph they stopped the newspaper presses for some breaking news. And since Fleet Street buys up most of the cabin space for deliveries, that tends to put the whole flight back.”
He lugged the last mail sack from the bed of the steam-wagon and Robert saw that it was stamped with the logo of The Daily Cog. “Must be a big story to delay the zep an hour,” Mr Brassnose said, opening the bag and handing a paper to Lily. “What’s it say?”
Lily read the headline and smiled, for the story was credited to a friend of hers and Robert’s.
Lily stopped reading, and pursed her lips. “They know all this and yet they can find not a single clue as to his whereabouts… Who would credit it?”
Malkin shook his head. “Not I.”
“Nor I,” Robert said. “What else does it say?”
Lily perused the rest of the article. “‘The redoubtable Chief Inspector Fisk of the Metropolitan Police, New Scotland Yard, is of the opinion that the convict was aided in his escape by a third party, and that he, or they, may have procured transport out of the city. Members of the public are advised not to approach Mr Door as he may well be armed and dangerous. They should instead make a note of his whereabouts and inform their local constabulary forthwith.’”
“Have we any letters today?” Malkin interrupted. “I’d hate to think we came all this way merely to hear you read out choice excerpts of the news. Hardened criminals or no, we deserve our mail.”
“Let’s see.” Mr Brassnose flipped through the piles of correspondence in one of the other bags, checking the addresses. “You do realize we deliver?” he said.
“I know,” Lily said, “but we were in the area…”
“And you wanted to watch the ships come in. I understand!” Mr Brassnose stopped abruptly and pulled a cream-coloured envelope from the bag. “You’re in luck, this one’s for your father.”
Lily took the envelope. It was addressed in scrolled calligraphy to: Professor John Hartman, Esquire, Brackenbridge Manor. After that came a long looping flourish – like the swish of a fancy sword – that gave her such a whoosh of excitement in her belly that Lily dearly wished the letter had been addressed to her.
She turned it over. On the other side was a red seal embossed with a Lion and Unicorn, rearing up on their back legs and facing each other across a large ornate shield topped with a crown. Under their feet were the waxy words: DIEU ET MON DROIT.
“Looks important,” Robert said, peering over her shoulder.
“Very.” Mr Brassnose’s eyes glowed. “You’d best get that to Professor Hartman immediately. That’s the Queen’s seal – you’ve got Royal Mail!”
Lily put the letter in the pocket of her pinafore. Malkin grasped the newspaper in his jaws, and the three of them hurried home. As they cycled through the village, Robert hung back, letting the others surge ahead. There was something else he wanted to do.
At the end of the High Street, as they approached Bridge Road, he took a detour across the village green, past the graveyard and the grey stone church where they’d buried Da last winter. The ground had been so frozen beneath their feet it had felt as if it might never thaw. He felt a pang of apprehension and squeezed the brakes of his bicycle, thinking he might stop, but this was not his destination. Instead, he coasted round the corner and on up the street to Townsend’s Horologist’s shop.
Once his da’s pride and joy, now it hunched, a festering tooth in Brackenbridge – a scorched shell of its former self, its windows boarded up, the glass of its front door broken. The state of it made Robert’s chest ache. And yet its dingy presence had become a magnet, pulling him in, until he found himself pining like a lost puppy for Da, and for his former life, lost in the fire.
Sometimes he liked to imagine he was only staying with the Hartmans until Da’s return. He’d pretend Thaddeus had popped away on a visit and would be back soon. It was only when he saw the concrete reality of things that he knew this wasn’t so.
He’d come to stare at the burned-out shop many times, but he’d yet to muster the courage to go inside. Professor Hartman had warned him not to. The building was unsafe. Anyway, everything he wanted had been taken from him by the flames. This wreckage belonged to his ma, wherever she might be.
Selena. In the ten years since she’d left, she hadn’t bothered to send a single card or telegram, not even on his birthday. She probably hadn’t heard about Da’s death – that was how little she cared. And yet she’d been named owner of the shop in his will… When Robert first heard that surprising news six months ago, he’d waited for her to return and clear things up. She hadn’t appeared, and Townsend’s sat empty, while he remained with the Hartmans. Well, he was done. There would be no more waiting. He would turn away from his past.
He was about to do just that when his eye was caught by his old bedroom window, and his heart leaped to his throat.
Something had moved behind the smokey pane of glass. A figure in the gloom…
He peered closer.
There was no doubt about it. There it was. Staring right back at him.
Its face was pale and moon-shaped, with a square nose, greying hair, and piercing dark eyes. Da? Could it be?
He stepped towards it, but the figure disappeared, vanishing as quickly as it had come, as if it was a ghost. For a moment Robert expected it to materialize in the downstairs doorway and beckon him over to open the shop. He waited, but it never did.
Suddenly Malkin skittered to a stop at his feet and, seconds later, Lily screeched to a halt beside him on her bicycle.
“Where have you been?” she asked breathlessly. “We were heading home but, when we looked behind, you weren’t following.”
“I was right here,” Robert replied. I was heading home, he wanted to add. This is it.
It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her about the ghost, but he didn’t. Because it could’ve been wish fulfilment, a fantasy. Hadn’t he just been thinking of Da? Maybe he’d conjured a picture of him looking down…
“What’s the matter?” Lily asked. “You seem lost.”
“Not lost,” he replied. “But I… I had a vision.”
“A memory?” she persisted.
“Perhaps.”
Was that what it was?
Lily nodded at the house. “If you’re planning to go in there—”
Malkin dropped the newspaper in the road. “No, no, no,” he barked loudly. “John said the building could collapse at any moment. Come on.” He nudged their legs with his dry nose. “Let’s get back to Brackenbridge Manor. There’s breakfast waiting. Delicious porridge! Besides, we still have the Queen’s letter to deliver.”
“I’d almost forgotten.” Robert gave a ponderous smile and
watched Malkin pick up the paper.
But as they cycled off, he couldn’t help glancing briefly over his shoulder one last time. There, in the shrinking gloom of the shop window, he swore he saw the shadowy face of his da again, watching them from behind the soot-stained glass.
Lily and Robert swerved up the drive of Brackenbridge Manor, with Malkin scampering along behind them. They aimed their bicycles through the open doors of the stable block and came clattering to a stop.
Malkin sniffed at a pair of metal feet sticking from beneath the front of a steam-wagon.
“Leave it out!” Captain Springer rolled himself out from beneath the vehicle’s chassis. His metal face was covered in engine oil, but that wasn’t unusual given that he was a mechanical. He dropped his spanner into his big tin toolbox and rooted around for something else. “Your father’s looking for you,” he told Lily. “You’re late for breakfast again.” He gave a tut like a ticking clock. “An engine can’t run without fuel, you know, tiddlers.”
“We know,” Lily told him. She and Robert left their bikes against the wall in an empty stall and hurried through the yard into the house.
They arrived in the dining room to find Papa already seated and tucking into a plate of kippers.
“Ah, the wanderers return!” he cried. “Zep-spotting, I take it?”
Malkin jumped up onto a chair and deposited The Daily Cog on the table. “Merely collecting the paper. Here you go – it’s hardly mauled.” He nudged the paper towards John with his nose, then jumped down and slunk under the table.
Papa smoothed out the crinkled pages. Lily half-expected him to start in straight away on the sensational story about the jailbreak, but instead he opened the technology section and, taking up his half-moon glasses, peered through them at the tiny printed articles.
“Aren’t you going to read the headlines?” she asked, as she reached over and snatched the puzzle pages for herself.
“This item’s far more interesting,” Papa muttered.
Lily gave a big sigh; she was too hungry to argue. Besides, she knew he wasn’t listening. He’d be lost in reports of the new inventions being built around Britain.
Mr Wingnut, the mechanical butler, bustled in. His metal brow furrowed in concentration as he set down a silver tray and gave a bowl of porridge and a plate of bacon, eggs and toast to each of them.
There was too much food again. Mrs Rust, the cook, had never quite got the hang of quantities and consequently would overdo things a little in the kitchen. But two breakfasts suited Lily down to the ground; she sat at her place and tucked in immediately. After so much cycling she felt as if a hungry army was marching round the pit of her stomach demanding feeding.
She scoffed down alternate mouthfuls of porridge, toast, bacon and eggs, and glanced at Robert across the table. He gave her the wannest of smiles. His complexion had turned terribly pale and he was barely eating. Lily hadn’t noticed before, but tired grey circles had grown under his eyes.
She was sure it was visiting the shop that did it. For a while a suspicion had been growing in her that Robert had been making secret excursions there regularly. He tended to disappear at odd times, when he imagined no one would notice. But Lily did. She always noticed where he was – it was as if she was extra-sensitive to it. Catching him at Townsend’s today had only confirmed her suspicions: he was aching for his old life. She knew what that was like, but dwelling on the past could only make you upset. Her heart went out to him.
Lily missed Mama every day. It could be a pain in her chest, as if a cord that once tied them had been broken, or the tiniest itch of a memory. Half-forgotten hugs and faded conversations – they rattled around inside her and came out sometimes, like catching the slightest whiff of a faded scent that you can’t quite place.
The pain of loss must’ve been keener for Robert, since the cut was fresh and deep. He probably thought of his da every hour of the day. And perhaps he felt he couldn’t say, or worried she, or Papa, would see that as ungrateful. But Robert was silly to imagine he couldn’t be truthful with them.
“Listen to this.” Papa shook out the newspaper. “Parliament today voted to build a new power station on Lots Road, in the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea, with plans to move ahead with electric power for the whole Underground and West London.”
“That’s not interesting,” Lily said.
Papa straightened his glasses, which had gone wonky on his nose. “Of course it’s interesting, Lily. Electricity is the future. Why, ever since Edison first lit up the street lamps on the Holborn Viaduct fifteen years ago, engineers in London have been striving for bigger and better power stations that will transport electricity efficiently around the city and, one day, around the country.”
He began moving condiments about on the table. “I mean, imagine this pepper pot is the power station, and this fork a railway train, or better yet, this knife.”
“That’s my knife!” Lily cried. “Give it back! I’m eating!”
Papa waved it at her. “But listen, Lily…this is important. Within your lifetime, there may be no more clockwork engines, or steam-wagons. The fact is, soon, everything will run on electricity.”
Lily snatched her knife from him and cut another slice of bacon.
“After that,” Papa continued, “mechanists like me will be out of a job. Mechanicals too. A multitude of electrical appliances will take their place.”
There was a crash in the background as Mr Wingnut dropped his silver tray, spilling a plate of kippers on the floor.
“Sorry!” he mumbled, and Lily heard him muttering, “What clacking nonsense,” under his breath as he bustled about picking up the tiny fish bones that were stuck to the carpet.
“In the meantime,” Lily said, tapping the front of the newspaper frustratedly with her eggy fork, “you’re ignoring the most exciting story of the year, right under your nose. The daring jailbreak of a vicious convict named Jack Door, written by our friend Anna.”
Papa stared at the headline splashed beneath the masthead. “Well, well, I see she’s their lead reporter now. A female lead, whatever next!”
Lily tutted. “Plenty of ladies are lead reporters, Papa. Haven’t you heard of Nellie Bly, or Elizabeth Bisland?”
“Why bless my soul, of course I have!” Papa peered at the article. “Who’s this blackguard Jack? He robbed the Queen, it says…”
“Yes,” Lily replied. “He was given a life sentence. And then he wrote a book in prison called The Notorious Jack Door: Escapologist and Thief Extraordinaire! It was serialized in the penny dreadfuls, but I read it as a book last year. It’s marvellous!”
“Sounds more scandalous than marvellous,” Malkin said.
“And a mite scary, if Anna’s article is anything to go by,” Robert added. “How’d he sneak a novel out of jail, anyhow, if he was being held in maximum security?”
Lily took a big bite of toast. “Nobody knows. But he managed it somehow – if you’re an escapologist you have those kind of skills, Robert.”
Robert pushed his food aside; he hadn’t eaten much, he was too busy thinking about the ghost at the window. At least Lily’s story was a distraction. “That’s what Jack’s book’s about then?” he asked. “His famous tricks and robberies?”
“Not really,” Lily said, spraying toast crumbs across her plate. “It mostly tells you how to pick locks. That and how to break unbreakable chains…oh, and how to tie untie-able knots.”
“Why on earth would you need to know any of that?” Papa asked.
Lily licked the end of her finger and picked up the crumbs one by one. “It came in handy when we rescued you, didn’t it?”
“If I recall correctly,” came a voice from beneath the table, “I was the one who did the better part of the rescuing on that occasion.”
Lily ignored Malkin and examined page two of the paper. “There’s a little more about Jack’s history here… It says he once had a show in the West End with his family. His wife was a spiritualis
t, and he was some sort of a magician and expert in escapology. When he bored of that, he started using his skills to steal from country estates – that was before he pinched the Queen’s diamond.”
“How’d they know he did those other robberies?” Robert asked. “It could’ve been anyone.”
“Ah.” Lily smiled. “He had a calling card. At every house he burgled, he left a Jack of Diamonds pinned to the wall. That’s how they got him in the end. Well, that and someone gave up his location to the police.”
“What a tockingly stupid way to incriminate oneself!” Malkin exclaimed.
“Quite,” she agreed. “He even tied a playing card to the Elephanta’s tail, when he stole the Blood Moon Diamond live onstage. So there was no need for the police to use their new fingerprinting techniques to prove his guilt. They locked him up for life on the strength of those cards.” She peered down at the article. “Anna’s called his jailbreak the most audacious ever.”
“Zeppelins and zoetropes!” said Mrs Rust, who’d come in with a plate of muffins during Lily’s chatter. “Let’s hope he never comes round here. That rogue’s probably gone right back into the burgling business.” She stooped on her way back to the kitchen to help Mr Wingnut clear up the dropped kippers.
“He’s not interested in inventions, Rusty. He only stole jewellery, and we don’t have any of that.”
“Houndstooth and herring bones! I should think not,” Mrs Rust spluttered.
“And thank tock for that!” Mr Wingnut added.
“There’s more,” Papa said. He was fascinated now, and perusing the article himself. “It says the diamond was never recovered, despite a ten-thousand-pound reward, and during his fifteen long years in prison the Jack of Diamonds never revealed its whereabouts.”
“That’s his nickname,” Lily whispered to Robert. “Because of the playing cards.”
Papa gave a loud cough, for he hadn’t finished reading. “On top of the original reward for the recovery of the Blood Moon Diamond, a further reward of five thousand pounds has been offered for any information that would lead to the rearrest of Jack.” He pushed the paper away and took a contemplative bite of his toast. “We could do with a little of that money ourselves!”