by Tony Pollard
‘Where to now?’ asked Ockham, without a hint of desperation in his voice.
‘I don’t know’ was the only response I could muster. In truth my mind was reeling from the shock of seeing William killed in such a cold and deliberate fashion. The old boy had sailed close to the wind on many an occasion, but he did not deserve the treatment meted out by that monster.
Ockham dropped his pistol and shrugged. ‘Perhaps it’s better this way. We’ve lost the heart and I for one don’t fancy living with the nightmares for the rest of my days.’
Perhaps he was right, but almost against my will, as if by one of Darwin’s theories, my survival instinct at last stirred me into action. Pushing the pistol into my waistband I reached for the trolley. ‘Here, help me with this. Grab an end.’
Together we lifted the trolley on to the ramp, its small iron wheels fitting snugly against the rails like those on a miniature train. We climbed aboard, lying side by side on our bellies, and as though it were a toboggan, gripped on to the front edge while trailing our legs behind. I kicked off just as a fresh sheet of flame engulfed the boxes behind us. The trolley rumbled forwards, slowly at first, but by the time it reached the first hatch we were really travelling, the wheels barrelling along the greased tracks. Then, when I thought we could go no faster, a great force, like an invisible hand, pushed us from behind and, as if we had been fired from a cannon, threw us down the ramp at breakneck speed. ‘Keep your mouth closed!’ I yelled, ducking my head to clear the hatch in the fence, though I doubt very much whether Ockham could hear me over the sound of the explosion, because I couldn’t.
The trolley left the end of the ramp and into the river we plunged. The water took us in its cold embrace, pulling us down into its muddy depths. But Old Father Thames seemed to have no need for us tonight, for we emerged from the foul water gasping for air. Burning lengths of timber were still falling into the river all around us, the building now nothing more than a charred husk, belching out smoke and sparks into the brightening sky. We clambered into the boat and, lacking the strength to row, simply lay back and let the river carry us downstream.
My lesson already learned the hard way, after a soaking on the river had almost proved the death of me, I had taken care to stow a couple of heavy blankets on the boat, and these were put to good use. We drifted along the water and in and out of consciousness, each of us now aware that we inhabited the same place when the dream engulfed us. It seemed to be that we only encountered one another, however fleetingly, in the engine room when both of us were asleep, for when I was asleep and Ockham remained awake I could not recall seeing any sign of him there. But even now I tried to retain a doctor’s rational view of things, seeing this as nothing more than a symptom of a deteriorating state of mind.
William’s loss had only added to these woes, coming as a heavy blow, and a tragedy for which I had to carry full responsibility. It had been my idea that he ignite the cloth stuffed into the bottle of medical spirit and throw it over the fence into the wood store. The aim had been to create a diversion, nothing more than a distraction for the watchmen while Ockham and I went about our search, but as it happened the results were disastrous. My reconnaissance had wrongly led me to believe that the wood store was isolated enough for the conflagration to be contained. Never did I envisage that the ensuing inferno would engulf the entire yard and cause an explosion of the like not seen in London since the Great Fire. How was I to know that large quantities of explosives and munitions were stored nearby, or that we were walking into a trap! But enough of excuses; William had died for an action that I set in motion and I would have to live with that fact.
Such were my thoughts as the little boat bobbed lazily along, its two inhabitants sprawled and parched like survivors cast adrift from a terrible shipwreck. It was as well it was night, for during the day we would most definitely have been mown down by any of the larger vessels that ply their trade up and down the river but, with our passage uninterrupted, we finally came to rest against the south side of the bank near Greenwich.
The sky over Limehouse was still blackened with the smoke from the blaze, though it looked as if the fire had not spread outside the yard. Ockham even suggested that the explosion may have blown the fire out.
Lord only knows what impression we made as we hobbled through the hospital corridor to my office, our tattered clothes hanging from our frames and blood seeping from wounds. But I was past caring, and after giving up trying to apply bandages in the boat due to debilitating fatigue was in urgent need of fresh stock. Leaving Ockham in my office, where he took a reviving draught from my brandy bottle, I headed off to the preparation room.
It was on my return, by now clothed in my soiled operating coat and with a bundle of fresh dressings under my arm, that I encountered Florence. Immediately seeing that something serious was amiss, she dismissed the two nurses in her company and, taking me by the arm, led me into a nearby linen store.
‘Now, George, you are going to tell me what’s going on.’ I made to leave but she closed the door in front of me. ‘First I have to pull a ball from William’s arm and now you arrive looking as though you have spent the last two months in the Crimean trenches.’
I was too weak to prevaricate. Letting her know anything about recent events, and indeed those preceding them, had never been my intention, but with William’s death there seemed no point in shrugging things off or trying to invent a yarn. And so, satisfied that Ockham wasn’t going to bleed to death in my absence, I proceeded to tell her the whole fantastical story, albeit in a much condensed form, all the way from Brunel’s first appearance in the operating theatre to the taking back of the heart. Florence insisted on dressing my wounds as I described the confrontation at Blyth’s yard but could barely hold her hand steady when it came to the telling of William’s fate. I used a bandage to wipe a tear from her cheek but she pulled her head away.
Turning her back and drawing a sleeve over her face, she stifled a sob. ‘Who killed him?’
‘A man called Perry – he was an agent for the yard. They went up in flames together.’
Florence faced me again, her eyes still moist. ‘Perry! Francis Perry?’
I nodded. ‘Yes, that’s his name. Why do you ask?’
She almost spat her answer. ‘I know that man.’
35
Ockham had complained bitterly about being abandoned in the office and was now trailing bandages as we hurried into the street. ‘What do you mean, you know who it is?’
‘It was Miss Nightingale – she knew Perry,’ I replied, rushing on ahead to wave down a cab.
‘But we know about Perry,’ he insisted, taking his seat beside me.
‘Yes, yes, but listen to me. Miss Nightingale’s father owns a mill in Derbyshire. Some years ago Perry showed up, and after introducing himself as the agent for an unnamed speculator offered to buy him out. He refused but the man wouldn’t give up, and then accidents started to happen, machinery broken and workers injured.’ Ockham looked none the wiser; his exhaustion was clearly getting the better of him. ‘Don’t you see? A mill in the north of England? An aggressive takeover bid with Perry acting as the agent? It’s got to be our friend the cotton baron. It’s Catchpole!’
It took a moment or two for the reality to sink in, but as it did the fatigue seemed to lift from Ockham’s face. ‘And if it is he will know where the other torpedo is. Can I assume we are on our way to the House of Lords?’
I nodded.
Ockham curled his lip. ‘Well, don’t expect my title to do us any favours, for while my father lives it is merely that.’
I had learned from Babbage that in some way he blamed his father for his mother’s tragic decline and so refrained from pressing the issue. ‘One thing is for sure though. We won’t get in dressed like this.’
After stopping off at my rooms and changing our clothes we disembarked from the cab at St Stephen’s entrance to the House of Lords. The time, according to the vast clock high up on the new tower, wa
s quarter past eleven. In our hurry we had given no thought as to how we might gain entrance to the building, let alone Catchpole’s office, so it was a relief to get through the door on nothing other than a flimsy explanation that we were there to meet Gurney, who some weeks before had been good enough to give me a guided tour of the ventilation system he was installing. He had been grateful for my favourable comments, which, he said, had helped to allay fears that the vents and ducts would encourage rather than prevent the spread of the cholera.
The place was a veritable warren of passages, corridors, debating chambers, offices and stairways. Although no more than thirty years old the building already looked to have been here for centuries, and that had of course been the intention of the architect. Not for the first time Ockham and myself were to find ourselves lost in a maze, only this time it was of stone and wood panelling rather than iron and steel. I had hoped my previous experience of the place would assist in getting our bearings, but as Catchpole’s office had not been on my itinerary it was proving of little help. But then, just as we were about to ask one of the smartly attired gentlemen who strode meaningfully up and down the corridors for directions, we turned a corner and spotted a familiar figure.
‘Christ, it’s Perry!’ whispered Ockham as we ducked as one into the recess of a doorway.
‘So he did make it out alive,’ I hissed, and without a second thought stepped back into the corridor, only to be pulled back by a level-headed Ockham.
‘He can lead us to Catchpole.’
He was right, and so with my hunger for revenge suppressed, we waited for him to round the next corner before stepping out and hurrying along the carpeted corridor in pursuit. He had entered on to a stairwell, which we arrived at just in time to see his head disappear out of sight as he descended. One flight down and he set off along another corridor with us at an unobserved distance behind. Not far in front of us now, he turned another corner, where we drew to a halt to observe his progress. It was just as well, for he had reached his journey’s end. Halfway along the corridor he halted and turned into one of the many doorways. He had led us to Catchpole’s office.
Having seen enough, we dropped back around the corner and stood with our backs pressed against the wall.
‘Damn it,’ I said, after seeing the two sentinels standing either side of the door. A mere gesture from Perry had been enough to secure his entry but the same casual wave was unlikely to serve as passport for us.
Ockham turned his head away from the corner. ‘What do we do now?’
‘Listening at the keyhole’s obviously not an option, nor is breaking our way in. Even if we get past the doormen, who’s to say how many he has in there with him?’ I glanced back up the corridor and told myself there was something familiar about the stairwell. ‘I’m not sure that’s what we want to do anyway.’
Ockham followed me back to the stairwell, where after descending another flight we stepped into a dark, stone, vaulted chamber. ‘I’ve been here before with Gurney,’ I said, once again setting eyes on a series of busts sitting on plinths around the walls. ‘They’re all lords who served as Prime Minister. The one over there with the big nose is of course Wellington; he managed it twice.’
Ockham was unimpressed. ‘Very interesting, I’m sure, but we’re not exactly here on a guided tour.’
‘Yes, but you never know when such a thing will come in handy.’ Stepping across the chamber, I tried the handle on a heavy panelled door. ‘In here,’ I whispered after finding it unlocked. The room was still being worked on by Gurney’s men, though fortunately none of them were in it. There was a stack of ornate stone mouldings waiting to be used and one wall was obscured by scaffolding. The floor was covered by a tarpaulin which bore the dusty impressions of workmen’s hobnailed boots.
‘Gurney brought me in here. As you can see, they’re still working on the ventilation system.’ I opened another door. ‘Now, if you’d like to step inside.’
‘It’s a toilet,’ remarked Ockham after taking in the design on the blue and white porcelain bowl set into a polished mahogany bench.
‘It’s the Queen’s toilet,’ I corrected him.
‘You mean Her Majesty sits on that?’ he asked, sounding impressed at last.
‘When she’s in the House, yes – one of her many throne rooms, you might say.’ Ockham raised his first smile for some time and I pointed to a metal grille on the wall. ‘That’s the vent which keeps her private little place nicely aired.’ Stepping on to the bench, I pulled the grille free to reveal the duct beyond. ‘The system goes all the way through the building, with vents in the floors or the walls of every room. Now, if one of us were to crawl through here to the vent in Catchpole’s office, they should be able to hear whatever passes between him and Perry.’
‘We’ll both go.’
‘Don’t you think we spend long enough following one another through tight spaces like this without doing so out of choice? No, I will go alone. In any case, I am smaller than you.’
Ockham confirmed this when he stretched out an arm only to have the tight cuff of my jacket come to rest halfway up his forearm. The same was true of his trousers, the legs of which were floating a half-inch or so above his shoes. He watched as I pulled myself up into the duct and on hands and knees began an uncomfortable but familiar crawl. After around ten feet the tunnel branched to right and left. Hoping that I had judged the relative positions of the Queen’s water closet and Catchpole’s office correctly, I turned to the right, into almost total darkness. A few minutes’ more hard crawling and the duct branched again; only this time it went straight up. Bracing my knees and arms against the side of the shaft, I inched my way upward. To my relief the shaft levelled out again after no more than ten or twelve feet, at which point the horizontal duct stretched out for an interminable distance. The passage was illuminated at regular intervals by light shafting down through the vents in its roof, each of them set into the floor of the room above. I guessed that Catchpole’s office should be the third or fourth vent along.
I wasted no time in passing beneath the first and second vents, from which the sound of disjointed voices could be heard, but paused under the third. Silence – it was the wrong room. For a moment I was gripped by panic: what if my calculations were wrong, and what if I couldn’t find my way back out? But the fear passed and I continued on my way. After recent events I never thought I’d be glad to hear Perry’s voice again, but there it was, clearly audible even a good few feet away from the next vent. There was good reason for this. He was shouting.
‘… because the plans were destroyed in the fire! My office was one of the first places to be engulfed. I need the remaining torpedo to make a new set. Without it we have nothing!’
By now I was directly below the vent and, lying on my back, could make out vague shadows as someone, presumably Perry, paced about the room not far away from the grille. His outburst continued: ‘If you had let me kill Ockham and that blasted doctor once we’d got hold of the engine then we wouldn’t have lost the yard or the rest of the torpedoes.’
Then it was Catchpole’s voice I could hear, further away but still clear enough.
‘Irritating as they were I wanted them alive for the same reason I didn’t let you kill that fool Russell. As the engine has proved, the Lazarus Club has the potential to throw up all sorts of innovations, some of which I may have the opportunity to procure before they are snapped up by outsiders. So what if most of the discussions revolve around crackpot scientific notions like evolution? Killing off the club’s members is not really going to be conducive to creative thought, is it? However, I grant you that, since Brunel’s death, the future of the club has seemed a little doubtful and in retrospect it seems we would have been better off with them out of the way. But there is no use crying over spilt milk. As you say, we still have a fully functioning torpedo and from it we can grow many more.’
‘Well, Ockham and Phillips are gone now anyway,’ added Perry.
‘You are certai
n they perished in the explosion?’
‘I killed the old man myself and then the place went up. There was no way out for them.’
This seemed to satisfy Catchpole. ‘I want you to load the torpedo on to the Shearwater and take her up the west coast. We will establish a new base of manufacture in one of my warehouses at Liverpool. It makes much more sense to build them there.’
‘You still haven’t explained to me what you intend to use these machines for?’
Catchpole answered the question with a question, albeit in a patronizing tone. ‘What business am I in, Perry?’
‘Cotton, of course, but I don’t understand the connection with the torpedo.’
That made two of us.
‘As you full well know,’ replied Catchpole, ‘the British cotton cloth industry is worth millions, and as you are also aware I happen to own a good proportion of the mills producing it. Most of our raw material is imported from overseas. Some of it comes from India but most of it is shipped into Liverpool from the southern United States.’
‘I am aware of that,’ said Perry, rather sharply.
‘Well, it is my belief,’ continued Catchpole, ‘that within the next few years this supply, of which myself and my business partners are presently the chief recipients, will be threatened by a civil war between the northern and southern states of America. Buchanan, their fool of a president, refuses to accept the fact, but all the signs are there for anyone who cares to sit up and take notice. The anti-slavery movement in the north is fomenting unrest in the south, where the cotton production depends on slave labour.
‘If it comes to war then the north is by far the stronger of the two powers. The coalmines, ironworks, arsenals – most of them are north of the Potomac. The south will undoubtedly be heavily dependent on overseas trade, and one of the few commodities she has to offer in return will be raw cotton. It logically follows that the north will use its navy to choke off this transatlantic trade by blockading southern ports and preventing any maritime traffic either in or out. That, sir, will be bad news for the British cotton industry and most importantly very bad news for me.’