The Ruby Airship

by Sharon Gosling

  J speared a piece of ham and stuffed it into his mouth. “Sure sounds like he needs someone who can nick ’im something big in a hurry, don’t it? Bigger than some beggar’s pearls. We know anyone who fits the bill, d’ya fink?”

  Thoughts whirled in Thaddeus’s head. He’d always seen Rémy as a free spirit, strong-willed, able to do whatever she wanted. But he hadn’t known her before, when she’d been part of that circus of villains, all kept on a leash held in the hand of one nasty kingpin.

  “That’d be awful, wouldn’t it?” J probed. “If that’s what Yannick’s about? And you know what’ll be even more awful? The fact that if you don’t go after her, you’ll never know. Will yer?”

  The boy was right. Thaddeus knew he was right. And, moreover, Thaddeus wanted to go after her — he did. Of course he did! How could he live the rest of his life without her in it? How could he let the Comte de Cantal use her to become the kind of threat he would be with one of Abernathy’s awful machines? But it was no good.

  Thaddeus shook his head, staring at the congealed mess of his wasted breakfast. “There’s no way to get there, J. I just don’t have the money.”

  J grinned. “Tell you what, I might be able to help you there.” The boy leaped up. “Meet me at the workshop tonight. Late. The later the better. And be ready to leave on the biggest adventure of your life!”

  “J,” Thaddeus began, but the boy was already halfway to the door, weaving between the tables and away. “J . . . wait! What —”

  “See you later!” J shouted, just before the door banged shut behind him.

  {Chapter 10}

  HOME AGAIN

  Rémy and Yannick reached Calais at midday, stepping from the ferry and into sunshine. Rémy was momentarily flummoxed to find herself surrounded by people speaking her native tongue. It had been so long since she’d spoken French properly that for a few moments it felt strange to hear the lilt of it everywhere, instead of the blunt vowels of English curled around the cockney tongues of the East End.

  “It’s good to be home, isn’t it?” said Yannick, watching her with a smile. “Smell that bread! See that sun! Good God, Rémy, what on earth were we thinking when we left this for decrepit little England?”

  Rémy laughed along with him, but still she felt a brief pang in her heart. She wondered what Thaddeus was doing at that moment. J must have found the note and told him of their departure by now. Rémy had thought about leaving one for Thaddeus, but what could she have said? At the time she’d been so angry about seeing him there in the theater, blatantly lining up her friend as his next target, that she’d not even wanted to say goodbye. And now . . .

  “Rémy!”

  She jolted out of her reverie to discover that Yannick was no longer by her side. Instead, he was standing under the sign that pointed to the train station.

  “What are you doing?” she asked as she hurried over to him.

  “Train, Rémy. We need to catch a train. If we take it as far as Angoulême, we’ll be pretty close to Moulidars, the last place we know the Circus of Secrets stopped.”

  Rémy shook her head. “I can’t afford a train ticket, Yannick! I used most of my money to get us this far. I was thinking we could hitch a lift — you know, find a cart or something going in that direction . . .”

  Yannick shook his head firmly. “It’ll take too long. Leave it to me. I’ve got a little saved. I put it aside in case England wasn’t as fruitful as I’d hoped.”

  “But you said . . .”

  Yannick held up a hand. “Stay here. With any luck, we won’t have to wait too long for the next train.”

  He vanished into the crowds before Rémy had a chance to say anything else, reappearing a few minutes later with two thick tickets in his hand.

  “We’re out of luck, I’m afraid — there’s an hour’s wait until the next one.”

  Rémy shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. Yannick, listen. Thank you, so much —”

  He cut her off with another smile. “Rémy, it’s nothing. Really. Once we find the Circus of Secrets, money won’t even matter, will it?”

  Rémy laughed at his optimism. “I’m not sure about that,” she said. “It’s not as if the circus life is a way to get rich, is it? But I’m sure we’ll get by. We always have before, isn’t that so?”

  Yannick offered a crooked smile, looking away to scan the crowds. “Something will come along,” he said. “Come on. Let’s go and wait on the platform. I think it’ll be quieter there.”

  The station at Calais had only two platforms. They fought their way through the crowds to platform two, Yannick showing their tickets to the blue-uniformed guard waiting by the entrance. He scrutinized their tickets before waving them through. Beyond the barriers, the platform was almost empty, though on the other side stood an engine just arrived from Paris. It gleamed red in the midday sun, disgorging a final stream of hissing steam into the cloudless blue sky as passengers spilled out of its doors. Rémy watched them scurrying about, hauling bags, gripping hats, calling for children in danger of being lost in the fray. It reminded her of an audience at the end of a performance, hurrying home, and another wave of homesickness struck her. Whatever she had left behind in England, Rémy was looking forward to being back with Claudette and the circus. The farther away she got from London, the more those six months felt like a strange, unearthly dream.

  “Rémy?” asked Yannick from the bench he’d found. “You are far away again.”

  She smiled. “Sorry,” she said. “Just a lot to —”

  She stopped dead as she saw the poster. It was pinned to the post behind the bench, there for any disembarking passengers to see.

  “What is it?” Yannick said, the look on her face making him leap to his feet. Together they stared at the poster. A sharp sketch of Rémy’s face stared back at them. The words below the picture read WANTED FOR THE THEFT OF JEWELS. Below that there were more details, and a reward for her capture. It was a hefty one, at that.

  A thousand francs, Rémy thought, in shock. All of that, just to catch me.

  “Ah,” said Yannick.

  Rémy dipped her head and pulled her hair around her face, glancing quickly around them. “Someone’s going to see me! We have to get out of here.”

  Yannick laid a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t panic, Little Bird. There’s no one here at the moment except us and the chubby guard who let us in, and he didn’t even look at our faces. When our train arrives, people will be too busy with their own affairs to even notice us, and once we’re aboard, we’ll find a quiet carriage and keep ourselves to ourselves. There is nothing to worry about.”

  His reassurances did nothing for Rémy. “We should never have chosen the train,” she muttered. “It would have been safer by road.”

  “And slower,” he reminded her. “Really, Rémy . . .”

  She looked around, spying a sign for a ladies-only restroom. “I’ll be back,” she told Yannick, before walking quickly toward it.

  Inside, Rémy locked the door. Stupid, she thought. How could you forget that you are a wanted girl here in France, as well as in England? Welcome home indeed, Little Bird!

  With one quick tug, Rémy let her hair fall down around her shoulders, and then opened her bag, searching for the nail scissors she had found in the Professor’s workshop and always carried with her. They most definitely weren’t for cutting hair, but this was an emergency and they were all she had. Taking a breath, Rémy grasped the first strands and snipped.

  * * *

  She emerged as their train pulled into the station. It wreathed the platform in thick white steam that billowed around her as she headed toward Yannick. He was examining something in his hand, and only glanced at her when he first looked up. A second later he looked back, his eyebrows raised, with a slight smile on his face.

  “You never were one for doing things by halves, were you, Rémy Brunel?
” he said.

  Rémy ran her fingers through her newly short hair. “Different enough?” she asked.

  “Different, but still beautiful,” he told her. “As always, of course.”

  Rémy flushed at the compliment and how easily it had been given. Wouldn’t life be simpler if all men could say what they were thinking just as easily? Pushing away the turn of her thoughts, she looked up at the poster of herself. It had gone.

  Yannick moved closer to her as the passengers began to disembark around them in a cloud almost as thick as the engine’s smoke. He showed her what was in his hands — the poster.

  “So no one else sees,” he told her. “Everything will be fine, Rémy. Trust me.”

  She was about to reach for it, to tear it into pieces so small that no one would ever be able to tell it had been her face that was drawn there, but before she could, Yannick moved. He turned toward their train as he folded the paper, tucking it into his pocket before looking back at her.

  “Shall we, Little Bird?” he asked, offering her his arm.

  {Chapter 11}

  AN UNEXPECTED DEPARTURE

  It was well after eleven o’clock that evening when Thaddeus headed for Limehouse and the Professor’s workshop. As he walked, he wondered how long they would continue to call it that. It seemed to have stuck, despite the man being dead these six months now, and also despite Thaddeus being the only one of the three that had ever really known him. Or at least, Thaddeus reflected, he had thought he’d known the Professor.

  The workshop was in darkness when he finally reached it, the door firmly locked. Thaddeus pulled out the key the Professor had cut for him, back when he’d thought they’d both been working together for the betterment of the police force. It turned easily, and the door swung inward with a familiar rusty squeal.

  “J?” Thaddeus called into the room beyond. The fire had burned to embers and the dinner table was empty. He tried not to look toward the door to Rémy’s room but failed. It was half-open, as if she’d just stepped out for a moment and would be back. “J,” he called again, turning away. “Where are you?”

  Neither he nor Rémy had ever been inside J’s bedroom. They understood that the street-boy, never having had a home before, desperately wanted his own private place. Thaddeus was about to knock on his door, when it opened. J’s face appeared around it, speckled with grime and grease and wearing a pair of over-sized glasses with metal surrounds, rather like the Professor’s revolutionary night-vision goggles, but far more substantial.

  “There you is,” said J with a sigh of relief. “When I said late, I didn’t mean tomorrer.”

  “Sorry,” said Thaddeus. “There was a lot I had to do at the station.”

  In truth, Thaddeus hadn’t known how to leave. J had seemed convinced — though Thaddeus couldn’t imagine how — that they would be setting off for France tonight. For Thaddeus to take a sudden leave of absence in the middle of such a difficult case was impossible, so in the end he’d just left two notes on his desk for Collins to find in the morning. One was a list of tasks for the sergeant to get on with while he was gone, and the other simply saying, “Following urgent leads. May be away a few days. Will be in touch when I can.”

  At least two of those three sentences were lies, though Thaddeus tried not to think about which they were. If he had a chance of saving Rémy and thereby thwarting the Comte’s plans for Abernathy’s submersible, what other choice did he have but to abandon his post? With any luck, he’d also be able to reveal Yannick as the perpetrator of the robberies and thus return with the case solved and the criminal in custody.

  “Ah, well,” said J with a shrug. “You’re here now. Best come in then, hadn’t yer?”

  Thaddeus frowned. “Into your bedroom? Whatever for?”

  The boy’s face took on the kind of grin he always got just before food arrived on the table. “For a copper you ain’t always very observant, are yer? You ever see me sleep in ’ere, ’ave yer?”

  “Er, no. But —”

  J disappeared for a second, and there was the sound of a winch being turned, the faint squeak of rope winding over upon rope. And then, much to Thaddeus’s astonishment, the wall of J’s room began to fold back on itself. It seemed to work like a concertina. What he had always assumed to be solid walls of wood turned out to be as moveable as a cart. They zigzagged together, moving along cunning metal tracks embedded in the floor and ceiling, until the whole wall had neatly removed itself to one side.

  It was what was in the room beyond, though, that made Thaddeus’s mouth fall open and his eyes bulge in naked shock.

  “So then, Mr. Rec,” said J in a theatrical voice, clearly enjoying the policeman’s reaction. “What do you fink of the Professor’s greatest invention?”

  It took Thaddeus a moment to move, and even longer to draw his next breath. Inside the now open room was another workshop. It was as cluttered as the main room of the warehouse, but a space had been cleared right in the center of the floor. And it was what stood there that had caused the policeman to stare.

  The huge structure looked a little like the hull of a boat, though it was like no boat Thaddeus had ever seen, apart, perhaps, from those monstrous contraptions that Lord Abernathy had secreted in the underground rivers of London. This one, though, was a mite smaller, and had been made of wood as well as of scraps of metal, riveted together roughly to form a whole. When Thaddeus thought of the hull of a boat, he thought of something almost cup-shaped, semi-circular and open to the skies, but this vessel looked like a large, sealed tube with two smaller tubes connected at either side. Small round windows had been cut into the wall of the main cylinder, three lined up along its length, with circular wooden shutters that fastened to close them. There was a door, too, or at least a hatch, as curved as the sides of the boat on either side of it and currently sealed firmly shut. At one end of the vessel — which Thaddeus took to be the front — was a semi-circular window. Below this, pointing out like the sharp nose of a deep-sea creature, was a twisted spindle of metal that tapered to a lethal-looking point. At the other end — the boat’s rear — were fixed several small but powerful-looking propellers.

  “J,” said Thaddeus, walking forward in slow wonder. “What on earth is it?”

  “It’s a ship,” the boy said with unmistakable pride. “But it ain’t any old sail boat, oh no. This here is an airship.”

  Thaddeus turned to look at J in astonishment. “An airship? What do you mean?”

  “It flies, Thaddeus!” J said proudly. “Now d’yer see what I meant earlier? We don’t need no train or boat to get us to France! We can just take off right from here and fly ourselves there.”

  Thaddeus blinked. “Fly to France?”

  “Aye, of course. What could be easier?”

  “But — how? I’ve heard of balloons crossing over to the continent, J, but this isn’t a balloon, is it? And even if it was — it’s too solid, too heavy, surely.”

  Chuckling at Thaddeus’s bemused state, J beckoned him over to a cluttered workbench that ran along the left wall. The only part of the bench not buried by bits and bobs was right in the center. An oil lamp had been lit and was burning gently, illuminating the pages of a large book that lay open to its center.

  “See this?” J said, pointing to it. “This here book has got all the Professor’s inventions in it — all his ideas, whether he got around to making them or not. I found it the first week me and Rémy moved in and I’ve been trying to work it all out ever since. Take a look.”

  Thaddeus did as he was told, turning the pages slowly and taking in the intricate sketches and scrawled notes. There were detailed plans for everything, from the night glasses that the Professor had given them so as to be able to see in the pitch dark, to the terrifying mechanical armor that Abernathy had put his hired thugs into. There were other plans, too — Thaddeus recognized the strange contraption that had swall
owed him whole when they’d first stumbled into the mad Lord’s lair. It looked just as he remembered it — like a strange hollow cone with a sharp nose at one end and sturdy metal feet at the other. For some reason the Professor had drawn it surrounded by stars.

  “I thought you might be interested by that one,” said J, peering over his shoulder. “Look at where he’s scribbled out loads of notes around it, over and over, like there was something he couldn’t get right.”

  Thaddeus nodded, turning the page to see another version of the mechanical armor. He stared at the helmet, which seemed to have no space for a human head. Beside him, J shuddered.

  “Now, these I’m glad he never made,” said the boy. “Look, ’e’s scribbled out all the words around ’em, which far as I can make out meant he never managed to get somefin’ to work. These would ’ave been nasty blighters, and no mistake. Best as I can work out, they’re metal soldiers with clockwork bits inside, instead of brains. Imagine that! A soldier who don’t even ’ave to think. Can’t get scared, can’t stop, doesn’t feel ‘urt. Just goes and goes, and is stronger than an ox.” He shuddered again.

  The policeman shook his head, turning another page to yet another scrawl of scribbled words and pictures. “How on earth did you manage to decipher all this, J?”

  The boy huffed a little. “Just cos I was raised on the street don’t mean I’m silly in the ’ead. You should know that right enough. The Sally Ann, they used to teach me my letters a bit — after they’d read the Good Book, o’course. And then Mr. Desai, he taught me some more. The rest I’ve just been working out for meself. It ain’t that hard once you’s got the hang of it.”

  Thaddeus patted the boy on the shoulder. “I didn’t mean the reading part, J,” he said, soothingly. “I meant, how did you understand all this? It doesn’t make a whit of sense to me!”

  “Ah, well,” said J conspiratorially. “It don’t always make sense to me, neither, and that’s the truth. You might say there’s been a fair bit of trial and error, like. That’s why I never showed you and Rémy this before. I wanted to get it right. I wanted you both to see that I ain’t a waste of space, or nuffin’. I wanted to do somefin’ on my own, like.”