She had meant is as a joke, but when he looked at her, Yannick’s gaze was sharp. Then his face softened into a smile and he laughed.
“You know me, Rémy. I’m a circus boy at heart — happier plodding along on the road than traveling like this. The speed makes me nervous.”
“We could have gone by road, or even by water,” Rémy pointed out. “It would have been far cheaper. I still don’t think you should have spent all this money. Not on my account, anyway. I thought you were lacking in funds?”
“Is that what I made you think?” Yannick asked, with another smile. “Well, the truth is I don’t have a lot, but I do have some savings put aside. For emergencies, such as this.”
“Is this an emergency?” Rémy asked with a frown, looking out over fields of corn that shone like pure gold in the light of the setting sun.
“I thought you wanted to make sure that Claudette was all right?” Yannick asked, sounding a bit hurt. “You seemed quite worried, back in London.”
“I am,” she agreed.
“Well, there we are,” said Yannick, leaning back, satisfied, and closing his eyes as the train rocked a little. “If I can help an old friend in the way that she helped me, so be it.”
“How did I help you?” The memory of Thaddeus’s face in the crowd at the theater flitted through her mind, along with another question, one she didn’t really want answered. Yannick had been poor in London, or at least he’d said he was. And now he wasn’t. Why? How?
Yannick opened his eyes again. “By giving me somewhere to stay in London, of course. What else?”
“Oh,” said Rémy. “But that was nothing . . .”
Yannick smiled again. “Not to me, it wasn’t,” he told her gently. “Finding such a friend when I most needed one meant a lot, Little Bird.”
But you told me then that you had to live cheaply, Rémy thought to herself. And now it turns out you didn’t have to at all. Why?
“It might be best to sleep while we can,” Yannick said, oblivious to her thoughts. “Once we reach the end of this line, we will have to do the rest of the journey by less comfortable means.”
Rémy pushed her troubled thoughts away. Why would he keep the truth from her? It was she who had wanted to return to France, after all. She settled back against the cushions and let the train rock her slowly to sleep.
She woke sometime later to find the carriage in darkness, the sun having finally slipped below the horizon for the night. Yannick was gone, and she was alone. Disoriented, Rémy stood up, stretching. She rubbed one hand across her eyes. Her brain felt fogged, her thoughts rolling thickly in her head.
Rémy pushed open the door and looked out into the corridor. It was empty. The rest of the passengers, she supposed, were long since asleep. She slipped out, shutting the door behind her, and headed for the restaurant car. To get there, she had to go through two other carriages, and as she approached the door to the first, she saw Yannick through the window. He looked as if he were deep in conversation with a man dressed in an elegant black frock coat, a white dress shirt, and polished black shoes. His dark hair was oiled and neatly coiffed, even at this late hour. The man nodded at something Yannick said, and the dim overhead light of the carriage gilded his cheek for a second. Across it snaked a thin, pale scar. To Rémy, this man looked entirely too richly dressed to be someone who would know a lowly stage performer such as Yannick. And yet they were standing very close, the way friends would who want to shut out the rest of the world.
As Rémy watched, Yannick took something from his pocket — a dark-colored cloth with something wrapped inside it — and passed it to the stranger, who immediately tucked the package inside his coat. There was something about the entire encounter that made the hairs at the back of Rémy’s neck prickle. She slid open the compartment door.
Yannick saw her and immediately walked away from the stranger, who moved in the opposite direction as if they had not been talking at all.
“Aha,” said Yannick, with a smile. “How was your sleep? Do you feel rested?”
“Who was that?” Rémy asked.
“Who?” Yannick glanced back down the corridor. The man in black had vanished into the next carriage. “Oh, no one. We just had the misfortune of reaching the same point in the carriage at the same time. They are so very narrow, these trains, aren’t they?” He shuddered slightly. “Another reason I shall be relieved when this one stops.”
Rémy nodded, slowly. Yannick walked past her with a smile, and she followed him back to their own compartment. She was unsettled and suddenly felt oddly wary of him.
“Yannick, have you got that ‘Wanted’ poster? The one of me? I’d like to see it.”
“Oh, that,” he said. “I tore it up, Little Bird, and threw it out of the window while you were asleep. The fair countryside of France is home to it now! I thought it for the best. Don’t you?”
Rémy did not sleep again. Instead, she watched the dark landscape pass the window and thought hard while Yannick snored gently in his seat. A sense of foreboding had settled over her again. She thought she’d pushed it away, but it had seeped back into her mind since observing the peculiar exchange between Yannick and the other man. She played it over and over in her mind. Perhaps her discomfort simply came from a lack of sleep. But she hadn’t imagined it — Yannick had passed something to the man he had said was a stranger. What was it, who was the man, and more importantly, why had Yannick lied to her so blatantly? The more she looked at him, the less Rémy believed she knew him as well as she thought she had back in London. The Yannick she’d known would never have lied to her as this one just had. And what about the money for this trip? In London, he’d been as poor as she was, but suddenly he had enough money for train tickets? Had he just been lying to her about that, as well? Or had something happened that meant he now had the resources to travel how he liked? Thaddeus was right, she told herself. He is not the boy you knew.
Glancing at Yannick’s sleeping face, Rémy reached for the secret pocket she’d added to her corset a few weeks ago. She’d sewn it herself — inexpertly, but she’d done it well enough, thanks to Claudette’s insistent tutoring. It was tucked above the hem so that it sat securely above her navel, only big enough to store something very small within. In this case, it was her opal necklace, coiled inside a fold of paper. Rémy took it out and looked at her talisman in the dawn light. It seemed duller than usual, and she wondered if not wearing it was somehow damaging the jewel. She couldn’t bear if that were true. It broke Rémy’s heart not to wear it, to reject the only gift her mother had been able to give her.
Well, Little Bird, perhaps now is the right time to wear it. And to use its powers, too . . .
Before the thought had even had time to echo in her mind, Rémy reached up and fastened the opal around her neck, straightening it so that the gem fell against the skin at her throat. It was almost as if the stone was connected to her heart somehow. The opal possessed a pulse that Rémy had felt so often she had forgotten it even existed. Now it was there again, passing between the stone and her body like electricity.
She sat still for a few moments, feeling the rocking of the train over the tracks and letting the opal settle. Then Rémy allowed her mind open and tried to read what was in Yannick’s. She looked at him, with no real idea of how this should work. She had never deliberately attempted to direct the opal’s powers before — hearing other people’s thoughts had always been accidental; an intrusion, rather than something she welcomed. But now the opal could be the key to knowing whether she could truly trust Yannick or not . . .
Something swelled in her mind, like the flame of a candle bursting into life for the first time. There was something there, something below the surface. She tried to follow where the opal was leading her, down a path into Yannick’s mind, yet something wasn’t right. Usually she heard a person’s thoughts straightaway. Yannick’s were muffled, as if behind
a veil that the opal was trying to break through, but…
Yannick opened his eyes. He was staring straight at her, wide awake, as if he’d not been asleep at all. The flame Rémy felt in her mind was snuffed out, the opal quaking suddenly against her skin before falling still. There was silence.
“Aha,” said Yannick, with a wide smile that had been absent just a second before. He nodded at her throat. “So there’s your opal! It’s what I remember most about you from when we were children — how you never, ever took it off. I wondered where it was. I was worried to ask, in case it had been lost.”
Rémy breathed hard, feeling sick to her stomach but trying to hide it. The moment was confusion upon confusion. The opal had not been able to let her into Yannick’s thoughts, but not only that — had the effort she had made woken him? If so, did that mean he had known that she was trying to see into his mind? Or was it just that the shock of him waking had thrown the opal back? How she hoped the latter was the case.
“Rémy? Are you all right?” Yannick asked, and she realized he was watching her with what appeared to be simple concern.
“Sorry. Yes, I’m fine,” she managed with a smile, as the train began to slow. “Oh — I think we must be coming to a station. Is this our stop?”
As he stood to look out, she unfastened the opal and hid it away once again, tucking it quickly into the pouch beneath her corset hem.
{Chapter 14}
IN PURSUIT
“How are you supposed to steer this thing?” Thaddeus asked, once he had recovered enough.
J had returned to his seat at the front of the ship, closing off the gas and dulling the hiss. The airship ceased its rise, drifting over the night sky of London like a concentrated cloud.
“’S got propellers,” J said, standing on tiptoe to reach another circular control at the very top of the control desk. “Didn’t you see ’em? At the back, like. Rudders, too, one left and one right. Sorry, I mean, one starboard and one port. Right nifty, this is — watch.”
He turned the handle slowly. The cabin filled with a whirring sound and the ship’s movement took on a purpose, nosing forward over the murky waters of Limehouse. Thaddeus got to his feet, feeling the gentle rocking of the aircraft, and leaned over J’s chair, looking out the window at his first view of London from the air. It was an extraordinary sight, despite the darkness. The sparse gas lamps of the east end were burning brightly, illuminating splashes of the surrounding streets with the curdled yellow of too-old milk.
“There’s The Grapes,” J pointed. “Here, looks like they’re havin’ a lock-in. And they didn’t even invite us, cheeky beggars!”
“J, mind the paper mill,” Thaddeus said. “It’s coming up on your right.”
“Don’t worry yourself,” said J, with a confidence Thaddeus didn’t share. “All’s I need to do is twist this handle here . . .”
J thumbed a lever on his left. The airship began to turn to the right — straight toward the tower of the biggest factory in Limehouse.
“J!” Thaddeus barked, “Left! We need to go left, not right!”
“Oops,” J muttered.
“Turn us the other way!”
“I’m trying,” J insisted, frantically yanking on another of the levers. “This one seems to be a bit stiff, that’s all! Give me a minute . . .”
“We don’t have a minute,” Thaddeus yelled, gripping the back of the chair as the mill loomed like a dark behemoth through the glass. “We’re going to hit it!”
“Hang about a tick,” J muttered, concentrating hard as he pulled the lever again. The ship tilted left. “There! Come on, me old girl, you can do it!”
The boy yanked the lever down again and the airship continued to move left. Thaddeus held his breath as the red bricks of the factory tower came close enough to count.
“Yes!” yelled J in triumph as they cleared the building with mere inches to spare. “That’s got her, all right!”
“J,” said Thaddeus, rubbing an anxious hand over his face. “Please tell me you know what you’re doing in this thing.”
“I do, Thaddeus. I absolutely, truly do,” said J. “And what I don’t know, I can read in the Professor’s book.”
“But have you ever flown this thing before?”
“Not as such, no. It’s kind of hard to do that without the balloon fully functional, like, which it wasn’t until today. But I have practiced, I promise.”
“How have you practiced, J?”
“Well, I’ve sat here in this very seat and done exactly what I’m doing now. It was just — on the ground, like.”
Thaddeus stared at the meager offering of control levers set into the panel. “Right,” he said weakly as they headed out over the Thames.
“Sorry,” said J, a tad on the defensive. “But I wasn’t to know there’d be an urgent call to use her so soon after I’d finished putting her together, was I? Otherwise I might ’ave ’ad a chance to do a proper test and all.”
Thaddeus blinked. “After you’d finished . . . putting her together?”
J glanced up at the policeman with a frown. “Yeah. I only finished greasing in the last propeller earlier today, y’see. And up until yesterday I was still trying to get the ruby mechanism to work.”
Thaddeus suddenly felt the need to sit down, which was unfortunate, since there was a distinct lack of chairs. He settled for staggering to one of the bunks, instead. “J, are you telling me . . . that you built this?”
“Well, not exactly, no. Like I said, I just finished her. The Professor, he must have got her started, because when I found her, the metal bits had been done. To tell you the truth, I think the Professor had in mind that the ship would be all metal, but obviously I didn’t have any o’ the right stuff.”
“Obviously,” Thaddeus echoed weakly.
“I figure all o’ what ’e was going to use went down with old Lord Abernathy,” J explained. “So I decided to use wood for the rest. Snaffled it from around Limehouse, I did. There’s bits of about a hundred boats from a hundred countries in this tub.” He rubbed the control desk affectionately.
“Right,” said Thaddeus, rubbing his eyes again. “So we’re sailing over London in what amounts to a pile of firewood.”
“Well, technically,” said J, “we ain’t actually over London any more.”
Thaddeus stood up and looked and saw that the boy was right. They had left behind the dark conglomeration of the city and were heading out toward the leafy, unlit countryside, the Thames on their starboard side, reflecting the hard glint of the stars above.
“So,” said J. “Next stop France then, eh?”
“How do you know which way to go?” Thaddeus asked. “Have you got a compass bearing?”
“Sort of,” said J, grinning up at him, “but even better.” He leaned forward on the control desk to a square of wood that didn’t fit in with the rest. The boy pressed the lower edge and it sprang up beneath his touch, rising an inch or so clear of the control panel.
“Sprocket and hinge,” J said casually as he flicked up the surface of the square to reveal that it was a tiny wooden door, set on the vertical. Within the raised column was complicated gadget of the like Thaddeus had never seen before.
“What on earth is that?” Thaddeus asked. Whatever it was, it looked as if it had been repurposed from a ship’s barometer, and was still in the glass housing of one. The original dial had been removed and repainted, and as Thaddeus leaned closer he could see the Professor’s neat handwriting. It marked out regular intervals around the new face, marked with what must have been a minute brush. The words ran from left to right, from the center of the dial, where the barometer’s original hands remained, to the outside edge.
Each of the words painted in that tiny hand was the name of a city. At least, that’s what Thaddeus assumed they all were as he peered at them, though only because some of th
e more exotic names he’d never even heard of before were arranged alongside ones that he had. London herself, for example, was flanked on one side by Innsbruck and on the other by somewhere called Katmandu.
“Amazin’, innit?” said J. “I mean, have you ever heard of somewhere called Manaus? I surely ain’t, but it’s there, so it must exist and this ship must be able to reach it. And Karachi, Timbuktu, Kandahar . . . they all sound made up don’t they? But I don’t fink they are. Anyway, watch this . . .”
J reached over and turned the tiny filigree metal dial in the center. Thaddeus watched as the barometer’s hands moved. J adjusted them until one was pointing at “London” and the other at “Paris.” Then he pressed the dial in. It clicked, locking into place.
Immediately there was a whirring sound from above them. Thaddeus looked up to see two spindly metal arms descend out of the ceiling above the control desk. Each was hinged in several places to allow maximum movement, and on the end of each was what looked like a single lens from a pair of small round pince-nez. The arms adjusted themselves, whirring happily, until they settled against the glass of the airship’s window. J pulled one lever and pushed another, and Thaddeus felt the craft move slightly, turning away from the Thames completely to head out over the open countryside. As they did so, the metal arms readjusted. J kept maneuvering the ship until both lenses were aligned, right in the middle of the window.
“There,” J said with a satisfied sigh. “We’re on the right track now. All we have to do is keep those two arms dead center, with one lens over the other just like that, and we’ll sail right into Paris. Or over it, I should say, eh?” He laughed.
Thaddeus shook his head. “Astounding. It’s truly, truly amazing, J. But how do you know how all this works?”
J jerked his thumb over his shoulder to where the Professor’s book lay open on his bunk. “It’s all in there. Glad I didn’t have to build these bits though, and there’s the truth. The fiddly scientific fings the Professor had already built. I just had to put ’em all together, like.”
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