by Jasmine Walt
And so, they found comfort in each other, though in many ways they didn't understand each other at all. Isambard – like his father – tested the boundaries of Stoker society. His mind connected ideas, toyed with tangents of thought, and although he knew he wasn't supposed to and he was constantly being beaten for it, he couldn't help inventing. He would take a machine apart, figure out how it worked, and put it back together so it worked more efficiently than before. He had a natural way with machines, as if his very mind worked on gears and pistons.
Aaron, on the other hand, spent his youth trying to stay as far from machines as possible. He had only to glance at a mechanism for it to seize and break down. He found the heat and steel stifling, pushing in on him so he couldn't breathe. Sometimes with Isambard, but often alone, he would slip unnoticed through the fences and wander through the city. He often found himself meandering around the many public gardens, ducking between the rose bushes at Kensington or sitting by the duck pond in Hyde Park.
It was here, in these parks, when he first heard – truly heard – the voices of the animals. He spent hours following the ducks inside his head, mapping their relationships and thoughts. Far from crowding his head, the voices calmed him. They eased the headaches caused by the constant pounding of pistons and roaring of furnaces.
With the exception of a few chittering compies – tiny feathered dragons who swarmed around food scraps and loved to steal bolts from the workshop floor – the only animals that entered the Engine Ward were already dead – the pigs and cattle put to the flame for dinner. Out here, Aaron felt for the first time as though the world were truly alive.
Despite their differences, the two boys had one thing in common. More than anything, they both desired to escape from Engine Ward forever. And that was why Aaron found himself teetering precariously under the window of a Metic Engineering School with a heavy future Presbyter standing on his shoulders, frantically scribbling down the lessons from the blackboard inside.
"Isambard? My shoulders are separating."
The scribbling intensified. "Got it!" Isambard jumped down, landing on his feet in the damp garden. Aaron slumped against the wall and rubbed his aching shoulders.
"Go on, let's see it, then."
With a smile as wide as a furnace door, Isambard held up the sketch. A crude drawing of a steam locomotive occupied the entire page; every inch of white paper covered in scribbled calculations and scrawled notations. Aaron squinted, wondering how Isambard planned to make sense of it.
"This is what we're going to make," Isambard said, his smile growing wide. "Except we're going to make it better."
Aaron didn't doubt Isambard's determination. If his friend set his mind to something, he would find a way to accomplish it, rules and consequences be dammed. He inherited this trait from his father, who flouted convention at every turn.
Marc Brunel had a reputation. And no Stoker alive wanted one of those. Isambard's father's troubles had begun when he'd lost his foreman job four years earlier after a blasphemous machine had been discovered.
He'd created a tunnelling shield for the Stokers who dug the networks of tunnels under Engine Ward. Though the Stokers now had enormous steam-driven tunnelling and earth-lifting machines, their operation required whole teams of men crowding into tight spaces. The tunnel work was dangerous – rock and debris fell in all directions. One wrong step in the cramped space and a man could find himself sawn clean through by the tunnelling arms.
The shield acted like a giant rain umbrella, protecting the men from falling debris and offering a barrier between the dangerous machinery. Grateful for any concession to their safety, the work crew made no mention of Marc's invention to the clergy, knowing what trouble it would cause.
But a surprise visit to the tunnels by Messiah Stephenson revealed Marc's folly. Appalled that Stokers were creating inventions without the sanction of their church or the Royal Society, he reported the infraction to the Council, and Marc was forbidden to work with machines ever again. Since no other work was open to a Stoker, Marc opened a school.
Marc's punishment outraged the Stokers, who knew that inventions were needed every day to keep the men safe and the works from failing. Surely, they cried, the church can't expect them to seek permission for every single innovation? Stephenson stood his ground – the Stokers were not to innovate without his explicit permission. Discontent between the workers and the clergy escalated: priests found their churches vandalised, indecipherable graffiti scrawled across the walls. Fires soon broke out across the Engine Ward, destroying two churches and severely damaging many more.
"We've as much right to invent as any other Englishman!" was the talk around the Stoker fires.
"Those Stokers have more rights than us, and we're the bloody followers of Stephenson," grumbled the Navvies.
"This Marc Brunel is dangerous, " said the priests, who would never dream of working in the tunnels where they might get their robes filthy. "He blasphemes against Great Conductor and mocks our King's laws."
"But we can't risk making him a martyr for the Stokers," said the Council, who knew the Engine Ward could not function without the Dirty Folk. "How do we make him go away?"
Then, of course, Henry had gone and got himself killed, and the Council and the priests finally had their chance to be rid of Marc Brunel once and for all. So they locked him away while they gathered evidence for his trial.
All of this was known to Aaron, and it made him nervous. But Isambard vowed to succeed where his father had failed, and convinced Aaron to help him construct the design for the locomotive engine in secret.
"When it's finished, the Council will be so amazed, they won't care that it was a Stoker who invented it," he said.
"That doesn't seem the likely reaction of any counsellor I know," said Aaron, once again trying to temper his friend's enthusiasms. "They'd sooner hang us for blasphemy than admit they were wrong."
"So we shall sell it to one of the other sects. Even the Navvies can have it. I don't care, as long as we build it and it is ours."
Once Isambard had perfected the design, they began to scrounge the parts they needed to begin the engine, picking through the detritus left in the scrap yards behind the Engine Ward. They worked in secret, during the few scant hours they could escape from work and chores and their families. Less and less Aaron found himself able to slip away and visit the parks, and Isambard never joined him anymore. His mind was always focused on the engine.
They found an abandoned workshop in the bowels of an old Morpheus church – the abode of a lesser artist whose cult had died with him – and there they dragged their hoard of scrap metal and worked tirelessly for months. Aaron – who barely understood the plans and couldn't fathom the complex nature of the machine – banged and hammered and welded and fitted. Isambard tinkered with the finer mechanisms – the condenser, the valves, the superheater. He stole chalk sticks from the nearby engineering school and drew columns of equations on the dirty walls.
And so they toiled, in the few hours they could escape from the workgangs, with the constant fear of discovery hanging over their heads.
And in the midst of this Isambard's father's trial began. Isambard was forbidden to visit his father in the Tower of London, and his mother – a spiteful, hate-filled woman – increased his sufferings by bringing home a retinue of men, each more despicable than the last. Priests and acolytes spent their nights in her bed, joining her in jeering at her son as he waited outside the door of their shack for her to finish. At her insistence, they would take off their tightly wound horsehair belts and beat him ‘till he wept.
Aaron worried for his friend, and for the damning evidence of their own innovations, still lying unfinished in the cellar of the abandoned church. He worried even more when Isambard threw himself into the project with abandon, channelling all his hatred and anger toward finishing the locomotive. He became careless, walking away from his duties as though he didn't care who followed him.
The entire Wa
rd crackled with tension. Every engineer lectured about Marc Brunel from their pulpit – many supported the Council of the Royal Society in punishing Isambard’s father for flouting the King’s most sacred laws, but others saw the true genius of his invention, and rallied for his immediate release.
But in the end, it was Robert Stephenson, who served as prime witness for the prosecution and spoke with grace and conviction in his Royal Society sermons about the importance of upholding the King's laws, who turned the tide of popular opinion against Marc Brunel. The Council needed to retain control over the unwieldy religious system, and could not back down, especially not for one of the Dirty Folk. But neither could they execute him and risk him becoming a martyr, and so Marc Brunel was sentenced to deportation.
Isambard didn’t cry when the priests and their supporters poured out into the streets of Engine Ward in celebration, falling in behind Stephenson's carriage, waving incense in the air and singing songs of praise; nor when he and Aaron snuck out and watched his father being marched on board a convict ship; nor when his mother slapped him about the face for staring and ordered him back to work. When Aaron looked into his friend's eyes, all he saw was hatred, and this worried him even more.
Later, while Isambard and Aaron worked by candlelight in their secret workshop, the priests held a great feast at the church. The scent of roasting meat and the sounds of music and laughter carried across the chilly night, and found their way underground to the boys’ workshop. And suddenly, the space seemed very, very small.
Isambard put down his hammer, leaned his face against the cold stone wall, and screamed. Aaron, frightened by the sound of his friend’s heart finally breaking, and by the fact that Isambard’s screams might at any moment bring the priests running to their hiding place, crawled under the engine and hid there.
A little while later, when Isambard had slumped against the wall and fallen silent, Aaron heard shouts outside. But it wasn’t the priests. The shouting grew louder. And now it was joined by screams.
Aaron crawled out from under the engine and grabbed Isambard’s hand. "Something’s wrong," he said, dragging his silent, shaking friend outside.
Outside, Stephenson's church was alight. Stokers raced through the narrow streets, carrying torches and calling for the blood of the man responsible for condemning Marc Brunel.
As Aaron and Isambard watched in horror, the Stokers surrounded the Navvy workcamp and ordered those inside to bring out Robert Stephenson, to be hanged in revenge for Brunel's banishment. The Navvies, of course, refused, so the Stokers put their camp to the torch.
Aaron and Isambard watched, silent, disbelieving, as the fire spread quickly through the shacks and workshops. Women ran screaming into the streets, their hair and clothes alight. Men trapped inside their homes cried from their windows as the flames engulfed them. Many threw themselves from the burning buildings, dashing their brains out on the streets below. The smoke blew over the whole Engine Ward, bringing with it the smell of burning flesh.
Aaron buried his face in Isambard’s shoulder.
As the alarms went up constables and Redcoats poured through the gates of the Engine Ward, and within minutes, they had rounded up most of the troublemakers and shot them, right there in the streets. Aaron dragged Isambard to the pumps, ready to help quench the flames, but a constable shooed them away. "You Stokers have done enough tonight," he growled.
So instead they clambered up the water tower and shared a bottle of whisky Aaron had stashed there. It took several hours to extinguish the flames, and it was only in the light of dawn that Aaron could gaze upon the true devastation to the Ward. The Navvy camp had been completely destroyed, and Stephenson's grand church stood gutted, a blackened skeleton in the early-morning sun. The fire had spread to parts of the Metic and Morpheus districts, but the Stoker camp remained unharmed.
"We will pay for this," Aaron whispered as he stared in horror at the destruction. Isambard nodded, but his expression betrayed his pleasure at the sight.
During his first few weeks on board the Euryalus, Nicholas hardly thought of Isambard at all. He spent every waking moment clutching the rigging for dear life every time the ship lurched on a wave, and learning the skills of a sailor: splicing and knotting ropes, folding sails, keeping time, and ringing the ship's bell every half-hour.
His small frame made him the perfect size for a sailor, and soon he was swinging from the rigging with the midshipmen. His hands tore and bled as he hauled in the ropes – the boys at night compared their wounds and watched with fascination as their scabs healed into calluses.
And he listened. He had hoped being on the ocean might offer him some relief from the voices, but he had been wrong. He could not ignore them, for they were so different from anything he'd ever heard before: schools of fish who thought like compies – one mind with a thousand vessels; molluscs with thoughts like treacle – thick and syrupy as they clung to the rocks for dear life. And far below the surface, in cracks and crevices that stretched right down to the centre of the earth, flickerings of much older creatures, whose thoughts seemed to stretch across eons, alien, and indiscernible.
The Euryalus, a 36-gun Apollo-class frigate, was one of the few English ships not destroyed in the Battle of Trafalgar, that terrible day in 1805 where Britain suffered such heavy losses to the French and Spanish fleets that her naval power had been crippled ever since. The Euryalus' orders were to patrol the Channel in a squadron with four other frigates, and engage the French ships that were disrupting trade between England and her colonies.
It was five months before he had his first taste of battle. He was on the foredeck when the call went up; a strange sail was sighted on the southwest, bearing up the coast toward them. She must've spotted them, because she gave tack, running away toward Ostend. The captain ordered the crew to raise sail, and they gave chase.
Nicholas was with the gunners. His job was to spread the sand on the deck – it would absorb the blood and water that pooled on the deck during an engagement and prevent the men and guns from sliding on the slick surface. He watched the men rolling out the guns – twenty-six eighteen pounders on the upper deck, where he was stationed. The more experienced sailors laughed and joked with each other as they prepared the guns, but the young boys exchanged worried glances. Nicholas knew he should feel scared, but he was excited at the prospect of meeting the French in battle and seeing the guns in action.
With the wind behind, Euryalus quickly drew ahead and the Captain gave the order to tack in front of the French vessel, a 31-gun frigate. She fired a broadside. Nicholas ducked as splinters exploded all around him, and the deck beneath him shuddered. He glanced around, but apart from a couple of boys cowering behind the mizzen, no one seemed that concerned. The French ship had tacked away in an attempt to escape, but Nicholas could already see they had made a fatal mistake. The Euryalus swung round and, with the favourable wind, was able to cross their line and the Captain gave the order to fire.
All along the decks, the cannons went off. Nicholas' ears rang from the sound, and the acrid smoke clouding the deck quickly extinguished his vision. He coughed, and crawled forward to the bulwark to try to see if they had hit.
When the smoke cleared, he could just make out the deck of the French ship. Her sails had been shredded by their shot, and she was dead in the water. He could see her crew scrambling to ready their guns. The Captain was yelling orders, but Nicholas could barely hear him over the ringing in his ears and the shouts of the men around him as they loaded the guns again.
Another broadside rocked Euryalus, splintering the mast above his head and showering the deck in wooden shards. Nicholas leaned against the bulwark and covered his head. The deck shook violently as the guns fired again, spewing powder into the air. Nicholas rolled out of the way as one of his crewmates fell off the arm and crashed onto the deck beside him, blood pouring from his mouth.
A cheer rang out along the deck. The enemy ship had been sighted, and she was in bad shape. Euryalus ma
de another pass with the guns, and the French surrendered. The Captain ordered a boarding party over, and Nicholas was chosen to help carry spoil back across to the Euryalus. At barely sixteen years of age, he stood for the first time on the deck of a naval prize and felt something like pride for his country, like he might finally have found where he belonged. It was a small victory in an ongoing war that the English were losing, but it filled Nicholas with hope for his future.
Weeks turned into months, and the months faded into a year. Nicholas' voice broke and stubble appeared on his chin and his skin cracked and blistered. He began to feel at home on the sea and with the new voices that inhabited his head. Now that he knew his duties by heart, he spent his days learning about navigation and repairing sails from the midshipmen and officers. While on watch at night he would lean over the edge of the deck and call dolphins to dance alongside the ship. He even tried to summon up one of those monsters of the deep. But as soon as he grabbed a mind, it would push him out again. But he kept trying.
Euryalus travelled down the coast of Europe, chasing down several Spanish privateers along the way, and finally put in at Gibraltar – her first time in port in fourteen months. The crew were let loose on the dockside to stretch their sea-weary legs. While the rest of the men headed to the taverns and bawdy-houses along the docks, Nicholas found the post office to deliver his letters to Isambard. He'd written several while on board, and these he stuffed into an envelope with some sketches he thought would interest his friend.
As he waited in line to buy stamps, he noticed a stand of British newspapers for sale – a few months old, but he hadn't heard news of England in even longer. He picked up a copy of the Times and leafed through it while he waited for the line to move.
STOKERS TO BLAME FOR ENGINE WARD FIRE
Following the deportation of Stoker Marc Brunel for causing the death of a child at his school, a gang of Stokers armed with torches attacked the Navvy district in the Engine Ward, killing thirty-seven and razing most of the buildings, including a wing of Stephenson's Cathedral, to the ground …