by Jasmine Walt
Marc Brunel – Isambard's father, his beloved teacher and the only person ever to encourage Nicholas' love of architecture – had been deported. Nicholas checked the date on the paper. He'll probably in Van Diemen's Land by now. He skimmed the rest of the article. The Navvies had left London, and anti-Stoker sentiment seemed at an all-time high.
Isambard. His heart ached for his friend, now truly alone.
James Holman's Memoirs – Unpublished
My ship, the HMS Cambrian, was heading to the Americas to join an English force to attempt to win back some of her lost territory. The excitement of finally being on board a vessel and bound for adventure soon wore off when I realised I had months of nothing to look forward to but miles and miles of ocean. I concentrated instead on working hard, taking regular exercise to prevent illness, and earning a good reputation on board, and so it was that by the time we put in at the port of New York, I had earned the esteem of the senior officers and was well on my way to making midshipman on board the Cambrian, a fifth-rate frigate in His Majesty's Navy.
Without a huge English naval presence in the Americas, the French and Spanish had been systematically gaining control of the ports, and were exercising monopolies on some of the most sought-after goods; Venezuelan coffee, Cuban sugar, and South American indigo. King George wanted to re-establish a viable trade route, which meant first taking back, and then holding, the strategic port of New York.
After nine months at sea, I was itching to set foot on foreign soil and explore a country completely foreign to me. But it was not to be. The hard work of returning the port to British control had been done before we arrived, so we had entirely missed our chance for glory. Our orders were to patrol the mouth of the port, inspecting the crew and cargo of the vessels entering to ensure they weren't French or Spanish. "Reflagging" of ships (forging their papers) was common practice, so any ship we deemed suspicious was sent to Halifax in Nova Scotia, where its goods could be seized and any American men found on board was impressed into the British Navy.
While the whole operation sounds terribly cloak and dagger, an adventurer couldn't have asked for a worse posting. Since we inspected vessels as they came into harbour, we remained at the harbour entrance and after five further months, we had still not put in on dry land. I saw the ruddy peaks of the new land, of America, jutting up from the horizon, but she was as impossible to reach now as she was from England, and the sight of her taunted me so.
I wished Nicholas were here with me.
The Stokers and the Navvies had never trusted one another, but after the fire they were the bitterest of enemies. Stephenson's response to the disaster was quick and devastating. Rather than rebuilding the Navvy camp, he simply moved his entire operation to Manchester, depriving the Engine Ward and the City of London of one of her most profitable businesses. And every time an engineer wondered why there was a lack of skilled workers, or the Royal Society lamented the loss of great minds to lesser cities, they had only to look to that charred patch of the Engine Ward to see where to lay the blame.
And during all this uproar, when the Stokers became overnight the most hated of all men in London, Isambard and Aaron toiled away on their engine, on their own private protest against the loss of Marc Brunel.
Isambard's life took a turn for the worse after the protests. Aaron's own unpleasant home life distracted him from his friend's increasingly manic state, but he couldn't fail to notice Isambard wincing as he worked. No matter how uncomfortable the temperature in the cellar, Isambard pulled his shirtsleeves down, attempting to cover dark bruises and burns on his arms and shoulders.
One day, about a year after they started work on the engine, Aaron entered their secret workshop to find his friend hunched over the bench, his face in his hands.
"Isambard?" Aaron reached out his hand, tentatively brushing his friend's shoulder.
Isambard shrugged his hand away. He lowered his hands from his face, revealing a swollen black eye.
"What happened?" Aaron asked, no longer able to hide his concern.
"Mother has taken up with a new suitor," said Isambard, his voice bitter. "The priest Merrick. He's a brute of a man, more animal than priest. They are to be married next week."
"Do you want to—"
"I want," Isambard growled, "to finish this engine."
In a rare moment of maternal kindness, Aaron's mother took him and his older bothers Oswald and Peter to see a menagerie in Regents Park. Perhaps she'd simply wished to escape the tension of the Engine Ward for an afternoon, or perhaps she hoped the fresh air would wash away the stench of alcohol and sadness that pervaded her body.
Since Aaron’s father, Henry Williams Senior, had been killed by a falling pylon five years previously, his mother had raised the boys alone, although Aaron often joked with Isambard that whisky had been his real father. After losing her husband and favourite son, she'd found solace in spirits. Her dull eyes barely strayed from the bottle at her side, and her listless voice could scarcely exert any kind of authority over her home. Since Oswald and Peter had both enrolled in the Great Conductor's seminary, Aaron looked after the home, made the meals, brought in a meagre wage from the scrap pits.
Although the Stokers were forbidden from working outside the Engine Ward, and the populace made it clear they wanted nothing to do with the "Dirty Folk", they could not be prevented from otherwise enjoying the pleasures of the city. Being poor, mostly illiterate, and mistrusted by the majority of the populace, the Stokers found that most of London's attractions – the lecture halls, the British Museum, the teahouses and bakeries – were out of reach, but the menagerie cost only a penny, and the proprietor wasn’t too fussed about who came in, so long as they paid up.
Aaron had to rise at 4am in order to finish the day's work before lunch. He arrived back at the house to find his brothers, dressed in their black robes, helping their mother outside. She clutched their arms as though they were all that held her upright. They set off, not talking, slipping through the Ward's high double gates and wandering toward the park. Aaron walked ahead, amusing himself by reciting the names of all the animals they would see. For once, their mother didn't seem to mind.
"… llamas and monkeys and ostriches …"
Aaron heard from another boy that this menagerie included a swamp-dragon, and it was this he most wanted to see. His grandfather had always talked about the dragons – their stealth, their strength, their intelligence. Quartz loved to tell him tales about his grandfather battling with the fearsome creatures. Aaron could barely control his excitement.
As they crossed the city, the familiar thoughts of birds and horses and compies passed through his head. He revelled in their presence, not listening for their individual thoughts but enjoying the sensation of flitting in and out of their consciousness. His mood lifted. Today will be a special day.
The menagerie was set up in a corner of the Regents Park. Two wagons stood against an ornate wooden gazebo, and makeshift wooden fences divided off separate open enclosures. Children tugged their parents between the wagons, exclaiming over each exotic beast.
At once, Aaron’s head churned with activity, as these large, exotic creatures pushed aside the thoughts of his usual animals. He raced toward the wagons, not heeding Oswald’s command to stop. More and more animals pounded against his skull – memories of far-off lands, deserts and jungles and watery swamps. He could see the head of a giraffe above the wagon roof—
And then, he felt it. The dragon.
"Look!" Peter cried, running up behind him and pointing at the cage on the back of the wagon.
It loped in circles, its mouth open, its tongue slapping against rows of razor-sharp teeth. Aaron leaned closer, staring into the dragon’s eyes. In his mind, the dragon stared back, regarding him with a mixture of revulsion and hunger. It hadn’t had a proper meal for several days. A girl threw her sandwich scraps through the bars. The dragon sniffed the corner of bread, its mind torn between hunger and its desire to simply break through the
bars and devour the girl. In the end, it nudged the sandwich with its nose, checking it was dead, and gobbled it up. The girl squealed, clapping her hands.
A rough hand grabbed Aaron’s shoulder, and his mother pulled him back. "Don’t lean over like that, you stupid boy. He'll eat you right up, an' you'll join your brother in the Station of Life."
Aaron shrugged her off, and walked to the next cage, where three monkeys sat on the stump of a tree, huddled together, picking and scratching at reddened sores that covered their rusty fur. He listened to them, felt their sadness, mourned the loss of their homeland.
These animals are so sad.
They lay in their cages, utterly defeated. Many had come from tropical lands, and they were suffocating in the cold. The dragon raised its nostrils and sniffed the air, its mind reaching, longing to race through the trees or sink its teeth into the compies hiding in the flowerbeds.
This isn’t fair.
The anger welled up inside Aaron, fuelled by the animals, whose aching desire to break free permeated his every thought. He knew how it felt to be trapped. Raw emotion welled up inside him, a rage building inside his chest, inside his head, pushing against his skull, growing larger and larger, until the emotions flooded from him, escaping from his body like a great cloud of steam from a smoke stack. He bent double, the breath knocked out of him.
And suddenly, they were free. Cages overturned. Fences collapsed. Monkeys ran under his legs. The giraffe galloped gracefully across the lawn. Children screamed. Mothers screamed. Men grabbed their families and ran across the lawns, chased by gleeful monkeys. Two ostriches and a small, feathered dinosaur raced for the pond, chased by the red-faced menagerie proprietor waving his whip.
Aaron froze, unable to tear himself away as the dragon, its eyes no longer sad but fierce with anger, strained against its bars. Aaron felt its mind wheeling, straining for its one chance for freedom.
Snap!
The dragon reached through the bars, grabbed the bolts between its arms, clasped them in its claws, and pulled, a motion it must have seen the proprietor perform many times. And now it, too, was free, but it didn’t go for the trees, as it perhaps should have, but bounded across the lawn with a grace and power that held Aaron in awe, and with a leap and a slash of its hind leg, tore the tendon in the proprietor’s foot.
"No," Aaron whispered. "I didn’t mean—"
The proprietor fell, screaming, as the dragon pounced. It tore at his face, spraying blood over the flower garden. The proprietor, still screaming, raised his hands to defend himself, to grab in vain at the meat of his ruined face, but the dragon bent down and with a quick snap of his powerful jaw, tore the man’s left arm clean away.
"Aaron!" His mother grabbed him by the shoulders and tugged him away. His brothers were already halfway across the field, their robes flapping with indignity as they ran toward the gate.
Aaron ran after her, his mind strangely empty. All around him, animals and people fled across the park. Screams followed him, high-pitched and terrified. Behind them, the proprietor’s cries cut off. As they raced through the gate, they passed a regiment of Redcoats on their way to contain the mess.
His mother wouldn’t stop crying. Oswald tugged her to his breast, stroking her hair and speaking in soft, soothing tones. Aaron leaned against the fence and watched the monkeys clamber up one of the oak trees. His body numb, his mind empty, devoid of thought. Silent.
I did this.
Aaron started to cry. Peter looked like he might slap him. Their mother, all business now, brushed off her skirt and pulled them along behind her, her head down, her face red with fear.
She saw a man selling boiled toffees beside the gate, and she bought a bag and handed it to Aaron. Oswald and Peter eagerly grabbed handfuls of toffees, the incident at the zoo instantly forgotten, but Aaron tucked the rest into his trouser pocket to share with Isambard. He couldn't think about sweets now. He needed his friend.
Aaron found his friend on top of the boiler tower, furiously kicking a steel pylon. He didn't stop when Aaron approached, just went on kicking, his hands balled into fists and his face wet with sweat and tears. He winced when Aaron grabbed his arm, and rolled his sleeve up to show him the enormous welts dotted with cigar burns.
"Merrick again," he said. "I wasn't even doing anything, just sitting in the corner, pretending to be invisible. Evidently I didn't try hard enough."
Aaron sat down beside him, and removed the paper bag from his trousers. The toffees had melted a little next to his skin, and stuck together in a big clump. He pulled it into two pieces and proffered one to his friend.
"Oswald and Peter ate most of them already, but I wanted to save some for you."
Isambard looked down at the sugary pile and then looked away. When he spoke, his voice sounded choked. "Please, you eat them, Aaron. You've earned them."
"For what? Leaving you here to suffer while I go away on a nice outing?" He wanted so badly to tell Isambard about the dragon and the proprietor, but he didn't want to give his friend anything else to be upset about. "Hardly deserving at all. I want you to have some."
He pushed the biggest piece into Isambard's hand, and he accepted it without another word. They sat for a while, chewing toffee in silence, each lost in their own dark thoughts.
"I have this idea," Isambard said, biting off a chunk of toffee. "I think we need to change the width of our locomotive track."
"What?"
"I've been working on some calculations, see?" He fumbled in his pocket and produced a faded leaf of paper, printed on one side with an advertisement for cigar leaves. He smoothed it out across his knee and pointed to the rows of scrawled numbers. "The current speed of locomotives is limited by the width of the axle. If I made the track wider, say with an eight-foot gauge, a boarder, heavier engine could operate, effectively able to carry more cargo at greater speed than the current trains."
"I'm not sure you can go around changing rail width and such. Didn't Stephenson standardise it for a reason?"
"I'm not beholden to Stephenson. I can do whatever I want," Isambard insisted. "Whose side are you on, anyway?"
"Mine. Because we've spent nearly two years working on that engine, and I'm the one who'll have to re-cut all the pieces of the chassis to fit this new design."
"Don't be such a whiner, Williams." Isambard crunched down on his toffee. "This will revolutionise locomotion. I'm sure you can handle a little remodelling."
James Holman's Memoirs – Unpublished
My eighteenth birthday passed at sea with little incident. I still hadn't set foot on American soil, and the adventurer within me was slowly withering away. But with a new first lieutenant on board anxious to prove himself, we were seizing more and more ships, pressing any men we could find with British ancestry (including deserters and nationalised Americans) and many without into the sadly-depleted British Navy. My fellow midshipman and friend Colebrook used to joke that he shouldn't be in the British Navy, as he had no Yankee blood.
All those seized ships presented a problem – what were we to do with them? We couldn't very well keep them at New York – they'd crowd the port and become a target for pirates. Instead, we had to sail each vessel to Halifax through a bitterly cold stretch of ocean, with only a skeleton crew of men, usually in biting fog.
The duty of captaining these vessels – called being the 'prizemaster' – had hitherto been a great honour, but was being passed out with such regularity mere midshipmen were accepting command of their own vessels.
And this was how, at eighteen years of age, I found myself a prizemaster of a confiscated ship. With a broad smile, I waved goodbye to Colebrook, and climbed aboard my vessel. My ship.
This auspicious day in my blossoming naval career was marred by a slight ache in my joints, which I ignored as best as I was able, walking with a stiff foot and setting my boots heavily on deck to minimise the flexing of my ankles. I hoped it would stop bothering me soon.
I hoped in vain.
; The aches persisted for the entire journey, coming in shooting pangs and settling in for hours – a dull, throbbing pain no amount of exercise could shake off. I endured it as best I could, and we made it to Nova Scotia with the ship still intact.
Once I arrived at Halifax, I sat my officer examination and, with my lieutenancy papers still wet with ink, I switched to a naval flagship – the Cleopatra, a British frigate recaptured from the French at Bermuda – with the aim of impressing the Commander with my skills in order to move up in the ranks … and maybe, maybe, land a position that involved some actual adventuring.
It seemed the first lieutenant of the Cleopatra, Jacob McFadden, had the same designs, for when I tried to introduce myself, he brushed me aside.
"What are you, fourteen?" he demanded, his cheeks flashing red.
"Eighteen, sir."
"By Isis, but they must be desperate for officers! Listen boy, I don't care who you are. I am not your friend. I am not your mother, and I don't want to hear one word out of your mouth that ain't ’yes, sir,’ or ’thank you, sir.’ I'm going to be Captain when Old McNeash dies, mark my words, and you'll want to be on my good side, yes?"
I nodded, too surprised to speak.
He kicked me, hard, in the side of the head as I bent to put my things on my bunk. "You’re a scrawny little shitter. You won't last long on this ship. As if it wasn't bad enough when O'Reilly took a swim and they brought in that Thorne boy as second lieutenant, all gangly legs and buck teeth and no clue about real sailing, and now you're third lieutenant and I'm a bloody nanny—"
"James? James Holman? Is that you?"
Ignoring the pain in my legs, I spun around, and there in the doorway, stooping to fit his height through the low door, was Nicholas.