Skycircus

by Peter Bunzl

  Lily tapped the page with a finger. “Droz,” she said. “Why does that name ring a bell?”

  Robert yawned through his last mouthful of truffle. “I’ve no idea.”

  “Neither do…I,” Malkin stuttered, his eyes flickering. He was running out of ticks. If they didn’t wind him soon he’d be asleep.

  “Never mind.” Lily read on.

  Dr Droz intends to put in a good word for me at the guild and suggested I might obtain a position there as an assistant, or a punch-card operator in the department of mathematical engines.

  It would be a good start, a chance to work with world-famous professors, and to see the machines of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace up close. I would love to learn something of Ada’s work, not only on the original Babbage Engine (though I was furious to discover Ada’s part had not been given due credit here), but on her Flyology project as well.

  Lily remembered the conversation Anna had been having earlier that evening with that mechanist from the guild. That was where she’d heard the name Droz. He’d mentioned Dr Droz alongside Papa and Professor Silverfish – something to do with hybrids and having been kicked out of the guild.

  But Droz had taught Mama too. And Mama’s words seemed so wise. Before she’d received the notebook, Lily had barely thought of Mama as anything other than, well…Mama. But now, reading the pages aloud, she realized there was a whole other side of Grace Fairfax that she’d missed. Mama had had her own life, separate from Lily’s and Papa’s. Her own dreams she’d wanted to achieve. And here she was, telling them to Lily as if they were in the same room together.

  It was funny how someone who’d been gone so long could be brought back to life through their words. Lily was finding Mama could still surprise her, even though she wasn’t there to do it in person. She wished her mama really was there. To tell her how brave she was and to offer encouragement for the predicament they were in. To tell her not to stop asking questions until she found the right answers. Answers that would help them get out of here.

  Lily realized her mind had drifted far away from the book. The others hadn’t even noticed. She glanced at Malkin and saw he’d wound down. Robert had dozed off. The empty chocolate box lay tipped to one side in his lap.

  She was starting to feel a little woozy herself…

  Not quite…

  all…

  there…

  One of them had to stay awake – that’s what they’d decided, wasn’t it? In her sleepy state she couldn’t quite remember. Suddenly Lily felt more tired than she had been in her entire life. She rubbed her eyes and tried hard to concentrate, squinting at the next diary entry. The words crawled spiderishly across the paper. She tried to corral them together, but they would not become sentences, and when she looked up from the page the room was swaying.

  She closed the book and laid her head on her arm.

  And then, just like that, she was somewhere else.

  No longer stretched out in the cold cargo bay, but sprawled beneath a chair in the parlour of her old house at Riverside Walk, Chelsea.

  The ammonite stone was clasped in her hand and a flickering fire in the grate warmed her socked feet, which were propped on the edge of the hearth.

  If she put her chin on her hands and looked upwards, she could glimpse Mama’s feet. Her satin slippers poked out from beneath her long dress as she paced to and fro across the carpet, holding the red notebook open in her hands and reading aloud from it.

  Lily tried to call to her, but when she opened her mouth to speak no words came out. She could find them neither on the tip of her tongue, nor hidden away deep inside her. So she closed her eyes, and fell into a deep, uninterrupted slumber.

  Robert woke with a splitting headache. His right arm – the one he’d slept on – felt dead. He fancied he could still taste the sugary grit of the chocolates in his mouth. A sickly, sticky feeling filled his belly, like greasy stones grinding together.

  The ripe tang of the animals wafted through the cabin, along with their whinnies, growls and grunts, which made Robert think of some strange interspecies conversation.

  The hard wooden floor beneath him was no longer juddering and the hum of the engines had ceased. That could mean only one thing: the Skycircus was no longer moving. They’d arrived at their destination.

  He shifted onto his back and took up his cap from where it had fallen on the floor. Then he rubbed the pins and needles from his arm until it came back to life.

  When he sat up, the heart-shaped chocolate box slid from his lap and a second rancid wave of biliousness hit him like a runaway steam-wagon.

  He tossed the empty box aside and gagged. He felt awful. The last thing he recalled was a sudden unnatural heaviness in his head and a sensation like being dropped down a well. He looked back at the box suspiciously. Was it the truffles? Had they been drugged? He remembered the clown giving Lily the special box in the Big Top and the men crowding in afterwards to capture them – they’d probably been expecting a slower target. But Slimwood and Madame Lyons-Mane had caught them anyway in the end, he thought angrily.

  He got to his knees and looked around. Lily and Malkin were sleeping on the far side of the cargo bay. Lily had passed out with her coat open and her scarf draped oddly across her body. Malkin had wound down and was curled at her feet.

  Robert shuffled over and gently shook Lily by the shoulder.

  “Wake up,” he whispered.

  “I feel terrible,” Lily moaned, opening her eyes a slit.

  “You look it,” he retorted.

  “Thanks a lot. Where are we?”

  “I’ve no idea. We appear to have landed.”

  “How did we sleep through that?”

  “I think there might’ve been something in the chocolates.”

  “Really?” She rubbed her eyes with a palm. “Everything’s spinning.”

  “It will for a while. Take deep breaths.”

  He put a hand on her back and helped her sit up.

  Eventually, she started to feel a little better. She brushed her hair from her face, then found Malkin’s winding key around her neck and, leaning forward, started to wind him. The fox’s gears tightened and clicked into place with each turn of the key.

  When Lily had finished, the cogs inside him fizzed and ticked into movement and he came to life, blinking his coal-black eyes and staring at the cage of wild beasts, and the horses in their stalls.

  “I forgot about this balloonatic ark of misfits,” he chirruped. “You were halfway through telling a story, Lily. I thought we were going to take it in turns to stay awake. What the clank happened?”

  “You wound down,” Lily said, “and Robert and I passed out. We think the chocolates were drugged.”

  “They’d have to be for you to sleep through such a stench,” Malkin said, sniffing the air. “This place stinks worse than a dead rat’s smelly socks. What time is it?”

  Lily fished around in the pockets of her coat and took out her pocket watch, flipping open the lid. “Nine fifteen.” She fiddled with the fob. “Unless it’s lost time overnight.”

  “It shouldn’t have.” Robert stood and peered out through the porthole.

  A low sun hung in a white sky flecked with slate-grey clouds above a clearing surrounded by autumnal trees. In the distance, higgledy-piggledy tall stone buildings clustered together as far as the eye could see.

  Beneath the porthole, a group of men were throwing out mooring ropes, fixing the gondola to the ground. Others were busy erecting the kiosk and the site’s exterior fence.

  The Lunk pounded around everyone in creaking circles, his arms clasped behind his back like a jailer, while his dim headlamp eyes swept the workforce, keeping everyone in line.

  Robert watched him nervously. “It really is a queer circus,” he said at last. “What d’you think they want from us?”

  “Me. Or at least my Cogheart.” Lily’s scars itched. She buttoned her coat across her front.

  Robert dragged himself away from the w
indow. “Why so?” he asked.

  “You saw the way Slimwood and Lyons-Mane used the other hybrids in the show. Playing on their differences. Distorting their natures. They exploit hybrids, and I am one. So all I can imagine is that they must have similar plans for me. The pair of them were definitely the ones who sent this.” Her fingers traced the pattern of the ammonite on the front of the red notebook. “Goodness knows how they got hold of it.”

  “It’s a clanking conundrum to be sure.” Malkin scratched at an ear with his back foot.

  Robert nodded anxiously. He couldn’t help thinking Lily was right. He feared for her safety in a place like this; horrible visions of what might happen to her, to both of them, swirled around inside him. “What should we do?” he asked at last.

  “There’s nothing we can do,” Lily said, “except wait.” She opened the notebook and flicked past pages of technical drawings and scribbled records. “Shall I read another diary entry from the notebook?” She took a breath and, over the growls of the animals, began at the top of the next page.

  Tuesday, 23rd September 1884,

  Riverside Walk, Chelsea

  “That’s seventeen years from the last entry!” Malkin squealed.

  “And the day of my first birthday.” Lily bit anxiously at a fingernail.

  “Which means Grace would’ve been thirty-seven and married by this point,” Robert said. “What could possibly have happened to her that meant she stopped writing in her notebook for seventeen years?”

  “Who knows.” Lily read on…

  I found this book whilst going through my old papers. I’ve been examining its pages to reacquaint myself with my ideas for the Flyology project I dreamed once of creating.

  But my most important creation is not represented here, and so I’ve decided to remedy that, by writing about my darling daughter, Lily.

  Today is Lily’s first birthday; we have decided to throw her a party. This afternoon, in fact. We’ve recently installed ourselves in a rented house on Riverside Walk. The house is barely decorated and we’ve no servants to speak of, so we’ll have to make do. It will be a simple affair: myself, John and a few friends and family. Simon Silverfish is invited. Lily will be baptized soon and he is to be her godfather. He and John have become firm friends since they set up their business together making mechanicals.

  Lily is so beautiful. She has strands of flame-red hair thin as cotton, rosy cheeks, and a smile that lights up my heart every time I see it. We will do our utmost to make this birthday special for her. And every one hereafter.

  Lily paused. The edges of the words were blurring. It was true, Mama had always tried to make her birthdays special – often taking her to places she would never normally see.

  She recalled a treasured photo of her third birthday, when they’d visited the London Zoological Gardens and she and Mama had ridden on a live elephant, a bit like the Elephanta.

  Another time they’d gone to see an exhibition with Papa about the amazing electrical work of two famous American professors, Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison.

  On a third occasion they’d visited the Babbage Engine at a special lab near the Mechanists’ Guild, and seen the machine in action, computing complex problems.

  Lily had always thought the majority of these outings had been Papa’s idea, but she could see now that many of them were Mama’s choices.

  In the last year Mama was with them, Lily remembered, they had gone to watch the airships taking off at Counter’s Creek Moorings and Mama had tried to explain to Lily a little of the science that lay behind their flight.

  She wondered what Mama would say if she knew of her predicament right now.

  But she hadn’t any time to consider this, nor to read the notebook’s next entry, for her thoughts were interrupted by the clatter of chains and the turning of cogs as the cargo-bay door began to open.

  “Quick!” she told Robert, waving the notebook at him. “We can’t let them take this back. We need to hide it. Push it under my belt,” she suggested, hitching up the back of her coat.

  Robert wedged the notebook between the belt of her dress and the curve of her back. Its red cover was almost camouflaged against her vermilion silk party dress.

  She dropped the back of her coat over the book as the cargo-bay door opened with a CLANG to reveal two figures.

  It took Robert a moment to become accustomed to the glare from outside before he recognized the silhouettes of Slimwood and Madame Lyons-Mane.

  They were both wearing the same clothes as last night. Slimwood, in his red riding jacket and dress coat, grasped a black horsewhip in his right hand, and under his left arm he carried a lumpy-looking laundry bag. His gold teeth flashed in a thinly-sliced grin.

  Madame Lyons-Mane twirled her striped parasol. The pointy tip glinted. It looked sharp enough to poke out an eyeball.

  “Bienvenue à Paris!” she said gaily.

  Paris! They’d been taken to another country!

  Robert felt a jagged pang of panic course through him, and Lily clasped her hands behind her back to stop them shaking. Malkin raised his hackles and bared his teeth, letting out a low, threatening growl.

  “If you want to survive this encounter,” Slimwood advised, coming close enough for them to see the whites of his eyes, “then you’d best muzzle that mechanimal.”

  “Do as he says,” Robert whispered to Lily.

  “Behave for a bit, Malkin,” Lily said quietly, retrieving the muzzle and strapping it back around Malkin’s nose. “We’ll get out of this, I promise.”

  “This must be some sort of terrible mistake,” Robert said to Slimwood. The words squeaked timorously out of him.

  “Oh, no mistake.” Madame Lyons-Mane stroked her hairy face with four long fingers and stepped into the shadowy interior of the cargo deck. “Everything’s gone perfectly to plan.”

  Suddenly she grasped her beard and moustache and, in one smooth movement, ripped them away, wincing with pain as her skin puckered and snot-like strands of glue stretched between her fake hair and her skin. “Bon anniversaire, ma chérie. I hope you enjoyed your birthday surprise.”

  Lily scrabbled backwards as bile rose in her. She knew she’d recalled that scent – it was lily of the valley. And now she recognized the beardless face of that betrayer too…it was her one-time governess and Papa’s old housekeeper.

  “Madame Verdigris,” she gasped.

  “Exactement,” Madame replied.

  “You look better with a beard,” Lily blustered bravely. “Hirsute suits you.”

  The ringmistress gave a jagged, glassy laugh. “Très bien, ma petite.”

  “Don’t think you fooled us for one second,” Lily bluffed. “We knew it was you. Your stinking perfume gave you away a mile off. You smell as bad as your mangy animals. I could work out your stupid tricks in my sleep.”

  “Vraiment?” Madame said. “Then how is it we caught you so easily, eh?”

  She signalled to Slimwood, who grabbed Robert’s arm and twisted it sharply behind his back until he cried out in pain.

  Madame, meanwhile, seized Lily, gripping her shoulder so hard Lily felt like it was caught in a vice.

  Malkin tried to slink off, but Madame blocked his path with her parasol, jamming the hooked end of it into the back of his muzzle like a lead.

  The fox growled, his eyes bright with anger.

  “Enough!” Madame cried. “Silence. Hold your tongues! Creating a scene will only make things worse.”

  “Don’t tell me to be quiet,” Lily spat, struggling against the woman’s vicious grip. “I want to know why we’re here.”

  The corners of Madame’s mouth tweaked up into a mocking, malicious grin. “I came back for you, Lily, and I brought the whole circus with me. We’ve been planning your kidnap for months.”

  “We?” Lily’s face went pale.

  “Bien sûr, chérie. Did you actually think I was going to let you expel me from your life for ever with not a thought of revenge?” Madame’s fingers tig
htened even further. “When I found your mama’s notebook among your papa’s papers, I knew it would whet your interest. You were always whining on about her.”

  “Papa trusted you!” Lily said. “You stole those papers. And Mama’s notebook.”

  “And look what I’ve caught with her words,” Madame said. “I was sure, along with the birthday card and the tickets for the show, they would be enough to reel you in… I was right, wasn’t I, Lily? You never could resist a mystery.”

  “What it is that makes you tick,” Lily spat. “Your pathetic riddle.”

  “Vous aimez?” Madame asked. “A friend came up with it.”

  “I don’t even know what it means.”

  “Of course you do, chérie. I must say, it took me some time to guess the answer myself. But I was foolish not to see it long ago. Your mama’s notebook was no great use to me in that regard, but your papa’s papers – they explained everything. Why everyone had been after his perpetual motion machine, where it had ended up, and how valuable it was.”

  “There’s no such thing as a perpetual motion machine,” Robert said. “They don’t exist.”

  “Oh, but they do. There’s one right here.” Madame unbuttoned the top of Lily’s coat and knocked on her breastbone with her knuckles. Lily’s chest made a horrible, low tock-tock sound.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lily bluffed, balling her hand behind her back, pressing her nails into the skin.

  “It’s called the Cogheart, n’est-ce pas? Professor Hartman stole it from Silverfish to save your life. That’s why everyone was looking for it. Why Silverfish’s henchmen, Roach and Mould, promised to pay me if I kept an eye on you and brought you to him. When they never came through on that pledge, I had to get away quickly with the one thing of value I could lay my hands on: your papa’s papers.”

  “I hope they’ve brought you nothing but trouble,” Lily said.

  Madame chortled until her cut-glass earrings shook and tinkled like little bells.