by Peter Bunzl
She stood and kicked over the traces of the fire. “Help me pack all this away,” she said, handing the cylinder back to Lily, “then we can go up into my airship Ladybird, and take a listen.”
Halfway up the chain ladder that dangled from Ladybird’s gondola Robert felt queasy. This was the highest he’d ever climbed. They were higher now than when they’d stood on the roof of his house.
Above him, Lily had the cylinder tucked into her coat pocket. Malkin was curled up and buttoned inside her jacket, and she was following Anna who’d nearly reached the top of the ladder.
Robert slowed behind her, and tried not to look down at the chains, twisting and creaking in the wind. The box, in its bundle strapped across his back, suddenly felt very heavy. He glanced up at the swaying ship still thirty feet in the air above his head. “It’s too far,” he muttered. “I can’t.”
Lily looked between her feet at him. “Please, Robert. You have to try.”
He gritted his teeth. At least if he fell, the last of the snow might cushion his fall. No, he mustn’t think about falling. When he used to go walking in the woods with his da and climbed trees, it wasn’t the up that scared him, but the down – that dreadful drop you had to navigate to get back on solid ground. Whenever his vertigo got the better of him and he got stuck, Thaddeus would clamber up and help him descend. His da had a lesson prepared for such moments, as he always did. It was similar to the thing he’d said the other day…what was it again?
No one conquers fear easily, Robert. It takes practice to reach true heights; a brave heart to win great battles.
Robert repeated those words to himself as he climbed higher, higher than ever before, towards the gondola of the floating airship. They gave him comfort – and soon he found he’d reached the top of the ladder.
“How do we get across?” Lily shouted through the wind.
“Just do as I do.” Anna opened a door in Ladybird’s hull and, grabbing a metal handrail, pulled herself inside. Climbing to her feet, she stood on the deck. “Simple.”
Lily copied her movements, clambering through the doorway, and Robert, following behind her, shut his eyes tight, thinking once more of his da’s advice.
When he blinked, he was onboard the airship, and Anna was winching the chain ladder onto a roll.
“Welcome to Ladybird,” she said, as she rattled in the last few metal rungs and reached out to close the door. “It’s a bit of a manoeuvre to get onboard, but in every other respect I think you’ll find her a first-class dirigible, if rather on the snug side.”
Lily unbuttoned her jacket and Malkin hopped out and skittered about giddily on the curved floor. “I hate these scruffy DIY airships,” he complained.
“It’s not so bad,” Lily found herself saying.
Robert leaned dizzily against the wall. He was just glad to have something solid under his feet. The tiny plank-walled passageway they stood in was barely wide enough for the four of them to fit into. He glanced around. A big brass porthole behind them lensed a circle of light onto four mismatched curtains shielding the space opposite, each one hand-stitched and higgledy-piggledy.
“Let me give you the grand tour.” Anna pulled back the rear curtain, and Robert and Lily peered in at a small tail compartment filled with an engine. Sandwiched between this tail space and the front compartment, which Robert assumed was the bridge, were two small crawl spaces, one on top of the other. The bottom one was a foot-locker storage cupboard, stacked with a few empty wooden crates, and the compartment above turned out to be Anna’s berth.
A small mattress entirely filled the floor space. Above the mattress, a smaller brass porthole lit a few trinkets on a wonky shelf – an airship in a bottle, a portable typewriter, and a large pile of dog-eared penny dreadful adventure magazines. Lily reached in and picked up one, examining the cover. The Zep Pirates Versus The Kraken it was called, and the engraved picture on the front was of a zeppelin being attacked by an enormous sea monster, who did look uncannily like her old teacher. “This is one I haven’t read,” she said.
“I’m not surprised,” Anna told her. “That’s the first issue. I only just finished writing it.”
“You write these?” Robert asked.
“Don’t say it with such disdain, boy. It’s another of my sidelines. I’ve got to make a living somehow.”
“They’re brilliant, Robert,” Lily told him. “You should read them sometime.”
“I don’t know about that,” Robert said. “After all that’s happened the last few days, I’m not sure I need more drama in my life.”
“Of course,” Lily said. She understood. For a moment she’d forgotten about the box and the men chasing them. She glanced down at the cylinder, tucked into the pocket of her coat. “Perhaps we should listen to this recording now?”
Anna nodded and yanked back the largest curtain and motioned them into the room at the fore of the ship. “Through here’s the flight deck.”
The space was so small that if Robert or Lily had raised their arms they could have touched both walls with the tips of their fingers, but crossways there was enough room for the three of them to stand shoulder to shoulder.
Anna flicked a row of switches on the dashboard and needles on various gauges and instruments came to life. Among them Robert recognized barometers, thermometers, a compass and a chronometer clock in a mounting. At the far end of the control panel was a cradle with an adjustable arm on a needle. “This machine’ll play the sound on your cylinder,” Anna said, and she plugged the cylinder into the cradle and put the needle down across the groove along the end. Then she pressed the button on the dash, and the cylinder began to whirl in its mounting. There was a crackling, like someone scrunching up paper, from a speaker embedded in the wall, and Robert and Lily held their breath.
The recording was blurry at first but soon words could be heard: a sharp skewering voice, barely audible over a soft silver thrum.
“Professor Hartman?” the voice said. “Are you conscious?”
“That’s Mould,” Robert whispered, but Lily shushed him.
“Starting to come round, are we?” said another voice – which sounded distinctly like Roach. “I suppose that means we’re ready to begin.”
Lily’s papa spoke then. “My name’s Grantham,” he stuttered. “Grantham. Not Hartman. You’ve got the wrong person. How did you get onboard?”
“Grantham – G Hartman – Grace Hartman,” Roach said. “It’s not the best of anagram aliases, considering we were the ones who killed your wife in the first place. When we’d worked out your false identity, it wasn’t hard to discover the real registration papers for your mechanicals and get your address. It’s been seven years, Professor. You have been rather a slippery fish to get hold of, but we have you in our sights now, so to speak.”
There was a distinct tapping then that Lily knew with certainty was Roach hitting one of his mirrored eyes with a finger. A shudder ran through her as his broken face surfaced in her memory, like a corpse floating from the depths of a glinting pond.
“I warn you,” Papa was saying – his voice sounded assertive, but Lily could tell he was frightened – “boarding another airship without permission is illegal.”
Roach spoke again. “And what you did was illegal too, Sir. Very illegal.”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“The theft of our master’s perpetual motion machine, Professor Hartman. Where is it?”
There was a crackle on the cylinder.
“I can’t,” Papa said. “It’s hidden.”
“Come, come,” Mr Roach said. “No games.”
Another crackle; and then a scream.
Lily cringed.
There was a pause, filled with ragged breath.
“I…will…tell…you…nothing,” Papa cried. “You may do as you see fit.”
Mr Roach chuckled, and the laugh rippled through Lily, as if the vile man stood right beside her.
“Well, isn’t this a pleasant surprise,” his voice oo
zed. “I’d quite hoped our conversation might take this turn. I was authorized to offer money, but I see now such action would be fruitless. You’re an ethical man, Sir, far too ethical for me, but perhaps you will respond better to this?”
Another scream and a horrible intense whining filled the recording… And then the needle reached the end of the cylinder; with a clunk-click, it raised up and the sound stopped.
Lily slumped against the wall. Suddenly the wave of emotion she’d been holding in for so long rushed over her. It was as if the last glimmer of hope she possessed had been pulled from her chest.
She gazed out of Ladybird’s slanted window, over her snub-nosed prow. In the distance she could see Dragonfly’s parts messily strewn across the glade.
She knew now for certain it was Roach and Mould who’d caused that destruction. They’d tortured her papa and taken everything: Mama’s life, and Robert’s da’s too, Mrs Rust, the other mechanicals, her home. And all for this box; this perpetual motion machine. They’d done so much damage to possess it. They’d kill her and Robert too, if they had the chance, and nothing she could say or do, no help she could call on, would ever stop them.
“Papa’s dead,” she said suddenly. “This whole time I hoped he might be alive, might still come back, but he’s not going to, is he? We should just give them the box – the machine – before they kill us too.”
Robert took a deep breath, his mouth dry. “If we give in now,” he said, “then everyone who’s tried to protect it would’ve died in vain, and we’ll never discover its secret – the truth of what it can do.”
“He’s right, Lily.” Malkin narrowed his black eyes. “There could be dangerous things inside, and clank knows what chaos Roach and Mould could cause with them.”
“I realize the odds don’t look good,” Robert added. “They know everything about us, and we don’t have a clue about them, so how can we ever win? But we have to win, Lil. We have to. Because of them, I’ve got no one. They’re evil, but we can’t give up. We’ve got the one thing they want – the one thing that’ll draw them to us. We can make them suffer. We mustn’t let them get away with what they did. And we must never give in. Not ever.”
Malkin nodded in agreement. “This box is the only thing we have against them,” he said. “The only clue left. When we get to London we’ll ask your godfather to alert the proper police, then use the promise of the perpetual motion machine to draw Roach and Mould into some kind of trap.”
“What do you know, Malkin?” Lily yelled. “You didn’t know anything before we read Papa’s letter.” She kicked at the box, bundled in its blanket. “If only we had the key.”
Malkin said nothing, just narrowed his eyes and tipped back his ears, staring at her with that foxy superiority of his.
“If you’re going to London,” Anna said, “I can take you. I have to go back anyway. File my copy and check in with my editor at The Daily Cog. I could play him this recording, and see if we can help you find out anything more about this Roach and Mould or the perpetual motion machine. There must be information about it somewhere, don’t you think?”
Lily didn’t answer; she felt as if they were all drifting far away from her, and at any moment she might fall into a comatose state.
She could hear Robert speaking a long way off. “Thank you, Anna. A ride to London and anything else you can do, would be greatly appreciated.”
“Let’s put her to bed for a while in my berth, young man. Robbie, was it?”
Lily let them carry her into the passageway. Anna drew back the curtain of the narrow berth, and she and Robert laid Lily carefully on the bed. Then Anna tucked a blanket around her and she drew the curtain, before Lily heard her and Robert step away.
“Come on, Robbie,” the aeronaut said, “I’ve a few more questions, and a job for you in the engine room.”
Lily woke some time later with the odd sensation of moving sideways. The wooden wall of the berth juddered with the thrum of the engine; outside the sky had darkened, and the brass porthole framed a few stars.
She felt around for Malkin, but he wasn’t there, and when she sat up she hit her head on the shelf above the bed. The pile of penny dreadfuls and the airship in its bottle slid from the shelf and landed on the mattress around her, and the typewriter rocked on its nail. Cursing softly, she pulled back the curtain and jumped down from the berth.
Except for the soft chug of a motor, Ladybird’s passage was quiet. The cabin rocked back and forth under her feet, buffeted by the light winds. Lily wandered towards the sound of the engine, rubbing the bump on her head.
She found Robert wedged in the stern of the ship. Standing beside the hissing furnace, which connected to a greasy propeller shaft, he was frying eggs in a pan on the furnace top. Malkin lay curled up at his feet, and something about the two of them together reminded Lily of her papa.
“Hello, sleepyhead, feeling better?” Robert asked. The eggs spattered and hissed in a pan in the belly of the open furnace and toast browned on a fork.
“Look at you,” Lily said. “You’re a proper little cabin boy and no mistake.”
“Anna’s let me take charge of the cooking, and the engines.” Robert opened another door on the front of the furnace with a stick of wood, then he threw in a shovelful of coal. “Keeps me busy, stops me thinking too much… about Da.”
Lily glanced away and pretended to examine the engine. Eight spidery piston legs emerged from the rear of the furnace and turned the prop shaft and various other mechanisms that were crammed into Ladybird’s tapered wooden tail. “This is an amazing device.”
“Isn’t it?” Robert wiped his brow with a sleeve. “Anna built it herself. I’ve been shovelling coal into it for the last few hours. I told her everything while you were asleep, about what’s happened to us. I mean the things she didn’t know – she knew a lot of it anyway. And she promised to help us.”
He flipped the eggs in the pan to cook the runny yolks, then slipped one egg onto each slice of toast. “She even gave me this grub from her belly box.”
“Her what?”
Robert made a face. “It’s what she calls that small box, where she keeps the food, in the footlocker under her berth.”
“Oh.” Lily laughed. “She’s an odd one, isn’t she?”
“But nice. I think we can trust her.” Robert handed Lily a slice of eggy bread and she bit into it ravenously, savouring the warm, soft taste.
When they’d both finished eating, he closed the furnace door and walked with her and Malkin along the passage to the flight deck.
“Ah, she’s awake.” Anna was standing at the helm, steering. She consulted a chronometer on the dash. “You’ve both had a spot of midnight-breakfast, I hope?”
Lily nodded. “It was a feast.”
“Jolly good. Jolly good.”
“Have we made much progress?” Robert asked, brushing away a yolky mark he’d made on his jacket.
“See for yourself.” Anna pointed at a map of Great Britain pinned to the back wall of the cabin. “We’ve passed three push pins, that long piece of thread, and the marmalade stain over the Midlands.”
“How long will it take us to get to London, do you think?” Lily asked. She watched Malkin sniffing away at the four corners of the cabin.
“We’re doing better than I thought.” Anna lined up the sextant. “See the dot there? Means we’re not far off. If this tailwind keeps up we should make it by first light. In a few hours we might get a glimpse of street lamps on the horizon – hundreds there are, like the stars, and when it’s dawn you see them disappear as the lamplighters go round and snuff ’em out.”
“Where are we going to land?” Robert wondered.
Anna consulted the compass. “Depends. Gypsy balloons like Ladybird aren’t welcome in a lot of places and I haven’t paid my air-dues. But there’s atchings out east we could make for.”
“Atchings?” Lily tried out the strange word.
“That’s traveller polari – traveller sp
eak – for a place to weigh anchor.”
Anna turned the ship’s wheel and the thick ropes that looped through the metal eyelets on the wall shifted.
“What are those for?” Lily asked.
“They run along the insides of the balloon to connect the steering column to the port, starboard, and tail rudders,” Anna explained. “One of them breaks and the entire airship goes off course, could hit anything.”
“Strange they’re not outside the gondola,” Lily mused.
“Not so strange,” Anna said. “Your delicate parts are all inside. If not it would hurt a darn sight more when you got hit.”
Robert was examining some of the controls on the dash. “They’re also on the inside so they don’t freeze and break at high altitude,” he explained.
Anna lit up. “He knows!”
“Oh. I see,” Lily said, though she didn’t quite. She examined an odd looking rifle-like gun in a mount on the wall, beside the flight controls.
“And what’s this?”
Anna slapped her fingers away. “Don’t touch that! It’s dangerous. It’s an emergency harpoon – in case of sky pirates.”
“But where’s the harpoon?”
“I don’t have one. There was an emergency…” Anna blinked sleepily. “With sky pirates.” She yawned. “Tell you what, Robbie, why don’t you take the wheel? I think I’ll go grab forty winks. You can steer for a while. You’ll be good for an hour or two, at least, both of you. You can keep each other awake.”
“We’ll manage,” Robert said.
“Reckoned you would.” Anna pointed out a group of stars through the cabin window. “Those constellations are going to move across the sky, but keep the middle star centre of the glass and the compass needle on the S of south and you’ll be heading in the right direction. Wake me when you see those street lamps on the horizon.”
With that she left, and they heard her climbing into the berth behind. Soon there was the sharp tap of typewriter keys, but that drifted off into silence after a while, and Lily assumed the aeronaut had fallen asleep.
Robert furrowed his brow and turned the wheel, keeping Ladybird on a straight bearing, pushing her onwards. The gentle thrumming of the engine filtered through the walls and the heat from the pipes made the cabin pleasantly toasty. Malkin had stretched out in a corner, his body against a warm pipe, and fallen asleep.