by Dave Butler
“I won’t be in the flotilla officially,” Bob said, and he grinned again. “But I will say that I am becoming very familiar with Waterloo Station.”
“Oh dear.” Henry Clockswain looked up from fussing with his twine. “That almost sounds as if you’re up to mischief.”
“It ain’t mischief exactly.” Bob’s grin got even wider. “But the flotilla men are aeronauts, see? Practical chaps, ’oo care as you know ’ow to do something, an’ not as you ’ave a university degree.”
“Are you saying you’re going to attempt to get the attention of Britain’s aeronauts by…by joining the flotilla uninvited?” The kobold’s eyebrows sprang to the top of his forehead in shock.
Bob winked. “When you ain’t got many cards, mate, you play what you ’ave an’ you bet big.”
“And Mr. Ferris’s Eye? Is it true that it’s an enormous leisure wheel, right next to the station?” Charlie had read everything he could about the London Eye.
“It’s true—built for the Jubilee itself. Starts with paying passengers at the very moment Queen Victoria departs from Waterloo Station, ’eaded for Buckingham Palace an’ the garden party.”
“Bap, let’s go see it,” Charlie urged his father.
“Harrumph,” Mr. Pondicherry snorted.
“I don’t know why they’re even ’aving the party in the garden,” Bob continued. “Don’t you reckon Emperor Franz-Joseph an’ King Humberto an’ Prince Bismarck an’ all them others would like a go on the wheel? Seems like a waste of a trip, come all the way from Europe an’ not ’ave a spin on the Eye. ’Ave they got leisure wheels in…where is it Humberto comes from, again?”
“Italy,” said his friend. “And it’s Umberto.”
“Right. You know your foreign lavatories better than I do.”
“Dignitaries, Bob.”
“But the Eye is for the people,” Charlie said. “Not the lavatories.”
Henry Clockswain chuckled. “Goodness gracious.”
“I mean dignitaries,” Charlie said. “I mean, maybe they’ll ride the wheel later.”
“Seems like rather a lot of to-do for an anniversary,” Oliver Chattelsworthy said sourly.
“Yeah, it’s a lot. An’ when you’ve been Queen of England fifty years, Sir Oliver, I’ll see to it we throw you an even bigger party.”
The boys shook hands with Mr. Pondicherry once more. Bob gleefully grasped hands with Mr. Clockswain too, but Oliver Chattelsworthy just frowned and nodded. Then they tipped their hats and left. Charlie looked over their shoulders, trying to spot the long-faced, sneering Sinister Man. He didn’t see anyone.
“That’s it for me, then,” Henry Clockswain said. He unwound twine from his fingers and wrapped it loosely around the folded brown paper. “I’ve put a couple of small pieces into my rucksack for this evening. Are you sure you can finish the spectacles and the gyroscopes both tonight?”
“Of course.” Mr. Pondicherry smiled. “Stay and eat with us. I have some lamb.”
“Oh, er…I’ve a bit of bread and cheese that will go bad if I don’t eat it. But thank you, Raj.” The kobold scooped up his rucksack, fiddling with its buckles for a moment before hoisting it onto his shoulder.
“Good evening, Mr. Clockswain,” Charlie said. Henry Clockswain sometimes forgot to say hello or goodbye to Charlie.
“Ah, yes, Charlie, thank you”—the kobold smiled back, blinking furiously—“and good night to you, too.” He pulled the lever in the bottom left corner of the shop’s front window; with a soft whirring, the wide brass slats crossing the windows rotated into vertical position and shut tight. The kobold let himself out.
Then came the evening routine.
First Charlie read the Almanack, as well as Sir Walter Scott’s Among Jacobite Dwarfs; Captain Burton’s Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Annotated and Illustrated Edition, Including Historical Bibliography on the Taxonomy of Djinns, Afreets, and Shaitans; several of the shorter lyrics from Child’s Popular Ballads; and even Mrs. Beeton’s Notes on Proper Management of the Modern Steam-Powered Household. Meanwhile his bap continued to work, and the lamb stewed in rosemary, tomato, and red wine on a rack of steaming hot pipes in the corner of the workshop.
Then they ate, under the serious but loving smile of Queen Victoria. Charlie had only the smallest amount, a cup of the stewed lamb and half of one of Henry Clockswain’s plums.
After dinner he lay on his cot in the corner of the workshop while his father smoked his pipe, rubbed Charlie’s shoulders and back in a gentle circle, and told Charlie stories. Most of the tales were about what life was like in the Punjab. The Punjab was a magical place where the dowries of princesses beautiful beyond imagining were paid in rubies the size of your fist and the riflemen of the East India Company fought princes mounted on war elephants.
“Why did you ever come here?” Charlie asked. He had asked the question before. “How could you leave the elephants for…for this?”
“I came here,” Mr. Pondicherry answered, with as much drama in his voice as he’d had the first time he’d answered the question, “because if I had not come here, I would not have been able to have my beautiful son.”
Charlie sighed. “I know, Bap.”
Then Charlie’s father returned to work on the second lens of the Close-Reading Spectacles and on the Articulated Gyroscopes. These were two linked series of spheres within spheres, each series bolted onto a seven-foot-long leather belt. All the spheres were studded with cranks and dials and well-oiled cogs so tiny that Charlie could barely see them. Not wanting to distract his father, Charlie went upstairs.
Charlie and his father worked, ate, and slept on the ground floor. Above the shop was the attic, a low-ceilinged room full of shelves. The attic held books, mannequins, tools, diagrams, spare mechanical parts, clothing, and outright junk. Where the ceiling sloped down on one side, the attic became a low crawl space over most of the shop. The crawl space was hidden behind a plaster wall and was accessible by squirming through a narrow crack in one corner.
Charlie reshelved the books he had been reading and lay on his belly. He wriggled forward to the wall above the street, where he planned to spend the next several hours looking out the window.
Charlie wished that Pondicherry’s Clockwork Invention & Repair were located on a busy street, such as Cheapside or the Strand. Even better would have been a view of one of London’s famous markets, Charing Cross or Covent Garden. Charlie would have liked to see more people, both in front of the shop and through its doors. Instead, during the day he watched his father’s customers. At night he peeked out the attic window and watched the alley.
The Gullet did see traffic, all of it on foot because it was so narrow. Charlie saw mostly hats and shoulders, and he tried to guess what business each passerby could be up to. He assigned some of them to be secret agents of the Crown in pursuit of foreign villains, others mad inventors pacing frantically to stimulate their powers of creativity, and yet other philanthropists carrying out missions of charity, distributing the wealth of a successful industrialist to the poor folk of East London.
Charlie’s imagining was interrupted by the appearance of three persons. They marched through the dim, window-leaked light of the alley and stopped at the door of the shop. Two of them were obviously hulders, from their size and their huge, bull-like heads. Charlie began to feel nervous when he noticed that one of them carried a heavy ax.
He became even more nervous when he realized that the third person was the dark-haired, sneering Sinister Man whom Charlie had seen earlier in the day on Irongrate Lane, and again through the shop window.
But Charlie Pondicherry was truly seized by panic when the hulder with the ax raised it over his shoulder and swung it down hard into the door.
Crack!
“Stay there!” Charlie’s bap hissed. “And whatever happens, my boy, stay hidden!”
Charlie ran halfway down the stairs and hesitated.
“Go!” His father shooed him back up to the atti
c.
Charlie crept to the top of the steps and watched.
Mr. Pondicherry rushed to the back wall of the workshop, just within Charlie’s sight. He threw open two tall wooden shutters to reveal a window that led into another alley—even smaller than the Gullet, and if it had a name, Charlie had never heard it—at the rear of the shop. Behind the shutters, the window was barred by a dense latticework of iron.
Crack!
Mr. Pondicherry grabbed a short brass rod at the side of the window. This was the emergency lever, which Charlie knew to pull in case of fire. Mr. Pondicherry threw his whole weight into yanking the rod down.
With a sproing! and a k-k-k-krang! the iron bars bounced out of the window and crashed to the ground. Charlie’s father rushed three steps up the stairs to call to his son again.
“If I am gone, go to Wales! Go to a mountain called Cader Idris and find Caradog Pritchard. Tell him you’re my son!” He smiled at Charlie, then frowned. “Now hide!”
Charlie froze.
Wales? His mind spun in circles. His father had never mentioned Wales before. Charlie only knew that Wales existed, and that it was a country to the west of London, because he had read of it in books. Why Wales?
Crack!
Charlie squeezed into the crawl space. The entrance was a tight horizontal gap into which neither Mr. Pondicherry nor the Sinister Man could have fit, let alone the trolls. There was no floor in the crawl space, only the tops of the oak beams that crossed the ceilings of the rooms below and the plaster between them. If he slipped off the beams, Charlie would fall through to the ground floor, so he moved carefully. He made his way to the part of the crawl space that lay over the shop’s reception room.
A spray of brilliant light shattered the darkness, shooting up through two holes in the plaster, poked earlier that day by Grim Grumblesson. Charlie lay along the beam and pressed his eye to the nearest hole.
“Run, Charlie!” Mr. Pondicherry shouted into the workroom, backing away from it.
Crack!
The handle of the shop’s front door and one of its big brass hinges gave way at the same moment. The door sagged into the room.
Too-who-ng-ng-ng! shrieked the door owl as it sprang from the wall.
The two hulders surged in. The troll with the ax came first and now Charlie saw that the second held a long rifle. They stooped under the shop’s ceiling. Charlie pulled his face back a couple of inches; if either of these hulders was as clumsy as Grim Grumblesson, he might lose an eye.
But he kept watching. Smoke blew up and around the hulder holding the ax. The troll must be smoking, but Bap’s pipe smoke was sweet and woody and comforting, and the smoke the hulder was blowing didn’t smell like anything at all.
Mr. Pondicherry spun to face the trolls.
Men rushed into the reception room from the workshop beyond. They were big men with dirty woolen trousers, shirtsleeves rolled up past the elbows, and faces unshaved. They held heavy naked cutlasses in their hands, each with a basket of metal around the handle and only one sharpened edge. Pirate swords, Charlie thought.
When he saw the men, Charlie understood why his father had opened the shop’s emergency exit but then hadn’t used it to flee. These armed men had been waiting in the alley beyond.
Charlie’s father was trapped, turning first one way and then the other between the two groups of rough-faced enemies. Behind the hulders, the Sinister Man now stepped into the reception room.
“You!” Mr. Pondicherry gasped.
The Sinister Man was silent.
“I have nothing to do with the Iron Cog anymore,” Mr. Pondicherry said slowly. “And I have said nothing to anyone.” His pronunciation was especially clear when he said the Iron Cog.
The Iron Cog—the three words rang heavy in Charlie’s mind. Charlie had seen a cog at the throat of the Sinister Man. Was that the Iron Cog?
“How nice.” The Sinister Man waved at some of the sword-wielding men. “You two, find the thing. You, the broadsheets. You, gather up everything in the shop that the good doctor is working on.”
“I will yell and the police will come,” Charlie’s father threatened.
The men scattered to their assigned tasks. “Oh, yeah?” one of them said, laughing roughly. “ ’Ey, Captain…this citizen ’ere wants to make a complaint.” He pulled a stack of large sheets of paper from inside his dirty shirt and set one on the reception table before disappearing into the workroom.
The captain was a heavy man with pouchy eyes. “I shall file a report. Shop broken into, shopkeeper abducted. Mind you, I don’t think the police will do anything about this particular crime. Since, you know, we’re the ones abducting you.” He smiled at Bap, but it was not a reassuring smile.
“You won’t find my son,” Mr. Pondicherry said.
“Your son, Dr. Singh?” The Sinister Man laughed harshly, and the captain chuckled.
“He’s long gone.” Mr. Pondicherry looked at the back window.
Heavy booted feet tromped up the stairs and kicked around in the attic. Charlie tried to lie still as he heard shelves toppled over and boxes smashed. He mostly succeeded, though his hands shook.
“Nothing!” The men thumped back down the stairs. “It must ’ave gone out the back window an’ we ain’t seen it.” They sounded like Heaven-Bound Bob, only cruel and hard.
The Sinister Man shrugged. “We have the doctor.” Why did the Sinister Man refer to Charlie’s father as the doctor and Dr. Singh?
Below, the hulder with the ax grabbed Mr. Pondicherry. Charlie’s bap struggled, but in vain, as the Sinister Man snapped an iron collar around his neck and locked it. Then he handed the end of the chain that hung from the collar to the second hulder.
Charlie gripped the beam he was resting on so hard his fingers gouged out splinters. He wished he were bigger, or there were more of him, or he were armed. If only he had a pistol, he’d rush downstairs and free his father.
“Cowards,” he muttered.
But he didn’t have a pistol, and he was only a boy, so he couldn’t stand up to trolls and men with swords. And also, his bap had told him to hide. Charlie had brought this disaster on his bap by being disobedient—the Sinister Man had followed Charlie back from Irongrate Lane. He wouldn’t make it worse by being disobedient again.
Charlie hid. He trembled as the Sinister Man and his henchmen led his father away. At the end of the line of armed trolls and thugs came two men carrying crates. In those crates Charlie saw his father’s life—the Articulated Gyroscopes, the Close-Reading Spectacles, and everything else he was working on—carted away in two smallish heaps of jumbled brass and steel.
He knew he had no chance of fighting the men, but the sight of the crates pushed Charlie into action. If he couldn’t rescue his bap, at least he could follow the kidnappers. Maybe he could find an opportunity to free his father later.
Stretching carefully but quickly from beam to beam over the plaster, Charlie moved to the exit. He found it blocked by a fallen bookcase. No way was he strong enough, Charlie thought, to push the shelves aside by himself. He didn’t even waste his time trying.
He was being left behind. Charlie rushed back over to the holes in the plaster and looked down.
Two people were hard at work in the shop’s reception room below him. They were short, and they occasionally looked up as they worked, so Charlie had a good view of them. They were dwarfs, also known, as the Almanack explained, as dwerger. Their long beards were braided in forks down their chests, and they dressed in wild colors, with puffy sleeves and striped pants and scarves wrapped around their heads. They wore gold rings on many fingers and in their ears.
They were fixing the door. They had already replaced both hinges and the destroyed planks and were now putting the final brass screws into the repaired lock. Charlie thought they must be friendly. He almost yelled to them through the ceiling—
but he caught himself.
It was the middle of the night. They must have come with the Sinister
Man. Why would the Sinister Man have brought dwarfs with him to repair the door he shattered?
They were covering up the crime. If they cleaned up the mess and went away, no one would know that anything had happened.
Soon the dwarfs finished their work and left. They turned down the lights as they went, plunging the reception room into deep shadow.
Charlie lay on the beam and thought.
Someone had kidnapped his father. His father had expected it and had even prepared an escape route, but the kidnappers had known about the exit. Mr. Pondicherry had known his kidnappers, or at least he knew the Sinister Man, and they had talked about something called the Iron Cog. The Sinister Man wore a pin shaped like a cog. The kidnappers had tried to take Charlie, too. Finally they had taken all Mr. Pondicherry’s projects and cleaned up the mess they left behind them. Other than some papers, which they had left on purpose.
It made no sense.
And it was all Charlie’s fault. The Sinister Man had seen Charlie on Irongrate Lane and had followed him home.
Charlie curled into a ball.
He almost surrendered, he almost just lay still and quit, but a tiny part inside him refused. The men who had kidnapped his bap would want him to give up. What would they not want him to do? Charlie asked himself. They would not want him to rescue his bap, so that was exactly what he should be doing.
But how?
He needed to see the papers. That meant that he needed to get out of the crawl space. But the only entrance was blocked.
He knew what he had to do.
Charlie stood as straight as the low ceiling would let him and stepped off the beam. He placed both feet squarely between the holes left by the troll’s horns. To his surprise, the plaster held.
So Charlie jumped, straight up and down, and collapsed through a cloud of plaster dust into a tangle of knees and elbows on the floor below.
The impact jarred him, but Charlie wasn’t hurt. He stood and began to dust himself clean. The shop was quiet and empty now. The invaders had replaced the workroom window bars and reclosed the escape door, too. Only the dust and plaster—silvery gray in the darkness—looked out of place, and the door owl, which hung upside down from the wall by a single screw, its eyes and beak open and its wings stuck in their extended position.