Desperation and Decision (2 page)

He pulled open the door of the mail coach and
a woman stepped out. I had a very curious sensation that something
was very, very wrong about that door. One moment it was a wooden
square, and the next it was round, made of brass, more like a
ship's hatch, and lined with golden velvet. The door closed and the
woman approached me.

She was a gypsy beauty, tall,
olive-complexioned, black curls escaping out of her veil. Her dress
was of the most fashionable and expensive, a dark green brocade
with sparkling silver beads and fringe. She held a parasol of green
silk and fringe over her matching hat.

"I have the pleasure of addressing Prince
Florizel of Bohemia, have I not?"

I had not been addressed in that way for some
years. My customers knew me as "Florrie," and some called me simply
"the Bohemian," but few these days knew anything of my past. I
hesitated and the woman gave me a lovely, apologetic smile.

"I am Phoebe Moore-Campbell," she hastened to
explain. I could tell that she was American, but the stamp of a
European polish marked her speech. "Please forgive me for accosting
you on the public street, but I wish to make you a proposal. Oh, I
beg your pardon. That sounded worse still."

She had a musical laugh but I still could not
get a sense of why she had spoken to me, or why her name sounded
familiar to me.

"I am forming an association of people to
investigate and try to put a stop to a criminal organization which
I believe originates here in London but extends throughout the
British Empire, if not beyond. I confess I have had to rely on
secondary sources but I have heard great things about your
commitment to fighting evil and seeking justice. May I beg the
favor of an interview with you this evening? Unfortunately I have
an engagement and must request you to meet my husband Archibald
Campbell and me and some trusted friends rather late, at our suite
in the penthouse apartments of the Bronze Cascade hotel. Will you
please come and hear what we propose -- What I propose?"

"What is it that you think you know about
me?" I could not make sense of a beautiful, wealthy woman inviting
me to a penthouse in the premier hotel in London for a late
tête-à-tête, to talk about fighting evil. It was more surreal than
the fleeting image of a hatch where a mail coach door should
be.

"I'm sorry, but my time is very short just
now. I have tried for months to locate you, and have only just
today succeeded. The other members of the group I propose to create
are en route or are already here. Everyone else has been made aware
of my plan. I truly wish to explain things more clearly to you, and
then if you agree, to invite you to attend our first meeting as a
formal association tomorrow. Can I count on you to come, please,
and will you hear my plan?" the woman pleaded. "This is the most
important thing I've ever done, and I pray God I have chosen the
right people. I also pray that the right people will choose to
pledge their help."

If ever a woman who had no reason to be
desperate still managed to communicate desperation, it was this
woman.

"Very well," I nodded. "But the hotel is not
so far from here and the weather has been very pleasant. I shall
walk. What time do you desire me to appear?"

"No, no, you cannot walk about London so
late. Please. This mail coach will arrive at ten o'clock. Do not be
frightened by it, please. It is perfectly safe."

"Frightened by a mail coach?" I was once
again hesitant. "Why would I be -- ?"

"I really must go." She had been checking a
little watch pin repeatedly. "I'm sorry to be so abrupt, indeed,
I'm being inexcusably rude. Ten o'clock." She whirled, the
red-haired man opened the mail coach door, and she was gone.
Literally, gone. The man climbed up to the box, cracked his whip,
tipped his bowler to me, and the mail coach vaulted into the air
and vanished.

I stood there staring into the sky until
Frank, the little sidewalk sweeper, shuffled by me. "What's comin'
down, Florrie?" he asked, squinting up after me. I tore my gaze
down to the grimy, gray-clad creature.

"Nothing," I said weakly. "It was what went
up that I -- " I stopped. "I just got lost in thought, I suppose.
Good evening to you, Frank."

I dined as usual at the little cafe around
the corner from my shop. The time dragged on abominably while I
wrestled with the strange meeting, the lovely woman and her odd
request, and most of all, the disappearing mail coach into which I
was supposed to trustingly step later this evening. I wavered
between anxiety to know more, to understand what might be asked of
me, and trepidation about what might happen when I did board the
impossible conveyance to the hotel meeting. The fog swirled in and
with it a nasty, soaking drizzle.

Shortly before ten o'clock I stood shivering
outside my tobacconist shop, cursing my stupidity for being out in
this beastly weather and absurdly watching for the mail coach to
drop out of the sky. It simply drove down the street and halted in
front of me, however, eerily silent as before.

"Oy, Princie," the driver said with a tap of
his whip against his bowler and a hop down to the ground. Before he
could get to the door it opened, and instead of the lady I had met
this afternoon, a very handsome, very young man stepped down and
approached me.

His eyes were blue in a pale,
delicately-featured face and his hair was a tousle of golden curls
escaping from beneath a bizarre kind of bronze and leather top hat
with a dark blue stone in the center of the bronze-plate band. He
wore a close-fitted leather jacket trimmed with what seemed to be
bronze plates like the hatband and outfitted with flared bronze
shoulder-pieces. It resembled a suit of armor with a matching
top-hat more than anything.

"Hold on just a tick, Prince." The fellow
kept walking toward me and I had to step clear of him. He stopped
and looked around, puzzled, until he located me again. I had moved
around behind him as I tried to get a peek at the bronze tablet in
his long, finely-boned hands. From it emerged a soft, steady
ticking occasionally broken by a hissing sound. "Need to get you
into the official record."

I looked at him quizzically. He grumbled
something inaudible and fiddled with the device again. This time I
stood in front of him, as he seemed to wish, and by lifting myself
up on my toes and leaning slightly forward I clearly saw dials and
a smooth, translucent surface set into the bronze, with ghostly
clockwork gears and mechanisms visible inside.

The large blue stone on Twist's hat suddenly
went pale and translucent. To my astonishment I saw a faint image
of my own face in the stone. It lasted just a moment and then the
stone returned to its original dark blue.

"Done and done," the little fellow said. "Oh,
by the way, I'm Oliver Twist. It's very wet, isn't it? Will you
step in?" He gestured toward the mail coach. The driver moved to
open the door.

As I approached I looked closely and noted
that the horses seemed a little too patient and perfectly matched,
identical russet drays with thick white leg fringes and black manes
and tails. In fact, they were completely motionless. I reached out
and instead of a horse's shoulder my hand encountered a smooth
leathery and metallic surface. I pulled my hand back as if I had
touched a hot stove.

"What is it?" I breathed.

"It's an airship," Oliver Twist explained. "I
built it. Tod can control it from up there -- " he indicated the
box " -- or I can work it from inside. I created the mail coach
projection because when I keep it at ground level every traffic
constable in the city stops it and asks what sort of license I have
for the thing."

"I do not understand." I knew about airships,
of course, in a general way, but what was this thing I was seeing?
Twist hopped up inside, clearly at home in his creation. It was one
thing to accept that I was about to enter an airship upon the
reassurances of its builder. It was quite another to see this
illusion of an everyday London sight and know that it did not
exist.

The angelic little inventor poked his head
out when I remained standing on the curb, staring into the coach
door at a spacious, bronze and leather salon-like room complete
with velvet curtains, sleek blue gasjets, and amber-tinted
portholes spaced along the sides.

"Tomorrow we can show you a giant catfish
that swam the Atlantic to get here," Twist grinned at me. "Then
you'll think this is tame. Climb aboard. I promised Lady Phoebe I'd
fetch you but I can't if you won't get in."

"You're enjoying this," I gritted, grasping
the handle of the coach door, as if it could reassure me that
ordinary modes of transport still existed. I was doomed to
disappointment, however, since the hatch of the airship felt
nothing like the door of a mail coach. I couldn't begin to describe
the sensation of closing my hand around sleek, warm bronze,
brushing alongside the quilted, velvet-padded hatch interior, and
looking backward at a round, portholed entryway swinging shut with
a soft tick of clockwork.

I seated myself next to the little inventor,
who had gone back to working with his mysterious tablet. I had to
suppress the violent urge to wrench open the portal and try one
last time to touch an ordinary, rectangular wooden mail coach door.
But a gentle hiss and a decided sense of thrust told me that the
ground had suddenly become very far away.

The hatch of the airship opened a short while
later. Tod once again held the hatch, though it seemed an
unnecessary civility on his part, since the door clearly operated
under its own power. As we stepped out I was staggered to see
London's lights glittering all around below me. I stood in an
extraordinary mountaintop sculpture garden of bronze. Animals from
every continent whirred and clicked through preset clockwork-driven
motions and they were breathtakingly realistic. The entire building
was etched with waterfalls in bronze, golden crystal and blue
gaslight. It was decked from top to bottom with bronze clockwork
animals lifting and lowering heads, clockwork trout leaping from
streams made of blue-gaslit and golden crystal, and fountains and
exquisitely detailed bronze trees, foliage and cliffs.

We proceeded to a glass cupola which enclosed
a lift. Down we went into the penthouse of the hotel. I knew from
descriptions that the Bronze Cascade Hotel was built in a circle
around a bronze spiral staircase with padded golden leather
handrails, which in turn wound around a crazed golden crystal and
bronze lift like the one we rode in. A large, luxurious drawing
room stood in the centre of the penthouse suites and into this room
Twist and Tod led me. A small garden area stood in the centre of
the drawing room. The lift was tucked away inside a glittering
semi-circular waterfall, an amber crystal cupola with bronze
fittings. This transparent-floored area allowed for gazing down at
the rest of the hotel. The lift communicated with an entry hall
below where regular guests could access the main elevator and
staircase.