Flights and Chimes and Mysterious Times (13 page)

Jack tried to console himself with the thought that the Lady had done this before, or so Beth said. It wasn’t really his fault, not if she had people hanged whenever she was angry.

“Doesn’t look like rain. Fancy a walk? Oh, don’t look like such a Nellie. You’ll be fine with your goggles and topper.”

In a careful hand, Beth left a note for the doctor to find when he returned from the market with food for himself and Jack. The goggles blurred the words and turned the world to smudges, letting through only the most vivid colors. The ladies on the street in their sweet-shop dresses, all lemon drops and strawberry trifles and peppermints, the hems streaked with muck. The air could hardly be deemed
fresh
,
but it was a relief to be out, exploring, forgetting for a brief time words printed in inky headlines and rattling around his head.

He suspected the doctor wouldn’t be very happy that they’d ventured out without him, and this was a thrill all by itself. Jack had never had anyone to get in trouble with before. Mrs. Pond was very fond of saying he did a good job of that all by himself.

Freshly wound and oiled, Beth walked quickly, neat buckled shoes clicking on the pavement. Jack hurried to keep up. Faeries skated over the grime on the street, wings shining. A barrow boy sold apples red as poison, a smile on his face as he sniffed through the grille at his nose.

Somewhere, music played. A jaunty tune, notes skipping along the fiddle strings.

“Where are we going?” He’d thought, at first, that she must be taking him to the park in which he’d first seen her standing in the birdcage, but realized that was in another direction.

“A surprise!” Her laughter sounded like an armful of copper pipes dropped to the floor.

She led him through streets and alleys, skirting the monstrous carriages that seemed to be everywhere, keeping Jack moving too fast for anyone to get a proper look at him. For nearly an hour they walked, until Jack’s chest
hurt with breathing. He was about to ask her to stop, just so’s he could catch his air, when she did, all of a sudden.

“This way,” she commanded, darting into a lane no wider than a grown man’s shoulders. Halfway down was a door, rotted through in parts, lock hanging useless and rusted.

They climbed a set of stairs that groaned and sulked with each footfall, winding up past other doors that apparently held no interest to Beth as Jack gasped and wheezed behind her.

The top of the building was one great room with windows at either end, half of them smashed to pieces or filched for the glass. Shards squeaked beneath their shoes. A flock of metal birds crowed, wings ringing as they flew overhead in a circle around a still one in the middle of the floor, separated from its bent wings. Jack didn’t know whether to think of it as broken or dead.

He pulled the goggles from his face and wiped the window with his hand. On the street below, a crowd was beginning to form with all the sparkling celebration of a party.

She had brought him to the gallows.

•  •  •

“It’s starting. Come see.”

Jack’s stomach slithered. Beth had fashioned herself a seat from an old crate, brushing the dust from it first so as
to not spot her dress. She sat by the window, beckoning to him, and her smile felt out of place amid the glass dust and the squawking.

On the street, the crowd had doubled—nay, tripled. Elbows nudged and jerked. A woman lost her hat. It fell to the ground, was trampled to straw not fit for horses and a sad bit of ribbon.

All heads were turned to the wooden platform. A guard in plumes and brass stood near the noose, occasionally shouting to the people to be silent. They did not listen, if even they heard him at all, until all at once, a hush fell over everyone. A great carriage, snorting steam that swirled around and through the bars on the one high window in back, approached. It stopped in a spot set aside for it behind the gallows. A driver—another guard, plumage just the same—got out.

Jack’s breath caught in his sore chest. From nowhere, the first face he recognized appeared.

Here Lorcan did not wear the neat suit in which he’d visited Jack’s home under the guise of being Mother’s new spiritualist. And of course he knew now that it had been a ruse all along, that what the soft-spoken, intriguing Mr. Havelock had wanted all along was not to summon the dead, but to take away a very-much-alive Jack.

No, here Lorcan wore a rich frock coat of bottle-green
velvet, a flower sprouting from the lapel. His breeches were neatly buckled, boots polished to a shine. On his head, a topper bound in brass cocked slightly to one side.

“Always looks just the same,” said Beth. Jack did not answer.

Several more guards nudged the crowd back, so’s they could open the doors of the carriage. Jack closed his eyes for a moment, but they would not stay shut no matter how tight he squeezed them.

It was just a man. A man like any other. The sleeve of his thin shirt flapped in the breeze, empty of an arm to keep it in place. Perhaps they had taken the arm, or the man never had enough coin to buy one at all. A uniformed hangman stood beside him.

The guards surrounded him, chivvied him up the stairs. The man’s feet did not seem to want to move.

He could stop it. Run down the stairs and out into the crowd, hollering at the top of his lungs for Lorcan, who would know him straightaway. There’d be no need for the noose to be tightened around the man’s neck as they were doing just now.

Beth’s mouth opened with a click.

Jack turned away, eyes fixed on the bird on the floor. It was already dead. Still, he knew the moment the trapdoor fell away. Twenty thousand gasps and twenty
thousand cheers smothering the sound of creaking wood.

“That was much faster than I imagined,” said Beth plainly. Crescent-moon bruises purpled on Jack’s palms.

“It was horrible,” he said. Just the thought was dreadful enough.

She thought about this for a moment. “Yes, yes I suppose it was. I don’t understand, you know, not very much. Not being born the way others were, like you were. No chance of me dying same as others, neither.”

But Jack listened with only half an ear. The guards were pulling the man from the hole, slipping the rope from a neck that was surely never meant to bend at such an angle. They laid him out on the planks.

His feet still twitched.

A fog like the one that swathed the sky cleared from Jack’s mind.

“We should get back. Dr. Snailwater will be missing us,” he said, careful to keep his voice very normal, however unlikely it was that Beth would sense a difference at all. They waited until Lorcan had climbed into a carriage, until its stream of smoke was lost around the next corner. A silly precaution, considering, but one that must be made.

Under cover of the departing crowd, Jack once more disguised, they left the gallows and set their aim for
Harleye Street. The sun had dropped below the ash, lending a lightness to the evening it did not quite deserve.

Jack’s belly still did not feel right. Whether that was due to what he had seen or what was to come, he wasn’t certain. Both, likely.

“I should tar the pair of you,” said the doctor the moment they pushed through the door, dropping a hammer with such force the table on which it landed shook. “Gallivanting off like that.” His shock of hair was wilder than usual, as if he’d been clutching at it. Jack tugged off the goggles and saw a few white strands trapped in the hinges of Dr. Snailwater’s fingers.

“I wanted to go for a walk,” said Beth. “We were perfectly safe. Not even a drop of rain.”

“Yes, well.” The doctor huffed, and Jack knew this was not what he had been concerned about; that his worries were almost certainly closer to the truth than what Beth let on with her sweet, innocent smile. “Upstairs, both. And hands washed, Jack. There’s a stew.”

It was good stew, rich and thick, brown gravy heavy with carrots and onions, just like the food at school. As was her habit, Beth drank her oil and retired to a chair in the sitting room with a book, reading until her eyes moved too slowly, her fingers sluggish at turning a page. Her key traveled its final few spins, her eyelids dropped.

“I’ve had word from Xeno,” said the doctor, pouring a cup of tea. “He’ll be ’round tomorrow.”

It would be of no use, whatever Xeno had learned. The doorway was gone, destroyed forever. Jack believed the voice, for it had not lied about the hangings.

He thought of the twitching foot.

“All right,” Jack said quietly.

Dr. Snailwater squinted, tapping his brass fingertips against the china. “Hmmm. See yourself to bed now.”

The blankets still choked, and Jack lay in his nightclothes, imagining himself climbing the stairs to the noose. All the faces agog, ready to gasp in surprise though they weren’t surprised at all. The planks groaned; the rope was rough around his throat. It took the hangman a long while to tighten it, being as Jack’s neck was so small, for he was only a boy.

He started awake, ears pricked. No sound, save the usual chugs and clunks, came from the workshop. All the lamps were dark, wicks cooling in the night. Dr. Snailwater had gone to his bed.

In silence, Jack found his shirt, trousers, socks. Beth would not wake, not when he dropped a shoe or from the scratching of the pencil as, on the back of the note she had written earlier in the day, he scribbled his own.

He took nothing with him but for that which he’d worn or had when he’d arrived. The topper and goggles he set
on the table beside the crystal ball that wasn’t as useless as Dr. Snailwater made it out to be. In his pocket rested the compass Mrs. Pond had bought for him.

Jack could no longer remember how many days ago that was. Perhaps, if he ever found himself home again, it would be to a London where a year, or ten, had passed for every day he’d been gone. And so perhaps it was best that he never would.

Little boys take what they’re given and don’t complain,
said a voice in his head, but it was a friendly one, this time. Mrs. Pond’s voice.

Outdoors was heavy with a squirming, darting, fluttering darkness. Creatures moved just beyond reach or sight, except for the tiny faeries who continued their lamp-glow dances.

He did not get lost, or frightened, as often as he’d feared he might. A few times something oily and slurred shouted at him from the shadows, but he quickened his steps and they did not follow.

The clock cloaked itself in ash and cloud. Jack followed the bells rolling over the night, then the river’s lazy, rhythmic whisper.

At the base of the tower, two guards stood, feathers in their hats tickling the shreds of light from a nearby streetlamp. Even in the soupy dim Jack could see, behind
them, the bright, new wooden door where the magical one had been. Just an ordinary door now.

“And who might you be, then?” asked one of them, peering at Jack. “Bit late for little wretches to be out, isn’t it?”

Jack’s throat went very dry. “I’m Jack,” he said. “You’re waiting for me.”

Everything seemed to happen at once. A hand clamped down on his shoulder, too pointy to be real. The guard’s metal lungs clanked in his chest, breath close to Jack’s ear. An imp darted from the shadows to run away in a knife flash of silver.

Moments later, a hammering, rattling dawned and grew louder—a carriage. Jack held his breath. It had scarcely pulled to a stop when the rear door opened.

“Little Jack Foster,” said Lorcan. “I knew you would come.”

P
ERFECT, HE IS.”

“Nearly. Bit grubby.”

“Bath’ll soon sort that out.”

The room was filled with chattering Jack only half heard. He was too busy gazing—or perhaps gaping was a better word. Once he’d thought his own house was grand enough, but this was something else entirely. Rich gold covered the walls and ceilings. Steam drifted gently from lamps on silk-covered tables, the light turning the wine color to blood red in spots.

“Wherever did you find him?”

“I shouldn’t think,” said Lorcan, “that it would be any business of yours.”

“Come with me,” said a girl. Jack thought of her as a girl in the way that he had been taught to view anyone in an apron as a girl. Except Mrs. Pond.

Lorcan’s hand pinched Jack’s shoulder hard enough to bruise and let him go.

Jack’s heart thudded, but he let the girl nudge him through a set of tall wooden doors. Here a marble floor grew seamlessly into a wide, curved staircase.

“Up you go.”

And up he went, to a corridor of closed doors and shadows, of dark portraits and carpet that thirstily drank in both their footsteps.

“This one’s yours, fit for a son of the Lady’s,” said the girl, her hand on a doorknob. Jack felt as if he’d swallowed several of those steel-winged faeries, but he followed her in.

The room shimmered. It was as if he were underwater, in a diving helmet, breathing as blues and greens rippled everywhere around him. Beside an enormous four-poster bed, a tiny dragon sat in a cage, snoring gentle puffs of steam.

The girl caught him looking. “Aye, the Lady wishes you to have a pet,” she said. He moved closer. It was about twelve inches high and had hinged wings like the faeries, though bigger and a bit pointier at the ends. Most of the rest of it was a mass of gears and rivets and fiddly things, all covered in small, flat scales. Its head and feet were smooth,
rather as if they’d been cast in a mold, though they couldn’t have been. As he watched, the creature blinked its red eyes and opened its mouth to yawn.