The Custodian of Marvels (8 page)

A thought – a ridiculous thought – had taken root in my mind. I had reasoned that the goal of my action was to confound the Duke of Northampton and enable my safe return to the Kingdom. But if the corrupt Patent Office official could be exposed and brought to book, could not also John Farthing and I be friends?

At the end of the row of townhouses I stopped and forced myself to breathe more slowly. I could not allow such foolishness in my mind. I would put it away entirely and go about my business as planned. Yet, when I turned and headed back, I realised that I was smiling. Indeed, I could not stop myself.

On my previous visit I had sent a boy into the building with a message. But this day I found myself opening the front door and stepping into an austerely furnished lobby. A young clerk stood behind a high wooden counter. On seeing me he folded away the newspaper he had been reading.

“May I help you?” he asked, in a voice that seemed older than his years.

“I wish to talk to an agent.”

“You have an appointment?”

“I have not.”

He slid a ledger across the desk, opened it at a black ribbon and traced his finger down a column of copperplate writing, too fine for me to read upside down.

“Could I suggest a week on Thursday?” he said. “Two thirty in the afternoon. Agent Blake could see you then.”

“It’s Agent Farthing I need to see. And I’d hoped he could see me directly.”

“But without an appointment–”

“I believe he’ll at least want to know I’m here.”

The young clerk closed his ledger. “Your name?”

“Elizabeth.”

“Your family name?”

“He’ll know who I am.”

I expected to be sent on my way, but he nodded towards a high-backed wooden chair opposite the entrance. “Please wait.”

The chair seemed to have been constructed for someone with a different body shape to my own. Horizontal struts pressed against my spine and the seat was too high, so that only my toes touched the floor. But I did not mind. I wondered if John Farthing’s office faced the front or the back of the building and what hours he kept.

A door opened close by, causing me to jump. But it was only another clerk, going about his business, a bunch of green cardboard files under one arm. He did not even glance at me in passing and was swiftly through the lobby and out the other side.

I could hear movement upstairs – the crisp tapping of hard soled shoes walking across a wooden floor. There were fainter sounds in the background. The creaking that every house makes. The flow of water in pipes.

Then the young clerk returned. I stood, ready.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“How so?”

“You cannot see the agent you requested.”

“Is he not here?”

“He wishes you to know that he is unavoidably and permanently engaged.”

I let the clerk book me an appointment with Agent Blake, giving my name as Elizabeth Underwood, an alias I had used before. He transcribed the time and date of the appointment onto a slip of stiff paper and passed it across the desk to me, though he was fastidious in avoiding contact with my hand. I thanked him and left.

I was no longer smiling.

Opposite the Patent Office building there was a library set back from and above the road. In the small garden at the front, under the shade of a tree, I waited and watched. Before the revolution the building would have been used for Christian worship and the grounds for burial. Always with one eye on the road, I strolled the perimeter, pretending to read the inscriptions on the gravestones, which had been arranged as a kind of ornamental boundary wall.

At half past five in the afternoon, the last patrons left the library and the great doors boomed closed behind them. Then, within minutes, people started to emerge from John Farthing’s offices. There were young and old, but all were men and all dressed resolutely in grey. I observed a mixture of top hats and bowlers. And then among them I saw a centre-creased hat with a wide brim. It was the same one he had worn on our first meeting.

He was a man with an easy stride that looked out of place on a cobbled street in Nottingham. He never seemed to be hurrying, but as I set out to follow, I found myself having to throw in extra steps to keep him in sight.

I do not know if I was seen by any of the others who came out of that building. I do not know if anyone watched me or followed. I kept John Farthing in view all the way up Stoney Street and Warser Gate. Then he picked up speed and began to pull away. I lost view of him in Bottle Lane. Forgetting myself, I ran. I knew that people were staring. If I had thought about it, I would have known the risk. There were still fugitive posters bearing my likeness. If one person had recognised me, my life would have been over. But I kept running, turning right up Bridlesmith Gate for no reason but that it felt to be the way he would have gone.

Then I saw the grand columns of the Council House, and striding along beside it, John Farthing. I caught up with him on the wide plaza in front of the building. He must have heard my footsteps because he stopped and turned. I was out of breath.

“Miss Barnabus,” he said, his voice strained by some emotion that I couldn’t read.

“Mr Farthing.”

“What possessed you to come to the office? Don’t you know how dangerous it is for you?”

“It’s the Duke… the Duke of Northampton. He’s done the same thing… again. Another girl. Another family.”

Farthing opened his mouth and closed it again.

“We must stop him,” I gasped. “Don’t you see? With this… A fresh trail. We can find the agent who did it. We can…” I faltered, tears running down my cheeks.

“No.” He was shaking his head.

I stepped towards him, but he held up his hands, as if warning me away. People had stopped to stare.

“But you must help,” I said. “Please.”

He took a step backwards. “I’m sorry. But I have no more disguises from you. I loved you, Elizabeth. But that way is closed. I’m an agent of the Patent Office. You know what that means. Celibacy. For life. You shouldn’t have come. We stand on opposite sides of a great breach. It is too much for me to bear. If we meet again, it will be as enemies. This is the end.”

Some minutes after John Farthing had strode away, an elderly couple approached me and asked if I needed help. The woman took my hand. She wore a jet ring and pinched cuffs. Her fingers were very pale. I do not know why these details were important, but I noticed them. I seemed to see every wrinkle in her aged skin. The two of them looked so alike in face that I took them to be brother and sister. Other people passed by in that busy square, making an art of looking the other way. A nurse pushing a perambulator, three students with battered satchels, two men carrying bags and carpenters’ tools. The flagstones beneath my feet were worn smooth.

“My dear? Can we take you somewhere?”

The woman was still holding my hand.

“No. Thank you, no.”

She unclipped her purse and withdrew a clean, white handkerchief. This she placed in my hand before guiding it to my cheek, drying the tear streaks. My nose was running. Suddenly I was aware of a plainly dressed woman standing alone on that wide plaza, in view of all, hundreds of eyes, surreptitiously stealing glances. The woman was me.

“I’d better go,” I said, offering back the handkerchief.

“You keep it, dear.” She closed my fingers around it with hers.

I should have liked to say thank you, but no more words would come. I turned and walked away.

I cannot say when the decision was made. Only that it was as I walked away from the Council House that I became aware of it. But, in truth, I seemed to have been making it for many years. Perhaps I had not been ready before then – my skills and resolve not fully honed. Or perhaps I just needed a big enough push. But I think it is more likely that until that moment there had always been some thread of hope. The illusion that my destiny could take any other course.

When I returned to the boat, Tinker was already asleep, curled up next to the stove. The candle lantern did not disturb him. I looked to the aft wall at the Spirit of Freedom. I had imagined her as many things. When she was first revealed to me, she had seemed the plaything of the sculptor. But her expression had suggested a different story – a woman more in control of the sculptor than the other way around. As I sailed the waterways of the Republic, she took on a different meaning, suggested by the name. Freedom. But now I saw her as she surely was – naked, stripped of every encumbrance. Supremely vulnerable. And thus, supremely dangerous.

I ate some food. It was a mechanical process. I tried to sleep. At three in the morning I gave up, and set wood and coal in the firebox. With the moon almost full, I could steam without a lookout on the prow.

By the time Tinker awoke, we were already on the Grand Union Canal heading south. He didn’t ask where we were going. He sat with me on the steering platform, chewing on a hunk of bread. And when the boiler pressure grew low he hopped down and started shovelling coal.

By dawn we were approaching North Leicester. We passed the spur that would lead to the wharf on which I’d once lived. I did not look along it for fear of seeing someone from my previous life.

“Are you ill?” asked Tinker, blurting the question as if he’d been holding it back.

“No,” I said.

He continued to stare at me. I turned my face away, towards the back gardens of houses that bordered the canal.

Soon there were factories on both sides and the sulphurous tang of coal smoke mixed with the smells from the warehouses – tar and hemp and bone meal and leather. The morning light touched the walls of terracotta brick but seemed to give them no colour.

Mine was not the only boat approaching the border crossing empty. It was common practice for captains to stop short and unload. Lines of porters were a familiar sight trotting through the backstreets of Leicester on the way to the many illegal crossing points. Each man would carry two great boxes, one on each side of him, dangling from a pole balanced across his shoulders. I had often been amazed by the loads thus carried, stout poles flexing under the weight of cargo.

Mathematics made the trade inevitable. The hiring of porters, fees paid to the owners of the illegal crossing points and the cost of lost time, when added together, amounted to less than the import duty thus avoided. Once on the other side of the border, the porters carried the cargo back to the boats for reloading. This industry, the only purpose of which was the avoidance of tax, had brought wealth to the city of Leicester.

The border came in sight – a high brick wall across the canal. I pulled the lever, disengaging the engine from the paddle wheels and let the
Harry
drift to a stop behind two other boats that were waiting their turn to cross. I could see the customs officers in their blue uniforms and flat caps talking to the captain of the foremost boat. He held a clipboard on which he wrote from time to time. Then I saw him shake the captain’s hand and hop off onto the quayside. Two workmen in grey overalls then set to with boathooks until the vessel was in position. A steam whistle hooted. The crane swung around and, with a rattle of chain spooling over a drum, two giant mechanical grabbers descended, closing around the boat.

I had watched this process before and been amazed. But today I was merely impatient. In the background the rhythm of the steam engine changed. The chains went taut. The boat began to lift. Then the entire hull was visible and water was running from it, splashing down into the canal. It was like watching an airship rising from the ground. Though I could see the chains and understand the method, it seemed impossible – as if nature’s laws were being contravened. The crane shifted and the boat floated forwards, smoke still issuing from its funnel, to descend beyond my view on the far side of the border wall.

While this had been happening, the customs officials had been inspecting the next boat in line. I watched the handshake, the positioning of the boat, the grabbers descending again.

“Good morning, missus,” said the customs man. “Can I speak to your husband please?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “He’s not here.”

“Going by another route, is he?”

“Maybe.”

While we were speaking, another man in uniform had unlaced the tarpaulin and peered into the hold. “She’s empty,” he called.

I handed over identification papers for myself, Tinker and the
Harry
. They were good forgeries and I had no worries that he would doubt them. He noted down details on his clipboard before returning them to me. Instead of shaking my hand he raised his hat. Then he stepped back to the quayside and the
Harry
was being positioned beneath the grabbers.

Tinker had not asked where we were going, even when he saw the border in front of us. It was only as we lifted from the water and I heard the hull creaking under the strain that I thought about the boy. Water splashed below us. The other boats seemed to have risen smoothly, but I could feel us swaying from front to back as we started to move forwards.

As the border wall passed below us, Tinker grabbed my hand. “We’re up in the clouds,” he said. “We’re flying!”

CHAPTER 9

September 25th

To perform the impossible is elementary. It requires only that everything you are and everything you have learned be brought to focus in one moment, and at a place where no one else is looking.

The Bullet-Catcher’s Handbook

At night and from a distance, the seat of the Duke of Northampton seemed less like a home, more a small town. From my hiding place, I could see over the perimeter wall, allowing me an unobstructed view of the front and one side of the buildings.

The main massing of stonework towered above a sprawl of outbuildings, workers’ accommodation and the garrison that was home to his private army. The roofs were a chaos of pitched slate, skylights, balustrades and tall brick chimneys, each surmounted by a cluster of spiralled pots.