The Sunken (27 page)

And then, he
felt
it. The dragon.

“Look!” Peter cried, running up behind him and pointing at the cage on the back of the wagon.

It loped in circles, its mouth open, its tongue slapping against rows of razor-sharp teeth. Aaron leaned closer, staring into the dragon’s eyes. In his mind, the dragon stared back, regarding him with a mixture of revulsion and hunger. It hadn’t had a proper meal for several days. A girl threw her sandwich scraps through the bars. The dragon sniffed the corner of bread, its mind torn between hunger and its desire to simply break through the bars and devour the girl. In the end, it nudged the sandwich with its nose, checking it was dead, and gobbled it up. The girl squealed, clapping her hands.

A rough hand grabbed Aaron’s shoulder, and his mother pulled him back. “Don’t lean over like that, you stupid boy. He’ll eat you right up, an’ you’ll join your brother in the Station of Life.”

Aaron shrugged her off, and walked to the next cage, where three monkeys sat on the stump of a tree, huddled together, picking and scratching at reddened sores that covered their rusty fur. He listened to them, felt their sadness, mourned the loss of their homeland.

These animals are so sad.

They lay in their cages, utterly defeated. Many had come from tropical lands, and they were suffocating in the cold. The dragon raised its nostrils and sniffed the air, its mind reaching, longing to race through the trees or sink its teeth into the compies hiding in the flowerbeds.

This isn’t fair.

The anger welled up inside Aaron, fuelled by the animals, whose aching desire to break free permeated his every thought. He knew how it felt to be trapped. Raw emotion welled up inside him, a rage building inside his chest, inside his head, pushing against his skull, growing larger and larger, until the emotions flooded from him, escaping from his body like a great cloud of steam from a smoke stack. He bent double, the breath knocked out of him.

And suddenly, they
were
free. Cages overturned. Fences collapsed. Monkeys ran under his legs. The giraffe galloped gracefully across the lawn. Children screamed. Mothers screamed. Men grabbed their families and ran across the lawns, chased by gleeful monkeys. Two ostriches and a small, feathered dinosaur raced for the pond, chased by the red-faced menagerie proprietor waving his whip.

Aaron froze, unable to tear himself away as the dragon, its eyes no longer sad but fierce with anger, strained against its bars. Aaron felt its mind wheeling, straining for its one chance for freedom.

Snap!

The dragon reached through the bars, grabbed the bolts between its arms, clasped them in its claws, and pulled, a motion it must have seen the proprietor perform many times. And now it, too, was free, but it didn’t go for the trees, as it perhaps should have, but bounded across the lawn with a grace and power that held Aaron in awe, and with a leap and a slash of its hind leg, tore the tendon in the proprietor’s foot.

“No,” Aaron whispered. “I didn’t mean—”

The proprietor fell, screaming, as the dragon pounced. It tore at his face, spraying blood over the flower garden. The proprietor, still screaming, raised his hands to defend himself, to grab in vain at the meat of his ruined face, but the dragon bent down and with a quick snap of his powerful jaw, tore the man’s left arm clean away.

“Aaron!” His mother grabbed him by the shoulders and tugged him away. His brothers were already halfway across the field, their robes flapping with indignity as they ran toward the gate.

Aaron ran after her, his mind strangely empty. All around him, animals and people fled across the park. Screams followed him, high-pitched and terrified. Behind them, the proprietor’s cries cut off. As they raced through the gate, they passed a regiment of Redcoats on their way to contain the mess.

His mother wouldn’t stop crying. Oswald tugged her to his breast, stroking her hair and speaking in soft, soothing tones. Aaron leaned against the fence and watched the monkeys clamber up one of the oak trees. His body numb, his mind empty, devoid of thought. Silent.

I did this.

Aaron started to cry. Peter looked like he might slap him. Their mother, all business now, brushed off her skirt and pulled them along behind her, her head down, her face red with fear.

She saw a man selling boiled toffees beside the gate, and she bought a bag and handed it to Aaron. Oswald and Peter eagerly grabbed handfuls of toffees, the incident at the zoo instantly forgotten, but Aaron tucked the rest into his trouser pocket to share with Isambard. He couldn’t think about sweets now. He needed his friend.

He found his friend on top of the boiler tower, furiously kicking a steel pylon. He didn’t stop when Aaron approached, just went on kicking, his hands balled into fists and his face wet with sweat and tears. He winced when Aaron grabbed his arm, and rolled his sleeve up to show him the enormous welts dotted with cigar burns.

“Merrick again,” he said. “I wasn’t even doing anything, just sitting in the corner, pretending to be invisible. Evidently I didn’t try hard enough.”

Aaron sat down beside him, and removed the paper bag from his trousers. The toffees had melted a little next to his skin, and stuck together in a big clump. He pulled it into two pieces and proffered one to his friend.

“Oswald and Peter ate most of them already, but I wanted to save some for you.”

Isambard looked down at the sugary pile and then looked away. When he spoke, his voice sounded choked. “Please, you eat them, Aaron. You’ve earned them.”

“For what? Leaving you here to suffer while I go away on a nice outing?” He wanted so badly to tell Isambard about the dragon and the proprietor, but he didn’t want to give his friend anything else to be upset about. “Hardly deserving at all. I want you to have some.”

He pushed the biggest piece into Isambard’s hand, and he accepted it without another word. They sat for a while, chewing toffee in silence, each lost in their own dark thoughts.

“I have this idea,” Isambard said, biting off a chunk of toffee. “I think we need to change the width of our locomotive track.”

“What?”

“I’ve been working on some calculations, see?” He fumbled in his pocket and produced a faded leaf of paper, printed on one side with an advertisement for cigar leaves. He smoothed it out across his knee and pointed to the rows of scrawled numbers. “The current speed of locomotives is limited by the width of the axle. If I made the track wider, say with an eight-foot gauge, a boarder, heavier engine could operate, effectively able to carry more cargo at greater speed than the current trains.”

“I’m not sure you can go around changing rail width and such. Didn’t Stephenson standardise it for a reason?”

“I’m not beholden to Stephenson. I can do whatever I want,” Isambard insisted. “Whose side are you on, anyway?”

“Mine. Because we’ve spent nearly
two
years working on that engine, and I’m the one who’ll have to re-cut all the pieces of the chassis to fit this new design.”

“Don’t be such a whiner, Williams.” Isambard crunched down on his toffee. “This will revolutionise locomotion. I’m sure you can handle a little remodelling.”

James Holman’s Memoirs — Unpublished

My eighteenth birthday passed at sea with little incident. I still hadn’t set foot on American soil, and the adventurer within me was slowly withering away. But with a new first lieutenant on board anxious to prove himself, we were seizing more and more ships, pressing any men we could find with British ancestry (including deserters and nationalised Americans) and many without into the sadly-depleted British Navy. My fellow midshipman and friend Colebrook used to joke that he shouldn’t be in the British Navy, as he had no Yankee blood.

All those seized ships presented a problem — what were we to do with them? We couldn’t very well keep them at New York — they’d crowd the port and become a target for pirates. Instead, we had to sail each vessel to Halifax through a bitterly cold stretch of ocean, with only a skeleton crew of men, usually in biting fog.

The duty of captaining these vessels — called being the ‘prizemaster’ — had hitherto been a great honour, but was being passed out with such regularity mere midshipmen were accepting command of their own vessels.

And this was how, at eighteen years of age, I found myself a prizemaster of a confiscated ship. With a broad smile, I waved goodbye to Colebrook, and climbed aboard my vessel.
My ship.

This auspicious day in my blossoming naval career was marred by a slight ache in my joints, which I ignored as best as I was able, walking with a stiff foot and setting my boots heavily on deck to minimise the flexing of my ankles. I hoped it would stop bothering me soon.

I hoped in vain.

The aches persisted for the entire journey, coming in shooting pangs and settling in for hours — a dull, throbbing pain no amount of exercise could shake off. I endured it as best I could, and we made it to Nova Scotia with the ship still intact.

Once I arrived at Halifax, I sat my officer examination and, with my lieutenancy papers still wet with ink, I switched to a naval flagship — the
Cleopatra
, a British frigate recaptured from the French at Bermuda — with the aim of impressing the Commander with my skills in order to move up in the ranks … and maybe,
maybe
, land a position that involved some actual adventuring.

It seemed the first lieutenant of the
Cleopatra
, Jacob McFadden, had the same designs, for when I tried to introduce myself, he brushed me aside.

“What are you, fourteen?” he demanded, his cheeks flashing red.

“Eighteen, sir.”

“By Isis, but they must be desperate for officers! Listen boy, I don’t care who you are. I am not your friend. I am not your mother, and I don’t want to hear one word out of your mouth that ain’t ‘yes, sir,’ or ‘thank you, sir.’ I’m going to be Captain when Old McNeash dies, mark my words, and you’ll want to be on my good side, yes?”

I nodded, too surprised to speak.

He kicked me, hard, in the side of the head as I bent to put my things on my bunk. “You’re a scrawny little shitter. You won’t last long on this ship. As if it wasn’t bad enough when O’Reilly took a swim and they brought in that Thorne boy as second lieutenant, all gangly legs and buck teeth and no clue about
real
sailing, and now you’re third lieutenant and I’m a bloody
nanny
—”

“James? James Holman? Is that you?”

Ignoring the pain in my legs, I spun around, and there in the doorway, stooping to fit his height through the low door, was Nicholas.

The years at sea had been good to him. He’d gained a foot of height on me, and his shoulders had broadened — his muscles rounding out so they pulled at the seams in his jacket. He’d grown out his hair, and it curled into sandy ringlets at the corners of his face, giving his usual angelic features a slightly roguish look. We embraced, and for the first time since I’d began experiencing the pain, I felt the warmth of joy spread through my whole body. Behind us, Jacob snorted, and made some rude remark neither of us cared to acknowledge.

“But you — how did you?” I cried. “You’ve been in the Navy only three years, and you started as a mere cabin boy. How do you now outrank me?”

“A combination of hard work and luck,” he smiled. “Our fleet came to blows with the French in the waters off Calais, and we managed to board one of their ships. The Captain, foolhardy as he was, got himself into a spot of bother, and I managed to rescue him. The Navy is quite grateful for that sort of thing, so I was hastily promoted. Six months ago I transferred to the
Cleopatra
out of Halifax, where I made the acquaintance of our dear friend Jacob here.”

From that day onward we were inseparable, as much as two men could be on board a busy vessel. Starved of friendly conversation for the last year, we never stopped talking — first the swapping of news (including the sad story of the fate of Marc Brunel), then the discussion of all our common interests. We spent every mess debating passages of Plato’s
Republic
, or recalling what we could remember of our favourite poetry. We bored the other officers quite silly and after a time they refused to converse with us at all.

I had been dabbling with poetry while at sea, in an effort to take my mind from the increasing pain. Nicholas was the first person I invited to read my work, and I did so with trepidation, knowing he would not hesitate to tell me if he thought it terrible.

“Your poetry longs for freedom,” he said, setting my notebook down on the quarter galley table with reverence. “You speak not of love for women, as most poets do, but of love for the world and all of her numerous wonders. Yet there is such a great sense of longing.”

“I want to see the world,” I said. “I have travelled halfway across the globe, and yet my world has shrunk to the size of this ship. I’ve been away nearly four years, and have spent a total of fifteen days on foreign soil. I feel as though I’ve seen nothing at all.”

“But your advancement has been swift enough, and you have the respect of the Captain and at least one of your fellow officers,” he smiled. “You cannot be too impatient, James. A naval career will give you money enough to travel as you wish, if you live simply and contain your enthusiasm for a few more years.”

I suspected my legs would not give me a few more years, but I did not wish him to press me, so I merely nodded. I had not told him about the pain — it was mine to bear as best I could manage. “What of you, Nicholas? What is your greatest wish?”

“I too wish for freedom,” said he. “But it’s freedom of a different sort. It’s freedom from myself, from the voices in my head. I had hoped that perhaps the ocean would grant me that much — a quiet space, where I would be free to think. But so far, it’s as noisy as ever.”

I didn’t understand what he spoke of, and he didn’t elaborate. Our discussion turned to other matters. That night as I raised myself up from my chair and shuffled toward my cabin, the pains sizzling up and down my legs, he reached across the table and squeezed my hand.