The Sunken (31 page)

Jacques threw open the door and Nicholas followed him into the narrow street. He could see the rear of the port, surrounded by shops and warehouses. Several carriages and wagons loaded with goods rolled past, heading toward the port. One broke away from the line and came to a stop beside them.

“Our ride,” said Jacques.

As he settled himself into the carriage, the black-haired girl slipped up behind him and settled herself among the hay bales. She slipped him an apple from inside her dress. He took it gratefully, smiling at her, and she dared a modest smile back.

Jacques took the reins from the driver, who jumped off and slipped away into the crowd. Jacques coaxed the horses into the crowded street, and they were off. Nicholas glanced about nervously, wary of the soldiers posted on every corner. He hid his face in his cloak, but Jacques slapped his arm away.

“You will call attention to us,
Monsieur.
You must be bold. This is how I elude them every time.” He winked.

And so, with heart in his chest, Nicholas rode with the strange man with the wild eyes and the silent, black-haired girl out of the town, and across the craggy landscape of Spain, toward the looming shadow of the Pyrenean mountains.

They passed into increasingly barren countryside, the towns becoming poorer, and the faces they passed on the roadside more hardened and rueful. Several times Nicholas asked where they were heading, but Jacques did not answer. Nicholas did not fear the man who had saved him, but kept his scabbard beneath the bench seat, pressed firmly against the heel of his boots, for reassurance.

They stopped often, and each time Jacques ordered Nicholas and the girl — whose name he learned from Jacques was Julianne — to remain in the wagon while he held council with various informants. Nicholas was beginning to understand that he had fallen in with a unique individual. He asked Julianne in his best French where they were going, but she only shook her head.

Once, while Jacques was occupied with his informers, Nicholas opened the corner of the parcel Jacques had taken from the Morpheus church. It contained six thick books on various subjects; chemistry, machinery, medicine, architecture.
Curious.

On the fifth day of their journey they ascended into the mountains along a crumbling, deserted pass, and camped that night in a cold wood, devoid of warmth, for Jacques would allow no fire. For two days Jacques drove the horses at full speed, ’till at last he stopped on the edge of a ridge and pointed to the other side.

“Bienvenue!”
he said. “This will be your home.”

Nicholas sucked in his breath, taking in the high walls banked with thick buttresses that seem hewn of the rock itself, the crumbling internal structures, and the precarious stone bridge that marked their path. “What is this place?”

“It was a monastery — a place of learning and worship many hundreds of years ago. But it has been forgotten, except by us.” Jacques urged the horses forward, and Nicholas shut his eyes as they bumped over the high stone bridge, barely wider than the wagon.

“You may open your eyes now,
Monsieur
Thorne.”

They had parked the wagon in a small, derelict courtyard. The crumbling walls offered some shelter from the biting wind, but most of the verandah roofs and lintels had fallen, strewn in weed-matted lumps across the open space. Doorways lined the crumbling walls, leading into dark spaces beyond. Not a soul stirred. Nervous, Nicholas jumped down from the carriage, his senses on high alert.

A man — dressed in faded black robes bearing the embroidered sigils of the Morphean sect — dashed from a nearby colonnade and began unhitching the horses. He spoke harshly to Jacques in a dialect Nicholas didn’t understand, shooting furious glances at Nicholas. Finally, he and Jacques seemed to reach an agreement, and he grabbed the reins and dragged the horses away across the courtyard.

“Auguste keeps the animals in good health. It’s hard on them, up here in the mountains. We lose many, but Auguste looks after them. Auguste, this is Nicholas Thorne,” announced Jacques.

The man glared at Nicholas, and he saw only hatred in those eyes. His gaze never leaving Nicholas’ face, Auguste snarled at Jacques. This time he used English.

“You said there would be no more men. We can barely feed those who we have. And he is an Anglaise — how do we know he won’t betray us?”

Jacques didn’t reply; instead, he stared down at the man and smiled. That smile carried something — Nicholas wasn’t sure what — but it made Auguste look away, his face flushed. He hurried the horses away. “Do not mind him,” said Jacques, placing a hand on Nicholas’ shoulder. “He will come around to you. Come. You meet the others.”

He followed Jacques and Julianne through one of the monastery doors, pushing aside a tangle of weeds to stoop through the low door. The monastery continued into the bare stone of the mountain, a series of low tunnels leading down into the darkness. Jacques carried no light, but Nicholas saw flickers at the end of the passage. Voices wafted up to greet them.
There are people down here?

They emerged into a bright, cavernous room, lit by a faded light from two ventilation shafts carved into the vaulted ceiling. But most astonishing of all were the thirty people gathered in this old chapel, divided into groups of threes and fours, each group occupied with a different intellectual pursuit. One man instructed his pairs on the construction of a model bridge, another poured chemicals between glass vials while two men wrote down the results, while many others copied passages from thick, leather-bound books. Dominating the room was a wide stone altar, covered in a stained white cloth and dotted with burning candles, providing the flickering light Nicholas had spied earlier. Where once a Christian crucifix would have stood, there was a golden statue of the God Morpheus.

“This is our sanctuary,” said Jacques. “Here we may worship and learn in peace. We have food and shelter, and fresh water from a mountain spring. And we are safe here from discovery and persecution. We are fifty-eight men, and three women — Julianne here, and you will meet Danielle and Marie later. You may stay with us for as long as you wish.”

“This is — I don’t understand — why have you brought me here?”

“You are a student of Great Conductor, yes? You will find many of your Industrian peers here. We worship together, for we have no other place to go.”

“Thank you for your kindness, Jacques, but I cannot remain here. I must return to England as soon as I can buy passage on a ship—”

Jacques laughed. “You will find no such ship leaving from French ports.”

“Pardon?”

The Frenchman laughed harder, slapping his hand against his thigh. “You fool! You silly English fool! You picked the worst time to run away. The Emperor Napoleon has blockaded England. He aims to stamp out Industrian influence in Europe completely. His constables travel the countryside, drawing out and destroying the remaining Industrian churches. They hanged two Morpheans in the market square at Marseilles just last week. That is why we live and study here in secret. And now you live here as well.” He laughed again. “Even if a ship could get through the blockade, no one would dare take an Industrian on board. No, Mr Thorne, you’re a Frenchman now.”

The news turned Nicholas cold. He slumped to the floor, his face in his hands. He was a fugitive with no way home. His chances of seeing London and Isambard again shrank to a tiny fleck.

Life in the monastery was modest and quiet, but not without its dangers. French troops patrolled the roads leading to the mountain pass, and Jacques said they would sometimes ride up to the ruins to check for refugees. When that happened, the Morpheans would retreat into the lower tunnels, and they had not yet been discovered. They could not have fires at night, nor could they take prolonged exercise on the slopes.

But as days turned into weeks, Nicholas found himself settling into the place. The men — no doubt at Jacques’ insistence — accepted him well enough, though they would not resort to speaking English in his presence. His French had much improved, and he was beginning to understand the idioms of the local dialect. It didn’t hurt that around every corner he saw Julianne staring back at him through a curtain of tangled black hair. She still did not speak, but for a girl of only nineteen or so her grim expression betrayed her hardship.

His days faded into one another. In the early morning, just as the sunlight appeared between the mountain peaks, Jacques called everyone to the chapel and conducted a church service — daily prayers intoned in his clear, rumbling voice, his conviction apparent as he lovingly removed the statues from their niches and bathed them. The men came from a variety of Industrian religions, and all risked persecution by hiding in the mountains with Jacques.

After church, Julianne and the other women handed around breakfast — a sparse meal of barley gruel seasoned with wild berries that grew in clusters on the slopes of the mountain. Nicholas ate it hungrily, for it might be the only meal he got that day. After breakfast they performed chores — sweeping, cleaning, gathering food and wood for the fires — and finally Jacques called them back into the tunnels to continue their studies.

They had little in the way of tools and provisions, but they had books — some found in the storehouses of the old monastery, the rest smuggled from across Europe by a growing network of Industrian dissenters — and paper and ink. Each man studied according to his own interests, and so it was that Nicholas quickly found books by Étienne-Louis Boullée and François-Joseph Bélanger, great masters of architecture and industrial design. These he devoured again and again, ’till he could quote whole passages by heart.

He shared his studies with three other students. Joseph Ramée — who had been an eminent Parisian architect and outspoken Morphean until the Emperor’s reforms had sent him underground — and Auguste, who made no attempt to disguise his hatred of Nicholas. They were joined often by Julianne. She still had not spoken, but read over her notes with a ferocious intensity. Sometimes she would lean over his shoulder as he read, tracing the drawings with delicate fingers. Her hair brushed his face, and all his thoughts and calculations escaped from his head.

As his mother and her new lover continued to torment him, Isambard’s fervor for his machine only grew. He began to openly flout their rules, returning late, stinking of grease, filling his bunk with minuscule workings of engine parts and crude clockwork mechanisms. He seemed to take the beatings as his personal triumphs, each rasp of his stepfather’s whip against his skin only hardening his determination to reveal the machine and prove once and for all that Stokers could be engineers.

“It will avenge my father’s banishment.” he said. “It will be the locomotive to end all locomotives. Faster than anything Stephenson has ever built. When we are done, I can show the King, and he’ll see he was wrong to send my father away.”

Every day, Aaron worried about what Isambard would do once he finished tinkering with the locomotive. Did he plan to sell the engine, or use it to incite the workers to rebellion, or to simply buy his way into another sect? They never discussed the subject, and Aaron — knowing the engine was not really theirs, but Isambard’s — felt asking was somehow sacrilegious.

Most of all, he worried about being discovered. He worried his love for his friend would soon see his own neck in the hangman’s noose.

But as the months and years went by, neither Isambard’s mother nor the priests discovered their secret hideout under the church. It was not for want of trying. Merrick paid boys in the village to follow Isambard, but he would weave and duck and lose them in the madness of the underground passages, before emerging and sneaking away to the church. The workers, who still remembered his father and knew Isambard was up to something, covered his shifts and stamped his attendance in the logbook. And though they made a terrible racket, no one noticed the hammerings of two boys amidst the banging and smelting and hissing and whirring of the day-to-day activities of the Ward.

They should have finished the engine a year ago, but at Isambard’s insistence, they had pulled the chassis apart and widened her, setting the bearings further apart. Now she was a different kind of beast entirely.

Finally, the day came when they hammered on the last sheet of iron over the boiler, and stood back to admire their work. Their adjustments gave the engine a squat, pygmy appearance — the round boiler casing jutting like a long nose from the high drive wheels. The cab was open to the elements, with barely enough room for two men to pass each other.

“She’s beautiful.” Aaron breathed, hardly able to believe they had built such an enormous engine themselves.

“Let’s fire her up.” said Isambard.

They ran down into the tunnels and carried sacks of coal up to their secret workshop. Aaron filled the coal store and spread a thin layer on the floor of the boiler while Isambard knotted rags to the end of a wooden pole, dunked it in oil, lit it, and shoved it in the firebox. They checked the water tank was full, wiped the grime from the pressure dials, and sat against the bare brick walls, waiting for the temperature to climb up.

“The festival of steam will be held in London in the summer,” Aaron said. The feast day of Great Conductor and the biggest religious festival on the Stoker calendar would see the Engine Ward filled to bursting with Conductor engineers, their priests, and followers. The streets would throng with food and drink and dancing, and the Great Conductor churches would be packed with worshippers making their pilgrimage during this auspicious time. The Royal Society was holding an exhibition of Stephenson’s work that would attract many people to the city, and rumour had it Stephenson himself might even make an appearance.

“The fact has not escaped my attention,” Isambard replied.

“Are you planning something foolhardy?”

Isambard laughed. “You know me too well, Aaron. But we’re not finished with her yet. She must work perfectly on the day she is discovered; otherwise, all our work will come to naught. Even if everything works perfectly today—”