corner of his mouth. ‘He can be trusted.’
‘Trusted?’ Captain Henri said in heavily accented Albionish, made all the more obscure by his not removing his pipe. ‘Of course I can be trusted. What have you been telling these young people? That I am a pirate?’
‘We have a shipment waiting for us on the other side,’ Aubrey said. ‘A dozen large crates. You’ll be able to manage them?’
Captain Henri took his pipe from his mouth and pointed it at the crate-loading. ‘Lothar and Volker are made of muscle.’
The two deckhands were indeed mountains of men. One, blond haired, had stripped off his shirt in the sun, either because he was hot or because his mother had grown tired of sewing up the seams after he burst them. The other was the more muscular of the two.
‘Lothar?’ Aubrey said. ‘Volker? Aren’t they Holmlandish names?’
Captain Henri laughed. ‘Of course. Holmlandish names for Holmlanders.’
George broke the uncomfortable silence that followed this announcement. ‘Your deckhands are Holmlanders?’
‘They are and have been all their life.’
‘Even though we’re at war with Holmland?’
Captain Henri scowled around his reinserted pipe. ‘These fellows have been with me for years. I vouch for ’em.’
Claude cut in anxiously. ‘We are close to the border here. We have always mixed, Gallians that way, Holmlanders this way. When the war was declared, most went home, but not all.’
‘Those boys don’t care about rich men in Fisherberg playing games with young men’s lives,’ Captain Henri said. ‘Now, you want your shipment or not?’
Claude promised that he’d see the crates safely stowed before he departed on the train. Some last-minute instructions from Sophie and he was off, leaping from the dock to the barge as it pulled away.
While they waited, George and Sophie wandered along the riverbank and bought some very savoury goat’s milk cheese, bread, a basket of pears and two bottles of fresh milk, thus pleasing the deckhands they bought from, who thereby had less to load, the barge captains, who grinned at the cash transaction, not to mention Aubrey and Caroline, who were the beneficiaries of this scavenged but delightful luncheon.
They sat under a pin oak that spread its branches wide, and they watched the commerce of the river and its banks while they passed Aubrey’s penknife and the cheese to each other. Aubrey insisted on cutting Caroline’s bread and cheese for her and remarkably – after a minor show of refusing – she accepted his help.
Aubrey was thinking of a dozen things at once, as was his wont, but he found time to notice how close Sophie and George were sitting to each other. Sophie had her legs folded up, with her striped skirt neatly draped around her. She wore a straw hat bravely perched on her head as she pointed out to George what he was missing in the bustle below.
Then he realised that Caroline and he were sitting just as close. He swallowed nervously and went to apologise but she hushed him with a twitch of one eyebrow.
‘Just sit back,’ she said. ‘Enjoy the moment.’
He did and he wished it would go on forever.
42
When they finished their lunch, George manoeuvred the wagon down from the road to the dockside with Sophie on the driver’s seat beside him, wide-eyed but game.
The crates were large, as promised, each about nine feet long. Lothar and Volker, grunting, loaded them with the aid of some imaginative swearing, an amalgam of Gallian and Holmlandish, Aubrey guessed, and the way they brought the languages together gave Aubrey hope for the future.
When they returned to the base, Aubrey enlisted the assistance of Madame Zelinka’s people to bring a crate inside – the one with a prominent ‘#1’ stencilled on the end. He was confident no-one could simply walk past and carry the others off the back of the wagon, but he made sure the gate was locked.
While George unhitched the horses and tended to them with Sophie, Aubrey studied the crate. The Enlightened Ones had rested it against the wall, next to the front doors, under the window. Nine feet long and narrow, it looked uncomfortably like a coffin for someone who was very tall and spindly.
Caroline appeared from the kitchen. She’d put on her fighting suit again, now that they were back in their base, and her feet were bare. In one hand she had a damp cloth. In the other, she had a pry bar. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘I’m anticipating.’
‘Anticipating?’
‘You were about to start an argument about whether to open the crate or not.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t say argument -’
‘Then you’d put forward the view that the orders didn’t say anything about not opening the crate.’
‘Didn’t they? Let me have a look at them again.’
‘Which you’d suggest was actually a way of telling us that the crates should be opened for good reasons.’
‘Like inspecting them for damage during transit.’
‘That’s the sort of thing.’
‘Or for sabotage.’
‘We can’t have sabotaged equipment going to the front.’ She handed him the pry bar. ‘In fact, you’d be derelict in your duty if you didn’t open the crate.’
‘I was just going to say that.’
She smiled. ‘I know.’
Under Caroline’s watchful eye, Aubrey took to the crate. He restrained an impulse to be indiscriminately destructive, something that pry bars seemed to inspire. He’d have to recrate the machine in order to transport it to the front so he eased off the lid instead of hacking at it. The nails groaned before giving way, only increasing the feeling that he was opening a coffin.
He straightened to find that on top of the packing material that was smothering the magic neutraliser was a large, buff envelope with his name on it.
‘It’s official, not personal,’ Caroline pointed out. ‘Last name only, no rank or initial. But it must be from someone who knows you well enough to assume you’d break into the crate.’
‘Craddock,’ Aubrey said after he tore open the envelope and scanned its contents. His eyebrows rose. ‘He’s aware of the wireless interference. The Department is doing its best to overcome it, but apparently every Directorate team near any of the fronts is having the same problem getting through. Tallis is furious.’
‘Commander Craddock said that Commander Tallis is furious? Let me see.’
‘I’m reading between the lines.’
‘What else does it say?’
‘The Holmland mobilisation in this region is continuing. Much rail traffic. Heavy armaments, troops, materiel, pointing to a concerted push. Albion and the colonies are sending reinforcements. Gallia too, but Holmland infiltrators have done a good job in blowing up railway bridges, apparently.’ Aubrey read on quickly, noting that more magicians were disappearing, both in Albion and across the Continent – and reports were also arriving indicating that the disappearances weren’t limited to magicians; magical artefacts were disappearing from museums and private collections.
His eyebrows rose. ‘Dentists.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Caroline said.
‘Commander Craddock wants us to question any dentists we come across.’
‘He’s concerned about the state of the army’s teeth?’
‘He wants to know if any supplies have gone missing.’
‘Dental supplies.’
Aubrey took a last look at the document and slipped it back into the envelope. He’d need to read it again, at
