city, seeming to wink in the darkness. The clean air smelled like the air on a Scottish hillside or on the edge of the ocean, laden with moisture, it seemed to St. Ives, and the world aloft was almost silent, just the thrum of the wind in the rigging. He looked at his watch: three o’clock in the morning. Finn had slept for a time, and they had eaten most of the food that Madame Leseur had put by. St. Ives would have paid a good deal for hot coffee, or cold coffee, for that matter, but they had been in far too much of a hurry to think of it.
He tried to determine just
The experiment of seeking the higher altitude had succeeded, however, for he had found a contrary wind, and they had made a wide circuit to the west and south, the North Sea disappearing below the horizon. Although they could not be said to be on course quite yet, they were in a fair way to run even farther south and west, drop down to a more sensible altitude, and make another attempt at London with a more favorable wind behind them.
Finn returned to the telescope, looking toward the horizon, the clouds having passed away for the moment. “I see darkness, sir, due south by the compass. The sea again, I believe, with towns along it.”
“The Channel, I’d warrant,” St. Ives said. “Fifty miles away, given our altitude. Perhaps sixty. The lights of Brighton and Eastbourne.” There was some fair chance, then, that the city below them had been Reading – a piece of luck if it were so. He depressed the tiller, and the balloon canted downward, St. Ives turning the wheel to port, watching the compass and feeling the wind. It would be a bad business to hurry it out of anxiety, only to be blown back to the west, and have to rise to the higher altitude again in order to take another run at it. Dawn was three hours away.
They descended through scattered clouds, the gondola bouncing and jigging erratically, and then abruptly they were caught by the wind off the Channel – the same that had blown them so far off course hours ago. But it was their ally now that they were far enough southward, and St. Ives carefully brought the airship around farther, contemplating a sensible course for London. The starry sky overhead seemed to him to be darkening by degrees, and very soon the stars ahead of them disappeared behind massed clouds. The storm he had seen from his dune beside Egypt Bay would soon be upon them, for they were heading straight into it with the wind nearly at their back.
Rain began to fall, although they were running before it, for the most part, and for a time it spattered against the rear windows, which were already closed. Soon, however, drops began to sail in through the front windows also, falling onto the balloon above and washing down the sides. St. Ives closed them with the hinged frames of glass, his mind revolving on the general subject of windows, on the more sensible ports and portholes – whether the window was the hiatus itself, or the wood-and-glass barrier that filled it. It was a question that seemed philosophical, and he was on the verge either of coming at it or falling asleep when he realized that his vision was obscured by the rainwater coursing down the glass. He could perhaps fly by the compass…
“Can you see anything telling?” he asked Finn, the telescope being fit quite sensibly with a hood.
“I believe I see London, sir, in the far distance, away off to the right, off to starboard, I mean. A vast field of lights, and the river, I believe, snaking through it.”
St. Ives felt a monumental relief. Their success wasn’t assured by any means, but by God they had managed a bit of smart navigation. Some few minutes after that thought had receded from his mind, he saw the first bolts of lightning descend from the clouds ahead of them.
FORTY
“Who would have thought that there were so many costers selling pineapples?” Jack asked. He and Tubby were standing under an awning out of the rain. “And at this early hour of the morning. We’ve got to look into every cart, I suppose, although I’m worried that we’re wasting our time. One of Narbondo’s people might be setting up shop a few yards away as we speak.”
“Not a waste of time at all,” Tubby told him. “One can never eat enough pineapple. And as for these fiends being a few yards away or half a mile, there’s nothing we can do about it but continue to search. Perhaps Hasbro and Doyle are having better luck.” He shoved the last of the slice into his mouth and chewed it up. “Uncle Gilbert spent some time in the Sandwich Isles, do you know, and grew very fond of the pineapple. He taught me to eat them as a boy, fried up in cane sugar of an afternoon, and served with a tot of brandy poured over and set alight. Those are glorious memories, Jack.” He wiped the juice from his face with a kerchief.
“I don’t doubt it for an instant, but here’s another of the damned barrows,” Jack said, “just now turning into the alley ahead. Two men this time, and a headlamp on the front of the barrow.”
“By God that’s one of
Jack was carrying de Groot’s tiny pistol in his pocket, but he had never shot the thing, had never shot a pistol at all, let alone at a man. He had thought there would be some comfort in carrying it, but at the moment he felt nothing of the sort. The alley was empty when they reached it. Halfway down stood a deep, foul-smelling alcove an inch-deep in standing water. Several feet into the alcove stood a low, iron door, heavy with rust, not just quite tight.
“They’re in a hurry,” Tubby whispered. “Too much of a hurry to bother shutting the door, the fools.”
“They mean to come back out this same way, no doubt,” Jack said. He peered into the passage beyond the door, immediately seeing the lantern moving along some distance down – two lanterns, he saw now, one carried in a man’s hand and the other the headlamp on the front of the cart, considerably brighter and showing far down the steeply descending tunnel.
Tubby set out, Jack following, pulling the door nearly shut behind them. The brick tunnel was thankfully dry – perhaps an access to the Fleet Sewer – and the loud creaking of the cart emboldened them to move even more hastily. Tubby carried his blackthorn raised across his chest for a backhand blow.
They were upon them quickly, apparently unheard until the last few steps. The man carrying the lantern turned toward them, his illuminated face bearing a puzzled look. He flung the lantern into Tubby’s face out of sheer surprise, and Tubby knocked it aside with his left forearm, the lantern clattering against the bricks on the opposite wall. Tubby struck with the blackthorn in the same moment, knocking the man sideways as Jack leapt past him, pursuing the one who pushed the cart, who was trundling along ever more rapidly down the decline, some distance ahead.
The man stopped abruptly, gripping the handle of the cart with one hand and skidding along for a moment on the soles of his boots. As momentum carried Jack helplessly forward, he saw the pistol come out of the man’s coat. There was the crack of the weapon firing as Jack threw himself down, realizing even as he did so that the man had missed the hasty shot, and tumbled forward into the man’s legs, bringing him down. His assailant hit him awkwardly on the side of the head, bit him on the hand, and then sprang up and sprinted down the tunnel in pursuit of the runaway cart, which careened away, bouncing on the uneven brick of the floor.
Jack followed at a run. The cart’s headlight showed a turning in the wall dead ahead of it. The right-hand corner of the cart struck the wall at the turning and the cart caromed off the brick. Immediately the front wheels caught against something unseen, and the cart overturned, its tin sides flying off and its contents tumbling. The man pursuing it, too close to it to stop, pitched bodily over the top and into the waters of the Fleet River along with a smoking kettle that instantly threw a blanket of roaring flame over the waters.
