Imperial Clock (The Steam Clock Legacy) (21 page)

“
Damned odd time and place for a meeting.”

“
I know. And the way she sped off like that, in such a spiffy-looking racer, makes me think she isn’t from around here.”

“
No, probably not.”

“
And how brief the meeting was, and how little Derek said—it was all her, her, the tramp—has me pretty sure it was all her idea as well. She lured him there to tell him something, or ask him something. He hadn’t been himself that day, behaved like a rotten ghost with me and Aunt Lily at lunch, so I’m assuming this mystery meeting was weighing on him. Poor man was exhausted, evidently hadn’t slept a wink.
Now,
what could be a) so troubling to distract him like that on such a big day for us, b) so secretive that it had to take place at night in such a lonely place, and c) the likeliest explanation so soon after his induction into the Leviacrum?”

“
I see where you’re going with this.”

“
He’s just been recruited into the Atlas Club. I’m almost certain.” Important that Sonja said that first. The last thing Meredith wanted was to put words in her mouth, words that might incriminate the man her little sister thought could do no wrong.

“
It’s certainly sounding that way, but why should he lose sleep over it?”

“
Because Derek hates taking sides in politics. When you make friends like those, you inherit those friends’ enemies.”

“
True. But maybe it’s just an honorary thing, and he’ll be able to keep his head down, under the crossfire.” Meredith was glad she’d said that. It might help Sonja trust him that bit more readily, even if her own instinct was to give the man a wide berth. He’d clearly thrown in with this esoteric society that fuelled the most dangerous dictatorial power of the modern age. He should
not
be trusted. “But be careful, Sonja, just in case. If he is Atlas, he’s putting you squarely in the mire.”

Sonja
’s sigh blustered through the receiver. “I feel like throwing up. What should I do? Ask him outright? Pretend I don’t know anything and just let it lie, wait until he approaches me with it,
if
he ever does? If not, it will always be there between us, and you know how combative I get when I sniff a conspiracy.”

“
Yes, you should be here with me. We’d solve this whole mystery in no time.”

“
Love to, if only I could think straight for two minutes. How is
your investigation coming along, by the way? Any news?”

“
Perhaps. I hired a private detective, a bloke called Donnelly. Cathy—Lady Catarina—isn’t too keen on him, thinks he’s a waste of space, but he’s been working ‘round the clock for days now and apparently he’s turned up some interesting titbits. He’s actually in the other room as we speak.”

“
Oh? Would I like him?” The sudden joviality in Sonja’s tone blared out with New Year’s cheer.

“
I think you would. He’s in his early thirties, fairly handsome, actually more so when he lets his whiskers grow, a bit slovenly as a rule—which is probably why Cathy thumbs her nose—and it takes him all his time to speak properly. He’s sort of the opposite of William Elgin in that he’d much rather curse and keep his Cockney-Irish brogue than put on airs.”

“
I like him already.” Sonja seemed to wait for Meredith’s reply, which didn’t come. “So...will it be a double wedding?”

“
Ha! That would be one heck of a heck followed by one heck of a no. He’s already married with two daughters.”

“
Shame. Will I get to meet him, though?”

“
We’ll swap. You get cursing Cockney, I get Atlas Auric.” The cheap attempt at humour received the crackling silence it deserved. They weren’t sisters for nothing; Meredith knew when they had nothing more to say to each other. It was like the rest at the end of a laboured piano duet that had outstayed its welcome. “Right, I have to go now. Cathy will be here any moment, and Donnelly’s waiting. But I want you to call me when you’ve seen Derek again, tell me what happens.”

“
Aye, aye, cap’n. And you let me know where the sleuthing goes. Leave some for me.”

“
Will do. Bye.”

“
Bye, Merry.”

She hovered the receiver over its hook for a moment
—every time she hung it up felt like severing her umbilical to home—and then set it down with fond reverence. Her heart ached at its primitive roots. Now that the perceived gulf between them had become reality, a reality spanning a full airship ride, she missed Sonja more with each passing day. It was the nature of magnetism: if you pressed two like poles together they repelled one another; if you held opposing poles too far apart there was no attraction. Somewhere between the two, then, lay the secret of sisters parallel: that happy medium between push, pull, and forever.

But w
ould they ever find it, the way things were heading?

“
Miss Meredith, can I have a word, before Swanny (Donnelly’s nickname for Cathy, referencing both her elegant swan-like beauty and her sometimes prissy, virginal attitude) tells me to wipe my bleedin’ feet or som’int?”

“
Yes. What have you got for me?”

He
’d arrived not a minute before Sonja’s call, and had had plenty of time to arrange his documents while waiting on the settee. “Well, I can tell you your man, Westerfeld, is being paid by one Claudette Clochefort, widow of—”

“
Armand Clochefort.” She sat beside him.

“
Right you are, and my man who used to work in the Deuxieme Bureau says it’s not for peanuts either. Madame Clochefort wanted the goods on your dad, to dish all the dirt she could on him, so she commissioned this fellow Westerfeld, a raker-for-hire, who has connections all over. None you’d brag about in public, though, if you get my drift.” She nodded. “Anyhoo, he was at it for some time, and was largely responsible for discrediting your dad in the public’s eye these past couple of years. But when things went arse up’ards—‘scuse me, all to pot—with his spying in Norway, he convinced Madame Clochefort he’d done all he could as a raker. It was never going to be enough to avenge her husband’s death. When she heard the professor was setting out on
another
underground journey, she must have seen it as an egregious insult to her old man’s memory. So she crossed the line, flipped. And Westerfeld was given permission to use his...other skills. To make sure your dad never reached Africa alive.”

Meredith swallowed. “
Fat chance. Father cracks on like nobody’s business once he’s started out. They’ll never catch him.”

“
No, I don’t think so either. Your dad is protected by powerful friends. I found that out too.” He gauged her reaction, gave a little nod, must have seen what he wanted to see. Calmness? Lack of surprise? “And that’s that. It’s nothing but a vendetta, Miss Meredith. Far as I can tell, you’re not in any danger on that front. Madame Clochefort has the knife in your dad, but that’s where it stays.”

“
The evil bitch. Wait till she hears the news that Father’s conquered Subterranea a
third
time, peeing all over her husband’s lies. I hope she chokes on it, the Frog whore.” Donnelly pretended to squirm under her abusive language, to not know where to look. It made her laugh. “But you’ve done splendidly, Donnelly. I knew I was right to hire you.”

“
Tell that to your Swanny, eh? She might not chew on me quite so hard in future.”

“
I’ll put her straight. Now, what’s all this?” She indicated the documents he’d fanned out on the settee next to him. “Looks interesting.”

“
Very. And I think you’ll like what I’ve found. That book you gave me, the
Shadow Players,
was on the right lines all along. The Rule of Eight, dead on. The author, Villiers, also published verse in his spare time, and he included a rather strange poem at the end of the last collection he printed, untitled and unsigned, eight stanzas long. An old colleague of mine who’s worked in used books since his teens assures me unsigned verses like these have been a part of literary lore for the past fifty years or so. No one talks about ‘em publicly, but that’s no surprise, right? Apparently it was an insider’s way of communicating, of smuggling out Atlas secrets. Say, do you happen to have the pocket watch you found?”

“
The verse tells us how to open it?” She practically tore it from her dress pocket, offered it to him.

“
You keep it for now. See what you can make of this first.” He read scribbled lines from a tatty sheet he’d folded many times:

“
The tower skyward trends; hold true—

Within
abideth precious few.

Attraction beats the iron gait
,

So tend
the field from twelve till eight.’

“
I never was much cop at riddles.” He scratched his stubbly chin. “How about you?”

“
Sadly lacking. My sister was always the game player. I wonder if I should ring her.” Then she went over the last couplet in her head—something in the ostentatious word play sat up and piqued her intuition. “Come now, we can make a go of this. The clues are like cherries on cream.”

“
What?”

“
They stick out a mile.”

“
Oh? Let’s see.” Donnelly flapped the sheet of paper taut, then traced his finger over the scrawled text. “Well, we can assume the ‘tower trending skyward’ refers to the engraving on the front of the case, the Leviacrum tower. ‘Hold true’ might mean we should do that literally?”

“
I see where you’re going. We should hold the case upright, so the tower really does point skyward.” She did that, waited, then when nothing happened, shook it, even held it against her ear to listen for something minutely awry inside, a click, a slosh of liquid,
anything.
“Read those last two lines again, carefully. My sister said something once about puns being the chinks in a riddler’s armour.”

“
Attraction beats the
iron gait,

So
tend the field
from twelve till eight
.”

“
Whoever wrote that made no attempt to tie it to the previous couplet thematically, at least none that I can see. It’s calling attention to itself. Let’s see—” She counted with her fingers, “—attraction, iron, field—they all pertain to magnetism, do they not?”

“
I reckon so. But magnetism in what sense? Literal? Figurative? And what does that have to do with a clock?”

“
How do you mean—oh, oh, the twelve till eight! Well, now we’re getting somewhere.”

“
We are?”

Meredith close
d her eyes in order to focus. “The clock face is this casing: they have the same shape. So...‘Tend the field’ might be telling us to tend, as in to move something around the clock face...something with a magnetic field...from the top of the tower, twelve o’clock, all the way around to eight o’clock.” She opened her eyes. Donnelly was frowning. “Don’t you agree?”

“
It’s clever. And if we’re talking about opening a mechanism, then a magnet makes as much sense as anything. Look, we’ve already tilted the thing upright. If that moves something into position at the top—a weighted iron needle, say—then we might be able to use a magnet to shift it around the circumference...”

“
To eight o’clock.”

“
Exactly.”

“
Brilliant. Bear with me two seconds.” Meredith dashed into the kitchen, where she rummaged through the worktop drawer full of practical odds and ends. Cathy’s previous tenant had been a hoarder, and no one had bothered to clear this drawer after the old woman had left. She found the small bar magnet she’d spied a few days before, and dashed back to the settee.

It worked. The magnet clung to the to
p of the casing exactly as they’d supposed, and when she pulled it free and tried it at any other point, it would not stick. The attraction was at that point only.

“
Not bad, not bad,” he said. “Now give us a slow turn to eight o’clock. Here, I’ll hold the case while you move the magnet clockwise. Easy now.”

Despite her fingers trembling with excitem
ent, Meredith kept the bar firmly on the rim and circumnavigated the invisible dial with remarkable steadiness. She gasped when the tiniest
clink
greeted eight o’clock, almost three quarters of the way around. Still the magnet held.

“
See if you can move the little winder,” he whispered.

She daren
’t breathe. Not that sharing air with Donnelly was unpleasant—far from it—but the immensity of what she might find inside, what it alluded to, the history, the hierarchy of this fearsome cult—it was all hers for the taking. After dozens of attempts to budge the tiny winder wheel these past weeks, would this be the moment it finally gave up its secret?