Imperial Clock (The Steam Clock Legacy) (41 page)

A trip to anywhere, nowhere, everywhere. It was a p
ining for adventure stronger than the pull of home, the culmination of weeks of fierce, turbulent change in her life. She realised it was in her blood. The thing that made the McEwans tick. Funny that
she
should be the one yearning for the horizon while Sonja, the freer spirit of the two growing up, should be the first to tie the knot and settle down. Not that Sonja couldn’t find the excitement in any lifestyle, any situation, especially as the wife of a Coalition spy!

As for Meredith, how far would this l
ure of adventure take her? For how long? Where would she start?

One muggy afternoon
, after the winds had passed, she received a visit from William Elgin. He was alone, dressed spiffily in a waistcoat and short-sleeved shirt, once again carrying a foreign communiqué...this time with a difference.

“
You’re fast becoming my personal courier.” She batted her eyelashes with a deliberately overdone coquettishness that made him roll his eyes. “And no longer easy to embarrass, I see. I’ll have to try harder next time.”

“
I’m immune.” He winked, raised his chin in a snooty fashion he intended to be charming.

But something in that gesture, an unbecoming smugness, reminded her of the realisation she
’d had the other day—his part in her embarrassment four years ago. It all flooded back with a torrent of humiliation she tried her best to dam. No use. He’d made her a laughing stock, and for no good reason.

“
Why did you do it?”

“
Excuse me?”

“
That evening in Niflheim, four years ago.” She shrank to that helpless girl again. “Why did you humiliate us like that? I know it was you.”

“
I, um...I, um...don’t know what to say.” He turned white, looked away. “Blame Brigitte and Helga, not me. I, um—”

She sl
apped his face. Hard. It stung deep colour onto his cheek. He sniffed, obstinate. She slapped him again. “That’s for never owning up. You’ve no idea what you put me through.”

“
I’m sorry.”

“
Say it again. And mean it.”

He cast his wounded gaze
on her, nodded, then kissed the hand that had smarted him. “Meredith, I’m so sorry. I’ve hated myself for years after what I did. It was the worst thing I’ve ever done to anybody, and I know that now. No excuses. No blame on anyone else. I was a bloody idiot, and I’ve never forgiven myself. I don’t expect you to either.”

“
Why
did you do it?”

“
For Freya Sorensen. No one put me up to it, but I did it to impress her. The three of them had been bad-mouthing you and Sonja for weeks, what your father had done, what everyone thought of him, what they thought of you. They made it sound like you deserved to be humiliated. So in a moment of absolute stupidity I used my five-past-eight secret to give them what they wanted. Later I thought about telling them it was me, but...I couldn’t do it. Seeing how upset you were, I knew I’d done an unforgivable thing. So I never owned up to it to anyone. It was the reason I was so shy around you after that, and also the reason I helped you humiliate them in return. The way they celebrated what happened to you, good God, they deserved everything they got. I can’t believe I ever had a crush on Freya. She was appalling. They all were.”

Meredith realised she
couldn’t hate William—he wasn’t that stupid boy any more—but she did hate what he’d done. Always would. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this before? Would you
ever
have told me?”

“
I tried that night in the museum. But once again, I attempted to impress a girl and failed. My practical jokes have a habit of backfiring, like Emperor Nero and his lyre. So there you have it, Meredith. It would serve me right if you never spoke to me again, only...I, um...”

“
You, um, what?”

“
I’d rather you didn’t...not speak to me again, that is. I mean I’d much rather you spoke to me again.” He tapped his temple with the heel of his hand. “I’m trying to get this out, but it’s stuck in there.”

“
It is?”

He started to wrap his mouth around a syllable, but grunted instead. “
So shall I show you how this thing works?”

“
If you like.” Damn it, he was the hardest boy—man—in the world to hate. So she focused on the message he’d brought. The very same miniature document viewer she’d smuggled out of the Atlas tunnels, if she wasn’t mistaken—a dent in the brass cylinder appeared identical to one she’d made when she’d dropped it getting out of Donnelly’s car. “Adjust it like a telescope? Or a microscope? Or what?”

“
It’s a backlit microscope.” He switched seats and showed her the correct way to hold it, gently manoeuvring her fingers onto the notched magnification dials as he said in a soft voice, “Rotate the first dial to enlarge or shrink the frame, like this...”

“
You mean like this...” She cupped his bristly chin in her palm, drew him close, close enough to taste the hint of sarsaparilla on his breath, and scrutinized him, this boy she couldn’t get a handle on. This boy she liked, in awkward, uncharted places inside herself, in ways she couldn’t describe. Why? Where had these feelings come from? He was no Donnelly. She wouldn’t pick him out from across a roomful of people. But being near William, just spending time in his company—made a mockery of all the ways she normally measured a man’s attractiveness. This made no sense, but that in itself was somehow the way it should be.

She
returned to the instrument, mentally feeling out her strange desire to grin. “I turn this to enlarge?”

“
Uh-huh.”

“
And these next two?”

“
To choose which section of the document to magnify. Up or down, and left to right. You should be able to read a line at a time without scrolling left to right, though. Have you got it?”

“
Got it. You say it’s backlit. Will it not work in ordinary light?”

“
Not very well. You can point it at a lamp; that would work. But you’re better off using the filaments inside.”

“
I see. Well, thank you for your instruction, Mr. Elgin. Now shoo!” She waved him back to his seat opposite. “I can read tolerably well on my own, last time I checked.”

“
I’m sure. But when you’re done, you’d best hand it back to me, so I can destroy the slide.”

“
Oh?”

The document, a typed correspondence bearing an unusual letterhead in the form of coded hieroglyphs, read:

Dear Miss McEwan,

I would like to offer my sincerest thanks for the recent
weapons intelligence you managed to procure for us. It has proved a vital coup for our cause, and concerns the catastrophic explosions around the world this past year, one of which I believe you yourself witnessed firsthand. I cannot go into the details of the weapon here; suffice it to say our organisation now has a clear indication of what it must prepare to fight against in the near future, and we are confident we can prevail. We live in a tumultuous time, governed by science and commerce, and when the twain meet with unfettered ambition, that is where the public pays the price and freedoms become threatened. But you have struck an important blow for those freedoms, and I salute you.

S
o few of us have managed to infiltrate the corridors of power with even the full backing of our organisation; for a young woman, alone, to gain entry to those tunnels was exceedingly clever and extraordinarily brave. I am therefore honoured to invite you to spend a weekend at my chateau in Innsbruck, to meet with the leaders of our organisation and to discuss what you saw in the tunnels, your aspirations for the future, and whether you would be willing to join us officially in a permanent role.

Wha
tever you decide, and owing in no small part to the recommendations of your Aunt Lily, Lady Catarina Fairchild, Tangeni, and William Elgin, all of whom say you would be an invaluable asset in our ongoing fight against the Leviacrum Council, I am granting you all the rights of protection and entitlement available to an agent of our organisation, for use at your discretion. Our network exists to keep you safe. Your aunt will supply you with the details.

Lastly,
I would like to offer my congratulations to your sister, Sonja, on her recent engagement.

We look forward to me
eting you soon.

Yours sincerely,

Tristan
, Chairman

Chapter Twenty

Flying the Colours

Nothing could ever return
to the way it was.

Hi
gh above, terrific winds bullied the grey clouds eastward, yet Derek felt only a pleasant breeze on his face. The wedding congregation before him somehow managed to appear wholesome despite a pervading atmosphere of mistrust. Who here was Leviacrum? Who was Coalition? The entire wedding scene could be a microcosm of 1915: duplicitous, reticent, yet desperately wanting to be optimistic, sharing a deep-down need for happy endings in a climate that was increasingly rendering them obsolete.

The
flustered steam-organist fine-tuned his impressive instrument, at Derek’s behest, to the left of the arbour.

He really ought to have left the organising to his parents, who were after all dab hands at arranging elaborate functions, or even to the professional planner they’d hired from Brighton, but no, Derek had taken it upon himself to be general of his own ceremony, nit-picking at every little detail he’d had no hand in until now, changing things he had no real artistic conception of. Maybe it was the shocking nervousness that had overcome him these past few days—the need for distraction from that—or it could be, as Mother had remarked, his fussy nature finally becoming tyrant after a lifetime of being consigned to the laboratory. Either way, by the time the ceremony arrived, the planner had long since caught the train back to Brighton in a huff, Mother and Father—the latter in his uniform ready for departure in a few days—had hugged each other for several long minutes to dispel their exasperation, and Derek felt certain he’d singlehandedly worked wonders on the entire show.

The organ music soared
over the grassy seaside setting. Things that would have been sadly misplaced had he not intervened—chairs, flowers, coloured drapes, the vicar—were correct and even vaguely geometric in their placement, he didn’t mind saying with a proud adjustment of his bowtie. The ingenious machine that formed coloured steam into wispy mid-air letters spelling DEREK & SONJA had drawn oohs and ahs from guests as they’d entered.

Everything ran like
clockwork. Well, almost...

“
No Meredith yet, so Sonja won’t have even arrived. Where are they?” he said to Brunnie, his best man by right, definitely not by choice—one of the concessions Derek had made to keep his family content.

“
Just what I kept saying when Melissa seemed to all the world a no-show, but she arrived in the end. They always do.”

“
And if she doesn’t?”

“
Then there’s always Tabitha Carson, Melissa’s sis—”

“
Forget I asked.”

Brunnie held up his hands in surrender.
“Say, isn’t that the beanpole vixen you were telling me about, sitting next to Bill Taylor?”

“
Don’t call her that.”

“
She’s splendid. Who is she?”

“
Nessie Fallon, from Astrophysics.” And secretly one of the most important people here, a Coalition spy second to none in the Leviacrum tower, a woman he admired greatly, even if she had struck him with that impossible dilemma on the day of his induction. A woman he would be trusting his life to for years to come, unbeknownst to almost everyone else here.

But w
hom on the bride’s side was not who
they
claimed to be? The African man, Simeon? William, the boy from Norway? Maybe even the Van Persies, for all he knew, for all
Sonja
knew!

“
Ah, here we go.” Brunnie nudged him, and the organ-led orchestra began its rendition of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy.

Meredith appeared first,
dropping petals as she went, looking extremely feminine in her peach bridesmaid’s dress—thankfully not a hint of the continental apparel she regularly wore these days and that more and more London women were copying. Behind her, Lady Catarina Fairchild, who had become a lovely surrogate aunt to Sonja and Meredith. She’d also become something of an inspiration in the way Sonja had begun to carry herself of late, at least in public—it was a real credit to them both.

He gasped when
Sonja herself drifted onto the aisle. Slim and veiled and angelic, she carried a bouquet of her mother’s pink roses. Her flowing dress was a miracle trail of white and silver over the maroon carpet. She appeared almost to float. His nerves strangely settled when she drew near, and he heard nothing but his heartbeat, saw only a delicate promise of beauty under a thin layer of lace.