Imperial Clock (The Steam Clock Legacy) (9 page)

Don
’t let him off the hook so easily. Keep him talking until he declares himself one way or the other. If you don’t, it’ll torture you forever.

 
“I feel terrible about Mrs. Prescott.” She eyed the canopy roof as it flexed and
whumped
against the brass ribs holding its form. “She seemed so full of beans throughout the walk, and then just like that—” The first tears of ripped stitching made her swallow. She eyed Mr. Auric worriedly.

He perched on the edg
e of his seat, biting his lip. His dull grey eyes pinwheeled as he watched the fray in the ceiling grow to a gaping wound, and considered his next course of action. “God, these winds are bloody-minded. I—we may need to reorganize if they get much worse. If the roofs should rip loose altogether...”

A frightening thought. Bad enough to have to spend the night maro
oned in a blizzard, but to be exposed to the elements as well. She fidgeted with the drawstring on her kagool, twining it around her finger. “Sir, are you in charge?”

He shot her a
cutting glance, as though the idea appalled him. “No. Why?”

“
Nothing. I just think you should be, that’s all.”

“
Well, both Mr. and Mrs. Challender have seniority over me, so the onus is on them...I mean they are in charge of the class.”

“
Sorry, sir.”

“
That’s quite all right, McEwan. Despite the constant reprimands you receive, you’re actually a very sensible—” he mouthed a few syllables, as if sifting through them for the most non-committal word, “—very pragmatic young woman. Very much your father’s daughter.”

She sensed he was caught between wantin
g to endear himself to her and his teacher’s duty to keep her at arm’s length. The result came across as cold, diffident.

“
Thank you.” Without the
sir,
she managed to soften the blow, make herself feel a little less patronized.

The door flung open and
Mr. Challender leaned into the carriage, followed by wicked swirls of snow. Sonja recoiled from the biting wind. “The roofs of four carriages have been torn free, including the girls’. My wife and I have made a decision.” He coughed and then wiped his streaming nose on a frozen sleeve. “We’re going to head for the farmhouse at the edge of Keswick before nightfall, before we all freeze. Everyone, that is. Everyone is going. Come on, Auric, McEwan, get yourselves ready. Grab whatever blankets you can find. As many layers as possible to insulate yourselves for the trek.”

A strange, overpowering sensation of drowning overcame Sonja
—drowning in snow, something that had never occurred to her until now. The drift had almost reached the highest step of the carriage, over two feet. If it continued at this pace, they might soon be entombed.

Mr.
Auric turned slowly to his superior. “Listen carefully to me, Eustace: leaving the coaches is the
worst possible idea
in this situation. I know you’re the senior faculty member here and we haven’t exactly seen eye to eye, but I implore you to trust me on this—if you take the girls out into this blizzard, there’s a very good chance you will kill some, if not all of them.”

“
Rubbish! Just sitting here waiting to be buried is the surest way to kill everyone. Think on it. At least if we start out now, before nightfall, we have a chance of reaching safety. If we stay here, we have no chance whatsoever of reaching safety. I’d rather not threaten you with disciplinary action by the School Board, Auric. My mind’s made up.
Now come on.”

“
I’m staying.” Sonja sat upright, adamant as Mr. Challender turned to scold her.

“
And so am I.” With a stomp of his boot Mr. Auric was on his feet, clawing at the canopy, making short work of the stay pegs. Exhilarated, Sonja leapt onto the seat and helped him rip the roof free from its nails and stitching. She only managed one corner but between them, they soon tore the whole thing down. Then, after barging his perplexed colleague aside, Mr. Auric waded through the snow drift to the first of the girls’ open carriages.

He shepherded the class into two groups, one per car
riage, and called for them to “Huddle together as tightly as possible. I’m going to tie the edges of the canopy to the seats, but I also want you to take turns holding it down, using your own weight to secure it. I’ll show you how. Use the blankets to make yourselves comfortable, as it’s going to be a trying night. If you require the toilet, alert either myself—I’m staying with one group in the first carriage—or Mr. and Mrs. Challender, who will stay with the second group, and we will make all the necessary arrangements. And lastly, try not to worry; morning will come sooner than you think.”

Despite the
incredible wind, Sonja and a few other girls helped him rip the final fraying roof down—all the carriages were now exposed—and secure it over Mrs. Challender and the girls in the second carriage. Mr. Challender spoke something she didn’t quite catch into Mr. Auric’s ear.

“
You do what you have to, but I may have just saved these girls’ lives.” Mr. Auric glared into his colleague’s hateful stare, inches away. “And if you do anything to scupper it, I’ll break your bastard neck. We clear?”

“
Just so long as you know what’s coming.”

“
And vice versa.”

They parted with obscene and livid
hand gestures Sonja could not believe came from teachers at
her
school. If the other girls had seen or heard that exchange, they might indeed think the world was coming to an end. But it only confirmed her suspicion—that beneath the slightly shy and awkward assistant teacher, Derek Auric was a formidable man. He would not be bullied or swerved from what he knew to be the right course of action. Admiration almost frothed through her chattering teeth as she watched him orchestrate the survivors in the gale force winds.

While
she squeezed between a shaking Dorcas Henshall and Patty Lonergan under the canopy in the first carriage, muffled sobs from all around reminded her she was in most regards still in a world of children. But she didn’t feel like one right now, not even a little. A warm, gentle kiss on her cheek made her gasp. She couldn’t see him, yet the faint hint of tobacco on his masculine breath was unmistakable under the whumping tarp. And when he whispered to her, “Thank you for believing in me, Sonja,” she knew instantly she would never be that child again.

She
closed her eyes and saw beyond the storm as clear as day; it was almost unbearably exciting.

Chapter Five

High Tide

The sluggish
beats of the vintage chronometer kept Meredith on edge as she paced around the living room and dining room and peered through the front window every few moments. Mrs. Van Persie, their half-blind housekeeper, flittered in and out, gathering items for the dining table spread, for this impromptu early lunch Father had scheduled by telephone. Exactly what trouble Sonja had been in was unclear, but it had to be serious for him to leave his pre-expedition operations in Portsmouth harbour and fly the first available airship all the way to Cumbria and the Lake District to collect her. He hadn’t had time to explain in his telephone call, but she was safe now and on her way home with him, if a little weak from whatever ailed her.

When Meredith spied the glinting brass of a large, tu
bular-shaped wagon pulled by a team of several beefy shires, and Father walking backward down the driveway as he guided the vehicle’s clumsy turning arc between the gate posts, her heart sank. His third expedition to Subterranea was suddenly imminent. He’d hired the wagon to transport the remainder of his supplies to the harbour, an impregnable wagon for his most secretive possessions: scientific tools and instruments commissioned from his learned colleagues around the world, kept under lock and key in the cellar these past several months.

Father was a puzzle of
a man, always had been, beset by an unfathomable desire to win dominion over inexplicable regions far beneath their feet. Meredith had only been a toddler when he’d burrowed his way to Subterranea in his giant mole. She remembered more of the ballyhoo here at home afterward than of the famous day itself, in the autumn of 1899, when the massive machine had dug its way into a hillside in Dover—and the history books. Endless streams of dignitaries and reporters and particularly those teams of postmen carrying sacks of correspondence had flooded the living room for months, reducing her to a shy little ornament, while elevating Mother to a kind of regal personage, always smiling, always offering her hand to strangers, always profoundly sad inside, or so it seemed to Meredith. For although Mother had supported Father’s expedition indefatigably, even funding it from her considerable fortune, she had cried herself to sleep most nights he’d been away.

She glanced to the photographed portrait hanging on the wall over the mantelpiece. Hair as white as
the whitest cloud, eyes bright as dewdrops in the sun, skin pale, almost unearthly pale, with a thin-lipped smile at once both lost and found, as though she were trying to equate a former happiness with a new one: yes, Mother had had her secrets too. She had never truly belonged here, that much had always been obvious—though quite where
here
referred to, Meredith couldn’t say for sure. Southsea? England? The twentieth century?

That feeling of de
tachment, of alienation permeated this portrait, but the sensation also gave Meredith an odd comfort, a kind of inherited defiance, hard to articulate, even harder to pinpoint. When Sonja limped up the front steps outside, grinning mischievously between coughs as Father draped a thick woollen shawl around her, Meredith would have given anything to have Mother at her side. It was an ache she’d ignored these past months, deep down, that now swelled with a vengeance. Seeing Sonja return home from some perilous adventure she’d had without her sister, out in the big wide world, made Meredith feel small. Left behind. Ill-equipped to deal with what the future might bring.

Alone.

“Meredith, come along, help your sister change upstairs before lunch, whatever she needs. It’s been a trying night, and she’s still shivering, poor creature. Warm as you can, now—I suggest you fetch the woolliest, wintriest—Mrs. Van Persie, is the fire licking high—ah yes, very good, very good indeed. Hot milk? A hot water bottle? Good, good. An appetising smell from the kitchen there and no mistake. Now then, Sonja, I know you said you’d rather gorge than get some sleep, but—”

“
Father dear, you’re nagging. I’ll take a nap later. And I am more than capable of dressing myself, thank you. All this confounded fuss over nothing. Anyone would think we’d been shipwrecked for a decade. It was just a night under a canopy, that’s all, and we were supervised at that.”

“
To say nothing of the freezing temperature, the dampness, or the blizzard raging around you.” Father desperately scanned the room for his pipe and tobacco pouch, sifting through his memories of places they could be with a single nodding finger. He located them in the pocket of the jacket he was wearing. “Honestly, child, you have no conception of the danger you were in. Were it not for that fellow—Auric—I shudder to think what might have happened.”

“
Mr. Auric? From biology? What part did he play?” Meredith had graduated last summer, and she struggled to conjure his face—a passably good-looking one from what she recalled. Her sister pretended distraction, miming a whistle as she climbed the stairs. “Sonja?”

“
Hmm? Oh, he told that fat gibbon Challender where to stick his seniority.” In her small pink hand, a folded note, almost concealed. “And if the School Board has the gall to accuse him of anything, he’ll give them a taste. He’s too good for that school, too good by half. Who knows, now that Mrs. Prescott isn’t here, maybe they’ll—”

“
What do you mean? Where’s Mrs. Prescott?” Meredith shouted up.

“
I’m afraid she died in the blizzard. Her heart gave out, poor woman. But exactly where she’d be
now—
that’s a tad ghoulish, even for me.”

Meredith ignored the quip and focused instead on the folded note Sonja continued to caress until she whipped out of sight along the landing. Whatever it was, it seemed to be the source of this new and disconcerting air of independence.

Mrs. Van Persie’s excellent cottage pie, made with minced beef, sliced Cumberland sausage and a generous helping of salted carrots, was one of Meredith’s favourite dishes, but throughout her sister’s recounting of the near-disastrous expedition Meredith hardly touched her plate. Those earlier kaleidoscopic reflections on Mother and Father—filtered through the portrait hanging on the wall—continued to spin and tumble into each other, glintings of memories, intuitions and myriad unanswered questions distracting her while Sonja did her best to make the blizzard tale engaging and seem, well, all a bit of a lark really.

Father, too, kept glancing away from Sonja and studying Meredith from the corner of his eye instea
d, as if he sensed whom the real weight in the room was pressing upon, and was trying to puzzle out the cause in his own scientific way.