Novel - Airman (17 page)

Billtoe arrived thirty minutes late that evening, swathed from head to toe in silken sheets. “Catch a goo at me,” he warbled. “I’m the emperor of Rome, I am. Arthur Billtoe Caesar.”

Conor was waiting by the door, and was dismayed to see Billtoe’s boot heel catching on the hem of one sheet. He had enough stitching to do without repairing rips, too. “My sheets,” he said, in strangled tones.

Billtoe stopped his tomfoolery. Inmate Finn had that look on his face again. The fearsome one. “Here you are,” he said, suddenly eager to be out of this tiny room. “And while you’re sleeping on ’em, dream about that twelve-shot revolver, partner.”

Partner, thought Conor doubtfully. As if Arthur Billtoe would ever accept a prisoner as partner. Conor caught the thrown sheets, laying them carefully on his bed. “Thank you, Mister Billtoe. These mean the world to me. These and my walks on the outside.”

Billtoe wagged a finger. “After the coronation, soldier boy.
After.
”

“Of course,” said Conor contritely. “After.” He took a timid step forward. “I was hoping to have the revolver designs ready for the coronation. Perhaps if I didn’t have to work for the next few nights . . .”

Billtoe backed out of the cell. “Don’t even ask, soldier boy. This is starting to sound like a relationship. As though we
do
things for each other. Favors and such. Well, it ain’t a relationship. Not of the friendly type, at any rate. You do whatever you can to stop me slitting your throat in the night. That’s all there is to it.”

Conor knew better than to wheedle. Once Billtoe was set in his path, trying to change his course would only send him trundling along it faster. “I am sorry, Mister Billtoe. Of course you are absolutely correct. There’s work that needs doing.”

Conor thrust out his hands for the handcuffs, as he had every day for the past two years. And just as
he
had been doing for the past two years, Arthur Billtoe ratcheted them on tight enough to pinch. Other guards stopped cuffing their charges after the first while, but not Billtoe. Care only took seconds, but it could keep a person alive for years. Billtoe had no intention of ending his days with his head stove in by some fisheye-sucking inmate who had lost the will to live and replaced it with the desire to commit murder.

“That’s right, Salt. Those diamonds aren’t going to just pop out of the ground and jump into the royal treasury themselves, now are they?”

Conor winced as the steel bit into his flesh. Two more days, he thought, doing his utmost to hide his hatred of Billtoe behind a mask of compliance. Two more days, then I can begin to collect my diamonds.

Billtoe was thinking, too. This one is not broke. He stands broke, but his eyes are burning. I will have to keep an eye on Mr. Conor Finn.

Conor Finn was important to Billtoe, and it was not just for his clever notions and the calm he seemed to have generated in the ranks of the Battering Rams. He was important because every so often, Marshall Bonvilain inquired after the young man’s health. There was a story somewhere in Soldier Boy’s past, but Billtoe had no desire to find out the specifics. It wasn’t healthy to have the marshall wondering how good a man was at keeping his mouth shut. He might decide that the man in question would hold his silence better on the bottom of the ocean, with only the crabs to know the contents of his brain.

Billtoe shuddered. Sometimes his mind conjured the most gruesome images. Perhaps they were memories seeping from Little Saltee’s walls. “Look lively, Salt. There’s more’n you to be seen to, and only Billtoe to see to ’em.”

With a last regretful glance at the precious sheets on his bed, Conor followed Billtoe through the doorway and into the flooded corridor. There was a spring tide that day, and salt water ran along grooves eroded into the mortar. Conor swore he saw an eel wriggling through the tiny torrent. This entire wing was a death trap, and had been for centuries. When he had first arrived there were signs of King Nicholas’s planned renovations: scaffolds, ladders, and such. But these had all disappeared within days of the king’s death.

No. Not simply death, thought Conor. Murder. The king’s life had been stolen, as mine was stolen from me. But soon he would steal it back.

The following days were a blur of feverish toil. By night, Conor mined the Pipe, sucking down the bell’s greasy air almost as fast as the pump team could send it through the vent. By day he worked on his sheets, stitching with lengths of thread he had bartered for, and cutting with a sharp stone whetted on the cell walls. There were twelve panels to be cut, hemmed, and stitched. The silk was not as tightly woven as he would have liked, but there was nothing to be done about that now. It would have to do. The work was flawed, Conor knew that; but how could he be exact with poor light, improvised materials, and no experience? He was most likely stitching a shroud for himself, but even the idea of a quick death held more comfort than a lifetime in this cell.

On the evening before the coronation, Conor almost gave himself away. Run ragged by stitching and mining, he began to behave like the lunatic he was supposed to be. When Billtoe collected him for his shift, Conor’s face hung from his skull like a wet cloth and his lips flapped in a dull mumble.

He is breaking, thought Billtoe, satisfied. It was the sheets that did it. Sometimes reminders of home are too potent to bear. The work will go quickly now; he will be desperate to please me.

The guard clapped on the handcuffs and led the way down the flooded corridor. He inquired on Conor’s progress regarding the revolver, but all he heard in reply was a burble of counting.

Billtoe stopped suddenly, wavelets scurrying from his boot heels.

“What’s that you’re saying? Numbers, is it? A count of some sort?”

Conor barely managed to avoid shunting his keeper. He had been making a count. A vital and secret one. He realized that one slip of the lip could be disastrous to his plan. “A nursery rhyme, Mister Billtoe,” he mumbled, flushed. “Nothing more.”

Billtoe looked him square in the face. “You’re red as a boiled lobster, soldier boy. Are you up to some scheming? Some numbers plan?”

Conor hung his head. “Just embarrassed. Those sheets set me thinking of my mother. Of the rhymes she used to recite to me.”

Billtoe laughed. Perhaps Conor Finn was not as fearsome as supposed. Then again, he had seen bigger men than he with Mummy’s handkerchief clutched in one hand and a bloody dagger in the other. “Come to your senses,” he advised the prisoner. “A diving bell is no place for daydreamers. You’re away with the birds.”

Nearly, thought Conor. Very nearly.

The final day whirled past. For months, time had mocked him, prolonging itself elastically. Each second a yawning chasm. But now there was not time enough to squeeze in the day’s work. To Conor, it seemed to take an age simply to thread a needle. His fine mind was fuzzy with fear. Twice he sewed sections of his contraption upside down, and was forced to pick out the stitches. Sweat dripped constantly from his brow, speckling the silk sheets.

This is ridiculous. I am a scientist. Look upon this as an experiment.
It was no use. He could not calm himself. The specter of failure tapped his shoulder in time with the water dripping from the ceiling. There would be other plans certainly; he already had the bones of half a dozen. Some more convoluted, some less so. He had designed a diving helmet, like a miniature bell, which should contain enough air to get him to open water; after that, he could manually inflate a pig’s bladder and swim to shore by night. To amass the materials for that plan would take five years, at the very least.

Five more years. Unbearable.
Conor redoubled his efforts, blinking the fog from his eyes, pressing his fingertips together until the shake subsided. The coronation was tonight: he must be ready.

CHAPTER 11: TO THE QUEEN, HER CROWN

The Saltee Islanders were preparing for celebration. The British royal yacht, HMY
Victoria and Albert II
, a three-hundred-and-sixty-foot paddle steamer, lolled regally in Fulmar Bay with the waves of St. George’s Channel tipping her gently like the fingers of a child on a rubber balloon. The queen herself was happily ensconced in one of the palace’s sumptuous apartments. Her diary records that
I find the air of industry in this miniature kingdom wonderfully exhilarating. Looking down from my balcony window at the commerce far below, one almost feels as though one has arrived in Swift’s Lilliput.

Almost every patch of Great Saltee’s two hundred acres had been appropriated for the celebrations. The South Summit was festooned with clusters of pikes decorated with crimson and gold flags. The streets of Promontory Fort were painted in the same colored stripes. Every man with a hammer was banging in nails, and every man without one was hanging bunting from those nails. Even the weather gods were proving benevolent on the day, pouring down sunshine on the little principality, setting the waves dancing with sparkles.

The southern cliffs lost some of their gloom, fringed in beards of white spume.

It seemed to the gentlemen of the world’s press as though the kingdom of the Saltees was an oasis of calm amid the political consternation of Europe. They sat in seaside taverns on Fulmar Bay, boiling up their gullets with traditional spicy gull pancakes and cooling them off again with tankards of Irish stout. No journalists were permitted on Little Saltee, and none had been invited who might press the matter.

On the surface, happiness and contentment abounded, but as in many things, the surface gave a treacherous reading. Many were unhappy in the kingdom. Taxes had been reintroduced, and heavy tithes on imports. Public services were so skimped on that they were almost nonexistent, and residency had been granted to an assorted bunch of motley characters who were then spiffed up and handed commissions in the Saltee army, the best barracks, too. Common scarred veterans most of them, landing on the port with clanking sacks of weapons. Bonvilain was filling out his ranks with mercenaries and turning away raw recruits. Building his own private army, many said; though the marshall claimed that he was merely protecting the princess from revolutionaries.

Captain Declan Broekhart would, once upon a time, have objected vehemently to Bonvilain’s politics, but now he was too besieged by his own demons. Catherine Broekhart, too, was haunted by sadness, though she concealed it for the sake of their eighteen-month-old baby son, Sean.

Declan was consumed and ravaged by grief. He wore it like a coat. It was more a part of him now than his eyes and ears. It took his hunger and his strength. It ate away his girth and his stature. Declan Broekhart had grown old before his time.

Often Catherine would encourage him to fight his way clear of his dark mood. “We have another son now, Declan. Young Sean needs his father.”

His answer was always a variation on the following: “I am no father. Conor died at
my
post, doing
my
duty. My life is gone. Spent. I am a dead man still breathing.”

Declan Broekhart shunned close contact, eager for punishment. He grew tight lipped and short fused. He returned to his duties at the palace, but his manner had changed. Where before he had inspired devotion, now men obeyed him through fear. Declan worked his men hard, chastising honest soldiers who had been at his side for years. No dereliction of duty was left unpunished, however slight. Declan prowled the Great Saltee Wall at night, clothed entirely in black, searching for an inattentive sentry. He demoted soldiers, docked their pay, and on one occasion had a watchman dismissed for nodding off in the guard hut.

This last was three days before the coronation, when Declan was at his most tense. When the news trickled through that the punished watchman was worn out with newborn twins and a wife still in her bed, Catherine believed her husband might come to his senses, but instead Declan Broekhart turned a degree colder.

Little Sean cried from the bedroom, his midday sleep disturbed. Catherine wiped her eyes so the baby would see her happy. “Do you think Conor would want this?” she said, making one last attempt. “Do you think he looks down from a hero’s heaven and rejoices at what his father has become?”

Declan cracked, but he did not break. “And what have I become, Catherine? Am I not still a man who fulfills his duties to the best of his abilities?”

Catherine’s eyes blazed through the last of her tears. “Those of
Captain
Broekhart, certainly. But
Declan
Broekhart, husband and father? As you say yourself, those duties have been neglected for some time now.”

With these harsh words Catherine left her husband to his brooding. When he was certain that she could no longer see him, Declan Broekhart clasped his hands on either side of his head, as though he could squeeze out the pain. Declan had never recovered from Conor’s supposed death, and perhaps he never would have, had two events not occurred one after the other on the day of Isabella’s coronation. Alone, each event might not have been enough to raise him from his stupor; but together they complemented one another, shaking the lethargy from Declan Broekhart’s bones.

The first was a simple thing. Common and quick, the kind of family happening that would not usually qualify as an event. But for Declan, something in those few seconds warmed his heart and set him on the road to recovery. Later he would often wonder whether Catherine had engineered this little incident, or for that matter, the second one, too. He questioned her often, but she would neither admit nor deny anything.

What happened was this. Little Sean came waddling from his room, unsteady on eighteen-month-old chubby legs. When Conor had been that age, Declan had called his legs
fat sausages
, and he and his son had rolled on the rug like a dog and its pup; but he hardly noticed Sean, leaving the rearing to Catherine.

“Papa,” said the infant, slightly disappointed that his mother was not to be seen. Papa ignored him. Papa was not a source of food or entertainment, and so little Sean toddled on toward the open bay window. The balcony was beyond, and then a low wrought iron railing. Hardly enough to contain an inquisitive boy.

“Catherine,” called Declan, but his wife did not appear. Sean skirted a chair, teetering briefly to starboard, then on toward the window.

“Catherine. The boy. He’s near the window.” Still no sign of or reply from Catherine, and now little Sean was at the sill itself, a pudgy foot raised to step over.

Declan had no choice but to act. With a grunt of annoyance, he took the two strides necessary to reach the child. Not such a momentous undertaking, unless you consider that this was perhaps the fifth time that Declan Broekhart had set hands on his son. And at that exact moment the boy turned, pivoting on the ball of his heel, the way only the very young can, and Declan’s fingers grazed Sean’s cheek. Their eyes met, and the boy reached up, tugging Declan’s bottom lip.

The contact was magical. Declan felt a jolt run through his heart, as for the first time he saw Sean as himself and not a shadow of his dead brother. “Oh, my son,” he said, hoisting him up and drawing him close. “You must keep away from the window, it is dangerous. Stay here with me.”

Declan was halfway back to life. Perhaps he would have continued the journey in fits and jumps, an occasional shared smile, the odd bedtime story, but then there came a knocking on the front door. A series of raps, actually. Regal raps.

Before Declan had the chance to register the sounds, the door burst open and one of his own men stepped across the threshold, holding the door wide for Princess Isabella.

Declan was caught tenderly embracing his son, a most un-Broekhart-like action. He frowned twice, once for the soldier, a warning to keep this sight to himself. A second frown for Princess Isabella, who was clothed in full coronation robes. A vision in gold and crimson silk and satin, more beautiful than even her father could have dreamed. What could she be doing here? On this of all days?

Isabella opened her mouth to speak. The princess had her entreaty prepared. Declan had requested Wall duty for the ceremony, but she needed him at her side, today of all days. She missed Conor and her father more than ever, and the only way she could get through the ceremony was if the man who she considered her second father was restored to her. And not simply in body, but in spirit. Today Declan Broekhart must remember the man he had been.

Quite a speech: obviously the girl would make a fine queen. However, no one heard the words, for the moment Isabella laid eyes on Declan cradling his son, her posture slumped from queen to girl and she flung herself at his chest, sobbing. Declan Broekhart had little option but to wrap his free arm around the weeping princess.

“There, there,” he said uncertainly. “Now, now.”

“I need you,” sobbed Isabella. “By my side. Always.”

Declan felt tears gather on his own eyelids. “Of course, Majesty.”

Isabella thumped his broad chest with her delicate fist. “I need
you
, Declan.
You
.”

“Yes, Isabella,” said Declan gruffly. “By your side. Always.”

Catherine Broekhart stepped in from the balcony, where she had been waiting, and joined the embrace. The guard at the door was tempted, but decided against it.

The coronation was a wordy affair, with clergy and velvet and enough Latin chanting to keep a monastery going for a few decades. It was all a bit of a blur to Declan Broekhart, who installed himself behind his queen on the altar, so he could be there to smile encouragingly when she looked for him, which she did often.

Shortly after the papal nuncio lowered the crown, Declan noticed his wife’s dress. “A new dress?” he whispered. “I thought we weren’t coming.”

Catherine smiled archly. “Yes, you did think that, didn’t you.” Declan felt a glow in his chest that he recognized as cautious happiness. It was a bittersweet emotion without Conor there at his shoulder.

They rode in the royal coach back from St. Christopher’s toward Promontory Point, though in truth the town now covered almost every square foot of the island. As the population increased, houses had grown up instead of out, and were shoehorned into any available space. The higgledypiggledy town reminded Declan of the Giant’s Causeway, a chaotic honeycomb of basalt columns in the north of Ireland. Though these columns were marked by doors and windows and striped in the traditional bold house colors of the Saltee Islands. As for the islanders, it seemed they were all on the street, along with half of Ireland, cheering themselves hoarse for the beautiful young queen.

The coach was shared with Marshall Bonvilain in full ceremonial uniform, including a Knights of the Holy Cross toga worn loosely over it all. The Saltee Templars were the only branch to have survived Pope Clement V’s fourteenth-century purge. Even the Vatican had been unwilling to risk disrupting the diamond supply.

Bonvilain took advantage of the new queen’s distraction to lean across and whisper to Declan. “How are you, Declan? I’m surprised to see you here.”

“As am I, Hugo,” replied Declan. “I hadn’t planned to come, but I am happy to find my plans changed.”

Bonvilain smiled. “I am happy too. It does the men good to see your face. Keeps them alert. Nice work dismissing that sentry, by the way. Sleeping sentries is just the opening the rebels need. One chink in the Wall, and they’re in. And I needn’t tell you the heartache they can cause.”

Declan nodded tightly, but in truth Bonvilain’s speech seemed a bit hollow on this day. There had been little rebel activity for many months, and some of the marshall’s arrests had been made on the flimsiest of evidence.

Bonvilain noticed the captain’s expression. “You disagree, Declan? Surely not. After all the Broekharts have endured?”

Declan felt his wife’s fingers close around his. He gazed past Isabella’s shining face, through the window, over the heads of a hundred islanders and into the blue haze of sea and sky. “I don’t disagree, Marshall. I just need to think about something else today. My wife, and my queen, they need me. For today, at least.”

“Of course,” said Bonvilain, his tone gracious, but his eyes were hard and his teeth were gritted behind his lips. Broekhart recovers, he thought. His scruples are already returning. How long before the dog bites his master?

Hugo Bonvilain waved a gloved hand at the cheering citizens on the roadside.
Better not to take the chance. Perhaps it is time for a little blackmail. Declan Broekhart could not bear to lose his elder son a second time.

Conor was ready for flight. His sewing was done. A double seam would have been better, but there was not a strand of thread left. The device was as sound as it would ever be.

The sounds of revelries drifted across from the Great Saltee Wall. Singing, cheering, stamping of feet. A great coming together. A thousand faces flushed in the glow of the Wall lamps. Conor imagined the crowds lined a dozen deep, waiting for the great show of fireworks. It seemed as though the very prison walls shook, though a stretch of ocean separated prisoners from the party.