The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (4 page)

“The Prime Minister handed the little French boy back to his father. Then he bowed stiffly to M. Venn. ‘Sir, your quick thinking preserved my life.’

“M. Venn was quite modest. He ruffled little Julie’s hair. `Perhaps you should thank this small fellow.’

“‘But I scarce thought the day would ever come when I of all people owed my life to one French gentleman, let alone two!’

“M. Venn said, ‘We are no longer enemies, sir. And I for one would not see a countryman of mine commit such a craven act as an assassination of this kind.’

“At that the Prime Minister’s formidable eyebrows rose, and I could see that he was thinking through the events of the hour in quite a different light — as was I. But of M. Gyger, who had tried to call the Prime Minister into the path of the advancing Rocket, there was no sign.

“And little Julie Venn, who had that day ridden faster than any small child in history,
and
saved the life of a Prime Minister, laughed and laughed and laughed.”

I checked out some of the details later. The Rocket, perhaps the most famous steam locomotive ever built, really was running that day, alongside seven of her sister engines, including the Northumbrian. And there really was a fatal accident, when William Huskisson MP managed to step out in front of the speeding Rocket.

I’ve come across no account of a Monsieur Gyger.

Albert couldn’t tell me why anybody would have wanted to try to kill the Prime Minister that day, French or otherwise. France and Britain were not, at that time, at war. It made no sense — until it occurred to me to check who the Prime Minister actually was.

Grand, aloof, distrustful of new technology and the working people alike, it was Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington, victor over Napoleon at Waterloo just fifteen years earlier — a man who many French people would surely have loved to see in his grave.

The eye-witness accounts of the day say nothing about the Prime Minister holding a small boy at the time. On the other hand, they don’t say he wasn’t. Maybe the incident was hushed up for the sake of international relations — or simply to save Wellington embarrassment.

The rest of the day rather fizzled out for Lily Ord. The mood was subdued after the accident. She rode on with her companions to Manchester, but the Prime Minister was greeted by boos and thrown stones; his government wasn’t popular with everybody, and nor was the new railway, a “triumph of machinery”. Wellington wouldn’t travel by rail again for thirteen years, and then only because Queen Victoria persuaded him.

At Manchester Lily said her goodbyes to the “Venns”.

“Little Julie lifted our spirits. In his mother’s arms he fairly bubbled with excitement, and he rattled on with a high-speed gabbling, as if bursting to tell the story of his day, but he was quite incomprehensible!

“M. Venn took my hand. ‘A memorable day, Miss Ord,’ he said.

“‘Quite so. Sir, you showed remarkable composure —-’

“For a Frenchman?’ He smiled. ‘My dear, you must not allow the foolishness at Parkside to colour your memories of the day. The railway is the thing — the railway! You British with your relentless desire for trade, trade, trade, will take Mr Stephenson’s marvellous invention and fling it around the world. When the whole of the globe is wrapped up like a fly in an iron spider-web, Mr Stephenson’s locomotive will carry us around the world in a hundred days, or less — ninety, eighty days!’

“Little Julie was laughing and kicking; he would not be without imagination, I saw. But this was one flight of fancy too much for me.

“And besides, M. Venn was holding my hand a little too tightly, his gaze a little too warm. As I looked into his eyes — just for a second, I confess it! — I saw another world opening up, a world of possibility every bit as remarkable as a planet girdled by railway tracks. But I knew it could not come to pass. I gently extricated my hand.

“I said my
‘Au revoir’
to Mme. Venn and Julie, and looked for Miss —, who was arranging our passage back to Liverpool . . .”

Albert only had that one fragment of memoir. I’d like to know what became of Lily Ord, if she was happy as she raised a family of her own in the Toll Gate Lodge.

And I’d love to know if her tall tale held even a fragment of truth.

“Isn’t it at least possible?” Albert said to me, earnest, wheezing slightly.
“Venn, Vairn —
she wasn’t used to French accents — could she have misheard the name? Lily wrote all this down long before he became famous, of course. And isn’t it possible all this affected
him,
young as he was? The mighty steam engines — the great metal road, the sense of speed, of plummeting into a new future — I’m only telling you because you’ve started to write your own science fiction, Stephen. No wonder he made up all those stories of his! And it all started here.”

Albert died a few years later. His family, always remote, took away his effects, and the old Toll Gate Lodge was sold, passing out of the family’s hands after two centuries. I don’t know what became of Lily’s manuscript.

Albert did leave a few tokens to friends. I was sent a small envelope that contained a length of silken streamer, imperial purple. One end was neatly hemmed, but the other had been cut crudely, as if by a small set of scissors. And when I lifted the ribbon to my face I could detect faint scents, almost vanished, of soot, and rosewater.

JEHAN THUN’S QUEST by Brian Stableford

Verne’s early stories are not immediately identifiable with the advancement of science. Indeed his very first story, “The Mutineers” (1851) and his third, “Martin Paz” (1852), were more inspired by the revolutionary zeal that was flooding Europe. Only “Un voyage en ballon”, also known as “Drama in the Air”, and probably inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Balloon Hoax”, gave thought to new technology. His fourth story, “Maitre Zacharius” (1854), also known as “The Watch’s Soul”, saw a change in direction. Whilst Verne was exploring technology — the desire to make the perfect watch — though in a historical context,  this story is more fantastic than technological, drawing more upon the works of Hoffman than on Poe. It concerned a master clock-maker who, in creating a new mechanism for his watches, believed that he had imbued the watch with something of himself — his soul. The locals, though, were suspicious of Zacharius and Verne used the opportunity to consider mankind’s fear of progress and how we need to embrace new technology not destroy it, a view that Verne would modify in later years. Here, Brian Stableford revisits the story and considers its aftermath.

The day had been clear when Jehan Thun set off from the inn on the outskirts of the city of Geneva, but the weather in the lake’s environs was far more capricious than the weather in Paris. He had hoped that the sky might remain blue all day, but it was not long after noon when grey cloud began spilling through the gaps in the mountains, swallowing up the peaks and promising a downpour that would soak him to the skin and render his path treacherous.

There were villages scattered along the shore of the lake but he had no thought of asking for shelter there. The time seemed to be long past when one could be confident of receiving hospitality from any neighbour, and the people in Geneva who had recognized his surname had looked at him strangely and suspiciously, although none had actually challenged him. It would have been better, in retrospect, to avoid Geneva altogether, since the Château of Andernatt was on the French side of the lake and he could have followed the course of Rhone, but he had hoped to find the city of his ancestors more welcoming by far than any other he had passed through on his flight from Paris. At least the many repetitions of his grandmother’s story had drummed the stages of the route that she and Aubert had followed into Jehan’s mind: Bessange, Ermance, ford the Dranse; Chesset, Colombay, Monthey, the hermitage of Notre-Dame-du-Sex.

When Jehan’s grandparents had made that journey the churches of Geneva had still been affiliated to Rome; now, fifty years after Calvin’s advent, they preached a very different faith. Notre-Dame-du-Sex was on the French shore, but Jehan was not at all certain that the hermitage would still be occupied. The apparatus of charity that had supported the hermit who gave temporary refuge to Aubert Thun and the daughter of Master Zacharius had been transformed for several leagues around the city, just as the environs of Paris had been transformed before St Bartholomew’s Day.

The rain began before Jehan had reached the Dranse, but it was no deluge at first and the torrent had not become impassable. The downfall became steadier as he left the shore, though, and the further he went up the slopes the greater its volume became. He dared not stop now, or even relent in his pace. It had taken his grandparents more than twenty hours to reach the base of the Dent-du-Midi, but they had been slowed down by Old Scholastique; he reckoned on covering the same ground in fourteen hours at the most — as he would have to do if he were to avoid spending the night on the bare mountain.

He had hoped that fifty years of footfalls might have smoothed the paths a little since his grandparents’ day, but it seemed that hardly anyone came this way anymore; parts of the path had all but disappeared. On a better day, the Dent-du-Midi would have served as a fine beacon, but with its top lost in the clouds he was unable to sight it.

Jehan Thun was a man well used to walking, but the gradients in and around Paris were gentle, and he was glad now that he had had to cross the forbidding slopes of the Jura in order to reach Geneva, for his legs had been hardened in the last few weeks. His cape and broad-brimmed hat protected him from the worst effects of the driving rain, but that would not have been enough to sustain him had he not been capable of such a metronomic stride. He had walked like an automaton since St Bartholomew’s Day, but even an automaton needs strength in its limbs and power in its spring.

It was a close-run thing, in the end; had he been a quarter of an hour later, he would not have been able to catch a glimpse of the hermitage before darkness fell. Had he not seen it in the fast-fading twilight he could not have found it, for no light burned in its window, and it had obviously been abandoned for decades, but the roof had not yet caved in. It leaked in a dozen places, but there was enough dry space within to set down his pack. He lit a candle—not without difficulty, for all that he had kept his tinder dry.

There was no point in trying to gather wood to build a fire that would burn all night, so Jehan made a rapid meal of what little bread he had left before wrapping himself more tightly in his cloak and lying down in a corner to sleep. Even as he reached out to snuff out his candle, though, he was interrupted. A voice cried in the distance, in German-accented French, asking what light it was that was showing in the darkness. For a moment he was tempted to extinguish the candle anyway, in the hope that the other traveller would not be able to find him once the guide was gone — but that would have been a terrible thing to do, even if the other turned out to be a bandit or a heresy-hunter. Instead, he shouted out that he was a traveller who had lost his way, and had taken refuge in an abandoned hermitage.

A few minutes later, a man staggered through the doorway, mingling curses against the weather with profuse thanks for guidance to the meagre shelter. He took off a vast colporteur’s pack, letting it fall to the floor with a grateful sigh. He was approximately the same age and build as Jehan Thun; even by candlelight Jehan could see the anxiety in the way the newcomer measured him, and knew that it must be reflected in his own eyes. He imagined that the other must be just as glad as he was to see that they were so evenly matched, not merely in size and apparent health but in the manner of their dress.

“I did not see you on the path ahead of me,” the newcomer said, “so I presume that you must be coming away from Geneva while I am going towards it. I don’t know which of us is the wiser, for they say that Geneva is like a city under siege nowadays. My name is Nicholas Alther. I was born in Bern, although my course takes me far and wide in the Confederation, France and Savoy.”

Jehan knew that the complications of Geneva’s political situation extended far beyond matters of religious controversy; although the city was allied with Bern it was not a member of the Swiss confederation; and its position as a three-way juncture between Switzerland, Savoy and France created tensions over and above the residue of Calvin’s reforms.

“My name is Jehan Thun,” he admitted, a trifle warily. “I’m stateless now, although I’ve recently been in France.” Jehan watched Nicholas Alther carefully as he spoke his name; there was a manifest reaction, but it was not the same one that the name had usually evoked in Geneva, and Nicholas Alther did not make the same attempt to conceal it. “Thun?” the colporteur echoed. “There was once a clock-maker in these parts named Thun.”

“That was a long time ago,” Jehan said, very carefully.

“Yes,” Alther agreed. “He was a fine mechanician, though, and his work has lasted. I have one of his watches in my pack — my own, not for trading.” So saying, the colporteur rummaged in one of the side-pockets of his capacious luggage and brought out a forty-year-old timepiece. Jehan Thun observed that its single hand was making slow progress between the numbers ten and eleven. “You doubtless have a better one,” Alther prompted, as he put the device away again and brought out a cheese instead.