Escapement (15 page)

“No . . .” Childress still wondered what this killer Chinese wanted with her. “Nothing not already broken beyond retrieval.”

“Replacement, not retrieval.”

“Yes.”

He rose and offered her his hand. She took it and stood. He walked her down to a point on the rail where they’d slung a rope. There was a drop to the heaving, foaming sea, where a small boat bobbed, tended by two sailors even now staring upward with round blank-eyed expressions on their golden faces.

“If the Mask would care to go first,” the captain said softly.

“The Mask—,” she began, then stopped with a flash of clear, bitter insight.

It was too much. Laughter bubbled up within. She had not been spared for a purpose at all. Her life in this moment was nothing but error. And when they found Poinsard, the Chinese would put a bullet through her head just as they had with each of Eckhuysen’s crew.

Rain and tears and pain and fear mixed together, so that the laughter emerged as a violent upheaval of her gut, disguising all her thoughts and feelings in a sudden vile spew that soaked the captain.

He said something calmly in Chinese, then helped her over the rail and down the rain-slick rope ladder.

The boat below tossed and heaved as the sailors pulled at their oars. The swells rose steadily as the weather worsened. Despite herself, Childress found that she was once more seeing the details around her.

The world had not yet ended. Not for her.

She looked at the captain opposite her in the stern of the little craft. He calmly picked her spew off of his uniform. He was clad in silk in a deeper blue than the roughspun cotton of the ordinary sailors, with tiny fabric closures where she might have expected brass buttons on an English officer’s coat. Though it was hard to tell with the mess upon his chest, the silk appeared to be damasked with some complex shape or image. His hat was strange, too, a little round pillbox of a stiffened version of the same silk as his jacket. A small paper scroll, now waterlogged, was tied to the front with red silk thread. Even his shoes seemed to be silk, more like blue gloves for his feet than anything she might ever have expected a man to wear.

A man rough and vile enough to kill an entire ship’s company, yet gentle enough to stay both his hand and his words when she embarrassed him in front of his crew. Childress wondered who he was, and what he did here.

Beyond murdering subjects of the English crown, of course.

Her interest vanished with the slap of cold seawater. The ocean was trying to come over the side of the boat now. All she could see was lifting
slopes of boiling, chilly gray around her, and a pall of smoke from
Mute Swan
that even the increasing rain had not fully dispelled.

Anneke dead. Eckhuysen dead. The smiling Swede and all the others. That she could begin to smile upon this man who had killed them all revolted her. When they found the Mask Poinsard, Childress, too, would go into the ocean, the accidental deception uncovered.

What if the Mask had died?
a dry and logical voice asked. Anneke died by accident. Could Childress, as a Christian and a white bird, hope the woman had met such a fate?

Her resolve crumbled once more into despair. Childress tried to take shelter in prayer, but the water was growing so violent, she could not form the words. Then she was jerked upward by grasping hands. Short unsmiling men lashed to the deck behind them tugged her toward the tower of the submarine. They would push her into the hatches there and take her below, where the guns were kept and all these men must live as they traveled beneath the sea.

She was heartsick enough to ignore her curiosity about what kept the vessel beneath the waves but above the sea floor. They hustled her down a narrow ladder through a tiny hole while the captain shouted over the rising storm.

Within, the passageways were tiny. As the ship rolled, she simply shifted from shouldering one side to shouldering the other. Two sailors clad in the same roughspun blue as their fellows who had assaulted
Mute Swan
led her through three knee-barking hatches before showing her to a tiny cabin. It was only slightly larger than the lav aboard the other ship had been.

Her escorts bowed several times, backing out carefully before swinging the hatch shut. It clicked into place with a hollow, sepulchral clang. The locking lever was on her side.

Not a prison cell, then. Not exactly. Except that this underwater ship was a prison from which she could not escape. Filled with jailors to whom she could not speak, but for the oddly gallant captain.

To stay alive in this undersea prison she must be prepared to play the part of the Mask Poinsard.

“I shall live,” she whispered, “and set every inch and noise of this place in my memory, so that someday when I return to honest soil I can tell my story to . . . to . . .”

She was unsure to whom she wished to return. New Haven as she had known it was lost to her. A woman missing even a day of work could expect to never see that employment again. There was always a deserving
man with a family to feed. She had no great circle of friends there to welcome her home. The congregation at St. John Horofabricus would see no difference in her going. She was just another aging woman who’d lost her way without ever finding husband and family.

As for Queen and country, living in New Haven, Childress found her loyalty as a British subject a natural position, like breathing. She’d rather return than not, but she did not feel a great pull of patriotism as some claimed.

Which left her with the
avebianco,
who had lately been set to bind her over to the Silent Order.

Tears took Childress in a rush that shocked her. What had she lived for? What had she made her life’s purpose? She lay on the narrow bunk and pressed her face into the rough blanket to sob for the first time in decades.

Later Childress arose as if from a tempestuous dream. The submarine had ceased rolling to and fro. She wondered what that might signify. Her head was full of the angry pressure of the recent tears, but her mind seemed clear.

That she was alive was a miracle. No sign from God, for Childress did not credit the Creator with reaching finger by finger into His world, but at least a blessing delivered by the machineries of fate.

She found a tiny metal mirror and looked to see what had become of her face. Even limited by the gleaming disc, the view was not encouraging. The recent battle had left her bruised from blows of which she had no recollection. Several lines of scabs were traced across her forehead. Had one of the splinters that claimed Anneke’s life so very nearly missed stealing hers as well?

Childress knew she owed these Chinese nothing but her life. Even that debt was a thing they’d made, a trap for her conscience. But without the cloak of her dignity, she could not face them. They would never believe her the Mask Poinsard unless she had the poise and strength of the Mask.
He
would never believe.

This was not about any captain,
Childress told herself sternly.

She set to cleaning as best she could, though that was sadly limited. There were jars on a shelf below the mirror that on examination contained liniments and powders. Not the paint pots of an actress, nor the urns of an apothecary, but something that seemed to somehow split the difference.

So she experimented until she found the right compound of cool smoothness and analgesic tingle. It was a pale green stuff that left a strange
tint to her skin, but the balm eased the pain of the cuts and bruises and smoothed the wounded strangeness of her face.

After judicious application of the salve, Childress explored the rest of the tiny cabin. It must be the captain’s, she realized. There were two silk jackets clipped behind the door that matched what he had worn out on the ocean. She fingered them. Fine stuff, as good as or better than any bolt she’d seen for sale in New Haven. Not that she’d ever been able to afford such a vainglorious cloth.

The silk was damasked with a pattern of cranes flying under moonlight, recurring roundels with that image repeated across the man so that when he wore it, he would walk in beauty. A subtle, tiny grace amid the humming metal death of this submarine vessel, but one that spoke volumes for what must be behind those black eyes.

Continuing her inspection, Childress found a pair of leather boots beneath the bunk, perhaps for going ashore. There was a modest chest of pale clothing, which she quickly shoved away. What a man wore beneath his trousers was no affair of hers. Three little calotypes, of an elderly couple who must have been his parents, and a girl poised in that cusp of age between childish joy and the serious business of womanhood.

She finally found his books, too. They were in a drawer set into the wall. Two drawers, actually. One had charts and manuals, obviously the documents of the vessel’s purpose and voyage. Were she some wily
espion
or saboteur, trained in the traitor’s arts and a knowledge of Chinese both, she would have known what to read, what to search through, to ferret out these secrets. It was not difficult to envision the interest that Her Imperial Majesty’s admiralty might have in knowing the accuracy of the Chinese charts of the Atlantic.

The other drawer held his personal books. They didn’t look much like what lay in her rooms back in New Haven, nor the ones in her library, but she still knew books when they were arrayed before her. Most were bound between thin square boards with silk ties to keep them tight between their covers. Those generally had rice paper over the boards, with some ideogram or other written in a swirling hand. A few others were accordions, folded and pressed tight and kept in place with ribbons. If she were to tug at them, they would pop open and become endlessly long.

Here, where space was at such a horrid premium, even the captain merited a room unthinkably small, he had filled a drawer with books.

Poinsard would have burned them for spite.

A bell clanged distantly, echoing through iron walls. She heard feet pounding. Some new danger was afoot. The thrum of the deck, so
pervasive and consistent, she had not truly noticed it before, changed. It deepened, making her feet quiver more.

Childress closed the drawers and stepped to the hatch. She still looked a wreck, far too shameful to have shown her face on the streets of home.

This was not New Haven.

The Mask Poinsard had survived the attack on
Mute Swan
. Emily McHenry Childress had died that day on the Atlantic Ocean. Things could be no different, not until she returned to her liberty among people who spoke her language and lived under the same flag she did.

“If you were going to kill me,” Paolina said with far more certitude than she felt, “you would have done so already. You have already encountered me. It is too late to kill.”

The brass man’s eyes flickered. “Authority has not vouchsafed me complete information.”

“Authority has forsaken you,” she snapped. “Obviously men, the lot of them. You have been left here to rot, except when you wake to kill. Surely whoever built you had intended a higher purpose.”

Keep him busy,
she thought.
Confuse him. Do not let him awake to his strength or the brutality of his orders.

“Authority . . .” His voice trailed off. He popped his neck several times. “Will you say a word unto me?”

“Of course.” She was relieved to at least have passed beyond the talk of killing. “What word?”

He worked his head back and forth. “I do not hold this word. It is a word I cannot know.”

“A word you cannot know . . .” She considered that. “In the numbers that count the beat of the world, there are some things that cannot be counted. I know this is true, but I do not yet know why. Is your word of that nature?”

“Yes.” There was relief in his hollow voice.

“So if I say the word to you, what will happen?”

“I am uncertain. I should be released from my bonds. You are correct. I was not . . . made . . . to stand here through the years as the simple papagallo of Authority. My ilk are created beneath the seal in the image of men.”

“Like man, made in the image of God,” Paolina said.

“Indeed.” He cocked his head, staring at her almost sidelong. “There also exists a word to unlock your soul.”

“Of course,” she told him, though that hadn’t been obvious until he’d stated it. “We are all measured by the beat of world. Therefore we can all be rendered into numbers. Within any system of numbers there are always some things which cannot be counted.”

“Words which cannot be spoken.”

“How would I know your word?” She looked at his face, so handsome and strange and frozen in a moment of casting. “I could speak English and Portuguese and Spanish to you all the day long, but I do not think your word is as simple as ‘adumbrate’ or ‘codicil’ or ‘polycrastic.’ I could talk my voice to dust and not find it.” Paolina stretched her finger to the brass man’s lip. “You must show me your word, through sign or deed or logic, then I will say it to you.”

“But the word is not known to me,” he protested.

She laughed. He was such a boy. “Then take me to Authority and we will see what we learn upon the way.”