Escapement (42 page)

Shuddering, Paolina slid off the wagon’s back. They were next to a
field of long brown grass that had been cut and stacked. Trees rose beyond the stubble. The sky seemed shallower, more pale. No airships lurked overhead.

She stared at him. “Now what?”

The Frenchman shrugged. “You are shut of the cathedral and her silent mice, yes?”

“Yes. The Queen can have her own.” Paolina added bitterly, “I never should have left
a Muralha.
”

“I am sorry?”

“The Wall. I never should have left the Wall.”

“Then go back to the Wall.”

“Who are you to care?” she demanded.

“Just a bird,” Lachance said. “A white bird far from home.” He opened his vest and took out a fat envelope of waxy brown paper. “A few maps, and some funds.”

“From whom?”

“White birds who do not want to see you trapped by those silent, orderly mice.”

Pride warred with practicality. She was deep within the British Empire and very far from home. While she trusted his birds no more than Sayeed’s silent mice, whatever Lachance was giving her was more than she had now. “I lost the gleam,” she blurted as she took the packet.

Lachance smiled sadly. “I will see what I can do to recover your property. If the bishop and his mice took it, your gleam will not pass readily into my hands, I am afraid.” He paused a moment. “If I may ask, why do you travel as a girl? Slim as you are, you could wear trousers and pass for a young man. People would devil you much less if you did so.”

“I . . .” It wasn’t as if Paolina didn’t understand that to be a possibility. “Men are . . . men.” The venom in her voice surprised her. “I don’t want to be one, even for moment.”

“Ah. My apologies. I should not have disturbed you with the question.” He pointed southward. “Erstein is beyond that rise. Follow the road, it will lead you to Colmar, then Mul house. As I take it you do not wish to continue onward to England, from there you may head south, perhaps by railway carriage. God be with you.”

“Thank you,” Paolina said automatically.

He climbed onto his cart, clucked to his team, turned in a circle, and drove slowly away without a backward glance.

This is it?
she thought. She waited until his dust trail settled, then found a quiet spot beneath a tree to examine the packet he’d given her. There was three hundred English pounds, with several maps of Europe and the
Mediterranean folded around them. Paolina had no idea what that amount of money represented, but it seemed quite a bit.

She tucked the funds away and studied the maps. There was no reason not to go to Marseilles, she realized. Sailing from that great port around the western coast of Africa would get her home fastest, but she didn’t want to be anywhere near
Notus
’ patrol route. Maybe once in Marseilles, she could find another way to Africa and the Wall.

There was a train from Colmar to Mul house. A local, she was told, once the station clerk found someone with decent English to speak with her. Tickets were four pence.

The price confirmed that three hundred pounds was quite a bit of money. She felt odd even presenting a ten-pound note. Odder yet when her change was given in livres and centimes, apparently French pounds.

The helpful citizen also was forced to explain about boarding, clearly baffled at how she could be such a bumpkin as not to understand trains and tickets.

Paolina ate a meal of potato cakes mixed with onions while she waited. The train eventually arrived in a startle of screeching and steam. She could see the kinship the locomotive’s rods and flywheels had with the movements in the clock that was the world. That comforted her somewhat.

On board, a conductor helped Paolina to her proper compartment. It was strange, passing down the lacquered wooden hall on footworn carpet, half-familiar from her time aboard
Notus,
yet as alien as anything else in the English world.

Her bench seat was easy on her feet. Next to her, two swarthy men carried on an earnest conversation in some language she’d never heard. Paolina watched the French countryside roll by. It was chilly in the carriage. She wondered if she would move south fast enough to not require a heavy coat.

Paolina had no belongings at all, now, save money and maps. She would need a few other things. Whatever train might carry her away from Mul house would surely allow enough time for shopping.

And so it went that day. Mul house was not so large as Strasbourg. Had Paolina been about a normal errand, she certainly could have boarded the train to Marseilles back where she had started. Europe was crossed by lines and lines and lines, iron tributaries that flowed into streams and rivers of rail, all of it tying Europe together into one tightly laced whole under the watchful eye of British governors and tax collectors and stationmasters.

There was time to shop. She thought about what Lachance had said, whether to buy clothes fit for a boy. She could claim to be shopping for a brother. But to play a man . . . They were deceitful, brutal, and careless.

What if she
liked
it?

Instead Paolina bought a decent dress of muslin and velvet with a pretty cutaway jacket over the bodice, yet somewhat practical. She could not find anyone to consider selling her the heavy workboots she craved, and so had to settle for the pointed toes of women’s footwear, though she insisted on a low heel against all fashionable advice.

After that, a leather satchel—“Unfit for a lady, mademoiselle”—with some vegetables and bread and three dark sausages. She was ready for the train.

When Paolina changed trains in Lyon that night for the Marseilles line, there were boys on the platform shouting something about Strasbourg in both French and English. She paid three centimes for a thick bundle of printed paper, which turned out to be the wrong language. Still, the headline was clear enough.

C
ATHÉDRALE DE
S
TRASBOURG
D
ÉTRUITE
!!!

Paolina scanned the text, seeing references to the Schwilgué Clock, and dozens of familiar and half-familiar words;
ville
,
prêtre
,
restaurant.
She wandered around the platform until she found two ladies speaking to one another in English. Pale, dark haired, freckled, they were probably sisters. They were dressed as she was—not of the quality, but not workers either.

Like the
fidalgos,
Paolina realized. She was thinking just like the
fidalgos.
The thought made her tremble with a disgusted anger.

“Excuse me.” Both women smiled blankly at her. “I do not know French. Is it possible that you can tell me what this says?”

One of the women glanced at the paper. “Everyone is speaking of that,” she said, not unkindly. “There was a terrible explosion at Strasbourg Cathedral this afternoon. Sabotage by Chinese irregulars, the newspaper is reporting. It caused a great fire in the town.”

“Oh . . .” Paolina felt ill.

“Have you relatives there?” asked the other woman. “Here, let me help you to this bench.”

“My, my . . . cousin,” she stammered. The bishop would be dead, and the priest, and all those men. They’d done something stupidly improvident with the gleam. Lachance was dead too, if he had gone back to the square to watch for the gleam as she’d asked him to.

How much worse could it have been?
That thought froze her blood.

The women fussed over Paolina as she sat, introducing themselves as Bonnie and Grace Jones, sisters traveling on a small income from their grandfather’s estate, and how was she, and what else might she need?

When the Marseilles train began boarding, the sisters Jones helped her to the conductor, explaining in hushed tones that Paolina had been stricken with grief for a relative. Eventually the train pulled away through the endless miles of shadowed houses and narrow, grimy yards that seemed to comprise Lyon, but she was no longer so enchanted with cities.

Arriving the next day, she found Marseilles no cause for rejoicing either. The railway station,
la Gare St. Charles,
let her out into a morning square filled with rushing Frenchmen. She didn’t know the language, the people were indifferent, the city overwhelming. These flatwater lands were ever so much stranger than the Wall.

Paolina set out to find streets that sloped away from her, until she could catch a view of the Mediterranean and make her way to the docks. She tried not to wonder about agents of the British Crown on her trail. There must be, of course, but would they have pursued her here?

At waterfront, she found a quiet place to sit and watch awhile, to understand the profound busyness that seemed to overwhelm everyone around her. They swirled and ran and shouted and carried burdens much as they had outside the train station. There were more languages spoken by the water, with sailors and women of loose virtue mixed among the suited English bureaucrats and the gray-trousered French errand boys.

The maps had suggested Suez to her, and a trip down to the port at Mogadishu, near the Wall. The dockside was complicated and confusing. She could scarcely wander the docks, asking at gangplanks where each ship might be bound. Paolina was most reluctant to commit her name and face to anyone here, lest the British learn where she had gone next—she would need to find a tout to help her book passage.

She finally hailed one of the errand boys. He was a dark-eyed lad with curls the color of old honey. He wore a bloused white shirt that had been drenched in some nose-wrinkling perfume.

“Bonjour, mademoiselle, ce qui serait que désirez-vous aujourd’hui?”

“English, please,” Paolina stammered.

“You gots.” He grinned, showing brown stained teeth. “What you want?”

Paolina handed him a ten-centime coin. “I will pay you a livre to find me three ships bound for Suez and the Indian Ocean.”

“One livre for each ship, yes?”

“One livre for all,” she said.
Hold firm,
Paolina told herself,
or this boy will take you all too easily.

He shrugged, flipped her coin, and slipped away.

She waited perched on a rain barrel for several hours, but the honey-haired boy did not return. Disappointed, Paolina went to buy meat from a seller with a cart, then retreated to her spot once more. Should she try another boy, or begin walking and trust to luck?

It was too hard to say. If she could just be on her way, that would be one thing. The trains were little help—the agent in Mul house had only had tickets as far as Dubrovnik when she inquired about crossing Europe by rail. And while she would contemplate walking a quarter way around the world along the Wall, Paolina was hardly likely to walk from France to the equator. Not with both the British Empire and the Sahara in the way.

It would have to be a ship.

And luck would not do it in this sprawling place.

Finally she flagged another boy and asked him the same thing. This time she promised two livres. She was smarter now, tearing both bills in half and giving him the same end of each of the two. His English was not so good, and he looked at her strangely, but he nodded and scuttled off.

In less than an hour, this second boy—not half so cute but twice as honest as the first—was back. “I have found the ship, yes.”

“Three ships,” Paolina told him. The day was growing late, and she wasn’t willing to take up residence in Marseilles. Having passage out would let her take leave of France, so close to treacherous England.

“Ship. Leave tomorrow, she is.”

Paolina gave up and followed him into the crowds of late afternoon.

The vessel was an iron monster, with two smokestacks, four deck cranes, and a rusting white superstructure over her riveted black hull. The name on the hull was
Star of Gambia,
out of Liverpool.

“Aboard,” said the boy. “See mate, Monsieur Johsen.” He stuck out his hand.

It was not the sort of ship Paolina had hoped for, but there were at least sixty ships along this dock. She could hardly go wandering in hopes of finding a solution.

“Where is Johsen?”

“Aboard. Money, please.”

Paolina handed the boy her torn bills. She grabbed the frayed rope that
served as a rail and trudged up the steep, creaking gangplank to the ship itself.

She must hope and pray that
Star of Gambia
was more lucky for her than
Notus
had been, and that she could stay well away from the clutches of the Silent Order and the treacherous British Crown they served. Spitting over the rail into the stinking tidewater below, Paolina cursed Newton and all his descendants, wishing that England had never found the key to the world’s power.

In two days they climbed, slow, aching, and painful, to a sort of highway that ran several miles above the African jungle, still on the lower reaches of the Wall. It was a true road, al-Wazir realized, with bridges and embankments, even if much of the right-of-way had decayed or been neglected.

He let Boaz lead. That bothered al-Wazir at first, but he soon realized that allowing himself to be upset by the metal man’s help was foolish. The pall of smoke still visible in the west told him all he needed to know about how Ottweill was faring. The recent unpleasantness with the Chinese airship told him all he needed to know about how
he
would fare without Boaz’ help.