Heaven's Bones (30 page)

Artemis turned away, impatient, and loosed the lock.

He felt Davy's hand on his sleeve.

“Don't open it, Mr. Donovan! Wait for a while. Wait till daybreak if you can, but at least an hour or so. It can't stay out there forever.”

“Nonsense, Davy,” said Artemis, and flung upon Mrs. Barnes' door.

And stood in shock of what waited there. The fog had advanced upon the threshold: a swirling mass of vapor and filth, pressing upon the door like a living thing seeking entrance. It was an odd, earthy tint
of yellow, and composed of coils and streamers that looked like a cluster of tentacles, like some strange sea creature. Now it roiled into the house as if it was searching, eagerly searching, for someone.

Davy let out an inarticulate cry and Artemis heard one of the women gasp as a wisp of fog drifted over his shoulder into the foyer and thickened, questing about like a living thing. He pushed the door shut and fancied he felt a resistance, as if the murk were pushing back against him, threatening to spill inside like water. Davy slipped past him and shot home the locks.

London fogs were ubiquitous and sometimes deadly. When they mingled with the smoke of industry and the thousands of fires that kept the city's inhabitants warm they became a choking miasma, and Artemis recalled vividly the blue face of an elderly beggar who had stifled one winter's night on the thick murk.

But this was different—the vapor had seemed alive and horribly intentioned. It was impossible. But then, so were Lydia Dare and her mutilations.

Sophie clutched her medical bag to her chest, and Lottie was pale as death, her hand clamped clawlike on the stair rail. Still, her voice was steady enough.

“It seems you'll be our guests for some hours, Detective Donovan, Doctor Huxley,” she said, ironically. “Shall I send for tea?”

She started down the stairs. “Gracious, Miss Janet,” she remarked, glancing behind her. “Sit down before you faint away like the detective.”

Bryani House, the Mists

The Mists were thick and impassable today, and Trueblood knew the risks of defying it. Yet one of Robarts' Angels was missing, and the Vistana could not allow such a creature loose in the world, free from his control.

Robarts stood beside him on the porch of Bryani House, clucking reproachfully at the fog.

“If one of the villagers finds her they'll bring her back,” he said. “My worry is that she'll wander down by the sea in this murk, and go over the cliffs.”

The fool still thinks he's in Cornwall, wherever that may be, thought Trueblood.

Aloud, he said: “That would be St. Agnes Town, sir?”

“Yes,” said Robarts, distractedly. “Not a bad lot—clannish, like all these rural folk tend to be. But salt of the earth.”

Trueblood smiled hawkishly. They would be salt in the earth when he was done. A town full of Jaelle's Breed—the one folk in this world who might be able to see him as he was, the only people who might, remotely, be able to hurt him. There would be others, he knew, scattered throughout the country, but as for this nest, when his—Robarts'—army was ready, he would deal with them.

A small figure loomed in the fog, and both men started forward. The woman with the hollowed-out ribs was walking toward the house. Ignoring them, she walked up the stair and passed into the foyer.

They followed. She stopped beneath the immense chandelier, immobile as if she were an engine run out of steam.

She had a blanket draped over her shoulders. Trueblood reached out to feel it. It was dry, for the most part—as it wouldn't have been had she been walking for hours in the fog.

“Where have you been?” he said.

She didn't move, or look at him. “In a city,” she said. “The city I came from. I've been to London.”

Now she did turn and stare at him with her great dark eyes.

“I didn't see the Queen, though.”

She giggled suddenly. Trueblood flinched.

“You'd never get to London in your bare feet, my dear,” said Robarts, obliviously checking her pulse. “You must have wandered into St. Agnes.”

The Angel was still looking at Trueblood.

“People took me inside, and tried to help me,” she said. “They were kind. The Mists called me back. They wanted something, and I don't know what. But now they've seen me in London. They know.”

She drew the blanket, which had been hanging loose around her, over her shoulders, and walked up the stairs, disappearing into the upper levels of the house.

“Well, I'm glad she came to no harm,” said Robarts, briskly.

“Yes, sir,” replied Trueblood, distractedly. He looked out the open front door, at the Mists that still loomed at the base of the stairs.

One day he would take Robarts' Angels back to London with him, to the strange world where both nature and artifice held sway. But not yet—they were not yet ready. He must keep them on a tighter leash.

He turned his back on the Mists and shut the door.

Henry Thorpe might have taken the man for a Frenchman, with his dark hair and eyes, save that he was too tall for a
Gallois
. He had a very slight accent, barely more than an emphasis on his “Ts” and “Ks.” Henry wondered if he was a German; he had a bit of the look of a Bavarian about him.

Absently, he dog-eared the corner of the card the man had sent up, and motioned him inside. The small apartment was filled with the detritus of his work—half-completed models of balsa wood; detailed sketches of wings and tail flaps and propellers; a drafting table scattered with pencils. A copy of da Vinci's ornithopter sketches was pinned to the wall behind the table, and from the central beam depended a graceful structure of balsa and muslin: a miniature craft that with its poised pinions and gentle scalloped curves resembled a bat—Thorpe's re-imagining of Clement Ader's
Eole
.

“They must have more lift,” he'd told his mentor. “The engines will be too heavy for them, yes, even so small.”

Ader expostulated, and together they'd reworked it on paper. Henry had cobbled together his model, but before they had a chance to try it out, Ader, too eager for the chance of more funding, had agreed to a test flight of an earlier experimental model of the
Eole
before a military commission.

Ader would always swear that it had worked—that the
Eole
had flown under her own power. Henry had his doubts, but remained
silent. Some few members of the commission had conceded a short flight had taken place, but as for the distance—none of their notes agreed, and none came close to Ader's estimation. Others frankly denied that the craft had done more than glide, and clumsily too.

Whatever the facts, the commission was less than impressed, and Ader's funding was eliminated.

The Frenchman was philosophical. “I will find a patron,” he told Henry that last afternoon as they drank strong red wine in the café where they'd taken their dinner for the past year. “It was my fault; I was ambitious, and tried too soon. But I will persevere.”

“You sell the
Eole
short,” retorted Henry. “It has the superior wing structure—or would, if you would follow my suggestions.”

Ader laughed and shook his head. “Would that you could prove me wrong, my young friend—or I you. But alas, it is time to—
retrench
, do you call it in English? Yes—to lick our wounds and plan another approach. I hope we can work together again. But for now—I have no work, and therefore no need of an assistant. Go back to your England and gift your countrymen with flight, if you can.”

Henry had returned, and with his meager savings and patrimony he had set up a tiny studio that barely had room for a drafting table yet also functioned as his house. His cousin Bernard was abroad in India, raising a family, and Bernard's sister Sophie was his only relative—or indeed acquaintance—in London. He must write his aunt and find out Sophie's address. What must she think of her daughter's shocking choice of a career?

Little Sophie, whose braids he had pulled, a doctor. He still found it hard to believe.

He scooped a pile of books and paper out of an armchair, deposited it on the floor, and gestured to the dark man to sit.

“Please forgive the disheveled appearance of the room, Mr.…” He glanced at the rectangle of pasteboard he had mutilated. “… 
Mr. Robarts. This is my workspace as well, and I tend to get—rather exuberant.”

The dark man remained standing. “Not to worry, Mr. Thorpe,” he said, the faint accent barely apparent. “And Doctor Robarts is my employer.”

“Ah.” At a loss, Henry sat in the vacated chair himself, wincing as he felt a stylus hiding in the depths of the upholstery prick his thigh. “I see,” he continued, seeing nothing.

The man smiled pleasantly. “Doctor Robarts is abroad at the time, and not in the best of health,” he continued smoothly. “But he is returning shortly, and most interested in the work you and Monsieur Ader were doing.”

“Oh!” said Henry, a trifle nonplussed.

“In fact, Doctor Robarts communicated to me that he visited M. Ader recently and was sorry to hear that the funding for his experiments in manned flight had been … terminated.”

“Yes; it was a
great
shame,” said Henry, leaning forward in the chair. He was about to launch into a diatribe about the foolishness of trying the
Eole
prematurely, before he could complete his modification of the wing. But there was something odd in the dark man's expression, something on the verge of the sardonic that made him pause.

“M. Ader informed Doctor Robarts that you had returned to England and, that as he intended to retire for a time and, as he puts it,
retrench
, he suggested that Doctor Robarts contact you in regard to his wishes.”

“And Doctor Robarts wishes …?”

“Regrettably,” replied the man, “Doctor Robarts suffered a great personal loss some years back, and went abroad in order to recover himself. He has decided that once he returns to health and public life he wishes to dedicate his fortune to improving the welfare of his fellow man.”

“Very commendable,” said Henry, wondering what any of this had to do with him.

The man's smile spread slightly. “Indeed. But Doctor Robarts has no intention of funding soup kitchens, or Magdalene Houses for unfortunate women. He wants to direct his resources to innovation, Mr. Thorpe. He wants to help usher in the future his wife and child could never see.” He leaned forward a trifle, and Henry straightened unconsciously at the intense scrutiny.

“He wants to help people fly, Mr. Thorpe. To let them take to the skies not only while traveling great distances but for small errands, and little journeys. And he wants you to make it possible.”

“Do you mean a personal aircraft of some sort, Mr.…?”

“Trueblood. I am called Trueblood,” the man replied. “And a personal aircraft—yes, of a sort. But he had nothing so bulky in mind—or as expensive either. Doctor Robarts wishes such transportation to be in the grasp of the common man—or woman.”

“Interesting.” Henry leaned back in his chair. “I do wish you'd sit, Mr. Trueblood.”

Trueblood only smiled politely.

“But I'm afraid I don't quite understand. Affordable and efficient transportation is our ultimate goal, of course—and the goal of all progress in the field. But the common man is well served by the underground or the omnibus. I don't see aeroplane travel for the masses having a practical application.”

“With all respect, Mr. Thorpe, Doctor Robarts considers that kind of thinking limiting.”

Henry frowned. The voice was too smooth, the words too innocuous to be insulting, and yet he felt mocked.

But then, maybe Trueblood—and this Dr. Robarts—were right. He remembered the inexpressive faces of the French military commission, and his professors who declared human flight to be
impossible, and his father's friends who would look at him as if he was an idiot when he spoke of the advances in the field.

Hadn't he always found their lack of imagination, their refusal to look outside their own experience, their
limited
thinking, frustrating? Even contemptible?

Perhaps he deserved to be mocked.

Henry shrugged and opened his hands, indicating the disarray that surrounded him.

“You—and Doctor Robarts—have a point,” he said. “But with my employment to M. Ader terminated and few resources of my own, I am somewhat at a loss these days and my work of necessity must be theoretical at best. How may I be of service to Doctor Robarts?”

Now Trueblood did sit, perching on the edge of the overloaded armchair opposite Henry's, and bending close.

“Doctor Robarts proposes to patronize your work,” he said, his voice low and silky. “Understanding that funding is needed, and generous funding in order not to stifle the work, he wishes to supply you with a studio and such materials as you may need—or rather, the money needed to procure such. You, of course, know what you require to pursue your studies. Simply inform me of what you want and funds shall be advanced to you.”

Henry stared, wide-eyed, at the emissary. A thrill of hope and of anticipation went down his spine. This was the dream of any innovator—the means to obtain what he needed, without begging or scrimping or making do with what was on hand.

Yet a warning throb of doubt started in his belly, persistent as a drumbeat. It was too good to be true. Such gifts, seeming heavensent, always were.

“Doctor Robarts is very generous,” he said picking his words carefully. It would never do to offend. “Does he understand, however, how expensive such a venture can be? To my mind, those who
would seek to develop manned flight must get support from an arm of a university, or more likely the military.”

In answer Trueblood reached inside his coat. For a cold second Henry wondered if he might have a weapon—not that there was anything worth stealing in the tiny studio, not unless the dark stranger had a fetish for balsa wood.