Shanghai Sparrow (28 page)

“Yes. Do you remember James Lathrop? Lathrop had no idea what he had stumbled upon. The girl is his niece, and I believe she has inherited the ability.”

“And that is why you wanted her at the Britannia school.”

“Yes.”

“Is she aware of your plans?”

“No. I thought it best to ensure she has the ability before telling her anything. I plan to return to the school shortly to see how she is getting on.”

“Good, good. Let me know. I tell you what. What we need is a demonstration. I’ll come over, see for myself, report back – and then that will give sufficient weight to make whatever other arrangements are necessary. How does that sound?”

“Excellent. The maker, though, Wu Jisheng – I doubt it will be possible to persuade him to give up his creation to another country. He seems to be fanatically loyal.”

“Oh, my dear fellow, I’m sure we can think of something. If he can’t be bribed, a couple of battalions should be sufficient to persuade him, what?”

“Could that be done?”

“In the interest of Empire, dear boy, anything can be done. There could be a commendation in this for you, you know, if we can keep it to ourselves until the moment is right.”

And Holmforth left the office with a lightness to his step, and a small, pleasing glow about his heart.

Woking

B
ETH STEERED THE
Sacagawea
carefully among the throng. A small boy, his legs so bowed with rickets you could have used him for a harp, pointed and grinned gappily. “Thass a magical carriage!”

“It’s not magic,” Beth said, “it’s engineering.”

“Giss a ride!”

“Another time, all right?”

His small sickly face fell and Beth felt a moment’s desperate guilt. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, but he was already swept away in the crowd.

So many of them. Little brown sparrow-children among the crowlike adults. Beth had grown up in a small country town, and had gone straight to Miss Cairngrim’s. She had never seen so many people, and all of them looking so grindingly tired, so ragged and ill. They stank and shuffled and barely spoke. She felt terribly conspicuous, terribly
privileged
up here in her magical carriage. She glanced at Eveline, who had got control of herself, though her eyes were dreadfully swollen and her breath hitched and caught. She had been one of these ragged wanderers. What had happened to her in that house that had hurt her so, after everything she must have survived?

Once they were out of the town, racing the rising sun down the still empty road, Eveline broke her silence.

Beth kept an eye on the coil, which was going a shade of green she hadn’t seen before. The persuasive fluid, which was a concoction of her own, and which was why this machine was less than half the weight and around twice the speed of that crude creation of Jackson’s, was overheating. But then it had never been worked so hard for so long. “I’ll have to create a more efficient cooling system,” she said.

“What?” Eveline said.

“Well, if we’re going to go all the way to Bedlam, to rescue your mama, we’ll need it,” Beth said, without taking her gaze from the road ahead.

“I’d not ask you,” Eveline said. “We’d never get there and back, not in the time.”

“You don’t have to ask me. I don’t want to stay in Miss Grim’s for the rest of my life.”

“What about your pension, and travelling in an airship?”

“I’ll build my own airship one day, and as to a pension... well, I’m not sure I want a pension for helping out the Empire.”

“I don’t understand,” Eveline said.

“All those people... They’re not in India or China or wherever, are they? They’re right here. And what’s all this Empire business doing for them? You’d better hold on, it’s straight here. I’m going to push her.”

Halfway down the woodland track, the sun already cutting shadows through the woods and the frost melting off the leaves and dripping down on them, something went
clang,
Beth shrieked and the
Sacagawea
shuddered to a halt.

“Beth?”

“Ow, dammit!”

“What is it?”

“That blasted ratchet arm... I thought I’d tightened it enough.” Beth had clamped her left hand under her right armpit and was white under the smudges of soot. “I think...”

“Let me see.”

Beth, grimacing, held out her hand. The little finger hung crooked.

“Ouch. That looks broke.”

“Hurts.”

“Yeah I ’spect it does. Bugger. Can you fix that ratchet thingy?”

Beth peered into the engine. “Oh, no. The coil’s gone. Oh...
bugger
.”

Eveline, despite everything, couldn’t quite repress a smile at the fact that Beth, who only gave a broken bone a
dammit
, could find a
bugger
for the machine.

“That’s bad, is it?”

“I can’t fix that even if I had two working hands. Not without tools and things I haven’t got.”

“Right, come on.” Eveline jumped down and reached up to help Beth follow.

“Come on where?”

“Well we got to get back, haven’t we – past sunrise and one of ’em’ll be coming round to bell us out of bed soon enough. Right, nightgowns.” She started to strip off her working clothes. “Remember, you were sleepwalking, I woke up and saw you were gone. You were in the woods in your nightie. You fell and broke your finger, I’m bringing you back. Reckon we can keep our boots and shawls on, they’ll believe I had that much sense to bring ’em with me.”

“But... the
Sacagawea
. I can’t leave her here!”

“Can we push her off the path, into the wood? We can make shift to cover it with branches and leaves and stuff...” Eveline had a moment’s memory of blanketing Charlotte’s pallid little body with leaves, and bit down on it. “You can come back, when it’s safe.”

“But the dogs...”

“I’ll deal with the dogs. We don’t get going now, we’ll both be caught and you’ll never get to drive her again. Come
on.
”

The
Sacagawea
being mostly frame and engine, she was just about light enough for them to move, but it was hard work, especially with Beth unable to use her left hand. They got her off the path and mostly behind some trees and flung armfuls of leaf mould, bracken and broken branches over her, Beth wincing with every thump and slush.

Eveline stood back. If no-one got curious, it’d do... at least, if the wind didn’t get up. Anyway it would have to.

“We’d better run,” Eveline said.

“Wait.”

“We
can’t
wait. Come on!”

“Eveline, the notes!”

Eveline stopped. The notes. The notes in her bag, that was on the ground next to the machine and that she’d almost forgotten. She
had
forgotten. And if it had come on to rain, or a fox had found the bag and hauled it off... She hugged Beth fiercely, making her squeak, dragged the bag out of the leaf mould and slung it over her shoulder. They started to run towards the house.

The dogs began to bark as they emerged onto the lawn. “Bugger, bugger, bugger,” Eveline said. “Didn’t give ’em enough.”

“What do we do?”

“Keep running,” Eveline said, glancing over her shoulder. The dogs were barking, but they couldn’t run properly; they staggered, weaving. The front one abruptly sat down, and the one behind cannoned into it, sending them both sprawling. They started to snap and snarl at each other.

The girls made the kitchen door. Eveline shoved her bag down behind the outbuilding just as the door swung open, and Miss Cairngrim, glaring like a gargoyle, grabbed her by the arm. “What are you up to, you bad, wicked girl?”

“Please, Miss Cairngrim, she’s hurt!” Eveline said.

“What have you been doing?”

“I don’t remember, Miss Cairngrim,” Beth said. “I woke up and I was in the woods. My hand really hurts, Miss Cairngrim.”

“Come with me.”

She kept them in her office for half an hour, going over their story, as they got colder and colder. Eveline kept her head and kept it simple; it was just like facing a nosy peeler who wanted to know what you were doing, walking past that house at three in the morning. Pity Miss Grim wasn’t a peeler, Eveline thought. She’d be just right for it.

Beth had the sense to keep her story even simpler. She’d woken up, on the ground, in the woods, her hand hurting and Eveline shaking her.

“And why didn’t the dogs chase you on the way out?”

“I don’t know, Miss Cairngrim. Maybe they’re sick or something,” Eveline said. “They weren’t half running funny when they come after us.”

“I shall...”

Something thumped against Eveline’s shoulder, and she caught Beth just in time to stop her hitting her head on the corner of the desk as she fainted.

“Wretched girl! Stop playacting!”

“She ain’t playacting, miss, she’s out like a candle,” Eveline said, lowering Beth to the floor.

“Isn’t!
Isn’t,
not
ain’t
!” Miss Cairngrim. “Hastings! Hastings!”

“
Sacagawea
,” Beth muttered.

“What? What is she saying?”

“Something from History, miss,” Eveline said. “She’s worried about lessons. Don’t worry, Hastings, I’ll get it dealt with,” she said loudly. Beth’s eyes flickered open and sought hers, and Eveline nodded.

Miss Cairngrim called for two of the girls to take Beth to the sickroom, and dismissed Eveline with a glare. “I’ll deal with
you
later,” she said. “Whatever’s going on, I know you’re up to your neck in it, Duchen. Now go wash and dress properly, put that
disgusting
garment in for the laundry, and get to class.”

Eveline grabbed her bag on the way to the Old Barn. Mr Jackson emerged from his machine long enough to snap at her that he needed that spanner, that one there, stupid girl. He didn’t seem to notice that Beth wasn’t there. She realised that someone – it had to be Mr Jackson – had been poking about among her mother’s mechanisms; some of the levers, she was sure, were standing at different positions, and there were a few small steel balls rolling about the bench that should have been carefully cupped in the grooves made for them.
What have you been up to, Jackson?
She thought, glaring at his back. She didn’t trust him. The only person she trusted in this place was Beth. What the hell was she going to do about the bloody
Sacagawea?
She couldn’t exactly push the thing by herself, and she had no idea how to drive it.

Still thinking about it, she fell asleep in History, and got her fingers rapped so hard she thought that perhaps she had a broken one too, but it was only stiff and sore. She rubbed it, staring sightlessly at the maps.
Rescue your mama.
Yes. But how?

In the meantime, she had to keep Holmforth happy. And the only way to do that was to convince him that she knew how to make the machines work.

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
Eveline dragged herself reluctantly from bed, and got hit with (variously) a ruler, a piece of chalk, a hat and a look of despair for her inability to pay attention.

A piece of paper was shoved under her hand. She didn’t recognise the writing. Notes, from that morning’s History class. At the bottom, the signature,
Treadwell.

Eveline blinked.

She gave Treadwell the notes back in between classes, and gestured her into an unused classroom. Treadwell followed, looking wary. “What? I can’t stop.”

“I need to ask you something.”

“What?”

“Would you be willing to do me a favour? Another one, I mean.”

“That depends.”

“Well, really it’s two favours. One is to keep acting like you don’t like me.”

“I don’t.”

“I don’t like you either, but it don’t matter. Only, I need for no-one to think you’d do me a favour, right?”

“Well, that’s easy, just don’t ask me.”

“Please. Look, if I ask Beth, everyone’ll guess she’s playing along. So it has to be you. Will you do it? Chance for a bit of play-acting and you can faint ever so pretty, if you like. Good practice for when you gotta be all
Oh, la, sir, I fear I may swoon,
and nicking the secret plans out their pocket while they hold you up.”

Treadwell snorted. “Tell me what you want. I’m not promising anything.”

E
VELINE WAS SITTING
in Retention class when she became vaguely aware of a commotion at one side of the room, as the girls whispered and looked out of the window. “Concentrate!” Miss Fairfield bellowed. “Distraction is the thief of knowledge, girls!”

She heard the sound of a carriage pulling up.

A few minutes later one of the girls appeared at the door. “’Scuse me, Miss Fairfield, but Duchen is to come at once.”

Eveline’s sleepiness disappeared into a wary, overstressed buzz. What was going on now? Had she been discovered? Had someone at Uncle James’s seen her? She followed the girl along the corridor back to Miss Cairngrim’s office, ready to turn tail and bolt like a rabbit the second she spotted a uniform.