The Custodian of Marvels (13 page)

There were more women than men. And too many children to count – most running barefoot with the dogs. A man turned to gob on the ground in front of me. To my right, a woman shouted something about dwarfs, at which others laughed. We carried on walking. A little girl burst from a doorway and pinched Tinker on the arm before running away again. He flinched, but didn’t break stride.

Then we turned left onto a yet narrower alleyway. This one sloped inwards from the close-packed houses on either side to an open drain running along the very centre. There were fewer people here, and they had no time to form an opinion of us before we were turning off again. The words Samuel Street had been daubed on a wall. The way was so narrow it seemed strange it had been named at all.

A dead dog lay on the ground, blocking the drain. A pool of black water had formed behind it. Fabulo stopped in his tracks and I thought he was recoiling from the putrefying animal. Then I looked and saw that he was gesturing for us to follow him into the open doorway of a tenement.

We stepped after him into a dark corridor then up a narrow flight of steps to a landing where he unlocked a door. We shuffled through into a bare room in which no angle was square. The entire contents were two beds, a limp curtain hanging half over a skewed window and a chamber pot lying next to the wall.

“Well done,” whispered Fabulo.

“What is this place?” I asked. “And why have you brought us here?”

He spread his arms in a flourish as if revealing some marvellous trick. “This is your new home. The duke’ll never find you here. Safest place in London. And as to why we’re in the great city – that I’ll show you tomorrow.”

I woke with a jolt, not knowing where I was. Then I saw the dwarf, pacing wall to wall in the small room. The whites of his eyes seemed unnaturally bright in the darkened room. With each pass, the floorboard near the door creaked under his weight. Tinker lay snoring in the other bed.

“This is London,” I said, as the memory came to me.

He didn’t answer. Then I must have been asleep again because when I next opened my eyes he had gone. So had the boy.

CHAPTER 13

September 30th

Cut a second into a hundred pieces and put your bullet inside one. Though it is in full view of the audience, it will never be seen.

The Bullet-Catcher’s Handbook

London. A crawling mass of humanity. A paradise for gamblers, lawyers, beggars, bankers and royals. For every church it was said you could find a pub. And for every gin house, a museum or university. It was, in short, the fairest, foulest, safest and most dangerous metropolis in the entire span of the Gas-Lit Empire – depending on who you were talking to.

With so much chaos and lawlessness it might have seemed an unlikely place to find evidence of the Patent Office. But in a twist of perversity, or perhaps genius, it was here that the architects of that all-powerful institution had chosen to place their most conspicuous structure. Even from a distance, it dominated the skyline.

“You’re not taking us there!” I said.

“Keep walking,” said Fabulo.

I drew closer to him and whispered, “When you said you were going for
them
, I didn’t think… That is, I didn’t imagine…”

My words dried up.

He winked at me.

I’d yet to ask him about his midnight wanderings. When I’d woken in the hour before dawn, he and Tinker had both been sitting on the other bed, eating bread and taking turns to drink water from a wine bottle.

“Rise and shine,” he’d said. “The sun waits for no man.”

Later, when the memory of the empty room came back to me, it became just one more in a list of questions that the dwarf seemed in no hurry to provide answers for.

He pressed on along Fleet Street, leading us past the doors of the Royal Courts of Justice, whose curved towers and turrets lay under the shadow of the great monolith that was the International Patent Court.

The sacrilegious thought of stealing from the Patent Office had been enough for me. I hadn’t worried about practical concerns. When Fabulo had spoken of the theft, I’d imagined him breaking into a discreet building tucked away in a side street. I had been picturing the office on High Pavement, not the tallest building on the continent of Europe.

Tinker, walking beside me, had never before been to the great city. He slowed as we approached the wide plaza before the court, his head tilting back to take in the columns, the high portico, the cliff face of grey granite behind it, the rows of identical windows, fading into the smoggy air.

I caught his elbow and pulled him along.

“Those soldiers,” he said, meaning the swordsmen in yellow silk standing to each side of the great entrance.

“Don’t stare,” I whispered.

“Stare all you like,” said Fabulo. “Everyone else is.”

“Where’re they from?” the boy asked.

“These ones are Chinese,” said Fabulo. “Tomorrow it might be Prussian or Crow or Nigerian. It’s an honour thing. Only the best soldiers get to guard it.”

“But if they’re the best…”

I squeezed Tinker’s arm. “Hush! We’ll talk later.” Though I’d been thinking the same thing. The greatest bastion of the Patent Office, guarded by elite fighters from around the world – it seemed impossible that anyone could break in and get away with their lives.

“Men-at-arms,” Fabulo said, pointing to a kiosk between us and the court. It was a structure of glass and wood, bigger than the ones next to the border crossing in Leicester. Through its windows, I could make out eight guards, all wearing the scarlet uniforms of the Kingdom.

They had not looked in our direction. I was about to hurry away before they could see us, but Fabulo had set off towards them with Tinker by his side. He strode out with such brash confidence that I found myself following.

In this grand setting, I felt conspicuous, though no one seemed to be looking. Alarmingly, Fabulo had stopped right next to the guard kiosk. He looked back and gestured for me to hurry up.

“Are you mad?” I hissed, when I was close enough.

“Look at the grand building,” he said out loud, playing the tourist.

I forced my tight muscles into a smile. Fabulo’s eyes flicked down to the paving slabs below our feet. I followed his gaze and saw the regular pattern of flagstones was cut by a line of yellow bricks immediately in front of us. It ran parallel to the road as far as I could see in either direction. The guard kiosk was just on the road side of the line, as were we. On the far side was another stretch of plaza, then a flight of low stairs rising towards the doors of the Patent Court.

A few paces further down the line, a young man hovered, trying to catch our attention. A vending tray hung from a strap around his shoulders. When Fabulo beckoned, he hurried over.

“Maps, guides, histories, court proceedings.” His accent sounded Eastern European.

Fabulo dropped some coins on the tray and gathered up one pamphlet from each of four piles. The man grinned, then hurried off towards a party of scholars in uniform, who were standing further down the brick line. “Maps, guides, histories, court proceedings,” he called.

“He has to stay this side of the line,” said Fabulo. “So do the red coats.”

“Why?” asked Tinker, for whom any strangeness could become homely if the ones he trusted were relaxed.

“This side, we’re in the Kingdom of England and Southern Wales. That side you’re in no country. Kingdom soldiers can’t go there. Nor can anything be sold or bought.”

Then he stepped across the yellow bricks and turned to look back at us. Holding out the pamphlets to me, he said, “You should read this stuff. You’d be amazed.”

I hesitated.

“Come on,” he said. “We’ve travelled a long way to be here.”

“A long way,” I said, stepping after him, pulling Tinker with me.

“We’re tourists,” Fabulo said.

I took the pamphlets. One was a map, which I handed to Tinker. “Open it up,” I whispered. “Pretend you can read.”

For myself I leafed through
The International Patent Court: A Visitor’s Guide.
It was a flimsy object – six sheets of poor quality paper, folded down the middle and held together with stitching. The print was smudged and uneven. Illustrations of the building were printed in ink of a different shade.

“What are we doing here?” I asked.

“Casing the joint,” said Fabulo.

“Why not speak louder?” I said. “I don’t think everybody heard.”

He laughed at that. “No one cares. You’ve been too long in the Republic, girl. This is London. Full of strange people. The louder you speak, the less they listen. If you really want to be ignored, wear a bright red jacket and juggle pineapples.”

“But if you want to get someone’s attention, you say you’re going to steal from them.”

“Perhaps,” he conceded. “If they’re a fruit seller. Or a jeweller. Or a bank, maybe. But this…” He spread his hands, palms raised, and craned his neck. “This is beyond theft. Beyond any dream of it. You’ve been saying as much yourself. You could walk up to one of those guards and tell them you’re going to break in next Thursday and they wouldn’t even twitch.”

Noticing that Tinker had the map opened upside down, I turned it and gave it back to him.

“Is it a picture?” he asked.

“It’s like a picture,” I said. “It shows where things are. Like the road and the buildings.”

He shot me a disbelieving glance. I’d seen him use the same betrayed expression on those occasions when I’d forced him to have a bath.

“What time is it?” Fabulo asked.

I looked up at the clock mounted at the centre of the portico. “Half past eight,” I said.

Sure enough, the half hour began to chime. Perfectly on cue, four new guards in yellow silk came marching up the steps, swinging their arms in synchrony, an exaggerated but precise movement from hip to chest and back. We were not the only onlookers. Other tourists stood watching the ceremony. The party of scholars stood nearby, gawping. And there were other people watching, from all over the plaza, Londoners and visitors from all over the Gas-Lit Empire. The chimes had not finished when the changing of the guard commenced. Once the new soldiers were in place, the relieved guards marched away, their movements just as crisp, though they must have spent hours standing frozen. I’d seen the ceremony once before. That time the soldiers had been German, wearing blue uniforms and helmets capped with a spike.

With a creak and an echoing boom, the great doors of the Patent Court swung inwards. A queue of civilians had been waiting under the portico. They now began to shuffle forwards into the building. Among them would be claimants, plaintiffs and lawyers – all cast of the morning’s court cases. I thought for a moment about Julia. In her letter she had said she came to the courts hereabouts on Tuesday and Friday afternoons. I had assumed she meant the Royal Courts, but now realised that she could equally have meant the International Patent Court. So confusing had been recent events that I didn’t even know the day of the week.

“You notice anything strange?” asked Fabulo.

“Give me a clue,” I said.

“The time.”

“Half past eight,” I said. “Always prompt and punctual.”

“You think so?”

Tinker knelt down on the lowest step and unfolded the map. Once again, he was looking at it askew. I tried to shift it around but he resisted, putting it back to the odd angle he had chosen before.

“That’s the Patent Court,” I said, tapping the blocked out region of the map. “And that’s the road.”

He tilted his head first one way and then the other. A look of fierce concentration had taken up residence on his brow.

“It’s not really quite a picture,” I said, trying to think of a way to explain cartography to an illiterate boy.

“It is,” he said. Then he pointed into the sky where, high above the rooftops, three red kites were circling, their wing feathers spread like fingers.

“The birds?” I asked.

He nodded.

“What of them?”

“It’s a picture like they drew it.”

My first thought was to correct him. But then I realised that, in a manner of speaking, he had it exactly right. I was about to ask him about the angle he had chosen to position the map on the ground when the clocks around the city began to chime the half hour. I listened, puzzled. The clock on the wall of the Patent Court put the time at nine minutes past the half hour.

“How about that?” said Fabulo, triumphant.

“Then it’s nine minutes fast?”

“Nine minutes and twenty-one seconds, to be precise. Though more rightly speaking it’s the other clocks that are late.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Then you should read the pamphlet.”

So I did, scanning the pages until I came to the heading
Timekeeping and the International Patent Court
:

Londoners know it as the Patent Court Clock. But the timepiece with its display on the high portico is more properly designated ICN2, so named because of its place within the International Chronological Network.

Another name for it that you may hear mentioned on your visit is the Fast Clock. The reason will become obvious when you compare it to other public clocks in the city which, if they are keeping good time, trail behind ICN2 by exactly nine minutes and twenty-one seconds.

Please be aware:
These differences are not a subject to be joked about when in the Kingdom. For many Royalists it is a touchstone that reminds them of grievances remaining from their accession to the Great Accord. With the signing of the Twelfth Amendment, all other nations adopted the metric system and the Paris Meridian for the fixing of longitude and the setting of clocks. Alone in the Gas-Lit Empire, the Kingdom secured an exemption to this standardisation. Thus, it still uses the Greenwich Meridian and Greenwich Mean Time. But, because the International Patent Court exists within its own jurisdiction, its clock is set according to the international standard.