Novel - Airman

  Little Sean cried from the bedroom, his midday sleep disturbed. Catherine wiped her eyes so the baby would see her happy. “Do you think Conor would want this?” she said, making one last attempt. “Do you think he looks down from a hero’s heaven and rejoices at what his father has become?”

  Declan cracked, but he did not break. “And what have I become, Catherine? Am I not still a man who fulfills his duties to the best of his abilities?”

  Catherine’s eyes blazed through the last of her tears. “Those of Captain Broekhart, certainly. But Declan Broekhart, husband and father? As you say yourself, those duties have been neglected for some time now.”

  With these harsh words Catherine left her husband to his brooding. When he was certain that she could no longer see him, Declan Broekhart clasped his hands on either side of his head, as though he could squeeze out the pain. Declan had never recovered from Conor’s supposed death, and perhaps he never would have, had two events not occurred one after the other on the day of Isabella’s coronation. Alone, each event might not have been enough to raise him from his stupor; but together they complemented one another, shaking the lethargy from Declan Broekhart’s bones.

  The first was a simple thing. Common and quick, the kind of family happening that would not usually qualify as an event. But for Declan, something in those few seconds warmed his heart and set him on the road to recovery. Later he would often wonder whether Catherine had engineered this little incident, or for that matter, the second one, too. He questioned her often, but she would neither admit nor deny anything.

  What happened was this. Little Sean came waddling from his room, unsteady on eighteen-month-old chubby legs. When Conor had been that age, Declan had called his legs fat sausages, and he and his son had rolled on the rug like a dog and its pup; but he hardly noticed Sean, leaving the rearing to Catherine.

  “Papa,” said the infant, slightly disappointed that his mother was not to be seen. Papa ignored him. Papa was not a source of food or entertainment, and so little Sean toddled on toward the open bay window. The balcony was beyond, and then a low wrought iron railing. Hardly enough to contain an inquisitive boy.

  “Catherine,” called Declan, but his wife did not appear. Sean skirted a chair, teetering briefly to starboard, then on toward the window.

  “Catherine. The boy. He’s near the window.” Still no sign of or reply from Catherine, and now little Sean was at the sill itself, a pudgy foot raised to step over.

  Declan had no choice but to act. With a grunt of annoyance, he took the two strides necessary to reach the child. Not such a momentous undertaking, unless you consider that this was perhaps the fifth time that Declan Broekhart had set hands on his son. And at that exact moment the boy turned, pivoting on the ball of his heel, the way only the very young can, and Declan’s fingers grazed Sean’s cheek. Their eyes met, and the boy reached up, tugging Declan’s bottom lip.

  The contact was magical. Declan felt a jolt run through his heart, as for the first time he saw Sean as himself and not a shadow of his dead brother. “Oh, my son,” he said, hoisting him up and drawing him close. “You must keep away from the window, it is dangerous. Stay here with me.”

  Declan was halfway back to life. Perhaps he would have continued the journey in fits and jumps, an occasional shared smile, the odd bedtime story, but then there came a knocking on the front door. A series of raps, actually. Regal raps.

  Before Declan had the chance to register the sounds, the door burst open and one of his own men stepped across the threshold, holding the door wide for Princess Isabella.

  Declan was caught tenderly embracing his son, a most un-Broekhart-like action. He frowned twice, once for the soldier, a warning to keep this sight to himself. A second frown for Princess Isabella, who was clothed in full coronation robes. A vision in gold and crimson silk and satin, more beautiful than even her father could have dreamed. What could she be doing here? On this of all days?

  Isabella opened her mouth to speak. The princess had her entreaty prepared. Declan had requested Wall duty for the ceremony, but she needed him at her side, today of all days. She missed Conor and her father more than ever, and the only way she could get through the ceremony was if the man who she considered her second father was restored to her. And not simply in body, but in spirit. Today Declan Broekhart must remember the man he had been.

  Quite a speech: obviously the girl would make a fine queen. However, no one heard the words, for the moment Isabella laid eyes on Declan cradling his son, her posture slumped from queen to girl and she flung herself at his chest, sobbing. Declan Broekhart had little option but to wrap his free arm around the weeping princess.

  “There, there,” he said uncertainly. “Now, now.”

  “I need you,” sobbed Isabella. “By my side. Always.”

  Declan felt tears gather on his own eyelids. “Of course, Majesty.”

  Isabella thumped his broad chest with her delicate fist. “I need you, Declan. You.”

  “Yes, Isabella,” said Declan gruffly. “By your side. Always.”

  Catherine Broekhart stepped in from the balcony, where she had been waiting, and joined the embrace. The guard at the door was tempted, but decided against it.

  The coronation was a wordy affair, with clergy and velvet and enough Latin chanting to keep a monastery going for a few decades. It was all a bit of a blur to Declan Broekhart, who installed himself behind his queen on the altar, so he could be there to smile encouragingly when she looked for him, which she did often.

  Shortly after the papal nuncio lowered the crown, Declan noticed his wife’s dress. “A new dress?” he whispered. “I thought we weren’t coming.”

  Catherine smiled archly. “Yes, you did think that, didn’t you.” Declan felt a glow in his chest that he recognized as cautious happiness. It was a bittersweet emotion without Conor there at his shoulder.

  They rode in the royal coach back from St. Christopher’s toward Promontory Point, though in truth the town now covered almost every square foot of the island. As the population increased, houses had grown up instead of out, and were shoehorned into any available space. The higgledypiggledy town reminded Declan of the Giant’s Causeway, a chaotic honeycomb of basalt columns in the north of Ireland. Though these columns were marked by doors and windows and striped in the traditional bold house colors of the Saltee Islands. As for the islanders, it seemed they were all on the street, along with half of Ireland, cheering themselves hoarse for the beautiful young queen.

  The coach was shared with Marshall Bonvilain in full ceremonial uniform, including a Knights of the Holy Cross toga worn loosely over it all. The Saltee Templars were the only branch to have survived Pope Clement V’s fourteenth-century purge. Even the Vatican had been unwilling to risk disrupting the diamond supply.

  Bonvilain took advantage of the new queen’s distraction to lean across and whisper to Declan. “How are you, Declan? I’m surprised to see you here.”

  “As am I, Hugo,” replied Declan. “I hadn’t planned to come, but I am happy to find my plans changed.”

  Bonvilain smiled. “I am happy too. It does the men good to see your face. Keeps them alert. Nice work dismissing that sentry, by the way. Sleeping sentries is just the opening the rebels need. One chink in the Wall, and they’re in. And I needn’t tell you the heartache they can cause.”

  Declan nodded tightly, but in truth Bonvilain’s speech seemed a bit hollow on this day. There had been little rebel activity for many months, and some of the marshall’s arrests had been made on the flimsiest of evidence.

  Bonvilain noticed the captain’s expression. “You disagree, Declan? Surely not. After all the Broekharts have endured?”

  Declan felt his wife’s fingers close around his. He gazed past Isabella’s shining face, through the window, over the heads of a hundred islanders and into the blue haze of sea and sky. “I don’t disagree, Marshall. I just need to think about something else today. My wife, and my queen, they need me. For today, at lea
st.”

  “Of course,” said Bonvilain, his tone gracious, but his eyes were hard and his teeth were gritted behind his lips. Broekhart recovers, he thought. His scruples are already returning. How long before the dog bites his master?

  Hugo Bonvilain waved a gloved hand at the cheering citizens on the roadside. Better not to take the chance. Perhaps it is time for a little blackmail. Declan Broekhart could not bear to lose his elder son a second time.

  Little Saltee

  Conor was ready for flight. His sewing was done. A double seam would have been better, but there was not a strand of thread left. The device was as sound as it would ever be.

  The sounds of revelries drifted across from the Great Saltee Wall. Singing, cheering, stamping of feet. A great coming together. A thousand faces flushed in the glow of the Wall lamps. Conor imagined the crowds lined a dozen deep, waiting for the great show of fireworks. It seemed as though the very prison walls shook, though a stretch of ocean separated prisoners from the party.

  The buzz of coronation excitement had communicated itself through the prison, and many of the prisoners hooted through their windows or dragged tin cups across their barred windows. Surprisingly perhaps, most of the inmates showed monarchist leanings in spite of their incarceration at Her Majesty’s pleasure. A ragged chorus of “Defend the Wall,” the Saltee national anthem, bounced off the walls and under Conor’s cell door. He found himself humming along. It was strange to hear the words King Nicholas already replaced by Queen Isabella.

  How could you believe Bonvilain’s lies? Why did you not send for me, Isabella? Confusion bred heat in his forehead, and Conor felt the strength of it cloud his brain. His senses piled on top of one another. Sight, touch, smell. Grime in the wrinkles of his forehead. The cell door seemed to shake in its housing. Sweat, damp, and worse from his cell. He closed his eyes, breathing deeply through his nose. One of Victor’s tricks, brought back from the Orient. Breathe in cold air, clear the mind.

  Conor pushed thoughts of Isabella aside. Time now to concentrate. Billtoe’s steps were on the flagstones outside. One last time through the checklist.

  Mud on his back? Yes. He could feel it crusting inside his collar. At last, a use for the damp wall. There is always a use for everything, Victor had told him. Even pain.

  The device secured? Conor reached around under his loose jacket, tugging at the rectangular pack concealed on his chest. The ropes groaned at his pull, but they were homemade and imperfect. Woven from raggy ends and cut-offs. Spliced together and daubed with candle wax.

  The cuff peg? Concealed in his palm. A jagged ivory cone, measured by pressing the cuffs’ ratchet hard into his palm when Billtoe was removing them. The cuff peg was an old escapologist’s trick and would only work on a set of single-lock cuffs with some play in the bolts; but Billtoe’s cuffs were old enough to have belonged to Moses, and Conor had been yanking at the bolts for half a year now. There was enough play. When Billtoe slapped the cuffs on, Conor would quickly plug the hole with the ivory peg. The ratchet would be deflected while appearing to close.

  Mud, devices, pegs! This plan is lunacy. And as such could never be anticipated. Conor stepped on his uncertainty with a harsh boot. There was not the time now. This plan would liberate him or kill him, and both were preferable to more long years in this hell pit.

  Billtoe’s key clanked into the ancient lock, turning it with some effort. The guard shouldered the door open, complaining as usual, but with one cautious hand on his pistol. “An angel is what I am, sticking it out with you clods, when a man like me would be welcomed into any discerning society in the world. I could be a prince, you know, Finn. An emperor, darn it. But here I stays, so that you can tell me my twelve-shot revolver is not ready yet.”

  “It is ready,” blurted Conor, playing the excited, eager-to-please prisoner. “I have the plan here.”

  Billtoe was canny enough to be suspicious. Lesser brains would have lost the run of themselves, and the price of their distraction would be a stove-in skull, but Arthur Billtoe’s prime instinct was self-preservation. “Where exactly, now, would that plan be? I won’t be doing any bending over, or fumbling in shadows.”

  “No. Lying on the table. Shall I hand it to you?”

  Billtoe cogitated. Coughed up a lump of recently swallowed rations for a rechew.

  “No, soldier boy. How’s about I cuff you as per usual, then have a little look-see at the plan myself.”

  Conor extended his hands, happy to comply. “Do I get my walks, Mister Billtoe? You promised I would.”

  Billtoe smiled as he clamped on the cuffs, one eye on the table. “It’s your beard that has me grinning. A pathetic shrub. It ain’t ready for growing yet. You ought to trim it back, thicken it up. The Rams ain’t going to be ordered to by some runt with a bare gorse on his chin. And we’ll talk about walks after I have a good study of this drawing.”

  Billtoe plucked the page from the table with two grubby, fine-boned fingers.

  “You know, I’ve been talking to a few mates. Apparently there’s a German makes twelve-shot revolvers.” He spat a stream of tobacco juice on the flags to show his displeasure.

  “But small caliber,” argued Conor. “To accommodate the bullets. With this design the cylinder is actually a screw, so the bullets can be as big as you wish, and the weight is spread out more efficiently, so it will work for rifles too.” The design was preposterous and utterly unworkable, but looked pretty on paper.

  “I don’t know,” grumbled Billtoe. “A screw, you say?”

  “Have one made. Like the balloons. Do a test.”

  Billtoe folded the page roughly, stuffing it into a pocket. “That I will, Master Finn. And if this turns out to be a scatterfool’s daydream, the next time you see daylight will be on the day I toss you from the south wall.”

  Conor nodded glumly, hoping his excitement did not shine from his forehead like the Hook Head lighthouse. Billtoe had made a mistake. In his eagerness to see the revolver plan, he hadn’t noticed Conor’s sleight of hand, plugging the Bell and Bolton handcuffs, diverting the ratchet to one side. His hands were free, but it was not yet time to make use of this.

  “This is no daydream, Mister Billtoe. This is our future. You can register the patent, then perhaps pay a few bribes to get me out of here.”

  Billtoe feigned great indignance. “Bribes! Bribes, you say. I am deeply offended.”

  Conor swallowed, a man holding his nerve. “Let’s speak plain, Mister Billtoe. I am in this hole for life, unless you can pull me out of it. I’m not expecting freedom right away . . .”

  Billtoe chuckled. “I am relieved to hear it. The pressure is on, says I to meself. Immediate freedom or no deal. But you’re not expecting freedom, so there’s a worry lifted.”

  “But I would dearly love a cell on the surface. Or near it. Maybe a mate to share with. Malarkey would be suitable, I think.”

  “I bet he would. Lovely and cozy, all Rams together. No wheedling now, Finn. First I have the model made, and when it doesn’t explode in my face, then we parley.”

  “But, Mister—”

  Billtoe held up a flat hand. “No. Not a word more, soldier boy. Your balloons have not taken flight yet. I may be coming for you in the morning with a Fenian pike.”

  Conor hung his head in defeat, in reality hoping he had not overplayed his role. The entire revolver notion was merely misdirection, any magician’s meat and potatoes. Fill Billtoe’s mind with notions so that he would be less attuned to what was unfolding in front of his eyes.

  “Now, let’s be off to work. Well, work for you. I’m off topside to supervise your . . . my . . . coronation balloons.”

  Conor sidled past Billtoe, through the doorway, careful to keep his mud-caked back on the guard’s blind side. His plan was a house of cards, a citadel of cards. One unlucky glance could bring the entire structure down. No time for that now. Begin your count.

  His count. Another largely theoretical card in the citadel.

  Cono
r had long since discovered that there was a blind spot in the corridor between his cell door and the diving bell wing. One of the mad wing’s occupants had been in front of him six months previously on the walk to the warden’s weekly speech. The man was tiny, with a disproportionately large head, especially the forehead that sat atop his eyebrows like a porcelain slug. It was the man Billtoe had called Numbers, because inside his strange head, everything was reduced to mathematics, the purest science. He would spout long streams of digits and then laugh as though he were watching cabaret in Paris.

  On that morning, half a year ago, Conor had watched the man lope down the line before him, muttering his numbers, counting his steps. Fourteen was the last in his list. Then Numbers took a sideways hop, and disappeared.

  No. Not disappeared, but certainly not as visible. There, in sudden black shadows, shaking with mirth at his own joke. A joke that could see him hanged.

  Numbers held his position until Pike noticed him missing, then hopped from his hiding place. “Fourteen,” he exclaimed in a screeching shriek. “Fourteen, eighty-five, one half!”

  Pike did not get the joke, proceeding to cuff Numbers around the ear hole several times. There were no more demonstrations from Numbers, but Conor learned quickly. He had seen the trick once and set about dissecting it. How do you unravel a magician’s secret? Start at the reveal and work backward.

  There was a natural blind spot in the corridor, something magicians and escapologists created artificially onstage with lights, drapes, or mirrors. A tiny spot of isolated darkness surrounded by stimuli that drew the eye. A patch of near invisibility. It would not stand up to any scrutiny, but for a second, in frenzied circumstances, it would do.

  For the next few weeks, Conor watched the space and analyzed the numbers. Fourteen, eighty-five, one half. It was no deep code. Numbers had taken fourteen steps from his cell door along the path, then hopped half a step, eighty-five degrees to the right. Into the belly of the blind spot. Conor simply added the five steps necessary to find the spot for himself.