Chapter Two
Do they even know it’s Christmas?
Edmond watched his father and mother walk arm-in-arm past all the best shops on Bishopsgate without even looking—Fergal O’Malley’s Scale Models, the sweet shop that sold strawberry bonbons for sixpence a quarter and all those delicious European chocolates, Perigore’s phantasmagoria, even Father’s favourite, Harry’s Handy Shop, where he bought all those odds and ends for his workshop. Christmas Eve? The day already ranked somewhere beneath exams day at his boarding school or having a tooth out in Father’s workshop—pass the pliers and cotton gauze, if you please—and it wasn’t even lunchtime yet.
“Mother, where are we going?”
“Hurry up, Edmond. Don’t dawdle, sweetie.”
“But we’ve been walking for hours.”
“Don’t exaggerate.” Father glanced back, a half stern, half amused look battling for control over his tired—always tired—demeanour. His oblong face had a few more wrinkles than the last time they’d all gone shopping together, in the summer.
People often said Edmond looked a lot like his father. He’d loved that comparison once. Now, with the old man resembling more and more one of those sleep-deprived professors from the penny dreadfuls, cooped up day and night in his laboratory, well, it was all a bit embarrassing really. His friends had begun to remark on it, too. “Sandman,” Ginny Burke had called him. “A bit creepy and a bit mysterious and always dead on his feet.” Edmond had pushed her over and made her cry for saying that, but he couldn’t quite shrug the insult off. It was a horrid thing, to think ill of his father—but damn it, Father was never around long enough to disprove it.
“What about the emporium? Are we going to skip that, too?” he asked.
They didn’t even acknowledge that remark. He kicked a mound of snow into the road, showering a steam-powered penny-farthing that appeared from out of nowhere between stationery post-chaises. The rider honked her horn, shook her fist at him. Edmond dashed to the safety of his parents, slid the last few feet over the ice to Mother’s side.
“Good heavens! Mind your footing, dear. There’s a good boy.” Mother adjusted her touring hat decorated with Bird of Paradise plumes and resumed her dutiful chuckle at one of Father’s never-ending funny stories. Probably one he’d told a hundred times before...and practised on the dog first.
Edmond sighed. At least he only had to survive one more day. It was worth enduring Yawnsville and all its little hamlets—endless stops at the homes of aunts, first cousins, grandparents, thousandth-cousins-ninety-million-times-removed he saw too often at only once a year—for the boatload of presents tomorrow morning. Yes, he could endure anything for that.
Anything except face the boarding school debacle again. God, no. How could he possible tell them now, after more than a week had passed? That familiar dull ache in his stomach anchored his steps, made him want to lie down and half-die so Mother and Father would say he had to stay at home for the rest of his life.
How he hated that Château d’If of a school. One year in and already he was allergic to the entire draconian institution, and it to him. Yes, he’d learned lots of big new words there. No, the place wasn’t worthy of any of them. It was ancient and—
All right, it might be worthy of one word:
Excrement.
“Look there, Edmond.” Father pointed up to the sky over the city centre. “You can see the top of the tower.”
Yippee-rotten-do. “You mean the place where they used to torture people?”
“Edmond.” Mother’s stern tone reminded him of the talks they’d had about his father’s important job in the Leviacrum tower and how the old man wanted Edmond to be proud of him.
“What?” Edmond asked. “People were locked up in the Tower of London all the time. Some of them never saw daylight.” Just like you, Father.
Out of the blue, the old man knelt beside him, retrieved a brass telescope from out of his duffel coat and extended it. “Here you go, son.” He handed the spyglass over. It weighed a ton. An uncharacteristic warm smile—uncharacteristic as in not distracted by anything—lit Father like a streetlamp in the snow. It melted Edmond a little, surprised him even more.
“Why don’t you use my shoulder.” He stood and then stooped, almost in the gutter, allowing Edmond to rest the telescope at eye level on his duffel. A coarse, alien coat that seemed larger than life. “Now, adjust the knobs either side of the eyepiece to focus, then I want you to find the second tier from the top, the one ringed with white railing. Let me know when you’ve found it.”
Edmond suddenly felt nervous. He’d used telescopes before in astronomy class, even looked through the giant one in the Westminster Observatory and visited the orrery on the floor below, but Father’s spyglass was special. It had over a dozen magnifications, and was custom-made for the detection of exotic energy spectrums—the slits for the different filters lined the first two segments. Its value was...he couldn’t even guess. But to Edmond, its most special attribute was simple.
It belonged to his father.
“There. Found it.” The Leviacrum tower measured thousands of feet in height and grew taller every year. No one really knew why the Council kept expanding it like a metal beanstalk to the clouds. Some said it would one day reach space itself. But it housed the brightest scientific minds in the empire—no, the world—and Father’s job there, Laboratory Supervisor, was a pretty important one for research.
“What do you see?”
“Figures wearing all-white suits and oxygen masks. About eight or nine.”
“What are they doing?”
“Building snowmen?”
Father laughed hard, and Mother joined in. She straightened Edmond’s bob hat. He rolled his eyes.
“Hmm, it looks like they’re holding dustbin lids upside-down. Some sort of metal dishes?” He glanced up to the boulder-like clouds sitting darkly over the tower’s pinnacle. “They’re waiting to catch the next snowfall?”
Father nodded, held his hand out for Mother to take. For some reason, Edmond felt the old man was proud of that answer, as if it was the one he’d hoped for. But he didn’t say so. As usual.
“So what are they up to, Father?”
“Now focus on the spire, the spearhead above the inverted dome, the topmost point.”
“Found it.”
“What do you see?”
“Something spinning. Colours flickering, like a whirligig. Sparks are flying out into the upside-down dome.” It’s weird, like something out of a H.G. Wells story. “What is it?”
“What if I told you those sparks were formed by exotic cosmic energy being converted?” Questions, questions. He was worse than Professor Pickervance in physics. “What’s the first thing that springs to mind about the shape of that apparatus—the inverted dome?”
“That they’re trying to collect something from those sparks, like a meteolor...metereo...”
“Meteorologist?”
“Yes. Like a meteorologist collects rain in a container.”
“Good, Edmond. Very good.”
Is that it?
“So what is it for really?”
“I’m not allowed to say, son. Not yet. But you’re on the right lines. That was excellent. I can see we chose exactly the right school for you.”
To hell with that! Edmond’s awful secret about Admiral Hood Boarding School yanked at his chest like an icy riptide. But why, oh, why couldn’t he tell it to Father? Even now, when the old man was more open than he’d been in a long time, he was still absent somehow, locked away in his Leviacrum laboratory with two-way mirror windows. And on the steel door, Do Not Disturb. Important Work In Progress. Sod Off.
“It’s half past ten, Cecil,” Mother reminded Father. “If we’re going to see the emporium before lunch, we’d best get a move on.”
“Yes.” Edmond pumped his free fist, remembered to keep a firm grip on the spyglass. He handed it back to Father and then performed a long running skid along the slick pavement, stopping nar
rowly short of a man with two Great Danes at the street corner.
His parents linked arms again and chatted away, both glancing at him now and then as though he was the centre of their conversation. If only they knew. By this time, they’d have no doubt already enrolled him for an apprenticeship in the Leviacrum. Father talked about it often, rarely to him, of course. In the Reardon household, being good at anything meant it was your calling in life—as long as that something was scientific. Heck, he’d once glued a porcelain figure of a naked goddess back together to escape punishment for breaking it and had wound up with a pat on the head from Father for his “mastery of the adhesive” and his “perfectionism”. Admittedly, he’d received a thrashing the next day when the goddess’s head had fallen off and smashed, but the lesson was clear: follow in your father’s footsteps and help mankind progress.
Sod that. I want a pint of shandy and two scoops of pistachio ice cream with a wafer and chocolate sauce. Mankind can go whistle Auld Lang Syne. We’re off to the emporium!
Now with genuine cause for a spring in his step, Edmond felt strangely compelled to walk at his father’s side, at a proper, reserved pace, matching the rhythm of the old man’s stride like he’d done as a young boy. The uneven snow made that difficult, however, and the crunches of their steps were not quite in sync.
Five steamcars were jammed in a line behind an upturned carriage, the latter missing a wheel. A constable blew his whistle as he separated two angry drivers at arm’s length. Up the next, tree-lined street, a group of men rolled a snowball over eight feet high down the pavement. Most pedestrians laughed as they stepped aside, but one woman screamed for them to stop, pointing at the main road.
“Father, what’s the biggest snowball you ever—” Edmond cut himself short when he glimpsed what appeared to be—surely not—a ten pound note trapped in the dirty slush lining the gutter? It flapped in the gust from a passing car.
Breathless, he sneaked behind his parents and planned the whole thing in a flash. Pretend to tie his bootlace, place himself between the note and other passers-by, snatch it up and not let on to anyone, not even Mother and Father, what he’d found. They might not let him keep it, and ten pounds would buy him anything he wanted at the emporium. Anything.
He sensed a city of prying eyes as he crouched, his leading boot half in the slush. A car horn blew its nose not far up the road. The tenner was within his grasp, a snatch away. Screams erupted from across the street and his heart froze—they’d seen him! What if he just got up and walked away, pretended he hadn’t seen the note? A skidding, scraping sound drew closer, like a heavy toboggan being dragged over the ice. A car horn blasted, made him jump. He looked up.
“Edmond!” Mother wrapped her arms around him from behind, tried to pull him away from the out-of-control car. It was too late. She slipped to her knee in the slush. He gasped. The driver’s bared teeth and round goggles and the car’s headlights hurtled at him.
“No!” she screamed. Father repeated the cry from miles away. Edmond shut his eyes, clung to his mother’s arms.
A violent yank threw them both backward onto the pavement. A scraggly old man wearing a red tunic spilled on top of them. The open-top car crashed into the nearest building, shattering the front window, its front tyres tearing at the side of the shop counter inside with a shuddery thrump, thrump.
Distant screams echoed in his mind like late-for-lesson bells at school—guilt piling on fear. Was this all his fault? Steam billowed from the car’s copper boiler, filling the shop. People stumbled out of the cloud, hands and handkerchiefs over their mouths while they coughed.
“Lisa! Edmond!” Father dashed through the steam, gloved fingers crooked at his sides, quicker than he’d ever moved. Edmond had never seen him like this. His eyes were bigger and rounder than the driver’s bared teeth or the goggles or the car’s headlights had been at high speed. Father was terrified.
“Are you all right? Oh my God. Are either of you hurt?” He fell between them, flung his arms around their necks. Mother started sobbing. “I can’t believe how suddenly—God help me, I nearly lost you both.”
“Aye, they had a narrow escape there, lad. I was just passing by, saw the snowball roll out and that idiot swerve—swerve on ice, I’m telling you. As luck had it, my footing held. I’ll never be more grateful to science than I am right now.” The strange man’s voice trembled like loose nails on a rattling old engine. He wiped his wrinkled hands on his dirty red tunic, a soldier’s tunic.
“I saw it, sir, and I can never thank you enough. You rescued everything that matters to me in the world.” Father shook hands with the old soldier while trying to hide his sniffles. “If you’ll give me a moment, I’d be honoured to help you up.”
“Pray tend to your wife and son first, lad. Don’t you worry about me. I can manage.”
Edmond’s curiosity gave way to awe when the old soldier rested on one knee—a brass, clockwork knee that clicked at the slightest bending of the joint. The man had a thick grey beard and a scar in the shape of an uncrossed f running through his damaged left eye. His bronzed skin didn’t match the winter weather.
A handful of envelopes lay strewn in the snow by his side. Edmond made out four of the addressees: Miss Verity Champlain at the House of the Harbour Master, the Royal Navy Port at Rapture’s Point, Van Diemen’s Land; Marquess Embrey at Dalton Manor, Winchester; Tangeni, Able Seaman in the British Air Corps, West African Gannet Squadron, Ovambo Contingent, Namibia; and the last, Sir Horace Holly—possibly the famous old adventurer whose exploits everyone knew?—at...he couldn’t quite make out the address. The man snatched the envelopes up when he saw Edmond was noseying.
Edmond sheepishly looked away—the old man’s secrets echoed his own. How would he feel if Mother or Father rummaged through his bedroom hiding places and found his private things. Or even the dreaded letter, the one he’d kept from them as guiltily as anything he’d withheld in his life. His eyes blurred at the thought.
But who is he? Where has he come from? Why is he sending letters all over the world? Is he a friend of Sir Horace Holly’s? How can he look like a down-and-out and afford such a spiffy-looking leg?
Two policemen helped the car driver out of the wreckage. He held his bleeding shoulder with one hand, nursed his cut forehead with the other. A voice called out from inside the cloud, “Nobody else is hurt, thank Christ. Were a blummin’ close ’un, though. Shouldn’t be any soddin’ vehicles out when there’s soddin’ ice on the soddin’ roads, I reckon.”
“He swerved to avoid a bloody great big snowball—I saw the whole thing,” another man said. “There should be a law against ’em.”
“What? Snowballs? Don’t talk rot.”
Father lifted Mother, then Edmond, then the old soldier to their feet. A flustered urgency in his movements revealed how much this accident had shaken him.
Brushing the snow off her best purple walking suit, especially the full bell lace sleeves she was so proud of, Mother turned to their newfound hero. “My dear sir, I—I’m—we are all very much in your debt. That was extraordinarily brave. You acted not so much in the nick of time as...well, I daresay its most infinitesimal flicker. My word! We could have been...Might I enquire as to your name?”
“R-Red Mulqueen, ma’am. Retired First Lieutenant in the...of the...” He dropped his gaze, held a trembling hand to his brow, as if the fall had affected his memory.
Mother embraced him gently and whispered something in his ear. He nodded, shut his old eyes tight, as though she’d just told him to make a wish. Then he opened them and looked at Edmond instead—a soft, searching look, filled with sadness and seawater.
She eased away, took Father’s hand. “Mister Mulqueen, I have the pleasure of introducing my husband, Professor Cecil Reardon, and our son, Edmond. We would be honoured if you would agree to join us for dinner this evening—a special Christmas Eve thank you for your brave heroics.” She snuggled up to Father and rested her head on his shoulder, the wide brim of her
touring hat tilted up, covering both their heads like a skewed parasol. “It would mean a lot to us.”
He hesitated a beat and recoiled, as though no one had shown him this much kindness in years. Then he straightened his frayed collar. “In that case—” With a click from his knee, he shuffled both legs together to stand tall, his bottom lip quivering, “—I would be delighted.”
“Excellent. Shall we say six-thirty?” Father asked.
“Fine.”
“Our address is seventy-nine Ransdell Avenue, the second street this side of Vincey Park. Shall I send a taxi for you?”
“No, no. Thank you, I can manage.”
“You’re sure?”
“Quite.”
“Where do you live, Mister Mulqueen?” Mother asked, a note of concern in her voice.
“Um, my current address is the Steam Emporium, ma’am. My colleagues and I are employed there through the holiday season.”
A homeless soldier? A handicapped veteran? It didn’t seem right for anyone so old and proud to be eking out a living like that.
“I see.” Mother wore her warmest, prettiest smile—no one could resist that. “Well, a very happy Christmas to you, Mister Mulqueen. We shall expect you at six-thirty.”
He gave a courteous bow. “Mrs. Reardon. Professor Reardon.” He shook Father’s hand again, then flicked Edmond a wink. “Young Master Reardon.”
If there was a correct way to address a retired, homeless soldier with a mechanical leg, who’d just saved his life, no one had ever taught it to Edmond. But one thing he did know—felt it so strongly his heart glowed—made the whole crazy incident seem somehow worthwhile as Father and Mother led him home.
He liked the old soldier.
There was an exciting air of mystery about him.