Lessons From Underground

by Bryan Methods

  We stood next at the top of a staircase more grandiose than the one at my home. It swept down to a lower deck, with its dark wood shining in the natural daylight that poured in from a great glass dome that would have suited a cathedral. A white-bearded, jovial man came to shake our hands and welcomed us aboard, introducing himself as Captain Smith. When Mr. Jackdaw gave our assumed names, the captain’s expression changed just for a moment, but he said, “Welcome aboard. Please enjoy the finest ship the world has ever seen.”

  Captain Smith had hundreds of passengers to greet, so we moved on. Still, I chanced a look back at him, trying to determine whether or not Mr. Jackdaw had told him we weren’t who we claimed to be.

  A smiling steward who had listened out for our names showed us down the sweeping staircase. When we reached our rooms, I couldn’t see the one Mr. Jackdaw would be sharing with the Valkyrie, but the one meant for Jacob and Aaron Fisher, the hatmaker and his son, was very fine. It had dark, wooden-paneled walls and two small but comfortable-looking beds on either side of a little round table. Dark green accents on the room’s upholstery matched well with the patterned carpet.

  After only a few moments, a knock came at the door. I turned the handle to see the Valkyrie. She looked rather troubled, but Mr. Jackdaw was smiling behind her.

  “Your room looks nice,” she said. “Ours is a little small, but thank goodness we can divide it in two. I’d rather we get this business over and done with quickly.”

  We decided to go to the first-class lounge, back up near the top of the ship. It was a cavern of a place, with a grand fireplace at the center and a huge chandelier above it. Dozens of comfortable-looking armchairs and sofas were arranged around small tables so that different groups could sit together.

  “It’s like a palace,” I said.

  “In the Louis V style,” said Mr. Jackdaw. “This is modern luxury. Even your father would have to hesitate before spending the money on extravagance like this.”

  “I sure he’d say it was a big waste, and we’d go in second class.”

  “I stick out like a sore thumb,” the Valkyrie said. “All these lords and ladies have their noses in the air. I think they get surprised when they can still see someone up here.”

  “Not so many lords and ladies today,” Mr. Jackdaw said as we chose some nearby seats. “Baron Pirrie ought to be on board with his nephew, who designed this beauty. Then the Countess of Rothes, and also Baronet Duff-Gordon with his wife.”

  After a waiter had taken our order for tea, I asked, “Duff-Gordon?” I looked about the room in case I could recognize the famous sportsman. “Maybe I can ask him about my fencing.”

  “Well, perhaps,” said Mr. Jackdaw. “But don’t draw attention to yourself. You’ll stand out enough being one of the only children in first class. And do remember that first and foremost, we’re on the lookout for Binns and his contact.”

  “Do we know who his contact is?”

  “No,” Mr. Jackdaw said. “There’s a family from South Africa in second class and some other South African passengers in third class, but having researched them all, I very much doubt he’ll be meeting them.”

  “What about Hunter?” said Mr. Scant, avoiding meeting Mr. Jackdaw’s eye by pouring the tea. “Will he be on board?”

  “I think not,” said Mr. Jackdaw. “It’s possible he’s using another name, just as we are. But, well . . . if children stand out, it’s nowhere near as much as he would.”

  “How do you mean?” I said. “What about the South African family?”

  “A white family.”

  “Ah,” I said, realizing what he meant by “standing out.”

  “That said, there are in fact a number of international passengers on board,” Mr. Jackdaw said. “In second class, a fellow from Japan. A cabin full of Chinese folk are in third class, off for a new life in the New World, I suppose, though they’ll have to contend with that beastly Exclusion Act. Two fellows of Egyptian descent will also join us in first class once we get to France.”

  “I wish I knew what to look for,” the Valkyrie said. “I’m not even sure I’d recognize Aurelian Binns after three years.”

  “He’s taller than his father now,” Mr. Scant said. “Almost my height.”

  “He never did take after either of his parents,” the Valkyrie said. “Except for that mean streak of theirs.”

  After finishing our tea, we set about looking for Aurelian. There was no sign of him in any of the public areas, from the smoking room to the promenade deck, where the great majority of passengers had gathered to wave to people at the pier. As we prepared to depart, people called to loved ones and waved kerchiefs in the air. I couldn’t find a lot of space between them, but I squeezed myself into a spot between a squat older lady in a large hat and a suave young man who smelled of cigarettes. I looked in wonderment at the mass of people waving off the ship. After a few moments, though, the crowd around me pressed closer, and feeling crushed, I withdrew.

  Mr. Scant and Mr. Jackdaw continued scanning the crowd, while the Valkyrie steadied herself against a post, looking queasy.

  “Any sign of Aurelian?” I said, but they shook their heads. “Maybe we should ask if anyone has seen him.”

  “Ask whoever you can,” said Mr. Jackdaw, “but there’s a time and place for conversation, and I don’t think most of this lot will be interested in it just now. We ought to wait until we’re sharing luncheon or brandies.”

  I nodded, glancing about but seeing only people’s backs or small groups of passengers talking amongst themselves. Then I noticed two children a little further down the deck. A boy and a girl, presumably siblings, with one of those funny dogs with a rectangular head and a little beard. The girl must have been about my age, her brother a few years younger. A maid was standing quietly by, keeping an eye on them. I decided to speak with the pair.

  “I like your dog,” I said. “Can I say hello?”

  The boy looked at me, then to his sister, who said in a clear, confident American accent, “He’s called Brinny. I’m called Lucile, and this is William. Say hello, William.”

  “Hello there,” said the boy. “Go ahead, he’s a good dog.”

  So I knelt and stroked the handsome brown dog and introduced myself. “I’m O—uh, Jacob,” I said, then quickly added, “This is my first time on a ship this size.”

  Brinny the dog regarded me with curiosity, but it was hard to tell if he appreciated the attention or not.

  “Isn’t it gargantuan?” Lucile said in the tone of someone very proud of her vocabulary. “But it takes such a long time to go across the ocean. We live in Europe now but we go to New York every year. At first it’s fun, but after three or four days, oh, it’s interminable.”

  “I suppose it takes a long time,” I said.

  “It’s interminable!” said Lucile.

  “I once went all the way to China in an airship,” I told the pair. “It wasn’t very luxurious, though.”

  “I’m sure Father could pay someone to make it more luxurious. I should ask him.”

  “Say, have you ever been in a motorcar?” William said excitedly.

  “Oh yes, many times,” I said. “My father loves motorcars.”

  “Oh.” William looked a little disappointed.

  I then remembered that I was supposed to be Jacob Fisher, so I lamely added, “Almost as much as he loves hats.”

  “I’m sure he’d love to try Papa’s brand new motorcar,” said Lucile. “It’s in the cargo hold. It’s quite the thing!”

  “I’m sure he would,” I said, smiling.

  “We’re going to have a ride when we get back home,” William said. “I’m going to learn to drive it.”

  “Lucky you. Oh, I’m looking for a relative of mine, but I haven’t found him yet. Maybe you’ve seen him? He’s older than me, seventeen or eighteen. He likes wearing nice clothes—erm . . .”

  “Whole lot of people like that here,” Lucile said, gesturing to the assembled crowd.

 
; “Well, one thing, he has long hair,” I told her. “Like one of the musketeers, I suppose. Perhaps not that long, but longer than anybody’s I can see here. Have you seen someone like that?”

  The two children shook their heads. I was about to say something else, but I saw Mr. Scant and Mr. Jackdaw coming toward me. I went over to my mentor while Mr. Jackdaw shined his teeth at the siblings and their maid. “Terribly sorry, but the boy’s mother is calling for him. He went off on his own, you see, and with these crowds, well, best to fetch him, what? Don’t want to put an oar in their boat or rock the boat when on such a boat as this! Just want to make sure we’re all on the same boat.”

  “Why did you do that?” I said, as Mr. Jackdaw and Mr. Scant ushered me away. “They might have seen something useful.”

  “Some old priest’s coming this way taking pictures of everything,” said Mr. Jackdaw. “The last thing we want to happen is to get photographed.”

  Finding the Valkyrie after that was a simple matter. She was always the tallest person in the vicinity, especially in her big fashionable hat. “They say we’re about to launch,” she said. “Master Diplexito, would you like to sit on my shoulders to watch?”

  I almost laughed. “Firstly, no thank you, I’m a bit old for that. Secondly, I’m Jacob Fisher here, remember?”

  “Ah, sorry,” she said, rubbing her temple as though it were all a bit too much to remember.

  “Thirdly, once this is all over and done with, please call me Ollie. We’re friends now.”

  “Friends?”

  “We’re all friends here,” Mr. Jackdaw said, moving to take the Valkyrie’s hand for a gentlemanly kiss. A ship-wide shudder gave her a chance to stumble away.

  “Ah! It must be noon,” she said. “We’re casting off.”

  The voices of the people calling to their loved ones swelled louder, passengers on the steerage decks below filling the air with cheerful whoops and whistles.

  “Keep watching for Binns,” Mr. Scant said, but we stayed where we were as the vast floating monolith beneath us set in motion. Through a trembling under my feet, I could feel the immense power of the engines, and somewhere a great whistle sounded.

  After a few minutes, people had started to relax and move away from the rails of the promenade deck. But around that same time, that the air changed. I began to hear concerned voices from further aft. “Something’s wrong,” I said.

  It wasn’t immediately clear what was happening—the crowd around us was still thick enough to keep us from rushing to the railings. But we began to understand. Another nearby ship, almost as large as ours, was moving very strangely. Its stern was swinging out from where it had been moored. And in a few more minutes, we were going to hit it.

  XVII

  Jewels and Grime

  eep your eyes open,” said Mr. Scant. “This is exactly the sort of irregularity we don’t need.”

  A crowd had gathered to watch the crisis unfold, which made it hard for me to see. With such enormous ships, everything happened very slowly, but a grim sense of inevitability about a collision overtook the crowd. The rumbling beneath our feet got stronger, and it became clear our captain was bringing our ship about. Someone said a tugboat was going to pull the other ship away, but it kept coming closer and closer.

  “If it gets much nearer, we’ll hit,” said Mr. Jackdaw.

  “Or somebody could jump from this ship to the next,” said Mr. Scant. “Watch carefully.”

  The other ship came so close that I gripped a handrail so I wouldn’t be thrown from my feet by the impact. But to everyone’s relief, the two liners missed one another by what looked like barely enough space in which to drop a billiard ball. Mr. Scant’s suspicions were likewise unfounded. Nobody jumped from vessel to vessel, which everybody would have been able to see in any case. Soon we were satisfied that the disaster was averted, and when my stomach growled, we decided to go to the dining room for lunch.

  The drama hadn’t prevented the kitchen staff from preparing a buffet, so I piled as much roast beef as I thought I could get away with on my plate.

  “This is the life!” I declared.

  “You can say that again,” said the Valkyrie, who had opted for a veal pie with daintily sliced vegetables. “The meat is remarkably high-quality. I wonder how they’re storing it.”

  “Let’s stay alert now,” Mr. Jackdaw said, scanning the room. “We’re not here to muck about.”

  “I haven’t seen the Binns boy anywhere,” said Mr. Scant. “Even amidst this many people, he’d be easy to spot.”

  “He must be on board,” said Mr. Jackdaw. “A steward said he was, but he also told me Aurelian’s moved cabins. In any case, catching him won’t be a matter of knocking on his door. If he doesn’t want to be found, it wouldn’t be difficult to hide.”

  “For an evening, perhaps, but not for day after day,” said Mr. Scant. “After we eat, we search.”

  “What about the other boat?” I said. “Could he have been behind that?”

  “I wouldn’t think so,” said Mr. Jackdaw. “A collision on that scale would be a very difficult thing to arrange, and for what? He makes another boat hit this one—what advantage does that give him? No, I think we can chalk that one up to bad luck.”

  “So how are we going to search?” I asked. “All together?”

  “Splitting up would be wiser,” said Mr. Jackdaw. “But for safety’s sake, not one by one. Two by two makes the most sense, no?”

  “Yes, but perhaps not the way you’re thinking,” said Mr. Scant. “I still don’t trust myself. You and I can look after ourselves, Jackdaw, but I don’t want to put Master Oliver in any more danger than he needs to be. I think Miss Troughton ought to go with the boy.” He turned to me. “And after all, you’re friends now, are you not?”

  And so it was that I began to explore the ship with the Valkyrie. I had grown a fair bit since the first time I met her, in an abandoned underground resort where she was trying to kill me. But Matilda Troughton still stood about twice as tall as I did and boasted far more muscle. It was strange seeing her in a fashionable dress, and I wondered where Mr. Jackdaw had gotten hold of it so soon. Sometimes we heard laughter behind us, especially from the young men on board, which may or may not have followed some cruel comment. But for her part, she nodded graciously to anyone who caught her eye and returned any polite greetings.

  “Mr. Jackdaw seems to have taken a liking to you,” I said.

  “Do you think so?” said the Valkyrie. “I never know if anything he says is true.”

  “Well, I can understand that.”

  “I think he’s just saying things to keep me off my guard,” said the Valkyrie. “He probably thinks I’ll be easier to deal with that way.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  We made our way around the public facilities of the ship, which were extensive and as fine as those of any country club. The F deck held a Turkish bath, which sounded like a good place to hide, but the attendant said nobody was inside. Outside a gymnasium, we met another two children, an older sister and a younger brother, whose mouths fell open as they saw the Valkyrie. They were younger than the other brother and sister I had met and told us in Scottish accents that they hadn’t seen anybody like Aurelian. The pair was only travelling as far as France and getting off there.

  “I forgot about people getting on and off at the other ports,” I said. “Maybe Aurelian’s buyer isn’t on board yet, and Aurelian’s hiding until they arrive.”

  After more than two hours of searching, we came across what we thought was the grand staircase we had seen when we first boarded. “We can go back to the lounge from here,” said the Valkyrie.

  “Hold on,” I said. “I think this is a different staircase. Look at the clock. The one we saw before had all that fancy carving around it. This one is only small.”

  “How many can there be?” the Valkyrie said, and then we heard laughter from above. The Valkyrie flushed and pulled her hat down to hide her face.
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  “Oh, do pardon us,” an older woman said, coming down the steps to apologize. “We only laughed because we said the very same thing earlier. How do you do? My name is Mary Fortune. These are my daughters, Ethel, Alice, and Mabel.”

  The daughters, all grown women, slim and elegant, gave little curtseys.

  “My name is Booth. Erm . . . Mildred Booth,” the Valkyrie said. Mr. Jackdaw had obviously never told her what her forename was meant to be. “This is the son of my husband’s dear friend. His name is Jacob.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” I said. “Are none of you married?”

  “Why! What a forward question,” the oldest, Ethel, said.

  “Oh, it’s only that if you’re not, you’d be Miss Fortune, Miss Fortune and Miss Fortune.” I smiled. “That seems a touch unlucky.”

  The four women laughed. “As it happens, we are not married,” Miss Mabel Fortune said.

  “And you don’t know the half of it,” Miss Alice Fortune said with a cheeky smile. “When I was in Cairo, a fortune-teller told me I will lose everything but my life by travelling on the sea. ‘Oh, great danger,’ he said. We Miss Fortunes must be a cursed and sorry lot!”

  “Oh, I don’t think I like the sound of that,” said the Valkyrie. “You gave me a shiver.”

  The mother looked amused. “What a fine tall lady you are, Mrs. Booth. And Master Jacob, I can tell you’re a clever one. You must join us at our dinner table tonight.”

  “We’d be honored,” the Valkyrie said. “I’ve never had friends from America before.”

  “And you still haven’t,” Mrs. Fortune said in playful reproach. “We are Canadians.”

  The search continued for the rest of the day, though we often stopped to enjoy the Titanic’s many luxuries, riding in the elevator for the novelty of it and visiting the promenade deck to enjoy the fresh air. The Valkyrie and I even went to the second-class facilities, where signage suggested we’d find a library. It was little more than a writing room, in truth, where a number of passengers were writing letters to send home. Throughout the experience, we encountered no sign of Aurelian Binns, but the more we saw, the more we realized just how many places there were to hide.