Moonlocket

by Peter Bunzl

  Papa paused halfway through folding a shirt. “I’ve decided Captain Springer will accompany me for that purpose. He’s the most practically minded.”

  “Robert and I are practically minded too.”

  “Lily, I don’t want to argue. There isn’t time. I have to get this done, or I’ll miss my airship.” He gave up folding and stuffed the shirt into his case. “Besides, you and Robert would never be packed and ready to leave in time.”

  “I thought you might say that,” Lily told him. “So I prepared a bag while you two were having your talk. It’s got everything we need, both of us, and it’s waiting in the hall. See how practical I am? I made sure we’d be ready, and with as little fuss as possible. You’ve got to stop treating me with kid gloves, Papa.”

  Papa shook his head. “Why don’t you listen, Lily? You’re not coming, and neither is Robert. He’s still hurt about his da, and as for you, the worst threats to you may be gone, but we can’t be sure that Silverfish, or those murderous blackguards, Roach and Mould, didn’t tell others about your Cogheart. After all, they were prepared to stop at nothing to try and steal it. We must assume there are still people who wish you harm.”

  Lily helped Papa close his case and buckle up the straps. Why did he always treat her like a little girl? She’d done more this past year than she’d ever thought possible, and yet he was too shortsighted to see it. Was he going to hide her away for ever? What kind of a life was that anyway?

  She slammed herself down on the bed. “I don’t care, Papa. It’s time we stopped concealing things. There’s no point living in fear of what might be when it prevents you enjoying the freedom of what is.”

  Papa took his case from the bed. “It’s not just that someone might try to steal your heart – as if that wasn’t bad enough! Mechanicals are property; hybrids are disapproved of – I’ve even heard of cases where they were harassed in the streets.”

  “I don’t think that’s true,” Lily said. “And I think you underestimate my ability to cope.”

  “Perhaps,” Papa said. “But it’s easier this way. I’ve made up my mind and nothing you can say will change it.” He paused and gazed at her. “There’s something else I haven’t told you, Lily… I asked Robert if he wanted to be a part of our family permanently. While I’m in London, I intend to speak with a lawyer about the possibility of adopting him.”

  Lily jumped up from her seat, excitedly. “That’s a splendid idea,” she said. Then she remembered how sad Robert had seemed lately, how she guessed he was aching for his old life. “But shouldn’t we give his ma one last chance to find him?”

  “Robert’s mother made her choice when she abandoned him. I’m not sure she’s ever coming back.”

  “Everyone deserves the benefit of the doubt, surely?”

  “Look, I must go,” Papa said, “or I’ll be late for my flight.”

  Then, when he saw the cloudy, confused thoughts flitting across Lily’s face, he stopped, dropped his bag and came over to her. He placed a hand on her shoulder and looked her in the eye.

  “Robert needs time without me around to think about what he wants, to get used to the idea that this is his home. And you need to get used to how things are changing too. I don’t want to pressure him, Lily. I want him to decide. Meanwhile, you must make him feel welcome, let him know he belongs.”

  He squeezed her into a hug. “This is your mission while I’m away. Do things together, treat him like a brother.”

  “Is that all?”

  “That’s all.” He kissed her forehead.

  Lily felt her anger still bubbling as they walked together to the top of the stairs. Being nice to Robert wasn’t a mission. She would do that anyway because she liked him. But them both going to London with Papa, that would’ve been a real adventure.

  She hated being sidelined like this. She hung back and lingered at the bannisters pretending she’d something else to do and observed Papa descend the staircase, alone, to greet Mrs Rust, Miss Tock, Malkin and Robert in the hall.

  Papa kissed Robert goodbye, nodded to the mechanicals and ruffled Malkin’s ears. Then he looked round for Lily, and when he realized she was still standing on the landing, gave an amused smile, before he waved and blew her a kiss.

  Lily’s heart softened a little, but let her face stay set, and folded her arms across her chest so she wouldn’t be tempted to wave back to him.

  She watched as he stepped into the porch, and out the front door, held open by Mr Wingnut.

  When she ran to the picture window, Papa was already climbing into the passenger compartment of the steam-wagon, along with Captain Springer. Meanwhile, Mr Wingnut had settled himself in the driver’s cabin. He had some trouble starting the engine as this wasn’t his usual job.

  Malkin slunk in beside Lily and jumped up onto the window sill. He cocked his head and regarded the steam-wagon as it puttered away down the tree-lined drive.

  Lily stroked his ears and stared at the plumes of smoke emanating from the wagon’s chimney. She suddenly wished she’d gone down to see Papa off properly. She’d tried hard to be the daughter he wanted, but it made no difference because he never seemed to notice.

  If he’d only stop treating her like a broken machine, then maybe she’d stand a chance. He needed to let go, quit being so stubborn and, most importantly, stop believing he was the only one in the world who could fix things.

  Next time they spoke, she would prove him wrong. Make him realize she could be her own person, beyond the doors of Brackenbridge Manor. She was strong enough to take care of herself. And fearless too – braver than him, anyway.

  What was it Robert’s da had said…? No one conquers fear easily, it takes a brave heart to win great battles. Yes…that was it! And though Papa might fear the fact that people would dismiss her as only a hybrid, deep down Lily knew she could achieve anything she set her heart to.

  Robert was woken by a stream of moonlight. He’d left the curtains open for that precise reason. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. The moon’s waxy pockmarked face peered through the window, pale and pithy as a piece of fruit, stars sprinkled behind her like spilled sugar. Her gaze silvered the room, the heavy wood furniture and the books and pieces of a train set that lay scattered about.

  Although it had everything he’d ever wanted, Robert could never get used to the splendour of this space, or to the quiet. His first night sleeping here, he’d stopped the clocks; their quiet ticking had been unbearable. It was too much a reminder of the shop filled with Da’s timepieces, their shapes and sounds engrained in him like old friends, before they were lost in the fire. Besides, he didn’t need clocks to tell the hour; he’d lived cheek by jowl with time his whole life. He could read it in the sun’s shadows, or the arc of the moon and stars.

  He jumped out of bed and pressed his nose to the glass, ticking off the names of the constellations in his head: Hercules, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Delphinus, Aquila, Ophiuchus and Serpens. He knew them by heart, thanks to Da’s summer star charts, and from their position in the sky tonight he estimated the hour to be around midnight. Time to be off.

  Robert dressed swiftly, pulling on his trousers, shirt and socks, before lacing up his boots. He paused to swipe the lucifer matches and the candle stub from its tin holder by his bedside. He’d refrain from lighting them until he left the house. He didn’t want to wake Lily next door, or alert any of the mechanicals who might not have wound down for the night.

  His da’s coat hung on the back of the door, as it had since he’d first arrived. He took it down and put it on. He’d need its warm comfort tonight – with a sky as bare and cloudless as a shorn sheep, it was sure to be cold out.

  As he buttoned the coat a ghostly trace of pipe tobacco wafted from its lining. Da’s smell. It made Robert feel Thaddeus was nearby, watching. And that thought fortified him for the journey he was about to make.

  He opened the door and crept out, past the entrance to the library, so full of books that the new ones awaiting shelf space were pi
led outside. The high-ceilinged landing was lined with rows of gilt-framed paintings. Between them heavy oak doors led to various rooms whose functions Robert had trouble remembering at the best of times, let alone half-asleep, in the dead of night, with a head full of worries. Luckily, he wasn’t aiming for any of those spaces. He was heading home.

  He took the servants’ staircase to the basement and sneaked along the tiled back corridor to the kitchen. There he paused in the darkness to light his candle.

  His heart jumped as a face appeared in the blaze.

  It was Mrs Rust, sat ramrod straight in a wooden chair beside the scrubbed oak table. Her metal eyes were closed and her paint-chipped brow furrowed. Being a mechanical, she only functioned for about sixteen hours a day and, right now, with the springs and cogs inside her run down, there was no chance she’d wake – not until she was wound again in the morning.

  Even so, Robert couldn’t help but creep past. Something about her face in the flicker of the candle looked so human, as if she was frozen in deep sleep, which, if you thought of her as alive, he supposed she probably was. But it made him fear she might wake at any moment and demand to know where he was sneaking off to.

  If that happened there’d be pitiful excuses and explanations, then disappointed looks, and telegraphs to John. Because, if you take someone in and give them a nice place to live, you don’t expect them to sneak off at midnight, when no one’s watching, to visit their old home.

  But maybe Robert did want someone to stop him from slipping away into the dark. Perhaps he wanted a friend to notice how bereft he felt, perhaps he needed their advice…because, the more he thought about it, the surer he was that the face at the window was an echo of the past. A signal there was something at the shop to do with his parents he needed to find. And with John’s talk of adoption this might be his final chance.

  He unlocked the back door and was about to open it, when a loud cough behind him made him almost jump out of his skin.

  He turned, expecting to find Mrs Rust awake and eyeing him with an inquisitive and disapproving stare. But instead he saw someone else…

  Lily.

  She was leaning on the door jamb of the open pantry, dressed in her long green coat and walking boots, almost as if she intended to go out. Behind her, half-hidden in the shadows cast by flour sacks and baskets of vegetables, was Malkin. He yawned and gave a little sneeze that sounded like the fizzing springs of a pocket watch.

  “Where are you off to in the middle of the night, pray tell?” Lily asked.

  “Nowhere,” Robert replied.

  “Liar.” She stepped forward until her freckled face filled with candlelight.

  Malkin came too, his claws scratching on the tiled kitchen floor. “Don’t think we tocking well don’t know what you’re up to, Robert Townsend. You’re sneaking off to visit your old home.”

  “So what if I am?” Robert said.

  Malkin sniffed. “We want to know why.”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Yes, you can.” Lily squeezed his arm and Malkin snapped at his shoelaces.

  “All right!” Robert gave up. “It’s the vision I spoke of earlier.”

  “What about it?” Lily asked.

  “Mmm, whtt?” said Malkin, with a mouthful of laces.

  “It was a face at the window. Eyes looking directly at me. I think it might be a ghost.”

  “A ghost!” Lily’s eyes went wide. “Of who?”

  “Da.” Robert shooed Malkin away. “It doesn’t sound very plausible, does it? I thought you might think I was mad, that’s why I was sneaking home. To prove I wasn’t daydreaming, and to find out if the spirit was real…or just some kind of sign.”

  “I can’t believe you would leave us out of a ghost hunt!” Lily said. “No, alone would definitely not be best. What would be best is if we came with you.”

  Robert gave her a defiant stare. But Lily was having none of it.

  “We need an oil lamp,” she said, taking one down from the shelf of the kitchen dresser. Prising the candle from his hand, she removed the lamp’s glass chimney and lit the wick. “Now,” she said, “let’s go and investigate.”

  The night was pitch-black, but the stars and gibbous moon shone bright. Lily rode her bicycle ahead along the drive, towards the gates of the manor, the lamp in the basket on the front. Malkin trotted beside her, Robert following behind. He was rather cross that Lily was taking charge, but that was just her way – always trying to turn everything into her adventure. He pedalled faster to catch up.

  Cycling in the dark, it took them almost twenty minutes to cover the distance to Brackenbridge village. The road brought them down Bridge Lane, past a scattering of houses. In the distance Robert could make out the vague curving shape of the river. They crossed the Bracken Bridge and passed along Bridge Road. The golden glow of bunting-strewn street lamps illuminated the length of the High Street. As they crossed the green, and neared his home, Robert’s body gave a small, involuntary shiver.

  He tugged at his shirt collar, darting nervous glances across the lane, up at the window of Townsend’s Horologist’s. It was too dark to be sure, but he sensed no one inside.

  As they propped their bicycles against the street lamp opposite the shop, a distant owl gave a screeching hoot.

  “The place is empty,” Robert mumbled. “Whatever I saw, I must’ve imagined it.”

  “There’s only one way to be sure.” Malkin pricked up his ears and scampered into the door well, sniffing at the planks nailed across the door. “I can’t smell anything strange, except singed metal.”

  The fox stood on his hind legs, placing his paws on the ledge beneath the boarded-up window, and peered through a narrow slit. “It could’ve been someone breaking into the house, but it doesn’t look like anything inside’s been tampered with.”

  “Perhaps we should check round the back?” Lily proposed.

  The three of them squeezed down the narrow passageway between the buildings and stepped into the yard at the rear of the shop. Behind the gloomy silhouette of the outside privy and a small pile of old packing cases, the back door had been boarded over with sheets of plywood, to hide the panes of glass Roach and Mould had broken on that fateful night when they’d followed Lily, set the fire, and killed his da.

  Lily felt about in the inky shadows and grasped the door handle. The door swung easily inwards. “Clinking chronometers!” she whispered, brushing her fingers against the side of the lock. “It’s been picked! It wasn’t a ghost, or a figment of your imagination. There really has been a visitor, Robert.”

  Robert leaned against the cold brick wall and gave a sickening cough. Suddenly he felt rather peaky at the thought of going inside. He remembered what John had said about his ma, how she could’ve been in hiding for years for some mysterious reason. If she came back at all she’d probably have to do it secretly. Could it be her in the house, or was it someone else? “What should we do?” he asked. “We can’t venture in without reconnaissance.”

  “Malkin can sniff around,” Lily said. “If he scares up anything he can scarper quick enough. Whoever it is might even imagine he’s a wild fox that’s got in by mistake.”

  “I am a wild fox,” Malkin said. “You’ve never seen my wild side – and thank goodness, because it’s positively tocking ferocious!” With that, he stepped through the door and disappeared into the sooty darkness.

  “Don’t fall down any holes,” Lily called after him softly, remembering the danger they’d been warned about.

  Robert waited for his sarcastic reply, but it didn’t come.

  Silence. The night was so still that Robert could hear his own heartbeat…or was that Lily’s, stood beside him? He listened for her tick amongst the booms. And then it came, but it was only Malkin, his fizzing clockwork echoing from inside the house, until his nose appeared in the narrow gap between the door and the jamb.

  “The coast’s clear,” he yapped. “I heard a few creaks, but it must be this old house, becau
se no one’s here. There is evidence someone was sleeping rough for a day or two. But they must’ve seen you through the window, Robert, got scared and moved on.”

  Robert felt a frisson of surprise. He’d been right then… The only difference was the face had been real, not the ghost or vision he’d imagined. Perhaps it had been his ma, secretly returned?

  “What kind of evidence?” Lily was asking Malkin.

  Malkin nipped at a charcoal smear on his orange fur. “Oh, you know…footprints in the dust, scratches on the walls, fingermarks on the wainscotting – that kind of thing. The front bedroom seems to contain a bed on the floor, made from pieces of cardboard and an old blanket.”

  “Is there anything that could’ve been left intentionally?” Robert asked. He was still in shock, and wondering if the visitor had been looking for him.

  “I don’t think so.” Malkin sniffed. “Why don’t you come and see for yourself? If there’s a significant clue, you’re more likely to find it.”

  “You’re sure we won’t get caught?” Lily asked.

  “I told you, didn’t I?” Malkin snapped. “The smell of humans is unmistakeable. There’s no one here. I checked.”

  “Fine.” Lily pushed the door wide, her lamp flickered and dimmed and she turned to Robert. “It’s nearly out of oil.”

  “Then we’ll need more light.” Robert took his candle and lucifer matches from his jacket. His hand shook as he struck a match, and the flame danced and jigged so he had trouble finding the candle. When he finally got it lit, he nodded to Lily.

  The pair of them stepped into the ravaged house with trepidation. Robert took a deep breath…and suddenly his past was upon him, seeping sootily into every bone and sinew of his body.

  Robert and Lily followed Malkin through the burnedout husk of Townsend’s Horologist’s. The fox skipped daintily ahead along the hallway, leaving tiny paw prints in the dust.

  Robert held his breath as he and Lily dodged beneath a fallen joist that must have once been a roof beam. Everywhere he looked he saw traces of the fire that had raged through the house six months ago: walls begrimed with mould, paint pimpled and boiled like greasy skin, and plaster that had flaked away to expose broken wooden lathes, like ribs. It was as if his home had been mauled by a flaming beast.