Imperial Clock (The Steam Clock Legacy)

by Appleton, Robert

  She gripped his arm. “Doctor, what are you saying?”

  “Sonja always was a strong girl—” He delicately undid her grasp, “—but this makes two bouts of extreme exposure in a matter of weeks. First the Lake District—”

  “But she recovered from that.”

  “Superficially she did, but it won’t have done her constitution any favours. We don’t know how much it weakened her system. Yet even without that, last night’s ordeal would likely still have had this effect. You see, the water on her lungs impaired her breathing quite severely. Joe Berwick revived her, yes, and I’ve managed to drain the last of the fluid, but the infection has taken hold. It’s as vicious as I’ve ever seen. She’s fighting it—you know what a stubborn little fighter she is—but I have to be honest here, Meredith—I don’t expect her to last through the night.”

  Somewhere a clock was ticking, then Sonja coughed a horrible cough, and time seemed to disappear from the house.

  “Maybe if we’d found her sooner,” Marsan added.

  “She can fight it off. Like you say, she’s stubborn.”

  He put his arm around her. “She is. As strong a girl as I’ve known. It’s a miracle she made it through last night—really, a miracle. That’s a bona fide will to live. But even the strongest will in the world can only achieve so much. Once an infection takes a hold of the body...”

  “What can I do? There has to be something I can do. Anything. Doctor, I swear, I’ll do anything.”

  “Meredith—”

  “The Leviacrum! This is the age of newfangled science, isn’t it? There’s nothing they can’t do there. A fresh medicine. A new treatment. They’ll have to know. What if I telephoned—no, no, I could fly there and be back before tonight. Yes, I could hire an aerogypsy, something fast—I haven’t touched this week’s allowance yet. They’ll help me, won’t they? I mean they can do anything in that tower. Can’t they?”

  “I’d like to say they can help, truly. But I read their medical journals and I’m afraid there’s nothing to fight this kind of infection once it’s taken hold. I’m sorry, Meredith.”

  “But they might not have published it? There’s a hell of a lot they don’t make public, you know.” Shaking some sense into him seemed the only way to open his mind to a solution, but he merely rode out her assault, polite and resolute. “Don’t you know?”

  He did know. Knew what she didn’t, and the longer he held her, whispering, doing his best to reassure, the more she let go of her desperate fantasies. She gasped. Sonja was in God’s hands now, breaths away from Mother, slipping into that mapless place where Meredith couldn’t follow.

  “The best things we can do for her are keep her comfortable—I’ll show you how—and have someone at her side at all times. She might be delirious with fever, but on some level she may be aware she has loving company. I know I would want a loved one by my side...when the time comes. Will you do that for her?”

  When the time comes...

  “You know I will.”

  “I know.”

  “And let anyone try and stop me.”

  “That’s my girl. I’ll be back in a few hours to see how she’s faring. In the meantime, this is what I’d like you to do...”

  ***

  Derek stopped the car so abruptly it skidded a one-eighty on the muddy lane and finished so close to the stone wall his door wouldn’t open more than a few inches, so he clambered out through the passenger side, realising he hadn’t switched the steam engine off. To hell with it. He rushed through the hot vapour cloud and slid partway up the paved path—the soles of his boots were still slick with oil from the dockyard. Rather than stop to take them off or ruin the carpet inside he wrestled them off on the hop, tossed them under an upended wheelbarrow against the wall of the house, and let himself in.

  Kingsley had stressed the urgency of this summons, but hadn’t known much more than Sonja was very ill, she’d been in some sort of car accident last night, and the housekeeper, Mrs. Van Persie, was in a state. Enough to incite Derek to commandeer the harbourmaster’s car and eat the miles to Southsea in quite phenomenal time—time spent out of his mind, very nearly to the detriment of umpteen pedestrians and cyclists along the way.

  But why, oh why had he been so far away? No one had seen in which direction Sonja had driven away last night, true, but his assumption after Mrs. Van Persie had claimed to know nothing over the telephone was so wrongheaded it now made him shiver with shame. A wonder the errant Kingsley had found him at all! Derek had checked every waiting room at the nearest two train stations, those at the airship docking towers at Portsmouth harbour, not to mention the passenger steam-ships, the yachts, even one or two freighters she might conceivably try to stow away on during her rash escape. In hindsight he ought to have come straight here, waited here for word from her.

  “Meredith, how is she?” By now he had to gasp to gain a full breath. “I came as soon as I heard. Is she—” The colour of alabaster, trembling head to toe under assault from a shocking fever. A film of perspiration, fed by fresh drips forming before his very eyes, covered every inch of exposed skin. If any more needed to be said, Meredith’s wounded pink face, puffy and damp with tears, ended his initial concern and thrust him headlong into a world of heart-thudding dread.

  He knelt at Sonja’s side, lifted her warm hand to his cheek, kissed her engagement ring. “What happened? How long has she been like this?”

  “How should I know? Since the middle of the night? All I know is she’s getting worse and worse, and there’s nothing we can do. The doctor...he doesn’t think she can win.”

  “Eh? But she has to.” He froze. Watched Meredith like he’d never watched anyone before, clinging to her grim, stoic intensity as a life-belt to keep him in this time, this place, and out of that one, one in which his heart would die. He felt a dizzying weight back up in his mind until for a moment he wasn’t here at all, he was a hundred feet off the ground in the wicker car of a hot air balloon, and Sonja was in his arms, telling him how the world worked through her eyes. A memory he would cherish forever. The weight left him and he could no longer look at Meredith. He leaned over Sonja, close enough to feel the heat from her burning cheek. “Do you hear me, darling? You have to. Please don’t leave me.”

  He whispered a prayer that lasted until the doctor returned, and after that he sat on a chair Meredith brought him, watching over his love until the streetlamps replaced the sun and the smell of toasted cheese—the Van Persies at supper—faded into a cast away world of bitter linctuses and far-off yesterdays.

  Meredith hardly left her sister’s side either. Neither she nor Derek spoke to one another. Instead she read an old, cork-bound children’s book by candlelight through most of the night. She read it at a whisper on Sonja’s pillow when Derek was still in the room, aloud whenever he left the room, and silently to herself while he took his turn attending to Sonja. It was a strange interplay at work between him and Meredith, strange and yet somehow completely natural, for they’d emptied of themselves and were there only because they loved the same girl. Words were not necessary. Only being there mattered.

  Late in the night, he left for the kitchen to make hot toddies for them both. On the way back he fetched a blanket for Meredith from the next bedroom. He stopped on the landing when he heard her sobbing. But not ordinary sobs. She was reading at the same time, presumably from the same book she’d been reading all along, with such determination, almost a religious fervour, he hadn’t the heart to interrupt. It sounded as though a child was reading a bedtime story in defiance of something its parents had said, willing the fantastical into the real world; it wasn’t just a story, it really meant something. So he listened.

  At the end of every chapter was a short verse, a refrain that illustrated a theme of the book’s adventure. Despite her voice breaking, Meredith read, “A Perfect Web:

  Could it be

  An accident of physics like the coin that lands erect?

  The wave that swells a hun
dred feet? The lives that intersect?

  By happenchance, are miracles the follies of design,

  Or are they peeks at other realms? Or glints of the divine?

  For what can spin a perfect web a thousand feet below—

  A grand arachnid masterpiece where ne’er a light will glow?

  And why would evolution bid its artist quickly die,

  To weave a silken wonderment and darkly know not why?”

  He breezed in as she turned the page, knowing it would stop her reading aloud—and if he listened to any more he might not be able to hold back his own tears. He handed her the hot drink and the blanket.

  “Thank you,” were her first words to him since the sun had set. She set the book on her lap, slung the blanket over her shoulders, and appeared to study him between sips of her toddy. Her lips half formed words that never escaped, as though she was torn between wanting to tell him something and clinging to her stubborn silence.

  Derek had no such compunction, not when the girl he loved might be listening in, from however deep a well; she would want them to talk, to at least make an effort to become friends. “Have you recovered from your injuries, Meredith? I heard you took a few knocks last night.”

  “It was nothing, just trampled, kicked around a little. I’m all mended now. And you?”

  “Same here. They told me I was out cold for twenty minutes. But I was right as rain after that, the moment I came to, apart from a humdinger of a headache.”

  “And the others?”

  “Let me see. Father had a nasty spill, suffered a concussion. They kept him in as a precaution, though he was none the worse when I left him. He’s a tough old cat. Uncle Rufus suffered a couple of cracked ribs—deserved more, if you ask me. He’s got a lot to answer for. Then there were three or four who needed multiple stitches. Brunnie’s friends copped the worst of it, I think. The rest were either bruised or shaken up. Kingsley told me a couple of his friends are still in the hospital?”

  “Yes, Nickson still hadn’t come round when we left him. That was this morning, though—I mean yesterday morning—so he’s likely awake by now. I’ll telephone at first light. Then Mears, poor lad, suffered two breaks.”

  “Two? My word.”

  “Wrist and hip. He fell awkwardly on his side, screamed when he tried to walk it off.”

  “I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.”

  “Me neither.”

  Derek leaned in close to Sonja, dabbed her brow with a damp cloth as she turned her head toward him. “She isn’t shivering as much. Her breathing seems a little easier. What do you think?”

  After taking her sister’s temperature with the thermometer, Meredith grimaced. “She’s worse, not better. Oh, Sonja, you have to fight harder than this.” She settled her own head on the pillow beside her. “If you can hear us at all, I want you hit this thing with everything you’ve got. Every cannon, you know, a triple-deck broadside—no, what’s that other one...rake...I want you to rake it for us, mean as you can. Derek’s right here. Here’s been here all the time, and he wants you to fight with all you’ve got. Do you hear me? Don’t you dare give in to this thing. Father’s on his way home, so is Aunt Lily. They’ll be here for your big day, and it’s going to be the biggest wedding Southsea has ever seen. Sorensen cousins not invited, of course. But we’ll all be there, cheering you on, and when you reach that altar, you can bet Mother will be watching too.”

  Meredith sat up, mouthed a prayer, then returned to reading her book, leaving Derek alone in his grief once again. An uncommon tiredness came over him as he watched the candlelight waver across Sonja’s ivory locks, subtly pulse over half her face, as if tugging at the shadow half, trying to rouse life from it. He watched until his eyelids grew heavy, then he laid his head beside her and clasped her hand to his cheek. Her fingers stirred, giving him hope. Then she was still again. Soon the fever raged more ferociously than ever, and all he could do was listen...listen to life leaving her...to those ragged drum-roll breaths...to death taking her...

  And above it all, those busy, muttered lines from a children’s book nagged and mithered and pestered death, not giving it a moment’s peace, getting under its skin, insisting beyond reason that now was not the time.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Death Comes Calling

  The answer struck her with palling certainty. It tried to wake her, but the memory of four years ago first demanded its own absolution. It insisted she look back at what had really happened that evening in Niflheim. William Elgin—ward of Professor Sorensen and erstwhile time traveller—had used his forty-one second time anomaly to humiliate Meredith and Sonja in front of everyone. There was no other explanation. To have pulled their frocks up over their heads and tied them with curtain cords in the blink of an eye required supernatural speed. No one in the room had seen the culprit because the culprit could not be seen—he’d done the deed while everyone was, to him, frozen in the moment, and then made his escape before time had resumed.

  But why had he done it? For a bet? For devilment? To impress one of the Gorgon cousins? Whatever the reason, he had a lot to answer for, this young mystery man whom she’d somehow grown very fond of. Perhaps he’d tried to tell her the other night in the museum, but her reaction to his demonstration had made him think twice. Why did every man she liked—Donnelly, Kingsley, William—have to bear a warning label? And this one had already poisoned her before they’d ever officially met.

  It was such a momentous revelation—the humiliation had eaten away at her month after month, costing her countless nights’ sleep and many a meal, not to mention the indescribable damage wreaked upon her self-esteem through at least two years of school—yet it now vanished almost instantly upon waking. For the only person she must tell it to, the only one who understood and had shared her pain, lay trembling on her deathbed. Sonja’s skin was almost as white as her hair, the pillow and bed sheets were wetter than Meredith’s had ever been after her post-Niflheim nightmares. Yes, that had all been child’s play. It no longer mattered. It was over.

  Only Sonja mattered.

  “Good morning, Meredith.”

  “Morning.” As she yawned and stretched, Derek donned his coat, opened the curtains, and gazed grimly out of the window to a frosty dawn. The red sun rose behind thorny treetops, silhouetting Derek’s hunched figure as he blew out the candle on the dresser. It also rouged one side of Sonja’s face. “Have something to eat before you go,” she said, “wherever you’re going. Mrs. Van Persie won’t be up yet, but I can make us toast and coffee?”

  “Thank you, no. Doctor Marsan said he’ll be back at eight, and I don’t want to miss him, which is why I’m paying Mother a quick visit now. ”

  “Nothing bad’s happened, I hope.”

  “She wouldn’t say over the telephone, but she’s very upset. A telegram arrived, and I’m fairly certain it concerns the new conscription.” He checked his watch. “Six-fifteen. I should be back here no later then seven-thirty.”

  “That’s fine. Dr. Marsan told you he’d be here—”

  “He telephoned while you were asleep to say he’d been detained with another patient. I told him Sonja’s condition hadn’t worsened that I could tell—her temperature and breathing seemed to be unchanged—and he said I was to call him right away if there was any change. I didn’t want to wake you, you had such a long day yesterday. But now that you’re up...”

  “Of course, of course. You must go. You say eight’s the soonest he can get here?”

  “I assume he’s catching up on some sleep—even doctors need their rest.”

  “True.”

  “Well, I’ll see you shortly.” His heartfelt kiss to Sonja’s forehead, and another to her hand that bore the engagement ring, buoyed Meredith with admiration for him. He was as good as his word; he would be here for her till the last, and would hate being away from her, even for a minute.

  “I hope everything’s all right with your mother,” she said.

  “Thank you.”
He puffed his cheeks as he made for the door. “Look after her now.”

  “Aye.” Something Sonja might have said, only she’d have said it with more gusto.

  The fever may have abated a little—Sonja’s breathing no longer seemed a gargantuan effort—but the longer it attacked like this, the weaker she’d become. At least Dr. Marsan’s prediction that she wouldn’t last the night had been proved wrong. That steeled Meredith’s resolve a little as she changed her sister’s nightie and put fresh sheets and a fresh pillow on the bed, and wiped Sonja down with a cool cloth as gently as she could. Then after making her sister as comfortable as possible, she went to the kitchen and made herself a few slices of toast with butter and shred-less marmalade, with a bit of Dutch Edam cheese and a mug of hot chocolate.

  Her insufficient sleep left her groggy, yawning. A pounding arrhythmia came and went as she paced around downstairs. Being half-awake like this was no good to anyone, so she swilled her face with icy water and ventured outside, hoping the crisp morning air would wake her senses. It did. Every bird chirrup, every distant foghorn booming in from Portsmouth harbour—the coast was incredibly misty—and every crunch of her slippers on the frosty grass pierced her tiredness.

  An echoing tapping noise, rather like a hammer on a loose chisel, turned her attention to the east side of the house. The sound was smothered, perhaps underground. A water pipe? No, something clattered as she skirted the flower bed. Now there were hushed voices, and more tapping, only it seemed to be under her feet, and yet not under her feet; the noises came from below but the echoes came from...inside the house?

  Father’s cellar?

  Burglars! But how had they got in? The front door had been locked overnight, and Derek had used the spare key to let himself out not twenty minutes ago. He’d locked it again after him.