Clank!
It glanced off the metal barrel over her extended left arm, jerking her off balance. She used the momentum to swivel her head enough to spot him—hell, almost close enough to spit on him—then she bolted across the muddy lane in a wild zigzag that lost her a slipper. No shot came. She ducked behind the gate post and thought about reloading.
But she was outgunned.
“You put up a brave effort, girl, I’ll not deny you that. A pity no one will ever know.”
I’m sorry, Sonja. I couldn’t do any more. I’m sorry I couldn’t keep you safe.
She closed her eyes and sat back against the stone post, letting her weight hold the fly-mech’s stiff frame in place. The muzzle aimed roughly at the front window. Pointing her home. For the last time.
“I want you to know this will be quick,” he said, standing over her. “And that this bullet was never meant for you. Never for his daughter. But you’ve left me no choice.”
“That’s enough of that,” boomed a familiar masculine voice from the house. “Put it down, Westerfeld. This is your last warning.”
She opened her eyes...
“Tangeni! William!”
...and wept at the sight of their rifles trained inches over her head.
“No, this is your last warning,” said Westerfeld. “Whoever you are, drop those weapons or I kill the girl.”
“There’s a third option.” A woman’s voice, clear and severe, yelled from down the lane. “Either you die or...no, that’s pretty much it.”
“You?” The shock in Westerfeld’s voice frightened Meredith as well. What if it made him do something rash? “But you’re Atlas. You and I, we’ve worked—”
“No. Say hello to the Coalition.”
Meredith dared enough to peer across. She thought she saw not one but two women approaching. She rubbed the teary mist from her eyes, and gasped.
Aunt Lily! Cathy! And Donnelly too! But how...?
“If you let me go, I swear I’ll leave the country. You’ll never see me again.” The same pathetic plea he’d tried on Meredith in the cellar. “Here, I’m unarmed.” True to his word, he tossed the gun onto the ground. Slowly, achingly, Meredith uncrumpled to her feet and began disassembling the fly-mech. It was so heavy and cumbersome and her solar plexus broiled under its constriction.
“Are you hurt, Meredith?” Aunt Lily’s unwieldy, two-handed weapon she held at her midriff like an usherette’s confectionary tray, boasted no less than four large brass barrels extending forward, side by side. It was cushioned by a crescent rubber stock a few inches thick that hooked around the waist onto her hips. With a jerk and a snap the barrels folded up into a perfect oblong, which she then pointed, like a sawed-off shotgun with two triggers and an under-arm stock, at Westerfeld.
“I’m unhurt,” Meredith replied.
“And the other two men?” Cathy was content to train mere twin pistols on her enemy.
“Unconscious. Maybe dead.”
“Where? In the forest?”
“Yes. Near the first fork in the path, past the saplings.”
“See to it, please, Cathy,” said Aunt Lily.
“Aye.” Cathy jogged away.
“What are you going to do with me?” Hands raised in surrender, Westerfeld back-stepped from Aunt Lily’s steady advance.
“I’m going to let you go.”
He cast Tangeni and William a worried glance. “Why?”
“So I can watch you run,” she said. “Your kind never has to run—the Atlas Club is so diligent when it comes to looking after its own. So I want to see you flee for your life, tail between your legs, knowing that you’ve seen England for the last time.”
“Oh, I swear. I swear I’ll take the first airship abroad.”
“Then what are you waiting for? Run, little fox, run.”
He made it as far as the privet hedge before Aunt Lily unleashed all four barrels into his back. Westerfeld flew forward and skidded into a puddle, which quickly turned crimson. He was dead. Killed by a quadruple-deck broadside Sonja would approve of.
Her barrels still smoking, Aunt Lily finally lowered the weapon. “Threaten my family? Nobody threatens my family.” Then she tutted irritably and checked her fingernails. At least one of them appeared to be broken.
Chapter Nineteen
In Demand
Meredith relished the influx of family and friends into her home. Aunt Lily, who hadn’t known of Sonja’s condition until now, watched over her upstairs, leaving Meredith to recover in the others’ company in the living room. It was all a little overwhelming but it was an overwhelming she needed, as it kept her focus without, not within herself. Figuring out the hows, the whens, the whys that had brought them all here at this exact hour proved fascinating in a coincidence-or-something-more kind of way.
“It’s no coincidence,” Donnelly assured her as he sipped his coffee, “and the opposite of timely, I’m afraid. If we’d acted faster we might have got here before those buggers. You see, I received a telephone call from my associate at Customs & Excise saying Westerfeld was back in the country, so I immediately woke my best surveillance man and had him trail Westerfeld. Before long he found out the filth was planning a trip to Southsea, with two professional safe crackers, and that they were being paid for the job by a foreign sponsor. Not exactly a puzzler for me. I telephoned your London apartment right away to warn you, but to my surprise it was Swan—I mean Lady Catarina who answered.”
“At which point I contacted William and Tangeni, who were in London on business,” said Cathy.
“Coalition business?” asked Meredith.
“Quite so,” replied Cathy. “Your aunt was with me in the apartment—in fact we’d hoped to find you there. The Council gave us permission to leave the Leviacrum hospital only yesterday. So the five of us got together in the early hours and chartered the fastest airship we could find. Unfortunately the pilot was an avaricious old sod who wouldn’t take off until we paid his exorbitant fee. Tangeni it was who brought the weapons. And believe me, we were in the air in no time once the pilot caught sight of what we’d brought. But like Mr. Donnelly says, if only we’d got here sooner. ”
“Soonest is soon enough, from the sounds of it. You all did all you could, and I’ll never forget it.” Meredith paid each of them, in turn, a nod of affection, knowing the faces looking back at her would forever be among the most important of her life. Whatever happened from now on, she need never feel alone, unwanted, neglected again. She mattered to them, and they to her, and in truth that was all that mattered in this cockeyed world.
The influx didn’t stop there, either. First Derek arrived, true to his word, shortly before Dr. Marsan. Derek was surprised by the full house, as he hadn’t met most of them. If only he’d known what had really brought them here, what had happened in his absence. Cathy and Tangeni had hidden the dead bodies in the cellar for now (the two locksmiths had not survived being moved—slit throats often had that effect), and would dispose of them later.
Poor Derek had enough on his plate with a sick fiancée and a distraught mother. He all but flew upstairs, while Meredith followed grimly, watching the ugly brown carpet one slow step at a time as it took her to what might be the worst news of her life.
But she found herself in her empty old bedroom, overlooking the twin single beds. Hers and Sonja’s. Instinct, habit had taken this detour. Sonja’s teddy bear in its aeronaut uniform sat on one side of the bedside table; next to it, her pile of nautical and science fiction adventure books. Meredith’s own stuffed gollywog with the mended stitching and a spiffy new pair of tartan trousers sewn on—heck, five years ago now!—sat up against the wall on her pillow. The armoire with two secret compartments, one in the base, one in the back panel near the top, where they’d hidden illicit items, had never changed in her lifetime. The various rocks and artefacts from Father’s expeditions, assembled on the mantel, whispered of happy homecomings. Beneath the mantel, the bricked-up fireplace where Sonja had tried to pa
int a scene from one of her Lady Skyhawk picture books directly onto the brickwork, not too successfully. These were the things she would never have again.
But they were just things.
“Did you hear that, Meredith? Oh, thank God.” Aunt Lily dabbed her eyes. Handkerchief still in hand, she threw her arms around Meredith. “She’s on the mend. The doctor says the worst may be over, that she fought the fever like a tigress last night and its grip appears to have loosened. Did you ever hear such good news?”
“Say that again.”
“She won’t be right for a while, and she’ll need lots of care, but...” Aunt Lily, flittering, glittering Aunt Lily, herald of joy, angel of death, was a stranger to Meredith, a Machiavellian figure with one foot in a familiar past and the other in the terrifying new world of espionage. As unexpected as the news she’d just brought. And in her own way, as deeply reassuring.
“Auntie, let me see her.”
“Oh, of course. Sorry, child—I mean Meredith.”
“Let’s go together.” She offered Aunt Lily her arm, caught the canny twitch of a smile on the woman’s quivering lips. In that moment she felt, truly for the first time, like the lady of the house. That she might at last be worthy of the name McEwan.
Four or five days of terrific winds battered Southsea and southern England as Sonja slowly recovered. Seeing to her every need, Meredith, Aunt Lily and Cathy rarely left the house. Derek braved the dangerous weather twice, sometimes three times a day to sit at Sonja’s bedside for an hour or two, reading up on his biology literature in preparation for his important new post in the Leviacrum—in the heart everything the McEwans stood against.
Cathy knew where his true loyalties lay, though. No one mentioned to him that they knew his predicament because until he figured out his role, his capabilities in said role, what he felt comfortable doing—spying wasn’t for everyone—it was better if he dealt directly with his sponsor in the tower and no one else. That sponsor was a woman named Clytemnestra Fallon, whom Sonja had clocked meeting Derek on the roof of the Round Tower that night in Portsmouth. All very cloak and dagger.
But never was a patient given more devoted care than Meredith’s little sister, and Dr. Marsan’s visits grew less frequent after the third night following her turn for the better. Meanwhile, the others—William, Tangeni, Donnelly, and the Gambling Six—had all returned to their lives in London or Oxford, with the exception of Mears, whose broken hip hadn’t fully healed. Kingsley paid Meredith a visit before he left, inviting her to Oxford after her sister’s recovery.
Nickson and the others bitterly regretted what had happened at the Aurics’, and had vowed to make it up to her somehow, should she ever find it in her heart to forgive them. In her mind there was nothing to forgive, and she’d be only too happy to see them in Oxford once she returned from her trip abroad.
A trip to anywhere, nowhere, everywhere. It was a pining for adventure stronger than the pull of home, the culmination of weeks of fierce, turbulent change in her life. She realised it was in her blood. The thing that made the McEwans tick. Funny that she should be the one yearning for the horizon while Sonja, the freer spirit of the two growing up, should be the first to tie the knot and settle down. Not that Sonja couldn’t find the excitement in any lifestyle, any situation, especially as the wife of a Coalition spy!
As for Meredith, how far would this lure of adventure take her? For how long? Where would she start?
One muggy afternoon, after the winds had passed, she received a visit from William Elgin. He was alone, dressed spiffily in a waistcoat and short-sleeved shirt, once again carrying a foreign communiqué...this time with a difference.
“You’re fast becoming my personal courier.” She batted her eyelashes with a deliberately overdone coquettishness that made him roll his eyes. “And no longer easy to embarrass, I see. I’ll have to try harder next time.”
“I’m immune.” He winked, raised his chin in a snooty fashion he intended to be charming.
But something in that gesture, an unbecoming smugness, reminded her of the realisation she’d had the other day—his part in her embarrassment four years ago. It all flooded back with a torrent of humiliation she tried her best to dam. No use. He’d made her a laughing stock, and for no good reason.
“Why did you do it?”
“Excuse me?”
“That evening in Niflheim, four years ago.” She shrank to that helpless girl again. “Why did you humiliate us like that? I know it was you.”
“I, um...I, um...don’t know what to say.” He turned white, looked away. “Blame Brigitte and Helga, not me. I, um—”
She slapped his face. Hard. It stung deep colour onto his cheek. He sniffed, obstinate. She slapped him again. “That’s for never owning up. You’ve no idea what you put me through.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Say it again. And mean it.”
He cast his wounded gaze on her, nodded, then kissed the hand that had smarted him. “Meredith, I’m so sorry. I’ve hated myself for years after what I did. It was the worst thing I’ve ever done to anybody, and I know that now. No excuses. No blame on anyone else. I was a bloody idiot, and I’ve never forgiven myself. I don’t expect you to either.”
“Why did you do it?”
“For Freya Sorensen. No one put me up to it, but I did it to impress her. The three of them had been bad-mouthing you and Sonja for weeks, what your father had done, what everyone thought of him, what they thought of you. They made it sound like you deserved to be humiliated. So in a moment of absolute stupidity I used my five-past-eight secret to give them what they wanted. Later I thought about telling them it was me, but...I couldn’t do it. Seeing how upset you were, I knew I’d done an unforgivable thing. So I never owned up to it to anyone. It was the reason I was so shy around you after that, and also the reason I helped you humiliate them in return. The way they celebrated what happened to you, good God, they deserved everything they got. I can’t believe I ever had a crush on Freya. She was appalling. They all were.”
Meredith realised she couldn’t hate William—he wasn’t that stupid boy any more—but she did hate what he’d done. Always would. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this before? Would you ever have told me?”
“I tried that night in the museum. But once again, I attempted to impress a girl and failed. My practical jokes have a habit of backfiring, like Emperor Nero and his lyre. So there you have it, Meredith. It would serve me right if you never spoke to me again, only...I, um...”
“You, um, what?”
“I’d rather you didn’t...not speak to me again, that is. I mean I’d much rather you spoke to me again.” He tapped his temple with the heel of his hand. “I’m trying to get this out, but it’s stuck in there.”
“It is?”
He started to wrap his mouth around a syllable, but grunted instead. “So shall I show you how this thing works?”
“If you like.” Damn it, he was the hardest boy—man—in the world to hate. So she focused on the message he’d brought. The very same miniature document viewer she’d smuggled out of the Atlas tunnels, if she wasn’t mistaken—a dent in the brass cylinder appeared identical to one she’d made when she’d dropped it getting out of Donnelly’s car. “Adjust it like a telescope? Or a microscope? Or what?”
“It’s a backlit microscope.” He switched seats and showed her the correct way to hold it, gently manoeuvring her fingers onto the notched magnification dials as he said in a soft voice, “Rotate the first dial to enlarge or shrink the frame, like this...”
“You mean like this...” She cupped his bristly chin in her palm, drew him close, close enough to taste the hint of sarsaparilla on his breath, and scrutinized him, this boy she couldn’t get a handle on. This boy she liked, in awkward, uncharted places inside herself, in ways she couldn’t describe. Why? Where had these feelings come from? He was no Donnelly. She wouldn’t pick him out from across a roomful of people. But being near William, just spending time in his
company—made a mockery of all the ways she normally measured a man’s attractiveness. This made no sense, but that in itself was somehow the way it should be.
She returned to the instrument, mentally feeling out her strange desire to grin. “I turn this to enlarge?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And these next two?”
“To choose which section of the document to magnify. Up or down, and left to right. You should be able to read a line at a time without scrolling left to right, though. Have you got it?”
“Got it. You say it’s backlit. Will it not work in ordinary light?”
“Not very well. You can point it at a lamp; that would work. But you’re better off using the filaments inside.”
“I see. Well, thank you for your instruction, Mr. Elgin. Now shoo!” She waved him back to his seat opposite. “I can read tolerably well on my own, last time I checked.”
“I’m sure. But when you’re done, you’d best hand it back to me, so I can destroy the slide.”
“Oh?”
The document, a typed correspondence bearing an unusual letterhead in the form of coded hieroglyphs, read:
Dear Miss McEwan,
I would like to offer my sincerest thanks for the recent weapons intelligence you managed to procure for us. It has proved a vital coup for our cause, and concerns the catastrophic explosions around the world this past year, one of which I believe you yourself witnessed firsthand. I cannot go into the details of the weapon here; suffice it to say our organisation now has a clear indication of what it must prepare to fight against in the near future, and we are confident we can prevail. We live in a tumultuous time, governed by science and commerce, and when the twain meet with unfettered ambition, that is where the public pays the price and freedoms become threatened. But you have struck an important blow for those freedoms, and I salute you.
So few of us have managed to infiltrate the corridors of power with even the full backing of our organisation; for a young woman, alone, to gain entry to those tunnels was exceedingly clever and extraordinarily brave. I am therefore honoured to invite you to spend a weekend at my chateau in Innsbruck, to meet with the leaders of our organisation and to discuss what you saw in the tunnels, your aspirations for the future, and whether you would be willing to join us officially in a permanent role.
Imperial Clock (The Steam Clock Legacy) Page 28
