The Custodian of Marvels

by Rod Duncan

  The light from the flames made an eerie sight, our shadows dancing off walls and cobblestones. Hearing the sound of the riot in the distance, I found myself shivering. But the others seemed to see none of these omens. Buoyed up in mood by the sudden urgency, they set off back to the small courtyard.

  Ellie draped herself in Jeremiah’s coat and took her place up top on the driver’s bench. With a bowler hat on her head she looked the part well enough. She would pass a first glance at least. And few people looked up at the drivers of carriages. The rest of us took our places inside.

  Then I remembered something and felt my stomach clench in panic. “We forgot the water!” I cried. “The light machine won’t work without it.”

  “It’s here,” said Yan, holding up a wine bottle.

  “And here,” said Lara, doing the same.

  “And here,” said Fabulo, showing me a third. “You see – nothing’s forgotten. We’ve done our planning well. It’s time to go.”

  He rapped his knuckle on the woodwork and we lurched forwards, turning sharply out of the gate and away.

  At every turn, Fabulo leaned forwards to look out of the window. And each time he sat back it was to take out the brass watch, though sometimes only seconds had passed since he’d checked it.

  “It’s going to be tight,” he muttered.

  Outside, I heard the whip snapping in the air, as if Ellie had sensed his thoughts. We were picking up speed. I caught glimpses of St Paul’s Cathedral and then the Guild Church of St Martin as we rattled down Ludgate.

  “You’re all ready?” Fabulo asked.

  “We are,” said Yan. “And won’t be more ready from fretting.”

  “You have your lockpicks?”

  Jeremiah nodded. “Yes – for the tenth time this hour!”

  I put my arm around Tinker’s shoulder and pulled him closer, wanting to send him away but knowing he’d follow me, whatever order I gave. Fabulo had told me the boy didn’t want to be safe. He only wanted to belong. He might one day repent of such foolishness, if he lived long enough.

  The coach slowed and we swayed into a tight right turn. I didn’t recognise the buildings outside, but knew we must be cutting north, looping around towards Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the back of the International Patent Court.

  Fabulo was staring at the brass pocket watch, as if willing the second hand to move more slowly. My heart was beating at such speed Tinker must have felt it, us being pressed close together on the seat. He tilted his head to rest it on my shoulder. The carriage turned left then right. Though I couldn’t see the great tower of the Patent Court, its shadow lay over the streets and buildings, making the darkness more complete. The carriage tilted on its springs as we turned once more and, through the window, I saw the silhouettes of trees and, far behind them, the lamps of the Inns of Court.

  “We’re here,” said Jeremiah.

  “We’re late,” said Fabulo. “The guards’ll roll up in three minutes.”

  The carriage slowed, then jerked forwards again as Ellie aimed for the few yards of road that would give us the cover we needed. We stopped with a jolt.

  Immediately Lara had the door open on the side facing the Patent Court. Jeremiah was out first, then Lara, Fabulo, Yan and Tinker. I followed in time to see the locksmith using the key he’d made. The click was so quiet I could have missed it from two paces. Then the gate was open and we were passing through into the expanse of the plaza beyond. Jeremiah locked the gate and we all looked to Fabulo, who gestured towards the ground. We dropped to hands and knees and began crawling towards the great building.

  Behind us, Ellie made a clicking sound with her tongue. The horses responded and the carriage began to roll away.

  The flagstones felt unnaturally smooth under my palms. I glanced back. The low wall below the railings blocked out the lights from the Inns of Court. We were in shadow, just as Fabulo had said we would be when he explained the plan. But something was different. Another coach was rolling up outside the gate. From away in the darkness I could make out the stamp of boots. The guards at the rear door were forming up, ready to march. I’d crawled only a quarter of the way. Then the Patent Court clock began to chime the hour.

  I could barely make out Fabulo in the darkness up ahead, but sensed the movement of his arm waving. I crawled faster, my knees hitting the stones with painful force.

  The bootfalls of the soldiers echoed off the buttressed wall that loomed ahead. And there were men marching behind us now, the new guard arriving to relieve the old, taking up their place just outside the gate.

  A hand reached out of the darkness and pushed down on my shoulders. It was Yan. I dropped flat to the stones. The whisper of our crawling had stopped. I twisted my neck and saw that the others had done the same. We were marooned halfway across with no cover but the shadow and our own stillness.

  I could hear the breath ebbing and flowing through my nostrils. But louder now were the marching boots. From that low angle, I could see the double line of soldiers approaching, the faint light touching their upper bodies. Each carried a shouldered musket.

  Closer now, I caught the glint from their bayonets. I held my breath, for it seemed their march would bring them directly over us. I closed my eyes for fear the whites would show.

  The noise of their marching grew, seeming impossibly loud. And then it was receding. I looked and saw that they had passed close to our left. They reached the gate and stamped to attention. Immediately outside their replacements did the same.

  And now I could see another figure – a short man in a ridiculously tall hat making casual progress along the road. The key holder was arriving to play his part. The hour chimes were sounding. I counted them. On the eleventh stroke, the gate swung open and the guard marched out. There was a clang as the gate closed again.

  “Now,” hissed Fabulo, his voice no more than a breath. He began to crawl and one by one we got back to our hands and knees and followed. Every few yards, I found myself glancing back. This would not be the usual nine minutes of humiliation. On this one day in the year, the key holder had over an hour to taunt the representatives of the Patent Office.

  With twenty yards to go, we passed beyond the shadow of the low wall. Looking back, I could make out the lamps of the Inns of Court, but they were so far distant now that we would only have been seen had the guards been staring directly at us.

  Then the shadow of a mighty buttress swallowed us. I climbed to my feet, my knees stinging from the punishment they’d taken.

  “That was the hardest part,” Fabulo whispered.

  “So are all the other parts,” replied Jeremiah.

  I felt rather than heard Lara suppressing a laugh. It was relief, I guessed.

  “Are you ready?” asked Fabulo.

  We all nodded.

  “Go slow. Go steady. And go silent.”

  So saying, he led the way out from the shadow and along next to the wall. The building was like a cliff face above us. Looking up at it made my stomach lurch, so I focused on the ground in front of me, concentrating on placing each foot in silence.

  But a movement beyond the railings caught my eye. Another figure was advancing along the road outside the perimeter. I could tell it was a man, though he was too distant to see in any detail. There were no others about. Only the key holder and the troop of guards waiting outside the gate. And this one man, who now had my attention so caught that I hardly noticed the others had stopped. We had reached the door that the soldiers would guard. Fabulo was getting everyone to lie on the ground next to the wall, except for Jeremiah, who knelt next to the door itself.

  He was unrolling a leather bundle on the slabs, revealing an array of picks and torsion bars. From these he selected three items, the shapes of which I couldn’t make out. I saw now that as well as a keyhole, the door had a padlock. Though I hadn’t seen it assembled, I recognised the shapes of metal I’d seen laid out in the Grand Master’s workshop. There could be no doubting that this was the timer lock, just as J
eremiah had described it. I could even hear the ticking of the mechanism within.

  Fabulo poked me on the leg and I got down onto the stones like the others. The man outside the railings had passed us and was advancing towards the soldiers at the gate, so I turned my attention back to Jeremiah, who was probing in the keyhole with the picks, two of them in one hand and one in the other. Such was the delicacy of his control, he seemed more a musician than a locksmith.

  Then the clocks of London began to chime the hour. From near and far came the tolling of bells. On any other night of the year, the new guard would be allowed in. But with the clocks going back, there was still an hour for them to wait. If we’d figured it all correctly.

  The last bells finished chiming. The key holder had not moved to open the gate, instead, he set off ambling around the group of soldiers. I let out a breath I hadn’t realised I’d been holding.

  With a sharp metallic double clack, the timer lock sprung open. The sound echoed back at us from the low wall.

  The lone figure on the road had stopped in his tracks. I watched him turn. Then he was hurrying back towards the place outside the railings nearest to us. And seeing him run with that powerful, open stride, my heart seemed to stop.

  There was another sound, much softer this time. Jeremiah turned the handle of the door and pushed it open.

  The locksmith was first inside. Then Lara, Yan and Tinker. Fabulo beckoned for me to follow.

  I pointed to where Farthing stood, a clear silhouette. Fabulo grabbed my hand and pulled.

  “We’re seen!” I hissed.

  But Fabulo shook his head, as if rejecting the evidence of his eyes. Then he grabbed my hand and hauled me inside. The door closed behind us and all was black.

  CHAPTER 26

  10.03pm

  The plan that no one else has thought of may be genius or delusion. Time alone will reveal which.

  The Bullet-Catcher’s Handbook

  There was camphor somewhere nearby and the space in which we stood stretched out ahead of me. I knew this before anything else, before even a light had been struck. As I sniffed the air, I heard a click from the door behind us. Then a lucifer fizzed to life and oil lamps were being lit and I saw that Jeremiah had pulled a handle on the door.

  “Locked it,” he said. “Even with a key it won’t open from outside now.”

  Yan held one of the oil lamps close to the ceiling and I saw that we stood at the end of a downward sloping corridor, square in cross section. The walls were brick, though painted white. The floor had been laid with the same grey flagstones we’d crawled over in the plaza. The ceiling was grey also, though I couldn’t guess what it might be made of. Set into it every few yards were circles of glass, which reminded me of portholes – though if they’d been portholes the ship would have been lying on its side. I found myself shivering.

  “Lead the way,” said Fabulo.

  At which, the locksmith set off and the others followed. I grabbed Fabulo’s shoulder and held him back until we had a few yards of privacy. Then I bent low and whispered in his ear.

  “Are you mad?”

  He batted my hand away. “I’m doing what we planned!”

  “But we’ve been seen!”

  “He was no one.”

  “It was John Farthing!”

  That stopped him in his tracks.

  “What?”

  “It was Agent Farthing. We could have given ourselves up. Out there, we’d only broken a Kingdom law. But now…”

  “Are you certain?”

  “It was him.”

  “Then how did he find us?”

  I looked away. Fabulo grabbed my wrist. “What aren’t you saying?”

  Then Lara turned to look back at us. “Is all well? Lizzy?”

  Fabulo gave my wrist a warning squeeze.

  “It’s all good,” I said, then hurried after her.

  Within thirty paces, the slope of the corridor levelled off and we came to the first of the doors, one on each side of the corridor. The Roman numeral “I” had been carved into the stone lintel above the one on the right. The lintel on the left bore the numerals “II”.

  “Rooms one and two,” said Fabulo.

  “Can you open them?” asked Yan.

  “I can and I will,” said Jeremiah.

  “Not today,” said Fabulo.

  “But that’s what we came for,” said Yan.

  “Find the door marked XI. That’s where we start.”

  None of them liked it. Nor could Fabulo explain the reason for the sudden urgency with which he drove them forward. Only I knew.

  When I’d seen the man outside the railings, I’d been certain it was Farthing. But doubt had started to grow in me. Perhaps my feelings for the man had warped my perception. And even if it had been, he might not have been able to see us. Indeed, when we had been outside the railings, I hadn’t been able to make out the base of the wall.

  But, one way or the other, there was nothing now that could be done. We would be hanged for breaking into the building. There could be no greater punishment for pressing on.

  “A penny for your thoughts,” said Lara.

  I hadn’t noticed her drawing close as we walked.

  “We’re doing it,” I said, trying to hide my disquiet. “All that planning and here we are.”

  I had the feeling she was about to press me further. But, in front of us, Jeremiah had come to a stop in front of a door. “This is it,” he said, pointing to the lintel stone, on which the letters “XI” had been carved.

  He knelt and unwrapped his leather bundle on the floor, choosing a torsion bar with a thin, springy arm. This he fitted in the keyhole, resting his little finger on the end. It flexed under the pressure. The pick itself was unlike any I’d seen before. Instead of a single spike of metal, it forked halfway along. He had to push the two tines together before they would fit into the hole.

  “Light!” he snapped. “More light.”

  Fabulo grabbed a lamp from Tinker and held it close to where Jeremiah worked.

  “And must you crowd me, little man?”

  “I must if you’ll have light!”

  I eased the lamp from Fabulo’s hand and held it close to the door, but above the locksmith’s head, out of his line of sight. Yan did the same with the other lamp.

  Jeremiah didn’t jiggle the pick in and out of the keyhole in that random way that I might have tried. His sausage-like fingers moved with such delicacy that it was clear he knew exactly what he was feeling for. He whispered numbers under his breath.

  “Eight. Nine. Ten.”

  Then the torsion bar dropped with a hollow sounding click.

  “Done,” he said.

  “What did I tell you?” said Fabulo, to no one or to everyone. “The man’s an artist.”

  It was Fabulo who turned the handle and opened the door. A breath issued from the room, like a sigh. The smell of camphor was suddenly more intense. We followed him inside and saw rank upon rank of storage shelves stretching off into the distance beyond the reach of our raised lamps. On each shelf rested wooden crates beyond my counting. They were plain, except for code numbers stencilled onto the face of each.

  The ceiling was not high. At first I marvelled that such a span could stand without supporting pillars. But then I saw that there were iron columns built into the shelving and that they must be taking the weight of whatever lay above.

  “What’s that?” asked Tinker, pointing to a small lever on the wall next to the door.

  “Don’t touch…” began Fabulo.

  But Yan had already reached out and was pulling the lever down. There was a soft popping sound and in that instant the entire room became flooded with white light. The effect was so dramatic and unexpected that all of us ducked. Then, having come to no harm, we looked up and saw that the light was shining from behind the glass circles.

  “Windows,” whispered Yan.

  “Not unless the sun’s risen in the night,” said Jeremiah.

  �
��They’re lamps,” I said, for I’d made out some of the detail behind the glass. Each circle had a niche behind it and within that was a centre of brightness.

  “If they were lamps, we’d hear the hissing of the gas.”

  “I told you we’d see marvels,” said Fabulo. “This is the first of many. But we’ve no time to gawp. Lizzy’s machine lies at this code…” He pulled the court record from his pocket and unfolded it: “IPC XI XXVI III DXIV. The first three letters are the building. The second three are this room. So go search for the others.”

  We spread out left and right, but for Tinker who, not being able to read, stayed close by my side. There were more roman numerals stencilled on the end of each rack of shelving. And the shelves were themselves numbered from “I” on the lowest level to “VI” just under the ceiling.

  The numbering system proved more complex than it had seemed. I was acutely aware of our precious time slipping away as we searched, my frustration and fear building with every minute. Then Lara shouted from the far end of the room. We all ran to where she stood, pointing to a box on the third shelf up.

  Yan took it down and placed it on the ground before me. The lid hinged back and there inside was the machine I’d hoped never to see again – an assemblage of tubes, flasks and mirrors. And next to it lay two demijohns of liquid, the reagents that would cause it to create a ray of intense light.

  “That can never damage metal,” said Lara, incredulous. “It’s little more than glass!”

  I reached into the crate and lifted it out. “This little machine can punch a hole clean through an iron gatepost. And that from a mile away.”

  Fabulo eased it from my hands, which I now saw were trembling. “We’d best not drop it then,” he said.

  Yan reached up to the topmost shelf and began taking down other crates, placing them on the floor. Lara opened one and pulled a glass flask from a bed of cotton wool. Its end was capped with silvery metal. She held it up for us to see. Within it, fine filaments of wire were suspended.