by Robin Paige
Worster cocked his head, and a slight crease appeared between his brows. “Think there’s something funny, do you? Think somebody’s out after Marconi operators?” He grunted. “Should I be worried?”
Charles gave a little shrug. “I doubt it,” he said, “unless you have something that somebody wants.”
“Well, I don’t know what it would be,” Worster said with an uneasy laugh. “And that’s God’s truth.”
As the man went back into the station, Charles turned to look out to sea. Daniel Gerard had the tuner and the notes describing its operation.
What did Jack Gordon have that someone might want?
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Alice’s foot slipped, and in another moment, splash! she was up to her chin in salt water. Her first idea was that she had somehow fallen into the sea, “and in that case I can go back by railway,” she said to herself. . . .
However, she soon made out that she was in the pool of tears which she had wept when she was nine feet high. “I wish I hadn’t cried so much!” said Alice, as she swam about, trying to find her way out. “I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears! That will be a queer thing, to be sure! However, everything is queer to-day.”
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll
With the book under her arm and a basket of currant tea cakes left from the picnic, Kate set off down the path to the cottage Alice shared with her grandmother. It was a small cottage in need of whitewashing and roofed with an untidy thatch full of birds’ nests. But a bower of red roses arched over the window, red geraniums brightened the window sill, and a half-dozen hens scratched diligently beside the path. The door was partway open, and Kate called out, “Alice, are you at home?”
There was a scurrying noise inside, the door was flung wide, and Alice appeared, wearing the same blue dress and white pinafore she had worn the day before. But her braids were full of twigs and leaves and her pinafore was hardly white. From the leaves in her hair and the red stains on her pinafore, Kate guessed that she had been picking berries and—from the smears on her cheeks and chin— eating them too.
“Hullo,” Alice said, with an oh-it’s-you-look, and added, “Your ladyship,” as an afterthought.
Kate glanced at the table, where a bowl of berries, tins of flour and sugar, and a rolling pin testified to Alice’s present occupation. “I’ve interrupted your baking, I see,” she said.
“I’m making a berry tart,” Alice said. “It’s a surprise for Gram.” Her eyes lit up as she noticed what Kate was carrying, and her tone became warmer. “You’ve brought the book. And cakes!”
“Yes,” Kate said, and put both on the table. “I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I did when I first read it. Lewis Carroll has quite a vivid imagination. As a writer, I’ve learned a great deal from him.”
“You’re a writer?” Alice asked, frowning skeptically. “You write books?”
“Yes,” Kate said, pulling out a chair. Sustained skepticism seemed to be the girl’s ordinary state of mind, and she was certainly a creature of moods. “I could read a bit of the story out loud, if you would like to go back to your baking. I shouldn’t like to delay your gram’s berry tart.”
“Is it as good as Treasure Island ?” Her tone implied strong doubt.
“I think so,” Kate replied. “Would you like me to read?”
“Oh, I suppose,” Alice said, with an elaborately nonchalant shrug which disclaimed any interest at all, and picked up her rolling pin.
Kate began to read the familiar text, while Alice—with a dexterity obviously born of experience—put the berries and sugar into a deep pie pan, rolled out a circle of pastry, fitted it neatly over the top, and crimped the edges. She continued to read as the girl put several lumps of coal into the black iron range built into the chimney, opened the oven, and slid the tart into it. When she finished the first chapter, she glanced inquiringly at Alice, who commanded, “Go on,” and began to clear the table. As Kate started the second chapter, “The Pool of Tears,” the girl finished the washing up, then sat down on the braided rug at Kate’s feet and crossed her legs, still listening.
Kate finished the chapter and closed the book. “Did you like it?” She sniffed the warm aroma coming from the oven. “Your tart already smells delicious.”
“Of course I liked it,” Alice said indignantly. “I loved it.” She pulled out her lower lip between her fingers and attempted to look at it. Her eyes crossed. “What sort of books?”
“Pardon me?” Kate asked.
“What sort of books do you write? The boring sort, or good ones like Alice?”
“I hope they’re good,” Kate said with a smile. “Perhaps you could read one or two and tell me your opinion.” On second thought, though, perhaps she wouldn’t want to hear Alice’s opinions. She had the idea that they might be scathing.
Alice rolled over on her stomach and propped her chin in one hand, twisting her hair in her fingers. “P’rhaps I shall write a story.” She thought for a moment, then rolled over on her back. “That was a sad one you told me yesterday.”
“Yes,” Kate said and sighed. “When it happened, I cried so much that I might have drowned in a pool of my own tears, like Alice in Wonderland.” She took a currant tea cake out of the basket and handed it to the girl, then took one for herself. “But I expect everybody has at least one sad story to tell. Don’t you?”
Alice shot her a look. “About somebody dying?”
“There are all kinds of sad stories.”
“The ones about people dying are the saddest,” Alice said definitively. She sat up, pulled out her pinafore, and began picking the currants out of her tea cake and dropping them into her lap.
“Yes,” Kate said.
Alice picked up the currants and ate them, one by one, slowly. “I s’pose it’s not so hard to drown,” she said, “especially if you can’t swim.”
“I suppose,” Kate agreed. “And if the water’s deep.”
“I shouldn’t like to drown,” Alice said, and ate the rest of the currants and the crumbs.
“Nor I.”
“But there wasn’t anything I could do, was there?” The girl looked up, and those electric-blue eyes were suddenly bright with tears. “No more than you, when your friend fell off the wall and got killed by the trolley.”
“I’m sure there wasn’t,” Kate said simply, “or you would have done it.” She paused, and said, for the second time that day, “If you would like to tell me, I’d be glad to listen.”
“It started with the pigeons,” Alice said. She dashed the tears from her eyes.
“The pigeons?” Kate asked in surprise.
“There were pigeons in the boat, you see. Harriet was the one who saw them first, and told me about it. We’d hide on the bank and watch the boat, and when the man wasn’t there, we’d go and look at the pigeons. Harriet said it was all right, because her mother went on the boat, too.”
“And that’s when Harriet drowned?” Kate asked in a matter-of-fact tone. “When her mother was on the boat?”
Alice nodded. Her face was pale and pinched. “We’d never gone to the creek at night before, but she came and tapped at my window, and I climbed out. She wanted to know what her mother was doing on the boat, you see. She was curious—Harriet was always curious, the most curious person I’ve ever met.”
A picture of Harriet was emerging in Kate’s mind: a girl with a passionate curiosity and her mother’s permission to explore. She could hardly be faulted for wanting to know why her mother was secretly stealing through the woods to join a strange man on a strange sailboat at night. “I suppose it was very dark,” she said quietly.
“Oh, very,” Alice said. She shivered. “It was cold, too. I didn’t think it was going to be much fun. It didn’t seem like a very good idea, either, ’specially since my gram would be very angry if she knew. But Harriet didn’t like it when I said no. And it wasn’t right to let her go alone, either
—at least I didn’t think so.” She looked anxiously at Kate. “Do you?”
“If I’d been in your shoes, I think I would have gone,” Kate replied, reflecting on the difficult moral choice the girl had made, between her grandmother’s anger, or her friend’s disappointment. It was a choice which would have baffled many adults. She paused. “Did either of you have a light?”
Alice shook her head, and then went on, very fast: “Harriet thought she knew where she was going, you see, but she didn’t, and she went too close to the edge of the creek by the big tree, where the water is deep, and she fell in. I tried to reach her but she was too far.” Her head dropped and her voice became muffled. “I tried really hard.”
“I’m sure you tried as hard as you could,” Kate said, and reached Alice’s hand. The girl’s fingers were surprisingly small and very cold, like a doll’s fingers. “And then what happened, Alice?”
“And then I fell in myself. But I grabbed a tree root and pulled myself out. I was scared, and I yelled.” She pulled in her breath. “I screamed really loud, but nobody came.”
“I suppose they couldn’t hear you on the boat.”
Alice shook her head. “It was around the bend.”
“And after you climbed out, you were afraid to run to the boat and tell them?”
A sad nod.
By then, it would have been too late, Kate thought. It was winter, and cold, and the girls would have been wearing woolen coats. Harriet had probably been pulled under the surface by her heavy clothing and drowned quickly. Aloud, she asked, “And you came home?”
“I came in through the window. It was hard to get my clothes dry without Gram noticing.” Alice let go of Kate’s hand. “I guess I should have told somebody,” she said in a small voice.
“You’re telling somebody now,” Kate said. She reached into the basket and handed over another tea cake, thinking about something she had read recently, about the way pigeons were used during the siege of Paris some thirty years before. And she thought of Kirk-Smythe, and his mysterious disguise, and his interest in the man on the boat.
“Pigeons on a sailboat,” she said after a moment. “That’s odd, don’t you think? But I suppose pigeons have to live somewhere, and a boat is every bit as good as a pigeon loft. Were they kept in a cage?”
“A wooden cage. There were six pigeons in it.” Alice wrinkled her forehead. “Sometimes there were only four or five. Or two.”
“Perhaps they were let out on holiday,” Kate said with a smile, “or to practice flying. Whose pigeons were they, do you think?”
Alice gave her a look. “Why, the man who sailed the boat, of course. They wore bands on their legs, and sometimes little canisters.”
“That’s interesting,” Kate said, remembering that, during the siege of Paris, the pigeons carried important messages from the city to the outside world. She pursed her lips. “You wouldn’t have seen what was in the canisters, I don’t suppose.”
“I did once,” Alice said. “Yesterday morning, actually. One of the pigeons came to the church tower while I was up there, feeding the other birds.” She wore a serious look. “While you were there, too. In the churchyard, I mean. You and Harriet’s mother and the other lady, and the bird-watcher.” Before Kate could say anything, she pushed her hand into her apron pocket. “You write things. Somebody wrote this. Maybe you can read it.” Frowning, she took out a wad of flimsy paper, about the size of a large pea, and handed it to Kate. “I can’t read it, and I can read almost anything.”
Kate pulled the wad carefully apart, trying not to tear the paper. What she saw surprised her.
“What does it say?” Alice asked.
Kate laughed a little. “It says: ‘I am a very pretty pigeon.’ ”
“Really?” Alice asked skeptically.
“Something like that,” Kate said. She thought once again of Kirk-Smythe, and then of Charles. “May I have this? I’d like to show it to someone.”
Another of Alice’s elaborate shrugs. “It’s of no use to me, I suppose.” She gave Kate a shrewd glance. “If I give you the paper, may I keep the book? Until I’ve finished it, that is.”
“Lady Loveday says you may have the book,” Kate replied, pocketing the paper.
That brought a smile. “Tell her thank you for me.”
“Why don’t you tell her yourself, Alice. And I also think you might tell her what you’ve told me.”
Alice looked down. “She would be very angry at me.”
Kate leant over and tipped up the girl’s chin so she could see her face. “I think you’re wrong,” she said softly. “I’m sure she would be sad, and so would you. But in the end, both of you would feel better.”
“Really?” Alice asked again but this time, there was more of hope than of skepticism in her voice.
“Really,” Kate replied.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The possibilities of wireless fired the creative imagination. In 1902, for instance, the well-known novelist Rudyard Kipling wrote an inventive story called “Wireless” in which a wireless operator picks up a jumble of unreadable Morse signals from Royal Navy ships.
“Have you ever seen a spiritualist séance?” the frustrated operator asks, as he tries to untangle the garble. “This reminds me of that—odds and ends of messages coming out of nowhere—a word here, a word here and there.”
Meanwhile, an elderly man in an adjacent room has fallen into a trance and is taking down stanza after stanza of poetry sent through the ether by the dead poet Keats, whose spirit seems to have been inadvertently contacted by the amateur operator’s wireless.
Although people in our time smile at the idea (which is often called “channeling”), a great many Victorians took it very seriously. It was conjectured that the wireless telegraph would allow the spirits of the dead to contact the living.
“Wireless and Psychic Phenomena
in Edwardian England,”
Susan Blake
Charles arrived at Penhallow shortly before seven that evening, and when he was shown into the drawing room, he discovered that everyone was already gathered there for dinner. He greeted his hostess and Patsy Marsden, dropped a kiss on Kate’s cheek—she looked especially rosy tonight, as if she had spent the day in the sunshine and wind—and turned with a ready smile and a warm handshake to Sir Oliver Lodge, whom he had not seen for some time.
“Lord Sheridan!” exclaimed Sir Oliver, beaming. He was a tall, distinguished-looking man with stooped shoulders, a balding head, heavy gray mustaches, and neatly trimmed gray beard broadly streaked with white. He shook Charles’s hand with enthusiasm. “I am delighted, absolutely delighted to see you, my dear fellow! An unexpected pleasure. And what, if I may ask, has brought you out to the Lizard?”
“I’m here to give Marconi a hand with a problem at the wireless station,” Charles said, feeling that he should mention his association with Sir Oliver’s rival and get it out of the way, in case there might be hard feelings about it. He was also mindful of Bradford’s insistence that Lodge’s visit was no coincidence. He did not think it likely that the man had ulterior motives, for he was widely respected as a teacher and scientist. But it was a possibility that had to be considered, especially since it seemed improbable that Sir Oliver would take time from his duties at the new Birmingham University, where he had recently been appointed Principal, to come to the Lizard on an inconsequential errand.
Sir Oliver’s eyes twinkled. “Oh, dear me. I do hope it’s a serious problem!” He chuckled. “There, there. I’m sure you don’t want to tell me what it is. After all, the Lodge-Muirhead Syndicate is Marconi’s closest competitor, you know. We’re negotiating a new wireless contract with—” He broke off, laughing heartily. “But then, I mustn’t let the cat out of the bag, must I? I shouldn’t want Marconi to discover what we’re up to.”
“I’ve read that your system has some advantages over Marconi’s,” Charles said truthfully. Sir Oliver was known to have sent wireless signals before Marconi a
nd to have developed a device that—according to some, at least—Marconi had copied and adapted. What was more, his patent on tuning was a strong rival to Marconi’s.
“A great many advantages, especially where tuning is concerned.” Sir Oliver paused. “I have nothing against Marconi himself, you know—although that patent of his . . . well, I shan’t talk about that, either. I’ll simply say that the young fellow’s commercial advisers have done him a great disservice by making excessive claims and seeking premature publicity.”
“It’s a difficult balance,” Charles said in a neutral tone. Privately, he agreed with Sir Oliver. It seemed to him that the company was promoting a product which was not yet perfected. And if the tuner and Gerard’s notes were not found, it might be a much longer time before—
“Those fools on his board of directors can’t understand that everything depends on the credibility of the company,” Lodge said emphatically. “On the company’s ability to keep its promises. They’re going to ruin it all for short-term gain. And when Marconi himself is thoroughly discredited, as he was at the Royal Institution night before last—” He shot Charles amused glance. “You know what happened at the lecture, do you?”
“I understand that Nevil Maskelyne indulged in a spot of jamming,” Charles replied with a smile.
“And followed it up with a revealing letter to The Times,” Sir Oliver said, “which will be made much of, in all quarters. In case you haven’t yet seen it, I’ll lend you my copy. But I’ll want it back.” He slapped Charles’s shoulder playfully. “It’s worth keeping, as far as I’m concerned. In fact, it’s worth framing and displaying on the wall above my desk. Not that I hold a personal grudge, mind you. But Marconi has got his feathers trimmed in a most public way, and I for one find it amusing.” He chuckled mirthfully. “And I suppose the fellow will reply, and then Maskelyne will reply, and the entertainment will continue for a while, eh?”
