Imperial Clock (The Steam Clock Legacy) Page 7

  She glanced to the photographed portrait hanging on the wall over the mantelpiece. Hair as white as the whitest cloud, eyes bright as dewdrops in the sun, skin pale, almost unearthly pale, with a thin-lipped smile at once both lost and found, as though she were trying to equate a former happiness with a new one: yes, Mother had had her secrets too. She had never truly belonged here, that much had always been obvious—though quite where here referred to, Meredith couldn’t say for sure. Southsea? England? The twentieth century?

  That feeling of detachment, of alienation permeated this portrait, but the sensation also gave Meredith an odd comfort, a kind of inherited defiance, hard to articulate, even harder to pinpoint. When Sonja limped up the front steps outside, grinning mischievously between coughs as Father draped a thick woollen shawl around her, Meredith would have given anything to have Mother at her side. It was an ache she’d ignored these past months, deep down, that now swelled with a vengeance. Seeing Sonja return home from some perilous adventure she’d had without her sister, out in the big wide world, made Meredith feel small. Left behind. Ill-equipped to deal with what the future might bring.

  Alone.

  “Meredith, come along, help your sister change upstairs before lunch, whatever she needs. It’s been a trying night, and she’s still shivering, poor creature. Warm as you can, now—I suggest you fetch the woolliest, wintriest—Mrs. Van Persie, is the fire licking high—ah yes, very good, very good indeed. Hot milk? A hot water bottle? Good, good. An appetising smell from the kitchen there and no mistake. Now then, Sonja, I know you said you’d rather gorge than get some sleep, but—”

  “Father dear, you’re nagging. I’ll take a nap later. And I am more than capable of dressing myself, thank you. All this confounded fuss over nothing. Anyone would think we’d been shipwrecked for a decade. It was just a night under a canopy, that’s all, and we were supervised at that.”

  “To say nothing of the freezing temperature, the dampness, or the blizzard raging around you.” Father desperately scanned the room for his pipe and tobacco pouch, sifting through his memories of places they could be with a single nodding finger. He located them in the pocket of the jacket he was wearing. “Honestly, child, you have no conception of the danger you were in. Were it not for that fellow—Auric—I shudder to think what might have happened.”

  “Mr. Auric? From biology? What part did he play?” Meredith had graduated last summer, and she struggled to conjure his face—a passably good-looking one from what she recalled. Her sister pretended distraction, miming a whistle as she climbed the stairs. “Sonja?”

  “Hmm? Oh, he told that fat gibbon Challender where to stick his seniority.” In her small pink hand, a folded note, almost concealed. “And if the School Board has the gall to accuse him of anything, he’ll give them a taste. He’s too good for that school, too good by half. Who knows, now that Mrs. Prescott isn’t here, maybe they’ll—”

  “What do you mean? Where’s Mrs. Prescott?” Meredith shouted up.

  “I’m afraid she died in the blizzard. Her heart gave out, poor woman. But exactly where she’d be now—that’s a tad ghoulish, even for me.”

  Meredith ignored the quip and focused instead on the folded note Sonja continued to caress until she whipped out of sight along the landing. Whatever it was, it seemed to be the source of this new and disconcerting air of independence.

  Mrs. Van Persie’s excellent cottage pie, made with minced beef, sliced Cumberland sausage and a generous helping of salted carrots, was one of Meredith’s favourite dishes, but throughout her sister’s recounting of the near-disastrous expedition Meredith hardly touched her plate. Those earlier kaleidoscopic reflections on Mother and Father—filtered through the portrait hanging on the wall—continued to spin and tumble into each other, glintings of memories, intuitions and myriad unanswered questions distracting her while Sonja did her best to make the blizzard tale engaging and seem, well, all a bit of a lark really.

  Father, too, kept glancing away from Sonja and studying Meredith from the corner of his eye instead, as if he sensed whom the real weight in the room was pressing upon, and was trying to puzzle out the cause in his own scientific way.

  “So you sided with Mr. Auric to the bitter end?” Meredith said blankly. “Bravo. I daresay I’d have done the same—Challender always was a bit of a sot. But I hope you’re not going to be punished alongside poor Auric. From what I gather the School Board doesn’t suffer dissenters readily, especially from the faculty. Right, Father?”

  “Indubitably not, no.”

  Sonja let out a loud sigh of frustration, then reshaped her napkin into a tepee on the tablecloth. “You do the right thing in this world, you pay the price. I should let you know I’m making a promise here and now: if he’s made to leave, so shall I. South Hampshire Grammar be damned.”

  Father eyed her sharply, doing his best to fight a proud smirk. “And if he resigns, Sonja?”

  “Then he’ll have done the honourable thing, but they’ll still have forced him out. Challender proved himself unfit to look after his class. If they don’t sack that fat ape, then they’ve sided with him...against the only one who is fit to be in charge.”

  “It’s never that straightforward, though, is it?”

  She flattened the napkin tent with her fist. “No, because it’s all piss and politics.”

  “Sonja!”

  “Sorry, Father. But this means a lot to me.”

  “I can see that.” After a brief, sullen glance at them both, Father dabbed the sides of his mouth and rose from his chair. “Girls, I’d like you to accompany me to the garden. I believe it’s warm enough. Bring your shawl in any case, Sonja.”

  “Father?” they both asked together.

  “This might be the last opportunity we have to discuss—things—before I leave.”

  Meredith hated the way that sounded, as though it was the last fizz of her favourite soda before the top was screwed on and the beverage confiscated forever. But the soda of her whole world. He’d returned home from his previous expeditions, yes, but what if this one...

  No, Father would always come home—it was simply who he was. Nothing and no one could deny that.

  After fetching a blanket and something wrapped in an old cloth from a sideboard drawer, he led them out into the back garden, where an insistent warmth from the loitering sun had managed to slice through the nip in the morning air. Thick clouds still bullied overhead, but those baking rays would probably win out before noon. A blue tit hopped across the lawn, then shot up when it heard footsteps, circling high into the convoy of airships that formed a dull V under a carpet of grey seaward cloud.

  Father laid the blanket across Mother’s memorial seat, covering the dew that collected there every morning. The brass plaque was still spotless after all these years, as either himself, or Mr. Van Persie while he was away, polished it frequently. This was Father’s favourite place to relax when he needed a few quiet hours to himself, usually to read his scientific literature, but it was not somewhere Meredith or Sonja ever sat.

  It offered them no comfort.

  He bid them sit next to him, one on either side, and then carefully retrieved a fragile book from the folds of old cloth. “How much do you remember about this story?”

  “Moon and Meridian?” Sonja beamed across at Meredith. “Pretty much everything.”

  “I should hope so. Mother only read it to us about a thousand times.”

  Sonja nodded enthusiastically. “Weird story, but magical. And I mean magical. I’ve had so many dreams about that adventure.”

  “Me too.”

  “The opening bit reminds me a bit of the Morlock realm in Wells’s The Time Machine—you know, the cruel underground masters who enslave the Eloi. Only there’s no world above the ground in this story, until this family of slaves has no choice but to flee from the subterranean rulers. They go on this amazing journey through the unknown, to find their way out, only it’s not really unknown, it’s just been lost for millio
ns of years. People have become so frightened of what’s up top, they’ve stopped thinking about it, about their history. All they know is what’s down there, in this artificial world they’ve been cocooned in. So it’s a journey of rediscovery. While the family has never amounted to much as individuals—they weren’t particularly good at what they did for a living under the regime—they grow into this amazing survival unit along the way, and they learn to improvise everything from firelight to killing monsters.”

  “Our favourite part,” Meredith reminded her.

  Sonja laughed. “Remember the magnetic tunnels, how they escaped through those?”

  “Fork two, corkscrew, up and over, left. Genius.”

  After Father had finished turning the pages, flashing the occasional smile at their reminiscences, he snapped the book shut and traced his finger over the author’s name on the spine. E.Q. Sabar. “Quite the storyteller, wasn’t he?”

  “The best,” they agreed.

  “And do you recall smuggling it into the library that day, so you could find out what else Mister Sabar had written? You were only little, Meredith.”

  “Vaguely. I remember the librarian couldn’t make head nor tail of it—no classification number, no publisher, no copyright, nothing. She said it must have been self-published, maybe a one-off.”

  “That is possible. But self-published or not, it wasn’t published in this country...or any other for that matter.”

  Sonja and Meredith shared a puzzled look. This time he wasn’t making a lick of sense, not even accidentally. If it wasn’t published in any country, where was it published? Thin air? The canyons of Mars?

  “Can we skip the riddles for once, Father?” Meredith masked a yawn. “I thought you had something important to tell us.”

  “Yes, out with it, old man, or we’ll duff you up and nick your wallet.”

  “Haha! That’s the one thing I won’t need where I’m going...where the author of this book came from?”

  “Eh? Subterranea?” Sonja clung to his arm, began to shake it. “You’re saying E.Q. Sabar published this book miles beneath the surface of the earth?”

  “That I am. But how?”

  Meredith grabbed his other arm. “Um, that would be my next question, yes. How?”

  “That’s one of the reasons I’m going back, to find that out. So far I’ve uncovered evidence of a subterranean civilization, yes, but nothing anywhere near this recent—recent enough to produce a book we can still handle, still read, still understand. Consider that last part for a moment. A civilization millions of years old that uses the English language, albeit with some odd phraseology. It’s a paradox, isn’t it. And believe me when I tell you the archaeology is profoundly more strange than even that. The deeper we venture into Subterranea, the more recent the artefacts are. It’s like finding Saxon ruins underneath Ancient Egyptian ruins somewhere in South America, and then finding a steam-powered typewriter under those.”

  “How much of this have you made public?” Meredith suddenly wanted to accompany him on his next expedition more than anything.

  “Very little. Mikael Sorensen knows, and Horace Holly. One or two other...close colleagues of mine, and now the two of you. The Leviacrum doesn’t know. Indeed, it mustn’t know. But I’ve told you because I think you’re old enough now to handle this, and because of what it means for our family.”

  “Our reputation, you mean?” asked Meredith.

  “Partly, but much, much more than that. Let me put it this way—” He danced his fingers down the book’s spine, “—I wasn’t the one who retrieved this book from Subterranea.”

  Great, more riddles.

  “Then who?” Sonja, too, was losing patience as she grabbed his chin and swivelled his face toward her. “Father, who brought this book out of Subterranea?”

  “It was a young, white-haired girl with one heck of a story to tell.” His smile grew inscrutably narrow. “Your mother.”

  A faraway hiss, familiar and constant, signalled the start of Mr. Van Persie’s latest attempt to inflate his hot air balloon in the glade across the lane, not much more than a stone’s throw away but out of sight for the three of them in the garden. Meanwhile, Father’s sudden revelation was beyond Meredith’s imagination. She couldn’t see Mother emerging from some ancient hole in the ground any more than she could swallow a civilization existing where there was no sun, no weather, no way to gauge the passage of time.

  “You’re trying to tell us we’re descended from a bunch of crackpots from some crack in the earth? That people existed long before the first homo sapiens, and they had technology, and they never saw daylight for thousands of years?”

  “Maybe millions of years,” he corrected her.

  “Oh. Do you want my penny now, or should I wait until the next instalment? Is that when the belching volcano shows up? Maybe Mother hitched a ride topside in a lava tube, and waved to the sun when the hot stuff spat her out.”

  “What would I gain by making any of this up, sweetheart?” Father didn’t look Meredith in the eye as he addressed her, which usually signified the beginning of a rhetorical tirade. This time, however, he surprised her by waiting for her reply.

  She shrugged. “How should I know?” The words brandy and absinthe almost came out, but as he was being so gentle and matter-of-fact about the whole thing, she hadn’t the heart to ruin what he obviously saw as a special moment between them, a farewell moment he’d remember fondly on his forthcoming odyssey. “You know me. I can’t swallow air without taking its temperature first. Right, Sonja?”

  They gazed at one another until Father squeezed them both toward him and sighed. “A good scientist never takes anything on faith, so, Meredith, you’re right not to take my word for it. I promise I’ll show you all the evidence when I return, and if I’m right in my predictions, and we can locate this heart of Subterranea where your Mother was born, you’ll both be welcome to accompany me on a subsequent expedition, so we can explore your roots together. You have my word.”

  Our roots?

  “In the meantime, I think it’s only fair that you hear the full story in your mother’s own words.” He rose without warning and led the way indoors. “She wanted to write you each a letter for when you’d finished your debut seasons, but I had a better idea. A more...personable one. Because no one could tell a story like your mother, face to face.”

  And none had Father’s confounded way of hinting and teasing when the mood for drama struck him. He resembled more a stage conjurer than a scientist, the way he gathered and assembled his outlandish apparatuses in the living room without explaining what any of it was for, all the while whistling and muttering to himself. Meanwhile, Meredith and Sonja huddled together on the settee and poured over the old story book, Moon and Meridian, wondering aloud whether its intimate briny scent or finely woven binding or the beautiful pastel illustrations were indeed evidence of a lost civilization hidden miles beneath their feet.

  “Father, if this is all true, how much does the Leviacrum Council really know of it?” Meredith’s anxiousness seemed to want to stitch together several loose conspiracy strands, especially those pertaining to his previous exploits. The spy in Niflheim had not been identified, having never awakened from his coma, but the Atlas inscription on his pocket watch casing, an old Leviacrum symbol, suggested that powerful organization was keeping tabs on Father. But why? How much did they know about his real reason for “discovering” and returning to Subterranea?

  “They know nothing. They can never.” He hurried over to the front window and snatched the curtains closed. “Don’t concern yourselves with the Leviacrum Council, girls, not yet; and don’t let on to anyone what you hear today. Let’s just call it...our family secret. I regret with all my heart how much you’ve had to defend the McEwan name over the years. And I blame myself for much of that—Lord knows, I can be a stubborn, bloody-minded old sod.”

  “No, I wouldn’t say old,” Sonja cut in.

  “Cheeky little imp.” He grinned
ready to laugh, but suppressed it when he eyed Meredith’s scowl. “Suffice it to say, the Council is both hopeful and wary of my expeditions, in that they’d love to have dominion over a world within our world—think of the untapped mineral deposits down there, for one—but they’re frightened of me finding precisely what I aim to find: that lost civilization we speak of. If that happened, and the people of Subterranea possessed significant technology, ergo weaponry, it could challenge the supremacy of the Leviacrum Council in any number of ways. At the very least, it would introduce an unpredictable piece into the global chess game of borders and diplomacy.

  “Which side would this people take, if pressed? The Coalition’s? The Subterraneans’ origins would certainly come into question, and like the Westminster disaster, that would raise all sorts of concerns about the wisdom of pursuing such risky scientific endeavours as time travel. For how else could this people have come into being so long ago, while also possessing advanced technology and the English language? And lest we forget, funnelling scientific progress is the Council’s bread and butter. People must trust in the efficacy of that pursuit, and of the Council’s sovereignty, or else the Leviacrum has no reason for being.”

  He paused to connect, with wiring, the six projectors perched on wooden stands he’d erected around the room. They all pointed to the centre, a few feet above a fumigation capsule standing upright on the carpet. Behind that, a silver canvas projection screen, similar to the one they’d used to shame the Sorensen cousins in Niflheim, reflected a slit of sunlight from between the drawn curtains. Sonja jumped up and closed them fully. “Is it just me, or is it all starting to fit?”

  “What do you mean?” asked Meredith.

  “I mean Professor Reardon and his Westminster time jump, the rumours of collapsed Leviacrum towers already waiting for them there in prehistory. Someone, sometime in the future figures out how to send these blasted towers back in time, for whatever reason, but it all goes wrong. The people are stuck there in a world ruled by hostile creatures. To survive, maybe they had no choice but to go underground and start civilization anew.”