Imperial Clock (The Steam Clock Legacy) Page 9

  He stole behind a group of automobile racers who waved their flat caps at a glamour puss sashaying across a nearby podium—she was there to promote the latest speed vehicle, and loved the attention. Derek helped himself to a newspaper that was tucked under a driver’s arm. He opened it and used it as cover while he watched the McEwans making their way behind the exhibits, toward the Roundhouse Circus.

  He cringed, let the pages flop to his waist. Was this what he’d been reduced to—spying on a schoolgirl? He was unfit to hold a position in the Leviacrum, unfit to call himself a gentleman, a damned disgrace to higher apes. If a man’s heart could reduce him to this, maybe he was better off without one.

  He scrunched the newspaper up and shoved it back under the driver’s arm, before heading for the Big Top.

  The packed circus, a two-tiered circular behemoth several hundred feet high, formerly the derelict ruins of the aborted first attempt to construct a Leviacrum tower in London, had almost finished its first show of the day. Glimpses of high-wire acts, and daredevil flying machines sputtering coloured smoke to form words and shapes in the air inside the colossal scaffold left Derek grinning. He couldn’t help it. Some of the most amazing sights he’d seen in his life had been inside the Roundhouse arena, and with this current sprint in technological advancement, he could only imagine what effect these new engineering wonders would have on today’s youth.

  Hundreds of stalls and vendors circled the outside of the arena, selling everything from candy floss to steam-powered skeet launchers and rapid-fire rifles, from hot chestnuts to a ‘Have Your Portrait Drawn By An Automaton in 30 Seconds’ service.

  Families swarmed around the various novelty acts, such as an electric eel that could emit messages in Morse Code—or so its slippery owner claimed—and especially The Levitating Man, a young fellow who could rise fifty feet into the air at the end of a tether, with no discernible means of uplift. It had to be a magician’s trick, but Derek was damned if he could figure it out. Another man on a ladder swiped a sword over the rising fellow’s head, to prove the protagonist wasn’t being pulled up by any kind of line.

  Sonja McEwan appeared equally puzzled by it, writing secret theories in midair with her gloved finger as she looked the act up and down several times. She then seemed to sense Derek’s presence and swivelled. Feigned surprise when he caught her eye, then blushed and coyly turned away. She tugged at her sister to move on.

  Meredith warded him off with a sharp glance in his direction. A little too sharp for his liking. He thought about doffing his hat, taking this opportunity to formally introduce himself to Sonja’s family—hell, to get it over with—but a flood of patrons leaving the circus swept between them, an impossible torrent to ford as the arena held forty thousand people at full capacity and the show had only just finished. He was bustled to one side, and soon found himself forced back toward the exhibition field, fingers clamped on the brim of his hat to keep it in place.

  He surrendered for the time being, cursing the species.

  A quarter hour later, he caught up with his parents outside the Tarot tent. Father hated to say it, but Mother’s guaranteed long life of good fortune and future grandchildren named Ned and Ruby—sired by Derek, no less—was emphatically not worth the three guineas he’d paid for it.

  “Oh, and what is a fitting price for such life-affirming news, pray?” she asked him, beaming rather too grandmotherly for Derek’s liking.

  “There’s news and then there’s news, Winifred. This was neither. I’ve never heard so much tosh.”

  “Pssh. Our understanding of the paranormal is growing all the time, don’t you know. Not everything is within your primitive logical grasp any more, Sebastian.”

  He muttered something about “especially those three guineas”.

  They walked on toward the luncheon tent, several hundred yards away at the other side of the field, stopping again and again to greet Father’s colleagues and Mother’s friends. Derek couldn’t engage beyond one-word answers and polite nods. His attentions were captive to a mysterious magnetic north, one he sensed but couldn’t quite locate in the crowds, spinning him every which way like a fidgety compass needle.

  A chorus of horns sounded off to the right. Mother playfully craned her neck sideways to catch Derek’s darting glance in that direction. “Have you seen the automobiles yet?” She smiled, seemed to recognise his distraction. “Why don’t you go explore for a while. Meet us in the luncheon tent shortly.”

  “Thank you, Mother. Don’t mind if I do.” He kissed her cheek.

  “Start by paying her a compliment...whoever she is.”

  He swallowed. How much does she...? “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Mother gave a gentle, vacant nod, then returned to her friends.

  After completing an entire circuit of the exhibits, taking care to dodge his old teammates from football—he was almost caught offside once or twice in the attempt—Derek slumped into a frustrated malaise near the sporting set-ups. Of a sudden, a prickly paranoia made him back up against a wire mesh fence. The perimeter of a tennis court. But not any old tennis court; the lines glistened, strips of some copper-like metal, while the line judges and the umpire were in fact jerky automaton figures croaking out phrases like, “Fault,” “First service” and “Quiet, please, ladies and gentlemen!” It was at once eerie and startling to see machines dressed in purple and green uniforms, as almost exact replicas of their human counterparts, employed to adjudicate something so trivial as a racquet sport at a fair.

  He was about to admire the nearest player’s figure—a human woman serving from the ad court—when she dropped her ball and turned to catch its bounce. “Mister Auric—” Her half-whispered, half-gasped address lit him from within, “—hello.”

  “Good day, McEwan.”

  “I thought my sister had frightened you off.”

  “No, I—”

  “McEwan, what’s taking so long?” screeched her opponent. An unfortunate screech, so grating and so familiar and so...Wilhelmina Challender?

  “Tarry awhile, sir? At least to the end of this game. Please?”

  “Your servant, ma’am.” His cartoonish bow had been charming in theory but felt dumb in execution. Positively dumb. To his relief, Sonja curtsied in equally overdone fashion before returning to the contest. Yes, the so-called contest—South Hampshire Grammar’s tenured tennis coach versus one of her least graceful protégés; determined and powerful perhaps, but Sonja was not a young lady one would count among the nimblest of racqueteers. Derek had played mixed doubles against her once or twice in the teacher-student friendlies last year, when he’d been at the receiving end of her wicked passing shots.

  Most of the other girls dinked the ball daintily over the net, relying on spin and angles to out-manoeuvre their opponents. Sonja, on the other hand, liked to test the catgut to its limit. She slammed, swiped, grunted, harangued, and generally did everything in her power to win the match.

  She was nothing if not entertaining to watch.

  Wilhelmina Challender sliced a serve out to Sonja’s forehand and received an up-the-line humdinger in reply. Sonja threw a wild fist in celebration, while her seasoned opponent stitched on a magnanimous smile for the crowd. Underneath she must be fuming. Less than a week had passed since the incident in the Lake District, and no decision had been made by the School Board regarding whom to punish, or whom to commend for their conduct. Like Wilhelmina’s gratuitous ball toss, it was all rather up in the air.

  “Fault,” a line judge croaked as the serve missed by a few inches. Going off the copper lines and the ball’s weighty flight and bounce, Derek reckoned it was some kind of electro-magnetic sensor system, perhaps a circuit, coordinating the magnetic proximity of the ball to the lines. But how was the magnetic circuit communicating with the automatons? By radio? Darn clever, whatever it was.

  Two sneaky drop-shots in a row left Sonja panting as she scrambled to the net and back in vain. Teacher outwitted student by hitting a lo
b right on the baseline. “Advantage, server,” intoned the stoic umpire.

  “Witch,” muttered Sonja.

  Wilhelmina hit a deep serve into Sonja’s body, forcing her to adjust with quick footwork, which wasn’t her specialty. Caught in two minds, she failed to get out of the way and the heavy ball bounced up, striking her chin.

  “Game, set and match.”

  “Cack.”

  Before Derek could commiserate her, Sonja ran up to the net, said something to her opponent and then motioned to the crowd behind Wilhelmina. Her teacher shrugged and walked off the court.

  Derek stood up straight, fidgeted with his gloves behind his back. “Good effort,” he reassured Sonja as she ran back to him. She tossed a handful of loose white curls from her brow. “Tennis of the future, eh?” he said.

  “Would you like to play doubles with me?”

  “What? Now?” For some reason the idea went down about as well as a homebound ship under a wreckers’ night-light. The last thing he’d wanted today was an audience. Him and her alone together with a stolen declaration or two, yes, enough to find out how strongly she returned his affection; and if she was unsure of her feelings quite yet, to ask her permission to call on her another time, perhaps when she turned seventeen.

  But this—this would gain him nothing and had the potential to lose him everything.

  “Consider it a rematch.” She pointed across the arena, to where Wilhelmina and her doubles partner—that shit-eater, Eustace Challender! no less—strutted onto court. The ass removed his bowler, jacket and tie, accepted a brand new racquet from the flustered organiser, and began limbering up with an annoying lack of irony, as though the prig really thought he was at Wimbledon.

  “I’m in.” Derek wove his way through the crowd to the gate on the other side, tipped his hat to Sonja’s sister as he stepped onto the court. “Miss McEwan.”

  “Mister Auric.” Muted. Still frosty.

  A wave of apprehension heaved over him. No, he’d never liked the limelight. No, it would not stop him now.

  Eustace remonstrated, almost stormed off when he saw Derek. But he knew and his wife knew, just as Sonja and Derek knew, why he couldn’t chicken out of this match. Pride. Pride was at stake, and the settling of a score.

  “This wasn’t quite what I had in mind, McEwan, but I’m ready if you are.”

  “Sonja.” She handed him his racquet. “From now on, I’m Sonja, you’re Derek, they’re going down. Okay?”

  He laughed. “Okay.”

  “Now I want two things from you, Derek. One, crush them to a pulp. And two, keep an eye on my father, if you’d be so kind. He’s inspecting that large portable drilling gadget over there.” She pointed to a row of tool benches some fifty yards behind her sister. “Now, we might be paranoid, but Meredith and I swore we saw someone following him, someone we know for a fact shouldn’t be here at all.”

  “Who, pray?”

  “We can’t be sure who he is exactly. He was caught taking photographs of Father in Norway, knocked himself unconscious when he fell out of a tree in the act. As far as we were aware, he never awakened from his coma. But he was armed. That he’s here now, watching us, can’t possibly be good news. Please keep your eyes skinned?”

  “You have my word. What does he look like?”

  “Five-ten-ish, slender build, about thirty-five years old, with piercing blue eyes, a dark beard and moustache, and a bowler hat.”

  “Not much to go on there. That could be any one from a thousand men. Anything else to identify him?”

  She bounced the ball on the hard floor a few times. It was clearly heavier than a normal tennis ball, no doubt containing a trace of some magnetic metal. “A tan overcoat. Oh, it’s probably nothing. Likely it’s not even the man we saw in Norway.”

  “I’ll keep a sharp eye nonetheless. Your father is a famous man, after all.”

  “Thank you, Derek. And for inviting me today. It was sweet.”

  He had to look twice to be sure this was a sixteen-year-old talking to him and not an accomplished woman of the world. Yet it was becoming increasingly clear that in Sonja McEwan’s case the two were one and the same. Decisive, articulate, frightened of nothing except her father’s safety, she left Derek tongue-tied.

  “You’re welcome,” was all he could manage. “Shall we?”

  “Your serve, McEwan,” Wilhelmina called across. “Best of three, so we don’t hog the court for too long.” The organiser checked his timepiece several times as he wound a crank in the small of the umpire’s back.

  “Who’s she calling hog? Look what she married,” Sonja whispered to Derek.

  A part of him wanted to laugh along, another had to chide her for her impertinence—Mrs. Challender was still her teacher. Yet still another part of him, the wisest perhaps, knew to stay quiet, to let this surreal scenario play out so he could review the madness later. For he was in uncharted regions, where magnets drew the lines of battle under his feet. And his compass had stopped spinning.

  He had found his own magnetic north. She had a heck of a first serve.

  ***

  “Fifteen-thirty.” Two senseless double faults in a row had gifted the Challenders an early lead, and only Derek Auric’s reassuring wink as he hunched ready to attack his opponents’ next return, shirt sleeves flaring out of his tight-fitting purple waistcoat, kept Sonja from smashing her racquet into the ground in frustration. She’d lured him into this grudge match after fortuitously spotting the Challenders because it had seemed a clever way to break the ice, a less scandalous way for her and Derek to spend some time together.

  Merry wasn’t for leaving her alone today, had shadowed her every move since they’d left the airship; but if there was one thing her older sister disliked more than being second best in a man’s eyes, it was the game of tennis. Yet Sonja’s only self-caveat, that she must under no circumstances let Derek lose this match, began to bite at her sense of satisfaction. What would he think of her if she let his bitter enemy waddle away triumphant?

  She might never see him again.

  Her next serve landed in but at a fraction of the pace of which she was capable. Mrs. Challender returned with a cross-court backhand beyond Derek’s lunge—it hit the tramline and skidded away off court. At full speed and reach, Sonja barely clawed it back over the net. Immediately Mr. Challender smacked the helpless ball straight at Derek, who was standing inches from the net, shielding his face with his racquet. The ball rebounded off Derek’s strings with such force it bounced once, and only once, in the Challenders’ court before clearing the fence behind them.

  “Thirty all,” the automaton umpire announced.

  “What the hell was that?” Derek raged at his opponent. “This is an exhibition game, not a cock-fight.”

  “Oh? Why don’t you go cry to your little peahen then.” Mr. Challender nodded at Sonja. “She’s clearly the one wearing the trousers on that side of the net.”

  “Just you and I, Eustace...after the match. You name the place.”

  “No need, seeing as I’m going to pulverize you right here on court. Or can’t you handle being beaten fair and square?”

  Derek thrust his racquet out to arm’s length over the net, pointed straight at Mr. Challender. “You’re on. And once we’re done here, then I decide if I’m satisfied or not.”

  “Ha! Hot air from a hot-head. Your kind always goes down in flames, Auric, always will. The School Board has your number.”

  “And I’ve got yours. Two tonnes of horse-shit, fertilizing the court. No wonder the ball jumped the fence. It couldn’t stand the reek.”

  By this time the audience had swelled to three or four times its size, and smatterings of laughter emerged. Both men glanced around, muttered under their breaths, then sheepishly returned to their positions.

  “Everything all right, Derek?” Sonja asked.

  “Your serve.”

  Oh God. She’d made a huge mistake setting up this match. Even if she and Derek did win, he woul
dn’t want to wait around afterward, fuming like this, or say the things he wanted to say to her. Heck, she’d taken away his very reason for inviting her here in the first place. She’d turned his planned tender moments into the Trojan War—not the most historically successful way to win a woman.

  “Fault.”

  Bugger.

  Mr. Challender returned her second serve with interest, so she lobbed the ball to his wife, knowing the overhead smash was her weakest stroke. Not this time! Mrs. Challender went cross-court with relish, and Sonja had to scoop an improvised half-volley from the hem of her skirt as she rushed forward. Mr. Challender caught it on the volley, again lashing a shot straight at Derek. But Derek anticipated and, with the deftest defensive block she’d ever seen, took all the pace off the ball, dropping it just over the net. The Challenders had no chance of reaching it.

  It won huge applause from the crowd.

  Sonja jammed her next serve into Mr. Challender’s body, giving him no wiggle room whatsoever. He fumbled the return.

  “Game.”

  “Yes!” Relief spilled out as she jumped up and down and danced an un-ladylike jig along the copper baseline. The crowd laughed hard but she didn’t care. Derek kissed her hand. She patted his perfect bottom with her racquet. Cheers erupted from the audience, combined with a smell of combusted magnesium from a nearby exhibit, igniting the on-court atmosphere to a fever. Tears welled in her eyes.

  The next game proved a struggle. Mr. Challender constantly—and with a distinct lack of chivalry, according to Derek—hammered away at Sonja’s backhand, her weaker side. It yielded no less than five points for the Challenders, who had clearly colluded to exploit that frailty. But she’d always been a quick study. Their tactic was unvarying and relentless, and therefore easy to anticipate. She ran around Mrs. Challender’s softer slices and let fly with several thunderous forehands, squaring the game to deuce over and over again. Derek weighed in at the net once or twice at full stretch, almost tossing himself to ground in the attempt. He was extremely athletic, if a little erratic in his shot placement.