Chapter One
London’s lights glittered all around below us, peeking in and out of the dissipating smoke from the cannon fire and the explosion of the Dragon’s Maw, the Pirate airship that had crashed on the streets below. I knew the name because Sluefoot Sue had sent a message up from her giant catfish about finding a piece of the bow draped over the catfish’s dorsal fin when she had surfaced after the battle. I remembered what poor Gertie the washerwoman had said to me before she disappeared forever into the black hole of Dodge’s rampage -- was it only a few months ago? I pulled up the moving images on my tablet and played it back against a white sheet somebody had spread to protect some evidence or other. Grimy little Gertie grinned at me again.
“‘Allo, lovey. Lookey you, tricked out loik Saint George!” cackled the old woman as dawn broke over the black, huddled buildings behind her. She shuffled a little ways down the street. “Goin’ t’ save this loidy fair from a dragon?”
I stood in my mountaintop sculpture garden of bronze on top of the Bronze Cascade, my hotel in the heart of London and wanted to feel more like Saint George, to imagine I really had slain the dragon and set everybody free. My creatures whirred and clicked through their preset clockwork-driven motions. We’d made them look as real as we could, my apprentices and I, and it was even niftier now that some of them walked about the garden like living things.
Now that it was quiet I could listen to the recirculating waterfalls flowing through their gold crystal and blue gaslit tracks. The place had bronze clockwork animals throughout, stags nodding, trout jumping out of streams, with fountains and bronze trees and bushes with every leaf and root etched in detail as real as we could engrave it.
“Why would you pay for a funeral for this man?” Jessica Fagin advanced across the roof in the middle of the clockwork menagerie and stood with the body of Jack Dawkins between us. I had to give her credit for single-mindedness and composure in the middle of my animated garden and the mayhem just coming to an end there. It should have made sense to me that she was focused on her work. I’d been rapped more than once for not paying attention to the world around me when a project had to get done. Rapped, literally, because back when I was supposed to be picking oakum I was designing mechanicals, scratching diagrams in the work table with the separating tool until the foreman came around and hit me across the knuckles with that rod he carried about.
“Oliver Twist, get about your task!” His voice still echoed in my mind, and my knuckles still ached with the memory. Nothing could stop me from planning. I had to be putting together gears and cogs and sprockets and chains. Nothing could keep me from figuring out just what steam could make go. Turned out it could be lots and lots of things, with more occurring to me all the time. In fact, three or four were trying to crowd into the front of my thoughts as fast as I tried to crowd them out and concentrate on the here and now.
But Jessica Fagin still stood there, looking at me, waiting. Some of the other Alexander Legacy Company were scattered about with constables, Scotland Yard inspectors and hotel crew, trying to clean up the mess. More of them were down on the street and about the banks of the Thames, dealing with the crashed pirate airship. There were bodies aplenty, but I didn’t care much what became of them. I stared down at Jack Dawkins, whom I’d once called friend. Now I didn’t know what to call him.
“I just want to, that’s all,” I said, looking up at her. I had to look up at mostly everybody, but when I looked up at her I couldn’t help remembering Fagin, the fence who was our pickpocketing master. Florizel had pretty much asked her straight out about her father and she hadn’t confirmed it or denied it. She certainly didn’t resemble that filthy old man. Jessica Fagin was a truly handsome woman, redhaired like Fagin had been, brown-eyed like he’d been, but she was so clean she squeaked, and dressed mighty fine, in sparkly blue and black and silver and done up like a fairy-tale queen.
“I want a regular funeral and service, like you did with Charley Bates,” I said. “Just the same. We’ll all be there, and whatever visitors come. That’ll be tomorrow night, right?”
“As you wish.” Jessica Fagin nodded. “The police have said they are not finished with their investigation yet, so I cannot remove the body now.”
“I’ll make sure you’re informed the minute they’re done with him,” I said. “Have you brought your men and your cart? You can wait down in one of the hotel conference rooms, or leave your barrow there and go have supper in one of the dining rooms, or whatever you wish. You’re my guest. I’m sorry, I should have thought about it being too soon to send for you. I just -- I don’t want him lying there like that a moment longer than absolutely necessary.”
She bowed again and departed. I dispatched a staff member to escort her down and make sure she was taken care of. After she was gone I stood there looking around at my menagerie. I’d made everything here to be peaceful and glorifying to God. Yet over to one side my bronze clockwork stag lay in pieces, still steaming and clanking its legs as if it wanted to get up. Crews were bagging up the bodies of the air pirates who’d come to kill us and carrying them off to the airship for Tod to ferry down. I had no intention of letting them drag those things through the hotel. I wanted to keep things peaceful for the guests if it was at all possible.
Most of the garden was still intact. The trees hid a lot of the destruction and the dead, actually. It was all quiet now, and could have been pretty, except that Jack Dawkins lay there right in front of me, staring up with the one good eye he had left. He was just as dirty as he’d always been. He was even dressed almost the same way he’d been as a teenager at Fagin’s. A too-big overcoat with the sleeves rolled up lay spread open around him. A too-big top hat lay beside him. He’d grown some mutton-chop whiskers, but he looked so much the same to me. He’d always been a bulldog of a fellow, shoving his way through life and “takin’ nuffink from naobody, nivver”.
That ruin someone had made of his right eye was a horrible thing and I could see why he’d adopted the bronze goggles. It was like him to want a badge of honor, though, even if it was his own eyeball, as if it didn’t matter to him that someone had treated him so vilely. It was part of the thieves’ code, the law of the underworld, not to cry about anything that happened to you, but rather to pretend your life was a lark and you were the king of the mountain. Those trial transcripts of his “day in court” burned in my mind. He’d not had the lark he had expected in prison. His mountain couldn’t have been anything better than a garbage heap.
“You need not stand vigil over him, Twist.” Florizel came over to me and put a hand on my shoulder. He looked so fine, even in his borrowed finery, outfitted in black velvet and gems as befitted a wealthy patron of Trevor Newsome’s MP campaign, He was always a soldier, though his black hair and beard had got abit mussed with all the fighting and chasing that had gone on.
“If you would have let me in on your plan, perhaps we could have spared him. But you have no cause to grieve over him. There is no childhood friend lying in his own blood before you. Ask your sweet little Tatiana if you doubt he deserved to go meet his maker. And remember what he did to you. Spare no pity for this dead monster.”
“He said it wasn’t him, Florrie.” I shook my head stubbornly. Florizel was a stiff sort, maybe from his upbringing as Prince of Bohemia. But I’d never be the one to criticize him. He was the one to come to my rescue after that night when the world seemed like it ought to end. Someone had attacked and sodomized me. Florizel was the one to talk me back into this world and remind me of what I owed to Jesus Christ. Speaking of larks, it was hard to think of how I’d gone off in search of Professor Polidori as if it were an exciting adventure and found out it was a nightmare. It still pulled a shudder out of me.
“Do you think that was what Jack meant -- that someone else was dressed as him, and did the deed, so he’d get the blame? He said he’d been set up, as if he was blamed for things he never did. What if Kera was right when she said there could have been automatons dressed as him, or even
another man, and he wasn’t guilty of all we thought he did?”
“Who is that lying there before you, Doctor Twist?” Florizel could be almighty stiff and stern when he wished. He was at the top of his form just now.
“Jack Dawkins,” I muttered.
“Who kidnapped Madame Phoebe out of the backstage of your own theatre?”
“Well, he did,” I admitted. “But in a way it’s true that we set him up for that, Florrie. Langham dangled the bait Lady Phoebe said to set out for him.”
“Did anyone force him to come here?” Florizel demanded. “Anyone put a gun to his head and say, ‘Drag that beautiful, good, innocent woman -- ‘ He threw up his arm and indicated our leader, Phoebe Moore-Campbell, standing under the clockwork moose and describing the night’s events to a detective “-- Out of the theatre and into one of your infernal bubbles to blast up here and escape in a pirate airship?”
I choked back a laugh at Florrie’s description of my observation bubbles. I knew he’d hated his trips in them but I loved that hurtling sensation and seeing the artificial cave walls fly past, nestled in pillows and surrounded by a bright golden ball.
“No, of course not, Florrie, and in my head I know you’re right. That’s Jack, certain-sure, and he did it all, or a lot of it. Maybe what he said to me at the last was just one more dodge, one more attempt to avoid taking responsibility for his actions. I just -- I wonder why he said that to me, instead of crowing like a cock over snatching Lady Phoebe, or paying me back, as he would have seen it, for being part of the reason he got such a harsh sentence and suffered so much in prison.”
“You bear no blame for what happened to him,” Florizel insisted, making me look him in the eye. “He made his choices. He lived his life. And he bore the consequences.”
I just nodded. Florrie was always like that, never seeming to have any doubts or questions about things. His mind was a wonder to watch at work, not for making things like I do, of course. But he could listen to bits of clues that were like puzzle pieces dumped in a heap to anybody else. He’d sort ‘em out proper and say, “Hey, presto,” and they’d be put together as they ought to be. We’d all scratch our heads and say, “How’d he know that?”
“Inspector, can we not have this thing removed?” Florizel snapped at the Scotland Yard man in charge, gesturing at Jack’s body. The man bustled and barked a few minutes more and then gave us a curt nod. I pulled out my tablet.
“Langham, have Lady Fagin come up to remove the body, please,” I said into it.
“At once, sir,” my hotel manager’s voice answered me. I slid the tablet back into my pocket and deliberately walked away from the body to meet the lift when it came up.
“Oliver, you must get some rest, now,” Lady Phoebe urged, caressing my face as she joined me beside the lift. She was looking a bit pale and her brown eyes had dark rings under them. Her thick black hair was all mussed over the shoulders of that lovely green satin and gold lace gown. Her crossbow was back to being a parasol and she sort of dragged it as if it were too heavy. “You and Todd and Sararati, too. You’ve all worked yourselves to death. The net to catch the Dodge-fish succeeded. It’s over.”
“Spring-heeled Jack said it wasn’t over,” I argued.