Chapter One
London 189--
The sign outside what appeared to be an ordinary, even rather small, London shop read simply, “Tobacconist.” The tiny establishment did a trickling trade and its patrons came and went as patrons of small shops usually did. On certain days and at certain times, however, certain patrons seemed to linger in the shop an unusually long time. The general public wondered about me, the quaint foreigner who ran the shop, but admitted they knew no harm of me. I was considered neat, even a little bit of a dandy, taking walks about town with a gaudy crested ring and a brocaded red satin waistcoat beneath my tidy, if slightly out of fashion black suit. Women said they thought me rather handsome and exceedingly polite and gallant. Men gave me little or no thought unless they had business at the tobacco shop.
Today was one of those days when certain patrons had cause to linger. I opened a door in the back of the shop and those certain patrons passed through into the Bohemian Club. I had painstakingly managed to acquire presentable furniture, comfortable chairs, a few tables for card-playing, and a small but respectable liquor cabinet. The best of my stock of tobacco was kept back here in a vault that raised and lowered by clockwork and steam from the cool recesses of the cellar. This bronze humidor kept the tobacco perfectly preserved.
My patrons sampled more of my atmosphere than of my tobacco, liquor, or my cards, or they did not return a second time to my club. I grouped my chairs and other furnishings carefully. Those who wished a quiet place for reading the papers were not troubled by those who gathered by the hearth to chat. Those who desired a gentlemanly game of cards did not discompose those who simply wanted to think and enjoy a peaceful smoke.
Today I reclined against the mantle and listened to the talk. It was easy and pleasant at first and I was lulled into a half-doze until a voice started to elevate subtly in volume. Someone was telling a war story and I came alert to listen. For ten full minutes I fixed my attention on this guest of a regular member and his tale of daring do. Then I interrupted him.
“You are a guest,” I said. “I make allowances for mistakes made by guests of the members, unless they breach the bounds of propriety, sir.”
“I’ve done nothing improper!” spluttered the guest.
“But you have, sir. Your tale is about yourself. It is not permitted that guests exalt themselves in my establishment. You may regale us with heroics but they cannot be your own. I waited to see if the one who invited you would recall his duty but he has not. So I ask you both to leave and not return.”
“Bosh!” exclaimed the member. “It was a great yarn, Florrie! You’ll not seriously bar me permanently, will you?”
“Indeed, I will, because I can,” I responded. “For ten years of my life I listened to the boasts of a man and could not discern that his boasting marked him as a liar and a selfish, cruel brute. So I paint all boasters with that brush, and banish them from my presence. But before you gentlemen depart, let me tell you a ‘great yarn,’ and a true one, featuring a true hero.”
When I had finished telling them the story of a lost and hunted prince spirited out of his country by a noble friend, they had no words except that every man jack hurried the braggart and the former member on their way out of the club room.
Afterward Trevor arrived and the room gave him a standing ovation, for it was not the first time I had made the company aware of what my friend had done for me. Trevor blushed and stammered as always before folding his lanky frame into a chair and accepting one of my best Cubans and a brandy. Never did Trevor pay for a thing he consumed in my shop or my club.
Nor ever would he.
“Say, do you repair pipes?” Clearly this was American. He was also the tallest, awkwardest man who had ever set foot in my shop. He pulled down a pair of blue leather goggles and revealed brilliant but clearly near-sighted blue eyes. His beard and hair were cornsilk yellow, somewhat darker than Trevor’s, but his tall frame and that familiar coloring created an odd attraction in me for the stranger. He juggled a very fine old amber and rosewood pipe and almost compounded the small crack in the bowl as it spurted out of his long fingers onto my counter. Happily I caught it and prevented further damage.
“I can easily mend this, sir, but are you certain you would not prefer a new one?” I waved at the good assortment I had on display. He followed my hand motion a little absent-mindedly but then snapped back to look straight into my eyes.
“Just got this one broke in,” he said laconically and gave me a lopsided grin, adjusting a pair of thick gold-rimmed spectacles into place and peering at me for a long moment. “You like my pipe and you want it for yourself, don’t you?”
It was my turn to smile. “It is a very fine pipe,” I admitted. “I have not seen finer. I have a small personal collection. I have not before today found a rosewood and amber I so much desired to add to it. What will you take for it?”
“I wouldn’t take gold for that pipe,” the fellow retorted, and I would have thought him rude if I had not already begun to like him so well. “You see this crooked tooth?” He proceeded to show me and I politely pretended to look. “I just got the pipe worn to the point where it fits that spot just so. Not for ready money would I part with that pipe. How long will it take you to repair it?”
“I can have it ready by three o’clock today,” I responded.
“Good. I must endure a whole evening’s singing by a dear friend of my wife’s tonight. I’ll need a pipe badly when the Phoebe-Bird’s done tweeting and I can go quietly back to the hotel.”
“The Phoebe-Bird?”
He looked as if he meant to leap across the counter and hug me. I took a step backward and he laughed, a great honest laugh that made me laugh as well.
“So you’ve never heard of Phoebe Moore? Never knew she’s ending a concert series just down the street tonight?”
“I confess I have not the means to attend live concerts, sir,” I admitted. Any money I earned went straight into stock or the club fittings.
“She could sell recordings, now couldn’t she?” The man mused in his eccentric way. “Wonder why Archie hasn’t thought of that one?” He gave me a narrow look. “Then I s’pose you’ve not heard of the celebrated composer and poet Alexander Mackenzie Campbell either, who is condemned to appear at that same closing concert? He must sit through the entire evening because he was fool enough to write one idiotic song she insists on closing every show with.”
I suppressed a smile. “I cannot say that I have, sir,” I responded soberly, though I was beginning to think that, just perhaps, I now had heard of that longsuffering poet.
“God bless you for that, sir. I shall return for my pipe at three promptly, and in the meantime shall miss it sorely.” He gave it a last fond caress and shambled out of the shop. I caught a glimpse of an enchanting lady, tiny and clad in royal blue. She was golden-haired and led three small children up to the gawky American outside the shop. She stretched up on tiptoe with clear blue eyes fixed on the homely giant as he leaned down. In front of all London she unashamedly kissed him.
I was just closing up the shop for the evening, only a little disappointed that a servant had come to pick up and pay for the rosewood and amber pipe. As I checked the lock on the front door an old-fashioned mail coach pulled up in front. Something struck me as very odd about it, though I couldn’t at first say what. London was a noisy city, but I realized this great coach and six had come up behind me without a sound. The driver hopped down from the box. He was a slim, wiry fellow with flaming red hair sticking out at all angles beneath a small scuffed brown bowler. His face was narrow and came almost to a point with his turned-up nose. Black, beady eyes swept over me and he slapped a whip trailing a foxtail from the handle against his over-the-knee spats. His clothing was a curious mix of equally scuffed olive and brown leather. A pair of leather and brass goggles dangled from his neck.
He pulled open the door of the mail coach and a woman stepped out. I had a very curious sensation that something was
very, very wrong about that door. One moment it was a wooden square, and the next it was round, made of brass, more like a ship’s hatch, and lined with golden velvet. The door closed and the woman approached me.
She was a gypsy beauty, tall, olive-complexioned, black curls escaping out of her veil. Her dress was of the most fashionable and expensive, a dark green brocade with sparkling silver beads and fringe. She held a parasol of green silk and fringe over her matching hat.
“I have the pleasure of addressing Prince Florizel of Bohemia, have I not?”
I had not been addressed in that way for some years. My customers knew me as “Florrie,” and some called me simply “the Bohemian,” but few these days knew anything of my past. I hesitated and the woman gave me a lovely, apologetic smile.
“I am Phoebe Moore-Campbell,” she hastened to explain. I could tell that she was American, but the stamp of a European polish marked her speech. “Please forgive me for accosting you on the public street, but I wish to make you a proposal. Oh, I beg your pardon. That sounded worse still.”
She had a musical laugh but I still could not get a sense of why she had spoken to me, or why her name sounded familiar to me.
“I am forming an association of people to investigate and try to put a stop to a criminal organization which I believe originates here in London but extends throughout the British Empire, if not beyond. I confess I have had to rely on secondary sources but I have heard great things about your commitment to fighting evil and seeking justice. May I beg the favor of an interview with you this evening? Unfortunately I have an engagement and must request you to meet my husband Archibald Campbell and me and some trusted friends rather late, at our suite in the penthouse apartments of the Bronze Cascade hotel. Will you please come and hear what we propose -- What I propose?”
“What is it that you think you know about me?” I could not make sense of a beautiful, wealthy woman inviting me to a penthouse in the premier hotel in London for a late tête-à-tête, to talk about fighting evil. It was more surreal than the fleeting image of a hatch where a mail coach door should be.
“I’m sorry, but my time is very short just now. I have tried for months to locate you, and have only just today succeeded. The other members of the group I propose to create are en route or are already here. Everyone else has been made aware of my plan. I truly wish to explain things more clearly to you, and then if you agree, to invite you to attend our first meeting as a formal association tomorrow. Can I count on you to come, please, and will you hear my plan?” the woman pleaded. “This is the most important thing I’ve ever done, and I pray God I have chosen the right people. I also pray that the right people will choose to pledge their help.”
If ever a woman who had no reason to be desperate still managed to communicate desperation, it was this woman.
“Very well,” I nodded. “But the hotel is not so far from here and the weather has been very pleasant. I shall walk. What time do you desire me to appear?”
“No, no, you cannot walk about London so late. Please. This mail coach will arrive at ten o’clock. Do not be frightened by it, please. It is perfectly safe.”
“Frightened by a mail coach?” I was once again hesitant. “Why would I be -- ?”
“I really must go.” She had been checking a little watch pin repeatedly. “I’m sorry to be so abrupt, indeed, I’m being inexcusably rude. Ten o’clock.” She whirled, the red-haired man opened the mail coach door, and she was gone. Literally, gone. The man climbed up to the box, cracked his whip, tipped his bowler to me, and the mail coach vaulted into the air and vanished.
I stood there staring into the sky until Frank, the little sidewalk sweeper, shuffled by me. “What’s comin’ down, Florrie?” he asked, squinting up after me. I tore my gaze down to the grimy, gray-clad creature.
“Nothing,” I said weakly. “It was what went up that I--” I stopped. “I just got lost in thought, I suppose. Good evening to you, Frank.”
I dined as usual at the little cafe around the corner from my shop. The time dragged on abominably while I wrestled with the strange meeting, the lovely woman and her odd request, and most of all, the disappearing mail coach into which I was supposed to trustingly step later this evening. I wavered between anxiety to know more, to understand what might be asked of me, and trepidation about what might happen when I did board the impossible conveyance to the hotel meeting. The fog swirled in and with it a nasty, soaking drizzle.
Shortly before ten o’clock I stood shivering outside my tobacconist shop, cursing my stupidity for being out in this beastly weather and absurdly watching for the mail coach to drop out of the sky. It simply drove down the street and halted in front of me, however, eerily silent as before.
“Oy, Princie,” the driver said with a tap of his whip against his bowler and a hop down to the ground. Before he could get to the door it opened, and instead of the lady I had met this afternoon, a very handsome, very young man stepped down and approached me.
His eyes were blue in a pale, delicately-featured face and his hair was a tousle of golden curls escaping from beneath a bizarre kind of bronze and leather top hat with a dark blue stone in the center of the bronze-plate band. He wore a close-fitted leather jacket trimmed with what seemed to be bronze plates like the hatband and outfitted with flared bronze shoulder-pieces. It resembled a suit of armor with a matching top-hat more than anything.
“Hold on just a tick, Prince.” The fellow kept walking toward me and I had to step clear of him. He stopped and looked around, puzzled, until he located me again. I had moved around behind him as I tried to get a peek at the bronze tablet in his long, finely-boned hands. From it emerged a soft, steady ticking occasionally broken by a hissing sound. “Need to get you into the official record.”
I looked at him quizzically. He grumbled something inaudible and fiddled with the device again. This time I stood in front of him, as he seemed to wish, and by lifting myself up on my toes and leaning slightly forward I clearly saw dials and a smooth, translucent surface set into the bronze, with ghostly clockwork gears and mechanisms visible inside.
The large blue stone on Twist’s hat suddenly went pale and translucent. To my astonishment I saw a faint image of my own face in the stone. It lasted just a moment and then the stone returned to its original dark blue.
“Done and done,” the little fellow said. “Oh, by the way, I’m Oliver Twist. It’s very wet, isn’t it? Will you step in?” He gestured toward the mail coach. The driver moved to open the door.
As I approached I looked closely and noted that the horses seemed a little too patient and perfectly matched, identical russet drays with thick white leg fringes and black manes and tails. In fact, they were completely motionless. I reached out and instead of a horse’s shoulder my hand encountered a smooth leathery and metallic surface. I pulled my hand back as if I had touched a hot stove.
“What is it?” I breathed.
“It’s an airship,” Oliver Twist explained. “I built it. Tod can control it from up there--” he indicated the box “ -- or I can work it from inside. I created the mail coach projection because when I keep it at ground level every traffic constable in the city stops it and asks what sort of license I have for the thing.”
“I do not understand.” I knew about airships, of course, in a general way, but what was this thing I was seeing? Twist hopped up inside, clearly at home in his creation. It was one thing to accept that I was about to enter an airship upon the reassurances of its builder. It was quite another to see this illusion of an everyday London sight and know that it did not exist.
The angelic little inventor poked his head out when I remained standing on the curb, staring into the coach door at a spacious, bronze and leather salon-like room complete with velvet curtains, sleek blue gasjets, and amber-tinted portholes spaced along the sides.
“Tomorrow we can show you a giant catfish that swam the Atlantic to get here,” Twist grinned at me. “Then you’ll think this is tame. Climb abo
ard. I promised Lady Phoebe I’d fetch you but I can’t if you won’t get in.”
“You’re enjoying this,” I gritted, grasping the handle of the coach door, as if it could reassure me that ordinary modes of transport still existed. I was doomed to disappointment, however, since the hatch of the airship felt nothing like the door of a mail coach. I couldn’t begin to describe the sensation of closing my hand around sleek, warm bronze, brushing alongside the quilted, velvet-padded hatch interior, and looking backward at a round, portholed entryway swinging shut with a soft tick of clockwork.
I seated myself next to the little inventor, who had gone back to working with his mysterious tablet. I had to suppress the violent urge to wrench open the portal and try one last time to touch an ordinary, rectangular wooden mail coach door. But a gentle hiss and a decided sense of thrust told me that the ground had suddenly become very far away.