—But sir, Mrs. Drake . . .
—Naturally I intend to visit my sister before I leave New Orleans. Though I confess I fail to see that whether I do so or not is any affair of yours. Father.
—Sir Thomas. I regret that I must inform you. Mrs. Drake is dead. Father St. Malo turned to his secretary as if to have him confirm this information or to solicit further details, though the provost of the Hôtel-Dieu, Dr. Legac, was a boyhood friend. The rector knew as much as anyone about the death, that morning, of the traitor Cuyahoga Drake’s wife.
—She suffered . . . she underwent a stroke, Sir Thomas. I am told that her end was swift and painless.
—Swift, perhaps, Sir Thomas said. Not painless. Oh, surely not.
—You have condolences of this house, sir, of the city, and of the whole Empire, I am sure.
Sir Thomas nodded. He took a handkerchief from his vest and dabbed at the corners of his eyes. Then he put the handkerchief away.
—Now I have less reason to tarry in this place than I had five minutes ago, he said.
He consulted his pocket watch, gold, fat as a biscuit, inscribed with tendrils and leaves that entwined the initials V.R.
—The storm may be here in an hour, he said, snapping the watch case shut. Time is short.
—I don’t understand.
—It isn’t necessary that you do.
—Do you not wish to see—? The, that is . . . the remains? And the arrangements, do you not—
—The arrangements have already been made. I made them by wire before I sailed from England, when it was made known to me that my sister might not survive.
—I see, the rector said. I suppose your work with engines has schooled you to be thorough in your plans.
—You satirize me.
—Not at all, I merely observe. . . .
—You exhibit considerable interest in my affairs, Father. I take it that when I leave New Orleans, you will be careful to report each of my least little actions and statements to the gossips of the town.
—You do me great injustice, Sir Thomas.
—When you do so, Father, make sure you do not fail to report my wishes for the disposition of the second set of remains.
—The second . . .?
—Say that I wish that the body of Henry Hudson Drake be strung up as food for kites and buzzards, and that crows peck out his eyes.
He took out his handkerchief again, and dabbed a fleck of saliva from his lips.
—Sir Thomas.
—Will you not take that down, Father? Will you not forget?
—No, sir.
—Don’t misquote me.
—I will not.
—Good, Sir Thomas said, turning toward the door. Now, take me to the boys.
7.
There was a fat white boy named Zebedee who sat on your head and broke wind into your mouth and nostrils, and a black boy named Hob Pistorus, all of whose modicum of unreasoning love was lavished on the shiv he had crafted from an iron bedslat. It could flay a live pig before the squeal was out the mouth, as he liked endlessly to repeat. Some of the so-called boys had rasp chins and hairy loins and were mean as Ohio keelmen. They drank themselves blind on cloudy stuff concocted from rainwater and sawdust, and boasted of having poisoned the predecessor of Father Dowd with rat bait. To the boys of St. Ignatius, Her Majesty the Queen-Empress was a fat, ancient she-toad who gaped from the wall with Jesus and Loyola as Father de Tant-Malodeur laid a whistling switch across their backs; her Empire was nothing more to them than the back of a constable’s hand, the gates of the debtor’s prison, the news that your father had succumbed to cholera with his entire troop in a cantonment on the Red River. Nonetheless the boys used the excuse of her betrayal by Cuyahoga Drake to plague the disgraced man’s sons with taunts, blows, and wretched tricks, and with constant allusions, enigmatic and stark, to ropes, neck bones, hangman’s hoods. Falling asleep at night, if it were not to be a fatal error, must be a work of forbearance and discipline; Jeff learned to distinguish and await the several snores and the varied nocturnal mutterings of every one of the twelve other boys who were locked into C Ward with him and Frank each night. After an early bad surprise from Zebedee Louch, Jeff schooled himself to tell the pattern of that boy’s imitation snore from the more erratic trend of his real one. And yet if Jeff had been on his own—if it had been either one of the Drake boys left alone with the toughs, cranks, and arabs of St. Ignatius—he might have suffered a much harder fate than, as befell Frank, encountering with the ball of his naked foot the soft dead rat that someone had placed in his boot or, in Jeff’s case, dwelling for an unbearable minute in the hot stench of Zebedee Louch’s crotch. Each brother scouted the other’s perimeters, stood picket on the other boy’s flank, kept vigil, whistling outside the shit-house, as the other underwent his lonely tribulations in the sweltering hell of the jakes. They had been assigned to bunks at opposite ends of C Ward, but every night, as soon as the porter snuffed the lamps, Frank would make his way down the long row of iron bed-steads and climb in to lie, tensed, listening to the darkness, alongside Jeff. This was an infraction punishable by a jaunt on the strapping horse. Frank was obliged to rouse himself every morning before light showed in the sky, and creep back in the half-light to his own bare bunk.
The brothers felt themselves and their behavior scrutinized by the priests with a greater than usual degree of intensity, and to the extent that they attempted to baffle or elude inspection they might well have been pleased had they known that the weekly reports on their conduct sent by the Fathers of St. Ignatius to the military tribunal at Sulla were replete with puzzled apologies. Though their conversations were indeed diligently monitored, both by the priests and by Hob Pistorus, the usually reliable C Ward telltale, neither of the Drake whelps was ever heard to make reference—not once—to their parents, let alone to any other conspirator, putative accomplice, or hitherto unknown plan of the mutineers. This all-but-inhuman regimen of silence was broken only on Monday mornings at nine, as if according to some privately evolved protocol on the treatment due prisoners of war, when the older brother would appear before Father de St. Malo, shoulders back, head high, and make what he termed a formal petition that he and his co-captive be permitted to visit their mother in hospital, a request that each week, for a different arbitrary reason, was always denied. Beyond this weekly ceremony, however, it was as if the fate and disposition of their imprisoned and ailing parents meant nothing to them at all.
It was Jeff who had recalled reading, in the Boys’ Own Paper, a ripping yarn, set in the time of Vortigern and Boadicea, in which shadowy druids spoke without speaking by means of a manual alphabet; it was Frank who had diagrammed their hands, assigning four letters to the tip, phalanges, and base of the thumb, five to each of the fingers, and Y and Z to the pair of knobby hinges at the heel of the palm. By this cumbersome, intimate means, lying beside each other on Jeff’s cot in the gray eternity of a night on C Ward, they communicated slow and feverish plans of escape, itemizing careful lists of necessary materiel, alternate routes, means of creating disruptions. With great difficulty they consolidated geographic information gleaned from other boys to sketch on the flats of their bellies a map of New Orleans, locating at the navel the Presbytère where their father languished and just under the left breast the mournful pile of the Hôtel-Dieu. Against the skin and bones of their hands the boys dwelt constantly, if never at great length, on the physical and emotional state of their mother, and speculated, with urgent jabs of their forefingers, on the chances of their father’s obtaining, and the likelihood of his accepting, the mercy of the court-martial. They remembered what they could of the history of Raleigh’s first acquittal, and attempted to derive a kind of grim comfort from the stoical grace with which earlier rebels of the frontier, Jackson and Crockett and Clay, had gone to their deaths. If the boys fell asleep too soon or too deeply, they knew, they would be set upon, and so each labored to keep the other awake, quizzing him on the colors and orders of Imperial
regiments; the stages, battles, and commanders of the great Yukon and Ohio campaigns; the names of dogs and horses their family had owned over the years; the genealogies of Morddens, MacAndrews, Evanses, and Drakes as far back as either could stretch them. They spoke and fretted and argued far into the stillness of the morning. They lay together on Jeff’s narrow cot, holding hands.
On the day when the dogfish shadow came snuffling over the housetops of the Vieux Carré, the Drake boys took the extreme liberty of appearing for morning inspection as they had slept, side by side, sitting on the younger boy’s bunk. This was grounds for caning but on this awful morning they sensed that for once they might be excused and if not then rules be damned and it would suit them to be caned. They had dressed themselves in the cadet’s uniform and the broad-cloth suit, laundered by Jeff and patched by Frank, in which the troop of Cajun Fusiliers had first dragged them onto the ward. Drawers, comb, stockings, and two suits of gray shoddy provided by the home lay rolled with regimental precision into a worn duffel on the floor.
The bolt was thrown back and the door to C Ward swung open. The brothers’ gazes remained fixed on the tall windows opposite the younger boy’s bunk. These windows overlooked the rector’s garden but years of salt breeze and soot and some inherent light-denying property of the glass precluded a view of anything but an ashy residue of the morning. Frank sat perfectly still; Jeff swung his skinny legs back and forth, making a swishing sound with the tips of his boots against the rough canvas top of the duffel.
—Franklin, Jefferson, said the rector. Sir Thomas is here.
Jeff started to look toward the doorway but felt or rather struck against his brother’s inertness, the inflexibility of his gaze on that impenetrable gray window. He stopped kicking at the duffel and just sat.
—He has come all the way from England to fetch you. That is far more than either of you deserves.
One of the boys snickered and Jeff could feel the steady hard examining stares of the others. The two men came down between the ranks of cots and stood before them. The black bulk of the uncle eclipsed the gray windows. His watch chain dangled before Jeff’s eyes. Frank had met the uncle a few times before, at Tir-Na-Nog, but Jeff only once, and that when Jeff was an infant in a dress. Frank said that their father and the uncle had quarreled, then, over the murder of John Brown by the Kansas Separatists. They had come to blows, and parted with rancor and finality.
—Nephews. It is hard to be so ill-met after so long a separation. Jeff’s right hand crept across the blanket of the bunk and sought the fingers of his brother’s left. They felt rough and cool and dry.
—Well, the rector demanded, have you nothing to say?
Have you? Jeff worked the words with his fingers against Frank’s.
Not to a Tory bastard like him.
—Well? said the rector again.
Jeff looked up into the bony florid face of his mother’s brother. The eyes were grave and held pity and fatigue. The lower lip of the mouth was like their mother’s, full and sorrowing. The sight of it, the memory of her, of his failure to kiss her that night in the coach, filled Jeff with an obscure anger.
—God save the Ohio Rebellion! he cried.
The boys of C Ward whistled and hooted and crowed. There was the whiz of a hornet at Jeff’s ear and then its sting. Jeff pitched forward and the hand he slapped to his temple came away shining with blood.
—Good heavens, the rector said.
The uncle caught hold of Jeff with his left hand, by the shoulder, and set him back upright on the bed, keeping a tight grip on him. He held out his big right hand, closed in a fist. The pale eyes were pink-rimmed, their whites stained yellow as if from exposure to some poisonous reagent or fumes.
—God save you, my boy, he said.
He opened the great white anemone of his hand, palm upward, revealing a smooth red stone.
—I assure you, Sir Thomas, the boy who threw that shall be punished, the rector said. None of them will eat today until he comes forward or is named.
There was a groan from the boys, and then silence. The rector worked at the silence with his glare and the twitching of his jaw. It would not give.
A damp cloth and a wad of bandage were found and applied to the jutting bone behind Jeff’s ear, and then the uncle applied a plaster. His ministrations were brusque but patient and in the care he took Jeff sensed or perhaps even remembered a vein of tenderness.
—On your feet, the uncle said, both of you.
They went out of C Ward for the last time, followed by the rector, and stood in the great echoing central stair. It seemed dark for this hour. Jeff looked up to the ceiling of the stairwell, where an iron-ribbed skylight generally let in a portion of the fair sky that mocked, or the foul one that suited, the unvarying gray weather of an orphan boy’s day. It was filled with something that Jeff took at first to be the shadow of the bell tower but which then moved—floated—to one side and seemed, ever so slightly somehow, to ripple.
The uncle’s hand lay heavy on Jeff’s shoulder.
—Let those boys not, he said to the rector, be punished for a display of patriotism, Father. I do not desire punishment.
The rector nodded. Then the uncle pushed Frank and Jeff toward the stairs.
—Up, boys, he said. We must hurry.
—Up? said Jeff.
He dug in his heels, gazing in uneasiness at the rippling shadow that filled the skylight. In spite of the gentle attention his cut had received, he felt a violent spasm of mistrust for the uncle now. Perhaps they were to be pushed from the roof, or thrown to a crowd of ruffians, or consigned to some unknown oubliette in the bell tower, like the poor little princes he remembered from his Lamb’s Shakespeare.
—We go up?
—Quite a considerable way, the uncle said. As a matter of fact.
8.
Though he was to observe and ship out in dozens of them during the course of his life and career—from the world-spanning, titanic Admiral Tobako f, with its concert hall and natatorium, to the worlds-spanning Lancet, hardly bigger than a racing scull, from the trim transpacific racer Gulf of Sinkiang to the sturdy, homely freight blimps of the Red Star line—Frank would never entirely lose the sense of melancholy majesty that stirred his heart when he first saw an airship, moored in the troubled sky a hundred feet above the St. Ignatius Boys’ Home. He was moved by her delicacy, by her massive silence, by the rich Britannic red of her silk gasbag. She was like a divot, bright as clay, cut into in the dull gray turf of the clouds. There was a wind in the southeast and she strained at the guy that moored her to the campanile, and once tossed her nose like a mare sniffing fire. An oblong car of silver and dark wood dangled from her underbelly, part Pullman sleeper, part clarinet, its windows haunted by dark mustached faces.
—The Tir-Na-Nog, Uncle Thomas said, as if she were a present he had brought along for his nephews. My own design.
He watched them watching his airship, pale eyes crinkling, face flushed. In the presence of the Tir-Na-Nog he seemed fonder of them; he draped his arms across their shoulders.
—There isn’t another like her in the world.
A hatch opened in the forebelly of the black gleaming gondola. Two of the mustached lascars peered out. One raised an inquiring hand and the uncle nodded, and taking his arm from Frank’s shoulders signaled, palm downward, twice. The blue-capped dark heads disappeared from the hatch and after a moment a large wicker basket dropped into sight and dangled, slowly falling.
Frank held his breath and pressed his lips together so hard they turned white. He suffered, with erotic intensity, from the signal passion of his age: engineering. He reverenced the men on whom was shed the peculiar glory of the second half of the century, when adventure went forth with gearbox, calipers, level, and chain. Thus he was mad to know the organization and capacity of the Tir-Na-Nog’s engines. He would gladly have indentured himself, for long years, to studying the system of cable, flap, and rudder that guided her, the science and finesse that r
egulation of her buoyancy and altitude required. He longed to subject his uncle to a close and niggling interrogation, as they had used to do on long July afternoons at Tir-Na-Nog, to draw fabulous facts and anecdotes out of Sir Thomas Mordden, pioneering aeronaut, penetrator of the trackless bush of the sky, deliverer, as the Illustrated London News had once phrased it, “of the key to making Britain the queen not merely of the land and sea but of all the vast empyrean girdle of the earth.” But gazing up at the wondrous contraption in the sky in which, most wondrous of all, he was now evidently to take ship, Frank maintained a silence as absolute as that of the Tir-Na-Nog herself. Their uncle invited them to marvel; Frank refused. He wanted, if momentarily, then with all his heart, to see their uncle punished. Frank knew that this was unjust of him, that his uncle could not be held responsible for things that had transpired and decisions taken while he was sequestered with his assistants in the famous Mordden Laboratories. Frank knew that in holding his tongue he was only punishing himself.
—Is that the one you flew in to Africa? Jeff said.
—No, I fear the Livingston was destroyed upon my arrival there, Uncle Thomas said. He smiled. Hacked to bits by the Mtabebe.
—Can we fly all the way to England in that? Without even stopping? How high will we go?
Frank applied a furtive knee to his brother’s bottom, hard. Jeff crumpled and then turned his traitor’s gaze to Frank. For an instant he looked angry, but the reproach in Frank’s eyes banked his fire and he rubbed at his backside with a sheepish air.
—We ain’t going anywhere, Frank said.
The basket scraped the tiled cornice, bounced against the galvanized tin of the roof, and settled. Uncle Thomas took hold of Jeff under the arms, and hoisted him over the side of the basket. Frank stood, fighting against the longing to fly. He would not abandon his mother. He would ensure that there remained at least one man in New Orleans, in the Louisiana Territory, in all the vast Crown Colony of Columbia, to mourn the death of Cuyahoga Drake.
—We shall make London easily, my boy, Uncle Thomas said, as if to Jeff. We could make it as far as Istanbul. The Mordden Mark III is a dreadfully efficient engine.