***
Young Edmond didn’t blink. His gaze didn’t rise above his own eye level as he approached his elderly friends. It was as though invisible reins held his pace to no more than a haunted jog. His eyes looked like they’d been lashed open. Red had never seen such a terrified expression on someone still able to move on his own.
“What did you see up there?” Red held on to the lad’s needy embrace around his waist, and glanced up to the treetop and the roving airship beam.
“Two fell. One stuck up there. I-I saw the other...b-break.”
“It’s all right.” Angharad crouched to comfort Edmond, touched foreheads with him. “You’re safe with us, sunshine. We’ll figure out what to do. These eons of experience between us should come in handy for something. What do you say?”
Lovely woman, thought Red. Flinty to a fault, but a real corker when the chips are down.
“I saw...a woman land...on top. She screamed. I think she’s badly hurt.”
“And the spotlight? Did you see it before or after the window smashed?”
“B-before. It shone as they fell.”
Angharad looked up at Red. “Sounds like it wasn’t an accident. They wouldn’t have had time to switch the spotlight on if someone had just fallen overboard. My guess is someone tried to desert, to climb down a rope or a line dangling from the ship. The spotlight was switched on to find out who it was—”
“And they sent someone down after her,” he said.
“And the rope broke,” they both finished together.
Joe, having heard every word, now sprang to life, throwing his overcoat off and buttoning up his smart blue tunic. “We need to find out who that is up there—the woman and the airship. Angharad, take Edmond somewhere safe, somewhere close by but safe.”
“Aye.”
However unpalatable it felt to have the boy he’d gotten so close to wrenched away, Red knew old Joe was right. A decorated officer in the fusiliers, DiStepano possessed a decisive streak as firm as a second spine. Angharad rushed Edmond to the caretaker’s cabin under the scaffold, kicked the door in and ushered him inside. Good thinking.
Meanwhile, Reggie mentioned rigging the steam-powered crane to reach the fallen man. While it couldn’t reach the woman in the upper branches, the man might still be alive.
“I’d be very surprised. You heard the crack when he hit the last branch. That was most likely his back snapping.” And Red sensed they didn’t have long to dither. He crossed the cobblestone to gain a better vantage and then yelled up to the treetop, “Anyone alive up there?”
“Yes. Yes. Alive. You have to help me!”
Definitely a woman. But as he couldn’t see her, that meant she was either trapped in the foliage or she had a serious injury—both would prevent her peering down at her rescuers.
“Who are you?”
“Alison Raw—all.” A howl of wind pierced her surname. “Midshipman aboard the Queen Vic.”
“What happened? How did you fall?”
“Oh, Christ, does it matter? They’re trying to kill me. For the love of God, they can’t let me live. I—who are you?”
“Red Mulqueen and friends, retired veterans of the armed forces.”
“Help me, Red M—een! I have urgent dispatches for a member of the Admiralty.”
“Who is it?” The name she gave would be crucial—it would tell him where her loyalties lay.
After a significant pause, “Viscount Faversham, Salisbury.”
Good girl. He didn’t need time to reflect—Faversham was sympathetic to the rebel cause and a prominent figure on Red’s list of contacts in England. “Hold tight, Alison! We’re coming up.”
He’d already made up his mind what he was going to do before Joe rattled off a quick-fire appraisal of their options. “The crane needs refuelling—that’ll take time, and it won’t reach but half way. The scaffolds either side are too far away. I reckon the riggers used roof harnesses to decorate the top of the tree like that, but we don’t have ’em. The only way we’re getting up there is to climb.”
“Already on it, old boy,” said Red.
Joe pressed a spidery hand to Red’s chest, halted him. “You’re not going.” He looked down at his clockwork leg. “That thing’d seize up before you got gibbet-high, then we’d have to haul you down as well. No, I’ll go get help.”
“I’m climbing, Joe.”
“The hell you are.”
Red gripped the old fusilier by his lapels. “Listen, that woman up there is a courier. She’s an agent for my organisation, and she’s a friend to us. Believe me, if the information she’s carrying is as sensitive as I think it is, the emporium is about to receive some very unwelcome guests. Buy me some time, Joe. Can you do that? But whatever happens, I’m making this climb?”
“And if you make it up there, what then?”
“Let me worry about that. Rope has plenty of uses. Just keep Edmond safe, and don’t let anyone near this tree. Anyone. You understand?”
Joe pursed his thick lips, gazed up to the frantic yellow beam lashing through the heavy snowfall. “I’ve got you, brother. Go rescue your damsel. The emporium is ours.” He dashed away to the others, pointing his one arm hither and thither.
Reggie fetched two coils of rigging rope from a pile over by the hot air balloon basket—the same basket used by Phileas Fogg himself during his famous circumnavigation. He slung them over Red’s shoulders, then shook his hand. “Good luck, guv’. Make sure you tie ’em onto somethin’ that’s got guts.”
“Thanks, Reggie. Keep any intruders busy for me, will you?”
“Gotcha covered there, guv’. Joe and Angie have a plan already.”
Red sucked in a livid breath, then a long, cool, stuttery one as he surveyed the dense, bristly tangle awaiting him. While the bottommost branches appeared sturdy enough, swirls of snow and jiving limbs would make the upper part of the climb far more treacherous. He made his mind up to stay near to the trunk as far as possible.
“All right, Red, let’s see what this leg of yours can really do,” he whispered. After a quick salute to the caretaker’s cabin, where he knew young Edmond would be watching every step of this crazy ascent—he couldn’t let the lad down now—he steeled the squirrel in his chest and fought through the first sharp curtain of pine needles.
A ladder led him up from the soil trough to the first branch. His eye adjusted to the darkness in no time. Climbing with one leg proved tricky at first, but quickly became swift and methodical. It was a clockwork rhythm for a clockwork tool. He stiffened the brass joint for each upward step, giving his natural leg a crutch to climb with, then loosened it so he could lift the limp appendage with him. By focusing on this simple procedure, he found he could overcome any obstacle, provided he took his time.
As he reached roughly a third of the way up, Alison’s voice floated down through the inner branches. It sounded much nearer, and reverberated in his ears. “I can hear someone climbing,” she called. “Is that you, Red?”
“Yes, it is. What injuries have you got, Alison?”
“Both legs broken. One shoulder damaged, maybe dislocated. Maybe a couple of cracked ribs. And it feels like I’ve gashed my back on something sharp. I’m a wreck, Red. There’s nothing for it—no way I’ll make it down in one piece. I’m a goner.”
“Nonsense. Just keep talking, love. I’ve enough rope here to scale Mount Everest. I’ll get you down.” He rested a few beats, gathered his breath. “Tell me what happened up there, Alison. Who are we up against?” Not that it mattered much now—he could never turn back, not with such a sweet, forlorn voice beckoning.
“Acting Captain Abercrombie, little more than a jumped-up lieutenant but ambitious as they come. Our captain by-rights, Agnew, is terminal sick in his cabin—some kind of dagoe malady. Abercrombie received a wireless coded message from the Leviacrum not long since, informing him the Queen Vic was carrying rebel dispatches from Gibraltar. I overheard him reading it to his second-in-command. Everyone on
board knew I was the only one who’d come from the Rock, so I dropped a line sharpish and aimed for the roof. Those idiots sent a man after me, without gloves. He slipped and hit me. Next thing I knew, we were both through the glass and shattered. Pathetic attempt at a getaway, eh?”
“You did what you had to, ma’am. Your dispatches concern the Atlas Club?”
“Why, yes—how did you—”
“Never mind that. Let’s just say I’ve been working hard to expose that secret society. It’s honeycombed the Leviacrum Council so thoroughly, there’s no difference between the two any more. The Atlas Club has also suborned its share of peers and industrialists in Britain, but not, I hazard, too many that it is beyond being brought to task by Whitehall. Not yet anyway. With assistance, perhaps with the evidence you possess, Viscount Faversham can help turn the tide. Nothing is more important in London right now. The Leviacrum Council cannot be allowed to go on unopposed.”
“How do you know all this? Mulqueen, is it? Why have I never heard of—”
Crack! Crack!
The first gunshots shattered remnant glass shards in the upper foliage and ricocheted down through the tree. Red gripped the trunk, ducked under a fat orange-brown branch. “Alison! Are you all right?”
“Still here, Red. They must be desperate. I’m under a few broken branches, flimsy cover, but it’s camouflage. They can’t see me.”
“They’re firing blind?”
“Yes.”
Christ. She must have the goods on some prime Atlas members. I need to get her away from here at all costs. Her and...the letter to Faversham.
“Hurry, Red! One unlucky shot and I’m done. Hell. They’re circling back. What’s taking you so long?”
He vaulted up the next half dozen branches without using his mechanical crutch at all, instead pulling himself up by anything his hands could grip. Pinecones dug into his palms, needles slid inside his sleeves and his collar and shook from his hair whenever he jerked himself up.
Crack! Crack!
“Alison?”
“Red, are you all right? I can here clanging. What have you got there?”
No use fibbing. “Something to help me climb—the strongest leg you ever saw.”
“Did you say leg?”
“I said hang on. It’s not far now.”