Imperial Clock

CHAPTER Seventeen

Sisters



At the first glimpse of Mrs. Van Persie inching onto the front step, shawl hanging from her fist, not even bothering to close the door behind her, Meredith knew something was amiss. She asked Kingsley and the remaining gamblers—Nickson and Mears were recovering in the hospital—to stay put in their taxi a moment.

The housekeeper saw her and sprang to life. “Miss Meredith, Miss Meredith, come quick!”

“What’s the matter?”

“It’s Miss Sonja, she’s—oh, you’d best speak to the doctor. It’s...it’s too upsetting.” The old woman’s shawl now doubled for a handkerchief over her mouth to hide how shaken she was—but Meredith knew, saw it her chalky pallor, how unsteadily she negotiated the steps, her hunched posture as though she’d spent hours bent over something...or someone.

Sonja.

The memory of Mother’s final days, a slow, insensible slipping away from the vibrant woman she’d always been, haunted Meredith as she looked up to the bedroom window. A hundred alien aches she’d buried long ago now sloughed her adult skin and bared the raw, core-sensitive nerves of childhood. Every inch of her felt tender, woundable. She started a walk down a garden path to a door and a house from a dream, and watched herself walking, wondering why she didn’t turn and run, why the garden path seemed to have always been here, unchanged, waiting for her to return on days like this she couldn’t escape from.

Mother had died on a Tuesday. The paving stones had been wet then. They were wet again today.

“Miss McEwan, is anything the matter?” Kingsley called after her.

“Is anything the matter?” she repeated to no one in particular. And to Mrs. Van Persie, “Does Mr. Auric know?”

“No, miss. I tried telephoning him back but there was no reply. That’s where we thought you were. What without your car and all...”

Meredith didn’t know why that snapped her from her funk but it did, as though some malign force had pointed its finger at her, blaming her for whatever had happened, whatever was yet to happen. She hated the accusation but there was truth in it. The awful turn of events last night had been partly her doing. She spoke over her shoulder, almost on the run into the house, “Kingsley, fetch Derek Auric at once, please—from his home, from the hospital, wherever he is. It’s urgent.”

“Aye. What shall I tell him?”

Mrs. Van Persie replied, “Tell him Miss Sonja’s taken a very bad turn after her car overturned. She was out in the storm for Lord knows how long last night. Old Joe Berwick found her in his field, managed to revive her and bring her here, but she wouldn’t stop shivering. The fever got worse and worse, and we did everything we could, but...” There the story choked her, and Meredith couldn’t wait any longer. She bolted upstairs into the master bedroom and found Dr. Marsan in his shirt-sleeves, measuring out a tincture of medicine and tipping it past Sonja’s quivering blue lips.

“What have you to say, doctor?” The words somehow came out accusingly, quite by accident.

Marsan, a wiry middle-aged man with a mop of blond hair and piercing blue eyes, sighed, set his instruments on the bedside table, and ushered Meredith onto the landing. “I wish I had better news. I’ve done all I can for now but she was exposed to the elements for such a long time, and the elements were so unforgiving last night, it’s a wonder she’s lasted as long as she has.”

She gripped his arm. “Doctor, what are you saying?”

“Sonja always was a strong girl—” He delicately undid her grasp, “—but this makes two bouts of extreme exposure in a matter of weeks. First the Lake District—”

“But she recovered from that.”

“Superficially she did, but it won’t have done her constitution any favours. We don’t know how much it weakened her system. Yet even without that, last night’s ordeal would likely still have had this effect. You see, the water on her lungs impaired her breathing quite severely. Joe Berwick revived her, yes, and I’ve managed to drain the last of the fluid, but the infection has taken hold. It’s as vicious as I’ve ever seen. She’s fighting it—you know what a stubborn little fighter she is—but I have to be honest here, Meredith—I don’t expect her to last through the night.”

Somewhere a clock was ticking, then Sonja coughed a horrible cough, and time seemed to disappear from the house.

“Maybe if we’d found her sooner,” Marsan added.

“She can fight it off. Like you say, she’s stubborn.”

He put his arm around her. “She is. As strong a girl as I’ve known. It’s a miracle she made it through last night—really, a miracle. That’s a bona fide will to live. But even the strongest will in the world can only achieve so much. Once an infection takes a hold of the body...”

“What can I do? There has to be something I can do. Anything. Doctor, I swear, I’ll do anything.”

“Meredith—”

“The Leviacrum! This is the age of newfangled science, isn’t it? There’s nothing they can’t do there. A fresh medicine. A new treatment. They’ll have to know. What if I telephoned—no, no, I could fly there and be back before tonight. Yes, I could hire an aerogypsy, something fast—I haven’t touched this week’s allowance yet. They’ll help me, won’t they? I mean they can do anything in that tower. Can’t they?”

“I’d like to say they can help, truly. But I read their medical journals and I’m afraid there’s nothing to fight this kind of infection once it’s taken hold. I’m sorry, Meredith.”

“But they might not have published it? There’s a hell of a lot they don’t make public, you know.” Shaking some sense into him seemed the only way to open his mind to a solution, but he merely rode out her assault, polite and resolute. “Don’t you know?”

He did know. Knew what she didn’t, and the longer he held her, whispering, doing his best to reassure, the more she let go of her desperate fantasies. She gasped. Sonja was in God’s hands now, breaths away from Mother, slipping into that mapless place where Meredith couldn’t follow.

“The best things we can do for her are keep her comfortable—I’ll show you how—and have someone at her side at all times. She might be delirious with fever, but on some level she may be aware she has loving company. I know I would want a loved one by my side...when the time comes. Will you do that for her?”

When the time comes...

“You know I will.”

“I know.”

“And let anyone try and stop me.”

“That’s my girl. I’ll be back in a few hours to see how she’s faring. In the meantime, this is what I’d like you to do...”



***



Derek stopped the car so abruptly it skidded a one-eighty on the muddy lane and finished so close to the stone wall his door wouldn’t open more than a few inches, so he clambered out through the passenger side, realising he hadn’t switched the steam engine off. To hell with it. He rushed through the hot vapour cloud and slid partway up the paved path—the soles of his boots were still slick with oil from the dockyard. Rather than stop to take them off or ruin the carpet inside he wrestled them off on the hop, tossed them under an upended wheelbarrow against the wall of the house, and let himself in.

Kingsley had stressed the urgency of this summons, but hadn’t known much more than Sonja was very ill, she’d been in some sort of car accident last night, and the housekeeper, Mrs. Van Persie, was in a state. Enough to incite Derek to commandeer the harbourmaster’s car and eat the miles to Southsea in quite phenomenal time—time spent out of his mind, very nearly to the detriment of umpteen pedestrians and cyclists along the way.

But why, oh why had he been so far away? No one had seen in which direction Sonja had driven away last night, true, but his assumption after Mrs. Van Persie had claimed to know nothing over the telephone was so wrongheaded it now made him shiver with shame. A wonder the errant Kingsley had found him at all! Derek had checked every waiting room at the nearest two train stations, those at the airship docking towers at Portsmouth harbour, not to mention the passenger steam-ships, the yachts, even one or two freighters she might conceivably try to stow away on during her rash escape. In hindsight he ought to have come straight here, waited here for word from her.

“Meredith, how is she?” By now he had to gasp to gain a full breath. “I came as soon as I heard. Is she—” The colour of alabaster, trembling head to toe under assault from a shocking fever. A film of perspiration, fed by fresh drips forming before his very eyes, covered every inch of exposed skin. If any more needed to be said, Meredith’s wounded pink face, puffy and damp with tears, ended his initial concern and thrust him headlong into a world of heart-thudding dread.

He knelt at Sonja’s side, lifted her warm hand to his cheek, kissed her engagement ring. “What happened? How long has she been like this?”

“How should I know? Since the middle of the night? All I know is she’s getting worse and worse, and there’s nothing we can do. The doctor...he doesn’t think she can win.”

“Eh? But she has to.” He froze. Watched Meredith like he’d never watched anyone before, clinging to her grim, stoic intensity as a life-belt to keep him in this time, this place, and out of that one, one in which his heart would die. He felt a dizzying weight back up in his mind until for a moment he wasn’t here at all, he was a hundred feet off the ground in the wicker car of a hot air balloon, and Sonja was in his arms, telling him how the world worked through her eyes. A memory he would cherish forever. The weight left him and he could no longer look at Meredith. He leaned over Sonja, close enough to feel the heat from her burning cheek. “Do you hear me, darling? You have to. Please don’t leave me.”

He whispered a prayer that lasted until the doctor returned, and after that he sat on a chair Meredith brought him, watching over his love until the streetlamps replaced the sun and the smell of toasted cheese—the Van Persies at supper—faded into a cast away world of bitter linctuses and far-off yesterdays.

Meredith hardly left her sister’s side either. Neither she nor Derek spoke to one another. Instead she read an old, cork-bound children’s book by candlelight through most of the night. She read it at a whisper on Sonja’s pillow when Derek was still in the room, aloud whenever he left the room, and silently to herself while he took his turn attending to Sonja. It was a strange interplay at work between him and Meredith, strange and yet somehow completely natural, for they’d emptied of themselves and were there only because they loved the same girl. Words were not necessary. Only being there mattered.

Late in the night, he left for the kitchen to make hot toddies for them both. On the way back he fetched a blanket for Meredith from the next bedroom. He stopped on the landing when he heard her sobbing. But not ordinary sobs. She was reading at the same time, presumably from the same book she’d been reading all along, with such determination, almost a religious fervour, he hadn’t the heart to interrupt. It sounded as though a child was reading a bedtime story in defiance of something its parents had said, willing the fantastical into the real world; it wasn’t just a story, it really meant something. So he listened.

At the end of every chapter was a short verse, a refrain that illustrated a theme of the book’s adventure. Despite her voice breaking, Meredith read, “A Perfect Web:



Could it be

An accident of physics like the coin that lands erect?

The wave that swells a hundred feet? The lives that intersect?

By happenchance, are miracles the follies of design,

Or are they peeks at other realms? Or glints of the divine?



For what can spin a perfect web a thousand feet below—

A grand arachnid masterpiece where ne’er a light will glow?

And why would evolution bid its artist quickly die,

To weave a silken wonderment and darkly know not why?”



He breezed in as she turned the page, knowing it would stop her reading aloud—and if he listened to any more he might not be able to hold back his own tears. He handed her the hot drink and the blanket.

“Thank you,” were her first words to him since the sun had set. She set the book on her lap, slung the blanket over her shoulders, and appeared to study him between sips of her toddy. Her lips half formed words that never escaped, as though she was torn between wanting to tell him something and clinging to her stubborn silence.

Derek had no such compunction, not when the girl he loved might be listening in, from however deep a well; she would want them to talk, to at least make an effort to become friends. “Have you recovered from your injuries, Meredith? I heard you took a few knocks last night.”

“It was nothing, just trampled, kicked around a little. I’m all mended now. And you?”

“Same here. They told me I was out cold for twenty minutes. But I was right as rain after that, the moment I came to, apart from a humdinger of a headache.”

“And the others?”

“Let me see. Father had a nasty spill, suffered a concussion. They kept him in as a precaution, though he was none the worse when I left him. He’s a tough old cat. Uncle Rufus suffered a couple of cracked ribs—deserved more, if you ask me. He’s got a lot to answer for. Then there were three or four who needed multiple stitches. Brunnie’s friends copped the worst of it, I think. The rest were either bruised or shaken up. Kingsley told me a couple of his friends are still in the hospital?”

“Yes, Nickson still hadn’t come round when we left him. That was this morning, though—I mean yesterday morning—so he’s likely awake by now. I’ll telephone at first light. Then Mears, poor lad, suffered two breaks.”

“Two? My word.”

“Wrist and hip. He fell awkwardly on his side, screamed when he tried to walk it off.”

“I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.”

“Me neither.”

Derek leaned in close to Sonja, dabbed her brow with a damp cloth as she turned her head toward him. “She isn’t shivering as much. Her breathing seems a little easier. What do you think?”

After taking her sister’s temperature with the thermometer, Meredith grimaced. “She’s worse, not better. Oh, Sonja, you have to fight harder than this.” She settled her own head on the pillow beside her. “If you can hear us at all, I want you hit this thing with everything you’ve got. Every cannon, you know, a triple-deck broadside—no, what’s that other one...rake...I want you to rake it for us, mean as you can. Derek’s right here. Here’s been here all the time, and he wants you to fight with all you’ve got. Do you hear me? Don’t you dare give in to this thing. Father’s on his way home, so is Aunt Lily. They’ll be here for your big day, and it’s going to be the biggest wedding Southsea has ever seen. Sorensen cousins not invited, of course. But we’ll all be there, cheering you on, and when you reach that altar, you can bet Mother will be watching too.”

Meredith sat up, mouthed a prayer, then returned to reading her book, leaving Derek alone in his grief once again. An uncommon tiredness came over him as he watched the candlelight waver across Sonja’s ivory locks, subtly pulse over half her face, as if tugging at the shadow half, trying to rouse life from it. He watched until his eyelids grew heavy, then he laid his head beside her and clasped her hand to his cheek. Her fingers stirred, giving him hope. Then she was still again. Soon the fever raged more ferociously than ever, and all he could do was listen...listen to life leaving her...to those ragged drum-roll breaths...to death taking her...

And above it all, those busy, muttered lines from a children’s book nagged and mithered and pestered death, not giving it a moment’s peace, getting under its skin, insisting beyond reason that now was not the time.