Imperial Clock

CHAPTER Two

Dark Salt



They crept around the exterior of the north wing by the brilliant light of a gibbous moon, peering in through every open window. Pale servants scurried hither and thither fetching blankets and smelling salts and jugs of water and other cautionary measures to the drawing room, where the vanquished cousins were no doubt licking their wounds, milking the attention.

Boo-hoo! What a to-do. Partygoers invaded by the score to enquire after the trollops—ooh, what a horrible reaction to insect bites—my word, they’d never seen the like this time of year—ah, at least there was no swelling—it was likely shock that rendered them mute for the present—cluck-cluck, cluck-cluck, etcetera. Meredith and Sonja hadn’t had such a fuss made over them three years ago, and they’d been much younger, genuinely inconsolable.

“Father will be all right, won’t he?” Her young sister’s concern made Meredith swallow too, but she didn’t want to dwell on it. This victory was still too raw, too invigorating. The end of an era. Let her have this one night to celebrate without repercussion—the consequences could roll over her tomorrow and forever on for all she cared.

A sugary rush gummed her insides and left her tingly. Warm tears welled in her eyes. The resulting shiver filled her with sublime satisfaction, as though the world could end right now and she could happily make her peace.

“Ah, there you are, Miss McEwans...Misses McEwan...I mean Miss and Miss McEwan.” The boy stopped blathering long enough to hang his head in shame. “Someone please kill me now,” he muttered into his bowtie.

“Gladly.” Meredith went to wipe her eyes with the heels of her hands, but Sonja stopped her in time.

“One prick is all it takes, remember.” Sonja unclasped both their bracelets, then carried them carefully, one in each hand, between forefinger and thumb. She rolled her eyes at the boy’s awkwardness. “William, may I introduce my sister, Meredith. Meredith, this is William Elgin, our silent accomplice.”

“Charmed.” It might have been easier to mask her impatience had the lad possessed the manners to acknowledge her in any way at all. Instead he simply gawped, his broad masculine face bunched into a disoriented scowl, as though he were a rugby player stuck with the ball and had no recollection of what he should be doing with it. “Well, do you speak or don’t you?”

“Sshh.” Sonja elbowed her. “Don’t be evil. He’s a bit shy around you.”

“We’re obliged to you for your assistance, Mr. Elgin.” Mister? Master? It was hard to tell his exact age in the moonlight—he could be anything from a grizzled thirteen to an impish eighteen. “Tell me—I’m curious—have you some personal grudge against the Sorensen cousins? Being the professor’s ward, I wouldn’t have thought you’d want to side with a couple of strangers against his nieces like that.”

“They ‘ad it comin’. I were after makin’—” He checked himself, straightened his slouch, and looked down at his hands in his pockets. “I mean they had it coming. I wanted to make up for something that happened a while back.”

The lad’s cryptic answer intrigued her, made her want to quiz him some more. His successful attempt to switch accents, from broad Lancashire to neutral Queen’s English, was also surprising. He might be a pauper playing at a prince, but he seemed to be caught in two minds: defy his stuffy new guise—by keeping his hands in his pockets—or try to impress her and Sonja.

Meredith liked the idea that he didn’t belong here, or anywhere else for that matter. It made him a puzzle, as no doubt she and her sister were to him. “I see. Walk with us then, Mister Elgin.”

Sonja cocked an eyebrow in surprise at the invitation. “This has to be the strangest night Niflheim has ever seen. I can’t wait to see what happens next. So what’s the news, William?”

He walked behind them at first, but when Meredith swivelled her head to glance back one way, then the other, mocking his reserve, he soon scurried to Sonja’s side. A predictable choice—he was clearly less intimidated by her.

“The professors are chewing the furniture a mile a minute,” he said, making them both chuckle. It seemed to egg him on. “They all twigged who did it, quick as shit off a shov—I mean quick as lightning. Sorry.”

“Ha! Shit off a shovel—that’s good. I like that.” Sonja was never this relaxed around strangers, let alone young men. But she seemed pally rather than smitten with him. She was talking and behaving in exactly the manner she did with her big sister.

William snorted. “But it don’t seem right when girls swear.” The Lancashire accent again. He looked across to Meredith. “You know I have not heard anyone else swear since...since Tangeni left.” Back to Queen’s English. Hmm, a pattern was emerging.

“Who’s Tangeni?” she asked. The name was vaguely familiar.

“My friend—I mean our friend from...from Africa. Used to be in the British Air Corps stationed in West and Central Africa. He visits us now and then. A right good bloke, Tangeni. I’ve learned a lot from him.” He shut his eyes, puckered his lips and mouthed the word shit to himself. “Sorry, did I say Tangeni. I meant Simeon. Don’t listen to me.”

Cagier and cagier.

“It’s okay. We’re none of us in our right minds tonight. We’d be automatons if we were. Right, Merry?”

“True. So how did they wrong you, William? The cousins, I mean. You said you were getting even with them for something that happened. Pray tell.” If it were juicy enough, it might complete her sense of victory tonight.

“I can’t tell you everythin’. Let’s just say they made me do the worst thing I’ve ever done, an’ I’ve hated ‘em ever since.”

“Um, I think you mentioned it to me a couple of days ago, William.” Sonja didn’t sound too sure.

“No, no I didn’t. I could never. See, they used me for their own ends—even they don’t know how I did it, only that I did it. An’ I’ll never say any more than that on the subject.”

He didn’t, and they barely shared more than a stray word during the remainder of their circumnavigation of the house.

Though the season of perpetual night hadn’t yet arrived, Niflheim saw no more than a few hours of full sunlight in the day. The presiding twilight, darker than what was commonly referred to as the gloaming in Britain but just as magical, silhouetted the mountain peaks and the steep walls of the fjords, while spreading a dusky cloak of almost-colour over the lake and sloping countryside below the Sorensen Estate. A niggling breeze spread the scents of awakened flowers over the now empty garden. Guests had retired inside, no doubt overcome by the shocking events.

As they passed the servants clearing the supper buffet from the circular tracks in the centre of the garden, Sonja stopped. Hunched her shoulders. She hooked Meredith and William by the arms and hurried them to one side. “Quick, hide! It’s Father...and the professor. They’re on the hunt.”

“Those bushes at the far end, behind the fountain.” William pointed the way, while Meredith and Sonja hiked their dresses a few inches in order to run with him. It felt absurd to be fleeing from the inevitable, but Sonja giggled in her brash, infectious manner, and it was suddenly the perfect capper to an altogether satisfying evening. Hiding from the finger pointing and wagging tongues. Ha! Let them cluck.

They’d almost descended the shallow slope which led to the fountain and the site of phase one—had only minutes passed since then?—when a strong gust hit her full in the face. A few specks of dust lodged in Meredith’s eyes. Sharp, annoying. She stopped to rub them out. Vinegary tears leaked down her cheeks as she blinked and rubbed and then peeled at her eyelids.

“What...what on Earth is that?”

“Eh?” Meredith heard only the high-pitched caws of seabirds over a distant rumble. She blinked like crazy, finally accepting William’s handkerchief to gouge the pesky bits out once and for all. “Much obliged. Thank you.” She went to hand it back but he wasn’t there. He’d stepped away and now appeared transfixed by...something out to sea. They both did.

Another gust hit as Meredith looked. She shielded her face, but through her fingers the population of stars began to diminish...rapidly, as though they were being swallowed from beneath.

What in God’s name?

The rumble grew to a bellowing roar—partly a ferocious wind, partly the crashing of terrific waves thrust up by the sea. She shouted to her sister but the words were lost to the furore. All at once a dark swell lifted behind the walls of the fjord and continued to rise, as though the ocean bed itself was being flung up from its roots, toward the heavens.

The wind threw her off her feet, the impact kicking her head back, enough to see the projection screen ripped from its tethers and thrashed away by vicious gusts into the night sky. She looked ahead and instantly froze on the grass, mouth open to the blasts of sea air.

Her gaze lifted with the colossal surge that scaled the fjord walls. But it hadn’t reached land yet. The monstrous wave was still out to sea and gaining height! She thought she saw someone fall out of a tree to her left. She crabbed backward up the slope. The urge to escape blanked every other thought from her mind.

Father plucked her up and squeezed her against him as he made back for the house. She peered over his shoulder in horror as the giant wave piled above the highest peak. It blackened all twilight and moonlight from the bay. A thousand feet and more and still it rose, finally crashing over the shoulders of the fjord cliffs and wiping out unreachable forests at high altitude.

It climbed higher yet as it approached shore, its spumy summit curling tonnes with the teetering promise of an avalanche. The black wall summoned all remaining water before it to feed a final towering surge of Biblical proportions. It dragged a fishing fleet from its berth before dashing the vessels to kindling. The wave leaned and toppled and collapsed—an incalculable explosion of breaking water—onto the village.

The crash shook the ground, forced Meredith to slap her palms against her ears. Niflheim burst into a cloud of roaring white. Its watery shrapnel bombarded the hillside and the garden. Father set her down and shielded her from the onslaught. William rushed to her defence as well, and she cringed as the massive drops thudded onto their backs. Meanwhile, Professor Sorensen protected Sonja in the same manner. They all crouched together and waited, prayed, not daring to look up. Not until the deluge slackened.

The worst eventually passed as driving winds dispelled the drizzle away to the west, but the thunderous new tide hadn’t even begun to settle. It heaved and sloshed its way up ridges and hillsides, then collapsed back on itself with the added tonnage of accumulated debris—rocks, trees, houses, boats.

Father had to shout to be heard. “Are you hurt, love?” He grabbed Meredith’s shoulders and peered into her gaze.

“N-no. I’m...”

He gave her a quick squeeze, then saw to Sonja. Meredith glanced all around her, trying to remember where she was, what part she’d played in the end of the world. Then she spied the used-to-be valley below, where upturned hulls rocked and glistened in the moonlight on the wild undulating sea. Broken rooftops and loose forests swam about and collided in the frothy cauldron. Waves continued to break ashore where there was no shore—on low mountain passes, against wrecked barns and farmhouses, on the bare crowns of besieged hillocks.

She shrank from her memory of the dark rising surge. Too big, too monstrous to comprehend. Her mind couldn’t think past the cold and the sure-to-be nightmare images and noises of the tidal wave. But why hadn’t it taken her? Sonja? Father? The last thought she’d had before the rain was of the sea swallowing the earth. But it had only swallowed the valley below.

She gasped. Had the walls of the nearest cliff not guided the wave, it would have broken over her as well, over Sonja and Father and the entire Sorensen estate. Washed them away like sheaves of wheat, as it had the village and the fishing fleet below.

God had spared them this night. He had wrought the rock cliffs into their specific shape for this purpose alone—to spare the McEwans. Of that she had no doubt.

Death. So that was what it tasted like.

Dark salt. An ant’s eye view of a mounting ocean.



Men waded out to see the shocking flood. Women screamed and fainted on the lawn which was still awash up to shin-height. A few of them had to be saved from drowning. Sonja had no words to describe the enormity of what had just happened—indeed, what was still happening. The tidal surge had reached as far as she could see into the valley, and even now it lapped over half way up the hillside to their garden.

As the event had unfolded, she’d detached from herself, quite involuntarily, as she always did when unable to deal with something momentous beyond her ken. Mother’s passing. The disappearance of Whitehall and Westminster during Professor Reardon’s accidental time jump of ‘08. The humiliation of three years ago in this very house. Father’s long, perilous absences. Yes, that instinct knew when to take charge, when to let things wash over her.

Wash over...

But poor Merry didn’t seem to have that capacity, never had. All happenings hit her head on, uncushioned, and she was forced to weather them no matter how severe. Did that make her braver? Sonja couldn’t decide as she hooked her arm around her big sister’s waist and helped her up to their guest bedroom.

Aunt Lily hugged them for longer than was necessary and handed them towels, then asked poor Mrs. Sorensen to see them to their room. The latter’s nerves were frayed and she might need these few minutes away from the crowd to collect herself as well.

Merry behaved as if nothing had happened while they dried and changed, the same serene, swan-like movements, only even smoother, even more serene. And she didn’t utter a word. Puffed her cheeks, yes, and gestured whenever Sonja made an empty observation, but for the next quarter hour or so, she was as mute as the Sorensen cousins.

They didn’t change for bed. There was no way Sonja could possibly sleep. They dried off and changed into the handsome eveningwear ensembles they’d reserved for tomorrow night, their last night. Make that tonight—they’d surely be on the first airship home in the morning. All the more reason not to miss a thing.

It wasn’t until they’d reached the main staircase that Merry finally uttered, “Did you see him fall?”

“Who?”

“Did you see him fall—the man from the tree?”

The image flickered in the corner of her eye. Something she’d seen in the periphery of her vision but had not registered at the time. A sack of spuds falling onto a hedge. “I...yes, I saw something fall from a tree. A man, you reckon?”

Merry shrugged, then pouted.

“We’d better ask somebody to find out,” said Sonja. “He might be hurt.”

“He was spying on us.”

“How do you know that?”

“Why else would he be up a tree?”

She had a point. Not a terribly consoling one, but a point nonetheless. “I say, William, come here,” Sonja called across the landing to where their new friend was fiddling with the cuffs of his fresh shirt. He was only half dressed—his white vest peeked from between the lapels of his green smoking jacket—and his hair was a wet bird’s nest. Even so, he looked quite handsome, more than she dared let on. And as usual, he couldn’t take his eyes off Merry.

“So we’re the ones,” Sonja announced. “Ringside seats and all that—a few gallons from being washed away.” It struck her how callous that sounded, but her mind insisted on loitering apart from the horror. Making light of the events, at arm’s length, somehow comforted her.

“Someone else was ringside with us,” he replied. “A peeping tom. He was armed, too. Knocked himself out when he fell and hit the fence. They’ve got him in the library, the rotter. He’s for it when he comes to. I plan to be there when they wring the truth out of him.”

“How beastly.” That sounded more like Aunt Lily than Merry, but it was indeed the latter, her gaze questing over the knots of guests in the foyer below.

“We can look out from the observatory if you like.” William nodded across the balcony to a door that led to Professor Sorensen’s famed telescope room.

“No thank you. I wish to see it firsthand...before it recedes altogether.”

“Merry? You want to go back out there?”

“Did you see him fall?”

“Um, yes.”

“I saw him fall—the man from the tree.” Merry walked stiffly, like a pallbearer down the grand staircase, her fingertips squeaking on the varnished banister. “Before it recedes,” she muttered.

“Psst.” William dashed to Sonja’s side, whispered, “Should we be letting her go? She doesn’t sound right.”

For some reason that observation stung. “Mind your own business, William Elgin. She’s coping with it in her own way. Why don’t you run along to your peeping tom, join the lynching party when he wakes up—that seems to be your way of coping.”

He sighed through his nose. “That’s rich coming from you. Brigitte’s still crying her eyes out. Anyways, I’m coming with you whether you like it or not.”

Stubborn boy. But he’d gone out of his way to help them this past week, and now, like Merry, she found herself curious as to why. Before, it had simply been a new and exciting acquaintance—an older boy eager to spend time with her—a first for her, however plutonic. Now, with his attentions clearly on Merry and not her, she had a more objective view of him.

He didn’t add up.

But something in what he’d said earlier about why he’d helped them get their revenge—“I can’t tell you everything—the worst thing I’ve ever done—they used me for their own bitchy ends”—pricked her intuition.

What part did he play three years ago?

After a rallying cry from one of the airship pilots, several men, including William, grabbed gas lamps, ropes, axes, blankets and emergency provisions from Professor Sorensen’s supplies, anything useful they could put their hands on, before making their way south to the small airships berthed at Sigurdfjorden. The floodwater would take hours, perhaps days to recede to a level safe enough to wade across, so for now the volunteers would have to do what they could from the air. Meanwhile, Aunt Lily, Father, Professor and Mrs. Sorensen, with the help of the head servants, made telephone calls for assistance, tended those taken ill by the shock, and generally orchestrated some semblance of order to the frantic comings and goings.

The dark torrent below gave off a constant gravelly rumble. It was punctuated by the grinds and thumps of smashing debris, and even the occasional distant scream, jerking Sonja’s gaze hither and thither across the valley. The terrible death toll might never be known.

She suddenly felt bad for not having liked Niflheim more when Aunt Lily had taken them shopping for souvenirs earlier in the week. It had seemed a sad, gloomy fishing village, nothing more, so isolated that it was in most respects a century behind steam-powered England. Its peculiar smell, too, a mixture of fresh fish, whale oils and blubber and a wild, natural salty scent all its own, had been a little too pungent for her—and she’d been brought up in Southsea.

But the village was gone now, and likely not a single building would remain standing when the waters finally emptied. An entire community washed away in moments.

She glanced at her boots as they squished on the wet topsoil. Not rain but seawater, all the way up here. A small metallic object in the grass reflected light from an airship passing overhead. She picked it up and showed it to Merry, who was leaning on the fence near where the peeping tom had fallen, staring blankly out at the fjord.

“What do you make of this, Merry?” It appeared to be a closed pocket watch with an odd design on the brass casing—something like a sceptre, but with the planet Earth as the ball at the top. Merry didn’t take any notice until Sonja added, “I think our tree man must have dropped it.”

“Hmm? What have you got there?” She grabbed Sonja’s hand and tilted the item until it caught the light of another passing airship.

“Is that a sceptre?”

“No, I don’t think so.” Merry plucked the spectrometer goggles from her sister’s pocket and inspected the inscription under medium magnification. “It’s a new one on me. The stick you thought was a sceptre is actually the London Leviacrum tower, and it’s holding up—”

“The earth?”

“Yes, but that’s obviously symbolic. Hmm. It won’t open.” She fingered the edges and tried to pry the two halves apart, but there didn’t appear to be a clasp or hinge. The little winder wouldn’t turn either. “Blasted thing.”

“Here, let me try,” Sonja said.

“After I’ve finished my inspection.”

Sonja masked her grin by pretending to wipe her mouth. This mystery was just what Merry needed, and it was great to see her engaged in it instead of brooding silently over things beyond her control. Sonja leaned in. “The engraving is incredibly fine, isn’t it—looks like it was done under a spectrometer microscope. Here, there might be something written—”

“Ah, ah...” Merry brushed her sister’s hand away, “...I’m on top of it. There are three words across the globe. I’m trying to think back to Latin class... Exitus acta probat.”

The result validates the deeds. Sonja would rather give her big sister a minute or so to translate it on her own, otherwise Merry might get snippy and sink back into her moroseness.

“Aha! I’ve got it. A means to an end.” Well, not quite, but close enough. “Obviously some kind of secret organisation. Don’t you think?”

Sonja snickered. She was usually the one prone to seeing conspiracies in everything. So this was what the others felt like, patronising her at breakfast as Father and Aunt Lily read the newspaper headlines and Sonja spun the stories into her ingenious speculative theories.

“Why do you say that?” Sonja asked.

“The man was armed. He was watching us. Then the wave hit. Connected...surely.”

Well, that was a stretch, even for a McEwan, but Sonja thought she’d best play along for now. Until someone made sense of all this. And if she were honest, nothing would ever surprise her again after tonight.