Imperial Clock

CHAPTER Five

High Tide



The sluggish beats of the vintage chronometer kept Meredith on edge as she paced around the living room and dining room and peered through the front window every few moments. Mrs. Van Persie, their half-blind housekeeper, flittered in and out, gathering items for the dining table spread, for this impromptu early lunch Father had scheduled by telephone. Exactly what trouble Sonja had been in was unclear, but it had to be serious for him to leave his pre-expedition operations in Portsmouth harbour and fly the first available airship all the way to Cumbria and the Lake District to collect her. He hadn’t had time to explain in his telephone call, but she was safe now and on her way home with him, if a little weak from whatever ailed her.

When Meredith spied the glinting brass of a large, tubular-shaped wagon pulled by a team of several beefy shires, and Father walking backward down the driveway as he guided the vehicle’s clumsy turning arc between the gate posts, her heart sank. His third expedition to Subterranea was suddenly imminent. He’d hired the wagon to transport the remainder of his supplies to the harbour, an impregnable wagon for his most secretive possessions: scientific tools and instruments commissioned from his learned colleagues around the world, kept under lock and key in the cellar these past several months.

Father was a puzzle of a man, always had been, beset by an unfathomable desire to win dominion over inexplicable regions far beneath their feet. Meredith had only been a toddler when he’d burrowed his way to Subterranea in his giant mole. She remembered more of the ballyhoo here at home afterward than of the famous day itself, in the autumn of 1899, when the massive machine had dug its way into a hillside in Dover—and the history books. Endless streams of dignitaries and reporters and particularly those teams of postmen carrying sacks of correspondence had flooded the living room for months, reducing her to a shy little ornament, while elevating Mother to a kind of regal personage, always smiling, always offering her hand to strangers, always profoundly sad inside, or so it seemed to Meredith. For although Mother had supported Father’s expedition indefatigably, even funding it from her considerable fortune, she had cried herself to sleep most nights he’d been away.

She glanced to the photographed portrait hanging on the wall over the mantelpiece. Hair as white as the whitest cloud, eyes bright as dewdrops in the sun, skin pale, almost unearthly pale, with a thin-lipped smile at once both lost and found, as though she were trying to equate a former happiness with a new one: yes, Mother had had her secrets too. She had never truly belonged here, that much had always been obvious—though quite where here referred to, Meredith couldn’t say for sure. Southsea? England? The twentieth century?

That feeling of detachment, of alienation permeated this portrait, but the sensation also gave Meredith an odd comfort, a kind of inherited defiance, hard to articulate, even harder to pinpoint. When Sonja limped up the front steps outside, grinning mischievously between coughs as Father draped a thick woollen shawl around her, Meredith would have given anything to have Mother at her side. It was an ache she’d ignored these past months, deep down, that now swelled with a vengeance. Seeing Sonja return home from some perilous adventure she’d had without her sister, out in the big wide world, made Meredith feel small. Left behind. Ill-equipped to deal with what the future might bring.

Alone.

“Meredith, come along, help your sister change upstairs before lunch, whatever she needs. It’s been a trying night, and she’s still shivering, poor creature. Warm as you can, now—I suggest you fetch the woolliest, wintriest—Mrs. Van Persie, is the fire licking high—ah yes, very good, very good indeed. Hot milk? A hot water bottle? Good, good. An appetising smell from the kitchen there and no mistake. Now then, Sonja, I know you said you’d rather gorge than get some sleep, but—”

“Father dear, you’re nagging. I’ll take a nap later. And I am more than capable of dressing myself, thank you. All this confounded fuss over nothing. Anyone would think we’d been shipwrecked for a decade. It was just a night under a canopy, that’s all, and we were supervised at that.”

“To say nothing of the freezing temperature, the dampness, or the blizzard raging around you.” Father desperately scanned the room for his pipe and tobacco pouch, sifting through his memories of places they could be with a single nodding finger. He located them in the pocket of the jacket he was wearing. “Honestly, child, you have no conception of the danger you were in. Were it not for that fellow—Auric—I shudder to think what might have happened.”

“Mr. Auric? From biology? What part did he play?” Meredith had graduated last summer, and she struggled to conjure his face—a passably good-looking one from what she recalled. Her sister pretended distraction, miming a whistle as she climbed the stairs. “Sonja?”

“Hmm? Oh, he told that fat gibbon Challender where to stick his seniority.” In her small pink hand, a folded note, almost concealed. “And if the School Board has the gall to accuse him of anything, he’ll give them a taste. He’s too good for that school, too good by half. Who knows, now that Mrs. Prescott isn’t here, maybe they’ll—”

“What do you mean? Where’s Mrs. Prescott?” Meredith shouted up.

“I’m afraid she died in the blizzard. Her heart gave out, poor woman. But exactly where she’d be now—that’s a tad ghoulish, even for me.”

Meredith ignored the quip and focused instead on the folded note Sonja continued to caress until she whipped out of sight along the landing. Whatever it was, it seemed to be the source of this new and disconcerting air of independence.



Mrs. Van Persie’s excellent cottage pie, made with minced beef, sliced Cumberland sausage and a generous helping of salted carrots, was one of Meredith’s favourite dishes, but throughout her sister’s recounting of the near-disastrous expedition Meredith hardly touched her plate. Those earlier kaleidoscopic reflections on Mother and Father—filtered through the portrait hanging on the wall—continued to spin and tumble into each other, glintings of memories, intuitions and myriad unanswered questions distracting her while Sonja did her best to make the blizzard tale engaging and seem, well, all a bit of a lark really.

Father, too, kept glancing away from Sonja and studying Meredith from the corner of his eye instead, as if he sensed whom the real weight in the room was pressing upon, and was trying to puzzle out the cause in his own scientific way.

“So you sided with Mr. Auric to the bitter end?” Meredith said blankly. “Bravo. I daresay I’d have done the same—Challender always was a bit of a sot. But I hope you’re not going to be punished alongside poor Auric. From what I gather the School Board doesn’t suffer dissenters readily, especially from the faculty. Right, Father?”

“Indubitably not, no.”

Sonja let out a loud sigh of frustration, then reshaped her napkin into a tepee on the tablecloth. “You do the right thing in this world, you pay the price. I should let you know I’m making a promise here and now: if he’s made to leave, so shall I. South Hampshire Grammar be damned.”

Father eyed her sharply, doing his best to fight a proud smirk. “And if he resigns, Sonja?”

“Then he’ll have done the honourable thing, but they’ll still have forced him out. Challender proved himself unfit to look after his class. If they don’t sack that fat ape, then they’ve sided with him...against the only one who is fit to be in charge.”

“It’s never that straightforward, though, is it?”

She flattened the napkin tent with her fist. “No, because it’s all piss and politics.”

“Sonja!”

“Sorry, Father. But this means a lot to me.”

“I can see that.” After a brief, sullen glance at them both, Father dabbed the sides of his mouth and rose from his chair. “Girls, I’d like you to accompany me to the garden. I believe it’s warm enough. Bring your shawl in any case, Sonja.”

“Father?” they both asked together.

“This might be the last opportunity we have to discuss—things—before I leave.”

Meredith hated the way that sounded, as though it was the last fizz of her favourite soda before the top was screwed on and the beverage confiscated forever. But the soda of her whole world. He’d returned home from his previous expeditions, yes, but what if this one...

No, Father would always come home—it was simply who he was. Nothing and no one could deny that.

After fetching a blanket and something wrapped in an old cloth from a sideboard drawer, he led them out into the back garden, where an insistent warmth from the loitering sun had managed to slice through the nip in the morning air. Thick clouds still bullied overhead, but those baking rays would probably win out before noon. A blue tit hopped across the lawn, then shot up when it heard footsteps, circling high into the convoy of airships that formed a dull V under a carpet of grey seaward cloud.

Father laid the blanket across Mother’s memorial seat, covering the dew that collected there every morning. The brass plaque was still spotless after all these years, as either himself, or Mr. Van Persie while he was away, polished it frequently. This was Father’s favourite place to relax when he needed a few quiet hours to himself, usually to read his scientific literature, but it was not somewhere Meredith or Sonja ever sat.

It offered them no comfort.

He bid them sit next to him, one on either side, and then carefully retrieved a fragile book from the folds of old cloth. “How much do you remember about this story?”

“Moon and Meridian?” Sonja beamed across at Meredith. “Pretty much everything.”

“I should hope so. Mother only read it to us about a thousand times.”

Sonja nodded enthusiastically. “Weird story, but magical. And I mean magical. I’ve had so many dreams about that adventure.”

“Me too.”

“The opening bit reminds me a bit of the Morlock realm in Wells’s The Time Machine—you know, the cruel underground masters who enslave the Eloi. Only there’s no world above the ground in this story, until this family of slaves has no choice but to flee from the subterranean rulers. They go on this amazing journey through the unknown, to find their way out, only it’s not really unknown, it’s just been lost for millions of years. People have become so frightened of what’s up top, they’ve stopped thinking about it, about their history. All they know is what’s down there, in this artificial world they’ve been cocooned in. So it’s a journey of rediscovery. While the family has never amounted to much as individuals—they weren’t particularly good at what they did for a living under the regime—they grow into this amazing survival unit along the way, and they learn to improvise everything from firelight to killing monsters.”

“Our favourite part,” Meredith reminded her.

Sonja laughed. “Remember the magnetic tunnels, how they escaped through those?”

“Fork two, corkscrew, up and over, left. Genius.”

After Father had finished turning the pages, flashing the occasional smile at their reminiscences, he snapped the book shut and traced his finger over the author’s name on the spine. E.Q. Sabar. “Quite the storyteller, wasn’t he?”

“The best,” they agreed.

“And do you recall smuggling it into the library that day, so you could find out what else Mister Sabar had written? You were only little, Meredith.”

“Vaguely. I remember the librarian couldn’t make head nor tail of it—no classification number, no publisher, no copyright, nothing. She said it must have been self-published, maybe a one-off.”

“That is possible. But self-published or not, it wasn’t published in this country...or any other for that matter.”

Sonja and Meredith shared a puzzled look. This time he wasn’t making a lick of sense, not even accidentally. If it wasn’t published in any country, where was it published? Thin air? The canyons of Mars?

“Can we skip the riddles for once, Father?” Meredith masked a yawn. “I thought you had something important to tell us.”

“Yes, out with it, old man, or we’ll duff you up and nick your wallet.”

“Haha! That’s the one thing I won’t need where I’m going...where the author of this book came from?”

“Eh? Subterranea?” Sonja clung to his arm, began to shake it. “You’re saying E.Q. Sabar published this book miles beneath the surface of the earth?”

“That I am. But how?”

Meredith grabbed his other arm. “Um, that would be my next question, yes. How?”

“That’s one of the reasons I’m going back, to find that out. So far I’ve uncovered evidence of a subterranean civilization, yes, but nothing anywhere near this recent—recent enough to produce a book we can still handle, still read, still understand. Consider that last part for a moment. A civilization millions of years old that uses the English language, albeit with some odd phraseology. It’s a paradox, isn’t it. And believe me when I tell you the archaeology is profoundly more strange than even that. The deeper we venture into Subterranea, the more recent the artefacts are. It’s like finding Saxon ruins underneath Ancient Egyptian ruins somewhere in South America, and then finding a steam-powered typewriter under those.”

“How much of this have you made public?” Meredith suddenly wanted to accompany him on his next expedition more than anything.

“Very little. Mikael Sorensen knows, and Horace Holly. One or two other...close colleagues of mine, and now the two of you. The Leviacrum doesn’t know. Indeed, it mustn’t know. But I’ve told you because I think you’re old enough now to handle this, and because of what it means for our family.”

“Our reputation, you mean?” asked Meredith.

“Partly, but much, much more than that. Let me put it this way—” He danced his fingers down the book’s spine, “—I wasn’t the one who retrieved this book from Subterranea.”

Great, more riddles.

“Then who?” Sonja, too, was losing patience as she grabbed his chin and swivelled his face toward her. “Father, who brought this book out of Subterranea?”

“It was a young, white-haired girl with one heck of a story to tell.” His smile grew inscrutably narrow. “Your mother.”



A faraway hiss, familiar and constant, signalled the start of Mr. Van Persie’s latest attempt to inflate his hot air balloon in the glade across the lane, not much more than a stone’s throw away but out of sight for the three of them in the garden. Meanwhile, Father’s sudden revelation was beyond Meredith’s imagination. She couldn’t see Mother emerging from some ancient hole in the ground any more than she could swallow a civilization existing where there was no sun, no weather, no way to gauge the passage of time.

“You’re trying to tell us we’re descended from a bunch of crackpots from some crack in the earth? That people existed long before the first homo sapiens, and they had technology, and they never saw daylight for thousands of years?”

“Maybe millions of years,” he corrected her.

“Oh. Do you want my penny now, or should I wait until the next instalment? Is that when the belching volcano shows up? Maybe Mother hitched a ride topside in a lava tube, and waved to the sun when the hot stuff spat her out.”

“What would I gain by making any of this up, sweetheart?” Father didn’t look Meredith in the eye as he addressed her, which usually signified the beginning of a rhetorical tirade. This time, however, he surprised her by waiting for her reply.

She shrugged. “How should I know?” The words brandy and absinthe almost came out, but as he was being so gentle and matter-of-fact about the whole thing, she hadn’t the heart to ruin what he obviously saw as a special moment between them, a farewell moment he’d remember fondly on his forthcoming odyssey. “You know me. I can’t swallow air without taking its temperature first. Right, Sonja?”

They gazed at one another until Father squeezed them both toward him and sighed. “A good scientist never takes anything on faith, so, Meredith, you’re right not to take my word for it. I promise I’ll show you all the evidence when I return, and if I’m right in my predictions, and we can locate this heart of Subterranea where your Mother was born, you’ll both be welcome to accompany me on a subsequent expedition, so we can explore your roots together. You have my word.”

Our roots?

“In the meantime, I think it’s only fair that you hear the full story in your mother’s own words.” He rose without warning and led the way indoors. “She wanted to write you each a letter for when you’d finished your debut seasons, but I had a better idea. A more...personable one. Because no one could tell a story like your mother, face to face.”

And none had Father’s confounded way of hinting and teasing when the mood for drama struck him. He resembled more a stage conjurer than a scientist, the way he gathered and assembled his outlandish apparatuses in the living room without explaining what any of it was for, all the while whistling and muttering to himself. Meanwhile, Meredith and Sonja huddled together on the settee and poured over the old story book, Moon and Meridian, wondering aloud whether its intimate briny scent or finely woven binding or the beautiful pastel illustrations were indeed evidence of a lost civilization hidden miles beneath their feet.

“Father, if this is all true, how much does the Leviacrum Council really know of it?” Meredith’s anxiousness seemed to want to stitch together several loose conspiracy strands, especially those pertaining to his previous exploits. The spy in Niflheim had not been identified, having never awakened from his coma, but the Atlas inscription on his pocket watch casing, an old Leviacrum symbol, suggested that powerful organization was keeping tabs on Father. But why? How much did they know about his real reason for “discovering” and returning to Subterranea?

“They know nothing. They can never.” He hurried over to the front window and snatched the curtains closed. “Don’t concern yourselves with the Leviacrum Council, girls, not yet; and don’t let on to anyone what you hear today. Let’s just call it...our family secret. I regret with all my heart how much you’ve had to defend the McEwan name over the years. And I blame myself for much of that—Lord knows, I can be a stubborn, bloody-minded old sod.”

“No, I wouldn’t say old,” Sonja cut in.

“Cheeky little imp.” He grinned ready to laugh, but suppressed it when he eyed Meredith’s scowl. “Suffice it to say, the Council is both hopeful and wary of my expeditions, in that they’d love to have dominion over a world within our world—think of the untapped mineral deposits down there, for one—but they’re frightened of me finding precisely what I aim to find: that lost civilization we speak of. If that happened, and the people of Subterranea possessed significant technology, ergo weaponry, it could challenge the supremacy of the Leviacrum Council in any number of ways. At the very least, it would introduce an unpredictable piece into the global chess game of borders and diplomacy.

“Which side would this people take, if pressed? The Coalition’s? The Subterraneans’ origins would certainly come into question, and like the Westminster disaster, that would raise all sorts of concerns about the wisdom of pursuing such risky scientific endeavours as time travel. For how else could this people have come into being so long ago, while also possessing advanced technology and the English language? And lest we forget, funnelling scientific progress is the Council’s bread and butter. People must trust in the efficacy of that pursuit, and of the Council’s sovereignty, or else the Leviacrum has no reason for being.”

He paused to connect, with wiring, the six projectors perched on wooden stands he’d erected around the room. They all pointed to the centre, a few feet above a fumigation capsule standing upright on the carpet. Behind that, a silver canvas projection screen, similar to the one they’d used to shame the Sorensen cousins in Niflheim, reflected a slit of sunlight from between the drawn curtains. Sonja jumped up and closed them fully. “Is it just me, or is it all starting to fit?”

“What do you mean?” asked Meredith.

“I mean Professor Reardon and his Westminster time jump, the rumours of collapsed Leviacrum towers already waiting for them there in prehistory. Someone, sometime in the future figures out how to send these blasted towers back in time, for whatever reason, but it all goes wrong. The people are stuck there in a world ruled by hostile creatures. To survive, maybe they had no choice but to go underground and start civilization anew.”

“And they just eked out a living there, not venturing to the surface for millions of years?”

“Not necessarily.” Sonja ran the point of her finger through midair, as if feeling out her theory. As much as Meredith admired her younger sister’s intellect, sometimes it annoyed her that Sonja was more like Father than she was, blessed with that ability to make uncanny leaps of logic while still keeping both feet on the ground. “Maybe they found a way to really thrive down there, using artificial light and some sort of hydro-electric power. For all we know, Subterranea’s a vast, teeming world, ‘eloquent of fertility’, as Wells put it.”

“That was War of the Worlds,” Father reminded her.

“Correct. And let’s hope that’s not what your expedition starts.”

Father lightly wagged a finger at her, as if to say, That’s exactly what the Leviacrum Council is afraid of.

“Okay, are you ready?” He donned his padded work gloves and shoved several coal bricks into the fuming portable boiler that powered all six projectors.

The butterflies under her tight corset made Meredith feel six years old again, out of control, breathless. Sonja nodded for them both.

Father opened the fumigation canister and hurried away. “Don’t worry, it’s only a steam-based gas with a light-sensitive compound.” He lit the projectors in turn. A slivery phantom figure, clutching a parasol, seeped into existence inside the columning steam. It fidgeted to one side, as real as life, making them both gasp. “I’ll leave you to her,” Father said from behind, and started his gramophone player with its familiar soft crackle. “This is for your eyes and ears only.” He left the room.

Meredith’s curiosity wanted to lift her from the settee, while a fear of this oily apparition sank her back into the cushion; it was something she must not see yet positively had to see, as though her life depended on it either way. She linked arms with Sonja, and waited.

“Is it recording, darling? The machine’s spin doesn’t appear—oh, good, fine—should I begin then?” Mother’s delicate voice was even more distant, even more dampened than Meredith remembered, as though she’d had a really bad sore throat as a girl and had been forced to speak softly ever since. She sat upright on her stool, gazing out from the flickering fumes. As the projector beams converged, they stretched and distorted her outline in the columning gas, denying her a completely real presence. The effect was spooky enough, but thank goodness it wasn’t photograph-real—Meredith glanced to the wall portrait and reassured herself this was only an illusion.

“Hello, Merry. Hello, Sonja. How are you, my loves? By the time you hear this, and indeed see it—what magic!—you will have already braved your first seasons, and will, I am quite sure, have enough suitors to start your own regiments. Are any of them scientific?” She appeared to wink across the room, perhaps to Father.

Meredith squirmed, as though Mother were gazing right through her, as though she were the translucent one.

“We have had precious little time, my darlings. And sadly these few minutes are all I can give you now. Would that it were not so, but despite your father’s bravest efforts, my illness has no cure in this world. Perhaps it exists in another world, a lost world far, far beneath us. That, however, is for your father to discover. I will no longer be here, yet his adventures will be our adventures, maybe the most important expeditions ever undertaken, to find out where I came from, and how my people came to be. Which people, you ask? Very well. Let me start at the end of my beginning, then, and let this be the real story of Moon and Meridian.

“I remember waiting forever in a firelit room with no windows. It may have been a cave. My feet were bandaged, and I lay on my side listening to the sound of running water overhead. The room shook periodically, as though a giant with a club was thumping the ground outside. I licked at the seepage that came through the rock, to keep myself alive, but barely. At length the fire went out and I shivered until I couldn’t tell whether I was awake or asleep. The thumps grew nearer. Louder. I thought I heard voices through the rock.”

Meredith was four years old again, and spellbound.

“One day the room leapt and the running water overhead became a thunderous torrent all around. I clung tightly to the book I was holding in the dark. Pieces of the roof and the wall began to collapse. One of them struck my foot and I cried out—exactly what, I can’t remember. As if in answer, a slender shoot of yellow light appeared high up above me, piercing the wall from outside. It illuminated a spot on the ground half way across the room. As I watched, the spot moved away from me, not in jerks but smoothly, slowly, until at length it climbed the far wall and turned blood red, finally dimmed and went out. It was soon replaced by a pale, silver beam that I fell asleep watching.

“Two more cycles of the yellow light and the silver light passed before I was rescued. Two black-skinned men wearing loincloths entered through the hole above and descended by rope. I’d never seen black skin before. I didn’t understand their language but they understood mine a little. We sailed in their canoe. Outside my room was a shallow lake, which had lately been vast and deep. Their leaders had emptied the majority of it, by means of explosion, to form a new river. We finally came to their camp on the lakeshore. All the while I’d had to shield my eyes from the blinding spherical light in the sky—something else I’d never seen before—until another black-skinned man, dressed in a tan uniform, gave me a pair of dark spectacles to wear.

“He said he’d never seen a girl with such white hair before, and when my two rescuers told him where they’d found me, he said they must be mistaken. My room had been fifty feet under the surface of the lake for thousands of years, with no other known way in or out until that day! They returned to my room, where they discovered a narrow passage leading to a network of underground rivers. One of these fell into an unfathomable chasm, they said. Several lengths of frayed rope had been left near the drop, along with numerous smears of blood on the walls.

“I never returned to that room, to my first memory. Whatever trauma I’d suffered, involving the unfathomable hole and the smears of blood on the wall, had locked away any earlier memories. The black-skinned man in the uniform took me to his barracks in a place called Benguela, where he and his wife cared for me and nursed me back to health. I was about eight years old, they said. I didn’t know what a year was. They told me about the sun and the moon and all the other things I’d never seen above ground. They took me to see a witch doctor, to try and recover my memories of life before that room, but nothing worked. Then a mesmerist tried and failed.

“The only things I had in my possession were the book I’d clung to through everything—it was called Moon and Meridian—and an under-belt studded with precious gems, one of them a large amethyst. If I’d been in the charge of a less honourable man, the book may have been my only legacy, but Major Bilali protected my interests fiercely. He said my existence was a miracle, and I left Africa as wealthy as I had found it, perhaps even wealthier, for I now knew two people whom I loved.

“Later, my new foster parents, the Moseleys, brought me to live in England. Major Bilali and his wife were posted to the Congo, a hostile region they insisted I not be exposed to. I attended South Hampshire Grammar and quietly flourished in every way. My business investments, directed in trust by my foster parents, bore fruit, I made friends, and my academic results grew from strength to strength.

“On my eighteenth birthday I made the two best decisions of my life. The first was to send Major Bilali and his wife the sum of five hundred thousand pounds, which enabled them to retire happily to Cape Town. The second was to accept a proposal of marriage by a debonair scientist whose fascination with geology and archaeology was second only to his devotion to me. He is my sweet Ralph, my heart’s one true companion, and I will love him always.”

She blew a kiss across the room, then gave a baleful nod. “And now I must be brief. Be proud of his expeditions, my darlings. They may take him away from you for a time, but you will never be without him, as you will never be without me, all the days of your life. Let his quest be my quest, and when you are old enough, please help him in any way you can. My origins are your origins, and they are extraordinary—trust in that, and you will find them someday.

“Goodbye, Merry. Goodbye, Sonja. I wish I could see you now, through time. Oh, how I wish it. But whatever happens, know that I love you. Your father loves you. And I’m so happy to know that you two will always have each other, just like Moon and Meridian. Be strong for each other, and try not to forget me?

“I wish you all the happiness in the world.”

Mother rose off her stool without a fuss and, after collapsing her parasol, left the limelight bearing a quivering smile. The gramophone went on crackling, the projector beams still blazed, the gas continued to column, but extraordinariness in the room was now everywhere else, as though Mother’s spirit had passed through into reality, encompassing Meredith and Sonja, imbuing the very air they breathed.

Neither she nor her sister cried. But they were both speechless, their gazes wandering around this newly alien living room, trying to get a handle on what was real and what wasn’t.

Time had shuffled its deck, and they were being asked to play a new game, the rules of which were suddenly unclear.

“I’m sorry for springing it on you like this, but I’m convinced you’re old enough now to bear our family secret.” Father brushed past and disassembled his apparatus without care. He wasn’t interested in using the set-up ever again—this was a one-time show, the keeping of an old, dear promise. “I’ve observed your awkwardness these past several years, your anti-social habits. Deep down, I think you know you’re not like anyone else in England, that you don’t belong here. Your mother was the same. We were very happy together, true, but I’d often catch her gazing off into the distance, or daydreaming during dinner. She’d always try to explain what she was feeling—a sad sort of inadequacy, a yearning for something money couldn’t buy, that England couldn’t provide. She seemed to know there was more to life than we were privy to.

“So we began to speculate. The gems she’d inherited were purer than anything else on the market. Then there was the unclassifiable book, her aversion to bright lights, her fascination with rain, her ivory-white hair, the story of her rescue from the African cave: these all pointed to some kind of unprecedented subterranean existence. No matter how much she wanted to ignore her past, it wouldn’t let her settle. I poured all my scientific drive, and she poured much of her wealth, into proving that theory of a world deep underground. What I discovered during my trial dig in the iron mole was beyond anything we could have imagined—a gigantic network of caves and tunnels, some of them natural, some manmade, stretching for hundreds, maybe thousands of miles. A whole new ecosystem of plant life, including bioluminescent fauna, in a world far beneath our feet. Evidence of large bodies of water. And most persuasively of all, archaeological relics of a human civilization that existed there millions of years ago, long before homo sapiens.

“Mikael Sorensen now holds the most crucial artefacts from my discovery in secret. He is also trusted by the Leviacrum Council, and is therefore beyond suspicion.”

“But the spy in Niflheim,” Meredith interrupted him. “You were both being watched, weren’t you? You and Professor Sorensen?”

“Perhaps.”

“So perhaps he isn’t fully trusted by the Council. I’ve learned about something called the Atlas Club. It’s some kind of fanatical branch of the Leviacrum, going right back to the original founders. What if they know everything you know, and they are—”

Father stopped her with his outstretched hand. “I won’t tell you again. Leave it, Meredith. Leave it right there and don’t go near it anymore, do you understand? These are dangerous people. They have made princes and politicians disappear before now for sniffing around dark and uninvited places. Like I said, the only reason they leave me to my devices is because they’re hoping I can lead them to pay dirt in Subterranea. And because I don’t bother them, or question them, or even mention words like ‘Atlas Club’ or ‘the rule of eight’. Investigating won’t get you anything but investigated. Look and they’ll be watching. Speak out and they’ll silence you for good. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Father,” Sonja replied.

“Meredith?” His stern gaze bore into her.

“All right, Father. I’ll do as you say.” A lie, which he seemed to recognise with a tilt of his head.

“Fine. We’ll talk some more tomorrow—no, better make it the day after, I’ve some calls to make in town.”

“And there’s the Steam Fair,” Sonja reminded him.

“What about it?”

“We’re going. Or I’ll scupper your whole expedition overnight.”

He laughed. “Why so interested in the fair? A lot of preening showmen and their flash-in-the-pan gadgets. Might be good for a laugh, though, now that you mention it. And it will give me an excuse to meet with Simeon before I depart for Africa. Hmm, I might be able to get us tickets on the late morning shuttle, have you there around two.”

“Twelve-thirty. It has to be for twelve-thirty.”

“Sonja?” He playfully squinted at her. “Who are we meeting at twelve-thirty?”

“Never you mind, Father.” She blushed and left the room, trying hard to walk like a lady before a dash of energy got the best of her and she vanished with an ungainly skip.

“Merry, who’s this mystery person?” Father finished disassembling his apparatus. “Anyone I know?”

It pained her to admit she hadn’t been told, so Meredith shrugged.

Soon she was alone again with the portrait on the wall. More alone than ever. All she had were questions—a hot air balloon full of questions, tethered absolutely to a ground she could no longer see. In the space of a single morning, everything and everyone she’d known was now unrecognisable. For goodness sake, she needed something of her own to latch on to or she’d go stark raving mad.

Was Mother still watching?

Playing with the pocket watch in her sweaty hands seemed as good a distraction as any. Better than any, in fact. For the postwoman arrived presently with a parcel from Europe—the airmail stamps stood out a mile—and Meredith now had her mystery to solve. To hell with promises.

Like Father and his expedition, or Sonja and her rendezvous, this was something she absolutely had to see through to its end. Right now, it felt like the only thing she could call her own.

She tore the wrapping off and clutched the well-worn, cork-bound book to her breast. The receipt card fell to the carpet, landing face-side up. It read:

1 Used Volume – Acceptable condition, some wear to spine and cover, some notations in margins, signed by author

Shadow Players: A Study of Esoteric Societies and Modern Conspiracies, 1893

By R.B. Villiers

Four pounds and two shillings...PAID IN FULL

Regards,

Ebony Eyes Books, 117 Rue de Saint Martin, Marseilles