“No, I am looking for my cousin,” she said. It was difficult to pitch her voice low, like a boy’s, while at the same time raising it to be heard above the tumult of the crowd. “Simon Ashby, from Oxford. He would have come in on the mail-coach yesterday.” She could only hope that Simon was not traveling under an assumed name; if he were, the chances of finding him were slim indeed.
With an annoyed sigh, the barman set down his dishes and shifted to the other end of the bar, where he drew out an account-book from a cupboard. “No one by that name,” he said after running his eye down the last page.
Arabella’s heart fell, but only a little. It would have been unreasonably good fortune to have found Simon in the first place she looked. “Thank you for looking, anyway.”
The barman shrugged. “I hope you find him.” He stuck out his hand. “Best of luck, Master…?”
Awkwardly Arabella took the proffered hand, which gripped her own with crushing force. “Ashby,” she stammered as her hand was briskly pumped. “Ara … Arthur Ashby.”
*
Arabella spent the rest of that day calling at inn after inn looking for her cousin. Sometimes she received concerned, solicitous aid, other times a brusque rebuff, but no one admitted having seen any one by that name.
What would she do, she thought as she walked, if she did find him? She was smaller than he, and weaker, and he might be carrying his pistol, so she would be foolish to attack him physically. She could denounce him to all the people around when she found him, and importune them to assist her in detaining him. But all she had against him was an accusation—she held no proof that he had imprisoned her, nor that he planned to murder her brother.
But still … the accusation, together with the pistol, might carry some weight with the local magistrate. When she found Simon, she would have to make enough noise that the two of them would be detained by the constables; once she had explained herself, surely, as the Gospels promised, the truth would make her free.
As plans went, she had to confess, this was not much of one.
A merry sound of chimes distracted her from her concerns, and she looked up to find herself in front of a clockmaker’s shop. A clockmaker’s shop that also sold automata.
Prominently presented in the shop window was a fine specimen of an automaton—an artist seated at a drawing-desk, about three feet high. A display model, designed to demonstrate the maker’s skills, only the right half of its body was clothed. The left half lay open to the air, displaying its gears and works.
But though the mechanism was impressively complex and finely made, it was flawed. The automaton bent and dipped its pen and scratched out its work with a cunning and lifelike motion, but the drawing that emerged—a ship at sea, its sails flying—had a long horizontal line drawn right through the middle of it. Several more copies of the same drawing were visible within the shop, on sale for a penny apiece, and each one was marred by the same error.
The fine automaton was damaged, just as her life had been damaged by Simon’s perfidy.
With grim determination she turned from the shop window and continued to the next inn.
4
THE AERIAL DOCKS
Arabella awoke the next morning to a brusque kick and an order to “move along” from the keeper of the shop in whose alley she had spent the night. Stiff, cold, and miserable, she parceled out a few coins from her nearly empty purse for a stale bun and a drink from a shared water cup.
At some point to-day, she reflected as she gnawed on the tough bread, she would have to find some way to send word to her mother about what had occurred at Simon’s. But her prime concern was to find and stop Simon.
*
Having finished her paltry breakfast, she determined that she would concentrate her attentions on the inns nearest the aerial ship docks. If Simon were still in London, she thought, he would no doubt have taken lodging there.
The docks were not difficult to find. With Mars in opposition, dozens of Mars-bound ships were departing each day, floating up into the sky like Newton’s Bubble—the soap bubble in the great man’s bath which had led him to the principle of aerial buoyancy. All she had to do was follow their path down to its origin.
The Mars Docks, once she arrived, proved to be a riot of clamor and noise that made the London streets on which she had spent the previous day seem bucolic by comparison. Men and beasts labored, hauling boxes and barrels to and from the docks; sweating stevedores walked in treadwheels, powering the cranes that lifted bales of cargo to the ships’ decks; hawkers cried the virtues of their products, ships, and services; and under all rumbled the ever-present roar of the great furnaces.