Skycircus Read online

  “Of course,” Robert said.

  “No matter what,” Malkin yapped.

  “Thank you.” John smiled. “In the meantime, go see if you can discover where Lily’s got to. Try to cheer her up a bit and get her to come down, eh?”

  “I’ll do my best,” Robert said.

  “As will I,” Malkin agreed. But as they wandered off, he added, “I imagine she’ll need a great amount of cheering when she hears the quality of the guests who’ve arrived so far.”

  They decided to start the search for Lily in her bedroom, but when Robert knocked and put his head round the door, he found that, apart from the clothes thrown across the floor and the stacks of gothic novels that adorned the bookshelves, the room was empty. He checked under the bed, in case she was hiding from them there, but she wasn’t.

  As he stood up he knocked the bedside table, toppling over a small fossil. He set it carefully right as best he could. The fossil was an ammonite of fool’s gold embedded in a stone that Lily’s mama, Grace Hartman, had found on a beach and given to her daughter. Robert knew it was one of the last gifts Lily had received from her and as such it was extra-special. Lily had told him that Grace had been a keen amateur geologist, as well as one of the first female mechanists in Great Britain.

  The library was next, because Lily sometimes liked to sit in there and read, but it too was empty. As were the other upstairs rooms, and the servants’ quarters, which they hadn’t really expected her to be in anyway, seeing as Mrs Rust and the others weren’t there for her to talk to.

  Finally, Robert suggested they try their den at the top of the tower.

  Malkin complained loudly as the pair of them climbed the stairs to reach the topmost room. “There’s too much winter damp up here. It rusts my insides. Seeps into my springs.”

  “John’s asked that we find Lily, Malkin,” Robert said. “And anyway, it’s either this or talk to those boring professors for hours – which would you prefer?”

  “Well, when you put it in those terms…”

  They stepped into the tower room and there was Lily, sitting in the scruffy old armchair. Her long shadow stretched across the dusty floor in the last yellow slivers of fading sunlight. In her hand she held a red leather-bound book, which she must’ve been reading, but she slammed it shut as soon as they arrived. From the look on her face, Robert guessed she’d overheard everything they’d been saying.

  “What’re you doing up here?” he asked.

  “Sulking,” Lily said. “D’you want to know why? Because it’s my birthday and everyone’s ignoring me. Rushing around after Papa, who’s behaving as if he were the Queen of Sheba. And now the house is full to the brim with those awful old mechanists, who are no fun at all. There’s no one for me down there.”

  “That’s not true,” said Malkin. “If you’d bothered to ask instead of moping around, you’d realize there are guests coming for you.”

  “Who might they be?” Lily asked.

  “Anna and Tolly,” Robert replied.

  “Really?” Lily leaped from her seat.

  “They’re not here yet,” Malkin said.

  “Oh.” She sat back down on the arm of the chair and hugged her book despondently.

  The gold pattern embossed on the cover glinted. It looked like an ammonite, Robert thought. “What’s that book?” he asked.

  Lily opened her mouth to reply, but then seemed to think better of it. After a moment she said, “It’s either nothing, or you’ll-have-to-be-a-lot-nicer-to-me-before-I-tell-you.” She hid the red notebook behind her back. “The choice is yours.”

  “In that case,” said Robert, “you won’t be wanting the birthday presents we’ve brought you.”

  “I didn’t say that, did I?” Lily replied with a wry smile. She leaned back in her seat and folded her arms, waiting to be impressed.

  “What’ve you brought me?”

  “Give her my gift first, Robert,” Malkin commanded.

  Robert reached into his pocket and apologetically handed over the perished rodent.

  Lily took it in her palm and gave it an unsavoury stare. “It’s certainly…different. I mean, it’s not like anything I’ve been given before.”

  “I thought you’d like it.” The fox ran his long pink tongue round his whiskers. “Keep it safe. A lot of thought went into that.”

  Lily shrugged. Robert watched as she reluctantly put the dead mouse away in the pocket of her dress.

  “Where’s your present, Robert?” Malkin yapped.

  “I have it somewhere.” Robert made a show of searching through his jacket. “I’m just not quite sure where… While I’m looking, d’you want to see a new trick I’ve learned?”

  “You’re certainly dressed for it,” she retorted. “You look like a proper stage conjurer in that outfit.” She checked herself. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…”

  “That’s all right,” Robert said. Half his family – the bad half – had been magicians. He didn’t really like to think of them. But his ma and sister, who’d given him his Moonlocket, were theatrical mediums. They wrote letters sometimes, telling him about their enchanting escapades as they travelled and performed alongside conjurers and the like, and ever since he’d started corresponding with them, magic was an interest that had grown in him.

  “Oh, I know where it is!” He tapped Lily’s dress pocket on the opposite side from the dead mouse. “Have a look in there.”

  Lily put her hand in her pocket and pulled out an envelope tied with red ribbon. “How did you do that?” she asked, astounded.

  Robert grinned. “A little bit of sleight of hand. It’s the same as picking pockets, except you put something in instead of taking it out.”

  “What’s in the envelope?”

  “Open it and see.”

  “It feels heavy.” She tore along the side of the envelope and tipped the pocket watch into the palm of her hand. “You fixed it?”

  Robert nodded.

  Lily examined the watch, her wide, excited eyes reflected in the brass case. “You’ve stamped my initials on the front. And it’s ticking again!” she exclaimed, putting it up to her ear. A broad smile burst across her face. She pressed the crown switch and the case flew open to reveal a second-hand sweeping round the clock face above the slower minute- and hour-hands.

  “There’s something else,” Robert said.

  Taking the watch from her, he twisted the crown three times. A fourth hand appeared from behind the hour hand and swirled around the watch. He stopped it over the minute hand, and the watch chimed loud as a bell.

  “I added an alarm,” he explained. “I thought it might come in useful.”

  “I bet you had to rejig the entire workings to get it to do that,” Lily said.

  “Not the entire workings, just a few cogs and levers here and there. I learned a lot of it from your pa’s teaching: he’s been showing me how to move mechanical workings about to change the way a thing functions.”

  “Well, it’s the best present ever.” Lily looked so proud of him.

  “What about my gift?” Malkin asked haughtily.

  “That was good too, but this is even better. Thank you.” She kissed Malkin on the snout and Robert on the cheek.

  “It’s a pleasure,” Robert mumbled, fiddling with his cufflinks as a wave of heat flushed through him. “Now you have all the time in the world.”

  Lily laughed. “And I shall keep it always. In my pocket.”

  “We ought to go downstairs and join the party,” Malkin suggested.

  “Perhaps.”

  Lily picked up her book and stepped towards the door. Then she stopped and turned mischievously towards the telescope and the east window. “I thought we might only stay at the party for a little bit – there’s somewhere else I wanted to go.”

  “Where’s that?” Robert asked.

  “Take a look.” She tilted the telescope towards him.

  Robert bent down and squinted through the eyepiece. The twilight countryside was
swathed in patches of fog, thick as fallen clouds. “What am I looking for?” he asked Lily.

  “Beyond the last house on the left, in the meadow by the bend in the river, at the far end of the village.” Lily pointed for him and, through a gap in the mist, Robert spotted it…

  A red-and-white striped hot-air balloon and ship-shaped wooden gondola, tethered beside an enormous Big Top that had been erected inside a high white wooden fence. The balloon’s silks flickered like an oil lamp, illuminating a long queue of excited-looking villagers running all the way down from the lane at the edge of the field to the kiosk and spiked gate set into the high fence around the circus.

  “Let me look! I can’t see a thing!” Malkin bounced about at Lily’s feet and scraped at Robert’s leg.

  “Foxes don’t do telescopes.” Robert shifted his focus to the sign above the entrance way. “Slimwood’s Stupendous Skycircus,” he read.

  “That’s where we’re going.”

  Lily handed him the birthday card.

  “It’s a queer poem,” he said at last, when he’d read it. “What does it mean? And what are the two clues?”

  “This is the first one.” Lily showed him the ticket.

  Robert was dumbfounded by the drawing of the winged girl and the message. “And the second?” he asked.

  “This.” Lily pulled the red notebook from behind her back. “It belonged to my mama. It’s about a project of hers to design mechanical wings,” she explained as Robert flipped through pages of amazing drawings and sketches of winged figures.

  “You’ve no idea who sent these?” Malkin asked.

  “Maybe this winged girl, Angelique. She’s asked to see us. I think she might be a hybrid too, like me. She looks nice.”

  “I’m not sure, Lily. How would she have got hold of your ma’s notebook?” Robert tapped the red cover. Something about the notebook’s sudden and unexpected appearance made his head itch with worry. “It could be a trap. Why else would whoever had this book send it to you, rather than to your father?”

  “Because it’s my birthday.” Lily snatched the notebook back and shut it with a snap.

  “But how would they know that?” He handed her back the ticket and card as well. “Don’t you think it’s odd for a circus to come to Brackenbridge? There’s not been one before. Such grand shows never normally visit such tiny villages.”

  Malkin stuck his tongue out of the side of his mouth. “Robert has a point,” he said. “For them to arrive on your birthday, of all days…then there’s these clues and presents, and the invite… I mean, what on clunking earth…?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Malkin – that’s why we should go and find out.” Lily looked at the pocket watch. “It’s almost six twenty now. We can probably arrive at the circus before it starts at seven thirty. See the show, meet Angelique and be back by nine, before the party’s even halfway over.”

  “We can’t just disappear without speaking to any of the guests.” The fox wrinkled his nose disapprovingly. “Your father’s expecting you to put in an appearance.”

  “Then we shall greet everyone briefly, before we sneak off,” said Lily. “What do you think, Robert?”

  Robert wasn’t certain they should be going at all. He wondered if he should mention the fact that Lily’s da was planning a surprise speech and present-giving at nine? But then he remembered he’d promised to keep that a secret. Did such promises apply if you were running off to see the circus? He thought he’d best keep his mouth shut just in case they did. If it looked like they weren’t going to be back in time, he might mention it to Lily then – to be sure she’d get a wriggle on.

  Besides, he did love a puzzle, and this one was very intriguing. The circus could be fun and this might be his only chance to see it…

  “Fine,” he said at last. “Let’s do it.”

  “But if we get into trouble,” Malkin added, “it was your plan.”

  Lily ruffled his ears. “We won’t get into trouble. When have we ever got into trouble?”

  The fox sighed deeply. “I’m not going to even dignify that with a response.”

  Lily picked up the ticket, card and notebook. She was glad she had a new mystery to solve. At last she felt as if she was doing something exciting and worthwhile on her birthday.

  “Don’t worry so much, both of you,” she said, shutting the window. “We’ll be back before Papa’s even missed us.”

  Lily, Robert and Malkin crept down the grand staircase to the front parlour, where a gaggle of guests were milling around, talking before dinner.

  Lily glanced about the crowd, searching for Papa, and though she couldn’t see him anywhere, she recognized a few faces in the room.

  There was the mayor of Brackenbridge, talking to the parson of nearby Brocklebridge Church and Mr Chantry from the second-hand bookshop. There was Inspector Fisk from Scotland Yard, who’d helped Robert, Lily, Malkin and Tolly foil a plot by Robert’s grandfather, the infamous escapologist Jack Door, to steal the Queen’s diamond. He was talking with Papa’s lawyer, Mr Rent, who’d been a partner in a firm called Rent and Sunder, before Mr Sunder had run off with their old housekeeper Madame Verdigris and a ton of Papa’s patents and papers, never to be seen again.

  And there was Mrs Chivers, whose clockwork canary Robert had once repaired. It was sitting on her shoulder now, chirping incessantly.

  The rest of the room appeared to be filled with mechanists and professors from the guild. Lily noticed that there were no ladies among them, and remembered that, on the first page of her notebook, Mama had mentioned how hard it was for female scholars to become mechanists.

  There’d certainly been no talk of such career opportunities at Miss Scrimshaw’s Academy – the awful finishing school Papa had attempted to press-gang Lily through last year. The life of a young lady, according to that place, was meant to be an endless parade of polite tea parties, cluttered with doilies and bone china, or else a stream of embroidery, etiquette and deportment classes. If Mama had truly altered things and gone against the grain of those ideas, why was it no one else had followed her example?

  Anna was the only other woman Lily knew who took exception to those kinds of rules. She looked for her among the throng of guests, and Tolly too. She was sure Robert had mentioned they’d been invited, but she couldn’t see them anywhere. She wanted to at least speak with Anna before they snuck off, and perhaps she could persuade Tolly to accompany them to the circus – they did have four tickets, after all.

  Finally, she spotted the stout figure of Anna in the far corner. The journalist and aeronaut looked rather incongruous, for, unlike the rest of the guests who were in evening dress, she was wearing her best bloomers and leather flying jacket. Although, in a concession to the formality of the occasion, she had taken off her hat and goggles, and had pinned her hair up in a neat plait around the top of her head.

  Lily wanted to ask her where Tolly had got to, and maybe tell her about the card, ticket and red notebook, but as she approached she saw that Anna was deep in conversation with someone – a tall professor, with bulbous ears and a bald patch. The professor had his back turned to her, and so did Anna, but their discussion was so interesting that Lily couldn’t help but eavesdrop.

  “I’m writing a piece on hybrids,” Anna was saying, “and I need some facts and figures for my article. I hear you worked at the Mechanists’ Guild for a time so I wondered if you might be able to help… How many hybrids are there in England, would you say?”

  The tall professor laughed and took a swig of champagne from the long-stemmed glass in his hand. “A good question, Miss Quinn. But, honestly, I’ve no idea. They’re not my speciality. If I had to make a guess, I’d estimate probably only half a dozen or so. The hybrids that were created were…experiments. Many of the early incarnations did not survive more than a few years, and those that did aren’t seen by the world at large… For obvious reasons – I mean, the sight of them is frankly unacceptable.” The professor gave an involuntary shudder. “B
ut, fortunately, such work is no longer being undertaken. The only mechanist I know who dealt in such things – apart from our poor deceased colleague Professor Silverfish – was a Dr…Droz, I think the name was. A thoroughly unpleasant and discredited character.” He leaned in closer to Anna, and whispered theatrically, his eyebrows wiggling like hairy white caterpillars, emphasizing each word. “Thrown out of the guild years ago. Though the details of that are not for me to divulge.”

  Lily was about to interrupt him when he continued; “Legend has it that Hartman and his wife were involved in hybrid research too, you know! The gossip was of some corrupted creature with a clockwork heart.”

  Lily felt a horrible shiver of panic.

  “Of course, we at the guild disavow hybrid study entirely,” the professor continued.

  “Why?” Anna asked.

  He shrugged. “Turning humans into hybrids is unethical, it changes who they are. Creating mechanicals is a different thing. But creating hybrids – half-and-halfs – it’s against the laws of nature. It contaminates us. People should be left as they are. I mean, why meddle with what the great maker himself intended?”

  Anna put her empty glass down on a side table. “Even if helping them means they’re happier and healthier?” she asked. “Even if it saves someone’s life?”

  “Especially if it saves someone’s life,” the professor said. “If you change someone with clockwork, turn them into a hybrid, how are you saving them? Would you want them to have to deal with that stigma? It’s worse than being a mechanical. No, better they remain normal and a little damaged: a pure human who meets their fate with dignity, rather than a transformed freak.”

  Lily gasped and felt the air knocked out of her. Did people really believe such things? Her blood boiled just to hear his little speech. He knew nothing of hybrids – if it wasn’t for her clockwork heart, she wouldn’t even be here, alive, on her birthday. She was no freak! Why did he think he had the authority to spout such vile opinions, the oaf!

  “How could you possibly understand what it feels like to be a hybrid?” she asked, stepping between him and Anna and thrusting herself into their conversation. “Who are you to say what’s good or bad?”