Praise for Peter Bunzl’s
“Vivid and gripping.”
Kiran Millwood Hargrave
“A gem of a book.”
Katherine Woodfine
“A stormer of a plot.”
Abi Elphinstone
“A glittering clockwork treasure.”
Piers Torday
“A blend of Philip Pullman, Joan Aiken and Katherine Rundell.”
Amanda Craig
“A thrilling Victorian adventure.”
The Bookseller
“Marvellous fun.”
New Statesman
“Prepare yourself for the adventure of a lifetime.”
Jo Clarke, Book Lover Jo
SECRETS NEVER STAY SUBMERGED FOR LONG
Swept into the bright hustle-bustle of New York, Lily, Robert and Malkin discover that danger lies beneath the city’s surface. For there are chilling goings-on… A strange boy held captive who needs their help, and a shadowy professor with a treacherous plan. Searching for clues, Robert and Lily are plunged into deep water… But will they uncover the deadly truth in time to survive?
CONTENTS
Praise for Peter Bunzl’s Cogheart Adventures
About this book
Map of New York, 1897
Dedication
Title Page
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
A Thrilling and Treacherous Cogheart Adventures Quiz…
A dictionary of curious words
More books in The Cogheart Adventures series
Cogheart Adventures Quiz Answers
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
About the author
Copyright Page
First there was darkness.
Then patches of watery green light.
Then fish, whole schools of them.
With luminous fins bright as knives, glowing scales that shimmered like armour.
They swam past the shadow of a submarine base that clung to a cliff edge beside a fathomless trench, which stretched like a scar across the ocean floor.
The base was the shape of a giant rusted wheel, with spokes that ran from the exterior to its centre. Parts of it were unfinished – the ties that bound it to the seabed still under construction. Fixed with rope and cable in place of iron trusses, the base bobbed slightly in the current. Rising from the hub was a tower with a turbine at the top, turning slowly.
Through the tower’s only porthole, a blond boy of thirteen with bright, inquisitive eyes could be seen sitting on the cabin floor. The boy was humming a tune to himself – a tune that matched the buzzing in the walls – as he worked on a miniature wagon. Jam-jar lids made up the wagon’s wheels, flattened cans its carriage. It had pencils for axles and wire for its yoke.
When he was done, the boy plucked a white mouse from his pocket and tied it to the wagon. He placed the mouse on the floor and geed it along like a long-whiskered, pink-snouted pony. The mouse tottered forward on tiny red paws, pulling the wagon behind it.
After a moment it broke into a run, skittering beneath a table, where two adults, a man and a woman with the same blond hair and inquisitive eyes as the boy, sat working.
The boy chased the mouse under the table and followed it out the door.
Hot on its heels, he ran down the passageway.
The mouse crossed grates and vents and wove beneath pipes, sticking close to the walls. It clattered its cart past damp bulbous diving suits that stank of the sea, tumbled across galleys and mess halls where crew members sat eating.
Still the boy chased it.
Finally it ran through a crack where a door stood slightly ajar.
In the room beyond, row upon row of mice scrabbled about in cages.
The white mouse stopped in the centre of the spotless floor.
The boy crouched, mouth half-open, stretching out a hand to pick it up.
A swish of a skirt.
A shiny leather shoe stepped across his path.
The boy glanced up. “Hey, Aunt Matilda!”
A gaunt-faced woman with short slicked-back hair, wearing a white lab coat and goggles pushed back on her head, was putting on a pair of rubber gloves. “That’s Professor Milksop to you.”
Professor Milksop scooped up the mouse and dropped the cart unceremoniously on the floor. “This rodent’s valuable. You should never have taken it from the lab.”
“He looked sad,” the boy said. “I named him Spook, on account of his colouring. He looks like a Spook, don’t ya think?”
The boy glanced at the mouse, scrabbling in the professor’s hand.
It squeaked softly.
“Don’t be naming them,” the professor said. “Name a thing and you start to have feelings for it.” She turned away and made a sharp, jerking motion with her hands.
The squeaking stopped.
“Go back to your quarters now, Dane. You shouldn’t be here. Could be bad for your health.”
The professor kicked aside the cart and headed for a second, lead-lined door at the far end of the room. A door marked:
Above these words was a picture of a snake curled in a circle, eating its own tail.
Dane rubbed away a stinging tear as he watched his aunt go.
Then he narrowed his eyes and stared at the door.
“No,” he said softly. “I won’t.”
He stepped forward and gently pushed against the sign, peering round the door’s edge.
In the room beyond, a large white laboratory, a mechanical nurse with a red cross on her chest was adjusting a square metal machine on a table. A phonograph on a wheeled stand in the corner played ghostly opera music from a wax cylinder.
“Ready to wake the dead, Miss Buckle?” Professor Milksop joined the mechanical at the table and examined the four glass lenses arranged on the front of the square machine.
Miss Buckle frowned as she checked a tangle of copper wires that emerged from the rear of the machine. They stretched out to a control box and socket inside a lead-lined observation booth on the far side of the room. “Is that one of your jokes, Professor?” she asked. “I can never quite tell. My clockwork doesn’t easily compute humour…”
“Forget about it.” Professor Milksop laid Spook in a tray on the table in front of the machine and adjusted a blue glinting shard of diamond inside its workings. Then, when she was satisfied all was ready, she pulled down her goggles and stepped away from the machine into the lead-lined booth. Miss Buckle followed her.
Dane peeked further round the door, watching Professor Milksop through the observation booth’s porthole window as she shut herself and Miss Buckle in. Then the professor pressed a series of buttons on a control box.
Soon, the machine on the table hummed to life as a tidal wave of electricity buzzed through it.
Miss Buckle peered out through the porthole and saw Dane sneaking into the lab.
“STOP!” she shouted, half at him, half at her mistress.
But it was too late…
Crackling strands of blue lightning were already shooting from the four lenses of the machine. They waved around the lab like a tangled ball of angry, energetic snakes. Their lightning strands latched onto Spook’s body, engulfing it.
The little mouse writhed and jerked in rhythm, then opened its eyes, wiggled its whiskers and crawled back onto its feet like a newborn.
Soon the lightning found Dane…
Winding round him like a nest of vipers…
Biting electrically into his skin.
His body spasmed.
His feet danced a random rhythm.
Silver scales burned his eyes.
His limbs scissored and jiggled.
He fell to his knees…
Keeled over on the floor…
And was still.
The arms of lightning crackled onwards, through the open door, arcing along the passageways of the base…slipping serpent-like around each crew member in turn and dancing them to the same jerky death.
Soon there was only darkness once more. And two last shadows: Professor Milksop and Miss Buckle, who ran from the open doorway of the observation booth and kneeled down beside Dane.
Sparks flew off Miss Buckle’s metal body as she shook Dane by his shoulders. “Master Milksop!” she called, her mechanical voice wavering. “Wake up!”
Professor Milksop kept her distance. She didn’t want to get an electric shock.
“Dane,” she asked. “Are you still in there? You still alive?”
Lily woke on Christmas morning to find herself not at home, as she had been dreaming, but on a top bunk in the cabin of a sleeper zep that was crossing the Atlantic Ocean.
She blinked her green eyes and rubbed her freckled face until she felt entirely awake. Then, with her fingers, she began combing out the worst of the knots in her tangled fire-red hair.
Under the thrum of the airship’s purring engines she could hear the beat of her Cogheart: a mechanical heart of cogs and springs that her papa had given her. It sat ticking in her chest like an overwound carriage clock. Because it was a perpetual motion machine, the Cogheart might go on for ever. Lily didn’t quite understand what that meant, but she knew one thing: without it she would not be alive today. Nor would she be taking this trip.
Papa, whose name was Professor John Hartman, was lying in the middle bunk beneath her. He wore a nightgown and nightcap and snored softly in his sleep. His feet stuck out the end of the bed, for he was quite tall, even lying down.
Robert Townsend, Lily’s best friend in the whole wide world, comrade in arms, first-class clockmaker and her co-conspirator in all things adventuresome, was asleep on the bottom bunk wearing blue-striped pyjamas. A coal-black cowlick of hair curved over his forehead like an upside-down question mark.
Malkin, Lily’s pet mechanimal fox, most trusted confidant and a red furry-faced know-it-all, lay next to Robert, curled up beside his pillow. Lily was only relieved he wasn’t sleeping on Robert’s head, which he sometimes did.
Malkin, of course, was frozen still. That was how mechanicals looked at night, when they were run down, before you took their winding key and wound them up again in the morning.
Christmas Eve had been most diverting. The three friends and Papa had set out from Liverpool Airstation on the Firefly airship, for what promised to be a once-in-a-lifetime adventure: a four-day flight to New York.
The Firefly was the grandest ship in her class and had all the modern conveniences of the most up-to-date sleeper zep in the Royal Dirigible Company’s Transatlantic Fleet. There was a control room where the captain and navigation crew worked. A radio room where they sent and received telegrams. An officers’ mess where the crew relaxed. A galley kitchen that serviced a dining room where two mechanical waiters in white silk jackets served breakfast, lunch, dinner and afternoon tea, with two different types of cake and sandwiches with the crusts cut off. A port and aft side promenade for exercising. A writing room. A thirty-four-foot passenger lounge, which had extra-light tubular-metal cushioned chairs and a duralumin grand piano.
And nestled on top of the zep was a magnificent viewing platform called the Crow’s Nest, which was accessed via a spiral staircase that wound through the centre of the balloon.
It was rather like travelling in a floating hotel. And Lily loved it.
In New York they would be staying in a real hotel, which she hoped would be just as good. They were due to arrive on the twenty-eighth of December. Robert’s mother and sister, Selena and Caddy Townsend, would join them at the airstation.
Since June, when Selena and Caddy had last seen Robert, the pair had been travelling across the states with their vaudeville act. Selena had written to her son and then to Lily’s papa to invite Robert and the Hartmans to meet them in New York for New Year’s Eve.
Luckily, Papa had been planning a trip to America himself. He’d been invited to speak at the Annual American Conference of Mechanists and Electricians in January at Hardwood University, near Boston. Or was that Aardvark University…? Something like that, anyway. To be honest, Lily hadn’t been listening to that part. Papa took his speech with him everywhere he went. Every few hours, in between his holiday reading, which was a hefty book on Shakespeare, he’d been practising snippets of his speech on Lily and Robert and Malkin. Just the thought of it was enough to make Lily feel like falling back to sleep.
She finished combing her hair and crawled down to the end of her bed. There was a stuffed stocking that she hadn’t noticed before, beneath her thrown-aside blanket. It must’ve mysteriously arrived in the night.
She eagerly examined the stocking, then climbed down the cabin’s wooden ladder to shake Robert awake.
“What is it?” he asked her, sleepily rubbing his eyes and crawling out of bed.
“Santa Claus has been!” Lily whispered. “We have stockings!”
She took Malkin’s key from round his neck and began winding him with it. The fox’s gears and cogs clicked into action and he shook himself awake.
They glanced up to find that Papa was yawning and wide awake too. “It’s rather early for gifts, isn’t it?” he asked.
“We’re in the middle of the ocean,” Lily said. “We are neither on British Time nor American. So it is neither early nor late. In my opinion, that is exactly the right time for presents!”
“All right then,” Papa said, getting up and putting on his dressing gown. “I suppose you can open them.”
Gleefully, Robert and Lily fell upon their stockings to see what Santa had stuffed them with.
There was an orange and three whole walnuts in each. Plus a brightly-striped twist of paper that contained a handful of lemon drops, barley sugars, chocolate drops, caramel creams and humbugs. Lily hated eating humbugs, especially on airships, but she would be able to swap them with Robert later.
“There’s more.” Papa reached up into the luggage rack and, from inside his suitcase, produced three finely-wrapped presents – one for each of them.
Lily opened hers first. It was a real magnifying glass, like the kind used by her favourite detective: Sherlock Holmes.
“To help you solve mysteries,” Papa explained.
She tried out the lens by examining the patterns of the carpet. Every minute detail blew up magnificently, even the worn-away threadbare parts.
“It’s perfect. Thank you.” She put the magnifying glass away in her pocket.
Robert opened his present next. Papa had got him a beautiful compass in a gold case. “So you always know where you are,” Papa explained as Robert examined it. “I found it in a second-hand shop in the village. I think it was made by your father.”
“It was. Thank you.” Robert ran his thumb over the maker’s mark on the side of the device: T.T. for Thaddeus Townsend.
Tears pricked at his eyes. This was only the second Christmas without his da, but it was the time of year when he missed him most of all.
Last but not least was Malkin. He tore the wrapping from his present with his teeth to reveal a bright green jacket, knitted by Mrs Rust, their clockwork cook and housekeeper back home. Mrs Rust was a legendarily awful knitter, but she didn’t look to have made such a bad job of this. Lily wrestled the jacket onto Malkin, with relatively little complaining and gnashing of teeth on his part.
“There,” she said when she was done, imagining the look of pride on Mrs Rust’s face. This was the first Christmas they’d spent apart since Papa made Rusty. Lily missed her so much, and the three other mechanicals Papa had built and created to look after her – Captain Springer, Mr Wingnut and Miss Tock. The four clockwork servants were like family and Christmas didn’t feel the same without them.
At least she had Malkin and Robert and Papa.
The fox grizzled at the jacket, pulling it this way and that until it sat comfortably across his back. “How do I look?” he asked.
“Rather smart,” Robert replied.
The scruffy tail part that sat over Malkin’s backside was a bit of a mess – it tangled with his wagging brush. But on the whole, the jacket gave him a raffish air.
“Unfortunately, I don’t have gifts for any of you,” the fox announced. “But I shall give you each a lick on the cheek and hopefully that shall suffice.”
This he promptly did and they laughed at him warmly.
They spent the rest of the morning playing charades in the cabin, before dressing excitedly for the lavish Christmas feast, which was to be served to all the guests in the airship’s dining room.
“Lead on, Macduff!” Papa said when they were ready.
“I think you’ll find it’s ‘Lay on, Macduff’.” Malkin hopped into a little picnic-style basket with handles, which Lily rushed to pick up.
“What are you doing?” Papa asked.
“Joining you for dinner,” the fox said.
“Mechanimals aren’t allowed on deck, you know that.”
This was true, unfortunately. It was a rule on public airships that all mechanimals were to be stowed away in travel trunks in the hold for the whole duration of the journey. But Malkin couldn’t abide such treatment, and neither could Lily.
The fox fidgeted in the basket, getting comfortable. “It’s Christmas Day. A time of goodwill to all creatures great and small. You can at least allow me this little indiscretion.”
“Fine,” Papa relented. “So long as you stay hidden.”
They closed the cabin door and followed Papa along the passage. Lily couldn’t wait to eat Christmas dinner with her two best friends, and the thought of doing so on an airship made a bubble of joy rise inside her, higher than the zep’s balloon itself.
In the dining room, the two mechanical waiters were busily showing the other passengers to their seats. A clockwork concert pianist sat at the duralumin grand piano, playing Christmas carols to welcome everyone to dinner.
Each table was set with bone china and silver cutlery, starched white napkins and red-and-gold crackers. There were even specially designed seasonal menus with sprigs of holly printed around their edges.
Lily put the basket down by her feet and checked to see how Malkin was doing. He’d dozed off already. Mechanical foxes, she found, did not take Christmas half as seriously as humans.
She fidgeted about in her seat to get comfortable. She intended to enjoy the festivities, yet she couldn’t help notice that everyone else was staring at her. Lily bit her lip and held the menu in front of her face, pretending to study it.
“What’s wrong?” Robert asked.
“Every time I come in here, people gawk at me as if I’m some kind of medical anomaly!”
“Nonsense!” Papa said.
“Cream of artichoke!” One of the mechanical waiters placed a gold-rimmed soup dish in front of each of them.
“I don’t see anyone staring.” Papa adjusted his napkin on his lap, while Robert tried to work out which of the diverse denizens of the dining room was gawking the most at Lily.
“That’s because you don’t pay attention, Papa,” Lily admonished. “You’re so lost in your own head, reading your patents and papers, practising your important speeches or inventing things, that you barely see what’s in front of your nose.”
“I don’t know what to say…” Papa stopped eating and reached up to clutch his nose comically, as if that was the culprit.
“You don’t have to say anything.” Lily dipped some bread in her soup. “But know that since we’ve been on this airship – in fact, even before that, at Liverpool Airstation – people were pointing me out to each other and whispering about me behind their hands.”
“Is this true?” Papa asked Robert.
Robert nodded. He had been having trouble deciding on which of the many different-shaped silver spoons to use, but had finally settled on the biggest one, which, it turned out, barely fitted in his mouth.
“Lily’s famous now,” he gargled through a sloppy spoonful of soup.
“Infamous, more like,” Malkin said, poking his head from under the table. “Thanks to that clanking article Anna wrote.”
“I knew no good would come of that,” Papa cried exasperatedly as the waiters swapped the barely-finished soups for a main course of roast turkey with the full trimmings. “Curse Anna and all her pals on Fleet Street.”
Anna was one of Lily and Robert’s closest friends – a journalist. She’d written an article about Lily two months ago in which she’d revealed the secret of Lily’s clockwork heart and, since then, people had become interested in Lily, often seeking her out.
Life at Brackenbridge Manor – the country house where she lived with Papa, Robert, Malkin, Mrs Rust, Captain Springer, Mr Wingnut and Miss Tock – had changed in many small ways. When journalists and other interested parties would knock on the front door in hope of an interview, Mr Wingnut, the mechanical butler, or Miss Tock, the mechanical maid, would send them packing. And if they sneaked round the back, then the indomitable Mrs Rust would threaten them with her meat-cleaver arm-attachment and shout, “COGS AND CHRONOMETERS! BE OFF, BEFORE I CALL THE CONSTABULARY!” Even Captain Springer, who was normally so calm and collected, had taken to chasing off any visiting reprobates with his rake.
All of which was lucky, as, oftentimes, Lily had no idea what to say to these people. She felt like she was an imposter and unworthy of their attention. But still, every week, dozens of letters arrived asking if Anna’s article was true, whether she really did have a clockwork heart, and how it felt to be the only one in the world with such a thing.
Of course, these were questions Lily didn’t know how to answer.
Anyway, they weren’t really about her. They were about Papa’s machine.
No one ever asked how she’d rescued Papa when he was kidnapped, or how she’d survived being almost drowned in the Thames by notorious criminal Jack Door. Nor what it felt like to meet Queen Victoria and ride on the back of her mechanical elephant. They never asked Lily about being held prisoner in the Skycircus, or enquired about how, along with the other acts, she’d fought for hybrid rights.
Things would be different, Lily thought, when she wrote her own story. Then she would explain what it was like to live through such adventures. She’d made a start already in her journal. It was slow going because writing was hard, but the important thing to stress was that being a hybrid was not dissimilar to being anyone else. It was how you lived your life that mattered; that made you who you were. Not whether you possessed a flesh-and-blood heart or a mechanical one.
“TELEGRAM FOR TOWNSEND! IMPORTANT TELEGRAM FOR MASTER TOWNSEND!” a voice called out, interrupting her thoughts and everyone else’s Christmas dinner.
Lily’s Cogheart tick-tocked wildly. That was Robert’s name. She looked up to see a mechanical porter in the blue uniform of the Royal Dirigible Fleet trundling across the floor on his wheeled feet, carrying a silver tray.
“Quick, hide!” Lily told Malkin.
Grumbling to himself, the mech fox clambered back into his basket beneath the table. Lily tucked him away and studied Robert’s nervous face. Who could possibly be sending him a telegram at Christmas dinner?
“That’s me!” Robert called out, a knot forming in his stomach. “I’m Townsend!” Anxiously he pushed aside his Christmas meal.
The mechanical porter approached their table. His wheels squeaked loudly, cutting through the chatter of the other diners.
“Here you are, Sir,” he said, holding out the telegram to Robert on its silver platter.
Gingerly, Robert took it.
“Thank-you-Seasons-Greetings-and-good-day,” the mechanical snapped quickly, before snatching away his tray and trundling off towards the exit on the far side of the dining room.
Robert ripped open the telegram and scanned it; the knot in his stomach loosened and his heartbeat slowed. It was from his ma. He read it aloud to everyone.
Lily felt relieved the telegram wasn’t bad news. “It’s a shame your mama and Caddy are going to be a day late,” she said. “But you still have plenty of time to see them,” she added soothingly.
“What do you think she means by surprises?” Robert asked her.
“I don’t know.” Lily took a mouthful of buttery turkey. “Perhaps she just means she’s brought you a nice Christmas present?”
“A snotty hanky, perhaps?” Malkin suggested, poking his head up between Robert’s legs in a most alarming fashion. “Isn’t that what most humans keep up their sleeves in winter?”
John Hartman looked up from his food. “I don’t see the point of trying to read these various meanings into such a short message, Robert.”
“Papa’s right,” Lily said, eating a Brussels sprout. “You’ve done that every time your ma’s sent you something.”
“Yes,” said Malkin, nudging Robert’s leg with his nose. “You need to calm down about seeing them again.”
They were right, Robert observed to himself. He clasped his ma’s Moonlocket that he wore around his neck, stroking its ivory inlay as he always did when he was worried about her. Since he’d been getting closer to the reunion with his ma and sister, his nerves had become more and more frayed. This would only be his second time seeing them, and yet, despite their differences, he’d missed their presence in his life. He wanted everything on this holiday to be perfect. “I suppose I am concerned about how it will be,” he said. “I want to prepare myself for every eventuality. Including…” He broke off, and finished quietly to himself, “The fact that we might not get along…”
The journey across the Atlantic took three more days, during which time Robert and Lily ate far too much Christmas cake, watched various ships passing in the night, and played a clank of a lot of hands of whist and cribbage. Malkin would’ve joined them in their games, only he found he couldn’t hold the playing cards in his teeth.
Every evening, before bed, they took it in turns to read aloud from Papa’s guidebook, which was called Appleton’s General Guide to the United States and Canada and had an illustrated section full of tips and advice on New York.
Finally, on the afternoon of the twenty-eighth of December, when they were due to arrive, the three of them pressed their noses against the cabin’s porthole window and peered out, expecting to see the city beneath them. Instead, they saw nothing but the bulbous shadow of Firefly, sweeping over the ocean.
“There’s nothing to see but sea!” Lily moaned. “We needn’t have bothered getting dressed up!”
In honour of their imminent arrival in New York, she’d put on her emerald-ribboned bonnet and a smart velvet blouson. Malkin wore his new green knitted jacket, which he’d barely taken off since receiving it. Robert had on his flat cap, which he always wore, and a woollen winter coat that had once belonged to his father. It was rather old now, but it was one of the last gifts that Thaddeus had given him before he’d died and it was Robert’s favourite item of clothing.
“Four-fifteen,” Lily said, checking the time on her pocket watch, which she’d reset to United States Eastern time.
“We must be getting close,” Robert said. “I imagine the coast will come into view quite soon.”
“Not likely.” Malkin hooked his forepaws over the edge of the porthole window and pressed his leather nose to the glass. “This clanking zep travels so slowly that the Christmas holidays will be over by the time we get there.”
Lily gave a disheartened sigh and hiked up the ends of her yellow-and-black striped scarf, tucking them into her coat pockets. The scarf was one of Mrs Rust’s early knitting experiments. Malkin said it made her look like a swaddled giraffe, but Lily felt more like a tiger when she wore it. The perfect beast to face New York.
Just then, Papa burst into the cabin. He was dressed for the outdoors too, in a dark grey overcoat with a silk cravat tucked into the heavy collar. “Lily, Robert,” he cried as soon as he saw them. “You must come at once to the viewing platform. The captain tells me we’ll begin our descent to New York in the next five minutes. As we cross the harbour, we’ll float straight past the Statue of Liberty and see the whole of the city.”
Lily peered out of the window and noted, with delight, that he was right. In the time they had been talking, a dark strip of coastline had appeared.
“What about me?” Malkin asked.
“You’ll have to watch from the window,” Papa said. “Mechanicals aren’t allowed on deck.”
“Ridiculous rules,” Malkin muttered, waving his brush angrily at Papa.
Suddenly, Lily had second thoughts too. “I don’t think I shall come either,” she announced. “I’m sure I’ll see well enough from here.” As thrilled as she was to see that statue from the very best vantage point, she didn’t want anyone goggling at her to mar her first view of the city.
Papa must’ve known that was what she was fretting about, for he put his arm around her and gave her a squeeze. “I promise no one will be staring at you on the viewing platform, Lily. They’ll be too busy looking at the sights.”
“Come on, Lil.” Robert flashed his friend a smile. “It’ll be no fun without you.”
“I suppose,” Lily said, feeling a bit better.
“Jolly good!” Papa was already on the move, marshalling them towards the exit. “And so, to the Crow’s Nest!”
Lily picked up her wicker basket and glanced down at Malkin.
“I wish you could come too,” she whispered.
“He can,” Robert said and, while Papa wasn’t looking, Malkin jumped into the basket. Robert threw a blanket over him so he was hidden beneath it. Then the three of them set off together after Papa to go see the view.
They traipsed along a corridor filled with numbered passenger compartments and took the winding spiral stairs at the far end that led right up through the centre of the zep’s balloon. It was a long climb past giant geometric frames that kept the silks in place, depleted oil tanks and gas envelopes and empty leather water bags that hung from various straps and girders. Through it all, Lily’s excitement rose at the thought of seeing New York.
They reached the top of the spiral stairs and clambered through a hatch onto the zeppelin’s roof. Lily felt her belly drop and heart tick-tock nervously in her chest. It was harder to breathe out here. The chill wind blew through her woollen winter stockings. The airship was crossing New York harbour and, far off, beneath the heavy clouds, the sun had started to set.
Lily squeezed into a gap at the viewing rail beside Robert and Papa and sensed a faint rustle against her leg. Malkin was poking his head from the wicker basket. He stuck his tongue out to taste the sea air and rested his snout over the foot rail, his ears flapping wildly in the wind as his bulging black eyes took in the view.
The rest of the passengers were leaning against the railing, staring at the miniature islands that crowded the bay and holding onto their hats to stop them blowing off. Papa and Robert had been right, Lily realized, everyone was too busy sightseeing to notice her arrival.
Then Lily spotted Liberty. And, in an instant, the sense of dread she’d felt at her own predicaments burned away. Papa was already staring at the giant metal lady, shading his eyes with a hand. Lily shook Robert by the shoulder and tapped Malkin’s head, pointing out the details on the statue.
Alone on her island, beset by the raging waves of the harbour, Liberty looked small and slight beneath the burgeoning grey clouds, holding her torch aloft. But, as the airship swooped closer, accompanied by the loud oohs and aahs of the passengers, she seemed to grow in stature.
Soon Lily could see every fold in her dress, every rivet on her bronze skin. Then they were passing right by her, beneath her raised arm – so close that Lily felt as if she might lean over the rail and touch Liberty’s hand.
The statue had her back to the troubled ocean and was staring with concern at the island city. Lily followed her gaze and saw a hundred thousand windows twinkling like fallen stars embedded in the surface of the earth.
It had started to snow. A flurry of flakes pinched harshly at Lily’s cheeks. She stuck her tongue out and swallowed her first New York snowflake. It tasted of ice and excitement.
As the Firefly dipped towards the southern tip of Manhattan, Lily, Robert and Malkin traded exhilarated glances, readying themselves for the start of this new adventure…
Lily took a deep breath and stepped down the gangplank of the airship, letting her lungs burn with the smoky sharpness of the city.
Following behind her, Robert pulled his cap low and wrapped his collar tight around him. Clapping his gloved hands together, he huffed out clouds of steam into the cold winter twilight. Sharp noise and chatter echoed off the warehouse buildings on the wharf, assaulting his ears.
Mechanical porters in red pillbox hats swarmed about inside the Firefly’s open hold, unloading everyone’s trunks and transporting them through the white slush to a warehouse filled with officious-looking customs officers in smart blue suits with starched white collars.
The sheer number of people in this airstation made Robert’s head spin, but it would be hard to lose Lily amongst them, thanks to her brightly-striped tiger scarf and the basket with Malkin’s brush sticking out.
As Lily and Robert walked with John through the crowds, not a single person stopped and stared, and Lily’s spirits were buoyed by the sudden and complete realization that no one here knew who she was, or the first thing about her.
Here, in New York, she was free.
“Malkin,” she said, stuffing his swishing tail back into the rear of the basket, “you’d best stay hidden. If you cause an international incident, they might send us back home before we’ve even properly arrived.”
“As if I would!” Malkin stuck his leathery nose out from the basket’s other end, sniffing around at everything that was coming his way. “You know me. I’ll be discretion itself.”
In the customs warehouse, the serious officials in the smart blue suits inspected each trunk in turn, overwhelming their owners with questions. Robert hoped he wouldn’t have to speak to any of them. He tended to get tongue-tied in those sorts of situations.
They found their luggage – three large travelling trunks that were as tall as he was – and waited by them, while one of the customs men came over to check their passports and papers.
“It says here you have a mechanimal with you?” the customs man said to John, consulting the manifest on his clipboard.
“That’s right,” John said. “He’s a mech-fox.”
Malkin tried to pop his head out of the basket then, but Lily pushed him down. The customs man glared at her. “He should really be packed away in a travel trunk. I hope you’ve filled in all the necessary paperwork for him.”
“We have,” John said.
“Good.” The customs man ticked a few boxes on a form. “Because it’s illegal to bring a mechanimal into this country unless it’s been properly registered.” He lowered his clipboard and gave them an uninterested smile. “All right, I’m done. You’ve cleared customs. You may leave.”
When he’d gone, John engaged a mechanical porter in one of the red hats to take their trunks on to the hotel. The porter gave him a brass tag for their luggage and agreed to receive payment when he met them at the other end.
“Look!” Robert said, tugging Lily’s sleeve and pointing out some of the other steerage passengers, who were being corralled off to a ferry boat at the edge of the quay by uniformed officials. “Where do you think they’re being taken?”
“I don’t know,” Lily said, “but it seems a bit ominous.”
“They’re going to Ellis Island for further processing,” John explained. “They’ve come to the US to stay for ever, unlike us, and so they need to be inspected properly before they’re allowed to enter the country.”
“But they’re wearing threadbare clothes,” Lily whispered to Robert.
Robert had noticed that too. The folk being waved through, like the Hartmans, were richer-looking. “Seems there’s one law for the better-off and another for the rest,” he told Lily quietly, and she nodded in agreement.
The Arrivals Hall was filled with people of all ages and races in outfits from every different kind of place. The air sang with their joyful babble, a mix of various accents, languages and dialects. Robert recognized snatches – French and what he guessed was Italian. Plus Polish, German and…Irish? Families and friends were meeting for the first time in a long time and their faces glowed happily in the warm electric light.
Lily fidgeted excitedly with her basket. Malkin was still hidden inside it and would occasionally stick his head out to glance around, or poke out his swishing brush. And Robert, who was walking behind Lily, would have to sneak over and stuff it back in.
They crossed the lobby and stepped through a row of swinging glass doors that led onto the sidewalk and the bustling streets of the city, where clouds the colour of roof shingles sprinkled snow on a cobbled road, busy with traffic.
“Come on,” John said, flagging down an electric taxi carriage and winking mischievously at the three of them. “Let’s go see New York.”
No one talked much as they set off in the brand-new electrical-wagon. They were too busy taking in the view. Robert had never seen the like of it before and neither, it seemed, had Lily. She swayed in her seat and lifted Malkin to the window so that he could see too. It wasn’t long before the fox had his snout pressed against the glass.
“Look!” he called out excitably, staring through the falling flakes of snow.
Robert wiped away the condensation and peered through the soot-and-dust-stained window as they chugged under an iron bridge that spanned the street.
A train sped across above them. Robert realized this was New York’s famous elevated railway, raised on heavy columns and stanchions above the road.
The train’s chimney puffed smoke that showered hot, hissing flecks of ash onto the roofs of the low tenements that edged up to the tracks. Behind those, taller buildings spread out in a forest of bricks, concrete, glass and electric light, which streamed from every window, making the cobbles and slush piles radiate a brilliance that twinkled like the joy in Robert’s heart.
The city appeared to be set out on a grid, for every crossroads had four junctions. They passed alleys crisscrossed with bare frozen washing lines and a humungous, half-finished tower on the edge of a park, whose top floors, concealed in scaffolding, almost touched the clouds.
“That’s Park Row,” Robert said, pointing it out eagerly to Malkin and Lily.
“How do you know that?” Lily asked, her eyes shining in the light from the tower.
“We read about it,” Robert replied, “in John’s Appleton’s Guide, remember?”
“That’s right,” John said. “When it’s finished, it’s set to be the tallest building in New York. A skyscraper, they’re calling it.”
“Impressive,” Lily said. And she meant it. It was a far cry from the short and dumpy houses she was used to seeing in Brackenbridge. Then, in the gap between Malkin’s ears, she glimpsed the Brooklyn Bridge.
With its imposing metal cobwebs of suspended steel cables, it was even more breathtaking than the skyscraper.
After ten more minutes, the cab turned off at a junction and pulled up before an eight-storey brownstone. Trees in white fluffy overcoats lined the avenue out front and the tall pyramid-roofed towers on each corner of the building’s roof looked like they were sprinkled with icing sugar. Three red words glinted on an electric sign at the front of the building:
“We’re staying here?” Lily asked breathlessly.
Papa nodded. “That’s right. I booked us a suite.”
“Blimey,” Robert muttered, gaping wide-eyed at the place. It looked like a palace. “I’ve not even stayed in a regular hotel before, let alone one that’s so…”
“Swanky?” Malkin suggested, finishing off his sentence.
The three of them stared at the building and then at each other in amazement, as Papa rapped on the roof of the cab to signal the driver to stop.
“To the hotel!” Papa called as the electric taxi juddered to a standstill. Then he opened the carriage door and jumped down from his seat.
His mouth still hanging open, Robert bounded after him.
Lily gathered a bouncing Malkin up quickly in his basket, and with a chest full of twitching excitement followed the pair out into the street.