The Spiritglass Charade (Stoker & Holmes 2)

I decided I could ask later about what an eagle scout was. Dylan didn’t seem to be the type of person to be interested in ornithology. Instead, I focused on his other revelation. “Your father is a physician?”

“Yes.” He grew quiet again, and I searched in vain for something to say.

Did he miss his father as much as I missed my mother?

Was it worse for Dylan, knowing that he’d left his parents, albeit not by his own volition—or was it worse for me, whose mother had left with no explanation and little communication in a year? At least she could come back if she wanted to.

My throat hurt and my eyes threatened to sting. I was relieved when Dylan spoke again.

“But the thing is . . . I saved the Queen’s life. And I was the only one who could have done it. Yet I didn’t change the course of history. The Queen doesn’t die—I mean, she wasn’t supposed to die yet. And she didn’t.”

“So you did something that only someone from the future could have done, but you didn’t change the course of history.”

It just occurred to me that Dylan knew when Queen Victoria would die. What else about the future did he know? A shiver rushed over my shoulders, ending in an unpleasant twist in my belly. That was dangerous. And fascinating.

“Yes. Isn’t that weird? But there are a lot of strange things about this whole mess anyway,” he muttered.

“I should think. Time travel is quite strange in and of itself.” And yet there was a part of me fascinated by it, and its implications. Imagine if one could go back in time to the scene of a crime—just when the deed was being perpetrated?

“But it’s not just that,” Dylan mused. “It’s . . . well, there are things in this London of 1889 that are very different from what I learned in history books. And so maybe . . . maybe I did change history—your history, this alternate history—by saving the Queen’s life.” Dylan’s expression was miserable. “And if I’m in an alternate history, how in the hell am I ever going to get home?”

For once, I didn’t have the answer. “You saved someone’s life. That’s the most important thing. It’s always the most important thing.”

Dylan seemed particularly moved by my words. “That’s exactly what my dad always says. Saving a life is the best work a person can do.”

Forestalling any further conversation, the taxi lurched to a stop. We’d arrived at our destination.

The driver engaged the vehicle’s side-lift. I appreciated these mechanized platforms, for it kept the chances to a minimum that I would trip on my skirts or catch a heel on the edge of the vehicle. The small lift was smooth and silent as it lowered me to the tiled walkway and the driver handed over my umbrella as I stepped down.

Glasner-Mews was a clean, well-kept neighborhood filled with shops, residences, and boarding houses at all five street-levels. While it wasn’t a particularly affluent area like Hyde Park or St. James’s, it certainly wasn’t the dingy, dangerous Whitechapel where that character Pix resided.

“We have to go to the third level.” Managing my umbrella, I led the way to the nearest street-lift while avoiding puddles of water, mud, and other waste. A demure young lady would have waited for the gentleman to offer an escorting arm, but as has been previously noted, not only did Dylan usually forget to do so, but I lacked the propriety Society requires of its young women.

After I nearly decapitated him while digging for a ha’penny in my bag, Dylan liberated the umbrella from my clumsy grip. He held it over my head as I placed the coin on the street-lift’s small metal tongue. The tiny tray clicked back as the mechanism gulped down my fare, belching and coughing the whole time.

The ornate brass gate opened. Taking care to gather up my skirt, which was always in danger of being trapped by the closing doors, I stepped into the grillwork-sided platform with my companion. It was a tight fit, placing me in pleasant, close proximity to Dylan. He gave me the warm, crooked smile that always made my insides swish pleasantly. I was relieved that he seemed to have pulled out of his doldrums.

The gears groaned and chains rattled as we rose above the street-level with little jerks. Moments later, we alighted and began to walk along the narrow upper walkway toward 79-K.

In this part of London, the buildings rose so tall and wide above the throughways they seemed almost to connect over the street. The balloonlike air-anchors attached to the cornices of each roof bumped and shifted in the sky as their weightless pull helped keep the corners of the brick structures from crashing into each other.

Street vendors called out at all levels, hawking their wares. Because the raised walkways were so narrow, allowing hardly enough room for two people to stroll abreast, the sellers were relegated to parking their carts so half the vehicle hung out over the street below, anchored by brass manacles the size of wagon wheels—which was why the vendor-balloons were such a welcome invention. Carriages clattered along on the ground below. People shouted, dogs barked, shutters thudded, a church bell clanged . . . and feathered through it all was the familiar hiss of steam.

“Something smells really good.” Dylan wielded my umbrella like a gentleman’s walking stick as he took in the sights.

It was a rare event in which he wasn’t hungry, eating, or at least thinking about food. But in this case, I couldn’t disagree with the sentiment. The scents of flaming carrots, shredded-meat pies, puffed plums, and frothy vanilla teas filtered through the air.

“Honey-Creme Mandarins, miss,” called a man from across the air-canal. “Fresh from the crystallizer, still warm!”

“Would you like one? My treat.”

I accepted Dylan’s offer with alacrity, for honeyed mandarins are one of my favorite sweets. He remembered to offer me a gentlemanly arm as we walked over the fly-bridge, crossing the road three levels above the ground.

The lowest street-levels were the meanest in the sense that they were the dirtiest, dingiest, and most unpleasantly aromatic. Sewer chutes rushed alongside the roads, and the primitive walkways were narrow and often flooded with rainwater or sewage that splashed up as various forms of ground transportation rumbled past. The higher the street-level, the cleaner, lighter, and more expensive the area. The lifts were the only way to travel between levels. Therefore, if one didn’t have a coin to feed the machine (or if the mechanism was disabled), one was destined to remain at the lower level—either permanently or temporarily. And the higher the level, the greater the cost of the ride.