From the angle of the sun she guessed it to be not long before nine in the morning. That meant her allotted time was already half spent. To find one person who would speak frankly with her would be a victory, let alone the entire crew. Not that the commodore wanted it, she thought. All he needed was plausible distance; a suitably phrased report with someone else’s signature on the bottom. Someone other than himself for the board of directors to question.

  She had no intention of being that person.

  The fleet had seven more gunboats. If they were sent south, together, they might be able to face up to the pirates. There would be a chance of capturing one of the pirate ships and discovering the nature of their weaponry. That was the only way the truth could be discovered. It was also the best chance of discovering what had happened to Julia.

  On the way up from the engine room Elizabeth came upon three ordinary seamen carrying water jugs. They swayed as they walked and had the pallor of men who regretted the excess of the night before. They touched their forelocks as they passed, but kept their eyes from meeting hers. She waited for them to descend to a lower deck before setting off to follow.

  By this method she found the main body of the crew, asleep in rows of hammocks so closely arranged that they touched, swinging together as the ship rocked. The three she had followed were filling beakers for others who were awake. She could not tell if it was water or the hair of the dog that bit them. They straightened somewhat on seeing her.

  “Who saw the Mary May go down?” she asked.

  They cast uncertain glances at each other before one said: “We all did, sir.”

  “And what exactly happened?

  “It was dragged to hell by a monster.”

  She found the first mate behind the wheel on the quarterdeck. He nodded to acknowledge her greeting but then continued to stare out at the horizon.

  “Your men are drunk,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “All of them.”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t use discipline?”

  “It’d do no good after what they’ve seen.”

  “But you said it was an accident. An explosion.”

  “They think different. And that’s all that matters. If there was something for them to do, I could take their minds from it. A whale to chase. A storm to fight. But this – the waiting. It’s the worst thing.”

  “Are there monsters in the sea?”

  “Somewhere. In the deeps. I’m certain of it.”

  “But this wasn’t one?”

  “They’d been staring into the white for hours,” he said. “When there’s nothing to fix on, it plays tricks with you. Maybe one of them saw a mackerel shark swim under the boat. I don’t know. Maybe the captain saw it too. But I’ll tell you this – half the men who’ll swear on their eyes they saw a monster weren’t even looking into the water. Oh, they all believe it now – since they’ve had time with nothing to do but stew together below decks. They’ve grown the story between them. But if it hadn’t been for the Mary May going down, it’d be forgotten already, just like every other shadow.”

  He glanced up and looked directly at her. There was fear in those over-large eyes. But not fear of a monster below the water, she thought. He was a man given leadership when he didn’t want it. Whatever the crew believed they’d seen, it had left them unbiddable. She’d assumed Captain Woodfall’s despair had come from being locked away. But now she wondered if that dark humour might have come from him trying to deny a truth that his eyes had seen.

  For all his fear, the first mate had had the courage to say what he believed, though it ran counter to everyone else on board. She respected that.

  “I never asked your name,” she said.

  “Ryan,” said the first mate.

  She shook his hand. “Scientific Officer Barnabus,” she said.

  It is a fine skill to open a lock leaving no sign of your work. Opening it when you no longer care is merely a trial of strength and requires a more substantial pick. She raided the whaler’s tool store and selected a bone spade for the job, resting the long iron shank over her shoulder as she marched back to the captain’s cabin. With the chart table turned over, she lifted the spade and crashed it down on the underside of the locked drawer. The noise left her ears ringing. The blade had cut into the wood. It screeched as she wrested it free. On the third blow, the oak cracked down the middle. Pressing on the shank with all her weight, she levered out a section.

  There was a bundle of letters in the drawer, a bottle of laudanum – half empty – a hefty purse of gold coins, a document wallet and the ship’s log book, bound in brown leather.

  The first letter was from the captain’s wife. She unfolded it and read. Last night I dreamed that you had returned to us, my dear Henry, just as you were in October, the same smile of parting, and this morning I can do nothing but think of you. Elizabeth flicked through the rest of the bundle. All had been addressed in the same hand. An image of John Farthing came unwontedly to her mind. Stifling a pang of longing, she retied the bundle of letters and slipped it back inside the ruined drawer.

  Next she opened the log book, flicking through to find the account of the disaster. But there was nothing. The final entry stated: Fog. Visibility 80 yards. Turned into the swell. Bearing 195°. Proceeding dead slow. Watch doubled.

  She slumped back against the chart table, the hope of discovery draining from her. And yet a picture was forming. She unstoppered the laudanum bottle and sniffed. It smelled of the same herbs as the residue in the captain’s drinking glass. Having witnessed the loss of the Mary May, he turned the ship around and steamed back to Mother, making no record in the log book.

  The document wallet was empty. There was wax on the flap; the remains of a seal bearing the commodore’s mark. Her mind flicked to the paper ash she’d found on the silver tray.

  For months she had been focussed on keeping secrets from the people around her. Now she could feel the presence of other people’s secrets. The commodore had two sets of secrets; those he kept for the Company and those he was keeping for himself. He had spoken too easily of the Company’s relationship with the Patent Office; their mission to keep the Atlantic open. He didn’t know she would see the strange unspooling drum in the belly of the mother ship’s central hull.

  Whatever secrets the commodore nursed, his steward would surely know them. There was a strange intimacy between the two men. Though Watkins’ rank was low, the guards had taken his word as carrying the authority of the commodore. And there could be few stewards with the seamanship to pilot a small launch between ships with such finesse. But perhaps most tellingly of all, the commodore had seen fit to keep a captain in solitary confinement for fear that he might mention what he’d seen. But he’d allowed his personal steward to keep Elizabeth’s company, despite what she’d been told.

  The image of the thick black cable came back to her, unspooling from its drum by inches, being fed out of the chamber. It did not emerge from any side, Tinker had said. Nor from above. But the boy hadn’t searched below.

  All the mysteries seemed tangled in what lay below.

  When she was freshly arrived on the Pembroke, before the crew turned against her, a harpoon man had shown her how to listen to the cry of the whales. He held the shaft of an oar against the bottom of the whaleboat and had her press an ear flat to the paddle. Nothing in her studies had prepared her for the sound. She’d found interest in the collections of the Natural History Museum. But this strange and unearthly music had stirred something deeper.

  A thought took hold of her. She jumped to her feet and hurried from the captain’s cabin, abandoning the ruins of the chart table to whoever might look in. This time she knew where she was going and the question she would ask. This time, on entering the engine room, she listened before speaking. Flywheel and regulators rotated slowly, clicking softly. The low boom of the engine came slower than a heartbeat.

  “How fast does it turn when you’re on one-eighth power?” she asked.

  “Just as you see,” said the old engineer. “That’s how we are today. Enough to keep us pointed in the right direction.”

  “And when the Mary May was sunk?”

  “It was the same.”

  She placed a hand on one of the in-curving walls. One sheet of iron was all that separated her from the ocean. And from all that swam in it.

  “Do you ever hear the song of the whales?”

  “Yes, sir,” said the apprentice. “When it’s quiet.”

  “Did you hear anything just before the Mary May went down?”

  He glanced at the old man, who nodded, as if giving permission.

  “There was a noise,” the apprentice said. “It passed under us.”

  “A whale?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Some other fish?”

  Again, that conversation of looks between the two of them. This time it was the old man who answered: “It was a machine,” he said. “I’d swear it. Though I never heard its like before.”

  Chapter 11

  The idea of the helio was simple. In the daytime it reflected the rays of the sun. In the darkness it directed its own light through lenses so as to be flashed over many miles with undiminished brilliance. But the marvel of the technology lay in its gimballed mounting, which perfectly counteracted the movement of the ship. It was a means of aiming, without which the helio would have been useless.

  Perhaps reasoning that it could equally have been employed to steady a gun, the International Patent Office banned its use. But the ban had jurisdiction only within the Gas-Lit Empire. Thus the Company could manufacture helio machines in workshops on the mother ship, far from the borders of any nation.

  With the other officers of the Iceland Queen drunk, it was left to First Mate Ryan to mount the helio on its stand. He primed it with a measure of methylated spirits, from which the main burner ignited. Next he pumped pressure into the oil chamber. The flame roared and the quicklime at its focus began to glow, becoming brilliant as it heated. Swivelling the mirror into place, Ryan looked through the sighting telescope and took aim at the mother ship’s control room.

  The shutter chattered as he sent three slow flashes. He repeated the signal over and over until three flashes came back.

  “We’re ready,” he said.

  It was just dusk and a band of yellow still hung in the sky above the western horizon. The commodore had offered Elizabeth twenty-four hours. That time had slipped past.

  “Signal this,” she said. “Report written. Send launch to collect officer Barnabus.”

  The helio chattered with each opening and closing of the shutter. Though Ryan wasn’t a signalman, he worked with marvellous speed.

  “Done,” he said.

  “Is that it?”

  “We must wait for their signoff.”

  So they waited. The yellow streak in the sky faded to cream, then to grey. The constellation of Orion became visible above them in a gap between the clouds.

  She was about to question him further, but saw the angle of his shoulders change. Eye to telescope, he began writing on his notepad. Even with the naked eye, she could see the flickering of helio light on the mother ship, but not clearly enough to have been able to read the sequence of flashes.

  At last, Ryan took his eye from the telescope and stood tall. He twisted a valve, releasing the oil pressure with a hiss. The flame died and the brilliant light began to fade.

  “You’re to remain on the ship,” he said, reading from the pad. “They’re sending us a new captain. And new orders. Do you think we’ll be going home?”

  Home was the one place Elizabeth knew they couldn’t be going. She’d been placed in the fleet in the hope that it would help her infiltrate the “nation of eels”. The fleet might be far beyond the border of the Gas-Lit Empire, but the commodore would never go against the desires of the Patent Office. He might send her into danger, but he’d not bring her back to Mother. And if the worst thing happened – if the Iceland Queen suffered the same fate as the Mary May – then the ocean would claim all those inconvenient witnesses that had so worried him.

  “They’ll be sending you back to face the monster,” she said.

  Ryan hesitated before answering. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Then why do they give us a new captain? You know Woodfall. He’d refuse to do it.”

  “He could be ill?”

  “He thinks it was a monster took the Mary May. He drank laudanum because the fear of it was too much for him to carry. He couldn’t order the crew to steam south. But a new captain might.”

  “The crew wouldn’t do it.”

  “Under a new command? A new hand at the lash?”

  But Ryan shook his head; more in an attempt to dispel fear, she thought, than in disagreement.

  “You said it was an explosion in the magazine.”

  “I said I didn’t see a monster.”

  Elizabeth regarded him. He was an honest man. And honourable. She imagined he would have thrived if all was orderly. But he was ill equipped to cope with the overthrow of reason.

  “I’m scared too,” she said. “But I’ve a way of making things safer for us. When the launch comes, I may tell you to do something. If it happens, you must act immediately and without question. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” He seemed almost relieved.

  Perhaps the hangovers had softened. Or perhaps fresh rum had been found to soften the edge. Either way, the crew set to work with a level of energy she hadn’t previously witnessed, hanging lamps off the starboard bow, preparing the Iceland Queen to receive the mother ship’s steam launch.

  First Mate Ryan had let the officers know that a new captain was on his way. The news swept through the ship, leading to a frantic bout of cleaning and the destruction of incriminating evidence. By the time they steamed in closer to the mother ship, the Iceland Queen was almost presentable. To a casual glance.

  “Could you point out three troublesome men,” Elizabeth whispered to the first mate.

  “Only three?” he asked, with the first smile she’d seen him wear.

  “Troublesome, but they must be able to handle a small craft.”

  The first mate pointed. “Him, him and him over there.”

  “Keep them in sight,” she said.

  With the ship turned so that the swell was hitting it abeam, it began to wallow. Elizabeth held tight to the gunwale. One of the watch officers shouted and pointed into the dark. It took several more seconds before she too made out the shape of the approaching launch, heading directly for them. As she’d guessed, there were three figures aboard.

  At the last moment the boat turned parallel to the Iceland Queen and came alongside. Someone threw down a coil of rope. Then a team of men hauled it back until two sea chests came crashing over onto the deck. One of them was hers. She watched as two more lines were thrown. The men in the launch gripped the ropes rather than securing themselves with harnesses. Each timed his jump so as to be lifted clear of the small boat and arrive dry on deck.

  Elizabeth grabbed Ryan’s arm. “Get your three men onto the launch and have them take it back to Mother,” she said.

  Then she leaned over the gunwale and shouted to Steward Watkins, who was at the helm of the little boat. “Climb up! I’ve the report for you!”

  He seemed bewildered. But men were already clambering down, so he gave up his place at the helm. So graceful was his jump from launch to ship that he could have been a trapeze artist.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” he demanded in that shrill voice. “Where’s the report?”

  Elizabeth drew him away into the lee of the wheel housing. The light of a wildly swinging storm lantern made their shadows dance.

  She leaned in close and whispered: “The Mary May was sunk by a machine.”

  “I need it in writing!”

  “Then I shall write it.”

  He must have sensed the trap because he spun and ran back to the gunwale. But too late. The launch was already slipping away from the Iceland Queen and heading into the dark.

  Elizabeth had but a moment of satisfaction before the other two men from the launch stepped towards her. The first was Captain Woodfall, as she’d expected. His expression showed bewilderment. The commodore was indeed getting rid of all the inconvenient witnesses. But then the second man came into the illumination of the swinging lamp: Captain Locklight, master of the whaling ship Pembroke, her old tormentor.

  “Scientific Officer Barnabus,” said Locklight, spitting the words. “It seems I’m fated to command you again. And straightways you’re mixed in a strange business. Tell me, man, why is it the launch is sent back without the commodore’s steward?”

  Chapter 12

  There is a moment when the last outlier dips below the horizon, when there is no more view of the fleet and the ship finds itself alone. It means a different thing to every man on board. But no one is untouched by it.

  From land, the horizon seems to be a straight line. But in the heart of the ocean it is revealed as a circle. And nowhere more so than from the crow’s nest, high above the deck. Elizabeth had never before climbed the mast. She had a good head for heights and had scaled buildings in the past; scrambling over rooftops to escape pursuit. But never before had she suffered from vertigo. Rooftops remained steady. The top of the mast swung wildly. It was the same movement as the rolling of the deck, but amplified tenfold.

  “You get used to it,” said First Mate Ryan, who was wedged into the small space next to her. “First time I took watch in the crow’s nest, I was sick. Luckily the wind took it and it landed in the ocean.”

 

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