Chapter Twenty-Two: To Australia
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originalsam_backupChapter Twenty-Two: To Australia
The easy communal spirit of the HMA Clare Fields was not what a seagoing woman was used to, which Jack came to understand quickly after de la Fitte arrived on board. Apparenty a pirate ship was a sort of democratic dictatorship based upon skill: on the water, with the sword, and in basic politics. De la Fitte saw the three of them as a hierarchy based on first impressions -- which consisted of Jack giving orders, Clare giving slightly less impressive orders, and Graveworthy being ordered about. She fitted herself in just below Clare and above Graveworthy, which rankled the man who was patron of, and oldest crewman on, the airship.
Jack was put in the unfamiliar position of having to intercede between them and anticipate Graveworthy's requests so that he could give the command without de la Fitte harassing Graveworthy. He didn't mind, precisely, but he wasn't sure he did a very good job of it.
To distract them both, he began teaching de la Fitte how to pilot and, when she demanded to know, how the propellers and steam engine worked. He found her an apt pupil, though her spirit failed somewhat when it came to the balloon. Without a lab to show her how it was made, Jack had difficulty explaining the concept of gases, and she seemed to prefer to believe it was an unfathomable mystery. Jack was baffled by such acceptance in the face of the relatively unknown, but it was not his first experience with complacency and he contained it well.
They were aft at the pilot's chair that evening, Jack calibrating the Helium dial (it tended to stick, harmless but annoying) and de la Fitte engaged in her favourite pastime of scanning the water below, when she spotted the ship on their starboard side.
"Do we steer away?" she asked, pointing it out.
"Probably not. What make is it?" he replied.
"Merchantman, armed, several cannon," she said, clinging to a rope with her elbow while she gazed through her spyglass, holding it steady with both hands. "More than I wish to raid. Cheap metal ship to Dead Isle."
"You said that before. Why's so much cheap metal going to Australia?"
"Midden dump?" she suggested. There was a cough from below, where Graveworthy had not yet fallen asleep.
"It sells dear for midden-fill," he said, emerging from their makeshift cabin. "Australians pay better for scrap than any sensible person ought. Cheap scrap goes in and gold comes out, in small but very pure bricks."
"Shall we pass her?" de la Fitte asked, with her occasionally inaccurate English.
"We will, rate we're going," Jack said. "Hang on," he added to Graveworthy. "Why would Australia pay so much for scrap?"
"It's less noticeable," Graveworthy answered. "It takes longer to track than an order of fresh, newly-made steel."
"But -- "
"Why the need for so much metal?" He gave Jack a look. "Ponder it, wunderkind."
"Building -- warships? Airships?" Jack asked, horrified.
"Warships fitted with all the new technology they've developed to accomodate the fact that they don't have Creation," Graveworthy continued. "That's what the Empire thinks. The backfire, my dear boy, of exiling the cleverest criminals of the nation to one place and requiring them to use their ingenuity is that they will -- and you can't control what they do with it. Why do you think the self-appointed local government finally closed its gates to new prisoners? Too much bloody competition. It was a masterstroke coup at the time."
"Is he speaking sense?" de la Fitte asked. "You talk too fast, pilot."
"He makes sense," Jack said. "Do you know about the Australian Local Government?"
"Quite a bit, gathered from here and there. Have you had any education about it?"
"Nothing more than what you pick up, I guess," Jack said.
"I suspect you pick up more, knowing Clare, than the average young man," Graveworthy answered.
"They be anti-pirate," de la Fitte said, still studying the ship below, watching the comings and goings of the sailors with her spyglass. "No letters of marque. Steamships only."
"Yes...lots of steamships," Graveworthy agreed. Jack watched de la Fitte cling precariously to the ropes. "Tomorrow I think we shall begin teaching the three of you a bit of dialect. I imagine you'll fit right in, Jack, and Clare seems to -- "
" -- remember things," Jack said, nodding.
"Indeed. As for Ms. de la Fitte...well, we'll see what can be done."
De la Fitte gave him a look of pure disdain. He returned it, much to Jack's amusement.
"And for me, bed," Graveworthy concluded, disappearing once more into the coal-and-Helium-storage. De la Fitte closed her spyglass and wandered along the rail until she reached the very stern of the ship, behind the pilot's chair.
"We travel very fast," she said to Jack. "Faster than a steamship."
"Well, we don't have to pass through the water," he replied. "And we can go over land just as easily. Someday -- well, I think -- the air will be full of airships. They'll replace passenger ships at any rate."
"Non, I think not," she said, coming around the other side of the chair and leaning against the rail next to the steam controls.
"Oh?"
"Too many people afraid of the air. If a ship sinks, there are boats. If an airship sinks..." she shrugged elegantly.
"But you're not afraid. You sleep in the hammock way up there."
"Is the best place. A life half-lived, not so much a life. I have read many books, and all say this is so." She looked wistfully up at the underbelly of the balloon. "We had a library on Queen Jacqueline. My mother, she said a young woman must know things about the world."
"She must have been an extraordinary woman."
"Not so much. Not on the sea. Our race -- Baratarians, pirates -- we make many strong women. I think, extraordinary is..." she pursed her lips. "I do not know how to say it."
"Do you understand extraordinary?" Jack asked. She sniffed.
"Different. Not the same."
"Well, yes, sort of."
"It is like women," she said, "Who -- we board a ship, oui? There are passengers, maybe guns, money, provisions."
"All right," Jack said, leaning back.
"The women on board these ships. They wear nice things, silks, gemstones, gold, silver. They cling to their men. Sometimes there is a woman who is not like this, but many are. The men are little better, they fear a sharp blade. Him," she said, tilting her head downward towards where Graveworthy (hopefully) slept. "He speaks like them but keeps a gun. You and First Mate, you are not like them. Your mother was a pirate, oui?"
Jack smiled. "Not that I know of. She was an engineer."
"Steam engines? She lived on the sea?"
"No. Trains -- ever seen a steam train?"
"In books. Very plain. They must always go straight ahead, straight ahead." She made the unmistakable shape of two railway tracks with her hands, pushing them forward.
"They have to, otherwise they'd crash," Jack said, striving to ignore the fallacy that trains couldn't go in curves. "They need the railings. I worked on trains, before..." Before Graveworthy. "...before I built this."
"Well, I do not need railings. This does not need railings."
"No, that's true. You'll likely see trains in Australia, you know. Probably even ride a few."
"It is a great adventure."
"I guess so." He adjusted the Helium slightly and tapped the gauge. "You must live a very free life."
"Me?" she laughed. "I am not the one who swoops out of the sky to rain fire on pirates!"
"Yeah, but before this I never did much. I mean I did a lot, but...I lived in a room at a university, and my whole world was in that little room. There was this world inside my head."
De la Fitte studied his head as if she could see through his skull to a little globe inside it somewhere.
"Then I came to England and I met some people who sort of seemed to...live in the same world I did -- "
"The world in your head," she said skeptically.
"But out here, seeing all the countries and the people, seeing pirates and things I only ever saw in books or paintings or something, that's amazing. Don't you think it's amazing?"
"Extraordinary?" de la Fitte suggested.
"Yeah," Jack agreed.
"What was it like, where you lived?"
"I lived in Boston. Well, Brookline, until I went to university."
"Port Boston?"
Jack hesitated. "I guess you could call it that. On the American coast. Have you been there?"
"Non. We had a bo'sun who was of Boston once. Good man. And you built trains?"
"Well, not built. Repaired, mostly. That's what Engineers do. In America, anyway."
"Not ships?"
"No, not ships. I was a student..." Jack checked the compass and adjusted his direction slightly. The coast seemed to be dwindling away to port, and he wanted to make sure he followed it. "I'd be doing my examinations now, if I weren't here. Getting up in front of the class and answering questions. Instead I built an airship. I can't complain."
"And when examinations is done, you are an Engineer?"
"No, I'd have another year before that'd happen. That's way more fun than examinations. Third year there's a lot of stuff you learn that's not about engines so much. There are initiations into clubs and secret rites and stuff."
De la Fitte's eyes widened slightly. "L'carbonari!"
"Huh?" Jack asked.
"Secret societies. A very bad business."
"Oh! No, it's not like that. They're harmless. They're just meant to, sort of, they pass on information. Things that Engineers should know. Stories and stuff."
Her eyes flitted to the cord around his neck, where the metal disc of the English Secret Service hung. Purva de la Fitte, he decided, did not miss much.
"Being an Engineer is special," he said. "It means you've earned something, you have an understanding that most people don't have. It's bloody, filthy work most of the time. It's just like a religion, really, it's a way of being special."
"A way of making yourself special," she said, in a tone that was not entirely complimentary.
"Maybe, but it's not like you can buy yourself a degree on a streetcorner. People have to earn it. You wouldn't let just anyone sail on your ship." He grinned. "You'd make a hell of an engineer, though."
"Trains," she sniffed.
"Trains are beautiful. They take people to places they've never been, faster than they could ever get there themselves. Everyone who works on trains knows they have personalities, they're like people. They have their own mysteries." He leaned forward, resting his hands on the strapped-down steering yoke. "Like -- what would you do if a train suddenly just disappeared from its track? One minute it's there and you know where it's going and how it's going to get there, and the next minute it's all fog and emptiness?"
De la Fitte leaned against the railing. "What mystery is this?"
"It's an old Engineer's story," Jack said, somewhat pleased to have a captive audience. How hard could it be, after all? Graveworthy did it all the time.
He did not hear the slight creak of wood under his feet, and Jack was a skilled enough builder that there were no gaps in the wood to show the slight movements in the darkened coal-storage cabin below.
***
Author's afterword to
THE GHOST ENGINE
Retold by Ellis Graveworthy
From an account by Jack Baker passed to him by Eileen Baker, his mother.
I overheard this story -- eavesdropped on it, really -- one night off the coast of India. I was lying in the dark, preparing to sleep, and noted down the elements of the story without benefit of light to write by or very much ink in my pen. It was being told by a young Engineering student to an even younger but long-seasoned pirate, in the hushed sort of whisper that good ghost stories always inspire. Convincing him to allow me to publish it took ages, and I don't know that it ever sat right with the older generation of Engineers, the fact that I had intruded into the Mysteries and committed one of them to paper. Still, I told the story with respect and, after all, I only heard it in the first place because my young charge was trying to impress a girl with it.
It is brilliant in its simplicity, tumbled and smoothed by decades of telling; at heart it is nothing more than a perplexing puzzle over a train gone missing, disappeared off its tracks one foggy night in the middle of empty country. The pleasure is in the build and the epilogue -- the mysterious goings-on beforehand, the ill Engineer who would eventually disappear with the train, the engine troubles, the peculiar cargo, the unease of the conductor and driver, the frantic search, the reports long after of drivers who would see a train coming towards them and brace for a collision only to find there is no other engine, the odd pieces of rusted iron discovered years later and quite too far from the track to mark a derailment. I have perhaps embroidered on it here and there, but one can only adorn a masterwork so much. The credit for this gothic tale is owed not to me half so much as to the generations of men and women who concieved of it and perpetuated it -- and, if it actually exists, to the original Train Ninety-Nine. It is perhaps a dream; to disappear with one's engine one night, and to go roving across the country without rails, the only restriction the Engineer ever feels. It is a Flying Dutchman for the landbound.
I once asked Sir Jack, long before he was such, if Engineers had stories. He declined to answer at the time but I am sure that, if this harrowing little tale is any indication, there is a rich oral tradition rooted firmly in the mind of the outwardly sensible and ostensibly unimaginative tribe who are dedicated to the life of the rail.
***
When India finally disappeared aft the next day, they celebrated the beginning of their journey over open water, which in the minds of the land-born trio was a great adventure. De la Fitte was less impressed; she'd spent her entire life in open water and had little fear of it, especially considering that they were, after all, in a boat.
"Have you kept count of the days?" Graveworthy asked, when Jack was waking. Clare leaned over the railing from the pilot's chair and waved at him.
"Yeah, I'm keeping the log. Why?" Jack asked.
"And what is the date today, Baker my lad?"
Jack blinked blearily and took the logbook Graveworthy offered him.
"The twenty-fifth," he said. "So?"
"The twenty-fifth?" Clare asked. "Really?"
"What's so special about the twenty-fifth? Are we behind?"
Graveworthy solemnly picked up an oblong package from the steps and presented it to him. Jack looked at the small tag. Happy Christmas, it read.
"Christmas?" he asked, startled. Of course the twenty-fifth was Christmas, but there were no signs of Christmas and no way to mark it. He hadn't even thought about it. With a small bubble of pleasure, he tore the paper packaging off. "Rum!"
"I thought it was appropriate, and quite portable," Graveworthy said, producing three tin cups and the small cup-shaped machine part that Jack had fashioned into a mug for de la Fitte. "Fitting, too, today. Lock the yoke and come down, Clare. Go on, Captain, open it and pour."
Jack poured for Clare and de la Fitte first, then himself and Graveworthy; the older man held his tin cup in the air and the others followed suit.
"To open water -- and Australia -- and the Queen's Health," he said, tipping the rim against Clare's cup. They drank the health of the Queen and the Dead Isle, Jack sputtering a little as the first sip went down. "And to lessons, which begin today."
Over the next few days, as the airship drifted towards Australia with no bearings but the stars to follow, Jack began to understand why Graveworthy had told so many stories and encouraged them to reciprocate in kind. It was easy to simply repeat what Graveworthy said in the way he said it, but harder to apply the broad, lyrical Australian accent to anything Jack wanted to say. Once it was decreed that they would speak nothing but dialect, Jack found it hard to remember to do when he was caught up in the moment or impatient with something or someone -- and he would hear himself slip back into his dry New England twang. It was a new sensation, to fail at something that couldn't be fixed with a wrench, and it didn't sit well with him.
Clare, of course, took to it as if she were slipping back into old familiar clothing, and de la Fitte, insult on injury, had no trouble dropping her bastardised French accent for Australian. Her turns of phrase were still a little peculiar and sometimes the more complex words eluded proper use, but she could have passed for a confused Australian where Jack would still have been arrested for a spy.
After a frustrating evening where he had been impatient with the speed (or rather lack) at which Graveworthy fixed dinner, he retreated to the extreme end of the bow, one of the few places in the little ship that anyone could gain any privacy now that they had a fourth passenger on board. Even then he could see Graveworthy steering and de la Fitte hanging off the ropes, elbow crooked around one in order to hold her steady as she scanned the horizon. The only things they had to contend with now were the occasional shipping frigate and far-venturing fishermen, but she kept a scrupulous watch for both.
Jack spat into the water far below, losing sight of it long before it hit the waves. He was quite aware that his ill-temper had to do with too much time cooped up on the airship without a workshop, combined with his anxiety about the landing in Australia. He simply didn't know what to do about it. Ignore it, he supposed, until they landed. Then there would no doubt be more than enough excitement to satisfy him.
And since when, he wondered, had excitement been what a second-year Engineering student buried in his studies on the closed Harvard campus craved?
De la Fitte skidded a little on the rail and tightened her arm against her body, securing her position. He saw Graveworthy glance at her to be sure she was okay and then turn back to his star-navigation. Perhaps he could rig some kind of rope harness that would let her stand hands-free on the rail, though if she slipped she'd overbalance that side of the balloon, and no harness he could make with rope would keep her really secure. It would be better if she could keep both hands firmly on the ropes. She couldn't hold a spyglass then, though.
He plucked idly at a metal strap holding one of the crates together. A strap on a spyglass would be inelegant, but maybe if you rebuilt the spyglass itself, you could make it a bit nicer to look at.
Jack glanced down at the bit of metal he was toying with, tugged on it gently, and then looked speculatively at de la Fitte. Well, the sign of a good ride-along was ingenuity, after all...
***
Jack had found something to occupy him, which was just as well, Ellis thought; he worked at it while they did their dialect lessons and seemed to absorb the accent better when his hands and conscious mind were otherwise occupied. Clare warned them not to ask what he was making, and he suspected Jack wouldn't have had much of a coherent answer anyway. To Ellis, it looked like nothing more than a confused jumble of metal rings with slots in them.
From the stars and Anderson's estimates he had a pretty good idea that they were closing fast, and that morning he left off the dialect lessons to preach a lecture on the history of Australia.
"Tell me what you know of Australia -- the history of it," he said to the assembled company, Jack piloting while Clare and de la Fitte sat on the steps below.
“James Cook,” Jack said promptly.
“Coxson and Wright,” Clare said at the same time.
“You see,” Ellis said, addressing himself to de la Fitte, “the fundamental difference between the arts and sciences. Science recalls the facts, in order of importance; art tells the stories. Coxson and Wright —- the first two men to die from the Dead Isle, when the East India Company’s ship the Trial was wrecked off the western coast. And how do we know they were Creationists, Clare? This was fifty years before Father LaRoche was even born.”
“It’s not like people didn’t know it existed,” Clare said, watching him as he paced the deck like any Cambridge don would. “Most ships brought a few witches on board, legally or not. Sailors thought it was good luck.”
“Very good. The Trial founders and breaks, the Captain strikes for land, where his witches are the first of several to die. The others are all attributed to cholera, as are Coxson and Wright, at first. Very well; who comes next?”
“Dampier,” Clare said.
“When William LaRoche is only sixteen, and being quodded for blasphemy and heresy, Dampier's witch, Elizabeth —- a servant, I believe, who also waited at table —- dies when they go ashore from the beached Cygnet on the Northwest coast, and two years later the Roebuck founders near the coast and eight crewmen, including two Creationists, perish. A third Creationist survives —- with terrible injuries and a permanent loss.”
“His Creativity,” Clare murmured.
“And one eye. Dampier’s a clever sort; he looks over his briefings back home and determines that the Dead Isle kills the witches it doesn’t cripple. And now we come to Cook —- tell us what you know, Jack.”
Jack looked like a rabbit pinned by a dog. “Um...James Cook,” he said. De la Fitte giggled.
"Profound,” Ellis drawled. "Step back a few years, in fact. All these discoveries are of little interest to the world -— just some sailors and a few eccentric scientists. How do we know of the Dead Isle? The common people?"
The others exchanged blank looks. Finally, de la Fitte hesitantly put up a hand.
“Yes?”
“There is a book,” she said. “I read it, called that. The Dead Isle.”
“Published in 1705 —- Anderson owns a first-printing,” Ellis said. “Take a point, de la Fitte!”
“Hm?” she said, curiously.
“It means you did well,” Jack said.
“Of course I did.”
“This book parodied LaRoche’s journey to the Americas with his followers. It was part satire, part horror; LaRoche sails the wrong way and lands on the Dead Isle, after which most of his people lose their abilities.”
“They turn towards cannibal, at the end,” de la Fitte put in.
“Turn to cannibalism,” Ellis corrected, “but the summary is correct.”
Clare looked annoyed at de la Fitte, probably because she was being shown-up. Ellis smiled and continued.
“It sold out several runs and fired public imagination fiercely. When communication came back that LaRoche was not only still alive in America but that the colony thrived where the pilgrim Puritans had not, decades before -— well, the book fell from favour. People started to flock to the Americas. Public opinion for Creationism turned. Though that’s a lesson for some other time,” he added. “People lost interest in Australia. Until,” he held up a finger, “The Empire got restless and Cook was commissioned to do some exploring. New lands to conquer!”
“Cook saw Creationism, though, at least he said so,” Clare put in.
“Dismissed as sensationalism for attention’s sake, but take a point anyway,” Ellis replied. “You’d better think hard, Jack, the women are beating you handily.”
“Bet they can’t fix a steam chamber,” Jack retorted.
“All right. So, Cook lands, claims Australia for George the Third, fires public imagination over it once more, and then?”
“Transportation,” Jack said eagerly.
“No.”
“Damn it, Graveworthy!”
“William LaRoche returns to England and begins touring Europe.”
“Like King Arthur returning,” de la Fitte said unexpectedly.
“Yes, I suppose so. He’s treated like a king, or —- say a pope. Peasants and children adore him, men and women of power compete to host him, kings and politicians ask his advice. What a thing it must have been to see him,” Ellis said, sidetracked from the lesson. “A hundred years old, a lean small man in buckskin leggings and rough cotton shirts, no waistcoat, nothing at all to show his wealth and power, and the Lords of Parliament stood when he entered and uncovered their heads for him. It must have been absolutely extraordinary.”
“I’ve got it!” Jack said, breaking the spell. “The Matra proposition! They asked LaRoche what to do with Creationist prisoners and he told them that —- ”
“‘New worlds build a man into a giant’,” Ellis quoted. “All right, Jack, have your point. LaRoche recommended Transportation to the Dead Isle where imprisoned Creationists could learn how they’d misused their gifts.”
“Can’t have made him popular with the prisoners,” Jack murmured.
“Well, therein lies the rub, my lad,” Ellis said. “Prisoners don’t have a representative in Parliament. Sooner than you could turn around -— now Transportation.”
“About damn time.”
“Thank you, Mr. Baker. Drugged with opium, hands bound, seven hundred and eighty Creationists, many of them from the riots in Scotland and Southern England, land on the east coast of Australia.”
“The Incorrigible Riots? In America they call it a war,” Clare said. “And the anti-Creationists started it.”
“Technically, the Creationist who killed and dismembered ten people started it. Fear is a powerful motivation and the Church was in its infancy. A pogrom was inevitable, and of course Creationists were going to fight back. The point is, these Creationists were shipped to Australia’s fair shores. And,” he added, checking the location of the sun against the pocket-watch he had to reset almost daily, “I think we shall take up the continued history tomorrow. Come down, Jack; you’ve been on long enough. I’ll take the seat for a bit.”
“Welcome to it,” Jack said, unbuckling himself. “Should be on course, you can probably leave the yoke strapped for now.”
Ellis took his place and rummaged in his pocket for the last of his notebooks, settling in for a comfortable, hopefully productive shift in the pilot’s chair. Below, Jack continued to fiddle with his project while Clare prepared to sleep and de la Fitte wandered from bow to stern, checking to be certain all was, as it were, ship-shape.
Ellis chuckled over the pun, to himself, as he began to write.
Chapter 21 | Chapter 23
The easy communal spirit of the HMA Clare Fields was not what a seagoing woman was used to, which Jack came to understand quickly after de la Fitte arrived on board. Apparenty a pirate ship was a sort of democratic dictatorship based upon skill: on the water, with the sword, and in basic politics. De la Fitte saw the three of them as a hierarchy based on first impressions -- which consisted of Jack giving orders, Clare giving slightly less impressive orders, and Graveworthy being ordered about. She fitted herself in just below Clare and above Graveworthy, which rankled the man who was patron of, and oldest crewman on, the airship.
Jack was put in the unfamiliar position of having to intercede between them and anticipate Graveworthy's requests so that he could give the command without de la Fitte harassing Graveworthy. He didn't mind, precisely, but he wasn't sure he did a very good job of it.
To distract them both, he began teaching de la Fitte how to pilot and, when she demanded to know, how the propellers and steam engine worked. He found her an apt pupil, though her spirit failed somewhat when it came to the balloon. Without a lab to show her how it was made, Jack had difficulty explaining the concept of gases, and she seemed to prefer to believe it was an unfathomable mystery. Jack was baffled by such acceptance in the face of the relatively unknown, but it was not his first experience with complacency and he contained it well.
They were aft at the pilot's chair that evening, Jack calibrating the Helium dial (it tended to stick, harmless but annoying) and de la Fitte engaged in her favourite pastime of scanning the water below, when she spotted the ship on their starboard side.
"Do we steer away?" she asked, pointing it out.
"Probably not. What make is it?" he replied.
"Merchantman, armed, several cannon," she said, clinging to a rope with her elbow while she gazed through her spyglass, holding it steady with both hands. "More than I wish to raid. Cheap metal ship to Dead Isle."
"You said that before. Why's so much cheap metal going to Australia?"
"Midden dump?" she suggested. There was a cough from below, where Graveworthy had not yet fallen asleep.
"It sells dear for midden-fill," he said, emerging from their makeshift cabin. "Australians pay better for scrap than any sensible person ought. Cheap scrap goes in and gold comes out, in small but very pure bricks."
"Shall we pass her?" de la Fitte asked, with her occasionally inaccurate English.
"We will, rate we're going," Jack said. "Hang on," he added to Graveworthy. "Why would Australia pay so much for scrap?"
"It's less noticeable," Graveworthy answered. "It takes longer to track than an order of fresh, newly-made steel."
"But -- "
"Why the need for so much metal?" He gave Jack a look. "Ponder it, wunderkind."
"Building -- warships? Airships?" Jack asked, horrified.
"Warships fitted with all the new technology they've developed to accomodate the fact that they don't have Creation," Graveworthy continued. "That's what the Empire thinks. The backfire, my dear boy, of exiling the cleverest criminals of the nation to one place and requiring them to use their ingenuity is that they will -- and you can't control what they do with it. Why do you think the self-appointed local government finally closed its gates to new prisoners? Too much bloody competition. It was a masterstroke coup at the time."
"Is he speaking sense?" de la Fitte asked. "You talk too fast, pilot."
"He makes sense," Jack said. "Do you know about the Australian Local Government?"
"Quite a bit, gathered from here and there. Have you had any education about it?"
"Nothing more than what you pick up, I guess," Jack said.
"I suspect you pick up more, knowing Clare, than the average young man," Graveworthy answered.
"They be anti-pirate," de la Fitte said, still studying the ship below, watching the comings and goings of the sailors with her spyglass. "No letters of marque. Steamships only."
"Yes...lots of steamships," Graveworthy agreed. Jack watched de la Fitte cling precariously to the ropes. "Tomorrow I think we shall begin teaching the three of you a bit of dialect. I imagine you'll fit right in, Jack, and Clare seems to -- "
" -- remember things," Jack said, nodding.
"Indeed. As for Ms. de la Fitte...well, we'll see what can be done."
De la Fitte gave him a look of pure disdain. He returned it, much to Jack's amusement.
"And for me, bed," Graveworthy concluded, disappearing once more into the coal-and-Helium-storage. De la Fitte closed her spyglass and wandered along the rail until she reached the very stern of the ship, behind the pilot's chair.
"We travel very fast," she said to Jack. "Faster than a steamship."
"Well, we don't have to pass through the water," he replied. "And we can go over land just as easily. Someday -- well, I think -- the air will be full of airships. They'll replace passenger ships at any rate."
"Non, I think not," she said, coming around the other side of the chair and leaning against the rail next to the steam controls.
"Oh?"
"Too many people afraid of the air. If a ship sinks, there are boats. If an airship sinks..." she shrugged elegantly.
"But you're not afraid. You sleep in the hammock way up there."
"Is the best place. A life half-lived, not so much a life. I have read many books, and all say this is so." She looked wistfully up at the underbelly of the balloon. "We had a library on Queen Jacqueline. My mother, she said a young woman must know things about the world."
"She must have been an extraordinary woman."
"Not so much. Not on the sea. Our race -- Baratarians, pirates -- we make many strong women. I think, extraordinary is..." she pursed her lips. "I do not know how to say it."
"Do you understand extraordinary?" Jack asked. She sniffed.
"Different. Not the same."
"Well, yes, sort of."
"It is like women," she said, "Who -- we board a ship, oui? There are passengers, maybe guns, money, provisions."
"All right," Jack said, leaning back.
"The women on board these ships. They wear nice things, silks, gemstones, gold, silver. They cling to their men. Sometimes there is a woman who is not like this, but many are. The men are little better, they fear a sharp blade. Him," she said, tilting her head downward towards where Graveworthy (hopefully) slept. "He speaks like them but keeps a gun. You and First Mate, you are not like them. Your mother was a pirate, oui?"
Jack smiled. "Not that I know of. She was an engineer."
"Steam engines? She lived on the sea?"
"No. Trains -- ever seen a steam train?"
"In books. Very plain. They must always go straight ahead, straight ahead." She made the unmistakable shape of two railway tracks with her hands, pushing them forward.
"They have to, otherwise they'd crash," Jack said, striving to ignore the fallacy that trains couldn't go in curves. "They need the railings. I worked on trains, before..." Before Graveworthy. "...before I built this."
"Well, I do not need railings. This does not need railings."
"No, that's true. You'll likely see trains in Australia, you know. Probably even ride a few."
"It is a great adventure."
"I guess so." He adjusted the Helium slightly and tapped the gauge. "You must live a very free life."
"Me?" she laughed. "I am not the one who swoops out of the sky to rain fire on pirates!"
"Yeah, but before this I never did much. I mean I did a lot, but...I lived in a room at a university, and my whole world was in that little room. There was this world inside my head."
De la Fitte studied his head as if she could see through his skull to a little globe inside it somewhere.
"Then I came to England and I met some people who sort of seemed to...live in the same world I did -- "
"The world in your head," she said skeptically.
"But out here, seeing all the countries and the people, seeing pirates and things I only ever saw in books or paintings or something, that's amazing. Don't you think it's amazing?"
"Extraordinary?" de la Fitte suggested.
"Yeah," Jack agreed.
"What was it like, where you lived?"
"I lived in Boston. Well, Brookline, until I went to university."
"Port Boston?"
Jack hesitated. "I guess you could call it that. On the American coast. Have you been there?"
"Non. We had a bo'sun who was of Boston once. Good man. And you built trains?"
"Well, not built. Repaired, mostly. That's what Engineers do. In America, anyway."
"Not ships?"
"No, not ships. I was a student..." Jack checked the compass and adjusted his direction slightly. The coast seemed to be dwindling away to port, and he wanted to make sure he followed it. "I'd be doing my examinations now, if I weren't here. Getting up in front of the class and answering questions. Instead I built an airship. I can't complain."
"And when examinations is done, you are an Engineer?"
"No, I'd have another year before that'd happen. That's way more fun than examinations. Third year there's a lot of stuff you learn that's not about engines so much. There are initiations into clubs and secret rites and stuff."
De la Fitte's eyes widened slightly. "L'carbonari!"
"Huh?" Jack asked.
"Secret societies. A very bad business."
"Oh! No, it's not like that. They're harmless. They're just meant to, sort of, they pass on information. Things that Engineers should know. Stories and stuff."
Her eyes flitted to the cord around his neck, where the metal disc of the English Secret Service hung. Purva de la Fitte, he decided, did not miss much.
"Being an Engineer is special," he said. "It means you've earned something, you have an understanding that most people don't have. It's bloody, filthy work most of the time. It's just like a religion, really, it's a way of being special."
"A way of making yourself special," she said, in a tone that was not entirely complimentary.
"Maybe, but it's not like you can buy yourself a degree on a streetcorner. People have to earn it. You wouldn't let just anyone sail on your ship." He grinned. "You'd make a hell of an engineer, though."
"Trains," she sniffed.
"Trains are beautiful. They take people to places they've never been, faster than they could ever get there themselves. Everyone who works on trains knows they have personalities, they're like people. They have their own mysteries." He leaned forward, resting his hands on the strapped-down steering yoke. "Like -- what would you do if a train suddenly just disappeared from its track? One minute it's there and you know where it's going and how it's going to get there, and the next minute it's all fog and emptiness?"
De la Fitte leaned against the railing. "What mystery is this?"
"It's an old Engineer's story," Jack said, somewhat pleased to have a captive audience. How hard could it be, after all? Graveworthy did it all the time.
He did not hear the slight creak of wood under his feet, and Jack was a skilled enough builder that there were no gaps in the wood to show the slight movements in the darkened coal-storage cabin below.
***
Author's afterword to
THE GHOST ENGINE
Retold by Ellis Graveworthy
From an account by Jack Baker passed to him by Eileen Baker, his mother.
I overheard this story -- eavesdropped on it, really -- one night off the coast of India. I was lying in the dark, preparing to sleep, and noted down the elements of the story without benefit of light to write by or very much ink in my pen. It was being told by a young Engineering student to an even younger but long-seasoned pirate, in the hushed sort of whisper that good ghost stories always inspire. Convincing him to allow me to publish it took ages, and I don't know that it ever sat right with the older generation of Engineers, the fact that I had intruded into the Mysteries and committed one of them to paper. Still, I told the story with respect and, after all, I only heard it in the first place because my young charge was trying to impress a girl with it.
It is brilliant in its simplicity, tumbled and smoothed by decades of telling; at heart it is nothing more than a perplexing puzzle over a train gone missing, disappeared off its tracks one foggy night in the middle of empty country. The pleasure is in the build and the epilogue -- the mysterious goings-on beforehand, the ill Engineer who would eventually disappear with the train, the engine troubles, the peculiar cargo, the unease of the conductor and driver, the frantic search, the reports long after of drivers who would see a train coming towards them and brace for a collision only to find there is no other engine, the odd pieces of rusted iron discovered years later and quite too far from the track to mark a derailment. I have perhaps embroidered on it here and there, but one can only adorn a masterwork so much. The credit for this gothic tale is owed not to me half so much as to the generations of men and women who concieved of it and perpetuated it -- and, if it actually exists, to the original Train Ninety-Nine. It is perhaps a dream; to disappear with one's engine one night, and to go roving across the country without rails, the only restriction the Engineer ever feels. It is a Flying Dutchman for the landbound.
I once asked Sir Jack, long before he was such, if Engineers had stories. He declined to answer at the time but I am sure that, if this harrowing little tale is any indication, there is a rich oral tradition rooted firmly in the mind of the outwardly sensible and ostensibly unimaginative tribe who are dedicated to the life of the rail.
***
When India finally disappeared aft the next day, they celebrated the beginning of their journey over open water, which in the minds of the land-born trio was a great adventure. De la Fitte was less impressed; she'd spent her entire life in open water and had little fear of it, especially considering that they were, after all, in a boat.
"Have you kept count of the days?" Graveworthy asked, when Jack was waking. Clare leaned over the railing from the pilot's chair and waved at him.
"Yeah, I'm keeping the log. Why?" Jack asked.
"And what is the date today, Baker my lad?"
Jack blinked blearily and took the logbook Graveworthy offered him.
"The twenty-fifth," he said. "So?"
"The twenty-fifth?" Clare asked. "Really?"
"What's so special about the twenty-fifth? Are we behind?"
Graveworthy solemnly picked up an oblong package from the steps and presented it to him. Jack looked at the small tag. Happy Christmas, it read.
"Christmas?" he asked, startled. Of course the twenty-fifth was Christmas, but there were no signs of Christmas and no way to mark it. He hadn't even thought about it. With a small bubble of pleasure, he tore the paper packaging off. "Rum!"
"I thought it was appropriate, and quite portable," Graveworthy said, producing three tin cups and the small cup-shaped machine part that Jack had fashioned into a mug for de la Fitte. "Fitting, too, today. Lock the yoke and come down, Clare. Go on, Captain, open it and pour."
Jack poured for Clare and de la Fitte first, then himself and Graveworthy; the older man held his tin cup in the air and the others followed suit.
"To open water -- and Australia -- and the Queen's Health," he said, tipping the rim against Clare's cup. They drank the health of the Queen and the Dead Isle, Jack sputtering a little as the first sip went down. "And to lessons, which begin today."
Over the next few days, as the airship drifted towards Australia with no bearings but the stars to follow, Jack began to understand why Graveworthy had told so many stories and encouraged them to reciprocate in kind. It was easy to simply repeat what Graveworthy said in the way he said it, but harder to apply the broad, lyrical Australian accent to anything Jack wanted to say. Once it was decreed that they would speak nothing but dialect, Jack found it hard to remember to do when he was caught up in the moment or impatient with something or someone -- and he would hear himself slip back into his dry New England twang. It was a new sensation, to fail at something that couldn't be fixed with a wrench, and it didn't sit well with him.
Clare, of course, took to it as if she were slipping back into old familiar clothing, and de la Fitte, insult on injury, had no trouble dropping her bastardised French accent for Australian. Her turns of phrase were still a little peculiar and sometimes the more complex words eluded proper use, but she could have passed for a confused Australian where Jack would still have been arrested for a spy.
After a frustrating evening where he had been impatient with the speed (or rather lack) at which Graveworthy fixed dinner, he retreated to the extreme end of the bow, one of the few places in the little ship that anyone could gain any privacy now that they had a fourth passenger on board. Even then he could see Graveworthy steering and de la Fitte hanging off the ropes, elbow crooked around one in order to hold her steady as she scanned the horizon. The only things they had to contend with now were the occasional shipping frigate and far-venturing fishermen, but she kept a scrupulous watch for both.
Jack spat into the water far below, losing sight of it long before it hit the waves. He was quite aware that his ill-temper had to do with too much time cooped up on the airship without a workshop, combined with his anxiety about the landing in Australia. He simply didn't know what to do about it. Ignore it, he supposed, until they landed. Then there would no doubt be more than enough excitement to satisfy him.
And since when, he wondered, had excitement been what a second-year Engineering student buried in his studies on the closed Harvard campus craved?
De la Fitte skidded a little on the rail and tightened her arm against her body, securing her position. He saw Graveworthy glance at her to be sure she was okay and then turn back to his star-navigation. Perhaps he could rig some kind of rope harness that would let her stand hands-free on the rail, though if she slipped she'd overbalance that side of the balloon, and no harness he could make with rope would keep her really secure. It would be better if she could keep both hands firmly on the ropes. She couldn't hold a spyglass then, though.
He plucked idly at a metal strap holding one of the crates together. A strap on a spyglass would be inelegant, but maybe if you rebuilt the spyglass itself, you could make it a bit nicer to look at.
Jack glanced down at the bit of metal he was toying with, tugged on it gently, and then looked speculatively at de la Fitte. Well, the sign of a good ride-along was ingenuity, after all...
***
Jack had found something to occupy him, which was just as well, Ellis thought; he worked at it while they did their dialect lessons and seemed to absorb the accent better when his hands and conscious mind were otherwise occupied. Clare warned them not to ask what he was making, and he suspected Jack wouldn't have had much of a coherent answer anyway. To Ellis, it looked like nothing more than a confused jumble of metal rings with slots in them.
From the stars and Anderson's estimates he had a pretty good idea that they were closing fast, and that morning he left off the dialect lessons to preach a lecture on the history of Australia.
"Tell me what you know of Australia -- the history of it," he said to the assembled company, Jack piloting while Clare and de la Fitte sat on the steps below.
“James Cook,” Jack said promptly.
“Coxson and Wright,” Clare said at the same time.
“You see,” Ellis said, addressing himself to de la Fitte, “the fundamental difference between the arts and sciences. Science recalls the facts, in order of importance; art tells the stories. Coxson and Wright —- the first two men to die from the Dead Isle, when the East India Company’s ship the Trial was wrecked off the western coast. And how do we know they were Creationists, Clare? This was fifty years before Father LaRoche was even born.”
“It’s not like people didn’t know it existed,” Clare said, watching him as he paced the deck like any Cambridge don would. “Most ships brought a few witches on board, legally or not. Sailors thought it was good luck.”
“Very good. The Trial founders and breaks, the Captain strikes for land, where his witches are the first of several to die. The others are all attributed to cholera, as are Coxson and Wright, at first. Very well; who comes next?”
“Dampier,” Clare said.
“When William LaRoche is only sixteen, and being quodded for blasphemy and heresy, Dampier's witch, Elizabeth —- a servant, I believe, who also waited at table —- dies when they go ashore from the beached Cygnet on the Northwest coast, and two years later the Roebuck founders near the coast and eight crewmen, including two Creationists, perish. A third Creationist survives —- with terrible injuries and a permanent loss.”
“His Creativity,” Clare murmured.
“And one eye. Dampier’s a clever sort; he looks over his briefings back home and determines that the Dead Isle kills the witches it doesn’t cripple. And now we come to Cook —- tell us what you know, Jack.”
Jack looked like a rabbit pinned by a dog. “Um...James Cook,” he said. De la Fitte giggled.
"Profound,” Ellis drawled. "Step back a few years, in fact. All these discoveries are of little interest to the world -— just some sailors and a few eccentric scientists. How do we know of the Dead Isle? The common people?"
The others exchanged blank looks. Finally, de la Fitte hesitantly put up a hand.
“Yes?”
“There is a book,” she said. “I read it, called that. The Dead Isle.”
“Published in 1705 —- Anderson owns a first-printing,” Ellis said. “Take a point, de la Fitte!”
“Hm?” she said, curiously.
“It means you did well,” Jack said.
“Of course I did.”
“This book parodied LaRoche’s journey to the Americas with his followers. It was part satire, part horror; LaRoche sails the wrong way and lands on the Dead Isle, after which most of his people lose their abilities.”
“They turn towards cannibal, at the end,” de la Fitte put in.
“Turn to cannibalism,” Ellis corrected, “but the summary is correct.”
Clare looked annoyed at de la Fitte, probably because she was being shown-up. Ellis smiled and continued.
“It sold out several runs and fired public imagination fiercely. When communication came back that LaRoche was not only still alive in America but that the colony thrived where the pilgrim Puritans had not, decades before -— well, the book fell from favour. People started to flock to the Americas. Public opinion for Creationism turned. Though that’s a lesson for some other time,” he added. “People lost interest in Australia. Until,” he held up a finger, “The Empire got restless and Cook was commissioned to do some exploring. New lands to conquer!”
“Cook saw Creationism, though, at least he said so,” Clare put in.
“Dismissed as sensationalism for attention’s sake, but take a point anyway,” Ellis replied. “You’d better think hard, Jack, the women are beating you handily.”
“Bet they can’t fix a steam chamber,” Jack retorted.
“All right. So, Cook lands, claims Australia for George the Third, fires public imagination over it once more, and then?”
“Transportation,” Jack said eagerly.
“No.”
“Damn it, Graveworthy!”
“William LaRoche returns to England and begins touring Europe.”
“Like King Arthur returning,” de la Fitte said unexpectedly.
“Yes, I suppose so. He’s treated like a king, or —- say a pope. Peasants and children adore him, men and women of power compete to host him, kings and politicians ask his advice. What a thing it must have been to see him,” Ellis said, sidetracked from the lesson. “A hundred years old, a lean small man in buckskin leggings and rough cotton shirts, no waistcoat, nothing at all to show his wealth and power, and the Lords of Parliament stood when he entered and uncovered their heads for him. It must have been absolutely extraordinary.”
“I’ve got it!” Jack said, breaking the spell. “The Matra proposition! They asked LaRoche what to do with Creationist prisoners and he told them that —- ”
“‘New worlds build a man into a giant’,” Ellis quoted. “All right, Jack, have your point. LaRoche recommended Transportation to the Dead Isle where imprisoned Creationists could learn how they’d misused their gifts.”
“Can’t have made him popular with the prisoners,” Jack murmured.
“Well, therein lies the rub, my lad,” Ellis said. “Prisoners don’t have a representative in Parliament. Sooner than you could turn around -— now Transportation.”
“About damn time.”
“Thank you, Mr. Baker. Drugged with opium, hands bound, seven hundred and eighty Creationists, many of them from the riots in Scotland and Southern England, land on the east coast of Australia.”
“The Incorrigible Riots? In America they call it a war,” Clare said. “And the anti-Creationists started it.”
“Technically, the Creationist who killed and dismembered ten people started it. Fear is a powerful motivation and the Church was in its infancy. A pogrom was inevitable, and of course Creationists were going to fight back. The point is, these Creationists were shipped to Australia’s fair shores. And,” he added, checking the location of the sun against the pocket-watch he had to reset almost daily, “I think we shall take up the continued history tomorrow. Come down, Jack; you’ve been on long enough. I’ll take the seat for a bit.”
“Welcome to it,” Jack said, unbuckling himself. “Should be on course, you can probably leave the yoke strapped for now.”
Ellis took his place and rummaged in his pocket for the last of his notebooks, settling in for a comfortable, hopefully productive shift in the pilot’s chair. Below, Jack continued to fiddle with his project while Clare prepared to sleep and de la Fitte wandered from bow to stern, checking to be certain all was, as it were, ship-shape.
Ellis chuckled over the pun, to himself, as he began to write.
Chapter 21 | Chapter 23
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