Lord Kelvin's Machine - By James P. Blaylock Page 0,45
inconceivable expense to the Crown and to private enterprise. Half of London trade had slammed to a halt, according to Godall. It was a city under siege, and no one seemed to know who the enemy was or where he lay... St. Ives was deadly silent, frustrated with our slow travel northward, with the interminable rocky landscape, the fjords, the pine forests.
What could he do but carry on? That’s what I asked him. He could turn around, that’s what. He made up his mind just like that. We were north of Trondheim and just a few hours from our destination. St. Ives would take Hasbro with him. I would go on alone, and see what I could see. He and Hasbro would rush back to Dover where St. Ives would assemble scientific apparatus. He had been a fool, he said, a moron, a nitwit. It was he and he alone who was responsible for the death of those ten men. He could have stopped it if he hadn’t been too muddleheaded to see. That was ever St. Ives’s way, blaming himself for all the deviltry in the world, because he hadn’t been able to stop it. The sheer impossibility of his stopping all of it never occurred to him.
Hasbro gave me a look as they hefted their luggage out onto the platform. St. Ives was deflated, shrunken almost, and there shone in his eyes a distant gleam, as if he were focused on a single wavering point on the horizon—the leering face of Ignacio Narbondo—and he would keep his eyes fixed on that face until he stared the man into oblivion.
Hasbro took me aside for a moment to tell me that he would take care of the professor, that I wasn’t to worry, that we would all win through in the end. All I had to do was learn the truth about Narbondo. St. Ives must be desperately certain of the facts now; he had become as methodical as a clockwork man. But like that same man, he seemed to both of us to be running slowly down. And for one brief moment there on the platform, I half hoped that St. Ives would never find Narbondo, because, horrible as it sounds, it was Narbondo alone that gave purpose to the great man’s life.
Narbondo had had a long and curious criminal history: vivisection, counterfeiting, murder—a dozen close escapes capped by his fleeing from Newgate Prison very nearly on the eve of his intended execution. There was nothing vile that he hadn’t put his hand to. He dabbled in alchemy and amphibian physiology, and there was some evidence that, working with the long-forgotten formulae of Paracelsus, he had developed specifics that would revive the dead. His grandfather, the elder Narbondo, had elaborated the early successes of those revivification experiments in journals that had been lost long ago. And those, of course, were the papers alluded to by the woman in Godall’s shop.
It was a mystery, this business of the lost journals—a far deeper mystery than it would seem on the surface, and one that seemed to have threads connecting it to the dawn of history and to the farthest corners of the earth. And it was a mystery that we wouldn’t solve. We would tackle only the current manifestation of it, this business of Higgins the academician and Captain Bowker and the revived Narbondo and the ships sinking in the Dover Strait. There was enough in that to confound even a man like St. Ives.
It was St. Ives’s plan to resort again to the dirigible. I would proceed to Mount Hjarstaad by train and make what discoveries I could, while waiting for the arrival of the dirigible, which would put out of Dover upon St. Ives’s return to that city. Ferries were still docking there, but only if they had come in from the north: Flanders and Normandy ferries had stopped running altogether. So St. Ives would send the dirigible for me, in an effort to fetch me back to England in time to be of service.
We should have hired the dirigible in the first place, lamented St. Ives, standing on the platform in the cold arctic wind. We should have this, we should have that. I muttered and nodded, never having seen him in such despair. There was no arguing with him there in that rocky landscape, which did its part to freeze one’s hope. I would have to go on with as stout a heart as I could fabricate.