time. A sack of spuds falling onto a hedge. “I...yes, I saw something fall from a tree. A man, you reckon?”
Merry shrugged, then pouted.
“We’d better ask somebody to find out,” said Sonja. “He might be hurt.”
“He was spying on us.”
“How do you know that?”
“Why else would he be up a tree?”
She had a point. Not a terribly consoling one, but a point nonetheless. “I say, William, come here,” Sonja called across the landing to where their new friend was fiddling with the cuffs of his fresh shirt. He was only half dressed—his white vest peeked from between the lapels of his green smoking jacket—and his hair was a wet bird’s nest. Even so, he looked quite handsome, more than she dared let on. And as usual, he couldn’t take his eyes off Merry.
“So we’re the ones,” Sonja announced. “Ringside seats and all that—a few gallons from being washed away.” It struck her how callous that sounded, but her mind insisted on loitering apart from the horror. Making light of the events, at arm’s length, somehow comforted her.
“Someone else was ringside with us,” he replied. “A peeping tom. He was armed, too. Knocked himself out when he fell and hit the fence. They’ve got him in the library, the rotter. He’s for it when he comes to. I plan to be there when they wring the truth out of him.”
“How beastly.” That sounded more like Aunt Lily than Merry, but it was indeed the latter, her gaze questing over the knots of guests in the foyer below.
“We can look out from the observatory if you like.” William nodded across the balcony to a door that led to Professor Sorensen’s famed telescope room.
“No thank you. I wish to see it firsthand...before it recedes altogether.”
“Merry? You want to go back out there?”
“Did you see him fall?”
“Um, yes.”
“I saw him fall—the man from the tree.” Merry walked stiffly, like a pallbearer down the grand staircase, her fingertips squeaking on the varnished banister. “Before it recedes,” she muttered.
“Psst.” William dashed to Sonja’s side, whispered, “Should we be letting her go? She doesn’t sound right.”
For some reason that observation stung. “Mind your own business, William Elgin. She’s coping with it in her own way. Why don’t you run along to your peeping tom, join the lynching party when he wakes up—that seems to be your way of coping.”
He sighed through his nose. “That’s rich coming from you. Brigitte’s still crying her eyes out. Anyways, I’m coming with you whether you like it or not.”
Stubborn boy. But he’d gone out of his way to help them this past week, and now, like Merry, she found herself curious as to why. Before, it had simply been a new and exciting acquaintance—an older boy eager to spend time with her—a first for her, however plutonic. Now, with his attentions clearly on Merry and not her, she had a more objective view of him.
He didn’t add up.
But something in what he’d said earlier about why he’d helped them get their revenge—“I can’t tell you everything—the worst thing I’ve ever done—they used me for their own bitchy ends”—pricked her intuition.
What part did he play three years ago?
After a rallying cry from one of the airship pilots, several men, including William, grabbed gas lamps, ropes, axes, blankets and emergency provisions from Professor Sorensen’s supplies, anything useful they could put their hands on, before making their way south to the small airships berthed at Sigurdfjorden. The floodwater would take hours, perhaps days to recede to a level safe enough to wade across, so for now the volunteers would have to do what they could from the air. Meanwhile, Aunt Lily, Father, Professor and Mrs. Sorensen, with the help of the head servants, made telephone calls for assistance, tended those taken ill by the shock, and generally orchestrated some semblance of order to the frantic comings and goings.
The dark torrent below gave off a constant gravelly rumble. It was punctuated by the grinds and thumps of smashing debris, and even the occasional distant scream, jerking Sonja’s gaze hither and thither across the valley. The terrible death toll might never be known.
She suddenly felt bad for not having liked Niflheim more when Aunt Lily had taken them shopping for souvenirs earlier in the week. It had seemed a sad, gloomy fishing village, nothing more, so isolated that it was in most respects a century behind steam-powered England. Its peculiar smell, too, a mixture of fresh fish, whale oils and blubber and a wild, natural salty