“Uncle?” I whispered.
He did not look up. He was on a stool, and to my surprise he was working feverishly, assembling a mass of incongruous parts on the table, working as if his life depended on it. Perhaps it did.
“No, no, NOT!” he shouted suddenly. “That is not right!” His voice bounded off the walls, but there was no movement in the room besides the two of us. Now that I was inside the cavern, there was a faint whiff of something chemical, something putrid. I knew the smell; I could never forget it: guncotton.
“Uncle Tully?” I said, hunching down next to him, sheltering from the sight line of the entrance behind the metal fish. I was relieved to see that he hadn’t bloodied himself. His face was deep red, veins popping out in his temples, frightening if you did not know him, but that was not what had my breath coming hard, my pulse skipping madly in my veins. Uncle Tully was in a tantrum, a full-blown tantrum, and he was working. Never had I seen him do both those things at once. But if Uncle Tully was working, that meant I was expendable. It was time for us to go.
I avoided touching anything near him and whispered, very calmly, “Uncle Tully, would you like me to take you away from this place? If we go right now, I can take you.”
“Go away, Simon’s baby. It is not the right day.”
He was using his hot pen, a curl of smoke twisting up as tiny bits of lead melted beneath it, and his hands were a little shaky, probably from the contents of the green bottle. My internal clock said that maybe half my time had gone. “Uncle, do you know who is waiting for us right now? It’s Lane. He’s come back, just as he said he —”
“NO!”
I paused, unsure whether he had been responding to his work or to me. “He came back, just as he said he would, Uncle. He’d like for you to come and see him.”
“Go away. This is not right, little niece. It is never the right day. Never the right place. You said it would be right and it wasn’t.”
I agreed with him there. “No, Uncle, it isn’t right,” I replied, darting a glance at the empty entrance to the cavern. “But I’m trying very hard to fix it. Do you remember how some days it is right to wind all the toys, and see what is needed? It is a time like that right now. Time to fix things, just like when one of your toys isn’t working properly. Let’s go back and fix things, and get Lane, and some tea, and find all your toys. Marianna says —”
“The fish wasn’t working.”
I looked up at the smudged, oil-spattered monstrosity on the table, and saw with relief that the chamber for the guncotton was empty. Something this large would not just blow a hole in an ironclad ship; it would obliterate it. “This fish doesn’t need to work, Uncle Tully.”
“NO!” he shouted, his fingers never slowing. “It must! It should! Toys should work!”
“But this toy could hurt someone, Uncle.” I tried to hold my voice low. “Marianna says we shouldn’t make this one work.”
“Clocks should be wound and people should be splendid! Go away, little niece. It is not the right day.”
I could feel desperation creeping around the edges of my words. “I would be splendid if you could come with me now, Uncle. It would make me very happy. You like to —”
“And yet it would not make me happy, Miss Tulman, to be deprived so soon of your company.”
I straightened. Ben Aldridge was coming across the cavern, almost to the other side of the table that held the fish. He was elegantly dressed, as if he’d come from a party, his blond hair combed back, the side whiskers neat. I searched again but I could see no other entrance. Had he come from the crypt, or from the other direction, farther down the passage? Uncle Tully’s fingers did not slow, and he did not acknowledge Ben’s presence.
“I thought it must be you,” Ben was saying, sounding pleased, as if I’d happened to drop in for tea just when he wanted me for business. “But where is your entourage? Don’t you keep a string of suitors about you these days? Or have you discouraged them all by running about in caps and trousers?”
I did not answer, just watched him warily as he came around the fish to my side of the table. I had no idea what to do, other than stay alive until my hour was up. At least Ben seemed to be alone. The room was deeply quiet beneath the hiss of gas and my uncle’s distracted muttering. I backed into the table as Ben reached around my neck and pulled off Lane’s cap, clucking in disapproval as he tossed it to the table.
“Oh, no, no, no,” he said, reminding me weirdly of Uncle Tully. “Never braids, Miss Tulman. I liked you better as a wood nymph, like the last time, when you came to my cottage all dirty and wild and with leaves in your hair.”
Thankfully he did not touch my hair.
“You quite impressed my father the other night. The emperor was rather taken with you, I think.”
“Do you have guncotton in here?”
“Oh, I do apologize. Such a shame about the smell. But I’m finished with the production process, at least for now. The barrels behind you there are full of the stuff. Quite watered down,” he said, “so not to worry. Unless you fire a rifle into it, of course. But you demonstrated the danger of that rather well, didn’t you, Miss Tulman?”
I saw the six large barrels behind me. If the tiny amount from before had blown Ben’s boat to smithereens, and if the empty chamber before me held enough to destroy a ship, then what would six barrels do to the shops, streets, and houses above us? Ben smiled as he ran his hand along the spine of the enormous fish. “She’s a beauty, don’t you think?”
I had no response. My uncle moved, reaching for a spool of wire, and then a clank near his feet drew my eyes downward. Uncle Tully had a shackle around his left ankle, linked to a ring driven into the stone wall by a length of heavy chain. A trickle of rage ran down my spine, the cold kind. I lifted my eyes to Ben Aldridge.
“I think my father will be more than pleased with his surprise. How shall he honor the son that hands him victory in the Crimea? And that should make you happy, too, Miss Tulman. You’d like to see Britain win this war, wouldn’t you? But it will be the Bonapartes that dominate the seas, in the end. And who will stand against them then?” He patted the fish. “Your Uncle Tully really is a marvel. Aren’t you, Mr. Tulman?” His voice rose on this last question, as if my uncle were hard of hearing. “Thank goodness I didn’t let you lock him away. All the trouble I’ve gone to, more than a year of work in the strictest of secrecy, all without making any headway at all, and Mr. Tully had the dashed thing fixed in less than five minutes.”
My eyes darted to the fish, and then back to my obliviously working uncle, the burning, flaming knot inside of me growing heavy with dread. Oh, no, Uncle Tully. No. Ben chuckled, reaching one finger inside the fish to swing a little strip of dangling metal back and forth.
“A pendulum, Miss Tulman. A pendulum! Of all things. Creating perfect balance. Just like a clock. So simple, childlike simplicity, and yet sheer, unadulterated brilliance. Yes, I think my father is going to be very pleased indeed.”
I was breathing, trying to stay calm, trying not to think of ironclad ships exploding into ragged bits and the thousands of bodies that would be the result, like the bones I’d just walked through. Trying not to think of the disgusting shackle around my uncle’s ankle. But the most immediate danger was that my uncle was working, and I was not needed, and Ben was telling me everything. I needed to live for at least fifteen more minutes, until Lane came.