He did feel a certain satisfaction, but it was grim and muted. It seemed as though memories of his old life were reclaiming their place at the forefront of his mind now that he was out of prison.
Conor wondered if he could ever feel true joy again without his loved ones to share his accomplishments with. He allowed himself a brief daydream. He imagined landing his glider not on Little Saltee, but on the long mainland beach of Curracloe, which ran straight and flat for several miles. This was the spot where Victor had incessantly talked of testing their aeroplanes.
There would be crowds present, of course, and journalists from all over the world. Gaggles of sceptical scientists too. But Conor did not care a fig for any of them – he was on the lookout for his parents, and Victor too. They would be hugging each other with excitement and pride. His father would reach him first as he swooped in to land. Perhaps Isabella would attend.
His heart sank. Isabella.
She believes that I helped to kill her father. How could she believe that?
Instead of gliding on to the golden sands of Curracloe, he was alone in a boat, with no one to boast to. No one to celebrate with. The power of flight was no longer an achievement in itself – it was a way to aid him in his thievery.
I have flown further than any other man. I have flown over water at night. No one to tell but the stars. The only person who knows is a cruel prison guard. A buffoon who thinks that I am the devil. I am the world’s first flying thief.
Conor shook his head to dislodge this disquieting daydream, then threw his back into the oars. He sculled skilfully, as his father had taught him. Bend forward, dip the blades but not too deep. Pull with the back and then arms. Develop a rhythm and let that rhythm calm you. A man can be truly at peace on the water in a small boat, even though only a plank of wood separates him from the cold, unforgiving ocean.
Can a thief be at peace? For a time perhaps.
Conor tied the skiff off at the quay, stuffed his hat and goggles into a jacket pocket then draped the coat over the folded glider. He hefted the nondescript package on to his back and climbed the ladder to the pier. The diamonds clinked like bags of marbles with each step he took along the quay wall. He hailed two boys patching a net on the slip and gave them two shillings.
One for the ferry back, and the other for yourselves.
It was common for visitors to the Saltee Islands to have one tankard too many and miss the last ferry. Common enough not to raise suspicions. There were always a couple of boys on the docks willing to return a borrowed boat, for a fee naturally.
I may have need of these boys a few nights more, thought Conor. Then I leave this place forever.
But there was no relish in the thought. As thoughts of his family grew stronger, his dream of America had paled. Nevertheless he would persevere, as staying here, close enough to home to see the kitchen light burning, would be intolerable.
I am Conor Finn now. I have no family.
Kilmore village was quiet enough due to the lateness of the hour, though there was still some argy-bargy emanating from the doorway of the Wooden House, the local pub built almost entirely from the deckhouse of a sunken Greek ship.
Conor was tempted to go inside and sit himself down with a bowl of stew, but the cargo on his back and belt was too valuable to stow under a tavern table, so he trudged on up the hill, leaving the village behind.
His new home was two miles past the village, off the old coast road. Conor climbed a stile and followed a worn path along the cliff edge to a set of late medieval gates, with eagles perched on their mossy pillars.
Eagles, thought Conor. Victor’s little joke.
The wrought-iron gates were imposing enough, and might have deterred thieves had not the walls on either side been cannibalized by locals over the years to build their dwellings. Cut stone is not so cheap that it can be left piled high on a derelict estate. There were no more than odds and halves left now littering the grass.
Conor stepped over the broken wall, walking along an avenue that wound through a copse of willow trees. Behind this screen stood a Martello tower, a squat cylinder of stone with walls of a prodigious thickness, built by the British Army to keep an eye on the Saltee Islands. The single door was eight feet from the tower’s base and could only be reached by ladder and the windows were letterbox gun ports that would allow the garrison stationed inside to pick off any poor unfortunates unlucky enough to be on the offensive.
Conor disentangled a ladder from the weeds at the base of the tower, propping it up against the tower wall, then, balancing the weight of the collapsed glider on his shoulder, he edged slowly up the rungs.
A pity to survive night flights over Saint George’s Channel only to crack my skull falling from a ladder.
The door seemed flimsy, of dry, crumbling wood held together by rivets and steel bands, but there were many deceptive things about this tower. Conor had spent many hours working on the structure, almost exclusively on the inside. No need to advertise the renovations. A steel door lay behind the wooden one, housed in a reinforced frame. Conor threaded a key though the lock, and let himself in.
He sighed in almost unconscious relief as he locked the door behind him.
Home. Alive.
The inside was far more salubrious than the exterior suggested. On the first storey was a fully equipped laboratory for the study of aeronautics, with more advanced machinery than would be found in many a royal college. Charts were nailed to the walls. The theories and diagrams of da Vinci, Cayley, the Marquis de Bacqueville. Models of gliders to various scales hung from the ceiling beams. Tyres, tubes, wings, engines, oil drums, timber planks, frames and reams of fabric were stacked neatly around the walls. Baskets of reeds. Ball bearings, magnets, rivets and screws lay neatly in wooden bowls on the long bench. On a steam-winch platform to the roof sat rifles, revolvers, swords, two small-calibre cannon and a pyramid of cannonballs.
Victor was preparing for a battle. He knew Bonvilain wanted him dead.
A Corsican tower at Mortella Point had once withstood bombardment from two British warships for almost two days with the loss of only three men. The British had copied the design and misspelled the name, changing Mortella to Martello. If Bonvilain wished to gain entry to Victor’s laboratory, he would have to pay dearly for the privilege.
It had not been difficult to locate the tower Victor had told him about on the last day of his life. There were two Martello towers in the vicinity of Kilmore and one had been occupied for the past fifty years. That left the gloomily named Forlorn Point. The tower had originally been called simply Saltee Watch, but the men of the garrison stationed there had soon taken to calling the tower after the headland it stood on. A name more in tune with the unrelenting winds and typical leaden weather of the region than the almost cheery-sounding Saltee Watch. So Forlorn Point it became, made somewhat notorious by the folk singer Tam Riordan in his ‘Lament of Forlorn Point’, which began: ‘’Tis off I am to Forlorn Point for my sins.’ The second line was no jollier. ‘And if there’s a tide, I aim to throw myself in…’
It was said that the tower was haunted by the ghosts of thirty-seven men who were burned alive inside its walls when the armoury caught fire. No wonder it slid to dereliction.
That is until Victor Vigny decided that it would make an ideal workshop and persuaded King Nicholas to fund the project. The Frenchman purchased the tower in his own name, to hide Nicholas’s involvement, then had a series of shipments sent there from London, New York and even China.