Exultation lasted perhaps thirty seconds, before it penetrated my mind that the lighter portion of sky was to our right. I rapped on the glass, then unlatched it and wrestled it up a crack to shout, “Mr Javitz, why are we going south?”
There was no response; between the noise and the partition, communication threatened to be a one-way event. I drew breath and shouted more loudly: “We're going south!”
I thought he had still not heard me-either that, or was refusing to acknowledge it. Then I saw that he was bent over something held near his lap. After a minute, he held up a note-pad on which he had printed:
BE NIGHT IN EDINBURGH.
I protested, loudly, cursing that my revolver was in the storage locker, but before I could excavate through my layers of clothing for the knife, I realised he was right: I had to trust his decisions. If we could get safely to Edinburgh, we would be going there.
We made it back to the air field near York well before dark. Fortunately for the laconic individual who had sold us the petrol earlier, Javitz did not find him, and when he laboriously filtered the new petrol through his cloth, not a trace of foreign matter showed up. We spent the night in a nearby farmhouse that let rooms, and before it was truly light, the farmer motored us back to the air field and swung the prop for us. In minutes, the clamour drew us forward and into the sky.
I had, I need hardly mention, given up any real expectation that this northward journey would be anything but a wild-goose chase. I was by now quite certain that Holmes would be closing in on Bergen, and he and Mycroft's men would be baying on the trail of Brothers and his captives.
For me, onward motion was merely a thing to cling to until someone told me to stop.
42
Place (2): All these are considerations in choosing the site
for a Work: Central and apart, it must draw from the ages
yet be ageless, between the worlds yet of the world,
recognised as holy yet wholly secular.
A man may search his whole life, for such a place.
Testimony, IV:6
WE COVERED THE TWO HUNDRED MILES TO Edinburgh in no time at all, the machine demurely slipping northwards as if in all the days since it had rolled out of the shop, it had never so much as hesitated.
This time, the problem lay not in the engine, but outside: As we flew north, the clouds tumbled down to meet us.
Fifty miles south of Edinburgh, the wind began-and not just wind, but rain. One moment we were grumbling along in the nice firm air, and the next the bottom dropped out of the world. It seemed eerily quiet as I rose out of my seat, stomach clenched and my skin shuddering into ice-until the machine slammed into air again and I was suddenly heavy as the propellers bit in and pulled us forward once more. It had happened so quickly, Javitz had not even shifted his hands on the controls. He glanced over his shoulder and laughed, more in relief than amusement. We climbed, I breathed, deliberately, and unclenched my rigid fingers from the seat. Two minutes later it happened again, only this time when the hole ended and we were buoyed and beginning to climb, a sudden gust from the side nearly slapped us over. Javitz fought the controls, raised our nose, and held on.
Then drops began sporadically to spatter my glass cage. Most of it blew past Javitz, but his hand came up several times, wiping his face.
It made for a long fifty miles, tumbling and tossing in the clouds. We came out of the mid-day murk alarmingly close to the ground, and Javitz corrected our course to point us at the aerodrome. A gust hit us just short of the ground and we hit the grass with a terrifying crack from below.
The American gingerly slowed the machine, and I waited for him to turn us about and head back to the hangers we had flashed past. Instead, he throttled down the motor, then stood to look back at the buildings: It seemed that we were to walk back to the aerodrome. I popped up the cover and started to rise, but he stopped me.
“Stay right there. We need your weight.”
“Sorry?”
“If you get out,” he explained impatiently, “we'll shuttlecock. Flip over.”
“I see.” I sat firmly in my seat, thinking heavy thoughts, until I heard voices from outside.
Two large men clung to the wings, the wind bullying us back and forth, while we came about and made our way back to the aerodrome. Only then was I permitted to climb down. I felt like going down on quivering knees to kiss the earth.
One of the men directed me to a café adjoining the air field, where I went in a wobbly scurry while the rain spat down and Javitz tied down the machine and contemplated the wounded undercarriage.
In the shelter of a room with a baking coal stove, I peered through the window and amended my thought: It appeared we would be making arrangements for repairs as well. Javitz and a man in a waterproof were squatting on either side of the right wheel, peering at where the struts connected with the body.
I closed my eyes for a moment, then turned and looked at the waitress. “Would it be possible to have something hot to eat? It looks as though I shall be here for a while.”
She was a maternal sort, and ticked her tongue at my state. “We'll get you something nice and warming,” she said, beginning with drink both hot and stout. I allowed her to slip a hefty and illicit dollop of whisky into the cup of tea before me, and downed the tepid atrocity in one draught. It hit me like a swung punching bag, but when the top of my head had settled back into place, I found that the impulse to pull out my revolver and begin shooting had subsided as well.
I placed the cup gently back into its saucer, took a couple of breaths, and decided that the day was not altogether lost. The men would fix the strut, the wind would die down, we would be in Orkney by nightfall.
And when we found that, in fact, Brothers had opted for Norway?
I would not think about that at the moment.
I reached for the tea-pot, and my eyes were filled with tweed: a man, beside the table; a small, round man in need of a shave, wearing a freckled brown suit and rather rumpled shirt.
“Miss Russell?” His accent was as Scots as his suit.
“Yes?”
“M' name's MacDougall. Ah've a message for yeh.”
“From?”
“Mr Mycroft Holmes.”
“Sit. Please. Tea?” For some reason, my tongue seemed limited to one-word sentences. But he sat, and the arrival of a second cup saved me the difficult decision of how to carry out my offer, so that was good. I watched him slip in and out of clear focus, and summoned my thoughts.
“He sent me a wire, askin' me t'watch for an aeroplane. Wi' the weather as it is, I'd gone home, but the man here rang me.”
“Mycroft. Yes. Good.”
“Er, are you altogether well, mum?”
My gaze slid towards the window, where the machine that had tried so hard to kill us sat, wet and complacent as men addressed themselves to its undercarriage. “It was a dilli-a difficult flight.”
The man's gaze followed mine. “Ah can imagine. Ah know three men who've bein kilt flyin'-ye'll never get me up in one a'them infernal machines.”
“Thank you,” I said coolly.
His eyes came back to mine. “Sorry. I'm sure they're ever so much safer now, and your pilot's sure ta-”
“You were saying,” I interrupted. “About Mycroft.”
“Yes. Well, Ah was the one took his orders Tuesday, to be looking for one and possibly two men and a bairn-and sorry to say we've seen nothing of them, although it was nobbut an hour after receivin' the first wire that Ah had men at Waverley, Princes Street, and Haymarket-for the trains, yeh know-and at Leith for the steamers.”
So it is Bergen after all, I thought, that mad-man with his knife at the throat of-
“But while they were watching, Ah myself made the roonds of the restaurants in the toon. And Ah found they may have been here on Monday.”