“By the time we finish this case, I expect you will be,” Bushell answered. When he’d smoked the cigar down to a short butt, he stubbed it out and went with Samuel Stanley to the airship’s dining room. Felix Crooke was already there, holding a couple of seats against the polite protests of the waiters. “Good thing you came to my rescue, sir,” he said to Bushell. “I was beginning to fear they’d heave me over the side.”
“Can’t have that,” Bushell said gravely. “Now as for this sir business - ” He explained his notion to Crooke.
“Very sensible,” the RAM from Victoria said at once. “The less public we can keep the investigation, the better it will go and the happier we all shall be.” Courteously, he turned to Stanley. “Don’t you agree, Sam?”
“Absolutely, Lieu - uh, Felix,” Stanley said, following the flub with a muffled “Dammit!” All three RAMs laughed.
“Good to see you gentlemen in such fine humor this morning,” a waiter said, coming over to their table with pencil poised above notepad. “And what would you care to have for breakfast?”
“Eggs Benedict for me, please,” Bushell said. “Since I’m here, I have every intention of enjoying myself.”
“An excellent notion,” the waiter said. He nodded to Samuel Stanley. “And you, sir?”
“I want four rashers of bacon cooked very crisp, with toast and marmalade alongside.”
“Very good, sir.” The waiter wrote it down, then looked a question to Felix Crooke. Crooke coughed a couple of times. “I don’t see it on the menu, but could you grill me a bloater and serve it up with mashed potatoes?”
The waiter almost lost his professional impassivity at that emphatically proletarian choice, but said, “I shall enquire of the chef, sir. We do endeavor to satisfy every taste.” He was shaking his head as he walked back toward the kitchen.
“I like bloaters,” Crooke said defensively. “I’ve been eating them since I was a boy, and I still do, every chance I get.”
“I didn’t say a thing,” Bushell replied. “Did you say anything, Sam?”
“Me? Not a word,” Stanley said solemnly. “Felix, if fancying bloaters for breakfast is the craziest thing you do, then you’re one of the saner men I’ve met.”
“He doesn’t say present company included, mind you,” Bushell put in, pointing to himself, “but he’s thinking it, never fear. Your adjutant is like your valet: he knows you too well to give anything near the amount of respect you think you deserve.”
“I like that, by God.” Felix Crooke made silent clapping motions. “Given half a chance, I expect I’ll steal it. I tell you openly, you see, for I’m a brazen thief.”
“That’s how you got to be our chief student of the Sons of Liberty, is it?” Bushell shot back. “They set you after them because they know you thought the same way?”
Samuel Stanley struck an injured pose “The two of you are going at each other so hard and fast, I didn’t get to say I thought Tom was spouting rubbish.”
“Your mother trained you up right, Sam, and taught you not to interrupt,” Bushell said. “Now you’re suffering for it.” All three men were smiling broadly. Bushell hadn’t known how Crooke would fit in with Stanley and himself, but a man who could take banter and give it back promised to be easy to work with. The waiter returned with three covered plates on a tray. “Your eggs, sir,” he said, setting one in front of Bushell and removing the metal lid with a flourish. Bushell smiled in anticipation as the poached eggs, smothered in rich hollandaise sauce and topping ham and muffins, were revealed. The waiter gave Sam Stanley his bacon and toast, then turned to Felix Crooke. “Here is your bloater and mash, sir. I am told the chef does keep them on hand, as several of our engine mechanics have a fondness for them.”
So there, Bushell thought. Crooke might as well not have heard the waiter’s editorial remark. He gazed on the large, lightly smoked herring with pleasure unalloyed. Steam rose from it and from the large mound of fluffy potatoes with which it shared the plate. He sprinkled the potatoes with salt and pepper, then dug in.
The bloater’s strong odor distracted Bushell from his own more delicate breakfast, but only till he took the first bite. After that, nothing short of the airship’s falling into the sea could have made his attention waver from the food.
The Empire Builder reached Drakestown just past one in the afternoon, within a few minutes of its scheduled arrival. By then, the sun had long since succeeded in burning away the morning mist. It sparkled off the little waves in San Francisco Bay, which somehow had not changed its name when Upper California passed from Franco-Spanish to British possession.
The bay was full of ships, not only those of the Royal Navy and Royal North American Navy but also merchant vessels flying every flag in the world and a great multitude of ferryboats traveling back and forth between Drakestown and the smaller cities on the eastern shore of the bay. Bushell watched the ferries for a while, then turned to Samuel Stanley and asked, “Do you think they’ll ever bridge the bay? They’ve been talking about it since I was a boy - do you remember the drawings in the supplements to the Sunday papers?”
“As if you were looking down from an airship, with all the steamers on the bridge as tiny as ants?”
Stanley said, nodding. “I think everyone remembers those. A few years ago, I would have said it might happen. But after that last earthquake? How would you like to be on a bridge going across the bay when the ground started shaking?”
“No, thank you,” Bushell said. “Getting through an earthquake while you’re on solid ground is bad enough, if you ask me. I suppose you’re right; and the ferryboats do a good enough job, by all accounts. Still, a bridge that size would have been grand to see, don’t you think?”
“For as long as it stood, yes.” Listening to Stanley, anyone would have pegged him at once for a veteran sergeant or a police officer. He had a deep and abiding faith that things would go wrong. The Empire Builder dropped its mooring lines. With the help of the ground crew at Drakestown’s airship port, it locked itself to a mooring tower to disembark some passengers and take on others, along with fuel and water for ballast. By half past two it was airborne again, swaying a little in a crosswind from the west.
Before sunset, it crossed from Upper California into the larger but more sparsely settled province of Oregon. “Are we scheduled to stop at West Boston on the way up to Wellesley?” Felix Crooke asked.
“On the Columbia, you mean?” Bushell said. “Yes, I believe we are. It’s a nice enough town; I’ve been there once or twice.” The last time had been the mission from which he’d decided to come home early. To keep from thinking about that again, he went on, “Did you know it was almost called West Portland?
The first settlers were Massachusetts men, and they spun a shilling, or so the story goes, to see after which of their towns they’d name this one.”
“I looked at the itinerary in my stateroom,” Samuel Stanley said. “We’re supposed to stop at West Boston from ten o’clock to just before midnight. We get into Wellesley at a little past four tomorrow morning.” He rolled his eyes to show what he thought of that.
“Good,” Bushell said, which made both the other RAMs stare at him. He explained: “God willing, at that heathen hour all the reporters will be sleeping peacefully in their nice, warm beds.”
“At that heathen hour, I want to be sleeping peacefully in my nice, warm bed,” Felix Crooke said feelingly.
Bushell sought his own nice, warm bed not long after supper. He was far enough behind on sleep not to mind going to bed early, especially when he knew he’d have to rise early, too. The captain’s voice from the ceiling speaker woke him from a dream in which The Two Georges had somehow stolen Sir Horace Bragg and was holding him for ransom: “Ladies and gentlemen, I am sorry to do this to you, but I have to let you know we will be arriving in Wellesley in half an hour. Please do prepare for departure. Thank you.” A hiss of static, and the speaker went dead. Bushell yawned, knuckled his eyes, and groped for the light switch beside his bed. He found it, clicked on a lamp, and sat up, blinking against the sudden glare. He was pulling off his pyjamas and putting on a suit of dark gray wool when a steward pounded on the door and said, “Landing soon, sir. Are you awake in there?”