“You’ll probably want to switch off your meter, then,” said Will.
“I probably won’t,” said the cabbie. “In fact, I definitely won’t.”
“Perhaps there’s another way in,” said Tim. “A back door or something. Perhaps we could slip in unseen.”
“Ain’t you got tickets, then?” asked the cabbie.
“Count Otto is a friend of ours,” said Will. “We’d like to surprise him. Perhaps you might leave the queue and fly around the circus. There might be somewhere else you could drop us off.”
“As you please,” said the cabbie, and he dropped his cab from the queue, then circled it up in a glorious arc and swung about over the dirigible.
“Look at the size of it,” said Tim. “It looks even bigger up close.”
Will rolled his eyes. “Fly very slowly around, cabbie,” he said. “Let’s see what we can see.”
“As you please,” said the cabbie once more.
“He’s very good,” said Tim. “A good pilot.”
“Thank you sir,” said the cabbie. “I got this cab from my brother. It was his you see, but he can’t fly it any more. He had a tragic accident.”
“In this cab?” Tim asked.
“Well, actually, yes. He was taking a Colonel William Starling to the launching of the moonship. But the Colonel threw him out of the cab into a pond at Crystal Palace. Broke both his legs. Then the Colonel crashed the cab. Cost me a packet to get it fixed up again. What a bastard that Colonel Starling, eh? I hope they catch him and string him up.”
“Right,” said Tim.
And “Right,” said Will.
“There,” said the cabbie. “Down there. See that gantry running the length of the southern star arm, I could drop you off on that, if you like. Then you can fend for yourselves.”
“Do that,” said Will and the cabbie steered the aerial hansom close in to the gantry.
“There you go, gents. That’s one and threepence on the clock.”
“Pay him, Tim,” said Will.
Tim patted his pockets. “I’m penniless,” he said. “I think someone deftly relieved me of all my money.”
“Me too,” said Will. “Winston the paperboy lifted my wallet.”
“This is most upsetting,” said the cabbie. “Generally in such situations, I close my hatch, engage the central locking, then fly the cab round to my other brother, Gentlemen Jim Corbett, barefist champion of Britain, and have him beat the non-payers to a bloody pulp.”
“We don’t really have time for that,” said Will. “But listen, as we’re sneaking in, we could let you have our tickets. Numbered seats in the front row. What do you say to that?”
“So where will you be sitting?”
“We’ll find somewhere. What do you say?”
“I say, thank you very much. Give me the tickets.”
Will took out the tickets and handed them through the little glass partition to the cabbie.
“Thanks very much to you,” said that man, examining the tickets. “Seats twelve and thirteen, row A. Careful how you go now.”
“Farewell,” said Will and he and Tim left the hovering cab and clambered onto the gantry.
A bit of a wind was blowing.
“It’s chilly up here,” said Tim. “Like being on a very high rooftop.”
“A rooftop,” said Will and he smiled.
“And why are you smiling about a rooftop?”
“Remember when we were in the cell at the Brentford court house and I told you about the Lazlo Woodbine thrillers I’d read?”
Tim nodded, but his nodding was all but invisible, hidden as it was by his hair, which was wildly blowing all around.
“And how I told you that every Lazlo Woodbine thriller ends with Laz having a final rooftop confrontation with the villain. Who then takes the big fall to oblivion at the end.”
“You did,” said Tim. “Although I didn’t see the relevance at the time. Everything gets explained eventually, doesn’t it?”
“It does,” said Will. “And I’m freezing my privy parts off here, so let’s get inside.”
Inside the big top, posh folk were taking their seats. And anyone who was anyone was there.
Wilde was there, sitting upon a swansdown cushion, due to the scalding of his behind which he had received when the moonship exploded. And Beardsley was there, chatting with Richard Dadd about how well his brother Peter was doing playing for Brentford football club and about how a talent scout from Liverpool had recently spotted him. And the Duke of Wellington was there, chatting with Lord Colostomy, who was trying to sell him a bag. And Dame Nellie Melba was there, admiring the boots of Little Tich.
Lord Babbage and Mr Tesla sat next to Her Majesty the Queen (GBH), who sat next to Princess Alexandra, who had her hand once more upon Joseph Merrick’s good knee.
And Mr Sherlock Holmes was there, back from Dartmoor with another successfully solved case under his belt. And Dr Watson, who had secretly been shagging the Queen for the last five years, sat with him, sharing a joke about bedpans with the Queen’s gynaecologist Sir Frederick Treves.
The Pre-Raphaelites were all there, of course, and these shared a joke with a group of proto-surrealists.
The joke was all about fish.
And there was Montague Summers and Madame Blavatsky, Aleister Crowley and the Pope of Rome.
But they weren’t sharing any jokes. They weren’t even speaking to each other.
There was an air of expectation breathing all around and about this salubrious crowd, an air of exaltation, of wonder and of hope. For a new century was dawning, and given the advances of the last fifty years, it was a new century that they were all very much looking forward to.
For what would happen next? What great steps would the British Empire be taking? To conquer all the world? And then the stars?
“Definitely the stars,” said The Man on the Clapham Omnibus, who was tonight A Face in the Crowd, albeit a most exclusive crowd.
Exclusive folk filed in and took their seats. Upon a high gantry Tim eased open a door.
“We’re in,” said he. “Follow me.”
“You know where we’re going then?” asked Will.
“Not as such,” said Tim.
A buzzer buzzed in the dressing room of the Lower Rank Performers. And a light flashed too. “Five minutes to curtain up,” came a voice through the public address system.
In the big top, the orchestra took their seats and took to tuning up their instruments. The smell of sawdust from the ring mingled with the perfumes of the wealthy.
“Down this way,” said Will.
“So you know where we’re going?”
“Not as such.”
The last of the aerial hansoms which had conveyed the rich and famous to the flying circus had now departed. One final cab drew up, this bearing the cabbie Will had passed his tickets to. The cabbie had brought his brother with him, the one with the broken legs. These legs were in plaster. The cabbie helped his injured brother from the cab. “This will be a real treat for you, bruv,” he said. “You deserve it.”
“Cheers,” said his brother, supporting himself on crutches.
“I’ll just switch off the engine,” said the cabbie, and he leaned inside the cab and did so.
“There,” he said, grinning back at his brother.
The aerial hansom plummeted down towards Whitechapel.
The cabbie’s plastered brother said, “You twat!”
“If we’d thought a little harder about this,” said Tim, as he and Will wandered aimlessly along a service tunnel beneath the dirigible proper, “we’d have got ourselves a plan of this craft. I’ll bet we could have got one from the Patent Office, or somewhere.”
“We’ll find our way,” said Will. “Have a little faith.”
“Oh I do. I have plenty of faith. Listen.”