Part 13 (2/2)

Outside it was a summer night, clear and starry and windless. Archer walked around to the back of her house, where a gate in a tumbledown fence opened onto a path up into the woods.

She set a good pace, despite the dark and the steepness of the path. Arthur clanked behind, sacks over his shoulder, grumbling as telescopes overbalanced him and tripods caught on branches.

”An eye out for what?” he said.

”Dimmick wouldn't have had to ask that.”

”I'm not Dimmick, am I?”

”Could be all kinds. They have all kinds of ways.”

He slapped at tormenting insects. Archer appeared immune to them. His stomach rumbled.

”Who does?”

”The other lot. Ah! I remember what happened to Lord Atwood-the old one, little Martin's father. Now, he was someone who respected the old ways of doing things.” She made a throat-cutting gesture. ”Not that I know what happened to him. Not that I'll spread gossip. But it was bad blood. There were rumours. And now there's Gracewell's Engine, and all the rest of it. Well, how could they stand for that? How could they, after what he did? Be fair. There'll be war, and it'll get worse. And poor old b.l.o.o.d.y me in the middle. Stayed out of it all these long years-out here, let others fight-let the young fight each other. Survived that way. But I couldn't say no, could I, not in the end? Greed. It's greed that gets us all, young man.”

Arthur stumbled and dropped a large ornate bronze implement.

”Don't drop that!”

”Sorr-”

”Well. Well! So now Atwood and Gracewell have got me working for them, and the other lot won't forgive that, will they? What'll they do next, I wonder? It was them who did that Storm, you know. Their work. You know why they did it?”

”Did what?”

”The storm?”

”No one can make storms, Mrs Archer.”

She looked disgusted.

”If they could, though, I'd say their motive was to flood Mr Gracewell's first Engine.”

”No! No! No! They did it, young man, they did it, they called that b.l.o.o.d.y thing up, d.a.m.n and blast 'em! b.l.o.o.d.y London know-it-alls! They did it for the sake of b.u.g.g.e.ring about with my b.l.o.o.d.y stars!”

She started on up the hill again, shaking her head. The trees thinned out, so that Arthur thought he could see the top of the hill-though hills were tricky things, and there was usually one more peak beyond the one you could see. For a little while he had been able to make out a square structure on the horizon against the starry sky.

He kept a wary eye out for a.s.sailants, but it seemed they were alone.

”Mrs Archer-”

”Shh. Thinking. Said too much already, haven't I? Not right, asking all those questions of an old woman. Not right.”

That was all she said until they stepped out of the woods and onto the crown of Rudder Hill.

A tower stood on the top of the hill. It was plain and windowless, circular, and made of brick. Arthur guessed it was about sixty feet tall. It had a conical top, out of which stuck an enormous telescope.

It was an extraordinarily impressive structure. At a quick glance, Arthur believed that the telescope was the equal of that of the Royal Observatory. He could not imagine what it was doing out in the woods, in the apparent possession of Mrs Archer. It looked quite new-no more than a few years old. It must have been staggeringly expensive.

The night sky above was so clear that Arthur could recognise no constellations, because it was all one field of a million stars, all of equal brightness. The Milky Way looked like something you could walk on. Arthur guessed it was midnight, or thereabouts.

Archer took one of the implements, a thing like an astrolabe on a tripod, and she set it up beside the tower. She crouched down and stared into a pinhole, and sighted the thing up at the stars. She grunted, and called for her papers. She made notes.

Arthur said nothing. The fact of the matter was that the sight of that telescope had unnerved him.

After a while she unlocked the tower's door and went inside. Stairs spiralled up into the dark. She hiked her skirts and hurried on ahead. The stairs looked steep, and the implements were terribly unwieldy and heavy, so Arthur left half of them behind, planning to make another trip. He was glad of it. With each turn of the stairs he felt heavier and heavier, and shorter of breath. He soon lost sight of Archer, who climbed without apparent effort.

By the time he'd caught up to her, panting and wheezing, she was already at work. The domed room at the top of the tower was dimly lit by stars and by candles, and cluttered with G.o.d knows what-chairs and hat-stands by the look of it, as if it were nothing more than an attic. Yet the huge telescope that dominated the room was a fine piece of work, so fine that Archer appeared able, with a turn of a wheel beside the door, to rotate it on its s.h.i.+ning tracks with no effort at all.

He set up her implements as she directed, then hurried back downstairs for the rest. On the walk down his footsteps lightened; but as he went back up he felt even heavier than he had the last time, as if he were carrying himself on his back. He planned for a third trip. Archer seemed busy-buzzing about, hmming and haaing and making observations and corrections and drawing circles and epicycles and taking notes. Her activities bore no more relations.h.i.+p to astronomy as Arthur understood it than the calculations performed by Gracewell's Engine did to everyday accounting.

When he next returned to the foot of the stairs-his legs aching from the effort-he glanced out the door and had a terrible shock. Someone stood at the clearing's edge, beneath the trees; a great tall heavy-shouldered shadow with two faintly visible eyes.

The man from Archer's house. He was watching, arms folded across his chest. A faint breeze rustled the branches overhead, and for a moment shadow swallowed him. He remained silent and still. Not so much as a nod in Arthur's direction. What on earth was he watching for?

Arthur's third trip up was his last. This time he felt heavier still, as if the shock of seeing Archer's whatever-he-was had left his legs weak. He nearly got down on hands and knees. At the top of the tower there was a sensation of great weight, quite unconnected to any obvious physical cause. He all but crawled into the room, dropped the last of Archer's implements with a clang, and fell into a chair. She grunted as if to acknowledge his efforts, but didn't look round. She was squinting into her telescope, muttering to herself.

He put his head between his knees and breathed deeply. Sweat ran from his forehead. The air was so dense that it seemed to murmur. He glanced up once or twice to see Mrs Archer still at work. She seemed to pay no special attention to the telescope. Instead she shuffled about in the gloom, examining her various odd little instruments, her bits of bra.s.s and bone and twig; except that sometimes she would pa.s.s the telescope and genuflect to it: a stiff curtsey, an awkward little dance like a diminutive and wizened priestess at the foot of a great golden idol. She'd hung something on it, something made of twigs and bone and G.o.d-knows-what. She was so busy and the room so full of clutter and shadows that sometimes it seemed there were two or three or a dozen of her, all performing their odd little dances. Windows overhead were unshuttered and star-light poured in. Arthur was scared to look up. G.o.d knows what those stars would look like; G.o.d knows what one might see through the lens of that telescope. Not, he was quite certain, the same heavens one might see at the Royal Observatory. He felt an urge to sneak up behind her and steal a peek. He felt an equal and opposite urge to run away. Instead, he remained where he was and struggled to breathe.

Archer tapped him on the shoulder. He snorted, jumped up.

”Fell asleep,” she said, almost as if to rea.s.sure him. ”Didn't you? Great silly fool.”

”I may have caught forty winks, Mrs Archer. It was a long journey from London.”

He stretched. The weight was gone from the room. He felt quite normal, though his legs ached from stair-climbing and hill-walking.

”That's that, then.” She shoved a messy stack of papers into his hands. ”There. Tell him these are my observations, whether he likes 'em or not. Still not there, is he? Still not there.”

”Who are you, Mrs Archer? What is Mr Gracewell paying you for?”

”I'm a very old woman who's been looking at the stars for a very long time. And he's paying me to keep on doing it.”

”What's Gracewell trying to do? What does it have to do with the stars?”

”I don't exactly know, young man. That's the honest truth. He pays me, him and his lot, and he sends me his estimations, and I tell him what I see in that big telescope he bought me. He keeps his secrets, that one.”

”It's a fine tower, Mrs Archer. A fine telescope.”

”How could I say no? Just a handful of winters ago I had nothing, nothing but the old house and my beautiful boy and the hill and the stars. Then they came for me-your master and his master. Little Lord Atwood, full of pride and his father's money-well, I should have said no, shouldn't I? Stay out of London's business, keep to myself, the way it's been all these long years. Greed, young man. It gets all of us in the end. And curiosity! Would you come out to Rodor Hill again, Mr Shaw, if you ever learn what they're up to?”

”I might, Mrs Archer.”

”Promise? Would you ally yourself with me?”

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