Silver and Stone

Chapter Two

Chapter TwoMatilda paced around the deceptively small hovel that Mr O’Connell called his home. The fire was still burning in the stone chimney, and the smoke crawled along the slope of the tin roof and made me cough. We’d climbed into the main house when we were sure it was safe to emerge from my laboratory.

I hunched down and poked viciously at the logs, making them hiss and spit. Matilda had made it clear that I was not to speak to her until she was finished ‘looking around’. Since I could clearly see the tracks of two horses coming and then going again, I wasn’t sure what she planned to add to the conversation. Our men were gone—not just Patrick, who had committed enough crimes to warrant attention, but Mr O’Connell as well. He was a convict, certainly, but an emancipated one. I was guilty of more than Mr O’Connell even knew about.

The thought of my friends in police custody made me gag. My mouth tasted of ash and I couldn’t stop clenching and unclenching my hands.

Matilda walked past the open side of the hovel again, muttering to herself, then circled the whole area widely once more in the opposite direction. I poured two mugs of grey-looking tea from the kettle on the hob and tried to take a calming sip. It scalded my tongue, and I gasped at the infernal pain.

‘Ballarat,’ Matilda pronounced.

I emerged from the hovel so I could stand upright. ‘This is no time for making fun.’

‘I’m not,’ she said. ‘Two horses—that’s police business, especially the way they’re shod with pitted iron instead of quality. Police coming all the way out here means they’re looking for someone or something specific. They took Patrick, so they found what they wanted. It’s possible they wanted you too, but we both know Patrick wouldn’t give you up. Since they took Mr O’Connell, we also know they’re spiteful bastards.’

‘Officer Dry,’ I said dully. We’d stayed too long, relying on Victoria’s post-Eureka reforms to keep us safe from prosecution. I was still an escaped convict, and Patrick was still a horse thief. Worst of all, Officer Dry would soon guess we didn’t intend to let Mrs O’Connell remain in the Female Factory prison. There was no more time for tinkering. We had to get the men and go—to Tasmania. Come what may. Why hadn’t I solved the problem of prison access faster?

‘I should have gone out and faced him,’ Matilda said, stopping me in my tracks. She wasn’t the type to have regrets. ‘He wouldn’t have taken Mr O’Connell if he’d had a prize like me to clap in irons.’

‘He won’t have Mr O’Connell for long,’ I said grimly, heading for the hidden hot air balloon. For someone who insisted Matilda’s half-native parentage made her less than human, Officer Dry was remarkably obsessed with my girlfriend. ‘We’re going to save him. Besides, no one can prove you’ve done anything worse than running away from home in dubious company. Not even Officer Dry.’

Matilda grinned at me. She was unhealthily proud to be associated with Patrick and me. Sometimes it surprised me that she hadn’t committed any real crimes yet.

She put her hands on her hips, looking west. ‘Naturally we’ll have to liberate both men before Dry gets them to Melbourne. I hope that rancid slab of meat has a pistol on him, so I don’t feel sad when I shoot him.’

‘You won’t really shoot him,’ I said, biting my lip as soon as the words had escaped. I’d learned from experience not to argue with Matilda.

‘Why not?’ she said with a steadiness more frightening than an angry shout. ‘You and I have both killed better men than him.’

‘That was in a battle,’ I said. ‘It was different. They were going to kill us.’

‘I’ll do what I have to,’ she said, and turned away from me.

We didn’t discuss Officer Dry any further. Some people wanted to ‘civilise’ Matilda. Others wanted her to disappear. Dry wanted her dead.

Matilda followed me to the twin winches hidden in thorny bushes on the nearby hill. The bushes were long dead and tied to the ground with string. We moved them aside and drew back the thin layer of dirty plywood covering the large chamber beneath. Without a word, we returned to the winches, kicking away a few dropped spikes. We counted together as we hauled, grateful for the activated steel that added magical strength to our limbs. It was strange how easily we worked together when our world had just fallen apart.

Creaking and groaning, a black-clad carriage rose majestically from the earth. When its platform was level with the ground, we locked the winches into place, hauled back the fabric cover, and pushed Patrick’s modified carriage onto solid ground, coughing at the dust.

My heart skipped a beat at the smell of a large pile of quality coal. Patrick and his luddite father were appalled that my father had replaced my ordinary flesh heart with brass and silver and magic, but it was more useful than they knew. Sometimes my heart knew things—useful things, like where to find gold. I’d never worry about money again.

‘Do you need a top-up?’ Matilda asked me, seeing that I was looking at the driver’s seat where the coal was stored. ‘I don’t know when we’ll next be on steady ground with coal and water a-plenty.’

She knew we’d be going straight to Tasmania. We were out of options as well as out of time.

‘My heart’s full,’ I said, and pointed in a westerly direction. ‘We need to go that way.’

‘I know where Ballarat is,’ she said, giving me an odd look. ‘The fastest way to Melbourne is to catch the new Ballarat train, so of course Dry is heading into town first.’

‘You misunderstand me,’ I said. ‘My directions are exact. Thanks to my heart, I am a living compass. Patrick is that way.’

‘Ah!’ she said. ‘That will be handy. I don’t suppose your rats can inflate the balloon?’

‘Sadly, no,’ I admitted. ‘They can light the coal and heat the air, but we shall have to collect the air ourselves or my little friends will be no use at all.’

She paced back and forth, barefoot as usual and apparently oblivious to the sharp-edged grass and the hard red gravel of the area. ‘We’re dependent on the wind for both speed and direction, while Dry has horses and will shortly be able to take advantage of the new train route.’

I shivered. Ever since I’d worked as a servant in Melbourne, I had lived in fear of the Female Factory. Mrs O’Connell’s constitution was evidently stronger than mine, since her letters made it clear that prison life had not diminished her in the slightest. In fact, she had made it clear she was up to some new form of mischief within the prison. Of course, her letters were monitored so she wasn’t able to tell us any details.

‘Never fear,’ said Matilda, seeing my frown. ‘Let’s put that pretty brain of yours to work saving our boys before we end up in dangerous territory ourselves.’

I focused on the carriage: wheeled like an ordinary vehicle, but lightweight in order to help it lift off when the enormous silk balloon was inflated and the coal burning. It was certainly not going to inflate on its own, despite the precious weight-defying aluminium we’d sewn into the balloon’s varnished black silk for magical assistance. I ran through other magics in my mind: tin for communication, lead for heightened emotion, brass for enhanced senses, iron or steel for strength, silver for healing, gold for attraction.

None of them could help us blow up a balloon.

I looked the other way, surveying the low hills around Mr O’Connell’s home. They weren’t much, but if we could have charged down the hills with enough speed the balloon would have been reasonably well inflated. Unfortunately we had no horses (tin or otherwise), and the ground was heavily lined with loose rocks and unexpected ditches where rainfall had gouged zigzag channels in every direction.

‘We need an airship, not a hot air balloon,’ I said, resisting the urge to panic.

‘Ideally, yes,’ Matilda said with uncharacteristic patience. That, more than anything else, told me how frightened she was. Our boys were in real danger.

‘We lack a frame, a suitable gas, an appropriate engine, and propellers.’

Matilda waited. She forced herself to stillness, refusing to give in to her fury—knowing Patrick needed her and she couldn’t get to him. Her whole body trembled with the effort of remaining civil. Any other day, I might have laughed.

‘Aluminium instead of gas,’ I said. ‘Which means we don’t need an appropriate engine—almost any heavy old engine will do, if the aluminium is feeling cooperative.’

Matilda twitched at that, and I knew she didn’t want to risk Patrick’s liberty on my recent hypothesis that all magical metals understood humans far better than we understood them. She remained silent, but it cost her.

‘I can make a frame,’ I said, ‘and a propeller.’

Matilda let out her breath with such control I felt briefly afraid she would knock me down. ‘What do I do?’

‘Get the poking stick—sticks, that is—and Mr O’Connell’s fishing line, and that woollen dress of Mrs O’Connell’s. I’ll get the engine.’

‘No, I’ll get the engine,’ she said, tapping her iron corset to remind me that she could draw on magical strength faster than I could.

‘Very well,’ I said, and ran back into my underground lab to fetch the ingredients for a frame.

It wasn’t easy to carry the broken poking stick and Mr O’Connell’s tangle of fishing line up the ladder, but I quickly passed Matilda as she dragged the kitchen engine out towards our hot air balloon.

I measured the length of the poking stick pieces, nodding in satisfaction that Matilda—and the disintegrated rat—had broken it almost exactly in half. I laid them out in an X shape and fastened them together with the twine before disassembling Mrs O’Connell’s dress and using it to pad the sharp ends.

By then Matilda had pushed and shoved and dragged the kitchen engine relatively close, and I ran back to fetch Mr O’Connell’s axe and remove a few of the extraneous parts. I left the burner, boiler, and exhaust funnel, and bound some superfluous pipe together as a makeshift propeller with precious home-churned butter for lubricant.

It looked positively monstrous, and I almost despaired, but Matilda’s eyes were bright with hard work and the unquenchable ferocity that always burned beneath her respectable veneer. She had a bad habit of making me believe anything was possible. Besides, it was unthinkable that Patrick should be jailed, and unconscionable that Mr O’Connell might suffer for our misadventures.

So we shoved our engine inside the carriage, and I invited Matilda to stand over the modified stove as I lit it, coaxing the smoke through the carriage’s large iron ring. I balanced the silk-clad ring on the wicker edges of the carriage, with Matilda standing on the ring itself and holding the wool-wrapped X-frame above her head to keep the fire from melting the silk while the smoke awkwardly inflated our shambolic creation.

My rats assisted me as stokers with their own peculiar methods of heat creation, and as Matilda dripped sweat to sizzle on the fire I felt a murmur from the carriage as the hot air and aluminium combined into a lifting strength.

‘Woah there!’ said Matilda, as one of her feet slipped.

I hadn’t thought through how to get Matilda safely down into the carriage once more, and for a moment I simply stared at her: a glowing apparition caught between fire, smoke, iron, and silk. Then I grabbed the axe that had somehow made it aboard and passed it up to her, motioning for her to cut the twine so she could withdraw the iron frame from the balloon without destroying it.

An axe was hardly the ideal tool to slice through string while balancing inside a balloon that was fighting gravity and losing, but Matilda managed to break enough strands that she could fold up the X-shaped construction and pass it down to me. The iron was heavy and the carriage cramped, and I very nearly threw the iron over the side of the basket before remembering we were likely to need it to come back. Instead I reached up to steady Matilda as much as possible as she half-climbed, half-fell into my arms. I blushed at the way my hands slid over unfamiliar parts of her body, but she didn’t appear to notice my distraction. The balloon was moving.

We bumped sharply against one of the many small gullies on the hillside and grass snick-snicked against the wooden underside of the carriage, catching in the wheels and spraying seeds and twigs. I stood by the engine, making sure it was burning well as I prepared myself to dive over the side of the carriage if it proved necessary to untangle us from some ambitiously long-leafed local plant.

The carriage bumped against the drought-hardened ground again, lurched sideways, and almost tipped over, but little by little the sagging mushroom shape of the balloon filled out. We gained an inch, two inches—a foot!

As always, the beginning of flight was merely the absence of gravity, as if its elemental force could be absent-mindedly forgotten. It was suddenly smooth, and natural, and made perfect sense. My heart leaped despite the circumstances, and I heard Matilda’s indrawn breath as she reached to squeeze my hand.

We sailed on the hidden currents of the air, leaving the O’Connells’ modest home and shrivelled garden behind, flying over the gentle hills and watching as the sparkling river snaked back and forth below us. The serenity of flight always shocked me. It was a comfort to have the disembowelled kitchen engine smoking, creaking, hissing, and popping as if we were attempting to cook a meal. The butter burned, and Matilda wrinkled her nose.

My heart quivered, telling me that we were bearing a little south. I checked the steam vent in the kitchen engine and the friction of the makeshift propeller. Matilda shifted to the other side of the balloon to stay out of my way.

‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘It seems I neglected to organise a steering mechanism.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Matilda. ‘You start the propeller, and we’ll go in the opposite direction to it. It’s not especially precise, but it’s still better than relying entirely on the wind.’

‘Ye-e-es,’ I said. ‘If only we had some kind of tubing that we could use as a rudder.’

Matilda cast her eyes around the carriage. We had plenty of coal, plenty of iron, an axe, each other, and not much else. She laughed despite herself. ‘Does your heart calculate how far off we are, and the relative distance to Ballarat?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Or if it does, I don’t understand it. The good news is that we’ll cross the new railway line before Officer Dry does.’

‘Which would be useful if we could stop the train,’ said Matilda. ‘There’s not much point if we can’t effect a daring rescue.’

‘Not much point in getting arrested, either,’ I said. I had relied on my relative lack of importance to keep me safe, not allowing for Officer Dry’s personal hatred for Matilda and anyone connected with her.

I attached the propeller to the engine and let it creak and clank into jerky life. If I didn’t correct our path we’d land too far away from Ballarat to get to Officer Dry before he caught his train. Then our only option would be to catch the speeding train. It would be somewhat less than ideal.

For the first time, I felt the wind on my face while flying. We were moving faster than the air. My improvised airship was working! It still wasn’t taking us in quite the right direction, but if I could convert a hot air balloon to an airship at a moment’s notice then surely I could hijack a moving train. How hard could it be?