“Eh, sir?” The clerk was a little deaf. He cupped one hand to his ear while the other snatched back the photograph. “What’s that?”
“I think her real name is Potts,” said Tom.
The clerk shrugged. “Whatever it is, sir, the Sky Gods must like her. There’s not many last eighteen years in the air trade.” And to prove his point, he turned the ledger around and showed Tom and Wren the index pages, where, amid a long list of airships, there were many names crossed through in red, with neat little notes beside them saying things like “missing,” “crashed,” or “exploded at her moorings.”
The clerk thought that Ms. Morchard had bought her ship in the Traction City of Helsinki, and when Tom slipped a golden sovereign under the cover of the ledger, he suddenly recalled that she had purchased her at Unthank’s airship yard there. But where she had come from before that, where she had found the money for an airship, and what precisely her business was, he did not know; and, alas, old Mr. Unthank and all his records had been destroyed ten years ago when one of his apprentices lit a cigar inside the envelope of an unexpectedly leaky Cosgrove Cloudberry. (“You can still see the scorch marks along the edges of Helsinki air harbor,” the clerk said helpfully, as if he hoped it might earn him another sovereign, but it didn’t.)
Outside his little office, the High Street was starting to come to life, and stallholders were rolling up their shutters and laying out trays of vegetables and fruit, flowers, cheeses, and bolts of cloth. Watching them, Tom recalled following Anna Fang past these same stalls on a honey-colored evening twenty years before. It had been his first visit to Airhaven. He remembered how Hester had slunk along beside him, hiding herself from the gaze of passersby behind her upraised hand…
“Oh, Gods!” said Wren, stepping out of the harbor office behind him and pointing to someone on a nearby quay. “Look who it is!”
For an instant, confused by his memories, Tom thought that it might be Hester come to find them. He felt strangely disappointed when he saw a shapely aviatrix in a pink leather flying suit.
Wren was jumping excitedly up and down and calling, “Ms. Twombley! Ms. Twombley!”
The aviatrix, who had been deep in conversation with some of her comrades, looked around in surprise, then strode gracefully across the quay to find out who was hailing her with such enthusiasm. “It’s Orla Twombley,” Wren told her father. “She used to work for Brighton.” And as the aviatrix drew nearer, her puzzled frown changed into a smile of recognition. She and Wren had not known each other well, but each was glad to find that the other had come safely out of the battle on Cloud 9.
“It’s Wren, isn’t it?” Ms. Twombley asked, and took Wren’s hands in hers. “The little slave girl from the Pavilion? I had imagined you dead, or captured by the Storm. How good to see you safe and well! And this fine gentleman is your husband, I suppose?”
“Father,” said Tom, going bright red. “I’m Wren’s father.”
“And wasn’t I always thinking Wren was one of those Lost Girls!” cried Ms. Twombley, astonished. “A poor motherless orphan from away out in the western sea somewhere …”
“Motherless, but not fatherless,” said Wren. “It’s a long story. But I am glad to see you so well, Ms. Twombley. I thought you’d been shot down…”
“That was a bad night, to be sure,” the aviatrix admitted, and shook her head at the memory of the dogfights that had raged around Cloud 9. “But it’d take a lot more than a few Stalker birds and poxy old Fox Spirits to bring down my Combat Wombat. I re-formed the Flying Ferrets. We work for Adlai Browne, lord mayor of Manchester. He’s bringing his city up to the line, and he sent us ahead as his advance guard.”
Wren nodded. They had passed Manchester a week before, a huge, grimy city lumbering southeastward, bristling with cranes that had been busy fitting shiny new plates of antirocket armor over its upper tiers.
“But what has brought you here?” asked Orla Twombley. She looked expectantly at Tom, but Tom said nothing. He had been wondering if those had been some of Ms. Twombley’s flying machines that had cut up the Jenny Haniver on her approach, and whether he should complain to her about them, but Ms. Twombley was so beautiful that he couldn’t quite bring himself to.
Wren jumped in quickly. “We’ve come looking for an old friend of Dad’s. She calls herself Cruwys Morchard. You don’t know of her, I suppose?”
“The archaeologist?” Orla Twombley nodded. “I saw her once at the Pavilion, in Brighton. She used to buy Old Tech from Pennyroyal. In fact, I think they were supposed to have been an item at one time—but then, Pennyroyal’s name has been linked with so many ladies. Even with me!”
“But I thought that you and Professor Pennyroyal were—” said Wren.
“Oh, only in his wife’s imagination, and in the gossip pages of the Brighton Palimpsest.” Orla Twombley laughed. “I just flirted with the old rogue a little, to make sure he’d renew the Ferrets’ contract. Mind you, when I heard how brave he’d been that night, I almost wished I had been his lover. Who could have thought that an old relic like Pennyroyal could outwit the Stalker Fang.”
Wren laughed. “Is that what people say he did?”
“Haven’t you heard of it?” cried Orla Twombley, as if Wren had confessed to not knowing that the world was round, or that high-collared flying suits were out of fashion. “It has been the talk of the season out here on the line! Isn’t Professor Pennyroyal the great hero of the world? And has he not been dining out on the stories of his exploits aboard all the Traktionstadts?”
“He’s here?” cried Tom.
“Aboard Murnau at this very instant,” the aviatrix confirmed. “I know—you must ask him about your friend Cruwys Morchard! He is sure to know all about her! If I know him, he’ll be having breakfast now at Moon’s, down on Murnau’s second tier.”
“Oh, yes, Dad!” said Wren cheerfully. “Come on, let’s find him, and ask!”
Tom put a hand to his chest, to the wound that Pennyroyal’s bullet had made. He didn’t want to go and have breakfast with the man who had shot him. And yet Pennyroyal had behaved decently enough aboard Kom Ombo, and now that he thought about it, he half recalled Pennyroyal telling him a story once about an aviatrix he knew who had ventured inside the wreck of London. Could her name have been Cruwys Morchard?
“I’ll take you to see him myself,” said Orla Twombley, and it was settled. She led them both away toward the center of Airhaven, where balloon taxis were waiting to ferry people to the towns and cities below.
As their taxi sank toward Murnau, Wren prattled excitedly about the exploits of the Flying Ferrets and how their midgelike flying machines had hurled themselves at giant air destroyers over Brighton. But Tom heard none of it. He was too busy thinking about the mystery of Clytie Potts. Where was her airship’s home port? Why was she buying Old Tech and medical supplies? Why livestock?
An answer occurred to him as he pondered what the clerk had just told him. It was a wild, unlikely sort of answer, and he didn’t quite dare to believe it, for he was afraid it might have more to do with his own nostalgic longing for London than with a cool assessment of the facts. He must wait and see what Pennyroyal knew, he decided. Perhaps Pennyroyal would remember something about the Archaeopteryx and her mistress that would prove Tom’s theory, one way or the other.
He found that he was quite looking forward to meeting his murderer again.