“If only I could make the ascent myself,” he sighed.
“Impossible. Even at four miles we are on borrowed time. You especially.”
“Green and Rush did it.”
“Only briefly. They were on borrowed time too.”
“Yet they lived.”
“They lived because they descended in haste. People must acclimatise slowly to very high altitudes. Mountaineers I have spoken to say that it takes weeks.”
“Find a way. Two hundred pounds, and I will pay for whatever you need.”
“Two hundred pounds, you say?”
“I do pledge that.”
“Then there may be a way. I have been reading about the nature of air, my lord. You may have heard of the experiments with glass jars and candles. Burn a candle in one, and it will go out when the oxygen is exhausted. Introduce a mouse to that depleted air, and it soon suffocates.”
“Explain further.”
“Suffocation interests me, being a balloonist. I performed this experiment, then piped some pure oxygen into that depleted air. The mouse revived.”
Gainsley thought about this for some time, smiling and nodding every so often.
“How heavy is the mechanism for supplying oxygen?” he asked at last.
“I need a bigger reactor to supply enough oxygen for humans, but it need not be very heavy. Just a tank, some pipes, spigots, and a sealable chute.”
“Then build it, build it! I shall pay for the materials and labour.”
“And the two-hundred-pound bounty?”
“It is yours.”
The problem of staying alive at extreme altitudes occupied my mind a great deal in the days that followed. Oxygen is the essential ingredient of air that gives us life, yet it occupies only one part in five of air’s volume. Provide air that is five parts in five oxygen, and one might well survive in much thinner air. I paid a visit to Darkington and Sons, Pneumatic Systems and Valves of Sheffield. Jeremy Darkington was about Gainsley’s age, but he was dressed as a tradesman and spoke with a hybrid Yorkshire-Cockney accent. He was a skilled metalworker who had made good by supplying valves for steam trains.
While he sat behind his desk, I unpacked my chemicals. I uncorked a bottle and poured a little solution into a glass, then opened a jar of dark purple crystals. I dropped one into the glass, where it began to bubble with great vigour.
“Permanganate of potash added to peroxide of hydrogen will release oxygen,” I explained as we watched the reaction turn the liquid to a greenish purple froth.
“I know t’reaction,” he replied.
I now laid out drawings before him.
“I wish to have a reactor built. Peroxide will be fed in here, potash here. Oxygen will be released into this pipe as they react, and when they are spent, the solution will be vented through this tap before fresh materials are introduced to give off more oxygen.”
He examined the drawings, scratching his head from time to time, but generally nodding. At last he looked up.
“Can be built, but what end for it? There’s oxygen all about.”
“I have an application that calls for pure oxygen. An industrial application.”
“Ah.”
“How much to build it, and how long?”
“Summat busy for present… thirty pounds. Just now there’s batches of valves for Mr. Stevenson’s new engine fleet… a fortnight?”
“Done! Put my contract on your books.”
My reactor looked viable in principle, but the only way to test it was by means of a flight. That was risky. Still, it was worth the risk.
My father had two sayings that I lived by. Luck is opportunity recognised, was sensible enough, except that opportunity generally eluded me. That which is too good to be true is never true, was a little less positive, yet it had kept me out of trouble on many occasions. Gainsley and his schemes seemed too good to be true, yet he paid generously enough.
I was returning from Sheffield and was within ten miles of Gainsley’s manor house when a rainstorm swept over the countryside. Because it was late in the afternoon, I decided to spend the night at a small inn on the edge of a hamlet. I was dining on a pork pie when a bearded man approached me. He was dressed as an itinerant labourer, but that illusion vanished as soon as he began to speak.
“So, you are Gainsley’s latest balloonist,” he said in a soft, almost conspiratorial voice with a French accent.
“I do not know you, sir,” I responded warily.
“My name is Norvin, and I know you to be Harold Parkes.”
Clearly he had something serious to discuss. I gestured to a chair.
“You said I was Lord Gainsley’s latest balloonist, yet the baron never flew before I took him aloft.”
“He has had four balloonists. Routley, he died in a mysterious duel in 1831. Sanderson died of food poisoning, two years later. Elders fell from the carriage of a train in 1837, and was found beside the tracks with his neck broken. I would wager my last pound that it was broken before he fell.”
I felt a stab of alarm, but the stranger show-ed not a trace of hostility.
“You said four balloonists,” I prompted.
“I was on a fishing boat, supposedly being taken back to France. One mile out to sea, I was padlocked to a length of iron rail and heaved over the side.”
“Yet here you are, alive.”
“When on hard times I supplemented my income by liberating goods guarded by padlocks. Thus my pick wire is always upon my person. It was a near thing, picking a lock in darkness, under water.”
I was aware that those balloonists he had named had died, for we are a small fraternity. Now I speculated.
“The balloonist Edward Norvin was French and a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars. He vanished in 1836.”
“So I did, Monsieur Parkes. The seventeenth day of July at one hour before midnight. One does not forget days like that in a hurry. I grew a beard and developed a new identity.”
“Can you prove that Gainsley was involved?”
“Can you prove that Gainsley and yourself have had any business dealings?” he asked in turn.
I raised my finger and opened my mouth to reply… but said nothing. All of our dealings had been in cash. My men Kelly and Feldman now lived on the Gainsley estate, as did I. Nobody knew. The colour quite probably drained from my face. Norvin smiled and took a sip from his tankard.
“You are having dreams and visions, Monsieur Parkes,” he continued. “The visions begin to tumble through your mind when ascending with Gainsley and Angelica. They begin at about ten thousand feet, the altitude at which the fox-woman’s mind becomes more clear. It is as if she were emerging from a drunken stupor, raving randomly.”
“But she has never said a thing.”
“She is not like us. She speaks with her mind; her words are images of thoughts. I would say that you have said nothing of this to Gainsley as yet.”
“Why?”
“You are still alive.”
I did not want to hear any of this, yet it seemed true.
“I saw landscapes that were all red and green under a violet sky,” Norvin continued. “There were cities of silver crystal, their streets strewn with bodies although the buildings were intact. It looked like a scene of plague. My perspective was odd. It was as if I were being dragged about, being made to look at the bodies. The only moving figures were wearing helmets and coveralls that resembled a Seibe diving suit—except that the helmets were made of glass and had no air hoses.”
Now I began to feel really frightened. Norvin was describing precisely what I had seen, both in the ascent visions and in my dreams. I decided to be honest, in order to gain his trust.
“I have also had dreams filled with vast, gleaming things that floated in blackness against constellations of unfamiliar stars,” I confessed.