Walking back to our makeshift aerodrome, I saw Javitz in conversation with the two boys. They trotted away, chattering avidly. When I got back to the 'plane, I saw that he had restored a fair number of the parts to their places.
“Have you fixed it?”
“The problem's with the petrol. I was hoping to find garbage in the carburettor, or in the fuel line, but it's in the petrol itself. The filter's a mess.”
“Can you fix it?”
“Sure, just drain the petrol and replace it.”
We surveyed the countryside, which had a singular lack of petrol stations.
“You've sent the boys for petrol?”
“I've sent them for clean, empty containers. If I drain it through a chamois, it'll be fine.”
“How many containers are we talking about?”
“Lots,” he said.
The tank, it turned out, contained seventy gallons of petrol when full, which it had been when we left the York field. When the two boys returned, an hour later, they were loaded down with a mad variety of vessels, from chipped tea-pot to tin bath. My job was to check each container, rinsing it if necessary in petrol, before handing it to Javitz. He would then position his chamois rag under the stream of petrol dribbling from the tank, and let the bowl, or coffee-pot, or tin bath fill up.
We ran out of containers before the machine ran out of petrol, so the four of us wrestled the machine forward, clear of the tin bath, for Javitz to open the plug, draining the remainder on the ground. I kept an eye on the growing puddle, to make sure our assistants didn't go near it with a lit cigarette, but he finished without mishap, cleared the lines, scrubbed the filter, and put everything back in place.
The petrol took a long time to replace, and even with the care we took, it splashed around and had us reeking and light-headed. At last, when the sun was well down in the afternoon sky, Javitz tossed down the coffee-pot he had been using to transfer the liquid, and we were ready.
He spent some time warning the boys about the danger of the fumes and traces that remained on their utensils, and more time explaining to the larger boy, in painful detail, how to work the prop and exactly what the consequences would be if the boy did it wrong.
He climbed back, I dropped my cover down, and we crossed our fingers. When he shouted his command, the lad yanked hard on the propeller. The engine sputtered and died, and Javitz shouted for him to do it again. On the fourth try, the engine cleared its throat and came to life.
When the boys were well clear of the wings, Javitz aimed our nose down the mild slope we had landed on, and opened the throttle.
Hard.
The engine noise built as 230 horses stirred themselves to life. We rattled and rumbled over the field, bouncing and nearly flipping over. My teeth felt loose in my jaw, and each bounce left us only slightly closer to air-bound.
There was a rock wall at the far end of the field, and we were coming at it fast.
Too fast. It looked as high as a building and was certainly solid enough to smash us to pieces. I caught only glimpses past my pilot's shoulders, but I was in no doubt that the rocks were there, greedy for our fragility, vanishing with each bounce, only to reappear closer and higher than before. Three times this happened, and I closed my eyes and drew down my head, because when we descended again, we should be on top of it.
But we did not descend. The wings clawed at air, and the wheels kissed the stones in passing, then before us was only the violet expanse of the heavens.
Exultation lasted perhaps thirty seconds, before it penetrated my mind that the lighter portion of sky was to our right. I rapped on the glass, then unlatched it and wrestled it up a crack to shout, “Mr Javitz, why are we going south?”
There was no response; between the noise and the partition, communication threatened to be a one-way event. I drew breath and shouted more loudly: “We're going south!”
I thought he had still not heard me-either that, or was refusing to acknowledge it. Then I saw that he was bent over something held near his lap. After a minute, he held up a note-pad on which he had printed:
BE NIGHT IN EDINBURGH.
I protested, loudly, cursing that my revolver was in the storage locker, but before I could excavate through my layers of clothing for the knife, I realised he was right: I had to trust his decisions. If we could get safely to Edinburgh, we would be going there.
We made it back to the air field near York well before dark. Fortunately for the laconic individual who had sold us the petrol earlier, Javitz did not find him, and when he laboriously filtered the new petrol through his cloth, not a trace of foreign matter showed up. We spent the night in a nearby farmhouse that let rooms, and before it was truly light, the farmer motored us back to the air field and swung the prop for us. In minutes, the clamour drew us forward and into the sky.
I had, I need hardly mention, given up any real expectation that this northward journey would be anything but a wild-goose chase. I was by now quite certain that Holmes would be closing in on Bergen, and he and Mycroft's men would be baying on the trail of Brothers and his captives.
For me, onward motion was merely a thing to cling to until someone told me to stop.
42
Place (2): All these are considerations in choosing the site
for a Work: Central and apart, it must draw from the ages
yet be ageless, between the worlds yet of the world,
recognised as holy yet wholly secular.
A man may search his whole life, for such a place.
Testimony, IV:6
WE COVERED THE TWO HUNDRED MILES TO Edinburgh in no time at all, the machine demurely slipping northwards as if in all the days since it had rolled out of the shop, it had never so much as hesitated.
This time, the problem lay not in the engine, but outside: As we flew north, the clouds tumbled down to meet us.
Fifty miles south of Edinburgh, the wind began-and not just wind, but rain. One moment we were grumbling along in the nice firm air, and the next the bottom dropped out of the world. It seemed eerily quiet as I rose out of my seat, stomach clenched and my skin shuddering into ice-until the machine slammed into air again and I was suddenly heavy as the propellers bit in and pulled us forward once more. It had happened so quickly, Javitz had not even shifted his hands on the controls. He glanced over his shoulder and laughed, more in relief than amusement. We climbed, I breathed, deliberately, and unclenched my rigid fingers from the seat. Two minutes later it happened again, only this time when the hole ended and we were buoyed and beginning to climb, a sudden gust from the side nearly slapped us over. Javitz fought the controls, raised our nose, and held on.
Then drops began sporadically to spatter my glass cage. Most of it blew past Javitz, but his hand came up several times, wiping his face.
It made for a long fifty miles, tumbling and tossing in the clouds. We came out of the mid-day murk alarmingly close to the ground, and Javitz corrected our course to point us at the aerodrome. A gust hit us just short of the ground and we hit the grass with a terrifying crack from below.
The American gingerly slowed the machine, and I waited for him to turn us about and head back to the hangers we had flashed past. Instead, he throttled down the motor, then stood to look back at the buildings: It seemed that we were to walk back to the aerodrome. I popped up the cover and started to rise, but he stopped me.
“Stay right there. We need your weight.”
“Sorry?”
“If you get out,” he explained impatiently, “we'll shuttlecock. Flip over.”