In Love and War

by Malcolm Macdonald

Genres: Historical Fiction; Sagas; Romance; Historical Romance

Synopsis

Clive Mortimer - an aspiring politician and son of a wealthy Midlands industrialist, and Freddy Oxley - a mere apprentice - seem the unlikeliest of friends. But something in their past exerts a mysterious power over them. And it is not just Anne Howard, the maidservant who loves and is loved by both - yet cannot find happiness with either. Travelling to the Cape, the lush jungles of Venezuela, Imperial Vienna, the Ottoman court and the Carribean, the trio seek to create perfect lives for themselves. Yet inexorably their past catches up with them and when a long-delayed time bomb threatens their ruin, the solution they devise is the most astonishing twist of all.

Release date: October 10, 2013

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 591

Sample

“THIS’LL MAKE THEM JUMP,” Clive said as he rammed the gunpowder even harder into the copper pipe. “Let them dare call it ‘childish amusement’ after this!”

Freddy looked on and smiled. He tried to lick his lips, to wet them, but the tip of his tongue was dry with excitement. A small, sensible voice within told him this latest “experiment” was folly; but too many forces were pulling him onward.

Above all he wanted to see how mighty an explosion they could make if they really tried. For the past month or so, ever since that wonderful day when he had spotted The Pyromaniac’s Delight among a grubby heap of secondhand books on a stall in Aston market, life had been all bangers and rockets and smoke bombs. From feeble little squibs that hardly woke the cat, from puny indoor mortars whose crimson flares could barely reach the low rafters of the potting shed roof, they had progressed – alarmingly as grown-ups saw it, stupendously in their own estimation. Now, as easy as pie, they could make a soaring skyrocket whose charred remains fell so far off they were never found. And the terrible cannonades of one of their thunderpots had ruined at least one shooting party.

That was the day on which the grown-ups had forbidden them all further pyromania; the day on which Clive had said, “Let’s go out in a real fire of glory!” and Freddy had answered – shyly, slyly – “Yes! Let’s make a Sebastopol special!” And they had looked at each other in a trembling kind of excitement, daring themselves to go back on this resolve, which neither boy had meant to be taken quite so literally.

Too late now, for here they were, actually making the bomb.

In Freddy’s case a more subtle force urged him onward: the force of class – for this was England and the year was 1863. Freddy was socially the inferior of the two boys; indeed the gap between them was so great that they ought not to have been companions at all. For Clive was Clive Mortimer, the squire’s son, while Freddy was only Freddy Oxley, son of a local tool and diemaker who worked in one of the Mortimer factories. So whatever Clive did was right. Freddy was relieved of the ultimate decision. He might share the blame but Clive alone had the responsibility.

True, it was Freddy who had found the book in the first place – Freddy who had suggested they should put its experiments into practice – Freddy who had bought the sulphur and carbon black and Chile saltpetre that made the bangs – and Freddy who had later extended their chemistry into the glorious and multicoloured realms of cadmium and cobalt and strontium. But Clive was a Mortimer and there was an end of it. The Mortimers ruled everything hereabouts. This was Sir Toby Mortimer’s garden, all twenty acres of it. The casing of their bomb was of copper pipe from a Mortimer rolling mill. And it was Sir Toby’s marble steps, all the way from Carrara in Italy, under which they were going to place and explode the charge.

The choice of this site had been practical enough. A badger had recently begun to dig out an earth under one of the steps; it made a convenient place to kindle a fire and, when the ashes glowed red, throw in the tight-packed, tight-sealed copper tube and run. At least, that was how they justified it later. Truly, though, both knew in their hearts that if the badger had not been so obliging, they would themselves have dug the hole. That great sweep of marble, from the fountains on the terrace above to the carefully manicured formal gardens below, was the only conceivable setting for this last, spectacular experiment.

“It can’t possibly ram any tighter than that,” Clive said. He turned to his young companion and added generously, “Give it one for luck?”

The copper tube, pinched and folded at the bottom, was clamped tight in the vice by that fold. Freddy took the wooden tamper, placed it firmly in the open mouth of the tube and gave it a ritual but expert blow with the mallet. The gunpowder, already tamped as hard as oak, yielded not at all. Freddy nodded his approval.

As if he had waited for that signal, Clive said, “We’d better close it off then.”

Working together, with few words, they gingerly flattened the open end against the workbench, folded it, pinched it in the vice, folded it again … and so on until Freddy feared that one more tightening of the handle would burst the copper seam. “That should do it,” he said.

“Enough!” Clive confirmed. “You slip ahead and see how the fire’s going.”

Freddy ran out of the shed and down one of the paths toward the formal garden, slowing to a walk only when he spotted Hawkins, one of the senior undergardeners. The man saw him and changed direction. “If you was going to feed that fire under the steps,” he said crossly, “you may turn about now. You must be mad.”

“You didn’t put it out?” Freddy asked anxiously.

“No point. It’s nearly out anyway. What was you thinking of? Did you suppose there was a badger there?”

“Isn’t there?”

The man spat disgustedly. “You could have cracked the marble.”

Clive came sauntering up, his arm stiff from the concealment of the copper bomb. “Race you to the lakes!” he said, to rescue Freddy.

They broke back into a walk as soon as they were beyond Hawkins’ sight. Clive took out the bomb, big as a policeman’s truncheon and twice as fat. He hefted it contentedly, whacking the palm of his hand – living dangerously, as he supposed.

“I’ve just thought of something,” Freddy said, looking at it. “It’s a pity we couldn’t have got some sort of round container. I mean spherical-round.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I just have a feeling it’d be more compact and would give a bigger e x p l o s i o n.” He loved the word explosion and always lingered over it.

“The Fenian bombs in Punch are always round,” Clive agreed dubiously.

“Too late now,” Freddy said. “But it’s something to think about.”

The fire was not “almost out,” it was glowing a fierce orange, dulled only by the strong sunlight, and perfect for their purpose.

Now that the moment had come they were both too scared to consummate it. There was at least ten times as much powder in this charge as in the biggest of their previous bangs – and all those earlier charges had been tamped in cardboard tubes, not in stout copper. The suppressed voices of good sense clamoured louder than ever to stop, to turn back – even now.

“I’ll just peep over the top of the steps,” Freddy said. “Make sure there’s no one around.”

“Good egg.”

Freddy had intended this move as an honourable postponement, a sop to reason – and even a hint that, in the few moments his scrutiny would occupy, the wiser counsels of conscience might indeed prevail. Yet in some curious way the effect was opposite. His words, his creeping up the broad expanse of marble steps, his peeping out over the acre of empty terrace, all somehow committed them to the action.

The house, a stately and much altered Elizabethan manor, shimmered in the August afternoon sun. The quiet of centuries seemed to hang about its ivied walls. The ballroom windows stared out over the terrace, somnolent and blank. The water, playing listlessly in the fountains, laid a drowsy, splashing hiss upon the air. Not for the first time Freddy imagined the comforts and luxuries of such a home, and he envied his friend.

His lips pressed tight together. He turned and rose to his feet. “Safe enough,” he said. “Chuck it on.” He began to saunter down the steps.

“Don’t be a fool. You come back down here first.”

“No! You chuck it on.”

Clive half-obeyed but just prevented himself at the last moment. He held the bomb like a pointer, its tip toward the glowing recess.

“Go on!” Freddy gave a wild, challenging laugh that – Clive was never able to explain it properly – commanded obedience. Like a felon destroying some incriminating evidence he threw the tube beneath the steps and ran.

He ran like a demon.

Nothing happened.

Freddy, moving through the unreal air of a dream, continued his slow progress down the steps. The Lord of Creation, unable to fear.

Still nothing happened.

Clive watched, half-aghast at the certainty of Freddy’s death, and half in awe at his coolness.

For Freddy the universe had become a kind of dream. There was no sensation beneath his feet; the steps were made of whipped cream. His body had no substance; the breezes chased one another through his frame. No birds sang. The flowers trembled in their efforts not to vanish. All at once he saw the world as a kind of painted backdrop, of which he and Clive – and everyone – were mere mechanical elements. At any moment now the real actors would come on and the real drama begin.

If he was smart, he thought, he could slip out of this half-world and join them, and they might not notice.

He reached the bottom of the steps, ten feet below and thirty away from the glowing badger hole and the reluctant bomb. He turned to look – perhaps to find a long pole and poke the bomb to life? “For Christ’s sake!” he heard Clive shout from another time and space.

The great marble steps lifted. He heard the explosion not so much in his ears as in the pit of his lungs. The marble lifted, cracked asunder, shattered, rose, and spun.

The shimmering arcs of splintered, sunstruck marble held him entranced. He knew what danger he was in, yet the knowledge was somehow arcane, like the knowledge of Latin grammar. It seemed to have no practical bearing on the here-and-now. Its remoteness liberated him from all fear. He stood and watched the explosion unfold before him as if it, and he, and all the world were immersed in clear golden treacle.

Small chunks of stone whizzed lazily by his charmed head. Larger fragments rose, spinning and wheeling, suddenly black against the brilliant afternoon as they soared over the terrace. There was an almighty shattering of glass, which frittered itself away into a gentle pitter-patter of descending stone. The envoi was sung by a chorus of protesting jackdaws, specks of fright upon a newly livid sky.

Eternity passed in approving silence. Freddy knew true ecstasy at last.

“What a stunner!” Clive said, breathless from his return sprint up the formal garden.

Freddy still forgot to breathe.

“You’re not hurt are you?” Anxiety edged Clive’s tone. “You were mad to stand there like that.”

Still awestruck, Freddy shook his head.

“What a stunner!” Clive rekindled his joy. “Let’s go and see the damage.”

Freddy did not move. He wanted the pleasure to last forever. Clive’s rough push broke the spell. “Come on!”

Together they clambered up the tangle of marble steps and gazed in awe at the gaping hole, large enough now for a whole colony of badgers.

What had that simple mixture of sulphur and carbon and saltpetre done! That splendid geometry of the steps – surely it was gone now – gone beyond recovery. And all in a fraction of a second!

They leapt the gap and hastened upward to the terrace.

At first it seemed nothing had changed. The fountains still splashed; the ivy still hung upon the walls; the old leaded windows still gleamed blankly in their shrouded quietude.

Then the two pyromaniacs saw the gashes in the red tiles of the roof, and the gaping hole, black on black, in one of the ballroom windows.

“Oh Christopher!” Clive said, all joy gone. The damaged roof might not have been so bad but the new ballroom windows were his father’s pride and delight – his great legacy in the evolution of the stately old home.

There were twenty of them – massive affairs of teak and polished plate glass almost half an inch thick; designed to last for ever, one of them had not even reached its first anniversary.

“Cut along home, Freddy,” Clive said in sepulchral gloom. “I’m bound to get it in the neck, now. No need for two of us to face the cannon. I’ll say I did it all by myself.”

Disconsolately he walked across the terrace toward the shattered window. Freddy was at his side.

They entered the ballroom to find it full of housemaids and footmen, standing aghast, waiting for the housekeeper or butler – or anyone with majesty enough to cope with this enormity.

The flying marble slab that had shattered the plate glass had gone on to plough a huge furrow clear across the gleaming parquet floor; the ballroom was a ruin.

Clive was marvellous, Freddy thought. The sight of the servants reminded the young master who he was. His head came up. His back stiffened. His eyelids drooped. “Don’t just stand there,” he said with languid majesty as he sauntered toward them. “Get buckets and things and start cleaning up this dreadful mess.”

It was sheer bravado, of course; everyone knew that. But they admired him for the way he carried it off – none more than Freddy. One day, he thought, I shall behave like that.

The young master swept out past them and went upstairs to soak the cheeks of his backside in spirit, a vain bid to harden them against the wrath to come. Freddy just hung around, knowing he was bound to be flogged as well, and wanting to avoid the ignominy of being dragged by the ear from his parents’ home by one of Sir Toby’s undergardeners.

And so it proved. The pain of the flogging was excruciating, of course, Sir Toby being both angry and powerful. It was the most dreadful torment either boy had ever had to endure. But the blood that was drawn by that pliant and screaming horsewhip forged between them a brother-bond that was to endure all their lives – through hurt and betrayal, both real and imagined.

THE HORSEWHIPPING, for all its terror, was soon forgotten. The sting went in minutes; the last dull ache in days; the final blue-brown marbling of the bruise in weeks. What then remained, for both boys, was the memory of an awesome power, a power they had for a moment controlled, a power they had unleashed – but a power which from that moment on had become unstoppable.

There were other, similar moments in their lives, of course. Once they dammed the Blythe, the stream that flowed through the garden. It was no ordinary boys’ dam, either; as Sir Toby later said to Lady Mortimer, “When that pair go at it, they go at it, by Hades!” No, this dam was large enough to drive a small mill. The boys had not intended anything so utilitarian; they merely wished to create a Little Venice beside the Elysian Grove. To get the dam built had cost them the sovereign that Clive’s Great Aunt Maud had given him for Christmas, and, a greater sacrifice, Freddy’s birthday shilling from his grandad; for that guinea a gang of diddicoys with donkeys and scoops had agreed to build their dam. In a single morning they had scraped up enough sand and gravel to pen back many thousand gallons. By late afternoon the stream had obligingly delivered that quota of water. By evening an angry band of flooded cottagers, living upstream at Sandal’s Cottages, had waited in deputation upon Sir Toby. The boys had tried to abate the flood by cutting an overflow channel to one side of the dam wall. The spirit of the waters, keen to show off his new might, had gone rushing out, scouring away the dam, and bringing a second, even angrier deputation of wet cottagers to Sir Toby’s back door, this time from downstream.

Those moments while the little rivulet of clear stream had gouged and swelled to a massive, unstoppable flood of churned-up headwater had been like a slowed-down reenactment of the Great Explosion. A pale echo, to be sure, and yet an equal reminder of those unseen and wilful forces in the world around us, forces that skilled men may tap and turn into wealth but that quickly slip beyond the grasp of the unskilled and then are free to whistle up the spirits of havoc.

Not all their ventures ended in disaster. They made a Robinson Crusoe raft that lasted several weeks, and though both of them nearly drowned several times, that was more to do with the places and distances to which the vessel carried them than with any essential defect in the craft itself.

With two diaphragms of tinplate and a length of taut copper wire they made a talking machine that enabled one of them in the potting shed to talk to the other in the hothouse. True, they ought not to have stretched the wire at the height of the average human neck – but then Hawkins ought also to have looked where he was going. And the talking machine was an undoubted success. Anyway, the wound soon healed.

Their only absolute, total failure was the experimental recreation of A Day in the Life of Ug the Prehistoric Ironsmith. But, as Clive often remarked in later years, the events of that afternoon did point up several deficiencies in the organization and equipment of the local volunteer fire brigade, the remedying of which had undoubtably saved a great deal of property – and, of course, lives – in subsequent years. What was one small plantation of balsam poplars, however beautiful, to set beside that?

For each of these disasters and near-tragedies they received the usual stigmata of boyhood. Time and again they were forbidden to have anything to do with each other – a prohibition that their differences in class and prospects ought to have made unnecessary in any case. But neither rewards nor punishments – nor even simple reasoning – could prevail against the delight of their mutual company. Clive had only to see the sprightly, cocky shape of Freddy, leading with his left shoulder as he walked, bursting with some grand new scheme and grinning as if it were already achieved … and all his promises and fear of retribution flew to the winds. Freddy had only to think of the tall, languid outline of his partner in so many past adventures, had only to remember how his easygoing calm had made many an awkward moment negotiable … and he could more readily have “given up” gravity than he could Clive.

“It’ll be different when he goes to Eton,” Sir Toby told Lady Mortimer. “He’ll mix with his own sort and develop some judgement.”

Clive did in time go to Eton. His recounting there of his adventures ensured that at least a dozen O.E.s regretted all their lives they had never known Freddy Oxley in their youth. And Clive’s attempt to introduce the Wall Game to the village – or, more specifically, to the wall at the end of the Rose Garden – was just one more of what his mother came to call “those sal-volatile moments of life.” Eton proved no cure for boys suffering from boyhood.

“That awful little Freddy Oxley will be apprenticed soon,” Sir Toby next assured his lady. “I’ll put him to Dixon – the hardest, surliest man I know. That’ll curb him.”

Freddy was in time apprenticed, and to Dixon. But in the remainder of his forecast Sir Toby was wrong. Dixon was not so much a hard and surly man as an average socialist. The angry political animal was all Sir Toby had ever seen. The man himself was something more complex. He was hard, all right. The smallest unevenness in a bit of filing, the slightest weep in a hand-forged weld, the faintest trace of bloom on a piece of supposedly annealed copper – and the curses and blows would rain down. But he appreciated good work, too; for him good craftsmanship and honest socialism were the two great moral forces in the world.

Once, when Freddy’s ears were still red-raw from Dixon’s corrective hand, a philosophic mood came over the man. “I know what you’re thinking, lad. You’re thinking it’d’ve done the job, that weld of yourn. And so it would!”

Freddy looked up in surprise.

“Aye,” Dixon confirmed. “It’d’ve stood till the Last Trump. But that’s not the point. It’d’ve been wrong until the Last Trump, too – that’s the point! There’s enough folk in the world think like that as it is, wi’out me fashioning one more out o’ you.” He looked around and lowered his voice, drawing Freddy closer to him in conspiracy. “You get them here. ‘Can’t you make it quicker?’ they ask. ‘Aye,’ I tell them. ‘If you’re willing to make it wrong.’ Or ‘make it thinner,’ they say. ‘Use less metal – it’ll still be strong enough to get by. Don’t use six studs, use four …’ All that caper. Cutting corners all the time. ‘It won’t last even one man’s lifetime,’ I answer. ‘Bugger that!’ they say.” He imitated “their” wink. “‘Half a lifetime’ll do us. Then they’ll have to throw it out and come back to us and buy another. More profit for us. More work for you.’”

Beginner though he was, Freddy realized that these conversations had never actually taken place; they were part of some token moral dialogue that went on endlessly in the fellow’s mind. As if to confirm it, Dixon went on: “That’s capitalism for you, lad. They’re just the same with folk. They want to get the most out of you for the least they can put into you – the least into your pocket, the least into your belly. They don’t mind if they make you thinner and you last only half a lifetime. They’ll just throw you out and buy another of you. That’s what we’ve got to fight against. And making things properly is one of the champion ways of doing it.”

Another time he said, “There’s justice for things as there’s justice for people, see? You forge a hinge badly, you make it so the rain can enter or all the wear goes on one of the knuckles – and you’ve not done right by that hinge. You’ve not done it justice.”

Hinges were on Dixon’s mind that week because the firm had taken delivery of a new machine that could stamp out cheap iron hinges from plate only half as thick as a man would need if he was to forge it “justly.”

Freddy took in all these arguments, saw the points the man was making, conceded their probable rightness, and yet felt he himself was somehow always going to live in a world where they didn’t quite apply – a parallel world where they would nearly apply but where there would always be some extenuating or exceptional circumstance to bend them aside. He never said so, of course; he simply nodded sagely and got on with the immediate practical business of avoiding Dixon’s verbal and physical scoldings. Once the skills began to grow in his fingers, which is the only proper place for skills to grow, it became easy enough, and the work, though long and hard, enriched him with its own rewards.

Clive Mortimer was a “capitalist,” of course. Freddy had discovered as much the first (and, after seeing Dixon’s response, the only) time he introduced that name into their conversation. The thought of dear old Clive “grinding down the poor” – or, rather, the impossibility of such a thought – merely strengthened Freddy’s conviction that he was going to live in that parallel world, more complex, less navigable, than Dixon’s simple universe, where it was always dawn and unknown flowers were always just in bud.

These experiments in human apprenticeship – Clive at Eton, Freddy at the mill – had precisely the opposite effect to that for which Sir Toby, his wife, the servants, Hawkins and the other gardeners, the cottagers (both upstream and downstream), and every other victim of their development had prayed. Clive had always been coolest under fire. Eton confirmed him in that and now, when his vacations and Freddy’s days off coincided, it began to rub off on Freddy, too.

For his part Freddy had always been a most ingenious young man. Whenever they came to some practical impasse, he was the one who said, “We could get over it like this.” And when Clive said, “Come on then. Let’s do that,” Freddy would say, “Or, another way …” until there were so many solutions to their problem, all of them sound and sensible, that Clive would resign the confusion to him and his decision. Now that native resourcefulness began to be backed by adult skills – craft skills handed down over centuries – some of it could not help but rub off on Clive, too.

The Mortimers were in despair.

“It’s your own fault,” Sir Toby’s younger brother unfeelingly pointed out. “Should have given young Clive a full complement of brothers and sisters.”

Sir Toby could hardly go into the gynaecological origins of this deficiency, but he did provide Lady Mortimer with an alternative paraphrase of his brother’s rebuke. “Perhaps it’s a bit unfair to blame the lad entirely,” he said. “Every growing boy needs the companionship of his fellows. Only natural for him to turn to scruffs like young Oxley. Let’s invite two of his schoolfellows down for Easter, eh? They’ll soon elbow the little tyke aside.”

And so it was ordered.

The two thus favoured were Tony Knox-Riddell (who was rumoured to be sired, on the wrong side of the sheets, by a now elderly royal duke) and the Hon. Howard Gray (whose father governed places here and there about the empire).

Alas for Sir Toby, he was as dazzled by what his capitalist friends said about Eton as was Dixon by what his socialist friends said about the upper classes; neither could see the truth for the Truth.

Tony Knox-Riddell and the Hon. Howard Gray were far keener to meet the famous Freddy Oxley than merely to stay at the fabled Mortimer Hall, for all its pleasures and treasures. The three young men, as they now were, came up to Birmingham by train, where the family coach met them and brought them out through Solihull to the Hall. They made all the right sounds of appreciation, of course. They admired the Rubenses and the Hogarths and the great ceiling by Sir James Thornhill, Hogarth’s father-in-law; but what they really wanted to see was the repaired cracks in the grand marble staircase out in the garden … the tidemark of the Great Diluvium on the cottages, both upstream and downstream … the charred memorials to Ug the Prehistoric Ironsmith … and all the other fabulous sites associated with the legendary Freddy Oxley.

That evening they met the legend himself. It had to be arranged with care for the entire staff were on pain of dismissal for any failure to prevent such a meeting. The Elysian Grove was the most easily defensible location. Every avenue to it led straight to its heart, where stood a marble reproduction of Pallas Athene, her arms, conjecturally restored by the copyist, welcoming the unwary from all points of the compass. To one side of the grove, invisible from anywhere beyond its confines, was a small folly of a temple, built with its domed roof frozen in the very act of collapsing; the tumbling stones were cunningly held in space by a concealed binding of iron straps and pegs, converting them into a makeshift staircase to the stars – or, at least, to the uncollapsed portion of the dome above. There the meeting had been arranged.

“Capital place to bring a wench!” Gray said, looking around knowingly. “Those Georgian squires knew how to do things.”

“I say!” Knox-Riddell exclaimed, pointing into the great, sunken basin of water that occupied most of the floor of the folly. Three huge goldfish were swimming lazily around in it. All were deformed.

“The defect is inherited,” Clive said. “My uncle brought them from China.”

“How do they feed? How did they get so big?”

“They swim in here from the lake. There’s a concealed pipe. Hush a moment!” He looked up at the evening sky, through the artificial gape in the dome. “Foxy?” he called.

“Gone to earth!” came back the challenge.

Clive smiled. “Code,” he explained. The others were thrilled. One by one they climbed the precarious stairway and emerged into the chill light of the fading evening sun.

As so often happens when anticipation magnifies an event out of all proportion, the moment of meeting was an anticlimax. Freddy Oxley did not bristle with bombs – or secrets; he carried no astounding scars; short said, he entirely lacked the air of a fellow to whom other boys would gladly sacrifice an entire holiday. Indeed, with his handed-down artisan clothing, his hobnail boots, his cropped hair, his work-blackened hands, and his common accent, he was a distinct let-down.

Freddy could feel it. He understood exactly what had happened – how Clive had built him up into some sort of hero, how they had been lured here by the promise of an adventure sandwiched somewhere between the lethal and the downright criminal … How dreadfully ordinary he must seem after all that. He was ashamed of himself.

Even Clive could feel it, though loyalty was his other name. “Well,” he said with a light laugh, after all other conversational resources had been exhausted, “what have you planned for us this hols, young ’un?”

More than all the world Freddy wanted not to let his friend down. Desperately he racked his brains for some scheme of ultimate devilment. He remembered how calm Clive had been after the explosion. It helped him now to keep a cool outward face to the world, and even to put a light smile on its lips. How the idea finally came to him he could never say. True, while he was waiting for them he had fashioned an aerial dart out of a piece of paper in his pockets – some announcement of a trade union meeting. True, he launched it on the air at that moment. But as they watched it spiral gracefully down and park itself in the shrubbery, he was almost as astonished as they to hear himself saying, in laconic tones that only Clive could have taught him: “I thought we might have a go at building a Grand Soaring Machine. Big enough to carry one or two of us, you know.”

The last of the sun was golden on his polished cheeks as he looked from one to the other and smiled. They digested his words, took