Chapter 3 - WIP2 - The Sculptor Of Frog Lane

The Sculptor of Frog Lane continues to be enormous fun to write and has sailed by 35,000 words this week. My instinct is that this will be slightly longer than my previous novels - all three of which were around 100k-110k.

In chapter three, John has just been made to pay for entry to the Great Exhibition to avoid being caught stealing the money he used to pay for entry to the Great Exhibition. Although the world of this novel exists in an alternative history, all the displays John visits are real and were present in 1851, including Samuel Colt, leech-powered weather prediction, and the invention of emojis.

Yes, emojis were invented before email, the internet and mobile phones. Intrigued? It's almost as if that was my plan. Read on...


III – Thursday, 1 May 1851
 
“But where does the key go?” the elderly gentleman asked, pointing to the pocket watch that lay in his palm and which he held as if it were delicate as a quail’s egg.

“Ah, monsieur! That is our innovation. If you pull gently on the stem, it moves into the first position where you can turn it to wind the watch.” The vendor’s accent was a muddle, with English being at least his third language.

“Oh my, I say, that’s a clever thing.”

“And if you pull slightly farther, you hit the second position, where using the same mechanism it is possible to change the time.”

“So there’s no key at all?” the elderly gentleman said, finally arriving at the conclusion he had been given two minutes earlier and was written on a sign above the stall – keyless pocket watches.

A selection of the watches were on display and a good deal of effort had gone in to polishing the brass casings so that they shone like gold, and ensuring the glass was free of smudges.

“No need for a key, and no more scratches on your watch.”

“Cunning device. Very cunning.”

John thought about stealing one, but it was early, and the man had yet to make a sale. The watch would be missed and the boy who stole it would not. John looked out of place. He looked obvious. He hoped none of the rich and powerful of British society were inclined towards impulsive petty theft, because he would be the one the police would snag for it. The old man could stuff his pockets so full of watches that he ticked and just point at John.

He found the watches interesting in general, as well as professionally. As explained, he could see the clear benefits of having a watch key that was built in. He’d stolen four or five watches that were missing their keys and – because they wound down – he’d had to take a lower price for them in case they were broken. These new watches were guaranteed.

John was less impressed by some of the other displays. A gentleman calling himself Dr Merryweather had invented a Tempest Prognosticator. To the uninitiated, the device looked an awful lot like twelve jars full of leeches. But according to the doctor, depending on how the leeches moved within the jars it was possible to predict the weather. How did the leeches know?

“Leeches, being mostly composed of liquid, are more sensitive to changes in temperature and barometric pressure. A marvel of nature: the leech can tell when a stormfront is approaching more reliably than any scientific instrument known to man.”

John studied the jars and asked, “How is it that some of the leeches are at the top of the jars predicting storms, and other leeches are at the bottom of the jars predicting good weather?”

Dr Merryweather displayed that effusive easy smile that was a reliable predictor of someone being a liar. He said, “The leeches at the bottom aren’t predicting good weather, they’re just not predicting a tempest.”

“Are they working shifts?” John asked.

Dr Merryweather leaned in and, still wearing the same smile, said, “Maybe they’re tired. Why don’t you fuck off before I clout you, there’s a good lad?”

John had been threatened better, but there was plenty elsewhere to draw his attention. There seemed to be no shortage of aspiring inventors who wanted people to know they were fully cracked. As a notice in the Times would have achieved the same thing, inventors must have derived a thrill from standing in front of strangers and seeing the realisation in their eyes – they were talking to an honest-to-goodness lunatic.

Amongst the maddest and most entertaining was Mr Smith’s Comic Electrical Telegraph. What it resembled was a human head in a birdbox. But Mr Smith’s elucidation made it clear that this object was the future of telegraphy.

“Imagine,” Smith began, “two old friends separated by an ocean. What is it that becomes friends more than anything else? Why – humour. It is laughter than marks us apart from the animals, and shared jokes that distinguish friends from strangers. But how can these two old friends truly share a joke without the proper context, without the face of the other person? It cannot be done, it cannot be done – until today. G R Smith’s telegraph transmits not simple words – but entire expressions!”

Smith pressed a button on a control panel before him and the head in the box sprang to action, generating a ratcheting noise and twisting its sackcloth flesh into something that could have been a smile. At the pressing of other buttons, the face displayed other emotions, all exaggerated, approximate and grotesque.

John hooted laughter.

“In the not-so-distant future,” Smith continued, “every home in the country will contain its own telegraph machine and its own mechanical electrical face for the conveyance of jokes, japes, expressions, and emotions of all flavours.”

John knew boys who were runners for telegraph stations. There were more of them each year, taking short, printed notes out and – if they were lucky – earning a tip and coming back with replies. The first central telegraph station had been built in London in 1850. Previously, all telegraph stations sent a message from one point to another along a single physical wire between the two locations. Now an exchange could route a signal from any location to any other location the exchange was connected to.

However, there were only a small number of telegraph stations in the city. John couldn’t say precisely, but he guessed there were fewer than a hundred, and there was not a single private home that had a telegraph. It was possible that Victoria had them at Windsor and Buck House for secret government business – or so she could tell the butler to put the kettle on. But queens, castles and palaces were different. Mr Smith’s telegraph messages would still need to be taken the final mile by boys who would have to remember the face produced by the machine and recreate it for the recipient of the message. It did not sound like the sort of work that would generate tips.

While John did not expect Dr Merryweather or Mr Smith to sell anything, the Colt Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company had come to do business. The business’s ledger had been left casually open on the glass display. Not close enough that it could be read, but there had clearly been pages of orders.

He had seen guns before. Former soldiers brought old rifles home from the Anglo-Sikh War – some were their own weapons, and a few were exotic and unreliable designs captured from their enemies. Every other pub had some ancient firearm from the English Civil War rusting quietly over the bar.

The Colt display did not include anything John was familiar with. Handguns gleamed. Mother-of-pearl handles shone. Steel glinted in the afternoon sun. Pistols inlaid with gold seemed like piled pirate treasure in their velvet-lined polished wooden presentation boxes.

“How do you do, young man?” The accent was American, the voice was deep, and it came from a portly man with a full beard and moustache.

“Very well, sir,” John replied. “How are you finding the weather in England?”

“Oh, it finds me,” he said. “Can I show you something?”

“Show me? I don’t think I can afford any of these, sir, begging your pardon.”

Normally when he was interested in buying anything, John wore an expression of disappointment and expressed frustration – do you call this an apple? I’ve had bigger plums – come to think of it, I’ve got bigger plums. But there was no shame in being awestruck by something you could never have. 

“Well, I am not about to sell a revolver to a child. But there’s no harm in looking.” He threw John a wink and picked up one of the pistols on display. “This is ranger-size; might still be a little big for you. Brand new design. Thirty-six calibre. Fires six rounds.” He passed the pistol to John, who took it with one hand – and it fell straight down, yanking his shoulder and almost pulling him off his feet.

“Grown men use two hands to fire that, son. Here—” the American stifled a chuckle and replaced the pistol in John’s hand with an alternative “—this is a revolving pocket pistol. Thirty-one calibre and more than a smidge lighter, but I’d still use both hands until you got used to it.”

John hoisted the dark metal gun and was able to hold it reasonably steady. The Colt stall had set up a target for people to aim at – though none of the guns had ammunition. John took aim down the tiny iron ridges that served as sights and pulled on the trigger.

He may have whispered, “Bang!”

“Ha! All right, so you’ve got something to learn.” The American moved John by means of soft kicks and pokes so that his stance was formed of triangles – his feet and legs, his waist and shoulders, his arms and hands. “With any firearm, it’s important to understand the trigger isn’t launching anything. The trigger releases the hammer, the hammer strikes the cap, the cap shoots the bullet. If you yank the trigger back, you’ve compromised your stance, and you’re not going to be able to resist the hammer, or the percussion cap, and your bullet can go just about anywhere. Squeeze the trigger. When you’re just starting out, don’t try to be a fast gun – be a straight shooter.”

“Thank you, sir,” John said. Correctly interpreting a subtle cue of body language, he understood it was time to return the gun, which he did with a little reluctance.

“When you’re ready to buy a firearm of your own – buy a Colt.” The American returned the revolver to its place on the stand and visibly locked his attention on another customer.

John smiled and walked backwards into a couple, then hurried off to avoid any further embarrassment. He had never held a gun before and the weight of it in his hand made him feel powerful – also a new experience. He had felt clever, quick, funny, and even wise, but never powerful, and he was both clever and wise enough to understand that feeling made the people who held guns dangerous.

He had roamed the exhibition for the first few minutes feeling glum about his bad luck in being cheated out of an entire quid – which he had stolen fair-and-square. But the Crystal Palace was an Aladdin’s cave of wonders. John had seen things he could barely describe, let alone explain. He had fifty stories to tell – some even less realistic or believable than the steam-powered knickers he had imagined. He wondered if he should patent that idea, since anything, it seemed, was possible.

In the centre of the Crystal Palace, under the high arch of the glass roof, there was a pond surrounded by exotic palms and ferns, and ivy that climbed the ironwork. In the centre of the pond was a fountain that was twice John’s height. A slender pillar of cut and carved glass whose shape vanished into the water that flowed over it, becoming one liquid form, hanging in the air exactly as the Crystal Palace itself appeared to.

A man in a grey suit was sitting on a chair nearby. Aside from the fact that the suit was clean, he otherwise looked as out of place as John did; nobody would have remarked on him digging a ditch in Islington.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said John. The eyes of the man in the grey suit flicked to John, seeing him for the first time, though he said nothing in reply. “Who would have thought of making a fountain out of glass? The best I could come up with was Chinese false teeth… See, they’re made of China—”

“It’s crystal,” he said.

“Oh. That’s just glass though, isn’t it?”

He shrugged, slowly and with a tortured effort, as if his body had forgotten how to be indifferent.

“Are you feeling okay, mate?” John asked. “Your colour’s not right. If you get seasick, maybe turn yourself so you’re not looking at the water.”

The more John looked at the man in the grey suit, the more uneasy he felt. The man’s skin was pallid, as if he had spent weeks in bed recovering from an illness or hadn’t eaten for a few days. He otherwise showed no signs of neglect: he had shaved that morning, his hair was combed, and even at a polite distance John could tell he was clean – except for his boots. His boots were heavily worn, punctured in a couple of places, muddy and generally in a worse state than the fourth-hand pair John was wearing.

The boots were incongruous with the rest of the man, but what John found chilling was his eyes. The eyes of the man in the grey suit were flat and lifeless. John had seen a few dead bodies – most recently that morning – and a few hundred inebriate drunks. They all shared a common quality – they all seemed to be somehow empty. A man who looked like that might go home from the pub and beat his wife black and blue, or kick a dog to death in the street, or never find his way home at all and turn up in the Union Canal the next day.

“I reckon you need a cup of tea,” John said. “There’s a place in here does tea. It’s probably gonna cost you an arm and a leg.”

“Why don’t you mind your own business?”

“You know, I ask myself that all the time.” He had better things to do than try and stop a miserable drunk he didn’t know from drowning himself in a public fountain. Yet he couldn’t quite find either the courage or the cowardice he needed to walk away.

As John debated what – if anything – to do, his sense of smell was overwhelmed by strong foreign odours. It was not unpleasant, but it was so different that it took him a moment to realise he didn’t hate it. A figure in a long, red, hooded cloak had walked behind him going towards the fountain. John turned to watch as they stepped over the stone rim of the pond and into the water.

No – not into the water. Onto the water.

The figure pulled down their hood revealing a cascade of blonde hair curled around their shoulders and she looked left and right, seeking something or someone in the bustling crowds.

Her face was how he would have imagined a Russian princess to look. Her eyes were a captivating, brilliant blue, and her lips were the colour of fresh blood spilled in snow. She was the most beautiful woman John had ever seen.

She was still mostly facing away from him, but he saw her reach under her cloak and grab an object which she held with both hands. His pickpocket’s instincts told him it was not much larger than a teacup – though he couldn’t get an eye on it.

The man in the grey suit beside him stood up, and John noticed mirrored movements. Two… three… four other men, all in matching grey suits, were now standing amongst the crowd. They were still and attentive, and their empty eyes tracked the people milling around them.

The woman in red reached both of her arms above her head. In her hands she was holding a glass cube, perhaps four inches wide on each side, and John watched in stunned amazement as she took her hands away and the cube remained floating in the air. Its stillness was disturbing. If it had been hanging from a line, it would have spun in place. Instead, the cube seemed to have been inserted – like a brick into the side of an invisible building, or a key in a lock.

“Come now, Miss. You can’t stand in—” The police officer had approached on John’s left, and he saw the man in the grey suit move swiftly to put himself between the officer and the woman in red.

John watched as the right arm of the man in the grey suit swelled impossibly. Veins stood out on the back of his hand that were as thick as John’s fingers. The arm more than doubled in breadth from the shoulder all the way down to the hard, white knuckles, and the fabric of the suit expanded as the flesh inside it had.

The officer had not seen it happen and on being approached he managed to say, “What’s all—?”

The man in the grey suit grabbed the officer by the throat. His fingers were long enough that they closed around the back of the neck. And he squeezed – once – violently. The sound was of so many little bones breaking, and of solid flesh suddenly becoming fluid and squirting between the gaps in those fingers. A pint of blood was spilled, and John felt some of it splatter on his face.

When the officer was released, he fell to the ground. His top hat rolled away, and his head flopped backwards, with the remains of his neck stretching out like an empty sack that had once contained raw meat.

Ten people screamed at once. John didn’t know if he was one of them.

A yellow-orange vapour had filled the air. It was billowing in all directions from the floating cube, some strands going directly up and through the glass roof of the building, while others went straight down into the water and the earth below. John tried to swat away a strand which was penetrating his chest, but his hands could not change the flow any more than his ribs could.

The light in the Crystal Palace was fierce. The vapour glowed brighter than a furnace, so that the cube itself – where the vapour was thickest – was impossible to look at without feeling pain. It was not a pain in the eyes that came from looking into a candle flame, it was a gnawing discomfort in the back of the skull. When John looked towards the cube, he somehow knew that he was not looking at a physical object, but through a hole and into a different place on the other side. And he did not know how to look away.

He was falling towards the other side. Becoming stretched out. Becoming thinner. John knew that in a moment he would die. Some vital part of him would snap and a pile of bones and skin would slump to the floor while a transcendent sliver – perhaps his soul – was sucked away to that other place. He was pulled apart for a length of time that was equal to all the days of his life to that point, but not long enough for his heart to beat once.

The light vanished. He saw her fingers close around the cube, pluck it from the air – as easily as a man might pick up a hole – and tuck it away under her cloak.

Another man in a grey suit ran forward into the pond – he looked to be in his forties, with leathery, sun-browned skin and close-cropped, greying hair. Whereas the woman in red stood on top of the water seemingly without touching it, he sank in up to his knees.

“You lying witch!” His yell came from the pit of his stomach. It was more like the cry of a sick child than a man. Its emotion was naked and furious. His right hand pulled a slender white dagger from inside his suit jacket, and he swung it an arc over his head towards the chest of the woman in red. John heard the impact and watched breathlessly for a reaction on her porcelain face.

She smiled.

The man pulled back his hand. The dagger was gone. He stared in alarm as he watched the fingers on his hand begin to turn ashen, then black, then fall away from his body in a stream of dust. He dropped into the pond, sending a ripple that overtopped the stone edge on all sides.

The woman in red turned towards John, revealing her dress of diaphanous dress of pale gold which had been embroidered with an array of gemstones. She gestured with her left hand, and next to John the man in the grey suit tensed, as if expecting some supernatural attack. The palm of his gargantuan right arm was flat against the floor and had left bloody handprints on the wooden boards.

There was a roar and a whooshing release of steam that caused John and the man in the grey suit to pivot. From out of one of the displays behind them, a collection of a copper and steel kitchenware – pots, saucepans, ladles, knives and new inventions with preposterously grand names – had conglomerated into the shape of a metal bull. Steam blew out of its nostrils and a leg made from three differently sized kettles began to paw at the ground.

“Thank you for all your help,” said the woman in red. When John turned his head back to look at her, she was gone, and in that same instant John and the man in the grey suit were hit by the charging metal bull and thrown sprawling, spiralling into the air.

John saw the sky pass underneath him three times before he landed on something that broke under him – perhaps a glass display case. He tried to breathe and felt sharp pain across the side of chest, then in his legs, his back, and the back of his head. Then was cold as a January night. His lungs crackled with frost. It felt as if all the blood had run out of his body through a thousand cuts.

He lay still and looked up at the sky. The screams got quieter and had longer gaps between them.

It was a nice day. In fact, it had been the most remarkable day of his life, so there was justice in it being his last. Some people had an interminable and dull existence full of boring work and crushing responsibility. John McNamara was probably eleven years old, and he had laughed, robbed, and feasted at every opportunity God had given him. It had not been the threescore and ten years the Psalms promised, but it had been a life worth the cost of living.

The pain eased until he felt nothing at all. He wished that he had a chance to tell his friends about the things he had seen. He worried about how they would manage without him, and he prayed that God would do His best for them.

John closed his eyes.

And felt a stinging slap across his face that made his left ear ring like a tiny bell.

​“None of that, young man,” said a woman with fiercely red hair and a strong Scottish accent. She peered into his eyes as if looking for something, and John couldn’t tell whether she found it or not. “Yes indeed. Yes, I can fix all of this.”