Heart of Iron - Ekaterina Sedia [42]
We stopped in the middle of the bridge. The wind was especially cutting there, and the black water churned below, occasionally silvering and growing choppy with the silent passing of submarines underneath its surface. I watched Jack observe their movement, and a quiet certainty grew within me. All this time I had agonized about ways of swaying him to my side, but he wanted nothing more. This is why he told me about the Crane Club. He could not help but tell me, yet he could not tell me all. Nor could he ask of me what he wished to ask.
“What is it that you want from me?” I asked.
He smiled, started saying something jocular, but then his eyes met mine and he stopped.
“You want me to free you,” I said. “Correct?” It was starting to feel like a parlor game, where a summoned spirit could answer only yes or no; all that was missing was a medium and table rapping.
He nodded, turning back to stare at the river. A submarine surfaced, and a freedman wrapped in an overcoat of sheepskin and shod in felt boots climbed out of the hatch awkwardly, and tinkered with something on the tail end of the contraption.
“These submersible craft are rather complicated,” Jack said. “Very interesting, really.”
“Of course you have plans of their inner workings,” I guessed. “You stole them, just as you stole the Chinese airship models.”
“And some other war machines,” he said. “When all of those documents travel to London, the British Empire will be impossible to oppose.”
“Especially if you have the Ottomans on your side,” I said. At that point it was a mere supposition, even though I had seen a Turk or two in the Northern Star, their red fezzes as visible in the crowd as blood on the snow.
“Yes,” Jack said. “I’m afraid there is nothing to be done about all that.”
“And you hate being a spy.”
“I was compelled. One cannot help but resent any sort of indentured servitude, be it slavery or something a little more genteel.”
“So if I were to offer you something else?”
“I would consider it,” he said. “Only what can you offer that Nightingale won’t take away?”
“Who is she, really?”
“The head of Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” Jack said. “She supervises all the spies.”
“So she has access to everything any of you bring along.”
Jack nodded. “Mr. Herbert, her . . . friend, is hoping to head the War Office, and she will do anything to help him get there. She calls herself his ‘helpmeet,’ if I recall correctly.”
“That is from your King James’s version of the Bible, I think.”
“Probably.” He sighed, still looking at the freedman and his bushy beard, at his thick clumsy fingers adjusting the membranous fins of the submarine’s tail and the lattice of bronze rods and gears that held them in place. “Everything she says is from somewhere.”
I pondered. It made sense that Nightingale would keep all the intelligence—copies or originals—gathered by her spies. Knowledge is power and she intended to gain such for her Mr. Herbert. “Do you know where she keeps her documents?”
He nodded. “A safe.”
Neither of us said it aloud, but Jack had experience with safes. The man who stole display cases from the Chinese students’ club could just as easily obtain all the secret materials from the British spymistress. The question remained what to do with them.
“She will not be leaving St. Petersburg before Christmas, will she?”
He stared at me. “I don’t think so. Why?”
I sighed, feeling petty and selfish. “I have exams to take. When I’m done, I think you should take those documents from her.”
“She’ll get them back. She has many men under her command, and your family can’t help you.”
“No.”
The freedman had finished his tinkering, leaving one of the fins hanging aslant, clearly broken. Cursing under his breath, he crawled through the hatch and the submarine sank from view, leaving only a small trail of silver bubbles in its wake, like a drowning man.
I continued along the bridge and Jack followed. “My family,” I said, thinking aloud more than addressing him, “may not protect me, but if anyone can make