Post by No Face on Mar 16, 2024 19:21:53 GMT -5
The Watchful Citizen just appeared places like a rabbit from a magician's hat.
At least that was the impression given by the total lack of contact details printed in each edition itself, and by the refusal of those associated with distributing it to talk about where it came from, how it was delivered and when.
Which was not, on the face of it, a very practical way to run a newspaper supposedly dedicated to Getting The Word Out About Misconduct.
Fortunately, the web of secrecy was only as deep at the first layer of distributors. Plenty of archives had backissues of the humbly printed paper, and those backissues proved that there had been a time, seventeen months ago, when the Watchful Citizen had openly included its proper address--171 High Bath Lane, London--as well as the name of the Editor-In-Chief, Tilmund Thackard.
Tilmund Thackard was, in fact, the vast majority of the small press's bylines, and his investigations dominated the Citizen new and old. While the latest issues skewered the theory of the Tropical Winds, past ones zeroed in on government and military figures who seemed immune to the common laws of the Empire.
Adeline didn't know if this was going to work.
Tracking down the Watchful Citizen's publishing location had proven more challenging than she thought. Looking for the location went beyond asking the standard questions of "do you know." It took scouring multiple copies of the paper before finally locating an address.
171 High Bath Lane, London.
Even then it could be a dead end. There was no telling if the building was still operational. She wouldn't let that stop her. Adeline set out early that morning, dressed in a solid navy-blue dress and Penny shoes to match.
She had no idea what to expect but felt hopeful as she rounded the corner of Bath Lane that busy London morning.
As she drew closer to where her research pointed her, she would notice a distinct drop in class.
The streets grew narrower and narrower, the tenements overhead looking more and more rickety by degrees. Nothing cleaned these streets but the whims of rainstorms, and every alley Adeline might look down would prove to be an Armada of sails formed of laundry lines.
Speaking of laundry, by the time Adeline reached High Bath Lane, she would find the street crushed with chipped-painted shopfronts, and one of those had the number 171 over the door. It was a laundry service, though who its clientele might be was a mystery, as most around here would either labor themselves or send washing to one of the many home laundresses available in the city.
The door was black-edged, the 171 the cleanest thing about it, and its windows had been papered over.
"Right." Adeline said with a steadying breath. "Here goes nothing."
But she didn't knock just yet. Instead, Adeline glanced up and down the street. Was there anyone to notice where she had stopped? Did it look as though there were others who also might be approaching the black door?
Only once she had a good measure on her presence in the cramped neighborhood, if it could even be called that, did Adeline knock firmly three times on the door.
From a nearby alley came the sound of a dog--muffled, and likely nothing to do with Adeline--and not much else. There were signs of busy people: the sound of talk heard through open windows from the tenements, and the occasional squeaking hinge of a closing door. For better or worse, at this hour High Bath Lane was not bustling. This was a factory neighborhood, and even its children were likely at work.
Something dropped, hit floorboards, inside 171, deep in the building on Adeline's level. There was a slight scuffling, also from far back from the door, and a rattle of something, before the rhythmic quickness of footsteps grew closer and closer, fully warning Adeline before the clack of a bolt being drawn on the inside could be heard.
Then three more clacks, sharp and metal, before the doorknob turned and the door creaked open a foot.
Revealed was a very young woman, shorter than Adeline, maybe a "girl," in a laundress's apron. She was blond-haired with curls pulled up into a practical bun, blue-eyed, dressed for work under the apron, and she could have been shorter than Aurelia Dumitru. She looked Adeline over with a swift cataloguing before she dipped slightly like a house maid into a curtsey and asked, "May I help you, Miss?"
The air that came out of the open door past her was mostly thick with humidity and the scent of soap, but there was something else there, too. Almost metallic.
"Hello." Adeline said, eyes widening a little when it was a young woman and not a man who answered. That simple shock of surprise was quickly greeted by guilt at her assumption. Shaking it off, she took a deep breath and began speaking.
"My name is Adeline Webber. I, uh, used to work for the London Times. I'm looking for a former colleague of mine. A mister Tilmund Thackard? I was wondering if you might know of his whereabouts?"
The girl had pronounced cheekbones, a bony face, and her eyes sat in sockets that looked slightly sunken, a little thinned out, in the way that some folk who spent time on the street might present. Not all of her features spoke of hardship, though: she looked healthy enough otherwise, with rosy cheeks and a youthful gloss to her pale hair. She took up her apron and wrung her hands in it as if to dry them off. "I'm afraid there's no one 'ere by that name," she said. "Perhaps you've the wrong door, Miss." Her accent had thickened.
"Is there another door, then?" She asked quickly while eyeing the building. "This was the last known printing location for a newspaper. Maybe you've heard of it, The Watchful Citizen?"
The girl's expression did not change, but a slight drag of one foot back and a resetting of her shoulders communicated wariness. "I'm sorry, Miss, I do laundry here--"
"That ink is streaking again! Mary!"
She winced at the man's shout and her brow scrunched up. She bowed her head, and might have pinched the bridge of her nose as she sighed if she had not been using her hands on door and doorjamb to bar Adeline's path. Looking back up, she cleared her throat delicately. "Laundry things. I'm sorry I can't help y--"
"Mary!"
Adeline's eyes widened. "Are you Mary Rollins?"
The girl jolted upright, her own eyes widening, and swiftly made to slam the door.
Forcefully Adeline's hand and shoulder pushed back on the door to keep it from slamming shut.
"I WROTE ABOUT THE DRAGON ATTACK FOR THE TIMES!" She shouted through the crack already made.
The girl--Mary Rollins?--yelped when Adeline surged forward and hit the door. Her first instinct was to brace her feet and shove with all her might to counter, so as Adeline was pushing she was mirrored on the far side of the door by the aproned girl. "You can't come in! I'll get the Constable!"
"Go ahead and call them! I'm sure they'd love to know where you've been!" Adeline barked back as her weight pushed against the weight of another. Adding more force, her hips and legs trying to push forward, Adeline continued. "I know what happened to you! I know what they did! And I am asking for your help if you would just bloody listen!"
Adeline's strength had the door bobbing inward three inches for every one that the girl could shove it back. The girl's shoes refused to gain purchase on the humid, soapy-air-kissed floorboards, so she was sliding, and her small victories were the result of scrambling that came in waves, feet beating on the boards, and they became fewer and fewer as the opening convulsively yawned wider and wider. "I don't know you!" she cried, and turned to get her back to the door to see if that would grant her better leverage against the stronger opponent.
"Wait--" The man's voice. Across the long and narrow front space with what Adeline would now see were indeed steaming vats of whites. No one else was working these, though--unless--yes--a single silhouette of a smoke-belching automaton, oblivious to the struggle toward the back.
It was oblivious to the tall, disheveled man back there, too, presenting his side toward the fight with the front door like a fencer. Or like a man trying to show as little of himself as possible lest he get shot.
First impression gave a flash of a tall man with a belly that made him look like a hard candy in a wrapper. His collar was undone, and his shirtsleeves rolled up, bland waistcoat askew and unbuttoned, hands splotched perhaps with ink.
"I'm not here to cause harm!" Adeline shouted through the opening of the door. She could feel herself gaining more footing. If the door could just get wide enough for her to slip through...
"I'm looking for Thackard!" This time her words were directed to a man she could just make sight of. "My name is Webber! I wrote the story on the dragon attack at St. Martin's before it was covered up! Please let me in!!"
Mary had to know she was losing, but still she shoved back against Adeline's efforts. She couldn't tell that the door had now opened enough for her opponent--
The man took one hesitant step toward the door, but the real work was done by the hand that he reached out with... from thirty feet away. He was flapping it in the air, and it was shaky on top of that, and his voice which had boomed before broke a little. "You're making a scene! Stop, Mary! Stop!"
--And Mary, leaned back now nearly horizontal against the door, shoved off of it so fast that the door would finally fly open, cracking back against the frame--
All her weight into the door. So when it finally gave, she went tumbling onto the soppy wet floor that Mary had struggled to find purchase with a loud, surprised yelp.
Heavy footfalls suddenly sounded through the floorboards that Adeline sprawled on, and the man was saying breathlessly, "Close the door! Close the door!"
Mary had not, in fact, fared tremendously better from her move than Adeline. The door had hit her just enough to trigger a reflex to leap, but her skirt had gotten in the way and she'd landed on her knees. Now, though, she looked up wildly at the man and then spun about on the floor in a twist of fabric to lunge to get the door shoved back so that its weight would trigger its own latch.
Mary - well she presumed it was Marry - got the door. Adeline stayed on the ground for a few more moments trying to orientate herself to the room and what just happened. Her skirt was wet as were her hands and knees. But she was a live and whole. That was enough to get her to her feet.
She saw the automation with the smoke that puffed out of its mouth. The room was hot and muggy with humidity, already she was starting to feel her brown hair stick to the back of her neck. Steaming vats of white filled the room and a man maybe thirty yards back.
"Right then." She took in a steady breath of warm air. "My name is Adeline Webber. I'm looking for a Tilmund Thackard."
There were only windows down the right side of the building, and every one of them was shuttered. The room was dim, spotlighted with infrequent bulbs hung from wires. The best light had come through the door when it had been open. The moment it clicked shut, the bright blue-white wedge of daylight had vanished and left the entire long space in a dim yellow gloom.
Mary heaved a breath behind Adeline now.
The man ahead of her stopped halfway up the length of the space. Around him, the vats were five in total, and the pipes that brought their water and their heat were corroded and as old as such a setup could possibly be, but at least they'd been designed in their heyday well enough that they weren't tripping hazards everywhere.
Staring at Adeline, the man's little eyes squinted. In his very long face, it made them nearly disappear. "You say you--The story they retracted--What are you doing here?"
The shaking that had briefly been evident in his hand was still present in little ways all about him. For as big a man as he was, he gave the impression of being rabbity and skittish.
"Because I need your help." Adeline huffed from both exhaustion and maybe a little frustration on the effort it took just to get her through the door. Eyeing the skittishness of the man, she guessed Thackard, she hoped this was worth it.
"It's about the golden airship."
His brow scrunched. It made him look like his facial features were being sucked toward the very center of his face. "You came here on your own?"
"I am here alone if that's what you're asking. I have associates and friends who are also investigating whatever our government is trying to pull." Adeline replied.
The step he took with his forward foot was absolutely tiny. The impression his entire body gave in that second was that it had taken a full-blown internal war for him to achieve it. Quivering wariness vs sudden intrigue. Intrigue had won.
Even if only by two centimeters.
"You know something?" he asked, that squint still there, but with a sudden sharpness that had been absent entirely a second before.
"I know about John Slake." Adeline said, eyeing him with the same sharpness of a reporter.
Across the soapy distance, the man stared at Adeline for a moment that grew and grew.
Behind Adeline, the girl Mary was stationed at the door, hand on the knob, absorbing the tension in silence.
Then the man flicked a look past Adeline at her, and he said, "The bolts. Let's get downstairs."
Adeline's hair had begun to droop and stick to her face as though she were trapped in a muggy shower. Sweat was beginning to bead on her forehead. The heavy navy blue dress was the wrong thing to wear in this place. None of that mattered though. She held his stare, refusing to back down. There wasn't a single ounce of her that wasn't tense and ready for the next round of fights. But something shifted in the man's face and her shoulders relaxed a hair for now.
"After you." she said. Then, with a little mutter she added, "I hope it's cooler where we are going."
"The boiler's down there," Mary noted from behind her, before the quick clack-clack-clack-clack said the door was as secure as a door with papered-over glass could be.
The man didn't wait, didn't offer an arm, didn't do any of the things a gentleman did for a guest, and particularly for a lady. He turned and his footfalls were swift, his strides huge and hasty, as he headed toward a blotch of darkness at the back of the vat room. There was no light over a hallway back there (or the bulb had blown), so the next island of light came up out of the stairway itself, which was off to the left.
Wooden steps down a short distance, which then turned to the left again to point the way into the basement, which was just as long and narrow (and maybe narrower) than the space upstairs. The boiler was right there on the left, a blazing blast of heat, and it was surrounded by what were presumably water tanks and an apparatus that was probably a pump for the water, currently off and silent.
To follow the man meant passing through this little hell.
Out the other side, the smell of soap was replaced by the smell of ink and perhaps some chemical, because there was a long printing press up the right side of the space.
Dark down here, the place was the same sickly yellow that the bulbs had leant above, and there were a few desks, many chairs covered in stacks of copy, files, and more, lots of crumpled papers everywhere, and a wall of cabinets that had been papered over by photographs, sketches, scribbles, notes, clipped articles, maps, train schedules....
This was The Watchful Citizen.
And it was hell for Adeline. The heat was unbearable. It stuffocated precious air and made her lungs feel heavy with steam and humidity. She ignored the insane desire to turn around and leave this horrible place. But there were far more important things than her comfort. Passing the boiler, the smell was replaced with the familiar scent of ink.
Adeline felt the shot of homesickness to straight to her chest. It had been so long since she saw something like this. The printing press. The smell of ink. The smell of fresh paper waiting to be printed on. She took in a heavy breath, sorting through the emotions that struck her before moving into the headquarters of The Watchful Citizen.
"You were very difficult to find." Adeline said as she took in the photographs, sketches, and clipped articles. "I almost feared you were no longer in London."
"Good," said the man as he rushed on ahead. --Apparently to sort out a chair situation, because he passed four heavily piled-up chairs before he found one that he could clear off in one go, and he grabbed the handful of files and turned--
--only to face a desk situation, because there was not an empty square inch anywhere nearby. "Mary!" he called, but then spotted a likely spot, going over to shove a shriveled potted plant aside enough to precariously balance his files.
Mary was there, going to the press, her skirts brushing a short span of dark curtain as she went. "If I have to fix the ink, you're the one making the tea," she said, the accent that she'd used at the door vanished and replaced by something that wanted to sound slightly more Irish. Irish, but not quite Irish.
"Sit, sit," said the man to Adeline, waving overactive hands at the chair he'd transformed back into a chair not ten seconds before. He ignored Mary's negotiation, buzzing around, spinning a circle, tapping his lips with two fingers while he hunted.
Adeline tried to think back on the tales she heard of Thackard back when she worked at the Times. The way he moved through the room reminded her of a buzzing bee, unable to decide which flower was the best to sit on. From here to there to back to here, Adeline wondered if this was what the Flynns could be like if they did not have such impressive organizational skills that keep their apartment in order.
She took a seat in the chair that was made chair again while taking in another heavy smell of ink and paper. She really did miss that smell.
"What is it you are looking for?" She inquired after a moment.
This was a man who had won awards. Tilmund Thackard had been known as a keen investigator and a dogged snoop. "Unshakable," they'd said. And some had even said he had genius. But the lean, sharp-eyed figure conjured by his reputation and the very pale, shaky, slump-shouldered man here were one and the same.
"Pencil," he said, looking past two tins of mismatched pencils as he strode away from Adeline.
"I have one--Tilmund--TIL! I HAVE ONE," Mary said, following him fast, her fingers smudged with printer ink but her work there left behind. She held out a pencil she'd drawn from the pocket of her apron. In her other hand was a notepad she'd swept off a desk as she chased him.
When he stopped, the girl was for a moment superimposed over him, and his size emphasized how tiny she was. Yet he was the one who looked a little bent inward, a little shrunken, and she was the one who stood tall, peering up at him as she offered him his tools. She whispered, "You're the one who let her in. We'll be all right. Breathe, like you taught me...."
The dynamic between the two was surprising. Not that she knew what to expect but Adeline was caught off guard at how shaken and shrunk in Thackard seemed to be and how Mary somehow felt taller than her age. Feeling like an interloper, Adeline looked away as Mary consoled Tilmund.
There were newspaper clippings everywhere. Articles of this or that. Scribbles of things that she didn't quite understand. "How long have you been printing out of here?" She asked idly, wondering if some direction in the form of questions would pull Thackard out of his shell.
Thackard took the pad and the pencil and nodded a few times very rapidly, starting to breathe in exaggeratedly deep cycles for a moment. Adeline's question broke in, and that brought his attention back to her. Mary stood watching his face from below for a moment longer before she, too, turned, but it was Thackard who answered. "Ever since they kicked me out of--nonpayment of rent--" He shook his head and peeled himself away from Mary Rollins, moving slowly back toward Adeline. Even though his movements had slowed, there rode within him a sense of ongoing jitteriness that might burst into view at any moment.
"Doesn't matter. A while. Who directed you here?" he asked.
"My friends helped me." Adeline replied. "It wasn't easy. We combed through many of your additions to find a printing address. It wasn't until we stumbled upon some of your first prints that there was an address - this one. You stopped adding that over a year ago. Why?"
Mary frowned, wiping her hands on the apron and leaving small smudges, before she slowly turned to go back over to their press, pushing her rolled sleeves up higher again from where they'd slid down.
Thackard came back toward Adeline and (lacking a cleared chair), shifted a hip to perch nonchalantly on the corner of the overladen desk in front of her.
--or would have, had not the move caused a minor avalanche of papers, an ominous shhhhhhhhffff of stacks before they plummeted off the edge and fluttered and fanned to the floor, making Thackard jump up again at once and ruining the brief snapshot of him as a relaxed reporter.
He set the paper and pencil aside and quickly went to unburden another chair before dragging it back and sitting down like a mere and humbled mortal.
"I don't remember," he said once he was there with her, still bigger than she was while seated but with a much more manageable presence. His fingers fidgeted with the pencil and his knee bobbed under the pad. "You want to know about the Pharos, you said. And you told me you know the name Slake. I need to hear more from you before we speak."
Adeline's eyes widened at the sudden avalanche of paper. Just what exactly was all this stuff?
"That is a fair request." She said a little hesitantly, looking around to see if any other precariously perched stacks were about to take a tumble because of all the movement. "What is it you would like to know?"
"What brought you here. To me. And what you think you know about Miss Rollins." He frowned. The knee's bob slowed a little. The man breathed and watched Adeline, and those concerted efforts seemed over seconds to slow some of the nervous energy.
"I know about Project OLYMPUS and what happened to Miss Rollins during the launch phase." Adeline said directly. "I know about that because I broke into Whitehall and saw the files Slake keeps. I came to you because you were investigating and reporting on the HMS Edinburgh before you left the Times and I believe you've been watching for quite some time. Much longer than I have."
Tilmund Thackard was left blinking at her.
OLYMPUS--
--launch phase--
--broke into Whitehall--saw the files--HMSEdinburghlefttheTimesbeenwatchin--
He stared at her.
The "You did what?" came from the across two desks by the printer, where Mary was upright again and scrunch-faced with stomach-punched astonishment.
"I broke into Whitehall." Adeline repeated, letting that sink in for them.
In a flash, Thackard was out of his seat and striding away, scanning stack after stack of tilting papers and files on the desks around him. Mary still looked shocked, but with the man's sudden movement her gaze followed him. He was saying, "How? What did you see? I think there's a man that's not a man in there, but I can't prove it. Can't get inside the place. But there was some sort of explosion, and they moved all kinds of burnt furniture into curtained trucks for discard, and I was able to get a count of desks and make an estimate of the number of personnel working in the basement areas--"
"Thackard!" Adeline said sharply to slow down the onslaught of questions and excitement that came from the reporter. "I will share with you what I can but first I need to know about the Pharos. I know they've been doing some sort of lighthouse testing in the country and they've unveiled the damn thing during the coronation of the King but the trail has gone cold from there."
He didn't stop, set his pencil and paper aside, still hunting, bending over this desk or that one...
Suddenly something popped back at the boiler, and a loud hiss of steam swallowed sound from that end of the room.
Thackard jumped out of his skin, but Mary was quickly saying, "I've got it--I've got it--don't worry--" as she raced back that way, yanking a rag out of one of her apron pockets as she went.
That was apparently enough for Thackard, who glanced at Adeline again.
She'd said some sort of lighthouse testing in the country, and that was apparently what stuck with him. "The Aerofleet. They took over properties. They call them 'flash towers.'" Slowed down, he went back to rummaging, this time actually using his hands to shift fat files on the last desk he'd perused. "They've tried all kinds of things, these last few years."
"Flash towers?" From the little leather bag slung over her shoulder Adeline pulled out her own pencil and notepad, thank you Flynns, and began writing down her own notes. "Do you know what those are?"
While Mary worked on whatever had popped loose at the boiler, Thackard straightened up, watching Adeline. "They're trying to improve communication with their airships. They started with semaphore, but decided to go to lights they could flash because the signals were more discernible in poor weather." The first crack of a smile appeared. "--of which we have plenty, in England."
"Too right." Adeline agreed. "A project like the Pharos would take years. I don't understand how they were able to do this without anyone noticing. For bloody sake, it's a golden airship."
"Glanning." Thackard spun around. "I have a file on him, too--somewhere--"
"Thackard..." She looked around the room, seeing it not only as a jumbled stack of papers but an untouched goldmine of information. There were plenty of rocks to be sure. But among those rocks...
"I no longer work for the Times." She informed. "I was fired last week."
He had a hand flat to the top of a precarious stack to keep this one from collapsing while he flicked through the tabs at the edges with his other fingers, which moved fast and seemed full of the same shaky energy that had gripped the rest of him over and over again. But then he stopped.
It took him a second but, still bent over, he turned his head to peer sideways at Adeline.
"I could help you with this." She gestured to the piles and piles of paperwork. "You wouldn't even have to pay me. It's just..." She took a slow glance around the room. "Well, there's quite a lot here, isn't it?"
Slowly, he straightened up. For a long moment he peered at her. Then, dully, he looked around. "It's all in order."
Shhhhhhffff!
Behind him, a slightly disturbed stack finally gave up verticality and slid off the edge of its desk to thump and flop to the floor.
Adeline raised a skeptical brow before smoothing her face. "It really would be no trouble. I have the time."
On silent feet, Mary ghosted back up into Adeline's line of sight, frowning and watching Tilmund Thackard. The man said, "You wrote a good story, if your name is really Webber. You know, if that had been a gas leak, they'd have had record of it afterwards at the main, but they never made a report except of the emergency area shutoff."
"Because there was no gas leak." Adeline replied. "What I wrote was true. And do you know what they did after my story was printed? They sent me to the classifieds. They tried to have me buried."
Silence.
From the man, at least, and from Mary Rollins. The boiler continued its constant, contained roar behind them.
"They tried that at first with me, too," Thackard muttered. "Reversed it within an hour to a firing."
"They finally found grounds to fire me." She admitted. "Reporters go dark all the time, investigating stories and digging up threads. I do the same and..." She shook her head. "I know what it is like to be silenced, Thackard. I know what it is like to know the truth, to try and tell it only to have no one listen."
The man's brow drew. Then his eyes went to Mary as she mouthed something.
That was over fast, and he frowned more. "I need to think," he told Adeline, shaking his head, the creases of his brow getting even deeper. "Come back tomorrow."
Accepting that, Adeline nodded. "I shall see you at the same time tomorrow, then. It was a pleasure meeting you both." But to Mary, Adeline stopped to hold her gaze.
"I am glad to know you never made it back into their hands. I'm glad you found a space in this world away from them."
Mary had been turning as if to show Adeline out, but that made her freeze. Unhappily so, and she studied Adeline's face with animal intensity for a long moment.
What she saw in Mary was something similar to what she saw in Marnie. The pain of that was sharp and straight to her chest. She took a slow breath, working to master that pain.
"One day, maybe we could talk more. But for now, I think it’s best I take my leave. Just know that I am glad to know you did not end up back up in their hands."
The girl nodded slowly, backed off one step, and then another, and turned to gesture mutely before she would turn all the way to lead Adeline back up the steps, out through the laundry, and to the door of 171 High Bath Lane.
At least that was the impression given by the total lack of contact details printed in each edition itself, and by the refusal of those associated with distributing it to talk about where it came from, how it was delivered and when.
Which was not, on the face of it, a very practical way to run a newspaper supposedly dedicated to Getting The Word Out About Misconduct.
Fortunately, the web of secrecy was only as deep at the first layer of distributors. Plenty of archives had backissues of the humbly printed paper, and those backissues proved that there had been a time, seventeen months ago, when the Watchful Citizen had openly included its proper address--171 High Bath Lane, London--as well as the name of the Editor-In-Chief, Tilmund Thackard.
Tilmund Thackard was, in fact, the vast majority of the small press's bylines, and his investigations dominated the Citizen new and old. While the latest issues skewered the theory of the Tropical Winds, past ones zeroed in on government and military figures who seemed immune to the common laws of the Empire.
Adeline didn't know if this was going to work.
Tracking down the Watchful Citizen's publishing location had proven more challenging than she thought. Looking for the location went beyond asking the standard questions of "do you know." It took scouring multiple copies of the paper before finally locating an address.
171 High Bath Lane, London.
Even then it could be a dead end. There was no telling if the building was still operational. She wouldn't let that stop her. Adeline set out early that morning, dressed in a solid navy-blue dress and Penny shoes to match.
She had no idea what to expect but felt hopeful as she rounded the corner of Bath Lane that busy London morning.
As she drew closer to where her research pointed her, she would notice a distinct drop in class.
The streets grew narrower and narrower, the tenements overhead looking more and more rickety by degrees. Nothing cleaned these streets but the whims of rainstorms, and every alley Adeline might look down would prove to be an Armada of sails formed of laundry lines.
Speaking of laundry, by the time Adeline reached High Bath Lane, she would find the street crushed with chipped-painted shopfronts, and one of those had the number 171 over the door. It was a laundry service, though who its clientele might be was a mystery, as most around here would either labor themselves or send washing to one of the many home laundresses available in the city.
The door was black-edged, the 171 the cleanest thing about it, and its windows had been papered over.
"Right." Adeline said with a steadying breath. "Here goes nothing."
But she didn't knock just yet. Instead, Adeline glanced up and down the street. Was there anyone to notice where she had stopped? Did it look as though there were others who also might be approaching the black door?
Only once she had a good measure on her presence in the cramped neighborhood, if it could even be called that, did Adeline knock firmly three times on the door.
From a nearby alley came the sound of a dog--muffled, and likely nothing to do with Adeline--and not much else. There were signs of busy people: the sound of talk heard through open windows from the tenements, and the occasional squeaking hinge of a closing door. For better or worse, at this hour High Bath Lane was not bustling. This was a factory neighborhood, and even its children were likely at work.
Something dropped, hit floorboards, inside 171, deep in the building on Adeline's level. There was a slight scuffling, also from far back from the door, and a rattle of something, before the rhythmic quickness of footsteps grew closer and closer, fully warning Adeline before the clack of a bolt being drawn on the inside could be heard.
Then three more clacks, sharp and metal, before the doorknob turned and the door creaked open a foot.
Revealed was a very young woman, shorter than Adeline, maybe a "girl," in a laundress's apron. She was blond-haired with curls pulled up into a practical bun, blue-eyed, dressed for work under the apron, and she could have been shorter than Aurelia Dumitru. She looked Adeline over with a swift cataloguing before she dipped slightly like a house maid into a curtsey and asked, "May I help you, Miss?"
The air that came out of the open door past her was mostly thick with humidity and the scent of soap, but there was something else there, too. Almost metallic.
"Hello." Adeline said, eyes widening a little when it was a young woman and not a man who answered. That simple shock of surprise was quickly greeted by guilt at her assumption. Shaking it off, she took a deep breath and began speaking.
"My name is Adeline Webber. I, uh, used to work for the London Times. I'm looking for a former colleague of mine. A mister Tilmund Thackard? I was wondering if you might know of his whereabouts?"
The girl had pronounced cheekbones, a bony face, and her eyes sat in sockets that looked slightly sunken, a little thinned out, in the way that some folk who spent time on the street might present. Not all of her features spoke of hardship, though: she looked healthy enough otherwise, with rosy cheeks and a youthful gloss to her pale hair. She took up her apron and wrung her hands in it as if to dry them off. "I'm afraid there's no one 'ere by that name," she said. "Perhaps you've the wrong door, Miss." Her accent had thickened.
"Is there another door, then?" She asked quickly while eyeing the building. "This was the last known printing location for a newspaper. Maybe you've heard of it, The Watchful Citizen?"
The girl's expression did not change, but a slight drag of one foot back and a resetting of her shoulders communicated wariness. "I'm sorry, Miss, I do laundry here--"
"That ink is streaking again! Mary!"
She winced at the man's shout and her brow scrunched up. She bowed her head, and might have pinched the bridge of her nose as she sighed if she had not been using her hands on door and doorjamb to bar Adeline's path. Looking back up, she cleared her throat delicately. "Laundry things. I'm sorry I can't help y--"
"Mary!"
Adeline's eyes widened. "Are you Mary Rollins?"
The girl jolted upright, her own eyes widening, and swiftly made to slam the door.
Forcefully Adeline's hand and shoulder pushed back on the door to keep it from slamming shut.
"I WROTE ABOUT THE DRAGON ATTACK FOR THE TIMES!" She shouted through the crack already made.
The girl--Mary Rollins?--yelped when Adeline surged forward and hit the door. Her first instinct was to brace her feet and shove with all her might to counter, so as Adeline was pushing she was mirrored on the far side of the door by the aproned girl. "You can't come in! I'll get the Constable!"
"Go ahead and call them! I'm sure they'd love to know where you've been!" Adeline barked back as her weight pushed against the weight of another. Adding more force, her hips and legs trying to push forward, Adeline continued. "I know what happened to you! I know what they did! And I am asking for your help if you would just bloody listen!"
Adeline's strength had the door bobbing inward three inches for every one that the girl could shove it back. The girl's shoes refused to gain purchase on the humid, soapy-air-kissed floorboards, so she was sliding, and her small victories were the result of scrambling that came in waves, feet beating on the boards, and they became fewer and fewer as the opening convulsively yawned wider and wider. "I don't know you!" she cried, and turned to get her back to the door to see if that would grant her better leverage against the stronger opponent.
"Wait--" The man's voice. Across the long and narrow front space with what Adeline would now see were indeed steaming vats of whites. No one else was working these, though--unless--yes--a single silhouette of a smoke-belching automaton, oblivious to the struggle toward the back.
It was oblivious to the tall, disheveled man back there, too, presenting his side toward the fight with the front door like a fencer. Or like a man trying to show as little of himself as possible lest he get shot.
First impression gave a flash of a tall man with a belly that made him look like a hard candy in a wrapper. His collar was undone, and his shirtsleeves rolled up, bland waistcoat askew and unbuttoned, hands splotched perhaps with ink.
"I'm not here to cause harm!" Adeline shouted through the opening of the door. She could feel herself gaining more footing. If the door could just get wide enough for her to slip through...
"I'm looking for Thackard!" This time her words were directed to a man she could just make sight of. "My name is Webber! I wrote the story on the dragon attack at St. Martin's before it was covered up! Please let me in!!"
Mary had to know she was losing, but still she shoved back against Adeline's efforts. She couldn't tell that the door had now opened enough for her opponent--
The man took one hesitant step toward the door, but the real work was done by the hand that he reached out with... from thirty feet away. He was flapping it in the air, and it was shaky on top of that, and his voice which had boomed before broke a little. "You're making a scene! Stop, Mary! Stop!"
--And Mary, leaned back now nearly horizontal against the door, shoved off of it so fast that the door would finally fly open, cracking back against the frame--
All her weight into the door. So when it finally gave, she went tumbling onto the soppy wet floor that Mary had struggled to find purchase with a loud, surprised yelp.
Heavy footfalls suddenly sounded through the floorboards that Adeline sprawled on, and the man was saying breathlessly, "Close the door! Close the door!"
Mary had not, in fact, fared tremendously better from her move than Adeline. The door had hit her just enough to trigger a reflex to leap, but her skirt had gotten in the way and she'd landed on her knees. Now, though, she looked up wildly at the man and then spun about on the floor in a twist of fabric to lunge to get the door shoved back so that its weight would trigger its own latch.
Mary - well she presumed it was Marry - got the door. Adeline stayed on the ground for a few more moments trying to orientate herself to the room and what just happened. Her skirt was wet as were her hands and knees. But she was a live and whole. That was enough to get her to her feet.
She saw the automation with the smoke that puffed out of its mouth. The room was hot and muggy with humidity, already she was starting to feel her brown hair stick to the back of her neck. Steaming vats of white filled the room and a man maybe thirty yards back.
"Right then." She took in a steady breath of warm air. "My name is Adeline Webber. I'm looking for a Tilmund Thackard."
There were only windows down the right side of the building, and every one of them was shuttered. The room was dim, spotlighted with infrequent bulbs hung from wires. The best light had come through the door when it had been open. The moment it clicked shut, the bright blue-white wedge of daylight had vanished and left the entire long space in a dim yellow gloom.
Mary heaved a breath behind Adeline now.
The man ahead of her stopped halfway up the length of the space. Around him, the vats were five in total, and the pipes that brought their water and their heat were corroded and as old as such a setup could possibly be, but at least they'd been designed in their heyday well enough that they weren't tripping hazards everywhere.
Staring at Adeline, the man's little eyes squinted. In his very long face, it made them nearly disappear. "You say you--The story they retracted--What are you doing here?"
The shaking that had briefly been evident in his hand was still present in little ways all about him. For as big a man as he was, he gave the impression of being rabbity and skittish.
"Because I need your help." Adeline huffed from both exhaustion and maybe a little frustration on the effort it took just to get her through the door. Eyeing the skittishness of the man, she guessed Thackard, she hoped this was worth it.
"It's about the golden airship."
His brow scrunched. It made him look like his facial features were being sucked toward the very center of his face. "You came here on your own?"
"I am here alone if that's what you're asking. I have associates and friends who are also investigating whatever our government is trying to pull." Adeline replied.
The step he took with his forward foot was absolutely tiny. The impression his entire body gave in that second was that it had taken a full-blown internal war for him to achieve it. Quivering wariness vs sudden intrigue. Intrigue had won.
Even if only by two centimeters.
"You know something?" he asked, that squint still there, but with a sudden sharpness that had been absent entirely a second before.
"I know about John Slake." Adeline said, eyeing him with the same sharpness of a reporter.
Across the soapy distance, the man stared at Adeline for a moment that grew and grew.
Behind Adeline, the girl Mary was stationed at the door, hand on the knob, absorbing the tension in silence.
Then the man flicked a look past Adeline at her, and he said, "The bolts. Let's get downstairs."
Adeline's hair had begun to droop and stick to her face as though she were trapped in a muggy shower. Sweat was beginning to bead on her forehead. The heavy navy blue dress was the wrong thing to wear in this place. None of that mattered though. She held his stare, refusing to back down. There wasn't a single ounce of her that wasn't tense and ready for the next round of fights. But something shifted in the man's face and her shoulders relaxed a hair for now.
"After you." she said. Then, with a little mutter she added, "I hope it's cooler where we are going."
"The boiler's down there," Mary noted from behind her, before the quick clack-clack-clack-clack said the door was as secure as a door with papered-over glass could be.
The man didn't wait, didn't offer an arm, didn't do any of the things a gentleman did for a guest, and particularly for a lady. He turned and his footfalls were swift, his strides huge and hasty, as he headed toward a blotch of darkness at the back of the vat room. There was no light over a hallway back there (or the bulb had blown), so the next island of light came up out of the stairway itself, which was off to the left.
Wooden steps down a short distance, which then turned to the left again to point the way into the basement, which was just as long and narrow (and maybe narrower) than the space upstairs. The boiler was right there on the left, a blazing blast of heat, and it was surrounded by what were presumably water tanks and an apparatus that was probably a pump for the water, currently off and silent.
To follow the man meant passing through this little hell.
Out the other side, the smell of soap was replaced by the smell of ink and perhaps some chemical, because there was a long printing press up the right side of the space.
Dark down here, the place was the same sickly yellow that the bulbs had leant above, and there were a few desks, many chairs covered in stacks of copy, files, and more, lots of crumpled papers everywhere, and a wall of cabinets that had been papered over by photographs, sketches, scribbles, notes, clipped articles, maps, train schedules....
This was The Watchful Citizen.
And it was hell for Adeline. The heat was unbearable. It stuffocated precious air and made her lungs feel heavy with steam and humidity. She ignored the insane desire to turn around and leave this horrible place. But there were far more important things than her comfort. Passing the boiler, the smell was replaced with the familiar scent of ink.
Adeline felt the shot of homesickness to straight to her chest. It had been so long since she saw something like this. The printing press. The smell of ink. The smell of fresh paper waiting to be printed on. She took in a heavy breath, sorting through the emotions that struck her before moving into the headquarters of The Watchful Citizen.
"You were very difficult to find." Adeline said as she took in the photographs, sketches, and clipped articles. "I almost feared you were no longer in London."
"Good," said the man as he rushed on ahead. --Apparently to sort out a chair situation, because he passed four heavily piled-up chairs before he found one that he could clear off in one go, and he grabbed the handful of files and turned--
--only to face a desk situation, because there was not an empty square inch anywhere nearby. "Mary!" he called, but then spotted a likely spot, going over to shove a shriveled potted plant aside enough to precariously balance his files.
Mary was there, going to the press, her skirts brushing a short span of dark curtain as she went. "If I have to fix the ink, you're the one making the tea," she said, the accent that she'd used at the door vanished and replaced by something that wanted to sound slightly more Irish. Irish, but not quite Irish.
"Sit, sit," said the man to Adeline, waving overactive hands at the chair he'd transformed back into a chair not ten seconds before. He ignored Mary's negotiation, buzzing around, spinning a circle, tapping his lips with two fingers while he hunted.
Adeline tried to think back on the tales she heard of Thackard back when she worked at the Times. The way he moved through the room reminded her of a buzzing bee, unable to decide which flower was the best to sit on. From here to there to back to here, Adeline wondered if this was what the Flynns could be like if they did not have such impressive organizational skills that keep their apartment in order.
She took a seat in the chair that was made chair again while taking in another heavy smell of ink and paper. She really did miss that smell.
"What is it you are looking for?" She inquired after a moment.
This was a man who had won awards. Tilmund Thackard had been known as a keen investigator and a dogged snoop. "Unshakable," they'd said. And some had even said he had genius. But the lean, sharp-eyed figure conjured by his reputation and the very pale, shaky, slump-shouldered man here were one and the same.
"Pencil," he said, looking past two tins of mismatched pencils as he strode away from Adeline.
"I have one--Tilmund--TIL! I HAVE ONE," Mary said, following him fast, her fingers smudged with printer ink but her work there left behind. She held out a pencil she'd drawn from the pocket of her apron. In her other hand was a notepad she'd swept off a desk as she chased him.
When he stopped, the girl was for a moment superimposed over him, and his size emphasized how tiny she was. Yet he was the one who looked a little bent inward, a little shrunken, and she was the one who stood tall, peering up at him as she offered him his tools. She whispered, "You're the one who let her in. We'll be all right. Breathe, like you taught me...."
The dynamic between the two was surprising. Not that she knew what to expect but Adeline was caught off guard at how shaken and shrunk in Thackard seemed to be and how Mary somehow felt taller than her age. Feeling like an interloper, Adeline looked away as Mary consoled Tilmund.
There were newspaper clippings everywhere. Articles of this or that. Scribbles of things that she didn't quite understand. "How long have you been printing out of here?" She asked idly, wondering if some direction in the form of questions would pull Thackard out of his shell.
Thackard took the pad and the pencil and nodded a few times very rapidly, starting to breathe in exaggeratedly deep cycles for a moment. Adeline's question broke in, and that brought his attention back to her. Mary stood watching his face from below for a moment longer before she, too, turned, but it was Thackard who answered. "Ever since they kicked me out of--nonpayment of rent--" He shook his head and peeled himself away from Mary Rollins, moving slowly back toward Adeline. Even though his movements had slowed, there rode within him a sense of ongoing jitteriness that might burst into view at any moment.
"Doesn't matter. A while. Who directed you here?" he asked.
"My friends helped me." Adeline replied. "It wasn't easy. We combed through many of your additions to find a printing address. It wasn't until we stumbled upon some of your first prints that there was an address - this one. You stopped adding that over a year ago. Why?"
Mary frowned, wiping her hands on the apron and leaving small smudges, before she slowly turned to go back over to their press, pushing her rolled sleeves up higher again from where they'd slid down.
Thackard came back toward Adeline and (lacking a cleared chair), shifted a hip to perch nonchalantly on the corner of the overladen desk in front of her.
--or would have, had not the move caused a minor avalanche of papers, an ominous shhhhhhhhffff of stacks before they plummeted off the edge and fluttered and fanned to the floor, making Thackard jump up again at once and ruining the brief snapshot of him as a relaxed reporter.
He set the paper and pencil aside and quickly went to unburden another chair before dragging it back and sitting down like a mere and humbled mortal.
"I don't remember," he said once he was there with her, still bigger than she was while seated but with a much more manageable presence. His fingers fidgeted with the pencil and his knee bobbed under the pad. "You want to know about the Pharos, you said. And you told me you know the name Slake. I need to hear more from you before we speak."
Adeline's eyes widened at the sudden avalanche of paper. Just what exactly was all this stuff?
"That is a fair request." She said a little hesitantly, looking around to see if any other precariously perched stacks were about to take a tumble because of all the movement. "What is it you would like to know?"
"What brought you here. To me. And what you think you know about Miss Rollins." He frowned. The knee's bob slowed a little. The man breathed and watched Adeline, and those concerted efforts seemed over seconds to slow some of the nervous energy.
"I know about Project OLYMPUS and what happened to Miss Rollins during the launch phase." Adeline said directly. "I know about that because I broke into Whitehall and saw the files Slake keeps. I came to you because you were investigating and reporting on the HMS Edinburgh before you left the Times and I believe you've been watching for quite some time. Much longer than I have."
Tilmund Thackard was left blinking at her.
OLYMPUS--
--launch phase--
--broke into Whitehall--saw the files--HMSEdinburghlefttheTimesbeenwatchin--
He stared at her.
The "You did what?" came from the across two desks by the printer, where Mary was upright again and scrunch-faced with stomach-punched astonishment.
"I broke into Whitehall." Adeline repeated, letting that sink in for them.
In a flash, Thackard was out of his seat and striding away, scanning stack after stack of tilting papers and files on the desks around him. Mary still looked shocked, but with the man's sudden movement her gaze followed him. He was saying, "How? What did you see? I think there's a man that's not a man in there, but I can't prove it. Can't get inside the place. But there was some sort of explosion, and they moved all kinds of burnt furniture into curtained trucks for discard, and I was able to get a count of desks and make an estimate of the number of personnel working in the basement areas--"
"Thackard!" Adeline said sharply to slow down the onslaught of questions and excitement that came from the reporter. "I will share with you what I can but first I need to know about the Pharos. I know they've been doing some sort of lighthouse testing in the country and they've unveiled the damn thing during the coronation of the King but the trail has gone cold from there."
He didn't stop, set his pencil and paper aside, still hunting, bending over this desk or that one...
Suddenly something popped back at the boiler, and a loud hiss of steam swallowed sound from that end of the room.
Thackard jumped out of his skin, but Mary was quickly saying, "I've got it--I've got it--don't worry--" as she raced back that way, yanking a rag out of one of her apron pockets as she went.
That was apparently enough for Thackard, who glanced at Adeline again.
She'd said some sort of lighthouse testing in the country, and that was apparently what stuck with him. "The Aerofleet. They took over properties. They call them 'flash towers.'" Slowed down, he went back to rummaging, this time actually using his hands to shift fat files on the last desk he'd perused. "They've tried all kinds of things, these last few years."
"Flash towers?" From the little leather bag slung over her shoulder Adeline pulled out her own pencil and notepad, thank you Flynns, and began writing down her own notes. "Do you know what those are?"
While Mary worked on whatever had popped loose at the boiler, Thackard straightened up, watching Adeline. "They're trying to improve communication with their airships. They started with semaphore, but decided to go to lights they could flash because the signals were more discernible in poor weather." The first crack of a smile appeared. "--of which we have plenty, in England."
"Too right." Adeline agreed. "A project like the Pharos would take years. I don't understand how they were able to do this without anyone noticing. For bloody sake, it's a golden airship."
"Glanning." Thackard spun around. "I have a file on him, too--somewhere--"
"Thackard..." She looked around the room, seeing it not only as a jumbled stack of papers but an untouched goldmine of information. There were plenty of rocks to be sure. But among those rocks...
"I no longer work for the Times." She informed. "I was fired last week."
He had a hand flat to the top of a precarious stack to keep this one from collapsing while he flicked through the tabs at the edges with his other fingers, which moved fast and seemed full of the same shaky energy that had gripped the rest of him over and over again. But then he stopped.
It took him a second but, still bent over, he turned his head to peer sideways at Adeline.
"I could help you with this." She gestured to the piles and piles of paperwork. "You wouldn't even have to pay me. It's just..." She took a slow glance around the room. "Well, there's quite a lot here, isn't it?"
Slowly, he straightened up. For a long moment he peered at her. Then, dully, he looked around. "It's all in order."
Shhhhhhffff!
Behind him, a slightly disturbed stack finally gave up verticality and slid off the edge of its desk to thump and flop to the floor.
Adeline raised a skeptical brow before smoothing her face. "It really would be no trouble. I have the time."
On silent feet, Mary ghosted back up into Adeline's line of sight, frowning and watching Tilmund Thackard. The man said, "You wrote a good story, if your name is really Webber. You know, if that had been a gas leak, they'd have had record of it afterwards at the main, but they never made a report except of the emergency area shutoff."
"Because there was no gas leak." Adeline replied. "What I wrote was true. And do you know what they did after my story was printed? They sent me to the classifieds. They tried to have me buried."
Silence.
From the man, at least, and from Mary Rollins. The boiler continued its constant, contained roar behind them.
"They tried that at first with me, too," Thackard muttered. "Reversed it within an hour to a firing."
"They finally found grounds to fire me." She admitted. "Reporters go dark all the time, investigating stories and digging up threads. I do the same and..." She shook her head. "I know what it is like to be silenced, Thackard. I know what it is like to know the truth, to try and tell it only to have no one listen."
The man's brow drew. Then his eyes went to Mary as she mouthed something.
That was over fast, and he frowned more. "I need to think," he told Adeline, shaking his head, the creases of his brow getting even deeper. "Come back tomorrow."
Accepting that, Adeline nodded. "I shall see you at the same time tomorrow, then. It was a pleasure meeting you both." But to Mary, Adeline stopped to hold her gaze.
"I am glad to know you never made it back into their hands. I'm glad you found a space in this world away from them."
Mary had been turning as if to show Adeline out, but that made her freeze. Unhappily so, and she studied Adeline's face with animal intensity for a long moment.
What she saw in Mary was something similar to what she saw in Marnie. The pain of that was sharp and straight to her chest. She took a slow breath, working to master that pain.
"One day, maybe we could talk more. But for now, I think it’s best I take my leave. Just know that I am glad to know you did not end up back up in their hands."
The girl nodded slowly, backed off one step, and then another, and turned to gesture mutely before she would turn all the way to lead Adeline back up the steps, out through the laundry, and to the door of 171 High Bath Lane.