CHAPTER 41

Wars are won in battles. But also in those battles never fought. The historians of the End, those people who would study the great collapse of the Gas-Lit Empire, would point to this as the moment that divided time. The event that the future-casters of the Patent Office feared had come to pass. The Americas were being cut off from the rest of the world. Change had become inevitable, but its outcome could not be predicted. It was the greatest unknown in the Map of Unknown Things.

As for Elizabeth, she walked until she came to the Columbia River, then found a thicket to sleep in through the day. At nightfall she set out again, walking always against the flow. In this way she reached the mouth of the Snake River. Her food ran out after four days. Beyond that, she walked hungry, and would soon have died but for a trader’s camp where she stole two loaves of bread.

The vastness of that great country seeped into her, a kind of delirium, awe mixed with fatigue and hunger. The river always flowing on her left. The brown hills reaching up to the sky on her right. When she turned her head, the horizon swam.

When the loaves had been eaten, she chewed grasses and leaves from the scrubby bushes next to the river, trying to fool her body with the illusion that it was still being fed. It could have been the wrong river. She might have been walking into an endless wilderness. But one day she saw an insubstantial line cutting across the world. Wooden posts and barbed wire. It would seem more substantial on a map. She remembered the words of Mary Brackenstow.

There was no way to find the place where the Arthurs had made the crossing. So she walked along the fence, on the wrong side, so to speak, until she came to a small gully where the wire didn’t quite reach the ground. With her last strength, she lifted it and crawled underneath, hardly feeling the barbs raking against her shoulders.

Some feelings are too complex to be rendered into words, but tears are enough to express them. So she lay down and wept for all the tragedy she’d seen, and the loss, and for the chaos that was to come. One piece of her own history had been completed. A void that she’d not previously been aware of had been filled. And on this foundation she felt somehow stronger.

In the dust next to a mile marker she dug a hole, scooping it out with her hands until it was deep enough to feel moisture below. Then she laid the parchment in the bottom and back-filled it, flattening the earth until all that remained was a darker patch, which grew pale as it dried in the wind. Then there was nothing but the marker stone itself. Twenty-three miles to Lewiston.

Later, it may have been the next day, though afterwards she couldn’t remember the sky becoming dark, a wagon came rolling along that track. Two outriders found her first, men dressed in the dark blue of the border regiment. They took her up, laid her in the back of the wagon, gave her water and food. This is how she returned to Lewiston.

None of them recognised her, though there were wanted posters on the wall of the guardhouse. It was a bad likeness. She could have stepped out from that place and disappeared from history. Instead she pointed to the poster and pointed to herself, still too weak to express herself in any other way. Then they understood.

Patent Office agents arrived within the hour and took her into custody. It took two more days before she was strong enough for questioning to begin. After the first session, she asked after Mrs Arthur. No one could tell her anything. But two days later, as she was being escorted to the air terminus, one of the agents said that he had checked it out. No one had seen Mrs Arthur or Conway for several weeks. As they escorted her onto the airship, hands cuffed, she found herself weeping once again.

In New York, the agents tried to threaten the story out of her, as they’d done in Niagara. But Julia and Tinker were free already. The Patent Office had nothing left to bargain with except her own life, which they’d already said they could not protect, and which she despaired of saving.

In response to every question she replied: “I will talk to John Farthing.”

After three days they moved her from comfortable accommodation to a bare concrete cell. Three times a day they brought food and water. Otherwise she was left alone.

But on the fifth day, the door opened and Farthing stepped inside. His cheeks had hollowed since she last saw him. He covered the spy hole with one hand, holding her with his free arm. She clung to him, as she had in the washroom above the falls.

“You’re thinner,” she whispered.

“You’re just the same,” said he.

She breathed in his scent and felt a wave of warmth pass through her body, as if every vessel and capillary had dilated in the same moment.

“I’ve done it,” she said.

“What have you done?”

“I know their plans. I know what they’re doing. In Newfoundland. And in Oregon.”

“I’m supposed to ask you to talk. I’m supposed to say that you’ll be hanged as a mutineer if you don’t.”

“They’ll still hang me if I do,” she said.

“I know.”

She felt the sag in his body as the truth of what she was saying took hold of him. “They’ve offered me no deal. They say it’s not in their control, and in any case my words aren’t so precious to them. The sailors – they’re demanding my death. Once I’ve told my story, the Patent Office will hand me over.”

“Elizabeth – you’re so much stronger than me. I don’t think I can take this anymore.” He struggled free from her embrace, still covering the spy hole, and from his pocket drew a small glass vial of pale green liquid. “There’s enough in here for both of us. It’s painless, they tell me. Once I crack the seal, I’ll drink half. The rest is yours.”

“The Patent Office wants to know the things I’ve seen,” she said. “And I want to tell them. But I can give them more than words. If they had something they could hold in their hands, something to place before the governments of the Gas-Lit Empire…”

“It’s the Navy that will kill you. It will be a hanging. In public. Oh, my darling. Oh, my Elizabeth.”

She took the vial from him. “I will die sure enough. And so will you. But not for nothing. There may be a deal to be done. If your masters had hard evidence in their hands, they might persuade the governments to act. And to do it now – before it’s too late. You must take a message for me. And trust me.”

It seemed that he did, for they kissed then. More like true lovers than they’d ever been. Not just with the passion of their first kisses. But also with the knowledge of each other and themselves that all the trials and separation had given them.