The Inventors and the Lost Island Read online

  “Now that you’ve rescued me, how are we going to clear my name so that we can stop the Society?” George asked hopefully.

  Ada took off her white linen apron and tied it around George’s head and jaw to disguise him. On her own head, she put a lace-trimmed mobcap that hid most of her hair. With a smile, she said, “From what I’ve heard, the evidence is very convincing. Convincing enough to land you a one-way ticket to Newgate Prison.”

  All of George’s emotions flooded out like a hurricane. “How can you be smiling at this moment? You were headed to prison, too! For joining a gang of shoplifters? Really? What nice company you’ve been keeping in your afterlife.”

  “Keep your voice down,” Ada said. She popped her head over a bush, then ducked back down. “We have a long walk ahead of us, and it won’t do any good to be shouting about prisons and gangs the entire way.”

  He tore the apron off his head and raked his fingers through his hair. “Keep my voice down? In case you’ve forgotten, I’ve been accused of attempting to murder the King.”

  The same fiery hate he’d felt as he cowered before the tall man reared up in his chest. George tried to swallow it down, remembering what his grandfather had once told him: You must never hate anyone, because if you hate someone, that means you are afraid of them.

  Whatever happened, George didn’t want to be afraid of the villain in No. 10. George was brave now. A hero. “The tall man is behind all of this. He poisoned the King. Don Nadie, Nobody, whatever his name is, should be rotting in Newgate right now for what he’s done. And then he should spend the rest of eternity in—”

  “Oh dear,” Ada interrupted. “I see that I’ll have to spell it all out for you. Firstly, no one poisoned the King. I was at the palace having breakfast with my friend Princess Victoria, and nothing out of the ordinary happened. The King has a terrible diet and is prone to indigestion on a daily basis. If I had to offer a theory, I would say that someone easily might have suggested to the royal doctor that perhaps, this time, the King’s indigestion was caused by something more serious than eating twenty-five chocolate tortes for breakfast. The power of suggestion is very—George, there’s a spider on your shoulder.”

  “A spider?” George frantically brushed his shoulders. “Where? Where is it? Get it off!”

  Ada snorted with laughter. She opened her arms wide as if she wanted to speak to the whole world. “There is no spider! Don’t you see? Suggestion.”

  George’s cheeks flamed red-hot. He straightened his jacket. “It’s not funny! A poor, innocent duck is dead because of what that man did.”

  “I am sorry about the duck,” Ada said sadly. Her face darkened. “Though if Don Nadie is planting a suggestion that you attempted to assassinate the King, that’s what everyone will really think if the King dies.”

  “Do you think he’s framing me for a murder he hasn’t yet committed?” George’s heart pounded with fear. “We have to stop him before he does any more damage. He even planted fake crime reports about my grandfather in the Old Bailey Proceedings.”

  George withdrew the reports Vice-Chancellor Shadwell had given him from his pocket. Ada examined them over his shoulder. “These don’t look fake.”

  “But… they can’t be real. Trust me,” George said firmly. They couldn’t be real. If they were real, his grandfather had kept secrets from him. And although Ada and Oscar had shown him that anything was possible, that one particular thing was not. The 1st Lord of Devonshire was not a liar or a criminal. That was not his legacy.

  Ada handed the reports back to George. “You won’t want to hear this, either, but I dare say Don Nadie might be the person who wrote that nasty letter to your grandfather.”

  George’s mind flashed back to the letter. “Ada—nobody signed it,” he exhaled. Some of the pieces were starting to fit together, just like the secret puzzles that made up his grandfather’s bookshelves. He pulled the Star of Victory out of his pocket and stared into the cracked jewel, as if he could find the answer hidden inside the swirling blues of the sapphire. “At least Don Nadie can’t hurt my grandfather. But he might hurt a lot of other people. He’s going to attack C.R.U.M.P.E.T.S., and he threatened your mother’s and Frobisher’s lives if we warn any of the scientists. I tried to tell the vice-chancellor about him, but who is going to believe me now?”

  Ada let her head sink into her hands. “My mother already thinks my inventions are dangerous. I can’t believe that my invitation to C.R.U.M.P.E.T.S. might be the thing that gets her killed. She’d never forgive me.”

  “Don’t worry, Ada.” George playfully nudged her shoulder with his, trying to cheer her up. “Maybe she’ll never find out. Besides, how much harm could Don Nadie do with a bunch of musty old scientists, anyway?”

  “Oh, the possibilities are endless. There’s the entire presentation on electromagnetism, and Michael Faraday will demonstrate his latest experiments on electromagnetic liquids and the optical properties of electricity. Could you imagine? If we could make the spark of life visible, if we could harness the energy of the earth, then there’s no end to what kind of terrible weapons he could make!” Ada huffed. “Whoever this Don Nadie is, he’s far more cunning than anyone we’ve seen from the Society so far.”

  “Well, he already has the spark of something in his walking stick,” George grumbled. “He said that as soon as he retrieves that map, he’ll be a somebody again. What could the map to the Star of Victory have to do with this?”

  Ada shook her head. “I don’t know. But whatever your grandfather is hiding is far more valuable or dangerous than we thought. Don Nadie has a personal interest in the Devonshires.”

  George swallowed hard. He remembered what his grandfather had once told him about the map: that if discovered, its hidden secret would guarantee the owner victory in any battle. His mind whirred with possibilities like one of Ada’s machines. What miraculous thing could be disguised in the map’s ink? And what would happen if Don Nadie found it first?

  He thought of the crime reports. He thought of the vile letter, too, so full of hate and anger, concealed in his grandfather’s book for years.

  Why would anyone hate his grandfather?

  Memories—real memories, not strange clues tucked away in books or musty newspaper reports—flitted into his head, one after another. His grandfather with a cup of steaming tea, the tip of his pen hovering over an acrostic puzzle or a map. The wooden toys he’d carved for George with his own hands, demonstrating with endless patience how to make a jig doll dance or throw a bandalore so that its string would wind up again around the wooden disc. Smiles—the countless, beaming smiles of everyone his grandfather passed on the street when they walked to the baker’s to pick up gingerbread at Christmastime. Everyone loved the 1st Lord of Devonshire. George most of all.

  The 1st Lord of Devonshire was good. He was a hero. And the tall man was a villain.

  It made sense that a villain would hate a hero.

  And because his grandfather was dead, it was up to George to stop the villain, who was very much alive.

  “Don Nadie wants the map. Getting it is part of his plan, so if we find Il Naso first, maybe we can stop his plan in its tracks,” he said. “How are we going to do that?”

  Ada’s face hardened into a fierce look that George knew too well. “We can’t find the answers we seek in London. Let’s get the map from Il Naso in Spain before the Society does.”

  A gust of wind whipped through George’s hair. After his nightmarish morning, he could at last draw in a deep breath. On the marshy breeze, he smelled the possibility of adventure. (He also smelled sewage drifting in from the Thames.) The weight of his impending doom was lifted off his chest. Beyond all reason, a smile tugged at the corner of his lips. He was finally going to solve the puzzle of the map. His grandfather was no longer of this earth, but piece by piece, he was assembling a tapestry for George to guide him forward and give him strength.

  Simple doesn’t build character, he’d said.

  E
xcept—

  They were missing something. Or someone.

  “The Society is already chasing Il Naso. We’re sure to meet them along the way, and we can’t face them by ourselves.”

  Ada crossed her arms, smug. “Are you saying we need help, Lord Devonshire?”

  George smirked. “It wouldn’t hurt to have a couple of pirates on our side. And an orangutan. After all, it was Oscar who saved us from the Society last time.”

  When George had first met Oscar, he didn’t see how they could ever be friends: they seemed like complete opposites. But soon George had grown fond of Oscar’s cheerfulness and had become impressed by his many talents. When they’d been trapped with no hope of escape, Oscar had set off an explosion to save them using only a simple rock and his flint stone. The memories of golden flames danced in George’s head. He couldn’t bear the thought of embarking on an adventure without his friend with the paint-stained fingers.

  Ada clapped; then her clapping turned into a whoop of joy. “Orangutans are quite useful, too! Plus, Captain Bibble and his crew hate the Society as much as we do. We’ll form a fleet!”

  “That’s the spirit! But…” George paused. “A fleet? A fleet of what? Captain Bibble only has one boat.”

  “Come on. I have something incredible to show you,” Ada said, beaming. “We have a whale to catch.”

  Once they were sure no police officers were coming, they hurried along the river for a while, until they were farther east in London than George had ever been. The air was thick with smoke, and particles of smog seemed to cast a dull haze over the skyline. With every block, houses and shops crowded closer and closer together. This was a dirtier, shabbier city than the comfortable neighborhood near Regent’s Park that George knew.

  They continued walking along the river until they reached the London Docks. The square pool of water was crowded with ships of every size, all moored along the edge with their sails stowed and their cargo holds open. Their bare masts stuck up like strange trees draped with vines of rigging rope.

  Ada weaved and dodged her way through the docks, where workers in flat caps and patched woolen trousers wrangled gigantic crates. George lagged farther and farther behind, letting all the sights and sounds soak into him as if he were a sponge. If they weren’t successful in their quest to get the map, this might be the last time George set foot in the land of his birth.

  Workers swarmed like ants around the ships, loading one, unloading another. Cranes swung huge pallets overhead. Crates and barrels were stacked everywhere, their contents hidden and stamped with names even George didn’t recognize. He could only guess what was inside from the various smells: the green-grass scent of tea leaves, the sickly-sweet stink of tobacco, and the woodsy perfume of fresh-cut timber planks.

  “Look out!” a dockworker cried as a huge crate swayed on ropes directly overhead.

  Ada led George to the end of a long, quiet dock, where a sailing ship patiently bobbed in the water. Waiting for them, apparently. Together, they walked up the gangplank. “A sailing ship? That’s very traditional of you, Miss Byron.”

  Ada pressed her lips between her teeth in a guilty grin. “Just one more surprise, I’m afraid,” she said, then reached up and pulled on a lever sticking out of the ship’s mast.

  With a loud whoosh and thump, the mast dropped into the depths of the ship and out of sight. George stumbled backward in amazement. A loud clicking noise made him spin around. Below him, gleaming metal fins sprouted from the portholes where cannons should be, while bit by bit, a long tail emerged from the stern. He watched in awe as wooden planks flipped to reveal undersides of burnished metal, only tearing his eyes away as Ada tugged him belowdecks through a small hatch. George pressed his face against the nearest porthole.

  In less than a minute, the sailing ship had transformed into a mechanical whale.

  George laughed with delight, even when the beast began to sink lower, lower, lower, his last whispers of doubt drowned out by the rushing roar of a new adventure as the whale plunged beneath the brown surface of the Thames.

  First they’d recruit Oscar and his father to help them fight the Society. Then nothing would stop George until Nobody slinked back into whatever nasty hole he’d crawled out of.

  Chapter Nine

  All of Ada’s inventions were like paintings done by the same artist. George pictured them in his head: her mechanical birds, the small one that had first invaded No. 8, and the much larger one that he’d crashed into the sea; her frog, which George had also destroyed; and now, her whale. They were all eerily graceful yet jerky, impossibly complicated yet rough. Her machines also always had a ridiculous number of levers and buttons and knobs, many of which looked like everyday objects plucked from their ordinariness: wooden spoons, clothespins, and cabinet knobs. So even though George had never been inside this whale, he felt instantly that he was somewhere familiar.

  “Oscar’s last letter came a few days ago. He said they were fishing just west of Spain’s southern coast, so I’ll set a course.”

  Ada sat down at the control panel in the whale’s head, which looked as though it had recently been the bow of the sailing ship. Two upholstered armchairs had been bolted to the floor, one directly in front of the ship’s massive wooden steering wheel. Ada flipped levers and switches. In response, a golden needle on the dial in front of her spun wildly. George thought the instrument looked awfully similar to a compass he’d recently misplaced, but his complaints were lost in the rumble that tore through the whale as its engine whirred to life. Feeling the floor wobble beneath his feet, George walked unsteadily to the copilot’s seat next to her and plopped down.

  “When did you build this?” he asked. He craned his neck upward, where brass joints ran along the seams of the wooden planks from floor to ceiling. To protect from leaks, he guessed. It reminded him of a rib cage made of metal.

  “I’ve been working on it here and there,” she said, smiling.

  George knew Ada well enough by now to know that she often accomplished impossible feats before breakfast. But this whale was something else entirely. Building a ship usually took a hundred men an entire year to finish. “You’ve outdone yourself. It’s so big… and complicated. It’s much larger than the mechanical fish we stole from the Society.”

  “You mean the fish made from the design the Society stole from me first?” Ada raised her eyebrow. “This is it! Since it was based on my plans, disassembling it was fairly easy. I made it bigger and better. With a few minor improvements to the ballast system, I was able to expand the hull so that we could go on longer journeys without being so cramped.”

  In the dull light of the whale’s cabin, George noticed the dark shadows under Ada’s eyes. Working was always more important than sleeping to her. “What longer journeys were you planning to take? Wait, don’t tell me—I want to be able to claim ignorance if your mother interrogates me.”

  Ada’s smile faltered.

  What if Lady Byron was so furious about his dragging Ada into a disastrous situation that she forbade George ever to see Ada again? The thought was too awful to say out loud. Instead, he practically shouted, “The whale is marvelous!”

  Ada’s smile returned. “Do you really think so?”

  He nodded. Ada’s inventions were so brilliant that George hardly understood them, let alone how to compliment them. He looked out the thick glass porthole directly to his left, where the last sliver of sky was shrinking and swirls of greenish-brown water were rising. They continued to sink into the river until the whale submerged completely with a loud blub. “So far, it’s been excellent at sinking!”

  Panels in the sides of the whale flexed as Ada steered the machine away from the docks. “Not quite the praise I was hoping for, but I’ll take it. Would you mind manning the periscope to navigate above the water? Getting out of the docks and into the river might be a little tricky.”

  A slim green-and-silver instrument popped down from a hatch above him. It was used to see the world above w
ater while they were underwater. George felt a rush of warmth when he saw that the sight piece had stopped right at his eye level—Ada must have designed it to fit his exact height. George pressed his eye against the periscope to see a blurry circle of sky.

  When his vision adjusted to the lens, he spotted a nest of ships that stood between the mechanical whale and the open river. “You need to veer to the left. There’s an American tobacco ship right ahead and a few more beyond, then we’re clear.”

  “A tobacco ship?” she said.

  “Yes.” The whale gave a quiet groan and picked up speed. “Yes, that’s good. A little more to the left. A little more. No, left, I said. Miss Byron, left!”

  The whale’s fin scraped against the other ship’s hull. It slid through the wood like a knife through truffle butter. Debris burst into the waters around them.

  “Excellent navigating,” Ada said cheerfully.

  George tore his eye away from the periscope to look at her. “Are you mad? You’ve punctured it! That ship is going to flood.”

  Ada’s face darkened. “If you use one more breath to defend that nasty industry, I will steer us straight across the Atlantic and drop you off at the nearest tobacco farm.”

  “As if being wanted for murder wasn’t enough…” George grumbled, pressing his eye against the cold metal again.

  They sliced through a few more ships on their way out of the dockyard. When they finally emerged into the deeper, clearer waters of the Thames, the periscope was no longer needed. George settled back into the copilot’s chair and watched the last bits of debris float by outside the porthole. In a matter of moments, they sped through the Thames and were quickly out into the wide estuary where the river emptied into the North Sea.

  “We are officially ghosts now, aren’t we?” George said. “How long do you think it will take to find Il Naso and get the map back?”

  Ada straightened in her seat. “According to the C.R.U.M.P.E.T.S. invitation, the gathering is in thirty-seven days. Hah!”