Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02 by Lord Kelvin's Machine

horizontal
hailstorm of hardware clanging and banging against the mysterious cargo and
clamping tight to it as if glued there.
                   A man on the street, the paper said, was
struck down by one of the posts, and wasn't expected to recover his senses, and two or three others had to be attended to by the
surgeon, who removed "shrapnel and all manner of iron debris."
Shopwindows were shattered by stuff inside flying out through them, and the
wagon itself, as if possessed, rocked up and down on its hounds like a spring
pole.
                   During the melee there sounded an awful
screaming and scrabbling from under the canvas, where the unfortunate passenger
(fortunate, actually, that he was padded by several folds of heavy canvas)
fought to clamber farther around behind the cargo. His cries attested to his
partial failure to accomplish this feat, and if the strange business had gone
on a moment longer he would have been beaten dead, and half a dozen houses
along Tudor and Carmelite dismantled nail by nail and left in a heap.
                   The howling noise stopped, though, just like
that. The horses jerked forward and away, hauling the lorry with its broken
stay chain and spokes, and disappearing around onto the Embankment as the rush
of iron debris fell straight to the roadway in a shower, clanking along in the
wake of the wagon until it all tired out and lay still.
                   The street lay deathly silent after that, although the whole business took only about a minute
and a half. Rain began to pour down (I've already described it; it was the same
rain that saved the baker's shop up in Holborn), and the lorry got away clean,
no one suspecting that the whole odd mess involved any definable crime until it
was discovered later in the afternoon that a building owned by the Royal
Academy—a machine works—had been broken into and a complicated piece of
machinery stolen and the paper company next door ignited ... It was thought at
first (by anyone who wasn't certifiable) that this business of the flying iron
might be connected to the theft of the machine.
                   The peculiar thing, then, was that a spokesman
from the Royal Academy —the secretary, Mr. Parsons—denied it flat
out and quick enough so that his denials were printed in the Standard by
nightfall. There wasn't any connection, he said. Couldn't be. And he was extremely doubtful about any nonsense concerning flying door
knockers. Science, Mr. Parsons seemed to say, didn't hold with flying door
knockers.
                   Tell that to the man laid out by the iron
post, I remember thinking, but it was St. Ives and Godall who between them made
the whole thing plain. I forgot to tell you, in fact, that Godall was at the
oyster bar, too—he and Hasbro, St. Ives's gentleman's gentleman.
                   But this is where art leans in and covers the
page with her hand—she being leery of making things plain when the story would
be better left obscure while the reader draws a breath. "All in good
time" has ever been the way of art.
     
                   AND ANYWAY IT wasn't Until the first of the ships went down in the Dover Strait that any of us was certain—absolutely
certain; or at least Godall was, from the deductive end of things, and St. Ives
from the scientific. I wasn't certain of anything yet.
                   I was sitting on one of Godall's sofas, I
remember, waiting for the arrival of St. Ives and thinking that I ought to take
up a pipe and thinking too that I had enough vices already—indolence being one
of them—when a man came in with a parcel. Godall reacted as if the Queen had
walked in, and introduced the man to me as Isaac Laquedem, but aside from the
odd name and his great age and frailty, there seemed to be nothing notable
about him. He was a peddler, actually, and I forgot about him almost at once,
their business having nothing