Free The Diamond Thief by Sharon Gosling Page A

a hand over the blank canvas of his shiny head. “Do you like it? I think it’s rather fetching, myself.”
    Thaddeus reached out and hesitantly poked at the pale skin. It was slightly spongy to the touch. “That’s horrible! And those eyebrows! That nose! You look… awful!”
    The Professor leaned back and sighed. “Ah well, never mind, I’ll remove it as soon as we get to the workshop. It did the trick though, didn’t it? Even you failed to recognise me. And if I hadn’t done what I did, you’d be languishing in a cell right now.”
    Thaddeus looked out of the window, watching the night streets of London pass by, lit by the occasional tame halo of gaslight. He suddenly felt very, very tired. The motion of the cab rocked him from side to side as it rattled over the cobbles, moving east. He slipped into a doze, and didn’t wake until the driver pulled the horse to a standstill. Thaddeus blinked sleepily as the Professor leaned over and poked him with a bony finger.
    “Come on, then, Thaddeus Rec,” he said. “Let’s get inside, eh?”
    Thaddeus stumbled from the cab, realizing that they were at Limehouse Basin, which meant they were going to the Professor’s workshop. The dock was already busy, even though dawn had yet to colour the sky above the grimy wharves. Men shouted as they heaved goods onto the waiting boats that bobbed about in the oily, choppy water of the Thames. He nodded to a couple that he recognised as they skirted the edge of the Basin, faces he knew from his occasional drinks in The Grapes public house, just a few minutes’ walk away.
    They slipped down one of the alleyways behind Oliver’s Wharf. The Professor glanced about him before pulling a heavy bunch of keys from his pocket and slotting one into the lock of an unimportant-looking door. He pushed it open and disappeared into darkness. Thaddeus waited until he heard the sound of a match struck, and the faint light of a candle lit his way. Then he followed the Professor, stepping inside and closing the door behind him.
    “Excuse me for a few moments, won’t you?” called the Professor, disappearing into his private study at the other end of the room. “Just going to remove this face you so heartily disapprove of.”
    Rec nodded absently as he shut the study door. He had been here a hundred times and had spent hours tinkering with the objects gathered about him, but he still found himself taking an extra breath when he entered the workshop. For one thing, it was just so huge. It took up the whole lower floor of the Wharf, and at some point the Professor had knocked through all the walls save the supporting ones, leaving the space open. Into the resulting cavern was crammed every manner of wonderful, inexplicable mechanical gadgetry, creating a merry mess that overflowed the many workbenches and shelves and spilled onto the floor in piles of cogs, springs, levers and other bits and pieces.
    One bench was dedicated to the workings of clocks, because the Professor was convinced that there was a way to make a pocket watch that would communicate with another watch of the same design, worn by a different person. He thought it would be possible to send messages from one to the other by means of a small electrical current, and so to experiment he had taken hundreds of them apart and wired them all up in different ways. Their collective ticking produced a whirring hum that filled Thaddeus’ ears like a swarm of bees as he passed.
    Then there was the rocket pack. If Thaddeus was honest, this was the invention that he was most excited about. He kept trying to persuade the Professor to let him test it out, but the answer was always, “It’s not ready yet.” The idea was to create a steam-powered engine small enough for a man to carry on his back. The Professor was currently working on the idea that if he built a cylinder that produced a vacuum at one end and propulsion at the other, the force and motion could lift a grown man off the ground.