“Bloke waved me down and asked me to give you this,” he said.

Javitz took the page in the hand that held the cup; whatever he read made the look on his face go grim again.

“What is that?” I asked.

He stuffed it into a pocket, and said, “Weather conditions. We'll have some wind, nothing to worry about.”

“I think-”

He turned on his heel and fixed me with an evil gaze. “I don't fly dual controls. You want to drive the thing? Go right ahead, it's your machine. If you want me to take you north, you're gonna have to let me do the worrying.”

Twice in a year I had climbed into an aeroplane under the control of someone in whom I had less than complete confidence. I must learn how to drive one myself, and soon.

I nodded, and let Lofte show me how to climb up the ladder. He followed me to demonstrate the special hinged cover that transformed the passenger seat into an enclosed box. I eyed the glass on all sides, wondering how hard a landing would be required to turn the windows into flying daggers.

I had brought my heaviest fur-lined coat, which I now wrapped around me. Javitz shook Lofte's hand and leapt into the pilot's open compartment in front while Lofte walked forward and waited for the signal to work the prop. Javitz fiddled with the controls in front of him, pulled on his goggles, then stuck up his thumb; Lofte vanished, the propeller kicked a few times before the engine caught, sputtered, then thundered into life. The fragile construction around me jerked and drifted forward. Lofte reappeared off the port side and waved at me with an air of confidence neither of us altogether believed. The sound of the big engine built, the seat pressed itself into my back, and with no ceremony at all we leapt once, twice, and the ground dropped away.

The compartment was freezing until the sun came up, then I sat in my mile-high conservatory and roasted. I tore the end off of my handkerchief and pushed little screws of the cotton into my ears against the unremitting bellow of the engine and the scream of wind. My bones rattled, my teeth threatened to crack unless I kept my jaws clamped shut, and the ground was a long, long way down. Tiny doll-houses grew among picturesque fields; miniature trains rode pencil-drawing tracks and emitted diminutive puffs of smoke: England was translated into an Ordnance Survey portrait, as real as a coloured moving-picture projected beneath our feet.

It was-if one didn't stop to consider the consequences-really quite thrilling.

We flew on through the morning. From time to time, Javitz craned to look over his shoulder at me, and once shouted a question. I shrugged; he laughed, and turned again so I could continue my study of the back of his coat, scarf, and leather cap.

Two and a half hours later, the engine sound changed and the ground began to grow nearer-slowly, which was a comfort. We had skirted several towns on the way up, and now I could make out the distinctive outline of York with its Minster off to the northeast. There was an air field here-field being the operative term-that Javitz seemed to know, because he made for it and took us down on the hard-packed grass. He shut off the engine, and I pulled the twists of cotton from my ears. They rang anyway. I let Javitz hand me down from my perch; on terra firma, I could feel my bones sway as if I'd been on a long sea voyage. I said, “It's hard to believe we left London at dawn and we're already in York.”

“You needn't shout, Miss Russell.”

“Sorry,” I said. “My ears are ringing.”

“But it's true, this is the next revolution in travel.”

Emergency speed was one thing, but I did not imagine the world was full of people eager to be cramped into place, shaken about, deafened, frozen, boiled, and frightened silly for the sake of a few hours saved. “I don't believe I'll invest in Imperial Airways quite yet, thank you.”

“You're losing an opportunity,” he said, and went off to poke gingerly inside the hot engine. A short time later, a laconic individual motored up with tins of petrol in the back of his Model T, and Javitz topped up the tank. He came back before my legs had altogether regained their normal sensation.

“Ready?” he asked. “Next stop, Edinburgh -we should be there in no time at all.”

In fact, however, five hours later Javitz and I were barely twenty miles away, in a pasture heavy with cow droppings, working on the engine while two young cow-herds watched us from their perch atop a barred gate.

Half a mile away, train after train steamed imperturbably northwards.

We had come down briskly. One minute we were flying merrily northwards, the next, moving air was the loudest thing around us, and through the glass, I could hear Javitz cursing under his breath. Fortunately, it would seem that rebellious engines were commonplace to him, because after an alarmingly long time spent fiddling with the controls and slapping instruments, he stood up in his seat to peer around, found a likely field, and aimed us in that direction.

After one hour, he'd found a number of problems that it was not. I now had as much grease on me as Javitz did, since his scarred hand could not manage the more demanding manipulations of the tools. Under his direction, I pulled one piece after another out of the engine, waited as he debated its qualities, and saw him lay it to one side before turning to the extrication of the next one. After an hour and a half, one of the cow-herds had taken pity on us and fetched up a pot of tea.

After two hours, I wiped the perspiration from my forehead and said, “Mr Javitz, if we continue with the process of elimination, we'll soon reach the rudder.”

“It's hard to think with you wittering at me.”

I looked at the sturdy spanner in my hand, dropped it, and walked away.

Two fields over, a pair of huge mares were pulling a combine harvester, inexorably up and down. Had they been cart horses, I might have stolen one and pointed its nose towards the nearest train station, but between the entangling harness and their placid gait, it would be faster to walk.

Another train flew past, an express by the looks of it. Perhaps I could climb up the telegraph pole and fashion an impromptu Morse generator, asking Mycroft to work his magic over the trains. No doubt I could find tools in the repair kit. Or I could be more straightforward and just build a fire over the tracks, commandeering the thing by gunpoint when it stopped.

Walking back to our makeshift aerodrome, I saw Javitz in conversation with the two boys. They trotted away, chattering avidly. When I got back to the 'plane, I saw that he had restored a fair number of the parts to their places.

“Have you fixed it?”

“The problem's with the petrol. I was hoping to find garbage in the carburettor, or in the fuel line, but it's in the petrol itself. The filter's a mess.”

“Can you fix it?”

“Sure, just drain the petrol and replace it.”

We surveyed the countryside, which had a singular lack of petrol stations.

“You've sent the boys for petrol?”

“I've sent them for clean, empty containers. If I drain it through a chamois, it'll be fine.”

“How many containers are we talking about?”

“Lots,” he said.

The tank, it turned out, contained seventy gallons of petrol when full, which it had been when we left the York field. When the two boys returned, an hour later, they were loaded down with a mad variety of vessels, from chipped tea-pot to tin bath. My job was to check each container, rinsing it if necessary in petrol, before handing it to Javitz. He would then position his chamois rag under the stream of petrol dribbling from the tank, and let the bowl, or coffee-pot, or tin bath fill up.

We ran out of containers before the machine ran out of petrol, so the four of us wrestled the machine forward, clear of the tin bath, for Javitz to open the plug, draining the remainder on the ground. I kept an eye on the growing puddle, to make sure our assistants didn't go near it with a lit cigarette, but he finished without mishap, cleared the lines, scrubbed the filter, and put everything back in place.