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    The orchestra grew louder, anticipating the coming scenes. Clown crept comically across the stage, a long string of sausages trailing from his pocket, the huge golden egg clutched to his splendid chest. Alerted by the music, he stared nervously around him, trying to stuff the egg into his pocket, to hide the sausages.
    Where was Columbine? Could she save him again?
    The limelight found Harlequin, following him as he danced across the stage, admired himself in the mirror, then dived through it, discovering with amazement the fantastic world of the future where mounted highwaymen held up trams on Hampstead Heath and were pursued by Bow Street Runners.
15 . A NIGHT TO REMEMBER
    Artificial clouds, flocks of jet packs, carbon emissions turned back into gasoline—it all sounds a little crazy, but the people behind these ideas are the bold thinkers who could save the planet. Plus: not everyone can be a visionary.
    —Popular Science
, July 2010
    H OW SAD TO be back in Simla as the rainy season ended, and an ice age was yet to begin. Jerry looked for his old nanny, his governess, his uncle in his gorgeous uniform, but they appeared to have gone ahead. He watched a lazy flotilla of civil airships bringing holiday-makers back from Nepal and Ever Rest.
    “Goodbye.” He straightened his Panama on his raven waves. It would be strange to see the old place taken over by developers. Major Nye had been close to tears, but Jerry had nothing to feel nostalgia for, not really. Just race memory he supposed of Victorian novels, Sexton Blake stories, John Ford movies, and all that Jewel in the Skull romancery. He had never wanted it back but he had wanted to retain the fiction, the escape. Major Nye had been its finest creation. The visionary patriarch who saw Modern India rising from the ruins of religion and barbaric tradition. Thank god the major wasn’t in the position of the many poor devils stranded between India A&M missing the power and the swagger of it all.
    Didi looked glamorous in her scarlet and yellow sari, and she had mellowed a bit, gliding her long fingers between his arm and his torso, coupling. Jerry wasn’t too easy with this. He let her fingers curl onto his arm but his body withdrew somehow. “You must miss it,” she whispered.
    “Not this time,” he promised. “This time I’ll hit it.”
    A black oriental cat, tail erect, rubbed itself against his leg. He bent to pick it up.
    She was weeping. She felt around in her purse and found a handkerchief, a bottle of smelling salts, some Kleenex.
    “Bloody allergies.” It was a request. “I’d forgotten all about that.”
    He raised the cat in his arms, stroking it. “What?”
    She shuddered at his cruelty. “Obedient girls.”
    He winked.
    “You’re addicted to the dosh, aren’t you? Is that why you joined the Baptists?”
16 . BIGGLES: THE LIMITED EDITIONS
    Sixty years after the famous outdoor writer Nash Buckingham lost his beloved shotgun after a duck hunt in Arkansas, a highly-anticipated auction delivers the beautiful Fox 12-gauge to its final resting place.
    —Garden and Gun
magazine, June/July 2010
    J ERRY WAS BACK in Panto playing Clown to his brother Frank’s Harlequin. As usual, Cathy was Columbine. Jerry had Grimaldi’s vegetable monster routine pretty much perfected. The orchestra struck up, all drums, cymbals, and brass, as Harlequin drew his slapstick and chopped the monster to bits before Clown’s widening eyes.
    But Sadlers Wells wasn’t the place it had been, thought Major Nye, who hoped he was offering moral support by coming to this dress rehearsal. He had persuaded his captors to make the exchange here. He hated breaking promises and, as old school mobsmen, they respected that.
    The scenery was perhaps too familiar. The big trick numbers, the magic and transformation business, all had a bit of a tawdry look. Major Nye had an idea that the public recognized what that revealed but kept coming anyway, missing the richness of shades and