I grinned at her. “I really like this being an item thing.”

“You romantic devil, you. Flatter me with your silver tongue, why don’t you?”

“Together, forever,” I said. “How about that?”

“Forever and ever and ever,” said Molly.

I led her into the long hangar. It’s a huge place, packed full of all the early technological wonders produced down the ages by family Armourers with a bee in their bonnet. It had to be said: Both the museum and its exhibits had known better days. The inner walls were cracked and discoloured, and dull yellow sunlight fell through glass panels left cloudy and spotted by age and neglect. This was just a storage space now, for things whose time had moved on. Strange and wondrous artefacts that had once been ahead of their time, now overtaken and forgotten.

Like the 1880s Moon Launch Cannon, only used once. And the oversized Moleship, basically just a steel cabin with a bloody big diamond-studded drill head mounted on the front. It had been constructed to investigate the interior of the earth, back in the days when people still believed in the Hollow Earth theory. The hulking exhibit before us was actually Mole II, built so the family could go looking for whatever had happened to Mole I. In the end it never got used, because we had to fill in and block off the original tunnel after something big and nasty from the lower depths tried to crawl back up it.

“And we used to have a giant mechanical spider,” I said, leading Molly through the exhibits. “We confiscated it from some American mad genius, back in the Wild West. Not entirely sure what happened to it. I think it ran away.”

“Boys and their toys,” said Molly, smiling sweetly. “You’ll be boasting about the size of your engines next. Why keep all this stuff if you never use it anymore?”

“Because the family never lets go of anything that belongs to it,” I said. “Besides, this is history. It’s . . . interesting. Not to mention instructive. And you never know when you might need something again. Better to have a thing and not need it, than need it and not have it. Like the Time Train . . . I only remembered it was here because I used to love reading about things like that when I was a kid, and sloping off from my lessons.”

We weren’t alone in the hangar. A dozen or so men and women in scruffy overalls fussed around various exhibits, tinkering with the machinery or just polishing and cleaning them to within an inch of their lives. None of them looked at us, as long as we were careful to maintain a respectful distance. Molly gestured at them, and raised an eyebrow.