Magnificent Devices: 4-Book Set

The Claire Quartet

Shelley Adina

Moonshell Books

Copyright 2013 Shelley Adina Bates. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author. This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogues in this book are of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is completely coincidental.

This book was produced using PressBooks.com.

Contents

Introduction

Lady of Devices

1. Chapter 1

2. Chapter 2

3. Chapter 3

4. Chapter 4

5. Chapter 5

6. Chapter 6

7. Chapter 7

8. Chapter 8

9. Chapter 9

10. Chapter 10

11. Chapter 11

12. Chapter 12

13. Chapter 13

14. Chapter 14

15. Chapter 15

16. Chapter 16

17. Chapter 17

18. Chapter 18

19. Chapter 19

20. Chapter 20

21. Chapter 21

22. Chapter 22

23. Chapter 23

24. Chapter 24

25. Chapter 25

26. Chapter 26

27. Chapter 27

28. Chapter 28

29. Chapter 29

30. Epilogue

Her Own Devices

31. Chapter 1

32. Chapter 2

33. Chapter 3

34. Chapter 4

35. Chapter 5

36. Chapter 6

37. Chapter 7

38. Chapter 8

39. Chapter 9

40. Chapter 10

41. Chapter 11

42. Chapter 12

43. Chapter 13

44. Chapter 14

45. Chapter 15

46. Chapter 16

47. Chapter 17

48. Chapter 18

49. Chapter 19

50. Chapter 20

51. Chapter 21

52. Chapter 22

53. Chapter 23

54. Epilogue

Magnificent Devices

55. Chapter 1

56. Chapter 2

57. Chapter 3

58. Chapter 4

59. Chapter 5

60. Chapter 6

61. Chapter 7

62. Chapter 8

63. Chapter 9

64. Chapter 10

65. Chapter 11

66. Chapter 12

67. Chapter 13

68. Chapter 14

69. Chapter 15

70. Chapter 16

71. Chapter 17

72. Chapter 18

73. Chapter 19

74. Chapter 20

75. Chapter 21

76. Chapter 22

77. Chapter 23

78. Chapter 24

79. Chapter 25

80. Chapter 26

81. Chapter 27

82. Epilogue

Brilliant Devices

83. Chapter 1

84. Chapter 2

85. Chapter 3

86. Chapter 4

87. Chapter 5

88. Chapter 6

89. Chapter 7

90. Chapter 8

91. Chapter 9

92. Chapter 10

93. Chapter 11

94. Chapter 12

95. Chapter 13

96. Chapter 14

97. Chapter 15

98. Chapter 16

99. Chapter 17

100. Chapter 18

101. Chapter 19

102. Chapter 20

103. Chapter 21

104. Chapter 22

105. Chapter 23

106. Chapter 24

107. Chapter 25

108. Chapter 26

109. Chapter 27

110. Epilogue

Author's Note

Other Books by Shelley Adina

About the Author

1

Introduction

Copyright 2011 Shelley Adina Bates. All rights reserved.

Bundle cover design by Kim Killion.

Cover illustrations by Phat Puppy Art used under license.

Discover other titles by Shelley Adina at www.shelleyadina.com.

shelleyadina@mac.com

http://twitter.com/shelleyadina/

www.facebook.com/shelley.adina

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“Great fun, extremely feel-good reads that make you share all of the protagonists’ journeys and victories … an excellent steampunk series.”

—Fangs for the Fantasy: The latest in urban fantasy from a social justice perspective

“A brave and talented author who looks at the darkness as well as the light.”

—Mary Jo Putney

“Adina manages to lure us into the steampunk era with joy and excitement. Her plotline is strong and the cast of characters are well interwoven. It’s Adina’s vivid descriptions of Victorian London that make you turn the pages.”

—Novel Chatter

I

Lady of Devices

1

London, 1889

To say the explosion rocked the laboratory at St. Cecelia’s Academy for Young Ladies might have overstated the case, but she was still never going to hear the end of it.

Claire Trevelyan closed her eyes as a gobbet of reddish-brown foam dripped off the ceiling and landed squarely on the crown of her head. It dribbled past her ears and onto the pristine sailor collar of her middy blouse, and thence, gravity having its inevitable effect, down the blue seersucker of her uniform’s skirt to the floor.

Shrieking, the other students in the senior Chemistry of the Home class had already flung themselves toward the back of the room and away from the benches directly under the mess. “Ladies!” Professor Grünwald shouted, raising his arms as if to calm the stormy waters, “there is no cause for alarm. Collect yourselves, please.” His gimlet eyes behind their gleaming spectacles pinned Claire in place like a butterfly on a board. “Miss Trevelyan. Did I not, just moments ago, tell you not to add the contents of that dish to your flask?”

“Yes, sir.” She could barely hear herself over the squawking of her classmates.

“Then why did you do it?”

The truth would only net her another grim punishment, but there was no other answer. “To see what would happen, sir.”

“Indeed. I seem to remember you gave Doctor Prescott the same reply after the unfortunate incident with the Tesla coil.” His jaw firmed under its layer of fat. He addressed the back of the room, where the others huddled against the cabinets in which he kept ingredients and equipment. “Ladies, please. Adding peppermint to an infusion of dandelion and burdock will do you no harm. You may adjourn to the powder rooms to rearrange your toilettes if you must.”

Several of the girls stampeded from the room, leaving behind Lady Julia Wellesley, Lady Catherine Montrose, and Miss Gloria Meriwether-Astor, who watched her humiliation with as much wide-eyed delight as if it were the latest flicker at the theater. Claire straightened her spine. She should be used to this. Fortitude was the key.

Another gob of foam landed on her shoulder. Behind her, Lady Catherine stifled a giggle.

“And are you satisfied with your newfound knowledge?” Professor Grünwald was not finished with her yet.

“Yes, sir,” Claire said with complete truth.

“I am delighted to hear it. In future, when I tell you not to do something, I would like the courtesy of obedience. You are here to learn the chemistry of the home, not to engage in silly parlor tricks.”

“But sir, it would be helpful if you had told us why the compounds should not be mixed.”

In the ensuing moment of silence, she heard an indrawn breath of anticipation from the gallery.

“I am sorry to have incommoded you in your quest for information.” His sarcasm dripped as unpleasantly as the substance now forming a sticky mass on her clothes. “By tomorrow morning, you will provide me with one hundred lines stating the following: ‘I will obey instruction and curb my unladylike curiosity.’ Repeat that, please.”

Claire did so in a monotone as faithful as any wax recording.

“Thank you, Miss Trevelyan. You will now go and inform the cleaning staff that their assistance is required here.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you will stay for the remainder of the period and help them.”

Claire clamped her molars down on the urge to further defend herself. “Yes, sir.”

“Ladies, class is dismissed. Thank you for your patience.”

Patience? He was thanking them? Claire kept her face calm above the storm in her heart as she turned toward the door, the heel of her boot slipping several inches in the foam. Lady Catherine giggled again—Claire suspected she couldn’t help herself, being the nervous sort—and the other girls followed her out, careful to keep their clean skirts from touching hers.

“Nicely done, Trevelyan,” Lady Julia Wellesley whispered. “We have a half period free thanks to you.”

“I must say, that brown substance suits you.” Lady Catherine’s overbite became more prominent as she smiled. “It’s the exact color of your hair.”

“Next time, perhaps you’ll be less inclined to show off your superior intellectual powers,” Gloria Meriwether-Astor added, her flat vowels emphasizing a colonial drawl.

Claire tried to keep silent, but this was just too much. She turned to glare at the new heiress from the American Territories, who had fit in with the other girls from the moment of her arrival like an imperious hand in a kid glove. “I don’t show off at all. I—”

“Oh, please,” Lady Julia waved her fingers. “Spare us the false humility. But tell me, how on earth do you expect to attract a husband looking like that?”

“She’s trying to impress old Grünwald.” Lady Catherine giggled. “He’s single.”

He was also forty if he was a day, overweight, and his receding hairline perspired when he was under pressure, which was nearly all the time. Besides which, marrying anyone below the rank of baron was out of the question, never mind a man forced to earn his living by teaching the next generation of society’s glittering lights.

Not that these particular glittering lights wanted to be taught anything but how to embroider a handkerchief or pour a cup of tea. Though if there were a class devoted to the art of landing a titled husband, she had no doubt every one of them would sign up for it and never miss a moment. Of course, Lady Julia could probably teach such a class. Rumor had it that as soon as she descended the platform on graduation day next week, Lord Robert Mount-Batting would go down upon one knee on the lawn and propose. Claire rather doubted that rumor had its facts in order. Lady Julia would never miss her presentation at court in two weeks, nor any of the balls and parties to be held in her honor afterward. If there were to be lawns involved, it would probably be the one at Ascot, or the one at Wellesley House, sometime before the shooting season began in August.

Julia, Catherine, and Claire herself were to be presented to Her Majesty during the same Drawing Room. Claire’s imagination shuddered and refused to venture there. Who knew what fresh humiliation those girls could dream up in that most august company?

Finally ridding herself of the maddening crowd, Claire went to Administration and sent a tube containing Professor Grünwald’s request down to the offices of the staff. No point in cleaning herself up or changing her clothes if she was to be doomed to pushing a mop for the next thirty minutes. This benighted school hadn’t the wit to obtain the services of a mother’s helper to take care of the worst of the mess. Armed with a ladder, mops, and buckets, it took her and the two chars the rest of the period to clean the sticky foam off the ceiling, benches, chairs, and floor of the laboratory.

Thank goodness the professor had retired to his office. She was able to laugh at the chars’ comments on his marital prospects with impunity.

After Claire helped them carry the equipment back to the basement, she changed into her spare uniform in the gymnasium dressing room as fast as she could. Still, she arrived at her French class late with half her blouse’s hem sticking out of the waistband of her skirt, much to the amusement of Lady Julia and Gloria.

“Never mind them,” Emilie Fragonard whispered from the desk behind her as she reached forward and tucked in the offending article. “You’re all right now.”

Dear Emilie. Though her friend’s hair was drawn back in an practical braided bun instead of a flattering pompadour, and her spectacles were, in Claire’s opinion, too heavy for her delicate features and hid her fine eyes, she was the soul of kindness. And kindness, heaven knew, was in short supply at St. Cecelia’s.

After class and before the midday meal, Claire and Emilie took refuge in the dappled shade under a grove of trees on the far side of the lawn. Over the ten-foot granite wall that separated the sheltered young ladies from the bustle of London, the rattle of carriages and jingle of harness could be heard on the road, along with the voices of passers-by and the occasional distinctive chug of a new steam landau. When she heard that sound, Claire could hardly contain the urge to run to the gates and stare. They were such fascinating engines, each one different, yet operating under the same marvelous principles.

“Don’t even think about it.” Emilie’s tone told Claire she’d been caught. “Ladies do not gawk after steam landaus or those who drive them.”

“I don’t care about who drives them. I drive one myself. I just like to look at them.”

“You do not. Drive one, I mean.”

“I do indeed. Gorse is teaching me.”

“Claire Elizabeth Trevelyan!” Emilie put a pale hand against the trunk of the largest of the elms for support. “I thought your escapade with the quadricycle was bad enough. You cannot tell me you are actually piloting one of those dangerous things!”

“They’re not dangerous, if you know their proper operation. Which I do. One’s speed and direction are merely a matter of the correct application of steam. The explosions of the first models are a thing of the past.”

“That’s lucky, knowing how you are about explosions.”

Claire’s good spirits cooled like a fire left too long without fuel. “You heard.”

“The entire school heard. Honestly, dear heart, you’ve got to curb this unhealthy tendency to blow things up.”

“That ridiculous excuse for a professor wouldn’t tell us what would happen. How can I be blamed for the silly man’s stubbornness? If there’s anything I hate, it’s someone telling me ‘don’t’ without saying why.”

“And one must know the reason why for everything.”

“Not everything. But certainly something as simple as why one cannot add a peppermint to dandelion and burdock. One adds peppermint to cookie batter and tea with no harmful effects whatsoever.”

“Thanks to you, everyone in school now knows why. And by breakfast tomorrow, everyone at Heathbourne will, too.”

Heathbourne was the equivalent of St. Cecelia’s on the other side of the square—and where she would have gone had she been born a boy and her father’s heir. “I don’t care about the opinions of schoolboys.”

“You will in a few weeks, when you’re at your come-out ball at Carrick House and none of them ask you to dance.”

“You sound exactly like my mother.” Why had no one told her the bow on the front of her middy blouse was lopsided? She pulled it out and began to retie it.

“In this she’s correct, and you know it. Claire, please consider.” Emilie’s tone became gentle. “It’s a fact universally acknowledged that a young lady of good fortune must make a suitable marriage.”

“Do not quote the mores of our grandmothers’ generation to me. Besides, not every young lady wishes that.” Her own appearance taken care of, she reached over to anchor a celluloid hairpin more securely in Emilie’s bun. If it could not be lovely, at least it should be secure.

“Every one who wishes to be received in good society does. You don’t want to be one of those dreadful Chelsea people, like poor Peony Churchill, do you?”

As a matter of fact, Claire coveted and envied the intellectual explorations found in the salons and lecture halls of the Chelsea set, known in the papers as the Wits. It was led by Mrs. Stanley Churchill, Peony’s mother, and populated by explorers and scientists from the Royal Society of Engineers as well as artists, musicians, and the most independent thinkers of Her Majesty Queen Victoria’s empire. Their philosophy that the intellect trumped the bloodline flew in the face of most of society. But no one could argue that the Prime Minister himself was one of them. The fact that a scientist or explorer could be granted lands and a title when noble bloodlines were getting more inbred and in some cases dying out altogether was an indication which way the wind blew.

And Claire had always loved the wind. Was it mere coincidence that the family estate in Cornwall was called Gwynn Place, from the Cornish plas-an-gwyn, meaning manor of the wind? Perhaps not. Perhaps it was a sign.

A shadow blotted out the sun and she and Emilie looked up to see not a cloud, but an enormous airship passing far overhead. The eleven-thirty packet to Paris had left its mooring mast at Hampstead Heath exactly on time.

Deep in the marble and sandstone halls of the school, a bell rang. “There’s lunch,” she told Emilie, turning from the wonderful sight of the ship and neatly evading the answer to her friend’s question. “Come along or we’ll be late.”

2

As was his habit, Gorse piloted the steam landau up to the steps in the mews behind St. Cecelia’s at precisely three-fifteen. Claire ran to meet him and waited impatiently while he set the brake and went around the front to pull open the thin brass door for her. She allowed him to hand her inside and, with a practiced eye, checked the pressure gauges, the switch positions, and the indicators that told the pilot the levels of coal and water in the boiler.

A hopelessly old-fashioned carriage with the Wellesley family crest on the door rolled up behind them, pulled by two fine chestnuts. Claire could practically feel the stares of envy as Lady Julia and her friends were handed inside.

“Gorse, please, may I—”

“No, miss. The Viscount would have my head were I to allow you to drive this beast in front of those ladies.”

What a triumph it would be! “But Gorse—”

“Miss, do not press me, I beg you.”

Only consideration for his feelings kept her silent until they were around the corner and halfway down an alley more suited to the collection of trash than the driving of the latest in engines. “Now may I, Gorse?”

“Yes, miss. Remember what I told you about releasing the brake. She’ll leap ahead because she’s been parked and had a chance to build a bit of a head up.”

Claire stepped out without assistance and collected her canvas driving coat from under the folding seat in the rear. Dear Gorse. He insisted on referring to the landau as she, as though it were an elegantly built horse made of brass, iron, and glass. But then, people referred to airships as she, did they not? The steam landau did have a mind of her own, like a woman of independent thought, that was certain.

She settled into the driving seat as he climbed in on her left. “Gorse, it’s a lovely day. We must have the top down.”

“Of course, miss.”

She braced both feet on the floor and grasped the lever on the side of her seat. As she leaned her weight on it and drew it back, the articulated top of the landau ratcheted back with the whispering sound of a train pulling into a station. It folded itself into a slot behind them like a golden metal fan, and she and Gorse let the glass windows down.

Ahhhhh. Freedom and the wind in her face.

“Mind what I said about the brake, miss. And don’t forget these.” He handed her a set of driving goggles with a tilt-down telescopic lens to see at greater distance should she need to.

“I remember.” It was the work of a moment to remove her broad-brimmed hat and slip the goggles over her eyes to protect them not only from the fug of London’s coal fires, but from the very wind of their going. Hat once more in place, she released the brake and the needles on the gauges jumped. Working the brake and the acceleration pedals simultaneously, she controlled the landau’s urge to surge ahead until it worked off its head of steam, bowling smartly down the alley and using the horizontal steering lever to turn the corner onto Curzon Street as smoothly as if she hadn’t learned to make turns just two weeks ago.

“Well done, miss. Mind that covered conveyance, there. He’s stopping.”

“I see him.” She steered around the enormous lorry filled with lengths of wood for the hotel being constructed on the corner. A cacophony of sound rose around her, from the hammers of the carpenters to the shouts of drivers warning off other people’s horses, to the ting of a bell on a shop door opening as they passed.

Their progress slowed to the point that a gaggle of ragamuffins was able to surround the landau and jog alongside it. “Please, miss, have you a halfpenny to spare? Please, miss, we’re hungry.”

Gorse’s jaw set. “Shove off, you lot,” he snapped. “Get your grubby paws off this engine!”

To her horror, Claire saw that two of the filthy children were girls of not more than ten. Had they parents? Anyone to look after them? She applied the brake and the landau slowed even further. Digging in the bottom of her school bag, she located a few pence and tossed them to the girls. With shrieks of delight, the little crowd vanished into the warren of alleys behind the construction site.

“Begging your pardon, miss, but you should not encourage beggars.” Gorse gazed in the direction they had taken. “It only encourages them to steal from you.”

“I gave those pennies voluntarily.” She applied steam to the accelerator and they resumed their pace. “And they did look very thin.”

Gorse was far too polite to argue with her, even if he was probably right. Didn’t the Good Book say that if a person gave a cup of cold water to someone in need, it was the same as giving it to our Lord? She wanted for nothing … well, nothing of a material kind, at least. Those pennies rolling around in the bottom of her bag would make themselves useful in filling a hungry stomach.

Claire kept a wary eye on the broad avenue in front of her. Large intersections such as the one at Park Lane still intimidated her just a trifle, but with Gorse’s patient coaching, they had become easier, especially as she learned to look for spooked horses and impatient young men coming in the other direction. She collected hoots and greetings from one or two of these, but as long as they weren’t swearing at her for cutting them off, she was content to blissfully ignore their shouts for her attention.

Not many women knew how to pilot an engine, much less one as pretty as her father’s.

And not only pilot it, but suss out the secrets of its operation. Every Saturday morning while the household slept, she and Gorse would examine the inner workings under the landau’s gleaming covers. She learned how to fill the coal hopper and top up the boiler. How to clean out the piping and grease the hard-working pistons. She even learned how to balance the delicate platforms that took the weight of coal and water and informed the gauges how much each contained.

Gorse, being a man of intellect and inner resources, knew as much about the physics of steam as any professor at St. Cecelia’s. “My grandmother’s first cousin on her father’s side was Richard Trevithick, the great Cornish engineer,” he’d told her one day at the beginning of their secret association. “Engineering runs in our family, you might say. I’d rather tinker with this fine piece of work than run one of his lordship’s tin mines, and that’s a fact.”

Claire deeply regretted the inanity of St. Cecelia’s curriculum, which dictated that young ladies should learn dancing, deportment, languages, and the chemistry of the kitchen and cookery rather than practical things like engineering and the operation of steam engines. Who cared how the cake rose? It would do so despite your knowledge of its chemistry, as long as you put the right ingredients into it and applied the right amount of heat. Getting oneself around the country under one’s own power—flying upon the ground at the speed of the wind itself—now, that was something worth teaching.

But of course her opinion signified nothing, at school or at home.

A block from Wilton Crescent, the elegant street in Belgravia where Carrick House was situated, she piloted the landau to a grassy verge, where the tracks of wheels told the educated eye this was where such an engine had stopped before. Divesting herself of her driving rig, she and Gorse exchanged places and a few minutes later, arrived with the utmost decorum at the shiny black rear doors of Viscount and Lady St. Ives’ home while in town.

“Thank you, Gorse. See you tomorrow.”

“Yes, miss. And may I say, well done.”

Glowing, she climbed the scrubbed steps and let herself into the rear hall. To her right, swinging doors opened into the kitchens, already bustling with preparations for dinner, which was served precisely at eight on the evenings her parents were at home. To her left were offices and the quarters of the senior staff. The housemaids had their rooms on the fourth floor. She climbed the stairs to the second level, where cool marble floors gleamed and the scents of wax and the freesias in their Chinese vase on the hall table greeted her in a silent benediction.

There was much to be said for silence. Perhaps Mama had not yet returned from paying her afternoon calls.

“Claire? Is that you?”

Claire’s chest deflated in a sigh. It had been too much to hope that she could escape to her room unnoticed. “Yes, Mama.”

“I wish to speak to you. In the morning room, please.” The tightness in her mother’s tone was her first warning. Like the yellow arc on the pressure gauge, it indicated that if something were not done immediately, the consequences could be dire.

The happy glow of a fine afternoon’s drive faded. In point of fact, the second brightest spot in this otherwise dreadful day had been the explosion.

Which she had no doubt at all was to be the subject of the next quarter of an hour.

3

Lady St. Ives sat upon the forest-green brocade couch, its width sufficient to accommodate the bustles and petticoats of the fashionable, in the forefront of which she maintained a dashing lead. Her navy-and-white striped silk skirts were overlaid by a polonaise of navy damask trimmed in gold ruching, and gold rosettes drew the eye to a square neckline and the statuesque figure that was the envy of many a dumpier matron.

The fact that Claire had inherited her father’s height but not her mother’s figure, her father’s unruly auburn mane and not her mother’s blonde curls, was a continuing source of despair. Only in the last year or two had she given up hope of developing differently than unpleasant reality suggested. The release of that last hope had been painful, contributing directly to her reluctance to be made a show of during the Season.

And speaking of unpleasant reality …

“Sit down, Claire. How did you enjoy your classes today?”

Was this a trick question, set to trap the unwary? “Very well, Mama.”

“So much so that you stayed late?”

She and Gorse had indeed taken a somewhat circuitous route home in order to practice right turns, but not enough to cause alarm. “I’m sorry, Mama?”

“I have just had a tube from Madame du Barry informing me that you did not appear for your appointment at four o’clock.”

Madame du Barry. Madame du … oh. “But the fittings aren’t until tomorrow.”

For the second time that day, she was pinned in place by an unrelenting blue gaze. “They were today.” A narrow brass mailing tube stood on the table, obviously fresh from the vacuum delivery system that snaked beneath London like a veritable Medusa of communication. Lady St. Ives tapped the rolled-up sheet of paper that had come inside it against the palm of her hand. “Do you have any idea how much effort I put into securing your appointment with her? Do you know how sought-after she is? Why, your appointment followed directly after that of Princess Beatrice. Princess Beatrice, Claire!”

“I’m so sorry, Mama. I honestly thought it was tomorrow.” How could she think about something as mundane as a dress fitting when the day had been such a disaster? A tube from Professor Grünwald could only be a matter of time. She should really be going about in a smock and boots. Think of the wear and tear she might save the stylish efforts of people like Madame du Barry.

“As it is, we will barely be able to get another fitting before your graduation, and I shudder to think what I will do if she decides to stop work on your presentation gown. Honestly, dear, is it so difficult to keep important things in mind? You are such a twitterpate sometimes—I really wonder if your education at St. Cecelia’s is having any effect at all.”

“I’m getting top marks in French and German,” Claire offered meekly.

“That will serve you well should you need to direct a staff in those languages. But in order to have a staff, you must have a home of your own. To have a home of your own, you must attract a husband of wealth and standing. And in order to attract a husband, you must yourself be attractive. How can you do that if you miss appointments with your modiste?”

Claire hoped her future happiness did not depend solely on a designer’s skill with tapes and drapery. “I would hope the man I marry would be attracted to my mind, not the efforts of my dressmaker.”

“Don’t be impertinent. I am quite serious.” That, sadly, was true. “You know Papa frowns when you talk like a Wit.” But Papa was not here. He had been spending long hours in the House of Lords, arguing with people about investing in the combustion engine. She supposed gentlemen had to spend their time doing something, but goodness, how foolish.

Mama was speaking again. “… are your dance lessons progressing?”

“The dance master is pleased.” Perhaps she could make her smile after all. “Twelve new variations of the mazurka are the rage this Season, and we have all learned them.”

“I am happy to hear it. At least I will not have to worry on that account. In the last report I had from your headmistress, she said you actually attain something akin to grace in the ballroom. Perhaps your debut will be a success after all.”

Claire gave the expected reply. “I hope so, Mama.”

The mother’s helper nosed through the open door, its busy brushes cleaning up particles of dirt and dust from both the polished hardwood and the Turkish rug. The size of a loaf of bread and made of gleaming brass, its tiny engine ran on the kinetick energy produced by its perpetual motion. What a help such a device would have been this afternoon.

“Claire, pay attention. I will do all I can to present you to the best society, but it is your charm, your wit, your—” Lady St. Ives seemed to change her mind about the next word. “—your ability to make yourself attractive to eligible partners that will determine your success.”

Oh happy thought. “Yes, Mama.”

“On that subject, we have no time to lose. We shall begin holding intimate parties for select guests, as a kind of prelude to your debut.”

“But Mama, you’ve said yourself I cannot go into society until after I’m presented.” Thank heaven.

“Did I say grand balls? I did not. I said intimate parties here at home, such as the ones I have planned for Friday, Saturday, and Tuesday, and we will of course be part of the progressive dinner on Friday night, after the graduation ceremony. If you had managed to remember your fitting, you would have had new dresses for these occasions. As it is, you will have to make do with something you’ve already worn, and I hope the new one is ready for next Friday.”

Talk of clothes was wearing her out. “I have several pretty dresses, Mama.” They were practically new, invitations from Wellesley House and Astor Place having not exactly flowed in.

“I believe the blue satin with the asymmetrical drape and Alençon lace will flatter your eyes and figure the best. This Friday we will have a number of young people in for supper and cards.” Lady St. Ives rose and took a piece of paper from her escritoire. Sensing her movement with the statick repulsion that kept it from bumping into furniture, the mother’s helper swerved to avoid her feet. “Look over the guest list and tell me if you wish to add anyone. Your papa may have to leave the card party before supper, so we must make up our numbers.”

Claire scanned the list. Lady Julia Wellesley. Miss Gloria Meriwether-Astor. Peter Livingston, Baron Bryce. Lady Catherine Montrose. The Marquess of Blatchley. Lord James Selwyn.

Oh, dear. Except for the last, who was unknown to her and therefore still held out hope for congeniality, the list was nothing short of torture. “You’ve left off Emilie Fragonard, Mama.”

“Darling, I was hoping for someone of the sterner sex. Besides, her great-uncle was an artist.”

“She is my closest friend, and her grandfather on her mother’s side is an earl.”

Reluctantly, her mother set pen to paper. “I had forgotten that.”

Claire bit back an unladylike snort. Her mother’s memory was more reliable than Debrett’s, and certainly contained more detail. Debrett’s, after all, did not list the annual incomes of the peers and their heirs.

“And if we are only playing cards, I should like to invite Peony Churchill and her mother, Mrs. Stanley Churchill.”

Lady St. Ives stared at her. “What an outlandish thing to call one’s daughter.”

Claire had not actually exchanged more than a few shy sentences with the offspring of her idol. Peony did not mix in the circles Claire’s mother encouraged, and word would travel fast if Claire sought her out. However, an invitation to Carrick House might open doors in Chelsea, if she could only get this past her mother.

“The name suits her. She is a girl of a certain … avoirdupois.”

“But her family? Her connections? Are they related to the Spencer Churchills?”

“I … I do not know. It is possible.”

“I suggest we find out, then.” Her mother laid down her fountain pen and rose from the writing desk.

“But Mama, I should like you to receive her. She must be of good family, or she would not be going to St. Cecelia’s.”

“Not so. There are far too many offspring of engineers and explorers trying to enroll in that school. It is only a matter of time before money and dubious accomplishment gains entrance to doors that have before only opened to breeding. I’m really rather glad that it is your last year there.”

“Please, Mama. It is only two ladies. Surely they will not set our party at odds.”

“I shall find out if they are connected with the Spencers. If they are, I will welcome them gladly.”

And if they are not … Claire heard the words as clearly as if they had been spoken aloud. Even if Claire begged her on her knees, she doubted Lady St. Ives would receive a woman who had helped to map the Niger River, and whose discoveries of diamond deposits in the Canadas had set the South African financiers of the City on their collective ear. She would not be permitted to even speak to Peony Churchill in the corridors at school, and all her tentative efforts to that end would be for naught.

Frustrated, Claire bit her lip and changed the subject to one that would please her mother. “And how is my little brother today? Has he managed to speak a complete sentence yet?”

Lady St. Ives’ features lost their pinched look and softened into a smile. “He has indeed. His nanny tells me she has never seen such a forward child.”

“I shall go see him at once.”

Her fingers had barely touched the door handle when her mother said, “Claire?” She turned. “What is that in your hair?”

If only she’d gone to see the baby before this interview! Then she could have passed it off somehow on him. “It is dried infusion of dandelion and burdock, Mama. I had an accident in Chemistry of the Home.”

Lady St. Ives sighed and followed her to the door. “What am I going to do with you? Come and see your brother. It seems you are only fit to play with babies.”

Claire could think of worse ways to spend an evening. Writing one hundred lines, for instance. What a lucky thing that Emilie had perfected her Multiple Nib Scrivener for this very purpose. With as many as ten pens affixed to an adjustable arm, Claire only had to write Professor Grünwald’s odious sentence ten times.

Thank heaven for friends who could be depended on.

4

“I’m so pleased to have been invited, Lady St. Ives.” Emilie sounded breathless as she allowed the maid to take her coat and dipped a curtsey to Claire’s mother. Perhaps Emilie’s corset was laced too tightly. Or perhaps it was merely because invitations did not come her way that often.

“We are pleased you could come.” She even sounded as if she meant it, though Claire would expect nothing less from her mother, whose manners were impeccable.

She gave her friend a hug and whispered, “Thank heaven you’re here. I couldn’t bear it otherwise. We’re partners for bridge.”

Emilie allowed herself to be steered into the parlor, while Claire braced herself to greet the next arrival. Lady Julia greeted her as if they were best friends, as did Lady Catherine. Feeling as false as Julia’s chignon, Claire pasted on a smile and kissed the air near their cheeks. They would all be taking the stage at Covent Garden at this rate.

“What an unusual gown, Catherine,” she said with complete sincerity, taking in the pink silk creation trimmed within an inch of its life. One could hardly see where the dress left off and Catherine began. “Is it new?”

“Delivered just this afternoon, in fact,” Catherine said, obviously pleased at the compliment. “I love Madame du Barry’s creations, don’t you? And these rows of lace trim—are they not the very latest?”

“Indeed,” Julia murmured. “Claire, I believe you wore that blue to the Countess of Inglewood’s tea last month, did you not?”

Claire was saved from a reply by the arrival of a tall young man who caused the melee in the hall to cease for all of five seconds while the young ladies measured his eligibility from head to foot.

“Lord James Selwyn.” Penwith announced him and took his top hat and stick before the young man bowed to Claire’s parents.

“I am delighted to see you both again. It was such a pleasure to meet you at Lady Belmont’s ball.” His hair was close-cropped and reddish-gold, and he wore a neatly trimmed beard that gave him a slightly rakish air. With such a twinkle in those hazel eyes, Claire could almost see him with a gold earring and a cutlass.

“Selwyn.” Viscount St. Ives shook his hand, and the newcomer kissed the back of Lady St. Ives’s white kid glove as if he were a cavalier from a bygone age. When Claire and the other young ladies had been introduced, the viscount said, “Please join us in the parlor—I believe our party is now complete. I must be on my way to—”

“Not quite, Papa,” Claire said. “Mrs. Churchill and Peony have yet to arrive.”

“Peony?” Lady Julia looked over her shoulder, interrupted, Claire was certain, in the very act of slipping a chummy hand into the crook of Lord James’s elbow as they entered the parlor together. “Peony Churchill is coming?”

“She accepted my invitation,” Claire said. “I hope they are able to come.”

“Really.” Julia glanced at Catherine and Gloria. “How endlessly entertaining.” The little group closed ranks around Lord James and moved into the other room, already whispering.

Claire had an uncomfortable ten minutes while playing the hostess, offering her guests tea and lemonade as they made small talk before dinner. Would Peony and her mother come at all? If they did, would Julia and the rest behave, or find some way to embarrass Peony to the point where she would never speak to Claire again? When the doorbell finally rang, she wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or even more anxious.

She took Peony’s camel coat with its arabesques of black soutache braid herself, and handed it to Penwith. “I’m so glad you could come.” Peony’s fingers were warm in her own, her dark hair piled high in a Romanesque coronet, her black-eyed gaze missing nothing. “And your mother?” She glanced behind her, but Penwith had already closed the door.

“She sends her regrets. A matter came up in Parliament and she had to organize a protest at the drop of a hat.”

Oh, my. Her admiration for Mrs. Churchill grew in direct proportion to her hope that Lady St. Ives had not heard. “Well, you are here and of that I’m very glad. What a stunning dress.” The brocade, a deep wine red most unsuitable for an unmarried girl, was cut so cleverly plain that it could only have come from one place. “Is it from the American Territories?”

“What a good eye you have. Yes. Mama had it sent from New York on the transatlantic airship. She says I must have at least one new dress for this Season. It’s a good thing I know she’s not trying to marry me off.”

“Lucky you,” Claire breathed before she could stop herself. “I mean—that is to say—won’t you come into the parlor?”

She introduced Peony to her parents, careful to mention that Mrs. Churchill had been unavoidably detained without giving details. Her mother then took over the introductions, standing in Mrs. Churchill’s place as she made Peony known to the gentlemen. Out of the corner of her eye, Claire watched as her mother led Peony over to the trio of girls on the sofa.

“Are you to make your bows in two weeks, then, along with the other girls?” A male voice made her jump, and she turned to see Lord James in front of her, turning a crystal glass of something amber in his fingers.

Peony said something, and the girls tittered. “I—yes, I am.” Oh, dear. Did Peony need help? She cast around for a polite way to get rid of him. Small talk usually worked. “Are you but recently come to Town?”

“I’ve been here since Easter. I’m involved in a matter of business that may take me to the American Territories in the autumn.”

“Oh?” What was Lady Julia saying now, with such a smile?

“Yes. My business partner and I have a scheme to—”

“I do beg your pardon, Lord James. Miss Churchill has nothing to drink. She will think me a poor hostess.”

With another smile, he bowed and turned to speak to Peter Livingston, who was all of nineteen and some kind of relation to him, though how her mother had ferreted that out was a mystery. Claire crossed the room to the punch bowl and ladled some into a cup.

“Lemonade, Peony?”

“Thank you.”

Lady Julia smiled with the soulless precision of an automaton. “I was just saying to Peony how trim this cuirass cut makes her look. And dark colors, you know, fool the eye into believing one’s weight is less than it is.”

“As opposed to overtrimming, which increases the silhouette by several inches at least,” Peony said with lazy good humor. Lady Catherine turned pale and looked down at her pink bodice.

“Did you make your dress?” Gloria inquired. “Such skill. I compliment you.”

“Your compliments are misplaced, I’m afraid. My mother ordered it from New York. I thought you might have recognized the designer, since you appear to be wearing one of his creations yourself.”

“Ah,” Lady Julia said. “The American Territories.” The very tone of her voice suggested that Peony’s gown had been constructed by savage tribes, somewhere on a trackless plain. “Mrs. Churchill, I hear, has many connections there. Though not with families such as dear Gloria’s, I believe?”

“She has friends all over the globe,” Peony said. “It’s difficult to keep track.”

“My mother beckons us,” Claire said desperately. “Shall we go in to dinner?”

Lady St. Ives, much to Claire’s relief, had placed Julia between Catherine and Blatchley, and Gloria next to Lord James, who spent the entire meal talking with her about the American Territories. That left Claire between Peony and Peter, with Emilie on his other side—a happy situation indeed. The only person in London who knew Emilie harbored a certain tendre for the young gentleman was Claire, and so it was no burden at all to leave him in conversation with her and turn her attention to making Peony more comfortable.

Though she certainly did not show signs of discomfort. Rather, Peony seemed amused at the efforts of the other girls to patronize and belittle her. How did one come to be that strong within oneself? Was it all in having a role model like Mrs. Churchill? No, that could not be it. Lady St. Ives was just as strong in her own way, leader of society as she was. Why, she had taken tea with Her Majesty herself with no more than a slight paling of the skin, which only served to make her more lovely. No, it must be something else. And there was no way Claire could ask Peony something so personal, especially not here at the supper table with all these people within earshot.

Besides, what if Peony laughed? Claire could bear any number of things, but not the laughter of someone she admired. The thought of it was enough to make her keep their conversation to very surface subjects, with the result that Peony probably thought her a mindless ninny.

Breaking up into parties of four or six for cards brought no relief. It was not until Peony took the chair next to her that Claire realized what she had in mind.

“Now, then,” Peony said, shuffling the cards as expertly as the riverboat captain that Claire and Emilie had sighed over in Heart of the Mississippi, a romantic flicker her mother would never have allowed her to watch had she known about it. “Who wants to learn how to play poker?”

“What on earth is that?” Emilie looked puzzled. “Something to do with fireplace tools?”

Lord James leaned in, his polite smile broadening to an honest grin. “It’s a card game the cowboys play in the Wild West,” he said. “Miss Churchill, you surprise me.”

“I shock you, you mean.” Peony fanned the cards at him so that they made a rude noise. “Well? Are you going to join me, or will your high principles relegate you to observation only?”

“My principles aren’t that high.” Lord James snagged the sleeve of his cousin. “Livingston. Join us. Miss Churchill is going to teach us a card game.”

“We need something to bet with,” Peony said, “since I don’t imagine you’re willing to part with the contents of your pocketbooks in front of her ladyship.”

Claire cast around the room. “Will sugar cubes do? Or toothpicks?”

Peony beamed at her. “Toothpicks would be perfect. And we need one more player.”

“I’ll join you.” Gloria, who was clearly not letting Lord James out of her sight even for the space of a card game, seated herself gracefully in the remaining chair, her cream silk skirts pooling around her in a casually studied manner.

Claire fetched a silver box full of toothpicks, and Peony explained the rules as she dealt the cards. Hm. It didn’t sound too hard. The point seemed to be less what was in one’s hand than in how one presented oneself to the rest of the players. Claire might not possess many skills, but putting a good face forward, no matter how she felt, was one of them.

Before long, the stack of toothpicks in front of her was nearly as substantial as the one in front of Peony. “Miss Trevelyan, you have cleaned me out.” Lord James laid down his cards. “I salute you and pass.”

Since Gloria and Livingston had declared themselves out within minutes of beginning, this left only Emilie with an active hand. And even that did not last much longer. Within five minutes, Peony had won, which surprised no one.

“I, too, salute a worthy opponent,” she said to Claire with a smile. “Beginner’s luck?”

“I think not,” Livingston put in. “Not for so sustained a period. She almost had you.”

“She did,” Peony nodded. “Shall we play again?”

“Indeed not.” Julia materialized behind Lord James’s shoulder. “Gloria, Lord James, I claim you both for my table and a hand of Patience.”

Lord James rose without complaint, but as he pushed in his chair, his rakish gaze met Claire’s. “I look forward to a rematch,” he said. “Perhaps it was a case of luck, not skill.”

Claire looked him in the eye. How dared he cast aspersions on her ability in her own parlor? “A lady of resources makes her own luck. Do you not agree, Lord James?”

He laughed and tapped the back of the chair with his palm, as if it were the invisible shoulder of a companion. “She does indeed, Miss Trevelyan. She does indeed.”

5

“I met a girl this evening.”

Andrew Malvern, B.S., R.S.E., looked up as his best friend, still in black tie, walked into the laboratory that filled the entire loft of their warehouse. “You are always meeting girls. Come over here and tell me what you think of this.”

Selwyn joined him and leveled his appraising gaze at the tempered glass chamber with its brass fittings and tubing. “Andrew. It looks exactly the same as it did yesterday when you showed it to me. And she wasn’t just any girl. She was St. Ives’s daughter.”

“It isn’t the same.” Andrew flipped up a lever and ten pounds of coal rattled down a flume and into the chamber. “Look, from here I can control exactly how much current passes through the coal, and how much gas. I’ve been waiting all evening to show you.”

“I was delayed by a game of poker.”

Poker? Andrew focused on James’s twinkling eyes. “I thought you said you were going to Carrick House for supper and cards.”

“I did. And a little baggage called Peony Churchill taught a few of us how to play. She says she learned in the American Territories but I find that very hard to believe.”

“Peony? Not Isabel Churchill’s daughter?”

“The very one. In Viscount St. Ives’s sacrosanct parlor, no less. Isabel, regrettably, was not there, or you could have read about the resulting fracas in the Times tomorrow.”

“We may yet. I’ve already had a tube from Cadbury at the Royal Society of Engineers about the demonstration this evening at Whitehall. Apparently there is unrest among the good English folk who have invested their life savings in the Persia-Albion Petroleum Company. The Peers could barely get past the door to vote.”

James snorted. “Fools. Their feeble combustion engines are too unstable, and no one can seem to make them otherwise, no matter how many exhibitions they put on at the Crystal Palace. Steam is the technology that will continue to power the world.”

“Which is why I draw your attention to this chamber.” He handed James a pair of goggles with lenses shaded to a deep brown. “Put these on and watch.”

Andrew put on his own goggles, then pressed two levers. The chamber began to hum. When he pulled on a third, a thin stream of green gas entered the chamber from the top, which condensed to a solid immediately on contact with the coal. The hum intensified and suddenly a brilliant flash exploded within, as though lightning had been generated from the walls of the chamber itself.

In point of fact, it was pure electrick current. “You see? The powerful charge forces the gas into the coal, enhancing its combustion power.” Andrew allowed the chamber to power down, and reached in with a gloved hand to retrieve a piece of the supercharged coal. “Put this in a boiler, and you’ll only—”

The piece of coal crumbled to bits.

James peered at it, then removed the goggles to look even more closely. “Is it supposed to do that?”

Andrew’s hand closed in a fist of frustration. Through the leather, he could feel particles of coal grinding together in his palm. “Of course it’s not supposed to do that. All my calculations indicated the gas would harden the coal, enhancing its propensity to burn longer, thus allowing the steam trains to travel further before taking on more.”

“I’d have another go at those calculations.”

Andrew struggled to conceal the disappointment and—yes—humiliation warring inside his belly at this ignominious conclusion to an experiment he’d been working on for weeks. “Are you laughing at me?”

“Indeed not.” He put an arm around Andrew’s shoulders. “I haven’t your talent for figures and physics. I’m just the idea man and the financier of this enterprise. We’ll find the correct combination of elements, never fear.”

“I know we will.” Andrew’s shoulders slumped while he regarded the recalcitrant chamber. “But time is of the essence. The world is moving quickly.”

“I have complete faith in our ability to match its pace, Andrew. This invention will make our fortune. Every steam company and builder of trains will be on our doorstep, clamoring for a license for this process. Every railyard will have a man educated in how to operate the equipment. Why, these chambers will become so vital to the railroad industry that entire companies will be formed just to manufacture them.”

Andrew allowed himself a moment to take in the grand vista of James’s vision. This was what he needed in a partner—a man who could see beyond the confines of a compression chamber to the horizon of a future limited only by their abilities and dreams.

“You are right.” He removed his gloves and laid them aside, and slipped the lead-lined leather apron off. His body felt strangely light without its familiar protective weight. “Come. I will pour us each a drink and you can tell me about this girl.”

The thick planks of the loft floor sounded hollow under their feet as they walked to Andrew’s spacious office with its single skylight, its ocular aperture filled now with a frosting of stars. He lit both lamps on the desk and rolled up a set of drawings for the compression chamber to make room for the bottle and two glasses from the sideboard.

James poured slightly more than two fingers of Glenlivet and handed it to Andrew. “You look as though you need it, after such a disappointment.”

The fiery liquor burned its way down with the fierceness of regret. “I will recover, and, as you say, have another go. But enough of that. I am happy your supper party was a success. Particularly since I had to talk you into it.”

“The company of simpering schoolgirls is not usually to my taste,” James admitted. “But they are to graduate next week, and be presented the week after. I look upon it rather as a preview showing, without the tedious competition of all the other young bucks. Blatchley is family, of course, and Bryce is civil enough. Between the two of them they make one active human brain.”

Andrew snorted with laughter and the whiskey went down sideways, causing him to cough. “Bloods, are they?” he inquired when he recovered.

“Tiresomely so. My esteemed cousin is not even aware there is an expedition returning from the Amazon, much less who leads it. And to Bryce, an airship has less meaning passing overhead than a cloud. He views it not as the crowning achievement of human engineering, but simply as something that gets in the way.”

“Until he wants to go to Paris.” Andrew admired the lamplight through the peat-colored lens of the whiskey. “Then he might view it differently.”

“Not he. A coach and a ferry, I’m afraid.”

Andrew made a face. “Poor man. Imagine living inside his skull.”

“I cannot. Let us return to a happier topic—the ladies. Miss Peony Churchill is a pistol.”

“I thought it was the Honorable you were interested in.”

“Andrew, you benighted sod, there are girls you look at with an eye to marriage, and girls you look at simply with an eye. For the sheer pleasure of it.”

Andrew frowned. “I would not say that in Mrs. Stanley Churchill’s hearing. You’ll find yourself cleft in two by one of the foreign blades they say she collects.”

“I kept my thoughts to myself, never fear. But the baggage is a toothsome eyeful, and that’s a fact.”

“James, your mother must be rolling in her grave. Do not say such things about a young lady of such a brilliant family.”

“She is going to be just like her fearsome mother, I tell you. And if a lady does not want to be talked of or looked at, she should not lead such a public life.”

Since when did a life led in the pursuit of knowledge entitle one to be sniggered at like a Whitechapel doxy? “I will not have you speak of Peony or of Mrs. Churchill that way. You know as well as I the latter is a champion of scientific inquiry, and she has the ear of the Prime Minister as well. We would be lucky to attract her notice, James. Why, a word from her could open doors throughout the ranks of better placed—and better funded—men than we.”

James had the grace to look abashed. “You are right. I’m sorry.” He cleared his throat and poured himself another finger. “But the fact is that Miss Churchill is a most unusual girl. The Wellesley girl and that horse-faced Montrose chit paled in comparison. Looking at the two of them I was reminded of nothing more than a row of meringues, baked in pastel colors and put on display in a confectioner’s case.”

“But the St. Ives girl? She is not a meringue? I confess I’ve not heard of her or seen her out in company.” Andrew welcomed the turn of the conversation back into more normal channels. He and James disagreed often in matters of physics or chemistry or philosophy, but not in matters of the heart.

Come to think of it, he could not remember ever having discussed matters of the heart with him before. A strange and sensitive topic, to be sure, and one not amenable to the tromping feet of careless and inexperienced men. Surely such territory belonged to women better equipped to explore it.

“You? Go out in company?” James scoffed. “If a lady doesn’t come to a lecture or take a stroll through the exhibitions at the Crystal Palace, you wouldn’t know she existed.” Andrew acknowledged the truth of this with an inclination of his head. “Miss Claire Trevelyan could be something to look at if she grew a spine and possessed some decent conversation,” James went on. “Fortunately, both faults can be easily rectified. In fact, I believe she hides the latter out of fear of her redoubtable mother. But what really drew my attention was the fact that she beat me at poker.”

Andrew raised his eyebrows. “Did she, now? How unladylike of her.”

“The young lady is a regular card shark. And on her first attempt, too. This leads me to believe there must be a mind lurking behind those big gray eyes.”

“If you are noticing the color of her eyes, my dear friend, there is no hope for you.” Andrew put down his empty glass. “Allow me to be the first to offer you my congratulations.”

Lord James Selwyn knocked back the last of his whiskey and grinned. “All in good time, Andrew. Like a perfect peach ripening upon an espalier, these things cannot be rushed.”

Andrew thought of his compression chamber, cold and thwarted, behind him in the laboratory. As always, James was right. But time was as precious a commodity as money, these days. In fact, as far as he was concerned, they were one and the same.

6

The sun beamed down upon Claire’s face like a benediction—one that would cause an unfortunate outbreak of freckles if she did not get off this stage in the next five minutes.

“The Honorable Claire Trevelyan, firsts in mathematics and languages, and the winner of Her Royal Highness the Princess Alice’s medal for best essay in German!”

Claire stepped forward to shake the hand of the dean of St. Cecelia’s, and took the leather-bound folder that held her diploma. At last, the precious sheet of vellum was hers, with its red wax seal bearing the school’s crest. Around her neck, the dean hung a gold medal the size of a guinea on a purple ribbon. It settled against her chest, heavy as validation. She doubted that Princess Alice had actually read her essay, which was an examination of Herr Emil Brucker’s new design for a four-piston steam landau. But it was most gratifying to have won, and to see the pride on her mother’s face as she and young Nicholas’s nanny watched her descend the stairs and make her way back to her seat in the front rows of chairs arranged on the school lawn.

Her father was supposed to be here. Half the reason she had written about the steam landau was so that he would be tempted to read her prizewinning essay, be astounded at the depth of her knowledge, and allow her to drive his landau with his full permission. She had trodden a long and difficult road of umlauts and consonants and polysyllabic compounds, all for nothing.

But no. A lady of spirit did not despair. There was always tomorrow, when surely she could prevail upon him to take a moment to read the essay, even if he hadn’t seen her receive the medal. She could always wear it down to breakfast.

When the ceremony finally ended—Lady Julia having taken the seniors’ prize for congeniality and Emilie having captured the overall academics trophy—she joined her mother and was enveloped in a perfumed hug.

“I am so proud of you, dearest,” she said, pulling back to look at Claire as though she hadn’t seen her in years and was surprised at how much she’d grown. “I had no idea you’d written an essay in German.”

“You can read it if you like. It’s about—”

“Heavens, dear. French was bad enough for me. German was insurmountable. I congratulate you.”

“I hope Papa will read it. I had hoped he would be here.”

A shadow passed across her mother’s face. “Your papa is detained in the Lords. He has been spending many long hours there, working for the good of the country, for which you should be proud of him and not wishing him here for your own selfish reasons.”

Claire did not think that wishing one’s parents to see one’s graduation was so very selfish. Well, perhaps only a little. “I hope when I graduate from the university he will be able to come.”

“I’m sure he—what?”

“The university, Mama. I would like to attend Oxford in the fall and study one of the sciences.” That was a very vague way of putting it. Claire wanted to study engineering.

Lady St. Ives stared at her as if she’d never seen her before. “What nonsense is this, child?”

Perhaps she should have led up to this more gradually. Spent some time softening her mother up and getting her used to the idea. But since academics were in the air and it was such a happy day, the words had popped out before she had a chance to consider them more carefully.

Considered or not, words failed her altogether at the sight of her mother’s face.

“You will put such ridiculous ideas out of your head at once. You are to have your Season, accept a suitable young man, and be exchanging wedding vows by autumn.” She seized Claire’s arm while the nanny, carrying her baby brother, trailed them across the lawn. “University. Great Caesar’s ghost. What outlandish thing will you shame me with next?”

“There is no shame in a university education,” Claire persisted with the sinking feeling that she spoke her words into the ether, to vanish forever. “I do not wish to be married so soon. I wish to have a career, like—”

“Like whom?” At the gate, Lady St. Ives rounded on her. “Like that Churchill creature?”

“Mrs. Churchill is admired by civilized people on three continents,” Claire said as steadily as she could.

“Isabel Churchill is a self-aggrandizing, grandstanding woman who deserted her family and prospects to go gallivanting into the wilderness with other people’s money. I will not permit you to use her as a model for success in the feminine sphere.”

Claire fell back a step, as if the very words had slapped her.

“You may well be shocked. She is a Wit of the very worst degree, and I very much regret receiving her daughter into our home last week. She is not related to the Spencer Churchills at all. I had been misinformed.”

“You just don’t like her because she’s not a Blood.”

“Do not speak as if you were a silly schoolgirl any longer. Come. We must get you home in time to dress for your reception and the salon at Wellesley House this evening.”

Mutinous, Claire nearly refused to walk any further next to the woman who had foiled all her hopes as carelessly as she might swat a fly. But if she did, she would only have to walk home, and half a mile in heeled dress slippers would be at least as painful as riding home in the carriage across from her ladyship.

She was still fuming as Silvie, her mother’s lady’s maid, helped her out of her afternoon dress and into her new dinner gown. The last thing she wanted to do was pretend she welcomed anyone to such a backward house. Her parents lived in the previous century, that was all. They couldn’t help it if the things they lived by—blood, breeding, birth—had become an anachronism in the face of the power of the human brain.

Society had divided itself into Bloods and Wits—the former headed by the Prince of Wales and the latter by the Prime Minister, Mr. Leonard Darwin, son of the famous naturalist—and where one rose to prominence, it was only natural that the other should fade to irrelevance.

The thought of her mother being irrelevant and not even knowing it was some source of amusement, at any rate.

This was cold comfort when Claire had to stand next to her and receive their guests. A harpist had been hired and there would be dancing later at Lady Julia’s home, though the affair was called a salon to forestall the gossips from making comments about Lady Julia and her classmates attending a ball before they had been presented. In the meantime, similar parties forming a progressive dinner were going on all over Mayfair and Kensington, the graduates flocking from one house to another to sip lemonade here, nibble an hors d’oeuvre there, fill a plate with iced cakes and macaroons yet somewhere else.

Only another hour, and she and Emilie could flit off as well, and during the short walk to Wellesley House she could unburden herself in detail to her best friend.

“Formulating another strategy to beat all comers at poker?” A male voice rumbled behind her, and Claire turned in surprise.

“Lord James.”

He bowed and extended his hand. “My best wishes to the new graduate.” When he straightened again, his lashes flickered. “And congratulations are in order, I see.”

“Thank you.” She fingered the round gold wafer sitting just below her clavicle, which Lady St. Ives had insisted she wear, and resisted the urge to take it off and tuck it in her bodice. She was wearing her very first low-necked gown, courtesy of Madame du Barry, and she was not yet used to the way gazes felt on naked skin. “It’s the Princess Alice medal for an essay I wrote in German.”

“How very clever. Ich spreche nicht Deutsch gut.”

“Neither do I, but the committee evidently thinks I write it fairly well.”

He laughed, and turned to regard the company moving from the sitting room, where the beverages were laid out, to the buffet in the music room, which was large enough to accommodate the silken, chattering company now that the piano was moved back against the wall.

“And are you enjoying being queen of the day?”

“Not particularly.” She caught her breath. If there was anything Lady St. Ives had drilled into her head, it was that in making social conversation with gentlemen, one did not voice one’s true opinions unless they concerned the weather, music, or classical literature. And sometimes, depending on the gentleman, not even then.

Again, Lord James laughed, though Claire had not meant to be amusing. “And why not? One would think having a party in one’s honor would be most enjoyable.”

Claire smiled a public smile. “Of course it is. I am enjoying myself immensely. I simply meant I am not particularly a queen—of a day, an hour, or even a minute.”

He took her hand in his. “Perhaps not. But speaking with you has certainly crowned this minute, this hour, for me. I shall live in the glow of it for the rest of the evening.”

She blinked, unsure how to respond, while a slow burn of blood crept into her cheeks. She did not blush prettily, like Gloria Meriwether-Astor or Lady Julia. She blotched.

Claire hated to be made to blotch.

She pulled her gloved fingers from his. “Sir, pray do not voice pretty sentiments that cannot possibly be true on such short acquaintance.” She sounded as stiff as her own grandmother, but she could not help it. What she really wanted to say to him could not be spoken aloud in her parents’ house. “Excuse me while I see to my other guests.”

With a swish of apple green silk, she escaped into the sitting room. Where was her father? Perhaps she could prevail on him to speak to Lord James and impress upon him that she was far too young to receive his attentions, particularly when she was still considered to be in the schoolroom until next week. She would not have believed she would take refuge in such a fiction, when she’d been living for today, leaving St. Cecelia’s and its teachers behind and embracing adulthood with joy.

“I haven’t seen your father, either,” Emilie whispered as Claire pretended to pour her friend a cup of punch so that they could speak privately. “I thought he had promised to be here tonight.”

“He did, at breakfast. Mama says he is detained in the Lords, voting on some business important to running the country. But still …”

“You will only graduate once, and he has missed it,” Emilie finished. “But that aside, I have no doubt he would give Lord James the set-down of his life if he were here. Even if he is not, you still have his protection. This is, after all, his house. Selwyn cannot behave like this and expect to be received by good society.”

“I shall take what protection I can find if it means not seeing that look in his eye.” She paused, then said in a rush, “It made me feel as though I were a naked statue from ancient Greece, frozen and unable to pull my draperies over myself.”

“How dreadful.” Emilie’s eyes held sympathy and the smallest bit of shock. “The man is a cad and your parents will not receive him once they know.” She glanced over the room, bright with light from the electrick chandeliers and scented with the perfumes of girls and the bouquets of white lilies on the occasional tables. “Do I imagine it, or is the crush thinning?”

“We must be between waves,” Claire said, thankful for the respite. “Now would be a good time to touch up our toilettes. You do still plan to walk with me to Wellesley House, inelegant as that might be? Papa has the landau and Mama is taking my grandmother and my two great-aunts Beaton in the carriage.”

Behind her, the front door slammed. Claire’s first thought was that she had offended Lord James so deeply that he had finally worked up enough steam to take his leave. But no, there he was in the music room, by the piano, talking again with Gloria. She hurried into the hall, followed closely by Emilie and Lady St. Ives.

“My lord!” her mother exclaimed as the Viscount staggered across the marble squares of the hall and fetched up against the carved banister of the staircase, his chest heaving. Every lamp had been lit, serving to illuminate a face gone gray and a cravat loose and disheveled. He raked a hand through his hair and Claire realized he had lost his top hat. “Vivyan, are you hurt?”

“We’re done for,” the Viscount croaked. “Persia-Albion’s failed. I put everything we had into it and now it is gone.” He gasped, as though he sobbed, without tears. “I’m so sorry, Flora. So sorry. For everything.”

He stumbled into his study, where he closed the door, leaving both Claire and her mother staring at it as though they’d both seen an apparition called up from some dreadful séance pass right through it. From behind the sturdy, white-painted oak panel, there came the sound of another door slamming.

No. Not a door. Claire had slammed every door in this house at one time or another during her adolescence, and that was not the sound of a door.

It was the sound of a pistol shot.

7

The Times of London

June 14, 1889

VISCOUNT PASSES IN TRAGIC MISHAP

In a loss as tragic as the fortunes of those with whom he invested in the Persia-Albion Petroleum Company, Vivian Trevelyan, Viscount St. Ives, left his family bereaved on Friday last. While cleaning his collection of Georgian pistols, he apparently did not realize one firearm had been put away loaded. The discharge killed his lordship instantly.

At the funeral yesterday, a nursemaid carried 19-month-old Nicholas, now the fourteenth viscount, who cried during the service as loudly as if he really had been aware his papa was being laid in the ground. Lady St. Ives, who could be forgiven for ignoring the demands of fashion during such a time of grief, instead was careful to maintain her reputation for taste and distinction in a beaded mourning gown by the House of Elsevier in Paris, and a swansdown-trimmed velvet cloak and hat by Belleville. Her daughter Claire, whose only style is that she is now known as Lady Claire, stood silently at her mother’s side for the length of the service.

This reporter does not know the fate of the Persia-Albion Petroleum Company, of which the late viscount was a principal investor, along with several of society’s leading Bloods and, some speculate, even Her Majesty. However, disturbing rumblings have been heard regarding the company’s solvency. Please see the Business section for more details on this unhappy situation.

*

On a good day, Claire could pretend that her father was merely away—in the Lords overseeing matters of state, or taking a quick trip down to Cornwall to visit Gwynn Place. The viscount had been better known as a shrewd investor and one of the leaders of London society than as a family man. It was not as if Claire had been close to him. All the same, he was her father, and one of the anchors to her life, and without him the whole household had been set adrift.

On bad days, the only thing that could rouse Claire from the stupor of grief was the knowledge that someone had to answer the landslide of condolences and black-edged correspondence, whose brass tubes had piled up on the salver in the morning room to such an extent that Penwith finally had to fetch a wooden chest to hold them. The new viscount could not do it. And Lady St. Ives was in no shape to do it. Except for her appearance at the funeral, she had not left her room since that dreadful night and from what Claire could learn from Silvie, she had no intention of doing so in the immediate future. Claire counted the family fortunate that she had managed to attend the funeral. Had she not, gossip would have been delighted to fill in the blanks that the Times had so obligingly left open.

The doorbell rang for what seemed like the fortieth time since breakfast, and out of habit, Claire paused on the staircase, halfway between curiosity and duty.

“I’m sorry, miss, but the family is not at home,” Penwith intoned. He must be so tired of mouthing the same words time after time. On the other hand, at least she did not have to do it.

“But I must see C—er, Lady Claire,” came Emilie’s voice, raised in anxiety.

“Lady Claire is unable to receive visitors, miss. You will note the crepe upon our door.”

Crepe notwithstanding, yes, she was able. “It’s all right, Penwith.” Claire hurried down the staircase, her skirts trailing behind her in a welter of black silk ruching and pleats. “I am always at home to Miss Fragonard.” She dragged Emilie into the morning room and hugged her fiercely, the unshed tears backing up in her throat. “I’m so glad to see you I can’t even express it.”

“I’ve sent you a tube every day,” Emilie said with the merest tinge of reproach.

“Have you?” Claire released her and indicated a second pile of tubes on the escritoire, which was reaching the limits of its stability, too.

“Oh dear.” Emilie appeared to do a quick calculation. “There is two weeks’ worth of writing replies between here and the hall.”

“At least. I can’t bear to think of it.”

“Think instead of the kindness of all your family’s acquaintance,” Emilie said gently. “They wish you to know they’re thinking of you.”

“I know,” Claire took a letter out of a tube on top of the stack and smoothed it flat. “And I appreciate it. I do. But what do I say to everyone? No one really believes what the Times said and we don’t dare refute it.”

Emilie took the letter from Claire’s hands. “They would not be so crass as to speak it aloud. Stick to the main point—their condolences. And for that I have just the thing. Have you forgotten my Multiple Nib Scrivener?”

“You’re assigning me lines?” Was this meant to take her mind off her situation?

“No, you goose. Where is your mourning stationery?” She rustled through the pigeonholes of the escritoire. “Never mind, I have it. We line up the reply cards like so—” She laid them out like dominoes and seated herself at the table. The ten nibs of her device hung poised above the creamy stationery. “—and begin composing. What would you like to say?”

“What would I do without you?” Claire gathered her wits and tried to remember what she and her mother had done when Grandmother Trevelyan had gone to her eternal reward. “We so much appreciate your kindness during this painful time,” she began slowly. Emilie’s nibs scratched along, following her. “The viscount, Lady St. Ives, and I are thankful for your thoughts and trust that God will keep us in His hand.”

“Is His capitalized?”

“Yes.”

“‘… hand.’ Anything else?”

“No. Hand them to me and I’ll sign them. Fortunately we use the same ink. India Black.”

Emilie gave her a look over the rims of her spectacles. “Was that a joke?”

Claire winced. “No, I’m sorry. Merely bad taste.”

“I think it’s good. It’s a sign that maybe in time you’ll recover.”

“I suppose I will. And Nicholas will be fine, except for the tragedy of his never knowing Father. Never learning how to ride with him like I did. Never seeing him come in at dinnertime and running into his arms, as I did.” She reached into her sleeve for her damp handkerchief.

“But you can teach him how to drive the steam landau when the time comes.” Emilie’s eyes were soft with understanding, and Claire hung onto her self-control with difficulty.

“That’s true,” she said, swallowing the tears down. “That much I can do.” She picked up the next batch of tubes and began extracting their contents. All she had to do was reverse the address on each tube and pop a reply in. Emilie deserved to have won the all-around academic award. She was brilliant. “At this rate we could be finished by teatime, just in time for the next mail.”

“It almost makes you wish you had no acquaintance, doesn’t it?” Emilie bent to her task.

“Almost.” Claire directed her attention to the pile in earnest.

8

The offices of Arundel & Hollis, Solicitors, were nearly as posh as the prime minister’s house, in Claire’s informed opinion. A clerk guided them to a heavily carved oak door whose brass plate identified it as belonging to the corner suite of Mr. Richard Arundel. A man of rather more dashing years than his position might suggest came out of it and greeted Lady St. Ives, bowing in his beautifully cut Savile Row suit.

“My heartfelt condolences upon your loss, my lady,” he said, clasping her black-gloved hand in both his bare ones. “I am so glad you saw fit to call upon us in this difficult time.”

Since they were there for the reading of her father’s will, Claire thought this was going a little far, but of course she said nothing.

Mr. Arundel guided them over to a pair of armchairs upholstered in glossy burgundy leather and studded in brass, placed strategically beneath a huge map of the Empire. He ordered the clerk to bring tea, and when it arrived, he invited Claire to pour. When she had handed the cups around, he took a sip and began.

“His Lordship entrusted the bulk of his business dealings to this firm, as well as his personal instruments. Following the reading of the will, I am happy to be in a position to apprise you of your situation—would it be appropriate to do so now, or should I wait for a more convenient time?”

Beneath the shroud of her black point d’esprit veil, Lady St. Ives’s head drooped. On her knee, her tea in its delicate Sèvres cup cooled, untouched.

Claire cleared her throat. “Mr. Arundel, my mother’s spirits may be taxed by such an apprisal, but I assure you it is necessary. This morning we were accosted by a number of dunner-men at our very door. It’s imperative we learn of the state in which my father left his affairs so we can end such nonsense.”

Mr. Arundel eyed her, then Lady St. Ives. “Very well. Shall we begin?” At her mother’s nod, he went on, “His lordship’s will is fairly straightforward. Gwynn Place, of course, goes to the infant Viscount in its entirety—lands, house, incomes and rents. Since Carrick House came into the family after the marriage of yourself and the late viscount, it goes to you, Lady St. Ives, with the proviso that it go to Lady Claire upon your decease, even if you should marry again and have, er, issue by that marriage.”

Claire had not expected this. She’d thought the lot would go to Nicholas. Goodness. The prospect of a house to depend upon in her middle years—or a refuge now should she prevail and be allowed to go to university—was a gift she had not considered in all her wildest dreams.

“There are, of course, the usual small bequests to the servants, and a marriage portion for Lady Claire when she reaches eighteen years of age in the autumn.” Mr. Arundel paused to fold up the creamy sheets of the will. “Which brings me to the next, rather less straightforward part of our meeting today. My lady, are you sure you can bear this now?”

Her mother cleared her throat, as though she was not quite certain her voice would work properly. She lifted her veil and placed it carefully on the wide, heavily decorated brim of her black straw hat. “Quite sure, thank you, Mr. Arundel.” Finally, she took a sip of tea.

Claire poured herself a second cup.

“Very well. How familiar are you with the business operations of the Persia-Albion Petroleum Company?”

“Not at all. My late husband was often in the Lords, voting on matters that concerned it, but he did not share his affairs with me.”

“Ah. Had you heard, then, of the collapse of what they are calling the Arabian Bubble?”

“No, Mr. Arundel.” Lady St. Ives passed a hand over her bone-white brow. “Could we get to the point, please?”

“Quite.” The lines of sympathy in his face smoothed out a trifle. “The point, then, is that as its principal investor, the bulk of His Lordship’s capital was tied up in the Persia-Albion Petroleum Company. He believed deeply in the future of petroleum and its application to the combustion engine. Unfortunately, any and all models of this engine have been failures, and some have even resulted in fatalities. The public, once so enthusiastically in its favor, has turned the tide of its opinion, pulling its support. Two Fridays ago it was discovered that all public shares of the Company were worth less than the paper they were printed on, and the entire enterprise collapsed. Your husband’s capital, and that of the other investors, has gone to pay the public debt. In short, my lady, it appears that you will have no source of income to ease your widowhood.”

“No source of income.” Impossible. “What about Gwynn Place? Our family has been living on the income from that for centuries.”

“Your father mortgaged it to invest in the P.A.P.C. When all the debts are settled, you will be fortunate indeed to have the house itself. I have already been approached by prospective buyers for the land.”

Lady St. Ives lifted her head. “Mr. Arundel, I may be Londoner born and bred, but even I know that an estate without its lands cannot support itself. I forbid you to sell any property attached to Gwynn Place. It is my son’s heritage.”

He inclined his head. “Very astute of you, my lady. That will mean, of course, that Carrick House will have to be sold immediately.”

The bottom dropped out of Claire’s stomach. “How soon is immediately?”

“By month’s end. You did say you wished the importunities of the dunner-men to stop.” He smiled, but at the same time, Claire detected real concern in his gaze.

“I appreciate your honesty, Mr. Arundel.” She straightened, and put the cup of tea on the low mahogany table between them.

“If we sell Carrick House, the mortgages against Gwynn Place will be repaid?” Lady St. Ives asked.

“I cannot promise that. As you can imagine, many find themselves in the same straits at this time, and there will be many houses for sale shortly. But I could negotiate with the banks on your behalf, and do what I can.”

“Thank you, Mr. Arundel. We are in your debt.”

Claire winced at this unfortunate choice of words. “What is your advice for the immediate future, Mr. Arundel?”

“Public opinion is running rather high at the moment, I fear. It would be prudent if you were to take some time in the country during your bereavement. No one would think it out of the ordinary, and to be blunt, there may be riots.”

“Good heavens.” The blood drained from Claire’s face, leaving her skin clammy and cold. “You can’t be serious. Riots? In Belgravia?”

“Feeling is running high against the Bloods at the moment. Your personal situation aside, the House of Lords is in a state of chaos. There is even talk of a revolution. It would be very, very wise to quietly pack up Carrick House, dismiss the staff, and board the Flying Dutchman by the end of the week, if you can possibly do it.”

Claire wished that she had not insisted on being laced quite so tightly this morning. She was finding it difficult to breathe.

“The end of the week?” How was it possible that the life she knew, the life she had taken so completely for granted, could be over by the end of the week? And it was already Wednesday. “We cannot possibly vacate Carrick House that quickly.”

“Then I recommend you pack as you would for a tour of the Continent, and board that train regardless.” His gaze held hers in all seriousness. “For his infant lordship’s sake alone, if for no other reason.”

“You are right, of course, Mr. Arundel.” The snap had come back into her mother’s eyes at the mention of Nicholas. The lioness, it was clear, had been roused at last at the thought of danger to her cub. “We cannot win this battle, but we can retreat and retrench, to fight again another day.” Claire raised her eyebrows. “I will take Nicholas and repair to Gwynn Place on Saturday at the latest. Claire will stay to oversee the disposition of the furniture and the servants, and follow me by the end of the month, as you said.”

“But Mama—” Claire struggled against the current of her mother’s will as her choices flew by, every bit as unreachable as the banks of the Amazon. “What about the Season? Being married by the fall?”

“Nonsense. There will be no Season—we are in mourning.” Her mother rose, smoothing the crisp black figured silk of her skirts. The beading on her bodice winked in the lamplight, for Mr. Arundel had the velvet curtains drawn against the morning sun. “Mr. Arundel, I assume I may distribute my husband’s bequests for our servants before I dismiss them?”

“You may. But I fear Lady Claire’s marriage portion …”

“… will have to go to pay the debts,” Lady St. Ives finished. “I understand. How much was that?”

“Twenty thousand pounds, my lady.”

All the breath whooshed out of Claire’s body, and she was profoundly thankful she had not yet stood up. Twenty thousand pounds! She could have gone for a master’s degree at Oxford with that—and financed an expedition to the Amazon on top of it! And then lived happily in Carrick House, hosting salons and entertaining the leading intellects of the day. How could Papa have done this to them all? It was apparent to even a baby that steam was the technology the world ran on—how could he have been so foolish as to gamble their futures on petroleum? Their very lives?

The image of her father as an all-knowing, godlike figure who controlled the destiny of the nation began to crumble—first his feet, then his legs and trunk, until the last thing to go in her mind’s eye was his smile and his crinkly brown eyes.

“Lady Claire? Are you quite all right?” Mr. Arundel bent to look her in the face. “Some more tea, perhaps?”

“No, thank you.” She swallowed her anger and struggled for civility. “I’m—I’m just trying to take it all in. It’s quite a shock.”

“It is, and I am deeply sorry to be the bearer of unpleasant news. But I felt it was better to be honest than falsely solicitous.” From the door, Lady St. Ives gazed over their heads, fixed on some uncertain view. The solicitor leaned closer. “Forgive me for making a personal remark, my lady, but I understand you are a young woman of considerable intellect. You might consider taking up a career of some sort.”

Claire blinked at him. “You mean … work? Go into trade? Is it as bad as that?”

The solicitor straightened. “I’m afraid so. Without a marriage portion, you join the already well-populated ranks of impoverished Blooded ladies looking for a secure marriage. At least if you could make your own way in the world you would not have to sail those uncertain waters.”

Claire had always wanted to join the ranks of the engineers of the Royal Society, traveling to far-off lands in support of the devices she would invent. Bridges across the wild rivers of the American Territories. Laboratories in India. Roads in South America. But that took money. Without it, her dreams were as fanciful as fairy tales and even less likely to have happy endings.

“But without going to university, what could I do?”

Mr. Arundel looked into her eyes and spoke with conviction. “You are a young lady of spirit and capability. I should begin by closing Carrick House. And then I should find friends with whom I could take refuge, and begin answering advertisements.”

She didn’t even know where to look for advertisements. “Thank you. I shall let you know what I decide.”

Lady Claire Trevelyan had walked into this office half an hour ago with brains, spirit, and a family fortune. She left it with the first two still intact.

That was something to be thankful for, at least.

9

Directly upon removing her hat, Lady St. Ives dispatched a tube down to Gwynn Place to prepare the staff for their arrival on Saturday. “Despite what Mr. Arundel suggests, I would rather go to Cornwall by airship,” she told Claire, tugging on the bell to summon the housekeeper.

“Mama, you cannot. With as much luggage as a trip to the Continent, the weight charges would amount to a fortune.”

“I have never had to concern myself with such a thing, child, and I resent having to think of it now.”

Claire thought quickly. “Besides, the public will expect you to go by airship. There could be demonstrations on Hampstead Heath, and I shudder to think what might happen if you took Nicholas there. If you go by train you slip out of town undetected.”

Lady St. Ives’s eyes narrowed, and for the first time, Claire saw the faintest tracings of lines at the corners. “I will allow no harm to come to my son. Perhaps you are right. We must put Nicholas first, regardless of the inconvenience to ourselves.” She glared at Claire as if she had been the one insisting on the airship, but Claire did not protest. She would far rather have the lioness than the defeated, weeping woman who had haunted the viscount’s rooms this past week.

Her mother assembled the staff that very noon and delivered the unhappy news to them. She distributed the viscount’s bequests and promised everyone, right down to the scullery maid, a letter of reference before the week was out. Only Penwith, two footmen, the nursemaid, and Silvie would go with her to Cornwall.

As the upstairs maid came into her mother’s room to light the lamps that evening, Claire paused in her packing, a froth of fashionable evening dresses on the bed beside her. “Mama, Mrs. Morven is staying until we close the house, isn’t she? If she isn’t, I must inform you that cookery was not my strongest subject.”

“Of course. I would not leave you alone in an empty house, prey for every brigand roaming the streets. Silvie, the lavender damask goes next. I shall want it when the year of mourning is up.” Carefully, with layers of tissue between each fold, Claire helped Silvie lay the damask in the steamer trunk next to the bed. “Except for those going to Gwynn Place, the staff will stay on until the end of the month. You must send a tube telling us which train you will take and I’ll have someone meet you at St. Ives station with the trap.”

Claire took a deep breath, Mr. Arundel’s words still fresh in her mind. “I’ve been thinking, Mama.”

“Yes?” Her voice came muffled from the closet.

“I believe I should like to stay in town a little longer.”

Lady St. Ives emerged with a fresh armful and handed it to Silvie. “Longer than what?”

“The end of the month.”

“Nonsense. The staff are all leaving.”

“If we could keep Mrs. Morven on, I could—”

“The black walking skirts should go on top. I shall want them immediately when we arrive.” The topic closed, her mother had already returned to the matter at hand, dismissing her daughter as though she were a servant—as though her thoughts and wishes did not matter. Resentment burned in Claire’s chest, her corset restricting its rise.

She took the walking skirts from Silvie, placed them on top, laid a layer of tissue on top of them, and closed the trunk. “Mama, I do not wish to go down to Cornwall right away, I wish to stay in London and look for employment.”

A full five seconds of silence passed. Perhaps, in the depths of the closet, she had not heard. “Mama? I said—”

“I heard you.” Lady St. Ives emerged with a rack of evening slippers and calling shoes. “This is no time for silly jokes. Save the next trunk for unmentionables, please. Silvie, you may pack them in the morning.”

“I am not joking. Mr. Arundel said I was a young lady of spirit, and if I do not want to join the ranks of other Blooded ladies looking for a husband, I should look to supporting myself.”

“Mr. Arundel is a liberal-minded fool. I’m surprised your father retained his firm if he harbors Wit tendencies.”

“He was only trying to be helpful.”

“And you at this moment are not. Please stop this chatter and help us finish. My head begins to ache.”

Claire tightened her lips against a sharp retort, and after a moment, relaxed them enough to speak. “If I can find employment before we close the house, may I stay with friends afterward?”

“With whom would you stay?”

“Emilie. Or—or perhaps Julia, at Wellesley House. Goodness knows they have room enough.” The Channel would freeze over before she asked Lady Julia for anything, but her mother did not need to know that.

“I’ll not have a daughter of mine begging for rooms in the street. Stop this at once, Claire. You’ll come down to Cornwall as planned, and I’ll do my best to find a suitable match for you once our period of mourning is concluded. It is obvious that your active mind needs to be engaged with the running of a home instead of these wild schemes.”

“But I don’t want a—”

“Claire.” For a moment her mother’s face softened into grief. “Please do not talk of separating yourself from me. I cannot bear it. We must stay together. For now.”

It was the softening that cooled Claire’s resentment into compassion as her own heart reproached her for adding to her mother’s burden. “Yes, Mama. For now,” she said at last, and turned away to pull in another trunk from the hall.

It was fortunate that now was a very flexible concept.

10

The great engine of the Flying Dutchman, capable of eighty-nine miles per hour and therefore making it the fastest train in the world, huffed out an enormous puff of steam at precisely nine o’clock and began to pull slowly away from platform number four at Paddington Station.

Gorse tugged his cap from his head and waved it as Claire lifted a gloved hand. “Good-bye! Safe journey!”

Lady St. Ives, of course, did not lean out of the window, but Silvie did, her elegant black-gloved hands waving with such emphasis that Claire shot Gorse a sudden look of comprehension. “Gorse, is something going on between you and Silvie?”

“Was, miss.” He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing with sudden effort. “Not so sure about now, though.”

“Why on earth didn’t you say something? You could have gone down to St. Ives with them instead of the second footman.”

“They’ll still drive carriages in St. Ives, miss. I’m much more likely to get a place here.” His gaze never left the train and the distant black flutter of Silvie’s glove. “I have an interview at Wellesley House this afternoon, as a matter of fact. Word is that his lordship is soon to be the owner of a four-piston laudau.”

“No! I don’t believe it. That family would never give up its horses.”

“Times change, miss, as we are living proof.” They stood upon the platform until the last of the Dutchman’s carriages disappeared around the bend. “Would you like to drive home, miss?”

“No, you may. Perhaps it will help take your mind off Silvie.”

“Not much possibility of that.” He guided her outside and waited until she had climbed into the landau, proud possessor of only two pistons. Two was all anything but a steambus needed. Four was ostentatious. How fast did Julia’s father’s driver propose to go? Or—yes, that was it—he obviously planned to enter the races at Wimbledon. She snorted, then resumed watching the road like a hawk on a fence post.

The truth was, after Mr. Arundel’s information on Wednesday, she looked at London with new eyes—eyes that saw the unrest, that found menace in a crowd surging to board a bus, that calculated distance now in terms of safety rather than convenience. She was no coward, but all the same, Claire was content to let Gorse navigate the turn into Park Lane and skirt the boundary of Hyde Park, where beyond the trees she could hear the roar of a crowd.

Gorse heard it, too, and applied a little more steam. “Let her stretch her legs a bit.”

“There must be a demonstration of some kind.”

“Likely the orator of the hour getting folk stirred up.”

“Yes, I’m sure that’s what it must be.”

Her breath did not come easily until they had turned into Wilton Crescent and hurried into the safety of their own mews. Once upstairs, Claire dragged the brass-studded trunk, which she had thus far resisted filling, out of the hall and into her room. A warm coat, trimmed in the latest Art Nouveau vinery. Three sensible dresses in dark colors, and five pretty embroidered white waists. Two walking skirts. Shoes. Unmentionables. Two practical hats and one utterly impractical one that she loved, with its flowers and plumes. Gloves.

She found herself packing the kind of wardrobe, in fact, that she might have begun a university career with. She left Madame du Barry’s evening gowns where they hung. The apple green had been burned days ago. Lady St. Ives had not permitted her to see her father’s body, but the memories of that night hung on the ballgown, as ugly and clinging as soot, and she never wanted to see it again.

She tipped up the false bottom of a small traveling case and laid her few pieces of jewelry inside, then covered it with handkerchiefs, her best set of tortoiseshell hair combs, and her Bible with a lock of her baby brother’s hair pressed between its pages. Last of all she put in Linnaeus’s Taxonomy of Elements, her engineering journal, and a set of pencils. If her new status as a career woman allowed her any spare time, she could continue her experiments and sketches in solitude.

Not that that would mean any great change.

The heavy weight of anxiety in her stomach eased a little now that she had done something constructive about the future. It was time to stop wallowing in her own fear and anger and behave as the young woman of substance that Mr. Arundel, at least, believed her to be. Her father may never have held that belief … Claire swallowed as hot tears sprang to her eyes.

She blinked them back. Look where Papa’s beliefs had got him. She was not a fool. She had never hung her future on the traditions of the Bloods, but she had never done anything to prove that she was different, either. If she thought of herself as a Wit, now was the time to show it. She reached for the bell pull to ring for Penwith, and realized a moment later that of course he was no longer there. If she were to make her own way in the world, she must get used to doing even the smallest things herself.

The house seemed even more silent than usual with the absence of the servants. Most of them had gone to the employment agency with her ladyship’s departure. Aside from the ubiquitous mother’s helper scooting about in the hall, the only two left were Gorse and Mrs. Morven, the cook, whom she found in the pantry, counting jars of jam.

“Oh, hello, miss—er, my lady. I’m just making an inventory in the event the new owners take the place complete.”

“I won’t keep you, Mrs. Morven. Do you know what Penwith did with this morning’s Times before he left?”

“He always leaves it on the hall table, miss, in case your lady mother wants it. Of course, with him gone, if you want it, you just need to tell me.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Morven. The hall table is fine. I suppose I should look into canceling our subscription.”

“I’ll ask Gorse to do it. Ah … miss? Lady Claire?” She turned at the door. “Me and Gorse—we were wondering …”

“Mrs. Morven, times are changing. We must not be afraid to speak plainly to one other.”

The cook fiddled with her apron strings and adjusted the set of her pristine white cap. “We were wondering, miss, how you’d be set were we to take our positions before the end of the month.”

“Have you had an offer from Wellesley House too?” The bitterness rasped at her throat.

“Oh, no, miss. I can’t abide the nasty biddy they have as housekeeper there. A face like suet pudding and no salt, that one. But young Lord James Selwyn is setting up his own household and has advertised for a cook. It would be light work, seeing as he’s single, and I’m ready to tote a lighter load in my golden years.”

“Mrs. Morven, your golden years are a long way off yet. But it would be a change to look after a young man instead of all of us. I’m acquainted with Lord James, you know.” She paused. “He is a gentleman of humor and, um, wit.” And a bit of a cad, but Mrs. Morven would likely not be the target of that.

“Plus he’s offering to equal the wages his lordship—rest his soul—was paying me.”

Claire saw her chance to even the score. “Negotiate for more, Mrs. Morven. Another ten percent and he can have you by the end of next week.”

The cook’s flushed cheeks became positively apple-like as she smiled. “You’ll be all right, then, miss?”

“I’ll be perfectly all right. In fact, I hope to be gainfully employed by then, myself.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“I’m not going down to Cornwall, Mrs. Morven. I’m going to get a job and go to work, and apply to begin at the university in the fall.”

“Are you, now, miss?” Mrs. Morven’s eyes widened.

“Yes, I am, despite what my mother says. I’m nearly eighteen and I have nothing but a trunk full of clothes, a steam landau, and my brains to recommend me. So I and they are going to work. Which is why I need the Times. Would you be so kind as to give me some instruction on how one actually goes about answering an advertisement?”

11

What a relief it was to send mail tubes that didn’t contain stationery rimmed with black. By Tuesday Claire had arranged four interviews—two families wanted a governess, a scientist wanted a secretary, and the British Museum needed someone to catalogue artifacts.

On Wednesday, she heard from Lady St. Ives.

My dear Claire,

We arrived safely Saturday evening and have settled in to life in the country. We are all well and your brother has gained another two pounds. Polgarth begs me to tell you that the chickens send their best greetings and look forward to your arrival.

As does your loving

Mama

Claire had to smile. As a child, she had loved the flock at Gwynn Place, which gave the best eggs in the parish. Polgarth the poultryman swore that she had a natural gift with them, and they used to follow her about the garden as if she were an exotic sort of rooster. The companionship of birds may have been all she needed then, but at nearly eighteen her requirements were substantially more. The hens would have to do without her some while longer.

By Thursday, she had decided that governessing was not the career path she was meant to take—not unless she was desperate and starving in the streets. The gentleman at the British Museum seemed more interested in cataloguing her anatomy than in her qualifications for cataloguing his artifacts, which left her feeling as though she needed a bath when she left that afternoon. Whatever her father’s faults, at least his protection had been real. No man would have dared to treat her that way if he had still been alive.

Of course, if he had been alive, she would not be piloting carefully through the crowded streets of London, sweating in her duster and jumping out of her seat every time a horse shied upon seeing the landau. Silly creatures. She made the turn onto the Blackfriars Bridge and proceeded across it in a stream of drays and carriages. The scientist kept his laboratory in a warehouse on Orpington Close, which turned out to be little more than an alley running down to the mud on the south side of the Thames. She parked the landau at the foot of an exterior staircase, as instructed by tube, and released the valve. Steam hissed into the air like a sigh of relief at their arrival, and she set the brake.

She was just raising her hand to knock at the lower door when it swung open. The apparition within looked as though it had come up from under the sea. Out of its leather helmet snaked a series of rubber tubes, while a pair of glass-fronted eyes stared at her with alien blankness. The rest of it was covered in a leather apron of the sort butchers wore, and the hands reaching for her were encased in leather gloves.

With a squeak, she stumbled backward, bumping hard against the post that supported the staircase. How far was the landau? Could she get inside and get it fired up before the thing caught her?

“Miss Trevelyan? Don’t—what are—oh, blast it!” The monster tore its head off and tucked it under its arm.  “I’m so sorry. Please forgive me. I forgot that—Miss Trevelyan? Are you quite all right?” A young man with hazel eyes and tousled hair the color of Brazil nuts took off his glove and extended a hand to her. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. It would serve me right if you turned and left this moment.”

Slowly, she extended her hand. “Is—what is that, sir?”

“It’s a gas mask. I devised it myself, you see—so that I could enter a large compression chamber without breathing in the gases. Look, these tubes attach to a flask of air at the back.”

“Ah.” She craned her neck to see. “Air, you said? Not compressed oxygen?”

A smile dawned, reaching all the way to his eyes. “Been reading the scientific journals, I see. Last month’s Illustrated Science article on Dr. Weathering’s undersea bell?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact.” She tilted her chin. “Not all of us find our entertainment in Lady’s Home and Garden.”

“You’ll find neither home nor garden here, I’m afraid. Do come in. Watch your step. These boards are uneven.”

She followed him across a huge warehouse containing what appeared to be pallets of various metals and glass, along with an enormous heap of lumber, to an interior staircase that brought them up to a spacious loft. “Am I to assume you are Mr. Malvern?”

He stopped in the act of clearing a stack of diagrams off the chair in front of the desk, and smacked his forehead. “Good grief. You will think me an ill-mannered ass. Yes, I am Andrew Malvern, A.B.D. Member of the Royal Society of Engineers. Part owner of this warehouse and in dire need of someone to keep me organized.”

“A.B.D., Mr. Malvern? Is that a new scientific society? The Association of Biological Diversity or some such?”

“No, no. It means all but dissertation. I would have a Ph.D. to add to my string of initials if I could only get this da—er, excuse me, this wretched theory of mine to work.”

Claire opened her mouth to ask him what was wrong with his theory, and closed it again. He might not appreciate her nose in his business. And anyway, if she got the job, she would find out eventually, wouldn’t she? She seated herself in the chair he had emptied, and regarded the blizzard of papers and drawings on the desk. Oak filing cabinets stood against the wall, papers sticking out of the drawers as though they were trying to escape the crowded conditions within. Here and there, instruments and devices held down stacks of drawings and columns of figures on the floor, and the woodbox next to the cast-iron stove was full of still sealed mailing tubes instead of kindling.

He followed her gaze around the room. “You see why I’m in need of an assistant.”

“I do, sir. Were I to be your choice, I should start with the mailing tubes and then work in concentric circles in a clockwise direction, from filing cabinets to loose papers.”

“Would you?” His chair swiveled as he followed this thought. “I suppose it’s as good a method as any.”

“What is your field of research, sir?”

His circumnavigation of the loft completed, he folded his hands on the desk and regarded her. He had very nice eyes, with long lashes and a twinkle that was most distracting. “You make it sound so formal. My interests are in the railroad industry at present. I’m working on a way to make coal go further more cleanly, reducing costs and increasing the engines’ ability to use it more completely. As it is, there’s too much waste without enough return in speed and efficiency.”

“Ah.”

“Are you familiar with the workings of engines? Was that your landau I saw out there?”

She may not know the first thing about locomotive engines, but the landau she knew inside and out. “Yes, it’s a two-piston Henley Dart, with a five-gallon boiler and a top speed of forty-five miles per hour.”

“Did you drive it here at that speed? If so, I salute you.”

He was teasing her, the rascal. “No, I topped out at twenty. It is very crowded on that bridge.”

“What do you say to taking it for a spin? I’ve never been able to afford such a thing, and the Dart is a very pretty model.” His gaze rested briefly on her hair, then moved to her eyes.

Claire shifted in the chair, and checked that the clasp of her pocketbook was firmly secured. “Did you mean to drive it yourself, sir?”

“Heavens, no. I want to expand my sphere of experience, that’s all. I’ve never seen a woman drive. It would be very useful to have an assistant with such skills. Consider it a test—much more useful than handwriting and typing samples, wouldn’t you say?”

Below, a door slammed and footsteps thumped across the boards to the staircase. “Andrew, are you here?”

“I’m conducting an interview. Come on up—my prospective assistant may as well know what she’s getting into.”

“You’re interviewing someone?” A reddish head appeared in the stairwell, then the rest of the speaker’s frame. Recognition sparked a moment later, and Claire drew a breath of surprise as Lord James Selwyn stepped into the light from the aperture overhead. “Good heavens. Lady Claire, what are you doing here?” He turned to Malvern. “I thought you were interviewing an assistant.”

“Lady Claire?” Malvern glanced down at her letter of application, as though puzzled he’d missed this fact.

“We are one and the same.” She rose and extended a gloved hand to Lord James. “I thought it prudent to use my family name and not my title in my correspondence. Lord James, this is unexpected.”

“Not half as unexpected as you interviewing for a job.”

She lifted her chin, even as the hot blood scorched her cheeks. Blast. She would blotch again, and in front of her prospective employer, too. “My circumstances demand flexibility, my lord. And you agreed yourself the last time we met that a lady makes her own luck.”

“Making one’s own luck is one thing, but reducing oneself to trade is quite another. Is this a joke you’re playing on us?”

“James, what a thing to say.” Malvern frowned. “Miss Trev—er, Lady Claire. Please excuse my partner’s forthrightness. He has been too long in the American Territories.”

“Believe me, my circumstances are no joke,” she replied in as steady a tone as she could manage, considering her temper was fast approaching a rolling boil. “I am seeking employment, and believe I could contribute to Mr. Malvern’s operations here.”

“Not to mention the fact that she can drive,” Malvern put in. “That’s tipping the scale right there.”

“Andrew, don’t talk nonsense. Lady Claire is a society belle barely out of the classroom. What can she contribute here? What does she know of science or business?”

“If you would address me directly, Lord James, I could tell you that I graduated with firsts in mathematics and languages, and I plan to apply to the engineering program at the university this fall.” She enunciated each syllable so crisply that each word cut the air. “This position, besides keeping me in bread and butter, would go far in recommending me to the admissions committee. If that were any of your business, of course, since it is Mr. Malvern who is interviewing me at present.”

Lord James stared. “The girl has a spine after all.”

Malvern pushed his chair back. “James, what has got into you? Miss Trevelyan, perhaps we should go for that drive now. I don’t know what bee my partner has in his bonnet, but it’s embarrassing both of us.”

“I just find it amusing, Andrew, that the lady who turned down the offer of my regard is now forced to seek employment in a venture I’m financing. I’m merely appreciating the irony of it all.”

“What?”

“The offer of your regard?”

Claire and Malvern spoke simultaneously. Then Claire controlled her tongue, gathered her courage, and bid farewell to her hopes. “Mr. Malvern, I regret taking up your time today, but I thank you for seeing me. Good afternoon.”

“Wait. Miss Trev—er, Lady Claire. Our interview is not finished.”

“I believe it is. If I am to be dependent on the financing of Lord James, then I prefer to seek employment elsewhere. In any case, he does not believe me capable of carrying out my duties.”

“But he’s not—Miss Trevelyan, wait—”

She reached behind and twitched the hem of her grey suit out of any possible reach of Lord James’s patent-leather shoes, and swept down the stairs. Malvern darted after her, but Lord James caught his arm and their raised voices followed her out of the warehouse, muffled only by the slam of the exterior door.

She ignited the landau and drove back to Wilton Crescent as fast as she dared, where she found Mrs. Morven in the kitchen preparing dinner.

“Mrs. Morven. Are you still set on taking employment with Lord James Selwyn?”

“Yes, miss.” The cook eyed her disheveled state, for she had not stopped to put on her motoring duster at the warehouse. “Why do you ask?”

“My advice has changed. Ask for twenty-five percent more, Mrs. Morven, not ten. And you have my congratulations and my deepest sympathy should you get the job.”

12

Friday brought two more depressing confirmations that governessing was not the career for which she was destined, and Claire began to give serious consideration to returning, hat in hand, to the British Museum. But that, she thought, glancing at the twilight sky, would have to wait until Monday. She ought to just make it home before the street lamps came on.

As she made the turn off Grosvenor Crescent into Wilton Crescent, she heard the same roar as before—as though hundreds of voices were expressing their outrage—at Hyde Park Corner. Pulling into the mews behind Carrick House, she released the landau’s steam and listened.

Birds, singing their adieux before dark.

The clash of cutlery from the town house next door, whose kitchen windows were open.

And in the background the roar of a huge crowd, getting louder.

Footsteps. No, an all-out sprint, booted feet slapping on the cobbles, coming down Wilton Crescent as though—

Gorse pelted into the mews, his driver’s cap gone and his coat unbuttoned. “Miss! Lady Claire—oh, thank God. They’re coming, miss. You must take the landau and run to Miss Emilie’s without delay.”

Automatically, her hands began the ignition sequence. “What is happening, Gorse? Tell me!”

“It’s a huge demonstration at Hyde Park,” he panted, the words coming out in chunks. “The Arabian Bubble investors. They’re rioting, miss. They swear to loot Carrick House. To get something out of their investment. Now. They’re coming here now.”

The landau clattered to life and she made sure the brake was set. “Help me get my trunk out of the house. And Mrs. Morven. We’ve got to get her out, too.”

“Miss, there isn’t time for possessions!”

“Come on, Gorse!”

But Mrs. Morven had left a note that she had gone to take victuals to the Foundlings’ Home. Thank goodness for that. “Gorse, you’ll have to go over there and prevent her return.”

“As soon as you’re away, miss.”

They pounded up the stairs. The house was practically naked, with the china, plate, and paintings already on their way down to Cornwall on a dray. The looters would have a tricky time getting the heavy furniture out the doors. With Gorse in front and Claire in the rear, they lugged her trunk and traveling case down the stairs. With a pang, she thought of her pretty bookcases and all her books, which she hadn’t got around to packing quite yet. Maybe someday she would come upon them in a stall in Portobello Road, once the looters lost interest in books about biology and engineering.

Wedging themselves through the kitchen door with the trunk, they could hear the sounds of individual voices at the curve of Wilton Crescent. “Hurry, miss. Go and don’t look back.”

“But you’re coming with me!”

“No, miss. I’m going to send a fast tube to Sir Robert Peel’s policing force and try to hold them off at the door. If I can’t do that, I’ll take to my heels after Mrs. Morven.”

“Gorse!”

“No arguments, miss. Mrs. Morven and I shall see you at Miss Emilie’s.” He secured her trunk to the rear with a pair of leather straps, and slapped it twice. “Now, miss! Quickly!”

The first of the rioters poured into the mews and gave a great shout of triumph when they caught sight of the landau. Claire’s heart leaped in her chest and she pushed the steering lever out as far as it would go. The rioters closed the forty feet between them in less time than it took to gasp, so that by the time the landau had completed the turn, they were already on her. She gave it some steam and the landau took off like a racehorse at Ascot, bumping over something she didn’t want to think about and eliciting a scream of rage. Hands and fingernails scraped at the landau’s shiny exterior, sliding off in a cacophony of frustration.

She did not stop to check the damage—or to look both ways at the corner. Behind her, a window broke with a crash and she heard Gorse’s distinctive voice turn the air blue as he mounted his resistance. The landau careened into Belgrave Square, causing a pair of roans to shy and paw the air while their coachman shouted obscenities at her, and she swung a quick right, heading for Cadogan Square and Emilie’s house. She did not stop at Lowndes Street either, rocketing across it with the throttle wide open and the speed indicator buried at the bottom of its arc.

Heart racing, hands shaking so badly she could hardly grip the steering lever, she slowed to a respectable ten miles per hour in Cadogan Square and coasted to a stop in front of Number 42. After she set the brake and climbed down, she paused. She didn’t like to leave the landau in the open street. First order of business was to secure safety with Emilie, she thought as she marched to the door. The second thing would be to find a place in the stable to hide it before some stray looter recognized it and they brought the hounds of hell down on the Fragonards.

A maid answered her ring. “Good evening, Gwennie. I’m here to see Miss Emilie on a matter of extreme urgency, please.”

The maid invited her into the hall and vanished upstairs. A moment later she heard the sharp sound of a voice, quickly muffled, a door slamming in the far reaches of the house, and then the swish of skirts descending the stairs.

“Lady Claire,” Mrs. Fragonard said from the final turn of the staircase, in tones so civil they practically cracked and shattered on the marble floor.

Claire looked up. “Mrs. Fragonard, I apologize with all my heart for descending on you like this, but I must see Emilie.”

“On what errand?”

Claire paused and looked at her more closely. Emilie’s mother had never been a beauty, but she had a kind heart and Claire had been a guest at her table many times. What was the reason for this carefully schooled neutrality of feature? This coldness of tone?

“I’m afraid I find myself at your mercy, ma’am. It seems that a host of—of investors have taken it on themselves to importune an empty house, and I’m unable to go home this evening. I have my trunk with me, and I was hoping to beg your hospitality just for tonight.”

Not a very gracious speech, but it would have to do. In her memory, Claire heard her mother’s opinion of it. Well, her mother was safely in Cornwall and only a fool would have stood on the step begging the rioters not to make such a fuss.

“My hospitality? After the snub your family dealt my daughter?”

Claire stared at her, lost. “I’m sorry?”

“Do not imagine I don’t know how difficult it was to obtain Lady St. Ives’ permission to invite Emilie to your graduation party.”

Claire’s mouth opened and closed. Then she took a deep breath and tried again. “Ma’am, I assure you no offense was meant by my mother, and I was very glad to see Emilie there. She has been a wonderful friend to me, especially during these past weeks. I beg you accept my apology for anything my family may have done.”

Even this pathetic but sincere appeal had no effect. “What they’ve done? You obviously have no idea how much the Arabian Bubble has cost this family, young lady.”

Claire’s eyes widened. “You invested, too?”

“We did, and now we are paying for it. I am no penniless rioter, however. If I were, I would also be tempted to, as you say, importune an empty house.”

“Mrs. Fragonard, please—if you’d just let me speak to Emilie—”

“Emilie is unable to receive guests at present. I have no personal animosity toward you, Lady Claire, but your parents have my undying disdain. I cannot let my daughter retain her connections with such a family. In this day and age, it is too dangerous. Good evening to you. Gwennie, will you see her out.”

Mrs. Fragonard, who had not left her lofty perch on the staircase, turned and made her way up it again. When the maid opened the door, Claire passed her like an automaton. Even when she heard a frantic pounding on one of the upstairs windows, she did not look up. She could not. If she met her friend’s eyes, she would break down in the middle of the street, and there was no time. She simply ignited the landau and released the brake.

Yet another sin to lay at her father’s door. Her mother’s too, if she were honest. How had Mrs. Fragonard found out that Claire had to practically beg Lady St. Ives to invite Emilie to the party? And what a reason to refuse someone a night’s shelter! In such dangerous times as these, people should band together to help each other, not throw their friends to the wolves. But then, her father had played the wolf often enough in Parliament, if the papers were to be believed, voting down the rights of prisoners and those being deported to the Antipodes. Human nature would not pause a moment to turn the tables on him and his, as she was witnessing this very evening.

Was Gorse all right? If he came to find her here, what would they tell him? That they had turned her away? Claire cast a glance over her shoulder as she bowled down the square. Should she wait? She must find shelter before it was fully dark, but where would she go? Wellesley House? Astor Place?

Not likely. Then she blinked as an idea struck.

Who would be most likely to take up the cause of the downtrodden and homeless? Why, Mrs. Stanley Churchill, of course. If she could not find shelter with Emilie, maybe Peony would be the better choice. Yes, that was it. She would go to Chelsea immediately, and send a tube from there to Cadogan Square for Gorse. Surely they would give it to him when he arrived. After all, he had done nothing to offend.

13

Claire had never been to Peony’s home, but she knew it was on Elm Park Road in Chelsea. Once she located the street, finding the house was just a matter of making inquiries—and even that proved unnecessary. Only the house of Mrs. Stanley Churchill would have a band of—Claire peered through the twilight—wild Indians on the front steps?

She parked the landau and made her way up the walk, sidling past the group of children playing on the railings of the white Georgian house. Not Indians. But definitely something wild, as their boots appeared to be made of animal skins. She rang the bell and waited.

To her astonishment, Peony herself peeked through the nine-paned glass and answered the door. “Why … Claire Trevelyan. What a surprise.”

“I’m so sorry to arrive unannounced like this, but I’m in rather a fix and I was hoping to ask a favor of you.”

“As long as it doesn’t involve funding of any sort, I’m all ears. Come along into the drawing room.” Over her shoulder, she tossed a string of unintelligible syllables that made two of the children laugh.

“No, no funding. Who are those children?”

“They are Esquimaux, from the Canadas. Far north of the Canadas, actually. Their band hunts on the land where Her Majesty wishes to mine diamonds. They are here to plead their case before the House, with my mother’s help, or they face starvation. Her Majesty wants to boot them off, you see. They’re in the way.”

“Goodness,” Claire said faintly as she seated herself on a striped divan. “And they have brought their children too?”

“They’re not very old,” Peony pointed out. “Can’t very well leave them sitting on an ice floe with a sandwich, can they?”

“I suppose not.”

“So what has brought you to us this evening? But first, allow me to offer my condolences on your loss, Claire. I should have said so right away instead of babbling on.”

“Thank you.”

“How are you managing?”

Claire took a breath and plunged in. “Not very well, I’m afraid. My mother has taken my brother down to Cornwall just in time. There was a riot on Hyde Park Corner tonight, and a crowd of vandals attacked Carrick House.”

Peony’s red lips fell open. “Good heavens!”

“They’re investors, apparently, determined to get something out of my father’s estate. As I fled, I heard glass breaking. I hope they find joy in our furniture.”

“They’ll make a bonfire in the street with it to make their point, more like,” Peony said with such world-weary practicality that Claire’s skin pebbled with goosebumps. What must this girl have seen in her life? Far more than herself, that was evident. “I’m very thankful that you got away.”

“Which brings me to the reason I’m here. You wouldn’t have an extra bed for tonight, would you?”

Peony’s eyes filled with sympathy. “My dear, I wish we did. But A’Laqtiq and his family have filled all the bedrooms, to the point that the children you saw outside are sleeping under the dining-room table. The carpet is quite thick. All I have to offer you is the bath, I’m afraid. With a bit of ticking it would do in a pinch.”

Claire was almost tempted. But it was clear that there were important political issues transpiring in this house, aside from the fact that Mrs. Churchill and Peony probably had enough on their plates hosting an entire foreign delegation. “I couldn’t possibly impose on you to that extent, Peony.”

“You wouldn’t be, truly. Now, if you were to demand my bed and make me sleep in the bath myself, that would be an imposition.”

Claire grinned. “It wouldn’t come to that. Do not worry on my account. I have friends yet to impose upon.”

“I know you do. A girl as nice as you probably has a host of them, all without children under the dining-table. But if you need it, the offer of the bath still stands. Or I could go all out and find a table in a different room to stash you under.”

Claire rose, still smiling. “I may take you up on it. Please give my compliments to your mother. I admire her enormously.”

Peony took her outstretched hand. “I do, too. If I can be half the woman she is, I’ll do well.”

“Heaven help Her Majesty’s empire in that case.”

Peony laughed and escorted her to the door. “I hope to see you soon, Claire.” She hesitated. “I would like it if—well, never mind. You have enough to fill your thoughts at present.”

Claire could seize an opportunity as well as the next person. “I would like it if we could be friends, despite my mother’s opinions on the subject. And since she is eight hours away by train, I think it’s safe to say so.”

“Let’s shake on it. Friends it is.” Peony’s fingers felt cool and strong.

Claire went back down the walk glowing with warmth. Friends were not so thick on the ground that she would turn one down, especially in circumstances such as these. The loss of Carrick House was a disaster, to call a spade a spade, but in the midst of disaster the good Lord had sent her a blessing. She would never have guessed a month ago that Peony Churchill would offer friendship, unsolicited. But the bathtub notwithstanding, Claire was very glad she had.

In the meantime, here came the lamplighter, climbing down into the chamber under the walk that concealed the engine powering the lamps for this block. While she had been within, full dark had fallen, and Claire had exactly no experience in piloting the landau after dark. Carefully, she opened the switches to the headlamps, and ignited the engine.

Returning home was out of the question. So, the next question became, where should she go? Wellesley House was out. She would rather sleep in a bathtub with no ticking at all than endure Lady Julia’s suppressed smiles at her misfortunes. Perhaps she could go to St. Cecelia’s and beg the headmistress for a bed. But no, that would entail far too many questions and very likely public exposure of her plight.

There was nothing for it. She was going to have to go to her grand-aunts Beaton in Greenwich, wake them out of a dead sleep, and explain in as little detail as possible why she was there. They were elderly, excitable, and as ignorant as chickens about the affairs of the day. They actually believed that Papa had had an accident while cleaning his gun. Not that that was a bad thing. It was necessary for everyone to at least pretend to believe that, or Papa could not have been buried in hallowed ground. At the same time, giving credence to a lie galled her.

Very well. To Greenwich she would go, and as soon as she read in the papers that the Esquimaux delegation had been heard and were on their way back to their home in the frozen north, she would return to Peony’s and claim both friendship and a bed until she could find employment and rooms of her own.

She turned east and tried to visualize the best route. The difficulty with Greenwich was that it lay on the far side of the East End. She could either cross the river at Lambeth and circle around to the south, in which case she would arrive long after midnight, upsetting her grand-aunts even more, or she could stick to the well-populated roads in Town and hope that the speed and the sturdy brass skin of the landau would protect her until she got over the new London Bridge.

If only Gorse were here.

Then again, she thought with a snort as she motored down the Embankment at a respectable thirty miles per hour, she could always accept the offer of Lord James Selwyn’s regard. She had no doubt that a fiancée of his would not be chugging briskly through the night, homeless and alone. But then, a fiancée of his would have neither a landau nor a brain to call her own, either.

This cheered her immensely, and she turned her back on the Blackfriars Bridge and took the corner into Farringdon Street with aplomb. Now came the tricky part. The lamp lighters had obviously not come this far yet, leaving her dependent upon her own head lamps to keep her in the center of the thoroughfare. The mouths of the streets yawned black on either side. The sound of the landau’s engine bounced back at her from the brick and wood surfaces of the buildings and the cobbles of the street, making it sound as though she were three or four engines, not just one. She swerved to avoid men loading kegs on to a cart, and steered back the other way to avoid a knot of people who had clearly just come from the theater. Was she so close to Covent Garden? No, that couldn’t be right. She was supposed to be on Queen Victoria Street, away from the bank. What street was this, exactly?

Along with keeping track of the thoroughfare and unpredictable human bodies in her path, she now peered into the cone of dim light provided by the headlamps, seeking a street sign. How careless of the city fathers not to provide them. Etching the name of a street into the corner of a building did not help at all in the dark. Ahead, bright lights shone onto the sidewalk, and she heard the subterranean screech of a train.

A station. That would tell her where she was. In moments, she had come abreast of the station’s front.

Aldgate. Aldgate Station? That couldn’t be right. Why, that would mean she was blissfully driving down Whitechapel Street in the middle of the night. She was not on Queen Victoria Street at all!

Oh dear. Oh dear. She had to turn around and get out of here.

Claire steered to the far side of the street and pushed the steering lever all the way out. At the apex of the turn her front tire bumped up onto the sidewalk in front of the station, but there was no help for it. She couldn’t reverse unless she got out and pushed, and she was not getting out of this vehicle for all the tea in China. Not in Whitechapel, for the love of God.

Careful. Carefully now. The last thing you want is to dislodge the arrangement of the boiler when you bump back down onto the street. One wheel. Good. Now the oth—

With a communal howl of triumph, a crowd of black shapes pelted out of the mouth of the Underground station and surrounded the landau.

“Lookit this beauty, Snouts! We got a pretty ’un this time, ent we?”

“And a pretty lady to boot. Whatsa matter, lady, want some help unsticking your carriage?”

“No, thank you,” Claire said as loudly as her desert-dry throat would allow. “Stand out of the way please.”

“Stand aht the way, please,” mimicked a high voice. “Am I in your way, lady? Wot’ll you give me and my mates to get aht the way?”

“I shall give you a penny. But you must move first.”

“Wot else you got, lady? I bet there’s more’n a penny in this pretty carriage.”

“Don’t touch that!”

“Lady, I wouldn’ say you was in a position to be dishin’ orders,” said a tall, thin shape with an enormous nose. “Give us what you got and then we’ll think about movin’.”

“Yeah! What’cha got, lady? Bet there’s plenty for me in here, eh?”

“Don’t open that! Don’t, I tell you—it’s boiling—”

Too late. The thug had popped open the landau’s side hood panel, probably thinking it was a repository for riches, and a cloud of steam billowed out of the boiler. With a scream, he fell back, writhing on the ground clutching his burned face with equally burned hands.

“You bloody rich witch!” screamed someone in the back. “You’ve hurt Jake!”

With a roar of fury, the entire pack descended on her. Claire just had time to feel her coat ripped from her shoulders when something hard whacked her on the side of the head, and the night whirled around her before she landed hard on the ground.

14

Something dug mercilessly into her ribs. With a groan, Claire cracked open her left eye, and then her right. Her head spun with dizziness and confusion, but she had not been rendered unconscious. At least, she didn’t think so. Under her cheek, dirt grated between her skin and the hard cobblestones, stinking of soot, alcohol, and ancient urine. Revolted, she lifted her head.

Something poked her in the ribs again. Blindly, she whipped her arm backward, connecting with empty air. “God help me.” It seemed to take an eternity to pull her knees under her, and even longer to get her hands on either side of them.

Her gloves were gone. Bare skin scraped the stones.

She raised her head. The landau. Her trunk. All her worldly goods. Memory rushed in—the shouting, the ridicule, being hit. Falling.

The landau.

The street stood empty, the lamps outside the Aldgate station shining steadily, as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Something glinted on the cobbles, and she bent to pick it up, groaning again as the blood rushed to her head.

One of her tortoiseshell hair combs. A tine had snapped off, leaving a gap like the smile of a child without a front tooth. Absently, she reached up and slid it into her chignon. So they had found her traveling case. It seemed too much to hope that they would miss the false bottom in it—at any rate, it had disappeared into the night with them and she was unlikely to see her pearls or her great-grandmother’s emerald ring again. At least they had not stolen the very pins from her hair, or the clothes off her body. Her coat, however, with its lovely twining soutache trim, was gone.

The landau. Oh woe. The landau. Tears welled into her eyes as she surveyed the empty, silent street, and scalded a hot track down one cheek.

Something poked the back of her knee.

“Get away!” She whirled, expecting to see a dog nosing at her to see if she was edible, and found instead a child. “Good heavens. Who are you?”

Dressed in a ragged homespun jacket and pants, and a shirt with a fraying band and no collar, the waif turned huge dark eyes on her and pointed into the mouth of an alley across the street. He took a handful of her blue merino skirt—streaked now with something she didn’t want to investigate closely—and tugged.

“Oh no, my dear. I know your tricks. If you’re hiding another band of miscreants in there, they’ll not have me to work over again.”

Brave words to a scrap who couldn’t be above four years of age. She was as weak as a day-old chick and wouldn’t even be able to fight off this child if he decided to do more than poke her.

He shook his head and tugged again on her skirt.

“I’m not going with you, poppet. I must find a bobby and report Mr. Snouts and his friends to the authorities at once.”

The ragged head, which might have sported curls if it had been brushed, shook more vigorously. He tightened his grip on her skirt and began to tow her across the street, toward the alley.

“Stop, little man. I’m not going in there. I need to find a policeman. Do you understand? Do you speak English?” He nodded, then made a buttoning motion over his lips, still tugging her toward the alley. “You’re not permitted to speak?”

Another nod. He frowned when her stumbling steps stopped, then seemed to get an idea. He dug in one pocket and pulled out her other comb, all its tines intact. After handing it to her, he pointed again at the alley.

Comprehension dawned as she rammed the comb into the other side of her chignon. “They’ve gone this way? The ruffians who stole my landau and my trunk?” His gap-toothed smile lit up his face in the dim glow from the station lamps across the road. “Aha. Then lead on, little man. It would be useful for the bobbies to have a destination for their investigations once I locate it.”

Again the vigorous shake of the head, but he set off at a trot, pulling her by the skirt as though she were a horse on a leading rein. Claire followed him down the empty alley, dodging crates and kegs and even a sleeping human form, its legs sticking out from behind a rubbish bin. The alley doglegged past the door of a tavern, where they both picked up their pace, and disgorged them into a street lined with warehouses of all shapes, piggybacked onto one another and leaving barely enough room to squeeze between. Beyond their ramshackle outlines, she could hear the suck and pull of the Thames as it gurgled against dock and piling.

Squeezed between two warehouses she saw a squat building that might have been a house once, or maybe a customs shed. Even with the moonlight, it was difficult to tell. Its roof raked upward at a steep angle, and it was so narrow a person could stand on one side, toss a stone, and hit the other. The ragged child tugged her skirt as if to moor her to the spot, and pointed.

“They’re here? This is where they’ve taken my things? What is it, some kind of robbers’ hideout?” The boy frowned. Too many questions. She tried again. “They’ve brought my things here?” He nodded. “Are they friends of yours?” He nodded again.

Here was a puzzle. She squatted next to him in the shadow of the neighboring warehouse. “But my little man, if they’re friends of yours, why have you showed me? I’ve said I’ll bring the bobbies down on them. Is it because they’ve hurt you?”

He shook his head so vigorously his matted hair swung straight out above his ears. He took her hand and pointed to the ramshackle place, smiling in a way that she could only interpret as encouraging.

“You want me to go in there?” Big nod. “By myself?” He thrust out his chest and planted his feet as though he were a captain surveying the quarterdeck. “Well yes, I know you’re with me, but you probably couldn’t stop them coshing me on the head a second time the moment they caught sight of me. All I want is to get my things back. Do you know where they might have put the landau?”

Confusion wrote itself all over the smooth but filthy features.

“Never mind. I shall find it.” She rose, the muscles on her right side—the ones that had unceremoniously met the street as she was pulled from the landau—aching with the effort. “And since I haven’t seen a member of Sir Robert Peel’s policing force in the last hour, I must conclude I’m on my own.”

Claire surveyed the building, which leaned against the warehouse next door like a drunk against his best friend. Rage bubbled just beneath her breastbone. How dared they take the clothes literally off her back? How dared anyone treat her like this? It wasn’t enough that a mob had invaded her home and caused her to run for her very life. It wasn’t enough that her father had made the poor decisions that had opened her up to this. But this scum—these ruffians—had taken everything she had in the world, everything that would have made it possible for her to make her own way. Without respectable clothes and the landau, she could not convince anyone she was worthy of employment, much less gently bred.

These wretches had stolen her future from her, and by all she held holy, she would not tolerate it. She was finished with apologizing and hiding and running away. It was time to stand up and impose her will on someone else for once in her life.

“I’ll be back in an hour,” she told the youngster still standing beside her, waiting for her to go skipping into that house to have tea and crumpets with his criminal friends. “And if you would be so kind as to make inquiries as to the whereabouts of my landau and meet me out here, I promise I will not involve you in what I’m about to do.”

The child’s eyes widened and he released her skirt as if it burned him.

She marched down the street, picked up her skirts, and took to her heels in the alley. The last trains ran at eleven o’clock. If she was lucky, she could steal a ride on one and get to the laboratory at St. Cecelia’s and back before an Underground conductor caught her without a ticket.

15

No one occupied the Underground train carriage but two middle-aged charwomen more interested in their own gossip than in what a young lady was doing unaccompanied on a train in the middle of the night. Claire sidled off at Victoria Station, ticketless but unaccosted, and took a shortcut through Eaton Square to the back gate of St. Cecelia’s. The administration fondly thought that their property was secure, but the students knew better.

Claire found the foot- and handholds worn into the wall behind the glossy curtain of ivy and clambered up and over in moments. From there it was a quick dash across the lawn and down the basement steps, where skillful application of a hairpin to the lock made the way plain.

The stairs were as dark as criminal activity required them to be, though Claire kept a firm hold on the rail. The last thing she needed was to miss her footing and tumble to the bottom.

Ah. The Chemistry of the Home laboratory.

She found the jar of lucifers Professor Grünwald kept next to his blotter for the purpose of lighting a forbidden cigar during the lunch hour, and by their light set to work. It took a few moments to dredge up the recipe from the recesses of memory—blast the thieves for taking her notebook!—but within a quarter hour she had four vials stoppered and ready to go. Some day, when she was famous and once again rich, she would make an anonymous donation to the school’s pitiful science department and make restitution for what she had removed. But for the moment, necessity was most certainly the mother of invention, and on that principle alone even Professor Grünwald might approve.

After bundling her treasure in a used cardigan and then into a leather book satchel, both abandoned in the Lost and Found, she strapped the satchel to her back and retraced her steps. Half an hour later, she stepped out of the alley mouth opposite the rake-roofed home of the rascals who had stolen her things.

No small boy waited for her. Her lips thinned. Well, if he had not taken her seriously before, he most certainly would now.

Keeping to the shadows, she hurried around the corner of a half-timbered warehouse that might have seen active commerce in King Henry’s time and removed the vials from her satchel. Their noxious contents gurgled in her hands once she’d refastened the satchel on her back. Since it and the cardigan were her only possessions, she was loath to leave them lying on the street—and the satchel had the advantage of providing storage while allowing her hands free movement.

Thank goodness she’d put on this navy merino suit this morning. The fog breathing off the river was damp and chill, and droplets were already condensing in her hair. The dark color also allowed her to blend into the shadows as she crept from corner to corner of the building. A rat’s entry chewed into a board welcomed the first vial. She smashed it into the floorboards. “That’s for my notebook, you miserable wretches.” A board missing altogether was a fine entry point for the second. “And that’s for my pearl necklace.” At the third corner, she could find no way in except for a window, so she tossed it through and heard the satisfying tinkle of glass. “My coat, thank you very much.” She ran for the front entry as the first noxious tendrils of smokelike gas began to curl out from beneath the boards.

She wrenched open the front door. “And this—” She threw it with all her might. “—is for my landau!”

Someone yelled as the gas did its work, and then pandemonium broke loose. Claire retreated, smiling in satisfaction, as half a dozen figures staggered out in various stages of undress—or not—good heavens—that creature was wearing her coat! Claire flew across the street and tore it off a very short individual who was trailing its lovely panels in the dirt. He—or she, it was difficult to tell—spun in place, both hands mashed to his eyes as he shrieked in pain. Shrugging on her coat, Claire felt as Queen Elizabeth must have at seeing the first of the fire ships succeed so brilliantly against the Spanish armada. It was almost enough to make a person dance a hornpipe.

But she restrained herself, for there in front of her was one of her pretty embroidered waists, being used as a nightdress over a pair of ragged combinations! She dashed over, grasped the hem of it, and pulled it over the filthy girl’s head. Weeping with pain, the child turned to her, instinctively seeking to be comforted, but she hardened her heart and stepped away. Finally, the spindly person with the enormous nose staggered out, his face contorted in misery, carrying the waif who had directed her here. The latter’s unhappiness was acute, from the sound of the roars emanating from under the coat covering the lad’s head.

“Everyone all right?” Snouts croaked, eyes screwed shut in pain. “Mopsies?”

Two cries answered him. One was the girl Claire had relieved of her waist. An identical copy wrapped itself around the first, and they both burst into fresh tears.

“Jake?”

“I’m gonna die, Snouts. Jus’ kill me now, eh?”

Ah. Jake, the unfortunate burn victim. His difficulties were only increasing the longer he retained Claire’s acquaintance.

“Tigg?”

“’Ere, to my misfortune,” wailed the boy who had been wearing Claire’s coat.

“’Oo’s got Weepin’ Willie?” came another voice, belonging to a boy of about twelve who cowered in the gutter, his ragged jacket over his head.

“I gots ’im,” Snouts reported. “Can’t you ’ear the racket?”

“What happened? Who’s set upon us?”

Claire stepped out of the shadows, even though none of them could see yet. “I have.”

Silence fell, broken only by the sobbing of Weepin’ Willie and the Mopsies.

“’Oo’s that, then?” Snouts tried to crack his eyes open, which only resulted in more agony as the condensed gas on his face dribbled into them. “Wot we done to you?”

“You have attacked me, stolen my possessions, and taken my landau,” Claire snapped, her voice ringing into the night. “You will return every piece of my property at once or I’ll give you a second dose.” There were not enough chemicals in the satchel to make good on it, but she would bet not one tortured individual lying in the street was about to take the risk.

“’Oo are you?” Snouts set the wriggling Willie on his feet and sat abruptly in the gutter, still blinded.

“Never mind who I am. But what I am not is some puling victim willing to be cowed and beaten by the likes of you. I demand the return of my property immediately.”

The waif—Willie—ran across the road, bawling, and flung himself against her knees. Nonplussed, she stared down at him for a moment, then sighed. “All right. All right then, little man, let me wipe the capsaicin out of your eyes.” She knelt, found her handkerchief still in her sleeve, and wiped his face. He wrapped his arms around her neck and sobbed. “Poor darling, why did you not wait for me? I didn’t mean for you to be gassed as well.”

“’Ow does she know our Willie?” Tigg’s voice was muffled from trying to grind his eye sockets into his knees. “She ent gonna hurt ’im any more, is she?”

Claire raised her chin. “Unlike some in present company, I have no intention of hurting anyone. I simply want my things when you are sufficiently recovered to gather them up.”

“’Ow long will that be?” Snouts attempted to open his eyes again, and whimpered behind clenched teeth.

“About thirty minutes, I should say.” Then she had an idea. “Willie, would you be so kind as to direct me within? I’m quite capable of repacking my trunk myself.”

“You leave our Willie alone.” The two Mopsies faced her, using their ragged garments to wipe the tears streaming from their eyes. One of them hauled back and kicked Claire in the shin.

“You wretched little monster!”

Claire dropped Willie on the cobbles and caught the girl by the back of her combies as she spun to escape. It was the work of a moment to turn her over her knee and remind her of Newton’s law that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

“Snouts!” the miscreant screamed, wriggling out of Claire’s grip and running for her life. “She whacked me!”

“There’s a surprise,” he mumbled.

“Shoot her!”

“Wiv what? You fink I’ve got a pistol in me undershorts?”

“But she whacked me!”

“You won’t be kicking her again, then, will ya?”

Fuming, the child stamped her foot and shot Claire an evil look, compounded by swollen eyes and a dirty, tear-streaked face. “You’ll be sorry, lady.”

“I’m afraid you’ll be the sorry one if you try to assault me again,” Claire informed her. “Honestly, I’ve never seen such a badly brought-up child, and that’s saying something, considering the past several days.”

“I ent been brought up, and you’re just mean.” The moppet stamped again.

“Don’t stamp. It isn’t ladylike.”

Stamp. Stamp.

Claire dodged behind Snouts’s balled-up form and snatched the disgusting creature by the back of her combies a second time. Again the laws of physics were soundly applied, to the accompaniment of such screeching Claire fully expected either bobbies or criminals to descend on them all like the wrath of God.

She set the child on its feet and silently dared it to stamp again. Its leg twitched once before discretion became the better part. “A wise decision,” she told it. “I’m encouraged to see that you have some capacity for education.”

The moppet blinked and ran away to its sister, who put her arms around it and administered what comfort she could to wounded pride and hinder parts.

Claire straightened her spine and surveyed the field of battle. Satisfied that no one had the spirit or the physical capacity to challenge her victory, she held out her hand to Willie. “Would you be so kind as to escort me inside, Master Willie?”

The boy shot an uncertain glance at Snouts.

The latter had at last managed to open one eye just a crack. He waved a defeated hand. “Don’t look at me. I ent gonna argue wiv ’er.”

16

Inside the derelict building, the gaseous miasma had already begun to clear, not finding the walls and roof any great impediment to its rise through the atmosphere. But Claire still felt a stinging in her eyes, like an echo of the pain endured by the criminals outside.

Criminals, hmph. They were children. How was it possible that so many children should be parentless and forced to make their own way in the world? It was one thing to be eighteen and possessed of an education. It was quite another to be ten … or four … and possessed of nothing at all.

Master Willie, being closer to the ground and less affected by the remnants of the gas, found her a lamp on a hook. Then he towed her over to her trunk, which lay empty on its side next to a cold fireplace that appeared not to have been cleaned since the Queen of Empires had begun her glorious reign.

“Ah. Here’s a start. Well done.” She righted the trunk and laid her embroidered waist inside. Then, holding the lamp high with one hand and her skirts with the other, she followed Willie carefully up a rickety stair—more of a ladder, really—that creaked alarmingly at their combined weight.

As she collected her various bits of clothing—underthings, blouses, walking skirts, dresses, hats—she saw they had already been sorted into heaps with sundry like items that were not nearly as clean. “Willie, were these going to the ragmen in the morning?” He nodded, his eyes tearing a little at the last remnants of the gas. “It’s a lucky thing I acted quickly, then. If I had waited, I should never have seen my clothes again. You wouldn’t have observed a small traveling case containing a Bible, would you?”

The little boy glanced to the rear of the apartment, where there was a single plank door. Everywhere else, it appeared the members of this gang were using the piles of rags and clothes as bedding until enough had accumulated to go to the ragman or the stall-keepers in Petticoat Lane. But someone rated the privacy and status of a door, and she had one guess as to who that might be.

“Is that Snouts’s room?” Willie nodded. “Since he has given me carte blanche to recover my property, I shan’t feel too bad about invading his privacy, then.”

Willie looked alarmed, and she suspected all the children were under threat of death if they, like Bluebeard’s wives, succumbed to the temptation to open the door.

For all his status as leader, Snouts had not much more than his minions, she saw as she stepped cautiously inside. A pile of rags, a pipe, a cage containing rags, and a window with real glass in it was the extent of his worldly goods. The room stank of acid alcohol and offal. Primming her mouth in disgust, Claire rooted through the rag-pile until her hands touched a hard and rectangular shape.

Her traveling case. She carried it over to the lamp and opened it to find only the Bible inside. The lock of hair still lay within, so that was another blessing. But what of the rest? She tipped up the false bottom and peered in, then felt the compartment with her fingers.

Nothing. No notebooks, and certainly no jewelry.

“Willie, have you seen any sign of a book and a notebook for writing in? They were in this case.” Again, he shook his head, looking worried. “Never mind. I shall have to conduct an interrogation, that’s all. Best to do that while the suspects are still somewhat incapacitated. Will you help me return these things to the trunk, please?”

A muffled sound, like water bubbling in a pipe, came as though in reply. Willie’s eyes widened and she glanced in the direction of his gaze. “Is there something alive in there?”

What she had mistaken for a heap of rags inside the cage moved and lifted its head. Two black eyes regarded her with suspicion, and the bubbling sound came again.

“Good heavens. Is that a chicken?” Willie gripped the windowsill and stood on tiptoe to peer into the cage. “Snouts keeps a chicken in his room? Why on earth should he do that?” The little boy gestured with both hands and she understood. “Ah. An inexhaustible source of food. What a pity he doesn’t understand that one needs to care for one’s birds in order to expect something in return.” If she had been angry before, it was nothing to what she felt now. This poor creature, locked in the dark with nothing to eat, expected to produce food until—what? It died?

“Come along, little bird.” She picked up the cage. “Willie, you are in charge of lighting us downstairs.”

In a few moments she had repacked everything into her trunk, and closed the lid. She was not sure how she was going to move it, and she did not yet know where the landau was, but she could only accomplish one thing at a time.

“Thank you for your assistance, Master Willie. Your help has been invaluable.”

For the first time, a smile broke out on his face, and she saw a dimple wink on each side of his mouth. He hugged her knees and she dropped to his level, carefully putting the cage on the floor before she hugged him back. When she tried to rise again, he hung on. “What is it, Willie?”

His grip tightened.

“You don’t want me to take the bird? No. You don’t want me to go outside again? But I must. It is clear that a few of my possessions are secreted upon the persons of your friends, and I intend to retrieve them.”

He shook his head, as if her guess was incorrect, and held her immobile with the force of his affection. “What is it, dear? I don’t understand.”

He released her and ran to the largest rag-pile, where he busied himself making the hollow in it larger, as if to accommodate a—

“Willie, is it that you want me to stay here?”

Beaming, he nodded, and sat himself in the hollow he had made, patting the space next to him. Unaccountably, her eyes filled with tears.

“But my dear, I must go. I must find a place to lay my head this evening, and then continue my search for employment. I appreciate your help deeply, and someday when I can, I will repay you, but I cannot stay.”

The smile faded from his face, and even the pathetic hen in the cage made a sad sound. Compassion warred with practicality. It was one thing to rescue a hen that was probably on its last legs anyway. It was quite another thing to rescue a child—or a number of children. Some things were just beyond her means and ability at the moment. She had never realized the power in a child’s tears—especially when this particular child had so little, and she was about to take even that away.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. Grasping the hen’s cage, she went outside.

The members of the gang—oh, for heaven’s sake, the children—had pulled themselves into a knot on the steps of the rope-maker’s establishment opposite. When she appeared, they stirred uneasily. Well, they didn’t know she had nothing but a cardigan in her satchel, did they?

“Thanks to Master Willie’s assistance, I now have most of my things,” she said, taking up a schoolteacher’s stance before them. “I now require two books, a parcel of pencils, a ring, and a pearl necklace, and I also require the whereabouts of my landau.”

They shifted, making themselves smaller on the steps. Snouts gulped audibly and climbed to his feet, brushing the fronts of his patched trousers. “We—we gots a proposition for you, lady.” Then he peered through the gloom. “Izzat my Rosie you got there?”

“If you mean this unfortunate scrap of poultry, then yes. I am in the process of rescuing her.”

“But she’s mine. How’m I gonna eat?”

“I suspect you’ll develop the same skills as your companions, Mr. Snouts. You have starved and degraded this poor creature until it’s a wonder she’ll give you anything but a sound pecking.”

“’E caught ’er in t’market in Poultry Street,” Tigg said. “’E were gonna eat ’er but t’Mopsies talked ’im out of it.”

The Mopsies glared at her, as if she’d singlehandedly undone all their good work. “You may rest assured no one will eat her whilst she is in my care,” she assured them. “Now. My property, if you please.”

“Our proposition first,” Snouts said.

“Mr. Snouts, you are hardly in a position to bargain. I am the one with the poisonous chemicals.”

“McTavish.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“My name’s McTavish. Snouts is just a handle.”

“And a fair one it is,” Tigg snickered.

“’At’s enough! I’m doing a spot o’ business ’ere, can’t you see?” He turned back to Claire. “Our proposition is, we give you back yer stuff if you stick aroun’ an’ teach us ’ow to make them chemicals and such.”

Willie crept up behind her and wrapped his arms around her knees. Snouts McTavish nodded. “Willie likes yer, so ye must not be like them toffs wot beat us off their fancy carriages.”

Memory flared. It had been the day she’d driven Gorse home from school—the day she’d caused the explosion in the laboratory. “That was you. You stopped my landau in front of Pilkington’s Hotel. I gave you all the change I had.”

Snouts shrugged. “So those’re our terms. For every day you stay wiv us an’ teach us summink, we give you back one of your gewgaws.”

“And my landau?” For the first time, Snouts lost his bravado. He sucked his upper lip into his teeth. “Mr. McTavish, do you have my landau or do you not?”

“Not,” he mumbled.

“You don’t? Then where is it?”

“Billy Crumwell an’ ’is gang stole ’er off us.” He met her eyes, pleading. “We ’ad ’er stashed safe as houses, honest, but they followed us. When we went back wiv a buyer—er, I mean, a friend of ours, yer landau were gone.”

Claire fought down a rising explosion of rage at having yet another foe to face. “If I stay and teach you, you will help me get it back?”

“Oh, aye, lady. I wouldn’t want it nosed about that Snouts McTavish can’t ’ang onto ’is plunder.” She glared at him. “Ah, I mean, that someone can take wot don’t belong to ’em and get away wiv it. It ent honest.”

“The hen remains mine.”

“Aye,” he said reluctantly.

“None of my property shall go missing again.”

He gave his companions a look. “Aye.”

If she left now to go to her grand-aunts Beaton, she would never see her notebook, full of years of painstaking experimentation, or her great-grandmother’s ring again. And the simple fact was, her aunts did not want her there. They were set like summer mud in their own ways, and barely tolerated anyone under fifty, never mind someone just out of school. Her friends could not help, and her mother was hundreds of miles away. She glanced down at Willie, who was still performing the duties of a ball and chain around her knees. He smiled up at her, and her heart turned over.

At least someone in the wide world cared whether she came or went—whether she had a bed for the night or not. It might be Hobson’s choice, but at least it was a choice. “Willie and Rosie shall share the upper room with me. I am afraid propriety dictates you must move your things and sleep with your companions, Mr. McTavish.”

“And you get all the eggs?”

“Certainly not. We shall save the eggs and have an enormous fry-up, to be shared by all. That is, provided we find some corn and perhaps some greens for Rosie to eat in the meantime. She is not an automaton. She must be cared for.”

“We’ll find food for ’er, lady.” The Mopsie that Claire had not paddled spoke up. The other one rubbed its behind and remained mutinously silent.

“We are agreed, then. I will teach you how to construct my gaseous capsaicin devices, and you will return my things and assist me in the recovery of my landau.”

Snouts nodded, and slowly the others followed his lead.

“Wot’s yer name?” the boy who had worn her coat asked. “We can’t call yer ‘lady ’oo makes the devices’ all the time.”

Claire hesitated a moment. “Lady will do for now. It has the advantage of being both true and anonymous.”

“Wot’s nominus?”

“What I choose to be until I make something of myself, that’s what. Now, then. I have observed that the gas I released inside, while it made you uncomfortable, had the side benefit of killing all the vermin in the place. Shall we all adjourn and see what comfort we can find in our lodgings?”

17

It cannot be said that Claire spent a comfortable night on her rag-pile. While Willie breathed gently next to her, she started and woke at every sound, suspecting thievery or vermin—she wasn’t sure which would be worse. When a watery dawn finally broke over London, she was already awake and regretting the absence of tooth-powder and warm water to wash in.

Clearly, better accommodations must join recovery of her property and employment on her list of immediate needs.

She combed her hair with her uninjured tortoiseshell comb, rewound it and pinned it into its customary chignon. Then she changed into a fresh waist and descended the stair with Rosie in her cage in one hand. The sound of conversation led her into the depths of the house, where she found her companions, including Willie, gathered in the kitchen around a three-legged table. A stack of bricks replaced the fourth leg.

Kitchen was a generous term. The room contained only a cold iron stove and the table, and the shelving tacked onto the walls above the stove were empty but for dirt and spiders. In the center of the table, a hard loaf had been hacked at with a pocket-knife, and the children were busy wolfing it down.

“Good morning,” she greeted them. “Where did this come from?”

A mumble answered her. Rosie tottered to her feet and focused on the bread on the table, tilting her head so as not to lose sight of it.

“We already been out,” a Mopsie said. “I got a corncob for Rosie.” She extracted it from a pocket and held it up.

“I could’ve et that,” Jake complained. “I’m still hungry.” Someone had wrapped a rag around his burned hands.

Claire opened the cage door and put the fresh ear inside. Rosie fell upon it like an eagle on a carcass. “A little self-sacrifice now will all be forgotten when we have our fry-up later in the week. May I have some of that bread, please?”

“Help yerself,” Jake said.

“Mr. Jake, a gentleman would slice a piece and offer it to a lady.”

“I ent no gentleman.”

“Since I am a lady, and since I do not consort with men who are not gentlemen, your training in that department begins immediately.” She smiled at him. “Thank you. You are most generous.”

He just stared at her.

“Crikey, Jake, you deaf? Cut ’er off a bit.” Snouts pushed the knife closer to him.

“I ent servin’ ’er. What d’ye take me for?”

“It is not a matter of serving, Mr. Jake. A gentleman puts the comfort of others before his own. That is how one tells he is a gentleman.”

“I said I weren’t a gentleman. Cut yer own bread. Or better yet, don’t, and I’ll ’ave it.”

Snouts swore and cuffed him across the head. “Do as she says, ye stupid cove.”

“Why should I? First she burns me, then she boils me eyes. If I take that knife to anything, it’ll be ’er, and that’s a fact.”

Though he couldn’t be more than twelve or thirteen, Claire could not mistake the deadly resolve in his eyes and had no doubt he meant exactly what he said. “I did warn you not to raise the landau’s front panel, Mr. Jake,” she said in quiet but firm tones. “You chose to ignore me. And as for the gaseous capsaicin, we’re going to turn that to our advantage and you shan’t have to experience it again.”

“About that,” Snouts said as Jake reluctantly picked up the knife and sawed off a chunk of the dark bread. Claire took it and tried to chew a few bites. Then she tore the remainder into bits and gave them to Rosie, who launched herself at them with enthusiasm.

“Yes, about that. The first thing to do is to compile the ingredients.” She told them what she would need. “Are you able to find these things?”

Snouts and Tigg exchanged a glance. “Sure. We’ll just stroll into the nearest chemist’s or apothecary’s and pick those up.”

“Lovely.” Claire smiled.

“I ’ope you ’ave lots of dosh, lady, because those things don’t sound free. Or easily liberated, if you get my drift.”

“Dosh?”

“Cash. Blunt. Pounds sterling.”

She had no such thing. She had never carried more than a few shillings for sweets, and had no doubt at all that the household money had been looted from wherever Mrs. Morven kept it in Carrick House. “I’m afraid not. What shall we do, then?”

The Mopsies elbowed each other and grinned. Snouts jerked his chin in their direction. “These ’uns ’ave a few useful talents along those lines. At least it ent the Lord’s Day. Pickings is always slim in the church crowd.”

“Pick—?” And then the penny dropped. “Oh, no. No. You will not be stealing from people’s pockets the means to obtain these items. Absolutely not.”

Five pairs of eyes turned on her with incredulity. “Beggin’ yer pardon, lady, but where d’you suppose the bread and corn came from?”

“I have no idea.” Someone had gone to the market, hadn’t they?

Snouts shook his head at her ignorance, and Claire began to feel nettled. “Babes in the woods,” he sighed. “Rag-pickin’ don’t cover expenses. If we don’t steal, we don’t eat, simple as that. If you’ve strong opinions on’t, I suggest we end our association ’ere.”

“Not until I get my landau back.”

“Then yer goin’ t’be awful hungry along about Wednesday.”

Sleeping rough was one thing. But descending to criminal activity simply to eat? Unheard of. Unacceptable. As it was, she was walking the knife’s edge—if it were discovered where she was, she could never be received again in polite society.

“Good heavens, Mr. McTavish. Has it never occurred to you that there are alternatives to stealing? Such as employment, for instance?”

“’Oo’s gonna employ the likes of us?” Tigg wanted to know.

She surveyed the ragged, filthy band. Point taken. “Well, if we cannot earn our bread by the skill of our hands, we must earn it by the power of our intellect. How many of you have your numbers?”

No response.

“None of you can count? Or do arithmetic?”

Silence.

“Dear me. All right. I can see I have my work cut out for me. So let me ask you this—do any of you gentlemen know where the gaming parlors are?” At this, every male hand but Willie’s went up. “Ah. I thought as much. Are we possessed of a pack of cards?”

Tigg reached over and removed the lid of the stove. He rummaged inside and withdrew a pack of dog-eared and dirty cards, tied into a bundle with a piece of hemp. “Keeps ’em dry in there,” he said by way of explanation. “What does knowing our numbers ’ave to do with the gaming parlors, lady?”

“Simply this. Unless one knows the values of the numbers, one cannot play cards successfully. And unless one plays successfully, one cannot win the pot. Do you see my reasoning now?”

Their eyes widened as the bright vista of possibility opened up to them. “Gather round, all of you. I’m going to teach you your numbers—yes, even you, Willie—and then I’m going to teach you a game of skill and strategy. To the inhabitants of the Wild West, it’s known as cowboy poker.”

18

Andrew Malvern had not known that James, always so hearty and hail-fellow-well-met, was a proud man. But it was quite plain that he possessed that vice, and that Lady Claire Trevelyan had injured it, whether she’d meant to or not. The fact that his partner struggled with a vice he did not didn’t bother him. After all, Andrew himself struggled with his temper and a tendency to fall into a glass of whiskey when he was tired and frustrated.

No, what bothered him was that because James considered himself snubbed by the young lady, he, Andrew, had lost the possibility of a fine assistant. How many gently bred young ladies, after all, were not only possessed of a landau and the skill to pilot it, but read scientific journals to boot? It galled him, frankly, and he was quite put out with his friend even now.

In fact, he was so put out that he couldn’t stay in his own laboratory, for fear that James would return and he would say more things he couldn’t take back. Instead of sending a tube to place another order of coal and chemicals, he had gone to the coal-yard himself, and then to the manufactory. He’d taken his evening meal with a glass of foamy beer at his mother’s cottage in Stratford, and watched the sun set over the smoke of London feeling full but not content.

He heard the whisper of her skirts upon the terrace a moment before she joined him. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen you and young Lord James on the outs, Andrew. Why don’t you tell me about it?”

“There is nothing you can do, Mother.”

“I can listen. It’s clear you need to get it off your chest, and you know it’ll go no further.”

That was true. A former lady’s maid, his mother had married a policeman who had advanced through the ranks to captain of his own detachment before he’d passed on. As confidante to both, she was the repository of secrets that even he was not permitted to know—such as what really caused the Duchess of Tavistock to divorce her husband, or what might have happened to the infant Lord Wilberforce Dunsmuir, who had disappeared two years ago from his bed under the very nose of his nurse. His mother had been employed in both households in her youth and in the latter case, still kept in contact with the nurse, sending the poor woman a basket of food every now and then to keep her from starvation.

“Very well.” He told her the whole story and ended with, “So there you have it. A woman’s come between us at last—but not in the way I might have expected.”

“The poor child,” his mother murmured. “Viscount St. Ives’s daughter, you say?”

“The very same. Now reduced to earning her bread like the rest of us—though I must say she doesn’t behave like your average Blood. She plans to put herself through university.”

“It will take more than the wages you can give her to do that.”

“I know, but I admire her for her ambition, at least. And there are scholarships to be had.”

“If one has the right connections.”

“Wit or Blood, I’m sure she does.”

His mother reached across the glass table for the newspaper that sat folded there. “I thought her name sounded familiar. Did you see this?” She opened the Evening Standard to the front page.

RIOT IN BELGRAVIA LEAVES BURNING QUESTIONS

Last evening the titled residents of Belgravia were treated to a shocking example of unbridled brigandry that prompted butlers up and down the tidy streets to lock doors and seek out the nearest fireplace poker. Carrick House was the focus of a mob of fifty or more, all of whom were whipped into an emotional frenzy by a speaker at Hyde Park Corner. The crowd adjourned to Wilton Crescent, where they converged upon the house of the late Viscount St. Ives, whom many are accusing of being the engineer behind the infamous Arabian Bubble. Whether this is true or not, the crowd obviously believed it to be so. With windows broken and furniture burned, this reporter was shocked to the core at such a public display of bad feeling.

A bystander said the uncontrollable mob was shouting about recouping its investments. “But that’s hardly reasonable when they made a bonfire in the street out of items they could have sold,” he said. “I feared for the lives of the remaining occupants of the house.”

Indeed, according to reports, the sister of the present viscount was believed to have been in residence at the time, along with one or two loyal retainers. Her whereabouts at present are not known.

“Great Scott.” Andrew held the paper up. “It says no one knows where she is.”

“So now I ask myself, is this tiff really over the young lady and Lord James, or the young lady and you, my dear boy?”

Andrew put the paper down and rose. “She is a young woman of intellect and spirit, Mother. This is not about a tiff at all—anyone would be concerned for a person of their acquaintance.”

“Certainly,” she agreed.

“Any gentleman with an ounce of humanity would be shocked at such a report.”

“Of course.”

“I shall take my leave now, Mother. Thank you for supper.”

“My compliments to Lord James when you make it up with him. And to the young lady when you find her.”

He paused in the act of putting on his bowler. “Mother.”

She made a gesture as though she were buttoning her lips, and smiled as she kissed him goodbye.

He caught an evening train into Victoria Station and walked the few blocks into Belgrave Square at a fast clip. The smell of burned, wet wood hung on the air as he rounded the corner into Wilton Crescent, and though he had never been to Carrick House, it wasn’t difficult to tell which had been Lady Claire’s home.

It was the only one on the crescent with no windows left on the ground floor. The white-painted Georgian exterior was smudged with black handprints, and the sidewalk in front had been trampled to the point that bricks had come loose, like teeth after a blow.

Dismayed, he stared from the house to the street, where dustmen were still loading the last charred and broken pieces of furniture into their wagon. One of them saw his face and paused to direct a stream of chewing tobacco into the still-smoking heap.

“Shame, innit?” he said affably.

“That it is.” Understatement of the year.

“Eejits, all of ’em. Her ladyship’ll not be able to get half the dosh she might’ve before. If they’re lookin’ for their money back, they just done themselves out of a bundle of it.”

“I daresay you are right.” Andrew scanned the house once more. “Her ladyship is not in residence?”

“Not that I know. Was supposed to be a daughter still ’ere but there’s been no sign of ’er, and I been ’ere since teatime. Prob’ly be an hour or so more, once t’lamps come on.”

Andrew dug in his breast pocket. “If you see her, could you give her my card?”

The dustman peered at it in the gloom. “Wot’re you, some sort of solicitor or summink?”

“No, just a—” Well, what was he, exactly? “A friend. A very concerned friend. I should like to know she’s safe, at the very least.”

“Can’t fault a man fer that.” The dustman pocketed the card. “S’a shame.”

It was as good an epitaph as any. Andrew thanked the man and began his walk back to Victoria Station. He had inherited his father’s aptitude for puzzles, and here was one that involved not only the brain, but also the sympathies of a gentleman. Lady Claire’s incursion into his life had been brief but brilliant, and he could not now walk away. He must apply his mind to finding her himself.

19

As it turned out, Snouts possessed the greatest aptitude, not for numbers, but for bluffing. “It is that talent that will allow you to win,” Claire assured him. “Such a skill cannot be taught. In the meantime, let us count these diamonds once more—if you have three on this card and four on this one, how many do you have in total?”

Tigg and Jake had at one time in their dark pasts received some schooling, so addition and subtraction came back fairly quickly. The Mopsies, however, treated the concept of multiplication with dark suspicion. To them, it was simply not possible to arrive at a single answer in a multitude of ways. One added three to three to get six, one did not simply say, “twice three” and arrive at six. Since there were only four suits, Claire could only advance to the four times table in any case. Everything after that would have to be memorized … another day.

Without slates, chalk, or books, they were limited to what the cards could teach them, and as the day tilted into afternoon, she and Snouts needed the deck themselves. They played hand after hand of poker until Tigg nudged her.

“We can’t do this much longer, lady. Everyone’ll be stumblin’ off ’ome soon to get a bit of shut-eye before tonight’s games.”

“We want to play when they’re tired and foxed.” Snouts gathered up the cards and tapped them into a neat deck. “Only one problem I see.”

“What would that be?” Claire lifted the stove lid so he could put the cards back in their place. “You have all done very well today. Even Jake can play a respectable hand, though I would not bet the deed to an estate on it.”

“That’s just it,” Snouts said. “What ’ave we got to bet wiv besides great lots of nuffink?”

Claire sat rather suddenly on the broken stool she had been using. “Oh. I had not got that far in my strategy.” She regarded him while her mind raced and anxiety puddled in her stomach. How could she not have thought of this? The whole point of gambling was to win, but one had to have a stake in order to be included in the game.

She did not even have a toothpick.

But wait—

Her gaze narrowed on Snouts. “We do have something to throw in the pot,” she said. “Where is my exchange for teaching you your numbers? Where is my great-grandmother’s ring?”

“You get yer stuff back when you teach us about chemicals and suchlike useful items.” Jake tilted his chair back, severely endangering its bodily integrity. “Not arithmetic.”

“Shut up, Jake.” Snouts reached under the muffler wound about his neck and rummaged in his shirt. “This it?”

Her great-grandmother’s Georgian emerald winked in his palm. Claire restrained herself from snatching it by sitting on her hands. She would not say she had gained their trust, but at least she was making every effort she could to help them in their uneasy truce. However, it seemed she would have to make this ultimate sacrifice in order to attain the greater goal.

“Yes, that’s it.” With a breath, she committed herself. “We will use it for our stake. I implore you to use your skills to the utmost, Mr. McTavish. I should very much like to see it come back again.”

“I ent goin’ into this wiv the intent to lose it, if that’s wot you mean.” He tucked the ring away.

“I still say we pawn the thing,” Jake put in. “Stupid to risk it when we could get ten pound easy over t’ Seven Dials.”

“We ent goin’ to pawn the lady’s ring if we have a chance of winnin’ the pot,” Tigg told him.

“What chance? Snouts ent no strategy man. You’ve got me for that.”

“But you cannot recognize the numbers on the cards fast enough,” Claire reminded him. “Snouts is our best chance.”

“I c’n tot them up pretty quick,” one of the Mopsies said with pride. “Faster’n you, Jake.”

In answer, he swatted her with the back of his bandaged hand. In the resulting uproar, Snouts grabbed him and pushed him out into the front room. “I’ve ’ad about enough of you!” he shouted. “Go do summat useful and don’t lemme see you back ’ere afore dark.” Jake’s broken boots pounded furiously on the street, disappearing into the hubbub dockside. “Stupid cove.” Snouts went to the back door and looked out, though there was nothing there but tangled weeds and broken rocks, and the river wall six feet away.

Claire opened Rosie’s cage and took her out, sliding one hand under her feet and passing her arm about her so she would not fall off. Rosie settled onto her hand, and Claire felt her feet relax.

Ah. She had gained the hen’s trust. Now she would not run away to become food for who knew what kind of four- or two-legged predator. She deposited the bird gently on the ground outside, where Rosie immediately began divesting the property of its insect life.

“She’ll run off,” Snouts said.

“She will not. We have fed her, you see, and provided a hunting ground. She has no reason to run. Mr. McTavish, would you have pawned the ring this morning if we had not decided to use it?”

“Aye.”

“Thank you for not doing so. At least this way we have a chance of getting it back.”

“Means summat to ya, does it?”

“It was my great-grandmother’s. The emerald came from the crown of an Indian prince. Or so family legend has it, at least. I should hate to lose something that has come so far and been with us so long.”

Rosie pounced on a beetle with energy.

“I’ll do me best,” Snouts said, his voice gruff as he watched the bird. “Ent often a lady trusts me with ’er family hairlooms.”

Claire smiled at him. “Good luck, Mr. McTavish. You’d best be off now.”

“What’ll you do?”

“I shall run the Mopsies through their four times tables once again, and then I must find a way to let my friends know I have not been kidnapped or pushed into the river.”

“You won’t tell ’em of us? Or cut an’ run?”

“Of course not. We have an agreement, and it is not yet fulfilled. I shall be here when you return triumphant, you may depend upon it.”

She had gained Rosie’s trust with a cob of corn and some bread. It would take a prince’s emerald to gain the trust of Snouts McTavish and his gang. But it was a price she was willing to pay if it meant getting her life back again. What shape that life would take was a mystery at the moment. But surely the good Lord could not expect her to waste the talents He had given her by going meekly down to Cornwall to become the wife of some husky lad whose idea of literature was the local cattle prices.

“I’m ’ungry,” one of the Mopsies announced. “We’ll be back.”

And before Claire could grab them and remind them that stealing was a crime, she and Tigg had vanished out the front. The remaining Mopsie sat upon the river wall and glared from her to Rosie in a way that told Claire exactly where her suspicions lay.

“I meant what I said, you know,” Claire informed the child. “No harm shall come to Rosie whilst she is in my care. She has given me her trust, so she will not run away. Nor do you need to stand guard over her.”

The child blinked at her. “Wot’s ’at?”

“Say, ‘I beg your pardon’.”

“I beg yer pardon, wot’s ’at?”

Claire sighed. “Once a bird gives you her trust, she regards you as a member of her flock. If I were you, I should endeavor to gain Rosie’s trust as well. One cannot have too many members in one’s flock.”

“I brought ’er a corn even when Jake would’ve et it.”

“Next time you shall give it to her from your own hand, so that she realizes you are also worthy of her trust.”

The child eyed her. “Yer a strange mort.”

“Why should you say that?”

“Most people just eat chickens and don’t care wot they fink.”

“Yes, well, no one is eating Rosie. She has a duty to perform and we shall enable her to do it. Just as you do. What is twice three?”

“I dunno.”

“Yes, you do. If I have three cobs of corn and you have three cobs, how many do we have to give to Rosie altogether?”

The wheels ground into motion. “Six. But she’d be sick for sure if she et ’em all at oncet.”

“She would indeed. However, if she ate only one, how many would be left?”

“Five.”

“One for each day of the week. A very satisfactory arrangement for Rosie, I should say, wouldn’t you?”

“If Snouts wins ’at poker game, we could ’ave ’em.”

“Let us hope he does, then. Would you do me the honor of telling me your name?”

The child gazed at her sideways while she studied Rosie, who had found a patch of bare dirt and was busy digging a dust bath. “I’m a Mopsie.”

“But you must have a Christian name.”

“I dunno.”

“You don’t know your name?” Here was a sad situation. Chickens were worthy of names but little girls with sticky fingers were not?

“I gots a name, I just dunno as I should tell you. Snouts said not if the coppers was to ask.”

“I am not a copper. And if we are to be members of Rosie’s flock, it is only fitting that we address each other correctly.”

She mulled this over. “I’m Maggie. Short for Margaret, but ’at takes too long to say.”

Claire leaned over and offered her hand, and bemused, Maggie shook it. “A pleasure, Miss Maggie. And your sister?”

“She’s Lizzie. Elizabeth.”

With a smile, Claire said, “My middle name is Elizabeth. I was named for my grandmother, who was reckoned a great beauty in her day. My mother, as you see, was an optimist.”

“Lizzie’s a beauty,” Maggie said defensively, as if her sister was not to be outdone by any other Elizabeth in the country, alive or not.

“She is indeed. She has very striking blue eyes. I hope she has forgiven me for spanking her last night.”

“Nope.”

“She did kick me first, and may I say, it was completely unwarranted. I hope her heart may soften toward me in time, if we are to be flock mates as well.”

Maggie fell silent, watching Rosie fling dirt over herself with great abandon. Then she said, “Why’s she making ’erself all dirty?”

“She is having a bath. The dirt suffocates any bugs, and leaves her feeling shiny and clean when she shakes it out.”

“’Ow’s a fine lady like you know so much about hens, then?”

“Polgarth the poultryman taught me when I was as old as you. He was wise in the ways of birds. We have the finest flock in the parish, and every bird in it trusts him with her life.”

“They’re flock mates, then.”

“They are indeed.”

Maggie glanced at her. “Jake don’t trust you. Ent he a flock mate?”

Claire hesitated. “In some cases it takes time. And I don’t think offering a corn cob to him is going to do the trick.”

To her surprise, Maggie smiled widely, dimples winking in her dirty cheeks. “’E likes corn. Try it.”

Claire smiled too, more at the unexpected companionship in the child’s gap-toothed grin than at the image of Jake taking anything from her otherwise than by force or stealth. “I think the price of his trust is substantially higher than corn. I’d have to offer him my pearl necklace at the least.”

“’Ere, then.” Maggie reached under her combinations and pulled out the double strand of St. Ives pearls. Claire stared at them, pale against the girl’s grubby hand.

“Take ’em.” Maggie tossed them over, and Claire caught them more by reflex than aim.

“I don’t understand. I haven’t shown you any chemical formulas yet.”

“Jake’d just take ’em in the night and pawn ’em if he knew I had ’em. That’s why Snouts didn’t tell ’im. But we’re flock mates, and Jake’s afraid of you.”

Claire hardly knew which astonishing fact to address first. “Tha—thank you, Maggie. It’s very … commendable of you to return them unasked.” She fastened them round her neck and pushed them beneath the collar of her blouse. “Jake does not strike me as being afraid of anyone.”

“’E’s afraid of you. He talks a hard streak, but I know. Otherwise he’d’ve knifed you straight out.”

“Would he?” Claire sat down rather suddenly on the filthy back step. “I must consider myself fortunate, then.” Perhaps it would be best to change the subject. “I must go and send a tube,” she said. “Mr. McTavish will not be back for some time yet. Would you like to come with me?”

Maggie shook her head. “Rosie and me will stay behind.” Rosie shook out her feathers in a cloud of dust and stalked over to recline upon the ground next to Claire’s dusty kid half-boots.

“You might take the opportunity to clean her cage and find some fresh bedding, then,” Claire suggested. “Since she has performed her ablutions, she may wish to lay an egg.”

At the prospect of the imminent arrival of food, Maggie hopped off the wall and went to get the cage. Upon the ground, Rosie blinked in slow contentment. One creature, at least, was perfectly happy in this moment. Claire went in and put on her hat and blue merino jacket, wished fruitlessly for a mirror, and set off.

20

She had never realized with such painful clarity how much she had taken even a shilling for granted. Without such a simple thing, she could not in good conscience take the Underground again to Victoria Station. She could not pay to have a tube sent from the Post Office, so she was forced to consider returning home. But Belgravia was a long walk from the docks.

Claire set her teeth. Snouts would return victorious. They would get the ingredients they needed for the gaseous devices. They would retrieve the landau tonight, and she would not have to walk anywhere henceforth. But in the meantime, she had miles to go, she was ravenously hungry, and her strictures against stealing were beginning to seem foolish.

No wonder Maggie wanted to stay behind to ensure the safety of the egg.

Claire felt dangerously out of place as she pushed and dodged her way along the streets. The markets might be closing up for the day, but the desperate crowds jostled her, men looked at her askance, and bands of thin, ragged children tugged at her skirts, begging. Little did they know she was as penniless and homeless as they. In fact, the only difference between them was that she possessed an education and a clean waist, and they did not. Her boot heel slipped in a mash of rotten fruit, and she fetched up against the side of a cart, whose owner shouted at her. Blushing, furious at her circumstances, she stumbled away and hurried up the street as fast as she was able, clutching her hat.

Half an hour’s sweating walk brought her back to the Embankment, and the sweep of another hour saw her at last in the quieter confines of Mayfair, where at least the air she breathed was free of stink and the invective of angry stall-keepers. Of course, she looked as though she had been dragged through a row of market stalls willy-nilly. Her skirt was stained in two places, her half-boots were filthy, and her navy straw hat had been knocked askew so many times she was sure her hair looked like a mares’ nest.

Wilton Crescent. Thank You, Lord. If she could only reach—

She stopped on the pavement as though she had run into a sheet of glass.

Broken windows. Charred walls. In the middle of the street, a huge black smear littered with coals of burned wood told her that Peony had been chillingly correct in her predictions. But what of Gorse and Mrs. Morven? Where had they gone? And was there anything left within?

She picked her way up the sidewalk. There was no hope of restoring the herringbone pattern of the brick—it had been crushed and broken beyond repair. The front door swung open with a creak that told her it had withstood severe strain, but would never lock again. The front hall was utterly empty. The drawing room a shambles—the velvet drapes pulled down and stolen, their rings kicked into the corners, all the furniture gone. The music room … Claire gulped and steeled herself. Her harp had gone down to Cornwall on the dray, so at least she would not have the heartbreak of looking at its ruin. Then she blinked. The piano was still here. She touched a key. Its weight must have defeated the mob—and they must have forgotten to bring axes along to demolish it inside. But it stood in a room that was empty save for the broken glass on the parquet floor.

“Mrs. Morven?” she called on the stairs to the kitchen. “Gorse? Are you here?”

Silence answered her—the most profound she had ever heard in the house.

The kitchen had, of course, been looted of everything Mrs. Morven had so carefully inventoried. A few pots remained, sundry bits of cutlery, even a basket. But she had to admit this was more than they had in her current bolt-hole, where the sole cooking implements were a spirit lamp, a cast-iron frying-pan, and a dented copper pot, all lifted from various refuse heaps after having been tossed as unusable.

An idea whisked through her brain like a rat disturbed in a dark room. This was still her home—and even in its broken state it was better shelter than the slant-roofed squat. Could she bring Snouts and his gang here until the terms of her bargain were fulfilled?

She climbed the stairs, noting that several of the oak spindles in the banister had been kicked out, likely to serve as kindling for the bonfire outside. The bedrooms had been looted, too, and most of the linens carried away. But for a miracle, the mattress remained on her bed, askew in its mahogany frame. The combination of the four-poster’s weight and the pitch of the staircase had probably saved it. And look, the linens in the closet, set discreetly inside the wall, were still here. But the books had been tumbled from the bookcase and scattered from one end of the third floor to the other. Half of them appeared to have been used for kindling as well.

With a sigh, her heart like a boat-anchor in her chest, she proceeded to the fourth floor. For a miracle, nothing seemed to have been broken or even disturbed. They had not reached this far. A busy buzzing sound caught her attention, and she pushed open the door to what had been Silvie’s room. The last mother’s helper paddled busily at the dhurrie as though nothing were amiss.

Claire sat suddenly on a ladder-back chair while the tears welled uncontrollably in her eyes. The mother’s helper was almost the only thing remaining from her old life. To see it going about its business as though Silvie would come running in at any moment to fetch some skin salve for Lady St. Ives was so ridiculous and comical and pathetic that Claire could not help it.

“What am I going to do?” she asked it when the paroxysm of grief had passed. Her chest jerking with a dry sob, she palmed the tears from her cheeks like a child. “What will become of us all?”

The mother’s helper bumped against the iron leg of the bedstead, turned left, and buzzed beneath it, intent upon its duty. It had no answers for her. She must come up with them herself.

First things first. Was there still a sheet of paper in the house? And a tube?

The answer to the first was no. Not one, unless she counted the end-papers of the books on the floor. But three tubes waited in the vacuum chamber, thank goodness. The first was a letter from the butler at Wellesley House, welcoming Gorse to the staff and stating that his duties would begin on the twenty-first of June.

Claire had lost track of her life so thoroughly that she could not for the life of her think what the date might be. She opened the next tube. A bill from Madame du Barry for her evening dresses. With a snort, she laid it aside. The back would do nicely for her purposes, and the good lady was going to have to sing for her dresses. The third tube contained a single card with—how very strange—Andrew Malvern’s name and address on the front. She turned it over. The word concerned was written on the back in what appeared to be charcoal in an almost unintelligible scrawl. She had seen Mr. Malvern’s square, legible hand on some of the documents on his desk, and unless he had deteriorated substantially in the last several days, this was not his writing.

Singular. And puzzling. Concerned. Hm. She was no concern of his. He would do better to turn his energies to his choice of business partner.

She slipped the card into her glove and began searching the kitchen. At length, rammed at the back of a drawer, she found a stub of pencil. Her mother would find it an even greater puzzle to receive a letter written on the back of a bill, but desperate times required desperate measures, and the escritoire was probably in Exeter by now.

Dear Mama,

I hope this finds you and my brother well. You should be seeing the arrival of the dray with the small items of furniture and plate shortly. It left Saturday. We are having a little difficulty selling Carrick House but I expect Mr. Arundel will continue to do his best.

I have taken a position as governess to six children, ranging in age from fourteen to four, including twin girls. They have no shortage of intelligence and we are presently engaged in learning our numbers. For this reason I will not be joining you and my brother for some few weeks. My position is not permanent, but it is necessary at present.

Your loving daughter,

Claire

She spun the letters and numbers on the tube to form the code for Gwynn Place, and watched the vacuum system suck it away to the Victoria switching station, where it would begin the series of relays down to Cornwall. So, for at least a few weeks, her mother would believe her to be safe and would be unlikely to dispatch a bobby to escort her to Victoria Station and ensure that she boarded the Dutchman.

Claire climbed the stairs and found an endpaper lying on the hall runner that would do nicely for Emilie.

My dear friend,

I am sorry I could not stay to converse with you last night, but twilight was falling and I needed to reach my aunts Beaton without delay. You will be happy to know I have taken a position as a governess. It offers more independence than I expected and I am presently engaged in the study of mathematics with my six charges.

I will be much occupied over the next several weeks but I beg you not to worry.

Your affectionate

Claire

With a hiss, the second missive began its much briefer journey over to Cadogan Square. Claire could only hope that Emilie was in the habit of intercepting her own mail, otherwise she would have sacrificed an end-paper to the Fragonard drawing-room fire. She returned to the third floor and began to collect end-papers and frontispieces from the shards of books on the floor. If Tigg and the others were to advance beyond the four times table, she would need something to write on. She tucked them in her satchel and surveyed the bedrooms. What else? Linens? No. There were no beds to put them on. Basin and ewer? Smashed. Clothes? She was hard put to carry the trunk she had. No point in bringing anything else along.

The painful truth was, she could not bring anything from her old life with her. Nor could she bring Snouts and the others here, sensible though that idea was. They could not be coming and going in Mayfair without danger of arrest simply for being where they were. It was up to her to resign herself to living rough until she had done what she had promised to do.

But in the meantime, life could be made a little easier, could it not? Back on the fourth floor, in Mrs. Morven’s room, she found a spare packet of tooth powder and a bar of soap. The good lady would not begrudge them, and Claire would reimburse her as soon as she could. She scooped up the mother’s helper and it immediately stopped moving. Tucking it under her arm, she descended the stairs.

Where was Mrs. Morven? And Gorse?

She had no way to tell them she was safe, and no way to find out if they were. All she could do was leave a note in their shambles of a kitchen and hope that one of them would return and find it. She wrote something brief and cheerful on an end-paper and left it on the chopping block. Then she picked up half a dozen metal forks and two slightly bent knives from the floor and tucked them in her satchel, with the mother’s helper going into the basket. If there was to be food today, at least they would have the wherewithal to eat it.

Food. Her stomach must surely be sticking to her backbone. In this house of plenty, could she not at least find something to keep body and soul together? At the very back of the cold cupboard, she found an apple, aged and wrinkled. With relief and a sense that she was behaving very much like poor Rosie, she devoured it in seconds. It did not fill her stomach, but at least she could face the long walk back to the squat with something approaching fortitude.

The squat. Another night lying on the rag-pile. And the prospect of Jake, who would have knifed her if his fear hadn’t overridden his hatred.

Outside on the step, she ran a gentle hand over the panels of the door as it did its best to close. For a moment, she leaned against it, eyes closed, breathing in the smell of paint and slightly splintered wood. Then she turned her face to the street and steeled herself to leave home once again.

21

“Twenty quid! Twenty quid!” Snouts riffled the ragged pile of bills in Claire’s face and danced a jig around her. “I’m the king of cowboy poker and I’m rich!”

With a laugh, Claire watched him attempt to polka with Tigg, who pushed him off with a “Garn, ya big lummox!” Then she folded her arms. “You mean to say, of course, that we are rich. Since this was a community effort, we all share in the spoils.”

“Ah … but it was me puttin’ me ’ead in the lion’s mouth, as it were.”

“Nonsense. The lions were drunk as lords and too bleary-eyed to see. It was a case of superior apprehension of strategy on your part, timing on Tigg’s part, and a lavish stake on my part. Which I would like returned, if you please.”

Whatever else he might be, she had observed that Snouts was a practical boy. Not only was he outnumbered, but the outnumbering parties were hungry, anxious, and not too proud to take him to the ground if he gave her any more guff. He dug about his person and produced the emerald ring. Claire’s fingers closed around it with an internal prayer of thanks. Then she slipped it on the middle finger of her right hand—the only one it fit—and held out her left hand, palm up.

Snouts eyed her. “Now, lady, even you will say it’s fair for me to ’ave me winnings once you’ve got your property back.”

“I’m grateful to have my stake returned. But as I’ve said, the winnings belong to all. We must save five pounds to stake the next game. Each member here receives two, to spend as they wish. That leaves five pounds for you, Mr. McTavish, which you must admit is far more than you would otherwise have had without our help.”

“An’ what about them chemicals?” Jake wanted to know.

“You are quite correct, Mr. Jake. I can obtain the chemicals with one of my two pounds. With the other, I must have something to eat or I shall fall down where I stand. We do not even have a loaf of bread this morning. Who’s with me?”

Maggie and Willie crowded her skirts. “C’n we ’ave a sweet?”

She looked down into two pairs of eyes, both shadowed with dirt and more care than a child should ever be burdened with. “I should think that a sweet would be a fitting reward for a job well done in the field of mathematics. And we must not forget Rosie while we are enjoying the fruits of our labors.”

“She laid an egg,” Maggie said in a confidential tone. “I hid it.”

Lizzie hung back, her face cloudy as the desire to go fought with the necessity of its being in Claire’s company.

“Miss Elizabeth, we would be glad of your company if you should care to join us.”

“My name’s Lizzie.”

“Of course it is—to your family. But it would be impertinent of me to address you so familiarly on such short acquaintance.”

“Say ‘I beg yer pardon,’” Maggie urged her sister.

“Ent beggin’ her pardon for nuffink.”

“That’s quite all right, Miss Margaret,” Claire assured her before fisticuffs ensued. “I am not offended. Let us be off. Master Jake, if you would be so kind as to accompany us, you may find it useful to memorize the list of ingredients as they are measured out. Since I do not have the use of my notebook.”

He nodded, his face expressionless as this hint flew straight past his ears.

Ah well. She could hardly expect to reclaim all her things so soon.

They found a likely chemist in a lane just off Haymarket, in a neighborhood where Claire was unlikely to see anyone she knew, but which received enough custom from people of quality that her accent would ensure there were no uncomfortable questions. At the door, Claire turned to see a familiar form whisk itself into the shadows further down the street. She schooled her lips into serious lines. “Miss Maggie, would you be so good as to invite your sister to join us? It is too bad of an acquaintance of mine to behave like a footpad.”

“She ent much of a footpad if you could see ’er,” Jake pointed out.

Maggie ran off while she pushed open the door to the shop, setting the bell over the door to ringing. Behind an oak counter blackened with age, the chemist looked up from measuring a paper of powder. At the sight of Jake, he frowned. “See here. Get away from that lady, you. I’ll have none of your thievery in here.”

The place smelled of lemon, bitter herbs, and kerosene, and Claire fought the urge to sneeze. “This young man is not a thief,” she assured him in her plummiest tones. “Nor is this boy, or these girls,” she added as the bell rang again and the Mopsies fell into the shop. “He is here to assist me as part of his education.”

The chemist did not dare contradict her, but his gaze did not leave Jake’s grubby hands as he said, “My apologies, my lady. Many ladies of quality take an interest in the indigent. How may I help you this morning?”

Beside her, Jake bristled. He may not know what indigent meant, but he certainly recognized the tone. She laid a hand on his jacket sleeve. “We are pursuing studies in the field of science, and my experiments require a number of chemicals.” Beginning with the liquid capsaicin, she dictated a list of what she required, estimating the amounts of each from recent experience. She spoke slowly, so that the chemist could write them down, and Jake could commit them to memory.

“It will take me some time to measure these out, my lady. Boy!” he shouted.

Beside her, Willie jumped, though he had been doing nothing worse than pressing his nose against the glass of the case.

“Sir?” A young man even thinner than Snouts popped out of a door in the rear like a jack-in-the-box.

“Would you care for some tea while you wait, my lady?” the chemist inquired. “Robin will fetch it for you.”

“How very kind. We should all love some, thank you.”

The chemist looked flummoxed. “Er, so that would be—”

“Five cups. Thank you so much.”

Ten minutes later found them seated with mugs of hot tea, sweet with honey and smoky with toasted jasmine. Lizzie and Willie slurped theirs with abandon, and Claire realized that lessons in deportment would need to be added to mathematics and science if they were to come out with her again. Maggie watched her every move, mimicking the way she held the mug, sipping when she sipped. When Willie drained his mug, Claire picked up the teapot. “May I offer you more?”

He shoved the mug closer, and Claire said to Maggie, “One goes to finishing school for months to learn how to pour tea gracefully, but the essence of the matter is this—your back must be straight, your shoulders lowered, and the speed of the pour is in direct proportion to the depth of the cup. In addition, you must never allow the spout to leak. If it does, the angle at which you are holding it is too steep.” She filled Willie’s cup without spilling a drop from the Brown Betty pot. “Would you like to try?”

Maggie swallowed the last of her tea and put it down, regarding the pot as one would a poisonous viper. “Pick it up by the handle, and rest your fingers upon the lid. In this way it will not fall off and land in your guest’s cup. I can tell you from experience the consequences can be disastrous.”

Fortunately, the pot was nearly empty and not very heavy. Maggie picked it up, held the lid on as if she were preventing a geyser from spouting out the top, and dribbled a quarter of it on the table before she got some into the mug that Jake pushed toward her.

“Thanks, Mags.” As if having his tea poured by a lady were nothing out of the ordinary, Jake picked it up and took a long swallow.

“Well done, Maggie.” Claire smiled as the girl put the pot down and sat back, blowing a long breath up through the nut-brown curls that fell in her face.

“She made a mess,” Lizzie said angrily. “It weren’t well done at all.”

“Would you like to try?” Claire hadn’t meant to be challenging, but Lizzie evidently took it that way. She snorted and grabbed the handle of the pot. But she underestimated its weight—the spout dipped—the lid fell off and smashed upon the tiles—and the entire pot slid from her hands and crashed upon the floor in an explosion of pottery shards and sodden tea leaves. Lizzie shrieked and burst into tears.

“Here, here, what’s this?” The chemist and Robin erupted from the back of the shop, staring at the mess in dismay. “You ruffians, look what you’ve done!”

Claire rose, lengthening her neck and looking down upon him. “To whom are you referring?”

He blinked and flushed. “I didn’t mean you, my lady. I meant—”

“Surely not my charges. I was attempting to give a lesson in deportment and we met with an accident. I will be happy to reimburse you for the cost of the pot and the tea. It was delicious and we enjoyed it very much.”

It would also likely wipe out the few shillings she was hoping to save for something to eat, but there was nothing to be done about it. She could be grateful the tea had come their way unasked; her dehydrated body was reviving already.

Robin cleared away the mess while Maggie dragged her snuffling sister out into the street, where it was clear the latter was being read the Riot Act. Claire couldn’t find it in her heart to stop her. Perhaps a remonstration from the sister she loved would do more to changing Lizzie’s attitude than chapter and verse from anyone else.

The chemist tied up the vials and papers of chemicals into a neat parcel, and Claire handed over her precious two pounds. When a couple of shillings came back, it was all she could do not to snatch at them in case he changed his mind. Instead, she tucked them into her glove, gathered up her charges, and handed the parcel to Jake.

“Now,” she said as they emerged from the lane onto Haymarket, “let’s find lots of lovely things to eat while you, Master Jake, recite the contents of that parcel back to me.”

As they went from the pie-seller to the sweet stall to the orange seller, Jake slowly and laboriously told over the list of chemicals, exactly as she had given it to the chemist. And when she finally—finally!—had a steak and kidney pie in her hands, she had to admit that his memory was faultless.

“Well done, Master Jake.” She ate the pie out of her own palms, and nothing had ever tasted so good. “Well done indeed. Are you able to read and write, so that you can make the record permanent?”

“I know my letters.”

“Good. Then I encourage you to possess yourself of a pencil at one of these stalls—paid for, if you please,” she added hastily, as he made to reach for one on the sly. “I have paper in my satchel. You can begin your own compendium of chemical devices this very day.”

He slid a glance at her as he handed over a half-penny for the pencil and put it in his pocket. “Don’t seem very smart to be tellin’ folk yer secrets.”

“That was our agreement.”

“Still. Folk’d pay big to know how to make them devices.”

“Perhaps. Do you plan to sell that list to Billy Crumwell?”

He stopped, his eyes wide, and his free hand slid under the hem of his ragged jacket, where he kept his knife on his belt. “I ent no turncoat,” he said in a low, dangerous tone.

Claire hoped he could not see her pulse pounding in her throat, and busied herself dusting crumbs off her hands and face. “I did not say you were. It seemed an odd thing for you to say, that’s all.”

“Tweren’t me I meant. You could sell that list easy.”

“I have no desire to sell it.” She kept her voice admirably calm. “I would rather use it to better our circumstances. No, Willie, I’m afraid that if you have another sweet you will be sick. Perhaps you might look for something Rosie would enjoy.”

“What’s the matter wiv our circumstances?” Jake demanded.

“You must admit that rag-picking has its limits as a career,” she told him. “If you were to focus your talents on chemistry, you might go farther.”

“How’m I to do that?”

“I might be of assistance.”

“Yer gonna disappear as sudden as you came. I don’t know what yer playin’ at, lady, but you don’t belong wiv us.”

Playing was the last word she would use to describe her situation. She swallowed the sharp retort on the tip of her tongue and said instead, “At the moment, our circumstances are remarkably similar. Rioters burned my house two days ago, Master Jake. It was in fleeing them that I came to your attention at the Aldgate station.”

“What’d they do that for?”

“They thought my father owed them money. Except that he is dead and unable to pay.” Jake snorted and Claire felt her cheeks cool with affront. “I find nothing amusing in that, sir.”

“Oh, I do, lady. That’s ezackly how I came to be on the streets.”

“Where is your mother, then?”

“Dead.”

“And you have no one?”

“Just Snouts and Tigg and the others.”

“But no family?”

“Nope. You?”

“My mother is in Cornwall. She may as well be at the ends of the earth.”

“I’m goin’ t’the ends of the earth someday.”

Unbidden, a smile tugged at her lips. “That’s an admirable ambition, Master Jake. Shall you explore the Amazon, do you think?”

“Dunno. I’ll most likely be transported for thieving.”

With a sigh, Claire turned her attention to the whereabouts of her young charges. One thing at a time. He had not, after all, pulled the knife on her.

Yet.

22

The moon was no more than a possibility above the rooftops and catwalks of the docks when Claire finished compounding the gaseous capsaicin devices. By the light of a single stubby candle, Jake had recorded the ingredients and the steps by which they went together in laborious capitals, which meant that Claire worked much more slowly than usual. If she had had her notebook to hand, she could have completed the task in a quarter of an hour, but she stood more to gain by encouraging Jake’s cooperation—not to mention the fact that here was an excellent opportunity for him to practice his letters and spelling.

Snouts ranged from doorway to doorway, his eye on the cobbled street on one side, and the river on the other. “Come on,” he urged every five minutes. “They’ll be long away before we get there.”

Claire was at least as impatient as he; she was only better at concealing it. “We are ready, Mr. McTavish.” She wrapped the vials carefully in what might once have been a tea towel before stowing them in her satchel. “Let’s be off.”

Billy Crumwell and his gang, it turned out, were the lords of a squat in St. Giles Close, an address that sounded much more aristocratic than it was thanks to its proximity to the impoverished St. Giles Church. All the same, it possessed a stone foundation, sturdy walls, and even an empty space in the back that had once aspired to being a garden.

“Does Billy Crumwell own this property?” Claire whispered to Snouts, crouching next to him in the shadows of the church’s graveyard.

Snouts gave a snort, quickly muffled. “Don’t nobody own it but who c’n ’ang onto it. Billy knifed Spotted Dick Black to get it, after ’e’d been in ’is gang for a year.”

“But someone must own it.”

“Ain’t never seen ’em then. Them walls is gonna be trouble.”

“What makes you say so?”

“’Ow you gonna loft them vials inside? I can only see one window what’s broke. Mopsies!” The girls materialized next to them out of the dark. “Do a fast reconnoiter. We need ’oles in the walls, broken windows, and such like to pitch the vials through.”

Without a sound, the girls vanished as though they had done this kind of thing before. Claire had done no more than spare a thought for how chilly the night was becoming when they reappeared. “There’s a broken window next to the back door,” Lizzie reported in a whisper. “Shingles ripped out of the roof on the river side, and a loose board on the other side. Front’s tight and they set a watch.”

Snouts swore at this intelligence. “Jake. You do the watch. Not a sound.”

Claire clutched at Jake’s arm. “What does that mean? You won’t kill that person, will you?”

He gave her an incredulous look. “What d’you take me for? Not unless he gives me a fight.”

“Not under any circumstances! I won’t have my friends connected with murder.”

“Lady—”

Claire’s skin had gone cold with more than just the dewfall. “I will not have it, do you hear? We are to succeed through the exercise of intellect, not brute force.”

“We’ll succeed through t’exercise of my good right arm, Lady,” Jake told her with flat scorn before he vanished into the night.

“I shall have words with him if any harm comes to the watch,” she said with grim promise.

“Jake’s a dab hand,” Tigg assured her. “Watch won’t feel a thing.”

This did not have the comforting effect he obviously intended. However, there was nothing to be done except the job she had come to do. She gritted her teeth as Snouts directed their strategy. “Tigg, you’re our best at the scramble, so you take the roof. I’ll take the back door. Mopsies, you take Jake his vial and set our own watch. Lady, you’d best stay here.”

“I shan’t,” Claire objected with no little warmth.

“You’ve done yer bit with the chemicals. You’ll only be in the way.”

“In the—? And who, might I ask, brought down your entire house at this very time last night with no assistance whatsoever?”

“Billy Crumwell’s killed four men,” Snouts’s tone was as blunt as a bludgeon and just as effective. “We make one mistake and he’ll do for us wi’out a thought. First sign of trouble, you take to your heels.”

“I am not leaving without my landau—or any of you.”

“Better you leave wi’ yer life.”

“But I—”

A bird whistled near the graveyard wall, and Snouts held up a hand. “Trouble.” Inch by cautious inch, they peered around the flying angel monument behind which they were concealed, to see a lantern bob across the squat’s yard. Three or four young men only a little older than Claire herself accompanied a person dressed in what appeared to be a velvet frock coat and a slightly crushed top hat adorned with a pair of driving goggles. His waistcoat was leather, and at his side he carried a rifle with a curiously bulbous and long barrel. Snouts drew a long breath.

“What? Who is that?” Claire whispered. “Is that Billy Crumwell?”

“Nah. Billy’s the git in the long coat wi’ the chains over ’is shoulder.” Claire peered at the group more closely. She hadn’t even noticed him. “That flash cove … Lady, this is trouble. I’m callin’ Jake and Maggie in.”

“Why?”

Before he could answer, Billy Crumwell spoke to his companion. “I tell ye, Luke, ye won’t be sorry. She’s a beauty, not a scratch on ’er. A bargain at a hunnert pounds. Ye can go drivin’ about and no one’ll know you ent a lord.”

Claire gripped the granite plinth. They were too late. That filthy criminal! “We have to follow them. They’re about to sell my landau to that Luke person.”

Snouts gave a very credible imitation of a sparrow, and within seconds Maggie had joined them. Not a moment too soon, either, because Luke and his four escorts hopped the wall where she had been posted and made their way through the graveyard not twenty feet away. They filed into the narrow alley between the church and the dilapidated tavern next to it. Claire rose and settled the satchel with its lethal contents on her back.

Snouts jerked her back down. “Lady, you can’t. That’s Lightning Luke Jackson.”

“For heaven’s sake, let go of my skirt. I don’t care if it’s the leader of the Opposition. We’ll lose them!”

Jake dove into the shadow of the monument, breathing hard. “Good call, Snouts. Watch is out, but you won’t catch me takin’ on Lightning Luke.”

She neither knew nor cared what or who Lightning Luke Jackson was. All she knew was that he was about to buy her landau out from under her, and she had not come this far nor lost this much to allow it. “We are armed. I’m following them. You may do as you like.”

Ducking low and moving from monument to headstone, Claire clutched her hat, dodged across the graveyard and plunged into the inky shadow of the alley, where the voices ahead told her that her quarry had no fear of pursuit.

She smiled, guiding herself with fingertips on the greasy, cold wall to her right. A sound behind her wiped the smile away and she whirled to find a small form silhouetted against the moonlight. “Maggie?” A second form joined the first. “Lizzie?” Both girls pressed themselves against her skirts, even as she forged ahead with as much stealth as she could muster. “What are you doing? Has Snouts relented?”

“E’s in a fury,” Maggie whispered with admirable economy. “But I couldn’t let you go by yerself. We’re flock mates.”

“An’ I’m her flock mate.” Lizzie evidently wanted no confusion as to where her loyalties lay. “Mind you don’t get ’er kilt.”

“I will do my utmost to prevent that,” Claire promised. “Now. No more talking. We have work to do.”

23

Two streets closer to the river, a row of warehouses stood hunched over a thoroughfare so narrow it might as well have been an alley. Down the middle of the cobbles ran a thin stream of filthy water, carrying with it bits of flotsam and food so rotted even the scurrying rats wouldn’t stop for it. Deplorable though her skirts might be, Claire lifted them and hugged the side of the building as the three of them kept their quarry in sight. They crouched behind a pile of barrels where the alley opened out into a square.

“No cover,” Lizzie whispered. “Best to wait ’ere.”

Billy Crumwell led the way to a low, arched door, with just enough clearance for a wagon. “In here. Won’t no one disturb us this time of night.”

In her stealthy pursuit, Claire had hatched a plan. The Mopsies huddled together next to her, and she leaned close. “As soon as they’re all inside, I shall use the gaseous capsaicin. Cover your faces with your skirts. Do not breathe it.”

“Let us have a look first.”

“No, I—”

Too late. With no more sound than a rustle of limp rags, the girls darted between the buildings, in a space barely wide enough for a skinny dog to pass. To her horror, she heard the landau’s top make the familiar shivery sound as it folded back, and in the next moment, someone dropped the hood and swore.

They were trying to ignite it. Heaven knew what havoc their untrained hands would wreak, messing about with boiler and coal. They would unbalance the entire mechanism, and then she would be unable to pilot it out of this noisome place.

As fast as her fingers would move, she retrieved two of the devices from their wrappings in the satchel, slung it back on, and slipped over to the door. Not one guard stood outside. Fools. By leaning mere inches to the left, she could see around the door. There was her landau, a sheet of canvas crumpled on the floor next to it. Someone had got the hood up again, and two of the thieves had their heads inside, trying to figure out how to ignite it, while a third sat in the driver’s seat, her own goggles perched on his head.

She tightened her lips, and when someone touched her hand, she jumped half a foot and let out a squeak.

“Warehouse fronts on t’river,” Maggie whispered rapidly. “If we gots to run, tide’s out.”

Before Claire could puzzle out the connection between these two facts, someone shouted from inside. “Hey! Who’s that? Jim, get the door.”

“We’re spotted!” Maggie grabbed her hand. “This way.”

“No.” As hard as she could, Claire flung first one, then the other device to either side of the landau. As they shattered on the floor, she grabbed the door. “Maggie, help me!”

They pushed it shut just as a body hit the other side, and Claire hung onto the slats for dear life. She pulled at the iron bar that had once rested across the front, but to no avail. The door began to open, inexorably pushing her out into the square. Another body hit the back of it, and another, and the door was flung back. She stumbled to the side as Lightning Luke careened into the open, his hands mashed to his eyes, his oddly shaped gun in the crook of his elbow and hanging over his forearm. Shrieking in pain, the others followed, a cloud of gas billowing out behind them.

Luke collapsed not ten feet from her, the flared barrel of the gun clunking on the cobbles next to him.

The gun. That was what everyone feared most.

She darted forward and snatched it up, then nearly fell headlong herself as its unexpected weight dragged at her arms. Luke did not move except to moan and scrub at his eyes with the velvet tails of his coat. She hefted his gun more carefully, and in the swath of lamplight that fell out into the middle of the square, eyed its operation.

It possessed a trigger, but there was no chamber for bullets. Not like her father’s pistols. But what was this? Instead of a chamber, there was a thick glass globe. If she moved this lever, then …

The gun began to hum.

Now what was she to do? Common sense begged her to ignite the landau and drive away as fast as she could. But where was Lizzie? Maggie had taken refuge again behind the barrels. She could not leave without the other child, but if she didn’t begin the landau’s ignition sequence immediately, the miscreants would recover and her situation would be unthinkable.

A dim reflection of blue light pulsed on the wet cobbles. She looked down.

A lightning storm had formed in the glass globe, and the hum had taken on real authority now. Great heavens, this gun somehow harnessed electrick power! No wonder they called him Lightning Luke.

She had to move. Now.

“Maggie,” she shouted. “Find Lizzie!”

“Who’s that?” Luke had gotten to his feet, and swayed like a drunken man. “Where’s my gun?”

He was still blinded. Common sense told her to keep quiet, get the landau started, and get out of there. Anger demanded that she give him a piece of her mind.

“It’s a trap,” one of his companions moaned. “Billy’s done turned on us.”

Luke got one eye open, which widened at the sight of her, then slammed shut as droplets of condensed capsaicin gas rolled into it. “Who are you? Put that down, you fool of a woman, and get out of here.”

With the help of the side of the building nearest her, Billy had managed to stand as well. One of Luke’s men flung himself at him. “Turncoat! You’ll see us all dead!”

He pulled a knife, and before Claire could even shriek, he had stabbed Billy in the chest. The chains laced through the shoulders of his long coat clanked on the cobbles as he fell. Instinctively, her hands tightened on the gun, her forefinger sliding into the trigger guard, and when Billy rolled, his still twitching arm slapped her skirts. She screamed, lurched back, and the gun went off.

A lightning bolt ten feet long leaped from the flared barrel, flashing across the square and catching Luke dead in the center of his chest. He arched back as flickering tendrils of blue light traveled outward, along his limbs, along his coat, even to the top of his crushed beaver hat. His eyes bugged out and there was a sizzling sound as the liquid in them evaporated. He fell, rigid as a tree trunk, and lay still.

A plume of smoke rose from the blackened mass that had been his leather vest.

Claire’s fingers went numb, and she dropped the gun on her foot. The night crowded into her vision, and a hive of bees seemed to have entered her brain. From a great distance, she heard another shout that sounded like, “Lady! Are you all right?” and several figures ran into the square.

Fisticuffs.

The Mopsies.

If there was fighting, they would be in danger. She must not faint. She must not.

The gun will hurt them. Pick up the gun. Get the landau. Find the Mopsies.

“Lady!”

She blinked and Snouts’s face swam into clarity. “Mr. McTavish?”

“Stop standing there like a mug, Lady. You just kilt Lightning Luke Jackson!”

“Is he … really dead?” Surely not. This had not happened. She would wake in her comfortable bed in Wilton Crescent presently and wonder what she had eaten to cause such vivid dreams.

“As a blinkin’ doornail.” Dream or not, Snouts was speaking slowly and not allowing her gaze to wander from his. “Look sharp, Lady. We have to get back to his squat before word gets out and the bobbies come.”

“Squat? What for?”

“He’s got a house, Lady. A real house, wiv a door and chimbley and everything. And rugs, so I hear. We’ve got to get there and claim it afore the rats come out’ the woodwork and take it.”

“What has his house to do with us?” Her mind felt like cotton wool. She could not connect sentences into meaning.

Snouts took her arm—the one not cradling the gun—and walked her back into the warehouse where the landau sat. “Here’s how it works. You kilt him—”

“I didn’t mean to, Snouts. The gun went off by accident.”

“Beggin’ yer pardon, Lady, but you just keep mum about that. Story is, you disarmed Lightning Luke and shot him for stealin’ your property. Maybe you knifed Billy Crumwell, too, for all I know.”

“Luke’s man did it. It was shocking.”

“That’s neither here nor there, and neither are they. Point is, he who takes down Lightning Luke gets his property, see? Jake!” he called into the dark. “Round everyone up. We’ve got a body to get over to Vauxhall Gardens for proof, soon’s we get this landau going.”

Ah, here was something solid to count on. Something she knew how to do. With the smoothness of long habit, she pulled her duster from its niche and buttoned it over her suit. By the light of the lamp the thieves had lit to admire her property, she saw her goggles lying on the floor where they had evidently been flung when the thief had run for it. She settled them over her eyes and began the ignition sequence. When the indicator needles jumped, she lit the headlamps. Snouts dumped Lightning Luke’s rigid body on the canvas and rolled him up in it, then tied the bundle to the rear guard with a length of rope.

“What about—him?” She indicated Billy Crumwell’s inert form out in the square. “We can’t just leave him there.”

“Pickers’ll do fer ’im before dawn,” Snouts said with chilling brevity while he divested the man of his perfectly usable leather coat. He and Maggie squeezed into Gorse’s usual seat, and Jake, Tigg, and Lizzie piled into the rear compartment, which was meant only for parcels.

As smoothly as though she were driving to Regent’s Park, she applied steam and they rolled out the warehouse door, leaving behind the deserted square—empty except for the silence of the grave and the smell of bridges well and truly burned.

24

Vauxhall Gardens was not nearly as picturesque as its name might suggest. Claire guided the landau down one narrow street after another at Snouts’s direction, winding deeper into the neighborhoods of the working poor. At least they had proper roofs over their heads, unlike the children packed all around her, who had to make do with a warehouse loft.

“There.” Snouts pointed to a stone house nestled against the bridge abutment. Possessed of two storeys, its windows were intact and even at this hour, light glowed behind the ones downstairs. “It fronts on the river, so Luke can move his cargo.”

“What cargo?”

“Dunno. Whatever he lifted that day, I suppose. He started out a rag picker like us, they say, but bein’ the enterprisin’ sort, he moved up in the world. I figure piracy and theft, but them’s the sorts of questions a man don’t ask down here.”

“I hope his associates don’t expect those activities to continue.” Claire appraised the house as the landau coasted to a stop in front. It was a solid little place. Nothing was broken or abused—in fact, if a criminal could be said to be house-proud, then Lightning Luke was that. Even the head-high stone wall around what could have been a front garden was sturdy and well kept.

Just how sturdy, they discovered as soon as they approached. “There’s no gate,” Maggie said. “’Ow are we to get in?”

“On the river side,” Jake said. “Best scout it first.”

The Mopsies took their duties very seriously, and even if Claire had wanted to protest, her voice would have had less effect than the gurgle of the river against the stone arches of the bridge. On the house’s other side was a tangle of brambles and what might have been a toll shed for the drawbridge, now fallen into disrepair. So Luke’s house might once have belonged to the toll keeper.

The Mopsies returned with silent suddenness. “Watch is posted,” Lizzie said. “There’s a platform above the people door an’ a bloke wi’ a bl—er, a dirty big gun. Water door’s shut and locked tight. Windows too.”

“We can’t use the gassy—gassicky—“ Maggie stopped.

“Gaseous capsaicin devices,” Claire finished. “It does not seem so. Our plan, then?”

Jake snorted in a most ungentlemanly fashion. “Lady, you’re the mort wi’ the gun. Ent no one gonna argue wi’ you. Take out the watch wi’ one shot and after that the place is ours.”

Claire felt her jaw slacken with horror, and firmed both it and her resolution. “We shall not. There will be no murder.”

“What d’ye call Lightning Luke’s situation, then?” Tigg wanted to know.

“As I’ve already explained, that was an accident. And since Mr. Jake is a ‘dab hand’ at such things, I suggest he take care of the watch.”

Jake put a hand on Lizzie’s shoulder. “What sort o’ gun was it?”

“One o’ them many-chambered ones that go round and round.”

Snouts made a sound of disbelief. “Them ones wot were invented by that nasty Gatling bloke? If that’s true, no one’s getting in that way. We’ll have to do for the river door.”

“And what’s to prevent him shooting us no matter what door we use?” Claire had not wanted to come on this fool’s errand, but she was not about to be held up at the gates if the inside of Luke’s house was as snug as the outside. What if there was food? And a basin to wash in?

And to what depths had she sunk when the merest possibility of such amenities would make her contemplate violence?

“Enough. We shall announce our presence like civilized people, show them Luke’s body, and the house will be ours. Isn’t that what you said, Mr. McTavish?”

Snouts hesitated. “It might be a tad more dodgy than that, Lady.”

“Why?”

“What’s to stop ’em from just shooting us fer killin’ their boss?”

It took Claire a full ten seconds to reel in her temper and exhaustion and to curtail the urge to slap him. “Why did you not bring up this possibility before?”

“’Cause maybe you wouldn’t have come?”

Claire turned her back on him and marched along the wall in the direction of the river. Behind her, a muffled conversation broke out, and then silence. When she risked a glance back, she could see nothing but two small shadows and a larger one against the deeper dark of the stone wall. Why the presence of two ten-year-old ragamuffins and a boy of twelve should make her confidence rise was more than she could explain. Still, if a person was going to march up to an armed establishment with a pathetic plan, it was comforting to know she was not alone. And just to be prudent, she flipped the lever on the lightning rifle. Its hum and the accompanying vibration in her hands was comfort of a different sort.

It felt good to be in command of something. Electrick power was nothing to sneeze at. She had no intention of hurting anyone, but she would not be treated like a nonentity again.

She peered around the corner of the wall and found the Mopsies’ reconnaissance report to be accurate. On a verandah above the door, a deadly looking example of one of Mr. Gatling’s guns stood mounted on a swivel. Behind it lounged an individual who clearly did not expect to be challenged.

“Ho! You there!” she called.

In the light from the window behind him, she saw him jump and swing his feet down from the railing. Leaping to battle position, he commanded, “State yer errand.”

“My errand is to require your unconditional surrender.” The lightning rifle had begun to sound like it meant business.

“Sez who?”

“Sez the Lady of Devices, ’oo shot down Lightning Luke wiv ’is own gun,” came Jake’s voice from behind her. “Show yer hands and come down.”

In answer, the guard grasped something in the back of his weapon, and the multiple bores swung to face them. “I’ll show ye more’n my hands, you pitiful lot.”

Claire’s instincts for self-preservation had not been honed by her previous life, but in that moment she discovered they were alive and well in her current one. She swung the lightning rifle to bear on the sullen barrels of the gun above her, and pulled the trigger.

The bolt sizzled wide and fried the railing two feet to the guard’s left. While he shouted, she corrected its trajectory and fired again. This time the bolt swallowed the Gatling piece in its lethal blue light, the tiny wriggling currents of power seizing it and stopping its action. The cartridges in the magazine began to explode like Cantonese fireworks. Claire and Jake grabbed the Mopsies and flung themselves under the verandah as, screaming and maddened with pain, the guard leaped into the sullen waters of the Thames below.

“Now, lady!” Tigg and Snouts rushed past her—oh, he condescended to join them, did he, now that the field was hers?—and burst through the front door. The commotion outside had alerted everyone within that something was amiss, and a bullet pinged off the door frame inches from her head.

“Stand aside!” she shouted, and when her crew pressed themselves against the wall, she sent a lightning bolt into the large room on the right, aiming at the fireplace. In the blue flash, the lamplight erased itself and time stopped, as though a flicker at the theater had frozen on a single image. Horrified faces. Bodies flung upon the floor. A rug. A sofa.

“I require your immediate and unconditional surrender,” she announced amid the smell of burned stone and the shrieks and whimpers of the unprepared. “I am the Lady of Devices, and I claim this house as my own. Lightning Luke is dead and I have his body outside. If you are unable to accept my terms, I will allow you to leave. But if you stay, I demand your loyalty. Make your choice now.”

No one moved.

In the silence, a muffled voice asked, “You kilt Lightning Luke? For true?”

“It’s true.” Snouts stepped forward, looking as though he were inspecting a battalion. “I saw it meself. The Lady’s a fair leader, and I’m her first lieutenant.”

“You’re not first anything, Snouts McTavish.” A boy who couldn’t be any older than Jake pushed himself up off the floor. “You’re a thief and a rag picker and I ent belonging to any gang wot has you in it.”

“That is perfectly fair.” With the flared barrel of the rifle, Claire gestured toward the door. “You may leave unaccosted.”

Snouts bristled at her failure to defend his honor, but for once, in the interests of solidarity, kept his mouth shut. The boy looked about him at his prostrate companions. “Are you lot gonna just lie there and let ’em take over? Anybody gets Luke’s treasury, it’s us wot worked for it, not them.”

Treasury?

Slights to his manhood forgotten, she and Snouts exchanged a glance. Without a word, the Mopsies disappeared. Scouts to their fingertips, they did not need to be told where their duty lay.

“The treasury belongs to those who have earned it,” she said loudly. “And believe me, if you stay under my—” Command? Jurisdiction? “—roof, you will earn it. There will be no more thieving and fisticuffs and pickpocketing. We will earn our bread through the force of intellect, as befits ladies and gentlemen of this modern age.”

Murmuring rose from the corners of the room, and people began to get up, keeping one eye on the lightning rifle as they did so. A handful of them—goodness, the eldest couldn’t be more than her own age—sidled past her and out the door.

“A pity a life on the correct side of the law does not appeal,” she observed to no one in particular.

“Ent much money in it to most folk,” Jake responded. Then his voice grew stronger, pitched to the back of the room. “Shame they ent schooled in the ways of your devices, not to mention your foolproof stratagems at cards, innit? All the more for us, I say.”

The slow trickle out of the room halted.

“Devices? Stratagems?” asked a boy with a mop of curly hair, mummified to the chin in an enormous woolen muffler. “Like them Wits?”

“The Lady is a Wit leader,” Jake said without a twitch. “We already took down Billy Crumwell’s gang afore we got around to Lightning Luke’s. I’ze you, I’d stick to the winning side.”

“It’s for true, then,” the boy whispered. “She really kilt ’im.” His gaze traveled the length of Luke’s rifle in Claire’s hands. “Her own self.”

“’Is corpse is outside, you don’t believe ’er,” Jake told him. “But touch the Lady’s landau an’ it’s worth your life.”

“I recommend we give your former leader a decent burial.” Claire took command of the situation before the tales got any taller. “Is there any among you who would like to say a few words?” No one moved. Evidently he was not held in high regard among his confederates. How did one go about burying the man one had accidentally killed? “Are we possessed of a shovel?”

Snouts nudged her. “You leave that to me, Lady. Once I’m done, no one will ever know what happened to ’im. You’d best see to that treasury quick-like, in case any here gets ideas above their station, as it were.”

“Quite right, Mr. McTavish.” She turned on her heel and, accompanied by Jake and Tigg, went in search of the Mopsies. Perhaps on her way to the treasury she might happen upon some food.

25

With Tigg in the passenger seat in charge of the lightning rifle, Claire piloted the landau back through sleeping London to fetch Weeping Willie and Rosie the chicken from the warehouse, where the former had been guarding the latter with all seriousness. On the way back, Tigg regaled the smaller boy with the story of their exploits. Willie turned upon her a look of horror mixed with admiration.

Claire’s heart twisted with remorse. “I did not kill Mr. Jackson on purpose, Willie,” she said as gently as she could, watching the street while she drove. Drat Tigg and his stories unsuitable for tender ears. “I’m afraid the lightning rifle fired by accident. And it won’t happen again, I promise you.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Lady,” Tigg warned. “It’s a hard life, wot we got.”

“No one knows that better than I,” she said with utter sincerity. “Which is why I shall do everything in my power to improve it for all our sakes.”

How that was to be accomplished was unclear at present, but she possessed a mind that relished such a challenge. At the moment, though, all she could think of was finding a quiet corner in which to sleep. She asked Snouts to set a watch on the landau to prevent its being stolen again. Then she, Willie, the Mopsies, and Rosie retired to the topmost room in the house, which featured bare wood floors, rather a lot of dust—and an actual lock upon the door.

“Tomorrow every single one of us shall clean this place from top to bottom,” she vowed. “And then I am tempted to return to Wilton Crescent to steal my own bed.”

The remnants of Lightning Luke’s gang soon found out she was a woman of her word. And in the course of their cleaning—amid mutters of mutiny—they discovered the wage of a good morning’s work. Claire had set the mother’s helper in motion in the upstairs room, and when she climbed the ladderlike stair to fetch it down to the next floor, she found the Mopsies bent over it, murmuring.

“What is it, ladies?”

Maggie straightened. “This device of yours, Lady. I think it’s ’ad a knock on its noggin.”

Claire bent to examine it. Repeatedly, it bumped against the wall, in the manner of a goldfish who does not realize it cannot pass through solid matter to escape its prison. How odd. “It is supposed to turn aside when it meets resistance,” she said to the girls. “I have never seen it do this before.”

“’Ow does it know it’s to turn aside?” Lizzie asked.

“With statick repulsion—rather like what happens when you put the wrong ends of magnets together.” At Lizzie’s blank face, Claire realized she would need to add rudimentary physics to the young lady’s education. “A solid object will intrude upon the statick field and cause the device to turn aside.”

“P’raps that wall ent solid.” Lizzie and Maggie stared at one another, wide-eyed. Then as one, they attacked. Claire had no more than raised a hand to stop them when a panel tilted backward, hinged from the top, and the girls tumbled headlong into the opening.

“Lady! Give us a light,” came a muffled voice. When Claire had fetched a lamp and Snouts, in case male assistance should be needed, they found the girls sitting on either side of an ironbound chest. “That’s why he had a lock on t’door,” Maggie told her with shining eyes. “’Ow we goin’ to open this mucky great strongbox?”

Together they dragged it back through the opening into the larger room. “Lucky job I checked Lightning Luke’s waistcoat afore I laid ’im t’rest.” Snouts pulled a small iron key from his pocket, popped the lock open, and lifted the lid. Maggie reached in and sifted pennies, crowns, and shillings through her fingers, her face slack with wonder.

“Well done, ladies.” Claire did not want to think about Luke’s final resting-place. She did not want to think about Luke or his demise at all. Not after the horrible dreams that had wakened her in the wee hours and stolen what sleep was left of the night. “You deserve every half-penny. Keep as much as you can carry in both hands.”

“’Twere the mother’s helper did it.” Lizzie regarded the device, now busy with the filthy plank floor of the room, with newfound respect. “P’raps it will find summat more’n dirt on t’other floor, too. Best we stick by it.”

Claire divided half of Luke’s ill-gotten gains among everyone in the house—which proved to be an excellent lesson in arithmetic for Jake and Tigg, who led the effort. “I shall take the other half to the bank,” she told Snouts privately, “and invest it in the railroads and the Royal Society of Engineers until we decide what to do with it. Personally, I think we should give it to the Society for the Protection of War Widows and Orphans. I am quite sure Mr. Jackson was responsible for the poverty of at least some of them.”

He gave her a doubtful look. “You’ll ’ave an ’ard time convincin’ this lot the widows an’ orphans deserve it more than they do. They’ll just think you stole it.”

She raised her chin. “I shan’t tolerate having my motives questioned. They have seen how fairly I deal. They will just have to trust me. Besides, none of this is really ours, Snouts. We have stolen it, not to put too fine a point on things.”

“Spoils of war, Lady,” he told her roughly. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. At least this roof don’t leak, an’ there’s enough artillery in the cellar to hold off anyone who disagrees wiv’ us for a month should it come to that.”

“It will not. We will not give the criminals and the thieves of London any competition. We shall set our sights on a different arena entirely.”

With the comforting weight of money in her skirt pocket, she hired a carter with a steam-powered dray and returned to Wilton Crescent. It stood just as she’d left it, except that the note was missing from the sink, as was everything but the bedstead in Mrs. Morven’s room. Ah. That worthy lady must have relocated to Lord James’s establishment. At least she would be safe there. Claire directed the carter and his burly boy to load up every single other thing left in the house, including the bedstead, the linens, and the piano.

What of Gorse, then? He must have gone to the Wellesleys. Claire added Send tubes to Gorse and Mrs. Morven to the mental list that included See Mr. Arundel about who owns the cottage and Eat something. The cottage in Vauxhall Gardens might not be much, but it possessed a vacuum tube. With that, she could communicate and keep a tenuous thread connecting herself with her old world.

Claire had been trained practically since infancy in how to run a household. Or to be more accurate, her mother had led by example and Claire had taken refuge in books and experiments. She regretted now that she had not paid more attention to the practice of housewifery. Of course, the art of drawing up the menu for a dinner party of eighteen was slightly different from arranging the trip to market that would result in the production of food on the table for the same number. She doubted that Lady St. Ives had ever been to market in her life, much less in the company of a gang of cutpurses and street children who saw no harm in lifting an orange if they could get away with it. In their view, the sin lay in being caught.

But at the very least, writing out the list of items to be purchased each day gave the Mopsies practice in their letters, and each of them possessed such a sharp mind that they were never shorted by so much as a penny during the actual purchase.

The boy who had been so scornful of Snouts on the night they’d claimed the house—who introduced himself to Claire as Lewis but was called Loser by everyone else—proved to be a helpful ally once he realized that the Lady meant business and tolerated no nonsense. The disloyal were invited to leave, and as her reputation spread, the number of volunteers knocking at the river door became rather gratifying. Lewis flushed an ancient crone out of the warren of streets whom he claimed to be his grandmother. She may have moved at the pace of a stick insect, but she could cook, and as long as the larder was kept stocked, meals appeared at more or less regular intervals. They had no table to put them on at first, but one evening four of the boys came puffing along the bridge above the house bearing a ten-foot dining table that they claimed had fallen out of a boat. Claire closed her eyes and beckoned them in, and the table became headquarters for the poker players when it was off duty.

A full stomach and productive activity went a long way to ensuring the loyalty of the last remaining doubters in her abilities.

It went a long way to easing the knot of tension between Claire’s shoulders, too. She was managing. With no tools but her mind and no prospects but those she was able to open up herself, she was actually managing to create order out of chaos. The fact that accidental murder had opened up these gates of possibility was not lost on her. Not an hour passed that she did not look out at the river or the road, convinced that a party of vengeful criminals—or a steambus of Mr. Peel’s bobbies—were on their way to demand justice. But at this moment, as she piloted the landau back to Vauxhall Gardens behind the chugging dray with one eye on the road and the other on the balance of the piano, she reflected that circumstances could certainly be much, much worse.

She could be in gaol.

She could be lying dead in the street.

She could be doing needlework in the dim, sunless parlor belonging to her grand-aunts Beaton.

26

Over the next week, her motley household settled into its own peculiar rhythm. Mornings were dedicated to market, with accompanying lessons in economics and mathematics. Afternoons were devoted to sharpening the skills of the card players and to the introduction of chemistry and physics. Here Jake’s photographic memory proved invaluable—and it was he who, on the Wednesday after their arrival, finally returned her engineering notebook, her pencils, and dear Linnaeus to her.

“I figure you ent gonna cut out on us now, Lady,” he said gruffly as he handed them over.

“No.” She clutched the books to her chest, resisting the urge to check that no pages had gone missing. “I’m glad to see your confidence in my character is improving.”

He shook his head, and his chocolate-brown eyes met hers. “You either keeps yer word or I goes to the bobbies and tell ’em it was you what kilt Lightning Luke.”

Clearly she did not have to look as far as the road or the river for justice to be meted out to her. She was harboring it right here.

Since the kitchen was now the sole domain of Granny Protheroe, with occasional incursions permitted by Claire and the Mopsies should they be bearing groceries, the front parlor became the laboratory. No more did boys lounge on sofa and floor, drinking rotgut, smoking, and staying out of range of Luke’s gun. Instead, glass tubes and flasks appeared, along with retorts, Bunsen burners, and cells for the creation of electrick current.

Claire had no idea who had built Lightning Luke’s gun, but he or she had obviously been a genius. Her first task was to discover the source of its power. If she could replicate it, then they could make other devices and sell them. She would not be so silly as to replicate the rifle itself—she was neither metallurgist nor fool—but there were other mechanisms that might be devised.

In the meantime, her sketches and equations had to be translated into terms that her ragged compatriots could understand. Some gave up and joined Snouts at the card table. But some, like Jake, persevered even in the face of repeated failure, stubborn as stones and unwilling to allow capricious numbers and persnickety measurements to defeat them. Jake had the makings of a fine chemist. What a pity she had to fight his mistrust at every turn. Ah well. If she could not create a friend where none had been, then at the very least she would create a capable assistant.

In the evenings the poker players scattered to their chosen fields of labor. There they learned variations on the venerable cowboy poker, or invented them, and taught the others when they returned. One of Snouts’s variations in particular, Old Blind Jack, suddenly became the rage in even the most fashionable of London’s card rooms, to the point that strategy diagrams began to appear on the back page of the Evening Standard where illustrations of classic chess moves had held court for years.

Snouts just chuckled and bought his very first velvet waistcoat, tailored to fit.

Upon seeing it the Mopsies immediately demanded their own finery, and Snouts magnanimously handed over twenty pounds as though it were nothing. Claire had seen the account book they’d cobbled together out of the end papers of her books from Wilton Crescent, and in comparison to the money flowing through the boy’s clever hands, twenty pounds was next to nothing.

On the next sunny Saturday, Claire took the Mopsies, Tigg, and Willie to Fortnum & Mason to have them outfitted. Never again would she allow the likes of the chemist in the Haymarket to look at her charges in that manner. And once the salesladies had removed the children’s old clothes to the dustbin, their mouths pruned in disgust, and dressed them from the skin out in clean linen, cotton, and lace for the girls, and practical navy wool for the boys, Claire beamed at them proudly.

“You look as though you were visiting from Buckingham Palace itself.” She smoothed Willie’s sailor collar so that it lay flat across his shoulders. “Even Her Majesty’s grandchildren don’t look as fine as you.”

“The Princess Alice chose that very dress for her youngest,” the saleslady confided, nodding in Lizzie’s direction. “She took the blue hair ribbons, though, instead of the coral.”

Lizzie wavered visibly.

“Have the blue as well, if you like,” Claire told her. “Snou—I mean, Mr. McTavish would approve.”

Upon their return to the river cottage Claire discovered that Lizzie was in unrepentant possession of the saleslady’s purse, having picked her pocket as the lady was dressing her.

The chill of disappointment warred with the heat of anger as Claire fought to keep her voice steady. “This is unacceptable.” Her tone was deadly quiet—so quiet, in fact, that Lizzie made the mistake of believing Claire was not serious.

“’Twere easy,” she said, swinging the pitifully small purse back and forth. “She leaned over to tie me sash and there it was, in front of me nose.”

“You will return it immediately.”

Lizzie gave her a look of disgusted disbelief. “Shan’t.”

Before the girl could do more than whip the purse back into her own pocket, Claire had snatched her off her feet and again applied the laws of physics in vigorous fashion. In the resulting uproar, the chemists reached protectively for their vials of liquids, and the card players froze with their cards pressed to their chests.

Unfortunately for Lizzie, her fine new underclothes were no match for the force of Claire’s temper, and when the girl was reduced to a sniveling, just barely repentant huddle on the floor, Claire said in a tone not one note removed from the one she’d used previously, “We shall leave immediately for Fortnum’s, where you shall return that purse.”

Mumble.

“I beg your pardon, Miss Elizabeth?”

“What’m I to tell ’er?”

“The truth, of course.”

“She’ll call t’bobbies for sure and it’ll be your fault if I land up in the clink.”

“You could say you found it on t’ground,” Maggie put in helpfully.

“And add lying to thievery?” Maggie quailed at the control in Claire’s voice. Claire would never have believed that of all the things her mother had taught her, how to infuse deadly force into one’s voice without raising it was the last she would have expected to find so useful.

“No, Lady.” Maggie’s lips trembled, both from shame and from fear for her sister’s liberty.

“You are young ladies now,” Claire said, allowing a touch of gentleness to creep in. “You make your way through the application of intelligence, grace, and consideration for others. You do the right thing, not the easy thing. I suggest you use the time it takes to drive back into town to compose an appropriately humble and truthful address to the purse’s owner.”

When they had located the young lady in question, it was clear she had just discovered the absence of her purse. “I beg your pardon, miss, but I’m all of a flutter. I—I seem to have—that is, I’ve lost—and I was just paid, too.” Her enormous brown eyes filled with tears before she got herself under control. “Is there something else you wished me to help you with?”

“My young charge has something to tell you.” With an inexorable hand between her shoulder blades, Claire pressed Lizzie forward.

The girl held up the little leather purse and the sales lady gasped as she took it. “Oh, thank you! What a precious child! You have given me such relief!” She swept Lizzie into her arms and hugged her so hard that Lizzie’s cheeks turned bright pink.

“Miss, I—” she tried to speak, but the saleslady covered her face in kisses. With a final “Thank you!” she bustled through a door in the back, leaving Lizzie with her fine speech trembling on her tongue, unsaid. She turned a beseeching face to Claire. “I tried, Lady, but she wouldn’t let me.”

“You have received thanks you did not deserve, and forgiveness that you did.” Claire touched the wide ribbon in her hair. “It took courage to make the attempt, and I salute you for it.”

Lizzie and Maggie shared the front seat all the way home, holding hands and considerably lighter of heart than on the trip in. Claire was no judge of how to bring up children, but she was a fair judge of character. The tension of that ride to town would go a long way to preventing Lizzie from exercising her light fingers again. At the very least, she’d seen the effect thievery could have on someone who was barely more fortunate than herself. The loss of a week’s wages would have hurt that young woman deeply, and Lizzie was headstrong, not heartless.

Dear me. Mathematics and chemistry are so much more straightforward. How have I managed to become a ramshackle sort of mother when I’m mere weeks out of school myself?

But there was no use wondering about the strangeness of her lot. She had killed a man, even if she hadn’t meant to. If she could turn these ragamuffin children into useful young men and ladies, maybe it would go some way toward paying back that debt. She may as well play the mother. After all, with every day that passed here on the wrong side of the river, the likelihood that any man would want to wed her faded further away. She had no prospects and now possessed what could only politely be called a “past.” If with God’s aid she could help these children, maybe she would have done as much good as any real mother in London.

27

If she held onto her hat, Claire could tilt her head wa-a-ay back and take in the topmost panes of the immense Crystal Palace. Beside her, Lizzie did the same, lost her balance, and staggered backward into Tigg’s arms.

“Steady on,” he said, setting her on her feet. “Don’t want to tumble into any of these engines.”

“’Ow tall is it?” Claire had never seen the girl so awestruck. “Does it touch the clouds?”

“It might if it were raining.” Claire consulted the guidebook. “It says here the top of that rounded roof is one hundred and eight feet. So if you took seven houses like ours and stacked them one on top of each other, you’d just be able to climb up and touch the glass.”

“I ent climbin’ up any such for all the tea in China.”

“I’m very glad to hear it. Shall we go look at the steam engines?”

Making their way through the crowds of people, it took some time to get to the exhibit hall. Half the spectators were looking at the exhibits and the other half were gazing up and down the long vistas of glass, holding their hats as Claire had done. While Willie and Tigg examined a small engine to pull wagonloads of coal or tin, Claire stood next to an enormous steam locomotive and gazed at it with as much awe as Lizzie had the glassed-over sky.

How was it possible that such power and intricacy could be so beautiful? And how was she going to gain admission to the university so that she too could one day create something as huge and inspiring as this?

“I see our interests coincide once more,” said a male voice beside her.

If he had left off the last two words, Claire would have cut the man dead for his impertinence and moved away to collect the children. As it was, she blinked up at him from under her impractical but very pretty hat brim.

Of all the people … ! “Mr. Malvern.”

“I must confess how happy I am to see you. Did you get my card?”

Concerned. “I did. What did you mean by it, sir?”

He hesitated, evidently expecting her to swoon like the schoolgirl his partner believed her to be. “Simply that I was worried about you. The papers were full of the Belgravia riots. When I could get no news of you, I went to the house. I left a message with the dustman.”

Ah. Mystery solved.

Goodness. He traveled all the way from his laboratory to Belgravia simply to see if she was safe? How kind. And how very singular. “You have no need to worry. I am quite well.”

“I see that.”

Tigg drifted to her side and Claire resisted the urge to smile at his protectiveness.

Andrew Malvern tensed under his conservatively cut suit. “I say. Not so close to the lady, if you please.”

Claire laid a hand on Tigg’s arm before he did something foolish, like attempt fisticuffs. “It’s quite all right. Mr. Tigg is with me, as are the three children examining that engine behind you.”

“With you?” Mr. Malvern’s gaze went from the Mopsies and Willie in their clothes fit for a queen’s grandchildren, to Tigg, who had not consented to dress for the occasion, in his ragged pants and jacket fit for the dustbin. “Is that so? Are you looking after the children of a friend, perhaps?”

“I am their governess, sir.” Though there was nothing wrong with her gloves, she tugged at them with brisk movements. “Mr. Tigg’s experience is with carriages and horses. I am giving him instructions in the operation of the landau, since he aspires to be a chauffeur. Thus, he has come with us to see the engines.”

Tigg, who did not even break a smile during these outrageous falsehoods, tilted his chin as if to say See? I’ve as much right to be here as you. The entrance fee had been set low on purpose, so that they were surrounded by people of all classes, from washerwomen to lords, from Wits to Bloods.

“Ah.” Mr. Malvern offered her his arm. “Then may I be of use to your party? Steam locomotives, you might recall, are a particular interest of mine.”

For the span of two seconds, Claire hesitated. The memory of the disdain in James Selwyn’s eyes flared, and then she squelched it. Lord James was not here. Andrew Malvern, who had never shown her anything but kindness—concern, even—was.

And he could tell her and the children about engines. Perhaps he even knew something of electrick cells.

She slipped her hand into the crook of his elbow. “Thank you, Mr. Malvern, that would be most kind. Elizabeth, Margaret, Willie … come along. This is Mr. Malvern, with the Royal Society of Engineers. He is going to tell us all about this magnificent locomotive.”

Since the girls had received strict instructions that there was to be no picking of pockets, they became bored by the time the little party had walked the length of the engine. Receiving permission to go to the ice-skating rink, they ran off while Tigg, Willie, and Claire drank in every word.

“You remember the experiment I was conducting the day we met, Lady Cl—“

“Yes, I do, certainly,” she said swiftly, before he used her name. “Have you had further success?”

With a sigh, he stopped, as if contemplating the row of four enormous iron wheels with their gleaming brass rods. “I wish I could say I had any success. But I cannot. I am stymied.”

“Perhaps you might ask for help?”

“James isn’t an engineer. He’s the brains of the outfit, as they say in the Wild West, but it is I who put his ideas into motion. At the moment, however, I am making no progress at all.” He looked at her sidelong from under the brim of his bowler. “What a pity you have found employment. The position is still unfilled, you know.”

How could this be? “But surely any number of candidates will have jumped at it.”

“Some. But having found the perfect candidate, I’m having difficulty settling for second best.”

His gaze did not leave her face, and Claire’s cheeks heated in a most disconcerting manner. “I—I—Mr. Tigg, what do you make of the position of the wheels under the boiler there?”

Startled, Tigg gaped at her. “Lady?”

“I mean, perhaps we might continue our tour with an exploration of electrick cells. Do you know anything of them, Mr. Malvern?”

While she pulled Willie away from his open-mouthed contemplation of the engine’s headlamp, set high above, she attempted to regain her composure. Goodness. Mr. Malvern could not be serious. Surely, with all the bright minds circulating in London like fireflies, he could find someone to assist him who was at least as qualified as she, if not more so? Surely he was not holding the position open in case she changed her mind?

And surely she was not even now contemplating doing so?

No, no, no. Eventually she must put those foolish dreams away. Even if she could leave the river cottage every day and drive to the laboratory, she could never tell him where she was living. And with whom. The fact was, she had painted herself into a corner with that confabulation of a story. How could a governess absent herself from her charges for hours each day? Even if she said she had left the position, there could very well be occasions when she would need to bring one or another of the children with her. There was their education to consider, after all, and what better place to conduct experiments than in a real laboratory?

Oh, no indeed. Because stories aside, what would Mr. Andrew Malvern think of a woman who made her home with cutpurses and gamblers, and who had actually slept in the rough and eaten stolen food? He would never employ such a woman if he knew that, much less … much less hold her in esteem.

Concern.

No. He would not squander his concern on a woman with a past, nor would she ask him to. She would enjoy his company for one brief hour and never see him again.

A stout resolution, to be sure.

What a pity the thought of keeping it made her sick to her stomach.

*

On the other side of the Palace, their little party found an entire hall dedicated to the wonders of electrick power. “I read in the Standard that at night, this hall is illuminated by electricks running along channels in the ironwork structure,” Andrew said. “They say it looks like a frozen lightning storm, and that you can read the paper by its light.”

The young ruffian Claire had called Tigg looked doubtful. “How’s that?”

Andrew pointed to the unobtrusive housings mounted next to every other support pillar, concealed by potted palms. “See those small engines there? The cells within generate the current. It’s tempting to come back later, isn’t it, just to see it all working.”

The hint could not be any broader, but Claire only looked away. “I’m afraid the children must be at home by teatime,” she said.

“Aye, some of us ’as to work,” muttered Tigg.

Claire looked at him in some alarm, which seemed puzzling under the circumstances. “He means in the mews.”

“Of course.” Andrew could not imagine what else he might have meant.

“Mr. Malvern, perhaps we might look more closely at the small electrick cells. I am conducting a series of experiments at present and I am interested in increasing power while constraining size.”

“You and every other inventor in that field.” Andrew smiled, and was rewarded with a smile in return that actually reached those anxious gray eyes. “Why don’t we start with the mother’s helper? It’s probably the most familiar to you.”

“I want to see the ones on guns,” Tigg said bluntly. “House things ent going to help us.”

“Knowledge of firearms wouldn’t help someone who plans to be a chauffeur, I wouldn’t think,” Andrew told him in what he hoped were quelling tones. Young upstart. If he hadn’t been in Claire’s company, he’d have been tempted to cuff the pup. By his age he should have learned to speak to his betters with more respect.

Tigg seemed to be swelling up with some kind of outburst, and again Claire laid a hand on his arm. “Mr. Tigg has a practical reason for his interest,” she said. “And I should be glad to expand my knowledge in that area, as well. However, let us begin, as you said, with the mother’s helper, and then branch off into uncharted territory once we are familiar with the basics.”

Unlike similar exhibits in the British Museum, the ones in the Crystal Palace were meant to be examined and explored. The Prince Consort was keen that the technologies invented by British minds should be admired by all. Andrew was able to disassemble the mother’s helper and spend an agreeable few minutes bent over it with Claire, whose own mind was so quick to grasp its principles that he suspected he was being led down the garden path.

“You’ve already done this, haven’t you?” he finally said, as she took the loaf-shaped brass housing from his hands and snapped it into place. “You’ve taken one apart already and could probably tell me how it works.”

“With statick repulsion,” Tigg said.

“Very good, Mr. Tigg,” she told him, and he straightened under her approval. Then to Andrew, she said, “I confess that I have, but my companions have not. I want Tigg and young Willie here to know as much as possible. They have … fallen somewhat behind in their educations.”

As the little boy couldn’t be more than five, Andrew wondered at this, but he wouldn’t contradict her for the world. “Very well, then, let us proceed to larger cells. I believe we’ll find a fine example of a Winchester electrick handgun in the hall of invention for the American Territories.”

Unfortunately they were not permitted to handle the Winchester piece, but a gentleman with an appalling accent and snakeskin boots was happy to show them how it worked. “This here cell replaces the old-fashioned magazine, see, where bullets used to go.” He tilted it out, and Claire and Tigg craned to see the small transparent globe better. “The copper tubing runs from the cell to the barrel to protect the mechanism, see, otherwise the whole shebang would melt.”

Claire’s eyebrows rose. “And the copper itself does not melt?”

“No, ma’am. Copper’s a conductor. So when you pull the trigger, it sets the current free, in a manner of speakin’, and it travels down the barrel and out to your target.”

“What’s the range?” Tigg asked.

“That’s a good question, pardner. Depends on the size of your cell. This here model, why, she’ll zap a fly off the back of a horse from fifty feet.”

Tigg’s eyes widened as he contemplated this picture in his imagination, and Andrew smothered a smile.

“And what of a cell about this size?” Claire curved her hands one on top of the other, as though she were cradling a rubber ball. “What range would it have if the barrel of the piece were about three feet?”

“Ah, now you’re talking rifles, which are a whole other animal. A cell that size paired with a barrel that long, why, it could take that same fly off my hypothetical horse from the end of this here exhibit hall.” He pointed to the exit doors. “It’s the barrel, don’t you know. The bolt gets going in there and nothing can stop it. I hope you ain’t planning to heft one of those, young lady. Purty little thing like you could get herself hurt.”

Claire gave the Territorial a winning smile. “Of course not, sir. I’m merely seeking instruction for my young charges. Now, could I impose upon you to explain a little further how exactly the bolt is created within the cell?”

By the end of the half-hour, the American exhibitor had somehow been convinced to disassemble the Winchester and tell them about it in such detail that most people’s eyes would have glazed over. But Claire Trevelyan was not most people, and neither were her companions. Andrew expected the kind of incisive questioning that Claire gave the man, but the mind of young Tigg surprised him. It was clear that a career as a chauffeur was the best he could do, considering his station—but what a waste of a fine brain. He would no doubt be the kind of driver who would while away his off days taking apart the engines and landaus of his employers and putting them back together again, just to relieve his boredom.

Claire finished her impromptu engineering class by reciting, along with Tigg, the parts that comprised the power cell, and the order in which they were assembled. From memory.

Concealing his amazement, Andrew waited as Claire thanked the gentleman for his kindness. They walked slowly down the length of the exhibit hall, stopping from time to time to examine the electrick cells on a pair of pistols, an icebox, and even on a serving trolley.

“I wonder.” She halted, idly watching the trolley as it trundled from one end of a mocked-up parlor to the other.

“What’s that, Lady?” Tigg’s gaze followed the trolley as well.

“How big a cell do you suppose it would take to power a landau, Tigg?”

Andrew stopped himself from laughing aloud just in time. Not only would she never forgive him, but it would show disrespect in front of her students. Having been in the position of instructor before, he knew how important respect was.

“A right fair size, Lady,” the boy answered. “Size of a mother’s helper, for sure.”

“At least.” Her tone was thoughtful, as he imagined her brain turning over and over under that heap of russet hair and that ridiculous hat. Andrew wished she would share her thought processes with him, outlandish though it might be. Were they well enough acquainted that he could inquire? If only to advise her of the impossibility of such a scheme—anything bigger than household appliances had to be powered by steam. Everyone knew that.

“Hm. Yes?” She looked down as Willie tugged urgently on her skirt.

Tigg took his other hand. “Looks like ’e ’as to take a leak, Lady. Come to mention it, I do too.”

This time Andrew did laugh out loud as Claire turned scarlet and clapped a hand to her mouth. “Mr. Tigg, I—really, I insist that you not—that you—oh, dear.”

Andrew stepped into the breach. “Would you allow me to take them? And on the way I’ll instruct them in the proper expression of such things. Shall we meet again at the ice rink to collect the girls?”

Her color still high, Claire nodded and gave him a speaking look that conveyed—what? Surely that soulful expression was more than gratitude for such a simple favor?

“Thank you. Dear me. Willie, you and Tigg are to go with Mr. Malvern, since I am superfluous in matters that concern gentlemen. I shall attempt to extricate the Mopsies from whatever disaster they have managed to create at the ice rink.”

She marched away, her back straight, her skirts frothing around her ankles with the firmness of her step. What a pretty sight she was. How utterly wasted as the governess of these children. There must be some way to convince her to come and work with him.

James was around here somewhere. Andrew would prevail on him to apologize for whatever offence he had caused, and then together they would bring their powers of persuasion to bear. Now that he had found her, he would not allow her to disappear. He would have to go a long way to find a woman like this again.

As a suitable assistant.

28

Claire followed the direction in her guidebook and located the ice rink in only ten minutes’ walk. What a miracle of technology such a simple thing was—a sheet of ice who knew how many inches thick, kept frozen by marvelous engines somewhere below. Upon it, skaters twirled on rented skates—including the Mopsies, whom she identified immediately by their shrieks of glee as they chased each other like waterbugs on blades.

It was apparent that the purchase of needle and thread on the way home would need to be followed by lessons in the homely arts of needlework. From the side of the rink Claire could see a row of lace drooping below the hems of Lizzie’s dress.

Someone cleared his throat quite close to her. “It’s quite a thing, isn’t it, to enjoy the pleasures of January at the end of July?”

Claire’s mouth went dry and instinctively she sidestepped. But there was no escaping him. Lord James Selwyn only followed. Unless she was prepared to make a scene in public, she would simply have to heap coals of fire on his head and be the soul of politeness.

“Lord James.”

“Lady Claire. This is an unexpected pleasure. Though perhaps that is unfair of me. I would expect to see you in few places other than the Crystal Palace, knowing the turn of your mind.”

Hmph. He knew less of the turns of her mind than Rosie the chicken, who was actually quite adept at divining what she wished to communicate. “Yes, we schoolgirls often come here to fill the gaps in our educations.”

He had the grace to pause and look down at her as if he really saw her. “I take it I am not forgiven.”

“That would assume you had engaged my mind enough to offend.”

“You seemed very offended when last we met. Exited my laboratory with precipitous haste, if I recall.”

“Your laboratory?”

“My money built it.”

“Ah yes. Your money.” She hoped Mrs. Morven had taken her advice about the twenty-five percent. “I trust you are satisfied with your new cook and housekeeper?”

“Mrs. Morven? That woman is a gem. A paragon. Her lemon soufflé could be presented to Her Majesty without shame.”

Claire recalled the lemon soufflé with a pang of homesickness—not so much for Wilton Crescent, but for her old life and the little pleasures she had completely taken for granted.

“I’m sure you miss her sadly.”

A presumptuous thing for him to say, but all too true. “Please give her my warmest greetings and let her know I am well.” It irked her to ask anything of him, but if he mentioned meeting her today, Mrs. Morven would be hurt if there were no message. She had sent a tube containing the governess story several days ago, and had received a relieved reply, along with a recipe for melted-chocolate milk—the very drink the governess used to make for Claire in the nursery long ago.

“I shall be happy to tell her,” Lord James said. “May I—”

“Excuse me, Lord James. Lizzie! Maggie!” She leaned over the barrier and waved them down. “Have you enjoyed yourselves?”

“Oooh, Lady, it’s the most wonderful thing, skating is,” Maggie panted. “I can go backward. See?” And she wriggled—resembling nothing so much as Julia Wellesley in a new set of petticoats—and began to move in reverse, her skates carving parentheses in the ice.

Lizzie grasped her hands and together they began to move faster. “Look, Lady! Ent it grand?”

“Yes, very grand.” Claire followed their progress, walking along the barricade. “But I must ask you to return to earth and hand in your skates. The others will be joining us shortly.”

Reluctantly, with fits and starts and several demonstrations of skill, the girls got their skates turned in and their new patent-leather shoes buckled on. And all the while Lord James did not leave. In fact, Claire had allowed the girls’ reluctance to go on far longer than she would have had he not been there, expecting his impatience to get the better of him and drive him away.

What could he be playing at, tolerating the Mopsies with such a fixed smile?

He must be up to something. And in her experience, it could not be good. She must get rid of him at once. For Andrew to find out her secrets would mean a personal loss. For Lord James to discover them would mean swift, certain, and irrevocable social disaster, to the point where she would be received by no one, not even her own mother.

“Girls, come along. We will walk this promenade and keep an eye open for Mr. Tigg and Willie.”

“And who might these charming young ladies be?” Lord James’s tone sounded so affable that it must be false.

The girls seemed to realize all at once that this gentleman was not just passing by, but seemed to be trying to make himself one of their party. And for a wonder, they buttoned their lips and regarded him with silent suspicion.

Snouts’s training had been thorough.

“These are my charges,” Claire said with admirable economy. “Margaret, Elizabeth, make your curtsies to Lord James.”

Maggie turned big eyes on her sister that plainly said, Cooooo, a real lordship, before both girls bobbed obediently.

“Your charges?” Lord James repeated. “Do you mean to tell me you are their … governess?”

“I am.”

“And a fine one,” Lizzie said without a trace of Bow’s bells in her voice.

“We quite like her.” Maggie took her sister’s hand. “We’re ever so hard on governesses.”

Claire struggled not to gape, and then struggled even more with the urge to box their ears for playacting when the moment was so serious. She reached down and took Lizzie’s other hand with rather more firmness than necessary.

“So nice to see you, Lord James. Good day.”

“Just one moment, Lady Cl—”

“Come along, girls!”

“Wait!” he boomed just as one of those silences peculiar to large crowds fell all at once. Reddening, he collected himself. “Please, just for a moment.”

If she did not listen to him, he would likely stalk her the length of the arcade. “Yes, my lord?”

He glanced to either side, but people had gone about their business. “I would have hoped for a more solicitous environment to say what I must say, but you are an elusive quarry. It seems I must take my opportunities where I find them.”

“You have something you wish to say to me?” She had quite a number of things she wished to say to him, but not in front of the girls. If one wanted models of good behavior, one must be a model of good behavior oneself.

“Yes. I—well, I—” Flushing again, he chewed the lower edge of his moustache. Good heavens. He was as edgy as a man about to propose. Not that she had any experience along those lines except for what she’d seen in the flickers.

“Cat got your tongue?” Lizzie enquired.

“He’s got something stuck in his throat,” Maggie agreed. “Lozenge?” She held up a hard cherry drop, somewhat fuzzy from being carted about in her pocket all day.

Lord James looked down at them like Zeus from Olympus. “Little girls should be seen and not heard.”

If Claire had heard that once, she’d heard it a thousand times, and every time it irritated her more. Girls should certainly be heard. It was their voices that the world was missing.

“Really, Lord James, I’ll thank you to leave the girls’ upbringing to me.” Her tone could have been chipped right out of the sheet of ice behind them. “As it happens, I’m a great believer in little girls being heard, if they have something to say. Miss Margaret was merely offering to help.”

“I was, wasn’t I?” Maggie sounded very pleased.

“You’re not a nice man,” Lizzie told him, eyes narrowed. “You made the Lady go all frosty. You really don’t want to do that.”

“Great Caesar’s ghost.” Lord James had finally lost his patience. He glared at Claire. “You’re as poor a governess as you are a scientist. All right. I’ll say what I have to say, and that is this. I will offer you a thousand pounds not to take the position in Andrew’s laboratory.”

She could not possibly have heard him correctly. “I beg your pardon?”

“All right, then, if you will stoop to bargaining. Fifteen hundred. I know your position, my dear young lady, and that isn’t the kind of sum you can turn down.”

The rage came bubbling up from under her corset and into her throat. Was it possible for a man to be any more insulting? “Isn’t it?”

If she said one more word, her façade would split and she would scream blue invective at him, right here, right now. The glass above their heads would crack and rain down upon him and it would serve him right for treating her in this high-handed, criminal, cruel manner.

Oh, if she were a lady in society instead of name how she would glory in crushing him to social powder under one kid heel! She would make it so that no one in their circles would receive him ever again. Even the Queen would frown when his name was mentioned. If she were—if only—

“Lady?” Maggie tugged her hand. “Look, there’s Tigg and Willie with Mr. Malvern.”

“Mr. Malvern?” James lifted his head like a wolf scenting the sheepdog.

Claire pulled in as deep a breath as she could, feeling her corset cinch her sides like the twin hands of caution and propriety. “Yes. He has been such a gentleman today. We’ve spent most of the afternoon together deepening our acquaintance and he has told us all about locomotives and steam.”

Ever so sweetly, she smiled at him and allowed the girls to drag her away.

29

Like the confluence of events that results in a battle at sea, nine people converged at a single point in the cheerful arcade next to the ice-skating rink. The chamber orchestra played “Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes” while the skaters dipped and twirled, vendors called the attention of customers to their hot meat pies and iced drinks, and Lady Julia Wellesley and Gloria Meriwether-Astor spotted Lord James and bore down upon him like two battleships under full steam.

“Lord James, how very unexpected!” Julia trilled.

“Such a pleasure to see you,” Gloria added, then halted in midstep, her skirts swirling forward like foam upon the waves. “Oh, hello, Claire.”

“Claire? Claire Trevelyan?” Her focus on Lord James broken, Julia looked around, her eyes registering astonishment at the number of people who had witnessed her unladylike hailing of his lordship in public. “Heavens, we thought you’d gone to Cornwall.”

So much for attempting to keep her name out of the children’s hearing. Well, that had been a thin hope at best.

Then Julia seemed to register Lord James’s proximity to Claire, and her long lashes fluttered. “Are you … and his lordship … enjoying the exhibit?”

“I am, very much.” Claire resented her implication that she and James were there together, and resented even more having to assure Julia that she was no threat to her pursuit. Honestly, what would it be like to live a life where such a thing was her only problem? “I cannot speak for his lordship, who was merely passing by.”

Lord James had concealed all his emotion of the moment before, and had put on his public face. “Ladies, the pleasure of our meeting is all mine. Lady Julia, you look enchanting. Miss Gloria, you should build yourself a crystal palace of your own. The light of heaven suits you exactly.”

Claire resisted the temptation to implore patience of that same heaven, and welcomed Andrew and the boys instead. Here was reality. No simpering exchange of insincere compliments. Instead, with them she could enjoy the meeting of like minds in pursuit of a common goal: a greater knowledge of how the world worked.

Julia and Gloria smiled and blushed. Lord James went on, “May I introduce my business partner to you? Lady Julia Wellesley, Miss Gloria Meriwether-Astor, this is Andrew Malvern of the Royal Society of Engineers.” The ladies inclined their heads while Andrew bowed.

“And what business are you working on together?” Gloria’s words were polite while her eyes said, What business does a Blood have with a Wit?

Lord James chuckled. “I would not trouble your lovely head with it. Suffice to say we are working on making locomotive engines run more efficiently.”

Lady Julia waved her hand in front of her face, as if she were overcome. “Goodness. How very droll. Do you own a railroad?”

“Not yet.” He smiled at her. “But I like to engage my mind in such matters, and Andrew and I went to school together, so I knew a fine scientist who could do the practical work.”

Dispensing with Andrew as unsuitable for her further attention, Lady Julia finally noticed that Claire appeared to be surrounded by children. Claire took a firm grip on the Mopsies’ hands and braced herself.

“Goodness, Claire. Are all these children with you?”

“They are. Girls, make your curtsies to her ladyship. Mr. Tigg, Willie, a bow, if you please.”

To her knowledge, Tigg had never bowed to anyone in his life. But having just observed Andrew, he replicated the courtesy exactly as he had seen it, and Willie imitated him so well one would think he had been born to it.

Gloria’s eyebrows drew together in such a way that Claire was tempted to tell her she would have wrinkles before she was thirty if she kept it up. “Is that … person … with you, Claire?”

“Of course. I would not be concerned with his manners if he were not.”

“I should think you’d be concerned with his clothes. Wherever did you pick him up?”

Tigg began to swell. Andrew said smoothly, “I believe Mr. Tigg is in training as a chauffeur at the children’s home. Lady Claire is encouraging his interest in engines.”

Both Gloria and Julia dismissed Tigg from their universe, for which Claire could only be grateful. “And who might you be?” Gloria bent as far as her corset would allow and chucked Willie under the chin. The boy tipped his head down and moved closer to Lizzie. “Don’t be shy.” When he still didn’t respond, she straightened. “Where I come from, children speak when they are spoken to.”

“Willie doesn’t speak to anyone, milady,” Lizzie told her. “Don’t take it personal.”

“Is that so. And you are?”

“Li … Elizabeth. This is my sister Margaret.”

“And how do you come to know Lady Claire, Elizabeth?”

Lizzie, don’t—don’t say it— Claire squeezed her hand in inarticulate warning and opened her mouth to say something—anything—

“The Lady is our governess,” Lizzie said blithely. “We’ve been skating. Do you skate?”

Gloria did not answer. She and Julia exchanged a single incredulous look and then turned it on Claire as if they were two automatons built for a single task. “Governess?” Julia’s eyebrows rose so high they practically disappeared under the flowers on her hat. “Governess?”

“For what family?” Gloria’s voice trembled with scandalous enjoyment. “Oh, do tell, Claire, so I can send your invitation to my next ball to the correct address.”

“You—you would not know them.” Claire’s lips felt stiff, her skin cold. Why had she chosen today to come to the exhibition? It had held nothing but humiliation and disappointment. Even her pleasure in Mr. Malvern’s company had been spoiled backward by the last ten minutes.

“So they do not move in our circles?” Julia inquired.

“What I mean to say is, I am not precisely a governess.” Was her voice as wretched as her blotchy scarlet face? “I am more a … teacher. For the time being, until I find more permanent employment.”

“So you are not with a family of good name and fortune?” Julia pressed. “Then these children are … ?”

Lord, help me.

Andrew Malvern hoisted Willie up into his arms, drawing the young ladies’ attention in his direction almost against their will. “As a matter of fact, I have been assisting Lady Claire in her educational efforts this very afternoon. We have a collection of fine young minds here.” He smiled at her, and even in the depths of her misery, his kindness made her smile back. It was a poor effort, but his eyes twinkled when he saw it. “I have been doing my best for weeks to convince her to assist me in my laboratory, but her loyalty to her charges has thus far prevented it. I still have hope, however.”

She could not bear another moment of Julia’s and Gloria’s smiles at her expense, however cleverly hidden behind beaded pocketbooks and gloved hands. Behind them, Lord James skewered her with his gaze. He would offer her fifteen hundred pounds to tell Andrew “no” once and for all. With it, she could return to her life and pay for a full year at the university. No one need ever know what she had been doing since that dreadful night in Wilton Crescent.

With fifteen hundred pounds, she could leave it all behind.

Willie wriggled in Andrew’s arms and held his own out to her. Without thinking, she reached over and took the child, his familiar little body settling against her with the full weight of his trust.

Trust.

He had trusted her, right from the moment she had pulled herself up off the filthy road outside Aldgate Station.

What had she been thinking? She could no more betray the trust of Willie, the girls, Tigg, Jake, or Snouts than she could her own baby brother Nicholas. No. Impossible.

Claire lifted her head and deliberately turned her shoulder to Lord James. “Mr. Malvern, you have convinced me. If we can work out a suitable arrangement for the continuing education of the children, I would be honored to assist you in your scientific efforts. Perhaps together we may yet change the landscape of the railroad industry.”

His delighted astonishment was all the reward a woman could ask for.

What a pity she couldn’t see the reactions behind her. Still, the silence reverberating in the air was extremely satisfying, and the brevity of their farewells even more so.

As she and her little party walked slowly toward the exit, the light playing over them as though even Heaven approved of her boldness, Claire couldn’t help the flutter of nerves in her stomach. Once again, she had burned a bridge behind her—this time, for all the best reasons.

Only time would tell if she had done the right thing.

She lifted her face to the sky as, surrounded by her accidental family, she stepped out of the mighty glass doors and into her future.

30

Epilogue

My dear Claire,

I am this very morning in receipt of a tube from my aunts Beaton, who say they have not seen you at all these past three weeks. I confess your behavior puzzles and distresses me. You were to have concluded the affairs of our move and joined me here in Cornwall. Instead, you have embarked on a mad scheme to find employment. It is enough that I must contemplate the thought of my daughter earning her bread in such a thankless manner. But to know so little of how or why—I cannot bear it.

What is the name of the family in whose bosom you have found such employment? Are they socially acceptable? If you must do this, I would expect nothing less than the children of a duke, dear. I would also expect you would keep your situation utterly unknown to our acquaintance. Find some way of swearing the duke and duchess to secrecy. I insist upon it.

Dear Heaven, Claire, you make it increasingly difficult for me to find you a suitable husband. How can you be so headstrong when my faculties are barely adequate to see to the tasks I have at hand?

Have you heard from Mr. Arundel? I find I am out of pocket far sooner than I expected. He must find a way to locate what your father used to call working capital, otherwise, I shall be forced to let some of the staff go.

Inform me at once of your situation. If I do not find it suitable, I shall contact Gorse and prevail upon him to bring you down to Cornwall by main force if necessary.

Ever your loving

Mother

END OF PART ONE

II

Her Own Devices

31

London, August 1889

They were too small to be airships, and too ephemeral to be bombs. Glowing with a gentle orange light, each the size of a lantern, they floated up into the night sky powered by a single candle and the most delicate of tiny engines.

One didn’t, after all, simply release such dangerous things without a means of directing where they were to go.

“They’re so pretty,” Maggie breathed.

“Sh!” Her twin sister Lizzie, both of them having no surname that anyone knew, nudged her with urgency. “The Lady said to be quiet.”

“You be quiet! Since when d’you listen to the Lady at the best o’ times?”

“Mopsies!” Lady Claire Trevelyan, sister of a viscount, formerly a resident of Belgravia and now a resident of a hideout in Vauxhall gained at the price of a brigand’s life, glared at both girls. They’d been on many a night lookout. What were they thinking, to risk giving away their position by whispering?

Though Claire had to admit that the beauty of the balloons’ dreamy flight hid the fact that she, Jake, and Tigg had constructed them out of a rag picker’s findings: a silk chemise, a ragged nightgown so fine she could draw it through her grandmother’s emerald ring, a pair of bloomers that a very broad lady had thrown away because of a tear she was too wealthy to mend.

Add to this a little device Claire had been working on that would act as a steering and propulsion mechanism, and you had a set of silent intruders that could go where she and her accomplices could not.

Hunching their shoulders at the reproof, the girls settled behind the tumbledown remains of a churchyard wall to watch the half-dozen balloons sail away with their cargo over the width of a street and up over a two-story stone wall as impregnable as a medieval keep.

The spider takes hold with her hands, and is in kings’ palaces. Well, tonight she was the spider and the inhabitants of “The Cudgel” Bonaventure’s fortress were about to learn a lesson in manners. One did not jump the associates of the Lady in the street and relieve them of the rewards of their night’s work in the gambling parlors without reprisal. The candles that caused the balloons to rise would not set his fortress on fire, but the chemical suspended in a single vial from each certainly would.

An owl hooted, rather more cheerfully than one might expect. “They’re over the wall,” Snouts McTavish translated. “We can move in when you give the word, Lady.”

“I think it will be safe to wait for Mr. Bonaventure in the street. Jake, do you have the gaseous capsaicin devices should he prove foolish?”

“Aye.”

She had known Jake for several weeks. Even now, she was not sure he wouldn’t use such a device on her and challenge Snouts for lieutenancy of their little band of the abandoned and neglected. However, if someone were to prove himself trustworthy, he must perforce be trusted. Leaving him in charge of the satchel with its clinking contents was a calculated risk, but it was one she must take. Especially since he had compounded the devices himself.

“Right, then. Let us offer advice to the distressed and homeless, shall we?”

The glow over the wall was bright enough to light their way into the street as the buildings behind it caught fire. The contents of each vial suspended beneath its balloon had ignited on contact with air as the candles burned out and they dropped out of flight, higgledy-piggledy all over the roof of The Cudgel’s headquarters. Wood that had been dried out during the hot summer—old wood, that had been standing since long before their glorious Queen’s time—ignited and in seconds the oldest part of the building had gone up like a Roman candle.

Claire regretted the loss of the steering mechanisms—a particularly nice bit of engineering of which she was quite proud—but at least they had gone in a good cause.

The Cudgel would think twice before picking on her friends again.

The entire house was engulfed in roaring flame by the time the single gate creaked open and a small crowd of men and boys tumbled through it, gasping and slapping smoldering sparks and holding bits of clothing over their faces against the smoke.

Hmph. And where were the women holding positions in The Cudgel’s hierarchy? Her opinion of his leadership dropped even lower.

The wailing of the fire engines in the distance told her she must be succinct.

“Mr. Bonaventure!” she called, stepping into full view in the middle of the street. She had dressed carefully in raiding rig for the occasion, in a practical black skirt that could be rucked up by means of internal tapes should she have to run or climb. She had dispensed with a hat for the evening, choosing instead to simply leave her driving goggles sitting in front of her piled hair, a gauzy scarf wound over it and around her neck. A leather corselet contained a number of hooks and clasps for equipment, and instead of her trusty rucksack, which Jake was wearing, she now wore a leather harness with a spine holster specially made to the contours of the lightning rifle she had taken from Lightning Luke Jackson three weeks ago. She was pleased to see that her lacy blouse remained pristine white, despite the half-hour spent huddled behind the wall.

She slid the rifle from its holster over her shoulder and held it loosely, her index finger hovering over the power switch.

In ones and twos, the small crowd of smoked criminals realized what she held—and therefore, who she was. Slowly, they backed against the wall, leaving The Cudgel exposed to her aim.

So much for honor among thieves.

The Cudgel eyed her. “I know you. Wot business you got ’ere?”

The sirens sounded closer. They would be crossing the Southwark Bridge over the Thames even now. “Just this,” she said, enunciating crisply so that there would be no misunderstanding. “Last night your men set upon four of my friends returning from the gaming halls, and took everything they had. This is a warning to you that I do not tolerate abuse of my friends or the fruit of their honest labor.”

“Izzat so,” he drawled. “Can’t say as I know wot yer babbling on.”

She hefted the rifle and pushed the power switch. “I suggest you apply your limited intellect to it.”

His head thrust forward like that of an angry bulldog whose bone has just been ripped from its teeth. “I say you go back to your needlepoint like a good little girl and think about wot I’m goin’ to do to you for—”

The gun hummed happily, its pitch and frequency announcing that it was ready for work. Claire’s index finger now rested on the trigger.

“If I hear that you have stepped foot in Vauxhall, with or without evil intent, your own yellow belly will be the last thing you ever see.”

Yellow belly? Goodness. That was a line straight out of one of the melodramatic flickers she and Emilie had been addicted to centuries ago—two months ago—when she had been a green girl.

“I’d say you owe me, then, girlie—”

“You may address me as the Lady.”

He started across the street. “And you must address this. Creeper! Hiram! Hold her down.” He fumbled with the buttons on his trousers, while Claire stared in astonishment. Really. With the fire engines nearly upon them and his house burning to cinders as they spoke, he thought he could threaten her by means of his disgusting person?

Creeper and Hiram, whoever they were, did not, in fact, hold her down. However, two shadows detached from the main body of the huddle and slipped away down the alley at the corner of the wall. Snouts, Jake, and Tigg formed an immovable mass at her back.

Claire sighed. “Really, Mr. Bonaventure. You should not, as my mother often told me, use a pin when a needle is called for. Particularly so dull and short a pin.”

She pulled the trigger and a bolt of lightning shot across the street, singeing him neatly between the legs and burning the inner seams of his canvas trousers clean away.

The Cudgel screamed and leaped back six feet, the scent of burning flesh overlaid on the smoke that filled the air. Hysterical, no doubt in pain at least equal to that he had hoped to inflict upon her, he capered and screeched so that Claire could hardly distinguish between him and the sirens of the engines as they roared up the cobbled street.

“Billy Bolt!” With the signal to scatter, her friends slipped into the shadows with her before anyone in authority could say they’d been there.

Snouts waited until they were nearly back in their own neighborhood before he said, “Been gettin’ a little target practice in, I see. It’ll look like he got burnt by the fire and none o’ that lot will say different.”

“I have indeed.” The furthest corner of the garden wall was scorched and pockmarked as proof. “There is no point in being considered armed and dangerous if one cannot actually hit anything.”

“Lucky that gun is accurate.”

“It’s more than accurate, Snouts. You’ve seen yourself how it practically feels your aim. Even Willie could hit a target with it, I’m sure.”

“Lady, please tell me you ent gonna—”

“No, certainly not. No one touches this rifle but me … or you, when you are acting in my stead. It’s more than just a weapon, you know. It stands for what we’ve accomplished.”

Snouts said no more, just kept pace with her, one eye on the others to make sure no one fell behind and no one was in pursuit, and the other on the street ahead, watching for danger.

Claire was the first to admit that keeping order in a band of thieves and cutpurses would be nearly impossible without the rifle—or rather, without their belief in what she might do with it. The truth was, she had only fired it outside the garden three times: Twice on the night it had come into her possession, and tonight.

Clearly she had inherited not only her father’s aptitude for firearms, but also his belief that one did not need to speak much, only to say what was worth hearing when one did. Or, as Polgarth the poultryman at the family pile in Cornwall was wont to say, Walk soft an’ carry a big stick.

She was thankful that at least Snouts, Tigg, and the Mopsies followed her lead without coercion. Since she had lost her home in the Arabian Bubble riots and fallen in with this street gang that was no more than a rabble of desperate, hungry children, they had taught her how to survive—and she had taught them how to thrive.

Between lessons in reading and mathematics, they rehearsed new and confounding hands of Cowboy Poker, the current rage they had fabricated in the drawing rooms and gambling halls of London. Those with a bent for chemistry and mechanics assisted her in the assembly of her devices. Food appeared on the table with heartening regularity now, and they all had more than one suit of clothes each. Even Rosie, the hen she had rescued, who ruled the desolate garden behind the cottage with an iron claw, had begun to put on weight.

And to top it all, tomorrow she was to begin employment as assistant to Andrew Malvern, M.Sc., Royal Society of Engineers.

The watchman on the roof platform above the river entrance whistled, and Snouts whistled three notes in return. The door swung open, allowing a wide bar of warm light to spill onto the planks that had been repaired after a series of unfortunate explosions caused by the previous inhabitants.

“Lady! You’re back. What happened?” Lewis asked eagerly before he was fairly through the door.

Weepin’ Willie, a mute boy of five, pushed through the legs of the boys crowding the porch, and flung himself into Claire’s arms. She hugged him, a warm rush of gratitude spilling through her that here, at least, was one person in all the world who loved her without reservation. The others respected her, perhaps even liked her. But this small scrap of humanity had stuck to her like a burr from the moment she’d met him. Because of him—well, because of them all, really, she’d kept to her course and not gone down to Cornwall beaten and defeated, to be the bride of some country squire chosen by her mother.

“The Cudgel will not be waylaying any of you in the future,” she told them, setting Willie on his feet and getting up. “He has a permanent reminder to mind his manners henceforth.”

Snouts made a gesture in the vicinity of his pants that caused the boys’ eyes to widen in horror and admiration.

She was committed to her new life now, for good or ill.

Of course, The Cudgel aside, avoiding ill was at the top of her list of priorities. For that reason, she had allowed her new employer to believe she was the governess of five of these children, and part of their agreement was that they might supplement their education in his laboratory on occasion.

Surely she would be able to keep her secret. After all, he had not inquired too closely about her place of residence or who, exactly, would allow their children out with her to perform experiments in a riverside warehouse. She would just have to remain pleasantly vague about certain details, and trust that his natural reserve and politeness would prevail.

It would never do for him to know that he was harboring the infamous Lady of Devices, inadvertent murderer of Lightning Luke Jackson and reigning queen of the south side underworld.

Her reputation in society would never recover.

32

“Miss, a word, if you please.” Granny Protheroe, who was their cook and possessed some tenuous relationship to Lewis that had never been satisfactorily explained, stepped outside into the walled garden where the Mopsies were attempting to encourage some beans and peas to grow. She gazed at the brave trellises made of string with narrow-eyed pessimism. “That hen’ll eat them things before they’re an inch taller. Besides, it’s too late in the summer to grow such.”

Claire watched the girls, who labored on as if they had not heard. “Perhaps they might surprise you. Rosie is more fond of things with legs than things with leaves.” She turned to Granny. “What would you like to speak about?”

“That hen don’t produce enough eggs, and it’s silly to barter for ’em. We ought to have a flock.”

The Mopsies came to instant attention. “A flock? More hens like Rosie?” Lizzie asked.

Maggie ran to them and took Claire’s hand. “Please, Lady, can we ’ave ’em? Rosie needs a flock. She must be lonely out ’ere.”

Rosie showed no signs whatever of loneliness. Quite the opposite—a feathered despot, she had quite cowed poor Lewis and some of the smaller boys, who wouldn’t go into the garden alone no matter what the provocation. Claire gathered her arguments.

“My dear girls, if we did such a thing and came under attack by The Cudgel or his like, who would protect these hens?”

“We would, same as we protect Rosie now.” Lizzie glared, as if Claire had impugned her ability to take care of her own. “It was us as saved ’er in the first place, innit?”

“Yes, but it is much easier to fight or flee with a single bird. How would you make for safety if you had four? Six?”

“We could have six?” Maggie’s face lit up.

“I was using a hypothetical number.”

“Wot’s hyp—hypofet—”

“Imaginary. For instance.”

“Oh. Well, that’s simple. We wouldn’t run. The rifle’d put paid to anyone who comes round.”

“We can’t depend on the rifle for everything,” Claire pointed out. “The sad example of Lightning Luke has shown us that.”

“We make ’em a house,” Lizzie said. “One that moves, so we can take ’em wiv us.”

“Or floats,” Maggie put in. “They could sleep on the river and come up into the garden in the mornings.”

“We’re not talking about ducks,” Granny Protheroe informed them. “Hens don’t like water. Ent you ever heard of ‘madder’n a wet hen’? Besides, they’d be stolen by some waterbug, like as not, and et. How’d you like that?”

Maggie’s eyes filled with tears, and Claire hastened to say, “It is a fine idea, though. A moveable coop. Would you put it on treads, like a steambus, or legs, like those automatons we saw at the Crystal Palace?”

“Legs,” the twins said in unison.

Claire tried not to show her glee at finally hitting on a project for this stubborn pair that would combine all the best lessons she could teach—a project they were motivated to do out of feminine protective instincts, the strongest on earth.

“Excellent,” she said. “We will begin with drawings—” Art and perspective. “—and proceed to building the structure.” Mathematics and physics. “We will need a small steam engine to power it, and some means by which to operate the legs.” Mechanics.

“When can we get the hens?”

Claire sighed. One thing at a time. “As you make your way through the city tomorrow, you must keep your eyes open. I have no doubt that Rosie was not the only chicken in London in need of rescuing. But no stealing, mind. The birds you find must be in honest need of a home.”

“Why are we going into the city?” Lizzie wanted to know. “We ought to stay on this side of the river and lie low after last night.”

“It is my first day as Mr. Malvern’s assistant, so I can drive you as far as Blackfriars. Snouts will take you on a reconnaissance mission to gather materials for your coop. You might have some success in the scrap-yards behind the foundries. We will work on a list later today.” Measurements and penmanship.

The hens won out over Lizzie’s natural caution. She and her sister turned back to the pea trellis, chattering in low voices about what the walking coop should look like. Granny Protheroe went back inside, leaving Claire to pace the length of the garden alone. Garden was a grandiose word for the half-acre riot of brambles and potholes blasted out of the earth, all enclosed in a six-foot wall at least a foot thick. No toll-taker needed such a wall; only the criminals who had appropriated the tumbledown cottage would have, in order to defend their territory. Had Lightning Luke used the ground for target practice of some kind? A missile or an explosive might gouge holes like these.

Not that they bothered Rosie in the least. Claire watched the red hen throwing dirt into the air with abandon as she enjoyed a dust bath at the bottom of a small crater.

“I’m glad you’re finding these useful,” she told her. “I trust you’re prepared to share. The Mopsies will be bringing some companions for you soon.”

Rosie blinked in slow contentment, utterly unconcerned about the prospect of rivals.

“I wish I had your sangfroid.” The truth was, she was a little nervous about beginning work at the laboratory. Doubts and fears swarmed her confidence like mosquitoes. Would Lord James Selwyn be there? Would he find some way to sabotage her efforts and make her look incompetent? He had been in a barely concealed rage the last time she’d seen him. Had that temper burned itself out, or was it merely banked until the next confrontation?

The memory of his attempt to bribe her into turning down Andrew Malvern’s offer of employment had been both infuriating and mortifying. Even now, the thought of his insolence at the Crystal Palace made her cheeks burn and her blood run hot.

Yes, it was true that taking his money would have turned all her dreams of a university degree and a career into reality. But at what cost?

Her own integrity, that’s what.

The children’s safety.

And Mr. Malvern’s regard.

She could not afford to lose the first or second, and as for the third … well, he was to be her employer, wasn’t he? Of course she wanted his good opinion.

As would any reasonable person.

*

Snouts, the Mopsies, and Weepin’ Willie—who could not be persuaded to stay at home helping Granny Protheroe to make pies, if there were more birds like his adored Rosie to be found—joined the crowd swarming across the Blackfriars bridge.

“You’re sure you don’t want to go with them?” Claire watched the little group as long as she could, but they were soon lost to sight.

Tigg shifted in the seat beside her. “I’ll go if you say to, Lady, but I’d druther stick by you.” His voice dropped to a mumble. “Might learn summat useful.”

The warmth of approval colored her tone as she said quietly, “I have no doubt you will, and I applaud your determination to get on, Tigg.” Smiling, Claire steered the steam landau down the warren of narrow streets until she reached Orpington Close—another grandiose name for a lane to the river barely wide enough to admit her and her gleaming engine. “I am quite sure Mr. Malvern could use a tender for his experiments with coal. And if he doesn’t, we shall persuade him that at the very least, he must have someone to sweep up afterward. I certainly have no intention of wearing my duster while I work for fear of ruining my clothes.”

She parked the landau and threw the switch that would shut down the flame and begin the boiler’s cooling process, then climbed out. No coach bearing a noble crest stood there, or any other kind of vehicle, but Lord James could have come by hansom cab, or by water.

“Oh, stop,” she muttered, unwinding her chiffon scarf and removing her driving goggles. “You have a perfect right to be here, and he can just take it like a gentleman.”

“What’s ’at, Lady?”

“Nothing, Tigg. Can you make sure the hood is secure, please? We don’t want anyone being nosy while we’re inside.”

Her duster over one arm, her navy skirt spotless and her hat in place, she waited by the door for him to check the latches on the brass hood flap that he kept polished to a gleam. He nodded in satisfaction and the two of them mounted the stairs to the loft, where Andrew Malvern kept his offices. The expanse below was filled with piles of building materials and an enormous glass chamber with brass rivets and hoses snaking in and out of it. Her back felt strangely naked without the weight of the lightning rifle, but even in this neighborhood, eyebrows might be raised if one arrived at the office armed.

No one need know it was under the seat of the landau.

Her employer raised his head as she reached the top of the stairs, and dropped his drafting pencil. “Miss Trevelyan! Er, I mean, Lady Claire. Good morning. I’m pleased to see you value punctuali—” He stopped halfway across the room. “Why, Tigg. I wasn’t expecting you.”

Tigg flushed with pleasure at being remembered. It had only been a week, but still … many would consider an alley mouse of thirteen beneath their notice.

Claire shook hands, and was close to coloring with pleasure herself when Andrew shook Tigg’s as well, as though he were an equal. “I hope you do not mind his accompanying me. As you know, he has a talent for mechanics, and you did say that on occasion—”

“I did say so, and I meant it.”

“If I can’t help you wi’ that great engine downstairs, sir, I’ll sweep … or run errands … or …” Tigg struggled to control his emotions. “Appreciate it, sir,” he finally mumbled.

“Your appearance is providential,” Andrew confided. “It will speed my work enormously to have someone to work the coal tender while I conduct the experiments in the main chamber. I’m forever having to go back there and shovel coal into the hopper.”

“I’m your man, sir.” Tigg stood straighter.

“Excellent. You might go down and find an apron and one of the heavier pairs of gloves. If I am only to have you in the mornings, I shall make good use of you. I’ll give Lady Claire some brief instructions, and we will begin immediately.”

Tigg vanished down the stairs so quickly Claire wondered if his feet touched them at all.

“Thank you,” she said softly. “He’s been a different boy since we all met at the Crystal Palace and you showed him the workings of those engines.”

“I admire an inquiring mind,” Andrew said. “Tell me, has he had your landau into pieces yet?”

“Just the boiler. I’m afraid to let him touch the drive mechanisms to the wheels in case they don’t go back together again. If worst comes to worst, at least I know how to reassemble the boiler.”

Andrew laughed. “It’s only a matter of time. Have I told you how pleased I am that you accepted my offer?”

“Not this morning.”

“I should make it a daily practice.”

“I trust Lord James has resigned himself to a better opinion of me, now that we will be working together?” She hardly dared hope that was so, but she had to know.

“I don’t know, to be honest. The day after our fortuitous meeting at the Exhibition, he left for the Midlands to meet with the president of one of the railroads there.” A shadow fell across his hazel eyes. “I wish he would wait until we had reliable results in hand, but what do I know? He is the man with the vision and the money. I’m just the man who puts it into practice. Glad-handing bankers and railroad presidents would give me hives, so it’s fortunate he has a talent for it.”

Claire’s eyebrows rose at this unexpected confidence. Should he be telling her such things about his business? Then again, in the course of filing the stacks of paper teetering all around her, she would learn all about it whether he told her or not.

“Now.” He gazed around the loft as though he wondered how all the mess had got there. “I believe you mentioned you had a plan when you were here for the interview?”

The disastrous interview, where she learned to her horror that Lord James had been prepared to court her—until he found out she was penniless and actually seeking employment with his partner—still burned in her memory. He had been so insulting she had fled.

Well, she was not prepared to flee now. No matter what he said, she would stand her ground and fight for what she wanted—which was to learn so much from Andrew Malvern that she could apply to The University of London to study engineering, and secure a letter of reference from him when the time came.

She dragged her attention from dreams of the future to the reality of the present. “Yes, I believe I said I would work in concentric circles, starting with the desk and moving outward.”

“I have no filing system,” he said meekly. “I trust you will institute one.”

She had never done such a thing in her life. “Of course. I will use the method that seems most logical.” She made it sound as if she had all the methods ever invented right at her fingertips, and he looked relieved.

“Right, then. I’ll leave you to get started. At midday I’ll take you and Tigg to lunch. We should celebrate your first day somehow.” He smiled, and she lost her iron grip on her mental to-do list.

Claire gathered her wits as he rattled down the staircase, and focused on the desk. Never mind the fact that he was continually throwing her off balance. She had work to do.

By midday, she had managed to clear the desk, leaving only the drawings he had been working on, an inkwell, his pens and blotter, and a heavy book he seemed to be referencing in the drawing project. She had made her way through the stacks of journals, academic papers, receipts, and reports, pausing now and then to read a particularly interesting one. He had been sitting on a newspaper, so she fished it off the chair and shook it out, ready to use it to wrap parcels or start a fire in the potbellied stove. As she folded it, an advertisement with a portrait on the back page caught her eye.

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS YOUNG LADY?

PLEASE WRITE W/DETAILS

C/O THE EVENING STANDARD

“Good heavens!” Claire flung the paper at the stove in a kind of convulsion, then recovered herself and snatched it up again.

Took it over to the round, curtainless window, where there was more light.

It had to be a mistake.

The portrait, taken from the senior class daguerreotype and reproduced in the Standard’s line-drawing-ink-blot style, was of her.

33

By the time Andrew and Tigg came up to fetch her, the Standard had burned to ash in the bottom of the stove and Claire was industriously wiping the inkwell with a clean rag.

This is what you get for not answering your mother’s letter, she told herself furiously as she ignited the landau and waited for Andrew to fold himself into the passenger seat and Tigg to climb into the small space behind them where the articulated brass top of the landau ratcheted down on fine days. She is reduced to advertising for informants.

As soon as they got back to the cottage, she would write a firmly worded letter to Cornwall. This nonsense must stop. With her luck, Julia Wellesley would see the advertisement and turn it into the joke of the season—because of course, anyone who must make their living by default must have fallen off the social map.

“Will you direct me, sir?” She backed the landau around until its forward lamps pointed up Orpington Close, and released the lever that allowed the head of steam to move them forward.

“Ladies’ choice. What do you like?”

She liked a number of places—every single one of which would be swarming with people she knew who also read the Evening Standard.

Then again, what better way to spike the guns of gossip than to appear as if everything were normal and laugh it off as a curiosity? The drawing, after all, was not that good a likeness.

“I should love to go to the Swan and Compass, in Piccadilly. It’s favored by the Churchill set, you know.” She steered for the bridge, and pushed the lever out to the point that Andrew had to hang onto his hat.

“I say, what speed are we doing?”

“Thirty miles per hour.”

He exchanged a huge grin with Tigg over his shoulder. “Marvelous. I never thought I’d see the day.”

“It’s a new day, Mr. Malvern,” she said cheerfully as they gained the bridge. Fortunately there were not too many people or vehicles on it, though up ahead the traffic had slowed considerably as a dray backed into the street.

Once they were past it and on the Victoria Embankment, she slowed to a respectable pace. “Are you interested in learning to drive, sir?” she asked.

“You might well ask me if I’m interested in taking the transcontinental airship to South America and exploring the jungles.” He still gripped his hat, though they were hardly going fast enough to stir up a breeze. “Both entail laying out vast sums and risking one’s life.”

“No risk in an airship,” Tigg put in. “Safe as houses, I’ve ’eard. Not that I was ever in one. Closest I’ve been is seein’ ’em go over.”

“I was referring to the jungles. You are quite correct that airships are the safest and most efficient means of long-distance travel yet invented. But in answer to your question, Lady Claire, no, I have no desire to learn to drive. I have enormous admiration for those who do, however.”

He slanted a glance at her that she was forced to ignore, or drive right over some unsuspecting pedestrian. Goodness. It almost sounded as though he admired her. But that could not be so. He had hired her for her mind.

Which was just as it should be.

“Here we are.” She slowed to a stop half a block from the Swan and Compass, and by the time they reached the restaurant, she had regained her composure. He was only being kind. She must take people at their word, and stop reading personal meaning into casual conversation.

They were shown to a bright table in the window at the front, where they could watch people strolling to and fro on the sidewalk, and Claire saw Tigg watching carefully as Andrew pulled out a chair and seated her. With such an example, it wouldn’t be long before the boy would be absorbing more than chemical formulas and theories of physics. With the opportunities the world offered in this modern age, he would not be forced to remain in the sphere in which she had found him. They might make a gentleman of him yet.

A lady enjoying lunch in a restaurant, she had been taught, might nibble delicately on a bit of endive, and sip tea with a pastry. But Claire was ravenous, and her mother was at the other end of the country. She ordered steak and mushroom pie with a salad, and devoured it so quickly and neatly that even Lady St. Ives might have wondered if it was ever actually there.

“I like to see a good appetite,” Andrew observed, cutting up the last of his Dover sole. “My mother never could understand why it was necessary for titled young ladies to eat their dinners before they went out, so that it wouldn’t look as though they were actually hungry.”

“Was your mother taught that by her mother?”

“Oh, no. Mama was a cook in the Dunsmuir house. She had to send the young ladies’ dinners up in the evening before they went out. She used to say at least she knew the girls enjoyed something they ate that evening.”

“The girls?” Surely his mother had not been employed in the house of those Dunsmuirs. Do you mean the sisters of the boy who was … ”

“The very ones.”

Tigg was looking from Claire to Andrew, clearly lost. “Wot boy? Wot ’appened to ’im?”

“You never heard the story?” Andrew refilled his tumbler with lemonade and offered Tigg another glassful. “The nursemaid was out in the garden one afternoon two years ago with the son and heir to Lord and Lady Dunsmuir’s fortune—the family owns practically the western half of the Canadas, you know, including vast diamond mines, and what they don’t own they have interests in—and she fell asleep in the sun. When she woke up, the boy was gone, and despite advertisements, an enormous reward, and the hiring of several Pinkerton men, no one ever discovered what happened.”

“Seems clear ’e wandered off. Somebody always ’as to keep an eye on our Willie, not t’mention the Mopsies. Curiosity on legs, every one of ’em.”

“He couldn’t have wandered off, though,” Claire said. “I recall a description of the house that said the garden wall was ten feet high and both gates were locked.”

“Eight feet, but yes. My mother says her ladyship was entertaining one of the royal princesses to tea, so the whole household was in an uproar. That’s why they’d gone out in the garden. The nursemaid had been hoping the boy would nap in his pram.”

“Those poor parents,” Claire said on a sigh. “They haven’t gone into society since. Lady Dunsmuir, apparently, would walk the roads at night—asleep. They have to lock her into her rooms.”

Andrew nodded. “My mother eventually gave her notice and retired. She said the sadness was too much to bear.”

“Claire?”

A crowd of gentlemen and ladies had come in, chattering like birds, and Claire looked away from Andrew to see Peony Churchill making her way between the tables.

“Claire, it is you! My goodness, where have you been? You’re quite the talk of the town.” Peony clasped her in a hug, then stood at arms’ length and looked her up and down. “You don’t look as if you’d been kidnapped, at any rate.”

“Certainly not. Peony Churchill, may I present my employer, Mr. Andrew Malvern, and his assistant, Mr. Tigg.”

Peony shook hands with both as if it were a matter of course, and Tigg’s shoulders went back, as though he were shifting the newfound burden of civility to make it comfortable.

“Will you join us?” Andrew said.

“Oh, no, I won’t impose. Besides, that lot will never forgive me—I convinced them to come here when they wanted to go to some awful dive by the river ‘just for the adventure.’” Peony rolled her expressive black eyes.

“Your mother is well?” Claire asked eagerly. Isabel Churchill—explorer, noted hostess, and political thorn in the side of many an M.P.—was one of her idols.

“Very well. You remember the Esquimaux delegation?”

“I do. There were so many in the house that the children were sleeping under the dining room table.”

“Yes, well, mama was unsuccessful in her pleas on their behalf, so she is preparing an expedition to the north of the Canadas to stir up as much trouble as she can in the diamond mines.”

Claire clasped her hands in sheer admiration. “She’ll be organizing labor unions among the Esquimaux next.”

“I’m sure that’s part of her plan—conditions in the mines are dreadful. I’m to go with her, you know. Now that I’ve graduated, there’s no earthly reason to hang about in London.”

“Aren’t you going to have a Season?” With a jolt, Claire remembered that she was to have been presented to Her Majesty to begin her own Season … when? Oh, dear. What week was this?

“Me? Dance with a lot of boys who have more air in their heads than Persephone herself? Present company excepted, of course,” she added hastily as Andrew choked on a mouthful of lemonade.

“Oo’s Per Seffonie?” Tigg whispered to Claire.

“The transcontinental airship we were talking about earlier,” she whispered back. “The one that goes from here to Paris to New York and Buenos Aires.”

“I haven’t the least interest in a Season,” Peony went on. “But I am taking flying lessons. There will be no one to tell me I can’t be an aviatrix in the Canadas.”

“I don’t imagine there is anyone who can tell you that here, either,” Andrew said, smiling at her with such admiration that Claire practically interrupted him to say, “Before you go, Peony, do explain something you said earlier. Why should I be the talk of the town?”

Peony’s eyebrows arched in disbelief. “Good heavens, Claire, surely you didn’t think you could snub Her Majesty and get away with it?”

Oh, dear. Oh, dear, dear, dear.

“And don’t think she didn’t notice the resounding silence after your name was called at the Drawing Room last Tuesday. You could hear Julia and Catherine giggling down at the other end of the room, quite clearly.”

“Was—was she angry?” And here she’d been worried about her mother’s wrath. She’d never thought for a moment she’d provoke the ire of the Queen of the British Empire as well.

“Well, your absence was partly explained by the fact that you are still in mourning. All the same, you won’t be getting an invitation to tea anytime soon.”

Claire sighed. “It’s a lucky thing my social aspirations don’t reach those heights, then.” Unlike those of her mother, who had taken tea with the queen on more than one occasion.

Claire became aware that both Andrew and Tigg were staring at her as if they’d never seen her before. Peony kissed her and turned in a swirl of bottle-green velvet to join her party, leaving Claire looking from one to the other.

“What is it? Do I have gravy on my chin?”

Tigg found his voice. “Tea? Tea wiv the queen, Lady?”

“I believe the opposite is true. I will not, in fact, be taking tea with the queen, since I appear to have missed my presentation at court.”

“Court?” Andrew sounded like an echo. “You were to be presented?”

“Yes. But I was not.” I was too busy burning down my rivals’ houses and keeping body and soul together to remember to present myself at Buckingham Palace.

“But you could have been.”

“Yes, of course, had I not been in mourning. Mr. Malvern, please. I am sure Lord James has apprised you of my history and my family. I do regret concealing them from you at first.”

Andrew appeared to be struggling to speak, and Tigg just gawked at her. “Yes, he did,” he finally said. “And the newspapers augmented the facts with reams of supposition.”

The Arabian Bubble. Her father’s investment in the ridiculous combustion engine, and its subsequent failure. The Belgrave Riots.

Claire realized she needn’t have worried about missing her Season.

She had not been the most eligible catch in London to begin with. Now she might be lucky to get a baron’s son, or perhaps a widowed knight with a tumbledown estate and seven cranky children.

How fortunate that marriage had never figured heavily into her plans.

34

When they returned to the laboratory, pleasantly full and with wind-reddened cheeks, Tigg and Andrew stayed below while Claire went upstairs to tackle the next section of the Augean stables.

She and Andrew had agreed that she would work mainly in the mornings, leaving her afternoons free to return to the cottage and keep up the children’s lessons. But Tigg seemed to be so absorbed in his work that she didn’t have the heart to remove him. She could hear them talking—instructions to “give us another shovel, lad” and “keep an eye on this flame, would you?” sprinkled with explanations of why certain compounds would behave the way they did given certain stimuli. If only that benighted professor at St. Cecilia’s had given her the courtesy of explanations instead of merely orders! She might already have earned a University entrance and not needed to take the exams. Instead, she had netted outstanding marks in languages and mathematics, and barely scraped through in Chemistry of the Kitchen, not to mention Social Arts, which had dragged her average down past the point of no return.

Ah, well. Claire tried to keep a cheerful attitude. At least this way she still had a chance to write the entrance examinations in the fall. She was not, after all, in Cornwall.

A loud clank and a shout brought her head up in alarm, and in the next moment she was flying down the stairs. “Mr. Malvern? Tigg? What happened?”

“Nothing,” came from under a glass tube as big as a man.

Tigg struggled to lift one end of it long enough to free Andrew from its weight, so she grabbed the other end. Between the two of them, they raised it so that Andrew could roll out from under it. “Good heavens, Mr. Malvern. Are you all right?”

He looked winded, but at the same time, he helped them lower it to the floor. “Gently. It would take a month to make a new one—time we can’t afford.”

Once they had it safely on the ground, Claire straightened. “How did it come to fall on you?”

“’E were carrying it over to the chamber, and lost ’old of it. Rather than let ’er smash, ’e cushioned it with ’imself.” Tigg sounded almost as if he admired this astonishing behavior.

Indeed, the thing must have weighed a hundred pounds.

Andrew brushed off his trousers and tugged on his waistcoat before retying his leather apron. “Come, Tigg. I see the error of my ways now. Both of us will carry the tube into the chamber and divide the load. If this tube weighs ninety-two pounds, what will each of our burdens be?”

Tigg thought, even as he hefted one end of the glass onto his shoulder. “This’d be forty-six, sir.”

“Excellent. Let us proceed.”

Claire followed them into the glassed-in chamber, where instead of hoses waiting to be attached to the tube by metal collars, a series of cables ran into them instead. “What is it for?”

“I have abandoned my efforts to affect the coal’s carbon density by external application of chemical gases.” Andrew puffed a little and they lowered the tube into its nest of cabling. “My calculations are flawed; there is no way around it. So on further study, I decided to experiment with electrick current.”

“But you were using electricks before, were you not?” She had seen the switches; what else could they be? “Are you applying Mr. Tesla’s theories?”

“I am. We shall see how prolonged exposure to high levels of current will affect the coal. The best outcome would that it would ossify it, making it last longer and saving the railroad industry millions, especially for long runs.”

“Such as wot they ’ave in the Americas,” Tigg supplied helpfully, clearly pleased that he could add to her education for once.

Claire nodded, but did not see the glass, or even the young men in front of her. Instead, she saw a flash of light arcing across a deserted square—saw a man fall, his chest reduced to a smoking ruin. A smoking, hardened ruin.

Her mind reeled in the moment that still haunted her. The moment she had, however unintentionally, ended a man’s life.

“Claire?”

“Lady?” Tigg touched her arm. “You all right, then?”

She blinked, and instead of the past, the present righted itself all around her. “Yes, thank you, Tigg. I—it was a moment’s thought, that’s all.”

She left them to their labors and returned to hers, but she could no longer concentrate. Something was bothering her about the memory—something more than simply the horror of it. When the afternoon began to wane, she collected her duster and hat and made her way downstairs, brows slightly furrowed.

It would come to her. These mental niggles always did, and found her ready with her engineering notebook and trusty pencil.

They had completed the new assembly, and as she gained the bottom step, Andrew called, “All switches forward?”

“Yes, sir,” came Tigg’s answer from somewhere away at the back, where it was dark.

“Then let’s see how she works.” Inside the glass tube, a load of coal waited. Andrew stepped to a control panel at one end of the chamber and threw a lever up. The entire assembly began to hum, and then glow. The glass tube, she saw now, was not completely clear. Within it, channels for current had been embedded, and they glowed an eerie green in the dimness.

“Almost got ’er,” Tigg murmured, materializing at her elbow, and Claire had to restrain her instinct to jump.

With a flash, the tube went from green to the familiar yellow of electrick street lamps and the running lights of steambuses. Now the coal itself glowed yellow, as if it were burning within its glass coffin.

Was this the extent of the experiment? Simply to warm it up without causing it to burn? Surely there must be more to all this effort than that.

Andrew threw the switch down. “That stops the electricks, see,” Tigg said in a low voice. “It needs to cool, and Mr. Malvern said we’d examine the load in the morning.”

Examine the load. Claire restrained the urge to comment on his excellent diction, and said merely, “I see. Are your duties concluded for the day, then?”

“Yes’m. Shall I fire up the boiler?”

“Please.” When he opened the door, the daylight made her blink.

“Are you away?” Andrew loped over. “I didn’t get a chance to thank you for your work. Both of you.” He leaned out to watch Tigg, in the driver’s seat, begin the ignition sequence. “He is a very useful young man. I believe our association is going to be productive.”

“I hope so. Good night, Mr. Malvern.”

“Good night, Lady Claire. Er, do you mind me asking why he abbreviates your title? Tigg, I mean. And I noticed the young ladies do, as well.”

She thought fast. “Young Willie cannot manage all the syllables, so he calls me Lady. The others have just … picked it up, I suppose.” Not for worlds would she tell him what it really meant. “They should be thankful that with my brother’s elevation to the title, it is no longer proper to call me Miss Trevelyan. Poor Willie. He would never manage.”

With a smile and a touch to his goggles that she supposed was meant as some kind of salute, he stepped back and held the door for her.

She adjusted her own goggles and arranged her scarf over her hat, tying it securely under her chin and looping the gauzy ends over her shoulders. “Until tomorrow, then.”

“I shall look forward to it.”

As they navigated the streets home, she reminded herself rather forcefully that he had meant their help with his endeavors.

He did not mean for her to think … anything more.

*

At the cottage, Claire ate the sausages and greens that Granny Protheroe had prepared for dinner, deep in thought. She waved the poker players off for another night of civilized marauding in which they would dazzle the gentlemen at the gaming parlors with their prowess at all the new versions of Cowboy Poker. None of their fellow players ever seemed to tumble to the fact that these very boys had invented the hands they were playing. Snouts had told her, laughing, of one indignant lordling who had informed them he studied the hands religiously on the back page of the Evening Standard, and since they couldn’t have done the same, they must perforce be cheating.

They did not cheat—at least, not that Claire knew of. They were perfectly capable of winning without demeaning themselves by such behavior. It was, in fact, a point of pride with Snouts McTavish.

Fifty percent of the winnings went to her for household expenses and investment, and the player kept the remainder to stake his next game or to spend as he wished. As well, when they had first taken up residence here, they had found a chest full of cash—the proceeds of Lightning Luke’s bullying and murdering. In the absence of knowledge of its original owners, Claire had invested half of it, and distributed the rest among everyone remaining in the house, with a substantial donation to the poor-box at the church down the road.

The money had again mounted in the chest upstairs to the point that it now represented a real temptation to someone to inform on them. The Cudgel’s waylaying of four of the lads was proof of it. So, that evening, Claire went upstairs and got out paper and ink.

Arundel & Hollis, Solicitors

London SW1

Dear Mr. Arundel,

Thank you for your recent assistance and that of your associates at the stock exchange to purchase shares of the Midlands Railroad and the London Electrick Company for me and for my friends.

I am afraid I must now request your assistance in a matter of real estate. I should like you to discover the owner of the property containing an abandoned toll booth and a cottage with a walled garden immediately west of the Regent Bridge in Vauxhall Gardens. I am interested in purchasing this property as soon as possible.

Have you had any buyers for the property in Wilton Crescent? Though the house was damaged, the location is very fine. I cannot imagine why it is not selling. I have no doubt you have heard from my mother on the subject, so I will not beleaguer you with it. I was merely curious.

I trust you are well. Again, thank you for all your help.

Sincerely,

Claire Trevelyan

She sealed the letter, popped it in a delivery tube, and turned the codex on the front so that the letters and numbers reflected the solicitor’s office address.

Then she reached for another sheet of paper.

Lady Flora St. Ives

Gwynn Place

St. Just in Roseland

Cornwall

Dear Mama,

First, let me assure you that I am well and that there is no need whatsoever to put advertisements in the papers implying I am missing.

I am not missing. Indeed, I am dreadfully embarrassed that you would do such a thing.

I am gainfully employed at the laboratory of Mr. Andrew Malvern, Orpington Close, London, who is the partner of Lord James Selwyn. You have received the latter in our home at Wilton Crescent, so you may be assured that I am well looked after and by no means unprotected. I have a comfortable home and industrious companionship. You need not worry about me at all.

Mama, I understand that you wish me with you to provide moral support. But I must tell you that there are those here in London who need me just as much, if not more, and whose minds and hearts would be at risk were I to leave them and come to you. I have a position of responsibility and I am well and as happy as can be expected without you and little Nicholas.

Please give my brother a hug and a big kiss for me, and convey my best regards to Polgarth the poultryman. He will be pleased to know his lessons given so many years ago are bearing fruit, as I am shortly to become the owner of half a dozen hens.

I send my love and affection always.

Your daughter,

Claire

There was much more she could have said on the subject of the advertisements, but she restrained herself and rolled the letter up, tucking it in a tube and addressing it. Then she went downstairs, opened the hatch, and with a pneumatic slurp, the Royal Mail system sucked both tubes away into its gullet. In the case of the one to Gwynn Place, it would take a few days to be sorted through the manual switches down to Cornwall, so she had as much as a week to look forward to before she received a reply.

She hoped Mr. Arundel would be much quicker.

That task complete, she fetched the lightning rifle from its concealment beneath the seat of the landau, and sat in the wicker chair outside the back door of the cottage. She laid it across her lap and gazed at it thoughtfully.

A Mopsie popped out the back door like a jack-in-the-box. “Wotcher doin’, Lady?”

Since Lizzie never spoke to her voluntarily, this must be Maggie. “I am thinking.”

“Wot of?”

“Lightning and electricks and other puzzling things.”

“Oh.” Maggie lost interest. “Where’s our Rosie?”

Claire looked up into the rafters of the rickety porch. Rosie sat perched upon a blackened beam, blending neatly into the shadows now that twilight was upon them. Maggie followed her gaze. “Ah. Gone to bed already. I’d like to know ’ow she gets up there, I would.”

“It’s the safest place she knows, and I agree with her. She could be snatched if she roosted on the wall, and an otter could come up out of the water and take her if she slept on the ground. All in all, she has used her powers of deduction and found the most suitable spot, as any lady of resources would do.”

“I ent never seen ’er fly.”

“Chickens will surprise you. How are you coming with your plans for a traveling coop? Did you find supplies today?”

Maggie nodded. “Them folks at the metalworks sure waste a lot. We found pistons and a set of legs. Bit banged up, but useful. The boys met us by our old squat on the river and we loaded up the boat.”

“Did you find any hens?”

“No, but we didn’t get near any of the markets. Tomorrow, Snouts says.” A call from the upper floor made her withdraw. “G’night, Lady.”

“Good night, Maggie. Sweet dreams.”

With only Rosie for company, Claire sat in the gathering dark and let her thoughts drift. This aggravating niggle in her mind had something to do with the lightning. Electricks were yellow for the most part. Or green, sometimes, if there wasn’t much current. Andrew was running full current through his glass tube, so its yellow color was perfectly healthy and to be expected.

Then why …?

Why was the firing charge from the lightning rifle white edged with blue?

What was the difference?

Electricks had never harmed anyone. They were strictly for domestic and industrial use. The glass tube had got hot, but the current itself was not dangerous.

Then why had one blast from this rifle been able to kill a man?

Was it hundreds of times stronger than ordinary electricks? Or was it a different kind altogether—something only the builder of this weapon knew?

She needed to lay the rifle before Andrew Malvern and ask these questions. She needed to know what the difference in color and power signified—and more important, how it was created. The cell in the rifle did not seem any different than those that powered household items like the mother’s helper, which cleaned the floors using kinetick energy.

What made this so different? So lethal?

Andrew would—

No. She could not bring this to Andrew. While he might not know who Lightning Luke was or how he’d come by his moniker, he would certainly know that gently reared ladies of Blood families did not go about with deadly weapons in their soft, gloved hands.

Claire set her teeth.

Blast it all. She needed to know.

Just how much was she going to allow convention to dictate her behavior when it clearly obstructed the path to knowledge?

35

Tigg managed to control his impatience long enough for her to climb out of the landau and join him at the door, but once inside, he bounded across the warehouse floor. Andrew had already arrived and was just removing the collar from the glass tube.

“Did it work, sir?” he asked as Claire removed her duster.

“You mustn’t expect anything to work the first time, Tigg,” Andrew said as Claire joined them. “Give me a hand with this, will you?”

Together they set the tube on the floor and Andrew reached in for a handful of coal.

“Looks ezackly the same as when we put it in, sir.”

Andrew looked crestfallen. “You’re quite correct.” With a hammer, he tapped the coal and it broke into several pieces. “There is no difference. It is neither harder nor more brittle. It just … is.” He sighed. “Well, such is the nature of science. I must turn my mind to a different approach, that’s all.”

“What if the nature of the electricks is the trouble?” Claire asked from behind them.

Andrew and Tigg turned, as if surprised to see her there. “The nature of them?” Andrew repeated.

“Is there not a different kind of electrick you might apply? One that is … stronger, perhaps?”

“I’m afraid the City of London can’t supply anything stronger,” Andrew said. “In fact, along with the steam engine that powers it, I have a number of converters in the system of this chamber that would not be, er, approved by our good Commissioner of Works, because they increase the current to a point that is too dangerous for ordinary use. Hence the glass chamber. I do not want my laboratory burning down.”

“Mr. Malvern …” She stopped. She must tread carefully. “What might it mean if an electrick current were not yellow or green, but blue-white?”

Tigg looked at her strangely, but to his credit, said not a word.

“Where have you seen such a thing?” Andrew frowned at her in a most disconcerting way. “Even Mr. Tesla’s cells do not produce blue-white current. They are always yellow.”

“But what would it mean?”

“Why, it would mean a stronger concentration of power than any I’ve ever seen.”

Strong enough to kill a man on contact.

“In fact, I read a paper once about a device that could generate such a current, but the engineering was a cross between genius and fantasy. Even if such a device existed any longer, it would be so dangerous that no one could work with it for fear of being killed.”

“It did exist at one time?”

“It must have. One must submit one’s inventions to the Royal Society of Engineers and have them vetted in order to have one’s papers published.”

“Do you know who might have written it?” A name would give her a place to start in mining his office for that paper.

Andrew laughed. “I do, but it won’t do any of us any good. You heard me say it was a combination of fantasy and genius?”

“The genius part might be interesting to us.”

“There is a fine line between genius and madness in some people, I’m afraid. The author of this particular paper is no longer with us.”

Claire’s shoulders wilted in disappointment. “He’s dead, then?”

“She. And no, she’s not dead. She is in Bedlam.”

“A scientist in Bedlam, sir? Insane?” Even Tigg sounded shocked.

“I’m afraid so. She was committed years ago, when she attacked Sir George Longmont, the Chief Engineer, at a meeting of the Royal Society. I was not present—being still a schoolboy then—but the old-timers told me it was a horrific scene. She had been one of the very first women admitted to the Society, you see. When she was committed, it set the Wits back twenty years.”

Claire suppressed a shudder. If the lady had been committed to the Bethlehem Royal Hospital years ago, it meant she was housed in the Incurable ward. Most people were cured and released in a year or less. Only the truly insane were locked away for their own good and that of society.

Andrew gazed at the coal in his hand. “Such a waste of an amazing mind. The electricks were all destroyed, for safety. Or almost all. A few went missing but they’ve never turned up. I supposed we’d know it if they did—it would be difficult to miss explosions or buildings suddenly burning down.”

Goosebumps prickled on Claire’s shoulders. “What would happen if one did turn up?”

Andrew laughed. “The likelihood of anyone knowing what to do with such a thing would be low.”

“I knew a man once,” Tigg said. “’E’s dead now, o’course, but they say ’e got into college afore ’e frew it all away an’ turned to a life of crime. Handy wiv electricks, ’e was.” Tigg studiously avoided looking at Claire.

“I wouldn’t like to see one of these devices in the hands of a criminal,” Andrew said slowly. “Fortunately, they were small. Dr. Craig—that was the scientist’s name, Rosemary Craig—could carry one in her reticule and still have room for stamps and a pocketbook.”

“But if there was a big ’un?” Tigg asked. “What then?”

Andrew gazed at his chamber. “From what I remember, even a small cell could probably power this chamber.”

“Could you build one?” Claire asked. “If you could find that paper?”

He shook his head. “Not if the order was given to destroy them. Once the Society makes that decision, it’s final. Every copy of the paper in their archives would have been destroyed. Now that I recall, it was that order that triggered the attack on the Chief Engineer. Dr. Craig simply snapped.”

Claire wondered if she might not do the same in that unfortunate lady’s position. Imagine devoting your life to a magnificent device, creating it, demonstrating it—and then being told that it was dangerous and every example of it would be destroyed. Flying at the Chief Engineer, it seemed to her, would be a fairly reasonable response.

But perhaps every example had not been destroyed.

The lightning rifle. Could it really be that it contained one of Rosemary Craig’s lost devices? And if it did, how could Claire find a way to use it to help Andrew in his endeavors?

The trouble was, she did not know enough about electricks. She could show the rifle to him, but then she would run into the troublesome problem of telling him where she’d got it. And that was impossible.

No. She needed to learn more about Rosemary Craig and what she had created.

But how? Where?

Claire went upstairs and began work on the piles of treatises, formulae, and measurements to one side of the desk. As she sorted, she began to see patterns—in the paperwork, in names, and in the nature of Andrew’s experiments. And in the back of her mind, a resolution formed.

Dr. Craig must have had a family. And if it were a respectable family, no one would know more about them than their staff.

And no one knew more people among the servants in the great houses than Mrs. Morven, the Trevelyans’ former cook at Wilton Crescent.

She was now employed by Lord James Selwyn at Hanover Square, but Claire would not allow that to dissuade her. Lord James was away, and there was nothing to prevent her from visiting a well-loved former employee, now, was there?

*

Mrs. Morven opened the door so fast that Claire was sure she’d been waiting behind it for her to knock. “My dear Lady Claire!” She had never been given to displays of affection, but she swept Claire into a hug against her vast chest and kissed her soundly on both cheeks.

Claire kissed her back, adjusted her hat, and stepped inside Lord James’s home. It smelled of carnations and furniture polish. “It’s very good to see you, Mrs. Morven. Lord James is treating you well?”

As she spoke, she took in every detail. Parquet floor in the hall. Ah, there were the carnations, in the front parlor, which was tastefully decorated in Wedgewood blue and Nile green. Not a speck of dust lay anywhere, from walls painted cream to the furniture and woodwork. Whoever was keeping house for him was a paragon. Claire thought of her own rough-and-tumble lot in the cottage, its table stained from chemical experiments, its floors coated with drying mud no matter how often they swept.

Never mind. It was full of life, not this dignified silence that spoke of the absence of both master and friends.

“Yes, my lady, he treats the staff very well. Always courteous, always a gentleman. It’s very quiet, though, I must say. Not as much life as on Wilton Crescent. I wonder how the little viscount, your brother, is getting on?”

“He is well,” Claire said, hoping it was the truth. “My mother owes me a letter, so I’ll have news of him shortly, I’m sure.”

“And her ladyship?”

“Also well.” You didn’t happen to see an advertisement with my face on it, did you? Never mind. It would be better not to ask.

“Come into my parlor.” Mrs. Morven waved her into a cozy little room down the stairs, opposite her office, where tea was already set out. “When I got your tube this morning, I was glad I’d done a little baking. I hope you still like orange chiffon cakes.”

Claire nearly swooned. Beside the cook’s lemon souffle, the little orange cakes iced in melted chocolate were her favorite. “You must have the second sight. I believe I dreamed about these last night.”

Pleased, Mrs. Morven poured tea for them both and handed her a cup. “Now, miss—er, I mean, Lady Claire—I must say it’s glad I am to be seeing you safe and well. After the riots I had my doubts about your safety. That one little note you sent wasn’t very comforting.”

“I am very well. In fact, I had lunch yesterday in Piccadilly and met Peony Churchill at the restaurant. She remarked upon the same thing.”

“Gorse was inquiring after you, too. I’m glad I can tell him I’ve seen you with my own eyes, and you’re hale and hearty.”

“Do give him my best regards, and let him know I have a student of mechanics now myself who will be every bit his equal when he grows up. Is Gorse … happy at Wellesley House?” Claire hoped so. But in her mind, even the joys of a four-piston landau in the mews would not make up for having to work for Julia Wellesley’s family. Insufferable Blood arrogance did not do them justice.

“He seems so. But then, his heart being away down there in Cornwall, I don’t suppose he cares much where the rest of him is.”

Poor Gorse. “I still don’t understand why he didn’t toss the second footman off the Flying Dutchman and go with Silvie, if he’s in love with her.”

Mrs. Morven smiled at her fondly. “Ah, the young. You think that love is worth throwing over a good situation and the prospects of a stable life. Gorse is old enough to know he must be able to provide a home for Silvie. Working at Wellesley House will let him do that. Working in the carriage house at Gwynn Place, your lady mother’s circumstances being what they are, would not.”

“I know.” Claire sighed. “You’re quite right. I shall look forward to a wedding in any case.” If her mother would ever let Silvie go. A French lady’s maid who could detect every whiff of fashion that came out of Paris and duplicate it with materials on hand was not easy to come by.

“So, miss, now that I know you’re well and you know that we’re well, perhaps you can tell me what that mysterious line in your note was all about? You wanted to ‘mine my memories,’ or some such.”

“I did.” Claire placed her teacup in its saucer, noting that it was none other than the third best set from Wilton Crescent. At least some of their things had survived the riots. “I would like to know if you know anything of the Craig family—specifically, the family of a scientist called Rosemary Craig, who I am given to understand is one of the unfortunates in Bedlam.”

Mrs. Morven took a long sip of tea and rocked herself gently in her chair. “A sad story, that.”

“I have heard some of it. Do you know the family?”

“I did once. My cousin was engaged to their butler, back when they could afford him.”

“And now?” Claire prompted, hoping that was not the end of it.

“Well, they did wind up getting married, but not until he took another situation. After Miss Craig was committed, the family withdrew from society. Shame, too. Apparently there was a sister about to make her come-out, and when that didn’t happen, the story is she went a little mad herself.”

“I can’t imagine driving oneself mad over missing a debut.”

“Begging your pardon, miss, but you aren’t like most young ladies in town. You know as well as me that some prepare their entire lives for their Season.”

That was true enough. If Julia Wellesley had put half as much energy into improving her mind as she did in improving her appearance, she might have gained a man’s respect instead of settling for his admiration. “Perhaps there was more to it. Is the family still in town?”

“Oh, aye. Last I heard from my cousin, they had taken a house in Chelsea. They’re a little more bohemian down there.”

Madness in the family being a social advantage to that lot, Claire heard as clearly as if she’d said it. Mrs. Morven would die sooner than take employment anywhere outside the black iron fences of Belgravia or Kensington.

A rattle of hooves and the sound of wheels coming to a stop on the pavement outside caused them both to lift their heads. “Bless me,” Mrs. Morven said. “I hope that’s not his lordship. We weren’t expecting him back until Thursday. The butler has the day off.”

A rush of feet in the hall above told Claire the parlormaid had gone to answer the door. “If it is his lordship I won’t stay. I’ll just slip out and—”

“Oh, no, miss. He’d be terrible offended if you slipped away without a proper greeting. Talks of you all the time, he does.”

I’ll bet. “Truly, no, I’m sure he’ll be tired and wishing to—”

A deep, cultivated voice in the hall above mingled with the parlormaid’s treble tones. And before Claire could gather up her hat and reticule and flee, the girl had appeared in the doorway. “Excuse me, Lady Claire. His lordship says what a pleasure and can he see you in the library. Mrs. Morven, ma’am, he asks for some refreshment.”

“A gentleman’s refreshment, or the kind fit for my young lady, here?”

The girl hesitated, her gaze darting from Claire to the older woman. “He didn’t say, ma’am.”

“I shall send both, then. Millie, show Lady Claire to the library. By the time you come back, I’ll have a tray ready.”

Oh, dear. This was intolerable. Claire mounted the stairs much the way she was sure Mary, Queen of Scots, must have climbed the steps to the block at Fotheringhay. She should have run while she had the chance. She shouldn’t have come at all. Why couldn’t she merely have sent a note and asked any further questions by correspondence? What had she been thinking?

“Lady Claire Trevelyan, your lordship,” the parlormaid squeaked, like a violin played by an inexperienced hand, and Claire walked in to face the one man she despised above every other person on earth.

36

He turned from his contemplation of the vase of paper flowers that filled the cold hearth in summer. It had been not quite two weeks since he had attempted to blackmail her, and the force of those emotions under Claire’s breastbone had not yet had time to diminish.

She had no idea of his thoughts. He stood, still in his traveling clothes, and regarded her as though she were there to collect funds for charity. Well, whatever his behavior, her family dated back to the fourteenth century, and she would not disgrace her breeding by alluding to his defects of character.

Perhaps his was only a life peerage. One must make allowances.

“Lord James,” she said politely, when it was clear that though he had summoned her, he did not seem inclined to speak. “I trust you had a good journey?”

“Very good,” he said, a little absently.

“I am happy to hear it. You were meeting with railroad people, I understand.”

“Yes.” His gaze sharpened. “And you have been talking with Andrew.”

“He is my employer,” she said steadily. “We talk quite frequently, given that I am in his office four hours a day at least.”

A knock sounded and Millie came in with a tray. She set out the teapot and cups—Limoges, no third best services here—yet more orange chiffon cake, and a decanter of spirits.

When the door closed behind her, he said, “Would you like some tea?”

“No, thank you. I have been visiting Mrs. Morven and we—”

“Then I hope you won’t object if I have a drink.”

Definitely a life peerage.

“I’m sure you’re tired after your long absence. I won’t trouble you.” She turned for the door, when the sound of a glass being set hard on the table startled her into turning back. Reflex had her reaching over her shoulder for the lightning rifle, and when she realized what she was doing, she turned it into a self-conscious maneuver with her hatpin.

“Lady Claire.” He splashed whiskey into the abused glass, but did not pick it up. “I find that in spite of my express wishes, you have accepted employment with my partner. He sent a tube two days ago to tell me you had begun work. I want to know why.”

Because the Lady of Devices does not bow to blackmail. “When we last spoke I told you I would do so. I must keep a roof over my head, sir. As you know perfectly well.”

“You have an adequate roof at Carrick House.”

“The house is for sale, and after the riots it is uninhabitable. Roofs notwithstanding, I fail to see why my working for your partner should be so objectionable.”

“You know why.”

The temptation to swing the decanter at his head surged through her, and she mastered it. “I do not. Please enlighten me.”

His fingers closed around the glass so tightly the liquid vibrated. “It is inconceivable to me that a woman I had hoped to court should be working for me. There. Is that plain enough for you?”

He had said something very like that during the disastrous interview. “It is inconceivable to me that you should harbor such a hope, sir. I knew nothing of it. And even if I had, it would not have stopped me. I want to work for your partner. I need to learn from him.”

“And charm him into giving up his secrets?”

She glanced at the decanter. Heavy crystal. A couple of pounds at least.

“I shall not need to use charm, even if I were silly enough to stoop to it. I am filing thousands of papers, and I’m perfectly capable of reading what interests me. Is there something you wish me not to see?”

“Andrew is doing valuable work. Any one of the treatises he has written could be sold.”

“And you believe me capable of that?”

He took a breath, as if to answer, and let it out again. “I have no idea what you’re capable of.”

We are in complete agreement there.

“I must have your word, Lady Claire, that nothing you learn in our laboratory will leave it. Nothing, do you understand?”

She looked him dead in the eye. Snouts McTavish would have run to the far side of the garden had he seen that look, knowing that a bolt of lightning was about to follow.

“You insult me, sir, by insisting on such a promise. Of course I would not speak of what I learn in the laboratory. Nor would Tigg, or the—” She almost said Mopsies, but stopped herself in time. “—or any of the children.”

“Those children are not to come on my property!”

“Mr. Malvern has already given his permission.”

“Then I rescind it.”

“Why?”

He stared at her. “Why? Because children have no place there, that’s why. They could be hurt, or destroy something, or—”

“Tigg is already acting as Mr. Malvern’s assistant, and very capably, too. Are you telling me you plan to deprive him of a way to better himself? Can you really be that unkind?”

Now he was entirely speechless. She took advantage of the welcome silence.

“If I had ever harbored any tender feelings toward you, my lord, this interview would have put paid to them. A man of your stature should be able to extend charity to those less fortunate, especially if it comes at no cost to himself. If Andrew is willing to teach him, how can you tell him he may not learn?”

“You … are a Wit,” he snapped.

She smiled. “How observant of you, sir. But my question stands.”

She had shamed him. His face flushed, and it was fortunate the glass was made of stern stuff, or it would have shattered in his grip long ago.

“Your father would be ashamed of you.”

“My father is dead, and I have good reason to be ashamed of him.”

“You are the most unladylike young woman I have ever had the misfortune to meet.”

“You have not answered me, my lord.”

“You will not hold me hostage with your infernal questions.”

“But you are free to blackmail me with impunity?”

She had brought out the bull in him. He practically pawed the Turkish carpet. He towered over her by at least a foot, and could probably snap her in two if he laid hands on her, and yet she would not back down. A year ago she would have burst into tears at the very sight of him, and run to her room.

The Lady of Devices did not run from anyone.

He controlled his temper by gritting his teeth and breathing deeply. “I shall write to your mother.”

She could stand up to Lightning Luke Jackson. She could take on The Cudgel without fear. But this … this! This was beyond anything.

“Why should you do that?” she said between stiff lips.

“To rescind the letter I sent her three weeks ago.”

Three weeks ago? Before he had tried to force her to turn down Andrew’s offer of employment? “What letter?”

“The one in which I told her my intentions toward you were honorable, and asked her permission to court you. I certainly have no desire to do so now, and you have made it abundantly clear that the feeling is mutual.”

Now it was her turn to stare at him, jaw unhinged. She must look like she belonged in Bedlam herself. “You—you did what?”

“You didn’t believe me, did you, when I interrupted your interview with Andrew? I can assure you, when I wrote that letter I was in earnest. Despite the fact that you no longer have a dowry, and you are certainly not the catch you were in June, I was still prepared to make an honorable offer. Lord knows you could use a firm hand on the reins.”

She overlooked these insulting remarks while she calculated time versus the speed of the mail system. Her mother had sent a letter saying she would be dragged bodily down to Cornwall if she didn’t come voluntarily. Lord James’s letter had obviously crossed with it. No wonder she had not heard again. Lady St. Ives was probably shouting hallelujah and planning the wedding.

Lord James wanted to court her. To marry her. Lord James Selwyn.

It beggared understanding.

“But—but why?” If he had been Fermat’s theorem made flesh, she couldn’t have been any more stumped.

“Why should I want to court you and contemplate a life in your company? I agree, it’s quite astonishing.”

“All the more reason I should want to know.”

He put the glass down carefully on the mantel, and studied the paper flowers as if they had been freshly delivered from the Antipodes. “Because you almost won at Cowboy Poker on your first try. Because no matter how abominably those meringues treat you, you are unfailingly polite. Because, Lady Claire, you have a spine.”

“You did not seem to appreciate my spine a few minutes ago.”

“I have a temper. Sometimes it gets the better of me.”

A gentleman of breeding could control his emotions. Claire let it pass. “Meringues?”

“Those girls. Julia and Catherine and that Astor featherhead.”

“You are most uncomplimentary, sir.” Meringues. Sweet on the outside but having absolutely no substance within. She bit down on the urge to giggle.

“It’s a failing of mine,” he said on a sigh, then glanced up. “It does not seem to have had much effect on you.”

I have killed a man, however unintentionally. Uncomplimentary remarks no longer have the effect they used to. “Are you a life peer, sir?”

He looked a little surprised. “No. Selwyns have held lands and the title in Derbyshire since 1625. Why?”

She shook her head. “No reason. I must thank you for your good intentions, Lord James, at the very least. Send your letter if you must.”

“I think I must. Unless you would like us to—I mean, if you wanted me to—what I mean to say is—”

He broke off, floundering, his face reddening as he realized he had left himself open to the lash of her tongue—and her poor opinion.

Several thoughts flashed through her mind with the force of a lightning storm.

Despite his fearsome denials, he might just want to go through with it after all.

If it were known he was courting her, she would be safe from public opinion.

She could continue her activities at night, and no one would connect the infamous Lady with the intended of Lord James Selwyn.

He did not love her. So when she must inevitably break it off, he would not be hurt.

And it would deal such a poke in the eye to Julia and Catherine and all the rest that they would never recover. She would be the first of her class at school to become engaged. She, the one with no prospects—indeed, who was more familiar with social disgrace than social graces—would be the first to be chosen.

She returned from that far-off, sparkling vista to realize that he was gazing at her, waiting, while the color returned to normal in his face. He must be preparing himself to be soundly refused.

“I must be permitted to continue my work in your laboratory,” she heard herself say.

It took him a moment to realize what she meant. “I see that I have no power to stop you, short of hammering a sheet of wood over the door.”

“I am responsible for the children.”

“Curiosity compels me to ask about them, but I will save it for another time.”

“You will not visit me at home.”

“That would be most improper.”

“I shall be applying to The University of London, to begin classes in the autumn.”

“Claire—”

“I am immovable on this point.”

“This is the deal breaker?”

“It is, sir.”

“It will be a very long engagement, in that case.”

“Four years. Three, if I take advanced classes and study during the summers.”

He did not drop his gaze. “I find this a very strange turn of events. I had every intention of turning you out of the house.”

“That would have been beneath you, sir.”

“James. If we are to be engaged, you must call me by my name.”

She didn’t think she could force her tongue to shape the word. Instead, she tugged on her gloves and held out her hand. “I must be going. Thank you for … er, tea.”

“I won’t write to Cornwall, then.” He sounded as if he wanted confirmation that they had just done what he thought they’d done.

“Only to tell my mother the … happy news. Or no, perhaps I should do that.”

“If you would. Well … goodbye, then. For now.”

“Goodbye, Lord James.”

It wasn’t until she was in the Underground carriage that the consequences of what she’d done hit her.

An old lady sitting across the aisle was kind enough to lend her a handkerchief to wipe up her tears.

37

She must have been mad.

She would write to Lord James when she got home this evening and call the whole thing off.

And then she would write to her mother and tell her she had called the whole thing off.

And then Lady St. Ives would be on the next train to London.

Oh dear, oh dear.

Claire leaned her head back against the window of the coach and closed her eyes in despair, which meant she nearly missed her Underground stop.

Surfacing from the tunnel into the bright light of late afternoon, she waited for her eyes to adjust. If she went back to the cottage now, she would only have to make the trip to Chelsea another day. Granted, at the moment finding out about Dr. Rosemary Craig seemed trivial, compared to what Claire had just done to herself. On the other hand, having a concrete task to perform might serve as a distraction, giving her a little distance until she was able to think clearly.

A brief stop at the local switch of the Royal Mail provided her with the location of the Craig house, which turned out to be a flat on the third floor of a building crammed between two more prosperous ones. So the Craigs did not go about in society? Claire wondered whether they could even squeeze outside.

It wasn’t until she stood at the door that she remembered she should have sent up a card first, to make sure the inhabitants were at home to visitors. However, in the absence of anyone to send a card up with, she herself would have to do.

At her knock, the door swung wide and she found herself face to face with a woman in her thirties wearing a severe gray suit in the elaborately bustled style of the previous decade.

“Good afternoon,” Claire said in her best social tones. “I am Lady Claire Trevelyan, and I do apologize for not informing you of my visit. Do I have the pleasure of addressing Miss Craig?”

The woman wobbled a bit at the knees, as if she were unsure whether or not to curtsey. Claire extended a hand and shook with the other woman to set her at ease. Finally she said, “I am Dorothy Craig. Please, won’t you come in?”

The furniture was so glossy with polish that one might almost miss the threadbare condition of the cushions. The floor likewise shone, and the single carpet was a good Persian. Daguerreotype photographs in silver frames were arranged upon a sideboard, and Claire wondered if Dr. Rosemary Craig’s likeness was among them.

“Would you like some tea?” Dorothy asked.

“Thank you, but no. I won’t trespass on your kindness. I merely came to inquire about a woman I believe is your sister. Doctor Rosemary Craig.”

At the word sister, the expression of polite but puzzled interest froze into shock.

Claire hastened on, despite the sinking feeling in her stomach that she had made a mistake. “I am very much interested in your sister’s work for—for a paper I am working on, and—” The other woman stood. “Miss Craig?”

“I am very sorry to incommode you, Lady Claire, but I find I have a headache coming on. Please allow me to show you out.”

How odd. She didn’t have any of the symptoms Mama exhibited during one of her headaches—the pale skin, the wincing at noise, the inability to bear light.

“I am very sorry to be the cause of your headache,” she said gently. “I will go, but I hope you will answer one question. Did your sister leave behind any papers or information that I might look at for my research?”

“If she did, they were burned years ago,” Dorothy said, her voice tight. “Before she was sent away.”

“To Bedlam.”

“It’s common knowledge among the titled, is it—my family’s disgrace?” she said bitterly.

“Not at all. I learned of it from someone at the Royal Society of Engineers. I mean—not the disgrace, which I am sure is not true, but of your sister’s unfortunate circumstances.”

“Which brought on our disgrace. My father was only a barrister, but who will hire a man into a position of trust when madness runs in his family?”

Claire saw that there were closed doors down a miniscule corridor on her right. “Are your parents well?”

“My mother passed away two years ago. I am my father’s nurse. As you see—” Her voice trembled, but whether with grief or rage, Claire couldn’t tell. “—our family has not recovered.”

Claire’s own family had not recovered from disgrace, either, but one did not simply sit down and give up. “Do you see your sister?” she asked softly, fully expecting to be pushed out the door.

“Oh, yes. Once a month, faithful as can be. For all the good it does.”

“Does she not recognize you?”

“Certainly. And therein lies the trouble. She blames us, you see, for having her committed. In her mad mind, she is perfectly sane and we are the crazy ones.” She turned away and picked up one of the pictures. “I don’t know why my father keeps this.” She handed it to Claire.

A young woman with dark hair piled high and wearing a tightly corseted gown stood to one side of a Greek pillar. One hand rested on the plinth, while the other held what appeared to be a key. The key of knowledge, one assumed. Indeed, her face was fierce, her eyes dark and intense, as if she were daring the photographer to get on with it; she had work to do. This was the face of a woman who would indeed fly at a man for getting in her way.

“Thank you for showing me.” She handed it back. “So she is allowed visitors?”

“Family only. Who else would want to see what her brains have made of her? And of the rest of us.”

Any empathy Claire might have felt was fast draining away. This woman was not crippled, nor was she lacking in intelligence. She could make her own way if it had not been more rewarding to blame someone else for her misfortunes.

“I appreciate your time.” Claire extended her hand again. “Good afternoon.”

She walked back to the Embankment as fast as she could, thankful for her escape from that narrow house. So Dr. Rosemary Craig was permitted family visitors, was she? Well, it was clear that Claire was not going to get any information from outside sources. Perhaps the poor lady in Bedlam would enjoy a visit from her long-lost cousin from Shropshire.

*

Express Mail

For Immediate Delivery

My dear Claire,

I am this moment in receipt of your tube. We will not discuss the advertisement—I was driven to it by desperation. I wish to speak of happier topics. As you can imagine, since I received Lord James’s letter two weeks ago I have been all aflutter. It was everything I could do not to buy a train ticket and come up to town immediately. Now I know why you have been so reluctant to join me here at Gwynn Place.

You sly minx, prating on about charitable works when all the time you have been indulging in a whirlwind flirtation with Lord James! I must credit your taste, if not your experience.

Let me advise you, dear. Accept only invitations from your closest circle. Due to our circumstances you were not able to make your curtsey to Her Majesty, so that means you must begin your Season with decorum. You may attend the theatre in Lord James’s company, and small dinners, but resist the temptation to be seen at any balls but those of the kind I might have attended with your dear father. Countess Selkirk, the Duchess of Wellesley, Lady Mount-Batting … these are the best hostesses and are the only invitations you should accept.

I will place the announcement of your engagement in the Times this week. I will also write to Mr. Arundel to see if there is any possibility of a sum to settle upon you. Lord James has been very generous—I have read between the lines and he is quite prepared to take you in nothing but your petticoat—ah, young love!—but there must be something, somewhere, in the accounts. What are we to have a wedding dress made with, else?

Nicholas sends a kiss, and Polgarth the poultryman begs me to advise you that each bird must have eighteen inches of roosting space in the coop. I do not know what this means, but I am dutifully passing it on.

I will let this do. Please write soonest and tell me of your plans. I must have a wedding date to put in the announcement. And do have Lord James bring you down for a visit within the month. I want to get to know him better.

Ever your loving

Mama

*

Claire rolled up the lavender-scented paper and tossed it in the fire burning merrily in the cottage’s hearth. Willie turned big eyes on her and then climbed up the arm of the rickety sofa and into her lap.

“You oughtn’t to waste good paper, Lady,” Lizzie informed her. “Even Willie knows that.”

“It was a letter from my mother, and I did not wish its contents seen.”

“We wouldn’t’ve looked. I could ’ave done another drawing of our walking coop on the back. An’ it smelled nice, it did.”

“Perhaps Granny Protheroe will teach you how to make lavender water, so that you may have your own.”

Lizzie subsided, mumbling something that Claire chose not to hear.

Cuddling Willie, who with regular meals was beginning to sprout out of his clothes, she raised her voice and spoke to the chemists at the table, the girls before the hearth, and the poker players, who had not yet left for the evening. “Has anyone ever been to Bedlam?”

The room had been lively with chatter, but now it fell silent. “Bedlam, Lady?” Lewis asked. “As in visited, or as in committed?”

“As in visited, silly gumpus. I wish to visit one of the patients there and I should like to know what it’s like beforehand.”

Jake and one of the chemists looked at one another. “Me gran said once that they used to sell tickets so folk could come and gawk at the lunatics.”

“Yes, well, they do not do so in this enlightened age,” Claire said crisply.

Jake was not finished. “I been, oncet. And I’m not like to go again. It were hellish, it were.”

“How so, Jake?” She did not like to ask whom he had been visiting, in case it was a sensitive subject.

“People rambling up and down the galleries, some in proper clothes, some in nightclothes—some in nowt at all. People screamin’, beggin’ fer help. It were awful.”

Claire swallowed. “Tigg and I have learned that the scientist who invented the device that powers the lightning rifle is in Bedlam. I wish to speak with her about it.”

Jake shook his head. “You’ll do as you like, o’ course, Lady, but me, I wouldn’t. No device is worth goin’ there again.”

“I’ll go with you,” Tigg said quietly, appearing out of the dark hallway, out of range of the lamps and firelight.

“Not wi’out me,” Snouts said, his nose throwing a vulture-like shadow on the wall behind him. “Mopsies? Ready for a mission?”

Sitting on the rug before the hearth, the girls looked at each other, then back at Claire. They shook their heads as one. “Not we, Lady,” Maggie said. “I’m afraid o’ them lunatics.”

Claire nodded with understanding. “Very well. Snouts and Tigg will accompany me. The scientist’s name is Doctor Rosemary Craig, therefore, I shall be her cousin, Lady Claire Craig, from Shropshire. Snouts and Tigg shall be my secretary and his assistant. Perhaps you might lay hands on a pair of spectacles, Snouts, to complete the illusion.”

“I b’lieve I ’ave some, Lady. Won ’em in a hand of poker not long back. Nice gold rims on ’em.”

“Perfect. We shall go tomorrow.”

Tigg and Snouts nodded, then faded into the dark. They had first watch tonight. Willie’s body had relaxed in her lap, and when she looked down, she saw he had fallen asleep. She carried him upstairs, which meant she didn’t see the Mopsies grab the poker and fish what was left of her mother’s letter out of the grate.

38

The sound of the warehouse door closing below brought Andrew out of his fierce concentration on a recent paper on the augmentation of electricks for industrial use. He had not heard the arrival of the landau, nor was that the swish of skirts on the stairs. In any case, Claire would not come so late at night.

It could only be— “Hello, James.”

James Selwyn mounted the last of the stairs into the lamplight and smiled. “Hard at work, I see. I thought you might be.” His gaze touched on the desk, the floor, a cabinet. “Something is different up here.”

“You’re seeing the initial results of Claire’s influence.” Andrew spread his hands to indicate the top of his desk. “I hardly dare leave a piece of paper out in case I get a lecture in the morning.”

“You are her employer,” James said dryly. He went to the table by the window and poured himself a finger of Scotch. “You could tell her to dispense with the lecture.”

“Ah, but then I would be deprived of the pleasure of it. How did it go at the Midlands Railroad?”

James took a healthy sip before speaking, and grimaced as the liquor went down. “Not so well, I am afraid. They appreciate the possibilities of what we’re doing—in fact, they’re quite enthusiastic about it. But they are not willing to promise to buy one of our devices without having seen it in action.”

He’d told James he was premature, but when had James ever listened when it came to his vision for their partnership? “You can hardly blame them for that. You and I would both do the same.”

“Perhaps. But we need a large railroad to back our efforts and give us legitimacy. Rail men are notorious for presenting a united front, competitive as they might be behind it. If we can crack only one, we’ll have them all.”

“I told you it was too soon. We must have a working prototype before we approach anyone.”

James merely shrugged. “How are the experiments coming? Any progress?”

Andrew had to shake his head. “I have given up on permeating the coal with gases and have turned my attention to augmented electricks. Hence a little research.” He indicated the paper. “Claire seems to think that—”

“Claire? What does she have to do with anything?”

Andrew raised an eyebrow. James was too well bred to interrupt … usually. But Claire had been the clinker in his coal box ever since the day they’d met. “You know she aspires to be an engineer.”

“I do, to my very great dismay.”

“I have promised to help her get into university in any way I can. And that usually means talking over problems together.” James merely snorted and emptied his glass. “Don’t you have any confidence in her?”

“My confidence or lack of it is irrelevant. The girl was hired to shuffle paper, not offer uninformed opinions on a great work.”

“Her opinions are far from uninformed. She came up with a theory that I feel I must explore, in fact.”

“Ridiculous. Next you’ll be holding her yarn for her while she knits.”

“I don’t believe the lady does knit,” Andrew said coolly. “And I must say I don’t understand your attitude toward her.”

“Yes, you do. I’ve told you before.”

“That you had honorable intentions and now cannot bear to see her in a position of dependence on us—on you?”

“That would sum it up, yes. And the fact that I seem completely powerless to stop her.”

Andrew was not a man who normally pried into his friend’s private life, but this was too much for him. “Why should you want to stop her, James? If she has declined your attentions and yet is a valuable addition to this venture, what has it to do with you any longer?”

James appeared to be struggling with himself. “You’re going to find out anyway,” he muttered.

“I beg your pardon?”

He raised his head and lifted his empty glass in a toast. “Congratulate me, Andrew,” he said in a tone that approximated good cheer. “I am going to embrace the proverbial ball and chain in, oh, four years or so.”

Perplexed, Andrew stared at him. “For the love of heaven, James, what on earth are you talking about?”

“Simply this. Much to my astonishment, and without quite knowing how it came about, I have somehow found myself engaged to your laboratory assistant.”

Was James so exhausted that a single finger of whiskey had addled his brain? “I don’t understand you.” Andrew’s lips felt frozen, his tongue barely able to form the words.

“Let me rephrase. This afternoon I believe I proposed to Lady Claire Trevelyan, and I am nearly perfectly certain she accepted.”

Andrew felt his jaw unhinge—and his mind as well. He simply could not make reality and this new information match in any way that was sane.

“Yes, I feel much the same way,” James went on, gaining control of himself now that the revelation was over. “I’m still not sure it is real.”

“It isn’t real. You don’t even like her.” Andrew caught one fact in the whirling morass that was his brain and clung to it. “You’ve never said one good thing about her except that she had nice eyes.”

“She has a spine, Andrew. I admire that about her.”

“I’ve heard you call her pig-headed and lacking in knowledge of her place. Right here in this room, in fact.”

It could not be true. James could not be engaged to Claire. And she of all people would never have accepted him. She could barely stand to be in the same room, for heaven’s sake!

“You must admit she is certainly both those things. But the fact remains, I have written to her mother declaring my intentions, and when I revealed this to Claire, she accepted my proposal.”

“She couldn’t have.” Andrew couldn’t make himself look beyond this. “She plans to become an engineer and—and explore the Amazon. Build airships. Construct bridges in China. Not become a peer’s wife and serve tea to railroad presidents. No, James, you must be joking.”

“I assure you I am not.”

“The Claire I know would never marry you.”

“Is that so?” James’s tone had become dangerously soft. “And how well do you know her after less than a week?”

“I know she has ambitions. I know she cares for those children. I know she would never do this.”

“And is it so bad, being engaged to me?”

Yes, it was. It was the worst thing that had ever happened. Because, Andrew now saw, if it were true, then she had chosen the wrong man.

If Claire Trevelyan was to marry anyone, it should be him.

*

Claire spent the next morning on the filing cabinets immediately behind Andrew’s desk. Since everything that had been on the desk was presumably of current interest to him, it was logical to put it closer to hand. That meant, of course, that the contents of the first cabinet had to go somewhere. For now, she was making orderly piles on the floor.

Andrew had been very distracted earlier, giving her the barest greeting and then removing Tigg to the chamber to continue their experiments. Snouts, who had elected to stay outside and guard the landau, could be heard whistling now and again through the open window. At noon, Claire dusted off her hands and collected both boys for lunch.

“Where is Mr. Malvern?” she inquired of Tigg, pinning on her hat. “I’ve hardly spoken to him today.”

“’E ent speakin’ to anyone much, Lady. In a bit of a temper, ’e is. I left ’im in the back, fabricating another augmentation switch. Dunno as it’ll do us much good, though. Electricks just ent made for this kind o’ work.”

“We shall see if our journey today will not change both his experiments and his temper. Come along.”

After a fortifying lunch at a pub close to Tower Bridge, Claire piloted the landau south to St. George’s Fields. There, she came to a halt outside the forbidding black iron bars of the fence that separated Bethlehem Royal Hospital from the sane world. Across the lawn and circular drive, the central cupola of the enormous institution rose above the fourth floor and into the sky. From somewhere they could hear the sound of birds twittering, and there were a few people pacing the lawn in quiet conversation. Other than that, there was no sound.

“If we go in there, we c’n come out again, right?” Tigg said in a small voice.

“Even lunatics c’n ’ave visitors,” Snouts said. “Buck up, mate.”

A man came to the gate. “Your business?”

Claire raised her chin. “Lady Claire Craig, here to visit my cousin, Dr. Rosemary Craig, if you please.”

“Certainly, milady.” He unlocked the gate and Claire pushed the driving bar forward so that they rolled through. “You’ll want to ask for her doctor in the receiving room, and they’ll arrange to have her brought out.”

“Thank you, sir.” They progressed around the circular drive and came to a halt in front of the steps. Claire descended and removed her driving rig, then tugged her suit jacket into place and made sure her lace jabot was suitably fluffed. Then she noticed Tigg, who had not moved.

“Tigg? Aren’t you coming?”

“Please, Lady,” he whispered. “I can’t do it. I can’t go in there.”

“Come on, Tigg,” Snouts said in bracing tones. “I ent afraid, nor should you be.”

From somewhere deep in the building came an ululating scream. Tigg flinched, and if he could have crept under the landau and laid flat upon the gravel, Claire was sure he would have. “Ent goin’,” he whispered. “You can’t make me.”

“On second thought,” Claire said, looking up at the doors, “I do not feel I should leave the landau unattended. Your logic is sound, Tigg. If you are willing to post a guard, I should be most grateful.”

The boy drew a deep breath. “You c’n count on me, Lady.” He slid out of the back and stood next to the passenger door, pressed against its gleaming surface as though glued there. “I shan’t move from this spot, and no one shall touch this engine.”

“Thank you, Tigg. You have set my mind at rest. Come along, Mr. McTavish. That silk cravat should be tucked into your waistcoat, not lying upon it. And don’t forget to put on your spectacles.”

So far today she had been two people: the Lady of Devices and the studious assistant to Andrew Malvern. Now Claire drew on a third persona—one oddly similar to that of her mother—like a cloak. She straightened her spine and tilted her chin so that she was obliged to look down her nose, and, grasping her skirts in one hand and her pocketbook containing her engineering notebook in the other, she sailed into the receiving room on a cloud of authority.

“I wish to visit my cousin, Dr. Rosemary Craig,” she informed the nurse at the desk in pleasant, plummy tones. “I am Lady Claire Craig, of—of Craigsmoor House in Shropshire, and this is my secretary, Mr. McTavish.”

The nurse looked awed, as though titled ladies did not come visiting so very often. Perhaps they did not. “Certainly, your ladyship. Let me fetch the doctor in charge of her case. In the meantime, perhaps you might care for some refreshment, here, in the sitting room?”

She showed them into a pleasant sitting room with white plaster walls and several chairs. In a moment she was back with a pitcher of water and three glasses, which she set on a side table. “The doctor will be with you shortly.”

Claire had just poured herself and Snouts a glass of water when a man in a white coat came in. He looked very much like the dreadful person at the British Museum who had interviewed her for a position—and been much more interested in her anatomy than in her knowledge of cataloguing specimens. Claire forced down her instant, irrational distaste and extended a hand.

“Lady Claire,” he said politely, shaking it. “I am Doctor Thomas Longmont, at your service.”

“How do you do? This is my secretary, Mr. McTavish.” Snouts shook hands gravely, his spectacles winking in the light from the front window.

“I understand you wish to see your cousin, Rosemary Craig. You will no doubt be very welcome, but first, I feel I should prepare you, since this is your first visit here.”

“Prepare me, sir? Is Rosemary not well?” She bit her lip. Of course she was not well. That was why she was locked up in here. “I mean—”

He smiled. “I imagine you meant is she suffering from an illness other than that of the mind. Let me assure you, in body she is sound. However, in mind … How long has it been since you last saw your cousin?”

Claire pretended to consider. “I was a child, and she and her family—my aunt and uncle, and cousin Dorothy—had come to Craigmoor House for Christmas. I believe she had just made a grand presentation to the Royal Society of Engineers, so it was a very merry holiday for all of us.”

Snouts gazed at her in admiration for this feat of storytelling. Claire ignored him and fixed a pleasant expression on her face as she waited for the doctor to speak.

“So it has been some years, then. Well, let me tell you briefly of her condition, which I hope will not cause you too much distress.” He tugged on his pant legs and seated himself. “Her affect is disconcerting. Be prepared for that at first. She cannot look anyone in the eye, and her replies to questions make no sense. She persists in believing her family are the mad ones, and she is perfectly sane, so I beg you, do not let your natural compassion and feminine sympathy overcome good sense.” He paused, as if gathering himself for the worst. “The presence of your secretary is fraught with danger, I am afraid. She has an intense dislike of men, even those who, like myself, are acting in her best interests. At the same time, she has a history of violence, so the presence of this young man with you is a positive. All I can do is post an orderly within calling distance, who will be ready to intervene at the slightest sign from you.”

Claire was sure she had gone pale, and indeed, the doctor searched her face.

“You may well be shocked. Miss Craig is not the same woman you remember from happier times in the bosom of the family, I am very sorry to say.”

She nodded, and rose on unsteady knees. “May I see her now?”

39

Dr. Longmont led them out. “The incurables are housed in their own wing, with their own airing garden. It would not do to mix them with the patients undergoing more successful methods of treatment.”

Claire felt Snouts close beside her, and indeed, felt no embarrassment at all in taking his arm and gripping it. They proceeded down a long gallery lined with doors. This was clearly the women’s side, and female patients in various states of dress and dishevelment walked up and down … or sat, drooping, by the windows. Or, in one case, lay on the floor in a corner, sobbing uncontrollably. From inside a room came that same throbbing scream that had so frightened Tigg, and Claire distinctly felt Snouts flinch.

They turned right and proceeded past a pair of double doors marked COLD BATHS and another marked ELECTRICK THERAPY.

Claire looked away.

The doctor unlocked a set of doors with the key that hung in a small cabinet bearing a combination lock, and they were in the incurables wing. This corridor was much shorter, and every door was closed and locked. Claire could see people’s heads through small windows in the doors—people in constant motion, it seemed, flying at the walls, walking in circles, gawking at the visitors, mouths open.

They passed through another door and moved through the ward, with beds against the walls, presumably for less dangerous incurables. An orderly in a clean white uniform joined them. Claire glanced at the beds. At top and bottom were leather straps, the kind that might wrap around ankle or wrist. Another set of locked doors, and then they were outside.

A deep breath did nothing to clear the miasma of fear and distress flowing out the door behind them.

The airing garden was a square of lawn with a couple of stone benches. At the far end, a woman in a white dressing gown sat, staring fixedly at a stone wall the height of two men. No one else appeared to be taking the air today, though the afternoon was fine.

“Remember,” Dr. Longmont said, “at the slightest sign of agitation, Mr. Wellburn here will be at hand to help.”

“Thank you,” Claire whispered.

“Would you like me to go with you?”

She would like him to take her back through all those locked doors to the main entrance, so she could escape this place. “No, thank you. She will remember me, I am sure.”

He nodded, and left them. Claire took a deep breath and she and Snouts approached the figure in white. An attempt had been made to dress her hair, but without hairpins it was difficult to do much more than braid it. Her posture was rigidly straight, as though she still wore a corset.

“Doctor Craig?” No response. Claire circled around to stand before her. “Doctor Craig, I am Lady Claire Trevelyan, daughter of Viscount St. Ives. I am posing as your cousin from Shropshire in order to visit you.”

A tremor seemed to run through the woman’s body, but her gaze remained fixed on a point at the top of the wall.

Well, she was not deaf. Claire saw no choice but to sit next to her and proceed. “I do hope you will not reveal my deception to the worthy doctor. The reason for my visit is that I believe I am in possession of one of your lightning devices. Contrary to popular belief, not all of them seem to have been destroyed. I have come today in hopes that you might be able to educate me on how they work.”

“Work equals force times displacement,” the lady murmured.

Snouts shifted his weight, and Dr. Craig’s head whipped around at the movement. She drew in a startled breath.

“This is my secretary, Mr. McTavish,” Claire said quickly, before the outrage on the woman’s face could resolve itself into something else—a scream, perhaps, or physical violence. “He means you no harm. He is here for moral support. I—I have never visited Bedlam before.”

Exhaling, the woman focused on a point over Claire’s knee.

This was hopeless. If she did not react at the mention of her devices, the destruction of which had brought her to this place, then had she forgotten them? Had the trip out here been for nothing?

She studied the woman’s face, and realized she was not gazing into space, but was in fact focused on her pocketbook, and more specifically, on the shape of the notebook within.

Work equals force times displacement. A physics formula.

Claire drew it out, along with a pencil. “This is my engineering notebook,” she said. “I’ve been keeping a record of the devices I’ve made—not on the scale of yours, of course. My aspirations and talent are much more modest.” She opened the book and paged through it. “This is a gaseous capsaicin bomb, and here are sketches for my firelamps, recently used with much success. I was quite pleased with the magnetic steering mechanisms, here.”

Ah. She had the scientist’s attention. Gone was the unfocused gaze and instead, Claire saw the intensity of someone whose concentration was absolute. She turned a page. “This is a sketch of an augmentation assembly for elec—”

A bony white finger came down on the page. “That cell is not nearly powerful enough.”

Claire gained control of her face and proceeded as if they had been conversing all along. “I know. It’s most distressing. The chamber has at least three augmentation assemblies and none of them seem to be able to produce enough power.”

“What are you trying to accomplish?”

“My employer wants to increase the carbon density of coal so that it will burn longer, reducing the cost of long-distance travel by train.”

“Lunkheads.” The lady’s mouth pursed. She took the book away from Claire entirely, and waggled her fingers impatiently for the pencil. Then she began to draw, the precise, perfectly curved strokes of someone who lives and breathes engineering. “You can’t augment city electrics, or draw extra current without endangering the entire system. You have to start fresh.” On the paper, a chamber began to take shape. “You don’t use electricks. You use kineticks.”

“As the mother’s helpers do?” Claire had briefly considered this, but the cell would need to be huge in order to power the chamber, so she had discarded the idea.

“It is similar, but not quite. With it, you could treat your coal in a conductive chamber.” She laid the pencil down and pushed the book onto Claire’s lap.

“This is similar to what he has in place. But the cell is what is stumping us. The one I have is this big—” Claire held her gloved fingers two inches apart. “—which I am quite certain would be inadequate.”

Dr. Craig gazed at her. “Where did you get it?”

“It was built into a rifle by a man called Luke Jackson, who turned from engineering to a life of crime. I call it the lightning rifle.”

“It can kill a man, you know.”

“Yes, I know.” Claire’s own gaze did not falter. “I need you to tell me how to construct a similar cell that might power this chamber.”

“Without burning down half of London? Why should I do that?” The anger, which had been temporarily held back by the dam of intellectual inquiry, flooded into her face. “Why should I help you, a perfect stranger, when no one will help me?”

“You have no reason in the world to do so,” Claire said steadily. “But if even one small part of your legacy still exists, and I can prove it works, would not that go some way to repairing your reputation—if not your situation here?”

Dr. Craig whirled on the seat to face Claire directly. “Do you think I’m mad?” she demanded.

“I have no idea. Are you?”

“Certainly not. And yet here I am, disintegrating year after year until even I begin to doubt myself.”

“The doctor and your sister both said you would say that.”

“Of course they did. And do you know why, young lady?”

Claire shook her head. She was no longer frightened, but all the same, her body tensed in case she needed to flee.

“Thomas Longmont is the younger brother of George Longmont, whose name I presume you have heard?” At Claire’s nod, she went on, “George saw the promise—the genius—in my work and realized the effect it would have on the family. The Longmont men have a monopoly on the board of directors of the London Electrick Company—and a commensurate monopoly on the stock.”

Claire took a breath as the enormity of the case suddenly became clear. Her back relaxed against the bench as the tension went out of her. “Your invention could revolutionize electricks. It could even put the LEC out of business.”

“So instead of embracing the new and changing the old to keep up with the times, they destroyed every example of my work and had me committed—with the collusion of my sister, who is a vindictive, jealous woman.” Her face turned bleak. “Much to my sorrow.”

“And yet she visits you every month,” Claire said in tones of wonder. How could such a Machiavellian plot be permitted to take place in this modern day and age?

“She does not visit me. I believe she has designs on Doctor Longmont, poor girl. She listens to his report on my ‘progress’ and simpers and smiles and goes away satisfied with her charity. And they say I’m mad. Thomas Longmont will never marry her. He much prefers the company of gentlemen, all of them smoking cigars and playing cards and ruling the world from the comfort of their club.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Everyone knows everything about the staff here. And about each other. For all the good it does us.”

Claire had never seen a lunatic, but this woman did not seem mad in the least. Angry, yes—perhaps debilitatingly so—but not insane. Her faculties seemed to be as sharp as ever, and if what she said was true, she had been dealt a criminal injustice.

One that deserved reparation.

But it could not be fought through the courts—young as she was, even Claire could see that a collusion of powerful men would never allow the case to see daylight.

Therefore, the solution must come during the night.

“Doctor Craig, how tall is that wall?”

“Fifteen feet, five and three-quarter inches. Not including the iron spikes.”

“And what are the security measures in this facility?”

“Here in the incurables wing, we are locked in and let out only for meals, for physical examination, and for therapy.” The emphasis on this last word came as bitter as acid. “Those of us considered less of a danger to ourselves and others have a bed on the ward, but we are strapped down at night. The ward is likewise locked. Their electricks room is a travesty, used for torture, not healing, and I do not wish to discuss the use of the cold baths.” She mastered herself, and went on in a calmer tone. “This is the first time I have been in the airing garden in six months. I have been amusing myself by triangulating the height of the wall.”

“Is there a guard on duty?”

“No guards, only the orderlies. But you have no doubt noticed they are hired less for their medical knowledge and more for the beefiness of their physiques.”

“You say you are among those on the ward?” Tied down to the bed to sleep. Dear heaven. “What kind of lock does it possess?”

“A bolt only, on the outside. Getting into the wing itself from the main hospital is more difficult. It requires the combination to the key cabinet, which is a closely guarded secret. What do you propose, young lady?”

Claire hitched herself a little closer to the woman on the bench. “I propose that in exchange for releasing you from this prison, you build a kinetick cell for my employer. Once that is complete, we will have no further obligation to one another and you will be free to take up your life again in whatever manner you please.”

A flicker of amusement creased Dr. Craig’s face, brief as lightning. “And how do you plan to keep your side of the bargain?”

Over the lady’s shoulder, Claire saw the orderly walking toward them. Beefy he was, to be sure. And her hour was up. “I must go. Tonight, at three o’clock, be prepared to leave.”

Claire rose and smiled at the orderly. He offered her his arm, and as they paced away across the lawn, she glanced back.

Dr. Rosemary Craig had approached the wall and appeared to be counting the bricks, her fingers investigating each seam and crack.

It would seem the scientist was preparing already.

40

“’Ow you plannin’ to pull this off, Lady?” Snouts inquired when they were safely back in the landau and bowling down Lambeth Road.

“Never mind ’ow, what about why?” Tigg wanted to know, his chocolate eyes huge. “Releasin’ lunatics? Wiv respect, Lady, are you mad?”

“I am not, and neither is she.” Claire made the turn just before the bridge and headed upriver for the cottage. “If Mr. Malvern is to succeed, we need her knowledge, because it seems all of our brains together are not sufficient for the task. I am convinced the lightning cell is the key to making his chamber work.”

“So, wot then … you’ll just turn up in the laboratory wiv a mad scientist and Mr. Malvern’ll stand aside while she does as she pleases?”

Claire collected her thoughts while she negotiated another turn, then pushed the bar out until they were traveling at a refreshing thirty miles per hour away from St. George’s Fields. “We have two options, Tigg. Either we bring her into the lab and introduce her, or we fabricate the cell in the privacy of our own cottage and present it as a fait accompli.”

“I dunno wot that is, but if you mean passin’ it off as if we done it, that don’t seem right, either.”

“You are quite correct. So, it appears as if we must go with the first option and present the lady herself.” She was not yet sure how she would manage that, but one thing at a time.

The boys remained quiet for the rest of the journey. It wasn’t until they had rolled to a stop outside the cottage that Snouts said, “So at risk of repeatin’ meself, ’ow we gonna do this, then?”

“Come inside,” Claire said, gathering her things—including the lightning rifle from under the seat. “This is going to be rather … complicated. I am going to need every man Jack of you if we are to complete our preparations before midnight.”

*

Their single greatest advantage was that the walls of Bedlam were meant to keep people in, not out. In fact, Claire reflected as she secured a loop in the rope to the brass clip on her leather corselet, this was probably the first time in recorded history that anyone had tried to break in.

Her black skirts were secured above her knees, revealing only black woollen stockings, and the lightning rifle’s comforting weight rested on her back. A black gauze scarf would conceal her features, though at the moment it was wrapped around her shoulders.

The wall, though smooth and relatively featureless on the inside, was easy enough to scale on the outside. A barrel and a damaged crate got them halfway up, and the grappling hook and rope took care of the rest.

The airing garden had no illumination of any kind—only the glow of the electricks in the corridors shone through the glass, which was not enough to cause any difficulty. The long shadow of the building would provide cover once they could reach it. A night bird twittered some distance away down the street toward the corner of Lambeth Road.

Lizzie, standing watch.

“Quickly,” Claire whispered. “Someone’s coming—probably the bobbies.”

She tugged on her rope, and on the other side of the wall, Snouts hauled on his end. Up she went, her corselet creaking as it took her weight, her feet in their sturdy boots scrambling for purchase. At the top, she pulled herself upright using the iron spikes, thankful that Bedlam had not yet seen the necessity for embedding broken glass in their masonry.

She slid down the inner side, and when Snouts caught her, released the rope from its clip. They had no choice but to leave it hanging there, ready for the return trip. She heard the scrape of boots on cobbles on the other side as her team scattered into the streets and alleys opposite, and then silence. The air sawed in and out of her lungs as she tried to breathe quietly, huddled with Snouts behind the bench she had occupied that afternoon.

A pair of male voices murmured, and they distinctly heard the scrape of the barrel as the bobbies—if that was who they were—disassembled their makeshift ramp.

Please don’t let them look up and see the hook.

A very long ten minutes later, another night bird called at the opposite end of the block. Maggie, sounding the all clear.

“It’s all right,” Snouts whispered. “We can manage wivout a stair.”

“I hope Doctor Craig can, too. Come.”

Keeping close to the ground, they dashed across the open lawn and into the shadows. Claire moved along the wall of the incurables wing, Snouts close behind her, until they reached a set of frosted glass windows. “The cold baths,” she whispered. “This is the easiest way in, and the furthest from anyone with ears.”

Snouts gazed upward. “Lady, they got bars on ’em. You proposin’ to squeeze between?”

“No, I’m proposing to use the rifle.”

She unholstered it and pushed the switch. The hum sounded uncomfortably loud in the silence, but instead of allowing the charge to build up to lethal force, she stepped back and took aim at the window. If one sent a bolt of power into sand, the result was glass. And if one sent a bolt of power into glass …

A tendril of blue-white light arced across the space, illuminating every leaf in the shrubbery before spreading over the surface of the window like spidery cracks in a sheet of ice. With a shivering sound, the window disintegrated into a million shards, sifting into piles of glittering grains on the sill.

“Completely disintegrated and returned to sand,” Claire whispered. “One would think it would melt, but no. It’s a property of this current that—”

“Lady! C’n we leave the lesson for after?”

Right. Perhaps after Dr. Craig was vindicated in the eyes of her peers, Claire would write a paper on the properties of the current. Leaving out its uses for burglary and vandalism, of course.

Meanwhile, the iron bars still remained.

Another dose of the current took care of this problem, as the metal glowed, cracked, and fell into the shrubbery like a house of cards falling down, no matter how hard Snouts tried to catch them in his gloved hands. The noise was deafening.

They dropped to their knees, frozen in place. Another long ten minutes went by, but when the sleeping building did not rouse with an alarm, Claire gripped the sill and hoisted herself in.

She did not need to tell Snouts to exercise caution. He was taut with nerves, his face a pale mask. She was rather tense herself, as she skirted the dual tanks of water. They were not bathing pools, exactly, bearing no resemblance to those in the gymnasium at St. Cecelia’s. They were big enough to accommodate perhaps two people, floating, and from the light seeping in through the window in the door, seemed about five feet deep.

Dr. Craig had not wanted to speak of them.

The sound of their footsteps echoed off the water in an uncanny way. Claire made her way to the door as quickly as she could. She was quite prepared to shoot it, but it was not locked. Evidently the main doors to the incurables’ wing kept the general populace out, and the baths themselves kept the incurables out.

Unless they were brought here under duress.

They slipped through and around the corner to the doors to the ward. The bolt slid across easily, and, knees bent so they could not be seen by a sleepless lunatic through the locked rooms’ little windows, they crept into the ward.

Which bed belonged to Dr. Craig?

Claire berated herself for not finding out. They had not been occupied this afternoon, and she had been so horrified by the leather straps that she had put the entire ward out of her mind. Now she must pay for that mistake.

“Stand guard,” she whispered in Snouts’s ear. As silently as she could, she glided down the aisle between the beds. It was impossible to see. The light filtering through the ward door was not enough to make out the features of the sleeping women, and she dared not switch on the electricks overhead.

At least, she hoped the women were sleeping.

Someone made a sound practically under her feet, and Claire jumped, clapping a hand to her lips just in time to muffle her own cry.

“Mama?” a woman said. “Papa’s hurting me.” Claire moved to the next bed. “Mama?” the woman said, louder.

Oh dear. Someone would come, and there was nowhere but the lockers at the end of the ward to hide. And once they were hidden, how would they get out? These walls were designed to contain, and designed well.

“Shh, dear,” she whispered. “You’re all right.”

“But he’s hurting me. Make him stop.”

“I shall. Mama will shoot him and then he won’t hurt you any more.”

The woman seemed to subside. Claire fervently hoped that her dreams would not come up in discussion with her doctor.

“Who’s there?” came a voice at the far end of the ward. “Is that you?”

Swiftly, Claire moved toward the sound. “Doctor Craig?” she whispered.

“Of course. I’ve been awake all night. You’ll have to undo these straps.”

They were tighter than Claire expected. How did the doctors think the women were going to sleep, battened down like this? She unfastened the buckles by feel—one hand, one foot, then the reverse on the other side. Dr. Craig gathered the thin woolen blanket around her shoulders and swung her legs over the iron bedstead.

“Where are your clothes?”

“I have none,” she whispered back. “They were all confiscated when I was admitted. I have nothing but this nightdress and blanket.”

“Possessions?”

“None.”

“Money?”

“Of course not.”

“Right, then. Let’s go.”

“Mama?” Blast, the woman had awakened again. “Mama, make him stop.”

“I will, dear,” Claire whispered as she went past.

“Don’t encourage her,” snapped Dr. Craig. “It makes the memories more intense and upsets her.”

“Mama!” The woman was struggling against her restraints now. “Mama!”

Botheration. Snouts held the door and they hurried through, then locked it behind them. “This way!”

“Papa, no!” They heard the terrified shriek through the solid wood panel, and Claire skidded around the corner and pushed open the door to the cold baths.

“What are you doing? I’m not going in there!”

“Afraid you are, ma’am,” Snouts said behind her.

“Take your hands off me!”

He pushed her through and closed the door behind him. Now the woman on the ward was screaming, and down the corridor, they could hear the approach of running feet.

“Doctor Craig, you must go through the window. Stop this struggling at once!” Claire grabbed her hand and between the two of them, they dragged the woman around the two tanks and over to the window, where Claire jumped down and Snouts pushed her out.

“Oof!” Dr. Craig fell heavily on her hands and knees.

“Come on. They’ll have seen you’re missing by now.”

Dr. Craig dragged in a shaky breath. “I … hate …”

“I know. Come. We haven’t much time.”

Running low, the three of them dashed across the lawn. Snouts whistled and tugged on the rope to be sure the grappling hook still held. An answering whistle came from the other side. Still clear.

“I’ll take you up pick-a-back, ma’am,” Snouts said tersely, bending his knees. Without giving her a chance to protest, Claire boosted her onto his back. Fortunately, the scientist was not a hefty woman. Snouts gripped the rope and began to climb while Claire watched frantically over her shoulder.

The longest thirty seconds of her life passed, while Snouts grunted and scraped his way up the rope and onto the top of the wall. From there, he delivered Dr. Craig into unseen hands and at last it was Claire’s turn.

She had never gone up a rope so fast. She had just stepped over the iron spikes when a shout from the building—outside the building—brought her head up.

“Oy! You there! Stop!” A man ran across the lawn, his white coat flapping around his knees.

Claire didn’t wait to see any more. She gripped the rope and leaped, the rough hemp burning through her gloved hands so fast she could feel its heat. She landed in the street with a thump.

“Leave the hook,” she gasped. “Billy Bolt!”

The hem of Dr. Craig’s night robe vanished into a dark alley, and Claire dove across the street to follow it. Dodging from one building to the next, it wasn’t until two streets over that she could open up and run in earnest.

The silky gleam of the landau waiting on the corner of the next road, with Tigg in the driving seat, was as welcome as a sunrise.

By the time the Southwark bobbies had been roused and begun to comb the area for the escaped lunatic, Dr. Craig was being ushered into the cottage in Vauxhall Gardens—disheveled, out of breath, and still struggling to believe that the evidence of her senses was actually the truth.

She had been broken out of Bedlam and was free for the first time in over a decade.

41

The first order of business was to find clothes for their guest, since one could not go about in a nightdress, particularly in a house full of boys. Claire had just tied Maggie’s blue hair bow—the one that went with her best dress—in preparation for a shopping trip to Regent Street, when she heard the familiar whoosh and thump of a tube arriving.

Dear Lady Claire,

My greetings and best wishes for your continued good health. I am in receipt of your letter inquiring after the property adjacent to the Regent Bridge and am happy to tell you that it belongs to a business entity whose directors assure me they are only too happy to sell. Having taken a drive to inspect said property, I confess myself mystified as to your reasons for the purchase. However, your business is your own and I would not presume to interfere.

I recommend that you offer no more than fifty pounds sterling for the place—a sum so generous, considering its condition and present occupants, that I am sure you will not need to negotiate further. If you agree, I will begin proceedings immediately. Once you have the deed in hand, you will need to hire bully-boys to turn out the squatters that appear to be living there at present. I know a man who could handle this for you.

I have heard interesting rumors that the glass-works on the other side of the bridge is looking to establish a housing development for its workers. Should this prove to be the case, you stand to make a tidy profit when they make you an offer for the property. I would be happy to act on your behalf in that event.

I remain,

Yours truly,

Richard Arundel

Arundel & Hollis, Solicitors

Excellent. Claire folded up the letter and tucked it into her reticule for answer later. It was clear the good Mr. Arundel did not pay much attention to the address codes on his tubes—which was all to the good. He would be terribly embarrassed had he known he had referred to her as a squatter.

“Will you be comfortable here until I come back?” she asked Dr. Craig, who was sitting on the bed attempting to make Weepin’ Willie answer her questions.

“Yes, certainly, once I find some breakfast. I haven’t had such an appetite in years. Why will this child not speak?”

“’E don’t,” Lizzie said, ever brief and to the point.

“Is he dumb?”

“’E ent.”

“Is he damaged psychologically?”

“Hey, now, don’t be sayin’ such about our Willie.” Lizzie’s frown was fearsome. “Lunatics wot got sprung out o’ Bedlam got no right to call others names.”

Claire gasped. “Lizzie! Apologize to Dr. Craig at once.”

“She ’as to go first.”

To Claire’s surprise, Dr. Craig was not offended—or even shocked. “My dear child, psychological simply means dealing with the mind. Sometimes a trauma early in one’s life can produce effects such as the inability to speak. I simply wondered if this was the case with, er, Willie.”

Lizzie eyed her, unconvinced.

“And I am not a lunatic,” Dr. Craig went on in the same tone. “I was put in Bethlehem Royal Hospital against my will by powerful men who wished to keep me quiet.”

“About what?”

“About my devices, among other things.”

“You gonna teach the Lady ’ow to make ’em?”

“That is our agreement. And I would very much like to begin work, so if you are joining Lady Claire in her expedition to find me clothes, I offer my thanks and wish you good speed.”

Lizzie hovered by the door. “Sorry I called yer a lunatic, Doc.”

“That is quite all right. You were laboring under a misapprehension, easily corrected.”

Claire went downstairs, hoping her astonishment was not plain on her face. Lizzie had never apologized to anyone in all the weeks they had been acquainted. She had come close to it once, but the words had not actually crossed her lips.

Perhaps the child was becoming civilized after all.

In Regent Street, Claire purchased a corset, several sets of unmentionables, a good walking skirt in navy wool, and two blouses of the sort she herself favored. Last, at the expedition outfitters’ in Market Street, she bought boots, a duster, and goggles so that the scientist’s clothes would not be damaged from traveling in the landau—or anywhere else.

“Is the Doc goin’ to South America?” Maggie gazed at the parcels and bags in wonder.

“She may, someday, as may we all,” Claire answered, stowing everything in the compartment behind the seat. “But for now, she may ride with us safely. What do you say to some tea at Fortnum’s and some new boots for the two of you?”

When they were comfortably seated in the tea room and had each ordered a plate of finger sandwiches, she looked up from enjoying her own creamed soup to see Emilie Fragonard across the room.

Her best friend from her past life was enjoying tea with a party of girls Claire vaguely remembered from their class at school. How strange. She hadn’t realized Emilie had been close with anyone but herself. But how lovely to see her here. She put down her spoon.

“Stay here and enjoy your lunch, girls. I’m just going over there by that row of potted palms to say hello to the young lady in the yellow sprigged walking dress.”

“’Ave a sandwich.” Maggie pointed to a delicacy on her plate. “These little ’uns with crab inside are ever so good.”

Maggie was right. The crab sandwiches were indeed delicious. Claire could empathize with Dr. Craig in one way, at least—food never tasted so good until you had gone a long time without any. She would never take it for granted again.

She made her way between the tables, glad she’d dressed in a particularly nice waist with eyelet embroidery and rows of tucking, and that—thank you, Cowboy Poker—her hat was new, pleated at the back and trimmed with a jaunty blue-and-white striped bow. “Emilie! I’m so glad to see you.”

The astonishment in her friend’s eyes behind their spectacles was almost comical. “Claire! Oh, Claire, whatever happened to you? Are you mad?” Emilie gathered her into a hug that was so sympathetic it almost hurt. “Dearest, to what desperate straits you have been driven—and to think I am partly responsible!”

Claire righted her hat and sank into the nearest gilded chair. “I—what?” She directed a vague smile at the other two girls. What were their names? And what on earth was Emilie talking about?

“We have just heard the news, haven’t we?” Emilie appealed to the others, who nodded. “About your engagement to Lord James Selwyn. It’s all over London. Claire, you don’t even like him!”

Oh. That.

Claire gathered her wits. She had been so focused on electricks and in freeing Dr. Craig that she had not devoted a single thought to her new fiance, nor thought up an appropriate story to explain him.

“He—he has improved on further acquaintance,” she said rather lamely.

“I heard he was a shocking rogue,” said the girl on the left in a voice just above a whisper. “And that no lady is safe with him.”

“Abigail, that can’t be true,” the other girl said. “Claire would never engage herself to a man like that.”

Abigail. Yes. That meant the other one had to be Charlotte. They were cousins, but for the life of her, Claire couldn’t remember their surnames. “Certainly not,” she said. “I feel perfectly safe with him.” As long as she had her lightning rifle to hand.

“You shall be Baroness Selwyn,” sighed Abigail. “A perfect match, since you are the daughter of a viscount.”

“The sister of one, presently,” Emilie corrected her. “Claire, do tell us how this came about.”

Oh, dear. “He wrote to my mother informing her of his intentions, and then he proposed.”

“Oh, you comical person. But was it terribly romantic?” Charlotte wanted to know. “Was it outdoors, in a pavilion, or indoors, with a bouquet of flowers?”

Flowers. Paper. In the hearth. “Indoors, with flowers.”

Charlotte clasped her hands in delight and subsided.

“So you will be comfortably situated and I can stop worrying,” Emilie said. “I take it you are with your grand-aunts Beaton in Greenwich?”

“No indeed.” So Emilie’s mother was still monitoring her correspondence, and she had not received Claire’s tube sent days and days ago. “I wrote to you some time ago to let you know my situation. Perhaps I miscoded the tube.” She smiled for the cousins’ benefit, while Emilie’s smile faded and her lips thinned. “I am employed as assistant to a scientist, and am supervising the education of a number of young persons.” She nodded toward the Mopsies, who were signaling the waiter with imperious energy. “Two of the girls are over there, by the window.”

“They look delightful,” said Abigail. “What pretty dresses. Who are they?”

“Orphans. They are, however, very intelligent and their lessons are coming along briskly.”

“Fancy you a teacher,” Abigail said. “I never would have guessed.”

“Claire has always done well in school,” Emilie said loyally. “I wouldn’t have passed Mathematics were it not for her.”

“What I meant was, with the Arabian Bubble and everything … well, let’s just say it’s quite a surprise you’re the first of our class to be engaged. And don’t think that hasn’t frosted Lady Julia’s turned-up nose.” Abigail’s smile was triumphant, as if she had produced a baron herself. “I hear she actually threw china.”

“Lady Julia is far too well bred for that,” Claire said. Though she could certainly believe it.

“Maybe she wanted Lord James for herself,” Abigail mused.

“If she wanted him for anyone, it was for Gloria Meriwether-Astor. That girl is looking for a title to go with all her father’s money, and Julia made no secret out of how amusing it would be to find one for her.”

“I’m sure the gentlemen appreciated that,” Emilie sniffed. “What are they, Bengal tigers to be bagged and mounted?”

This produced a round of giggling, and Claire felt herself flush as heads turned toward them. “I must be getting back to my charges before they order everything on the menu. Emilie, I trust I may write?” You must get to the mail before your mother does.

“Yes, do.” Never fear, now that I know what she’s been up to. “I hope I may come and call?” Don’t visit our house, though. She’ll toss you out just as she did before.

“My situation doesn’t allow it, but I would love to meet for tea. I must attend my duties at the laboratory in the mornings, but I am free in the afternoons.” Please don’t deny me your friendship. I could not bear it.

“I shall look forward to it.” Never. We are friends forever.

When she got back to her table, the Mopsies were digging into a plum trifle, one on either side of it. “D’you think Granny Protheroe could make summat like this, Lady?”

It took a moment for Claire to cross the gauzy border between old life and new. Granny Protheroe. The cottage. Yes.

She arranged her skirts and addressed herself once more to her soup. “I’m sure she could. People can surprise you with what they know.”

So the news of her engagement was out. She had not said a word, so James must have taken it upon himself to announce it. And since Emilie did not move in his circles, it must indeed be all over London if it had filtered down to her.

Well, she had accepted James’s proposal knowing that this could work to her advantage.

What she had not expected was how trapped it would make her feel.

*

“The boots are a touch on the large side, but no matter.” Dr. Craig tried to see more of herself than the single cracked mirror in Claire’s room would allow. “I shall wear thicker stockings. You have a good eye for fit.”

“Now that you can go about, you can exchange them,” Claire replied. She did have rather a good eye. The skirt could have been made to order. There was even a little room for the scientist to gain some weight.

“I shall not waste my time on boots when I have a debt to pay.” Dr. Craig abandoned the mirror. “Shall we begin?”

“I am taking the children to church this morning, but we may certainly begin this afternoon. Then tomorrow morning I shall introduce you to Mr. Malvern, my employer.”

“I have given some thought to your awkward position. I shall merely say that I have been released, and in the interests of science offer my modest talents to his venture.”

“Do you think he will believe it?” Claire couldn’t help but think that the coincidence of timing might be considered suspicious.

“From what you have told me, I think he is becoming desperate at his inability to harness electricks for his purposes. Expediency will overcome suspicion, you may depend upon it.”

Claire rounded up the Mopsies—giving them strict instructions that on no account were Sunday pockets to be picked—and Willie. Jake was lounging on the porch overlooking the river when they emerged.

When he got up as if he intended to come with them, Claire tried to hide her astonishment. “Are you joining us this morning?”

“Snouts gave orders one of us ought to go with you anytime yer out.”

“But it’s Sunday morning, Jake. I am hardly likely to be set upon at St. Peter’s. And we were out most of yesterday without protection.”

“Snouts, ’e’s nervous since ye sprung th’ Doc. Figures she’ll draw attention we don’t want.”

Claire gave up. “Very well. Since we are walking, I suppose he is quite right.” And perhaps an hour in church would be good for Jake, though the good Lord had His work cut out for Him there.

The Mopsies weren’t happy about giving up a morning’s work on the walking coop, wriggling and whispering to distraction, but Willie was quiet in the pew beside her, gazing up at the ceiling and examining the carvings.

And to her enormous surprise, he attempted to sing during the hymns.

The Mopsies gawked, and even Jake looked amazed. “Willie, you can so speak!” Maggie whispered, elbowing him. “Why don’t you say anyfink at the cottage?”

But silence claimed him once again, and throughout the service, Claire wondered if Dr. Craig could be right. Had something happened in his early years that had deprived him of the will, but not the ability? And how would one ever find out, since he did not answer any question put to him using words, no matter what the subject?

After lunch, she put this puzzle aside in favor of another one. She fetched the lightning rifle and handed it to Dr. Craig, who took it in both hands with care, as if it might explode, and examined it minutely. “I see,” she murmured. “No finesse, but it is obviously operable.” She looked up. “I am surprised you have not reverse engineered it and duplicated the device yourself.”

“I would have, had I not feared I could not put it back together again. The connections are straightforward, but the device itself … since there is only one in existence, I did not want to risk it.”

With fingers that were hesitant at first, then more confident, the scientist began to disassemble the rifle. Claire clamped her lips shut on a protest. If the inventor of the device could not reassemble it, then no one could.

“There, you see?” Dr. Craig held up the cell. “Released from its servitude. Now, let me show you how it works.”

“I am most interested in how it converts elec—”

“Oh, no.” Dr. Craig had the brass cover off. “It’s not electricks. It uses kineticks.”

“I know, but there must be some conversion process that—”

“No. See?” She laid the pieces on the worktable, each tiny gear and bit of clockwork placed in order. “You understand how lightning is created in the natural universe?”

Lewis, who had been leaning over to watch, recited what Claire had taught them verbatim. Jake elbowed him none too gently in the ribs. “Clever-clogs, stop showin’ off.”

“Think of this device as a miniature heaven. Kineticks move the particles, which build up the charge, which causes the rifle to fire the bolt.”

The assembly fell into place in Claire’s head. “That’s what is wrong with Mr. Malvern’s chamber.” She locked eyes with Tigg across the table. “He is trying to apply electricks to the coal when what he should be doing is creating a charge in the chamber, the same way it is created in this device.”

Tigg wasted no words, simply fetched a bit of brown paper and a pencil from her case. Claire sketched the changes that would be needed in the chamber. “We can bring this to him tomorrow. That way, Dr. Craig’s visit can be shortened to the absolute minimum necessary for politeness. His laboratory is too close to St. George’s Fields for my comfort.”

“I quite agree with you,” the scientist said. “Now, my dear, if you would reassemble this device for me? I shall watch in case you take a wrong turn.”

On her third attempt, which involved using a toothpick as a tiny screwdriver, the scientist nodded. “You’ll do. Now, mount it in the rifle.”

This was much easier. Claire had it back together in seconds.

“Excellent. Now, take the rifle apart again and put it back together—blindfolded.”

Tigg let out a yelp of laughter as Claire allowed Maggie to tie her sash over her eyes. It was difficult, but the workings were laid out in her head. She would be able to assemble the rifle in the dark.

How odd that the scientist had thought it right for her to prepare for such a thing.

When she was finished, she pinned Tigg in place with a glance. “Your turn.” The smile fell from his face. Smugly, she tied the blindfold on him herself.

42

Dr. Craig enjoyed her second trip in the steam landau much more than she had her first. “This is such a novelty,” she called over the wind, holding her borrowed chiffon scarf in place under her chin with one hand. “Even at his most successful, my father could never have afforded one. He was a horse and carriage man, in any case.”

“It is all I have left of my father,” Claire confessed, watching the road. “He was a forward thinker.” It was such a pity he had not applied his thinking in the right direction. It still hurt, deep inside, knowing he had gambled the safety of his family and the futures of his children on something as frivolous as the combustion engine. Were they not worth more to him?

In the end, however, even life was not. Only she and her mother knew he had taken his own life in despair when the Arabian Bubble burst.

At the laboratory, Dr. Craig and Tigg climbed out while Claire shut the engine down. And then the awkward moment that she had dreaded was at hand.

*

Andrew Malvern stood by the cold chamber, gazing at it disconsolately. He had not even put on his leather apron yet, and he hunched into his frock coat, though the morning was pleasant.

He would not have believed it was possible to be so miserable. Not only was he out of ideas, he was actually considering smashing the chamber to bits, dissolving his partnership, and offering his services as a mechanic on an airship to Australia.

He might just do it, too. If Claire was going to be James’s wife, he didn’t want to be here to watch.

The familiar singing sputter of the landau came down Orpington Close, and he braced himself to see her.

“Mr. Malvern,” she called when the door opened, “we have a guest this morning.”

James, probably. Though he was no guest. Still, there was no way on this earth he would allow James to see how much his engagement had hurt him. So he struggled to shrug off his blue devils and don civility like another garment.

“Dr. Rosemary Craig, may I present Mr. Andrew Malvern, of the Royal Society of Engineers.”

Andrew’s mouth fell open in sheer shock, and it wasn’t until Dr. Craig stepped fully into the light from the skylights and extended a hand that he came to himself with a start. “I beg your pardon … I am honored … but how—I thought—that is—”

“I made the acquaintance of Lady Claire some time ago, and when I was released from hospital recently she had the goodness to call.”

“Call.” He did not release her hand. She could not be real—this genius, this icon of engineering. But no, there were her fingers in his. Gently, she pried them out of his grip.

“Indeed. In the course of our conversations, she let slip that you have a conundrum of the mechanical kind here, and was good enough to bring me by to see it.”

“See it.”

Dr. Craig seemed unaware that Andrew was sounding more and more like a parrot. Or an echo. He could not seem to get his brain working. “Yes. Is this the apparatus here?”

The scientist walked toward the chamber, unwinding her scarf as she went, and the prosaic gesture seemed to clear his fog. “I say, Dr. Craig, how is this possible? I mean, of course the state of your health is none of my business, and I’m delighted to see you—honored that you would, um, honor us, but … ten years? And you walked out of there just recently?”

How was it possible he had not heard of it? The papers should have been screaming the news in headlines two inches high.

Standing next to the chamber, she smiled over her shoulder. “Yes, ten years. I must say, the modern treatments are most efficacious. Now—” She indicated the control panel with its levers and alarm horns. “—I understand you are attempting to increase the carbon density of coal by means of pure current, for use on the railroads?”

He struggled with incredulity on one hand and necessity on the other. But his situation was so dire that necessity won.

“Yes. In theory, it should work. But in reality, the application of current simply disintegrates the coal, or burns it up. I’ve tried every possible method and nothing has produced results. My partner is already soliciting interest from the railroad men, but without a working prototype it will remain just that—interest. And no orders that would give us our start.”

Dr. Craig nodded. “My young colleague and I put our heads together yesterday and may have a solution for you.”

How on earth had Claire convinced the finest mind in three generations to apply itself to his little problem? Andrew hardly knew whether to laugh or fall at her feet babbling his thanks.

From the pocket of her coat Dr. Craig drew a folded piece of brown paper, and spread it on a nearby workbench. He recognized Claire’s neat hand—and then his mind snapped to full attention as he realized what the lines and curves meant.

“I’ve been going down the garden path all this time,” he breathed. “It’s not electricks that will solve it at all.”

“Our conclusion exactly,” Claire said. “You must rebuild the chamber.”

“Tigg.” He glanced around wildly. “Where is Tigg?”

“’Ere, sir.” Tigg popped up at his right hand.

“We must begin immediately,” he said. “I’ll draw up a list of supplies we’ll need. We won’t wait to order them—I’ll visit the metalworks myself. In the meantime, I want you to disassemble the chamber.”

“Shame to waste that brand-new glass cylinder, sir.”

“Oh, we’ll need that. It’s the acceleration engines that have to go. We’ll need to make room.”

“Mr. Malvern.”

“Once we have the switches and cells, then I’ll—”

“Mr. Malvern!”

He realized Claire was standing on the other side of the bench, arms akimbo, that schoolmarmish look upon her face. The look that always made him smile. In the excitement, he had managed to forget his pain, and now it swamped him all over again. “Yes?”

“Dr. Craig was speaking to you.”

“My apologies, ma’am.” It was a relief to look at the scientist instead of Claire. “I’m afraid in my enthusiasm I forgot my manners.”

“That is quite all right. Enthusiasm has carried many a scientist forward. I would offer you my help, but I’m afraid I cannot.”

“You cannot?” Claire’s eyebrows rose. “Aren’t you going to assist us? This new chamber will be based on your device. There will be papers to be written, patent applications to file—”

“You have my permission to do all that. Since the sketches are yours, and the construction of the chamber will be yours, the papers and patents should be yours as well.”

“I don’t understand.” Claire’s voice sounded almost plaintive. Disappointed. “The theory—the concept—those are yours alone. One look at this device and everyone will know where it came from.”

“Let me clarify my situation. The same gentlemen who would be reading those papers and approving those patents are those with whom I dealt most recently.” A look passed between them that Andrew couldn’t read. “Do you imagine that they would receive them now without the same consequences as before?”

“Oh,” Claire said faintly. Her face had gone pale.

Andrew began to feel a little uneasy. Something was amiss here.

“However, if you present the device and the chamber works as we believe it will, then regardless of what it looks like, my name need never come into the conversation. I will not sully the waters by becoming involved even at these early stages. I have set you on the path, and I know that your minds are equal to the task.” She smiled at Claire with approval and—could it be true?—fondness. “I consider you the heiress of my past achievements. You are welcome to them. But it is time for me to move on to other fields.”

“What fields?” Andrew couldn’t help himself.

“Far-off fields. Those in the Canadas and the Americas, perhaps. I should like to see New York, and even Edmonton. I hear the diamond mines have made it nearly the equal of San Francisco for elegance and society.”

Claire’s mouth opened and closed, and finally words came out. “But your financial situation—I can assist to a certain degree, but a transatlantic airship ticket is no small matter.”

“You have done quite enough to assist me,” Dr. Craig said. “I am in your debt always, and if you should ever need anything, you have only to ask. But as to your kind concern, when things began to deteriorate all those years ago, I took the precaution of depositing a certain sum that my devices had brought me in a French bank. If I can get to Paris, I will have all the money I need.”

“The packet leaves from the airfield at Hampstead Heath every day at noon,” Andrew said, speaking automatically while his mind spun. Why should a scientist of her caliber flee the country? Why was she in Claire’s debt if the latter had merely called upon her during her incarceration? Why should she not stay and reap the fame and benefits of her inventions? Times had changed. She was no longer the only woman in the Royal Society of Engineers—in fact, there were some among the younger generation who venerated her in the same way people venerated the Queen.

As for her time in Bedlam, well, it was quite clear that however she had gone in, when she came out she was perfectly sane. Such an ordeal could only add to her mystique.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand either,” he said at last. “Your career was brilliant. You could have all of Wit London at your feet. In fact, once the newspapers find out that you’re free, I have no doubt you’ll—”

Dr. Craig’s hand came down on the drawings with the sound of a pistol shot. “The newspapers must not find out. The price of my help is your silence. No one must know I have been in London until I am well out of it. I must have your word.”

“But—but why?”

“My reasons are known to Lady Claire and young Tigg here, and go no further. Your word, sir.”

“You have it, of course,” he said slowly. “I shall tell no one of your presence here, and we will present the new device as if it were our own. Though something in me balks at misrepresenting your work in that way.”

“You may represent it however you like. Your discretion is all that matters to me.” She turned to Claire. “I should like to return home now, please. I do not feel safe in a place where anyone might walk in.”

“Of course. Mr. Malvern, I shall be back directly. Tigg, you stay here.”

“Sure, Lady. I ’ave my work cut out for me anyways.”

And so Andrew stood there as Claire and Dr. Craig wound their scarves about their hair, and watched them walk away—the greatest scientist London had seen in years, scurrying out of town like a thief, and with her the young woman he had not had the wits to court when he had the chance.

The door closed behind them and he turned to find Tigg already in apron and gloves, hard at work on the great brass cowling that held the glass chamber in place. “You aren’t going to tell me what’s going on, are you?”

Tigg shook his head. “It ent worth the risk, sir. Would you like either of them two on your tail, mad as hornets and with ten times the sting?”

Andrew had to confess that he would not.

*

Claire slipped into the laboratory after having returned Dr. Craig to the cottage. She had left her in the hands of the Mopsies, who, upon hearing of her imminent departure, claimed her remaining time for the walking coop. Claire had no doubt that by the time she returned for dinner, the coop’s leg mechanisms would have been constructed and would be lurching around the garden, followed by a squawking and deeply offended Rosie.

The sounds of clanging and tinkering told her that Tigg and Mr. Malvern were engrossed in adapting the chamber to its new purpose, so she climbed the stairs and seated herself at the desk with pen and paper.

Purchase airship ticket to Paris. (Safe to travel under own name?)

Visit bank for loan of traveling cash.

Underground to airfield or landau (recognition)?

Disguise? (Hair color? False padding?)

While at ticket office, inquire re self and 5 children to Cornwall.

A scrape of boot heels on the stairs brought her head up, and she smiled as Andrew emerged. He looked startled, and she hastened to reassure him. “I am not trying to usurp your place, I promise.” She stuffed the paper into her reticule and capped his fountain pen. “I was merely making a list.”

“You looked perfectly well behind the desk, and you know you may do as you like up here.” He picked up a book teetering on a stack, then put it down again.

“Those are to go on the shelves, there, as soon as I find somewhere to put the stacks of treatises.” But he did not seem concerned with her organizational abilities, though he had hired her for them. “Mr. Malvern, what is it? Are you disturbed by Dr. Craig’s essentially giving away her devices to us?”

He gazed at her a little blankly. “What? Oh, yes. Yes, I am. Singular, I would say. I have so many questions, I hardly know where to begin.” He seemed to come to a decision. “But I suppose the first one I must ask is, is it really true that you are engaged to be married to my partner, Lord James Selwyn?”

This was so far from what she’d expected him to ask that for a moment she couldn’t think of the correct answer. “Oh, dear.” James really was broadcasting it far and wide. All of a sudden her corset seemed very constricting, and she stood to try and get a breath.

“Oh, dear? My assistant engages herself to my partner without telling me about it, and all she has to say is ‘oh, dear’?”

“James told you?”

“James, is it? Strange how I never thought you two were even on a first-name basis, much less making wedding plans.”

“We have made no plans. The wedding is four years off at least.”

“I should hope so,” he muttered furiously to the bookcase. “He’s robbing the cradle otherwise.”

Is that how he saw her? As a helpless schoolgirl who couldn’t be trusted to know anything about the world? “I shall be eighteen in two months. I’m hardly a child.”

I am the Lady of Devices, and I broke Dr. Craig out of Bedlam two nights ago so that we could help you in your blasted experiments, and this is the thanks I get? To be berated and belittled by a scientist who wouldn’t be able to complete his dissertation without me?

She ground her teeth together in an effort to keep her temper. “He very properly asked my mother for my hand, and proposed to me at his home last week. No robbing of any kind took place.”

“Oh, no?” He gave a bitter laugh. “And why so extended an engagement? When two people are in love, they usually want to be bound for life immediately.”

Why on earth did the news displease him so? Why was he being so unkind? “I told him I would be applying to enter The University of London in the fall, and would do my best to complete the four-year degree in three.”

“You’re engaged to a baron and you’re going to university?” He dropped the folio he was pretending to leaf through, and it landed on the stove with a splat. Fortunately, no fire was lit.

“Of course. You knew that.”

“But Claire, when a woman’s future is assured, she hardly needs that kind of education.”

“I don’t understand you. Of course she does.”

“So that on those occasions when you’re not entertaining members of parliament and their wives, or drinking tea with Her Majesty, you can putter with your fleet of landaus out in the garage?”

This was interesting. “James has a landau?”

“No!” he practically shouted. “I’m speaking metaphorically, you aggravating creature. The point is, Lady Selwyn doesn’t need a university education. She doesn’t have to make her living like the rest of us, and it’s a waste of time to pretend she does. Some other deserving person should have that seat.”

“Metaphorically speaking,” she said crisply, “Lady Selwyn will do as she likes. James has already agreed to it.”

He gazed at her in utter perplexity. “What leverage did you use on him?”

“None at all. I merely stated what my goals were, which was to work for you so that you could provide a letter of reference for me, and to apply for the engineering program, beginning in the fall. I will need that letter by the end of the month, in case you are wondering.”

“And if I don’t give it to you?”

She leveled a long look at him. “Is my performance lacking in some way?”

“Of course not.”

“And my collaboration with Dr. Craig, is that not going to be of use to you?”

“You know it is.”

“Then why would you threaten me with such a thing?”

“Because—because, deuce take it—” He crossed the room in one stride, yanked her up against him, and—

Kissed her.

Desperately—deeply—

Ohhh.

Claire’s knees went weak and she clutched at his lapels, her hands moving of their own volition while she fell into his kiss, spiraling into the delicious darkness, tasting him, opening to him, surrendering to him …

This is what it’s like.

This.

This is what I have been waiting for, and never knew.

He broke the kiss and she gasped for air, stumbling back to fetch up against the heavy desk. He turned away, breathing as though he had just run from one end of London to the other.

“I’m sorry, Claire. That should never have happened.”

She could not speak. She was dazed with wonder and with her first taste of pleasure.

“It was a mistake, and I’ve dishonored both you and James. Please accept my apology.”

A mistake? How could something so wonderful be a mistake?

Of course it was. She was engaged to James, whom she could not imagine kissing.

Committed to a man she did not love, and for what? To use him as a cloak? A social disguise so that she could carry on her nocturnal activities without reprisal?

For the first time, Claire realized the price that she would be required to pay.

No. I will not pay it.

There must be some other way.

She would extricate herself from her engagement at once, and then she would be free to kiss Andrew again.

The Lady always found a way.

43

The door closed downstairs. At first, Claire thought it might be Tigg, going out to the landau to fetch something, but no, there were feet on the stairs with a much heavier tread than his.

James Selwyn emerged, removing his gloves.

Andrew turned away, and Claire bent to the nearest stack of papers, tapping them into order with absolutely no idea of what they were.

James glanced between them, apparently seeing no hint of what had just transpired. “Good morning, Andrew. Ah, Claire. I was delighted to see the landau outside just now.”

“I’m usually here in the mornings.” Drat. That wasn’t very welcoming. She was engaged to him. “I trust you are well?”

“Very well. You know, it occurred to me I have no idea of your address, so I cannot forward the invitations that have begun to arrive.”

“Invitations?”

“I’m afraid I mentioned our happy news to one or two people—” Andrew exhaled sharply, but he didn’t seem to notice. “—and now I am inundated by tubes. Tomorrow night, for instance, we are invited to the theatre with my cousin and his wife, and thence to Lady Wellesley’s ball. On Friday there is dinner and cards with the Meriweather-Astor clan, and the next evening some kind of fancy-dress nonsense rumored to be attended by the Prince of Wales.” He smiled at her. “My social life has doubled since I took myself off the marriage market. It’s mystifying.”

“It’s not mystifying at all,” Andrew said shortly. “Everyone knows Claire’s circumstances. They simply want to be entertained by seeing the two of you together.”

“Are you implying there is something amusing in my fiancee’s situation?”

“It’s no secret that she has to make her own way in the world. Those—those meringues are going to be at many of these events, and you’ve seen how they amuse themselves at her expense.”

“I am standing right here,” Claire reminded them both. “I’m not afraid of Julia and her set. I have more important things than their opinion with which to occupy my mind.”

James smiled again, but it seemed a little tighter this time. “Then you will accompany me?”

An idea popped into her head, fully formed, and she had difficulty controlling the urge to laugh. “You may accept on my behalf for the fancy-dress ball. As to the others, I’m afraid I have nothing suitable to wear. I left all my evening clothes behind at Carrick House, which was subsequently looted.”

“I’m sure my cousins’ wives can find you something.”

“No, thank you, I could not put them to that trouble.”

“Claire, you’re going to have to meet my family eventually.”

“Yes, I know, and in four years I am sure I will have many opportunities. But for this week, I simply have too much to do, and too little time in which to do it.”

“Is Andrew working you that hard?” He glanced at him, censure in his gaze. “If that’s the case, I’ll have a thing or two to say about it.”

“You shall not,” Claire retorted. “I’m quite capable of managing my work here without interference.”

“I’m entitled to interfere. You forget who is funding this endeavor—including your salary.”

“I shall forego my salary, in that case.”

This seemed to take him aback. “You don’t mean it. What will you live on?”

“Until we are married, that is my business.”

He gazed at her, perplexed. “Perhaps I was a little hasty,” he said carefully. “Please forgive me.” The tension in her shoulders did not relax, but she inclined her head. “I have another matter to discuss with you.”

“If it is another ball, the subject is beginning to fatigue me.” She swept the treatises from their shelf into one arm, and carried them across the room. Then she began to shelve books.

“No, not another ball, though you may as well resign yourself to them. They aren’t going to go away. This is a more personal matter.”

“Please excuse me,” Andrew said. “I should not be an unwelcome third in this conversation.”

“Relax, Andrew.” Lord James waved his concern away. “I simply wanted to say that among the invitations was one from Claire’s mother, Lady St. Ives.”

She gripped a stack of books as if it would shield her from whatever he was going to say. “Did she want a wedding date for the announcement in the Times?”

“Yes, but I took care of that. She invited us down for a few days, that is all. I believe she wrote to you about it as well.” When Claire nodded, he went on, “It just occurred to me that if I decline most of the other invitations, we could take the Princess Mary down and be back in time for the fancy-dress ball Saturday evening.”

“Go by airship? Not the train?”

The Princess Mary was the air equivalent of the Flying Dutchman—though of course it traveled much, much faster. Going to see her mother in Lord James’s company was the very last thing she wanted to do … but at the same time, what better way to smuggle Dr. Craig out to the airfield and get her on the packet to Paris than as part of her own party?

“It will be dreadfully expensive.”

“For two people? Hardly. I can send a tube and make the reservations at once.”

“For seven.”

“Seven?” He dropped his walking stick and had to bend to pick it up. “Are you planning to take my entire family?”

“No, mine. I should like the children to go, as well.” She held up a hand and counted them off on her fingers. “Margaret, Elizabeth, Willie, Tigg, and Jake.” As her lieutenant, Snouts would need to stay behind in her place. She would, unfortunately, need to leave the lightning rifle behind, and she could entrust its care to no one else. “I believe you’ve met everyone except Jake.”

For a moment, all he could do was stare, and then he closed his mouth with a snap. “Certainly not.”

“I shall buy their tickets myself, so they will not presume upon your generosity.”

“I’m not going all the way to Cornwall with a passel of brats who don’t even belong to me!”

“They are my responsibility, therefore, they go with me.”

“Aren’t you taking your governessing a little too seriously? Where are their parents?”

Time to take the plunge. “They have no parents. They are orphans. I have taken it upon myself to see to their education and well-being, and I think a journey to Cornwall will be beneficial to both.”

“Why … why didn’t you tell me this?” James looked to Andrew for support. “Did you know?”

Poor Andrew looked as though he would rather be anywhere but in his own office. “I knew some of it. But it isn’t really my business what Claire chooses to do with her private life. My business is the four hours she and Tigg spend here.”

“Well, the rest of it is my business! I won’t have it, Claire.”

She gazed at him and for the space of two seconds there was silence in the room. Even downstairs in the laboratory, the sounds of banging and clanking had stopped. Then she lifted an eyebrow. “Until four years are up, my life is not your business. You surprise me, James. Would you begrudge a penniless orphan the chance to see an airship, to travel in civilized company, and to see a great estate like Gwynn Place?”

“It’s not a matter of begrudging. The point is that they have nothing to do with me, and I don’t care to be imposed upon.”

“They are not imposing upon you in the least. They are my responsibility, and I propose it as an educational and social opportunity.”

“Ridiculous.”

She put the books on the shelf in a neat row. “As ridiculous as your balls and dinners. Very well. I decline all invitations, and you may explain to your circle in any way you like why your fiancee will not appear with you at any of your engagements.”

For a moment he appeared to struggle with himself. “Claire, please.”

Her voice quiet, she said, “It is the responsibility of the noble and blessed among us to look out for those who are less fortunate. The children will not bother you. I will not beg, but I will ask you to think of their well being—and my own.”

Was he grinding his teeth? No, she was imagining it. “I suppose you will do what you like, no matter what I say.”

“Certainly. But my mind would be greatly eased if I knew I had your approval.”

“I don’t know if I can manage approval.”

“I would be satisfied with unwilling complicity.”

“It is safe to say you will have that.”

Her smile seemed to make his face soften. At least, his jaw had stopped working. “Thank you, James. If you will be so good as to make the reservations for tomorrow’s flight, I will pay for the children’s tickets.”

“Certainly not. In for a penny, in for a pound, I suppose.”

She savored her victory. All in all, perhaps it would be best if she didn’t mention the sixth member of their little party.

After all, he could hardly pitch a tantrum if the scientist were standing right in front of him, could he?

*

“Cor,” Tigg breathed, gazing up with huge brown eyes at the enormous elliptical shape of the airship over his head, “I ent never seen anything so big in all me life. Not even bleedin’ Parliament.”

Even Jake, who rarely reacted to anything with more than a snort or clenched teeth, did not seem to be aware that his mouth had fallen open as he gazed up past the gleaming wood and brass gondola, to the mooring ropes that held the ship to the ground, to the polished canvas of the balloon itself as it swelled over their heads.

Jake had not wanted to come. “Ent never had my feet further off the ground than the Whitechapel catwalks, and never plan to,” he said, and it had taken all the Mopsies’ wheedling and all the other boys’ teasing to get him to agree. It was Snouts who tipped the scale in the end. “The Lady needs protection, mate, and yer the best ’and I got,” he’d told Jake in a low voice. “I don’t trust his bleedin’ nibs and nor should you.”

Tigg, evidently, had blabbed the entire debacle up in the loft to a rapt audience. Claire was not certain she wanted her personal business common knowledge in the cottage, but it couldn’t be helped. If it got Jake to go with them, she was willing to make the sacrifice.

“Any sign of his lordship, Mopsies?” she murmured. They never missed a thing, and getting Dr. Craig onto this airship with no one recognizing her was vital.

“Still in the bar, Lady,” Lizzie said from her post on the walkway above. “He don’t even know we’re here yet. I ’ope ’e don’t get sick.”

Lizzie’s only contact with boats, floating or flying, had been on the Thames, and nausea had been the result. Claire hoped that her stomach would stand up to the test today.

“Come, Dr. Craig. The steward appears to be beckoning to us.”

“Tickets, ladies? We cast off lines in five minutes.”

Dr. Craig handed him the ticket that had come in the tube this morning, and he stamped it and handed it back. “A pleasure to have you aboard, ma’am. Your seat is second from the bow. Please strap yourself in until we reach cruising altitude.”

Dr. Craig drew a shuddering breath through her nose, and her skin turned white as paper. “Doc—Rosemary?” Claire had agreed not to use her last name aloud. “Are you all right?”

The scientist controlled herself. “Must I be … strapped in?”

Claire felt the cold brush of the woman’s fear on her own skin. Of course.

Leather straps.

“It’s for your own safety, ma’am. The Princess Louise, she’s eager to fly. If you’re not prepared, you can lose your balance when we take off, what with the speed of ascent and all. But of course you can unbuckle them and move about the gondola as you please when the captain gives the all clear.”

Slowly, she nodded. “Very well. It … helps to know I can take them off myself.” She turned to Claire. “I suppose this is where we bid each other farewell.”

“I suppose it is.” Claire gave her a warm smile. “I hope someday to see you again.”

“I do, too.” She turned to the others. “Margaret, remember … the leg mechanisms must be oiled regularly, and you must exercise the coop at least once a week. Otherwise, you will find it unwilling to move when you really need it.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Maggie gazed up at her and took her hand. “Ta for your ’elp, ma’am. We would never ’ave figured out those legs without you.”

“Yes, you would, little gumpus.” The scientist’s gaze softened. “I have every confidence in the inventiveness of your intellect. Goodbye, Master Tigg, Master Jake. I look forward to seeing all of you in the Canadas someday. I expect you will take them by storm.” She knelt and took Willie in her arms. “And goodbye to you, darling. I shall never have children now, but if I had had any, I should have liked them to be like you.”

The steward offered his hand and she mounted the steps, which since they did not actually rest upon the ground, dipped under her weight. As Claire moved everyone back, they could see her take her seat through the oval windows, and in the next moment someone shouted “Up ship!”

The lines were cast off, the mooring mast released the ring in the bow, and the Princess Louise leaped into the sky. In the space of a breath, she was the size of a gold piece next to the sun, and then she passed behind a cloud and was gone.

“That’s a relief,” Claire said. “I didn’t think anyone would recognize her after all this time, but you never know.”

“Recognize who?”

She nearly jumped out of her shoes as James’s voice boomed right behind them. She shot a poisonous glare at Lizzie, who had been watching the ship with her head tilted back and her hand shading her eyes, instead of keeping an eye on James’s whereabouts.

“Oh, no one,” she said easily. “I just thought I saw an old friend of Mama’s, that’s all.”

“None of your gadding down here. It isn’t safe. Come, they’ve just called for us to board.”

The Princess Mary, being a domestic vessel that did not need to cross the sea, was much smaller than the Princess Louise, but she was no less beautiful. After they had presented their tickets, James handed Claire into the gondola and waited with barely concealed impatience for the children to board behind her. Jake stuck to her side as though he had been strapped there.

“Excuse me, you young ruffian, but I will sit beside my fiancee, thank you very much.”

It wasn’t until the steward explained that they could not all sit on one side (“The gondola will not trim, young sir. You must counterbalance the lady’s weight by sitting in the corresponding seat on the port side.”) that Jake grudgingly left her.

He did not relax his vigilance for the first hour, even during castoff, when he resolutely kept his gaze on Claire and not on the ground as they fell up into the sky. Tigg could barely keep his seat, straining against the leather harness as he pressed his nose to the window. “Lady, it’s like a map down there, all laid out so tiny. Look, there’s Windsor Castle!”

Claire had made this trip a number of times with her parents, but there was nothing more delightful than the awe of a child.

“Lady,” Lizzie said faintly, “my stomach feels funny.”

As James made a disgusted sound, Claire unharnessed herself and knelt by Lizzie’s seat. “Come, dear. The ladies’ lounge is to the rear of the gondola.”

The steward appeared as if by magic. “Milady, you cannot move about yet. The captain has not given the all clear.”

“You will have an unfortunate job of cleanup if my young charge does not reach the ladies’ lounge in the next ten seconds, I fear.”

His eyes widened. “Oh. Yes. In that case, let me escort the young lady.”

Lizzie did not appreciate the novelty of a man offering his arm. Speed was of the essence, and they barely made it through the carved door and over to the gleaming metal sink in time. Lizzie rinsed her mouth and Claire gave her a peppermint. “When they serve lunch, I recommend eating lightly. Some soup and crackers, and perhaps a little fruit.”

“But Lady.” Lizzie’s eyes filled with tears. “Those people behind us said there’s to be chocolate macaroons! I ent never had such a thing.”

“That, my dear, is what reticules are for. When we are on the ground again, the macaroons will be waiting for you.”

Color began to return to Lizzie’s pale face. “That ent stealin’?”

“Certainly not. Lord James paid your fare, and lunch is included. When you actually eat it is immaterial.”

“I don’t like ’is nibs, Lady.”

“I hope you will not call him that to his face, Lizzie. His proper address is his lordship.”

“I know it. He don’t like us, so we don’t like ’im.”

“But if you were to give him reason to like you, then perhaps you might change your mind.”

“He don’t much like you, either, Lady. Leastways, not as we can tell.”

This was a highly improper conversation to be having with a ten-year-old. But then, the Mopsies were not ordinary children. From what Claire had been able to discern, they had been living on the streets since they were knee-high. Self-preservation was a finely honed instinct, and the girls had not liked James Selwyn from the first.

“Lord James is used to the company of men, not ladies. He is brusque and wields authority, which we are not used to. He has asked me to marry him, though, so he must hold me in some esteem, wouldn’t you say?”

Lizzie gazed at her while Claire adjusted her hair ribbon. “He don’t show you respect, Lady. You gots to have respect to keep order.”

Claire could hear the echo of Snouts’s voice. “I have him in order, never you fear. Now, if you are feeling better, shall we return to the main salon before that poor steward is forced to come in after us?”

Lizzie clutched at the sleeve of her silk twill jacket. “Don’t marry him, Lady. What will become of us?”

Ah. Here was the crux of the matter. It was a question that had teased Claire herself in the dark hours of the night. And now the answer came to her.

She knelt again, so that their eyes were on a level. “No matter what happens—whether I remain with you at the cottage, whether I marry James, or whether I take ship for South America to build bridges in the jungle—we will stick together for as long as we need to. We are flock mates, Lizzie. You, me, Maggie, Willie, the boys, Rosie … all of us. Do you understand?”

It took a moment for her to nod. “Even if you marry ’is ni—his lordship and go to live in a castle?”

“I do not believe Selwyn Park is a castle, but yes. Even if it were.” Some might see such a promise as rash. But Claire saw beyond that to something greater. She and these children were in the process of becoming a family. If Lizzie—stubborn, willful, disobedient Lizzie—cared enough and was afraid enough to show what she really felt, then there was no way on earth Claire would promise or intend anything less.

To do so would make Claire herself less than she had been. The loss of this child’s faith would mean a loss more terrible than she could repair.

A loss more terrible than that of James’s regard.

“I’m—I’m feeling better now, Lady,” Lizzie whispered.

“I am, too.” She rose and took Lizzie’s hand. “And I’m not talking about airsickness, either.”

44

“D’you mean your mum ent got a steam landau, Lady?” Tigg asked, aghast, when he caught sight of the carriage and four waiting for them outside the airfield at Truro. “And there’s not a steambus in all of Cornwall?”

The shock of such provincialism kept him silent during the entire journey along the Carrick Roads, the great waterway that enabled seagoing ships to come and go between Falmouth and Truro. The north wing of Gwynn Place rose from the trees, and through the open carriage window they could hear the mewing of the gulls as they flashed and swung above the ocean.

When the carriage stopped under the portico, the great double doors opened and there stood Lady St. Ives with Nicholas upon her hip. Claire dropped reticule and traveling case and covered her little brother with kisses, then gave her mother a more dignified hug.

“Mama, it is wonderful to see you.”

“And you.” Lady St. Ives ran a critical eye over her. “You’ve grown. Filled out. Changed, somehow, and yet it has only been a matter of weeks since I left you in town.”

“More like two months, Mama. And here is James.”

Her mother dimpled like a young girl and handed Nicholas to Claire so that she could envelop James in a hug. “I am so glad to welcome you to Gwynn Place. Do come in.”

“Mama, I should like to introduce my young charges,” Claire said firmly, the weight of her baby brother a comfort against her chest.

“Charges? I thought these were the tenants’ children, being given a ride. What do you mean, charges?”

“I mean the young people for whom I am responsible. These young men are Jake, Tigg, and Willie. And the girls are Margaret and Elizabeth.”

To Claire’s astonishment, Lizzie and Maggie both dropped perfect curtsies, and Tigg bowed from the waist, as he had seen Andrew do that day in the Crystal Palace. Willie stood stock still, staring at Lady St. Ives as if seeing a vision.

Jake made a choking sound and turned away to haul Lord James’s suitcase off the rack on top of the carriage before the coachman could swing it down to him.

“Do they not have—my goodness!” Lady St. Ives staggered back one step as Willie launched himself at her, hugging her legs through her voluminous skirts and bursting into tears. “Dear me, child, what on earth is the matter? Now, now. Dry those tears. Heavens, can you not—? Claire, what has possessed him?”

Try as she might, she could not detach the little boy from her mother’s skirts. Even Jake stopped his busy work, his brows wrinkling in concern, as if he were half undecided as to whether Willie needed rescuing or not.

“Willie, darling … it’s all right.” With the baby on one arm, Claire tried to put her other arm around the little boy. “You’re quite safe. We’re home now, at Gwynn Place, where I was born. You shall see Polgarth the poultryman, and the hens, and we shall picnic on the beach tomorrow and try not to have our toes pinched by crabs. Would you like that?”

Hiccuping, his face wet with tears, he gazed up at her mother. His mouth worked, but no sound came out. Claire had never seen anything quite so distressing. At last, Willie backed away and turned his face into Claire’s collarbone as she knelt on the flagstones. His chest heaved with the effort not to cry—as if he were struggling with some disappointment too great to be borne.

“Ah, my little man,” she whispered, the tears merely a breath away in her own throat. “What have you been through that you cannot speak of it?”

He merely clutched her tighter and did not answer.

“Dear me, such a perplexing group,” Lady St. Ives said weakly, rescuing Nicholas and firmly affixing her best hostess smile. “I would ask why you feel responsible for them, but then we would be standing out here until dinner. Do come in. Lord James, Penhale will show you to your room. Claire, come with me and we shall sort out rooms for your … charges.”

Claire put on her best smile and led the little group up the grand staircase, along whose walls portraits of long-dead ancestors hung. There were more in the gallery, but these were of lesser importance. They merely welcomed guests; they did not impress them.

She had no doubt that she would be questioned within an inch of her life as soon as her mother got her alone. She’d been prepared for that. Having made the decision on the airship about the children’s future went a long way to strengthening her resolution.

Along the gallery, then, through the sitting room and the morning room and the library, and up another staircase to the third floor. Male voices told her that James was being installed in the Blue Room, so called because of its bed hangings and its view of the sea. Her own room overlooked the rose garden, the orchard, and a piece of the poultry yard, just visible past a corner of the house.

“It’s fairyland,” Maggie breathed, turning to gaze from the yellow sprigged bed hangings to the sofa and chairs with their upholstery the color of a spring leaf. Gold trimmed the curlicues of her French Provincial dressing table and the matching mirrors on the wall, and the drapes were the same sprigged fabric as the bed, hanging the length of the double French doors that acted as windows. A balcony outside contained nothing but a bird feeder, broken and empty after a winter of disuse. She would have to fix that. “Does her ladyship sleep here?”

“Heavens, no,” Lady St. Ives said from the doorway. “Our—my—room is the suite at the end, with a view of the sea. This is Claire’s room.”

“All this?” Maggie encompassed the space with both arms. “All for one person?”

Claire swung open a cabinet filled with books and papers, pencils, ink, and compasses. Good. Nothing had been removed. “Yes. I grew up here, remember.” She moved to the bookshelves that flanked the bed, both containing the books that had been the companions of her lonely childhood. “See? We can read these stories at night. They’re the ones I loved growing up.”

A broad figure appeared behind her mother and Claire smiled. “Hello, Mrs. Penhale.”

“Good evening, Lady Claire. I am happy to see you looking so well. Polgarth bids me tell you that Seraphina hatched sixteen chicks day before yesterday, and he hopes you will come to see them.”

Lady St. Ives firmed her lips. “Not now, Claire. Mrs. Penhale, if you would be so good as to take these children upstairs and find beds for them?”

“Upstairs?” Claire left Maggie and Lizzie leaning over the balcony and crossed the room. Upstairs was where the servants slept, and no one would thank her for making them share their beds. “They are my guests, Mama. The girls can sleep here with me, and the three boys will all fit in the Raja’s Room with acres to spare.”

“Certainly not.” Her mother eyed Jake, who had ranged to the end of the corridor and was gazing out at the sea as though he’d never seen it before. Perhaps he had not. “When was the last time that young man had a bath?”

“Last night, as it happens,” Claire said tightly. “These children are our guests as much as Lord James is. I will not have them sent upstairs as though they were bootblacks and scullery maids.”

“That young man could pass for a bootblack.” Her mother lowered her voice. “And is the shorter one a blackamoor?”

“What?”

“The one you call Tigg—such an extraordinary name. The one whose skin is the color of coffee.”

Claire stared at her in utter perplexity. “Tigg has the mind of an engineer and the quickest at that. What on earth has the color of his skin to do with anything?”

“Calm down, dear. I was merely remarking upon it.”

“You would do better to remark upon something sensible, then, such as how well he maintains the steam landau. He can take it apart and put it together again as quickly as I can.” Too late, her mother’s eyebrows began to rise, and Claire realized what she had said. Well, there was nothing for it now. “Gorse taught me.”

“Then I am devoutly thankful it did not come with you. Honestly, after visiting these children upon us, nothing you do will surprise me anymore. Fine, then. The girls will stay with you, if you insist. But upstairs the boys will go, and that is that. The second footman has engaged himself to that redheaded cook of Sir Richard’s, so he has left an empty room. They can use that.”

“Mother—”

By this time, Tigg and Jake had heard the fuss and hovered in the hall outside. “It’s all right, Lady,” Tigg said. “We c’n sleep on a pallet in the stable, if it comes to that. We done worse.”

“Certainly not. You are my guests.”

“If it’s all the same to you, Lady, I wouldn’t catch a wink in a room like this.” Jake gazed at her dear sprigged curtains as though they might billow out and wrap themselves around his neck. “Upstairs might be less’n you want, but it’s better’n we’ve ’ad lots of places.”

“A sensible young man,” Lady St. Ives said. “I don’t know where you found that coat, but if you do not want to be mistaken for a bootblack, you must find another. You’re about the size of my late husband’s younger brother, who was lost at sea. Let me see if I can locate something of his for you.”

Jake looked as though he wasn’t sure about wearing the clothes of a dead man, but he had the sense not to argue. “Thank you, milady.”

Another revelation. Claire had never before heard him thank anyone, either.

*

Since they were to dine en famille in the conservatory, there was no need for evening clothes. All the same, Claire looked through the dresses in her closet since tomorrow they were to go to Sir Richard’s and she had nothing suitable. Everything looked impossibly young, not to mention short in the hems. She had grown since she was down last summer—grown and changed in mind as well as body.

The fact that she could carry a point with her mother and actually win was proof of that.

After the fresh-caught fish, salad, and ham, the hour grew late. A tour of the house and grounds was enough to exhaust Willie, and the girls began to fade as well. Claire put them to bed, said good night to Tigg and Jake, and girded her mind to return to the music room, where Lady St. Ives was entertaining James at the piano.

“Ah.” Her mother ceased her cheery runs up and down the keys, and settled herself on the sofa. She patted the cushion next to her. “Come here, dear. We have much to discuss, and if I know you, you will go to visit Polgarth in the morning and that will be the last I see of you.”

James leaned on the mantel, a thin cigarillo between his fingers. Rather pointedly, Claire crossed the room and opened the window, then seated herself and prepared to face the music.

“Dear James tells me that you are planning to go to The University of London in the fall, and your engagement will be a long one. Claire, you astonish me.”

She ignored the last bit. “James is quite correct. That is why the announcement went in the Times without a wedding date.”

“But why?” Her mother’s eyes were genuinely distressed. “I cannot understand why you would not marry within six months, especially when you are living from hand to mouth—where are you living, exactly, if it is not with your great-aunts Beaton?”

“I have a cottage on the river, Mama, that is quite comfortable and meets the children’s needs. I school them in chemistry and physics, arithmetic and reading, as well as outdoor pursuits such as climbing, walking, running, and gardening. We even have a chicken.”

“And how did you come upon this … cottage?” James inquired, turning the cigarillo in his fingers as if its incendiary properties interested him.

“I bought it,” she said bluntly. “My income is quite up to the task, I assure you.”

“You bought a cottage?” Lady St. Ives, who as an heiress had never done such a thing in her life, stared at her incredulously. “What income?”

“Really, mother, do you expect me to discuss such things in front of a gentleman?”

“Since your income is partly financed by me, I find the subject very interesting,” James said. “I certainly don’t pay you enough to buy cottages.”

She lifted her chin. “Be thankful I don’t ask you for a pay rise, then.”

“Claire! I find this most distasteful. One does not accept pay from one’s fiance, much less joke about it. It’s just not done.”

“In your world, Mama, of course it isn’t. But in mine, I see no reason why I should not be paid for the work I do. Joke though it is.”

“You would not have to work at all if you would be sensible and marry James at Christmas like a normal person. I hope you do not expect me to finance this university nonsense. We are barely getting by here, and Lord James is—” She glanced at him and stopped.

“Of course not. I do not expect James to finance it, either. I expect I will have to sell some of my shares in the Midland Railroad.”

James fumbled his cigarillo, dropped it on the hearth, and was forced to toe it half smoked into the grate. But before he could say a word, Lady St. Ives waved Claire off, looking faint. “I cannot listen to you. Have the goodness to keep your commercial transactions to yourself. This topic is in the very worst of taste.”

“I did say so earlier, Mama. Tell me, if we are to dine with Sir Richard tomorrow, might I borrow an evening dress? Every frock I owned was looted the night I left Carrick House.”

“I suppose you will have grown out of your country clothes. Yes, I will see what Silvie can find for you. And while we are there, please have the goodness to keep these subjects to yourself. I am sure Sir Richard does not want to know.”

“I can promise you that.”

“I suppose there is no use attempting to persuade you to come and live here?”

“None at all, Mama. I am very happy where I am. I am doing satisfying work, and then there are the children.”

“Ah yes,” her mother said. “The children. Do you expect them to accompany us to dinner?”

“Of course not. Would you bring Nicholas?”

“No. Well, I must say, that is a relief. Mrs. Penhale will look after them in the kitchen.”

“I’m sure they would much prefer that in any case. Tonight’s dinner was enough of a trial. I’m afraid I haven’t had much time for the finer points of their educations. Managing the basics keeps my hands full.”

“Where exactly did they come from, if they do not even know a soup spoon from a dessert fork?”

“An excellent question,” James put in.

A sound came from the hall outside. Probably the footman, lighting the electricks.

The silverware had been a trial, but Claire had done her best to show the Mopsies what each gleaming utensil was for. With the boys she had not been so successful, and they’d eaten their entire dinner with knife and spoon. “In the course of my getting settled, I met them and realized they would benefit from a mutual arrangement. We had much to teach each other. When the cottage came available, it seemed natural to include them so that their educations might continue.”

“Yes, but who do they belong to?” her mother insisted. “Where are their families?”

“They are orphans.”

“Did you adopt them from an orphanage? I simply do not understand how you can go from graduating from St. Cecelia’s on one day to acting as a mother hen on the next.”

“The riots changed everything, Mama.”

“I am well aware of that, since I cannot sell that house for love nor money.”

“Lady Flora, if I might suggest something?” James put in.

“Do, please. I so long for a man’s guidance in these matters.”

Oh, good heavens. Surely she hadn’t just fluttered her eyelashes at him? Claire frowned.

“The Wilton Crescent address is a good one, and the house is sound,” James said. “It just needs repair and cleaning out. If you will sell it to me, I could offer you a good price for it.” He turned his gaze on Claire. “And then Claire could move back in and live there in comfort while she pursues her education. When we are married, I will sell my town house and live there as well.”

Another sound, like the scuff of a boot on carpet. No one seemed to notice but she. Perhaps her senses were more attuned to such things since she had to depend on them more.

Lady St. Ives clasped her hands in delight. “Oh, would you? His lordship bought that house when we were married, and it broke my heart to hear of it being mistreated by those vandals. It’s a wonderful plan, James. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

“What do you think, Claire?” James strolled to the sofa opposite and stretched his legs out in front of him. “Would you like to return to familiar ground?”

The invisible ropes of his will tightened around her shoulders and feet—she could almost feel their physical touch. Why had he never mentioned a word of this to her? On the outside, it seemed highly reasonable—generous—thoughtful. But on the inside … there was the soft touch of the rope.

“I must confess, I’ve thought of it often,” she said slowly. “There would certainly be enough room for the children, and—”

“I was not thinking of the children, Claire,” he said. “I was thinking of you, going to classes, growing in intellect and confidence, and becoming the woman who will be my bride.”

“That is kind and generous of you, James. But I must think of the children, since no one else can. They are my responsibility.”

“Can you see that ragamuffin lot in Wilton Crescent?” Lady St. Ives leaned over and lowered her voice, though there was no one in the room but the three of them. “They would be arrested the moment they stepped into the garden.”

“You must return them to where you found them and get on with your life,” James said. “You must be reasonable. Think of it from my point of view. I want a family of my own, not five castoffs from who knows where running wild about the place.”

Claire got up and closed the window. She was feeling chilled.

When she returned to her seat, she took the long way around the sofa, allowing her to see out into the hall. Aha. As she had suspected, Jake had not relaxed his vigilance. Snouts had told him to keep an eye on her, and he was fulfilling his duty to the letter. A movement behind him told her Tigg was with him.

She should feel perturbed that they had overheard the details of her finances—that they were witness to this loving grilling. But she was not.

In point of fact, it only made her more sure that she was doing the right thing. You must. You must. The last man who had said You must to her was no doubt still nursing his burns and mourning the loss of his future progeny.

“And what of my commitment, James? I gave the children my word that we would not be separated, no matter our circumstances.”

“I suppose we should consider, then, which is more important—your commitment to a group of alley mice, or your commitment to me.”

“They are not alley mice.”

“Not any more, perhaps. Do not mistake me, dear. I admire your attempts to civilize them, spoons and forks notwithstanding. But you must look at the longer view.”

If he said those two words to her once more … Her trigger finger twitched, and she clasped her hands in her lap.

“So then, as I understand it, I may live in Carrick House until we are married, but I can only do so if I am alone.”

“If you truly own this cottage, as you say, then the children can stay there, as long as there is some responsible person with them, of course.”

“Otherwise they might return to being alley mice.”

James inclined his head in agreement, completely missing the edge to her tone.

Very well, then. “Since I am educating them, such a scheme would not be practical. I prefer to live in my own home, thank you. But do not let this dissuade you from buying Carrick House, James. You must, of course, do as you like.”

He looked so flummoxed she realized that he had not thought she might turn him down.

“Claire, I won’t have it.” Lady St. Ives leaped into the conversation once more. “You are not only ridiculous, you are unladylike to insist upon living with these children when a good man is perfectly willing to provide for you. I insist that you accept his offer and do as he suggests.”

“I am very sorry, Mama, but I cannot. I will not go back on my word. If the children cannot live with me at Carrick House—and I mean all of them, because there are at least a dozen back at the cottage—then I cannot live there, either.”

“There are more?” James’s face was slack with disbelief. “How many indigent orphans have you been concealing?”

“I haven’t been concealing any. You simply made an incorrect assumption about the five I have with me.”

James rose abruptly and stalked to the window. “I give up,” she thought she heard him mutter, but she couldn’t be sure.

Lady St. Ives gazed at her. “I have brought you up and lived in the same house with you for seventeen years … but I do not know you at all.”

“I have grown up, Mama,” Claire said gently. “I hope you will become acquainted with me as I am, not as you once wished me to be.”

“Acquainted?” Her mother shook her head and rose gracefully from the sofa. “A good choice of words. One I never thought I would use of my own daughter.”

And she swept from the room, never even noticing the two shadows that withdrew into the darkness as she passed.

45

It took a good hour with Polgarth the poultryman before Claire got her equilibrium back. Then, her delight in showing Maggie and Willie Seraphina’s baby chicks washed over the memory of the previous evening, smoothing out the edges and softening the view.

Her mother loved her. James held her in some esteem. They were both concerned for her wellbeing, and it was not their fault that their way of expressing it was not only suffocating, but irritating to boot.

She knelt by the broody-house and pushed her thoughts away. She would not allow them to spoil her pleasure in the present.

Maggie was gazing up at Polgarth as though he held the keys to the kingdom. He smiled at her as he spoke. “Seraphina is a Buff Orpington, of a purebred stock we developed right here at Gwynn Place. She’s a good mum, she is. You see how she uses a special cluck to call to the chicks.” The golden balls of fluff tumbled and ran to her, tucking themselves under her wings and in her breast feathers as the humans crowded around the little wood-and-wire house. “They’ve been listening to it in the egg, see, and that’s how they know she’s their mother.” Willie tugged on the man’s jacket, his brow furrowed in disbelief. “Oh, aye, young sir,” Polgarth said, as if the boy had spoken aloud. “They can hear in the egg once they’ve developed enough. Now, there, Seraphina has realized that you mean her no harm, so the little ’uns are coming out now to see who’s come to visit. Would you like to hold one?”

Willie nodded vigorously, and when the chick was deposited in his cupped hands, he touched it with gentle fingers. Maggie waited impatiently for a chick, and giggled with delight as it ran up her arm and nestled under her curls.

“Ah, ye have the gift, maid,” Polgarth said. “Much as her young ladyship does.”

“The gift?” Maggie tried to turn her head to see the little peeper by her ear.

“Aye. There’s some as have it, and some as don’t. If ye don’t, ye can’t see these hens as owt but meat. But we as have it, we see something different. We see the feathery people that they are, and they recognize it, they do. This little ’un has no fear of you.”

Seraphina watched them with a suspicious eye, and Willie gave Maggie a nudge. “I see ’er. She thinks I might hurt the little ’un, but I won’t.”

Claire suppressed a smile as Maggie unconsciously echoed Polgarth’s turn of phrase. “We have a hen at home, Polgarth, called Rosie. She is of uncertain parentage, but she rules the garden absolutely.”

“Lewis is terrible afraid of ’er,” Maggie told him. “But me and Lizzie, we saved ’er life in the market and she knows it. We built ’er a walking coop, with steam-powered legs, see, so’s we can take ’er with us when we leave.”

“Did ye now? I should like to see such a thing. But you know, this hen alone, that’s not good. Chickens are flock birds. She must have companions.”

Willie nodded and looked anxious. The chick was attempting to struggle out of his hands, and Polgarth took it gently.

“We’re going to find companions for ’er,” Maggie confided. Her chick had fluttered up on top of her head, where it stood like Christopher Columbus looking out at the New World. “But the Lady has said we’re not to steal any. They must be in need of rescue.”

“Her ladyship is right,” Polgarth said solemnly. “Stealing is not for the likes of you. But rescue, now, that is a noble task.” He held out a hand, and the chick ran onto it. He restored it to Seraphina, who relaxed visibly when all her brood were around her again.

“Maggie! Lady!” Lizzie came panting around the corner from the rose garden. “Jake says Cook ’as made us a basket and it’s time to go to the shore.”

“I don’t want to go to the shore,” Maggie said. “I want to stay here with Polgarth.”

Lizzie’s eyes widened and Claire wondered if this was the first time they had ever been of two minds about something. “But you must come. We ent never seen the shore.”

“I’ll see it tomorrow.”

“But Mags—”

“You ’eard what Jake said about what ’is nibs thinks of us. I ent goin’ if he’s goin’. Chickens is much nicer.”

“What did Jake say?” Claire asked softly, the edge back in her tone.

“That Lord James don’t want us to live wi’ you. ’E called us a bunch of alley mice.” She turned a pleading gaze on Claire. “You ent goin’ to do what he says, are you?”

“Certainly not. I made you a promise and I shall keep it.”

“What if he don’t want to marry you, then?” Lizzie wanted to know.

“Then I shall bear that sorrow as best I can.”

*

Not one of her companions, with the possible exception of James, had ever seen the sea.

The sand, a pale gold color unique to Cornwall, stretched in a narrow ribbon along the cliffs above the Carrick Roads. With the wind tugging at her hair, Claire tucked up her skirts into her waistband and hung her shoes around her neck. Navigating these cliffs required bare feet, and the reward would be the soft sand. In seconds, Lizzie had followed suit. Maggie had remained with Polgarth, but Claire had no doubt her sister would chivvy her down here tomorrow.

The path down to the sand was more overgrown than it had been when she lived here, but that did not stop her nimble descent. She, Lizzie, and the boys had run to the water’s edge and let the waves cream over their toes before James and his elegant kid boots even reached the bottom.

“Lady, you were mad to leave this place,” Lizzie sighed. “It really is bleedin’ fairyland.”

“How much belongs to you?” Jake asked. He gazed at his feet as the waves sucked the sand from under them and a tiny crab came to investigate.

“As far as you can see.” Claire waved a hand to the south. “And to the ferry on the north.”

“Cor,” Tigg breathed. “If you only ’ad proper steam vehicles down ’ere I’d never leave.”

“Steam vehicles, and a university, and manufactories from which to obtain parts for inventions,” Claire added. “London has its faults, but you must admit it is a good place for putting one’s intellect to work.”

“But Gwynn Place is for putting one’s knowledge of the land to work,” said Lord James, coming up behind them. “And for restoring the spirit by growing close to nature again.”

He had not removed his shoes, and placed his feet carefully.

“You may explore as far as you like,” Claire said to the children. “There are caves about a half mile that way, once used by pirates to smuggle in brandy from France. I used to find silver pieces in there, and—”

With a whoop, they were off and running.

“We shall have lunch in an hour,” Claire called after them. When she turned, James had unfolded a blanket on the warm sand and managed to sit on it without bringing even a grain of sand with him.

She was not so careful. But the sun felt wonderful on her bare feet and on her face.

“You should have brought a hat,” James observed. “You will be tanned … more.”

“The gulls don’t care, and neither do the children.”

“Ah, yes. The children.”

“James, if you plan to lecture me again, you may save your breath to cool your tea.”

“Now you’re beginning to sound like them.”

“I am simply stating a fact. And here is another. I am very sorry you and I do not agree about the depth of my commitment to them. I mean that, truly.”

His gaze softened under the brim of his bowler hat. “I am glad to hear it. You had me worried.”

“Do not mistake me. I shall not change my mind. But I do wish we could have found some common ground.”

Why was she even drawing out this charade? She had known going in that she did not intend to marry him, so why continue the deception? She must simply break their engagement here and now, while they had both time and privacy.

When she did, her heart and mind would be free to think about kissing Andrew Malvern. There would be no more guilt, no more shame. At the very least, she had things in common with him. What did she share with James, really, except a common upbringing and an interest in locomotives?

She must have been mad to accept his offhand proposal, and the worst sort of flirt to behave as his fiancee when she did not intend to be his wife. There was the protection of his name if her underground activities caught up with her, but even that did not seem worth the price.

And what of his regard for her? She had no idea if it even existed. But even if it did not, she had wronged him the moment she had allowed Andrew to kiss her.

Oh yes, she could serve up a heaping plate of shame without half trying. She was better than this. Best to have it out now.

“James?”

“Yes, dear?”

“Do you love me?”

She could feel him turn to gaze at her, but she faced into the breeze, looking out to sea. “And what has brought this question on now, instead of on the day I proposed?”

“I have had time to think, and to weigh options, and to look into the future.”

“It sounded to me as though you had the future planned out, and I was to stand aside and allow you to put the plan into action.”

Goodness. How soft his tone was, and how cutting. “I do have plans.”

“Yes, but on close observation, I cannot see that they include me.”

She was silent, allowing the truth to speak for itself. Then she said, “Shall we call it off, then?”

“I will of course abide by your wishes, but I must tell you that your mother and I have already come to an agreement. You do not have much in the way of a dowry, but Carrick House is to be signed over to me in lieu of that sum.”

“I thought you were going to buy it?”

“No. Your lady mother and I had a little talk last night in her private parlor. She is most anxious to see you settled.”

So anxious that she would sign over Claire’s lovely house to a stranger. Oh, she would be living there, true enough. But it would never be hers, in her own right, as it would have been before the riots according to the terms of her father’s will. As the cottage was hers now.

“In fact, she was most insistent that I not allow you to attend university. A wedding by Christmas was the price of the house, in fact.”

The ropes. Sliding, whispering, snaking around her. Invisible and potent, they would tie her down as a spider tied down a fly until it was convenient to eat it.

“It would be difficult to agree to such a plan if I were not willing,” she said, her mouth dry.

“You are not yet eighteen, and therefore under her authority.”

“I am under no one’s authority but my own, James. Let us be clear on that.”

“A Wit point of view, to be sure, but one that is not upheld by the law.”

“I shall be eighteen in October. Her authority will have ended before Christmas.”

“You will note that I said by Christmas. I understand it is lovely in Cornwall at Yuletide, particularly for a delayed honeymoon.”

“Delayed?”

“Yes. October is an unseasonable time to travel, what with the shooting and hunting parties. Much better to save family visits for the winter, when one expects and indeed looks forward to indoor pursuits.”

Now she did look at him, swinging around so she could see his eyes while these outrageous things came out of his mouth.

“Are you saying my mother has agreed that we should be married when I turn eighteen, with complete disregard for my plans and hopes and promises to others?”

“In essence, yes.”

“I shall not.”

“I am very much afraid that you must. Come, Claire. You have already agreed to be my wife. Why is that so distasteful to you now, when it does not seem to be four years hence?”

“You know why. Lady Selwyn cannot, of course, attend university.” Well, perhaps she could, but not without enormous effort at lifting the heavy, suffocating strictures of society. The Lady of Devices could attend classes and invent and laugh and breathe the free air just as she pleased, with no one the wiser and no one to tell her she could not.

She was not Lady Selwyn. Not yet.

“Nor can she act as governess to impecunious children,” James went on. “Or live unchaperoned in a house heaven knows where.”

He would take from her everything she valued. And for what? What would this accomplish except the acquisition of a wife who hated and resented him?

“Why are you doing this, James? If you know I wish to be free to pursue my degree on my own terms, why are you risking the utter loss of my regard by forcing the issue?”

Now it was his turn to look out to sea, as if the answer could be found in the spindrift on the waves. Following his gaze, she saw figures in the distance. The children were on their way back from the pirates’ caves.

“I want a family, Claire,” he said simply.

The roaring dragon of her rage sat down abruptly, and coughed on its own flame.

“I want a woman who is brave and principled and intelligent, so that the best qualities of us both can be passed to our children. I want someone who is not a meringue, who will stand by me and face the adventures of life without flinching. Someone who will raise children who can make their way in a new world that may not run on Blood principles. I have had this list in my mind for years, and until I met you, it was just a list. But now it has flesh and form. It has become a real woman. You.”

“James, I—”

“I know you don’t love me yet. I know you don’t like my high-handed ways. But Claire, along with being a Selwyn, I’m also a man of parts. And one of those parts drives a hard business bargain. If I’m too forceful, it’s only because I don’t want to lose what I’ve found.”

The dragon hung its head, quenched and frowning, tortured by the memory of another man’s kiss.

And then the children were upon them, shouting something about pirate silver, and the opportunity to answer him for good or ill was lost.

46

Much to Claire’s relief, when it came time to say goodbye and climb into the carriage for the trip back to the Truro airfield, Lady St. Ives did not bring up the subject of their engagement. Claire was sure that she had hashed it out with Lord James in yet another private tete-a-tete, and trusted him to carry the day.

Instead, her mother gazed at Willie as Claire helped him mount the steps of the carriage. “Strange,” she murmured. “That child looks so familiar, and I simply cannot place him at all. It has been bothering me since you arrived, and I am no closer to an answer than I was on Tuesday.”

“Truly?” James was already inside, along with the rest of the children, and Claire stood alone beneath the portico, waiting for a final hug goodbye. “I am quite certain you have never met before this.”

“As am I,” her mother replied. “But the widow’s peak, the eyes … depend upon it, I will wake in the middle of the night with the answer, and by that time you will be back in London.”

“Then you must send me a tube.” Claire leaned in and hugged her, breathing in the scent of lilies. “You must also tell me what develops with Sir Richard,” she whispered. “I saw how he looked at you at dinner the other night.”

“Oh, pshaw.” Lady St. Ives flushed and shook out the black crystal-pleated chiffon at her wrists. “I am in mourning and it is not appropriate to say such things. Goodbye, dear. I wish you a safe journey.”

During the flight back, it was almost comical to see how the Mopsies’ attitude toward such a mode of travel had changed. This time, they were the experienced ones—quite possibly experts in the field, if the way they bossed some businessman’s little sons about the gondola was any indication. And Lizzie’s stomach appeared to be equal to the challenge—and the macaroons.

When they landed at Hampstead Heath and the airship had been moored to its mast once again, Lord James escorted them to the Underground station. “Are you sure I cannot give you a ride in the carriage, Claire? It is hardly suitable for my fiancee to be running about on trains.”

“I invest in them and so do you. There is nothing wrong with trains.” It was the fact that working people used the Underground that bothered him, not the method of transportation itself. Hmph.

“You just don’t want me to know where you live. This cottage on the river is either a dream or a disgrace.”

“It all depends on your point of view,” she retorted with airy ease. “So, then, a fancy-dress ball at Wellesley House tomorrow evening? Shall I meet you there?”

Surely by then she could think of a way to extricate herself from an emotional tangle that was becoming deeper by the day.

“Certainly not. You must allow my carriage to fetch you so that we may arrive together, the way an engaged couple might actually do.”

“So that you may grill your coachman as to my address? No.”

“Claire, you’re being unreasonable. This secrecy is not only inconvenient, it is ridiculous.”

She reined in her temper. “I am never unreasonable. Your coach may fetch me at the laboratory at eight, which is neither inconvenient nor ridiculous. Listen—I can hear the train. Into the tunnel, girls, or we shall miss it. Thank you for a lovely trip, James,” she called over her shoulder as, bags in hand, they ran helter-skelter down the tunnel to the platform.

It was a relief to see the cottage as they walked across the Regent Bridge, and a greater relief to know that the chemists had not burned it down, nor had it been attacked by some South Bank rival in her absence.

There were, however, a number of chickens in the garden that had not been there before. “Snouts, where did these come from? What a motley lot. And how thin.”

Before he spoke, he made a show of handing the lightning rifle back to her, as if formally relinquishing command. “Me and some o’ the boys were minding our own business up on the watch platform—”

“Snouts …”

“Honest, Lady. It weren’t our fault some bilge rat decided to take potshots at us from the river—I suspect our friend the Cudgel ’as called in a few chips—and when I returned fire, ’is barge began to take on water.”

“But the chickens, Snouts?”

“They was on the deck, Lady, in cages,” Lewis put in. “We barely got ’em off in the skiff afore the old wreck sank.”

“You sank a barge and stole its cargo?” she said, aghast. “After I gave strict instructions that any birds were to be rescues only?”

“Lady, if that weren’t a rescue, I dunno what you’d call it,” Lewis protested. “Them bilge rats was swimmin’ for the Chelsea Embankment fast as they could go, never mind that them cages was shut fast and them birds trapped in ’em.”

“Poor birds was cover, like as not,” Snouts said. “Stolen to make ’em look like an ’armless barge goin’ to Leadenhall from upriver.”

Claire took a calming breath. That did make sense. “Then you did well, and I am happy that Rosie has at least a dozen minions to manage.”

Even as they watched, a big black rooster flinched at Rosie’s flashing beak, and bowed himself to the ground as she passed. The walking coop stumped up and down along the wall, scattering those few birds who had not already learned to keep out of its way.

“I see the coop is operating.”

“Aye. Mopsies sent a tube with instructions,” Lewis told her. “Doc said it was to be oiled an’ exercised once a week, or it’d seize up.”

“Excellent. You all deserve a reward for your heroic behavior. I shall see Granny Protheroe about the prospect of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding for dinner tomorrow.”

The boys grinned and left her to herself.

Home. It might be humble, but how peaceful it was.

She settled on a kitchen chair and watched the Mopsies and Willie catch up to the coop, direct it over to the porch, and cool it down for the night. They removed the ladder from the watch platform overlooking the river—much to the dismay of the boy on watch, who would have to crawl through an upstairs window to go to bed—and leaned it against the door of the coop. As dusk fell, one by one the chickens gathered around the porch, where they could see Rosie in majestic repose up in the rafters. The girls gently persuaded them with handfuls of corn that the coop was the better option, until every one had mounted the six feet of ladder and was safe inside.

“What about Rosie?” Claire inquired. “She must become used to the coop as well.”

“Can you reach her down for us?”

Once up on the chair, Claire could just slip a hand under the bird’s feet. “Come along, your ladyship,” she said, climbing down with her. “It’s time for you to see your new quarters.”

Rosie went, but only under protest. Soon, though, the fuss behind the closed doors settled down, and Claire waved the girls inside much as they had just done with the birds, while Willie climbed into her lap.

Lizzie stopped at the door. “I liked that airship, Lady, and your house, and Polgarth and the chickens.” Willie nodded vigorously in agreement. “But I like it ’ere, too.”

“So do I, me dearie,” she said in her best imitation of Polgarth’s West Country drawl.

“So we won’t be leavin’, then, to go live in Belgravia?”

“No,” she said in her own voice. “I am sorry to say that there is no room in Wilton Crescent for a dozen of us and as many chickens. We are forced to stay where we are.”

Lizzie nodded, satisfied, and went in.

Willie touched the locket on her chest—one she’d had since childhood but had left in her treasure box at Gwynn Place. Lady St. Ives had put a daguerreotype of Nicholas inside it and pressed it into her hand when they’d said good night the evening before.

She opened it for him. “See? A picture of Nicholas, so I don’t forget him.”

Inexplicably, Willie’s eyes filled with tears, and it was some time before she could calm his sobbing enough that they could go in to dinner.

*

“Lady, you’ll be caught!”

Jake and Lewis gaped as Tigg handed her into the steam landau. She pulled the lightning rifle out of its holster and tucked it under the seat, otherwise it would dig into her back as she drove. The buckles and clips of her corselet held their usual accoutrements, and her skirts were rucked up to her knees by their leather straps. A riding hat completed the raiding rig, with a black chiffon scarf tied round it in case she needed it, and her driving goggles perched on the brim.

“I think not, Jake.”

“I thought you said you was goin’ to a ball wiv ’is nibs, not on a firelamp run.”

“I am. A fancy-dress ball.” She indicated a Venetian leather mask hanging from a clip, bought that morning in Portobello Road. “The best disguise is to go in plain sight. I can’t think of an ensemble more likely to accomplish that end, can you?”

“Make someone recognize you, more like.”

“It’s hardly likely anyone from the South Bank gangs will be at Lady Wellesley’s ball. And if they are, it’s for thieving, which I would be well equipped to prevent, don’t you agree?”

“If you say so, Lady.” Doubt laced his tone. “One of us orta go wiv you.”

“Tigg will go with me as far as the laboratory, where he will wait with the landau, and his lordship is going the rest of the way.” Jake made a sound that conveyed his opinion of his lordship’s usefulness in a tight spot. “I will be all right, Jake. I’ll have the rifle in its holster and a vial of gaseous capsaicin at my belt. Which I will not need, of course. These are civilized people, more interested in waltzing and gossip than in wrangling and stolen goods.”

With that, she ignited the landau and pushed out the steering lever. The boys stepped back as they bowled past, taking the familiar road to the laboratory.

“I’ll be interested to see what progress Mr. Malvern made on the chamber this week,” she said to Tigg.

“I went yesterday, Lady. He’s got it all constructed, and said ’e was waiting for you before ’e did a test ignition.”

“How exciting! Does it look like the old chamber?”

“It’s bigger. I could stand up in this ’un.”

“Did he … have any message for me?”

Tigg shook his head. “Just said ’e were impatient to see us Monday so’s ’e could do the test and see wot adjustments we need to make.”

Claire stifled a pang of disappointment. Of course he would say nothing to Tigg. And when they arrived at the laboratory and found him there, tinkering, he was his old self, breezy and self-deprecating and utterly unlike the man who had kissed her so passionately.

Which was all to the good, she thought as the baronial coach pulled to a stop, its horses stamping, and Lord James got out.

“Great Caesar’s ghost,” he said, gaping at her much as Jake and Lewis had done. “What in heaven’s name have you got on?”

“A costume,” she said, twirling like a ballerina. “Do you like it?”

“You look like an air pirate. Let those skirts down at once. Do you want His Royal Highness to see your knees?”

“They are covered in wool stockings, James. It is not likely he can see through them. Why, you are wearing hose yourself. What is the difference?”

He had chosen to go as an Elizabethan courtier, complete with white lace neck ruff and puffed and slashed pantaloons tied at the knee with ribbons. “The difference is that they are your knees.”

“You are being illogical.”

“And you are being intransigent.”

“And you both look wonderful.” Andrew moved between them. “With your masks on, I would not recognize either of you, which is the point of fancy dress, isn’t it?”

“Just so,” James said stiffly.

“So take your matching knees and go have a wonderful time. Lady Claire, I look forward to Monday, when we’ll see what our contraption will do. Tigg, how fortuitous that you came. I could use your assistance, and then perhaps we’ll go round the corner to the pub for a meat pie.”

Tigg’s face lit up. “Yes, sir. I’ll just check the pilot flame on the landau, and be in in a tick.”

It took all of the ride to Wellesley House for James to master his temper and speak civilly to her. There was no receiving line, of course, since it would not do to be recognized at the door, which allowed him to find a circulating waiter straightaway and secure two glasses of champagne. He knocked one back, found her a glass of punch, then drank the second one more slowly.

After that, he was ready to converse. And following that, to mingle.

Secure behind her mask, Claire smiled at the raised eyebrows and smothered gasps that her costume provoked. No Greek goddesses or china shepherdesses for her. The fact that her raiding rig was both sensational and utterly practical delighted her.

“Goodness. And what have we here?” said a fairy Claire assumed to be Titania, complete with glittering wings, in Julia Wellesley’s unmistakable drawl.

“An air pirate, milady,” Claire responded in her best airman’s vernacular. “We moored t’yer roof an’ gots our eyes on yer jewels.”

Julia sniffed behind her silver mask. “What a pity everyone else’s eyes are on your legs. Ah, well. Some people have no sense of propriety and are no doubt no better than they should be.”

“Lord Robert Mount-Batting liked ’em well enough.” Which was the truth. “Asked me for a waltz, ’e did.” Which was almost the truth.

She had pretended to threaten him if he did not dance with her, and he had put up his hands, laughing, and surrendered. His name was on her card for the third waltz—which would never have happened if she had been in regular evening clothes. In her old life, she had been introduced to him at least five times and he could never remember who she was.

Julia whirled and pushed through the crowd, her wings raking the coiffures of passing ladies, and Claire resisted the urge to chuckle. Julia would no doubt be kinder if he had asked her to marry him when she expected him to, immediately following graduation.

“I say, well done,” purred a voice behind her. Claire turned to see the female equivalent of a Cowboy, complete with buckskin skirt, drover’s coat, and a Colt repeating pistol strapped low on her hip. “It takes a woman with a spine to stand up to Julia Wellesley in her own ballroom.”

Claire took a closer look at the merry black eyes behind the mask. “Peony Churchill?”

“The same. Jolly marvelous costume, Claire. I would never have recognized you. Even your walk and your carriage are different.”

That was because she lived under no one’s thumb nowadays. “How did you recognize me?” Heavens, if Peony could, then anybody could, and she would have to leave rather sooner than she’d planned.

“Your voice,” Peony said simply. “Julia doesn’t mix with the working classes, so she can’t tell an imitation airman when she hears one. But I can.”

“I shall have to do better, then. But tell me, why are you still in town? I thought you were going to the Canadas.”

“I am. Persephone leaves on Saturday next, makes a stop in Paris, and I will be in New York by Wednesday night. From there we take another airship directly to Edmonton, and go by train to the mines up north.”

“It sounds terribly exciting.”

“It is. I do regret missing the new exhibitions coming to the Crystal Palace, though. The papers say they will include the most advanced engines ever invented.”

“I shall write and describe them in detail, then.”

“That would be wonderful. And put a few clippings in while you’re at it. We shall get our mail care of the Canadian Pacific Hotel in Edmonton.”

“Expect one from me. Peony, is that pistol loaded?”

“Of course not, or I should be tempted to shoot Catherine Montrose. What about that magnificent device on your back?”

“Oh, yes, it’s loaded. But Catherine is quite safe. It’s for my own protection only.”

Apropos of nothing, Peony said, “Is it really true you are engaged to Lord James Selwyn?”

“Yes,” Claire said slowly.

“You sound as though you don’t want to admit it.”

“I—well, our engagement is—the circumstances are—”

A man materialized at Peony’s elbow and bowed. “Oh, dear, this will be the second waltz. Goodbye, Cl—er, Mamzelle Air Pirate. I want you to tell me the end of that sentence in your letter.”

“Safe travels,” Claire said. Perhaps by then Peony would have forgotten.

*

By the time Lord Robert Mount-Batting appeared to claim his waltz, he was three sheets to the wind. If she had been a better dancer, she might have been tempted to lead, but as it was, she was forced to endure an embrace much closer than she would have preferred.

She had been perfectly right to wear her working clothes. The leather corselet protected her from roving hands as well as it did flying objects or certain kinds of weapons.

“Izzat a real gun?” he slurred, looking over her shoulder. “Where’d you get that?”

“I inherited it, and of course it’s not real,” she said, attempting to steer him away from a potted palm before he fell into it. “I imagine it’s just painted ceramic.”

“Looks real.” He attempted to touch the barrel, and she gripped his hand firmly. “Who are you again?”

“If I told you that, sir, the unmasking at midnight would be dull indeed.”

“Whole party’s dull. Julia’s angry with me. I ought to just go to the card room and stay there.”

Claire perked up her ears. “There’s a card room?”

“Course. Wanna play?”

Two hours later, Claire had cleaned out every man at her table using the very latest permutation of Cowboy Poker.

“I don’t understand it,” one man muttered—a knight with estates in Sussex, if she remembered correctly. “That hand just came out in the Evening Standard tonight. How is it possible for a female to know it already?”

Claire tucked her winnings in the wallet secured to her corselet by a chain, and wished the players good night. It wasn’t until she was descending the steps to the ballroom again that she remembered the supper waltz, which she had promised to Lord James.

Oh, dear.

From the clatter in the dining room, it was over and done some time ago. She would apologize profusely, and consider it a bargain. After all, she had made enough tonight to pay for her first term at university, not counting books.

She collected a plate and arranged a nice selection of food on it, then turned to look for James. Ah, there he was, deep in conversation with Lord Wellesley. She would not interrupt that for the world. Instead, she was content to sit with three elderly ladies behind an arrangement of lilies and enjoy her dinner.

Once she had taken meals like this for granted. But no more. She appreciated every bite.

“—find it most distressing to think of,” one of the ladies said.

“It’s worse than that.” Her companion did not seem to mind that a stranger had joined their party. With everyone masked, an odd sort of anonymity prevailed. “I heard she is to be admitted to a private sanitarium.”

The curried prawns turned over in Claire’s stomach. Had Dr. Craig been apprehended in the midst of leaving the country?

“Well, the family couldn’t very well send her to Bedlam, could they?” Her companion tucked into her salad with enthusiasm. “She’s the wife of an earl.”

Claire resumed her dinner, relieved. Who on earth were they talking about?

“The poor girl. She’s been going downhill ever since that precious child disappeared. I suppose it was only a matter of time before—”

“Oh, go ahead, Alethea. Just say ‘before she made an attempt on her own life’ and be done with it. We are not schoolgirls any longer.”

Lady Dunsmuir. They were talking of Lady Dunsmuir, whose son had disappeared from the garden while his mother entertained a princess to tea. “She tried to take her own life?” Claire leaned forward. “When was this?”

“Two days ago. Such a pity. She’s a shadow of what she once was, poor girl, and no hope of getting better. The only thing that will cure her is seeing her boy again, and that’s not likely.”

“Not after all the time that’s passed.” Alethea shook her head. “It’s certain he is dead.”

Alethea. This was Julia’s grandmother, the Dowager Duchess, and a crony of Claire’s great-aunts Beaton. Claire withdrew, and the ladies went on with their observations of the guests without her.

Poor Lady Dunsmuir. She should send a tube to her mother and let her know how things stood. They had been great friends once, before all the troubles. Perhaps Lady St. Ives would be able to give her some comfort.

Claire accepted another glass of punch from an obliging waiter and watched the dancers for a while, but then began to feel restive. She had never liked large crowds, or small talk, or the kind of empty social events that were more about being seen than about greeting friends. She was good at the latter, and abysmal at the former.

She would go out to the mews and see if she could find Gorse.

Her rig was designed for concealment. She slipped down a passage behind the roar of activity that was the kitchens, and into the rear courtyard. The sound of muffled wood on metal took her to a carriage house, where she found a man in livery beating a curve into what looked like a fender.

“Gorse!” She slipped off her mask and hooked it to her belt.

His jaw fell open and it was a moment before he could say, “Miss Claire!”

She was so happy to see him that she threw propriety to the winds and hugged him fiercely. He smelled of wool and engine oil and bay rum. “Are they treating you well here? Is this Lord Wellesley’s four-piston Henley? What are you doing to it?”

“Slow down, miss, I haven’t caught up with you yet. What are you doing here, and in that getup to boot?”

“It is a fancy-dress ball, Gorse. I had to wear something. But you didn’t answer me. Are you well?”

“As well as can be expected, what with Silvie downalong.”

“I was down to Gwynn Place this week with Lord James. Silvie is very well, and most of that hug I just gave you was from her.”

“Lord James? Ah yes. I did hear a little news along that line. Are you happy, miss?”

“I’m very happy.” Lord James had only a little to do with that, but Gorse did not need to know. “Thank you.”

He gazed at her, then looked at the metal in his hands. “I’m trying to bend this fender back into shape. I’m afraid his Lordship isn’t as handy with the engines as you are. He had an unfortunate tangle with a tree this afternoon.”

“I hope it wasn’t serious?”

“No, merely a brush, but enough to bend this here almost back to the fuselage.” He gave it another whack with the wooden hammer wrapped in cloth.

“Let me help. If I hold it, then you can apply more pressure.”

“But your ball, miss. Won’t you be missed?”

“I hardly think so. I danced once, spoke to my hostess, played two hands of cards and won both, and had my supper. My social obligations are fulfilled. I would like to help.”

They spent a very satisfying half hour repairing the fender, and then Claire got a personal tour of the four-piston’s more sophisticated inner works.

“Do you still have the landau, miss? Ever since that night of the riots, I’ve thought of you and wondered how you were. I did get the one note, but that was all.”

“I am very well. I live in Vauxhall Gardens, in a cottage by the river, and am governess to a number of orphan children.”

“Are you now, miss?” His eyebrows rose. “And what does your lady mother have to say to that?”

“Plenty.” She grinned at him. “But she is in Cornwall, so I cannot hear it.”

“And his lordship? Mrs. Morven seems to think you will be living in Wilton Crescent again soon.”

“His lordship may. I am going to the University of London to study engineering, as I’ve always told you I would.”

“You’re a singular young lady, miss,” he said, admiringly. “I always thought folk underestimated you.”

She only smiled. As the card players now knew, folks’ underestimating a woman was often her greatest advantage.

47

On Monday, she sent a tube to Lady St. Ives tell her about the ball and the sad news about her old friend, omitting the part about the lecture James had read her on the way home. Apparently, the card players had not taken their losses like gentlemen.

Then she and Tigg drove to the laboratory with a sense of anticipation.

They found Andrew already there—did he sleep in the equipment loft?—and the chamber already humming. “Ah, I’ve been waiting for you,” he said. “The coal is ready in the chamber. Tigg, will you do the honors?”

“Me, sir?” Tigg’s eyes widened. “But you’ve been working at it all this time.”

“With your assistance. Go on. Throw the switch. I must observe down at this end.”

“Yes, sir.”

He grasped the lever and jammed it upward with the flat of his hand. The chamber’s hum increased, much the way the lightning rifle’s did, and Claire clasped her hands at her breast. Would it work? Would the months of failed experiments now finally come to fruition?

A glow began to form in the glass chamber, surrounding the coal. “Yes!” she heard Andrew whisper. But before the word was fairly out of his mouth, the glow intensified, and then with a pop it went out.

She and Andrew looked at each other.

“Is that it, sir?” Tigg finally asked. “Should I shut it off?”

“Yes. Let me inspect the coal.”

He unscrewed the cowling and the bottom of the chamber lowered, revealing coal that looked very much like … coal.

Andrew touched it. Examined it. Took it over to a microscope and gazed at it under the magnifying lenses. Then he sat rather abruptly on the unused chair.

Claire couldn’t hold back another second. “Well?”

“Nothing. As far as I can see, the coal is completely unchanged.”

“Try it again. Perhaps it needs more than one treatment.”

They tried again. And again. And by noon, Claire could bear it no longer, and made Andrew stop. “Mr. Malvern, please. You will do yourself harm. It is clear that there is some error in our calculations.”

In reply, he threw the innocent coal so hard against the wall of the warehouse that it bounced halfway back again. “I don’t understand. Your drawings were perfect. Everything that Doctor Craig said was necessary is in that chamber. What did I do wrong?”

“We will find the error,” she assured him. “We must apply our minds to it until we do.”

They spent the rest of the afternoon on it, and when she and Tigg returned to the cottage, the two of them disassembled the lightning rifle and studied the pieces. “It’s the same, Lady,” Tigg said. “The chamber is just a bigger version of your glass globe, ’ere. The cell is the same—I’ve looked at it often enough.”

Claire pushed her hair off her hot forehead. “We can do no more tonight. Let us reassemble it so that Granny Protheroe can bring in our tea. Perhaps the answer will take us unawares.”

After supper, Claire took her usual spot in the garden, Willie on her lap, the two of them watching the chickens nibbling the last few bites of grass while the walking coop stumped over to its resting place next to the back porch.

She gazed at the machine, then turned and called in the open door, “Lizzie? Will you come here a moment?”

Lizzie came reluctantly, having just discovered a cache of cookies. She brought some with her and offered one to Claire and one to Willie. “Wotcher want, Lady?”

“Thank you, dear.” She indicated the coop. “I’ve been looking at your coop and observing that it doesn’t have the usual mechanisms to power the legs. Was that an improvement made by Doctor Craig?”

Lizzie nodded. “She said the steam engine wot went with these legs was too big for our coop, so she made us one of ’er cells, like in the lightning rifle.”

“Did she, now. That was clever. I’m surprised she remembered how, after all those years.”

“Me, too. But it don’t work right away. Jake an’ Lewis made us one o’ them little engines what power the firelamps, only bigger. That gets it goin’.”

“Why should that make a difference?”

“Dunno.” The child finished off her cookie with relish. “But it does. It don’t start to glow without the coop movin’ a bit first.”

Moving.

Kineticks.

The rifle was usually in motion when she used it.

Great Caesar’s ghost.

She set Willie on his feet and seized Lizzie in a hug that made her gasp. “That’s it! You have solved it, you brilliant child—you and Jake and Lewis. Oh, I foresee many roasts of beef and Yorkshire puddings in this house in the future. Run and get Tigg. We are going back to the laboratory immediately.”

Willie roared at this disruption in their evening routine. He clung to her skirts as she fetched her hat and her engineering notebook, and even as she prepared to climb into the landau, he wept and clutched her legs through the practical twill.

Finally Tigg said, “Come on, old man. ’Op in and you shall go with us.”

He subsided in the passenger seat on Tigg’s lap, hicupping and sniffling, his hand twisted in Claire’s skirt. Without the busy day’s traffic, they reached the laboratory in record time, only to find it locked and empty.

“’E’s likely gone ’ome, Lady,” Tigg said. “Do you know where he lives?”

Claire had not filed hundreds of papers without noticing that some had gone to his home address. The wind of their going practically lifted off her hat as they crossed the Blackfriars Bridge and turned left on the Victoria Embankment, then headed north for Russell Square in Bloomsbury.

She pulled to a stop in front of a neat row house with a shiny black door. The son of a policeman and a cook had done well for himself—all due to his wits and ambition. Warm yellow light glowed from the windows, and as Claire shut down the landau’s boiler, she belatedly wondered if he might have company.

Never mind. This was too important to sleep on. “Come along, boys.”

Andrew answered the knocker in slack-jawed surprise. “Claire! And Tigg and Willie. What—is everything all right?”

“More than all right,” she assured him. “We have a discovery we must share with you immediately. It will not wait until morning.”

“Come in.” He led them into a cozy parlor, then to a dining room the size of a handkerchief, where the table was set for two. A woman rose, setting her napkin aside. “Lady Claire Trevelyan, may I present my mother, Mrs. Jane Malvern. Mother, this is my laboratory assistant, of whom we were just speaking.”

Mrs. Malvern began to dip into a curtsey, but Claire forestalled her with a handshake. “I’m so happy to meet you. And these are my charges, Tigg and young Willie.”

Willie sidled out from behind Claire’s skirts and both he and Tigg bowed. Bless their hearts, how proud she was of their manners.

Mrs. Malvern stared at the boys, her greeting dying on her lips when Claire turned in excitement to Andrew. “Please sit and continue with your dinner. Mr. Malvern, we—that is, Lizzie and Jake and Lewis and Doctor Craig—have made the most astonishing discovery. It was in front of me all the time and I did not see it until this evening.”

“Claire, the suspense is killing me.” Andrew did not pick up his knife and fork.

“It is simply this—we are using kinetick energy now. Movement. Andrew, the chamber must be in motion in order for the cell to work.”

“What?”

“Lizzie pointed the anomaly out to me not half an hour ago. Doctor Craig installed a lightning cell in our walking coop. But it won’t activate until a preliminary engine—which we designed for a project not long ago—gets the coop in motion. Kineticks, Andrew. We have been predicating everything on electricks. No wonder we made such an error.”

“Great Caesar’s ghost.”

“My sentiments exactly.” She laid her engineering notebook on the table. “We must modify the chamber again.”

“I agree. Mother, did you hear? Such a breakthrough! I almost want to—”

“Lady Claire.” Mrs. Malvern’s face had gone as white as the table linens. “Who is this child?”

It took a moment for Claire’s mind to move from the aether of science to the room in which she sat. “Which child?” Tigg was seated at the end of the table, looking rather longingly at the filet of plaice on the plates of the others, though Claire knew for a fact he had had two helpings of stew at home. Willie had not taken a chair at all, preferring instead to stand next to hers, regarding everything in this strange household from within the circle of her left arm.

“The younger.”

“Why, this is Willie. Did I not introduce him?”

“You did. What I want to know is, where did he come from?”

“Mother, this is hardly the time. Lady Claire and I must—”

“You and Lady Claire must listen to me. Where did this child come from?”

Claire gaped at her blankly. What was she to say when she had absolutely no idea?

Tigg stirred in his chair. “’E was wiv—with us when the Lady came to us, mum. ’E brought ’er to us, you might say.”

“And where did you find him?”

Tigg screwed up his face with the effort to remember. “It was that ’ot summer a couple of years back. Snou—er, Mr. McTavish, the Lady’s secretary, ’ad been to the river with some of our mates to swim and when ’e came ’ome, Willie was with him.”

“The river. Two years ago.”

“Yes’m. Thereabouts.”

“Mother, what has come over you?” Andrew asked. “What is all this about?”

“Simply this,” she said. “Two years ago, a three-year-old boy was stolen from a garden while his nurse slept. A boy with brown hair in a widow’s peak like his father’s, and big blue eyes like his mother’s. A boy for whom I used to make sugar cookies shaped like stars, because they were his favorite.”

To Claire’s astonishment, Willie grinned at the older woman, his dimpled chin barely level with the tabletop as he stood pressed against her. Then he pushed away, ducked under the table to the other woman’s place, and flung himself into her lap. Mrs. Malvern gasped as she tried to hold back a sob, gathering him into her arms as she spoke in a voice close to tears.

“A boy whose name is Lord Wilberforce Albert John Dunsmuir, Viscount Hatley, and Baron Craigdarroch.” With each syllable she gave him a tiny shake, as if impressing them into his memory, though her voice broke. “The son of Lord and Lady Dunsmuir, who have been looking for him without ceasing these two long and empty years.”

48

It was nearly ten o’clock, and Claire wondered if Lord Dunsmuir would have them thrown out of his library as charlatans. “They have had to deal with all manner of criminals parading boys in front of them, every one trained to pretend he was a lord,” Jane Malvern told them in a low voice. “But young Willie is no pretender. I would know those eyes anywhere.”

A patter of footsteps sounded on the grand staircase of Hatley House, the Dunsmuirs’ town house bordering on Regents’ Park. Somewhere above, a man’s stifled voice said, “Davina, no. You will do yourself harm. Please, let me—”

With a rustle of silk, a woman appeared in the door of the library in a dressing gown, breathing hard. “Mrs. Malvern,” she said. “You would not trifle with—please tell me—” Her wide blue gaze fell on Willie, who until that moment had been pressed against Claire’s side while she knelt, her arm around his shoulders.

She distinctly heard Willie suck in a great breath, and in the next moment he had bounded across the room, the woman had flung herself to her knees and opened her arms, and mother and son both burst into tears as they clutched each other in a bear hug.

Lord Dunsmuir, his shirt collar open and his feet bare, finally reached the library. “Is it—? Davina—?”

“Yes, milord, it is,” Mrs. Malvern said, dabbing at her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief. “It is really your boy, after all this time.”

“But how—? How did you—?”

The poor man did not seem able to complete a sentence. Finally he abandoned the attempt altogether and joined his wife and son on the floor, manfully attempting to keep his tears back, and failing utterly.

Willie looked at Claire over his parents’ shoulders. “Mama and papa,” he said, clear as day, beaming with such happiness that Claire came near to tears herself.

“Yes, darling,” she said. “Your mama and papa, at last.”

After several more minutes, the earl finally collected himself enough to speak coherently. “Mrs. Malvern, you must tell us how this—this miracle came to pass.”

“I think that story belongs to Lady Claire, milord. She has been acting in a mother’s place for many weeks, I think.”

“Lady Claire?” For the first time, the earl seemed to notice that there were a number of additional people in the quiet, carpeted room.

“Yes, my lord,” Claire said. “I am Claire Trevelyan, daughter of the late Viscount and Lady St. Ives.”

“You are Vivyan and Flora’s daughter?” he said blankly. “How did you come to be acquainted with our cook—not to mention my boy?”

“I am Andrew Malvern’s laboratory assistant,” she said, blithely ignoring his lordship’s look of shock and sticking to the facts. “After my family’s ruin, I was forced to seek employment. In the course of that effort, I met a group of orphans who eventually came under my care. Your son was one of them. But I must tell you, my lord, I have been caring for Willie since the beginning of the summer, and not once have I heard him speak. The other children told me he had been struck dumb—some think it was by an early trauma. To the best of my knowledge, the words he just said are the first to cross his lips in two years.”

The countess looked into Willie’s eyes. “Is it true, my darling?” she asked softly. “Is what she says true?”

“Yeth,” he said, and Claire smiled to realize that his little lordship lisped. “They thaid they’d kill me.”

“Dear God.” The countess hugged him to her breast again.

“Thnouts ith my friend. He thaved me from the bad men.” He looked back at Claire. “I love the Lady, Mama. Can she thtay with uth?”

Claire’s eyes filled with tears again as she knelt next to them. “This is your home again, my dear one, and my home is in the cottage. But we will see each other often, I promise. Just because you have come home does not mean you can neglect your studies in reading and mathematics.”

“You have been teaching him?” Lady Davina asked.

“She teaches us all, milady,” Tigg piped up. “I can read now, and do sums, I’m Mr. Malvern’s assistant too.”

The countess blinked at him. “My goodness. I have more to be grateful for than I ever dreamed.”

The earl got to his feet. “This is not the time, but by all I hold dear, I will find the miscreants who took my boy, and see them in gaol. Perhaps when it is convenient I could speak to this …?” He gazed inquiringly at Claire.

“Snouts? He means Mr. McTavish, my secretary, whose nose, regrettably, is a source of great fun for the boys.” She had no doubt that convenient to the earl meant immediately, if not sooner. “Perhaps we might call tomorrow afternoon, if you are at home?”

The countess stood, and Claire found herself in a fierce embrace. “We are always at home to you—to you all. I can never, ever repay you for bringing my boy home to me.”

“My wife is right,” Lord Dunsmuir said. “If there is anything any of you need, anything I can do, you have merely to name it, and it will be done instantly.”

“Your lordship is very kind,” Claire said. “But at the moment, I have all I need.”

“As do I,” Andrew said. “And my mother lacks for nothing.”

“But if at any time your situation should change,” the earl told them, “any of you, even your secretary or this young man here—”

“That’th Tigg,” his son informed him. “He’th my friend, too.”

The earl acknowledged Tigg with a nod, one man to another. “—I wish to be the one to assist. I mean it. No matter what it is, it cannot be enough to equal my gratitude.”

The moment was a good one to exercise delicacy, and Claire and Andrew took their leave. Willie looked confused, and made to go with her, but she knelt and said, “No, darling. Your mama wishes to tuck you into your very own bed, and kiss you good-night. How lovely that will be!”

“You will come back, Lady?”

“Of course. Your papa and I and Snouts are to have a visit tomorrow afternoon, so you will see us then.”

“Promith?”

“Cross my heart.” And she did so.

Only then was he satisfied, and the little group took their leave.

In the landau once again, bowling down the side of Russell Square, an emotionally drained silence reigned until Tigg said, in wondering tones, “Wilberforce. Huh. Wonder if he expects us to call ’im that now?”

“Oh, no,” Andrew said. “You must address him as Lord Wilberforce. Or Viscount Hatley.”

Tigg made a rude noise. “Not bleedin’ likely. ’E’s our Willie, no matter what.”

“I imagine he will be perfectly happy to be known as Willie to his friends,” Mrs. Malvern put in. “And you certainly have a friend for life in his lordship. Goodness gracious me, what a night it has been!”

What a night, indeed. Claire realized with a sense of shock that she had not thought of the chamber or of kineticks or science at all in more than three hours. And somehow, when she remembered the joy that had filled that library, it seemed only right.

*

The Evening Standard

August 26

KIDNAPPED VISCOUNT RETURNS

In a turn of events straight from the pages of a penny dreadful, the young Viscount Hatley, stolen from the garden of Hatley House two years ago while his nanny slept, has been restored to the arms of his joyful parents.

According to a source close to the family, Lord and Lady Dunsmuir were summoned from their beds in the middle of the night to find a group of Good Samaritans—as yet unnamed—with a young boy they claimed to be Lord Wilberforce. As our readers are aware, the Dunsmuirs have been summoned to many such meetings, all of which have been proven to be the work of confidence men attempting to pass off urchins and alley mice as the missing lord.

But the credentials of these unnamed angels appear to have been bona fide, because this morning Lord and Lady Dunsmuir announced to their callers that their son had been returned. Little is known of the harrowing events of his captivity, save that he was sworn to silence on pain of death. The boy has been mute for two years, and only the sight of his mother loosened his tongue once more.

Lord Dunsmuir has posted a reward of 100 pounds for any information leading to the capture of his son’s kidnappers, with a further 100 pounds due when they are proven guilty and sentenced to gaol or transport.

The editors of this newspaper join our readers in thanking Providence for the return of the young viscount, and offer our hopes that his ordeal will soon be forgotten in the joy of his return to the family circle.

49

“’E’s only been gone two days and I miss ’im already.” Tigg finished with the last of the screws on a contraption that, if Claire had to say so herself, was fairly ingenious. Andrew had wasted no time in another trip to the manufactory, and between the two of them, they had created a sort of metal hammock that would set the chamber in motion. Once the cell was activated, the hammock could be locked in place so that the ignition process could occur with some precision in the chamber itself.

“He’s not really gone, you know,” Claire assured him. “His lordship has said we may visit at any time, with no restrictions.”

“It won’t be the same, though. ’E won’t be able to come and see us, will ’e?”

“I shall ask. The Mopsies miss him, too, and the chickens will forget who he is if he does not come within two weeks. But we must understand if Lord and Lady Dunsmuir are not quite prepared to let him out of their sight. Not this soon, at any rate.”

“Are we ready out there?” Andrew called from behind the control apparatus, where he was tinkering with gears.

Tigg scrambled down and put his screwdriver and mallet away carefully in a leather case that appeared to be rather new. “Yes, sir,” he called.

“Come on over, then, and man the switches.”

This time the ignition procedure was more complicated. Tigg set the hammock in motion with one switch, and Andrew raised his arm to signify that the cell had begun to glow. With his other hand, Andrew brought his goggles down to cover his eyes, and motioned for Claire to do the same. When the hum in the chamber reached a pitch that satisfied him, Andrew’s arm swung down sharply and Tigg rammed the control lever all the way up. A blinding light flashed in the chamber—bright as the bolt that had killed Lightning Luke—engulfing the pile of coal. Again, Claire saw the tendrils of power flicker and touch the chunks of coal, delicate as a spider climbing from top to bottom, before the current dissipated and the chamber settled into inactivity once more.

A plume of smoke rose from the coal and was whisked away by the air flowing through the chamber and out through a brass pipe that led out of doors.

Once again, Tigg lowered the cowling and Andrew examined the coal in his heavily gloved hands. He looked up at Claire. “This does not look like the coal we began with.”

“I should say not. All the pieces are fused together.”

“This won’t fit under the microscope, and it’s hot—I must put it down. We shall have to field test it. Tigg, where’s your mallet?”

“Here, sir.”

A smart tap on the coal produced a clink rather like metal hitting metal.

“Claire, Tigg, this is a good sign,” Andrew breathed. “It is hard, is it not? I’m not just imagining it because I want it to be so?”

“Let me, sir.”

Tigg tapped all around the sample, careful not to let it touch his hands. “It’s glowing hot, sir, but it doesn’t burn. How can that be?”

“I suppose if we heated a diamond, the result would be the same. Now, come upstairs. We shall give it another test. The bonfire I lit in the stove should be hot coals by now.”

He carried the sample upstairs in a metal pan, and with the tongs, put it on the thick bed of red-hot coals in the stove. Every half hour, he checked its progress, dictating the results over his shoulder to Claire.

She and Tigg had their lunch, and then she went shopping, since the skirts she had left Wilton Crescent with were getting rather well used. At four she returned to collect Tigg, and found them both upstairs.

Andrew closed the stove door and wiped the perspiration from his forehead. A streak of coal lay upon his cheek, and Claire resisted the urge to use her handkerchief to wipe it away. “Eight hours, and it’s still burning. This is miraculous.”

“Is it safe to say it worked, sir?” Tigg asked.

“I don’t mind confessing to you that I have failed so many times I hardly dare say whether something is working or not. We shall not know for certain until we have a large sample we can test in an actual train. But for now, I will venture to say it looks promising, Tigg. Very, very promising.” He looked up at Claire and stood, dusting off the knees of his trousers under the heavy leather apron. “And it would not have happened were it not for all of you. Claire, I shall write that letter to the university board of regents this very night.”

“But I did not invent the cell, Mr. Malvern. Doctor Craig should have the credit.”

“Doctor Craig shall, when we call a press conference and announce it to the world. But it was not she who designed that movable truss, was it, to create the initial motion? It was not she who made the connection between the walking coop—which I still want to see sometime, by the way—and my ignition chamber. It was you. And believe me, the board shall hear about it from me.”

“Thank you, Mr. Malvern.”

“Claire, I think we know each other well enough now for you to call me by my Christian name.”

“Thank you, Andrew,” she said softly.

She didn’t mean to look at him, then. But when he said nothing, she raised her head to see if something was wrong … and she saw his face.

The naked longing. The admiration. The softness in his eyes.

She blushed, and felt the heat searing her cheeks in all its blotchy unattractiveness. And then Tigg spoke, shattering the spell into fragments.

“I’ll go shovel a bigger load into the chamber, then, shall I, sir?”

“Yes, thank you, Tigg. I’ll be down in a moment.”

The boy clattered downstairs, but Andrew did not move. And until he did, Claire was trapped between him and the desk.

“I meant it, Claire. I shall write your letter tonight … if you still plan to use it.”

“Of course I do. Without a letter of recommendation from a member of the Royal Society of Engineers, I cannot apply to the engineering program. You know that.”

“I do, and I also know that you and James came to an understanding while you were down in Cornwall.”

“Is that so?”

“An autumn wedding, he tells me, which under normal circumstances would preclude a university career.”

“My circumstances are hardly normal.”

“Are you going to go through with it?”

She had managed to bury her conversation with James on the beach under larger concerns, except for the times when the thought of it woke her in the middle of the night. “He and my mother have come to an understanding,” she managed at last. “I shall be eighteen in October, but until then, legally I am under my mother’s control.”

“Are they trying to force you?” His fists clenched.

She drew herself up. “No one can force me. I just wish I knew which was the best course. In some ways he is a good match—”

A muscle twitched in his jaw. “Barons usually are.”

“I didn’t mean in that way. We both have strong personalities and inflexible wills, which may or may not be a good thing. We have a similar upbringing, and a place in society.” She paused. “We share an interest in steam engines and trains.”

“Marriages have been based on less,” he allowed.

“But—” She gazed at him, beseeching.

“But …?”

“You kissed me,” she whispered.

Now he flushed as deeply as she. “We were to forget that,” he said. “It was dishonorable of me to do it, and dishonorable of you to speak of it again.”

“But it happened. And it changed everything.”

“It did?” Somehow, without her realizing it, she had come to stand in front of him. He reached out to grip her upper arms. “Claire, it was foolish and wrong and we must both forget it.”

“Must we? Can we?”

For a moment, entire futures hung in the balance. In those seconds of loaded silence, Claire searched his face, seeing the truth: that with one word, her life and his could change.

And then the door banged downstairs and James’s voice boomed through the laboratory. “Andrew? I got your tube. Is it really true? Do we have a working prototype at last?”

And the moment scattered into noise and confusion, like a flock of startled pigeons.

Andrew released her and went downstairs, and while he explained the mechanics of the new chamber and Tigg set it in motion, Claire filed papers and cleaned out cabinet drawers as if her life depended on it. It wasn’t until she heard her name mentioned repeatedly that she judged it safe to come down, and by then, James was absorbed in the spectacle of the kinetick charge doing its work on the coal in the chamber.

When the sample lay cooling in the metal pan, James realized that Claire was standing with them.

“I can hardly believe it,” he said. “Am I to understand that we owe this breakthrough to you?”

“Not me,” she said. “To Lizzie and Lewis and—and others.”

“I refuse to believe that a gang of uneducated alley mice could have come up with this device.”

“James, please do not call them that. They are far from uneducated.”

“Their names will not be going on the patent application.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Andrew said hastily. “James, the first sample we created has been burning for eight hours—nearly nine, now. If the burn time is consistent, our next step is to test the samples in a steam locomotive.”

“I shall send a tube immediately to Ross Stephenson.” James paused, and Claire could practically see his mind leaping ahead. “If he can arrange to put a train at our disposal, we could travel with the samples to Birmingham, perhaps as soon as the day after tomorrow. Claire, can you be ready to travel again at such short notice?”

“Travel?” she said blankly. “To Birmingham? Me?”

“You hold shares in the Midlands Railroad, don’t you?” he asked with some asperity. “Ross Stephenson is the chairman, and it is only fitting that as my fiancee you should meet him at some point. If this chamber really works, our association could be of some duration.”

“But what about the—”

“No children this time. It is one thing to take a menagerie down to Cornwall to your family estate. It is quite another to take them to a business meeting with a very influential industrialist.”

“James, I can’t possibly—”

“Give it some thought. I hope you will see the benefits of the plan, particularly if your name is to be recorded on the patent.”

“That should be a given whether she goes or not,” Andrew put in.

“And it just occurred to me,” James went on without acknowledging his partner, “that if you are looking for letters of recommendation, what better signature to have on such a letter than George Stephenson’s? He is, after all, a past president of the Royal Society.”

Claire had not known that. But what was this talk of letters when the last she had heard, she was to be married to him practically the day after she turned eighteen? Was he toying with her? Or had he reconsidered his high-handed plan?

She resisted the compulsion to look at Andrew.

And then she realized what she was in for.

A trip to Birmingham, whether by airship or steam train, in the company of both men—one to whom she was engaged but had very conflicted feelings for, and one for whom her feelings were not in the least conflicted, but who was barred to her forever by her own actions.

Oh, dear.

The coal sample was not the only thing, it seemed, to be placed in a most incendiary position.

50

The test locomotive, it turned out, would require a ton of the experimental coal in its tender, so the chamber was set to work in fifty-pound increments, around the clock. Tigg trained Snouts and Jake to take alternating shifts, and by late Thursday, the entire amount had been produced and sent to the railyard in an enormous, lumbering steam dray. Mr. Stephenson had a locomotive at Euston Station that was scheduled to deadhead back to Birmingham on Friday, so they were instructed to conduct the experiment on the way.

He attached two first-class salon cars and a dining car with his compliments.

Clearly, there were advantages to hobnobbing with railroad men. Claire wondered whether becoming socially acquainted with the heads of airship companies might not produce a similar result. She made a mental note to instruct Mr. Arundel to buy stock in Persephone to begin with, and in the Albion Airship Company, which owned the domestic vessels serving all of England. What a pity Peony had already sailed—Claire would bet a gold guinea that the Churchills were socially acquainted with that raffish lot, the Cunards.

James strode down the platform to where Claire stood next to the tender, watching Andrew and Tigg briefing the fireman on the properties of the experimental coal.

“I thought I said there were to be no children on this trip,” he said, without so much as a “Good morning, dear.”

“Tigg is not a child,” she replied with some spirit. “He is Mr. Malvern’s assistant, and has been since the chamber was re-invented.”

“You are his assistant.”

“I am, but Tigg is much more willing to leap about loading chambers and getting covered in coal dust than I am. He thrives on it, in fact.” As she spoke, Tigg was hunkered down next to the fireman, showing him the properties of the new coal while Andrew told him how they expected the substance to behave once they were under way.

“Once again you have outwitted me.”

She couldn’t tell if he meant to be sarcastic or not. The smile that might have accompanied such a statement was missing entirely. “I have not. Tigg is a necessary part of this enterprise—certainly more necessary than I. I am merely window dressing.”

“I disagree. There are more parts to this enterprise, as you call it, than the merely mechanical. There is a social element, too.”

“Which brings me to the second part of Tigg’s usefulness. It would be dreadfully improper for your fiancee to travel with you unchaperoned, in the company of another man. If I travel as Tigg’s governess, then no tongues will wag.”

“That boy needs no governess.”

“My point exactly. He is no child. However, the social niceties must be preserved.”

Having hoisted him with his own petard, she gave him a sunny smile and made her way to the salon car, where her traveling case and engineering notebook rested next to a comfortable chair. A tea service had already been laid out, but she waited until the whistle blew and the train jerked into motion before she poured. Some time later, James, Andrew, and Tigg found her, the latter two ravenously hungry.

“A ton of untreated coal will take us about forty miles,” Andrew said between mouthfuls of egg salad. “I am exceedingly anxious to see what the new material will do. James, we shall have to think of a name for it. New material and treated coal are cumbersome, to say the least.”

“Kinetick coal?” Tigg suggested.

“Malvernite,” Claire said. What a pity Dr. Craig’s involvement could not be known. Craig coal had an interesting ring to it.

“Selwynite.” Andrew snapped his fingers. “That’s it.”

“Now, now,” James said, clearly pleased and trying not to show it, “let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We wouldn’t want the champagne christening to cause the ship to sink, would we?”

At about the forty-mile mark, Claire could see Andrew and James becoming increasingly restive. At fifty miles, they could stand it no longer, and went forward to the tender.

Sixty miles. No news.

Seventy. And eighty. Good heavens. Had they forgotten that she was along for the ride, and had as much interest in the project as any of them? She closed her notebook and packed it away, and located her hat. New skirt or not, danger notwithstanding, she would go forward and find out what was going on.

At eighty-five miles, Tigg burst through the salon doors. “Lady! It works!”

“It’s about time someone gave me some news. I was just about to go forward myself.”

“Mr. Malvern sent me to tell you. One ton of our coal ’as taken this train eighty-five miles. We’re almost to Birmingham!”

“Heavens. Let us go forward, Tigg, at once.”

“No, Lady, they’re right behind me. Lord James says ’e has champagne in his traveling case. D’you think ’e’ll let me ’ave some?”

In the ensuing celebration, Tigg was allowed approximately a thimbleful of champagne—“Oy,” he said, wrinkling his nose, “I dunno wot the fuss is about—there’s nuffink to that stuff.” By the time they reached Curzon Street Station, James was in fine fettle.

He leaped from the salon car the moment it had fairly halted at the platform, and vigorously shook the hand of the man waiting there with his entourage.

“Claire, may I present Ross Stephenson, chairman of the Midlands Railroad. Ross, this is my fiancee, Lady Claire Trevelyan.”

“How do you do?” Claire extended a gloved hand to the man, who shook it with rather more force than Claire expected.

“A pleasure to meet you, Lady Claire,” he said, as bluff as the Prince of Wales himself and at least as expensively dressed. His coat was collared in fox, though it was a warm day, and its facings were velvet. His beaver top hat gleamed with daily brushing, and Claire could practically see reflections in his shoes. “My wife will be delighted to make your acquaintance also. If you will excuse me, I will take his lordship and Mr. Malvern off your hands and down to my offices. My second landau—a six-piston Delage—is waiting to take you out to the house.”

“But I wish to go along and hear the results.”

He looked flummoxed, and glanced at James. “Business talk. No-ho, my dear, it would bore you to bits. Mrs. Stephenson—Lady Elizabeth Drummond as was—will have refreshments waiting for you before we dress for dinner.”

Now it was her turn to glance at James. “Mr. Stephenson, it is hardly likely I would be bored by the results of my own—”

“Now, Claire,” James said in a low tone, attempting to lead her away from the group. “Ross Stephenson is a bit old-fashioned. I’ve kept his knowledge of our arrangements fairly simple so that—”

She cut him off. “Do you mean to tell me he does not know of my involvement?”

“That is correct.”

She tried to keep her voice low and her face pleasant, in case anyone watching should think they were actually having a quarrel. “Then you must inform him of the truth. It is terribly rude to allow him to labor under a misconception.”

“As I said, he’s old-fashioned. In his mind, women belong in the ballroom, not the laboratory.”

“It is time he was educated.”

“It is not the time. Claire, you are making a scene.”

“A scene!” He had no idea of the kind of scene she could make. “Do you ever plan to tell him the truth?”

“Of course, dear, just as soon as the contracts are signed. His opinion of a woman’s place is of no consequence anyway. In the larger scheme, it is your name going on the patent.”

“But James, if he is to give me a letter of recommendation, he must know of my involvement, to the last line and measurement!”

“All in good time, dear. First we must get his commitment to the venture in writing. Everything else will follow from that.”

She didn’t know whether to be mollified or not. But she did know one thing: It was ridiculous that James and Andrew should go off in one gleaming steam landau while she and Tigg were taken out into the countryside in another like a pair of babies in a pram.

Lady Elizabeth turned out to be the widow of an impoverished lord, and had received Mr. Stephenson’s courtship with open arms. His grown children had not needed her guidance as a parent, but they needed her cachet as they made their debuts in London, and held her in some affection as a result.

Claire endured yet another description of the daughter’s ballgowns and wondered where on earth the men had got to. If they didn’t come and save her from this poor woman, she would grab Tigg and run screaming down the mile-long drive. That young man had found a book in the library, and was on the couch opposite, poring over drawings of locomotives and sounding out the words and figures, his lips moving silently.

Lucky Tigg. At least he had something of interest to occupy his mind.

At last came the crunch of gravel in the sweep outside, and Lady Elizabeth smiled brightly. “This will be Ross and dear Lord James. I do hope they have enjoyed themselves together.”

“I am quite sure they have.”

The men came in then, all bonhomie and full of plans for the future. In her days at St. Cecelia’s Academy for Young Ladies, Claire had endured plenty of moments when she had felt shut out and ignored. But it hadn’t been like this. It was one thing to be excluded from a discussion of who would partner whom when the Heathbourne boys came across the square for a joint dance class. It was quite another to be excluded from a discussion of her own invention.

On purpose.

By the man who was supposed to hold her in such esteem.

Any tender feelings that might have taken root during his confession on the beach were rapidly being blasted to ruin with every course during the interminable dinner. She was thankful Tigg had gone away with the upstairs maid to supper in the unused nursery with his book and then bed. He had tumbled to what was going on before ten minutes had passed, and his natural instinct to right what he saw as a terrible misunderstanding would get him into more trouble than Claire was willing to allow.

When the men finally joined her and Lady Elizabeth in the drawing room after their brandy, she was barely able to be civil, and Lady Elizabeth had actually gone so far as to ask gently if she were suffering from a headache.

After that, Claire pulled herself together. Her hostess did not deserve her bad temper. She made an extra effort to be smiling and kind, to the point that Lady Elizabeth was charmed to forgetfulness and would afterward to refer to her as “Lady Claire, that dear child, such a pity.”

Mr. Stephenson poured cognac into a glass and handed it to Lord James. “A toast, my friend, to our success. I’ll come down with you tomorrow and see this chamber in action. Then we’ll want to build a prototype at my ironworks.”

“After the contracts are signed,” James put in.

“Of course, of course, old man.” James accepted the glass and toasted his host with it.

Andrew took one as well. “Here’s a thought for both of you. The Royal Society has been buzzing for days about the new exhibits going in at the Crystal Palace. I submit that our chamber is at least as ground-breaking as any of those engines. Why don’t we enter it?”

Claire drew in a breath. Dr. Craig’s device—her own moving truss—both working together in an environment where every scientist in the city could see it … what a grand opportunity to reveal the inventors of both! Even without Mr. Stephenson’s letter of recommendation, the fact that she had an exhibit in the Crystal Palace would guarantee her a seat in the engineering program. Nothing could trump that.

She could barely keep her seat on the Nile green brocade settee.

“That’s a capital idea,” Mr. Stephenson said. “I thought you were a man of science, Mr. Malvern, but I see you are adept at the public side, as well.”

“Not really,” Andrew said modestly. “But I do know that having an exhibit in the Crystal Palace will raise the visibility of our device throughout England … and across the ocean.”

Mr. Stephenson snorted. “If by that you mean the Americas, I wouldn’t worry about them. They’re so busy scrambling to keep up with us that they have no time to develop anything original on their own.”

“They do pay well, though,” Andrew said. “Did you hear that they have tempted Count Zeppelin to build a shipyards at a place called Lakehurst, New Jersey, so that the lords of industry will have access to domestic airships?”

“I did not hear that,” Mr. Stephenson replied. “Avery Cunard will not appreciate his monopoly being broken by Prince Albert’s countrymen, no-ho, not one bit.”

“In any case, it is said to be the single largest international deal to be signed since our glorious Queen came to the throne.”

Lady Elizabeth looked pained. “Must we speak of money? Come, Mr. Stephenson, gentlemen. Let us turn to more civilized topics.”

The lady had exchanged a title for a fortune. Perhaps she was sensitive on the subject. Claire wished she had not spoken, though. Her father had never discussed such interesting subjects at home, and now that she was being exposed to them when she was with Andrew and James, she was developing quite a taste for them.

German-designed airships to be built in the Americas. Fascinating.

“I believe you should exhibit the chamber at the Crystal Palace,” she said. “The timing could not be better. Were you not just telling me on the journey, James, that the exhibit should come first, and then, when excitement is at its highest pitch, the announcement of your joint venture with Mr. Stephenson could be made.” She smiled at him so sweetly that sugar crystals practically formed in the air.

Mr. Stephenson clapped James on the back and laughed. “O-ho, you have it all planned out, like the man of vision I knew you to be.”

James shot Claire a look that promised they would be revisiting the “women should be seen and not heard” edict later on. “It is kind of you to remind me, dear. Not only will we gain visibility for the device, as Andrew suggests, but the Midlands Railway Company will be seen as leading the van of progress when it adopts a new technology.”

“Capital!” Mr. Stephenson beamed at them all, and Claire prevented herself with difficulty from rolling her eyes.

After that, of course, their host was feeling expansive enough to allow his wife to play a tune or two on the piano. Claire declined his invitation, however. Playing and singing were not talents she was willing to inflict on the present company. If he were to suggest target practice, that would be a different matter, but it did not seem likely.

Though the public rooms were lighted with electricks, the upper floors were not, so the guests were given lamps to light their way to bed. James stopped Claire outside the door to her room as Andrew passed them. “Good night, Claire. James. We will have an early start tomorrow, so I wish you a good rest.”

“Thank you,” Claire said. Stay, her heart cried. Talk to me. Reassure me that James will not ride roughshod over both of us. Hold me.

“A word, dear, if you are not too tired?”

She silenced the longing inside and turned to her fiancee. “Here, in the passage?”

“Certainly not. In here.”

“James, this is my room.”

“I am aware of that. It will offer us some privacy.”

“That would not be proper, engaged or not. What would our hostess say?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. In this one, then.”

At the top of the stairs was a small room fitted out with bookshelves and a couple of chairs. The titles were those Claire had read in her childhood. Perhaps the first Mrs. Stephenson had sat here and read stories to her children at bedtime. In any case, it would do for the present.

“If you are simply going to wish me good-night, we could have done that in the passage.”

He ignored this pleasant beginning. “I’m sure you are aware how dangerous your behavior was tonight.”

Well. Nothing like jumping right in with both feet. “Certainly not. I had a good idea and attributed it to you, just as a self-sacrificing, supportive fiancee should.”

“Sarcasm is an unbecoming trait in a woman.”

“As is deceit in a man.”

“I am deceiving no one. As I explained to you before, we are just being careful about the timing of the information we give. To everything there is a season.”

“And it is my season to be cast in your shadow?”

He gazed at her as she perched bolt upright on the chair opposite him. “I had not suspected this need for recognition in you, this constant desire to be in the spotlight. It is unwomanly.”

“I desire no such thing, except to receive credit where it is due. You are baldly taking credit for my ideas and hard work, and it is becoming increasingly hard to bear. How I shall get through the next couple of days in Mr. Stephenson’s company without telling him the truth, I do not know.”

“Then perhaps you should retire to your cottage by the river and look after your charges.”

Her temper was rolling at a fine boil by now. “Perhaps I should do so on a permanent basis.”

“What do you mean?”

“I cannot live like this, James.”

“Like what? In modesty, content to allow men of business to conduct their business?”

“It is my business as well. Andrew treats me as an equal. He would never dream of passing off my ideas as his own, temporarily or not.”

“Ah, Andrew. And do you view him as such a paragon, and me a villain?”

“I base my views on observation, as any good scientist would do.”

“But you are not a scientist.”

“Perhaps not yet by education, but certainly by inclination.”

“And do you see your current behavior as promoting those ends?” For a moment she was silenced, and he followed up on his advantage. “I have not made up my mind yet about whether to do as your mother asks and insist on an autumn wedding, or to allow you to attend university.”

Her jaw tightened at insist and allow, words that he wielded as carelessly as he wielded power over her.

“I have noticed that,” she said with forced calm. “Particularly in your mention of the letters of recommendation. But I do not need Mr. Stephenson’s letter. Not if we exhibit the device and my name is on the patent.”

“The name of a willful, self-aggrandizing woman will not go on that patent.”

She stared at him, fingers twisting in the satin folds of the bottle-green dinner gown she had borrowed from her mother, as her blood slowed in its course and froze with horror. “What did you say?”

“I am completely willing to put the name of a cooperative, supportive woman on that patent and acknowledge her help in creating the device. I am not so willing to do so for someone who will not do as I ask, who is short-sighted and selfish, and who puts her own needs before those of others and endangers a business venture that has been in the making for two long years.”

It took at least ten seconds before Claire could master herself and not fly at him the way the Mopsies would, fingernails first.

“Are you blackmailing me?” she whispered through stiff lips.

“Certainly not. Simply presenting the terms of an agreement.”

She must break off their engagement. She must rid herself of this man as soon as possible before she committed an act of which society would most certainly not approve. Her trigger finger twitched, and she wound her fingers together.

But if she jilted him, he would certainly expunge her name from the patent, from the exhibit, from the application that would gain her what she so dearly wanted.

Just another few days.

Once her name was published on that patent, she would throw him over so hard his posterior would never recover.

“As you wish,” she finally said.

“You will abide by my terms and stop endangering this deal with your behavior?”

“Yes.”

He let out a long breath. “I am glad.” Rising, he took her cold hand and helped her to her feet. “Thank you. I realize my methods have dampened your spirits somewhat, but in the long run you will not regret it.”

She did not answer, simply preceded him to the door of her room.

“You look very nice tonight, Claire. May I say that that color suits you admirably.”

The door closed in his face.

51

“Lady,” Tigg said as the gentlemen left the salon car and went forward to talk to the engineer on the long, flat run before the grade into London, “I fink the Mopsies are right.”

Claire felt fit to burst out of her corset. “About what, Tigg?” She leapt to her feet and began to pace from one end of the car to the other. Ten down, ten back, her traveling skirts swishing like the tail of an angry cat.

“About ’is ni—er, ’is lordship. Beggin’ yer pardon, but they don’t like ’im.”

“I know. At the moment, I don’t like him very much, either.”

“’E’s leavin’ you behind in this venture. But what I don’t get is why you or at least Mr. Malvern don’t fix it.”

“I don’t believe Mr. Malvern is aware of it. Or if he is, he believes I am going along with it and will not speak up out of delicacy.”

“Why are you goin’ along wiv it, Lady?”

There was the crux of the matter. “I want my name on that patent, Tigg. I must play my part in this charade until that happens.”

“And then what? You give ’is nibs the air?”

Not for worlds would she reveal her inmost thoughts. Not that Tigg would talk, but it was not easy to look at herself and realize that she had let herself in for the whole thing. If she had not been swayed by the idiotic thought of being the first of her set to be engaged, of being the one sought after for a change instead of pitied, then she would not be in such an awkward, uncomfortable, maddening position now.

She had lost sight of herself in the vision of how others saw her, and now she had to pay the price.

“A lady does not give anyone the air, Tigg. She acknowledges the honor of his proposal and declines it with grace.”

“But you’re going to, aye? Decline with grace? Coz I’ll say this, I don’t think ’is lordship is going to take kindly to our continued association, if you get my meaning.”

“I made a promise to you all, and I shall keep it.”

“’Ow? Wot if ’e turns us all out?”

“He will not.”

“If yer ’is wife, Lady, you’ll ’ave to do as ’e says. And if ’e says to turf the lot of us, then there ent much you could do to stop it.”

“It will not come to that, Tigg.”

But perhaps it would.  If she felt oppressed and imprisoned as his fiancee, how would she manage when she was his wife, and all her worldly goods belonged to him, including her very person?

Girls from families like hers had been born and bred for such an eventuality. But girls from families like hers did not end up as leaders of South Bank gangs. And once one had had a taste of respect and authority, it was downright difficult to give it up.

“No, it shall not come to that,” she murmured. She hadn’t meant for Tigg to hear, but his ears were sharp. He sat back and concentrated on the view rushing past the window at fifty miles per hour, and said no more.

When they reached London, nothing would do but that Mr. Stephenson should go immediately to the laboratory. Claire had thought he might go to an hotel, or at the very least, to James’s club, but no-ho. His impatience to see the chamber in action brought them all to Orpington Close in a hansom cab.

Since she was not permitted to be of use, like Tigg, she repaired to the office above to wait until they were finished. She stripped off her gloves and laid her hat on the desk, then walked over to check the mail repository.

Several tubes lay within. One after the other, she sorted them—invoices, a note from Andrew’s mother reminding him of a family birthday party, a letter from the Royal Society giving particulars of the submission process for the new exhibit.

That she read with interest, making mental notes on which points she might best assist.

The last tube contained a piece of hotel stationery, and had been forwarded from Greenwich, whence came all the international mail into the country.

Dear Claire,

Our voyage over the Atlantic was every bit as exciting and interesting as you could imagine. There are fifty passengers, plus the crew, and though accommodations are rather tight, what could be lovelier than waking to a view of nothing but sky of a morning? I’m half tempted to sign up as crew myself, though what I would do is a mystery. There are no decks to swab; however, I could do a passable job at polishing brass, of which there is an abundance.

But enough of my nonsense.

I am bidden to convey the greetings of a friend of yours—Dr. Rosemary Craig, who sails with us. She and my mother have become great cronies, and in fact, since her plans were quite nebulous—oh, to be so free that you could take ship for nowhere in particular!—we have invited her to come along to the Canadas with our party. San Francisco will be there whenever she gets to it, but an adventure in the diamond mines with my esteemed mother is not to be missed.

If you are of a mind to write to her, you may use our address at the hotel in Edmonton. Such fun!

I trust you are well and happy. I am still waiting for the end of that sentence. I find myself fascinated by all the possibilities.

New York is calling. I do wish you were here—we could have made this town our own.

Warmly, I remain

Your friend,

Peony Churchill

Claire folded up the letter and tucked it in her reticule. What a relief to know that Dr. Craig had made a clean escape—and whether or not Isabel Churchill knew of her history, her future as a crony of that lady was certain to be spectacular.

At the conclusion of the day she declined to have dinner with James, Andrew, and Mr. Stephenson, and declined as well the offer of the cab. In this, at least, she could exercise her independence.

She’d come to a pretty pass when taking the Underground was an act of rebellion. But in the doing of it, she firmed her resolve. She would not marry James under any circumstances, even if it meant going into hiding even deeper than she already was until her eighteenth birthday. She would see her name safely on that patent, secure the letter of recommendation from Andrew, and move on with her life as a university student and governess to the children.

Mentally, she waved farewell to Lady Selwyn, Baroness, that fictional being who had never had any more substance than smoke.

She had never really liked her anyway.

*

Andrew heard Claire and Tigg arrive the next day for their morning’s work. When they saw that the laboratory was empty, they climbed the stairs to find him up to his elbows in paper from the Patent Office.

“Where are Lord James and Mr. Stephenson?” Tigg asked, tying his leather apron around his waist as if he expected to begin disassembly of the device that moment. “Didn’t they say the chamber was to be packed up and ready to move?”

“They did, and it will be.” Andrew picked up a sketch and numbered it. “They’ve gone to the Crystal Palace this morning to enter it as an exhibit. They’re calling it the Selwyn Kinetick Carbonator. Once Ross Stephenson gets a bee in his bonnet, there’s no stopping him. I can’t see them turning him down, either. Between James’s influence in Parliament and Ross’s importance in industry, it’s a given.”

“And what about the patent?” Claire looked pale and a little drawn, as if she had not slept very well. But a gentleman would never let such an observation cross his lips.

Andrew indicated the pile of drawings and forms that covered the desk. “They left that to me. A patent application must sponsored by a member of the Royal Society of Engineers. At least in that I can be useful.”

“I know what you mean,” Claire said. She unwound a length of gauzy fabric from around her hat. “I have never felt more like a mantel scarf than I have this past few days. Entirely decorative, prone to gathering unwanted objects, and of no earthly use whatsoever.”

He gazed at her, puzzled. “But James said you preferred the company of Lady Elizabeth. Something about missing adult female companionship.”

“Bullfeathers,” Claire snapped, surprising him with the barely contained force of the outburst. “The unpalatable truth is that Ross Stephenson believes women are mantel scarves. James would not allow me even to join your discussions, much less inform Mr. Stephenson that I had invented the movable truss.”

Aghast, Andrew put the pen down, where it proceeded to ooze a blob of ink on a sketch of the control levers. “But that is criminal. Why did you not tell me?”

“Because ’is nibs said ’e wouldn’t put ’er name on the patent if she didn’t keep mum,” Tigg said, gracelessly putting his oar into the conversational waters.

Claire rounded on him. “Tigg! That is a confidence between his lordship and me, and none of your business.” She narrowed her gaze at him. “And how did you hear of it, pray?”

“The nursery is straight above that little room you were talkin’ in, Lady. I can’t help it if voices come up the stove pipe, clear as day, if you just open the stove door.”

“Good heavens.” She struggled for control—perhaps of her language, certainly of her temper. “You have succeeded in humiliating me in front of Mr. Malvern, Tigg. Thank you very much.”

Tigg’s face fell in lines of distress. “I didn’t mean to, Lady,” he said, his lower lip beginning to wobble. Perhaps, Andrew thought, she had never spoken to him sharply before—and she had not realized that her good opinion was so important to him that the loss of it would reduce him to tears. “I just wanted Mr. M-Malvern to ’ave the t-truth.”

She crossed the room to take him in her arms, leather apron and all. “It’s all right, Tigg,” she said gently. “Of course you did, and it was honorable of you to want to set the record to rights. But you must remember that information gained by eavesdropping must be kept confidential. It can be too hurtful otherwise.”

“Y-yes, Lady.” He sniffled into her shoulder, and she fished her handkerchief out of her white voile sleeve. He blew his nose and mopped his face, and offered the scrap of cambric back to her.

“Keep it, dear.” She turned back to Andrew. “Well, now that you have the truth, I—”

“I cannot believe this of James.” He felt so dazed that he interrupted her without thinking. “To use the patent as the condition of your effacing yourself? That does not seem like him—or like a gentleman, for that matter.”

“As you can see, I have a witness,” Claire said dryly.

Now it was Andrew’s turn to voice his distress. “I didn’t mean I distrusted your word. I meant that I thought I knew him better than this. I mean to say, putting the business first is one thing, if we must stay on Ross Stephenson’s good side. But to require such a thing of his own fiancee …” Andrew gathered his wits with an effort. “Well. We can only do what we can do, and since I am the one filling out this application, Claire’s name will go where it belongs. While I am doing that, Tigg, you are quite correct. You should start disassembling the chamber and get it ready to be hauled out to the Crystal Palace. I sent a tube to a packing company first thing this morning, so we should expect a delivery of crates and straw at any time.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I have laid out a rough schematic of which sections should be crated together. You will find it on the workbench.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tigg?”

“Yes, sir?”

“I am including you on this application in an adjunct capacity. But I cannot very well put Tigg in all its expressive simplicity. What is your full name?”

Tigg’s eyes and mouth formed a trio of Os. “My name, sir?” he said at last. “On the patent? For true?”

“Yes, for true. What should I write down?”

“I ’ardly know, sir. I ’aven’t used it since I was a little shaver.” Andrew waited. Then, with a gulp, Tigg finally said, “Tom Terwilliger, sir.”

“That’s quite a handle,” Claire said with a perfectly straight face.

“None of me mates could manage it, so they shortened it up for everyday.”

“Thank you, Tigg.” Andrew wrote Thomas Terwilliger in the blank. “Two Ls?”

“Dunno, sir.”

“You have two Ls now. Thank you. I shall be down to help you in just a moment.”

“Yes, sir.” The boy clattered down the stairs and, moments later, they heard the sounds of clanking metal and glass as he got to work.

The moment they were alone, Andrew laid down his pen and stood, coming round the desk. He was still reeling from the knowledge that his partner, nobly born and up until now as honorable as the day was long, could stoop to blackmailing the woman he was supposed to marry.

“Do not,” Claire said, her voice tight, as she held up a hand to ward him off. “Do not speak of it. It is bad enough that you know.”

“You should have told me.”

“To what end? So that you could think me spineless sooner rather than later?”

“I don’t think you’re spineless. Quite the opposite. It is James who has shocked me. Claire, if a man can treat you so abominably, what else is he capable of? I mean to say, once one has stooped to blackmail, what comes next?”

She turned away. “That is an ugly word. We merely came to the terms of an agreement.”

“Unacceptable terms, agreed to under duress, if your face is any indication.”

“My face is my business,” she said. “All that matters is my name on that patent, and your letter of recommendation.”

“Speaking of that, it’s right here. With all the racketing around the country, this is the first chance I’ve had to give it to you.”

He pulled the two closely written pages out of the top drawer of the desk, the second one with his Society seal already affixed.

She read them, and color rose in her face. Her features softened, and if he had not been under her spell before, he certainly would have fallen head over heels now. It was all he could do not to pull James’s intended wife into his arms.

Surely she would not go through with the engagement, once the patent was secured? Surely she could not face life at the side of a man who would treat her as less than she was?

She looked up, her gray eyes swimming with tears she was too proud to shed. “Thank you,” she said hoarsely. “I had not expected—that is, you are much too generous—”

“I hardly touched on the half,” he said gently. “The university here should be glad you are even considering them, when you could go to Edinburgh or the Sorbonne and have them welcome you with open arms.”

He realized a moment too late that he had illustrated his point with his own open arms. His body had gone where his mind had forbidden it, and now he looked like an utter fool.

He cleared his throat and got himself safely back in his chair again, the width and bulk of the desk between them. “You will be a great success, Claire,” he said, striving for a hearty, brotherly tone. “Lady Selwyn will be the most brilliant woman in London.”

“I’m sure she will,” she said, and turned away to go down the steps.

It wasn’t until he went to number another sketch that he realized how distant the words had sounded.

As if she hadn’t meant herself at all.

52

The grand opening of the new exhibit wing at the Crystal Palace was the social event of the Wit season. Even the Bloods, whose tolerance of new technologies extended only to securing the newest versions of the mother’s helper when they came out, could not stay away. Every newspaper in England seemed to be represented, and the Times of New York had sent a reporter over by airship so there would be no time lost between the unveiling of a new engine and its subsequent reproduction overseas.

The evening before the opening day, when the general public were to be admitted, a reception and ball were held under the sparkling glass panes of the exhibit hall. Between the huge iron support pillars and the potted palms, tables of food and refreshment had been set up, and down at one end, an orchestra tuned up its instruments. Everyone Claire greeted seemed to be in a tizzy of excitement.

“The Prince of Wales is expected, you know,” someone told his partner immediately behind Claire. Since he had been expected at the Wellesley’s fancy-dress ball and had not come, Claire did not put much stock in this.

She was, however, presented to His Royal Highness Prince Albert, who was representing Her Majesty, and whose particular project was the entire Crystal Palace itself.

“Your Royal Highness,” James said, “may I present my fiancee, Lady Claire Trevelyan.”

She dipped into her lowest curtsey, thankful that the poker players had had a particularly good week and she had been able to buy a new gown for the occasion. A deep sapphire blue, it had the barest suggestion of cap sleeves and was pleated tightly in a vee on the bodice that arrowed down to a tiny waist, with a satisfying long train faced in black velvet trailing out behind. The Mopsies had pounced on a pair of kid opera gloves at Portobello Road, with only a tiny stain on the palm of the left one, and to her astonishment, James had presented her with a diamond necklace when she had climbed into his coach at the laboratory.

“To celebrate your triumph,” he had said simply. “It was my mother’s, and now it is yours.”

To remind you of our agreement, she heard. You will act like a Blood and not a Wit.

“It is a pleasure to meet you, my dear,” the prince said. “Please accept my belated condolences on the passing of your father, the viscount.”

“You are very kind, Sir,” she said. “I know he held you in the highest esteem for your support of England’s position at the forefront of industry. Sir, may I present Mr. Thomas Terwilliger?” She clutched Tigg by the back of his brand-new morning coat before he could dodge behind the chamber. “He is Mr. Malvern’s laboratory assistant and was instrumental in the initial construction and subsequent redesigns of the Selwyn Kinetick Carbonator.”

His face as pale as his coffee-colored skin would allow, his eyes enormous, Tigg bobbed a bow. “Sir,” he whispered.

“This young boy?” His Highness said in some astonishment. “Helped to construct this chamber? Why, he can’t be more than thirteen.”

“He did, Sir.” Andrew stepped away from the control console and gripped Tigg’s shoulder as if to say, Courage, man. “I predict a bright future in engineering for him.”

The Prince gazed down at him, and Claire feared that Tigg might actually faint under the royal regard. “Young man, when it comes time to apply for university, I hope you will send me a note. It is my honor to be patron of the Royal Society of Engineers, you know, and if what Andrew says is true, I would be pleased to provide a letter of recommendation for you.”

“For me?” Tigg gulped. “You’d do better to give the Lady one, Sir. It were she wot invented the movable truss.”

The prince blinked, and before anyone could say another word, Lord James moved in, smiling and guiding His Highness around to the other side of the chamber, where Claire heard him say that there would be a demonstration of the chamber’s power in less than an hour.

“Bravely done, Tigg,” she murmured, pretending to adjust the lie of his coat. “Ineffective, but very bravely done, and I thank you for it.”

“’E were only funnin’ me, weren’t he, Lady? He didn’t really mean it about the letter.”

Lord James, it would seem, had tainted more than one person’s faith in the promises of others.

“On the contrary. Prince Albert’s word is as good as a gold guinea. If he instructed you to send a note, then depend upon it, he will write a journal entry to that effect. His memory is prodigious—and his journals are even more so.”

“Cor,” Tigg breathed. “Who’d ’ave thought?”

“Tigg,” Andrew said, coming around the side of the chamber, “I require your assistance if we are to make the demonstration on time.”

Claire stood back, watching them load coal into the chamber and secure the cowling and pipes. They had modified the design so that the entire engine would be relatively portable, making it more attractive to the railroad men, who would not have to build new edifices to house it. It also meant that, unlike some of the engines in the exhibit, which had to depend on schematics to explain their workings, theirs could be demonstrated on the spot, to spectacular effect.

“Lady Claire Trevelyan?”

Claire turned to see a man in white tie at her elbow. “Yes?”

“His Royal Highness Prince Albert requests the honor of the first waltz, milady, to open the dancing at ten o’clock.”

She devoutly hoped her astonishment did not show on her face. By order of precedence that honor should go to the most senior lady present, which in this case was the Duchess of Devonshire, holding court over there by the champagne punch.

“I am Percival Mount-Batting, personal secretary to His Royal Highness,” the man went on. “What answer may I convey to him?”

Ah. One of Robert’s cousins, said to be in line for a baronetcy for his service to the Crown. He must be a very good secretary indeed.

“Please offer him my thanks and tell him I would be deeply honored,” she said.

Dear oh dear. Perhaps he would not notice the spot on her left glove.

Perhaps the entire female contingent at the ball would not notice, either.

But she would be noticed. It would be in the papers tomorrow that she had danced with the Prince Consort. Goodness, how Julia and Catherine and the rest would fume!

No, no. That kind of thinking had got her so deeply in trouble that it was all she could do to stay afloat. She must leave off thinking like a schoolgirl.

What would she talk about with a prince as they waltzed among the sparkling pillars and under the fronds of the palms? She had no talent for small talk, and no personal details she was prepared to divulge.

Engineering, of course. That was it. Had he not just said he was the patron of the Royal Society? What a relief!

If it had been the Prince of Wales she would have to go and seek out the smelling salts. He was such a randy-dandy that no woman of virtue was said to be safe with him. This was probably why he was so madly popular among the titled set, and why nabbing him for her guest list was every hostess’s dream.

While she had stood there woolgathering, Andrew and Tigg had prepared the chamber, and a crowd had gathered.

“Please stand back,” James advised them. “And shield your eyes—the power of this device can blind you for several seconds.”

He gave an introductory speech, which mentioned neither Claire’s part in the development of the chamber nor the impending deal with the Midlands Railroad Company. They must have appropriated her idea and were waiting for its fame to go far and wide before they made the announcement, in order to get the most publicity.

At last it was time.

Andrew activated the chamber and the movable truss. The familiar hum sounded even over the buzz of conversation and the clink of glasses. When it reached its operating pitch, Andrew raised an arm, then lowered it sharply. Tigg shoved the levers up and a flash of light caused men to gasp and ladies to cry out.

When the smoke cleared from the chamber, everyone surged forward to look, while James explained the coal’s new properties and what it could accomplish. Claire moved back against a pillar, cradling her glass of punch, and realized a moment too late that she had put herself in the company of Ross Stephenson.

He smiled at her as if she had done it on purpose. “A grand sight, eh?” He, too, was dressed in white tie, which only succeeded in making his face look more florid. “We shall be the talk of the town.”

“I was surprised that James did not mention your joint venture in his remarks,” Claire said. “Are you waiting for a more opportune time for the announcement?”

“We’re waiting for the blasted solicitors to draw up the contracts. Lawyers. Have no-ho idea of the importance of timing.” He gulped his champagne punch as if it were water.

“That may be all to the good, though,” she said. “Let the anticipation, the newspaper reports, the public approbation build to a fever pitch, and then make the announcement. That will keep the Midlands Railroad uppermost in the public mind.”

He laughed and patted her shoulder. “You’ve been talking with James, I see.”

“No, I—”

“He’s a good man. Sharp. I like a man who gathers good minds around him. Like that Malvern fellow. Sharp.”

“Like myself and Tigg, as well,” came out of her mouth before her brain could engage and stop the words.

“Eh? Yes, of course. A good wife is—”

Again the rush of words, spilling out of her with no semblance of control. “I am not his wife yet. And I must correct a slight misunderstanding, since you will see the patent when it is assigned … I am the inventor of that movable truss, which creates the motion necessary to build up the kinetick charge.”

“Eh?” His mouth hung open a little, making him look rather like some of the unfortunates in Bedlam. “What’s that you say?”

“We must all move with the times, Mr. Stephenson.” She smiled at him. “A woman possessed of a fine intellect is as capable of contributing to the forward march of progress as any man.”

“You—are you saying that you—a mere girl—? Impossible.”

“Quite possible. Quite real. And quite a success, as you can see.” The crowd had begun to disperse, chattering among themselves about the breakthrough and all its possibilities.

“But James—”

“James concealed my involvement out of respect for your views and feelings, sir. But on this happy night, I only felt it proper that you should know the truth. And one more thing, while we’re on the subject—that power cell on which your whole enterprise depends was invented by a woman. Doctor Rosemary Craig. You may have heard of her.”

She gave him another brilliant smile and observed that now she had rendered him incapable of any speech at all. Trailing satin, velvet, and triumph, she walked away to inspect the buffet.

She had no doubt that he would hustle over to James and demand the truth as soon as he could speak. Well, James could just deal with it. She was tired of being shunted into the shadows and demeaned and patronized, and tonight at least, James could do nothing about it. If he so much as looked at her sideways, all of London would take note, and the gossip would be fearsome.

At five minutes to ten, she was still managing to elude him—not so difficult, since he had spent the last half hour engulfed in a loud crowd of what appeared to be Texicans, if their boots were any indication. The orchestra began tuning up in earnest.

But the one man whose job it was not to be eluded appeared at her elbow. Did he track down all the prince’s partners and line them up like forks at a place setting?

“The opening waltz will begin shortly, milady,” Percival Mount-Batting murmured. “If you will come with me?”

The orchestra played a chord and Prince Albert stepped up to a sound-amplifying horn mounted on a dais flanked by banked flowers.

“It is my great pleasure to declare the New Sciences Exhibit officially open. Please enjoy yourselves this evening, and marvel with me at the wonder of human endeavor.”

The orchestra struck up the Treasure Waltz, and Claire slipped a wrist through the loop that lifted her train into dancing position, curtseyed, and stepped into the prince’s arms. His hand was firm at her waist, his other hand lightly grasping hers. He was an exceedingly good dancer, guiding her about the expanse of the arcade as lightly as a fencing master. After the first turn, other dancers swirled into the pattern, and it was safe to converse.

“I am sorry Her Majesty was not able to accompany you, Sir,” she said. “I understand she enjoys dancing.”

“She does, indeed, but she is meeting with a delegation from India this evening. Some appallingly boring dinner which she is much better at managing than I am.” Claire could not quite stifle a smile, and he saw it. “This is a treat for me, spending an evening in the company of minds with which I feel a kinship.”

“I am happy to be part of it,” she said.

“I understand you have a greater part in certain things than I had been led to believe. That young man said you invented the moving truss. Is that true, Lady Claire?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Admirable. Her Majesty must hear of this. So then I must ask, why is your name not in the exhibit description?”

“It does not matter to me, Sir. What matters is that my name is on the patent application.”

He was silent a moment, twirling her out and back in again in a figure of the waltz. “There is some skullduggery afoot here.”

“No, merely a reluctance to crush a partner’s illusions about the capabilities of women.”

The prince made a most unprincely sound. “This partner does realize that the greatest empire in the history of humankind is ruled by a woman?”

“It is a puzzle to me also, Sir.”

“I will have this situation corrected if you wish it.”

“No, Sir, though I thank you for your concern. In the larger scheme of things, the patent will last longer than people’s memories of this evening.”

“An unusual view for one so young.”

“Youth does not preclude knowledge of people.”

“In that you are correct. My dear wife could attest to it as well. I see that Percy is signaling us from the sidelines, so I am afraid that our partnership is at an end.”

He whirled her back to the dais, where the Duchess of Devonshire raised her lorgnette to see who on earth had upstaged her.

“Thank you, Sir,” Claire said. “For your kindness. And your powers of observation.”

“I was an engineer before I was the consort of a queen.” He bowed, and she curtseyed, once to him, and once to the Duchess, who lifted her chin and passed her with a nod stiff with frost.

Claire repaired to the punch bowl, her heart beating fast, both with relief that she had not tripped and embarrassed him, and exhilaration that at least two people outside the walls of the laboratory knew the truth. She had no doubt that enlightening Ross Stephenson would cause trouble of some kind, but the knowledge that the Prince Consort both knew and approved would bear her up during times of trial.

For she had spoken the truth to him—it was not the public approbation she wanted. James could have his champagne and his crowds. She wanted a career, and it would begin with that patent.

James found her at the dessert table, savoring a fluffy little bite composed of candied fruit and sheer fancy.

“Have you had your supper, dear?”

She had not much experience at galas of this kind, but even she knew a gentleman would have seen that she had all she needed long ago if he had not been wooing his cronies in the crowd.

“Yes, thank you. Try one of these, James. They are wonderful.”

He accepted it and popped it in his mouth. “May I have the next?” She picked up another comfit but he shook his head. “I meant the next dance. It is a polka.”

She ate the comfit herself. “Certainly.”

He drifted off into the crowd again and she decided to join Andrew and Tigg at the chamber. Tigg saw her coming and pulled her off to the side.

“’Is nibs is in a fine fury,” he said, stretching up so she could hear him. “If I was you, Lady, I’d stand ’im by the brandy and keep it coming.”

He had not looked in a fury a moment ago. “Has something happened, Tigg? Did something go wrong with the chamber after the demonstration?”

Tigg ducked his head without answering and vanished around the control console as James approached and offered her his arm. “Shall we?”

Whatever he was angry about, he concealed it as they merged into the circle and the contagious beat that was all the rage in every capital of Europe took their feet under its spell. But halfway around the third circuit, James changed course and danced her out the end of the gallery into a courtyard garden arranged between the wings. “It is time for a little privacy with my intended,” he said.

She could not see his face in the dark, so strolled in a short circle, pretending to admire their surroundings, until he was facing the brilliant lights of the exhibit hall. Still, his eyes were dark wells, and some emotion she could not identify sparked there.

“I hope you enjoyed your waltz with the prince.”

“I did indeed, thank you. He is a very skilled dancer. And an interesting man of conversation.”

“It is conversation that interests me, dear, now that you mention it. What the devil are you playing at, to announce your involvement in this project so clumsily to Ross Stephenson?”

He sounded almost casual. If it had not been for his language and the crispness of his consonants, she would not know he was angry. “It was time he knew the truth.”

“And you are the one who decides the timing?”

“When it concerns me, yes.”

“It concerns more than merely yourself. I was prepared to live with your self-centeredness, Claire, but bullheaded foolishness is quite another matter. It must stop.”

Self-centered! Bullheaded! These were fine names to call someone who was merely trying to stand up for herself. “I am sorry my behavior distresses you. But I cannot unsay words that have been said.”

“You may not, but I already have. I told him that you overstepped your bounds and were merely a secretary. That you had twisted filing the designs in your head with actually developing them.”

“You what?” Claire whispered, so shocked that she was barely able to speak. “You told him I lied?”

“You put me in this position. Thank heaven I had already blacked out your name on the patent application, or he would have been more confused than he already is.”

She stared. This second shock rendered her completely mute.

“Yes. I removed your name from the application.” Gently, he held her bare upper arms in his warm hands. “It’s only a temporary measure, so that Ross isn’t offended. He put down a thousand pounds as earnest money this evening, when we were having drinks in Hanover Square and I showed him the application. It was a necessary measure. But don’t be alarmed—the patent process takes a few months and we can add a name back in at any time. In fact,” he said, drawing her closer, “it would be the perfect wedding gift. I could not think of anything more fitting for my bride.”

First it had been only until they signed the contract. Now it was only until they signed the wedding license. What would be next? Only until they signed the parish register upon the birth of his heir?

Every woman has a threshold beyond which she will not go. And at this moment, Claire realized she had reached hers.

“No,” she said.

“No?”

“No wedding gift. You will put my name back on that application, James, or there will be no wedding.”

“Come now, dear. You can’t tell me that a piece of paper is of more value than our union.”

“I will tell you what is of value. My integrity. My self-respect. And my happiness. All of which you have battered down, leaving no walls in which to shelter a union.”

“I think your emotion and offended pride have caused you to exaggerate.”

“If anything, I am being remarkably civil, since at this moment my actual desire is for a vial of gaseous capsaicin.”

“How very improbable. Not to mention unladylike.”

“How fortunate that I have released you from our engagement, then.”

“I’m afraid you cannot. If you recollect, you are under your mother’s control until October. She and I have agreed on a wedding date, in fact. October fifteenth. The day before your birthday.”

“Agree on as many days as you like. You will have to find me first.”

With that, she snatched up her train and left him, her dancing slippers flying. Weaving through the crush, dodging around tables of food, she spotted Tigg next to the chamber gazing longingly at someone’s plate.

“Billy Bolt!” she whispered as she hurried past.

Without an instant’s hesitation, he fell in behind her. Andrew looked up from his conversation, mystified. “Claire? Tigg? Where are you going?”

But even for him, she did not stop. If she did, James would find some way to catch up, to stall her, and she would never escape. With the instincts of rabbits bounding over tussock and bramble for their bolt-hole, they headed not for the main doors, but back toward the open French doors the waiters had been using. Tigg lifted food from tables and plates as he went, stuffing them in his mouth as if he knew he would not get another opportunity.

The muted roar of conversation and the strains of the next waltz faded behind them as they gained the lawn. “What’s ’appened, Lady?” Tigg panted.

Ah, there it was. James’s coach stood ready, his coachman lounging in his seat with a glass of ale. “You there!” she called. “Lord James would like you to take me back to Hanover Square. We are to have drinks shortly with some of the Society men and their wives.”

“At once, milady.”

She had never stolen a coach before.

It was much easier than she thought.

53

Claire directed the coachman to leave her, not on the square where anyone could see, but in the mews behind the house. “I must make quick arrangements with Mrs. Morven,” she told him, and he did not question her. He merely handed her to the pavement, waited for Tigg to jump out, and rattled off down the street, heading back to the exhibition to collect his employer.

Mrs. Morven had heard the coach, and despite the late hour, met them in the kitchen, tugging her wrap closed at the waist. “Why, Lady Claire! I thought you were at the Crystal Palace with his lordship. Not that I’m not glad to see you, but what …?”

James had stolen her reputation and her future from her. A thousand pounds would not be reparation enough. Nevertheless, there were still good uses for it.

“Mrs. Morven, I know that you are loyal to your employer, but I must beg your help.”

“Of course, dear. And as for loyalty, I wouldn’t worry your head about that. I was loyal to you and your lady mother for long years before this.”

Something in her expression made Claire pause. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that at least a woman could earn her keep in the Trevelyan household. His lordship has not given the staff their wages since I came to work for him.”

Claire stopped edging toward the stairs and gave the woman her full attention. “Why should he do that? He will have a mutiny on his hands.”

“He’s about to get one. He keeps telling us that once he closes this railroad deal, there will be ample money. Once he marries you, miss, we will have a new home at Wilton Crescent. Once the future arrives, in other words, everything will come up roses, but in the meantime, I’ve got to whip up fancy dinners out of nothing but brisket and potatoes and whatever I can scour at the end of a market day.”

Suddenly Claire realized why James had insisted on marrying her, when any other man would have abandoned her penniless family and dim prospects long ago. Ross Stephenson was a man susceptible to the lure of a title. He had married a widow to get an entree into society for his children. He had formed a relationship with James, who came of an ancient family, and with her, whose parents had moved in the best circles, so that he could move in those circles, too. The earnest money he had so eagerly laid down before the contracts were signed proved it.

“Lord James has no money, either,” she said, almost to herself. “He has been putting your wages into development of the chamber. If he doesn’t sign the deal with Ross Stephenson, he will be ruined.”

“I am afraid he is not the catch either of us imagined, miss.”

“No. That is why I have broken my engagement.”

“Have you, miss?” Mrs. Morven smiled. “I knew you had some sense, though your lady mother will disagree.”

“Sense perhaps, but very little time. Would you mind if I ran upstairs to his lordship’s study? Since we are no longer engaged, I cannot in good conscience wear these diamonds. I wish to return them to his desk, where they will be safe.”

“Of course, miss. Young man, would you like a glass of milk while you wait?”

She devoutly hoped that James did not have a safe in his study. Perhaps in the bonhomie of having drinks with Stephenson, he would have put the money somewhere as a temporary measure until he got home. It was the work of a moment to rifle through his desk and find a cigar box, and sure enough, there were ten hundred-pound notes in it.

She had no intention of stealing his money for herself. But Andrew would lose everything once James’s perfidy was discovered, as it surely would be now that he had misplaced his fiancee. She fetched a mailing tube and found a piece of the baronial crested stationery.

A—

For you.

J.

Hopefully Andrew would not realize the nearly illegible scrawl was not that of his partner until it was too late. She rolled nine of the bank notes into the tube, inserted the note, and the hydraulic system sucked it away into the night.

Then she unclasped the diamond necklace and laid it in the cigar box, replacing it exactly where she’d found it and erasing all signs of her presence.

Mrs. Morven nearly fainted when Claire presented her with the hundred-pound note. “You should divide this among the staff. Mrs. Morven, I am going away for several weeks. Thank you for everything you have done for me. I consider you a true friend.”

With a quick hug and a kiss on that lady’s hair, Claire hitched up her train once more, called to Tigg at the kitchen table, and the two of them vanished into the night.

*

TO: PEONY CHURCHILL, C/O CANADIAN PACIFIC HOTEL, EDMONTON

FROM: CLAIRE TREVELYAN, LONDON

AM COMING TO JOIN YOU STOP TAKING PACKET TO PARIS THEN PERSEPHONE STOP EXPECT ME SECOND WEEK SEPTEMBER STOP JILTED JAMES STOP NEED HUG END

*

When Claire returned from the telegraph office, she was so focused on her list of items to be accomplished that it took her a moment to realize there was a gorgeous Bentley steam landau parked overlooking the river in the spot usually reserved for hers. She brought the Henley to a stop and initiated its cooling sequence, her hands moving automatically.

Who on earth …?

The watchman on the river platform had her answer. “We gots company, Lady,” he called down. “A lord and ladyship—Willie’s mum and dad.”

“The Dunsmuirs are here?” she exclaimed in amazement. “How on earth did they find us?”

This was catastrophic. She had counted on being invisible for the few days it would take her to wind up her affairs and board the Princess Louise for Paris. Of course she could have flown in Persephone from Southampton, but an initial gambit to throw James off her trail should he make inquiries was worth the day or two delay to her real journey.

She had not informed the children yet.

And was not looking forward to having to do so.

The watchman laughed. “Willie, o’ course, Lady. ’E knows ’is way home as well as any of us.”

Of course. Relief swept through her. She would just have to swear Lord and Lady Dunsmuir to secrecy on the subject, that was all.

She found the couple in the garden, watching Willie’s delight in seeing the chickens again. “Hello, Lady Claire.” Lord Dunsmuir shook hands, but Lady Dunsmuir clasped her in a hug that told Claire she was gaining her strength back in leaps and bounds now that she had her beloved son home again. “We’ve just been admiring your walking coop,” his lordship went on. “Miss Lizzie says that Doctor Rosemary Craig assisted them in its construction. Most singular.”

“A story for a long evening,” Claire said with a smile. “But suffice to say that Doctor Craig is perfectly sane and healthy, and she is at present enjoying her travels out of the country.”

Rosie marched up and tugged upon her skirt, demanding her attention, and Claire picked her up. The hen cuddled into her arms with the air of a queen resting upon her jeweled cushions, and surveyed her kingdom from on high.

“Most singular,” Lord Dunsmuir murmured.

Two of the boys brought the table out into the sunshine, and Granny Protheroe proceeded to lay out tea.

“Where’ve you been, Lady?” Lizzie wanted to know.

“You didn’t go to the laboratory?” Tigg asked. “If ’is nibs were there you might be in danger.”

Lady Dunsmuir’s eyebrows rose, and Claire hastened to explain as she took a seat. “I did not go to the laboratory. I have been visiting Mr. Arundel and sending telegrams.” She gazed at them all—Snouts, Jake, the Mopsies, Lewis, Tigg, and the others—and her heart broke at having to leave them. But it had to be done. “Has Tigg told you that I have broken my engagement to Lord James?”

The Mopsies nodded. “And good riddance, too.”

Lady Dunsmuir made a sound suspiciously like a laugh, picked up the teapot, and began to pour for all of them, her face appropriately sober once more.

“He is not … taking it well. I am very much afraid he will force me to marry him before my eighteenth birthday, so I am going on a trip.” They stirred, and looked at each other with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. “I am going to visit Miss Churchill and Doctor Craig in the Canadas. I shall return in six weeks, after my birthday, so I’ll be back before you know it.”

Maggie sidled up to her and stroked Rosie’s feathers, and Willie came to her other side, laying his little hand upon her knee. “But what about us, Lady? Are we to go, too?”

“I—I am afraid not. I have cashed out my stock in the Midlands Railroad—” And put half of it in shares of Count Zeppelin’s airships. “—but even then, I could only afford passage for one.”

“Not go?” Maggie’s eyes filled. “But you promised. We’re flock mates. We’re always to be together. You said so.”

Oh, dear. “I know, but it’s only for—”

“You said so! You promised!” Maggie burst into tears, and Lizzie followed suit, and then Willie, too.

Claire felt her own eyes fill, and before she knew it, all the strain and emotional upheaval of the past few days overwhelmed her, and her breath hitched in a sob. “I’m sorry,” she choked out. “I must go where he cannot reach me—I don’t know what else—”

Lady Dunsmuir telegraphed an urgent message to her husband with her fine, expressive eyes.

“Lady Claire, if I might offer a suggestion?”

He could hardly be heard above the wailing. Rosie, disturbed by the noise and kerfuffle, jumped down from Claire’s lap and stalked away into the pea arbor, where she vented her displeasure on the unfortunate rooster.

Claire controlled herself with difficulty, swiping her wet cheeks with the palm of her hand. “Yes, m-my lord?”

“It seems to be the season to make travel plans. Since Willie returned to us, Davina and I have been vexed to the point of near violence by newspaper reporters camped outside the door, and sundry evil gossips making free with our names in public. We have decided to take an extended tour of my family’s holdings and enterprises in the Canadas until the furor dies down. We are, in fact, leaving tomorrow. This is why we came to visit—Willie would not rest until he had said goodbye to each and every one of his friends, including that extraordinary hen.”

Claire slipped an arm around Willie’s shoulders and kissed the top of his head. “You darling, always thinking of others before yourself.” She sniffled. “We should have been dreadfully upset to have come to call, only to find you all gone.”

“Claire, would you consider accompanying us?” Lady Dunsmuir’s soft voice silenced the crying, and the girls subsided into sniffles themselves. Claire pulled her handkerchief out of her sleeve and handed it to Maggie. “And the children, too, as many as wish to go, so that you will not be separated, and Willie will have companions with whom to enjoy the adventure?”

Claire’s breath went out of her in a rush. “My goodness, how kind you are—but we could not—the expense!”

Lord Dunsmuir waved a negligent hand. “Oh, we do not travel on Persephone. Lady Lucy, the family airship named for my grandmother, is moored at Southampton. Between my father, rest his soul, and my younger brothers, one of us has always been in the air either coming or going from our business in the Canadas. Believe me, there is room for you and your household, as our most honored guests.”

A private airship—! Goodness, the Dunsmuirs must be wealthier than she had ever dreamed.

“We are staying at the hotel at Waterloo Station, and will take the seven o’clock train to Southampton tomorrow morning.”

And to travel in the comfort and companionship of a family she had learned to respect … suddenly the prospect of traveling alone to the other side of the world held no appeal whatsoever. “I should love to share the adventure with you,” she said. “And the children—you are sure—?”

“If they agree to come, I can have a word at the Home Office and have traveling papers prepared within the hour. I assume you have yours.”

She did, having secured them during her errands this morning. Goodness. Well. All that remained was to determine who would go. “Mopsies? What say you?”

“We’re going,” Maggie said promptly. “I like airships.” Lizzie looked a little ill, but where her twin went, there she went also.

Willie grinned, left Claire’s side, and went to hug his mother, as if in thanks for arranging the entire enterprise.

“Tigg?”

“I—I dunno, Lady. I feel beholden to Mr. Malvern, but I want to stick wi’ you. Then there’s the landau to be thought of.”

“You have a steam landau?” his lordship asked. “Even better. Ours goes with us on the cargo deck. Yours will balance the load. It is simply a matter of driving them up into a boxcar and tying down the wheels.”

For every problem, he provided a solution. How lucky Lady Davina was to have a man who lived positively instead of negatively.

“If the landau and the Lady go, then I go,” Tigg said, lifting his chin as if to challenge anyone who disputed it. “I s’pose Mr. Malvern will understand, since our project is done with and I dunno what he’ll be working on next.”

“Snouts?” Claire asked. “Jake? Lewis?”

Lewis shook his head. “No airships for me, nor Rosie either. I’ll stay and look after the chickens.”

“Nor me,” Snouts told her. “Beggin’ yer pardon, Lady, but I’m better off on the ground where I know what’s what. Someone ’as to be in charge of this lot, and it won’t be you, Lewis.”

Jake mumbled something, and at Claire’s prodding, said, “’Er ladyship did give me yer uncle’s coat. Shame to waste it.”

“It would be. I should appreciate your companionship and protection, Jake, if you would come.”

He glanced up under his shaggy hair at the Earl of Dunsmuir. “If ’is lordship don’t mind?”

“Certainly not,” he said stoutly. “I should be glad of a man’s company. And it doesn’t hurt to learn a thing or two about aerial navigation. Captain Hollys is a fine teacher, despite the fact that it’s taken years to pound such facts into my thick skull.”

Lady Davina clapped her hands like a delighted child. “Then we are agreed. We shall share this adventure together. In fact, if you can gather your things on such short notice, we can leave now and spend the night in the hotel. I understand they serve a particularly fine roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.”

And so it was decided, with less fanfare than it took to plan a dinner party.

Claire required only moments to pack the clothes for herself and the girls, along with enough notebooks to record their journey—the only difficulty being where to conceal the lightning rifle, for she would not leave it behind. Finally she rolled it up in her driving duster and strapped it to the outside of her traveling case, which was stuffed with the extra burden of the blue satin ballgown and her leather corselet, driving goggles, and riding hat.

She would not leave her raiding rig behind, either, or a small supply of gaseous capsaicin and enough small parts and gears to construct a firelamp or two.

Because it was a big world out there, and one just never knew.

A lady of resources and intellect always faced the future prepared.

54

Epilogue

Dear Claire,

I am writing to you in shame and great distress. After you departed the Crystal Palace last night, the most appalling scandal broke out involving someone we both know well.

I hardly know how to say this, so I will just write it baldly: James has absconded with our chamber. Worse, he has sold it to a consortium of Texicans who promised to triple the deal that Ross Stephenson offered him. I say him because I have been completely cut out. All I have are the bolts on the exhibit floor that were left after they carted the entire chamber out in the small hours of the morning. From what I have been able to discover, James and the Texicans plan to shoulder their way onto one of the transatlantic airships that accept heavy cargo, and flee before agents of the Midland Railroad Company catch them.

For some reason that mystifies me, he has tried to make reparation by sending me money. I will use it to pursue them. Needless to say, it is my livelihood and reputation that are at stake.

I swear, Claire, that I will get the kinetick cell back. Dr. Craig said it was yours. It is one thing to use it to make our own living in an honorable way. It is quite another to steal the entire device and flee the country. But without the cell, the chamber will be nothing more than glass and brass, and we will see how clever the Texicans are at carbonating coal without it.

I do not know when I will see you again.

I hope you will think of me kindly.

Yours in haste,

Andrew Malvern

END OF PART TWO

III

Magnificent Devices

55

Somewhere over the Atlantic

Late September 1889

The man’s eyes bulged in his final moments and he glared with brutal accusation. “You—” he choked. “You did it … you’ll regret it …”

She faltered back, but her feet tangled in her apple-green skirts and she couldn’t run. Still he staggered toward her.

“You—” Those eyes, filling her vision. Hazel eyes under auburn hair. James’s eyes in another man’s face. And then they boiled over, sizzling like bacon on a griddle, and popped and she screamed—

—and woke herself up. The breath left her lungs and Lady Claire Trevelyan flopped back on the bunk with a gasp. Sweat trickled down her temple.

Breathe. You must breathe.

Lightning Luke had met his Maker several weeks ago at her hands, and while he might have found some measure of peace, she had not. Most of the time she was able to tamp down the guilt at having ended the life of another human being. It had been an accident. But in the midnight hours, there was his face again, contorted and boiling and accusing her until his last breath.

It was always so real, even if she had never actually seen his eyes. Her mind had put those of another in that face, one she had wronged, as if he—

Something rustled in the dark.

Claire sucked in a breath. It was not Lightning Luke. He was in a watery grave, to the best of her knowledge. It was not even Lord James Selwyn, who was in London. She was safe aboard the Lady Lucy, the luxury airship belonging to John, Earl Dunsmuir, and his wife Davina, to whom she had restored Willie, their son, not a week past.

Her cabin, while comfortably appointed with a velvet coverlet on a bed set into a kind of curved cupboard, and gleaming paneling that set off the visiting chairs, was not large. She could cross it in six steps, and by now, the third night of their voyage, she knew its topography by heart.

“Maggie?” she whispered. Perhaps one of the Mopsies had awakened in the night and needed her. “Lizzie?”

A thump, followed by scratching that somehow communicated agitation. This time, she could pinpoint its location: above, in the brass piping that ran along the floors and ceilings conveying heat, gas, and various other necessities in an airship this size.

She reached for a moonglobe. That was what the countess called them, she being of a gentle and fanciful turn of mind. Claire had inquired of the chief steward what they were, and he had launched into such an enthusiastic explanation of its properties (“One cannot have lamps and flames on an airship, my lady—only think of the gas fuselage above our heads!”) that even she had been astonished that so much clever chemistry could be cupped in her hand. She shook the globe and it lit from within as the chemicals combined, illuminating the entire room.

No one was there.

But something was. Something that scratched, and clinked, and—was that a flutter? Good heavens, did bats lodge in the high ceilings of the passenger deck?

She lifted the globe and peered upward, and an enormous winged shadow leaped down upon her head.

She choked down a second scream that wanted to rattle the pipes, and grabbed for the shadow. It fought back, a limbless fighting ball of claws and feathers that—

Feathers?

Claire pounced on the moonglobe she’d dropped and held it up.

The fighting claws and feathers landed on the nightstand and resolved themselves into a red hen, who shook her plumage into order and glared at her with offended dignity.

“Rosie?” Claire’s knees gave out and she sat in the opening to her bunk rather suddenly. This couldn’t be Rosie, the alpha hen of the flock of rescued chickens at the cottage in Vauxhall. The Dunsmuirs must have a small flock aboard for eggs, though with the powers of modern refrigeration, this seemed rather bucolic and unnecessary.

The hen stepped daintily off the nightstand and onto her knee, settling there as if she meant to spend the night.

She always did this. And it never worked.

“Rosie, for goodness sake. How on earth did you come to be on the Lady Lucy when I thought you were safe at home?” She petted the hen, speaking softly. “Lewis is going to be frantic, to say nothing of your flock. You will be supplanted by that rooster, my girl, and there will be no going back.”

The door cracked open and in the greenish-white light of the moonglobe, Claire could see a two-inch-wide sliver of white batiste nightie. “Come in, Maggie.”

“I ’eard a noise, Lady. All right?”

“Yes, quite all right. Come and see who has taken ship with us.”

If she had expected Maggie to fall on Rosie’s neck rejoicing, she was sadly disappointed. She looked almost … guilty. “Hullo, Rosie.” She stroked the gleaming feathers with gentle fingers, and Claire put two and two together.

“Maggie, did you know Rosie had stowed away?”

Maggie chewed on her lower lip. “She ent no trouble, Lady. She’s bunked wiv us before.”

“True on both counts. But that does not answer my question.”

The ten-year-old’s eyes filled with pleading. “She wanted to come, Lady. So I tucked ’er in my kit and she were quiet as the grave … ’til she found out she could roost up there.” When she lifted her eyes to the pipes, a tear escaped down her cheek. “She’s been up in the pipes a day and a half and I couldn’t get ’er down.”

“She’ll be hungry, then.”

“Aye. And thirsty.”

“Then we will nip along to the dining saloon. You know Mr. Skully keeps a cold collation on the sideboard in case the family wishes a snack in the night.”

“I know. Me and Lizzie, we found Willie an’ Tigg in there two nights in a row. Willie can’t keep out of the trifle. Nor can Lizzie, except when she’s underfoot in the guardsroom and the gondola.”

The little monkeys. “Is there anywhere on this ship you haven’t gone? Captain Hollys gave me a tour of the gondola, but I couldn’t tell you where the guardsroom is.”

“Below and aft,” Maggie said. “Just forward of the storage bay where the landaus are.”

“Goodness.” Claire slid a hand under Rosie’s feet and carried her out into the corridor, closing the door behind them. “You sound like a proper airman.”

“Only ’cos Willie laughed at me when I called the bow the front.” She kept pace with Claire without effort. Regular meals, exercise, and hope were causing her to grow. Soon she would be past Claire’s elbow and asking to have her skirts let down. “He’s got nuffink to be proud of—a month ago he couldn’t’ve said nor bow nor front.”

“Wouldn’t, Maggie. You know why.”

“I know. Still. He oughtn’t to’ve laughed and called me a silly gumpus.”

They passed into the dining saloon and closed the door behind them. Ship’s rule—doors left open tended to swing to and fro and smash walls and people when wind gusts affected their trim. At the sideboard were two little nightgown-clad figures, and a taller one with his nightshirt tucked into his pants. Willie turned at the sound of the door and a smile broke out that was brighter even than the moonglobe on the rail above the dishes of food.

“Lady! I saved you some trifle.”

“You did not.” Lizzie tolerated fibs in others about as often as she told them herself. “You’d ’ave eaten that quick enough if she ’adn’t come in.”

“You’re too kind, Lord Wilberforce.” As the son of an earl, Willie outranked her, even if he was only five. “But I must see to Rosie here first.”

“You found ’er.” Lizzie smiled at her twin. “I was that worried we wouldn’t.”

“She found her way to my cabin like the lady of resources she is,” Claire said fondly, crumbling a blueberry scone into a Spode saucer and sprinkling a palmful of tiny red grapes on it. Rosie fell upon the food, and Claire filled a second saucer with water from a cut crystal carafe. “Now that I know she is traveling with us, I shall mention it to Mr. Skully. He will see that the crew knows she is one of our party and not a future meal.”

Willie gasped. “No one will eat Rothie, will they? Papa will throw them overboard if they do.”

His charming lisp was fading, only cropping up now in moments of stress. “It shall not come to that, my lord.”

“My lord,” Lizzie mimicked in her best private-school voice, and nudged Willie so hard in the ribs that the whipped cream wobbled on top of his trifle and the blackberry he’d so carefully placed at the summit rolled off onto the floor.

Rosie dispatched it with the speed of a striking cobra.

His face crumpled and Claire replaced the blackberry with another, and a second for Rosie, before the storm broke. “Rosie says thank you for the berry, your lordship,” she said. “And for being a gentleman who always puts a lady before himself.”

The skies cleared and Claire did not point out that he had already eaten half the trifle he had offered her. She cut a slice of apple pie instead, and poured cream over it.

Even now, she could not quite believe that the food would not disappear as magically as it came. As the daughter of a marquis, she had grown up eating mounds of food in multiple courses—so much that it regularly went back to the kitchen uneaten, to be made into something else or distributed to the poor. But in those dark days between being forced out of her home in Wilton Crescent and taking up residence in the river cottage in Vauxhall, she had gone hungry for days at a time. She had been reduced to foraging for the scraps that had once been thrown away, and she never forgot it.

She would never take food, shelter, and companionship for granted again.

The closing of the door signaled the arrival of yet another midnight marauder. Jake joined them and began piling cold meat and cheese on a thick slice of bread.

“Couldn’t you sleep, Jake?” Claire cut a slice of beef into beak-sized bits, then put them in Rosie’s saucer.

His gaze followed. “Found ’er, did you?”

Clearly she was the only one who had not been permitted knowledge of the stowaway. “She came along the piping to my cabin.”

He nodded, mouth full. “Told ’em she’d come down when she got hungry. Bird’s not stupid.”

“She didn’t feel safe,” Maggie informed him. “I think she’s clever for finding the Lady all her own self.”

“Not feelin’ so safe neither,” Jake mumbled around the beef. “How much longer we goin’ to be floatin’ around under this big gasbag?”

“Why, Jake,” Claire said in some surprise. “I thought you were enjoying your duties in the gondola with Captain Hollys.”

“I’d enjoy ’em more if I couldn’t see out.” He began to build another sandwich. “Gondola’s mostly glass held together with strips of brass an’ curly bits of wood. Makes a fellow woozy.”

“Hard to steer if you can’t see out,” Tigg observed.

Jake cuffed him on the shoulder, but since the sandwich was in that hand, it wasn’t much of a blow. “I’d like to see you up there wi’ the navigation charts an’ nowt but stars and waves to go by.”

“Not me,” Tigg said, apparently unmoved. “I’m ’appy in the aft gondola, wi’ little windows and big engines. Mr. Yau—he’s the first engineer—he says I’m a dab hand wiv ’em.”

“Hard to be a dab hand at anyfink after only three days.” Jake wiped the crumbs off his face with his sleeve and eyed the pie.

“Jake, that weren’t kind,” Maggie said. “Who was it told me the captain let him take the rudder wheel for ten minutes? You got no call to talk to Tigg so, when from accounts he’s as good as you.”

“Three days is enough to show you everyfink you don’t know.” Jake cut the pie with the knife he kept at his belt, and wolfed it down without benefit of a plate.

“I don’t know anything, that’s wot I know,” Tigg said bravely. “But I’m workin’ on it, not complainin’ about it.”

When Jake stabbed the pie again, Claire opened her mouth to remonstrate about both greed and unkindness. But when he offered the second slice to Tigg, and the latter took it, she turned her attention to Rosie, whose appetite was finally satisfied. An apology had been given and accepted, and it was a foolish woman who would intrude on affairs of honor between gentlemen.

She hoped they would become gentlemen, in any event.

Some day.

Even Jake.

56

If owning a private airship like the Lady Lucy were a measure of wealth, then the Dunsmuirs were wealthy indeed. For the most part, the family passed the voyage on the A deck, where the staterooms, reception lounge, smoking lounge, and dining saloon were laid out with every attention to luxury and good taste. Claire had packed only one evening gown, but when the countess came in to dinner the first evening in the family diamonds and the last word in Paris décolletage and trained bustles, she realized she would not be wearing anything less than silk to the table.

Even if it was the same silk for seven nights running.

On the B deck, however, one could wear one’s raiding rig and striped stockings, for all the attention the crew paid to such things. There, everyone had his job, from Captain Hollys at the helm to Tigg in one of the two engine cars on either side of the treated-canvas fuselage, watching over the great Daimler steam engines as though his personal attention were all that kept them running.

“Lady Lucy is one of the original Zeppelin passenger airships,” Captain Hollys told her proudly, one hand resting gently on the wheel that controlled the enormous rudder far to the stern. “Even Persephone isn’t as fine a design, though of course she’s bigger.”

Ian Hollys was a former pilot of Her Majesty’s fleet, invalided out after an injury in the war, much to his vigorous indignation. He and the earl had served together briefly, and when the Lady Lucy needed a man at the helm, John Dunsmuir had turned to his dashing companion-at-arms to offer him the position. Claire suspected there was much more to the story than Lady Dunsmuir had told her, but there was no arguing that both men had an air of command that was most attractive.

Most attractive indeed.

“Have you met Count Zeppelin?” she inquired, forcing her gaze to the vast wrinkled sheet of the Atlantic two thousand feet below. “I have recently bought stock in his company. I do hope that was wise.”

“Very wise. I congratulate you on your perspicacity, Lady Claire.”

Oh dear. It would not do to blush at a compliment. One should save one’s blushes for those one has kissed.

“I have met him, at a gathering of pilots in Paris one winter. He is a force to be reckoned with, and anyone who doubts he will lock up the transatlantic shipping lanes for himself is going to be sadly left behind.”

“Even the businessmen of the Americas?”

“Particularly those. Oh, they have ships, for what that’s worth. But they’re the inferior French design, and the engines simply aren’t up to the rigors of the crossing. Too many accidents, too much hemming and hawing and not facing up to the fact that German engineering is superior.”

“Which manly British opinion has nothing to do with Her Majesty’s family connections, of course,” Claire said slyly.

“I am a loyalist, it’s true. But I’m also a realist. As are you, I suspect.” He took his gaze from the course ahead and she met it with only a tiny blush. At least she did not blotch. The heat in her cheeks was not from humiliation; it was merely the acknowledgement of the presence of a companionable mind.

“Sir, we have a pigeon incoming.”

Captain Hollys turned to the young man whose collar insignia would have told Claire he was in charge of communications, if his duties as they left the airfield at Southampton had not already demonstrated it. “Let the aft control room know to open the stern hatch.”

“A pigeon, captain?” They were four days out on either side. How could a bird have flown this far without dying of exhaustion?

“Not a real one,” he assured her with a smile. “It’s simply what we call them for the sake of convenience. Would you like to go aft and see?”

“I would indeed. And I’d like to pay a visit to Tigg in the engine room. I’ve barely seen him the whole voyage.”

“From what I hear, we’d better keep you out of there, or you’ll be tinkering with the engines yourself.” He gave the helm to the first officer, and accompanied her to the ladderlike stair from the gondola beneath the fuselage up to the B deck. “After you, my lady.”

Claire hitched up her workaday blue wool skirts and climbed the ladder nearly one-handed. The captain, gentleman that he was, may have had more of a view of her ankles and calves than she might have intended, but he said not a word. Instead, he guided her up a second stair and onto a catwalk as delicate as a spiderweb, though it appeared to be made of some metal. “This is the main coaxial corridor that traverses the length of the ship,” he said.

“Corridor?” Claire hesitated the briefest of moments, then bravely stepped out onto the catwalk. Below was the network of piping and the thin partial ceilings of the A deck, where Rosie had been trapped. Above were the huge bags of gas, separate from each other but still bigger than any building Claire had ever been in with the exception of Parliament.

“A practical design,” she said, to keep her mind off the space around her.

“It is indeed. If one bag should get into trouble, there are still five to do the work.”

“And if all five get into trouble?”

“We do not like to think of such things, but each member of the crew is trained in what to do.”

“And what should the passengers do?” Dear me. This was no way to keep one’s mind off the two thousand feet of space beneath one’s feet. Perhaps she should change the subject.

“Each member of the crew is assigned a passenger, my lady. I, of course, am assigned to his lordship, the chief steward to her ladyship and Lord Will.”

“And I?”

“You are under the care of the chief engineer, which I believe to be singularly appropriate.”

“The children?”

“It is unlikely the girls will be separated from you, so I have assigned Mr. Yau to them as well. Young Mr. Terwilliger is unlikely to be separated from him, so you make a party of four. The lad Jake will go with my communications officer.”

“And Rosie?”

Behind her, the captain’s step hitched. “Rosie? Is there another in your party of whom I am unaware?”

“Rosie was spirited aboard the vessel by the twins. She is a red hen of singular ability. Though she can fly, I fear two thousand feet may prove too much even for her.”

“You don’t say.” The captain took a moment to absorb this information. “A hen.”

“She is not to be eaten.”

“Of course not. I will inform Mr. Yau that he is responsible for a party of five, then.”

“And what do these responsibilities include, if I may ask?” If one were falling out of the sky at some horrific rate, she did not see that any action on the part of the crew would help the situation.

She had counted five gas bags. The sixth loomed ahead, so they were nearly to the stern. She turned to get her answer.

Captain Hollys practically ran into her. “I do beg your pardon, my lady.” Now it was his turn to be flustered, as he set her away from him on the narrow catwalk and stepped back a respectable distance. His cheeks were ruddy, but whether it was because she had embarrassed him or because he was used to standing in rushing wind and sunshine, she did not know. “What was your question?”

She had nearly forgotten herself. Dear, dear. “The responsibilities of each crew member,” she finally recalled. “What are they, if we are falling into the sea?”

“Ah. Firstly, you will not fall. Even if all six gas bags come to grief, enough gas will remain to make it more of a long glide, with a gentle landing.”

She frowned at him. “This seems difficult to imagine.” Anyone who read a newspaper knew of the fatal mishaps that balloonists sometimes experienced. Gentle gliding did not seem to be a feature of such stories.

“You are thinking of balloons, I see.” He had regained his composure, and indicated that she should precede him down the ladder. The engine noise was much louder here, and he raised his voice. “The physics are quite different with a zeppelin. It is merely a matter of collecting one’s valuables, strapping on a small rocket pack, and leaping to safety once the ground is within a one-hundred-foot range.”

“Good heavens. Are we permitted to practice with these devices?”

“The Lady Lucy has never gone down in a decade of flight,” he said as he jumped the last of the steps and showed her into the engine gondola. “I do not expect that record to change this week. The rocket packs are merely a precaution. They are tested periodically by the middies, but no one has ever actually had to use one.”

Claire fervently hoped that this was not a case of famous last words.

Mr. Yau, who wore his dress blue uniform with an interesting sash of intricate knots worked in red silk cord, looked up and straightened into a salute as they stepped into the gondola. It was smaller than the control gondola forward, but still held a dizzying array of equipment, including the controls for both engines and all six gas bags within the fuselage.

Captain Hollys returned the salute. “I have brought Lady Claire to see the pigeon and Mr. Terwilliger, Jack.”

Mr. Yau nodded. “I sent one of the midshipmen to fetch it. Tigg?”

A black curly head popped out of the space behind a console. “Sir?”

“Is that pulley assembly fixed?”

“Yes, sir. Good as new.”

“You have visitors.”

Claire smiled at him, conscious of his pleasure at this attention to his duties. “I will not keep you from your work, Tigg. But I hear good reports of you from Captain Hollys.”

His coffee-colored skin suffused with a blush and he ducked his head wordlessly. With a mumble, he vanished through a door. The sound of engines increased and softened as the door closed behind him.

“A good little chap, that,” Mr. Yau said as a boy in a sailor collar scrambled down the ladder with a device under his arm. “I’d be tempted to offer him a job if he wanted one.”

“He acted as a laboratory assistant until very recently,” Claire said. “I would be loath to lose him, but of course a man must forge his own career.” In point of fact, an opportunity to learn his trade under the care of one of the most powerful families in the land—in the world, if one counted their holdings in the Canadas—merited careful consideration. “If you are serious, I could have a word with him.”

“I’m quite serious,” Mr. Yau said. “All the middies up to the age of sixteen receive instruction in reading, penmanship, navigation, and mathematics from Mr. Skully. His education would not go a-begging because of his duties here. Isn’t that right, Mr. Colley?”

“Yes sir,” the boy piped. “Here’s the pigeon, sir.”

Claire examined the device with interest. A combination of propellers and articulated wings for gliding made up most of it, with a cell on top that in some ways resembled the power cell in her own lightning rifle. “It is not propelled by steam?”

“No, ma’am,” the boy said, evidently under the impression she was asking him. “It’s a sun cell.” At her raised eyebrows, he explained, “It gets its power from the sun, and when it’s cloudy, there’s enough stored to make the props and wings go. The mail’s in here.”

He flipped it over and opened a compartment emblazoned with the emblem of the Royal Mail, now filled with rolls of paper.

“How on earth did it find us?”

“Magnetic signal, same as the land post,” the boy said. “Milady, there’s something here for you.”

“For me?” She unrolled it eagerly. “Poor Lewis has no doubt written to tell me Rosie is missing.” But it was not from Lewis. It was from Andrew Malvern, and the news it held made the blood drain from her head.

“Lady Claire!”

The captain, ever gallant, caught her just in time.

57

“In the Texican Territory.” Lady Dunsmuir could not seem to wrap her mind around the astounding news as she pressed the smelling salts into Claire’s hand yet again. “Lord James Selwyn is pursuing you to the Americas to press his suit? I cannot comprehend it. It is either utter devotion or sheer madness.”

Claire put the smelling salts firmly on the table. She was quite recovered. Embarrassed, yes. Determined not to lace her corset quite so tightly in future, yes. But quite recovered physically, thank you very much.

Mentally, she was struggling with how much of the truth she should reveal to Lady Dunsmuir. For Andrew’s message had told her that James had reneged on his agreement with Ross Stephenson and his railroad, absconding instead with the Selwyn Kinetick Carbonator they had invented, with plans to sell it to a Texican consortium.

It was the act of a scoundrel, not a gentleman. But though she trusted Andrew’s word, she could not condemn a baronet in the eyes of his peers without physical proof. And how she was to lay hands upon that in all this vast country was a conundrum.

“It is not solely devotion that has brought him so far. Andrew Malvern—my erstwhile employer in the laboratory—was Lord James’s partner in his railroad ventures. James was in the midst of negotiations with the Midlands Railway Company, but it appears he has broken those off to come here with a group of Texican railway barons. Andrew has—has set out to bring him back. But my goodness, the Americas are enormous. How will he discover them?”

Dear me. She was skating dangerously close to the shameful truth. In a moment she was going to trip over her own tale. Because really, James did not deserve her protection. He had acted like a criminal, so he should face up to the consequences. It was a dreadful pity her upbringing would not allow her to be the instrument of it.

Because what if Andrew was wrong, or had misunderstood? Then she would have shamed a baronet publicly in error, and the consequences would be on her own head.

“If he does not find you in New York, I imagine his business will take him to Santa Fe.” The earl shook a map out of a brass tube and unrolled it on the low table in front of the sofa. “New York and Philadelphia—” He pointed to the two largest cities of the Fifteen Colonies on the eastern seaboard. “—are where the railroad barons have begun building mansions, but if this is a group of Texicans interested in a business arrangement with a man of vision such as James, they’ll be in Santa Fe.” He indicated a dot in the middle of a large area marked Texican Territory and colored a faded red. “That’s the capital of a territory that runs from the border of the Canadas all the way down to Texico City.” His finger slid from one edge of the map to the other.

“But we will no doubt meet in New York,” Lady Dunsmuir said. “That is the entry point for the Americas—not to mention the only airfield on the entire coast capable of handling the traffic. They must receive traveling papers for these skies. And of course they must take on kerosene for their engines, and supplies and the like.”

Claire fingered the letter in the pocket of her skirt. “Andrew’s message was dated the day we left London. Do you suppose we shall arrive at the same time?” What a joy it would be to see his familiar face—and to find out if, perhaps, she might assist him in his mission. After all, as he had said, that power cell was hers and the children’s, no matter whose name was on the patent. If anyone was going to profit by the sale of it, it should be them, not James.

On the other hand, she had gone to great lengths to remove herself from James’s orbit, where he could not touch her or force her to be his wife. No, she must continue on with the Dunsmuirs to the Canadas, as planned, far from Santa Fe. Andrew was perfectly capable of managing on his own.

“No telling if we’ll arrive before or after Persephone,” his lordship said. “We haven’t been pushing the ship or attempting any speed records. Captain Hollys has been holding us back because of the hurricane.”

All four children looked up. “Hurricane?” Lizzie said. “Wot’s that?”

“You know how the water behaves when you pull the drain plug in the tub?” Lady Dunsmuir asked. When Lizzie nodded, she said, “Imagine the water is air and we a very tiny rubber duck, and you have a hurricane, more or less. It’s an enormous storm that spells disaster for any zeppelin. We are forced to stay well clear of it.”

“This rubber duck is going to stay far north of their brewing grounds in the Bermudas and the southernmost of the Fifteen, you may be assured of that,” said Captain Hollys, entering the room in time to hear. “My lord, might I have a word?”

“What is it, Ian?”

The captain kept his gaze on his employer. “In private.”

“Good heavens. If you and Jack have been gambling again, I’m not advancing your wages.”

“It’s not that, sir.” The gravity of his tone and the absence of a smile caused a flicker of unease to dart through Claire’s stomach. The two men stepped into the corridor and Lady Dunsmuir distracted the children by pulling out the Chinese checkerboard and a fat bag of marbles.

Most of the children. Not all.

Claire caught Lizzie’s eye and glanced toward the door. Lizzie got up and drifted toward the serving pantry, aimless as a cloud and harmless as a dove.

They had already discovered the pantry contained three doors, one of which led into the corridor. There was even a dumb waiter apparatus to transport food from the galley below on B deck to the dining saloon. The fact that it transmitted sound as efficiently as it did filet of sole and steamed vegetables was an advantage, if you had an interest in gathering as much information about the goings-on among the crew as you could.

Lizzie, Claire knew, had quite an interest.

In fact, she must ask her to find out about these rocket packs as soon as possible.

When Lady Dunsmuir and Willie later retired to their cabin for afternoon naps, Lizzie and Maggie appeared in Claire’s own doorway with eyes that told her they had news. Claire ushered them in and removed Rosie from Maggie’s shoulder, setting her on the nightstand with a saucer of water.

“Well?”

“I didn’t understand most of it, Lady.” She exchanged a wordless glance with her sister. “Wot’s diversionary tactic and circumnavigate?”

“The first is a dodge and the second a runaround.”

“Ah. Then that’s wot Cap’n Hollys wants to do.”

“Why? Is he dodging the storm?”

“Not only. Seems there’s a ship off our stern that’s been behavin’ bad. Captain don’t like it.”

“They’re probably doing the same as we are—avoiding the storm.”

“That’s wot ’is lordship said. But Cap’n don’t think so. ’E thinks it’s pirates, Lady.”

“Pirates!” She had heard of them, of course. Wherever there was wealth in transit, it seemed, there were those who wanted to skim off a little for themselves. To take rather than earn. But the Lady Lucy had been plying the skies for years. Surely Captain Hollys knew what to do.

“So ’e says, Lady. We ent near so high as we were off the Seychelles—an we’ll make landfall tonight, ’e says. Just not in New York.”

“How did we not know of this?”

“They think we’re just girls,” Maggie said with scorn. “Ent no pirate ’alf as nasty as the Cudgel, I’ll bet—you put paid to ’im an’ you’re a girl.”

“But Maggie, that was with the assistance of the lightning rifle. I can’t use that aboard ship. An inch too close to the fuselage and we’ll go up in an explosion they’ll see all the way to New York.”

Lizzie sat on Claire’s bunk and tucked her feet up under her dress. “I knew I should’ve stayed wiv Lewis and the others.”

“We must consult with Jake tonight when the family is asleep,” Claire said after a moment’s thought. “He’s been in the gondola, so he must know what’s going on. In the meantime, pack your kit and let Tigg know, too.”

“Pack?” Maggie repeated. “Wot for?”

“Just in case.”

“Lady, you don’t think the ship’ll go down?” Lizzie’s eyes grew huge.

“Of course not. Captain Hollys is an experienced airman and our waiters in white gloves have an air of competence that suggests they know more than merely which side to serve on. But it does not hurt to be prepared.”

Lizzie looked as though she wanted to ask what she was to be prepared for, but she did not.

When they found him in the dining saloon some hours later, Jake did not have much more to tell them. “We’re way north of New York now,” he reported, wolfing down a cream-filled biscuit. “Dodgin’ that ship and waitin’ for t’storm to pass over New York. Can’t moor till it blows itself out.”

“I saw the cloud bank as the sun went down,” Claire said. “I’ve never been in the sky to see a storm before. It’s much more frightening up here than it would be tucked up in a warm library.”

“Captain plans to circle around and come at New York from the west.” Jake mumbled something else and stuffed a plum in his mouth whole.

“What was that, Jake?”

“Nuffink.”

“I quite distinctly heard you say something about fuel.”

“We’d ’ave enough if we’d just quit this dodgin’ and backtrackin’ and fire something at those rascals.”

Claire’s stomach did a dip and twirl that had nothing to do with the ship’s trim. “So let me understand you correctly. We are not only illegally flying in American air space, we are the target of sky pirates and are running out of fuel. Would you say that was accurate?”

“Lady Claire.”

She choked on a scone covered in cream and turned to see the earl not six feet away. “Your lordship,” she said when she could speak. “What are you doing here?”

“I hope you do not expect me to sleep when my family and guests are in—” He stopped.

“Danger?”

“We are in no danger at present.”

“But we could be, if that ship gets down to business and our engines give out.”

He eyed her. “You are singularly well informed, though I would appreciate it if you would not say such things in front of the children.”

“The children are my source of information.”

He selected a scone and slathered cream on it while he recovered. “They are mistaken.”

“Aren’t!” Lizzie lifted her chin, affronted. “I ’eard the captain tell you so meself.”

“Then you should know that eavesdropping is most unladylike.”

“So is takin’ a stone to a knife fight.” Her tone dripped with scorn. “I don’t aim to carry stones if I c’n ’elp it. I aim to be prepared.”

He regarded her with raised brows. “I see I have underestimated you, young lady.”

“If I were to wager who would succeed in a contretemps with sky pirates, my lord, I would put my money on Lizzie,” Claire told him. “We do not mean to displease you, but any of these children will tell you that the secret to beating a bully is to be ready for him. That is all we are trying to do.”

“I hope it does not come to that. Both vessels are struggling with the storm, which has pushed us far off our course. We have evaded miscreants before with success, and shall do so again, I trust.”

It was a thin comfort, but it was all she had to keep warm with during that fitful night.

That and her raiding rig. If one were to face danger, it would certainly not be in a nightgown.

58

Claire woke to a crack like a buggy whip, and the sound of feet pounding down the corridor. Her internal clock told her it was past dawn, but the gloom outside the porthole cast her cabin in darkness.

Something was missing.

A moment later, when she heard Rosie cluck a sleepy inquiry from the back of the guest chair, she realized what it was.

The engines had stopped.

She leaped for the porthole and looked out into the slashing silver of rain. Lightning flashed in the belly of a cloud—they were surrounded by clouds—buffeted to and fro at the whim of the weather. She could no longer see the ground.

What was going on? They were to have avoided the storm, not sailed smack into the middle of it! And where were the pirates? Were they at the mercy of the winds, too, or were they using them to their advantage while the Lady Lucy wallowed, helpless without her engines?

“Go back to sleep, Rosie,” she said, pocketing a moonglobe. “I’m going to find out what has happened.”

Another crack of thunder shook the ship—at least, she hoped it was thunder. Claire ran down the corridor and was forced to use the moonglobe. All the lamps were out. At the door to the main saloon, she found Tigg.

“What has happened?”

He turned, his eyes wide with distress. “I can’t tell, Lady. They locked us in.”

She tried the handle. Stupid. Of course he was correct. She peered through the circular window, trying to see through the gloom. “This is maddening. Where are the Dunsmuirs?”

The family had its own set of staterooms further aft. A dash to the other end of the corridor ended in a locked door as well. Claire set her teeth.

“If we cannot go out, we must go up. Tigg, if I give you a boost to the top of the wall, can you remove the paneling and go through to the catwalk?”

“Quicker’n you can think of it, Lady.”

It took a moment and some unbalanced staggering to find a loose enough panel, but once through, Tigg’s feet disappeared and Claire was left to wait. She went to Jake’s room.

“Jake, I fear we must—” The room was empty, the bed mussed as if he’d just climbed out of it. “Jake?” He had not been in the corridor. Maybe he had gone to wake the girls.

“Mopsies?” The twins peered down from the top bunk, where it was clear they’d gone to sleep together fully dressed, with only a heavy tartan blanket over them. Clutched in Lizzie’s hand was the heavy silver carving fork that usually attended the roast at dinner. “Good heavens, Lizzie. You might have put an eye out while you slept.”

“Not likely.” Lizzie slid to the floor and jammed the fork in her sash. “Are we boarded?”

“I cannot tell. I don’t think so. We are, however, locked in. Tigg has climbed up to the catwalk to reconnoiter. Have you seen Jake?” They shook their heads. “That’s a puzzle. Perhaps he had the same idea.”

“Perhaps we all ought to go up an’ out,” Maggie suggested. “Why’d they locked us in?”

“Don’t much like that,” Lizzie said. “I’m for up an’ out.”

The words were barely out of her mouth when the floor jerked out from under them as though it had been a rug yanked by a giant. All three landed in a heap next to the wall.

“What was that?” Claire said on a gasp.

“We’re goin’ down.” Lizzie’s face held all the conviction of one who has long known men were not meant to fly.

“If we were going down, we should know it by the angle of the floor and the weightless feeling in our stomachs.” Claire struggled to her feet, rubbing the bruise that was surely forming on her hip. “Come, we must—”

Another jerk of the fuselage sent them to the floor a second time.

“Either the wind has risen, or we’ve just been bumped by something.” With caution, Claire got up, hanging on to the wood opening of the double-decker bed, and peered out the porthole.

“Oh, dear.”

They had indeed been bumped by something. A ship rode the air currents next to them—a ship with dual fuselages, one of which had clearly struck their own, considering its close proximity. Between the fuselages like the downstroke of a letter Y hung a gondola, with a spiderweb of catwalks and ropes that at present were swarming with men.

Armed men. Men with ropes over their shoulders, and dangling from those were large versions of the grappling hooks she had used herself.

“We are being boarded. In midair. By sky pirates.”

The thing his lordship had assured her would not happen.

Where in the name of heaven was the family? Had she and the children been locked behind sturdy teak doors for their own safety? Or had everyone fled in the equivalent of a dinghy and left them to fend for themselves?

The floor jerked again as the two ships collided, but it was gentler this time—as though the Lady Lucy were snugging herself up to a dock. Claire came out of her horror-filled trance with a jolt.

“I don’t know what is going on, but we must prepare to defend ourselves. Maggie, find a weapon. I’m going back to my cabin for the lightning rifle.”

“But you said—”

“I would rather an explosion and a long glide to earth because of a ruptured gas bag than to be taken and held for ransom by a pirate. I’ll be back in a moment. Keep an eye out for Tigg.”

In her cabin, she filled her pockets and pouches with every device she had brought with her. Her notebook went down the front of her leather corselet, her grandmother’s emerald ring on an ivory pick slid into a hastily assembled chignon. She rammed the lightning rifle into its holster on her back. She put Rosie on her shoulder and cast an affectionate glance at the evening gown hanging in the closet. It was not likely she would see it or her favorite blue hat again.

The twins met her in the corridor. “Now what, Lady?”

“We go topside. We must find the crew and make our stand with them.”

A thump sounded above their heads and the panel in the ceiling wiggled back and forth.

“Tigg? Maggie, put your foot in my hands and help him move the panel.”

Thump. Scratch. A small blond head popped out of the opening and Maggie reared back and practically fell to the floor. “Willie, you gumpy, you scairt me.”

Above her, Willie’s tear-filled gaze found Claire’s.

“What is it, darling? Did Tigg send you?”

Wordlessly, he shook his head, and Claire’s stomach sank. “Have you seen him?”

Another shake.

“Willie, it’s safe to speak. You must tell us what has happened.”

But it seemed he would or could not. Something had frightened him so badly that his recently regained powers of speech had deserted him, and he had reverted back to the condition in which she had found him.

A condition directly related to being forcibly removed from his mother and father.

“Darling, I fear we have been boarded by sky pirates. Have they taken mama and papa?”

His face crumpled and he nodded.

Nausea and fear rose in her stomach and she struggled for control. “Did they lock us in?”

A shrug.

“Do the pirates know we are here?”

Willie hesitated, then slowly shook his head.

“Well, that’s something, at least. How did you escape?”

He withdrew into the opening, and motioned with one hand that someone should come up and join him. “Aha. Your papa had the same idea as we did. He stuffed you in the ceiling, did he, to—”

Willie’s small hand appeared again, and from it dangled the countess’s diamond parure, fully two feet long and worth the price of the Lady Lucy at least. Even the gloom in the corridor could not disguise its brilliance.

“Dear heaven.” Claire struggled to reconstruct the scene through which they had all managed to sleep. “He stuffed you and the family collection in the ceiling. What quick thinking for a man under siege. We shall follow his excellent example immediately. Maggie, Lizzie, up you go.”

“Are we going to find the crew?” Maggie hefted herself into the hole and turned to pull her sister up after her.

“If the earl has not been able to make a stand, it is not likely his crew has, either.” At the far end of the corridor, she heard a shout. “He means us to stay hidden if we can. Here, take Rosie.”

But Rosie did not want to be taken.

“Rosie, this is no time to give us trouble. Someone’s coming!”

The bird flapped and fluttered and took off down the corridor. With a moan of frustration, Claire dashed into her cabin, snatched up the hatbox, dumped her beloved blue hat out of it, caught the hen and put her in. “You’ll thank me when we get out of this.” Slamming down the lid and tightening the cord, she passed the hatbox up to an anxious Maggie.

Someone kicked the door, and she heard a burst of raucous laughter.

There was no one here to give her a leg up. She would have to manage it herself, without benefit of rope or hook.

Using a candelabra on the wall, she pulled herself up on the railing.

Bang!

They were kicking in the locked door. Teak was a sturdy wood, but it would be no match for the combination of strength and greed.

She got both elbows inside the opening.

“We’ll pull you, Lady.” A twin knelt on either side.

Claire pushed off from the railing as hard as she could. She landed on her chest. With the girls pulling, and by bracing one knee on the next panel, she kicked her way up and through.

Another shout, this time of triumph, as the brass locking plate gave way.

Footsteps pounded down the corridor as Claire whisked her black skirts up after her, and together she and the girls slid the panel into place right over the heads of half a dozen pirates.

“Don’t move,” Claire whispered.

The children froze. The only sound was the scritch of Rosie’s claws in the hatbox, but their pursuers couldn’t hear it. They were too busy carousing through the cabins, exclaiming about bits of plunder.

Blankets. Pillows. Her hat.

Claire closed her eyes and wished it a fond farewell.

The pirates thundered back down the corridor and in a moment they could hear them clearly in the dining saloon. Up in the ceiling, sound seemed to distribute itself equally, as though there weren’t much in the way of barriers to stop it.

“How many are there?” Lizzie whispered.

“Besides these? No telling,” Maggie said.

“There were hundreds in the rigging of the other ship, it seemed,” Claire added. “Shh. Let us listen. I believe they are arguing about my hat.”

“That’s all you found?” a deep voice roared—a voice that reminded her of the booming sea in the smugglers’ caves, far below Gwyn Place. “A hat? Where’s the girl?”

“There weren’t nobody there, captain,” said another voice. “Doors locked on both ends and not a soul to be found.”

“They will be found, or it’s a long step off a short board for the lot of you. Where’s that kid? I want some answers.”

The sounds of scuffling ended in a thud, as if someone had been tossed on the floor.

“You. Kid. You said the other lady was in the guest cabins. So where is she?”

“She’s there. Where else would she be?”

Maggie gasped. Lizzie clapped a hand over her sister’s mouth.

They knew that voice well. Jake’s voice.

“I locked the doors,” the boy went on in a tone halfway between defiance and a sulk. “She’s just hidin’ is all.”

“You two. Take our friend here back in there and don’t show your windbitten faces unless you’ve got her. Why ransom two when you’ve got three?”

Claire and the children sat frozen in horror as they heard the footsteps return below them, and the systematic sounds of a search.

Jake had done what Claire had always secretly feared he would.

He had betrayed them all.

59

Claire huddled in the crawl space with the children, thankful for one very small mercy—that the sounds of the search in the distance masked the sniffles of misery close by.

“I can’t believe it of ’im,” whispered Maggie, her voice clogged with tears. “Our Jake.”

“’E ent our Jake no more.” Lizzie’s voice might have been barely audible, but her rage came through loud and clear. “It’s every man for ’imself wi’ that one, an’ no mistake.”

“Shhh.” Claire sat up. “They’re coming back.”

“How many rooms does one nob need?” growled a voice directly below them—right outside her room, in fact. “Looks like she spent each night of the voyage in a different cabin.”

“Who knows ’ow nobs fink,” Jake said. “Wot’re we gonna tell t’captain?”

“I’m gonna tell him she ain’t here. And then you’re gonna take whatever he dishes out, and hope it’s not that long walk.”

“But it ent my fault she scarpered.”

Claire couldn’t help it—Jake sounded so young and frightened that she could almost pity him.

Almost.

“It’s your fault you didn’t find out where she was first and save us all a bunch of time. Me, I’d send that pigeon pronto and get the Dunsmuir relatives coughing up the ransom. But the captain, he’s a businessman. He’s got other plans, and if you know what’s good for you, you’ll find that girl before you go back in there.”

Other plans? For her? Claire’s stomach did a dip and twist that had nothing to do with air currents.

But maddeningly, the pirates said nothing more, just hotfooted it out of the guest quarters, presumably to widen the search.

“I don’t understand,” Maggie whispered. “Why did he say you were sleeping in all those rooms?”

“Easy, silly billy,” Lizzie said. “Jake squealed on t’Lady cos she’s worth summat. But we ent. ’E’s keepin’ mum about us, for all the good it’ll do us or him. We can’t creep about up ’ere forever. They’ll find us when we fall out of the ceiling from hunger.”

“Then we must make them call off the search,” Claire said with dawning realization. “If they don’t know you’re here, and they’re not looking for you, maybe you can help us.”

“Fine by me.” Claire couldn’t see her in the dark, but she could tell by the grimness in the girl’s tone that she was already planning to start her help with Jake. “How you gonna get ’em to call it off?”

“By surrendering myself.”

Maggie sucked in a breath, and behind her, a whimper escaped Willie’s throat. “Lady, you mustn’t. We’re a flock. We gots to stick together.”

“It’s the only way. The sooner they stop looking, the safer you and Willie and Tigg will be. And you will not starve up here. I’ll find a way to get food to you, and if that fails, there is always thievery.”

Dear me. If mama could only hear me now.

“I’ll leave you the rifle,” she went on. “If you’re cornered, you must have a way to defend yourselves.”

“Can’t, Lady, beggin’ yer pardon.”

“Why not, Lizzie? I can’t leave you with nothing.”

“We ain’t defenseless.”

Claire was reminded again of how much she did not know about the twins’ early years on the streets. How much, perhaps, she did not want to know.

“But Jake knows you got that gun, and he knows you always give it to yer second. If it don’t show up wiv you, he’ll make ’em keep up the search.”

“Her second would’ve been him if he weren’t such a blackguard.”

Lizzie paused a second to acknowledge her twin’s brokenhearted bitterness. “After ’im, it’s Tigg. You got to take it or they’ll hunt him sure. It’s ’obson’s choice, Lady, but you got to make it.”

Claire swallowed the obstruction in her throat. “You will on no account allow yourselves to be captured,” she said huskily.

“No, Lady.”

“You will protect Willie and Rosie at all costs. They are the least able to defend themselves.”

“Yes, Lady.”

“And if the opportunity arises to save them at the expense of the Dunsmuirs or me, you will take it as though it were an order.”

A pause.

“Lizzie?”

“Yes, Lady,” Lizzie said at last. “But it best not come to that.”

Claire took this in the spirit in which it was meant. “I hope not. As Maggie says, we are a flock and I do not mean that we should be separated.” She took a breath and willed herself not to cry. Then she took off the St. Ives pearls and wound them about Maggie’s neck, under her voile blouse. The raja’s emerald went on Lizzie’s thumb by feel in the dark, and she replaced the sharpened ivory hair stick in her chignon. “Now, then. Let us move the panel. On three.”

She slipped through the opening and dropped lightly to the Turkish carpet. Then she shook out her skirts, lifted her chin, and …

… paused for a moment as an idea struck with the suddenness of lightning.

*

Their hiding place had been just outside her cabin door. Through the porthole, she could see the pirate airship, riding easily next to them. Piled-up clouds formed a backdrop, and somewhere the sun was coming up, outlining them in a lurid glow of orange and red. Lightning flickered in their depths, and in the distance, thunder cracked. Not as close as it had been, but close enough to make her nerves jump.

The invaders did not yet know her location. She would give herself up, yes, but before she did, what damage could she inflict?

She opened the porthole and clutched its lower rim as she gazed out, cataloguing the parts of the ship and calculating distances.

The rightmost of the twin fuselages bumped gently against their own, which put the hanging gondola not thirty yards off. Most of the crew must be on the Lady Lucy, because the ladders and ropes had emptied, and men moved to and fro behind the glass of the gondola. Engineers, likely, and mechanics, though they were a motley lot with hardly a whole uniform among them.

Instead of engine cars flanking the fuselage, as on the Lady Lucy, though, this ship appeared to have some kind of external propelling assembly cobbled to the back of the gondola.

Inefficient. Ugly. A true engineer’s nightmare, and quite likely the very devil to repair while under way.

Marvelous.

Claire unholstered the rifle with the ease of long familiarity and pushed the engagement lever forward.

It began to hum.

She did not have much time before someone decided that her disappearance was quite impossible and came back for a third search. At the moment when the rifle’s pitch reached a working range, she hefted it onto the rim of the porthole and took careful aim.

A ragged beam of blue-white energy sizzled out of the barrel and arced across the space between the two ships. It hit the propeller assembly like a splash of wine in a man’s face, and busy tendrils of light flickered over every surface, exploring and sizzling and frying every possible working component to a blackened mass.

Claire permitted herself a smile of satisfaction. It looked for all the world as though the pirate ship had been struck by lightning.

She pulled the rifle in. They would take it from her. But that didn’t mean they could use it to threaten her or hers.

With quick fingers, she found a tiny brass coupling that formed part of the trigger assembly. Its removal would not be noticed unless the rifle was disassembled completely and the mechanic counted five instead of six. But neither would the rifle work without it.

She threaded the ivory hair stick through it and inserted it into her chignon.

Now then.

All she had to do was stay on the working ship. If they planned to take the Lady Lucy for salvage or sale, they would not harm it. In the wildly unlikely event that the Dunsmuirs and their crew could reclaim their vessel, their chances at an escape were marginally better now.

She hoped.

Her blue hat was not the best accessory for her raiding rig, but it made her look taller and gave her confidence. She collected it off the floor, punched the dents out of it with her fingers, put it on, and sallied forth to the dining saloon as though she had been invited to lunch.

All the food that had been on the sideboard had been commandeered to the family table. Behind a full plate lounged the largest man she had ever seen, with a wild mane of black hair. But it was not his size that made her steps falter.

It was the device set into his eye socket. As she advanced toward him and his table full of cronies, all eating and arguing and laughing at once, it swiveled toward her like a telescope, adjusting itself in and out until apparently it found a satisfactory focus.

And then as he raised a glass of the earl’s good Madeira to his lips, she saw his left arm. It was mechanical also, a wonder of cogs and gears and pistons, each moving in smooth concert. Good heavens. The Texicans possessed technology the likes of which they had not even seen in London. What were they doing, masquerading as bumpkins and followers when they could be cornering the market on automatons?

“And what do we have here?”

She stopped, planting her feet as two miscreants leaped up and grabbed her arms as if she planned to escape, not come forward.

“If you don’t mind,” she snapped. “I am clearly not running away.”

“This would be her,” one of her captors said helpfully. “That girl you was looking for.”

For answer, the mechanical arm flashed and the man on her right screeched as an apple bounced off his forehead. “I can see that myself, you dolt.”

Hm. A little sensitive on the subject of his eyesight, was he? She made note, as well, of the accuracy of his mechanics.

“Do I have the pleasure of addressing Lady Claire Trevelyan?” he drawled.

There was nothing wrong with his mind, either. “You do,” she replied. “But you have the advantage of me, sir.”

“I do, at that.” He grinned, and the men at the table laughed.

She waited, the very picture of icy dignity, and the laughter trickled off into grunts and grumbles as they returned to their food.

“Oh, let her go.” He waved an irritated hand at the two men on either side, and reluctantly, the unhanded her. “I’m Ned Mose, captain of the Stalwart Lass, and I claim this vessel. And its occupants.”

“By what right?”

“By right of arms, you little minx, and I’d watch my tone if I were you.”

“Were you me, you would need a larger corset.”

His nonmechanical eye bulged, and then he let out a bark of laughter. This time, the men shifted their feet and looked at one another, as if they hadn’t gotten the joke and weren’t sure whether to laugh anyway.

“There’s nothing wrong with your tongue, at any rate. Where have you been hiding?”

“There are spare blankets in the cupboard in my room. I concealed myself behind them.”

Without warning, he reached over and cuffed the man next to him. “Remember that next time, you idiot, so you don’t spend an hour searching for a prisoner who isn’t there.”

“But—but—”

The man was perfectly justified in his confusion, since even Rosie would have difficulty concealing herself in that cupboard. But no one was listening.

One of her former captors yanked the lightning rifle out of its holster and tossed it in the captain’s direction before she could pretend to protest. His hand ratcheted out at least an additional arm’s length and snatched it out of midair, then the assembly clanked as it retracted to normal length again. “What’s this? Some kind of gun?”

He examined it, and the hairs on the back of Claire’s neck stood at attention as the telescopic eye swiveled to and fro. It was most unnerving. She had never been one to play with dolls as a child—any creation, in fact, that looked human but was not. She loathed the automatons that some families used as butlers. As a child, china faces of dolls with eyes that blinked had made her scream and run in the other direction … and here was a face with practically the same effect.

But Ned Mose was human. Merely a man, and possessed of the same qualities all men possessed, including a sense of humor. She must remember that when the blank gaze of the telescopic eye passed over her once again.

“I asked you a question.”

She collected herself. “Yes, it’s a gun. But it no longer works. I don’t know why.”

If she had removed the power cell, Jake would have told them at once. But even he would be slowed down if he tried to repair the gun. The coupling was not the most obvious cause of its failure—in fact, it would charge perfectly well now that the captain had flicked the engagement lever forward.

The trigger would simply not release the charge.

And until this moment, she had never had reason to wonder what would happen if the charge was not released.

“I would not do that if I were you,” she said pleasantly. “You might disengage the lever again.”

“I might if I felt like listening to a slip of a girl.” He heaved himself to his feet, brought the rifle to his shoulder, and aimed straight at her. “Enough conversation. You’re coming with me.”

If ever her life had depended on her own work, it was now. Stricken motionless, she gazed into the bell of the barrel, half expecting a bolt to sizzle out of it and fry her where she stood.

But it did not.

The captain waggled the trigger. Hefted the gun. Shook it. Pulled the trigger again while looking directly into the flared barrel.

Goodness. Here was something to know. In moments of frustration, logic forsook him. She might take it upon herself to engineer several more such moments, in hopes that she might find an advantage.

With a growl of frustration, he flung the gun at someone. “Fix that.” The mechanical hand clamped her arm and she winced with pain. “You. Come with me.”

He marched her down to the B deck and from thence into the gondola.

“Claire! Oh, thank God!” The countess flung herself across the bridge at the same time as the captain released her with a shove that told her just how much power that arm possessed. They crashed into each other in the middle of the deck, and Claire hugged Davina hard.

“Davina. John. I’m so glad you are all right.”

“For now,” the captain growled. “Long as I get what I want, I don’t see the need for killing. But cross me and you won’t get a second chance.”

“You cannot kill an earl,” Captain Hollys said stiffly. Blood had crusted in front of his ear and down the side of his neck, and one uniform sleeve was torn nearly off. A large bruise was forming on his right cheekbone. “You would be hunted from one end of the Empire to the other.”

“Lucky job we ain’t in the Empire, then, bucko.” The arm ratcheted out and took a careless swipe at Hollys’s head. He staggered back, but a fresh trickle welled on his cheek. “You’re in the Texican Territory air space now, and nobody here cares if you’re an earl or a girl, except if you’ve got money. And both earl and girl here do, if my information’s right.”

“You intend to ransom us?” John Dunsmuir asked, moving so that he stood between the pirate and Claire and the countess.

“Be pretty stupid of me not to, considering you’re rich as Croesus.” The telescopic eye looked him up and down, its assembly whining. “Everyone knows who you are, yer lordship. Be a fine feather in my hat to line my nest with.”

Claire forebore to remark on this distressing mix of metaphors. The point was clear enough. And since he appeared unaware that the couple had a child, maybe he didn’t know as much as he thought he did. Thank heaven for small mercies.

“My family does not negotiate with pirates.”

“They’ll negotiate for you. But I might be convinced to lower my asking price if your missus here will hand over the family hairlooms. I hear from a reliable source that she travels in style, diamonds and all.”

“Your source is misinformed.”

“Yeah?” He turned to holler up the gangway. “Jake! Get yer skinny carcass down here!”

In moments, Jake had tumbled down the ladder and fetched up at the bottom as though his toes hung over a precipice. The earl, his wife, and the crew stared at him with stony disbelief. But his panicked gaze went only to Claire.

“Jake,” she said with the kind of politeness society matrons use to cut the unworthy to shreds in public, “I’m sorry to have missed you earlier.”

“Lady, I c’n explain—”

“I am not interested, thank you. The flock has decreased by one, and you know what happens to birds left outside the coop at night.”

“Quit yer babble.” The captain, it seemed, did not appreciate metaphors correctly used. “Jake, tell us again about the countess’s jewels.”

“There’s a big diamond necklace goes all the way to her waist,” he said in a voice that cracked. “A couple ropes of pearls. Earrings and some other bits an’ bobs I seen.”

“Anything else?”

“A crown thing.”

“She wears a crown?” This seemed to be more than he could believe. “You some kind of princess, lady?”

“Certainly not.” Davina’s voice was soft, but it held the same kind of society ice that Claire’s had. Somehow its gentleness made it even more cutting. “He means a tiara.”

“Ah. I got a woman who might like to see one of them. Maybe I’ll give it to her for services rendered.” He laughed raucously while Lady Dunsmuir’s lips thinned—not, Claire suspected, because she was disgusted, but because it was that or cry. “So. Now that we have that cleared up, why don’t you tell Jake here where the safe is, and he’ll fetch them for us.”

“The Lady Lucy does not have a safe,” the earl said steadily. “Up until now, there has been no need.”

“More fool you. Hoyt, take Jake here and a couple of others and have a look for the jewels. And to make you extra careful, Jake will take a long walk if you don’t find them.”

The blood drained out of the boy’s face. “What?”

“You heard me.”

Lady Dunsmuir paled even further, leaving her fine skin nearly grey. “You would not throw the boy overboard?”

Claire felt sick. Disgust and grief and dislike for his behavior was one thing. But no one deserved this. Not even a boy who had betrayed his closest companions for—for what? What had they offered him that meant more than his future? His very life?

“Just a little incentive to look harder, is all. Nothing personal.”

No. Murder never was.

60

Jake and his escort had barely cleared the ladder when a flat, tinny voice emanated from somewhere about the pirate’s person. “Captain! You’re needed urgently aboard ze Lass. Trouble in ze engine.”

Ned Mose flicked a tiny brass lever on his shoulder. “Fix it, you dolt. Do I look like a mechanic?”

“Oui, monsieur. You’re wasted as a captain. Ze assembly of ze arm proves it.”

“I didn’t yank you out of that Montreal prison to give me grief. You’re aboard to see to the engine. Do yer job, Andre.”

“Even I cannot fix what le bon Dieu has done. The engine, she is struck by lightning, capitaine. Wizzout ze Lady Lucy, we shall be adrift.”

Mose slapped the lever the other way and roared like a frustrated beast. Then he glared at Ian Hollys. “You. Tell someone to go astern and prepare a tow line. If what he says is true, I’ll command from here.”

“Where do you plan to take us?” the earl asked.

“I’ll take you where I take you and not after askin’ your permission!” Mose snapped, and climbed the ladder. Moments later his bulky figure careened past on a zip line that had been rigged between the two vessels.

“Where is my crew?” Captain Hollys asked the two pirates left to guard them. “I must give your captain’s orders.”

“You’re staying here. The crew’s confined to quarters under guard. Zeb, you go.”

“Me?” the other pirate said incredulously. “Why does it have to be me?”

“Because I’m senior. Do you want the captain to keelhaul you for not taking his orders astern?”

Evidently Zeb did not, for he slunk grumbling up the ladder and the sound of his boots receded in the distance.

“I’m going to get me some of that fine grub I’ve heard tell of.” The second one climbed halfway up. “No funny business, you hear? I’m locking you hoity-toities in.”

No sooner had the hatch clanged shut than Davina embraced Claire again. “Have you seen Will?” she asked urgently, as if the question had been blowing up inside her the whole time. “Is he all right?”

“Yes, he is perfectly well, as are the Dunsmuir diamonds.”

“I don’t care so much about those,” said the earl. “We’ve been beside ourselves.” He struck his forehead. “I don’t know what I was thinking, putting him in the ceiling. What a mad idea. He’ll probably fall and—”

“Willie is not in the least likely to fall,” Claire said in bracing tones. “He found me and the girls, and it was such an excellent idea that I boosted them up there as well.”

Lady Dunsmuir let out a breath as though she had been holding it all morning. “So he is well and as yet undiscovered. I feel as though I can go on now. Oh, Claire, you can only imagine my feelings. If he was snatched from me now that I have him back at last …”

“He will not be snatched from us, not in the near term, at least. I have made certain that we shall all stay on the Lady Lucy for now.”

“Tell me you didn’t have something to do with that lightning strike?” Lord John’s face brightened even further.

“I did.” She did not elaborate, merely smiled. “The Stalwart Lass must be docked somewhere for repairs. Our company will not be divided between two separate ships. At least now we have a chance to recover.”

“But what do you make of Jake?” Captain Hollys touched his forehead and seemed surprised when his fingers came away smeared with blood. “I do not understand it.”

“I do not know, nor do I wish to.” The pain of betrayal and the loss of trust hurt her deep under her breastbone. “Captain Hollys, are you quite all right?”

He nodded. “Of course. These are scratches. Of no consequence. I have a ship to retake, and that fool thinks he has locked us in.”

“Ian, you will not do anything brave,” Lady Dunsmuir told him. “I could not bear it if something happened to you.”

“It is my duty to see to the wellbeing of this family, my lady. Every man Jack aboard has the same duty, and we all know the contingency plans. It is simply a matter of putting them into action, now that we know everyone is accounted for.”

“Tigg is not,” Claire said. “I am hoping he is with the crew in Mr. Yau’s care and will be considered necessary to the ship’s operation. They would not harm him, I hope.”

“Hope is well and good, but I prefer certainty.” The captain crossed the gondola and cranked a wheel with a handle protruding from it. “This way, before those miscreants come back. If you have a fear of heights, I will assist you.”

Claire had discovered there were many things in the world to fear, but heights, in her opinion, were among the more benign. That said, she still felt a sick swoop in her stomach when she realized that the captain meant them to climb out onto the roof of the gondola and into a hatch set in the fuselage of the ship. The curve of the great rigid structure did not conceal them entirely from the view of anyone in the pirate bridge. But there was no time to think of that.

The wind was like liquid ice this high above the earth, and as she tried to gasp for breath, it cut into her lungs as though it had actual physical form.

“Quickly.” The captain lifted Lady Dunsmuir bodily through the hatch, and her husband pulled her through the rest of the way. “There is not enough oxygen in the air to sustain us long.”

Claire scrambled through, and the captain closed both hatches behind him, spinning the wheels until they snugged tight. “That will keep them guessing for a few moments, at least, when they find a locked room with no one inside. Come.”

Lady Dunsmuir was as white as her own Brussels lace waist. “Where are we going?”

“Our first task is to arm ourselves. Then free my crew. Then retake the ship and cut her free of the Stalwart Lass.”

Such was the captain’s confidence that Claire could almost believe it was possible.

Apparently the coaxial catwalk was not the only way to travel the length of the ship. “We are between the B and A decks now,” Lord John said in a low voice, speaking over his shoulder to Claire, while Captain Hollys brought up the rear, herding them closely so no one fell behind. “The false ceilings were designed to lead up here so that if we were boarded, the family had a means of escape and concealment. I was not aware of the hatch out of the gondola. That anything escaped my brothers and me in our explorations quite surprises me.” He touched a metal strut as he passed it. “I thought I knew the old girl inside and out.”

“We could find William in here, then?” Hope had brought color back to the countess’s face. “May I call him?”

“No!” both men said at once.

“The walls are thin,” Lord John said more gently. “And he is in the A deck ceiling, a floor above.”

“We must be quiet and take them by surprise,” the captain added. “No more talking, now.”

Moving swiftly, they reached the stern in a few minutes, evident by the narrowing of the fuselage and the increase in the sounds of men’s voices. At a niche in the wall, the captain paused, selected a key on his ring, and turned it in a lock. “They must be under guard, or Jack and the other officers would already have been up here to retrieve these.” He reached in and took a rifle, handing three of them back in rapid succession.

But it was not a rifle—at least, the kind that fired either bullets or current. There was no means of loading it. Claire turned it over. A trigger. Well, that was something.

“It is called an aural detonator. It fires sound waves,” Lady Dunsmuir said, indicating the bell of the barrel. Suddenly Claire realized where the barrel of her own rifle might have originated. “We cannot use anything else aboard ship. Fired straight at a person, the wave it emits will knock a man senseless but will have no effect on the fuselage.”

Clearly Lady Dunsmuir had not been as gently reared as one might have expected.

“Brilliant,” Claire said.

“Here is our plan,” the captain said. “We come out of the ceiling, we disable the guard, we release the crew and move forward. Questions?”

Claire needed clarification on one point. “Are we—Davina and I—to stay behind?”

Davina looked at her incredulously. “Certainly not. Can you fire a gun?”

“Yes.”

“Then what purpose would it serve for you to stay up here?”

To which, of course, there was no answer.

Captain Hollys and the earl moved a panel aside, and then dropped to the carpet below. Davina went next, then Claire. As soon as possible, she was going to possess herself of a rope and grapple, if this climbing in and out of ceilings was going to become a regular practice.

The crew’s quarters were guarded by two pirates, who whooped and raised their weapons. But the earl and Captain Hollys beat them to it. Claire felt a curious sensation, rather like the popping in one’s ears when one descends to a landing field too quickly, and the pirates fell in a heap. A trickle of blood seeped from the ear of one of them.

The captain dragged them out of the way and pounded on the door. “Gentlemen! It is Hollys and the earl. We are coming in.”

It was fortunate he had given a warning. As he opened the door, someone jumped down from a wardrobe pushed up next to it, and put away what appeared to be a candlestick. It was the first officer, looking enormously relieved. “Sir! Is the family all right?”

“Quite all right, thank you, Mr. Andersen,” her ladyship said, stepping into view. “We must retake the ship and then locate Lord Will and the young ladies, who are in the A deck ceiling.”

“Right ho. Middies, look sharp. First opportunity you get, scamper up into the A deck rafters and find his lordship and the girls.”

The captain nodded. “The rest of you, arm yourselves. I want four men posted on the gangways to A deck. No one but our crew is to pass alive, is that clear? This is no time for Queensberry rules.”

Claire had no time for more than a glance at the men in the room. Tigg did not seem to be with them—but she could be mistaken. Mr. Yau was not present, either, so perhaps they were still at the engines.

They divested the pirates of a considerable number of weapons and locked them in the wardrobe. Then they headed forward, to the closest gangway up to the A deck, which was between the galley and the crew’s and officers’ mess.

Two more pirates went down, a third caught halfway down the steep stair.

The first officer went up and kicked the unconscious body aside. Before he could clear the gangway, however, a pair of objects clanked onto the stairs and bounced down them two at a time.

They looked rather like pine cones, only made of metal. One rolled to a stop and the end of it popped open.

A wisp of green mist puffed out, then a stream, then a cloud.

“Gas!” the captain shouted. “Retreat!”

The first officer plummeted to the deck before he could finish the word. Two of the middies collapsed toward each other in a hug, then landed in a pile.

The second bomb puffed and her ladyship went down.

Claire dove through the galley doorway, tripped over a silver coffee pot lying on the floor, and fell headfirst into the dumb waiter.

A hiding place!

She yanked her feet in and slammed the door, then let out a squeak of dismay as the floor rose up under her posterior.

Good heavens. She would be deposited in the serving pantry, not ten feet away from where she had begun the day, in the dining saloon facing a roomful of pirates.

Only now they had much more reason to be angry with her.

61

Had anyone heard?

Curled up as small as she could make herself, Claire listened so intently that her own breathing sounded loud enough to bring the pirates running if the dumb waiter’s mechanism had not.

Nothing seemed to be stirring outside, though she could hear a ruckus below—one with a triumphant tone to it. Round two to Ned Mose, but they were not beaten yet. Claire now knew two things the pirates did not—the existence of the ceiling passages and the location of the weapons locker in the stern.

Slowly, she slid the door aside and wriggled out feet first. On her hands and knees, just pushing up from the floor, she froze.

A pair of boots stood in the doorway of the serving pantry.

Boots she knew as well as her own.

“Hallo, Lady,” Jake said.

Drawing a deep breath, she rose to her feet. She must be calm. She must use her wits and perhaps he could be persuaded to abandon this madness and help them all.

He lounged against the door jamb, what looked to be an actual bullet-shooting rifle in the crook of his arm. “I figured I’d find you here.”

She had no idea where her aural detonator had gone. It had probably fallen down a shaft somewhere. “Did you? How is that?”

He shrugged. “It’s just wot I’d do. You’d best come wiv me quiet-like. Captain’d like a word.”

“Jake, just a moment.”

“Don’t ’ave a moment if you value yer life.”

“Oh, stop talking like a pirate.”

“I’ll talk ’ow I like and there’s nowt you can do to stop me. I’m the one ’oldin’ the rifle now.” His posture was cocksure, his tone as insolent as she’d ever heard it. But something in his eyes, in the tension around their corners, told her he wasn’t completely comfortable in the role of ruffian.

He’d lost the talent for it somewhere along the way, and it was that which kept her tone gentle, and allowed the faintest shoot of hope to spring up where a rational person would find none.

“Only tell me why, Jake. Why did you throw in your lot with these men when his lordship has done so much for you?”

His face hardened, and the conflicted look in his eyes faded. “I make me own way in the world. I take handouts from Dunsmuir and I’m nowt but ’is lackey, then, ent I?”

“Certainly not. You have been earning your way. His lordship is not the kind of man to give handouts, in any case. He is fair. A gentleman. And worthy of your loyalty. As, I hoped, was I.” Her throat closed and made her voice fade to a whisper.

She turned away, unable to look at him. And there, practically under her nose, was a paring knife lying next to a pile of fruit, some peeled, some not.

She gripped the edge of the counter and hoped her skirts were enough to conceal what lay on it.

Jake merely shrugged. “Takin’ a gentleman prisoner is heaps easier’n regular folks. But you was harder. They needed me, and captain’s gonna give me a cut of t’plunder. When we find it.”

“And yet you’ve said nothing to him of the Mopsies. Or Willie.” She reached back slowly, feeling for the knife.

He shrugged, and levered himself off the jamb. “Kids don’t interest t’captain. I got nothing against t’Mopsies. No reason to hand ’em over. Once we make port, they’re on their own.”

“That’s hard. They’re only children.”

He raised his eyebrows and nearly smiled. “A lot you know. Come on, enough lollygaggin’. Captain’s waitin’.”

As she pushed away from the counter, her fingers found the knife. Before she had taken a step, it had gone up her sleeve where once, in happier days, she had kept a spare handkerchief.

Her interview with Ned Mose went rather more poorly than the first one. The upshot was that they were all imprisoned in the crew’s quarters on B deck once again, leaving the pirates to make themselves comfortable in the family’s and guests’ quarters above.

Claire lay on an airman’s bunk, twitching and tossing and wondering how a man could possibly sleep on such a hard pallet. But she must not complain. She and Lady Dunsmuir had the only bunks, one above the other. The other pallets had all been requisitioned by the pirates for their greater numbers, forcing the men to take what rest they could on hardwood floors.

The sun rose and fell, from the limited view she could get out a tiny porthole, and still they flew steadily west, their progress slowed by the drag of the Stalwart Lass on the tow line. She wished she’d punctured the pirate ship’s fuselages while she had the chance. But it was too late now. Below them, the landscape changed from verdant tracts of trees broken by the occasional patchwork of farmland, to more farmland, to open prairie.

“We must be nearly to the Wild West,” she said to Lady Dunsmuir. “How long does it take to cross the Americas?”

“Days.” Her ladyship lay on the top bunk, one wrist across her eyes. “You will know the Wild West by the color of the landscape and its aridity. Do you suppose my poor darling has starved to death by now?”

“No, I do not. He is in the Mopsies’ company, and is likely in much better shape than we.”

“How can you say so? He is trapped in the ceiling.”

“He is not in the least trapped. We are trapped. If they have not been feasting on trifle and roast beef, I will eat my hat.” She paused. “If I had it.” Her lovely hat was gone, knocked off somewhere or whisked off her head by the wind during the escape from the gondola. Some lady in the Fifteen Colonies would come out of her farmhouse and find it perched in her garden like an exotic bird.

“I suppose we should be thankful for small mercies,” her ladyship sighed. “These could be pirates from the Spanish Main, in which case we would be dead. They have no patience for ransom and a distaste for witnesses.”

“The Spanish Main?”

“Yes. Everything south of the Fifteen Colonies—the Bermudas, Florida, Louisiana, all the way to the South American coast. A lawless anarchy of a place which all good society avoids.”

“Dear me. I had no idea.”

“It is not something spoken of in the drawing rooms of London. But in the homes of the railroad barons and shipping people, particularly those seeking trade in the southern hemisphere with the Royal Kingdom of Spain, it is a concern. One cannot fly safely through those skies at all. Hence the vigor of the Texican economy—everyone is forced to fly their way and east again.”

“But our captors are … local?”

“There is no shortage of lawlessness in the Texican Territory, my dear. The Rangers do what they can, but the country is simply too big.”

“I wonder where they are taking us.”

“I do not know. Usually we travel further north than this, from New York to the Canadas, so my usual landmarks and little familiarities are leagues away.”

Claire gazed out of the glass, wishing she could at least open it. The room was tiny to begin with, and two women crushed into the space without even a breath of fresh air was beginning to make her a little crazy. If she could only see enough of the country to—

The floor dropped ever so gently out from under the soles of her boots.

Lady Dunsmuir sat up. “Did you feel that?”

“Are we descending?”

It happened again.

“I believe we must be. I don’t know whether to be glad or terrified.”

“One thing we can be glad of,” Claire said. “The children have not been found.”

“I hope they have the sense to remain concealed,” Davina said. “When we escape, we will return to the ship. Do you suppose they will think of that?”

“I hope so.”

They had dropped about a thousand feet by now. Outside, the two women heard a ruckus and in moments the key turned in the lock.

A pirate stood in the doorway. “Nearly there. Out with you.”

“Where are we going?” Claire asked.

“You’ll see soon enough.”

They were herded, along with the officers and Lord Dunsmuir, down to the embarkation hatch where normally a set of steps would be rolled up to let the passengers on and off. But now there was nothing but the large boarding area and the open hatch, through which Claire could see the landscape sailing past several hundred feet below them.

Trees. Rolling hills. And now, water. A lake? Or the ocean? Oh, if only she knew where they were!

The captain strode up to his lordship, his neck outstretched like a rooster challenging a more powerful one. “I’ve had about enough of this nonsense. I’ve asked nicely. I’ve looked myself. And now I’m about done with being nice.” Practically nose to nose, he demanded, “Where are those jewels?”

“I have no idea, sir,” his lordship said with the conviction of one who tells the truth. He did not, after all, know where Willie had gone with them.

“You’re lying!” the captain roared. He reached out one long, apelike arm and grabbed Jake by the shoulder. “Boy, tell him what you told me last night.”

“They got to be in the ceiling,” Jake managed, as the captain shook him.

The blood drained from John Dunsmuir’s face, and Captain Hollys started forward, only to be yanked back so roughly he fell to his knees on the deck.

“He was tellin’ the truth, at least. I sent him and a team of my men up to comb every inch of them passages. Found a nice cache of weapons, but no jewels. Now, once and for all, you tell me where they are, or this boy takes a long walk.”

“Wot?” Jake jerked away, to no avail. The captain had a grip like a grappling hook.

“What does that mean, exactly?” Lord Dunsmuir’s color had not improved.

“It means exactly this—you tell me what I want to know, or Jake here goes out that hatch. Simple.”

His lordship searched his wife’s face, the full horror of his dilemma in every line of his own. It was clear Jake had not told them about the children. If John Dunsmuir revealed where they were, the pirates would take the jewels and Willie’s life would be in mortal danger along with their own. As long as the children remained concealed, there was hope for the desperate parents. But if he did not speak, there was no hope for Jake.

All three Dunsmuirs could be held for ransom by the threat of death. But what of the Mopsies? Their lives were worth nothing to these men. If they were discovered, would they be deemed useless and pushed out the hatch, too? And what of poor Rosie? She would last only as long as it took someone to whip out a butcher knife.

For the first time, Claire felt the sheer terror that parents feel when the children they love are threatened.

My lord, you cannot make this decision. Claire reached out a hand in entreaty. Who to, she hardly knew. Ned Mose? John? The Lord looking down from heaven?

Ned Mose roared in utter frustration. “That’s it! I’ve had enough of you! If you weren’t worth so much, I’d toss you out myself. But he’s worth nothin’.”

With that, Mose whipped around and before Jake could brace himself or grab something or so much as take another breath, the pirate captain had given him a mighty shove.

With a shriek that Claire would hear in her nightmares for years to come, Jake tumbled out of the hatch and fell like Icarus into the empty sky.

62

Claire and Davina both screamed, and Claire leaped for the opening. Oh, dear Lord in heaven, please let him have caught something … let him be in the rigging, hanging onto a rope, something … please …

But he was not.

The water gave way to land and she could not see a thing. She ran to a window, heedless of grasping hands or the laughter of the pirates.

Nothing! Not a sign that Jake had ever been there, had ever learned chemistry recipes, had ever touched a sextant or gazed at the starry sky.

Had ever lived.

Each breath practically a sob, she could not tear herself away from the glass, in case somewhere in the distance she caught a movement that might indicate he had survived. Behind her, the countess had gone into hysterics, and the ensuing hubbub formed a kind of privacy in which Claire could grapple with regret and horror and grief.

Which meant that she was the only one looking out when a most peculiar assembly floated past.

Suspended from what was clearly a makeshift balloon was her hatbox.

Her mouth dropped open. She craned to see where it was going, and in doing so, saw that they were only fifty feet in the air and coming in for a landing. The hatbox floated downward and vanished somewhere in an uninhabited landscape populated by scrubby trees.

An enormous spire of red rock filled the windows and blocked her view. One of the pirates shouted, “Port ho, sir! Prepare to secure ropes!”

She was pushed out of the way but she hardly felt it.

Her hatbox. Floating away.

The last time she’d seen it, it had contained Rosie and the Dunsmuir diamonds.

If it did still, had the Mopsies seen Jake’s demise and taken precautions? Or did it mean that they had given up hope and were prepared to surrender?

Oh, she must give these wretches the slip and find the children! She had not been able to save Jake. But with every cell in her body, she meant to save the Mopsies and Willie and Tigg. Wherever he was.

And then they could mourn Jake together. Properly.

But for now, she must concentrate on staying alive and at liberty. She would do none of them any good if they locked her up, or separated her from the Dunsmuirs and the ship. She must at all costs be able to get back to the Lady Lucy, if only to discover whether or not the children were all right.

Especially Tigg. Why had she not seen him? He had not been locked up with the crew, and he had not been with Willie in the ceiling. What had happened to him?

Under her feet, she felt a curious sensation, one a bird might feel if it were prevented from flying. “They have moored us,” the countess said.

“Quiet!” one of the pirates barked, and Claire realized that the captain and those miscreants who passed for his officers had gone while she had been pressed to the window—probably to the gondola to oversee their landing.

But what was this? They were still thirty feet in the air. How were they to get down—jump? Or be pushed, like poor Jake?

And then she saw it. A cloud of dust rose into the air ahead of it—a huge engine that might once have been a locomotive, with a tower bolted to it. Steam puffed from the stack as it made its ponderous way across the yards of crushed plants and matted bush below, until at last it heaved up next to the gangway hatch and stuck a ramp into the opening. At least, that seemed to be the goal. However, it missed the opening and crashed into the fuselage. Backed up. Fired up its engine and tried again.

This time, the ramp protruded more or less into the hatchway, and two pirates grabbed it and locked it down. Steam puffed out and up around the tower, for all the world as if it had heaved a sigh of relief.

“You lot.” The pirates flanked the earl and countess and one of them gave John Dunsmuir a poke in the back with a rifle for good measure. “Out.”

“Is the mooring mast not on the ground? Why are we up so high?”

“None of your questions or you’ll go down the short way. It don’t take so long, but the landing’s harder.”

With a rifle barrel in his back, the earl did not answer. Instead, with as much grace as he could muster, he handed his wife and Claire onto the ramp, then preceded them down an iron ladder in the tower, lit only by daylight at top and bottom. How the countess managed her skirts, Claire could not imagine. Even with her own tucked up, it was difficult.

This engine was nothing like the smooth, efficient wonders belonging to the Midland Railroad. This one might at one time have been pushed over a cliff, it was so banged up, and instead of normal four-and-six wheels, it had a kind of track that went round and round.

“Quit yer gawking and move.”

The rifle prodded her and she resisted the urge to jump ahead. Instead, she kept her step unhurried and ladylike, for all the world as if she were crossing a gallery to see an exhibit of famous masters.

No master would ever visit here to paint the landscape. During the walk into town—apparently the engine and tower did not proceed any further than from a shack up against the wall of a cliff to the field—she had plenty of time to see it.

Dry scrub. Soil so light and dusty it was clear all the goodness had been leached out of it by weather or some chemical disaster. Canyons that dropped unexpectedly away from one’s feet—some a foot across, some a hundred—and heaps of red rock like loaves of bread. And over it all stretched a pale, distant sky that neither knew nor cared that it had swallowed a boy’s life.

She could not help but look over her shoulder at the Lady Lucy, floating serenely with her bow moored to … ah, now she saw why they had had to disembark with the help of that tower. The Lady Lucy had been towed and was now snugged into a berth formed by the sheer red cliffs behind the shed, as neatly as any dock at Southampton.

Well. That would make escape problematic, but not impossible.

Her biggest concern at the moment was the increasing separation between herself and the children, to say nothing of the hatbox some two or three miles behind them, which she was now certain must contain Rosie and the Dunsmuir jewels. Otherwise, why take such a risk in launching it? The girls must have worked under some duress to rig such a contraption so quickly. Claire could only hope that they had not been discovered in the process.

*

“That’s it—she’s away.”

Clinging like monkeys to the guy ropes that crisscrossed the exterior of the fuselage of the Lady Lucy, the Mopsies and Tigg rested at the base of the enormous ventral fin and watched their makeshift parachute take Rosie and the jewels away out of danger. They couldn’t stay long or Weepin’ Willie would take it into his head to live up to his old nickname, but a minute to savor their success wouldn’t hurt.

“We best not be long in finding it again,” Maggie said. “Rosie won’t like bein’ stuck in a hatbox for much more time than she takes to land.”

“Better bein’ stuck than et.” Lizzie was practical to a fault. “And we tied the lid down so tight ent nuffink going to get in after her.”

“Lucky job the Lady’s hats come in leather boxes.”

“Lucky job Tigg knows ’ow to rig a balloon out of a landau cover.”

Tigg looked justifiably proud. “After all them fire balloons we made, it were easy. Though between Rosie and them diamonds, it weighed more’n I expected. Come on. Willie’ll be worrit.”

The hatch on the dorsal fin opened inward, and the wind blew the three of them inside and down the ladder. Willie was guarding the sternsman’s chamber deep in the rear of the ship, just above the loading bay—deeper even than the quarters where the captain and crew had been imprisoned.

There was no sternsman now. Every last crewman had been rounded up by the pirates. But his quarters had a bunk, and Maggie had to admit that it was right comforting to all sleep together in a tangle, like the old days in the warehouse squat on the banks of the Thames. This one had its own sink and no fleas, which in her opinion was a big step up.

Willie was under the bunk. “It’s all right, old man,” Tigg told him, bending to look. “With the wind and our speed, Rosie shouldn’t be more’n a mile or two behind us. After the coast is clear, we’ll go get ’er.”

“But in the meantime, even if we’re took, Ned Mose and his lot won’t get what they’re after,” Lizzie said. “Your da wanted us to keep ’em safe.”

Willie crept out from under the bunk just as the ship gave a gentle shudder. Tigg took his hand. “Come on. Feels like we’ve docked. Let’s go ’ave a look-see and then find some grub.”

The navigational gondola had no ceiling passageway, so they couldn’t eavesdrop from above. But they hadn’t gone far on the way to the engine pod when they heard the racket of the crew being bullied along the corridors. “They’re takin’ everybody off,” Tigg whispered. “Quiet, now.”

The port side engine pod was empty, the mighty Daimlers silent and smelling rather burned after their long journey over the Atlantic and half the Americas. They had put down to take on kerosene, of course, but never for very long—and not at all on the forced flight into the middle of the Texican Territory.

Maggie pressed against the curved windows of the pod. “Willie, there’s your mum and dad, see? Going across the gangway. They’re all right.”

“And there’s the Lady.” Tigg’s shoulders relaxed just a fraction. “I reckon we get the lightning rifle back to her and start settin’ things to rights.”

“Rosie first,” Maggie said.

“We just sent her off,” Lizzie told her. “Wot we want to get her back for so soon?”

“I just don’t want us to forget her. We’re a flock.”

“Nobody’s forgetting anybody,” Tigg said. “Look. I never ever thought I’d see that.”

Two pirates were attempting to stuff her ladyship into the tower of an awful-looking engine. She slapped one of them, twitched up her skirts in one hand, and climbed into the mouth of it under her own steam.

“Good for you, missus,” Maggie breathed. “You tell ’em.” She glanced at Willie, whose eyes were shining. “Yer mum’s got a spine, she ’as.”

The possession of a spine, according to their Lady—Lady Claire, not Willie’s mum—was a person’s greatest advantage. Consequently, the children considered it a great compliment.

From the engine pod they watched their friends marched away under armed guard. They were high enough up that they could see the town, but not, sadly, exactly where the little group was being taken.

“Better get back astern before someone comes,” Tigg finally murmured, when they could no longer distinguish a man from the sickly-looking pines and spiny plants that clawed a living from the soil. “They’ll ’ave left a guard and we don’t want to get took by surprise.”

They’d no sooner got back into the ceiling when the ship moved. Maggie staggered and grabbed Lizzie’s arm.

“We can’t be lifting off! Not when everyone’s gone!”

Maggie lost her head and pelted down the passageway to the sternsman’s cabin, which had a porthole. Slowly, ponderously, the ship moved, the walls of a deep canyon closing in on it close enough that she could practically reach out an arm and touch the rock.

“They’re dockin’ us somehow,” she reported with some relief when Lizzie caught up. “That big tower is moving us. Hear it?”

Sure enough, the sound it made growling and roaring was amplified ten times by the close walls of stone. “It’s like bein’ cornered in a blind alley. And I bet anyone flyin’ overhead isn’t goin’ to look down ’ere. They’d be lookin’ for a proper landing field, wiv a mooring mast an’ all.”

“Nothin’ proper about this devilish place,” Lizzie said, pushing her out of the way so she could see, too. But there wasn’t anything but stone out there now.

“You wouldn’t use that word if the Lady was ’ere,” Maggie observed.

“Well, she ent, is she? An’ it is devilish. The very devil hisself wouldn’t come here on a bet, you ask me.”

“Nah, ’e sent Ned Mose instead.”

Lizzie grinned. “That were ’is mistake, innit?”

“We’ll make sure o’ that,” Maggie said stoutly. Lizzie’s grin could make anyone believe anything.

“We got the lightning rifle thanks to yer light fingers, so like Tigg said, all we ’ave to do is get over to that pimple of a town and break the Lady out.”

“Simple. A simple pimple it is.”

“It always is, Mags. You just got to have a spine.”

And a lightning rifle that worked.

And a crew that outnumbered that of the pirates.

And maybe a map of the town with a big X marked where they were holding everyone.

Easy peasy, Mrs. McGreasy.

*

Their prison turned out to be a ramshackle house in the middle of town. The locks on the room at the top of the stairs into which she was thrust, however, were anything but ramshackle—and they were on the outside of the door. The earl came to blows with two of the sky pirates over whether or not the countess would share his prison. Apparently even he had his limits, and it was not until Ned Mose intervened that he backed away, blood dripping from his nose and onto a shirt that was no longer as pristine as it had once been.

“Fine,” Mose snapped. “Let her stay with him. It’s not like they’re going anywhere. They can recite poetry to each other to pass the time.” He pushed them into a room, but the walls were thin, and on the other side Claire could hear every word.

“Now, let’s get down to brass tacks,” Mose said. “We’re holding you for a hundred thousand pounds’ ransom.”

“The family will never pay,” the earl said at once.

“Maybe not, but the pigeon didn’t go to your family. It went to that frumpy old bat you call a queen.”

Silence. Claire’s mind reeled as she tried to imagine the reception such a demand would get at Windsor. She hoped he had not addressed Her Majesty in such terms.

“I fail to see what Her Majesty has to do with this,” the earl said rather stiffly.

“Simple. Your family brings in a fistful of dough for the government, what with your holdings in the Canadas and whatnot. I’m thinking a little pressure from higher up might do the trick where a pigeon from old Ned Mose might not.”

“Her Majesty may be just as likely to send a zeppelin full of soldiers than a chest of money.”

“And she has so many of those hanging around? I hear tell of an uprising in the Near East that’s sucking soldiers like one of our dust storms.”

“If that is true, she will have even less cash to spare.”

“We’ll see, won’t we? Now, you just make yourselves comfortable. You’ve got a long wait ahead of you.”

He was, as ever, quite serious. The day passed with tedious slowness. Claire spent most of it alternately prowling around her prison and staring out the window.

She made a number of interesting discoveries. One, the house in which they were locked—all the houses and buildings, really—sat on sturdy stone footings, all of which were at least ten feet high. Hence the steep climb to get her into this room. Again, escape would be difficult, but not impossible.

Two, the town protruded out of an expanse of scrub that had been scored by some kind of force—as if it had been in the path of something with the power to score deep trails in the soil. It almost looked like the paths the creeks made in the sand at Gwyn Place as they ran to the sea—sinuous and braided, but relentless in their drive to join the larger body of water.

But there was no water here. Not for miles and miles. She felt rather lucky that there was a sprigged china pitcher full of it on the nightstand—and it was evidently meant to do double duty for washing and drinking.

Three, and most interesting of all, someone had forgotten to lock the single sash window. They must be laboring under the delusion that a drop of nearly twenty feet would dissuade anyone from trying.

At sunset, a woman brought her a bowl of soup and some bread, but Claire’s attempts at conversation only resulted in a terrified look and a crablike scuttle for the door. The sound of locks turning put paid to that.

She polished off the soup, which contained not much more than beans and some kind of ground-up meat whose provenance she was in no position to question.

Then she tapped on the wall. “John? Davina?”

“Claire, are you all right?” The earl’s tone was low, but she could hear him clearly.

“Perfectly. Is your nose broken?”

“I don’t believe so. But Davina is not well. Fear for Will is wearing down her ability to cope.”

“Have you a window in your room?”

“No, I’m sorry to say. I suspect that’s the only reason they allowed us to stay together. There is no way out, no matter how much plotting we do to escape.”

“I have one. I simply need to engineer a way to use it.”

“Have you sheets with which to form a rope?”

“Sadly, no. That was the first thing I thought of. I wish now I’d brought my evening gown. It has a train that would have done the job admirably.”

“Alas. Hindsight. If I had not lost my head and hidden the jewels, we might have been—”

“Dead, John.”

“There is still the ransom.”

“They are only ransoming us as a fallback plan. If they had had the jewels, their hundred thousand pounds would have been in hand and there would be no reason to keep any of us alive.”

He was silent a moment. “And what of your family? Will they be willing to negotiate?”

Claire choked back a laugh. “My family—my mother and brother—have the land they sit on and not much else. She has leased our acres to a neighboring squire, but that income is only enough to keep them in pastry. There is nothing left to ransom me with.”

“Then escape is your only option.”

“Not without you. And the children. And Captain Hollys and the crew.”

“Don’t be foolish, Claire. How can one girl elude a shipful of pirates and set nearly thirty people free?”

Put like that, it was a little daunting.

But Ned Mose and his motley crew had never dealt with the Lady of Devices.

63

The locks ground and Ned Mose kicked the door open. By the time it had banged against the wall and rebounded on him, Claire was sitting demurely on the bare pallet, ankles crossed, hands in her lap, just as Miss Follet at St. Cecilia’s Academy for Young Ladies had taught them a lifetime ago.

He narrowed his gaze at her. “What are you up to, you minx?”

A lifting of the brow in inquiry was his only answer.

“Stand up. Turn around and show me that holster of yours.”

She did so, and was subject to a number of jerks and tugs. “Are you interested in designing one?” In the process, he investigated the contents of her pouch.

“Shut up. What are these?” He sifted the gears and bits of machinery through his fingers.

They were the parts that went into a fire balloon. “Mr. Yau gave them to me. I thought I might crochet a purse and weave them into the design. That spiral gear is particularly pretty if you don’t think about its original use.”

“You ain’t gonna be crocheting purses anytime soon.” He pocketed them, and her heart sank. “Where’s my rifle?”

She tried to keep her expression calm as she gazed at him. “In your hand?”

“Not this one, you aggravating chit. The one I took off you. The one that don’t work.”

The lightning rifle had gone missing? “I have no idea, captain.” She adjusted the pins in her chignon. “You are welcome to search, however.”

“Don’t give me that. That rifle was in my cabin on Lady Lucy and now it’s not. The only other person with an interest in it is you.”

“I have been here all day, not gallivanting about the landscape stealing arms. I suggest you look to your crew, sir.”

An irate glance about the cabin told him that even if she had managed to get her hands on the rifle, there was nowhere to hide it. The room held only Claire, the bed and pallet, a brass chamber pot, and the sprigged-china water pitcher.

“My crew is true. If I find out you had something to do with this, and lied to me, you’re not going to like what happens.” He glared at her. “I’ve been making inquiries about your ransom. Seems you’re not a very good investment.”

“I am sorry,” Claire said quite sincerely.

“Yer queen knew who the Dunsmuirs were smart enough, but she didn’t have no idea about you.”

“Are you in communication with the queen?” How on earth had he pulled that off? A simple tea with her took weeks of management and involved several layers of the military, not to mention household staff.

“Don’t take that tone with me. Course not. But I made headlines in the London papers two inches tall,” he said with rather more pride than this should normally warrant. “In New York, too. I seen ’em. Pigeon brought ’em this morning. My demands were plainly laid out. I expect to hear something tomorrow on the Dunsmuirs.”

She was silent. He was not expecting to hear about her. “Was I … mentioned at all?”

“Pricked your pride, has it, that no one cares about you enough to want to ransom you?”

“I don’t think it’s a question of caring. It is a question of resources. My family have none.”

“You got a fancy title and no money?”

“I’m afraid so.”

He snorted. “Might have to make your own way in the world, huh, girlie? Ain’t that a shame.”

“I have been, sir, and quite successfully. I ran a home for indigent children up until very recently.”

“Indi—ing—”

“Orphans.”

At this, he stopped playing with the fire balloon parts in his pocket, pulled them out, and absently dropped them out the window. Claire bit back a cry of distress.

“You some kind of bluestocking do-gooder?”

“No, merely an impoverished woman making the best of a bad situation.”

“So what are you doing with the Dunsmuirs, then, with satin dresses in your cabin and them fancy boots on?”

“I have precisely one satin dress to my name. And these boots were bought in Leadenhall market off a rag picker who’d had a good day.”

Now he was looking at her as though she’d inconvenienced him—worse, that she’d somehow lied to him and he’d made a bad bargain because of it.

“I’m sorry to have misled you. Had I known we were to be skyjacked I would have been more clear about the situation.”

Sucking in his lower lip, he thought for a moment. “Oh well. Buck up. Maybe someone will come forward yet.”

“One can always hope,” she said pleasantly. “However, if that turns out not to be the case, what might you do with me?”

“I dunno. I ain’t never skyjacked a working woman before. I’ll have to think on it.”

And with that, he turned and left with a slam of the door. The lock ground into its housing once again, and as soon as the sound of his boots on the stairs faded, Claire darted to the window and leaned out.

Twenty feet below lay the scattered parts of her device. First thing on the agenda was to get down there and collect them. Second thing was to find out what had become of the lightning rifle.

It would have been far too easy for Ned Mose to shake it out of any of his crew members foolish enough to steal from him. Who would risk being shot for theft, or whatever the punishment was out here for such things? If it had gone missing on the Lady Lucy, there was only one explanation.

The Mopsies.

They must have lowered themselves from the ceiling and taken possession of it, and by now they would have discovered it did not fire. All she had to do was reunite with them, pull out the trigger coupling concealed in her hair and replace it, and their odds of success would increase immeasurably.

Off in the distance, thunder growled in the twilight sky. The prospect of rain in this dry landscape seemed impossible—the state of the plant life proved it. But rain and night notwithstanding, a sense of urgency was growing under her breastbone. If Rosie was indeed in that hatbox somewhere out there, she would make a meal for some creature unless someone did something quickly.

She had to get out of this room!

Sitting on the windowsill, she leaned out and surveyed, not the wall below, but the wall above.

Urgh. Nothing but sheer wood planks. Five or six feet away was a rusty drainpipe, but it looked so unstable it would barely support a spider, never mind a young woman. Claire could just see herself leaping for it, and it promptly tearing away from the wall. Frustrated beyond measure, she slid back into the room.

Just in time to hear someone release the lock.

Ned Mose came in bearing a lamp, and Claire blinked, her eyes adjusting to the light.

“What are you doing?” he demanded.

“Gazing at the stars and feeling homesick.”

He snorted. “You won’t have much longer to do that. Buck up, girl. Seems you’re to be ransomed after all.”

Claire stared at him. Impossible. Lady St. Ives would not sacrifice Claire’s baby brother Nicholas’s inheritance, even for her own daughter. Would she? “You’ve heard from England already? How is it possible for the pigeons to travel so fast?”

“If they don’t have so far to go, it ain’t difficult.”

“I don’t understand.”

“They read the New York papers up in Santa Fe. And telegraph works as well there as it does in New York.” He sounded indignant, as if she’d impugned the literary abilities of the outposts in this godforsaken land. “Turns out you got a friend up there with a bit of ready cash.”

Andrew!

Hope leaped in her heart and she put a hand to the wall to steady herself. His letter had said he was in pursuit of Lord James Selwyn. Had he located him so soon? Had he sold their Kinetick Carbonator to lawful buyers instead of the thieves who had spirited it out of England?

Ned Mose was watching her closely. “I sent a message back saying I was willing to negotiate, since if I was looking to recoup my costs I wouldn’t get much out of you otherwise.”

“That’s … comforting.”

“So this Selwyn fellow should be here by tomorrow night at the earliest, if he takes ship. Train’ll take longer.”

Something was wrong with her head. Claire felt as if her ears had stopped up. He couldn’t possibly have said what she thought he’d said. “What was that? Whose name did you say?”

He pulled a piece of yellow paper out of his pocket and squinted at it. “James Selwyn. What’s the matter? Is he a friend of yours or not? Don’t matter anyway—long as he’s got the cash I don’t care who he is.”

And with that, he walked out and closed the door.

Claire heard the sliding of the lock as if for the first time. Locking her into a room—a house—a life she could not seem to escape, no matter how she tried.

*

Lizzie nearly came to blows with Tigg over the question of who would stay with the airship and who would go and find the Lady.

“Our Willie can’t leg it all that way and back,” Tigg said as firmly as a person could with a six-year-old clinging to him like a burr. “Besides, ’e won’t leave the ship.” Willie shook his head vigorously. “His dad told him to stay put, and nothin’ short of a bomb’s gonna make ’im go.”

“Fine,” Lizzie snapped. “He stays. But we can’t leave ’im alone. What if t’watch finds ’im? He can’t defend ’imself.”

“That’s why you’re going to stay wiv ’im,” Tigg said patiently. “Girls stay with the kids and look after ’em.”

“Wot?” Maggie goggled at him. “Tom Terwilliger, I ent never heard you spout such nonsense in all me life.”

“That’s wot Mr. Yau says.”

“Mr. Yau don’t know us very well,” Lizzie said grimly. “Who’s been scouting for Snouts since we was little tykes, eh? It weren’t Mr. Yau, now, were it?”

“Besides, all his opinion got ’im was locked up,” Maggie put in. She had nothing against Mr. Yau—had quite admired him and his red sash, in fact. But being left to mind the children just because she was a girl was plain silly.

“Me and Maggie will take the rifle to the Lady. We know wot we’re doin’. And seems to me knockin’ out the watch is more your job, now that Jake went over to the other side.”

Tigg’s eyebrows drew down in a way Maggie had never seen before. “Don’t say ’is name in front of me again. I catch ’im, I’ll give ’im what for, see if I don’t.”

“Cheer up,” Lizzie told him. “Maybe they made him stand watch. You c’n fill yer boots then.”

“T’engines need checked,” Tigg said, clearly torn. “When Mr. Yau comes back, likely he’s going to want a fast liftoff.”

Lizzie could sense her victory close at hand. “They did smell a bit on the burnt side, didn’t they?”

Tigg nodded, as if he’d made his final decision. “All right, then. Willie and me will get the Lady Lucy ready to cast off when you come back with everyone. We’ll do for the watch quiet-like. And don’t forget Rosie.”

“As if it were all ’is idea,” Maggie muttered indignantly to Lizzie as they hurried through the ceiling to the cabin they had shared.

“Never mind. Let ’im think wot ’e wants, long as we get to do wot we want. Tigg belongs wi’ them engines and we belongs out there, sussin’ out the situation, an’ that’s that.”

They changed quickly into raiding rig—black skirts and stockings, their hair braided tightly so as to stay out of the way. “Will we want a rope?” Lizzie asked, tipping up the false bottom of her travel bag. “And a fire balloon?”

“Best take both. You never know. Here, use my sash an’ tie the rifle on my back. You got the Lady’s ring still?”

“Round my neck. The pearls?”

“Under my cammy.” Maggie grinned over her shoulder as Lizzie cinched the last knot. “We’re as rich as Rosie, an’ that’s a fact.”

The humor of the situation lightened their feet as they crept down the gangway. Silence and darkness greeted them. “Wonder where t’watch is?” Maggie whispered.

“Long as ’e’s not ’ere, I don’t care. Come on. Hope you remember ’ow to shimmy down a rope.”

“No need. Look, ’ere’s the airmen’s ladder.”

Working quickly, they opened the hatch and tossed the bundled ladder out, where it unfurled and hung within jumping distance of the ground. Maggie had been in plenty of high places, but she still forbore to look down, concentrating instead on the immediate sight of the rungs in front of her eyes and under her boots.

There was no watch on the ground, either. She’d only been on an airship twice—once down to Cornwall and this time—but even she knew that an airman stood watch on the mooring ropes at every field.

“Lot of confidence, this Mose bloke,” Lizzie muttered. “Only four guy ropes and no watch to be seen.”

“Lucky for us. Come on.”

Snouts had always told them to avoid roads and open land if they could, so they crossed the curious shallow course cut into the ground in order to approach the town from the opposite side. There was more cover over here—the thorny bushes stood a mite taller, and Maggie could smell the scent of pitch from the stunted little pines, breathing in the night air.

You would think a deserted wasteland would be quieter, though. Above the steady wind, she could hear something else.

“Liz? ’ave a listen. Wot’s that?”

Lizzie cocked an ear. “Wind.”

“No, under that. Deeper.”

“Sounds like a train comin’.”

There had been train tracks—she’d seen them from above as they’d come in. “Ent no train runnin’ in the middle o’ the night. Besides, them tracks are on t’other side.”

“I don’t like it.” Lizzie picked up her pace. “Might be a ship o’ some kind. Let’s move.”

By the time they got within sight of the town Maggie could hear more than just a roar—it sound like a band of trolls in full cry. “Lizzie! Get up on that rock! It ent no ship!”

They flung themselves at a pile of rocks, each the size of a house, all tipped and tilted as though a giant child had knocked them over one day and had never picked them up. Kicking and scrambling, Maggie pulled herself up onto the last one and looked over the top just in time to see a huge wave of water engulf the town.

The sound of it! The worst thunderstorm she’d ever been out in was like a baby’s temper tantrum compared to this. The water roared, while big rocks and pieces of trees chunked against the stone bases of the houses, whirling off whatever it could grab.

“We could’ve been out in that!” Lizzie shrieked, and they clung to each other as the mad flood scoured through the buildings and out the far side, washing away their footprints in ten feet of water.

The edges of it came within a few yards of their perch, but it was like a flood tide in the Thames basin. It made its mark and then began to recede. The stars had barely moved in their wheeling arc across the sky when the roar became a rush, and then a chuckle, and finally a whisper, as if the whole town let out a breath.

Nothing moved but the watercourse, running and trickling and sighing after the bulk of it had stampeded off and what was left leached into the ground.

“D’you think they survived?” Lizzie’s voice cracked.

“Dunno. Wot kind of idjits plant a town in t’middle of a riverbed?”

“Idjits who don’t want company?”

Silence while a few more minutes passed.

“Mags?”

“Yes?”

“I’m afraid to go down there. Wot if it comes again?”

“It comes regular like, if that watercourse is any indication.”

“Tonight, I mean.”

“That’s a chance we got to take. The Lady’s down there, and Willie’s mum and the captain and all. We gotta spring ’em before dawn. Seems now would be the best chance, while everyone’s—”

Recovering? In shock? Dead? It was hard to find a word that would do justice to this stunned silence that lay across the land.

“I don’t think I can move.”

“Buck up, Liz.” Maggie pushed herself to her feet. Truth be told, she’d far rather put her arms over her head and have a good cry, but that wouldn’t do the Lady any good, nor any of the others, either. “Now’s our chance.”

“I can’t. The noise, Mags! Ent no surviving that, you get caught in it.”

“It’s down to a trickle now, see? Come on. The Lady’s countin’ on us.”

Cajoling, urging, and finally pulling on her arm, she got Lizzie down the rock. Their two figures cast long, vague shadows ahead of them as they ran toward the first of the buildings.

Starlight made a shadow. Who’d have thought?

*

Any hope of sleep fled. Claire lay on her pallet as though she had been paralyzed—and perhaps she had.

She had no plan, no action she could take. All she had was the slim hope that, after the ransom had been paid and she was under James’s protection, she could somehow give him the slip and find Rosie and the children.

I cannot let him pay the ransom.

Of course you can. It’s your money. He stole it. You would practically be ransoming yourself.

It is Andrew’s and mine and Dr. Craig’s and the children’s.

Regardless. Let him pay it and gain your freedom.

Yes, but at what cost? Would James be willing to assist her in freeing the Dunsmuirs and the children? Would he stand up to Ned Mose and the pirates for their sake? Would he be willing to comb the countryside in search of Rosie? Or would he take the Dunsmuir diamonds the same way he had taken the Kinetick Carbonator and return to Santa Fe, his investment tripled?

Her throat thickened with tears.

No. She must not give way to despair. There must be something she could do.

Perhaps the drop was not as far as she thought. If she hung from the sill and dropped to the ground, why, that would subtract six feet from the twenty-foot total.

She pushed up the sash and leaned out.

Fourteen feet was still a very long way. Long enough to break an ankle. And then where would she be—unable to run or save or do anything for anybody. Who knew if there was even a doctor in this place to set the bones?

The stars she had lied about gazing at before twinkled down on her.

At least, some of them did. The rest had been obscured by thick cloud. And in the distance, she heard a rushing, roaring sound, almost like the wind. No, not wind. Water.

Water. Oh, dear heaven.

The torrent bore down upon the town like a train, rushing in the path it had clearly cut many times before. There was nothing she could do but stare in motionless horror as it raced toward them, slurping up a half mile, then three hundred yards, then the last hundred feet.

With a bone-shaking sussuration, it leaped forward, rushing between the buildings, slapping against the stone foundations—stone, that was why the first floor of even the most wretched house was stone—heaving great whitecaps up into the air as force met resistance.

The sound was deafening, the shuddering of the house as the water engulfed it terrifying. Why, one loose board or stone and the water would tear in and the entire house would go whirling off into the maelstrom.

Off into the maelstrom.

Claire yanked the window up. The water shot past a mere ten feet below her. The house shook once again as something—a tree trunk that must have been uprooted miles away—struck the side of it like a battering ram and spun out into the current.

Floating.

Claire’s horror snapped into intelligent thought. In less than a second she had swung her legs outside. She sucked in a deep breath, clutched her chignon where the precious coupling hid, and leaped feet first out of the window into the roaring night.

64

Cold.

Claire had swum in the sea below Gwynn Place, but even that had not prepared her for the chilling cold of water that must have come from mountains far away. One hand clutching the back of her head, she struggled for the surface with the other, hoping her boots would stay laced to her legs and thankful that at some point earlier, she had rucked up and fastened her skirts.

Her head broke the surface just in time for her to see a solid wall looming up. Kicking furiously, she allowed the current to take her around it rather than mashing her into it, where she would be pinned like a struggling butterfly until it receded.

The current pushed her into the street and widened out into a rushing river, carrying her like a piece of gasping flotsam all the way through town in a matter of seconds. She had no choice but to let go of her hair and use both arms to half-swim, half-steer herself, mostly feet first to fend off posts and structures.

Once free of the unnatural canyon made by the houses and store fronts, the water spread, scouring yet deeper the channel she had seen on the way in. Before long, her weight and her sodden skirts made her drag along the bottom until at last she could gain her footing.

She staggered up a sandy bank and collapsed upon it, gasping and crying at the same time. Thank you, blessed Lord, for saving my life. Oh, how foolish she had been—but bruises and filth notwithstanding, she was free!

The coupling! She clutched at her chignon. Thanks to the wire pins and the thickness of her hair, not to mention the ivory pick, she had a fine sopping mat decorated with leaves and bits of flotsam. And here it was. Nothing had ever been so welcome as the feel of that U-shaped bit of brass. She may as well leave it, because nothing would dislodge it from this mare’s nest.

And now she must rest. Just for a moment. Her limbs felt so heavy …

The cold woke her.

Shivering, she rolled to a sitting position, her wet clothes clinging like the hands of the dead. How could such a hot, dry place get so cold at night?

She drained the water from her boots, wrung out what she could from her skirts, and pushed herself to her feet to get her bearings. Below her, the river chuckled and bubbled, but even as she watched, it seemed to be receding, soaking into the thirsty earth and losing itself in the flat spread of the plain. How strange and wonderful and deadly—coming and going in what seemed like a mere flash of time.

She, meanwhile, felt as though she’d aged a year. And how long had she been unconscious?

In the distance somewhere lay the town. And ahead loomed a thicker darkness that blacked out the stars.

The cliff?

There had only been the one, that she could remember—a red sandstone monolith cut by centuries of wind and storm, with caves scoured out of its faces and pinnacles left where rock had fallen away. There had been a shack snugged up against it, directly to the west of the canyon where they had moored the Lady Lucy. She would simply have to circle around to avoid being detected by whoever lived in the shack. And as far as boarding, there must be a way other than by the locomotive tower. If she had to shinny up a mooring rope, she would do it.

But now she needed to decide between two urgent questions—and quickly, before her shivering and chattering teeth became uncontrollable. Should she strike out to the east and try to locate Rosie and the hatbox before one was discovered and the other eaten? Or should she secure the girls and Willie and the lightning rifle?

On a moment’s reflection, the airship won out. The children’s safety was most important. And with the lightning rifle, at the very least, she could shoot any threat to Rosie.

With a sense of relief at having real work to do once again and a clear path to it, she turned toward the cliff.

A dark shape rose out of the river course behind her. “Hey!” it shouted. “This stretch is mine!”

Claire gasped and whirled, in the same movement snatching the ivory pick from her hair. “Who’s there?”

“What do you mean, who’s there?” The voice sounded indignant. “This is my stretch. You go find your own.”

Now there were two figures, moving toward her cautiously, as though she presented some danger.

That was comforting. In a way.

“I have no idea what you mean. I was carried here by that—that—” What did one call it? “That act of God.” Briskly, she rubbed her arms.

“What, the flash flood?” The voice rose to such a pitch that Claire realized with a jolt that the speaker was a woman. “How did you survive that? Who are you?”

She carried the lamp close enough now that Claire could see the outline of a body. Rolling the pick in her fingers, she glanced from the woman to the dark figure moving next to her. “I’m Claire. Who is that with you?”

“Oh, that’s Nine. I’m giving him a trial run. He’s an automaton. See?”

She lifted the lamp just enough for Claire to see a metal contraption vaguely human in shape, with buglike eyes and enormous feet. She stumbled back. An ivory hair pick would do nothing against a brass casing. And who knew what malevolence was contained behind that blank stare?

“Oh, don’t worry, he’s harmless. He’s a metal picker. Like I said, we were just doing a trial run when I saw you climb up the bank. Say, you’re all right, ain’t you? Nothing broke? Or worse?”

The woman lifted the lamp to examine Claire’s face, and in the light, Claire took in what appeared to be a mechanic’s overall and a leather cap on which were perched a pair of goggles. They bore no resemblance to the driving goggles she owned herself; in fact, they seemed to be made of sterner stuff. Poking out from under the cap were a few strands of frizzly blond hair.

“Are you a w-welder?” she asked.

The woman—no, girl, really, she couldn’t be more than a year or two older than Claire herself—wagged her head back and forth. “Welder, tinkerer, picker. You name it, I probably done it. Alice Chalmers, at your service.” She stuck out a gloved hand.

Claire moved the pick into her left and shook it.

Alice gazed at her as if she couldn’t believe she was real. “You look like a drowned rat, so your tale must be true.” Shaking her head, she said, “Come on. You could probably use a hot toddy before you get hypothermia, and you can tell me all about it. I’m that keen on a good story.”

A hot toddy sounded divine, but her story was hers to keep. Too many lives depended upon it. “I’m so sorry, I can’t. I have urgent b-business. Where do you live?”

“Over there.” She jerked her head in the direction of the cliff. “Got a place to myself. I make my living picking and wrecking, sometimes mooring. Whatever it takes, you know?”

“You mean the sh-shack by the cliff?”

“Sure, where else?”

“Are you the operator of that locomotive tower?”

“Sure am. Built it, run it, fix it every time it breaks, which is daily. Say, how’d you know about that?”

Claire felt the irrational urge to weep.

Out of the frying pan, into the fire, as Mrs. Morven used to say.

*

It wasn’t so hard to find where the Dunsmuirs and the crew were … all you had to do was follow the sounds of fighting.

Somehow the crew had seized their chance in the calm after the deluge, and the pirates were giving back as good as they got. The street was filled with debris—tree branches, rocks as big as one’s head, pieces of buildings—so when Lizzie tossed her a jolly great branch to use as a club, and picked up a rock in each hand, Maggie prepared herself.

She wasn’t so keen on fighting. She was a fine scout and even better on watch, but she had to admit that being ten and not very tall had its disadvantages in a scrum.

But there were ways to turn disadvantages upside down.

Darting in and out of the fray like birds, Maggie swung her club at the head of a pirate who held the first officer down in the mud. When he collapsed with a grunt, Mr. Andersen finished him off with his own air rifle. Lizzie had a good eye and deadly aim, so she chose her targets and launched rocks one after the other. Maybe they landed hard enough to do damage and maybe they didn’t, but they distracted their opponents just long enough for a crewman to get the upper hand.

Even his lordship fought like a madman. He’d stuffed her ladyship behind a cart loaded with what looked like engine parts, snatched up a healthy length of pipe in each hand, and was wielding them like a proper dockside drayman.

Someone caught Maggie from behind and smashed the breath right out of her. She dropped her branch and clawed at the iron fingers around neck and waist, a scream choked off before it fairly got out of her throat, her feet kicking and trying to find purchase on flesh.

“Aiyeeyah!” The most unnatural cry she had ever heard came from somewhere behind her captor, and in the next second his head jerked forward, clocked her on the back of the noggin, and something made an awful snap. She fell, rolling clear and scrambling to her feet so quick Snouts would’ve been proud.

The pirate lay dead in the mud, and Mr. Yau nodded at her as calmly as if she’d come into the engine room for a lesson in mechanics. “Thank you, sir,” she managed to gasp, remembering at last to drag in some air.

“Duck, missy.”

She dropped to the ground and his leg lashed out, catching a pirate under the chin and snapping his head back with lethal force. There was that sound again—the sound of neck bones being permanently snapped. The pirate’s weapon fell on her and she caught it.

“Take this, sir.”

“No need.” He waded into the fray with pleasant determination while his appendages moved so quick the eye could hardly follow. Every man he touched fell.

What wouldn’t she give to know how to do that.

However, as the Lady might say, one made the best of one’s circumstances. Maggie hefted the rifle. All right, then. If a pirate could shoot it, so could she.

It had a big fat barrel and weighed a ton. Must be a royal sized bullet in there.

Someone roared with rage and she sucked in a breath. The earl. Two pirates advanced on him, screaming for him to put his weapons down and surrender. Both of them had air rifles trained on him and while Mr. Yau and two of the crew were fighting their way to him, he was so mad and so determined to protect her ladyship that they’d have to shoot him.

But Maggie couldn’t raise the gun. The blasted thing was so heavy it wobbled all over the place. Aiming at anything but a warehouse was out of the question.

Her ladyship’s cart!

Maggie dashed behind the earl and took up her position. If anyone but the countess saw her, she’d be surprised, but in a trice her ladyship took in what she was up to.

“John!” she shrieked. “Duck!”

It was a rare man who would do what his wife screeched at him in such a tone, but the earl seemed to be that kind of man. He dropped like a stone, leaving the pirates gawking at him for just a second.

A second was all Maggie needed. She pulled the trigger, wondering what on earth she’d got them all into—

A pair of cannonballs, each as big as her fist and tied together with a length of chain, exploded out of the big bore of the rifle. Whirling like a very dervish of destruction, they struck the pirates and then whipped around the two of them, cracking their skulls and tying them up tight all in the same graceful swirl.

The countess shot her the kind of triumphant look that Maggie had only seen on the Lady’s face when she’d got her times table right or fixed the mother’s helper that cleaned the cottage. Except the Lady didn’t look quite so bloodthirsty when she did it. “Well done, Maggie. Well done indeed.”

The earl scrambled up and joined them. “If I’d had any idea you were such a good shot, I’d have come and found you first.”

“Where’s Will?” the countess demanded. “Is he with you?”

“Not likely. ’E’s on the ship, ’elping Tigg get ’er ready for liftoff.”

“He’s safe.” Her ladyship’s eyes could burn a hole in a hanky. “You’re sure he’s safe.”

“Safe as houses, ma’am.”

The intensity in her gaze was dissolved by relief. “Good heavens, Maggie. You just saved my husband’s life. I think we can dispense with the ladyships and ma’ams. My Christian name is Davina, and I would be honored if you would use it.”

Goodness. Wait till Lizzie heard!

“I—well, all right, then, yer la—er, Davina.”

“If you ladies are finished with the proprieties, perhaps we might consider getting back to the ship,” his lordship said. “Maggie, is that rifle on your back operable?”

“No, sir.”

“Has that thing in your hand got another shot?”

“No, sir.”

“Can you use it as a club if you must?”

“Oh yes, sir.”

“Right, then. It appears our side is carrying the day. Let us locate Ian and Jack as fast as possible. If I do not see my son within half an hour, I won’t be held accountable for the consequences.”

As it turned out, Maggie could have stood to find Captain Hollys about two seconds later than she did. Then she would have missed the sight of some dilapidated old sword going right through a raggedy pirate’s chest. Why that bothered her more than having a man’s neck broken right next to her ear she couldn’t say, but there you were.

Compared to the Texican Territory, life in Blighty was tame. In fact, she’d almost be willing to shake the Cudgel’s hand after this.

Almost.

They found Lizzie with Mr. Yau, and after that, the officers rounded up the crew right quick. They dragged the wounded and dead into one of the houses the captain said had been used as a prison, made the former as comfortable as possible under the circumstances, and left the latter for Mose to deal with.

“Where is Ned Mose?” Maggie ventured to ask Mr. Yau. The man had saved her life—she felt a connection to him now that went deeper than admiration for his sash and his skill with the engines.

“I don’t know, little missy.” She and Lizzie had to jog to keep up with the pace they set across the wash and along the bank on the other side. “This is merely a skeleton crew. If the entire band had been here, the outcome would have been much different. Apparently they have urgent business elsewhere.”

“Pirating other people, maybe,” she grumbled.

“I think not. The Stalwart Lass is disabled, and unless they have taken the Lady Lucy to do so—ah.”

Maggie looked up to see the smooth fuselage of the Dunsmuir vessel protruding from the canyon, exactly as she and Lizzie had left it.

Her ladyship picked up her skirts and broke into a run.

*

Alice Chalmers grasped her arm, but Claire was shivering too hard to shake it away. “Come on. We’ve got to get you warmed up. I’m surprised you ain’t dead. Not many people get washed up out of the flash floods alive.”

She was of no use like this—better to be restored to herself than to let the night air finish what the water had not. The shack was several hundred yards away, and by the end of it, sheer stubbornness was all that kept her on her feet.

Alice ushered her inside, poked up what appeared to be a boiler combined with a stove, and stuck a hand into the hot water reservoir. “Won’t be a shake. Meanwhile, better knock back some grog. That’ll help.”

She handed Claire a brown bottle. Another thing mama need never know. One swallow was enough to make her splutter and cough, but oh my, it burned all the way to the pit of her stomach.

A thick, uneven slice of bread and honey, and a chunk of surprisingly creamy cheese went down next. Claire began to feel as if walking out the door might not be such an insurmountable task after all.

“D-Does this happen often? This flash flood?”

“All the time. The minute you hear the thunder up in them hills, you batten down the hatches. Me, I’m out of the way, so I just wait till it all goes down, and then I see what there is to see.”

“But why build a town in the middle of a riverbed?”

“They didn’t, originally. But the water goes where it wants, so there’s not much to do but live with it. They could move the town, I suppose, but there’s no guarantee it won’t be just as bad in the new place. Here, have a wash. I make the soap myself. We’ll do your clothes after.”

“No, really, I must be on my way.”

“Best listen. I been living out here close on five years now. If you don’t want to be scratching red sand out of places you never knew existed, you’ll want to wash it away. Here, behind the curtain. I’ll bring you a tub. Take your time.”

Other than bolting for the door and raising the alarm, she couldn’t see any course but to obey. If Rosie had not been eaten by an animal yet, then perhaps chances were good she would make it to the morning. It would be better to search by daylight anyway.

The hot water felt better than any satin gown ever had.

Claire washed her hair with the lavender-scented soap—where did Alice Chalmers get lavender way out here?—and scrubbed the sand out of her skirts and blouse as well. The holster and her leather corselet had fared quite well, so she hung them on the back of a chair to dry out. When Alice brought more water to rinse everything in, she felt nearly human again.

“Thank you for rescuing me.” She sat by the stove, which had been roused to a fine heat to dry her clothes, and drank the tea that magically appeared. “And feeding and washing me. I owe you much more than I can repay.”

Alice shrugged modestly. “It ain’t often I get to talk with another girl. Mostly it’s that rabble off the Stalwart Lass and the yahoos in town. There’s a few ladies, and I’m pretty good friends with some of the desert flowers over at the honkytonk, but mostly I keep to myself.”

Claire had no idea what a desert flower or a honkytonk might be, but at the mention of the Stalwart Lass, her guard came back up. It was far too susceptible to the blandishments of hot water and food. “Are you part of the crew? Of the Lass, I mean.”

“Not me. They need a place to land, and I got one. That’s about the extent of it. Not that I own this.” She waved a grimy hand to encompass the cliffs and the desert outside. “Nobody does, really. All I got is in this one room and my locomotive tower. Oh, and the automatons.”

Plural? There were more? A prickle of unease ran up Claire’s spine.

Alice’s face took on a dreamy expression as she gazed into the distance over the stove. “Someday I’m going to get to Santa Fe and have a real manufactory. I bet they could use some good automatons up there. And mine are good. They don’t look like much, but they work real well. See?”

She pulled over what looked like a leather mail pouch, and sifted through its contents. Gears, pulleys, tools—even jewelry and kitchen implements. At the bottom was something that might have been a mechanical arm such as the one employed by Ned Mose. “Nine found all this. He’s got a magnetic charge in his feet, see? Saved me weeks of combing the sand with a big rake, like some of ’em do.”

She smiled, and Claire realized she wasn’t gazing into the distance at all. Nine stood behind the stove as if that were its resting place. She resisted the urge to push her chair back and put it between them. She must control this irrational aversion. There were a few automata in England, used mostly by the nouveau riche as butlers at parties, but people of good society employed actual humans. Were they so common in the Americas that this apparently uneducated girl in the middle of nowhere could build them?

“Have you training in mechanics?”

“I had a year at the engineering school down in Texico City, but mostly I just tinker until something works. Nine, come here.”

Claire sucked in a breath as the machine whirred and took several steps closer. In the light, she could see that its arms and legs were jointed roughly where human joints would be. In fact, the arm assemblies looked familiar.

Distressingly so.

“How very clever. Have you ever considered building these limb assemblies for people who have lost theirs in some accident?”

“Oh, sure. I made the one Ned Mose wears. Pretty proud of it, too, with the telescoping forearm and all. Ever seen it?”

Claire evaded the question with another one. “You made it for him, but he’s not your employer?”

If all she did was look after air traffic, and she didn’t associate with the sky pirates except to take money from them, then maybe this girl would help her.

Alice laughed. “Not him. I’m not what you’d call an employer kind of girl. No, didn’t I say? Ned Mose is my pa.”

65

“But we can’t leave Rosie!”

Maggie could count on the fingers of one hand the times she’d put her foot down and acted the way Lizzie did every day of her life. If a point needed to be carried, Lizzie usually did it. But in the crunch, Maggie could stiffen her spine and make a fuss with the best of them.

This was a crunch, and she was prepared to fuss as much as it took.

“Maggie, dearest, we have only moments in which to escape.” The countess knelt next to her so that Maggie, who had grown quite a lot in the past couple of months, thank you, could actually look down into her face.

“The Lady will never leave wivout Rosie. And what about yer jewels ’is lordship was so keen to keep safe?”

“We have learned a lesson or two about the relative value of jewels,” the earl said grimly. “Davina, you must tell her. There is no getting round it.”

“Tell us wot?” Lizzie’s face took on that mulish look she got when she suspected a gull. It took a lot of skill to put one over on her—and hardly anyone succeeded. “Why’re you lookin’ at us that way?”

“My dears,” Davina said softly, “I’m very sorry to tell you that Claire is … gone.”

“Gone?” Like a blow to the stomach, Maggie suddenly realized what she’d done. They’d gone to free the Lady, and in the shock of the flood, the fighting, and the mad dash back to the ship, she’d completely forgotten about her! “Where is she? Why didn’t she come wiv us?”

“She was gone before the fighting started. We—we are very much afraid that there has been foul play.”

Maggie snuck a glance at her sister, whose face was as blank as her own must be.

“Immediately after the flood receded, Mr. Yau employed his skill at the ancient Eastern practice of juh-doh. The door was no match for him, and he and Captain Hollys came to free us. Mose was holding Claire next door, but when we got in, we found no one.”

“She ’scaped, then.” Why were they leaving it to her to point out the obvious?

“We are very much afraid she was pushed. Due to—to economic circumstances that are too complicated to go into now, the pirates discovered there would be no ransom for her. We—oh girls, how it pains me to say this! We believe she was pushed out the window during the worst of the flood, and drowned.”

Maggie stared at her ladyship, her stomach pinching and a horrible cold creeping over her skin. They must be talking about someone else. Not the Lady.

“The day the Lady lets someone push her out a window is the day the queen leaves Windsor and turns ’erself into a Billingsgate doxy.” Lizzie’s tone brooked no argument. Maggie couldn’t have said it better herself.

“An admirable sentiment, but misplaced, I fear.”

“I don’t believe you fer a second, but no matter. We still ’ave to collect Rosie.” Maggie braced herself for some truly epic fussing.

“Your lordship!” A middy, covered in mud and with the sleeve of his uniform hanging off his wrist, appeared in the hatch from the navigation gondola. “Captain says to tell you up ship in five minutes, sir.”

“No!” Maggie shouted. “We have to go find Rosie!”

“I’m sorry, darling.” Her ladyship looked close to tears. “You were brilliant and brave to send Rosie and the diamonds off the ship to safety, but I’m very much afraid we must leave them behind in order to save ourselves.”

“Please, yer ladyship.” Lizzie, reduced to begging? Maggie could hardly credit it. “It won’t take but a moment. We saw where the hatbox went down, not a mile away, past that big pointy rock. It’s near dawn—she’ll be callin’ for us. We c’n find her in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

“Captain says you ent got one shake,” the middy observed from the hatchway, not without sympathy.

“Thank you, Mr. Colley, that will do,” the earl told him. “Tell the captain we are ready to lift.”

“We aren’t!” Maggie shrieked.

“Maggie, the diamonds are not worth the lives at stake here,” the countess said desperately, trying to put her arms around her.

“I don’t care about the bloody diamonds,” she screamed, yanking herself out of reach and practically standing on her toes like a rooster about to attack. “I care about Rosie! We’re a flock!”

“You don’t even know if the Lady is dead and you’re going to leave her? What kind of people are you?” Lizzie demanded.

“Dear heaven, Davina. This is no time for argument. Mr. Andersen, take the young ladies to their cabin and lock them in. We have no time to waste.”

“No!” Maggie cried, and dodged, but no matter how she struggled, the chief steward had a grip like a manacle.

“You can’t do this!” Lizzie screamed all the way down the corridor, until Mr. Andersen thrust them into their cabin and closed the door on them with inexorable politeness. The lock clicked over.

Lizzie launched herself at the door, kicking and pounding on it, to no avail. She collapsed in a heap at its foot, tears and snot streaming down her face.

If ye can’t get out the door, ye numpty, look for a window.

Snouts’s voice, irritating as it was, came to her out of the depths of memory. Maggie leaped for the porthole.

What luck! “Lizzie!”

A storm of tears was her only answer.

“Lizzie, a guy line!” She shook her sister with rather more violence than usual. “There’s a guy line right outside this porthole. Think we can get out?”

Lizzie lifted her head and wiped her nose with her muddy sleeve. “If we can’t, I’ll die tryin’ before I stay aboard this tub one more minute.”

*

Claire’s stomach clenched so hard the bread and the cheese threatened to come back up.

Ned Mose was this kind girl’s father?

She pretended interest in Nine’s arm while she controlled herself and tried to think what to do. She had been a fool to let Alice’s ingenuous gaze and disarming way of speaking get past her guard. Her admiration for Alice’s talent with mechanics was likely to get her sent straight back to that locked room. Alice was no society belle, trained not to use her mind except to dabble in conversation with possible suitors. Behind that open gaze lay a quick brain that seemed to be always working.

“So I’m thinking, from that white look on your face, that you were one of those rich folks Ned took off the Lady Lucy.”

She could deny it, but the prospect of having to come up with a Banbury tale to explain her presence here was just too exhausting. “Yes, I am. I’ve been locked in a room for two days, being driven nearly mad with anxiety. I have urgent business to attend to.”

“So you said.”

“You may tell him I was here if you like, but by the time you do, I will be long gone. And if you try to restrain me, be assured I am no stranger to violence.”

Alice raised blond brows, scratched her scalp, and pulled off her leather cap. She shook out hair that was a frizzled, curly mess. With a little care it could be beautiful—there was certainly plenty of it. “I don’t see how you’re going to leave, unless you plan to pilot that airship out of here, or take my locomotive tower. In that case, you’d be better walking. A good horse can beat that thing any day. What makes you think I’m going to tell him?”

“Why wouldn’t you? You’re his daughter—you said so yourself.”

“That’s got nothing to do with nothing. I’m my mother’s daughter, too, and you don’t see me working at the honkytonk, do you?”

Ah. So that was what a desert flower was. A street sparrow. A dollymop. A woman forced to make her way using any method she could.

She gazed at Alice, who got up and refilled her teacup. “Just because they have the use of the field don’t mean I agree with what they do. I gotta eat, same as anyone else. And if I say that no killing is to happen during any mooring or lift, then I suppose being his daughter is some advantage. At least he gives me enough credit to indulge me.”

“So …” Claire hardly dared say it. “You do not intend to hand me over to him?”

Alice shrugged. “Not my affair. Pulling a half-drowned girl out of a flood path is my affair, since this is my patch. All this flat, from the nose of the mesa down to Spider Woman, that’s mine. I got no call to interfere with you once you’re on your feet again.”

Hope was an amazing thing. It grew and bloomed even in the most trying and inhospitable environment.

“Thank you for that.”

Alice twinkled at her. “Us girls gotta stick together, or the men will run us over.”

“What is a may-so? And Spider Woman?”

“Mesa. That’s Spaniard for table, because of their flat tops. And Spider Woman, that’s a big old rock spire down at the end, where the wash flattens out. There’s a legend among the Navapai hereabouts that she sits up there on top and spins out the lives of men.”

“I see. And the Navapai?”

“Indians. We rub along all right so long as you don’t try to cheat ’em. They’re like you about automatons—no, I saw you. The Navapai, they think they’re the walking dead.”

Claire began to feel some affinity for these mysterious people. Perhaps they were the desert equivalent of the Esquimaux in the Canadas.

“So, you got an interest in mechanics?” When Claire nodded, she went on eagerly, “Sometimes the pigeon brings papers from the big cities, and I can see what people are inventing. That’s where I got the idea for One way back. This man in New Jersey took a basic household automaton and outfitted it for his cotton mill. Doubled production in a year.”

“One? So Nine means you’ve built nine automatons? Where on earth do you get the parts?”

Alice flushed and looked away. “Here and there. Resolution ain’t much of a town, but traffic does come through.”

“Is that what this place is called? Resolution?”

“Yep. Been here ten years or so. Might not be here ten years from now, though. The floods are starting to get on people’s nerves. Say, maybe you’ve seen this one?”

Claire thought she meant a flood until a scientific magazine was thrust into her hands.

“Andrew Malvern has an article in this issue.” Claire looked up in surprise. How strange to hear that name out here in the middle of nowhere, in those flat Texican accents. “They don’t come often enough, you ask me. He could fill a whole subscription just by himself.” Alice bent to show her the page, and sure enough, there was Andrew’s daguerreotype next to the byline. The article outlined his theories on coal production and how technology could help the railroad industry.

“Are you an admirer of Mr. Malvern?”

Absently, Alice took the magazine from Claire before she could read much more than the first paragraph, held it at arms’ length, and gazed at the picture. “He’s so brilliant. And his writing is so entertaining. I wonder if he really looks like this. Before I die I’ve determined to meet him. Haven’t figured out how yet, but I will.”

“How very strange life can be. Alice, I have been Mr. Malvern’s laboratory assistant these past two months. We worked on that very project, with the coal.”

Alice lifted her head and goggled at her as if she’d just announced she was the queen herself in disguise, come for a visit. “You?”

“The very same. Along with a young man named Tigg, who is part and parcel of my urgent business.”

Alice shook herself, much in the manner of a dog climbing out of a lake soaking wet. “Well, I never. His assistant, you say. Boy, what wouldn’t I give …” She glanced through the cabin’s two windows. “Dawn’s a few hours away. What business is it that’s so urgent you can’t catch a few hours’ shut-eye?”

“I must rescue a friend who is marooned some distance to the east of here.”

“Marooned? Is it this boy? Is he injured and can’t walk into town?”

“It’s possible. Thank you for rescuing me. But I really must set out.”

“I’ll come with you. I know the terrain and you don’t.”

“Thank you, but—”

Alice held up a hand, as if to stop her refusal. “Shh. Someone’s coming.”

They’d discovered she was gone. And what more logical place to look than downriver for a dead body, or at the shack for a live one?

“Alice—I must hide.”

Frantically, she cast around the one-room cabin for somewhere to conceal herself. The stove, the chairs, the cupboards, the automaton—those were the sole contents of the shabby room.

“Here.” Alice snatched up her corselet, holster, and damp skirt, pushed them into her hands, and tilted a ladder against the wall. “Loft.”

As someone pounded on the door, Claire practically leaped upward and found herself in a crawl space barely high enough to fit a couple of crates and a strongbox. She rolled over them and lay face down on boards that were placed carelessly enough to give her a limited view of the room below. Unfortunately, anyone looking up could also see her white corset cover in the spaces between the boards.

Perhaps they would not look up.

Alice tossed the tea things in a metal washbasin and answered the door. “Pa. What brings you out here at this time of night?”

He pushed two or three of his crew into the room and slammed the door.

“I been out picking and Nine found—”

“Quiet, girl. I need to think.”

“Fine. You do that. Tea?”

One of the pirates looked hopeful, but was crushed by a glare from Mose. Alice filled the basin from a metal spigot poking out of the rear wall, and washed up the tea things as if her father and his temper were a common sight in her little home in the middle of the night.

Perhaps they were.

“So here’s where we are,” Mose said abruptly, apparently having had enough time to think. “I got the Dunsmuirs up for ransom, and a cache of missing jewels. The Stalwart Lass is crippled, maybe for good, but I got another ship we can strip for parts.”

Lying prone some three feet above his head, Claire pressed her lips together. We’ll see about that.

“I got someone coming to ransom a prisoner, but the rascalous girl escaped.” His ocular assembly whined as it focused on his daughter, in and out. “You seen her?”

“Who? Your prisoner? It’s been a while since anyone gave you the slip, Pa.”

“Girl vanished out of a locked room.”

“You don’t say.”

“Only explanation is she fell in the flood, but that don’t seem likely. People don’t just fall out of windows.”

“Maybe someone pushed her, Pa. And locked the door behind him when he was done.”

He was silent for a moment while Claire silently applauded her. How clever to plant yet another doubt in his mind about his own men! Who knew when that might bear fruit?

“Ain’t none of us would do such a thing, Ned,” one of the pirates ventured. “Not if there was money to be made off her. Say, Miss Alice, you got anything to eat around here?”

“I could whip up a mess of biscuits if you wanted, Perry.”

Claire couldn’t see Perry, but from the sound of his voice, he was young. A hungry age, maybe somewhere between her own age and Jake’s.

Jake … Jake. Oh, if only I’d—

“Shut up, Perry. We got work to do.” Mose began to pace, though the cabin was so small he couldn’t take more than a few steps either way. The ocular assembly adjusted to his course every time he made the turn. “So I’m thinkin’, since I got no girl to hand over for the ransom, I gotta do something else. I don’t see any choice.”

“Pa, no.” Alice’s tone was hushed with pain and pleading.

“Don’t take that tone with me. You think I like wrecking? But what’s this fancy man gonna do once he finds we got no girl? He’ll have the Rangers down on us quick as that flash flood and twice as mean.”

“Rangers been here before and we gave ’em the slip, Ned,” one of the pirates offered.

“Got too much to lose this time. Got a house, and a woman. And I’m getting too old to pick up and run every time someone takes exception to the way I manage my business.”

“So you’re set on this course, then?” Carefully, as if it were fine Limoges that would shatter at a breath, Alice put a dry saucer into a crate tacked to the wall as a cupboard. “You want to wreck this ship that’s coming?”

Claire suddenly realized what they were talking about. Wrecking.

Wreckers operated in Cornwall, too—setting out lights on the cliffs on stormy nights. A ship would steer toward the light thinking it indicated a safe harbor, only to be wrecked on the rocks. The loss of life was terrible—some wreckers even made sure it was total. Meanwhile, the cargo washed ashore for the wreckers to pick over, use, or sell. Claire had heard them use the word and it hadn’t sunk in that the despicable practice could mean the same thing out here in the desert as it did at home in Cornwall.

“I do. Pigeon came saying they’re a hundred miles off. The boys will help you set out the lanterns.”

“Pa—”

“No arguments, girl. Do it or you’ll be sorry you didn’t.”

It took an act of will for Claire to remain motionless. The ship was coming—James’s ship. No matter what he had done to her, he was still part of her past. They had broken bread together, conversed together. He had asked her to be his wife.

If she did not do something, he would be lured to his death.

And it would be all her fault.

66

Alice did not give up, despite the fierce brows and downturned mustache of her father. “There must be a different way. Why not just take ’em prisoner when they get off?”

“Because then we’ll have more witnesses than we do already. My mind is made up, girl, so quit your whining. We’ll run ’em into Spider Woman same as always.”

“Pa, they’re innocent people trusting you to do a proper deal.”

This appeal to his better nature seemed to have no effect on Ned Mose. “Cheer up. You can make yourself another automaton from the plunder. Ten’s a nice round number.”

They had wrecked nine ships?

But how did they coax a ship out of the sky and run it into a rock?

The pirates swept Alice out with them, and in a moment Claire heard the locomotive tower fire up. But, in the grip of cold horror, she could not move.

Spider Woman. That spire of rock with the woman spinning on top of it. Spinning out the threads that would end the lives of innocent men.

She rolled over the crates and fell to her hands and knees, fighting the nausea down. Alice had not been able to put the ladder back up. Never mind. She’d dropped from the tops of walls higher than this.

As she landed lightly, she heard scraping and cursing somewhere behind and above the shack. Then the sound of metal on rock and a shout of “All the lamps. No, all of them! Hurry up, you fleabitten coyotes, or they’ll be on us!”

There must be some kind of equipment storage up in the cliff, reachable only by the tower. Evidently they valued their equipment more than the life of their tower operator—considering the unpredictable flash floods and goodness knows what other natural disasters this place was subject to.

Her fingers felt almost numb as Claire pulled her damp clothes on. She snapped the corselet together and snatched a knife with a thick bone handle from beside the washbasin, wrapping the blade in her scarf and slipping it diagonally into the leather. She’d never laced her boots so fast in all her life.

She slipped out of the shack and into the inky shadows where it met stone. And it was there, as she watched the tower chug across the ground toward Spider Woman, that the full scale of the enterprise hit her.

They were not carrying lamps to light their way across the flat. They were going to set them out on either side of Spider Woman to indicate a landing field, and when the zeppelin glided in, it would smash right into the vast spire of rock.

What could one almost eighteen-year-old girl do against two dozen pirates, a locomotive tower, and this hostile landscape?

Claire examined the impossibilities as they raced before her mind’s eye.

Could she release the Lady Lucy and take it up, turning it somehow so that it would obscure the lamps from the view of the incoming ship? Assuming she could release the mooring ropes and get aboard before it floated away, how would she manage both steering and engines? They were hundreds of feet apart, and by the time she got one going, the other would have become uncontrollable.

Keep it simple.

Could she run out and kick over the lamps? Yes, and then they’d catch her and this time, they’d save themselves the bother of locking her up. They’d simply shoot her on the spot.

Could she run to town, then, and release the Dunsmuirs and the crew? That would be an excellent plan if she had more than a few minutes. By the time they got back, James would have fallen out of the sky and landed among the wreckage, twisted and broken.

She couldn’t even send a pigeon up to tell them something was wrong. Or wave a flag or those lamps that the railway men had to signal a train to—

Wait. Lamps.

One lamp.

All she needed was one lamp with which to signify danger, up high enough to catch the eye of the navigator and make him wonder why there was a danger signal where logic said no signal should be.

Her scarf was red. She could wrap the lamp in it. It would probably catch fire, but she had to take the chance.

With only the vaguest idea of where exactly Spider Woman was in the dark, Claire followed the sound of the locomotive tower, keeping fifty yards to the side and praying the night would conceal her. No point trying to keep quiet—the locomotive, grumbling along on its rotating treads, made enough noise to cover the sound of an approaching army, never mind one person.

She must steal a lamp. Now, while everyone was facing the monolith that rose out of the desert floor, blocking out the stars.

Crouching low, she ran in and snatched up the first one on the makeshift landing field, then darted back out to the perimeter.

Blast, it wasn’t a flame at all! It was the same substance as in the moonglobes, and the more she agitated it by moving, the brighter it glowed.

She tore off her skirt and wrapped the lamp in it, then took off at a dead run for the foot of Spider Woman.

This was no time for modesty. Besides, it was dark.

She didn’t know what she expected, but it was not the scree of fallen rock and shelves of rough, sandpaper-like stone that made up the base of the huge formation. It was unstable and broken and was probably going to kill her—but better that than to live with the knowledge that she had watched a ship full of people die and had done nothing to stop it.

Perhaps this would balance her accounts with the Almighty over the matter of Lightning Luke.

Her foot slipped and she banged a knee on an outcropping. A word escaped her she had heard Snouts use and never imagined using herself—but when she lifted her head to grit her teeth in pain, she saw that the locomotive tower had passed the rocks and was laboring away into the dark on the other side. Alice was placing lamps. The pirates would conceal themselves in the monolith’s shadow. She had a few moments to gain some ground.

If only she could stuff her bundle in the holster and use both hands! If only her underthings weren’t white! It was of no use at all to have a black skirt and stockings in one’s raiding rig and have a white batiste corset cover and pantalettes. If she survived this, by George, she was going to have black underthings made just as soon as she found civilization.

Another ledge. Another outcrop of rough stone.

Pull, scrape, heave. Again. And again.

Scrape. Claire halted. She could hear her own boots on the rock.

The locomotive had shut down.

And in the distant night sky, she heard the now-familiar clattering purr of steam engines. They were not Daimler engines, that was certain—the Germans were dab hands at a smooth operation that didn’t make so much noise. These must be made here in the Americas.

What was she thinking? Climb!

Ten yards further, the scree smoothed out and the stone leaped straight up in a face so smooth it could have been cut with a spinner’s knife. She could go no further.

How far up was she? And how long would it take them to scale the tumble of rocks and earth to catch her?

No matter.

Claire unwrapped the lamp, which was glowing like a small sun from all her exertions. She yanked her skirt back on and slid the knife out of her red scarf, jamming it into the back of her corselet. Then she wrapped her scarf around the lamp, grasped the handle, and swung it in wide, swooping arcs, the way she had seen the switchmen do on the tracks. Only this time her movements were exaggerated, almost balletic, the red glow of the lamp curving up, down, and up again.

The hum of the approaching airship did not change pitch. Or course.

She must get their attention. She must.

Please, Lord. Let them see. Let me be in time.

Down, out, up again. Down, out, and up. Again. And again.

Her arms were getting tired, both from the climb and from the weight of the lamp.

Down, out, up.

Two hundred yards.

Down, out, up. Down, out, up.

One hundred.

Oh, God—oh, God—

Down, out—

Fifty.

—up.

The engines coughed, hitched, and growled in a change of pitch that told her they’d been thrown, protesting, into full reverse.

Down, out, up. Down, out—

The fuselage floated over her head and scraped along the face of Spider Woman as if kissing it hello.

Claire cried out and, far above in the gondola, got a glimpse of a man’s face, his mouth stretched in a rictus of terror, his hands flashing as he ratcheted the wheel over, its spokes blurred in the light of the running lamps.

He had not given up his post.

Neither would she.

Whoever he was, they were bound in this moment of horror as the sheer rock released its burden. Canvas tore, but the great gas bags housed within did not, and the ship turned as ponderously as a whale in the open sea.

Something landed ten feet down the slope, as heavy as a body. Claire screamed and dropped the lamp, and darkness plunged down on her.

Another body. And another and another—had so many died?

Straining, she tried to see movement. And then she realized what had happened. They were releasing the sandbags, lightening the ship enough to take them aloft again. Sure enough, as she sat there amid the wreckage of the lamp and the splattered sandbags, the breathing, living presence of the ship rose to block out the fading stars, its engines once again set full ahead.

Before her heart had slowed to its normal rate, the airship bearing her former fiancé had climbed to cruising altitude. As it moved off into the glimmer of gray that presaged the dawn, a silence that was almost holy fell upon the spire of rock lifting into the night.

67

A howl of pure rage echoed among the rocks, somewhere on the ground behind Spider Woman, as the sound of the airship’s laboring engines faded into the distance.

Claire picked herself up and retrieved her scarf from the wreckage of the lamp, but it was soaked in the chemical compound from which the light had emanated. Nothing emanated from it now but a harsh, sour scent that burned her nostrils.

It had served its purpose well. She could see the outlines of objects now—well enough to scoop up the crumbly clay earth and cover the scarf and the wreck of the lamp. Then she picked up one of the lengths of rope that had secured the sandbags to the ballast irons, and wound it around her waist, over the corselet.

One never knew when one might be glad of a length of rope. Earlier tonight, for instance.

For the moment, though, the most urgent course of action was to stay out of sight until Ned Mose and his gang of wreckers had gone back to town. She shuddered to think what might happen to the Dunsmuirs and the crew in that event, but the truth was, she was powerless in the matter.

However, she could do one thing. She could find Rosie and the hatbox and put a little distance between herself and Mose’s rage at the same time.

The sun had not risen, but the rocks had taken on shape and substance now. She climbed down somewhat more carefully than she had scrambled up, keeping a sharp eye on the ground below in case someone rounded the base of the monolith. In her black raiding rig she could give a fair impression of a shadow if she had to, despite the red and ochre colors of the rock.

The sound of the locomotive tower’s engine firing up halted her so suddenly that she skidded on gravel. Taking refuge in the inky shadow of a huge tumbled boulder, she stretched up just enough to see the tower rumble off toward the wash and Alice’s shack. When no one followed on foot, Claire assumed the pirates were crammed inside.

That did not mean Ned Mose wouldn’t send someone to see what had alerted the Texican airship and caused it to evade their trap.

Darting from rock to rock, holding her breath and feeling exposed every time she was forced to step out on a ledge and drop the next level down, she made her way back to the desert floor. Her hands were scraped raw from the sandpaper consistency of the rocks, and all the knuckles on her left hand had been bruised when a handhold had crumbled.

But she was free. And alive. And so were James and the crew of that ship.

Knuckles would heal, and torn stockings could be mended. But if that ship had gone down … Claire shuddered.

She began an easy run in the direction the hatbox had taken, angling away from Spider Woman and toward the lake over which they had passed. Somewhere between the water and the spire of rock, there had been a stand of scrubby trees, bigger than the round bushes that seemed to uproot themselves and go rolling across the landscape, but smaller and less densely leafed than any tree back in England.

She had just passed an outcropping of rock that jutted out of the side of a much smaller wash when the sun broke over the horizon and painted it with gentle shades of yellow and cream. This country, harsh as it was, had its beauties, then. Who could have imagined that ordinary rocks could possess colors from scarlet and carmine to lemon yellow and deepest ocean blue? Someone who made a study of geology could make his fortune writing papers about—

In the distance, she heard the sound she had been waiting for—and dreading.

An engine.

She whirled and flung herself at the base of the outcrop. There was no shelter—it was merely a heap of rock piled in the middle of a hump of land—but the eye saw what it expected, did it not? Not what was there.

She stretched out at the base of it and did her best impression of a shadow.

The sound grew louder, and then she saw it.

The great golden fuselage of the Lady Lucy fell up into the sky above the red mesa, made a quarter turn to the north, and moved gently off into the clear bright morning.

*

Claire lay in the dirt, leaning on her elbows, her mouth hanging open. Under the twin blows of shock and dismay, it didn’t even occur to her to leap to her feet and signal, and by the time it did, the Lady Lucy had already reached a thousand feet, where no one save a hawk or an eagle could see a small, disbelieving figure jumping up and down, waving frantically.

She sat abruptly in grass that had once been green, but was now burned and dry from the sun.

They had left her!

Marooned her in the middle of a desert, without a single ally or even so much as a drink of water!

How was this possible? Granted, she had been somewhat distracted in trying to save the lives of an entire ship and crew, but for goodness sake, couldn’t they at least have sent out a search party when they found she was missing?

They must have freed themselves and returned to the ship immediately after the floodwaters had receded. Clearly she had been a little hasty in jumping out of the window when if she had merely waited half an hour, she could have walked out the door with the rest of them, and at this moment be floating off into the air, blissfully unconcerned about what was happening on the ground.

No, that was not true. For who else had they left?

Rosie, that was who.

Ooh, if she ever saw the Mopsies again in this life—and even in the next—they were going to get such a spanking as they would never forget for the rest of eternity. They were a flock! They might consider Claire able to take care of herself, but she would never have imagined Maggie and Lizzie would leave Rosie behind to starve to death tied up in a hatbox.

Well. She had set off to find Rosie, and find her she would. Even if there were only two remaining members, they were still a flock.

She got to her feet, dusted off the front of her sadly abused shirtwaist and the swag formed by her rucked-up skirts, and resolutely did not look toward the north as she set off once again.

A cry sounded behind her. A bird of some kind. An eagle, perhaps, circling and wondering if she would make a tasty morsel.

Another cry, urgent, breathless.

Then— “Lady! Lady! You’re not dead!”

Eagles did not speak English—especially the kind born within hearing of Bow’s bells.

She turned, hardly able to believe the evidence of her own eyes. “Mopsies?”

“Lady!” Lizzie burst into tears and flung herself at Claire so hard that she staggered.

“She told us you was dead,” Maggie exclaimed in tones clogged with betrayal.

Claire had never been at once so happy to see anyone, and so dismayed. The Mopsies. Left behind as well. Innocent children! What was the world coming to?

She fell to her knees and hugged both of them so hard Lizzie squeaked.

“Who told you?” she finally found voice enough to say, releasing them.

“Her ladyship. She said someone pushed you out a window into that flood.”

“She was correct in general, though not in the particulars. I jumped. It seemed a good idea at the time. But why are you here and not on the Lady Lucy? Did you see her lift just now?”

“Aye.” Maggie grinned. “Such a to-do there’ll be when they open our room and don’t find us. Oh, and ’ere—” She turned and presented her back.

“Good heavens.” With quick fingers, Claire undid the knots in the silk sash and freed the lightning rifle. “I am utterly lost. You had better tell me the whole story while I put this back together.”

By the time the Mopsies had finished catching her up, their words tripping and tumbling over one another as each jostled for her part of the night’s work, Claire had put the coupling back in its place and blasted a nearby stump to kingdom come.

It felt extremely satisfying.

“I cannot believe you shimmied down a guy rope,” she said. “You could have been killed!”

“Well, we wasn’t,” Lizzie said, ever logical. “But Rosie might be. We came to find ’er and we found you instead!”

“As well, you mean. Come, we must locate a stand of trees about halfway between here and the lake. I believe she may have touched down there. And as we go, I’ll tell you my side of these events.”

They were as impressed with her diverting the Texican ship as she was with their sliding fifty feet down a guy rope.

“Each of us is a lady of considerable resources,” Claire said at last. “Which we will have to employ shortly now that we are left behind.”

“Wot about that Alice?” Maggie wanted to know. “She might help us.”

“I hope so, but other than a bite of tea, I cannot see her being able to give much assistance. Her father will see to that.”

“Lady.” Lizzie tugged on her sleeve. “Ent that them trees you was talkin’ of?”

A swale sloped gently into what might have been a creek bed in a moister climate. But the trees must have found something there with which to nourish deep roots, because a line of green followed the turns of its dry banks.

“I shall take the far side, if you two will cover this side,” Claire said. “Walk a hundred yards in each direction and meet back here if you don’t find her. We will move outward after that.”

“And don’t forget to look up,” Maggie reminded them. “You know ’ow Rosie is.”

The copse had hardly a hundred yards to its name, but Claire searched every foot of it, including peering through the branches of the trees for a flash of reddish-brown feathers—even one lying on the ground might have been a clue. That is, if one assumed Rosie had escaped the hatbox. If she had not, then they could be guided by the mottled colors of the balloon.

But after an hour, both searches had borne no fruit.

“Move away from the wash twenty paces, and search again,” Claire said. “And you might call. Rosie will answer if she is able.”

“Because that’s ’ow birds tell who’s in their flock,” Maggie said.

“Polgarth the poultryman taught you well in our brief visit.” Claire smiled. “We are a flock, and Rosie knows all our voices.”

Maggie put a hand on Claire’s skirt to stay her. “I knew you wouldn’t leave us. I told ’er ladyship so. Cos we’re a flock.”

A lump rose in Claire’s throat, and she knelt in the dust, taking both their grubby hands. “We are more than a flock. I consider the two of you my family. When his lordship filed our traveling papers for this voyage, he registered you officially with the Foreign Office as my wards. That means that nothing can separate us except our own free will.”

“Wot about Tigg?”

“Him, too. But not Jake, because he was above the age of fourteen.”

“That rascal Jake,” Lizzie exploded, dropping Claire’s hand. “I’d like to know how ’e feels now, left alone wi’ them pirates. I bet he’s missing us bad and wishin’ ’e’d done things different.”

Claire’s heart drubbed in her chest, making her a little lightheaded. “My dears—” Did they not know?

But then, how could they? The girls and Willie had been concealed in the ceiling during those dreadful moments, and then they had all been separated. Oh, if only there had been anyone else to say these words!

But there was not. There was only herself to say what must be said, to look after these two little lives when she had no idea what the next hour might bring.

“Lady, don’t look like that.” Maggie’s gaze searched her face. “Did summat happen to Jake?”

There was nothing for it. She had never lied to these children, and she was not about to start now. “Ned Mose lost his temper and pushed Jake out of the hatch,” she said in as soft a tone as she could manage.

What little color was left in Maggie’s face drained out of it. “Wot hatch? There’s any number of—”

“An outside one. The one in the main gangway, where we embark and disembark.” Claire swallowed. “He would not tell where you and Willie were, so Mose threw him out. We were three hundred feet up.” Her throat closed and she whispered, “There is no way he could have survived.”

The tears overflowed Maggie’s eyes and she threw herself into Claire’s arms. “I wish we’d never come on this awful voyage,” she sobbed. “I want to go home.”

“I’m glad,” Lizzie choked out. “’E ’anded us over to them pirates and it’s no more’n he deserves.” But her eyes were piteous.

“Do not blame him, darling,” Claire told her over the top of Maggie’s head, and held out a hand to gather her close once more. “I have no doubt he was forced to do what he did. But whether he was or was not, no one deserves an end like that. We cannot even give him a Christian burial—we don’t know where he—where he is.”

It took several long moments before Maggie’s sobs turned to hiccups and at last to sniffles. Lizzie kicked viciously at a clump of dry grass. “We might not know where ’e is, but we’ll find Rosie. I know we will.”

And not half an hour of dusty searching later, a cry went up. “Lady! Over ’ere!”

Claire took off at a dead run, leaping into the wash and out again like a species of antelope. Maggie waved her over to a clump of rocks, and there was the balloon, snagged on it.

“Is she here? Is Rosie here?” Please don’t let her have been eaten. Please don’t make them endure one more loss on this morning of terrible losses.

Both girls knelt on the ground with the hatbox between them. In a trice they had yanked off the cords securing the lid, and Rosie exploded out of it like a pheasant flushed from the grass. With a squawk of indignation, she stalked in a circle, ruffled her feathers, and glared at the girls as though she had not forgotten who had put her in there.

Lizzie sat back on her heels, grinning. “Aye, Miss Rosie, it were our fault, but yer not some nasty pirate’s breakfast, now, are ye?”

Rosie turned her back on her, and both girls giggled in sheer delight at the perfectly ordinary sight of the hen scratching and pecking up the grass seeds.

Claire drank it in, feeling as though she had come up for air after a long time underwater. One small red hen, safe as houses.

Compared to the dreadful events of the last twelve hours, it seemed like a wonderful blessing, indeed.

68

The Mopsies gave the all clear, and Claire knocked softly on Alice’s door. It opened immediately.

“I wondered where you’d got to. Get inside, quick, before someone sees.”

“I have company.” She turned and whistled, a skill that would have sent Lady St. Ives into a paroxysm of embarrassment. The Mopsies materialized and slipped inside with her before Alice could do more than gawk.

She did have the presence of mind to close the door, however. “And who are you?”

They both buttoned their lips and glanced at Claire. Snouts’s training on one’s behavior during questioning had sunk deep.

“It’s all right, girls. This is Miss Alice Chalmers, who is Ned Mose’s daughter—” Both Lizzie and Maggie stiffened with alarm. “But she is a friend to us. Remember? I told you she makes a fine cup of tea.”

Lizzie did not take anyone at face value. “’Ow can she be a friend when she’s—after wot ’e done to Jake—”

Alice worried her bottom lip with her teeth. “What pa does got nothing to do with what I do. You’re safe with me, and I promise on my honor I’ll do nothing to harm you or Claire here.” She peered at Claire, having just noticed the hatbox. “Is that a chicken?”

“This is Rosie,” Claire said. “She has come all the way from England as one of our party, and met with a mishap on the way. All is well now.”

“Our Rosie’s not to be et,” Maggie told her with as close to a threat in her brown eyes as Claire had ever seen.

Alice nodded, eyebrows raised at the sight of Rosie reposing in the hatbox. “Understood.” She focused on Claire. “You got an explanation for last night?”

If Alice was to be trusted, now was the moment to test it. “I climbed up and signaled the ship. The navigator diverted it at the last minute and, as you probably saw, it went on its way.”

“I figured you must’ve had something to do with it. You’ve got to get out of here afore pa finds out you didn’t die.”

“I agree with you. Is there a train?”

Alice snickered through her nose. “There’s a track. Ain’t never been a train since I come here.”

“It’s only a matter of time before your policemen—what did you call them?”

“Texican Territory Rangers. You’re right there. Once that ship gets back to Santa Fe they’ll be on their way pronto. So pa will be after you and they’ll be after pa. You ask me, Resolution’s gonna be too hot to handle by this time tomorrow.”

“What do you suggest, then?”

Alice gazed at Nine in his corner. Claire found a moment to be thankful that an automaton named Ten was not, after all, under construction. “Way I figure it, between rage and disappointment, Pa’ll get tanked up and go on a tear the rest of today. Probably kill somebody by sunset, then sleep it off. By dawn the Rangers will be here and there’ll likely be a gunfight.”

The Mopsies’ eyes grew huge.

“So if I was you, I’d give him and his crew enough time to get properly sauced, then make your escape.”

“In what?” Lizzie wanted to know. “The Lady shot the engine out of t’Stalwart Lass.”

“Is that what happened?” Alice’s eyes shadowed and she couldn’t quite meet Claire’s gaze. “That engine was a fine piece of work. I used an old schematic from a Royal Society journal. I was kinda proud of it.”

Claire put a hand on her arm. “I’m sorry, Alice. But we had just been boarded. With the children’s safety at stake, I could not risk being separated into two ships, so I disabled the Lass.”

“She were a good piece of work,” Maggie said. “Caught us fair and square.”

“She had speed, she did.” Alice’s face brightened a little with the praise. “There ain’t much left, but I guess I can rebuild her.” Then her expression became downcast again. “Guess I’ll have to. Pa’s not gonna like bein’ groundbound for long. On the good side, the Rangers won’t confiscate her if she can’t fly, will they?”

“You would know better than I.”

Alice shook herself and pasted on a smile. “So we have a little time yet. Who’s for some breakfast?”

Both Mopsies came to attention. Lizzie said, “We would’ve ’ad eggs ’cept Rosie ’ad a rough landing, so she ate what were in the hatbox.”

“You can put her out back if you like. I got a little garden there, with a spring.”

“Why don’t you take her, girls?” Claire suggested. “And perhaps clean out the hatbox if there’s water.” The Dunsmuir jewels were encrusted with yolk and dirt and excrement, having lain in the bottom of the box without a covering. But no one but themselves need know.

“Give me a hand with breakfast, Claire, and we’ll have it outside. That way, if we get company, at least I can fob ’em off long enough for you to scamper up the ladder into the supply cave.”

When they carried out the bread, honey, cheese, and a stack of bulbous green vegetables Alice called poblanos that she had grilled on the top of the steam boiler, Claire saw what she meant. Tucked between the back of the shack and the wall of the mesa was a small plot of tomatoes, poblano plants, and corn, between the rows of which Rosie had made a dust bath. An iron ladder led up the rock to a cave, and from further up, a streak of glistening moisture indicated the spring that watered the garden.

The girls eyed the poblanos with suspicion. “Eat up,” Alice said. “They’re not the capsaicious kind, so they won’t burn your innards.”

“Capsaicious?” Claire examined a poblano with interest. “Gaseous capsaicin comes from a plant like this?”

“Indeed it does. Horrid stuff. Only the most vicious rabble—criminal gangs and the like—would use it on a living creature.”

The Mopsies exchanged peculiar looks while Claire bit into her bread and cheese to prevent herself from saying anything rash.

“So here’s what I think,” Alice said, using her bread to mop up a puddle of golden honey. “You don’t have much choice but to use a velogig. People think they’re stupid toys for rich folk to play with, but I’m thinking beggars can’t be choosers.”

Three pairs of eyes—four, if you counted Rosie’s—waited for an explanation.

“What, you’ve never seen a velogig?”

“Wot, you’ve never seen a steam landau?” Lizzie muttered.

There was nothing wrong with Alice’s hearing. “Nope, I haven’t, but not because I haven’t wanted to.” Her eyes turned dreamy. “Some day, when I’m rich and living in someplace classy, like San Franciso or Edmonton, I’m gonna have my very own landau. The latest model, too, like a six-piston Henley.”

“You should see the Lady’s,” Maggie put in. “You could’ve, if it hadn’t flown off.”

Slowly, Alice turned to gawk at Claire. “You own a landau? And it was on your airship?”

Her mouth full of bread and cheese and poblano, Claire could only nod.

“And I missed it?” The girl’s eyes filled with tears. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

With a mighty swallow, Claire downed the mouthful and gulped some tea. “It’s a four-piston Dart, and I’ve been rather occupied. I had no idea you were interested.”

“I’ve never seen a landau. Nowhere to run ’em in these parts—just a lot of open country full of gopher holes and slot canyons. But oh—” She gazed into the garden as though it were Paradise. “—just wait till someday comes.”

“I’d like to see mine someday, too, and sooner rather than later,” Claire said. “Do you suppose the Lady Lucy is headed for Santa Fe?”

“Must be. It’s the only place to put down for two hundred miles if you don’t want to get your pants full of pinon needles and rattlers. That man who was coming to pay your ransom—he came from there, too. Nearest detachment of Rangers is stationed there.”

“So we must make for Santa Fe on this—this velogig.”

“It’s crazy, but if you’re going to try crazy, this is the country to do it in. Wind never stops, see.”

“These vehicles are wind powered?”

“Vehicle. Only got one, off a big old double-fuselage Hemmings—” She stopped and seemed to find Rosie’s lolling in her dust bath fascinating.

Claire glanced at the Mopsies, but they were both fully occupied with food. “You acquired it in the same manner as the parts for One through Nine.”

“Yep,” Alice mumbled. Then she looked up, her eyes so distressed and yet so clear that Claire wondered how she could be so openhearted when her father was so … so heartless. “You ain’t holding that against me, are you? I—I don’t think I could stand it if you did.”

Claire put gentle fingers on her hand and squeezed it. “If you knew the things I’ve done in the name of survival, you would not ask me that.”

Alice’s gaze held hers. “Maybe someday, when we both have our landaus and one of us isn’t running for her life, we can sit down and have a cup of tea and talk it over.”

“Maybe. I look forward to that day.”

Alice sat back. “Well. Let’s do our best to make it happen, then. You girls done?” Even the suspect poblanos had disappeared. “You want to catch that hen and box her up again, Claire and me will get the velo ready. And then I’ll pack you some food and water. You can’t carry much, since weight matters, but the three of you plus a couple days of food can’t weigh as much as the sporting man we ran—uh, who used to own it.” Rosie was returned, protesting, to the hatbox while Alice climbed the iron ladder and began tossing bundles down.

Claire could not imagine what a velogig could be. A boat that ran on land? Some kind of flying machine?

Whatever picture she had in her mind, it bore no relation to the reality that Alice assembled on the far side of the shack, which faced Spider Woman and the trackless desert beyond.

It looked rather like a tripod on wheels. There was a bench on which to sit, and a steering mechanism formed by a bar attached to pulleys. And towering above it all was a blue silk sail that was already billowing and snapping with eagerness to taste the wind.

“Good heavens.”

Alice dusted off her hands and jammed a wrench in a pocket of her pants. “I’ve had it out a few times. You need to be careful—if the wind gets ahead of you the whole thing can go top over teakettle.”

“The sons of the squire next door taught me to sail a boat out of the harbor at home. I don’t suppose this is anything like that?”

“Dunno—I’ve never seen the ocean.”

“Never seen it?” She couldn’t imagine going through life without having seen the ocean—so vast and changeable and full of wonders. It restored a sense of your place in the world, the ocean did, and kept you humble. “Oh, Alice.”

“Well, when I get to San Francisco, I’ll see it then, won’t I?”

“I hope you do. You cannot go through life without doing so.”

“I’ve managed so far, but maybe you’re right. Come on over here, now, and I’ll show you how to steer.”

It was not a bit like a sailboat. In fact, managing the direction of the sail as well as the direction of travel was going to prove quite a challenge. Claire trundled across the ground, feeling at any moment as if the sail would catch a good stiff breeze and send her flying across half a mile before flipping her off and continuing on to New York without her.

“Lady!”

She jounced back at Lizzie’s call and climbed down, halfway between exhilaration and humiliation. “Lizzie, wait till you—”

“Lady, they’re coming!” Lizzie ran out to meet her. “A band of men, they’re comin’ this way from town. It’s too far to see, but we have to hide.”

Alice ran into the shack and a minute later came out, a fat bundle that might once have been a pillowcase in her arms.

“Claire, you have to go right now. That’s pa coming, lit up and looking for a fight. I just heard shots.”

“He’s not going to fight you, is he?” Instinctively, she reached over her shoulder and touched the flared barrel of the lightning rifle.

“No, course not. But he made a law about fighting in town, so he can’t break it. They come out here and raise a ruckus. I’m gonna lock the doors and put up the shutters, but you have to go right now.”

“Maggie!”

The girl ran around the side of the shack, hatbox in her hands. Claire took it from her and felt around in the bottom, under Rosie’s indignant protests. She drew out the smallest thing her fingers could find and pressed it into Alice’s hand. “This is to thank you for everything.”

Alice opened her fingers as if they held a snake. “But—but this is a diamond—what is it, exactly?”

“It’s a watch pin. To hold a watch upon your blouse.”

“Don’t own a watch. Or a blouse. I can’t take this. Where in the heck did your bird dig this up?”

“Some things must remain a mystery until we meet again. Show it to no one. Goodbye, Alice. Wish us luck.”

“Luck,” the girl said faintly. The sun burnished her unkempt hair, turning it nearly white, as she gazed at the object in her palm.

Claire grabbed the girls’ hands and ran.

It became immediately apparent that five minutes of rehearsal was not going to be enough for a command performance.

“Lady, where are we supposed to sit?” Maggie seemed close to tears after the three of them had tried unsuccessfully to fit on the bench. “And wot about Rosie?”

It was difficult to design a conveyance with only thirty seconds to do it in. “Tie the hatbox to that crossbar there. Rosie will have to swing. Perhaps it will put her to sleep.” Scuffling and indignant squawks emanated from within.

“She wants to see out,” Maggie said.

“She will have to wait.” Claire took a deep breath. Hold on. “This is less like a tripod and more like a Roman chariot. Lizzie, hop up next to Maggie. You will steer. I will stand on this bar behind you and manage the sail. Quickly, now. I hear shouting.”

Before she’d even finished the word, a gunshot rang out. Lizzie yelped and jumped up, and Claire grasped the cords of the sail.

If one pulled the rightmost, the sail moved one way. The leftmost, the other. She had no idea what the middle one did, but first things first.

“Steer, Lizzie!”

“Where?”

Claire tightened the rope and the sail bellied out. They began to roll across the ground, bumping and jouncing.

“I don’t care—away!”

The wind caught them just as Ned Mose burst around the corner of the shack and raised his gun.

69

Both girls’ shoulders hunched up to their ears in unconscious expectation of a bullet. Hers probably had as well, but the only thing that would get them out of range was speed, so Claire focused on the sail as if it were her salvation.

The velogig careened across the ground in the direction of Spider Woman, the sail bellying out like the breast of a frigate bird. The wind’s speed might be constant, but its direction did not seem to be. Claire realized that as soon as they’d gone a hundred yards. She trimmed the sail and once again it filled. They flew toward the monolith as if they had wings, and both girls shrieked with either fear or exhilaration.

“Lizzie, to the right, or we shall drive straight into the rock.”

“I dunno how!”

“Push your left hand out.”

The velogig veered to the right and Claire distinctly felt the leftmost wheel leave the ground. “Gently, Lizzie.”

“But you said—”

“It’s all right. We are out of range of the bullets!” She laughed in sheer relief mixed with a healthy dose of terror.

The strange vehicle flew to the south, then Lizzie steered it around the worst of the rocks.

“Now to the north. We must get as far away as we can by nightfall. I wonder how many miles per day one can travel on this thing?”

“Where’s north?” Lizzie held onto the steering bar like a drowning person, her knuckles stiff and white.

“To our left. A gentle arc, yes, that’s it. The wind is coming from the south, so it will push us along nicely.”

Lizzie pushed with her right hand even more, and the velogig’s course curved in an arc until they were heading due north.

“’Ow do you know which way is north?” Maggie said through clenched teeth, one hand gripping a brass support and the other her sister’s dress. “It all looks the same to me.”

Claire adjusted the sail and they flew forward on the very wings of the wind. She would give anything to know their speed—but if the tears whipped from her eyes were any indication, it was faster than the landau had ever gone, and it topped out at forty miles per hour. If she only had her goggles!

“North is the only portion of the sky where the sun does not travel. We shall choose our landmarks each morning and simply do our best.”

“’Ow far is it?”

Belatedly, Claire realized she might have asked more questions of Alice before their abrupt departure. “I’m not sure, but Miss Alice said there wasn’t another landing field for two hundred miles, and the Rangers came from Santa Fe. So I would assume that is how far it is.”

“Two ’undred miles,” Maggie squeaked. “That’s from London to Cornwall.”

Dear me. It was, nearly. “Just pray there are no canyons to traverse. That will make it longer.”

“Lady, I’m scared.”

Claire risked a glance down and tried to smile with reassurance. “There is nothing to fear, darling. We are together, we have food and water, and Ned Mose is at least two miles behind us already.”

But somehow Maggie did not look comforted. “’E’s going to be awful angry with Miss Alice.”

And there was the awful truth that Claire had been trying to evade even as they had evaded their pursuers. “I expect he is. But she is a lady of resources, too, and his own daughter. Lizzie, watch that mesa coming up. We must steer for that saddle-shaped valley in the middle of it.”

“Bein’ someone’s daughter never ’elped us,” Lizzie muttered, but the wind snatched away her words and Claire wondered if she’d actually heard them.

When life found some semblance of normalcy, she must bring it up again. In the meantime, she must concentrate on the movements of the air.

In her entire life she had never been quite so focused on the small shifts of wind direction that meant the difference between slowing to a bumpy creep and taking off like a sea bird from the surface of the sea. Around midday they stopped for some water and a few bites of the odd, hard strips of meat Alice had stuffed into the pillowcase.

“Wot is this?” Maggie chewed and chewed, and finally tore off a piece to give to Rosie, who swallowed it in one gulp. At least the bird had managed to find grass seeds under a bush, and was presently occupied in cracking a nut with her beak.

“I have no idea.” Claire swallowed it half chewed. “But if Alice gave it to us, she must have believed it would be suitable.”

“Tastes all right,” Lizzie said. “It’s better wiv water.”

“Don’t drink too much. We do not know how long it will take to get to Santa Fe and believe me, I have no wish to expire of dehydration out here.”

Rosie made a chirruping sound and flattened herself under the bush. Far above, a bird with a wingspan of at least eight feet wheeled lazily against the sun.

“That’s not good,” Maggie observed. “She don’t do that for doves and robins, nor crows neither.”

“I’d be very glad of the sight of a robin right now,” Claire said. “Come. Let’s be on our way.”

Lizzie had cut a hole in the hatbox for Rosie to poke her head through, but when they really got going, the hen hunkered down out of the wind. By sunset, Claire was wishing she could do the same. She patted her cheeks. Dry—chapped—she would be looking like the bottom of a dry lake before long.

“Lizzie, are those trees greener than any we’ve seen since Resolution?”

“Seems like.” She pushed the bar, and the little craft made for the line of trees. “Let’s go see if there’s any water about.”

There was not only water, there was a creek!

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so beautiful.” Claire took off her boots and divested herself of her clothes. “I’m going to lie right in it.”

If one could take a bath with no soap and while lying prone in two inches of water, then they managed it. Claire rinsed her underclothes, too, just for good measure.

Then they ate a little more of the bread and cheese, and gnawed on the meat strips.

It was not until the sun slipped below the huge tumble of rocks to the west that Claire realized their mistake. Night was falling and all their clothes were wet.

And cold.

And they had nothing—not even a pair of drawers—to change into.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “I think we ought to have waited until the morning, when the hot wind would have dried us as we went.”

“You mean we’re to sleep starkers?” Maggie felt her dress, which, while not sopping, was still too wet to put on.

“I don’t see a way around it, unless we—”

“The sail.” Lizzie fingered the fabric. “We can wrap up in it, like bugs in a rug.”

Claire considered the fastenings. It had gone together quickly. It would come apart just as quickly. “An excellent idea, Lizzie. The silk is treated, too, so no chilly breezes will be getting in.”

Before the dark had fully fallen, they had bundled up in the sail, all together, with Rosie bedded down in the hatbox with the diamonds next to their heads.

“I have to say, I’ve never slept out in the open before,” she murmured. “Have you?”

“Outside, inside, in squats,” Lizzie said sleepily. “In a tree once. That were ’orrible. A wasps’ nest not two feet from our ’eads, and a nasty waking it was.”

“I fell out,” Maggie added. “Nearly broke me leg. Sprained me ankle.”

“Trees big enough to fall out of are one thing we don’t need to worry over,” Claire said. “Good night.”

But the girls were already sound asleep under their stiff blue coverlet, stretched out on the ground. Claire lay watching, thinking, until the quarter moon rose over the horizon in the east, looking at least as big as any full moon ever had back in England.

What a vast country this was.

What an enormous, starry sky stretching to infinity.

And how very, very small and out of control she felt under it all. How very tired of being brave and positive and adult.

And it was only the first day.

She rolled over and tried to keep the tears from coming, but she could not say she succeeded.

*

Claire woke with a start to the sound of shrieking panic right next to her head.

Clawing her way out of the blue sail, she rolled onto all fours, trying to clear the fog of sleep. “Rosie! Rosie, what is it?” She reached for the hatbox and froze.

A pair of eyes glowed in the gray light before dawn—eyes that had no business being so big or so close.

A low growl was her answer.

Rosie had succumbed to utter terror and the hatbox lay silent, a paw on top of it.

A large, feline paw. Larger than that of a house cat, but smaller than that of the lion she’d seen once at the Royal Menagerie.

Claire met the creature’s eyes as it growled again, obviously as surprised to see her come alive as she was to meet it face to face. It also made it plain that it had plans for Rosie, and she was not welcome to share.

“How dare you! Mopsies!” Maggie whimpered, and behind her, Claire felt a scuffle of movement. “Billy Bolt!”

The girls took off at a run, dragging the sail with them. The feline did not move. Instead, it snarled.

“I think not, you wretched thing.” She snatched at the hatbox and wrenched it out from under the paw.

The cat screamed and leaped for Rosie. Claire dropped the box and grabbed it, holding it under its forelegs as she might a house cat.

“Oh, dear.” Now that she had it, what was she to do with it? For heaven’s sake, why hadn’t she just thrown a rock at the horrid thing?

It screamed again, kicking with hind legs that had no business being that long. She felt the claws hook into her arms, dragging and tearing the flesh.

“Oh, no, you don’t.” She must get control of those lethal legs. The cat kicked and shrieked, but Claire gathered all four of its feet into her hands, holding it like a sack of candy. The infuriated beast wriggled and bucked, but it could not move. At last it hung there, glaring at her and panting with its exertions.

“Throw it!” Lizzie screamed from twenty feet away.

“What good would that do? It will just come back.”

“Not before we get out of ’ere.”

“We can’t re-rig the sail until we can see. Lizzie, come here and pick up the lightning rifle.”

“Lady, no, I can’t—”

“Yes, you can, and you will. Now, before this creature decides to use its fangs on my hands. I can’t hold it forever.”

In tears, Lizzie fetched the rifle and pulled it from its holster.

“Activate the cell by pushing the lever forward. Good. Now give it a moment to build the charge and walk over here.”

“I can’t get close. What if it bites me?”

“It’s a lot more like to bite ’er, Liz,” Maggie told her. “Hustle yer bustle.”

“It’s not you who’s never shot this thing!”

“Lizzie, it were goin’ to eat our Rosie. And it still plans to, soon’s it gets away. We gots to put an end to it.”

Her breath one shudder after another, Lizzie approached.

“Now, take aim and fire.”

“But—but—what if I ’it you?”

“You shall take care not to do so. Take a deep breath, aim, and pull the trigger.”

“But—”

“Lizzie, do not fear. You are only five feet away. Even Lewis could hit a target at that range.”

“Lewis would’ve been in Santa Fe by now, ’e’d be runnin’ so fast.”

“At your convenience, please, Lizzie,” Claire said through gritted teeth as the cat wriggled and hissed. Any second now it was going to rear up and bite her hand, and she would have to let go.

Lizzie hefted the rifle, and it wobbled as she sighted down the barrel. Then she squeezed her eyes shut as she squeezed the trigger.

A bolt of lightning sizzled the air, caught the cat in the midsection, and ended its attempts on Rosie’s life forever. Claire dropped it and turned away as the life writhed out of it, and gathered Lizzie close.

“Well done, darling. It’s all right. It’s over now.”

“I killed it!” Lizzie wailed, dropping the rifle at their feet. “I didn’t want to, Lady.”

“I know. We never want to take another life. But it was the cat or Rosie. We are responsible for her safety. She is an innocent, and we must do what we must.”

Lizzie drew back. “Lady, you got blood on me cammy.”

There was almost enough light to see colors. “So I have. We will rinse it out again when the sun comes up, which will not be long now. Come. I’ll wash off and bind up these scratches with a piece of my petticoat. And then we shall sit with Rosie on that rock and watch the sunrise.”

And think of life, not death.

70

With the resiliency of childhood, Lizzie seemed to recover by midday. The hot wind of their going dried her underclothes, and they were soon able to dress again completely. Though there was not a soul for a hundred miles or more, but Claire still felt naked and exposed in the vastness of the landscape.

As vulnerable as Rosie, with only the leather sides of the hatbox between her and death.

Hungry enough to regret that the cat had not been something more edible.

By late morning of the third day, they swallowed the last of the dried meat. The cheese and bread had gone the day before. Rosie killed a lizard and Maggie’s speculative gaze caused Claire to say rather hastily,  “They’re not edible by people, dearest. We must have fortitude.”

They had more water because of the creek, but while it went down like a blessing, it did nothing for the fact that her stomach appeared to be clinging to her backbone. It was all she could do to keep her temper every time the girls whined for something to eat or one more sip of water.

They were still heading north, weren’t they? She was losing the ability to tell.

And surely they must have covered two hundred miles by now. In three days they could have walked halfway to Cornwall.

It would be all too terrifyingly easy to miss a city by ten miles, would it not? One could sail right by and never know that one had left safety and friends well behind—and they in turn would never know one had done so.

Why had they not seen the Rangers going overhead in their ship? She would have expected them on the first day, but not a whisper had they seen or heard.

In their miserable foodless camp, Claire tilted her head to the brazen sky, which reflected all the reds and oranges of the interminable mesas and rock piles in this godforsaken land.

Did no one care that they were going to die out here? Would no one search? Andrew—James—the Dunsmuirs—they were all probably sitting down to a huge dinner of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and every vegetable imaginable while she was out here, sitting on a rock, staring death in the face for the umpteenth time in the past week.

One of these days it would come for her and the girls. Maybe not today. But tomorrow, certainly.

They were all lightheaded and weepy and she had never felt such pain in her stomach. Her tongue moved sluggishly, and she kept hearing bees where it was not possible for bees to be.

“I want to go ’ome,” Maggie moaned. “I hate this place. Why aren’t we there yet?”

Claire clenched her molars together to keep from snapping that if she knew where “there” was, it would go a long way toward actually finding it.

They could not die out here. It was insupportable and inconceivable … and inevitable, if they did not locate Santa Fe the next day.

How could she manage the sail with arms too weak to hold the cords? Maggie and Lizzie were already trading off the steering every hour, one resting while the other tried to concentrate on steering.

There was absolutely nothing she could do to help the situation except to go on … and trust to Providence.

In the morning, after waking from a dream of pastel-colored meringues raining from the sky, it seemed as though even Providence had forgotten them.

The wind died.

Claire stood with the cords wrapped around her hands, turning the sail this way and that to try to catch a breath of breeze.

“Wot’s wrong wiv it?” Maggie’s voice was so apathetic it sounded as though she asked for form’s sake only. “Why ent we goin’?”

“There is no wind.” Claire sat on the rail with a bump. “How can there be no wind? That has been the one constant of this place besides grit in one’s eyes.”

“Yer not doin’ it right,” Lizzie said. Her eyes were swollen to slits from sunburn. “Are you tryin’ to get us killed?”

“I have been trying to save your miserable lives, you—” She bit back her temper, wondering why she even tried if that was what they thought of her.

“Miserable is it?” Lizzie flared. “I’ll tell you this, we was a whole lot less miserable before you came. We was ’appy in London.”

“What, picking rags and stealing bread? Yes, I’m sure you were.”

“It’s better’n bein’ shot at and starvin’ to death.”

“We haven’t starved. You’re still talking, aren’t you?” Claire took a deep breath. “Come. We will push the frame along until the wind comes up. We must make some progress today.”

But the girls would not push. They would only sit on the bench and moan, and Claire could not hold the cords and push at the same time.

It was too much.

She sat in the dirt and a great sob came heaving up from her chest, but no tears stood in her eyes. Her body was too dehydrated to allow her that luxury. Wrapping her arms around her legs, she lowered her forehead to her knees and wept soundlessly.

“Lady.”

She could not bear it. If Lizzie could think of nothing kind to say, she would just pretend the girl did not exist.

“Lady, I c’n hear something.”

“It’s just the buzzing in your ears, Lizzie. I have it, too.”

“It ain’t in my ears. It’s in the sky.”

“Yes, and it sounds like bees. I know.”

“Lady! Look up!”

Atlas hefting the world up on his shoulders could have felt its weight no more than Claire. Wearily, she peered in the direction Lizzie’s trembling finger indicated.

She sat up, then used the rail to drag herself to her feet.

“An airship!” They were saved!

Now she could hear the distant purring of the engine. She blinked, and rubbed her eyes free of grit. “Is that a double fuselage?”

The distinctive Y shape floated closer. Two gasbags, with a gondola suspended between them.

How many ships of that configuration flew these unrelenting skies?

“Girls! Conceal yourselves under something. It’s the Stalwart Lass—Ned Mose has found us!”

*

Maggie and Lizzie flung themselves at a pile of rocks, but there was not even a shadow to be found under them. Claire took refuge under a bush, which was rather like Rosie trying to hide behind a pebble—it offered no protection, either. They could do nothing about the velogig—there it sat in all its brass and silk glory, a rich man’s plaything that was as immobile as a beacon advertising their location.

Even the slender hope that the pirates would think it had been abandoned and move on to find people on foot was dashed as the engine slowed and finally reversed.

They were going to moor.

If she and the girls were not shot on sight, at least there was the soup in the prison room to look forward to. And the nice sprigged-china ewer and basin with blessed cold water to drink. Why had she not been grateful for that ewer of water while she had it? If she had, she might have waited that half hour and none of the past four days would have happened.

If only …

A lead weight slammed into the ground. In the absence of a mooring mast and any wind, it would act as an anchor long enough for the pirates to lower a basket. Because if she was to be required to shimmy up that rope, they may as well leave her to die. Claire put her head down on top of Rosie’s hatbox as though it were a pillow.

One way or another, she really didn’t care.

Rosie stuck her head out of the hole and bubbled a greeting.

Good grief, you silly bird. Those men will make a fine dinner of you. There’s no need to sound so glad to see them.

“Lady!” a boy’s voice called. It cracked—not a boy, then. Becoming a man. The one called Perry, perhaps?

“Lady Claire! Are you dead?”

She could swear she knew that voice.

With a Herculean effort, she lifted her head.

Rosie clucked again, and she heard a scream from the direction of the rocks. “Jake! Jake, is that you?”

A slim figure slid down the mooring rope and pounded across the dry soil. “Mags? Lizzie? All right?”

As if she were watching a flicker at the theatre, Claire saw the dead boy scoop Maggie up in his arms and hold her a moment over his head before he hugged her and grabbed Lizzie, swinging them both in a circle so that their limp legs flew out.

Hallucinations. Was this the precursor to death? It wasn’t exactly her life flashing before her eyes, but close enough.

The apparition set the girls down and tilted his head up to the gondola floating above his head. “Alice, send down t’basket. The Lady’s in a bad way.”

In a moment a hatch opened in the stern, near the engine. A passenger basket was winched down and the ghost bundled the girls into it. It rose swiftly, to return empty, settling on the ground once more.

“Come on, then, Lady,” the ghost said. “Cor, izzat Rosie? Ent you stew yet, old girl? Up wi’ you, now.”

There was only one reason a ghost came to fetch people. That was why they called it a fetch. Her Cornish nanny at Gwyn Place had been firm on that point. “Am I going to hell for my sins?” Claire’s feet dragged as he pulled her over to the basket and bundled her in.

“Seems both of us ’ave been there an’ back, eh? But they’ll ’ave to wait a while to get us permanent-like.”

And then all the buzzing bees coalesced into one giant swarm. The floor of the basket rose up and slapped her, and Claire went out like a lamp.

71

Maggie’s eyes unstuck long enough for her to see a perfect square of blue sky. She blinked, then raised a hand to rub them—not that it did much good. A blanket covered her. Wool, worked in odd patterns like stairsteps and lightning and the whirls water made when it went down a drain.

“Water,” she croaked.

“Right ’ere, yer majesty.” A mug was set to her lips and she drank and drank until it was taken away.

“More.”

“In a bit. A little at a time, Alice says. That sunburn prob’ly smarts, but she put cactus goop all over it. She says it’ll be better tomorrow.”

The water was clearing her brain. “Jake?”

“Yes. Alive and well, no thanks to Ned Mose. I’ve a score to settle wiv ’im, an’ no mistake.”

“Lizzie?”

“Right next to you. Snug as two bugs, you are.”

She had a moment to wonder why he was being so nice to her when he never was before, but then her eyes slid shut and she knew no more.

*

The next time she woke, the square of blue was replaced by black, and a lamp burned in a niche in the wall. A wall made of mud. Was she in a mole’s hole?

Maggie propped herself up on her elbows just as Lizzie pushed the door open with her bum and backed in carrying a tray. “You awake, Mags?”

“Water.”

“Right ’ere, plus some soup. I already had some. It’s good. Poh-soh-lay, they call it.”

“Who?” She drank the whole mug of water and then tipped the pitcher up to her mouth and drank half of that, too. The soup was good. It went down almost as fast.

“The Navapai. Friends of Alice’s.” She lowered her voice. “I think they’re real Wild West Injuns, like in the flickers.”

“When did you ever see a flicker?”

Lizzie looked injured. “I might’ve snuck in once.”

“Wivout me?”

“Maybe you were sick. Listen, d’you remember who rescued us?”

“Jake was here.” Another thought occurred to her. “Where’s the Lady?”

“Next door. I think summat went wrong in them cat scratches she got. She’s been talking strange. Thinks Jake’s a ghost.”

“I think he is, too. He’s nicer than in real life.”

Lizzie giggled. “The Navapai are doctoring her. So’s Alice. Can you get up?”

Maggie slid her feet out of bed. She was wearing her cammy and drawers and nothing else. “Where’s our clothes?”

“Washed and drying. C’mon. Jake says to bring you.”

“Where’s Rosie?”

“Come on. I’ll show you.”

They emerged out of the mud house onto a flagstone terrace that dropped away into space on the far side. Maggie swayed and staggered back. “Is this Santa Fe?”

A voice came from across the terrace. “No. This is a Navapai village. Can’t pronounce the name of it.” Jake sat on a wide, low wall, his feet dangling over a couple of hundred feet of empty air. He could kick out one boot and practically nudge the leftmost fuselage of the Stalwart Lass, floating serenely at the end of her line. A skinny pinnacle of rock seemed to be her mooring mast.

Jake saw her looking at it. “A mast is a mast, eh?”

“Jake, what are you doing here? How did we get here? How did you get on the Lass and where are all those pirates?”

He grinned, that sly urchin’s grin that immediately made her feel at home. “Probably ridin’ shank’s mare t’the nearest airfield and cursin’ our names.”

“Nearest airfield besides here is Texico City, and that’s three days’ flight from Resolution.” Alice Chalmers stepped out onto the terrace. “How do you feel, Maggie?”

“Like that dried-up meat you gave us.”

“That’s called jerky, and it probably kept you alive long enough for us to find you. What were you doing all the way out there, thirty miles east? You were supposed to head north from Resolution. Santa Fe is hard to miss.”

She waved a hand to the east, and Maggie took in the size of the city that lay in the distance. It seemed to go on for a mile, though maybe that was the clarity of the air, which made you able to see almost forever. Spires of rock and brass punctuated neat stretches of mud houses like the one behind them—only they were bigger, like layer cakes and building blocks all mixed up. Airships floated from mooring masts even in town.

“Does everybody have their own ship?” she asked in wonder.

“Most of those are the Ranger fleet, but some people do.” Alice patted a stone bench and Maggie sank onto it with Lizzie. Not likely they’d join Jake on his wall, not with her head feeling as muzzy as it did.

“I dunno where we were,” she said at last. “All I know is, we ’ad no wind and no hope of anyone, and next thing I knew there was Jake. Mind tellin’ us ’ow you came to be not dead? Did Ned Mose really push you out of Lady Lucy in midair?”

Jake leaned back against a rock and stretched his legs out on the top of the wall. “He did. I thought I was a goner, for true. But what ’e didn’t know was that if ’e’d waited just a minute or so, we’d’ve been flying over land instead of water.”

“He fell into the lake,” Alice expanded helpfully.

“An’ not just any old how, either,” Jake said. “Remember jumpin’ off the Clarendon footbridge that summer we found Willie?”

“I do. You pushed me off cos I wouldn’t jump.” Lizzie hadn’t forgotten, that was clear.

“Did I? Anyways, wot we found is that if you jump in straight-like instead of floppin’ around like a trout, it don’t hurt when you hit. So there I was, fallin’ out of the sky, out of me ’ead with fear. I remembered Clarendon footbridge and straightened meself out. Went into t’water like a spear and didn’t get kilt.”

Maggie could see it, plain as day. “And then what?”

“I swam hard as I could for shore and watched what direction the ships went in. Figured there’d be food I could steal to keep body an’ soul together until I found you.”

“What would you want to find us for?” Lizzie burst out, as if she’d had enough of being polite. “You turned us over to Ned Mose like we was cattle and I ent forgot it, Jake Fletcher. Nor am I like to, ever.”

At least he had the grace to look shamefaced. “Don’t hold it against me, Lizzie.”

“Where else am I supposed to ’old it? You nearly got us all killed.”

“Nearly. Fact is, you would’ve been killed for sure. I were their first collar, you know. They woulda stuck me then an’ there if I didn’t go over to their side and show ’em where the family were and such.”

“You never!” Lizzie stomped over to him and shook her finger in his face. He ought to grab hold of something, in Maggie’s mind, in case she gave him a push, she was so angry. “I saw you. You were ’appy to ’and us over. Fact is, Jake, you go to whatever side you think is winnin’, never mind who yer friends are.” She paused, fists on hips, glaring. “Were.”

“Don’t be so hard on him, peaches,” Alice put in from the rock. Maggie leaned against her side, and Alice slipped an arm around her. It felt nice. As nice as the hugs the Lady gave when she wasn’t being leader of the gang.

“Why shouldn’t I? I don’t even know why you’re ’ere.”

“I’m here because it was that or let pa kill me,” she said simply.

Maggie stiffened and straightened up to stare at her. Alice coaxed her back against her side with a squeeze. Lizzie stood there, the wind properly taken out of her sails.

“Kill you?”

Alice nodded. “He caught me giving you help, see. So he locked me in a storage room in town till he was sober enough to shoot straight, and that’s when—”

“—I broke in lookin’ for food.” Jake looked rather pleased with himself. “So between us, we took the engine out o’ that locomotive tower and put ’er in the Lass, and—”

“—before pa woke the next morning, we set out to try and find you. Didn’t see you in the logical places, so widened our search, all the while hoping pa and the boys wouldn’t cobble together an engine and start out after us.”

“There ent no airships left in that place, is there?” Maggie asked in spite of the fact that she felt so sleepy.

“Ranger ship was on its way, we knew that. Pa’d likely wreck it and use the fuselage.”

“Did the Rangers come?” Even Lizzie had to admit that the prospect of being killed by your pa was heaps worse than going over to the other side to save your life. “We looked and looked but never saw ’em.”

“Don’t know,” Jake said. “I expect me and one or two of Alice’s friends here will go into town after a bit and do some scoutin’.”

“I’m coming,” Lizzie said at once. “You can’t scout wivout at least one of us.”

“Not lookin’ like that, you ent.” Jake’s voice was firm. “You look like a tomato getting’ ready to spoil, for true. Besides, someone has to stay and watch over the Lady.”

Lizzie subsided, but Maggie could see plain as plain that watching over the Lady was just a job to fob her off while Jake and Alice got all the fun. She kept the smile off her aching face, though.

What Mr. Pleased-as-Punch didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.

72

“There ’as to be another way down.”

Maggie gazed into the chimney of rock, down which spiraled steps cut out of the stone. The two Navapai boys who had gone along had lit lamps that flickered in niches every now and again, but other than that, only the glow left in the sky after sunset lit the stair.

“If there is, we ent got time to find it. C’mon, before we lose them.” Lizzie started down as though she was tripping down the steps in the cottage in Vauxhall Gardens.

It was all an act. One misstep and in the morning, those big birds would be scraping her off the rocks hundreds of feet below. Maggie consigned her soul to Heaven and started down after her.

It didn’t take near as long to get to the bottom as she thought. The stair wound inside for a bit, so that helped. The girls emerged at the base of the cliff feeling as though they’d managed to burgle the Tower of London, because on a difficulty scale of one to ten, that stair was definitely a ten.

In the distance they could see Jake and Alice and two Navapai boys, jogging along a road that looked white in the fading light. There was nothing for it but to jog along after them and hope they didn’t look back.

They didn’t—not until they’d reached the outskirts of Santa Fe. The girls’ steps echoed off the mud walls of the houses, and before you could say Jack Robinson, Jake stepped out of a shadowy alley and grabbed them both by the scruff of the neck.

“Didn’t I tell you two t’stay wi’ the Lady?”

“You can’t go on a mission wivout scouts, you silly gumpus.” Lizzie wriggled until he set her down. “Ent you listened to Snouts ever?”

“Two days ago you almost died, and now yer givin’ me guff?”

“Somebody has to,” Maggie said. “Now, what’s the plan?”

“Give it up, Jake,” Alice said merrily, while the Navapai boys snickered. “There’s no keeping these two out of the soup, so we may as well take them along. Maybe they can help.”

Jake wagged his head. “Keep up and shut up, aye?” Maggie and Lizzie exchanged a triumphant glance. “Here’s what we’re doin’. Alice knows the mechanics at the airfield. We’re takin’ a steambus out there and doin’ a reconnoiter for news of Ned Mose, and seein’ if the Lady Lucy is here.”

Hope surged in Maggie’s chest. “You mean we c’n go home?”

His rapid pace checked, then resumed. “You can, likely. Don’t see why they wouldn’t take you an’ the Lady on, now that yer not dead.”

“Wot about you?” Maggie had to jog to keep up, but nary a complaint would pass her lips. “You c’n explain—’is lordship’ll understand.”

Jake kept his face turned away, faking like he was watching where they were going, like Alice wasn’t in charge of this little parade. “I dunno. Ent much for me back ’ome except playin’ second fiddle to Snouts. Might stay ’ere and scare up some work.”

Maggie fell back to keep Lizzie company. It had never occurred to her that they wouldn’t all go home together—and the sooner the better. Who would want to stay in this outlandish place all alone?

“Don’t worry,” Lizzie said in a low tone as they got on a steambus without paying any fare. “We’re a flock. Of course we’ll stay together. ’E’s just talkin’ up a show for them boys and Alice. I think ’e’s sweet on ’er.”

Maggie rolled her eyes. Alice was about a century older than Jake, and could probably do better in any case than a penniless runaway with a reputation as a turncoat.

They got off the bus outside the airfield, before anyone came to check for tickets, and followed Alice through a maze of hangars, piles of scrap metal, and wide acres where the airships floated at their masts. They approached a building where the plinkety-plunk of music told them airmen found entertainment, but Alice waved them off to the side behind a stack of what smelled like whisky barrels.

“No kids allowed inside, I’m afraid. Wait here while we take a look.”

“Jake’s a kid,” Lizzie objected.

“He’s over fourteen, and he’s a boy, both of which you ain’t,” Alice told them. “I don’t want you getting stole or mistook for a desert flower.”

“What’s a—”

“Never mind. Just stay here, all right? We won’t be long.”

They were long. They were interminably long. They were so long that Lizzie fell asleep behind the barrels, and when she woke up, she was in a fine temper.

“I ent stayin’ here another moment.” She craned up to look over at the door, where everyone in the city but Alice and Jake and those boys was going in and out and having a fine time while they were stuck here in the dark. “Come on. Who cares what them Rangers are up to? They don’t want us. We c’n spot the Lady Lucy ourselves. They’re probably sitting down to dinner and won’t they be glad to see us?”

“Mad, more like.” Maggie hurried behind her sister as they made for the biggest airfield, where the greatest number of ships was moored. “We didn’t stay in our room, ’member. We didn’t do as we was told.” If they had, what then? Maybe the Lady would have found Rosie. Maybe not. But their hides would have been safe.

Was it better to keep your own hide safe, and not try to save those of your flock mates? Not likely. Even knowing what she knew now, she’d still have gone down that rope.

She wouldn’t’ve nearly died in the desert, maybe.

But she wouldn’t’ve met up with Miss Alice again, either, or known Jake was still alive.

All in all, the scale was about even.

Besides, they’d been in bed for two days. The goop Alice had slathered on her made it so her sunburn hardly hurt. And Snouts always said, if you didn’t keep your hand in, you lost your skills.

Maggie had no intention of losing hers.

“There she is!” Lizzie pointed to the near side of the field, where the Lady Lucy’s distinctive golden fuselage rode gently next to a long, sleek craft with a shallow gondola set close underneath. It looked as if it were designed for speed records. “Come on. There’s even a tower pushed up to it. We can walk right in.”

Together, they ran across the field.

But someone was coming down the steps inside the tower. Running, more like. Light boots pounded on brass stairs.

Running people never meant good things, in Maggie’s experience. She grabbed Lizzie’s sleeve and dragged her behind the tower’s wheels.

“Mopsies!” someone exclaimed, half a shout, half a whisper. “Mags—Liz—it’s me, Tigg.”

“Tigg!” Maggie had never hugged Tigg in all the time she’d known him, but that was before she’d almost died. They were a flock, and as far as she was concerned, flock mates hugged.

And the funny thing was, he hugged her right back.

“Cor, what a fuss you two caused, disappearin’ like that. Where’ve you been?”

Lizzie just shook her head. “You wouldn’t believe us if we told you. Was ’is nibs fit to be tied?”

“Yes. But ’er ladyship took it the worst. She cried. Thought you’d both been killed in the fall when we lifted.”

Lizzie laughed. “Even Jake didn’t get killed when he fell.”

Tigg grabbed her. “What’d you say? Jake? Jake’s alive?”

“Alive and havin’ a wonderful time somewhere over there.” Maggie waved a hand in the direction of the building with the music. She wasn’t sure she could find it again if he asked her, but that didn’t seem very important right now. “’E fell in the lake, just like off the Clarendon footbridge. Didn’t ’arm a single ’air.”

“C’mon, Mags, I’m starved.” Lizzie pulled her toward the stairs. “Tigg, what’s Cook got for grub? I ent had nowt but soup in two days.”

He took a quick breath. “Don’t go up there.”

“Whyever not?” Lizzie stopped on the third step. “Did you eat it all?”

“No, but they’re at dinner. And you don’t want to join ’em, Liz. Not after what he done to the Lady.”

“Who done?” Great snakes, the Dunsmuirs couldn’t be eating with Ned Mose, could they? That was impossible.

“Lord James Selwyn, that’s who.” Tigg’s face set in lines of implacable dislike. “That’s why I’m out here instead of in there in me best bib and tucker. I ent sittin’ across from that bounder if it were me last meal. Not after ’e stole our device an’ kidnapped it here.”

“Stole? How come we never ’eard of this?” Lizzie demanded. “The Lady never said a word.”

“She never said nuffink to the Dunsmuirs, neither. Nobs don’t run down other nobs, I guess, no matter what they done. And up till we left, she were going to be ’is wife, weren’t she?”

“She ent goin’ to be ’is wife now.” Maggie knew that for true.

“Guess not.” In the electrick lights on the tower, Tigg’s face became bleak. “Not now she’s dead.”

Lizzie clutched his arm. “Cor, Tigg, didn’t you know? She ent dead. She got swept off in that flash flood, but Alice pulled ’er out and she’s right as rain now.”

“Or mostly,” Maggie corrected. “Had a run-in with some kind of cat creature so she’s feeling poorly, but she ent dead at least.”

Tigg looked from one to the other in astonishment. “The Lady’s not dead? Somebody better tell the Dunsmuirs, then. They already sent a pigeon to Gwyn Place, and Lord James is wearin’ black like he ’ad a right to it.”

Lizzie shook her head. “She might not want ’im to know. She might be quite ’appy wiv ’im thinkin’ she’s dead.”

“Better ask her,” Maggie agreed. “Soon’s we get back.”

“Back where?”

“The Navapai village, over there.” Lizzie waved a hand in a general westerly direction. “Alice got the Stalwart Lass running again, and her and Jake flew it up here.”

Tigg’s eyebrows rose. “Who’s this Alice, then?”

“Ned Mose’s daughter, but he was goin’ t’kill her for helpin’ us, so she took off in the Lass.” Lizzie tugged on his shirt sleeve when he didn’t appear to be able to get his mouth working properly at these astonishing revelations. “Sure you can’t nip up t’the galley and nick summat for us?”

“All right,” he said at last. “But stay out of sight. Lord James gets a peep at you two and the jig’s up.”

Back up the stairs his boots went, and Maggie pulled Lizzie down in the shadows behind the great wheels of the tower again. To keep her mind off the sad state of her stomach, she pictured his route—through the embarkation bay, then avoiding the open stair that led up to A deck, he’d nip along the corridor past the crew’s quarters and the Chief Steward’s cabin. The galley was the very next door. If Lord James had come to dinner, what would Cook be dishing up? Roast beef, maybe? Or pork? No fish, that was certain, unless there was a river within fifty miles. Her mouth watered at the thought of a nice roast beef, with Yorkshire puddings swimming in drippings—

“Mags!” Lizzie nudged her in the ribs with her elbow.

“Do you think Tigg’s on ’is way back yet?”

“Sh! What’s that over there? D’you see something moving?”

The vision of the beef and pudding evaporated as Maggie focused on a pile of crates stacked up near an airship that looked as though it had been through a war moored just off the Lady Lucy’s stern. Sure enough, a dark figure detached itself from the stack and darted across the flat ground into the shadow of the Lady Lucy’s fuselage.

Lizzie’s hand closed around a broken brick. “He’s headin’ this way,” she whispered, her lips barely moving.

Maggie whistled, the unknown intruder approaching whistle they’d used for years, just in case Tigg was on his way back and could hear.

In the distance, the call of a bird came in acknowledgement. Maggie sucked in a breath. “That were Jake.”

The intruder gave no indication he’d heard, or if he had, that the sounds of night birds in a busy airfield were anything unusual. They could hear him breathing now, heavily, from all his running.

And overhead, the girls heard the sound of Tigg’s boots on the first of the stairs.

“Thief,” Lizzie breathed. “On three.”

One … two …

Three! Both girls leaped at the black figure and Lizzie swung the brick so hard Maggie expected the man to drop like a stone.

Instead, an arm flashed out and caught her on the wrist, and the brick fell out of her fingers. “Dash it all,” he said, “what do you mean, attacking me in this fashion, you little ruffians?”

With both hands, he pushed them off and Maggie landed so hard on her bottom that the breath was knocked clean out of her. When Tigg burst out of the entrance to the tower, a basket in his hands, she couldn’t make a single sound to warn him.

Tigg’s mouth dropped open.

“Mr. Malvern, sir!” he exclaimed when the man stepped into the light. “What in all the skies are you doing here?”

73

Claire swam to the surface of an ocean filled with gibbering monsters and apparitions, all of which wanted her dead. Expecting at any moment for one of them to grab her by the ankles and pull her under once again, she opened her eyes to a warm darkness punctuated by gentle lamplight.

A cool cloth was applied to her forehead. “She wakes, and her spirit is with her,” said a woman with dusky skin and calm dark eyes. “Are you feeling better?”

“Where am I?”

She put a mug to her lips and Claire drank. It tasted acidic and faintly like grass, but no matter. It was cold and wet and glorious.

“You are in the Navapai village west of Santa Fe. The girls who were with you are well. They have been out doing a reckoning with Alice and my sons and have brought back some folk who are anxious to see you.”

Alice? Alice was here and not floating in the sky or back in her shack by Spider Woman? Claire roped her thoughts together. “Dunsmuirs?”

“No. Lie back. I have told them they cannot see you until you can sit up.”

“I can sit up.” She struggled up, allowing the woman to stuff a rolled-up wool blanket behind her back. “Forgive me for asking, but who are you? What happened to me? I had a dream that Alice and Jake came and rescued us—but that is impossible.”

“I am Alaia, healer of this village, and it was no dream. Jake fell in Spider Woman’s mirror and has lived to tell about it. He is now her son, and under her protection.”

She rose, and Claire saw she wore a black dress belted with colorful woven wool in the same pattern as the blanket. She must be the weaver. Spinning threads like Spider Woman. She picked up a bowl of something that smelled delicious, and Claire leaned forward like a hound sniffing the wind.

“Thank you for caring for me, Miss—Mrs.—Alaia. The girls and I would surely have died without you.”

“You are Alice’s friends,” the woman said simply. “And she is my friend and sister in spirit.”

Claire took the bowl and tasted the soup. She couldn’t remember ever tasting anything so delicious. The entire bowl went down in less time than it took to think about it.

Alaia nodded with satisfaction. “Now your friends may come in for a short time.”

Claire touched her hair and realized it was down, and someone had brushed it. She was wearing a cotton shift and not much else, so she pulled the wool blanket up under her armpits.

And then the door opened and Tigg and the Mopsies poured in, followed by Jake. They fetched up in a wave on the bed, everyone except Jake climbing on in a great pile of hugs and relief and greeting.

Laughing, Claire kissed Tigg with such joy that he blushed and ducked his head. She settled the Mopsies on either side and extended her hand to Jake. When he took it hesitantly, she tugged on his arm so that he practically toppled over, and she hugged him fiercely as he knelt next to the bed.

“I am so glad you were not killed,” she whispered. “If I never experience a moment as dreadful as you going out that hatch for the rest of eternity, it will be too soon.”

He could not look at her. His face buried in her lap, he choked out, “I’m sorry, Lady. Sorry I turned coat. Sorry for everything. But they told me they’d kill you all and I—”

“Shh.” Gently, she rubbed his heaving shoulders. “It is forgotten. We are all together again and we will not look back.”

“We’re a flock,” Maggie put in from her cozy corner between Claire, the bolster, and the wall.

“Don’t forget Mr. Malvern,” Tigg said from his place next to her knees. “He’s been awful anxious to see you.”

Claire looked up and saw Andrew hovering in the doorway. For the space of ten seconds she could not speak. Instead, she drank in the wholly unexpected sight of him. Yes, he had told her he was in pursuit of James. But to see him here, in the flesh, in circumstances that anyone would call extraordinary … she drank in the sight of him with shameless greed.

And speaking of extraordinary, what an astonishing rig he wore! Over the normalcy of his brocade vest and cravat and shirt was a dusty canvas coat, and he wore an airman’s leather cap with the goggles pushed up on his forehead. A holster on his hip contained some kind of firearm, but she could not tell more than that.

Heavens. He looked positively wild. In a good way.

A very good way.

“Are you not glad to see me, Claire?”

And there was the Andrew she knew, a gentleman and a scientist to the core, complete with an endearing awkwardness around the fairer sex.

“I can think of no more welcome sight in the world, after that of Jake alive and well.” She extended her hand and Andrew took it, folding himself onto the lightning designs of the rug next to Jake, who sniffled one last time and wiped his nose on his sleeve as he made room.

“I was awful anxious,” Andrew said with a smile. “In what seems another life, I sent you a letter. Did you ever receive it?”

Claire nodded. He did not release her hand, and if he was content to do so, she was perfectly content to leave it there.

“A pigeon came about three days into the flight. But immediately after that, we ran into a dreadful storm, and—”

“Do not exert yourself. Tigg and the girls told me the whole story on the way here.”

Claire looked over the little assembly. “Mopsies, if Alice was indeed here and not a dream, why do I not see her?”

“She’s probably still at the airfield,” Jake said. “She an’ Alaia’s boys were talkin’ so long wiv these airmen friends o’ hers that I thought I’d take a reconnoiter meself. When I didn’t find t’Mopsies where we’d left ’em, I headed over to the Lady Lucy. Got there just in time to see Lizzie clock Mr. Malvern wiv a brick.”

“Lizzie!” Claire looked down at her, shocked to the core.

“I thought ’e were an intruder,” Lizzie said in her own defense. “An’ I missed anyhow.”

“What was in this letter you were talkin’ about?” Tigg asked. “Mr. Malvern, I can’t figure why you’re here and not in the laboratory in London.”

“All in good time.” Andrew smiled and finally released Claire’s hand. “It sounds like we owe this Alice a great debt for saving your lives.”

“Jake, too,” Lizzie said. “Tell ’em what you and Alice did, Jake.”

Uncomfortable in the spotlight, Jake shifted and cleared his throat. “We put the locomotive tower’s engine in the Stalwart Lass and came after the Lady and the girls.”

“Wait—you did what?” Andrew leaned forward to look into Jake’s eyes. “Two of you put a locomotive engine in an airship? How is that possible?”

“It weren’t really a locomotive engine. It were an airship engine, but it runs the tower just fine. And we ’ad ’elp. Half a dozen automatons, easy. They’re a lot stronger’n they look. They made a good crew, too, once we was in the air.”

Goodness. A vision of a miniature army of automatons carrying bits of engine from one vessel to another played across Claire’s mind. On one hand, what a triumph of engineering it must have been. On the other, they were automatons, bronze and faceless and mindless. And she had been unconscious and surrounded by them on the Lass. She swallowed.

“Where did the automatons come from?” Andrew asked with interest.

It was best he did not know their actual provenance. “Alice made them. She is a young lady of singular resources.”

“I look forward to making her acquaintance. Very much so.”

Hmph. Were her accomplishments as nothing? It was quite clearly time to change the subject.

“Now you must tell us your adventures,” she said. “Including the parts about Lord James. I have a feeling our tales will dovetail rather neatly toward the end.”

Andrew got to his feet and removed his canvas coat, while Claire and the Mopsies settled more comfortably against the bolster.

“As I said in my letter, the night of the exhibition at the Crystal Palace, James came to an agreement with a consortium of Texican railroad men and made off with the Selwyn Kinetick Carbonator. They had passage on a private merchant ship belonging to one of them, but I was able to leave the next morning on a Zeppelin vessel out of Hamburg going to New York. Once there, I made inquiries and learned that the Texican vessel was bound for Santa Fe, which is the capital of this territory.”

Claire nodded, encouraging him to go on.

“When I arrived here, I realized that learning their intentions was paramount. They might choose to duplicate the Carbonator and build the devices here, or they might ship the Carbonator to some other location. They might even begin processing coal.”

“Did you find out?” Tigg asked with the seriousness of a fellow scientist. He, after all, had as much invested in the Carbonator as any of them.

“I could not just hang about the railroad offices and eavesdrop, so I did the next best thing. I signed on as a laborer in the yard. They soon realized I had more skills than loading cars, so they moved me into the laboratory, where I had a fair task ahead of me to stay out of sight whenever James or one of the barons was on the premises. They’d all met me at the Crystal Palace, you see.”

“Did you succeed?” Claire asked.

“I did. I found out that they plan to carbonate an entire trainload of coal and send a locomotive from here to San Francisco on the new Nevada Territory line as a kind of demonstration. They plan to sell a device like ours to the Royal Kingdom of Spain, you see. The Spaniards are building locomotives with the plan to run railways all the way down to South America.”

“How will they get past the Texicans?” Claire asked. She had seen the charts. “The Territory covers nearly the entire southern half of the continent.”

“Ah, but there are no railways directly to South America. The Spaniards are building lines down the west coast to evade the Texican tariffs, and you can bet the government in Texico City will not be happy about it.”

“The money to be made will be astronomical,” Claire murmured.

“And the carbonated coal is light, hard, and lasts a long time,” Tigg said. “If you’re aiming for speed, you can’t stop to load your tender, can you?”

“What villains they are,” Claire breathed. “Go behind the Texican government’s back to supply the Spaniards, then claim innocence and rake in the money.”

“With our device,” Tigg said indignantly.

Claire’s lips firmed. “I think not.”

Andrew nodded, following her train of thought as though he had had the same one. “The Carbonator is heavily guarded, but there are brief periods when the guard changes and it could be possible to slip past. The power cell you and Dr. Craig developed is not so large that it could not be spirited out. And without the cell, of course, they have nothing.”

“They’re probably already working on more of ’em,” Tigg said. “Wouldn’t make sense to risk something happening to the one.”

“You are quite correct. I have already seen the prototypes. Time is of the essence,” Andrew agreed. “With assistance, I could repossess the cell as soon as tomorrow night.”

Jake, who had not said a word during the tale, nodded now. “We could use a mission. Keep our ’ands in, like.”

“You’ll need scouts,” Lizzie said.

“And someone who knows ’is way round bolts and suchlike,” Tigg put in.

“I could not ask it of you all.” Andrew seemed to have realized a moment too late that he was proposing that a group of children engage in criminal activity on foreign soil. “I will hazard the task alone.”

“You would be foolish to do so,” Claire told him. Her energy was rapidly seeping away.

Andrew’s gaze became concerned. “We will discuss this in the morning. The moon is probably setting and you will be no use to anyone if you do not get some rest.” He chivvied them out of the room.

“A moment, Andrew.” When he returned alone to her side, she gathered her strength. “You will be careful on this enterprise?”

“I have had several days to reconnoiter the hangars and laboratory,” he said. “Have no fear. You must concentrate on getting well.” The assurance faded from his expression and he started to speak, then thought better of it. After a moment of struggle, he finally blurted, “Claire, I know it is none of my business, but considering James’s behavior, I must ask you to reconsider your engagement to him.” When she only stared, he rushed on, “I know what you are thinking. I am only the son of a policeman and a cook, and these things are done differently in Blood circles. But can you not—I cannot bear to think—” His voice stumbled into silence. “I apologize,” he said finally, and had taken two steps toward the door before Claire found her voice.

“Andrew, I have not been engaged to James Selwyn since the night he stole the Carbonator.”

He turned, stiffly. When his gaze found her face, his eyes were blazing. “You have not?”

She struggled to sit higher against the bolster. “He removed my name from the patent that night, so as not to shock Ross Stephenson. He said he would reinstate it as a wedding gift. And at that moment I realized he would never do it—he would use it as a carrot for years to come, and expect me to follow it as obediently as a brood mare. I broke it off that same moment.”

“You are not engaged to him,” he repeated. He took a step closer. “You are a free woman.”

“As free as you.”

Another step. “I have not been free since the moment you knocked on the door of my laboratory.” The sound of voices came from outside the door. “Claire, would you—”

The door flew open and Alice burst into the room like a whirlwind. Her hair was a wild tangle, and there appeared to be pieces of those tumbling weeds stuck in it. One sleeve of her cotton shirt had been torn out, and her knuckles were scraped raw. She had either been dragged some distance by a vehicle, or had been in a fight.

“Claire, you’re awake! I’ll tell you, you gave me quite a scare. Listen, you’ll never guess who I—oh, I’m sorry. You have company.”

Claire released a long breath and with it, any hope of knowing what the conclusion to Andrew’s question might have been.

“Alice. We’ve all been worried about you. I’m glad you’re back. But are you all right?”

“Not near as worried as I’ve been about you.” She paused. “I’m fine. Just a little dustup. Are you going to introduce me?”

Exhausted as she was, the situation was too interesting to ignore. “Do you not know?”

Alice looked puzzled. And awkward. And a trifle embarrassed. “Um. No.” Gamely, she held out a hand to Andrew. “I’m Alice Chalmers. Sorry about the mess.”

Andrew looked equally puzzled, but it was quite likely about Claire’s behavior. She could not resist. “Cast this face as a daguerreotype, perhaps. And surround it with print—an article on the properties of coal. Give it a byline, one that says—”

Alice gasped, and covered her mouth with filthy fingers. “It can’t be,” she whispered.

Andrew had clearly had enough of being sported with, particularly so soon after … whatever he had been going to say. He bowed. “Do forgive Lady Claire, Alice. She is not in full control of her faculties just now.”

“Not in—!”

Andrew ignored her and spoke to Alice. “I am Andrew Malvern, and I am very pleased to make your acquaintance. I do hope you fared better than the other person.”

“Andrew Malvern,” Alice whispered. “The Andrew Malvern, of the Royal Society of Engineers?”

Andrew peered at her, as though doubting the strength of her mind. “The very one. Have you read one of my monographs?”

Alice grasped her hair in both hands, yanked some dried vegetation out of it, then clapped one palm to her mouth. She dashed to the window, and in the next moment, was violently sick onto the terrace outside.

74

Claire woke in the cool dawn feeling much better than she had in days. Whatever the herbs or chemicals in the drink Alaia plied her with every hour, they certainly worked. She touched her face. Even the sunburn had cooled to the point where she did not feel her skin would crack and bleed should she smile.

Alice stirred on the pallet next to the bed, and sat up with a groan. She clutched both sides of her head as though it were a melon ready to burst open. “Please tell me I didn’t toss my innards in front of Andrew Malvern last night.”

“Not directly in front of him. You made it to the window in time. Are you ill, dear?” Alice looked utterly miserable. Claire reached for the mug half full of the healing liquid, and offered it to her.

Alice drank it down. “No, not ill.” She wiped her mouth with her sleeve, having gone to sleep fully clothed. “It’s the mescala. Never, ever drink that stuff, Claire. It’s poison.”

“Is it some form of liquor?”

Alice nodded miserably. “We met a couple of the pilots who fly the Ranger airships, and in the party were some airmen from the Canadas. Me and Alaia’s boys thought we might get some good information, and I guess we did, but then they started in on the mescala. One thing led to another and we … well, one of them said something Luis didn’t like, and then Alvaro went to his defense, and I couldn’t just stand there and do nothing, so …” She sighed. “It was a mill, plain and simple. So of course that had to be the night I meet Andrew Malvern.” She buried her face against her knees. “I want to die.”

“Have some more of Alaia’s cordial. It’s in that lovely pottery jug with the spider pattern.”

“Not about that.” Her voice was muffled. “About being the ugliest, most harum-scarum idiot that ever made a man run for the nearest ship.”

“Oh, Alice.” Claire touched her hair, and the girl actually flinched. “Come and sit by me.”

Reluctantly, Alice hefted herself up on the bed and they both leaned their backs against the wall. Claire tucked the blanket around their legs. “Look. From here we can see the sun rise.”

“I wouldn’t be getting too excited about the sun just yet. You need to stay out of it until your skin heals some more.”

“I know. But what I was really pointing out is that today is another day, fresh and new, with no mistakes in it yet for either of us.”

Alice would not look at her. “What must he think of me?”

“He will think that you are the one who saved our lives. Who engineered the Stalwart Lass so she could fly again. He knows about your automatons, and I must say, he is impressed.”

“He won’t be so impressed with the sorry reality.”

“Why does it matter so much?” Claire asked gently. “He is a stranger to you, and once our aims here are accomplished, he will likely be going back to London.”

“It’s stupid, I know. But I admire him so much, and—and—oh, never mind.”

Admire? This was not the despondency of unrequited admiration. Claire was not sure exactly what it was, but she was determined to see her spirits revived. She could not bear to see her friend so cast down, after all she had risked for them.

“I suppose you’ll be going back to London with him?” Alice asked, gazing at the clouds through the window, which were streaked with red and orange that might have seeped from the mesas themselves.

“No.” She would not be eighteen for another three weeks, and she was taking no chances. James might be a mere two miles away, but the laws of the Empire did not apply here in the Texican Territory. He could force her to do nothing. “My original plan was to meet friends in the Canadas—in Edmonton—and visit the diamond mines. I am already a week late, so I must let them know I am alive, and find my way there somehow.”

At last Alice slid a glance her way. “We could go in the Stalwart Lass.”

“Alice, you cannot steal your father’s airship and go gallivanting about the continent.” Claire’s face felt almost natural as her eyebrows rose. The skin was tight, but at least it did not feel as though it would peel right off.

Alice pleated the patterned blanket between her fingers. “Pa was pretty mad about me helping you. It was either leave town or get shot, so I left. I don’t expect I’ll ever go back.”

“I’m so sorry.” She hesitated, then plunged on. “My father removed himself from me. He—he shot himself rather than face the poverty he had himself created.”

Alice’s lips trembled around the edges. “I’m sorry to hear it, Claire. But Ned Mose—he ain’t really my pa anyhow. He’s just living with my ma. My real pa went off to seek his fortune and—removed himself, like you say. Maybe now I can pick up his trail.” Life came back into her voice. “One of those airmen from last night—an old-timer—said he remembered a man with one blind eye working on one of his crews in the Canadas. My pa was a mechanic—he lost his eye to one of his early machines. I suppose that’s where I get it. Mechanics, I mean. Not blind eyes.”

“Then we must go together, as soon as our work here is done.”

“What exactly are you all up to? I’d have thought you’d be off on the Lady Lucy.”

“Tigg said he’d found the girls and Mr. Malvern ready to board her. It would not surprise me if she lifts soon—I imagine Lady Dunsmuir will be anxious to put this country behind her. I wonder if the Dunsmuirs know yet that I am alive?”

And that Rosie still had their diamonds in her possession. She must get up and see about returning them, if indeed they were planning to leave soon.

“We’ll ask him. Come on. My stomach could use some of Alaia’s poh-soh-lay. It’s guaranteed to bring even the dead back to life.”

Claire threw the blanket back. “Let us hope not. I will settle for breakfast.”

*

“The Lady Lucy? This morning?” Tigg could not have looked more dismayed if Claire had said she was going to leap off the cliff stair. “Lady, are you mad? Lord James could be aboard. ’E came to dinner last night like some fine gentleman and hoodwinked ’is lordship well and truly.”

Claire spooned up the last of her poh-soh-lay and Alaia filled the bowl before she even swallowed. A flat wheel of unleavened bread lay in the center of the table, nearly all consumed. It had arrived bubbling with cheese and a paste made of beans and layers of tomato, corn, and small green chiles. Claire could not imagine what such a thing might taste like, but she was a believer now. A lady might not be permitted to take a second helping, but in the Texican Territory, ladies had to adapt.

Before Tigg could become any more upset on her behalf, Alice gave him a companionable nudge with her shoulder. “Truth is, youngster, this James person owes her one. She saved his life the other night.”

Claire nodded at her to go on. If she wanted to speak of her stepfather’s criminal behavior, then it was her place to do so, and Claire would not claim the story.

Andrew stopped shoveling in his flatbread, which he had rolled into a tube, the better to preserve its ingredients. “You saved James’s life? After what he did?”

“The man who skyjacked the Lady Lucy and all aboard was the man I’ve called my pa for the past dozen years,” Alice said. “It’s no secret he’s a sky pirate and a heartless man, but if not for him, the town of Resolution probably wouldn’t exist.”

“He was holding us all for ransom, but unfortunately, I am not worth very much,” Claire said. “He had no idea what to do with me, but in the meantime, James had found out what had happened to the Lady Lucy, and was on his way to pay my ransom.”

Andrew nearly choked on his breakfast, and Maggie handed him a mug of the grass-scented liquid.

“Pa—Ned—decided that he’d take both ransom and ship if he wrecked her. Without witnesses, he’d have nothing but profit.” Alice glanced at Claire, who took up the tale.

“I had been washed downstream by the flash flood, and Alice pulled me out. So when Mose and his crew went to set out the lamps to lure the ship in, I climbed up on a pinnacle of rock—”

“Spider Woman,” Alaia said, passing behind her to fill Andrew’s clay mug. “She had not finished spinning the thread of this man’s life.”

“Yes,” Claire said after a moment. “I flagged the ship with a lamp like the railway men do, and it changed course at the very last moment.”

“I heard about that,” Andrew said. “The airmen at one of the public houses—”

“Honkytonks,” Alice put in, then blushed scarlet.

Claire smothered a smile. One would not correct one’s idol in public if one had thought about it beforehand.

“Honkytonks, yes.” Andrew nodded at her, and she blushed even more deeply. Even her hair seemed to be turning scarlet.

Andrew went on, “The word was that the ship must have been in poor repair to have lost a piece off her bow.”

“Scraping along Spider Woman would have torn the canvas right off.” Valiantly, Alice attempted to recover. “It’s sandstone, you know—it’ll take your skin off soon as look at it.”

“James may not know it yet, but he owes me a debt. And when I go this morning to return the diamonds, if I should meet him I will tell him so.”

“And then you can have the bobbies come an’ arrest him for thieving,” Tigg muttered. “’E ’as to pay for making off wiv our device.”

“You will do no such thing,” Andrew said firmly, but whether to Claire or Tigg, she was not sure. “James must not know that I am here, or that you know what he has done. It is clear that the Dunsmuirs do not, or they would never have received him.”

“I did not tell them,” Claire said. “I allowed them to think he had business here, and that he was pursuing me with the hope that …” Her voice trailed away. If he had been willing to pay her ransom, perhaps he really did still hope.

“You were wise, then. He has duped them the way he duped Ross Stephenson and most of London society.” He gazed around the table with seriousness. “When we have Doctor Craig’s cell safely in our hands again, that will be punishment enough. You may believe that the only reason he had funds enough to pay Lady Claire’s ransom was because the Texicans have already paid him off. Without the cell, he will have them to deal with.”

“If it’s Stanford Fremont’s boys he’s dealing with, he won’t last long,” Alice told them. “Those boys shoot first and ask questions later, and they don’t tolerate anyone taking advantage of them.”

Claire got to her feet—there was no table, but the sleeping pallets acted as seating and were arranged around a flat stone that served as one. If she was to enjoy any more meals like this one, she would need to let out the strings of her corset. Of course, four days of next to no food had made it rather loose, anyway.

“Who is coming with me?”

Jake got up, and Tigg as well.

“I don’t like this, Claire,” Andrew said. “Look what happened the last time you were alone with him.”

“I believe I stole his coach and relieved him of nine hundred pounds,” she said crisply before she thought.

Andrew goggled at her. “That was you? You sent that money in a tube?”

It was too late now to deny it. “I did. So you see, I am as guilty of thievery as he is.” She lifted her chin. “If you wish to break off our acquaintance, I shall quite understand.”

With a shake of his head, he conceded. “I wouldn’t have the opportunity to put right his crime were it not for that nine hundred pounds. And since my plans for tonight include thievery on a grand scale, I can hardly point fingers at you.”

“Do all the toffs in London have thievery on their minds?” Alice asked, looking from one to the other.

“You bet yer boots they do,” Lizzie said with certainty.

75

The Dunsmuirs’ joy at learning Claire was not among the angels knew no bounds. Lady Dunsmuir fell on her neck rejoicing, and even the earl clasped her hands in both of his, tears standing in his eyes.

“Never for a moment would we have left you if we had known you were alive,” he said, his voice breaking. “But the flood was so fierce it did not seem that anything could survive it.”

“It’s the Lady,” Willie informed his father, as though fire, flood, or act of God was irrelevant where she was concerned. He clasped her legs through her skirts and gazed up at her with such happiness that Claire couldn’t help but kneel to hug him.

His parents, of course, thought he referred to her title. “It is, indeed, darling,” the countess said. “And I have never seen a more welcome sight.”

“Then allow me to offer you another.” Claire handed her one of Alaia’s mats, rolled into a tube. She and Alice had scrubbed away all evidence of the diamonds’ misadventures in the hatbox, where Rosie had used them for a cushion, and when the mat unfurled on the mahogany dining table, their full beauty glittered in the lamplight.

Lady Dunsmuir gasped. “But how—where—oh Claire, we thought they were lost forever! Even when Will told us they were safe, I did not believe him. I am sorry, my darling, but I did not see how it could be true.”

Claire smiled at Willie, and Tigg rubbed the top of his head with rough affection. “Willie, the girls, and Tigg put them into a hatbox with Rosie, attached a small dirigible, and launched them into the air the same moment that—” She stopped and glanced at Jake, who had just emerged from the earl’s hard clasp looking rather ruffled.

“The same moment as I went into the lake,” he finished. “Wish I’d seen ’em. Rosie wouldn’t’ve had to spend a night shut up in a box elsewise.”

“Jake, my dear boy.” Captain Hollys appeared, breathing rather heavily, as though he’d run all the way from the gondola. “One of the middies just told me he’d seen you board.” He shook his hand, pumping it so hard Jake’s jaw flexed in an effort not to wince. “I am so very glad to see with my own eyes that you are safe and unharmed.”

“Thank you, sir.” The boy swallowed, then stood straighter. “I want to apologize to you all. I done so to the Lady, but I want you folk—I mean to say—” His lips trembled and his voice broke. “I wouldn’t ’ave done it if they ’adn’t threatened to kill you, starting wiv the youngest. Turned me coat, I mean. I were sorry then and I’m sorry now.” He stumbled to a halt.

“My dear fellow.” The earl shook his hand a second time. “One doesn’t come back from the dead to apologize. Consider it forgotten, and we will go on as we began—as friends.”

Jake’s face crumpled, and it was only with a heroic effort—and a glance at Tigg, who would never let him live it down if he wept like a girl—that he blinked his tears back and clasped the earl’s hand in return.

Lady Dunsmuir gasped. “John! We must send a pigeon at once to Gwyn Place. Poor Flora—she must hear this happy news at once, before she undergoes the dreadful trial of a funeral.”

In the air hung the word again, which Davina was too delicate to say.

Claire put a soothing hand on her black silk sleeve. Black—could she be wearing mourning for Claire herself? “Do not distress yourself. We have already done so, with a message in my own hand so she knows the happy truth.”

Her ladyship beamed with relief and did not seem to wonder where Claire had obtained her information. “You must fetch the girls—why are they not with you?—and bring them to dinner. We will be lifting in the morning, and were having something of a send-off. It was to be rather a sober affair, but now we shall have a real celebration. Claire, you will never guess who our other guest is.”

“The Prince Consort?” she asked, as though she could not possibly already know.

“Lord James Selwyn!”

Tigg sucked in a breath through his nose, and the earl did not miss the cautioning hand Jake laid on his shoulder. “Are you young men acquainted with his lordship?” he asked.

“Aye,” Tigg said with admirable brevity.

Lady Dunsmuir looked from them to Claire. “Now I know that you are no longer engaged, of course, but he has crossed two continents to see you, in the midst of his business affairs. I cannot help but think—”

“Dear Davina.” Claire did her best to remember how one acted with blushing modesty. “Really, you must not suppose that he … that there is any danger of …”

“That he’s still carryin’ the torch,” Tigg put in with an edge to his tone.

“Yes.” Oh dear, she must not laugh. Not when Davina had put her fingers to her lips in distress at the thought that she might have embarrassed Claire.

“Oh Claire, surely you are mistaken. Why on earth is he wearing mourning for you if he harbors no tender feeling?”

“I cannot imagine. I would be grateful if you would send the message informing him that I am alive and well, so that he is prepared to celebrate rather than mourn. And do not think of trying to mend what is broken. My mind is made up, but that does not mean we cannot be civil to one another.”

Tigg and Jake stared at her as if she were speaking the language of the Navapai, no doubt wondering why she was actively inviting the blackguard into their company. After kissing Davina and telling her she could not wait another moment to retrieve her clothes and change, she pulled Tigg and Jake into the cabin that had been hers and closed the door.

“Lady, what are you thinking?” Jake’s gaze was wary, but she could tell he expected her to have a reason behind her mad behavior.

“Just this. If Lord James is here indulging in the earl’s good wine, he will not be at the laboratory tonight when Mr. Malvern goes in. I am going to contrive to have one or two of the barons invited to dinner, if I can, to lessen the chances of his discovery even further.”

“Lady, are you sure?” Tigg’s face creased with doubt. “I wouldn’t want to be within a mile of ’im, meself. What if ’e convinces you to be Lady Selwyn again?”

“I can safely assure you that will never happen.” She chivvied them into the corridor. “Now, Jake, I want you to go find Mr. Malvern and tell him my plans. I will make your excuses to the Dunsmuirs. Tigg, off to your cabin for a scrub and a change. I’m not ashamed to appear anywhere in my raiding rig, but I must say I will be glad to see a waist other than this one.”

Her lovely blue evening gown was gone, confiscated by Ned Mose—no doubt to bestow on Alice’s mother. Claire could not regret that, though it did mean she must appear at dinner in a plain navy skirt with an embroidered white waist more suitable for work in a laboratory than at an earl’s table.

She twisted the St. Ives pearls around her neck—hidden safely under Maggie’s clothes this whole time—and touched her grandmother’s emerald ring with affection. Both pieces went a long way to restoring her confidence.

She was not feeling a dearth of confidence at the prospect of sitting across a dinner table from James. Rather, she needed the pearls to remind herself of who she was—the Lady of Devices, who did not tolerate attacks upon herself or her own. It would take all her self-control not to fling the roast at James’s head for his confounded thievery.

*

James had removed the black armband, but his face still carried traces of strain in the pinched look around his eyes and a physique that had lost weight in the weeks since she had last seen him.

Claire doubted, however, that these touching proofs could be attributed to his belief in her demise.

“Claire,” he breathed as he came toward her, hand outstretched, in the lounge of the Lady Lucy. “I cannot tell you how happy I am to see you alive and well.”

“And I you.” She stepped back when it appeared he might take her in his arms, and he bent to kiss her hand as if he had meant to all along. “Thank you for being willing to pay ransom on my behalf.”

Lady Dunsmuir gasped. “Claire, that is hardly a topic to bring up in polite company.”

James smiled at his hostess. “If I have learned nothing else in my business affairs here in the Texican Territory, it is that while the country is beautiful, life here can be unexpectedly brutal, with no regard for polite company. For instance, the airship that carried me south to come to Lady Claire’s assistance barely missed a rock formation that would have wrecked it. Who would have predicted such a thing?”

How convenient it was that they seemed to be in a mood for truth. “It missed the formation—called Spider Woman—because your navigator has quick reflexes. I was up in those rocks signaling with a lantern to turn the ship aside. It was about to be wrecked on purpose by Ned Mose and his gang of sky pirates.”

How satisfying it was to render him completely speechless for once—he who had an answer for everything.

Mr. Stanford Fremont, the most powerful railroad baron in the Texican consortium, nudged James with an elbow. “Saved your life, eh? Maybe there’s a little spark in that cold fire yet.”

James flushed while Claire gazed at the man, marveling at his effrontery. He had only just met her—how very rude of him to make such personal remarks about a stranger!

“I would have done the same had you been on the ship, sir,” she said coolly.

The insult sailed over his leonine head. “I like a woman with spirit. How did she come to be so intrepid, so young?” He rocked back on his heels, his thumbs hooked in the velvet lapels of his dinner jacket.

“I do not call an unwillingness to see a good ship and crew die intrepid, sir. Any of us possessed of a lamp and the ability to climb rocks would have done the same.” She turned from him with a polite smile and addressed James. “You have not introduced the others in your party. I should like to make their acquaintance.”

He gathered himself with difficulty. “Certainly. Lady Claire Trevelyan, may I present Garrison Polk, who owns the Silver Nevada Railway, and Lieutenant Robert van Ness, commander of the detachment of Texican Rangers here in Santa Fe.”

She offered her hand graciously to each man. As Lieutenant van Ness bowed over it, he clicked his heels as precisely as any Prussian soldier. “I am honored to make your acquaintance, Lady Claire,” he said in accents that confirmed he had not been born on this side of the Atlantic. “Let me assure you the Rangers are doing everything in their power to bring Ned Mose and his crew of miscreants to justice.”

“I hope you find him,” she replied. “It should not be too difficult—his airship has, I believe, been stolen and he is grounded for the time being.”

“There are more ways to get out of Resolution than by air,” the lieutenant growled. “But rest assured we know all of them. It is only a matter of time.”

Lady Dunsmuir came forward and laid a hand on James’s arm. “Dinner is served, gentlemen. James, will you escort me in?”

The villain, patting Davina’s hand on his arm as though she were a child too innocent to see what kind of man he was. Claire set her teeth and thought longingly of the lightning rifle, under her pallet in Alaia’s home.

Never mind. By this time tomorrow they would all be in the air heading for the Canadas, with the rifle once more in her possession and the Carbonator’s cell safely tucked under canvas in her steam landau in the hold.

And then James’s perfidies would all catch up to him with a vengeance. Her only regret was that she would not be here to see it.

Tigg had taken his supper with Willie earlier, but as Lord Dunsmuir cut the roast beef and Davina passed her a plate, as though they dined en famille, her ladyship returned to her previous line of thought.

“Are the girls quite safe, Claire? I must say it surprises me to see you separated.”

“I hope you told them in no uncertain terms that their behavior in leaving us was unconscionable,” John put in. “When we realized what they’d done, I nearly stopped breathing.”

“What had they done?” James inquired. “I’ve long been of the opinion that those children belong in a school or institution of some kind that will impose a little healthy discipline on them.”

Claire’s knife clanked on china as she cut her beef with a little more energy than necessary. “They would not be separated from me,” she said mildly, to cover it up. “They refused to believe I was dead, and came to find me though it might have meant their lives.” Her lashes flicked up. “It is difficult to instill such loyalty in an institution, would you not agree?”

Stanford Fremont gave a bark of laughter. “She’s got you there, James.”

The man’s familiarity was beginning to get on Claire’s nerves.

“But where are they, Claire?” The countess was honestly concerned. “And how did you get from Resolution to Santa Fe? I cannot puzzle it out.”

She smiled. “This land may be brutal, but it harbors people who are willing to help when one is in need. Friends brought us here, and the girls are with them.”

Technically, the girls were with Andrew, acting as his scouts, but he was a friend, was he not?

“I am glad to hear it, though I must say, finding a friend in that dreadful little town is quite an accomplishment.” The countess shuddered.

“They will be aboard in time for lift tomorrow, Claire, I hope?” John asked.

“Of course. You may depend upon it.”

“And that extraordinary hen?”

Lieutenant van Ness leaned forward. “I beg your pardon, sir? Did you say hen?”

“I did. When was the last time you took ship with poultry in your party?” Lord Dunsmuir’s question, Claire was quite sure, was merely rhetorical. “But this bird travels with Lady Claire, and woe betide anyone who mistakes her for a meal.”

“Does she ride your shoulder, as the parrots do in Nouveau France?” Lieutenant van Ness’s eyes twinkled with honest humor, and Claire found herself liking him. What a pity he kept such deplorable company.

“She will if she is forced to, but for the most part, she travels in my hatbox. I lost the hat, alas, somewhere over the eastern part of the Territory.”

“I should like to see this bird. I never would have believed a chicken could possess a spirit of adventure.” Smiling, the lieutenant addressed himself to his dinner.

Claire did as well, it being the first solid food other than poh-soh-lay and the flat bread that she had eaten since she had been ill.

Oh, if only she knew what was happening at the laboratory! But it was miles from here—at the south end of the city, where the railyards were—so she would not have news until Andrew, the girls, and Alaia’s sons returned.

Those boys would fit right in at the Vauxhall Gardens cottage, she was certain. They could hardly contain their anticipation at the prospect of another adventure, and had gone with James before their mother could prevent them.

“So if I might inquire, Lord Dunsmuir, what are your plans from here?” James asked, forking fluffy mashed potatoes and gravy into his mouth with appreciation. Perhaps he did not care for the local cuisine as much as others might—and his haggard appearance was due less to emotion than to simple reluctance to eat unfamiliar food.

And then a particular intensity in his eyes caused a frisson of alarm down her back. She did not want James knowing their destination. Who knew what he might be capable of, frustrated and infuriated without the means to power the Carbonator?

She opened her mouth to deflect the conversation to safer waters, but the earl forestalled her. “As I said, we lift in the morning, to continue our voyage to Edmonton.”

“Edmonton,” James murmured. “And the Canadas, I understand, are part of the Empire, under the dominion and laws of our glorious Queen?”

Claire could not imagine why he would state the obvious—he must simply be making dinner conversation for the benefit of their Texican guests.

“Yes, we have a home and many friends there,” Lady Dunsmuir put in. “I am looking forward to introducing Claire to society—I am sure she will be the toast of the town.”

“It seems a certainty,” Lieutenant van Ness said gallantly. “What a pity you are lifting so soon—I would be pleased to show you what rough society we have here.”

“It cannot be so rough if you are a representative of it,” Claire told him with a smile. “Did you spend much time in the court of the Kaiser, sir?”

He smiled while Fremont guffawed. “There’s no putting one over on this young lady, is there?”

Claire suddenly realized why she did not like the man—was it necessary to refer to her in the third person at every opportunity? Did he never make a remark to a woman directly?

“Lady Claire has a good ear,” the lieutenant said. “As it happens, I was in the service of Count von Zeppelin himself.”

“And is he as remarkable an engineer of airships as I have heard?” Claire asked, unable to tamp her eagerness down to polite dinnertime levels. “When I left, I was particularly interested in the new B-30 model, built for military communications and transport at high speeds.”

Fremont guffawed again. He might be rich as Croesus, but he sounded like the donkey in the farm across the river from Gwyn Place.

Lieutenant van Ness did her the courtesy of answering quite seriously. “In fact, a prototype model is at the airfield here. If it were not so late, I would have been honored to give you a tour.”

“I saw it on our way in. What is its top speed?”

“Really, Claire,” murmured Davina.

“Under steam power, and with a tailwind, it has reached speeds of nearly fifty knots—well in excess of the fastest train in England—”

“—the Flying Dutchman,” he and Claire said simultaneously.

James glanced at Fremont with a smile of which an automaton might have been proud. “I feel as though I am at a meeting of the Royal Society of Engineers.”

“Why, thank you, James,” Claire said. “Our voyage may have delayed my plan to attend the university to study engineering, but it has not weakened my intention.”

“Claire, shall we leave the gentlemen to their port and cigars?” Lady Dunsmuir rose gracefully, and Claire had no choice but to follow or appear hopelessly forward and discourteous. “We will have coffee and dessert in the lounge.”

She settled next to Davina on a soft couch near an expanse of glass that would have given them a view of the prototype airship had it not been dark and the drapes drawn.

“Lieutenant van Ness seemed quite taken with you.” Davina offered her a Sevres porcelain cup bearing the Dunsmuir crest picked out in gold. “It is almost a shame we are leaving so soon. But I cannot be altogether sorry.” She lowered her voice. “It is only by chance and misfortune that we are here at all, of course. I have asked John to convey my wishes to Captain Hollys that we make for Edmonton with all possible speed. The sooner we are in the Canadas, the happier I will be.”

“It has not all been misfortune,” Claire said softly, stirring cream into her coffee. “I have met some wonderful people.” Without Alice and Alaia, her life would have been the poorer. As it was, she did not know how she was going to say goodbye to Alice, knowing it was unlikely she should ever see her again.

“I am glad to hear it, but weighed in the balance against these few are people like Ned Mose, and Jake’s near death, and now Lord James’s own brush with mortality.” Davina tasted her coffee and looked up. “He came all that way to ransom you. Are you sure that, whatever your reasons for breaking your engagement, they are valid now?”

“Quite sure.” Claire sipped her own coffee.

“But in the face of such devotion—his face when he came in and saw you—”

“Davina, it pains me to speak of him. There are things you do not know.”

“There always are,” the countess said with a sigh. “It is a great pity. He would be a fine match.”

“Socially, perhaps, but in no other way, shape, or form.” It was long past time to change the subject. “I am glad we are leaving sooner rather than later. Tell me, do you think this climate is healthy for Will? I hope he is not developing a cough from the aridity and the dust?”

This sent Davina into a lengthy commentary on the health of her beloved boy, and Claire nodded and smiled in all the right places. Not for worlds would she hurt Davina’s feelings after she had been so good to her and the children, but some topics were so distasteful that the less time spent with those words upon the tongue, the better.

When the gentlemen came in and settled on the couches for their dessert, there was no more talk of eligible men. Instead, the talk turned to what Claire supposed was inevitable—railroads and the prospects for more of them.

She was content to occupy her couch, back straight, an interested smile upon her lips, while all the time she counted hours and steps and miles, wondering where Andrew and the girls were and whether they had accomplished their mission. In fact, within half an hour she was quite ready to bid her host and hostess goodbye for the evening, and make her way back to the village to wait for news of them.

She had just put her plate down after finishing a dessert that resembled pumpkin pie but certainly was not, when there was a thump on the decks below, and the sound of raised voices.

Claire and Davina both glanced toward the door, and the lieutenant half rose. “Is there some trouble below?”

A shout was his answer, and Lord Dunsmuir and the Chief Steward started for the door at the same time. A scuffle could be heard on the gangway, and then a muffled curse in a voice Claire could swear sounded familiar.

James had risen to his feet as well. “Is that—?”

Three or four men in black coats much like those Claire had seen Andrew wearing in his laboratory appeared in the doorway. “Mr. Fremont, sir!” one of them called.

Between them they held a man who was covered in dust and bruises, his hair flung over his face. His canvas coat appeared to have been dragged along the ground—possibly with him still inside it.

His canvas coat.

Claire started to her feet, but James beat her to it. “Andrew?” he said in tones of utter astonishment. “Stanford, ask your men to release him at once. I know this man.”

“What is the meaning of this?” Stanford Fremont demanded. “Can’t you see we are at dinner with Lord and Lady Dunsmuir?”

The biggest of them gave Andrew a shove, and he stumbled to his knees. “We thought you’d want to talk to him yourselves, sirs,” he said, “seeing as he was trying to steal the power cell right out of the Carbonator. Caught him red-handed, we did, and you know the penalty for thieving here. The only question is, do we shoot him now or wait until dawn?”

76

Lizzie kicked the man in the black laboratory coat with all her strength. He howled and his grip loosened for a split second, just long enough for her to tear loose and pound up the gangway. “Lady!” she shrieked. “Help!”

Maggie grabbed her opportunity, kicked the man in his other shin, and took off after her sister, screeching loud enough to raise the dead.

They burst into the lounge together, only to realize a moment too late that there were more men in black coats—the room was crawling with them—and there, looking like death warmed over, was his nibs himself, the Lady’s former fiance.

Oh woe, the plan was all at sixes and sevens, and now what were they to do?

Maggie dove for the Lady’s skirt and clutched it, sobbing in terror that was half real. “Lady, that man grabbed us and they was ’orrible to us and oh, Mr. Malvern is in such trouble!”

The Lady sank to her knees and gathered Maggie and Lizzie into her arms just as the bloke that had tried to hold them ran into the room, red-faced and swearing.

“There!” he shouted. “Mr. Fremont, sir, those two little she-demons were in on it with him. You just leave them to me, sir, and I’ll show ’em how to mend their manners. I’ll shoot ’em myself.”

“You will do no such thing.” The freezing tones that could quell even Lizzie on a rampage made a shiver tiptoe down Maggie’s back as the Lady rose to her feet. “What is the meaning of this?”

The man gawked at her, then at the big man with the mane of hair groomed so perfectly that it could have been carved like the angels in Westminster Abbey. “Mr. Fremont, sir?”

“Answer the young lady—Baxter, is it? I’d like to know myself why you’re wrangling children when you’re supposed to be working in my laboratory.”

“They ain’t children. They’s devils. I got bruises coming the size of apples, sir.”

“I dislike repeating myself,” the Lady said, enunciating so clearly the consonants cut the air. “Why are you manhandling my wards?”

Maggie straightened, but didn’t leave off her hold of the Lady, instead slipping both arms around her waist. A comforting hand came down upon her shoulder, and the Lady drew Lizzie close as well.

“Your … wards?” Baxter didn’t look as if he knew whether he was coming or going. “I dunno nothing about that. All I know is that when we captured Malvern here breaking out the power cell, we found these two in the yard outside. Ain’t no reason for kids to be there, so they have to be together.”

“I believe the children are acquainted with Mr. Malvern, as am I,” Lord James said. “I cannot help but think there has been a dreadful misunderstanding.”

“Not much to misunderstand,” another man said. His moustaches were the size of mice. Maggie stared, wondering if he ever lost his food on its way to his mouth. “This man Malvern was caught thieving, and it looks like these girls were with him. The penalty for thieving in the territories, like I said, is death by a single shot. So I’ll ask again—are we doing it now, or at dawn, so he has the services of a padre before he meets his Maker?”

“They,” Baxter said, feeling his calf. “Those little demons are going with him. I’ll do it myself.”

“You will do no such thing,” her ladyship said in scandalized tones. “They are only children. And Mr. Malvern is a very good friend of ours, to whom we owe a great debt. I am sure it is as Lord James said—a misunderstanding.”

“Andrew, would you like to explain?” his lordship said. “What were you doing at the laboratory? I thought you had come to the Americas on behalf of Ross Stephenson, concerning that device you exhibited at the Crystal Palace.”

Mr. Fremont laughed a big laugh that didn’t sound a bit as if he thought something was funny. “You’re behind the times, Dunsmuir.” He slapped his lordship on the back, and when Lord Dunsmuir turned slowly, his eyebrows rising, Mr. Fremont went on oblivious to the fact that his lordship didn’t appreciate the familiarity. “That deal’s dead in the water. Selwyn here went with the horse that’s going to win this race.”

Horses? Maybe the man had had a knock on the noggin. He wasn’t making a bit of sense.

Mr. Fremont waved an expansive arm. “I understood from James that Malvern had signed off on the whole shebang. Isn’t that right, James?”

“Whether he did or he did not is immaterial,” his nibs said, smooth as butter. “The fact remains that I own the Carbonator and can do with it as I wish.”

“That is not the case.” Andrew struggled in the grip of the black coats. Mr. Fremont waggled a hand at them and they let him go. He tugged his beaten canvas coat into place while his face reddened with temper. “I am joint owner of that device, and you people stole it out from under me. Ross Stephenson paid earnest money in good faith and James, you reneged on that deal. This entire enterprise is a dishonorable mess from start to finish.”

“Is that so?” With two fingers, Fremont dug in the pocket of his fine jacket and pulled out a chased-silver cigarette case. Maggie would bet Lizzie’s fingers had twitched at the sight of it. He lit a cigarillo and blew a stream of smoke in Mr. Malvern’s face.

Ooh, if that weren’t as rude as rude could be!

“So, what, were you planning to take back what you consider your own?”

“It is half mine.” He glanced at the Lady. “More than half. Lady Claire is invested in it as well. It cannot be sold—or moved—or duplicated—without our consent. I do not speak for her, but I certainly do not consent.”

“Really.” Lord James accepted a nasty, stinking cigarillo from Mr. Fremont. “And whose name is on the patent application, might I ask?”

“Yours and mine, of course,” Mr. Malvern said.

“Are you quite sure? I believe at this moment it is in Fremont’s offices with only mine on it, to be filed in the Santa Fe Office of Engineering as soon as we have the manufacturing process in place.”

The Lady’s fingers were digging into her shoulder, and Maggie squirmed.

“So you redacted his name as well, James?” she asked. “I am fascinated at the way you treat your friends.”

“The real application is in my laboratory,” Mr. Malvern snapped. “I don’t know what counterfeit you plan to file, but it is not the real patent. That can only be filed in London, with the approval of the Royal Society of Engineers.”

“Spoken like a true subject of an irrelevant Empire.” Mr. Fremont waved this away as though he were bored to death with the whole subject. “The fact is, you broke into my laboratory with larcenous intent, and assaulted my men in the defense of my property, as Murphy here says. Out here we deal with thieves ourselves. Baxter, Murphy, take Mr. Malvern here to the city lockup and see he has a padre.”

“Mr. Fremont, I must protest.” The earl stepped in front of the man called Murphy, who had grabbed Mr. Malvern’s arm in a grip he couldn’t shake. “This man is a subject of the Crown. He cannot be shot. He cannot even be detained without benefit of a hearing by a magistrate. He did no harm. He was most likely examining this device to see that it had come to no grief. And I must say, James, that I am shocked that you—”

“He had the cowling off and had the power cell half disconnected,” another man interrupted. “That’s more than an examination. Five more minutes and who knows what damage he would have done. Lucky thing Murphy here forgot to take his smokes with him during shift change, and came back to get them.”

Murphy dragged Mr. Malvern, kicking and struggling, to the gangway. They all seemed to have forgotten Maggie and Lizzie.

“This is outrageous!” the Lady cried. “You cannot do this! Lieutenant van Ness, do something!”

“Fremont, Lord James—surely this bears looking into,” said the man in the slate-blue uniform with the little gold birds on his collar points. “It isn’t the Texican way to execute a man before we have all the facts. Especially not a citizen of the Empire.”

Mr. Fremont’s eyes narrowed, and Maggie pressed closer to the Lady. She’d seen a snake in the Tower Zoo once that had looked just like that. The poor rat they’d put in the cage with it for its dinner hadn’t had a ghost of a chance.

Lord James stubbed out his cigarillo in a crystal dish that Maggie knew her ladyship meant for candies. “Let us be calm,” he said. “Perhaps I can see a way out of this difficulty.”

“I knew you would.” Fremont made to clap him on the back, too, but James stepped out of the way. “Let’s hear it.”

“Since Stanford and I are joint partners in this venture, I believe I can speak for him as well, when I suggest an exchange.”

“An exchange?” his lordship said. “A man’s life for—what?”

“For a woman’s.” Lord James smiled at the Lady, who simply stared at him while all the color drained out of her face. “I propose—” He smiled wider at the word. “—that Lady Claire retract the statements she made to me when last we saw one another in London, and reinstate our engagement. Instead of fabricating the Selwyn Kinetick Carbonator immediately, I further propose we continue with our manufacture of enough carbonated coal for a demonstration run to San Francisco, where we will conclude our arrangements with the Royal Kingdom of Spain, and then Claire and I will take ship for Her Majesty’s namesake city, Victoria, in the Canadas.”

“No,” the Lady whispered, but only Lizzie and Maggie were close enough hear her.

“The Canadas being a dominion of the Empire, all Her Majesty’s laws apply there, including the age of majority. Lady Claire and I will be married in Victoria, and spend our honeymoon traveling from there to Edmonton, as she had originally planned.”

The Lady forced her fingers to release Maggie’s and Lizzie’s shoulders, and Maggie let out a breath of relief.

“What are you saying, Selwyn?” Fremont boomed. “That I set this man free in exchange for this young lady’s hand? What kind of a bargain is that?”

“A fair one, I think.” His nibs didn’t take his eyes off the Lady for one second. “She and the Carbonator go with us on the demonstration run, safe from the depredations of my former partner, who, I’m afraid, will have to find his own way home—unless he runs afoul of the Rangers.”

“This is outrageous,” Lord Dunsmuir said. “You can’t treat Claire this way. Or Andrew. Or any of us.”

“She already said yes to me once,” Lord James pointed out. “And in any case, my affairs are none of your business.”

His lordship rode right over this insulting observation. “But Claire is under my protection and—”

“Yes, I’ve seen how effective your protection has been,” Lord James said. “So far she has been skyjacked, washed away in a flood, and left for dead. I believe I can keep her at least a little safer than that.”

Maggie would never have believed Lord Dunsmuir capable of violence, but she believed it now. Shaking with rage, he turned from Lord James to the Lady.

“Claire? What do you say to this plan?”

Maggie could distinctly feel her trembling, but whether it was from rage or fear, she did not know.

“If I agree to go with you,” she said in a voice that only shook a little, “Andrew will go free?”

“Yes.”

“And what of the children?”

Lord James’s dispassionate gaze swept lower, and Maggie shrank back against the Lady’s skirts. “I’m afraid there is no provision on the train for children.”

What?

Lizzie’s fists clenched. “We go where the Lady goes.”

The carpet might have spoken up and said so for all the interest he showed. “The children may stay here with the Dunsmuirs, or find a ship back to London, or set out across the desert in a pram, for all I care. But they will not be coming with us.”

“But we’re a flock!” Maggie cried. She looked up into the Lady’s face. “You can’t go wiv ’im and not take us!”

The Lady knelt so that they three were face to face, and spoke so only they could hear. “Would you have Mr. Malvern be executed instead? Because you know perfectly well there is no magistrate or law or any other thing in this wild place that will save him, if they are determined to do it.”

“I don’t care!”

“But I do,” she said softly, and behind her, even through her distress, Maggie saw Mr. Malvern’s face sag into lines of despair. “It is in my power to save his life. It may be the only thing I will ever be able to do for him.”

“But what about us?” she wailed. “You promised we’d always be together! That wiv that piece of paper, no one could separate us!”

“We will be together, back in England,” she said. “I will find a way to contrive it.”

“He’ll never let you go back.” Lizzie’s cheeks were wet, and her nose was running. “He’ll take you away and we’ll never see you again. You know he will.”

The Lady shook her head. “Impossible.”

“You said this would never happen.” Maggie clutched at a straw. “You said you’d never marry him. You have to do what you said!”

“Children oughta be seen and not heard,” Fremont remarked to no one in particular, and Maggie burst into tears.

“All right, all right.” Mr. Fremont turned to the lieutenant. “Until the happy couple are on their way, maybe the lockup is too severe for a man my new friends are in debt to.” He bowed to the Dunsmuirs. “Mr. Malvern will be comfortable in the peace and quiet of a pinnacle cell.” Baxter and Murphy’s eyes widened, and Maggie’s stomach turned over. “I don’t want to cause an international incident, now, do I?” He laughed his big laugh.

Maggie sat on the floor like she was only Willie’s age, and gave herself up to tears of utter hopelessness.

“I do not know what a pinnacle cell is, but I think Mr. Malvern would be much more comfortable here, among his friends,” Lady Dunsmuir said over the sound of her weeping. “May he not spend the night aboard the Lady Lucy?”

The big man smiled and directed his reply to his lordship. “Well now, that would be a real fine plan, but I don’t want to put you good folks out.” He held up a hand as Lord Dunsmuir began to protest that it would be no trouble at all. “No, no, I’ll take responsibility for him. It would be a terrible shame if some … misunderstanding … occurred and the Lady Lucy continued on her voyage with my prisoner aboard, wouldn’t it? My sense of justice would oblige me to ask the lieutenant here to mobilize his Rangers in that speedy vessel moored next door. In the chase, it would be a terrible thing for your family to be put at risk of being shot down.”

“Sir, you speak in fabrications and impossibilities,” his lordship said through stiff lips. “I don’t know which is worse—the fact that you and Selwyn both are ruthless blackguards, or the fact that I did not recognize it until now.”

“Lieutenant, please,” the Lady pleaded, turning to him. “Surely you can see that this is unacceptable.”

The man in the uniform took her hand in both of his, but his eyes had gone hollow. Maggie could see that it required an effort of will for the Lady not to pull away. “Your friend will come to no harm on a pinnacle cell. He’ll be far more comfortable there than at the lockups, I’ll guarantee you that, and we will release him once the demonstration party and the Lady Lucy are away.”

“Claire, this is absurd,” Mr. Malvern said desperately. “You cannot even think of this. Please. I got myself into this—I will get myself out without you sacrificing yourself for me.”

Murphy batted him across the face with one beefy hand. “Shut up, you. Save your noise for the vultures.”

The Lady’s lips trembled as she asked Mr. Fremont, “What exactly is a pinnacle cell?”

“Why, simply one of those spires of rock that protrude out of the ground here and there about our city. They are seven hundred feet high, and once a man is imprisoned on the top of one, he cannot escape—not unless he wishes to save the executioner the cost of a bullet.”

The Lady’s face could not pale any further. It turned gray. “And will you guarantee his safety?”

“I will,” the lieutenant said. “Justice is swift here, but it is justice. No harm will come to him while he’s in our custody.”

How could he make a promise like that? It seemed to Maggie that all a man would have to do was roll over in his sleep, and so much for their harmless custody.

The lieutenant signaled Murphy to take his hands off Mr. Malvern. “If you will accompany me, sir, I will escort you off the ship.”

Maggie had never seen a look quite like the one exchanged between the Lady and Mr. Malvern. One part fear, one part apology … and two parts despair.

The party disembarked and her ladyship retired to her room in tears. His lordship followed her, so angry he could hardly speak.

Lord James approached the Lady and she held up a hand. “No closer, James, or I will spit in your face. How dare you?”

“It seems you dare quite a lot for my former partner. It is very touching. I look forward to the day when I inspire such emotion.”

Maggie caught Lizzie’s eye and cut her eyes toward the serving pantry. As the Lady faced his nibs, they drifted toward it a step at a time.

“I saved your life.”

“And now I am saving his. One would think you would be grateful.”

“I’m afraid you inspire no such tender emotions. I cannot fathom why you do not find another woman who cannot see through your falsity and who does not hate you with every fiber of her being.”

He smiled at her, though it did not extend to his eyes. “When are you going to understand that you are mine, Claire? You promised yourself to me, and Selwyns do not release what is theirs.”

“I am not yours. I will never be. I will throw myself from that train first.”

“Then I will have to keep a careful eye on you. Beginning now. You will accompany me back to my hotel, where I will have a room prepared for you. An inside room, preferably without windows. And in the morning, after I see the Lady Lucy lift, we will be on our way to San Francisco. I am sure you will waste no time in boarding the train, so that dear Andrew may have his freedom.”

The Lady’s jaw flexed as she ground her teeth. “May I collect my things from my cabin?”

“Certainly. I shall ascertain that it has no porthole, and then I shall wait outside the door.”

“And may I return to my friends to collect my belongings there?”

“How very careless of you to leave your property behind. I am afraid not. There will be no time.” He indicated that she should precede him down the corridor.

No one paid the least attention to Maggie and Lizzie. Which is why it was so easy to slip out of the serving pantry, down the gangway, and out into the night.

77

They hadn’t gone two steps when a thin, wiry shadow detached itself from behind the wheel housings of the embarkation tower. “Mopsies.”

“Jake!” The last they’d seen of him, he’d been telling Mr. Malvern what the Lady was up to. Then they’d heard a sound and he’d dived behind a huge machine with arms as big as a building, evidently used for moving things on and off trains. “Where are Luis and Alvaro?”

“Hightailed it back to the village. Ent nothin’ they could do to help, and getting’ caught wouldn’t do us any good. Wot ’appened?”

Catching him up as they went, they ran deeper into the shadows until they were on the edge of the airfield near where the steambus would stop.

“D’you mean t’ tell me the Lady is goin’ off with that blackguard? To San Francisco? Is she mad?”

“She’s tryin’ to save Mr. Malvern’s life,” Maggie panted, “but that devil’s goin’ to hurt her somehow, I know it.”

“Simply lookin’ across the breakfast table at ’im would ’urt,” Lizzie observed.

“We ’ave to stop it,” Jake said, but this was so obvious that neither of the girls bothered to answer. “Hey. Where’s our Tigg?”

“On Lady Lucy, I think.” But Maggie did not know. “Liz? You see ’im?”

“He was supposed to go wiv the Lady. If ’e’s anywhere, ’e’s in the engine room.”

Jake stopped dead. “You silly gumpies. They’re goin’ t’ lift tomorrow, ent they? We can’t leave wivout knowin’ for sure where ’e is.”

In the distance, the steambus huffed and chuffed its way toward them. Lizzie planted her fists on her hips.

“He’s a fair sight better off than we are. The Lady’s sendin’ ’erself to the noose wiv that rascal, Mr. Malvern’s to be trapped on a pinnacle ’e’s like to roll off of before daybreak, we’re standing in the road miles from anywhere, and where’s Tigg? Prob’ly tucked up nice and safe in ’is bunk, wiv a good breakfast waitin’ for ’im come morning.”

The conveyance spewed steam everywhere as it pulled up next to them, and they clambered aboard. Jake grumbled and grumped, but really, Lizzie had the right of it. Someday soon they would all be together again, but if anyone had to leave with the Dunsmuirs on their lovely ship, Tigg would be the happiest to do so.

They, on the other hand, had to think of something, and quick.

They would have got to the village sooner if their steambus hadn’t had a ticket collector on it. They were forced to jump down two stops ahead of the end of the line, which meant they had to ride shank’s mare for more than a mile. It was another two miles out to the village, and then the sick-inducing spiral rock stair … by the time Maggie staggered onto the flat top of the mesa, she was gasping for breath and every muscle felt as though it was made of iron.

Lizzie and Jake hadn’t fared much better. They rested for a moment at the top of the stair, neither one inclined to rib the other about their powers of endurance. In fact, when Lizzie finally spoke, it wasn’t about the climb at all. “D’you think she’ll really go through wiv it?”

Jake chucked a rock into the whispering darkness. Several long moments later, they heard a distant clack. “I think she’ll fob ’im off wi’ what ’e wants to ’ear, and then choose ’er moment to scarper.”

“He’s going to lock ’er in a room. We ought to spring ’er like we sprung Doctor Craig out of Bedlam.”

“The lightning rifle,” Maggie said suddenly. “She didn’t take it to dinner. Said it weren’t proper. That’s why she wanted to come back ’ere.”

“He said no.” Lizzie chucked her own rock. “We gonna try to get it to ’er again? It worked last time.”

“That train’s going to be crawlin’ wiv black coats,” Jake said. “If ’e’s got ’er locked in a room, then under guard when she gets on the train, we won’t stand a snowball’s chance.”

“We could get on the train now. Tonight.” That was our Lizzie. Always thinking.

“What train?” That was our Jake, always finding the holes in a perfectly sound plan. Which was good, Maggie supposed, but it did tend to be demoralizing. “There must be a dozen trains in Stanford Fremont’s railyard alone. We got no way to know if they’re goin’ on one o’ his, or on a proper one, where you pay a fare and all.”

The problem seemed insurmountable.

“Maggie? Lizzie?” Alice’s voice floated out of the darkness between the square mud buildings. No matter that she looked like a miner or a stevedore half the time, Maggie liked her voice. It was like honey with toast crumbs in it, and just as sweet.

Alice!

“Alice will know what to do.” Maggie scrambled to her feet. Her legs felt wobbly, but at least they’d got moving again.

“Aye, best person to fox a villain is another villain.” Goodness. Jake actually sounded like he might be smiling.

“Our Alice ent no villain, even if she’s a villain’s daughter,” Maggie told him. “She saved our lives, out there on that blasted velogig in the middle of the desert.”

“I know, I were there, remember? An’ I might’ve had a bit to do with savin’ yer cantankerous hide.”

He was smiling.

Maggie took heart.

In the little mud cube that was Alaia’s home, the boys were back and she was feeding them prodigious amounts of black beans and cheese and those little green chiles that she fried on a flat piece of iron. Maggie still could not fathom how they could eat the little beggars with apparent enjoyment while tears and sweat streamed down their faces.

Alaia had them seated and was dishing up grub in a matter of moments.

“I hope you plan to tell me what happened,” Alice said urgently, “or you’ll hear a scream that’ll reach clear over to Santa Fe. Claire gets all gussied up to go have a fancy dinner with the man she’s not engaged to, and she doesn’t come back. Mr. Malvern goes to steal the power cell and he doesn’t come back. What in tarnation is going on?”

So they told her, in fits and gulps between great mouthfuls of food. Raiding was hungry work, particularly when you failed miserably at it and came home empty-handed and hopeless.

Alice stopped eating right about the time Maggie said pinnacle cell.

She put her bit of flatbread down, as if she’d lost her appetite. “They’re going to put him on a pinnacle?”

Maggie nodded. “That Ranger lieutenant said ’e’d be safe, but ’ow can he when all ’e ’as to do is roll over to be killed?”

“And people called my pa inhuman. At least he never used Spider Woman for such a thing.” She took a breath and looked away from her flatbread as if it made her ill. “Mr. Malvern’ll have to kick aside the previous prisoner. I hope he’s got a strong stomach.”

Maggie stopped chewing.

“What do you mean?” Lizzie demanded. “Don’t one person get a pinnacle to himself?”

“One live person does,” Alice said grimly. “They don’t bother to clear off the dead ones.”

It took a moment for the macabre picture to sink in.

“That Ranger man,” Lizzie said. “He promised Mr. Malvern would be let go soon’s the Lady were on the train an’ Lady Lucy were in the sky.”

“He may have promised that,” Alice conceded. “He may even have meant it. But that’s what they do with the really bad criminals. The lucky ones get a single shot. But the ones they really want to punish—murderers, kidnappers, extortioners, and the like—they put them in a pinnacle cell. They sit up there and you ain’t ever heard anything more pathetic than those men up under the broiling sun, callin’ for mercy.”

“What if you tried to help one?” Jake asked.

“You’d be shot, same as if you tried to spring someone out of lockup.”

“But if they can get ’em up there, they can get ’em down again,” Lizzie objected. “We’ll just steal whatever device they use and—”

“—and you’d be stuck up there with him,” Alice finished. “They use a balloon with a puncture in it. It has just enough lift to get ’em up there, but if they stay in it, it’ll outgas. The fall kills ’em. Some stay in the basket, of course. The optimistic ones, they climb out, hoping for mercy or help.” Sadness and hopelessness pulled at her mouth, turning its corners down.

And suddenly Maggie, who left the losing of tempers up to Lizzie as a general rule, lost hers with a vengeance.

“So you’re just gonna leave Mr. Malvern on his pinnacle to die?” she demanded, pushing away what was left of her food. “Yer just gonna give up and wait for the vultures to come and finish ’im off like they nearly did us?”

“Of course not. Sit down, you little fireball. We have to think of something that’s not gonna get us shot.”

“Think!” Maggie waved madly at the little mud house and beyond. “We got everything we need—we don’t need to think. We need to act, before everyone in our flock either dies or gets scattered so’s we can’t ever find ’em!”

“And what would you suggest, Little Miss Ingenuity?”

Maggie didn’t know what engine-ooity was, but she knew a solution when it was floating right outside. “You silly gumpus, we got the Stalwart Lass! And we got eighteen different kinds o’ nasty capsacious chile peppers right here and—” She flung an arm out and Jake ducked. “—in Jake’s brain we got the recipe for gaseous capsaicin.”

With his quick pickpocket’s fingers, Jake was already gathering up the raw chiles on the flat table stone. Lizzie pitched in to help him.

On the other side of the table, Alaia nodded with approval. “Spider Woman’s spirit moves with the power of the wind, and we must obey or lose that which we value most.”

Maggie saw the moment the penny dropped and Alice figured out exactly how to save Mr. Malvern’s life.

Her smile was so big, it was almost as if the sun had risen, right there in the room.

78

The hotel, as it turn out, possessed no rooms without windows, but it did have the next best thing. James gazed with some satisfaction at the elegant whorls of ironwork covering the windows, securely anchored with iron bolts to the sandstone outside.

“It’s to keep them thieving Indians from ransacking the rooms,” Stanford Fremont said, chewing the end of his cigarillo and rocking back on his boot heels. “I trust your lady will be comfortable?”

Claire did not dignify this with a reply. She was firmly on the side of the Indians, and the moment she had even the slenderest chance, she would be ransacking these rooms herself for a tool or implement with which to get out.

She seated herself on a chair upholstered in moss-green velvet and inclined her head at her male visitors in a way that clearly indicated she wished them to leave.

Stanford Fremont winked at James. “I’ll leave you two to say your good nights. I’ll be in the bar downstairs if you’d like a nightcap, James.” Claire could hear his booming laughter all the way down the stairs to the lobby.

Gazing at a wall sconce of chased glass, she prepared to wait in silence until James decided he wanted that nightcap.

“I know you are angry with me.” He strolled to the mantel and rested an elbow on it, though the grate was cold and the night too warm for a fire. “But I want you to believe I am acting for the best.”

She could sit here until she froze him out, or if she must tolerate his presence, perhaps the wiser course would be to attempt to discover something useful.

“Whose ‘best’ do you mean?”

“Why, our own, of course. I have nothing against Andrew. I have no idea what he’s doing here, apart from some harebrained plot to sabotage the Carbonator. Is he really so angry that I chose to partner with Fremont instead of Ross Stephenson that he would harm his own device to prevent us using it?”

“I rather think that if he is indeed angry, it is because you fled the country without telling him of your plans, or including him in them.”

“Oh, I would have. There simply wasn’t time. The Texicans are an impatient lot, as you may have noticed. They make up their minds quickly, and their justice is equally swift.”

“Some justice.”

“This is a lawless land, Claire. They don’t call it the Wild West for nothing. If one is to hold onto one’s possessions, one must act decisively to prevent others from taking undue advantage.”

There was no point in discussing Andrew with him. She must be sensitive to the direction of the wind and direct the conversational course as she would the velogig.

“Does Mr. Fremont hold extensive possessions in these Territories?”

“Indeed he does. I saw at once that his vision for the Carbonator extended far beyond that of Ross Stephenson. Why, one could fit all of England into one tiny corner of the Texican Territory, and Stanford Fremont owns a good chunk of it. The potential for profit is much greater here—especially when one looks west, to the Royal Kingdom of Spain.”

“And the Selwyn holdings could use an infusion of that … potential.”

“They can indeed. Selwyn Place is practically falling down around my ears, and there are improvements I wish to make to the farms and machinery that are simply too costly without an investment like this one to produce an income stream.”

Claire wondered how many years of mismanagement it had taken for an estate as old as Selwyn Place to fall into such disrepair.

“Mr. Fremont seems like a most sagacious businessman,” she observed. “I am sure the Texican government relies heavily on men of vision to bring the country forward in true progress.”

“I thought you didn’t like him.”

She lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “Perhaps not at first. But it seems he may play some part in my future, so I am willing to reassess his qualities.”

James laughed. “And now you are playing a part, my dear. This ladylike compliance is most unlike you.”

Perhaps she had, as they said at cards, overplayed her hand.

“Making observations about the character of others is hardly compliance,” she replied. “I am still most upset with you for removing me from my friends.”

“Ah, but I don’t want to lose you. You are a young lady of resources, and I have learned to my chagrin not to underestimate you.” He met her gaze in the mirror. “It is one of the qualities I most admire in you.”

“I cannot see why, when it has played against you nearly every time.”

“I live in hope that some day you will look upon me with a softer eye. In the meantime, I enjoy your spirit—and take appropriate precautions.”

If she dwelled on that for more than a moment, she would lose her temper—and she was determined to expend no more emotion on him. Besides, the sooner he left the room, the sooner she could search it for a weapon. She had her ivory hair pick, of course, but short of stabbing him through the eye with it, it was not very useful at present. She had not saved his life only to murder him now.

As if he were a stage savant, he said, “You saved me from a dreadful death in an airship wreck, Claire, at some risk to your own life. Surely you must harbor some feeling for me deep in your heart?”

At last she met his gaze directly, not through the medium of the mirror. “If I did in the beginning, I am afraid you hope for too much now. James, you cannot belittle me in public, steal my future, and imprison me without annihilating those feelings you desire so much.”

He shook his head. “If I did any of those things, it was only to fit you for the place you will hold in society. You must trust me to know such things better than you—I have nearly ten years more experience in the world.”

She could have retorted that the depth of her experience more than made up for the length of his, but she did not. Instead, she folded her hands on her blue merino skirt. “Speaking of experience, what are your plans upon our arrival in San Francisco?”

He crossed to the other chair, hitched up the knees of his trousers, and sat. She smothered her disappointment and impatience and gazed at him with placid interest.

“The things I have been hearing about that city would amaze you, Claire. It is built on seven hills, like Rome, and there is a World Exhibition planned there next year by El Rey himself, ruler of the Royal Kingdom of Spain and the Californias. They say it will rival anything Her Majesty or the French have ever built.”

“Rival the Crystal Palace? Or the tower designed by Monsieur Eiffel to moor Persephone? This El Rey must be very ambitious.”

“Stanford has seen the plans, and he says they are very ambitious indeed. In fact, that is part of our partnership here in the Territories. If the Selwyn Kinetick Carbonator proves to be all I believe it is, we will not only have an exhibit hall that can hold the chamber, but an entire moving train inside it to demonstrate the coal’s longevity as well.”

“Heavens.”

“You may well look astonished. And of course, to manufacture chambers and other devices based on its power cell will make us some of the richest men in the world. There is no end to what we might accomplish.”

“It is the cell, then, that is the key.” She made a rueful moue of her lips. “And here I thought it was my movable truss.”

He chuckled and reached over to pat her hand. She marveled at her own self-control in not leaping to her feet and swatting him.

“The truss is a necessary component, and as my wife, I will make sure you are properly credited with it on the patent we file here.”

When she looked away, he misread her. “I see that you are tired, and no wonder. Your skin still bears the depredations of sun and wind. You will enjoy the journey to San Francisco, I know—especially since there is no way to expose your skin to the weather unless you stand on the viewing platform at the back of the train. By the time we reach the coast, your complexion will be back to its usual loveliness.”

She had never aspired to loveliness, preferring intelligence instead. However, she allowed her shoulders to droop, and offered him a wan smile.

“Until the morning, then.” He rose, tipped his beaver hat to her and would have leaned over to kiss her, but she got up and moved her valise to the chair he had occupied. At the door, he said, “Our train leaves at dawn. I will have the maid wake you.”

“Thank you, James. Good night.”

“Good night, Claire.”

The door closed behind him.

The lock turned over.

She leaped for the window, tugging at the iron scrollwork, looking for a weakness. Finding none, she tried the hearth next, flinging a towel down and lying on her back to peer up the flue, but it was merely a stovepipe masquerading as a chimney. Frustrated, she went into the water closet, but short of turning into a trout and swimming down the hole, there was no escape there either.

She tapped the walls, but no hidden doors revealed themselves. She lifted the carpet, but the floors were solid, with not even a crack between the heavy planks of dark, adzed wood.

Fuming, she sat at last upon the bed. It was clear there was no hope of escape tonight. She would have to do so on the way to the train, then. Or on the train itself. Trains had plenty of windows and doors through which to slip.

Since she could not do what she must, she would do what she could.

She took the longest, hottest bath of her life, washed her hair with creamy, scented soap, and washed all the clothes and underthings she had with her. There was a heated drying rail—wonder of wonders—in this godforsaken outpost, so everything would be dry by morning.

Then, clothed, clean, and with her mind honed to sharpness by fear and loss, she would escape at the very first opportunity.

Because she would not get a second.

79

Maggie woke to the gentle touch of Alaia’s hand upon her cheek.

“It is nearly dawn,” she said. “Gather up your things, for Spider Woman will pass her shuttle many times in your life’s pattern before I see you again.”

“She will? How do you know? But we will see you again, won’t we?” Lizzie always came wide awake, with none of the sleepy stretching and curling Maggie did.

“I feel that we will, little daughters of the air.”

Maggie smiled and stretched up her arms for a hug. “I like that. Thank you for everything.”

Alaia smelled of wood smoke and warm grass and the capsaicin they had extracted from the chiles the night before, and her lips on Maggie’s forehead were soft as she gave her a mother’s kiss. “Come. I have given your little hen enough corn for many days, and she is safe in her box. Alice is waiting.”

The sky was a clear bell of ink over their heads, cold with the promise of frost before too many days passed. But on the hems of it burned a gray light that was rapidly strengthening to a shine of pure pewter.

Maggie hefted the lightning rifle, rolled in a wool rug with a lightning pattern woven into it—Alaia possessed a sense of humor—and the weaver’s clever fingers passed a wide knotted sash around her that hugged the bundle close against her back.

“Remember, daughter. Should you need a rope, merely tug these knots. The thread is thin, but I have woven metal into it. It will not break.”

Lizzie picked up a rucksack filled with food, Maggie collected Rosie’s hatbox—the hen’s head poking out and tracking their movements with interest—and they followed Alaia outside, where Jake was waiting for them.

“’Ow we getting to the ship?”

Her bow tethered to the pinnacle of stone that was her mooring mast, the Stalwart Lass rode serenely on the updraft not twenty yards off, but in between was a drop at least as high as the top of Big Ben.

“I ’ope yer recovered from last night,” Jake said, adjusting his own rucksack of food. “We got to go down the stone stair on this side and up inside that pinnacle. See the hatchway?”

Maggie groaned, gave Alaia a final kiss, waved to her boys, who lounged against the door eating their breakfasts, and plunged down the stair.

When she emerged at the top of the pinnacle opposite, legs aching and lungs aching, Alice was waiting on the gangway, utterly heedless of the drop directly below her feet. “Careful, now. That’s it, don’t look down. And right through here. Well done, Maggie.”

The gondola of the Lass was much smaller than that of Lady Lucy. It held the wheel and the instruments, and a speaking horn protruded from one wall, but there were no control panels, and no gears to signal changes in engine speed to the stern, because the engine was right behind it. A person only need shout to give a command.

Alice closed the hatch. Jake chucked his rucksack on the floor and took up a station next to the navigation charts and the huge viewing glass as if he belonged there.

“Nine, full reverse,” Alice said, and Maggie jumped nearly a foot as behind her, a gleaming brass automaton took hold of the gear levers and began to work them.

“Seven and eight, stand by to close vents.” Two more automatons moved stiffly to obey.

“Cor,” Lizzie breathed. “That’s ’ow they flew the ship wiv only two in the crew. The rest of ’em’s them automatons.”

“What should we do, Alice?”

Alice spun the wheel, and the Stalwart Lass floated up and over the mesa, where down below, Luis and Alvaro waved their flatbread in farewell.

“It’s going to take us a few minutes to find out what pinnacle they’re holding him on,” she said. “We don’t have much light to see by, but that means they won’t see much of us, either.” She straightened the ship’s course, and through the viewing glass—pocked with bullet holes—Maggie could see the city dead ahead, lights beginning to come on in some of its windows.

“I want you girls to go with Four and Six here, and station yourselves in the bombing bays, one in each fuselage. I can give you some orders through the speaking horn, but it’ll be up to you to keep them from shooting at us.”

“Aye, Cap’n.”

Alice grinned. “I suppose I am, aren’t I? I kinda like the sound of it.” She handed each of them a big burlap sack that clinked in a most ominous way. “Off with you, now. We’ll be overhead in a few minutes and I don’t want to give them a lot of warning. Leave Rosie there, on that hatch. And don’t forget to use the safety lines up top.”

The racket that old engine was making, Maggie didn’t see much hope of approaching undiscovered. But she and Lizzie had a job to do, and if she’d learned anything since Snouts had allowed them into the gang, it was that each person had their part. If you didn’t do your part, it put everyone else in danger.

And this raid was touch and go to start with.

She and Lizzie emerged from the top hatch and when the automaton called Four began the climb up the ladder into the starboard fuselage—this one seemed to be an earlier model, and its legs were articulated backward, like those under their walking coop—she clipped a waving safety line to her belt and handed one to Lizzie. The wind whipped at their braided hair and sawed through their dresses. “Good shooting,” Lizzie shouted, and Maggie nodded the same back. Then she followed Four—who had not bothered with a safety line—up the ladder and into the bombing bay.

It held no bombs, which was something of a disappointment. But Four braced himself—itself?—against a strut and Maggie looked down past the rack where bombs might have been, down … down into whistling, empty air.

The ground floated past seven hundred feet below her boots, covered in the square reddish-brown buildings all laid out in neat, dusty rows, like cakes in an abandoned bakery-shop window.

And then they drifted over the first pinnacle cell.

Maggie gasped and clapped a hand to her mouth, rearing back from the bay and fetching up next to Four, who might as well have been a metal strut himself for all the response he made. The coffee she had bolted down just before they’d lifted rose in her throat, and she swallowed hard.

A skeleton, dry and bleached and horribly human, lay on the flat top of the pinnacle, the bones of one arm extending out and the little bones of its fingers hanging off the edge, as if the poor sod had tried to wave someone down in his last moments.

Maggie gulped cold air. She must not faint. She must not throw up. She must do her part.

“All right up there?” came Alice’s voice through the horn.

“Aye,” Maggie managed. A squawk in the depths of the horn, she assumed, had come from Lizzie.

“Say a prayer for the poor devil. It helps.”

Doing her part would help more. It would be downright satisfying, in fact. Maggie ordered her stomach to behave, and took up her position next to Four.

When the next pinnacle passed under her boots, she nearly averted her gaze, and then realized the man was still alive. He lay face down, one hand beating the rock in a steady rhythm. The light had strengthened now so that she could see color—the dark red pool of drying blood beneath that pounding hand.

Oh dear. Courage, she heard the Lady say in her memory. Courage and good cheer, Maggie.

Well, she could not manage the one, but she could certainly try for the other. “Courage,” she said in bracing tones to Four.

He did not respond.

Right, then. She was on her own.

The clattering drone of the Lass’s steam engine changed pitch, and Maggie knew beyond doubt that Alice had seen Mr. Malvern’s pinnacle.

“Look sharp, ladies,” came her voice. “We’ve been spotted. Seems like they were expecting some kind of rescue—though maybe not from this angle.”

Maggie doubted they expected anything like them at all—how could there be another airship flown by a girl who’d probably not even seen twenty summers, a boy who’d come back from the dead, a pair of nearly eleven-year-olds, half a dozen automatons, and a hen in a hatbox?

Below, a shot rang out, and she flinched, expecting the bullet to tear through the fuselage and strike her where she stood. But it did not hit the ship at all. Instead, Alice’s laugh came rat-a-tat through the horn.

“They’re gonna have to break out something more serious than a sixgun with a three-hundred-yard range if they want to scare us.”

“I dunno, it worked up ’ere,” Maggie muttered.

Never mind. Concentrate. Do your part.

And then she sucked in a breath of air that chilled her lungs, but the sight was so grand that she hardly felt it.

Mr. Malvern!

He clung to the top of what was surely the smallest pinnacle of them all. If the other poor blokes had had enough flat space to spread themselves out, then they had it good. Mr. Malvern had only enough to sit on with his feet drawn up. It was cruel—inhuman. A man could not sleep, nor stretch, nor do anything but sit or stand—and once unconsciousness finally claimed him, nothing would keep him from slipping off the side and falling to his death.

“This is ’ow you keep yer word, eh, Mr. Gold Birds?” she snarled. “Guarantee ’is safety, will you?” The only thing she’d guarantee was that the Lady would blast him to bits if she ever saw him again.

“Girls!” came Alice’s voice, urgently. “We got company to port—look sharp, Lizzie!”

Down below, an enormous engine with as many arms as a spider or an octopus lumbered into view at the base of the pinnacle. Maggie recognized it at once—Jake had hidden behind it not eight hours before. In the open chamber at the top of it stood at least eight men—one to operate each arm—every one with his eyes trained upward.

An arm ratcheted back and Maggie’s eyes widened as she realized what was in the bucket at the end of it. In the next moment, the arm gave a great heave and flung a boulder as big as Alaia’s house straight at them.

It struck the pinnacle fifty feet below where Mr. Malvern clung, and Maggie heard him cry out as the spire of stone shuddered and cracked.

Below, men began to scream.

A flash in the air—the tinkle of glass far below—more screams.

Three of the engine’s arms fell idle, whatever their purpose had been abandoned as their operators shrieked under the assault of the gaseous capsaicin, and attempted to scramble free.

“Well done, Lizzie!” she shouted, though she had no idea if her twin could hear her.

“My stars, that’s a nasty trick,” came Alice’s voice. “I guess that makes us vicious rabble—or a criminal gang, maybe. Look sharp, girls, it’s got five arms left. Jake, stand by to lower the basket.”

This time Maggie did not wait for an arm to reveal its weaponry. She threw down the glass globe full of its crippling liquid, and the aim that had not failed her with stone and brick did not fail her now. An arm with a giant grappling hook—one from which an entire cargo car might have hung on a mighty chain—halted in midair, touching the pinnacle as softly as a woman touching a child’s cheek.

The gondola obscured Maggie’s view of the Lass’s basket, but from the encouraging sound of Mr. Malvern’s shouting, he was able to see what they were about.

Boom!

Maggie staggered. “We’re hit!” she shrieked to Four, who still did not reply.

“No, we’re not. Steady on, girls. Seems they’ve got a few Canton chemists roped into this. That was an exploding rocket. Maggie, watch it—one more of those and we’ll be landing on this pinnacle ourselves.”

The Canton chemists looked like dolls from this height, but even so Maggie could see the chains looped from one to another.

“I’m sorry!” she shouted to the poor devils before she lofted another globe, and winced when, moments later, it shattered all over the cannon they were using to launch them. Men spilled over like ninepins, writhing. She shouted another apology as if they could actually hear her, and threw another one as a second crew ran into to replace the first.

The great engine, dragging four of its arms, backed up.

“They’re giving up!” she yelled.

“Maggie! Fire!”

“But they’re—”

And then she saw what they meant to do. The engine growled and seemed to gather itself—and then it picked up a train car with two of its arms.

It had cracked the spire of basalt the first time. One more strike and it would shatter, raining rock down upon the poor suffering Cantons chained to that cannon, and burying Mr. Malvern in the wreckage.

“Lizzie!” she shrieked. “One—two—three!”

She flung the last globe and saw another fly from the opposite bay. Winking in the sun, they fell, and shattered dead in the center of the chamber where four of the men cranked the levers and gears with mad precision.

Gaseous capsaicin formed a green cloud of agony, and Maggie shouted, “I’m out! If ’e’s not in the basket now ’e’s a goner!”

Not five seconds later, Alice hollered, “Winch, Jake, fast as you can! Seven, Eight—up ship!”

Someone had roused the poor Cantons, who were now tracking their course with the mouth of their cannon tilted skyward. Sandbags rained down among them and they dove for cover.

The Stalwart Lass fell straight up into the sunrise … and freedom.

80

Mr. Stanford Fremont, as might be expected, owned the train on which they were to travel. It departed from the railyard at whose laboratory Andrew had been apprehended shortly after dawn, steaming due west away from the rising sun.

Claire had not had a single opportunity to give James or the infernal black coats the slip. During every moment, he accompanied her, and when she required the use of the ladies’ powder room, he produced a female black coat to attend her there as well.

“No offense, ma’am,” the woman said. “But I got orders to wait in here with you.”

“None taken.” If she were pleasant and civil and utterly ladylike, perhaps they might let down their guard for just the second she needed to run. “We all have our obligations.”

“Thank you, ma’am. I appreciate your forbearance.”

“Are you to accompany me all the way to San Francisco?” she inquired as she washed her hands at the shining copper sink in the waiting lounge before they boarded.

“Yes, ma’am.” The woman tucked a strand of hair into her Gibson coiffure, a new style that seemed enormously popular among the Texicans—perhaps for its sheer bouffance. “With what they’re paying me to watch—er, attend you, I can send my kids, Kate and Jeremy, to the city school for a year.”

“Well, then, I assure you I shall be as little trouble as possible.”

They issued out onto the platform, where the train waited, steam hissing out of the wheels and pistons of the locomotive, and porters bustling this way and that to load luggage. Down at the very end, a small crane hefted the crate containing the Selwyn Kinetick Carbonator into the caboose.

The woman gazed at her, her brows slightly knit. “You ain’t a bit like Mr. Fremont said.”

Claire hardly dared ask, but the temptation was too great. “What did he say?”

“He said you’re a great heiress and you’re leading Lord Selwyn—”

“Lord James. Lord Selwyn would be his father.”

“—Lord James a merry dance. You’ve broken his heart so many times that he’s finally had to carry you off before your enraged father can stop the wedding.”

A laugh bubbled up out of Claire before she could remember she was supposed to be civil and ladylike. “My father would need to be enraged indeed to climb out of his grave to do so.”

The woman’s eyes widened.

“It is quite true that I am here against my will, and you are obligated to see that I stay. However, I am neither an heiress nor Lord James’s fiancee, much as he would like to think so.”

“But the carrying off part? That’s true?”

“Quite true.” Down the platform, James and Fremont were coming toward them.

“Why, those rascals,” the woman said in scandalized tones. “It’s one thing to assist in an elopement, but it’s quite another to aid in a kidnapping. What am I to do?”

They were almost in earshot now.

“I shall not hold it against you.” Claire held out a hand. “I am Lady Claire Trevelyan, of River Cottage, Vauxhall Gardens, London.”

“Tessie Short, of Sand Street, Santa Fe.”

“Do give the impression you are restraining me,” Claire suggested.

Tessie’s workworn hand slid around her wrist. She had a grip like iron, which under any other circumstances would have given Claire pause. But the frown had not left her forehead, which was a good sign.

A lady of integrity, then.

The stuff of which allies were made.

James’s gaze took in Tessie’s hand, though they stood close together to screen it from passersby. “That will be all, Mrs. Short, thank you,” he said, and offered his arm to Claire.

“Welcome aboard the Silver Queen,” Fremont said proudly, and led them up a set of steps into the most luxuriously appointed lounge car Claire had ever seen. Even the train on which Ross Stephenson had tested the carbonated coal did not look like this.

Velvet covered every possible surface, even the walls, which were chased in a hunting pattern of horses and hounds. What was not velvet was mahogany and teak, and on top of every surface were metals: copper, tin, brass—inlaid in the wood, forming the trim, decorating every possible corner and curve, ceiling, wainscoting, and window.

One could go utterly mad trying to force the senses to take it all in.

Beyond the lounge car was a dining car, and beyond that, a smoking car saturated in the smell of the cigarillos Fremont favored. A library was a welcome respite—books covered every wall and surface there, too, but somehow the mind did not shudder away from those as it did the chaos of the lounge.

Disappointment settled heavily upon her when she reached to take down a volume and discovered the entire bookcase to be a false front.

“This one’s real,” he said heartily, indicating the glass-fronted shelves that ran under the window frame. “Feel free to read what you like—as long as you like books on engineering!” Another hearty laugh with his head thrown back, which meant he missed the keen glance Claire bestowed on the titles as they passed.

One shelf of the sane and rational. An oasis in a wilderness of ostentation and sheer vanity.

There were a number of sleeping compartments beyond the entire car designated as Fremont’s sole domain. Claire and Mrs. Short were to be housed in the second to last car, immediately before the caboose, which suited Claire admirably. The farther she was from that lounge, the better she would feel—though the sleeping compartment, alas, had its share of velvet as well.

“We’ll expect you for breakfast in fifteen minutes,” Fremont told her and James in the corridor outside. “Feel free to wash up if you like—there’s hot and cold running water in every car. Only the best, eh, Selwyn?”

Laughing his donkey laugh, he went away down the corridor, swaying slightly with the motion of the train.

Claire inclined her head to James and stepped into her compartment, closing the door firmly behind her.

The outside lock clicked.

She stood there a moment, fuming. No, a display of temper and pounding upon the gleaming panels would net her nothing except a closer watch. For the moment, she must channel her emotion into examining her situation.

The window was large and surrounded by a cowling that did not look like that of the windows on the other cars. In a moment she saw why. The window had once tilted open, but it did so no longer. It had been soldered in place, and the decorative brass trim fitted over it.

Heavens. Someone must have been up late cutting off this means of escape.

Well, the other windows had not been augmented in such a manner. She would simply find one she could use.

Breakfast was very welcome, though she would have preferred a tray in her compartment or at the very least, the library. Biscuits had been heaped with creamy gravy laden with crumbled sausage, and there were mountains of eggs and potatoes and fried tomatoes and squash.

Eggs. She felt a pang of anxiety.

Rosie. The girls. Tigg and Jake. What had become of them when she did not return? She had been so upset at James’s perfidy and threats and Andrew’s arrest that she could not even remember seeing the twins after he had been taken away.

She was the worst guardian in the world, losing children left and right, leaving them scattered across the landscape, just as Maggie had said.

She could only hope that the Dunsmuirs would have collected them all and taken them away to safety in the Canadas. This hope must sustain her as she made her way there herself.

It might take months, but she would find a way.

Her appetite faded, but she forced herself to keep putting forkfuls of food in her mouth at regular intervals. She had gone hungry once and did not care to repeat the experience. If a person intended to escape, she had better do it on a full stomach.

“So, Lady Claire, what do you think of my train?”

Stanford Fremont leaned back in his chair, his thick workman’s fingers toying with the delicate handle of his porcelain coffee cup. At the table behind him, Claire noticed, Tessie was drinking hers from a plain white mug, as were the other black coats taking breakfast with them.

Hmph. Her own cup was porcelain, too—and he was speaking directly to her. How she had risen in the world!

“It is quite a marvel,” she said with sincerity. “I have never seen anything like it. Have you clocked its speed?”

“You must have been talking to James.” He grinned at her. “We have indeed. One hundred miles per hour on the flat—and there’s plenty of flat between here and San Francisco. Once we come down out of the mountains east of the Great Salt Lake, I expect she’ll clock closer to a hundred and twenty.”

“Goodness. Will that be a world record?”

“I expect so.” He looked so satisfied and pleased with himself that Claire wanted to fling her coffee in his face.

But of course she did not. That would get her thrown into her compartment, and what good would that do?

“So the trip to San Francisco, then, will take how long?”

“With the carbonated coal, we won’t need to stop as much. I expect we’ll make it in twenty-four hours.”

That was not much time. And at a speed of a hundred miles per hour? Even if she did contrive to lose Tessie’s surveillance and get out a window or a door, to leap from a train at that speed or even half of it meant immediate death.

“And the stops we do make? Are there towns along the route?”

Towns where she could send a pigeon or a tube or whatever passed for communication in this sprawling land?

“Sure,” he said, “though, you understand, there won’t be time for sightseeing.”

You will not be allowed off the train, she heard quite clearly.

“I shall be quite content to observe from these lovely windows,” she said, and addressed herself to the fruit cup which appeared before her.

Outside, a plume of steam whipped past in the wind of their going. The window was open a sliver at the top, and she could smell it, over and above the smell of the grass and sagebrush that stretched to the horizon, punctuated by the red mesas and spires of rock that seemed to be unique to this part of the Territories.

Something didn’t seem quite right.

The steam and the hot oil and the working iron of the locomotive—these smells were familiar to her. Even the smell of carbonated coal was familiar, after eighty miles of it only a few weeks ago. But there was something else. Something … different.

She could not identify it, but it would bother her until she did. Perhaps one of those engineering books would hold the answer.

She laid her damask napkin upon the table. “With your permission, James, I should like to go into the library.”

“Certainly. I shall join you there.”

Fremont jerked his chin as Tessie looked up. She had not finished her breakfast, but she laid down fork and knife and stood.

Flanked by her two captors, Claire left the dining car feeling frustrated and anxious, her fine breakfast sitting uneasily in her stomach.

In the library, she perused volume after volume on subjects as varied as steam locomotion, metallurgy, and manufacturing, but she found nothing that might explain that peculiar smell. How odd that James had not noticed it. Was it something utterly mundane and she was being—as Lizzie might say—a worrywart over nothing?

It must be. There were any number of scientists and railroad men aboard, not to mention the owner of the railroad. If something had been out of kilter, they would have known.

By afternoon, they had steamed out of the desert, and stopped for the night in a thick forest, where they took on coal and the black coats set the Carbonator to work. When Claire woke the next morning, they were passing through a country of undulating grassland broken by pinnacles of stone and thundering herds of what Tessie told her was a creature called the buffalo. Claire had never seen any animal so huge and majestic—they reminded one of cattle in some ways, and in others were utterly unlike them. She watched leaping herds of antelope with fascination and something akin to joy, and, as they came down out of the mountains toward the enormous salt pan stretching for miles below them, on the side of the track Claire saw her first bear.

Of course, steaming past it on a downhill grade at nearly eighty miles per hour, she did not get much more than a glimpse.

Her hopes of escape faded utterly. Even if she did manage to get off the train, where would she go? She had not seen a single airship overhead, and according to Fremont’s endless conversation on the subject, this was the only rail line running west between the Canadas and Texico City. There were more under construction, of course, Mr. Polk’s Silver Nevada line, after which their train was named, being a case in point, but Claire could not see how she could get off this train without being picked up by another of Stanford Fremont’s trains shortly thereafter.

And finding her way in one of these wild frontier towns, alone, without money or food, and without her lightning rifle, was unthinkable.

Every mile took her further and further from Santa Fe, which was beginning to feel like an old friend in comparison.

She must pin her hopes of escape on San Francisco.

“Tell me about our destination, Mr. Fremont,” she said over drinks that afternoon. “Is it a large city, there on its seven hills?”

“Larger than Santa Fe, but not so spread out.” He was already on his second brandy, while Claire’s thimble of cordial sat nearly untouched. “The Viceroy of El Rey has his seat there, as does the Spaniard governor, so the society is quite, er, elevated. See, the Californias are divided up into these enormous ranchos, thousands and thousands of acres each. The owners are called Californios and each rancho has a market town. Everyone works for the Californio and owes their loyalty to that man’s family.”

“It sounds very … feudal.”

“Oh, there’s feuds, all right. Some of these rich landowners can get into a quarrel at the drop of a hat, and then they raid each other until their tempers cool. But with all the money they control, they like their good time. San Francisco has its own opera house. Did you know that Madame Louisa Tetrazzini herself sang there this spring? Thousands of people flooded the streets to see her, and she actually sang an aria from the steps of the opera house just to please ’em.” He chuckled. “With them hot Spaniard tempers, I s’pose there would’ve been a riot if she hadn’t.”

Claire had heard Madame Tetrazzini once, in London. If ever a woman could create heaven simply by opening her mouth, it was she. No doubt her song had soothed the savage breasts of the surging crowds and she had been allowed to proceed into the building.

The steam puffed past outside the window, and Claire could smell it again. Only, it was stronger now, since they had descended onto the dry saltpan. More … burned.

“Mr. Fremont, I must ask you something.”

“Sure, I can get you an audience with the Viceroy. He’s the closest you’ll probably ever come to a king.”

“I have danced with the Prince Consort, thank you, and that is quite sufficient for me. No, what I would like to know is, by what process is the carbonated coal being used? Because I must say, the quality of the smoke and steam—the smell of it, sir—is disconcerting.”

He chomped on the end of his cigarillo for a moment. “The steam smells?”

“It does. And not quite right, either.”

He gazed at her as if he didn’t understand. “James, has this girl got a bee in her bonnet? The steam smells? What is she on about?”

“Dear, perhaps you might wish to lie down. Mrs. Short will accompany you to your compartment.”

“I do not wish to lie down, James, I wish to know what has changed in the carbonation process to make its product smell as though something is burning.”

“Nothing’s burning, missy, that ain’t supposed to be.”

“It doesn’t smell right,” she repeated stubbornly. Missy, indeed. “When the carbonated coal was used in Ross Stephenson’s tender, it smelled normal. That is to say, it smelled like steam and iron and gear oil, as these things do. It did not smell like metal heating past the point of safe operation.”

Fremont gaped at her, and then he guffawed. “Look who’s been reading my engineering treatises! James, this one’s a keeper.”

“I am not to be kept, and I should appreciate it if you would refer to me as your ladyship, or Lady Claire, not missy.”

In the overstuffed chair a few feet away, Claire distinctly heard Tessie draw in a breath.

“You don’t say.” Stanford Fremont’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t take that tone with me, missy. Where I come from—”

“Yes, I know. Children should be seen and not heard. But I am not a child.”

“You are not an adult yet, either,” James reminded her silkily. “Do remember your manners, Claire. Mr. Fremont is a kind and generous host. Here, let me refill your drink.”

“No, thank you.” Claire rose and shook out her skirts. “I believe I shall take your suggestion, James, and retire for an hour.”

Head high, she glided from the lounge car, Tessie scrambling in her wake. The car was immediately behind the tender, and as she passed from it to the dining car beyond, the burning smell—hot metal and acid and something that triggered a memory of a house fire she had witnessed in Cornwall—was nearly overpowering.

How could they think that was normal? If she were the engineer, she would be stopping the train this instant to investigate.

Hurrying now, she gained the sleeping compartment, and then changed her mind. With Tessie still making her way through the sleeping car, Claire stepped into the caboose, past the Carbonator in its tied-down crate, and out onto the viewing platform at the back.

The hot wind snatched at her skirts and whipped them out in front of her, and she pressed a hand to her chignon to keep it in place. The railroad track scrolled into the endless distance until the mountains swallowed it up. On either side of the track, the salt pan stretched for miles in all directions, the sun beating down upon it, bouncing up off it, and baking every living thing at temperatures that must be well over one hundred.

The heat was devastating. But she could not go back in.

If she did, she would weep with frustrated rage, and much as she liked Tessie Short, she did not want to do so in front of her in case the woman was obliged to report upon it.

“Claire?” Tessie called from the doorway of the sleeping car. “I don’t think Lord James will want you out th—”

The train jerked and knocked Tessie off her feet.

Claire was flung back into the doorway of the viewing platform, and before she could catch her breath, an explosion concussed her eardrums.

A fireball blossomed into the sky as under it, the train leaped the tracks, flinging cars this way and that as though a fractious giant had swatted them.

The doorway disappeared as earth and sky cartwheeled past.

Plowing up earth and salt and broken rail ties, the caboose scraped to a halt with a groan of dying metal.

The only thing that moved was the thick column of black smoke, rising into the burning sky.

81

Andrew Malvern’s knees buckled under him. Jake wedged a shoulder under his armpit, passed an arm about his waist, and heaved him up, and together, they staggered into the navigation gondola. Maggie and Lizzie followed, in case at any moment Mr. Malvern should tip over and collapse.

“Good show,” he gasped. “I’m all right. Thank you. Dear God in heaven, thank you.”

He tottered to the navigator’s chair and clutched the map rack to hold himself upright, then gazed about at them.

Alice Chalmers looked as though the Angel Gabriel had come to give her a personal escort to heaven. “That was a close one,” she said, almost shyly, from her post at the wheel—though why she stayed there Maggie could not imagine. She was not looking at their course at all. “I’m glad we were able to help.”

Good grief, a daring rescue and a near brush with death, and she sounded like she was at a church jumble sale, presiding over the teapot. What was wrong with her?

He glanced from one to another. “Where is Tigg? And Claire? Are they with the engine?”

At the mention of the Lady’s name, some of the brightness in Alice’s face dimmed. “We think Tigg is aboard Lady Lucy, but we don’t know for sure. And Claire left on Fremont’s train this morning. At least, the girls believe she did. She never came back with them last night.”

“Why not?” Mr. Malvern tried to stand, but his knees wobbled and he sat rather suddenly. “What happened?”

“Lord James took ’er to an ’otel,” Maggie said. “’E wouldn’t let us go wiv ’er—told us we could shove off and cross the desert in a pram for all he cared!”

“Nasty old boot,” Lizzie put in. “Said ’e would lock ’er in a room with no windows and they’d be off to San Francisco this morning.”

“San Francisco!” The color drained from his face. “We must pursue them!”

Alice left the wheel with a leap. “Mr. Malvern, you aren’t recovered from your ordeal. Jake, take him to the crew’s quarters in the starboard fuselage and find a bed for him. He’ll need some—Lizzie, what’s the matter?”

Lizzie had plastered herself against the viewing window. “Alice, we ’ave to go back to the airfield.”

“Over my dead body. If we’re going anywhere, it’s the Canadas or San Francisco or—”

“No! Go back! That’s Tigg down there, runnin’ like mad. Don’t you see ’im?”

Alice leaned far over the wheel, and Maggie dove between her legs to peer out the very bottom of the viewing port. Far below, a tiny dark figure ran and dodged between the craft moored on the field, waving his arms and jumping over barrels and crates. Even as they watched, he slowed, and Maggie could see the moment when hopelessness overcame him and he realized he was going to be left behind.

“Why in tarnation ain’t he on Lady Lucy?” Alice demanded of no one in particular. She spun the wheel and the Stalwart Lass put her hip to the wind and came about in a great gliding circle.

With a leaping wave, Tigg took off for the eastern edge of the airfield, where the flattened, tended ground gave way to hillocks and dry watercourses and sagebrush once again.

Lady Lucy had lifted and gone, for her great golden fuselage was nowhere to be seen. But between Tigg and the edge of the airfield lay the Rangers’ B-30, and to Maggie’s eyes, there was far too much activity on her.

She had not been trained as a scout for nothing.

“Alice, that Ranger ship is awake and I don’t like the look of it. I bet that lieutenant who pretended to be so nice to the Lady knows we just sprung ’is prisoner.”

“Our engine ent gonna outrun that thing,” Jake said. He had not removed Mr. Malvern, and the latter was again struggling to his feet.

“We must not leave Tigg.”

“Ain’t no question about leaving him,” Alice said through stiff lips, as if he’d offended her. “Question is, how we gonna evade the Rangers when that ship lifts and comes after us? Nine, give me some reverse. Jake, get your skinny behind back to that basket. This is gonna be fast.”

Maggie and Lizzie ran after Jake to the aft hatch. He grasped the crank and began to lower the basket, but their speed was so much faster than it had been at the pinnacle that it blew straight out behind like a wind sock. “One of you, get in!” Jake shouted. “Your weight will take it straight down.”

Lizzie shrieked in an agony of indecision, torn between fear for Tigg and her own terror of heights. Without another thought, Maggie leaped into the basket, and before she could fairly get her feet into the bottom, Jake was winching her down so fast the crank was a blur.

The wind snatched the basket and swung it like a pendulum, but it did not blow back. Lower and lower they circled, and below them, Tigg’s running figure disappeared beneath a garish scarlet fuselage that would look like a setting sun if it flew. He emerged on the other side, and now he only had to get past the B-30.

Maggie could feel the Lass adjust her course to meet him, out on the far side of the B-30 in the desert. Tigg could draw a trajectory with his eyes as well as the next man, and he changed his direction to the same heading.

Talk about touch and go.

She was close enough to the ground—ten or twelve feet—to see him clearly, now, and waved encouragingly. His coffee-colored face split in a white grin, and then he bent all his energy to the task of getting to that point in the sagebrush where basket would meet body and they could do the Billy Bolt to end all bolts.

Even over the roar of the wind, Maggie heard the shouts of the Rangers as they realized what the Lass was about. If before they had meant to pursue them, now it seemed that they were simply going to shoot them out of the sky, for here came a contingent of blue uniforms dragging another one of them rocket cannon—this one long and slender and no doubt possessed of the kind of aim that could take a ship out in one shot.

“Tigg!” she screamed. “Run!”

As if he had merely been standing there sipping a lemonade before, Tigg poured on the speed and in seconds he was running beneath the basket.

“Jake!” she shrieked upward. “More line!”

But he could not hear her, forty feet above, and Tigg was tiring, his hands grasping at the basket bottom fruitlessly, trying to get a grip.

Oh, if only she had a rope!

A rope!

Scrabbling with numb fingers, she pulled at the knots of Alaia’s woven sash. She had left the lightning rifle in the gondola, for it was heavy, but hadn’t removed the sash. She tied one end to the winch line just above the join that spread four cables to the corners of the basket, and whipped the other out over the side.

“Tigg! Grab hold!”

The ground raced below her, and on the edge of her vision she saw the Rangers push the cannon into position and ram something down its throat.

With a mighty leap like his very best dive from the Clarendon footbridge, Tigg grabbed the end of the rope.

Immediately the basket began to rise—the Lass fell up into the sky—and the rocket launched from the cannon with an explosion that slapped Maggie’s ears.

Tigg kicked, hanging onto the sash with both hands and trying to find purchase on the side of the basket as Maggie grabbed him around the waist to pull him in.

The rocket struck the basket with the force of a runaway steambus, tearing the bottom and sides out of it as it blasted out the other side, trailing fire, into the sky.

Maggie screamed, dangling by nothing more than her grip on Tigg’s waist as he hung onto her sash with both hands, his fingers piercing the knotwork.

“Hang on, Mags!” he shouted.

Weeping with terror and the cruel wind that needled tears from her eyes, she buried her face in the front of his dirty shirt and prayed.

Someone must have been listening, for the next thing she knew, hands were pulling her and someone had her in a hug so hard she could barely breathe and the wind finally stopped and when her eyes opened at last, gummy with grit and streaming with tears, there was Jake on his knees on the engine-room floor, hugging her to his chest like she were his own long lost sister, sobbing as if his heart would break.

*

One of the children was sitting on her feet.

How dreadfully annoying. The weight kept her from turning over, from throwing off the sheets—she could hardly breathe. What were they about, the rascals? Why, she was just going to—

Claire opened her eyes.

Her cheek pressed into bare dirt that was loose and crumbly, as if it had been dug up. It smelled burned. Everything smelled burned, even the air, which had a peculiar cast to it. Not the clean, sharp light she had grown used to of late, but a smoky, rotten kind of light.

She lifted her head.

Blinked.

Her mouth fell open as she remembered what had happened—what had happened, but not why, or how.

And her feet? She reared up and attempted to turn over. Ah, there was the problem. The slatted side of a heavy crate lay across her legs.

Toes? Yes, they wiggled.

Knees? Both bent.

It had not broken her legs, thank goodness. As she moved, pain stabbed into her side, as vicious as a blow from the Cudgel, back in London. She gasped and tears started into her eyes.

Oh, dear.

Gritting her teeth, she shoved the planking off her legs, and slowly, breathing as shallowly as possible, climbed to her feet. She had never had a broken rib before, but Papa had, having fallen from a horse in Cornwall. Now she understood his bad temper. Well, she had no choice but to hope her corset would act as a binding, in the absence of anything else.

She stood, marveling that she could even breathe. The world had been transformed, and she could no longer see any familiar thing.

Yes, the sun still beat down on her bare head.

Yes, the saltpan crunched under her boots, its crystals winking and glittering.

The twin threads of the railway still extended back into the mountains, but where she stood, it was broken and twisted, dragged into tortured bends by the train cars’ derailment. As she gazed at them, trying to get her bearings, a car groaned with the agony of twisting metal and fell on its side with an earth-shaking boom.

Dust sifted into the sky and was carried north by the wind.

Did any remain alive?

Tessie! Tessie Short had been immediately behind her in the sleeping car. There was the caboose, upside down. It must have thrown her as it flipped, for it now lay on its roof, its metal wheels helpless without the track to which they were mated.

There.

Limping, wheezing with the pain, Claire stumbled to what had been the sleeping car. It lay on its side, which meant she had to duck through the twisted door. At any moment it might collapse upon her, but if Tessie was alive, she must get her out.

A shoe, a stocking, a skirt. Tessie lay as though asleep on the partition, her back against the ceiling. She gazed, astonished, at something past Claire’s shoulder, her head tilted at a peculiar angle.

“Tessie? Can you hear me?”

Claire touched her wrist, then her neck.

No pulse.

Her face crumpled, and the tears that had been so close trickled down her cheek. “Oh, Tessie. If it hadn’t been for me, you would have been safe in Santa Fe with your children.” Gently, she closed the open eyes. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

The partition in her own compartment had popped off its moorings and now lay askew and crushed. There was her valise, lying on the window.

Or rather, on the dirt under it, for the window lay in pieces everywhere. She picked it up. She had not unpacked it, since if one planned to escape, one had to be ready to snatch it up and do so at a moment’s notice.

This was not quite the escape she’d had in mind.

She must find out whether any others had lived.

Once again sliding through the sideways door, she set the valise on the ground and approached the other cars. There had been no one in the library, nor the dining room, either. James and Fremont had been in the lounge, and she assumed that aside from Tessie, the other staff had been forward taking their meal.

The lounge car, being immediately behind the tender, had not fared so well as the caboose. Half of it was utterly gone, as was the tender. In fact, the explosion had torn the locomotive to pieces, leaving only the great smokestack and half the cowcatcher in recognizable form, lying on the other side of the track at some distance from the mangled body.

She walked forward, skirting pieces of flung mahogany, now reduced to kindling, in which brass and copper glinted. What could possibly have caused such a disaster?

Clearly it had been centered in the tender. The great furnace full of the carbonated coal would have—

The carbonated coal.

Her mind could not grasp it, but there was the evidence that something very dreadful, very unforeseen, had caused the carbonated coal to explode in the steam engine. She staggered back, unwilling to look on destruction of such magnitude any longer.

The lounge car. Could any have survived?

In the wind, hundreds of Texican bills—dollars, they were called—blew in whirlwinds with the dust, sifting and blowing out of what was left of the end wall of the lounge car. Mr. Fremont, it appeared, had had a safe there. And then she received the dreadful answer to her question, which would repeat itself in her nightmares for many years to come.

She did not know how long it was, but some time later she came to herself, on her hands and knees in the dirt fifty feet from the destruction, retching up the rest of the contents of her stomach.

The pain finally drove her to her feet. Wiping her mouth on her torn and filthy sleeve, she staggered to the caboose, her mind reeling at the possibility that of all the people on Stanford Fremont’s train, she might be the only survivor.

She had been furthest from the destruction, flung through an open door when the brakeman had thrown the switch to slow the train, and thrown out again when the caboose had been wrenched off its couplings.

Pure chance. And luck. And perhaps the grace of God.

The hot wind whistled across the saltpan, pressing her blouse against her back and doing absolutely nothing to cool her burning skin.

Claire walked back to her valise, removing her blouse as she went. The St. Ives pearls still lay under her chemise, the raja’s emerald on her finger—and that only because her fingers were still a little swollen from her ordeal in the velogig. She put on a fresh waist. Then she wrapped the torn blouse over her head like a fieldwoman’s scarf, winding the sleeves about her throat.

As protection from the furnace of the sun, it wasn’t much, but it would have to do.

Feeling hollow, as though her soul had been torn away and twisted like the iron of the train, she forced herself to consider her prospects.

The sun was on its way down, lengthening the shadows of the tumbled train cars like beseeching fingers across the white waste of salt.

The last town she could remember seeing had been some miles before the bear, and that had been on the downhill side of the mountains.

She had no idea where the next town might be. It could be San Francisco, for all she knew, with any number of miles of the Kingdom of Spain to get through before that.

She had no food and no water, for the dining car had been crushed between the library and the exploding lounge.

She did not even have the means to bury the dead, for the saltpan was hard and unyielding, and with her broken rib, she could not dig even if there had been anything but broken spars to use as a shovel.

Tessie. James.

Tears welled in her eyes. She had hated him, yes. She would willingly have gone the rest of her life without seeing him ever again. But to die like this? His body left unclaimed and unmourned, merely unidentified bits and pieces that the vultures even now circling lower and lower would soon discover?

She gave a single sob. She could not even identify enough in the carnage to conceal it from the birds and predators.

She could do nothing.

With what they’re paying me to attend you I can send my kids, Kate and Jeremy, to the city school for a year.

She did not want to go back to the remains of the lounge car. She did not want to look at what lay there. But she owed Tessie a debt, and if she survived, she had only one way to repay it.

When she was finished her sad task, shuddering, she picked up her valise and made her way back to the caboose. Here lay the culprit, the root of all this destruction, smashed and flung out of the broken car. The heavy iron and glass of the chamber was twisted and broken now, the power cell—

The power cell!

It had nearly cost Andrew his life. It had certainly cost James his. But would it take hers, too—or would it mean a new life somewhere if she were able to find her way to civilization before she collapsed?

The cowling was bent, but if she lifted this panel, no, pushed it—tore it off—there. The power cell lay within its housing, its fine brass windings unharmed. The glass globe within was smashed to pieces, but that could be replaced. It was the gears and works that were important.

Working quickly, she released all the cables and hoses that still survived, and pulled the cell from its damaged prison. Dr. Craig had told her this was her inheritance. It was heavy, that was true. But it was also hers, to do with as she would.

She dropped it into the valise, too, fastened it closed, and bent to hook its two leather handles over her shoulders.

Her broken rib stabbed, and she gasped in pain.

Slowly, she straightened.

The gleaming ribbon of undamaged track stretched out into the distance, giving her a direction, at least.

Claire set her teeth, hefted the valise on her back, and took in the wreck one last time. It was foolish to hope that something would move. And sure enough, nothing did … except the wind, moaning through the wreckage, humming against the broken metal like a dirge.

She set her face toward the east and gasped in fright.

Something did move.

Like a cloud, but not a cloud.

An airship.

A ship with a double fuselage, its gondola hanging between them in the shape of a Y. She had only seen one ship designed like that in all the time she had been in this country.

Her heart lifted, a sob catching in her throat.

Claire began to run.

82

Epilogue

TO: TEXICAN TERRITORIAL BANK, SANTA FE

FROM: ROYAL RENO BANK, RENO, ROYAL KINGDOM OF SPAIN AND THE CALIFORNIAS

TRANSFERRED HEREWITH IS SUM OF FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS PAYABLE TO MASTER JEREMY AND MISS KATE SHORT, SAND STREET, SANTA FE STOP CONDOLENCES ON LOSS OF YOUR MOTHER STOP SHE WAS A GOOD WOMAN STOP

END

END OF PART THREE

IV

Brilliant Devices

83

The Evening Standard

October 9, 1889

TITANS OF MODERN INDUSTRY DIE IN TRAIN CATASTROPHE

In a tragedy that strikes at the very foundations of society on two continents, one of London’s brightest lights and most brilliant minds, Lord James Selwyn, of Selwyn Park, Shropshire, and the leader of modern railroad invention in the Texican Territories, Mr. Stanford Fremont, have both lost their lives in a train wreck on the plains of the Wild West.

Both men were traveling west on the inaugural journey of the Silver Queen, the newest locomotive in a vast railroad empire that stretches from New York in the Fifteen Colonies to San Francisco, the capital of the Royal Kingdom of Spain and the Californias. Accompanying Lord James was his fiancee, Lady Claire Trevelyan, of London.

The journey was to be a showcase for Lord James’s latest invention, the showpiece of the newest exhibition at the Crystal Palace, the Selwyn Kinetick Carbonator. The Carbonator had produced enough coal to power the locomotive and several luxury coaches, as befitted Fremont and his titled guests, with only two stops to take on unprocessed coal during the entire journey across the Wild West.

However, on the second day out of Santa Fe, disaster struck. From what the Texican engineers can piece together from the wreckage, the arid atmosphere of the salt flats caused the coal to ignite prematurely and with such vehemence that it caused the tender and boiler to explode. The locomotive was blown off the tracks, and the passenger coaches jumped the rails, resulting in total loss of life.

Funeral services for Lord James Selwyn will be held at St. Paul’s on Friday, the eleventh of October, at eleven o’clock in the morning. His Royal Highness the Prince Consort, patron of the Royal Society of Engineers, is expected to address the mourners. Services for Lady Claire Trevelyan will be held privately at the family estate in Cornwall.

This publication humbly extends its condolences to the Selwyn and Trevelyan families, who have been beset with tragedy in recent months. As our readers know, Vivyan Trevelyan, Viscount St. Ives, was killed in a mishap while cleaning his antique pistols. Old Lord Selwyn himself passed away recently. With the death of Lord James, his only son, the baronetcy now passes to a cousin, Peter Livingston, who recently announced his engagement to Miss Emilie Fragonard, of Cadogan Square.

*

Claire Trevelyan smoothed the newspaper on top of the navigation chart. She had been encouraging the Mopsies to read the easier headlines aloud, until they had all stumbled upon this particularly grisly one in the “World” section.

“My poor mother. No sooner does she cancel my first funeral than she must immediately plunge into plans for my second.”

Andrew Malvern looked up from the tiller, where he and Jake were jointly calculating how much altitude the airship, the Stalwart Lass, would have to gain in the next hundred miles to take them over the aptly if unimaginatively named Rocky Mountains.

“We can send a pigeon as soon as we reach Edmonton. That paper is a week old. The funeral will already have been held, so there is nothing you can do to forestall it.”

Maggie laid a hand on Claire’s arm. “Yer mum’ll be happy to ’ear you ent dead again, Lady. Funeral or no funeral.”

“She’s going to stop believing in reports of my demise after this, that is certain.” Claire angled the paper down so Maggie could see it. “Can you read this line to me?”

“Wiv the death of … Lord James, ’is only son, the … Lady, I dunno that one.”

“Baronetcy.”

“I beg yer pardon, wot’s that?”

“It’s a title, Maggie. It means that if you met Peter Livingston, whom I once seated next to my friend Emilie at a dinner party because she was sweet on him, you would call him Lord Selwyn. Once she marries him, Emilie will become Lady Selwyn.”

“Instead of you.”

“Quite right. Instead of me. I’m sure her mother is delighted that there is no longer any danger of her being left off the guest lists at dinner parties.” Claire sighed, gazing out the expanse of glass that formed the upper section of the Stalwart Lass’s gondola. “To think that I once worried about such things.”

“We’ve got other things to worry about,” Alice Chalmers called, coming along the gangway from the engine at the rear of the gondola. “She’s not giving me any lift at all—it’s everything I can do to keep her airborne. We can’t take a run at those mountains unless Andrew and Tigg can pull a miracle out of their hats.”

“Ent got a hat,” hollered Tigg from the back. “Alice, come ’ere!”

“Or a miracle.” Andrew turned from the tiller and ran a finger down the chart on the table, moving the newspaper they’d picked up in Reno to one side. “If we don’t get some lift in the next couple of hours, we’re going to run smack into the side of a mountain. Some of these are thousands of feet high.”

Claire, whose idea of mountains had been formed while on holiday in the Lake District, could hardly imagine it. “Can we not go around them?”

Andrew shook his head. “Not unless we want to return to Reno, sail east, and turn north on the other side.”

“Alice!” shouted Tigg. “We got trouble!”

Alice turned and ran astern, Andrew and Claire hot on her heels. “What’s the matter? The ship was flightworthy when we left Reno,” Claire said to Andrew’s back.

But that had been two days ago. As she now knew, anything could happen to an airship in two days.

“She may have been, but whatever old wreck of an engine she put in here, it wasn’t meant to go much farther.”

“It saved your hide, if you recall,” Alice snapped, popping into view from behind the engine cowling. “Don’t go calling my girl names.” Tears flooded her eyes and she blinked them back.

“I apologize,” Andrew said at once. “And I hadn’t forgotten. I never will, you may be sure of that.”

“And mine, too,” Claire put in. “Twice. I’ve never seen anything so beautiful as the Stalwart Lass coming through the sky, both times.”

“She’ll be fallin’ out o’ the sky if we don’t do summat,” Tigg put in tersely. His round, coffee-colored cheek had a smear of grease across it from chin to temple, and he held a wrench in either hand.

The words were no sooner out of his mouth than something deep in the engine hitched and coughed.

“That’s done it.” Alice grabbed a safety line and clipped it to a metal loop on her leather belt. “Don’t fail me now, girl.” She grabbed one of the wrenches and leaped down onto the propeller housing. The wind slapped her pants flat against her legs, and she pulled her goggles over her eyes. One look at the great shafts that powered the propeller must have told its own story. “Who’s on the tiller?” she shouted above the sound of both engine and wind. “We’re going to go down!”

“Jake!” Claire ran forward. “Alice says we’re going down!”

Maggie gasped and clutched her twin, Lizzie, who burst into tears. “I knew it! I knew I should ’ave stayed home and not mucked about in airships.”

Claire grasped both their hands and drew them over to the glass, controlling her own panic with a herculean effort. “Look. We’re not in the mountains yet.” Though they loomed in the near distance, tall and blue and forbidding, rimed with old snow. “Remember what Captain Hollys told us on Lady Lucy? Airships don’t crash. It’s a long, slow glide to a soft landing.”

Lizzie did not buy that for a moment. “That were if the gas bags burst, Lady. Wivout an engine? We’ll just stay up ’ere floatin’ about till we starve to death.”

“Naw, we won’t.” Jake grasped the controls for the elevator vanes with both hands. “One stiff breeze and we’ll run into one o’ them rocks first. Mr. Andrew, I could use you on the tiller if yer done gawkin’ at that chart.”

“Quite so.” Andrew took the wheel and turned it a few degrees east. “If these charts are up to date, there should be a wide river valley in six or eight miles. Vanes full vertical, Jake, and release some air from the forward gas bags.”

Spaniard charts up to date? Claire could only hope. Her brief experience with the Royal Kingdom of Spain in Reno had left her with no very good opinion of their skills at engineering. How could it be otherwise, when they outlawed airships because—of all things—they contravened the intentions of the Almighty? The Lass had been allowed to land in Reno only because Alice was a Texican citizen, and only then just long enough to take on food and water and make a visit to the nearest bank and telegraph office before they were chivvied on their way as though they carried the plague.

No wonder James and Stanford Fremont were to have been received by the Viceroy himself when they and the Carbonator arrived in San Francisco. To the Spaniards, rail technology was the very pinnacle of human achievement. Anything else was practically suspected of witchcraft.

Her stomach lifted in a momentary feeling of weightlessness.

“We’re goin’ down,” Lizzie whimpered, hiding her face in Maggie’s shoulder. “I hate airships. It ent gonna be a long, slow glide. We’re gonna fall and die and—”

“Shut up, Liz,” Jake said through his teeth. “Yer makin’ me nervous.”

Andrew glanced over his shoulder, in the direction of the stern. “What’s happening back there? Claire, perhaps you should check on Alice.”

She did not want to check on Alice. She wanted to remain fixed at the window, as if sheer strength of will could bring the ship in for a safe landing.

But that was selfish and pointless. So instead, she ran back to the engine, where an alarming plume of black smoke now trailed in their wake.

“Lady!” Tears were whipped from Tigg’s eyes through the open hatch. “I can’t hold ’er—She’s gonna burn up!”

The ancient engine, which had suffered so many lives, had finally come to its last. “Claire! The kill switch!” Alice shrieked. “Get her stopped!”

Claire reached past Nine, who was standing silently by as if he’d been deactivated, and jerked the engine’s emergency ignition lever down. The engine juddered and shuddered, steam hissing out from among the gears and every possible aperture. The smell of burning intensified.

Even the kill switch had died.

She whirled, scanning the engine room for anything she could use.

There!

She snatched up an iron crowbar that had been flung to the floor. There was no hope for the engine, so this would not hurt any more than the utter destruction it was destined for. “Alice, get out of there!” Alice scrambled up onto the gangway and Claire rammed the crowbar into the seam of the red-hot boiler door and pried it open. With a whoosh of surprise, the door blew off, the contents spilled out into the sky—and the engine gasped and gave up the ghost.

The wind whistled through the sudden silence.

And then the earth, spiny and sharp with trees, leaped up to meet them.

84

Claire pulled herself upright with the help of Nine’s metal leg. Having magnetic feet, he had merely stuck fast to a structural support during the long slide of their landing and its abrupt halt in a copse of quivering aspens, golden in their autumn foliage. But other than that, he did not appear much damaged. She hoped that was the case for the other members of the crew.

“Mopsies?” she called anxiously, staggering forward into the gondola.

“’Ere.” The voice was muffled, and a heap of arms and legs and petticoats resolved itself into two girls. “I fink I’m broken.”

Lizzie patted Maggie down, her keen green eyes clouded with worry. “Where does it hurt?”

“In my stomach, where your knee is. Gerroff.”

Andrew groaned. He appeared to have gone right over the tiller headfirst, much in the manner of a horseman on an unbroken mount, and had been bent in half with his feet dangling in midair. Claire assisted him to slide off the wheel to the vertical once again.

“Remind me to get some lessons in steering one of these things the next time we meet your friend Captain Hollys,” he said. “That was a bruiser of a landing.”

“We are bruised, but not dead,” Claire pointed out. “Look on the bright side.” She adjusted his tawny brocade waistcoat so that it sat upon his shoulders again, more as an excuse to touch him and reassure herself that he was whole and undamaged than because she cared tuppence about how he looked.

“Everyone all right?” Alice came in on wobbly legs, Tigg at her heels. She took in the two of them in one glance and Claire stepped away.

Or tried to. The deck was canted several degrees and her graceful, subtle movement turned into a drunken stumble that fetched her up against the bulkhead. “Yes,” she said, trying to recover her dignity. “I feared for us all for a moment.”

“You still can,” Alice said grimly. Her curly blond hair had been torn from under her airman’s cap by the wind, and stuck out in a hundred different directions. “Come on. We need to suss out how bad the gondola and fuselages are damaged.”

Getting out of the hatch was not easy—in fact, it was more like climbing out of a window that was tilted toward you. In the end, Andrew and Alice went down on a rope and caught the other four as they slid down one by one.

“It’ll right itself once we fill the starboard fuselage again,” Tigg said in tones that asked for confirmation. “Port fuselage is topmost. Looks spiff to me.”

Alice did not give it. She was already inspecting the double fuselages that contained the gas bags. They hung in the crushed aspens that had stopped their slide, but the trees had bent rather than broken.

“Tigg, Andrew, Lizzie, run round to starboard. Listen for a whistle—that’ll be a leak. Claire, Maggie, you’re with me on the port side.”

Just below the bow on the starboard side, the canvas had been gashed, and air was leaking out with a continuous sigh of hopelessness. If Alice had been brisk before, now she really swung into action. She sent Tigg up into a tree with a bucket and brush and, from the ground, instructed him how to patch it, and when the awful hissing had stopped, she let out a breath as if she’d been holding it the whole time.

“The fuselage is my biggest worry,” she confessed to Claire as Andrew and Tigg cleared saplings, aiming to use one of the taller trees as a mooring mast. “The Lass can lose a lot and still fly, but she ain’t going anywhere without lift.”

“We should like to go anywhere as soon as possible,” Claire agreed.

“Say, where’s the girls?”

Claire looked around her. Aspens, poplars—chunks of tumbled granite—gently blowing grass—and a hundred feet away, the silvery glint of the river that had cut this swath broadly enough for them to land beside it. On a pile of rocks that caused the river to eddy and swing in a new direction, she spotted two little figures, hands shading their eyes as they looked into the distance and turned to cover the points of the compass.

“There. Scouting.” She pointed, rather proudly.

“They ought to let us know before they disappear.”

“You may certainly suggest it. But they know their duty and it would seem strange to them to warn me they’re going to do it.”

Alice shook her head and returned to her inspection of the partially buried gondola. “Not like any little girls I ever met. I bet they wouldn’t know what to do with a doll if you gave ’em one.”

Claire remembered her own nursery and the row of abandoned dolls on the top shelf of the bookcase. “Papa used to give me a doll every year for Christmas.” She knelt to inspect a brass plate in the hull, bent nearly double with the force of the landing, but salvageable. “He gave up when I was eight and my nurse reported to Mama that I was disassembling them and making notes on their anatomy. Which, I discovered, bore no resemblance to actual human babies’ anatomy at all.”

Alice’s brow lightened a little and she almost smiled through her worry. “I ain’t never had a doll. I wouldn’t know what to do with one, either.”

“You have the automatons. Theirs may only bear a nodding resemblance to human anatomy, but at least they’re useful. Dolls, I’m afraid, are not.”

By the time the Mopsies ran up, panting, to report, Alice had finished inspecting as much of the hull as she could see. The rest would have to wait until the gas bags had been inflated once again, and the hull lifted to its normal resting altitude of a few feet.

“You sure picked a good place to crash,” Maggie informed Jake and Andrew. “Ent a soul or an ’ouse or so much as an eyelash to be seen for miles an’ miles.”

“There is a bunch of mucky great creatures on t’other side of t’river, though,” Lizzie put in. “Horns on ’em as big as Tigg.”

“I suspect those might be elk,” Andrew said. “They possess antlers, which are solid. Cows have horns, which are hollow.”

Lizzie did not look impressed by the distinction. “Solid—hollow—they’re pointy, is what I’m sayin’. Big and pointy.”

“Duly noted,” Claire said. “And no sign of any source of help. Well, on the positive side, neither is there any danger … of the human sort, at least. We shall only have to worry about bears.”

“Bears?” Lizzie’s eyes widened. “There’s bears ’ere?”

“There was a bear due east of where you found me in the Texican Territory. I have no doubt there are similar creatures here in the Idaho Territory.”

“If you folks are done with the nature lesson,” Alice put in with barely concealed impatience, “can we get the pump going and get some gas into the bags? That patch oughta be dry enough to hold now.”

The pump turned out to be an automaton named Eight, who had hose concealed in his appendages and a small engine as well. Claire watched, hands nervously clasped, as the bags filled, the twin fuselages leveled out, and the Lass slowly freed herself from her untidy nest. The trees brushed the lower surfaces of the fuselages as they rose, until finally the airship stalled.

“Gondola’s stuck,” reported Tigg from the far side. “C’mon, everyone, it’ll be like pushin’ that barge off into the Thames once we got all the chickens into the garden at ’ome.”

Home. The warmth of affection flooded Claire at the thought of the shabby cottage in Vauxhall Gardens—the first place in Tigg’s memory where he had an actual pallet to himself and “three squares” a day.

If she had accomplished nothing more on this earth, she had at least done that—given these children their first home.

Maybe some day they would even see it again.

Heaving, pushing, and commanding Nine to help, they dislodged the Lass from her clinging prison. With a sucking sound, she lifted a few inches, like a char who remembered better days shaking mud off her shoes. Rosie the chicken, who had been hunting in the fallen leaves as they worked, immediately jumped into the gash in the earth and yanked a fat worm out of it.

“That’s it,” Alice muttered to the old ship. “Come on, girl. Eight, keep pumping on the starboard side.”

The fuselage fattened until it curved like the breast of a healthy hen, lifting the gondola until it bobbed a couple of feet off the ground.

“There.” Alice patted a ripped piece of brass, whereupon a number of rivets hit the stones with a tinktinktink. “Eight, that’ll do.” The automaton fell silent and she disconnected the hose.

Then, elbow to elbow with Claire, she studied the hull. “Bow’s stove in, but Nine and Andrew can bang it back into shape.”

“Tigg and Jake and I can replace rivets.”

“The girls can take the ballast out so we can see what’s what inside.”

Andrew looked from one to the other, then at Tigg. “Aren’t we forgetting something?”

“We ain’t forgot,” Alice said tersely. “We’re merely thinking out what we’re going to do while we try to figure out what to do about that.”

“About wot?” Maggie asked.

“About the fact that we have no engine,” Claire said gently. “We can bring the ship’s body back to life, but if she has no heart, she can’t sail.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Tigg said stoutly.

“Yeah?”

Claire wished Alice would not sound so grim in front of the children. Or in front of her, for that matter.

“We got no boiler. Without a boiler, we can’t make steam. Without steam, the pistons and props won’t turn.”

Claire clutched what remained of her chignon with both hands. “Good heavens. I completely forgot! Oh dear. Oh dear. I hope no harm has come to it.”

She gathered up her skirts and scrambled into the hatch, heedless of the mud that rimmed it. In a moment she reappeared with her valise.

“Going someplace, Lady?” Jake inquired.

“Maybe there’s a nice hotel we ent seen yet,” Lizzie told her twin in an aside that ought to have been on the vaudeville stage. “Maybe she ordered roast beef an’ Yorkshire puddings for all of us.”

“Very funny. Andrew, Alice, look.” She pulled the valise open to reveal Dr. Craig’s power cell nestling like a great bronze cat on her shirtwaists and spare skirt. “Is there any reason we cannot power the Stalwart Lass with this?”

*

Alice handed Andrew Malvern the smaller wrench so he could tighten the bolts on the far side of the hastily fabricated housing for the power cell. The silence as they buttoned up after the flurry of work, while companionable, had gone on long enough. If somebody didn’t say something, she was going to leap out of her skin.

“I got to hand it to Claire, she knows how to pull a rabbit out of a hat.”

Outside, Claire and the Mopsies were pounding dents out of the brass plates of the gondola with rocks wrapped in spare canvas, which meant she could hardly hear herself speak. She’d heard a wax recording once called the Anvil Chorus—if the girls ever wanted careers in music, they could start with that.

“What mystifies me is that she kept it a secret. We’ve been in flight for days—I would have thought the subject might have come up in that time.”

“We didn’t need it, Mr. Malvern.”

“Alice, we have stared death in the face together more than once. Under the circumstances, I believe it would be quite proper for you to use my given name.”

It had been so long since Alice had blushed that it took her a moment to recognize the hot, prickly feeling in her cheeks and forehead.

We, he’d said. Together. Dang. In all her daydreams she had never expected to experience the thrill of the plural pronoun in connection with the brilliant mind she had been worshiping from afar—very far—for so long. In the delight of it, she quite lost track of what he was saying.

“—risking my life for the wretched thing, she might have told me she’d liberated it from the wreckage.”

In Alice’s experience, liberate was a word you used when you didn’t want to say steal. “But doesn’t it belong to her?”

“I am not arguing that. Dr. Craig left it as her legacy.”

“That mad scientist?” Tigg had told her the whole juicy story. Alice wouldn’t have believed a word of it, except that she’d been the one to pull Claire out of the drink half drowned. Anyone who would jump into a flash flood on purpose could break a mad scientist out of Bedlam if she darn well wanted to.

“It is my uneducated opinion that Dr. Craig was not in fact mad. She was being held against her will because she represented a threat to some very wealthy men. But that is beside the point.” Andrew heaved on a nut. “The point is that we are both invested in that cell, and she could have told me.”

The plural pronoun didn’t sound nearly so appealing that time.

Alice stood and dusted off her pants. “Well, in all fairness, we’ve had our hands full. I got a pile of parts in the hold I’ve been meaning to make something with, and I haven’t given them a single thought, myself. So I can’t say as I blame her.”

Andrew finished with the last of his bolts and stood as well. He pulled off his gloves and surveyed their work. “You’re quite right. Isn’t it singular that the four of us—engineers all, and I include Tigg in our number—wound up on this particular ship at this particular time? Without any one of us, we would not have been able to create what I must say must be the first engine of its kind.”

Alice couldn’t keep her face from breaking out in a smile. “You’d better call her in. After you and her rigged that swinging truss—”

“—and you found that glass for the lightning chamber—I swear it will never cross my lips that it began its career holding a gallon of rotgut whiskey—”

“—and you and Tigg and Jake manhandled poor Four into becoming this housing—”

“—we definitely must all be present when we fire her up for the first time.”

Sharing a laugh with him was probably the sweetest moment in Alice’s whole life. The part that came after her father had jumped ship, anyway.

A moment later she realized the hammering had stopped, and Claire and the girls appeared in the gangway. “Did we miss the joke?”

“We’re just having a moment of celebration,” Andrew told her, still smiling.

Claire looked from him to Alice and a shadow passed over her eyes. Was it—could that be hurt?

Well, never mind if it was. Lady Claire Trevelyan had just about everything on earth a girl could want, minus a working airship, but they were about to fix that. If she begrudged Alice a moment of laughter with a certain handsome and brilliant man, well, that was just too bad.

In the next moment, she felt ashamed of herself. Claire wasn’t that petty. She probably liked a good laugh as much as anybody, and wanted to be included, that was all.

If this worked, they’d have plenty to celebrate.

“Is it done?” Maggie asked, evidently objecting to silences, too.

“It is done. Tigg, are you ready?” Andrew asked.

“I been ready for hours, sir. I don’t care if we do have to fly at night, I ent minded to stick around and be dinner for bears.”

“I quite agree,” Claire said. “Alice, let’s see if she’ll go, shall we? Girls, is Rosie safely aboard? Yes? Jake, ready tiller.”

Jake jogged forward and called, “Ready, Lady.”

Who was in command of this tub, anyway? Much as she liked and admired Claire, Alice was the captain and it was her job to give the orders, not someone who was used to ordering maids around and bossing dressmakers and—and whatever else it was fine ladies did in London Town.

“Tigg, stand by engine,” she said, moving smoothly but with authority to the stern with him. “Mr. Malvern, take the vanes, please. Full vertical. Passengers, I’d find somewhere to sit. Lift in five, four—”

Claire and the girls scrambled forward and sat wherever they could find a horizontal spot with something to hang onto. Rosie perched above their heads, her feet wrapped around a pipe.

“—three, two, one.” She slammed all three levers down, one after the other. “Ignition, Mr. Tigg!”

She half expected to hear the throaty grumble of the poor old Massey. But there was no such sound. Instead, the engine mount seemed to tremble, there was a flash of light that she could see right through the rippled seams of Four’s erstwhile chest, and the pistons began to move.

The props turned, slowly at first, then faster and faster. It worked, by golly, it really, truly worked. Alice drew in a breath that was more like a gasp of relief.

“Up ship!”

The Mopsies yanked in the mooring ropes. Andrew threw the levers for the elevation vanes forward and Jake gripped the tiller …

… and they fell up into the twilight sky with the joy of a lark greeting the morning.

85

Edmonton.

The Northern Light, some called it, the third jewel in the continental crown that included New York and San Francisco, and light it was.

The Stalwart Lass circled an airfield big enough to put fifty small towns on, looking for a mooring mast that was free. Through the glass, Claire could see the twinkling lights of the city coming on as darkness fell. It was bigger than Santa Fe, though not nearly as large as London or Paris—but give it time. The lights—not the sallow yellow of electricks, but orange and blue and nearly white, sparkled like the diamonds that gave the city its reason for being.

“Look!” She pointed a little to the west. “Isn’t that Lady Lucy? Jake, steer that way. Perhaps we can moor close enough to walk over and see the Dunsmuirs.”

“Dunno as I want to.” Tigg popped out from behind the engine mount and leaned through the gangway door. “Ent they the same ones as left us all behind in Resolution?”

“They didn’t intend to leave us behind.” Lizzie giggled and elbowed Maggie in the ribs.

Maggie, who was holding Rosie and stroking her feathers, nodded. “We left our own selves.”

“Be fair.” Claire turned from the viewing glass and scratched Rosie’s head. The bird, who was getting sleepy with the fading of the light, gave her a polite tap upon the finger with her beak. One did not disturb a lady at her rest. “They believed me to be dead, the two of you in your cabin, and Tigg back with Mr. Yau at the engines. And you know the countess puts Willie’s safety before all other considerations.”

“Kid’s goin’ t’be spoiled rotten,” muttered Jake.

Despite his grumbles, Claire was pleased to see that he had changed their course, and they were now floating nearer to the Lady Lucy.

“There’s a mast free,” Lizzie said suddenly. “Fifty feet off the port side of her.”

So there was. Maggie took Rosie to her hatbox in the twins’ berth in the starboard-side fuselage while Jake and Alice brought the battered Lass in for a smooth landing. One of the ground crew stationed at the field caught the rope and moored them fast, and for the first time since they had left Reno, Claire found herself disembarking like a lady—meaning on her feet, as opposed to climbing out by means of a rope or being hauled about unconscious like a sack of vegetables.

“Cor, it’s freezing!” Lizzie bleated as she jumped to the ground from the gondola. She wore her black raiding skirt and striped stockings and boots, but her white blouse was thin voile, much like Claire’s own.

“I would wrap you in my coat if I still had one,” Andrew told her. “Will my waistcoat do?”

“Here.” Alice pulled off her mechanic’s jacket and settled it around Lizzie’s shoulders. “Air’s got a bite to it, that’s for sure. It never feels like this in Resolution except in the deeps of winter. But then, we’re pretty far north. It’s winter here already.”

“Let us board the Lady Lucy, then,” Claire said briskly. “Davina will know where we can buy clothes more suited to this climate.” And hopefully sooner rather than later. She herself had two skirts and a waist to her name, and both pairs of stockings had holes in the heels. If she didn’t open her mouth to speak, an observer would assume she was a young woman down on her luck—a seamstress, perhaps, or a schoolteacher who had come north to find more opportunity, or a shopgirl down on her luck.

That was certainly not the case. She had been enormously lucky. Blessed, even. They had simply come to the end of the resources left from the previous stages of their journey. She would visit a bank, and then repair as quickly as possible to the high street to resolve this most immediate problem. Small difficulties like this certainly beat her most recent ones—like having to invent an engine from scratch in the middle of a wilderness.

How she had changed! She recalled clearly the burden that visiting a dressmaker had been even six months ago. But that had been a time when clothes appeared magically in her closets and she never gave a single thought to stockings or coats—or to money, for that matter.

By now darkness had fallen, but the airfield was illuminated by lamps on every mooring mast. The Mopsies and Tigg set off at a determined jog for the warmth of Lady Lucy’s salon—where Claire hoped they would be received with open arms and not a lecture upon the evils of  abandoning ship. Jake and Andrew followed, and when Claire looked back, she saw Alice lingering at the gondola, pretending to check their repairs to its bow.

“Alice, are you coming?”

“I—well, sure. Maybe later. I just want to make sure things are buttoned up here.”

“I’ll wait for you, if you like.”

Alice hunched her shoulders. “Naw, you should go join your fancy friends. And Mr. Malvern. I’ll see what I can rustle up with the ground crew. They’re usually good for some news and a laugh.”

Claire took in the poor posture, the hands jammed into the pockets of her pants, the scuffed toes of her work boots.

“Alice, you do not need to be ashamed of who you are. John and Davina certainly aren’t, and neither am I.”

Alice snorted. “An earl, a countess, and a lady. ’Course you’re not.”

“You are the woman who saved my life,” Claire reminded her fiercely. “Who helped us put the cell in the Lass, which, as Andrew pointed out, has never been done before. You are the woman who flew across I don’t know how many territories to get us here safely, when you didn’t have to. You could have gone to Texico City and spent the rest of your life being nice and warm instead of risking your life to stand here in this cold airfield arguing with me.”

“That all might be so, but it don’t mean I can go shake hands with an earl looking like this.”

“He will not hold it against you. Looks are irrelevant, Alice, and I should know. The earl is a man of perspicacity. He will see a lady of resources and bravery when he looks at you.”

“Is that what Mr. Malvern sees when he looks at you?” Alice lifted her gaze to meet Claire’s. “Now, don’t go all huffy on me. I’ve seen him.”

“I hope he does,” Claire said a little stiffly. Really, Andrew’s looks or lack of them were none of her business. “And I am not huffy.”

Another snort. Really, it was a most unattractive sound.

“Do you—” Alice swallowed. “Do you think he sees those things when he looks at me?”

“Who, Andrew? Of course. He owes you as much as I do.”

“Not because he owes me. He don’t. But because—because—”

“Claire! Alice!” came a distant shout from the object of their discussion. “Are you coming?”

Claire grabbed Alice’s hand and dragged her along the hard-packed ground, the fuselage of a neighboring airship forming a darker shadow above their heads against the starry sky.

Perhaps it was just as well that Alice had not finished that sentence.

*

The only reason the Mopsies did not get a stern lecture on the subject of what happened to little girls who abandoned ship was because the countess fainted dead away at the sight of all of them.

In the ensuing ruckus, Maggie and Lizzie made themselves helpful, snatching the towels from around the wine cooling in silver buckets and applying them to her ladyship’s pale cheeks while Claire cleared the nearest sofa of its embroidered pillows and instructed her frantic husband to lay her upon it.

By the time Davina had come to herself, sat up, and tossed back a tiny glass of brandy supplied by Andrew, the opportunity for lectures had passed in the general joy of being reunited again.

“And you are all alive, and well, and oh Claire, I am so sorry we fell for the stories those rascals in Santa Fe told us,” Davina said breathlessly. “Mr. Malvern, I am very glad to see you—we feared you would be in gaol for months.”

Claire made a movement as if to stop him from telling her the truth, then thought better of it. Davina may look as though a gust of wind might blow her away, but under the tightly laced corset was a spine of steel. “He was not in gaol, my dear friend,” she explained gently. “They imprisoned him on top of one of those stone pinnacles and left him to die. If not for Alice here coming to the rescue with the Mo—with the girls, his remains would be up there still.”

“No!” Davina laid a hand on her pristine Flanders cutwork blouse. “Shocking—distressing—how could they? And … Alice? Which of your party is she?”

Out of the corner of her eye, Claire saw Jake give Alice a shove in the small of her back. She stumbled out of her hiding place behind Andrew.

“Pleased to meet you, ma’am. Sir. Lordships. I’m Alice Chalmers.”

Davina rose and shook her hand, followed by the earl. “You must call us Davina and John. We’re among family here. We are so grateful. How did you accomplish such a daring rescue?”

Alice hunched her shoulders, as though Davina’s wide eyes and guileless smile were a plague she might somehow catch. “I just flew the Lass overhead and we winched him up.”

“It weren’t quite so easy as that,” Lizzie interrupted, ever factual. “They was firing cannon at us and those poor Cantons got blown up and that mucky great engine were flingin’ railway coaches at the pinnacle to try and break it in pieces and—”

“Great Caesar’s ghost!” the earl exclaimed. “Can this be true?”

“It’s quite true, sir,” Andrew replied, backing Lizzie up before she did something foolish, like kick his lordship in the shin for implying she was telling a tall tale. “It takes a cool mind and a steady hand on both tiller and weapons to pull off a rescue like that. I owe Alice and these girls my life.” He smiled at the Mopsies, and at Alice, who flushed all the way to the edges of her cap.

“But wait, did you say the Lass?” Davina asked. “The Stalwart Lass, Ned Mose’s ship?”

Alice nodded. “Ned Mose is—well, the truth is, he—”

“He was her stepfather,” Claire put in smoothly. “They became estranged when Alice took possession of the ship in order to pursue the girls and me to Santa Fe and save our lives.”

“Ah,” said the earl thoughtfully. “I am astonished that this is the first time we have met.”

“Circumstances conspired to keep us apart, but I am glad they have brought us all together again,” Davina said. She reached up and hugged Alice. “I for one am delighted.”

Alice blushed again, and after a moment, gave her ladyship a squeeze before she stepped back. “I’ll get your blouse all dirty, ma’am.”

“Nonsense. Rather a dirty waist than no hug, as any mother of a boy will tell you.”

There was a pounding in the corridor outside the salon and Willie burst into the room. “Lady!” He dashed over to Claire and flung himself against her skirts. “I knew you’d come back!”

“Yes, I do seem rather like the proverbial penny. I’m very glad to see you, darling.”

“Mama and Papa are going into town for dinner. Are you going?”

“I’m afraid I have nothing to eat dinner in, and their company would be scandalized if I turned up in this poor old navy skirt.”

“Mama and Papa will send their regrets to the lieutenant-governor,” Lord Dunsmuir told his son with a smile. “I can’t imagine any society dinner would be more interesting than hearing about your travels, though I must say any dinner with Isobel Churchill at the table will not be dull.”

“Isobel Churchill?” Claire let Willie go and he ran to his mother. “She and Peony are still here? Oh, I hope I can send a message to let them know I’m all right—we were to have met some days ago, you know, and they are likely wondering why I did not arrive as planned. There have been some rather, er, alarming reports in the papers lately.”

“I should say so,” said a voice from the gangway. Captain Hollys stepped into the room and offered Claire his hand, his face alight in a way that would have been most disturbing had Andrew not been standing right behind her. “May I say I am very glad that the reports have been exaggerated?”

“Thank you, Captain. And may I say that the lessons you gave Jake in navigation and aeronautics have more than repaid the time you took to give them. He has been Captain Chalmers’ first officer on the Stalwart Lass in everything but name.”

“Captain Chalmers? The Stalwart Lass?” The captain of the Lady Lucy looked over the little party, his gaze darkening. “I’d like a word with him, and then perhaps he’d like a quick trip to the local gaol.”

“She, sir.” Jake gripped Alice’s arm and pulled her over much the same way as a tug drags a boat anchor. “An’ she ent no pirate. She saved all our lives, one after t’other.”

Bravely, Alice held out her right hand while attempting to smooth her hair with her left. “Alice Chalmers, sir. I deeply regret my stepfather’s treatment of you and your crew.”

“You were in Resolution?”

“I was, sir.”

“Keeping me and the girls alive,” Claire put in.

“And you are not a pirate?”

“No, sir. I operated the locomotive tower, though.”

“But that were only cos ’er dad would’ve shot ’er if she ’adn’t.” Maggie came to the captain’s side and took his other hand. Alice tugged hers free and tried to hush her, but Maggie pushed on. “An’ ’e took ’er prisoner and would’ve shot ’er ’cept Jake set ’er free and they come after us.” She gazed up, earnestly. “Don’t throw our Alice in gaol, Cap’n. She’s in our flock.”

Captain Hollys looked bemused. “I would say that no higher character recommendation is necessary, then.” Alice straightened. “So young Jake’s service has been satisfactory?”

“Quite satisfactory.” It appeared that being addressed as an equal by another airman was affecting her spirits positively. “He has a knack for navigation and can read a chart at a glance, even if he has to spell out the names.”

Now it was Jake’s turn to blush and attempt to hide behind Andrew, who nudged him forward.

“It’s the land forms that count.”

“You’re right, there. How long did it take you to get here from Santa Fe?”

“It would have been three days, but Lord and Lady Dunsmuir took a fancy to a bit of shooting in the Montana Territory. Her ladyship bagged a—”

“Really, Ian, I’m sure our company does not want to hear such things, especially the children,” Davina interrupted hastily, covering Willie’s ears.

“I do,” Lizzie said.

“Me, too,” said Maggie and Tigg together.

“Mama, I saw you shoot that big deer,” Willie said earnestly. “Mr. Skully and me were looking out the window.”

“You were supposed to have been having a nap,” his mother said severely. “I shall have a word with Mr. Skully.”

“It was a single shot, too,” the earl said with proud affection. “Let us have dinner together en famille. I confess my appetite is only being whetted the more, the longer we remain out here.”

When Alice would have melted out the door, both Andrew and Claire took her by either arm and marched her down the corridor to Claire’s former cabin, which was possessed of a sink and mirror.

With some water and a comb, Claire decided, she would work a minor miracle on her friend. A little attention from Captain Hollys instead of Andrew would, she was quite sure, go a long way.

86

Alice figured the meal that evening in the dining saloon could have rivaled anything the railroad barons might put on in their fancy New York mansions. The rolling plains of the Canadas produced an enormous shaggy creature that tasted much like beef, much to the delight of the Mopsies, and she was introduced to the finer points of Yorkshire pudding, which in their minds was the epitome of heaven.

The puffy puddings were pretty darned good, she had to admit, though it was hard to beat one of her own biscuits. But what felt even better was a full stomach, for the first time in days. Flight rations consisting of dried fruit and jerky were easy to carry and did very well in a pinch, but they got old fast.

The little boy had been bundled off to bed after insisting on kissing Claire good-night, and the Mopsies had settled without protest in their old cabin, when her ladyship ran into a snag in her assumptions.

“But Claire, I insist that you and the girls stay here with us.” She leaned over from her seat on the sofa and clasped Claire’s hands. “Our original plan was for you to sail with us to the Canadas and back, and to share our adventures together. I admit that since we made the acquaintance of Ned Mose and his crew, we have not achieved that goal, but we must make a fresh start.”

Alice was staying out of this one. Why should she care whether Claire and the girls stayed here or went back to the Spartan comfort of their temporary berths on the Lass? In fact, she’d prefer it if they did stay on this luxurious boat. Then if Alice decided to pull up ropes and head off to see where the sun went every day, she could, and it would be nobody’s nevermind but her own.

A quiet nevermind, it was true, but there was nothing wrong with the sound of the wind in the guy wires. It would make a nice change. Maybe she’d even start on Ten, and figure out how to get an automaton to talk.

“But then Alice would be alone,” Claire replied, pulling one hand from Davina’s gentle grip and giving Alice’s shoulder a shake. “I wouldn’t want her to get itchy feet and leave us just when we’re all getting to know each other.”

What was she, a clairvoyant? “I wouldn’t do that,” Alice lied through her teeth, doing her best to look innocent. “What do you take me for?”

“What are your plans, Alice?” the countess asked, her fine dark eyes sparkling with interest, and a flush on her tanned cheek.

Until this moment, Alice hadn’t given it a single thought. Just flying here had been enough to knock the stuffing out of anybody, without worrying about what came after. “I—I’m not sure. I hadn’t really thought much past getting Claire and Mr. Malvern here in one piece.”

Davina actually clapped. On anyone else it would have seemed silly and childish, but Alice had heard the pride in her husband’s voice when he’d told them that she’d dropped that elk with a single shot. This woman was the furthest thing from silly.

“Why, then, you must stay and enjoy the delights of the Northern Light with us. The lieutenant-governor’s dinner was bound to be stodgy—oh, he’s a gentleman, to be sure, but my goodness, one can only talk about mineral rights for so long—but there is a ball the day after tomorrow at Government House, and two shooting parties for grouse, and I can’t tell you how many card parties and visits to the theatre. We have missed Madame Tetrazzini, apparently, but Mr. Caruso is expected on the next airship from San Francisco. Our time here will rival anything you’ve experienced in London, I can assure you.”

“Sounds lovely,” Alice said faintly. It sounded like purgatory. Like torture. Like an unrelenting exercise in embarrassment and humiliation for one Alice Benton Chalmers.

If this was to be her fate, she was pulling up ropes tonight, no matter how exhausted and full of good food and wine she was.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Davina said knowingly. “Both of you.”

“That we have nothing to wear but what’s on our backs?” Claire asked.

Ha! That was the least of it.

“Exactly. But we will remedy that tomorrow. There are Canton tailors here that can construct everything from a riding habit to a ball gown overnight—and with the latest designs from Paris, too. None of this nonsense that the New York ladies adhere to about leaving a dress in its box for a year or two before wearing it, so one doesn’t look nouveau. Oh, no. If one cannot have Mr. Worth create a gown in Paris, one simply chooses fabric and a fashion plate from Fourth Street, et voila.”

She looked so pleased that Alice almost didn’t have the heart to disappoint her.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you, your ladyship—”

“Davina.”

“Davina, but I ain’t got the ready money for this kind of exercise—clothes and balls and whatnot. I have to figure out how to power the Lass without Claire’s energy cell, and that’ll probably mean hiring on as ground crew for a while, till I get an engine in her. And you’re not going to want to take a grease monkey along on all these fancy excursions. Especially one who can’t dance and wouldn’t know a dessert fork from a carving knife.”

“I’ll bet you’re quite proficient with knives.”

“But you see what I’m saying.”

“I see what you’re not saying. Do you think that Claire and I have not been in your position—untried and ignorant of society?”

“When you were little Willie’s age, maybe. I bet you learned all that stuff in school. Or from your governess or whatever.”

Davina leaned forward, a fierce, predatory look on her delicate features. “Where do you think I am from, Alice?”

Well, that was a poser. How should she know? “Um. England?”

One eyebrow rose. “Try again.”

“New York?”

“Farther west.”

“Here?”

“Farther still.”

What was out there, farther still, on the edge of the world? “Victoria?”

“Close. Picture an island off the coast, peopled by a tribe of what you might think of as wild Injuns. I am a Nan’uk princess. My father is chief of a tribe that populates most of the islands and inlets around Victoria and north along the entire coast to the borders of the Russian Orthodox Empire. Our nation has intimate ties with the Esquimaux and the Athabasca, making ours the largest united peoples in the Canadas.

“I met his lordship when I was a guide on a hunting trip. I taught him how to handle the new Sharps lever-action repeating rifle.” Her eyes took on a focus and intensity that were rather like those of an eagle stooping upon its prey, and Alice found herself pushing up against the back of the chair. “I did not grow up in the ballrooms of London, Alice Chalmers. I learned to take my place there, and if you are afraid to do what I have done, then I am ashamed of you.”

Alice glanced at Claire, whose jaw hung open as far as her own.

“But—but your speech,” Claire stammered. “Your accent—it’s Belgravia to the last vowel.”

“I have a good ear and am an excellent mimic. You ought to hear my northern loon.”

“I knew there was more to you than met the eye!” Claire was beginning to recover from her astonishment. “A woman could not be so good at weaponry and be so comfortable in the wilderness who had grown up in the drawing rooms of London.”

Davina smiled and turned back to Alice. “There are those in said drawing rooms who made an attempt to turn a cold shoulder to me because of my birth. They soon learned it is not safe to offend my husband—or Her Majesty, who recognizes a princess whether she is arrayed in diamonds or deerskin. I can assure you, Alice, my dear, that if you accept my guidance and his protection, there will be no opportunity for the embarrassment you fear.”

Alice felt a little winded. “Another blasted clairvoyant. Between the two of you, I ain’t got a chance.”

Claire smiled, a hint of wickedness in the corners. “Among the three of us, neither does Edmonton.”

*

Claire and Andrew walked back to the Lass with Alice, since Claire could not be permitted to cross the airfield alone on the return walk. Such silliness, really, but the fact remained that, if she was to submit herself to the chaperonage of the Dunsmuirs, she would have to reaccustom herself to old-fashioned ways of thinking. The Mopsies, dead to the world in one bunk in their shifts, would stay, so Davina felt her battle half won. If she had it her way, Andrew would stay on the Lass and the two young ladies on the larger ship, as was proper, but Claire doubted very much that Alice would be talked into leaving her vessel. In any case, Claire needed to return for her much-abused valise.

Alice ducked past a set of mooring ropes and emerged into the lamplight again, shaking her head. The French braid that Claire had fashioned in her hair was beginning to come apart at the end where she had lost the ribbon. It seemed that Alice’s hair would be more of a challenge than she had first supposed.

“How about that Davina?” Alice said, apropos of nothing. “A Na’nuk princess. Who would have thought?”

“Even more astonishing is how little it is talked of in London. Her Majesty and the earl between them must have been quite … firm.”

“I doubt Her Majesty’ll be giving me the same backup.”

“The earl will,” Andrew said. “And that counts for quite a lot.”

Alice stopped walking. “Claire, Mr. Malvern, it’s no use. I got something I have to do here tonight, and once that’s done, I’m going to lift and head north, to the mines. And maybe after that I’ll head out west and get a gander at this ocean you and Davina were talking about.”

Two thoughts combusted simultaneously in Claire’s mind. The first was that Alice intended to search for her father, all alone. And the second was that no woman who would set off into the sky all by herself to undertake a journey of at least a thousand miles nurtured any hopes whatsoever of catching the eye of a certain engineer.

Claire did not want her to catch his eye. She liked his eyes trained in the direction they were presently, thank you. But neither did she want her friend, to whom she owed so much, to head out into the unknown, unprotected and alone.

“Please don’t go.” She put a hand on Alice’s arm, and to her relief, was not shaken off. “I am as much a stranger to Edmonton society as you. We must stay together.”

“Why?” Now Alice did pull away. They had reached the Lass, and as Claire and Andrew followed her through the hatch, she said, “I can see why you’d like it. Balls and theatre and such, they’re what you’re used to. Heck, you probably know half the people here, not to mention that Churchill girl you were talking about. But I don’t.” They emerged into the gondola, which was silent and dim and smelled faintly of axle grease and canvas paste. “I don’t know a soul but those on the Lady Lucy. I don’t know how to go about in society. I don’t know nothing because it’s nothing to do with me. And I’m going to keep it that way.”

As if this were the last word on the subject, she shook up a moonglobe or two and placed them in a net dangling from the ceiling, where they cast a soft white glow.

“But Alice, in the salon with Davina, you seemed perfectly willing to go shopping with us tomorrow, and join us for all the rest of it.”

“Where I come from, that’s called being polite.”

“Then let me tell you what I did not say back there. I have been to exactly one ball in my life.”

“Two,” Andrew corrected her, “if you count dancing with the Prince Consort at the Crystal Palace a ball.”

“Now, see?” Alice lifted her hands in a gesture of despair, and they fell to the idle tiller as if by habit … or an unconscious reach for something that was safe and known. “You danced with a prince and it’s an afterthought. This is exactly what I’m talking about. I wouldn’t know a prince from a pirate if he popped me on the nose.”

“You’d know Prince Albert,” Andrew told her. “His likeness is on the coinage here.”

“My point is, my dad could be up in this territory somewhere, and I aim to find him, not go gallivanting about doing frivolous things in clothes I’ll never wear again in this lifetime.”

“Then let us help you,” Claire said at once. “Is that what you were going to do tonight? Begin your inquiries in the—the honkytonks the airmen frequent?”

“Yes,” Alice said reluctantly. “But I won’t get much out of them with you along.”

“Why not?” Andrew asked. “With three, it will go thrice as fast.”

“With Claire in her nice white blouse and you in your brocade waistcoat, everyone will just think you’re slumming. Airmen are a chummy bunch. They’ll close ranks on you.”

“Give me a moment to change,” Claire said, “and we’ll see about that.”

In her raiding rig, with the lightning rifle in its holster on her back, it would be a rare man indeed who would mistake her for a fine lady.

Something else she must make sure never got back to Mama.

87

Andrew kept glancing at her sideways as they made their way to the Crown and Compass, the honkytonk that the ground crew around the Lass insisted was the place to begin inquiries about anyone. Finally, as if his curiosity could not be contained, he said, “You brought fancy dress all this way?”

Claire thought back to what must be the only occasion he had ever seen her in her rig—the costume ball she had attended with James at the Wellesleys, when James had upbraided her for showing her legs in their striped stockings in public. “It isn’t fancy dress,” she said briskly. “It is a very practical rig, and the corselet provides a foundation for the rifle’s holster.”

“Which you do not intend to fire, I hope.”

“Certainly not. Unless we find ourselves in some danger.”

“If we do, I will handle it and you ladies will seek safety.”

Claire and Alice exchanged a glance of amusement. “That is very gallant of you, Andrew, but you must know by now that Alice and I are quite capable of protecting ourselves.”

Andrew cleared his throat and held the Crown’s door open, nearly shouting over the roar of the crowd and the notes of the pianoforte playing something fast and loose. “When it comes to fisticuffs—if it does—I insist you leave the protecting to me.”

Alice leaned close to shout in Claire’s ear. “I ain’t never had a gentleman offer to protect me before. Maybe I’ll start a fight just to see it.”

“You shall not, you rascal. We are here to gather information, not start fights.”

Smiling, Alice bellied up to the bar and ordered tawny-colored drinks that came in tiny glasses. Claire would have preferred lemonade, but to order such a thing in here would have negated the effect of her raiding rig and drawn unwelcome attention.

As it was, the rambunctious crowd ignored them. A table full of airmen sang along with the songstress next to the pianoforte. Men at several tables played cards—cowboy poker, if she wasn’t mistaken. Ooh, what an excellent opportunity to strike up a conversation—and gain some ready money in the absence of a bank!

“I’m going to join a card table,” she told Andrew, and swiped the third drink.

“You’re what?”

But she didn’t wait to explain—or ask his permission. While Alice dragged him, protesting, toward a crowd of airmen on the far side, she pulled up an empty stool and smiled beguilingly at the dealer. “Deal me in?”

“What’s your stake? Here at the Crown we take gold and diamonds, and paper if that’s all you got.”

“I have none, unless—” She pulled the raja’s emerald off the fourth finger of her right hand. “This is gold. Will it do?”

“Close enough.” The dealer tossed her legacy from her grandmother into the center of the table and dealt her in.

Within a few minutes, Claire realized that she might be just the tiniest bit out of her league. Of all the variations of cowboy poker that she and the boys in the cottage had fabricated, she had not yet seen this one. She must remember, when things calmed down a little, to diagram it out and send it to Vauxhall Gardens on a pigeon. Snouts and his merry band of gamblers would make a fortune and confound the denizens of Percy Street in one fell swoop.

But she must not think about London. She must concentrate.

Too late, her ring met its doom in the person of a fat man in a tweed suit of a particularly obnoxious pattern. He raked in a pot of at least two hundred dollars—two thousand if you counted the ring and the sprinkle of tiny cut diamonds that glittered on the green felt table covering.

“Ante up,” the dealer said. Cash and gold clinked into the pot, the fat man smiled with anticipation, and the dealer looked at her.

“My rifle,” she said.

A flick of his gaze took in the lightning rifle from stock to sights. Then he shrugged and dealt her in.

“And the ring. It goes back in the pot.”

“You think you can win it back, little lady?” the fat man said, still smiling. He slipped her grandmother’s emerald onto his thumb as if to test the size.

“I know I can.”

“I don’t know … I kinda like it.” His fist closed around the emerald and Claire’s temper ignited.

“Are you afraid of my skill?” she asked, her tone so cool and silky it might almost have been rude.

His eyes widened. “What skill? You lost the hand.”

“Ah, but I have the measure of my opponents now. If you do not throw the ring back in, I shall know your true measure, too.”

His companions snickered, and his cheeks reddened. “You calling me a yellowbelly, missy? You know what happens to people who backtalk Sherwood Leduc?”

“I know what happens to people who walk away from a display of cowardice.” She smiled sweetly, as if he were a drawing-room dowager who must be placated and plied with cakes. “I’m sure they return to their ships and talk about it, don’t they? Tsk. It’s so difficult to stop people talking, particularly on an airfield the size of this one.”

He flung the ring so hard it bounced off the table. A cowboy in a brand-new hat caught it one-handed and tossed it back in the pot. “Deal,” snarled Sherwood Leduc.

With a sunny smile, Claire accepted her cards and fell to her task. She did not see Andrew and Alice talking with the airmen, or hear Alice’s offhand questions. She did not see the cowboy in the new hat swipe her drink and down it himself. Instead, the shape of the table formed in her mind’s eye, and mathematical probabilities, and patterns, all shifting and changing as the minutes crept by.

And when the cowboy and two others folded, only she, Leduc, and one of his cronies laid their cards on the table.

Royal flush.

She had won!

“Thank you, gentlemen,” she said with real gratitude, raking the pile of gold, the half-dozen diamonds, and the bills toward herself. The ring went back on her finger in the twinkling of an eye, and the rest went into the square leather pouch chained to her leather corselet. The rifle had not left its holster—nor would it now, to her great relief.

“Another game,” Sherwood Leduc demanded. “I’ll have that rifle and the ring both.”

“I think not,” Claire told him. “I have other business that calls me away. I’m out.”

“Who’s the yellowbelly now? You haven’t heard the last of me, missy,” he called as she pushed in the stool with one foot and turned away.

“Neither has the rest of the company here, I’m sure,” she said sweetly, and headed for a door with a silhouette of a dancer burned into it.

Once locked in the ladies’ retiring room, which consisted of a hole in the floor with a noxious smell emanating from it, and a broken mirror on the wall, she opened the leather pouch. She redistributed her winnings about her person, since only a fool would walk about the field now with a full purse and Sherwood Leduc’s threats ringing in her ears. Her skirt had two hidden pockets in the bustle that fastened closed with snaps, so in those she secreted the gold and small stones. The paper she stuffed down the inside of her blouse, to be held in place by the corselet. Last, she removed the ever-present ivory pick in her chignon, threaded the ring on it, and worked the jewel deep into her hair. Even if Leduc made good on his threats and cut the purse from her, all he would find in it was a few silver coins.

Then she sallied forth to rejoin Andrew and Alice.

Who were no longer at the airmen’s table.

Well, goodness, this was no time to be left on one’s own. She sidled up to the table and propped her hands easily on the chairs of two airmen.

“Excuse me, but do you know where the two mechanics who were just here might have gone?”

The nearest crewman pushed his goggles higher on his cap and looked her over with appreciation. “No, but if you’re looking for one, will I do the job?”

His friends laughed, and she smiled into his eyes. “I have no doubt you would, but it’s rather urgent I find them. You see—” She leaned a little closer, and hoped he didn’t hear the crackle of paper under her blouse. “—I confess I was rather insulting to Sherwood Leduc over the matter of the pot, and I’m very much afraid he intends to take it back … by force.”

“You don’t say.” The smile went out of the airman’s eyes. “What’s a little rose like you doing insulting a coyote like him?”

“I did not know he was a coyote,” she said. “And he refused to give me the chance to win back my property, as a gentleman might. I rather lost my temper, I’m afraid, and he took offense.”

“We ain’t all like that, missy,” someone else piped up from across the table. “There’s plenty here who would hand over a pot for the chance to insult Leduc. George, walk her over to the Tiller to find her friends. And don’t try no funny business, neither. It’s obvious to a blind man she’s a lady, not one of yer prairie partridges.”

George the airman straightened and gave his companion a hard look. “What do you take me for? Contrariwise to what some might think, I’m a gentleman.”

“Thank you, sir,” Claire breathed, with such a gaze of admiration that two others left their drinks to join the little party.

As they stepped out onto the hard-packed gravel of the airfield, Claire’s gaze swept from left to right to take in her surroundings—equipment, the gentle, swelling curves of airship fuselages, mooring masts, the occasional crewman tightening ropes and inspecting landing wheels. Nothing out of the ordinary.

But she had not dealt with the dockside bullies who worked for the Cudgel without learning a thing or two.

“Gentlemen, I appreciate your protection,” she said softly, which had the effect of making them close up around her in order to hear. “How far is it to the Tiller?”

“Half a mile or so,” George said. “Ten minutes if you don’t dally. We might catch your friends if we pick up our pace.”

Claire obligingly matched his long stride, and the two others hustled to catch up. “So, missy, this here’s Elliot and I’m Reuben,” one of them told her.

“And you may call me the Lady.”

“Lady? You don’t got a Christian name?”

“She’s from the old country, you dope,” George said. “Can’t you hear it? That’s a title, not a name.”

“Oh. A real ladyship? I ain’t never met one of those before.”

“Title notwithstanding, I am honored to be among your company,” Claire said warmly. “But with the likes of Sherwood Leduc about, perhaps it would be best to keep my real name concealed for now.”

“Not meaning to alarm you or nothin’, Lady, but ain’t nobody gets away with insulting Leduc,” Reuben said in a low tone. “We got a couple of his brutes on our tail right now, matter of fact.”

“I saw them,” Claire said. “They are lurking under that enormous fuselage with the Iron Cross upon it, are they not?”

“More fool them,” George said with a snort. “Ten to one the count’s men bag ’em before we go another hundred yards.”

Claire put crest and title together. “That ship belongs to Count von Zeppelin?”

“Yep. Never seen him, myself, and his crew don’t mix, but that ship arrived two days ago.”

“Why would they not mix?” Claire felt a little breathless at the prospect of a chance meeting with the man who had invented the modern airship. What an honor that would be! Not to mention she could ask him some rather troublesome questions about converting a steam engine to one that harnessed lightning.

“You can’t understand ’em, for one, hawking and spitting in that Kaiser tongue. And for two, maybe they think they’re better’n us.”

“I doubt that very much,” Claire said, reining in her excitement. “They are likely military men, and hence would put their duty before fraternizing with potential friends such as yourselves.”

“How would you know that?” George said curiously.

But before she could answer, a shout came from the direction of the mighty Zeppelin ship, and three shadows detached themselves from the darkness under it, outrunning and losing their pursuers on the far side of a pair of small cargo vessels.

“They’ve sussed out where we’re going and plan to circle around to meet us before we get there,” Reuben said in a low voice. “Look clueless—and look sharp.”

Sure enough, they could hear music in the distance—a horn of some kind, maybe two. And in a lamplit space at the base of an empty mooring mast three men jogged into the circle of light between their party and the Tiller.

“Why, those are two of the men gambling with Leduc,” Claire said just loud enough to be heard. “Do you suppose they are anxious to retrieve his—and their—property?”

“I suppose any sore loser would try. What’s the matter, Paxton?” George called as they emerged on the near side. “Surprised to find the little lady ain’t alone?”

“Don’t matter if she is or ain’t.” Paxton cracked his knuckles. “We aim to take back our property. She cheated at cards.”

“I did not,” Claire said indignantly, and reached behind her to unholster the rifle. “I suggest you use what few brain cells remain to you and leave while you still can.”

“Or what?” Paxton laughed, and his companions moved a few steps closer. “These airbrains will slap us with their gloves?”

Elliot growled and Reuben offered a few most uncomplimentary speculations about the man’s lineage. Claire pushed the switch forward and the lightning rifle began to hum. Startled, George stepped to one side just as a rock whizzed past his ear from the darkness behind them and clocked one of Paxton’s companions on the side of the head.

He howled and George shouted, “Who’s that?” All three of Claire’s erstwhile protectors whirled, and Paxton saw his moment. He leaped forward, aiming for Claire, his arms raised as though he intended to bull his way through and grab her.

The rifle hummed happily at the prospect. She raised it to her shoulder, sighted, and fired. Paxton screamed as a bolt of lightning sizzled across the fifteen feet between them and engulfed his fisted right hand. Tendrils of blue light danced down his arm and his coat caught fire. His men tore it off him and stamped it out, but there was nothing they could do about the cauterized remains of the hand that would have beaten her bloody had she allowed it.

“You may take that back to Mr. Leduc as a warning,” she said politely as he wept and howled. “I dislike hurting anyone, but if he interferes further with me or mine, I must and will protect myself.”

“You’d best listen,” came a voice out of the dark behind them. “Tell ’im the Lady of Devices sends ’er regards.”

Claire rolled her eyes as the two men still on their feet helped Paxton away. “Jake, there is no need to be theatrical. You sound as though you’ve been at the flickers.”

Jake emerged from under a neighboring fuselage. “Couldn’t resist, Lady.”

“What on earth are you doing out at this time of night? I thought you were safe in your berth on the Lady Lucy.”

“Wait—you know this rascal?” George had finally found his voice, although the whites of his eyes still showed as his gaze swung from Jake to Claire. “Where’d you learn to shoot like that? And what kind of a gun shoots lightning instead of bullets?”

Claire patted the rifle affectionately and holstered it. “Did you think it just for show?”

“I don’t make no assumptions about a man’s ordnance,” George said. “Guess there was a few I shouldn’t have made about a woman’s, neither.” He grasped Jake’s shoulder and shook him. “I’d best not find out that rock was meant for me.”

“Course not,” Jake said. “You stepped practically in its path. I were aimin’ at that miscreant, obviously, or I woulda hit you instead of ’im.”

“Do unhand my navigator, George,” Claire said.

“Navigator?” the man snorted.

“Assumptions, George,” she reminded him gently.

“Fine. Fine. You’re her navigator and—” He swung to Claire. “—you need about as much protection as a wolverine and—” He set off. “—I’m going to the Tiller right now and ordering up the biggest whiskey they got.”

“I shall stand you all the first round,” Claire called after him, and then pointed up ahead. Two people were ducking into a low door in a long building that appeared to be half of a giant pipe embedded in the ground. “Look, isn’t that Alice?”

88

The good thing about airmen, in Alice’s mind, was that they tended to congregate with their own kind and exchange news, gossip, wind and weather, and general badinage. They rarely fought among themselves—they were a tightly knit breed, looking down in more ways than one on the men who chose a groundbound career. If a person needed to find information, an airman’s honkytonk was the place to do it.

The bad thing about airmen, as Alice had found in the Crown and Compass, was that you couldn’t count on them to stay in one place very long. They were forever moving, following the wind. One word of a storm front and the whole flock of them would scatter like so many starlings with a startled cry of “Up ship!”, leaving you standing with your mouth full of questions and nothing to show for your pains.

Her father had been a mining engineer, and had been gone most of Alice’s life, but she never gave up hope that somewhere there was an airman who remembered him and could point her to him. The fact that she didn’t remember him and couldn’t say what he looked like other than that one eye was damaged from falling rock didn’t stop her inquiring about him of every airman she met.

In Resolution, mind you, most of them were dead by the time she got to their wrecked ships, so up until now she hadn’t actually spoken to as many as she would have liked. But that one man in Santa Fe hadn’t been quite drunk enough to forget he’d seen a one-eyed man up here in the Canadas.

That was more than enough for her. It was more than she’d heard in years.

If her mother had been a different kind of woman, she would have stayed to keep her company in the afternoons, before business got going at the Resolute Rose. But Ma, having become the hardheaded practical sort out of necessity, was Ned Mose’s kind of woman. A girl had to survive in any way she could, and Alice wasn’t about to judge the woman who had borne her for the choices she made.

She had to live with them. Alice didn’t.

She’d sent a pigeon from Santa Fe letting her know she was riding the winds and probably wouldn’t be back. There had been no reply, and Alice expected none.

Expectations were a luxury Alice Chalmers couldn’t afford. But hope didn’t cost a thing.

There was a commotion near the door and Alice turned to see Claire and Jake and a crowd of the rope monkeys who had been at the Crown all coming in together. Naturally, Andrew took one look and made the wrong assumption.

“Claire? Are you all right? Are these men being troublesome?”

“On the contrary,” she said gaily. “They are keeping me out of trouble. Andrew, this is George, Reuben, and Elliot. Gentlemen, this is Andrew Malvern, and the blond young woman at the bar is—”

“Alice Chalmers.” George touched two fingers to his brow in acknowledgement. “I see you found the place.”

“Your directions were precise.” She turned to Claire. “I’m going to make inquiries at the bar. Do you and Andrew and—Jake? What are you doing here?”

“He was filling in for the Mopsies,” Claire said. “May he come in?”

“If he stays out of the way,” George put in. “And don’t throw anything.”

Alice let this go as none of her business, though how these two could have a history in the ten minutes since she’d left the Compass was beyond her. Claire and Jake took a table, and the airmen joined them. Andrew stopped to speak with a man heading out the door, and Alice—you’d think she’d know better—felt a glow of warmth that he had got right down to the business of helping her.

But mooning over that wasn’t going to help her find her pa. She ordered something mild in the hopes that at some point later this evening, she would not be caught vomiting all over Mr. Malvern the way she had on the occasion of their first meeting. When the barman didn’t seem inclined to move away, but stood there drying glasses, his gaze moving from table to table as he kept an eye out for trouble, she cleared her throat.

“Business good?”

“Middling. I was hoping the count’s ship’d bring in business, what with the size of the crew it carries, but no such.”

“You see a lot of traffic through here. Different crowd from the Compass, I understand.”

He nodded, and wiped out another glass. “Compass caters to visitors. We get a different lot here. More flighty, you might say.”

“You might have seen a friend of mine, then. Mining engineer, he is. Was. Accident took one eye.”

The barman considered, twisting his towel in the glass. “How old?”

“Your age, maybe. Give or take five or ten years.”

He snorted. “Ain’t seen anyone like that lately.”

Lately? “It could’ve been awhile ago. Years, even.”

“Some friend. Close, are you?”

Caught. “It’s my pa,” she admitted. “I’m trying to get a lead on him, but I haven’t seen him since I was knee-high.”

Another snort, this time not without sympathy. “Maybe he don’t want to be found.”

“That might be. I’m prepared for it. But I’d still like to give him the chance to tell me so.”

“Sorry. Not ringing a bell. But I can ask around. What ship?”

“Stalwart Lass, out of—”

“—Resolution. I’ve heard of it. I wouldn’t be bandying that about, if I were you.”

“Oh? Ship got a bad name? I stole her, if that makes a difference.”

Slowly, he set down both glass and rag. “You stole the Stalwart Lass? Ned Mose’s ship?”

They were thousands of miles from Resolution, and she’d walked into the one bar in the one city to strike up a conversation with the one man who could get her clapped in gaol with one word.

Alice resisted the temptation to put her head down on her arms and weep.

“I did. Used to be I called him Pa, but we had a falling out.”

“Pa? Your ma Nellie Benton?”

“She is. We’re still speaking, at any rate.” It was one-sided at the moment, but he didn’t need to know the details.

“I remember Nellie Benton fondly,” the barman said, picking up another glass and leaving the first one abandoned where it sat. “You’re in touch with her, you tell her Mike Embry sends his regards. Tell her I’m a darned fine prospect now, she ever changes her mind.”

“I’ll do that.” Silently, Alice blessed her mother for treating this man kindly. “She ever talk about my pa?”

His face cracked into what might have been the first smile it had worn in a decade. “We didn’t converse much about other men, missy.”

“Alice. Alice Chalmers.”

“That his name? Chalmers?”

“Could’ve been.” Ma wasn’t much on accuracy except when it came to the account books at the Resolute Rose. “I’m pretty sure.”

Nodding, he said, “I’ll see what I can find out. In exchange, you pass that message on to your ma.”

“I said I would, Mike. I’ll be around for a couple of days.”

Too late, she remembered she was supposed to be pulling up ropes as soon as she could dodge Claire and the rest of her party.

“It’ll take me that long to put out the word, find out who knows what. Three days, at least.”

With a sinking feeling in her middle, Alice knocked back the rest of her drink, laid down a coin, and pushed away from the bar. At least in a fistfight, she knew what to do. In the air or under an engine, she was in command of her element. But now she was stuck with at least three days of shopping and balls and all manner of nonsense, where she knew nothing and commanded less.

If she ever found him, Pa would owe her one for that alone.

*

The shop was the size of the Lass’s gondola and yet the entire contents of ten ladies’ closets seemed to be crammed into its windows and displays, and layered on mannequins that resembled her automatons.

Alice would never put a hardworking, self-respecting automaton in a corset, though.

“I have it on good authority from Lady Arundel, the governor’s wife, that this corsetiere is the best in town,” said Lady Dunsmuir, clasping her hands in anticipation and practically bouncing on her toes. “If one begins with a good foundation garment, an elegant, correct silhouette will follow.”

Alice had never had a correct silhouette in her life—or stopped to consider that there was such a thing. Wasn’t whatever a woman possessed correct for her?

She, Claire, and Alice had breakfasted on the Lady Lucy with the family. The Mopsies had pitched a fit and flat refused to come along, so they had been stood up near a window, measured with ruthless accuracy by her ladyship, and then both of them sent to join Willie at his morning lessons. Alice had briefly considered trying the same ploy, but before she could open her mouth, had been hustled down the gangway with no opportunity to beg for mercy.

At which point she had come to a dead stop as though she had forgotten how to walk.

There on the gravel stood the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. Gleaming with flawless curves, its brass wings and swooping lines told everyone within a thousand yards that Serious Money was driving past.

“It’s a six-piston Bentley,” Claire whispered, and elbowed her to move out of the way. “Isn’t it lovely? Davina is driving us into town.”

“We’re going … in that?” Alice couldn’t breathe. How could you waste time on something as prosaic as breathing when a lifetime’s dream had just come true right in front of you?

“We had it unloaded before breakfast,” Davina chirped, brushing past Alice and opening the rear compartment for her.

Tigg was already there. “Hullo, Alice. The Lady’s landau is still in the cargo bay cos we weren’t sure she would need it. Ent this fine?”

Alice had forgotten Claire also owned a landau. And had flown it across the ocean on the off chance she might have somewhere to go in it. Did all rich people think this way?

“We can run about in this while we’re here,” her ladyship said. “Tigg, watch closely. The ignition sequence is slightly different from that of the Henley.” He leaned over Claire’s shoulder and watched Davina flip switches and turn a series of small wheels.

That was like saying you could run about in von Zeppelin’s great warship if you wanted to hop over to the coast for lunch. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” Alice breathed. She touched the door with one finger. Leather upholstery as soft as butter. Brasswork as smooth and glossy as satin.

“I can give you a driving lesson when we come back, if you like,” Davina said. “The airfield is perfect for it. It’s much easier to manage the gears here, where it’s flat.”

Alice was smitten silent at the prospect, and now, standing in the corsetiere’s emporium, she still hadn’t regained her powers of speech. Not when the steam landau sat right outside, gleaming in the autumn sun and accepting the gawking admiration of passers-by as if it were her due.

There were plenty of vehicles about. In Resolution, they used animals to go across country, there being only the promise, not the reality, of roads. The flash floods were hard on anything the territorial authorities tried to lay down—not that Resolution ever got much attention. That was why Ned Mose liked it.

But here in Edmonton, there were not only roads, but great steam-powered bridges that ratcheted up and down to let boats pass on the river. There were steam drays and clockwork buses that ticked along their cog tracks on a schedule so faithful that if you didn’t hustle and get on, they would leave without you. Those, the countess had told them, worked in the summer and autumn. In winter and spring, when the roads were impassable with either ice or mud, everyone used the Underground system, which had been modeled after the one in London.

Every street was as straight as a rifle barrel, laid out in a sensible grid so that the cog tracks would work most efficiently. And along the streets, shops and houses and warehouses were packed, bustling with the activity of the biggest city in the Canadas.

How in tarnation was she to find her pa? Outside the city, the plains stretched into the distance, with lakes and rolling hills thrown in for relief, until you reached the mountains on one side or the diamond fields on another. Somewhere in all this busy vastness was her father—and she was one girl searching for one man, like a tiny gear looking in a huge machine for the other little gear that would match it.

“Alice, are you listening?”

She came back to this pretty, fluffy prison with a start. “Sorry, Davina. What?”

Her ladyship held up two corsets. “Do you prefer the pink with the roses, or the burgundy brocade?”

Heaven help me. “Neither. Isn’t there something more … practical?”

“What about this?” Claire held up a plain coutil garment that at least possessed hooks down the front. Alice had tried on her mother’s best back-laced corset once as a young girl, and words could not describe the torture of trying to get out of it when Nellie had been called away. She’d screeched so loudly that one of the customers had finally come in to discover what the racket was all about … which had subsequently caused a ruckus of a different kind when he’d mistaken her for a desert flower.

“Fine.”

When Davina went back with the clerk to commandeer a dressing room, Claire rummaged in a wardrobe and pulled out a black brocade number with patent leather grommets. “I’m going to try this one, too. White underthings are so inconvenient when I’m trying to accomplish something at night.”

Alice couldn’t remember the last time she’d been as shocked as this. She knew Claire led something of a double life, but this? “You tend to flash your underthings when you’re out?”

“Not on purpose. But think how useful this would be. I wonder if there is a black lace petticoat to go with it.”

“There is.” Alice pointed. “Good luck getting them past Davina.”

Claire snorted. “She would have a right to speak if it were her money buying them. But it is not. With what I won last night, I can outfit us both and the girls besides, and still have enough for a new pair of boots.”

“I’d like to know where you learned to play cowboy poker. Can you teach me?”

Claire’s smile lit her eyes. “Of course. Though I suspect it may be a gift. Now, come. This nice, plain coutil should fit you.”

Alice was shoved and tugged into the corset, and after that a series of petticoats and walking skirts and a couple of waists of French lawn embroidered within an inch of their lives (“Don’t they have anything that’s just white?” she said in despair, only to be blithely ignored). Then, just when she thought they might stop for tea or maybe something stronger, Davina halted outside a shop with a gilded sign that read Regina Couture.

“Here we are,” she told them. “Ball gowns to order.”

“I’ll just wait outside with Tigg,” Alice said, a little desperately.

“Oh, no, you don’t.” Davina took her wrist and pulled her in. For such a tiny thing, she had a grip like a bear trap. Something like this dad-blasted corset—Alice could swear her ribs were actually grinding against one another under its merciless compression, never mind her lungs.

The Canton modiste was as delicate as a lily, but there was nothing delicate in the way she moved Alice in one direction then another, the measuring tape hissing this way and that upon her body. Good grief. Why did anyone need to know how big she was around the bum when it all got covered up with fifty yards of material anyway?

“Heavens, Alice, the last vestige of the bustle went out last year,” Davina told her briskly. “Now one leads from the bosom, with slender hips and lots and lots of froufrou under the skirt from the knees down.”

Alice was afraid to ask what froufrou was, exactly, in case it was something that hurt.

Silks and organdies and velvets became a blur, and when she couldn’t answer or make a decision to save her life, Davina conferred with the modiste and made said decisions herself with the expertise of long practice.

Who knew she spoke Cantonese, too?

The only good part was when Alice’s measurements were duplicated on the expandable body of a gleaming bronze automaton, whose arms and legs ratcheted in and out depending on the customer’s stature. But even then, she was whisked away for a conference on bodices and forced to choose between puffed sleeves or cap, instead of examining the way they made the automaton duplicate her gait so the skirt would accommodate her stride.

At this very moment her father could be on a train for goodness knows where, and she was required to make a decision about sleeves?

Again she fought the desire to weep.

89

The dresses were delivered the next evening, two hours before they were to depart for the governor’s mansion. The Mopsies both came to Davina’s stateroom to watch the three of them dress.

“’is poor lordship,” Maggie remarked. “Booted out of ’is own room?”

“His lordship has a dressing room of his own and many fewer yards of material to manage,” Davina told them. “Make yourselves useful, girls, and help Claire and Alice with those skirts. No, Alice dear, it must go on over your head. Try not to disturb your hair, for we do not have time to put it up again.”

“Ain’t nothing disturbing this hair,” could be heard from the depths of the aquamarine silk. “There’s enough pins in my head to melt down for a pistol.”

To Claire’s relief, Maggie played ladies’ maid for her while the countess and Lizzie saw to Alice, snapping snaps and tying tapes and fluffing organdy. This was nothing like the blue gown that Ned Mose had taken from her in Resolution. Her new gown was a deep emerald green that brought out the red lights in her auburn hair. A cluster of yellow velvet roses pulled up a flutter of pale gold organdy on each shoulder—and not much else. Claire had never exposed so much of her arms and bosom before, nor been laced in the new style of corset which actually gave her a bosom, not to mention a very tiny waist. The skirts belled out below, embroidered with yellow roses in a border a foot above the hem.

“Ent you pretty,” Maggie said, standing back so Claire could admire the train behind her in the mirror. “You look like a daffodil, Lady.”

Claire bent over and kissed her. “And you are kind to say so. Will you wind the pearls about my neck? At least they’ll cover some of me.”

It was the first time she had had the use of a full-length mirror since the riots in Wilton Crescent, and she almost didn’t recognize herself. With her grandmother’s ring and the St. Ives pearls, and a yellow velvet rose pinned next to her chignon, Claire had to admit that for the first time in her life, she was almost satisfied with what she saw in the glass.

What a pity Alice could not say the same.

Alice regarded herself with some dismay. The aquamarine blue brought out the vividness of her eyes, and her hair had been curled within an inch of its life and braided into a coronet about her head. Between two panels of cream lace on her bodice, ruched organdy arrowed into a satin belt whose circumference could almost be spanned with two hands. The skirts spilled to the floor in a froth of silk and organdy, but the countess had wisely ordered no train. It took practice to manage one, and Alice had had none.

Alice flicked at the blue feather curling around her ear and held in place with a diamond clip loaned by the countess. “This is gonna drive me batty.” She gazed at herself in dismay. “I have no idea who that person is.”

“Then you must become acquainted with her.” Davina looked like a slender Roman goddess in draped crimson and cream silk. Upon her hair rested a diadem of tawny diamonds. “You must face the unhappy truth, Alice—you clean up very nicely.”

“I can’t breathe, I’m swimming in all these skirts, and if I shake my head, this stupid feather will make me sneeze.”

“Chin up,” Claire said. “You’ll get used to it. Just remember to lift your hems going down stairs as well as up, and use the loop sewn into the skirt to lift it a little when you dance.”

“Claire, nobody is going to dance with me.”

“I’ll lay you a bet that you’re wrong.”

“Name it.”

“If you are a wallflower, I’ll give you my landau.”

All the color drained from Alice’s face. “Are you crazy? You can’t do that.”

“Of course I can. I am not a simpleton—I know I cannot lose.”

“I say you’re going to. But if you win, I’ll give you Nine.”

Claire opened her mouth to refuse. The last thing she wanted about her was that eerie, eyeless presence, its servomotors whining every time it moved to do its owner’s bidding. And then she caught herself. Besides the Lass, Nine was the creation Alice valued the most—the way Claire valued her own landau. It was a fair bet.

Fair, but rather like taking candy from a baby.

“Done.”

“All right, you two,” the countess said. “Find your cloaks and fans and let’s be off.”

When they entered the main salon, the gentlemen came to their feet. Claire could not tell which was more rewarding—Andrew’s gobsmacked face as he realized who the lady in seafoam was, or the warmth in the eyes of Captain Hollys as he bent over her own hand.

“You will outshine every woman there,” he murmured. “If you do not save a waltz on your card for me, I shall sign on with a mining crew and never come back.”

“I must save you from that fate, then.” Claire smiled at his nonsense. “The first waltz—and be forewarned that dancing is not my strong suit.”

Andrew was still staring at Alice as if he had never seen her before.

Well, no one had ever seen this Alice before, but that was no reason to be rude and to make the color rise in her face.

“Captain Hollys, do rescue Alice. Andrew is making her uncomfortable.”

The good captain did just that, and Andrew snapped out of it as Claire stepped into his line of sight. “Claire. You look very pretty. No rifle?”

Pretty. Hmph. So it was the first time he had ever told her she was pretty. But need he sound so—distracted?

“Not tonight. I trust that with Count von Zeppelin and the governor himself there, we will be troubled neither by thieves nor pirates. However, I do have an ivory hair pick if my assumptions prove incorrect.”

“I knew I could depend on you.”

She narrowed her gaze. “Andrew, do not stare. It is abominably rude.”

“But can that really be Alice? I swear I thought her a complete stranger when she walked in.”

“She will think you completely strange if you do not behave more naturally. I do hope you told her she was … pretty.”

“I shall. The moment I secure the first dance.”

Which rendered Claire speechless until they were well on their way. Government House lay in several acres of park and gardens that Davina told them duplicated exactly the estates of Sir Geoffrey Arundel, the governor, in Derbyshire, though sadly, the elms and maples of that county had not survived the winters of the Canadas and had been replaced by pine and fir. The gardens still glowed, however, in the middle of October, and—

“My goodness!” Claire exclaimed as the Bentley came to a stop under the portico. “Today is my birthday and I completely forgot until this moment.”

“You’ve chosen a nice way to celebrate.” The earl smiled at her and kissed her cheek. “Happy eighteenth, Lady Claire. All Edmonton will be at your feet by midnight, or I’m a sad representative of the species.”

All Edmonton, it seemed, was in the ballroom, whirling in the patterns of the dance and chattering with such gusto that Claire could barely hear her own name as the majordomo announced it.

Earl and Countess Dunsmuir, of Dunsmuir House, London, and Hatley Park, Victoria.

Lady Claire Trevelyan, of Gwyn Place, Cornwall.

Miss Alice Chalmers, of the Texican Territory.

Mr. Andrew Malvern, B.S., R.S.E., of London.

Captain Ian Hollys, Baronet, Royal Aeronautic Corps, London.

Baronet? Heavens. What was a baronet doing flying a ship for an earl, companions at arms notwithstanding? She must find out during their waltz.

“So much for keeping a low profile,” Alice whispered as they descended the grand staircase. She clutched a great handful of her skirts so hard they would be fearfully crushed. “I should’ve given an alias.”

“I am very glad you did not,” Davina said behind her. “I plan to introduce you to everyone, and I should hate to have to remember it.”

Alice groaned, and before she could recover, Andrew had stepped up to write his name upon her card and then whirl her off onto the floor.

“Dear me,” Davina murmured, watching. “I am afraid our attempts at teaching her a few steps this afternoon were … inadequate.”

“Andrew will make sure she comes to no harm.” And sure enough, when Alice turned the wrong way, Andrew tightened his hand upon her waist and steered her back into the frothing current of the dancers. “She must learn that the first rule of dancing is to allow the man to lead.”

Davina looked amused. “Is this wisdom the product of personal experience?”

“I have not had much personal experience. But that is what the dance mistress at school always told us.”

“Claire, you must not stare at them so.”

“I am not staring. I am merely following the pattern of the dance and admiring the gowns of the other ladies.”

“If you say so, dear. Come. I want John to introduce you to Count von Zeppelin.”

With a determined effort, Claire pushed the image of Andrew’s gloved hand on Alice’s corseted back out of her mind. A dream was about to come true. She must not let that pleasure be muted by … by … well, she must not let it be muted.

She followed Davina and John to a small group standing next to the royal purple drapes that framed the tall windows overlooking the garden. A slender man in his fifties turned with a smile, his moustaches curled at the ends like the feather in Alice’s hair. “John, mein lieber freund. We meet again.”

The two men embraced in the European fashion and John turned to indicate his wife. Davina smiled her charming smile and extended her hand in its pristine opera glove. “Count, it is lovely to see you again. I trust the Baroness is well? Did she accompany you on this trip?”

Von Zeppelin bent over her hand. “Alas, no. She has just become a grandmother for the third time, so she has stayed at home to assist our daughter.”

“I hope you will give our best wishes to the new mother,” John told him. “I would like to introduce you to a young lady who admires your work greatly. Count Ferdinand von Girsberg-Zeppelin, allow me to present Lady Claire Trevelyan, a dear friend of the family.”

Claire dipped into a curtsey as the count bowed. “I am delighted to make your acquaintance, Lady Claire. Are you familiar with my ships?”

“I am indeed, sir,” she said rather breathlessly. How charming he was! And what lively intelligence danced in those eyes, glinting through his formal manners. “In fact, I own stock in your company. I am quite certain that the Atlantic shipping lanes will belong to Zeppelin before many more months pass.”

His eyebrows rose, and then he gave a bark of laughter. “She is prudent as well as pretty.” He had not released her hand, and now he patted it. “I shall do my utmost not to disappoint you.”

“Claire aspires to be an engineer, Ferdinand,” John told him as he released her hand at last. “When we return to London, she will be entering the university to study.”

“Is it so? What field interests you?”

He had not laughed. He had not even behaved as though this were unusual. What an extraordinary man. Of course, things might be different in Prussia. After all, Madame Bertha Mercedes ran the largest manufactory of steam engines in all of Europe. Perhaps women were accepted to the universities there as a matter of course.

“I hardly know which to choose, sir, so many interest me,” she replied. “But since my travels have brought me here, I find my fascination with flight grows daily.”

“One can hardly function in this vast land without some way to get about,” he said, nodding in agreement. “A landau depends upon the existence of roads. A water vessel upon a river or sea. But an airship…” He gestured into the distance, as if his great ship were moored outside in the park. “An airship can go anywhere and be put to nearly any use in the service of mankind.” His gaze returned to her. “I think you would be wise to pursue aeronautics, my dear.”

“Thank you, sir. I appreciate your counsel.”

“And do not forget the stock market.” He laughed at his own joke, clicked his heels and bowed from the waist to her and Davina, and drew John aside.

“Come, Claire,” Davina said. “I believe I see someone you know.”

“But—”

“We will leave the gentlemen to themselves for a moment.”

Claire resigned herself to being social when what she really wanted was to ask the count about his plans for a Zeppelin airfield outside New York, and follow that with her questions about the power cell and its ability to replace a steam engine. “Yes, Davina.”

“Claire!” A small commotion seemed to be moving toward them, which resolved into none other than Peony Churchill. She flung herself upon Claire in a huge hug. “Oh, I am so glad to see you—Mama was quite convinced you had decided to stay in London and marry James Selwyn. See what a low opinion she has of you! But I knew differently.” The laughter and joy faded from her face. “Claire? Are you quite all right?”

“Peony, did you not hear? James was killed in a train accident nearly two weeks ago.”

Wide-eyed, Peony lifted her gloved fingers to her lips. “No, I did not hear. We have been in Esquimaux country, documenting conditions there for a petition to Her Majesty.”

“I am very sorry to spring it on you in this fashion.”

“Are—are you all right?”

There were a number of ways to answer this, but Davina took the matter out of her hands. “They had not been engaged for some weeks.”

“Yes—yes, I know, but—” Peony suddenly seemed to realize to whom she was speaking. “Your ladyship, I do beg your pardon.” She sank into a graceful curtsey. “What a pleasure to see you. When I got your note that Claire had arrived, I hardly knew what to think. For all I knew, she was in New York awaiting passage here after her voyage on Persephone.”

“We must contrive a way to catch you up on my adventures,” Claire said. “I need at least two hours, and we will not get that here.”

“You certainly will not. I intend to see you dancing before this mazurka ends.” Davina sounded very firm. “Come along, you girls. There is Mrs. Abercrombie. She owns the second largest diamond mine in the Canadas, and her unmarried sons dancing attendance upon her stand to inherit the lot.”

“Who owns the largest one?” Claire asked.

“Why, John and I do, of course.”

Within moments of their introduction, Davina made sure that Claire and Peony were launched onto the ballroom floor in a lively polka with the Abercrombie boys, and Claire had not another moment to think until Captain Hollys appeared at her elbow.

“This one, I think, is mine.”

The boy—Conrad? Charles?—relinquished her with a smile, and Claire found herself slowing both steps and heart rate as she relaxed. What a blessing it was to dance with someone familiar.

“Small talk is so exhausting,” she said on a long breath.

“I hope that is not meant to discourage me,” Captain Hollys said, clearly taken aback.

“Oh, no, I didn’t mean you.” She smiled up into his eyes. “I merely meant I am glad to dance with someone I know. Remarks upon the weather and the state of the roads have their place, but one can only take them so far. Thank goodness the polka does not require much conversation.”

“And were you required to make small talk with Count von Zeppelin? I saw his lordship introduce you.”

“Is he not a fascinating man? Imagine being the one to invent something so marvelous as the airship—something we use for such magnificent purposes, and that we cannot imagine living without. I wonder if he realizes what a great thing he has done for mankind.”

“If he does, it is likely he gives the credit to his engineering staff. He is not proud or self-involved.”

“He advised me to take up aeronautical engineering when I return home.”

“And is that your intention? You do not plan to stay here?” He moved her smoothly into a turn that would take them close to the French doors.

“Goodness, no. I was only to come for a few weeks, until—” Until I turned eighteen and James could not force me to marry him. No, it would not do to bring up old hurts. “Until John and Davina wished to return to London.”

Another turn and he waltzed her out onto the terrace. The night air was cold, but braziers had been set up at intervals along the stone balustrade, so it was not unpleasant.

“Captain Hollys, Davina will be looking for me.”

“I think we have been through enough together that you might call me by my Christian name. Ian.”

She hardly knew where to look. Part of her wanted to flee to the crowded ballroom and find Peony—find Davina—find Alice and see if she was still dancing with Andrew.

Andrew. She was in love with Andrew, was she not? How did one know? With him, she did not have this fluttery, nervous feeling in her chest. Instead, she felt a sense of safety, of homecoming. To be sure, a Kensington address might elicit the same feeling—so that could not be a symptom of love at all.

And yet … she had kissed Andrew, and it had been heaven.

She had kissed James, too, and it had been quite the opposite.

But now, here on this lovely terrace in a beautiful dress, she stood with a handsome man whose eyes told her he would very much like to be the third man to kiss her.

If she were in love with Andrew, then why was she filled with such … anticipation … at such a wicked prospect?

“Claire? What are you thinking?” He stood only inches from her, as though he might take her in his arms.

“I—I cannot say.”

“You can say anything you like to me.”

“You would be shocked.”

“From the woman who jumped into a flash flood … who sacrificed herself to save a friend’s life … who managed to find her way across miles of desert practically unaided … I think not.”

“Are you going to kiss me?”

Oh dear.

She had shocked him now.

90

“Should—should you like it if I did?” Captain Hollys was clearly attempting to regain his footing.

“Logically, you know, that question is unanswerable until after the fact.”

That surprised a laugh out of him. “You are a minx. But I should have expected nothing less. You are quite right. But logic notwithstanding, perhaps you might tell me something.”

It was not quite fair. She stood in the light of the brazier, while his face was shadowed. She stepped to the side so that both of them shared equally in the light. “Certainly.”

“How does it stand between you and Andrew Malvern?”

She would give a great deal to know that answer herself. “We are very good friends. We owe each other our lives.”

“Owing a life is not quite the same as promising one.”

“We are not promised. I have been too recently engaged for that.” Belatedly, it occurred to her that her affections were not really any of his business unless he planned to make them so. “What is your purpose in asking, Captain?”

“Ian. I should think that when a man and a woman discuss kissing under the light of the moon, his purpose should be rather obvious. You cannot doubt my feelings for you, Claire.”

If her racing heart was any indication, that was a fact.

“But I should very much like to know yours.”

“If—if I knew them myself, I might be able to tell you.” Oh dear. She sounded like a perfect featherhead. Snouts would be ashamed of her. “But Captain—Ian—there must be many other ladies here tonight with whom you might have this discussion.”

“I’m sure there are. But I am having it with you.”

“Many others with whom your time would be better spent. Ian, I am not the best prospect in the world. If you knew—there are things that—” She took a frustrated breath at her own inability to speak her mind. For if she did, he would bolt into that ballroom and for the rest of the voyage she would have to endure the loss of his friendship and the pain of his avoiding her.

She rather enjoyed being the Lady of Devices. She suspected, however, that the Lady would not make the best choice of wife.

“If you mean to frighten me off, you will have to do a better job than this.” He smiled down at her, and moved a step closer. The tips of his polished boots touched the hem of her gown. “I have nothing but admiration for you. If it is your family’s straitened circumstances that you’re thinking of, that does not matter to me. I am not without resources.”

This reminded her of something she had meant to ask him. “How does a baronet come to be flying a ship for an earl, taking his orders and ferrying him about the world?”

“You did not know I am a baronet?”

“You wear no such insignia on your collar, sir. Merely an airman’s wings and an officer’s bars.”

“And I am proud to wear them. For me, they are the important ones. As for taking the earl’s orders, he takes plenty of mine, too. We have seen too much together and had each other’s backs too many times to let something as unimportant as rank affect our relationship. I am, in fact, John’s cousin.”

“Ah.” That certainly explained the ease with which he came and went among the members of the family. “But what of your responsibility to the baronetcy? Your home?”

“The estate is a small one, but it is in the capable hands of a steward I trust. And until now, I have not been overly concerned with taking up, as you say, my responsibility. Should I be shot down, the estate will be folded into the Dunsmuir holdings and managed as efficiently as they manage everything.”

“I imagine your family would prefer you not be shot down. Though I must say, you came rather close on this voyage.”

“My mother would agree. She would like you, I think.”

I doubt that very much. My own mother has a difficult time with me.

“Ian, we cannot speak of these things.”

“I mentioned that I had not thought much of my responsibility until now. But I could see myself at Hollis Park, settling down, with a gray-eyed girl who makes my heart lift like a ship each time she enters a room.”

She must put a stop to this. Could he be about to propose? If so, she could not toy with a good man’s affections in this manner.

“Ian, I am … encumbered. I have the girls to think of, and Tigg, and Jake.” And there is Andrew.

“It is heroic, the way you look after those children. I can be of assistance to them. I believe I have already offered young Tigg a position. Our chief engineer, Mr. Yau, is standing ready to take him on as midshipman, if you and he agree, and Jake has the makings of a fine navigator now that he has decided which side he wants to fight on.”

“You may have to fight Alice for him. He got us here, all the way from Reno, when none of us had ever been in these skies before.”

“Do not change the subject.”

“But I must,” she said desperately. “I am so confused. One moment I’m a giddy girl, thinking you might kiss me. The next moment I’m as old and wise as a professor, thinking of my wards and their futures. And then there is my own future. If my application is accepted, I will be going to university when we return. I will not have time for—for courting. And in any case, you will be off to the Antipodes with the Dunsmuirs. It seems a hopeless case.”

“Not hopeless,” he said softly. “Never hopeless.”

And before she could take another breath, he dipped his head and kissed her.

*

Knots in one’s stomach were anatomically impossible. Yet there they were, growing tighter with every moment that Claire and the Lady Lucy’s captain did not reappear.

Finally Andrew had had enough.

He smiled at his partner, the daughter of one of the governor’s cabinet ministers, bowed over her hand, and made his way through the crowd to the French doors. He stepped through just in time to see Captain Hollys gather Claire into his arms and kiss her.

Just the way he himself had kissed her, that day in the lab when she had been engaged to another.

And she allowed the captain’s kiss, just the way she had allowed his.

The breath rushed out of him and he actually flinched, as if someone had delivered a sucker punch to his stomach. Blindly, he turned before they could see him, and stumbled back into the ballroom.

“Mr. Malvern!” Lady Dunsmuir emerged, smiling gaily, from between two large matrons. “Good heavens, sir, you look ill. Are you all right?”

He must pull himself together. He and Claire were not engaged. They were not even a couple. They were … whatever two people were who had shared a kiss and had both acknowledged that it meant something, however wrong it had been at the time. He had never had a chance to speak of what lay on his heart, and she had been too busy looking after the children and flying about the country saving people’s lives to remember that she carried it in her hand.

“Mr. Malvern, I am becoming quite concerned.”

He focused on Lady Dunsmuir, who was gazing up into his face, two worried lines between her brows. She laid a gentle hand upon the fine wool sleeve of his new dinner jacket. “Is there something outside that upset you?”

The breath he had managed to catch rushed out again. “Claire is kissing Captain Hollys on the terrace,” he said dully.

“Ah.” She pulled him aside, between the drapes and a huge potted topiary tree shaped like a series of lollipops piled one upon another. “I rather think Captain Hollys is kissing her. He has been smitten since the beginning of the voyage.”

“The result is the same.” He came to himself with the realization that discussing Claire with anyone else was the height of disloyalty.

Not that loyalty was counting for much anywhere he looked at the moment.

“Dance with me,” she commanded, and when he obediently whirled her out onto the floor, the action seemed to clear his mind.

“I beg your pardon, Lady Dunsmuir. It is wrong of me to say such things.”

“Why? You have her affections, I know. One does not sacrifice oneself to save a man’s life if one does not care.”

“She risked her life to save James Selwyn, and she did not care for him. It seems to be her way.”

“She is brave and impulsive and fiercely loyal. And, I suspect, rather inexperienced when it comes to matters of the heart. You must make allowances, Mr. Malvern. She is only just eighteen.”

“I know,” he sighed. “I do not know whether to propose or pack her off to university.”

“The latter is not within your control, is it?”

“No. Nothing is. I do not even have passage back to England—and if I did, I would not leave her.”

“Do not worry on that account. You are most welcome to travel with us. Lady Lucy has any number of empty cabins.”

“At this rate you will have to open your own shipping company.”

She laughed. “I would say we already have one, but in truth, that is under negotiation.”

“Oh?”

“I am not supposed to breathe a word, Mr. Malvern. You must not provoke me to be indiscreet.”

“Then I shall not.”

She allowed him several turns before she spoke again. “We are to tour our mine next week. Isobel Churchill has been agitating up in the north for indigenous control of natural resources, so it is becoming rather urgent that we go.”

“Does your mine infringe on that control?” Somehow he had not suspected the Dunsmuirs of the exploitation with which Mrs. Churchill had inflamed the London papers.

“No indeed. Nobody wanted that land until diamonds were discovered—and even afterward, the land could not be bought or sold in any case. Instead, we have a most amicable agreement with the Esquimaux, but there are those who would argue it reaches further than it should.” She laughed. “I fear I must remind them that those lands remain under indigenous control—merely in the hands of a member of a different nation.”

This was such a mystifying statement that he could not even frame a way to question it. Instead, he changed the subject.

“Are you acquainted with Count von Zeppelin?”

“I am indeed. We have visited Schloss Schwanenstein—his estate in Munich—on a number of occasions. In fact, I believe John is to stand as godfather to the newest grandchild. We will be going to Prussia for the christening before long, I daresay.”

“Perhaps you might introduce me? I saw that Claire met him, but I should very much like to as well.”

“Of course. I shall have John make the two of you known to one another. I imagine you will have no end of things to talk about.”

“Thank you, Lady Dunsmuir.”

“Oh, goodness. You must call me Davina. I will not have my friends standing upon ceremony.”

“And I am Andrew.”

The orchestra swung into the final figure and in moments ended the waltz with a flourish. Andrew could not resist the temptation to scan the crowd once more over the top of Davina’s tiara.

There.

Claire stood with Peony Churchill and Alice, laughing over something the latter had said. Peony slipped an arm around both their tightly corseted waists and they moved in the direction of the refreshments. Captain Hollys was nowhere to be seen and Andrew hated himself for even caring.

“You see?” Davina said as he kissed the back of her gloved hand. “She is a girl yet in some ways. She needs those ways, Andrew. Do not rush her.” She squeezed his hand. “I will find John and see about that introduction.”

And she slipped into the crowd, a small, regal figure whom he had no doubt the leaders of industry obeyed without a moment’s hesitation.

Do not rush her.

He did not want to rush Claire in the least. In fact, he wished she would slow down before she left him behind altogether.

91

Claire hardly knew what she was doing or saying—she was only thankful Peony did. She and Alice nodded and smiled at the people to whom they were introduced, allowed gentlemen to claim the dances on their cards, and when those were full, allowed other gentlemen to provide them with ices and sparkling champagne.

“Not too much of that,” Peony warned her, “or you’ll forget which end is up.”

“I have no idea which end is up as it is,” Claire said without thinking, and Alice, who was looking much more cheerful now than she had at the beginning of the evening, smiled at her.

“As long as Captain Hollys does,” she teased.

“Oh, do give over. Though I am grateful you turned up just then.”

“Why, can’t the man kiss?” Alice’s eyes were big and blue and innocent over the rim of her champagne glass.

“He certainly can. But what does one say afterward? That is where the two of you saved me.”

“If you don’t know what to say afterward, it means two things.” Peony tossed back an iced oyster with the finesse of one who had done this many times. “Either you’re overcome with maidenly confusion, or you have no conversation with the gentleman anyway.”

“Neither of those things are true in my case, so your theory needs work.” Claire considered the oysters and turned away, shuddering. “I have no difficulty discussing any number of subjects with Captain Hollys under normal circumstances, and I am not confused.”

“Liar.” Peony’s eyes sparkled. “If I had to choose between two handsome men possessing both intellect and resources, I would be no end of confused.”

“I’d be happy with just one,” Alice said to the ice sculpture of a bear in the center of the table.

At which point Claire spotted Davina talking with her husband, Andrew, and Count von Zeppelin. She put down her glass so firmly that the champagne sloshed onto the damask tablecloth, and took two steps over to join them.

And stopped. Of course she should include Alice. She turned back. “Alice, come and be introduced to Count von Zeppelin.”

Alice’s eyes grew wide in truth this time. “What, me? Why should he want to know me? I’m no one.”

“Nonsense.” Claire linked her arm in Alice’s and pulled her along while Peony turned her attention to some serious flirting with a gentleman who also liked oysters. “I’ve already won Nine from you. Are you going to make me wager again? Because I will bet Nine back that the count will be delighted to meet you.”

“You don’t have to do that. You won fair and square.”

“Then stop saying such untrue things. Anyone in this room would do the same—and has, if Peony is any judge. She told me while you were in the powder room that you have made quite a number of conquests.”

“So have you. I wonder what Captain Hollys and Mr. Malvern think about that?”

But Claire was saved from a reply when Davina turned to them both and introduced Alice to the count without a moment’s prompting.

“Alice has a great deal of natural ability as an engineer,” Claire told him as he straightened from bowing over her gloved hand. Alice had blushed as red as one of the mesas overlooking Resolution, so to give her a moment to recover, Claire went on, “She has created nine automatons.”

“Have you indeed.” Von Zeppelin took her in with renewed interest. “I have noticed that automata are much more in demand here on this continent than they are in Europe or England. Can you enlighten me as to why?”

Alice gulped at being asked for an informed opinion by a man she held in such esteem. Claire supposed it would be akin to being asked by Apollo if she could suggest a more efficient way to travel across the sky than by sun chariot.

“I—I suppose it’s because there aren’t so many people over here to hire on as servants and such,” she finally managed. “Folks find it easier to mechanize their help.”

“Is it so? Does this theory apply in the larger cities, where there are people looking for employment?”

“It depends on the employment,” Alice said, warming to her subject now that he seemed honestly interested and not merely making polite conversation. “There are more people exploring resources than cleaning latrines, and more women interested in engineering and science than being housemaids. Not,” she said hastily, “that there is anything dishonorable in being a housemaid. My ma was one, once. But if those tasks are taken care of by an automaton, and her family has the resources, then a girl can look to what interests her. That’s what I think, anyway.” The tumble of words slowed on the rocks of propriety. “I can’t speak for the whole territory.”

“I think you have spoken very well,” Davina said. “Can every household afford one?”

“It depends. All the rich folks seem to have ’em.”

“And what of families that do not have the resources?” Andrew asked. “Are they a status symbol?”

“Maybe,” Alice allowed. “But mine are just useful. I build ’em with what I have on hand, so that often determines what they’ll be used for.”

“Nine, for instance, has magnetic feet for locating items buried underground,” Claire put in helpfully.

“Six and Seven work in the engine room, Eight has his hoses, and Four—”

“We used him for an engine housing, I’m afraid,” Andrew said with a laugh. “We were stranded in the Idaho Territory and he sacrificed himself to get us back in the air.”

The governor appeared behind John’s shoulder. “Earl Dunsmuir, Count von Zeppelin, I hate to tear you from your lovely companions, but we are meeting in the library. May I show you the way?”

Claire and Alice smiled at the reluctance with which the count allowed himself to be led away from a discussion that clearly interested him. Claire was rather more interested in what the meeting might be about.

“Men,” Davina said. “How can they think about business when the orchestra plays so divinely?”

Andrew gave her an odd look before he said, “Perhaps you would honor me with another dance?”

And then Claire and Alice were claimed, and it was not until the evening ended that they saw the count again. They were putting on their wraps in the great entry hall with its black-and-white marble parquet when he came out of another door swinging his driving coat on.

“Lady Dunsmuir,” he said, “might I offer your protegees a ride to the airfield? I am most interested in continuing our discussions about automata. You too, Mr. Malvern. I am a great reader of your monographs and would be honored if you would accompany us.”

“You—you drive yourself, sir?” Andrew said.

“Certainly. My captains will follow in their own landau. They think I drive zu schnell—how do you say? Too fast.”

Claire bit back an eager acceptance, and turned to Davina. “May we?” After all, they had come with the earl’s party and were his responsibility.

“You will be careful with them, Ferdinand,” Davina said, half teasing, half stern. “They are precious to us.”

The count bowed, sweeping his beaver topper from his head. “As my own daughters, my dear lady.”

“Then you must enjoy the ride, girls. We will see you later at the Lady Lucy.”

Andrew handed Alice down the steps and into the rear compartment, and Claire seated herself in the front next to the count.

“This is a Daimler,” Alice breathed, looking about her as if she were in a palace.

“Eight pistons,” the count said proudly, flicking levers and spinning a great wheel next to his knee. “She’ll do nearly sixty miles in an hour, if the roads are good.”

“Sixty…! Oh sir, when we get to the airfield, may we please look in the engine compartment?” Claire begged, and was thrown back against the seat cushions when the Daimler took off like a horse from the starting gate.

“I will give you a personal tour of it tomorrow,” the count assured her. “Now, Fraulein Alice, I beg you to tell me more about these automata of yours. You say the one has magnetic feet?”

Claire relaxed in the seat next to him as the count kept one eye on their route over the prairie and the other on Alice as he peppered her with questions. When he had extracted her promise of a demonstration in exchange for a good look at the engine in daylight, he said, “It is my belief that man was not created for drudgery, but for genius, and craft, and good, profitable work. Why should the factories not be run by automata? Why should machines not be operated by machines?”

Claire had never devoted much thought to the subject of mechanized labor, but clearly, the great man had. On the other hand—

“But, Count, machines cannot solve problems, or take a line of action to a logical conclusion. They can only obey.”

Andrew chuckled. “I could say the same about many a fellow student in school.”

“Yes, but those students are likely not inventing great devices in manufactories.”

“God has given us many gifts,” the count said, “among them creativity, logic, and consideration for the needs of others. But I am not speaking of these. I am speaking of rote tasks on the manufactory floor. Why encumber a man with such when he could be in the laboratory, conducting experiments?”

Something about this argument bothered Claire, but she could not put her finger upon it. She gazed into the darkness, thinking, as the landau’s lanterns illuminated the road ahead. Road was a generous term. The landau took its bumps and potholes in stride, its great wheels floating over them as if they were nothing. The moon had moved across the sky to the point where Claire could tell it was very late. Past midnight, at least. She hoped the Mopsies had not waited up to hear about the ball.

“Count, do you not think that—”

He cursed as a deer or an antelope of some kind bounded into the lamp light and across the road, and hauled back on the bar that controlled the rate of steam. Simultaneously, the sheet of isinglass next to her ear exploded inward, showering her with glittering fragments. She screamed and leaped to her left as the landau swerved and hit the bank on the driver’s side. The heavy Daimler’s nose lunged at the sky and then dropped them half on top of the bank, the engine laboring at nearly full throttle as its wheels thrust them up and over the other side.

The deer bounded right, then left, and then disappeared into the darkness.

“Count!” Andrew cried. “What are you doing?”

And then Claire saw the blood.

The right side of his head was awash with it, dripping black into his pristine collar and soaking the gray wool of his driving coat.

“Count!” she shrieked. “Andrew, he’s hurt!”

Without a second thought, she grabbed the acceleration bar from hands that had convulsed around it. Between her position and her inability to move the unconscious man, it was awkward, but she pulled back on it with all her strength.

The Daimler had been moving at a speed of at least forty miles to the hour. The bar fought her, bucking and shuddering, but she did not release it. Instead, she threw her weight against it, wedging herself against the instrument panel and trying to gain purchase on the floor.

“Claire, the wheel!” Alice shouted. “You must turn the wheel to reduce the steam pressure!”

“I don’t have another hand,” she managed on a gasp.

Alice flung herself over the back of the seat and, hanging bent in half, feet in their delicate dancing slippers braced against the bench, reached for the wheel and spun it with both hands.

Something groaned deep in the belly of the landau and dual clouds of steam hissed out of both sides of the bonnet.

It seemed like an hour before the great landau came to a reluctant, canted stop against a small rise crowned by a stubby tree that had seen one too many winters. With a sigh, the vehicle settled onto its wheels, as blown as a horse.

Andrew gripped Alice’s waist and assisted her to slide back against him, and all three of them pushed open the wings and scrambled outside.

“Alice, grab one of the lanterns,” Claire said. “Andrew, help me get the count out where we can see him. Oh, please don’t let him be dead!”

Andrew slipped his arms under those of the unconscious man, and they pulled him from the Daimler. Once he was laid out on the long grass of the prairie, Andrew laid an ear upon his chest.

“Alive,” he said, and Claire’s knees went weak.

Alice bent down with the lantern. “This don’t make a lick of sense,” she said, “but it looks like he got creased by a bullet.”

“A bullet!”

“You’re right, that doesn’t make any sense,” Andrew agreed. “But only because we don’t have all the facts. But they must wait for another time. At the moment we must act, and quickly.”

“We have to get him back to Government House,” Alice told him in a tone that said there was no other option. “It’s a good couple of miles, but he needs a doctor, pronto.”

“Where are his captains?” Claire said suddenly. “They can help us. They may even have medical training.”

“I’ll fetch them.” Andrew leaped up. “See if you can stop that bleeding.”

The sound of his dress shoes thudding on the ground faded into the dark. Claire scrabbled under her skirts. “At last. A sensible use for froufrou.” She ripped an entire row of eyelet ruffle from her innermost petticoat and wrapped it carefully around the count’s head. “I need something to secure it with. Do you have a pin?”

“Nothing,” Alice said in despair, waving her hands at the frothing pool of skirts. “This is the most useless outfit in the world.”

“My kingdom for my corselet and all its pouches. Never mind. If you would be so kind as to remove the ivory pick from my hair, I shall thread it through these holes. At least this fine cotton will provide some protection and absorb the blood.”

Alice pulled the pick from her chignon and sucked in a horrified breath. “Claire, you’re bleeding yourself!”

Claire secured the count’s makeshift bandage before she lifted a hand to her cheek and brought it away smeared with blood. “It doesn’t hurt, and I am fully conscious,” she said in a wondering tone. Would she collapse without warning at any moment? “It must have been the isinglass window. Is it very bad?”

“Head wounds bleed like a son of a gun,” Alice said quietly, her fingers gentle as she investigated. “There’s a lot of glass in your hair, and a bunch of tiny cuts, but nothing big. The count’s in much worse shape. If it was a bullet, and even if it did just graze him, we have to act fast.”

“Alice, the ground is freezing. We must get him into the back of the landau and cover him up.”

“You’re right. Come on. Lucky job he ain’t built like that Lord Arundel. We’d never manage it.”

Claire dropped the poor man’s feet once, but together, with much huffing and a few whispered curse words from Alice, they got Count von Zeppelin into the rear compartment of the landau. Claire activated the storage door in the side, and there, like a miracle, was a heavy traveling blanket and a can of kerosene for the lanterns.

“At least we won’t be left in the dark.” Alice refilled the Daimler’s lantern carefully while Claire tucked the blanket around the count’s unresisting form. “Where is Andrew, for gosh sakes? This man doesn’t have any time to waste.”

They could hear nothing but the sound of the wind, whistling through the dead branches of the tree.

“He should have been back by now.” Claire closed the compartment door with a thunk.

Alice gazed at her, eyes huge and becoming increasingly frightened in the lamplight. “I didn’t hear a shot.”

“We didn’t before, either. The window simply blew inward with the force of the projectile.”

“It would’ve got you and him both if he hadn’t swerved for that antelope.”

“Alice?”

“Yes?”

“Perhaps they’re still out there. Perhaps you should put out all the lamps. We are not, after all, so far from where it hit us.”

“I’ve got a better idea. Let’s go get Andrew and get out of here. Can you pilot this thing?”

If only she’d watched more closely as the count had initiated the ignition sequence! But no, she had been too bothered by the thought of Andrew and Alice alone in the rear compartment to pay much attention.

Of all the silly geese …

Never mind. She must focus on the task at hand. How different could the Daimler’s instrument panel be from that of her own Henley Dart?

“Yes,” she said.

“I don’t see we have a choice. The count has to get to a doctor, and the longer we wait, the poorer his chances are. If we can’t find Andrew, why, we … we …” Her voice faded.

The same dreadful thoughts hovered in both their minds. What if he had been shot, too, as he came over the rise? And why had the count’s captains not come to their aid as soon as they saw the Daimler go off the road? In Claire’s mind, there was only one answer. If Andrew had shared their fate, she did not think she would be able to bear it.

“Come.” She shook away the ugly thought before it could root in her mind and terrify her. “You must ride in the rear compartment and hold his head.”

Alice climbed in and gingerly took Count von Zeppelin’s head into her silken lap, heedless of the blood. “This has to be one of the most valuable heads in all the world,” she muttered. “How’d this come about, I’d like to know?”

Claire tried to remember the order in which he had flipped levers and spun the wheel. After a number of false starts, not to mention some suggestions from the back, the mighty boiler rumbled to life and steam began to issue from the pipes extending out the side. She leaned on the acceleration bar and spun the wheel to give it more steam, and they began to roll.

With the other hand, she guided the landau into an arc that took them back the way they had come, and in a moment, they half rolled, half slid onto the road.

She had underestimated the other landau’s location, and they were now behind it. But where were—

“There’s Andrew,” Alice said urgently, craning her neck to be able to see over the padded cushions. “Thank God.”

“What is he doing?” Claire murmured, half to herself. For he was not administering aid to anyone. He crouched against the wing of the captains’ landau, head down, his body stiff and focused into the distant night. Cold fear cascaded into her stomach.

Claire piloted the landau as close as she dared. “Andrew!” she called through the broken window. “Are you all right? Where are the men? Come quickly—we must get the count—”

Without warning, the rearmost window exploded and Claire distinctly felt something thud into the cushions upon which she sat.

Alice screamed and Andrew jerked upright as though he had been struck by lightning. He flung himself into the front compartment, shouting, “Go! Go!”

“But the captains—”

“Go!”

Claire leaned on the acceleration bar and the engine coughed, like a horse who has been struck with the crop when it expected to stop and nibble the grass. It had gathered a small head of steam while she had paused it and forgotten to release the pressure valve, and with this, they leaped down the road at a headlong pace.

With one hand on the steering wheel and the other on the acceleration bar, Claire peered wildly into the night hoping nothing would smash their one remaining lantern.

“What happened?” she managed between chattering teeth.

“Dead, both of them.” Andrew’s tone was grim, his face carved in stone at the edge of her vision. “And while I was searching for signs of life, a bullet missed me by half an inch.” He raised his arm. “It passed right through my sleeve. The second one went over my head when I ducked behind the landau.”

Claire could not look, though she heard Alice gasp. Her gaze was fastened on the ribbon of road ahead and she could not look away.

“But who—how could anyone—”

“I do not know, but I fully intend to find out,” Andrew said. “It could only have been someone who knew when our party would leave Government House—and that the count would be piloting. For it must be he who was their target.”

“An assassination?” Alice squeaked.

“With a silent weapon.” Claire risked a glance at Andrew. “You heard no report, such as gunpowder would make?”

“None. Nothing but the whine of the bullet, and then the impact.”

“So no indication of where the gunman stood.”

“We must return in the morning to search the area, and notify the authorities.”

“We can’t go back to Government House,” Alice said. “Not now. It’s too risky.”

“We can only hope there is medical aid on the count’s airship.” Claire pushed the acceleration bar out as far as it would go, and they flew through the night on the landau’s towering wheels as though the hounds of hell were after them.

92

Claire had barely brought the Daimler to a hissing, growling stop—something must have been punctured under the chassis during their plunging flight to the airfield—when it was swarmed by the count’s men. In less time than she would ever have thought possible, he had been removed from the rear seat and borne aboard the ship.

She was bundled off to sick bay herself, and a stinging concoction applied to her temple and cheek where the isinglass fragments had struck her.

“You were lucky,” the officer murmured, dabbing the excess away and applying sticking plasters. “The hood of your cloak protected your arms and shoulders, and the cuts are not deep.”

“I wish I could say the same for the count.” Claire’s voice wobbled. “Please, can you tell me if he will be all right?”

“It is my first concern, after your welfare,” he said gallantly. “Please, rest for a moment and I will find out. In the meanwhile, mein herr und fraulein, you are certain you are not injured in any way?”

From the white-sheeted bunks next to her own, Alice shook her head and Andrew said, “No, not at all. Lady Claire and the count suffered the brunt of the first attack. When the captains tried to come to his assistance, they were shot. By the time I reached them, it was already too late.”

“Ist so?” The second officer’s gaze hardened. “We will send a detachment. They will bring in our fallen companions and search for the ones who did this.”

Claire had a feeling they would find as little evidence of anyone being there as they’d had warning of a shot, but all the same, she was glad that men of competence were swinging into action. This was an international crime, she thought, struggling to keep her mind clear. If the count took a turn for the worse, the consequences could be grave.

There might even be war, if Prussia blamed the government of the Canadas.

She did not want to be in a war. She wanted to go home, to the cottage by the river, to Carrick House, to Gwyn Place …

“Claire! Herr Doktor, she is going to faint.”

The darkness feinted at the corners of her vision, and no matter what she did, she could not stop its advance.

When she opened her eyes several minutes later, Alice’s and Andrew’s anxious faces were hovering over her. “Claire? Can you hear me?”

“Yes. I am perfectly well.” She struggled to sit up on the pristine white pallet. “I was merely overcome for a moment.” Her head still swam a little, but if she said so, they would fuss, and this was no time for fussing. “Have we heard anything of the count’s condition?”

The medical officer assisted her to a sitting position, honorably keeping his gaze averted from her ankles until she had settled her velvet skirts over them.

“Our ground captain has sent out men to the site, fraulein. Also, I have a report from my superior that he has examined der landgraf—the count, I should say. You did well to bind up the wound and get him here so quickly. The loss of blood was not as great as we feared, and my superior is stitching him up now. He will have a most interesting scar that will fortunately be healed by the time we all must face the Baroness.”

“Is she a woman of character, then?” Alice asked.

“She is, fraulein. Like a lioness in defense of those she loves. It is indeed fortunate she was not in the landau with you, for she would have leaped out and hunted these men herself.”

“I think I would like the Baroness,” Claire said, and winced when her attempt at a smile pulled at the sticking plaster on one side.

“I see some similarities,” the officer allowed.

From the gangway area on the deck below, they heard a commotion, and in a moment, Captain Hollys appeared in the door of sick bay. A soldier panted up behind him. “My apologies, Herr Doktor, but he would not wait to be announced.”

“Claire!” Ian exclaimed. “What on earth happened? Her ladyship was ready to send out a search party, and when the messenger came from the Margrethe, she—”

“Get out o’ the way!”

A second commotion could be heard in the hall, and like a pair of jack-in-the-boxes, the Mopsies evaded the grip of someone behind them, popped past Captain Hollys’s legs, and flung themselves on Claire. “Lady, we was so worrit!” Maggie exclaimed. “Her ladyship’s fit to be tied.”

Claire gathered them both close. What a gift it was to feel their warm bodies, their coats still bearing the night’s chill, but the warmth of love and concern flowing between the three of them acting like a tonic to her spirits. Hot tears welled in her eyes and she buried her face in Maggie’s hair as she blinked them back.

Captain Hollys appeared to be restraining himself with some difficulty—but whether it was to castigate the Mopsies or to fling himself to his knees and hug her, she could not tell. Perhaps that was just as well, though it was very dear of him to be concerned.

“Her ladyship will be even more so when she finds you have followed me over here,” was the only observation he allowed himself, however.

“O’ course we followed you,” Lizzie told him. “’Ow else was we to find where the Lady was?”

In the face of such irreproachable logic, he merely said to Claire, “Lord Dunsmuir has sent me to escort you personally back to the Lady Lucy.” He glanced at the medical officer. “And we have dispatched a messenger to Government House by air, informing Lord Arundel of this outrage. Be assured that we will not rest until these miscreants are brought to justice.”

Ignoring Andrew’s protests, Captain Hollys offered Claire his arm and was all solicitude during the measured walk over to the Lady Lucy.

“Count von Zeppelin is fortunate that his ship is fitted out so well,” Andrew said tightly as its golden fuselage came into view. “That medical bay is the very last word in modern equipment.”

“The Landgrafin Margrethe is a military flagship,” the captain said, not relinquishing Claire’s arm in the slightest. “It was named for the count’s mother and is the crown jewel of the Prussian fleet.”

“Wot’s a Prushin?” Lizzie wanted to know.

“Prussia is the European kingdom on the other side of the English Channel, past France,” Claire told her. The cold night air was invigorating, and she was feeling much less woozy and sick. “We must add geography to your studies in mathematics, mechanics, and language arts, I see.”

“So wot’s ’e doin’ ’ere, then, this Zeppelin cove, besides getting shot at?”

“The shooting does change the answer to that quite substantially,” Andrew mused aloud.

“Perhaps it has something to do with his meeting with Lord Dunsmuir and Lord Arundel at the ball.” Claire squeezed Lizzie’s fingers to let her know that her questions had not been impertinent. “Lizzie, you have quite the discerning eye for politics.”

The eleven-year-old snorted. “’E’s a long ways from ’ome, that’s all.”

“Like we are,” Maggie put in. “Oh! Alice!”

Claire turned. “Alice?” But there she was, walking next to them, perfectly safe. “Goodness. Do not frighten me so, Maggie. I have had quite enough excitement for tonight, thank you.”

“Sorry, Lady. I only meant that a messenger come for Alice earlier, after supper. Tigg talked to ’im, and ’e said to give you this.”

She dug in the pocket of her fashionable short coat with its rounded collar and bows on each pocket. The note was crumpled, but Alice was able to read it in the lamp light from Lady Lucy’s mooring mast.

She folded it up. “I have to go, just as soon as I get out of this confounded rig.”

And without another word or a good-night or any such civility, she hurried across the field to the Stalwart Lass, hauled up her skirts, and leaped aboard without benefit of gangplank.

“Who does she know here who would be sending her notes?” Andrew wondered aloud.

“Perhaps it is someone she met at the ball.” Captain Hollys assisted Claire up the gangway into the warm familiarity of the ship. “May I do anything else for you, Lady Claire?”

“You have already done too much.” Claire gave him an equally warm smile. “Thank you for coming to our aid.”

He flushed, and would have said more, had not Maggie tugged on Claire’s cloak. “Best come and see ’er ladyship before she ’as us all skinned alive.”

Laughing, Claire allowed herself to be led into the salon, and in explaining the night’s misadventures to the Dunsmuirs, and speculating on the possible reasons for them, her questions about the author of Alice’s note completely slipped her mind.

*

Alice let out a sigh of relief as she struggled out of the corset, and resisted the temptation to kick it across the cabin. It had cost too much and was far too beautiful for such treatment. But like many such things, it was hard to live with and belonged in a closet. Besides, where she was going, it would be more of a hindrance to useful movement than anything else.

The note had been brief.

Heard a word or two on the subject you’re interested in. Come by anytime.

M.E.

She buttoned her denim pants with a sense of relief at their comfortable familiarity. After she heard what Mike Embry had to say, then maybe she could shake a leg out of this place and find somewhere she didn’t have to look at certain people queening it in high society and being handed about by handsome men, in places where certain other people didn’t belong and never would.

She shrugged on a flight jacket and rammed her Remington 44-40 into the long inside pocket. She didn’t usually go armed, but after tonight, lugging around the extra weight might prove to be worth it. When she jumped down onto the field, she nearly screamed and whipped the blessed thing out when a shadow moved under the Lass’s fuselage.

“Who’s there?”

Andrew Malvern stepped into the cone of light cast by the lamp on the mooring mast. “I beg your pardon if I startled you.”

Alice released her grip on the Remington with a sigh.

Her heart rate, however, didn’t change one bit.

“I thought you were explaining tonight’s goings-on to the countess.”

“Claire is quite capable of doing so, and in any case, it’s not likely she’ll be allowed to set foot on the ground again tonight, if her ladyship has anything to say about it.” He matched her long-legged stride even though he couldn’t know where she was going. “In fact, if Lady Lucy doesn’t lift in the morning, I’ll be very surprised. Lady Dunsmuir will not allow any danger to young Will, even if it’s five miles off.”

“And she thinks the diamond mine will be safer?”

“It is theirs. I imagine so.”

He paused to turn his head her way, but she kept her gaze resolutely forward. She could hear the plinking of a pianoforte now, so it seemed Mike hadn’t closed the Tiller yet.

“May I ask why you’re headed to the Tiller, Alice?”

She didn’t know what he was up to, traipsing around the airfield with her, and she had no business being glad about it. Maybe it was a thing men did after nearly being shot.

“I have business to take care of.”

“Would you allow me to accompany you? It does not seem safe for a young lady to be going about by herself at nearly two in the morning.”

For answer, she slid the Remington partway out of her jacket.

“Oh.” It took him a moment to recover. “You know how to use that thing?” Then he shook his head. “I’m sorry. That was stupid. Of course you do. You and Claire both know how to take care of yourselves and make yourselves useful, whereas I must be satisfied with getting in the way and being rescued repeatedly.”

She slowed under the lamps Mike had burning outside the door of the half-round pipe shape of the honkytonk.

“Of course you’re useful.” She could hardly credit what she’d heard. “You’re one of the most brilliant scientific minds in England—you heard Count von Zeppelin. Even he reads your monographs. Why on earth would you think that? It wasn’t your fault some crazypate shot at you.”

“Perhaps not.” He seemed to find the posts that held up the awning over the door highly interesting. “But the fact remains that my usefulness on this voyage has been limited to partnering ladies in the ballroom and not much else.”

“There’s men who make an entire career of that,” she said dryly. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself, man. If you’re coming in, then fine—do me a favor and keep your ears open. There are who knows how many gunmen and only two honkytonks on this quadrant of the field, if you get my meaning.”

One eyebrow rose. It was such an appealing sight that she turned away and grasped the door handle.

“You mean that there’s a fifty percent chance that whoever shot at us might have come here for a drink to celebrate?”

“See?” She grinned over her shoulder as she pushed the door open. “You’re not so useless after all.”

He straightened his shoulders and waited outside for a count of ten while she let the door swing shut behind her. When she looked again, he had come in and was making jokes with a group of mechanics.

Her idol thought he was useless. Honestly, it was no wonder she stuck to automatons. People were too hard to understand.

She bellied up to the bar and held up a finger when Mike glanced over. “Mescal?” he asked, setting a glass down in front of her.

“Not a chance. Do you have elderberry cordial?”

He snorted. “Use it for flavoring.”

“One, please.”

Shaking his head, he unearthed a bottle of cordial from beneath the bar. The smell of it reminded her of the days when she’d been a little girl, curled up in her mother’s boudoir while they waited for her pa to get home from the mine. They’d share a glass of cordial and tell silly stories and forever after, she would miss the woman her mother had been. Once her pa had gone for good, Nellie had changed her name back to Benton, found her way to Resolution, grown a carapace over her heart, and taken up the only profession open to her.

Mike filled the glass with purple liquid. “Been talking to some of the fellows hereabouts. It seems a mechanic with one blind eye was working the cargo ships a couple years ago.”

“Cargo ships? For the mines?”

Mike nodded. “Not much grows up that way, nor eats what grows neither, except for three months in summer. The cargo ships keep foodstuff and parts coming in, except for when the weather closes everything down from November to April. Seems this man was working the routes keeping the boats in the air.”

“Is he still?”

With a shrug, Mike topped up her glass, though she’d only taken a sip or two. “No telling. Other than that, I couldn’t dig up a word. Either your pa didn’t associate much, or he just ain’t been around for folks to notice.”

With a nod, she swallowed half the drink. “I appreciate your taking the time.”

“You remember what I said.”

With a smile, she repeated, “‘Tell Nellie Benton Mike Embry sends his regards.’ You ought to take a trip to Resolution, Mike, and tell her yourself. She runs the Resolute Rose—you can’t miss it. It’s the only garden of desert flowers in town.”

“I might just do that if I get tired of this place. Cold gets to me in the winter, and it’s coming on. Ships’ll be clearing out soon.”

“Clearing out?”

He stopped wiping glasses and frowned at her. “You mean the port authority didn’t tell you? Foreign ships got to lift and be out of here before the snow flies; otherwise, they’re grounded until spring.”

And the countess wanted to fly even farther north? How come nobody in their party seemed to know this? “Because of the snow?”

“Nope. The ice. Behaves peculiar-like up here. Ships get coated with it and the gas bags contract. If the foreign ships didn’t leave, we’d have a field full of ice balloons, until the weight collapsed the fuselages and crushed the gondolas under ’em. And don’t get me started on the icicle problem.”

Alice did not want to know about the icicle problem. Foreign capital or not, San Francisco was beginning to look mighty good.

“Believe me, a couple of days at the mines and I’ll be heading south for warmer winds.” She knocked back the last of the cordial, laid down a coin, and pushed away from the bar. “Thanks, Mike. I’ll write to my ma before I leave, I promise.”

“We’re square, then,” he said, nodding. “Good hunting.”

She worked her way slowly to the back, as though she were looking for someone, keeping her ears wide open to the conversations going on all about her. Most of them were about the cards—the weather—Sherwood Leduc—the latest accident in the mines.

She slowed and bent to adjust a loose bootlace.

“—couldn’t save him,” a grizzled engineer said into his beer, pushing his goggles further up on his battered hat. “He was a good friend, as miners go. Not a waste of oxygen like some.”

“Something’s gotta be done,” said the man next to him. “Dunsmuir mine’s had a good record a long time. Somebody’s behind this, you mark my words.”

“All we’ll be marking is a target on your back, you don’t keep your voice down,” another man muttered. “I say it’s Sherwood Leduc.”

The engineer snorted. “He’s small fry. A thug. You think he’s got the muscle to blow up them big engines? We’re talking serious money—and serious engineering skill.” He noticed Alice kneeling on the floor between the tables. “You lost something, missy?”

She tugged her bootlaces and stood. “Nope. Just trying to keep from falling on my face. You fellows from the Dunsmuir mine?” No answer, just a lot of black suspicion. “I’m looking for a man with one blind eye, said to work the cargo ships up that direction. Ever seen him?”

“What, did he leave you with a pup?” the man next to him said, laughing.

“Naw, I am his pup.” She grinned, as if he’d told a good joke. “Got his talent for mechanics and figured I’d try and partner up, make a living maybe.”

The engineer snorted. “You’d do better here. Mine’s no safe place for a woman.”

“A man neither,” somebody muttered. “Not lately, anyhow.”

“Oh?”

But the conversational stream, such as it was, dried up to nothing, and Alice was forced to take herself off.

Andrew waited outside. “All right, then?”

“I guess. Seems the Dunsmuirs have trouble up at their mine.”

“I got that impression as well. Something about an explosion.”

“One of the big engines—whatever that means. General feeling is it would take a lot of money and skill to pull off such a thing.”

Andrew walked beside her, his back straight, his gaze moving constantly from fuselage to wheels to gangways as they passed them. “I wonder if sabotage is a normal part of mining operations?”

“Doesn’t sound like it. They said the Dunsmuirs have a good record.”

“Until now. When they happen to be in the country, and Isobel Churchill is agitating the Esquimaux nation for indigenous rights.”

“You think them Esquimaux got that kind of money?” In her experience, the Injuns kept themselves to themselves and didn’t care much what the Territorial folks did, as long as they left them alone.

“I know nothing about them, Alice. But it might be worth a word in the earl’s ear.”

“For which he’ll tell us to mind our own business. I don’t know about you, but I ain’t getting mixed up in his affairs. All I want is to find my pa.”

“And all I want is to find the miscreants who shot at us. But the tables were silent as the grave on that subject.”

“Maybe they’re still out on the prairie, hiding.”

“Or maybe they’re professional marksmen who know how to keep their mouths shut.”

“Or maybe they were just hunters after that antelope, we got in the way, and they’re afraid to come forward and admit it.”

“I think it unlikely, Alice.”

“I know,” she sighed. “What is Claire thinking, coming to this place, anyway? Seems awful dangerous, for all its balls and fancy dress and money. At least in Resolution, I knew what was what.”

“Did you?” Now it was his turn to sigh. “I wish I knew what was what.”

“Meaning?”

Silence, during which she did not dare to look at him. It was too dark to see his face, anyway, as they passed into the massive shadow of the Landgrafin Margrethe. Fifty yards off, a pair of sentries paced back and forth before the gangway, and another patrolled the bow and mooring mast. The crew was taking no chances with the count’s safe recovery, it seemed.

“Alice—”

“Yes?”

“How soon do you plan to leave?”

“Tomorrow, I expect. Other than you nice folks, I got no reason to stay here. And I understand foreigners have to lift before the first snow, anyway, because of the ice problem.”

He had stopped, so she stopped with him, his form a darker shadow in the shadow under which they stood.

“Alice, would you object if I—”

What was he trying to get out? Great snakes, if he wanted her to take some lovelorn message to Claire, she was going to give serious consideration to whacking him on the skull with the Remington.

“Oh, dash it all, this is impossible!” he exclaimed.

Then he seized her roughly by her upper arms, and before she could even take a breath, his mouth came down on hers in a bruising kiss.

93

They were interrupted at breakfast by a messenger from the Landgrafin Margrethe, who was escorting a rather pale and silent Alice.

“Alice, do sit down and join us,” urged the countess, while Tigg jumped up from his seat and pulled her over to the table.

“I don’t want to be any trouble,” she mumbled. “This gentleman brought me over here all willy-nilly. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“You are welcome at any time of the day or night,” Lord Dunsmuir told her. “Come and sit. Sir, you have a message from Count von Zeppelin?”

The officer dragged his gaze away from Rosie the chicken, who was enjoying a biscuit and some berries on a saucer under the sideboard, and straightened as if the count himself had spoken. He clicked his heels together. “Der Landgraf has bidden me to convey to you his greetings. He inquires as to whether you are at home to visitors this morning, as he wishes to thank the young ladies and the gentleman in person for their care last evening.”

“We are indeed at home. But the count cannot mean to come over here himself when he is injured. The young ladies and Mr. Malvern will wait upon him at his convenience.”

But the man shook his head. “My lord is a man of action. If he were to put himself to bed every time he was a target, he would never get up. No, he will attend upon you here as soon as he may.”

The earl clearly knew when to back down in the face of a stronger force. “If the count would like to join us for breakfast, we should be very glad to see him.”

The officer bowed and vanished down the gangway.

“I adore the informality of this country—this airfield.” Davina returned to the table after giving the steward rapid instructions. “A request that would have been shocking in London—for who receives anyone before three in the afternoon, never mind at breakfast?—is utterly normal here.”

Claire sipped her tea and marveled at the strength of a man who could be shot in the evening and invite himself to breakfast the next morning. He was a man indeed whom any soldier would be glad to follow. “Society ladies would faint in ranks at the very thought,” she agreed.

“I am afraid the count is more likely to faint—from loss of blood,” the earl said unhappily. “I do hope he has not been hasty in attempting a visit so soon after his injury.”

“If he does faint, you will catch him, Papa,” Willie piped from his father’s lap, where they had both been engaged in dissecting several walnuts and an orange. “Will he wear his sword?”

“This is not a formal occasion, my boy.” The earl opened his mouth so that Willie could feed him a walnut meat. “We shall hold out hope for pistols, however.”

To Willie’s joy, the count was indeed armed when he arrived, though he divested himself of his twin Ruger pistols immediately upon coming into the countess’s presence, and handed guns and belt to one of his officers. When he bent over Davina’s hand, Claire saw that the bandage around his head had been replaced by a more discreet sticking plaster, partly covered by his flight cap.

“I am delighted to see you on your feet, my lord.” Instead of offering him her hand, Claire astonished herself and the whole company by rising on tiptoe and kissing him on the cheek. “I feared for you, truly.”

The count’s face reddened and Claire would have given anything to be able to drop through the floor and hide. What on earth had she been thinking?

But then she saw that his heightened color was the result of emotion, not affront.

“My officers have told me that you piloted the Daimler overland to bring me to safety, despite your own injury,” he said gruffly, blinking the moisture from his eyes. “Words express my gratitude poorly, I am afraid, but please allow me to thank you.”

“I did nothing that any friend would not.” Her own face was flaming scarlet by now—probably blotching in a most unappealing way. “Andrew risked his life in an attempt to give chase and to assist your captains, God rest their brave souls. And Alice was the one to ascertain your injuries at first and suggest a course of action.”

He pulled Alice and Andrew close and somehow managed to enfold all three of them in a hug that made up in feeling what it lacked in finesse. “I will never forget it.” He released them and cleared his throat, seating himself at last in the chair the earl held for him. “You have only to say a word and I will do anything in my power to repay my debt.”

Alice shook her head. “There is no debt, sir. Seeing you on your feet is reward enough for me—for us, if I can make so bold as to speak for Claire and—and Mr. Malvern.”

Claire could only nod in agreement, and wonder why she did not look at either of them. Both she and Andrew seemed unusually silent this morning. Had some other dreadful thing happened? But how could it? Perhaps there had been more in the note Alice had received last night than she had believed.

They settled around the table. On either side of Claire, the Mopsies seemed torn between choosing a jam for their biscuits and staring at the count. They knew the entire tale, of course, but Claire wondered whether they knew exactly who their guest was. Or perhaps they did not need to know. Perhaps it was enough for them to count him as a friend, with no trappings of rank or strings attached.

Davina passed a tray of eggs on toast to the count, and followed it with another loaded with sausages. “We have just been discussing our plans to lift today, Ferdinand. I must confess to a mother’s fears for her child’s safety. Balls and visiting and outings to the theatre are all very well, but when laid in the balance next to last night’s events, they come up very short indeed.”

“You must not blame Edmonton for last night, my dear,” the count said, putting three fat sausages on his plate. “I have long since resigned myself to the fact that there are those who do not see progress and achievement in the same light as we.”

“Perhaps not, but when they start shooting to prove their point, something must be done.”

“Believe me, something will.” He glanced at Tigg, who was cutting a sausage for Willie. “But we will not speak of it in front of the children.”

“Why not?” Lizzie asked, suddenly as prickly as a cactus at this affront to her capabilities. “The Lady ent afraid to start shooting, nor Alice—and me and Maggie, we’re not so shabby with the gaseous capsaicin, neither.”

Count von Zeppelin choked on his sausage, and while the earl clapped him on the back, Claire tried heroically not to laugh.

Lizzie seemed rather pleased to have caused such a sensation. Maggie elbowed her and spoke up. “Jake’s the Lady’s second cos Snouts ent ’ere, so ’e can fire the lightning rifle when ’e’s got it. Even our Willie’s done his duty as a scout when ’e’s ’ad to. None of us is little babies in prams.” She considered for a moment, then added, “Sir.”

The count drained half his coffee and gave a mighty swallow. “I consider myself corrected, and look forward to discovering exactly what is this gaseous capsaicin, to say nothing of lightning rifles.”

“Don’t forget the firelamps, Lizzie,” Willie said. “I like those the best.”

Davina stared at him. “What on earth…?”

“Getting back to our plans,” Claire interjected hastily, “I should be glad to go to the mine sooner rather than later. His lordship has been telling us of the great engines in use there to drill down to where the diamonds are embedded. I should like very much to see them.”

“From what I hear, sooner is better than later,” Alice said, and told them about the danger of the ice. “We’d have to lift and be out of here pretty soon, anyway,” she finished, “considering the snow will fly any day now.”

“Then let me tell you what my men have discovered,” the count said with a long look at the Mopsies, who smiled sunny smiles and addressed themselves at last to the jam pots. “They returned to the scene at first light and were able to discover where the gunmen lay as they fired.”

“Were there shell casings?” Alice asked.

“Alas, no. These weapons do not seem to depend on powder or brass, but rather on air pressure. The grass was flattened in a fan shape for ten feet, and there were depressions in the soil as though a large weapon had stood there. And they found one of these buried in the bank opposite the wreckage of my captains’ landau.” He dug in the pocket of his uniform jacket and held up the strangest projectile Claire had ever seen.

It was shaped like a bullet, but it had a tiny engine and propeller on its stern. Its nose was pushed in, likely from impact with earth instead of flesh. Her mind’s eye reconstructed what had happened in a flash. “That’s why we heard no report,” she exclaimed. “If they are using some kind of air gun, and the projectile’s speed is enhanced with an engine, it could do its damage silently.”

“And if it hits its target,” Andrew said slowly, “death is unavoidable, considering its size. You could conceivably drop a bear in one shot with one of these, could you not?” He took the projectile gingerly, examined it, then handed it to Tigg. “Was there any—Tigg, what are you doing? That is not yours.”

For Tigg had picked up his unused butter knife and had begun removing the screws holding the engine in place. His fingers were nimble, his actions precise, and before the count could say yea or nay, the tiny engine had been removed and an even tinier compartment revealed in the body of the projectile.

Yellow liquid drained out, and in less than a second, a slender plume of smoke rose as it ate its way through the bottom half of the casing and into the mahogany dining table. The countess gasped as Tigg pushed away from the table so hard he knocked his chair over. Andrew grabbed the heavy porcelain gravy boat and caught the dribble of acid when it ate its way through to the underside. Sinking into the gravy, the liquid seemed to extinguish itself.

“Mr. Andersen,” the countess called in a voice that did not resemble her own, “remove the gravy, if you please, and return with a ceramic container and some gloves.”

“Looks like an effective way to get rid of the evidence,” Alice said, her gaze locked on the hole in the table. “Can’t imagine there’d be many survivors, either, and the body’s liquids would neutralize it.”

“Fiendish device,” the earl snarled. The countess had already hustled Willie over to the window seat, half a sausage still in his chubby hand.

The count snapped something in Prussian to his aides, and when the chief steward returned with a freshly scrubbed thunder mug, they waited until what was left of the projectile had been deposited within, and removed the damaged leaf from the table.

“Tigg, the engine, too,” Claire said. “There might be traces of acid left on it.”

“There’s summat here, Lady. Lemme get a good squint at it.” He carried the engine casing over to the window of the salon.

“Tigg, I must insist—”

He looked up. “Lady, wot’s M-A-M-W spell?”

Maggie made a face. “Nuffink.”

Lizzie nudged her. “Wot, you know all the words in the world now?”

“No, but I know that ent one, unless you got a mouth full o’ toffee.”

“Maggie is quite correct,” Claire said, cautiously examining the interior of the tiny engine’s housing. “It is not a word. These are initials, most likely indicating the maker.”

“Perhaps if we discover who made this so small engine,” Count von Zeppelin said grimly, “we may discover who tried to assassinate me.”

*

Andrew had never passed a more uncomfortable hour in all his life. It was worse even than sitting the board examinations for the Royal Society of Engineers—at least there, he had been prepared and had a good idea of what to say once he took his seat opposite his examiners.

With women, one never knew what to do—and when one did something, it was inevitably wrong.

He had wanted to apologize profusely last night, there in the Margrethe’s huge shadow, for his ungentlemanly conduct. He didn’t know what he expected from Alice upon being kissed—a modest shrug, a chummy laugh at his stupidity, a return to their cordiality—but it wasn’t what he got.

Alice’s lips had parted in surprise, and then she had melted in his arms—for about five seconds. Then she’d come to herself with a shocked noise in her throat, pushed away, and fled into the dark so fast that by the time he’d emerged into the light of the mooring mast, he could no longer see her.

Or apologize.

Or figure out what on earth was the matter with him for treating her in such a fashion.

Because was he not promised to Claire—in his heart at least, if not in words acknowledged on both sides? What madness had seized him and compelled him to kiss a woman whom he respected as a fellow engineer and liked immensely as a person? Because such a stupid move was bound to shatter both respect and liking on her side. If she and Claire should happen to exchange confidences, then the jig was well and truly up, because he would not blame either of them in the least for giving him the air and sending him on his sorry way.

Stop lying to yourself, man. You know why you kissed her.

No. He was not that much of a cad.

You kissed Alice because Ian Hollys kissed Claire.

He hadn’t. That was ridiculous.

It was a jealousy kiss. And you used your friend poorly.

Oh, sweet mercy.

If he could have flung himself down the gangway and never come back, he would have. But no. He had to sit at this breakfast table and smile and smile, and be a villain—and see her opposite, pale and having clearly spent a sleepless night on his account.

He could not meet her eyes. The fact that she could not meet his, either, was almost a relief.

Claire handed the projectile’s engine casing to the count, who pocketed it. “Here is what I propose,” he said. “John, you and Davina plan to lift this morning, taking Lady Claire and Mr. Malvern along with you to the mine?”

“We do,” his lordship said.

“I’m going that way, too,” Alice said quietly. “I got a lead on my pa last night from a man who used to know my ma. He says pa might’ve been working the cargo ships up there, so I’m going to see where that takes me.”

“Excellent.” Count von Zeppelin nodded briskly. “I will leave an officer and six men here to make inquiries while I go also to the mine. I believe our discussions at Government House may bear fruit, but they need more in the way of tending, do you not agree, John?”

What discussions? Andrew would give a good deal to know what the two nobles had to talk about besides the merits of efficient flight, but that was none of his business.

“So we shall be a flotilla, then?” Claire asked with a smile. “An impressive sight, to be sure. One almost wishes one could watch from the ground.”

“I don’t.” Davina adjusted Willie’s sailor collar gently, and touched his cheek. “The sooner we lift, the happier I shall be.”

“One thing, though,” Alice said diffidently. “I’m going to need a navigator. The automatons are all very well, but they don’t read charts.”

“I do.” Jake lifted his head like a pointer scenting a pheasant. “I’ll go wiv you.”

“Me too,” Tigg said. “You’ll need someone in the engine compartment who ’as a foggy clue about ’ow to work the Lady’s power cell. And since you ent got a replacement steam engine yet, that would be me.”

“Power cell?” The count’s hawklike gaze stooped upon Tigg, who took a breath and bore up bravely under it.

“Aye,” he said. “It got kidnapped ’ere by—” Claire cleared her throat and Tigg changed course without missing a beat. “—by mischance and we put it in the Stalwart Lass when ’er engine burned up in midair.”

It was fortunate the count did not wear a monocle, for it would have fallen out when his eyebrows rose under his cap in astonishment. “Was sagst du? How extraordinary. You must tell me this adventure sometime soon. Tonight at dinner, perhaps.”

“Dinner in midair?” Maggie asked. “’Ow we gonna get from one ship to another?”

“The Firstwater mine is not far, as the crow flies, Maggie,” Davina said with a smile. “If we leave before noon, we shall reach it by sunset, even with the days as short as they are now.”

The count glanced over his shoulder, and one of his aides sprang to his side. Andrew didn’t know much Prussian, but it seemed he was giving instructions for the dinner party. He suppressed a sigh. Once again, it seemed, he would have to face Alice across a table. He must resolve this, and sooner rather than later.

As soon as he figured out how.

“Master Tigg,” Lord Dunsmuir said, “are you prepared to abandon your post so soon?”

“My … post, sir?” Tigg looked from his lordship to Alice in some confusion.

“I believe you were to sign on as midshipman to the Lady Lucy, Tigg,” Claire said gently. “Have you changed your mind?”

“No, I ent … but Lady, Alice needs me. Four could’ve ’elped, but ’e ’s an engine housing now.”

“I would not shanghai you if you have a prior commitment, Tigg,” Alice said. “I’ll manage with Jake.”

Andrew could not imagine her flying the Lass with fewer than three in her crew. This was absurd. “I will go as chief engineer,” he blurted. “I know that cell as well as Tigg, and you cannot fly with so few. Besides, we have already been attacked once. Each ship should have someone aboard who can fire a gun.”

“That would be us,” Lizzie announced. “If the Lady makes us some capsaiceous bombs, we can take ’em with us.”

Alice had gone as white as the damask tablecloth. “The girls will help me, Mr. Malvern. I won’t trouble you.”

“Nonsense.” The count looked her in the eye, and if it were possible, her skin paled even further. “As a personal favor to me, Fraulein Alice, I beg you to accept Herr Malvern’s assistance. I wish to continue our discussions of automata over dinner this evening, and if something were to prevent it, I should be most distressed.”

“Nothing will prevent it, sir,” she managed. “But—”

“Good. It is settled, then. Shall we lift at eleven o’clock? I will notify the port authority.”

And so it was done.

Andrew would have an entire day within the cramped confines of the Stalwart Lass with three children who all had a bad habit of popping up when one least wanted them. The possibility of seeing Alice alone for even a moment to apologize for his behavior seemed more remote than ever. And yet, the prospect of five hundred miles of strained white politeness was unendurable.

Something would have to give.

94

“Claire.” Alice put a hand on Claire’s sleeve, and even through the fine batiste, her fingers felt chilled. “You have to help me.”

“Of course.” After transferring Rosie to her left shoulder, Claire tucked Alice’s cold hand into the crook of her arm and drew her into her cabin, where her valise sat packed and ready for lift. She had packed it before breakfast, having a feeling that Davina’s concern for Willie’s safety would carry the day. “What is it?”

“You have to fly with me, and manage the engine. I can’t—we have to—” She broke off with a gasp that sounded almost like a sob. “Please.”

Was this Alice? Had someone switched her sensible, down-to-earth friend with this pale woman whose hands were now tucked into her armpits as if she had an ague?

“Alice, whatever is the matter? Here, sit by me.” Claire put Rosie on the bedside table and sat on the velvet coverlet of her bunk, but Alice did not. Instead, she paced from door to porthole and back again.

Rosie shot her a gimlet glare and proceeded to preen her feathers.

“I can’t sit. I feel ready to fly out of my skin. I wish I’d never come here. I wish I’d gone when I wanted to go, and not let hope flamboozle me into staying. Hope will kill you every time, Claire, like a rattler on a rock.”

“You are not entirely making sense,” she said gently. “Please, dear. What has happened?”

“I can’t tell you,” Alice moaned. “But you have to come with me. I can’t fly all that way with him, whether the girls are aboard or not.”

Claire’s eyes widened as the real source of her friend’s agitation became clear. A strange, chilly feeling settled in her stomach. “You mean … Mr. Malvern?”

Alice leaned her forehead on the panels of the bed cabinet. “Yes, Mr. Malvern,” she said into the glossy wood. “Who else?”

“Did something happen last night? Has there been some other trouble?”

A huff of breath might have passed for a laugh. “Trouble. Yeah. Only I would see it as trouble. Any other woman with a lick of sense might have enjoyed it, but me? I’m a darned fool.”

The chilly feeling solidified into certainty. Claire was no mathematician, but she could put two and two together as well as the next person. Speaking aloud the sum of her conclusions was another matter.

“He escorted me over to the Tiller,” Alice said, turning to lean a shoulder on the cabinet. “I talked with Mike, and then we came back. And under the Margrethe, in the shadow, he—he—”

“He kissed you?” Claire whispered.

“Yes!” Alice wailed, and flung herself down on the bunk, burying her face in Claire’s shoulder. “I know it was wrong, but I liked it! Until I thought about him, and you, and what a mess it all is, and so I—I ran away.” She sighed, and sat up, swiping the flat of her hand over her cheek.

Claire’s face felt stiff. But this was ridiculous. She herself had been kissed by another man last evening, and had been just as confused as Alice was now. Was she such a dog in the manger that she could begrudge Andrew’s giving a kiss when she had been guilty of accepting one with every appearance of enjoying it?

She could not say such things. Better to let her friend talk away her burden, and keep her own secrets and shortcomings to herself. “Alice, do you care for him?”

“I don’t know. I admire him. He can’t care for me, that’s certain. He was only amusing himself. I know that. Why else would he …?”

“How can you be so sure? After your appearance in that gown last night, I know he sees you differently.”

“I don’t want to be seen like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like … like some fragile porcelain shepherdess in a pretty gown, who needs to be protected and escorted and wrapped in cotton wool when she’s put away at night.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t—”

“I’ll tell you for true, he never thought about kissing me before he saw me in that dress.”

Put like that, Claire could hardly argue. “He sees you as a woman, perhaps, not as a mechanic in pants and flight goggles. There is nothing wrong with that.”

“Shouldn’t make any difference. I’m still me, whether I’ve got grease on my face, or powder.”

“You’re quite right, it shouldn’t.” She squeezed Alice’s shoulders and made a decision. “Cheer up. We’re both in the same boat. Captain Hollys kissed me last night, too, and very thoroughly at that.”

Alice sat up straight and gaped at her. “He did? When?”

“At the ball. A moment later I came in from the terrace and found you, and then we met Peony.”

“No wonder you were all colored up. I just thought you’d been dancing.” She huffed another breath, of discovery this time. “So you and Mr. Malvern …?”

Now it was Claire’s turn to lay her cheek on Alice’s shoulder. “I don’t know. I honestly don’t. I don’t even understand myself. How can I enjoy another man’s kiss when all this time I thought I cared for Andrew?”

“Thought? You mean you don’t?”

“Of course I do.” Oh, how could she explain her feelings? They were feelings, not theories or maps or anything else that could be understood and put into words. “I admire him enormously, and like him. He is my friend, the person I trust with my very life. But the trouble is, I can say all those things of you, too.”

A smile flickered over Alice’s lips, then went out.

“I care—I must,” Claire said, half to herself, “or I would not have felt such jealousy a moment ago, when you told me he’d kissed you.”

“Claire, please say I haven’t hurt you. I couldn’t bear it. It was so sudden, and—and it was my first time, and—”

“I know what you mean. Andrew was my first kiss, too.”

“We’ll have to form a club.”

That startled her into a laugh. Rosie, who had settled onto the nightstand in sphinx-like repose, looked alarmed until Claire passed a soothing hand over her feathers. “You have not hurt me. If anything, you’ve made me see something about myself that I hadn’t before.”

“And what’s that? We both have excellent taste in men?”

Another smile. “That … and the fact that we can admire the same man and still be friends.” How was that possible? If the flickers were any authority to go by, they should hate each other. “That’s rather remarkable, don’t you think?”

Alice nodded. Her hands, which had been clasped tightly in her lap, relaxed. “You don’t hate me? Because I’ve seen some pretty ugly things at the Resolute Rose, when two of the girls both wanted the same man.”

“I admit, I have been feeling a little jealous since we left Reno, which is ridiculous. I am not proud of it. You and I have seen some dreadful things together. I should think—Alice, I hope—that this would strengthen our regard, not cause us to hate one another.”

Alice hugged her. “You’re a peach.”

“And so are you.”

“But meanwhile, here I am with five hundred miles of sky to deal with.”

“I imagine Andrew is every bit as agitated about this as you are. Perhaps it will be a relief to know that I would rather act as your engineer than sit on the Lady Lucy staring out the window wondering how the girls are doing. We might even send a message to the count suggesting that he give Andrew a working tour of the Margrethe. After all, we do not know if he will get another opportunity.”

“I knew you would help me.”

“Didn’t you tell me once that we women must stick together?”

“I meant it.”

“And so do I.” Claire got up and extended a hand to pull Alice to her feet. “Come. Rosie and I will help you pack. I do not think all of your new clothes are going to fit into your locker on the Lass, so we will have to ask Davina if you may borrow a trunk.”

*

The Mopsies were delighted that they were to have the Lady practically to themselves for the flight to the diamond fields … though by the fourth hour, when it appeared they would not be called upon to defend the ship, they began to get restless.

“How much further?” Lizzie whined, gazing down at the endless stretch of land far below, covered in thin pines and punctuated occasionally by a lake or a river. “There ent a thing down there but trees.”

“And reindeer,” Maggie put in, pointing. “There’s another ’erd.”

“They call them caribou in these parts,” Alice said. “That’s a big herd. Must be thousands of them.”

“I do hope Davina does not want to put down and shoot one.” Claire came to join her at the window as they sailed over the enormous running flow of animals, which swerved under the airships’ three shadows and galloped in the opposite direction.

But the Lady Lucy did not alter her elevation, merely kept a steady speed and an unchanging heading of north by west.

Lizzie wandered back toward the engine, and a moment later popped back into the gondola. “Alice—we gots a pigeon coming.”

“A pigeon,” Alice repeated blankly. “Where on earth from? There is nothing here for miles.”

“It dropped out of the Land-whatsit’s belly, behind us. Maybe the count will fly over and visit.”

“Lizzie, the count is hardly likely to strap on a rocket pack at his age,” Claire said, smiling at the picture. “It is probably a message between captains.”

But it was not.

When the pigeon tucked itself into its landing bay, Alice pulled the pouch out of its belly and read the piece of paper within. Then, her lips thinning, she handed it to Claire and stalked forward to relieve a protesting Jake at the tiller.

Dear Alice,

In the absence of a single moment alone with you, and in the face of Claire’s sudden change of mind, I have contrived to communicate in this rather unusual manner. The count is a gracious host, and his pigeons being otherwise unoccupied, he has allowed me the use of one.

I wish to apologize for my behavior of last night. It was unpardonable and you have every right not to speak to me.

However, I hope that in time you will find it in your heart to forgive me. I should not like to see you take to the skies knowing that you had not.

Sincerely,

Andrew Malvern

Claire folded the letter under Lizzie’s inquisitive gaze. “I beg yer pardon, wot’s ’at?”

“It is a letter to Alice, and none of our business.”

“But she gave it to you to read.”

Drat Lizzie’s logical mind. “She did. It is from Mr. Malvern, on the Margrethe.”

Lizzie’s jaw dropped a little. “Mr. Malvern is sendin’ our Alice letters in the middle of the sky? Is ’e in love wiv ’er, now, and not you?”

Good heavens. “Lizzie, for pity’s sake, where on earth do you get your ideas?”

“Tisn’t an idea, is it, Mags?” She appealed to her sister, who was sitting at the map station cutting up a slab of chocolate with Jake’s knife. “Mr. Malvern’s sweet on t’Lady, innit?”

Alice’s back became ramrod straight as she tipped the wheel a degree to port, following the course of the Lady Lucy ahead of them.

“Aye.” Maggie handed Jake a piece, then Lizzie and Claire. “Want some chocolate, Alice? It’s ever so fine.”

To Claire’s relief, Alice released the wheel long enough to take some. “If you nosy nellies are done discussing my letter, you might clear out and let Jake see his charts. I want this route plotted before we moor, in case I ever need to come back.”

Maggie cleared away the chocolate—after carving off several healthy chunks—and Claire saw that Jake had been plotting their route all along. Careful notes had been made in his laborious capital letters, following the land forms.

“Well done, Jake,” she said with honest admiration.

His cheeks reddened. “I done it for Alice,” he mumbled as he drew a careful line to the side of a curving river. “I remember wot the charts and the land look like, but she don’t.”

“His memory is prodigious,” Claire told Alice. “It is almost as though his brain takes a photograph, with all its detail. If he can see something, he remembers it.”

“Wish I had that talent,” Alice said. “Would’ve come in handy in the schoolroom back when.”

“Ent never been to school,” Jake said, “’cept lately, when the Lady made us—er,” he corrected himself with a hasty look at her, “—helped us learn our letters and numbers.”

“You can be glad she did, then,” Alice told him. “Navigation means reading a lot of letters and numbers, not just clouds and land forms. It means filling out forms at the port authority and sending messages on pigeons to other captains.” She paused. “If a man intends to be legal, anyway. Ned Mose never held much truck with letters and forms. Quickest way to get permission, in his mind, was to wave a pistol.”

“I ent plannin’ to be like Ned Mose.”

“Glad to hear it. Me neither. Stand watch, please. It can’t be long now.”

“Aye, Captain.” Jake finished a last notation and resumed his duty with the solemnity of a career military man commanding a bridge the size of the Margrethe’s.

“Lady, look.” Maggie pointed out the window off the bow. “Izzat smoke?”

Claire helped herself to a second piece of chocolate and joined her at the window. As she did, the Lady Lucy dipped in the air and suddenly they were looking down upon the top of her great golden fuselage.

“The Dunsmuirs have begun their descent,” Alice said.

“I see them.” Jake reached over and made a note on the chart while Alice flipped a series of switches. “Seven and Eight, stand by. Claire, I’ll need you at the engine to decrease power from your cell.”

“Aye, Captain.”

“But Lady, the smoke—”

“Maggie, I’m sure it is safe.” Claire cast an anxious look over her shoulder at the thick plume, which must be huge, considering how far away from it they were. “Come with me. Lady Dunsmuir would never put Willie in jeopardy,” she said as they walked back to the engine. “You must remember we are going to a mine, where there are engines working and digging in the earth.” She had only the vaguest knowledge of what went on at a mine, but surely she could safely say this much. “It is likely a plume of dust, or smoke from those engines.”

Maggie looked doubtful, but when Claire required her assistance at the switches, she seemed much more interested in ordering Seven about than in asking any more questions.

After all, nothing was managed better than a Dunsmuir holding, was that not what Captain Hollys had said?

The only thing they had to fear this far north was catching a chill.

95

The Firstwater Mine had its own landing field, of course, for the cargo ships and the Lady Lucy, a short distance from what appeared to be a town and the vast open pit that was the mine itself. As the Lass was moored to its mast by the ground crew, Alice saw that a dun-colored ship with no name, merely a string of letters and numbers on its fuselage, was already moored some distance away.

“No, you may not go to the edge and look down,” her ladyship informed Willie as they disembarked. “It is far too dangerous. That is why it is surrounded by a palisade.”

“Chin up, son.” The earl tossed the boy in the chilly air and then set him on his shoulders, where he clutched his father’s ears and giggled. “We shall tour the mine tomorrow, and you may come along. One day you will be running this empire. We must waste no time in making you familiar with it.”

A party of men approached in a vehicle that rumbled and hissed and emitted great clouds of steam.

“Same traveling mechanism as my locomotive tower,” Alice said in a low tone to Claire. “The continuous track is more stable than wheels when the river keeps washing out the road.”

“Let us hope they do not have that problem here. My goodness, it is cold. If this is what it is like in October, I shudder to think of January.”

The men disembarked and introductions were made all around. The driver of the enormous vehicle turned out to be Reginald Penhaven, the managing director of the mine, and his eyes were anxious as he turned his fur cap in both hands.

“You’ll have seen the smoke, then, your lordship?”

“I have,” Lord Dunsmuir said gravely. “It’s visible for fifty miles. What happened?”

“One of the diggers was sabotaged. It took three engines with hoses to put out the fire, and the digger is beyond repair. That leaves us with four, sir.”

“Four? We have—had—six, did we not?”

“We did, sir. You’ll recall we had the same kind of trouble a month ago, sir.”

“And you have apprehended the culprits?”

Penhaven’s hands tightened so much on his cap that it bent between them. “Despite best efforts at investigating, sir, and a doubled watch on the vehicle yard, we have not, sir. Though we have our suspicions.”

His lordship bent a long, thoughtful gaze upon him. To the man’s credit, he didn’t quail or look aside, but swallowed and kept his chin up and his return gaze level.

John Dunsmuir shook himself and seemed to come to a decision. “We will meet in the office in an hour.”

Count von Zeppelin stepped forward, and Alice realized that the other occupants of the vehicle had been nudging each other and murmuring among themselves since the great inventor had been introduced. “Once you have concluded your business, I should like to propose dinner on the Margrethe this evening,” he said. “I would be pleased if Herr Penhaven and his officers could join us, as well as your family, Dunsmuir, and the crew of the Stalwart Lass. Shall we say eight o’clock?”

“I would not hear of it, Count,” Lady Dunsmuir said. “The mess hall here is not ornate, but it will accommodate all of us and more. There is no need to put your crew to any trouble on our account.”

“It is no trouble, good lady, it is an honor,” he said gallantly. “I insist. I would like to join you on your tour tomorrow, and then the day following, I must lift and make my way back over the sea. I have been away from my home these four months, and the Baroness will be growing anxious. So you see, I must seize my opportunity to issue an invitation while I can.”

“You are very gracious,” she said. “We would be delighted to join you.”

Oh, no. Alice leaned over enough to murmur, “Claire, does that mean…?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so. Full evening dress. Isn’t it fortunate we packed your blue gown so carefully? It will not have had time to become crushed.”

Alice groaned. She’d had enough of formal occasions this week to last her for the rest of her life. “I’ll just go to the mess hall with the men. No one will miss me, and I need to find out if anyone’s seen my pa.”

“Indeed you shall not.” Claire gripped the sleeve of her flight jacket as if she thought Alice planned to cut and run that very moment. “Don’t you remember what the count said? He wishes to discuss your automatons more at dinner. I should think he, at least, would miss you. As would I.”

“Miss you?” Alice’s stomach dipped and steadied at Andrew’s voice behind them. “Are you going somewhere, Alice?”

“I was going to try,” she said with some asperity. “Th—thank you for your letter, Mr. Malvern. I accept your apology, though none was needed.”

Lizzie tugged on the skirt of the canvas coat he had bought in Edmonton to replace the one lost in the Texican Territory. “Are you in love with our Alice?”

“Lizzie!” Claire pulled her away. “That is none of your business.”

“But we just—”

“Never mind, Lizzie,” Alice said, and extended a hand. “I wonder if you’d come along with me to the cargo ship? Jake, too. I want a word with the watch, and it seems like this is my only chance.”

“I’ll escort you,” Andrew said promptly.

“No, thank you, Mr. Malvern,” she said as steadily as she could. Her heart was jumping in her chest like a fish on a line, but the fact that the very word escort set her teeth on edge went a long way to settling that down. “My navigator will come with me. I don’t want too large a party. Makes it hard to ask questions.”

“I’m good at ferreting out things,” Lizzie said happily. “Maggie’s coming too, ent she?”

Alice couldn’t imagine the two of them being separated for any reason. “If she likes.”

Lady Dunsmuir looked over her shoulder. “Claire, are you coming with us?”

“I shall catch you up, Davina, in just a moment.” She leaned over and whispered something to Mr. Malvern that made him straighten and put a cautioning hand on her arm. With a shake of the head, she said, “Maggie, would you come with me, please?”

Maggie hesitated between Claire and Alice, clearly torn. “But Lizzie’s going wiv Alice.”

“Because Alice needs her. And I need you.” She raised her eyebrows in a way that caused understanding to dawn on Maggie’s face.

Some wordless communication occurred between the twins, and before you could say Jack Robinson, Maggie was tripping off with Claire and Andrew, meek as a lamb.

Lizzie looked positively gleeful as she trotted alongside Alice and Jake.

“What just happened there, young lady?” Alice asked her, only half joking. “Do you have some kind of mental telegraph that lets you talk without words?”

“No, ’course not. Wot’s a telegraph?”

“It’s a device for messages,” Jake informed her. Then he said to Alice, “T’Lady wants Maggie for some scoutin’, same as I expect you do for Liz.”

“I do not,” Alice protested. “I just thought she could come along as some—some cover, you might say. Men tend not to suspect women and children, and I figured they might be freer with their conversation, that’s all.”

“So why am I going?”

They were nearly to the cargo ship, and the watch appeared to have figured out they were about to have company.

“Because you are my crew,” she said simply. “And I need a good hand on the ground as well as in the air.”

Jake could not have looked more pleased if she had told him he was going to get his own ship.

“Hallo, the ship!” she called, taking Lizzie’s hand in a sisterly fashion. “Captain Alice Chalmers of the Stalwart Lass, and navigator, at your service.”

“Bob Grundage, botswain of cargo ship one-oh-seven, at yours,” the man guarding the gangway responded. “This here’s my friend Joe Stanton, and that there is his brother Alan. And who’s this, might I ask?”

Lizzie gave him a sunny smile. “I’m Lizzie.”

“Well, Lizzie, you and your captain are a darned sight politer—not to mention prettier—than some folks I could name. What’s your business here?”

“We came with the Dunsmuirs’ party,” Alice said, releasing Lizzie’s hand. The little girl drifted away, looking up at the cargo ship’s plain canvas fuselage with something akin to awe, as if she’d never seen such a magnificent one. “But my purpose here is a little more personal. You boys been flying the cargo ships long?”

“Long enough,” Bob said, lighting a cigarillo. Its acrid smoke smelled familiar. Ned Mose had smoked the same kind during his rare moments of leisure. “If you’re looking for a job for your young man there, you’re out of luck. Ships’re crewed out of Edmonton.”

“Good to know,” Alice said easily. “Matter of fact, I’m looking for a man and wondered if you might have seen him. About your age, with one blind eye. Was a mechanic—a pretty talented one, if my information is right. Ring a bell?”

Bob glanced at Joe, then released a cloud of smoke and shook his head. “Nope.”

“Might not be recent. Maybe a year ago or more?”

Again the glance and the shake of the head. “Nope. Sorry.”

Alice saw Jake frown and crane his neck, looking for Lizzie, who had managed to drift out of sight.

Alan hawked and spat on the gravel. “We’re expecting a convoy any day now, to start taking the miners’ families out before the snow flies. You might have better luck then if you’re still around.”

Joe waved the smoke away as it drifted in front of his face. “What’s your business with him?”

“He’s my pa, I think.” Alice gave the same story she’d given Mike, which might or might not be true, depending on how events played out. “If you hear of him, maybe you could let them know at the mine, and they’ll get word to me.”

“Chummy with the Dunsmuirs, are you?” Bob asked. “Ain’t many can say that.”

“I’m chummy with friends of theirs,” Alice said cautiously. “Can’t have too many friends up in these parts, I’d think.”

“You’re right there.” Bob tossed his cigarillo to the gravel and ground it out with the heel of his boot. “Well, it’s back to work for us.”

Alice could take a hint as well as the next person. “Nice talking to you.”

She moved off, and Jake followed her, his hands in his pants pockets, cool as you please. “Where is she?” Alice murmured out of the side of her mouth.

“Behind a bunch of crates near the gangway. Any minute now …”

They got halfway across the field between the cargo ship and Lady Lucy when they heard a shout. Turning, they saw Alan leading Lizzie by the hand as if she were four years old and they were learning to cross the street.

“Captain Chalmers, looks like you forgot something,” he called.

“Sorry, Alice,” Lizzie said in a breathless voice about five years younger than her normal one. “That ship is just so big I couldn’t resist seeing if it were as grand inside.”

“Lizzie, you rascal.” Alice shot an apologetic look at Alan. “I appreciate this, sir. She loves the airships. I can’t keep her out of them.”

He laughed and handed Lizzie over. “She reminds me of my granddaughters back home. Their mother can’t take ’em into the big houses with the laundry, without them running upstairs to see how the rich folks live.”

Alice laughed, as if she could see it. “You sound like a Texican man. What part? I’m from down Resolution way, myself.”

“Santa Fe is where I hang my—” He was cut off by a yell from his companions. “Nice talkin’ to you. Good-bye, Lizzie. Stay out of trouble, you hear?” He jogged back the way he had come.

“Alice, they—”

“Not yet, Lizzie. Wait until we’re back on the Lass, if you please.”

She hustled them aboard and made sure the gondola hatch was good and shut.

“What’s the matter, Alice?” Lizzie wanted to know. “You’re awf’ly pale.”

Alice chewed the inside of her cheek. “Maybe I’m making a river out of a raindrop. Maybe it’s nothing that don’t happen all the time up here. But I’d sure like to know what Texican men are doing aboard a ship this far north in the Canadas.”

“I’ll tell you wot they’re doin’,” Lizzie said. “They’re tellin’ you fibs.”

Alice nodded at her to go on.

“Soon’s you were out o’ earshot the fat one said to that Bob, ‘Better send word someone’s askin’ about ’im’ and Bob says ‘Maybe she’s kin, maybe she’s not’ and then the one ’oo brought me over, ’e says, ‘We don’t owe them dadburned toffs nothing but a distraction’ and then they saw me sneaking up the gangway an’ that were that. Wot’s dadburned?”

Alice felt her stomach go cold, and goosebumps broke out on her arms.

“Summat you don’t need to say,” Jake informed her. “Sounds to me like they’re talking about someone ’oo’s actually ’ere. They know a man wi’ one blind eye.”

“It does, don’t it?” Alice said slowly. “But send word to who? Him or someone else? Why make such a secret of telling me where he is? And what kind of distraction?”

“And ’ere’s summat,” Lizzie said, digging in her pocket and removing a small piece of brass. “Look wot I found behind them crates, dadburn it.”

Jake cuffed her, but there was no energy in it. He took the object and frowned. “This ’ere’s a bullet casing. Not a bitsy engine casing like wot got shot at the count, but look.” He held the object up to the light from the gondola’s viewing windows. “M.A.M.W.”

“It must be an arms manufacturer, like Colt or Sharps,” Alice said. “But it doesn’t prove anything. Those bullets could be sold all over the territory.”

“P’raps.” Jake pocketed the casing. “T’Lady ought to know anyhow.”

Alice nodded slowly. “And I’d give a lot to know what the ‘toffs’ are going to talk about in that meeting.”

“Just wait,” Jake told her. “Our Maggie won’t let us down.”

96

It did not take long to learn the lie of the land, but that did not ease Claire’s frustration in the least. On closer inspection, what she had thought to be a town turned out to be a series of long sheds set into the ground, so that one had to descend a staircase in order to enter each one. The mess hall hunkered in the center, and arrayed in neat rows around it were housing for the miners, supply sheds, the mine offices, and management quarters, as well as what she was informed were wash houses, equipment sheds, and storage.

“There’s no shortage of water here, of course,” said the young engineer who had been seconded by Lady Dunsmuir to show Claire and Andrew around. “Those larger buildings there contain great steam engines that produce heat and electricks for housing and offices.”

“But why is everything set into the ground?” Andrew asked.

“Because of the storms and the cold, of course,” the young man said, as if this should have been obvious. “The ground may freeze as hard as iron, but at least it’s some protection from the gales from the north. If we didn’t build this way, homes and offices would be torn from their foundations during the winter, and we’d arrive in the spring to nothing but debris. The Firstwater Mine is like an iceberg, you see—ninety percent underground—and that includes the settlement as well.”

Claire nibbled on the inside of her lip to stop herself from telling the young man he was boring her to tears, and could they return to the office where the meeting was, please?

“Lady.” Maggie tugged on her skirt. “Lady, I’ve got to—to—” She rounded her eyes in a wordless plea.

“Sir, thank you for a most informative tour,” Claire said at once. “But I am very much afraid my ward and I must find a powder room posthaste.”

He blushed scarlet, and pointed. “L-lady Dunsmuir’s powder room is in that row there, third stair from the end. I’ll take y—”

“I wonder if I might prevail upon you to tell me more of the engineering side of mining?” Andrew put in smoothly, taking his arm and walking on.

The young man looked over his shoulder in some distress, but Claire took care that he should see nothing but a lady hustling a child to the nearest facilities. “Well done, Maggie.”

“I weren’t fibbing. I’m fit to burst.”

They located the indicated door without difficulty, and found the tastefully appointed powder room empty. And what luck—somewhere in the neighborhood was where the meeting was to be held, if the gentlemen milling about in the square outside were any indication.

When she and Maggie had completed their ablutions, Claire whispered, “We must find a way to hear what they’re saying. See if we might get into the ceiling.”

But they could not. On one side, the single window was at ground level, the ceiling not much higher. Other than the door, there was no other exit.

Behind her, Maggie opened the other lavatory stall, and drew in such a sharp breath that Claire turned. “Lady, look. This ent a loo at all.”

Expecting to see a sink or cleaning supplies, Claire was intrigued to see an empty cubicle, neatly paneled in wood. “I cannot imagine her ladyship ordering this for mere entertainment. Do you suppose it is something like the hidden closet you found at home?”

A few taps upon the panels revealed its dimensions, and it was only the work of a moment to spring the latch. A set of steps descended even deeper into the ground. “Maggie, you are a treasure. Where do you suppose these go?”

“Dunno. Let’s find out.”

Cold air breathed up from the depths, and Claire was glad once more that they had both worn coats. The steps were clean and well kept, which meant this passage was not secret, and was even regularly used. A thin line of electricks glowed along the ceiling.

“Lady! A signpost.” Maggie squinted at it in the dimness and spelled out the words slowly. “Managing Director that way. Owner’s soo—syu—”

“Suite.” Claire turned to gaze down a second passage, equally gently lit.

“Supplies. Mess Hall.”

“Good heavens,” Claire said. “These are underground streets. That young man was not exaggerating. It is like the Tube in London, Maggie, so that people—or perhaps only the Dunsmuirs—do not need to venture aboveground in the cold.”

“I thought everyone left when it got cold.”

“But if a storm should strike early or late in the season, one must still come and go.”

“Which way, Lady?”

“The Managing Director’s office. I wonder where we shall come out?”

A short distance down the corridor, they found another set of stone steps. “Quietly, now.” At the top, she pressed the latch slowly, and pushed the door open a scant half inch. The two of them pressed one eye to the gap, one above and the other below.

In the time it had taken them to find the door, the men had gathered around a heavy mahogany table—the Dunsmuirs, Count von Zeppelin, Captain Hollys, and the mine officers. And what she heard during the next half hour made her wish that her corset had not been secured so tightly, because she felt a distinct need to gasp for air.

Maggie sat on the steps after about ten minutes, and when that proved to be too cold, she got up and went exploring down the tunnel. Claire took this in at some level, but like the iceberg, ninety percent of her mind was taken up with understanding what was going on around that table.

For the Dunsmuirs were not merely a wealthy couple who dabbled in natural resources in various locations about the world. No, they intended to change it—and for the better, too, as far as Claire could see.

“Why should all the commerce from Europe be funneled through New York?” the earl asked, indicating a huge map of the continent on one wall. “Any market needs competition to be viable, and since Charlottetown and the Maritime Territory have so recently declared for the Canadas, it makes sense to locate the airfield, port, and seat of government there.”

“And Zeppelin ships shall be the first to enter the new port,” the count said with satisfaction. “It will be profitable for all concerned when I do not have to pay the tariffs that New York extorts from me.”

“But we must be cautious,” his first officer warned. “It seems the Texicans may have infiltrated as far into the Canadas as Edmonton. It is my belief that they are responsible for the events of last night, when der Landgraf was attacked.”

The count nodded. “They are foolish, then, if they believe a single bullet can derail the development of a country’s economy. Whether I had fallen or not, these plans will proceed.”

“We shall be returning to London immediately following our tour, then,” Lady Dunsmuir said. “I will meet with Her Majesty to inform her of these developments.”

“Do you fear reprisals, then, your ladyship?” the mine director asked.

“I fear they have already occurred,” she said bluntly. “With the sabotage here and the attempt on Count von Zeppelin’s life, we would be fools if we did not believe them related. The only thing we do not know is who is behind it.”

“We shall find out,” the count said grimly.

“I’ll tell you who’s behind the sabotage,” the mine director said, his brows lowering in a frown. “If it isn’t Frederick Chalmers and his Esquimaux, I’ll eat my hat. Who else knows this mine like the back of his hand? And—begging your pardon, your ladyship—who parks his boots under the bed of a woman of the Esquimaux, the whole kit and caboodle of whom are in Isobel Churchill’s pocket?”

Frederick Chalmers!

Claire gripped the door frame hard so she would not fall headfirst through it. She must find Alice immediately. Could her father really be so close? Because it had to be he. How many men named Chalmers would have intimate knowledge of a mine’s workings if he were not an engineer?

And then what the man had said sank in.

They suspected Frederick Chalmers of the sabotage.

Oh, dear. Which would be worse—never to know one’s father, or to know him for a saboteur and a criminal?

*

When Claire joined Andrew and their guide topside once more, she was hard put to keep from spilling her news. But of course one must not blab indiscriminately what one had learned by eavesdropping—though this was not a rule of etiquette her mother, Lady St. Ives, would ever espouse.

They joined the others in the office, conveniently too late to have been included in the discussions. The meeting had broken up and everyone was enjoying thimbles of port and brandy. Claire and Maggie had just accepted cups of piping hot tea when a messenger came in.

“Beg pardon, sir,” he said to the earl, “but a pigeon’s just arrived.” He handed his lordship an envelope bearing a most flamboyant script.

The earl tore it open and read the contents.

“Good heavens,” he said blankly, and handed the letter to the countess. “We are to be inundated with guests, it seems. The news of your visit, Count, seems to have traveled far and wide. And is about to travel farther.”

Davina’s brows rose and she handed the letter to Count von Zeppelin. Then she turned to Reginald Penhaven. “It seems the end-of-season convoy is arriving a week early, in the company of Julius Meriwether-Astor and his family, plus a rather large contingent of reporters from the Texican, Colonial, and Edmonton newspapers. Do you know of Mr. Meriwether-Astor?”

“Is he the railroad baron out of New York?”

“He is indeed,” Count von Zeppelin said. “We have met on one occasion, but I am afraid it was not a happy one. He is expanding his interests from railroads to airships, you see, and did not look upon my newest designs with a friendly eye.”

“His ships fly with the older Crockett steam engines, do they not?” Claire asked. And when surprised faces turned her way, she fought the tendency to blush under their scrutiny. “I went to school with his daughter Gloria. And when I was looking for a company with which to invest, naturally I first investigated a concern that was familiar to me.” She smiled at the count. “Their ships do not hold a candle to the Zeppelins, though, I am happy to say.”

The count smiled back and waved the letter. “It seems he has been making a world tour in his newest model, seeking to drum up publicity.”

“This seems a strange stop to make, then,” Mr. Penhaven observed. “A little out of the way, wouldn’t you say?”

“Not if you bring reporters with you,” Davina countered. “The world comes with them. Count, I am afraid our dinner en famille is about to be augmented by several orders of magnitude. May I offer our mess hall once again, and recommend we move dinner to tomorrow evening?”

He bowed to her gracefully. “If your chef will agree to working with mine, we will put on an event that will give these reporters something much more interesting to write about than Meriwether-Astor’s creaky old ships.”

The door opened and another messenger came in. “A pigeon for you, your ladyship.”

Davina tore open the envelope, scanned the letter, and raised her eyes to the heavens. “We may as well invite the governor of the territory and be done with it. This is from Isobel Churchill. She is on her way from Edmonton with what she says is an order from Prime Minister Darwin himself that we suspend production of our diamonds pending a hearing of the Esquimaux’s case before the Bar.”

“Poppycock!” the earl exploded, taking the letter as if its contents would wither to nothing under his furious glare. “The prime minister has no such authority—particularly since the diamonds for Her Majesty’s thirty-fifth anniversary tiara are being cut and finished as we speak. I’m sure she would have a thing or two to say about a suspension, particularly since she chose the stones herself.”

“Not to mention the fact that our mine is not under Esquimaux control,” Davina said more mildly. “It seems I may have to reveal my parentage to the dear lady after all this time, and settle the matter.”

“That is your choice, my dear.” The earl touched her cheek, his temper fading as he regarded his wife with fondness. “You have the family and Her Majesty behind you, whatever you decide.”

“I am not ashamed to let it be publicly known to Isobel Churchill … and twenty foreign reporters.” Davina raised her chin and looked positively wicked. “Perhaps I might even upstage Mr. Meriwether-Astor’s world tour.”

97

Claire found Alice shortly thereafter, pacing to and fro in the gondola of the Stalwart Lass. She lost no time in telling her about Frederick Chalmers—and about Mr. Penhaven’s suspicions concerning his activities.

“I ain’t going to judge him one way or the other,” Alice said after a short silence, during which Claire wondered if she were revising the appearance of the dream figure she had called Pa for most of her life. Adding shadows and angles. Taking away a certain amount of the glow.

Or perhaps she was merely wondering about the presence of a woman in his life who was not her mother.

“I ain’t interested in his politics. I’m just interested in whether he’s my pa or not, and if he is, why he went away and left me and my ma.”

“The question is, how do we find him without raising the ire of the mining people? It would not do to be seen consorting with one whom they consider a saboteur.”

Alice’s gaze was uncompromising. “Are you afraid, Claire?”

Alice’s inability to prevaricate could sometimes produce most uncomfortable results. “Not afraid, no. But our situation is rather delicate, both of us being guests of the Dunsmuirs.”

“I’m not really a guest. I’m here under my own steam.”

“But you’ve eaten at their table—and will again, if the ball tomorrow night goes off as planned.”

“I don’t have to go to that. Would rather not. But we’re getting off track. How are we going to find my pa?”

“That nice boy who was guiding us might know,” Maggie said suddenly. “You could say you wanted to take Lizzie an’ me to see some real Esquimaux.”

Claire gazed at her in admiration. “What an excellent mind you have, Maggie. The very thing. How difficult can it be to locate a Texican man in an Esquimaux village? Let us ask the ground crew to unload my landau at once. We shall be back for dinner before anyone notices we are gone.”

Within half an hour, the thing was done. While Tigg, who was given land-leave by Mr. Yau to accompany them, supervised the unloading of the landau, Claire and the Mopsies changed into raiding rig.

“Not that I expect any danger, of course,” she assured them, buckling her leather corselet. “But it would be foolish to set off into a wilderness populated by bears and caribou without some means of protecting ourselves. And the lightning rifle cannot be holstered in a sash.”

The young man had innocently provided them with a map and an offer of assistance, one of which was accepted with gratitude and the other declined with the same. And before long, they set off along a track of packed and already frozen gravel, which seemed to receive frequent use.

“How far is it, Lady?” Tigg asked, leaning over the bolster between the compartments. “Will we see a bear?”

“Mr. Eliot said about five miles as the pigeon flies, but that does not take into account the turns and—ouch! My apologies, that was a big one—the potholes.”

“We’re lucky there’s a road at all,” Alice observed, hanging on to the seat with both hands. “Oh, kids, look—a bear, to be sure!”

An enormous brown heap of fur back in the trees lifted its head to observe their chugging passage. They probably looked as strange and exotic to it as it did to them … but nevertheless, Claire increased the steam as they passed just in case it took exception to their presence.

She had never been so glad to see the end of a road—if eight miles of unrelenting torture could be called a road. They crested a rise in the ground to see a river valley spread out below them, and clustered along it, a series of gleaming humps in the ground, in front of which smoke rose gently in the afternoon sun.

“They bury their ’ouses, too,” Tigg said. “Bet they gave the miners the idea.”

Claire rolled slowly to the outskirts of the village and before she could even begin to shut down the boiler, they had been surrounded by children of all shapes and sizes, in colorful dresses and thick jackets, their awed, bright-eyed faces rimmed in fur hoods.

“Now, now, don’t be touchin’ this landau, you lot,” Tigg warned, trying to push the wing open wide enough to get out. “That bonnet’ll be ’ot.”

Smiling, Claire and Alice descended, and lifted the Mopsies down. Two little girls who couldn’t be more than Willie’s age immediately reached out to touch Lizzie’s golden hair where it streamed over the breast of her coat, their velvety eyes huge. “Chama,” one of them said. Then her gaze moved to Alice’s head of blond curls, which she’d drawn up carelessly in a bunch and tied, unfettered by either pins or hat. “Chama.”

“Chalmers.” Alice pointed to her chest. Then she swept a hand out to indicate the village. “Chalmers?”

The children shrieked and ran like a pair of rabbits, bouncing and dodging between two of the mounds and disappearing.

Alice’s shoulders sagged. “So much for trying to talk. Maybe Chama means Shove off or I’ll shoot in Esquimaux.”

The chattering crowd of children seemed to be pushing them willy-nilly toward the village. “Tigg, stay with the landau,” Claire called over her shoulder, rather unnecessarily. For Tigg had planted himself bodily between the bonnet and two older boys who were trying to see where the tendrils of steam were coming from. She had no doubt that by the time they returned, Tigg would have given them a lesson in basic physics and they would be using a wrench for the first time.

As they approached the strange silvery mound where they had last seen the little girls, a door opened in its basal structure and a woman stepped out.

Claire’s first thought was that this was Alaia—the Navapai woman who had cared for her and her friends in her dwelling on the mesa outside Santa Fe. Her face held the same calm confidence edged in joy. But there the resemblance ended. Where Alaia had been slender and graceful, this woman was stocky and solid—at least, she appeared to be under her red dress and fur-trimmed coat. Clinging to each hand was one of the little girls.

Ah. This must be their mother.

The deep brown gaze passed over Claire and Maggie, lingered a moment on Lizzie, and proceeded to Alice, where it missed no detail of Alice’s appearance. Then she lifted her chin.

Alice found her voice. “Um. Chalmers?” she said, no doubt feeling as foolish as she sounded.

The woman planted her feet, as if she were expecting a blow. Claire received the distinct impression of a ship’s captain, giving the command to fire all cannon even though he knew the battle was lost.

“Chalmers,” the woman said, in a voice as mysterious and deep as an owl’s call, and just as musical. “Alice?”

*

“What do you mean, the Esquimaux village?” Andrew Malvern couldn’t decide whether he most wanted to ream out his own ear, or to box those of his companion.

“Just what I say, sir,” said the young man who had been their guide that afternoon. “The young ladies went off in a landau to the village, about eight miles from here. I offered to go with them, but they refused.”

“And you let them?” Andrew’s eyes were practically bugging out of his head, and he reined in his temper with difficulty. “You let two young ladies go off into the wilderness without protection of any kind?”

“They were better protected than I, sir,” he protested. “Have you seen that mucky great gun Lady Claire carries? Can she really shoot it?”

“Yes, she can, and—” He stopped himself with a physical effort. “That is not the point! The point is, they do not know their way, nor do they know the extent of the dangers in this country. How could you have been so foolish?”

The young man wilted. “It wasn’t just the two young ladies. The girls and that young blackamoor went as well.”

This time Andrew was bereft of speech entirely. When he could speak again, he managed to get out, “That young blackamoor, as you call him, is my laboratory assistant and a midshipman on your employer’s personal vessel.” He breathed heavily. “You will refer to him as Mr. Terwilliger.”

“Yes, sir.” By now the boy was close to tears. “What can I do, sir?”

“Despite the fact that I would put the Mopsies up against anything except a bear, I see no option but to pursue them. But I swear, sir, that if any harm has come to so much as one hair upon their heads, you will pay for it with your hide.”

“Yes, sir,” the young man whispered miserably. Then his gaze shifted upward, past Andrew’s shoulder. “Oh, no.”

Andrew turned. A ship had emerged from the clouds over the forested tops of the hills—a ship with an ornate brass gondola and a bronze keel that ran the length of the fuselage. They could feel the sound of its engines as a vibration in the stomach—rather the way dread felt.

“Whose is it?”

“That would be the Skylark, Mrs. Churchill’s ship,” the young man said on a sigh. “We’re in for it now.”

“Why? Is she so terrifying?” Andrew followed his guide, who broke into a jog as he headed in the direction of the airfield. “I’ve read about the lady’s political and charitable works, and she seems rather admirable to me. Do you suppose her daughter will be with her?”

“I imagine so. Don’t let your admiration blind you to the facts—she is determined to shut the mines down. The Firstwater is only one of several.”

They emerged from between the low-slung buildings as the Skylark sailed low over their heads. The ground crew swung into action, and within a few moments, the ship was secured to its mooring mast and settled into position. The gangway folded down and two ladies descended, allowing the crewmaster to hand them to the ground.

Andrew, slightly out of breath, realized one of them was Peony Churchill. The other, then, must be the famous and redoubtable Isobel Churchill—intrepid explorer, fearless speaker, and scourge of Parliament.

She did not look like a scourge. Indeed, her daughter was taller than she by a head, and her figure was trim and set off becomingly by a tobacco-brown tailored suit and a small hat set over one eye that somehow involved netting, silk roses, and pheasant feathers. It managed to add to her height, however. Her hair was russet brown and piled up under the hat in fat curls. She looked, in fact, like one of the smart set so frequently seen in Kensington High Street and the Burlington Arcade.

But upon closer inspection, it was in her eyes that Andrew saw the woman who made members of parliament quail and newspapermen uncap their pens. For those eyes did not suffer fools at all. They saw the world as it could be, and had very little patience with it as it was.

That sharp brown gaze also noted the distinct lack of an official welcome—if you did not count Andrew and his guide.

Andrew swept off the fedora with the driving goggles affixed to the brim that had seen him from New York to Santa Fe to Edmonton, and bowed. “Mrs. Churchill. Miss Churchill. I trust you have had a pleasant flight?”

“Why, Mr. Malvern,” Peony said before her mother could speak. “How lovely to see you again. Mama, this is Mr. Andrew Malvern—you remember, the scientist for whom my friend Claire was working in London. We met him last night in Edmonton, at the governor’s ball.”

Had it only been last night? For Andrew, it seemed a lifetime ago.

Isobel Churchill extended a gloved hand. “How do you do, Mr. Malvern? You are a long way from home.”

“As are we all. I am here as a guest of the Dunsmuirs—mostly, I am afraid, because they do not know what else to do with me.”

“I am sure that is not the case.” She smiled, and Andrew felt the power of her intelligence, not to mention that of the dimples that flirted at the corners of her mouth. He began to see why individuals at the highest levels of government believed her to be one of the most dangerous women in England. And maybe even the world. “Perhaps you can tell me where I might find the Dunsmuirs.”

“If you will allow me to escort you, I believe they are in the offices still.”

“Are you sure you want to do that?” The dimples twinkled, and he found himself losing track of his concentration. “If you are their guest, being seen with me could put your next meal in jeopardy.”

“I am quite sure that not only my next meal, but yours as well, is already being taken into account.”

“You are very gallant, but the Dunsmuirs know why I am here. I shall say my say and be back in the sky by sunset. There is weather coming, and I wish to be safely in Edmonton before it does.”

“Weather is not the only thing coming,” he said. “Apparently we are to have a visit from the Meriwether-Astor family and a flock of reporters. Mr. Meriwether-Astor is on a world tour, we are given to understand, and he and his entourage are expected at any moment.”

“Meriwether-Astor?” Peony repeated in tones of amusement. “The family of Gloria Meriwether-Astor? Do not tell me so.”

“Claire said nearly the same thing.”

Peony laughed. “Mama, if there is to be a grand to-do, we simply must stay. Seeing Gloria here in the wilderness will be worth the price of admission. If she met a bear in the forest she would demand to know who its parents were, and whether it had expectations.”

“Is she a Buccaneer, then?” Isobel asked, but only with half her attention. They had been spotted, and a small party had set out from the mining office, Lady Dunsmuir’s slender figure at the head.

“A most determined one. Rumor has it her dear papa wanted her to bag a duke at the very least, the moment she was out of school. The fact that she is accompanying him at all tells me she did not succeed.”

“Barbaric,” her mother murmured, and raised a hand in greeting. “Lady Dunsmuir, I trust you received my pigeon?”

“Isobel.” Regardless of her politics, Andrew could see that Davina Dunsmuir would not treat a guest with anything less than the utmost courtesy. “Welcome to the Firstwater Mine. Peony, dearest, you are looking very well. The brisk northern air seems to suit you—as does that smashing emerald suit. Do come inside, I have tea waiting for all of us. Mr. Malvern, will you ask Claire to join us?”

“I would if I could, my lady, but she has taken the landau to the Esquimaux village with Alice, the girls, and Tigg.”

“I beg your pardon?” Lady Dunsmuir came to a dead stop and stared at him. “She did what?”

“It was my fault, your ladyship,” his young guide said. “She said the girls wanted to see the village, so I drew them a map. And then they wouldn’t let me go with them,” he finished rather miserably.

“I have already pointed out the foolishness of such an excursion to our young friend here,” Andrew said, “but—”

Davina had recovered her wits. “You must fetch them back at once. Good heavens, any number of dreadful things could happen. Two girls and the children? What on earth were they thinking?”

“Do you think the Esquimaux will set upon them?” drawled Isobel Churchill. “Like wild animals? Beings of lesser intelligence than you?”

“Certainly not,” Davina snapped. “I am afraid that wild animals will set upon them. The caribou are migrating down from the north, and if they should be trapped in a river of moving animals, the consequences could be disastrous. Did you not see the herds as you flew?”

Isobel looked the tiniest bit taken aback. “I did. Are they really such a danger?”

“I will not take the chance.” She gave rapid orders, and several men separated themselves from the party.

“I’ll go, too,” Andrew said. This was his fault. He should have kept a closer eye on Claire and not let her go rambling around the camp getting odd ideas.

“And I,” Peony said.

“Certainly not,” her mother informed her, unconsciously echoing Davina’s words and snap. “If there truly is any danger, we do not need more inexperienced people out there. You will stay with me.”

“But mama, she is my friend.”

“All the more reason to stay out of the way and allow the men here, who know what they are doing, to fetch them back.”

Peony got a distinctly mulish look in her eye, but the men were already jogging toward what appeared to be a large equipment shed. Andrew hurried after them, and did not hear her reply.

98

Alice wondered if it were possible to be turned to stone by surprise.

The silence stretched out, punctuated only by the wavering laugh of some water bird on the river. Lizzie gave her a nudge with her elbow. “’Ow does she know your name?”

She would have given up another automaton to know the same thing. Or rather, to have confirmed what must be the truth—that the only reason this woman could know her name on first sight was because she had been told it, and been given a very accurate description.

Which, if Frederick Chalmers was indeed here and had done so, was a good thirteen or fourteen years out of date.

“Alice?” the woman repeated, a little more cautiously now. With either hand, she gently moved the two children behind her, so that a curious eye peeked out from either side of her fur-trimmed jacket.

With another dig from Lizzie’s elbow, Alice roused herself, like an automaton given a command. “Yes,” she said. “Who …?”

“I am Malina, wife of Chama. These are my children.”

“You speak English?” Alice said, unable to come up with a more intelligent reply.

“Chama taught me. And the children.” She extended an arm to encompass the village. Not just her children, but all of them, apparently. Did he teach in a school when he wasn’t being a saboteur and who knew what else?

“Where is … Chama?” Claire asked.

Alice was grateful that someone was asking the right questions. Chama might not be the man they were after. If it wasn’t, they could steam right back to the airfield and she’d pull up ropes two minutes after.

Malina glanced at the sun, which just brushed the tops of the trees. “He comes soon. He hunts with the men. Come.”

Without waiting for a reply, she ducked into the nearest buried house. The little girls giggled and followed her.

She met Claire’s inquiring gaze as her eyes filled with tears. “Do you think he’s here? With his little family? Do you think he forgot me?”

“I do not,” Claire said stoutly. “That lady knew you immediately, as did the children. How would that be possible if he had not told them about you?”

A little figure popped out of the door. “Come!” she shouted impatiently. “Tea!”

Lizzie and Maggie needed no further prompting. They followed the little girl through the door, while Claire took Alice’s elbow firmly and propelled her through it ahead of her. Inside, the warmth gathered them in like a mother’s hug. The walls were curved, and what appeared to be ribs of some white stone arched up from below the floor to meet nearly over their heads. Above that, the silvery roof seemed to let in a kind of pearly light that illuminated the entire house. Beds were made up neatly on wide shelves that doubled as benches in compartments between the ribs, and at the far end, about twenty feet from the door, a—great snakes, it was a kind of mechanical oven that bubbled and clanked, simultaneously boiling water, baking biscuits, and … Alice peered through the gentle light. Washing dishes? Two slender figures worked the gears. Who were they? More possible half-sisters? Above it, steam went straight up through a mechanism that appeared to be part window, part bellows, and part fan.

The interior smelled of herbs and hot metal and baking, and Alice realized she had not eaten anything decent since breakfast in Edmonton. Not that she could manage much. Not until she knew.

Malina waved them onto the benches near the stove, and the little girls offered them cups of tea in curious vessels.

“What are these made of, ma’am?” Maggie asked, indicating her cup, which was as transparent as one of Claire’s tortoiseshell hair combs, and colored much the same.

“The goddess has called me Malina, and you must, too. They are teeth of whale. We offer tea in holy vessels as welcome.”

Whales had teeth? And sacred ones at that. Maybe that made this the next thing to drinking tea out of the chalice at church of a Sunday. Or was the welcome of a guest a holy act in this village?

“Thank you.” Maggie smiled at her, and Malina’s eyes crinkled in return. “It’s awf’ly good. Like honey and grass. We ’ad summat similar a long way south of ’ere.”

“Are you the sister of Alice?” Malina asked her gravely.

“No. Me and Lizzie, we’re wiv the Lady.”

Claire rose, cup in hand. “I am Claire Trevelyan, and these are my wards, Lizzie and Maggie de Maupassant.”

Alice realized with a tiny shock that this was the first time she’d ever heard the Mopsies’ surname. And it was quite a mouthful.

Malina frowned in confusion. “So many strange words. What is ward?”

“It is used when a child is— When one looks after—” Claire resumed her seat, her brow furrowing as she sought a definition. “They are my young sisters of—of the spirit.”

Malina’s face cleared and she beamed at the three of them. “I understand. The goddess has given them to you, though you have not birthed them, nor has your mother.”

“Quite so,” Claire said with some relief.

Lizzie exchanged a look with her twin, then both the green eyes and the blue turned to Claire. “Izzat wot wards are?” Lizzie asked. “Sisters?”

“Technically, no, but I rather like ‘sisters of the spirit,’ don’t you?” Claire smiled down at Maggie, who leaned against her. “It’s like flock, only closer. Nicer.”

They looked so comfortable together that Alice’s heart ached just a little, missing something it had never really had.

“I like it,” Maggie said. “Now all we ’ave to do is find a dad for Alice.”

The words were no sooner out of her mouth than they heard a commotion outside, muffled by the walls of the house. It sounded like a crowd of people were arriving, and Alice heard hoofbeats and shouts, along with the barking of dogs.

But the women of the household did not move, other than the two young women operating the mechanical contraption, who put another kettle of water on to heat.

Alice got halfway to her feet, but Malina leaned over from her bench and put a hand on her knee. “They must give thanks to the goddess for good hunting, and prepare the kill. Then he will come. Drink tea and I will talk story.”

Standing on the tip of Alice’s tongue was a refusal—they had to be going, they had come a long way to find Frederick Chalmers—but Malina began to speak in a soothing tone. The hasty words settled like chickens on a roost and instead, pictures formed in Alice’s head … of a beautiful woman birthing stars, of whales that came to her hand to feel the joy of her touch, of caribou and wolves bowing to her and offering her children their lives so that all might be sustained through the winter.

And as she concluded and the final image—a man bowing to a strong, brown-skinned woman before she took him as her husband, and offering her food and drink and a home—the door opened and daylight poured in.

Alice sucked steam- and tea-scented air into lungs that didn’t seem to be working right. But they had to work. Otherwise, she’d faint in a heap on the floor.

Malina stood while Claire and the Mopsies looked a little dazed, as if they were struggling to come back from the place where legend was still alive, and influenced the hours of every day in this village.

Alice found herself on her feet, watching a tall man push through the door and close it behind him. “Malina, we saw the landau and the watch told me we have guests? It’s hard to believe it would be the Dunsmuirs, but—”

He stopped. Alice swayed, taking in his face, trying to match it to the hazy one in her memory. He was fair complected, as she was, his skin reddened from wind and sun. He had frizzy blond hair, as she did, though his was cropped close to his head, she saw as he pulled the fur hat from it. One eye was blue, the other covered by an ocular device held over the socket by a leather strap. It seemed to move in tandem with the gaze of the healthy one.

Both false and real eye locked on her, standing motionless and voiceless next to the fire. “Alice?” he said.

She had dreamed of this day for years and years, had figured out a speech that would make him sorry for leaving them, make him respect her, even if he didn’t love her.

But she couldn’t remember a word of it. All she could remember was strong hands, and a hard knee that formed a horsie she had loved to ride on as a tiny girl.

Both his gazes seemed to devour her from head to foot. “Is it really you?” He stepped closer, his hands coming up to touch her face, and she stepped back.

“Surprised?” Whose voice was that? And what had it said that for? Where was her speech? Where was her brain, for that matter?

But he took her at face value. “Surprised. Overjoyed. Astonished.” His voice dropped to a whisper, but his gazes did not leave her face for an instant. “Relieved.”

What?

“The last pigeon came back with no photographs of you. I’ve been living in fear that Ned Mose—that he finally—” Moisture glistened in the corner of his good eye. “Thank the goddess and the Lord and all good spirits everywhere. You’re alive and well and standing right here,” he whispered. “It’s a miracle.”

“Photographs?” Lizzie said to no one in particular. “Pigeons?”

“Every solstice, I sent one of my pigeons to your coordinates. Every solstice, it came back,” he said. “A little blond girl grew into a young woman, and no matter where I was, I knew what you looked like.”

If he had struck her, it could not be worse than this. The color rose hot into Alice’s face, and her jaw worked before words came out. “You sent a pigeon to photograph me, but you couldn’t send a letter to let us know whether you were dead or alive?” Tears clogged her voice, as bitter as the words tasted in her mouth. “You took the time to invent that kind of device, but you couldn’t have told me in fourteen years that you cared? That you were sorry you left? That you were even alive?”

“Alice.” He said her name like a blessing, the way Malina had said the name of the goddess. “Ned Mose had a price on my head. If I had contacted you or your mother in any way, he would have found me and put a bullet in my skull.”

“I s’pose that was why Ma married him.” Sarcasm dripped from every word, as though the poison she’d kept hidden deep inside had finally been lanced.

“She married him to save her life. And yours. A deal went bad—oh, I’ve made mistakes, sure enough. But one mistake I didn’t make. I got myself out of his way and that was the price I paid. Never to see you again. Or rather, never to let him know I saw you. But the birds told me how to make a way.”

“The pigeon came back with no plates of you. He thought you had died,” Malina said to her gently, going to his side. “He mourned you as if you had.”

No wonder the children had looked so overjoyed at the sight of her appearing so suddenly in their midst. For them, she would have come back from the dead.

“I ain’t dead.” Alice wasn’t ready to give in. The urge to punish him as she had felt punished beat behind her breastbone like a frantic, caged thing. “I came across the continent to find you and tell you—tell you—” She struggled to finish, but the tears in her throat got the better of her. Her voice rose to a squeak. “Tell you, darn you, that I hate you! Hate you for leaving us—and for being such a dadburned coward!”

Lizzie’s eyes widened. Frederick Chalmers’s ruddy face turned pale.

“Do you know what Ma had to do to put food on the table? Huh? She was a desert flower, that’s what!”

His throat worked, but he didn’t speak, so Alice struck again, like a rattler, mindless and terrified—anything to make these feelings go away.

“And now she’s a different woman—a hard woman. The kind it’s easy to leave. So I did what you did, Pa, and I left her, too. And you know how that makes me feel?”

What could he do but shake his head?

Now the tears were coming in earnest. She had to say the rest of her say quick, before she broke down and did something completely stupid, like throw herself on his chest and bawl.

“I came all this way to look for you, and now that I have, I just want to spit in your eye. But I won’t, because there’s young ’uns here and I got responsibilities. Instead, I’m going to leave you, too, Pa.” She caught her breath, pushed it in and out. “Don’t bother sending any of your dadburned pigeons after me, either. I’m a darned fine shot, and if I see one, I’ll shoot it out of the sky.”

She made it to the door without her knees collapsing. And turned.

“Thank you for your hospitality, Malina,” she said with as much dignity as she could muster. “Claire, I’ll be with Tigg at the landau.”

And then she did exactly what she said she’d do.

She left, and she didn’t look back.

*

If his head didn’t fall off or his spine snap, it would be a miracle. Then again, if his head did fall off, at least this cursed journey would be over.

The huge vehicle with the continuous track in place of wheels jounced into a pothole the size of a pond and labored out the other side. “Is this the only road?” Andrew shouted in the ear of the young man who had been their guide, who possessed the unlikely name of Errol Eliot.

“Don’t need any more than this,” was the hollered reply. “There’s nothing out here but the Esquimaux and a whole lot of nothing.”

Andrew doubted that the Esquimaux considered their home nothing, but it was too difficult to talk over the roar of the steam engine powering the vehicle. Andrew could feel the heat from its exhaust stack against his back, and the thing was all the way across the cabin in which they sat on benches bolted to the floor.

But a question had to be asked.

“Do the migrating herds attack?” he shouted.

One of the men in the front, who operated the rate of steam and thus their land speed, glanced at his companion, who turned the great wheel used for steering. “Depends on whether they get spooked. And whether the bulls are feeling frisky. And whether there are a lot of calves in the herd with a lot of protective mamas. But don’t worry, sir,” he yelled, “they won’t bother this vehicle.”

It was not this vehicle that concerned him.

Six miles. Seven, if he was lucky.

Errol must have noticed the grip he had on the back of the bench before him. “Nearly there, sir,” he shouted. “This hill is the five-mile marker.”

Only five? Andrew sagged, then straightened as he jounced sideways and back with neck-snapping suddenness.

They topped the hill and the country spread itself before him. The road wound down in long, looping steps to a river valley far in the distance. To the east were low, beetling mountains that probably had never seen a piton or pick, and to the north were endless ranks of spindly trees that seemed to become even thinner with distance. To the west, the sun had dipped below the tree line, and with it went what little warmth the day had possessed.

Movement caught his eye—not the movement of bird or beast, but a flash of gold.

“Look!” He pointed out the viewing port, which was made of isinglass. “Is that their landau?”

“Sure enough.” The man on the lever made some adjustments, and a great billow of steam issued from the stack, like a signal. “That should let them know we’ve seen them.”

The driver hunched over his wheel, peering into the distance. “Hey. That look like a herd to you? Light’s going. It could just be one of those big flocks of geese.”

Andrew half rose from his seat, peering down the long slope and past the first loop in the road, where the landau was now laboring upward toward them.

“That ain’t geese.” The lever operator spun a pair of wheels, and the engine groaned back into life. “That’s a herd, and that landau is dead in its path.”

He kicked a pedal as the wheelman spun his wheel, and the great engine turned down the face of the hill, its continuous track grinding stones and plants and small trees under and spitting them up into the air at the rear.

“What are you doing?” Andrew yelped, grabbing onto the first things that came to hand, namely Errol’s shoulder and the back of the bench. “We’re off the road!”

“Won’t make it in time if we stay on it,” shouted the wheelman. “Hang on!”

They plunged down the slope at a precarious angle. All Andrew could see was the earth rushing up at them, as though he were falling out of the sky instead of rolling over the surface.

They crashed onto the last loop in the road for about ten yards, then took the next plunge over. And still the landau made its steady way up the first loop and into the second.

Now Andrew could see them in the distance—a thundering wave of animals, galloping, running, tossing their heads in the headlong joy of the moving herd. A herd that would break against the fragile landau with its precious human cargo, overturn it, and whirl it away in pieces, treading bodies into the earth under their galloping hooves.

No rifle could stop this tide—no man could throw himself in its way and hope to survive. The only thing that could save Claire and Alice and the children was this great lumbering behemoth of a vehicle, if it could wedge itself between animals and humans in time.

“Faster!” he cried.

“We go any faster we’ll overset,” the steam operator roared. “Sit down and shut up!”

The continuous treads bit into earth that was not quite frozen, and chewed its way down the hill.

“We’re not going to make it,” gasped Errol, his eyes bugging out of his head in horror. “The herd is almost upon them!”

What was wrong with Claire that she didn’t see the approaching maelstrom of hooves and antlers and thousands upon thousands of pounds of hurtling flesh? Could they not feel the drumming in the ground? Or see the grinding progress of the mining engine laboring toward them on its elephantine track?

“Claire!” he shouted, though of course she couldn’t hear. “Alice!”

The herd burst over the shoulder of the hill and poured onto the loop of the road, a hundred feet from the landau.

And now, when she should have been accelerating, the foolish female brought it to a stop!

“What are you doing?” he screamed.

Fifty feet.

The top folded back and Claire stood, the lightning rifle on her shoulder.

Forty.

Bracing herself against the steering lever, she aimed the rifle straight toward the center of the herd and fired.

A bolt of lightning leaped into the clear air like a pheasant exploding out of cover. It sizzled through the atmosphere, burning oxygen as it went, a foot above the sharp antlers of the lead animals.

The enormous males snorted, bobbed, and in a move that was almost balletic, bounced to either side of the road. The herd parted like the Red Sea, one half washing up the slope between the landau and the mining vehicle, the other half pouring down the lower side. Then everyone stood—children, too—and waved their arms, making themselves a large, strangely colored organism that the caribou had never seen. Smoke puffed from the animals’ nostrils as they bounced out of reach of this strange apparition, and the pouring tide passed around them, then past them, and before Andrew could even think to draw his next breath, a thousand animals had regained their joyous momentum and were receding down the valley and into the distance.

The last cream-colored, bouncing caribou behind vanished into the trees and Andrew fell onto the bench as though it were he who had been shot.

“Who is that girl?” The steam tender recovered himself and got the vehicle moving again.

“She’s a dadburned fool,” the wheelman groused. “Putting eight people in danger, and for what?”

Errol gripped the bench, his eyes still wide. “Did you see that? Did you see her fire over their heads? What kind of rifle does that? And what kind of woman fires it?”

“A lady of resources,” Andrew said, feeling as winded as he sounded. “Just don’t ever ask her to dance.”

99

Claire drove the landau carefully up the loading ramp into Lady Lucy’s cargo bay, and began to shut down the boiler as Tigg leaped out to stuff sandbags against the wheels so it would not roll about during flight.

Not a minute later, Andrew came striding up the ramp under a full head of steam. “Claire, you lunatic, what on earth were you thinking?” he shouted.

The landau ticked softly to itself and settled onto its axles with a sigh. She turned, raising an eyebrow at his disheveled appearance and red face. Lunatic? Really. He of all people should know better than to call a woman such a thing, when a woman’s invention had just saved their lives.

“Can you be more specific?” she inquired coolly.

“At every point!” he shouted. “What possessed you to go to the village unescorted?”

“I had Alice and Tigg and the girls with me. Any more and we should have had to requisition a second vehicle.”

“You put their lives in danger, to say nothing of your own.” Andrew took a long breath, as if he were reining in his temper before it ran away with him. He gripped the top of the landau, his fingers tightening in a most alarming way. “I have never been so afraid in my life—not even in the pinnacle cell, or during the crash in the Idaho Territory. Claire, for the sake of my heart, please think before you do such a thing again.”

“She was helping me.” Alice came to her side and helped her disconnect the boiler, then replace the bonnet. “I went to find my pa, and since Claire is the only one who can pilot a landau, she took me.”

“We promised you lessons,” Claire remembered. “I must keep my promise.”

“Well, you won’t have to worry about me going out there again,” Alice assured her. “In fact, I’m going to pull up ropes shortly and be in the sky by sunset.”

“That’s exactly what Isobel Churchill said, and she was disappointed, too,” Andrew told them both. His tone still held an edge, but at least he was no longer shouting.

In fact, his gaze as he watched Claire was so intense that it almost looked as if he wanted to pull her into his arms. A sign, a look, the merest softening, and she was certain he would do it.

And then she remembered Alice’s face as she had confessed her feelings for him, and the moment passed.

“Cheer up, Mr. Malvern.” Maggie came to his side and took his hand. “The Lady wouldn’t ’ave let us be run over by them ruddy great creatures. It were touch and go there for a bit, though.”

He gazed at her for a moment, then sank to his knees and pulled the little girl into an embrace that was half relief, half …

Well, sometimes a gentleman could relieve his feelings by hugging a child, without other emotions being ascribed to it, could he not?

He released her and stood up, leaving Maggie looking both puzzled and pleased. “Just promise me that the next time you go rabbiting off into the wilderness, you’ll let someone know.”

“We did,” Lizzie said. “That boy wot was our guide, he drew us a map.”

“Someone in charge,” Andrew said. “Someone in a position of responsibility.”

“Oh, they prob’ly would’ve told us not to go,” Lizzie informed him with airy unconcern. “Say, d’you suppose Mr. Andersen ’as food on the sideboard? That grassy tea were nice, but it didn’t go far and me stummick is stickin’ to me backbone.”

They scampered up the ladder to the A deck, dragging Tigg with them.

Alice roused herself out of a brown study. Claire felt rather brown herself. The adrenaline of their near escape, the pell-mell journey back to the airfield with the mining engine practically climbing up into the steampipes, and Andrew’s show of temper, had worn off rather suddenly, leaving her nearly exhausted. Claire couldn’t blame the Mopsies for wanting to raid the sideboard. She could think of nothing better than to do the same—and seek her quiet cabin and Rosie’s soothing company immediately thereafter.

“I’d best be going, then,” Alice said.

“Please don’t,” Claire pleaded. “It’s nearly sunset, and you don’t want to fly at night.”

“Night, day, it’s no nevermind to me. I want to put this place to my rudder and get as far from it as I can.”

“Alice, what happened?” Andrew asked her, his eyes calming now, and filling with concern. “Did you find your father?”

“I did, and now I’m done.”

“But—”

“Andrew,” Claire said quietly. “Do not press her. We must instead convince her to stay at least until morning. Better yet, until after Count von Zeppelin’s reception.”

“Absolutely not.” Alice backed away as if they were about to forcibly restrain her. “Fine, I can maybe see the sense in waiting to lift until morning. But I ain’t sticking around for that hoedown. You can show him Nine and be done with it, if he wants to talk about automatons.”

“It would be most unwise to snub the count, you know.”

“Why? I ain’t ever going to see him again.”

Claire took her arm and shot Andrew a speaking glance as they made their way over to the ladder. “Do you not see what you are doing? You are cutting people dead right and left—people who could mean something to you.”

Alice went up the ladder like a monkey, as if she couldn’t wait to get away from the sound of Claire’s voice. But Claire could climb a wall with or without a rope. A ladder was nothing. She emerged onto A deck at practically the same moment, so that Alice could not escape.

“Please, dear, reflect upon what you are doing. This is a harsh land,” she said as they entered the dining saloon. “We all need friends if we are to survive here.”

Lizzie turned from the sideboard. “Alice, you said the same to them crewmen on t’cargo ship,” she said around a mouthful of fruitcake and marzipan. “Oh!”

“What’s wrong, Lizzie?” The girl was digging in her pocket. “Did you bite down the wrong way on a nut?”

“No, I forgot about this.” She handed over a gleaming cylinder of brass. “It’s like them other ones. I meant t’ tell you, I found it underneath that cargo ship. There’s a lot more ships now, but I mean t’first one, that were ’ere when we landed.”

M.A.M.W.

Claire handed it to Andrew. And a pair of facts settled into place in her mind, like sparrows landing together on a twig.

“Why didn’t I see this before?” she murmured. Then, “Does it not strike you as strange that Mr. Meriwether-Astor and his entourage should journey all the way here as part of his world tour?”

Andrew gazed at her thoughtfully while Alice nabbed a piece of cake for herself. “It does,” he said. “But I try not to comment on the vagaries of the wealthy. They are often beyond the understanding of mere mortals.”

She held up the casing. “This is the second time one of these has appeared where it does not belong. Do you suppose M.A. stands for Meriwether-Astor?”

Andrew blinked at her. “As in Meriwether-Astor Manufacturing Works? But Claire, they do not make bullets or arms. They make parts for steam engines, and rivets for ship hulls and connectors for train carriages. I’ve ordered one or two parts from them myself, in the course of my experiments.”

“What if there’s a smaller group?” Alice asked, her mouth as full as Lizzie’s had been. “Meriwether Astor Munitions Works, say?”

“Who buys bullets, then?” Claire mused aloud. “There cannot be enough hunters and sportsmen in all the Territories to make such a division profitable.”

“Armies,” Andrew said. “Countries at war.”

“Or about to be,” Alice added, and swallowed.

And suddenly Claire understood why Count von Zeppelin had nearly been assassinated.

*

Gloria Meriwether-Astor’s hat defied the laws of gravity. Perched upon her forehead, its rear tilted up nearly to the vertical by virtue of its resting on her piled-up blond curls, it seemed on the verge of sliding down her face and coming to rest upon her petulant lower lip.

Claire smiled and extended her hand. “Gloria. How lovely to see you again. You have not changed one whit since last we met.”

Gloria took her hand, her gaze puzzled. “And when was that? Have we been introduced?”

Lizzie snorted like a horse who has unexpectedly met with a groundhog in its path. “O’ course you have. At the Crystal Palace, wi’ Lord James Selwyn, when me and Maggie was skating.”

Gloria stared at Lizzie, her brows raised in affront. “Really. Forgive me. I do not recall.”

Claire could not hold back her laughter. “Oh, Gloria, do give over. Your town manners will not win you any points here. But to refresh your memory, we also saw one another at Julia Wellesley’s costume party last month.” She smoothed the folds of her raiding skirt with affection. “I believe I wore this very rig.”

“I’m sure Miss Meriwether-Astor will have no trouble remembering both occasions if she puts her mind to it, won’t you, dear?” Lady Dunsmuir slipped an arm around Gloria’s waist and the air exploded in a flash of light and the smell of phosphorus as a phalanx of journalists recorded the moment for posterity. She steered Gloria and her father toward the dining hall and the welcoming party followed. “Lady Claire is our honored guest. She has been touring the Americas with us and sharing our adventures.”

“Lady Claire, is it?” Mr. Meriwether-Astor puffed along behind the women like a steam train. “Better mind your manners, Gloria. She might have a brother.”

“I do, in fact,” Claire told him, trying not to show her amusement at the poisonous glare Gloria threw him. “But as Lord Nicholas is not even two, he is more interested in his stuffed giraffe than he is in young ladies.”

“Ah well, it never hurts to know these things.” The poor man’s short legs could barely keep up with Lady Dunsmuir’s effortless glide. “Don’t want to cut ourselves off from possibilities, do we, girl?”

“Father, please,” Gloria said softly, her head up and slightly turned away, as if she could not bear the sight of him and was admiring the view instead.

For the first time, Claire felt a pang of sympathy for the girl. Though the days immediately following her graduation from St. Cecilia’s Academy for Young Ladies now seemed as if they had been lived by another person altogether, she distinctly remembered how uncomfortable she had felt, being on display at the few parties she had attended, and dreading her presentation at court.

It was one thing to travel across the ocean as a Buccaneer and set one’s cap at a title in exchange for a Fifteen Colonies fortune. It was quite another to be bullied and bossed into it by one’s father, whom one might expect to take one’s tender feelings more into consideration.

Though, if what she suspected was in fact true, Julius Meriwether-Astor, who appeared to be merely a blustering, insensitive buffoon, was nothing of the kind. Could this man now talking with such animation with Lord Dunsmuir really be the one behind the attempt on Count von Zeppelin’s life?

It hardly seemed possible. And yet …

She had sworn her friends to secrecy on the matter. Secrecy, and vigilance. Though how they were to watch out for the count’s wellbeing without actually telling him what they suspected was a puzzle she had yet to work out. Because of course they had no proof of anything, only mad speculation hanging by the thinnest of threads. If she accused Gloria’s father of such a heinous crime, and was proven wrong, they would all be disgraced, and Claire could not bear the thought of any taint upon the Dunsmuirs—not after they had shown her and the children such kindness and support.

Nor could she risk Tigg’s future as a midshipman on the Lady Lucy for the sake of mere speculation. So for now, they must keep an eye peeled, as Maggie would say, and be alert for the slightest hint that this visit was not as it seemed.

“Lady Dunsmuir, a photograph opportunity, if you please?” called one of the journalists. “If we get a group shot, we can send the plates by pigeon and get the pictures in the Sunday papers.”

“Very well.” She turned to Claire and Alice. “While we are doing that, you girls might like to change for dinner. Count von Zeppelin’s invitation, you know, aboard the Margrethe.”

Alice looked as though she was going to be sick. “I thought that was tomorrow. And anyhow—”

“Tomorrow we shall host a dinner for the entire camp, and a ball. But tonight is a smaller, more intimate party.”

“No, I can’t,” Alice said, a little desperately.

“Please, dear.” Davina put a hand on her arm. “You and Jake. As a personal favor to me.”

Alice let out a long breath in defeat. “Very well. But I’m pulling up ropes in the morning.”

“You must do as you think best, of course. But may I say that we women will be far outnumbered by partners tomorrow evening at the ball. The loss of one of us will be a tragedy for a great many men.”

“Dancing with me would be a greater one,” Alice mumbled.

The journalists began to clamor for Davina’s attention. “I must go. Eight o’clock, ladies, with sherry at seven.”

Claire took the Mopsies’ hands so they would not get lost in the pushing and shoving as the journalists set up their equipment and vied for the best spots in the central courtyard. Alice accompanied them back to the Lady Lucy, where she said, “Jake’s waiting on me. He won’t be too happy about being shanghaied tonight, either.”

“If there’s a spread, he’ll be fine,” Maggie told her. “Can’t we come?”

“I’m afraid not, darling,” Claire said. “You are not yet out in society, and won’t be for some time, so I hope you will keep Willie and Tigg company here on the ship.”

“Wot’s ‘out in society’?”

“It means you go on display in your mama’s shop window when you’re sixteen, waiting for the highest bidder,” Alice told her without much grace.

“We ent got a mama,” Lizzie said. Then she turned a horrified gaze to Claire. “Lady, you ent goin’ t’put us in a window, then, like a pair of plucked geese wiv frilly paper round our feet?”

“Certainly not.” She must not laugh, for if her limited experience was anything to go by, the image held more truth than the little girl knew. “Alice is being a poultice, and you must not listen to her. Being out simply means that you may go to balls and parties, and receive calls from gentlemen. When the time comes, you and Maggie will go with me and—” She stopped.

Dear me. She had come within a breath of saying—

“You an’ ’oo?” Lizzie prompted her.

“My husband, whomever that gentleman may turn out to be, if I am indeed married five years from now.”

“Mr. Malvern,” Maggie said with an air of one who knows.

“Captain Hollys,” Lizzie shot back with equal certainty.

“The man in the moon, if it were any of your business!”

Honestly, she was going to pack them both back to London for further lessons from Snouts McTavish in keeping their mouths shut, and that was a fact.

100

Alice took a deep breath and felt the determined grip of her corset as it restricted her air intake to ladylike levels. No wonder ladies in novels fainted every time they got scared. They couldn’t ruddy well breathe.

Beside her, Jake indicated she should precede him up to the gangway, and she looked at him, surprised. “Where did you learn to do that?”

“Wot?”

“Allow a female to go first.”

He flushed, and let out a croak that turned into a squeak. He coughed and tried again. “I watched ’is lordship and Mr. Malvern. Go on, then. D’you want to freeze standing out ’ere?”

“Thank you, Jake,” she said as politely as any lady, and picked up her turquoise skirts to manage the gangway. At the top an officer was posted, and he assisted her from the last step.

“Welcome again to the Landgrafin Margrethe, Captain Chalmers,” he said. “I am the assistant steward. Will you follow me?”

“Good evening,” she replied. “This is Jake, my navigator.”

Awkwardly, Jake bowed, clearly uncomfortable in the one good suit that Claire had prevailed upon him to get in Edmonton. It was clear he had never worn a jacket and shirt so fine in his life, and it was that which made him uncomfortable more than how the fabric felt.

“Never mind, Jake,” she whispered as she rustled down the passage after the assistant steward. “It’s only a couple of hours and some good grub, and then we can go.”

Their guide motioned them through a set of carved double doors and they entered the flagship’s huge salon. Alice’s breath caught and Jake whistled, a low sound like a half-empty teakettle taken off the burner.

The room could hold a hundred people, though at present there were only half that number. What appeared to be gambit tables for the planning of battles had been seconded to duty as buffet tables, which were laden with food and phalanxes of crystal glasses and goblets. At the far end, uniformed men formed a small orchestra, at present engaged in a graceful waltz.

“Oh, blast, can they really be planning to dance after dinner? I thought all that palaver wasn’t until tomorrow.”

“They’ve room to,” Jake observed tersely. “You could ’ide behind them velvet curtains, or pretend to be one of them trees in pots.”

“Best shut up, or you’ll be the first one I ask to be my partner.”

Jake clamped his lips together as if he never meant to speak again. Still, he stuck by her side like a burr as she wended her way across the room to where Claire and Captain Hollys stood, looking picturesque and annoyingly comfortable in all this posh crowd, next to the punchbowl.

“Captain Chalmers. Jake.” Hollys knew better than to kiss the back of her gloved hand, so he shook it instead. “You’re looking uncommonly well this evening, Alice, considering your brush with near death this afternoon.”

“I’d rather face a herd of caribou than this lot,” she told him.

“Buck up, old thing,” Andrew Malvern joined them just in time to hear her, and she immediately wished she could drop through a hatch in the floor. “Did you stash a pistol in that rig to ward off potential partners?”

“That dress is the latest design from Paris,” Claire informed him down her nose. “It is not a weapons holster.”

“If it were, it would be the prettiest one ever made,” said Captain Hollys gallantly, coming to Alice’s rescue. “You wore this to the governor’s ball, did you not?”

“She did,” Andrew said before she could open her mouth.

He remembered. And Alice had not forgotten her feelings then, either, when it seemed he finally saw her as a woman, not a companion at arms. What was up, then, with his cavalier treatment of her now? Didn’t she deserve to be treated like a lady, the way he treated Claire, instead of one of his chums from the honkytonk?

She turned her back on him and laid a hand on Captain Hollys’s arm. “I wonder if we might walk over to the windows, sir? I thought I might lift in the morning and would like your opinion of the sky.”

Since it was pitch black, all they’d be able to see would be their own reflections, but Captain Hollys was too much of a gentleman to say so. He tucked her hand into the crook of his elbow and led her away, leaving Andrew standing there gaping like a barn owl.

Alice’s spine straightened with satisfaction, which had the added effect of making her corset sit more comfortably. Her skirts whispered across the Turkish carpet and Captain Hollys cut a tall, debonair figure next to her in his dress uniform.

Very satisfying indeed.

“Are you really planning to lift tomorrow?” he asked. “We’ve had reports of weather on the way, but not for a few days yet.”

“Who do you get weather reports from? Are there other mines further north than this?”

“No. I mean, there are other mines, but they are scattered to the south and east. We obtain our reports from the Esquimaux.”

“But I thought—the miners—”

“You’ve seen the tension between them.”

“I understand some think the Esquimaux are responsible for the sabotage,” she said as delicately as she could, considering Isobel Churchill, resplendent in green-and-gold brocade and a train you could make a set of drapes out of, was talking in low tones with one of the journalists not ten feet away.

“That is a mystery her ladyship is determined to solve,” he said softly. “The Dunsmuirs have excellent relationships with the Esquimaux in these territories. Did you know the latter have thirty-five different words for snow?”

“I did not. But what that tells me is that they know it intimately.”

“Quite so. They know weather just as intimately, and many of the young men have shown an aptitude for mechanics, to the point that they operate a fleet of pigeons themselves. Pigeons, and many other marvelous devices.”

“So they do more than hunt and fish?”

“As do we all, my dear. The trappings change, but one must still eat and drink and protect oneself from the weather. The Esquimaux have honed all three skills to a fine art—among many others. Her ladyship encourages as many of the crew as are able to spend a winter with them here. It is a hard winter, mind you, but the ones who survive it have the ability to read skies that cannot be replicated anywhere else. One of my engine masters can practically feel a storm two days before it hits.”

Alice was silent a moment, taking this in.

“So the bad blood between the miners and the Esquimaux … is it a fabrication, then?”

“I cannot say for certain. Only that her ladyship is distressed by it and is determined to get to the bottom of it. Such fabrications, as you say, would tear the substance of what we have built here—and I do not mean mines and such.” He looked across the room, where Lord Dunsmuir was offering his wife his arm. “Dinner is served, I see. Will you join me at my table?”

For a moment, Alice thought he was joking. “Are all the captains put together?”

“No indeed. But my opportunities to dine with a young lady are few and far between, and if you lift tomorrow, I shall not get another chance.”

Alice hardly knew which way to look. And here she’d thought the captain was sweet on Claire! Well, maybe he was, but he was also a gentleman who would not leave a lady in the lurch. Claire had told her in Edmonton that people paired off to eat according to some confusing set of rules of precedence. He was a captain. She was a captain. He was handsome and interesting and she’d be gosh-darned if she let Andrew Malvern see how much his treatment bothered her.

“I would be delighted and honored, sir,” she said. “May we include Jake?” She took two steps over behind a potted palm and snagged the boy’s arm. “Otherwise the poor git will hide back here all night and not get a single bite.”

“Nothing would please me more.” Captain Hollys smiled, and for a wonder, Jake grinned back.

“Someone’s got to look after our Alice,” he said. “Some days it takes two.”

“Says you, you rascal,” she told him with no small amount of affection, taking the captain’s arm and offering the other in a more ladylike fashion to Jake. “Just for that, you can dance the first waltz with me. Then we’ll see who’s looking after who.”

Which shut him up properly until they were well into the second course. By the time dessert was set out—a flaky pastry filled with apples that made Jake’s eyes roll back in his head with ecstasy—Alice was feeling much more at ease.

So much so that she didn’t even mind when Captain Hollys responded to a glance from Lord Dunsmuir and left her to her coffee with a murmured apology.

“This ent so bad,” Jake said, relaxing on a settee next to her as the stewards cleared the tables, pushing the chairs back against the wall for the dancing. “Even Count von Zeppelin’s speech. Hard to b’lieve a toff like ’im could be so funny.”

“I’m finding folks aren’t often what we think,” she agreed. “I wonder what—”

“Is this seat taken?” Gloria Meriwether-Astor sank onto the settee next to Alice as though the weight of the world lay on her lace-covered shoulders. “You’re the Texican, aren’t you?” she said, and when Alice nodded, she sighed so deeply her stays creaked. “What a relief. Talk to me. I long for the accents of home.”

Alice couldn’t think what to say. This girl had insulted her friend to her face, and now she was sidling up to her? “Have you been gone a long time?”

“A year and a half. It feels like forever. I swear, when we put down in New York I nearly fell to the ground and kissed it. I was highly tempted to simply run away. It’s only a day on the train home to Philadelphia.”

“Why didn’t you?” Jake wanted to know.

Gloria’s gaze inspected him for flaws, or so it seemed to Alice. “You’re not Texican.”

“That’s right observant of you.”

“Jake,” Alice said in warning.

“It’s all right.” Gloria waved a hand. “Who might you be?”

“I’m navigator aboard the Stalwart Lass.” Jake nodded at Alice. “This ’ere’s ’er captain, Alice Chalmers.”

“That’s right, I remember now. You were with Claire when we landed.” While Alice marveled at the sudden resurrection of her memory, Gloria gazed out across the room to where her father was engaged in a lively conversation with the Margrethe’s first officer. “And my father made a fool of himself and me.”

“Does he do that a lot?” Maybe that had been rude. But Gloria didn’t look offended.

“I’m afraid so. Goodness knows what he’s saying now—probably some burble about how much money he has.”

“That’s the first officer ’e’s talkin’ to,” Jake said. “Might be he’s talking sense, like ships and guns and such.”

Gloria touched her forehead delicately with the back of her hand in its fine kidskin glove. “Save me from more talk of guns,” she sighed. “It’s pressure rifle this and steam cannon that until I swear I’m fit to scream.”

“Ah, the Meriwether-Astor Munitions Works?” Alice inquired, as if she hadn’t made up the term out of thin air not an hour past.

“The very same. Papa’s pet project, and one I’d cheerfully blow up myself if I thought it would do any good.”

“Wot’s a steam cannon?” Jake asked in a tone that almost sounded social.

“Heavens, don’t you start. Because of the wretched thing, we could not bring the second landau—the one that I should have had use of. If I hear its name again I swear I shall scream. On the other hand, maybe that handsome captain would come back to rescue me. Do you think I should try it?” And she straightened so gracefully that it took Alice a second to realize she was craning her neck to find Captain Hollys in the crowd.

“Don’t think so,” she said through her best smile. “Captain Hollys, if that’s who you mean, isn’t much for fragile flowers. He seems to prefer the strong and sensible type.”

“That will never be me.” Gloria subsided, her brief spurt of energy gone.

“Why not?” Alice asked her. “This room is full of strong and sensible types. Why shouldn’t you be one of them?”

“Because strong and sensible types don’t land titles, you ninny,” Gloria snapped, her company manners peeling back abruptly to reveal what might be the real person underneath.

“More to this world than titles,” Jake observed.

“Not when you have the father I do.”

Jake shrugged. “So leave. Go do summat sensible yer own self.”

She glared at him. “Mind your manners, you young scamp, or I’ll have you put off this ship.”

He grinned at her. “I’d like to see you try. You ent no fine lady. I know a few, and you ent one. Yer just content to sit and whinge about yer lot. There’s a pair of eleven-year-olds ’ere got more spine than you.”

“How dare you!” Two spots of color appeared in Gloria’s porcelain cheeks, and she looked almost ready to get up. “Do you know who I am?”

“I ’spect you need the answer to that worse than me,” was the laconic reply.

“Well, I never.” Gloria stood and turned on her heel so swiftly that Alice felt the breeze from her train. She stalked across the empty space in front of the orchestra, heading for the bluster in the corner where her father seemed to be holding court.

“Nicely done, Jake.” Alice toasted him with her china coffee cup. “We’re about to get tossed off this boat thanks to you.”

But he only shrugged. “I got no time for whingers, whether they’ve got a fat purse or not. If I c’n make summat of meself, then so can she. You don’t ’ear the Lady orderin’ people about and moanin’ about ’er lot, nor you neither.”

Rough-and-tumble though they might be, those few words from her young navigator made Alice feel better than any number of compliments could have.

“Jake, about tomorrow. I don’t think it’s fair to ask you to leave all your friends to go gosh knows where with me.”

She would have to figure out the location of gosh knows where pronto. Now that she’d found Pa, she didn’t really have a destination in mind once she got herself away from him and his infernal pigeons. It was one thing to ask a young man to help a girl in her quest. It was another thing altogether to drag him around the skies while she figured out what to do with the rest of her life.

Jake dragged his gaze from Gloria, who was now propped against a table while she tried to get her father’s attention. “But I’m yer navigator.”

“I know, and a fine one, too. But—but I’m not sure you’ve thought this through. If you go with me, what are the odds you’ll see them all again?”

“When I play cowboy poker, I stack the odds in me own favor by rememberin’ the cards.”

“That’s all very nice for clever-boots with memories like cameras. But I’m talking about wind currents and continents and many miles between friends.”

“Them wind currents blow east as well as west. And wiv a stout ship that don’t leak, one continent is much the same as another. I say we gets to choose our course, Alice Chalmers, not be blown about like thistledown.”

“You sound like Claire.”

He snorted.

“So you wouldn’t object to the occasional voyage to, say, England—” An idea swooped into her head like a cliff swallow to its nest. “—if we could pick up a proper cargo?”

“I wouldn’t. There’s a field hard by t’cottage. Lewis and Snouts c’n do some pickin’ at t’scrap yards and rig up a mooring mast there in jig time.”

She needed to speak with Lady Dunsmuir. Surely an empire as big as theirs needed folks with the skills to ferry things around?

She looked over to where the Dunsmuirs were laughing with the count and clinking glasses with him, when the music started up. What was it with these Prussians that everything they played was a waltz? And worse, there was Andrew Malvern heading her way like one of those mining engines under full steam.

“Oh, blast.” She put her cup and saucer down and turned to Jake. “Dance with me.”

“Wot?” He goggled at her as if she’d given him orders to fling himself off the top of the fuselage.

“I don’t want to dance with Mr. Malvern, and he’s headed this way. It’s an act of charity, Jake. Get a move on.”

“I dunno ’ow to dance, Captain!”

“Just get me out on the floor,” she said between her teeth.

He grasped her in a fair approximation of a waltz hold, and she realized that he had grown four or five inches while no one was looking. “One two three, one two three. Just move your feet. That’s it.” Well, this was a blessing. A lifetime of being nimble on his feet in order to survive seemed to be paying off—he picked up the rhythm much more quickly than she had in her few lessons in Edmonton. “Now lengthen your step—I want lots of people between us and him.”

Within a few bars of music, he had done what she asked.

“Well, done, Jake. Remind me to cut you hazard pay for this.”

“Any pay ’ud be good, Captain … one two free, one two free.”

“Point taken. Now see if you can—”

“Excuse me, may I cut in?”

A large body in a black dinner jacket levered Jake out of the way. She got a glimpse of the boy’s astonished face before she thought to look up at the man who had removed him so cavalierly—and so efficiently.

“Evening, Alice,” Frederick Chalmers said as he waltzed her smoothly into the whirling stream of dancers circumnavigating the salon. “You sure do clean up nice.”

101

Alice was so gobsmacked that even the swear words that might have been appropriate to the situation fled her empty skull. The best she could manage was a lame, “What are you doing here?”

Chalmers—she would not think of him as Pa, she just wouldn’t—whirled her into a spin and caught her on the other side of it without missing a step. “I’m trying to find a way to apologize to my daughter without getting shot.”

“I didn’t mean that. I meant, how did you get past the officers at the gangplank when half the camp thinks you’re responsible for the sabotage at the mine?”

For six full bars of music he stared into her face as if he were trying to translate what she’d said from Navapai to Esquimaux. Finally, he said, “You’ve been here less than a day and you’ve heard this?”

“Is it true?” If he could butt in on her nice evening with society folks, then she could butt in on his peace of mind. If he had any.

“It is not. And I am sorry you had to ask. But it’s my own fault, isn’t it, for not providing you with a father you could trust.”

Well, that took the gas out of her balloon good and proper. Maybe she should just shut up and hope that Andrew Malvern would come and cut in. Because getting to the end of this waltz seemed about as simple as flying back to Edmonton in the next three minutes.

“Please don’t lift tomorrow,” he said quietly, his breath disturbing her hair. “I would consider it a gift to spend a few hours with you and find out what kind of woman you’ve become.”

Alice tried to think of a scathing reply, but mostly she just wanted to pull out of his arms and find a pair of drapes behind which she could cry.

“I never stopped loving you, dearling,” he said. “I know what they’re saying about me and the Esquimaux here, and I know Reggie Penhaven will probably have me arrested as soon as he knows I’m aboard, but it was worth the risk to find you and say my say while I could.”

“Is there a price on your head here, too?”

“As soon as they manufacture some proof, I’m sure there will be.”

“But why? What have they got against you? The Dunsmuirs seem like decent sorts—they know who I am and they’ve treated me downright civil.”

“So you’ve told them you’re related to me?”

“Well, sure. That’s the whole reason I came all the way from Resolution. I tracked you to Santa Fe and then to Edmonton … and then here.”

She felt like a fool for admitting it, but it was the truth. When he didn’t reply, she looked up, and was stunned into silence a second time by the expression in his eyes.

His wet eyes, blazing with admiration, with grief, and … with love. For her.

“You tracked me from one end of the continent to the other?” he breathed at last. “No wonder you were so angry. You went through all that, and I must have seemed like ten kinds of yellow-bellied coward for not being willing to do the same.”

Another whirl, and she found herself being danced down a short corridor and into what appeared to be a galley. It was narrow, and cramped, and empty but for racks of dinner plates and cups.

Frederick Chalmers released her, all except for her gloved hand, which he held the way some people held gold, in both hands.

She had not been prepared for honesty. It was one thing for her to say her say and call things as she saw them. It was another altogether to have someone be just as honest with her. It left her nowhere to hide, no smart remarks behind which to take offense, no lies and affectations to poke fun at and gain the upper hand.

It left only herself, in her silken finery, feeling lost and naked in the cold.

“Yes,” she said at last. “That’s exactly how I felt. But that’s no reason for you to come here and risk getting tossed in the brig.”

“They need proof for that, and since it’s all rumor and innuendo and third-hand information, it’s not likely they’ll find any by the end of the evening.”

“But why? That’s what I don’t get. The Dunsmuirs don’t—”

“It isn’t the Dunsmuirs. I don’t want to say any more in case I’m wrong, and to burden you with knowledge might harm you.”

“I know a thing or two, Pa. I know that the Dunsmuirs trust the Esquimaux who work here, and the folks in your village. And I know there’s someone out there who doesn’t want Count von Zeppelin’s ships to land anywhere but New York City. And I know—”

His grip on her hand tightened. “What do you know of that? Alice, keep your voice down. Men can be killed for saying things like that out loud.”

“But it’s true,” she whispered. “Men have already been killed. They nearly got Claire and me—it was only chance that we didn’t get shot full of bullets with tiny propeller engines and M.A.M.W. stamped on ’em.” She tugged her hand out of his. “Ow.”

“I’m sorry, dearling. You just—you surprised the stuffing out of me. Please tell me you haven’t said any of this to anyone.”

“Just to Claire and the kids.”

“Kids? Are you serious? Children are being burdened with this knowledge?”

“They’re not ordinary kids,” she said dryly. “Those twin girls with us—they know everything.”

“They can’t. You can’t. Alice, it’s worth your life to speak of this.”

She eyed him. “You sound like some kind of spy. What are you really doing up here?”

Now he slid the galley door closed and locked it. His voice dropped to barely above a whisper. “You’ve got your ma’s brains, and that’s a fact. So it has happened already? The count knows his life is in danger?”

“Hard to avoid it, when a bullet creases your head and lays you out. But like you say, there’s no proof. Someone shot at us, and the bullets’ engine casings have those initials on them, but that don’t mean anything. Lizzie found something similar under one of the cargo ships, too, but—” She shrugged. Said out loud like that, most sane people would just roll their eyes and sidestep away.

“On the contrary, it means a great deal. Alice, are you acquainted with the count? I mean, outside of being in the vehicle when the attempt was made?”

“It does tend to bring strangers together,” she said dryly. “I guess I’m on speaking terms. He wants to talk with me about my automatons.”

“I do, too, but it will have to wait for a sunny day and crisp snow.” She must have looked confused, for he smiled and said, “It’s something Malina says. Alice, I must be quick. You must find a way to convince the count to leave here as soon as possible. By dawn at the latest.”

“How d’you expect me to do that?”

“I am sure you can find a way.”

“But Pa, I can’t just waltz up to one of the greatest men in the world and say, excuse me, sir, but a suspected saboteur says you’re to leave pronto. Why would he do anything but laugh and pat me on the head?”

“Because I have reason to think there will be another attempt if he stays much longer. If not tonight, then definitely during the tour of the mine tomorrow. They mean to blame it on poor management by the Dunsmuirs, thus discrediting the family and destroying the enterprise here. It might even—” He clamped his lips shut.

“—start a war?”

He stared at her, his face going so still it might have been turned to stone. “Where did you hear that?” he whispered.

“Nowhere. Claire and Andrew and I were talking of it. Why start a bullet business on a continent where you can’t sell enough to keep it going? The only place you could sell them would be to countries who are at war.”

He drew in a shallow breath, then seemed to force himself to breathe more deeply. More calmly. Finally he was able to speak.

“Governments have fallen for saying such things.”

“Lucky it’s just you and me and the plates and cups, then.” She waited for him to reply, and when he did not, said, “Pa, how do you know all this? What’s a man living in the back of beyond with a lot of Esquimaux got to do with anything?”

He seemed to come back to himself with difficulty. “Thirty days from now I will tell you, when it’s all over.”

“When what’s over?”

“Alice, please just trust me. You must whisper in the count’s ear and get him to lift by dawn. Can you do that?”

“I can probably whisper in his ear, but I don’t fancy he’s the type to ask how high when I say jump.”

“Just do your best. It is all any of us can do.”

Frustration and about a thousand questions roiled in her gut under the constricting corset. She stared at him, her lips compressed so she wouldn’t blurt out a bunch of swear words, and his gaze softened.

“My dear brave girl. Have I told you how proud I am of you?”

She shook her head. “You ain’t spoken to me in fourteen years, Pa.”

“But I have. Every day. Every time I learned something new, I shared it with you in my head. Every time I saw a new landscape, I imagined exploring it with you. And every time the pigeons came back, I saw you growing and changing, and my heart broke a little more.”

Now she really had to press her lips together, or she would break down and weep. As it was, the hot prick of tears made her blink. She must not cry. She must not let him see.

“Alice.” He said her name like a prayer. “Whatever happens, I will find you when what the Esquimaux call the caribou moon—the full moon following the caribou migration—is at its brightest. Our time here is nearly over, anyway. I just wish—”

She followed his gaze to the ring of delicately carved ivory on the fourth finger of his right hand. “Is that from Malina? Is she your wife?”

“Yes. And yes. I am trying to steel myself to leaving her and the girls. The shadow side of my actions is that I have no funds to keep them with me. It is a simple fact that in doing my duty, I must leave them.”

Alice raised her fingers to her hair, and touched what was fixed there. “You need money?”

“Not here, no. But if I were to travel with my family, I would.”

She was already undoing the clasp of the diamond watch pin that Claire had given her back in Resolution as thanks for helping her. She had offered to give it back to Davina, but the latter had only laughed and asked if she would like the earrings to match. The latter were in her ears at this moment, as a kind of security deposit against the future. “Take this. If you can get as far as Edmonton, you can exchange it for gold. It ought to get you wherever you’re going.”

“I can’t take this from you. Was it a gift?”

“It was. It used to belong to Lady Dunsmuir, and now I’m giving it to you.”

“Alice, this is worth several hundred pounds at least—these three diamonds are a carat apiece, and all these brilliants set around them amount to one more. I can’t take the most valuable thing you own.”

“The Lass is the most valuable thing I own. This is just something to put in my hair.” She put the pin in his palm and folded his fingers around it. “If this means you can be with Malina and the girls and me all at once, then it’s money well spent.”

His other hand covered hers. “Just when I believe there is no hope for human nature, I meet the refutation of that belief in my own daughter.”

“That’s a lot of twenty-five-cent words, Pa.”

“I believe in getting my money’s worth.”

“Will I see you again, really?”

“Look for me by the caribou moon.”

“How? I could be in Victoria by then. Or San Francisco. Or—or London, I guess, if I can find a cargo.”

“You forget the pigeons. I will send one with you on the Lass. Just release it when you moor somewhere for more than a day, and I’ll come.”

She could say no. She could drum up some righteous rage, and turn a cold shoulder and march out of this narrow little room doing double duty as a confessional. But what would that get her?

More of the same, that’s what. More tears, and more empty skies, and a lifetime of feeling as rootless and vulnerable as she had coming in here.

A caribou moon meant the end of one season … and the beginning of another.

Maybe she should open her eyes … and her heart.

“Alice?” He bent to look into her face. “Please don’t cry, sweetheart.”

But it was too late. She threw herself into his arms and bawled like the little girl she had once been.

102

“’Scuse me, c’n I ’ave this dance?”

To Claire’s utter astonishment—and that of the young officer partnering her—Jake cut in and manfully attempted to steer her away from the young man and across the floor.

“One two free, one two free … Lady, we gots to rescue Alice. She an’ some gent did ’alf a waltz and then disappeared down that corridor there, behind them frondy things.”

“Those are palms. And Jake, there are occasions when a lady may be allowed some privacy.”

He made a disgusted sound and tripped. His recovery was quick, though, and her skirts disguised most of it. “It weren’t that way. ’E weren’t one of us, nor one of the Margrethe’s crew neither.”

“Describe him.”

When he was finished, Claire patted him with the hand that rested on his shoulder. “The ocular device confirms it. That is Frederick Chalmers, her father. They had words in the Esquimaux village. Perhaps he has come to repair their relationship.”

“P’raps. And p’raps we should make sure she’s all right, him bein’ a saboteur and all.”

“I am convinced he has been unjustly accused, but to set your mind at ease, we will join them.”

In seconds Jake had located which of the paneled doors along the short service corridor was the correct one, and Claire opened it, preparing a smile.

She found Alice in tears in Frederick Chalmers’s arms.

“Captain!” Jake sprang into the room. “All right?”

Alice lifted her head and snuffled like a child, whereupon her father twitched a linen napkin off a nearby stack and handed it to her. “Yes,” she said, and blew her nose. “What’s wrong?”

“I thought—”

“Jake was concerned,” Claire said smoothly, when Jake came to an abrupt halt. “Mr. Frederick Chalmers, may I introduce Alice’s navigator, Jake Fletcher.”

“Beggin’ yer pardon, Lady, but it’s McTavish,” the boy said slowly. “Snouts bade me keep it quiet from the others and use a different ’andle. I’m ’is brother. ’alf brother.”

“Jake McTavish,” she corrected herself, inclining her head in thanks for the information while wondering why on earth Snouts would require such a thing. “Mr. Chalmers, will you be joining us this evening?”

“No,” Alice said. She balled up the napkin and stuffed it down the front of her gown. Claire tried not to wince. “He’ll be hightailing it off this boat as quick as he can, before Penhaven finds out he’s here.”

“Or I can be polite and greet the Dunsmuirs and Count von Zeppelin.” He gave his daughter a meaningful glance. “And then, while the director is dragging me away, you might get a chance to speak with the count.”

Instead of answering, Alice proceeded to brief Claire on the particulars of what she and her father had just been discussing.

“I knew it,” Claire breathed.

“You know nothing,” Frederick said sharply. “I have asked Alice to do one thing, and one thing only. Her friends are not to be involved.”

“Gettin’ shot at don’t make us involved?” Jake asked. “Seems like we got bigger fish to fry than gettin’ the count clear of here. Wot ’appens if they go ahead wiv the sabotage anyways? More folks than just ’im could get ’urt.”

“For heaven’s sake, I will not discuss such secret matters with children!”

Jake eyed him. “Ent been a child in a long time.” Then, upon seeing Claire’s pointed gaze, reluctantly added, “Sir.”

“Give it up, Pa. We’re involved and that’s that. You can be secretive about the rest of it, but meantime, it’s our friends in danger here.”

Chalmers struggled with himself, and while he did, Claire thought aloud. “It’s safe to expect that Meriwether-Astor wants the Dunsmuirs to survive to bear the shame. Otherwise, why go to all the trouble of bringing the journalists? If they are killed, they become martyrs and the two-inch headlines will announce a state funeral instead of … whatever he is going to accuse them of.”

Chalmers let out a breath with as much exasperated noise as a steam engine. “For the last time, you must not—”

The floor jerked out from under their feet as the great flagship reeled from a sudden blow of massive force. Claire and Alice were flung into one another’s arms, while Jake fell into Chalmers’s back. The dishes slid up one side of their racks and clattered down into place again, while outside the galley, shrieks of terror and the smash and tinkle of glass told Claire that the buffet had not been so carefully engineered for bad weather.

She had just pushed herself up onto her hands and knees when a second blow struck the ship. It swooped sickeningly, as though all its mooring ropes had failed on one side and it had taken leave of the ground. With a cry, she fell against the cabinet doors. At least she had not far to fall this time.

“Alice? Are you all right? Jake?” Dear heaven, she had to get over to the Lady Lucy. “We must make certain the Mopsies are all right, and Tigg and Willie. Jake?”

A groan told her he was conscious, at least. The three of them helped each other struggle to their feet, she and Alice impeded by yards of silk and petticoats that they finally hauled up in their hands so they could find their footing.

“What was that?” Alice groaned. “An earthquake?”

“That was no earthquake.” After pulling himself to his feet, Frederick Chalmers tugged his waistcoat into place, looking grim. “That was a pressure wave—or else something happened to the gas bags within the fuselage. There will have been an explosion, and close by, too.”

Bruised, sore, they tumbled out of the little galley. When they entered the saloon, Claire realized how much luck had been on their side. For the galley had protected them in a way that the large room full of loose objects had not protected the dancers, musicians, and other guests and crew of the Margrethe.

Chalmers gripped his daughter’s hand. “Are you really all right?”

“Yes, Pa. I’ll have a big bruise on my behind tomorrow. Not like these other poor folks—where are the count’s medics?”

But Chalmers was not to be distracted. “You must get von Zeppelin off the ship and out of here. Ten to one this is merely a distraction and he is the real target.”

“But Pa—”

“Quick, Alice. There is no time to lose. I’m going out to see what happened.”

Claire caught Jake’s eye and the boy followed him out without a word, quick as a footpad, weaving in and out of the dazed men and women in formal dress who were making for the gangways, instinctively seeking solid ground. The medics, who were coming through from the crew deck with their bags, began to work on the fallen and injured.

The Dunsmuirs were on their feet, and appeared to be having strong words about her ladyship’s leaving. Claire wound her way over, stepping over a swath of smashed desserts and three potted palms stretched out on the carpet, their fronds like fingers beseeching aid.

“Davina, we must see to the children on Lady Lucy immediately,” she said in a tone that made the earl draw himself up in affront.

“You shall not—”

“John, I am responsible for the twins and Tigg,” Claire told him firmly. “Davina and I will escort each other. You must see to the safety of your crew and officers here.”

“But there may be—”

“Thank you, John. We shall return in half an hour.”

Davina grasped her hand and the two of them hauled up their trains and dashed helter-skelter for the gangway, leaping over smashed china and fallen chairs, skirting around the medical men bending over their patients, until they gained the ground.

From there it was only a matter of fifty yards to Lady Lucy … where they could see what had happend. For the force of the blast had pierced the Margrethe’s fuselage, and in the light from the airfield they could see its great gas bags slowly collapsing. Already aeronauts were scrambling in the fixed rigging, closing valves and shouting orders to one another as the ship sagged on the ground.

If Frederick Chalmers had hoped the count would leave the north under his own steam, that hope was now dashed. From what Claire could see, it would take days to repair the damage—and with weather on its way, did they have that time?

“Such a noble ship,” Davina said, as though of a friend who had died. “We must do all we can to assist. But first things first.”

Three of the middies watched anxiously at the windows of Lady Lucy’s gondola, and when Davina waved, their heads disappeared and they appeared moments later, jumping down to hold the gangway steps for her.

“Were any of you injured?” she asked, pausing on the bottom step.

“No, your ladyship,” young Colley said. “I can’t say the same of the furniture, nor the collation on the sideboard, neither.”

“Willie?”

“Safe, your ladyship,” Tigg responded. “Bumped ’is elbow falling out of bed, is all.”

“Well done, Mr. Terwilliger. Mr. Yau shall have my commendation for your prompt action this very night.” Davina took the steps two at a time, Claire on her heels.

Davina ran back to the family’s suite, while Claire dashed down the corridor with Tigg right behind her. “What was it, Lady?” he asked. “Knocked us all to the deck all of a sudden, it did.”

“It was a pressure wave from an explosion.” She pushed open the Mopsies’ door to find them both on their feet. “Are you all right?”

“Aye,” Lizzie said. “Wot’s a pressure wave?”

But Claire did not answer. Instead, she gathered the three of them into her arms, much to Tigg’s embarrassed pleasure. “I am so glad. There were many people injured on the Margrethe—I had terrible visions of what might have happened on a ship so much smaller.”

“What exploded?” Tigg wanted to know. When he wriggled out of her grasp, Claire released them and stood.

“I’m sure we shall find out shortly, when Jake comes back. Lizzie appears to have been correct earlier, though … Count von Zeppelin is to be the target of another attack, we suspect by the Meriwether-Astors, and Mr. Chalmers seems to think the explosion is merely a distraction.”

“Mr. Chalmers?” Maggie sounded puzzled. “Where’d he come from?”

“He and Alice have made up. Come. Enough talking. Help me out of this ridiculous gown and into my raiding rig. I suspect our night has only begun.”

*

Any faint hope Claire might have cherished that the Mopsies would stay on the ship was dashed so quickly it might not have existed.

Keeping close, they followed her to the family suite, where she opened the door without being invited to do so. “Davina? I’m taking the girls and Tigg to reconnoiter.”

Her ladyship and Willie cuddled together on a divan that had slid all the way over to the row of portholes on the hull. “You promised John to return in half an hour. See that you do so. Then bring him here if you can, to begin planning for the Margrethe’s repairs. Willie and I are quite all right, and Mr. Andersen and Mr. Yau are aboard should we need assistance.”

Or protection. Claire could hear the words in her tone, though she did not say them with children present. If any danger to her son were to present itself, Claire had no doubt who would win.

She nodded and closed the door. “Come along, girls. Tigg, are you armed?”

“No, Lady. We ent issued a pistol till we been crew for six months.”

“Then stay close.”

They had no difficulty discovering from whence the explosion had come; a thick plume of dust and smoke issued out of the open pit as though a volcano had erupted. A crowd twenty men deep clustered at the gates, held back by the Dunsmuirs’ security men who had linked arms across it.

But even from behind the crowd, the pit was so vast that Claire had no trouble seeing into its depths.

“Wot ’appened, Lady?” Maggie struggled to see past a large gentleman’s coat. “I can’t see.”

“It appears that another of those enormous digging engines has been destroyed. That is source of the smoke—there is nothing left of it but a burning shell and some of its continuous track.”

But there had been two explosions. What had caused the other? On tiptoe, craning her neck past the shoulder of the large man, she scanned the pit for evidence of another burning engine. Perhaps it was closer to where they stood, and perspective did not allow—

And then she saw it, deep in the pit, where the funnel narrowed and it appeared tunnels might have been dug. But there were no tunnels now. The lowest level had been blown to bits, and even now, entire sections of the sides of the pit were sliding into the hole that was hundreds of feet deep, filling up whatever excavations had once been there.

Claire’s knowledge of diamond mining was limited strictly to the brilliants that were its end result, but even she could see that the Firstwater Mine was done for. It would take months of excavation to return it to production. Maybe years.

“Lady!” Lizzie tugged sharply on her sleeve.

“What is it? Did someone step on you?”

“It ent me. It’s Alice’s dad.”

“Where?” How on earth could she see in this crush?

But Lizzie, who apparently had grown tired of trying to see around people and had gone out to the fringes to get a better look, was no longer interested in pits and explosions. She dragged Claire over behind a sentry shack and pointed. “Look. That’s ’im, innit?”

If the crowd in front of them was awestruck in the face of tragedy, the one over by the mine offices was fierce and savage. Struggling in its midst was Frederick Chalmers, his dinner jacket torn nearly off, and alongside him two young men wearing the colorful fur-trimmed coats favored by the Esquimaux.

“Oh, dear. Come on.”

“Pa!” came a shriek from across the gravel of the airfield, and Alice shot between two of the buildings to plunge into the crowd, her aquamarine skirts bunched up in both hands as she used elbows and shoulders to get to him. “Take your hands off him, you dadburned varmints! Leave him alone!”

“Alice, no!” her father roared.

“Shut up, you!” Reggie Penhaven, his face scarlet in the light of the mining lamps held by nearly half the crowd, threw an elbow that made Chalmers double over, gasping. “We’ve caught you in the act this time and you’re not going to weasel out of it. You and your Esquimaux accomplices!”

Claire unholstered the lightning rifle and plowed into the crowd right behind Alice. The butt glanced off someone’s head, then between someone else’s shoulder blades, and the way was clear.

“What is the meaning of this?” she demanded in such frigid Belgravia tones that Lady St. Ives herself would have been proud. “Unhand this man at once.”

Reggie Penhaven eyed the rifle with more respect that he did Claire herself. “You’d best get back to Lady Lucy, yer ladyship,” he said. “This is Firstwater business, and none of yours.”

“Since Alice was dancing on Count von Zeppelin’s ship with Mr. Chalmers not half an hour past, and she is with me in the Dunsmuirs’ party, I think it is indeed my business,” she snapped, gazing down her nose as though Penhaven were the most disgusting sort of insect. “It is impossible that he should be your saboteur.”

“I beg your pardon, but it isn’t. These two men are his accomplices. They set the explosives on his orders, and if he was dancing and leaving them to take the blame, then shame on him and her both.” Penhaven’s eyes blazed. “Now get out of my way, yer ladyship, before you get hurt butting your nose into men’s business.”

The men holding the struggling Chalmers and the Esquimaux in iron grips surged past her, causing her to stagger back or be trampled.

And as he passed, Frederick Chalmers shouted, “Find Isobel! You must tell her—” One of his captors cuffed him right across his bad eye, and his instructions were cut off in a yelp of pain.

“Where are you going?” she shouted. “Lord Dunsmuir is going to hear of this!”

“Hang ’em! Hang ’em!” the crowd chanted.

“Oh, dear Lord above,” she moaned. “Mopsies, Tigg, we must fetch Lord Dunsmuir at once. He will see reason.”

“Lady, they’ll hang ’im before we get halfway across the airfield.” Tigg’s voice squeaked and then hit bottom, his brown eyes wide with fear. “And ’oo’s Isobel? Not that Churchill mort wot makes ’is lordship so angry?”

Claire couldn’t imagine what on earth Isobel Churchill had to do with Frederick Chalmers. To her knowledge, they’d never even met. The only thing they might have in common would be a regard for the Esquimaux … which was not going to save his life.

“Lady, I know that man.” Lizzie yanked on Claire’s sleeve so hard she nearly lost her grip on the rifle. “That big one holding onto one of the Esquimaux men. ’Is name’s Alan, and ’e’s wiv that cargo ship where I found that brass shell.”

Alice fell out of the crowd and clutched Claire like a drowning person. “We have to do something! Did you see that? They’re going to hang him, Claire!”

“Wait—Alice, no, they’re not—Alice, dear one, stop this at once! You cannot help your father if you fall to pieces now.”

Tears glazed Alice’s face and the whites of her eyes showed her fear for her father’s safety. She gasped, coughed, and did her manful best to control herself. “Please help,” she begged. “I can’t bear it to only have known him for a single day!”

“Alice, listen to me. Did you hear what Lizzie just said?”

“N-no.”

“The man holding one of the Esquimaux lads was Alan, from the cargo ship. Do you remember seeing him?”

“Y-yes. He brought Lizzie back. He’s from Santa—” She stopped. “He told us he’s Texican.” Alice’s breathing calmed as her brain began to turn and pick up steam. “I’ll bet you my diamond earrings that those men from the cargo ship—maybe more—set those explosives.”

“And were the first to turn and point fingers at the Esquimaux, who have no one to defend them.”

Is that why Chalmers wanted Isobel? To defend the Esquimaux men? But what good would that do? She would have about as much power in this situation as Claire herself.

Alice took a few steps in the direction of the mining offices, where they could hear the roar of the crowd bouncing between the low-slung buildings. “They won’t hang him, will they?”

“They need the journalists to do a proper job,” Claire said, thinking fast. “But what they didn’t expect was the damage done by the pressure wave. Half the journalists are probably in sick bay on the Margrethe, and the other half are in that crowd, trying to get closer to the pit.”

“We have to get him away from them.” Alice’s voice was rising, her hysteria temporarily slipping its reins. “But how?”

Maggie slipped over to her side and put both arms around her waist in a comforting hug. “Don’t fret, our Alice,” she said. “Maybe they’ll lock ’im in the gents’. Then me and the Lady, we c’n fetch ’im out.” She grinned over her shoulder at Claire. “Can’t we, Lady?”

103

Claire wasted no time. “We must divide and conquer. Where is Jake?”

But in the shouting crowd, it was impossible to see more than a heaving mass of angry, fearful and therefore bloodthirsty humanity. One skinny boy doing as she had wordlessly asked—follow and watch—was impossible to make out.

“Maggie, find him and find out where they are holding Mr. Chalmers. Then meet Alice and Lizzie in the countess’s powder room, at the bottom of the steps in the secret passage.”

Alice gawked at her as though she had gone mad. “Secret passage?”

Lizzie clutched Maggie’s hand. “I dunno where the passage is, Lady.”

“Maggie will show you. I will go to Lord Dunsmuir and fetch him back here to prevent this disaster. You are the backup plan if I fail. We have broken people out of more impossible prisons than this, have we not?”

“Aye,” Maggie said. “Don’t be long, Lady. I don’t much fancy ’angin’ about underground not knowin’ wot’s goin’ on.”

“I won’t. No matter what, I shall fetch you within the hour. Now, run.”

She took her own advice, weaving through the crowd of frantic diamond miners still shouting and pressing at the gates, until she gained the relative freedom of the airfield. She had promised to return to the earl in half an hour. It must be well past that, but perhaps the earl would not notice in the urgent need of all those people for his guidance and leadership.

The damaged ship belonged to the count, of course, but she could not remember seeing him in the melee. Which did not bode well. Anxious butterflies began to flutter in her stomach, but she took a deep breath and leaped up the gangway of the Margrethe, trying to ignore them. Perhaps Alice had succeeded in convincing him he was in danger, and he had prudently taken cover.

One thing at a time. At least the count, she devoutly hoped, was not in imminent danger of being hanged.

In the salon, the deck of which was now tilted slightly off the horizontal, some semblance of order had been cobbled together. She dodged between people laid out on the carpet with varying degrees of injury. Medics tended to those who had been hurt the worst, which seemed to have been the dancers, knocked out of their turns and thrown several feet. At least those who had been seated or in the orchestra had been closer to the ground, and had not been plucked out of the air in midstep.

Lord Dunsmuir was nowhere to be seen.

“I do beg your pardon,” she said to a man with a red band about his sleeve wrapping a bandage around Gloria’s arm with swift, firm movements. “Do you know where I might find Lord Dunsmuir? It is a matter of the greatest urgency.”

“Nein, fraulein,” the man said. “As you can see, I am busy here.”

“Looking after me,” Gloria said. “Claire, what a fright. Do you know what happened?”

“Parties unknown blew up the mine and one of the digging engines,” she said with heroic brevity. “Have you seen Lord Dunsmuir?”

“Last I saw, he was over there with my father.” Gloria waved a hand in the direction of the corridor that went forward to the bridge. “I’ll come with you. Good heavens, Claire, is that a gun?”

“Yes. There is no need. You must conserve your strength.”

And without a backward glance, she headed down the corridor, trying doors one after the other. The bridge was in a state of organized chaos as the Margrethe’s captain appeared to be taking reports on the state of ship, crew, and guests.

No John.

She could not search the entire ship. There was no time. She must ask for help.

Someone tapped her shoulder and she turned to see Gloria, cradling her arm. “I just had a look out the porthole and saw Lord Dunsmuir heading over to that pretty gold ship with Father and some others.”

“Oh, thank you.”

She headed for the forward gangway at a run, and only realized several moments later than Gloria was running behind her, awkwardly hugging her arm to her ribs.

“Claire, wait up.”

“I can’t. A man’s life is at stake.” She jumped down the stairs two at a time, and ran for the Lady Lucy faster than she ever had in her life.

She found John and Davina together in the forward salon, her ladyship still with Willie in her lap, and conferring in low, rapid tones with several men, among them Mr. Meriwether-Astor and the first officer of the Margrethe.

Oh, dear. And Reginald Penhaven, who had clearly come straight here while she was fluttering about on the great Zeppelin ship attempting to find them, like a moth beating itself to exhaustion against a windowpane as it tried to get to the lamp within.

“Lord Dunsmuir!” she said breathlessly, crossing the room. “I need your help!”

But he did not seem to hear. It was only when Willie wriggled out of his mother’s grasp and ran to hug her around the waist that they took any notice of her at all.

“Claire, return to your cabin at once,” his lordship ordered in tones he had never addressed to her before. “It is far too dangerous for you to be wandering about.”

“It is far too dangerous for me to stay,” she retorted in tones equally peremptory. “John, they are about to hang Frederick Chalmers for causing the explosions, but he is innocent.”

“My information indicates you are wrong.”

“Your information is biased by the self-interest and criminal intent of your informants.”

“Claire!” Davina had gone as pale as her cream silk gown, which, Claire now saw, was streaked with brown stains and what appeared to be half the contents of a punch bowl. “Explain yourself.”

Too late, she realized she had let her fear and her temper get the better of her. She had no proof. All she had was the goodwill of her host and hostess, and if she did not step very, very carefully now, she would lose even that.

“Please, my lord, forgive me. I only meant that it is impossible. Frederick Chalmers was dancing with his daughter only moments before the explosion occurred. He could not have done it.”

“Are you here again, meddling in matters that don’t concern you?” Reginald Penhaven appeared to be on the verge of striking someone. She took a prudent step back. “Your lordship, this girl has already importuned me with the same ridiculous story. We don’t have time for this nonsense.”

“Claire, I am very sorry, but the evidence suggests that Alice’s father is behind this terrible destruction.” Davina’s voice trembled. “You must be brave—and so must Alice.”

“He is not!” Claire said in desperation. “And neither are those poor Esquimaux boys with him. It’s all a plot to discredit you!”

“The poor girl is hysterical,” Meriwether-Astor said, his face arranged in lines of pity, his eyes measuring, calculating. “Perhaps the medics should administer laudanum?”

“A good suggestion,” Penhaven put in.

“At least wait until morning to do … anything … and allow him to tell you himself,” she begged the earl, feeling the cold of approaching doom on her skin.

“Claire, if you do not have proof, you must see our position.” John Dunsmuir visibly controlled himself in an effort to be civil.

“I do have proof. Perhaps if we speak privately—”

“Dunsmuir, this is a waste of time,” Meriwether-Astor snapped. “I have fifty injured men, a damaged convoy, and an injured daughter, and I want to know what you’re going to do about it, since it’s clear your mismanagement of this operation has been the cause of this disaster.”

“Mismanage—!”

“I said mismanagement, and I meant it. If any of those men succumb to their injuries and—God forbid—die, I am holding you personally responsible along with that Chalmers madman.”

Over by the window, she saw now, two journalists had their notepads out and were scribbling furiously. She and Alice and Lizzie had been right. Meriwether-Astor had timed his moment perfectly, for what better time to strike at the heart of an enemy than when he was staggering from a blow?

Claire felt as though she was caught in the middle of a street with two steambuses bearing down upon her. No matter in which direction she chose to run, one bus or the other would strike her.

But Lord Dunsmuir was an experienced man of the world. If he and Davina could not handle Meriwether-Astor, then no one could.

And they were not in imminent danger of being hanged, either.

For the second time in ten minutes, she made Hobson’s choice.

As a towering argument broke out between the Dunsmuirs and Meriwether-Astor, no one but a tearful Willie noticed as she gave the world’s most abbreviated curtsey, turned, and hurried from the salon.

At the bottom of Lady Lucy’s gangway, Gloria Meriwether-Astor had finally caught up to her. She brushed past the girl. “I’m sorry, Gloria, but I don’t have time.”

Gloria grabbed her arm in a grip surprisingly strong for such a languid person. “Is my father up there?”

“Yes. He is attempting to ruin my friends. You’ll forgive me if I do not have much to say to you at present. I must save a man’s life.”

“I’ll come with you.” Breathlessly, Gloria matched Claire’s pace.

“Your place is with your father,” she told Gloria with the calm of despair. “Go away and keep it.”

“I’m not responsible for what he does, you know. You don’t have to treat me like I am.”

In a sudden spike of rage, Claire swung on her. “I’m not treating you as anything at all. Much the way you treated me at school. Now get out of my way.”

In the light from the lamps on the mooring masts, Gloria’s eyes glittered with unshed tears. “I suppose I deserve that. But Claire, wait. I want to help.”

“You want to help?” She couldn’t control her own voice—it was shrill with impatience and fear. “Why should you, when your father has contrived to blow up the Firstwater Mine to discredit the Dunsmuirs, cover up the assassination of Count von Zeppelin, and provoke an international incident?”

Gloria’s mouth fell open. “Are you insane?”

“Not in the least. I just can’t prove any of it. So go on, take that tale back to your father and he can feel free to assassinate me, too. But while you’re about it, I have work to do.”

She whirled and began to run.

And to her outraged dismay, her plain speaking still did not dislodge the cocklebur that was her former classmate, who seemed determined to stick to her no matter what unpalatable truths she flung in her face.

“All right, so you’re insane,” Gloria panted. “But I could almost believe you. Insanity is the only thing that can explain why I’m even here. And maybe it explains some of the things I’ve heard him say—things that made no sense.”

“Everything makes sense if you have the right point of view.” Claire dove into the shadow of a building and flattened herself against the wall to catch her breath before the next leg. “Gloria, I mean it. You cannot be here.”

“A man’s life is at stake, I know. Is Father trying to have him killed?”

“He is using him as a scapegoat. He will take the blame for the explosion and be hanged in short order if we do not prevent it.”

“You need help.”

“If you are going to insult my mental capacities, you may save your breath to cool your—”

“No, I didn’t mean that. I meant, you need reinforcements. Surely you’re not taking on that mob by yourself?”

“I tried that, and failed. So now I must resort to stealth. What I need is for Penhaven to have locked him in a room to which I can gain access, like—like his lordship’s private dressing room, or Davina’s powder room, in the building where the management offices are.”

“I can do that.”

Claire stared at her with astonished contempt, but in the dark of course she could not see it. Just as well. She moderated her tone so that her utter disregard of this mooring-rope of a girl did not leak through. “Now who is the crazy one?”

“I’m serious. I’ll simply tell them I’ve a message from my father and Penhaven, and tell them to lock him in one of those places. It’s not like they have a gaol here. We’re not in the Wild West.”

“Why should they listen to you? They didn’t listen to me.”

“You haven’t been yawning through all those meetings with the management. Father doesn’t think I have a single feather in my brain, and maybe I don’t, but he makes me sit with him anyway. Family solidarity or something. But the directors know me. They might believe it—at least, for long enough that you could do … whatever it is you plan to do.”

Now it was Claire’s turn to grasp Gloria’s elbow and drag her into the light from the main square, so she could see her face properly. “Or for long enough for you to tell them to trap me, too, once my back is turned?” A spasm passed across Gloria’s pale, elegant features. “Why are you suddenly being so helpful, when it means betraying your own family?”

For a moment Gloria gazed at her, as though she were trying to remember where she’d seen her before. “You aren’t really governess to those Cockney children, are you?”

Dear heaven, the girl was unbalanced. “I really don’t have time for—”

“How did you meet them?”

Impatiently, she said, “They accosted me the night of the Arabian Bubble riots. I accosted them right back, and we came to an agreement—I would teach them their numbers and letters, and they would teach me how to survive in—in less comfortable circumstances than I had been used to. I am now their guardian—we are family. But what has that to do with Mr. Chalmers?”

“I never thought I’d learn anything from an alley mouse, especially one so rude, but …” Gloria shook her head. “Never mind. For once in my life I’m going to do what’s right instead of what’s expected of me.”

Perhaps Gloria meant to betray them all. Perhaps she was deluded. But the truth was bleak: Claire had no plan other than to trust to chance that four girls could save a man’s life. And for that, chance was not good enough.

Gloria was a gamble of a different sort.

So Claire dealt her the cards.

104

Andrew Malvern had been dancing with Davina when the pressure wave engulfed the Margrethe, sending them both sideways and toppling over a potted plant. He had managed to roll so that her ladyship’s slender form landed on him rather than the other way round, to be followed immediately afterward by a shower bath from the punch bowl, which circled away under a table after it had deposited its contents upon them both.

His first thought, while picking orange slices off her ladyship, was for Claire, his second for Alice. Since then, both those thoughts had remained uppermost and urgent in his mind as he tried to find them in the chaos.

Then, out of a porthole, he had a glimpse of Claire—no longer in evening dress, and with the lightning rifle out and ready, tearing across the field with the Mopsies—which galvanized him into action. He had left the young officer he was tending to the medic who had finally arrived, and sprinted after Claire, only to lose her in the shouting, panicked crowd at the gates of the mine.

Then, to his horror, he heard a man’s name taken up with chants of “Hang him!” and realized who the man in the middle of the crowd must be. Tall, blond, one eye, and with the same wide mouth and firm chin—it could only be Alice’s father.

“Get Isobel!” Chalmers shouted into the screaming crowd—and a second later, Andrew tripped over a pair of booted feet and fell to his hands and knees with bone-jarring force.

“All right, sir?” Someone hauled him up by one arm. Someone with a familiar voice.

“Jake?” He got to his feet to see that the crowd had moved on, dragging Chalmers deeper into the circle of buildings. “Jake, what is going on? Is that Alice’s father?”

“It is. They’re going t’blame the explosion on ’im and ’ang ’im for it. I just saw T’Lady run off—I ’ope she’s gone t’fetch ’elp.”

“Is she all right? I must find her.”

“Ent nowt you c’n do fer her, but you c’n give me a hand.”

“Jake, you don’t understand—she will be hurt.”

“The Lady?” The boy snorted with derision. “Not likely. She’s armed and in a fine uproar of a temper. Don’t you worry about ’er—worry about yer own self. She gave me a job and I can’t do it and do wot Alice’s dad said, too. You gots to ’elp me.”

Was he ever to be useful to Claire on this benighted journey? How was she to see him as a man she could trust with her life and future if she kept leaving him behind to go and save people? Andrew reined his emotions in with an act of will and focused on the boy in front of him, whose desperate eyes belied the curl still on his lip.

“All right, then. What can I do?”

“The Lady bid me follow Alice’s dad and report back to ’er when I found out where they’re goin’ wiv ’im. But he needs someone t’find that Isobel Churchill, and I reckon that’s you.”

“I heard him shout. But why—”

“Dunno, and it don’t matter. A desperate man shouts for ’er, seems a bloke ought t’find ’er.”

Privately, Andrew thought that a desperate man might call a woman’s name if he were having a love affair with her and wanted to see her one last time before he met his doom, but that was none of his business. “Right. I shall do that, and bring her … where?”

“You ought’nt to ’ave much trouble ’earing where ’e is, ’specially if they’re to ’ang ’im. Folks tend to get loud on such occasions.”

“I trust you have not learned this from experience?”

“Mr. Malvern, sir, wiv all due respect, we ent got time.”

“Quite right. To the Skylark, then, as quick as may be.”

Andrew had only had the briefest glimpse of Isobel Churchill this evening on the Margrethe. He had wanted to ask her to dance, but by the time he had screwed his courage up to the sticking point, he could no longer see her among the dancers or at the buffet. And after the explosion, he did not remember seeing her at all.

When danger threatened, it seemed logical that a woman would take her only child and flee to safety. He would begin with the Skylark.

She did not even have a crewman posted at the base of the steps. “Mrs. Churchill?” he called as he emerged onto the lower deck. “Mrs. Churchill, are you here?”

Peony dropped down the gangway from B deck and landed lightly in front of him. “Mr. Malvern, what a surprise.”

“Miss Churchill, this is no social call. They’re about to hang Frederick Chalmers for sabotage and he is calling for your mother. Is she here?”

Peony’s flushed cheeks drained of all color. “That can’t be true.”

“I heard it myself. Time is of the essence. Is your mother here?”

“Yes.” She turned and climbed the gangway as nimbly as she had come down it, seeing as she was wearing riding breeches. “She’s sending a pigeon.” He resolutely did not look at the unusual view of a woman in breeches as he leaped up the steps after her. “Mama! Come at once!”

But she did not come. Instead, Peony ran to the stern of the trim little gondola, where they found Isobel Churchill seated on a sandbag, writing furiously, a pigeon with its hold open lying at her feet.

“Mama, they are going to hang Frederick Chalmers for sabotage, and he bids you come at once!”

Isobel signed her name with a flourish, folded the still-wet paper, and stuffed it into the pigeon. A few taps of her fingers embedded the magnetic coordinates of its destination in its small engine. She released it from the nearest porthole with a shove that caused its wings to spring open and catch the night wind as it soared upward.

“I told him to go,” she said in a voice like steel. “As soon as I saw him walk into the salon, I told him Skylark would escort his daughter and meet him in Edmonton if he would only leave at once, but no. He had to do this himself. Had to reveal himself in front of all our enemies, and now all is lost.”

Andrew did not understand, but he did not need to. “He is asking for your help, Mrs. Churchill. He, and the two young Esquimaux men who were taken with him.”

Her eyes blazed. “He has dragged them into it, too?” Her laugh cut the air like an axe. “If he survives this and they do not, he will answer to Malina’s mother, the priestess. They are her youngest sons.”

Why on earth was this woman not—in the Texican parlance—saddling up and moving out? “Will you come to his aid, or no?”

“There are bigger things at stake here than you have any idea of, young man. Frederick Chalmers has been one of the best friends the Esquimaux Nation has ever known, but even he would tell you that the good of the village comes before the good of the individual. He has gone into this recklessly, acting from the heart and not the head, and has put hundreds of people in danger.”

She reached for the airman’s coat lying on the sandbag, and Andrew realized with something of a shock that she had also divested herself of her green ballgown some time earlier, and was now clothed in breeches, boots, and shirt.

“Come, Peony. I shall tell Captain Aniq we lift in five minutes.”

“But Mama—”

“Do not argue. We cannot go charging in there with no weapons and no information and expect to save his life. But we can save the village, if the pigeon gets there and they lift before that mob decides there are more saboteurs where he came from.”

Peony turned to Andrew as her mother went forward, presumably to command the engineers to fire up the boiler in preparation for lift. “I am sorry. I would help if I could.”

“What did she mean about the village lifting? There were no airships there—I saw the place myself. And what part does Frederick Chalmers play in the lives of the Esquimaux? She made it sound as if they were a government—a country.”

“Why, they are.” Peony gazed at him in some surprise. “He has been liaison between Her Majesty’s government and the Esquimaux Nation these seven years at least. Why do you think the Dunsmuirs have permission to mine here?”

“I understood they own this land.”

“Ownership is a foreign concept to the Esquimaux, as is the European fascination with diamonds. It is more of a … partnership with Lady Dunsmuir. Which is, of course, utterly unacceptable to certain business interests on this continent.”

“Colonial interests.”

She twinkled at him. “My, my, Mr. Malvern. Your quick mind will get you into trouble one of these days.”

“I hope it will get Frederick Chalmers out of it. I am going back to do my best to assist him.”

She laid a hand on his arm. “Be safe. Tell him I am sorry. And give my regards to Claire. I do not know when we shall see one another again.”

*

For a moment, Alice could not place the tiny, muffled sound. Then she realized it was poor Maggie’s teeth chattering.

“Dearling, come close to me.” She sat on the stone steps where they gave onto the narrow corridor chipped out of frozen ground and granite. “Lizzie, you too.” She lifted the voluminous folds of her turquoise gown and wrapped the fabric around both girls, folding them in close like a mother hen with her chicks. “I should have gone to the Lass and changed out of this silly rig.”

“You weren’t thinkin’ of clothes at the time,” Maggie said with some sympathy. “Besides, all these petticoats is warm.”

“Do you think Claire was able to fetch the earl?” Down here, with only a thin yellow ribbon of electricks for light, she was cut off—buried as surely as any corpse in a grave. And for so long a time, it seemed eternity had passed.

Alice wobbled dangerously close to losing hope. “I’m going to give her another five minutes and then I’m going up there myself.”

“Wot ’ud you do?” Lizzie asked from within her turquoise-and-lace cloak. “Come to fisticuffs wiv that lot?”

“No, but I have a set of lock picks and I know how to use them.”

“Right, and they’ll ’ave left ’em unguarded.”

Alice exhaled in lieu of snapping at the child. “How can someone so small know so much about lockups?”

“Did the Lady ever tell you about Dr. Craig, and ’ow we broke ’er out of Bedlam?”

And she made the mistake of saying, “No,” and some while later when the two of them wrapped up their tale, Alice realized that the little scamps had actually made her forget what they were all doing there.

“Tell ’er about the time Lewis rescued all our poor ’ens off that barge, Liz,” Maggie said. Lizzie opened her mouth to do so when they heard a thump from the ground above them.

“Sssh! Wot were that?” Lizzie hissed instead.

“And which way did it come from?” Alice whispered.

Now they could hear a commotion—boots and angry voices and what sounded like fists landing.

“There!” Maggie pointed down the corridor. “The next set o’ steps, I’m sure of it.”

The girls scrambled out of the silken embrace of Alice’s skirts and all three ran down the corridor. Maggie was right—as they climbed the steps, they could hear snatches of people talking. Or shouting, more like.

“Leave them here,” an imperious female voice said quite clearly through the panels of the hidden door at the top of the steps. “My father and Mr. Penhaven will be along shortly to deal with the nasty miscreants. He plans to give them a fair trial, right there in the boardroom.”

“We’ll give ’em fair!”

“Just as fair as they gave our boys on the digger—a long dance on a short rope!”

“But the earl’s dressing room, Miss Meriwether-Astor?” said a calmer voice, more worried. “Is that quite proper?”

Meriwether-Astor? Alice’s mind felt like an unmanned dirigible being batted around by high winds. Where had the girl come from? And what did it mean that she was doing exactly as Claire had said? How could she? She was their enemy’s daughter!

So where were Claire and the earl? Had something gone dreadfully wrong?

Mumbletythump! A body landed against the door, then another a little distance away. And a third beyond that. Someone groaned right next to the panel against which Alice pressed her ear, and it was all she could do not to jerk back and send herself tumbling down the steps.

“Oh, yes. Why should they have the dignity of a drawing room, or even an office? A latrine is good enough for them.”

“I’d say so. Nothing but dung, they are!”

“Hey, don’t insult good dung!” Raucous laughter greeted this witticism.

“Come along, gentlemen. If you will arrange the boardroom and see that this door is securely locked, with a guard posted outside it and outside the window, I will inform my father that his wishes have been carried out.”

“Right you are, miss. Careful. Don’t step in the blood and spoil your pretty dancing shoes.”

“Thank you, Alan. You are the kind of gentleman I despaired of ever meeting in these parts.”

The door slammed, and the lock turned over.

Alice took a breath and listened. Nothing moved on the other side.

Oh, please don’t let him be dead. Please. I’ve only had a day …

She leaned gently on the lever next to the panel and the door eased open toward her, allowing a crack of light through from the electricks in the dressing room.

The man on the other side sucked in a breath through his nose, no doubt thinking he was suffering from both nausea and vertigo.

Perhaps he was.

Through the crack, she got a glimpse of matted blond hair.

“Pa?” she whispered. “Pa, can you hear me?”

He stirred, and clutched his arm against his ribs. “Alice?” he breathed. “Where are you?”

“There’s a movable panel behind you. We’ve come to get you out. Easy now, not so fast. The steps go straight down.”

“But what—I don’t understand.”

“We’re breaking you out of gaol, Pa. But you have to be quiet. Rouse the other boys and come away quick, before they decide to check to see if you’re dead.”

“I think Alignak might be hurt. Ribs. And Tartok took a pretty bad hit to the head. He’s out cold.”

“What about you?”

“I’m fine.” Gasping, he pulled himself to his feet while Alice swung the panel open.

He was not fine. But it was brave of him not to show it.

She wriggled out of her topmost petticoat. What a lucky thing both she and Claire had lots of them, with multiple flounces of gathered eyelet. At the rate they were going, they’d use every yard for bandages before they got away from this inhospitable country.

“Girls, take this to the bottom of the steps. I want it ripped into strips by the time we get the men down. We’ll patch them up as best we can. Then we’ll have to hoof it before Penhaven and his bunch come back and find the room empty.”

Alignak had heard their whispered exchange and was already on his feet by the time Alice poked her head into the next latrine compartment. He limped out and went immediately to the third one.

“Tartok sleeps,” he whispered, his sloe-black eyes worried. “A demon sleep.”

“Demons made him that way, that’s certain,” Alice whispered back. “Pa, can you lift him with just one arm?”

“Yes.”

Alice helped him shoulder the young man and bit back a cry when she saw her father lose all color and gasp in pain. But he said not a word. He maneuvered Tartok through the opening and took the steps carefully. Alignak followed right behind, holding his ribs as if trying to keep them in place.

Alice brought up the rear and closed and fastened the door. If only there were a way to block it! But there was nothing in the stone corridors that would help them.

Only cold silence, and the yellow ribbon of electrick light fading into the distance.

A click sounded above them, at the top of the steps leading to her ladyship’s dressing room. Alice fell to her knees as her father put Tartok down, and began binding up wounds as fast as Lizzie could hand her the torn strips of eyelet. Maggie went up to investigate.

“Lady!” Alice heard her whisper. “Come quick!”

“Do you have them?” came Claire’s quiet voice.

“Aye. That Meriwether-whatsis mort ’ad ’em put right where you said.”

“Are they hurt?”

“Aye. Come away down, Lady. We gots to get out of ’ere.”

105

Claire wasted no time in assisting Alice, fabricating a sling out of a length of white voile for Chalmers’s arm, and binding up Alignak’s ribs with half a second petticoat.

“What luck you’re still in evening dress,” she whispered to Alice. “This rig doesn’t allow for petticoats—though I’m tempted to add a number of layers of ruffles. They seem to come in handy rather regularly.”

“It’s this place,” Alice whispered back. “Once we’re clear of assassins, our clothes ought to be fine.”

“Speaking of assassins, were you able to speak to the count?”

In the dim light, Alice looked stricken. “I forgot all about him,” she said in horror.

Frederick Chalmers looked up from tightening the knots on his sling. “You what? You mean you didn’t warn him to lift?”

“No, Pa, I was too busy trying to save your hide.”

“But this is terrible! We must—”

“We must do nothing but get you out of here before you’re recaptured and hanged,” Claire said briskly. “We’re not likely to get a second chance to spirit you out of a locked room. I will see to Count von Zeppelin.”

“And I will get you all in the air without delay.” Alice’s gaze was as stony as the one her father leveled upon her. There was no doubt in the world that the two of them were related. Claire wondered who would win this contest of wills.

“But—”

“Chama,” Alignak interrupted, “we must get Tartok to Malina or his spirit will leave him. And we must warn the village so the goddess whales may sail.”

Frederick Chalmers gazed from the young man to his daughter, clearly torn between two equally important choices. But to Claire, there was only one.

“You leave the count to me,” she repeated. “I will have him in the sky within the hour, I promise you.”

“Do you know where he is?” Alice asked.

“No, but it cannot be difficult to find out.”

“Just look for an assassin,” Maggie put in helpfully.

Tartok stirred, but then his eyes rolled up in his head and he slumped into unconsciousness again. “We must go,” Alignak said, his voice hoarse with anxiety.

Alice helped heft Tartok onto her father’s back, his wrists tied together with a bit of lace to form a loop under Frederick’s chin. Then they set off down the corridor. Claire visualized the route in her mind’s eye as they traveled under the mine offices, under the parade ground, and paused at a cross-corridor with another tiny sign.

Dining was indicated to the left.

Supplies lay to the right.

“The supply warehouse is not a hundred yards from end of the airfield where the Stalwart Lass is moored,” Claire said, keeping her voice low. “That way, as fast as we can.”

It couldn’t have been more than a quarter of a mile, but to Claire it seemed endless. At any moment a door could open at the top of any of these flights of stone steps, and a horde of angry men pour through clamoring for the immediate deaths of Frederick Chalmers and the Esquimaux men—to say nothing of the girls attempting to save them. Alice reached the final stair first and darted up it, opening the hidden panel with caution as she tried not to gasp for breath.

It opened in a small storage room directly across from an exterior door. The warehouse was pitch black except for a small electrick lamp glowing over the door.

“Come on—” Alice began, when Maggie and Lizzie slipped past her. “Girls, wait—”

Claire touched her arm. “Let them do what they do better than any of us.” Then she turned to Frederick, who emerged slowly from the staircase with Tartok’s head lolling on his shoulder. “Mr. Chalmers, are you all right?”

“Fine. Alignak?”

“I am able.”

Maggie materialized out of the dark. “All clear, Lady, but we’d best be quick. We c’n ’ear voices behind this building, as if someone’s coming to get summat.”

They ran through alleys of pallets and crates filled with supplies—food, flour, spare parts. They gained the door and Claire had enough time for a frantic glance across the airfield. “Alice, do you hear that?”

An engine.

Even as they ran, peering past the light cast by the lamps on the mooring masts, the Skylark lifted, sailing straight up into the night sky and blotting out the stars.

Frederick gasped. “Isobel!”

Alignak let out a low cry of despair.

What…? But there was no time to ask questions, for someone was running across the field toward them. Two someones—one tall, one lanky and shorter.

Claire pulled the lightning rifle out of its holster and took aim.

“No, Lady, don’t!” Maggie cried. “It’s our Jake and Mr. Malvern!”

But they could still hear an engine, even though Skylark had passed out of sight and out of all hope of assistance.

“Someone’s fired up the Lass’s boiler,” Alice said. “Jake, you get double pay for this.”

“Here, sir, let us take him,” Andrew said to Frederick, and in a trice he and Jake had the unconscious Tartok between them, jogging across the field to the battered old airship. Alice and the men followed, tumbling up the gangway into the gondola.

Claire grabbed the Mopsies by the hand. “We must untie the ropes. I shall attend to the mooring mast. Run, fast as you can.”

“Claire!” Alice leaned out of a porthole. “I never got a proper engine in here to replace Dr. Craig’s power cell!”

“Take it!” she called, scrambling up the ladder to the rope looped through the Lass’s nose ring. “I can make another one.”

“I need to make some room and ditch some ballast on the double quick—I’m sending out Seven and Eight. Take care of ’em, will you?”

Must she? Ugh. “Fine!”

“And what about Jake?”

“I’m goin’ and that’s that!” came a stubborn shout from somewhere within.

“Feed him and teach him, and turn him into a capable man,” Claire called, “and I shall be satisfied.” She untied the rope. “Free to lift when ready, Alice. Fair winds!”

She heard a clanking crash and the scrape of gravel—the automatons, no doubt, being unceremoniously unloaded in a heap.

“To you, too! Up ship!”

The Mopsies and Andrew ran clear of the gondola as Claire climbed to the ground. The Lass fell up into the night sky, her engine running as smoothly as a sewing machine as Dr. Craig’s cell gave it more power than it had ever had before this stage of its life. And as the craft turned its bow to the south, Claire saw movement in the sky behind it.

Andrew drew in a long breath.

“Lady, what are they?” Maggie asked in awe.

A cluster of silver craft floated purposefully after the Stalwart Lass, their silver fuselages rippling with the speed of their going, for all the world like elongated bubbles swimming through the cold air. The gondolas clinging to the undersides were sleek and shallow, each one ribbed like the skeleton of a long-dead creature.

Ribbed like the interiors of the Esquimaux longhouses.

Like the interiors of great, long-dead creatures.

The goddess whales.

“They live in their ships,” Claire breathed on a note of discovery. “That’s what Alignak meant by the village lifting. He meant it quite literally. The entire village has pulled up ropes and gone with Alice and Frederick.”

“And, I assume, Isobel Churchill,” Andrew said. “She sent a pigeon not half an hour ago to warn them.”

“So they will all be safe?” Maggie asked, her forehead creased in concern even as she watched the majestic sight of the Esquimaux craft sailing through the stars.

“They will all be safe,” Claire echoed. “I do not know where they are going, but with Malina and Alice in charge, they will find a quiet harbor somewhere.”

“But our Jake,” Lizzie wailed. “They’ve took our Jake!”

“He has his duty as navigator, Lizzie,” Andrew told her gently. “He chose his course like a gentleman, and he will keep to it until his captain releases him from duty.”

“Besides, someone’s got to look after our Alice,” Maggie said, taking her twin’s hand. “Wiv Tigg on Lady Lucy, we’ll be the Lady’s seconds in ’is place, won’t we, till we gets ’ome to Snouts?”

“I wouldn’t have anyone else.” Claire laid a gentle hand on each of their shoulders, feeling both girls lean into her skirts as if unconsciously seeking the comfort of someone who would not leave them.

The Esquimaux fleet glimmered one last time, as if in farewell, and passed out of sight over the black shapes of the hills to the south.

Claire took a fortifying breath. “Now, then. I think it is time we located Count von Zeppelin and made sure of his safety, as Mr. Chalmers wished. Even though we have no proof whatsoever that he is in danger, except the evidence of our own eyes.”

“Isobel told me that he has been Her Majesty’s liaison with the Esquimaux nation for some seven years,” Andrew told her. “If he believes the count is in danger, I think you may take that as proof.”

They crossed to the small heap of bronze limbs and torsos, and assisted the automatons to their feet.

“Has he?” The mystery of Chalmers’s life here began to make a glimmer of sense. “No wonder the Colonials wanted him to take the blame. They would not only discredit the Dunsmuirs, but throw a spanner into Her Majesty’s works as well.”

“So what is our plan?” Andrew asked her, quite seriously.

She had no idea. But it would never do to say so in front of the children.

She straightened her shoulders, and the automatons turned their blank faces toward her as if waiting for instructions. “I think Maggie had the right of it. This whole affair began with a gun that makes no sound. Do you not agree that if we can find that, we might find a clue that will lead us to the count?”

*

It was fortunate indeed that, while someone had unloaded an enormous number of trunks and cases from the Meriwether-Astors’ ship, it appeared no one knew exactly what to do with them afterward. So they sat upon the gravel some distance from the ship, in the inky shadow of the fuselage, providing enough cover for two small figures and two larger ones, with a view of both that ship and the motley group of cargo ships moored around it.

Claire had told Seven and Eight to wait by Lady Lucy. The thought of a pair of clanking shadows following them about when a man’s life might be at stake made her shiver with revulsion.

“Mopsies, what do you make of our situation?” she whispered.

“This Astor bloke, ’e’d want to keep ’is treasures close, yeah?” Lizzie said in a low tone. “Lightning Luke kept ’is treasure box where ’e slept, innit?”

“So your guess is that the count would be upon Mr. Meriwether-Astor’s ship?”

“Aye.”

“Which is guarded,” Andrew put in. “They’ve posted a watch.”

That was true. A man sat upon the gangway smoking a Texican cigarillo, the noxious fumes of which they could smell from here.

“Ent much of a watch,” Lizzie said with some disdain. “Pity we just lost Jake. ’E were a dab hand at dealing wiv such.”

“We might shimmy up a mooring rope,” Maggie suggested.

“Too dangerous, and we risk being spotted before we reached the top,” Claire said. It was one thing for the girls to slide down a rope to escape for purposes of saving a life. It was quite another to labor to the top, exposing themselves to discovery—or gunfire.

“Wot about a diversion?” Maggie asked. “You c’d zap one of them cargo ships wiv the lightning rifle, and when everyone come out to put out the fire, we c’d go in.”

“You forget that our time here is limited to a few more days,” Andrew told her gently. “With the Margrethe disabled, the loss of one cargo ship could be devastating to the Dunsmuirs, the count’s crew, and the people who work here, once the snow flies.”

“Don’t care about the Dunsmuirs no more,” Lizzie grumbled. “They didn’t believe the Lady, and let those blokes ’urt our Alice’s dad.”

“We have no proof, Lizzie,” Claire said gently. “Without that, the Dunsmuirs cannot act except to delay and pray that calm heads will prevail. I wonder if anyone has checked the dressing room yet?”

“Let us hope not,” Andrew said. “It will not take a brilliant mind to conclude that you are behind their escape. I wonder where they’d put you?”

Somewhere without tunnels, that was certain. Or windows. A memory of a locked room in Resolution assailed her, and she set her teeth. She would not allow anyone to make her a prisoner again.

Lizzie touched her arm, her fingers cold. Claire was seized in the sudden grip of guilt. What was she thinking, bringing the girls along on such an errand? They should be tucked up in bed aboard the Lady Lucy, safe and warm, with Tigg and the other middies to look after them, not in danger of being made prisoners themselves.

She was a terrible guardian, Claire thought on a wave of despair.

But Lizzie did not seem to be much inclined to seek either safety or warmth. “Lady,” she whispered, “there’s that Alan again. See? By that wreck of a ship we visited wiv Alice. Where I found that other brass casing.”

“Those other two, they’re Bob an’ Joe. Alan is Joe’s brother,” Maggie explained.

Goodness. What a memory she had. Almost as good as Jake’s.

Huddled behind the sort of trunk that turned on one end to open into a traveling closet, they watched Bob and Joe pace in front of the nearly derelict cargo ship, from one end to the other, as if doing an inspection while they waited for Alan to come out of it.

“Does it not seem strange to you that that ship is the only one of the convoy that appears to have a proper guard?” Andrew asked. “Aside from our smoking friend behind us, of course.”

“I had not noticed before, but you are quite right.”

Alan rejoined his friends, and a brief conversation took place before they began to pace again, two heading down to the stern vanes, one to the bow, then reversing and crossing at the gangway in the middle of the gondola.

“And do you see how very large the doors are to the rear of the gondola? One could wheel a landau out of them if one had a ramp.”

“What I see is an engine so large and powerful it warrants its own gondola, there at the stern.” Andrew paused for a moment for them to see the truth of it. “Jake mentioned something Gloria Meriwether-Astor said to him and Alice, just before the explosion,” he went on. “Something about a steam cannon.”

“We are not looking for a cannon, Andrew. Those propelled bullets may have been large, but they were certainly not large enough to fill a cannon barrel.”

“Still … if a man transported a cannon secretly, disguised in an old trap of an airship that would be an unlikely target for sky pirates or tariff men, he might be just as likely to transport silent rifles and who knows what else along with it.”

“But that does not mean he would conceal a prisoner with them.”

“Why waste guards?” Maggie put in. “If yer guardin’ yer guns, might as well put the prisoner there. That lot’ve been there all day. So it would make no nevermind to someone lookin’ on whether there was guns or trussed-up gentlemen inside.”

“You sound like Alice,” Lizzie said.

“And you make a sound point,” Andrew told her. “I say it’s worth a look.”

“I say we are outnumbered,” Claire reminded them softly. “Though I would put Lizzie up against a miscreant any day, I should not like to take the chance that she might be hurt.”

“Diversion,” Maggie singsonged softly, as if to remind them she had suggested this before.

“But what?” Claire’s legs were beginning to cramp. She longed to stand up, to shout and wave her arms and demand to be allowed aboard that ship.

Which would net her absolutely nothing except the relief of movement and the inevitability of imprisonment. It was maddening to be trapped here in the shadows with so little time and so urgent a task. She might as well be one of Alice’s automatons, standing uselessly at the bottom of Lady Lucy’s gangway.

Wait.

“The automatons,” she said.

106

Lizzie and Maggie could not have been more delighted to be in charge of the diversion. Claire was not so sure this was the right course—though it seemed to be their only one. Since the three guarding the airship knew the twins, they would at least allow them to get closer than they might allow Andrew or Claire herself, who were strangers.

And the one called Alan had seen Claire’s failed attempt to come to the rescue of Frederick Chalmers.

So there they went, the two little girls in striped stockings and ruffled skirts, dancing and gamboling as they led Seven, Eight, and Nine across the airfield toward the cargo ship. It looked like two kittens leading a trio of tall, awkward storks.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Andrew said in a low tone next to her, behind the closet trunk.

“So do I. They did assure us they have acted as a diversion before.”

“Were there guns involved?”

“I do not know. And now is not the time to think of such things. I am quite anxious enough.”

“Hey!” Alan called, leaving off marching. He approached the girls, carelessly balancing his rifle over his shoulder like a vagrant’s pole. “What are you two doing out so late?”

“We didn’t want to go to bed,” Lizzie told him with a giggle. “We stole the automatons and we’re taking them for a walk. See?”

“You rascals,” he said with a chuckle. “Who do those belong to?”

“We dunno,” they said together. “Aren’t they fine?” Maggie added.

By this time Bob and Joe had joined them, and by their relaxed posture, considered the girls no threat. In fact, Bob put his hands on his hips and laughed outright. “Don’t you two beat all. What are you going to do with them?”

Maggie looked at Lizzie, who shrugged, grinning. “Perhaps we can ride them pick-a-back.”

“They’re too tall, Liz.”

“Too tall?” Alan snorted. “I s’pose everything looks tall to little mites like you. Look, they’re not as tall as Bob and me.”

“Are so.” Lizzie crossed her arms. “Garn. Stand next to ’em so we can see.”

Bob and Alan straightened up next to two of the gleaming bronze figures, one in front of each. “Come on, Joe, you’re the shortest of us all and I bet even you are taller than that thing.”

Joe rolled his eyes and sloped over. “Are you two so bored? Got nothing better to do?”

“Humor the little ladies, you old cross-patch. Now, girls, who wants to bet—”

“Seven, Eight, Nine, hold the man,” Lizzie commanded.

Simultaneously, the automatons turned, passed their upper appendages—for, since they possessed all manner of parts built into them, they could not properly be called arms—about the men, imprisoning them against their metal bodies.

Bob roared and kicked his legs, then bucked like a horse that has never felt the saddle. All to no avail. Nine stood as if rooted to the spot, clutching him about the torso so that he could neither quite touch the ground nor elbow the automaton away.

“Go!” Andrew said.

Claire staggered a little as blood flowed back into her cramped legs, and sprinted behind the automatons as Maggie and Lizzie led them up the gangway and into the ship.

The men made a terrible ruckus until Andrew took up a rifle and used the butt of it to render them temporarily unconscious. They slumped in the automatons’ hold, while the grip of the latter only tightened further.

“Maggie, Lizzie, well done,” Claire told them.

“Stay with them,” Andrew said. “We will search the ship and return as fast as we can.”

“What if they wake up?” Maggie asked.

“Cosh ’em again.” He tossed the rifle to her, and she caught it by reflex, then staggered under its unexpected weight.

“I do wish you would not incite the children to violence,” Claire told him as they made quick work of searching the navigation gondola. “It is bad enough that I must resort to it from time to time in this dangerous country.”

“There will be time enough for fine manners and grace when we get ourselves out of this,” Andrew said, his jaw flexing as if he were holding back a much stronger opinion. “Though I must say, I will have a whole new appreciation of the resourcefulness of ladies after this.”

Was he thinking of Alice? Was he already regretting that he had not leaped aboard the Stalwart Lass when he had the chance? Alice would have welcomed him. And if she did not, an educated and trained engineer would not go amiss in any crew in the skies.

But Claire did not have the courage to ask him, and now was not the time in any case. She must not allow her mind to wander to matters of the heart—if he were indeed here, the count’s life would depend on quick action and clear thinking.

In fact, perhaps she ought not to think about matters of the heart at all. Because it was a stark and simple fact that she could not make up her mind where men were concerned. She had kissed three—once on purpose, twice not—and the only conclusion she could come to was that, on a purely sensory level, kissing was a most pleasurable occupation. But what it meant was an impenetrable jungle of feeling and emotion that she simply was not ready to explore. It was too strange, too frightening … and too permanent.

She had proven herself capable when it came to helping her friends out of tight spots—and getting out of them herself. But she was as clumsy and inexperienced as a fawn when it came to the connection of committed affection, and she had no idea if it got easier as time went on.

Andrew assisted her up the ladder and onto the coaxial catwalk that ran the length of the ship. “The cargo area will be through those doors,” he said. “You might power up that rifle, in case there are guards there, too. They may have heard our friends shouting and be ready with an ambush.”

Right. This was not the time to be mooning over men. She must collect herself and be ready to face whatever lay behind that door. But first—

She unholstered the rifle and laid her free hand on Andrew’s arm. “Thank you for being with me,” she said softly. “I should find this very hard to face without your company.”

He turned to her, surprise in his brown eyes. “That is the last thing I should ever have expected you to say.”

“What, thank you?”

“No. You are the most fearless, capable woman I know, along with Alice and Lady Dunsmuir and Isobel Churchill.”

Alice. First in his thoughts, first in his heart.

“Fearless?” She huffed a laugh. “Hardly. There may not be much time for terror, but believe me when I say I feel it.”

He grinned at her. “Don’t destroy my illusions. Come. Let us storm the door. Together.”

He pushed the door open, and together they stepped into a large cargo space, illuminated by a strip of electricks that ran from strut to strut of the iron gridwork supporting the fuselage. Claire’s hands tensed on the rifle, but the two of them were not accosted. In fact, the space was silent except for the excited scrabble of rats, off to one side, down one of the alleys formed of boxes and crates.

Andrew inhaled and his shoulders lost some of their tension. “I do not believe there is a guard. Hush. Was that a cat?”

A mewling sound issued from the darkness. “A cat … or a person who has been gagged?” Claire whispered.

Slowly, cautiously, fully expecting a guard to leap, firing, out of the shadows, they made their way down the corridor, dirt crunching under their soles. An odd smell hung in the air, like smoke and kerosene and something sour.

The mewling sound came again. Claire flicked the lever on the lightning rifle, and it hummed to life. The globe on its underside began to glow as the lightning woke, flickering and exploring its rounded prison. She held the rifle upright so that the globe became a lamp.

“Mmmph!” someone said in response to the light.

“That is not a cat, nor a rodent,” she said, and stepped out of the darkness of the corridor into a wider area formed by crates piled high.

On a pallet on the floor lay a man with his hands and feet tied behind him, his knees bent nearly double so that his ankles and wrists could be tied together. A calico sack did duty as a hood, concealing his face. But no sack could conceal the fact that he was in evening dress, his white shirt front gray with grime and dried blood, his tie gone altogether, and his trousers torn.

“Count von Zeppelin?” Claire said softly, rushing to his side. “It is I, Claire, with Mr. Malvern. We shall have you free in a moment.”

From the pocket of his duster, which he had had replaced in Edmonton, Andrew pulled a knife, its lethal blade advertising to everyone that it had been made by Mr. Bowie in the Texican Territory. The ropes parted as if they had been made of pie pastry, and when Claire whisked off the hood, the count gasped and curled up, his knees to his chest, as if to give relief to muscles that had been strained in the other direction to the point of torture.

“Count, are you hurt?” Claire said quickly. “Bones broken, wounds?”

“Nein,” he gasped. “Blood is returning. I shall be … all right in a moment.”

She and Andrew massaged his lower limbs until the blood flowed unobstructed and he was able to stand. “Thank the merciful God you found me. Is there any water?”

Andrew surveyed the barren prison. “Not here, I’m afraid. We shall search the galley once we reach the gondola.”

Half carrying the older man, Andrew helped him down the corridor while Claire went ahead with the rifle-turned-lamp. It took ages to get him down the ladder from the catwalk, but she could tell that with every step, his strength was returning.

They emerged, breathing heavily with exertion, into the navigation gondola.

Three automatons stood there at attention, as if waiting for a command.

Their prisoners were gone.

And so were the Mopsies.

107

“Nine, where are the girls?” Claire snapped.

But the automaton remained maddeningly blank and silent, and she resisted the urge to clap a hand to her forehead in chagrin. Of course Alice had designed them to follow orders only. They had no ability to give information. They didn’t even have mouths.

“And where are our prisoners?” Andrew said aloud. “The girls would not have moved them elsewhere, would they?”

“How? And where? We passed through the crew quarters on the way.”

“The engine gondola at the stern?” Then he shook his head. “Never mind. That would be nonsensical.”

“The only logical conclusion is that your prisoners have made off with your little friends,” the count said, heroically resisting the urge to examine the automatons. Instead, he contented himself with, “Are these the work of Fraulein Alice? And they can give no information?”

“No.” Fear had formed a hard ball in her stomach, and Claire was very much afraid she was going to be sick. “We must find the girls at once.”

“And I must return to the Margrethe.” He tugged on one of the sleeves of his dinner jacket, and it came away in his hand. “The crew will be on the point of despair—or worse.”

“Your disappearance and eventual death are meant to provoke an international incident,” Claire told him. “Meriwether-Astor is behind it.”

“Ja, of such I am well aware. The hood they put over my head did not impair my hearing in the slightest.”

“So we have our proof after all,” Andrew said. “The count himself will corroborate what you have to say when you tell the Dunsmuirs, and the crew of the Margrethe can take Meriwether-Astor into custody and return him to Edmonton.”

“Andrew, they cannot. Remember? The Margrethe is grounded.”

“Was sagen Sie?” Von Zeppelin made for the gangway with only the slightest hitch in his stride. Then, when he saw the mighty fuselage of his flagship wilted and flapping, he let out a cry. “I must return— Lady Claire, who is this who comes?”

She crowded behind him on the gangway and leaped to the ground. The night wind caught at her skirts and sent them belling out to the side, the air frigid on her stockinged legs.

Snow’s comin’, whispered the voice of Polgarth the poultryman in the back of her memory.

The Mopsies were running full tilt across the airfield, Tigg right behind them, loaded down with—good heavens, he carried her valise in one hand and the twins’ in the other. Lizzie carried a hatbox by its cord, swinging in the wind of her going, and containing something somewhat heavier than a hat, by the look of it.

“Lady!” Tigg shouted. “You gots to get out o’ here quick!”

“What has happened?”

“I’ll be keelhauled if they catch me.” He dropped the valises and flung himself upon Claire with such force she staggered. His arms went around her in a ferocious hug. “I don’t want to leave you, Lady. Wot’ll I do?”

Good heavens. Why should he be forced to leave her? But there was only one answer to the question that was obviously uppermost in his mind. “Your duty lies aboard Lady Lucy, my dear one. That is—if the Dunsmuirs still consider us friends?”

“That’s the trouble, Lady. That Meriwether bloke ’as ’em over a barrel good and proper.” He looked up. “Izzat the count?”

“Indeed,” said that gentleman.

“Cor,” Tigg said on a breath of disbelief. “You ent dead?”

Claire put her hands upon his shoulders and gave them a gentle shake to return the boy’s attention to her. “Tigg, tell me what has happened.”

“The Dunsmuirs are under ’ouse arrest and can’t leave Lady Lucy. T’Mopsies and me snuck out through the ceilings and down into the cargo bay, an’ out through the loading doors. That Meriwether-Astor cove ’as took over. These cargo ships, they were full of ’is Texicans and Colonials, not proper crews at all. And sir—” He looked up at the count. “—if you ent dead now, you will be shortly. You gots to get out. I c’n commandeer one o’ them mining engines an’ we c’n go to the Esquimaux village. They c’n ’ide you.”

“Can’t,” Maggie said. “The village flew away.”

Panting from his lengthy speech, Tigg stared at her. “Are you off yer ’ead, Mags?”

“Their ’ouses was ships,” Lizzie said. “Lifted not ’alf an hour past. We saw ’em.”

Claire straightened and passed an arm about Tigg’s shoulders. He was trembling, and not from the cold. From fear, she had no doubt—fear for the people he loved.

“What of Captain Hollys and the crew?”

“Outnumbered an’ confined to quarters. Lady, I know it’s me duty, but must I go back?”

She hugged him close, then looked into his eyes. “What are your own feelings?”

“I dunno wot to do. I want to ’elp. But I also want to come wiv you an’ leave this place be’ind for good. I ’ate it ’ere.”

He was not the only one. “A year from now, what will you wish you had done?”

Her hand slipped away as he turned slightly to gaze at Lady Lucy’s fuselage, barely visible beyond the sadly listing Margrethe.

“I s’pose I’d wish I’d’ve ’elped, ’specially if some ’arm comes to our Willie. I’m the only crewman got free.”

“I suppose the marauders relieved the crews of all their weapons?”

Tigg nodded. “First thing.”

“And the air rifles in the ceiling cabinets were confiscated by Ned Mose back in Resolution. I imagine Captain Hollys would be glad of a few weapons smuggled in to them, would he not?”

“Claire, are you mad?” Andrew demanded. “You would send a child back into danger, loaded down with guns?”

“I ent a child,” Tigg retorted with spirit. “I’m nearly fourteen, and I got a duty to ’elp.”

Her gaze met Tigg’s, and in his brown eyes she saw the hardening of resolve. She nodded briskly. “We shall conceal as many upon your person as we can, and once we are clear, you must board and assist your captain in retaking the Lady Lucy for our friends.”

“Clear?” Andrew repeated. “What do you propose?”

She lifted her chin. “I have stolen a coach and a scientist. It cannot be any more difficult to steal an airship.”

*

“You cannot mean to steal Meriwether-Astor’s ship.” Andrew’s eyes practically stood out on stalks.

“Of course not. After Tigg has what he needs, I mean to steal the one with all the guns on it.” She looked up at the fuselage above their heads, which only looked ragged and poorly maintained. But under the torn exterior they had observed a sleek substructure that meant business. “I mean to steal this one.”

But time, it seemed, had run out.

In the distance, a large group of men issued from between the mining offices and the outlying buildings, shouting the alarm and streaming past the now deserted mine gates.

“Oh dear,” Claire said. “It appears someone has noticed the prisoners are missing. Tigg, inside, quickly. We must get you armed before we are seen.”

“We do not have time to open crates,” Count von Zeppelin said. “And it is imperative that I return to my ship immediately.”

“Sir, you can’t!” Tigg told him. “They’ll shoot you on sight.”

“Better an honorable death trying to reach my crew than a dishonorable one hiding with women and children.”

“I doubt the Baroness would see it that way,” Claire said with some asperity.

“Lady, we got Alan and Bob and Joe’s guns over ’ere. And that cove wot were smokin’ earlier—we got ’is, too.”

Claire had barely made sense of these astonishing facts when the Mopsies dashed over to the pile of luggage sitting under Meriwether-Astor’s ship. They flung some clothes aside and pulled five pistols and a smaller, more portable version of Mr. Gatling’s repeating cannon out of a trunk.

“Maggie, pray tell, what did you do with our prisoners?” She saw now that the pile of luggage was in somewhat more disarray than it had been.

“We locked ’em in these big trunks, Lady. The automatons stuffed ’em in, and we sat on ’em and shut the lids.”

Andrew let out a startled exclamation that might have been a laugh. Then he turned to the count. “I should not complain about being left with the women and children, if I were you, sir. You might find yourself set upon by mechanicals and locked in a lady’s trunk for your pains.”

The count had lost his spectacles at some point during the course of the evening, but his manner of looking at the Mopsies as they armed Tigg with speedy efficiency reminded Claire of someone looking over his lenses, as if unable to believe the evidence of the naked eye.

Then he raised his gaze to the Margrethe and the muscles flexed in his jaw, forcibly holding back either action or words. “If I knew how to reverse our situation, I would,” he growled at last.

A contingent of men poured down the Lady Lucy’s gangway. The two groups conferred for a moment, and then split off into several smaller groups.

“They are going to search,” Andrew said. “Tigg, now is your chance, while there are fewer men aboard.”

“Goodbye, Lady,” Tigg said, turning to her. His voice cracked.

“We shall meet again, my brave darling,” she told him with a fierce hug that drove the lumps of the arms concealed on his person into her chest. “At the very least, you shall have a pigeon from me each week, and—and I expect good penmanship in the replies you return.” The lump in her throat choked off the last word.

“Goodbye, old man.” Andrew shook his hand. “Thank you for all your assistance in the past.”

By now Tigg was too close to tears to speak. He gave each of the Mopsies a rough hug, saluted the count, and vanished into the shadows with the suddenness of a boy who cannot take any more, and must flee—or break down.

It felt as though he had taken a piece of Claire’s heart with him. She had suffered the loss of her father, of her home, and of all she had held dear … and none of it felt as though a vital organ had been torn from her chest, leaving the ache of emptiness behind.

“I cannot bear it,” she whispered, and attempted to take a fortifying breath.

She must bear it. She must get the Mopsies and the count through the next hour in one piece.

The hour after that, she could collapse in a heap and cry her heart out.

“Come quickly,” she said. “We must lift now, while they are distracted by the search.”

She and the Mopsies ran up the gangway into the navigation gondola, where the automatons were standing exactly as they had left them. Let them stay there. They had done their part, and done it surprisingly well. They all owed Alice’s genius a debt. But as soon as she could, she would find somewhere to leave them so that she would no longer have to look upon those blank, soulless faces.

She turned to find Andrew and the count bent together over the tiller and the panels of gauges. “How long until we are ready to lift?”

Out of the gondola window, shadows moved and darted and lamps danced in the middle distance as the search grew more intense the more frustrated the searchers became. They did not have much time. At some point the men would turn their attention to the luggage pile, and then the fat would well and truly be in the fire.

Andrew conferred with the count in a low voice, and Claire felt a needle of impatience at being thus ignored. “Well?”

“Claire, we have a problem. We cannot fly this ship.”

“What do you mean? An engine is an engine, and you flew the Stalwart Lass on our journey to Edmonton.”

“Yes, but the Lass is a much smaller ship. And its engine was a part of the navigation gondola.”

“So?” She did not like this. Not one bit. And not the least of it was the dawning dismay in Andrew’s face.

“This ship must be crewed by at least a dozen men. The engine gondola is so far astern that the two cannot communicate except by mechanical means.”

“And there does not seem to be a means of communication,” the count put in. “The controls are here, but they do not respond. Surely they did not send messengers astern every time they needed more steam or a change of course?”

Of course they did not.

“What is that?” She pointed above their heads, at what appeared to be tubing wrapped in copper wire. The two ends of it hung down, shredded as if they had been cut with a sharp knife or a pair of pliers.

“Um. Lady?”

She turned. “Lizzie, if you must find the powder room, it will be in the crew’s quarters. I do not have time to take you.”

“It ent that, Lady. It’s about that ’ose there.”

“And that one.” Maggie pointed to a similar hose that snaked along the ceiling, heading in the direction of the stern. “And that one across there, too.”

All of them had been cut.

“Girls, what is it?” Had Alan and his friends sabotaged their own ship?

“I’m—I’m afraid we done it.” Lizzie took Maggie’s hand and they huddled close, as if they expected someone to toss them down the gangway and they were determined to go together.

“You did—what?” Andrew said, so shocked his voice had hardly any sound. “You cut the lines that carry the signals from this gondola to that of the engine?”

“We thought we was ’elpin’,” Lizzie wailed, on the point of tears.

“We didn’t know the Lady were planning to nick this ship,” Maggie said, her voice thick with horror. “After we stashed them blokes, we came back ’ere and did a nip and tuck before we went and found Tigg.”

“Didn’t know what them cables were, only that it might slow ’em down should they try to chase us.”

The count let out a cry of frustration and even Andrew clutched his head as if it were about to explode. The tears overflowed Lizzie’s eyes and streaked her dirty face.

“We’re awful sorry, Lady. We thought we was doin’ right.”

The count turned away with a string of Prussian epithets that had no business in the hearing of young ladies. “I shall have to return to my ship,” he got out at last, in English. “Perhaps there is room for negotiation.”

“Certainly—negotiations will net you the choice of a pistol, or a long fall from an airship in flight,” Claire snapped. She pulled the twins into her arms, and Lizzie sobbed against her heart. “It is all right, darlings. So we cannot communicate from one end of the ship to the other. We shall simply have to come up with an alternative, even if it means using you two as messengers, as the count suggested.”

“Impossible,” Andrew said.

What business did he have making the girls feel worse than they already did? Claire lost her temper.

“I am aboard a disabled ship in the company of two of the finest engineers the world has ever seen,” she said with barely concealed impatience. “Do not stand there telling me it is impossible. Do something!”

108

The men wasted a good two minutes running through alternative plans, one of which included smuggling members of the Margrethe’s crew out of that vessel to take over crewing the cargo ship. Another involved flying blind and hoping for the best—a plan that was shot down as quickly as they would have been had they tried it.

Finally they addressed themselves to the problem of recreating the mechanical system that transmitted orders from the bow to the stern. They found an extensive officers’ toolbox where logic dictated it should be, and while they put their heads together to find a solution, Claire and the Mopsies stood at the window, anxiously keeping an eye on the progress of the search.

“Wot’ll we do when they get to us, Lady?” Maggie asked, gripping the brass trim of the viewing glass with fingers whose knuckles had whitened.

“We must be gone by then. Look, two of the groups are returning to Lady Lucy, I suspect to receive new orders.”

“They think that Astor cove’s ship is safe?”

“They think both are under guard, and the darkness is concealing us,” she replied. Half of her brain watched the search. The other half worried at the problem of the communication system. It was a simple one—various levers were employed to convey commands such as full steam and reverse, and direction: port, starboard, and all points of the compass in between. Wires conveyed pressure and produced a corresponding command in the engine gondola and in the tiny room on the uppermost deck where a crewman controlled the vanes.

They would have to go around it all somehow.

But how?

The ship lay silent and unresponsive despite the frantic beating of her heart and the increasingly frustrated attempts of Andrew and the count to make repairs. As silent as the automatons standing there in the loading area, waiting for a command to make them come alive.

A command.

A spoken command.

Claire’s heart nearly stopped as her mind seized this thought and ran away with it. They had used the torso of the unfortunate Four to create an engine housing after the crash. Could they not do something similar now? She had three automatons here, all of whom were useless unless activated by spoken commands.

The principles of mechanics were the same whether one referred to automatons or transport. If one could command an automaton to activity inside a bronze casing, why could not one command it to activity if its casing were … an airship?

She hardly dared to breathe as her mind expanded with the idea. She saw it all, the way she had seen the layout of the tunnels superimposed upon the landscape—the way she saw the hands of cards in cowboy poker, laid out among the various players. A glowing network of wires and switches and possibility, rerouted and commanded to perform new tasks that they had not performed before.

Just because something had neverbeen done did not mean that it could not be done.

“Maggie. Lizzie,” she whispered. “Tell the automatons to come here. And then fetch three screwdrivers. We must take them apart immediately.”

She had the automatons in pieces before Andrew and the count realized what had happened. “Claire, what on earth …?” Andrew clearly believed her mind had given way under the strain of losing Tigg, and their impending capture.

Quickly, she explained, her words tumbling over one another in her haste to make them understand. Andrew’s eyes widened, and the count gave an oath that made Maggie jump and fumble for Lizzie’s hand. “By Jove, young lady, you are either quite mad or a marvel,” he said.

“Well, she ent mad,” Lizzie told him, being of a very literal turn of mind.

“Then she is a marvel,” Andrew said softly.

The admiration in his eyes caused Claire’s cheeks to burn. In a moment she would blotch, and that must not happen. They did not have time for missish behavior. “We must hurry,” she said, rather breathlessly. “Meriwether-Astor’s men will be upon us at any moment.”

Working at top speed, the three of them removed the engines in the automatons’ chests that controlled their response to command. Nine, being the most sophisticated, should be installed in the navigation gondola, Seven could control the vanes, and Eight was designated for the engine gondola. They no longer needed the cables controlling the levers, so they rerouted them into the ship’s infrastructure, in effect turning the ship into an enormous, obedient mind with three nerve centers.

Claire put down the screwdriver and wiped her hands on her skirt. “Count, if you and Andrew would begin the ignition sequence, we will lift.”

“Aren’t you going to test it?” Andrew asked with a final turn of his wrench.

“How? We can ask Nine to move the rudder, but we cannot see a result until we have air flow with which to change direction.”

“Claire, we can’t just lift and hope to heaven that this works. We’ll be shot out of the sky as soon as they see us hovering here like a big brown cloud.”

“We have no choice. And we have only one chance,” she told him tersely. “If we cannot trust our own abilities, then we deserve to be shot out of the sky.”

“She is right,” the count said. “Come, Mr. Malvern. Let us put some fire in the ship’s belly and hope she listens.”

“She is the cat’s grandmother,” Maggie said to no one in particular as the men ran down the coaxial catwalk to the stern. “Can’t just call ’er ‘cargo ship’ all the time, poor old thing.”

“An excellent point,” Claire said. Across the airfield, a second contingent of men poured out of Lady Lucy and began to run, lamps bobbing, toward Meriwether-Astor’s ship not thirty feet away. “Athena was the goddess of mathematics, and if it were not for adding together Seven, Eight, and Nine, we would not have our chance to escape.”

She hoped desperately they would have a chance to escape.

“Athena.” Lizzie tried out the syllables on her tongue. “I like it. Could she fly?”

“Of course she could, silly,” Maggie told her. “She were a goddess, innit?”

“Even the goddess whales could fly, if you remember the story Malina told you,” Claire reminded them. “And so can we.” She tilted her head as she felt the thrumming of the engine through the soles of her boots. “Seven, Eight, Nine, prepare for lift. Seven, vanes full vertical. Nine, stand by for course. Eight, engine full ahead.”

But nothing happened.

Or rather, the stern rose obediently, pressing up against their feet and causing their knees to bend to compensate, but the bow remained stubbornly attached—

“Lady, the mooring mast!” Lizzie shouted. “We’re still tied down!”

And now the teeming mass of men had seen the ship do its odd bobble in the air, and had swerved in their direction.

“Seven, lift!” Claire shouted, and plunged down the gangway.

She leaped for the ladder of the mooring mast, scrabbling up the rungs like a frantic spider. The seething crowd of men, angry at being denied their quarry, set up a roar as they caught sight of her. Her fingers had turned to rubber as she worked the knot. Finally she bit it with her teeth and gave a mighty pull, and the rope loosened. She felt the strain on her arms as the airship lifted ten feet off the ground.

I won’t get aboard—they won’t wait—the count must be saved—

The first of their pursuers leaped for the mooring mast and it shook with the fury of his ascent.

Not a prisoner! No, never again—

Claire flung herself off the mast, clinging like a monkey to the mooring rope, just as the man screamed in fury and lunged for her.

He grabbed, and caught only empty air as Athena fell straight up into the stars.

*

Cold.

The wind howled and snatched with icy fury, blowing her skirts up around her waist and her hair into her face, while freezing her hands to the rope. Claire had managed to twist a foot in it to give her arms a tiny bit of relief, but there was no way she would manage to hang on for more than a few minutes.

Had anyone seen her? Did Andrew and the girls even know she was out here, freezing to death and likely to plunge a thousand feet through the air at any moment?

A sound like the cry of a bird needled through the howl of the wind, and she managed to turn her head enough to see that she was nearly on a level with the navigation gondola, swinging like a pendulum about ten feet in front of it.

Three people crowded the gangway port. One of them—Andrew—held something long and gleaming.

“—end—rope!”

What?

“Claire, slide to the end of the rope!” the count’s much louder voice boomed upon the wind.

Oh, no, she didn’t dare do that. What if she slipped right off the end of it and fell to earth like Icarus, doomed to death because she chose to fly?

“Claire, you must give us some slack in the rope! Slide to the end!”

Something tugged at the holster on her back in which the lightning rifle was secured.

Suddenly terrified, Claire threw a glance over her shoulder. Her hands were freezing. Had some giant creature landed? She could not use her hands—

Tug. Tug.

The rifle. The rifle was being drawn backward, back toward the gondola, as if under a magnetic compulsion.

Something bronze flashed in the running lamps.

Nine’s leg, with its magnetic foot.

With a gasp, Claire loosened her death grip on the rope by the smallest margin and clutched it between her legs, inching like a caterpillar toward the end. With every foot, the rifle on her back was drawn closer to the gondola by the power of Nine’s feet, both of which were now being employed to bring her in.

Thank God she had not removed the rifle.

Thank God she had not left the automatons behind.

Thank you, God, for watching over us. Oh, please, protect Tigg and Willie and Alice and all of us who love them—

“I’ve got you!” Andrew grabbed her, and while the count used Nine’s legs to draw her further into the port, the Mopsies pulled on the tails of his dinner jacket to make sure he did not lose his footing.

Andrew rolled her into the loading area, Lizzie and Maggie sprang to close the port, and Claire curled herself into Andrew’s warm, blessed arms and burst into tears.

109

Cargo ship she might be, but Athena was exceedingly well stocked with provisions as well as more munitions than any of them—with the possible exception of the count—had ever seen in one place. Much to Claire’s surprise, the count informed them that he enjoyed turning his hand to cooking now and again, tied an apron about the remains of his evening clothes, and fell to work. As Athena flew steadily south, they decided against eating in the crew’s quarters away at the stern, opting instead to clear the charts from the navigation table and remain where Nine could hear them.

“I’m very glad you ent dead again, Lady,” Maggie observed, spooning stew into her mouth at a terrific rate. Both the girls had not left her side since her rescue, as if they feared the wind would blow her out of the gondola and they would not be able to fetch her back, with or without the assistance of Nine’s magnetic feet.

“I am very glad I am not, as well. When do you suppose we shall land in Edmonton?”

“I do not think we should go to Edmonton.” The count put down his spoon and indulged himself in a stiff tot of what appeared to be very fine brandy. He offered one to Andrew, who accepted with alacrity. “I suggest that we make straight for Charlottetown and inform the authorities in the new government at once.”

“Charlottetown! But that is at the other end of the continent!” Claire objected.

Thousands of miles from Tigg, and Willie, and the Dunsmuirs, and everything she cared about on this side of the wide world.

“What do you suppose are the odds that a pigeon was launched long before we lifted?” the count asked. “Whether to report my death or the supposed perfidy of Frederick Chalmers, I think it very likely that any ship coming from points north that is not Lady Lucy or Meriwether-Astor’s ship will be treated as suspect. The Canadas have only the very beginnings of a fleet of law enforcement, but from what I have seen of the Royal Canadian Airborne Police, they will not suffer us merely to take on fuel and be on our way.”

“And it is not likely that a pigeon or a telegraph message will be heading for Charlottetown,” Andrew added. “We are the only ones who can help the Dunsmuirs now. The sooner orders come from the Viceroy to the Airborne Police, the better.”

Their logic was sound, and in light of the greater good, Claire swallowed her distress at being separated by so many miles of land and air from the ones she loved.

By the third day in the air, they had not only covered a great many of those miles, but they had fine tuned the operation of what Maggie had taken to calling “our Athena’s brains.” Claire had explained to her the properties of the engines that Alice had created—that they were capable of obedience only, not thought—but Maggie airily dismissed such details. Claire suspected that she regarded the airship as something of a pet, like a spaniel. She could only hope that the girls did not try to make poor Athena do tricks.

By the fourth day, they could see a wide blue vastness on the farthest curve of the horizon. Claire stood at the viewing window, Rosie the chicken in her arms, stroking the bird’s feathers. Count von Zeppelin had never quite accustomed himself to Rosie’s release from the hatbox, nor to her being a member of their company, and looked askance at her each time she shared a meal with them.

He joined Claire at the viewing window, slightly out of range of Rosie’s beak. “The Atlantic,” he said. “Our journey is nearly over.”

“I confess I shall be glad to step on the ground again. Have you been to the new capital?”

“Nein. To be on the safe side, I have dispatched a pigeon to the Viceroy’s house announcing our arrival and including my letters of passage from His Majesty the Kaiser of Prussia.”

“Let us hope the Viceroy appreciates engineers as well as representatives of foreign governments.”

The count smiled under his handlebar moustache, whose jaunty curl had now been restored. “I have heard a rumor that it is so. Lady Claire, may I ask you something?”

“Of course.” She turned to him, curious.

“Please forgive me if I am too personal, but I was a soldier and am a man of blunt speech. What are your plans for the future?”

Rosie protested as the familiar arms about her feathery body tightened, and Claire forced herself to relax. “I am not certain. Return to London, I suppose, and take up my life where I left it.”

“Which was what? Do you plan to marry young Malvern?”

Claire nearly dropped poor Rosie on the gondola’s polished deck. “Gracious! No indeed. I mean … that is to say …” She controlled her babbling mouth with difficulty, settled Rosie once again, and wondered where Andrew was at this moment. She devoutly hoped he was nowhere within hearing. “I had planned to begin at the university in September, but I suppose that opportunity is now lost until next year. I—my plans are unsettled at the moment.”

Going home seemed monumental enough that she could not see past it. And in some ways, she did not want to.

“I wonder … Lady Claire, forgive me, but a mind such as yours comes along so rarely that I must speak. I admired you before, but only in a general sense. Now my admiration is tinged with ambition. For myself, and for the Zeppelin Airship Works.”

Puzzled, she gazed at him. “Sir?”

“Would you consider attending the university in Munich, and upon your graduation, coming to work for me?”

This time she did drop poor Rosie. The bird landed on the deck in a flutter of wings and claws, and stalked off toward the dining salon, where the Mopsies could be counted upon to have a treat at hand and make a much more reliable cushion.

Claire, bereft of speech, could only stare open-mouthed at the count.

“I realize that this is wholly unexpected, and you must not give me an answer this moment. All I ask is that you consider it. The University of Bavaria, as you know, is second only to the University of Edinburgh for scientific achievement.”

“I—yes, I did know,” Claire managed.

She felt as if the floor had opened under her feet and left her suspended in air. Her stomach dipped and plunged while her mind flew ahead, across the Atlantic, to the little cottage by the river and the children who lived there.

“I have responsibilities—the children—”

“Ja, I realize this is so, and I admire you for considering their welfare before your own. I also admire these young ladies. Not every little girl in ruffled pantaloons can sabotage an airship quite so effectively.”

With a trembling smile, Claire nodded in agreement. “They are my wards, count. I cannot leave them, even in the face of an offer as attractive as yours.”

“And I should not expect you to. They ought to go to school as well. There are many fine lycees in Munich, some not a stone’s throw from the gates of Schloss Schwanenstein.”

“Is that an hotel?”

He laughed. “Nein, my dear young lady. The schloss is my family estate in Munich. You might call it a castle or a palace, but it has become much more than that. It is—permit me to say—the center of advanced thinking in Europe, much as the salons of London were a hundred years ago. You and the girls might live there as my guests, until your career is launched and you are able to provide a home for them on your own.”

Again Claire lost her breath. “But, sir … How is it possible? What have I done to deserve such generosity at your hands?”

The count rocked back on his heels, his hands clasped behind his back, keeping a keen eye on the slowly approaching horizon. “It is not what you have done, though saving my life is a not inconsiderable part of it. It is what you are capable of doing, my dear. I have faith in you. Perhaps it is time for you to have faith in yourself.”

“But—there are other children—at the cottage. In London. Not Munich.”

“How are they being supported?”

“They earn their living gambling at the moment. And I have certain investments. The cottage is paid for, and Granny Protheroe sees to their immediate needs.”

“Then you must certainly visit during holidays. It is not far, you know. A Zeppelin airship makes the journey from Munich to London in—”

“—three hours. Yes, I know. I should like to see a Meriwether-Astor ship attempt such a feat.” She must deflect this conversation, even for a moment, to more prosaic subjects so that her staggering mind could recover.

“After our interview with the Viceroy, I very much doubt you will see a Meriwether-Astor ship at all in English skies. He will be marooned on his own continent and will have to content himself with ferrying groceries and livestock up and down the eastern seaboard.” The count looked exceedingly pleased at this prospect.

Then he gave her a little bow.

“As I have said, I do not require an answer immediately. We have work to do first. But when you have consulted with your wards and with your friends, and you know your own mind, I hope you will inform me of it.”

“I will, sir. And … thank you. You do not know what this means to me.” Her voice trembled as she struggled with tears.

He smiled, his gaze fixed on the distant horizon as if it were the future. “You would be surprised.”

And then he walked off in the direction of the galley, humming a jaunty tune that Claire recognized as one of the polkas the orchestra had played on the Margrethe.

She turned to the viewing window, hardly able to believe that the mighty Count von Zeppelin, one of the finest engineers of the modern age, considered her so valuable that he was willing to give her and the girls a home for the next four years, in hopes that Claire would add her mind to the storehouse of intellect his firm already possessed.

Ahead, the horizon widened, encompassing the vast oceans of water and air through which Athena steamed steadily, doing brilliantly what she had been designed to do.

It was an amazing offer—one that had been prompted by affection as well as appreciation and faith.

Faith, the substance of things hoped for.

Claire could not remember anyone—save perhaps Polgarth the poultryman—ever having faith in her. And now look. She was rich in people who possessed it. The Mopsies. Andrew. The count. Alice. Perhaps even the Dunsmuirs, whom she hoped would regain their faith in her once the Meriwether-Astor affair was settled for good.

She had been through some perilous times, it was true. She had learned and grown and was no longer that shy, unsure, untried girl she had been when Snouts had pulled her from her landau outside Aldgate station.

She was a woman now. A lady of resources, of intellect—and of faith in herself and the ones she loved.

Maggie and Lizzie crept into the navigation gondola and joined her at the window, passing their arms about her waist and snuggling against her, one on either side. Rosie perched on Maggie’s other shoulder, settling there as comfortably as if she were in her own garden.

“All right, then, Lady?” Lizzie asked, peering ahead into the vast sky that enfolded them and beckoned, even as they sailed majestically on.

“Yes, Lizzie.” She hugged them both close. “It’s more than all right. In fact … I think it’s going to be wonderful.”

110

Epilogue

Palace of the Viceroy

Charlottetown

All Souls’ Day

My dear Claire,

I hope you will allow me to apologize for slipping this missive under your door in this clandestine fashion, but it seems to be my last resort. Amid the joy of Tigg’s arrival with the Dunsmuirs here in Charlottetown and the latter’s subsequent rapprochement with you, then the meeting with the Viceroy for your testimony in the case—to say nothing of the pigeon from Her Majesty herself!—it has been a mad several days in which I have found it utterly impossible to contrive a moment alone to speak.

Hence, a letter.

I must confess that I share both your excitement and your apprehension over this new stage in your life. But I know also that you will manage famously, and so will the girls. Count von Zeppelin has offered you a marvelous opportunity and you must let nothing stand in the way of making it everything it can be. Have no fear as to the welfare of the children remaining in London. I shall visit often and make sure that they want for nothing.

When the time comes, I shall see you off at the airfield, waving farewell with a full heart. (Note: If you are going to keep Athena, Tigg suggests that we see about Snouts & co. building a mooring mast in the field next to the cottage.) Then I shall address myself to finishing my long-neglected dissertation and rebuilding the Malvern-Terwilliger Kinetick Carbonator and filing all the patents appertaining thereto, including yours. Four years will pass quickly—four years in which we will both achieve a measure of our dreams, and prepare ourselves for what may come after.

Claire, I shall say only a word of my feelings here. I do not hesitate to be honest, for you deserve nothing less, but neither do I wish to burden you at the moment you have the chance to fly. You are a special woman with special gifts, and I do not mean to stand in your way. So I shall say only this:

When you return to England in triumph, your diploma in hand, for your last summer in London before beginning your career, you will find me waiting, my heart as true as my intentions are honorable.

I cherish the hope that some day, you will accept them both.

I remain yours always,

Andrew

THE END

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Author's Note

Dear reader,

I hope you have enjoyed reading Claire’s adventures in the Magnificent Devices world as much as I have enjoyed writing them. It has been your support and enthusiasm that has been like the steam in Athena’s boiler, keeping the entire enterprise afloat and ready for the next adventure.

And what might that next adventure be? Well, there are a number of ways we can go, but I really feel that Maggie and Lizzie need their own book—or maybe books, plural! So, sometime in the fall, we’ll defy the space/time continuum to move five years into the future, when the Mopsies are sixteen and on the verge of coming out as young ladies …

… except that it’s terribly difficult to be a proper young lady when—besides literature, elocution, and mathematics—your only real skills are pickpocketing, scouting, and making bombs …

www.shelleyadina.com

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Other Books by Shelley Adina

Did you enjoy the Magnificent Devices 4-Book Set?

If so, you might leave a review on the book’s page on your favorite online retailer to tell others about it!

Other Books by Shelley Adina

Caught You Looking (July 2011, contemporary romance, Moonshell Bay #1)

Immortal Faith (August 2011, paranormal YA)

Peep, the Hundred-Decibel Hummer (May 2012, early reader)

The All About Us series of six books (contemporary YA, 2008–2010)

To learn about Shelley’s Amish women’s fiction written as Adina Senft,

visit www.adinasenft.com, and don’t miss her blog, A City Girl’s Guide to Plain Living.

The Wounded Heart (September 2011)

The Hidden Life (June 2012)

The Tempted Soul (March 2013)

And coming in 2014, the Healing Grace series

Upcoming Releases

A Lady of Resources, Magnificent Devices #5

Emily, the Easter Chick (early reader)

Caught You Listening, Moonshell Bay #2

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About the Author

RITA Award® winning author and Christy finalist Shelley Adina wrote her first novel when she was 13. It was rejected by the literary publisher to whom she sent it, but he did say she knew how to tell a story. That was enough to keep her going through the rest of her adolescence, a career, a move to another country, a B.A. in Literature, an M.F.A. in Writing Popular Fiction, and countless manuscript pages. Shelley is a world traveler who loves to imagine what might have been. Between books, Shelley loves playing the piano and Celtic harp, making period costumes, and spoiling her flock of rescued chickens.

Learn more about Shelley and her books at www.shelleyadina.com.