A Lady of Integrity Read online

  “You could have sent a note from the mooring station,” Andrew said. “We would have come to fetch you immediately.”

  “But then someone might have seen you,” Alice said. “I came on the sly in hopes that no one would twig to me being on this side of the Channel. Not before we’re rigged and ready.”

  “Ready for what?” Lizzie asked, her eyes wide, maybe at the thought of being shut up in a rifle case for all that time. Alice couldn’t blame her. It wasn’t an experience she wanted to repeat. “Who is chasing you?”

  “That’s just the thing. In Venice I had my suspicions, but no proof. And by the time I realized the danger, it was already too late. They’d impounded the Stalwart Lass and taken Jake as insurance for my cooperation. But as I found out, they had no intention of setting him free.”

  “Alice, you’re getting ahead of yourself.” Claire’s tone was calm, but the pads of her fingers on her teacup were turning white around the edges from tension. “Of whom are you speaking?”

  “The Famiglia Rosa,” Alice whispered, her voice dropping to nothing. This was Wilton Crescent. Claire’s home. She’d only been here twice in five years, but those visits had been enough to tell her that this house was one of the safest places in all of London.

  If London could be said to be safe—and Alice wasn’t one hundred percent sure of that.

  Blank, expectant faces told her she’d better get on with it. “The Famiglia Rosa—that means Red Family in the Venetian tongue—owns the shipping trade from the Levant to the north coast of Africa, and all the Adriatic. Everyone thinks it’s the Doge—that’s the Duke who sits on the throne—but he’s just one of three brothers who pretty much run the tables in that part of the world. One brother rules Rome, one controls Naples, and the third is the Doge.”

  “And how did you and Jake run afoul of them?” Andrew asked.

  Alice sighed. She’d give a lot to know that herself. How kind Andrew’s eyes were, yet how intelligent and alert. Oh, if only …

  Never mind.

  “It was just an ordinary job, or so I thought. A month or so ago I got orders from the Dunsmuirs to take a cargo of furs from Charlottetown to Byzantium, and do a deal with a contingent from the Tsar of Russia.”

  “In Byzantium?” Claire sounded puzzled. “That’s a long way from the Tsar. Why not go directly to St. Petersburg?”

  “It might be autumn here, but it’s already too cold there. Airships can’t fly directly to the Russias after October, just like at the Firstwater Mine, remember? The gas contracts in the fuselages if the weight of the ice doesn’t collapse them first. So the solution is to go to Byzantium, where it’s still temperate, and put things on a train. Of course, Byzantium is just close enough to the Famiglia Rosa territory to give them itchy fingers. If they can coerce an airship to go through Venice instead, they can extort what they call a ‘transfer tax’ … which can be as much as half the value of your cargo. And where is a rope monkey like me going to get cash like that?”

  “From the outfit you contracted with?” Snouts said. A reasonable suggestion. Too bad it hadn’t worked out so reasonably. “How much were you carrying?”

  “About six hundred pounds’ worth—so the tax would have been three hundred.”

  Good heavens. Claire’s spine wilted into the back of her chair. She could almost buy Athena over again for that price. If she had in fact bought Athena. Which she had not.

  “But if you were going to Byzantium, how did you come to be in the Duchy of Venice?” Now Claire put her teacup down altogether, and it rattled in the saucer before she let go of it.

  “Stupid me—I put down for water and repairs. It’s halfway, you know, and getting over the Alps is a tricky business at this time of year. The poor old girl still has your power cell in her, which runs like a clock, but the rest of her is beginning to show her age. I no sooner reported to the port authority when this gang showed up to confiscate my cargo. Illegal import without authorizing papers, they said. Oh, they’d give it all back once I had the paperwork, but what they didn’t tell me is that you have to get authorization before you leave your home port, as part of filing your flight plan.”

  “But that’s ridiculous!” Claire exclaimed. “No one does that. Shipping would slow to a crawl.”

  “It’s just an excuse,” Andrew said, “to seize and extort whatever tariffs they wish.”

  “Seize is right.” Alice nodded. “Before I knew what was what, they had the Lass locked down and Jake in quarantine so I’d do what they said. But when I didn’t—because I couldn’t—I went into hiding. Next thing I find out is that they’ve run poor Jake through a sham trial and clapped him in gaol. And he wasn’t alone. There were ships—and presumably prisoners—there from England and Prussia and France. And from the Americas, too.” She lifted her gaze to Claire’s. “Meriwether-Astor ships.”

  “That’s impossible,” Lizzie piped up, evidently recovered from the thought of the rifle case. “One, he’s dead, and two, his ships aren’t allowed to leave the Fifteen Colonies.”

  Andrew was about to reply, but a boy Alice had never seen before appeared in the doorway to the dining room. “Beggin’ your pardon, Lady, but Granny Protheroe says to tell you dinner’s on the table.”

  “Thank you, Charlie. We will be in directly.”

  Claire rose and shook out her skirts. “We’ll stand on no ceremony. I want to get food into you, Alice, before we ask any more questions. I do not like your color at all.”

  Alice had eaten unidentifiable dishes in Na’nuk villages and exotic ones in the Dunsmuirs’ castle in Scotland, but she’d never tasted anything better than the golden pheasant pie at Wilton Crescent that night. Rich with gravy and vegetables, and accompanied by potatoes and roasted onions, it could have rivaled anything set before the Queen.

  Claire allowed her enough time to wolf down her first helping before she said, “Alice, is there any evidence to indicate Gerald Meriwether-Astor is alive?”

  Her mouth full, Alice shook her head. When she swallowed, she said, “He don’t need to be alive for his ships to fly into the Levant. The company would go to his girl, wouldn’t it? What was her name?”

  “Gloria,” Maggie said, exchanging a glance with her sister that Alice couldn’t read. All she could see was the mischievous smile that played around her lips, as though she’d put one over on the absent Gloria and still enjoyed the joke.

  “Surely not,” Andrew said. “She didn’t seem the sort to break the law—although she certainly did you and Claire a service in the Canadas.”

  “Lot of rope pulled up since then.” Alice addressed herself to her second wonderfully runny slice of pie. “Anyhow, that edict only applies to the Prussian Empire and England. If Meriwether-Astor Shipping wanted to run cotton over to Byzantium or Venice, I suppose they could. It’s not like the Famiglia Rosa are going to pay attention to anybody’s edicts—and the Turks certainly won’t.”

  “Enough politics,” Snouts said around his potatoes. “Can we get to the part where we spring my brother from gaol?”

  “One must know the lie of the land before one goes barging in to break someone out of gaol, Snouts,” Claire told him, her tone soft with understanding. “Even we reconnoitered Bedlam before we freed Doctor Craig.”

  “Claire, you are not seriously thinking of going to Venice?”

  Both Alice and Claire stared at Andrew in shock before Claire found her voice. “Andrew! If not we, then who?”

  “He is there under contract for the Dunsmuirs,” Andrew pointed out. “Between her ladyship and Her Majesty, it should be a simple enough matter to send an envoy and free an innocent English subject from what is clearly a gang of criminals. At gunpoint, if necessary. There is no need for you to go.”

  3

  Claire was not certain what shocked her more—that Andrew believed she needn’t assist in Jake’s rescue, or that, engagement notwithstanding, he believed he was able to prevent her.

  “Do you think I haven’t already thoug
ht of that?” Alice said impatiently. “The first thing I did when I got to Bavaria was send a pigeon to Scotland, only to be told by return that the Dunsmuirs are back in the Canadas, seeing the last convoy out of the Firstwater Mine.”

  Claire recovered enough to speak. “Even if they left tonight, they would not reach England for a week or more, and by then—”

  “Did you say ‘underwater’?” Snouts asked.

  “I did.” Alice’s color, which had begun to return, faded once again. “It ain’t pretty. Maybe we should wait until everyone has finished dessert and had a thimble or two of port before I go any further.”

  “With all due respect, Miss Alice, I want to know my brother’s situation.”

  “As do we all, Snouts,” Maggie said gently. “But it may be hard for Alice to tell us. Give her a moment to collect herself.”

  Alice took a fortifying sip of wine. Then she addressed herself to Claire, as though she felt safer saying these things to her rather than directly to Jake’s half brother.

  “The thing you have to know about Venice is that it ain’t like other cities.”

  “Clearly not, if ruffians and criminals are in charge of its economy,” Andrew said.

  “Hush.” Claire touched his arm. “Let Alice speak.”

  “I mean physically not like other cities. Most places sit on the land, but Venice … she sits on the water.”

  “On islands, I understand,” Claire said.

  Alice shook her head. “Maybe back in Roman days, but not now. See, hundreds of years ago, Leonardo da Vinci was the most famous engineer in the world. The Doge who was in power back then hired him to make Venice the most difficult city to conquer in all of the Levant. So da Vinci turned the city into a giant moving clockwork. That way, an enemy could never pin down the Doge’s exact location, nor that of the shipyards, nor the armory. It would be different every day.”

  “What?” Snouts shook his head, as though a fly were buzzing around his ears. “I don’t understand.”

  “It takes some getting used to,” Alice said. “Even now you can’t post a letter to an actual address, because the postmen could never find it. Everyone goes to a central post office on the mainland for their mail.”

  “But what of Jake, then?” Snouts asked, looking more and more confused and angry. “How are we to find him? And how does it work, exactly?”

  “I suppose if you hovered over the city in your ship for a good long time, you’d see all the neighborhoods moving on their individual pieces of the mechanism,” Alice explained, “but when you’re on the ground on foot, all you know is that every so often, all the church bells ring, all the bridges go up, and you feel a little seasick while the gears underwater grind into action, moving the neighborhoods into their next position. How they dodge around one another is a mystery, but they do—and have been for five hundred years.”

  “How does it not fail?” Andrew asked, clearly interested in spite of himself. “The corrosion of the parts from seawater alone—barnacles—algae—heavens, even an errant fish if it were large enough—could damage the workings and bring the city to a grinding halt.”

  Alice swallowed, and Claire put down her fork. Here it was. Here was the part that she had been unwilling to share with them until now.

  The worst part.

  “That’s a very good question. And the answer is—convicts.”

  Now Snouts put down his own fork with a clatter. “Convicts?”

  “That’s who they use to clean and repair the gears and workings. That’s why going to prison in Venice is so dadburned awful.” Tears began to swim in Alice’s horizon-blue eyes. “The ground crew on the mainland told me. Ships don’t moor in the city proper because there’s no free space to put down—it’s all taken up with palaces and houses and court buildings for the Doge. They … they send the convict crews out along the great arms of the gearworks in diving bells, where they spend their days cleaning off barnacles and algae and everything you said, Andrew. The convicts are the ones who keep the city oiled and operating—because no sane person would volunteer to do it. Venice has the lowest crime rate among ordinary folks in the whole Levant—if you don’t count the crimes the Famiglia Rosa gets away with. And since no one wants to make a misstep and spend the rest of their days under the sea, the powers that be have taken to preying on foreigners like us. One false step on that moving ground and you’re snatched up and put under with only the barest excuse for a trial, like they did with Jake.” A single tear tracked down her cheek as she finally raised her chin and met Snouts’s horrified gaze. “Hardly anyone is found innocent. And so they stay down there until they die—or go mad.”

  The last words seemed to echo in the silence of the dining room, and when Charlie came in with the treacle tart, everyone jumped.

  “Claire, please, for the love of God—” Andrew began.

  “How are we going to get him out from under—” Snouts cut him off.

  “What about Claude?” Lizzie’s voice rose in shrill concern. “He could drop a handkerchief and be arrested!”

  Claire put her hands to her ears, both to shut out the cacophony and to squeeze out the awful vision of Jake, that independent, brave, conflicted young man, forced under the waves for the rest of his life. A large body of water had been instrumental in saving that life earlier in their acquaintance, when the sky pirate Ned Mose had pushed him out of an airship in a rage. She would not allow it to be the end of him now.

  “Girls. Gentlemen.” She was not in the habit of raising her voice, only because her occasional use of her mother’s tone of authority usually produced the desired result. But she did have to speak twice, which only went to show how upset and agitated were the people around the glossy table—the people she cared about most in the world. “I agree that what we face here is nearly insurmountable.” Snouts drew in a sharp breath, and she moved on quickly to spare his feelings further laceration. “But it is not impossible. Around this table are some of the bravest hearts and finest minds in all of England—quite possibly in all of the world. When we apply all our resources to the problem set before us, I have every confidence that we will find a solution.”

  It did her heart good to see both Alice and Snouts relax visibly. It would have done it far more good had Andrew done the same, but her brave words only seemed to inflame him further.

  “Claire, may we speak privately?” he said with an evenness of tone that she knew must have cost him dearly.

  “Of course, Andrew. But for the moment, surely we can agree on one point—Jake must not be left in that place an instant longer than necessary.”

  “Of course I agree. I am not a monster,” Andrew said, still with that calm control. “But it is in the means of carrying this out where I believe we differ.”

  “Then let us agree on our first steps.” The treacle tart was set down before her, along with a knife and a stack of small plates. “Thank you, Charlie. You must have some of this with us, so that you may receive your payment in praise.” She smiled at the ten-year-old urchin, who had been discovered in the garden by Lewis several weeks previously, sleeping stretched across the threshold of the hens’ coop, as though guarding them. Or, more likely, their eggs. “I know you had a hand in making it.”

  The boy smiled shyly, wriggling onto a chair next to Maggie. “I did, Lady. Granny Protheroe says I have the touch—she let me make the pastry.”

  The boy was never happier than in a kitchen, where he could not only learn a trade, but also keep an eye on all the foodstuffs and prevent their escape. Having known debilitating hunger herself, Claire fully understood his reluctance to leave apples and cabbage and beef alone and undefended, even in Belgravia.

  When everyone was settled with their tart and cream, Claire seized the metaphorical bull by the horns. “We had planned to leave London for Bavaria on Sunday, so I believe we must follow that plan.” Snouts began to speak, but she forestalled him. “I know you believe we ought to lift at once, as do I, but hear me out. It is quite clear
that Alice is being pursued by unknown parties who mean her harm.”

  “That’s putting it mildly,” Alice said. “It’s got to be the Famiglia Rosa. I just had no idea their reach was so long.”

  “Precisely. But by all accounts they do not know you are in London, so we will keep it that way. We will act as though no news or visitors have come, and leave in two days, as we do every autumn, for Munich. Once the girls are comfortable in our rooms at Schloss Schwanenburg, they will begin classes as pl—”

  “Classes?” Lizzie interrupted her with a complete lack of propriety. “There’s no point in beginning classes if we’re only to leave to go to Venice.”

  “My darlings, you will not go to Venice. It is far too dangerous, and you have responsibilities of your own at the lycée.”

  “So do you, at Uncle Ferdinand’s manufactory,” Maggie riposted with needle-like skill.

  “I agree with Maggie,” Andrew said promptly. “The Count expects you to take up your new position on Wednesday.”

  “He will understand when I tell him I must postpone.” Really, must she explain herself on this point? “I’m sure you see this, too, Andrew. It is clear we cannot rely on the Dunsmuirs now. Jake has only us to count on, and we cannot let him down.”

  “Of course not. Once you add your pigeon to Alice’s and notify Lady Dunsmuir that she must solicit Her Majesty’s help, and that is secured, Jake will be a free man within days.”

  “You can depend on Her Majesty’s help, just like that?” Alice asked, clearly impressed.