Her Own Devices, a steampunk adventure novel Page 3

  “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.

  Chapter 4

  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 win
ded, 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 t’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 W
ilton 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.