“See if you can spot anything that strikes you as odd or out of place,” replied the earl. To Sheffield and Hawk, he added, “And you two look for any correspondence.”
While they began searching, the earl moved to the desk. More sheets of mathematical equations covered the blotter. But when he shifted the papers to set down his candle, something else caught his eye.
Drawings.
He carefully cleared away the mathematical calculations and began to page through a set of intricate mechanical drawings. Some showed a close-up of a specific part, while others appeared to depict sections of a complex assembly of gears, levers, and numbered disks. As for the margins, they were covered in a hodgepodge of complicated mathematical equations.
Frowning, he waved Raven over. “Any idea what these are?”
The boy appeared equally mystified. “No, sir. I’ve never seen them before.” He leaned in to study the notations. “And I don’t recognize the mathematics. The groupings appear to be a series of calculations, but”—he lifted his shoulders—“I don’t know what they mean.”
“Hmmph.” Wrexford spread out the drawings and studied them for a moment longer. “It appears to be the plans for some sort of . . . machine.”
“For adding and subtracting numbers?” said Sheffield after a long look. “Wouldn’t that be a godsend.”
“It’s been done before, Kit,” said the earl. “Several centuries ago, in fact.” He continued to stare at the drawings for another long moment, then quickly shuffled them back into order and twirled them into a tight roll. “I’ll take these with me. Maybe Tyler will have some ideas of what they are.”
The call of the night watchman making his rounds on the nearby street floated in through the drawn draperies.
“Damnation,” muttered Wrexford. “Let’s be off. We’ve got plenty to puzzle through.” He tucked the roll under his arm. “Though the devil only knows where it will lead us.”
CHAPTER 8
Charlotte patted back a yawn before taking a sip of her morning coffee. Dawn’s first rays had been teasing at the horizon by the time she made her way home from the docklands. Footsore from the long trek—and headsore from the copious amounts of piss-poor ale she had been forced to drink with her informant—she would have much preferred to stay abed until well after noon.
Perhaps there were some benefits to rejoining the ranks of indolent aristocrats, she thought wryly. But alas, they didn’t have deadlines hanging over their cosseted heads.
Wincing, she swallowed another mouthful of the scalding brew, hoping to jolt the muzziness from her head.
“A long night?” commented McClellan as she carried a platter of freshly fried gammon and shirred eggs to the table.
“Yes, I ended up working later than I intended.” Charlotte touched her fingertips to her brow. “And will likely pay for it.”
“And what’s your excuse, Weasels?” demanded the maid. The boys, who were always ravenous, had been suspiciously unresponsive to the delicious smells wafting up from the stove.
“Hmmm?” Raven blinked as he looked up.
“Please take your elbows off the table,” murmured Charlotte. “It’s very ungentlemanly.”
“I can’t help but wonder . . .” McClellan’s eyes narrowed as she served them each a generous helping of eggs. “What unholy mischief were you up to last night?”
“We did nuffink!” said Hawk.
Charlotte felt a skittering of unease. The boy’s pronunciation tended to lapse only when he was nervous.
“We were looking at some difficult mathematical problems,” said Raven.
The thought of numbers, and having to update her ledger with the monthly accounting of income and expenses, made her head hurt even more. “Better you than me,” she muttered, breaking off a bite of toast. Though, numbers, she decided, were the least of her worries. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to go work on the drawing that’s due to Mr. Fores at the end of the day.”
The boys didn’t look up from their plates.
Another unsettling sign.
McClellan set down the empty frying pan. “I can brew a tisane if you’re feeling poorly.”
“I’m merely preoccupied,” replied Charlotte. She would, of course, have to tell Wrexford what she had learned last night.
Once in her workroom, Charlotte quickly scribbled a note to the earl. Then she shifted a sheet of drawing paper onto her blotter and let out a guilty sigh. Of late, she hadn’t been giving her work the thought it deserved.
“I know . . . I swore I wouldn’t lose my edge,” she whispered in response to the accusing glare of the blank page. If personal problems began to take precedence over keeping the public informed on the issues affecting their lives, then . . .
Then I don’t deserve to hold my pen.
With that in mind, she pushed aside her own concerns and made herself focus. The price of bread had taken a recent upturn, and she had heard whispers that certain politicians might be profiting from it.
Charlotte quickly rose and called down to Raven and Hawk. After handing over the note for Wrexford, she took up a pencil and began to sketch.
* * *
“Interesting.” Tyler slowly paged through the drawings, taking his time to study the details. “The draftsmanship is impressive, and the construction of interlocking gears and levers ingenious.” He looked up. “However, I haven’t a clue as to what is it.”
“But the dials with the numbers, and the equations in the margins of the paper, must mean something,” mused Wrexford. “Could it be a device for doing sums? Addition, subtraction, multiplication . . .”
The valet raised his brows. “The idea is certainly not a new one. It’s been around for centuries.” He thought for a moment. “Leonardo da Vinci did a sketch for such a device. Then, of course, there’s Blaise Pascal’s Pascaline and Gottfried Leibniz’s Stepped Reckoner from the seventeenth century, though Leibniz’s design never worked properly—”
“I simply asked for your humble opinion,” muttered the earl, “not a history lesson.”
“In that case,” replied Tyler with an aggrieved sniff, “yes, it’s a distinct possibility.”
Turning his gaze back to the drawings, Wrexford frowned. “Be that as it may, it still begs the question of why Lady Cordelia had them in her possession.”
The silence stretched out for several minutes before Tyler cleared his throat. “Some ladies have hobbies, like embroidery. Is she, perchance, mechanically minded?”
“Not that I know of.” But clearly, he was ignorant about a great many things concerning his friends and acquaintances.
“You might ask Mr. Sheffield.”
Wrexford gave a grim nod. Yes, but whether he would get a straight answer was an entirely different question. For all his faults, Sheffield had always been unflinchingly honest, often to his own detriment. His new slyness was more worrisome than the earl cared to admit.
He knew Sheffield hated the helpless feeling of having no funds of his own. The prospect of making money was a powerful allure under any circumstances, and a force that could twist one’s morality.
“Damnation,” he muttered under his breath. There had been no time to discuss the discoveries with his friend last night. However, he fully expected a confrontation at any moment—
“Your pardon, milord.” His butler’s discreet cough drew him from his brooding. “But you have—”
“Show Sheffield in,” he muttered with a resigned sigh.
“Actually, it’s Master Thomas Ravenwood Sloane, milord,” replied Riche, maintaining an expression of solemn formality. The Weasels, whose muck-flecked untidiness and guttersnipe language had greatly offended the butler on their first few encounters, now never passed up the opportunity to announce themselves with their high-and-mighty official monikers. “And his brother, Master Alexander Hawksley Sloane.”
Feeling a spurt of relief—a coward’s reaction, he conceded—Wrexford waved for the boys to enter.
“M’lady wan
ts for you to pay her a visit this afternoon,” announced Raven, handing over the note.
“You shouldn’t read a missive that isn’t meant for your eyes,” he chided, unfolding the paper.
“We didn’t!” protested Hawk. “That would have been ungentlemanly.”
Tyler cleared his throat to smother a laugh.
“She told us to come here straightaway, because she hoped you would be free to come take tea with her,” added Hawk in explanation.
“Tea,” repeated the earl. The way the past few days had gone, he might prefer to be served hemlock. “Thank you. Please tell her I’ll be there.”
Raven had moved to the desk and was looking intently at the mechanical diagrams.
“Think hard, lad,” said Wrexford. “Do you have any idea of why Lady Cordelia had these drawings in her desk?”
The boy shook his head.
“Does she perchance have a penchant for—”
“Making things?” suggested Tyler. “Could they be her own sketches for some whimsical apparatus that she intends to build for herself?”
Raven scrunched his face, carefully considering the questions. “She’s never mentioned anything like that.”
Frustrated, the earl kept pressing. “Then if they’re not hers, have you any ideas of where she got them or what she’s doing with them?”
“No, sir,” answered Raven quickly.
Too quickly. And with a certainty belied by the flicker of doubt in his eyes.
Wrexford decided not to challenge him on it. Life had become much more complicated for the boys as well as for Charlotte. Loyalties were now interweaving and overlapping. He didn’t want to risk snapping any of the fragile threads.
“Well, then, we must attack the conundrum from a different angle.” Moving around his desk, the earl went to stand by the hearth. The day was warm, and the coals lay unlit in the grate, shadows dipping and darting through the dark chunks instead of flames.
Were the recent unsettling mysteries really linked? Or were they all seeing specters where there was naught but a simple ripple of air? It was tempting to see connections. But as Wrexford pondered all the evidence they had at hand, logic argued against it.
C. Hoare & Co. was a private bank of excellent repute and handled money matters for a number of aristocratic families. That the dead man’s cousin worked at the same establishment where Woodbridge had his finances was really not as much of a coincidence as it might seem at first blush. As for Woodbridge’s muddy boots . . . Bloody hell, like moths drawn to a flame, a great many wealthy young men found the lure of London’s less salubrious parts irresistible.
The voice of reason carried a knife-edge clarity. And yet the whisper in the shadows of his conscious thought refused to be silenced.
Logic . . .
As an idea suddenly leapt to mind, Wrexford turned abruptly and gathered up the drawings. “Tell Sheffield I’ll meet him—”
“Meet me where?” His friend halted in the doorway, looking uncertain of whether he was welcome to join the others.
“A thought occurred to me on where I might learn more about the drawings we found,” answered Wrexford. “I’ll be back within an hour or two.”
“Might I come with you?”
Yes or no? The earl sensed his reply would profoundly affect their friendship.
“Of course.” He squeezed past Sheffield and gave a curt wave for him to follow. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you that the meeting will likely involve a lot of boring scientific habble-babble.”
It was only a short walk to Albemarle Street and the Royal Institution, whose lecture hall and laboratories drew many of the leading scientific minds in Britain. The earl led the way up the stairs, bypassing the area devoted to chemistry and heading up to the workrooms housing the . . .
Tinkerers.
Wrexford knew that many of the traditional men of science who studied chemistry and physics looked down their noses at their colleagues who had a passion for engineering mechanical innovations, dismissing them as mere craftsmen rather than considering them erudite thinkers.
Wrexford suspected it was due in part from jealousy. The word engineering derived from the Latin ingenium, which meant “cleverness,” and men like James Watt and his partner Matthew Boulton had earned great riches from the patents on their steam engines.
“What is that infernal racket?” asked Sheffield.
“You’ll see in a moment,” he answered. After turning down one of the side corridors, the earl paused at the first door and rapped loudly, hoping to be heard over the metallic clack-clack emanating from inside the laboratory.
“Come in, come in!” called a muffled voice. “But do watch your step.”
Wrexford and Sheffield entered, both of them nearly tripping over an undulating oval formed by a pair of curving steel tracks that were fastened to the floor. They looped under a massive worktable, around a storage cabinet—
From behind it suddenly clattered a foot-high iron carriage belching steam from a smokestack rising up from its front as it raced through the curve.
Sheffield hopped out of the way and watched it speed back under the table, where a rumpled figure was crouched, peering at his pocket watch.
“Excellent, excellent!” exclaimed the fellow after the carriage gurgled to a stop. “Mark my words, we’ll soon have goods and people moving smoothly along roads of rails, rather than bumping over ruts—and at far greater speed!”
“Quite impressive, Hedley,” murmured the earl.
“Yes, Puffing Billy here is a model of my latest innovations—a locomotive with piston rods that extend upward to pivoting beams—”
“Fascinating,” interrupted Wrexford. “But might I ask for a few moments of your time to look at something?”
“I’ve always time for a man of curiosity like yourself, milord.” Hedley crawled out from under the table and tugged his coat into place, setting off a prodigious cloud of dust. “Pray, what is it?”
“Actually, that’s why I’m here.” Wrexford moved to the work desk and unrolled the drawings. “I’m hoping you might have some ideas.”
The engineer patted at his pockets and fished out a pair of spectacles. “Let me have a look.” He came to stand beside the earl and began to page through the drawings.
Sheffield remained where he was, and crouched down to make a closer inspection of the metal tracks and the still-steaming Puffing Billy.
“Hmmph,” grunted Hedley, his brows tweaking up in surprise. “Differential equations.”
“Which means?” asked the earl when the engineer didn’t elaborate on the cryptic statement.
“Which means the man who scribbled in the margins has a very advanced understanding of mathematics.”
Or woman, thought Wrexford.
More grunts followed as Hedley shuffled back and forth between several of the more detailed drawings, then ran a hand through his shaggy hair, leaving the strands standing in spiky tufts. “Ingenious.”
He looked up. “Where did you get these?”
“At the moment, I’m not at liberty to say,” replied the earl. “But I’m hoping to get some answers from you concerning its design.”
“I’ll do my best.” The engineer traced a finger along a series of geared levers. “Though I confess, I’ve never seen anything quite like this.” He blew out a breath. “The intricacy of the components rather boggles the mind. I’m not quite sure how one would actually fabricate all the parts . . . that is, assuming it’s not just a pipe dream.”
Perhaps it was merely an opium-induced hallucination, thought Wrexford. He had heard that the members of Lady Cordelia’s intellectual salon included some very eccentric individuals.
But if it was real . . .
“Let’s assume it’s not a flight of fancy. Given all the numbered wheels, it looks to me like it might be a machine for doing advanced mathematical calculations. In your judgment, is that technically possible?”
Hedley made a face. “Up until seeing these draw
ings, I would have said that no mind could envision a design able to perform such complexities. But now . . .” He lifted his shoulders. “But now I’m not so sure.”
The earl considered what he had just heard. “You’re familiar with the best mathematicians in all of Great Britain. Who do you think is capable of such a feat?”
A wry laugh. “I can’t say any of us mere mortals are that advanced in our thinking. But since you wish for a few names, allow me to think . . .” Pursing his lips, the engineer slowly shuffled through the papers again, studying both the technical diagrams and the equations written in the margins.
“At Oxford, there’s an upstart American on a two-year fellowship to Merton College who’s a brilliant theorist and has an expertise in the sort of functions shown here,” he finally said. “But to my knowledge, he’s never shown any sign of being mechanical minded.”
“Nonetheless, I’d be grateful for his name,” said Wrexford.
“I don’t know it. He signs his scientific papers simply as JRE,” answered Hedley. “However, I’ve heard he’s related to a cadet branch of the Marlborough family, so it shouldn’t be difficult to learn.”
“Anyone else?”
“Sorry, but I really can’t offer anyone else who might be capable of such advanced thinking.”
“Thank you.” The earl rerolled the drawings. “I appreciate your time.”
Sheffield was still engrossed in studying the steam-powered engine. “You say you envision this machine moving people and goods, Hedley?”
“Yes!” The engineer’s face took on a dreamy expression. “Mark my words, it will be the transportation of the future. I’ve already built a full-scale model prototype, and we’re testing it at Wylam Colliery. Today I’ve just been tinkering with a slight modification.”
Wrexford stepped carefully over the metal rails, ducking through a plume of steam that was wafting up from the water boiling over a large spirit lamp near the door. “Puffing Billy certainly looks to have great promise. I wish you good fortune with its development.”
“I just need to make a few adjustments to the piston rods . . .”
“Come along, Kit. Let us leave Hedley to his work.”
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