I ducked behind the curtain I’d rigged in the corner and changed into my working trousers and waistcoat, shivering at the touch of the cool morning air against my bare arms. By the time we launched, the heat of the fires would make me all too grateful for my scanty attire.
I slipped on my coat, covered my waist-length auburn curls, currently braided tightly about the crown of my head, under a soft cap, and raced outside to climb the wooden superstructure high above the deck and complete the necessary checks to ensure a safe flight. Bags, lines, valves. All seemed in good order.
Time to light the furnace.
I loved this part—taking the cold, dead heart of the ship and bringing her to life with the touch of flame to kindling and coal. The long, slender lucifers, coated with sulfur and phosphorus, filled the engine room with a scent most would ascribe to Hell, although to me it smelled of power, of freedom, and of home.
The kindling caught, and I watched the fascinating dance of the flames as they leapt from the wooden twigs to settle in the coals like a fine plow horse settling into the harness.
As the firebox heated, the water tank above also grew hot, sending steam through the pipes leading to the three turbines that powered the ship’s screws. All the Mercury needed to race across the open sky was to have her central gasbag inflated with the residual hot air from the fires, and to engage the gears that connected the spinning turbines to the screws.
The tocsin rang, alerting me to the fact the captain had boarded. I reached to unhook the speaking tube from its cradle beside the door.
“Inflate the bag, two-hundred degrees,” Lieutenant Whitcomb said in his sharp accents.
“Aye, sir!” I snapped back smartly, and gave a large, four-spoked brass valve wheel three brisk cranks, keeping my gaze fixed on the hot air gasbag pressure and temperature gauges.
Fire-heated air propelled by a fan rushed from the furnace up a short section of metal pipe to a flexible leather hose leading to the rubberized silk gasbag. I imagined the scene on deck; the silver bag expanding inside its rigid framework, giant lungs taking a breath before the race, growing like a billowing thundercloud to take its place between its two aether-filled companions.
The hot-air pressure gauge rose as the bag filled enough to push against the spring-mounted plate between the hot air bag and the forward aether gasbag, thus measuring the amount of pressure the hot air gasbag exerted on its neighbors. As the pressure gauge approached 50 percent, the Mercury’s superstructure creaked and popped—the normal complaints of a ship stretching its wings.
The temperature dial turned as the bi-metal coil inside the bag relaxed with the growing interior heat. I felt the lurch and sway as the Mercury shed the restraints of gravity, held down by the slender bow and stern lines.
At one-hundred-eighty degrees, I slowly cranked the valve shut, so as not to overshoot the target temperature. I left a slight opening in the pipe’s valve to allow heated air to replace the air naturally cooled by time, thus maintaining the lift the captain desired. Or Lieutenant Whitcomb desired. I assumed the lieutenant was relaying the captain’s orders, but how was I to know from my position deep in the inner workings of the ship?
I heard Whitcomb’s muffled bark, and the deck pressed up against my feet as Reuben cast off the last lines and we surged aloft.
The speaking tube sounded again. “Engage screws, ahead one quarter.”
I worked the lever that meshed the central turbine’s gears with its corresponding screw. The first lever controlled a brake, pressing a pad against the turbine’s shaft, slowing the spin enough to allow me to throw the lever that brought the screw’s gear sprockets to meet the turbine’s. I slowly let off the brake, and the big aft screw spun up to speed. The Mercury slid forward, graceful as her namesake.
I followed the same procedure for the two other screws, first to the starboard and then the port side, using the correct gearing to give a quarter of the speed the ship could manage at full power.
So far, my first undocking as Chief had gone as flawlessly as I could have desired.
But this type of thing was but the smallest part of a chief engineer’s responsibility, and I had the assistance of the aerologist, who stood on the tower and controlled the winds to send us smoothly on our way. My true test would come when storm winds arose far from friendly airfields, breaking lines and shoving the gasbags out of alignment; when gears sheared off in mid-flight; or when any one of a hundred—a thousand!—things went wrong with the ship.
I hoped and prayed my skills proved sufficient to handle any difficulties we might encounter. I needed to convince the new Captain Rollins of my skills before he found out I was a woman, or I’d very likely find myself grounded in Paris, Marseille, Trieste, or any other city along the route.
The Mercury glided above the center of London. Hyde Park formed a splotch of lighter grey to one side amongst the soot-stained buildings surrounding it. Before us lay the muddy brown of the Thames with its many bridges and stately buildings. Even the Houses of Parliament looked small from our height.
The call for full speed and more heat came as we moved beyond London’s borders and soared over the Channel, gaining altitude until the packets that carried most traffic oversea to France appeared as tiny as a tot’s folded paper boat. We powered forward, the prevailing winds at our backs, making good time. If all went well, we’d see Paris before Henry McDonnell had our evening beans and bacon on the table.
But now I had a few minutes of leisure in which to take the cup of tea and biscuits Benjamin brought in for me on Lieutenant Whitcomb’s orders. I supposed I should get used to eating alone in the engine room, instead of in the galley with the rest of the crew. It appeared I’d be confined here for the duration of the flight in order to protect my anonymity.
While I ate, using the ruthlessly organized tool bench as a table, I pulled out the stack of old charts upon which I’d listed all the possible clues I’d found to Captain Rollins’ death.
They were few in number. Two missing cigars, indicating the captain had met with a man he liked enough to offer him a cigar; a rudimentary sketch of the brass button depicting a sailing ship in flight around our planet; the words “Russian’s Cap—2300 hrs.” from the note; and the dates, initials, and payment amounts from the hidden ledger from Captain Rollins’ cabin.
I jotted a brief note about the projectile that had caused the draft horse to shy on our docking, in case the incident had some bearing on the case. I was not entirely convinced of its relevance to the mystery. Perhaps someone was merely trying to capitalize on Winged Goods’ problems by attempting to drive us out of business, and the incident had nothing at all to do with Captain Rollins’ murder. Several companies, R.A. Dalton and Sons Airshipping and Empress Airships, in particular, had been nipping at our heels for years. And, of course, new companies cropped up all the time, as evidenced by Mr. Fairlane’s company, Falcon’s Flight.
Or perhaps the horse had been spooked by some enterprising urchin armed with a slingshot and a spent bullet.
All in all, I had precious little to go on.
But enough to convince me, again, that Captain Rollins had not been killed by petty thieves.
Josiah Rollins stood to gain the most from Edmund Rollins’ death. As captain of the Mercury and owner of Winged Goods, Josiah now had access to all of his father’s considerable wealth. I didn’t know what kind of allowance Captain Rollins had given his son, but knowing the man—or the captain, anyway—as I did, I couldn’t imagine the amount to be overly generous. Not enough to allow the boy to fall in too deeply with the wrong sort of company.
Perhaps Josiah had fallen in with bad company despite his father’s provisions. If Josiah, let’s say, owed money to the wrong people, he might have been desperate enough to hire thugs to kill his father in order to inherit the company and its assets.
However, I could think of no way Josiah could find willing assassins in faraway Constantinople. He’d served aboard one of his father’s airships, the
Winged Eros, but the farthest she ventured from London was the occasional jaunt to “exotic” Edinburgh or the seashore at Bath or Brighton.
Perhaps Josiah had grown tired of being second in command of a pleasure ship. Perhaps he had tried to hasten his promotion to captain.
And that brought to mind another person with a motive to kill.
Lieutenant Whitcomb wanted a captaincy, if only to be free of my—to him—irritating presence. With the number of trips we made to Constantinople due to the latest Turkish unrest, he certainly had plenty of opportunities to contact hired killers. The Russian’s Cap, a Turkish seyhane located near the British Embassy, made much of its income from English tourists and embassy officials and their families. Captain Rollins would have no qualms meeting his own lieutenant at such a place.
Whitcomb had not accompanied Obadiah and me or any of the rest of the crew to one of the seyhanes airmen usually patronized. He’d ostensibly been in command aboard ship. However, he could easily have slipped off for an hour or two with no one the wiser. The ground crewmen on watch were notoriously unreliable if we had no sensitive documents or important people aboard. I’d been able to make it onto the bridge that night without once being challenged.
I could see how Whitcomb could have accomplished the foul deed.
But the theory didn’t fit as well as I would like. I had little reason to like the man personally, but he had seemed loyal to his captain. Would he have stooped to such a vile action? The ultimate betrayal of another?
I thought not, on the whole. Murdering one’s captain was against regulations, and Whitcomb was nothing if not bound by regulations. I would keep a sharp eye on him, nonetheless. If he had killed one Captain Rollins to obtain a captaincy, he might not hesitate to kill another. As much as I disliked the task, I had promised to watch out for Josiah Rollins. I would do the best I could while keeping out of the captain’s sight.
I supposed, if Josiah Rollins turned out to be his father’s killer, my promise to help the lad could be considered void.
I sipped at tea gone tepid and studied the list of payments and initials. The amounts and timing were regular, with few deviations. One, to a certain AC, detailed small, regular payouts along with irregular notations of amounts received, always larger than the amount immediately preceding it. Gambling debts, it appeared.
A disbursement for twenty pounds, paid monthly, went to one DP. I assumed DP stood for Dearest Phoebe, the name Captain Rollins called Maman. That payment I understood.
I didn’t understand the seventy-five pounds per quarter that went to MB.
But most mysterious of all were the infrequent, large sums assigned to YS. They varied in amounts, from as little as twenty pounds, six shillings, all the way up to one of a whopping five hundred pounds—enough for a family to live on comfortably for a year. The payments came with no pattern that I could discern, sometimes as many as twice in a single month. But the last payment had been recorded in January of this year, fully six months ago; the longest interval by far between payments to YS.
Who was YS, and why was Captain Rollins paying him so much? And why had the payments stopped? Had the captain been the victim of a blackmailer? What could he have done that required such great sums to cover up?
I supposed YS may have been angry when the flow of monies ceased, which could have caused him to desire Captain Rollins’ death in retaliation. But if YS were a blackmailer, wouldn’t he have released whatever scurrilous information he had to the press? I had heard not a single whisper of anything defamatory concerning the captain. Perhaps negotiations had been ongoing. But a dead man could not resume payments. Perhaps YS believed Josiah Rollins would be an easier source of income.
Or perhaps Edmund Rollins had simply been contributing to a favorite charity, or paying his tailor, or his wife’s modiste.
I ground my teeth in frustration. The one person who might be able to shed some light on the problem was Josiah Rollins.
The new captain, who did not know his chief engineer was a woman.
The one person I could under no circumstances approach.
Chapter Six
The smoky, choked odor of flagging flames roused me from my dark thoughts. Or perhaps the slight change in the roar of the furnace alerted me, or a shift in the quality or color of the light cast through the furnace grate. Or I heard the distressed call of the dying fire. Whatever the cause, I looked up a bare moment before the alarm on the temperature dial went off. The coal feeder must have run down.
I tossed my sheaf of notes into the top drawer of the tool bench, already overflowing with charts detailing our fuel consumption and repair schedules, and slapped at the bell to silence the jarring noise. Laying hold of the lever-like key hanging from a hook beside the coal feeder, I inserted it into the mechanism and rotated it until the spring grew taut. The clockwork screw that trickled pellets into the flames started ticking once more.
I checked its reservoir. Nearly empty. I grabbed the shovel, opened the coal bunker, and began to fill the conical copper container with pelleted coal, throwing a shovelful or two directly onto the flames for good measure.
“Wake up, sleepyheads,” I muttered. “Time to go to work!” I held the image of snapping white tongues of fire in the front of my mind, deliberately using my affinity to hurry the process. I was alone in the engine room. No one would know.
Under my attentions, the flames soon danced merrily behind the grate once more. I mopped sweat and soot from my face and neck with the kerchief I kept in my back pocket for the purpose. I suddenly realized that no matter how many private cabins I had when our important passenger disembarked, until I found an apprentice to help out, I would be spending every night in the engine room, stoking the furnace at regular intervals.
I contemplated the lack of sleep I’d suffer on truly swift flights where the stops were few and short as could be managed—such as the voyage on which we were currently engaged. Perhaps I could borrow young Tibbets for a night or two so I could snatch a few unbroken hours of rest.
* * *
We made Paris well before dark, in plenty of time for our passenger to see to his urgent business in town. The airfield adjoined the new rail spur built to bring coal in for the increasing number of airships. Paris typically overpriced its coal, due, they claimed, to transportation costs, but I believed they did it because most airships crossing the Channel could carry enough fuel to make it this far and no farther, and thus were a captive market.
The intense, but hushed tones of an argument approached the engine room door. I recognized Lieutenant Whitcomb’s nasal voice, but the other, a rather pleasant baritone even in anger, I couldn’t immediately place.
Captain Josiah Rollins, I realized. How could I forget his impatient tone?
If he came in now, he’d know immediately his chief engineer wasn’t quite the man he expected. Sweat plastered my thin chemise to my chest, outlining the top curves of my bosom exposed by my short stays, and my waistcoat gaped open. The need to keep my most-used tools close to hand was the single reason I hadn’t stripped it off in the engine room’s close heat.
I scrambled behind the blanket curtaining off my one private corner of the ship and snatched up the shirt I wore when I frequented the airmen’s public houses. The muffled argument came closer, the words becoming clear through the thin wood of the door.
“Sir, I’m certain we don’t need to take on more coal at this time. Chief Everley would have informed us of the need—”
“That is enough, Lieutenant Whitcomb!” Captain Rollins cut in. “I have studied the proper fuel management techniques of every major airship company. Common sense dictates that we must be nearly out of coal supplies by the time we make Paris, or we lose time and waste cargo space carting around the extra coal’s weight.”
I stripped off my waistcoat, dropped it to the floor with a clatter of screwdrivers and spanners and thrust my arms into the shirt’s sleeves, buttoning it rapidly and leaving the tails hanging loose to disguise
as much of me as possible.
Lieutenant Whitcomb made one more attempt to deter the captain from bearding the chief engineer in her den. “Chief Everley recommended we wait to resupply at Saint-Etienne. It is what your father always did.”
I grabbed my waistcoat from where I had dropped it and pulled it on to further obscure my form. Taking my kerchief from my pocket, I tied it around my head to hide the long coils of my hair. A few tendrils escaped, but I shoved them under the uniform cap I nabbed from the hook beside my bunk.
“I fail to see how the chief’s miscalculation, or my father’s, has anything to do with you, Whitcomb,” Captain Rollins replied. “Now stand aside.”
The door swung open, and Josiah Rollins appeared in the opening, followed by Lieutenant Whitcomb and a rush of cool air as the circulation provided by the two small portholes increased by an order of magnitude.
The new Captain Rollins looked very different today from the somber young man with a supportive arm around his mother. He seemed large, taller. His intense vitality crowded the engine room, making the tight quarters feel even smaller.
He strode in as if he owned the ship—which he did. I banished an unhelpful flare of resentment. I’d been Captain Edmund Rollins’…what? Protégée? Pet? Friend? Whatever I had been, I had certainly not been his son. I had no claim upon the Mercury.
Now, if I could only convince my silly heart of that fact.
Today, Captain Josiah Rollins appeared both more alive than the man I’d seen at the funeral and more mature. More confident in his surroundings. The blue of his uniform picked up the color of his eyes, intensifying the grey to the pale cerulean of a winter sky.
Those eyes fastened on me, and I straightened to attention, snapping a salute.
He came to a stop in front of me, studying me with unsettling sharpness. I prayed he would not see through my hasty disguise.
Fires of Hell: The Alchemystic Page 6
