Fiddlehead (The Clockwork Century)

by Priest, Cherie

  “I trust you.”

  “Gideon, you’re right. We need to cover all the windows, at least on the first floor. That will be our next priority.”

  “I already did it. The back entrance locks up easily, and fastens with a full-length beam. They’d need a horse to knock it down, and even if they had one, they probably couldn’t persuade it to help. So I took the long way back and drew all the curtains.”

  “Excellent. You’ve got a good head on your shoulders.”

  The scientist paused, and when he said, “Thank you” Grant thought he almost sounded insulted.

  “How many guns do you have on your person?” Grant asked him.

  “Only the one.”

  “What kind?”

  “A Starr revolver.”

  “Ah, another ’58 model. Good gun. How much ammunition?”

  “A pocketful on me. More in my bag.”

  “You always travel armed to the teeth?”

  “Only when I’m wanted for murder.”

  “Then today’s our lucky day.” Grant patted his own pockets to remind himself of his holdings. “I have a Remington and a fistful of cylinders.”

  Bardsley snorted. “What about you? Do you always travel so heavy, yourself?”

  “Only when warhawks are trying to assassinate me.”

  Grant thought he saw Bardsley’s eyes roll, but in the dark he couldn’t be certain. “This isn’t an assassination attempt. They didn’t even know you’d be here.”

  “They’re shooting at me all the same, and if they kill me, we both know what the history books will call it. Now, where the hell is Wellers?”

  “He took the other wing, where Lincoln is. Might’ve stopped to look in on him.”

  “Polly, go check.”

  Polly dutifully crept away, relieved to be sent from the front of the fray.

  “Mr. Grant,” Gideon said quietly, and closer to him than Grant expected. The man moved like a cat, for God’s sake. No wonder he’d stayed alive this long. “Lincoln has a gun as well. I don’t know how much ammunition he’s packed.”

  The president considered this, and said, “He should keep the gun for now, unless we get any other good ideas that require it. But I hope it doesn’t come to that. If everything goes to hell, he might need a last defense, though I hope it doesn’t come to that, either. It’s a wonder he can even hold one.… Goddammit, what’s taking so long down there?”

  “I could go and find out.”

  “No, because if you don’t come back, then I’m really up a creek. Stay here, and take shots at anything you see moving past the edge of that quilt, you got it?”

  Grant shuffled low and fast back into the hall, even though it made his knees ache. All along the hall the other doors were shut. When he tried one he found it locked—and saw no key—so that was good. Maybe Wellers had done it, or maybe the Lincolns kept half the place closed up tight at any given time. Didn’t matter. It was another line of defense.

  He went ahead and ran the rest of the way, announcing his approach before flinging himself into the library. “It’s me!” he declared as he darted inside. There, he found Lincoln in his chair with the gun across his lap and Polly at his side, while Mary and Nelson Wellers shifted books from the cases to the window.

  “What are you…?” he began to ask, but realized the answer before he finished the question.

  Without stopping her task, Mary answered him anyway. “One of the windows broke from the shooting outside. The bullet went into that painting over there,” she complained.

  Wellers finished the explanation. “But I’d like to see a bullet break through a wall made of books.”

  Abe smiled, a smile you’d only recognize as such if you knew how hard it was for him to move his face. “It’s a good thing I have so many.”

  “Hard to argue with that,” Grant conceded. “Wellers, did you get the far entrance secured?”

  “Yes, sir. Took me a minute, because I had to draw a sideboard across it, but I think the sideboard was made of lead.”

  Mary shook her head. “Oh dear, Aunt Agatha’s sideboard? No, but it’s rosewood, and filled with silver. You’ll hurt your back, dragging around furniture like that!”

  “My back is just fine, and they’ll have a hell of a time opening the door past your Aunt Agatha’s sideboard,” he said, grunting as he stacked another armload of books—up over his head now. “Almost done with this,” he promised.

  Mary noted, “It doesn’t need to go all the way to the top. Unless they’re standing on stilts, they’ll never get a bullet that high.”

  Lincoln’s smile faded, and his good eye stared into space. “I need to get in touch with Allan Pinkerton. I have to send him a wire as soon as possible.”

  Wellers finished with the last of his books, and wiped his dusty palms on the top of his thighs. “If we can get a wire out to anybody, we need to send word to the District office. If we can get their attention, they can send agents to help us.”

  More shots erupted outside, and were answered by Gideon Bardsley from within.

  “I’ll get back there and help him,” Grant said, giving up on the idea of signaling for aid. “Wellers, when you’re done here, make a pass of the back of the house. Bardsley said he’d secured it, and I believe him, but they’ll be circling so we need to circle, too.”

  “I can help,” Polly said. “I can … I can sneak out through the cellar. Take a message to the District office, if you need me to.”

  “That’s very brave of you, dear,” Grant said kindly. But with the lights out and armed gunmen surrounding the place, it’d be a suicide mission at the very best, and he wouldn’t have it on his watch. “But let’s not resort to such drastic measures yet. The Lincolns need you here now. Abe, maybe you ought to give her your gun and let her stand guard.”

  “I’ll give it to Mary, when she’s satisfied with the blockade. She’s an excellent shot, and I don’t know about Polly’s prowess with a weapon.”

  “I’m no good at all,” Polly admitted.

  Mary Lincoln said to Grant, “Polly’s idea might be a good one. Draw her up a message, and let her run with it.”

  “No.” He was thinking of Betsey Frye, who’d last run errands for him. He couldn’t do that to this girl, too. “Not yet. They’re getting the lay of the land, watching the house from every angle. They’ll shoot her if they see her.”

  “They might shoot me even if they don’t. They’re tearing up the house right good, Mr. Grant,” she said, some kind of terrible plea in her eyes.

  She was afraid, and she wanted to run. Grant understood, but he also understood that if she ran, they’d chase her. “How about this,” he started, but when another gunshot rang out from the front door where that colored scientist was valiantly holding down the fort, he spoke more quickly. “Let us figure out how many there are and where they’ve stationed themselves. At some point they’ll dig in and call for assistance, but not quite yet. They’re still trying to decide how many of us are in here, and how strong we are, and how determined we are to hold our ground. There’ll come a window, Polly—a window when it’ll be safer than it is right now. When that window comes, I’ll give you the note and send you running, and trust you with all our lives, if you think you’re up to it.”

  She nodded gravely.

  He turned on his heels and dashed back down the hall, knowing he’d lied to her, but that it was necessary. The truth was, he’d only send her if it got so bad she was just as likely to die on the road as in the house. They’d see her in a heartbeat, even if she found a good dark cloak.

  The Lincoln crew was already outnumbered—heavily so, he suspected—and he guessed they’d already sent for assistance; he knew it in his bones, like Abe sometimes said. In another few minutes—maybe more, maybe less—they’d be farther outnumbered and outgunned. But in an hour the situation would have settled into whatever form of havoc it would ultimately take, and then … then he’d either need Polly, or he wouldn’t.

  N
o. She was safer inside. They all were, for now. That could change in an instant. Then again, it might not.

  He counted the variables.

  Someone would’ve heard all the shooting, that was a virtual certainty. Who would they summon? The real police? Some local night watchman? Neighbors or friends? It was as likely as not that someone would rouse the nearest Pinkerton office. Everyone knew that Lincoln relied on them—his affiliation with them was the stuff of history books—and the District office was one of the largest outside of Chicago, second only to New York. They weren’t the law, but they were lawful, so long as they were paid.

  All right, then. Let it be mercenary against mercenary, and may the best army win.

  But until reinforcements arrived by the gift of fortune or could be flagged down, Grant had a fortress to secure. And despite the peril to himself and to his friends, and the potential damage to his legacy for murdering a man on a stoop, and the fact that the fate of the nation—the fate of the continent, as Bardsley liked to remind him!—was on his shoulders … for the first time in months, he was sober. He was certain. He was ready.

  He knew exactly what he was doing.

  Eighteen

  “Can you see it anywhere?” Maria asked, scanning the horizon for the other dirigible.

  “Along the road ahead of us, I think. We’ll catch up to it soon; we’re flying faster than that big old cargo cruiser, even with the thruster working funny.” Henry adjusted his grip on the controls, his fingers moving stiffly with the chill and repetition. They should’ve been halfway to Atlanta by now, but the flight felt like it was just beginning.

  They were both cold and uncomfortable, and still shaky from the firefight they’d left behind them and weather that simply wouldn’t cut them a break. But the clock was ticking, and a weapon of unparalleled, poorly understood destruction was crawling toward the Confederacy’s biggest metropolitan area.

  Though Maria desperately wanted to beg Henry to land, for God’s sake, and let her walk around for a minute—to get the feeling back into her feet, if nothing else—she said nothing except, “Then let’s see how fast this poor little dove feels like flying.”

  He upped the pressure and changed a gear setting, and the craft lurched forward, listing to the left but keeping a straight course along the road that dragged out below them.

  Traffic down there had dwindled to almost nothing. They were now a ways out of Chattanooga, and not close enough to Atlanta for anyone to be bustling along, save for a few farmers moving supplies to and from markets. As her eyes examined the path through the spyglass, she said, “If they’re anywhere in front of us, they’ll stick out like a sore thumb. There’s nothing down there at all. Nothing interesting, anyway.”

  She turned her attention to the sky, scanning it until she spotted a dark pinprick several miles ahead. “That military craft, on the other hand…”

  “What do you think it was up to?”

  “Could be anything.”

  “Even Union agents with a Southern ship, looking out for their own,” Henry suggested, wiping his nose with the back of his hand.

  “Yes, a decoy ship, like we discussed. I wonder if that would do them any good.”

  “Having a cargo ship along for the mission? I can’t imagine it’d hurt.”

  “No,” she agreed. She removed the spyglass from her face, then jammed it down her scarf, into her bosom. She shuddered with the shock of cold metal against her naked skin. “In fact, if the gas bomb covers as much range as we’ve been told, they’d need a ship to take them far away, and fast. A cargo cruiser might cut it.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe, but … what are you doing to my spyglass?”

  “Warming it up. It’s practically sticking to my eyebrow.” She shivered at the press of the metal. “The simplest, most obvious answer might be the right one: It could be a CSA ship heading for Atlanta. There’s a big military base there, yes?”

  “Dobbins, yes. Specializing in aircraft.”

  “Well”—she retrieved the glass, rubbed the eyepiece shiny, and stuck it back up to her face—“if the simplest answer is the correct one, then we may have found ourselves a fantastic new ally.”

  “If we can get them to talk to us. Or listen to us. Hey, do you think Troost got through to the base?”

  “If he did, the cargo ship’s not evidence of it. That cruiser’s going toward Atlanta, not flying out of it at top speed searching for a doomsday weapon.”

  “Good point.”

  “Thank you. I want to believe in your friend Troost, I really do; I find shady men to be the most effective, as often as not. But he’s right about the wires. The lines between North and South are feeble enough when the weather is good and the troops are clear. We don’t dare assume that Haymes’s agents haven’t performed some deliberate act of sabotage to keep the information out of military hands until it’s too late. Besides, the taps are only as reliable as the people who man them. No”—she shook her head—“we have to assume that reinforcements aren’t coming. If they do, we can be pleasantly surprised. By the way, I think the ship has stopped—we seem to be catching up to it.”

  Henry squinted hard against the sky, and against the wind that warped around the glass screen meant to keep it out. “Yes, you’re right. Have they landed or dropped anchor yet? I can’t tell if they’re moving.”

  Past the spyglass, she observed, “No, but they’re settling down now.”

  “Right on the road?”

  “Get us closer and I’ll be able to tell you.”

  She eyed the damaged thruster and wondered if they’d move faster if it worked better, but as far as she could tell, it mostly just caused the craft to pull to the left. Her impatience was matched only by the chill she felt—or could no longer feel, depending on which extremity she considered. If she had toes, she couldn’t prove it by wiggling them, and it was a good thing that the shooting had happened before her fingers had lost all sensation through her gloves. Bending and unbending them was a Herculean exercise in the cold weather, and she had to be quite careful indeed with the spyglass, for the bare metal burned against her skin, even after her bosomly attempts to warm it.

  The wind was unrelenting, and so was the spitting, driving rain that came from every direction at once as they tracked the cargo craft through the lowest clouds. “We’ll overtake them in a few minutes,” she said, through chattering teeth. “But what happens then? Do you think they saw us fight with the other craft?”

  He was silent. “I don’t know.”

  Maria mulled over the possibilities. “If they’re Confederate soldiers, I must believe they would’ve turned around to assist us. We were a legally marked civilian craft, menaced by an unmarked crew that could’ve been piratical, as far as anyone knew. They would’ve turned around,” she said again, more confidently this time.

  “Because you waved at them? And they waved back?”

  “Because it’s their job to guard the skies over the South, and protect its travelers from harm during wartime,” she protested—though privately she believed that, yes, good Southern boys would’ve hightailed it back to prove their chivalry, given half a chance to do so. “But they didn’t. They didn’t even stick around to watch. They just kept flying.”

  “So perhaps they didn’t give a damn what became of us and went on their merry way, leaving the other ship behind to deal with a couple of maniacs out for a flight. You said they weren’t armed.”

  “Didn’t appear to be, no. But,” she added quickly, “I might’ve been wrong. Do you think they’d gone far enough to miss the fireball?”

  He shrugged. “Far enough that they wouldn’t have heard it inside the cabin. If they weren’t looking behind them, they might not’ve seen it. I don’t know, and I still don’t know what side they’re on. But we’re coming up on them fast, so tell me what you see.”

  “I see…” She held the spyglass a fraction away from her cheek. “There’s something in the road. A … a caravan of some sort! Henry, this mig
ht be them!”

  “If the cargo ship is hanging around it, then that’s probably a good sign. Or a bad one,” he said. If his lips weren’t turning blue, they might’ve been set in a grim, uncertain line.

  Under her breath she asked, “But are they stopping the caravan to investigate it, or help it?” Through the spyglass, she couldn’t quite tell.

  “Another five minutes and we’ll be on top of them.” Henry said it like a warning.

  “Or…”

  “Or what?”

  The big ship stopped its slow descent and began to rise again. It pivoted to face them.

  It was Maria’s turn to issue a warning: “Or maybe they’ll be on top of us.”

  “Shit.”

  While she still had a spare moment to do so, she turned the spyglass to the ground and did a hasty estimation of the caravan. As fast as she could count, she called it out. “Eight horses drawing four carts. Maybe thirty men, all uniformed. One rolling-crawler, the Texian kind, but bigger than the ones you usually see. They’ve stopped. They’re hailing the cargo runner, like they aren’t sure why it’s rising again. The ship is there as friend, not foe. Henry, set us down.”

  “Where?”

  “Anywhere, but set us down now. Set us down!” she hollered at him, her throat too frozen to manage the shriek she would’ve liked to deliver.

  “I’m … I’ll try! What do you see?”

  She saw a hatch ratcheting down from the ship’s underside, a bulbous protrusion descending from the hull. She’d never seen a turret that could be retracted inside the belly of a ship before; only the ones that were affixed and unmoving, that would leave anyone who sat inside them exposed to enemy fire.

  “A ball turret,” she breathed. “With one of the biggest guns I’ve ever—”

  The cargo vessel’s gun fired, kicking out a round of such power that the ship rocked gently as it sent the shell careening through the sky, covering the space between them in one, two, three seconds.

  In one, two, three seconds Henry managed to swerve to the right. It was only a tiny, insufficient angle out of the way, except it meant that when the shell struck them head-on it didn’t go straight through their windscreen and kill them both. Instead it crashed beneath their feet, cutting through the engine and out the top of the chassis.