Her Ladyship didn’t seem too worried as the small crowd made its way towards the gondola, the passenger compartment hanging down from the colossal gasbag. Instead, she spoke to Raechel in tones that suggested she would have been shouting, if she had been ill-bred and brought up to believe that shouting at her niece in public was acceptable behaviour. The younger woman, Gwen noted, didn’t seem too cowed at her Aunt’s words. Gwen sighed, inwardly, then watched as Romulus and a team of footmen started to pick up the bags and transfer them to the airship. She couldn’t help noticing that half of the footmen were staring at him whenever they thought he wasn’t watching. They’d probably never seen a black man before, at least not one dressed like a Butler.
Inside, they were greeted by a man wearing a uniform grander than any Royal Navy Admiral, an elaborate collection of navy blue and gold lace. He bowed low to Lord Standish, kissed Lady Standish’s hand and didn’t seem particularly put out when Raechel declined to have her hand kissed. Once the greetings were over, he allowed a pair of young women to lead them into the seating compartment, which was larger than Gwen had expected. Beyond the doors, the women explained, were the sleeping compartments, ranging from a large section for the aristocrats to a smaller set of rooms for the servants. It looked, Gwen realised numbly, as though Janet and herself would be sharing a compartment with Romulus.
A dull whine ran through the gondola as they explored the passenger section. Gwen had to admit she was impressed, even though she’d seen pictures of airships her father owned years ago. It was both spacious and compact; the staff had a cooking section, while the aristocrats had large bedrooms and a drawing room that allowed them to talk or stare out of the windows towards the ground, far below. She hastily joined Janet in unpacking the travel bags – the remainder would be stowed in the cargo compartment, out of reach – and then returned to the smoking room. Sir Sidney and several other diplomats had arrived and were clustering around Lord Standish like planets around the sun.
Sir Sidney caught her eye, then headed for the door and walked past her. Gwen followed him into his room, after checking to make sure they were unobserved. Sir Sidney was not meant to know Gwen the Maid – and if they were sighted together, she knew what sort of conclusion would be drawn. Sir Sidney, unlike Lord Standish and the rest of the mission, was young enough to feel a fire in his blood.
He looked her up and down as soon as the door was closed. “You seem to be fitting in nicely,” he said, wryly. “How are you coping?”
Gwen looked down at her maid’s uniform and scowled. “When we get back,” she said, “I’m going to make damn sure that servants are treated better by their masters.”
“A sensible desire,” Sir Sidney agreed. He took a breath as he sat down on the bed. Apart from being surprisingly small, it was little different to one on the ground. “There have been worrying developments.”
“Oh,” Gwen said. She took a breath. “What sort of worrying developments?”
“We just picked up a message from an ... agent in Paris,” Sir Sidney said. “The good news is that the Russians are clearly hesitating to join the French in war against us. That actually works in our favour right now.”
Gwen nodded. The airship would be overflying French territory for part of its journey to St. Petersburg, allowing the French a chance to shoot it down if they wanted to start the war in style. But if the Russians were being baulky, the French wouldn’t dare interfere with the airship for fear of convincing the Russians to join the British in war against France. They’d probably prefer to allow the British to send their envoys and then try to outbid them, if the Russians wanted to get more out of their allies before going to war.
“That’s good,” she said. “And the bad news?”
Sir Sidney hesitated. “We know the name of the envoy the French will be sending,” he said. “It’s Talleyrand.”
Gwen swore an unladylike oath, just loud enough to be heard. Talleyrand was the Grand Master of French Politics, the ultimate survivor ... and the closest match France had for Lord Mycroft. Gwen had met him while he’d been in London; if there was anyone likely to recognise her under the maid’s uniform and demure attitude, it was Talleyrand. And he wouldn’t be stupid enough to ignore the help.
Sir Sidney smiled, seemingly unabashed by her oath. “It makes sense,” he said. “The French have to know they don’t dare lose the Russians.”
“I know,” Gwen said.
She ran through the situation in her head. Without the Russians, the Franco-Spanish Empire would be badly outmatched by the British-Ottoman alliance. It was unlikely that France could be defeated so completely that she could be occupied – and Gwen knew that Lord Mycroft preferred a balance of power to conquest and occupation – but the French would be foolish to start a war if they couldn’t count on the Russians. They’d made huge strides forward in uniting their Latin American territories, yet there was no way to know if their work would survive the test of war.
“It can’t be helped now,” Sir Sidney said. “You just need to keep your head down and remain part of the background.”
“I’ll do my best,” Gwen said. She groaned. Talleyrand had a reputation for chasing women ... and Raechel probably wouldn’t run very hard if he caught sight of her. How best to shock her Aunt than by making love to a man old enough to be her grandfather? “Keep me informed if anything changes.”
“I will,” Sir Sidney said. “It’s a minimum of five days from London to St. Petersburg. All hell could break out by then.”
Gwen nodded, then motioned for him to check the corridor to be sure it was safe for her to emerge. Outside, there was nothing and no one, apart from a growing whine as the airship’s engines powered up. Gwen felt the floor – the deck, she reminded herself – shudder under her feet as she left the cabin and walked back to the servants’ compartment. Janet was sitting on the bunk bed, looking nervous. It was clear that the thought of flying didn’t agree with her.
“Lady Raechel was looking for you,” she said, as Gwen entered. “I think she’s in the drawing room.”
“I’ll go there,” Gwen said. The airship shuddered again as she turned to leave. “It never ends, does it?”
Janet gave her an odd look, but said nothing.
Chapter Fifteen
Gwen,” Raechel said, as she entered the drawing room. “You’re just in time!”
Gwen hurried over to the window and watched as the last of the ropes were pulled away from the airship. It shuddered again, then started to rise slowly into the air. Gwen vaguely remembered her father explaining to David precisely how the hydrogen was used to make the airship fly, but she couldn’t recall enough of it to explain to someone else. Instead, she sat down and gripped the handles of her chair as the airship rose higher and higher into the sky.
“It’s amazing,” Raechel said. Below them, London was growing smaller and smaller, even though they could see all the way to the edge of the city. “I could look down on everyone from such a great height.”
Gwen scowled as the airship shook, again. Flying under her own power was fun, but the airship simply didn’t strike her as very safe. Quivers ran through the deck as the engines started to push the airship forward, heading towards the English Channel, while the gondola shook every time a gust of wind struck it. A single spark in the wrong place, Gwen knew, could cause an explosion that would kill them all. She knew it was unlikely, she knew her father and his designers had worked hard to eliminate risk, yet she couldn’t help feeling uneasy. It would be a relief to be down on the ground once again.
“You could, My Lady,” she agreed. “What are you going to do now?”
“Sit here for a while,” Raechel said. She waved a hand towards London, now starting to recede into the distance. “And you?”
“I probably have work to do,” Gwen said. She stood up and headed towards the door. “I can bring you a book, if you like.”
“Please,” Raechel said. She winked as Gwen looked back at her. “One of the more ... i
nteresting books.”
Gwen sighed as she walked out of the compartment and down towards Raechel’s cabin, where her travelling bag had been left on her bed. It was easier, somehow, to cope with being on the airship if she wasn’t actually looking out of the windows and down towards the ground, even though it was still shuddering every time the wind blew and struck the hull. She passed Lady Standish, who looked thin and pale, and paused long enough to see if her mistress needed assistance. Lady Standish waved her on impatiently and stumbled into her cabin. It wasn’t going to be a pleasant trip.
In Raechel’s cabin, Gwen opened the bag, removed a handful of books and looked down at them, sighing. The printing press had a great deal to answer for, she knew, starting with the publication of hundreds of crass romantic novels that ranged from coy to alarmingly explicit and crude. Some of them had actually been banned, with heavy penalties for owning them, but it didn’t stop the tidal wave of filth. Gwen actually recalled attending a meeting of the Royal College where one speaker had urged using magic to destroy all such books. The fact that magic didn’t actually work that way seemed to have escaped him completely.
She picked up a couple of the less unpleasant ones, wrapped a cloak around them and carried the books back to the drawing room. Raechel was still there, gazing out over south-east England as the airship’s course carried it towards France. She took the books, muttered a thank you, then sat back to keep drinking in the view. Gwen nodded, then slipped out of the room and back towards the armoured smoking room. Inside, Lord Standish, Sir Sidney and the other four diplomats were playing cards and drinking port. Gwen wasn’t too surprised. It wasn’t as though they could actually do anything until they reached St. Petersburg.
The next three days went by slowly, but surprisingly well. There was relatively little work for the maids to do while they were on the airship, so Janet largely remained in her cabin, fighting the effects of airsickness, while Gwen did her best to tend to Raechel and Lady Standish. The latter, in particular, had a worse case of airsickness than Janet and was an aristocrat to boot, so the stewardesses spent a great deal of time coddling her and trying to make the older woman feel better. Gwen privately suspected that Lady Standish wouldn’t feel better until she was down on the ground, even if it was Russian soil.
Gwen spent the time with a Russian phrasebook, trying to learn a handful of Russian words and how to use them. Romulus, much to her surprise, could speak Russian and taught her how to pronounce the words properly, although he also warned her that it might be a long time before she mastered the language. Gwen, who could speak both French and a surprising amount of Latin, couldn’t disagree. Russian had simply not seemed a very important language to teach to English boys, let alone girls.
“You also need to be firm when you speak to them,” Romulus added. “The Russians respect strength and firmness, not weakness and indecision.”
Gwen wondered, as she wandered the airship’s corridors, just how he would know. It was the same piece of advice, she knew, that she’d been given for handling servants by her mother, who had driven a number of maids and menservants out of the house with her incessant demands. And she was fairly sure that slave-owners made the same arguments in the American South, where negro slaves picked cotton or tried to flee southwest to French-held Mexico. But then, given how badly outnumbered the aristocracy was by the rest of the world’s population, having an absolute sense of confidence would probably help them maintain their absolute control.
She peeked into the smoking room and saw Sir Sidney peering down at a chessboard, studying a problem he’d drawn from a book. It had been weeks since she’d played, Gwen recalled; part of her was tempted to sit down facing him and challenge the young man to a game. But she knew a maid couldn’t be seen to sit down with an aristocrat and play, let alone win. She looked at the problem for a long moment, then walked onwards, keeping her face carefully expressionless. There was so much in her life she couldn’t do as a maid. She looked into the drawing room and froze. Raechel was missing.
Gwen sucked in her breath sharply. Raechel seemed, on the journey, to have become a creature of habit; she moved between the bedroom, the dining room and the drawing room, rarely altering her pattern for anything. She was bored, Gwen knew; there were few people she could talk to as an equal on the airship. Gritting her teeth, Gwen headed down towards Raechel’s cabin and looked inside. It was empty too. Gwen felt cold ice running down her back as she turned and started to search the gondola, trying to deduce where Raechel might have gone. Could she have sneaked into the engine compartment, or up towards the bridge?
She moved through the rest of the passenger compartment quickly. Raechel wasn’t with her Aunt – that was no surprise – or trying to cadge some additional food out of the stewardesses, or even bothering her uncle. Gwen hesitated, then stepped towards the door leading to the bridge, hoping she wasn’t about to made a deadly mistake. The door was locked, but picking locks through magic was now second nature to her. She stepped through into a small airlock and then opened the next door.
The sound of the engines and the wind was much louder as she saw the railing leading around the airship. There were open gaps allowing someone to look out and see the engines, even netting they could use to climb over to the engines in midflight and examine them, perhaps even repair them without having to land. She took a step forward, feeling the deck shifting as the airship shook, and walked towards the next gondola. If she hadn’t known she could catch herself if she fell, she doubted she could have made it to the airlock. It clicked open on her touch and she stepped through.
She let out a sigh of relief as the airlock closed behind her, snapping off the sound of the engines. Ahead of her, she heard a moaning noise – a feminine moaning noise. Swallowing the urge to curse loudly, Gwen hurried down the corridor and peered into a small bedroom, presumably intended for the crew. Raechel was pressed against one wall, her dress pulled down to her waist, the Captain kissing and sucking at her breasts as his hand stroked between her legs. Gwen stared in absolute shock, then cleared her throat loudly. The lovers jumped apart so quickly it was almost comical.
“Pull up your dress,” Gwen snapped, forgetting her determination to be demure in all things, even if it meant risking her cover. “You can’t stay here.”
The Captain rounded on her. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“I was sent to find her,” Gwen said, not entirely truthfully. She had no doubt that Lady Standish would have sent her after Raechel, if she’d known her niece was missing. But Gwen had been careful not to mention it to anyone. “And you left the door unlocked.”
“It locks automatically,” the Captain snapped. Despite being so badly shocked, his career at risk, he was still thinking clearly. “You shouldn’t have been able to get here alone.”
Gwen would have been impressed, if things had been different. Instead, she forced herself to cool her temper and remain calm. Raechel glowered at Gwen, her face as red as her hair, and scrambled to pull her dress back over her breasts. It was torn in several places, suggesting that their ... lovemaking had been urgent. Her underwear, a pair of satin panties from France, were ripped and torn beyond salvation. Gwen sighed, picked them up and dropped them in her pocket. They’d have to be quietly lost later, if only to ensure that Lady Standish didn’t discover them and ask pointed questions.
“You didn’t lock the door,” she said, tartly. “How else could I have made it here?”
She waited for Raechel to finish dressing, then sighed when she saw the girl. Raechel’s makeup was smeared, her dress badly damaged and her hair completely out of order, but there was nothing they could do about it, not here. They would have to sneak back to Raechel’s cabin, wash her thoroughly and dress her in something that wasn’t so torn. The dress, too, would probably have to be dumped.
“You just had to spoil this, didn’t you?” Raechel muttered, as the Captain turned to lead them back to the passenger gondola. “I was enjoying myself.”
“He told me he was sterile,” Raechel said. “I couldn’t have caught a baby from him ...”
Gwen barked a harsh laugh. One of her less pleasant duties as Royal Sorceress had been forcing a magician to help take care of a woman he’d made pregnant, after telling her that he was a magician and he could make sure nothing unfortunate happened. But no magician could prevent themselves from siring a child, as far as anyone knew. Lucy had told her afterwards, that men were quite happy to tell whatever lies they had to tell just to get into bed with a girl. Gwen recalled Sir Charles and flushed at the memory.
She prayed under her breath that they wouldn’t encounter anyone as they walked back through the airlocks, then into the passenger gondola. Luck was with them; they saw no one as they crept down to Raechel’s cabin, then through the door. Once safely inside, Gwen locked it, then turned to face Raechel. The older girl was clearly spoiling for a fight.
“Before you start shouting,” Gwen said, quickly, “you should be aware that the walls here are very thin.”
Raechel glared at her, then composed herself. “Do you have to ruin everything?”
Gwen took a long breath. “Did you really believe him when he said he was sterile?”
Raechel’s glare grew harder. “Are you saying he lied to me?”
“Men like to enjoy their masculinity,” Gwen snapped. “I don’t believe a man who was really sterile would advertise it to anyone, even a girl he was trying to deflower. It’s much more likely that a virile man like the Captain has a woman in every port.”
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