Scarlet Devices

by Delphine Dryden

  “Ah,” Dexter finally responded.

  “I was going to tell you, sir.”

  “But you didn’t want to spoil my birthday?”

  “There is that. It’s a business matter, I had planned to discuss it at a more appropriate time.” He shot Barnabas a glare.

  “I didn’t know about the last part, with the new company and so on,” Barnabas said in his own defense. Dexter ig-nored him.

  “Only a business matter? Matthew, you’re my heir.”

  “Oh, I didn’t know that part either. Right, if you gentlemen will excuse me, I’m off to find the hard liquor. Pence, Hardison.”

  “Thank you, Barnabas,” Matthew growled at his friend’s retreating figure. “Thank you so very much.”

  “Did you know he was entered as well?” Dexter asked. “Some business his family owns is sponsoring his car.”

  Nodding, Matthew returned his attention to his employer. “Yes. He didn’t tell me, I saw his name in the ledger when they were taking my entrance fee. I don’t think he has much interest in winning, it’s just an excuse to go looking for his younger brother Phineas. Going west. Traveling across the Dominions alone is far too dangerous, and Barnabas could never afford a security detail. This way the expense is borne by the company as a promotional scheme, and Barnabas will have a car fast enough to outrun most of the dangers he may face on the trip.”

  “The Dominions are a long way from where I last saw Phineas Smith-Grenville. Barnabas really thinks he’s come all that way from France? Rutherford Murcheson reported the lad missing and seemed to have no idea where he’d gone.”

  Matthew knew enough about Dexter and Charlotte’s French honeymoon to know they’d done more than sightsee when they visited Honfleur. He also knew that Rutherford Murcheson did more than simply run Murcheson’s Modern Wonderworks, the successful manufactory that was Europa’s equivalent to Hardison House. Murcheson was a spymaster, and Dexter had been doing some sort of secret government work in France while posing as a honeymooning tourist. But the bulk of Dexter’s activities were classified, so Matthew had never been quite sure why Dexter saw so many British naval officers on that trip. Phineas Smith-Grenville had been a lieutenant at the time, and had been part of some operation Dexter participated in while in France. Now, not even the navy seemed to know where Phineas might be found.

  So many mysteries. Matthew shrugged, unsure what Barnabas really thought, not willing to say any hope was unreasonable at this point. “Opium is a cruel mistress, and not just to the addicts.”

  “He seemed so full of promise.”

  “I suspect you wouldn’t think so if you saw him now.”

  “True. But we’re off the subject. About your new enterprise?” The big man sighed, folding his arms across his chest. “You didn’t want to inherit your family’s fortune either, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised you don’t want mine.”

  “Father disinherited me because I told him my sister should be allowed to take control of the company after him. That’s different.”

  “Not all that different. You stepped aside in her favor. And now you’re doing the same, aren’t you?”

  They both spared a brief look down the path in the direction Charlotte had gone.

  “Dexter, it was only a matter of time before you realized you needed to update your will. I was only ever a placeholder until a real heir came long.” Matthew spoke without bitterness. Hardison was his mentor and over the past few years had become one of his closest friends as well, but everyone knew a man’s own child took precedence.

  “Charlotte wanted me to wait until after the baby was born. She thought it might be bad luck to change it beforehand.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  “I was going to tell you.” They shared a chuckle, and the tension lightened. “Unfortunate timing aside, I wish you the best, of course, Matthew. And aside from staking you against my own driver, I’ll offer you any other support you need. You’ll train here, of course, and take full advantage of the facilities and staff. It’s difficult enough when you’re just starting out, even if you happen to be mind-bogglingly competent and steady. This is no time to be looking for a new team and organizing a new workshop, not when you should be focused on preparing for the rally.”

  Matthew shook the hand Dexter offered, relief coursing through him. He hadn’t realized how very worried he’d been about things. “I can’t thank you enough for everything.”

  “Actions speak louder than words, Matthew. And you’re not entirely off the hook, not yet.” At Matthew’s unspoken query, Dexter went on with a distinctly wicked grin. “As I said earlier, I have no intention of sending Eliza off into the wilderness entirely alone, if she does finally agree to drive for me. There are few enough people I’d trust with her welfare, and fewer of those I can feel certain will keep pace with her throughout most of the rally. At least until the airship leg. So really I ought to be thanking you. You’ve just spared me the expense of running a second car in the race so that you can keep an eye on Eliza.”

  THREE

  CHARLOTTE HAD SET up a throne-like wicker chair under a pergola near a fountain, down the path from the rose pavilion. She held court there, surveying the tidy serving tables and well-appointed crowd with the elegance of a queen and the shrewdness of a general. Mostly, however, the crowd ignored her to allow her time to talk with her recently arrived friend.

  “I like these new garden parties,” Eliza commented from the stone bench adjacent Charlotte’s throne. She idly watched a bee as it dallied in a nearby rose, thinking the scene was idyllic with a potential to sting and therefore a fitting symbol for a garden party. In her experience, there was always some social hazard hidden in the beauty, and all too often Eliza seemed to trigger the stinging response from some innocent partygoer. She’d never been much good at parties. “People seem more at ease, going where they will and playing games.”

  “We’ll all be sunburned before the ball tonight, but I wanted something informal while everyone was here, and it was so wonderful that it was finally warm enough. And this way the children can participate.” Her hostess passed an unconscious hand over her belly and smiled as she waved vaguely at the scene with the other hand. In the afternoon sun, most of the revelers had taken shelter in the shade of the lawn tents or under various pretty gazebos and pergolas placed strategically throughout the gardens. Others, more ambitious, engaged in casual sports, while small children dashed along the garden paths with sweets or cakes or cups of iced lemonade in hand. Though the foliage was still young, the new roses barely beginning to cover their supports, it was already taking on an informal lushness that lent itself perfectly to such gentle revelries. It was a far cry from the stuffy affairs they were all accustomed to, and Eliza approved thoroughly.

  “Is that very uncomfortable?” she asked Charlotte, as she watched her cousin’s wife shift in poorly hidden irritation on the thick cushion. Eliza thought it must be horrible, as it looked like the equivalent of carrying a large medicine ball tucked under one’s rib cage. “I wonder you can breathe. It must be so unpleasant.”

  Charlotte shook her head. “Not precisely. It’s . . . oh, how to put it? It was never explained very well to me, and now I see why. Difficult to put into words. It can be uncomfortable, but the real problem is you simply can’t put the thing down when you get tired of it. There it is, darling creature, getting bigger every day. I fully expect to adore it, but good heavens, what I wouldn’t give right now just to have a few minutes without it weighing on me. Especially in this heat. Even oxen get to shed the yoke at the end of the day.”

  Eliza giggled. “Charlotte, I don’t think you’re supposed to say that. And it’s hardly hot yet. I may even go back in for a shawl.”

  “You’re quite right,” Charlotte agreed. “I’m always unbearably warm these days, though. And as for what I’m supposed to say, I think I’m supposed to either tell you it’s all
a miracle and I’ve never felt more like a woman, or terrify you half to death by telling you only the most gruesome bits, in the most repellent terms possible.”

  “Exactly. I’m usually more inclined to believe the latter. Miracles bore me. You may proceed with the horrors whenever you’re ready,” Eliza granted graciously. They shared a laugh, warm and easy in the dappled sunshine.

  “There are some very interesting bits I would tell you if you were a married woman,” Charlotte said apologetically.

  Eliza sighed. “You could hint. You know I’m not entirely without experience in country matters. Not ruined,” she hastened to reassure Charlotte, “but not utterly innocent.”

  She appreciated that Charlotte didn’t condescend when she replied, “Your cousin would kill me if he found out. And he would, you know, because your mother would find out and she would tell him, so that he could kill me.”

  “That’s all very true. I’m fond of you, don’t risk your life on my account.”

  “I wish I could. I rather wish you’d hurry up and find some nice young man, Eliza, so that you could marry and I wouldn’t have to bite my tongue all the time when we have these little chats. It makes me feel like an old biddy.”

  At twenty-three to Charlotte’s twenty-nine, Eliza sometimes felt like Charlotte might indeed be an old biddy by the time Eliza actually found somebody to wed. Not that she was sure she had any inclination toward marriage. “Are you waiting for me to marry as such, or just to have carnal knowledge of some poor fellow? I don’t know if the former is in the cards any time soon, but I’m sure I could arrange the latter.”

  Charlotte gave her a pointed look. “Be very careful joking that way, Eliza. I know you’re in favor of equality, and your parents have quite given up on your becoming a society darling, but the fact remains you’re part of the class that still cares about these things. Chaperones for grown women and forced marriages over innocent kisses may be things of the past, but there is still a bright line that unmarried women shouldn’t cross without a great deal of thought and discretion. Hopelessly old-fashioned though it may be, that particular double standard will likely be with us as long as legitimacy and inheritance issues are with us. You wouldn’t be happy with your options if you compromised yourself publicly, no matter what you’d like to think. Besides, men do seem to like the idea of virgin brides.”

  Eliza looked at her cousin’s wife sharply, well aware that Charlotte had been a virgin bride once, but obviously not the second time when she married Dexter after five years as a widow. Glancing around to make sure they weren’t overheard, she dared a question that had long plagued her.

  “Charlotte, was it better being a virgin bride, or . . . the other kind?”

  Charlotte blushed and bit her bottom lip, closing her eyes. It took her a few attempts to speak, and when she did Eliza was sure it wasn’t her first thought on the matter but a much-tempered version of her original answer. “It’s different with each man, but what really makes it worth doing is having a genuine affection for the other person. Trusting one another, and caring about one another’s pleasure. Women can have pleasure too, you know,” she digressed, with an earnest intensity. “Climaxes, I mean. Don’t let anybody tell you differently. Insist on it.”

  “All right.” Eliza already knew about climaxes and was uneasy with the notion that at some point Charlotte obviously hadn’t. It was more than Eliza had wanted to know about her friend.

  Perhaps society is right, and there are some questions we really shouldn’t ask, she thought. I do hope the one she’s had the climaxes with is Dexter and not the dead one.

  Eliza winced at her own thoughts and changed the subject rapidly; Charlotte seemed as relieved as she to talk about anything else under the sun.

  “Do you suppose you could still teach me to pilot one of those tiny airships? You did promise some time ago, long before all this rally nonsense came up. I know you couldn’t demonstrate right now, of course, but if the controls aren’t too different from a basket dirigible, I shouldn’t need very much instruction.”

  “Naturally. Name the time. But about the rally . . . I do wish you’d reconsider, Eliza.”

  Humoring her very pregnant friend, Eliza said, “Since Dexter’s failed to convince me, suppose you try. Why on earth should I want to participate in the rally? By all accounts the competition is brutal, it’s dangerous, there are all sorts of dubious goings-on when the racers are parked for the night. And if I make it to the airship leg, there’s always the possibility that those geologists are right and the air over the Sierra Nevada range is poisoned. It hardly sounds like the sort of undertaking a respectable woman like yourself would recommend to a naïve young thing like me.”

  Charlotte’s snicker was hardly complimentary, but Eliza allowed it was well-deserved. And Charlotte didn’t know the half of it. Vassar had offered many educational opportunities that did not appear on the curriculum, and Eliza had explored most of them.

  “Eliza, how old are you now? Twenty-three?”

  “Yes.” It sounded hopelessly young and at the same time dangerously close to spinster territory, even in this enlightened day and age.

  “That’s young,” Charlotte assured her. “I recommend the race for two reasons. It’ll get you away from your family for a time, since you’re always talking about wanting more independence. Second, and more importantly, I think you would have fun.”

  “Fun?” Eliza repeated the word as though Charlotte had suggested she kiss a toad. “It sounds positively uncivilized.”

  “Listen to yourself! You’re an elitist snob, my darling. Time to go out and actually do some of the things you advocate, instead of trying so hard to become the new generation’s Eliza Chen.”

  “I’m not,” she insisted immediately, but a little bell rang in Eliza’s mind—because Charlotte had struck it hard. “I’m simply trying to focus on truly important issues. If some of them happened to be causes that my grandmother fought for as well, then isn’t it all the more important people continue working to correct those ills?”

  “Of course it is. But do you have to do it to the exclusion of all else? You’re getting grim, Eliza. Oh, not all the time,” Charlotte amended when Eliza started to protest, “but if you don’t take steps soon it will only get worse from here. You need to get away from this place, these people. From academic life and charitable societies too. It might give you a chance to . . . oh, I don’t know, explore other ways of thinking and living. Other things about which you’re curious.”

  Eliza was sure she couldn’t have heard that correctly. Was Charlotte implying she needed to sow wild oats? “I beg your pardon?”

  “You say you want to be somebody whose opinion is respected. You want your voice to be heard. But right now, all you’re doing with that voice is responding to the society you claim to want no part of.”

  “I never said no part.”

  “Near enough. You’re letting those ideas shape you, and lately all you talk about is the things you don’t want, the life you don’t want to be trapped in. But what do you want, Eliza? Do you even know who you are, what sort of life you would lead, given the choice? What is your natural inclination? I don’t think you can know that, because you’ve never seen anything but the safe little high society world and then academia, and I doubt you’re destined for either of those.”

  Eliza bristled at the characterization. After that morning’s fiasco at the lecture hall, she felt polite society and the academic world were anything but safe. It all felt like a wilderness, full of hidden perils and vicious beasts ready to attack. “You’re hardly one to judge. Is your life so out of the ordinary?”

  “My life,” Charlotte asserted, “is exactly the life I chose to live, after exploring other options about which you know nothing. A whole career, in fact, about which you know nothing. And I’m sorry if I sound impatient, Eliza, it’s partly just this damned—this miracle of l
ife within me.”

  “You’re calling it a miracle of life and using profanity?” Dexter said, sounding concerned as he approached his wife. “Is it time to send the guests home? Are you going to start throwing vases? Do I need to procure any particular food for you?”

  Charlotte chuckled wearily up at Dexter, who bent to kiss the top of her head. Eliza felt a pang of envy at their ease with one another, at the obvious affection between them.

  He’s definitely the one she’s had the climaxes with, she thought, then had to look away from her cousin for a few moments and think about puppies to clear her mind.

  “What has you looking so flustered, my delicate petit four?” Dexter asked Charlotte. Eliza couldn’t help but smile at the endearment; he always seemed to have a new one.

  “I’m worn out trying to convince Eliza to take my place. She’s dead set against it.”

  “Just as well,” Dexter replied. “Nobody would get a moment’s peace at the rest stops with my cousin and poor Matthew at each other’s throats.”

  Eliza’s head snapped back toward Dexter. “Who?”

  “Pence,” Dexter repeated. “He’s going to be driving for his own brand-new company, apparently, but I’ve offered him some non-financial support as well. I don’t mind doing him a good turn to start him on his way. If I bet wisely enough, perhaps I’ll profit from the whole business, even without an entry of my own in the race.”

  Charlotte scoffed at the idea of wagering, while Eliza tried to capture the thoughts flying wildly through her brain. She couldn’t . . . could she? She knew if she agreed, she would be doing so for all the wrong reasons, not to explore the world for herself but to spite Matthew Pence. This was an old reflex, drawn from the days years ago when she’d been so frustrated by Matthew’s attempts to restrict her actions. It was still strong, however, probably because she found that he still annoyed her. Made the hackles on her neck rise . . . sort of. Her reaction unsettled her, and she was inclined to go on the offense rather than wait passively and hope things would improve.