Courting Trouble

by Jenny Schwartz

  She attracted a train of curious and concerned followers, and they all converged on Mrs. Hall’s boarding house and Jed’s shed.

  “Oh God.” She would have fallen, but sympathetic hands held her up.

  Neighbors and firemen were already there. The workshop was ablaze. Hot metal from the coal stove glinted evilly. Flames licked at the tortured wood. Green paint blistered and boiled off the door.

  “Please. Tell me he wasn’t in there. Tell me.”

  The fire captain was a courageous man, compassionate too. “We don’t know. Miss Esme, we’re sorry. No one knows where your Mr. Reeve is. We must hope.”

  Mrs. Hall, Jed’s landlady, pushed through the crowd and, ignoring the destruction of her outbuildings, gathered Esme into a maternal hug. “There, lovey, there. He’s a good man. Clever. He wouldn’t blow himself up.”

  Except the workshop was burning, filling the air with ash and the stink of chemicals. A wooden beam fell, bringing a side wall down with it. Esme flinched. The crowd murmured.

  Then from the back of the crowd, a different sound emerged. Shouts. Happy shouts. No words, but a cheer.

  She turned from the disaster in front of her, hardly daring to hope. “Jed?”

  His jacket gaped open and his chest heaved from exertion, but he hadn’t been in the workshop.

  “Jed!”

  His arms closed fiercely around her.

  She buried her face in the hot curve of his throat, inhaling the reassuring scent of him, bay rum and sweat. She couldn’t hold him tightly enough.

  * * *

  “God in heaven.” Jed looked over Esme’s head at the burning ruins of his workshop.

  She mumbled something, the words muffled by her closeness.

  “It’s all right.” He rubbed her back, soothing her, reassuring her, even as the implications of the explosion settled coldly in his bones. “I’m all right. I’m alive. I’m here.”

  He looked around at the crowd of excited and relieved faces. Familiar faces—European, Indian, Nyungar, Chinese. He couldn’t see Nazim, but he had no doubt that this was the bastard’s work. “Let’s get you home.”

  Esme nodded against his shoulder. He gave her his handkerchief, holding on to her as she wiped her eyes and blew her nose, then smiled around at the watching, sympathetic crowd.

  “There now. Didn’t I tell you your man would be fine?” Mrs. Hall said.

  “I’ll make good your workshop,” Jed told her. He had money, both from his inventions and his inheritance, but the same wasn’t true for the elderly widow.

  “As to that…” The fire captain cleared his throat. “Any idea how this could have happened?”

  Jed met the man’s eyes. “I was down at the harbor.” Walking off his fight with Esme, watching the busy port and the soaring, noisy gulls while dealing with the turmoil of his emotions.

  “Humph. I’ll talk to you later.” The fire captain glanced disgustedly at their interested audience. “In private.”

  “Fair enough.” He turned Esme in the direction of her home, keeping an arm around her. In the circumstances, not even the highest stickler would quibble at their closeness. They walked that way, threading through the crowd and people’s congratulations on his being alive, until the street emptied out.

  Most of her servants stayed to watch the dying blaze.

  “I believe everything Lajli said about Nazim, now,” Esme said. “He tried to kill you.”

  “I don’t think so. He must have known I wasn’t in the workshop when he set the fire.”

  Neither considered for an instant that the fire might be accidental. Coincidence could only stretch so far.

  Jed thought of all that he’d lost in the fire. His current notebook, with its plans for his kangaroo bounding-vehicle, was safely stowed in his pocket, but the experimental working models of various parts were gone. The intense heat would have melted them into misshapen blobs. Likewise his heavy trunk of books might have survived an ordinary fire, but not this explosive, fierce blaze. Nazim had attacked his work and his dreams. Even the Diwali illumination project Felix Coldwall had left with him for study and an opinion on its revolving arm was gone. Damned anarchist.

  But what froze the blood in his veins was that it could have been worse, much worse. His arm tightened around Esme. She was more precious than any invention.

  “So what was the fire?” she asked. “A threat? A warning? Oh! We all left the house. Jed, we left the house. All of us. When we heard your workshop had exploded, everyone ran into town. Nazim had the perfect chance to search for Lajli.”

  “I’m surprised she didn’t run into town with you.”

  “But she isn’t there. That’s the point. If Nazim was watching the place, he’ll have seen us running into town and probably took the opportunity to search the house. He’ll know she’s not hiding there.”

  “Hold on. What do you mean, Lajli isn’t in the house?”

  “When I went upstairs, I checked her room to see if she’d settled in comfortably. I found a note addressed to me. I have it here.” She fished it out of her pocket and gave it to him. “I showed it to Gupta. He thinks the note is genuine, that she has slipped away to do heaven knows what. But if she is to be safe, Nazim has to believe Lajli is tucked away at home.”

  He read the brief note as Esme hurried him along the street. They were almost running as the mansion came into view.

  “I can’t believe we left it unguarded. What if Nazim is still in there? Jed, do you have a pistol on you? No, why would you? Dad keeps a couple in his desk, or I can sneak upstairs to get mine. Or maybe we don’t need a pistol. There’s a cattle whip hanging coiled in the cloakroom.”

  He’d never seen her so distraught. His anger against Nazim grew.

  “We’ll manage,” he said calmly, conscious of the knife tucked into his ankle sheath. They stepped through the front gate and stopped. “Or maybe we don’t have to.”

  “Owens.”

  For a minute, Jed thought she was going to hug the stocky man standing guard on the steps. By the frightened widening of his eyes, so did Owens. But at the last moment, Esme instead crouched and hugged his dog, the “hellhound” she’d requested present itself for duty. The dog, well accustomed to Esme from her frequent visits to the animal sanctuary, endured the hug with surprising equanimity.

  “How long have you been here?” Jed asked Owens.

  “I watched them all run into town. Since Miss Esme asked for Brutus to guard the house, we stayed to do so. No one’s gone in or come out.” He paused. “Glad to see you’re alive.”

  “Thanks,” Jed said.

  “Thank you, Owens.” Esme gave Brutus a final pat. “Could you stay on guard a little longer, till the others return, so you can introduce them to Brutus?”

  He nodded. A hand signal sent the dog out on a circuit of the yard and garden.

  Jed and Esme went inside. He automatically headed for the library, but she tugged him aside.

  “While no one’s here, I’ll show you the secret entrance to Father’s workroom.” She glanced at him, waiting for his argument, his defense of the proprieties.

  But he had none.

  Her eyes looked bruised, their brilliant blue deepened with worry for him. He wasn’t leaving her alone in the house, not even with Brutus on guard. Nazim had shown himself too ruthless, too reckless, to risk leaving Esme alone.

  He followed her into the parlor. For all his frequent visits to the house, it was a room he’d never seen used. Guests tended to congregate in the drawing room or library. The air of the parlor had the cool, dry scent of disuse, redolent of lemon oil and beeswax from the highly polished furniture and paneled walls. A fine Turkish carpet muffled their footsteps as Esme wove a path to the empty fireplace. She pushed a panel to the side of it, and a narrow door swung open.

  “Ingenious.” Despite their troubles, he admired the way the door hid in plain view, the casual eye distracted by the fine carving of Australian flora and fauna in the woodwork. Kangaroos l
eaped, bandicoots scampered, golden wattle nodded gently, elegant gum leaves and nuts were scattered randomly.

  “Father enjoys the game of it. He read about secret passages in old English houses and decided he’d include one in his house. A friend carved the panels.” But her voice lacked its customary energy.

  Emotional exhaustion.

  She descended a metal ladder fixed to the opening. “Just a moment till I find the candle and matches. Then you can pull the door closed before you descend. There’s a handle in the bottom half of the door. Ah, here we are.” A match scraped and light flared, then held steady. “There’s also a bolt, to hold the door secure.”

  He stepped onto the ladder. The door shut silently and he slid the bolt across before descending.

  Belowground the air was fresh. Ventilation shafts. Aaron Smith, Esme’s father, was an experienced miner; he’d know about introducing good air and extracting the bad.

  The mansion was built on a limestone ridge, and Aaron had quarried down, the pick marks showing in the soft stone. The room was compact but efficiently arranged, the space dominated by a large worktable with a stool and a comfortable chair squeezed in beside it.

  Esme set aside the candle and lit a kerosene lantern, adjusting its flame and standing on tiptoe to hang it over a hook clearly designed for that purpose

  As soon as her hands were free, he took her into his arms. There was nothing of passion and everything of tenderness in their embrace. He’d wondered if she needed him. The answer was in her response to the workshop fire and in the tiny shivers that still ran through her body. He rubbed his cheek against her hair.

  “I don’t know how we’ll work this out,” she said.

  “I’ll deal with Nazim,” he vowed.

  “Him?” She lifted her head, startled. “I’m talking about us.”

  “What about us?” he questioned cautiously.

  “You and me.” She smoothed a wrinkle in the shoulder of his jacket. “I…I learned today how important you are to me.”

  “You’re important to me, too. I’m sorry I lied to you, sorry I didn’t think how you’d fear for Ayesha and your other Indian friends. I was thoughtless but not uncaring. Sweetheart—”

  She covered his mouth with her hand. “Please, this is hard for me. Just listen.” Her hand left his mouth. “I didn’t think it would be so difficult to be a suffragette and be courted. You’re a good man, Jed Reeve, and you share my values, my belief in universal suffrage. I thought we had enough in common that our lives—” She broke off. “I thought we’d grow easier with each other as we courted.”

  “We have, haven’t we? You know me now.”

  “Yes, but…neither of us know how to deal with me. Being a suffragette, I mean. That’s why you dreamed up your fake assassination plot. You were trying to find a way to court me. I understand that now. You wanted to reassure me that you could let me face danger—only it was a pretense of danger, because your instinct to protect is so strong. Other women would prize that protectiveness. But I’m scared of being less. Everything twists around the fact that I don’t know if I can be me and love you.”

  His arms fell away. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I love you, but I think we’re doomed.”

  Chapter Ten

  Doomed. The little room under the Smith mansion seemed to echo with Esme’s voice. Doomed, doomed, doomed.

  Esme had to have seen the fury in his expression because she slipped away on the heels of that outrageous final pronouncement. Her father’s secret workshop had a second exit, via the cellar, and she vanished before Jed realized her intent.

  “Ridiculous.” He had to make allowances. Her nerves were no doubt overset by the excitements of the day. But honestly, where did it say in the suffragettes’ handbook that an independent woman couldn’t have a husband? Especially a supportive and enlightened one, such as he intended to be?

  Darn it all. The screwdriver slipped from his grip as anger made him clumsy. Here he was thinking marriage, and Esme was trying to back away from their courtship. “I won’t let her.”

  The knowledge that he was responsible for this debacle due to his ridiculous plan only annoyed him further. As for Nazim, that bounder had made the plot real and had the nerve to approach Esme… Jed gripped the worktable so hard it creaked.

  First, he’d eliminate Nazim as a threat. Then he’d kiss some sense into his infuriating suffragette. He spun on his heel and strode out to tackle the fire chief. Proof of arson would go some way toward giving credence to the admittedly improbable tale of an Indian anarchist in Swan River. He’d speak to Owens about staying on guard till he returned.

  * * *

  Esme retreated to the library. She walked over to the window and put on a squeaky voice. “I think we’re doomed.” Her voice returned to normal. “Who do you think you are, a tragic actress?” She rested her forehead against the cool glass.

  She hadn’t known a threat to Jed could rip her heart out and turn her into an abject coward. Faced with his burning workshop, she’d have done anything to have him safe—and that terrified her.

  The library windows looked out over the town to the port and the dark horizon. The storm was no longer threatening. It was here. Rain drummed on the tin roof. It would put out the fire at Jed’s workshop and disperse the crowd of curiosity seekers. Her own servants would be returning home, like birds seeking their nest.

  Birds. She patted her pockets. No, she’d left Lajli’s note with Jed. But she could recall the contents. It had been brief enough. Thank you for your invitation to stay in your home. It is a lovely home. But I am a thief, not a caged songbird. Do not worry.

  A thief. But sometimes thieves stole information rather than property.

  “A caged songbird.” Esme pushed away from the window. “I wonder.”

  It would be stupid to venture out in this storm, but Bombaytown wasn’t beyond reach. Telephones were a blessing in situations like this. Caged songbirds. She grabbed the phone.

  “Greetings of the day,” Ayesha answered.

  “Good afternoon, Ayesha.”

  “Esme. Good gracious. I’ve just heard the news of Mr. Reeve’s workshop. Is he well?”

  Esme thought of Jed, the fury of his expression at her rejection of their courtship. “He wasn’t anywhere near the workshop when it blew up.”

  “There’s a mercy.”

  “Uh, yes.” She could hardly say Jed thought it had been planned that way. She hesitated. There was always the potential for eavesdroppers. Telephone lines weren’t a secure form of communication. That was why people used codes.

  But Ayesha interrupted before she could form her question. “I have your firelighter ready for Diwali. I assume it’s why you called? You did specify a songbird, did you not? A caged songbird?”

  “Yes.” Esme sighed in relief and sat down on the telephone table. “I knew I could count on you, Ayesha. Will you keep it for me till I have a chance to collect it?”

  “But of course.” A slight pause. “Are you still interested in socialism after the debacle at the Rootail Pub? Perhaps you might even prevail on Mr. Reeve to attend a socialist meeting with you.”

  Esme grimaced. “I think that might be pushing my luck.”

  “Of what use is luck if you don’t push it? There is a socialist meeting, tonight, at the Mechanics Institute. A newcomer to our shores will be speaking. A Mr. Ishaan Prasad.”

  Nazim! The name was an unexpected punch, breaking in on her thoughts that Jed was now unlikely to accompany her anywhere. “I believe I’ve met him.”

  “He seems to have tapped the Bombaytown rumor mill successfully.” Ayesha’s tone was dry. “He visited me with a message for you, my friend. An invitation to attend his talk.”

  Of all the nerve. “Interesting.”

  “I didn’t find it so. A babu of the most self-inflated kind.” Ayesha dismissed the man. “It is lovely to speak with you, but I can see Mr. Khan shuffling past the window. He’ll be coming in with his ridic
ulous tele-recorder, asking me to fix it. Why that old fool can’t trust a telegraph operator with his messages like everyone else!” A doorbell tinkled tinnily. “Good afternoon, Mr. Khan.”

  “’Bye, Ayesha,” Esme said hastily. “Thank you for passing on Mr. Prasad’s message.”

  “Goodbye, my friend. Be careful.”

  “You be careful, too.” Esme replaced the telephone receiver on its hook and stared out the window. She could hear the servants returning and a babble of voices as Owens introduced them to Brutus.

  She and Ayesha might have seemed unlikely friends, with over twenty years and different life experiences separating them, but they shared a passion for women’s rights. Ayesha was a member of Esme’s Women’s Advancement League, but she also favored direct, if covert, action. Ayesha was an active member of a secret network that sheltered and arranged new lives for women at the mercy of abusive husbands, father, brothers, uncles and other men. The network had no name, but Esme had provided money for it and she knew the code word. Safe passage was arranged for “caged songbirds.” Lajli had found sanctuary—trust a thief to learn of a secret escape route.

  The interesting point was that if Ayesha had given the girl sanctuary, her friend believed Nazim was dangerous—without knowing he’d likely exploded Jed’s workshop.

  Esme rubbed her arms as a goose-walked-over-my-grave shiver crawled down her spine. It was all very well to remind herself that Ayesha knew how to protect herself from violent men who objected to having their punching bags—their wives and daughters—whisked away from them. Anarchists were a whole other kettle of rotten fish. And she couldn’t risk visiting Ayesha again for fear of alerting Nazim to her importance.

  There had to be something she could do.

  She picked up the conch shell in which her father had installed a speaking tube connected to the hidden workroom. “Jed?”

  No answer.

  “Jed?” If he was sulking…but no, he wasn’t that type. “This is important.”

  Darn it. Where had he gone?

  * * *

  Confounded, blockheaded officialdom. Jed’s temper was boiling as he stalked back to the Smith mansion.