Magnificent Devices 6: A Lady of Spirit

by Shelley Adina

  “I did not know I had a living.” Lizzie went up on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek. “But I should love to come, and so would Maggie.”

  “We will talk of that another time,” he said gruffly, following Grandmother up the stairs. “Good-night.”

  “What did he mean?” Maggie said once they were safely in their room. “Talk of me going along another time? Or of livings?”

  “Livings, I expect,” Lizzie said. “Though I can’t imagine what he means, unless he plans to give us an allowance as he does Claude. Fancy that, Mags. An allowance!”

  “The Lady gives us pocket money, and we have our investment money every quarter from the Zeppelin Airship Works.”

  “But this is different.”

  “I don’t see how. Besides, at this rate it’s not likely I’ll get anything.”

  Lizzie dropped her shoe and turned, puzzled. “What do you mean? If I’m to get an allowance, then you will, too.”

  But Maggie could not bring herself to chivvy the facts out into the open, or confide in Lizzie what she had heard her grandparents say. It was too humiliating, too ugly—and she did not want to change Lizzie’s view of her family. If she did not see their darker side, then Maggie would not be the one to shine the light upon it. She would just have to rise above it until her grandparents saw her for the lady she was, and welcomed her into the family circle for her own good qualities.

  “They will break the bank giving us all an allowance,” Maggie said with a smile. “You and I together could not come close to what Claude spends in the course of a month!”

  “Isn’t that the truth. Wait—you’re not putting on your night-clothes, are you? Aren’t you coming with us? You must, Mags—you’re our guide.”

  Maggie’s fingers halted on the hooks of her corset. “Coming where?”

  “Down to the sawan. Come on, toss on your boots and raiding rig. Claude is afire to see it, and now that the grands have gone up, the field is open.”

  “Lizzie! You don’t mean to disobey them.”

  “I do indeed. Oh, we’re not going in via the beach, as you did. We’ll simply slip down through the cellar and have a proper look.”

  “But Nancarrow has the keys—how will you explain this to him when he was right there in the room to hear Grandmother forbid our going?” Lizzie smiled that mischievous smile that Maggie had learned to dread. “Lizzie. You didn’t.”

  She reached into her pocket and pulled out a ring from which dangled the heavy iron key. “I did. It was easy as a wink.”

  “But how—when—”

  “When he was serving the coffee, and his hands were full with that big, heavy tray. When I bumped into him at the door, he barely kept it from falling, didn’t he? Oh, don’t look like that, Mags. They don’t serve spirits on Sundays, so I’ll have it back before he notices it’s gone.”

  “Lizzie, your light fingers are going to get you into trouble someday.”

  “They already have, and I survived, didn’t I?”

  “I wouldn’t push my luck if I were you.”

  “Oh, stop being a gloomy gumpus. We won’t be gone an hour, and if it makes you feel better, I’ll slip it under his door when we come back.”

  Maggie forbore to remind her that this plan would guarantee that Nancarrow would realize it had been pinched, but there was no stopping Lizzie once she had the wind to her rudder. So Maggie pulled on her raiding rig—a practical brown skirt over a black ruffled petticoat and stockings, a wide leather belt with hooks and rings for equipment, and a cream eyelet blouse that was comfortable as well as pretty.

  Moonglobes in hand, they crept downstairs and met Claude at the green baize door that led downstairs. His eyebrows rose at the sight of them.

  “You look rather like pirates,” he whispered in admiration. “Were you thinking the grands would be hosting a fancy-dress ball?”

  “Shh!” Lizzie pulled out the key and waved it. “Let’s be off!”

  They located the stone stairway once again and slipped through the cellar door. Since Maggie was the only one who had been down here, she led the way, winding through stacks of barrels, and shelves constructed of apertures for glossy wine bottles.

  Claude gawked about him. “I say, for a pair of old folks, the grands have enough spirits here to intoxicate half Penzance.”

  “The result of a lifetime of collection?” Maggie hazarded.

  “I’d say not. Papa used to keep a rather nice cellar, but the bottles he collected always looked so old and dusty I always wondered how the contents could possibly taste good. And look—this is a recent vintage.” He pulled a bottle from its sleeve and showed them a date of two years before.

  “Never mind that,” Lizzie whispered. “How do we get through this door? Bother it! There must be a second key.”

  “No, there isn’t.” Maggie abandoned the stacks of spirits and joined her at the door to the stone stair. “It’s a mechanical lock. See if you can pick it as easily as you picked poor Nancarrow’s pocket.”

  “You never did!” Claude breathed in admiration. “Good show.”

  “It was nothing,” Lizzie said modestly, then turned her attention to the locking assembly. “Hm. Well, my goodness. Whoever installed this wasn’t very concerned about keeping people out, was he?”

  “Are you joking?” Claude frowned at the assembly. “I can’t make head or tail of it. And why put a mechanical lock on this door and not the one above?”

  “Because the people in the house didn’t want whoever came in via the sawan to go any farther than the cellar?” This seemed the only practical explanation, in Maggie’s mind. “Not unless they were expected, I mean.”

  “Here it is.” Lizzie pressed the old nail head and the assembly clicked into motion, its moving parts clicking and groaning and finally locking into the open position.

  “Upon my life, you’re a tricky one, Elizabeth,” Claude breathed. “How did you figure it out?”

  “A lucky guess,” she said airily, and leaned on the handle. “Come on, let’s go exploring.”

  This time, Maggie counted one hundred and eighty-four steps down into the sawan, and when they emerged at the bottom onto the landing, she surreptitiously massaged her aching legs. Going down didn’t affect them quite as much as going up—but then, she’d been so frightened going up that it had probably made it worse.

  Lizzie and Claude had ranged over the landing in moments—it was rather bare of interest, unless one enjoyed old packing crates—and jumped down to the damp sand. Maggie followed them to the stone archway and showed them the little shelf where the moonglobes were kept for those coming in from the seaward side.

  “Can anyone’s blood tell us when the tide will turn?” she asked, gazing out at the waves, which seemed to be a safe distance off. “We don’t want to be cut off, and it comes in quickly.”

  “We’re a good hour short of when we found you last night,” Lizzie said, “but I wouldn’t risk staying out here too long. We have to go up the way we came down or the doors will all be found open in the morning.”

  “Show us the track up to the cliff-top, then, for future reference,” Claude said. “Was it difficult?”

  “Not at all,” Maggie said. “This way.” She passed under the arch and emerged onto the sand of the beach. The boom of the waves sounded much as it had the night before, which some deep instinct inside her took as a warning. They didn’t have much time.

  She skirted a granite outcrop and pointed up the cliff. “There. Do you see where the black stone turns to soil? The path is more a crack in the rock, but it’s wide enough for a person. I came down right here, though the tides have erased my footprints.”

  Claude approached the rock. “Here?” He began to climb, and Maggie looked over her shoulder anxiously.

  “Don’t go far, Claude. The sound of the waves is getting louder.”

  “Nonsense. Look—I’m almost up.”

  “Maggie?” Lizzie called, and Maggie hesitated, torn between anxiety for Claude�
��who could not have had much experience in rabbiting about cliffs at night—and the note of puzzlement in Lizzie’s voice.

  “What is it?”

  “What’s that, do you suppose?”

  Oh, goodness. Claude was a man grown. He could fend for himself, and if he fell off, well, the sand was soft.

  “What is what?” She joined her cousin at the water’s edge, which was definitely closer than it had been minutes ago.

  “That light.”

  Some thousand yards to the west of the house, a red lamp glowed on the cliff-top, right where a valley cut down to the sea, filled with the dark shapes of trees.

  On. Off. On-on-off. On for ten seconds. Off.

  “That’s the second series,” Lizzie said. “The first is what caught my eye. What do you suppose it means?”

  “Someone is signaling, that’s clear.” Maggie looked out to sea, but saw nothing. No answering signal from a boat, no horn, no blast of releasing steam. “But to whom?”

  And then her attention focused on the waves. “Lizzie, we have to retrieve Claude and go up. The tide is coming in.”

  Lizzie dragged her gaze off the red lamp, which was going into its third series of flashes to … no one. “Perhaps someone is practicing. We ought to take a picnic over in that direction in the morning and see what we can see.”

  “Lizzie! The tide!”

  Lizzie finally realized that if she did not move, her boots were going to get wet. They scampered up the sand to find Claude had disappeared completely.

  “Oh, that boy,” Lizzie said impatiently. “He’s probably in the garden by now, congratulating himself on his prowess and planning a mountaineering holiday in Switzerland. Come on—we don’t have time to wait for him to come down.”

  They dashed into the sawan and scrambled up onto the landing, heedless of the guano that covered the stone and wood, and ten minutes later emerged into the cellar. They found Claude in the stair well waiting for them, delighted that he had been the first to gain the house—as if it were a race and he had won.

  He was so happy over the joke that Maggie just shook her head at him. She noticed, however, that in all the whispering and sliding of keys under doors and sneaking up staircases, neither she nor Lizzie brought up the subject of the red lantern signaling to no one on the cliff-top.

  A small thing. A trifle.

  But Maggie felt a glow of happiness nonetheless that, despite her cousin’s changed circumstances and her own dubious status, there was still something that the Mopsies could share between themselves alone.

  12

  At ten o’clock the next morning, the girls presented themselves to Grandfather for his inspection. His gaze swept from jaunty straw hats covered in flowers to navy suits to lacy Belgian cutwork blouses to gloves, and with a decided nod, he declared that they would do. He handed them into an open horse-drawn carriage, where Claude was already waiting.

  Lady Claire, Mr. Malvern, and Tigg climbed into her steam landau, in which they had come back yesterday afternoon. Maggie had no doubt that all three would thoroughly enjoy the sensation they made as the Lady piloted it through town.

  Maggie eyed the rumps of the horses, and leaned over to whisper to Lizzie. “You don’t suppose they’ll—er—fertilize the road while we’re driving, do you?”

  “Horses have been pulling carriages for hundreds of years,” Lizzie whispered back. “I’m sure someone will have accounted for that. But how very strange not to travel in a landau.”

  Fortunately, the journey was a short one, taking them down the High Street hill in state. People stopped to gape at the landau, and nodded in greeting when the carriage passed. Some even pulled off their hats, which felt even odder to Maggie than having the little housemaid curtsey to her. The procession made its way to the harbor and the carriage driver pulled up in front of the huge, imposing stone building that housed the offices of the Seacombe Steamship Company.

  They were ushered into Grandfather’s office, which was the size of the drawing room, with a big mahogany desk and shelves and cabinets and all manner of curiosities from foreign parts upon display tables. They were treated to a history of the company from its founding by Pendrake Seacombe, all the way to the enormous map showing the current shipping routes.

  Claude rose from the nap he was taking in the upholstered guest chair to trace with his finger the routes painted from Penzance, Southampton, and Portsmouth to the Nordic countries, the Royal Kingdom of Spain, the East and West Indies, and the Fifteen Colonies.

  “What an enormous undertaking,” he finally said. “I can scarcely wrap my mind round it all.”

  “That is why I am so anxious for you to begin, my boy,” Grandfather said. “While I might wish that your education had taken place here in England, and not France, it is too late to unmake those decisions now. When you graduate from the Sorbonne in the spring, it is my fondest wish that you take a commission and begin serving aboard one of our ships. It is best to begin at the water line, as it were, and work one’s way up. That way one understands the entirety of the business.”

  “To say nothing of the lives of one’s employees,” Maggie offered. “You will understand how they think and feel if you are doing the same work they are.”

  Grandfather cleared his throat with a harrumphing sound. “The thoughts and feelings of sailors and longshoremen are hardly the business of the Seacombes. We have larger concerns, young lady, such as the political and economic states of the countries with which Her Majesty trades.”

  “But you said—”

  “A young lady should not bother her head about it in any case. It is Claude’s career of which I speak. Now, Claude, you will notice that there are no shipping routes to Calais or for that matter, any of the French ports.”

  “The lines appear to have been painted out,” Claude said as the Lady whipped her skirts around her and stalked to the window. He tilted closer to the great map on the wall. “Or at least, a darker color has been used.”

  “That is because the Ministry of Trade has advised us to suspend activity with France until they come up to scratch and stop this nonsense.”

  “Suspend activity?” Lizzie repeated. “Is there going to be a war?”

  Her grandfather beamed at her. “An excellent question, Elizabeth. You see now why some knowledge of global politics is necessary in this very office. France, I am sorry to say, has shrugged off its Republican costume and revealed its true colors, putting Bourbons on the throne once more. And you know what they’re like.”

  “Um. Would that be Louis the Fourteenth and that lot?” Upon her graduation, Lizzie had received firsts in mathematics, German, and the French language, not its history.

  “I believe he means that the French kings have always believed themselves entitled to the English throne,” Maggie said. “Is that not correct, sir?”

  Grandfather harrumphed again at being thus directly addressed. “A tempest in a teapot—or the mind of a crackpot,” he said. “Her Majesty and her nephews—the Kaiser and the Tsar—will give that French nincompoop a smack on the side of his schoolboy head and it will all blow over.”

  But Maggie took courage from the approving look the Lady passed over her rigid shoulder and spoke up once more. “Claude, you go to school in Paris. Have you heard nothing of this?”

  “If I did, I made certain I forgot it forthwith,” Claude said with a laugh that sounded somewhat strained. “I am afraid horribly dull lectures on history and economics from the professor’s podium are as close as I wish to get to that sort of thing.”

  “You will feel differently when ‘that sort of thing’ affects your livelihood,” his grandfather said. “I must confess I am glad you will only be in that blasted place for a few months more. Come. I will show you the rest of the offices, and then we will proceed to the docks for a tour of Demelza, which lies at harbor for the family’s use. She is our flagship, you know, named for your grandmother.”

  Maggie wondered if her lines were as stiff and her temper as
uncertain as the woman for whom she was named, but the Lady would never recover if she said such a thing aloud. She didn’t know what the others thought of the tour of the offices, but she found it most interesting, particularly on the lower levels, where the goods were stored which had been received and inspected and were waiting to be loaded onto trains for shipping in England. There seemed to be everything from lovely embroidered fabrics to strange hairy nuts and lumber from exotic trees on the warehouse levels, and it fascinated her. Who had woven these fabrics, or picked those nuts? What was the climate like there? And why on earth would one choose to ship goods by sea when it was so dangerous and unpredictable and slow?

  But apparently there were as few answers to that last question as there were to the first two.

  The warehouse levels bustled with people—clerks, laborers, sailors—and when Maggie turned from her contemplation of a large winch assembly that was loading a cart, she realized that Lizzie and the others were nowhere in sight.

  Goodness. She had better catch up, or she’d never find them in this melee. But they had only just been on the viewing platform, so no doubt she’d see them at the top of the wooden staircase.

  But she did not.

  Instead, she found herself with no prospect but a catwalk strung over the bustle of the warehouse, or a trip back down the steps that would net her nothing more than she had before. In vain she looked for the bobbing froth of Lizzie’s hat, or the painfully fashionable yellow-and-black plaid of Claude’s jacket.

  Why had Lizzie not noticed she was missing? They were close as two peas in a pod—or at least, they had been until they’d come to Penzance. No matter what Maggie did, it seemed Lizzie was far ahead of her—with dazzling prospects, with Tigg, with the family—and Maggie was left behind with nothing but her manners to recommend her.

  And a letter to her mother. And the Lady.

  In her catalogue of sorrows, she must not forget her blessings, the Lady chief among them. In fact, she would just pull Claire aside and obtain her permission to abandon this whole disastrous excursion. The prospect of laying her hot cheek on the Lady’s shoulder and feeling the comfort of her arms around her was immensely appealing.