Their distress and grief were palpable, almost another presence in the room. While Claire could not condone their treatment of Maggie for a sin she had not committed—that had been committed a generation ago—at the same time, she could empathize with parents whose child had been abused and then taken from them in such a terrible manner, by someone whom she knew from experience was quite capable of it.
“I appreciate your taking me into your confidence,” she said at last, when it was clear they would take her into it no further. “I will counsel Maggie that she must be more careful in her friendships. In return, you must do something for me.”
“Must we?” Mrs. Seacombe’s spine was beginning to straighten as she recovered.
“Yes. You must not punish Maggie for the sins her father committed. In the end, he did right by her when he adopted her as his own daughter. This does not excuse his behavior on any other front. However, in the matter which concerns me most deeply, I must have this reassurance.”
“I am not sure I can,” Mr. Seacombe said with surprising honesty. “He is like a ghost standing behind her every time I look at her.”
“Then you must look instead for the ghost of your daughter, who most assuredly would entreat you in the same manner as I do.”
“Perhaps you are right,” was all he said, and Claire realized she would have to be satisfied with that.
Leaving her tea unfinished, she went blindly from the room. Oh, what was she to do now? For Maggie would demand to know what was behind her friend’s peremptory dismissal from the house. How was Claire even to begin to tell her?
Or worse, should she step inside the circle of secrecy with the Seacombes and not tell her at all?
16
When one was a young lady old enough to let down her hems and put up her hair, there was nothing quite so maddening as to be told that the adults had been talking about you and you were not allowed to know what they said.
“I still cannot believe they sent you from the room,” Maggie said to Lizzie the next morning. The night before, she had confided to her cousin everything that Michael had told her, rejoicing in Lizzie’s wet-eyed appreciation of the sad romance and her empathy for her own loss. Now, they were supposed to be acting like young ladies and writing letters, but who could concentrate on that when there were mysteries springing from the sadness that demanded solutions? “And the Lady allowed it—that is the strangest thing of all.”
“They must have told her something terrible, Mags,” Lizzie said from the window, where the bright day was apparently drawing her like a moth to a lamp. “Did you see her face at dinner? I swear it was positively gray. And then she lost at cards three times in succession—which you must admit is a first.”
“It could have been the fish. After three days of fish at dinner, I’m feeling a little gray myself. I shall begin to grow scales soon.”
“This is no matter for flippancy. Are you sure Mr. Polgarth had nothing more to say on the matter of your mother and his uncle? For there must be something he is not telling us. It is the only explanation I can think of.”
“Nothing more terrible than my parents dying far apart at the hands of …” Maggie lowered her tone, for the morning-room door was open. “Those two people.”
“Please don’t be angry with me for bringing it up. I don’t mean to imply he is not telling the truth of it … but I cannot help my feeling.”
“I am sure there is more to the story, but I do not wish to hear any more about what the Lady knows or doesn’t.”
The door opened further to admit … the Lady, dressed in her nice chestnut houndstooth walking suit with the black soutache trim, and Maggie relaxed. “I am sorry to hear it,” Claire said gently, as if she had been part of the conversation all along. “Lizzie, Maggie, would you fetch your hats? I feel in need of a walk, and we must look in on Holly and Ivy. They have not been left alone this long before, and I fear for the contents of the pantry.”
Which was nonsense, since the birds were quite content in their aviary in the boarding area, but one never knew who might be listening in the halls of Seacombe House.
Claire twinkled at them. “Billy Bolt,” she whispered—their old code for doing a fast scarper to avoid trouble.
Maggie dashed upstairs and fetched their hats, and it was not until they were well down the drive and out of earshot of anyone at an open window that any of them spoke again.
“Will Mr. Malvern come with us?” Maggie asked, despite the fact that their strides were already lengthening with an unladlylike sense of freedom.
“He and Tigg have been invited by Mr. Polgarth to go surf fishing,” the Lady replied in her normal voice. “A message came after breakfast, and when Nancarrow showed it to your grandparents, being cognizant of their wishes on that head, they made their feelings plain.”
“And they are going anyway?” Lizzie said with a wide smile.
“While I cannot blame the Seacombes for their feelings, it is also true that Mr. Malvern and Tigg are independent gentlemen, unconnected with anyone here, past or present. And it is a lovely day.”
“What feelings, Lady?” Maggie was unwilling to let the subject go. “It is too bad of everyone to leave Lizzie and me out of what you are all talking about, when it concerns us most of all.”
The Lady walked on for a little without answering, her smile fading into a kind of distressed solemnity, much like the expression she had worn for most of the previous evening. Then she said, “It is only because they do not wish to hurt you, darling. And for the older generation, you know, it is difficult sometimes to speak of the past.”
“But Mr. Polgarth has done nothing wrong. All he did was tell me of my parents’ love affair—and it was beautiful, Lady. I have proof. Here is the letter I told you about and did not have a chance to show you.” She pulled it from her pocket, and the Lady read it swiftly. “They truly loved each other, and I was wanted, Michael says. And there is more. Do you realize that if Kevern—that is the K who signed this letter, Michael’s uncle—was my father, that makes Michael my cousin, and Polgarth the poultryman my grandfather? Is that not a lovely surprise?”
The Lady’s pace faltered. In the distance, past the valley that held Penzance in the cup of its hand, they could see Athena and Victory tugging longingly at their mooring ropes.
“Lady, what is it? Do you have a pebble in your shoe?”
“No, darling. I have a pebble in my conscience that is causing me much more pain.”
“Then you had better have it out.” There was something in the Lady’s face that made Maggie want to brace herself as soon as the words left her lips.
Claire took the girls’ hands in hers and walked between them. “You know I have never concealed the truth about any matter from you, even when it has been difficult to hear.”
That was one of the things they loved about her. She did not underestimate either their intelligence or the depth of their bravery and compassion. She simply treated them as she wished to be treated—as a woman who possessed the resources to bear what she must, if she were only prepared with the truth.
Claire’s voice gentled as she began to speak in a tone Maggie had heard only once before—when she had told her who Charles de Maupassant Seacombe really was.
Lizzie’s father.
Lizzie’s.
Not hers.
Maggie could not stop the story, much as the Lady did not want to tell it, much as Maggie did not want to hear it.
Oh, no. She could not have come into the world in that terrible way. No, it was a lie and the Seacombes hated her and no no no it wasn’t true! None of it was true! Her parents were Kevern Polgarth and Catherine Seacombe, and they had loved her and wanted her!
“Maggie!” Claire shouted behind her, but Maggie was already fifty yards away, running … running … leaping over a stile in the hedgerow and pelting across the field, her goal the flat granite rock in the sun, where only yesterday she had been truly happy to be herself.
*
&
nbsp; Maggie spent the afternoon huddled up on the rock, alternately weeping and thinking and then weeping again. But when clouds began to pile up in the southwest with threatening majesty, and the wind off the sea turned cold with warning, there was nothing for it but to return to the house.
She had two choices.
In the first, she would ask the Lady for permission to spend her last night in Penzance in her own cabin aboard Athena, in Holly and Ivy’s sympathetic company. In the morning the Lady and Mr. Malvern and Tigg would put this place to their rudder and Maggie would never come here again, leaving Lizzie and Claude to their bright future with her blessing.
In the second, she would stay and ferret out which of the two stories she had been told was the truth, even if that meant going to France somehow to see if that dual grave indeed existed.
The first choice would be by far the easiest one to make. But as the Lady had once said, “There is the easy course—and there is the right one. Sometimes they are the same, but when they are not, that is when we show what we are made of.” Maggie had the uncomfortable feeling that if she was ever to know peace in that hollow place inside herself, she would need to choose the right course, as difficult and grievous as it might be.
Then she would quite literally know what she was made of.
Wearily, she climbed through the tall grass and heather and emerged on the cliff-top, her eyes aching and no doubt reddened from wind and crying, her bones stiff from sitting too long on the rock.
Lizzie was perched on a hillock, waiting for her.
“What are you doing here?” The wind pushed Maggie forward, and her hat slid down over her face. She settled it on the mare’s nest that had once been a neat French coil, and when she could see again, Lizzie had joined her on the path.
“I followed you, of course,” Lizzie said. “If you had flung yourself into the sea you would have needed someone to fish you out. The Lady nearly came, too, but I convinced her to leave you on your own until you got things sorted. I hope you have, because I certainly haven’t.”
“What do you mean?”
Lizzie glanced at her with an expression that clearly said, What do you think, you gumpus? “He was my father, too,” she said. “He was a murdering anarchist who tried to kill us both—twice—and it horrifies me every time I am reminded we’re related. But I never expected anything as terrible as this. Oh, Maggie.” She took Maggie’s cold hand in her warm one.
“Being the daughter of such a man is nothing to be proud of, that’s certain,” Maggie said.
“No wonder my mother attempted to leave him. Plunging to her death in the Thames was better than grieving her sister and living with the shame of being his wife.” Lizzie took a breath, clearly trying to shake the bitterness from her tone. “On the bright side, we are sisters again. Or half-sisters, at least.”
“Lizzie, do not take this the wrong way, but I cannot believe we are. I cannot believe what Grandmother told the Lady when it contradicts what Michael told me in nearly every particular.”
“And you would believe him—a man you met yesterday—over our grandparents, who have known us and our mothers both?”
“His story felt right, Lizzie. It touched something deep inside me that has been going wanting all these years.”
“Because you wanted it to so badly, my dearie,” Lizzie said softly.
They were on the lawn now, the house rising up beyond the hedge, its windows perpetually watching for something out beyond the horizon. Behind the glass upstairs in their grandparents’ room, a velvet drape twitched and settled back into place.
“I don’t know. Perhaps,” Maggie said. “All I know is that I must find out whose truth is the real one. When the Lady goes tomorrow, I will stay behind with you and Claude and attempt to get to the bottom of it.”
Lizzie squeezed her hand, and together, they passed into the garden, where the roses bobbed restlessly, their petals torn away by the rising wind.
17
A howling gale kept Athena on the ground until late Wednesday. Maggie and Lizzie busied themselves assisting Lady Claire, Mr. Malvern, and Tigg in packing up and transporting their luggage out to the airship under protective tarpaulins, where they spent a happy afternoon together preparing for lift.
The pain of not going felt like a weight in Maggie’s stomach, but she did her best not to let it show.
Instead, she and Lizzie helped Tigg tie the steam landau down in the hold, and then she absented herself so that the two of them could have a little privacy in which to say good-bye.
The Lady found her standing in her cabin, gazing out the porthole at nothing in particular. “You are quite welcome to come with us to Gwynn Place,” Claire said quietly. “It is entirely possible that you may learn what you need to know there instead of here.”
Maggie turned and went wordlessly into Claire’s arms. “If I said that I wanted to find out the truth in order to prove them wrong about me, would you think less of me, Lady?”
“I would not,” Claire said, hugging her. “But I hope you remember that they are old, and their grief has warped them somehow inside, like a piece of metal that has held one shape for too long. Be gentle in your attempts to change their minds. If they are to be bent in a different direction, I would imagine the process might be quite painful.”
Maggie nodded, the well-worn fabric of the Lady’s raiding rig soft under her cheek.
“You and Lizzie will come to us in a week,” the Lady said, though this had been the plan since they had left Wilton Crescent several days ago. “Mr. Malvern and I will wait for you anxiously, and I hope you will write every day. Athena will be moored in the home paddock, since Mama does not keep sheep anymore, so I will be checking the pigeons religiously.”
Which reminded her— “We have not checked yet this morning ourselves. I will do that, and then Lizzie and I will man the ropes for you.”
To her surprise, there was indeed a pigeon waiting in the messenger cage, though they expected none. And it contained yet another puzzling missive.
Delta 14 08 94 02 00 100L 1000KG 6
When she showed it to the others, Tigg said, “Whatever they’re measuring, it’s doubled. The last one said fifty and four-fifty.”
“But what is Delta, besides the fifth letter of the Greek alphabet?” Maggie wondered aloud.
“A location?” the Lady guessed. “A river mouth? But there are none in these parts. The cliff faces are too steep to allow for sedimentation.”
“In mathematics, delta means change,” Lizzie said. “That’s what this is. A change order, increasing the amounts of liquid and weight, as Tigg says.”
“Which still makes no sense at all.” Maggie folded up the paper and pushed it into her pocket. “I’m convinced it has been misdirected. There is probably a grocer somewhere, wondering where his potatoes and ale have got to.”
“If a grocer ordered things by the ton and possessed a non-fixed address,” observed the Lady. “No one but Lewis, Snouts, and ourselves knows Athena’s code, and I prefer to keep it that way.”
Athena moved restlessly at the sound of her name, and Tigg lifted his head like a pointer sniffing the air. “The wind has changed,” he said. “You should be able to lift soon—and I must get myself over to the Mount while the tide is low, or I’ll miss my ride to Scotland.”
“We cannot have that, though I am mightily tempted to invent some crisis so that I may keep you a little longer,” the Lady said with affection.
“The Mopsies are going to be on their own for a week,” he said as he hugged her. “Don’t tempt Fate.”
While the Lady took the helm and Mr. Malvern began the ignition sequence on Athena’s great boiler, Lizzie and Maggie gave Holly and Ivy their final cuddles and lifted the birds up on the piping in the navigation gondola, from which they were accustomed to watch the proceedings. Then the girls ran down the steps, Tigg lifted the folding staircase into its closed position, and the three of them took up their positions on the ropes.
&nb
sp; “Up ship!” the Lady called through the open viewing port, and they let go. “Good-bye, my darlings—until Tuesday!”
Athena rose gracefully into the sky, shouldered into the wind, and began to make way. The engines changed pitch and she moved off steadily north and east.
When she disappeared into a bank of clouds and the sound of her engines faded, Tigg took Lizzie’s hand. “Will you and Maggie walk me to the beach?”
“Try to stop us,” Lizzie said, holding his gaze as though memorizing it.
When Tigg boarded the Corps airship that would take him via Bristol to Scotland, where he would rejoin the crew of the Lady Lucy, Maggie felt nearly as teary as Lizzie as they walked down through St. Michael’s village. By the time they reached the flagged causeway, the great ship was passing overhead, and they waved their handkerchiefs madly until it floated from sight.
Two good-byes, two ships sailing away without them, and now it was just the two of them left. Well, and Claude, but he was being kept practically under lock and key by Grandfather, who was determined he should learn a thing or two about the business before he went back to Paris.
“Are you going to beard the grands in their dens after dinner?” Lizzie wanted to know as they walked along the beach toward Penzance in the distance.
“No,” Maggie said. “I have had enough emotional ups and downs for one day. Tomorrow is soon enough. But I am curious about one thing.”
“Only one?”
“Only one that I can bear to think about. Do you remember the red lantern flashes we saw the other night?”
“The signal to no one? The ones that seemed to come from the direction of that little valley where I followed you yesterday?”
“We saw the lights … and then a pigeon came to Athena. Do you suppose the two might be connected?”
“I don’t see how,” Lizzie said flatly. “What connection does someone with a lantern have with us?”
Magnificent Devices 6: A Lady of Spirit Page 12
