Magnificent Devices [5] A Lady of Resources

by Shelley Adina

  A pang of homesickness reverberated through her, and she decided she would write letters this afternoon. It had only been a day, but there had been so much left unsaid between her and the ones she loved best that she would not waste any more time in communicating it.

  Cynthia ran over to hug her when it appeared everything at last was loaded into the ship. “Are you sure you will not come?”

  This was the second woman who had asked her that in as many days, but the answer was still the same. “Quite sure. Do send a postcard, though, won’t you? I should like to see a picture of the engine, at least.”

  “I shall, then, if that is all you wish. Will we see you before September?”

  “I will be here for ten days, and then I return to London. I must order my wardrobe, you know.” Goodness. How Maggie would laugh, and remind her that even five years ago, neither of them would have dreamed one could say such a thing.

  Cynthia clapped her hands. “We are, too! Oh, do give me your card. We must meet in town—put our heads together at the modiste’s and have lunch in Piccadilly—perhaps take in a fashion show or two. Monsieur Charles Worth is exhibiting his most famous gowns, you know, for the first time ever. One mustn’t miss it.”

  Lizzie had no idea who Monsieur Worth was, but she nodded as enthusiastically as if she did. “I haven’t a card, but we live in Wilton Crescent. Number twenty-three. You are welcome to call at any time, Cynthia.”

  “Wilton Crescent, is it?” Her eyebrows rose coyly. “Aren’t we the fashionable ones. I shall be delighted to call.” She kissed her on both cheeks, in the European way. “Until then, dearest.”

  Arabella gave a languid wave and the two of them climbed the gangway, assisted by Geoffrey and Darwin, who appeared to be able to stir themselves for that much, at least. And then with a cry of “Up ship!” Victory lifted, leaving Lizzie alone in the company of the groundsmen and her father.

  She smiled as she joined him. “I hope they have a pleasant flight.”

  “I’m sure they will.” He offered her his arm. “The barometer is indeed dropping, which makes me a little concerned for the flight of our scientific guests. But Cowell over there assures me that as long as they arrive by midafternoon, they should avoid the worst of the storm currents. Will you join me for another cup of coffee, my dear?”

  “With pleasure,” she said, happiness flooding in to fill the empty spaces all these rapid departures had left inside her.

  The breakfast table had already been cleared of the mess left by the Sorbonne set, and magically, two places re-set with a coffee service. Either someone was listening at the windows for the least whim of the master of the house, or he habitually returned for coffee at mid-morning. If the latter, perhaps he would not object if she made it her habit, too, though coffee was not one of her favorite beverages. Perhaps she might stand near an open window and muse upon the possibility of chocolate for herself to see what would happen.

  “So, my dear.” He waited for her to pour him a cup, then her own. “We are to keep each other company. I should very much like to hear of your life between the day I last saw you at five, and the day I saw you again at sixteen.”

  “I will need more than the space of a cup of coffee for that story, Father. And there are parts I do not wish to dwell on, even for your sake.”

  “Understandable. But perhaps we might begin with how you met Lady Claire?”

  Lizzie hesitated. Yes, he was her father, but at the same time, the Lady’s secret life was just that—secret. While much of it might be in the past, there were still loose threads that extended from that time to this, and every inhabitant of number twenty-three knew how to keep mum on the subject. If the Lady didn’t deal with you herself, Snouts would. His patience was much thinner than hers, and his methods less civilized.

  “We were street sparrows, Maggie and I,” she began. “Lady Claire had opened a school in Vauxhall Gardens, hard by the bridge, and we heard from some of our mates that a body could get a good meal there. We went, thinking that at any moment we would be beaten and turned away, but instead she took us in, fed us, and offered us a cot. The next morning, she began to teach us our letters and numbers.”

  “How commendable.”

  “Our lessons progressed to table manners and ethics, and then to physics, mechanics, and chemistry. And then when it was discovered that one of our number, Weepin’ Willie, was actually Lord and Lady Dunsmuir’s kidnapped son, our lives changed again, and through them we met Count von Zeppelin. He encouraged Lady Claire to study in Munich, and of course by then she had made us her wards, so we went, too.”

  “It seems I owe Lady Claire a great debt.”

  “We all do,” Lizzie said softly. “I can’t bear to think what might have happened to Maggie and me if we hadn’t met her. We’d likely be Whitechapel chippies—or dead.”

  He shuddered and set his cup in its saucer rather forcefully. “I’m sorry, my dear, but to hear such words upon your innocent lips distresses me.”

  “I’m sorry, Father.” There were many worse epithets she could have used, but to say desert flower, an expression used only by Texicans, would have brought up their adventures in the Americas, and that was skating a little too close to other people’s secret lives—including her own—for comfort. It was much easier to tell him the story of Weepin’ Willie, and of his dramatic return to his parents.

  “So that is the secret of your familiarity with the Dunsmuirs,” her father said, draining his cup. “It is very good to know. Upon such connections a glittering social career is often based, from what I understand.”

  “Oh, yes,” she agreed eagerly. “Lady Dunsmuir has already offered to sponsor us for our come-out in two years’ time.”

  “Has she?” A glow of approval suffused his face. “How very kind of her to take a motherless girl under her wing.”

  “Well, at the time we were not really motherless. Lady Claire is more of a—an elder sister, but as our guardian, she stands in the place of a mother from time to time. I am quite certain she and Lady Dunsmuir put their heads together on the subject behind our backs.”

  “You speak of our and we, my dear. Are you including Margaret in your thoughts of the future?”

  What a question. How could she phrase this so that he would understand? “She is my sister in every way that counts. We have been like this—” She crossed her third finger over her forefinger. “—forever. As you say, practically since birth.”

  “But she is not, in truth, your sister.”

  “Well, no, but certainly by all other ties, if feeling and experience mean anything.”

  “Your loyalty to the girl is commendable, my dear, but do you see your relationship continuing?”

  “Of course.”

  He gazed at her, as though marshaling the right words to say. Once back in England, with its kinder systems of illumination, he had put away the amber, multi-lensed spectacles. Now his gaze held hers, tawny and somber.

  —tiger eyes—

  —smoke, and the floor falling—

  “Elizabeth? Have I said something to distress you?”

  She blinked and gripped the edge of the table—something firm to hold on to while she battled a sense of vertigo. “No … no, I think I may have had too much coffee. It has made me dizzy.”

  He rose at once, and took her hands to guide her from her chair. “Then you must lie down in your room. Let me call a maid.”

  “No—no, Father. I am quite all right. I think I might just step out into the garden and walk a little in the fresh air.”

  “Do whatever you think best. I do not want my hostess taking to her bed, after she was so selfless as to give up a trip to Newquay in order to assist me with my guests.”

  With a smile, she made her way to the grand salon and then out the open French doors to the terrace, where she breathed deeply of the soft morning air. Several wide flagstone steps took her down into the garden, which seemed in disarray despite the efforts of the two gardeners she could see b
eavering away in the shrubbery.

  The roses smelled beautiful, though, and as she made her way around the Queen’s Tower, she found herself descending into the moat. Here was clearly where the cut flowers for the table arrangements had come from. The air was heavy with scent and the somnolent buzzing of bees. Butterflies wavered from rose to lily to lavender, with no particular destination in mind, much like herself.

  At the second tower, she climbed the slope, wondering if there was a kitchen garden on the fourth side of the castle, and if so, if there might be chickens. She missed the company of the hens. Perhaps if there were none, Father would let her bring some home, and she could have her own flock here, as Lewis and Granny Protheroe did at Wilton Crescent, and the Lady did wherever she happened to be.

  “I say, make up your mind. Are you coming or going?”

  Lizzie looked past the drapery of honeysuckle and ivy growing on the tower wall to see Evan Douglas standing on the flagged step of what she supposed must have been the old postern gate, back when these towers were meant to defend actual occupants, not merely the bastions of science.

  “Neither,” she replied, his bluntness freeing her rather neatly from the constraints of civility. “I’m exploring.”

  “One usually has a destination in mind for that.”

  “If one did, it would be called traveling, not exploring.”

  His lips twitched. “Point to you. I thought you’d gone to Newquay or Cowes or wherever it was that lot were off to.”

  So he did listen to the dinner conversation, even if he hardly ever participated. “No, I’m to act as hostess this evening, when the scientists come, remember?” Perhaps he would be different tonight, with his own kind at the table.

  “I do now. You’re to be our sole civilizing influence, then, I take it.”

  “I shall at least endeavor to keep you from smoking in the dining-room.”

  “Good luck there. You’ll be lucky if they use their napkins—to say nothing of spoons.”

  The image made her laugh. “Come now. It can’t be that bad. You seem fairly civilized.”

  “That’s only because I have to sing for my supper and be on my best behavior.”

  “Sing for your supper? Do you mean with your experiments?”

  He kicked a stone away and sat on the step, his hands dangling between his knees, heedless of the fact that the back of his white laboratory coat would be dusty when he got up. “Yes, that is what I mean,” he said, gazing moodily down into the moat. “Cousin Charles is sponsoring me to conduct the research, but that means that when there is something to write up, he gets the credit, not I.”

  “Has there been something to write up?” Lizzie sat on a mossy rock close by, wondering if it had fallen from the tower a century or two ago—or perhaps been dropped upon an invader’s head.

  “A small monograph on the two images I’ve managed to capture. The Royal Academy of Technology and Science was not impressed. I did not make it into the monthly journal—not even in the Notes in the back.”

  “But you will, in time,” she said, trying to encourage him. “If effort and application lead to success, then of course you will. You must be patient.”

  He turned his gaze upon her. His eyes were the blue of the bachelor buttons that grew on the roadsides, and his brows were strongly marked under the riot of curls falling onto his forehead. “What an odd field genetics is,” he said, apropos of nothing.

  “I find it rather fascinating,” she said at once, feeling quite chuffed that here was a subject about which she knew a little. “At Gwynn Place, in Cornwall, where we’ve spent the last few summers, Polgarth the poultryman is breeding a special strain of chicken—they’re calling it the Carrick Orpington. Maggie and I were able to assist him using what we had learned of the subject at school.”

  She realized with a sinking feeling that this would be the first year since they had met the Lady that they had not gone down to the St. Ives estate for the summer. No wonder things felt so out of joint.

  “I’m glad to hear it. Perhaps you can explain, then, how Charles managed to produce a daughter like you and a flibbertigibbet like Claude.”

  “We do have different mothers,” she reminded him, unsure of whether or not to be pleased. It might not, after all, be a compliment. Nor was it exactly the kind of polite conversation a gentleman might have with a young lady.

  But no one was listening, were they?

  “There is that.”

  “And nurture, you know, has as much to do with how someone turns out as nature. Claude would likely be an entirely different person if he had spent five years on the streets of Whitechapel, scrabbling and thieving and trying to stay alive.”

  “Is that how it was for you?” She had his entire attention now. “Margaret was not merely playacting?”

  “Worse. I do not like to dwell upon it.”

  “So your memories and dreams, then … they might be particularly vivid, given the material upon which they cogitate?”

  “Sometimes they are.” Sometimes she woke, screaming, with the snarling faces of Billy and Albert and the other members of the Billingsgate gang hanging over her, their hands scrabbling at her skirts, and in the dream, no help or hope in sight. In reality, she owed quite a lot to Snouts and Jake.

  She shook the ugly images from her mind. Her dreams since returning from Bavaria were much stranger—water, falling, that silly children’s tune perpetually in the background—but no less frightening.

  “Would it be an imposition if I asked you to help me?” His gaze had not moved from her face. A gentleman would have looked elsewhere to give her time to compose herself. But Claude and the others had already established that the young scientist was not a gentleman.

  “How?” she asked. “Are you going to put me in your machine and extract my memories? Are you quite prepared for what you might find, Evan Douglas?”

  “I am never prepared for the endless puzzle that is the human brain,” he said slowly. “But if you are willing, I should like it very much if you would consent to be a subject. It does not hurt … and I am afraid I have rather run out of people able to help me. Geoffrey said he might, but he is halfway to Exeter by now.”

  From here, she could not see the front of the castle, the gardens, or even the broadmead from which the airships had lifted. She had nothing to do but tidy the room she had shared with Maggie, no one to talk to except her father, and he likely had estate business to take care of in between rafts of guests.

  No one needed her except this disheveled young man, who at least spoke to her as though she had a brain in her head, though his delivery could use a little refinement.

  “All right,” she said. “Why ever not?”

  15

  Filled with curiosity, Lizzie followed him into the tower. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust from the bright summer day to the enormous, dim interior, which was illuminated by electricks strung along the stone walls about ten feet from the floor, and further up, by the arrow slits where archers might have fired during a siege. The floor the archers stood upon, however, had been knocked out to accommodate the size of the scientific equipment.

  “Shall I explain what you are looking at?” Evan asked.

  “I presume that enormous thing is the mnemosomniograph. Goodness, what a mouthful. It is almost as long as that machine is tall. May I simply call it the dream device and be done?”

  Again, he almost smiled. “A reasonable plan. So, before you is the table upon which the subject—you, for instance—would repose, either in a state of meditation or sleep.”

  She tilted her head back in an attempt to see where the coiling cables went into the body of that enormous glass globe suspended above their heads. “I would not be able to sleep with that above me, I am quite sure.”

  “I could read my baccalaureate thesis to you, if you like.”

  She laughed in sudden delight. If only Arabella could see him now. “And they said you had no sense of humor.”

  “
Just because one possesses different qualities does not mean one is devoid of them.”

  “Of course not. I am pleased to make the discovery. We shall get on swimmingly now.”

  “I thought we were getting on already. You have not made a single disparaging remark and it has been all of ten minutes.”

  “Oh, I am sorry. You must have me confused with Arabella. One blond girl is very much like another, I suppose.”

  “I could hardly find two more different. And you are not really blond, you know. Your hair is more a honey color.”

  Goodness. At this rate he would begin reciting poetry.

  “So this is the table, and those are the cables. Why is that glass globe suspended up there? I won’t even ask how you got it up there—one could fit a piano inside it.”

  “We built it inside the tower. That is an aggregation chamber, based in part on the Malvern-Terwilliger Kinetick Carbonator. One needs a lot of power to create the equivalent of a flash charge on a camera. And since floor space in towers is limited, we have spread vertically rather than horizontally.”

  “I see. And those massive flumes?”

  “They speed the particles of light to the substrate upon which the subject’s memories or dreams are recorded.” He walked behind a screen and came back with a square plate rather like the ones that slipped into the backs of cameras in a photography studio. “These contain the chemical substrates. Eventually, my technology will progress to the point where a continuous series of small plates can be made as the dream progresses, and then illuminated one after the other to replicate the dream exactly as the sleeper experienced it.”

  “Fascinating. But if you do not mind my asking, what is the point of all this? Why capture people’s dreams and memories at all?”