Magnificent Devices [5] A Lady of Resources

by Shelley Adina

  She opened the envelope with the least amount of curl.

  Dearest Claire,

  It has come—the day I have waited for so long! The day I may write and tell all my friends that Peter and I have fixed a date at last—and I hope that after four years of patient waiting, you will not find it too short a notice.

  Our wedding day is the fifteenth of August. There! I have written it in ink but I am determined it will be in stone—I will not be obliged to move it out one more time. The ceremony will be at eleven in the morning, at Holy Trinity, with a breakfast afterward in Cadogan Square.

  Claire, we have talked about this and dreamed about it together on many occasions, but I must have your answer by return. Will you be my maid of honor—for sure and for certain, as we used to say when we were schoolgirls? Mama has my bridesmaids lined up from every possible branch of the family—eleven, can you imagine anything so silly?—but I have held firm that there is only one person who will stand beside me at the altar, and that is you.

  Please let me know soonest. I promise I will not make you wear pink.

  Your own,

  Emilie Fragonard (soon to be Livingston)

  Claire could not help the joy that warmed her heart at the thought of Emilie being married at last. If any woman had shown the patience of a saint as her intended readied Selwyn Place for them and brought it back from a near ruin to a producing estate, it was Emilie. Claire would write this very evening with an emphatic yes, and then wouldn’t Mrs. Fragonard stamp up and down the stairs and abuse the housemaids!

  But it could not be helped. Claire had been responsible for seating Emilie and Peter next to one another at dinner several years ago—the night that both their lives had changed, in fact—and she would reap the happy harvest of the seeds that had been sown then.

  Still smiling, she ripped open the thin post-office paper most often used by people who did not possess stationery.

  Lady,

  I am at Colliford Castle and you must come with all haste. Lizzie’s father is a murderer, and she is his next victim. So is the Prince of Wales. The telescope on the tower is really a cannon, and he plans to shoot down the prince’s airship tonight. We are going to prevent it.

  Please come.

  Maggie

  Claire leaped to her feet and the sheets of paper scattered like snow in a gust of wind. “Snouts!” she shrieked, dashing out of the room. “Lewis! Quickly!”

  The two of them materialized in the hall, Snouts with his mouth full of the cake that hadn’t quite made it to the library. “Lady, what’s wrong? Is there a mouse in the book room?”

  “No, but there is a rat in the castle. Arm yourselves with everything you have to hand, and meet me in the mews in ten minutes. We’ll drive out to Athena.”

  She was halfway up the stairs when Lewis got his mouth moving. “Athena, Lady?”

  “Yes. Quickly, now! We are flying to Colliford Castle to rescue the Mopsies from that murdering Seacombe and we must lift within half an hour.”

  She dashed into her room and flung open the trunk that stood at the end of the bed, perpetually packed and ready for a sudden departure. Her raiding rig lay on top. If she had not been shaking with rage and fear for her girls, she would have rejoiced in the occasion to put it on again.

  The Lady of Devices had not made an appearance on English soil in quite some time. The man who had precipitated her appearance was going to regret it for the rest of his very short life.

  21

  Lizzie balanced on the point of a gable and scrambled in through the open window of one of the servants’ rooms on the fourth floor. Thank goodness it wasn’t November, or raining, which would have meant locked windows all over the house. Now to leave the sash just the way she’d found it, and nothing else disturbed. She let herself out of the room and made her way downstairs on quiet feet.

  Maggie’s valise still sat on the floor of their room where the footman had left it. She rifled through it quickly and found her cousin’s raiding rig, which she had not taken the time to put on. Lizzie wrapped the leather corselet about her waist, cinched it closed, and checked inside the square, flat case hanging from it by a brass catch. Matches. Some firecrackers for distraction. A handkerchief and two sticking plasters. A pound note. And under it, one of the smaller of their collection of lightning cells, assembled at various times over the years because of the Lady’s insistence that they never forget how to do it.

  Maggie thought the oddest things necessary. Never mind. Though she could not see a use for any of these things just now, the heat of the moment might call for any one of them.

  Looking this way and that, Lizzie crept out of the bedroom and down the back stairs to the kitchen garden. The kitchen maid straightened up from the lettuce she was picking when she saw her.

  Blast!

  “Good afternoon, Miss Elizabeth. Have you come looking for your tea?”

  “No, thank you, Dorie. But I did lose something out here—a corset bone. Black, with a blue tinge. Have you seen something answering that description?” She gazed up at the roofs far above, attempting to calculate where the rod might have come down.

  “Pardon me, miss, but why should a young lady’s corset bone be out here in the garden?”

  Lizzie gave her a smile filled with mischief. “It was meant to be a joke on my cousin, but it seems to have turned into a joke on me, since I cannot find it.”

  Dorie did not look as though she understood the joke. Gamely, though, she walked slowly down the row of lettuce, and Lizzie did the same in the carrots and radishes, then cast a wider net over the squash, pumpkins, and herbs. There were plenty of stakes, but they were all canes, not black metal. Then Dorie frowned at the neatly staked tomatoes, which had just come into flower. “Wait. Here is something.” She plucked it from the plants and held it up. “Is this it?”

  Far from bouncing off the ground, the rod had become wedged in the bushy, slightly sticky tomato plants, which gave it no solid surface from which to be repelled.

  “It is!” Lizzie took it, and pushed it down between her corselet and her blouse. “Thank you. What good eyes you have.”

  “Mam always told us to eat our carrots. Are you sure you don’t want your tea, miss? Mr. Seacombe is up with his telescope and don’t want to be disturbed, but Mrs. Kirby can have something ready for you young ladies in a trice.”

  If she forced anything into her stomach in the state she was in, she would toss it right back up. “No, but thank you for your kindness.”

  “All right, then. Mrs. Kirby says dinner is at eight o’clock—unless you’d want to dine earlier, since you’re going to Penzance tomorrow?”

  “No, no. We usually dine at eight. There is no reason to change it. Thank you, Dorie.”

  Lizzie retreated back along the castle walls, attempting to look as though she were enjoying a botany excursion while hugging the stone to avoid being seen from above. How strange that the staff behaved exactly as though everything were normal. Mrs. Kirby, the cook, did not know that she and Maggie had been locked in the tower, and in fact was expecting them at dinner. Surely her father did not plan to let them out for that? What would he do, swear them to silence in front of the servants?

  Not likely. He was going to shoot down the prince’s airship, put paid to her and Maggie, and then saunter down to eat his filet of sole as though nothing in the world was wrong. Why, their bodies would probably rot in the tower and not even be discovered until the next royal visit— because he would simply say this evening that they were resting, and tomorrow that he had taken them to the station himself and seen them off to Penzance.

  Oh, he was a clever-clogs. But no more clever than she and Maggie—and they had been trained by the best. The fact that she had told someone she planned to be at dinner would come up eventually, as would the fact that Maggie’s valise still sat in their room instead of in the Queen’s Tower. Doubt at these inconsistencies would drift into the minds of the staff. Doubt was a thin line to hang a life on, bu
t it was all she had at the moment until she could weave something better.

  Lizzie slid around the curve of the cannon’s tower and paused outside the door. Silence, except for the breeze that was freshening across the fields and in the trees. Those clouds were piling higher in the west, and something in the air told her there would be rain again tonight.

  Oh, please let the Lady arrive safely. Please let Athena weather the journey and bring us help. I can’t do this alone.

  She allowed herself only a moment to despair. Because she could not avoid the truth—for the moment, she had to do this alone. She must do what she could, and hope it would be enough. Even if rescue never came and she died in the attempt, anything was better than an ugly end locked up alone in a room the Queen had found so safe and comforting.

  Safety and comfort, Lizzie had learned, all depended on who held the key to the door.

  Speaking of which …

  She slipped inside and removed the old-fashioned key from the lock, tucking it inside the pouch on her corselet. If anyone were to lock people up, it would be she.

  Was Evan here?

  The laboratory stood empty, but from behind the screen came the click and slide of glass and brass. Lizzie gritted her teeth. Why couldn’t he have gone to the house for his tea as he had every day she’d been here? Why did he have to become caught up in his experiments today, of all days?

  Holding four or five plates, he came around the screen and saw her before she could dart up the steps encircling the walls and out of his line of sight.

  “Lizzie!” he exclaimed. “Are you completely recovered? I thought you and your sister were resting in the Queen’s Tower.”

  “Yes, I am recovered, thank you. Maggie is resting after her train journey, but I’m not fond of idleness during the day—there is too much to interest one, don’t you agree?”

  “I work at all hours of the day and night, and in here, you know, midnight and noon look much the same. I say, are you quite all right? You look as though you’d been dragged through a hedge backward.” His gaze fell to her stockings, which she should have changed when she was in her room. Bother! “Have you fallen? Would you like to sit down?”

  “No, I’m quite all right. I have been studying botany outside, and slipped into the moat. Evan, how much are you acquainted with my father’s telescope, really?”

  He set the plates on the dreaming table and gazed at her, puzzled. “Not at all. As I told you, no one but Charles is permitted up there—and it was sheer good luck that you and I were not discovered.”

  “Evan, I must tell you something.”

  “Certainly. Here are some more of your plates. You can tell me whatever it is, and then you can tell me what these images mean.”

  He spread them out, and for good or ill, Lizzie made up her mind. She pointed to the middle one. “That is another image of my mother on the floor of our cabin in the airship that crashed. She had just been injected with a syringe of something fatal by my father.”

  “That is encouragingly specific and—what?”

  “This one is London Bridge as we flew over it, moments before the ship crashed. My father set fire to it, you see. Maggie and I were the only survivors, but only because we jumped out of the viewing port at the last moment before it went into the river.”

  His jaw sagged open and he stared at her as though she had gone utterly mad.

  “It is quite true, Evan,” she said steadily, holding his appalled gaze. “My father killed my mother that day the airship crashed in the Thames, because she had discovered that he and others had been plotting to assassinate the princes next in the line to the throne. And since I was the only witness to Mother’s murder, he plans to kill me, too. Today, in fact, after he shoots down the Prince of Wales and Prince George as their airship passes overhead. He will use the cannon up there on the roof that everyone believes to be a telescope.”

  Under this fresh shock, poor Evan’s mouth snapped closed and he took a step back from her, fetching up against a counter containing a cast-iron sink and a Bunsen burner. “You are hysterical,” he finally managed. “Or I am dreaming. And since the second is not true, the first must be.”

  “That is poor logic and you know it,” she said crisply. She held up the plate showing her mother’s prone body. “How else do you explain this?”

  “It—it is a dressmaker’s mannequin, as you said.”

  “I only said that because my father was standing right there and I did not want him to know that I remembered his crime. But it was already too late. He locked Maggie and me into the Queen’s Tower, you know, and told us what he planned to do with us. We weren’t resting at all. We were prisoners.”

  “You are not a prisoner now.” He seemed to grasp this inarguable fact with relief.

  “We escaped. But he is already up on the tower, preparing the cannon for the prince’s airship. We must stop him, Evan, and I need your help.”

  He gazed at her. Took another step back. “Are you quite sure you are well, Lizzie?” he asked gently. “If you have been out rambling so soon after recovering from the elixir, it is entirely possible that you are suffering from heat stroke.”

  “I am nothing of the kind. Evan, you must believe me. Why else has he isolated me here and contrived to send everyone but you away? He needed to know how much I knew—how much I remembered of my mother’s death. He needed you for that, to operate the mnemosomniograph. Once he succeeds in killing the princes, he will come for me and Maggie—and you, for that matter. You are the last witness to today’s events.”

  “There have been no events.”

  “But there will be. I armed that cannon myself, by accident, when we were up there. A missile the size of that gas canister on the counter dropped into the barrel. I remembered the Sorbonne set talking of republicanism, and then last night I dreamed of my mother and what my father had done. It all fit together. ”

  “Why in God’s name didn’t you tell me?” But he didn’t look as though he believed her. She held his gaze, but in her peripheral vision, she saw him reaching behind his back.

  “Because I did not know whether or not you were aiding him in his efforts at anarchy.”

  “Now you do go too far.” He smiled disarmingly. “Anarchy? He has been known to criticize the monarchy, and half the students in my class at university toyed with republicanism, but it is a far cry from that to shooting royals out of the sky.”

  “If it did not mean your being killed, too, I would encourage you to go up there and see for yourself. He is testing the cannon’s undercarriage as we speak.”

  As she said the last word, she balanced her weight evenly on the balls of her feet, and when his hand tightened on a vial of elixir and he lunged at her, she was ready.

  Swinging to the side, she snatched up the canister of gas for the Bunsen burner, and when he staggered past her, off balance, she pirouetted as gracefully as a dancer and swung it at his head with all the force she possessed. Thank you, Mr. Yau.

  He went down like a rock, and the vial shattered on the stone floor. The thick and bitter elixir that had disabled her for most of the day spread in a pool, seeping inexorably toward him.

  Well, that would be one solution, if he ingested some of it. But if she managed to cause an explosion, he would not survive it. She was not convinced that he knew anything of her father’s activities—that incredulity could not have been manufactured. He was simply loyal to his patron, whom he had known for some years, and had only met her a few days ago. She could be a raving lunatic, for all he knew.

  Right, then. Lizzie grasped him under his armpits and, huffing and blowing, half-dragged and half-rolled her cousin out the door of the tower, down the steps, and into the grass. He was dreadfully heavy for such a slender person. She made him as comfortable as possible, considering he would have a huge goose egg on his head tomorrow, and returned to the laboratory, locking him outside.

  And locking herself inside with the man who had wanted her dead for eleven years. />
  22

  Lizzie climbed the steps, watching her footing more carefully the higher she went. The rod of repenthium tucked in her bodice would not help her in the least if she were to fall more than about ten feet—and the parapet was far higher than that. About fifty feet up, level with the great glass globe and the power mechanism for the mnemosomniograph, she paused and sat on a stone step, her back against the cold wall, to examine it.

  He might be a fine scientist as far as the realms of the mind went, but Evan and whoever had put this together were dreadful engineers. Lizzie’s gaze followed the cables around in an enormous, messy coil, in and out of the power cell and thence into the globe where the charge would be aggregated. Disabling the entire apparatus would be fairly simple, but how was she to create an explosion that would lift the parapet clean off the tower—without killing herself?

  What she needed here was one of Tigg’s ignition clocks. Or a fuse that could be lit from a safe distance. Some explosives. She would even be happy with a firelamp.

  But none of these helpful inventions were available to her. She climbed a few steps more. Perhaps if she had a view from above the apparatus, she could see a way to create a blockage in the circuit. If only it were not so dim up here! The electricks running along the wall were all very well to guide one’s feet up the steps, but they were clearly not meant to allow people to see into the dream device’s power structure. There must be a way to lower the entire mare’s nest down to where it was light. How else could Evan see to maintain it?

  Looking up, searching the dim reaches, she saw the pulleys bolted into the stone and reaching from one side of the tower’s interior to the other, which she had completely missed before. Who noticed pulleys, after all, unless one needed them? It looked like a two-man affair, however. Up there by the trap door was one set of levers, and the second set was at the bottom of the steps, affixed to the wall.