“Tilbury dock ahead. We need to get off the main road, miss.”
“Fred.”
“Aye, Fred. We don’t want to be the ones spotted, we’re trying to do the spotting. So which way?”
“You remember Jameson, the tobacconist? Cut down the road past his shop and pull up at the end near the fishing guild hall. We’ll be able to see the entrance to my father’s warehouse from there. I’ll wake Lord Smith-Grenville.”
She leaned over the back of the bench and prodded the top of Barnabas’s head. His bowler had slipped off while he slept. His hair was soft, barely springing back against her fingers as she tapped.
“Wake up, my lord. We’re in Tilbury.”
“Who—huh?” He came to and jerked to a sitting position, facing the back of the trap, wrench held in front of him like a shield. “Where?”
“Up here.” She waved her fingertips at him when he turned around, wild-eyed. “You fell asleep. Long day?”
“I—yes, I suppose. I apologize. Is this your wrench?” He held it out to her politely, and Freddie had to restrain a grin.
“Yes, but it seemed to bring you some comfort as you slumbered. By all means keep it if you like. Are you otherwise armed?”
She showed him the impressive pistol she carried, and after blinking for a moment he reached beneath his jacket and withdrew a slightly smaller firearm of his own. “I forgot I had it.”
Dan muttered something under his breath that sounded very much like, “Bloody hell.” Freddie nudged his boot with her own.
“At least you’ve remembered now.”
Barnabas nodded. “And now that we’re here, what is the plan, Miss Murcheson?”
“Fred, please. When I’m dressed like this, it’s Fred. The plan is to wait on that corner there,” she explained, pointing, “until we see my father arrive and meet his colleague. Then to follow them without being seen, and find out what they’re up to.”
“But Miss—Fred, if it’s a matter of state secrets, I can hardly condone . . . oh, blast.”
“So my father is privy to state secrets. Thank you for clarifying that. Do you know why he’s meeting this man Hampton here?” She ran her fingertips over the barrel of her weapon, caressing the wood.
He eyed the pistol as he felt around him, then replaced his hat on his head. “Your father hasn’t confided in me regarding his schedule. You clearly know more than I do about his intentions. Shooting me won’t get you anywhere.”
She clamped down on the impulse to apologize for the implied threat, reminding herself that this harmless-seeming young noble was an admitted spy and her father’s man. It was entirely possible his accidental sincerity and naïveté were an elaborate front to gain her confidence. In fact, that was a more plausible explanation than the face value of Lord Smith-Grenville.
Freddie checked her pocket watch. “He’s due to arrive any minute now. Come with me, take the rear, and do try to tread lightly and keep to the shadows. Mr. Pinkerton will guard the trap.” She hopped down to the street, automatically adjusting her balance to account for all the heavy padding but still less hampered than she would be in a skirt. Dan’s mum had found her a new pair of braces to go with the trousers, replacing the old, worn pair she’d liberated from her father’s wardrobe and cut down to size. She felt even more comfortable and mobile than usual. “Dan, if we aren’t back in two hours, feel free to come looking.”
“One hour.”
“One and a half. Coming, Lord Smith-Grenville?”
“Do I have a choice?”
A sudden rage threatened her vision for a moment, a flicker of red in the dark. Did he have a choice? Lord Barnabas Smith-Grenville, a first son of the peerage, an agent of the Crown, a titled young gentleman in the prime of his life?
“You’ve nothing but choices, my lord,” she managed against the angry tightening of her throat. “A world of them.”
She turned and made for the corner, not bothering to look behind to see if he would choose to follow.
• • •
BARNABAS HEFTED THE pistol in his hand, taking confidence from its weight and the memory of his successful last turn at the firing range behind Hardison House.
As Miss Murcheson had predicted, her father and another man had rendezvoused in front of the warehouse, then disappeared down a side alley without speaking a single word to one another. Both men were on foot. The streets were empty, as befit the ungodly hour. The church bell up the road had tolled three as Freddie and Barnabas slipped across the pavement to steal down the alley after their quarry.
It was clear Miss Murcheson had a knack for this sort of thing. Although most of the narrow passage was lit only by the moon and stars, she never faltered. Her movements were swift and sure as a cat’s in the dark, and when she pulled Barnabas with her behind the cover of a row of barrels, he noted that the spot afforded a perfect view of the door through which Murcheson and his colleague entered one of the warehouse’s outbuildings. A moment later, the painted-over window by the entrance flickered with a tracework of warm light. A muffled rattle of metal on metal wafted to them on the damp breeze. The glow brightened, then slipped from view as if a lantern shade had been pulled down over it.
Then silence again, and darkness, punctuated only by Miss Murcheson huffing out a puzzled, “Hmph.”
“What?” he whispered.
“It reminds me of something. I’m trying to think what it could be.”
“I see. Are we stopping here, then?”
“Of course not.” She stepped from behind the barrels and strode toward the door, no longer bothering with stealth. He caught up to her as she peered into the window. The glass was dark, the cracks invisible now that they were no longer backlit.
“I have a pocket torch,” he offered, hoping it might forestall the inevitable break-in. He pulled the slender rod from his breast pocket and slid his fingers down its length until he found the tiny latch that held the crank lever flat. With a flick of one fingertip, he loosed it and used it to slide the mechanism free. The crank needed only a few brisk turns before the rod’s tip began to shine.
“Very clever,” Miss Murcheson granted, though she didn’t sound as though she meant it. Her father was Rutherford Murcheson, after all; Barnabas suspected the young lady saw a dozen more fascinating technological marvels than this on a slow day.
“I shouldn’t be helping you. But as I’m doomed to hang anyway . . .” He pressed the torch to one corner of a windowpane, sliding it along the seam between glass and wood, looking for the gap in the paint that the earlier flash of light had revealed. There was nothing, then a flicker he nearly missed.
“Go back a bit,” she urged. “There. Just there.”
In the feeble glow, they could see the network of paint cracks again. Freddie peered through the largest one into the room beyond, then gasped and backed away.
“What?”
“I’ve seen this before.”
“It’s your father’s warehouse, isn’t it?” Barnabas pressed his eye to the gap and observed what appeared to be an all-but-empty storage chamber. “I don’t know why you’d have spent time looking into the closets, but—”
“No, no. I’ve seen this, but not here. There’s a room exactly like this one in my father’s factory in Le Havre.”
Giving the torch crank another spin, Barnabas shrugged. “I’d venture to say there’s a room like this in almost any factory or warehouse in the world, Miss Murcheson.”
“No. I mean exactly alike. The same paneling. The same few crates in the corner, mouse-eaten papers on the floor. The closet in Le Havre has a broken chair and this appears to have a stepladder with a broken step, that’s the only difference. I used to hide in there when I’d go to visit Father, just to see if anyone would notice I was missing. Nobody ever looked for me there; it was as if they didn’t know the room existed.”
He looked again. “It’s a wholly unremarkable storage room. Perhaps they weren’t looking very hard?” He regretted that the moment he’d said it, but she didn’t seem to have paid him any mind.
“The same room,” she insisted. “In two busy establishments, in two different countries. The same storage room with nearly nothing stored in it. Why are they empty? And where are Father and Mr. Hampton?”
Blast. “The light. This must just be a pass-through to something else. They must have opened a door. I don’t see one, but it’s the only explanation. I mean they had to have gone somewhere.”
She was already working at the lock with a hairpin, cursing softly. Her absurdly large hat obscured her profile from his view, and she sounded more tinker than lady. For a moment, her disguise worked on him, causing him to doubt his own sanity. The illusion broke when she spoke to him directly. “Shine that over here, please, sir.”
Even after he obliged, it took Freddie several minutes and two broken hairpins before she finally turned the knob with an air of supreme satisfaction.
“That lock wasn’t put there to protect a few empty crates and a broken ladder, Lord Smith-Grenville.”
Clearly not. But the longer she’d worked on it, the more anxious Barnabas had become about what it might be protecting. Nothing that would help his case, he suspected.
“The light shone straight through the window. I think it came from that wall, but I don’t see any door.”
The wall opposite the door was faded gray paneling, unpainted, undistinguished. But where the light of the pocket torch slipped over the wood, Barnabas detected a spot that looked out of place. A seam where one needn’t be, and a patch where the touch of many hands might have worn down the rough wood. He pressed his palm to the wall, and after a moment the grinding clank of chains announced his success.
“Oh, well done, my lord. Very well done indeed.”
The light flickered on from behind the dull paneling, and a moment later the wall itself slid to one side with a whir of gears. An ordinary lift cage greeted them, unassuming brass and wood with an accordion door and a lantern that appeared to be electric. Beyond the framework, bare wooden walls were visible.
Barnabas didn’t want to take that lift. He wanted to be anywhere else. But Fred was already pushing the latch up, sliding the door open. She entered the cage and looked back at him, and then she smiled as though embarking on a delightful adventure and inviting him along for the ride. It was the grin of a mischievous tinker lad with nothing to lose . . . or that of a society maiden who excelled at playing such a dangerous role.
A world of choices, she’d ascribed to him. He saw few choices at the moment, and none of them good. But he found he couldn’t look at that smile and not follow it. The ridiculous hat, the padded tummy, the hands covered in grime to mask the dainty and well-manicured fingers, none of that mattered. Miss Freddie Murcheson was grinning at him and beckoning, and he must follow. So he did, and let her shut the lift door behind him.
SIX
FOR A MOMENT, Freddie doubted herself. That moment fell when the lift sank into the earth and she saw the bare rock walls beyond the fragile brass framework in which she and Lord Smith-Grenville stood. The light flickered a few times as they descended, and more than once she felt her mind flirt with panic when she thought they might be plunged into subterranean darkness.
But clever Smith-Grenville kept his pocket torch out, occasionally spinning it back into brightness as they clattered downward. If the lift motor was electric, the torch wouldn’t help much, but at least they would be buried alive with enough light to see by. Or they would discover something new, something she hadn’t been meant to find. A familiar rush of energy seized her, the impending thrill of exploring the forbidden.
She risked a longish look at her companion when he seemed distracted by the passing geological display, and wondered at her first assessment of him. Although he looked somewhat ghastly in the harsh light, she could also see every minute action of his face’s musculature, each subtle change in expression in that visage she’d thought so calm and bland. Perhaps it was exhaustion, not just lighting, that laid Smith-Grenville so bare now, but whatever the reason Freddie liked the outcome. The subtle hint of curiosity and fear in the fine lines beside his eyes, the puzzled tension of the corner of his mouth. Even in profile she could see the almost-furrow of his brows, as the lightbulb sputtered and he gave his torch another crank.
He wouldn’t hang. She was almost certain of that. Even if her father did find out what a horrible spy Smith-Grenville made. Still, perhaps it had been harsh of her to drag him along for this evening’s work. She had no idea what she was doing, which was all very well and good for her, but hardly fair to someone who was practically an innocent bystander. Usually she worked alone.
“Can I help you, Miss Murcheson?”
“Sorry?”
He met her gaze, and a long moment ensued during which Freddie could feel herself blush, and Smith-Grenville’s face went through an array of minute expressions she couldn’t quite read.
“You were, um . . . you were staring. A bit. Or so it seemed to me. Do I have something on my face?”
Your lovely soul. “No, nothing. I apologize. I didn’t mean to stare.” But she kept doing it. He was the first to look away.
“We seem to have arrived.”
The lift settled into place with a grumbling thump, and Barnabas slid the door open and practically threw himself out of the tight space.
Following more cautiously, Freddie saw a large chamber that was clearly a work in progress. Hewn from the bedrock, the lift vestibule was twice the height of a large man and as long and wide as her bedchamber in the manor house outside Le Havre. The floor was polished native stone, and the corners were full of the detritus of construction. Tools, finely milled wood planks, lengths of copper tubing, and what appeared to be a partially assembled lift cage of much more elegant make than the simple model they’d traveled in. Glass panels with a frosted pattern at the edges, held in place by a hardwood frame with elegant brass fittings. When it was completed it would rival the lift in any fine hotel.
At the far end of the room an archway led to a broad corridor with two pairs of narrow grooves carved into the floor along each side. The pile of lanterns and wiring at its entrance suggested it was as yet unlit, and this turned out to be the case. Barnabas fired his torch again and they set off into the darkness.
“It looks like a track for some sort of vehicle,” he ventured after they’d walked for several minutes in silence. His whisper echoed harshly against the stone walls. “There’s a metal rail in there.”
“I wish we could find whatever it is that runs on the track,” Freddie whispered back. “I suspect it would make this distance in a fraction of the time we’re taking to walk it.” They couldn’t walk all night.
“Your father and the other one must have used it. Oh, what’s this?”
On the right-hand track sat what appeared to be a handcar—or rather, on closer examination, a velocipede. The simple metal framework sported two seats and a complicated system of treadles and gears that led, to Freddie’s great delight, to a rudimentary Stirling engine.
“Bring the torch closer! Oh, this is brilliant. Look, the treadles create a charge to heat the element that powers the engine, then the engine maintains the speed after you shift this gear. This will take us as far as we care to go. All we need to do is provide the momentum.”
“You believe you can operate that after a cursory glance?” He sounded less disbelieving than amazed, to his credit.
She nodded. “It’s what I do. Climb on.”
It wasn’t as smooth as described, of course. Building momentum from a dead stop was a good deal of work. Then finding the switch to start the heating process once they were in motion took Freddie a few extra moments, during which they had to hurtle into pitch blackness because she was using the torch to e
xamine the controls on the engine casing. She had to stop pedaling in order to crank the engine itself when the element seemed sufficiently hot, the attached indicator needle creeping into the comforting green zone on the dial. Barnabas had to work all the harder in those moments, complaining bitterly as he did so. Then the first time she attempted to engage the gear shift, the velocipede shuddered so badly she thought it might come apart, and she had to ease back and reconsider, all the while pumping madly at the treadles until she thought her legs or lungs would surely give out. The second time, however, she coordinated a brief pause in their pedaling. The gear clunked into place and engaged, and suddenly they were whirring down the track along the torch’s narrow beam, faster than could possibly be safe.
Barnabas laughed aloud as he resumed pedaling in a slow, easy motion. The velocity was in the engine’s hands now, the treadles merely providing its sustaining heat and helping maintain momentum.
“I could go like this all night,” he claimed.
“We should agree on a time. Especially as we’ve no idea how fast we’re really going.”
He checked his pocket chronometer, a lovely gold piece that gleamed even in the weak light of the torch. “Twenty minutes?”
“Forty-five. I don’t suppose you have a compass as well? I didn’t think to bring one.”
“Thirty minutes,” he countered. “We’ve been some time down here already, and I suspect Mr. Pinkerton won’t give the full hour and a half before he investigates. We need to allow ourselves time for the round-trip and the lift ride back up. And no, I don’t have a compass.”
Gilded Lily Page 5
