“Something that’s underwater anyway,” Freddie posited. “Some sort of mining operation, or specialized research facilities. Or a docking station for submersibles with special hydrophonic sensors that the Navy doesn’t want anyone to know exist.”
“This is giving me a headache.” He steered toward the shadiest side of the drive, slowing the horses. “I should just tell your father what we saw.”
Freddie snapped her fan shut and glared at him. “You wouldn’t dare.”
“I’m done for anyway, Miss Murcheson. I’ve failed in this assignment from the start. Now look there, everyone passing also sees you staring daggers at me, and you know how fast these things travel. Before too long word will get back to your father that I’m not even an adequate suitor.”
In a twinkling, her expression and posture altered, everything about her intimating a coquettish willingness to be courted. She even tapped his shoulder with her fan, and giggled. It was all quite devastating. “Oh, Lord Smith-Grenville, you’re a delightful suitor! Never doubt it for a moment!”
“Thank you.” He attempted to match her demeanor, but the girl’s skills were far beyond his own. Once again, he could only coast along in her wake, anxiety warring with admiration.
“Now, tell me about your brother. Do you really think he’s an opium smuggler?” She flipped the fan open again and batted her eyelashes as she asked this. It was completely egregious, but Barnabas was still utterly charmed. Miss Murcheson’s eyelashes were longer and thicker than he’d realized before, and the dress brought out the green in her eyes.
“Oh. That. Honestly, I don’t know what to think. Phineas was a naval officer serving in Europa until a few years ago. Then he went missing, and all the evidence suggested he’d succumbed to an opium addiction.”
“How horrible!”
“I never believed it. His commanding officers told us, but it seemed so out of character for Phineas. I looked for him everywhere, even in Le Havre and Paris. My friend Matthew Pence tried to enlist your father’s aid in the search, in fact. But by that time all the people who’d seen him said he’d gone west to the Lord of Gold.”
“That myth? I suppose it turned out to be true, though. All those poor people on that farm . . .”
Baron Orm had kept thousands of workers addicted and enslaved on his vast opium farm in the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada. More than half of them had died, unidentified, when their source of the drug had been incarcerated. Only a few had been healthy and lucid enough to come through withdrawals with their faculties somewhat intact. Of those, a mere handful were able to testify as to the conditions at the farm that Orm had called El Dorado.
Phineas hadn’t been among that handful. He hadn’t been among the wretches doomed to live out their half-witted lives in sanitariums. Nor had his body been found among the legions of dead.
“My friend Mrs. Eliza Pence, who won the Sky and Steam Rally, swears she saw Phineas at the finish line ceremony. He was one of Orm’s men. Not an opium slave, but a hired mercenary. A pirate.”
“Oh, dear.”
“She ascribed him higher motives than I can. Assumed he was there for some good reason, and that he didn’t come forth to help her because he saw there was no need. But I can’t be so sanguine about it. Phineas always did have a hidden side. Why would he hide it if it wasn’t dark?”
Freddie sighed, toying with the edges of her fan. “He might have assumed nobody would accept it. Even if it wasn’t a dark side. We all have our reasons.”
Barnabas navigated a corner before responding. Their turn around the park was finished. “I can’t equate your desire to thumb your nose at your father by working on shopkeepers’ equipment to my brother’s decision to abandon his family and commission—and evidently his clandestine job as a secret agent—to throw his lot in with a band of criminals. If he did, which I find I still have trouble believing.”
To her credit, Miss Murcheson maintained the sweetly flirtatious smile she’d worn since he pointed out that people were watching them and gauging the course of their supposed relationship. “My feelings about Father have nothing to do with my work, Lord Smith-Grenville. I would do it all in the open if I could, but I do it in secret anyway because I must. Machines speak to me. I hear them, I see them, I know them and I can no more resist their call than you can resist looking for your prodigal brother. These are our passions. Even though you tell yourself you’ve given up on his character, you still look. And you still won’t tell my father about the submersible we saw, until you’re sure you won’t be incriminating Phineas in the process.”
She was right. He was a fool, but he wouldn’t go to Murcheson. “Probably I just don’t want to incriminate myself.”
“That too. It occurs to me . . . I heard Father say something about ‘S-G.’ He seemed to be talking about an agent, someone he was disappointed with. I assumed at the time he was talking about you, but now I’m not so sure. What if Mrs. Pence was correct, and Phineas was working for the Crown when she saw him in San Francisco? Still working for my father? He’d be an S-G too.”
His jaw dropped. “I knew it. I knew your father wasn’t telling me everything he knew about Phineas. Good God, this could change everything!”
“Perhaps. By the way, what’s wet work?”
Barnabas’s gut clenched, hearing the ominous term fall from such tender lips. “Wet work? Your father said that Phineas . . . ?”
She shook her head, artistically arranged curls bobbing around her smooth shoulders. “He said that S-G was squeamish about it. Father sounded rather disappointed. It sounds like something a scullery maid would do, so I didn’t quite understand. Is it a type of work you’re supposed to be doing? Or something to do with working on submersibles? If not, it’s still entirely possible Father meant you, you know.”
“Good heavens, no. That’s not in my brief. Wet work is—” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “It’s killing people. I don’t kill people. I’m the one who forgets he’s carrying a pistol, remember?”
“Wet. Oh, I see. It’s meant to be a clever euphemism for bloodletting. That’s appalling. Like something schoolboys would say.”
“We were all schoolboys once,” Barnabas pointed out. “Well, you weren’t, obviously. But the men who thought up these names for things were. Your father wasn’t talking about me. I suppose you have only my word on that, but I was brought on to gather and relay information, not kill anyone. So he must have been talking about Phineas. How many S-Gs can there be? And why would he lie to me, after telling me as much as he already had? Perhaps it’s just another cover story! What else did he say?”
“It’s difficult to recall everything. I had no context for it, you understand. But something about it being impractical to replace him. And lying is second nature for Father. He might well have done it as a reflex.”
Eliza had been right, Barnabas was sure of it. The more he considered it, the more he thought the opium addiction must be a cover. When Eliza saw Phineas he had been embedded in Orm’s employ, and for whatever reason he was still under cover. Was he still pretending to work for Orm, or Orm’s successor? Was he indeed in London, or were the sightings Barnabas had heard about in error? Wishful thinking on the part of some well-meaning friends? Barnabas wanted to go to Murcheson that instant, to demand the truth. But revealing what he knew would mean revealing how he’d learned it, and everything else in that chain of implication. He was trapped by ridiculous circumstance.
“I have a thought, my lord; would you like to hear it?”
“I don’t suppose I have a choice.”
“Again, sir, you have all sorts of choices. I’m choosing to take you into my confidence. You might find it more convenient to allow this, rather than attempting to follow me blind later this evening. But the decision is entirely yours.”
He wanted to take his frustration out on something or somebody, but there was no approp
riate outlet for that here. “Fine. Out with it.”
“Manners, please!”
“I do beg your pardon, Miss Murcheson. Kindly proceed to enlighten me regarding your thoughts.”
She gestured toward the road, allowing him to negotiate a merger with the general traffic before speaking. “We saw something that might interest my father greatly. A submersible, possibly a smuggler, carrying secret technology only the military should possess. And you think you may know who’s behind it, except that the obvious suspect is in prison on another continent. So.”
“So?”
“I don’t want to thumb my nose at my father per se, but I wouldn’t mind seeming more valuable in his eyes. It might afford me more freedom to do what I like, if I can bring back something of use to him. Information. A name, perhaps. And you might be forgiven many transgressions if you helped deliver that name.”
He fingered the reins, contemplating the notion. Cushion the inevitable blow of his failure by achieving some intervening success to trump it? The idea was probably insane. Miss Murcheson was probably insane. But really, at this point Barnabas had little left to lose.
“I find your thought not entirely without merit.”
“Excellent. Do you know, my lord, I think I’m beginning to enjoy our courtship.”
Despite himself, despite everything, he smiled. “I do what I can, Miss Murcheson. I do what I can.”
• • •
ANOTHER BOAT HAD been lost in the night, and half a dozen men along with it. They’d been at the signal buoy again, edging on no-man’s-land at the estuary mouth, and the rumor on the docks confirmed Rollo’s worst fears. Mrs. Hill, God rest her soul, had been telling the truth. A late-returning trawler had spotted the monster pulling the boat down, glowing tentacles as long as the masthead Robson was tall, and now every ship in the port was buzzing with talk of the giant killer squid. Some were even trying to link the squid to the earthquake, heaping nightmare upon nightmare.
Rollo had slept through the quake, so he wasn’t sure he believed in it. Even the deaths didn’t make it real to him. They weren’t his men, and buildings collapsed all the time. But he believed in some creature with unholy tentacles and a vicious temper when it came to flashing lights. That was the key, he’d decided. The underwater lamps they’d been testing to signal to the submersibles must have attracted the hellish squid, and it had lashed out at the nearest moving object. Tom Hill had escaped the beast—although he hadn’t escaped Edwin, who found him in an opium den a few days later and dispatched him with a minimum of fuss—but the larger boat hadn’t. The squid was escalating its hostilities.
“Or it were a different one,” his pet cartologist Robson suggested, as they breakfasted on buns and studied a map of the channel. “Bigger and meaner. Maybe Tom’s squid ’as a vengeful mother. A kraken, like.”
Maybe so. Robson had spent years serving on merchant ships before coming to work for Rollo, and he’d seen many strange things in his travels. He’d never seen a kraken, though, he’d had to admit.
Rollo stared at the pattern of pins on the map and absently fingered the enameled gold poppy on his lapel. His new talisman, all the way from the California Dominion, courtesy of a lad who had worked for the Lord of Gold himself but managed to escape the authorities’ sweep of Orm’s employees. An airship pilot, or so he claimed, who also knew his way around a submersible. A useful type, this lad Finn. Young, to know all he did, and suspiciously posh in accent and manner. He reminded Rollo of himself at that age, and Rollo suspected they shared a certain type of history—the history of grasping bastard brothers who hadn’t quite come to terms with the limitations of birth on the wrong side of the aristocratic blanket. But he’d have been wrong to accept those limitations himself, so perhaps this Finn was too. After all, who ran things now that Baron Orm was moldering in jail? Belowstairs maid Alice Furneval’s boy, not the son of the late dowager baroness. Rollo, the lad who’d been lucky to receive acknowledgment from his sire, and grudging time with his half brother’s tutor.
His brother had always shown an interest in botany and horticulture, and he’d adopted the poppy as his motif even as a young man. Finn could have brought no surer proof that he came from Orm’s employ. The boy reported that before his arrest, the Lord of Gold had a different golden poppy ornament for every day of the week, each with its hidden cache of snuff and its even more cleverly hidden blade. This particular one had been for Tuesdays, apparently. But Rollo had worn it every day since acquiring it from Finn two months prior. It was a source of strength, a symbol of his ascendancy.
The map in front of him had changed dramatically over the course of those same two months, donning an array of color-coded pins and lines that stood for all sorts of hard-won knowledge. The givens, such as the boundaries of the military’s blockade and the position of various ports within and without that zone, were marked in white. But now there were green flags standing for the “safe” routes the military allowed approved traders like the British East India Company, and a network of blue to indicate the various regular submersible patrols they’d ferreted out with the help of the new hydrophone array. Orange flags with times penned on, showing the windows of opportunity for travel to avoid those patrols.
This afternoon, however, Robson was focused on the red pins, and Rollo nodded as the man added a new point of interest. “Our lad Billy Walthrop confirmed it this morning. The Navy’s seismograph failed ’em again. His cousin in Le Havre sent him a message with reports from three different clients. All officers. The alarm in Atlantis Station didn’t trip until the quake had already started. They had to shuffle the crew out on subs, no time for the tunnel. Which means none of the sensors to the west of the base are functioning anymore.”
“Or so we surmise,” Rollo countered. “We’re basing our deductions on the word of an expatriate whore with a side business in illicitly gotten opium, after all.”
“Aye. But Billy says she’s a good girl, for all that.”
“I’ve told you before, we need a new source. I don’t like relying on a whore; they’re not dependable. My mother was a whore, after all, and she sold me to my father when I was still in swaddling clothes. I know whereof I speak.”
Robson frowned at him. “I thought she were a scullery maid?”
Grinding his teeth, Rollo pointed toward the newest red pin. “Flashing lights, Robson. We’ve been assuming for months that the Royal Navy’s fancy geological equipment has suffered sabotage from one of our competitors. Or from the French. But their seismic sensors use some sort of flashing light signal, correct? I think I know who their saboteur is.”
“Oh, aye?”
“Aye, as you say. Aye indeed. The squid, Robson.”
After a moment of incomprehension, the light dawned on Robson’s broad face. “It’s going for the lights! It’s probably yanked them all clean out o’ the bedrock.”
“They’ve been doing all that good work, and we’ve certainly reaped the benefit. Sooner or later the Navy will have to abandon the station or risk being flooded if a big enough quake occurs and they’ve no advance warning. No station means more difficulty refueling and deploying their damn submersibles. They’ll have to rethink their entire blockade strategy.”
“Beggin’ your pardon, sir, you don’t seem best pleased about it.”
Rollo flicked at one gilded petal of the lapel poppy, triggering a minute tray to slide out with a handy pinch of snuff. “I would be, if the damn sea monster hadn’t taken two of my own boats by now. I can’t risk the creature going for any of my submersibles, can I?” He took the snuff with a slightly indelicate snort. “They’d flood the whole channel with opium, for one thing. I’ve two large shipments ready to send, and a batch of the new Afghani product to receive next week. Enough to worry about with the Navy and the British East India Company’s investigators looking out for the stuff. I don’t need to add dangerous boat-eating squid into the
equation. If I have to choose between the sabotage continuing and my shipments continuing, I choose the shipments.”
“What, then, sir?”
Tensing his upper lip against the urge to sneeze, Rollo gestured toward the array of red pins that fanned out on the map over the western inlet to the channel. “The hydrophonic array has proven successful against the military’s submersibles. It has let us avoid our hunters. Now it’s time we put it to use on other prey.”
EIGHT
TWO DAYS HAD passed since their very proper-seeming turn through the park. Freddie didn’t like to admit she’d enjoyed the time spent with Barnabas, especially given the circumstances driving them together. But she had no trouble acknowledging her amusement now, in this new setting she’d dragged him to. Her own adopted turf, where she was comfortable but poor Smith-Grenville was decidedly not.
“Don’t know about the new lad,” Mr. Armintrout whispered as she tightened the final nuts on his steam dog and prepared to fire it up. “Seems a bit at sea. Old to be starting at this too.”
She bit back a smile and cut her eyes toward Barnabas, who was attempting a casual crouch on the other side of the dog’s wheel enclosure. Even in coarse-woven trousers and a miserably patched jacket, hunkered over a pile of machinery with a grease smear on his cheek, Smith-Grenville managed to look like he belonged in a drawing room. Or any place populated by gentle folk, which definitely didn’t include butchers, fishmongers, or the like. His posture alone gave him away as a product of public schools, she thought. But to anyone who didn’t know, he just seemed supremely uncomfortable.
“Just nervous, I expect. He’ll learn. How’s business been, Mr. A?”
“Can’t complain. No thanks to you. You’re a hard man to get hold of, Fred Merchant.”
“I wouldn’t want to make it too easy for my adoring public to find me. All right, would you care to do the honors?” She pointed to the flint trigger on the coal hopper.
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