After a moment of silence, Dan ventured, “But this one’s different. Isn’t that right, miss?”
They turned onto Freddie’s street, which meant their talk was nearly over. She wasn’t sure if it was perfect or terrible timing. “Oh, big brother Dan. Is that what has you so worried? My virtue?”
Dan snorted. “You can do as you like with that. What you and me have done, tinkering and all, that’s been a lark. What you’re doing with this lord, this ain’t no lark. And I don’t mean anything to do with that virtue. There’s talk, bad talk down around the docklands. Folk have been hurt. Folk have been . . . murdered, miss. No nice way to put it. You don’t want to go messing in this business. Especially not when you have your mind on other things. Love makes you blind.”
“Love? Who said anything about love? Don’t be ridiculous.” Pfft. Love.
Dan shook his head, drawing to a halt at the carriage block. He leaped down as a boy took the reins, and beat the footman to the barouche’s door to hand Freddie out. His neatly gloved hand dwarfed hers. In his midnight blue livery, he looked enormous, and Freddie wondered if that was part of his hesitation at allowing Barnabas to take his place as her escort and bodyguard. Dan relied on his physical strength so much he would naturally be leery of other competencies.
“Safe home, miss.” He tipped his hat, reminding Freddie of her need for a new disguise hat now that she no longer needed the gigantic top hat to stuff her hair into. A cap, perhaps. It would be so light and easy to wear.
“Thank you, Daniel.”
He kept her hand a moment longer, giving her a stern look before he made a quick bow to excuse his lingering. “Makes you blind, miss,” he murmured.
“I shall keep that in consideration, Daniel.”
She was inside the house before realizing she didn’t know the final outcome of the uniform issue. With any luck, Mrs. Pinkerton would make the changes quickly and have it back to her with nobody the wiser, relieving Freddie’s and Dan’s minds.
• • •
FOR DECADES BEFORE the long war devastated their economy, the French had set the standard for large-scale nautical construction. Ironically, many of the ships in the British fleet had been commissioned from French shipyards. The flagship of the Lord of Gold’s submersible fleet hailed from that earlier, glorious time, and it was Rollo Furneval’s favorite spot for imagining he was the Lord Admiral of his own sinister, clandestine navy.
“Steady as she goes, Mr. O’Brien. Keep an even keel, Mr. Finn.”
“Aye aye, cap’n,” Finn replied. It always sounded so automatic from Finn, all that jackspeak. As if he’d been a real sailor at some point in his life. Rollo had no idea what any of it meant, but that hardly mattered because this wasn’t the Navy and the chaps he employed could bloody well pilot the submersible with or without him.
“Ballast . . . ho. We need to get deeper, O’Brien; stay close to the channel floor.”
O’Brien grunted and turned a valve on the baffling collection of pipes in front of him. Something creaked out a ticking groan, and Rollo’s ears tightened as the slender sixteen-man craft dove.
All about him was brass and curved beams of wood, most of it in need of a polish. He’d had one of the lads maintain the commanding officer’s chair in the cockpit, however, and the glowing gold of the brass rivets and fittings gleamed from the dark teak frame. His undersea throne. They were running dark this trip, even the work lights covered with red cloths to limit glare from the portholes, all in hopes they could avoid attracting the squid’s attention. In the dim, ruddy light, his throne looked like the helm of hell. Smelled a bit like it too, Rollo noted with a grimace. Too many fearful bodies in too small a space.
“There’s something off the port bow.” Mordecai Nesdin, the hydrophone operator, fiddled with his spectacles in the jerky, fitful way he always did when excited, then blurted out a bearing. It must have made sense to Finn, who pulled on some levers and adjusted a few dials. The sub turned, its sonic sensor array drifting more slowly to sway before the cockpit window like tendrils.
Or tentacles. Like seeking like, perhaps. Mordecai paddled from one foot to the other, holding his glasses in place as he watched his instruments. “Large. And moving. No, there are . . . Roland, Roland! There are more than one! One, two, three—”
“Don’t call me Roland. You know that, Mord. What the hell do you mean there are more than one?” He had known Mordecai since they were both boys. Mord, the tutor’s simple-yet-sometimes-brilliant son, and he the evil genius who could always turn Mord’s talents to his own uses.
“Rollo, Rollo, Rollo! Things out there! Seven, eight, nine, teneleventwelvethirteen twenty-nine, there are twenty-nine things out there, Rollo.”
“Fuck.”
The real Navy would have somebody sane to do the counting, somebody entirely unlike sad Mordecai with his fidgeting and his undeniable genius with machinery. Somebody who wouldn’t engage in self-polluting practices over said machinery more than once, requiring intervention from Rollo to prevent the devices from being lubricated in untoward ways and Mordecai from having his bits ground to bits.
“Count them again, Mord.”
“Twenty-nine!” His childhood friend crowed out the number in delight. “It’s a prime, Roland!”
He knew how Mordecai felt about prime numbers and declined to comment on that. “Let’s come to a halt here, lads.”
Finn and the others moved their controls smoothly, proving their worth. The submersible slowed, halted, and Rollo approached the cockpit window to survey the aquatic landscape beyond with his own eyes. Sometimes he simply trusted those more than all the fancy instruments in the world.
He saw . . . seaweed. Rocks, crusted with barnacles or something like that. Murk, and more murk, and—there, darting across the vista as quick as lightning, a shape that went from dark and speckled to a flashing ghostly pale, and a wash of inky black that dissipated quickly in the current but accomplished its purpose quite well. By the time Rollo could see again, the creature that had left the ink was gone.
“What the bloody hell—”
“Cuttlefish?” whispered Mordecai, fingering his bottom lip with one hand and his spectacles earpiece with the other. Then he held up his hands before his face, counting to ten. “Octopus? No, no. Cuttlefish?”
If it could be learned from a book, if it had a classification of some kind, Mordecai knew it. Rollo turned his attention to the savant, rounding the captain’s seat and crossing the narrow cockpit to his side. “What d’you suppose it is, Mord? Where’s it fit?”
“Too big,” Mordecai replied. “Cuttlefish are little, little fish. Not fish. Cephalopods. Phylum: Mollusca. Order: Cephalopoda. But . . . decapodiform? Eight legs, two tentacles, that’s ten. And it was camouflaged in the coral before it moved. Then pulsing. I saw it change. Direct observation. So it must be a cuttlefish. But a giant one. Something new.”
“What’s a cuttlefish?”
Mord turned his head and aimed a scornful glare at Rollo. “A squid, like. Only a squid with eight legs and also two arm sort of things. And can do . . . camouflage. Even more than a squid. And can flash, like light on the surface of the water.”
“Camouflage? What’s that, then? Sounds French.”
“Blowing smoke. Hiding. Disguises. Disguises . . . guises . . .”
Mord lowered himself to a crouch and started to rock. Once he was rocking, Rollo knew, there was no point asking him further questions unless you wanted to trigger an explosion.
“And there are twenty-nine of those bastards out there.” He glanced at the notes Mordecai had taken as he listened to his device, interpreting the pings and echoes into a picture made from sound. He’d ended with crude X shapes but at the start he’d created a shockingly accurate picture of something. If it wasn’t an octopus or a sea monster, Rollo didn’t know what it was. Some unholy combination of the two. “Tentacle
s. Tom Hill wasn’t lying about that.”
“Sir?”
He looked up to see Finn watching him, awaiting orders. The rest had lost interest, it seemed. O’Brien was picking his nose with a contemplative air, and the other two lads were arm wrestling on one of the control consoles. Useless, the lot of them. Except for poor Mordecai, and perhaps young Finn.
“Take us home, Finn.”
The young man nodded and roused his companions, and together they twirled valves and flipped switches and brought the submersible about with a sickening lurch, pointing it toward what Rollo could only assume was the direction of the home port.
“No torpedoes fired today, Mr. Furneval?” O’Brien asked, as they slipped through the chilly waters of the channel toward their berth. “What about the big squid, then?”
“Not today,” Rollo confirmed, taking his seat again and lacing his fingers together as he considered his options. “We’ll have to wait until we can assemble the fleet, I think. We’re going to need more submersibles.”
• • •
FORTUNE SMILED UPON Freddie when she learned that Sophie was planning a small house party for the following weekend. This was rare for the widow Wallingford, who usually preferred to avoid inviting speculation about her love life. House parties were notorious opportunities for liaisons, and people would surely gossip about whomever she chose to invite. As she told Freddie, however, she couldn’t bring herself to care.
“It’s simply too hot in town already,” she’d complained. “It’s not yet June, but it’s dusty and horrible and the flies are in full force. Some fresh air will do us all good.”
Freddie didn’t want fresh air. She wanted the close, intense atmosphere of an undersea catacomb, or the no doubt stale and stifling environment of a tiny submersible vessel.
“The country does sound delightful. But do you think you could spare me?”
“Spare you? I suppose so. Or would you rather I invite Lord Smith-Grenville along too? I’d planned to, you know.” The older woman refreshed her own cup of tea and smiled at her in a knowing way, which Freddie felt in no position to rebuke. “Do say you’ll come. My favorite mare has foaled, and by all reports the baby is absolutely darling. Well worth the trip.”
“I’d like to go. Or rather . . .” She was venturing into novel and dangerous territory. Sophie was her oldest, dearest friend, but Freddie was well aware that her antics had long pushed at the limits of Sophie’s comfort. Though Sophie wasn’t above a little subversion, she might well balk at something of this magnitude. And it was a great deal—perhaps too much—to request of a friend. Still, there was no knowing until she asked. “I’d like to say I’m going, so Father won’t expect me in the house for a few days, and then skip the party to go do a job of work that’s a bit more complex than my usual.”
“Oh, Freddie.” Sophie put her teacup down too abruptly, clinking the china and nearly sloshing the contents in her haste. “What are you up to now? Does Lord Smith-Grenville know about this?”
“Of course. He’s coming with me.”
“He’s what? Oh, don’t tell me you’re planning to elope. I know I’m the worst chaperone in the world, but I simply won’t have an elopement. Your mother would murder me.”
Blushing to her forehead, Freddie took up her tea and took an overlarge sip to bolster herself. “It isn’t. We’re not eloping. We’re not—he’s the man my father hired to watch me, not—”
“Fine job he’s doing too.”
“That’s what Dan said.”
“Daniel Pinkerton is a fine, sensible young man, and you ought to pay more attention to his advice.”
“We are not eloping. I can’t say exactly what our plan is, because the less you know, the better. But I should think you’d be the last person to suspect me of planning to elope, Sophie. Where on earth did you get such an idea?”
Her friend’s serene brow wrinkled the tiniest bit, the closest to a frown Sophie ever allowed herself to get. “I’ve seen the way he looks at you. I know that look. Too well.”
“You’ve seen Barnabas look that way before?” Was he in the habit of mooning after young ladies? She wasn’t at all sure she liked that idea.
“No, not on Lord Smith-Grenville.” There was a subtle rebuke in her voice at Freddie’s familiarity. A much-needed one too. Freddie should be more careful to use the man’s proper title. “Although there is a strong family resemblance.”
“His brother.”
“Phineas.” Her lovely mouth curved around the name, turning it into a sensual talisman of sounds.
They had been on a first-name basis, just as Freddie and Barnabas were and shouldn’t be.
“Oh, Sophie. How?”
“Not easily. But my father was occupied with keeping his creditors at bay, and my mother took ill for over a fortnight that Season so I had an unprecedented bout of freedom. Events I wouldn’t have normally attended. Driving out with groups of friends. Wallingford seemed primed to offer for me, and I’d complied with all their instructions to encourage him, so I think they were also inclined to give me my head and let me push on to the finish. Which I did, of course.”
“Eventually.”
“Thomas never imagined he had my heart, Freddie. That wasn’t part of our arrangement. He had someone else, you know. Someone he could never be public with. We did become friends, and we even tried for an heir before he grew ill. It was far from unpleasant, to be honest. I was faithful to him. But neither of us ever thought it was love. He and I understood one another perfectly.”
Freddie suspected many marriages made do with less, and she knew her friend had been relieved to free herself from her family’s clutches. Grateful to Wallingford, and happy in her new life. But it still sounded sad, deeply so, now that she knew how steep the cost of Sophie’s liberation really was. She would never have been allowed to marry Phineas, but to turn him away in order to accept the ring of a man she had no hope of loving must have been unbearably bitter.
“What happened, then?”
“We met on one of those drives. Phineas was on leave and visiting a friend in London. It was as if we’d known each other all our lives. He didn’t want to hear that I was already spoken for. We quarreled when he found out the engagement had been formalized, but we still corresponded for a few months afterward. He tried everything he could think of to persuade me. The next chance he got, he came again to see me. That was a few days before my wedding. It ended in tears.”
“Had you told him why—?”
“No,” Sophie snapped. “How would that have helped anything? I made my own choice. You want to paint me as a tragic heroine, Freddie, but I was never that. You mustn’t think that way. My life is not a Gothic novel. Yes, my aunt was put into an asylum shortly after she refused a promising engagement. Yes, my parents felt free to remind me of that, and the knowledge was ominous at times. But what you’ve never seemed to accept is that everyone in the family truly believes Aunt Elizabeth is a lunatic, whether or not she actually tried to kill herself. She was never quite right, even as a young girl. And they kept me so close because they were terrified of what might happen to all of us if I didn’t marry well, or if I started to behave as Elizabeth had and couldn’t marry. It’s not as though they were profligate. Father inherited most of his debts and saw a chance to clear them in one go. Besides, the laws have changed considerably in the last twenty years. My solicitor now says they never would have managed to have me committed, even if I turned down a proposal from the Prince of Wales himself, so the implied threat was an empty one.”
“You didn’t believe so at the time.”
“I could have run off with Phineas. If I’d truly wanted to, I could have. I decided to accept Wallingford because I wanted to please my family and ease their circumstances. And I wanted a comfortable life for myself too, more than I wanted the uncertainty of aligning myself with a young officer I though
t I loved but barely knew.”
Freddie’s own stakes were not quite so high. She clung to her life of luxury, true, but there was no romance attached to the other option to lend it urgency. Nor would her family suffer financial loss if she ever did make that choice. She had it easy in every way, compared to her friend. If only it felt easy. Her trouble was she wanted both things, her family’s regard and support and the freedom to go forth and tinker. Finding a way to have both had become something like an obsession for her lately.
Sophie might have superb control over her emotional display, but Freddie had never perceived her as cold or calculating. Now, seeing the fine house in Belgravia, the delicate china, Sophie’s muted but elegant dress in the latest style, she tried to imagine how she might choose, if presented those same drastic alternatives. True love at the price of possible penury, and the loss of one’s family, who must then suffer financial disaster? Or the chance to secure everyone’s future, at the cost of one young man’s heart?
In a romantic novel, the choice would be obvious. True love must always win. In real life, however, the handsome young lover might not turn out to have a secret fortune stashed away, to be revealed only once he knew the heroine was picking him for the right reasons. And the nasty, grizzled, rich old husband of necessity might in fact be a soft-spoken, kind gentleman in poor health who simply didn’t want to spend his final years alone. It all bore further consideration, but for now she had more important concerns.
“I am truly not planning to elope with Phineas Smith-Grenville’s brother. I am not planning anything romantic,” she insisted, stretching the truth a bit more than she knew she should. “I only need a few days.”
Sophie shook her head, then sighed again. “Two. You can have two days. Saturday as early as you like, you can be off and do what you need to do. By Sunday afternoon you report back here, with Lord Smith-Grenville, or I’ll go to your father.”
TWELVE
Gilded Lily Page 12
