Gilded Lily

by Delphine Dryden

HE COULDN’T TAKE his eyes off her. At some point, Barnabas knew that might conflict with the impression he was trying to give of being a naval officer. Military men weren’t encouraged to sneak glances at one another’s bottoms and think lascivious thoughts, as far as he was aware.

  To be fair, it wasn’t only her bottom that drew his interest, in part because her smart, double-breasted uniform coat covered much of the body part in question, so only tantalizingly brief glimpses were available. No, it was the whole of her, the Freddie-ness, that appealed. The very fact that she’d orchestrated this excursion, that they were descending into a secret tunnel to explore an undersea station and possibly steal a submersible while they were at it, all because some fishermen were out of work . . . the certainty she projected, that this was a justified and appropriate course of action. Her conviction and bravery astounded him. The facts of her life, as she’d managed somehow to arrange them, amazed him.

  She defied belief, and she put him to shame, because she made things happen instead of waiting for them to come along. Barnabas was beginning to feel as though he had only ever existed on the fringes of his own life, instead of inhabiting it fully and turning it into what he wanted. Even this job, he had taken at somebody else’s suggestion. Only recently had he started to ask himself, why? Why was this search for Phineas so important to him, when even their parents had come to peace with the loss of their younger son? As yet, he had no answer for himself.

  “Remember, if there are workers in the vestibule, we ignore them and move forward. Keep your eyes on the tunnel entrance, and if the velocipede is there just climb aboard and get ready to pedal. Let me handle starting it up, while you look at your papers and act disinterested.”

  “I’m not completely unfamiliar with engines, you know. I can strip a steam car to parts and rebuild it. I could have sorted out what to do myself, given time.”

  “But even I, who did sort it out, had difficulty operating the thing smoothly. Now I’ve had a few times to practice, while you’ve had none. Besides, you’ll look like the senior officer. It makes sense for the junior to have to crank up the engine.”

  “If it’s there at all. If it isn’t, we’ll have to turn back. We can’t walk to Le Havre, it must be three hundred miles.”

  They’d had this argument before, with Freddie insisting on exploring as far as they could even on foot, and Barnabas refusing to venture into the tunnel again except in whatever ran on the rail. As the lift was slowing toward a halt, he finally brought out the trump. “If that tunnel really does run all the way to France, nobody would ever walk into it on foot. Where would they be going, on foot down a featureless three-hundred-mile tube? We have to take the vehicle or the workmen will know something is amiss. If it isn’t there, we can only act surprised and annoyed and leave with all due haste.”

  She scowled at him a moment, then: “Blast.”

  The door rattled open and they strode into the vestibule, heading straight toward the tunnel. Barnabas could feel the handful of workers looking, studying them. Identifying their features for future identification, possibly. Sweat formed on his brow and he forced himself to unclench his fingers when they began to crumple the sheaf of papers he held. He heard the noise of a saw blade and then a creak of metal on metal behind him as the men resumed whatever they’d been doing.

  A cart was waiting for them, and he wasn’t sure whether he was relieved or thrown into a panicked despair. Either way, it felt almost like swooning. This was no humble pedaled vehicle, but a full-fledged carriage of newly polished wood and brass, with plush velvet upholstery on its benches. Brave Freddie marched straight up to the shiny, teacup-shaped thing and started turning a crank on what must be the engine casing near the base. As Barnabas mounted the step and swung himself into the forward-facing seat, the motor purred into life, much quieter than he was expecting.

  “I’d love to know what’s under the bonnet,” Freddie murmured as she joined him, sitting opposite and perusing the control panel with a nonchalant eye. “Another Stirling engine, I’d be willing to bet, but it sounds like nothing I’ve ever seen or heard of. Can you reach that panel behind you on the wall? There’s a flame symbol on it. I think it might activate a light. Or a fire alarm, one or the other.”

  “We’ll find out,” he muttered back, reaching for the panel and just managing to tap it with his fingertips. Tiny green bulbs guttered into brightness along that wall, illuminating an eerie path down the tracks that disappeared into the darkness.

  “That’s better than nothing,” she said with a shrug. “Although this time . . . ah, yes.” With a decisive gesture, she flipped one of the myriad toggles on the panel, and a headlamp blazed to life. Another flick, and Barnabas heard a ratcheting sound as the carriage shifted into movement. Slow at first, probably because the engine was still heating, and it took time to build up momentum.

  By the time the thing was at top speed, he longed for the relative sedateness of the velocipede. The green lights blurred into a solid line on the wall beside him. The headlamp illuminated a woefully short distance ahead of the cart and created, for Barnabas, the constant sensation that something was going to fly at his face from the suddenly violated darkness of the tunnel.

  I must not be sick, he told himself over and over. I must not be sick, I must not be sick.

  He checked his chronometer when they flew past the first set of portholes, easier to spot this time with daylight filtering down through the water of the channel. It had taken a mere twenty minutes, compared to thirty on the velocipede, to reach that point.

  “Do you mind if I join you on that seat?” Freddie asked. Her voice sounded strained. “Sitting backward, I feel like something’s going to loom up behind me at any moment and whack the back of my head.”

  He nodded, lips clamped firmly together, and slid over to make room. He’d have liked to commiserate more clearly, but feared to speak lest he lose his already tenuous control over his protesting stomach.

  She took the space next to him, looking forward with a groan. “I’m not sure this is any better.”

  “At least we’ll see it coming.”

  It never came. After the first quarter hour or so, the fear wore itself down into boredom. Freddie’s tentative math regarding the time to reach Le Havre had been based on the apparent speed of the velocipede in reaching what had appeared to be the mouth of the Thames estuary. As she had only the roughest gauge of the actual distance, and the carriage seemed to be traveling faster than the velocipede, all she could do was guess at how long their journey would take. Four hours was her estimate.

  At first, they sat, not saying much. Then the silence grew intolerable, but as neither of them had spoken in so long, neither seemed willing to speak first. Finally, Barnabas cleared his throat.

  “I need to talk or I’m liable to fall asleep.”

  Thank God. “What would you like to talk about?”

  “You. How did you learn to pick locks, anyway?”

  “That’s what you want to know? You could ask me anything, and you choose that? It’s not very exciting. I taught myself, mostly.”

  “Yes, but . . . why? You said your parents didn’t lock you in, so you obviously didn’t need to escape.”

  She considered that, the earnest belief with which he’d said it and the instinctive clench of her stomach at the idea. “Just because you’re not locked in, doesn’t mean you have nothing to escape. I’m not trying to wax metaphorical, I simply mean that there’s escaping from and escaping to. But that doesn’t really answer your question, I know.”

  “No. You don’t want to answer my question. Forget I asked.”

  They would be there for hours, and awkward silence would only make the time go more slowly. She might not be used to conversing this way with anyone, but Barnabas had proven himself a good listener thus far.

  “It’s all right. There’s nothing sinister involved. It’s just . . . compli
cated.”

  “We have time,” he pointed out needlessly.

  “All right. When the war ended and my family moved from London to Le Havre, we settled in a rather large manor house in the countryside. Huge, actually. It had belonged to some ancient, aristocratic family who’d lost their fortune, and it had been empty for close to a decade when we moved in. Father, Mother, and me.”

  “No siblings?”

  “No, just me. And I’d spent most of my formative years in the London house, which always seemed crowded with guests and family. Everyone on top of each other. I’d never been in a house as big as the one in France, or in a place so empty. There were a dozen or so servants, naturally. But other than my governess, I hardly saw any of them. As a child, I felt very much alone there. And with my father spending so much time at his factory, and Mother often away visiting old friends or reacquainting herself with Paris, I truly was by myself there most of the time. Eleven years old. Nobody to play with, no shops or sights to see. Just miles of coastline. Every so often Father would take me to the factory with him, and it was the best place on earth. I would have happily gone every day. I dreamed of a day he might even allow me to work for him, with him. But most of the time he left me at home where I was lonely, and terribly bored.”

  He knew her well enough by now to smile and shake his head. “Oh, dear.”

  “I’m afraid so. I was an intrepid little girl—”

  “This does not surprise me.”

  “Hush! I was too intrepid for my own good, and the only way I knew to manage fear was to be bold in the face of it. I was bored but also terrified, you see. Of that big, spooky house, especially the closed-up wing my father had forbidden me to enter.”

  “He might as well have laid a trail of candy to point the way.”

  Freddie nodded. “It’s as if he had designed it specifically to entice me. I set out to explore, and it wasn’t long before I came up against locked doors. There was nothing for it but to open them, and I didn’t dare risk stealing the housekeeper’s keys. I had hairpins, I knew the basic principles of lock design, and I had plenty of time on my hands, so . . .”

  “What was your governess doing while this was going on?”

  “Carrying on an affair with my father’s valet. He still used one back then. I thought it quite romantic. Anyway, I learned to pick the locks, which weren’t all that complicated as it turned out. I explored the mansion and conquered my fears.”

  Barnabas tilted his head, acknowledging her accomplishment. “And what did you find in your explorations? Treasures? Skeletons?”

  “Yes, actually!” She giggled when he affected to look appalled. “Mouse and rat ones. And a tiny, perfectly preserved bird skeleton on one hearthstone. Also some furniture that hadn’t been fine enough to sell or light enough to steal. A beautiful crystal chandelier shattered on the floor in an empty ballroom, because the ceiling was rotten. Fortunately I hadn’t yet tried to walk in the room overhead, or I might have fallen straight through on top of all that mess. Let’s see, what else? Several lovely books, most of which were full of bookworms but a few of which I was able to salvage. A forgotten menagerie of tiny clockwork toys that I appropriated for experimenting on. Most of them were broken, which turned out to be instructive. And a single diamond ear bob lodged in a crack in the floorboards of what appeared to have been the lady of the manor’s boudoir.”

  “Real diamonds?”

  “Yes. You’ve seen me wear them. I told my parents I’d found the thing in the upstairs parlor, where I was allowed to be, and they praised me for having such sharp eyes. When I was older, Mother had the stones set into a pendant for me. They still don’t know where I really found it. And they thought the clockwork menagerie came from the nursery cupboard.”

  He shook his head, equal parts admiration and pity. “That’s amazing, but still . . . terrible too. Poor little thing. It’s lucky you didn’t kill yourself wandering around alone in all that decrepitude.”

  Freddie recalled the days spent creeping through the silent, dusty halls, the thrill of even the most insignificant discoveries, and the rank terror that had claimed her on a few occasions. Like the time she’d tried to shove a heavy curtain aside to let light into one of the rooms, and the rotted fabric had torn from its rod with no warning to fall on top of her. She’d screamed and screamed, batting at the suffocating velvet until the thick dust and mildew nearly choked her. In her panic, she was sure somebody had accosted her, and she struck out in front of her rather than seeking the edge of the curtain. And then by some accident she found it, and burst forth into air and sunlight, whipping the assaulting cloth away from her body in a final glittering shower of dust particles. They danced in the sunbeams long after her heart had stopped its mad racing.

  Another time, she’d nearly set the empty wing on fire when she set her lantern on a chair that was too rickety to take even that slight weight. The whole thing had toppled over, and the candle had tumbled from the lantern and ignited the cobwebs between the chair legs. She’d barely managed to stamp out the flames with her feet before they spread.

  “It is lucky,” she agreed. “But it wasn’t terrible. I learned a great deal.”

  “With the clockwork pieces?”

  “Those too. At the time my father still liked my propensity for tinkering, and he let me bring the menagerie to his workshop. I would study what the masters and journeymen did, and apply everything I saw to repairing the toys until they were all running again. But really, what I learned from the whole experience is that I can sometimes create options where none seem to exist.” And she’d learned not to let her father hear her talk of a desire to become a makesmith herself. That sort of talk had gotten her banned from even visiting the factory, much less spending time on the workshop floor. Her father wouldn’t hear of Freddie sullying herself by taking up a trade.

  “Is that what you were trying to teach Lady Sophronia? The lock-picking was just a metaphor?”

  She reminded herself yet again to be patient. To remember that Barnabas had never truly been circumscribed in his life and simply couldn’t grasp what it really meant to have no options available. To even have to create one’s own alternatives. “Sophie’s parents were more desperate for money than anyone but their creditors knew. She was their one hope of resolving their financial difficulties in a single swoop, and they weren’t going to waste her. They polished her until she shone, they gave her everything she needed to be successful on the marriage mart, but they were more about the stick than the carrot. Not the literal stick,” she hastened to assure him. “She had this aunt, you see. Her aunt Elizabeth. She’d only known her for a short time, back when she was a little girl and Elizabeth was about to make her debut. Something bad happened, Sophie never knew exactly what, and one day Elizabeth was gone. The official story was that she’d suffered from a nervous condition, and had to move to the country for her health. That her constitution was too delicate for marriage. For years, that’s what Sophie believed.”

  “And the truth?”

  “Because of her nervous condition, she’d refused to marry the man her family chose for her. She refused to marry at all. After they’d failed to convince her, they had her declared insane and committed to an asylum. And before they sent Sophie to France—which they only did to delay her debut for a year, giving them more time to come up with the money to fund it—they told her the truth. A little cautionary tale, with her ‘bon voyage.’ It was not entirely a lie, of course. The asylum is in the country. A sanitarium, really.”

  Barnabas was shaking his head. “That doesn’t really happen in this day and age. Surely Lady Sophie must have misunderstood, or . . . perhaps the woman was simply genuinely ill. If she weren’t, they never would have kept her at the sanitarium once it was clear she didn’t need their care.”

  “You think so? An overdose of laudanum. A suicide note, in what appeared to be her handwriting. A devoted fam
ily claiming a history of such attempts. And a patient who denies these very clear proofs, and also demonstrates paranoia by implicating her family in a conspiracy to make her appear a lunatic. There’s really no way to know who’s telling the truth; even Sophie says the family truly believes the woman is mad. But even if she isn’t, the presumption favors the people doing the committing, not the patient. Sophie’s parents also made it very clear to her that a family history of insanity would only make it easier for them to repeat the process. For her own good, of course. Because she would have to be a lunatic to deny a reasonable proposal.”

  “Good God.”

  “I suspect God abandoned the case years ago. The locks weren’t a metaphor for Sophie. Learning to pick them was a survival skill. In case she ever truly needed to escape. Fortunately for her, it didn’t come to that.” Freddie pulled her feet up beneath her, squirming to make herself more comfortable on the seat.

  “Because she accepted Wallingford.” Barnabas sounded dubious, still.

  “He seemed by far the best alternative.”

  “I suppose he was.”

  “How magnanimous of you to allow for such a possibility.”

  He looked at her, clearly bruised by the touch of sarcasm evident in her tone. “I can’t pretend to know what the ordeal was like for Lady Sophronia. However, I can still feel for my brother. He was a reserved and steady man, not given to dramatics. If the affair affected him as deeply as it seems to have done, caused such an upheaval that he turned to narcotics to forget, he must have been truly in love with the lady. The circumstances were unfortunate for him too, not her alone.”

  She nodded, ashamed of herself. Of course Barnabas thought of his brother first, as was only right. Sophie herself was inclined to remark on all the various extenuating circumstances surrounding that time in her life, giving credit wherever she possibly could. It was easy for Freddie, on the outside, to take an extreme view. It didn’t really impact her directly.

  “My turn to ask you a question.”