Gilded Lily

by Delphine Dryden

  “Why do you despise him?”

  “Why do you defend him?”

  A stalemate. And Barnabas wasn’t even sure why they were fighting to begin with. It had all gone sour so suddenly.

  He gestured toward the main tunnel. “I don’t hear anything out there. I think they may be gone.”

  She seemed to come back to herself, to his relief. “Forgive my outburst. It’s hardly your fault, after all.”

  He thought in a sense, perhaps it was. He was complicit in the system. Pointing that out was an exercise for another time, however. “Of course. And I apologize if my question was impertinent. Shall we see if we can find the Gilded Lily now?”

  He’d raised concerns earlier about what would happen to them after the Navy discovered its submersible was missing. Freddie had never adequately addressed those concerns, to Barnabas’s mind, but it hardly mattered now. They had to get out of the station some way, and taking the Gilded Lily seemed as good a way as any other. They’d just have to handle the consequences as they came.

  “I suppose we ought to.” With a last, wistful glance at the seismography equipment, she joined him at the doorway. Nobody was in the side hallway, and when they crept forward to check, the main corridor was empty as well. The station was silent, at least of personnel noises. A pervasive hum of hidden gears, the engines that kept the station habitable for humans, accompanied the pair as they scouted their way down the hall one doorway at a time.

  • • •

  THE ROUTE WAS more complicated than Freddie had anticipated. None of the closest doors led to submersibles at all, but to other offices, equipment consoles and work rooms. And when they finally discovered the twisting stairway around the corner at the end of the corridor, they followed it up to find a labyrinth of steel-paneled passages. The only improvement was that some of the walls had portholes, so they knew they were no longer in the bedrock but once more above the surface of the ocean floor.

  “That’s promising. And look, how clever!” She pointed out one of the portholes and waited for Barnabas to catch up. “See there, at the edges of the pane? Rock and coral. And if you look over there, that hillock thing at an angle to the window? There’s another porthole in there, I think, right next to that largest clump of seaweed. You can just make it out.”

  “The whole thing is camouflaged.”

  To any submersible or diver who didn’t know what to look for, the entire station must look like an outcropping, a natural formation. Except for the larger glass panels over the main control chamber, but perhaps those were camouflaged too in some way that wasn’t noticeable from the inside.

  “The smugglers weren’t flirting with danger, they simply didn’t know the tunnel was there.”

  The massive scale of the undertaking grew more apparent as they passed through a hatchway and entered yet another corridor, this one angled downward in wide, terraced steps. At each landing, there was another hatchway. The low-ceilinged passage continued out of sight, curving as it followed the natural or manufactured terrain. Two dozen hatches, perhaps more. A glance into the porthole on the first one confirmed Freddie’s suspicion. These, at last, were the submersible docks. An entire fleet, apparently, could be housed at the station, all unseen except by those with a need to know.

  Like the hatch they’d just come through, the portals along the terraced passage were closed. Nevertheless, the air was distinctly briny, damper than the rest of the station had seemed. The odor reminded Freddie how deep they were underwater, how much pressure must be on the station, how strong the structure needed to be to withstand the weight. And the earthquake had jarred it badly.

  “If we split up, we can find the Gilded Lily faster.”

  Barnabas shook his head. “Under no circumstances will we split up. I put my foot down.”

  When she opened her mouth to argue, he put a finger over her lips, then pointed down to his foot. And stamped it.

  It should have made her furious, his emphatic insistence. Instead she had to turn away to hide her smile. “Very well, then. We can start here. The sub in this one looks smallish; let’s take a closer look.”

  “It’s not that I don’t trust you alone.” He stepped forward to spin the wheel on the hatch, pulling it open to let her pass through first. “I mean I don’t, of course I don’t, but that isn’t the point.”

  “That’s quite all right.”

  “No, no. I believe you can take care of yourself. Good God, you travel regularly in parts of London where no gentleman dares go, and you haven’t had your throat cut yet, so I can only assume you have developed at least some self-preservation skills. But—oh, this isn’t the one, is it?”

  The submersible that bobbed in the open-topped tank before them was more bathysphere than anything else, a pudgy pod that bore no resemblance to a sleek lily bud. Freddie propped one foot on the low metal parapet that held back the water, sighing as she gazed down at the ugly vessel.

  “No, it isn’t. And I don’t think both of us would fit in there, at any rate. On to the next one.”

  “It might do for a backup plan, if we can find two of them.” He followed her to the next docking chamber, still talking as he worked the wheel to the portal. “But capable as you are, I would never forgive myself if I knowingly let you go off alone, and something happened that would have been in my power to prevent. I know it makes little sense. You did well enough before I arrived, after all.”

  She had. But Freddie had to admit it was enjoyable to adventure with a partner for once. Dan Pinkerton, bless him, had never quite been that. He’d never entered into the spirit of the thing. Despite his obvious anxieties, Barnabas at least seemed game to explore. Like a small boy, he took up the ineffectual wooden sword of his bravery and crossed into the dark forest, fully accepting the possibility of wolves.

  Or, in this case, floods. The stone floor of the next dock was slick with seawater, an ominous sign. Whatever had once been docked there was gone now, and the water in the tank was level with the top of the retaining wall.

  Barnabas closed the portal carefully after they’d exited. “We should hurry.”

  Another few of the ugly bathysphere-shaped things, another half-dozen empty tanks. Freddie’s chest began to tighten, her head to ache. From the pressure, probably, but whether it was literal or figurative, she couldn’t tell.

  The wheel on the next hatch stuck, but when Freddie stepped in to help Barnabas turn it, he pushed back with a stiff arm. “No! Look . . .”

  She looked at his face first. He’d gone a sickly shade of pale gray, and sweat beaded on his brow. “Are you ill?”

  “No, not at me. At the window.”

  “Porthole,” she corrected automatically, but turned her gaze where he was pointing. And gasped, backing away as if it might help. He followed, embracing her, placing a comforting hand on the center of her back as he tried to interpose himself between her and the danger. She had to peer over his shoulder to keep her eyes on the hatch, clinging to his upper arms for support.

  Water splashed against the double pane of reinforced glass, level with Barnabas’s eyes. If he’d succeeded in opening the hatch, they might have been drowned. And who could say what the deluge might have done to the station? The hatches were obviously closed, and very thick and heavy, for good reason. The docking pools clearly relied on a careful balance of air pressure to maintain their integrity. If the quake had caused a breach in the station’s hull, any one of the hatches might be holding back the entire channel.

  And what’s more, “What if that one was the Gilded Lily?”

  Barnabas shook his head and released her with clear reluctance, then proceeded to the last hatch before the tunnel turned at an angle. “Nothing we can do about it. If this isn’t it, though, I vote we split up after all and each take one of the ones that look like oversized diving helmets.”

  “Agreed.”

  But the
last hatch along that wall was operational, with no flood behind it. And there, in the pool of pressure-contained water, floated the living embodiment of the diagram in her father’s office.

  “The Gilded Lily, I presume?”

  “At last!”

  Grinning, she turned to him, thrilled to see that his anxiety was at least tinged with excitement over their discovery. Freddie flung her arms around his neck on impulse, too happy and relieved to care about the setting, the awkwardness, the fact that she was meant to be a male naval officer.

  “Thank you,” she whispered in his ear, and his arms came up around her waist as a shiver went through his body.

  “For what?” he responded, bending to let his breath tickle her ear in return. Freddie’s body tingled with surprised interest.

  “For helping me find the Gilded Lily. For coming with me to scout out the station. For believing in me, even though we may both hang if we’re caught.”

  Pulling back enough to look at her, Barnabas smiled weakly. “I’m trying not to think about the hanging part. What do you plan to do with the submersible once you’re through using it? So that we can avoid being caught with it in our possession, at least?”

  “Abandon it. I ought to scuttle it, but I can’t bear the thought of ruining such a lovely piece of machinery. Besides, I don’t want to deprive the Navy of their equipment, only borrow it for a little while since they’re not making good use of it. So I’ll leave it somewhere they can probably find it again, under a dock or something like that. Wipe all the surfaces clean first, of course, because I’ve heard they have a way to take a person’s fingerprints from smooth surfaces like metal now.”

  “I read an article about fingerprints in a scientific journal that Baron Hardison had lying about. I’d forgotten all about it. You’d make a brilliant criminal, Freddie.”

  “Thank you, I think.”

  He smiled, looking almost bashful, and bent closer. She could feel his breath against her face and wished she weren’t wearing so much padding so she could feel the solid planes of his body against hers.

  “I meant it as a compliment,” he assured her, before stealing a kiss. Just a brush of lips, a moment of shared breath, but it was enough to make Freddie’s knees go weak. She sighed as they stepped away from one another, recognizing the necessity but wishing the kiss could have gone on for longer. Maybe later, when they weren’t threatened with the imminent collapse of an undersea cavern and orchestrating the theft of costly military equipment.

  She searched the chamber’s worktable until she found what she needed, a thick book with a cheap binding. It was a manual, filled with additional notes in various neat hands, clearly a work in progress.

  “Look, Barnabas! Instructions!”

  “I suppose that will help. You, ah . . . you have no idea how to pilot this thing, do you?”

  He still looked distinctly off-color. Freddie didn’t blame him one bit. She felt somewhat fragile and translucent around the edges herself and would be more than glad when they could finally vacate the possibly crumbling station.

  “But we have the handbook, so I will in a bit. We’ll start at the beginning, yes? Preoperation Checklist. Item the first: Integrity inspections . . .”

  FOURTEEN

  IT LOOKED LIKE a typical warehouse built out over the dock. Sometimes Rollo’s men even used it to store goods other than contraband, although only for short periods of time. But the important part of the main building, the only part Rollo really cared about, was the giant open pool in the middle of the complex. Submersibles could access it only by navigating through the channel at precisely the right intervals to avoid the Navy patrols, and then following the one narrow cleftlike passage with a deep enough draft to accommodate them and keep them hidden from any fishermen or commercial boats on the surface. Nothing came through at low tide.

  There were no pleasure craft to worry about. Nobody would tour that part of the channel for the view, unless they had a particular fondness for mile upon mile of seedy waterfront construction, fishing docks and dry docks and freight yards and the nastiest drinking establishments in the Commonwealth.

  When his brother still held the reins, there had always been at least some cargo in the warehouse. Dried beef, leather goods, cheeses . . . the products of the legitimate side of Lord Orm’s business. His cattle didn’t make him anything like the money he earned from opium, particularly once shipping costs to Europa were factored in, but that didn’t matter. The respectable front was all that counted.

  Rollo had no further access to leather and cheese now that the California operation had been shut down. He did, however, have an unprecedented load of opium on hand, the largest stockpile of his career. His subs met the boats, which went on to their destinations with no trace left of their suspicious freight. Then brought the goods to the warehouse, where they were normally dispersed throughout England and, via other subs, across the channel to Europa. Orm had built a black market empire, nearly cornering the market in illegal opium to the continent, and Rollo was determined to hang on to it as long as he could despite the lack of new product coming in from the Dominions. While he opened negotiations with new suppliers, he’d hoarded what he could to drive the price up.

  Opium dens across the land had awaited his product eagerly at first, then fervently, now desperately. The time was right. Rollo sensed he’d pushed the market as far as he could take it, and he was set for a massive, staged delivery operation.

  As soon as he eradicated the cephalopod threat. And for that, he needed all the submersibles in his fleet that were equipped to carry torpedoes. Four were docked in the warehouse already, with another one expected from France at high tide. Two more awaited his signal to rendezvous at the coordinates where they’d spotted the squid.

  “What d’you call that, anyway, Mordecai? A herd of squid? A school? Maybe a flotilla?”

  “Cuttlefish,” Mordecai corrected him, rousing from his sulk to engage on the topic just as Rollo knew he would. “They’re cuttlefish. And . . . I don’t know. I don’t know, Rollo. Not a school, that’s for fish. Whales are pods. I don’t know what it is for cuttlefish. Or for squid.”

  There was always the risk, once Mord was upset, that any little thing might set him off. He was already miffed at having to wait so long to return to the nest of squid. He hadn’t wanted to leave in the first place. If Rollo had let him have his way they’d still be there, counting and observing the monsters. Then someone had let slip that Rollo meant to do away with the creatures, and Mord had been in a proper stew ever since.

  Rollo had seen Mordecai pull wings from flies and study their dying throes. He’d kept his young friend from performing equivalent operations on kittens and was fairly certain he’d been unsuccessful in saving the lives of many rats and mice who had gone to their untimely deaths in Mord-inflicted agony. But Mord liked these sea creatures. Found them peaceful. Didn’t want them to die.

  Sometimes—just sometimes—Rollo thought Mordecai was more trouble than he was worth.

  “Can we let one live, Roland? Just a small one, like?”

  That was the problem. Moments like that one, Mord staring at him with those huge, hopeful eyes, looking to him for help. Trusting him, as terrible a specimen of humanity as he was. Mord looked up to him, without even fearing him as most sensible men did. Mord had no sense of that kind. He feared many things, but not Rollo Furneval. And Rollo could never resist the allure of having somebody, even as wretched a somebody as Mordecai, trust him implicitly.

  “All right. But only a small one.”

  “Can we bring it home?”

  “I don’t see why not. If somebody were clever enough to devise a net we could deploy from the sub. Something that wouldn’t snag on the propellers or be in the way of the torpedo launchers, mind you.”

  “I can! I know! Do you promise?”

  “Yes, I promise. But it’ll need a tank. You�
��ll have to take care of feeding it and looking after it.”

  “I know what to do. I’ll do it, you wait and see, Rollo!”

  Mordecai ran off to work on his scheme, slamming the office door behind him. Rollo had no doubt his childhood friend would come up with a brilliant mechanism that would find all sorts of applications unrelated to the capture and keeping of live cephalopods. And the invention process would keep him happily occupied for hours and conveniently out of the way while Rollo devised a plan with the other submersible pilots.

  “Barmy bugger,” Edwin scoffed from the corner of the office, where he sat whittling a figure from a hunk of driftwood. He kept a special knife just for that, along with those he used in the course of his employment.

  “Barmy, to be sure. I’ve never known him to be one for the gents, however. You don’t want to know about his tastes as regards the fairer sex.”

  “Aye, I’m sure I don’t. You really gonna let him trap one o’ those things, Mr. F?”

  “Indeed I am, Ed. Pet squid. Never know when that might come in useful, eh?”

  Ed snorted. “It’s a cuttlefish.”

  Rollo turned toward the corner, observing his minion silently until the large man grew visibly uncomfortable under the scrutiny. “Perhaps I shall assign you the task of feeding the new pet, Ed.”

  “As you say, sir. Though I’d hate to deprive Mord of the pleasure and the chance to learn some responsibility.”

  “I’m fairly sure Mord would derive great pleasure in figuring out how to feed the squid with you.”

  A sharp knock interrupted them. If Rollo had been a different sort of man, he would have laughed out loud at the look of exaggerated relief on poor Edwin’s bulldoglike face.

  “Come.”

  Young Finn leaned into the room, holding the doorway by his fingertips as though the floor might lurch beneath his feet or otherwise betray him at any moment. As always, Rollo was struck with the thought that the man must have been a proper little sailor at some point in his life, as he seemed to have a permanent set of sea legs.