“Stand here.” Jed positioned her to block passers-bys’ view of him, took a Swiss army knife from his pocket and selected the screwdriver. Swiftly, he unscrewed three of the screws holding the nameplate, “Gypsy Oracle”, to the machine and swiveled it aside to reveal the original maker’s stamp, “Vernon”.
He replaced the screws and returned the army knife to his pocket.
“What does that tell you?” Esme asked.
“Not much yet. But now that I have its designer’s name, I can telegraph a friend in the patent office in London. He’ll be able to tell me more.”
“And then you will tell us,” Grandma said sternly.
“Of course, Grandma.” He kissed her cheek before tucking her hand in his elbow. “Thank you for your defense of me.”
“Ha! Better I undertook it than your fiancée. She was all ready to spring at that good-time girl like a tiger on its prey. The situation called for subtlety.”
Esme bit her lip, clearly holding back the question she wanted to ask: What was subtle about inferring Miss Lee had a contagious disease less respectable than warts?
“Still, I can’t fault a woman for wanting to defend her man.” Grandma said. “You’d best call me Grandma. No more of this Mrs. Reeve nonsense.”
Jed smiled at Esme.
She smiled back, understanding the nature of the accolade. “Thank you, Grandma. Albert is waiting with the carriage at the side gate,” she added for Jed’s benefit.
He nodded, pleased by her concern not to tire Grandma. When they reached the carriage, though, he hesitated. “If you’ll excuse me, I’d like to telegraph Edistone, my friend at the Patents Office.”
“Albert can take us home that route.” Esme pressed a button and an umbrella fringed in yellow silk unfolded an articulated arm before popping it’s flat mushroom-like cap to shade the ladies.
The two horses in the shafts stood solidly, accustomed to such oddities.
“Very well, miss.” Albert was equally stolid. If Esme wanted to go home via the busy town center, he’d accomplish it.
“Esme, you were right,” Grandma said as the carriage wove its way through heedless fairgoers.
“She often is. But about what this time?” Jed raised an eyebrow, grinning.
She kicked his ankle gently as he sat opposite her. “When Grandma and I discussed the situation I said I thought Miss Annabel Lee was no gypsy, but a lady.”
“A lady?”
“Tcha, did you waste your time in the schoolroom?” Metaphorically, Grandma rapped his knuckles. “I understand Esme not recognizing an American writer, but you should have picked up the reference to Edgar Allan Poe in ‘Annabel Lee’.”
“What I noticed,” Esme said. “Was the ‘gypsy’s’ slipping accent. When she didn’t concentrate, she spoke with the round, polished accents of the British middle class.”
“Women of the middle classes do find themselves destitute,” Jed said reasonably. “Perhaps that is the explanation. Miss Lee has found a rather unorthodox means of supporting herself.”
“If that’s the case.” Esme leaned forward and the silk fringe of the umbrella tickled her face. “Why are you bothering to telegraph your friend about the origins of her Oracle machine?”
Grandma beamed. “She’s got you there, son. You’re as curious as us.” She turned to Esme. “He was always a boy for asking ‘Why?’. Endless questions. You’d better be prepared for your children to be much the same.”
Esme blushed.
Jed tugged at his collar, feeling the heat of the sun redden his face.
Albert drew the carriage to a halt in a side street near the telegraph office.
“I’ll just be a moment.” Jed leapt out gratefully. If he’d thought Esme and Grandma skirmishing was difficult, having them allied might prove even more daunting. Swan River wouldn’t know what had hit it.
Chapter Fourteen
The answer to Jed’s telegram arrived while they were at tea.
“A message for Mr. Reeve.” Francis, the general factotum, interrupted with scant ceremony.
“Already?” Esme set her cup back on its porcelain saucer painted with forget-me-nots and butterflies.
“Edistone pretty much lives at his office and he has a telegraph line running into it. I didn’t expect he’d get back to me so swiftly, though. He must have recognized the name, Vernon.” He glanced around at the company, which included Aaron Smith and Captain Fellowes. “Do you mind if I read it now?”
“Of course not,” Esme said impatiently.
He ripped open the envelope and read the contents aloud. “Robert Vernon. 18 April 1894. The Times.”
“Some answer.” Captain Fellowes snorted.
“Edistone thinks like a telegraph machine.” Jed replaced the telegram in its envelope. “The inventor of the Oracle machine must be this Robert Vernon. Whatever I want to know about him, Edistone thinks I’ll find the answers in The Times of 18 April last year.”
“You’ll need Patrick Murphy, an old friend of the family,” Aaron Smith said. “He’s kept every newspaper he’s ever read, and I know he reads The Times. What’s more, he keeps them in order. He’ll have your answers.”
Esme glanced at the clock. “We could go now. I’ll ask Maud for a fruitcake to give him.”
The fruitcake bribe was successful. After thanking them, Mr. Murphy, who looked like a gravedigger, cadaverous and stooped, pale-skinned and large handed, found them the relevant editions of The Times.
“Thank you.” When they’d finished reading, Jed gathered the papers up and handed them back to their hovering host.
“You’re welcome.” Mr. Murphy obsessively aligned the sheets of paper and returned them to their slots in his filing system. He glanced up with a sudden, shy smile. “And may I congratulate you on your engagement? Both of you.”
“Thank you, Mr. Murphy.” Esme kissed his cheek.
As they walked down the steps of his house, she grimaced at the newsprint on her gloves. “Wasted effort. A tragic story, but hardly relevant to Miss Lee. She must have bought the Oracle machine at a general sale of Vernon’s estate.”
“I wonder if she’d let me buy it from her,” Jed said. “I believe it’s capable of far more than stamping the hands of the credulous.”
“At least she found a use for it and a means of supporting herself. Look at my friend Jane Bryant. When she was widowed, she had few options. Fortunately, her dressmaking skills are excellent, but establishing a small business was difficult for her. Even now, she has to guard her reputation or the old biddies in the colony wouldn’t buy dresses from her. Until the professions are truly open to women, our situation remains precarious.”
“Hmm. Perhaps I could pay Miss Lee an amount to simply let me study the machine.”
Esme laughed and squeezed his arm, her passionate pursuit of women’s rights momentarily forgotten. “I love that gleam of inventor’s curiosity in your eyes.”
“Do you?” He smiled down at her, curiosity displaced by love. “We haven’t had a cuddle on the porch swing in days.”
“Jed.” She glanced scandalized at a passing matron.
The stout, middle-aged woman’s mouth curved.
She’d heard.
Jed was unabashed. “Do you think we could convince your father and uncle to take Grandma to the theatre tonight?”
“And leave us alone at home?” Esme smiled. “Dreamer.”
“I do dream. Every night, of you. I’ll make you happy, sweetheart. I swear.”
The serious note in his voice took her by surprise. He was making a vow. She recalled Grandma’s wisdom, that Jed had his own apprehensions of their coming marriage. He worried if being with him would compensate for being far from her family, friends and home?
She rested her head briefly against his shoulder, crushing her hat brim. “Being with you makes me happy.”
“Sweetheart,” he said achingly.
“I know we haven’t spoken much of the future, of where we’ll make our
home.” It had been tacitly understood that they’d stay in the Swan River Colony while he finished and tested his bounding-vehicle. After that…Jed’s home was in California and although she believed whole-heartedly in her suffragette principles, the expectation was still there that as a woman, she’d follow her man. Besides, America was the place for an inventor—both to sell his inventions and to discuss possibilities with other inventors. “I’m looking forward to meeting the rest of your family.”
“Grandma hasn’t scared you off?” But the humor only lightly overlaid his emotion. In the late afternoon light, his eyes were intent.
“When I said yes to marrying you, I said yes to everything. Swan River is the only world I’ve known, but the past doesn’t define our future. I’ll miss my Father and Uncle Henry, friends, familiar sights, but you must know from your own experience, homesickness doesn’t kill. And it’s not like either of us are poor. We can visit.”
“Would that be enough for you?”
“Yes. Jed, you are the most important person in my life. More important than anything. Jed!”
Her earnest endeavor to convince and reassure him were cut short by his arm wrapping like iron around her waist and sweeping her forward at a near run.
“What on earth?” She clapped one hand to her battered hat, holding it in place as she trotted beside him.
“I have to kiss you, now, and the side gate to your house is probably our best chance for privacy.”
The side gate was shaded by a jacaranda tree. It’s purply blue flowers formed a canopy overhead and a carpet beneath their feet.
Jed crowded her into the corner of the limestone wall and kissed her. No finesse, no delicate respect for feminine sensibilities, just raw hunger and untamed male possessiveness.
She moaned and wrapped her arms around his neck, barely aware that her hat had fallen off.
They drew apart slowly, reluctantly, both breathing heavily. Esme leaned against the wall, feeling its cool, rough surface through the cotton of her gown and linen underclothes.
Jed tipped his face to heaven, seeking control. “I should go home, change for dinner.”
“Dinner?” She struggled with the bizarre concept. Food. Social chatter. The proprieties.
He smiled ruefully. “I would prefer to feast on you, but…” A graceful gesture of his hands. He noticed her fallen hat, bent and rescued it from the dirt.
“Thank you.” She accepted it with returning awareness and glanced around. Thank heaven there were no gardeners or other staff in view. From the other side of the enclosing wall she heard the rattle of a gig, the swish of bicycle tires and the sharp ring of a bicycle bell.
“I’m leaving now,” he said.
A slow smile dawned, curving her mouth. “Who are you trying to convince?”
“Me.” His gaze caressed her as covetously as his hands had done just minutes before. He stepped close for one swift, hard kiss before striding out the gate.
She sighed, touched the tip of her tongue to the flavor of him on her lips, blushed at her own desire and hurried inside.
At dinner, Esme wore an evening gown in a deep blue satin with a lace inset in crisp white. The color complimented her engagement ring. The large sapphire caught the gas lighting and glimmered with blue fire.
Jed smiled at her across the polished table with its low arrangement of white roses and ferns.
Her father cleared his throat. “So, what did you learn at Murphy’s?”
Jed set down the wine glass he’d tipped to Esme in a subtle toast to her beauty. The generosity of what she’d given him this afternoon was still a fire in his blood. She’d given him not only her love but the surety of her complete confidence and loyalty. Was it any wonder he was drunk on his own desire for her? It took him a moment to gather his thoughts.
“Mr. Murphy was as organized in his storage of The Times as you’d said. He found us the 18 April edition in minutes, and those for the days that followed. The man who invented the Gypsy Oracle machine—although, I’d suspect, for a different original purpose—was Robert Vernon, an English inventor.”
“Quite a successful and respected one,” Esme contributed. “He formed a consortium to build a new style of dirigible.”
“The Vernon Victory,” Jed said. “It seems the man had a butterfly mind. He churned out brilliant ideas but seldom interested himself in their actual build. In this case, he should have. The dirigible was launched with great fanfare on the seventeenth of April. For the inaugural flight, it carried five people. The pilot, chief engineer, a boy who’d won a lottery to go up in the first flight, a journalist and a local minister of parliament. The dirigible exploded. Fiery debris rained down on the spectators. Two were killed, making the list of fatalities seven.”
“Of which, Vernon wasn’t one. He hadn’t gone up in the dirigible because of a stated fear of heights.” Esme cut into her fillet of snapper in dill sauce. “The newspapers claimed he’d had doubts about the dirigible’s safety.”
“He was ruined.” Jed took up the story as she ate a morsel of fish. “He arranged compensation for the families of those killed and shot himself two weeks later.”
“According to the newspaper report, Vernon was survived by his wife and two young sons. He left them to cope with the shame and his financial debts.” She waved her fish fork in disapproval.
“Financial debts? Was the compensation so extreme?” Captain Fellowes asked.
Jed responded. “The compensation was irrelevant. The consortium fell apart, exploded like the dirigible, as the other investors scrambled to divorce themselves from Vernon’s guilt.” He paused. “Esme, we overlooked the obvious.”
“Pardon?”
“The Times named the key investors. Do you remember the first one mentioned? A Mr. Pond.”
“Pond…as in the Pond here in Swan River?”
He nodded. “As in Alfred Brixton’s employer.”
“Who?” Grandma interrupted sharply.
“The man who died in the fair grounds. The man the newspapers are calling the victim of the Gypsy Curse.”
“Do you know it’s the same man?” Aaron Smith asked.
“No, but what are the chances?” Esme countered excitedly. “Pond isn’t that common a name in financial circles, and you know that people have a tendency to come out to the colonies when they want to lie low during a scandal.”
“I’ll grant you the man’s identity.” Captain Fellowes finished his fish and pushed aside his plate. “But what does it matter?”
“It matters because perhaps the newspapers were right. The gypsy did curse Alfred Brixton and she wanted to curse Pond, too,” Jed said.
“But we were there.” Esme nodded. “Watching. Grandma said she looked like she lost her nerve.”
“What the heck would a gypsy care about…” Captain Fellowes stopped as realization dawned. “You think the gypsy is Vernon’s widow.”
“Her accent was middle class, when she wasn’t performing. She appeared fascinated by Mr. Pond.” Esme ticked off points on her fingers. “If she can’t accept her husband’s ruin, she might have transferred his guilt in her mind to Mr. Pond. He’s certainly unpleasant enough.”
“It’s not proof. Far from it,” her father said.
“I don’t think we can afford to wait for further evidence,” Jed said slowly. “Miss Lee was baiting a trap this afternoon.”
“Private sessions!” Esme caught his thought. “That’s what she was luring Mr. Pond to agree to…a private meeting. He’d gone, but she told his friends to be sure to mention the private sessions.”
“One in which she’ll get her revenge.” Grandma’s eyes snapped with excitement.
“We have to stop her.” Esme shot out of her seat.
“Hold a second.” Jed caught her wrist as she started past. “Mrs. Vernon won’t lure Mr. Pond to any private meeting, tonight.”
She tugged against his light hold. “Why not?”
“Because he’s booked to attend the Wealth Club D
inner.”
“That bunch of prosy bores.” Aaron wasn’t impressed.
“Rich bores,” Jed said. “I was reminded of the dinner at the club, today. If Mr. Pond is the financial con man we think him, the Wealth Club Dinner is unmissable.”
“And it’ll run late.” Esme squeezed his shoulder. “Mr. Pond will be rolled home drunk by one of the Club’s servants. So he’s safe, tonight.”
Jed covered her hand with his. “And tomorrow we’ll speak with Mrs. Vernon.”
Chapter Fifteen
The boardinghouse where Mrs. Vernon aka the gypsy, Anabel Lee, had found lodgings was one of the many that fringed the fun fair. It was one of the more ramshackle, filled with performers rather than holiday-makers. Esme and Jed had arrived early enough to catch Mrs. Vernon before her first performance.
Esme hadn’t expected quite such an interested audience for their own encounter.
Mrs. Vernon sat on the sagging front veranda of the boarding house drinking a cup of tea. Unlike the three other female performers sitting with her, she was fully dressed, clothed with semi-respectability in a crimson gypsy dress with a black shawl thrown over her shoulders. The other women lounged in cheap cotton wrappers. One was even barefoot. Without the cosmetics they wore for their performances, they looked tired.
“Annie, you have visitors.” The oldest of the trio made a performance of re-tying her blue wrapper as she eyed Jed.
“Miss Lee, we need to talk,” Esme said determinedly.
“Feel free.” Mrs. Vernon smiled over her tea cup.
“In private.”
The woman in blue laughed throatily. “Girl, if you’re going to tell Annie to stay away from your man—”
“I don’t need to.” Esme looked challengingly up at them as they sat on the veranda, above her and Jed who waited on the footpath.
“On the other hand,” Jed’s American drawl was very evident. “Miss Lee mightn’t want us shouting about Robert Vernon here on the street.”
Mrs. Vernon dropped her tea cup.
Her fellow boarders stared at her. One crouched to pick up the pieces of broken china. Blue wrapper turned back to Esme and Jed. “I don’t know what your—”
Curses and Confetti Page 9
