The introductions concluded, the party adjourned to the table. Six soldiers stepped away from the walls to draw out their chairs, and to push them back in as the guests seated themselves. A veritable army of servants then appeared, bringing course after course of delectable foods.
The guests were seated in alternation of men and women about the round table. The empress sat to the emperor’s left, of course, followed by Fulton, Lady Corey, Fouché, and finally Arabella—which put her immediately beside Napoleon, who consumed her entire attention.
No matter how inconsequential the conversation—even a simple request to pass the salt—the least remark from his lips to her made her heart pound and her insides roil. Not only could a single word from him condemn her and every one for whom she cared to speedy death; not only was she desperate to glean any vital intelligence he might accidentally let slip in his conversation; not only did the slightest glance from his extraordinary dark eyes seem to pierce to the depths of her soul; but his French was terrible, and she was required to employ every bit of her concentration merely to understand it.
His native language, as she understood it, was that of Corsica—wherever that might be—and his accent in French was closer to a rough Italian than the cultured Parisian French she had learned from her tutors, making him sound as though he were speaking through a mouthful of gravel. His grammar was equally atrocious, barely literate and full of uncouth contractions, and sometimes several additional sentences would go by before she was able to parse out what he had meant by the first. Even Fulton, whose murmured translations of Fouché to Lady Corey were so helpful to Arabella, seemed daunted by Napoleon’s mutilation of the French language.
Marie Louise, to the far side of Napoleon from Arabella, was in some ways equally difficult to understand. Her French was cultured, grammatical, and precise, but her accent was German—no doubt equally genteel, but unfamiliar to Arabella—and her voice was quite small and high. She also seemed extremely subdued in manner, quite shy and self-effacing.
But despite the young empress’s diffidence and the difficulties in communication, Arabella found herself kindly disposed to her.
* * *
As the first fish course was being cleared away, Fulton spoke up from his place across the table, between Marie Louise and Lady Corey. “Lady Corey tells me,” he said to Arabella in his flat American English, “that you are preparing a performance, to be presented this Tuesday. Would you care to tell us about it?”
As Fulton translated his own words into French for the benefit of the rest of the table, Arabella’s mind raced. The play was set for just three days hence, and preparations were not going well. Nearly all of the arrangements for the escape were in place, thankfully, but the play itself had received very little attention. Just last night she had insisted to Fox that he must make time for additional rehearsals.
“It is only a small entertainment for the prisoners,” she stammered in something approximating correct French. “An amateur performance of Twelfth Night.” They had changed from Romeo and Juliet to Twelfth Night after one too many arguments between Fox and Singh over Fox’s overly attentive performance as Romeo to Arabella’s Juliet. Arabella was much happier playing Viola than Juliet in any case, especially as the part permitted her to wear breeches for much of her time on stage.
“Cela semble délicieux!” Marie Louise cried. It was the first expression of interest or enthusiasm Arabella had seen from the young empress, and Arabella’s delight at seeing her pretty face so animated immediately collided with a new and distressing realization: if Marie Louise were to attend the play—or, even worse, if Napoleon attended along with her—Fouché and his crack troops would certainly come along as well, for the protection of the imperial couple. All the conspirators’ hopes for a light and inattentive guard would be for naught.
“I doubt it would be of any interest to Your Highness,” Arabella prevaricated in French, realizing as she did that she had mangled the empress’s French title. “We lack professional actors; it is only for the amusement of the players.”
“Je déteste votre Shakespeare,” Napoleon spat … but then Marie Louise touched his arm, and gave him such a poignant pleading look that even the Great Ogre’s heart melted. “Eh, bien. Si ma impératrice désire,” he said, inclining his head indulgently.
Fulton and Lady Corey both smiled at this, but Fouché—never a cheery man—looked as though he had swallowed an unripe plum. Nevertheless, he bowed his head and said that he would make the appropriate arrangements for Their Imperial Majesties to attend the performance.
Every one looked to Arabella. Though her heart had collapsed to a small, leaden lump somewhere in the vicinity of her stomach, somehow she managed a smile. “Nous nous félicitons de la visite des Majestés Impériales.”
* * *
The dinner wore on—course after course of delightful morsels which might as well have been ash in her mouth; hour upon hour of conversation inconsequential in meaning yet freighted with implication—until, just as the soup course was being served, the young empress murmured a quiet request to her husband. After Napoleon replied in the affirmative, she said to the company, “Veuillez m’excuser.”
Clearly, the young woman merely needed to relieve herself. But when the empress rose, all must rise. Soldiers immediately scurried from their places at the wall to pull out every one’s chair, and with a scrape of wood on wood and a clatter of cutlery the entire party rose to its feet—somewhat unsteadily on Arabella’s part, as she was unused to the quantities of wine she had been consuming.
Indeed, even as she stood, Arabella realized that she, too, required the necessary. Catching Marie Louise’s eye across the table, she spoke just loud enough for the young empress to hear her. “Excusez-moi, Votre Majesté Impériale, pourriez-je vous accompagner au chambre du toilette?”
“Bien sûr, madame,” the empress replied in her cultured German accent.
The two women curtseyed to the table—Arabella, despite her best efforts, knew herself thoroughly surpassed in elegance—and walked together toward the double doors, a retinue of imperial guards forming up around them as they did so. But as Arabella passed Lady Corey’s chair, she spotted something that brought her heart to a sudden stop.
The trembling gleam of candle-light on steel.
* * *
The steel was an oyster-knife, which had been employed in the second fish course to pry some local mollusk from its stony shell. Somehow Lady Corey had managed to retain it when the course had been cleared away. The light gleamed because, although the blade was quite short and thick, it was wickedly sharp, and it trembled because Lady Corey’s fingers, which held the knife in a death grip, were nonetheless shivering markedly.
One glance at Lady Corey’s face told Arabella all she needed to know. The older woman’s gaze was fixed on Napoleon, and her skin showed the pallor of heartfelt terror, but her eyes were full of hate and her jaw was set in firm determination. The plume on her silk coif quivered, whether from fear or barely-contained rage Arabella could not tell. Napoleon, for his part, was distracted, all his attention upon his young wife, and the guards were occupied in readjusting their positions for the protection of the departing empress and the emperor simultaneously. It was the perfect moment for Lady Corey to strike.
But Arabella knew she could not succeed.
Lady Corey might be armed, determined, and have the advantage of surprise, but she was nonetheless a woman of middle age, inexperienced in combat, and lacking strength of limb. She would have to leap across the table, or push past both Fulton and the empress’s just-vacated chair, to reach Napoleon, and armed guards—men no doubt pledged and fully prepared to give their lives for the emperor—were mere steps away. At best she might injure Napoleon slightly before being seized and dragged to the ground by Napoleon’s guard. After which not only she but any suspected co-conspirators, including Arabella, Singh, and Fox, would surely be jailed or executed.
All of this ran through Arabella�
�s mind in an instant as soon as she saw that flash of candle-light on steel, and a moment later—almost without volition—she acted.
“Oops!” she cried, pretending to trip upon her dress’s ridiculous train, and pitched forward. Sprawling across the table, she shoved the soup tureen with both hands directly into Lady Corey’s lap.
It was an awkward performance, unconvincing even to Arabella herself, but it had the desired effect.
Lady Corey shrieked—the soup, fortunately, was not extremely hot, but the surprise, especially given Lady Corey’s heightened state of excitement, was profound—and fell backward, sending the chair clattering to the floor behind her. Fine porcelain shattered left and right, the silver tureen rang like a bell as it struck the ground, and orange-red bisque splashed everywhere.
“Oh!” Arabella cried in English. “Oh! Oh! I am so terribly, terribly sorry, Lady Corey! Please permit me to—”
But Lady Corey would have none of it. Livid with anger, she slapped Arabella’s helping hand away, making an incoherent noise of rage and disappointment as she tried to wipe the thick, clinging soup from her robe and pelerine. The dress, though, was as ruined as her assassination attempt.
Arabella hoped that, some day, Lady Corey would find it in her heart to forgive her. Though she doubted that she ever would, still she knew that her action, though intemperate, had been absolutely necessary.
As the table was set right, and the empress and two of the guards escorted Lady Corey away to change her dress, the men muttered amongst themselves in French. Arabella, feeling her face flushing hot with humiliation that was not in the least pretended, sank into her chair and stared down at the disheveled table.
A small sound brought her attention from her own misery. To Arabella’s surprise it was Fouché, clearing his throat and holding out a silk handkerchief. Confused, she followed his gaze to her shoulder, where a small spot of bisque stained her dress. Nodding her abashed thanks, she took the handkerchief and cleaned the stain away. It appeared to be the only such smudge.
She returned the handkerchief to Fouché, who accepted it unsmiling and dropped it into the soup still puddled on the floor beneath Lady Corey’s fallen chair. He then bowed to Napoleon and Fulton, gesturing toward the adjacent smoking-room. “Messieurs?”
“Avec plaisir,” Fulton replied, smiling and drawing a cigar from his pocket. “Contrairement au chantier, ici je peux fumer sans souci!”
To Arabella’s surprise, Napoleon reacted to Fulton’s off-hand remark with incandescent fury. “Silence, imbécile!” he growled through gritted teeth.
Fulton cringed at the rebuke, ducked his head in embarrassment, and begged Napoleon to accept his apologies, promising that the indiscretion would not be repeated.
“Ça ne devrait pas!” Napoleon snarled, and stamped away through the indicated door, not in the least mollified. Fulton and Fouché followed, neither of them favoring Arabella with even a backward glance. Plainly, she was dismissed.
She sat, uncertain what to do with herself, for only a moment before two of the soldiers approached her, offering to conduct her back to her lodgings. Numbly, she allowed them to lead her out of the room.
* * *
As Arabella trudged back to the auberge—head down, disconsolate, and unconcerned with the soldiers marching beside her—the horrible events of the evening ran through her mind again and again. She had jeopardized the escape attempt, saved the tyrant Napoleon’s life, and destroyed her friendship with Lady Corey.
Yet, despite her great misery, one nagging detail of the evening’s disastrous end would not let go of her mind. Fulton’s inoffensive remark “ici je peux fumer sans souci”—which she was certain meant nothing more than “here I can smoke without concern”—had driven Napoleon into a rage. Why?
No. Wait. Fulton’s words had not merely been “ici je peux fumer sans souci.” He had also said “contrairement au chantier”—as opposed to the ship-yard.
It was not, perhaps, a surprise that smoking might be prohibited at the ship-yard. It was a place of saw-dust, wood-chips, tar, and other highly inflammable substances. Yet that alone could not explain Napoleon’s great ire at Fulton’s statement. The emperor had reacted as though the American had betrayed a state secret.
Could it be that he had?
She let her mind drift across all that she knew about the ship-yard, and the fleet of armored airships a-building there. All the secrets of this place seemed bound up with that infernal airship Victoire, which was, they knew from Mills’s reports, nearly ready to launch, except for the lack of such vital equipment as cook-stoves, lanterns, and of course the necessary launch-furnace.
Cook-stoves. Lanterns. Furnaces. All of them concerned with fire or flame.
And the ship-yard prohibited smoking.
Might there be something aboard the armored ship that was especially inflammable? Something, perhaps, unique to Venus? For the questions of why the ship-yard was here, and why Napoleon had immediately fled to this planet upon his escape from the far side of the Moon rather than returning in triumph to France, remained open.
Thinking of inflammable materials led her to recall Isambard, the creature who lived beneath the Touchstones’ barracks and which they sometimes used to cook their food. He produced a highly inflammable gas from his abdomen.
Might this gas, in some way, form the connection between the several mysteries of the armored airship?
The answer, she felt, was very nearly within her grasp. Yet some vital point was missing.
19
FINAL REHEARSALS
When she returned to the auberge, she found Captains Singh and Fox, and all the principal officers of both Diana and Touchstone, gathered in something very like a council of war. “My dear, dear Mrs. Singh,” Captain Singh cried, rising from his chair. “We were sick with worry!”
Heedless of all social graces, Arabella rushed to her captain and embraced him passionately, to which he responded by decorously patting her shoulder. Eventually propriety triumphed, and the two of them stepped away from each other, holding hands and blinking tearfully.
Captain Fox, less restrained, whooped aloud at her appearance. “You are a veritable fashion-plate!” he cried. “Wherever did you obtain that extraordinary gown, especially in this benighted backwater?”
“It was given to me as a present by Emperor Napoleon,” she replied, and the expression on Fox’s face was positively delicious. “I will explain later,” she said, smiling through her tears. “For now, I must speak privately with my husband.”
She and Captain Singh adjourned to their chamber, where—after a heartfelt embrace and expressions of affection inappropriate for a more public place—she quickly explained the disastrous events of the day and her conjectures upon the inflammable gas, to which he replied with one mysterious word.
“Hydrogen,” he said.
“Hydrogen?” Arabella repeated in confusion. The word was unknown to her.
“Tell me more of the creature Isambard,” he said, waving aside her questions. “You say he produces this gas from his abdomen. Does it have any smell?”
“No,” she replied. “None at all.”
“And it burns with a colorless flame?”
“Very nearly. And quite extraordinarily hot.”
The captain nodded vigorously, stroking his chin with a finger, his thoughts clearly directed inward. “Hydrogen, then. I am certain of it. This explains every thing.”
Vexed, Arabella stood back from him and planted her fists upon her silk-clad hips. “I shall give you no more intelligence until you explain this word.”
Captain Singh blinked once, then said, “Very well. Hydrogen is a gas: colorless, odorless, and highly inflammable. It does not exist in nature, but may be artificially produced by several methods including the dissolution of iron filings in acid. When burned, it produces water, hence the name. It is the lightest in weight of all known gases.”
Arabella tried, and failed, to imagine what the phrase “weight o
f a gas” might mean. “I do not understand. Gases weigh nothing! They simply drift about in the atmosphere.”
“Gases weigh very little, but some are heavier than others. Consider, please, Newton’s Laws of Universal Buoyancy. Do you recall the First Law?”
“The upward force upon any body suspended in a medium in gravity is equal to the weight of the medium displaced by the body,” Arabella quoted. “This is the principle by which airships ascend to the interplanetary atmosphere, and is also known as the Law of Archimedes.”
“Exactly. Now consider the net upward force, which is the buoyant force reduced by the weight of the body in question.”
Arabella considered. “What has this to do with the weight of a gas?”
“A modern airship ascends because her envelopes are filled with hot air, which is a gas whose weight is less than that of unheated air. If an envelope filled with hot air weighs less than the same quantity of cold air, what does this imply about the net upward force? Imagine only the filled envelope, please, without the airship. You may assume that the envelope fabric weighs nothing.”
Why did the captain always answer her questions with more questions? She thought the problem through before replying. “An envelope filled with unheated air weighs exactly the same as the medium—the unheated air—around it. Thus, the net upward force is … zero. Whereas an envelope of the same size filled with hot air weighs less, hence its net upward force is positive.”
“Precisely. Now imagine that the hot air is replaced with a different gas whose weight is even less. What effect does this have?”
She understood immediately. “The upward force is increased, by the difference between the weight of hot air and the weight of an equal quantity of the new gas.”
“Now you see the significance of hydrogen and its weight. Hot air at one hundred degrees weighs one and one-eighth ounces per cubic foot, while hydrogen, even at a cool temperature, weighs just three thirty-seconds of an ounce per cubic foot. For this reason, the lifting power of a cubic foot of hydrogen is as much as four times that of hot air.”
Arabella and the Battle of Venus Page 26
