“Nothing. As far as I can see, the coal is completely unchanged.”
“Try it again. Perhaps it needs more than one treatment.”
They tried again. And again. And by noon, Claire could bear it no longer, and made Andrew stop. “Mr. Malvern, please. You will do yourself harm. It is clear that there is some error in our calculations.”
In reply, he threw the innocent coal so hard against the wall of the warehouse that it bounced halfway back again. “I don’t understand. Your drawings were perfect. Everything that Doctor Craig said was necessary is in that chamber. What did I do wrong?”
“We will find the error,” she assured him. “We must apply our minds to it until we do.”
They spent the rest of the afternoon on it, and when she and Tigg returned to the cottage, the two of them disassembled the lightning rifle and studied the pieces. “It’s the same, Lady,” Tigg said. “The chamber is just a bigger version of your glass globe, ’ere. The cell is the same—I’ve looked at it often enough.”
Claire pushed her hair off her hot forehead. “We can do no more tonight. Let us reassemble it so that Granny Protheroe can bring in our tea. Perhaps the answer will take us unawares.”
After supper, Claire took her usual spot in the garden, Willie on her lap, the two of them watching the chickens nibbling the last few bites of grass while the walking coop stumped over to its resting place next to the back porch.
She gazed at the machine, then turned and called in the open door, “Lizzie? Will you come here a moment?”
Lizzie came reluctantly, having just discovered a cache of cookies. She brought some with her and offered one to Claire and one to Willie. “Wotcher want, Lady?”
“Thank you, dear.” She indicated the coop. “I’ve been looking at your coop and observing that it doesn’t have the usual mechanisms to power the legs. Was that an improvement made by Doctor Craig?”
Lizzie nodded. “She said the steam engine wot went with these legs was too big for our coop, so she made us one of ’er cells, like in the lightning rifle.”
“Did she, now. That was clever. I’m surprised she remembered how, after all those years.”
“Me, too. But it don’t work right away. Jake an’ Lewis made us one o’ them little engines what power the firelamps, only bigger. That gets it goin’.”
“Why should that make a difference?”
“Dunno.” The child finished off her cookie with relish. “But it does. It don’t start to glow without the coop movin’ a bit first.”
Moving.
Kineticks.
The rifle was usually in motion when she used it.
Great Caesar’s ghost.
She set Willie on his feet and seized Lizzie in a hug that made her gasp. “That’s it! You have solved it, you brilliant child—you and Jake and Lewis. Oh, I foresee many roasts of beef and Yorkshire puddings in this house in the future. Run and get Tigg. We are going back to the laboratory immediately.”
Willie roared at this disruption in their evening routine. He clung to her skirts as she fetched her hat and her engineering notebook, and even as she prepared to climb into the landau, he wept and clutched her legs through the practical twill.
Finally Tigg said, “Come on, old man. ’Op in and you shall go with us.”
He subsided in the passenger seat on Tigg’s lap, hicupping and sniffling, his hand twisted in Claire’s skirt. Without the busy day’s traffic, they reached the laboratory in record time, only to find it locked and empty.
“’E’s likely gone ’ome, Lady,” Tigg said. “Do you know where he lives?”
Claire had not filed hundreds of papers without noticing that some had gone to his home address. The wind of their going practically lifted off her hat as they crossed the Blackfriars Bridge and turned left on the Victoria Embankment, then headed north for Russell Square in Bloomsbury.
She pulled to a stop in front of a neat row house with a shiny black door. The son of a policeman and a cook had done well for himself—all due to his wits and ambition. Warm yellow light glowed from the windows, and as Claire shut down the landau’s boiler, she belatedly wondered if he might have company.
Never mind. This was too important to sleep on. “Come along, boys.”
Andrew answered the knocker in slack-jawed surprise. “Claire! And Tigg and Willie. What—is everything all right?”
“More than all right,” she assured him. “We have a discovery we must share with you immediately. It will not wait until morning.”
“Come in.” He led them into a cozy parlor, then to a dining room the size of a handkerchief, where the table was set for two. A woman rose, setting her napkin aside. “Lady Claire Trevelyan, may I present my mother, Mrs. Jane Malvern. Mother, this is my laboratory assistant, of whom we were just speaking.”
Mrs. Malvern began to dip into a curtsey, but Claire forestalled her with a handshake. “I’m so happy to meet you. And these are my charges, Tigg and young Willie.”
Willie sidled out from behind Claire’s skirts and both he and Tigg bowed. Bless their hearts, how proud she was of their manners.
Mrs. Malvern stared at the boys, her greeting dying on her lips when Claire turned in excitement to Andrew. “Please sit and continue with your dinner. Mr. Malvern, we—that is, Lizzie and Jake and Lewis and Doctor Craig—have made the most astonishing discovery. It was in front of me all the time and I did not see it until this evening.”
“Claire, the suspense is killing me.” Andrew did not pick up his knife and fork.
“It is simply this—we are using kinetick energy now. Movement. Andrew, the chamber must be in motion in order for the cell to work.”
“What?”
“Lizzie pointed the anomaly out to me not half an hour ago. Doctor Craig installed a lightning cell in our walking coop. But it won’t activate until a preliminary engine—which we designed for a project not long ago—gets the coop in motion. Kineticks, Andrew. We have been predicating everything on electricks. No wonder we made such an error.”
“Great Caesar’s ghost.”
“My sentiments exactly.” She laid her engineering notebook on the table. “We must modify the chamber again.”
“I agree. Mother, did you hear? Such a breakthrough! I almost want to—”
“Lady Claire.” Mrs. Malvern’s face had gone as white as the table linens. “Who is this child?”
It took a moment for Claire’s mind to move from the aether of science to the room in which she sat. “Which child?” Tigg was seated at the end of the table, looking rather longingly at the filet of plaice on the plates of the others, though Claire knew for a fact he had had two helpings of stew at home. Willie had not taken a chair at all, preferring instead to stand next to hers, regarding everything in this strange household from within the circle of her left arm.
“The younger.”
“Why, this is Willie. Did I not introduce him?”
“You did. What I want to know is, where did he come from?”
“Mother, this is hardly the time. Lady Claire and I must—”
“You and Lady Claire must listen to me. Where did this child come from?”
Claire gaped at her blankly. What was she to say when she had absolutely no idea?
Tigg stirred in his chair. “’E was wiv—with us when the Lady came to us, mum. ’E brought ’er to us, you might say.”
“And where did you find him?”
Tigg screwed up his face with the effort to remember. “It was that ’ot summer a couple of years back. Snou—er, Mr. McTavish, the Lady’s secretary, ’ad been to the river with some of our mates to swim and when ’e came ’ome, Willie was with him.”
“The river. Two years ago.”
“Yes’m. Thereabouts.”
“Mother, what has come over you?” Andrew asked. “What is all this about?”
“Simply this,” she said. “Two years ago, a three-year-old boy was stolen from a garden while his nurse slept. A boy with brown hair in a widow�
�s peak like his father’s, and big blue eyes like his mother’s. A boy for whom I used to make sugar cookies shaped like stars, because they were his favorite.”
To Claire’s astonishment, Willie grinned at the older woman, his dimpled chin barely level with the tabletop as he stood pressed against her. Then he pushed away, ducked under the table to the other woman’s place, and flung himself into her lap. Mrs. Malvern gasped as she tried to hold back a sob, gathering him into her arms as she spoke in a voice close to tears.
“A boy whose name is Lord Wilberforce Albert John Dunsmuir, Viscount Hatley, and Baron Craigdarroch.” With each syllable she gave him a tiny shake, as if impressing them into his memory, though her voice broke. “The son of Lord and Lady Dunsmuir, who have been looking for him without ceasing these two long and empty years.”
Chapter 18
It was nearly ten o’clock, and Claire wondered if Lord Dunsmuir would have them thrown out of his library as charlatans. “They have had to deal with all manner of criminals parading boys in front of them, every one trained to pretend he was a lord,” Jane Malvern told them in a low voice. “But young Willie is no pretender. I would know those eyes anywhere.”
A patter of footsteps sounded on the grand staircase of Hatley House, the Dunsmuirs’ town house bordering on Regents’ Park. Somewhere above, a man’s stifled voice said, “Davina, no. You will do yourself harm. Please, let me—”
With a rustle of silk, a woman appeared in the door of the library in a dressing gown, breathing hard. “Mrs. Malvern,” she said. “You would not trifle with—please tell me—” Her wide blue gaze fell on Willie, who until that moment had been pressed against Claire’s side while she knelt, her arm around his shoulders.
She distinctly heard Willie suck in a great breath, and in the next moment he had bounded across the room, the woman had flung herself to her knees and opened her arms, and mother and son both burst into tears as they clutched each other in a bear hug.
Lord Dunsmuir, his shirt collar open and his feet bare, finally reached the library. “Is it—? Davina—?”
“Yes, milord, it is,” Mrs. Malvern said, dabbing at her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief. “It is really your boy, after all this time.”
“But how—? How did you—?”
The poor man did not seem able to complete a sentence. Finally he abandoned the attempt altogether and joined his wife and son on the floor, manfully attempting to keep his tears back, and failing utterly.
Willie looked at Claire over his parents’ shoulders. “Mama and papa,” he said, clear as day, beaming with such happiness that Claire came near to tears herself.
“Yes, darling,” she said. “Your mama and papa, at last.”
After several more minutes, the earl finally collected himself enough to speak coherently. “Mrs. Malvern, you must tell us how this—this miracle came to pass.”
“I think that story belongs to Lady Claire, milord. She has been acting in a mother’s place for many weeks, I think.”
“Lady Claire?” For the first time, the earl seemed to notice that there were a number of additional people in the quiet, carpeted room.
“Yes, my lord,” Claire said. “I am Claire Trevelyan, daughter of the late Viscount and Lady St. Ives.”
“You are Vivyan and Flora’s daughter?” he said blankly. “How did you come to be acquainted with our cook—not to mention my boy?”
“I am Andrew Malvern’s laboratory assistant,” she said, blithely ignoring his lordship’s look of shock and sticking to the facts. “After my family’s ruin, I was forced to seek employment. In the course of that effort, I met a group of orphans who eventually came under my care. Your son was one of them. But I must tell you, my lord, I have been caring for Willie since the beginning of the summer, and not once have I heard him speak. The other children told me he had been struck dumb—some think it was by an early trauma. To the best of my knowledge, the words he just said are the first to cross his lips in two years.”
The countess looked into Willie’s eyes. “Is it true, my darling?” she asked softly. “Is what she says true?”
“Yeth,” he said, and Claire smiled to realize that his little lordship lisped. “They thaid they’d kill me.”
“Dear God.” The countess hugged him to her breast again.
“Thnouts ith my friend. He thaved me from the bad men.” He looked back at Claire. “I love the Lady, Mama. Can she thtay with uth?”
Claire’s eyes filled with tears again as she knelt next to them. “This is your home again, my dear one, and my home is in the cottage. But we will see each other often, I promise. Just because you have come home does not mean you can neglect your studies in reading and mathematics.”
“You have been teaching him?” Lady Davina asked.
“She teaches us all, milady,” Tigg piped up. “I can read now, and do sums, I’m Mr. Malvern’s assistant too.”
The countess blinked at him. “My goodness. I have more to be grateful for than I ever dreamed.”
The earl got to his feet. “This is not the time, but by all I hold dear, I will find the miscreants who took my boy, and see them in gaol. Perhaps when it is convenient I could speak to this ...?” He gazed inquiringly at Claire.
“Snouts? He means Mr. McTavish, my secretary, whose nose, regrettably, is a source of great fun for the boys.” She had no doubt that convenient to the earl meant immediately, if not sooner. “Perhaps we might call tomorrow afternoon, if you are at home?”
The countess stood, and Claire found herself in a fierce embrace. “We are always at home to you—to you all. I can never, ever repay you for bringing my boy home to me.”
“My wife is right,” Lord Dunsmuir said. “If there is anything any of you need, anything I can do, you have merely to name it, and it will be done instantly.”
“Your lordship is very kind,” Claire said. “But at the moment, I have all I need.”
“As do I,” Andrew said. “And my mother lacks for nothing.”
“But if at any time your situation should change,” the earl told them, “any of you, even your secretary or this young man here—”
“That’th Tigg,” his son informed him. “He’th my friend, too.”
The earl acknowledged Tigg with a nod, one man to another. “—I wish to be the one to assist. I mean it. No matter what it is, it cannot be enough to equal my gratitude.”
The moment was a good one to exercise delicacy, and Claire and Andrew took their leave. Willie looked confused, and made to go with her, but she knelt and said, “No, darling. Your mama wishes to tuck you into your very own bed, and kiss you good-night. How lovely that will be!”
“You will come back, Lady?”
“Of course. Your papa and I and Snouts are to have a visit tomorrow afternoon, so you will see us then.”
“Promith?”
“Cross my heart.” And she did so.
Only then was he satisfied, and the little group took their leave.
In the landau once again, bowling down the side of Russell Square, an emotionally drained silence reigned until Tigg said, in wondering tones, “Wilberforce. Huh. Wonder if he expects us to call ’im that now?”
“Oh, no,” Andrew said. “You must address him as Lord Wilberforce. Or Viscount Hatley.”
Tigg made a rude noise. “Not bleedin’ likely. ’E’s our Willie, no matter what.”
“I imagine he will be perfectly happy to be known as Willie to his friends,” Mrs. Malvern put in. “And you certainly have a friend for life in his lordship. Goodness gracious me, what a night it has been!”
What a night, indeed. Claire realized with a sense of shock that she had not thought of the chamber or of kineticks or science at all in more than three hours. And somehow, when she remembered the joy that had filled that library, it seemed only right.
*
The Evening Standard
August 26
KIDNAPPED VISCOUNT RETURNS
In a turn of events straight f
rom the pages of a penny dreadful, the young Viscount Hatley, stolen from the garden of Hatley House two years ago while his nanny slept, has been restored to the arms of his joyful parents.
According to a source close to the family, Lord and Lady Dunsmuir were summoned from their beds in the middle of the night to find a group of Good Samaritans—as yet unnamed—with a young boy they claimed to be Lord Wilberforce. As our readers are aware, the Dunsmuirs have been summoned to many such meetings, all of which have been proven to be the work of confidence men attempting to pass off urchins and alley mice as the missing lord.
But the credentials of these unnamed angels appear to have been bona fide, because this morning Lord and Lady Dunsmuir announced to their callers that their son had been returned. Little is known of the harrowing events of his captivity, save that he was sworn to silence on pain of death. The boy has been mute for two years, and only the sight of his mother loosened his tongue once more.
Lord Dunsmuir has posted a reward of 100 pounds for any information leading to the capture of his son’s kidnappers, with a further 100 pounds due when they are proven guilty and sentenced to gaol or transport.
The editors of this newspaper join our readers in thanking Providence for the return of the young viscount, and offer our hopes that his ordeal will soon be forgotten in the joy of his return to the family circle.
Chapter 19
“’E’s only been gone two days and I miss ’im already.” Tigg finished with the last of the screws on a contraption that, if Claire had to say so herself, was fairly ingenious. Andrew had wasted no time in another trip to the manufactory, and between the two of them, they had created a sort of metal hammock that would set the chamber in motion. Once the cell was activated, the hammock could be locked in place so that the ignition process could occur with some precision in the chamber itself.
“He’s not really gone, you know,” Claire assured him. “His lordship has said we may visit at any time, with no restrictions.”
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