He looked at it as if it were a snake that might bite him, dutifully took it, kissed it, and led her to the opposing wing chairs by the hearth. Her father joined them after a few moments and they all sat together in a civilized manner and took refreshments. Her father had his nightly brandy, Lord Quinn had his whiskey, and Sasha took tea. They sat in unbroken silence while the drawing room clock ticked solemn ticks and solemn tocks. Her father lit a cigar. Lord Quinn took more whiskey. Sasha shifted uncomfortably in her seat, picked up her petit point from the basket next to her chair, and did a few stitches, not very well. Lord Quinn politely inquired about her interests, and Sasha explained about the Tuning Machine that she had built in the conservatory, making her father cringe back in his seat as if blows were falling upon him. Lord Quinn seemed unperturbed, disinterested. He did not ask to see it.
Finally, her father could take no more of this. “I think you’ll be very happy together,” he announced. “I think you will make a fine couple and will be good for each other.”
“I’m sure we shall,” Sasha agreed, not very enthusiastically, and snapped the thread she was sewing with her teeth, making her father cringe even more. She might have pointed out that he had nothing to fear; Lord Quinn had long since passed out in his seat. Newton took that moment to wend his way into the drawing room. Sasha jumped up. “I should take Newton into the kitchen and see if Cook has any scraps for him. It was good meeting you, Lord Quinn.” She curtseyed respectfully.
Lord Quinn snored rather dramatically.
Sasha carried the cat away, Newton hanging over her shoulder and hissing at the sleeping lord.
CHAPTER 3
How bad could marriage to Lord Quinn be?
Sasha sat at the table in the pantry where Cook normally prepared their meals and watched Newton lick up his milk from a bowl on the floor. She would marry Lord Quinn to please her father and protect herself from Uncle Mycroft, and she’d likely never have to see him. He’d be too busy cavorting every night at gambling halls and pubs. It might even work to her advantage. She could work on her experiments and never experience a distraction. She could read her beloved books all night and never see her husband. Except…well…
“I don’t want to marry Lord Quinn, Newton. I don’t want to marry anyone.”
Well, that wasn’t strictly true. When she thought of marriage—not practical marriage, but fairy-tale marriage, the kinds of marriages that really ought to happen to young women—the image of the husband that came to mind was Toby Hallowman, their stableman.
They’d practically gown up together, Toby having come to them as a boy of seven from a nearby workhouse. He’d been thin and sallow back then. Now he was twenty-one, and tall and lean and muscular, with brown hair that fell in a froth over his brow and a permanent summer tan and the most amazing brown eyes. What’s more, he was good to the horses, always making certain the mares she rode in the frosty early morning were in good spirits before lacing his fingers together and bumping her up into her saddle. Her father’s carriage horses never bore whip marks like so many other lords’ horses, and every resident of their stable was properly shoed and groomed every day, even when it rained. Toby loved the horses.
Galvanized by such thoughts, Sasha jumped up and ran for the courtyard door. The lights in the stables were still burning, which meant Toby was still there. He hadn’t gone into London for the night, thank goodness. She needed to see him, needed to talk to someone she understood. Lifting her skirts, she scuffled across the pavilion to the stables and ducked inside, where he’d thoughtfully hung a long line of lanterns on hooks. Toby always kept the stables properly lit in the event she came visiting unexpectedly.
Toby sat on an overturned bucket with his broad back to her, carefully oiling a harness.
“Toby,” she said, “the most horrible man is here. Have you seen?”
Toby immediately stood up and turned to face her. His entire face lit up with a lopsided smile. “You mean Lord Quinn.”
“Yes,” she said, wrinkling up her nose. “He’s as pale as a Morlock and as heartless as Captain Nemo.”
“You and your books.” Toby shook his head and grinned as his eyes took in the full sight of her still dressed in her debutante dress. He had read many of the same books as Sasha. In fact, Jules Verne had brought them together in the first place. One of the first things Sasha had done was teach him to read, starting with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Since then, she’d shared book after book with Toby. Right now, they were sharing Moby Dick. Toby was smart, understood the concepts and devices in the books they read, and was always happy to help her with an invention. If she could have chosen anyone to marry, she would have chosen Toby in a heartbeat, though of course she knew her father would never approve such an arrangement. Toby had no status.
“I wish I was more like you, Toby,” she mused, watching him hang the shining harness on a hook near the ceiling among the other tack.
Toby shrugged his broad shoulders. “No, you don’t.”
“I do! If my Papa wasn’t a lord, I could marry anyone I wanted.” She didn’t know if that was strictly true, but there had to be more freedom away from the gentry. “We could even marry, and then you could be my assistant in the laboratory.”
Toby laughed at the fantasy and turned around. “I’ll be your assistant, even after you marry. You know I’m forever at your service, Sasha.” He said it solemnly, with a deep bow, a kiss of her hand, and a big grin that was so infectious it had her smiling in return, even though she was in a positively unsmiling mood.
She thought about his offer. “Will you come now? I’d like to show you the Tuning Machine.”
Toby glanced at the oil lamps on the walls. He could always tell what time it was by how much oil remained in them. “It’s rather late, Sasha.”
“Just for a few minutes! After this terrible day, I’ll never get to sleep. And it’s already done. I want you to be the first to see it!”
“I can’t resist you, Sasha,” he said as she took his hand.
They raced each other back inside and up the stairs to the third floor of the manor where her father’s conservatory was located. It was a huge space with a glass ceiling, set up long ago with an array of telescopes. Her mother had once had an intense interest in astronomy. But now a great deal of the space was filled with Sasha’s notebooks, workbench and experimental devices, many of which stood dusty in dark corners, a testament to Sasha’s learning curve when she first embarked on becoming an inventor.
In the center of the room squatted the enormous Tuning Machine, which she had finished only a few short days ago. Much of it had been constructed with a combination of organ parts, a printing press, a typewriting machine, plus a number of odds and ends mostly borrowed from the manor. Attached to the machine via wires were two great Tesla coils that Sasha had redesigned to emit not electricity but sound. Once the Tuning Machine was cranked up and running, it was possible to encourage the two orbs atop the Tesla coils to produce song and images by running one’s fingers over them. The idea of high-frequency sound waves to generate power had been John’s theory, though much of the design of the machine belonged to Sasha. John had a similarly constructed machine in America, and Sasha wondered if it was possible that John’s machine could generate such a wide variety of images.
She had no idea where the images came from. She was still exploring the mystery of it, but she hoped to share her findings with John in her next letter.
Sasha explained the function of the machine to Toby as he circled it, touching the chimerical design on all sides. With Toby as her audience, Sasha began cranking the giant clockwork wheel. Once she had it at a sufficient speed, it would run on centrifugal force for more than an hour. She positioned herself before the two Tesla coils and extended her hands, her fingertips just touching the orbs. As always, she felt a rush of excitement as the machine powered up, its gears clicking and clacking along with an almost hypnotic speed.
Newton, always up for an adventure, raced int
o the room and jumped up onto the embroidered seat of a nearby chair to watch the proceedings, his tail switching cautiously.
Sasha felt a tickle of electricity from the orbs, a sensation like a hum throughout her entire body. The serene humming quickly deepened and soon she could feel it deep inside her bones like an ache.
Toby smiled, his face full of light and wonder.
Sasha played her fingers across the orbs. The music that came out of them was not music in the traditional sense; rather, it was like birdcall, or the sound of a rushing stream—natural, elemental. Sasha moved her fingers to make the pitch change, and it wasn’t long before the Tuning Machine was at full power, the gaslights of the old mansion flickering, and the space between the two coils growing foggy and shimmery with pinpricks of light.
The first moving image that appeared was of a deep emerald green forest, not perfectly illustrated, but like a broken painting seen through a fuzzy dream. Figures moved in the picture, men darting through the trees on horseback, archers with bows and men with broadswords. A war was being fought in some other place. A warrior raised a blood-slathered sword over his head and emitted a silent battle cry as he charged toward his enemies.
Toby was left speechless by the sight, but Sasha felt the image was much too grim. She moved her fingers and the tune and image changed. Now she saw the surface of some grey, pocked foreign world, with a tiny glass city cradled in a giant-sized crater. Large airships darted overhead, as fast as wasps. This picture was much more pleasant, if a bit dull. She moved her fingers again. Now she saw a primordial jungle with large creatures slithering beneath the undergrowth. Start-bright eyes glowered out at her, hungry eyes…
“Sasha?”
Sasha lifted her hands off the orbs and turned to find Lord Quinn slumped in the doorway. His sudden appearance surprised her. He was the absolute last person she’d expected to see standing in her father’s conservatory. He’d obviously been drinking heavily because he was weaving dangerously on his feet. He took an unsteady step forward, then stopped to grasp the back of a settee to orient himself. “Sasha, I need to speak with you at once,” he said, before venturing another drunken step. “Your father said you’d likely be here.” He looked about the conservatory populated with its many bizarre devices with some dismay. “It’s terribly important.”
“Lord Quinn,” Sasha began, eyeing him angrily, “Because of my father, we will be seeing quite a lot of each other in the near future. So I really don’t see what we have to talk about now…”
“It’s important, I assure you. It’s about the wedding…I…” He’d reached the chair that Newton was crouched on. The cat, understandably upset about the strange man grasping at the air around him, screeched and jumped at him. Lord Quinn jerked his hand back. The cat jumped down and arched his back fearsomely. “Bloody beast…” Quinn began, trying to kick the cat away, but the motion only unbalanced him. Before Sasha could give warning, Quinn, standing within easy reach of Toby, had gotten hold of the boy’s arm in a desperate attempt to regain his balance. The motion offset Toby, who tried to jerk his arm back, and the two pitched forward…straight into the moving picture of the jungle.
Before Sasha’s very eyes, both men vanished.
She experienced a moment of disbelief, followed by panic. She rushed forward, but stopped abruptly inches away from the Tesla coils. Her first instinct was to utter a cry for help, except that the conservatory was on the third floor of the mansion, and almost no one was up here at this hour. There were no servants, and her father was likely preparing for bed. She might have very little time, she realized. The two men could be in terrible danger…wherever they’d gone. Her invention had caused this anomaly. She needed to help them immediately. Taking a deep breath, she dropped to her knees and reached into the shifty, dreamlike field of the picture. “Toby!” she cried, hoping to feel the familiar warmth of his hand.
A sudden, powerful gust of wind ripped her hair right out of its coiffeur. It was like being sucked into a swirling vortex. Before she could even scream for help, the darkness beyond the picture had its claws in her. Her long dark hair was dragged relentlessly forward and the rest of her followed, her skirts flying up around her face, obscuring her vision. The vortex swallowed her whole…
Sasha screamed. And screamed again…
CHAPTER 4
When next Sasha opened her eyes, she saw a clear, summery blue sky burning high overhead. It reminded her of the meadow behind the manor house, and at first glance she thought perhaps she’d fallen asleep while lying on a blanket, reading a book. She’d done so often enough in the past. Except that there was something peculiar about the trees overhead. They didn’t look like the alders, silver birches and grand oaks she was used to. These looked frilly and exotic, like something from the South Seas, or something she’d seen in drawings in her archeology books. She sat up slowly and looked around. Strange birds she didn’t recognize were cackling overhead and unseen creatures were hooting busily to each other in the trees. She knew there were no queer cackling birds or hooting tree creatures on the manor estate.
Jungle growth closed in on all sides of her, thick thorny bushes, tall, upright frond-trees, and low, ground-clutching bushes with great red and orange orchids she had never in her life seen growing on the shores of England. It had to be a dream; there was no other logical explanation. She closed her eyes and lay back down on the leaf-littered forest floor. She was just dreaming. If she closed her eyes and waited long enough, she’d wake up. And then everything would be normal again.
She waited. And waited.
But nothing happened. Nothing changed.
“Bloody hell, get it off of me!” a panicked voice shouted.
The sound galvanized Sasha. She jumped to her feet in the midst of the possibly-not-a-dream-jungle and turned her attention on some furious bushwhacking going on not ten paces away from her. Leaning forward, she started parting the undergrowth when Lord Quinn jumped out of the bushes with what looked like a giant beetle attached to his back, its carapace a slick oily black, its antenna flickering over Quinn’s head of disheveled red hair. It was making the most frightening clicking noises! Sasha squeaked and jumped back at the sight.
Quinn swung around, his blue eyes wild and unfocused. “Get…it…off, girl!” he commanded.
So Sasha bent down, picked up a half-rotted log lying at her feet, and when Quinn turned his back, she used both hands to hit the beetle just as hard as she could. It made a wet, crunching noise that made Sasha flinch. Lord Quinn and his beetle landed face first on the jungle floor and lay still.
“Oh dear.” Sasha dropped the log that was dripping with black beetle juices and stared at Quinn lying there unconscious. The squashed beetle was roughly the size and shape of one of her father’s silver serving trays, and it was that fact—more than anything—that convinced Sasha that she was probably not in England anymore. In fact, she didn’t think she was anywhere anymore.
“Sasha? Sasha, are you all right? I heard you screaming,” said Toby, emerging unharmed from a copse of the peculiar jungle trees, palm fronds brushing his cheeks. With his work shirt open at the throat and the sleeves rolled up, he looked rugged, bronzed, and relaxed—and much more at home in the jungle than Lord Quinn in his sunless white skin and dark, severe suit. Long hours of work with the horses had turned Toby’s face a burnished golden-brown, and his sun-streaked brown hair was wild from their sudden trip through…well, whatever portal she had opened. He stopped when he saw Lord Quinn lying so still on the jungle floor. “What happened to him?”
Sasha gestured at the fallen man. “He wanted me to squash a bug. So I did.”
CHAPTER 5
Together, Sasha and Toby got Lord Quinn up and propped against one of the exotic tree trunks. He was still out cold, and there seemed to be a nice-sized goose egg growing on the back of his head, but at least Sasha hadn’t killed him. Toby joked that that was either good or bad, depending on how one was looking at things, but Sasha didn’t laugh. She
was starting to feel bad about Quinn.
Toby bent low and slapped Quinn across the face, using more force than was necessary, in Sasha’s opinion. Almost immediately, the bright blue, bloodshot eyes flared open and Quinn let out his breath and exclaimed, “Dear God!” Then he started panicking all over again. “Is it off? Is…it…?”
“It’s dead,” Sasha told him, indicating the bug parts scattered all over the jungle floor and, presumably, on the back of Lord Quinn’s suit as well. She nearly rolled her eyes in exasperation. She’d never seen a grown man react so nervously to a tiny bug. Well, maybe a not-so-tiny bug, but still…
Lord Quinn took one look at the remnants of the beetle, turned his head, and vomited all over Sasha’s slippers, making her leap back in alarm. His breath wasn’t roses, that much was obvious. He smelled like the inside of a cheap tavern. “Bloody hell,” he said when he’d recovered. “I hate bugs!” He ran his hands over his face and hair, mussing it further. “I swear I shall never again drink your father’s whiskey, Sasha.”
“You shouldn’t be drinking so heavily in the first place!” Sasha exclaimed, attempting to stay downwind as she contemplated her ruined shoes. Toby looked surprise; he’d never expected her to speak so plainly, and neither had she, but Sasha had a feeling that the normal rules of polite society no longer applied here…wherever they were. And if she was going to be stuck in this…whatever this place was…she was bloody well going to speak her mind! She patted at her loose, mussed hair, attempting to fix her coiffure, then realized the futility of the gesture. Her combs were gone, her hair too heavy to manage, and now her shoes were ruined beyond repair!
Planet of Dinosaurs, The Complete Collection (Includes Planet of Dinosaurs, Sea of Serpents, & Valley of Dragons) Page 2
