Magnificent Devices 07 - A Lady of Integrity (7 page)

“After I checked on you in your room in the palace? After I returned to the ship myself?”

“Yes, Lady. We came in through the communications cage, where the pigeons dock. It—it’s a flaw in
Athena
’s design, and a squeeze now that we’re older, but—”

Claire’s razor-quiet voice cut her off. “Is there a reason for this deceitful behavior?”

A rustle near the door produced Lizzie, just in time to hear this question, take in the silence in the room, and observe the state of Claire’s complexion. Claire saw the moment when Lizzie came to the conclusion that innocence was futile and they would have to employ a different strategy.

“We knew you would need us, Lady,” Lizzie said, her tone cautious, as one might use when approaching a lion. “It wouldn’t be proper for an unmarried lady to attend the exhibition in a company of gentlemen, so we came along to make the numbers more believable.”

Another silence. Any other response would dignify this nonsense far too much. And she needed a moment to take a firm grip on her temper—and her fear.

“First,” Claire said, “I am engaged to one of the gentlemen, so your concerns are groundless. Second, Alice, too, was a lady the last time I looked. Third, do you realize you have put your final year at the
lycée
in jeopardy? Do you really have so little respect for yourselves that you would risk losing all for which you have worked so hard? And
fourth
, the count and the baroness will be frantic with worry, thinking you have been kidnapped. Have you no regard for them, after all they have done for you?”

Maggie shrank under the lash of her tone. Lizzie did her best to bear up, but by the fourth point, she, too, could only gaze at the floor, blinking, her lips trembling and her fingers pleating the skirt of her raiding rig.

“You will send a pigeon at once,” Claire said, “informing them of your whereabouts and asking them to send a landau to the commercial airfield to meet the packet from Geneva. We will re-route our course and have you on it this afternoon.”

“But Lady—”

“I will hear no arguments. You have disobeyed and deceived those who love you most with no regard for our feelings, and I can barely look at you for disappointment. Go aft now, please. You may leave Holly here.”

Meekly, Maggie put the hen on the teak floor, and the two of them trailed out the door, faces red with shame, tears standing on their lashes.

Alice gazed after their retreating backs, then turned to Claire as though she didn’t know who to offer comfort to first. “Claire,” she began, “surely they—”

But Claire turned away, blinking back the tears she would not shed in front of the girls.

Tigg had already gone out after Lizzie, but the two men still stood there, gawking and unwelcome during this moment of feminine emotion. As though realizing that such a moment demanded privacy and consideration for finer feelings, Alice took the elbows of Captain Hollys and Andrew, and steered them toward the door.

“What—”

“Give us a moment, gentlemen,” she said.

“I hardly see why—”

Alice glared, and Captain Hollys abruptly closed his mouth, turned, and departed, Andrew on his heels.

Gently, Alice removed Ivy’s feathery self from Claire’s shoulder and passed a comforting arm about her. Claire leaned her forehead on her friend’s shoulder and let the tears come. “There, there. It will be all right,” Alice said softly as she patted her back, as though Claire had been one of her little half-sisters back in the Canadas.

“I’m just—so afraid for them—and for you,” Claire finally managed between sobs.

“Don’t be afraid for me,” Alice said in some surprise. “I made sure I stocked up on bullets for the Remington before I left.”

“But the girls—if anything should happen—”

“I would put those two up against just about anybody,” Alice said. “Don’t forget that one foiled a plot to kill the Prince of Wales, and the other stopped a French invasion. These are no ordinary young ladies.”

“Believe me, I have not forgotten.” Neither had she forgotten the knifelike terror during the final moments of each of those occasions, when she had thought them dead. “But in striving to give them as normal an upbringing as possible, I fear they may never forgive me.” Claire sniffled and wiped the tears off one cheek with the flat of her hand, then pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve and used it with vehemence. “But if I let them come, I may regret it for ever.”

“Forgive me for saying so, but our sudden lift tells me that you defied the count this morning in a way not so different from the girls’ behavior last night. You just got away with it and they didn’t.”

Trust Alice to bring her face to face with the truth she had been trying to avoid. “Thank you for the reminder of my own poor example,” Claire moaned. “Honestly, I am the worst guardian anyone ever had—and if they are killed or taken prisoner and forced underwater, I do not know what I shall do.”

“The same thing we’re going to do for Jake,” Alice told her firmly. “This is no time for you to lose your nerve, Claire. We have work to do, and I can’t do it alone. We need every hand on deck. If I have to walk back into that boiling kettle of a Duchy, I tell you what, I’d be glad of Lizzie or Maggie watching my back.”

“I would too—but their educations, Alice.” Shouldn’t a guardian look at the longer view, not merely the current emergency? How was one to know the right thing, when what was right at one moment might be wrong for the next?

“Send a pigeon to their headmistress and say that a family emergency has come up. All we need is a week. They won’t be booted out of school for missing that, will they?”

“No,” Claire said slowly. “I do not suppose so.” She couldn’t keep the plea out of her gaze. “Do you really believe we ought to take them?”

Alice’s mobile mouth took on a rueful cast. “I believe that if we don’t, they’ll bribe an aeronaut in Geneva to get them over the Alps themselves, and that poses its own problems.”

The corners of Claire’s own lips twitched, and the tension in Alice’s shoulders eased a little.

“Thank you, Alice,” she said. “I am glad I can count on you to tell me what I need to hear, not merely what I
want
to hear. And now I must hurry back before they release that pigeon. On the way I shall decide how best to recant my position. Will you take the helm?”

“I’d be happy to.” Alice turned to relieve Nine of his duty, blowing a long breath up through her curly fringe, as if she’d had a narrow escape.

Alice gripped the wheel with a sense of relief, the familiar course scrolling beneath
Athena
’s hull like a map being unrolled on a giant’s table. Flying she could handle. It was straightforward. You calculated your course, prepared as much as you could for the unexpected, and kept a weather eye out.

She supposed that motherhood—or being a guardian standing in a mother’s or an older sister’s place—was somewhat similar, if you got right down to it. But she wasn’t sure she’d be able to manage the Mopsies if she were walking in Claire’s shoes.

Still, her relief at having those two irrepressible girls along felt like a child’s balloon under her breastbone. She hadn’t been telling Claire a story—she’d meant it when she’d said she’d rather have one of them at her back than just about anybody. And what did that say about her own maternal instincts, such as they were?

“Captain Chalmers?” Ian Hollys stepped into the gondola, looking about him as if he were expecting to be snapped at. “Permission to enter?”

“Granted,” she said, and he strolled over to the viewing port, taking in the landscape and no doubt pinpointing exactly where they were. Well, one look and anybody could see that. The Bodensee spread below them, a silver sheet in the morning sun, like a flat doorstep before the wall of the Alps.

“I take it the contretemps with the girls has been resolved satisfactorily?”

“Yes.”

“So why then are we bearing due south rather than west, toward Geneva? This route will take much longer.”

She suppressed a tingle of irritation at having her course questioned, even by an aeronaut of his standing and experience. It was a fair question, but if their positions had been reversed, she would have kept her mouth shut and assumed the other person knew what they were doing.

“Because our plans have changed,” she said. “We’re not going to Geneva. We’re heading straight for the Duchy and the girls are coming along.”

“After that lecture, Claire is backing down?” His eyebrows rose. “Is that wise, to give such strong-willed young ladies as these the upper hand?”

“She isn’t backing down, and if you think they have the upper hand with her, you haven’t been around them much.” She adjusted course a slight degree. “I simply convinced her that we can use their help, and she’s gone to send a pigeon to the school to say they’ll be delayed a week with a family emergency. And another, I expect, to the von Zeppelins letting them know the girls lifted with us.”

“She was quite right, you know. Their behavior was deceitful. But she is not without culpability, either, lifting like an owl in the night.”

“Did you manage to get your bags aboard?” Alice asked.

“As it happens, we did. But that is completely beside the point.”

“Oh, do give over, Captain Hollys. What’s done is done, and grumbling about it isn’t going to change anything. She did what she believed she had to do—and so did the girls. Their motives were for the best and sometimes you have to look past the means to the end.”

“Is that your philosophy?” He clasped his hands behind his back and gazed out the bow, as if checking that the course she’d set was the correct one. No, that wasn’t fair. She was probably reading too much into it. It was a bad habit. “That the end justifies the means?”

“Why don’t you ask me that when we have Jake and my ship safely back in hand?”

“Perhaps I shall. Would you like me to take the helm as we pass over the Matterhorn?”

“Why?” she blurted. The nerve of the man! “Claire gave it to me, and I’ll hang onto it until she relieves me, if it’s all the same to you.”

His skin reddened, as if he wasn’t accustomed to being spoken to in such a way. Well, maybe he wasn’t, in his own gondola. But she could speak any way she wanted to in her own—or at least, as long as she had the helm.

“I simply did not know if you had planted the flag.”

Hmph. So of course he had assumed she hadn’t. “Yes, we did, in the
Stalwart Lass
on the flight down.”

It was a crazy custom—almost a rite of passage among the rope monkeys. You’d fly so close to the famous peak that you could plant a small flagpole bearing the pennant of the country you flew for and the call numbers of your vessel. It signified both skill and the extent to which you’d traveled. Jake had hung on a harness below the
Lass
’s engine compartment, hooting like a cowboy riding a bull, as he’d planted the flag in the frozen snow while she steered overhead, and then been reeled up before the tricky winds and the cold punished them for their impudence.

“Congratulations,” Captain Hollys said, somewhat stiffly.

“Have you done it?” If they were to work together on this mission, then she supposed she should be polite. Really, he’d given her nothing but courtesy in the past, so she should be a little nicer.

Besides being a baronet, and Lord Dunsmuir’s cousin, he was good-looking—if you liked the tall, dark, and masterful type—and captain of one of the most recognizable ships in the world. If what Claire said was true, he was making quite a splash among this season’s debutantes, with Miss This on his arm one evening and Lady That dancing with him the next, to say nothing of enjoying the opera with the Honourable So-and-So the night after that, while he looked for a wife to suit him.

The man had everything going for him and probably didn’t even need to earn his living. Could she really be blamed for giving in to the temptation to cut him down to size once in a while?

“Yes, on our first voyage to Byzantium,” he replied, shaking her out of what was fast becoming a mood. “It only counts if you do it your first time across, you know, so one of my lieutenants came prepared. I had the helm while he dangled from an access hatch on a safety line. I must confess I was glad when the job was done. One moment of wind shear and we’d have been picking ice out of our teeth while we waited in line at the pearly gates.”

She’d had a moment of fear herself, wondering what she was doing as she risked life and ship to participate in such a crazy custom.

“I am surprised at your temerity, with only your navigator as your crew,” he added.

“One to fly, and one to plant the flag. That’s all you need.”

“But the loss of one would mean disaster for the other. I hope you come to your other decisions as captain with greater thought and less daring.”

Well, if that didn’t beat all!

“We survived, didn’t we? And besides, I have one of Claire’s and my automaton intelligence systems in the
Lass
now. If there are only the two of us, it’s because I don’t need more.” She paused. “Until Mr. Stringfellow joins us. Then we’ll be three.”

“This ship has the same, does it not?” He gazed above her head, where the cables ran like nerves between the brains of her original automatons, still running like clocks, bless them.

“It does. So you’ll excuse me when I disagree with you.”

Again, his skin reddened. With the world’s briefest bow, he said, “Forgive me for intruding.” And he turned on one boot heel, as though he were on parade, and marched out the door.

Hot blood cascaded into Alice’s cheeks with chagrin and remorse. The man was risking life and liberty to come to her assistance and this was how she treated him? What was the matter with her?

Now she would have to go and apologize. And he would take it as his due, which would mean she would lose his respect.

Fiddlesticks.

Why did she care?

Because earning someone’s respect meant something. It cost dearly, and few people in her experience had that kind of coin. With a few prickly words, she had thrown it away, and now, too late, she would give anything to get it back.