Fiendish Schemes (15 page)

“My assumption is that you speak of those enterprises upon which your father and his business associates have newly launched themselves.” I sat back against the corner of the
chaise
. “They seek to multiply their fortunes by wagering with the Sea and Light Book—

though
wager
is perhaps not an apt term in these circumstances, as they propose to remove all doubt as to the outcome of the underlying events. Very well; I admit having allowed myself to be recruited into their schemes. If you have become party to them as well, perhaps by entrusting your father with whatever finances are under your control, so that he might place them at the betting counter on your behalf—then we are moral equals, if not social ones.” Evangeline hurriedly sat next to me, leaning close so as to place her trembling hand against the front of my shirt. Somewhere beneath her touch, my heart trembled in response, and rather more so; my experience with the fairer sex had not been so great that a young woman bringing her face close to mine ranked as an everyday happenstance.

“This is not about money.” Her whisper drew me into her confidence. “May I rely upon you, Mr. Dower?”

“As much . . . as anyone can.” The request evoked my own inward fears. “I possess no reputation for being a pillar of strength.”

“But you will have my gratitude,” she said, “for whatever aid you might supply to me. There is no-one else to whom I can turn.” If such were the case, the young lady’s situation was indeed desperate. “Ask of me what you will. But there is little I can promise you.”

“To begin, your discretion will suffice; do I have that? For those I fear most are close at hand.”

I hazarded a guess. “You speak of Stonebrake?”

“Yes—” She gave a rapid nod. “Him, amongst others. Including my father.”

“Indeed?” The latter accusation took me by surprise. “He doesn’t seem like such a bad sort. A bit on the overbearing side, but not altogether—”

“You mistake my meaning. I have all the appropriate affections for him, but the conspiracies with which he has allowed himself to become entangled—they weigh heavily and darkly upon all chances of my future happiness, and that of those whom I love.”

“The reference is, I take it, to the esteemed Captain Crowcroft?”

Bit by bit, a picture was assembling in my mind, though I had some concern as to whether all its details would be painted in by the time Stonebrake returned to fetch me. “He evidenced himself as a capable enough man when I was introduced to him. And his position with Phototrope Limited seems honourable and straightforward; to steer a lighthouse from crag to crag, and cast its helpful beam across the ocean—surely that renders him of such value as to be past the reach of all these conniving schemes?” I attempted to cast my voice in as comforting a manner as possible, as the girl seemed but a quivering eyelash’s length away from shedding tears. “If I were to place a wager, it would be that a gentleman such as your betrothed is more than capable of guarding your prospects in this world.”

“Oh, Mr. Dower—would that it were so!” Her bosom rose and fell with one of those overly dramatic sighs to which creatures of her youth and gender were given. “And not long ago, I would have believed you had the truth of the matter. The good captain has more than won my trust, in addition to my desire.” Her expression turned reflective. “Which serves to illustrate how mysterious are the ways of the heart, seeing how great was my initial loathing of him.” I took some comfort in the perception that the lethal regard she had bestowed, in our previous encounter, was not a personal and specific matter relating to me, but evidently something that she directed in general toward the male species. Or at least until she got to know one of them to a better degree.

“Many successful marriages,” I advised her now, “have commenced in exactly such a fashion.”

“Of that, I have no doubt; my mother has told me as much. But you must understand, Mr. Dower, that the circumstances of my engagement to Captain Crowcroft might have been expressly designed to raise the emotions of contempt and loathing within me.”

“Oh?” My sympathies lay more with her
fiancé;
she seemed capable of anything, if provoked. Having seemingly escaped her wrath, I endeavoured to remain on her congenial side. “I’m sure you wish to keep all that private—”

“No, no; I
must
tell you!”

My own heart sank within me. There seemed no end to these revelations.

“You see,” Evangeline continued with even greater earnestness, “my engagement to Captain Crowcroft was none of my doing, or in fact, anything I wished for. It was all my father’s idea, in pursuance of those schemes of which you yourself are now a part. He believed—and I imagine still does—that having the most celebrated lighthouse commander as his son-in-law would in some way further the plans that he had laid.”

“So it might,” I said. “Through you, his daughter, there would be another channel of information as to the operations and maneuvers upon which the Sea & Light Book accepts its clients’ wagers.

Or possibly, your father and his associates might be able to induce your husband to steer his various light-bearing craft in such a manner as they had predetermined, and upon which they had appropriately made their bets.”

“No doubt,” conceded Evangeline, “my father’s reasoning was something along those lines. Though I little cared at the time, when the engagement between myself and Captain Crowcroft was announced—the shame and chagrin I felt, at being affianced to a man with whom I was barely acquainted, let alone loved, was more than I could bear. However, as I came to know him, my feelings altered.”

“Very likely.” I gave a shrug. “He doesn’t seem such a bad sort.”

“Oh, more than that, Mr. Dower; he is a very fine man, indeed.

He has more than won my heart, though the first tenderness of my regard for him was motivated more by pity than affection.” Her words puzzled me. “Why pity? He seems almost literally on top of the world he inhabits.”

“If you but knew! I am sure that many things seem benign and straightforward to an honest man such as yourself—”

I said nothing.

“But if you obtained any sense of the deviousness of those in whose schemes my poor Captain Crowcroft has become ensnared, I am sure you would fear for his prospects, as well as mine.” She slowly shook her head, gaze drifting beyond me to some horrid vision of disaster. “How cruelly ironic it seems, that my own father’s machinations should have brought about both my greatest happiness and my direst forebodings.”

“Well . . . I am not sure
irony
is the correct term to use in this case.” I was at a loss for anything else to say, though I felt compelled to make an utterance of some kind. “It might just be simpler to call it a dastardly thing to do to one’s own child.”

“If I believed that destroying all my hopes had been my father’s intent,” said Evangeline, “I might agree with you. But his wickedness is more of the unthinking kind, that lays waste without prior consideration, rather than the premeditated variety. He and his associates construct their schemes, then wind them up as though they were but clockwork toys, setting them into motion with no care as to what ultimate damage they might wreak. And as my father bears no actual malice toward me, I am certain that if he were aware of the blighted desert he were about to make of my life as well as Captain Crowcroft’s, he would be greatly chagrined.”

“Perhaps you should mention it to him.”

“I would as profitably speak to a wall!” Her inclination to the higher sort of personal drama manifested itself again. “You’ve spoken with my father, Mr. Dower; you know what he is like when he is caught up in one of his various enthusiasms. Nothing else matters; others’ voices are as the buzzing of gnats to him. Ruin might lie straight, and even his own flesh and blood could no more speak warning of it than alter the course of the sun in the sky.” Stonebrake was taking an inconveniently long time in arranging for my transportation from this place. If Fusible’s daughter spent much more time unburdening her maidenly heart, I feared I might collapse under the weight.

“Your apprehension, then, is that your father’s current scheme might fail, and disastrously so?”

“Worse, Mr. Dower! It will succeed! And then all my felicitous hopes are dashed.”

Now I was confused. “I fear I am not quite following you in this regard. . . .”

She regarded me with dismay. “Do you not see?”

“Quite frankly, no.”

“It is my betrothed’s very soul for which I am so concerned!”

“Oh.” I nodded my head. “That’s very good of you, I am sure.

And the captain undoubtedly has a care for yours.”

“Mine is not in the same peril,” said Evangeline. “You apparently do not understand—”

I held my tongue, feeling it redundant to agree with her once more on that point.

“Perhaps no man is capable of doing so.” Her head drooped mournfully. “Perhaps it is only a woman’s tender senses, so easily bruised by this world’s hard, unyielding realities, that can apprehend such a dolorous future as the one that awaits us now.”

“I am sure that is the case.” Perhaps it would be better if I concocted some pretext for making my excuses and going off in search of Stonebrake and the carriage. “These do seem like unnerving times, to even one as dull as myself.”

“You have little idea, Mr. Dower. Situated as I am here, in the midst of all these schemes and plots, I find myself close to the center of events, the unfolding of which will horrify you.”

“I have been sufficiently horrified already.” The automated Orang-Utan still ticked and leered at the back of my thoughts. “It has been a long day, and a disagreeable one.”

“Worse will come,” predicted the young lady in somber tones.

“You men have been so clever, with all your tinkering about and devising, setting great hissing pipes across the countryside and through the urban streets, the better that machines might serve you—”

“I wouldn’t exactly call it
serve
—”

“Just so!” She seized my arm, her features alighting, as though suddenly recognizing a fellow disciple in some deeply held faith.

“For now, we are their masters—but soon they shall be ours.”

“Indeed.” As my arm was numbing with the fervour of her grip, I thought it best to concur. “I have heard similar premonitions expressed before. Though if such is to be our species’ fate, I am not exactly sure what I can do about it.”

“Do you really think I care about our species, as you call it?” She let go of me, so as to lay the back of her hand against her own brow. “A woman’s heart is not so capacious as that, Mr. Dower! We love the individual, the fleshly creatures who hold us in their embrace, not these huge, gaseous abstractions spoken of by bearded philosophers. And I have already witnessed the horrible process commenced, in the one who has captured my heart. When you look upon my
fiancé,
you see a man admired by every level of our society, a hero to all— but I discern more deeply than that. I know the price he pays, the burden that his commanding rank imposes upon him. These ‘walking lights’—the intricacy of their construction, the minute adjustments necessary for their mobility, the fearsome explosive forces at their core, the scalding deaths that might be inflicted upon every man inside, the result of the slightest miscalculation at the helm—it is more than any man can bear, no matter his strength and resolve.”

“It does seem,” I allowed, “to be a demanding job—”

“More than demands, Mr. Dower; it
consumes
. This truth is known to me, as all that impinges upon my good captain is known.

I have watched it happen to him. Little by little, a bit at a time; a bit more today than yesterday, and a bit more to come tomorrow. The intricacies and complications of operating such a device have taken over his soul; he is at risk of becoming no more than a sort of flesh-and-blood appendage to whichever lighthouse he commands.”

Evangeline’s voice softened for a moment. “This is why I hope that you might pardon me, for I blush to recall with what venomous regard I looked upon you, when first I apprehended that you were the son of that genius-possessed inventor who created the essential elements upon which the walking lights depend.”

“Think nothing of it,” I assured her. In fact, a degree of relief was evoked by her confession; it was but another instance of someone’s opinion of me being based more upon my lineage than any personal failing. “I’m sure you are aware of what is so often said, regarding the sins of the fathers being visited upon their sons.”

“No, Mr. Dower; it is kind of you not to condemn, but it was still wicked to hate someone I did not even know, if only for a moment.

Though it was a dark moment indeed; the sight of you at the launch party, there in Cornwall, overwhelmed all my better instincts—you seemed to represent to me all the evils of such cleverness, which values intricately working machinery more than human beings.”

“Whatever cleverness I possess, as it were, has been greatly overestimated.”

“So I have discovered,” said Evangeline. “The resolution I had already vowed, to forgive you upon our next encounter, was made considerably easier by the reports I received just this evening, as to the degree of not just ineptitude but sheer terror that you appear to display when confronted by your father’s creations.”

My own resolution, vowed at this immediate moment, was to dismantle that accursed Orang-Utan at the earliest opportunity. “Ineptitude, perhaps.” I attempted not to bristle at her comments. “Though I believe
terror
to be putting it a trifle harshly.”

“Please don’t be angry with me, Mr. Dower.” She laid her hand upon my arm, lightly enough to allow the blood to continue to circulate. “For if you had been terrified, it would only cause me to regard you even more highly. For such is my reaction, when I contemplate all these so-called technological wonders that have marched and hissed their way into our world.” To my paralyzed surprise, she leaned forward and kissed me on one side of my face, then drew back as though to assess the effect this momentary tenderness had upon me. “Though Captain Crowcroft owns all my heart,” she spoke softly, “I have some gentle feeling for you as well. For I have now come to see that you are as much a victim as he is, of all this unrelenting machinery.”