Magnificent Devices [5] A Lady of Resources (10 page)

“Deuce take it, we’re not invited to that confounded hullaballoo again, are we?” His lordship straightened in alarm.

“Every year, dear.”

“Then by all means let us tell him we are engaged at Seacombe’s. I shall consider myself lucky to have made the escape.”

Lizzie hardly dared breathe, much less ask, but she felt driven to clinch the deal. “So you will come? On the fifteenth? We shall all go together?”

“Yes, drat and bebother it,” Lord Dunsmuir sighed. “It is the lesser of two evils, and I shall call you to account for it one day.”

“Oh, thank you, sir!” Lizzie leaped from her chair, hugged them both, and danced deliriously from the room before either of them could reconsider.

Lizzie gazed out the viewing port, and observed that on the ground below as they came in for their landing, four young men had abandoned a pair of girls on a blanket next to the river. Dressed in casual boating jackets and linen trousers, they galloped across the field to catch the landing ropes before the startled groundsmen could get there, and had
Athena
tied to her mooring mast and her gangway down before
Lady Lucy
was fairly secured.

Lizzie was first off the ship, to a raucous greeting by Claude, who swung her around in a hug. “I’m so glad you’re here!” he cried. He set her down and indicated his three companions with a sweep of one arm. “These are my partners in mischief, but never mind that, you must come with us and settle our question at once.”

“And what is that?” Lizzie said, laughing, allowing herself to be borne along by the boys with only the barest, tiniest bit of guilt at abandoning Maggie and Lewis and the Lady before they’d so much as set a foot on the ground. Well, goodness, Maggie was as welcome as anyone. She could catch them up if she wanted to. Everyone knew Lewis was shy in company, so he would take longer to warm up, but by the time they’d finished supper, she had no doubt they’d all be the best of friends and merry as grigs.

“Simply this,” Claude said, pulling her along. “Adolphus here says that when the old Queen dies, the crown ought to go to the Prince of Wales. But I say, and the pater says, that the prince is so ruddy ancient that it ought to skip him on grounds of simple economy, and go straight to Prince George—or someone more suitable.”

“You know that won’t do, Claude,” laughed the young man in the enormous bow-tied cravat whom Lizzie presumed must be Adolphus. “You’re bucking a thousand years of history and tradition. It will never happen.”

“Of course it will.” One of the girls joined in the conversation as though it had never been interrupted by the airships’ arrival. “The Prince of Wales has got to be fifty or sixty at least, and his fast living and bad habits are going to make an end to him sooner rather than later. You can’t deny it saves England a walloping great deal of money to simply skip him as a bad job, and move on.”

“Move on to what, though?” Lizzie found herself saying. “If you don’t observe the rights of succession, you’re looking at a republic and ending the monarchy altogether, as they’ve done in France.”

Claude whooped and slapped Adolphus on the knee. “She’s got you there, cornered, tied, and served up for dinner, old chap!” He flopped onto the blanket and chortled in glee. “I knew you would fit right in, Lizzie, old thing!”

“Mind whom you’re calling old,” she said pertly. “As a college man, you’re practically out to grass.”

Far from taking offense, this sent Claude into a fresh paroxysm of laughter as he lay on his back on the blanket.

“Do introduce us, Claude, darling,” said the brunette reclining closest to the picnic basket. “I want to know the girl who can arrive in a perfect wreck of an airship and trounce you so soundly without even breaking her stride.”

“It isn’t a wreck.” Lizzie snapped to
Athena
’s defense. “It’s the prototype ship for the Zeppelin automaton intelligence system.”

“Goodness, what a lot of syllables,” drawled the other girl, a blonde who rolled over and regarded Lizzie from under the brim of a straw hat so beautifully trimmed that Lizzie coveted it on the spot. “How exhausting.”

“
Breathing
is exhausting for you, Arabella,” the first girl said, and extended her hand. “Since an introduction is clearly beyond Claude, I shall do it myself. I’m Cynthia von Stade, Dolly’s sister. I’m so pleased to meet you, after all we’ve heard of you from this wretch here. He’s really quite smitten.”

“Give me away, why don’t you,” came from under the boater with which Claude had covered his face, evidently worn out by his own humor.

“How do you do?” How she wished she had Cynthia’s artless way of speaking, as though they were already fast friends. “Elizabeth de Maupassant, but do call me Lizzie. Everyone does.”

“Elizabeth!” The Lady chose that particular moment of all moments to call her full name from across the field. “Come and pay your respects to our host, if you please.”

Arabella giggled and Lizzie got up off the blanket, pulling her dignity around her, though she felt like a five-year-old being called in to tea. Fortunately Mr. Seacombe was as glad to see her as his son, though he was much more dignified about showing it.

“I am so glad to see you again, Miss de Maupassant,” he said, shaking her hand in a firm grip. “And Lord Dunsmuir, Lady Dunsmuir, Lord Wilberforce, words cannot express how happy I am to welcome you to my home here in England.”

Lord Dunsmuir shook his hand with a little more enthusiasm than he might have had he not known how closely he’d escaped the Prince of Wales’s “hullaballoo,” whatever that was. “It is our pleasure, sir. And now, if you don’t mind, I do not wish to keep my wife standing in the sun. She is in a rather, er, delicate condition.”

Understanding dawned immediately. “Of course, of course. I have tea waiting inside, and perhaps a little drop of something stronger would not go amiss?”

As the little party paced away across the lawn, Lizzie took Maggie’s hand as she made to join them. “Come on, and I’ll introduce you to everyone once I get them all straight myself.”

The languid Arabella Montgomery turned out to be the sister of Darwin Montgomery, a lad as lanky as she was petite. She and Cynthia had just finished their first year at Maison Villeneuve. “We shall tell you all about it,” Cynthia promised. “The good, the bad, and the perfectly dreadful—by which I mean
table service
. You will make no missteps with us to look after you, have no fear.”

“I don’t think Miss Arabella plans to look after anyone,” Maggie whispered.

“She was just being polite,” Lizzie whispered back. “And don’t call her Miss Arabella. Among equals, we just use first names.”

“Equals, is it?” Maggie murmured.

She lifted her eyebrows in polite interest as Cynthia indicated the young man standing next to Arabella over at the river’s edge, looking into the water through his amber spectacles as though he could see the fish fanning themselves at the bottom. “That’s Claude’s cousin Geoffrey, and somewhere hereabouts is his other cousin. Claude, darling, what’s his name? The scientific one who always looks at you as though you’re some species of baboon?”

“In my cousin’s mind, that sacred organ being evolved far beyond those of the rest of us, I
am
a baboon,” came from under the hat. “But for informational purposes only, his name is Evan Douglas.” Claude removed the boater at last and sat up. “It’s not likely you’ll see him. He is engaged in Serious Work and does not have time for fribbles such as we.”

Cynthia laughed at his capital letters and italics, and Lizzie smiled as well. “So instead of a madwoman in the attic, we have a perambulatory brain in the tower?” she asked.

“You have the right of it,” Claude told her with a nod. “One does not cross the holy threshold without an invitation, which I have been waiting for these two long years.” He shook his head sadly.

“Then you shall have to make do with us,” Lizzie told him, tucking her hand into his elbow with such easy familiarity that Maggie looked shocked. “I do not care for heights, so receiving no invitation to the tower will not hurt my feelings in the least.”

“And having to listen to his interminable lectures on mnemosomniography will not hurt your brain,” Cynthia said. “What luck all round.”

Claude groaned. “Must we discuss it? Such a crashing bore—the very name puts me to sleep.”

“Just because you aren’t invited to see his work doesn’t mean someone else might not find it interesting,” Arabella chided, gliding back to the blanket and seating herself gracefully. She gazed at Maggie as if she had just this moment noticed her sitting next to Lizzie.

Which was quite possible.

“Mnemosomniography is the study of imprinting dreams and memories upon some physical means of observing them,” she explained, as if to children who did not understand how to hold a cup. “You are familiar with the way cameras work?”

“Of course,” Maggie said. “But how do you extract an image from inside someone’s head?”

“The difficulty exactly,” Geoffrey said, joining them. “Hence the years of study.”

He made it sound as if Maggie were stupid. Lizzie bristled. “It’s a fair question. I should like to know the answer myself.
If
you know.”

Cynthia bit her lip and twinkled at the twins. “Bella knows. Don’t you, darling? I saw you come out of the tower a time or two last summer, did I not?”

Arabella merely raised an eyebrow as fine as a butterfly’s feeler. “Perhaps.” Then she turned to Maggie. “He has invented a machine that detects the images in the mind. His goal is to have them projected from the sleeping brain like the flickers at the theatre, but so far that eludes him. He has succeeded in securing one or two plates, however, from the minds of some of the villagers.”

“Nightmares seem to work best,” Claude put in. “Macabre, what?”

“They would be the most vivid, I expect,” Lizzie said. Goodness, the things these people talked about. Most people, lying on a blanket by the river, would have nothing more interesting to remark upon than the quality of the food in the basket, or an estimation of the ant population in the meadow.

“That is what Evan says,” Arabella remarked. “Perhaps you should volunteer to be his next subject.”

—tawny eyes—

—a crack—

Lizzie blinked the image away, swallowed, and put on a smile. “Perhaps I shall.”

*

Dinner that night, while a merry affair, did not see them all as friendly as Lizzie would have liked. Mr. Seacombe sat at one end of the long, formal table, with Lady Dunsmuir, as the only married woman present, at the other. Lady Claire sat at his right hand, with Lord Dunsmuir upon his left and Lizzie next to him. But after that, rules of precedence seemed to be abandoned, which was unfortunate. Had Lizzie been in charge of seating arrangements, she would have put Lewis next to herself instead of next to Arabella, where the poor young man spent half the evening writhing in embarrassment at her careless sarcasm, too polite to give as good as he got and too unsure of himself to take up conversation with Cynthia on his other side and Geoffrey opposite.

Tomorrow she would see that girl put in her place, see if she didn’t.

Between Lizzie and Maggie sat the mysterious Evan Douglas. Even superior brains, she supposed, must be fed at intervals. The conversation on the picnic blanket still in her mind, she turned to him after the first course had been removed.

“I understand you are the protege of Mr. Seacombe, Mr. Douglas. Are you seeing success in your work?”

It took him a moment to respond, as though he had been somewhere else in his mind—somewhere quite a distance from Colliford Castle. “Hm? Yes … well, no. It varies.”

Maggie came to her rescue. “The study of mnemosomniography seems fascinating—and difficult. I should think that one’s success might be many years in coming.”

Lizzie took the opportunity to examine him. He sat straight in his chair, not slouching as Claude did, and while he was dressed for dinner as a gentleman might be, in black tie and jacket, the tie looked as though it could be secondhand, and his shirt did not lie as smoothly as Claude’s did. With rag picking in her past, Lizzie could spot such differences without difficulty, and concluded that Mr. Douglas had not come to Colliford prepared with dinner clothes, and had been forced to borrow some of Claude’s.

“How long have you been working in the laboratory here?” she asked, when he did not seem inclined to respond to Maggie.

“Two years, more or less.”

“And it is housed in the tower?”

“You seem well enough informed that these questions are rather unnecessary.”

For a moment, Lizzie couldn’t think of a word to say. Then, “Perhaps you might give us a little more information to work with.”

“My work is not the subject of dinner-table conversation.”

“Oh, come, Evan, don’t be such a stick,” Claude said, leaning around a bouquet of lilies to address him. “The ladies are curious, that’s all. How often do you suppose they sit at table with someone of your scientific stature?”

“Quite often, actually,” Lizzie said pleasantly to Claude, when the young scientist did not reply. “Mr. Andrew Malvern is rather a good friend, and we’ve spent many a day in his laboratory assisting with his experiments.”

At last Evan Douglas had found something at least as interesting as the vistas in his mind—or his leg of lamb. “You don’t say? I have enormous respect for Mr. Malvern, though of course our fields of study are very different.”

Maggie spoke up. “We count several engineers among our acquaintance. Lady Claire is to be inducted into the Royal Society of Engineers on Friday. That is the reason we are returning to London a day early.”

“Returning early?” Arabella murmured. “Such a pity.”

The young man’s gaze swung from Maggie to the Lady. “This Lady Claire, to whom I was just introduced? She is one of the co-inventors of the Malvern-Terwilliger Kinetick Carbonator?”

“Yes, and said Terwilliger is at present out in your park, aboard
Lady Lucy
,” Maggie informed him, her generous spirit giving him the gift of knowledge she thought might please him. “He is a lieutenant serving under Captain Hollys.”

Now Evan put down his knife and fork altogether. “You are having me on.”

“She is not,” Lady Claire said pleasantly. “Would you like us to introduce you after dinner?”

“I should like that very much. I had no idea Cousin Charles moved in such intelligent circles. I had been avoiding the party fearing that the current one had simply multiplied.”

Lizzie raised her damask napkin to her lips for fear she would laugh out loud. Cynthia looked amused, and Arabella’s expression had merely narrowed with something approaching dislike, as if she knew she had been slighted, but it was only to be expected, considering the source. Perhaps he had scorned her last summer, and the sting had not been cured by the attentions of someone else.