Magnificent Devices [5] A Lady of Resources (3 page)

“All right, all right, I take it back,” she said breathlessly as the polka ended and a waltz began. “We should go join Maggie. I shouldn’t be out here at all, you know. She was quite right—neither of us are out yet.”

“This is a graduation party, not a society ball, you gumpus.”

She stepped on his polished shoe on purpose, just to remind him that she didn’t permit name-calling, even by her oldest friends. “You can explain that to Lady Dunsmuir when you’re dancing with her, so she won’t come and read us a lecture.”

“Good idea.” With that, he danced her over to where Lord and Lady Dunsmuir circled the floor, smiling into each other’s eyes like a pair of moony spooners. “Pardon me, your lordship, may I claim her ladyship in exchange for this minx?”

Lady Dunsmuir laughed, the diamonds in her tiara and at her throat sparkling in the soft electrick lights. “You’ll be getting the best of that bargain, John. Go on. Show Lizzie what she has to look forward to.”

In the space of a single measure of music, the earl whirled her away and Tigg and her ladyship disappeared from view in the current of elegantly dressed couples. His lordship was still smiling as he glanced down at her. “All right?”

“Yes, sir. We practice three times a week at the
lycee
, you know.”

The smile grew broader. “You make it sound rather like calisthenics, Lizzie. You had best get used to it as the most efficient way to converse privately with a member of the opposite sex.”

“I’ll remember that.” A brocade waistcoat caught her eye, and irrepressible curiosity made her say, “Your lordship, do you know that man there? The one by the punch bowl, with the dark spectacles and the waistcoat with peacocks on it?”

“Shocking bad taste on both counts. But only to be expected.”

“So you do know him.”

“Yes, by reputation only. That is Charles Seacombe, a man with his fingers in several pies both here and in England. He reminds me rather forcibly of a certain shipping magnate in the Americas whose name will not pass my lips. Seacombe’s largest concern, I believe, is based in Paris—something to do with electricks—but he has homes in several places. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, no reason. I thought he looked familiar, that’s all.”

“I should think not. Men like the Count von Zeppelin do not need to associate with men like Seacombe in order to be successful, though there are several who will tell you I am wrong.”

“They are foolish, then.”

The smile lit his eyes once again, but not because she had flattered him. They knew each other too well for that. “And when did you become interested in what my wife so vulgarly calls the movers and shakers of the world, my dear?”

“Oh, I’m not. He just looked out of place, that’s all. I expect he’s here for one of the graduates. Perhaps his son has got his diploma and will join him in the business.”

“He does have a son, if I recall. Or perhaps I’m thinking of the Rothschild boy. Never mind.” He gave her a stern look as the music ended and he led her from the floor. “You do not need to concern yourself with the sons of anyone at all for at least two more years, and after that I believe my wife has a plan.”

“So I hear. And I would love to hear more.”

“That is a sphere in which my clumsy boots are emphatically not welcome, so I shall say no more.” He bowed to her with enviable grace, and Lizzie did her best to curtsey without falling over onto Maggie, who joined them just then.

“Well?” Maggie said as the earl moved away. “Did you find anything out?”

“Not a single useful thing except what we already knew—that his lordship is a lovely man and Davina is a lucky woman. Come on, Mags. I’m dying for another strawberry ice. Last one to the table is a nit-picking mudlark.”

It would have been easy, in the glittering and celebratory crowd, to avoid the Lady and wait for another day to resolve the unsettled spirit between them. But Lizzie, sadly, did not possess the gift of finding the easy way to do anything. She didn’t think she could bear having the Lady look at her again with the memory of the tears that she had caused between them. If she was to enjoy this revel, she had to do it with a clean conscience, even if it meant calling upon her old scouting skills to do it.

“Liz, you’re making too much of this.” Maggie attempted to gather up her gown’s miniscule train, of which she was inordinately proud, to follow her sister. “What d’you want to go bringing it up for in the middle of a ball?”

“Because it’s spoiling it for me.”

“It might spoil it for the Lady, you trailing her around the room looking desperate. Tonight’s a night for congratulations, not apologies.”

But Lizzie ignored her, for there was the Lady over at a table with Davina and Captain Hollys. Getting to her in the crush proved more than a little difficult, though, between brushing up against people talking, dodging first-year students carrying trays, and avoiding being swatted by the skirts of ladies whirling past in the waltz. By the time she reached the table, Claire and Captain Hollys had drifted out the French doors into the garden.

Lizzie changed course and dodged down a short hallway that led to the music rooms.

“Liz, you’re never going to follow them,” Maggie said, her voice low. “What if Captain Hollys wants to steal a kiss?”

“And risk the Lady zapping him with her little lightning pistol? He’ll be glad to see us, at least, if we have to pick him up off the ground.” Claire and the girls had amused themselves during the Christmas break designing and fabricating a device that a lady could carry in her pocketbook or muff to provide more discreet protection than that of the lightning rifle. The latter still resided in Claire’s room, but since they’d moved into Carrick House and become respectable, the demand for its services had lessened. Still, one never knew—and as the Lady said, a little practice in how to take a power cell apart and put it back together again never went amiss.

If only they could make such useful things in Lizzie’s physics class! But no. For their term project—on which she was already nearly a week behind—Professor Sturm required that they focus on the basics, which meant an assignment to either harness or defy the power of gravity in some way. If she didn’t come up with something in the next fourteen days, she would fail the course, and then what would happen to finishing school?

The French doors of a piano studio decanted them on the far side of the lawn, just in time to see the captain hand the Lady down the flagged steps to the gazing pool. Maggie gripped Lizzie’s elbow so hard that her dancing slippers nearly went out from under her in the grass. “Liz. You can’t go down there.”

“Whyever not? It’s only the captain, and he’ll excuse me.”

“Liz, stop!”

Gaping at the vehemence of her hissed whisper, Lizzie sank down next to her on a bench screened by a huge mound of French lavender. The scent, as familiar as linens and sachets, washed over them in a wave as the movement of their skirts disturbed it, and Lizzie’s nose twitched.

“Fine, but if they don’t start back up here in the next five minutes, I’m going down.”

“Isn’t it a lovely night?” they heard Claire say as she gazed over the pool to where the stars were just beginning to prick out on the horizon. “I just wish my mother and brother had been here to share it. And Sir Richard Jermyn, of course. But dear Nicholas has the chicken pox and my mother could not leave him.”

“Of course not,” the captain agreed, his voice carrying to Lizzie and Maggie in an agreeable bass tone that carried both sympathy and comfort. “You will be able to go to them now, however.”

“I shall wait until after the girls graduate from the
lycee
,” she said. “By then he will have recovered and my mother will be better able to receive visitors. I’m afraid she finds Maggie and Lizzie rather … trying.”

The girls glanced at one another, and Maggie made a rueful moue of the mouth. It was only too true. Lizzie had never been able to fathom how such a beautiful woman could have produced a daughter like the Lady. Not, she amended, that the Lady was not pretty. The light of intelligence lay upon her brow, and her mouth curved up in humor much of the time, creating the best kind of beauty. But Lady Flora’s beauty went skin deep, and she expected everyone else’s to, as well, in the service of catching a husband. It was exhausting, having to care so much about one’s looks—no wonder Claire’s visits to Gwynn Place were limited to the summer holidays, and only in the company of as many of the inhabitants of Carrick House as possible.

How Lady Flora would rejoice that Claire looked so well in her Nile-green ball gown, and had ventured into a garden in the company of a baronet!

“The girls are a credit to you,” Captain Hollys said, and Maggie and Lizzie exchanged an altogether different glance—one filled with pleasure, visible in the glow spilling from the doors behind them. “You can be proud of all you have done for them.”

“They have done all the work for themselves since we arrived here,” Claire told him. “Though something Lizzie said this afternoon disturbs me.”

Lizzie straightened, and Maggie laid a gloved hand upon her arm. Was the Lady about to tell him all her sins? Was that really fair, when she hadn’t had a chance to explain?

“She has got it into her head to go to finishing school, and I cannot in all conscience agree to it.”

“Why not? If she wants to, it seems harmless. Many young ladies do, I understand.”

“Yes, but they are not Lizzie. With a mind like hers, she would be utterly wasted learning to cut cucumber sandwiches and reciting the rules of precedence. When she told me she wanted to go because of some mistaken idea of her suitability as a debutante in two years, I wanted to weep. In fact, I believe I did.”

Lizzie pressed a hand to her mouth.
That
was what the Lady had meant, and she’d got it all backward. She should have known that Claire would never think she wasn’t good enough. In fact, the opposite was true. The Lady thought she was
too
good—that she had set her sights on a goal too low for her true abilities.

Captain Hollys moved closer. “I should hate to think that anything would make you weep, dear.”

Claire breathed a laugh. “Oh, it has happened a time or two. I love the girls with all my heart, but such emotion only makes that organ easier to bruise, it seems.”

“And is your heart filled only with maternal impulses?” he asked softly. “Is there no room in it for emotions of a sturdier sort? That would not bruise it, but rather, heal it and prepare it for a lifetime?”

Claire fell silent, and Maggie’s hand tightened even more on Lizzie’s arm. Oh goodness, he was going to propose, right here in the garden. How exciting—and romantic—and horrible! “We have to rescue her,” she breathed in Maggie’s ear. “Right now, before he says it.”

“If you go down there, I will never forgive you,” Maggie whispered back. “We must go back to the ball now, before they realize we’re here.”

Too late. The captain had taken the Lady’s hands in both of his.

“Claire, my feelings for you have not changed in the five years we have known one another. I have waited faithfully for you to complete your education, and have celebrated your success with all the joy a man can feel.”

“I did not ask you to wait,” the Lady said in a tone so low the Mopsies could barely hear her.

“I know, but it was my honor and purpose to do so. Claire, will you end my waiting now, and make me the happiest man on earth by consenting to be my wife?”

Breathlessly, the girls waited for her answer with as much attention as Captain Hollys did. Because she would not only be answering for herself—one word would change their own lives at the same time it did hers.

“Ian … I must know … do you plan to continue as captain of
Lady Lucy
?”

“That would depend on your answer,” he said with a smile they could hear in his voice. “If we marry, I should turn over the helm to Mr. Yau without a backward glance, and return to my estates with you.”

“Then … the career that I have prepared for—that Count von Zeppelin has prepared for me—what would become of it?”

“There is nothing to prevent you having an engineering salon connected with our home, as many inventors do. Great things have come out of private laboratories, as our friend Andrew Malvern has proven many times over. And speaking of that worthy individual, does he have any influence on the direction of these questions?”

“No—no, not at all. At least, not in the way you imagine. He has hinted at a jointly operated laboratory, but only if for some reason I could not fulfill the terms of Count von Zeppelin’s offer.”

“I see.”

“Ian, I do not think you do. I hope you will understand … How can I accept the count’s hospitality and kindness these four years, and then back out of my promise to join him at Zeppelin Airship Works? How will he then realize the benefit of the education he has made possible?”

“The count is a man of the world. Do you not feel that your becoming a baroness would assuage his disappointment in some small degree?”

“I cannot see the connection.”

“No, perhaps not. Your mind is as clear as your heart is considerate, and it is one of the reasons I love you. No, dear, please do not look away. I love you, and I should like to know if you love me, too.”

“Ian … dear Ian … of course I do, in—in my way.”

“What way?”

She looked up at him, her face in his shadow as he moved a little closer. Lizzie didn’t dare move to see better, in case the Lady glanced over his shoulder in her agitation and spotted them, frozen behind the lavender.

“In the way of close friends and companions at arms. In the way that two people who have weathered the next best thing to a war love one another. As family. As someone whose loss would leave a hole in my heart that cannot be repaired.”

He was silent in his turn, for the space of a breath. “And what of the other kind of love? The love a woman has for a man?”

“That, too, a little. But Ian … I can still care about you without our becoming engaged. The one does not necessarily preclude the other. I am only twenty-three and there are so many things I want to do with my life I can hardly count them all.”

“And I am nearly thirty, with responsibilities to my family and my name that are beginning to weigh more heavily than ever before.”

“She’s going to turn him down,” Maggie breathed. “Oh, Lady, how can you do this to the captain?”

Maggie had a gift for seeing things that people were going to do before they actually did them. Claire called it perception and empathy, but Lizzie simply thought it was because Maggie paid attention. She drew in a huge breath of relief—

—and the scent of lavender went up her nose—

—and she sneezed.

*

Lizzie wasn’t sure who hustled whom through the open doors of the ballroom, but when the two trumpets sounded to announce the arrival of Her August Majesty, the Empress of Prussia, the entire company and grounds, right down to the goldfish in the gazing pool, were electrified to attention at the royal presence.

Claire’s grip on the Mopsies’ hands was cold as they squeezed through the doors and into the crowd. “I don’t know who I am happier to see—you and Maggie, or the empress. Come. We must find Tigg and the others.”

For once, Lizzie felt she could have been right, if Maggie had only let her. When Claire released their hands in order to squeeze through the crush, she lost no time in bringing this fact to her sister’s attention. “See? She didn’t want him to propose. If you’d just let me go down there, she wouldn’t have had to go through it.”

“He won’t be satisfied with not getting an answer,” Maggie said. “You know the captain.”

And then Claire spotted Tigg and there was no more time to talk, because the trumpets sounded again on either side of the door. Lizzie craned her neck to get a glimpse of the empress, whom she had never seen close up. At a distance, yes, in parades and processions and such, but a faraway glimpse of glossy dark hair and a lot of diamonds didn’t count. The empress would be congratulating a select number of graduates in person this evening, and Lizzie had bet Maggie a hundred schillings that their Lady would be one of them.

She didn’t actually have a hundred schillings, but if she lost, Maggie would forgive the debt.

A slender figure dressed in—in a split skirt and an aviator’s jacket and goggles dashed into the room.

“Who is that?” Maggie wondered out loud. “Did one of the aeronauts lose her way again?”

But then the crowd began to sink into the deepest of curtseys, like a wave that spread outward, washing them to the floor with it and losing its energy at the walls.

The president of the university approached the young woman—for she couldn’t be very much older than Lady Dunsmuir—and bowed himself nearly in half. “Your August Majesty,” he said clearly into his knees. “Welcome to our graduation celebrations.”

“Oh, do get up, Friedrich.” As he straightened, Lizzie heard a whisper like a wave on the beach below Gwynn Place, as the entire company rose from the floor. “I’m so sorry I’m late. I took up the velocithopter and the wretched thing caught an unexpected draft. That’s the last time I’ll go without a rocket rucksack, I’ll tell you.”

“Velocithopter?” the Lady repeated in astonishment as a chuckle ran through the crowd. “If I’d known one could wear the next best thing to raiding rig to this ball, I’d have done it.”

“Is His August Majesty to honor us with his presence?” the president inquired.

“No, sadly, it’s only me you have to put up with,” Her August Majesty said. “But I am looking forward to meeting your new crop of brilliant minds. Shall we begin?”

After that, the lengthy program that Lizzie had no doubt the president intended to inflict upon his guests had perforce to be abandoned.

As they made their way through the crowd to Tigg and the Dunsmuirs’ party, Claire smiled at the girls over her shoulder. “You see now why Prussia is neck and neck with England for progress. There is a good reason the empress was the first civilian to travel in the CET-100 model airship when it was launched. She was so impatient to see our automaton intelligence in action that she ordered it to lift even before the First Admiral of the Navy could get aboard.”