Magnificent Devices [5] A Lady of Resources (4 page)

Which had caused headlines around the world, and which had subsequently caused the stock in the Zeppelin Airship Works to hit an all-time high, making Claire a rich woman. And, of course, Lizzie and Maggie and Snouts and the others back in London, in whose names the Lady had been prudent enough to buy stock as well.

Lizzie, whose head for mathematics had improved since the old days of counting spades on playing cards, had found herself the proud owner of a healthy little competency. How that would help her at finishing school, she wasn’t sure, but at least it would help pay to get her there herself, if the Lady was not willing.

A young man in livery appeared at Claire’s elbow. “Milady, if you would be so good as to come with me?”

Claire froze, and Lizzie saw Davina hide a smile. The rascal, she already knew! Of course she did. She’d probably had a personal audience already and hobnobbed with the empress over a cup of tea, talking over the list of those to be honored.

Wordlessly, Claire followed the young man to the front of the ballroom and up onto the stage once more, where a small cluster of graduates in evening clothes shuffled nervously. Five young men and three young women, all persons of accomplishment, all completely ignored by Lizzie and Maggie, who waited breathlessly to see what would happen.

And then the empress held out a hand to Claire, who sank into a curtsey in front of her. She raised her gently, but her voice rang out, resonant and clear, as if she’d been making speeches to crowds since she was born.

“I am pleased to introduce to you all Lady Claire Trevelyan, from London, England, whose achievements in the field of engineering have earned her a special place in the history of this, the Prussian Empire. For it is her invention—jointly with Miss Alice Chalmers of the Texican Territory—of the automaton intelligence system that has revolutionized the airship industry in this country, and put it ahead of its competitors.”

Maggie and Lizzie held hands, breathless with delight, and Tigg’s face glowed with pride.

The empress directed her next words to Claire. “I was present to christen the CET-100 ship that bears your initials, and words cannot express how proud I was that a woman was responsible for such a breakthrough.”

“Two women, ma’am,” Claire said. “It was my friend Alice Chalmers who invented the automaton’s intelligence engine. I wish she could have been here to share this moment.”

Instead of being taken aback by being corrected in mid-speech, the empress’s infectious smile broke out. “So do I. I think we would have had a lot to talk about, don’t you?” She cleared her throat and turned to a footman bearing something on a purple cushion. “I understand you were able to waive your senior project requirement and claim the intelligence engine in its place. But this is from me. Lady Claire, I am pleased to present the Medal of Honor for service to the Empire—known to most as the Iron Wings—oh, no, please don’t kneel again. I’m sure to poke you trying to get it pinned on.”

Claire straightened as the empress pinned something on a bit of royal-blue ribbon to the breast of her gown, and Lizzie clasped Maggie’s hand more tightly. “Oh, Maggie, she’s crying.”

For it was true. Though she bravely tried to hold her lips steady, tears overflowed the Lady’s eyes and rolled down her cheeks as the assembled company of dignitaries and students applauded.

“Come on, Mags. I’ve got a hanky in my pocket.” Lizzie pushed through the barrier of two stout matrons, slid around a crowd of chattering third-year students, and emerged at the front of the crowd just as Claire descended the steps. She dashed over to her and offered her hanky in the nick of time.

“Oh, Lizzie,” the Lady whispered, mopping her face, “please tell me I did not blotch.”

“No, Lady, you looked wonderful. We were all so proud. I just wish Snouts and Jake and our Alice could have been here to see it.”

“I do, too.” Claire sniffled and huffed the ghost of a laugh. “There is apparently some kind of bursary attached to the receiving of this medal.” She touched it, gazing down at the iron eagle’s wings with the crown between them. “Wherever she is, I’m sure Alice will be glad of it, for I intend to give her the entire amount.”

By now Maggie had joined them, and Claire hugged them both, all three heedless of the wrinkles pressed into their silken skirts by love.

Love.

What answer was Claire going to give Captain Hollys, who was among the happy group even now bearing down on them?

There was no chance to find out, and Lizzie had a feeling that the Lady was just as glad to leave it that way.

Term project.

The words were like a death knell in Lizzie’s mind—the sound you heard just before your professor of physics announced your failure of his class.

She sat, disconsolate, at the workbench in the
lycee
’s physics laboratory, supposedly working on her project, but in reality merely pushing gears and springs around on the polished surface like an oracle searching for meaning in mechanical entrails.

She didn’t even have the comfort of Maggie as a laboratory partner, because they’d been split up during their first year as a means of strengthening their characters as individuals—a stupid theory that neither of them could understand, since they did their preps together in their apartments with the Lady anyway.

“I’m dying to see your project on Friday, Elizabeth,” purred Sophie “Bug Eyes” Bruckheim as she passed Lizzie’s bench. “I’m sure it will be a wonder on the level of your sycophantic friend’s intelligence system.”

“Nothing could be,” Lizzie returned in flawless German, cool as you please. “Including your poor papa’s navigation assembly. I hear the count turned it down and it had to go to the Americas to find a buyer.”

Sophie glared daggers at her, and Lizzie had a feeling her brief victory would probably net her a splash of tea on her uniform at lunch or some other petty revenge.

Ah well. Sophie’s reign as queen of the fifth form was nearly over, and with any luck, she wouldn’t choose finishing school afterward.

Lizzie pushed away from the bench. This was getting her nowhere. She obtained permission from the professor to go down to the supply cellar, which would mean a climb of eighty stairs down and eighty back up again, but perhaps the extra oxygen to her brain would produce an idea for a project. The best idea she could come up with now was to fling herself on the Lady’s mercy and beg an idea from her—a plan she’d so far managed to resist out of sheer stubbornness.

If Alice and Claire could apply their minds to groundbreaking inventions, then she could, too. And she didn’t even have to break ground. She’d be happy with a mere furrow. A tunnel. Anything.

In the cellar, she signed the log book and paced along the shelves and barrels of materials and equipment. Gears, ironworks, and mechanical bits and bobs shared space with bottles of chemicals, lengths of rope, and the boxes of punch-cards used by the difference engines to run the university. Farther and farther back she went, with the feeling that she was going back in time to older and older components of long-ago breakthroughs. Finally she hit a wall.

Literally. She was in an old part of the cellar, which contained things of so small a value that they sat on metal shelves that dripped with cobwebs and dust. This would net her nothing. She turned, and her uniform skirt brushed a lower shelf. Something rolled off it and bounced.

Without touching the ground.

It arced over her head, to within a few inches of the ten-foot ceiling.

She lifted her moonglobe and watched the fragment of … whatever it was … bounce again and again, until it lost momentum and rolled under the shelving unit, as if it were ashamed of its performance.

Lizzie knelt down and fished about under the shelf, withdrawing the fragment at last, her skirt and white shirtwaist covered in dust and dirt that had been collecting there for a lifetime. “Where did you come from?”

It looked like a rock. Or a shard of iron, the size of her palm.

She bent over and dropped it.

Again, it hit a point about four inches above the ground, resisted the landing, and bounced up, whacking her on the chin. “Ow!” She grabbed it, then cradled her face, touching the tender spot to make sure the skin was not broken.

A rock that bounced. That resisted gravity. In a way.

Was there any more?

She spent an hour searching through boxes and barrels, growing increasingly dirty and frustrated, but apparently there was no more. Well, goodness, this wouldn’t do. She could not simply present a rock to her professor, bounce it between floor and ceiling, and take credit for a great discovery, could she? Sophie would cover her mouth and snicker that horrid, whimpering laugh Lizzie detested, and she’d be made a fool of again.

No, she must look into this. Surely such an interesting element would have a history of its usefulness in some dusty book somewhere? Or perhaps the Lady would know?

But when the Lady examined it after tea that afternoon, watching with some fascination as it resisted hitting the floor with each bounce, she had no more to offer than Lizzie herself.

“It is fascinating, though, Lizzie. I suggest the university library, and if you can, speak with Herr Himbeer, the science librarian. I’m sure he’s been here since the Crusades, and if he can’t give you an answer, at least he can give you a book.”

During her study period the next day, Lizzie requested and received an hour’s pass from school, and leaped aboard a passing cable car as it slowed outside the
lycee
’s gates. The university was only ten minutes’ walk, but Lizzie liked to ride the cars. The mystery of the mechanisms below the streets of Munich fascinated her, their cogs and gears pulling the cars about on cables like an enormous, hidden brass spider web—if spider webs could be said to operate like well-oiled clocks.

She leaped down near the imposing building that housed the library, designed to look like an enormous Greek temple. The temple of knowledge, she supposed. In her pocket, the rock bumped against her leg as she climbed the broad staircase and asked directions to the science section.

The Lady may have been poking gentle fun at him, but Herr Himbeer did look as though he might have existed for a couple of centuries at least. His blue eyes, however, were alive with intelligence, and rested upon her with curiosity as she was shown into his cluttered office. She dropped a polite curtsey. It would never do to have it get back to the Lady that her ward had been discourteous to someone belonging to the kingdom she had just conquered.

“
Guten abend
,” she greeted him politely. “My name is Lizzie de Maupassant, and I am the ward of Lady Claire Trevelyan. She suggested that you might be able to help me identify something.”

The sea of wrinkles split into a smile, and his white beard twitched above the horn buttons of his loden-green boiled wool jacket. “Ah. Lady Claire. A fine mind. You are most welcome, my dear. Sit down. How may I help you?”

She pulled the rock from her pocket and tossed it on his desk, where it did not hit, but bounced until its momentum lessened enough to make it drop.

“I should like to identify this mineral, if indeed that is what it is.”

He picked up the rock from the pile of yellowed papers on which it had landed, and sat back in his wooden chair. “Goodness. Did I leave some of this behind?”

“I beg your pardon, sir? I found it in the materials cellar at the Lycee des Jeunes Filles. Away at the back, under a shelf.”

“I imagine you did. I taught there many years ago, before I took up my first post here.” He tossed it in the air himself, and watched it repeat its performance. “This mineral is called repenthium. Perfectly useless stuff, I’m afraid, at one time mined in the Ural Mountains to the east. Years ago the manufactories used it as a kind of accident prevention, smelting it into the fenders and bumpers of the steam buses when they ran here, so they would repel one another if they got too close. But since the cable system was put in, they’ve had no use for it. Accidents rarely happen now.”

Well, goodness. This was disappointing. “Is it a metal, or a rock, sir?”

“A metal, of sorts. I can give you a number of treatises penned by men who tried to make it useful, but really, its properties give more amusement than concrete benefit. Can you imagine any machine in which it would be useful?”

Lizzie thought quickly of something over which gravity exercised complete control. “An airship? It might prevent a crash.”

“Airships do not crash.”

“A long, slow, glide and a soft landing. Yes, I know. But I have been in a ship that crashed, and a substance like this coating the hull would have made it much softer.”

“Perhaps, once you’d got done bouncing up and down. Which would be rather trying, do you not agree?”

Lizzie pictured what might have happened if the
Stalwart Lass
had bounced on its hard landing in the Idaho Territory. “Hm. I suppose you’re right. It would be. Well then, what about applying it to a landau or a velocithopter?”

“There you run into the same difficulty. The substance does resist gravity at nearly any velocity. That much is true. But it is uncontrollable. Undependable. And in this day and age, one cannot hang about waiting for the bouncing effect to slow enough to get on with one’s business. In fact, in the open air, it does not stop at all unless some means of slowing the bounce is introduced.”

How very annoying that she should find something so interesting, and yet so useless at the same time. Just her luck. Well, she must be honest, at least. “My term project is due on Friday, sir, and I haven’t a single idea in my head. What do you suppose I could do with this so that I don’t fail the term?”

Herr Himbeer regarded her with some sympathy. “Better you should build a miniature velocithopter or solve some physics equation using the difference engine than mess about with an element with such a poor reputation.” He handed it to her, careful not to toss it across the desktop. “The best you could do is use it for a paperweight, or entertain your friends with it. Or melt off a bit and wear it round your neck to remind yourself that sometimes the elements found in nature are just not made for humanity to put to work. A valuable lesson, sometimes, I think.”

Lizzie thanked him, pocketed the repenthium, and escaped before he got up enough steam to launch into a philosophy lecture. She made it back to the
lycee
just in time to join the river of students ebbing and flowing up the staircases to their next class. She was just rounding the landing, heading up to the French classroom, when she met Bug Eyes coming down the stairs.

“Get out of the way, Maupassant,” Sophie drawled, and somehow her satchel of heavy books swung out, knocking Lizzie across the landing and into the wall.

But she did not hit it.

Instead, she distinctly felt her heels leave the ground as the repenthium in her pocket, which had been closest to the wall, resisted the force of impact. She staggered a little and fetched up against the marble balustrade, the breath going out of her in astonishment.

“Honestly, Maupassant, have a little more beer with your lunch!” floated up the stairwell below her, and the giggles of her classmates echoed like a fluttering chorus of derision.

She took the rock out of her pocket and stared at it. Maybe it wouldn’t do an airship or a steambus any good. But wouldn’t it be interesting to have a little of this about one’s person. In a belt, say, or—or—

Her hand crept across her ribs, where she might have bruises now if it hadn’t been for the rock and her corset. Under the fabric of her blouse, the bones of the corset, which weren’t actually made of whalebone anymore, but steel, ran in ten orderly channels about her person. She’d made the corset herself, in Home Arts. All the girls were required to sew and learn fine work, like Brussels lace to trim their blouses, or crochet to enliven an apron.

She’d put the bones in herself. But what would happen if she replaced them with bones made of … repenthium?