A crack like a branch snapping off a tree made Lewis cry out, and a cloud of black smoke enveloped the Acorn. The acceleration stick fell, tumbling through the air end over end. Spectators in the row below Lewis dodged as it clanged on the stones. The propelled board dipped and swooped, but without controls, the pilot could not guide it. He bent his knees and attempted to steer by banking, but it was no good. Drunkenly, he wobbled as the bubble passed him triumphantly, the biprop right behind.
“Give him a hand, you idiots!” Lewis shouted to their pilots, his voice drowned in the cheers and muffled clappering of the crowd.
The engine on the Acorn’s footboard choked, buzzed into life, then choked again. The boy swung off it, dangling by his hands ten feet above Lewis and Snouts’s heads.
“He’s going to jump!” Snouts shouted.
The engine gave out. The boy let go.
He plummeted straight down and landed on Lewis and Snouts in a flail of arms and legs as the largest ornithopter crossed the finish line and the crowd surged to its feet with a roar.
Gasping to regain the breath that had been knocked out of her, Lady Philomena Noakes attempted to scramble off the two gentlemen who had broken her fall. “Awfully oblig—oh!” Her wrist gave out in a flare of pain and she wound up on her stomach, nose to nose with the dark-eyed young man whom she had just flattened again, knocking his bowler to the grass behind him.
Philomena had never been this close to a man in her life. Other mechanics in the village didn’t count—she was not in the habit of lying prone upon them. “Terribly sorry,” she choked as she rolled off him, her lips pressed together in pain as she cradled her wrist.
“You’re hurt.” The young man sat up, retrieved his bowler, and replaced it on his head. “Is it broken?”
Almost afraid to find out, Philomena waggled her fingers. “I don’t think so. But it hurts like the devil.”
“A sprain, then.” The young man who appeared to be with him sported an astonishing nose and a purple waistcoat, cut in a style that had been madly fashionable that season. “Come on. Best get it seen to.”
“I’ll be all right,” she said. Their housekeeper was good at binding up her scrapes and bruises before Papa got a look at them.
“Nonsense,” the more sober individual said. “Maggie is closest,” he told his friend. “She can get that wrapped before it swells up like a melon.”
The fewer people who saw her in the light, the better, including whoever Maggie was. Two men pushed past her, one of whom handed her the acceleration bar to her poor dead flying device. Her fingers went numb as she tried to take it, and she couldn’t bite back a groan.
“No argument,” the sober one said. “I am Lewis Protheroe, and this is Steven McTavish.” He picked up the bar. “Snouts, collect the man’s engine, would you?”
And before her wrist could swell to the point where she would be obliged to remove her shirt and the jig would be up, she had been bundled into a landau and in a few minutes was entering the front gate of a snug little cottage just up the hill from Vauxhall Gardens. A young woman working by lamplight at the dining table rose to her feet as they came in.
“Lewis—Snouts—has there been trouble?” Then her eyes widened. “Good heavens. Phil! What on earth are you doing here?”
Maggie Polgarth! Of all the rotten luck! “I might say the same,” Philomena croaked.
“What happened?”
“A sprained wrist,” Mr. Protheroe said.
“This is the Acorn, Maggie,” Mr. McTavish said. “He fell off his flying device at the Kennington Oval and landed on us.”
Maggie shook her head. “He is the cat’s grandfather, and you two are as blind as you are kind.” So much for any hope of maintaining her disguise. Philomena winced as Maggie gently took her hand to look at the damage. “Racing, were you? I am glad that St. Cecilia’s Academy for Young Ladies has had as little effect upon you as it had upon me.” Maggie turned to a boy who had come out of the kitchen, tousled with sleep. “Alfred, get me the bandages, please. Don’t wake Lucy, mind. Snouts, if you would be so kind as to fetch a cloth and some ice from the cellar, we’ll see if we can stop the swelling.”
The two went off to do her bidding as though it were completely normal. Philomena felt a spurt of envy. Imagine not one, but two people actually listening to what you said.
“I take it you two know one another?” Mr. Protheroe said to Maggie. “Perhaps you would introduce me?”
“What, she fell on your head and no introductions were made?”
“She?”
Mr. McTavish came back with chipped ice in a cloth, and Maggie wrapped it around her wrist. The relief nearly made Philomena groan.
“For goodness sake, Lewis,” Maggie said with a laugh. “Snouts, you are just as bad. This is Phil. I beg your pardon—Lady Philomena Noakes. You may have seen Lord Oakmond in his carriage in Belgrave Square. They live ’round the corner from Carrick House, on Wilton Row.”
Complete, goggling silence met this declaration. Philomena decided that, under the circumstances, an inclination of the head would do as an acknowledgement.
“Blimey, miss—er, your ladyship,” young Alfred blurted as he joined them, laying the bandages on the table. “Ent you got guts, flying a device when you’re a girl?”
“Alfred,” Mr. Protheroe said, “Our Lady Malvern is a girl, and she flies anything that comes to hand.”
“Aye, but she’s the Lady,” Alfred said, as though this clinched the matter.
All these people were acquainted with Lady Malvern? Worse and worse. “You must not tell anyone,” Philomena blurted. “My father knows nothing about this. Racing. Flying devices. Mechanics. Any of it. He would have me whipped.”
Maggie shook her head. “Our lips are sealed. But goodness, Phil, I thought you would be making your debut and waltzing with all the Blood heirs, like the rest of our graduating class, not doing something this interesting.”
Of course, Maggie didn’t know, but Philomena felt the sting of her own poverty nonetheless. “Papa can’t afford a deb—” She stopped herself with an effort, the heat of shame rising into her cheeks.
“So, the rumours are true, then,” Mr. Protheroe said quietly. “He and several others invested in the Meriwether-Astor Munitions Works, and when its current president took the business in a different direction, they could not wait for slower profits, but took their money to that steamship venture of Mount-Batting’s.”
Philomena lifted her chin. “As you say, many gentlemen did the same.”
“Pity about the steamships,” Snouts said. “At least Mount-Batting has one left that hasn’t exploded.”
“Have you truly lost all?” Maggie asked. “Surely your papa will sell the house in town, and the carriage and all of that, so that you may keep Oakmond. I know how you feel about your home.”
What good did a proud tilt of the chin do when one’s lips trembled and tears filled one’s eyes? Oh, bother it. This was Maggie, who had quietly and calmly walked away with a number of school honours and then gone to university in Germany, as if such miraculous freedom were nothing more than she expected of life. What she was doing in a cottage in Vauxhall now was more than Philomena could fathom. She had to talk to somebody, and Maggie had been a good chum to her in those dark days when she had been torn out of Oakmond and stuffed into Belgravia, to wilt like a plant in the wrong soil.
“He is already planning to sell the estate.” Her voice wavered. “I am racing to earn the money to at least keep the staff paid until he does. I have known them all my life.”
“Would a twenty-pound bet on third place have accomplished such a goal?” Mr. Protheroe asked, pricking to attention.
“Did the bets go as high as that?” Philomena asked miserably. “Oh, how I wish the engine had not failed! I could have paid the housekeeper and two of the maids in full for the year with a purse that size.” She covered her mouth with her good hand, disappointment overwhelming her in a sob. “I’m sorry,” she blu
bbed. “It’s just that—” No matter how hard she tried, how good she was with engines, she just did not have enough knowledge to do a proper job of it. And no hope of learning, either. Father had been frightening in his determination that she should dispense with further education and bag a lord, the sooner the better.
“A lady from a Blood family cannot earn her own way,” Maggie said calmly. “I know. I am very glad to be Lady Malvern’s ward, and a Wit. I bought this cottage and land with my own investments, cleverly advised by our Lewis, here.”
“You were?” Philomena raised wet eyes to Mr. Protheroe. “You did?”
Mr. Protheroe looked rather as though he had been poleaxed, and when Maggie began work with the bandages, he took the opportunity to slip away. Philomena set her molars against the pain of having the wrist wrapped, though Maggie was as gentle as any nurse could be. He was probably going back to his respectable house on the other side of the river, where he made other people rich, and had a pretty wife waiting for him.
“All done. Are you in pain, Phil?” Maggie asked gently.
“Not in my wrist,” she whispered. “Thank you.” She turned away so that Maggie, who seemed to hold the high regard of so many, would not see the tears that loneliness and despair had wrung from her.
After the events of the past year, Lewis had believed his heart would be immune to the charms of any female for the rest of his life. And in a single moment, Lady Philomena Noakes had struck him like a bolt from the blue—literally. Those brown eyes, starred with wet lashes, had finished the business, and now here he was in Maggie’s garden, gazing down at what remained of the Acorn’s flying device without really seeing it.
“Is there any hope for it?” He turned to find her approaching him, tugging her jacket’s sleeve down over her bandaged wrist. “The last race is next Friday. I am allowed one mechanical failure, so I will have another chance.”
“I am no engineer, my lady,” he said. “But from what I have seen of engines and machines in my position as Lady Malvern’s secretary, it does not look good.”
“After I nearly crushed you flat, I think we may dispense with formalities,” she said glumly, prodding the footboard with the toe of her boot. “Maggie calls me Phil. You may do so, too.”
“Not Philomena?”
She shook her head. “My father calls me that when he is angry. I suppose I will hear it with greater frequency now.”
He could not bear to see her so despondent. “We have a week. Snouts can help, and we know one or two fine mechanics.”
“We?” Despite the clouds moving in to cover the moon, her eyes glittered, as though they had filled with tears. “Why should any of your friends help me, a stranger?”
Maggie came out of the front door with Snouts in time to overhear. “A stranger? I think not. You have fallen in with us now, Phil, dear. Welcome to the flock.”
The very next day, Lewis and Snouts conveyed her and the broken machine to Sir Andrew Malvern’s workshop in Orpington Close, where a girl called Margaret Anne Hodges met them, her toolbox in one hand. “Margaret Anne, mind,” she said cheerfully. “So as I don’t get mixed up with the other two Margarets at the glassworks.” Rain lashed the glass and iron walls Snouts’s crew had constructed, designed to let in all the light any inventor would need. “Thanks for springing me, sir,” she said to Snouts. “With a day off, I am completely at leisure to amuse myself with the thought of a ladyship racing flying devices and no one the wiser.”
“You mustn’t tell,” Phil cautioned her. “But I do thank you. Now, what can you salvage from my poor old engine?”
She, Margaret Anne, and Snouts bent over it. Snatches of conversation drifted to Lewis while he wandered about the laboratory, picking things up, putting them down, and thinking.
“—too heavy,” Margaret Anne said. “We need to start from scratch. Light. Powerful.”
“Aye,” Snouts said. “I’ll leave the design to you, keeping in mind we have until Friday to build it.”
“I’ve looted the scrapyards and manufactories I could get into,” Philomena said. “I drew the line at disabling other people’s steam landaus, however, including my father’s.”
Snouts rubbed his chin in thought. “Smaller than your footboard.”
“Lose that acceleration bar,” Margaret Anne said. “Too much weight.”
“How am I to accelerate, then?” Philomena lifted a hand, as though to stop their thought processes. “Wait. I tilt the bar forward for speed, and back to slow. What if my own body were used for that purpose?”
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Snouts said. “How?”
Margaret Anne snapped her fingers. “Foot pegs. She leans forward, they depress. She leans back, they release.”
“Excellent!” Philomena applauded her, and the mechanic blushed with the praise. “Now, the engine. We need to—”
“You cannot use a conventional engine at all,” Lewis said suddenly, strolling over to join them. “Water and coal or even kerosene are too heavy for a device as small as this. You need—” His gaze met that of Snouts.
“A Helios Membrane,” Snouts breathed on a note of understanding.
Philomena’s mouth fell open. “That is impossible,” she said when she had her breath back. “I have read about it. The Helios Membrane powers airships, not—not flying breadboards.”
“The Membrane is down in Cornwall,” Lewis said, thinking rapidly. “But there may be parts and pieces left over from its construction here. Once it has been exposed to the sun—”
“Provided it comes out sometime this week,” Margaret Anne put in.
“It can be run along the underside of the board and connected to the engine and propellers. Can it not?” Philomena’s mind was clearly taking up the chase as she appealed to the mechanic.
“It can,” she said with a nod.
“Come, you lot,” Snouts ordered. “All hands on deck to find pieces left over from the Membrane. And then we’ll get to work.”
It took every one of the intervening evenings to build the new flying device, and even then, Phil had the thing in her lap, screwing down the final plate, as Lewis piloted his steam landau to the Kennington Oval and she and Snouts alighted at the entrance arch. “I will leave the landau at Maggie’s and meet you where we sat before,” he told Snouts. Then he attempted to take the screwdriver from Phil’s hand. “Go, or you will be late and forfeit the race.”
She hung on to the screwdriver as her eyes, concealed by the goggles, met his. “Thanks are completely inadequate. But you have mine anyway.”
“I know,” he said. “Good luck!”
He felt the touch of her fingers like a kiss, all the way to Maggie’s.
Nerves set up a trembling in Philomena’s stomach—or perhaps that was the tremor in the board under her feet, its power leashed and eager. If she could pull this off, she could keep the staff at Oakmond. If she took first place, she could give them nest eggs to live on until they found new places. Just one chance, she begged the night sky. Just one.
“Go!” The white handkerchief came down and the ornithopters leaped into the air.
With an effort, she controlled the urge to move quickly. Lean forward. Under her toes, the pegs depressed, and power flooded the engine. She bent her knees to meet its thrust and—wheee!—she was flying, just as she had in her test flights over the Thames last night. She took the first turn as gracefully as a banking gull, passing up Sir Leonardo, pedalling furiously to power his canvas wings, and the Mad Hatter on his biprop. The Merman and his bubble had dropped out after last week’s race, as had one of the small ornithopters. But the March Hare was in it to win, his ornithopter far out in front.
Philomena leaned forward as she passed the smaller ornithopter. It was down to her and the March Hare, and the crowd knew it. The clappering was a roar in her ears as she bent lower, her arms out behind, and aimed for the Hare like an arrow shot from a bow. Down the straightaway she flew, the foot pegs level with the board now, at maximum pow
er.
Into the third turn, lift up on the pegs just a trifle. She went into a bank that took her to his near side—they were even—she was clear and in front! Down she went, arms back, in a crouch that made the board respond as though they were a single being. Her hair blew straight back, and she lost her cap, but now she was in the straightaway, and there was the racing master and his handkerchief, waiting for her like an old friend.
The March Hare crossed the line twenty feet behind her, and the crowd went mad, throwing their clappers into the air and storming down the stone levels of the stands as she made her victory lap above their heads. She couldn’t see Mr. McTavish or Mr. Protheroe in the melee, but she knew they were there. She had never been part of a team before, never had anyone care whether she succeeded at anything. Sheer joy bubbled up inside as she brought the board in to the grassy centre, where the racing master waited with the purse.
“Well done, Acorn!” he shouted as she landed and hopped off her board. “What a showing! What an upset!”
She grinned like a fool as she accepted the purse. “Thank you, sir. Much obliged to you.”
“I say!” Sir Barclay Ightham pushed his way to the front of the crowd, and Philomena’s blood, which had been galloping in her veins, froze in horror. “I know you. Racing master, this pilot is a fraud.”
Sir Barclay Ightham. The man Papa had offered up as the perfect suitor. The man she had been forced to take tea with on Tuesday afternoon, when she’d been dying to get over to Orpington Close to work on the device.
“Explain yourself, sir,” the racing master demanded. “This man has been competing for weeks, and has won this race fairly.”
“That is the problem,” Ightham said with triumph. “This man is a woman—and women cannot compete. They are not even allowed to be spectators. She has fooled you all, and defrauded you, to boot.”
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