Gossamer Wing 1

by Delphine Dryden

  “Pull!”

  The trap launched off the deck above, striking a lazy parabola that peaked somewhere over the ship’s wake in time for the bullet to intersect it.

  “Mark!”

  Its twin, shot from the opposite side of the broad stern, seemed to come directly over Charlotte’s head at a steep angle. She forced a little squeak and giggle out of herself as the fowling piece discharged, jerking Lord Johnson’s shoulder back.

  He had missed his shot, which she would have thought impossible given the lazy trajectory of the clay and the very fine make of the elaborate fowling harness Johnson was wearing.

  The young Lord pushed the weapon, one adapted for the shorter-range clays, down along its track and off his arm. Then he made a great show of cursing and adjusting the trigger grip and stabilizing grip, all the while making pointed little remarks about the quality of Hardison’s goods.

  “Oh I know, isn’t it lovely, Lord Johnson?” she twittered, batting her eyes and twirling her hat ribbons around her finger. “And so shiny!”

  Dexter shot her a look and then stepped forward, clearing his throat.

  “Johnson, if I may?”

  With a few deft motions over the other man’s harness, Dexter had reseated the shoulder pad and fastened the middle strap of the chest piece, which had apparently never been buckled. Perhaps because the abundance of decorative and very shiny rivets made it difficult to locate the actual buckles amid such a profusion of brass.

  Not waiting for Johnson to reseat the weapon, Dexter nodded to the steward, who returned his nod and called out to the company, “Lord Hardison’s target! Lord Hardison’s target!”

  “Pull.”

  A hit.

  “Mark.”

  Another hit.

  “Pull.”

  Hit.

  “Mark.”

  Hit.

  And so on, for the complete round, Dexter’s voice as firm and controlled as his aim, Charlotte clapping like a giddy schoolgirl every few shots.

  And aside from those holding the straps in place, Dexter’s fowling harness was ostentatiously free from rivets. Charlotte knew he would have preferred simply using a gun. As would she, were she the one shooting, whether at clay or live targets. But they were masquerading as a fashionable young couple, and harnesses were the fashion.

  These traps were filled with feathers that exploded in gay little puffs of color when they were hit. Charlotte looked for the feathers on the wind, but most of them were churned almost instantly into the wake of the huge cruise ship.

  “Mr. Tanaka’s target! Mr. Tanaka’s target!”

  That gentleman began his turn, faring somewhat better than Johnson, as Dexter shrugged out of his harness with a resigned expression. “He’ll want to yammer about it for the next hour, mark my words.”

  “Darling,” Charlotte said a bit too loudly, warning Dexter with a nod that Johnson was headed their way, “You were brilliant, simply brilliant! You are going to teach me to use one of your splendid harnesses, aren’t you? Remember, you promised. And when we get back home I want a robin’s-egg blue one, with pretty gemstone rivets, exactly like my very dear friend Meggie’s. But not paste! And one for riding to the hounds, as well. But in scarlet kid, to look well with my new riding habit.” She giggled again, forcing the sound to the pitch and frequency that had seemed most distasteful to Lord Johnson on previous occasions. “Only that one wouldn’t be for a fowling piece of course!” She tapped her folded fan smartly against Dexter’s broad shoulder.

  “Of course, my darling. Anything you like. I shall send a message to Pence to have him begin the work right away.” He was almost as effusive as she, and sounded disgustingly besotted, but to no avail.

  “Sorry, it didn’t work,” she whispered, and pretended tremendous interest in Mr. Tanaka’s skill as the odious Lord Johnson ahem-hem-hemmed at Dexter’s side.

  “Johnson.”

  “The Hardison Harness not quite performing as expected this morning.”

  Dexter allowed a tiny, polite smile to bend his lips for the slightest second. “I have never referred to the style or the product as the ‘Hardison Harness,’ sir. But I’m sure if you try it again with the shoulder seated correctly and all the buckles, ah, buckled—”

  “Quite. But you know—”

  “I say, Hardison. Might want to look to your wife,” another one of the waiting shooters suggested.

  Charlotte had placed herself near the rail and was now leaning over it, pointing with dangerous enthusiasm at the wake in which she had just seen absolutely nothing unusual.

  “Darling, a porpoise! I’m certain I saw a porpoise!” Hooking one foot under the lowest bar of the rail for safety, she let herself bend forward until anyone watching would surely think her set to pitch herself straight off the edge into the briny deep. “Look, over there!”

  It had worked, she saw. In his need to rescue his obviously feather-brained wife from unintentional porpoise-motivated suicide, Dexter had ample cause to abandon all attention to Lord Johnson.

  She could only hope that at least a few of the other passengers suspected she was not really as stupid as all that.

  Then the boat hit a swell large enough to register despite the vessel’s mass. Charlotte’s body tilted and her stomach lurched, and she was suddenly incredibly grateful for the large, firm hands at her waist. And terribly, terribly sorry for the absolute mess she proceeded to make of the deck as she relived her breakfast in the most violent and graphic way imaginable.

  Dexter muttered his thanks to the nobly silent, efficient stewards who swarmed to the spot and began to sand and swab before Charlotte had even quite finished retching. He tipped them handsomely, she noted with the one eye that seemed still able to open without causing her stomach to lurch again. Then he picked her up gingerly, without seeming to mind too much about the horrible state of her garments, and was almost all the way to their stateroom before giving in to the urge to say anything the least bit snide.

  It wasn’t snide at all, really, just, “And you didn’t even have the fish.”

  Which was true, she hadn’t.

  * * *

  DEXTER WAS EXPERIENCING difficulty keeping his rationalizations straight. He had explained his actions to himself at every step of the way, and at each juncture things had made a certain kind of sense.

  His companion, his wife, had been unspeakably sullied by the products of her gastronomic upset. It only made sense to remove her clothing upon their return to the stateroom. He had called for the ship’s surgeon, naturally, and that gentleman had arrived so quickly he encountered a baroness still clothed in her chemise and drawers, and wrapped in Dexter’s dressing gown. She still had her stockings on, in fact. It was all quite modest.

  Dexter declined the offer of a nurse to assist in bathing Lady Hardison and putting her to bed because, after all, he was supposed to be an ardent young husband on his honeymoon. It didn’t make sense, viewed that way, to accept help from a nurse. Why would he require or want that?

  So after the doctor had poured his restorative if highly narcotic tonic down Charlotte’s throat and taken his leave, Dexter did what was necessary to see his young wife safely to bed. The dressing gown was removed—and sent out for cleaning—but it was clear the undergarments were also in need of removal. And once he had the giddy, woozy lady down to her stockings, it was also clear that actual bathing off was desperately needed.

  He did that because it was necessary, keeping his sleepy wife wrapped in a blanket as much of the time as he could and carefully washing her off in sections. Charlotte was less than cooperative. She kept slumping to one side or the other in her chair as he sponged her off with a warm wet rag, or making giggling slurs on the shooting abilities of certain decidedly plump lordlings on the ship. Dexter wondered if he could get the doctor to prescribe some of that seasickness medication for his own use.

  Then Charlotte raised a leg to the table and started to peel a stocking off, and Dexter was both chagrined and
fascinated by the complete lack of modesty his overmedicated companion displayed. He could see things he had intended to studiously avoid seeing.

  “You should put your leg down, Charlotte,” he suggested in a hoarse voice he barely recognized as his own.

  “Oh, Dexter.” Her broad gesture swept the blanket free of her shoulders, revealing most of her bosom and taking with it the rest of the thinking portions of Dexter’s brain. “You’re bathing me off. That’s so thoughtful, especially . . .”

  After a moment, he prompted her. “Especially?”

  “Especially what?” She blinked at him and smiled slowly. She looked barely able to keep her eyes open. “So kind. And so very, very . . .” She reached out to pat his cheek lightly, then lowered her hand and gave his shoulder a little pat as well. And then a shake. She was so small, it moved her more than it did him. She jiggled quite deliciously as she shook his shoulder, in fact. “So very big,” she finally finished. “Like a lovely big wall. Or a bear. I do like your big, clever paws, Mister Hardison. Baron . . . thing.”

  She nodded off all at once, snoring in a way that was not dainty or charming at all, and with the most appalling breath . . . in only one stocking, her modesty hopelessly compromised by her foot still propped on the table’s edge, and by the slipping blanket.

  Dexter tortured himself by finishing Charlotte’s bath before he slipped the clean night rail over her head and tucked her into the berth to sleep off the surgeon’s remedy. The last thing he did, because he was a glutton for punishment he supposed, was reach under the fragile lawn gown to loosen her other gaiter. He rolled her stocking down her sleek thigh and trim calf until it popped off her foot in a silken ring.

  Dexter forced himself to back away after that, wondering all the while if perhaps the good doctor was amenable to bribes.

  * * *

  WHEN CHARLOTTE WOKE up she was blessedly clean and dry. Her stomach was firmly in its proper place, no hint of queasiness. Her mouth tasted like the bottom of the Aegean stables pre-cleaning, but other than that she could hardly complain. Dexter offered her an iced soda water when her eyes were barely open, and she drank a tentative sip before she tried to sit up on the berth.

  “No. You’re staying right there. And you’re telling me where the retrieval hook is.”

  “Retrieval hook?”

  “For the Alvarez devices,” he said with exaggerated patience. “In your ears.”

  “Oh, that retrieval hook. It isn’t really a hook, did you know? It’s a special sort of magnet with a—”

  “Charlotte. For the better part of three days, I have been entertained with a parade of foodstuffs issuing from your person in very much the wrong direction. I have nearly run myself out of pocket money paying off the stewards, a team of whom seems to have been formed for the express purpose of following you around this ship with a sand pail and a mop.” Well, she knew that was an exaggeration. He was not even close to running out of pocket money. “And I don’t suppose I would find it quite so very annoying, and might feel a wee bit more sympathy, if it weren’t for the fact that I know you to have a pair of medical devices worth more than that entire team of stewards makes in several years, implanted in your ears for the specific purpose of preventing motion sickness.”

  “No, they’re really so I know where I am in the air. And they work splendidly for that,” she protested. “They chime and everything.”

  His jaw clenched. Charlotte could see a pair of muscles bulging along the chiseled line from his ears to his chin, and a matching set of muscles forming solid columns of contained impatience down the sides of his neck. “The extraction tool.”

  “All right,” she agreed reluctantly. “But Dr. Alvarez had them out for me a few months after they first went in. And she said there was nothing wrong,” she reminded him. She groaned as she tried to rise to a sitting position.

  “Stay.” He pressed her shoulder back into the pillow and glared until she stopped moving.

  “In a little wooden case in my reticule. I’m supposed to keep it with me at all times.”

  “This reticule?” he said, pulling the small bag from the back of the doorknob to the sitting room area of their absurdly expensive stateroom. “The one you weren’t carrying on deck today? The case was in here?”

  “That’s the one, yes. Don’t be unkind, Dexter. It’s not as though I’ve enjoyed casting my accounts all over the poor ship.” Indeed, Charlotte felt somewhat ill-used in general for having to suffer vomiting and scolding.

  “You had these put in when you first started training on the airship, yes?”

  “Yes. For the altimeter chime modification, and there’s also a port in the left one that can connect to a directional sonic amplificator built into the ship. Sometimes if the wind and geography are right I can pick up conversations on the ground from a few thousand feet up.”

  “Mmm. Remarkable.”

  He moved from the nearby chair to the edge of the berth, which sagged a little under his weight. Charlotte trembled as he leaned over her, turned her head to the side with three fingertips placed along her cheekbone, and deftly inserted the slender gold reed into her ear.

  The click was wrenchingly loud, as always, and the quarter-twist to loosen the implant from its shaft made Charlotte’s hackles rise, as always. That moving thing felt horribly wrong inside her head. But that only lasted a second or so.

  Once it was out, everything felt wrong—inside her head and otherwise. Without the equilibrium provided by having both implants functioning in tandem, Charlotte’s sense of up and down fell into disarray. The loss of functional hearing from the temporarily disabled ear added its own disorientation, making it difficult to tell which direction sounds were coming from.

  She hadn’t even realized she was hyperventilating until she felt warm, heavy hands on her shoulders, rubbing in soothing strokes, and a rumbling voice from everywhere and nowhere reminding her to breathe out, not just in. She forced herself to relax, to open her eyes and focus on the nearest thing. Dexter’s face.

  “If I take out the other one,” he said, exaggerating the movement of his lips to ensure she understood, “you’ll be deaf but not nearly as dizzy.”

  She nodded, swallowed back her panic and presented her other ear. It was faster this time, the discomfort masked by the generally worked-up state she was already in.

  And he was right. Though she could hear only echoing emptiness, like the sound of the ocean in a seashell, she could feel her body’s own orientation to the world clearly again. She could even sit up, though she did so slowly.

  Dexter was scribbling something on a notepad, and before she could peek over his shoulder, he turned to show it to her.

  You might want to clean your teeth while I work.

  He grinned and moved off to the sitting room, holding the implants carefully in one hand. She sighed, feeling irritated that the sound did not register in her own ears. And then, because she did desperately want to clean her teeth, she sighed again and swung herself out of the berth.

  She was in her nightdress. And if her nose could be believed, she was quite thoroughly clean.

  “How long have I been asleep?” she asked, hoping she wasn’t too loud.

  Not loud enough, apparently. He didn’t move, and she aimed her second try directly at his big, impassive shoulders through the open connecting door.

  “How long have I been asleep?”

  He jumped and whirled, eyes wide.

  Perhaps that one was a bit too loud.

  He mouthed something. Charlotte read lips fairly well, having learned in the course of her unique job training. But perversely, she shrugged and made a puzzled face to see what Dexter would do.

  He cocked that skeptical eyebrow at her, is what he did, and jotted on his notepad in a sharp hand that almost tore the paper.

  4 hrs

  “Four? Hours?” He couldn’t be serious. She thought he’d said “a few” something. Perhaps her lip-reading was less accurate than she’d supposed. “
Four hours? But when did I have a bath?”

  More of a glare, this time, followed by another scribble.

  Brush your teeth.

  Charlotte put her hands on her hips and stood her ground. “Dexter! Did you change my clothes?”

  He was securing one of the implants in a clamp under a magnifier, on the sitting room table he’d co-opted from the first day to house a number of vaguely scientific-looking devices, few of which Charlotte recognized. He didn’t write anything down, didn’t even turn his head to her this time, only nodded.

  She tapped her foot. Opened her mouth to say something, then caught a whiff of her own breath and stormed over to the door to the lavatory, which the men all insisted on calling a head, just as the doors were all hatches on board the ship, and the beds were all berths or bunks. Tiresome.

  After scrubbing her teeth thoroughly with a great quantity of tooth powder, Charlotte returned to her position in the center of the stateroom, feeling much better prepared to do battle.

  Dexter was now hunched in intense concentration over the table, doing something intricate with what looked like a tiny pair of tweezers and a bottle of mineral spirit.

  “Dexter,” she said experimentally. Not loud enough.

  “Dexter!”

  Perhaps a bit too loud again.

  He looked around, querying with his eyes.

  “Did you give me a bath?”

  He smiled, a bit too broadly, and turned back to the table. Charlotte stamped her foot, feeling ridiculous and blaming him for it. She wanted her ears back. She remembered nothing of a bath, nothing of clothes being changed.

  “Do you mean to say you saw me naked?”

  He went still, head tilted to one side. For a moment she wondered if he would pretend not to have heard. Then he turned all the way around in the swivel chair, arms crossed over his chest. He was still smiling, an entirely different kind of smile now though. His dark eyes made a languorous circuit from her face to her ankles and back again, and he finished by meeting her eyes in what could only be a challenge. Then he swung the chair around to the table again and scribbled something longer on the notepad, then offered it over his shoulder without turning. She was forced to come closer if she wanted to take it from him and read it. While she did, he screwed the top back on the mineral spirit bottle and carefully replaced his tweezer-things in a little case with fitted velvet slots for holding various small tools.