She was leaving that one for last. If she survived that long and did not go completely mad.
The only facts she currently possessed were that their heading was westerly, and aside from the detours, they were traveling at the upper limits of the engines’ capabilities. Why the crew had not staged an airship somewhere so that this interminable journey could be made in three or four days instead of weeks, was a question she had not bothered to ask, for she already knew the answer. Stealth was the most urgent necessity, and airships could be spotted and pursued. Airships were subject to sovereign air space and identification and the filing of flight plans. Undersea dirigibles, being a new technology not yet in use on the Continent, had no such restrictions. And not even her father could track one until it surfaced and a pigeon could locate its magnetic code.
No one knew where she was. And somehow the utter loneliness embodied in that fact was the most horrifying thing of all.
She, who had tasted the delights of friendship, of conversation with active minds and warm hearts, had developed a taste for it that had spoiled her for her previous life. Before she had met Claire, she’d thought she had friends, but now she knew differently. The girls from school understood friendship to be mutual society—and mutual use of one another’s connections and talents. But friendship was not that at all. Friendship was being understood. Being esteemed for one’s talents, yes, but even if one had none, one could still be appreciated for one’s other qualities. The ability to laugh at a joke. The need for solitude on occasion—but not too much. The appreciation of a piece of music or a line of poetry. And most important of all, the ability to offer a hand when a hand was needed—and being able to instantly recognize such a need when words could not be spoken.
After two weeks under the sea, Gloria missed Claire and Alice and the girls and even that outspoken rascal Jake with an intensity that was almost becoming a pain in her middle. And she had had just about enough of moping about and trying to distract herself by reading of other women who had friends and family while she did not.
“We’re a flock,” Maggie had told her once, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.
Gloria wanted a flock. She wanted to be reunited with her friends, not putting mile after mile of bubbles and water between herself and people whom she was quite sure actually cared about her.
In fact, she realized now, she was quite put out that she had been removed from them against her will under circumstances that would paint her in the blackest of lights, and her days of being complaisant and polite were over. She swung her feet over the side of her bunk, and as she stood, her ears popped.
She gripped the iron rails of the bunk. That meant only one thing—they were surfacing.
A horn blew and feet began to pound along the corridors, in exactly the same manner as they had on the three previous occasions.
But on those occasions she had not yet had enough. Now the Meriwether-Astor temper, which she had thought utterly cowed over the years and groomed into more acceptable forms such as spirit and determination, and occasionally, bull-headedness, flooded her system with a tingling need to act.
Under the bunk was a sea-chest belonging to the cabin’s real occupant, a middy of some fourteen years. She had already rifled it, but now she jerked it from its place with more purpose. Swiftly, she put on the linen pants, blouse, and jacket that identified her as a member of the crew. She flung her hair up and pinned the tail in such a way that it fell all about her face, as shaggy as that of a boy who hasn’t seen a pair of scissors in six months, and jammed the middy’s cap on top. Stuffing the contents of her slender purse—ten pounds in coins, her identity papers, and two rings—into the pockets, she rolled up her skirt and petticoat and stuffed them under the bedclothes, then pulled the covers up.
It might pass for her recumbent form, and it might not. But she no longer cared.
Opening the door, she jogged along the corridor and joined a stream of men heading to the upper deck. As she reached the hatch, it opened, letting in the first sunlight she had seen in weeks. Choking back a groan of anticipation, she went up the ladder like a monkey, took a deep breath, and jumped over the chasm between streaming deck and sturdy wooden dock with as little hesitation as the other middies. Immediately she busied herself with ropes and boxes.
Little by little, she moved down the dock. She had perfected the art of looking productively occupied years ago, and it stood her in good stead now. Only a gangway stood between her and the shore, so she hefted a small barrel to her shoulder and walked down it in as unstudied a manner as she could.
“You there!” someone shouted. “You’re going the wrong way!”
A glance over her shoulder showed her a longshoreman as big as a house, with his greasy hands on his hips. “It’s empty, sir!” she called. “Won’t pass muster wiv our cap’n, so I’m going to fill it.”
“Drink it yourself, more like,” the man grumbled, clearly too busy to bother himself any more.
Her stomach jumping with nerves, Gloria lost herself in the crowd on the dock, dumping the barrel in a pile the moment she was out of sight. The air smelled of rotting fish and tar and overheated steam engines, and she dragged great, satisfying breaths of it into her lungs.
A woman selling fried kraken tentacles, cut crossways and rammed on a stick, looked up as Gloria stopped at her brazier. “Can I interest you in a kraken stick, young sir?” she asked.
“Not at this time, mum, but p’raps you might tell me the name of this port?”
The woman’s eyebrows rose under the kerchief tied about her head. “First voyage, aye? Silly trout. Look up.”
Gloria did so, and saw nothing but a great cliff of rock that seemed familiar, though she was quite sure she had never been here in her life. “What…?”
The woman frowned at her ignorance. “Ye git, it’s the Rock of Gibraltar. How long you been at sea?”
“First time,” Gloria said faintly. Gibraltar! An English colony, one of the largest trading ports in the entire Mediterranean … and the last stop before skirting the Royal Kingdom of Spain and entering the Channel. “My thanks, mum.”
“Sure you don’t want kraken? Plenty tasty, mine is.”
Gloria’s nerves were stretched to the point that any food, never mind the greasy, fried remains of a species that had likely meant the end of her friends, would have come up again immediately. “No thanks, mum. But maybe you might know where a man could send a pigeon?”
“Lawful correspondence here is sent by tube, lad, as anybody knows.”
Gloria eyed her. “And is there another kind?”
“No, but if there was, a man could inquire at the Barnacle.”
“My thanks.” Gloria dug a sixpence out of her pocket and gave it to the woman, waved off a stick of tentacle with a sickly smile, and jogged off down the waterfront in the direction she’d indicated.
In the public house, the pandemonium seemed less the result of drunken merriment than a deliberate screen for the sundry illegal activities going on. Thankful for her male disguise, Gloria inquired and then pushed her way back to a cage where a boy sat sucking a peppermint. “I need to send a pigeon.”
He moved the peppermint from one cheek to the other. “Be a pound.”
A pound! Highway robbery! But she was in no position to quibble. She handed it over, and he pushed a piece of paper and a pencil under the grate.
Alice, or to whomever this note may come,
I have been abducted by Captain Barnaby Hayes on Neptune’s Fancy. He is taking me against my will to England. I don’t know why, or where. Please believe I did not leave Claire and Andrew willingly. Sending this from Gibraltar. Will try to escape and reach Munich.
Gloria
A note was one thing, but as desperately as she tried, she could not recall the delivery code for Athena, nor for Alice’s ship, provided the latter had recovered it. She did not even know if either of them was alive—and if they were not, whether whoever received the note woul
d give a flying fig that she was being kidnapped. But she had no choice. She must try.
In despair, she looked up. “Have you a directory of some kind?”
“Do I look like someone who has a directory? You want one of those, go to the post office and send a tube.”
She cursed—one of the saltier versions she’d picked up in the Americas.
“Where you sending it?”
“To Count von Zeppelin in Munich.” It was the only address she could think of that had any hope of reaching … anyone.
The boy straightened on his stool. “I know that one. Lot of air traffic here. Give it.”
Gloria pushed the message under the grate and he stuffed it into what she had mistakenly believed to be a lantern hanging from the ceiling. Seeing her surprise, he said, “What, you think we have ’em out in the open for the postal authority to pinch?” He spun the numbers, opened a hatch behind him, and shoved the pigeon out into the sunlight, where it rose into the sky and disappeared to the northeast.
She must do the same, somehow. And quickly.
“Where is the airfield?” she asked the boy.
“Out on the point, past the docks, between the Rock and the sea. Can’t miss it.”
In her fear, she’d already managed to miss the Rock of Gibraltar once, so this didn’t mean much. All the same, Gloria thanked him and pushed her way back out of the taproom, keeping her head down and her posture crablike and subservient.
The moment she stepped out on the cobblestones, she heard the hue and cry. It could have been a boiler explosion. It could have been an escaped horse causing the running, shouting, and relaying of information. But she couldn’t take the chance.
She ran along the waterfront, dodging carts and steam drays and even the swinging cargo on a walking crane, which might have decapitated her had she not ducked in time. But the sounds of a chase did not dissipate with distance. Looking over her shoulder, she saw one of the officers from Neptune’s Fancy running, his face red and sweating, followed by a cluster of middies and bathynauts in Meriwether-Astor colors.
Blast! No, she would not be taken!
Abandoning caution, she began to run in earnest, feeling her leg muscles stretch and her lungs clutch in a way that told her she might not be as fleet of foot at twenty-three as she’d been at fifteen.
She was no match for the middies, used to haring up and down decks and loading supplies. In moments they surrounded her like a pack of hounds, baying and shouting and closing around her long enough for the officer in charge of the search party to catch up and seize her by the arm.
“Miss Meriwether-Astor, you have led us a merry chase,” he said between breaths as heavy as those of a blown horse. “Enough of this nonsense. You are coming with us.”
“I am not!” She kicked the nearest knee, threw an elbow, and would have broken the circle of her captors, too, if it had not been for the middy whose clothes she was presently wearing, who grabbed her about the waist and swung her around.
He had arms like iron, the wretch.
Cursing like a bathynaut herself, Gloria was soon dragged onto the Fancy and shown to the bridge, where Captain Hayes waited, his hands clasped behind his back and an expression in his eyes that was almost hurt.
“I am sorry to see that you prefer the dangers of the waterfront to the safety of our vessel,” he said. “I very much regret the action I must take, Miss Meriwether-Astor, but we cannot allow you the freedoms you have heretofore enjoyed if you cannot be trusted. I am afraid you are confined to quarters for the remainder of the voyage.”
He seemed rather taken aback at her language.
She hoped he had learned something.
6
Claire’s official title at the Zeppelin Airship Works was Junior Engineer, Flight Development Department. But she had been occupying space here for two weeks now, and had not yet had a chance to develop so much as a turnscrew, never mind anything approaching flight, despite her excellent credentials. She and Alice had, after all, invented the automaton intelligence system that Zeppelin was currently installing in all of his airships. It stood to reason that she should have begun the illustrious career she had been expecting in that hangar, but no.
Instead, she had been walked over to the Flight Development Department and informed by the person in charge that she would start at the bottom, as did every engineer who crossed the threshold.
“Can’t have the count accused of playing favorites, now, can we?” said the gentleman with every appearance of geniality.
“But the automaton intelligence system—I know it better than any person on earth save one. I should be working there.” In her black skirt and protective gray laboratory coat, Claire had tried to be firm and dignified. But all it had netted her in the end was a bare bench and a gleam of spite that, she suspected, revealed the man’s true feelings on the subject.
She hesitated to take her grievance to the count, though she was living in his palace and it would have been the work of a moment to visit his study after dinner one evening for a private conversation. But delicacy prevented her—that, and the stubborn conviction that if they wanted her to prove herself, she would do it so spectacularly that they would face reprimand for being so short-sighted as to hold her back.
So for some days now, instead of dusting her bare bench, calibrating Bunsen burners, sweeping floors, and asking Herr Weissmann, the department head, if he would like a cup of tea—oh, yes, they expected her to do all those things—she tinkered. She found gears that did not mesh, and flywheels that needed grease, and came in early in the morning to splice cable so that a signal might be detected in a ship’s engine room as well as in its navigation gondola.
In short, the Flight Development Department began to see an improvement in its production. The next stage was to generate memoranda. For every improvement, she documented what she had done, with drawings, and laid it on the department head’s desk. This went on for some days, until the morning she completed the cable project. When she took in her memorandum, she was so early that she discovered the previous day’s report still in the rubbish bin.
Pressing her lips together, she took it out, enclosed it with the completed report on the cable, and popped it in a tube addressed to the managing director’s office.
Not surprisingly, she was summoned thither at the end of the week.
She stood quietly in front of Herr Brucker’s desk, where a series of her reports was fanned out in front of him. “What is the meaning of this, Fraulein Junior Engineer?” he asked without preamble. “Why am I honored with so much information regarding the progress of your labors?”
“Because Herr Weissmann merely tossed them in the rubbish bin,” she said calmly. “I felt that the improvements to the process here ought to be documented so that others might change the procedures.”
His monocle fell out as his eyes widened, and he hastened to screw it back in. “Young lady, do you know the meaning of the word insubordination?”
“Of course,” Claire replied. “But I hardly see the relevance.”
“If the head of the Flight Development Department does not believe your reports are significant and chooses to disregard them, and yet you go over his head to bring yourself to the attention of his superiors—this does not strike you as relevant?”
For a moment, Claire was transported back in time to the Chemistry of the Home laboratory at St. Cecilia’s Academy for Young Ladies. Professor Grünwald’s tone had been very much like this, his underlying fear that she might be more intelligent than he becoming more apparent the more he spoke—and the more he attempted to discipline her.
But she was no longer the cowed seventeen-year-old she had been.
“I do not call it insubordination,” she replied. “I call it common sense. Count von Zeppelin is the last man on earth who would accept shoddy workmanship and deliberate stupidity among his employees. I am simply emulating his excellent example.”
“Ah, because you are such great friends.”
Claire inclined her head. “I consider it a privilege to have earned his esteem.”
“And you feel that you are undervalued in your present position, though it is one that has been honorably occupied by every engineer to pass through these doors?”
Here was a sticky wicket to navigate. “I am not averse to working my way up the ladder. I wish to be useful to the count. My only aim in writing these reports is to document ways in which, in the absence of a permanent assignment, I have been able to contribute to that end.”
“Do you believe it is useful to him and to this company to point out the faults of others?”
“If they have not been pointed out before now, then that is also something which might be improved.”
“Fraulein Junior Engineer, in the noble pursuit of improvement, let me point out a thing or two. We are not in the habit of brooking such arrogance and self-aggrandizement as this. It is one thing to do well in one’s assigned duties. It is quite another to believe oneself above them.”
Arrogance! Self-aggrandizement! Shades of Lord James Selwyn!
“I am above them—since I have been employed here nearly three weeks and have not yet been informed as to what exactly my duties are. I have a bench, with no parts or projects upon it. I have a department head who has not yet seen fit to assign me to a ship. I have an engineer’s ring and a mind eager to begin work, but I am expected to sweep floors and fetch tea. Tell me, Herr Brucker, would you not do the same in my place?”
He gazed at her for so long that she began to suspect that might have been the wrong question.
A Gentleman of Means Page 5