“And mine,” Snouts spoke up from the corner of the sofa, where he’d been totting up a column of figures on the back of an envelope. “You don’t suppose we’d let you go off to meet a stranger in the Cudgel’s territory, do you?”
“Is he still alive?”
“Alive, though after that incident with the Lady, of course, there’ll be no one to carry on his illustrious name after he’s dead. Alive or dead, his temper hasn’t improved one bit.”
“Do you think he’d recognize us after all this time?”
“I think he knows exactly what we look like. There’s a reason I’ve posted a permanent guard at all the Lady’s properties, you know.”
That was Snouts—prepared for anything. “Then I’d be happy for your company, too. It will be like old times.”
“I hope not.” Snouts stroked a velvet waistcoat of particular magnificence that Tigg had not seen before. “I’m fond of the new times, myself.”
All in all, Tigg had to agree. His prospects had never been brighter. Once the captain was better, he looked forward to returning to duty with fresh determination to have his first engineer’s bars in four years. He and Lizzie had talked about it before he’d left Munich, and settled on a plan. It wasn’t quite like being engaged, for he had been mindful of his promise to the Lady, but planning for a mutual future had made him feel engaged. And Lizzie’s kiss good-bye had been everything a man could wish for in the woman he wanted to make his wife.
The Lady and Kitty concluded their calls the next day, which according to her account that evening at dinner, proved as mind-numbing and dull as could be expected, except for two tidbits: Peony Churchill was in Paris but expected back before Christmas, and the scandal surrounding old Mount-Batting’s gift of property to his baseborn son had not died away among the drawing-rooms of London.
“I am undecided whether this is because of the general opinion of society on the subject of that family which Julia and her husband have done nothing to improve,” the Lady remarked, passing the potatoes to Alice, “or because property is always a subject that excites conversation among the Bloods.”
Alice had been down at the warehouses with Captain Hollys all day buying parts and fittings and rope for Swan, and consequently looked much more cheerful and like their Alice than she had the day before. “But it does confirm what Ian and the clerk told us about the family. I just wish there was information more recent than four or five years old.”
“It doesn’t help us much to know he has a house when no one has seen him on this side of the Channel since then,” Tigg agreed, tucking into his slice of pork and baked apples with gusto. “My offer to take Athena and patrol the coast for a sign of Neptune’s Fancy is still open.”
“I’m afraid you would have more success finding a hook in a pile of rigging,” Captain Hollys said. “It is frustrating to have amassed a number of facts—only to find that they are no help whatsoever.”
“We did agree that to paint a picture of the only person we know to have been involved was the best course open to us,” the Lady pointed out. “I only wish we had another.” She turned to Tigg, lowering her fork to her plate. “You will be careful tonight.”
He took it as it was meant—both as an order and as a bid for reassurance. “I will, Lady. I have my lightning pistol, and Jake has a pocketful of Mr. Andrew’s walnuts.”
The moment that name passed his lips in connection with the tiny Short Range Dazzling Incendiaries he had invented, Tigg wished he could have just shut up. But the Lady bore up under it bravely.
“And Snouts?” She gazed at him down the length of the table, where he occupied the chair opposite her, as the de facto man of the house. The chair he had been prepared to abdicate in favor of Mr. Andrew—and now had had to re-occupy. “You will take all proper precautions as well, won’t you? It has been some time since you’ve run a raid.”
“Claire, really,” Captain Hollys murmured.
“We have no secrets in this house, Ian,” she reminded him crisply. “And you are as aware of the manner in which we had to live in the past as anyone here.”
Snouts interjected smoothly, “I’ve kept my hand in, Lady, and will be wearing my pistol in a holster under my coat.”
She nodded, satisfied, and her gray gaze met Tigg’s once more. “We do not know what may come of your meeting tonight, Tigg, but no matter what it might be, you can count on all of us to back you up.”
Nothing he says will change my opinion of you.
Tigg understood her meaning as clearly as though she had said it aloud. “Thank you, Lady,” he said quietly. Then he pushed back his chair. “No pudding for me tonight. I’d like to get down there in time to reconnoiter a little.”
Jake and Snouts shrugged on their coats, checked their pockets, and the three of them set off. They took an underground train to Tower Bridge and then crossed it on foot, arriving in the neighborhood of the Sea Horse about ninety minutes after their departure from Belgravia. They might as well have crossed the ocean.
In a way, they had—a wide gulf made of the time that existed between their past lives and their present prospects.
They’d reconnoitered many a tavern, and their old skills did not fail them. Jake melted into the darkness in the alley behind while Tigg and Snouts determined that the place had only two doors—the one on the street and one out to the kitchen yard, an unappealing square of brick full of refuse and rats.
“Don’t think I’d trust their grog as far as I could spit it,” Snouts murmured when Jake joined them once more, one street over. “They probably cut it with rat piss.”
“They’ve got a watch posted on the stairs to the second floor,” Jake reported. “I had a peek through a window from the roof. No watch up there.”
“I’m not interested in whatever is going on upstairs,” Tigg told them. “Just in whether or not this is an ambush.”
“Looks fair for now,” Snouts concluded. “You go in alone. We’ll follow in a moment, see if anyone follows you in who doesn’t look thirsty.”
Tigg had believed himself to be unaffected by the prospect of meeting the stranger calling himself Terwilliger, but as he crossed the greasy threshold, he took in the faces at the tables with far more intensity than usual.
How often did a man get to meet the father who was no father? One thing was certain—he and Lizzie would have even more in common now.
His gaze settled on a dark corner, where a man sat at a table clearly meant for private conversation. When he raised his tankard in salute, Tigg drew in a slow breath—of an atmosphere flavored with rum and onions and urine—and walked over.
“Buy you a drink, Lieutenant?” The man’s skin was so dark that he blended into the shadows in a way that was positively eerie. Until he leaned into the light of the old-fashioned wax candle on the table, all Tigg could see of him in the light of the electrick lantern that hung a few feet away was the glimmer of light along a cheekbone, the white of his teeth, and the gleam of polished skin upon his bald pate. He was not old, but shaven smooth in the way of pugilists or swimmers.
This had to be he, if he knew Tigg’s rank—for Tigg was not in uniform, but in raiding rig: dark trousers, vest, flying goggles, and leather belt studded with pockets and hooks for bombs and weapons. His lightning pistol lay concealed in his pants pocket, and while there were two vials of gaseous capsaicin in the loops in his belt, the vials had been made to look like tiny rum bottles, as befitted an aeronaut.
“No, thank you.” He waved the barmaid away, and got a dirty look for his pains.
“So,” his companion said, looking him over. Did he expect to see some hint of himself in Tigg’s face and form? “You’ve got her forehead, too. Nancy’s. And her way of frowning, with the two lines, just here.” He touched his own forehead. “Would you like to see her?”
For a moment, Tigg wondered whether, if his father had come back from the dead, his mother might not as well. But no. That couldn’t be right. The night-hens had wrapped her body r
ight there in the kitchen before she’d gone to the potter’s field to be buried. “What do you mean?”
In answer, the man fished a chain out from under his shirt, from which hung a round brass locket, plain and unadorned. He pressed the screw and it opened to reveal a daguerrotype portrait. He handed it over. “Do you remember her?”
“Not like this.” For the face in the portrait was young and smiling, with a cloud of golden hair. “Before she died, she was thinner, and the pox was coming on, and she’d sold her hair to the wig maker for money to eat.”
Something flickered over the man’s face, and he took back the locket. “I didn’t want to leave you,” he said. “Take that for what it’s worth.”
“It’s worth nothing to me,” Tigg said evenly. “I don’t know you. What you want now or didn’t want then makes no nevermind to me. I got on with the life I was handed, and as you see, made something of it with the help of others.”
“You sound like you’ve been in the Colonies.”
“Perhaps.”
“The wind. It’s in our blood. I’ve been on every continent on this earth, and most of its islands.”
“I came by my profession by my own will, not because of you.”
The man regarded him more intently now, not looking for himself in Tigg’s face any longer. “So you say. Well, perhaps you did. How do you like being in Her Majesty’s service? Suit you?”
The more he spoke, the more Tigg tried to place his accent. Not English. Not from the Fifteen Colonies. Was he French? With a name like Terwilliger?
“It does. Where do you hail from? You don’t speak like an Englishman.”
“I was born in England, true enough, but grew up on the Moorish coast. My pa was from Yorkshire. He was an aeronaut, too. I learned my trade in Rome, and hired on as a ropemaker in the Royal Air Corps. They needed men, and I needed work. That’s when I met your mother, when we were based at Hampstead Heath. I was married and you were on the way before I knew it.”
“Why did you leave? You left the Corps at the same time. Seems fishy to me.”
His eyebrow lifted, cocked at a diagonal, and Tigg felt a shock of recognition. That eyebrow—his mother’s finger, drawing a line along it—her laughter—
The door opened and Tigg glanced over his shoulder to see Snouts and Jake come in. They sat four feet away, their backs to them, their faces toward the door as they chatted in low voices, and ordered drinks.
Tigg settled his flight jacket on his shoulders, feeling the truth settle upon him at the same time.
“Something wrong, boy?” Terwilliger asked.
“No. I just recognized something about you, that’s all. I hadn’t expected to, and it surprised me.”
“Ah. Didn’t trust me, did you?”
“I still don’t. Why did you want to meet me, after all this time?”
“Can’t a man want to be acquainted with his son?”
“Depends on whether he ever wanted to, I suppose.”
Terwilliger leaned toward him on one elbow, his eyes somber, his pupils dilated in the dim light. “I did want to. You want to know why I left the service?” When Tigg shrugged, he went on. “I had to. I got into bad company—made some poor decisions. It was either desert and face court martial if I ever set foot on English soil again, or be killed on the spot. I chose the long-term plan, if you will.”
“So if you’re discovered here, you’ll be shot? Why would you take the risk?”
“Because I saw you at Gibraltar, and I realized I’d missed my chance. We won’t see one another again, my boy—not on this side of the ocean, or of eternity, probably. I have debts to pay, and a harsh master to serve.”
“Who? Old Scratch?”
Amusement twitched at the corners of his lips. “I’d choose him in a moment. No. The Doge of Venice.”
Tigg felt his face go slack, and struggled for control. “You fly for the Famiglia Rosa?”
His father grabbed his wrist and yanked him toward himself across the table. “Keep your voice down!”
“Are you mad?” Tigg tugged his wrist out of his grasp—not without difficulty, for the man was as wiry as a fighting cock, with muscles ropy and honed from years of scrambling up and down fuselages. “Do you have a death wish, to work for them and yet return to England with nothing to look forward to but being seized to the rigging?”
For aeronauts were not hung, or shot, if they received the death penalty. They were tied in the rigging of the fuselage on the ship they had wronged, and left there until the elements and the cold of the clouds caused them to perish.
The man shrugged. “It was worth the risk to see you.”
Tigg could not imagine someone who valued his life so little that he was willing to take that risk. If he only had one last chance to see Lizzie, would he take it, come what may? Somehow he thought that he would. But in her case, love lay in the scale, heavy as gold and twice as fine. This man could have no such counterweight.
But he had told the Lady he would try to find out what he could of the comings and goings in Gibraltar. New information of the Famiglia Rosa could only be to their advantage.
“What do you do for the Doge?” he asked, more quietly still.
“Anything he asks of me. At the moment, the family has the wind up about convict labor in Venice. A deal gone bad or some such. So my being here is self-serving, I suppose, while their eyes are turned to the Adriatic and not to the north.”
Tigg nodded. “I heard. Something to do with Meriwether-Astor, wasn’t it?”
His father’s eyes gleamed. “That’s the last name I’d expect to hear on your lips.”
“I was just in Venice—third engineer on a ship taking a party to the art exhibition. Heard about the fuss.”
“Rich folks, must be.”
Tigg shrugged. “A job’s a job.”
“What do you know of the convicts, then?”
“Nothing. Just that they work under the water, cleaning the gearworks. Nasty custom, if you ask me.”
“The family lost a couple of them. Big stink about it. Some young lady broke them out and got away with one of the impounded ships. Stupid gambit on her part—the family are like dragons. You touch even one coin and they’ll burn you to hell and back for it.”
Alice. It had to be. “There’s a price on her head?”
He tilted one shoulder up in a half shrug. “Death medallions come at a pretty high price.”
Tigg’s stomach did a slow swoop that made him feel a little ill. “Does everyone in the Levant know about the sentence, then? A man wouldn’t have much of a chance—a young lady even less.”
“No. There was a price of a hundred gold guineas on her head, but that’s been lifted. When the family give a medallion, it’s to a trusted man. And he doesn’t come back until the job is done or he dies trying.”
Medallions. Tigg’s mind flashed to that night in the park at Schloss Schwanenburg. Three men had not come back. Did the Famiglia Rosa think they were still looking, or did they know the men were dead? It had only been a couple of weeks. Surely that was not enough time to send out another squad?
He dared not ask further. But it seemed clear as day that a medallion meant a man was charged to deliver the death sentence to a victim. Best to change the subject before a word slipped loose that would give Alice away.
“So,” he said with an air of a man who has another appointment, “you spotted me at Gibraltar. Do you moor there often?”
“It’s the gateway to the Mediterranean and the family have business interests there,” his father said, clearly equally willing to change the subject. “But I was on two days’ land leave, soaking up the sun—and the excellent grog at the Barnacle. You might be interested in this—ever seen an underwater dirigible?”
Tigg schooled his face into polite but slightly disbelieving interest. “No. Sounds impossible.”
“There you’d be wrong. Talking of Meriwether-Astor, he’s got a fleet of them in that part of the world, and no one the wi
ser. Just between you and me and the wall here, I think the family would be wise to throw in with him. But that’s none of my affair. I’d never seen one, or the little bubble they use to come ashore.”
“You saw one come ashore?” Chaloupes, Lizzie had called them. But he could betray no knowledge of that.
His father nodded. “I was too far away to see much, just saw the dirigible surface and send out a little bubble of a thing. Rolled up to a ship and rolled back into the sea in about ten minutes, neat as you please.”
Tigg’s heart felt as though it would beat so hard the man would be able to see it right through his jacket. “Seems impossible—like they’d be swamped. Does it roll onto the beach like a ball?”
“No, it has wheels. Brilliant, the mind what came up with that.”
He couldn’t ask about the airship. Bad enough he was asking questions about the undersea dirigible. But those might be asked by anyone with an interest in engineering marvels—anyone who had never seen what he had described.
“I can’t say the Sea Horse’s grog measures up to the Barnacle’s,” he finally said. “Or anywhere but the bottom of a rat’s nest.”
The man smiled. “You see I’m only drinking enough to be polite.” He tilted the mug until its noxious contents lapped at the rim. “Those gents are doing the same. Smart coves. Obviously been here before.” He nodded toward Snouts and Jake. “Not me, I’m here on business.”
“For the family?”
“Aye.”
“Rocks and hard places come to mind.”
His father nodded, and pushed the tankard away. “I want you to have this.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out what looked like a coin. “Nope. Not that.” He laid the locket on the table. “It’s all I have.”
The locket with his mother’s picture. Tigg’s heart pounded, and he felt as though his next breath might choke him. “I can’t take that. It’s yours.”
“She had her portrait made and gave it to me on one of my first voyages after we were married. She would want you to have it. I have no ties here now save this one. It should be with you.”
A Gentleman of Means Page 13