“Sure you don’t want one of us along?” Tigg said. He hadn’t been happy about this excursion from the moment he’d learned that Claire and Andrew would attempt it alone.
“I want both of you along,” she said, “but as you can see, the addition of Gloria’s weight on the return journey will be as much as this poor old wreck can manage. You know your part. I count on you to carry it out.”
She had every confidence that they would, for she had no confidence at all that the ancient touring balloon would survive the journey. Jake and Tigg were to follow as best they could in the landau, keeping them in view as much as possible during the ten miles between Hollys Park and Captain Hayes’s house, in case something went wrong and the little vessel went down. Claire was not afraid of an outright crash, for unless the gasbag ruptured altogether, it would behave as larger ships did, and land on a long, slow approach. The part she did not relish was being stranded in some farmer’s field and having to abandon their precious Membrane, with miles to walk and Gerald Meriwether-Astor who knew where in the neighborhood.
Jake and Tigg released the ropes, and the touring balloon with its silvery cover rose gracefully into the sky. As the ground fell away beneath them, Claire controlled the amount of energy going to the propellers and the homemade vanes, while Andrew did his best to steer by controlling the propellers’ direction.
Awkward, yes. Inefficient, certainly. But they were flying!
One mile, two, and Claire caught a glimpse of the road and the double glow of the landau’s running lamps far below. So far, so good. Four miles. Five. Eight …
And there it was.
Andrew patted her arm, since he couldn’t be heard over the beating of the propellers, and made a downward motion with one hand. Claire nodded, and leaned on the lever that throttled back the energy. The balloon sank toward the house.
Now came the tricky part.
She could feel the balloon’s trajectory as Andrew controlled vanes and propellers with both hands and one foot. The still night was perfect for flying—with one difficulty. They were too loud. Which was why speed and accuracy would be paramount, and she must judge this very carefully …
Now. She pulled back again on the lever and the propellers fell silent, still turning for a last few rotations as the balloon drifted toward the roof. The large square area in the middle, near the short tower, might have seemed enormous to someone standing on it, but for them, it was a bull’s eye all too small, and they had only one shot.
Someone stepped out of the shadow of the tower—a bulky, shapeless mass—and Claire’s heart nearly failed in her chest.
But it was too late now. They must land. With her free hand, she unfastened the strap of the lightning rifle in its holster on her back.
The bottom of the basket scraped on the gravel of the roof. Andrew leaped out to hold it steady, his body positioned protectively between her and the unknown person. Claire thumbed the switch of the rifle and it began to hum.
The person hurried toward them, tearing something from its head—a blanket! The moonlight struck—
“Claire! Andrew! Thank God!” Gloria said with a gasp, and flung herself upon Andrew in a hug.
“Gloria—yes—no, wait—”
Claire leaped from the basket and pulled her away, then both she and Andrew whirled to catch at the ropes before the whole rig floated away, unmoored, into the sky.
“Oh, I’m so sorry!” Gloria clapped her hands over her mouth until they moored it to one of the crenellations of the parapet. “I’m just so awfully glad to see you—alive—well!”
Claire turned and wrapped her arms about her in joy. “And we are equally glad to see you. Come. We will have only a moment once the propellers begin to turn. Someone will hear.”
“You’re quite right. The place is crawling in government men,” Gloria said.
Andrew held the basket while she and Claire clambered in, then ran to untie the rope. “What possessed you to come up here?” Claire whispered. “I had thought I would be searching the house in evening dress.” She indicated her ensemble under her coat—which Ian had unearthed from a trunk in the attic, made in the fashion of a hundred years before.
“I’ve been waiting all day, and finally concluded that you would come by air. Anything else would be too risky.”
“There is no shortage of risk even yet.” Rope in hand, Andrew barrel-rolled over the side of the basket and the balloon began to float upward. “Claire, ignition, please, quickly.”
Again the ignition procedure, her chilled hands moving with difficulty now, on switches and levers.
“Halt right there!”
Gloria gasped and Claire lost her balance for a moment on the tilting floor of the basket.
Below, several men emerged from the tower and fanned out on the roof. One leaped for the bottom of the basket, his fingers barely scraping its wicker floor under their feet. “Stop, in Her Majesty’s name!”
Claire braced her feet and flung her weight against the lever, and power flowed to the propellers. They sputtered into action, and Andrew threw the vanes full vertical.
The touring balloon labored into the sky, the weight of three people clearly forcing it to its limits.
“Stop, or we will be forced to bring you down!”
“Andrew,” Claire gasped. “Vanes full horizontal, propellers north and east!” The lightning rifle was ready now, blue and white tendrils of light flickering impatiently in its globe. “I dare not fire—Gloria, what does this mean?”
“They laid a trap for my father—I’m the bait.” Crouched in one corner, Gloria clutched the edges of the basket, her back pressed against the wicker. “But heaven only knows where he is. It doesn’t matter—get me out of here!”
21
Tigg would never have imagined that following a touring balloon would be so dad-blasted difficult. He would have had more success putting a steering mechanism in the Lady’s walking coop and taking it across country than he was having presently in her landau.
“Ow!” Jake cursed as they jounced into a pothole and back out again. “Are the roads this bad in the rest of England?”
“No idea.” Tigg hauled on the acceleration bar to slow the vehicle down. “Sensible people fly. Spin the wheel, would you, and get us back in the middle.” Nothing like on-the-job instruction to hammer something into one’s head. Jake had wanted to learn to pilot the landau, but this was not the classroom exercise Tigg would have chosen.
“They’ve landed!” Jake exclaimed a moment later, when the sorry excuse for a road crested a hill and they could see Haybourne House in the distance. “They must have. The balloon is gone. No, there it is—rising, see?”
“Something’s wrong,” Tigg said tightly, hauling on the wheel himself to turn them around in the narrow confines of the road’s high banks. “They can’t have even got inside the house—we only lost sight of them for a moment.”
“Heading north and east.”
Tigg leaned on the acceleration bar and the landau shot back down the road toward Hollys Park. “Now?”
Jake craned to see. “Tigg! They’re firing on the balloon from the roof! Look!”
Even over the puttering of the boiler, Tigg could hear the sound of the rifles’ reports. Icy cold fear poured into his gut, and he spun the wheel left, sending them diving down a farmer’s lane that with any luck would take them on an intersecting course with the balloon if it fell. Then he pushed the bar as far forward as it would go, the landau rocking and jouncing down the dirt lane at a horrific pace.
“Slow down or you’ll crash us!” Jake shouted. “We’ll be no help to them dead in a pile of metal!”
Hauling gulps of air into his lungs, Tigg controlled his panic and dared a look up into the sky. “Where are they?”
“Can’t see—”
A bolt of silvery blue light flashed, seeming to come from nowhere and everywhere under a ceiling of woolly clouds. “That’s the Lady’s rifle! Heading!”
“Two points
west,” Jake said. “We’ll have to go overland and hope there are no walls.”
It was a vain hope—but Tigg urged the landau up and out of the lane and into a meadow that stretched down a slope toward a line of trees. The Hay bourne. The river.
“Where are you?” he demanded of the sky.
Two more shots was his answer.
“There!” Jake rose in his seat and pointed. “They’re almost down!”
Past the line of trees, Tigg could just make out the diffused light of the obscured moon as it reflected off the silvery Helios Membrane—before the balloon disappeared from sight.
“Jake, triangulate,” he ordered. “I need an approach and an exit strategy.”
It took five seconds of bouncing, frantic flight down the slope before Jake’s focused stare came back to earth and he nodded. “Stay on this course for two hundred feet. There’s a wall three-quarters of the way down; we’ll leave the landau there where it’s protected, and get across the river on foot.”
Tigg nodded. “They dropped fast. If anyone is injured, we’ll use the Lady’s driving coat behind the seat as a hammock and carry them back.”
He hauled the landau to a rocking stop next to the wall, half of him relieved he hadn’t gone right through it. The machine was heavy, and with the slope … He shook the thought away as they clambered out.
Crack!
Instinctively, both he and Jake flung themselves to the ground, out of sight behind the wall. “Are they still shooting from the roof?” Jake said incredulously, raising his head for a look. “Are they mad? It’s half a mile off!”
That couldn’t be right. But there was more. “Look!” Hunched close against the old stones, Tigg pointed to the hills that rose gently behind the estate. Dark shapes bounced and jogged down the stalking trails. Human shapes. “It’s a bloody army!”
Only one person could call up an army in a country where he was forbidden to set foot.
“They’re coming for the Lady and Andrew—and Gloria, if she’s with them,” Jake said, vaulting over the wall. “But not if we get there first!”
Tigg and Jake pelted down into the river bottom, leaping over rocks and tussocks of sedge. The river widened here, and clearly the farmer used it as a ford, for the bottom was shallow and graveled. Splashing through, soaked to the knee, the two young men dashed up the opposite slope into the trees.
“This way.” Jake’s internal compass hadn’t failed him, from the speed with which he ran through the brush, pushing branches aside. The dark seemed thicker here, though the trees were bare of leaves. After a hundred feet of slapping branches and tripping over fallen logs in the dark, Tigg’s eyes had adjusted enough that he could see where the trees began to thin out.
“There!” He pointed at a struggling hillock of silvery fabric on the near slope.
“And none too soon,” Jake panted. “Vultures at ten o’clock, a thousand yards off.”
And to the left, in the distance, lights were coming on all over Haybourne House. If only the balloon had been able to stay aloft another half mile! They’d have been behind the hill and out of sight of the riflemen on the roof. But now the men would have told their companions in the house exactly where the balloon had gone down, and Gloria’s captors would come from that quarter to join the army coming from the other.
They didn’t have much time.
The silvery cover was flung back and Andrew crawled out from under it. Claire and Gloria, on hands and knees, emerged right behind him.
“Lady!” Tigg shouted. “Into the trees, quick!”
Claire’s head lifted at the sound of his voice, and she clutched Gloria’s arm. The words had barely drifted away on the wind when there came a crack! and a bullet pinged off a bent propeller right behind them.
Claire flung herself to the ground, dragging Gloria down as well, and Andrew dove on top of both of them.
“Where did that come from?” Jake demanded. “We’re out of range.”
“Behind us,” Tigg said. “It’s impossible.”
Jake’s curses this time were truly spectacular.
By now the three next to the downed balloon had commenced crawling on their bellies, moving as fast as they could up the slope, using hillocks and rocks as cover. Tigg could hear the Lady murmuring encouragement to Gloria, hear the sound of fabric tearing as their skirts were caught up under them.
Another bullet sang and pinged off an outcrop of granite.
Andrew grasped the waistbands of both women and hauled them up the slope, hunched over, Claire and Gloria using both hands and feet in a headlong dash for cover.
“Show yourself, you beggar.” Jake’s whisper was harsh, his lightning pistol out and humming as he cast about for a target. “How can we cover them if we can’t see him?”
“Jake, don’t!” Tigg grabbed his shooting arm. “The vultures don’t know we’re here. Don’t give us away.”
“But—”
“Come on!”
He burst out of the trees and grabbed Gloria. Andrew seized the Lady and together, they half-carried, half pushed them up the remainder of the slope and under the eave of the trees.
“Tigg, thank God,” the Lady gasped.
“Is everyone all right?” Jake demanded.
Gloria couldn’t speak, between gasping for breath and crying, but she nodded. The Lady and Andrew both managed to say yes before Andrew demanded, “Where did that shot come from? It can’t have been the house.”
“It wasn’t.” Jake stood, pistol at the ready. “It was from the trees, to the east and behind us, but we ent got time to search him out. There’s a teeming horde of vultures pouring down that hill, and we have about half a minute to get to the landau before they catch us.”
“Vultures?” Gloria squeaked. “I’d welcome vultures.”
“He means men,” Claire said briefly. “Run.”
Back through the whipping darkness of branches and trip holes and traps for the feet. Jake led their little party, his unerring sense of direction their only advantage. At least the vultures would have these woods to negotiate as well, and with any luck, they wouldn’t have a Jake in their party to help them.
“Perhaps it was only the farmer, thinking we were poachers,” Andrew panted. “I cannot imagine there are three parties of gunmen in the Somerset hills. It beggars the imagination.”
“The ones in the house are government men,” Claire said, hauling Gloria out of a hole and over a fallen log. “But who are the vultures?”
“I’d lay money they’re mercenaries, hired by Gloria’s dad,” Tigg said. “Watch that bough.” Andrew ducked, and the rest of the party ran under it. “Not far now.”
“The walkers,” Gloria said unevenly. “All the walkers in the hills. In November.”
“Ah,” the Lady said. “We should have guessed. They have been watching you for some time, then.”
“No one … can second guess … my father,” Gloria got out between breaths.
They emerged from the trees and now there was only the river and the far slope to manage. “Landau’s behind that wall over there,” Tigg said, conserving his breath. “Not far now.”
“Gloria,” Claire said, “you must tell us—what is the situation with your father? If Jake’s vultures are indeed sent to fetch you to him, why should we not throw in our lot with them?”
“Claire, there is no time!” Andrew’s tone was urgent, and even now they could hear the crashing of branches in the distance.
“I’m sick of them all!” Gloria said, bent over and holding a hand to her side. “Sick of being bait. Sick of my ignorance about the French invasion and some stupid telescoping cannon. Neither Barnaby nor my father wants me for me. They just want me for what I can do to further their political schemes.”
“Right, then,” Claire said. “That clears matters up somewhat.”
“Lady, if you cover us with the lightning rifle, Jake and I can get Gloria to the landau,” Tigg said urgently. “You and Mr. Malvern have a better chance of
hiding than all five of us do.”
“A good plan,” Andrew said. “A better one is if I cover you with the rifle and the four of you go.”
“I think not,” Claire said with some heat. “You and I remain together or we do not remain at all.”
“If you lovebirds have finished billing and cooing, can we hurry this up?” Gloria demanded, clearly having regained both breath and nerve.
“Now.” Tigg grasped her elbow and she, Jake, and Tigg hunched over and began a zigzag run down to the bourne.
Crack! A rock shattered into pieces not five feet from Jake’s boot, making him jump back as his leg was struck by a shard of it. A bolt of blue-white light sizzled across the gap, aimed vaguely in the direction from which a shot might have come.
“Why shoot at us?” Gloria panted. “We haven’t done anything.”
Another rock exploded ten feet in front of them, and a tiny propeller arced into the air, broken off by the force of the impact.
A propeller!
“Wait—that was a—” Gloria said.
“We’re not going to make it,” Tigg said grimly. “He’ll pick us off one by one as we cross the bourne.”
“It’s him!” Gloria staggered to a halt.
Crack! Jake cried out, spun, and fell to the ground.
“Jake!” Gloria screamed.
“I’m shot! Back to the trees!”
She dashed to him and hauled him up by an arm—the wrong arm, from the resulting howl of pain. Tigg grasped the good one and together they got him back under the sheltering cover of the trees.
“Jake, how bad is it?” Gloria demanded. “I’m so sorry—the acid—”
“Dunno. Don’t care. We have to get out of here, and the direct route ent going to cut it.”
“We can’t go east,” Claire and Andrew ran up. “That’s where the gunman is. Jake, my dear—”
“I’ll be fine, Lady,” he said through his teeth. “For now, we have to run.”
“But the acid!” Gloria was practically in tears. “If nothing else, we must get him to the river to wash it away!”
“Are you mad?” Jake glared at her.
A Gentleman of Means Page 20