“Don’t count your chickens,” Alice said through her teeth, and, her hand still in her pocket, where it had been wrapped around the grip of the lightning pistol, she pulled the trigger.
A bolt of blue-white light burned through the front of her pants and arced across the space dividing her side of the gallery and his. She saw at once that shooting from the hip had caused her to aim low. The bolt burned away part of the marble railing and spent itself at last in Terwilliger’s leg, where it burned his pants and some of the flesh right down to his boot.
He screamed, and in his convulsion of pain, pulled the trigger of the huge double-barreled pressure rifle that the lightning had revealed he carried. Alice dove for cover behind the urn, and it exploded in a million pieces that rained down for twenty feet onto the parquet floor of the entrance hall.
Simultaneously someone banged on the front door and shouted. Ian burst out of the corridor to the guest bedrooms, skidding on the polished wood and diving to the floor, rolling and coming up next to her. “Alice!”
“He’s down but not dead,” she said, barely able to get the words out for shaking.
“Not for long,” Ian said, gathering himself for a rush along the gallery.
“No!” She grabbed his arm. “That gun has two barrels—he only shot one! I saw where he went down—there. Cover me.”
To her everlasting amazement, he did not argue. He, an experienced military man, simply calculated the odds, saw that they were greater if they did as she said, aimed his Corps-issued pistol across the gallery, and fired. At the same time, she ran like the hounds of hell around to the next side and saw Terwilliger lying on the floor, propping himself up with the stock of the pressure rifle.
Ian fired again—glass shattered on the floor below—and Alice aimed the lightning pistol and let off another bolt as she flung herself to one side, against the wall. Simultaneously, the pressure rifle barked, deep as a bloodhound’s baying, and a painting fell off the wall and landed with a crash on top of her.
As she struggled to get it off—it had to weigh a hundred pounds—footsteps passed her at a run.
“Lay down your arms in Her Majesty’s name!” Ian demanded. “Or I’ll shoot you where you lie.”
Which was all Alice heard before someone hauled on the painting and Claire’s voice said, “Alice! Oh God, Alice, are you alive? Speak to me!”
“I’m fine,” she managed. “Dadburnit, I missed and that villain is still alive!”
“Ian and Andrew are tying him up with their belts,” Claire said breathlessly. “Dear heaven, is this painting lined in lead?”
“Gold, probably. Umph!” With a final push, she was free, and Claire hauled her to her feet.
“Oh, I am so glad you are unharmed. So happy—” Her voice wobbled and she burst into tears.
Alice put her arms around her. “Hush. It’s all right. Between the two of us, Ian and I brought him down. Now I suppose it will be up to the Admiralty to deal with him.”
“And you and Gloria will be safe at last,” Claire wailed, completely gone to pieces.
With a quick breath, Alice remembered that she wasn’t the only one in danger tonight. She patted her friend’s shaking back urgently. “Gloria! What happened? Is she here? Did you get her out?”
Claire raised her head, drew a shuddering breath in a clear effort to regain control, and scrubbed the tears off her cheeks. “We got her out and they shot us down. Her father and his mercenaries found us—and when Terwilliger shot at Gloria, Mr. Meriwether-Astor flung himself in front of the bullet.”
“Then—”
“He is dead and Gloria is alive and explaining all of this to the gentlemen from the Walsingham Office.”
“The who?”
“Never mind, we’ll explain it all later. The important thing is that you are both safe!”
“Alice?” Claire stepped back to allow Ian to take her into his arms. “You’re all right? He didn’t hurt you?”
“The only thing that might have hurt me is this ruddy great painting.” She craned her neck to look up. “Oh dear. It looks like you’ll have to replaster your wall. And the painting’s done for, I’m afraid. The canvas tore clear across.”
“The devil take the painting. It was my great-uncle George and he was a crashing bore. The only interesting thing he ever did was fall on you.”
She grabbed his lapels, a sudden urgency compelling her to speak, though Claire was standing just on his other side. “Ian. Yes.”
Despite the fact that his gallery was in ruins and an assassin lay not ten feet away, he understood at once. Or perhaps he understood not the words so much as the emotion gleaming in the tears in her eyes. His face softened in a smile and he whispered in her ear, “I understand, my dearest, bravest love. You have made me eternally happy. And great-uncle George notwithstanding, I want no other partner by my side.”
“Tigg?”
At Claire’s soft question, silence fell upon the gallery, broken only by gasping attempts to catch their breath. Alice pulled herself out of her own chiefest concern with an effort, and focused on the young man approaching slowly along the gallery.
Tigg knelt beside his father, who had been trussed hand and foot by Ian and Andrew. “So,” he said quietly.
“We meet again,” Terwilliger agreed, his face pinched with pain from his burned leg. “Can’t say I’m sorry.”
Tigg gazed at him. “I wish it hadn’t been during your attempts to kill my friends.”
“If your friends hadn’t offended the Doge, they’d never have met me. But that’s all clouds under the keel. You’re a fine young man, Tommy. I know I haven’t a right to be, but I am proud of you.”
“No. You don’t. It’s my friends here who have that right—Lady Claire. Captain Hollys. Alice. Andrew. It’s them you should thank for helping me along.” Tigg paused, and leaned down. “Dad?”
Alice leaned in to see better over Ian’s shoulder. The man’s face was working, as though he was in greater pain than could be accounted for by the burns, and a bubble of liquid frothed between his teeth. “Nice … to hear that word on your lips, son. I won’t go to prison. Won’t even go to trial.”
“You don’t have much choice,” Tigg pointed out. “We’ll be sending a tube to the Admiralty in a minute, to report the capture of a foreign assassin and a deserter.”
“A man always has a choice,” Terwilliger choked. “Always. Mine were bad. I have regrets. But I don’t regret Nancy … and I don’t regret … you …”
His voice faded into silence and his body went limp.
Tigg whipped off the belt and grabbed his wrist, and in doing so, revealed a ring on the man’s hand. A ring with a hinged top that lay open, revealing a tiny empty chamber.
“Dad!” But his fingers on Terwilliger’s wrist revealed the truth—as did the froth issuing from the man’s lips. Tigg raised his head, his gaze meeting Ian’s. “Poison, sir. Must’ve taken it before you reached him.”
“Oh, Tigg,” Claire breathed, and moved to touch his shoulder. “I’m so sorry.”
Slowly, he stood, gazing down at the body of the man who might have fathered him, but who had never been a father to him. Almost blindly, his hand covered hers on his shoulder. “Don’t be sorry, Lady,” he whispered. “I never knew him long enough to grieve him.”
“But you can grieve the loss of what might have been,” she said softly. “You can grieve the man who loved your mother, and who made her smile so beautifully in that daguerrotype.”
Tears swelled in Alice’s throat, and instinctively she slipped her arms around Ian’s waist, under his coat. He pulled her closer, his arms about her shoulders.
And when Tigg, all six feet of him, turned to Claire and buried his face in the crook of her neck to weep, his shoulders shaking as she hugged him tightly, no one begrudged him his tribute to what might have been.
25
Three rosebushes had managed to bloom in the conservatory at Gwynn Place, so Maggie had gathered several bloo
ms and buds into a nosegay with some glossy camellia leaves, some sea-grass, and one or two golden sickle feathers from the majestic Buff Orpington rooster who was the pride of the small breeding program with which she and her grandfather were experimenting. Titan had obligingly moulted in time for Claire’s wedding, which all parties concerned felt was most considerate of him.
Now Claire stood in the porch of the tiny chapel whose windows overlooked the sea. It was indeed a white Christmas, she thought with satisfaction—no, more than that. It was a sparkling, glorious, silver-and-gold Christmas. The sky was a brilliant blue and the light peculiar to Cornwall glimmered on glass and snowdrifts alike. She had not, after all, been able to convince the parish priest at the Baie des Sirenes that she ought to be married there, so she had taken her mother by the horns, as it were, and wrestled the Christmas Eve wedding she really wanted from her, practically by main force.
“Are you scared, Clary?” piped six-year-old Nicholas, Viscount St. Ives, resplendent in his very first morning coat and topper, at her side. “Your flowers are shaking.”
“A little,” she confessed in a whisper meant for his ears alone. “It’s rather momentous, getting married. One doesn’t do it every day.”
“Lady, after all you’ve faced?” Snouts, resplendent in the most astonishing embroidered waistcoat on her other side, grinned. “This will be a piece of cake.”
“There is cake?” Nicholas looked deeply interested in this new information.
“There is indeed, darling. Weddings are known for cake, you know, and you shall have the first piece once we have our breakfast. But now here is the curate to tell us that they are ready for us.”
The tiny organ began the wedding march and Maggie and Lizzie, holding matching prayer books bound in trailing ribbon and ivy, stepped into the aisle. The chapel only held twenty, so Claire was able to see nearly everyone through the door. Her family. Andrew’s widowed mother, already dabbing at her eyes. All the inhabitants of Carrick House under Lewis’s watchful eye. Lord and Lady Selwyn, holding hands and looking so adorably happy that Claire’s heart rejoiced. Captain Hollys and Alice, sitting in the second row, an heirloom sapphire on the fourth finger of her left hand. Peony Churchill, lovely in bronze silk, batting her eyes at Maggie’s cousin Michael Polgarth, though she had no business to do so. Polgarth the poultryman and his daughters and grandchildren. Her solicitor Mr. Arundel and his wife—and next to them—
She drew in a breath.
Nicholas looked up, and Snouts leaned in. “What is it, Lady?”
“The Count and the Baroness,” she breathed. “I did not think they would come.”
“I did,” Snouts said, nodding. “They landed an hour ago, while you were dressing. You know the man does not hold a grudge, nor can he refuse you anything.”
Claire could think of a number of things he had refused her, but today was not a day to dwell on them. Today was a day for happiness and celebration, and if she could number Count von Zeppelin among her friends again, then the day was truly complete.
“Our turn,” said Nicholas when Lizzie and Maggie passed the halfway point down the aisle, and reached up to take her hand. She slipped her right hand into the crook of Snouts’s arm and together, the three of them stepped forward.
Her dress rustled in the most delightful way as she paced slowly up the aisle. The only person missing from the happy scene was Gloria, who had shaken her head and hugged her at the suggestion that she stay another month and join in the celebrations.
“I would love nothing better,” she told Claire regretfully at the airfield at Hampstead Heath, where she was to board Persephone and connect with a Meriwether-Astor airship in Paris. “But every day I get another message from the bankers and the board members demanding my presence in Philadelphia, so for my own sanity I must go. But you can expect a wedding present in a week or two.”
Claire had kissed her and bidden her a safe journey, but she did not say good-bye. Between the three of them—Alice, Claire, and Gloria—there existed a bond so fine yet so strong that even oceans could not separate them. Sure enough, two weeks later, when Claire had forgotten all about it, came a box from the Atelier Worth in Paris containing the most beautiful wedding gown that she—or anyone in Cornwall—had ever seen.
When she had put it on this morning, she thought her mother would faint. “Oh, why would you not let me invite all of the County families with whom we dine?” she had wailed. “Every woman in Cornwall must see this dress. It must have cost a thousand pounds, Claire.”
Truly, it was lovely, with pleating and sashing and fans of beaded embroidery in which the discerning eye might detect either the curling of waves … or the graceful tails of chickens. It also possessed a waist so small that Claire had a feeling she would be giving her piece of cake to Nicholas, to say nothing of the array of sweets and delicacies that had been prepared.
But best of all was Andrew’s face as she approached the altar and he saw her in the gown for the first time. Even through the mist of her veil she could see the moisture glistening on his cheeks—tears of sheer joy.
Which made her own eyes brim over, too.
Snouts kissed her cheek, and Nicholas, having been briefed on his duty, solemnly conveyed his sister’s hand into that of Andrew.
“Dearly beloved,” the rector began, “we are gathered here today in the presence of God and this company to unite this man and this woman in holy matrimony.”
As Claire and Andrew said their vows, knelt for the blessing, and Andrew lifted her veil to kiss her for the first time as her husband, Claire felt as though she were in a dream. But then, after they had signed the parish register, the rector said, “May I be the first to congratulate you, Doctor Malvern, and offer my very best wishes for your happiness, Mrs. Malvern.”
A wave of happiness broke over her. It was not a dream. She was really Andrew’s wife, and he her husband. Together, they would face the joys and triumphs and sorrows and dangers of life, with the confidence that each held the other’s heart in safekeeping.
She took his arm and laughed with sheer joy. In the first pew, Mama looked scandalized. But Andrew put his hand over hers and they walked down the aisle together, her thrown-back veil trailing like a banner of light. Jake escorted Maggie, and Tigg, of course, took Lizzie, holding Claire’s bouquet. Little Viscount St. Ives offered his hand to his mother, and Snouts took Mrs. Malvern. The guests began to cheer from the sheer exuberance of the recessional, and as the curate flung open the doors and the light poured in, Claire saw that Holly and Ivy were there, too, busily snapping up the seeds thrown into the air by the crowd of staff from the manor house. She was quite sure that somewhere in heaven—probably sitting on God’s knee—Rosie the chicken knew that all was finally as it should be, and was content.
The light burst over them and Andrew flung propriety utterly to the winds. “I love you,” he said, and kissed her again, right there in front of God and everyone.
“I love you,” she whispered, “and always will, no matter what our lives hold in store.”
Hand in hand, they ran down the steps and into the bright silver and gold of the first day of their lives together, the sound of the cheering and laughter of their friends and family rising like music into the sky.
26
Epilogue
January 3, 1895
Philadelphia, the Fifteen Colonies
Claire, my dear heart,
Thank you so much for the account of your wedding, for the piece of wedding cake (which I ate instead of putting under my pillow to dream of the man I will marry, which was much more satisfying, believe me), and for the lovely little watercolor painting from Maggie of the chapel on the cliffs, so that I might imagine it all. I am very happy that the dress arrived in time. I am sure you looked a perfect princess in it—and being that heavy cream color, you know, it can easily be worn on formal occasions afterward.
I can just imagine Julia’s and Catherine’s faces should they see you in it at the recepti
on to which you’ve invited the Prince Consort. That alone would be worth the price of a transatlantic fare.
You’ll never guess whom I heard from in a letter this week—Captain Barnaby Hayes. If you can believe it, he wishes to press his suit! Well, I am sure you know the tenor of the reply I returned, for who could trust a man who had deceived one and treated one so abominably? It is a shame, really. He is so handsome and so kind. But such a man may smile and smile and be a villain, so I will put him out of my mind.
My mind is quite occupied, thank you, with business matters. It is going to take me some time to untangle the labyrinth of my father’s business dealings. The first thing on the agenda was to recall the fleet of undersea dirigibles from the Adriatic. Now that Captain Hayes has no doubt turned Neptune’s Fancy over to Her Majesty, I suspect they will use it as a prototype and this new method of transportation will become popular in the seas about England, giving me some competition. I am determined that the Meriwether-Astor name shall henceforth be known for its honesty and integrity, which means the dirigibles will be plying the waters off the Fifteen Colonies like good little vessels, with no more dealing in convicts and contraband.
This matter of the Californias has me a little worried, however. I am investigating just how far my father’s plans had gone in that regard, with a view to nipping them in the bud. Goodness knows how long that will take, or how complicated it will be, but rest assured that I will prevail in the end over board members and family connections alike. In moments when I doubt myself, I think of you and Alice, and my courage returns to me threefold.
I am sorry that the Admiralty continues to be obstinate about Alice captaining Swan. Actually, I am not sorry at all. For my devious plan is to encourage her to register the vessel here so that she may join my fleet. I will not only have her fly as captain, I will pay her handsomely to run cargo between here and England, once I am successful in having the embargo against us lifted. If Ian is to settle down to the life of the landed gentleman, it will be up to the women of his acquaintance to keep our various ships in the air, don’t you agree?
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