No, they were sinking, far too quickly. She glanced up to see the balloon dimpling from air loss.
“Wait a moment.” She kept her voice calm. “I have to fill up with more air.”
She scrambled to her feet and applied the bellows to the brazier. Flames licked at the coals, raising the temperature. The vitriol bubbled, sending its light gas hissing up the tube to the balloon.
But the creases in the balloon did not diminish fast enough. The basket continued to sink toward the ground. Air continued to hiss . . . hiss . . .
Hiss too loudly.
Cassandra tilted her head back and squinted at the balloon. She saw nothing wrong.
“Geoffrey,” she asked through stiff lips, “will you look at the balloon and tell me if you see anything odd?”
He stood close behind her, one hand warm and strong on her shoulder. “What am I looking for?”
“A tear,” she admitted, though her throat was almost too dry for speech. “I believe we have a tear and the balloon is losing more air than it is getting.”
28
Whittaker glanced from Cassandra’s stricken countenance to the ground to the balloon that did look less turgid than earlier. The earth was not precisely rushing toward them, but it appeared far closer than it had the last time he had looked, when it had barely been visible. Anything greater than ten feet off the ground was too high for him.
Another wave of vertigo washed over him, and he closed his eyes. “Can it be repaired?”
“It will have to be.” Cassandra still spoke in that voice of icy calm. “We are going to crash onto the ground if we lose too much air too quickly.”
“What can I do?”
“Toss out ballast to make us lighter. One or two bags of sand, I think, for now.” She suddenly sounded far too cheerful. “And I will climb up and wrap my shawl around the tear in the tubing.”
“The tear?” Whittaker looked her in the eye.
She offered him a half-smile. “You had not reached the part about someone destroying the balloon, had you? Was it because I warned you about the assassination attempt?”
“That was not the excuse, but yes, I think as much. I will finish if—when we get out of this alive.” He stood and gazed up at the balloon, a colorful sphere above them. “But how will you reach the tubing?”
“I thought to stand on the edge of the basket.”
“You will do no such thing. If you slip—no, I will never let—” He stopped, and despite the sinking sensation in his middle and feeling that his head was lighter than his body, he laughed. “Perhaps I can reach it. I am taller than you by at least a head.”
“But I know what I am doing.” She reached for one of the ropes tethering the balloon to the car in which they stood. “If you hold on to me . . .”
“You will still be too short to reach it.”
She cast a frown from him to the balloon above. “We need a ladder. Yes, that will do.” She grew animated, reaching past him and drawing a knife from the basket of provisions in the rear of the car. “If I cut the mooring lines from the sides, we can tie them around the tether ropes and make a ladder like rigging on a ship. I should have thought of this sooner. It should be a regular part of the balloon’s configuration for such incidents. This surely cannot be the first time a balloon has needed repairs in flight.”
“But you cannot climb it.”
Foolish thing to say. The fastest way to get Cassandra to do something was to tell her she could not. Yet she would respond to logic.
“Cassandra, your skirts. The fire. Unless we douse the coals.”
She shifted her gaze from him to the fire to her plain but long gown, and paled. “If we douse the fire, we have no means of filling the balloon with hydrogen again.”
“But can we not let out the air slowly for landing?” Even as he asked the question, Whittaker looked down and noticed what lay beneath.
At their current level of elevation, they had caught a strong breeze sweeping them out over the sea. Waves swelled and sparkled, creamy white at their tops. Not a calm sea. A sea rough enough to swamp the little balloon basket in minutes.
“How—” He swallowed. “How did that happen so fast?”
“Different wind currents and velocities at different heights.” Cassandra leaned over the side of the car and came up with a length of rope. “If you take that end, I will get this one.” She handed him the length of light hemp.
He took it and began to secure it to the mooring line.
“There,” she said, “it is high enough not to catch my skirt ablaze.”
If she did not slip. Too few inches lay between her standing on that makeshift ladder rung and the brazier.
“You need another step too,” he pointed out. “It will still be too low for you.”
“We have four mooring lines.”
“Yes, but—” His stomach rolled at the thought of what he was about to say, let alone the offer or the action. He swallowed against the sourness of apprehension in his throat. “I will do it.”
“You?” Her eyes widened. “You—you have no idea what to do.”
“I have been repairing looms for two years. My brain wraps itself well around mechanical devices. This cannot be all that different, can it?”
“No, but you—that is, it—”
He smiled and touched his fingertip to her lips. “You are trying to spare my pride.”
“Or your life.”
“I would rather spare yours.”
“But if you fall—” She yanked off her spectacles and scrubbed at her eyes. “I love you.”
“I know.” He kissed her lightly, quickly. “And you should know that I love you too.”
She shoved her spectacles back on and handed him her shawl in response. “Have a care.”
“I will.”
If nothing else, he could not slip and fall to his death, simply to have time to persuade her that he still loved her, regardless of her scars, regardless of her lack of dowry now, regardless of any harsh words between them.
Mouth dry, heart racing, he grasped one of the mooring lines and hoisted himself onto the line they had stretched across the basket. The line dipped. The basket tilted.
“Brace a foot on either side,” Cassandra commanded. “Now.”
For a heartbeat, he could not move. The basket tilted more.
“Geoffrey.” She laid her hand on his back.
He dared not glance back and down but knew her conformation well enough to guess that she must be standing far too close to the brazier than was safe in order to reach him. The knowledge yanked him from his paralysis and he shifted his feet.
“Step back, Cassandra,” he said as calmly as he could manage. “I truly am all right now.”
Her hand left him. Cold touched him where it had been. Heat flooded the rest of him, heat from the fire below and the tubing in front of him. Hot air wafted into his face. Dizziness and sickness washed through him like a draft of poison. He turned his face for cooler, fresher air, and all he saw was sea and sky—blue, green, gray, and foaming streaks of white.
Swallowing hard, he looped one arm around the mooring rope for balance and began to twist the silk shawl around and around the slit in the tubing.
“Knot it tightly,” Cassandra directed him from the basket. “It will impede airflow into the balloon but will also keep it from escaping.”
The sound of her low, smooth voice soothed him, calmed him, and he completed his task. No more hot air wafted into his face. Only the cool, sweet draft from the sea.
“Come down slowly,” she continued. “Hold on to the mooring lines and bring this foot first.” She curved her hand around his booted ankle. “Step back toward me.”
Slowly, hesitating every time the basket tilted, he lowered himself to the relative solidity of the floor. His knees demanded that he keep lowering himself until he sat, but then Cassandra wrapped her arms around him and rested her head against his back. Her trembling shuddered through him, shaking off his fear and filling him wit
h peace.
“We are stronger together,” he said.
She released him. “We will drown together if I do not get gas back into that balloon.”
She now sounded as calm as he felt. More so. She sounded brisk and efficient. Her action proved the truth of her tone. She slipped past him and began to feed the fire. Within moments, the balloon began to lose its crumpled appearance. The sea retreated, flattened with distance. The sky grew broader, more vast.
“Are we not high enough?” Whittaker asked.
“I hope we can catch a current leading back toward land. We are not all that far out.”
Whittaker dared to look. She was right. The line of the shore seemed to grow closer at an amazing speed. “Will we set down once we are over land?”
“Yes, if the terrain is flat and we need not fear landing on top of a village.” She turned toward him. “I have the sails on the sides, but they have proven to be inadequate for direction so far. I was going to experiment today, but this happened.” She gestured to the makeshift patch on the tubing. “It will not hold for long, so I will set you down on terra firma as soon as possible.”
He smiled down at her. “Will you still love me on terra firma?”
“I only said that to encourage you.” She turned her face away. “I may have realized that I brought my own disasters upon myself, and it does not change the fact that they happened.”
“Or my mother’s illicit behavior.”
“Do you think I care about that?”
“Do you think I care about your scars?”
“I know your mother and her goodness, her faith. You have not seen my scars.”
Nor could he outside the bounds of matrimony.
“And someone still wants me dead and is willing to hurt you in the bargain.” He looked at the approaching land, at Cassandra, at the sea. He listened to the quiet, the peace of floating through the firmament, and released his grip on the side of the basket so he could cup her face in his hands. “If nothing has changed between us once we reach the ground, I think I want to stay up here all day.”
“Geoff—Whittaker, we—”
He kissed her. “I prefer Geoffrey. Not the usual address for an earl but what you called me when we were friends.”
“We cannot be friends. You must marry—”
He kissed her again, longer, more insistently. She clung to him for a moment, then drew away. “Who wants to kill you, my lord?”
The question, coupled with the most formal of addresses, knocked him back to earth despite being a mile above it. He grasped the sides of the balloon’s car and stared at the colorful ball of silk overhead, shining in the morning sunlight like a daytime moon. “I have spent the last six weeks trying to persuade the Luddites that breaking up looms is hurting them more than the owners. But I have no solutions as to how to fix the problem of low wages, nor any way to stop the mechanization that is putting many of them out of work, except perhaps if they emigrate to America, though they cannot do that now with this war on.
“So they continue to riot and destroy, and my job is to inform one man about the Luddites’ plans for attack on mills and other loom locations. He is also the one man who knew about your balloon flight thwarting an attempt on my life the other morning. When one of the rebels said he was going to stop the balloon from going up this morning so no one in it could identify any of the rioters if it sailed over the next target, I knew who wants me dead.”
“Major Crawford.” Cassandra said the name with the same surety Whittaker felt about the answer himself.
He nodded. “I knew it would not be you and doubted Sorrells capable of anything that would harm you.”
“No, he is too enamored with my aeronautic skills. But the major could not have known I was going up, and certainly not you.”
“Of course he knew you were going up. You were quite openly enthusiastic yesterday afternoon.”
“Oh.” She pressed her hand to her lips. “Then why did that man give himself away? But of course. We were supposed to be dead. Or I was.”
“And me too, but the man who was supposed to kill me, Jimmy, was in truth working for your father to watch out for me.”
Cassandra started. “My father?”
“He wanted my help with the rebels, but not me dead.”
“And this Jimmy?” Cassandra glanced up, then down.
Whittaker stared straight ahead. “I am hopeful your father will pay him, and he—Jimmy—will get his family away from here. I only told the soldiers about Rob and Hugh. And Crawford. But the soldiers were disinclined to believe that of a fellow officer.”
“I am afraid,” Cassandra said slowly, “they may have to.” She turned toward the brazier, lifted a jug of water, and doused the coals.
Steam billowed around them. Air began to hiss from the balloon. The car sank through the air with the glide of a bird riding the currents, currents that began pushing them toward the sea the lower they dropped.
“Open the sail on the left,” she directed, her voice too tight. Too even. “It will slow our outward progress, if nothing else.”
Whittaker did as she bade, working the parasol-type contraption on the seaward side.
It did indeed slow their seaward progress. For a moment, they hovered, suspended in space, then the makeshift repair on the tubing came loose. Her shawl fluttered to the earth, and they began to descend with too much speed.
“Open the other sail,” Cassandra barked. “Now.”
Whittaker did so. With a jolt, their downward progress slowed. The ground drifted toward them, a brown and gold field like a carpet scattered with grayish-white ants running in circles, bumping into one another, scattering, then bunching up again. The ants became cat-sized, then dog-sized, and finally resolved into sheep. Their panicked baas rose in a discordant chorus.
“Hold on,” Cassandra directed. “We will bounce a bit.”
They bounced. The basket touched the dried grass, sprang at least twenty feet into the air again, dropped. Each time, more air hissed from the balloon until the trajectory of their upward flings grew shorter and shorter. Then the balloon collapsed.
“Hold on tightly,” Cassandra cried. “We are going to—”
The basket tipped over, tossing Cassandra and Whittaker onto the dirt, driving air from his lungs hard enough to stun him. Vaguely, he heard glass tinkle, knew to move because . . . because . . .
“The acid!” Whittaker scrambled to his feet.
Cassandra sprawled on the grass, wheezing and trying to push herself up with her hands. Whittaker caught her around the waist and hoisted her over his shoulder seconds before the vitriol from the broken beaker pooled and smoked where she had been lying.
“And you wonder why I think this is too dangerous.” He turned so she could see what had happened.
She pushed against him. “I would be all right if your friends had not wanted to stop anyone from observing their violence.”
“They are not my friends. I would not be involved if your father had not been complicit in forcing me into this to spare my mother’s reputation and family honor.”
“Your mother is the godliest woman I know. If people cannot believe in salvation from past sins after meeting her, even knowing the truth, then they are no one worth knowing.” She pushed against him. “Now let me down.”
He set her feet on the ground but kept his arms around her. Her glasses had fallen off somewhere, and her eyes were wide and dark, her lips parted and trembling.
“You just accused my father of being in collusion with a—a traitor.” Tears hovered on her lashes, then spilled down her cheeks. “And I fear my balloon is ruined. And—”
“Shh.” He brushed the tears off her cheeks with his fingertips. “I think your father has been duped by someone with an impeccable military record and good family. And as for your balloon being ruined—”
She sniffed. “You think it is just as well.”
“I want you safe and whole, is all.” Even before the words left
his lips, he knew they were the last thing he should say. “I mean, Cassandra—”
She pulled away from him and turned away. “I hear horses. My friends are likely coming.” She shot him a glare. “They accidentally saw my scars and did not mind in the least.”
“Cassandra, I do not care—”
The riders were upon them, three of them, but not Kent, Sorrells, and another person. Miss Honore, Miss Irving, and Major Crawford perched atop their mounts.
And the latter two held pistols.
29
“We saw the balloon coming down.” Honore spoke in a rush, her words tumbling over one another in her haste. “Miss Irving and Major Crawford suggested we ride this way and see if it was you. And see, it is.” She let out a high, hysterical laugh.
“Is something wrong, Honore?” Cassandra squinted at her sister, wishing her spectacles did not lie back in the wreckage of the balloon. “You know I can scarcely see half a dozen feet in front of my face without my spectacles. It is one reason why I am not very good at—”
Whittaker’s hand clamped hard on her wrist, halting her words, as he murmured, “Crawford and Miss Irving have pistols.” Aloud, he asked, “How may we assist you?” In contrast to Honore, his voice was calm, his face relaxed and void of emotion.
“Pistols?” Cassandra wanted to join her sister in hysterical giggles. “And you thought me being up in a balloon was dangerous.”
“We have come to take you home, of course,” Miss Irving said.
“Miss Honore wishes to go home now, and I do believe Lady Whittaker is expecting us,” the major added. “I left her bound and gagged in her bedchamber.”
“You would not dare.” Only an infinitesimal tightening of his hand on Cassandra’s wrist shouted of his reaction to the news of his mother. “I know we have less staff than is usual, and someone will find her.”
“She has given orders not to be disturbed,” Major Crawford said, “and all the bellpulls have been cut.” His voice hardened. “Again. Yours should have stayed that way, Miss Bainbridge. Who would think that a lordling and his groom could make repairs?”
Laurie Alice Eakes - [Daughters of Bainbridge House 02] Page 27