The Wicked Deeds of Daniel Mackenzie hp-6

by Jennifer Ashley

  “Come with me, lass, and see.”

  Again the hesitation, the little frown, the quick look upward, to where her rooms lay. “My mother . . .”

  “She can do without you one day, can’t she? With all these ladies here to look after her?”

  “Well . . .”

  Daniel tightened his grip. She needed this, and he needed it. A day spent in Violet’s company, with the opportunity to peel away her layers and find out all about her, was not to be lost.

  “I’m not letting you say no,” Daniel said. He gave her what he hoped was his most promising smile. “Come on with me, and I’ll give you a day out you’ll never forget.”

  Madness, absolute madness. Violet’s thoughts flipped one over the other as she sent word up to Mary that she was going out, possibly all morning and on into the afternoon.

  The next thing Violet knew, Daniel was leading her out of the house, past the interested ladies who’d stuck their heads out of the next room to watch them go. He took her out into the street and pushed her up into his tall, hired carriage.

  The coach took them to the nearest train station, and not many minutes later, they were boarding a train, for which Daniel had already bought two tickets. Two, the presumptuous man.

  The train glided out of the city, steam pumping, bells clanging. Violet and her mother and Mary had arrived in Marseille at night, traveling through most of the southern part of France in the dark. Violet had seen nothing of the countryside. Now she trained her gaze out the window to high hills, swaths of empty fields, and cliffs tumbling to the sea, which was gray under scattered clouds. The winter wind was brisk, but the private train compartment was toasty warm, with coal boxes for their feet and oil lamps to chase away any darkness.

  Of course it was a private compartment. Daniel, lounging back on the seat opposite her, seemed surprised when Violet mentioned it. When he traveled in England and Scotland, Daniel said, he often used his ducal uncle’s entire private car attached to the back of whatever train he wanted to take.

  He said it casually, not boasting. In the next breath Daniel explained that when he didn’t take his uncle’s private coach, he rode rough by himself or with his friends in second class. But he’d thought Violet would appreciate the soft seats of first class today.

  The statement brought home how different Daniel’s existence was from hers. Violet regarded riding second class as a luxury up from third, while Daniel obviously thought nothing of making a train wait while a separate car was attached for himself and his family. Violet and her mother had often hunkered in crowded stations waiting for privileges to be given to wealthy men like Daniel.

  Daniel leaned back into the corner of his seat and swung his long legs up on the cushions, resting his hands behind his head as the train swayed on. He said, with a wink, that he didn’t sit next to her, because it was bad etiquette, as they weren’t related. Besides, she needed somewhere to put her machine.

  The box rested next to Violet, she not wanting to put it on the rack above. The mechanisms could be delicate.

  The journey to the small town near the coast took about an hour. They emerged from the train to the sound of seagulls and the smell of fish and brisk sea air. The wind was cold but not nearly as dank and bone-chilling as in London.

  Daniel, speaking French with a strange mixture of Parisian slang and coastal dialect, hired a cart. He explained to its owner that he wanted to drive the cart himself, and reinforced his request with a large handful of francs.

  The man laughed with Daniel, slapped the horse on the rump, and said in a dialect so thick Violet barely understood him, “Tell Dupuis, that old bastard, that I said he owes me money.”

  Daniel grinned, helped Violet onto the front seat with him, and touched the reins to the horse.

  “Sorry it’s not a better conveyance,” Daniel said as the cart jerked from the middle of the village up a steep hill. There was no other seat but the driver’s, and Violet was squeezed tightly against Daniel’s side. “The ducal coaches all seemed to be out.”

  “It’s perfectly adequate.” Violet pulled her coat closer about her, but it was Daniel who kept her warm.

  “You’re a sweetheart, you are. The females of my acquaintance, with the exception of my resilient aunts, would be shrieking in dismay. Pierces your eardrums, those shrieks. My aunt Eleanor, on the other hand, would tell them to buck up and enjoy the fact that they didn’t have to walk.”

  “Isn’t your aunt Eleanor a duchess?”

  “Aye, she is now. And she was an earl’s daughter, but she grew up without a penny, and learned how to fend for herself. You’d like her. You’d like my stepmum too. She’s as resilient as they come.”

  “Your stepmother was a lady-in-waiting to the queen of England,” Violet said in a rather bewildered voice.

  “What do ye think made her resilient? The queen, she doesn’t believe in heat in her drafty Scottish castle, and she’s a hearty woman. Very hearty. Her frail look and any worry about her health is a nice façade. She can ride around the countryside in her little cart all day long and then stay up all night demanding to be read to. Marrying Dad was a relief to poor Ainsley. Putting up with him is easy in comparison.”

  Violet had never met anyone who talked about a queen behaving like a real person. A few of her mother’s clients had believed they were queens, or had been queens centuries ago, or claimed they knew the deceased Prince Albert. None of them had ever mentioned driving around in pony carts or skimping on coal in the palace.

  Daniel, son of a lofty lord and nephew to a duke, drove the rattling cart and old horse with competence. “Not much longer,” he said after a time. He clucked to the horse. “Come on, old fellow, you can make it. Then a nice long rest for the afternoon, eh? Better than dragging a cart up and down a cobbled street all day.” The horse flicked his ears back to Daniel, seeming to like his voice.

  Their destiny turned out to be an old farm in the hills away from the sea. This one looked ancient. Three wings of a two-story house surrounded a pitted courtyard, the house’s doors and windows facing the courtyard rather than outward to the land. Plaster crumbled around the walls’ wooden half-timbering, revealing worn bricks beneath. A barn and storage rooms took up the entire lower floor; the living quarters for the farmer and his family looked to be on the upper floors.

  The farm, however, was long gone. The fields around them were overgrown, though farther away, on the next farm, neat plowed rows, bare with winter, lay ready for spring planting. The courtyard was littered with coils of metal and pieces of wood, and the only animal in the barn was one large draft horse.

  Two men were carrying what looked like a giant basket out of the courtyard as Daniel pulled up. One of the men broke away from the basket and came to take the horse’s reins as Daniel jumped down. The man was large, with a hard face and a nose that had been broken more than once.

  Daniel reached back and handed Violet out of the cart. “Lass, ye remember Simon? Who followed Mortimer to your house with every intention of beating five thousand guineas out of him? Or maybe you never saw Simon that night. He works for me now. Carry on, Simon. I’ll take care of the cart.”

  While Violet stood aside and Simon returned to help the other man carry the basket, Daniel deftly unhitched the cart. He left it braked on one side of the courtyard, and led the horse past Violet to the stall next to the draft horse. He talked to the cart horse all the way, little endearments in his broad Scots as he gave the old animal a brief brushing down and made sure it had hay and water.

  What kind of a man, with all the trappings of wealth, who could live the softest possible life, took the time to comfort a working cart horse?

  Daniel seemed to think nothing of it. He emerged from the stall, took Violet’s box from the cart as he passed it, then led her out to follow Simon.

  At the top of a hill was a flat, fallow field, which had been hidden from view by the wide house. In the middle of this field bobbed a giant bubble of red and yellow, half on its s
ide, a buoy in a sea of dark earth. The bubble was being held down by four men, straining against ropes. Mr. Simon and the other man carried the basket toward it.

  Violet stopped in her tracks. “Mr. Mackenzie, what on earth . . . ?”

  “Monsieur Dupuis is lending us his balloon,” Daniel said. “For my experiments with your wind machine.”

  Violet stared at the balloon, which was coming to life, men holding the ropes as though they fought to contain a wild stallion. “You’re going up in that? Now? With my machine?”

  “Aye. Ye see, it’s my theory that hot air is a much safer and more useful method of keeping a balloon afloat than hydrogen gas. At the present time, though, if you want to use hot air, you fill up your balloon on the ground, and that’s all you have. You either have to tether the balloon for your ascent, or go wherever the wind blows you. But, I’m thinking that if I have an efficient heat source I can take on board, I can manipulate the balloon, not just float where it wants me to go. Understand?”

  Violet blinked. “Not really.”

  “If I can fix a good engine above the basket after the balloon is inflated, I can replace the hot air while I’m flying, and give the balloon a boost when I need it. I came up with the engine design, but never had a good way to shoot the heated air into the envelope while aloft—I don’t want it to burn up the blasted silk when I’m two hundred feet off the ground. When I saw your machine, with its efficiency of pumping out a great blast of air, I thought, bloody marvelous.”

  Violet strove to follow his speech without looking too bewildered. “And you brought your engine with you?”

  “No, but Dupuis let me tinker with one of his to make a similar one, and now I’m going to enhance it with your machine. My idea is to make hot air balloons dirigible—steerable—but smaller and lighter than the airships people are working on now. I’m thinking of making single-man crafts anyone can afford. You want to go across the downs and visit your friend in the next town? Hop aboard your own little dirigible and float there in comfort.”

  “In good weather,” Violet said, looking up at the relatively clear sky.

  Daniel shrugged. “Well, if it’s pouring down rain, you want to stay home by the fire anyway.”

  Violet, who rarely had the luxury of staying home by the fire, gave him a skeptical look. “Won’t the machinery be too heavy for the balloon?”

  “That’s what I mean to find out. Don’t worry—I’ve done a few test runs at my dad’s in Berkshire, and I’ve figured the ratio of weight to balloon size. That’s why I came to Dupuis. He’s a dedicated balloonist, experiments with several different kinds of them. He’s interested to see whether I can take a machine-driven balloon aloft.”

  Violet followed as Daniel walked eagerly toward the waiting balloon, which was generally upright now. She watched his kilt move with his long stride, his broad back strong as he went swiftly up the hill.

  He baffled her. Daniel Mackenzie, from one of the wealthiest families in Britain, rubbed down old horses, tinkered with machines, and said offhand that he traveled around Europe in second-class train compartments with the hoi polloi. He was equally comfortable speaking jumbled French dialects to French villagers or discussing the Queen of England’s private household. Every time Violet thought she had the measure of him, Daniel turned into something else.

  They reached the basket. It was a large one, with room for several people. Mr. Simon and the man who must be Monsieur Dupuis had attached a net of ropes from the balloon to the now tethered basket. As the balloon rose from its reclining position, the bulbous top full now, the basket strained to rise with it. The tied lines kept it down. A platform had been fastened above the basket, suspended up inside the balloon’s envelope, and a large metal box with coils rising from it rested on the platform.

  “Nice day for it,” Dupuis said to Daniel in French. “Is this it?”

  Daniel climbed into the basket and lifted Violet’s wind machine out of its box. “We’ll give this a try.” He looked down at Violet. “Well, come on up, lass. I’ll need your help. And a spanner.”

  Daniel was not the sort of man to shut a woman out of male activity, it seemed, especially when things turned interesting. Simon boosted her into the basket, and not long after, Violet was working with Daniel, her gloves off, helping him integrate her wind machine with his engine.

  “It’s useless without a generator,” Violet pointed out as Daniel started connecting wires and tubes from her wind machine to his engine on the platform. “It won’t run.”

  “But I have fuel, which will both keep the burner alight and turn the wind machine’s fan—for as long as the fuel lasts, of course.”

  Daniel finished whatever he was doing, then fitted a crankshaft into a slot on the side of the engine. He advised Violet to step to the other side of the basket, then he gave the crankshaft a sharp heave.

  The engine coughed once and died into silence. Daniel cranked again, and again, grunting with the effort. He stopped to drop his coat to the bottom of the basket, rolling up his shirtsleeves, then went back to the machine, his shirt stretching over muscled shoulders as he worked. Violet saw that a black design of an oriental-looking dragon had been inked over his right forearm at some time in his life. Her gaze went to the tattoo and stayed there.

  Daniel kept cranking. Finally, sparks went off, a grinding like gears sounded, and the basket vibrated.

  “Cast it off!” Daniel shouted to the men below.

  Violet grabbed the basket’s lip. “I believe it’s time for me to disembark.”

  Daniel laughed. “Too late.”

  Violet’s eyes rounded. She looked down at Simon and the men, who’d started releasing the ropes tethering the basket. “I’m not going up in this thing! Let me off.”

  The basket shuddered again and rose straight into the air. “No choice now,” Daniel said, his grin in place. “You’re coming with me.”

  Violet protested, but the men dropped the last of the lines, and the balloon climbed into the sky, taking Violet right along with it.

  Chapter 10

  Violet grabbed the nearest rope, her heart in her throat as Daniel gave the engine one last crank.

  “Don’t worry,” he said over the motor’s splutter. “I’ve done this before.”

  The balloon gave a hard jerk and rose higher. Violet yelped and dared to look down. Simon, Dupuis, the rest of the men, the house, and the spread of the old farm had already receded. Violet calculated they must be about fifty feet from the ground when a gust of wind caught them and shoved them rapidly east.

  Daniel cupped his hands around his mouth and called behind them. “Looks like we’re heading to the valley. Meet us!”

  Violet clamped her hands around the ropes, her hat tugging against its pins, her coat and skirts billowing. She caught her breath, then amazement struck her.

  “We’re flying!” she shouted.

  “I hope so, love. Better than the opposite.”

  The land grew smaller, the heavens, wider. The silence of it, except for the gurgle of Daniel’s engine, opened up and swallowed them.

  Violet had lived in cities so long she’d grown used to constant noise—the rumble of carriages and wagons, the clopping of horses, shouts of men, high-pitched yells of boys, vendors calling on every market street, steam engines and train whistles in the railroad yards.

  The balloon lifted Violet above it all. She saw a train, miles away, on the line that had brought her and Daniel to the village, chugging noiselessly into the station. From up here, it made no noise at all.

  Daniel was still working. Gazing up inside the balloon, he gave the engine a few twists with a spanner and pulled down on a cord. The balloon kept climbing, but their sideways thrust became smoother.

  That is, until another gust nearly tipped the basket on its side. Violet gave a little scream and shifted her grip from ropes to the basket itself.

  “Come over here with me,” Daniel called. “We need to balance against the drift.”

&nbs
p; Violet stared at him in fear. “You are completely mad, do you know that?”

  “Get over here, lass. Or we’ll tip.”

  Violet made her fingers loosen from the basket’s side, and she half climbed, half scrambled to where Daniel stood. With her weight and his on one side, the basket righted itself and glided smoothly again, now heading a bit north as well as east.

  Daniel’s arm came around her waist. “We have sandbags to counterweight as well,” he said. “But this is much more enjoyable.”

  Violet sucked in a breath, torn between exhilaration and terror. “You are the most bloody incorrigible madman I’ve ever had the misfortune to meet!”

  “I have no doubt.” Daniel held her close against him, his grin infectious. “Do ye know, when you’re this angry, you speak in your own accent. London, is it? A bit south?”

  “Now you are a dialectician as well as a horseman, inventor, and balloonist?”

  “No, I’m friends with a bloke from Southwark. You’re not French at all. You’re one of the bloody English, aren’t you?”

  “My father’s family is French,” Violet said. “Came to England from a village outside Paris. My father was . . .” She trailed off, not sure what to say. She had no idea what her father had been, and only a vague idea who he’d been.

  “I like that you have difficulty lying to me,” Daniel said, his hand warm on her back. “Ye do it so easily to others.”

  “I don’t lie.”

  “Not outright, but you deceive. Amounts to the same thing in the end. Me, now, I’m never anything but honest.”

  “You are, are you?”

  “Look around.” Daniel gestured with a broad hand. “Did I not promise you a day out to remember?”

  Violet looked, and the last of her fear loosened and flew away. They were higher now, higher than the tallest building she’d ever seen, higher than any hill she’d climbed. The French countryside spread out before them, sharp hills studded with dark evergreens marching northward, snow on the highest peaks.