Fields of Air: A steampunk adventure novel (Magnificent Devices Book 10)

by Shelley Adina

  “Exactly,” Alice said with gloomy satisfaction. “You don’t know either. Well, that makes me feel a little better, at any rate.”

  “I do not find tents,” Gloria said at last. “My housekeeper does, or my butler. But what on earth do these things have to do with marrying Ian?”

  “Everything.” Alice made a gesture with her hands, as though to encompass the river from bank to bank. Or her future, from mooring ring to vanes. “Lady Hollys has to do any number of things that Alice Chalmers simply isn’t prepared for.”

  Gloria was trying hard to understand. “So you love Ian, but you do not believe you are prepared to be his wife, with all the responsibility that entails.”

  “Precisely. Got it in one.” What a relief to be able to stop explaining!

  Gloria frowned, as though marshalling her resources. “Then you are a bigger fool than I have ever met in the whole of my life.”

  Alice actually stepped away from her in astonishment, and Gloria grabbed her sleeve before her foot slipped down the snowy riverbank. “I beg your pardon?”

  Once they had retreated a safe distance from the bank, Gloria glared at her. “You heard me. Do you seriously mean to give up love and happiness because you cannot find a festival tent? Let them have their festival in the open air, for pity’s sake, or in the hall, or in the closet! Alice, you are so blinded by the trees that you are completely missing the forest—and it is a beautiful one. One that can shelter you and keep you warm for a lifetime. Are you completely mad?”

  Alice’s mouth opened and closed a time or two before she finally got out, “One of us is.”

  “It is not I, of that I can assure you. Honestly, if you weren’t two inches taller than me, I should turn you over my knee and spank you for even thinking of throwing Ian over.”

  “I wasn’t—”

  “Or for hesitating in such a way. For fleeing here when you should be there! Why, I expected you to be Lady Hollys already, in a double wedding with Claire.”

  “The chapel at Gwynn Place wasn’t big enough.” She was still reeling from being lectured to by Gloria Meriwether-Astor, of all people, who to Alice’s knowledge had never been in love with anyone.

  “There must be more to your indecision than tents and church. What of your ship?” She waved over her shoulder at the sleek, shining bulk of Swan, bobbing gently on her lines. “Is Lady Hollys going to give her up too?”

  “Certainly not,” came out of Alice’s mouth without a single thought.

  “Are you going to fly for me?”

  “Maybe.” Alice set her teeth. “If you ever stop lecturing me.”

  “I shall stop when you begin to make sense,” Gloria said crisply. “If Lady Hollys is going to fly, then it follows she will be absent some of the time. Therefore, she certainly must delegate certain of her duties to her household staff.”

  “She can do that?”

  “Of course she can, you goose! She may need to put others before herself upon occasion, but in the main, she will have people about her whose job it is to assist. Whose life’s work it is to assist. My goodness, surely you did not think you were to be mucking about in market towns and lumber yards yourself, and nailing bunting to booths?”

  “I didn’t know what to think. Claire said that her mother took care of the people in the village with fetes and whatnot.”

  “I am sure she did—with the assistance of a small army.” Gloria’s eyes flashed with sudden understanding. “Think of them as your ground crew on the estate, much as you have your crew in the air. They keep the ship running efficiently while you give the orders, do they not?”

  “Ye-e-s.”

  “There you are, then,” Gloria said triumphantly. “I suggest you turn your ship about and make good time back to England. Take your fiancé by the hand and march him to church without further ado.”

  While Alice’s brows rose at this familiarity, to her own surprise, she laughed. “I never suspected you were so bossy.”

  “I never did either,” Gloria admitted. “But I suppose I shall have to learn now, and I thank you for giving me some practice in the art.”

  “You’re welcome. Look—the boys are coming.” She waved, and in the distance, Evan Douglas waved back.

  “I mean it, Alice,” Gloria said in a low tone that somehow held urgency. “Do not let the chance for happiness pass you by. You will regret it, and living with regret is worse than all the failed fetes and harvest banquets in the world.”

  Which rather left Alice wondering if her information about Gloria’s romantic prospects had been dead wrong.

  CHAPTER 3

  T hough she had advised Alice to leave at once, Gloria was still thankful that her friend planned to stay until Friday, and see her through the reconvened board meeting. Accordingly, they dressed in their most fashionable yet businesslike clothes (with only a very little appliquéd lace on the jacket, in Gloria’s case) and once again took their seats at the mahogany table in the boardroom of the Meriwether-Astor Munitions Works.

  When Gloria had called the meeting to order and welcomed her cousin Hugh to his new position—why had someone not told him he was now entitled to sit in his brother’s chair, instead of the one at the foot of the table he usually occupied?—she rose to her feet.

  “Gentlemen, I will not waste your valuable time, since you have been so kind as to return today. I will simply call for a vote on the matter of the final shipment to the Royal Kingdom of Spain and the Californias. Those in favor of stopping the shipment and recompensing the Ambassador with interest, raise your hands.”

  She, Mr. Pitman, and Mr. Adams were the only ones to do so.

  She stared at Hugh, who looked at his brother and then away. Doing her best to look as though her stomach was not rolling and pitching like a steamship about to go down in heavy seas, she said, “Am I to understand that this company supports the invasion of a peaceful territory by a neighboring nation?”

  Carmichael cleared his throat. “We have nothing to do with the use to which our products are put, madam, whether by hunters in the woods of the Carolinas or nations on the western frontier. We simply sell them to customers who have the gold to pay for them, and there our responsibility ends.”

  “Even though we know our customers have hostile intentions?” Now nausea fought with disgust at these men—men who had no doubt been groomed to this way of thinking by her father. “Intentions that may be spread by greed even to our own doorstep?”

  “Are you hinting that Spain may declare war on the Fifteen Colonies, Madam President?” Sydney actually sounded merry. Ooh, if she carried a cane, she would whack him for his impertinence.

  “If one rules half a continent, why not take a run at the rest of it?” she snapped. “In any case, you are no longer a member of the board, and have no right to speak. Hugh, your proper place is here, to my right.”

  “On the contrary, coz,” Sydney told her. “A little detail slipped your mind on Tuesday.”

  “Do not patronize me,” she said through her teeth. “Family or not, I allow no one to take that tone with me.”

  “I do apologize,” he said, not very apologetically. “But the fact remains that the board did not actually vote me out of this chair with a legal motion when last we met. As a result, the final payment has been made, and the shipment and the Ambassador left Philadelphia on Wednesday on the specially commissioned train built for the late Viceroy.”

  The breath went out of Gloria’s lungs, and her knees failed her. She sat rather abruptly in the upholstered chair at the head of the table. “I beg your pardon?” she whispered.

  He looked so pleased that one would think his next move would be to tip her out of this chair and take it once and for all. “In the absence of a motion to remove, I am still a serving member of this board, and as the nephew of the founder of the company, I had sufficient authority to accept the payment that His Excellency the Ambassador was so anxious to make, and to release the machinery from our warehouses.”

&nbs
p; “How dared you?” She could barely take enough breath to speak. “You knew my intentions.”

  “It was the only honorable thing to do, despite the intentions of our esteemed but inexperienced president.” He bowed in her direction and directed his subsequent remarks to the gentlemen around the table. “The deal having been struck months ago by my uncle, I saw no reason to delay further.”

  “Well done, Sydney!”

  “This is an outrage!”

  “Sydney Meriwether-Astor for president!”

  “Are you people completely mad?”

  Gloria heard Alice’s exclamation as though she were under water. She must not faint. She must regain control of herself immediately. Only then could she regain control of the situation—and the company.

  Carmichael leaped to his feet. “I move for a vote of non-confidence in the president. It is clear that there is only one member of the family who steps up to do the right thing, and is therefore fit for the job.”

  “You just voted her in three days ago, you nincompoop,” Mr. Pitman snapped.

  “I didn’t,” Carmichael pointed out with some heat. “I was outvoted.”

  “By no means—”

  “I say again, this is an outrage!”

  “Shut up, Adams, you know perfectly well that—”

  “Silence!” Gloria shouted, and seven astonished faces turned toward her. She threw the gavel across the room, where it bounced off the wainscoting. “Sit down!”

  All but Sydney did. He remained standing, a challenge as strident as if he had spoken aloud—or flung a pair of gloves at her feet.

  Gloria leaned into the speaking tube affixed to the wall at her right shoulder. “Miss Ashlock, send our security officers to the boardroom immediately to remove Mr. Sydney Meriwether-Astor.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She looked him in the eye, and his satisfied smile lost a few degrees of tilt. “I move once and for all that you be removed from your position—and from these premises. You are never to set foot in these buildings again. If you do, you will be charged with trespassing, if you are not shot on sight.”

  Four hands wavered upward. Mr. Pitman inhaled sharply, then collected himself enough to record it.

  “Gloria, please,” Hugh said, clearly trying to smooth troubled waters. “While I disagree philosophically with my brother, you were outvoted a minute ago because economically, we had no other choice. It’s business. The shipment would have gone ahead in any case.”

  “But it would have had the approval of the board, not the cavalier actions of an offended child who knows no one is listening to him.”

  A rap came at the door, and the security officers came in. “Come with us now, Mr. Sydney,” one of them said. “No fuss.”

  “I move that Sydney be made president, and this crackpot of a girl be sent off to an asylum to mend her soft head,” Carmichael blustered. “All in favor?”

  This time only two hands went up. The other four members shook their heads, until finally Adams said, “The security men can take you too, Carmichael, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve never seen such a display of hooliganism in all my life.”

  “Mr. Sydney? Come along, now.” The security men laid their hands on his arms, and when he went to shrug them off in irritation—did he think there was going to be another vote upon the subject?—they only clamped down harder. “Off we go.”

  “You’ll see I’m right, Gloria,” Sydney called as he was half-dragged, half-escorted down the corridor. Doors opened as clerks and secretaries stared in astonishment. “I did the right thing, and when you apply your feathery female mind to it, you will have no choice but to agree.”

  Perhaps he had obeyed the letter of the contract, while flouting the standards of respect, familial duty, and company unity in every other way. Gloria waited until the sounds of his departure faded, and a door closed with a bang of finality at the end of the hall. “If there is no other business, I move that the meeting be adjourned.”

  No one argued.

  No one stayed. Not even Alice.

  Gloria sat in the lonely chair at the head of the empty table and considered the wreckage of her first week at the helm of her father’s company.

  And of all her high hopes for it.

  * * *

  AN HOUR LATER, unable to find Gloria in the enormous corner office with its displays of modern and antique weaponry—she hoped redecoration efforts would soon commence—Alice poked her head into the boardroom.

  To her surprise, Gloria still sat at the head of the table, having clearly not moved so much as a ruffle since her directors had decamped. Her face was pale, and her gaze seemed fixed upon a view far away, as though mind and body occupied two different worlds. Perhaps they did. Perhaps her mind had taken refuge in a world where men did not encourage others to war, or to arm them when they succeeded.

  Alice closed the door, turned the key in the lock, and sat in the chair recently vacated by that nice Mr. Pitman. “Gloria.”

  She said the name two more times before the vacant stare returned to the room, and the other girl looked at Alice in some surprise. “Are you all right?”

  Gloria’s mouth trembled for a moment, before she brought her emotions under control. “Physically, yes. But my heart feels as though it has been trampled by a herd of runaway mechanical horses and left for dead.”

  “That pretty much sums up the board meeting, I’d say.”

  “Oh, Alice,” she sighed, pressing both hands to her face. “What am I going to do?”

  “I don’t see that there is anything you can do, legitimately, except to close this chapter of the company’s history and do better with the next one.”

  “In other words, give up?”

  “I said, legitimately.” Gloria’s gaze sharpened upon hers, and Alice couldn’t help a smile. “Did you even notice that I was gone?”

  “I assumed your disgust had taken you outside, to prepare Swan for lift and a return to a life that must be many times more rewarding than mine is at the moment.”

  “You’re almost right. I found Evan Douglas downstairs, waiting to see if you wished to be escorted home, and sent him to Washington Avenue with orders to my crew to be ready to lift.”

  Gloria seemed to sag, and she gripped one arm of her chair as though it would hold her up. “You mean to go home, then. I do not blame you. In fact, I believe I told you to do so myself, the other day. But—oh, Alice—I cannot bear it. To lose my cousins—my company—my integrity—and now, my friends—” This time she could not control her emotion, and tears overflowed to trickle down the porcelain-pale cheeks.

  Alice laid a hand upon Gloria’s sleeve and squeezed gently. “You have not lost the last two, and you’re well rid of the first, in my opinion, though I’m surprised at Hugh. He seemed a decent sort. Let me ask you something—can you get away from here?”

  Gloria squeezed back, and then with both hands scrubbed the tears off her cheeks. “Get away? From the company, or from Philadelphia? What do you mean? Are you suggesting I go to England with you?”

  “No. I’m suggesting that since we cannot stop that shipment of mechanical menaces by fair means, we employ foul.”

  Gloria’s wet gaze held doubt. “I have had enough foul means this week to satisfy me for some time. Possibly for the rest of my life.”

  “All right. I can do it myself, if you would rather not take the risk.”

  “Do what? Alice, what are you up to?”

  “That train is two days ahead of us—nearly three. But Swan is ten times faster than a train. We may not have been able to stop its departure, but we can certainly prevent its arrival.”

  Gloria stared at her. “How on earth do you propose to do that? Are you trying to start a war in spite of me?”

  Alice shook her head impatiently, and a lock of hair fell out of its neat roll. A hairpin pinged off the table and was lost forever in the thick Aubusson rug.

  “We are not going to stop it. But we might be able to find someone wh
o will. Someone armed with the ability and the greed to equal those of anyone in Sydney’s camp. Someone in the Texican Territory, close to the route the train has to take to get to the Californias. Someone with considerable experience in, er, the removal and redistribution of cargo.”

  Now her companion looked as though she might call the security guards a second time. “Are you suggesting we employ a train robber?”

  The solution had come to her in a blinding flash the moment the report of the train’s departure had left Sydney’s lips, and Alice had barely been able to contain her impatience for the board meeting to be adjourned before she’d fled the room in search of Evan Douglas.

  “How on earth would you know such a person?” Gloria demanded.

  But Alice noticed that she did not condemn the scheme. She merely doubted the method.

  She couldn’t restrain her grin now, though she did resist the urge to clap her hands in delight. “Gloria, do you remember me telling you about my stepfather, Ned Mose?”

  CHAPTER 4

  Dearest Ian,

  We reached the Fifteen Colonies safely, having made the airship flight across the Atlantic in two days and 14 hours. Considering this is January and we dodged four storms, I am pretty proud of the way Swan acquitted herself.

  I wish I could say all is well. That rascal Sydney Meriwether-Astor has gone behind his cousin Gloria’s back and released the final shipment of arms and mechanicals to the Californio Ambassador, whom Gloria suspects is the strong arm behind a threat of war that might have died with the old prince. Sydney said she was contractually bound to complete the deal. While that may be true, she says she is morally bound to stop the war.

  So, we are casting off immediately for Resolution to arrange a train robbery. While my last sight of Ned Mose (who despite his relationship with my mother is not your future father-in-law) involved his shooting at me, I believe the prospect of the cargo will induce him to forgive me and assist me in the endeavor.