Courting Trouble

by Jenny Schwartz

  Lonely, desperate poverty.

  “I’m not lonely.” But she was. The gap resulting from her own panicked rejection of Jed’s courtship had shown her what a huge part of her life he was.

  She stared at the conch shell hiding the speaking tube. She could contact Jed. He was so close, the thought tempted her. He’d said she was in charge of their courtship, that she should woo him.

  Did she want to?

  That’s not the issue right now. She stretched out her hand for the speaking tube. Jed had been underground for hours. He needed fresh air. She would invite him to stroll down to the post office with her. Her busy morning had left her with more letters than stamps.

  “Jed.” She waited for his acknowledgement, a preoccupied Huh? “I need to go to the post office. Would you care to accompany me?”

  Unaccustomed butterflies rioted in her stomach as she waited for his response. Was this nervous anticipation, this bracing for possible rejection, what men endured when they courted a woman?

  “I would like that very much.” The speaking tube distorted his voice.

  She couldn’t read emotion in it, so took the words at face value. The butterflies quieted a fraction. “In ten minutes? Perhaps we could stop for tea while we’re in town?”

  “Fine with me.”

  She set the speaking tube down and crossed over to the mirror above the fireplace. Her color was high, her eyes shining. She looked like a woman in love. She touched a finger to the smooth glass. “Am I?”

  “Good afternoon, Esme.” Jed stood in the library doorway, a smile and something more lighting his eyes. His dark brown suit sat impeccably across his shoulders, with a honey-and-gold-colored silk waistcoat beneath. His boots gleamed with a high polish.

  “Jed.” She hurried back to the desk, gathering up the stack of mail. “I’m sorry. The time got away from me.” She offered him a small smile.

  “I’m early.” His answering smile was as intimate as a kiss, though his words were prosaic. “It’s cool out. You’ll need a coat.”

  How could a man’s smile make her pulse quicken? “It’s in the hall. I went out this morning to the printer’s.”

  “How is Angus?” He watched her walk toward him.

  She was conscious of his admiration. She smoothed her hand over the fine wool of her suit. Its soft sage-green color and her own full curves were an enticing contrast to its masculine cut. She wondered now if she’d worn it to elicit that wanting look in his eyes. “Angus is a very proud papa. Paul, his eldest son, has won a scholarship to the grammar school.”

  “Clever boy.” Beautiful woman, his eyes said. He touched her waist lightly as she walked past him, out the door.

  Her breath caught. She wanted to lean into his touch.

  The threat of Nazim and the sonic destroyer ought to have loomed like thunderclouds on the horizon, and they did, but they also revealed something unexpected. She saw Jed’s gravity and sense of responsibility, rock solid beneath his easy charm, and it strengthened his appeal.

  He noted her momentary hesitation and his hand lingered, only to drop away as they exited the library. At the foot of the stairs, he helped her into her coat. His gloved fingers stroked her throat.

  “I thought I was meant to court you,” she managed. “If I loved you,” she added hastily.

  He smiled as his hand drifted down her shoulder, her arm, and slowly relinquished her hand. “An uncertain suitor needs some encouragement.”

  Francis was visible through the stained glass beside the front door, and Maud’s voice could be heard approaching as she scolded a maid. Esme liked all the servants—and Francis and Maud were more like family—but at this moment, she could have wished them all to Antarctica.

  Francis opened the door and Jed stepped back from her. The fresh spring wind swept into the hall, carrying the scents of coal smoke and salt from the port.

  “We’re just off for tea, Francis.”

  “You could have that here,” he grumbled.

  “True, but a walk will be invigorating.”

  Francis’s faded blue eyes looked from Esme to Jed and back. Some of the grouchiness left his face. “Invigorating, is it?”

  Esme whisked Jed out of the house before Francis forgot himself and let loose a wicked comment on young love in the springtime. His chuckle followed them down the front steps.

  They walked through the gate and downhill into town. She concentrated fiercely on everything but the man walking lithely beside her.

  Posters for a traveling circus and various patent remedies occurred with increasing regularity on the walls of buildings and fences as they drew closer to the town center. Somers’s Summer Tonic. Pristine Starch for Pristine Women. Billiard’s Baldness Cure. A horse-drawn tram rattled past with a solitary passenger standing up and chatting with the driver. A joiner’s apprentice idled along, pushing a barrow of timber off-cuts. He glanced up, saw the time on the town hall’s clock and broke into a trot.

  “How goes your work on the prototype?”

  “I’ll be ready to test it tomorrow.” The strain he was under showed only in the slight deepening of the lines at the corners of his eyes.

  She shivered. “I hope it doesn’t work.”

  He covered her hand where she clasped his arm. “I know. I hope the same, but I have to be sure any failure is in the design and not in my realization of it.”

  “Of course.”

  From the veranda railing of Miss Strezlecki’s terrace house came a shriek of derision. Mozart, her sulfur-crested cockatoo, considered himself a critic, and this time it seemed the bird had a point. Esme winced. From Miss Strezlecki’s front parlor came the halting sound of scales played badly on a piano—another less-than-talented music student at practice.

  Esme could sympathize. She appreciated good music, but couldn’t play herself. Heaven bless the inventor of the player piano. Which reminded her, Mr. Lewton at the music shop had been expecting a new shipment of piano rolls. She had promised to stop in and buy some, only Jed’s description of the design principles underpinning Kali’s Scream had put her off the notion of music, music boxes and anything related to them. “I wish this was all over.”

  He pressed his elbow to his side, trapping her hand between his arm and body, a subtle caress. All that was permitted on a public street. “On the positive side, we haven’t had any trouble from Nazim.”

  “But you still go armed?”

  “Yes.”

  “I hope it’s a pistol and not just a knife.”

  They turned a corner into the high street, busy with pedestrians, and the opportunity for private conversation passed. One could hardly discuss preparations for mayhem on the main street.

  Sunlight glinted off colored glass bottles displayed in the window of Fotheringway’s Chemist’s. Beside it, the sign above a narrow door proclaimed Dental Surgery, No Appointment Required. A miserable-looking miner walked toward it, a scarf wrapped securely around his lower jaw.

  “Poor man,” she said, distracted from their problem. “I do hate visits to the dentist.” She turned away from the unhappy sight. “Goodness!” The exclamation was the result of the crowd gathered on the steps of the telegraph office. “I do hope nothing terrible has happened.” Such crowds usually meant bad news.

  A mix of Europeans and Indians spoke in low voices and studied a few newssheets passed from hand to hand. Jed bought one from a newsboy who darted forward. The headline was lurid: Delhi Disaster—Indian City Explodes.

  Jed held the newssheet so they could both read it. The details of the story were less sensational, though no less tragic. It wasn’t Delhi that had exploded, but a dye factory operating in a small village on the city’s outskirts. The three boilers that powered the factory had exploded.

  “Three?” Esme murmured, dazed.

  “Sabotage.”

  The newssheet made the same deduction as Jed. Two hundred people were dead, and hundreds more—workers and villagers both—were injured. In the surrounding area, many wer
e sick from the purple and sulfur-yellow clouds of smoke released when the factory went up in flames.

  “Oh, God. Imagine if the winds had driven the smoke toward Delhi rather than away?” Esme leaned into Jed’s sturdy strength. “How awful.”

  “Bleedin’ horrors,” a Cockney-accented voice said hoarsely. “To do this to women and children. Bastards.”

  When she looked around, it was obvious that as news of the disaster sunk in, unlikely conversations were springing up everywhere.

  Nazim stood by the steps of the telegraph office, resplendent in his Oxford style and flamboyant necktie. It was a flowing shimmer of blue silk, such as an artist might wear. Standing a wary distance from him, and leaning wanly against the office, was Gupta Singh.

  “M-Miss Esme, Mr. Reeve.” Gupta straightened and moved toward them through the crowd. “Isn’t this appalling?”

  “A tragedy,” Esme agreed. “Those poor people.”

  “Poorer than you know.” Nazim followed in Gupta’s wake. “That dye factory was notorious for what it hid.”

  His brazen approach astonished her, coming as it did on the heels of his threat to all she held dear. Beside her, Jed tensed into battle-readiness.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Nazim,” she said with rigid politeness. “I don’t understand how a dye factory could hide anything.”

  “The British Raj said it was a dye factory, and indeed, its terrible aniline dyes poisoned the villagers’ wells, but it was the laboratory attached to the factory that truly interested them—and explains why they required not one but three boilers to supply steam power to the factory. They dreamed of adding dyes not simply to clothing and textiles, but to food. And with the dyes would come other chemicals, chemicals to control subject people’s very moods. Imagine. A people zombified to do their masters’ bidding or sterilized, denied children.”

  The murmuring crowd grew silent, listening.

  Gupta eyed Nazim askance. There was too much unsteady passion in the man’s glittering eyes and loud voice. It could stir the crowd to violence. The youngster ventured a distraction.

  “I-India has had m-much bad luck recently. The goddess is angry. Wh-whoever stole the emerald from her golden belly three months ago has unleashed her curse.”

  Discussion of a curse was more to the crowd’s taste than derogatory talk of the Raj. They seized on it eagerly. The Jungle Heart emerald was the largest in the world, and no one knew where it had gone or who had stolen it. Such brazen theft caught the imagination.

  “Emeralds again,” Jed muttered.

  “To talk of curses is foolishness,” Nazim said. “The only curse on this earth is man himself—and he is going to oblivion.” He pushed through the crowd and strode off.

  “Barmy bloke,” someone in the crowd dismissed him.

  “I hadn’t realized he was quite so…despairing.” Esme watched his departure, the jerky nature of his walk hinting at uncontrolled emotion.

  “Yes, he didn’t seem concerned how much destruction the saboteurs caused.”

  “Anarchists aren’t. I’ve read about their nihilist beliefs in my research into radical theories of social change. They argue that life is without meaning and that the world must be annihilated to destroy the evil of the existing social order—or that is the excuse they give for advocating violence.”

  “They’ve gone beyond advocating it,” Jed said grimly. “They’re committing it.”

  Esme gripped his sleeve. She didn’t have to put her fear into words.

  He put a reassuring arm around her shoulders, ignoring the crowd. “I know, sweetheart. I promise you, if the damn thing works, he won’t get his hands on it.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  The final tweaks to the prototype had taken longer than Jed anticipated, but late the following morning it was finally ready to test.

  Using jeweler’s tweezers, he picked up the chip of emerald he’d pried from a posy ring the jeweler had willingly created for him—emerald for e, sapphire for s, moonstone for m and a second emerald for e spelled Esme. He fitted the emerald chip into the gold cradle of the sonic exploding prototype.

  Beside him, Esme watched closely.

  His whole body tautened at the rose-and-sandalwood scent of her. Her hair was frankly messy after their busy hours in the workshop. Sweet disorder, the poets called it. He had another name for the tantalizing lure of her hair brushing against his jacket and clinging to the rough weave. He wanted to feel her unbound hair against his skin, to coil it around his hands and hold her prisoner for his kiss. She’d be the most rewarding prisoner, so beautifully responsive.

  He shifted abruptly, trying to discipline his thoughts and his body.

  It was torture having her this close and knowing her ambivalence. She wanted him. He couldn’t miss her awareness of him, the hitch in her breathing, their lingering exchange of looks. But he couldn’t force her acceptance of her own feelings. He wanted everything—her love, freely given.

  He turned back to what he could control.

  All was in place for this first test of the device. They had removed the kerosene lamp, and the small workroom was lit by candles, which had no glass to shatter. The unguarded flames shifted in the slight breeze from the ventilation system, sending their distorted shadows dancing over the limestone walls.

  He put the tweezers down and checked the blueprints one last time. “We’re set.”

  Esme handed him cotton wool to stuff in his ears. He wound the key of the clockwork mechanism till it caught. As he released it, the first note struck, signaling the start of the internal cylinder’s revolution.

  The device worked on the principles of an old-fashioned music box. He had soldered pinheads to the cylinder in the pattern dictated by the stolen blueprints. As the cylinder revolved, the pinheads plucked the teeth of a steel comb.

  An alien tune, repetitive and haunting, filled the air. He took her hand and they retreated three steps—all the space the small room allowed them. He stuffed the cotton wool in his ears. Esme did the same, her hands clenched.

  He’d modified and miniaturized the design of a phonograph’s trumpet to a long, narrow horn, like a cannon with a flare on the end. The flared end engulfed the emerald in its gold chamber. If the inventor of the infernal device hadn’t been crazed, then the “music” would set up a reverberation in the emerald chip that would express itself as a vastly amplified, single note.

  Esme had placed a china eggcup beside the trumpet. Stretched over the top of the cup was a translucent onion skin. If it ruptured, they had proof of concept—and his troubles really started.

  I never thought I’d wish an invention to fail.

  A high pure note started his ears buzzing despite the muffling cotton. Like Esme, he leaned forward.

  The onion skin tore.

  He darted forward to switch off the machine, inserted a thin steel needle to stop the cylinder spinning, and grasped the tiny trumpet to dampen its vibrations. Its buzzing ceased and he took the cotton wool from his ears.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” she answered absently, her attention on the tattered onion skin. Then she looked up at him. “It worked.”

  He realized she hadn’t truly believed it would. He picked up the eggcup, peeling off the onion skin and discarding it to run his finger around the smooth rim. Even held to the light, there wasn’t the slightest fracture in the porcelain. Relief flooded through him. “It worked exactly as I’d calculated.”

  “You sound pleased.” She sounded accusing.

  He smiled at her. “I am. The original inventor was overenthusiastic in his calculations. I spent some time researching physicists’ work on sound waves and crystals. I thought the onion skin might tear—if the device worked. The inventor of Kali’s Scream thought the eggcup would crack.”

  “So we have proof of concept, but the concept isn’t as powerful as we feared?”

  “Exactly. According to my calculations, the emerald would have to be of exceptional size to bring down
a building. But to be sure, I have a larger emerald to test. I think it should be safe enough in here.” He glanced around the small room that Aaron Smith had braced in the manner of an experienced miner. “We’ll wait outside though.”

  “Heavens.” She blinked at the large emerald he extracted from an inner pocket of his waistcoat.

  It was a sizable stone, and for a moment her response distracted him from the business at hand. He wondered what she’d say if she knew he’d bought it as part of an engagement ring. Of course, he’d bought it purely for the emerald, but the jeweler had smiled approval, mistakenly thinking Jed intended to propose with it.

  Some people had no imagination. Esme deserved sapphires to match her eyes, not a green stone chosen because its name started with e.

  “Can you pop upstairs and collect a crystal glass and perhaps a solid crystal vase, please?”

  She nodded and left. He bent to fit the larger emerald. The small-scale prototype only just accepted it. He used tweezers to adjust the placement.

  “Are you sure this is safe?” Returning, she set the crystal glass and vase on the worktable beside the eggcup.

  “We’ll wait outside the door and stuff our ears with cotton wool once more, but yes, I think it’s safe—far safer than Nazim hoped.”

  He wound up the sonic destroyer then closed the heavy door behind them. They waited on the far side of the cellar. Esme stood tensely in the circle of his arm, while in his other hand he held his watch, timing carefully the length of time it would take the device to run down its clockwork mechanism.

  He snapped the watch closed, restored it to its pocket and took the cotton wool from his ears.

  Esme did the same. “Well, I didn’t feel the earth shake, so it can’t have been too destructive.”

  Perhaps it hadn’t worked at all, with the size of the emerald overwhelming the prototype? He opened the door and they studied the workshop by the light of the candles they held. The crystal glass had broken, but the chunkier vase stood. He took Esme’s candle and set it by his on the worktable. The eggcup had a crack along its rim.