Magnificent Devices 6: A Lady of Spirit

by Shelley Adina

  “None at all. But two odd things have happened at the same time. Perhaps we should take naps this afternoon.”

  Lizzie stopped in her own tracks on the shingle. “What has come over you? We never take naps. Only old people take naps. And what has that to do with pigeons?”

  “Old people aren’t going to be out on the cliffs at two in the morning to see one hundred liters of something and a thousand kilos of something else landed on the beach.”

  Lizzie laughed. “Is that what you think will happen? What an imagination you have!”

  Maggie hadn’t really expected her to go along with it, but nobody liked to be laughed at, either. “You don’t have to come, but I’m still going to ramble out in that direction, just in case I’m right and something happens.”

  “What good will it do you?”

  “None … except the satisfaction of my curiosity.”

  “I think you’re going to meet Michael Polgarth—against the grands’ wishes.”

  Maggie wished that were the truth. “If I did, I should be turned out of the house, and have to walk all the way to Gwynn Place. No, I’m just going to have an adventure. You may stay behind if you like. But even if that message does turn out to be a grocer’s list, I’m going to find out what those lights are.”

  And there would be one mystery she could solve—even if it was the only one.

  *

  If Maggie could have invented an illness and taken a tray in her room that evening, she would have. But the possibility of Grandmother inspecting her throat and chest was a consequence too terrifying to contemplate, so she put on her dinner dress, arranged her hair, and presented herself downstairs with Lizzie and Claude as the gong sounded.

  The dining table seemed even glossier and much larger without the rest of the London party, unrelieved as it was by so much as a bowl of flowers. But one thing had changed.

  “Lady Claire and Mr. Malvern lifted safely?” Grandfather inquired of Maggie, who was so surprised at being thus directly addressed that she nearly inhaled a mouthful of asparagus soup.

  “Yes, thank you,” she managed as soon as she could speak. “We were a little worried about the force of the wind, but then it changed and they were able to lift without trouble.”

  “I do not hold with young people gadding about the skies in these airships,” Grandmother said. “When I think of the danger they put themselves in so needlessly, I wonder at their parents allowing it.”

  “Lady Claire has been independent for some years now,” Lizzie said. “And she is to work on airships in Germany, you know, so her familiarity with them will be to her advantage.”

  “Papa made sure I knew how to fly so that I could travel independently in Victory,” Claude offered. “And it’s not so hard, you know, once you get the hang of wind and steering. When we came down earlier in the summer, even the girls had a go at the tiller.”

  Grandfather’s face flushed. “Claude, you know my feelings about any mention of your father in my house.”

  “I know, Grandfather, and I apologize. But it is difficult. Up until two months ago, I believed him to be a good man. He was certainly good to me.”

  But Grandfather was not willing to allow Charles de Maupassant Seacombe any shred of humanity or family feeling, for which Maggie for once was inclined to side with him.

  “How did your day go at the office, Claude?” she asked him, since a change of subject was most definitely in order.

  Claude heaved a sigh, caught his grandfather’s eye, and straightened. “I am finding it a very complicated beast. No wonder so many minds are required to make the company run properly. A single brain cannot hold it all—mine in particular.”

  “You are not required to know everything, only the important points,” Grandfather told him. “Having the right men working for you is one necessary part. A knowledge of politics and economics is another. And a working knowledge of accounts is helpful, too, so that you may understand what others tell you.” Grandfather’s eye fell on Maggie, and like the clouds massing in the west, she saw a storm coming. “While we are on that subject, Margaret, I feel you ought to know that Mr. Polgarth has been released from his employment with us.”

  He might as well have turned the pitcher of water at his elbow over her head. “On what grounds?” she blurted. The poor man! How was he to make his living now?

  The bushy eyebrows pinched together in a frown. “That is hardly your concern.”

  “If a man is sacked simply for speaking to me, then it certainly is my concern.”

  Grandmother laid down her knife with a clink. “Margaret, do not be rude to your grandfather or I shall ask you to leave the room.”

  Maggie could think of nothing she’d like better, but at the same time, antagonizing them would not make them amenable to conversation of a personal nature later on.

  “Forgive me, Grandmother—Grandfather,” she murmured, ignoring Lizzie’s incredulous gaze at her backing down from a fight.

  After a few moments, Claude said, “I had the opportunity to spend some time in the accounting department today.”

  Poor Claude. Truly, the prospect of being cut out of the will was becoming more and more appealing the longer she stayed here.

  “And what did you think?” Grandfather accepted a helping of breaded plaice from the footman, and Maggie stifled a sigh. Once they got home, she was never eating fish again.

  “Well, I do not think the books they showed me were complete.”

  “What do you mean, Claude?” Grandmother accepted her own fish, and next to her, Lizzie visibly braced herself.

  “From what I could see, it does not look as though the company’s receipts are enough to sustain operations throughout the year. Is there more than one set of books?”

  Grandfather’s eyes narrowed before his gaze fell to his dinner once more. “I am surprised you could make such a pronouncement when you admit yourself that your faculties are as yet not up to the task of understanding the business.”

  Goodness. That was the closest Grandfather had ever come to a criticism of Claude in all the time they’d been here.

  Claude nodded and gave a Gallic half-shrug. “You are quite right. Most of the time I am lucky if I can figure out how to tie my cravat in the morning. The books will take several years to understand, I am sure.”

  And he subsided into silence while Maggie struggled with the urge to put a hand on his shoulder and tell him he was not as stupid as his grandparents were encouraging him to be. Claude was capable of sensible observation—she’d seen it herself. If he thought the books were unbalanced, then goodness, in all likelihood they probably were.

  But bringing that up right now would definitely get her sent to her room. Maggie gazed at the limp plaice as the footman slid it onto her plate. Then again, perhaps she ought to.

  “Claude, now that the storm is blowing itself out, do you think tomorrow would be a good day for a picnic?” she asked instead.

  “Jolly good idea. I—”

  “Claude is to go with me to the warehouse of one of our suppliers in Exeter tomorrow,” Grandfather said heavily. “We shall leave on the seven o’clock train.”

  “In the morning?” Claude said faintly.

  “Of course in the morning. Do you think we do business at night?”

  “Some men do. Papa used to say more business was accomplished over brandy and cigars than ever got accomplished in offices.”

  “Claude, I will not remind you again.”

  “Grandfather, regardless of his crimes, you must admit that Papa was an excellent businessman. In that area of his life, at least, he behaved honorably and with great success.”

  “I think that, along with your observations of the books, your estimations of your father’s honor and success are sadly inaccurate,” Grandfather snapped.

  Carefully, Maggie put down her fork and instinctively readied herself for … whatever might happen.

  “You cannot know that.” Maggie had never heard such a tone from
her cousin. “I was with him daily on my vacations, accompanying him to meetings and such, and never heard anything from his associates to indicate such a thing.”

  “That’s because they were probably in on it with him.”

  “In on what?” Lizzie asked.

  “Never mind!” Both men turned on her with a simultaneous exclamation.

  “Gentlemen, we will change the subject,” Grandmother said in quelling tones. “Claude, if you distress your grandfather in this manner again, you will be taking your dinner in your room henceforth.”

  “I believe I should prefer that in any case.” Claude rose and tossed his napkin down on his chair. “Good evening, Grandmother. Thank you for dinner.”

  “Claude!” Grandmother half rose from her seat.

  But he did not stop, and they heard his footsteps cross the hall, then a murmur. When Maggie heard the great front doors thump closed, she realized that he had gone out instead of going to his room.

  The breaded plaice waited, untouched, on her plate.

  She should have spoken up. She would have been disgraced for a couple of days, but at least she would have had the pleasure of going with Claude to … wherever he was going.

  The Lady was right. Doing the right thing really wasn’t easy.

  With a sigh, Maggie picked up her fork.

  18

  Maggie had fallen asleep after the massive clock in the hall had bonged ten times, but by the time it bonged once, she had already awakened and was pulling on her raiding rig.

  “Are you really going?” Lizzie murmured sleepily from her side of the bed. “It’s cold.”

  “It won’t be once you have your rig on. Are you coming?”

  Lizzie groaned and pulled the quilts over her head. After a moment of motionless contemplation, she flung them back and got up, making a big production of shivering until she was buttoned into her black waistcoat and blouse, and had fastened her skirts up for freedom of movement.

  Swiftly, the two of them braided back their hair. “It’s at moments like this that I wish I’d finished making that lightning pistol,” Maggie said. It still lay upon Lewis’s work bench at Wilton Crescent, where it was doing no one any good at all.

  “Why, if we are only going to watch the cliffs, would you need a lightning pistol?”

  “It never hurts to be prepared.”

  “Prepared for potatoes and ale,” Lizzie grumbled, but all the same, she made sure they both had a moonglobe as they slipped downstairs and out the side entrance, where the staff came and went.

  “Do you suppose Claude ever came home?” Maggie asked as they ran through the cook’s sweet-scented herb garden and out through the garden wall on the west side. It took a little longer to cross the expanse of grass and trees to the cliff-top, but she was not willing to risk going out through the rose garden under the watchful eye of their grandparents’ windows, which could be open.

  “I never heard him come in—but since the men are in the other wing, we wouldn’t have, would we? Don’t worry, Mags, he probably went to a tavern to drown his sorrows and then out to Victory to sleep it off.”

  The sea heaved against the foot of the cliff, still restless after the storm. The clouds were being chased inland by the wind, scudding across the face of the moon as though embarrassed to be caught in the light.

  “If you were a boatload of potatoes, where would you land?” Maggie asked, not really expecting an answer. It seemed obvious—the tiny harbor formed where the cluster of stone houses tumbled to the sea. Where the red lights had come from someone’s window or roof. “If I were not doing it in daylight, in Penzance harbor like a respectable person, there is really only one safe place on this headland.” She pointed in the direction of the granite rock, a quarter mile or so away. “We’d better get on shank’s mare. It must be nearly two.”

  “You know what?” Lizzie said thoughtfully, “If I were bringing in contraband potatoes, I’d land them in the sawan. Wouldn’t you?”

  “The Seacombe sawan?” As if there were any other improved caves along here with landings specifically built to accommodate a large cargo—and a rising tide. “I am clearly out of the habit of thinking like a street sparrow or a confidence man. Unlike present company.”

  “But you have to admit it is a reasonable possibility. However, we can only go and look at one thing—not both, unless we split up. We must choose.”

  “The tide hasn’t turned yet. If it is the sawan, the door will be mostly under water—those potatoes could only get in on a raft or a rowboat.”

  “Maybe they’ve come and gone,” Lizzie said. “Maybe the ‘two o’clock’ was high tide, and they had to do their business before then. Or maybe—”

  She stopped abruptly when Maggie grabbed her sleeve. “Lizzie, what is that?” Maggie pulled her down behind a tumble of weathered rock, and peered over it.

  “What? I can’t see anything. Ouch, you’re pinching my shoulder.”

  “Lizzie, the sea is boiling.”

  Wide-eyed, the two of them leaned on the rough, lichen-covered rocks, Maggie’s breath catching in her throat in sheer amazement. For the sea, which had been breaking in perfectly normal waves on the rocks a moment ago, seemed to be heaving into a dome fifty feet across, coming up out of the deep with such inexorable force that seawater slid down the face of it in crashing waterfalls and torrents, foam leaping back into the air to form a mist above it.

  And now it rose and rose and they could see below it an elliptical body made of glass and metal, intricately worked in seams and waves to direct the water past its hull and increase its speed. Facing them, encased in a metal housing worked in the shapes of waves and curves, a huge bubble of glass emerged from the water, which sheeted over its roundness and plummeted straight down into the deep, frothing and hissing.

  Inside, lit by an eerie yellowish-green light, several men worked the controls. Others ran to and fro working levers, and standing in the front was a figure with its hands clasped behind its back, as if he were too important to do the job of operating the thing. He merely watched as the whole enormous contraption freed itself of the ocean’s grasp, water streaming off its sides in great torrents. Finally, its internal systems seemed to stabilize it and it bobbed on the surface like a duck in a child’s bath, the heaviest part of its body still submerged to who knew what depth.

  It looked for all the world like an airship, with its parts put on in the wrong places. An airship that traveled under the water.

  Where it could not be detected.

  Maggie’s chest felt tight, and she sucked in a lungful of air with a gasp. She had completely forgotten to breathe.

  “What … is it?” Lizzie managed to whisper.

  “I do not know,” Maggie whispered back. “What are they doing here?”

  “Not landing potatoes, I’ll wager.”

  “Come on. Let’s go down the cliff path and see what they’re doing.”

  “Are you mad? They’re not exactly the Royal Aeronautics Corps on maneuvers—people with honest intentions don’t go swimming about at night in undersea dirigibles!”

  “Exactly why we have to know what they’re doing. We need to be able to tell Grandfather and the authorities.”

  “Maggie—”

  “Come on!”

  Maggie did not know what drove her across to the western side of the headland and down the cliff path. A sense of loyalty to the family that had shown her none? Did she wish to prove herself worthy by putting herself at risk for the Seacombe name? Or was she simply feeling angry and reckless and not one whit concerned about what her grandparents thought? She was going to have an adventure and they could just—just stick their heads in a bucket!

  She heard Lizzie slipping and swearing along the path behind her, and waited a moment for her to catch up. “We are going to be in so much trouble,” Lizzie panted.

  “I’m in trouble anyway. Claude is, too. Why shouldn’t you be?”

  “Yes, I was feeling a bit left out. Careful—the
earth there has fallen away.”

  Maggie stepped around the notch in the path, and they zigzagged down until the soil thinned and they were clambering over solid rock. She could hear the waves lashing the beach now, the sea still not recovered from the dirigible’s intrusion. The noise of it covered any sounds they might have made as they inched around the rocks, their boots sinking into the damp sand where the tide had just begun to turn.

  Someone shouted behind them, and Lizzie grabbed Maggie, pulling her back into a crevice. They pressed themselves flat as a rowing boat propelled by a large man dressed in a fisherman’s jersey shot across the waves from the direction of the stone houses.

  “The last number on the paper that pigeon brought,” Maggie whispered. “Six. I wonder if that’s the number of men they need to unload whatever it is they’re bringing?”

  “But they haven’t got six,” Lizzie whispered back. “There’s only him.”

  “They haven’t got the message, either. If that’s what it was, none of them know what the other is expecting.”

  “I still think it was a grocer’s order.”

  “We’ll soon see, I hope.”

  They edged around the cliff face and saw that the dirigible had navigated its way closer to shore. It was not as deep in the draft as she’d thought, Maggie saw now. In fact, if the navigation gondola had been under it instead of on its nose, it would be similar in shape to the Rangers’ B-30 ship from which they had escaped in Santa Fe when they were children—slender and fast like a sea creature.

  They heard the grinding of machinery, and the dirigible gave a great belch of steam. A hatch opened under the navigation deck, and out of it issued what Maggie could only describe as large glass and metal bubbles—three of them, hooked together like train cars, the lead vessel the only one with an engine and steered by men inside working wheels and levers. They grumbled through the water, wallowing slightly as though weighted down.

  The sawan gaped black in the cliff face, the head space gradually increasing as the tide went out, and lamps came on in the front of the bubbles to illuminate their way. Through the arch they went, and disappeared within.