Other than bolting for the door and raising the alarm, she couldn’t see any course but to obey. If Rosie had not been eaten by an animal yet, then perhaps chances were good she would make it to the morning. It would be better to search by daylight anyway.
The hot water felt better than any satin gown ever had.
Claire washed her hair with the lavender-scented soap—where did Alice Chalmers get lavender way out here?—and scrubbed the sand out of her skirts and blouse as well. The holster and her leather corselet had fared quite well, so she hung them on the back of a chair to dry out. When Alice brought more water to rinse everything in, she felt nearly human again.
“Thank you for rescuing me.” She sat by the stove, which had been roused to a fine heat to dry her clothes, and drank the tea that magically appeared. “And feeding and washing me. I owe you much more than I can repay.”
Alice shrugged modestly. “It ain’t often I get to talk with another girl. Mostly it’s that rabble off the Stalwart Lass and the yahoos in town. There’s a few ladies, and I’m pretty good friends with some of the desert flowers over at the honkytonk, but mostly I keep to myself.”
Claire had no idea what a desert flower or a honkytonk might be, but at the mention of the Stalwart Lass, her guard came back up. It was far too susceptible to the blandishments of hot water and food. “Are you part of the crew? Of the Lass, I mean.”
“Not me. They need a place to land, and I got one. That’s about the extent of it. Not that I own this.” She waved a grimy hand to encompass the cliffs and the desert outside. “Nobody does, really. All I got is in this one room and my locomotive tower. Oh, and the automatons.”
Plural? There were more? A prickle of unease ran up Claire’s spine.
Alice’s face took on a dreamy expression as she gazed into the distance over the stove. “Someday I’m going to get to Santa Fe and have a real manufactory. I bet they could use some good automatons up there. And mine are good. They don’t look like much, but they work real well. See?”
She pulled over what looked like a leather mail pouch, and sifted through its contents. Gears, pulleys, tools—even jewelry and kitchen implements. At the bottom was something that might have been a mechanical arm such as the one employed by Ned Mose. “Nine found all this. He’s got a magnetic charge in his feet, see? Saved me weeks of combing the sand with a big rake, like some of ’em do.”
She smiled, and Claire realized she wasn’t gazing into the distance at all. Nine stood behind the stove as if that were its resting place. She resisted the urge to push her chair back and put it between them. She must control this irrational aversion. There were a few automata in England, used mostly by the nouveau riche as butlers at parties, but people of good society employed actual humans. Were they so common in the Americas that this apparently uneducated girl in the middle of nowhere could build them?
“Have you training in mechanics?”
“I had a year at the engineering school down in Texico City, but mostly I just tinker until something works. Nine, come here.”
Claire sucked in a breath as the machine whirred and took several steps closer. In the light, she could see that its arms and legs were jointed roughly where human joints would be. In fact, the arm assemblies looked familiar.
Distressingly so.
“How very clever. Have you ever considered building these limb assemblies for people who have lost theirs in some accident?”
“Oh, sure. I made the one Ned Mose wears. Pretty proud of it, too, with the telescoping forearm and all. Ever seen it?”
Claire evaded the question with another one. “You made it for him, but he’s not your employer?”
If all she did was look after air traffic, and she didn’t associate with the sky pirates except to take money from them, then maybe this girl would help her.
Alice laughed. “Not him. I’m not what you’d call an employer kind of girl. No, didn’t I say? Ned Mose is my pa.”
Chapter 11
“But we can’t leave Rosie!”
Maggie could count on the fingers of one hand the times she’d put her foot down and acted the way Lizzie did every day of her life. If a point needed to be carried, Lizzie usually did it. But in the crunch, Maggie could stiffen her spine and make a fuss with the best of them.
This was a crunch, and she was prepared to fuss as much as it took.
“Maggie, dearest, we have only moments in which to escape.” The countess knelt next to her so that Maggie, who had grown quite a lot in the past couple of months, thank you, could actually look down into her face.
“The Lady will never leave wivout Rosie. And what about yer jewels ’is lordship was so keen to keep safe?”
“We have learned a lesson or two about the relative value of jewels,” the earl said grimly. “Davina, you must tell her. There is no getting round it.”
“Tell us wot?” Lizzie’s face took on that mulish look she got when she suspected a gull. It took a lot of skill to put one over on her—and hardly anyone succeeded. “Why’re you lookin’ at us that way?”
“My dears,” Davina said softly, “I’m very sorry to tell you that Claire is … gone.”
“Gone?” Like a blow to the stomach, Maggie suddenly realized what she’d done. They’d gone to free the Lady, and in the shock of the flood, the fighting, and the mad dash back to the ship, she’d completely forgotten about her! “Where is she? Why didn’t she come wiv us?”
“She was gone before the fighting started. We—we are very much afraid that there has been foul play.”
Maggie snuck a glance at her sister, whose face was as blank as her own must be.
“Immediately after the flood receded, Mr. Yau employed his skill at the ancient Eastern practice of juh-doh. The door was no match for him, and he and Captain Hollys came to free us. Mose was holding Claire next door, but when we got in, we found no one.”
“She ’scaped, then.” Why were they leaving it to her to point out the obvious?
“We are very much afraid she was pushed. Due to—to economic circumstances that are too complicated to go into now, the pirates discovered there would be no ransom for her. We—oh girls, how it pains me to say this! We believe she was pushed out the window during the worst of the flood, and drowned.”
Maggie stared at her ladyship, her stomach pinching and a horrible cold creeping over her skin. They must be talking about someone else. Not the Lady.
“The day the Lady lets someone push her out a window is the day the queen leaves Windsor and turns ’erself into a Billingsgate doxy.” Lizzie’s tone brooked no argument. Maggie couldn’t have said it better herself.
“An admirable sentiment, but misplaced, I fear.”
“I don’t believe you fer a second, but no matter. We still ’ave to collect Rosie.” Maggie braced herself for some truly epic fussing.
“Your lordship!” A middy, covered in mud and with the sleeve of his uniform hanging off his wrist, appeared in the hatch from the navigation gondola. “Captain says to tell you up ship in five minutes, sir.”
“No!” Maggie shouted. “We have to go find Rosie!”
“I’m sorry, darling.” Her ladyship looked close to tears. “You were brilliant and brave to send Rosie and the diamonds off the ship to safety, but I’m very much afraid we must leave them behind in order to save ourselves.”
“Please, yer ladyship.” Lizzie, reduced to begging? Maggie could hardly credit it. “It won’t take but a moment. We saw where the hatbox went down, not a mile away, past that big pointy rock. It’s near dawn—she’ll be callin’ for us. We c’n find her in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”
“Captain says you ent got one shake,” the middy observed from the hatchway, not without sympathy.
“Thank you, Mr. Colley, that will do,” the earl told him. “Tell the captain we are ready to lift.”
“We aren’t!” Maggie shrieked.
“Maggie, the diamonds are not worth the lives at stake here,” the countess said desp
erately, trying to put her arms around her.
“I don’t care about the bloody diamonds,” she screamed, yanking herself out of reach and practically standing on her toes like a rooster about to attack. “I care about Rosie! We’re a flock!”
“You don’t even know if the Lady is dead and you’re going to leave her? What kind of people are you?” Lizzie demanded.
“Dear heaven, Davina. This is no time for argument. Mr. Andersen, take the young ladies to their cabin and lock them in. We have no time to waste.”
“No!” Maggie cried, and dodged, but no matter how she struggled, the chief steward had a grip like a manacle.
“You can’t do this!” Lizzie screamed all the way down the corridor, until Mr. Andersen thrust them into their cabin and closed the door on them with inexorable politeness. The lock clicked over.
Lizzie launched herself at the door, kicking and pounding on it, to no avail. She collapsed in a heap at its foot, tears and snot streaming down her face.
If ye can’t get out the door, ye numpty, look for a window.
Snouts’s voice, irritating as it was, came to her out of the depths of memory. Maggie leaped for the porthole.
What luck! “Lizzie!”
A storm of tears was her only answer.
“Lizzie, a guy line!” She shook her sister with rather more violence than usual. “There’s a guy line right outside this porthole. Think we can get out?”
Lizzie lifted her head and wiped her nose with her muddy sleeve. “If we can’t, I’ll die tryin’ before I stay aboard this tub one more minute.”
*
Claire’s stomach clenched so hard the bread and the cheese threatened to come back up.
Ned Mose was this kind girl’s father?
She pretended interest in Nine’s arm while she controlled herself and tried to think what to do. She had been a fool to let Alice’s ingenuous gaze and disarming way of speaking get past her guard. Her admiration for Alice’s talent with mechanics was likely to get her sent straight back to that locked room. Alice was no society belle, trained not to use her mind except to dabble in conversation with possible suitors. Behind that open gaze lay a quick brain that seemed to be always working.
“So I’m thinking, from that white look on your face, that you were one of those rich folks Ned took off the Lady Lucy.”
She could deny it, but the prospect of having to come up with a Banbury tale to explain her presence here was just too exhausting. “Yes, I am. I’ve been locked in a room for two days, being driven nearly mad with anxiety. I have urgent business to attend to.”
“So you said.”
“You may tell him I was here if you like, but by the time you do, I will be long gone. And if you try to restrain me, be assured I am no stranger to violence.”
Alice raised blond brows, scratched her scalp, and pulled off her leather cap. She shook out hair that was a frizzled, curly mess. With a little care it could be beautiful—there was certainly plenty of it. “I don’t see how you’re going to leave, unless you plan to pilot that airship out of here, or take my locomotive tower. In that case, you’d be better walking. A good horse can beat that thing any day. What makes you think I’m going to tell him?”
“Why wouldn’t you? You’re his daughter—you said so yourself.”
“That’s got nothing to do with nothing. I’m my mother’s daughter, too, and you don’t see me working at the honkytonk, do you?”
Ah. So that was what a desert flower was. A street sparrow. A dollymop. A woman forced to make her way using any method she could.
She gazed at Alice, who got up and refilled her teacup. “Just because they have the use of the field don’t mean I agree with what they do. I gotta eat, same as anyone else. And if I say that no killing is to happen during any mooring or lift, then I suppose being his daughter is some advantage. At least he gives me enough credit to indulge me.”
“So …” Claire hardly dared say it. “You do not intend to hand me over to him?”
Alice shrugged. “Not my affair. Pulling a half-drowned girl out of a flood path is my affair, since this is my patch. All this flat, from the nose of the mesa down to Spider Woman, that’s mine. I got no call to interfere with you once you’re on your feet again.”
Hope was an amazing thing. It grew and bloomed even in the most trying and inhospitable environment.
“Thank you for that.”
Alice twinkled at her. “Us girls gotta stick together, or the men will run us over.”
“What is a may-so? And Spider Woman?”
“Mesa. That’s Spaniard for table, because of their flat tops. And Spider Woman, that’s a big old rock spire down at the end, where the wash flattens out. There’s a legend among the Navapai hereabouts that she sits up there on top and spins out the lives of men.”
“I see. And the Navapai?”
“Indians. We rub along all right so long as you don’t try to cheat ’em. They’re like you about automatons—no, I saw you. The Navapai, they think they’re the walking dead.”
Claire began to feel some affinity for these mysterious people. Perhaps they were the desert equivalent of the Esquimaux in the Canadas.
“So, you got an interest in mechanics?” When Claire nodded, she went on eagerly, “Sometimes the pigeon brings papers from the big cities, and I can see what people are inventing. That’s where I got the idea for One way back. This man in New Jersey took a basic household automaton and outfitted it for his cotton mill. Doubled production in a year.”
“One? So Nine means you’ve built nine automatons? Where on earth do you get the parts?”
Alice flushed and looked away. “Here and there. Resolution ain’t much of a town, but traffic does come through.”
“Is that what this place is called? Resolution?”
“Yep. Been here ten years or so. Might not be here ten years from now, though. The floods are starting to get on people’s nerves. Say, maybe you’ve seen this one?”
Claire thought she meant a flood until a scientific magazine was thrust into her hands.
“Andrew Malvern has an article in this issue.” Claire looked up in surprise. How strange to hear that name out here in the middle of nowhere, in those flat Texican accents. “They don’t come often enough, you ask me. He could fill a whole subscription just by himself.” Alice bent to show her the page, and sure enough, there was Andrew’s daguerreotype next to the byline. The article outlined his theories on coal production and how technology could help the railroad industry.
“Are you an admirer of Mr. Malvern?”
Absently, Alice took the magazine from Claire before she could read much more than the first paragraph, held it at arms’ length, and gazed at the picture. “He’s so brilliant. And his writing is so entertaining. I wonder if he really looks like this. Before I die I’ve determined to meet him. Haven’t figured out how yet, but I will.”
“How very strange life can be. Alice, I have been Mr. Malvern’s laboratory assistant these past two months. We worked on that very project, with the coal.”
Alice lifted her head and goggled at her as if she’d just announced she was the queen herself in disguise, come for a visit. “You?”
“The very same. Along with a young man named Tigg, who is part and parcel of my urgent business.”
Alice shook herself, much in the manner of a dog climbing out of a lake soaking wet. “Well, I never. His assistant, you say. Boy, what wouldn’t I give …” She glanced through the cabin’s two windows. “Dawn’s a few hours away. What business is it that’s so urgent you can’t catch a few hours’ shut-eye?”
“I must rescue a friend who is marooned some distance to the east of here.”
“Marooned? Is it this boy? Is he injured and can’t walk into town?”
“It’s possible. Thank you for rescuing me. But I really must set out.”
“I’ll come with you. I know the terrain and you don’t.”
“Thank you, but—”
Alice
held up a hand, as if to stop her refusal. “Shh. Someone’s coming.”
They’d discovered she was gone. And what more logical place to look than downriver for a dead body, or at the shack for a live one?
“Alice—I must hide.”
Frantically, she cast around the one-room cabin for somewhere to conceal herself. The stove, the chairs, the cupboards, the automaton—those were the sole contents of the shabby room.
“Here.” Alice snatched up her corselet, holster, and damp skirt, pushed them into her hands, and tilted a ladder against the wall. “Loft.”
As someone pounded on the door, Claire practically leaped upward and found herself in a crawl space barely high enough to fit a couple of crates and a strongbox. She rolled over them and lay face down on boards that were placed carelessly enough to give her a limited view of the room below. Unfortunately, anyone looking up could also see her white corset cover in the spaces between the boards.
Perhaps they would not look up.
Alice tossed the tea things in a metal washbasin and answered the door. “Pa. What brings you out here at this time of night?”
He pushed two or three of his crew into the room and slammed the door.
“I been out picking and Nine found—”
“Quiet, girl. I need to think.”
“Fine. You do that. Tea?”
One of the pirates looked hopeful, but was crushed by a glare from Mose. Alice filled the basin from a metal spigot poking out of the rear wall, and washed up the tea things as if her father and his temper were a common sight in her little home in the middle of the night.
Perhaps they were.
“So here’s where we are,” Mose said abruptly, apparently having had enough time to think. “I got the Dunsmuirs up for ransom, and a cache of missing jewels. The Stalwart Lass is crippled, maybe for good, but I got another ship we can strip for parts.”
Lying prone some three feet above his head, Claire pressed her lips together. We’ll see about that.
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