“I guess it makes you feel big to insult a woman who isn’t here to defend herself,” I said. “Especially since if she were here, she’d make you look like a monkey—again.”
“I won’t—” he started, but I cut him off.
“Fuck you, Harding. Fuck you up the ass. That’s how it’s usually done in the Royal Navy, isn’t it? What are the three enduring traditions of the service again? Oh, yeah, I remember: rum, sodomy, and the lash. Which one’s your favorite?”
There was a moment of stunned silence on the bridge. Harding stood with his mouth open, face turning red, and then I heard a nervous snicker from one of the trimsmen behind me.
“You’re in a bad spot, Harding,” I said. “If we come back, you and I might have to have a real serious conversation you won’t like. If we don’t come back, then no matter how good an excuse you come up with, Lord Chillingham is going to flay the skin from your bones. I guess you’re going to have to decide which one of us you’re more afraid of.”
There I was, using Chillingham as a boogey man again. He was becoming so useful in the role I was starting to feel gratitude toward him for being such an over-the-top son of a bitch. I left the bridge while Gordon wasted his time sputtering an apology to Harding.
I found Gabrielle in her cabin. She sat on her bunk, dressed in a green-grey riding habit, with her gear packed and piled neatly at her feet. I noticed her hands clasped tightly in her lap and her face paler than usual.
“What’s wrong, Gabi?”
“I am frightened. The weather . . . it is not good for the flyer, is it? For the trim? If the ship tilts too far to one side, the lifting panels cannot compensate, because they will line up with each other and then they lose all their lift and we fall.”
I couldn’t exactly reassure her on that point. Flying by jet was safer than driving a car, but they didn’t have either of those here. I didn’t know much about the safety record of liftwood flyers. I felt a shudder of anxiety myself, but it was submerged in the wave of surprise I felt at Gabrielle’s fear. She showed so few emotions it was easy to fall into thinking she was immune to them, but fear was a basic animal instinct.
She cried out as the porthole flashed white, flooding the room with light. She clamped her hands over her ears with the crack of thunder immediately following it, her face wrinkled up and tears streaming from her eyes.
One long step took me across the little cabin. I sat down next to her and put my arms around her, and she clung to me as if to a life preserver at sea.
“I do not like the lightning,” she explained in a small voice, trying to choke back the panic. “Or the thunder. It hurts my ears.”
“Yeah, it sucks.”
“It sucks?”
“That means it’s bad.”
She nodded her agreement against my chest.
“Did my pistol shooting hurt your ears yesterday?” I asked, just to make conversation and divert her mind.
“Oui. All my life the loud noises bother me, more so than others. So I could not sleep while you shoot. But it was good watching you. You are funny the way you shoot.”
“I’m here all week.”
She lifted her head and looked at me, confusion momentarily replacing the fear.
“Sometimes the things you say—I understand the words but not the sentences.”
“Yeah, I get that a lot, mostly from my students. Listen, I kind of kicked a hornet’s nest up on the bridge a little while ago. Gordon’s going to be pissed—angry—at me and he may try to take it out on you, maybe try to leave you behind.”
“We have the agreement. He is not an honorable man?”
“He’s a frightened man. To be honest, I don’t know what sort of guy he is under all the fear.”
“You need to find this thing out, Jack,” she said, concern for me momentarily trumping her own fear. “So much for you now depends on him. For me as well, but I still have information he needs which I have not shared.”
“Good girl. I figured, but it’s good to be sure. He needs me as a translator with the Turks and maybe as bait. Our plan doesn’t use me for that, but it’s always there as a back-up.”
She was right about Gordon. What did I really know about him? He was angry a lot, probably as a cover for his fear. He drank for the same reason, but he’d stopped, and that showed something. What sort of man was he underneath?
Lighting flashed outside the porthole, and Gabrielle jumped again.
“Tell me something about this Tesla guy I don’t already know,” I said, just to get her talking and take her mind off the storm. “Tell me about his folks, his family.”
“He . . . his father was an orthodox priest, well-educated and très charismatique. It is said he had many affairs of the heart outside of his marriage.”
“No vows of celibacy in the orthodox church, huh?”
“Non. Priests marry and raise families, the same as the Protestants. His wife, Tesla’s mother, was the daughter of a priest herself, but she was uneducated, unable to read. She memorized many of the Serbian epic poems and recited them to Nikola as he grew.”
“Are they still alive?”
“Non, both dead. His father died eight years ago. His mother died six years ago, when he lived in France. He was grief-stricken at her loss, so much he suffered the physical collapse. Strange. He broke the ties with his family ten years ago, and yet he was so upset at the deaths of his parents. This is odd, don’t you think?”
“People are strange, Gabi, no getting around it. Is there a woman in his life?”
“He had three sisters, all married, but they died in an outbreak of typhus not long after his mother died.”
She started telling me where they had lived, what their husbands had done for a living, how many kids they had had, but I shook my head.
“Oh, a woman. You mean the romance? Non, he is—what is the word you used?—celibate. He says the celibacy keeps his head clear.”
“A lot of nutcases think that.”
“Nut case?” she asked and then nodded. “Ah, you mean the crazy person. But is he crazy because he has the different ideas?”
“No, Gabi. He’s crazy because he sends clockwork mechanical spiders and assassins high on hashish to kill people who disagree with him. I’ve met him. Odd guy.”
“I have only seen photographs of him. Do you think he misses his sisters?”
I blinked at the conversational sharp right turn, but before I could answer there was a loud pounding on the door.
“Fargo, are you in there?” Gordon shouted from the corridor.
“There’s trouble,” I told Gabrielle and then raised my voice to answer him. “Yeah, I’m in here. Come on in.”
“Is Mademoiselle Courbiere with you?” he shouted.
“Oui, I am here,” she answered.
“May I come in?” he shouted.
I couldn’t help but smile. There he was, steaming mad out in the corridor, and still impeccably polite, asking permission from the lady to enter her quarters, and asking it at the top of his lungs.
“Oui, you may enter.”
“Are you decent?” he shouted.
My grin got bigger as Gabrielle frowned in confusion.
“I believe so, but sometimes I do not think everyone agrees,” she called back.
“He means are we dressed,” I explained.
“Ah! We have on the clothes,” she called out.
There was a moment of silence, and then Gordon opened the door and stepped in, red-faced with anger or embarrassment or both. He made a little bow to Gabrielle before turning on me.
“Thank you, Mademoiselle. You are most kind. Fargo, what the bloody hell were you thinking, insulting Harding like that on the bridge? Don’t you know we need his help to carry this off?”
“Relax, Gordon. Have a seat.”
“I will not relax, and I prefer to stand when dressing someone down.”
Gabrielle turned to me, confused again.
“This ‘dressing down,’ it has
again to do with the decency? And why did you insult Captain Harding?”
“Yes, we’d both like to know that,” Gordon said.
“So sit down and I’ll tell you.”
He stood fuming for a few more seconds, but when I showed no sign of budging he looked around the tiny cabin, pulled the single straight-backed chair out from the writing desk, and sat facing us. I turned to Gabrielle first.
“Harding insulted you. I didn’t like it, but that’s not the reason I insulted him.”
I turned to Gordon.
“I insulted him because we need his support and cooperation, and we were not going to get it any other way.”
“Just how, in that twisted, convoluted brain of yours, did you imagine this would increase his chances of helping us?”
“He insulted me?” Gabrielle said, curious rather than angered. “What did he say?”
“He called you a trollop. You aren’t a trollop.”
“Non, certainly not. A trollop is a woman promiscuous, or who exchanges sexual favors for money, neither of which am I. You were right to disagree with him. And how did you insult him?”
I told her.
She started laughing, harder than I’d ever seen her laugh. She covered her mouth with her hands and leaned back against the wall behind the bunk, laughing so hard tears came to her eyes. Lightning flashed outside the cabin and thunder shook Intrepid, and for a moment she froze, eyes wider, and then she started laughing again, even harder than before, laughing at the lightning too, or her fear of it. I laughed as well, and after a moment Gordon’s anger melted away and he joined us.
“Oh God!” he said as our laughter began to subside. “Rum, sodomy, and the lash? I don’t believe I’ll ever forget that.”
“I can’t claim it. A young British Army officer, alive right now, so I won’t tell you his name, will go on to become First Lord of the Admiralty and eventually Prime Minister, at least in my world. He’ll say it. He had a way with words.”
“I dare say. But really, Fargo, what were you thinking?”
“Yes, Jack,” Gabrielle said. “Harding is not a very interesting man, but his good feelings are important to us, oui?”
“Non, cheri. His good feelings are meaningless. What is important is his cooperation. Gordon, I as much as threatened to kill him if I got back from this, and I did it in such a way that everyone on the ship is going to hear about it.”
“Precisely, old man. That’s rather the point.”
“Yeah. So what happens if we don’t come back? People will say Harding sabotaged the mission to keep me from making good on my threat. They will whisper that, whether it’s true or not, and Chillingham will hear the whispers. That’s what I meant when I asked him who he was more afraid of, me or Chillingham. Trust me, Harding’s not afraid of me.”
Gordon rubbed his chin and scowled.
“Still too damned much of a gamble. More flies with honey than vinegar, that sort of thing. You need to look before you leap, Fargo, or better yet leave all this sort of thing to me. You’re just the translator. It would be best if you remembered that.”
“This Lord Chillingham, he is a very bad man,” Gabrielle said, reasserting her right to change the subject.
“You’ve met him?” I asked.
“No, but Renfrew has told me enough.”
“Interesting,” I said. “So we’re all in agreement on that point, including the royal family.”
“Not so much the queen, from what I understand,” Gordon said. “Not that she likes him—too aristocratic for her tastes, I would imagine. But she’s not willing to move against him.”
“He’s too aristocratic for my tastes,” I said, “but a queen’s? That’s a little hard to get my head around.”
Gordon leaned forward, and for the first time I saw a hint of fire in him, other than just anger.
“You have to understand, Fargo, the old aristocracy, people like Chillingham who own probably four-fifths of the land in England, look down on the royal family. Really they do. They see them as a pack of nouveaux-riches German bog-runners, Johnny-come-latelys the lot of them. To Chillingham’s way of thinking, when his family won its coat of arms, the queen’s family was still cutting peat on Luneburg Heath, and they have no business telling proper Englishmen how to run their country. But for all that, the queen won’t stand up to him.”
“What can she do, anyway?” I asked.
“The one real power the monarchy retains: create lords. She could flood the House of Lords with her own people, but she won’t. God knows how the old aristocracy would react, and she’s not willing to chance it.”
“Her son will,” Gabrielle said.
Gordon nodded but seemed to grow angrier as he did so.
“Yes, the Prince of Wales will, once he’s king and assuming he lives that long. Fargo, he’s the one man in Europe with the guts and brains to stand up to Chillingham and perhaps come out on top, and you’ve decided to roger his mistress! What in God’s name were you thinking?”
“I am not Renfrew’s mistress!” Gabrielle exclaimed. “We are friends, sometimes we are allies, but not lovers. He is currently enamored of the Countess Warwick, n’est pas? And who is this Roger?”
Hearing those words from Gabrielle made me feel light in the chest, but that made no sense. Our relationship was based on mutual physical attraction without promise, or even prospect, of a deeper emotional commitment from either of us. Friends with benefits, we’d say in my time. Gabrielle couldn’t understand falling in love, let alone do it, and as for me, I didn’t want to even think about that, or where this entire quest was inevitably headed. So her words shouldn’t have mattered.
But they did.
When I told her people were strange, I meant it, present company included.
TWENTY-THREE
October 8/9, 1888,
Aboard Her Majesty’s Aerial Ship Intrepid,
Aloft over Turkish Bosnia
Harding might have been an asshole, but he was a righteous navigator. He dropped us right down through the storm into the valley of the Drina River. The river’s surface, visible in the glare of the bow searchlight, danced in angry whitecaps. Wind gusts made Intrepid shudder and sideslip, and sheets of rain slammed into the glass windows of the bridge.
As bad as it was down here, it was certainly worse aloft, which is why Harding brought Intrepid down as soon as he did. Another reason was the lightning, crackling and exploding all along the banks to either side, as ferocious a display as I’d ever seen in my life. Intrepid was struck three times, but as soon as Harding had seen the water, he had dropped the ship’s ground cable and raised its lightning masts. All three strikes had grounded into the river below us.
Gordon and I declared an uneasy truce and returned to the wheelhouse as we approached our landing area. It looked like hell out there.
“How are you going to return in all this?” Gordon asked. “You can’t go up into those thunderheads, surely.”
“We’ll follow the river back north,” Harding answered. “It flows into the Sava near the Austrian frontier. With luck we will have a break in the weather and can make the run to Ujvidék from there. It’s only fifty miles. If the weather doesn’t break, we’ll have to follow the Sava west to Zagreb.”
That would mean not being back at Ujvidék by morning, possibly alerting Tesla’s informants to the threat, but there was no point in belaboring the obvious.
“We’re going to have to change the plan anyway,” I said. “We were going to camp in a meadow down there while Gordon and I contact the Turks in Višegràd. That won’t work in this weather.”
“What’s wrong, Fargo. Don’t fancy getting your dainty feet wet?” Harding asked.
“The plan made sense because there are no villages down there in the meadows. They’re all up in the foothills, so not much chance of anyone stumbling across us at night.”
“And?” he demanded.
“And there’s a reason there are no villages on the meadows. It’s th
e same reason they call those meadows ‘flood plains.’ With this rain, by morning there’s going to be a couple feet of water over all that ground and anything not tied down is going to be twenty miles downriver. And no, I don’t fancy getting that wet.”
Harding scanned the riverbank for a while and scowled, trying to come up, I imagined, with a good reason not to agree with me. But facts were facts.
“Very well. If we are going to drop you closer, we may as well take you to the bloody city gates. Mr. Jenkins, take us down to wave-top level, if you please.”
“Wave-top level, aye, aye, sir.” Jenkins replied. “Trimsman, one per cent negative buoyancy.”
“In this weather any sensible person will be indoors, and the lunatics may think we’re a riverboat,” Harding added and glared at me, daring me to disagree. I returned his look until he turned away.
“Captain Gordon, I’ll let the others know about the change in plans,” I said.
“Very well. I will join you when we arrive.”
I left the bridge into the driving rain, slid down the ladder to the superstructure level and then down the adjoining ladder to the main deck. One of the naval ratings had shown me how, feet on the outside of the handrail using friction to slow me, and I was getting pretty good at it. I opened the hatch into the superstructure just abeam of the midship port gun mount and ducked out of the rain.
The group was assembled in the crew’s mess, with the tables pushed against the walls to make room. I looked them over and shook my head. They were probably all in civilian clothes, but nobody seemed to think about their overcoats. All twenty Bavarians wore identical field gray greatcoats while the twelve Marines wore identical blue-gray coats. Von Schtecker was chatting with Gabrielle, but he bowed to her and crossed the room to meet me.
“We are ready,” he announced. “We should be nearing the landing ground, ja?”
“Yeah. Slight change of plans: Intrepid is taking us right into Višegràd.”
“Sehr gut. Bad weather for marching, even though the men are well-equipped.”
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