“Mrs. Singh,” the captain said mildly, “if I did not know better, I would suspect that your head had been turned.”
Arabella turned away quickly, lest the captain see the blush she could feel springing to her cheeks. It is but the heat, she told herself. “This suspicion is beneath you,” she said.
“I apologize,” he said, and placed his hands on her shoulders.
She reached across herself and laid her right hand on his left. The long, strong fingers were dry and warm beneath hers. She took a deep breath to settle herself, then let it out and turned back to him. “I cannot deny that I find Captain Fox agreeable. But do not believe this interferes with a clear-eyed assessment of his merits as a commander. I have experience of him; you do not. Furthermore, though I have given the matter much thought, I have been unable to conceive of any other means by which intelligence may be reliably communicated from the ship-yard to here.”
“Nor have I,” the captain admitted. “Yet I still find myself reluctant in the extreme to add even one more person to those whom we must trust, never mind two. Each additional person privy to a secret is another hatch which, if not properly battened, may leak information in any storm.” He squeezed her shoulder, then released it and stepped back to Arabella’s side, the two of them looking across the pond together once again. “Keeping a secret, I have found, is terribly wearing. The creation of plausible fictions, the constant struggle to remember what one has told to whom, the eternal vigilance over one’s every word and indeed thought…”
“I have experience in keeping secrets,” Arabella interrupted softly.
That simple reminder stopped his words completely.
“How long did it take you, sir,” she continued, already knowing the answer, “to discern that your captain’s ‘boy’ was, in fact, nothing of the sort? Or did I manage to conceal that from you until Gowse removed my shirt?”
“You … you did indeed,” he said, his voice low and—for perhaps the first time she could recall—somewhat abashed.
“The truth of our marriage, or lack thereof, has also remained a secret known only to yourself.”
“You have made your point, Mrs. Singh,” he replied, with a semblance of his usual imperturbability, which brought a silent smile to Arabella’s lips. He turned to face her, and she faced him as well. “But I must remind you that your … previous secret was maintained only because you told no one. If you had entrusted the fact of your sex to Gowse, or Mills, or even myself, earlier in the voyage, how long do you suppose it would have remained unknown to any one else?”
“A fair point,” she acknowledged. “But we must have Brindle, or we can gain no intelligence from Mills. It seems to me that the great value of this arrangement is worth the additional risk of bringing Fox in as well. And time is of the essence.”
“Indeed,” he sighed. “Very well. But I will be the one to approach Brindle; my authority as captain may persuade him not to share what he knows with any one, even Captain Fox.”
“We must at least make the attempt,” Arabella acknowledged, though she doubted—and she suspected Captain Singh did as well—that the request would make any difference.
Captain Singh folded his arms upon his chest. “Now … how are we to arrange for Mills to be transferred to the ship-yard?”
“I have an idea. But you may not care for it.…”
* * *
“Thank you for agreeing to see me at this early hour,” Arabella said to Lady Corey. The great lady was still in her dressing-gown, with her Venusian servant Aglanawamna bustling about laying out her morning clothes.
“Any thing for you, dear child. What is the matter?”
“It is about Mills, one of the topmen from Touchstone. You may recall him?”
“Oh yes … dear Mr. Mills,” Lady Corey replied, almost convincingly.
“I knew him aboard Diana as well,” Arabella continued undeterred. “He was very helpful to me there, especially during the mutiny. Now it is he who needs help, and you are the only one who can give it.”
“How so?”
“It is his lungs, the poor man. The French have him working in the furnace-house, which—as I am certain you are aware—is a place whose air is terribly hot and frighteningly foul.”
“It could scarcely be worse than the rest of this horrid planet.”
Arabella’s eyes darted to Aglanawamna, who continued smoothing out Lady Corey’s dress on the bed with apparent equanimity. She did not know how much English the Venusian comprehended, but suspected the servant understood more than she—or perhaps he—let on. “It is worse,” Arabella insisted, “considerably so, and Mills’s lungs cannot withstand the strain.”
“I am terribly sorry to hear that, but what help can I provide?”
“I hope that you may be willing to impose upon your new friend Mr. Fulton to have him transferred to the ship-yard. He is an experienced boat-builder—he worked for the Portuguese in Africa—and I am certain that the comparatively salubrious sea air at the ship-yard will do his poor lungs a world of good.”
“Mr. Fulton is, in truth, no one’s friend but his own,” Lady Corey sniffed, “but he certainly does have sufficient influence with Fouché to effect such a transfer.” She paused, considering. “I believe I may be able to make the request in such a way that he will see it as being to his advantage to comply. He desires my good favors, as I believe I have told you.”
“You have.”
Lady Corey dismissed with a brusque gesture the hat Aglanawamna was presenting to her. “Oh no, not that ratty old thing. I could not bear to wear it even one more day. Take it away. Um, no chapeau!”
Now Aglanawamna did react, a long slow blink of her broad shining eyes which demonstrated, Arabella had come to understand, annoyance and impatience.
“Wanagaagna lo gugnula,” Arabella muttered under her breath to the servant. It was, Mills had learned, a thing that Wagala parents said when their children misbehaved, and meant something along the lines of “be patient with them.”
Aglanawamna’s eyes snapped open in surprise, fixing themselves upon Arabella’s; she saw her own face doubly reflected in the wide black pupils.
“Ugugla wom guluk,” Arabella said, enunciating carefully: I am a friend. It was a phrase she had rehearsed many times with Mills, but never before spoken to a Venusian. She hoped it was appropriate in this circumstance.
“Gumum,” the Venusian replied, her throat-sac working. It was a statement of acknowledgement—not agreement, exactly, but at least a recognition of the offer. It was a start.
“What on Earth are you gurgling there?” Lady Corey sputtered.
“Just a few pleasantries I have picked up,” Arabella replied mildly. “Venusians are people, you know, just as Earthlings and Martians are, and deserve our respect. These servants are as much under Napoleon’s yoke here as we.”
“Humph,” Lady Corey scoffed. “As near as I can tell, they are as happy to work for that murderer Fouché as for me. And, unlike me, they are free to come and go as they please.”
Another long slow blink at that, and Arabella reflected on what she knew of the relations between the Wagala slaves and the Gowanna slavers. “I would not be so certain of that. In any case, would you please make that request of Mr. Fulton? I would be ever so grateful on Mills’s behalf.”
“Of course, my dear. Any thing for you.” She turned back to Aglanawamna, regarded the replacement hat she was presenting, and seemed about to snap something disparaging … then paused, collected herself, and said with some dignity, “Un other chapeau, s’il vous plait.”
As Arabella departed, Aglanawamna raised two fingers to her lips. It was a gesture Arabella did not understand, but she thought—she hoped—it was a positive sign.
* * *
Arabella reported to Captain Singh that she had made the request of Lady Corey without revealing any thing of their secret plans; the captain, in turn, told her that he had approached Brindle about using his drumming skills to communicate
with Mills at the ship-yard, and had impressed upon him the importance of keeping the content of those communications secret even from his own captain. “Brindle expressed enthusiasm at the prospect of participating in such an important undertaking,” the captain said, “and promised to exercise discretion—though I fear that, at the critical moment, his enthusiasm may outweigh his discretion.”
“That is, I fear, a risk that we must take.”
“Indeed.” He blew out a breath through his nose. “In any case, we have done all we may for the moment … now we can only wait for Mills’s transfer to occur.”
* * *
That wait lasted three days—three days full of anticipation, anxiety, and doubt. As Captain Singh had warned, keeping a secret was terribly wearing, even more so when several people already knew part of it. Arabella could barely bring herself to converse with Lady Corey, Fox, or indeed any of the Touchstones, so filled with concern was she over letting some bit of information slip to the wrong person. Yet she knew she could not separate herself from them completely; this would arouse too much suspicion. So she forced herself to continue her rounds of visits and assistance with as little change as possible.
In this she succeeded only partially. Several times Captain Fox or Lady Corey expressed solicitous concern over her drawn expression and the dark circles beneath her eyes; to these entreaties she responded with sincere thanks and a reassurance—not entirely untrue—that her low mood was due to the men’s continuing abuse at the hands of Fouché.
The wait ended one evening, in the midst of a language lesson with Mills. The two of them were conferring over the differences in the imperative between Gowanna and Wagala. The slaves’ language indicated commands with a suffix, derived from the second person pronoun, while in the slavers’ language, as far as Arabella could tell, commands had the same grammatical form as the ordinary third person present indicative but with an added stress on the final syllable. Mills, whose command of both languages was definitely superior to hers, lacked the formal terminology to discuss these fine distinctions, which made it somewhat difficult to be certain they agreed.
Their intense colloquy was interrupted by the sound of stamping boots upon the rough wood of the barracks floor. Arabella looked up to see a detachment of four of Fouché’s personal platoon—striding in absolute unison, their uniforms crisp and boots highly polished—marching directly toward her. Her heart leapt into her mouth, but before she could utter a word the leader of the group pointed at Mills. “You,” he said in heavily accented English, “come with us.”
Mills gave Arabella a look full of anxiety as he stood and meekly presented himself to the French soldiers, who immediately surrounded him and began marching him to the door.
“D’ou prenez-vous lui?” Arabella asked—where are you taking him?—recognizing even as she did that, with her mind currently occupied by Venusian languages, she was mangling the French badly.
“Au chantier aérienne,” the leader sneered without turning his head. To the aerial ship-yard.
Arabella’s sentiments at that moment were so strongly mixed—fading agitation that she might be the French soldiers’ object, satisfaction that her request to Lady Corey had borne fruit, fear that their scheme of espionage might yet be found out, anticipation of what they might learn, concern that she might never see dear Mills again, and many others—that she could not frame a reply, and was reduced to girlishly wringing her hands together at her chin, her sweat-soaked handkerchief twisted between them.
But Mills, bless his courage, managed a smile and a wink over his shoulder as he was led away.
17
CONSPIRACY
Several more days passed in anxious anticipation, until to Arabella’s surprise the silence was broken from an unexpected quarter.
“Mrs. Singh,” Fox said one afternoon with a courteous bow as they encountered one another in the street.
“Captain Fox,” she acknowledged neutrally.
“I have recently received some … curious intelligence from my man Brindle, which I believe may interest you. Would you care to discuss it over tea?”
She would, she would very much indeed, and shortly thereafter they found themselves ensconced over a pot of dreadful tea in the back room of Fox’s club. They were alone, save for a bored young Venusian who provided a fitful artificial breeze by means of a large fan of dried leaves, and to prevent eavesdropping they seated themselves far from him and kept their voices extremely low.
“I came across Brindle just this morning,” Fox said, “behind the necessary-house at the barracks, where he stood with eyes closed and a captivated expression on his face, as though enraptured by some distant piece of music. But, even if he were of a musical bent, which he has never before shown himself to be, there was no music to be heard—only the usual hammering from the ship-yard that lies some miles distant across the swamp.”
“I know of it,” Arabella put in impatiently.
“Naturally I inquired of him to what he might be listening. Imagine my surprise when he started as though struck from behind! I swear that he jumped a good three feet in the air.”
“What was the matter?”
“Well, he was so startled by my interruption that it was some minutes until I could extract a coherent answer from him, and for some reason I found myself forced to exert my full persuasive powers before learning the full story. It seems that the Africans, or certain tribes among them, employ a code consisting of drum-beats…”
“Please do come to the point!” she interrupted.
“Mrs. Singh!” he said, raising his tea-cup and his eyebrows. “This is one of the most extraordinary things which has come to pass in weeks in this benighted prison-camp, and I intend to milk it to the greatest possible conversational extent.”
In reply she fixed him with her steeliest glare.
“Oh, very well,” he sighed. “If you insist on taking all of the pleasure out of it.”
“I do insist,” she hissed. It was a struggle to keep her voice low and conversational.
Again he sighed. “In brief, then. Your friend Mills, who as you may know was recently transferred to the ship-yard, was sending a message to Brindle by means of drumming!”
“I know! What was the content of this communication?”
Fox’s attitude, up to that point rather teasing and flirtatious, suddenly became serious. “As I suspected,” he said. “You have been involved all along.”
At once Arabella realized to her shame that she had fallen into a trap. “I, I have no idea to what you might refer,” she stammered.
Fox’s mien was now as hard as it had been just before the attack upon Fleur de Lys. “Do not pretend innocence, Mrs. Singh. I am quite aware of the fact that you and Mills have been making a study of the Venusian language for these last few weeks, and that his transfer to the ship-yard—a quite unprecedented transfer—was the result of a request from Lady Corey to the American Mr. Fulton. The only point of commonality between Mills and Lady Corey is yourself, and the obvious conclusion is that you have engineered this transfer for the express purpose of obtaining some information from the Venusians at the ship-yard.” He leaned toward her across the tea-set now, his eyes burning into hers, and spoke low and very intently. “You have deprived me of one of my people, Mrs. Singh—possibly putting him in grave danger—and attempted to suborn another, all without consulting me. And despite the fact that we are guests of dear Monsieur Napoleon—and although I have great respect for you, and your husband—I am still the captain of my crew and I will no longer brook such interference.” He sat back and took up his tea-cup, abruptly genial again … at least, to all appearance. “So, my dear Mrs. Singh. Do you wish to know what news has made its way from the ship-yard to Brindle’s ears, or do you not?”
“I…” She paused, swallowed. “I do.”
“Then you will inform me of your larger plan—for I know you well, after all these months, and I know that you do have a larger plan—and, if I agree with it,
I will instruct my man Brindle to cooperate with you. Otherwise, you must do without him.”
Arabella covered her consternation by pouring herself another cup of tea—though, to her dismay, her hand shook sufficiently that the tea-pot lid rattled—as she considered her options. Captain Singh would be furious if she told Fox any thing without consulting him first. Yet she knew and trusted Fox; his perspicacity in deducing the facts of the situation provided further confirmation of his powers of mind and observation; and his hatred of Napoleon would certainly guarantee his whole-hearted cooperation in any scheme of espionage.
And, she was forced to admit to herself, inviting Fox into their conspiracy would require her to spend more time with him … which did not displease her in the least.
“I am waiting,” Fox said.
“It is a … delicate situation.”
“I am certain that it is.”
Arabella glanced over at the young Venusian, who sat more than fifteen feet away and appeared to be nearly dozing as he lazily wafted the fan. Even so, she leaned in close to Fox and spoke very low as she explained the whole matter: Captain Singh’s secret mission, Fulton and the armored airship, how Arabella had engineered Mills’s transfer to the ship-yard, and Brindle’s role in the affair. “Lady Corey has no knowledge of any of this,” she emphasized. “She believes the transfer was done for Mills’s health, and under no circumstances may she or any one else learn any of the true details.”
“I understand,” Fox replied in an equally low tone. “You may rest assured that my discretion in this matter will be absolute.” A small smile quirked one corner of his mouth. “I must confess myself pleased and honored that you have chosen to include me in your scheme.”
Once again Arabella was required to take a sip of tea to hide her reaction. But she could not suppress her own smile as she set the tea-cup down. “Now, what was the content of Mills’s communication to Brindle?”
“He has arrived safely at the ship-yard and has been put to work at the rope-walk. It is wearisome work, and offers few chances for gathering intelligence, but he hopes to demonstrate his skills at ship-building and be promoted to a position of greater opportunity soon.”
Arabella and the Battle of Venus Page 23