In The Service Of The Queen (The Gunsmith Book 1)

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In The Service Of The Queen (The Gunsmith Book 1) Page 7

by C. K. Crigger


  “If you’re afraid to so much as lay a finger on this gun, you shouldn’t have made the commitment. It’s not fair to Doc if you don’t mean to do your finest work,” he said.

  “I’m not afraid exactly,” I said. His words stung. Where had he gotten the impression I meant to shirk the job? Just because I felt a certain reluctance at this moment, didn’t mean I wouldn’t give it my best shot when I felt ready. “I just don’t think I can handle any more strange happenings so soon after yesterday. I need a day or two.”

  “You mean you’re still getting vibes off it?” He said “vibes” like a Sixties dirty word.

  “There’s no doubt in my mind something is going to happen, Dad.

  The only thing I don’t know is the scope. Whether the—the tour will last for minutes or days. I do know that with my first touch, unless I can figure out how to power-down, I’ll be off.

  “I’ve never had as strong a feeling from any of the other guns, like a warning of how intense the situation is going to be. Not even from Beth’s Sharps. Now do you understand why I’m a little hesitant about starting anything? I’d like to pick the time. A time of my own choosing.”

  “Do you have to follow the power? Can’t you say no?”

  “For goodness sakes, don’t you think I’ve tried?” I said. "This isn’t always the most fun I’ve ever had after all. And I did manage to put a damper on a couple of spells when you were so sick. But the second I let my guard down, the power just takes me. I simply don’t know enough about the magic yet. I’m not as strong a mage as Mother was. I can’t turn tornadoes. All I’m able to do is butt in on other peoples’

  lives.”

  “I’d think people are the hardest problem of all. Maybe even harder than weather.” It appeared he could see my rather obvious bitterness over this fact.

  I believe he meant that to be a comfort, choosing his words carefully so as not to hurt. Wisely, he dropped the subject and went back to his rocker for a nap.

  I felt leery of working with the Sharps again, so during the afternoon I finished with the Springfield and called the owner. He assured me he’d be in to pick it up first thing in the morning. “Like a Christmas present,” he said. “As good as new.”

  At least one person got some joy out of the day.

  There was sleet during the night, and a major traffic accident at our intersection that sent a car sliding to within inches of our front door.

  Emergency Services carted the two people they pried out of the wreckage off to Sacred Heart. The next morning, radio announcers reported similar happenings all over town and I wondered if Caleb was double-shifting over at the hospital. If he was, I thought this might be a good opportunity for me to examine the blunderbuss without any distractions. Consequently, as soon as my Springfield man picked up his gun and paid, I closed the shop.

  Scott, more dutiful than I, kept his retail store open regardless of the weather, so I shut the double door separating our businesses and hung out an “OTL” sign. I was alone since Dad had stayed upstairs this morning. He was tired, I think, from his busy day yesterday and his broken sleep last night. He didn’t deny my accusation of overdoing.

  All the privacy in the world doesn’t help a reluctant will. I realized this simple truth after I cleared away the floor clamp the Springfield had been in, cleaned all my tools and did an inventory on the chemical supply. I had simply put the confrontation off for a bit.

  Dad was right. I knew darn good and well I was afraid of the blunderbuss, and if I ever had a chance of conquering that fear and taking charge of the magic, I might as well get started.

  Stay alert, I reminded myself. There’s nothing you can’t handle.

  I hummed a mantra—a nonsense kind of thing I’d read about in one of my books, meant both to mask a person’s emotional pathways and to focus concentration.

  The mantra worked, too, while I got the gun out of the vault and carried it to a freshly cleaned spot on the workbench. No taint of old magic here. I’d cleaned any residue away with solvents and neutralizers, their acrid odors still sharp in the air. And the mantra still worked while I used a pair of strong forceps to skin away the blanket covering the gun. I hummed while I looked at Richards’ signature on the lock plate of the old blunderbuss through a magnifying glass.

  No problem. I sighed in relief. I can do this.

  And without any sort of transition, but without any kind of disorientation either, I found myself sitting on a hard, little stool, waiting to be called into Queen Charlotte’s antechamber. I knew I was Boothenay Irons off on another magically driven adventure, and more than a little awed by the grandeur of the palace. At the same time, I was Annabelle Winthrop, separate and distinct, set down in the middle of her story.

  As Annabelle, I was completely at home in these surroundings, having spent several years as one of Queen Charlotte’s Ladies of the Court. I felt a keen interest in the changes taking place around me.

  I had been waiting for only a moment, barely long enough to notice all the queen’s hangings and pictures had been taken down from the walls, and her knickknacks removed from the tables. Light spots showed where the tapestries and paintings had hung. A fine layer of dust already filmed the beeswax shine of the furniture.

  “Is she very sad?” I asked Sally when she came to usher me into Queen Charlotte’s chamber. I shook the wrinkles from the front of my gown, wondering why I hadn’t noticed before I left home that the color was far too vivid a green for me to be wearing during this meeting with the queen. Nervous, I retied the ribbon threaded through the lace in the dress’ bodice. I didn’t want to disgrace myself by entering Her Majesty’s presence with less than perfect ribbons.

  “This move must be exceedingly hard for her when she’s made Buckingham her home for so many years,” I said after I’d done my best with my appearance.

  “Aye, my lady. So you’d think, not that she would be confiding in the likes of me. I’d be saying she’s bearing up under the strain, though, if anyone was to ask.”

  Sally, Queen Charlotte’s maid, had never been a gossip. The Ladies of the Queen’s Court knew her to be the queen’s most trusted confidante, with whom Charlotte regularly shared her woes. Woes aplenty, considering King George III’s problems. But no amount of bribery or cajolery had ever managed to pry out of Sally any more than her mistress wanted told, so from her words I deduced the queen may have been relieved to retire from the public’s eye.

  Charlotte’s sitting room looked as if a fast moving storm had blown through, leaving everything at sixes and sevens. I thought the maids must be in the last stage of packing, if they were down to her personal gear. Through the door opening into her bedchamber I saw her old-fashioned gowns strewn over the bed, with gloves, bonnets and shawls draped across every chair and couch in sight. On her Chippendale writing desk, ink spilled over a sheet of ivory vellum. All three of the clocks her husband had given her told a different time without him there to set them properly.

  Two maids dashed back and forth, doing their best to create order in the midst of chaos while the queen issued a series of conflicting orders.

  Lady Emma and Lady Georgina, two of her ladies-in-waiting, presided over an almost empty tea table, telling Charlotte that she must eat in order to keep up her strength.

  It seemed to me that someone who had survived the birth of fifteen children, the madness of her husband, and was now coping with the impending regency of her son, the Prince of Wales, hardly needed that advice. Everyone was talking at once while Charlotte’s little longhaired dog yelped loudly, adding his pennyworth to the turmoil in the room.

  The queen, wearing an old, too-tight, gray gown in which to supervise her servants, offered her hand to shake and smiled as she welcomed me into the midst of this commotion, even as she attempted to hush the dog. “Annabelle, my dear, thank you for coming so promptly at my call. As you can see, I am in the midst of removing to my own dear little home at Windsor.” She interrupted herself to urge me to sit down. “How i
s your sweet sister? Has she recovered from the birth of her child? How long until she returns home to the colonies and her husband?”

  Annemarie? Why did the queen have me here making small talk regarding my sister when the royal summons that demanded my presence today had been worded as if a crisis was at hand?

  “Annemarie is quite recovered,” I said, with a questioning quirk of an eyebrow meant only for the queen’s eyes. “She is on her way home even as we speak.”

  With war between England and the American Colonies once more looming on the horizon, I had hated to part with my twin sister and my new little nephew so soon after her confinement. But if Annemarie hoped to make her way home before hostilities broke out, the choice had been to go now, or face the possibility of waiting for the war to be over. The blockade had nearly put a stop to both commerce and passenger service between England and the colonies. No, I should say States. The United States of America, they called themselves.

  Whatever, it meant I could not even be sure my sister had arrived safe home, and years might pass before I saw her again.

  “So willy-nilly,” I said, finishing a report of Annemarie’s visit,

  “when the opportunity of passage on a neutral ship leaving from Holland presented itself, she packed up and was gone lickety-split.”

  Queen Charlotte’s eyes widened as if in dismay. “Lady Emma,” she said, turning to the other ladies at the table. “Would you be so kind as to call for fresh tea and some cakes? Annabelle must be famished. Lady Georgina, I do hate to ask it of you, but I should be so grateful if you were to take the maids in hand. I’m afraid the packing will never get done if someone doesn’t oversee them every moment.”

  Since this was patently a bald-faced lie, I feared Queen Charlotte was going to have some very unhappy maids to deal with when they found out she had sicced Lady Georgina on them.

  “Of course, Your Majesty,” both women chorused, not having any more choice in the matter than the maids. The ladies went about their assigned tasks with great reluctance, well aware they had been sent off so Charlotte could speak with me in private. Yet once they had moved into the other room, she still did not speak.

  “Is there anything I can do for you, ma’am?” I asked. I wondered at her strange silence, positive she must have called me here for some compelling reason.

  She looked at me with what almost looked like fear in her eyes, although her voice, retaining a faint German accent after nearly forty years spent in England, was quite steady. “Do? Do for me? I—ah…”

  She hesitated, and then, as if suddenly making up her mind, said,

  “Yes, my dear, there is, if you don’t mind. I’d thought…hoped…well, never mind that now, but I wonder if you can tell me how you went about finding a ship bound for America that you considered suitable for Annemarie’s passage. It can’t have been easy, not with the blockade shutting down the ports.”

  Queen Charlotte had done many favors for my family and me, one of them being permission to remove myself from duty as one of her Ladies-of-the-Court to care for my sister when Annemarie came home to bear a child. Being family-oriented herself, with a marked preference for the company of her children and her husband—at his convenience—she understood my own familial obligations.

  Favors, however, even favors from a queen—maybe especially favors from a queen—are not without their own liability. And while I questioned Charlotte’s reason for asking, I couldn’t refuse to reply.

  How complete I made my answer, however, depended on why she wanted to know. My brother’s honor and prior promises were at stake.

  I rubbed my fingers together in the universal, if somewhat less than tonnish, gesture denoting money and bribery, and said, “Not so difficult as you might think, madam. Knowing the right people to contact helps, of course.”

  “Do you know the right people, Annabelle? Personally, I mean?”

  The queen’s nose lifted higher, as if daring me to challenge her right to ask.

  I chewed on the inside of my mouth a second. I trusted her—I really did—to keep a confidence, but… “I know some names, or at least I did.

  I don’t know if the persons are still available. May I ask why you want to know? You’re not planning on removing to the Americas instead of to Windsor, are you, ma’am?”

  She didn’t smile at my little joke. For a moment, and much to my amazement, I thought I’d hit on the reason for her curiosity—and that my perspicuity did not amuse her.

  I greeted the arrival of the refreshments as a welcome diversion.

  Strangely enough, I believe Queen Charlotte did, too. She sat at the table, poured tea and placed a cake on the Wedgwood porcelain plate with her own hands, which she then passed to me.

  “Thank you,” I said, taking the plate although I wasn’t hungry.

  Apparently, we were to maintain the charade that this was a social visit in front Lady Emma and Lady Georgina. I couldn’t imagine why.

  Quietly, I added, “You know you have only to ask, Your Majesty, if there is any way I can be of service to you.”

  How onerous could it be after all? Certainly the queen would not be embarking on a passionate intrigue, not at her age, and I had never heard of her interfering in the rule of the country. If she had ever wanted to press home an agenda of her own, now was not the time. Not with the Prince of Wales about to assume Regency over her husband.

  I didn’t believe she really contemplated escaping the country, but I couldn’t blame her for wanting to think she had the option. If my poor information helped free her mind, then far be it from me to keep this from her.

  “I knew I could count on you, Annabelle,” Charlotte said. “You have always been such a good girl, always so very helpful to me, and such a good friend to my daughter.”

  Rare praise, although I wished for a more straightforward explanation. What did she want with me? If I didn’t know better, I should have said the queen was dithering.

  “Oh, yes,” Charlotte went on. “I remember when you first came to court, so young, so lost. Just of an age with Amelia.”

  I’d been seventeen. Close to ten years ago, not that it mattered.

  After the queen’s tenth anxious look toward the antechamber door in as many minutes, it occurred to me that she expected another guest.

  Finally, she rang a silver bell and, without raising her voice, called for Sally.

  “Has he not yet come?”

  “Not yet, Yer Majesty. Now don’t you worry, ma’am,” Sally assured her mistress. “I’ll bring him just as soon as he gets here,”

  “Are we waiting for someone, ma’am?” I asked smiling. “Surely you haven’t called me here in hopes of marrying me off to one of your relatives.” She’d put the offer forward once, but had laughed and shrugged when I’d turned down the elderly widower. He’d had a dozen children, some older than me.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “I learned my lesson that time. I dare say I was nearly frizzled you glared at me so fiercely.”

  At this, I laughed out loud. “Of all the fables,” I said. “I must have been properly polite.”

  “Indeed,” she agreed. “You politely glared so fiercely.”

  She poured more tea into my cup without asking if I wanted any, and began those agitated, questing glances toward the door again. At least this new anxiety diverted her from pushing for the name of a ship’s captain willing to smuggle passengers from England to the free ports on the continent.

  “Just whom are we waiting for?” I asked, my curiosity growing by the second. I was beginning to get a little fidgety myself from her obvious nervousness. “This someone must be an extremely important person.”

  “No, no, he is not an important person,” she denied. “Only the coachman from my country estate. But he is of utmost importance. We can’t get on without him. Where can he be? How dare he keep me waiting?”

  A puzzle, indeed. More puzzling to me was why the Queen of England should be fretting about a mere servant.

  “I�
��m sure I don’t know, ma’am,” I said. “Should I go ask if anyone has seen him?” How hard could it be to find a coachman in a palace?

  He’d stick out like pimples on the clear complexion of a country maid.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “You needn’t do that. I’ll send Sally.” She acted relieved now that she’d found some action to take.

  But Sally had disappeared for the moment, and I exited the queen’s suite in search of the missing coachman after all. It didn’t seem odd to me that I would willingly undertake a chore more suited to one of the maids or a footman, rather than one of the Queen’s former ladies. It felt more as if an inner voice was telling me I must find him.

  Find Ethan, it said. You must bring Ethan.

  Who in the devil is this Ethan? I asked myself with confused wonder. How did I know his name?

  Turning into the passage beyond the queen’s rooms, I slammed with abrupt force into the arms of an impatient young man who stood arguing with two of the queen’s guards. My nose pressed into the front of a many-caped coat—it must have weighed a ton, dragging from his shoulders—that smelled of horse and fresh air. Aha! I told myself. The missing coachman. Smiling, I looked up into his green eyes.

  Chapter 6

  The next thing I knew Caleb Deane was glaring furiously into my face. Sparks, like glints of angry fire, shot from his eyes, threatening to engulf me.

  “What the hell kind of rigmarole is this?” he demanded.

  “What are you doing here?” I blinked at him in an attempt to rid myself of the layer of stupid fogging my brain. This person did not belong in the hall outside of Queen Charlotte’s rooms. This person belonged… “Oh.”

  The world dipped in a scrambled blur. Instead of the luxury of a queen’s palace, my surroundings contained lathes, gunsmithing tools, and the pungent odor of chemicals. Nice, homey smells, I decided, sniffing their comforting familiarity. “Oh,” I repeated.

 

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