Brilliant Devices

chapter 2



Claire pulled herself upright with the help of Nine’s metal leg. Having magnetic feet, he had merely stuck fast to a structural support during the long slide of their landing and its abrupt halt in a copse of quivering aspens, golden in their autumn foliage. But other than that, he did not appear much damaged. She hoped that was the case for the other members of the crew.

“Mopsies?” she called anxiously, staggering forward into the gondola.

“’Ere.” The voice was muffled, and a heap of arms and legs and petticoats resolved itself into two girls. “I fink I’m broken.”

Lizzie patted Maggie down, her keen green eyes clouded with worry. “Where does it hurt?”

“In my stomach, where your knee is. Gerroff.”

Andrew groaned. He appeared to have gone right over the tiller headfirst, much in the manner of a horseman on an unbroken mount, and had been bent in half with his feet dangling in midair. Claire assisted him to slide off the wheel to the vertical once again.

“Remind me to get some lessons in steering one of these things the next time we meet your friend Captain Hollys,” he said. “That was a bruiser of a landing.”

“We are bruised, but not dead,” Claire pointed out. “Look on the bright side.” She adjusted his tawny brocade waistcoat so that it sat upon his shoulders again, more as an excuse to touch him and reassure herself that he was whole and undamaged than because she cared tuppence about how he looked.

“Everyone all right?” Alice came in on wobbly legs, Tigg at her heels. She took in the two of them in one glance and Claire stepped away.

Or tried to. The deck was canted several degrees and her graceful, subtle movement turned into a drunken stumble that fetched her up against the bulkhead. “Yes,” she said, trying to recover h> er dignity. “I feared for us all for a moment.”

“You still can,” Alice said grimly. Her curly blond hair had been torn from under her airman’s cap by the wind, and stuck out in a hundred different directions. “Come on. We need to suss out how bad the gondola and fuselages are damaged.”

Getting out of the hatch was not easy—in fact, it was more like climbing out of a window that was tilted toward you. In the end, Andrew and Alice went down on a rope and caught the other four as they slid down one by one.

“It’ll right itself once we fill the starboard fuselage again,” Tigg said in tones that asked for confirmation. “Port fuselage is topmost. Looks spiff to me.”

Alice did not give it. She was already inspecting the double fuselages that contained the gas bags. They hung in the crushed aspens that had stopped their slide, but the trees had bent rather than broken.

“Tigg, Andrew, Lizzie, run round to starboard. Listen for a whistle—that’ll be a leak. Claire, Maggie, you’re with me on the port side.”

Just below the bow on the starboard side, the canvas had been gashed, and air was leaking out with a continuous sigh of hopelessness. If Alice had been brisk before, now she really swung into action. She sent Tigg up into a tree with a bucket and brush and, from the ground, instructed him how to patch it, and when the awful hissing had stopped, she let out a breath as if she’d been holding it the whole time.

“The fuselage is my biggest worry,” she confessed to Claire as Andrew and Tigg cleared saplings, aiming to use one of the taller trees as a mooring mast. “The Lass can lose a lot and still fly, but she ain’t going anywhere without lift.”

“We should like to go anywhere as soon as possible,” Claire agreed.

“Say, where’s the girls?”

Claire looked around her. Aspens, poplars—chunks of tumbled granite—gently blowing grass—and a hundred feet away, the silvery glint of the river that had cut this swath broadly enough for them to land beside it. On a pile of rocks that caused the river to eddy and swing in a new direction, she spotted two little figures, hands shading their eyes as they looked into the distance and turned to cover the points of the compass.

“There. Scouting.” She pointed, rather proudly.

“They ought to let us know before they disappear.”

“You may certainly suggest it. But they know their duty and it would seem strange to them to warn me they’re going to do it.”

Alice shook her head and returned to her inspection of the partially buried gondola. “Not like any little girls I ever met. I bet they wouldn’t know what to do with a doll if you gave ’em one.”

Claire remembered her own nursery and the row of abandoned dolls on the top shelf of the bookcase. “Papa used to give me a doll every year for Christmas.” She knelt to inspect a brass plate in the hull, bent nearly double with the force of the landing, but salvageable. “He gave upot“He gp when I was eight and my nurse reported to Mama that I was disassembling them and making notes on their anatomy. Which, I discovered, bore no resemblance to actual human babies’ anatomy at all.”

Alice’s brow lightened a little and she almost smiled through her worry. “I ain’t never had a doll. I wouldn’t know what to do with one, either.”

“You have the automatons. Theirs may only bear a nodding resemblance to human anatomy, but at least they’re useful. Dolls, I’m afraid, are not.”

By the time the Mopsies ran up, panting, to report, Alice had finished inspecting as much of the hull as she could see. The rest would have to wait until the gas bags had been inflated once again, and the hull lifted to its normal resting altitude of a few feet.

“You sure picked a good place to crash,” Maggie informed Jake and Andrew. “Ent a soul or an ’ouse or so much as an eyelash to be seen for miles an’ miles.”

“There is a bunch of mucky great creatures on t’other side of t’river, though,” Lizzie put in. “Horns on ’em as big as Tigg.”

“I suspect those might be elk,” Andrew said. “They possess antlers, which are solid. Cows have horns, which are hollow.”

Lizzie did not look impressed by the distinction. “Solid—hollow—they’re pointy, is what I’m sayin’. Big and pointy.”

“Duly noted,” Claire said. “And no sign of any source of help. Well, on the positive side, neither is there any danger … of the human sort, at least. We shall only have to worry about bears.”

“Bears?” Lizzie’s eyes widened. “There’s bears ’ere?”

“There was a bear due east of where you found me in the Texican Territory. I have no doubt there are similar creatures here in the Idaho Territory.”

“If you folks are done with the nature lesson,” Alice put in with barely concealed impatience, “can we get the pump going and get some gas into the bags? That patch oughta be dry enough to hold now.”

The pump turned out to be an automaton named Eight, who had hose concealed in his appendages and a small engine as well. Claire watched, hands nervously clasped, as the bags filled, the twin fuselages leveled out, and the Lass slowly freed herself from her untidy nest. The trees brushed the lower surfaces of the fuselages as they rose, until finally the airship stalled.

“Gondola’s stuck,” reported Tigg from the far side. “C’mon, everyone, it’ll be like pushin’ that barge off into the Thames once we got all the chickens into the garden at ’ome.”

Home. The warmth of affection flooded Claire at the thought of the shabby cottage in Vauxhall Gardens—the first place in Tigg’s memory where he had an actual pallet to himself and “three squares” a day.

If she had accomplished nothing more on this earth, she had at least done that—given these children their first home.

Maybe some day they whise day tould even see it again.

Heaving, pushing, and commanding Nine to help, they dislodged the Lass from her clinging prison. With a sucking sound, she lifted a few inches, like a char who remembered better days shaking mud off her shoes. Rosie the chicken, who had been hunting in the fallen leaves as they worked, immediately jumped into the gash in the earth and yanked a fat worm out of it.

“That’s it,” Alice muttered to the old ship. “Come on, girl. Eight, keep pumping on the starboard side.”

The fuselage fattened until it curved like the breast of a healthy hen, lifting the gondola until it bobbed a couple of feet off the ground.

“There.” Alice patted a ripped piece of brass, whereupon a number of rivets hit the stones with a tinktinktink. “Eight, that’ll do.” The automaton fell silent and she disconnected the hose.

Then, elbow to elbow with Claire, she studied the hull. “Bow’s stove in, but Nine and Andrew can bang it back into shape.”

“Tigg and Jake and I can replace rivets.”

“The girls can take the ballast out so we can see what’s what inside.”

Andrew looked from one to the other, then at Tigg. “Aren’t we forgetting something?”

“We ain’t forgot,” Alice said tersely. “We’re merely thinking out what we’re going to do while we try to figure out what to do about that.”

“About wot?” Maggie asked.

“About the fact that we have no engine,” Claire said gently. “We can bring the ship’s body back to life, but if she has no heart, she can’t sail.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Tigg said stoutly.

“Yeah?”

Claire wished Alice would not sound so grim in front of the children. Or in front of her, for that matter.

“We got no boiler. Without a boiler, we can’t make steam. Without steam, the pistons and props won’t turn.”

Claire clutched what remained of her chignon with both hands. “Good heavens. I completely forgot! Oh dear. Oh dear. I hope no harm has come to it.”

She gathered up her skirts and scrambled into the hatch, heedless of the mud that rimmed it. In a moment she reappeared with her valise.

“Going someplace, Lady?” Jake inquired.

“Maybe there’s a nice hotel we ent seen yet,” Lizzie told her twin in an aside that ought to have been on the vaudeville stage. “Maybe she ordered roast beef an’ Yorkshire puddings for all of us.”

“Very funny. Andrew, Alice, look.” She pulled the valise open to reveal Dr. Craig’s power cell nestling like a great bronze cat on her shirtwaists and spare skirt. “Is there any reason we cannot power the Stalwart Lass with this?”


Alice handed Andrew Malvern the smaller wrench so he could tighten the bolts on the far side of the hastily fabricated housing for the power cell. The silence as they buttoned up after the flurry of work, while companionable, had gone on long enough. If somebody didn’t say something, she was going to leap out of her skin.

“I got to hand it to Claire, she knows how to pull a rabbit out of a hat.”

Outside, Claire and the Mopsies were pounding dents out of the brass plates of the gondola with rocks wrapped in spare canvas, which meant she could hardly hear herself speak. She’d heard a wax recording once called the Anvil Chorus—if the girls ever wanted careers in music, they could start with that.

“What mystifies me is that she kept it a secret. We’ve been in flight for days—I would have thought the subject might have come up in that time.”

“We didn’t need it, Mr. Malvern.”

“Alice, we have stared death in the face together more than once. Under the circumstances, I believe it would be quite proper for you to use my given name.”

It had been so long since Alice had blushed that it took her a moment to recognize the hot, prickly feeling in her cheeks and forehead.

We, he’d said. Together. Dang. In all her daydreams she had never expected to experience the thrill of the plural pronoun in connection with the brilliant mind she had been worshiping from afar—very far—for so long. In the delight of it, she quite lost track of what he was saying.

“—risking my life for the wretched thing, she might have told me she’d liberated it from the wreckage.”

In Alice’s experience, liberate was a word you used when you didn’t want to say steal. “But doesn’t it belong to her?”

“I am not arguing that. Dr. Craig left it as her legacy.”

“That mad scientist?” Tigg had told her the whole juicy story. Alice wouldn’t have believed a word of it, except that she’d been the one to pull Claire out of the drink half drowned. Anyone who would jump into a flash flood on purpose could break a mad scientist out of Bedlam if she darn well wanted to.

“It is my uneducated opinion that Dr. Craig was not in fact mad. She was being held against her will because she represented a threat to some very wealthy men. But that is beside the point.” Andrew heaved on a nut. “The point is that we are both invefonre bothsted in that cell, and she could have told me.”

The plural pronoun didn’t sound nearly so appealing that time.

Alice stood and dusted off her pants. “Well, in all fairness, we’ve had our hands full. I got a pile of parts in the hold I’ve been meaning to make something with, and I haven’t given them a single thought, myself. So I can’t say as I blame her.”

Andrew finished with the last of his bolts and stood as well. He pulled off his gloves and surveyed their work. “You’re quite right. Isn’t it singular that the four of us—engineers all, and I include Tigg in our number—wound up on this particular ship at this particular time? Without any one of us, we would not have been able to create what I must say must be the first engine of its kind.”

Alice couldn’t keep her face from breaking out in a smile. “You’d better call her in. After you and her rigged that swinging truss—”

“—and you found that glass for the lightning chamber—I swear it will never cross my lips that it began its career holding a gallon of rotgut whiskey—”

“—and you and Tigg and Jake manhandled poor Four into becoming this housing—”

“—we definitely must all be present when we fire her up for the first time.”

Sharing a laugh with him was probably the sweetest moment in Alice’s whole life. The part that came after her father had jumped ship, anyway.

A moment later she realized the hammering had stopped, and Claire and the girls appeared in the gangway. “Did we miss the joke?”

“We’re just having a moment of celebration,” Andrew told her, still smiling.

Claire looked from him to Alice and a shadow passed over her eyes. Was it—could that be hurt?

Well, never mind if it was. Lady Claire Trevelyan had just about everything on earth a girl could want, minus a working airship, but they were about to fix that. If she begrudged Alice a moment of laughter with a certain handsome and brilliant man, well, that was just too bad.

In the next moment, she felt ashamed of herself. Claire wasn’t that petty. She probably liked a good laugh as much as anybody, and wanted to be included, that was all.

If this worked, they’d have plenty to celebrate.

“Is it done?” Maggie asked, evidently objecting to silences, too.

“It is done. Tigg, are you ready?” Andrew asked.

“I been ready for hours, sir. I don’t care if we do have to fly at night, I ent minded to stick around and be dinner for bears.”

“I quite agree,” Claire said. “Alice, let’s see if she’ll go, shall we? Girls, is Rosie safely aboard? Yes? Jake, ready tiller.”

Jake jogged forward and called, “Ready, Lady.”

Who was in command of this tub, anyway? Much as she liked and admired Claire, Alice was the captain and it was her job to give the orders, not someone whomuc someon was used to ordering maids around and bossing dressmakers and—and whatever else it was fine ladies did in London Town.

“Tigg, stand by engine,” she said, moving smoothly but with authority to the stern with him. “Mr. Malvern, take the vanes, please. Full vertical. Passengers, I’d find somewhere to sit. Lift in five, four—”

Claire and the girls scrambled forward and sat wherever they could find a horizontal spot with something to hang onto. Rosie perched above their heads, her feet wrapped around a pipe.

“—three, two, one.” She slammed all three levers down, one after the other. “Ignition, Mr. Tigg!”

She half expected to hear the throaty grumble of the poor old Massey. But there was no such sound. Instead, the engine mount seemed to tremble, there was a flash of light that she could see right through the rippled seams of Four’s erstwhile chest, and the pistons began to move.

The props turned, slowly at first, then faster and faster. It worked, by golly, it really, truly worked. Alice drew in a breath that was more like a gasp of relief.

“Up ship!”

The Mopsies yanked in the mooring ropes. Andrew threw the levers for the elevation vanes forward and Jake gripped the tiller …

… and they fell up into the twilight sky with the joy of a lark greeting the morning.