Brilliant Devices

chapter 23



Claire wasted no time in assisting Alice, fabricating a sling out of a length of white voile for Chalmers’s arm, and binding up Alignak’s ribs with half a second petticoat.

“What luck you’re still in evening dress,” she whispered to Alice. “This rig doesn’t allow for petticoats—though I’m tempted to add a number of layers of ruffles. They seem to come in handy rather regularly.”

“It’s this place,” Alice whispered back. “Once we’re clear of assassins, our clothes ought to be fine.”

“Speaking of assassins, were you able to speak to the count?”

In the dim light, Alice looked stricken. “I forgot all about him,” she said in horror.

Frederick Chalmers looked up from tightening the knots on his sling. “You what? You mean you didn’t warn him to lift?”

“No, Pa, I was too busy trying to save your hide.”

“But this is terrible! We must—”

“We must do nothing but get you out of here before you’re recaptured and hanged,” Claire said briskly. “We’re not likely to get a second chance to spirit you out of a locked room. I will see to Count von Zeppelin.”

“And I will get you all in the air without delay.” Alice’s gaze was as stony as the one her father leveled upon her. There was no doubt in the world that the two of them were related. Claire wondered who would win this contest of wills.

“But—”

“Chama,” Alignak interrupted, “we must get Tartok to Malina or his spirit will leave him. And we must warn the village so the goddess whales may sail.”

Frederick Chalmers gazed from the young man to his daughter, clearly torn between two equally important choices. But to Claire, there was only one.

“You leave the count to me,” she repeated. “I will have him in the sky within the hour, I promise you.”

“Do you know where he is?” Alice asked.

“No, but it cannot be difficult to find out.”

“Just look for an assassin,” Maggie put in helpfully.

Tartok stirred, but then his eyes rolled up in his head and he slumped into unconsciousness again. “We must go,” Alignak said, his voice hoarse with anxiety.

Alice helped heft Tartok onto her father’s back, his wrists tied together with a bit of lace to form a loop under Frederick’s chin. Then they set off down the corridor. Claire visualized the route in her mind’s eye as they traveled under the mine offices, under the parade ground, and paused at a cross-corridor with another tiny sign.

Dining was indicated to the left.

Supplies lay to the right.

“The supply warehouse is not a hundred yards from end of the airfield where the Stalwart Lass is moored,” Claire said, keeping her voice low. “That way, as fast as we can.”

It couldn’t have been more than a quarter of a mile, but to Claire it seemed endless. At any moment a door could open at the top of any of these flights of stone steps, and a horde of angry men pour through clamoring for the immediate deaths of Frederick Chalmers and the Esquimaux men—to say nothing of the girls attempting to save them. Alice reached the final stair first and darted up it, opening the hidden panel with caution as she tried not to gasp for breath.

It opened in a small storage room directly across from an exterior door. The warehouse was pitch black except for a small electrick lamp glowing over the door.

“Come on—” Alice began, when Maggie and Lizzie slipped past her. “Girls, wait—”

Claire touched her arm. “Let them do what they do better than any of us.” Then she turned to Frederick, who emerged slowly from the staircase with Tartok’s head lolling on his shoulder. “Mr. Chalmers, are you all right?”

“Fine. Alignak?”

“I am able.”

Maggie materialized out of the dark. “All clear, Lady, but we’d best be quick. We c’n ’ear voices behind this building, as if someone’s coming to get summat.”

They ran through alleys of pallets and crates filled with supplies—food, flour, spare parts. They gained the door and Claire had enough time for a frantic glance across the airfield. “Alice, do you hear that?”

An engine.

Even as they ran, peering past the light cast by the lamps on the mooring masts, the Skylark lifted, sailing straight up into the night sky and blotting out the stars.

Frederick gasped. “Isobel!”

Alignak let out a low cry of despair.

What…? But there was no time to ask questions, for someone was running across the field toward them. Two someones—one tall, o—width="2emne lanky and shorter.

Claire pulled the lightning rifle out of its holster and took aim.

“No, Lady, don’t!” Maggie cried. “It’s our Jake and Mr. Malvern!”

But they could still hear an engine, even though Skylark had passed out of sight and out of all hope of assistance.

“Someone’s fired up the Lass’s boiler,” Alice said. “Jake, you get double pay for this.”

“Here, sir, let us take him,” Andrew said to Frederick, and in a trice he and Jake had the unconscious Tartok between them, jogging across the field to the battered old airship. Alice and the men followed, tumbling up the gangway into the gondola.

Claire grabbed the Mopsies by the hand. “We must untie the ropes. I shall attend to the mooring mast. Run, fast as you can.”

“Claire!” Alice leaned out of a porthole. “I never got a proper engine in here to replace Dr. Craig’s power cell!”

“Take it!” she called, scrambling up the ladder to the rope looped through the Lass’s nose ring. “I can make another one.”

“I need to make some room and ditch some ballast on the double quick—I’m sending out Seven and Eight. Take care of ’em, will you?”

Must she? Ugh. “Fine!”

“And what about Jake?”

“I’m goin’ and that’s that!” came a stubborn shout from somewhere within.

“Feed him and teach him, and turn him into a capable man,” Claire called, “and I shall be satisfied.” She untied the rope. “Free to lift when ready, Alice. Fair winds!”

She heard a clanking crash and the scrape of gravel—the automatons, no doubt, being unceremoniously unloaded in a heap.

“To you, too! Up ship!”

The Mopsies and Andrew ran clear of the gondola as Claire climbed to the ground. The Lass fell up into the night sky, her engine running as smoothly as a sewing machine as Dr. Craig’s cell gave it more power than it had ever had before this stage of its life. And as the craft turned its bow to the south, Claire saw movement in the sky behind it.

Andrew drew in a long breath.

“Lady, what are they?” Maggie asked in awe.

A cluster of silver craft floated purposefully after the Stalwart Lass, their silver fuselages rippling with the speed of their going, for all the world like elongated bubbles swimming through the cold air. The gondolas clinging to the undersides were sleek and shallow, each one ribbed like the skeleton of a long-dead creature.

Ribbed like the interiors of the Esquimaux longhouses.

Like the interiors of great, long-dead creatures.

The goddess whales.

“They live in their ships,” Claire breathed on a note of discovery. “That’s what Alignak meant by the village lifting. He meant it quite literally. The entire village has pulled up ropes and gone with Alice and Frederick.”

“And, I assume, Isobel Churchill,” Andrew said. “She sent a pigeon not half an hour ago to warn them.”

“So they will all be safe?” Maggie asked, her forehead creased in concern even as she watched the majestic sight of the Esquimaux craft sailing through the stars.

“They will all be safe,” Claire echoed. “I do not know where they are going, but with Malina and Alice in charge, they will find a quiet harbor somewhere.”

“But our Jake,” Lizzie wailed. “They’ve took our Jake!”

“He has his duty as navigator, Lizzie,” Andrew told her gently. “He chose his course like a gentleman, and he will keep to it until his captain releases him from duty.”

“Besides, someone’s got to look after our Alice,” Maggie said, taking her twin’s hand. “Wiv Tigg on Lady Lucy, we’ll be the Lady’s seconds in ’is place, won’t we, till we gets ’ome to Snouts?”

“I wouldn’t have anyone else.” Claire laid a gentle hand on each of their shoulders, feeling both girls lean into her skirts as if unconsciously seeking the comfort of someone who would not leave them.

The Esquimaux fleet glimmered one last time, as if in farewell, and passed out of sight over the black shapes of the hills to the south.

Claire took a fortifying breath. “Now, then. I think it is time we located Count von Zeppelin and made sure of his safety, as Mr. Chalmers wished. Even though we have no proof whatsoever that he is in danger, except the evidence of our own eyes.”

“Isobel told me that he has been Her Majesty’s liaison with the Esquimaux nation for some seven years,” Andrew told her. “If he believes the count is in danger, I think you may take that as proof.”

They crossed to the small heap of bronze limbs and torsos, and assisted the automatons to their feet.

“Has he?” The mystery of Chalmers’s life here began to make a glimmer of sense. “No wonder the Colonials wanted him to take the blame. They would not only discredit the Dunsmuirs, but throw a spanner into Her Majesty’s works as well.”

“So what is our plan?” Andrew asked her, quite seriously.

She had no idea. But it would never do to say so in front of the children.

She straightened her shoulders, and the automatons turned their blank faces toward her as if waiting for instructions. “I think Maggie had the right of it. This whole affair began with a gun that makes no sound. Do you not agree that if we can find that, we might find a clue that will lead us to the count?”


It was fortunate indeed that, while someone had unloaded an enormous number of trunks and cases from the Meriwether-Astors’ ship, it appeared no one knew exactly what to do with them afterward. So they sat upon the gravel some distance from the ship, in the inky shadow of the fuselage, providing enough cover for two small figures and two larger ones, with a view of both that ship and the motley group of cargo ships moored around it.

Claire had told Seven and Eight to wait by Lady Lucy. The thought of a pair of clanking shadows following them about when a man’s life might be at stake made her shiver with revulsion.

“Mopsies, what do you make of our situation?” she whispered.

“This Astor bloke, ’e’d want to keep ’is treasures close, yeah?” Lizzie said in a low tone. “Lightning Luke kept ’is treasure box where ’e slept, innit?”

“So your guess is that the count would be upon Mr. Meriwether-Astor’s ship?”

“Aye.”

“Which is guarded,” Andrew put in. “They’ve posted a watch.”

That was true. A man sat upon the gangway smoking a Texican cigarillo, the noxious fumes of which they could smell from here.

“Ent much of a watch,” Lizzie said with some disdain. “Pity we just lost Jake. ’E were a dab hand at dealing wiv such.”

“We might shimmy up a mooring rope,” Maggie suggested.

“Too dangerous, and we risk being spotted before we reached the top,” Claire said. It was one thing for the girls to slide down a rope to escape for purposes of saving a life. It was quite another to labor to the top, exposing themselves to discovery—or gunfire.

“Wot about a diversion?” Maggie asked. “You c’d zap one of them cargo ships wiv the lightning rifle, and when everyone come out to put out the fire, we c’d go in.”

“You forget that our time here is limited to a few more days,” Andrew told her gently. “With the Margrethe disabled, the loss of one cargo ship could be devastating to the Dunsmuirs, the count’s crew, and the people who work here, once the snow flies.”

“Don’t care about the Dunsmuirs no more,” Lizzie grumbled. “They didn’t believe the Lady, and let those blokes ’urt our Alice’s dad.”

“We have no proof, Lizzie,” Claire said gently. “Without that, the Dunsmuirs cannot act except to delay and pray that calm heads will prevail. I wonder if anyone has checked the dressing room yet?”

“Let us hope n˜Lenfire.ot,” Andrew said. “It will not take a brilliant mind to conclude that you are behind their escape. I wonder where they’d put you?”

Somewhere without tunnels, that was certain. Or windows. A memory of a locked room in Resolution assailed her, and she set her teeth. She would not allow anyone to make her a prisoner again.

Lizzie touched her arm, her fingers cold. Claire was seized in the sudden grip of guilt. What was she thinking, bringing the girls along on such an errand? They should be tucked up in bed aboard the Lady Lucy, safe and warm, with Tigg and the other middies to look after them, not in danger of being made prisoners themselves.

She was a terrible guardian, Claire thought on a wave of despair.

But Lizzie did not seem to be much inclined to seek either safety or warmth. “Lady,” she whispered, “there’s that Alan again. See? By that wreck of a ship we visited wiv Alice. Where I found that other brass casing.”

“Those other two, they’re Bob an’ Joe. Alan is Joe’s brother,” Maggie explained.

Goodness. What a memory she had. Almost as good as Jake’s.

Huddled behind the sort of trunk that turned on one end to open into a traveling closet, they watched Bob and Joe pace in front of the nearly derelict cargo ship, from one end to the other, as if doing an inspection while they waited for Alan to come out of it.

“Does it not seem strange to you that that ship is the only one of the convoy that appears to have a proper guard?” Andrew asked. “Aside from our smoking friend behind us, of course.”

“I had not noticed before, but you are quite right.”

Alan rejoined his friends, and a brief conversation took place before they began to pace again, two heading down to the stern vanes, one to the bow, then reversing and crossing at the gangway in the middle of the gondola.

“And do you see how very large the doors are to the rear of the gondola? One could wheel a landau out of them if one had a ramp.”

“What I see is an engine so large and powerful it warrants its own gondola, there at the stern.” Andrew paused for a moment for them to see the truth of it. “Jake mentioned something Gloria Meriwether-Astor said to him and Alice, just before the explosion,” he went on. “Something about a steam cannon.”

“We are not looking for a cannon, Andrew. Those propelled bullets may have been large, but they were certainly not large enough to fill a cannon barrel.”

“Still … if a man transported a cannon secretly, disguised in an old trap of an airship that would be an unlikely target for sky pirates or tariff men, he might be just as likely to transport silent rifles and who knows what else along with it.”

“But that does not mean he would conceal a prisoner wl aes ith them.”

“Why waste guards?” Maggie put in. “If yer guardin’ yer guns, might as well put the prisoner there. That lot’ve been there all day. So it would make no nevermind to someone lookin’ on whether there was guns or trussed-up gentlemen inside.”

“You sound like Alice,” Lizzie said.

“And you make a sound point,” Andrew told her. “I say it’s worth a look.”

“I say we are outnumbered,” Claire reminded them softly. “Though I would put Lizzie up against a miscreant any day, I should not like to take the chance that she might be hurt.”

“Diversion,” Maggie singsonged softly, as if to remind them she had suggested this before.

“But what?” Claire’s legs were beginning to cramp. She longed to stand up, to shout and wave her arms and demand to be allowed aboard that ship.

Which would net her absolutely nothing except the relief of movement and the inevitability of imprisonment. It was maddening to be trapped here in the shadows with so little time and so urgent a task. She might as well be one of Alice’s automatons, standing uselessly at the bottom of Lady Lucy’s gangway.

Wait.

“The automatons,” she said.