Lady of Devices

chapter 23



Two streets closer to the river, a row of warehouses stood hunched over a thoroughfare so narrow it might as well have been an alley. Down the middle of the cobbles ran a thin stream of filthy water, carrying with it bits of flotsam and food so rotted even the scurrying rats wouldn’t stop for it. Deplorable though her skirts might be, Claire lifted them and hugged the side of the building as the three of them kept their quarry in sight. They crouched behind a pile of barrels where the alley opened out into a square.

“No cover,” Lizzie whispered. “Best to wait ’ere.”

Billy Crumwell led the way to a low, arched door, with just enough clearance for a wagon. “In here. Won’t no one disturb us this time of night.”

In her stealthy pursuit, Claire had hatched a plan. The Mopsies huddled together next to her, and she leaned close. “As soon as they’re all inside, I shall use the gaseous capsaicin. Cover your faces with your skirts. Do not breathe it.”

“Let us have a look first.”

“No, I—”

Too late. With no more sound than a rustle of limp rags, the girls darted between the buildings, in a space barely wide enough for a skinny dog to pass. To her horror, she heard the landau’s top make the familiar shivery sound as it folded back, and in the next moment, someone dropped the hood and swore.

They were trying to ignite it. Heaven knew what havoc their untrained hands would wreak, messing about with boiler and coal. They would unbalance the entire mechanism, and then she would be unable to pilot it out of this noisome place.

As fast as her fingers would move, she retrieved two of the devices from their wrappings in the satchel, slung it back on, and slipped over to the door. Not one guard stood outside. Fools. By leaning mere inches to the left, she could see around the door. There was her landau, a sheet of canvas crumpled on the floor next to it. Someone had got the hood up again, and two of the thieves had their heads inside, trying to figure out how to ignite it, while a third sat in the driver’s seat, her own goggles perched on his head.

She tightened her lips, and when something touched her hand, she jumped half a foot and let out a squeak.

“Warehouse fronts on t’river,” Maggie whispered rapidly. “If we gots to run, tide’s out.”

Before Claire could puzzle out the connection between these two facts, someone shouted from inside. “Hey! Who’s that? Jim, get the door.”

“We’re spotted!” Maggie grabbed her hand. “This way.”

“No.” As hard as she could, Claire flung first one, then the other device to either side of the landau. As they shattered on the floor, she grabbed the door. “Maggie, help me!”

They pushed it shut just as a body hit the other side, and Claire hung onto the slats for dear life. She pulled at the iron bar that had once rested across the front, but to no avail. The door began to open, inexorably pushing her out into the square. Another body hit the back of it, and another, and the door was flung back. She stumbled to the side as Lightning Luke careened into the open, his hands mashed to his eyes, his oddly shaped gun in the crook of his elbow and hanging over his forearm. Shrieking in pain, the others followed, a cloud of gas billowing out behind them.

Luke collapsed not ten feet from her, the flared barrel of the gun clunking on the cobbles next to him.

The gun. That was what everyone feared most.

She darted forward and snatched it up, then nearly fell headlong herself as its unexpected weight dragged at her arms. Luke did not move except to moan and scrub at his eyes with the velvet tails of his coat. She hefted his gun more carefully, and in the swath of lamplight that fell out into the middle of the square, eyed its operation.

It possessed a trigger, but there was no chamber for bullets. Not like her father’s pistols. But what was this? Instead of a chamber, there was a thick glass globe. If she moved this lever, then ...

The gun began to hum.

Now what was she to do? Common sense begged her to ignite the landau and drive away as fast as she could. But where was Lizzie? Maggie had taken refuge again behind the barrels. She could not leave without the other child, but if she didn’t begin the landau’s ignition sequence immediately, the miscreants would recover and her situation would be unthinkable.

A dim reflection of blue light pulsed on the wet cobbles. She looked down.

A lightning storm had formed in the glass globe, and the hum had taken on real authority now. Great heavens, this gun somehow harnessed electrick power! No wonder they called him Lightning Luke.

She had to move. Now.

“Maggie,” she shouted. “Find Lizzie!”

“Who’s that?” Luke had gotten to his feet, and swayed like a drunken man. “Where’s my gun?”

He was still blinded. Common sense told her to keep quiet, get the landau started, and get out of there. Anger demanded that she give him a piece of her mind.

“It’s a trap,” one of his companions moaned. “Billy’s done turned on us.”

Luke got one eye open, which widened at the sight of her, then slammed shut as droplets of condensed capsaicin gas rolled into it. “Who are you? Put that down, you fool of a woman, and get out of here.”

With the help of the side of the building nearest her, Billy had managed to stand as well. One of Luke’s men flung himself at him. “Turncoat! You’ll see us all dead!”

He pulled a knife, and before Claire could even shriek, he had stabbed Billy in the chest. The chains laced through the shoulders of his long coat clanked on the cobbles as he fell. Instinctively, her hands tightened on the gun, her forefinger sliding into the trigger guard, and when Billy rolled, his still twitching arm slapped her skirts. She screamed, lurched back, and the gun went off.

A lightning bolt ten feet long leaped from the flared barrel, flashing across the square and catching Luke dead in the center of his chest. He arched back as flickering tendrils of blue light traveled outward, along his limbs, along his coat, even to the top of his crushed beaver hat. His eyes bugged out and there was a sizzling sound as the liquid in them evaporated. He fell, rigid as a tree trunk, and lay still.

A plume of smoke rose from the blackened mass that had been his leather vest.

Claire’s fingers went numb, and she dropped the gun on her foot. The night crowded into her vision, and a hive of bees seemed to have entered her brain. From a great distance, she heard another shout that sounded like, “Lady! Are you all right?” and several figures ran into the square.

Fisticuffs.

The Mopsies.

If there was fighting, they would be in danger. She must not faint. She must not.

The gun will hurt them. Pick up the gun. Get the landau. Find the Mopsies.

“Lady!”

She blinked and Snouts’s face swam into clarity. “Mr. McTavish?”

“Stop standing there like a mug, Lady. You just kilt Lightning Luke Jackson!”

“Is he ... really dead?” Surely not. This had not happened. She would wake in her comfortable bed in Wilton Crescent presently and wonder what she had eaten to cause such vivid dreams.

“As a blinkin’ doornail.” Dream or not, Snouts was speaking slowly and not allowing her gaze to wander from his. “Look sharp, Lady. We have to get back to his squat before word gets out and the bobbies come.”

“Squat? Whatever for?”

“He’s got a house, Lady. A real house, wiv a door and chimbley and everything. And rugs, so I hear. We’ve got to get there and claim it afore the rats come out’ the woodwork and take it.”

“What has his house to do with us?” Her mind felt like cotton wool. She could not connect sentences into meaning.

Snouts took her arm—the one not cradling the gun—and walked her back into the warehouse where the landau sat. “Here’s how it works. You kilt him—”

“I didn’t mean to, Snouts. The gun went off by accident.”

“Beggin’ yer pardon, Lady, but you just keep mum about that. Story is, you disarmed Lightning Luke and shot him for stealin’ your property. Maybe you knifed Billy Crumwell, too, for all I know.”

“Luke’s man did it. It was shocking.”

“That’s neither here nor there, and neither are they. Point is, he who takes down Lightning Luke gets his property, see? Jake!” he called into the dark. “Round everyone up. We’ve got a body to get over to Vauxhall Gardens for proof, soon’s we get this landau going.”

Ah, here was something solid to count on. Something she knew how to do. With the smoothness of long habit, she pulled her duster from its niche and buttoned it over her suit. By the light of the lamp the thieves had lit to admire her property, she saw her goggles lying on the floor where they had evidently been flung when the thief had run for it. She settled them over her eyes and began the ignition sequence. When the indicator needles jumped, she lit the headlamps. Snouts dumped Lightning Luke’s rigid body on the canvas and rolled him up in it, then tied the bundle to the rear guard with a length of rope.

“What about—him?” She indicated Billy Crumwell’s inert form out in the square. “We can’t just leave him there.”

“Pickers’ll do fer ’im before dawn,” Snouts said with chilling brevity while he divested the man of his perfectly usable leather coat. He and Maggie squeezed into Gorse’s usual seat, and Jake, Tigg and Lizzie piled into the rear compartment, which was meant only for parcels.

As smoothly as though she were driving to Regent’s Park, she applied steam and they rolled out the warehouse door, leaving behind the deserted square—empty except for the silence of the grave and the smell of bridges well and truly burned.