Lady of Devices

chapter 5



“I met a girl this evening.”

Andrew Malvern, B.S., R.S.E., looked up as his best friend, still in black tie, walked into the laboratory that filled the entire loft of their warehouse. “You are always meeting girls. Come over here and tell me what you think of this.”

Selwyn joined him and leveled his appraising gaze at the tempered glass chamber with its brass fittings and tubing. “Andrew. It looks exactly the same as it did yesterday when you showed it to me. And she wasn’t just any girl. She was St. Ives’s daughter.”

“It isn’t the same.” Andrew flipped up a lever and ten pounds of coal rattled down a flume and into the chamber. “Look, from here I can control exactly how much current passes through the coal, and how much gas. I’ve been waiting all evening to show you.”

“I was delayed by a game of poker.”

Poker? Andrew focused on James’s twinkling eyes. “I thought you said you were going to Carrick House for supper and cards.”

“I did. And a little baggage called Peony Churchill taught a few of us how to play. She says she learned in the American Territories but I find that very hard to believe.”

“Peony? Not Isabel Churchill’s daughter?”

“The very one. In Viscount St. Ives’s sacrosanct parlor, no less. Isabel, regrettably, was not there, or you could have read about the resulting fracas in the Times tomorrow.”

“We may yet. I’ve already had a tube from Cadbury at the Royal Society of Engineers about the demonstration this evening at Whitehall. Apparently there is unrest among the good English folk who have invested their life savings in the Persia-Albion Petroleum Company. The Peers could barely get past the door to vote.”

James snorted. “Fools. Their feeble combustion engines are too unstable, and no one can seem to make them otherwise, no matter how many exhibitions they put on at the Crystal Palace. Steam is the technology that will continue to power the world.”

“Which is why I draw your attention to this chamber.” He handed James a pair of goggles with lenses shaded to a deep brown. “Put these on and watch.”

Andrew put on his own goggles, then pressed two levers. The chamber began to hum. When he pulled on a third, a thin stream of green gas entered the chamber from the top, which condensed to a solid immediately on contact with the coal. The hum intensified and suddenly a brilliant flash exploded within, as though lightning had been generated from the walls of the chamber itself.

In point of fact, it was pure electrick current. “You see? The powerful charge forces the gas into the coal, enhancing its combustion power.” Andrew allowed the chamber to power down, and reached in with a gloved hand to retrieve a piece of the supercharged coal. “Put this in a boiler, and you’ll only—”

The piece of coal crumbled to bits.

James peered at it, then removed the goggles to look even more closely. “Is it supposed to do that?”

Andrew’s hand closed in a fist of frustration. Through the leather, he could feel particles of coal grinding together in his palm. “Of course it’s not supposed to do that. All my calculations indicated the gas would harden the coal, enhancing its propensity to burn longer, thus allowing the steam trains to travel further before taking on more.”

“I’d have another go at those calculations.”

Andrew struggled to conceal the disappointment and—yes—humiliation warring inside his belly at this ignominious conclusion to an experiment he’d been working on for weeks. “Are you laughing at me?”

“Indeed not.” He put an arm around Andrew’s shoulders. “I haven’t your talent for figures and physics. I’m just the idea man and the financier of this enterprise. We’ll find the correct combination of elements, never fear.”

“I know we will.” Andrew’s shoulders slumped while he regarded the recalcitrant chamber. “But time is of the essence. The world is moving quickly.”

“I have complete faith in our ability to match its pace, Andrew. This invention will make our fortune. Every steam company and builder of trains will be on our doorstep, clamoring for a license for this process. Every railyard will have a man educated in how to operate the equipment. Why, these chambers will become so vital to the railroad industry that entire companies will be formed just to manufacture them.”

Andrew allowed himself a moment to take in the grand vista of James’s vision. This was what he needed in a partner—a man who could see beyond the confines of a compression chamber to the horizon of a future limited only by their abilities and dreams.

“You are right.” He removed his gloves and laid them aside, and slipped the lead-lined leather apron off. His body felt strangely light without its familiar protective weight. “Come. I will pour us each a drink and you can tell me about this girl.”

The thick planks of the loft floor sounded hollow under their feet as they walked to Andrew’s spacious office with its single skylight, its ocular aperture filled now with a frosting of stars. He lit both lamps on the desk and rolled up a set of drawings for the compression chamber to make room for the bottle and two glasses from the sideboard.

James poured slightly more than two fingers of Glenlivet and handed it to Andrew. “You look as though you need it, after such a disappointment.”

The fiery liquor burned its way down with the fierceness of regret. “I will recover, and, as you say, have another go. But enough of that. I am happy your supper party was a success. Particularly since I had to talk you into it.”

“The company of simpering schoolgirls is not usually to my taste,” James admitted. “But they are to graduate next week, and be presented the week after. I look upon it rather as a preview showing, without the tedious competition of all the other young bucks. Blatchley is family, of course, and Bryce is civil enough. Between the two of them they make one active human brain.”

Andrew snorted with laughter and the whiskey went down sideways, causing him to cough. “Bloods, are they?” he inquired when he recovered.

“Tiresomely so. My esteemed cousin is not even aware there is an expedition returning from the Amazon, much less who leads it. And to Bryce, an airship has less meaning passing overhead than a cloud. He views it not as the crowning achievement of human engineering, but simply as something that gets in the way.”

“Until he wants to go to Paris.” Andrew admired the lamplight through the peat-colored lens of the whiskey. “Then he might view it differently.”

“Not he. A coach and a ferry, I’m afraid.”

Andrew made a face. “Poor man. Imagine living inside his skull.”

“I cannot. Let us return to a happier topic—the ladies. Miss Peony Churchill is a pistol.”

“I thought it was the Honorable you were interested in.”

“Andrew, you benighted sod, there are girls you look at with an eye to marriage, and girls you look at simply with an eye. For the sheer pleasure of it.”

Andrew frowned. “I would not say that in Mrs. Stanley Churchill’s hearing. You’ll find yourself cleft in two by one of the foreign blades they say she collects.”

“I kept my thoughts to myself, never fear. But the baggage is a toothsome eyeful, and that’s a fact.”

“James, your mother must be rolling in her grave. Do not say such things about a young lady of such a brilliant family.”

“She is going to be just like her fearsome mother, I tell you. And if a lady does not want to be talked of or looked at, she should not lead such a public life.”

Since when did a life led in the pursuit of knowledge entitle one to be sniggered at like a Whitechapel doxy? “I will not have you speak of Peony or of Mrs. Churchill that way. You know as well as I the latter is a champion of scientific inquiry, and she has the ear of the Prime Minister as well. We would be lucky to attract her notice, James. Why, a word from her could open doors throughout the ranks of better placed—and better funded—men than we.”

James had the grace to look abashed. “You are right. I’m sorry.” He cleared his throat and poured himself another finger. “But the fact is that Miss Churchill is a most unusual girl. The Wellesley girl and that horse-faced Montrose chit paled in comparison. Looking at the two of them I was reminded of nothing more than a row of meringues, baked in pastel colors and put on display in a confectioner’s case.”

“But the St. Ives girl? She is not a meringue? I confess I’ve not heard of her or seen her out in company.” Andrew welcomed the turn of the conversation back into more normal channels. He and James disagreed often in matters of physics or chemistry or philosophy, but not in matters of the heart.

Come to think of it, he could not remember ever having discussed matters of the heart with him before. A strange and sensitive topic, to be sure, and one not amenable to the tromping feet of careless and inexperienced men. Surely such territory belonged to women better equipped to explore it.

“You? Go out in company?” James scoffed. “If a lady doesn’t come to a lecture or take a stroll through the exhibitions at the Crystal Palace, you wouldn’t know she existed.” Andrew acknowledged the truth of this with an inclination of his head. “Miss Claire Trevelyan could be something to look at if she grew a spine and possessed some decent conversation,” James went on. “Fortunately, both faults can be easily rectified. In fact, I believe she hides the latter out of fear of her redoubtable mother. But what really drew my attention was the fact that she beat me at poker.”

Andrew raised his eyebrows. “Did she, now? How unladylike of her.”

“The young lady is a regular card shark. And on her first attempt, too. This leads me to believe there must be a mind lurking behind those big gray eyes.”

“If you are noticing the color of her eyes, my dear friend, there is no hope for you.” Andrew put down his empty glass. “Allow me to be the first to offer you my congratulations.”

Lord James Selwyn knocked back the last of his whiskey and grinned. “All in good time, Andrew. Like a perfect peach ripening upon an espalier, these things cannot be rushed.”

Andrew thought of his compression chamber, cold and thwarted, behind him in the laboratory. As always, James was right. But time was as precious a commodity as money, these days. In fact, as far as he was concerned, they were one and the same.