If such a thing were possible.
Arabella’s gaze fell to her own plate. Suddenly the lovingly prepared joint of beef and Yorkshire pudding seemed overly rich, and entirely unappetizing. “I am terribly sorry to have discomfited you,” she said, looking straight at Stross’s averted eyes, “and, on behalf of my sex, I accept your apology for any improprieties inadvertently committed due to my pretense.” She paused a moment to calm her breathing, though tension still clamped her teeth together. “Furthermore, I find that I am no longer hungry.” She undid the strap beneath her thighs and, with as much dignity as she could muster, extracted her legs and her floating skirt from beneath the table. “Good evening, gentlemen.”
She managed to keep the tears from her eyes until the door of her little closet had closed behind her. Even then, though, with the officers just the other side of a thin partition of khoresh-wood, she had to keep her sobs silent.
*
Two days later, Arabella floated before Aadim, watching the dials on his desk as his clockwork whirred and ticked through another course correction. The map of Mars was spread out before him, his pointing finger resting on Fort Augusta; though Mars’s turbulent Horn was smaller and calmer than that of Earth, navigating through it was still tricky, and frequent small corrections were required if Diana hoped to land at the port itself rather than hundreds of miles away.
The many corrections were, she must admit, rather a blessing to her, as they provided her an excuse to spend time alone with Aadim. The clockwork navigator might not be much of a conversationalist, but unlike the officers and men, his behavior toward her had not changed with her clothing. Even the captain, whose treatment of her had altered the least, sometimes seemed discomfited by her skirted presence.
She looked into the automaton’s eyes; though they did not see, they seemed filled with a sort of animation, jittering slightly as the wheels within his cabinet spun. “I wish I could take you off the ship and show you Woodthrush Woods,” she said, finger tracing an area some inches from the fort. “That is my family’s khoresh-tree plantation.” Though unmarked on Aadim’s map, the spot was well-worn in Arabella’s memory. The great manor house, the Martians’ dwellings of fused stone, the long drying-sheds with their great coal-stores—in which she would sometimes hide, to her mother’s great dismay—all sprang vividly into her mind’s eye. “Khema used to take Michael and me to Fort Augusta nearly every week.”
At the thought of Michael, her eyes began to sting. Her fingers crept to her throat and touched the locket with his miniature portrait.
She hoped her brother still lived. With all the delays that had afflicted Diana, Simon would surely have already reached the plantation and insinuated himself into its daily routine. Michael, for all his intelligence, could be na?ve in his dealings with other people, and she feared that it would not take Simon long to work his way sufficiently into her brother’s confidences to have an opportunity to do him in. On an isolated plantation, a moment’s inattention might be sufficient for Simon to push Michael off a cliff, poison his water with uthesh-seed, or simply shoot him, and no one would ever be the wiser.
A bell pinged, distracting Arabella from her distressing speculations. Startled, she looked up into Aadim’s face. The automaton’s head was tilted, his glass eyes seeming to regard her with concern.
She took a deep breath, then let it out. “All will be well,” she said, and bent to record the sailing order from Aadim’s dials. “All will be well.”
3
MARS, 1813
17
MARS