A Flight of Fancy (26 page)

“Some people get dizzy when they look at the ground so far below,” he continued.

“Not me.” Tendrils of mist clung to the pastureland now below them, parting like a gauzy curtain to reveal a flock of sheep munching what was left of the grass. They looked like a child’s toys discarded on a nursery floor, so tiny did the distance make them. Although sheep were rarely quiet, their baas did not reach the balloon, nor did what should have been the
chunk
,
chunk
,
chunk
sound of a man splitting logs outside a dollhouse of a cottage with smoke curling up from its chimney. The smoke dissipated before it reached Cassandra’s nostrils.

She smelled nothing but their own fire to heat the balloon’s air, the hint of linseed oil and turpentine, and the damp wool from Mr. Sorrells’s coat. She heard nothing but the faint hiss of flames and her own wildly beating heart. She saw the world slipping past her at a speed no horse could travel. Meadow, sheep, cottage flashed past in favor of the village, an armload of houses, a handful of shops, the spire of the church. Beyond, billowing dark smoke signaled the edge of the city and the mills.

Whittaker’s mills lay there somewhere. No doubt he sat or walked about in one, inspecting damage, advising or even making repairs himself, getting men back to work as quickly as possible. If she saw the one damaged in the spring, she might
know which small factories belonged to him. She leaned a bit further forward, scanning the larger buildings on the edges of the Dale.

“We should try to turn back,” Mr. Sorrells suggested behind her. “The sails are imperfect for steering, and I think the wind is shifting a bit in our favor anyway.”

Cassandra narrowed her eyes, peering through the tendrils of mist still clinging to the ground. “In a moment.”

“What are you looking for?” Sorrells leaned over on his side.

“The Hern mills. I think they are here about.”

“They are.” Mr. Sorrells suddenly sounded as cold as the cloud that had surrounded them earlier. “I’ll take us down a few hundred feet so we can see them more clearly.”

He released the valve that allowed air to flow out of the balloon. The change was imperceptible to the eye, but suddenly they began to descend, dropping down with an abruptness that left Cassandra’s stomach somewhere in her throat.

She caught her breath. “That I was not expecting.”

“I should have been more careful and eased you down.” Mr. Sorrells did not sound particularly apologetic despite his words. “But you wanted to see the mills, and there, to your right. I mean your left. Where that man is—” He stopped abruptly.

Cassandra glanced behind her to see him still leaning over the side of the basket, so she bent over her edge and peered down. The distance made details impossible to detect, but she recognized the man’s easy gait, the breadth of his shoulders, the tilt of his head that set his overly long hair swinging and shining with touches of auburn in the first rays of sunshine reaching the earth.

Whittaker, dressed like a laborer rather than a nobleman, sauntered down the alleyway behind his mills. One hand rested
on his hip as though about to draw something from his pocket. The other hand held a bulging canvas sack.

Another man slunk behind him, keeping to the long shadows still cast by the buildings that early in the morning. He too rested one hand on his hip. In the other, he held an object too small to detect, but he lifted his arm up and back. A single beam of sunlight flashed.

“Whittaker!” Cassandra screamed. “Geoffrey, down!”

22

The cry dropped from above, a shout sounding oddly like his name. He halted and glanced up. Above him, a balloon glided like some bird from another world. Though several hundred feet in the air, the long, dark hair lifting and drifting with the wind carrying the aeronauts past could belong to only one person.

“Cassandra Bainbridge, I declare I will—” He began to run forward in the path of the balloon, though it floated far faster than any man could run. Still he shouted after her as though she could see him. “Cassandra, I am going to—to—”

A flash snagged the light at the corner of his eye. He leaped back, pivoting on one heel in time to see a man slink between two weaving shops like a feral dog down an alley.

A knife lay at Whittaker’s feet.

If Cassandra had not shouted to him from her infernal balloon, the knife would now stick out of his back and he would be lying on the street like discarded rubbish.

He dropped into a crouch and picked up the knife. More like a dagger—long, slender, lethal. Someone had been bold enough to throw it at him, if not during full daylight, at least during light bright enough that Cassandra had seen him from several hundred feet off the ground.

She was off the ground far enough for a fall to kill her.

She had seen someone throw a knife at his back.

Whittaker leaned against the wall of the weaving shop. Inside, the looms lay in silence, still too damaged to function. He had salvaged much of the cotton and woolen thread, but the rebels had taken axes to the looms.

As someone had wished to take a knife to him, a silent, swift way to do away with him. “Lord, I never made any man my enemy I can think of.”

He stared at the knife. Throwing with deadly accuracy took a special skill. The would-be assassin might not even be someone who knew him. Numerous men from sailors to gypsies possessed the skill to hit a target with a knife from yards away, and too many of those would exchange a few guineas for slipping their dagger between the ribs of a man for whom they held no feelings.

So where was Major Crawford’s spy now? He might have been of use if he were following Whittaker’s movements. That was why Whittaker was still in town—he needed to draw the man out—though he should be long gone before the sun rose much higher. Whittaker had developed a plan for escaping the clutches of Bainbridge and Crawford’s blackmail. To do it, he needed to find the man Crawford had said spied on him, to ensure he was not representative of the Crown.

As if Whittaker would tell the Luddites which of them worked for the Crown, even to help himself. He might as well take the dagger in his hand and slip it into his heart all by himself. The Luddites had killed before. They would kill again.

Whittaker held up the knife, allowing sunlight to dance along the steel blade. It was good steel but nothing exceptional. The hilt was well-worn, smooth and shiny from considerable handling, and made of hard but common enough ash wood. It was
the sort of knife one could buy in any cutlery shop in a large city or from some tinker along the road. If he showed it to the constable, he would give away his mission, opening up Mama to the scandal of Crawford’s condemnatory information, and the constable would be able to tell him nothing. If Cassandra had not warned him from the car of that infernal machine . . .

But she had. She had saved his life.

Shoving the dagger into his pocket with one hand, he rubbed his eyes with the other. All night he had kept vigil on his mills. First he had warned another weaver of a potential attack on his facility, then gone to his own. He could not afford to lose more looms. The ones damaged in the spring were just now becoming operational again. Another assault would suck dry the rest of his profits for the year, and the estate would suffer.

The Bainbridge sisters were right in one thing: he did need a wife with a good dowry. A pity he loved a woman whose father would not give him one unless something changed.

“If I deliver the leaders into your hands?”

He was spending too much time alone and talking to himself like a crazed man. He wanted to talk to Cassandra—after he gave her a scold—

What was he thinking? He had no business scolding Cassandra. He was not her father. He was not even her fiancé now.

The would-be assassin may as well have stuck the knife in his back and twisted. It would have hurt no worse than her walking away from him the previous Saturday night.

The light growing too bright for him to remain where many people knew him and would likely see through his disguise in a second, Whittaker ducked down the same passageway between two mills that the knife thrower had taken. No recesses in the walls allowed for places to hide despite the darkness still
clinging to the opening between the brick walls rising up on either side of him. Beyond lay warehouses filled with linen and wool thread from the water-powered spinning mules. One day he would like to have his own spinning facilities. They would prove more profitable. Until the mill was destroyed in the spring, he had poured his profits into Whittaker Hall. It was beginning to support itself, but now all the profits went to protecting and repairing the mills.

No wonder Cassandra did not wish to marry him. Especially now that she had told him about her scars, she surely thought he wanted nothing more than her dowry. Her father must think he wanted nothing more, that only a desperate man, not a sensible one, would wish for financial recompense to marry a flawed wife.

But it is my fault!
The cry rang so loudly inside his head he might have shouted it. If he had experienced the anguish of guilt before, it now left him so crushed inside he dared not look at his reflection. He could not like what looked back at him.

And now she had run off to fly. The idea of being that far off the ground in an open-air basket made him want to cast up his accounts. Yet Cassandra acted as though she might be on nothing higher up than a first-floor gallery.

He reached his own climb nearly as high as a balcony—the fence surrounding the mills for what had proven to be insubstantial protection. He had tucked a rope, knotted and looped, to the top of the barricade. He climbed it now, telling himself that he would not hurt himself if he fell. The fence rose no more than ten feet in the air, made of straight, wooden slats set vertically to discourage easy climbing. His own secret entrance into the yard had shown the fence’s protection to be a farce, with the ease of the would-be assassin’s entrance. Had he used a rope of his own?

No time to look. The bell had rung. Weavers would arrive through the front gates at any moment. Whittaker poised on the top of the fence, pointed boards digging into his hands and thighs, and drew the rope up to toss down the other side. He then lowered himself to hang from his hands and drop. The ground was soft. He remembered to bend his knees. Not so much as a twinge in ankles or knees. Hearing voices on the other side of the fence, he picked up his rope and began to wind his way through the other warehouses and smaller weaving shops, then some mean houses—little more than hovels—on the edges of the factory area, which gradually gave way to fields and trees and places to hide from curious passersby.

Few of the travelers on the road gave him a second glance. They were stolid farmers hauling their wares into town. Apples scented the air. Whittaker’s stomach growled. He considered buying a bagful of fruit and a wheel of the cheeses he saw on one wagon, then recalled Cassandra warning him, the flash of the blade barely missing his back, Cassandra hundreds of feet off the ground—and his appetite fled.

“When I find you, my dear lady, I will . . . will . . .”

He would hold her tightly with her feet on the ground. And she would hate that. Perhaps not the holding part. But she wanted no one telling her what she could and could not do.

“Do not scold,” he told himself as he reached his cottage in midmorning and made himself a bit of bread and cold sausage. He ate standing in the cottage doorway, staring up at the sky. He could not simply trot across the fields in the middle of the day, not Whittaker Hall fields, and wait for her to land—if she landed neatly and not in a heap of blazing wreckage.

When he climbed the narrow stairs to his bedchamber, little more than a dormer beneath the roof beams so low he could not
stand upright, he could not sleep for seeing Cassandra caught beneath flaming silk. A single dose drove memories of the celebrations through his mind, the pounding on his carriage, the taunts directed at him, the torch dropped on her gown.

He jerked upright, sweating despite the chill away from the fire. He had slept, and in his sleep he had dreamed a memory. In waking he began to worry on a notion that sent him downstairs to heat water for shaving and washing, with the lightest application of his own soap rather than a spy’s rough lye.

He donned a clean shirt, then, as the early autumn dusk began to fall, he set out through the meadow and woods to see Cassandra. After that, he would find Major Crawford and tell him about the knife too close to his back.

With the major staying at the Hall, not to mention Miss Irving, who had clung to him at the assembly like a limpet to a rock, Whittaker waited on the edge of the parkland until he saw everyone gather in the dining room for supper. Miss Irving clung to the arm of Roger Kent of all men, the major escorted both Mama and Miss Honore, and Cassandra tucked her hand into the crook of Philip Sorrells’s elbow. Her face positively glowed in the candlelight as she gazed up at the man, and he bent his head over hers like a bird of prey over a mouse. Or perhaps merely possessively. Either way, Whittaker clutched a branch so hard it snapped off in his hand with a crack like a pistol shot.

At once, a footman appeared at the dining room window and drew the curtains.

Whittaker left his hiding place and skulked around the perimeter of his own home, his own house and lands, until he reached the orangery. He looked first to ensure his cousins and their tutor were not occupying the one indulgence that Mama insisted Whittaker keep going, then cut through it to Cassandra’s sitting
room. A maid might enter her bedchamber to turn down the bed, bring hot water, and refresh the fire, but she had no cause to be in the sitting room. Miss Honore might arrive first, but Whittaker could manage her. As for Cassandra? He had proven himself incapable of managing her at all. But they needed to talk. He needed a description of the man who had thrown the knife, if she had one. He needed to talk to her.

He needed her.

He waited beside the settee, ready to dive behind it if anyone else entered one of the ladies’ chambers. No one did, not even a maid, though an open periodical and Cassandra’s spectacles lay on a chair by the hearth as though she had been called away in haste.