A Gentleman of Means (14 page)

“Yes.”

“Transferred to you … by the count himself? How very singular.”

“We have had several business dealings, and I have the honor to call him friend.”

“It is an honor not vouchsafed to many, I understand.”

“So you see my difficulty,” Alice said, inclining her head. “I can choose to register it here, or in Prussia, or in the Fifteen Colonies.”

The man looked as though he could barely wait for her to finish speaking. “Might I presume for a moment upon your kindness, madam, and urge you to register this vessel in Her Majesty’s fleet. For I can tell you now that any captain worth his salt would be honored to serve aboard her.”

It was not possible for Alice to straighten further, but Captain Hollys did. Tension filled the air between them, blowing up as suddenly as any tropical gale.

“I am sorry, I do not understand you,” Alice said at last. “If I were to register
Swan
in England, I would captain her.”

“You?” The registrar’s gaze took her in from hem to lacy jabot. “But a woman cannot serve in the Corps. Surely you see that.”

“I do not. Why shouldn’t she?”

“Because—well, think of the crew’s quarters, for one. And the disruption and distraction among the men. No, no. It is impossible—to say nothing of the vagaries of the female mind, which is simply not designed for the mathematics of flight.”

Tigg waited for her to snatch up an ink pot and throw it at his head, but she merely took a breath as if preparing to plunge into a pool.

Then she leaned forward, as if to make sure he clearly understood. “I’ve been flying for most of my life. Captain Hollys can tell you I’m as conversant with the Daimler and Mercedes steam engines as I am with the Crockett—more so, since I wouldn’t fly a Crockett if you paid me—and in fact I codeveloped the automaton intelligence system that Zeppelin is installing in all his ships. So I have already proven that nonsensical prejudice you hold to be false—as has my co-engineer, Lady Claire Trevelyan, of whom you may have heard.”

From his blank look, this was clearly not the case.

“I congratulate you on these achievements,” he said at last. “But regulations do not permit females in the Corps.”

“Then perhaps regulations should be changed.”

“I am afraid it would take more than the wishes of you or I to do so. But, madam, this does not prevent you from registering the B2 as its owner. Most of the private entities do. It is the rare military man who both owns and captains his ship.”

“This woman does both.” She straightened once again. “And until I am permitted both to own it and to fly it in Her Majesty’s service, then I suppose I shall have to register it elsewhere.”

The loss of the B2 was clearly a greater catastrophe than Tigg had imagined, for as Alice rose, the registrar came around his desk to take her hand.

“Please, madam—”

“Captain. Captain Chalmers, as I believe Captain Hollys said when he introduced me.”

“A colonial captain, excellent,” he said, babbling now. “Please allow me to make an appointment for you with the Registry, so that we might welcome the B2 into—”

“Sir, I believe I made the conditions of my registration clear.”

Tigg resisted the urge to cheer. Good for her for not backing down. He couldn’t wait to tell Lizzie about this in his next letter.

“But we simply cannot—”

Alice pulled her hand from his and strode to the door. “Good afternoon, sir. Thank you for your time. It has been most instructive.”

“Captain Chalmers, please—”

But Alice did not wait.

Captain Hollys bowed to the registrar and Tigg did the same. And then they both practically scampered out the door.

Alice had already reached the end of the corridor, bearing down on the exterior door like a ship with vanes set full horizontal. They didn’t catch up with her until she was halfway across St. James’s Park.

Alice was closeted with the Lady for a very long time that afternoon, and even Robbie and Dickie looked nervous at the sound of raised voices not quite muffled by the office door.

“She’s in a proper temper, she is,” Jake murmured to Tigg that evening as Charlie brought in the tea and Kitty helped everyone to a cup and a slice of fruitcake. “I haven’t seen the captain like this since the Famiglia Rosa told her the
Stalwart Lass
was to be impounded at the Venice airfield. That were a proper Donnybrook, it were.”

Quickly, Tigg filled him in on the details of their visit to the Registry. If he had thought Jake would be surprised, he was in for a letdown, for he only laughed instead. “I have to give her credit for trying. Our Alice ent afraid of nothing—I never seen her back down from man nor beast. And some of the folks we met have been both.”

“I hope it doesn’t make her fly off to the Fifteen Colonies in a temper,” Tigg said. “Not with Captain Hollys still on land leave and Christmas coming.”

“If it does, I’ll spike the automatons so they don’t do as she says, and ground us.” Jake grinned. “I picked up a trick or two in my travels.” Then he sobered, and held Tigg’s gaze. “Which is why you ent going to the Sea Horse alone tomorrow night.”

Instead of taking offense, Tigg nodded. He’d already planned to ask for help, but it was nice to have it offered without asking. “I’m not that stupid. Without Liz and Maggie for scouts, I suppose I’ll have to make do with your ugly mug.”

“And mine,” Snouts spoke up from the corner of the sofa, where he’d been totting up a column of figures on the back of an envelope. “You don’t suppose we’d let you go off to meet a stranger in the Cudgel’s territory, do you?”

“Is he still alive?”

“Alive, though after that incident with the Lady, of course, there’ll be no one to carry on his illustrious name after he’s dead. Alive or dead, his temper hasn’t improved one bit.”

“Do you think he’d recognize us after all this time?”

“I think he knows exactly what we look like. There’s a reason I’ve posted a permanent guard at all the Lady’s properties, you know.”

That was Snouts—prepared for anything. “Then I’d be happy for your company, too. It will be like old times.”

“I hope not.” Snouts stroked a velvet waistcoat of particular magnificence that Tigg had not seen before. “I’m fond of the new times, myself.”

All in all, Tigg had to agree. His prospects had never been brighter. Once the captain was better, he looked forward to returning to duty with fresh determination to have his first engineer’s bars in four years. He and Lizzie had talked about it before he’d left Munich, and settled on a plan. It wasn’t quite like being engaged, for he had been mindful of his promise to the Lady, but planning for a mutual future had made him
feel
engaged. And Lizzie’s kiss good-bye had been everything a man could wish for in the woman he wanted to make his wife.

The Lady and Kitty concluded their calls the next day, which according to her account that evening at dinner, proved as mind-numbing and dull as could be expected, except for two tidbits: Peony Churchill was in Paris but expected back before Christmas, and the scandal surrounding old Mount-Batting’s gift of property to his baseborn son had not died away among the drawing-rooms of London.

“I am undecided whether this is because of the general opinion of society on the subject of that family which Julia and her husband have done nothing to improve,” the Lady remarked, passing the potatoes to Alice, “or because property is always a subject that excites conversation among the Bloods.”

Alice had been down at the warehouses with Captain Hollys all day buying parts and fittings and rope for
Swan
, and consequently looked much more cheerful and like their Alice than she had the day before. “But it does confirm what Ian and the clerk told us about the family. I just wish there was information more recent than four or five years old.”

“It doesn’t help us much to know he has a house when no one has seen him on this side of the Channel since then,” Tigg agreed, tucking into his slice of pork and baked apples with gusto. “My offer to take
Athena
and patrol the coast for a sign of
Neptune’s Fancy
is still open.”

“I’m afraid you would have more success finding a hook in a pile of rigging,” Captain Hollys said. “It is frustrating to have amassed a number of facts—only to find that they are no help whatsoever.”

“We did agree that to paint a picture of the only person we know to have been involved was the best course open to us,” the Lady pointed out. “I only wish we had another.” She turned to Tigg, lowering her fork to her plate. “You will be careful tonight.”

He took it as it was meant—both as an order and as a bid for reassurance. “I will, Lady. I have my lightning pistol, and Jake has a pocketful of Mr. Andrew’s walnuts.”

The moment that name passed his lips in connection with the tiny Short Range Dazzling Incendiaries he had invented, Tigg wished he could have just shut up. But the Lady bore up under it bravely.

“And Snouts?” She gazed at him down the length of the table, where he occupied the chair opposite her, as the
de facto
man of the house. The chair he had been prepared to abdicate in favor of Mr. Andrew—and now had had to re-occupy. “You will take all proper precautions as well, won’t you? It has been some time since you’ve run a raid.”

“Claire, really,” Captain Hollys murmured.

“We have no secrets in this house, Ian,” she reminded him crisply. “And you are as aware of the manner in which we had to live in the past as anyone here.”

Snouts interjected smoothly, “I’ve kept my hand in, Lady, and will be wearing my pistol in a holster under my coat.”

She nodded, satisfied, and her gray gaze met Tigg’s once more. “We do not know what may come of your meeting tonight, Tigg, but no matter what it might be, you can count on all of us to back you up.”

Nothing he says will change my opinion of you.

Tigg understood her meaning as clearly as though she had said it aloud. “Thank you, Lady,” he said quietly. Then he pushed back his chair. “No pudding for me tonight. I’d like to get down there in time to reconnoiter a little.”

Jake and Snouts shrugged on their coats, checked their pockets, and the three of them set off. They took an underground train to Tower Bridge and then crossed it on foot, arriving in the neighborhood of the Sea Horse about ninety minutes after their departure from Belgravia. They might as well have crossed the ocean.

In a way, they had—a wide gulf made of the time that existed between their past lives and their present prospects.

They’d reconnoitered many a tavern, and their old skills did not fail them. Jake melted into the darkness in the alley behind while Tigg and Snouts determined that the place had only two doors—the one on the street and one out to the kitchen yard, an unappealing square of brick full of refuse and rats.

“Don’t think I’d trust their grog as far as I could spit it,” Snouts murmured when Jake joined them once more, one street over. “They probably cut it with rat piss.”

“They’ve got a watch posted on the stairs to the second floor,” Jake reported. “I had a peek through a window from the roof. No watch up there.”

“I’m not interested in whatever is going on upstairs,” Tigg told them. “Just in whether or not this is an ambush.”

“Looks fair for now,” Snouts concluded. “You go in alone. We’ll follow in a moment, see if anyone follows you in who doesn’t look thirsty.”

Tigg had believed himself to be unaffected by the prospect of meeting the stranger calling himself Terwilliger, but as he crossed the greasy threshold, he took in the faces at the tables with far more intensity than usual.

How often did a man get to meet the father who was no father? One thing was certain—he and Lizzie would have even more in common now.

His gaze settled on a dark corner, where a man sat at a table clearly meant for private conversation. When he raised his tankard in salute, Tigg drew in a slow breath—of an atmosphere flavored with rum and onions and urine—and walked over.

“Buy you a drink, Lieutenant?” The man’s skin was so dark that he blended into the shadows in a way that was positively eerie. Until he leaned into the light of the old-fashioned wax candle on the table, all Tigg could see of him in the light of the electrick lantern that hung a few feet away was the glimmer of light along a cheekbone, the white of his teeth, and the gleam of polished skin upon his bald pate. He was not old, but shaven smooth in the way of pugilists or swimmers.

This had to be he, if he knew Tigg’s rank—for Tigg was not in uniform, but in raiding rig: dark trousers, vest, flying goggles, and leather belt studded with pockets and hooks for bombs and weapons. His lightning pistol lay concealed in his pants pocket, and while there were two vials of gaseous capsaicin in the loops in his belt, the vials had been made to look like tiny rum bottles, as befitted an aeronaut.

“No, thank you.” He waved the barmaid away, and got a dirty look for his pains.

“So,” his companion said, looking him over. Did he expect to see some hint of himself in Tigg’s face and form? “You’ve got her forehead, too. Nancy’s. And her way of frowning, with the two lines, just here.” He touched his own forehead. “Would you like to see her?”

For a moment, Tigg wondered whether, if his father had come back from the dead, his mother might not as well. But no. That couldn’t be right. The night-hens had wrapped her body right there in the kitchen before she’d gone to the potter’s field to be buried. “What do you mean?”

In answer, the man fished a chain out from under his shirt, from which hung a round brass locket, plain and unadorned. He pressed the screw and it opened to reveal a daguerrotype portrait. He handed it over. “Do you remember her?”

“Not like this.” For the face in the portrait was young and smiling, with a cloud of golden hair. “Before she died, she was thinner, and the pox was coming on, and she’d sold her hair to the wig maker for money to eat.”

Something flickered over the man’s face, and he took back the locket. “I didn’t want to leave you,” he said. “Take that for what it’s worth.”

“It’s worth nothing to me,” Tigg said evenly. “I don’t know you. What you want now or didn’t want then makes no nevermind to me. I got on with the life I was handed, and as you see, made something of it with the help of others.”

“You sound like you’ve been in the Colonies.”

“Perhaps.”

“The wind. It’s in our blood. I’ve been on every continent on this earth, and most of its islands.”

“I came by my profession by my own will, not because of you.”

The man regarded him more intently now, not looking for himself in Tigg’s face any longer. “So you say. Well, perhaps you did. How do you like being in Her Majesty’s service? Suit you?”

The more he spoke, the more Tigg tried to place his accent. Not English. Not from the Fifteen Colonies. Was he French? With a name like Terwilliger?

“It does. Where do you hail from? You don’t speak like an Englishman.”

“I was born in England, true enough, but grew up on the Moorish coast. My pa was from Yorkshire. He was an aeronaut, too. I learned my trade in Rome, and hired on as a ropemaker in the Royal Air Corps. They needed men, and I needed work. That’s when I met your mother, when we were based at Hampstead Heath. I was married and you were on the way before I knew it.”

“Why did you leave? You left the Corps at the same time. Seems fishy to me.”

His eyebrow lifted, cocked at a diagonal, and Tigg felt a shock of recognition. That eyebrow—his mother’s finger, drawing a line along it—her laughter—

The door opened and Tigg glanced over his shoulder to see Snouts and Jake come in. They sat four feet away, their backs to them, their faces toward the door as they chatted in low voices, and ordered drinks.

Tigg settled his flight jacket on his shoulders, feeling the truth settle upon him at the same time.

“Something wrong, boy?” Terwilliger asked.

“No. I just recognized something about you, that’s all. I hadn’t expected to, and it surprised me.”

“Ah. Didn’t trust me, did you?”

“I still don’t. Why did you want to meet me, after all this time?”

“Can’t a man want to be acquainted with his son?”

“Depends on whether he ever wanted to, I suppose.”

Terwilliger leaned toward him on one elbow, his eyes somber, his pupils dilated in the dim light. “I did want to. You want to know why I left the service?” When Tigg shrugged, he went on. “I had to. I got into bad company—made some poor decisions. It was either desert and face court martial if I ever set foot on English soil again, or be killed on the spot. I chose the long-term plan, if you will.”

“So if you’re discovered here, you’ll be shot? Why would you take the risk?”

“Because I saw you at Gibraltar, and I realized I’d missed my chance. We won’t see one another again, my boy—not on this side of the ocean, or of eternity, probably. I have debts to pay, and a harsh master to serve.”

“Who? Old Scratch?”

Amusement twitched at the corners of his lips. “I’d choose him in a moment. No. The Doge of Venice.”

Tigg felt his face go slack, and struggled for control. “You fly for the Famiglia Rosa?”

His father grabbed his wrist and yanked him toward himself across the table. “Keep your voice down!”

“Are you mad?” Tigg tugged his wrist out of his grasp—not without difficulty, for the man was as wiry as a fighting cock, with muscles ropy and honed from years of scrambling up and down fuselages. “Do you have a death wish, to work for them and yet return to England with nothing to look forward to but being seized to the rigging?”

For aeronauts were not hung, or shot, if they received the death penalty. They were tied in the rigging of the fuselage on the ship they had wronged, and left there until the elements and the cold of the clouds caused them to perish.

The man shrugged. “It was worth the risk to see you.”

Tigg could not imagine someone who valued his life so little that he was willing to take that risk. If he only had one last chance to see Lizzie, would he take it, come what may? Somehow he thought that he would. But in her case, love lay in the scale, heavy as gold and twice as fine. This man could have no such counterweight.