A Gentleman of Means (18 page)

“One last thing,” she said. “What of my friends in Venice—the ones who boarded the
Fancy
with me? If they had not attempted the rescue, would you have abducted them, too?”

“Of course not. We should have conveyed them to the dock and pretended to obey your father’s order to take you out to sea until the floods subsided. That they acted so precipitately …” He looked away for a moment. “I have many regrets, Gloria, and their fates are numbered among them. I hope you will believe me.”

She nodded, and after a moment he cleared a space at the table and provided her with stationery and ink.

She looked up to see Barnaby reading over her shoulder, his face scarlet. “If—if it makes a difference—which of course it does not—I am the son of a duke, though sadly, on the wrong side of the blanket.”

“Do you wish me to add that?”

“No. Dear me, no.”

“He will never fall for it, duke or no duke,” she told him, folding up the letter and pressing her mother’s diamond ring into the wax that sealed it closed—a habit her father was well aware of. The letter could come from no one else.

It took him a moment to reply. “We shall see. I—I did not expect
this
as a pretext, I must say.”

“It will bring him on the run, so I have fulfilled my duty to Her Majesty. Shall I send it to the house in Paris, or to his personal airship?”

“I can procure a pigeon to send to the airship.” The color was fading from his cheeks now. “It will perhaps be most efficient.”

He went out of the room to give the order, and when he returned, she had risen to her feet.

“Do you think—” But her throat closed and choked off the rest, as if there were words too terrible to be spoken. She walked to the window, staying carefully behind the velvet drape.

“Yes?” he prompted softly.

“Do you think … the man with the pressure rifle …”

“We do not know his weapon, only that it was a most peculiar bullet.”

“Hollow, with an external propulsion mechanism, and containing acid?”

She had surprised him again. “How could you possibly know that?”

“Because it was fired from an Astor fifty-five caliber pressure rifle. Dual barrel, double trigger, with a range of one hundred yards.”

“Good heavens. If you can tell me who fired it, I will commission you into Her Majesty’s service myself.”

Her lips attempted to flicker into a smile, but she did not have the strength. “It is the only firearm that can accommodate that bullet. My father makes them.” She paused, then, “I cannot tell you who fired it. But is there a chance, no matter how small, that my father might have hired someone to perform the deed?”

She didn’t know how she got the words out. All she knew was that her voice had dropped to a whisper of misery. Captain Hayes made a single sound of distress and in the next moment, had gathered her into his arms.

How long she stood in that warm embrace, losing her control utterly and sobbing into his lapels, she did not know. But when someone cleared his throat, she sprang away as though she had touched a Tesla coil.

“I beg your pardon, Captain Hayes, Miss Aster,” the butler said, gazing at something over their heads, “but several tubes have arrived.”

Barnaby’s consciousness seemed to come back from a long voyage. “Thank you.” He took the curled envelopes from the silver tray and seemed to find them extremely interesting, which suited Gloria just fine.

She had to get out of here. For her own sanity, if nothing else. For only a madwoman would enjoy the embrace of a man who had lied to her from the moment he had laid eyes on her—who had abducted her, locked her up, and was even now using her as bait to capture a wanted criminal.

Only a madwoman would feel cool air on her arms and miss the warmth that, for one brief moment, had seemed to offer safety and respite. Only a madwoman would care for a scoundrel, no matter his patriotic credentials and ideals.

And Gloria Diana Meriwether-Astor was not mad.

“Good heavens,” Barnaby exclaimed. “I declare, the world cannot possibly become any stranger than it is—and yet—”

“What now?” she asked, since the butler had departed and someone had to say something.

He handed her a square of creamy stationery with a crest at the top—a raven with a twig of holly in its claws.

“How peculiar,” Barnaby said as she turned it over, as if the direction could tell her something more. “Never met the man, and he is inviting me to a ball as cordially as if we had indeed served together.”

Gloria gathered her scattered thoughts the way a small child picks up jack-straws—slowly, and with dogged precision. “Perhaps you met at some military function and don’t remember.”

“Perhaps I did. I’ve certainly heard of him. I didn’t know he lived in these parts. Decidedly peculiar way of expressing himself, don’t you think? Very poetic. Perhaps it’s all those years of flying in foreign skies with the Dunsmuirs.”

“Barnaby, if you will excuse me, I must go lie down,” she said desperately.

“Why, of course.” He was immediately all solicitude. “The revelations of this morning would lay a fighting man flat, let alone a young lady. Please, allow me to—”

But she evaded his proffered arm and fled, the invitation hidden in the folds of her skirts. She took the stairs to the room she had been given as fast as her flying feet would go.

Captain Hollys.

Claire.

Oh, thank God, thank God.

For she had understood the message perfectly, as soon as she’d laid eyes on Ian’s holly crest. She’d seen that crest before, stamped upon his luggage, and upon the pocketbook he carried in his coat.
The safe arrival of friends from Venice.
They had survived. And not only survived, but were even now a mere ten miles away!

Gloria flung herself down next to her bed, clasped the invitation between her hands, and gave thanks to the Almighty that He had kept them safe, and that their deaths would not be laid to her account.

When she rose, it was with renewed spirits and fresh determination.
The moon will be full and you and your friends may travel in safety.

Peculiar indeed. From her bedside, she could see the southern sky, where the waxing moon would rise. In three days, when it was full, her friends—her flock—would come to set her free.

She would be ready. And waiting.

“We simply do not have enough people.” Claire clutched her head in both hands, her gaze on the map in her lap, which Ian had sketched on the back of an old menu plan that probably dated from his mother’s time. She released her hair with a sigh and looked about her. “I cannot be a member of the walking party, lest Captain Hayes should recognize me. Alice cannot leave Hollys Park lest somehow Terwilliger should find her. Ian must be here to guard Alice—”

“I don’t need guarding. I’m probably a better shot than he is.” Alice took another sandwich.

“That is emphatically not true!” the captain exclaimed. “I challenge you to some target practice in the orchard.”

“Done,” Alice said. “After you lead the walking party to Haybourne House.”

“Ian cannot go to Haybourne House,” Claire explained for what must be the fourth time. “If Captain Hayes’s eyesight is even half as good as Lizzie’s, he might have seen Ian and Jake in the diving bell. We cannot risk it, and while Jake may patrol forest and road safely in the dark, Ian is better used here. Oh, why did I leave Lizzie and Maggie behind?” she moaned. “They are so good at providing distractions.”

“Because they have a job to do in Munich, and you all three know it,” said an unexpected voice from the hall. A voice so familiar that for the space of a moment, Claire’s heart stopped.

Impossible.

“Is there any chance of a cup of tea?” said Andrew Malvern, walking into the library where they were all gathered, attempting to come up with a workable plan for Gloria’s rescue. “I have been on an airship, a train, and a wagon behind the most recalcitrant nag you ever saw, and I am famished.”

Claire could not speak. Her mouth opened, and though she poured him a cup of tea, put milk in it, and handed it to him, still no words came out. Her heart, having resumed its normal operation, now proceeded to speed up to the point that he must be able to see the pulse point in her throat, beating like the wings of a bird.

How …?

“Thank you, Claire,” he said, and scooped up a piece of Mrs. Boatwright’s excellent fruitcake, which had been doused in so much whiskey that a spark from the fire would set it alight. “Do not look as though I am a vision from Hades. I received a note from Alice yesterday requesting my assistance. And though I could not imagine how I might be useful, I threw as many of my completed, er,
projects
into a valise as it would hold, and set off.”

Alice? Alice was the engineer of this betrayal? How
could
she?

Her questions must have been quite clear on her face, for Alice blushed up to the roots of her hair. “I’m sorry, Claire. But we needed him—both for brains and brawn.”

She must recover, and quickly, before everyone began to feel awkward on her behalf and it had a deleterious effect on the task set before them. “On the contrary,” she said at last, “I see the logic in it. We were just discussing the deployment of our resources.”

“Which we will take up again in a moment,” Ian said. “Let the poor man have his tea. Boatwright, will you see that Mr. Malvern’s bags are taken up? And we might put him in the Turkish room, in the guest wing.”

The butler bowed and withdrew, but not before refreshing Andrew’s tea and offering him grapes and sandwiches.

“Capital,” Andrew said at last, with a sigh of satisfaction. He took them all in, his gaze passing over Claire with no greater or less cordiality than he showed anyone else. “Now, then. Where are we?”

She passed him the map while Ian briefed him on their situation, including the strange behavior of the mysterious gunman. “So while we deeply appreciate the addition to our numbers,” he concluded, “I am afraid you must be content with the position of mastermind. You and Claire are both known to Captain Hayes, so you must not set foot on the Haybourne estate under any circumstances.”

Andrew studied the map, where the house and its river were indicated, as well as the two bridges over the water. The post road and the stone wall had been drawn in by Tigg and Jake, along with an
X
that indicated approximately where the gunman had been concealed.

“We must divide into three groups, then,” Andrew finally said. “Ian and Alice will stay here, Tigg and Jake will provide a perimeter in case the gunman returns, and Claire and I will perform the rescue.”

Claire and I!
How easily he said it—as if such a thing would be just as easily accomplished. Claire could imagine nothing so dangerous to her composure—to say nothing of her heart—than to be walking through the forest in the moonlight with Andrew, gunmen nothwithstanding. She had barely begun to keep his face out of her mind’s eye for two minutes at a time, and now here he was in the flesh, looking every bit as competent, every bit as warm and kind, as ever he had in the sitting room at Carrick House.

Oh, no. This was too cruel. What had she ever done to Alice to deserve this? How was she ever to endure the finest torture a woman could be subjected to—yearning endlessly for the man she herself had pushed away?

Andrew tapped the penciled image of the house set in its cup of hills. “You say there are three men at least inside, in addition to Captain Hayes?”

Tigg nodded. “There were three in the drawing room before the shot, and the two ladies. It was also clear that they were armed. One of them dove for the side of the window, and came up with a rifle. They expected an attack of some kind. They were prepared.”

“Or a rescue, maybe,” Alice suggested. “I wonder if they think her father and an army of mercenaries are coming?”

Claire stared at her, grateful to have something to think about besides the shape of Andrew’s fingers as they handled the map. “Alice, I wonder if you might be right. They cannot have known about this mysterious gunman—and yet, who stages firearms beside the windows?”

“Ned Mose used to,” Alice said. “Behind all the curtains, just in case, and one next to the door.”

Of course.

“Tigg, why did you say nothing of this yesterday?” Ian asked him. “This changes the entire light upon the situation.”

“I just thought of it,” Tigg confessed. “If Gloria doesn’t have a price on her head—and we can’t imagine that she does—then why else bring in men who have clearly seen action and arm the house?”

“Because they expect to be besieged,” Andrew said slowly, nodding. “My money is on Meriwether-Astor.”

“But that makes no sense,” Claire objected. “The poor man is desperate to know where she is. He isn’t going to put up a fight, or risk her being hurt.”

But Andrew shook his head, and she felt a twinge of disappointment that even in this they should disagree. “This is all speculation,” he said. “Let us stick to the facts we know. Gloria is there against her will. The house is armed to the rafters, so getting her out on the ground will be next to impossible. Therefore, we must consider getting her out by air.”

“What—from the roof?” Jake asked. “We’d only have a few minutes before someone noticed there was a ship hanging about like a ruddy great cloud over the chimneys.”

“Do you have another idea?” Andrew was not being rude, it was clear. He was deeply interested. But the sad truth was that the unknown assailant had complicated matters dreadfully.

“What about the rocket rucksacks?” Jake said with an air of one producing the ace of spades, which was understandable since no one had brought it up before.

“Left in Venice, I am afraid,” Claire said, “at the bottom of the Grand Canal.”

“But that is an idea,” Tigg told them. “We need something smaller than an airship, but larger than a rucksack, and capable of flying far enough to get her and the pilot out of the danger zone.”

“I have a touring balloon in the carriage house, I think,” Ian said with a smile. “But it hasn’t been used since before Her Majesty came to the throne, of that I am quite sure.”

“Is it a steering model?” Andrew asked.

“Yes, complete with propellers, but no vanes or steam propulsion. My sisters and I used to go up and down in the meadow while my mother begged us to land and not endanger the line of succession.”

“Has it a fuselage?”

Ian laughed. “Heavens, no. They were silk then—and long rotted away. I expect the basket has, too.”

Claire gazed at the man she had loved for so long, who was now as far out of her reach as any balloon. “Andrew, what is in your mind?”

He cleared his throat, and for a moment, she almost thought he looked … guilty. “I left a large parcel at the train station in Bath, with orders that it be delivered as soon as possible. I brought it to show you and Alice, but I had no idea—it is quite impossible—and yet—”

“Malvern, old man, stop babbling,” the captain said. “What is in this parcel, and how will it help us?”

Andrew looked up, and Claire found time itself slowing under the intensity of his gaze. “I completed a prototype of the Helios Membrane for a small vessel,” he said to her, as though they were alone in the room. “If the basket and rigging for Ian’s touring balloon are still serviceable, I thought you might take it up on its maiden voyage.”

*

Claire thought it odd when Ian and Alice suggested they take her steam landau to Bath in order to hurry the parcel on its way. But she became downright suspicious when Tigg and Jake vanished in the direction of the carriage house to, so they said, unearth whatever was left of the touring balloon and make any necessary repairs to it. Before she could offer her assistance or even a suggestion, she and Andrew had been left in the library with a scattering of maps and drawings … and the ghost of what they had once been to one another standing in the room like another living being.

Finally, after several agonizing minutes of pretending to be absorbed in the drawings for the Helios Membrane, which he had fetched down from the Turkish room while everyone else was rabbiting off, she decided that the silence must be broken. Heaven forbid that he should think she had engineered everyone’s disappearance in order to be alone with him.

“If I had not been in the room myself, I might have believed they had all rehearsed their departure.” She straightened and dared to look him in the face. “Do you not agree that it looks suspiciously like they planned to leave us alone?”

The smile she loved broke briefly on his lips, then disappeared, as fitful as the sun on a March day. “It does, though I do not believe we weigh so heavily on their minds as to deserve such a complicated consideration. I am certain it was only coincidence.”

Now he must truly think she had engineered it. If she was not to die of mortification, she must change the subject. “These plans are a work of art,” she managed, moving the inkwell so it sat exactly in one corner of the drawing on the library table. “How clever of you to adapt my original concept of the ribbing along the fuselage, and weave these small conductive channels into a fabric that is the next best thing to chain mail … though much lighter, of course.”

He nodded, as though he was as eager not to speak of themselves as she. “It works out very well, since the threads themselves absorb the energy, channeling it through your ribbing to the automaton clusters containing the power cells, where it is directed to the engines. It is essentially a combination of your work with the energy cell and mine with the Helian batteries on the locomotive, turned inside out, if you will.”

“Have you tested it with something smaller than a touring balloon?”

He nodded, and when he smiled, it was the smile of someone presenting a gift, and hoping that it will be welcome. “Young Willie Dunsmuir told me about your firelamps, so when he came to visit me at the laboratory the other day, we constructed one with a smaller version of the Helios Membrane. And much to my astonishment, it worked.”

“I hope you didn’t lose it over the rooftops, like the firelamps. I always hated having to sacrifice them for the greater good.”

“He warned me about that, and so we knotted a long tether with which to bring it down again.”

She smiled, too, at the thought. “I have not seen Willie in weeks. When I return to London, a visit to Hatley House must be the first thing in my diary.”

“He misses you.”

“Does he? But he must be very much occupied with school and travel. If the Dunsmuirs are in town, they will want Ian soon, I imagine.”

“How is he, by the bye?”

She lifted one shoulder in the French manner. “I am not a physician, but I believe he is better. Being at home, here at Hollys Park, seems to have made a difference. And having someone else to think about has made even more. This affair of the death medallion has brought out the protective side of his nature with a vengeance.”

Andrew looked completely at sea—a sea with a kraken surfacing in it. “The what?”

With relief at having another subject to discuss that did not involve either of them, she told him what Tigg had discovered, both about his father and his certainty about the man’s mission in England. “He does not say much,” she concluded, “but it must be dreadful for him. He is as focused on Alice’s safety as Ian is, but for different reasons. If Terwilliger is killed during an attempt on her life, how will he feel then? How could someone feel, so recently reunited with a parent—only to find out he has been coerced into being a villain?”

“Slightly better than if Alice were killed, I should imagine,” Andrew remarked dryly. “But you are right, it is a dreadful situation, and one not easily solved. Is there any indication that this Terwilliger senior is anywhere in the neighborhood?”

She shook her head. “Aside from one shot aimed at Gloria for reasons we cannot fathom by someone we cannot identify, it has been as quiet as the frost forming on the lawns. We suspect he remains in London. If it were not for the need to extract Gloria from Haybourne House, I should rather enjoy it here.”

A pause. “No regrets?”

“You sound like Alice. Of course not. If there is anything positive to be gleaned from her situation, it is that Ian may finally see that she is the woman for him.”

“Do not tell me you are still playing matchmaker.”

“Not I.” At last she was able to smile a little. “But I cannot speak for Jake and Tigg.”

“Do you really think they will suit one another? I cannot imagine two people more different.”